Pack of Lies [2]

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Out of the shower, I styled my hair into its spiked, sparkly best, then did myself up in what J used to refer to as my out-of-gum clothes. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, but when I finished lacing up the corset and lining my eyes until I looked like an Egyptian queen, I felt like I could kick ass from one end of the city to the other without breaking a single purple-tinted nail. I stopped to consider myself in the mirror. The scarlet brocade corset and black skirt could run the gamut from SCA glam to urban goth, but the kitten-heeled boots whispered “slinky.”

  Benjamin Venec wasn’t going to know what hit him.

  I stalked out of the bathroom, my heels making a satisfying clatter on the hardwood, and Pietr let out a low whistle. He was still sprawled on the sofa, but he’d turned onto his back, and was flipping through a bunch of magazines. The hour it had taken me to get ready seemed to have revived him somewhat, and I suspected I was going to have to make that bouquet of flowers for the next-door super larger than planned.

  “You planning to go break hearts or crush gonads?” he asked, once I’d curtsied in response to the whistle. Thankfully, there was only admiration in his voice, and no jealousy.

  “Maybe both, maybe neither. Depends on what I find when I get there,” I said. He didn’t ask any more questions, just shook his head and went back to the magazine. I swooped over to drop a kiss on his forehead, staining his skin with mochaberry gloss. “You crashing here tonight?”

  “I’m still too drunk to move,” he said without apology. “Try not to step on me when you stagger home.”

  “If I come home, dear boy. If I come home.”

  He laughed, and waved me out the door.

  I wasn’t just heading out to club, despite what Pietr thought. No, I had a specific goal in mind; or rather, a specific quarry. I just didn’t know where he was. But I knew how to find him.

  That damned connection could be useful, as well as annoying.

  The spring night air was cool on my bare arms, and a faint breeze moved the fabric of my skirt against my legs as I stood on the sidewalk outside my building and slowly, carefully, let down my wall.

  Like water flowing over a dike, the awareness of Venec entered me, an ordered rush of sensations and current-hum. Not signature, not quite, but something more raw, more…disordered. I’d never thought anything to do with Venec would be disordered. The thought amused me.

  He was downtown, all the way downtown. Somewhere noisy and crowded and loud. Good. I took a hit off the streetlamps, the shot of current curling like a swirl of static in my core, and headed toward him.

  “Well, well, Big Dog. I wouldn’t have thought it of you.” The trail led me to Mei-Chan’s, one of the bars Mercy had been at the night of the attack. Was Venec working, or had he been intrigued enough to go take a look-see? Or was this how he blew off steam, and I never knew? Whatever reason, he was on my ground now, not his. I liked that.

  There was a line at the door, even at 1:00 a.m., but the bouncer took one look and let me through. I wasn’t a goth chick, not really, but that wasn’t what the bouncers looked for. Their checklist was simple: does he have money? Is she hot? Will they look good on the dance floor or in the gossip rags?

  Inside, the club was pretty much as I remembered it: loud, crowded, and high-end trying to be dangerous. I was probably in the upper end of age for the girls on the floor, and rather than depressing me, the thought made me want to laugh. I could outdance most of them, and still get up in the morning to go to work, if I wanted to. Right now, though, I had a different kind of dancing in mind.

  I bypassed the bar, three deep and doing a rousing business, and headed into the crowd on the dance floor, following my instincts and the deep-tingle that said “Venec.”

  He was dancing with a girl. Actually, as I watched, I changed my initial impression. She was dancing with him. His body was there with her, but he wasn’t.

  “Honey, you’re missing the best part,” I told her. She was too far away to hear, even if the music hadn’t been pumping, but Venec looked up, pinpointing me without hesitation. Wherever his thoughts had been before, they were present and accounted for now.

  I stalked across the floor, sliding one hand between them before the girl even knew I was there. “Sorry, darling,” I told her in my best dangerous purr. “I’m not in the mood for cute and cuddly tonight, and I’m really not up for sharing.”

