Hard Magic

Sixteen

The Guys kept me waiting for almost half an hour, pacing back and forth, worried that Will was going to appear and ask me what I was doing there, or a cop was going to cruise by and accuse me of loitering, or half a dozen other real and baseless worries.

My nerves weren’t helped by a chittering of noise in the tree above me. It sounded too heavy for a bird, and too…intelligible for a squirrel. I really didn’t want to look up, but eventually, of course, I did.

The ugliest mug God ever wrapped around a nose stared at me from a low-hanging branch, like the unholy love child of a bat and a Kewpie doll. Another damned piskie.

“Oh. What?” I really wasn’t in the mood, but ignoring it would probably make things worse.

“You’re new around here, buttercup,” the mug chirped at me.

There was nothing wrong with piskies that a good hard sauté wouldn’t cure. Winged pranksters, they were the most common, annoying, and irritating of all the fatae. Not even Nick could get excited about being accosted by one, and I didn’t want to risk attracting attention by using current to make this one go away, the way I had back home.

“I’m not in the mood,” I warned it. “Try pranking me and I’ll singe your fur down to your bones.”

“Ooooh. Cranky.” It tsk-tsked like an old Irish granny, and I couldn’t help myself; I laughed.

“Better,” the piskie said, and leaped higher into the tree, its wings spreading just enough to help it rise—piskies could fly, but seemed to enjoy soaring, more. “Cranky no good, buttercup,” it said, and then it was gone.

Then the stirrings of current wrapped around me, fair warning, and the Translocation sucked me from Chi-town back to upper Manhattan.

“I hear lawyer-boy was among the attendees,” greeted me before I’d even managed to take my first breath of East Coast air. Obviously, Pietr had gotten back before me.

“So was Jack Reybeorn,” I growled, my crankiness in full force, and I had the satisfaction of seeing Nifty blink in surprise and shut up. I might look delicate-boned and feminine to the big bad football-player, but I could slap him down as good as any defensive lineman, if he got in my face. “Are you going to interrogate me here, or do we get to wait until everyone else arrives?”

“Sorry. I…” Nifty Lawrence was many things—arrogant, aggressive, etc.—but an asshole wasn’t one of them, and he was smart enough to know by now that I wasn’t competition, damn it. “I was jabbing, and I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” I let it go; we had other things to deal with. “Where’s the huddle?”

“Main conference room. Ian ordered in pizzas, figured you guys hadn’t had a chance to eat dinner.”

“They’re going to start docking our pay if they have to feed us, too.” I reached down and took off my shoes, wiggling my newly freed toes against the rough carpeting. The sandals were adorable, and the heels made my legs look fabulous, but they were going-out-to-dinner shoes, not stomping-around-after-suspect shoes.

“We don’t solve this, we may not have to worry about that anymore.”

I stopped luxuriating in the feel of free toes, and looked at my coworker. More than one-upmanship had been in his voice. “What?”

“Somebody fried our electronics while you were gone. That’s why we had to hold off on bringing you back—we wanted to make sure the building was current-stable.”

My first thought was a sort of generalized so what—we’d had enough gremlins running in the office to be blasé about it, and anyway, power fries happened in major cities and it wasn’t always the fault of a Talent. Then I heard the emphasis in his voice when he said “our” electronics, and stopped.

“Just our building? You think someone’s trying to shut us down? I mean, it couldn’t just have been some cadet making his mentor nuts?”

Nifty was shaking his head, and I noticed that his close-cropped hair had been allowed to grow out into tiny black ringlets. “Venec checked around. Not just our building—it only hit our offices. Not even anyone else on this floor. But every wire in the wall’s been crisped. Going to cost a small fortune to replace.”

“Damn.”

“On the plus side,” he said with forced cheerfulness, “we’ll be able to customize it all now. And maybe open up a few walls, put in a larger kitchenette, maybe another bathroom…”

“Dreamer,” I snorted, following him along the hallway, the lights dimmer than usual. Obviously, not everything was back up and running, underscoring what all his big talk didn’t cover up: someone was gunning for us. Based on the evidence, someone Talented. Someone who seemed to have a really strong desire to not have PUPI succeed. All the gremlin incidents, which we’d been ascribing to our own twitches and coincidence, could have been someone trying out our defenses. Psi-bombs, current-strikes? They were all used for only one purpose: to crisp the short-hairs. The fact that neither attack—none of the three, if we counted the security guard shooting at us—were fatal could have meant that someone was only trying to scare us, or that they were bad shots. In either case, intentions could change, and aim could be improved.

