Praise for

laura anne gilman

PARANORMAL SCENE INVESTIGATIONS

Hard Magic “Gilman’s deft plotting and first-class characters complement her agile blend of science and spell craft, and readers will love the Mythbusters-style fun of smart, sassy people solving mysteries through experimentation, failure, and blowing stuff up.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

RETRIEVERS

Staying Dead “An entertaining, fast-paced thriller set in a world where cell phones and computers exist uneasily with magic and a couple of engaging and highly talented rogues solve crimes while trying not to commit too many of their own.” —Locus

Curse the Dark “Features fast-paced action, wisecracking dialogue, and a pair of strong, appealing heroes.” —Library Journal

Bring It On “Ripping good urban fantasy, fast-paced and filled with an exciting blend of mystery and magic … this is a paranormal romance for those who normally avoid romance, and the entire series is worth checking out.” —SF Site

Burning Bridges “Wren and Sergei’s relationship, as usual, is wonderfully written. As their relationship moves in an unexpected direction, it makes perfect sense— and leaves the reader on the edge of her seat for the next book.” —RT Book Reviews [4 stars]

Free Fall “An intelligent and utterly gripping fantasy thriller, by far the best of the Retrievers series to date.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

About the Author

LAURA ANNE GILMAN is the author of the popular Cosa Nostradamus books for LUNA (the Retrievers and Paranormal Scene Investigations urban fantasy series), and the Nebula award-nominated The Vineart War trilogy from Pocket, as well as the YA trilogy Grail Quest for Harper. Her first story collection, Dragon Virus, will be out in winter 2010, and she continues to write and sell short fi ction in a variety of genres. She also writes paranormal romances under the name Anna Leonard.

Laura Anne lives in New York City.

More information can be found online at www.lauraannegilman.net. Readers can email her at LAG@lauraannegilman.net, or follow her on Twitter @LAGilman.

Pack of Lies

Laura Anne Gilman

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Lisa: pour le voyage entre lectrice et amie

prologue

My name is Bonita Torres. I am an investigator with the Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations team of New York. And I love saying that.

Funny, how life can change really fast. Eight months ago, I was an unemployed college graduate without a clue what I was going to do with my life. Seven months ago, PUPI was created out of the wild inspiration of Ian Stosser and his best friend, Benjamin Venec, and we—a team of five twentysomething Talent—were hired, green as grass and still wet behind the ears. Six months ago we solved a double murder, and earned the chance to show the rest of the Cosa Nostradamus, the magical community, what we could do.

A chance isn’t acceptance, though. The Cosa is naturally suspicious, and there were still a lot of folk out there who didn’t want us around, either because they didn’t trust us, or they were afraid we’d find out what they’d been up to. And in New York City, believe me, there are a lot of people who are up to something. Magic’s been around forever, but mostly on the honor system for how you used it. And some Talent? Not the nicest people around, always.

So we busted our tails, and learned as fast as we could, perfecting the spells we’d already created and crafting new ones to fit our training scenarios, wondering if we’d ever get a chance to use them. In the months since the Reybeorn murders, we’d gotten one missing person case that ended well, and an organ-stealing case that didn’t, so we’re going fifty-fifty. Not great, but the bills—and our paychecks—were getting paid. Barely. Maybe more to the point, I had a job that meant something to me, coworkers I liked, and I got to live in the Electric Apple, New York City, where I could work twelve hours and then play for seven, sleep five and do it all over again. Life was pretty good.

All we needed were a few more jobs to really get going, establish ourselves. The only problem was that even now that we’d showed the Cosa what we could do, nobody ever called us until it got ugly….

one

We were surrounded, outnumbered, and out of luck. I risked a glance at my partner, and saw the same desperation on his face. We needed to think of something, something brilliant, something fast.

Too late. There was a crack like thunder, lightning filling the entire room, and we both fell to the ground like someone slammed a two-by-four over our heads.

A deep male voice pronounced our doom. “You’re dead. Also, stupid.”

There really wasn’t much to say to that. Of the four PUPIs in the room, Nick probably would have milked the death scene. Sharon would have argued her way into a second chance. Nifty wouldn’t have been dead or stupid, probably.

Pietr and I lay on the floor and were dead. Also, stupid.

The deep voice continued. “Now. Can one of you surviving idiots tell me where your cohorts fucked up?”

The voice belonged to Benjamin Venec. Top-notch magical Talent, experienced private investigator, owner of a pair of gorgeously intense brown-black eyes, and, along with Ian Stosser, one half of the leadership of Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations, also known as PUPI. Yeah, Puppy. The jokes just write themselves, and we’d already made most of them.

If we were PUPIs, though, Venec was Big Dog, and obedience school was in session. I loved my job, but this seriously was not my idea of how to start out a Monday morning, especially the Monday after my old college roommate’s annual April Fool’s Bacchanalia. My eyes felt like sandpaper, and I was cranky over more than getting killed. Even on a good day, I was emphatically not a morning person.

Since Venec had moved on to his next victims, I risked raising my face from the carpet to see who of the remaining three PUPIs was going to chime in first. What, as Venec was always asking, did the available evidence tell me? Nick’s shoes needed polishing, and the way he was rocking back into his heels suggested he wasn’t going to volunteer. Sharon had toed off her two-inch heels, and there was a run in her left hose. That was unlike her, and I wondered briefly what epic catastrophe had hit her wardrobe that morning. Also, she was humming under her breath. She only did that when she was stumped, and was trying to scramble for an answer.

That left only one person, but he was out of my line of sight.

“Mister Lawrence?”

His voice amused, our former college linebacker made the call. “They zigged when they should have zagged.”

Pietr, his face still down on the carpet, made a rude noise. Venec kicked him in the ribs, gently, and he subsided. Dead puppies weren’t supposed to talk back.

“Right,” Venec said, his voice thick with disgust. “I stand corrected, you’re all stupid. Dead bodies, off to the side. Sharon and Nick, you’re up. Don’t expect the attack to come in the same pattern. I’m not going to make it that easy for you.”

Easy. Hah.

Pietr rolled over and jumped to his feet with annoying agility. Show-off. I sat up slowly, feeling my back crack in protest. Venec reached down and hauled me to my feet without taking his attention off the rest of the team, like he had some kind of sonar that told him where I was. Maybe he did: Venec was occasionally scary like that.

Benjamin Venec. Not much scared me, but I was willing to admit that this particular Big Dog could unnerve me occasionally. His hand was dry and strong, his fingers wrapping around my wrist with a casual familiarity. I was so tired, I guess my control wasn’t as strong as it usually was, and the touch sent sparks—of the purely incendiary, nonmagical sort—through my veins. Hoo-cha.

I took the lift, and ignored the sparks with the strength of months of self-denial and fierce rationalization. Unnerving, in the sexually charged way. We’d been doing a weird sort of dance since the first day on the job, me and the boss man—well, me anyway. Venec played everything close to the vest, and I had no idea if he felt it, too.

From across the room, Nick caught my eye, and gave me a slight but unmistakable smirk.

Yeah, Venec was undeniably hot, if you liked the brilliant, dark-eyed, moody, remote sort, and I knew damn well that he felt some of those sparks, too. I’d been around that block a time or two before, and I could tell when someone was reacting. He was also the boss, and that was more important than any fireworks show. I might be dead and stupid, but I wasn’t dumb. A bed partner was easy enough to find. A good job? Lots tougher. Especially for someone with our … call them specialized skills. I wasn’t going to risk that, not for anything.

“Move the chairs over here. Lawrence, shove the chest into the middle of the room. No, more to the left.” Venec was barking orders like a B-grade movie director, resetting the stage for the next test. Nifty and Pietr lifted and toted, while Sharon paced around the edges, checking the layout as it emerged and trying to get one step ahead of whatever Venec was going to throw at them.

I snorted. Good luck with that. We were all damned good, but we were damned good because Venec taught us to be. He still knew shitloads more than we did all put together, with a decade more experience, and there was no way to predict the way his brain was going to jump.

Ian Stosser, Venec’s business partner and the public face for PUPI, was widely acclaimed to be brilliant. For my money, though, I’d place the bet on Benjamin Venec. Ian was a flashy thinker, but my mentor always told me to watch the quiet ones.

“Pay attention,” Venec said sharply, and I jerked a little, sure he was scolding me. But no, he was glaring at Nifty. Good. Nifty could use the occasional slap down to remind him he was only two-thirds as smart as he thought he was.

Everything was finally rearranged to the Big Dog’s satisfaction. Out of the game, Pietr and I sat on the chairs now shoved against the far wall of the office conference room, while Nifty leaned against the wall like a bouncer on break, and we watched Venec put Sharon and Nick through their test.

Venec was re-creating a scenario we’d run into last week: lung-runners, illegal organ-leggers, working out of a warehouse on Staten Island. They’d been a mixed group, Null and Talent, operating off the grid—literally—so that law enforcement was having trouble finding them. The pirates used current to keep the tissue fresh until they found buyers, which was a particularly nasty bit of work, and exactly the kind of thing PUPI had been founded to track down: magic used in the commission of a crime.

The hospital the tissue had been stolen from had hired us on the recommendation of a Board member who was also a Talent—our first “corporate” client.

We’d followed the traces of current they left behind, and confirmed the site, catching them with a half-dozen coolers filled with stolen human tissue. We had meant to alert the cops to come in and arrest them, but things got a little messy, and then they’d been tacky enough to try to kill us, rather than surrendering or running away. Venec took it personally when someone tried to kill us. Especially since the bastards got away. The fact that we’d recovered the coolers and gotten enough information to put the lung-runners on the radar for more traditional investigations was enough to get us paid—but not enough to avoid one of Venec’s lecture/training sessions. “Fail better” was probably tattooed on his ass somewhere.

The good thing was that we were just as fanatical about learning as he was about drilling this stuff into our heads and reflexes. That had been one of the requirements to become a PUPI—the desire to learn how to do something new, and do it better, instead of following the worn track.

Sharon had put her shoes back on, and was kneeling by the foam chest that was standing in for the medical cooler of tissue. Nick had her back, the way he should—good boy. Nicky-boy was really good at his specialization, but sometimes a little flaky outside that, and I’d had to remind him more than once to keep his eye on the game.

Venec stepped forward and raised his left hand, indicating the show was about to start.

I wished deeply for a bucket of popcorn, because once you’re dead, and not worrying about what’s going to hit you next or how you’re about to screw up, Venec’s fun to watch. He has what my mentor calls an economy of motion that tells anyone paying attention just how damn good he is at manipulating current. No muss, no fuss, no showboaty waste of energy, just results. You can learn a lot by watching carefully.

The fact that he was hot like a hot thing was just a distracting plus. I’m a red-blooded twentysomething female who hadn’t had a date, much less sex with another person, in three months thanks to the demands of this new job and all it was throwing at us. I might only be able to look, in Venec’s case, but look I would, and appreciate.

The subject of my ruminations dropped his hand, and a wall of current-fire rose around Sharon and Nick, pushing them away from the cooler. They shifted fast, standing back-to-back. There was no heat, but the sparks were sharp and bright, crackling in the air as Venec directed them with just a flicker of a glance. I almost lost track of what he was saying, watching the neon-bright strands weave through the air.

Current—magic—had one aspect that people always seemed to forget: it was pretty.

It was also dangerous, and Sharon and Nick were giving the strands their full and complete attention. Just because Venec was controlling it didn’t mean it couldn’t hurt them, as per our prime example a few minutes before. My skin still itched from the bolt that had taken us out.

“All right,” Venec said, his deep voice patient, but still rock-hard. “You’re in the middle of a warehouse, the perps have outsmarted you and backed you against the wall, and your evidence is across the room. What are you going to do?”

The wall of fire was new—Pietr and I’d gotten hit from above, suddenly, in a literal rain of energy—but it was the same question. What are you going to do? I leaned forward, waiting to see what bit of brilliance they came up with that had escaped us. I am, unabashedly, a geek about this sort of thing. We were inventing procedures as we went—magic had been around forever, but paranormal investigations as a formal, scientific, proof-oriented gig was something new—and I totally got off on it.

“Come on, people,” Venec said, still patient. “Time’s passing. Suspect’s gonna flit on you.”

“Let them flit,” a new voice said.

The current-wall faded and flickered out, Venec’s hand closing shut and pulling it back in a graceful movement, like a conductor halting the symphony, and we all turned to the door where the other Big Dog, our founder and public leader, leaned in the doorway. Where Venec was square-shouldered and dark, Ian Stosser looked like a beeswax candle—tall, skinny, and pale, topped with a long ponytail of orange-red hair that was too healthy-looking not to be natural. Today he was wearing a dark gray suit, tie still tied, which meant he’d been in a meeting and just gotten back.

“This had better be good, Ian,” Venec said, but he wasn’t even half as cranky as he sounded. Stosser wouldn’t have interrupted unless it was important.

“We have a case.”

That was important.

Our office was on the seventh floor of a seven-story building far enough uptown in Manhattan to be decidedly untrendy in a neighborhood nobody was going to mistake for Park Avenue. We didn’t get so many visitors that we had to worry about appearances, and not being in midtown suited me just fine, although it was a hell of a commute for Sharon, coming up from Brooklyn. The Guys had used the correlating savings in rent to rent a second suite, once they knew we were going to stick around, and restructured our half of the floor into a warren of workrooms and meeting spaces that gave the illusion of privacy.

Location and privacy were important.

