Pack of Lies

nine

I’d thought, with the exhaustion of everything that was going on—not to mention the alcohol in my system—I’d wake up feeling shaky and starved. Instead, the first ray of sunlight coming through the windows found me coming awake naturally, feeling as though I’d slept for ten hours—almost disgustingly bright-eyed and proverbially bushy-tailed, like someone had slammed the door shut on the doubts and worries that had been nipping at my heels. Because of Ben’s late-night virtual tuck-in? Maybe. Embarrassing, if so, but maybe. Whatever the reason, I’d take it.

I slid down from the loft bed and zipped through my morning routine with a cheerful hum in my throat, and came out of the stairwell bright if not early at nine-fifteen, thanks to the subway. The weather had finally, grudgingly, agreed that it was spring, and the air had a softness to it that hinted at green grass and lazy afternoons to come.

Two of my boys were already on their stoop, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper.

“Ai, you’re going to stunt your growth drinking that stuff!” I warned them as I walked by, waggling a finger in mock-instruction.

“My growth’s jus’ fine, momma,” the younger of the two catcalled back, making a rude gesture with his free hand, while the older boy—Dee, his name was, I thought, or DJ—whapped him over the head with the newspaper. Even after months of back-and-forth, they weren’t quite sure if I was one of them or not—I didn’t look barrio, but I could talk it—and we walked a line between casual teasing and disrespect. I guess Dee thought that had gone over. I let myself grin a little. I might have spent years twelve to twenty-one living in an upper-crust Back Bay apartment, but I’d spent enough summer afternoons as a preteen hanging out on stoops a lot like theirs, down off 4th Avenue, where I’d lived with Zaki.

“You just keep eating your Wheaties,” I told them, “and I’m sure some day you’ll make a nice little girl very happy.”

They whooped at that, and I chalked up a point for my side. Girls are much tougher than guys when it comes to trash-talking, really.

I buzzed myself into the building, took the stairs double-time—not even out of breath, go me!—and heard…something. A low rumbling growl, was my first thought, or a drill being used somewhere in the building. Walking into the office itself, the growl resolved itself into two voices…male, angry.

“Ben, we don’t have time for this.” Stosser.

“Then we have to make time.”

I felt a shiver run through me that had nothing to do with the change in temperatures from raw spring rain to the still-overheated offices at the raw unhappiness in Ben’s voice. This wasn’t argument, this was out-and-out disagreement.

Stosser again, firm and determined like the knees of god. “No. We don’t. It’s not our concern, and we’re not going to make it our concern.”

“Damn it, Ian, stop being such an arrogant shit and listen to me.”

“Wow.” It wasn’t the noise—although the voices were carrying clear through the walls—as much as the harsh static in the air that made me wince. The pleasant float I’d been carrying crashed and burned away, leaving me with an ache between my eyes and a sense of foreboding. “Do I want to know what’s going on?”

Nifty shrugged. “Don’t know myself. Came in, heard them going at it, decided to stay right here until someone sent out the all-clear. Told shadow-boy to do the same.”

Nifty was occasionally arrogant and obnoxious, and always opinionated, but he was also nobody’s fool.

Pietr, curled on the other end of the sofa, looked like hell. I was guessing he’d not had as good a night’s sleep and the atmosphere in the office wasn’t helping: harsh current and hangovers did not mix. I was just as glad that Nick hadn’t staggered in yet; he’d be hurting, based on how trashed he’d been the night before.

“Anyone thinking an out-of-office breakfast meeting might be a good idea?” I asked, fighting down the urge to find out what exactly was making Ben—Venec—so unhappy. It might have been happening in the office, but Nifty was right, I didn’t think it was our business, and we had no business messing with anything else. You did not get between the Big Dogs when they rumbled.

Nifty raised one thick-fingered hand in agreement. Pietr was already off the sofa and grabbing his coat by the time I finished the question.

By the time we came back, filled with greasy hash browns, crisp bacon, and runny eggs, it was almost 10:00 a.m., and the office was quiet.

“Too quiet,” Nifty said. Funny, he wasn’t usually the one who could pick up my moods. There seemed to be an awful lot of it going around, though.

“Anybody else in?” I asked Pietr, who was hanging up our coats.

“Yeah, Sharon’s coat is here. Not Nick’s though. Lightweight may still be sleeping it off.”

“You hurt him last night, didn’t you? Bonnie, you’ve got to stop being so hard on the kid,” Nifty said. “He wants to keep up with you, and he can’t.”

“Not yet,” I said, playing along, trying to lighten the mood. “Give him another year. But nobody can drink you under the table, big man, so you’re safe.”

“Hah.”

Nifty outmassed us all by a considerable margin, but he drank on par with Pietr—steady but not impressive in terms of consumption. None of us were heavy drinkers, actually, despite the previous night’s activities. I had a feeling that might change, though, if the jobs kept going like this.

Suddenly I had a lot more sympathy with all the noir detectives in the old movies, who always had a bottle stashed somewhere nearby. I might take up smoking, too, if it weren’t impossibly expensive. And if J wouldn’t put me over his knee the first time he smelled tobacco on me.

I looked at the door that led into the main office, and smothered a sigh. We had two choices: wait for one of the Big Dogs to come find us, or dig them out. The former was more appealing but the clock was ticking and the urge to get working outweighed everything else.

“Come on, guys,” I said, and led them through the door, in search of boss-shaped objects.

