Pack of Lies [2]

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “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.

  Sharon came in from the outside hallway, her hair for once not in the sleek coif I coveted, but rather loose down to her shoulders, and her china-blue eyes were tired-looking. There was a lot of that going around today. She took off her coat and handed it to Pietr, who automatically hung it in the closet for her. I don’t think either of them realized they’d done it; Sharon just had that aura around her—alpha female—and Pietr was our omega. “Is Venec around?”

  “In back,” Pietr said. “Why, what’s up?”

  “You finally quitting?” Nifty asked.

  She shot him a glare, but you could tell that her heart wasn’t in it. Considering that the two of them usually wrassled for alpha spot in the team with gleeful ferocity, that set off all sorts of alarms in my head. In Nifty’s, too, because he actually sat up straight. “You’re not, are you?”

  “No. I’m not. You don’t win that easily.” She suddenly realized we were still on alert, and waved her hand. “It’s nothing. I’m fine, it’s nothing to do with the case. Just something Venec asked me to look into last night, is all.”

  Huh. I was going to make a crack about being teacher’s pet, but whatever it was, it must have been grim, and she obviously didn’t want to talk about it—or couldn’t, if it was on Venec’s orders—so we let her go in search of the Big Dog without further comment.

  “So if we’re all here, cheer, cheer, where’s Stosser?” I asked, curious, after she’d gone.

  None of the guys had an answer for that. “Haven’t seen him since the scene,” Nifty admitted. He sank back into the sofa, and put his feet up on the table, dislodging the napkin bits. “You think something’s up?”

  “With Stosser? You think I have a clue what’s in Stosser’s mind?” I paused, and gave a delicately staged little shudder. “You think I want to go there?” Genius minds were scary places.

  I sat down on the other end of the sofa, not so meh-depressed that I didn’t notice I was still keeping an unusual distance between the guys and myself…but I hadn’t twitched when Sharon came in, and the women on either side of me on the subway hadn’t triggered it, either. My brain gratefully seized on something concrete to analyze. Gender, definitely, and not mitigated by the size of a guy, since Nifty was all bulk and Pietr was slender. Raw nerves again, survival sense kicking in overtime when a male someone, known or otherwise, got into my personal space.

  If you weren’t used to noticing things, it probably wasn’t, well, noticeable. Problem was that PUPI training was to be investigators, to notice things, and look for their causes. I saw it. I had to believe that the guys saw it, too. And nobody commented on it, which meant they were treating me as damaged, or at least delicate goods. Damn it.

  I could feel my teeth grind, and had to consciously relax my jaw. Damn it; I was not going to let an atavistic fear make me change my behavior in useless and unhelpful ways. That would piss me off more than anything else, and it would cramp my ability to do my job, which was unacceptable.

  I started to move forward, sliding along the sofa cushion, when the sound of the door being slammed open made all three of us jump. The boss man stalked in looking like seven years of bad luck, his long orange-red hair loose and charged with energy that might have been static but wasn’t.

  When a high-res Talent gets angry in your immediate vicinity, it’s time to ground and duck.

  “Boss?” Nifty got to his feet fast, blocking Stosser’s progress without actually touching him. “Boss, dampen it down or you’re going to short the entire building out. Again.”

  Stosser stopped hard and stared down at Nifty. The air practically crackled, and my skin twitched. A little voice in my head told me to get down, under the sofa, away from the rush of current being raised in front of me—and another part was fascinated, like a little kid watching fireworks, or a pyromaniac in front of a roaring blaze.

  “Boss.” Nifty’s voice was soft, but firm, the way you’d handle a scared dog. I didn’t think that was going to work, not the way the boss was radiating current. My heart was pounding, my bp way up in the stratosphere.

  *ben! trouble!*

  I never called Venec by his first name. Ever. It was…too personal. But the emotion of that mental ping came out without conscious thought. By the time I realized what I’d done, there was the faint inrush of air and current that indicated someone had Translocated into the room.

  “Ian!”

  Anyone who thought that Benjamin Venec was the secondary force in PUPI, a mere sidekick to Ian Stosser’s star turn, would’ve had that notion knocked right out of their head. Stosser’s head snapped up and his entire body turned toward Venec like he was pulled on strings.

  “Stand down, Ian. Whatever it is, stand down. I will not have another Chicago here.”

  Like that, like someone turned a switch off, the current dancing around Stosser’s core went silent, his hair falling flat around his shoulders, and his skin flushed, then went back to his normal pallor. As Stosser’s presence faded from the ether, I could feel Nifty’s current curved around us like a protective barrier, and wasn’t sure if I should kick him for thinking he was stronger than we were, or kiss him for being such a damned nanny.

  “Lawrence.” Venec’s voice was still hard, and Nifty reacted with the same speed that Ian had, dropping his barrier and pulling the current back into his core.

