Yeah. I was wondering that last bit, too.
Bobo shrugged his massive, furry shoulders. “I don’t know. I saw, and I came to warn. But... ” He frowned, which on him was a very odd look. “You investigate paranormal. It causes paranormal. You are opposed to each other, before you even do anything.”
Like I said, Bobo only played dumb.
The Big Dogs looked at each other, and there was a humming in the air that wasn’t really there, the way it always was when they were doing the not-quite-pinging thing they did. Telepathy was a myth – the closest I’d ever even heard of was the tight-wound connection Venec and I could have when we both let the walls down and reached – but those two weren’t even using magic, just years of knowing each other really well.
“Anything that worries both our visitor and Madame worries me,” Stosser said finally. “Especially if it is taking a specific interest in one of us. Ben, tell the others, tell them we’ve officially bumped this from casual observance to high priority. I want them alert for anything even slightly out of whack. No matter if it is in reference to one of our jobs, or life in general – I want to know everything.”
“Will you alert the Council?” I couldn’t tell, from Venec’s voice, if he thought Ian should or not.
“You know I have to.”
Like J – like me, technically – Ian Stosser was Council. The rest of our team were lonejack or, more formally, unaffiliated. They didn’t understand the obligations even nominal Council membership put on you. Or, actually, they understood just fine, and wanted no part of it.
We – meaning Venec and myself – showed Bobo out. He rested one of his massive paws on my shoulder again, and shook his head at me. “I will be there. Even if you do not see me.”
“I know,” I said, and touched his hand with mine. J had hired Bobo originally, but he hung around for friendship. That meant a lot to me, even if I sometimes forgot to say so.
The door closed behind him, and it was just me and Venec in the break room. The office was, for once, utterly silent. Everyone else was either running late, or had gotten to work already, and Stosser was likely Translocated to the nearest Council office by now. I knew why he felt obligated, but there was a growing part of me that agreed with the others: the Council repeatedly refused to grant us approved status, meaning their members would not easily or officially come to us with cases, so why should we do anything gratis for them?
“Massive unease?” Venec asked me, referring to my earlier description.
I put aside questions of Council and loyalty, and focused on the more immediate problem. “Unease and discomfort, yeah. Like big test and you didn’t study kind of thing.”
“But not dread like you realized you studied for the wrong thing?”
That made me laugh, a little. “You did that, too? No, not like that. Venec, a couple of days ago, I saw a pigeon fly by. Backward.”
“Uh-huh.” He gave me one of Those Looks. “And you didn’t think to mention that little detail?”
We had been a little preoccupied with other things at the time. “I figured... okay, fine, all right, I fucked up. If I see something that makes me wonder if I’m hallucinating from lack of sleep, I promise, I’ll file an immediate report.” I was joking, sort of, but also sort of not. The tension was weirdly thick in the room, and I could feel something almost like it was pushing me forward, like a hand between my shoulder blades.
Taking that one step forward would have put me square inside Ben’s personal space.
I’d been that up close and personal once before. Downtown, the night I’d confronted him about this thing between us. We’d been off-hours then, both dressed for the occasion, and I’d danced with him, just long enough to get his attention. I wondered if he was remembering that, now, the way I was. From the way his breathing had gone shallow, and his eyes had gotten heavy-lidded, and the way he suddenly reached up and shoved a lock of hair off his face with way more force than the offending hairs deserved, I was betting he was.
Oddly, what I was remembering, even more than those few seconds of body contact, was the way he had, unconsciously, taken my hand when we walked, and the way his scent had lingered on my skin, after.
The sound of someone in the hallway outside broke the moment, thank god, before either of us did anything stupid. By the time Sharon and Nick came into the office, we were standing a respectable distance apart, and talking about the developments regarding The Roblin like there was nothing else on our minds.
“Hi, sorry we’re late, got held up on the subway,” Nick said in greeting, seeing Venec standing there like the Fount of Doom.
“People, listen up,” Venec said it loud enough that doors down the hallway opened, and Nift, Pietr, and Lou popped their heads out to see what was up. He waved them down, and waited while everyone gathered.
“We’re taking the situation with The Roblin to active status. There’s reason to believe that he may be looking at us, specifically.”
“Meaning what?” Sharon narrowed her eyes, trying to figure out what he wasn’t saying.
“Meaning I want all of you to keep your eyes out. Anything even the slightest shade off, be it winning the lottery, polar bears in your bathroom or – ” he shot me a glare “ – pigeons flying backward, I want to know about, and I want to know the instant you see it.”
“And?” Nick looked poised to be given some new, more exciting task.
“And that’s it. Don’t change your lives, keep your focus on the two cases we already have.”
The message was clear: no matter what warning we might get, mischief – no matter the source – was not our priority.
Somehow, from the look in his eyes, the way he watched me for a long minute before excusing himself, I didn’t think Venec was going to let go of it that easily, himself.
Everyone scattered again, and I went to get my delayed coffee, swearing under my breath when the only milk in the fridge was chunky. No time to go buy fresh: the meeting was about to start.
