Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

I also noted now that DB was seriously hot. Not good-looking, the way Pietr was, or even Nifty’s dark, corn-fed handsome, but hot.

  “How did you create the illusion you were dead?” Sharon demanded. “You had no pulse, no breath, no nothing!”

  Flame turned to DB and smirked. “I told you I could do it.”

  “And you were right,” DB said easily. “Get over it. Gloating’s bad for your digestion.”

  That voice. That was the same voice I had heard on the answering machine.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Nifty demanded, his body pulling up so he looked the way he must’ve to the guys who’d faced him across the scrimmage line: big, bad, and needing to hit something, hard. “Who the hell are you people?”

  “You’re the guy who called,” Pietr said, looking at DB. “I recognize your voice.”

  I wanted to say me, too, but I think the shock had seized up my vocal cords, because I couldn’t say a thing. Probably just as well; standing up and breathing, DB was the yummy, intense sort I really like, and I’d probably have embarrassed myself if I had been able to say anything. Flame wasn’t quite as yummy, but when you looked at him magically, oh wow. He had an inner core that seriously radiated, like…

  The current that had knocked me sideways. It felt familiar because it was—it was the same signature as the current that shattered my scrying crystal last night.

  Son of a spavined bitch. They had damn well better hire me. These bastards owed me.

  “You wanted people who didn’t freak when faced with freakiness,” Nick said, as if he’d just figured out the last missing piece of a puzzle. “Whose first thought wasn’t to run, but to look.”

  “And you all passed, with flying colors,” Flame said. He seemed to be the spokesperson of the two, stepping forward, literally, and taking the floor. “Even in the face of…unfortunate circumstances, all of you stepped forward and used your respective skills to observe and gather details, integrating information as it was brought forward rather than choosing a conclusion and then sticking to it no matter what.” Flame smiled at us, a wide, approving smile that looked false but somehow felt real. “You all worked together, as a team, despite having no reason to do so. Not a prima donna among the bunch.”

  “Which means what?” Sharon asked, her hands fisted on her hips, like she was going to walk out if she didn’t get answers, stat. Hah. Flame’s definition of a prima donna was clearly different from mine.

  “It means you’re hired,” DB said, his expression almost—not quite, but almost—looking pleased about the prospect. “All of you.”

  There was a slight popping noise, and four more chairs appeared in the office, distributed neatly around the desk. Someone was showing off. From the look DB shot his…partner? I was guessing it was Flame.

  “Please,” he was saying, gesturing to the chairs. “Sit. I will explain.”

  “That would be nice,” Nick said, sitting in one of the chairs and leaning back in it as though he had all the time in the world. “Starting with who the hell you are.”

  Pietr stuck to his position against the wall, but the rest of us took the offered chairs, mainly because, at least for me, my knees were still wobbly. DB righted the overturned leather desk chair and sat in it, effectively reclaiming the desk as his territory, while Flame rested his right hip against the edge of the desk and gazed at us as though he was about to start a lecture.

  “Ah. Where to start. At the beginning, yes, Ben, I know,” he said before DB could say anything. I was right, they were partners—not sexual, not unless I was reading them all wrong, and I didn’t do that very often. But business partners, in whatever this was, yes.

  “My name is Ian Stosser.” He waited, like we were supposed to have heard of him. “Ah. My partner here, whom you have already met under…awkward circumstances, is Benjamin Venec.”

  Venec nodded once at us, his gaze sweeping restlessly from face to face. It wasn’t boredom but evaluation; I knew, having used the same sweep myself more than once. The look of a people-watcher. Stosser was the talker, Venec the looker. One prodded, the other collated responses. Good teamwork. Good cop/bad cop. Or whatever they were.

  “Several years ago, there was an incident in Seattle. The Madeline case.” Stosser paused, probably for dramatic effect. “Do any of you remember it?”

  I did. Nifty shook his head, and so did Pietr and Sharon. Nick was the only one who spoke up.