Ian and Sharon were in the midsize workroom. The boss looked up when I stuck my head in, and looked pleased to see me. I so didn’t trust that pleasure, not after the last go-round with Sharon’s latest concoction.

“We think we have the hiccups in the truth spell worked out,” he said, confirming my fears. “Come in, come in.”

“Do I have to?” I asked, even as Pietr elbowed me through the doorway.

“Relax,” Sharon said. She had her hair pulled back in a sleek ponytail, was wearing a gorgeous—and seriously expensive—dark red cashmere sweater that should not have looked that good against her pale coloring, and looked like she’d gotten ten hours of sleep, too. I didn’t think it was for the same reasons, though—or if it was, it was because she’d had someone actual flesh and blood in her bed, not ghosting through in her head.

“I figured out what went wrong, before,” she went on, resting her hand on a pile of papers; the documentation of her work, I was guessing.

“That’s reassuring.” I sat down next to her anyway, mainly because I knew I wasn’t getting out of there short of fighting my way out, and putting the table between me and the boss man felt like a good idea. There was a vibe coming off Stosser that I didn’t quite trust. His eyes were too bright, his smile too wide, and it wasn’t the usual glamour he threw on whenever he had to be charming in public, either.

He didn’t like fighting with Venec, a little voice told me. I was pretty sure it was my own voice, but it could have been a nudge from Sharon, too. Being on the outs with Venec made him uncomfortable…he relied on his partner to be his mirror, his conscience. When they argued, it made him question his own decisions. He, like me, wasn’t used to doubting himself.

Definitely my own voice. I don’t know how I suddenly knew that about Ian, but I did. It was like looking out a fogged-up window and then having someone clear it away and everything was sharper, brighter.

“Where’s Venec?” Nifty asked, fitting himself into one of the chairs at the other side of the table. The look Stosser gave him made even Nifty’s cocoa-dark skin turn a few shades paler, and Pietr faded out of view a little.

“Walking off his snit,” Stosser said, and I was right, his voice wasn’t so much angry as worried. I wasn’t sure anyone else could tell, though, and when I tried to focus on it, the sharp awareness faded back to the usual softer edges.

I think I liked it better that way. Even in our job, there were some things you didn’t want to know, and Stosser’s thoughts were high up on that list. Like I’d said before, genius brains were scary things, and my own smart-but-not-scary brains were overworked enough right now.

“The problem was,” Sharon said in the bright tone that she used when she thought she’d been dumb about something before and was by-god going to do better now, “I was projecting too much, trying to draw the truth out. So it went deeper than it should have, and, well…”

“Yeah. And well,” I mimicked. Sharon flushed, and I relented. Wasn’t like I had room to mock, the way I might have screwed up the scene read. Had Sharon been able to stop this morning, to read the scene for us? No way to ask, not right now.

“It’s okay,” I said to her, instead. “Thankfully for all concerned, I don’t actually have any secrets.” Which was a lie. Especially now. For the first time in my life I had something serious that I didn’t want anyone else to know.

“You’re young yet,” Stosser said, absently. “I’m sure you’ll collect some as you go. But I’ve been working with Sharon on her ideas, and I think that we’ve modified the spell enough that it will now focus on the thing we’re asking about, rather than…being a blanket all-truth spell. Specifically, it won’t trigger the anxiety Bonnie reported.”

Oh, good. So glad my trauma was useful. I knew better than to say that out loud, though.

“And if the person is resisting?” Nifty asked, his brain already leaping ahead to problems.

“Then I’ll know,” Sharon said. “Not what they’re lying about, but the fact that they’re resisting telling the truth, yeah.”

“But we won’t be able to isolate what they’re resisting, specifically?” That was Pietr, picking up the subtleties, as usual.

“Fine-tuning the spell can wait until we have the leisure for that. All we are concerned about is the specific matter at hand,” Stosser said, and his voice was crackling with current, enough that everyone dropped the side discussion then and there. “The Council, as expected, has indicated to me this morning that they are not going to pursue this matter any further, and would strongly prefer than we not, either.”

That went over real well, especially since it seemed, for a minute, like Stosser, of all people, was going to tell us to drop the investigation.

“However,” he went on, “Ben has uncovered some information that suggests the issue may be more involved than I had originally thought. If so, then it is even more important that we determine exactly what happened—and the Council be damned.”

Since half the office would gladly damn the Council already, that didn’t really raise any eyebrows, but I did note that he was taking whatever Venec had brought up earlier seriously, despite his annoyance. I wondered if Venec knew that.

All the others were focused on was that we would be allowed to investigate further.

“So what next, boss?” Nifty asked.

Stosser looked up at the ceiling while he gave us our orders. “Due to pressures within the fatae community, the ki-rin is off-limits to us, and the suspect will have lawyers on us the moment we start asking questions—and we have no legal standing to counter a lawsuit. The girl is the weak link.”

I winced, but he was right.

“We need to talk to her again, to get some kind of response from her so that Sharon can gauge the veracity of her claim. If she is telling the truth, then the ki-rin’s actions are vindicated. If not…”

“If not, there’s a whole new mess of shit hitting the air vents, yeah,” Nifty said, nodding. “That will not go down well at all, not with nobody.”

“Anybody,” I corrected automatically. He glared at me, and I made a moue of apology.

“Shit you cannot imagine,” Stosser said, his voice hard. “Sharon, you and Bonnie will go talk to her.”

