Tricks of the Trade

by Laura Anne Gilman

  *case stuff * True enough, if I counted The Roblin as a case. *worried about you* Also true. It wasn’t words I sent him, any more than he was forming them in his drug-sleepy mind. It was…like water flowing from one container to another, if one was colored blue and the other gold. If that made any sense, which it did to me.

  *i’ll sleep if you will*

  And because I never lied to him, the moment I got his water-flow assent, I put the mug down on the table, snuggled myself into the blanket, and went to sleep.

  If I dreamed anything, I didn’t remember it in the morning.

  The next morning guilt and responsibility trumped my disinclination to have anyone poking at my personal life, and I geared myself to tell all. Well, mostly all.

  For once, though, Nick and I were the only ones in the office at 8:00 a.m. He took one look at my face, and handed me a doughnut, fresh out of the box.

  We had made a serious dent in the box before I finished.

  “Sounds like The Roblin, yeah,” Nick said. “I mean, not that I’d know, particularly, but the circumstances had way too much going on for it to be sheer coincidence. How come you got so lucky, Dandelion?”

  “No damned idea. First it stalks, and then it splats my apartment, and what’s next? Is it going to chase me across the city, hound me for the rest of my life?” On waking up I’d found a note from the super under my door, confirming that they were going to claim I was in violation of my lease for noise issues. That hadn’t helped my mood any, either.

  All right, I’d taken the apartment out of a panic to get out of the hotel I’d been staying in—on J’s dime—and now that I’d been working, and didn’t expect to be fired, probably…I could afford something a little nicer, in a better part of town. But still, it was a pain and a hassle.

  On the third hand, this would give me a reason to get in touch with The Wren again, like Stosser had strongly suggested would be a good idea. “Hi, just checking in to see if there’s an apartment coming open in the building, like we’d talked about…” That had been an awesome building, in a perfect location—okay, I wouldn’t be able to walk to work on nice days anymore, and the commute would take longer, but it would be a straight shot up the 1….

  “I wonder if anyone else had trouble last night. Would explain why everyone’s late. Hey, you think The Roblin had anything to do with Venec…”

  “No.” That came out more sharply than I intended, but the thought unnerved me too much to consider. Mischief, all right. But that attack had nearly been fatal.

  “How much damage could a mischief imp do, assuming a mischief imp did do damage?” Nick stumbled over the last few words, and pursed his lips as though trying to limber them up. He looked like a demented goldfish.

  “What damage did it do?”

  Stosser, with Sharon in tow, came in through the front door. The almost-frantic Ian Stosser of yesterday had been wiped clean, leaving behind the usual smooth-faced, dapper-dressed Big Dog, his hair slicked back and his nicely tailored Euro-style suit hanging without a wrinkle. Half the time he dressed like a color-blind granola-cruncher, and the other half he could have posed for GQ. I’d learned to read Stosser-sign, a little: granola was his downtime, when he was trying to be Just Another Guy. He really wasn’t very good at it, and it kind of, honestly, freaked me out a little. Seeing him in a suit was like having the sun rise on the proper side of the city: you didn’t know what kind of day it would be, but at least it wasn’t starting with a pre-apocalyptic warning.

  “We think The Roblin made its first real move last night,” I said, before Nick could tell my story. I gave them a quick rundown, ending, “Something tore up my place—moved furniture, loudly, tossed my linen closet, broke a piece of glass-art—” damn it, I was still weepy about that “—and made everyone in the building believe that there were open flames in my apartment. I’m just lucky I got home when I did, or they would have called the fire department and maybe hacked down my door to get in.”

  Which might have been funny, seeing my super trying to explain to the fire department…but no, thanks.

  “You saw The Roblin?” Stosser went on alert.

  “No.” Seriously? I would have told him that, instead of sitting here bitching. “The place was empty when I got there. The windows were all locked, the door secured…. I guess imps can Translocate.”

  “Or walk through walls.”

