Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “The car’s not going to go anywhere or have anything new done to it overnight, Mendelssohn. This is a case, yes. It’s our first case, and it’s important that we do good and look good. So everyone will get their hands dirty. But don’t think it’s your sole responsibility. Life goes on, and so does your training. Flying fatae, people. There will be a quiz.”

  “I’m an investigator, not a bird-watcher,” Nick had grumbled to me, but quietly, and Venec pretended not to hear him. For a guy who had been all excited about the chance to see fatae, Nick didn’t seem all that excited about learning to recognize them. I thought about pointing out the inconsistency, but decided it probably would just make him crabbier. Getting a green light and then seeing it turn to yellow was frustrating; I was with him on that.

  Orders were orders, though. We all took our packets, loaded up on coffee and doughnuts from a platter that had appeared out on the front counter while we were in the meeting, and headed off to separate areas of the office to do the assignment. Stosser had been very clear about that: hands-on material we did in groups, but reading was a solitary occupation. I think he figured we needed the time away from each other during the day, too.

  My usual favorite spot—the sofa in the entry room—was claimed almost immediately by Pietr, who settled himself with the complete and total self-consciousness of someone who knows he’s being a pig. I shot him an evil glare, and went off to find somewhere else previously unclaimed.

  “If you want us to do our job, you must allow us to do our job.”

  Oh. I stopped halfway through the door of workroom #3 as the voice hit me. Damn it, we needed to have In Use placards put up outside the offices: I had almost walked in on Venec holding a conference call with a bunch of other people. Their figures shimmered like holograms in the space, and I flattened myself against the wall instinctively to keep out of range. I had absolutely no damn idea how they were managing this, and walking into the middle of an unknown current-spell was always a bad idea.

  There were three floating busts, two women and a man. The women were older, the man younger. I recognized one as Ms. R, and the others had enough of a staticky resemblance to assume they were members of the family.

  Venec didn’t look away from this display, but made a subtle, unmistakable hand gesture to indicate that I should come into their range of vision. I’d never seen him use it before, but I knew exactly what he wanted me to do. I wished, briefly, for Stosser’s gilding-the-lily spell, squared my shoulders and tried to look professional as possible, and walked into view.

  “This is Bonita Torres, who leads our initial evaluation team.”

  I did? Most excellent. I channeled J at his Council best, as much as I could, and inclined my head gravely first to Ms. R, as our client, and then to the others. “I regret the circumstances of our meeting,” I said. “Sympathies on your loss.”

  “Indeed,” Ms. R said. “You seem rather young to be leading a team.”

  “Ms. Torres led her first investigation while she was still in college,” Venec said smoothly. “And to a successful conclusion, as well. You are in excellent hands here, I assure you. But in order to begin, we must be able to examine the car itself.”

  I kept my face professional, but inside things were chasing around each other going “what the fuck?” because how the hell had Venec known about that? Nobody knew about that, except me and J and my dad’s girlfriend Claire and a nameless cave dragon up in the Adirondacks…

  And the strange presence that had shadowed me the entire time I was digging into my dad’s disappearance. The one that had congratulated me on a job well done, given me a vague idea about maybe going into law enforcement, and then disappeared….

  I had almost forgotten about it, written the voice off as a hallucination, my understandably overstressed brain dealing with my father’s murder as best it could. Even the dreams had forgotten it, for the most part.

  Because it couldn’t be Benjamin Venec, three years before I even knew he existed, or he had any reason to know I existed. It wasn’t impossible, no, but it was damned improbable and that was as good as impossible. Right?

  Or was that why he felt so familiar to me, why I knew when he was in the room, why he watched me, sometimes, like…I didn’t know what it was like. But it was intense, and overwhelming, and it made me want, very badly, to crack open his brain and see what was inside.

  “The car is still in police custody,” the man with Ms. R was saying. “Although the case has been closed on their part, they don’t know who the owner is. I expect that it will go to auction at some point. They haven’t seen fit to tell us anything, naturally.”

  “Of course.” Venec was trying to stay soothing and politic, but he really wasn’t good at it, and his body language was muttering impatience. Stosser should have been handling this interview, really. Could the client see how annoyed the boss was, through the interface? Hopefully not. Venec made an effort, stilling his body and letting the lines of his face smooth back into pleasantness. “The fact remains that we need to be able to examine the car itself as part of our preliminary investigation. We simply need to determine the best way to achieve that. With your permission, I will make contact with the officer in charge of the case and arrange it as soon as possible. We will update you as soon as there is news.”

  He closed the fingers of his right hand into his palm, a subtle little spellcast, and the connection flickered and died. Sweet. He looked up and saw me watching his hand, I guess, because when I met his gaze there was this little, secret smile on his lips. Not the fang-baring smile he’d given Sharon—no less dangerous, but in a totally, totally different way. If a random guy in a bar had given me that smile, I’d have bought him a drink and gotten his number. I wasn’t used to not going after what I wanted. Venec, on the other hand, seemed to be all about control, self—and otherwise. That just made me want to rattle his cage, just a little. But he’d be expecting the obvious approach, so I went sideways.