“You think, after the last time you talked to her, she’s going to talk to us, boss?” I didn’t want to be the one to point that out, but seriously—did Ian really think… I sighed. Of course he did. She was, as he said, the weak link. Therefore…

“You’ll find a way to get in to talk to her.”

Yeah. We were still on the job, and tact and sympathy and respecting a victim’s wishes had nothing to do with that, from Stosser’s point of view. Not when we needed answers. At least he was sending us, and not the guys, although that might just have been luck of the draw.

“He’s not a cold bastard, exactly,” Sharon said five minutes later, once we’d escaped from Stosser’s hearing. “He’s just…focused.”

“Obsessive,” I corrected.

“Well, yeah. But we knew that from the start.”

We had. The very first day, during our job interview. Ian and Venec had set us up to discover a dead body in the office—Venec, playacting—to test our dedication and initiative. We’d been hired because the Guys thought we matched their dedication to the truth.

And we did. That didn’t make what we were going to do suck any less, though.

“I wasn’t able to get to the scene,” she said, before I could find a way to ask without making it sound like I thought she’d forgotten. “I stopped, but there were a bunch of fatae there, poking and sniffing—literally. I didn’t think it would be a good time to look for current….”

“No, you were right.” The last thing we needed was feeding the fatae fear of Talent, and no matter how Sharon tried to explain, it would have fed that fear. “Damn it. Not knowing is going to bite us on the ass, I know it.”

Sharon shrugged, as though to say there was nothing to be done about it right now, which was the truth, and we caught the M-120 crosstown to the N line. The girl—whose name, I finally learned from the sheet of paper Stosser handed us, was Mercy, and the irony of that almost broke me—had been released from the hospital, and could be reached at her apartment, way out in Astoria.

Sharon and I didn’t get seats next to each other on the train, so I spent the trip out dozing, listening to the contented hum of current riding the third rail. I loved subways: it was like listening to a cat purr. Right then, I needed the soothing, and kept letting little tendrils of current out to spark off the electrical system, pulling in the excess current like sips of champagne. Stupid—if I’d mistimed it, the entire train would go dead and we’d be stuck, along with a lot of other cranky travelers—but I never claimed to be smart all the time.

When this was all over, I was going to dive headfirst into the nearest power station, and totally restore my core, just so I’d remember what it felt like.

Mercy lived a few blocks away from the last stop, in a three-family brick house that had seen better days, but was still holding on to respectability. The postage-stamp yard was paved over with concrete, and there was a nice set of chairs and a glass-topped table waiting for warmer weather.

“She’s on the third floor,” Sharon said. I nodded, and rang the appropriate doorbell. Mercy’s last name was Trin, printed in neat black ink on a waterproofed card. Someone had taken effort to do that right, and I suspected it hadn’t been the landlord.

There wasn’t an intercom, so we waited a few minutes, and then just before I was about to push the bell again, there was the sound of feet on the stairs, and a low voice asking from behind the door, “Yes?”

“Ms. Trin? My name is Sharon Mendelssohn. I’m here at the request of the Council.”

Well. That wasn’t…exactly untrue, and nicely bypassed the current status of our hire. If Mercy asked, would Sharon fess up? Probably. I’d be ready to duck.

There was a soft sigh, then the sound of a chain lock being undone, and the door opened.

Mercy Trin was definitely the girl I’d seen in the gleaning, slight and seemingly frail, but now I was seeing her in color—and part of that color was a nasty green-and-black bruise across half of her face, where someone had obviously slapped or punched her. I exhaled, hard, and her gaze swung from Sharon to look at me. I guess we passed muster, because she stepped back and let us in.

Luckily we were both in shape from taking the stairs at work every day, because the three flights up were steeper than normal. I was egotistically gratified not to be out of breath when we got to the third-floor landing.

“I’m not Council,” Mercy said in her quiet voice, as she ushered us into her living room. It was pretty—not girly like I’d half expected, but done in mint greens and soft browns. Pastoral. I guess that made sense, considering she’d been hanging with a fatae for the past few years. Not all of them were forest-dwellers, but I didn’t see a ki-rin being all in-your-face techno, either. Or maybe it was. What the hell did I know?

There were places on the wall where it looked like something had been hung, recently. Photos, or paintings? If I were a betting girl, I’d lay odds they’d been of the ki-rin.

“Neither am I,” Sharon said to the girl—Mercy. “Council, that is. My coworker, Bonita, is.”

That was stretching it a bit—J was Council, yeah. I’d never really affiliated myself one way or the other, despite J’s totally unsubtle hopes in that direction. But Sharon was running this show, so I just smiled and nodded, hoping to pass along some of what Venec once snarkily but accurately called the naturally annoying competence of a seated Mage Council member.

“We’re just following up on the terrible incident earlier this week….”

Mercy swayed a little, and I touched her shoulder as gently as I could, easing her down onto the sofa and sitting next to her, making sure to keep a good ten inches between us in case she needed space, but close enough if she suddenly keeled over.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Thank you.”

“If it were me, I’d still be in bed and having occasional hysterics,” I said, moved by some unknown urge. I didn’t know if that was the truth or not, but it was enough to make her laugh roughly.

“I wish I could,” she said softly. “But…it doesn’t work like that.”

Odd choice of words. “What doesn’t?”

I wanted to look at Sharon, to see when she was going to take control, but was afraid to lose Mercy’s attention and maybe give the gig away before Sharon was ready to cast the spell.