PUPI had a problem that most small start-ups didn’t face: We were routinely tossing around a lot of current during training. Current, the source of our magic, ran alongside electricity like horses in a herd, and sometimes they did the dominance thing. When that happened … well, you learned to be careful, and work as far away from delicate electronics as you could.

Going out into the forest for privacy the way they used to in the Bad Old Days wasn’t really feasible, though—Central Park was just as wired as SoHo these days, anyway, and having a bunch of twentysomethings spellcasting in public might raise an eyebrow or two. Or maybe not; this was New York City, after all. Venec liked to keep our training in the office, though, so the Guys had modified the wiring when they did the other renovations to make sure that we didn’t short out the entire building’s electrical system, no matter what we threw at it.

But while we did most of our training in the largest workroom, and almost all the casual gatherings in the break room—where, not coincidentally, the coffeemaker lived—the briefings were held in the smallest office at the far end of the hall where Ian Stosser now held court.

We didn’t have many meetings here—maybe one a month—but we’d already established a routine, doing a subtle push-and-shove to get at the three armchairs that fit in the space in front of Ian’s desk. As usual, Nifty claimed the largest one, since he held on to the muscled bulk that had made him such a hot draft prospect in college. Sharon claimed the other on the basis of a short skirt not really suited for sitting on the floor, and Pietr ghosted into the third chair in that spooky way he had before anyone saw him moving.

Nick and I were relegated to sitting on the floor. Again. Thankfully I’d opted for black cargo pants and a black hip-length sweater today, in honor of the still-raw April weather outside. Spring in New York City was better than spring in Boston, but not by much. I tucked my legs up in front of me, elbows on my knees, and watched while Venec took his usual spot, holding up the wall behind Stosser’s desk.

Ian Stosser and Benjamin Venec. The Big Dogs. The two men were an interesting contrast, and not just physically. Even after all these months, we didn’t know much about Benjamin Venec, who was a closemouthed bastard when he wasn’t tearing us new ones in the name of keeping us smart and alive, but Ian Stosser was—on the surface—an open book. High-placed in the Midwest Council once upon a time, he had made a very public break with them about a year ago. A few months after that, he came to the East Coast with the idea of holding Talent—both Council and the Unaffiliateds, or lonejacks—accountable for criminal misbehavior of magic. To do that, he created PUPI.

Why? What had happened in Chicago to send him here? That was where the book closed and not even my mentor, a man of considerable high-level connections himself, could get a read.

With Stosser’s reputation, and the tendency of some Talent to misuse their skills, you’d think people would welcome us with open arms, glad that someone was there to ferret out wrongdoers … not exactly. The first few months we’d been open for business had been tough. Not everyone in the Cosa Nostradamus thought having us poking our noses into magical crimes was the best thing since sliced bread. Stosser’s own sister was opposed to the very idea of PUPI, enough that she tried to get us shut down by any means possible.

Having the office rewired had saved us when one of those means, involving a current-strike against the building, coincided with the killer we were trying to take down deciding to take us on directly. Saved us—but not a teenage boy who had been in the elevator when the rest of the building went off-line.

I still occasionally had nightmares about that.

In the eight months since the boy died, and Little Sister had been disciplined, nobody had taken potshots at us—physical or magical. We’d even gotten a few jobs; a jewelry heist, the organ-legging gig, but that didn’t mean we were wanted yet, or trusted. We had to do everything perfect just to be considered acceptable, and never mind that what we were doing—creating investigative tools that gave measured and quantified results out of a naturally chaotic and individualized power source—was totally made up as we went along. No pressure, right. I knew for a fact that Sharon was developing an ulcer, and I’d started chewing my fingernails again.

And all that got us here, waiting in Stosser’s de facto office, hoping that this might be the job to finally break that last hesitation, and make us legitimate.

Venec closed the door behind us, for some reason—if someone Translocated into the office, we’d have bigger problems than them overhearing us—and Stosser dropped the news.

“No time to give you a full briefing—this one’s hot, and might get hotter. But for once, somebody with a bit of authority used their brains instead of their hair spray, and had us called in right away, so we have a chance to actually pull something off the scene.” Ian paused, his gaze meeting each of us in turn, assessing us the way he always did, like he was ready to demand the impossible. “It’s hot, and it’s ugly. A girl was attacked early this morning, downtown, an attempted rape. Her companion murdered one of the assailants and partially disemboweled the other.”

I could feel Nick, who was sitting beside me, shudder a little, although I wasn’t sure which of the events caused him to react that way. I wasn’t exactly cackling with glee at this assignment, either. Murder was … I wasn’t jaded, but I’d seen a lot of death already. Rape? Okay, that was a trigger-point for any female, no matter how tough you were, but he’d said attempted rape. The disembowelment … that was, um, new. And carried a nasty visual I wanted very badly to get rid of. Thanks, boss.

Behind Stosser, Venec’s heavy gaze held steady, but there was a twitch over his left eye that gave it away. Big Dog was a hard-ass, but I knew from personal experience that there was actual give-a-damn under that bastardized exterior.

“So why’d we get called in? I mean, if they caught the guy, and it was obviously self-defense or near enough …” Nifty was asking the practical question, beating Sharon to the punch. We were, in theory, all equal to each other, but like any pack there were alphas and omegas, and those two competed for lead the same way they fought for the chairs, using every angle they had short of stomping over each other. Sometimes I thought it was just Venec’s glare that kept the stomping from happening. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other—they did. We all got along fine. They were just fierce competitors; stomping was what they did for fun.

“You’re right,” Stosser said. “It should have been an open-and-shut case, none of our business, except for two things.” He paused, as though he was trying to choose his words carefully. Anything that made Ian Stosser hesitate was not going to be pretty. I braced myself, mentally.

“One, both the victim and the perps are Talent—” someone snorted, Talent being no proof against being a scumbag “—and two, the accused killer is a ki-rin.”

That made the room go quiet. I felt something catch in my chest: not pain, but something fierce and hot. A ki-rin. Dear god and a merciful universe, a ki-rin, here, in the city. A ki-rin, accused of murder.

I suddenly understood why things moved so fast on this one—and why we were called in. If anything went wrong, we were going to take the fall.

“This needs to be as clean and as tight as a waterproof drum,” the boss man said, standing up, his words confirming my fears. “I want everyone on this, right now. So let’s move, people.”

We moved.

two

Normally we didn’t all haul ass to a site—we didn’t really have a normal yet, even after eight months—but Stosser had indicated all of us, and so all of us went.

Well, all but one. “You take them,” Venec said to Ian as we grabbed coats and kits out of the closet and headed for the door. “I’ll see what I can drag out of the unusual suspects.”

Overhearing that made me feel better about this case. Based on the rather interesting individuals he brought in to lecture us on lock picking, surveillance, scams, and other things your mother wouldn’t want you to know, Venec had collected an assortment of contacts in various low places. When we got back, I’d lay money that he’d have a full dossier on anything and everything there was to know about the people involved, even better than the official files.

Stosser looked like he was going to argue, then nodded instead. He wasn’t happy about it, though, and shoved us into the elevator with a look on his face that made us all hush our usual chatter. Not that anyone was feeling much in the way of wisecracks. Organ-leggers lent themselves to the bad jokes, the more disgusting or punny the better. Attempted rape and actual disembowelment, not so much. Add in a ki-rin … We were all quiet, locked in our own thoughts, in the time it took to get to the lobby and out to the avenue.

There was an SUV with TLC plates already waiting outside our building. Obviously the boss had made some calls before he brought us in. Stosser got shotgun, the rest of us were in back, elbow-to-rib and knee-to-knee. The car came with a manic driver who swung through the morning traffic like he’d been a Shanghai cabbie in another life, shoving us around even as packed-in as we were. Nobody complained. The subway might have had more room, but it would have taken too long. Since we opened our doors for business, the main problem had been that we weren’t called in until after everyone else had tromped all over the scene and made things harder for us to sort out. Today, we’d been given time to get in and take a look while things were clean … but the clock was ticking and the twenty minutes it took us was nineteen minutes too long.

I sat back in the seat, stuck in the middle, trying to ignore Nifty’s elbow hitting my ribs, and Nick’s cheap, toxic cologne in my nose, while Sharon and Pietr got the very back seat with all our kits. Four basic black hardcases and one bright red one: Pietr’s, as though to make up for his unwanted but useful ability to disappear when you were looking straight at him. Sharon had added a discreetly stylin’ silver tag to hers, and mine had a glittering 3-D ice-spider decal on the side, just where anyone looking to steal it would see it and be freaked out. Nifty and Nick didn’t bother with anything, far as I could tell.

I stared up at the ceiling as we zoomed through lights that were yellow-turning-red, trying not to guess at what we were going to find on the scene. The trick to scene investigations was to look without expecting to find anything, examine without assumption. Current was directed by what we desired; even without the words of a spell, you could possibly create something just by assuming strongly enough that it was there.

Or so Venec warned us, at least twice a week.

The driver let us out on the corner, and zoomed off like he had to be in Queens three seconds later. The minute we got out, I was shivering inside my coat, but it wasn’t because of the sharp wind coming off the river. Something had walked over my spine, and that was never a good thing. I had a slight touch of precog, what my mentor J called “the kenning,” and it told me this was a bad place to be. Bad things happened here.

No choice, though. This was the job: investigating bad things.

The others were already walking toward the scene, and I had to stretch my legs to catch up. We weren’t the only ones interested; there was a small crowd already gathered around the scene of the attack, maybe twenty people, and even from the street you could tell that the mood was not good. Sometimes there was a weird party atmosphere when people rubbernecked a crime scene. Not here. I could practically smell the current on them, crackling like ozone, and I knew the rest of the team was getting the same vibe: Talent, wanting to know why another Talent was dead, and a second wounded, at the hands—horn—of a fatae.

Normally interactions between fatae and humans in the Cosa Nostradamus were cautious but healthy, but something like this … I didn’t need Stosser’s warning still ringing in my ears to know that things would get a lot worse, and fast, if we didn’t get the evidence sorted and delivered, soon.

I wondered, suddenly, why so many Talented bystanders were here. Coincidence? Or had someone put the word out, in the time it took for us to get called in? And if so … why, and who?

Questions I didn’t have answers for, yet.

Someone in the crowd noticed our arrival, and a low mutter went up, like the first roll of thunder. Hot and ugly. Ian had it on the nose.

Stosser had already given the crowd a once-over, and was issuing orders. “Cholis. Run the tape. Lawrence, crowd-watch.”

“On it, boss,” Nifty said, and he and Pietr moved toward the crowd, walking like men with purpose. The tape wasn’t the yellow crime-scene tape so beloved of Null cops, but a thin red extrusion of current that flickered and snapped in the cold air as they spun it out, walking a circuit around the scene. The tape was invisible to Nulls, but warned Talent and fatae alike away from the investigation. If they trespassed, Pietr, our rope-man, would know.

“Hey!” Pietr scowled at a lanky figure that brushed against the wire leaning in to get a better look. “Back off!”

“Or what, little man?” The intruder—your basic suburban white-boy macho wannabe in clothing too expensive to be tough—loomed over Pietr, who seemed to almost fade from sight, the way he did when stressed. There was an instinctive urge to go to Pietr’s defense, but I checked it. We would all be given our particular assignments, and that wasn’t mine. Nicholas James Lawrence wasn’t all that big, for an ex-college linebacker, but he presented like a big-ass mofo when he wanted to. Nobody threatened a coworker when Nifty was around.

Satisfied that the guys had things in-hand, I turned my attention back to the boss. Ian’s long orange-red hair was covered by a black wool watch cap, making him tougher to identify at a distance. I wasn’t sure if that was intentional or not, since he was normally a flamboyant publicity-magnet. Oh, hell, Ian never did anything unintentionally. He was letting us go public, and playing it close and quiet himself. Interesting. Not useful, right now, but interesting.

“How virgin is the scene?” I heard the word come out of my mouth and winced. I’m not normally big on tact, but that had been particularly ill-chosen even for me.

Stosser didn’t even seem to notice, although Sharon’s cheek twitched a little in response. “Thankfully, one of ours was with the first responders, and was quicker on the draw than most of his peers. Paramedics took the human bodies, but the cops haven’t gone over the scene yet.” A grim smile touched his face. “New York’s finest decided to wait for someone to come down and take care of the ki-rin before they approached the scene itself, so the area’s about as untouched as we’re going to get.”

I couldn’t blame the cops—I wouldn’t want to deal with a ki-rin in a bad mood, either.

“Not that there’s any doubt of who did what,” Stosser went on, “but I am informed that the fatae community’s already screaming for blood—more blood, I mean. They don’t like that a ki-rin’s been shown disrespect, disrespect being anything other than kissing its hooves in abject adoration.”

Wow. That was the bitterest I’d ever head the boss man get. Normally he left the snide comments to Venec.

“What kind of blood do they want?” Nick asked.

“Who the hell knows.” He seemed to remember he was talking to staff, not himself, and I saw the usual cool exterior go back up. “Our contact thinks the fact that there was any investigation by Nulls at all set them off. They’re already demanding that the ki-rin be released, and nobody’s even questioned it yet.

“The one thing everyone agrees on is that this needs to be cleared up and closed down as soon as possible, if not sooner. That means we have to determine exactly what happened, who did what, and in what order.”

“That’s what you built us to do,” I said. And then, since he hadn’t really answered me before, I prompted him again. “The scene?”