The escalation happened when we went from “training” to “under contract.” I didn’t think that was a coincidence. I suspected the Guys didn’t think so, either.

Enemies were bad. Unknown enemies were really bad. Unknown enemies and no allies was about as bad as it could get.

We needed allies.

But first, we needed to solve this damn case, and prove we were worth allies.

“Please tell me you got something,” Pietr greeted me when we walked into the conference room. The windows still boarded up, and the lights on half power, the room felt smaller and strangely ominous, despite the comforting smell of sausage and cheese. “Please tell me two hours spent listening to spoiled rich girls giggle over a car not one of them is smart enough to drive was not suffered in vain.”

I dropped my shoes by the door and glared at Nick until he got up and gave me his chair. To the on-site investigator went the padded seating, damn it.

The body language in the room was grim, but not hopeless. I hoped.

“So your girlies were a washout? Did you at least get their phone numbers?”

He shot me a pained look. “I’d sooner date a waxed ape. The conversation would be better.”

Ouch.

“Torres.” Stosser was in pacing mode. Looking at him made me dizzy, so I reached across the table and scored a greasy slice of pepperoni pizza instead. Sharon shoved a plate toward me and a couple of napkins. “Do you have anything to give us?” he asked, not waiting for me to put my dinner together.

“I don’t know. Maybe. The suspect went to a café to meet with a woman. I managed to eavesdrop on some of their conversation. It sounded like they were business partners on at least one deal with the victims. They discussed the sale of the car, but only in passing, and Will didn’t say why he had been there. It might have just been idle curiosity, if he was meeting this woman anyway. Oh, and she’s Null, so that pretty much rules her out as a suspect, right?”

Venec looked at Stosser for a second opinion, then he nodded reluctantly. “It would be difficult, if not impossible, for a Null to subdue both victims without leaving any sign. However, we can’t overlook the possibility that they worked together, since the toenail paring we found was most likely a woman’s. I don’t suppose you were able to get a look at her toes?”

Damn it, I hadn’t even thought of that. Not that it would have been possible anyway, but…

“Her toes, no. Her hands…” I tried to remember, then shook my head. “I’m sorry. I remember that she was dark-skinned, Mediterranean, maybe, but I don’t remember anything about her hands. Which might mean she wasn’t wearing polish, or it just didn’t stand out.”

“Pity we can’t just do an info-dump of everything you saw, share it out among all of us. Maybe we’d find something that way.”

“There is a way to do that,” Stosser said, “but it would not be helpful in this instance. We cannot afford to risk blurring the lines between observation and interpretation. Some of the evidence we have collected already has been compromised.”

“What? How?” This was the first I’d heard about that.

“Not your fault, Bonnie,” Nick said. “The retrieval procedure’s flawed. I went into the locker to get something, and it was all…smudged, is the best way to describe it. We just need to find another way to keep it, I guess.”

I deflated, my sole real contribution to the case now useless. “Man, the bad news just keeps on coming, doesn’t it. Do you think it might have happened during the attack? Yeah, Nifty told me about it. Am I alone in thinking there’s a pattern there, starting with the gremlins, and…”

The expressions around the table told me that my teammates, at least, were on the same page.

“Great. Any idea who’s behind it?”

“Oh, that we know,” Venec said grimly.

“What?”

“Why?”

“Who?”

The last question got the most volume, with me and Nick both asking at the same time. I don’t know; that seemed more important than the why, since knowing who is a step closer to stopping it.

“And if you say ‘it’s not your concern,’ we’re going to stomp you, boss or not,” Sharon warned Venec without the slightest hint of irony.

“Even if it’s not?” Stosser asked, deflecting attention away from Venec in a smoothly timed interruption. “Because it has less than nothing to do with you all individually, than—”

“In this room, there is no us, individually,” Nifty said. “Not anymore.”