“Trying to hide. Or run away. It’s done, and I have to live with it. Doesn’t matter, now. They find you anyway, and they’re even worse then, because you’ve validated what they were saying anyway, because you wouldn’t come out and deal with them…but dealing with them just makes it worse.”

I was totally lost now. She was rambling, not meeting our eyes, twisting her delicate, fine-boned hands together like she was trying to rub the skin off them. I wanted to grab her hands and still them, but didn’t.

Mercy was still talking, although I was pretty sure it wasn’t to us. “Afterward, I just wanted…to be left alone. To…figure it all out. But then they showed up….”

That made me lean forward and put myself back into the dialog. “Mercy, is someone giving you grief? Because of the attack?” One of the perps’ friends, maybe, trying to scare her? Was that why she decided not to press charges?

Off to the side I heard Sharon sit down in the armchair opposite us, the cloth of her skirt making a srrssshing noise against her stockings, and a whisper of something that might have been spell words, subvocalized. There was a slight rise in current-spark in the apartment, but I was aware of it only because I was looking. Mercy, being lo-res, probably wouldn’t pick up on it.

“What happened, Mercy? Please tell me?”

I felt like a total shit. I really did. But the spell, and the sympathy in my voice, must have worked because rather than clamming up, Mercy started talking to me directly.

“Si-Ja was…was everything to me. I was seventeen when we bonded, and that’s old—usually companions’re chosen when they’re seven or eight, but it couldn’t find anyone, all those years alone, and then it found me, almost by accident, but he said there were never any accidents, and once we met it was all I ever wanted, to be its companion, to listen to its stories, and travel with it—it loves to travel but it’s hard, you know, for a hoofed fatae to get around, all the doors and things….” Mercy seemed to realize she was running out of air, and stopped long enough to take a deep breath. When she started again, her voice was slower. “And it would sing me to sleep, when I had a headache, and carry me sometimes, when I was tired…. Si-Ja’s a good soul, an old soul, and there’s nothing it wouldn’t do for me….”

Her voice, soft to begin with, faded into nothing. Shee-Jah. The ki-rin had a name now. I didn’t know if that made things better, or worse.

“But that’s all gone now,” she said. “All gone. I didn’t know how much it would hurt. Even worse than…” Her voice trailed off. I’d been right. She really had wrapped her entire sense of self into being the ki-rin’s companion. Damn.

“Why didn’t you press charges?” Sharon asked, finally.

The girl—Mercy—jerked as though someone had stuck her with a pin, and shook her head, not looking at Sharon. Her hair, longer than mine, straight and shiny and so black she had to have Amerindian blood in her background, fell into her face, covering the bruises and shielding her eyes. “No. No…no.”

“If it was because of Si-Ja, because you didn’t want to have to go in front of a Null court and talk about it…honey, there are lawyers and judges who know about the fatae. It wouldn’t…”

“No!” She looked at Sharon then, her eyes wide and filled with panic. “No! They think I betrayed them! They told me…they threatened…”

“Who threatened?” Sharon sat up straight like the arrow of justice, but I was the one who asked. “Mercy, who told you that you betrayed them?”

The spell, or something, kept her talking. “When I was at the hospital. There was a note, on the bed when I was waiting for the doctor to come in…someone had known I’d be there, had left it for me. Someone in the hospital…a doctor, or a cop, or…someone with authority, who knew what had happened. They said that I was a disgrace, that by being Si-Ja’s companion I’d been a disgrace to every Talent, and I’d caused that man’s death, and if I said anything, they’d kill me and Si-Ja both. That I should just shut up and go home and be thankful nothing worse happened to me.”

She swallowed hard, her throat practically convulsing to keep from saying anything more. Her hands now lay limply in her lap, palm up and fingers curled in. Passive, accepting, like an old woman’s hands. I knew I should try to keep her talking, but somehow it felt too cruel. Pietr was right. I liked people too much to be good at this.

“Someone threatened you, if you reported the rape?” Sharon’s voice was so cold and thin, it could’ve done stand-in for an icicle. Arrow of justice, yeah.

Mercy nodded, then shook her head as though denying it. “I didn’t… I wasn’t expecting that. I didn’t…” She suddenly seemed to realize that she was spilling her guts to two strangers, however sympathetic, and clamped her lips shut. I noted, almost in passing, that she was wearing colored gloss on those lips, but no other makeup…like she had been trying to pretty herself up, when we came by, and interrupted it.

Or, she just naturally wore gloss on her lips to keep them from chapping. It didn’t mean anything.

I filed it away anyway.

“Did you keep the note, Mercy?” I asked her, as gently as I could. “It might help us track down whoever it was, and make sure they leave you alone.” If the bastard who had written it was Talent, we might be able to pick up usable trace.

“I burned it,” she said flatly. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. What does it matter? It was all…it’s all over.”

The urge was to push a little more—I didn’t want to go back to Stosser with nothing—but Sharon stood, and I followed suit.

“We’re sorry for intruding, and about such an unpleasant matter,” Sharon said, in the smooth, professionally sincere voice I bet she learned back in her legal beagle days.

“Unpleasant? That’s one way to put it.” Mercy looked out the single window in her sitting room, as though expecting someone to be lurking there, three stories off the ground, and shook her head again. “You need to go now.”

Apparently, we really did need to be told twice.

