Hard Magic

Nine

We didn’t, after all, have a quiz on flying fatae, although I wouldn’t be at all surprised to walk in one morning and get handed a multiple-choice paper. Instead, at the close of the workday, we got assignments. Sharon and Pietr were set to compile dossiers on everyone even remotely associated with the deceased, using, in Venec’s words, “whatever sources you come across, just don’t tell us how you did it.” Nifty was told to hone and perfect my follow-the-suspect cantrip, in case we needed it. He looked at me, startled, as though I might object. I just looked back at him, impassive. Normally, a spell belonged to the person who crafted it, as much as magic could belong to anyone. But I wasn’t about to start a squall over it; if it did come in handy, I’d bring it up when raises were discussed.

Nick and me? We got to take a road trip.

The next morning I reported early, if not bright, and had my sense of doom confirmed. Trouble probably wasn’t the word for what Venec had in mind. Insanity, maybe.

“You ready?”

I looked Venec straight in those deep brown eyes, and didn’t blink. “Ready.”

The first thing I noticed was that Chicago in mid-September was a lot cooler than New York, or even Boston. That was the damnable thing about Translocation—it never gave you any time to acclimate. I didn’t think it was the lake-effect breeze that was making my skin prickle, though.

Nick appeared a few feet away from me, trying to look as though he Transloc’d every day. He looked around, saw me, and came over. “He’s good.”

“Yeah.” There were probably a lot of things Benjamin Venec was good at. Best not to think about that, though. “Hey, Nick, isn’t it a crime to impersonate a police officer?”

He shrugged, and started walking toward our goal, a long, low building at the other end of the near-empty parking lot. “Yes. But we’re not.”

“We’re not?” I asked, catching up.

Nick looked over his shoulder at me consideringly, letting his gaze linger in a way that I’d probably have slapped a stranger for. “Are you wearing a uniform? Carrying a badge?”

I had to admit that no, I was not. I was, however, dressed in dark blue coveralls that looked an awful lot like police-issue, and carrying a fake walkie-talkie that looked an awful lot like ones the actual police employees were carrying—fake, so that we didn’t have to worry about cracking one open with current—and we were walking through the corridors of an impound facility as though we had every reason to be there.

The mock-up ID cards Venec had pulled out of god-knows-where, which didn’t actually say Police Department anywhere on them, weren’t going to get us out of trouble if we were stopped, so the trick was not to get stopped. That meant looking as if we belonged. I slumped a little, and tried to feel as put-upon as possible. Apparently, that was what it took to pass as a civilian employee of the state, because nobody even looked twice at us as we flipped those ID cards at the single bored cop on duty, bypassed the main building, and walked out into the impound yard.

Damn, there were a lot of cars there. Most of them were junkers, crap rides I’d be ashamed to park next to, and an unnerving number of them had what looked like bullet holes in the doors or windshields.

Yesterday afternoon, I’d been chatting via current with a Council powerhouse; now I was wandering a graveyard of broken cars. Never let it be said this job didn’t take you places.

A little farther in, and the cars got nicer: no rust, gleaming chrome, and intact interiors. I figured these were the ones impounded during search-and-seizures, rather than being abandoned or towed. Nick was scanning over the tops of the cars and checking numbers against the list on his clipboard.

“There. That’s the lot number. And there’s the car.”

“Wow.” I wasn’t much for cars as a rule, but if you had to go out in one, that was the way to do it. Huge, sleek, and gleaming with chrome and silver paint, like a Grande Dame of an era a long, long time ago. I didn’t even want to think about what kind of mileage to the gallon it probably didn’t get.

Or the fact that two people had died in it.

“All right, let’s get to it.”

When they selected us for this job, the Guys had officially-in-front-of-everyone appointed me team leader—apparently that much of what Venec had told the client was true: whatever initial evaluation team we had, it was mine. Of course, the entire team consisted of me and Nick, so it wasn’t much of an accolade.

That hadn’t stopped Sharon from doing an obvious slow simmer, though. I hoped to hell Stosser knew what he was doing. The Guys were smart and savvy and all that, but I was starting to wonder about how much attention they paid to the stuff right under their noses….

“Do you think Sharon’s pissed? About me being made lead, I mean.”

“Yep.”

“Great.”

He snorted at my tone. “Shar’s going to be pissed over the air entering a room before her, Bonnie. It’s just the way she is. Doesn’t mean she’s pissed at you.”

For some strange reason, that actually did make me feel better. I sort of liked Sharon, for all she was a prickly bitch. I wanted her to like me, too.

Nick reached the car first, and put his kit down on the pavement next to it. A flip of the latch, and a gleaming array of tools were revealed inside. To anyone watching, he was just a tech doing whatever it was techs did to cars. I put aside any thoughts of Sharon, or the rest of the team, and put my brain full on the problem at hand.