  “The girl who was raped and murdered. They never found the killer. She was Cosa,” he said to the others. “Sixteen, still in mentorship.”

  That meant that she was still a kid, supposed to be protected, taken care of, not just by her mentor but by every adult Talent. That’s the theory, anyway.

  “She was killed by strangulation, but the coroner was never able to say exactly how, because there wasn’t any of the usual marks or indications in the autopsy. There were rumblings, maybe she’d been killed by someone within the Cosa. That someone had used current to subdue and kill her. Madeline’s mentor offered a huge reward, but nobody ever came forward.”

  I knew about the case because Madeline and her mentor had been Council. J had been part of the investigating team flown out to look into the alibis of a couple of the guys they suspected. Nothing had ever been proven, nothing had ever been done. He’d come home and hugged me really tight, and never said a word about it after that.

  “That’s right. A dead end, totally untraceable, unprovable…Then.” Stosser started pacing, forcing us to follow his movements. “But it got us, Ben and me, to thinking. Why was it untraceable? We all know how to detect current—it’s one of the first things we’re taught in mentorship. We gather it, manipulate it, direct it, imprint it… A current-signature is like a fingerprint, and therefore, like a fingerprint, it should lead you back to the owner, if you only know how. They had suspects, and my contacts tell me that the signature connected to one of them. So why couldn’t they do that, why couldn’t they make that connection for Madeline?”

  “Because nobody could agree on the validity of the identification, because there were too many personal conflicts…and not everyone agreed on the validity of the identification, leaving enough doubt that they couldn’t do anything about it.” I hadn’t learned about that from J—I’d done some digging myself, after. All this had been just after Zaki had been killed, and murder was a lot on my mind.

  “Right.” Stosser gave me a look of approval, professor to bright student. “But what if…a large what-if, but work with me here, what if there was someone who could and would do the work, tracking down the evidence and building a case based only on the evidence…totally unbiased by any other allegiance than a dedication to the facts…to an insatiable desire to know What Happened?”

  I could hear the capitalization in his voice, even before he made quote signs with his hands around those last two words.

  “What if there was a place that people could turn to, for crimes committed outside the abilities of the Null police force and court system—crimes by Talent against Talent?”

  His comment cut so close to my own pain that I was literally breathless for an endless second.

  “There isn’t,” Sharon said, her I-know-everything voice back. That tone was already starting to irk me, even though I knew she was right. “Council won’t trust anything not Council, and lonejacks…”

  “Lonejacks won’t trust anyone,” Nifty said.

  “That has been true, traditionally,” DB said, and I really needed to stop thinking of him like that, since he wasn’t actually dead anymore. “But traditionally, Talent did not attack Talent, either. The Madeline case was high profile, but even that didn’t get much chatter. So what you don’t know is that there have been others…and the numbers are growing.”

  I felt a chill in my spine. Zaki had been one of those numbers, killed by another Talent. I hadn’t realized… I had always thought he was an aberration, a tragic fluke. Talent killing Talent…there weren’t that many of us to begin with; the line
s of community had always kept us safe from each other. What had changed?

  “The world is changing. We’re changing…” Stosser did that dramatic pause thing again, while I reminded myself that there was no way he could have been reading my mind, that not even the purest Talent could do that without permission. “And we need to change other things in order to keep up. Including how we react to those changes.”

  “And you want to be part of that change,” Pietr said, sounding intrigued despite himself. “How?”

  “Puppy.”

  “What?” I couldn’t have been the only one hearing that wrong.

  “P-U-P-I.” DB—Venec—spelled it out. “Private, Unaffiliated, Paranormal Investigations. The name was Ian’s idea—” he shot his partner a rueful glance “—but it has the benefit of being easily remembered. A team of trained forensic Talents, shorn of their normal affiliations of lonejack or Council, answerable only to the evidence, the truth. A handpicked group of investigators who don’t care why, only how, and who. A group who can deliver evidence to be used to prosecute and punish Talent who think they can escape detection by ordinary methods.”