Stosser looked up at the sky, checking the thickness of the clouds. Normally we—Talent—like storms, since electrical storms are natural generators of current, but rain right now would seriously screw things up by compromising the scene. Magical trace washed away the same as physical, especially if there’s lightning involved—current from the electric bolts could wipe the slate clean in one flash—and being wet made me look like a drowned albino rat.

“Like I said, reasonably untouched, for NYPD values of reasonable. Ground’s been trampled by a couple-three cops, one of whom is our first-responder lonejack.”

Poor guy must have shit a brick when he saw the ki-rin, and realized what he’d gotten. Ki-rin were not only rare, they were ancient, as a breed. Like dryads and greater dragons, they were given respect by every other fatae breed, and any Talent with a lick of sense or tradition. We were lucky our first responder didn’t panic, and luckier still that he called the Council, and not one of the lonejack elders. The Cosa Nostradamus’s relationship with the NYPD is a long and fragmented one, but something like this was going to get every alarm jangling everywhere, and the Council—much as a lonejack would hate to admit it—was the best way to handle things. Council had the protocol.

“We have a signature on the cop?” Signature was the way we identified Talent, the way their current “felt.” It was individual, like a fingerprint—but you had to know what it looked like, first. Problem was there wasn’t a database for us to check, which mostly made identifying a particular signature near-impossible unless we had access to everyone on the scene, to tag them for comparison, and rule them out of any evidence we collected.

“Not yet. Nick, go find and fetch.”

Nick rolled his eyes, then saluted crisply, and turned on his heel and headed out into the crowd. That left me and Sharon.

“The deceased has been carted off to the morgue, while his companion is on his way to the hospital, presumably doped to the gills.” That was standard for Talent in those situations—current is only under our control by conscious effort: when stressed, we can go haywire. Pietr was unusual in that he faded from view as a protective measure—most of us just shorted out sensitive electronics like, oh, lifesupport systems and finely calibrated medical apparatuses. Emergency-room staff hated to see us coming.

Ian went back to issuing orders. “Mendelssohn, I want you working the crowd. Listen, don’t talk. If there’s anyone out there with more than a prurient interest, or says anything—anything—that gives you a twitch, I want to know, immediately.” While the Guys had us stretch in training, or on low-intensity cases, when we were on a sticky job they preferred to match people up with their native skills, and Sharon had a seventh sense about if people were lying or not. My teammate, characteristically stylish in a long black suede coat and a black wool beret over her blond hair, nodded and went off to do our master’s bidding

And that left me. And the scene. No surprise. I didn’t need to hear the band playing to know what my marching orders were.

“You okay with this?” Ian generally played the compassionate soul to Venec’s hard-ass, but he really wasn’t much on the touchy-feely when it came to us, more likely to toss us in without a by-your-leave. I blinked at his concern, wondering what triggered that, and then shrugged it off. No way I was going to make him think I couldn’t handle it.

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

He lifted the wire, the spell recognizing his signature and not sending an alarm, and we entered the crime scene.

Like I said, everyone on the team had their strength. If Sharon was a truth-scryer, I was a gleaner. I figured that my recall, both visual and factual, was one of the reasons I’d been recruited. Venec had run me through endless tests and scenarios, honing that ability and tying it into a cantrip we used to capture the scene intact. They’d tried, first, to teach everyone the spell—that hadn’t worked out well. So unless it was an emergency, it was just me. My job here was to walk the scene, gathering as much information as I could, both physical and magical, and re-create it later for the rest of the team to study.

Since joining PUPI, I’d gleaned murder scenes, dipped into the minds of pathological abusers, and—Venec’s idea of training—skimmed the hot emotions of a rabid Salamander. Reading the scene of a self-defense killing where we knew the identity of all the players should have been a piece of proverbial.

Except the guy’d been killed because he’d tried to rape a ki-rin companion. Scum, and stupid, and I was not looking forward to getting my mental fingers into what that left behind.

That thought drew my attention to what Stosser had said, about the NYPD not wanting to touch the scene until the ki-rin had been dealt with. What sort of trace did a ki-rin leave behind? I let my gaze pass over the scene, looking and yet not looking, and found myself noticing a shadowed corner near one of the riverside buildings about a hundred yards from the scene where two men—older, suited, officious-looking, and couldn’t be more obviously Council if they’d had it branded on their left buttocks—had the accused killer contained.

My breath caught in my throat, despite my determination not to be impressed. I’m hardly a country bumpkin, but a ki-rin … my god. One of the most exotic and magnificent of the fatae, the nonhumans. They’re sometimes called Asian unicorns, but that was so far off the mark to be useless. A unicorn was a horse with a horn and an attitude. The ki-rin were … It was too far away to see details, but I knew the description, same as any halfway-trained Talent. Body of a stag, mane of a lion, head of a dragon—and yeah, a single slender horn growing from the center of the dragonlike head. Wise, fierce, compassionate, truth-seeking … and, like European unicorns, associating only with women of untouched virtue.

Okay, obviously I wasn’t going to get close-up and personal with one anytime soon. Considering the sole example present was currently pacing back and forth, making the suits with him display some seriously cautious body language, that was fine by me. Some glorious legends could remain legend.

It did make me wonder about the sexual experience of the guys talking to it, though, and—more to the investigation—why they were keeping it there instead of whisking it off … somewhere. Especially if the fatae community already had their knickers in a twist about anyone questioning it. Oh. Oh, no …

“We don’t have to …” I asked Stosser, with a twitch of my fingers in the ki-rin’s direction.

He followed my fingers, and shook his head. “No.”

“Good.” Because if the local looky-loos were upset about it being asked to step aside while the scene was cleared, I didn’t want to think about what they’d do to the person who actually interrogated it.

That left one unpleasant bit still to be done. “You going to … interview the woman?”

She’d been taken to the local hospital—the same one her accused assailant was currently being treated in—and released. But we needed her statement, before things got even more muddled in her head.

“I thought that would be best,” he said.

Understatement. Ian Stosser was the public face of PUPI not only because he was the founder, but also because he was a PR schmoozer par excellence. He looked you in the eye and every bit of his compassion and empathy and intelligence was focused on you, your problem, and he existed only to solve that problem for you. It was not entirely a sham—he did care, and he did want to solve the problem, otherwise he would never have gotten into this line of work. But Ian could and would kick it up a notch or seven. In a word: charisma. Natural, and magical. But he was also a bulldog when he was after something, as we knew to our own bruises.

“Yeah. Boss?”

He paused, one narrow red eyebrow cocked under that stupid watch cap.

“The girl …” I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say. Actually, I knew exactly what I wanted to say, I just wasn’t sure how to do it without getting fired.

He showed his teeth in a reassuring smile, a Stosser specialty. “I’ll be gentle, Torres. Get to work.”

With that, Stosser headed off for, I presume, the hospital. I watched him disappear into the crowd, then turned back to look over the scene. He was right: Time for me to do what I did, before anyone muddied the scene, or the cops came back and kicked us out, or anything else came along to make the job tougher.

I hesitated a moment, looking over the ground. We were down in what had once been the meatpacking district, alongside the Hudson River. It’d been prettied up over the past few years, and the city had put in walkways and greenery so during the summer it was a nice enough place to skateboard or bike, or walk your dog, but on an overcast, blustery almost-but-not-quite-yet spring day? Not so nice. Why had they been out here before dawn? A ki-rin wasn’t the sort to club it up … but he wouldn’t be able to say no to his companion, I bet. She might not be having sex, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t like to dance.

So. Run through the probable scene, capture the details, gather the pieces. I turned slowly, letting my gaze take in the entire area. The woman and her companion, maybe flushed and tired after a night out, had been walking along the path, there. It’s not quite dawn, the visibility’s crap, maybe some of the streetlamps flickered or went out. They’re talking, maybe laughing, maybe arguing. Had she been drinking, drugging? Ki-rin companions were virgins, but I never heard they had to be pure every other way, too. And who knew what a ki-rin did for entertainment. So. Maybe not too steady on all six legs, maybe not seeing so well, and they came up to the building there, where the shrubs were planted, and … two men had … approached them? Jumped out at them?

I cast another glance over to where the two Council flunkies had been. As though they’d heard me wondering, they were now leading the ki-rin away, flanking it like a suited honor guard, to where a small trailer-van had pulled up to the curb. The ki-rin was smaller than they looked in pictures, with a pattern of marks on its linen-white neck that didn’t look natural—bruises, maybe, or current-burns? A Null, someone who couldn’t use current, didn’t know about the fatae, might have been confused in the predawn light, might have thought that it was a really large dog, or maybe the girl was walking alongside a pony, or something. Or maybe not even seen it, if they were completely Null. That happened, sometimes: Something in a Null’s brains just refused to acknowledge the presence of the supernatural, even when it was right in front of them, like not being able to see blue or green: current-blind.

A Null might not have seen it. The would-be rapists had been Talent, both of them. A Talent, ignoring the presence of a ki-rin? Impossible. Insane. Maybe they were high, or drunk, or …

Staring at the landscaping wasn’t going to tell me anything, and we only had a small window before the NYPD came back to reclaim the scene. Time to stop avoiding, and do my job.

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven …” In the exhale, I sank into myself, burrowing down into my core, gathering my magic to me.

During my mentoring period, J told me that everyone saw their core differently; for me, it was a tangle of threads and cables, neon-bright blues and greens and yellows. Personal magic, gathered from external sources and hoarded; like a tank of gas, if you ran out you were screwed.

For once, I had more than enough current gathered and stored; the trick was to control it, make it do what you wanted and only what you wanted. As I counted down from ten, I closed my eyes and pushed the soles of my boots firmly against the asphalt of the jogging track. My body was still, but my current was reaching down, finding the bedrock deep underneath, grounding in that solid base. That allowed me to use more current without worrying about affecting anyone around me—or, hopefully, their electronics.

When I opened my eyes again, deep in a working fugue-state, it was as though someone had dropped a scrim over the stage, and rolled back time to just before dawn. It wasn’t real—but it was, too. Places hold memories, same as people. Not for long, and they’re easily scattered and corrupted, but if you’re fast and good, you can capture it. Like spirit photography, Ian had said during training, only I was doing it with current instead of light-sensitive paper and chemicals. I could see, using mage-sight, the splatters of blood and other bodily fluids like Day-Glo paint on a gray background, and felt my stomach do a slow roll-and-turn. I didn’t want to see this, I didn’t want to see this, I didn’t …

Enough. Everyone else was doing their thing; I wasn’t going to go back to Stosser and tell him I couldn’t hack it, after all. A hard shove set aside the whining inner voice, and a sort of Zen calm settled over my core. That was another thing that made me good at my job; like Pietr, I didn’t get staticky and disruptive when my emotions were involved. I got very, very precise.

Ideally I’d let the scene play out in real time, getting it with my eyes as well as my senses. I could faintly hear the rumble of voices outside that suggested the guys in blue were back, and I needed to be gone. Just because we’d been called in didn’t mean we had any actual authority, and pressure would come down soon enough to get all this dealt with.

I did a hard-and-fast scoop, pressing everything I could find into a strand of current, and sealing it away so the rest of my own personal memories or emotions couldn’t tamper with it. Hopefully. We were still working out some of the kinks in that particular procedure.

“Miss?”

I opened my eyes to see a cop—maybe a few years older than me, clean-shaven and anxious-looking—staring down at me. Rookie, probably, sent over to get rid of the pretty little girl, while his partner did the real work. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, miss. This …”

“Yeah, it’s okay,” I said. He had a faint telltale glint, seen with fugue-sight, that told me he was Talent, and so he probably-maybe knew who I was and what I was doing there. Or maybe not; just because you could didn’t mean that you did. There were a lot of Talent who ignored anything magical. Lonejacks especially didn’t care, if it didn’t affect them directly and personally.

Either way, I wasn’t going to give him cause to get annoyed. Our window had slammed shut. I gave my “packet” a mental touch, just to reassure myself it was there, and got lost.

There wasn’t much point to waiting around for the others to finish up; they’d do their job and get back to the office when they were done. I walked over to the nearest 1 line stop and caught the next train uptown, keeping myself as still and focused as I could, the magical equivalent of walking with a glass of water on your head. Only if I “spilled,” it would contaminate the entire gleaning and ruin our only record of the scene, and every minute I spent with it inside me, the greater the chance of contamination.

Not that anything I picked up was admissible in the court of law, even perfectly preserved, but we didn’t exactly deal with the courts, or law, as most of the world knew it. We were of the Cosa, for the Cosa, and the Cosa determined what—if any—punishment would be handed out, based on what we reported. That was why the “Unaffiliated” part of “Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations” was so important. The Cosa entire wasn’t exactly filled with love and trust: Council looked down at lonejacks, lonejacks sneered at Council, and the fatae thought most humans were jumped-up Johnny-come-latelies, Talent only a little bit better. And what most Talent thought of the fatae could be summed up in two words: treacherous bastards. Have you read a fairy tale lately? Not the Disney kind; the real stuff. Even the good fairies are not the type you’d invite in for tea.

I no sooner had the thought than I looked up and had my attention caught by a good-looking guy sitting across the train from me, slouched in his seat, leather jacket nicely scruffed and jeans worn white in interesting places. While normally I’m all about the good-looking bad boy—or, occasionally, girl—I shook my head and smiled, to his obvious disappointment. The gills at the side of his neck were a dead giveaway, if you knew what you were looking for. Pickups were all well and fun, but I’d learned my lesson about playmates on office time. Anyway, mer-folk weren’t my thing. Sardine-breath was a total turnoff.

