Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Not even cave dragons wait forever for repayment. The Guys needed PUPI to work, and fast.

  The rest of the week was more of the same, with the added joy of the ventilation system breaking down on the warmest day of the summer yet. Dog days, yeah. That could totally have been coincidence, or bad building management…but it felt like gremlins mocking us, especially after the coffee machine died for the third and final time when Pietr tried to prep a spell in the break room, and Sharon and Nifty got into it over the finer points of historical magic, which I don’t think either of them knew a damn about, causing the lights to flicker badly enough to give us all headaches.

  Of course, the latter wasn’t gremlin-provoked, just the two of them butting heads—and current—as usual. But all told, it was a tough five days, and when Friday afternoon rolled around, Stosser kicked us out with firm directions to take the weekend off and do nothing even remotely current related. “You guys have been stretching, and while that’s good, we don’t want you to stretch until you break,” he said. “So take a few days to recover, and we’ll see you back in here on Monday.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I made some arrangements to look at a couple of apartments on Sunday and, when I woke up—reluctantly, groggily—to a Saturday filled with glorious sunshine, declared it a total R & R day. I sorted through the pile of clean laundry, found appropriate day-off clothing—a long black linen skirt with deep pockets and a T-shirt with a green-haired punk troll giving the world the finger printed on it—and got dressed before I could let myself fall back asleep. Grabbing a book off my to-be-read pile without even caring what it was, I shoved it into my backpack with my notepad and a couple of pens, stopped by the local overpriced deli to buy a sandwich and a bottle of water, and headed out to the Park with the rest of the known city-dwelling universe.

  Fortunately, most people seemed interested in either sprawling on the Great Lawn, or strolling, and I found a pretty granite fountain in the middle of a circular walkway that wasn’t overcrowded, and claimed a spot on the rim. It was surprisingly comfortable, with the sun on my legs and arms but not in my eyes. I dropped my backpack, pulled out my book, and started to read.

  I’d made it about three chapters in when I was interrupted by a familiar voice.

  “Hey.”

  I looked up, and sighed in resignation at the familiar form trying to loom over me. “You know, this city’s too big for this to happen.”

  “Welcome to New York, girl. Biggest small town in the world.”

  Nick sat down without asking, and, incidentally, blocked my ray of sunlight.

  “Move over,” I told him, pushing at his rib cage with one finger to show I was serious. He slid over, stretched his legs out in front of him, and leaned back.

  “That line about the biggest small town in the world? I thought that was Paris.”

  “Nah.” Nick sounded certain of that, so I let him have it. A minute passed without him saying anything more, so I tried to go back to my book.

  “You been to Paris?”

  “Yes.” I turned a page, maybe a little more ostentatiously than was really needed.

  “A lot?”

  Clearly, the hint was lost on my coworker. “A few times.” It wasn’t really any big deal.

  “Wow.”

  The tone of his voice made me pause. All right, maybe it was. I forgot, sometimes, that J and I didn’t exactly lead the normal Americana life.

  I lifted my head from my book and frowned at Nick. “Did you follow me?”

  “Nope.” He crossed his heart like a five-year-old telling a lie. “Was on my way home from work when I saw you, figured I’d be cohort-ly and stop. If you want to be alone…”

  He made as though to get up, and I stopped him. “Home from work? Were we supposed to…?” A flutter of panic hit my rib cage. Had I missed something? We were all still on probation; I couldn’t afford to miss anything….

  “Relax, Torres. Home from my other job. All right? I want to pay off my student loans before I’m thirty, and I can’t rely on this job to cover me. Not all of us have a comfy background to fall back on.”