We went back down the stairs, and I’d put my hand on the doorknob when Sharon made one last attempt to connect. “Don’t be afraid of them,” she said. “Whoever it was…we’ll make sure they won’t hurt you.”

“Why?” Mercy was blunt, looking Sharon right in the eye now. “Why should Council worry about me? I’m nobody. Nobody, now that Si…” She lost her steel, and faltered.

“Council may not,” Sharon said firmly, meeting her gaze. “But we do.”

The front door closed firmly behind us, and we walked down the sidewalk back toward the subway station. I shivered, even though the afternoon air was actually pleasant, with the sun still lingering overhead. “You didn’t take the spell off,” I said, lifting a hand to stop Sharon.

“It will fade. Unless there was someone hiding in the back room waiting to interrogate her, she’ll be fine by dinnertime. Back to normal.”

Sharon’s voice was odd; still cold, but dryer than usual.

“What’s wrong? I mean, other than the fact that someone threatened her….”

“I don’t know. I just… The entire time, I felt there was something wrong.”

“You mean other than the whole being threatened, traumatized, not-wanting-to-deal-with-it vibe she was giving off?”

“Yes, more than that.” The dryness in her voice ratcheted up a notch, and I regretted my flippancy. This was what Sharon was good at; I needed to listen to her.

“Was it something in the spell? Was she lying?”

“No. She was telling the truth. The spell worked, in that part. But I think that it was how she was telling it that made me feel weird.” Sharon shook her head, walking faster. “The spell does something to my sense of people, something we hadn’t anticipated. It’s harder for me to see them clearly. I need to think about it, before I make my report.”

That was a “shut up and leave me alone” if ever I got commanded. I moved faster to catch up, keeping quiet, and wondering, quietly, to myself, if the kind of person who left anonymous notes and candles to a murdered rapist would threaten the victim, too. And if they were, could we trace them down from the limited evidence we had left?

I was willing to give it a try. Right now I needed to do something.

She’d been wearing lip gloss. My mind went back to that… why? There had been something off about it. I’d noticed it because it was smudged, smeared off her lip, just a little. Not the kind that happens when someone kisses you—the kind when your hand is jostled. Or your hand is shaking too hard to apply the wand properly.

Did that mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. But my heart ached, and I wished for the first time ever I wasn’t on the job, so I could have gone back and cuddled her until she stopped shaking, stopped blaming herself. Nobody should be left alone feeling like that.

But I was on the job, and we were PUPI. The U stood for unaffiliated—and that meant we had to be impartial, too, otherwise it all fell apart.

Knowing that, knowing it was the only way to help her, didn’t make it suck any less, just like I’d predicted.

We were almost to the subway when we both stopped, like somebody had nailed our shoes to the sidewalk.

*feel that?*

*yeah* My flesh was still prickling from the wash of current that had just shot through us; too strong to just be a stray tendril off someone’s core.

Pinging each other was automatic by now: J might think it was slapdash and sloppy of the younger generation, but when you were in a situation where you didn’t want anyone else to know a conversation was going on, it was damned useful. And the better we got to know each other, the easier it became.

*hostile?*

My feeling was that anything that made us freeze in our tracks like that was not friendly, at best. I sent that, not in words, but a wash of “what do you think?” sarcasm.

*us, or someone else?* Someone else, by implication, Mercy. We’d been in close contact with her, used current on her; we’d feel an attack on her, at least for a little while after.

A fair question. I didn’t know.

Then the current-wave came back, strong enough to make me stagger, and I knew. Us. Definitely us.

*keep walking. don’t stop*

The sound of our heels on the pavement was way louder than they really could have been, but I could hear each step clearly over the traffic next to us, and the rattle of the elevated subway pulling in to the station overhead. I focused on it, letting my breathing match the tap-tap of our steps, until my entire body was focused on that noise, my awareness hyperalert to anything and everything around us in a way that wasn’t fugue-state, but felt like it. The current-wave was gone, but I could still feel it on my skin, like piskie-size spears jabbing into my skin, looking for the lethal spot.

“Breathe, Bonnie. It’s okay.”

I nodded, but didn’t let myself break the pattern, even as we climbed up the metal steps to the subway, and waited for a train. Not until we actually were in the car, and the doors shut, enveloping us in a comforting metal embrace, the sensation of being pricked to death fading, did I let go.

I took a near-normal breath, then another. “Who do you think that was? Was it related to Mercy?”

Sharon gave me a look that would have wilted a Mack truck. “Whoever threatened her doesn’t want her talking to anyone else, either. We were being warned off.”

“Yeah.” That had been my take, too. “Didn’t work, though.”

A small, perfectly vicious smile curved Sharon’s lips, the smile that made us forgive all the ways she occasionally drove us crazy. “No,” she agreed. “It didn’t.”

“Will you sit down?”

Venec didn’t sit down, but he did pause in his pacing. “They should have been back by now.”

“The 1 train’s been screwed seven ways from Sunday and twice more during rush hour, all week. Relax, Ben.”

His partner snorted: you didn’t get to hire a guy because of his obsessive-possessive paranoid tendencies and then get to tell him to relax. Ian’s brain was clearly elsewhere. Or he wasn’t taking their missing pups seriously.

“If they were in trouble they would have let us know.” Ian gave his partner a long, assessing look. “Why are you worried? What aren’t you telling me?”

