Pack of Lies [2]

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Sharon’s voice trailed off and she tilted her head back, and her “let me think, let me think” humming started again.

  “Right.” Stosser took over the discussion when Venec didn’t say anything, still too busy studying his notes. “Lawrence, you work with her on that.”

  Sharon and Nifty were constantly warring for alpha spot, but they were also both really good at brainstorming. It made sense to put them both on it.

  “The rest of you—”

  “And Nick,” Sharon said, breaking off her humming to lay claim.

  Stosser looked surprised: we didn’t often interrupt him.

  “I think what I’m going to do…it’s going to need his specialization.”

  Nobody ever actually said “hacker” out loud. You didn’t even think about it too much. It was an amazing, rare skill…but it was also one of the ones that could go most spectacularly blooey, so it was like not mentioning certain breeds of the fatae—if you don’t name them, they won’t come by and screw things up.

  “All right. Shune, you get to stay inside. Torres, take Pietr back to the scene and don’t come back without something useful.”

  Well. That was nicely non-directed and open-ended. And completely unhelpful.

  *how the hell are we supposed to know if it’s useful or not?*

  Pings didn’t actually use words, but emotions and intents that our brains transcribed into something comprehensible. This one came on an arrow of frustration wrapped with a hint of amusement, shaded with Pietr’s unmistakable mental flavor, and I ducked my head to hide the smile I could feel rising. Ian Stosser thought we were all nearly as capable, competent, and borderline-brilliant as he was…and expected us to perform to those standards.

  We did our best, and our best was pretty damn good, but our brains weren’t Stosser-level.

  “I’ll follow up on that other matter,” Venec said. Stosser looked surprised, and I knew some ping went back and forth between them, but Ian just nodded and that was that. Whatever the other matter was, it was need-to-know, and we didn’t need to know.

  The others filed out, talking animatedly about ideas for a spell. Part of me really, really wanted to be going with them. I was good at crafting spells, and seeing where we could improvise—the Guys had said that I was their best tech, hands down. I should have been working with them.

  Instead, I got to go back to the site. Again. Like I wasn’t going to see it in my dreams for the rest of the year, already?

  “Bonnie.”

  I didn’t jump when Venec came up behind me, despite my general unease. Like before, in the common room, like all the time, he had the ability to slip into my personal space without me reacting—even now, when every other human male other than my mentor set my nerves jangling. Freaky. Although considering the first time we’d met he’d already been in my head, scouting me while I hunted Zaki’s killer, maybe I’d gotten so used to second-guessing his motives and intentions that it felt normal to have him in my personal space.

  And, after what had just happened, whatever had just happened, him being able to do anything didn’t surprise me, although it was starting to really piss me off.

  Venec glared at me. “None of that made any sense.”

  My brain hit a brick wall, and I blinked, gaping at him. What the hell? I knew damn well I hadn’t said anything, and that wasn’t the kind of thing you say out of the blue, so he had to have heard my thoughts without me knowing, which was impossible, so therefore he hadn’t done it. But he had.

  Even as I was chasing that logic tangle, I was answering him. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but you have a better explanation?”

  He’d gotten into my brain before, during that scouting expedition. That’s why I knew how damn strong he was; that sort of eavesdropping took immense control and power, as well as the particular skill set called the Push. But even then I’d known someone was lurking, and I’d been strong enough to shove him out.

  All right. He knew the feel of my brain, we worked together closely, and right now I was so wound up, it was probably inevitable that I’d leak something. Venec was already always monitoring us, so…

  No. That still didn’t explain it, or the weird dizzying zing I’d felt earlier from him just looking at me, or… It was weird and disturbing, and I really wanted it to not happen again. I didn’t like things I couldn’t track down and nail to the wall and break down into basic, comprehensible facts. I especially didn’t like things that disturbed and distracted me during a job. The only thing that made me feel better was that I was pretty sure Venec felt the same way about not liking it.

  He hesitated, like he was going to say something, and then his hand came down on mine, just a brief contact, palm to the back of my hand. It wasn’t anything special: we’d knocked into each other more than once, walking in the office, and there’d been taps on the shoulder, a hand up from the floor…but this one felt different. This wasn’t the correction of a teacher, or the help of a coworker. This was a touch.

  Everything that had been happening until then, the past eight months of building tension, suddenly hit flash point, and I barely had time to think holy shit and Shinola before everything exploded.

  Not physical, not emotional, not even metaphorical. Magical. More than what I’d felt before, more and worse and totally not anything I’d ever felt before. For a second I swore I could feel the thump of his brain working inside mine, and then current slipped from his core into mine, or maybe the other way around, or maybe both, and it was like an entire storm’s worth of lightning inside your underwear. Literally, because in addition to the current-shock, I got a sexual jolt like I hadn’t had since the first time a guy went down on me.

  My control tightened and my walls went up like they hadn’t since my first high-school dance, and we stared at each other, my pulse racing like I’d just realized I’d missed a flight I was supposed to be on.

  What the hell?

  I wasn’t sure if it was his thought or mine. It felt like mine but it sounded like his, and—

  “Hey.” Pietr stuck his head back into the conference room, his expression a little annoyed. “You coming, Torres, or do I carry this solo?”

