Freshwater would mean that our Bippis had been killed somewhere else, in another body of water, and tossed into the river after the fact.
When I screw up, I own it. Nodding an apology to Sharon, I turned to Venec, who was in his usual hold-up-the-wall pose, his eyes closed and his face not showing much of anything at all, a stone-cold poker player. I couldn’t get even a tremor of sensation out of him: both our walls were up, and holding. “I fucked up. Boss, you want I should – ”
“Send Pietr.” He opened his eyes to look at me, and I tasted that hot candied ginger again, even though neither wall budged. “I want to hear about that scrying you did last night.”
Pietr, who had already hauled himself out of the chair and was heading for the door, checked himself, barely, before moving on. He didn’t have even a hint of foresee in him – most Talent didn’t – and was fascinated by it. While I’d read his tarot cards once or twice as a lark, I’d refused to scry for him. I don’t scry for people as a rule, least of all friends. I didn’t always get something, but when I did it was always accurate, probably due to the additional whammy of the kenning. Nobody needs to know their personal fate, and I didn’t need to be the one to give it to them.
I stopped, struck by that thought. Was that why I was so pissed about this stupid Merge? Not because it was trying to make me do something, but because I thought it was trying to tell me what my capital-F Fate would be? If so, that was pretty stupid. No matter how strong this Merge thing ended up being, or how it would change my life if I let it, that wasn’t fate, or destiny.
I could feel a crease etch between my eyebrows. Was it?
I really wanted to follow that thought, the analytic cast of my mind and my Need to Know warring with the fact that I was on office-time, and Venec was standing there, waiting for my report.
“Now?” I asked, stalling. We weren’t exactly a formal organization, but usually reports were written – or presented in front of the entire team – for brainstorming. Nifty and Nick and Stosser were conspicuous by their absence, even though the board said they were in the office. Ian could be anywhere, from his back office to Timbuktu. He ignored the board unless someone else checked him in or out.
Venec frowned at me, all Big Dog. “Now.”
Verbal report, then, not written. “It was mostly visual. Fire-current-fire and real fire. Metal spires, shattered, but I think they were representational, not real.” It was tough to tell how, exactly, but real things felt different somehow. A lot had been written up about scrying, but as usual with current, it seemed to work slightly different with each person. That was part of what made our job... interesting.
“A dragon, turning overhead.” That had felt real. Physical. There was something else, something I wasn’t remembering... .
“A dragon?” Sharon had been trying not to listen in, but that caught her attention. I kept my gaze on Venec, the way his eyes drooped a little at the corners, and his nose really didn’t fit the rest of his face, and the tiny imperfection in his lip, that made it seem almost crooked. It should have been distracting, but somehow his features focused my memory into its usual razor-sharp perfection. “It could have been a projection of emotions, anger, or power. Maybe.” My tone would have told a deaf person I didn’t believe that. “I was being shoved from viewpoint to viewpoint – ” that had been the bungee cord “ – so a lot of people are going to be involved, somehow. I don’t think it’s associated with this job,” I said. I looked at Sharon as though waiting for some connection to kick in – or not – and then considered the residue of the scrying. “Either job. It feels... ”
“Another scrying of danger.” He stared at me. “Still in the future?”
Right. That was why it all seemed familiar. I’d had a shimmer of something months ago, during the ki-rin job. That was what I’d told Stosser and Venec, then; that there was a distant sense of danger, of something off-kilter, but I couldn’t identify the source.
“Yes. Closer now. But not immediate.”
I hoped. If I was wrong, and that beast was circling overhead even now, even if it was, please god, only metaphorical...
Venec picked up on what I wasn’t saying, although that was probably just his own instincts working again. “Bad?”
His words triggered details I didn’t remember seeing the first time; I saw the splatter of blood against the snow, smelled the stink of something burning, the feel of those claws on my skin, and nodded slowly. “It will be, yeah.” I hadn’t known that for certain before, hadn’t even known until he asked. But I knew, now. That’s how the kenning worked. You don’t always know what you know, and sometimes you don’t know what it was until someone else tells you. Combine it with a strong scrying, and I was never, ever wrong. Even when I wished I were. “In winter, I think.” There had been snow, ice. “Not now.”