He couldn’t say. There was an itch, or a twitch, or something in his skin that made him jumpy, like live wires stroking his core, feeding him too much dirty current. He had been on edge for days now, and while he wanted to chalk it up to the uncomfortable convergence of events, case and his own research, he knew there was more to it. The under-his-skin feeling had all started with that snap-crackle-pop with Torres, with that damned exchange they’d had that he still didn’t understand.

Be damned if he was going to say anything about that to Ian, though.

“I don’t like this case. I didn’t like it when you brought it in, and I like it even less now. Someone’s playing us.”

Ian stretched his legs out and clasped his arms behind his head, willing to be distracted onto this older argument. “God, you’d think you were a cloistered nun before you came here. Someone’s always going to be playing us, Ben. Especially the Council, bless their overcomplicated souls. They think they can use us, for their own ends.” He smiled, a smug little smile that annoyed the hell out of most people. “And we will let them…so long as it allows us to do what we need to do.”

Ian had always been a cocky bastard. “What happens when their game and our needs don’t coincide—or come into conflict?”

“Let me handle that, Ben.”

Cocky bastard. “I hate it when you say that.”

Ian didn’t laugh—he never did—but that smile grew a little warmer.

Ben started to pace again, prowling the confines of the small office.

“Someone tried to Push me, last night.”

That wiped the smile off Ian’s face, but he looked thoughtful, not surprised. “Was last night the first you felt it?”

“Yes. Why?” He looked at his partner. “Did someone try you, too?”

Ian shrugged, a surprisingly graceless move, considering how elegant he could be when he wanted. “You know I can’t tell things like that.” It was a weakness in his skill set, and one that had to rankle, not that he ever let it show. “But now that you mention it…doubt, and annoyance?”

“Self-doubt, yes. Someone trying to make me feel insecure about my decisions.”

Ian snorted, knowing how well that had probably gone over. “Then yes, about, mmm, two days ago, for me. Interesting. Good to know that it’s external. Do you think it’s related to this case?”

“No,” Ben said, then added, “Maybe. Bonnie had a kenning, at the beginning of all this, something related to the case, but not directly, coming down the pike, not right away. If she was sensing this, then it will affect the team, too, so probably case-related.”

“Kenning isn’t precog, we can’t make assumptions. She might have been sensing the fatae problem you’re chasing, too. That connection would tie it into the case enough for her to feel the tremor.”

Ben grunted, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, then went to the door, his hand lifting to the knob. “They’re back. I’ll round everyone up.”

Ian held up a hand to stop him, his expression changing from mild consideration to active interest. “I thought you set the door downstairs to Automatic?”

He paused. “I did.” Once the team had signed on, he’d set elementals, tiny creatures that lived in the current stream, to watch for each of them, and activate the electric lock when they approached. That way they didn’t have to carry keys, or worry about someone in the office buzzing them in. It also gave them a little extra security, in case their hands were full…or they were being followed. No chance for someone to attack while they were waiting for the door to be opened.

“Then how did you know they were back?” Ian asked, reasonably enough.

Ben opened the door, willing himself not to turn and look back at his suddenly intently observant partner. “I don’t know. But I did.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Boss!”

Anything else Ian might have been planning to say was drowned out by Nifty’s yell down the hallway.

“Is he talking to you, or to me?” Ian wondered, distracted from his earlier question.

“I think it’s a singular plural. Come on, let’s see what our girls have come back with.”

“Better not let them hear you call them that,” Ian murmured, but got up and followed his partner down the hallway.

The team had already gathered in the main conference room, ranging themselves around the table. Mendelssohn and Lawrence anchored each end, left and right, with Shune and Torres separating them. Ben paused and focused, and saw Cholis sitting next to Shune.

Pietr noticed Ben looking directly at him, seeing him, and smiled; it was an almost shy grin that caused an involuntary smile in return, before Ben tamped it back down into his normal stoic expression. But Pietr saw it.

And so had Torres. He knew that even before he turned to look at her.

He knew she was there. Knew where she was, knew the moment she had come back into the building. The information hadn’t been intrusive, and not at all disturbing, which bothered him more than if it had been disturbing. Awareness of her return had slid into the back of his brain without fanfare, the way you knew a lover lying next to you had woken up even when your eyes were still closed.

That wasn’t normal; if he had wanted to be aware of someone coming in, he could have set the elementals to alert him. But he hadn’t. And neither of the girls—hell, none of the pups—were good enough to slip under his guard like that. Nothing got into his brain except what he brought in. His control was better than that, even when he was distracted.

Ben let Ian stride past him to open the meeting, and took a seat at the far end of the table, where he could monitor everyone’s reactions, as usual. Whatever had happened between them, whyever it had happened, it had opened a channel he didn’t control, and he was going to figure out what it was, and shut it down.

Later. When they had time.

I felt Venec’s gaze pass over me, and shivered; thankfully, he looked away, and I had time to get my nerve endings back under control. Stosser didn’t waste any time with pleasantries, as usual, grabbing a chair and opening the meeting. “All right, people, it’s been a busy morning, things to discuss.”

Nick took advantage of everyone’s attention being focused on the boss to lean in and whisper in my ear. “I see your fatae buddy got you home safe.”

I snapped the pencil I’d been playing with in two in surprise. What the hell?

“What the hell is your problem, ferret-boy?”

For once the words didn’t come out of my mouth, but Sharon’s, who had picked up his words, even though they were meant to be quiet.

“Didn’t you hear? She’s got her own personal fatae bodyguard to keep her safe.”