Although it was reassuring to know that some human/fatae relations were still going strong.

The subway dumped me out at my stop, and I emerged into a distractingly normal scene: bright sunshine and busy traffic; people going in and out of the stores and buildings that lined our street. There were only two teenagers lounging on the stoop of the building next to ours—either the usual gang had decided to go to school today, or they’d gotten jobs. I gave the two a distracted wave, but didn’t pause for our usual exchange of friendly catcalls.

I was buzzed into our lobby by the current-lock the Guys had put there to let team members in without needing to worry about a key, and took the stairs slowly, feeling the burn in my legs. We had an elevator, but I didn’t like using it. It wasn’t fear, or guilt, exactly. None of us used it anymore, unless Stosser herded us into it, like he had this morning. There were bad vibes in that shaft. And the exercise was good for me, anyway. Current burned calories, but it didn’t build muscles.

“Anyone home?”

The office was quiet, and the coffeemaker was turned off; two signs that I was the first back. Where the hell was Venec? It was almost lunchtime; maybe he had run out to get a sandwich? If so, I hoped he brought back extras: I suddenly realized that I was starving. There was a bodega on the corner that made a fabulous meatball grinder, if he hadn’t brought in food….

I dumped my coat in the front closet, and ran my fingers through my hair, trying to fluff it up. It was cut short again, curling around my ears, and was my normal wheat-blond color, for now. I had been contemplating going back to bright red, but the almost translucent whiteness of the ki-rin’s mane stuck in my head, and I started to wonder if it was time to bleach it all out again….

“And spend half a year waiting for your hair to recover? Maybe not.” I used to change my hair color the way Nick changed his socks—once every week or so—but bleaching wasn’t one of my favorite pastimes.

Even as I was debating styles with myself, I was moving down the carpeted hallway, the weight of my gleanings a solid, unwelcome presence in my brain. Food, hair, everything my brain was churning over was just a distraction. I didn’t want the gleanings in there any longer … but I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the unloading, either. I loved my job, but I hated this part.

The room next to Ian’s office was the best-warded one; the walls had been painted a soothing shade of off-white, and the pale green carpet everywhere else had been pulled up and bamboo flooring put down. There was a single wooden table and a single wooden chair in the room, and nothing else. I closed the door behind me, and leaned against it, trying to let my center settle itself.

“Seal and protect,” I said, triggering the wards we had set up to keep things inside the room inside the room. Once I felt the wards click into place, I pulled out the chair and sat down at the table.

Wood. Everything in our office was wood or plastic; no metal if it could be avoided. Wood didn’t conduct current the way metal did, which meant we didn’t have to be quite so careful all the damned time. I placed my hands down on the surface, my palms sweaty against the varnish, and exhaled.

“All right,” I said to the packet inside me, reaching down with a gentle mental urge. “Come on out and show me what we’ve got.”

We’d originally tried to create a virtual lockroom for things we pulled from scenes, both magical trace and physical debris. It worked great on the deposit, but got corrupted whenever someone tried to access it. We still hadn’t licked that problem. This dump-and-display was something that Stosser and I had invented out of old spells and new needs. Some of the stuff the team came up with worked, and some didn’t. We had to be flexible, adapt. Find better ways to fail, and then find a way not to fail.

Visuals were the easiest to process and share. Anyone could do it, theoretically. In practice, not so much. Nick and Sharon both made a total hash out of every try on their own, Pietr was around sixty-five percent, and even Nifty only got about eighty percent of each gleaning back in one piece.

I had a consistent ninety-three percent return rate on visuals, and a decent eighty-two percent on the other senses. That was why, no matter what happened in practice, it was me in the barrel, every time, and the hell with everyone taking turns.

Basically, the cantrip used current to create a permanent, three-dimensional display of the visual record I had garnered, sort of like what a computer would generate using pixels, only it was running off the electrical and magical impulses of my brain. The only problem was that, although the image would be here, in the room, I’d still be the one hosting it. The echo would still be in my brain until we dumped the gleaning entirely and I could detox, which generally required a full dose of current, a pitcher of margaritas, and a very hot shower.

I wasn’t all that thrilled with my gray matter being used in that way, but Stosser swore it wasn’t doing any permanent damage, and so far it seemed to be working. Whatever worked, we used.

It wasn’t something I was going to tell my mentor about, though. J had let me hunt for the truth about my dad’s murder when I was a teenager, had seen how much the simple fact of knowing what had happened to Zaki set me free. He was coming to terms with what I did, the physical and magical risks, but that didn’t mean he liked it, and he’d like this bit of current-risk even less. J’s always—some part of him—going to see me as the kid he took under his wing, someone he needs to protect. So, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t telling him everything.

I sat back, relaxed as much as I could, and closed my eyes. The current-camera rolled, the virtual film unreeled, and the figures took form in front of me, one-third of the size but every bit as real. The shiver I’d had at the scene intensified, until it racked my entire body, a seemingly endless rolling wave of cold rippling along my skin. I’d known it was going to happen, it happened every time, even in training, which was why I was doing this alone. Unloading sucked.

The problem was, you couldn’t disengage from what you gleaned, not after you took it inside. Visuals, sound, magical trace, it all carried emotional residue—a thousand tiny fishhooks that caught at you. We’d learned that the hard way, going in to gather trace on murder victims during our first case. Then, we’d gotten caught up in the last moments of the victims’ lives, almost been swamped by the experience. We’d refined the process since then, so it was an external view only that kept the hooks to a minimum. What we missed in information we avoided in agony and near-death. I was all about that.

Freaky shivers, I could live with.

The image flickered with the current I infused into it, and came to life. Girl, check, dressed in cute clubbing clothes totally unsuited for the weather, her coat open to the air. She was bubbly, bouncing. I could almost feel her adrenaline rush in the way she moved. I knew that rush, had been caught up in it myself over the years, when you’re so tired and so energized you don’t think you could sleep even if you were dead. Your brain’s going a hundred miles an hour, and you know you’re not making sense anymore, and you just don’t care, because you feel so damn good.

I forced myself to look away from her. Where was … there was the ki-rin. For something so pale, it blended really well with the predawn shadows. She skipped ahead, and it fell back a couple of paces … and that was when it happened.

I made it about halfway through before I threw up, but my concentration stayed steady on the job, even while I was heaving the remains of coffee and bagels onto the floor.

three

When I unsealed the wards and opened the door, Venec was standing there in the hallway. You know how some guys just make you feel better by looking at them? Not comforting or daddylike, just …”all right, you’re here, the ground is solid” kind of way? Venec was like that. Well, sometimes, anyway. When he wasn’t making you feel like an idiot.

He handed me a mug, and I took it automatically, my hand shaking more than I wanted. Venec took note, his gaze sharp, but he didn’t say anything. Tea, not coffee. Not Pietr’s green tea: herbal. My face screwed up in distaste even as I was drinking it. Heavy on the sugar, and I could feel my energy level starting to pick up again. Burning too many calories, using up too much current. I had to remember to watch that.

“You done in there?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Venec stood there and watched me drinking, his gaze on my face like a nanny—or a dark-feathered falcon, watching a rabbit to see which way it was going to hop. He didn’t touch me, or try to offer any kind of comfort, which was good, because I didn’t want any. I needed the rawness, the bitter taste in my mouth that not even sweet tea could erase, the acid burning in my gut. I needed to remember every detail of what I had seen, what I had felt. It wasn’t even close to what any of the actual participants had felt, distanced by being third-person, but it would keep me going when we hit dead ends or inconsistent facts, give me the energy to push through and keep working.

The truth was I hadn’t seen much of anything of the attempted assault, just a scuffle in the shadows. The flash of hooves and horn, after, had been far more clear. My brain was filling in more of those shadowed details than was healthy, but I didn’t know how to stop it. Curse of an overactive empathy, one woman to another. If one of the guys on the team had been better at gleaning …

No. My instinctive reaction to that thought was, well, instinctive. As bad as it was that I had eavesdropped like this … even if the girl never knew we were poking around in her trauma, somehow I felt I had a responsibility to her now, to take care of that trauma. I couldn’t protect her, but I could protect her memories.

The fact that I couldn’t, really, that it was evidence now, preserved for anyone on the team to look at … well, they still had to go through me, in order to view it. That was a distinction without a difference but somehow, it helped

It did strike me as worrisome that while the initial attack made me feel ill, the ki-rin’s murder of the assailant didn’t seem to affect me; it was as though I’d been watching a real—nonmagical—movie, like the blood and gore and dying wasn’t real. Maybe because the ki-rin was fatae, I hadn’t picked up its emotions from the gleaning, and I was reacting to that blank space? The dead guy had been a real human being, and he was dead. Why wasn’t I feeling anything?

Because he’d assaulted her. Because I was glad he was dead. The thought bothered me, a lot. Justifiable, yeah, but we were supposed to see the facts, and I couldn’t do that if I let my emotions cloud judgment, maybe make me overlook something. That was as bad as trying to protect the victim, in its own way.

The tea was doing its job, settling my stomach enough that I didn’t feel like I was going to puke again. I finished the rest of the liquid, and held it upside down to show the boss I’d been a good little girl.

Venec looked like he was going to say something else, then stopped and tilted his head, looking at me like I was some new bit of evidence. That feeling that tiptoed into me whenever he did that came back, little muddy cat feet.

“What?” I heard the defensiveness in my voice, and reached down to touch my core, almost in reflex. But no, the current there was still and calm. Damn it, I would not let him get to me, not just by looking at me with that heavy gaze, like I was being weighed and judged, and the jury was still out. Nobody, not even J, not even my dad, had ever made me feel like that. I didn’t like it, at all.

“Trigger the display for me, please,” Venec said, and I got the feeling that wasn’t what he had meant to say, but I was still unnerved enough that I didn’t push. He could trigger it himself, with a little effort, and I was almost tempted to tell him to do so, but my mentor had taught me manners, and I had some natural smarts to go with it. The office mood was informal, but I never made the mistake of thinking that orders weren’t meant to be obeyed, even if they weren’t phrased as orders.

“There’s soup in the ready-room,” the Big Dog went on, still staring at me. “Go eat something before you fall over.”

I stared back at him, not quite sure he was speaking in English. Soup. Soup … sounded okay. My stomach could handle soup.

And it hadn’t been a suggestion. The sugar in the tea had helped, but it was going to drop me into a crash pretty damn soon, if I wasn’t careful.

I went back into the room to reset and trigger the display, then pushed past him and headed for the kitchenette. Venec went into the room and I heard him sigh. Ah, give me a break, I thought; I’d cleaned up the worst of it. It was just going to smell a little musty in there for a while, was all.

The break room was still empty, and I found the soup in the fridge easily enough, tossing it into our small, battered microwave and letting it reheat, scrounging some crackers and a soda while I waited.

It was another half hour before the rest of the team started to straggle back from the scene. Nick was the first through the door. He stopped short when he saw me, and pasted on a snarky grin.

“Hey, Dandelion.”

He loved calling me that, because of my hair being short and fluffy and naturally blond. I let him think it annoyed me, because it amused both of us. The things we did, the way the Guys pushed us, and we pushed ourselves, a lot of stress built up and there was only so much drinking you could do and still do your job. Teasing let us blow off some of that tension in reasonably healthy ways.

I’d been in some situations—high school being the prime example—where the allegedly friendly sniping could get nasty. Not here. Not to say we didn’t occasionally do damage, especially Sharon’s smart, sharp tongue, but it was never intentional.

From the very beginning, it had been like that, all the parts that didn’t seem to fit somehow fitting anyway. Stosser and Venec had handpicked each of us, not just for our individual skills, but how we’d form a team. I don’t know how they did it, but … it worked. God knows there was the normal tension you get when you throw high achievers into close contact, but there was more to it than just being coworkers, from that very first day. We counted on each other to be there—the job required us to work together, or fail.

The closest I could describe it to J had been that we were packmates. You didn’t eat your own.

While all this skittered through my brain, Nick was waiting there, his body language expectant.

I sighed and gave in to ritual. “Bite me, Shune.”

His put-on grin softened to a smile with real humor. “Am I the first one back?”

I was curled up on the couch in the ready-room, which had once been the lobby of the original office. I suppose there might have been better, more private places for us to hang out, but the kitchenette was there, and the comfortable chairs, and somehow we all just naturally gathered there when we were all in the office and not otherwise working. That meant that anyone walking in saw us immediately, but we didn’t get many unannounced visitors. In fact, other than our first client and her son, I don’t think anyone had come to the office except us.

“No,” I said in response. “I was. You’re second. As usual.”

My heart really wasn’t in banter today, though, and I guess he realized that, because he just nodded, letting the conversation die quietly. I spooned up some more of the soup—a decent tomato bisque—and watched him put his coat away.

“You get your shit from the cop?” I asked, I guess as a peace offering.

“Yeah.”

He didn’t sound like his usual puppy-dog enthusiastic self in that, and I sat up and looked more closely at him. Nick was slight, almost scrawny, with perpetually tousled brown hair that always looked like he’d just rolled out of bed, but he’d started out the morning looking if not dapper, then decently put-together. Now, he looked like crap, and his brown eyes had a cast to them that I was starting to get all too familiar with. “What?”

“Nothing. I don’t know.” He shrugged, a gesture that drove me crazy.

