Pack of Lies psi-2

by Laura Anne Gilman

  And we did. That didn’t make what we were going to do suck any less, though.

  “I wasn’t able to get to the scene,” she said, before I could find a way to ask without making it sound like I thought she’d forgotten. “I stopped, but there were a bunch of fatae there, poking and sniffing—literally. I didn’t think it would be a good time to look for current….”

  “No, you were right.” The last thing we needed was feeding the fatae fear of Talent, and no matter how Sharon tried to explain, it would have fed that fear. “Damn it. Not knowing is going to bite us on the ass, I know it.”

  Sharon shrugged, as though to say there was nothing to be done about it right now, which was the truth, and we caught the M-120 crosstown to the N line. The girl—whose name, I finally learned from the sheet of paper Stosser handed us, was Mercy, and the irony of that almost broke me—had been released from the hospital, and could be reached at her apartment, way out in Astoria.

  Sharon and I didn’t get seats next to each other on the train, so I spent the trip out dozing, listening to the contented hum of current riding the third rail. I loved subways: it was like listening to a cat purr. Right then, I needed the soothing, and kept letting little tendrils of current out to spark off the electrical system, pulling in the excess current like sips of champagne. Stupid—if I’d mistimed it, the entire train would go dead and we’d be stuck, along with a lot of other cranky travelers—but I never claimed to be smart all the time.

  When this was all over, I was going to dive headfirst into the nearest power station, and totally restore my core, just so I’d remember what it felt like.

  Mercy lived a few blocks away from the last stop, in a three-family brick house that had seen better days, but was still holding on to respectability. The postage-stamp yard was paved over with concrete, and there was a nice set of chairs and a glass-topped table waiting for warmer weather.

  “She’s on the third floor,” Sharon said. I nodded, and rang the appropriate doorbell. Mercy’s last name was Trin, printed in neat black ink on a waterproofed card. Someone had taken effort to do that right, and I suspected it hadn’t been the landlord.

  There wasn’t an intercom, so we waited a few minutes, and then just before I was about to push the bell again, there was the sound of feet on the stairs, and a low voice asking from behind the door, “Yes?”

  “Ms. Trin? My name is Sharon Mendelssohn. I’m here at the request of the Council.”

  Well. That wasn’t…exactly untrue, and nicely bypassed the current status of our hire. If Mercy asked, would Sharon fess up? Probably. I’d be ready to duck.

  There was a soft sigh, then the sound of a chain lock being undone, and the door opened.

  Mercy Trin was definitely the girl I’d seen in the gleaning, slight and seemingly frail, but now I was seeing her in color—and part of that color was a nasty green-and-black bruise across half of her face, where someone had obviously slapped or punched her. I exhaled, hard, and her gaze swung from Sharon to look at me. I guess we passed muster, because she stepped back and let us in.

  Luckily we were both in shape from taking the stairs at work every day, because the three flights up were steeper than normal. I was egotistically gratified not to be out of breath when we got to the third-floor landing.

  “I’m not Council,” Mercy said in her quiet voice, as she ushered us into her living room. It was pretty—not girly like I’d half expected, but done in mint greens and soft browns. Pastoral. I guess that made sense, considering she’d been hanging with a fatae for the past few years. Not all of them were forest-dwellers, but I didn’t see a ki-rin being all in-your-face techno, either. Or maybe it was. What the hell did I know?

  There were places on the wall where it looked like something had been hung, recently. Photos, or paintings? If I were a betting girl, I’d lay odds they’d been of the ki-rin.

  “Neither am I,” Sharon said to the girl—Mercy. “Council, that is. My coworker, Bonita, is.”

  That was stretching it a bit—J was Council, yeah. I’d never really affiliated myself one way or the other, despite J’s totally unsubtle hopes in that direction. But Sharon was running this show, so I just smiled and nodded, hoping to pass along some of what Venec once snarkily but accurately called the naturally annoying competence of a seated Mage Council member.

  “We’re just following up on the terrible incident earlier this week….”