  “Comforting thought, that,” Sharon said dryly. “So it’s gone from following you to fucking with you. Why you?”

  “It was here.”

  “What?” We all looked at Stosser at that revelation.

  “A few nights ago. I have an alarm set up, similar to the spell Ben has on the front door that recognizes us, and challenges anyone it doesn’t recognize. It went off, but by the time I got here—twenty minutes, tops—the place was empty. And also a mess. Whoever it was, it had been going through our personnel files. Based on the timing of it first stalking Torres, and the tossing of her place, I think that it is a reasonable assumption that it was The Roblin, looking for…whatever it was looking for. Your address, one supposes.”

  “Great. So flattered.” What the hell made me such irresistible imp-bait?

  Stosser looked at the other two. “Have either of you had anything odd happen? Not just the general weirdness we’ve been seeing, anything out of the usual at all?”

  Sharon shook her head, but Nick looked thoughtful. “Maybe. I didn’t think anything of it, or, at least, I figured it was just under the ‘shit happens’ category. But yesterday morning I was tweaking my netbook—” And that still freaked me out, that Nick could use a personal computer. Most of us, a heavily warded desktop was the best we could do, and even then we had to be careful, but the rules were different for current-hackers. “—And something surged.”

  “Surged.” Ian had a look on his face that meant he knew what Nick was talking about. “You’re all right?”

  “Yeah, I was more surprised than anything else.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “Yah, well, I was going to mention it to Venec, and…” Nick’s voice trailed off. “How is he, anyway?”

  And, damn it, he looked at me when he asked that, not Stosser. Damn it…I gave back a blank face like I didn’t know anything. Which I didn’t, other than the fact that I hadn’t gotten any Merge-inspired alarms, so he was probably doing fine and either still sedated or had his walls up tight.

  “They are releasing him later this morning,” Stosser said. “Knowing Ben, he’ll be here as soon as he finds his clothing and hails a cab.”

  “You let him check out alone?” Sharon turned on Stosser, probably as pissed as she got. Sharon was a prima donna and a pain in the neck, but she was also in a lot of ways the mom of the group, her and Pietr, and apparently moms did not let people check out of hospitals alone.

  “If I’d shown up, I would have told him to go home, not come here, and we would have gotten into an argument,” Stosser said calmly. “This way, we avoid the fight, which I would have lost, anyway.”

  When the hell did Stosser develop a sense of humor? He wasn’t wrong, though. That would have been Ben all over.

  Big Dog turned to me, then. “Your apartment’s okay?”

  “For now,” I said. I really didn’t want to get into the details, not until I had a new place lined up.

  “All right. Nick, I want you to work with the netbook, here, where we’re properly warded, so we can determine if it’s infested.”

  “Infected,” Nick said, correcting his terminology.

  Boss scowled at him. “With a mischief imp, infested might be the better word. Go. Sharon, when Lou and Pietr get here, do a full sweep of the office, and double the wardings. And then do the same in everyone’s apartments. I don’t like this, not at all.”

  “And me, boss?” Be damned if I was going to sit here while everyone else got to work.

  Ian turned and looked at me. “You stay here until Venec arrives. Lawrence and Cholis came b
ack with new information on the body dump case, and I want you three to close it today. If we’re being targeted by a mischief imp as powerful as the Old Man thinks, I don’t want any dangling threads left it can possibly yank.”

  Given our marching orders, we marched. Or Nick did, anyway. I’d helped him a time or two with his hacker-magic, and was just as glad not to be anywhere near when he did his thing. It made me feel like I was going to throw up, and I hated throwing up.

  “You really think The Roblin’s after us? I mean, not just you but all of us?” Sharon asked, sitting on the sofa next to me.

  I lifted my hands palm-up, to show my utter ignorance and frustration. “Don’t know. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The warning, the break-in here, the break-in at my apartment…we’re a natural focus.” Bobo had said as much, when he warned us. We investigate chaos. The Roblin causes it. Peanut butter and jelly.

  “But why you, and Nick specifically?”