  Man, oh, man, oh, Man o’ War. I started to breathe again, a little irregularly, and felt my heartbeat go back to almost normal.

  Stosser had calmed down enough to talk, his voice clipped and red-hot. “I just heard from the head of the Eastern Council. Our vic in the hospital—the survivor—is now claiming it was a setup. That the girl lured them in, and the ki-rin attacked them, unprovoked. That it was a bias attack, fatae against Talent, and the girl was bait.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Venec said, with feeling.

  I echoed that, mentally. Our open-and-shut case? No longer open or shut. And I noted Stosser’s word-use—from alleged assailant to potential victim. We now had to think about everyone as both possible wrongdoer and potentially wrong-done. Shit.

  Sharon and Nick both reappeared at the doorway from the inner office, although I don’t know if they followed the noise, or if one of the Guys had called them. Ian looked around, his eyes still cold and mad, and nodded curtly. “This i
s worst-case scenario. We need to look at everything again. New eyes, new brains, absolutely no damned assumptions or notions. If this was anything other than what it seemed at first, we need to know, and we need to know now, before anybody gets any stupid ideas about retribution.”

  He’d obviously heard the same stories J had told me about. Not surprising—they were plugged into a lot of the same sources.

  “We still working for the Council?” Nifty asked, fishing for details.

  “We’re working for the answers, Lawrence.”

  As answers went, that was totally true, and totally not useful. But if Ian wasn’t worried about where the paycheck was coming from, I wasn’t going to, either. We were on the scent of a more interesting puzzle than I’d thought at first, and I could feel the anticipation in the room. As everyone adjusted their thinking and processed the shit that had just been thrown our way. The hounds were on a new scent…or we would be, soon enough.

  “All right.” If I’d thought he was charged before, when he stormed into the office, I didn’t know shit. Under control, Stosser was even scarier, practically shimmering like a heat vibration, and his voice was molten lava, sliding fast. “Pietr, fill Sharon and Nick in on the details, then you two start tracking down possible witnesses. Half the damn city’s nocturnal, someone had to have been out there, and not just gawked after the fact! Bonnie, you, Pietr and Ben run through the gleaning again, maybe they can see something you missed. Nifty, have you gotten anything from those scraps yet? Now, people! Move!”

  We moved.

  The workroom still smelled like musty vomit and citrus cleaner, as expected. Next time we reorganized the office I was going to suggest that we use one of the offices with a window, instead. It might be harder to ward, but the fresh air would be welcome. Not that every gleaning caused people to toss their cookies…but I had a bad feeling going forward it might be more common than not.

  The shudder I’d described to Pietr rippled through me, even as I thought that. Not the depression that had been dogging me since the day before, but something more familiar—and more unnerving.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said to myself, barely a whisper, heavy on the k sound.

  “What?” Venec had come in behind me, and was in the process of pulling a chair out to sit down. Bad timing and worse luck he looked up in time to see me react. “Torres?”

  I couldn’t not answer. “Something just tagged the current. Something kenning.”

  “About the case?” The Guys knew about my kenning, but they also knew it was something that happened in its own time, not an on-demand party trick.

  “I…don’t know. It came and went so fast…whatever it is it’s going to involve me. Maybe everyone. But…maybe not.” Not every kenning came true. Just most of them. I wished I were home, to follow through—I had scry-crystals that helped me focus, but I didn’t keep them in the office anymore. Too many people made woo-woo jokes.

  “Triggered by the case?” One of the things that made Venec good to work for; he knew how to ask for something rather than demanding it. It was easier to think things through, that way.

  I tried to hold on to the feeling, analyzing it as best I could. “I don’t know.”

  “By the conditions around the case?”

  “I…yeah. That felt right.” It was like being brushed by a tornado when it hit the house next door. Something in all this was going to affect me…no, us, directly. I just didn’t know what, or when, or why. Yay for the damned impreciseness of the future.

  “Something we need to react to immediately?”

  “No.” That I was definite on. Whatever I had felt, it was down the road a bit. A mile or a hundred miles, I didn’t know, but it wasn’t going to hit us in the next couple of days.

  “All right, then.” That was the other thing that made Venec good to work for. He didn’t do Drama. “Where’s Pietr?”

  I made an effort to look around the room before answering. My coworker had shared a few sparse details of his life with me, back during our first case, that made me determined never to crack a joke about his chameleonlike ability to disappear, but that didn’t make him any easier to spot. But no slender form revealed itself, leaning nonchalantly against the wall.

  “Not here yet. Should I start the reel anyway?”

  “No. We need to see it from start to finish.” Left unsaid, but evident in his voice if you were listening, was the fact that he wasn’t looking forward to seeing it again, either. That made me feel…not better, exactly. Less bad, maybe.

  “Hey.”