  Mercy swayed a little, and I touched her shoulder as gently as I could, easing her down onto the sofa and sitting next to her, making sure to keep a good ten inches between us in case she needed space, but close enough if she suddenly keeled over.

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “If it were me, I’d still be in bed and having occasional hysterics,” I said, moved by some unknown urge. I didn’t know if that was the truth or not, but it was enough to make her laugh roughly.

  “I wish I could,” she said softly. “But…it doesn’t work like that.”

  Odd choice of words. “What doesn’t?”

  I wanted to look at Sharon, to see when she was going to take control, but was afraid to lose Mercy’s attention and maybe give the gig away before Sharon was ready to cast the spell.

  “Trying to hide. Or run away. It’s done, and I have to live with it. Doesn’t matter, now. They find you anyway, and they’re even worse then, because you’ve validated what they were saying anyway, because you wouldn’t come out and deal with them…but dealing with them just makes it worse.”

  I was totally lost now. She was rambling, not meeting our eyes, twisting her delicate, fine-boned hands together like she was trying to rub the skin off them. I wanted to grab her hands and still them, but didn’t.

  Mercy was still talking, although I was pretty sure it wasn’t to us. “Afterward, I just wanted…to be left alone. To…figure it all out. But then they showed up….”

  That made me lean forward and put myself back into the dialog. “Mercy, is someone giving you grief? Because of the attack?” One of the perps’ friends, maybe, trying to scare her? Was that why she decided not to press charges?

  Off to the side I heard Sharon sit down in the armchair opposite us, the cloth of her skirt making a srrssshing noise against her stockings, and a whisper of something that might have been spell words, subvocalized. There was a slight rise in current-spark in the apartment, but I was aware of it only because I was looking. Mercy, being lo-res, probably wouldn’t pick up on it.

  “What happened, Mercy? Please tell me?”

  I felt like a total shit. I really did. But the spell, and the sympathy in my voice, must have worked because rather than clamming up, Mercy started talking to me directly.

  “Si-Ja was…was everything to me. I was seventeen when we bonded, and that’s old—usually companions’re chosen when they’re seven or eight, but it couldn’t find anyone, all those years alone, and then it found me, almost by accident, but he said there were never any accidents, and once we met it was all I ever wanted, to be its companion, to listen to its stories, and travel with it—it loves to travel but it’s hard, you know, for a hoofed fatae to get around, all the doors and things….” Mercy seemed to realize she was running out of air, and stopped long enough to take a deep breath. When she started again, her voice was slower. “And it would sing me to sleep, when I had a headache, and carry me sometimes, when I was tired…. Si-Ja’s a good soul, an old soul, and there’s nothing it wouldn’t do for me….”

  Her voice, soft to begin with, faded into nothing. Shee-Jah. The ki-rin had a name now. I didn’t know if that made things better, or worse.

  “But that’s all gone now,” she said. “All gone. I didn’t know how much it would hurt. Even worse than…” Her voice trailed off. I’d been right. She really had wrapped her entire sense of self into being the ki-rin’s companion. Damn.

  “Why didn’t you press charges?” Sharon asked, finally.

  The girl—Mercy—jerked as though someone had stuck her
with a pin, and shook her head, not looking at Sharon. Her hair, longer than mine, straight and shiny and so black she had to have Amerindian blood in her background, fell into her face, covering the bruises and shielding her eyes. “No. No…no.”

  “If it was because of Si-Ja, because you didn’t want to have to go in front of a Null court and talk about it…honey, there are lawyers and judges who know about the fatae. It wouldn’t…”

  “No!” She looked at Sharon then, her eyes wide and filled with panic. “No! They think I betrayed them! They told me…they threatened…”

  “Who threatened?” Sharon sat up straight like the arrow of justice, but I was the one who asked. “Mercy, who told you that you betrayed them?”

