Tricks of the Trade

by Laura Anne Gilman

  It hadn’t been a full-on purebred hellhound. If it had been, he would be dead. A crossbreed, or maybe even a quarter-breed, something with mastiff or—

  His mind went over the details, trying to determine what the beast was, so that he could find out where the client had gotten hold of one—and why—and then go find the breeder and issue a smack-down for letting a Null have a goddamned hellhound, even one that watered down. It was pointless obsessive work, but it kept his mind occupied and away from what they were doing around him, shifting him onto another surface, drawing white curtains around him, switching out the drip in his arm for another and the doctor was there again, his face covered but his eyes dark gray and focused the way a real professional got when they were in the groove, and Ben was able to let go of the last bit of conscious thought and let them do what needed to be done.

  When he had first approached Benjamin with the idea—then only a glimmer born out of frustration and anger—for PUPI, Ian Stosser had thought about things like justice, and conscience, and how to win people over to his cause.

  Ben Venec had thought about things like training, licensing, and hospital authorizations. Making his signature on the seventh page of tagged forms, Ian was thankful, once again, that his partner had a grasp on the practicalities he sometimes forgot. Trying to reach Ben’s family in time…wouldn’t have happened.

  “Fortunately, he hadn’t lost much blood, and there doesn’t seem to have been any infection in the wounds. From the size of the bite marks, I’d say it was a mastiff or some other large breed. We gave him a rabies shot as a precaution, but…”

  The doctor’s voice trailed off, and he looked at Stosser with a steady gaze. He was young, maybe barely out of residency, but Ian had a suspicion that he’d ended up in the E.R. not by chance but choice. Ex-military, maybe. Calm in crisis and able to think no matter what the shift threw at him. Not a Talent, but he knew what he was about—and had recognized what Ben was. Ian owed him.

  “Hellhound.”

  The doctor’s eyes went a little wider, but he only nodded. “So rabies probably not an issue, but better safe than really sorry. It will be taken care of?”

  “It has already been dealt with.”

  You didn’t send cops or ASPCA workers in after a hellhound, not even a half-breed. The moment Bonnie had shown him what had happened, Ian had put the call in to the local Council, who had sent a team in to take down the animal. They had found it, bleeding, in a corner of the client’s property, and taken it in.

  Ian regretted the inevitable ending to this story. It wasn’t the hound’s fault; crossbred and properly trained by someone who knew what they were doing, a hellhound was an amazing creature. Smart, loyal, fierce…and deadly without the proper ownership and continued handling. The client was damned lucky the animal hadn’t turned on him, or one of his staff—if Ben hadn’t shown up, and been strong enough to beat it back with current, someone would have died, eventually.

  Ian was willing to bet that the client had been told the beast would be a good guard dog, prevent anyone who had come the first time from returning. Same idiot who had sold him the “magic-proofing” alarm system in the first place, probably. If the Council didn’t take care of that, too, Ian and Ben would pay the fellow a visit when this was all over, and explain to him that fleecing Nulls was one thing, but endangering them—and anyone else in the damned vicinity—was another entirely.

  “Boss.”

  He wasn’t at all surprised to hear Torres’s voice behind him. In fact, now that he thought about it, he was surprised she hadn’t been at the hospital when he arrived. Whatever was going on between the two of them, it clearly did not allow for indifference.

  And that was another thing he was going to look into, now. Ben owed his life to her reaction—but it was clearly something that involved the agency, not just their personal lives. And that meant he, Ian, had to know what the hell was going on.

  “Torres. Where’s the rest of the pack?”

  “Working.” She looked past his shoulder once, briefly, then her gaze came back to him. “I drew the short stick, to brief you.”

  He didn’t believe that for a minute. From the look on her face, she didn’t expect him to, either. He let it pass. Now was not the time.

  “You know why Ben was there,” she asked, “the connection between him and the client?”

  He did not. “Tell me.”

