Pack of Lies [2]

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “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 e
yes 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 physi
cal 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.