Tricks of the Trade psi-3

by Laura Anne Gilman

  The fact that Ben’s usual chair was directly opposite the desk had nothing whatsoever to do with it. What was I, a moonstruck twelve-year-old?

  I was working through my notes, notebook open in my lap, pen clenched in my teeth, and totally lost to the outside world, when the air in my head filled with the heavy weight of one word.

  *ass*

  It wasn’t a ping; more like a muted thought that came from me, except I didn’t think it. More like an echo, the emotion so thick and layered that it couldn’t be contained. Ben was annoyed, but not angry. I was curious, but not enough to inquire. I flipped my notebook closed, though, and waited to see if anything more came along.

  About five minutes later: *incoming*

  That was a ping, and it was directed at me, as though he knew I was in the office – he probably did. I had just enough time to get my feet off the desk and my ass out of the chair before the Big Dogs Translocated into the office.

  They looked... tired. Stosser’s hair was staticky again, like he was barely holding his core quiet, and Venec –

  I didn’t think; I don’t think I could think. I moved around the desk and slipped my arms around him, resting my head against his chest, feeling his heart beating, slow and hard.

  I’m not a caretaker, damn it; I was raised to be self-sufficient, and I expect everyone else to be, too. But the pain in his eyes was more than I could bear.

  There was a hesitation, and then his arms came up around me, resting loosely across my shoulders. It wasn’t a hug, but he wasn’t rejecting the comfort, either. We leaned against each other, not saying anything, just breathing.

  Whatever they had done, whatever they had heard, I knew I didn’t want to know. But the job was about knowing. We were the investigators, the witnesses-after-the-fact. The ones who didn’t look away.

  Thankfully, both Big Dogs seemed willing to just let it be, for a moment. I let Benjamin’s warmth under my hands soothe me, and tried to send it back into him, knowing that he was blocking me, holding his walls firm, and The Roblin be damned. He didn’t want me to see what he had done.

  The fact that Venec could be a badass wasn’t news to me. If he had done something that was hard by his standards... it was only what was needful and necessary. But I’d be just as thankful not having it in my own brain, yeah.

  “He had them transmuted.” Stosser’s voice, like it was coming from far away, through a stone tunnel. “The watch, his son. The dagger... ”

  “His wife. Christine.” Ben’s voice was hard and ragged, like a cold wind. The moment he spoke I could feel the anger and the frustration in him, held tight against his spine like it was all that was holding him upright. He had no regret for the way he’d gotten the news out of our former client – and he was a former client, I knew that instantly.

  Even without the Merge, I understood why Ben was reacting the way he was. Years ago, he had worked for the woman. He had met her, taken responsibility for finding her son. He was thinking that if he’d been better at his job, been able to do what was needed, seen the danger she was in, they’d both still be human, be free, right now.

  Being Venec, there was no way he could be thinking anything else.

  I wanted to reassure him, to tell him that he’d done the job he was hired to do, that he’d had no idea the danger the woman and her son were really in. Thankfully, the Merge didn’t make me stupid. He knew all that, and he still felt responsible. I didn’t understand it, but I understood him, if that made any sense.

  Whatever had happened between then and now, if Wells had always been batshit insane or something had caused him to totally lose his shit and dabble in things even the most high-res Talent would blanch at, it didn’t matter. I’d hoped... I don’t know what I’d hoped. That the objects had been his parents, maybe, gone willingly into another form rather than die of old age. That they’d been volunteers, trapped in an experiment gone wrong, and the client was safeguarding them. Anything but this.

  Because however Wells had managed to do this, whatever price he had paid, it was a crime worse than any I’d ever heard of, one of the prime and undeniable crimes of the Cosa Nostradamus: to remove free will from another. Talent or Null, it didn’t matter.

  And how it had been done – all the evidence we had suggested that he had done it by bargaining with an Old One, or an agent of an Old One. God. Of all the arrogant, oblivious stupidity... And had he found it, or had it found him? I wasn’t sure which thought was more distressing.