We already had, courtesy of the client, the full police report on the state of the car as it was found, as much as they could determine. A good thing, too, because I didn’t know a damn thing about cars, and I suspected Nick wasn’t much better. He’d let enough slip in the past few weeks to make me think that if he hadn’t been Talent, he probably would have been a tech geek, not a grease monkey, but current made both hobbies problematic.

So while he was making like he knew what he was doing, I stood back and just looked at the car, getting a feel for it. Ideally, the Guys and every crime drama told us, you got to look over the crime scene itself, create a visual record of what happened—or might have happened. Getting called in late and third-hand like this, we didn’t have the option. The car had been taken out of context, the crime scene manhandled, and god knew how many Council Talent had been futzing current all over the place without a clue. All we had was what was left. It had to be enough. Our future depended on it.

The Guys hadn’t said that. We knew it anyway. Ms. R was too high-profile to flub.

So. Time to do what the Guys seemed to think we could do. I had taken a quick hit of fresh current off the city grid before Stosser Translocated us into the facility, and my core was still assimilating the new energy, weaving the man-made current into my own cords until they were ready to work together.

“Come on, pixie-girl, get started.”

“Shut up.” My white-blond fluff really seemed to bring out the nickname instinct in Nick. Pixie-girl and dandelion seemed to be his favorites. It amused me, but letting him know that would miss the whole point of the game.

And he was right; sooner started, sooner out of here. I was discovering a distressing honesty in my genetic makeup—sneaking into places made me nervous. Not just about getting caught, but because it was wrong.

They really should have sent Pietr; I didn’t think he had a bone of morality in him. But they hadn’t: this was my job to do…or screw up.

All right, I thought at the car while I walked toward it, trying for the same calm tone I’d use to approach a dog I wasn’t sure about. Let’s see what you’ve got.

The entire lot was visible to the main building through a large glass window on the second floor, but it was still early, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around to wonder why a tech was standing next to the car, passing her hands over it with six inches between her hands and the metal.

If a Talent were to walk by and look out, they might be able to see the current flickering from my palms to the surface of the car, coating it like dusting powder, but they’d have to be paying attention. Nulls, the rest of humanity without a magical clue? Wouldn’t see a thing.

Odds were good that the Council investigator, whoever he or she had been, did the same thing—looking over the car to see if there was any sign of current having been used on it. The difference was, that was probably all they’d been looking for, and there were damned few things in this world that didn’t carry a touch of current on them, even just in passing. A car where two Talent had died, if they had actually died here, and not just been dumped?

If I were suffocating to death, I know I’d have used current to try to stop it, break a window, call for help, something. Can’t imagine these two were any different.

So I was looking for something different, going deeper and lighter all at once. There were traces of current in the seats, yeah…and in the frame of the car itself. Some in the dashboard, too, which made me wonder if the car would even work now, or if all the high-end extras were fried. Whoever bought this car at auction might be in for an unhappy surprise.

“Go in clean.” Venec’s voice in my memory, giving last-minute instructions while Nick fidgeted, eager to be gone. “Don’t have an agenda. Don’t expect to find anything. Don’t look for anything.”

Easier said than done. Another voice from my memory, this time J: “Keeping an open mind is good. Too open, and things fall out of it.”

This was my strength, Stosser had said when he picked me for this job. My ability to see, and observe, and remember details other people didn’t catch. Question: How did I do it? Answer: I didn’t do anything. Everything was there, and it came to me, and my brain just took it. So how did I intentionally use it?

Current stirred within me, and I fashioned it into a net, the kind that fishing boats use out in the deep sea, throwing it over and dragging it behind them, to see what they can glean. Cops look for something that’s wrong, or out of place, something hinky. Council probably looked for something familiar, to confirm their expectations. My net was set for everything, not only the stuff that jumped out at you but anything trying to hide, something so innocuous or ordinary that it might be overlooked, or something so wildly wrong it might not be noticed because it was so impossible.

Improbable doesn’t mean impossible. Don’t bring an agenda to the gathering. Don’t eliminate anything. Not yet.

The net snagged, and I tugged it, carefully. The normal neon-bright blues and greens darkened to black where something physical stuck, hot red to where current sparked back against it. The urge to grab it and run swelled, and I tamped it down. Gently, gently. I needed to gather without destroying, take without leaving any trace of myself behind, or letting anything of myself infect the evidence, to muddy the scene. Damn it, those TV shows make it look so easy, just swab and bag. Venec said most of the TV shows got it wrong, anyway.

Brain on the job, brain on the job! My muscles started to cramp up, but I couldn’t afford to deal with it. Gently, gently…

“I have physical trace,” I said to Nick, not breaking my focus to see what he was doing.

“Show me.”