  She was cute, in a Barbie-goth way that never did much for me, but she was also smart enough to know when to back off. I slid my arms around Ben’s neck, and stared up into dark, very annoyed eyes. Not annoyed with me, though; I could tell that, even through both of our walls. No wonder Barbie hadn’t been able to engage him; he was totally inside his own head.

  Good. That’s where I needed to be, too.

  “You and I, we have to talk,” I told him. Even with the noise, he heard me perfectly.

  “Talk?”

  “Talk,” I repeated, not without a little reluctance. In office gear, Venec was quietly hot. In black leather pants and a soft blue-black shirt showing just the right amount of neck, he was unfairly hot. If you liked the mussed, cranky, deep-thinking type, anyway.

  I liked.

  There was no way you could talk in Mei-Chan’s, not even in the allegedly “quiet” rooms. I got my hand stamped in case I decided to come back later and blow off some steam, and led Ben out to the sidewalk. The usual pack of smokers was gathered by a lamppost, talking quietly as they filled their lungs and rested their ears.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked him.

  Ben had the decency not to look surprised, or to try and pretend that we were still in work mode, with the generally accepted boss-to-worker protocols. This was a straight guy-girl thing.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.”

  Oh. Well. I hadn’t expected that.

  He sighed, and went over to one of the smokers to bum a cig. I also hadn’t expected that. What else was I going to learn about Benjamin Venec tonight?

  “Walk with me,” he said.

  If I’d known we were going to be strolling, I’d have worn a top with a little more top to it. I unfurled a little current to warm up my exposed skin, and used the remnant to light his cigarette with a flicker of fire coming out of my fingertip, a trick I’d picked up back in high school.

  “Cute,” he said, leaning in until the cig caught, and then pulling back to study me with those dark eyes. “Two hundred years ago you’d have been stoned as a witch.”

  “Two hundred years ago I’d have been stoned as a witch for a lot more than that.”

  He didn’t smile. “You and Pietr have something going on?”

  “Who’s asking?” Boss or not-boss, I meant. Was this office-concern, or personal?

  He didn’t respond for the length of half a block. I realized suddenly that we were following the same path that Mercy and the ki-rin had taken, that night a week before.

  “Have you ever heard of a current merge?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, taking a hit off his cigarette as though he hated the taste of it. “I hadn’t, not until I did some research.

  “Most of us use the same current but on different, call it wavelengths. That’s part of what makes up a signature. Merge is a kind of shared wavelength. Rare, but not unheard of. You could go your entire life without ever finding someone who is a match, even if you’re riding the same subway every morning, but once you interact…”

  The shiver of sparks flickering from my core out into his skin, the sensation of his current sparking mine, then coming back to me. I shivered again, despite the fact that I was comfortably warm.

  “Is that what happened? We’ve got a merge?”

  “I think so.”

  “Huh.” I considered that. I’d been prepared for…I don’t know what, something more tangled, complicated, maybe even mystical. Knowing it could be quantified, that there was a way to understand what was going on, made it manageable. Maybe.

  “And that means…?”


  “I don’t know. My sources are from the Old Days, so they’re couched in…annoying phraseology.”

  “Oh, god. They don’t say soul mates or anything, do they?”

  He laughed, but it wasn’t an amused sound. “They do.”

  I was chewing over that when I realized suddenly that at some point, we’d started walking hand-in-hand. And neither of us had noticed. And it felt…familiar. Right. I had never, ever been a hand-in-hand girl. Ever.

  “What else did your research turn up?” I decided not to mention the hand thing, if he wasn’t noticing.

  “On the useful side? The ability to find each other, pretty much anywhere. You seem to have already discovered that. Useful but annoying? You may not be able to shut out a ping from me, now. And vice versa.”

  “So far, nothing I can’t live with. Um. You can’t actually hear my thoughts through my wall, can you?”