“What?” Unlike with Venec, I pushed Nick. Unlike Venec, Nick liked to confide.

“Nothing.” He saw the look I was giving him, and smiled again, this time with the real sweet warmth I was used to seeing from him. “Seriously. I got the guy’s signature, so we can rule him out of the evidence. I’m tired, that’s all.”

Uh-huh. We’d been working together long enough he couldn’t bullshit me quite that easily. Smile or no, he was upset about something.

“Guy was scummy?” You couldn’t always tell from a signature, but … sometimes it just oozed.

“No.” Nick shrugged again, not finding the words he needed. “It’s just … he’s a cop.”

Ah. I understood, the way I wouldn’t have a couple of months ago. You work with crap, no matter how clean you are inside, a stink of it stays with you. It’s like the smell inside the workroom—enough people throw up over time, and the smell won’t ever go away, no matter how much lemon-scented cleanser we used. Cops stank. Even the good ones.

There wasn’t really anything to say. Part of the job. Like carrying around the memory of an assault that didn’t happen to you. I lifted my spoon. “You want some soup?”

Nick made a face, indicating his opinion of soup. “Nah. Nifty said he’d pick up a pizza on his way back.”

I must have gone green or something, because he grabbed the container of soup and had the trash can under my face before I was halfway off the sofa. My boy’s got good ref lexes.

“Sorry, ah, hell, Bonnie, I’m sorry … here.” He put the soup down and grabbed a paper towel from the counter, wetting it under the faucet and handing it to me.

I sat back and wiped my face with the back of my hand, then realized what he’d given me the paper for and wiped my hands with it, instead. So much for that soup.

Nick got me back on the sofa, and dropped himself down next to me.

“You okay? You got a stomach bug?”

Easier to claim that, but … his concern was real, and we were honest with each other. You had to be, if you expected them to have your back. Nobody got to pretend to be a hero. “Scummy,” I said, and tried to smile. He got it. He knew what my job on the scene had been, and what it meant.

He put his arm around my shoulders, his brown eyes puppy-sorrowful. “These things … nobody should have to go through it, and we shouldn’t have to witness it, either.”

I smiled a little and nodded, but there wasn’t any comfort in his words. He didn’t understand. He couldn’t really. Oh, he got it intellectually. Intellectual understanding had shit to do with it.

You talk about rape, and every female over puberty understands, way more than a guy ever could, even the most sympathetic gay-or-straight male. Women know, instinctively; hammered into us by society, every single day of our lives, even before we know what sex really is. Even if you never talked about it, it was there, lurking behind your left shoulder, an awareness of risk, even if nobody ever touches you without your consent.

But that wasn’t what was making me uneasy, why what I’d seen was bothering me so. Not exactly. Violence I could handle. I had never been a sheltered child, and I knew that people weren’t angels—not that the angeli were all that nice, from what I’d heard. It was the entire concept of sex-as-violence that was … More than alien to me, it was supersize noncarbon-based life-form alien. J said I was a hedonist, I just believed that mutual pleasure was a noble goal. To me, sex was play: it was an expression of affection, of mutual satisfaction, and yeah, when time, of procreation. That someone could use it to hurt someone else? Being reminded that, in the wrong minds, it can also be a weapon? Scummy. Scary.

I struggled to hold on to my anger from before. Anger was better than fear. Anger I could use.

Nick rested his head on my shoulder, almost a cuddle, and even though it wasn’t anything he hadn’t done before, on tough days, my body shifted away from his. Then he sighed, and I felt a sudden urge to comfort him overriding my own discomfort. Unlike me, Nick had been sheltered. Dealing with scummy took more out of him than he wanted to admit.

Without thinking about it, my arm lifted, draping itself around his shoulders. Nick and I’d flirted—hell, we still flirted, because that was what we did—but I just didn’t react to him that way, and Nicky’d adapted. Sometimes it was nice to have sex out of the picture and off the table, so you could offer comfort without wondering if anything else was being offered, too.

“Hey, guys. Whoops, did we interrupt something?”

Pietr had come in, unnoticed as usual, followed by Nifty, burdened with two pizza boxes, and Sharon, closing the door behind them. Still no sign of Stosser, unless he’d come in while I was in the workroom and Venec hadn’t thought to mention it?

“Bonnie …”

“Bonnie is just fine,” I interrupted, giving Nick a hard elbow in the ribs, and forcing him to move away a little. I’d let him coddle me, a little bit, because he was Nick and it made him feel better. But be damned if I’d announce it to the entire damned pack. He took the hint, and shut up.

“I put the gleanings on loop in the warded workroom,” I told them, even as they were stuffing their coats in the closet, and heading for the coffee. “Venec’s in there now. No idea where Stosser is—he went to interview the victim.”

There were a few winces at that: I wasn’t the only one assuming the worst. Ian Stosser might be smooth to the outside world, but we knew him a little better than most. Still, when he wanted something he could ooze compassion and caring. Just because he rarely used it on us anymore was no need to assume the worst … right? And he had agreed to be gentle with the girl. He wasn’t going to screw it up.

Nifty put the pizzas down on the counter, and opened the lid of one. The smell filled the air, and while normally the combination of tomato, garlic and oregano would make me a happy girl, at this exact moment I didn’t want to be anywhere near food.

“I’m … going to go get Venec,” I said, uncurling from the sofa and making my escape into the hallway before anyone could say anything. I made a quick pit stop into the bathroom, to splash some water on my face and rinse my mouth out. It was your basic small-office restroom: two stalls, two sinks, wall-size mirror over the sinks, but about a month ago Sharon had made a big deal about putting new bulbs in overhead, so she could, as she said, apply makeup without looking like a corpse, and they cast a gentler, kinder light I suddenly really appreciated.

I leaned on the counter and stared at myself, taking inventory. Hair: still blond, still short, still almost-curly, like a palomino poodle. Eyes: a little bloodshot but nothing that couldn’t be attributed to a lack of sleep. Skin: pale, but that was normal for me. Were there new lines around my mouth and eyes that hadn’t been there last night? Probably. I was only twenty-two, but sometimes I felt like I was thirty, at least.

I loved my job. Ian had something else driving him, some figurative demon crowding his shoulder, but the rest of us … we just wanted to know why, who, what … and we liked to push ourselves. It wasn’t an obsession: I could walk away, if it got too much—and I knew I never would. This was my passion, what I was driven to do.

I practiced a smile, something cheery and bright to reassure everyone I was fine, and shuddered at the result. Maybe not just yet.

I loved my job, but some days the fun level … wasn’t.

Face splashed and mouth rinsed out, I wandered down the hallway and found Venec, as expected, in the room I’d left. The door was open, so I just stuck my head in enough to see him sitting at the table, back straight, elbows on the chair-arms, watching the display the way a meter maid watches a parking meter ticking down the last seconds.

I didn’t say anything: He knew I was there.

One hand lifted, and the display stopped just as the ki-rin dropped behind his companion, a scarce minute before the attack. “The others are back?”

“Yeah.”

“All right. Tell them to start writing up their reports, and I’ll be with them in a minute.”

I nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at me. “Should they come here?”

“No.” He stared at the frozen display. “No, I want them to come to the discussion with a blank slate. Time enough for them to watch this when we’ve looked at the rest of the picture.”

In other words, nobody else needed to get their facts tangled by an emotional reaction. It made sense. Part of me was relieved that the girl wouldn’t have her trauma spread around, and part of me was pissed that I got stuck with it … but Venec had gone there, too. I wasn’t alone.

It didn’t help as much as I’d hoped.

“And Torres?” His voice was quiet, a softer growl than usual.

I paused, but didn’t look back. “Yeah, boss?”

“You did good.”

That didn’t help, either.

I walked down the hallway, feeling the walls press in around me. The others were still gathered in the break area. Sharon was writing up her notes already, slice of pizza in one hand, pen in the other, frowning intently, while the guys were bullshitting about baseball. Still no sign of Stosser. I leaned against the wall and watched them. Although my stomach gave another slow, queasy roll from the smell and sight of the pizza, I didn’t feel the urge to throw up again. I didn’t feel much of anything, in fact, the earlier unease drained from my body while I talked to Venec. While I was normally pretty calm—that was part of why I was so good at this job—that sudden loss of emotion didn’t feel right. It was as though someone had siphoned the emotion out of me, and I knew enough psychology to know that probably wasn’t a good thing.

I needed to get out of here, put some distance between myself and the display room, so when it all came slamming back, I could break in private.

I went to the closet, and pulled out my coat. They already had my report. If Venec or Stosser wanted me, they knew how to get in touch.

“Hey, where you going?” Nifty asked, wadding up his napkins and tossing them into the trash.

“Home,” I said.

My apartment isn’t much, by my mentor’s standards, but it’s better than what I’d been born into, and more importantly right then, it’s all mine. My refuge. A cash payoff to the landlord, and I’d painted the walls of the main room a pale purple, and the kitchen dark gold. The furniture was a clash of expensive antiques and trash-day rescues that looked pretty damn fine, if I did say so myself.

I kicked my shoes off and dumped my coat and bag on the floor. There was a pitcher of sweet tea in the fridge, and I drank it straight, like I’d spent the past week being dehydrated in the Sahara, then grabbed an apple and went back into the main room. Most people who had studio apartments separated out their living and sleeping space—not me. My bed was on a loft platform in one corner, but my dining table was shoved underneath, and got pulled out whenever someone came over for dinner or stayed for breakfast. There were two love seats, reupholstered in gold velvet a shade lighter than the kitchen walls, and a black lacquered Chinese chest that held all my dishes and silverware. I’d had a coffee table at one point, but the glass chipped during a party when I first moved in, and I hadn’t had time to find a replacement. Something sturdier this time …

Although … another party like the last one would get me kicked out of the building, payoff to the landlord or no. I’d been in such a rush to take the apartment before someone else could steal it from me, I hadn’t thought to ask about the neighbors. They weren’t bad, just mostly older and settled, and not really happy with parties, even quiet ones, that went on all night. Not that there had been all that many. Since moving to the city last summer, I’d tried to build up a network of friends, people who liked to go clubbing, to party not heavily but well, but the past few months the job had overrun all of that. If I hung out at all, it was mostly with the team, and when I did go out, it was weird … sometimes now even in the middle of a hot dance floor I’d feel this sudden urge to be home—alone.

I took a bite out of the apple, absently, and stared at the wall opposite me. Where most people would have a flat-screen television, I’d hung a mosaic made out of hundreds of colored glass tiles. The sunlight from the windows hit it just-so twice a day, and rainbows streamed all over the place. Magic. Right now, it was still, just bits of colored glass doing nothing special at all, except reflecting my image back to me, fractured and broken.

The apple tasted sour in my mouth, and my beloved, comfortable space suddenly felt shabby and sad. I spit the apple into my hand, tossed the entire thing into the garbage can, and without a ping of warning—or asking permission—I Translocated my sorry ass to J’s place.

When a teenager starts showing signs of magical ability, they’re assigned a mentor, someone who will take them through the stages, teach them what they need to know and help them figure out their strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes it’s a parent or cousin, but more often it’s someone not related, a friend of the family with a skill level close to yours, or a particularly good rapport with kids.

Ideally everyone mentors, at some point, but the reality is that not everyone’s good at it. And it’s important to be good at it—you’ve got another person’s life depending on your ability to teach them properly. We’re taught one-on-one, not in classrooms, and the mentor-student relationship trumps almost every other bond we have, even after the mentorship ends.

In my case, Joseph Cetala was more than a mentor—he’d been standing in loco parentis since I was eleven. Long story-short version was I went from being the only child of a ne’er-do-well lonejack carpenter to the live-in student of a Boston lawyer/Council muckety-muck with contacts in the White House … and maybe even the Kremlin, for all I knew. By the time I came along he’d retired from all that, and just did some very quiet and occasional consulting of the sort you don’t talk about. J hadn’t been real happy with my going to work for Stosser and Venec—he wanted me somewhere safer, like a paralegal for a cushy law firm, or teaching in an inner-city school—but he was experienced enough and honest enough to admit that PUPI was needed, and that I was good at what I did.

That didn’t mean he didn’t worry. I might not tell him the shit that went down when we were on a case, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think that he didn’t hear about it, eventually. We’d reached a compromise. There was a lurking fatae with the inappropriate name of Bobo who occasionally showed up late at night to walk me home when things got rough—or Bobo thought they might get rough—that soothed J’s discomfort, and we never talked about the dangers of my job.

Translocation only takes a few seconds, but it’s a major power drain for most of us, messing with natural physics in ways that supported the whole “indistinguishable from magic” thing Zaki—my dad—used to quote. Nifty, who was our best practical theorist, had tried more than once to explain it, but all I cared about tonight was that it took me home.

“Bonita.” J was in his early 70s, with fine patrician features and a shock of immaculately groomed white hair, and you’d think he’d greet you in the library of his ten-room apartment wearing a tuxedo and carrying a brandy snifter. Reality wore a pair of ratty jeans and a Harvard sweatshirt, and carried a bottle of Stella. He didn’t look at all surprised to see me. He never did. “Would you like a beer?”

I would.

I dumped my shoes on the outrageously expensive carpet, curled up in the security of a leather club chair, and cradled my bottle in both hands, letting the condensation soak into my skin. The antiques in my apartment all came from J’s collection, but he’d never had a hands-off attitude; to him, furniture was what you sat on, and a sofa was for naps as well as tête-à-tête. I knew better than to put my bottle down without a coaster, though.