Stosser’s pale blue eyes got really wide, and I think maybe his jaw dropped open a little. Venec just snorted, which from him might have been disgust, amusement, or approval. I’m pretty sure nobody expected Nifty to suddenly sprout up with that comment, all things considered.

“He’s right.” Sharon sounded sort of disgusted, too, although I couldn’t tell if it was because of what Nifty said, or the fact that he was the one to say it. “You hired us as a team. Isn’t that what you keep saying? Then in here, we are a team. So what involves one of us involves us all. Especially violence. Especially violence committed against the office, while we’re all in it.”

“Three strikes,” I added. “The security guard, or cop, or whatever, who shot at us. The psi-bombing. The current-fry on our electronics, which could have been harassment, or it could have been a try at frying one of us, too. If anyone had been taking a hit off the tame current…” I wasn’t sure what might have happened then, but at the very least, a few nose hairs would have gotten seriously real-time fried. “It all adds up to someone gunning for us as a team, and that means we have…” I almost said the right to know, but even I knew that wasn’t going to fly with the Guys. “We have a need to know, so we can protect ourselves—and each other.”

Stosser looked as though he was going to argue but, to my surprise, it was Venec who coughed up, earning him a really filthy look from his partner.

“This isn’t about the case. Not directly, anyway,” he said. “You already know that there are people who don’t want us to succeed. For their own reasons, some of which I can, reluctantly, understand. We’re going to be stirring up hornets going forward, and hornets aren’t always particular about who they sting. That’s why we’re being careful, only taking assignments from direct clients, people involved in the incidents under question.” The “for now” was silent but seriously implicit. “We have turned away several potential clients, under those guidelines.”

Oh now, that was interesting….

“Hopefully,” Venec went on, not letting anyone question him about that little bombshell, “our discretion will ease fears and reduce concerns. But there is…” He paused, trying to gather his words, which made me wildly curious. Stosser, the wordsmith, was silent, and Venec was trying to moderate himself? Oh boy.

“There are people who think that what we are doing is an abomination. That using current in this fashion is…wrong.”

“What, to find out the truth?” Pietr shook his head, his forehead creasing in confusion. “We’ve had soothsayers and scryers since before anything else, how—”

“Not what we are doing, but how we are doing it. Turning current from a personal, individualized craft to a—how did she put it?” he asked his partner. “‘A petrified work of noncreativity’?”

“Close enough,” Ian said, looking like the words hurt like a mouthful of glass.

“She?” Sharon asked.

“Don’t be so sexist,” Nifty said. “Women can be the villains, too, right?”

“Bite me, Lawrence. She?”

Stosser was the one who answered this time, as though the words were getting dragged out with fishhooks. “She. My sister. Aden.”

Oh. Well. This suddenly got all sorts of interesting….

That pretty much ended the meeting. Stosser went into the chat room and shut the door firmly; not that anyone had any desire to follow him. Venec looked at us for a minute, then shook his head and went off somewhere else.

“His sister is trying to kill him.” Nick looked weirdly impressed. “Man, I’m suddenly glad I’m an only child.”

“She’s not trying to kill him. Just stop him.”

“Right. By killing him. And maybe us, too.”

“You scared?”

“Hell, yes. Ian Stosser is a Talent of significant ability, by all public and private accounts. Smart, savvy, sharp, and scary. His sister, if she’s able to make him nervous, is at least at the same level.”

“Talent isn’t genetics. Just because one member of a family is strong…”

“You’re not even remotely worried?”

“Of course I am. It would be stupid not to be worried that someone wants to shut us down. But I’m not scared.”

“Potato, potahto.”

Pietr and Sharon were going back and forth over the remains of dinner, and I wanted to slap both of them. I’d rather have someone scared of us than someone objecting on a more philosophical basis. Fear was a logical motivator. Theology? Not so much. And it was crazy, besides. Current might not be a science the way, say, chemistry was, but the days of superstition and ignorance about what we did were long gone—current was a verifiable, measurable source of power, shaped and manipulated by the force of your own will and skill. The only thing that tied it to the old magic was that not everyone could use it…but even back then, in the old days of hedge witches and alchemists, they still had set-spells and incantations….