“All right.” He seemed satisfied, for the moment. I didn’t trust it. “You wrote it down?”
I swallowed, tasting the stink of that burning and the blood in the back of my throat, as though I’d breathed it in, deep. “Most of it, yeah. In my notebook.” I’d had to, dumping it out before I could fall asleep.
“Get me a copy.” He switched gears. “I’m switching you up on the cases – Sharon has your notes, you take hers. See if there’s anything that bites you on the nose.”
That was the PUPI philosophy – nobody got ownership of a case; we all worked everything. It hadn’t been a problem when we started out, and had one job every couple of months; everyone was chomping to get their teeth into something and who was working what didn’t matter so much. Now, with different cases at cross-times, things might get a little complicated, even confusing. Venec wasn’t going to let that slow him down, though, and we’d damned well better keep up. Like the in/out board, we needed to track things. Lou, bless her, was working on a system for that, too.
I hadn’t lied when I’d told her we were a stronger team for her being part of it.
With Venec’s gaze still on me, I sat at the table across from Sharon, creating a tiny spot of current on the table to act as a combination coaster and coffee-warmer. It was a crappy waste of current, but I hated the taste of even lukewarm coffee. Sharon shoved a folder of notes across the table at me, and raised one of those elegant eyebrows at my current-coaster, but didn’t say anything. We were still not forgiven for the pizza-grease stains faintly outlined in the middle of the table.
I opened the file. Sharon’s notes were neatly handwritten, readable as a printed page. Nick’s... not so much. And it wasn’t a guy-thing, because the others all managed to make their notes legible, and Nifty’s handwriting was better than mine, for all that his hand dwarfed most pens.
“Someday, one of us is going to have to put some effort into a current-run printer,” I said, trying to puzzle out a word in Nick’s initial overview. The bastard had run over into the margins, and not rewritten his notes for the file when he got back to the office. I was so going to kill him. “A dictation machine or something.”
“Nice retirement plan. You go for it.”
Sharon wasn’t being sarcastic – I was one of the better improvisers in the office, and something like that, if I could make it work, could be worth a small but nice bundle in the community. Something to think about later. Much, much later.
I gave up on Nick’s notes, and moved over to Sharon’s, figuring that I could use his to add color commentary, later. I’d just gotten into a nice comfortable groove, making checkmarks where something caught my eye, when a roar tore through the office.
“Goddamn it!”
Once I’d gotten my heart back into my chest enough to determine that (a) the bellow belonged to Nifty, and (b) he sounded more pissed off than angry or scared, I drew the current that had automatically sparked on my skin in defensive mode back down into my core, and spent a minute getting my control – and my heartbeat – back to normal levels.
Sharon recovered faster than I did, and was on her feet and poking her nose out into the hallway.
I noted in passing that the previously closed door now looked like it had been pulled off its hinges, hanging sideways like a post-Mardi Gras reveler, and that Venec was nowhere to be seen. The two facts were not unrelated. Big Dog had scary-fast reflexes.
Sharon followed her nose out into the hallway, and I followed her. The hallway was empty, but the door into the second conference room was open, if still attached to both hinges. Looking in, we encountered Venec, his back to us, a rather sheepish-looking Nifty, who was covered in a soft gray soot, and Lou, who looked...
Smug. Really, quietly smug.
I laughed, reading the scene quickly, with the ease of familiarity. Nifty had done something stupid, and Lou felt she was finally out from under the mockathon. If he’d blown anything up, she was right.
“Anybody dead?” I asked. Venec turned his back on the tableau, and glared at me.
Oh, boy. His hair looked like he’d just run his hands through it in exasperation, his eyes were dark like whoa, and if you really looked at his body language you’d think he was about to start swearing, but his wall was down just enough that I got hit with a full-body blast of tight-wound hysterics just waiting for privacy to explode.