  “Bite yourself, Shune.” I hadn’t mentioned J’s background, or J much at all, but it didn’t surprise me the others had done some digging. I’d done the same on them. Nifty I already knew about. Sharon Mendelssohn was exactly what she seemed: well-educated daughter of a middle-class family who blended really well with the Null world. Nick was the eldest son of gypsies—lonejacks who chose not to settle within any one region—who’d really only appeared on the radar when he went to college. Pietr Cholis, like Sharon, was mainstream all the way, except for a stint in the juvie facilities when he was thirteen. Me, they’d get the whole story: lonejack daughter turned Council mentee, Phi Beta Kappa goth-girl, one arrest for trespassing with intent to protest, no convictions. I doubted my investigation into my father’s death was on any record; to the rest of the world, Zaki Torres just disappeared one day, same as my mother did, three months after I was born. No foul play on her part—she just decided she didn’t want to be a mom, handed me over to Zaki, and split. All I’d ever gotten from her was fair hair and paler skin that—thank god—didn’t burn or freckle.

  Nick had gone quiet, his head tilted back to let the sunshine wash over him, but I was totally distracted from my book now. “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “You wanted to see a fatae, right?”

  His eyes opened, and his head came into an alert position so fast I swear I heard it crack. “What? Where?”

  “Over there.” I pointed with my chin, trying not to be obvious. Some fatae didn’t mind, but some got really pissy about being outed. “In the leather jacket.” It was too nice a day for that jacket, which was why I’d noticed him in the first place.

  “He’s not…” Nick started to say in disgust, and then stopped. It wasn’t obvious—the obvious ones didn’t stroll around Central Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon—but once you actually looked, the evidence was there to be noticed.

  “What is it?”

  “He, and I have no idea.” I’d met a few over the years, obviously, and J had trained me on the basics: the different kinds of breeds and where they came from, and how to not be an idiot when confronted with one, but without a checklist I couldn’t do more than land-based, air-breathing, bipedal. “That jacket on a day like today, he’s probably from one of the warmer countries, not Nordic or northern. Land-based, obviously. No gills visible.”

  There were some fatae breeds with horn or antlers, but this guy’s head was bare, except for a crop of dark curls. It was what was under the hair that gave him away. His ears were not only elongated, they were tasseled with tufts of fur at the tip and lobe, and the skin at the back of his neck, where it showed above the coat’s collar, was dappled with close-cropped, fawn-colored fur.

  His hands were in his pocket, and his feet were covered by boots, but I would have laid down money that his nails were more like a horse’s hooves than a human’s. His face was humanlike, too, close enough to pass if you didn’t stare, but the lower half moved oddly, as if the bone structure of his mouth wasn’t quite the same as ours. I had the sudden thought that a lot of FX guys in Hollywood might be fatae, or know some pretty well.

  We watched as he walked past us. I got the feeling he knew we were watching, but there was no way to tell, not without being either obvious or rude, or both.

  A tune sounded from his pocket, and he took out a cell phone and answered it. His hands were shaped like human hands, but with three thick fingers instead of five more slender ones, and each curved down, ending with what looked like a soft miniature hoof. He managed the phone like a pro, though.

  He turned, as he passed, and looked directly at us. It was then that I realized the reason his mouth looked strange was because of his double rows of teeth.

  Sharp teeth.

  The urge to pull current wiggled in my belly, but I held steady. Carnivore did not mean threat, automatically. Not anymor
e, anyway. Probably. But the fact was that he saw us—more, he saw us—not just as human but Talent…. I forced myself to relax. Some fatae could sense current, even though they didn’t use it the way we did. That was all, no need to be jumpy. Gremlins or no, we weren’t in anyone’s crosshairs.

  And then the fatae was walking past us, talking urgently into his cell, and I heard Nick let out a little sigh.

  “You’re disappointed?” I asked.

  “No. Okay, maybe a little. I guess I thought he’d be more…impressive.”

  He’d missed the teeth, obviously. “Some of them are scary as hell,” I said. “Someday, if you’re a good boy, I’ll take you to meet a cave dragon.”

  “You do not know a cave dragon.” He sounded indignant, and I laughed at him.

  “I do, actually.” I even really did have an invitation to return. And I was pretty sure it was meant in a “stop by and say hello” manner, not “stop by to be lunch.”

  Nick started to get excited about the thought. “How about a dryad? I heard there are a lot of them in the Park.”