  “And you want to hire…us.” Pietr’s voice was carefully noncommittal.

  “Any of you can get up and walk out at any time,” Stosser said, coming to rest by his partner’s side, hands clasped behind his back as though to keep them from waving about while he talked. “There’s nothing keeping you here against your will. We chose your names not by random chance, but because each and every one of you met our criteria for intelligence, independence, determination, curiosity, and a certain…dogged stubbornness.”

  Nifty coughed deep in his throat, like a strangled laugh, and I had to grin in self-recognition. All the traits J occasionally despaired of, suddenly touted as employable virtues. That was funny.

  “You’re free to walk,” Venec said. “But none of you will. The fact that you made it this far, through all of our tests, means that you are perfect for this challenge…and the job is perfect for you.”

  He smiled then, an arrogant, challenging smile, and a shiver ran through me that had nothing whatsoever to do with the ghoulishness of what we’d been discussing. He was yummy, yeah, and intense…and offering me what just might be the job of a lifetime.

  This was either going to be a clusterfuck of monumental proportions…or a whole lot of fun.

  five

  My mentor took the news about as well as I’d expected.

  “Absolutely not! Impossible! You need a real job, not this…irresponsible pipe dream! Stosser—bah, Ian Stosser has always been a troublemaker, and this partner of his, this Ben Venec…I’ve never heard of him. Who is he? What are his credentials? Where is their funding coming from?”

  J had been ranting for almost an hour now, ever since I Translocated into his Beacon Hill apartment and told him the results of the afternoon’s meeting. Periodically I used a strand of current to check his blood pressure, an intimacy he allowed me only because he was too distracted to slap the tendril away, and then went back to my own thoughts. Eventually he would run down, and we could have a reasonable discussion.

  Not that it mattered. I had already made up my mind.

  It took another ten minutes, but finally my mentor dropped into his chair and stared gloomily across the room at me. I lifted my head up from the paperwork I’d been flipping through, and met his gaze evenly.

  “And you didn’t hear a word I said, did you?” he asked.

  “I heard every syllable,” I said in the same measured, reasonable tone he was using now. “I even agreed with some of them.”

  “But you disagree with the overall conclusion.”

  I scratched the tip of my nose and tossed the folder of papers onto the end table. The salary they were offering was passing-decent, the benefits not worth mentioning, and none of it mattered, really. None of it had since The Guys, as I’d started thinking of them, had given us the pitch.

  “Joseph. You know they’re right. About the need for this—for unbiased investigators for the Cosa—and about how very good I’d be at it.”

  J knew what I was talking about, and I knew that he really didn’t want to think about that. His expression didn’t change, but he shifted in his chair, just enough to let me know he was uncomfortable.

  “That was different,” he said, not meeting my gaze.

  “Of course it was,” I agreed. “I was just a kid looking to see what had happened to her dad, after he left me a mysterious letter and then disappeared. All I did was poke around into a few dark holes—” including one that belonged to a loan-sharking cave dragon “—and ask a few questions, and use current to trace down the clue that led to the guy who killed my father…”

  I played dirty then. “And then I couldn’t do anything.” I paused, letting that statement drill down a little. “There was no one to go to with what I knew, then. Not even you could do anything. I had no evidence, nothing that could be used in an ordinary court of law, and no way to give Zaki justice. He wasn’t Council, so Council wouldn’t get involved. There was no way to get closure, unless I was willing to do the deed myself.”

  Zaki hadn’t been much of a dad, but he’d been a good person. He didn’t deserve to get killed over a woman he hadn’t even touched. And he would have hated me having blood on my hands, especially in his name. That, not legalities, not any sense of civilized behavior, had been all that had stayed me. But J never needed to know that, if he hadn’t twigged already.

  “Child, you are a dirty pool player.”