  The spell, or something, kept her talking. “When I was at the hospital. There was a note, on the bed when I was waiting for the doctor to come in…someone had known I’d be there, had left it for me. Someone in the hospital…a doctor, or a cop, or…someone with authority, who knew what had happened. They said that I was a disgrace, that by being Si-Ja’s companion I’d been a disgrace to every Talent, and I’d caused that man’s death, and if I said anything, they’d kill me and Si-Ja both. That I should just shut up and go home and be thankful nothing worse happened to me.”

  She swallowed hard, her throat practically convulsing to keep from saying anything more. Her hands now lay limply in her lap, palm up and fingers curled in. Passive, accepting, like an old woman’s hands. I knew I should try to keep her talking, but somehow it felt too cruel. Pietr was right. I liked people too much to be good at this.

  “Someone threatened you, if you reported the rape?” Sharon’s voice was so cold and thin, it could’ve done stand-in for an icicle. Arrow of justice, yeah.

  Mercy nodded, then shook her head as though denying it. “I didn’t… I wasn’t expecting that. I didn’t…” She suddenly seemed to realize that she was spilling her guts to two strangers, however sympathetic, and clamped her lips shut. I noted, almost in passing, that she was wearing colored gloss on those lips, but no other makeup…like she had been trying to pretty herself up, when we came by, and interrupted it.

  Or, she just naturally wore gloss on her lips to keep them from chapping. It didn’t mean anything.

  I filed it away anyway.

  “Did you keep the note, Mercy?” I asked her, as gently as I could. “It might help us track down whoever it was, and make sure they leave you alone.” If the bastard who had written it was Talent, we might be able to pick up usable trace.

  “I burned it,” she said flatly. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. What does it matter? It was all…it’s all over.”

  The urge was to push a little more—I didn’t want to go back to Stosser with nothing—but Sharon stood, and I followed suit.

  “We’re sorry for intruding, and about such an unpleasant matter,” Sharon said, in the smooth, professionally sincere voice I bet she learned back in her legal beagle days.

  “Unpleasant? That’s one way to put it.” Mercy looked out the single window in her sitting room, as though expecting someone to be lurking there, three stories off the ground, and shook her head again. “You need to go now.”

  Apparently, we really did need to be told twice.

  We went back down the stairs, and I’d put my hand on the doorknob when Sharon made one last attempt to connect. “Don’t be afraid of them,” she said. “Whoever it was…we’ll make sure they won’t hurt you.”

  “Why?” Mercy was blunt, looking Sharon right in the eye now. “Why should Council worry about me? I’m nobody. Nobody, now that Si…” She lost her steel, and faltered.

  “Council may not,” Sharon said firmly, meeting her gaze. “But we do.”

  The front door closed firmly behind us, and we walked down the sidewalk back toward the subway station. I shivered, even though the afternoon air was actually pleasant, with the sun still lingering overhead. “You didn’t take the spell off,” I said, lifting a hand to stop Sharon.

  “It will fade. Unless there was someone hiding in the back room waiting to interrogate her, she’ll be fine by dinnertime. Back to normal.”

  Sharon’s voice was odd; still cold, but dryer than usual.

  “What’s wrong? I mean, other than the fact that someone threatened her….”

  “I don’t know. I just… The entire time, I felt there was something wrong.”

  “You mean other than the whole being threatened, traumatized, not-wanting-to-deal-with-it vibe she was giving off?”

  “Yes, more than that.” The dryness in her voice ratcheted up a notch, and I regretted my flippancy. This was what Sharon was good at; I needed to listen to her.

  “Was it something in the spell? Was she lying?”

  “No. She was telling the truth. The spell worked, in that part. But I think that it was how she was telling it that made me feel weird.” Sharon shook her head, walking faster. “The spell does something to my sense of people, something we hadn’t anticipated. It’s harder for me to see them clearly. I need to think about it, before I make my report.”

  That was a “shut up and leave me alone” if ever I got commanded. I moved faster to catch up, keeping quiet, and wondering, quietly, to myself, if the kind of person who left anonymous notes and candles to a murdered rapist would threaten the victim, too. And if they were, could we trace them down from the limited evidence we had left?