  “That’s how you handle clients? Not even a good afternoon, have a nice day?”

  Venec let his annoyance show now. Point to me! “I hate dealing with people.”

  “So I noticed.” I thought about confronting him with my suspicions about his—or Stosser’s—intrusion into my earlier life, but decided that now really wasn’t a good time. Either he wasn’t, in which case where did he get that information, or he was, in which case…okay. It had nothing to do with the game I’d decided was happening between us now. That voice in my head had helped me when I needed it. I owed them thanks, not complaints, even if it was a little…creepy.

  If he was, it also confirmed my suspicions of how and why I’d gotten that phone call. He, or maybe Stosser, had followed through on that implicit promise of employment, all those years ago…which suggested that they’d been planning this for a lot longer than any of us had estimated. In light of all that, why would I be upset about a little violation of privacy?

  If he did it again, ever, I was going to kick his ass. Hard.

  “So,” I asked him instead, “how are we going to convince the Chicago cops to let us get our mitts on an impounded vehicle?”

  “We aren’t.”

  “Um?”

  Pietr would have grinned when he heard someone say something like that. Nifty might have rubbed his huge hands in anticipation. Me? When Ben Venec looked at me with that considering expression, his eyes dark and serious and with a pull like riptide, I knew we were in deep trouble. And by “we,” I totally meant “me.”

  nine

  We didn’t, after all, have a quiz on flying fatae, although I wouldn’t be at all surprised to walk in one morning and get handed a multiple-choice paper. Instead, at the close of the workday, we got assignments. Sharon and Pietr were set to compile dossiers on everyone even remotely associated with the deceased, using, in Venec’s words, “whatever sources you come across, just don’t tell us how you did it.” Nifty was told to hone and perfect my follow-the-suspect cantrip, in case we needed it.
He looked at me, startled, as though I might object. I just looked back at him, impassive. Normally, a spell belonged to the person who crafted it, as much as magic could belong to anyone. But I wasn’t about to start a squall over it; if it did come in handy, I’d bring it up when raises were discussed.

  Nick and me? We got to take a road trip.

  The next morning I reported early, if not bright, and had my sense of doom confirmed. Trouble probably wasn’t the word for what Venec had in mind. Insanity, maybe.

  “You ready?”

  I looked Venec straight in those deep brown eyes, and didn’t blink. “Ready.”

  The first thing I noticed was that Chicago in mid-September was a lot cooler than New York, or even Boston. That was the damnable thing about Translocation—it never gave you any time to acclimate. I didn’t think it was the lake-effect breeze that was making my skin prickle, though.

  Nick appeared a few feet away from me, trying to look as though he Transloc’d every day. He looked around, saw me, and came over. “He’s good.”

  “Yeah.” There were probably a lot of things Benjamin Venec was good at. Best not to think about that, though. “Hey, Nick, isn’t it a crime to impersonate a police officer?”

  He shrugged, and started walking toward our goal, a long, low building at the other end of the near-empty parking lot. “Yes. But we’re not.”

  “We’re not?” I asked, catching up.

  Nick looked over his shoulder at me consideringly, letting his gaze linger in a way that I’d probably have slapped a stranger for. “Are you wearing a uniform? Carrying a badge?”

  I had to admit that no, I was not. I was, however, dressed in dark blue coveralls that looked an awful lot like police-issue, and carrying a fake walkie-talkie that looked an awful lot like ones the actual police employees were carrying—fake, so that we didn’t have to worry about cracking one open with current—and we were walking through the corridors of an impound facility as though we had every reason to be there.

  The mock-up ID cards Venec had pulled out of god-knows-where, which didn’t actually say Police Department anywhere on them, weren’t going to get us out of trouble if we were stopped, so the trick was not to get stopped. That meant looking as if we belonged. I slumped a little, and tried to feel as put-upon as possible. Apparently, that was what it took to pass as a civilian employee of the state, because nobody even looked twice at us as we flipped those ID cards at the single bored cop on duty, bypassed the main building, and walked out into the impound yard.

  Damn, there were a lot of cars there. Most of them were junkers, crap rides I’d be ashamed to park next to, and an unnerving number of them had what looked like bullet holes in the doors or windshields.

  Yesterday afternoon, I’d been chatting via current with a Council powerhouse; now I was wandering a graveyard of broken cars. Never let it be said this job didn’t take you places.

  A little farther in, and the cars got nicer: no rust, gleaming chrome, and intact interiors. I figured these were the ones impounded during search-and-seizures, rather than being abandoned or towed. Nick was scanning over the tops of the cars and checking numbers against the list on his clipboard.

  “There. That’s the lot number. And there’s the car.”

  “Wow.” I wasn’t much for cars as a rule, but if you had to go out in one, that was the way to do it. Huge, sleek, and gleaming with chrome and silver paint, like a Grande Dame of an era a long, long time ago. I didn’t even want to think about what kind of mileage to the gallon it probably didn’t get.

  Or the fact that two people had died in it.

  “All right, let’s get to it.”

  When they selected us for this job, the Guys had officially-in-front-of-everyone appointed me team leader—apparently that much of what Venec had told the client was true: whatever initial evaluation team we had, it was mine. Of course, the entire team consisted of me and Nick, so it wasn’t much of an accolade.