“Don’t even try,” Nick said, glancing over at me.

“What?”

“I can practically see the water-wheel turning over your head. You’re trying to make sense of Aden Stosser’s reasons. Don’t even try. There’s no way to do it, not without walking the same path to crazytown. And we need you here, not there.”

I rolled my eyes. “When did you suddenly get to be the wise old man around here?”

He laughed, and patted my arm in a way that was surprisingly reassuring. “Somebody has to be,” was all he said, and then switched the subject. “Jack Reybeorn is in the clear, by the way. Turns out, through a very neat twist of rulings, the family is getting part of the proceeds from the auction. Don’t ask me how or why. The legal system makes my head hurt. But that’s why he was there, to watch, and to collect a check. I guess he didn’t trust the City of Chicago to do direct deposit.”

“Oh, I can’t imagine why,” I said, not quite as drily as he managed. “I don’t suppose anyone’s been able to get an identification of the woman our other suspect—” I couldn’t call him Will, not now, not here, not anymore “—was talking to?”

“I’m going to be working on that. Tomorrow, because as tired as I am right now I’d be no good to anyone. And no, you may not ask how I am going to do it.”

I hadn’t been about to—all right, maybe I had. But his statement just made me even more curious, where before it had been just an idle question.

“Nicholas Merriweather Shune? What tricks do you have up your sleeve that you’re not sharing with the rest of the pack?”

“Nothing.” Not even the use of his full name—which he’d never told us—made him give.

“Uh-huh…”

“It’s nothing I can share,” he said, finally. “Really. Just let me do my job and you’ll be the first to know as soon as I get something, okay?” His brown eyes met mine directly. “Even before I tell Ian or Benjamin. I’ll tell you.”

“Thanks,” I said. I was not going to get choked up, damn it. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t.

Nick just nodded, as if he could hear my thoughts and didn’t believe them, and stood up. “I’m packing it in, people. Dump the leftovers and shut off the lights when you leave, we don’t have Brownies here yet to clean up after you.”

About half an hour later, the last of the garbage was tossed, the table was wiped, and I was more than ready to pack it in and go to the hotel. At least that was drawing to a close—the paperwork from the broker had been delivered and signed and sent back along with my first month’s rent check to go with the godawful deposit check I’d had to write, and I could take possession of my new apartment as soon as the credit check cleared me.

Even that thought wasn’t doing much to cheer me up. I felt…it took a minute for me to identify what I was feeling. I felt totally useless.

“Hey.” Stosser was standing in the doorway. I guess I wasn’t the last one out, after all. He was dressed for a long night in another granola-grungy outfit, his hair tied back, and an oversize mug of something that smelled like crap in his hand. Green tea, my brain finally identified the smell. Usually Pietr drank that stuff; I wondered if Stosser had lost a bet, or something.

“I feel totally useless,” I told him, out of nowhere.

“I can understand that,” Stosser said, nodding his head without surprise. “I mean, you haven’t carried your weight once since you signed on. Haven’t done a damn thing to add to the knowledge of the case, haven’t figured out a single bit of evidence, or…”

I was amused despite myself, despite knowing that he was mocking me. “You know what I mean. I feel like we’re standing still. Worse, like we’re running in place.”

“It always feels like that,” he said, serious now. “No matter how much we gather, no matter how much we know that we didn’t before, it always feels like nothing, not enough. The curse of giving a damn.” He took a sip from his mug, and made a face. “This stuff is disgusting, but Pietr swears it will settle my guts better than Maalox. I should know better than to eat Chinese food. Anyway, yeah. From start to finish, mostly we’re always going to be wading through muck, thinking we’re not going anywhere—or worse, we’ll think we’re getting somewhere and then the hot lead becomes a cold dead end. All the way until we finally make the one connection that’s needed to break it open and give us an answer. If you thought we were giving you an exciting, glamorous life of intuitive glory…sorry. No.”

He looked at me, and I could feel the honey-ooze of his current stroking my skin. Normally that sort of thing would creep me out, but from him it was…okay. Soothing. Even knowing he was manipulating me somehow, I didn’t mind, because he was doing it honestly, letting me see it in progress.