  I updated Stosser on everything that had happened, standing there in the hallway, hospital staff and patients going past us as though we were nothing more than furniture. Part of my brain wondered at that: normally Stosser commands at least a first look from everyone in the vicinity, his natural charisma is just that damn impressive. But today, he had the mute button taped down, or something.

  “There was no reason for the client to connect the P.I. his wife hired, with us,” Stosser said, when I was finished. “Ben was acting in a purely Null capacity, then. I don’t see why he thought there might be anything suspicious about the connection now.”

  “Venec thinks there’s something suspicious about everything.”

  That almost got a laugh out of the boss, mainly because it was true. Venec wasn’t cynical, or jaded, just really wary.

  “I think…” I hesitated, not because I wasn’t certain, but because I wasn’t sure how to tell a Big Dog what I thought without him asking why I thought that.

  “You think, or Ben thinks? And does he know that you know what he thinks?”

  Ow. I guess the boss could do direct as well as he did politically indirect, yeah.

  “It’s called the Merge,” I said, just as blunt. “You ever hear of it?”

  Stosser blinked, as surprised by my counter serve as I was, and then shook his head no.

  “Me, neither. It’s rare, and stupid, and it boils down to we’re stuck with each other. Current-wise, I mean.” I should have given him more detail than I’d given the rest of the team, probably, but I wasn’t in the mood for details, and if he was so damn brilliant, he could figure it out.

  “Your current…merges.” He wasn’t asking for confirmation; I’d been right, and his scary-brilliant brain had already leapfrogged over the basics and was going into the possibilities. And, knowing the boss, his possibilities had nothing to do with the personal lives or preferences of either of us, but what it would mean for PUPI.

  Considering the sideways looks and uncomfortable body language I’d left behind in the office, I actually preferred Stosser’s reaction.

  “Can you hear him now?” he asked.

  “No. They have him drugged too deeply.” I could feel him, this close, and with his walls down under the drugs’ influence; restless fingers fluttering at the edge of my awareness. If I dipped in, I knew I’d be inside his morphine-dreams. So I stayed out.

  “All right. There’s nothing we can do here—they’ll keep him drugged for a few more hours, and he won’t welcome either of us hovering. Come on.”

  “Where?” But I knew, even as I followed him. The client had put Ian Stosser’s best friend and partner in the hospital. The boss was going to take a direct hand in the investigation, now.

  Part of me wanted to stay in the hospital, lurking in the god-awful waiting room, to be there when Venec woke up, and to hell with what he would or wouldn’t welcome. But I went with Stosser. Boss was brilliant, and way more high-res than the rest of the office put together…but he had no damned idea what to do on a crime scene, and would probably do more harm than good, if unsupervised.

  Besides. I’d know the instant Ben woke up.

  We exited the hospital through the main door, and I blinked in the sunlight, relaxing a little now that we were out of direct surround of all that technology.

  I figured that we would take a cab back to the site, because there was no way Ian Stosser used mass transit, but I hadn’t taken into account the fact that the high-res do things different than us peons. The only warning I got was his hand coming down on my shoulder, and the quick tingle of cur
rent, and we’d Translocated.

  Most people knew better than to Transloc blind, out of line-of-sight, without prepping the destination, if it wasn’t an emergency. Ian Stosser was not most people. I guess he was arrogant enough to assume everyone would get the hell out of his way, somehow.

  Apparently he was right, because we hit the street without so much as a bump or stare, mainly because, unlike the crowded avenue outside the hospital, there was nobody on this residential street to bump or stare.

  The house looked pretty much exactly the way Sharon had re-created it in the diorama, at least from the street. Ian landed us just inside the shrubbery surround, on the well-trimmed, if muddy lawn. I took two steps toward the house, and almost fell to my knees.

  The grass wasn’t muddy. It was bloody. Ben’s blood. I knew it without even looking, the way the images flooded my brain like my own memories. A wave of woozy nausea hit me, like it was my own blood there, flushed from tears in my own flesh. Oh, god. I’d almost lost him. Oh, god.