  No, wait: I knew.

  The hard beat of Venec’s heart was slowing to a softer thump, and I slid away from him as discreetly as I could, before he suddenly realized what he’d allowed and pulled back first. I’d offered; I wanted to be the one to control when it ended.

  Stosser, thankfully, didn’t say anything, or even look at us; he might be staring at the far wall, but his attention was somewhere else entirely.

  “You think the... whoever cast the spells, came to take them back?” I had to ask.

  “We know so.” Stosser again. Now that the tableau had been broken, he moved, as well, sitting behind his desk like a guy twenty years older. I’d only ever seen the boss so beat-down once before, when a teenager died in our building, because of something his little sister did. “Apparently, a few years back, Wells had been browsing for someone to help him with a domestic problem.”

  “The problem of a wife who wanted to leave him, and a son who didn’t want to listen to dear old dad,” Venec interjected, his voice still low and bitter.

  “And he found an Old One?” Most people, Talent or Null, who ran across one of the old races, would have backed away as fast and as quiet as they could, and prayed that it didn’t follow. But it was better than an Old One actively trolling for humans.

  “Wells has no idea who the source of the original spell was,” Stosser went on. “He only spoke with a magician.”

  In other words, Wells was an idiot. But if nothing else, we knew now who had sold Wells his so-called magical protections. “Magician” was a damning phrase, in the Cosa. It meant someone who was still using old magics more than current, relying on tricks, and supplementing their own natural core by deals with the fatae, just like the old tales. A magician couldn’t shape or form a transformation spell; it was totally beyond their capabilities. Had he made a deal with an Old One for power? Wow, talk about a classic Bad Idea. And then to turn around and deal with Nulls, who had no idea what they were doing or getting into? Lovely.

  “The spells were maintained on a regular basis, with a payment due every season-change.” Traditional old magics ritual bullshit. “Wells... defaulted on the payments. Several of them, in fact.”

  I went still. I’d once had passing contact with a cave dragon, the loan sharks of the Cosa Nostradamus. It had been a misunderstanding, and he’d been only pleasant to me, all things considered, but just the memory of that glare directed at me was enough to make me pay my bills on time even now. Cave dragons were short-tempered when it came to breaking your bond. How much worse...

  “What happened?”

  “What do you think?” Ben’s voice was way too calm. “The magician came, with what sounds like a hell spawn pet, jaws like a sabertooth, and demanded payment. Wells refused – he felt that he had paid long enough.”

  Wells was damn lucky he was still intact and breathing. The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t exactly invisible – we were part of the day-to-day world, and enough people knew about us, interacted with us on a daily basis, so I guess I’d gotten used to them knowing enough to stay out of trouble. It wasn’t difficult. Like I’d told Nick more than a year ago – read your fairy tales; everything you need to know to stay clean is right there.

  Nobody ever read Wells fairy tales when he was a kid, clearly.

  “I assume the goon was what tore the place up.” You did not fuck with hell spawn. Ever. They were the badass creatures hellhounds had been bred down – way down – from.

  “The magician... ?” I let the question trail off, no
t sure how to phrase it.

  Venec answered me. “The name went to an empty storefront. Whoever and wherever our guy might have been, he’s in the wind, now.”

  Or gone, in a more permanent fashion. No loss whatsoever to the world. And whoever, or whatever he had been working for would now be impossible to find; that went without saying. I wasn’t sure even Stosser was angry enough to go after an Old One, no matter how many claws it had in the modern world. If we didn’t bother it, maybe it would go bother someone else.

  Even the Big Dogs knew there was only so much we could bite off at a time.

  I tried not to think about the scrapings in the conference room, and refocused on what we could handle. “And Wells called us to investigate, when he already knew damn well what had happened?”

  “He’s used to being in control,” Stosser said dryly. “He thought he could still control the game, get his toys back without admitting anything, and without having to pay the fees, in the future.”

  Venec’s dark eyes looked at the far wall, his face expressionless. “Yeah. He knows better now.”