  “Yeah.” Venec sounded dazed, like he’d just seen—or felt—something he wasn’t expecting. That made two of us, Big Dog. “Bonnie, go.”

  I didn’t just go—I fled.

  seven

  Pietr must have sniffed something in the current, because he hustled me out of the office like he was afraid the place was about to explode. I was so taken aback by what had happened that I let him, barely even noticing his presence as he handed me my coat and we went down the stairs and out through the lobby.

  I pride myself, with some justification, on being more analytical than impulsive, on staying focused and calm. Even when I was diving into some new hedonistic impulse, I never lost control. And yet right now I felt like every single inch of me was fizzing and spazzing like a ten-year-old on her first current-rush. What the hell had just happened? Yeah, okay, Venec and I had sparks. We had chemistry. We had ha-cha-cha, like Zaki used to say. None of that explained the weirdness when we looked at each other in fugue-state, or my thoughts landing in his head without intent or effort. That last…it just wasn’t possible. There wasn’t any such thing as telepathy, just fine-tuned pings, and pings didn’t happen without intent. Not once you got past the wild years of prepuberty, at least, and the two of us were damn-well past that sort of idiocy.

  And that…oh, my god that current-shock between us, just then? My legs went wobbly just thinking about it, and not just because it had been too long since I’d had a play-partner who was also Talent. That had been…wow. It made my earlier jumpiness feel like nothing, like an unpleasant hiccup knocked away by an orgasm. And okay, maybe not the best choice of analogies, even if it was probably pretty accurate.

  Even once I recovered myself a little, my skin and synapses settling down, there were so many unanswered, probably unaskable questions filling my head
and wondering what the hell? that I let Pietr, for once, do all the heavy lifting in the conversation.

  It was a very quiet subway ride down.

  We stopped on the way over to the scene, and picked up coffee and a bagel with cream cheese from one of the corner carts. The harsh caffeine did the job, burning my throat and making me focus on the here and now. Pietr kept sliding looks at me, the way guys do when they think they’re being subtle. I ignored him, eating the bagel as we walked even though I wasn’t really hungry. We burned calories fast, when we were working, and even with J’s scolding I hadn’t had a chance to recharge properly.

  Finally I reached out and slapped my partner on the shoulder, letting him know I knew he was hovering.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t know if it was true, but we were going to make like it was.

  We crossed the street at the crossing, ducking around the cabs waiting for the traffic light to change, and turned left, surveying the site. The difference a few days made in an otherwise unremarkable site was…scary. Where, in the early morning of the attack, the ground had been bare and cold, reflecting nothing but blood and mud, it was now…

  “Sick.”

  “Huh?” I looked at Pietr, almost surprised that he was still next to me.

  “All that. It’s…sick,” he repeated.

  “All that” was the piles of offerings: flowers and stuffed animals, saints’ candles in their tall glass pillars, and countless notes, folded and already yellowing. One pile had built near the site of the actual attack, and the other located on the other side of the walkway. Literally opposed; one facing off against the other, vying to be the more impressive, more important statement.

  “You’ve never seen memorials before?” They sprouted anywhere there had been a violent crime—hit-and-run, a deadly mugging, a drive-by shooting…some grew, some didn’t. It all depended on how much publicity they got, how much word of mouth.

  Pietr put his kit on the ground, and bent to pick up one of the notes from the second memorial. He opened it, and then dropped it almost immediately in disgust. “Never ones dedicated to a dead would-be rapist.”

  That’s what the second group of notes and candles were: an homage to the dead man. I picked up the note Pietr had dropped, and smoothed the paper out so I could read it.

  We know the truth. That animal will get what’s coming to it.

  It was handwritten, in black ink, in a scratchy script that looked like a woman’s, or a man with a penmanship class somewhere in his past, dripping with hatred for the ki-rin.

  “Are they all like that?” Pietr reached to pick up another one, but I grabbed his elbow roughly, stopping him midreach. “Don’t touch anything else. Wait.”

  Pietr stood, and watched me, his gaze cool and patient. In the hierarchy of our pack, I wasn’t alpha, but Pietr was omega. If I said wait, he waited.

  “How many notes, would you guess?”

  He looked the collection over carefully, walking around but careful not to step inside an invisible but obvious boundary. “Twenty? Maybe twenty-five? A bunch are weighted with stones, but not all of them. It hasn’t rained or been particularly windy overnight, but some of them might have been blown away.”

  “Seven candles. None of them have burned all the way down—one was never lit. Do you know what saints they’re to?”

  Pietr gave me a Look. “You think I’m a good Catholic boy? You’re the one with the Latina last name.”

  “Believe me, I’m not a good Catholic boy, either.” My dad might have been, but by the time I’d come along and my mom had walked out, he’d given up on the Church of Anything except his work. He’d been a carpenter, a damned good one. J said the only way I took after him was my attention to detail and a certain fondness for things that weren’t good for me. J went to church but never made a deal about me joining him or not, and anyway he went Protestant.

  And none of that had any bearing to the case, so I shut that line of thought down, and brought my attention back to the notes.