  “Keep moving.”

  It was an order, not a suggestion, and my feet kept moving, carrying me forward onto dryer ground. The memory remained, but its hold on me faded enough that I no longer felt it in my own flesh.

  I didn’t think Stosser noticed anything except his own thoughts. I was wrong. “This Merge-thing. It can be a problem, too.”

  “Yeah.” Boss had that right, and then some.

  We were met at the door by the housekeeper. She seemed a little less together than Sharon and Nick had described; I guess a break-in, however damaging, was easier to deal with than a guy almost dying on your front lawn.

  “Mr. Wells is not home….”

  “We’re not here to see him,” Stosser said, walking past her as though she’d invited us in. “I want to see the room where the missing objects were kept.”

  She looked at me, and I gave her my best “I’m just the flunky” look. “Best to give the man what he’s asking for,” I suggested. “He’s kind of cranky about one of his people almost being puppy chow.” The flippancy cost me, but it worked. Her lips tightened, but she led us to the office.

  We passed by the library, which according to Sharon and Nick was the room that had gotten the most damage, first. Peeking in, I saw that it was covered with sheets, the kind you use when you put a house up for the season, not the kind workers use, so I figured they hadn’t gotten the insurance evaluation yet. No matter how rich you were, insurance companies made you wait, I guessed.

  The office where m’lady chatelaine brought us was uncovered; most of the damaged furniture had obviously been cleared away, but the space otherwise untouched. If Wells was anything like J in his desk management, the staff was afraid to do anything in here without his express orders.

  “The missing objects were kept here.”

  She stood in the doorway and didn’t offer any more information. I wasn’t sure if she was being recalcitrant, or she just honestly didn’t know anything more. In my experience among J’s friends and colleagues, housekeepers knew everydamnthing, especially the stuff they weren’t supposed to know, so I was betting on recalcitrant. She was possessive of her boss’s privacy, and felt that we were just as bad as the goons who’d broken in originally; maybe even worse, because we hadn’t already made the problem go away.

  Stosser stepped into the room, and I could swear, even from behind him, I could see his nose twitch.

  While he was doing whatever the hell he was doing, I surveyed the room from the doorway, ignoring the housekeeper, who sniffed and retreated, apparently not worried that we would sticky-finger anything left behind.

  Deciding I wasn’t going to discover anything standing there, I leaned against the doorway, crossed my arms over my chest, and watched the boss do his thing.

  “Are you looking for something in particular, or just sniffing in general?” I wasn’t being snarky; the only way to learn, Venec constantly reminded us, was to ask when we didn’t know something. And I had no damn idea what he was doing, or why we were here.

  Well, no, I knew why we were here. We were here because Ben was in the hospital, and Ian Stosser was angry, and worried, and needed to do something, even if there wasn’t anything to do. Also, it kept my thoughts off Venec, away from the bite marks I could still feel ghosting on my skin. The hellhound had, obviously, been dealt with, and it wasn’t illegal as such to own or hire one, so we couldn’t do anything about the owner in that regard…especially since Venec had, in some respects, been trespassing….

  My brain was starting to ache, so I shut down that line of thought and waited for Ian to answer me.

  “There was something about those objects.”

  “Yeah,” I said, because he seemed to be waiting for a response, even without looking at me. His hair was pulled back and tied at the base of his neck, but even as I watched, the strands quivered, as though touched by a wind nobody else could feel. Current-use rising from his core, so subtle and powerful you couldn’t sense it any other way.

  Sometimes, the boss scared the hell out of me.

  “And what is that something?” I asked, when he didn’t offer anything more.

  “If we knew, we’d know why someone would take it, and then we’d know who.”

  “Well, yes.” I didn’t even think the “duh” because he’d probably pick it up and neither of us needed that right now.

  He was waiting for something else from me. It was like being in fifth grade and having a surprise pop quiz first thing in the morning, while you were still trying to wake up and remember what subject you were in.