  “Probably are,” I said. “It’s an old park. But they’re tough to meet, and not always good to meet, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I put down my book, resigned to the fact that Nick wasn’t going to shut up anytime soon. “You ever read any fairy tales when you were a kid, Nick? The real ones—the Grimm versions, not the Disneyfied ones.”

  “Sure. Um. No, not really.” He shrugged. “I mean, I got my basic history during mentorship, so…”

  “Well, you should. Read them, I mean. Because a lot of them aren’t so much stories as lessons. About how to behave—and not get sunk in a swamp, or cooked and eaten, or run out of your home or any of the other things that happen to idiots who disrespect the fey folk.”

  I wasn’t sure how much of it I believed, really. But the breeds had been around forever, since before the Old Magic days, when we were still trying to figure out why some people could start fire by staring at a stick, and other people burned those people with those same sticks. The fatae didn’t use magic, but they were Cosa Nostradamus, same as us. Cosa-cousins. It paid to keep up-to-date with what your relatives were up to, and what family feuds were dead and which ones still simmered.

  I didn’t say any of this to Nick, though. I didn’t know how to verbalize it without sounding preachy and uncool, and I was discovering, much to my surprise, that I really wanted to fit in. It wasn’t just about being good at the job, although I wanted that, too. Sharon’s elegance, Nifty’s charisma and pull, Pietr’s total cool and calm, even Nick’s fumbling geeky charm, it all made me want to be part of the group. Where did I fit in? I had no idea. But Venec and Stosser thought we could be a team.

  Why had that fatae looked at us? Was it just a case of Cosa acknowledgment? Was that creeping sense of menace and uncertainty real, or just a remnant of the crap from the previous week? I couldn’t tell, so I let it go.

  “So, what’s your other job, anyway?” Maybe he could get me part-time work there, if I needed it. If this all went south on us and we got kicked to the curb.

  “You promise you won’t tell anyone?”

  I sketched an X against where I figured my heart was, more or less, hopefully with more élan than Nick had managed. “Promise.” How bad could it be?

  “I’mamassagetherapist.”

  Once my brain untangled his hurried mumble, I sat up and looked at him with, I’m afraid, a gleam in my eye.

  He saw it. “See? People only love me for my hands.”

  “Awwwww. We’d like you even if you didn’t have hands at all. Can you massage with your toes, too?”

  “Hmmph.” He didn’t quite stick his tongue out at me, but I swear I could hear him thinking about it. “All right. I need to go home and collapse for a while. See you Monday, if we’re still employed.” He hauled himself upright, and waggled his fingers at me, a sort of dorky goodbye wave. I waggled my fingers back, and he walked off, heading toward the east side of the park. I wondered suddenly where he lived, and if there were any apartments for rent in his building. Why hadn’t I asked him that?

  Well, there was always Monday, if I didn’t see anything tomorrow.

  And, as he said, if we were still employed.

  I picked up my book, but the fascination of reading about the life and times of an eighteenth-century courtesan had dimmed, somehow. The flash of that fatae’s teeth, and talking about fairy tales, however briefly, had stirred some depth of unease in me that I couldn’t blame entirely on stress or overwork. Or gremlins.

  Was it kenning? Was I having one of my rare moments of precog? No. It didn’t feel right. But something was wrong.

  I closed the book and shoved it into my backpack, wrapped up what was left of my sandwich and tossed it into the nearest green trash can, deciding on my direction because I had already turned that way to find the trash. J used to say that he could think better while he was walking; maybe it would work for me, too. If nothing else, I’d been spending way too much time the past week sitting on my ass. Exercise was a good idea.

  The path I was on seemed to circle endlessly on itself since I never seemed to get closer to the buildings in the distance, but rather kept diverging past seemingly endless fields, rocky outcrops, and tiny scenic ponds. It was hard to believe the entire thing was man-made, but if you looked again, more closely, there was a perfection under the natural surface that could only be crafted. Nobody out enjoying the day seemed to care, so I let that thought drop and waited to see what else came to replace it.