“We’ve only been on the case for a week, Bonita. A week, and we’ve already determined that they didn’t commit suicide, and that a Talent, probably female, had a hand in their deaths. The client now knows that her parents didn’t give up, that they didn’t abandon her and the rest of her family. It’s a sort of peace she didn’t have, before.”

It sounded good, and reasonable, and yet… “We’re not here to give peace,” I said. “We’re here to get answers.” I sounded, even to my own ears, sulky.

“And we will. But not tonight.” He turned to leave, then stopped and, over his shoulder, threw back, “You’ve done nothing wrong, Bonnie. A little stupid, maybe, but nothing wrong, and nothing that can’t be recovered from. Sleep on that, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

There really wasn’t much to do after that except grab my coat and bag, and leave. The streets were oddly deserted, considering it wasn’t that late, and I found myself walking a little faster toward the subway. I reached down and touched my core not to soothe, but to stir it up, to let a solid ribbon of dark red curl around my mental wrist, ready to use. It was an unfamiliar and unnerving instinct. Flickers of that neon thread wrapped tighter, reassuring me. If something came out of the still night air, I’d be prepared.

A siren rose and fell in the near distance, someone shouted at someone else through an open window, and the tension in the back of my neck eased a little.

“You shouldn’t be out alone.”

I swear to god, at first I thought it was that damn piskie returning to torment me. Then I remembered that it was back in Chicago, and the current-threads flared into thick cables, pulsing with the desire to wrap around someone’s neck.

I’d never used current for violence. I didn’t even think I was capable of it. But if I were…the power was there. Yeah. New thing to learn about myself, and one I wasn’t sure I was liking.

I forced those cables to relax, and turned to look at the speaker.

“You’re Bonita, yes?” He was short and broad, like a fireplug, and coated in brown fur that made my fingers ache to dig into it. The body could have belonged to half a dozen fatae breeds, but the face—flat, yet curiously mobile, with dark brown eyes that slanted at the edges—gave my brain the clues it needed. The fatae in front of me was Mesheadam, and the current-cables softened a little in response to that knowledge.

“Depends on who’s asking, and why,” I told him, flippant now that I could place the breed and knew it was—generally—human-friendly.

“I’m Bobo, your escort.”

It was nice to know that shit could still surprise me. “Beg pardon?”

He grinned, and the flat, plant-crunching teeth were a relief, even though I’d already identified the breed as being typically nonhostile. “Your escort. Hired for the evening to make sure you get back to your hotel in one piece. Tonight, and any night you leave after 10 p.m., although I promise that, if you’re with someone, neither you nor they will see me unless I’m needed. I’d advise you not to argue, my employer seems like a stubborn kind of human.”

J. Of course. Why I thought he’d back off and let me run my own life…

Still. Considering everything that had been going on recently, including Stosser’s little surprise announcement about his sister, a little muscular company on the subway wasn’t the worst thing in the world. The Guys might be training us to be proactive, but I still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of using current to hurt someone. This guy looked as though he could just flex, and would-be assailants would pass out in fear.

“All right, Bobo.” His name really was Bobo. There was no justice and much mockery in the Universe. “For now, I won’t argue. But don’t expect this to be a long-running gig.” Until we knew that Aden Stosser had backed down, at least, I’d go along with it. But tomorrow, J and I were going to have a serious and possibly loud discussion about personal boundaries, letting fledglings leave the damn nest, and no-means-no, even for him.

Bobo offered me his fur-coated arm, and I took it. The urge to whistle “We’re Off to See the Wizard” flickered through my head, and was quashed. I really needed to get a decent night’s sleep….

But when I got back to the hotel room, the message light was blinking on the phone. The credit check had cleared, and the apartment was mine. J must have greased wheels. Or palms. I was too tired, and too relieved, to be upset about that, right now. The desire to be in my own place swamped everything else, but there was no way I was going to be able to move my stuff, much less hunt for furniture, while this case was hot.

It was late, but I picked up the phone and dialed the only number I knew from heart.

“All right,” I said when my mentor picked up. “You win. I need your help.”