  I was surprised and a little alarmed by the surge of vicious satisfaction I felt at those words, until I realized that it was coming from Venec, not me. All right. My Dog was a fierce bastard. I knew that.

  And yeah, I knew what I’d just thought, and how possessive it sounded, and I’d deal with that later, when the walls were all the way up and we had time to breathe. If the barn door was open and the horse was gone... well, neither Zaki nor J had raised a dummy. I’d deal with it then.

  “So what now?” I asked.

  Venec looked at me like he couldn’t believe I’d actually asked that question.

  “Now, we get them back.”

  Oh. Right. Of course.

  thirteen

  “It’s too dangerous.” Nifty crossed his arms and looked... well, like a large dark wall of muscle, which was what he was. “I get what our job is, and I get what our obligations are, but what the hell do you think we’re going to be able to do against an Old One? Seriously. You’re damn good, Ian, ain’t nobody denying that. All of us together, we’ve got a decent level of firepower. We’re a damn good team – at investigating and discovering. That isn’t going to mean crap, here.”

  “We don’t even know the level of Old One,” Sharon said, not quite so outwardly defiant, but clearly set against the plan, such as it was. The alphas of the pack, facing off against the Big Dogs. It was fascinating, if not exactly what I wanted to be dealing with, right now. “No idea as to how much power it actually holds, what its intentions are. The last time an Old One was actually involved in human affairs was, what, 1917?”

  “It was 1924, actually.”

  Sharon accepted my correction with a tip of her chin, indicating – rightfully – that the difference in years didn’t mean squat. “Our information about them is hearsay and hundred-year-old history. If this is an Old One... ”

  “After a hundred years, what’s the real chance that it is?” Lou asked, tapping her pen thoughtfully against the table. The noise was soft, but annoying. “I mean, I know what Bonnie and Pietr felt, but all we know is that it’s powerful enough to transmutate... ”

  “That’s not a Talent skill set,” Pietr said. “Not s’far as I’ve ever heard or read, anyway. All the alchemists in the world never tipped to the secret.”

  “Rumpelstiltskin,” I said quietly. Straw into gold. Borrow a fatae’s ability and you could do things humans only dreamed of. You made your promise and you paid your price. If you kept to the bargain, all ended well. But humans seemed almost incapable of keeping their bargains.

  “So it might be a fatae?”

  “What do you think Old Ones are, Nick?” I asked, and was proud of the fact that I neither rolled my eyes nor let anything other than matter-of-factness into my voice. Seriously, was I the only one with a mentor who taught them anything?

  It was closing in on midnight, we’d been at this all night, and I felt unutterably weary, as though the entire week of stress was catching up with me all at once, and wanted nothing more than to ditch this scene for a nice long soak in a power plant. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, though. Someday the lectures Venec kept giving about topping off our cores was going to sink in with me, so I didn’t get caught short like this.

  “But fatae don’t use magic.”

  Fatae didn’t use magic; they were magic. That was why they were able to disappear, to change form, to fly, to create glamour, and live far longer than we frail mortals. But those were all things they did of themselves, not projecting onto others, or even creating something separate. The fatae needed humans – Talent – to actually work magic, to control and shape current. It took something more, to do this. The miller’s beautiful daughter had made a bargain with an Old One, who worked straw into gold... and then she reneged on the deal, refusing to give up her infant when the Old One came to claim it.

  Read the story today, and she was clever enough to come out on top. That was where stories were different than real life: you could rewrite the ending, over the years, until it came out happy.

  Stosser took up the lecture-voice. “Old Ones are like the fatae we know like... dinosaurs are like chickens.”

  “Old ones old ones beware the really really old ones,” the refrain to one of the stories went, and it was true. They were the fatae who had been around since forever, since when humans were learning how to save fire, and most of the other breeds were hiding in trees or lurking in bogs, waiting for something edible to come along. We’d grown up since then, but we were no match for the masters of old, their memories dark and filled with resentment. All we could do was hope that they left us alone, that the worst we ever saw were the Ancients, who mostly held no malice toward us.