Oh, we were not going there. Abso-damn-lutely not, and I didn’t care how bad his hangover was or how annoyed Stosser got at a sideline conversation happening during his meeting. “Are you more pissed off at the fact that you didn’t get to play drunken Sir Galahad last night, or the fact that Bobo isn’t human?”

“A bodyguard?” Sharon looked at me, and I shrugged, refusing to listen to Nick’s splutters, aware that we now had everyone’s attention. Great.

“My mentor called in a favor or two. Bobo’s large but sweet—sort of like Nifty with hair, and he’s the one who got us in to see the Gather, so I’d say he’s more than justified his presence, not that I have to justify a damned thing in my life to you, Shune. Or anyone.” I glared around the table, daring anyone to say anything. I might be annoyed at J’s presumption in arranging a bodyguard but I’d be damned if anyone else was going to say a word against him—or Bobo, for that matter, who was becoming a friend.

“Yeah, but a fatae? With everything that’s going on in the city?” Nick made a face. “You’re trusting yourself with—”

“With what?” I don’t have a temper, but I was tired and frayed and between the interview with Mercy and the weirdness with Venec, and my general ickiness about this case, things were starting to get hot in my core. “With what, Nicky-boy?”

He leaned forward to respond, but anything he might have said was cut off before it left his throat.

“Enough!”

Stosser, using the Big Dog voice. “Nick, reconsider your words and then deal with your damn issues, whatever they are.”

Nick winced, the bellow making his hangover come back to haunt him, and I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

“And you, Torres.” I cringed. “This Bobo. He’s the one who took you to the Gather?”

“Yessir.”

“And he’s on your mentor’s payroll?”

“Yessir. Only after-hours, when he doesn’t think it’s safe for me to be out alone.” That was what J had said, anyway. I got the feeling Bobo was reinterpreting the guidelines, since he’d shown up not only during daylight, but also when I was with coworkers, and was taking an indirect but active interest in what we were doing.

“Useful,” Ian said, and it was clear that we were done with the topic.

Venec was glaring at me like I’d done something wrong, but his mood swings—and my reaction to them—were the least of my problems right now. I sat back, still fuming over Nicky’s behavior, and let Sharon give the report; she enjoyed getting up in front of everyone more than I did. As per her background, she was concise and precise, right up to where we were magically accosted on the street.

“You both felt this…malice?”

“Oh, yeah.” I answered Ian before Sharon could take offense at having her word questioned. “Someone was definitely watching, and wanting us to know that they were watching.”

“Who?” Venec asked, and I could feel how tense he was, even across the table.

Sharon looked at me once, as though to confirm her own impressions, then answered. “Talent, obviously. More than that, I don’t think I could say. There wasn’t enough flavor to the sensation to even tell male or female.”

I raised an eyebrow. She could tell that? Color me humbled.

“They were pretty high-res, to make us both react so strongly without giving anything away, and definitely not friendly…although I didn’t get a sense that we were in specific danger, just…being warned away.”

“By whoever threatened the victim,” Venec said.

Sharon looked at me, and I nodded.

“I want everyone to be careful,” Venec said, giving everyone the two-second intense glare thing he did so well, each in turn. “If what Torres and Mendelssohn felt was from the same people who threatened the girl, any one of us could be their next target. If this is the same group that has been targeting the fatae, we know they don’t hesitate at physical violence, so just watch yourselves.”

“None of us have the kind of connection the girl did,” Nifty objected.

“Mercy.” Sharon glared at him. “Her name is Mercy.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Nifty leaned back in his chair, his body language showing he was raising a point, not picking a fight. “It doesn’t change the fact that none of us have that kind of associations, none of us hang with the fatae—excepting Bonnie—”

“Don’t you start,” I muttered, but he was right. I was, as Nicky’d already pointed out, the one with the most connection with the fatae, and they didn’t know the half of it. J had some friends who couldn’t pass for human even on their best day.

“—so why would we be targets?” Nifty finished.

“Lawrence, you’re asking me to explain the thought processes of bigots, people who generally say that if you’re not one hundred percent in agreement with them, you’re not only wrong but dangerous.”

Stosser stirred at that, but Venec glared him down, too, and he subsided without saying anything. Interesting. The boot was on the other foot, today.

Ian took control of the meeting back. “At this point, all we have are unverified reports of attacks being made on fatae in this city, and others. Ben has been following up on this, and he thinks that it’s a real problem. I am…not inclined to disagree at this point, although I will remind everyone that it is not our main point of concern, except as and if it impacts our case.”

Venec lifted his chin slightly, and his mouth tightened slightly.

“However,” Ian continued, “it would appear—verified by our own observations and experiences—that those who are targeting fatae have no hesitation threatening fellow Talent as well. As Ben said, watch yourselves.”

Venec opened one of his folders and pulled out a flyer, sliding it onto the table. “I do believe that the two events are connected, yes. How many of you have seen these around?”

We all leaned forward to take a look. I shook my head, but Sharon and Nick both nodded.

“They had them up in the lobby of my building,” Nifty said. “Super trashed ’em all, because we have an agreement with another exterminating company. What’s the big deal?”

“You ever have a problem with roaches or silverfish in your apartment, Nifty?”

“Of course not. Current scares ’em away. So what? I think there’s maybe one other Talent in my building, everyone else is supposed to suffer?”