  Why not her, was what she wasn’t asking. How was The Roblin picking its victims.

  “Damned if I know,” I said. “Just be glad, if you’re not on the short list, not insulted.”

  “I’m not. I’m just curious. Like Venec always says, if we know why, then we can figure out the rest of it. Nick’s skill set is unusual, so maybe that’s it, but you’re not…” She stopped, aware she’d been about to go somewhere seriously not-complimentary.

  “Not unusual? Not special? Not exceptionally strong?” I kept my tone mild. I was moderately high-res, as the general population went, but not in this crowd, no.

  “You’re practically perfect in every way,” she said, and I thwapped her on the arm, laughing for the first time in what felt like days. Maybe even weeks. Since we’d gone to the Devil for drinks, maybe. That felt like a month ago, with everything that had happened.

  “You think the attack on Venec was…” She trailed off, as though not wanting to follow that train of thought.

  I sobered, turning the suggestion over in my mind in a way I hadn’t been able to, when Nick suggested it.

  “No. It doesn’t feel right. The Roblin is about confusion and chaos, the more people involved the better, probably. Even my apartment, he got the entire building in an uproar. A single attack, and the cause easily put down? Anyway, the client had just hired the dog a few days after you cleared the site,” I said. “Stosser said the trainer was recommended by a friend of a friend, the same idiot who suggested the mage-alarm. The housekeeper was so terrified of the thing when it showed up, she refused to go near it, so it was prowling the grounds on its own. Sheer bad luck.”

  “Oh, lovely,” Sharon said, in the tone of voice that was very much not-lovely. “Do we have a line on the trainer?”

  “Stosser said that it was taken care of.” The look on the boss’s face had told me that the trainer was a name he knew, which meant either high-placed Council, or lowdown scummy. Stosser might be useless on the scene, but he was the best we had at getting high-level people to sit up and listen.

  Venec was the one who handled the lowdown. With Ben in the hospital—

  Like my thoughts conjured him, I felt Venec come through the main door downstairs, like a trickle of warm air against my skin.

  “There’ve been so many complaints about hellhound breeders, you’d think somebody would have tried regulating them, or something,” Sharon said.

  “They tried to ban them entirely, about a hundred years ago,” I said absently. “Huge yowl of complaints, said true hellhounds were so rare, anyway, they were doing a service by continuing the breed.” Like anything that was supposed to harry the souls of the damned was going to make a cuddly pet for junior.

  “How could the housekeeper just let it run around like that? If she was so scared of it, why not shut it up somewhere?”

  “Seriously? You wanted her to do something about a hound? She was probably afraid to do anything beyond coexist. It was introduced to her, so it knew she was allowed on and off the property, but I doubt she trusted it beyond that,” I said, listening without trying to be obvious for the sound of someone coming down the hallway. “And it wouldn’t go beyond the lines of the property, so she didn’t have to watch it. That’s why they’re so in-demand—smarter than any mortal dog, even quarter-bred, and most human guards, too. Plus, they’re vicious.”

  The door opened, and proof of that viciousness walked in.

  I thought I was prepared—Stosser said that the doctor had to do some serious stitching—but he’d been released, right? So it couldn’t have been that bad?

  I hadn’t thought about the fact that this was Benjamin Venec, and his release was almost certainly AMA—against medical advice.

  I think Sharon started to say something; I couldn’t hear it. My entire focus was not on the thick white bandage covering his neck, or the arm in a cloth sling, or even the blue-and-purple stippling of bruises on his face that looked like they’d been made by a giant paw, or the tiny stitched scar by his left eye, too painfully close.

  My entire awareness was taken up by the look in that eye; pupils pinpointed way too much for the casual over head lighting. He looked at us, blinked, and the pupil remained narrowed.

  Benjamin Venec, Mr. Control, was stoned on painkillers. That would explain the utter lack of discomfort I felt coming off him; in fact, he was remarkably muffled. I’d thought it was because he had his wall up again but…nope.