Whatever had happened, Venec thought it was funnier’n hell, and I was the only one who knew. Laughing, though? Not a good idea right now. Especially if Venec had to read Nifty the riot act over something he’d done wrong. I turned away, looking out the sole window in the room to give myself time to recover, and blinked.
A pigeon had just flown past the window... backward. Oooookay. Maybe J was right when he said I needed some downtime, maybe a vacation in the tropics somewhere... .
I was still staring out the window trying to decide if I’d really seen that or just hallucinated it, most of my awareness still on the scene behind me, when the sound of the office’s front door slamming open bought me back to the scene in the room.
“Lawrence, go get cleaned up. Make sure you get all of that off your skin, or it will just make the itching worse.” Venec’s voice was the usual low rumble, not even a hint of amusement in it. “Lou, can you re-create the steps prior to Mr. Lawrence’s mishap?”
Uh-oh. I didn’t quite hold my breath, but I bet Sharon did. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that Lou’s smirk had turned to uncertainty. Damn it, I thought, but kept it within my own walls, don’t push her like that!
Lou was just as skilled as the rest of us in theory – she wouldn’t have been hired, otherwise – but her control of anything external was crap, making her use of active forensic magic... iffy. So far the calm of the office kept her steady, but this would be the first real under pressure test since her rather public screwup with the garbage truck.
Although blowing it up like that had exposed the body hidden inside that we hadn’t known about. So in the end, it had actually been a plus.
Lou didn’t see it that way, though, and neither had Venec.
At the moment, she looked exactly like she had the moment the spell went bad, wide-eyed and panicked. “Ah... ”
I would swear under oath that Sharon started edging out of the conference room without seeming to move at all. She’d clearly been taking lessons from Pietr, who was almost Retriever-like in his ability to disappear when stressed. I was torn between wanting to beat Shar out the door, and being fascinated by what Lou might do.
“Yes or no?”
Lou, stung by the cold tone, met his question with a flat stare I admired, knowing firsthand how knee-quaking his glare could be. “Yes.” If she had any doubts whatsoever, you couldn’t tell from her voice, or her body language.
“Good. Do so. Sharon, stop that. You’re Lou’s second. Make sure she doesn’t go splat, too. Bonnie, go fetch Nick and get back to work. When Nifty finishes cleaning up, update him on the break-in. I want to see dioramas of both scenes when I get back.”
We didn’t exactly snap off salutes, but nobody argued. And nobody asked Venec where he was going, when he headed past Nick, and down the hallway toward the elevator.
Ben didn’t let himself relax until he was in the elevator, and the doors had shut securely in front of him. Then there was a brief pause, and his shoulders began to shake and his eyes teared, as the laughter he’d been holding back finally escaped.
It really wasn’t funny. The scene that had met him when he burst in: Lawrence flat on his back and covered in spell-soot, Lou crawling out from under the table like a morning-after reveler, had damn near stopped his heart. Now that everyone was safe and accounted for, he let the laughter come, knowing that it was as much stress-release as amusement.
Nifty could have been hurt – Lou could have been seriously hurt, if the explosion had caught her off guard. But it hadn’t. His newest pup might not be able to control her current well enough to be a field operative, but there wwas nothing wrong with her brains or her reflexes, and she’d gone under the table fast enough to avoid being hit with the spell’s debris. He hadn’t chosen poorly when he hired her. That was a relief.
Alone in the elevator, laughter dying down, Ben allowed his muscles to relax, the exhaustion he’d been repressing finally surfacing for a moment, and he found himself considering the ramifications of the event. Some days it seemed as though the simplest of spells – simple in theory, anyway – caused the biggest boom when they went wrong, and went wrong more often than the complicated ones. And those booms were happening more and more often, in the past few weeks. It wasn’t because his pups were being careless: he’d beaten that out of them the first month they were on the job. No, there had to be something more to it.