*here*

Pinging was mind-to-mind contact, the closest thing we had to telepathy, but seriously limited. You had to know someone pretty well to actually get words across, much less complicated conversations, so I stuck to basics, more a sense of where things were than an actual description.

*got it* Nick’s pingback was triumphant, and I felt the current-net jerk and then sag a little when he Translocated the trace back to the office. The important part of his assignment was done: he had the lightest touch of all of us, so hopefully his current wouldn’t adhere to anything too badly, or distort any previous signature.

Now for the current-trace: I sent a narrow thread of yellow filtering into the net, racing along the existing strands to where the hot red still glowed, making the strands sticky in a way I couldn’t really describe. It would have been nice to toss this to Nick, too, but that wasn’t how it worked, not like the physical stuff. A twist of the now-sticky net and it all came back to me, stored not in my core but a separate place, hollowed out and waiting. The weight ached like brain-freeze, all this stuff-not-me in me. I didn’t like it, not at all.

“Done.” I was sore as hell, physical to match the magical. Nothing an hour of deep-tissue massage wouldn’t take care of, hopefully. I stretched, fingers reaching for the sky, and felt something in my back crack. “So, any idea—”

“Hey. What’s up? I thought they closed this case?”

I didn’t need a ping to feel Nick’s sudden panic and frustration at the interruption, because the same things were flooding my system. I turned to face the intruder.

Late sixties, maybe. Hispanic, stern-faced but not threatening. Wearing a suit, not coveralls. No briefcase, no walkie-talkie on his belt, no tech-growth clinging to his ear. Middle management.

“Do I look like I get to make decisions?” Nick, stepping in front of me, hefting his tool kit. “Some bright child wanted another run of the engine, make sure there wasn’t anything missed that could come back and bite us on the lawsuit. Word is the vic’s daughter isn’t happy with the verdict, so brass wants us to CYA. So we get to come down and waste everyone’s time proving what we already know, instead of dealing with the backlog that actually needs us.” He put just enough disgruntled professional in his voice to back up the story, and I could see the suit start to back down, reassured.

Then: “Who placed the work-order? All ongoing investigation requests are supposed to pass by my desk.”

Oh, shit. I was ready to really panic, try to Transloc out of there right in front of the guy, when Nick took a step closer, his hands in plain sight, totally nonthreatening.

“You already signed off on it,” he told the guy, his disgruntlement modifying into honest puzzlement and a hint of much-put-upon underling. He was one hundred percent convincing as a loyal and long-suffering schlub.

“I did?”

“Yeah, sure.” Total assurance, confidence, security in those words, and like Stosser’s glamour, it soaked into the suit, making him believe it, too. Oh, I so needed to learn how to do that!

“All right, then. Make sure you lock everything up again when you’re done, and damn it, don’t scratch the finish! Car’s supposed to go to auction next week—not surprisingly, the daughter refused to claim it, after all that.”

The suit nodded once, briefly, to me, and turned away. We waited until he disappeared out of sight behind the first line of junkers, before breathing a sigh of relief.

“These are not the droids you’re looking for?” I was more impressed than my comment indicated.

Nick shrugged. “It’s not polite—” that was an understatement “—but he really didn’t want to deal with the paperwork, and I didn’t want to deal with him. A little pushing seemed the lesser of two evils, overall. You ready to go?”

He made it sound easy. I could have been choked to the gills with current, and not been able to pull that off. “Yeah, yeah. The hell with Pietr, you could have been a serious Evil Mastermind, you know that?”

“Nah. Too much work. Same with the NSA.”

“The what?” I’d heard him, but I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard him.

He gestured with his tool kit that I should precede him out of the bay. We were supposed to go out to the parking lot and walk about a mile away before calling for a Translocation back. “The NSA. Yeah. I got calls, starting about halfway through college. I started keeping a lower profile, after that. Like I said, too much work. They still keep calling, though. So did a few less official organizations. Venec just got in with an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

“Which was?”

“Excitement, puzzle-solving, and nobody shooting at me.”

“Better offer than I got,” I had to admit, holding the fire door open for him. Besetting honesty wasn’t always my sin, but something about Nick seemed to draw it out of me. “I got offered a job, period.”

He shrugged again. J was right; it did look ungraceful. “You didn’t have any other options, I bet,” he said, not meaning for it to sting. “I did. They had to woo me.”

We walked through the parking lot, and the fresh air and sense of a job accomplished almost relaxed me. “Huh. Are you saying I’m easy, mister?”

“Torres, after almost two months working with you, I think I can say with some veracity that you’re not only easy, you’re cheap.”

Ouch. “Ha. I—”

I didn’t get a chance to say anything more, because the sound of something slamming past me way small and way fast triggered drop-and-freeze reflexes I didn’t even know I had. Nick had the same ones, the way he hugged the pavement next to me.

“They said no shooting, damn it!” he yelled, even as I was pinging home.

*get us the hell out of here!*