  And Ian wanted us to take him out in the field? Oh, hell, no.

  “I’m fine, Bonnie.” His voice sounded solid, almost amused, and he moved into the office with his normal graceful prowl. “A lot of stitches, and some lectures on what to look for, infectionwise, and I’ll have to go for a follow-up to make sure everything’s healing all right. But it was just a bite.”

  “It almost tore your throat out,” Sharon said, but in a much calmer voice than I would have managed. I don’t think—even with all the worrying—that had really sunk in, for any of us.

  When it did, I needed to be ready for a meltdown. Hopefully somewhere private.

  “Almost doesn’t count,” he said, with a dismissive air that made me want to shake him—or tie him back down to a hospital bed. I did neither. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “Stosser’s got us all off and running. You and I are supposed to go help Nifty close the body-dump case. The break-in gets all our attention, after that.” I decided not to say anything about The Roblin, right now, and hoped Sharon had the same thought.

  She did.

  “All right.” He sat next to me, maybe just a bit too close, and I should have moved away. I didn’t. The smell and the fear of the hospital came back to me, and the urge was to do something totally and wholly inappropriate, especially in the office, with Sharon watching us with far too much lively curiosity.

  “All right?” I blinked at him, his words finally making it through my brain.

  “You were expecting argument?”

  Actually, I was. Even with the muted, mellowed-out feel, this was still Benjamin Venec, hard-ass and Big Dog.

  He smiled: barely a lift of his lips, like it hurt too much to use most of his lower face, but a definite smile. “Believe me, I have no desire to tear open these stitches, or do anything likewise idiotic. Nifty will do any required heavy lifting, and you will do the lighter lifting, and I will stand back and glower as required, with these wounds undoubtedly adding to the impression of a team too tough to tangle with. Ian is annoying but no fool.”

  And that, actually, was pretty much what we did. When Nifty came in, we headed out, following up on the name they’d gotten as a possible Person of Interest, one Nico Kaufman, a freelance dockworker who’d had a sketchy alibi for the hours our DB went missing, and—more relevant to our interests—had been working for the same company that stiffed the DB financially.

  And if I stayed a little too close to Venec’s side, was too aware of his every move, trying very hard not to flinch every time he was jostled by someone, neither he nor Nifty commented on it.

  T
he building—a four-story walk-up down in Alphabet City—was, in a word, dingy. In two words, run-down. The moment we knocked on the door of Kaufman’s apartment, I was really glad Nifty and Venec were with me. The info we’d gathered had neglected to mention that our suspect was a minotaur.

  “We come in?” The way Nifty said it, it wasn’t a question, or even a request. The bull-headed fatae glared at him, but took a step back, and made a gesture with his thickly muscled arm that translated into “yeah, whatever.”

  The apartment was bare and barren, matching the building, and pretty much the way you’d expect a minotaur to live. There were beautiful photos on the wall, though, of sweeping blue seas and clear skies.

  Greece. J and I had been there once, when he was still working on expanding my horizons. I wondered if this guy was an immigrant, or if he just longed for the ancestral home.

  We’d discussed our plan of attack in the cab ride down—with the Big Dog along, injured, we weren’t worried about having to justify the expense report—and now it fell into place like we’d had time to rehearse.

  “You worked with Aodink,” Nifty said without lead-in or introductions.

  “Yeah. What’s it to you?”

  No accent, beyond the basic stereotypical Noo Yawkah I’d learned to recognize as actually being from Queens. Local boy, then. Dreaming of a better time and place?

  He took the only seat in the apartment, a sofa that looked like it had been retrofitted to support his mass. Minotaur weren’t actually that large—no bigger than your average pro wrestler—but they massed something fierce. Venec leaned against the wall, as usual. With his arms folded against his chest—the sling having lasted halfway through the cab ride, before he took it off with a muttered swear and shoved it into my kit—and the white bandage stark against his black jeans and sweater, he really did look the part of annoyed and potentially violent hard-ass.