“They’re not exterminators,” Sharon said. “I checked on their alleged company, which took some doing, since all they offer is a phone number. No license was ever granted, so far as the city’s concerned, this company doesn’t exist. The service they’re selling isn’t pest removal.”

The side project Venec had asked her to look into? She had seemed disturbed by it, but not really concerned.

“Not the kind you find in the Yellow Pages, anyway,” Venec said grimly, leaving the flyer on the table and leaning back in his chair

“Wait a minute….” I was picking up something from him—not satisfaction but a dark resignation, the kind you get when bits come together in the worst possible scenario.

Sharon beat me to the punch, though. “You think all this is connected. The attack on the girl…the claim that it was all a setup on the part of the ki-rin…you think it’s connected to this antifatae sentiment…and that the extermination advertisement is part of it, all one great big city-wide plot?” She had the best poker voice of all the pups, but even she was drawing close to incredulity.

Venec met her gaze with his very best Big Dog look: stern, straightforward, and totally intense. “I think it’s all deeply coincidental. And I don’t trust coincidences.”

“Right now, it’s only a theory,” Ian said, for once the calming voice of the two, and that freaked me out more than anything Venec said. “It’s not a theory I support, particularly—there’s enough nasty in the world without it having to be connected—but it’s worth keeping in mind so long as you don’t let it distract you from the specific job…finding out who did what to whom.” He looked briefly at Venec, and I felt an entire speech pass in that glance, although I wasn’t sure exactly what was being said. “I remind you again, we are neither judge nor jury—just the investigators.”

Ow. That was pointed, and I could tell that Sharon felt it, too. But it was a good point to remember. The fact that we’d never had enough evidence to do anything about the guy who killed my dad…I could have acted on my own, based on what I did know. But I hadn’t. Zaki wouldn’t have wanted blood on my hands, not like that. Same way, if there was some plot…our job was to find evidence, not pass judgment.

“If the antifatae fever spreads, if we can link them to this…the Council will have to do something about it, won’t they? If those people are threatening us, threatening members of the Cosa?” I’d walked away from Zaki’s killer, back then, pretty sure that the guy would never hurt anyone again. But this…I couldn’t just look away, once we knew something for certain. Not after hearing Danny’s stories, listening to the fear in Mercy’s voice.

“I stopped trying to predict what the Council might or might not do years ago,” Stosser said. “You’d be advised to do the same. Not all of them are like your mentor.”

“So what you’re saying is that the Council, locally, if not as a whole—” and bless the San Diego Council for giving us a tentative thumbs-up last month, so their members could approach us, not that anyone had, yet “—while refusing to authorize us for their own people to hire directly and then hiring us on the side for their own benefit, will not act on information we uncover in the course of an investigation, even if it adversely affects their members, in order to avoid granting us legitimacy.”

“That about sums it up,” Nifty said.

“Hypocritical bastards.” I didn’t mean to say it out loud; it just slipped, and Sharon laughed. “Welcome to the lonejack mindset, Torres.”

I was not amused. J had raised me to have some respect for the Council as a whole, even when he railed against individual members. But for them to sit quiet about this…

Maybe they wouldn’t. J said people were already talking about this at his levels. If we brought them evidence, they could go after the bastards before it got out of hand. But we needed evidence, first.

It always came back to the evidence.

“Lawrence, lead us through the dance,” Stosser said.

Nifty got up and walked to the far wall, which had been painted over with chalkboard paint so we could work things out without wasting reams of paper—one of Nick’s occasionally brilliant ideas. He picked up chalk, and started to do his thing—diagramming the problem like it was one of his college games.

“Day one. Girl and fatae out clubbing, two human Talent out for an early-morning cigarette. Intersection.”

Neatly swooping chalk lines, one white and one green, joined on the board.

“Result, one dead Talent, two injured Talent, one male and one female, and one fatae, unharmed but bloody.”

So far, purely the facts, just the way Stosser liked it.

Nifty drew a dual-colored line down a few inches, then split them off again. “Day two. Stories diverge. He said, she said.” A third chalk stick appeared in his hand, and he managed to draw a red line without dropping the first two chalks still between his fingers. “Day three. Third story appears—threat against injured female to force her to drop charges.”

“Alleged threat,” Sharon said. “I believed her, but they’re not verified.”

Nifty nodded. “Alleged threat. But you both were threatened by a force that appears connected.” A fourth chalk appeared, and a blue line echoed the red one. At this point he had all four chalk sticks clutched in his hand, and I was totally distracted wondering how he managed that. My own hand flexed, and I remembered that Nifty was twice my size—he could probably handle an entire crayon box in one paw.

“Do we want to put in the antifatae group as a sideline, if we’re going to include a threat that might have come from them, or as a main line, if they’re an instigator?” Nick asked. We all looked at Stosser, who nodded—reluctantly, I thought. “Main line.”

A fifth chalk, and a purple line appeared, parallel to our investigation. He was going to run out of colors, soon. “So that’s—”

It was the magical equivalent of an air-raid siren going off next to your ear, and I fell off my chair from the blast—literally. Current was swirling up from my core, ready to be shaped into defensive or offensive charges as needed, by the time I scrambled to my feet. I scanned the room to see where the threat came from, and realized that nobody else had responded the same way—except Sharon, who was standing, her chair tipped over behind her, current haloing her like St. Elmo’s fire.

Her gaze met mine, and realization flooded us both. Mercy.

There was a rush and a swirl, and before I could ready myself, Sharon had Translocated us both back to Astoria.