A few months ago, we – meaning the pups, not the Big Dogs – had started holding Wednesday morning meetings in the midsize conference room, as opposed to the largest one where we did brainstorming sessions with the whole team. We’d gotten rid of the table that came with the lease, and brought in a bunch of padded benches and armless chairs. It wasn’t as comfortable as the break room, and didn’t have instant access to the kitchenette, but it was quiet, and more private for brainstorming. Venec and Stosser stayed out, unless specifically invited in.
It was a pretty somber group that eventually gathered, once everyone’d had a chance to digest the news. In an obvious change of agenda, our first item was sharing any information we had found on The Roblin’s proclivities since last week. I started out, reluctantly, by telling them about Bobo’s warning. I’d gotten enough shit from certain coworkers previously for having a fatae bodyguard, I didn’t want to bring it up again, but for once, Nicky kept his mouth shut.
Everyone had seen things that were, in retrospect, weird, but other than my creepy-crawly sensation, nobody had noticed anything that really tipped the scales. Mostly it was small stuff, pranks rather than what you’d expect from an imp with The Roblin’s reputation: traffic signals flashing “better run” instead of “walk,” PETA protesters finding bacon in their tofu sandwiches during a protest outing – which had Sharon audibly wishing she’d thought of it – to every TLC meter in the city spinning wildly out of control, resulting either in negative cab fares, or tabs of $100 to go crosstown. The resulting fistfights that inevitably broke out from that were bad, but the cops handled it. It wasn’t anything that should be calling for our attention. We weren’t sure, in light of the most recent events, if that was good, or bad.
The pigeons flying backward thing had the potential to freak tourists out, and it seemed like that was a pretty widespread occurrence, but when Pietr checked with a birder he knew, we discovered that the falcons that lived in the skyscraper cliffs had caught on quickly, and had no tr
ouble catching an awkwardly flying, and therefore slower than usual, lunch.
“The problem is, in a city this size, with this many of the Cosa? Weird is sort of the default mode. How do we know what’s The Roblin’s fault, and what’s just, y’know, Life in New York?”
Like most of Lou’s questions, it was a damn good one, and echoed what I had been thinking, earlier.
“When things start to go right, that’s when you know it’s weird,” Sharon said, with the voice of experience. “I know that’s no help whatsoever but it’s the truth.”
Yeah. Default mode in any large city was to assume that everything that could go wrong, would. You left early because you assumed traffic or transit delays. You left an extra pair of shoes under your desk because you assumed a heel would break. You carried extra cash and a spare MetroCard somewhere other than your wallet, assuming you might get mugged. It wasn’t paranoia, just planning.
But I’d been specifically targeted, according to Bobo.
“So we should be looking for sudden outbreaks of peace, joy, and happiness?” Pietr suggested.
“Well, that would be weird,” Nick said.
“No, your protector said chaos, right?” Lou had an inward-turning look on her face that made her black eyes seem even larger. If I’d taken after my dad instead of my mom, I might have gotten eyes like those.
“He’s not my... ” All right, maybe he was, technically. “Yeah. Chaos and mischief. Which isn’t wrongness, not exactly. We’re looking at it from a human viewpoint. The Roblin’s not human.” Things started clicking in my head, loud enough I’d swear the others could hear it. “Okay, logical thinking here, which sets us apart from those poor schlubs who don’t get paid to investigate. What’s the one thing all the stories say consistently about the fatae?”
“That they lie?” Nick.
“Other than that.”
“That they have rules,” Nifty listed, ticking things off on his fingers. “They like things tidy and organized. They like to count things to make sure, sometimes, or sort through things to make sure it’s all there... ”
Yeah. Dragons didn’t actually count their treasure for value, but to ensure nothing had gone missing. I knew that one firsthand.
“So we look for rules and regs being broken, and that’s our imp?” Lou nodded. “Okay. Makes as much logic as anything else. And then what?”
Sharon made a hands-up gesture she’d gotten from me, to indicate “damned-if-I-know.” “And then we throw a net over it? Hell if I know. We tell Venec and Stosser and they come up with something brilliant. Can anyone come up with something more immediately useful?”
No one could.
“We done?”
Apparently, we were.
Sharon kept the floor as we moved into preexisting business. “Okay, so what’s the status on the floater?”
Everyone looked at me and Pietr, but it was Lou who claimed the floor.
“I took the files you had been going through, earlier,” she said, “and sorted through them according to breed characteristics, narrowing down to the ones who might have been able to take down our vic.”
“And?” Nifty said.
Lou pulled three files out of thin air – a bit of showing off I didn’t begrudge her – with the air of a woman who has cleaned the damned Augean stables after Hercules failed. “And we now have a database of over seventy-five different breeds currently known to be residing within the city limits, broken down into harmless, mostly harmless, and potentially harmful.” God, I loved that woman, in a purely platonic but undying fashion. She might be useless in the field, but to sort through that much paper work and come up with answers was an awesome kind of magic of its own.
“You are a goddess, and totally rock my world,” I told her with utter honesty. “Tell Stosser I said you deserve a raise.”