  Pietr got down on his knees and pulled a small notebook and ballpoint pen out of his coat pocket, squinting at the labels on the sides of the candles and writing something down for each one. Was there a patron saint for accused rapists? I was betting there was. Probably the same one pedophiles and abusers prayed to.

  “Count the visible notes, too,” I told Pietr. “But don’t touch any of them, not even to get a better count. Not yet, anyway.”

  “And the stuffed animals?”

  There were only three in this pile. One teddy bear with a broken heart sewn to its front, and two snowy-white and sparkly unicorns with their horns cut off. Despite my attempt to be cool and calm, a shudder went through me at the casual promise of violence implied by that.

  “Just make note of ’em. Unless you brought a camera?”

  Pietr gave me a Look.

  “We really need to start. Even if it goes on the fritz half the time. One of those cheap disposable ones that use actual film, maybe.” I made a note to myself to buy a few and throw them into my kit. It couldn’t hurt. Especially if it meant I didn’t have to glean every damn detail at every damn crime scene, going forward. Relying on magic for everything was just stupid. And I’d tell Stosser that, too, if he bitched.

  My partner shrugged and opened his kit, pulling out a vial of metal shavings and a natural-bristle paintbrush. The current-charged shavings, brushed around an object, would help us determine if anything had been magically booby-trapped, without us actually triggering it. Nifty and I had run that up, after one of Venec’s nastier tricks during training. “You think someone left an unpleasant surprise?” I asked.

  “Maybe. I’m not going to take any chances with people who leave offerings to an accused rapist.”

  Accused, attempted rapist, technically. But since I shared the sentiments, I left Pietr to his job, and stepped across the paved jogging path to look at the other pile of offerings.

  More stuffed animals here—a lot of unicorns with their horns intact and blue ribbons tied around their necks. Blue, for…right. The Virgin Mary. Purity and loyalty. Between that and the candles…had any of the victims been religious? I hadn’t even thought to ask, or wonder if it might be important. Something deep inside said it wasn’t a factor, but Stosser would give me hell if I thought of something and dismissed it on a gut feeling, especially if it turned out to be relevant, later. I pulled my own notebook out of my coat pocket, and jotted the thought down for later.

  So. There were fewer notes on this side, but more candles, almost all of which had guttered out. Interesting. Had they been left here earlier, and the others placed later, or were they better protected from the wind on this side, and so didn’t blow out?

  I pulled a strand of current from my core and played with it absently, passing the energy from gold to green and then back again as I thought. It wasn’t as good as holding one of my scrying crystals, but it helped. “Is there a spell to determine when something was placed in a location, and if not, can we fake it?”

  “What?” Pietr called from where he was crouched, his head turned to look over at me.

  “Nothing. Thinking out loud. Damn bat-ears on your head, boy.”

  My partner made a rude gesture, and went back to his own job.

  About ten stuffed animals, a bunch of roses, now dead and brown, so they’d probably been put there right after the attack, and a hand-tied bouquet of early wildflowers, wilted but still pretty. Did florists sell wildflowers, or had someone actually gone out and picked them? A scattering of notes, mostly on note cards rather than the sheets of paper in the other shrine. I wasn’t going to touch them until Pietr had tested this pile, too, but one of them was faceup and still legible:

  You did not deserve this. We will hold you in our prayers.

  Nice thought. Useless, in my opinion, but nice. Nobody deserved any of this—even the dead guy hadn’t deserved to be gored like that, not without a trial and conviction. I paused,
and considered. Yeah, even though I hadn’t felt anything watching him die, I really did believe that.

  Good. Okay. A little of my balance came back, and with it, my focus. Let the anonymous mourners pray. I’d take a more proactive route.

  I took out my notepad again, and did a quick sketch of the display from a couple of sides. I should have gleaned it, but the thought of having to regurgitate it all up again… This way everyone could see it, and leave me out of it after the fact. Distance. The Big Dogs were always on us about keeping distance, and I’d proven already I needed more of that. Besides, J had spent good money giving me art lessons. I should use it every now and again.

  The scratch of the pencil on rough-coated paper was soothing, and the lines quickly resolved into something recognizable. I was no great shakes as an artist even after those lessons, but I’d become a reasonably competent draftsperson.

  When I had everything sorted to my satisfaction, I put the notepad away and chewed on the end of the pencil, looking at the display without really seeing it. No preconceptions, Stosser said. Facts only. Find clues. Clues to what?

  In my hyperaware state, I actually heard and felt Pietr come up behind me.

  “Everything’s clean on that side. No signature flares, no nasty surprises…just paper and plastic and baby-safe fabric.”

  “Great. Check these?”

  He knelt to do so, while I kept staring out across the site, my eyes half-focused. “What are we looking for?” I asked, as much for my own benefit as hoping he’d be able to tell me.

  “Something that shouldn’t be here.”

  “Very helpful.”

  Thankfully, expectedly, he didn’t take offense at my sarcasm, but finished the testing.

  “All clear here, too. When you did the gleaning…what were you picking up? I mean, I know what I saw, but…was that everything? If this was a crime of passion, do you think if we went in together…”