We did the quiet chitchat for a while; he’d been down to NYC to take me out to dinner just last week, so there really wasn’t much new to share, unless I wanted to talk about the non-thing that kept showing up between me and Venec, which I didn’t, or the cold empty echoing thing where my emotions should be, which I really didn’t.

“Hey,” I said suddenly, realizing that something was missing. “Where’s Rupert?” Rupert was J’s dog, an aged sheepdog who had as much to do with raising me as J did.

“Vet. His stomach decided to disagree with him. I’m having them do a full checkup, just in case. He’ll be home tomorrow morning, don’t worry.”

Rupe was almost fifteen. Anything that required an overnight stay at the vet worried me. And I knew it was worrying J, but if he didn’t want to talk about it, we weren’t going to talk about it. Time to change the subject. I thought about regaling him with the story of Jennie’s party last night, or the way the hot doctor across the way from my apartment threw her most recent lover out wearing only his boxers and one sock—but finally had to accept the fact that I hadn’t come here for distraction, but after-the-fact mentoring.

“We have a new job.” He’d heard already; I knew he’d heard from the way his expression didn’t change at all. J was a damned good listener, though; he just sat back and let me talk, or not, as I wanted.

I didn’t want. It came out anyway.

“Girl, a Talent, barely out of mentorship, probably. Companion to a ki-rin.” J was one of the most traveled, most experienced Talent I’d ever met. He knew how rare they are, here and in their native country. It’s not like griffons, breeding two kits at a time, or the damned piskies, who populate like squirrels. Ki-rin are magical, even to us. If the perps had hurt it … I shuddered at the thought. If the ki-rin had been hurt, those rubberneckers would have been an angry mob of fatae, not human looky-loos. “They were out for a night clubbing, or she was, and he’s keeping her company. Two guys, Talent, jump them on the way home. Jump her. The ki-rin had fallen behind a little. It was late, his mane is pure white so he isn’t a youngster anymore, I guess.” I paused, suddenly struck by the thought. “How old do ki-rin get, anyway?”

J hadn’t moved while all this was pouring out of me, sitting in his usual armchair, legs crossed at the ankle. “I don’t know. It’s considered quite rude to ask.”

“Huh. Well, it … didn’t get to her in time. Killed the first attacker, wounded the second, I guess it didn’t kill him because he didn’t get the chance to do anything?” My hands were colder than the bottle I was holding. “The story seems straightforward, you know? Bad guys do bad thing, are killed—or maimed—by the good guy, survivor gets jail time. We’ve been asked to investigate only to make sure everything’s clean, that it was self-defense, I guess. Stosser didn’t say outright, but the only one who’d hire us for something like this, where there’s no money involved, or a revenge motive, would either be family or Council, and I got the feeling it wasn’t family. Don’t know why Council would be taking such a hard-line interest, though.”

Council was for Council members, which meant human, not fatae; even if a ki-rin was involved, their instinct would be to sweep it under the rug as fast as possible to protect their people. Had the dead guy been Council? It wasn’t impossible—Council was the country club association of Talent, and there were as many ass-wipes in country clubs as there were hanging on street corners. But then they’d be trying to cast blame away from their man, not hire us to find out the actual facts.

No, something didn’t feel right. I wondered what Venec thought of this case, and in that thought I could almost feel his hand on mine again, the smooth, firm touch sending another round of current-shock through my system, then flowing back out again, leaving me with a hitch in my breath.

“PR concerns, I suspect,” J said. “There has been some … unpleasantness toward the fatae recently.” He shifted, leaning forward from the hips. It was a tell he had, a giveaway sign when he was thinking hard about something. “In New York, and in Philly. Nothing here in Boston that I’ve heard. Minor annoyances, mostly, although some have become physical. Bigotry picking up a stick. I can imagine that the Council is concerned that this incident of yours not spark a greater conflagration. As it might, with a ki-rin involved.”

I forced myself to focus on his words, not the echo of tingling on my skin. “Yeah. I can see why they’d want this handled without a hint of impropriety on their part.” And that would explain the crowd that had gathered—they weren’t there for the ki-rin, not to support or gawk at it, anyway. And the Council boys had been there to protect it, not confine it. “Nice to know the Council thinks we can be of some use, even if it’s only to use us.”

All right, so I was bitter. The Council was split into regional areas, and half of them had refused to authorize their members to hire us … but the leadership was willing to use us when it suited their needs, to protect their privileged asses.

“Bonita …” J’s tone of voice was the same he’d used when I was missing the point during a lesson.

“Yeah, I know. It’s going to take time to win them over. I know.” My stomach wasn’t queasy anymore, and my skin didn’t tingle, but now my entire body was so very cold, so cold I couldn’t even shiver. It didn’t feel like shock or trauma, though—I knew those. It wasn’t even the emptiness of waiting to break, from before. It felt more like … like something had been cut out of me, where the outrage and fear should have been.

Weird. Very weird, discomforting, and I did not like. But if I said anything at all about it, J would freak.

I took a hit off my beer, and tried to wash the feeling away. “Well, we’re on the job now, and first look says this probably won’t take more than a day or two to wrap up and write a report. Yay us. What do you think will happen to the ki-rin?”

“For killing his companion’s attacker? A slap on the hooves, maybe. He would be within rights to demand reparation from the dead man’s kin, on the girl’s behalf. Every Council from here to Beijing would back him on that, if he did, and lonejacks …” He made a palms-up gesture. “Well, who knows how lonejacks will react to anything.”

I shook my head, rolling my beer bottle back and forth between my hands. I love J, but he’s a bigot in his own liberal way. Council and lonejack and fatae: the carefully delineated, political world that J lived in. I’d never had to worry about any of this before I became a Pup.

“And the girl?” I asked him, instead. “What rights does she have in all this?”

“She can take the survivor to court, if she …” J’s voice trailed off.

The bitterness surged to the fore again, and I grabbed onto it; anything other than that cold empty feeling. “Yeah. Take him to court, and not only does she have to relive the attack, but she has to explain what happened to the other guy, the one who actually attacked her. Oh, my oversize, horned intelligent magical companion killed him. With his horn. Yeah, a single slender horn, right in the middle of his forehead …”

I hiccupped, and took a long pull of the beer to cover the crack in my voice. “J?”

“Yes, Bonita?”

“Why?”

He didn’t pretend not to know what I was asking; he’d known me too long. “I don’t know, Bonita.” J had been a great mentor; still was, in a lot of ways. He’d always been straight with me, never lied, not even when I almost wished he would. “There are theories, and psychological jingo, but I’ve never understood how it translates into the human mind, thank god. I’ve just always been thankful that you grew up without encountering that sort of male, firsthand.” His voice was quiet, but I could hear the sorrow in it, for that girl, for me, for every girl who had something beautiful and joyful and honest taken from them for nothing more than selfish cruelty.

The cold forming under my skin cracked a little under the touch of his voice, and the itchy heat in my eyes promised a buildup of tears, but they didn’t come. We just sat there, and breathed in the quiet security of the library, of civilized behavior, until the daylight faded, leaving us in the shadows.

J reached out and turned on a lamp, bringing an amber glow into the room. “You’ll stay for dinner.”

It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. “Please.”

A few hundred miles south in Manhattan, the same dusk was settling over the skyscrapers and brownstones, the sunset reflecting off the water and flashing last spears of light against the glass walls and windows of the financial district. Uptown, traffic was at rush-hour peak, but in the halls outside the PUPI offices, it was quiet. The seven-story building housed a dentist, a handful of CPAs, two lawyers, and a few offices whose signs didn’t give away their contents or purpose. On the bottom floor, there was a photographer who was rarely there, and a literary agency. Neither office had many visitors outside of UPS and FedEx deliveries, although those seemed to come every day.

By contrast, the office across the hall had a steady stream of people going in and out, the same seven people, usually in a group and often, as now, in the middle of a seemingly continuous conversation.

“We could …”

“No.”

“But …”

“No.” Venec’s growl warned the speaker not to push further. He had been itchy all day, morose and snappish, as though someone had shoved unbalanced current into his core, and he was in no mood to deal with the carping of overtired puppies.

There was a moving tangle of arms being thrust into coat sleeves and bags and backpacks being swung carelessly, and then they exited the office, Venec closing and locking the office door behind them.

“I don’t see why you don’t let us,” Nifty said, his voice calm and reasonable in a way that set Venec’s teeth on edge. “It’s not like—”

He cut the overeager PUPI off midsentence. “Because I said no and how many times will it take for me to say that until at least one of you listens?”

“Seven.” Sharon was positive.

“Four,” Nifty contradicted her.

“Eleven?” That was Nick, looking thoughtful.

Venec shook his head, feeling the exasperation simmer just under his skin. He really should know better by now, he really should. He’d scouted each of them, chosen them, trained them. The talkback came with the other traits he’d selected them for, no way around it. Mouthy and Talented, the pack of them.

On that thought, he paused and looked around for Pietr, who was the only one who hadn’t ventured a guess. “Where the hell is Pietr? Did we leave him in the bathroom or something?”

“I’m here.”

Sharon jumped, as the voice seemed to come from just at her left shoulder.

“I swear, I’m going to bell you,” she muttered. “Can’t you cough on a regular basis, or something?”

“I would, but you wouldn’t hear me.”

Venec frowned, listening in, this time intentionally. That had to be getting to be a sore point—Pietr swore he didn’t intentionally disappear when he got stressed, it just happened. God knew, there was enough stress in the office right now, after the day they’d had.

The usual reaction to having a stressful problem was to chew at it until it was solved. That was good, if they were on a hot trail. But they didn’t have enough information yet to solve it, so they’d start chewing on each other, instead. Part of his job was to prevent that. Bonnie’s need to get the hell out had been one he supported, even though he wished she’d said something to him beforehand. Now he needed to get the rest of them to go home as well, before he had to put a boot under their tails.

“Children, enough.” He put extra exasperation into his tone, not difficult to do right then. “Everyone go home. Or go to a bar, or a strip club or whatever it is that you do to blow off steam. You just can’t stay here.”

That was the rule he had invoked to get them to leave: nobody stayed late, not when neither of the Big Dogs—and yes, he knew what the team called them—were around. He had made that rule after their first investigation. His partner believed that, with his sister scolded and publicly shamed for her part in the death of the Null boy, her posse of anti-PUPI protesters wouldn’t do anything more against them. Ben was less certain of that, and not willing to trust any of his team on that chance. Besides, it gave him a good excuse to make sure they got a decent night’s sleep. His pups thought they were tough and tougher, and they were, but it wasn’t a much-older couple this time, or disembodied bits packed neatly in a cooler. It was a young girl, their own age. He might only be ten years older, but he had seen more than all of them put together. The case was shaking them, even if they didn’t realize it. Better they take a step away now, get a breath, do something normal.

“We go to Bonnie’s,” Nick said in response. “But she’s not home. I called and got her answering service, and she’s not responding to a ping.”

“Oh, god, she’s not still dating what’s-his-name, is she?” Nifty asked, distracted. “The doink with the goofy smile?”

Nick threw up his hands in a dramatic gesture of disgust. “What, you think she tells me everything?”

“Yeah.” Sharon, Pietr and Nifty all responded in the same instant. Venec just closed the door quietly behind him while they were all preoccupied. He had no interest in their personal lives beyond how it affected their professional behavior, not even their sharp young technician, had no interest in her at all beyond her skills in the office.

“Right. No, she’s not,” Nick said. “I think we scared him off.”

“We did no such thing.”

“Of course we did,” Sharon said. “He took one look at us and ran for the hills. No great loss, he wasn’t right for her anyway. Too …”

“Stable? Sturdy? Much a productive member of society?” Nifty asked.

“Boring. Bonnie should not be with someone boring.”

“Right.” Nick rolled his eyes, still being dramatic. “And we’re all having such good luck on the dating front, we can give her advice.”

It seemed that nobody wanted to touch that comment, from the brief silence that fell.

“So if she’s not home where are we going to go?” Nifty asked.

“We might try our own homes?” Sharon suggested caustically. “Since Big Bad Dad here won’t let us work any longer, ‘cause he’s got a hot date or something….”

There was a flyer stuck to the nameplate on the door. Annoyed, Venec plucked it off, telling himself that his annoyance had to do with the solicitation, and not the way Bonnie’s love life was being batted around. Too young, too much an employee. Too much trouble, damn it.

“We’ve done everything we can right now,” he said to them. “Ian will be back in the morning with the girl’s testimony and the ki-rin’s deposition—” he hoped; his partner hadn’t pinged to say he’d be late, but Ian was not what you’d call a steady-goer “—and then we’ll be able to start putting the pieces together for our report. Right now, you’re just chewing on your tails, and that’s starting to chafe mine. So. Go. Home.”

He shooed them down the hall, noting with concern that they didn’t even stop at the elevator, but headed for the stairs at the end of the hallway. He understood their aversion—none of them were going to forget the boy who had died anytime soon—but it wasn’t good that they were now so conditioned to avoid it. He was going to have to do something about that, as well as the situation with Pietr.

He stopped to push the button for the elevator, meaning to set an example, and realized that he still had the flyer in his hand. Curious, he unfolded the salmon-colored paper and scanned the text, and then stopped and read it again, more carefully. On the surface it was an advertisement for a fumigation service. On the surface …

He had seen the wording before, on a different flyer, on his own door.

