If my Miss Susan had taken up with Manhattan’s answer to Trooping Fairies, I might as well hand her parents back their check and call it a night. The fatae rarely give back what they take, especially not if they thought someone else wanted it.

“Who with?” I asked my informant, who shrugged his furry shoulders, and scampered off.

Great. Well, that was why there was an “I” in “Investigator — I was the one who actually had to work.

The thing about the Cosa Nostradamus is that it’s pretty polarized. You have the human Talent on one side, and the non-human fatae on the other, and they don’t often mingle. Not socially, anyway. Lucky for me, horns and hooves made me fatae enough to be able to ask the questions that would get a human hurt. That didn’t mean I could go in like an Appalachian cave dragon on a bender, though. You had to know the players. That was what had made me useful on the force, and was a lot of what made me successful now: I could work both sides of that street. And I knew that there was one fatae breed that not only gossiped like a knitting circle, but was amenable to some gentle bribery.

“For me?”

The salamander looked longingly at the glowstick, but didn’t take it out of my hand. We were on the West side of the Park, just below the Rambles, at dawn. I’d hauled my ass out here to make sure I caught one of the firebrands before they were really up and moving. Sure enough, one of them had been having breakfast along the stone wall, catching the early morning rays and hotfooting the occasional jogger for laughs.

“A gift for you,” I agreed, placing it on the top of the stone wall. The salamander considered it without touching it, then looked up at me, its lidless eyes surprisingly expressive. It wanted it, oh so very badly, but it wasn’t sure why I was just handing it over. It assumed I wanted something.