  “Equal parts nature and nurture,” I said in reply, and it was true. I might be the child of drifters and grifters, but J hadn’t gotten to where he had in his career by always playing by the strict interpretation of the rules. Always legit, sure, but maybe not always kosher. There was no way I was going to grow up a delicate, idealistic flower, under those conditions.

  J had a crease between his eyebrows, meaning that a headache was creeping down from his scalp. I didn’t want to cause the old man any worry—I never wanted him to worry about me ever—but I couldn’t back down. Not about this.

  Meanwhile, I had my own forehead-crease forming. There was something niggling at the back of my brain, about this job. Not a bad thing, just a thing I needed to remember, or a connection I needed to make. If I left it alone, it would come crawling out on its own.

  “Dirty pool,” J said again, then leaned back in the chair, letting his legs sprawl in front of him. Rupe appeared from wherever he’d been hiding during the rant and settled his shaggy body on the carpet next to J’s chair. “You really think that this…wannabe investigational unit can accomplish anything? Do you think they will make a difference?”

  “We won’t know unless we try.” And then I played even dirtier. “Would you have been able to use us, something like this, out in Seattle?”

  I didn’t have to say anything more; part of loving someone is knowing what still bothers them. He sighed, and all the argument went out of him, just like that. He reached down to pet Rupe’s head. “I hate to say it, and when I say hate I do mean hatred, but…yes. We could have, and by god, we would have, if I had anything to say about the matter.”

  J was a stickler for honesty, even when it hurt.

  “You are correct, Bonita. This may be exactly what the Cosa needs…and, more to my regret, it may be exactly what you need.”

  It wasn’t a paternal blessing, exactly, but it would do.

  The question of my employment settled for the moment, J gathered all the paperwork from me and spent about an hour explaining it all, in excruciating detail. His grudging approval of their having health insurance and a 401(k) set up would have been funny if it wasn’t all so surreal, and I signed in the places he marked without really paying much attention. The paycheck had suddenly—and probably stupidly—become secondary to me. I was never going to make a good mercenary.

  The initial argument, followed by what seemed like endless paperwork, took so much out of us that I vetoed h
is cooking, and we ended up doing take-away Thai and beer instead. J sometimes forgets he isn’t fifty anymore.

  We had a few more rounds of “do you think this is a good idea” over the last of the six-pack, and I went back to New York under his current, a little before midnight. All this Translocating back and forth between Boston and New York was starting to make my neck ache. Next time, I thought as I crawled into bed, I was going to take the Chinatown bus. Or, considering I now had a paying job, maybe I’d go crazy and take Greyhound. Or hey, Amtrak! Or maybe, once I got an apartment, I could drag J down here for dinner, for a change. I hadn’t cooked for anyone in a long time….

  That thought consoled me as I put my head on the pillow and was out almost before my eyes were closed. I slept well, no dreams intruding, so the wake-up call at 6:00 a.m. was a rude shock. I rolled over, snagged the receiver, grunted something into the phone. and then dropped it back into the cradle. “Oh god,” I moaned, and then rolled out of bed for what I supposed would be my first day at work.

  Supposed, because at the end of the interview yesterday, they’d just handed us the papers, and told us to think it over, and they’d either see us today, or not.

  I got out of the shower and stood in front of the closet, hesitating over what to wear. For some reason, a perfectly office-appropriate slim blue skirt and white blouse didn’t feel right. I dithered for a while, then finally opted for a V-neck sweater the same shade of red as my hair, and black pants with subdued buckles and loops over a pair of heeled black half boots. Not quite my stompy boots, but they’d do for confidence. You couldn’t be wimpy, wearing boots.

  The subway was packed with people going off to their jobs, some of them slow-eyed and grumpy, others bopping along to their music, or nose-deep in newspapers or magazines. I didn’t even bother to try to get a seat, just grabbed a handrail and concentrated on not focusing on the hum of current running through the subway, for fear of accidentally damaging someone’s electronics. I was used to ignoring the hum of electronics in the dorm, but that was familiar ground…hopefully in a few weeks, this would be, too.