Do you have problems with unwanted creatures in your space? Looking for a way to evict them forever without chemicals or fuss? Call us.

He hadn’t thought anything about it then, piled with the other flyers and junk mail that seemed to accumulate every week; current use was one of the best natural cockroach repellents, and his building didn’t have a rat problem that he was aware of. Now, on its own, the wording seemed somehow more … something. He didn’t know what, but it made him uncomfortable.

He was a cautious, suspicious sort by training as well as natural inclination, and he didn’t believe in ignoring his instincts when they said something was wrong.

It was probably nothing; he might simply be overreacting. Or it could be important. That was his job, too; to scout things that might be important, and keep Ian informed. More, he didn’t like something about the wording of these flyers—or the fact that there was no company name on it, no website or email, only a phone number. That sort of thing raised a definite red flag—it meant someone was trying not to leave a trace. Pay-as-you-go cell phones were easier to dump than websites these days.

It wasn’t all current, this gig. Sometimes you had to use Null methods, too.

“Sharon,” he called, stopping her before she went into the stairwell. “Hang on a minute. You still in contact with the legal types you used to work with?”

She had come to them via a Talent-heavy law firm, specializing in discrimination cases and medical malpractice.

The blonde stepped back into the hallway, letting the others go on down the stairs without her, and looked at him inquiringly, switching easily from off-duty grousing to professional competence. “Yeah, why?”

He uncrumpled the paper, and handed it to her. “I need you to do some digging for me. Quietly.”

It had been a long day filled with not much of anything, and Aden was tired. She heard the door open, the sound of Carl’s steps in the hallway, but felt no urge to get up and meet him. The divan she was sitting on was comfortable, and he would come to her if there was anything to say. There was a skitter of claws as the dog was released from its leash and went into the kitchen to see if there was anything in its bowl.

His footsteps moved along the tiled hallway, down into the sunken living room, then stopped. She could feel the change in the air, but kept her back to him, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the wall. The beach was empty save for a single jogger coming down the sand toward then. The high season was still months away, and she would be gone by then, the lease on this house expired. She didn’t know where she would go, then. Maybe Miami. Maybe Canada. Not home, not yet. She was not yet ready to deal with them. Not while they still slunk about like whipped dogs, too hesitant to do what was needed.

Carl cleared his throat. “They’ve hired your brother.”

The bile swirling in her throat at his words was an old, not-unwelcome friend. There was only one “they” in this house. The Mage Council. Specifically to her, the Midwest Council, her home and kin, but she knew he meant the Eastern Council, the region her brother lived in now. They were all the same in the end, even if they claimed autonomy and embraced geographic limitations. The elite of the elite; the decision-makers, the voice of reason and control against the human tendency to excess. She had spent her entire life living up to their standards, hoping to one day be strong enough, respected enough to be asked to join the seated members, to be a decision-maker herself.

Her childhood idols had feet of clay.

She sighed, hugging her knees more tightly to her, still watching the blue-gray waves rolling up onto the shore. “And what should I do about that, rush in to protest? Try to save them from their folly? Because that ended so well, last time.”

“The boy’s death was not your fault.” His reaction was automatic, but heartfelt.

“Of course it wasn’t.” She had not attacked with lethal force, only attempted to warn her brother, to force him to acknowledge the wrongness of his path. It was pure sad chance that the killer they had been chasing attempted to take them out at the same time, and that the elevator had failed in the resulting current cross fire and fallen, with the boy inside. Regrettable of course, but responsibility had to go to the owners of the building, who had not maintained their power grid properly. It merely reinforced her belief that Ian’s foolhardy quest would bring only grief and disaster to their people, no matter his good intentions. “But the Council needed someone to blame, and my brother was once again golden. He challenges their decisions, denies their authority, abandons everything that we were raised to believe … and they not only do not slap him down, they hire him. It would make me laugh, if it wasn’t so horrifying.”

Carl came farther into the room, but did not sit down, instead standing behind her. She could see him reflected faintly in the glass; hands behind his back, silver hair uncovered, like a soldier reporting to his general. The thought pleased her.

“And so he is allowed to spread his theory further….”

Aden looked at the reflection as she spoke. “And there is nothing that I can do to stop him. I am still banned from going within two miles of his precious puppies, forbidden to speak against them for another year.” The injustice of it made her want to spit. Never mind that within a year they would inevitably be out of business, their methods reviled, and her brother doubtless disgraced and discredited again. Who knew what damage they could do to the fabric of the Cosa Nostradamus in a year? “There is nothing I can do,” she said again, this time more softly, and her fingers unclenched, smoothing the nubby fabric of the divan underneath her as though petting a cat.

“Not directly, perhaps.”

She didn’t move, didn’t stop stroking the fabric, or watching the waves rise and unroll. Both soothed her, kept her from dwelling on the injustices of the world. “And … indirectly?”

He didn’t respond, his glass-shadow not moving, waiting at relaxed attention, and eventually curiosity forced her to turn around on the divan and look directly at him.

“Indirectly? And don’t give me that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ crap. I have no desire to align myself with some radical group or lunatic antimagic front.” Her voice was sharp, and she was pleased to see him flinch. Aden was a Stosser: she had objections to her brother’s actions, yes, but she would be damned if she would lend her legitimacy to some nutcase who wanted them to deny their heritage and abandon current, or something equally insane.

“What about ‘the enemy that can be used is a useful tool’?”

He looked entirely too poker-faced—there was something he was pleased about. She studied him a moment, putting her thoughts in order. She disliked speaking before she knew exactly what she was going to say, especially on matters of such importance. Carl was far too good a planner to bring her smoke and mirrors; something was up. Something that pleased him, and thought it would also please her.

“All right,” she allowed, leaning back and nodding. “You have my attention.”

four

By the time we reached the pecan tart, I’d gotten the ground under me, again, and was feeling kind of silly for overreacting. “Dinner was, as always, delightful.” It was—J was a fabulous cook, and an even better conversationalist. “But I should scoot—they’re going to expect us in the office at Oh-god-Early again.”

J smiled briefly, honestly amused. “The thought of you being a nine-to-fiver …”

“More like eight-to-eight,” I said, and like that was a trigger, a yawn almost cracked my jaw open, loud enough that I was embarrassed. “It’s not the company, I promise.”

“You used to run three days without sleep,” he observed, standing to gather plates from the table. “You’re getting old, Bonita.”

“And you’re getting younger,” I said, standing to help him clear the table. A wave of exhaustion hit me, almost knocking me back into my chair.

“Bonita?” J moved pretty fast for an old guy. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, just …” I had to double-check to make sure what the problem was. “Wow. My tank sprang a leak somewhere.” I wasn’t about to tell J how much our work took out of me—it would just be another thing for him to worry about.

There is no sigh like a mentor’s sigh. “When was the last time you sourced, Bonnie? Not merely a hit here or there, either.”

I couldn’t remember, so I just shrugged, a bit of body language that I knew would drive him crazy. Even as a kid I’d forgotten to recharge regularly … back then, it hadn’t really mattered. I could go months, sometimes, without hitting empty. Now? Two days seemed to be the max.

There were different ways to recharge, but mostly it came down to choosing between wild current, or man-made. Wild current was exactly that—magic that formed from a natural charge. Current ran alongside electricity, in ways we still didn’t quite understand but were more than happy to use. So thunderstorms, ley lines, any focused electrons we can lay magical hands on, that was how we sourced wild current. Nick claimed he knew someone who could pull current directly from the atmosphere, but I think he was full of shit, because you’d either get so little it would be useless, or overrush your brains out and leave you a twitching, grinning wreck. No thanks.

Fortunately for us, anything that carried electricity also carried some amount of current. That was where man-made current came from—modern generators. The old stories were a crock—modern technology didn’t kill magic, it enhanced it, gave it another burst of always-accessible power in the form of generated electricity. Thank god, because I really hated sourcing wild. A portable computer or phone: that was a small hit. An apartment building’s electrical system: more. A power plant? Smorgasbord. That’s why so many of us lived in cities: 24-hour access where something was always turned on and working.

And why, every now and again, the entire power grid went dark, because some nitwit Talent had pulled too much, too hard. Bad enough to short out your own electronics. Taking down the grid got you Idiot Hall of Fame status.

“Bonnie …”

I smiled up at him, as innocent a look as I could manage, and he gave up. “I’ll send you home, but you have to promise to recharge, all right?”

I held up my hand in solemn oath, and he believed me.

J was a master craftsman: he dropped me neatly into the middle of my living space, with only a slight wooziness that passed with a blink and refocusing. I sat down on the nearest love seat and did another quick check of my core. Mmm. All right, yeah. There wasn’t anything nearby that would give me a full soak, but I could fix the immediate damage, at least.

I sank into a half fugue, and siphoned off a thin trickle, not from my own building, but the newer, nicer one across the street. They had cleaner wiring, so I was less likely to cause a burp in their service, or fry someone’s computer. I’d do better this week, when I had time to hunt down a stronger source.

The recharge took care of the wobblies, enough that I could have gone through my normal bedtime routine. Instead, I stayed where I was. Talking to J had helped, the way it always did—that was what a mentor did, once they finished kicking you into shape—but I still felt worn down. Was it just this case hitting me hard? Or was it the job itself? Was I not hacking it? The thought scared me more than anything else ever had.

I loved this job. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t wash out.

At that moment I wished that I had a dog. Or a cat, or even a gerbil. Something I could pet when I came home, and cuddle, and know that it loved me. Okay, maybe not a gerbil. Rodents were nasty. But a cat, maybe. A cat would be good.

I’d never had a pet before; there was only room for one animal in J’s apartment and Rupert was it, in no uncertain terms.

“Worry about a cat later,” I told myself, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. “If one is meant to come, it’ll come. Isn’t that how cats worked?” I yawned, aware that, even recharged, my brain was getting fuzzy. I should go to bed. Should. Yeah. Right.

Even though I love my loft bed—it’s big enough for two, comfortable enough to live in, and sturdy enough for a pillow fight, or any other kind of energetic activity—the thought of climbing up there right now was too much effort. It wasn’t just the current-drain, or even the emotional seesaw I’d been riding. We’d been pushing hard, the organ-leggers case and now this, with no real downtime between. Was this what it was going to be like once we convinced the naysayers, and cases came on a regular basis?

The thought both thrilled and horrified me.

I ended up dozing on and off, curled up on the sofa, instead. I woke up a few times during the night, once from a dream of a large black cat sleeping on my chest, and then again when a truck rumbling by set off a series of car alarms down on the street, and then finally overslept, waking up only when the sound of kids on the street outside wormed their way into my consciousness.

Oh, fuck. I wasn’t late—yet. But there was no time for my usual putter-around-the-apartment wake-up routine. A fast shower got me clean, and a rummage in my closet resulted in an easy-to-manage outfit of long black skirt, leggings, and black cotton sweater over my lace-up stompy boots. I managed to make it out the door by ten after seven, feeling like crap, but still on time. Thank god we didn’t have a particular dress code.

Manhattan in the morning is a living stream of purpose; everyone’s got a place to be and a problem on their mind. That doesn’t mean it’s an unfriendly place—just busy and preoccupied. Personally, I love it. I’m a social creature but there are times and places you just don’t want to do more than grunt at your fellow human being.

This morning, though, my usual comfort level was replaced by something a lot less … comfortable. Walking to the station, and standing on the platform waiting for my train, I was acutely aware of everyone around me, not in the usual “get your elbow/cell phone/coffee away from me” sense but judging distances, evaluating body language, watching anyone who got too close … specifically anyone male.

Huh. It wasn’t that I didn’t do this sort of thing all the time. You have to, wherever you are. It’s just basic common sense and security, and when you’re being trained to observe and detect, that goes into overdrive. But normally it was background processing, something I did without being really aware, unless a warning signal pinged my forebrain. Today … it was all front-and-center consciousness, and very much focused on gender. The difference was like between healthy skin and abraded flesh. Every whisper of touch, every possible glance from a stranger, made me shudder in almost physical discomfort.

It wasn’t worse than the cold numbness of yesterday, but it sure as hell wasn’t better, either. What the fuck was going on?

I managed to clamp down on it long enough to get on the arriving train without screaming or snarling at anyone. Once on, I slipped and slid my way into an empty seat at the far end of the car, between a young Asian woman in a suit, eyes closed as though she were sleeping, and a large, middle-aged black woman with a bundle of knitting in her hands. She radiated a don’t-mess-with-me-this-morning attitude that was soothing.

I exhaled, forcing myself to calm down. The car was full but not packed, and there was actually enough room that people weren’t in each other’s personal space, which always made for a more relaxed atmosphere. I had a book in my kit, but it didn’t feel like a reading morning. I looked down, and only then noticed that in my rush I’d put on mismatched socks. Great. My fashion style was a little on the fashion-risk side sometimes, but that was going to be tough to carry off as intentional. I pushed the brown one down into the ankle of my boots and closed my eyes instead, trying to get into work mindset.

Usually it wasn’t a problem. While I’m not a morning person, the hum of the subway’s electrical power and the jolting of the train typically eased me into the day, while the promise of a puzzle—either a training session exercise or, as now, an actual job—to chew on got my brain to agree to function.

But this case … Damn it, I was the one who stayed cool. But my brain wasn’t cooperating, even after a night’s sleep and a recharging hit, so I couldn’t blame it entirely on exhaustion.