  I was willing to give it a try. Right now I needed to do something.

  She’d been wearing lip gloss. My mind went back to that… why? There had been something off about it. I’d noticed it because it was smudged, smeared off her lip, just a little. Not the kind that happens when someone kisses you—the kind when your hand is jostled. Or your hand is shaking too hard to apply the wand properly.

  Did that mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. But my heart ached, and I wished for the first time ever I wasn’t on the job, so I could have gone back and cuddled her until she stopped shaking, stopped blaming herself. Nobody should be left alone feeling like that.

  But I was on the job, and we were PUPI. The U stood for unaffiliated—and that meant we had to be impartial, too, otherwise it all fell apart.

  Knowing that, knowing it was the only way to help her, didn’t make it suck any less, just like I’d predicted.

  We were almost to the subway when we both stopped, like somebody had nailed our shoes to the sidewalk.

  *feel that?*

  *yeah* My flesh was still prickling from the wash of current that had just shot through us; too strong to just be a stray tendril off someone’s core.

  Pinging each other was automatic by now: J might think it was slapdash and sloppy of the younger generation, but when you were in a situation where you didn’t want anyone else to know a conversation was going on, it was damned useful. And the better we got to know each other, the easier it became.

  *hostile?*

  My feeling was that anything that made us freeze in our tracks like that was not friendly, at best. I sent that, not in words, but a wash of “what do you think?” sarcasm.

  *us, or someone else?* Someone else, by implication, Mercy. We’d been in close contact with her, used current on her; we’d feel an attack on her, at least for a little while after.

  A fair question. I didn’t know.

  Then the current-wave came back, strong enough to make me stagger, and I knew. Us. Definitely us.

  *keep walking. don’t stop*

  The sound of our heels on the pavement was way louder than they really could have been, but I could hear each step clearly over the traffic next to us, and the rattle of the elevated subway pulling in to the station overhead. I focused on it, letting my breathing match the tap-tap of our steps, until my entire body was focused on that noise, my awareness hyperalert to anything and everything around us in a way that wasn’t fugue-state, but felt like it. The current-wave was gone, but I could still feel it on my skin, like piskie-size spears jabbing into my skin, looking for the lethal spot.


  “Breathe, Bonnie. It’s okay.”

  I nodded, but didn’t let myself break the pattern, even as we climbed up the metal steps to the subway, and waited for a train. Not until we actually were in the car, and the doors shut, enveloping us in a comforting metal embrace, the sensation of being pricked to death fading, did I let go.

  I took a near-normal breath, then another. “Who do you think that was? Was it related to Mercy?”

  Sharon gave me a look that would have wilted a Mack truck. “Whoever threatened her doesn’t want her talking to anyone else, either. We were being warned off.”

  “Yeah.” That had been my take, too. “Didn’t work, though.”

  A small, perfectly vicious smile curved Sharon’s lips, the smile that made us forgive all the ways she occasionally drove us crazy. “No,” she agreed. “It didn’t.”

  “Will you sit down?”

  Venec didn’t sit down, but he did pause in his pacing. “They should have been back by now.”

  “The 1 train’s been screwed seven ways from Sunday and twice more during rush hour, all week. Relax, Ben.”

  His partner snorted: you didn’t get to hire a guy because of his obsessive-possessive paranoid tendencies and then get to tell him to relax. Ian’s brain was clearly elsewhere. Or he wasn’t taking their missing pups seriously.

  “If they were in trouble they would have let us know.” Ian gave his partner a long, assessing look. “Why are you worried? What aren’t you telling me?”

  He couldn’t say. There was an itch, or a twitch, or something in his skin that made him jumpy, like live wires stroking his core, feeding him too much dirty current. He had been on edge for days now, and while he wanted to chalk it up to the uncomfortable convergence of events, case and his own research, he knew there was more to it. The under-his-skin feeling had all started with that snap-crackle-pop with Torres, with that damned exchange they’d had that he still didn’t understand.

  Be damned if he was going to say anything about that to Ian, though.