  My mind remained blank. All right, maybe Stosser had been right, and we did need the break, and all this was just stress-related. I rolled with the blankness, and let my body go on automatic—until something hit the back of my head and bounced off.

  “Hey!” All the paranoia came slamming back, and some instinct made me look, not behind me, but up.

  The branches shook, but I couldn’t see anything moving.

  Not that it mattered. I had a pretty good idea, once my heart rate calmed, what was up there.

  A good idea, though, wasn’t a fact. I looked up at the branches, judging from the movement which ones had been disturbed. There was a cantrip we had been testing that, if it worked, would show us the way a suspect had run, based on the displacement of air. So far it had failed pretty miserably, but if I applied the basics to the pattern of the leaves rustling…

  I thought hard and fast, drawing a few threads of current up out of my core and casting them into the air, toward the branches.

  “Follow the trail of the passage unseen,” I directed it. With established spells you didn’t need to actually speak them out loud, but the words helped focus the intent, and right now that cantrip needed all the help it could get. The threads hovered midair, as though they were confused, or uncertain. Current didn’t actually have emotions, or any kind of sentience, so that meant that I was uncertain. More focus was needed. All right, then.

  “Follow the trail of the passage unseen. Lead me to the pranking hand.”

  The air shimmered as the current went to work, like the heat signature of a fire, and a handful of leaves changed from dark, healthy green to a sickly looking yellow, as if they’d aged immediately. Then the shimmer moved on, changing another set of leaves, and the first set went back to green, moving along deeper and higher into the tree, until I couldn’t see it any longer.

  There was a startled squawk and a loud rustle of leaves, and a branch swayed as though something had tried to escape being turned yellow. I caught a glimpse of fluttering wings, and a shock of hair a color even I wouldn’t dare try.

  Hah, I’d been right. A piskie. Winged pranksters of the Cosa. It probably thought I was a Null, and would have spent time looking for the person who threw that nut at me, rather than retaliating.

  I made a mental note of the wording I’d used—specifics were clearly needed to get the proper results. I hadn’t used enough current to actually catch someone, but that c
ould be amended in later test trials. Maybe even use current to tag someone, so we could find a culprit in a crowd? Odds were we’d never need something like that, if we were called in after the fact, but a Talent cop could use it….

  “And how would you introduce that into the court records?” I asked myself. “Your honor, I know that it was him because he had a bright yellow splotch on his forehead?”

  I wasn’t too worried about the piskie being chased too far by the spell—if she or he went far enough away the spell would wear off. I thought it would, anyway.

  “Not that having bright yellow fur would stop the bugger. Idiot piskie would probably think it was some strange badge of honor, almost but not quite getting caught.” Piskies were pranksters, but they were pranksters who respected competent opponents far more than they enjoyed clueless ones. That was probably why they hadn’t been hunted down and eaten over the years.

  It hit me then—I’d not only used current offensively, I’d done that before, although not quite so easily or without planning—but I’d done it automatically, with an eye not for the immediate result, but a long-term refinement for job use.

  Huh. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, being so—call it proactive—but there was an extra lift in my step as I continued on my way through the park, and the unease and paranoia of earlier slowly faded away.

  seven

  Sunday passed without me shouting eureka! at any of the apartments I was shown, and then Monday morning rolled around again, and we were back at it—studying, practicing, refining, and wondering when—if—we were ever going to get a chance to actually use any of this on a case.

  A male voice shouting “What the hell?” down the hallway was the first and only warning I had that it was going to be one of Those Days. The overhead lights were the victim of the office gremlins this time, a trail of them blowing out with tiny little implosions, like the sound of someone popping their bubble gum.

  “Do we have to replace those, or is it the landlord’s responsibility?” Nick wanted to know. Stosser looked—as much as I could tell, in the dim emergency lighting—grim, while Venec just looked pissed. We all stayed low while they had a short, closed-door session that left them looking, respectively, more grim and more pissed. But a little mage-light got us through the morning, and when we came back from lunch, the lights had been replaced.