  “And…?” I gave up, baring my throat, figuratively, in submission.

  Stosser sighed. “And that is exactly what the client doesn’t want us to know.”

  I blinked. “How the hell…” I started to ask, but Stosser was already moving on farther into the room, inspecting the floorboards with the air of someone who has answered all the questions he intends to acknowledge.

  Working with a genius? Not all that it’s cracked up to be.

  I stood and watched him work—or whatever it was he was doing, and then retraced my steps, back to the main room, where Nick and Sharon thought the perps had come in. There were the French doors that had been boarded up with plywood. It was a decent job, and I left it in place—I had no desire to bring the wrath of the housekeeper down on me. They’d already checked for magic-trace on all the entrances, I knew that from the report, and ditto the physical lock on the other side, but it was possible—not probable, but possible—that they’d missed something.

  Stepping back until I was in the middle of the room, more or less, I slipped into fugue-state with an ease that I wouldn’t have thought possible even six months ago, when I’d still needed to do the counting-backward thing. I didn’t call up a spell, or even consciously touch my current the way I normally do, just opened my eyes and looked at the room.

  Mage-sight is sort of like viewing things, not underwater, exactly, but close enough. You can “see” normally but it’s wavery and blurred, and there’s current flickering everywhere, dipping and flaring with its own natural energy, influenced by and influencing everything around it. Cantrips or spells can focus it, but then you risk missing something that your cantrip didn’t take into account.

  Sharon and Nick were right: the only major source of current in the room right then was me, and I knew how to identify and tune out my own signature. That left the normal dark-hued streaks in the walls and floors—current ran alongside electricity, which meant that every house had at least some, hanging with the everyday wiring that Nulls took for granted. Normally it was baby-level, tiny threads that wouldn’t give you much of a jolt at all. But the threads seemed thicker here, somehow. How had they missed that? Was the room specially wired, maybe the “anti-magic” system the client had been sold? Or…

  I moved closer to the wall without thinking, lifting my hand to summon the current to me. If it had been installed by a Talent, their signature might still be lingering….<
br />
  What I got was the magic equivalent of a spluttering raspberry, and the sense of something skittering away. The shock was enough to kick me out of fugue-state, embarrassingly enough.

  “What the hell?”

  Like that, Stosser was in the room with me. I didn’t know how the hell he moved that fast—there had been no inrush to indicate he’d Transloc’d; he must already have been heading down the hallway when he heard me.

  “What?”

  I was staring at the wall, my shock fading into annoyance at having been caught off guard. “There was something…in the current.”

  Rather than looking worried, the boss actually laughed, although his eyes were still shadowed, and his body language more tense than amused. “Tiny, scurrying, giving an impression of a lot of eyes and not much sense?”

  That was it, exactly. “What…?”

  “Elementals.”

  “Oh.” I felt stupid. Of course. Elementals were…well, creatures, I guess, that lived within the current-stream. They weren’t really alive, as such, or maybe they were, in some way nobody could quite explain, but they had a certain crude awareness. Usually, unless they were grouped together, you wouldn’t even notice them. What I had sensed was definitely a flock. Like pigeons, fluttering and scattering.

  “I wonder if that’s what they were using as the alarm system,” Stosser said. “If so, it was a failure, of course. Anyone with a lick of current could calm them down, even assuming you could train them to react and sound an alarm.”

  “You really think elementals could remember anything that long?”

  One narrow red eyebrow rose over a mocking gaze as he turned to look at me. “It doesn’t have to work,” he said. “Whoever’s selling the alleged security system only has to talk it up as though it does. Not like a Null would know any better.”

  Boss was feeling better, if he was being snarky. Didn’t mean he was wrong, though.

  “Pity we can’t glean their memories,” I said. I parsed that thought, then shook my head. Too scattered, anything I picked up would be fragmented at best. Stosser might be high-res enough to hold them still long enough to get something significant, but he didn’t have a clue how to glean. He was management, not tech. I supposed we could teach him….