Bad luck? Ben didn’t believe in it. A hex? Those he did believe in, having seen them placed – and dismissed – more than once. There was an old-style conjure woman back in Texas who could hex up a mess of trouble, if you gave her reason. Just because they hadn’t heard of anyone like that in town didn’t mean they weren’t here. And there were people who’d have cause to hex the pups, either in payment for what they’d done, or to keep them from doing something in the future.
He wished to hell he’d been able to talk Ian out of accepting both jobs, giving the pups the chance to not only hone their skills but stand down for a bit, but his partner wanted – needed – to prove something. That meant never backing down from a challenge. Understanding the goal that drove the other man didn’t make it any easier to deal with the inevitable cock-ups that would happen because of it. All he could do was try to limit the damage done if someone dropped the ball due to exhaustion or inexperience.
But, god, he was so tired. Between the job, and keeping Ian focused, and trying to find out what was going on with this Merge, without letting it get its hooks into him...
Giving in to a rare self-indulgent impulse, Ben let his mental wall down a bit, and reached out deliberately with a thin tendril of current, like the streamer of a pea plant unfolding. Bonnie was distracted, her thoughts tangled, but her core hummed like a well-tuned car, focused on her task, and the sound of it soothed him. If there was anything bothering her, he couldn’t tell, not without going deeper.
He pulled the tendril back and rebuilt the wall, ignoring the hum within him that protested the loss of contact. Bonnie might fling her emotions and affections around, but that wasn’t his thing. He needed privacy, distance. The urge to know where she was, what she was doing or feeling: that was the Merge pushing him, not his own needs.
The elevator doors opened, and he strode out into the lobby, nodding politely at the older woman waiting to enter.
“Have a nice day,” the woman called after him, as the doors closed. There were a dozen offices in the building, and he wondered, sometimes, what the other tenants thought of them, the odd assortment of twenty-somethings, their eccentric leader, and the dour man riding herd on them all hours of the day.
He was halfway down the block, wishing that he’d brought his leather jacket with him against the cooler-than-expected breeze, before his brain finally started to sort out why his body had taken him outside. He could have e
scaped to Ian’s little back office if he just needed to laugh without being seen or heard, so clearly he needed to walk something out, away from the confines and demands of the office.
The thought occurred to him that, outside the warded office, he was vulnerable, but he dismissed it as occupational paranoia. Nobody was gunning for him; not right now, anyway.
He lengthened his stride, moving quickly to keep warm, and let his body go on autopilot, allowing his brain to do what it did best: process and place.
Ian was the brilliant Idea Guy, the Concept Man, and the consensus-wooer. He, Ben, was along to kick those ideas and concepts – and employees – into productive, working shape. “You’re my gut instincts,” Ian said, when his old friend had first called him with the idea for an investigative team that would keep the Cosa in line. “I can see what they’re doing, even when they don’t want me to, but you know what they’re up to.”
Ben was starting to think that his partner had overestimated his abilities. Because right now his brain kept returning not to the cases on hand, or even the mental or magical state of his pup-pack, but a greater – and harder to track – uncertainty. His gut instincts were telling him that the human/fatae trouble they’d seen earlier in the year during the ki-rin job, was still there, simmering... waiting for a single spark to blow up under their feet. There hadn’t been any proof – the flyers advertising the so-called “exterminators” had disappeared, and the whispers of violence had died back down to their normal level – but his gut wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t let him sleep without worry. Bonnie’s new kenning added fuel to that, so much that he couldn’t focus on the jobs at hand.
Bonnie... He was tired enough that the thought of her was like a mild gut-punch of a different sort, taking him unaware even when he knew that it was coming. He let it roll over him, still walking. Bright eyes and a ready smile, her expression almost fey, with her short curls and pointed chin, a mind that was tough and sharp and moved almost as fast as his own. And her body... She was slender, and slightly built, and under the long-sleeved Ts and pants or long skirts she wore most of the time her muscles were warm and firm. He remembered that from the few times he’d touched her, before the Merge made that too complicated to even consider.
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