  As usual, Pietr appeared as though he’d been there for ten minutes. If he’d gone to the other side of the force, he’d have been a hell of a Retriever.

  “Got the others caught up to speed.” He slid into the chair next to me, boneless as a snake. Venec sat in the other chair, and the lights came down. “How much did you manage to pick up in your gleaning? I don’t think I could have gotten anything, not after all the looky-loos muddled up the scene.”

  A major drawback to doing something as brand-new as investigative magic was that there wasn’t a tradition for our group to fall back on—and the Cosa Nostradamus was all about tradition. If Talent or fatae wanted to gawk, we didn’t have the oomph to stop them. Yet.

  Another reason for us to slam-dunk this job, so we could hold it up as an example and justification for “get the hell out of my way.”

  Pietr was still waiting for me to respond. I really didn’t want to talk about what I’d done, so I just toggled the mental image of a switch, and the display appeared in front of us.

  “Oh.”

  Even smaller-than-life, a gleaning representation packs a wallop. Like watching a movie where you know what’s going to happen, and the director knows you know what’s going to happen, so rather than mess it up with soundtrack and fancy camerawork, just lets it play out straightforward, in absolute silence. I could feel my skin tighten on my arms, and a knot of tension form in my chest, somewhere inside my lungs.

  *no preconceived perceptions*

  The warning ping felt private, but Pietr nodded his head once, slightly, so he heard it, too. I focused my attention on the display, trying to let it run in front of my eyes as though it hadn’t already been seared into my brain. Look as though it’s all new, everything a shiny dispassionate fact….

  The scene, still and dark, the lamps casting just enough light to create deep shadows. A flicker of movement…down there, off-camera. Then two figures; the girl, slight and cute in her club clothes: short skirt, jacket carelessly open to the night wind. She had legs like a colt’s, and hair that was long and tangled from dancing. The ki-rin came to her shoulder, its head slightly above hers when it was lifted, even-level when it ducked down as though to say something. I don’t know why anyone ever described them as horselike. Seeing it now, with distance, it was built more like a deer than a horse, and the dragon’s head should have seemed odd on top of that muscled neck, but didn’t. The horn, about the length of a forearm and twisted the way you traditionally see it in pictures, seemed too ethereal to do anything like gore a man to death.

  “They’re walking really slowly.” Pietr’s voice, out of the room’s darkness.

  “They’re tired,” I said.

  “It’s cold. You’d think they’d move it along?” Venec, to my left.

  “If she’s been dancing, the cold air probably feels pretty good, if she’s even aware of it. The clubs can get really close and hot.”

  They took my word for it. I guess neither of them was much for clubbing.

  The two were walking forward, fully in view now, within the range I’d gleaned from. The wind tossed bare branches on the trees along the path, and even if the girl didn’t shiver, I did, imagining how cold it must have been, that hour before sunrise. She leaned in against the ki-rin, put her arm over its neck, ruffling the white lion’s mane the way you would a beloved friend’s hair. Such total, thoughtless comfort made what was about to happen even harder to watch. If the vic was right,
if the ki-rin had set her up as bait, used her trust…the thought just—

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “Over there. To the left.”

  Where the attack happened. I brought the display back a few seconds, and looked where Pietr had indicated.

  Two deeper shadows in the shadows. That I’d seen before. The brief red glint of something…I’d missed that. A cigarette butt? Yes, the flick of ash about hip-height: someone pausing to have a cigarette. Two shadows: two figures. Two men, waiting in the shadows…smoking?

  No preconceptions. I let the display roll.

  The ki-rin fell back, the way I’d noted before. I let my brain just take it in, as dispassionately as I could. In a human, you would have expected it to kneel down and tie its shoe, perhaps. The girl, so affectionate a moment before, went on her way, seemingly not noticing that her companion had dropped away. Was she still talking? No way to tell. She was walking with a distinct kick to her step. If she was sober, she was floating on the endorphins of the night.

  One figure stepped out of the shadows. The cigarette smoker. The girl stopped, her body language… I’d said at first that it was patient, the way you are when a stranger approaches you when you’re in a good mood, and you’re going to give them real directions, or whatever spare change is in your pocket. But looking now, she seemed…expectant. Flirty? She leaned in and put a hand on the stranger’s arm. Damn, how had I missed that before? Could the second man’s claim that they were set up be right?

  What happened next was fast and brutal. The second figure came out, grabbed her, dragged her back into the bushes. My stomach rose up again in protest but this time I held it down, forcing my eyes to stay on the display. Next to me I heard Pietr swear in a language I didn’t recognize, his body convulsing as though forcibly keeping himself from getting up to help the three-quarter-size figure in need. On the other side of me, Venec was perfectly still and quiet. The current in the room sparked and sizzled with their agitation, and I had to focus to keep my own current steady and unaffected, to keep the display from shorting out in response.