  There was something there, in that thought, and part of me wanted to follow after it, but the conversation was moving on and I needed to focus there. I tucked the story behind my ear, and brought myself back to the table.

  Apparently, they’d all come to terms with the fact that it was an Old One of some sort – no shit, guys – and now the argument was raging over what the hell we were supposed to do about it.

  Which was pretty much where we’d been all night.

  “Seriously,” Nifty repeated again. “How are we going to make... anything that powerful cough up two objects it probably thinks it reclaimed in fair terms? We just don’t have that kind of juice, and anyone who did... we’d have to convince them to do it out of the, what, goodness of their own hearts?”

  “Or the guilt in them,” Stosser said, like Nifty had just given him an idea.

  Venec shot him a look that went from curious to annoyed to worried, like the strobe of a flashing light, 1-2-3. “Ian, no.”

  “It will work.”

  “It’s insane.” Venec was using the tone of voice that normally ended discussions, all dark and jagged, like lava rock that might not be entirely cooled. “Also, incredibly stupid.”

  Stosser leaned back, tugged at the end of his long flame-colored ponytail, and lifted his elegant eyebrows at his partner with exaggerated curiosity. His voice, by contrast, was mild, almost disinterested. “You have another idea? Other than charging in there on your own, like a time-delayed White Knight to put right what you think you should have solved before it happened?”

  Oh, boy. Usually the Big Dogs took their squabbles private. This one was out in full display. I wanted to kick Stosser for being such an ass – guilt over a failed sense of responsibility had gotten Venec’s throat nearly torn out, for chrissakes... you had to add onto it? But I kept my mouth shut and my fingers curled into the arm of my chair. Not my fight.

  “Ah... ” Nifty shut his mouth with a snap – someone had kicked him under the table to tell him to shut up.

  “You want this done?” Stosser didn’t even look at Nifty, probably hadn’t even heard him. “Then that’s how it will get done. Lawrence is right... we don’t have enough firepower to compel, and there’s no ti
me for me to build a consensus. Isn’t that the argument you would make? Do it now, not wait, and mumble our way through protocol?”

  It felt like a direct quote, and from the way Venec’s eyes stormed up, I knew it was his, used against him.

  “Let me go with you, then.”

  “No.” Stosser might have considered the idea, but if so it was only for a second, then he shook his head. “You two in the same room makes things worse, not better.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Nick said, not quite under his breath, and I echoed that, more quietly. There was only one person I could think of who was a powerful Talent, whom Stosser could influence that quickly, and whom Venec hated – and hated him in return.

  Aden Stosser, Ian’s sister.

  The way Ben accepted Ian’s words, I knew I was right. “You still shouldn’t go alone.”

  Whatever their plan was, I already knew I didn’t like it. Not if it involved Aden Stosser. From the look on everyone else’s faces, they were of like mind. Nifty, though, unfolded his arms and nodded. “Take Pietr with you. He’s unobtrusive, but sneaky. If you need backup, he’ll do, without setting her off.”

  I figured Stosser would brush off the suggestion, but he looked at Venec, who gave a tight little nod. “He’s decent with his protections, and can double-up a Translocation. Any help you need, it’s not going to involve bulk or muscle.”

  The slur on Pietr’s build went unanswered; I knew full well Pietr had a deceptive strength, and Stosser – who had worked with us all, closely – knew the same, if for different reasons. I refused to believe that Ben was jealous; we’d agreed he had no cause or right to be jealous, but... it sure felt like jealousy, to me.

  It wasn’t funny, nothing about any of this was funny; but when I looked up, Pietr had a warm humor in his eyes that meant he was amused, even if I wasn’t.

  I scowled at him, and he laughed. It was totally inappropriate, and stupid, and lightened the mood in the entire room, just a little.

  “Don’t feel left out, Torres.” Venec pointed at me, then at Nick, and there was a look in his eye that was all Big Dog. “I have a job for you two, too.”