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The first dream comes two days after the Brighter Futures Society meeting. Jess really, really wants to blame it on the Erlking, but she knows better than that. (She’ll probably curse at him anyway, though, if only because having a target for her discontent makes her feel slightly better. Slightly.) She doesn’t remember all of it - just flashes of a door, an apartment, scared brown eyes. Her forehead is throbbing when she wakes. She can’t blame it on a hangover or a headache anymore, but no matter how much the magic wants to fuck with her, she has the miracles of modern medicine in the form of ibuprofen.
It only works temporarily. Right around four-thirty, it hits her again with a vengeance. The memory of the dream comes back to her, clearer now. She can see the address on the door, and she needs to be there. Well. It’s about time she started her fieldwork anyway.
The building’s down in Englewood, half overgrown with weeds. Jess locks her car doors and doesn’t make her usual effort to hide her gun. The pain in her forehead spikes again as she circles around the back to the garden apartment door she saw earlier. She hesitates for a second, trying to figure out what the fuck to say, when a scream cracks through the silence. Michigan v. Fisher. The chain lock snaps against her weight like a charm bracelet.
There’s a man standing in the kitchen, arm locked around a boy’s wrist, holding it at an angle that has to hurt. They’re both staring at her (fair enough, she did just break down their back door). The man’s face is frozen in a rictus of rage and terror. Jess knows a normal ass whooping when she sees one. This is not normal. She realizes in a flash that he’s not afraid of her - he’s afraid of the kid.
The kid is old enough that Jess knows he’d bristle at being called a kid, but young enough that she can’t really think of another word for him. His long, scrawny limbs splay out like they’re not used to holding him up. There’s something else about him, though - maybe the tilt of his head or the flicker of his eyes - and she just knows. Werewolf. No. Weredeer, SWM-30900. If the father’s losing his shit like that, it comes from the mother’s side. Fuck. What is she going to say? Her usual introduction is bubbling just under the surface, no matter how ridiculous it sounds under the circumstances.
“Leave him alone.” The words rise out of her unbidden.
“What the fuck are you - ”
“Take a walk and let me handle this.”
“You broke into my damn house, you crazy bitch!”
“I said.” Jess feels the tide of anger rise within her, white and cold and silver-metallic. The kid’s eyes widen even more. “Leave. Him. Alone.”
She’ll never know whether it was her tone or her look or whatever came rolling through her, but the man’s expression shifts. She’s the one he fears now. Good. He drops the boy’s arm and beats it out of the front door. Jess doesn’t follow him. Fuck it.
The kid’s dropped onto the floor, so she joins him. “Hi. I’m Jess.” There are bruises blooming on his skin, and she reaches out to him. “Can I?”
“My name’s Henry.” He nods, and suddenly there are tears gathering in his eyes. “Dad doesn’t - I don’t do it to piss him off. I just wanted to get home from school faster, and I can run better when - when I do that.”
She touches the bruises on his arm lightly. She wouldn’t be surprised to know that there’s a spiral fracture under his skin. “That’s alright. It’ll be alright. What you can do - it’s - ” She struggles for words. It’s not normal, not quite, and she’s not going to lie to him. “There’s lots of people that can do it. Doesn’t have anything to do with your father. No matter what he thinks.” She hands him a kleenex and lets the silence hang between them until it feels comfortable. “You want to meet some of them?”
“Some of who?”
“The other people. Like you. I know some of them. It’s up to you.”
“They’re…” He curls in on himself. “But they’re wolves.”
“No. Not necessarily. You just hear about the wolves a lot. There’s rats, pigeons, cats, whatever you can think of. They might be able to explain this better than I can.”
“Sure.” He hiccups a little, and she fishes a water bottle out of her kit. “I’ve always been able to do it, I just try not to do it in front of people.”
“That’s smart.” She lets him rehydrate a little, lets the adrenaline ebb out of him. When he finally seems calmer, she helps him to his feet. “Come on. Let’s go. You’ll like these folks, they’re good people. Can maybe set you up with a place to crash if you need it.” As she’s ushering him off the door, she speaks, again, without thinking. “You can come in now.”