“Hah.” The sharp bark of laughter was all that comment deserved. We had a surprisingly decent benefits package – health care not something the Big Dogs took lightly, considering the number of times we’d been put in harm’s way already – but our paychecks were barely enough to get by.
Nick took the files out of her hand, passing two of them around. Sharon got one, Pietr the other. He flipped his open, and scanned the contents.
“The red-tagged folder,” Lou said, directing their attention. “Those are the top candidates.”
“If we go by the timeline you put together for the body-drop,” Sharon said, “ – and yes, I’m going by your timeline, don’t give me that look! – then our perp had to be a day-mover.”
Lou gave her a withering look Venec would have been proud to claim. “Already sorted,” she said. “Anyone who would have problems moving under any kind of sunlight was filtered out, likewise any breed that would be too noticeable to pass without comment.”
“We have fatae who are that noticeable?” I was surprised.
“One. Literally – there’s reports of a Nriksha up near the Cloisters.”
“A what?” I’d never heard of that.
“Flesh-eater. Decent enough creature, according to those who didn’t get eaten, but the aroma is... unmistakable.”
Suddenly my egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich wasn’t so appetizing anymore.
“According to Pietr’s exam notes, there were two sets of bruise-marks on the body,” Nick said. “So that rules out one perp... . Or if there was one, he has four hands.”
“No four-handed fatae currently residing within the city limits,” Lou said. “Although god knows what’s out in the ’burbs.”
“I doubt they’d haul in here to dump a body in our river when they’ve got better spots for it there,” Nick said.
“They couldn’t be imported bone-breakers?” I hadn’t thought of that before – mostly we’re territorial, and you don’t bring in outsiders to do your own dirty work, because outsiders can’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut – but we’d already encountered a Talent killer-for-hire, so it was a possibility. “Our vic worked construction... Hey, you think the Mob’s gotten in with the fatae?”
There was a moment of silence, and then Nick laughed, and Lou shook her head, and we went back to the realistic possibilities.
Nifty slapped the table with one oversize palm. “Nick, give me a checklist. What do we know?”
“We know that it wasn’t a domestic thing – the vic lived alone, didn’t seem to be interested in anyone of any breed, and only owed the usual amount of money.”
“And that someone wanted it dead enough to use a significant amount of force... and wanted to make sure the body was found,” Lou added. “There are places to dump the body where you won’t ever find it again, even for Nulls. You think the fatae are any less creative?”
Damn it. She seriously deserved that raise. We were so caught up in how the DB was offed, we forgot to wonder about the whys of the dumping. And that was important.
“Someone wanted to send a message. But if not the Mafia, and we’ve already ruled out any kind of union goon squad... do the fatae have their own goodfellas?”
“Like a union, that would require them organizing,” I said dryly. “They’re even worse at it than lonejacks.” Not to mention that the different breeds only played well with each other when they were playing against humans. But that gave me an idea. “Maybe we’re looking at this wrong.” I thought it through out loud, listening to how the logic sounded. “We were warned off from investigating by a fatae, right? And the killing was probably done by a fatae, so we’ve been assuming, based on the available evidence, that it was an intrabreed thing.”
There hadn’t been any warnings since my pushy visitor, but it had only been a few days, and maybe they were waiting to see how hard we pushed back. Or maybe we had read the situation wrong.
“Huh. Maybe it’s not a fatae thing at all. Or, at least, not entirely.”
I looked around the room, and saw that I had everyone’s attention.
“My dad was a carpenter,” I said, the words coming almost as fast as
I was thinking. “A damned good one, and he got called in on a lot of jobs out of the city because people talked about his work, passed his name along. There’s a – hell, call it a brotherhood, why not – of people who do finer work like that. They share job leads, information, news about who pays well and who stiffs or treats their workers like shit.”
“But not a union?”
“Not a union. No dues, no leadership, no organization except as how they felt like it at that moment. All totally under the radar.”
“And?” Lou asked, waiting.
Pietr was thinking along my brain tracks. “And you think that it’s this brotherhood, or something like that, that offed him? Because... what?”
That was as far as my thinking had thought out. “I don’t know. But it makes as much sense – more – than looking for an individual with a grudge, or some breed-on-breed hostility that nobody else is whispering about.” Especially after recent events, when human-fatae relations had taken a seriously negative turn. We’d heard buckets about that. “You said that he didn’t owe enough money to get killed over. That means he was working regularly... but he doesn’t seem to have been on a job when he died. We need to find out what he was doing the days before he took his swim. I’ll bet you next round of drinks that someone says something that points us toward the reason he was killed, and once we have the reason... ”
“We have the killer,” Nick finished.
Ian Stosser knew that the pups were having their weekly meeting, no bosses invited, so he wasn’t too worried about them poking their noses in at the wrong moment when he took the phone call, already knowing who was on the other end.
“I want to see you. Alone.”
The meaningful emphasis in Aden’s voice made it clear who she meant: no pups. Particularly, no Benjamin Venec.
His sister hadn’t always hated hiis best friend, had she? Ian pinched the bridge of his nose, and shook his head. “We have nothing to talk about, Addy. The Council is deliberating my most recent proposal. Go politic at them – leave me alone.”
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