  “Thank god, no.”

  It was tempting to be annoyed at the relief in his tone, but I was too busy trying to untangle the specifics of this merge-thing. I dismantled my wall halfway. “How about now?”

  He cocked his head, as though listening. “No.”

  The wall came down all the way. “And now?”

  He dropped the cigarette, half-unsmoked, on the ground, and used the tip of his shoe to grind it out. “I can hear…white noise. Like someone murmuring in another room. But nothing specific, and I can only tell it’s you because I know it’s you.”

  Huh. “Does it bother you?”

  I don’t know if he was aware of the fact that he had crooked his arm so that I was pulled in closer, but I’d noticed it. “It should,” he replied. “It should piss me the hell off, and annoy me, and distract me. It doesn’t. I think that bothers me more than if it did distract me.”

  As he was talking, I felt a pressure building up. No, not pressure; more like the weight of a cat pushing against your leg, asking to be noticed, only against my core. Ben was taking down his wall, too, letting me sense him.

  “Like a waterfall,” I said. “Steady, quiet…yeah. It’s not disturbing at all, now that I know what the hell it is.”

  *and this?*

  I jumped, literally, straight into the air.

  “Damn.” I’d never had a ping come through like that, clear and solid as an actual voice. No, it was an actual voice, silent but audible inside my head. And all he’d done—I knew, but I didn’t know how I knew—was think the words.

  Telepathy wasn’t possible. People had been trying forever and ever amen to manage it, but all we’d gotten were strong pings and—if you knew the person really well, or had a butt-load of power behind it—a stream of emotions or visuals. Ben’s Push probably helped, but this…

  Wow. And also, uh-oh. As intriguing as it might be to have this whole new area to dig around in, and the possibilities for what this could mean for stuff we could manage on the job—no wonder I’d been able to send him the stuff from Mercy’s apartment!—it still meant something else entirely when we were off the clock.

  I realized I’d been watching him as we walked, just soaking in the view, and forced myself to look away. “Um. Did you walk this way intentionally?” Because we’d followed Mercy’s path all the way to the waterfront.

  “No. I was wondering if you had.”

  It was subtle, like the waterfall backdrop in my awareness, but I felt the slide sideways, as Ben went back to being Venec, and we were on the job again. And, like the awareness of him, it didn’t bother me at all.

  We had walked all the way to the edge of the city. New York may never sleep, but it does occasionally doze, and other than the siren of an emergency vehicle racing uptown, the night was quiet. There weren’t even any cars on the street in front of us, making the flashing traffic light and walk signs seem somehow surreal.

  We crossed the street against the light, our heels echoing oddly.

  “They would have come this way. She was ahead of the ki-rin. It was all choreographed. She had to look like she was alone….”

  “The hug she gave the ki-rin, before the attack.” The knowledge came to me, as I retraced her steps one final time. “It wasn’t a sudden burst of affection. She was saying goodbye.”

  Venec nodded. He had let go of my hand as we crossed the street, and I moved ahead, finding myself bouncing a little as I did so, exactly the way Mercy had, in my gleaning.

  I stopped before I reached the site of the attack, though. Venec caught up with me, standing at my shoulder, looking at the path.

  “There are fewer offerings,” he noted. “On both sides.”

  I nodded. “People are starting to reconsider their initial flush of outrage?”

  “Or maybe they’ve just found new things to be outraged over. All it will take is one burst of news and they’ll be back here, so don’t relax. Where was the dark current you felt?”

  Okay, time to see if this merge was good for anything useful. I thought about how to direct him to what I “saw,” and a thin thread of current dipped into the awareness of the waterfall, coming out with droplets of water clinging to it, like a sheathing of liquid ice, if that made any sense at all. I turned and looked at the offerings, and Venec’s current followed mine.