It couldn’t be the job itself: we had all the answers already. All we had to do was organize and present the evidence. But I needed to be in a nicely grounded state of mind to do that kind of sorting and organizing, and it wasn’t happening, even after spending time with J. The sleeplessness, the raw nerves, and the lack of ability to dress myself decently were all warning signs that I was off-kilter, still. The unease, the cold numbness, the discomfort within my own skin … not good.

When I forced myself to look at the emotional side, rather than the facts, it was—duh—obvious. The girl, what had happened to her. It was tough for me to see what happened to her as a puzzle to be solved, a question to be answered, and nothing more.

I tried to focus again on the hum of current in the third rail, letting it trickle into me like bittersweet honey. That helped, but the tinny crap music pumping out way too loud through the ear-buds of the guy standing in front of me was seriously annoying, and I almost wished that I had a cup of coffee just so I could accidentally-on-purpose slosh some over his expensive sneakers. When the sound suddenly spluttered and died—I suspected that another Talent in the car had taken offense and sporked him—it cheered me significantly.

Small revenge is large comfort, some days.

Between that and the hum of current, by the time the train dumped me out at my stop, my mood was better and my nerves under control. I tromped up the stairs, enjoying the ringing noise my boots made in the stairwell because some days I really am seven, pushed open the office door, and headed directly for the coffeemaker, shedding my coat as I went.

“Hey, girl.”

“‘Morning.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and leaned over to see what Nifty was doing with the bits of paper he had laid out on the coffee table. It was a casual move, nothing I hadn’t done dozens of times in the past six months, but this time I hung back just an inch or two more distant than I normally did, not resting my hand on his shoulder for balance. It took me a minute to realize it, and another one to realize why.

Damn it, this was Nifty. He was a good guy. He was on our side.

He was a guy.

I guess my nerves weren’t quite as under control as I thought.

Whatever calm I’d gotten went sizzle like water on a griddle, my core shifting from its usual cool loops of neon to something more jagged and hot. Bad. Very bad normally, and even worse here, in the office. Be calm, Bonnie, I told myself. Be still and controlled, that’s what you do, remember? You’re the one who has the most excellent control.

Knowing why I was reacting this way, and that logic wasn’t going to work, not right now, didn’t help. All I could do was deal with it, and try not to let it get in the way of the work. With that in mind, I consciously leaned forward to get a better look at what he was doing, even as I smoothed the jagged spikes back down into cool loops through sheer force of will. I would not let nerves show. Would not.

“I really wish I had a camera right now.”

I twitched, and looked up at Pietr, who had been his usual silent self until now, meaning I hadn’t even realized that he was in the room. He had an amused look in his gray eyes, so I looked down to see what the hell he was talking about, and started to laugh. Me, my white-blond hair, pale skin, and black outfit, and Nifty’s dark skin and white sweater—yeah, I could see where we’d make an irresistible target.

The tension broke, a little, and I could function again, control slipping back into place naturally.

“You try bringing a camera in here,” Nifty said, mock-scowling, “I give it a week, tops, before it goes snap, fizzle, pop.” Warding could only do so much; the moment current was free of either core or spell, it looked for an electrical stream to hook up with, the more powerful the better. That was why we’d trashed the original expensive coffeemaker for a simpler, if still wicked, brewmaster, and why there was only one phone and one computer, and both were down in Stosser’s office, where nobody did any workings by order of the Big Dogs.

“So what’re you doing?” I asked Nifty, leaning in a little more easily now.

“Girl had a bunch of scraps in her pocket, got ‘em in this morning, courtesy of one of Venec’s contacts. Looks like they were napkins or something, but there’s writing on them.”

I took a closer look. They were smudged and incomplete, but I recognized them. “Oh. She was collecting numbers.”

“Numbers?”

“Phone numbers.” I looked at him in astonishment. “Dear god, Nift, for a jock you sure are innocent….”

He stared down at the bits of paper, trying to see what I saw. “That’s a lot of numbers for a virgin to be collecting.”

I resisted the urge to pat him on the top of his buzz-cut head. “It’s not about calling them, it’s about getting them.” He looked at me and I raised my hands palm-up in a don’t-ask-me gesture. “Not my kind of game, but some do it. So our girlfriend was playing the game but not paying the pot.”

“Looks like.”

Quiet fell in the room as we both stared at the pieces of paper. Magic was all sorts of fun and splashy, but this was how we did most of the grunt work: Everyone put some elbow grease and some brain sweat into the mix, and we stirred it with a big stick until it smelled right. Another Venec quote.

Pietr put down the file he’d been reading and looked over the table at the napkins, too. “There are three different bars there, at least.”

Nifty looked up at him, then down again at the table. “How can you tell that?”

“Different paper. Look at the textures.”

“We supposed to go check each bar, see who she might have chatted up?” He sounded discouraged.

“We should,” Pietr said.

“Why?” I tilted my head and looked at my coworker, playing devil’s advocate. “You going to claim that she asked for it, somehow? That maybe she blew one of these guys off, before, and that’s why they attacked her? Doesn’t matter, to our job. We’re not here for the why, just the who and the how. We know who did it. One guy’s dead, the other’s in custody, and the cops will get the story out of him. All we have to do is make sure the ki-rin’s skewing was clean, or whatever the cop terminology is, and the case is closed. No need to poke around anything that happened before, right?”

“Right.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

I looked at Nifty, who looked back at me and shrugged. He didn’t know what was up with ghost-boy, either.

“It’s not about poking into her personal life or accusing her of being a tease, Bonnie. I just have a bad feeling about this. Like there’s something under the surface, and it’s going to bite us if we’re not careful.” Pietr was too mellow, as a rule, to be defensive, but he was skirting awfully close. Considering my own twitchiness, I wasn’t going to rag on him for it.

“You got precog?” Nifty asked, interested. If so, he’d been holding out on us. Precog wasn’t a common skill set, but it did happen, and would be amazingly useful in this job. My own kenning worked mostly on people I already knew and cared about, so it didn’t quite qualify.

“No. I don’t think so. I just …” He exhaled hard. “How would I know?”

That, I could tell him. “It feels bizarre, like a goose walking over your grave, only in your brain.”

Pietr considered that a moment, rubbing his fingers along the front of his shirt. “No. It’s more like an itch somewhere I can’t reach.”

“There’s probably something you’re seeing, but haven’t identified. Did you …” I hesitated. “Did you look at the gleaning?”

He shook his head, a little stiffly. “Venec said no.”

“So it has to be something you saw on the site, maybe, or talking to people?”

“Yeah, I guess. But what? And how the hell would I know, if it didn’t strike me enough to consciously remember?”

Good point. I had no answer.

“Did anyone say anything that gave you a wiggy feeling,” Nifty asked. “Was there anything in your report that you hesitated over, or rethought?”

I looked at Nifty in surprise. That sounded like something J would have asked me. Mr. Lawrence had better think about mentoring at some point, because he had the knack for it.

Pietr was considering the question. “I don’t know. No.” He shrugged. “This whole thing, it’s making me feel … urgh. Uncomfortable. Dirty.”

Huh. It might not have been something he saw, but something he was feeling. Like me. Of all the guys, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pietr reacted that way. Nick got it on an intellectual level, but all those years of being overlooked and near-invisible because of a quirk he had no control over had given Pietr a level of empathy you didn’t normally find in the average twentysomething male.

“Hey, guys.” Speak of the devil and he pops in. Nick wandered over to the coffee station and refilled his mug. Sharon had bought us all individual—and individualized—mugs a month ago, after one too many “wrong coffee” incidents. Nick’s was a bright blue, with a yellow happy face with a bullet in the forehead. It had an odd sort of fascination for me, in a way that my own—a beautifully appropriate black one with a colorful but dead parrot on the side—didn’t. “You hear the news?” he went on. “Girl’s not going to press charges.”

“What?”

Pietr’s yelp was outraged. I discovered that I wasn’t even slightly surprised by the revelation. Depressed, but not surprised. Like I’d said to J last night, it’s hard enough even today to come forward with sexual-assault charges. Having to explain how your attacker died? How about doing that without mentioning the ki-rin, Talent, the Cosa Nostradamus or anything else that would get you locked in the psych ward for evaluation? The very best scenario involved a Cosa-sympathetic cop and judge, where she’d still have to relive every minute of the attack; worst case brought up the possibility that they’d think she had killed the guy and nail her for manslaughter, provoked or not. And it’s not like they could punish the guy who died, or bring back her relationship with the ki-rin….

Nifty didn’t look surprised, either. I bet he’d seen a lot of that kind of scared-silent, all the years he spent playing high school and college football. The bitterness in my own brain surprised me again. I knew, with the rational portion, that I was being unfair, tarring Nifty just ‘cause he’d been a jock. But the rational part wasn’t leading in this dance.

Nick was nodding sagely. “Stosser told Venec, who just told me. I think she thought the ki-rin was going to pretend it didn’t happen, or something. She went totally hysterical in the emergency room.”

“Nicky, you’re an insensitive asshole,” I said. Nick must have realized how his words sounded, because he blushed. “I didn’t …”

“The ki-rin is refusing to acknowledge her now, isn’t it?” Pietr asked

The bitterness in my brain escaped into my voice. “You expected anything different? That’s how ki-rin are—it’s like asking a dryad not to put down roots, or a griffon not to fly. It’s what they are—she had to know that before she agreed to the terms, and evidence is that she’d adhered to her part of it all the way up to that night. Being a ki-rin’s companion isn’t something you pull out of a Cracker Jack box. There’s no greater honor, by fatae standards, a human can aspire to, and one asshole with more brawn than humanity took that away from her, for his own jollies. You think you’d be calm and rational right now, if it was you in that emergency room?”

That pretty much put a damper on the entire conversation, and Nick took his coffee and his mug out with enough speed that I almost felt sorry for snapping at him. Almost.

“So if we can’t do anything for her, and the guy who did the attacking is dead … are we still on the job?” Nifty wondered, giving up on his napkin-puzzle. “I mean, what does it matter? Christ, I’m sorry for the girl, but I can’t see our client paying for our time if the girl is going to sweep it under the rug her ownself. It’s over and done with, nothing to see here, move along, thanks for your time. Right?”

He probably wasn’t wrong, and I’d wondered the same thing myself. Except… “J says—” it wasn’t really a secret in the office that my mentor had Connections into all the best gossip lines, or that I tapped into them as needed “—that there’s been a bunch of fatae-related incidents in town already. Folk are tetchy, rumbly—like the crowd we saw at the scene.” I saw the guys process that, then nod. “He thinks the Eastern Council thought that if they did some proactive digging into this, or had us do it …”

“They’d be off the hook for whatever happened after,” Pietr finished for me. “Nice.”

“Council.” The disgust in that single word dripped from Nifty’s mouth and splashed into a thick puddle. “So that’s who we were working for—again?”

Other than Stosser, I was the only Council-side member of the pack, and even my connection was only through J. Lonejacks didn’t have much use for the Council, either the actual seated members who made the rules or the general members who followed those rules. Lonejacks didn’t have much use for anyone who followed rules, period, which made for interesting group interactions—and probably why Stosser and Venec kept us on such a loose rein most of the time, when we weren’t in training.

“You didn’t guess that?” Pietr sounded surprised. “Most of our work’s going to come through Council contacts, at the very least, not lonejacks. Lonejacks settle their own scores. They’re not going to suddenly step back and let us determine who’s at fault—not until we have a lot more street cred, anyway.”

I had a feeling Pietr’s family was Gypsy—they tended to be more clannish than the independent lonejacks, but just as regulation-scorning, hence the nickname—but he had a strong pragmatic streak that put even Venec to shame.

“Council leads may be callous bastards,” he went on, “but they’re the callous bastards with a checkbook. And their checks clear faster than most. Get used to it.”

Nifty looked like he wanted to argue the point, but couldn’t.

“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” I reminded them. “Until we’re told otherwise, we’re still on the job.”

“Here …” Pietr held out the file he’d been reading, offering it to me. “The dossier Ben put together, plus what we were able to add in the follow-up.”

“Give me the highlights,” I said, not taking the file. I thought better hearing information than I did reading it.

“Right. Dead would-be rapist was a local boy—lonejack, but his mentor’s long dead and his only remaining family’s crossed the river down in Ohio.” Crossing the river meant going from lonejack to Council, or vice versa. It happened, but not all that often. “Not very well-liked, from what the people who were willing to talk about him said.”

“Nasty? Or did he owe everyone money?”

“Had a less than savory reputation with women. No criminal charges, but a restraining order against an ex, and rumors he didn’t always take no for an answer. Nobody’s surprised he moved up—or down—to assault.”

Nifty made a note in his pad. “Someone should have taken him out before this. Ten minutes in the alley would’ve done it.”

Nifty had two little sisters still living back home, I suddenly remembered. I wasn’t going to argue the pros and cons of presumptive justice, though, not right now. Especially when I pretty much agreed with him.

“His friend, on the other hand, the guy who landed in the recovery ward, is fourth gen lonejack, and a first-time offender. Hangs out with a stupid crowd, reportedly, but stupid isn’t a crime, more’s the pity. The two of them don’t have any connections before about a month ago, when they reportedly met in a bar, and hit it off. So we’ve got bad seed leading bent sapling astray….”

“Or giving him the courage to do what he wanted to, anyway,” I said. The fact that the guy was there in the first place made him just as responsible for what happened as the dead guy. The ki-rin might only be interested in actions. Me, I thought about intent, too.

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