  That hadn’t stopped Sharon from doing an obvious slow simmer, though. I hoped to hell Stosser knew what he was doing. The Guys were smart and savvy and all that, but I was starting to wonder about how much attention they paid to the stuff right under their noses….

  “Do you think Sharon’s pissed? About me being made lead, I mean.”

  “Yep.”

  “Great.”

  He snorted at my tone. “Shar’s going to be pissed over the air entering a room before her, Bonnie. It’s just the way she is. Doesn’t mean she’s pissed at you.”

  For some strange reason, that actually did make me feel better. I sort of liked Sharon, for all she was a prickly bitch. I wanted her to like me, too.

  Nick reached the car first, and put his kit down on the pavement next to it. A flip of the latch, and a gleaming array of tools were revealed inside. To anyone watching, he was just a tech doing whatever it was techs did to cars. I put aside any thoughts of Sharon, or the rest of the team, and put my brain full on the problem at hand.

  We already had, courtesy of the client, the full police report on the state of the car as it was found, as much as they could determine. A good thing, too, because I didn’t know a damn thing about cars, and I suspected Nick wasn’t much better. He’d let enough slip in the past few weeks to make me think that if he hadn’t been Talent, he probably would have been a tech geek, not a grease monkey, but current made both hobbies problematic.

  So while he was making like he knew what he was doing, I stood back and just looked at the car, getting a feel for it. Ideally, the Guys and every crime drama told us, you got to look over the crime scene itself, create a visual record of what happened—or might have happened. Getting called in late and third-hand like this, we didn’t have the option. The car had been taken out of context, the crime scene manhandled, and god knew how many Council Talent had been futzing current all over the place without a clue. All we had was what was left. It had to be enough. Our future depended on it.

  The Guys hadn’t said that. We knew it anyway. Ms. R was too high-profile to flub.

  So. Time to do what the Guys seemed to think we could do. I had taken a quick hit of fresh current off the city grid before Stosser Translocated us into the facility, and my core was still assimilating the new energy, weaving the man-made current into my own cords until they were ready to work together.

  “Come on, pixie-girl, get started.”

  “Shut up.” My white-blond fluff really seemed to bring out the nickname instinct in Nick. Pixie-girl and dandelion seemed to be his favorites. It amused me, but letting him know that would miss the whole point of the game.

  And he was right; sooner started, sooner out of here. I was discovering a distressing honesty in my genetic makeup—sneaking into places made me nervous. Not just about getting caught, but because it was wrong.

  They really should have sent Pietr; I didn’t think he had a bone of morality in him. But they hadn’t: this was my job to do…or screw up.

  All right, I thought at the car while I walked toward it, trying for the same calm tone I’d use to approach a dog I wasn’t sure about. Let’s see what you’ve got.

  The entire lot was visible to the main building through a large glass window on the second floor, but it was still early, and there didn’t seem to be anyone around to wonder why a tech was standing next to the car, passing her hands over it with six inches between her hands and the metal.

  If a Talent were to walk by and look out, they might be able to see the current flickering from my palms to the surface of the car, coating it like dusting powder, but they’d have to be paying attention. Nulls, the rest of humanity without a magical clue? Wouldn’t see a thing.

  Odds were good that the Council investigator, whoever he or she had been, did the same thing—looking over the car to see if there was any sign of current having been used on it. The difference was, that was probably all they’d been looking for, and there were damned few things in this world that didn’t carry a touch of current on them, even just in passing. A ca
r where two Talent had died, if they had actually died here, and not just been dumped?

  If I were suffocating to death, I know I’d have used current to try to stop it, break a window, call for help, something. Can’t imagine these two were any different.

  So I was looking for something different, going deeper and lighter all at once. There were traces of current in the seats, yeah…and in the frame of the car itself. Some in the dashboard, too, which made me wonder if the car would even work now, or if all the high-end extras were fried. Whoever bought this car at auction might be in for an unhappy surprise.

  “Go in clean.” Venec’s voice in my memory, giving last-minute instructions while Nick fidgeted, eager to be gone. “Don’t have an agenda. Don’t expect to find anything. Don’t look for anything.”

  Easier said than done. Another voice from my memory, this time J: “Keeping an open mind is good. Too open, and things fall out of it.”

  This was my strength, Stosser had said when he picked me for this job. My ability to see, and observe, and remember details other people didn’t catch. Question: How did I do it? Answer: I didn’t do anything. Everything was there, and it came to me, and my brain just took it. So how did I intentionally use it?

  Current stirred within me, and I fashioned it into a net, the kind that fishing boats use out in the deep sea, throwing it over and dragging it behind them, to see what they can glean. Cops look for something that’s wrong, or out of place, something hinky. Council probably looked for something familiar, to confirm their expectations. My net was set for everything, not only the stuff that jumped out at you but anything trying to hide, something so innocuous or ordinary that it might be overlooked, or something so wildly wrong it might not be noticed because it was so impossible.

  Improbable doesn’t mean impossible. Don’t bring an agenda to the gathering. Don’t eliminate anything. Not yet.