The front door of the apartment creaks open, but they’re gone before Henry’s dad can stop them.
Her next dream is more boring and somehow, therefore, weirder. Just a computer clock reading a certain time. She had recognized the clock from her work computer, and rearranged her schedule so she could be at her desk, poring over incident reports, when someone knocked at the door.
“Come in,” she called, and watched as a short, well-groomed Indian man with worried eyes came into her office.
“Miss Majeski?”
“Jess is fine, but that’s me. Associate director of the Chicago Office of Supernatural Affairs. How can I help you?”
“I’m Mr. Khouri, Mr. Ravi Khouri. The lady at the front desk sent me up to you. She said you can maybe help with a problem we’re having?”
“I can try. What’s going on?”
“It’s - ” His voice breaks, and he takes a minute before he starts again. “It’s my daughter. There’s something very wrong with her.”
“What kind of wrong, sir?”
“She’s always been shy, but now she’s completely antisocial. We can go days without seeing her, and when we do, she barely speaks. And then sometimes she’ll just get incredibly aggressive out of nowhere. The counselors all said it’s part of her going through puberty, but…”
Jess looks up from the notes she’s jotting down. “But what?”
“This is going to sound crazy.”
“Try me.”
“It’s… her ears.” He cringes as he says it. “They’ve been… growing. More than usual. They don’t look human, and we think that started around the same time as the rest of it, and we just don’t know what to do anymore.”
FCU-12020. Goblin changeling. Not easy, but not uncommon either. “What, ah.” She pauses, uncertain how to phrase it. “What do you know about her mother?”
He looks at her for a moment, baffled. “Nothing? My husband and I are fostering Lia. We don’t know anything about her parents. The foster agency said they never filed any personal information.” Oh thank Christ. She’s had enough “it seems you fucked a fairy at some point” conversations to last a few dozen lifetimes.
“Okay, sir.” She leans forward on her desk. “Tell me, what do you know about the fae?”
Almost an hour later, Jess has explained the care and keeping of changelings as best as she knows how. Mr. Khouri pauses in the doorway, clutching a folder of the pamphlets and referrals that are COSA’s bread and butter. “I’m glad you could help,” he says softly. “Karl and I were at our wit’s end with this. We love Lia so much, but… we were thinking about not going forward with the adoption.”
“I understand,” she says, and she does.
Whatever was sending her these dreams is slowly starting to work with her instead of against her. No more signs and portents - well, there were still signs and portents, but now they were accompanied with a code, address, and time. Concrete, actionable bits of data. Jess made sure she was there. If she wasn’t, she’d start getting the forehead aches again.
She’s getting better at it, too. She’d locked eyes with some sketchball guy on a date with a soft, naive gravity mage and watched in satisfaction as he “got a phone call” and had to leave. She’d caught an eleven-year-old by the armpits before she hit the river and the mouth of an eager kelpie. She’d broken up a street fight and watched another Tarquin melt back into the shadows. She’d trailed a junior member of Paranet home, weaving through the tail end of rush hour, and nothing had happened, but she suspects that’s because she was there.
She rather enjoys this new obligation. Blood will tell, she thinks; “protect and serve” is clearly embedded deeper in her psyche than she’d realized. Especially when the people she’s protecting and serving are kids. She sips her rapidly-cooling coffee as she watches a familiar crew of tree children play hide-and-seek - or rather, tries to watch. It’s much harder when half the players are beleafed and bark-textured.
There’s just one downside. (Besides the one she’s not thinking about: the dangerous thaw she can feel inside herself, the softness that is her greatest flaw, her father’s voice reminding her if you’re lucky, you’ll get yourself killed - if she doesn’t think about it, maybe it’ll wither and die, and her weakness won’t put anyone else at risk.) Jess climbs into her car and throws a baleful look at the banker’s box nestled on the passenger seat. She’ll be up all night catching up on paperwork. Again.