  Unlike sharing the view with Pietr, I couldn’t tell what Venec was thinking, or if he was even seeing the same thing—we weren’t seeing it together, just side-by-side. Some of my worries about this thing we had faded. I wasn’t the most private of people, okay, yeah, but Venec was. I didn’t want him to feel imposed on or anything. At least, not when I didn’t intend to impose.

  *thank you* But the thought, although dry, was gentle, almost affectionate, not cutting.

  On the verbal surface, we were all business. “I see it. It’s not fresh, though. Whoever left it, they haven’t been back.”

  “Is that good, or bad?”

  “They’re still out there,” he said, responding to what I hadn’t asked. “But right now, it’s not our problem. Nothing we can do tonight. Come on. There’s a diner around the corner that’s still twenty-four-hour. I need coffee.”

  How he knew about this diner I don’t know—it was about the size of a phone booth, covered in shiny aluminum siding, and had room for six tables along its length, and a cracked Formica countertop that had probably been there since they installed it in 1951.

  The waitress had probably been there that long, too.

  We slid into the table farthest at the back, and ordered coffee.

  “This thing…I called my mentor earlier, asked her about the merge, in a purely hypothetical formation,” Ben said. “Most of my books came from her, anyway—she’s an archivist at Founder Ben’s.”

  Okay, I was impressed. Back in the 1800s some smart rabbit got the idea to collect every bit of historical data he could on verified magic—the stuff we know for true, not the legends or myths—and store it somewhere safe, so no matter if there was another Burning, or we suddenly lost all sense of ourselves, there would be a place our history was safe. Naming it for Franklin—the founder of modern Talent in America—had been a no-brainer. Venec having an archivist as a mentor…it didn’t really match the picture I had of him, but it didn’t not match, either.

  He seemed oblivious to me switching around my mental picture of him, playing with the spoon in his coffee. “She’s used to me asking about odd bits of spells, especially once I started back with Ian. All she could turn up was that it was something that was celebrated, and yes, it usually had a sexual component to it, too.”

  Not that I had asked, or anything.

  “That’s a problem. Sex would be a very bad idea.” He stopped stirring his coffee, and stared at the murky brown liquid. “I mean…” He sighed, and I knew—the link—that the sigh was as much at himself as me or the situation. “I mean because of the situation. Not…” He stopped and raised his head to glare at me, like I’d been the one to trap him in that sentence.

  I thought about letting him dangle a little longer, but the glare had as much confusi
on as annoyance in it. “Ben. It’s okay. I get it. I agree. Sex between boss and employee, not good for office politics.” His shoulders lowered a little in relief, and he lifted the coffee to his lips.

  “Although Nick totally thinks we should get it on.”

  I timed that just right, and coffee sprayed everywhere. The waitress glared at us, like a snarf was declaration of war, or something.

  “He does, does he?” There was that lamb nom-nomming look in Venec’s eyes again, the one that made me feel a little nervous and a lot intrigued, before it was shuttered behind the usual distanced amusement.

  “For the good of the rest of the office, yeah.” This conversation felt a little surreal, even for me, but he was rolling with it….

  “And how does Pietr fit into this?”

  Big Dog had a bone, and didn’t want to let go of it. This had to be settled now, while we were still being civil to each other.

  “Does the merge give you any say over what I do with my life?”

  “No. It doesn’t. I apologize.” He looked annoyed again, but same as before I could tell it wasn’t me he was annoyed with, but himself for being annoyed. That could come in handy, yeah, when he was reaming us out in the office. Or maybe not. I didn’t want to know everything he was feeling, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to know what I was feeling. Unless I wanted him to, that was. Damn it, this was all getting way too complicated. Complicated made me cranky.

  “You feel it, too. Sparks. Serious sparks. And you’re the kind of guy who wants to—” I almost said “control” and switched it out at the last instant to “—know what’s happening every step of the way. I get that. But if we’re going to be smart and civilized about this, you’ve got to accept the fact that I haven’t been celibate since I was fourteen, and I’m not going to start now.”