Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “A sad ending, yes. But at least it is ending. Let the dead rest. A pity. Our deals with them were quite profitable.”

  “And profit is all you care about, isn’t it, Katie?” Will didn’t sound as though he was complimenting her.

  She didn’t seem to think he was, either. “I’m sorry that you think I am cold, Will. But if you recall, I didn’t know them, I never met them, and I can’t pretend any great personal loss, or mouth polite platitudes.”

  “All right, yes. But you could at least show a little human decency.”

  It didn’t sound as if all was well in patio-land. It didn’t sound as if Will had been there to claim a trophy, either. But maybe we’d been wrong about that. Maybe the killer just wanted to make sure the last bit of possible evidence got out of police custody?

  The waiter came, and they gave their order. The woman, Katie, had a hanger steak, while Will ordered a chicken Caesar salad. I felt my mouth curl in disdain, almost instinctively. Neither choice showed any imagination or joy in food at all; I had expected better of Will, somehow. I ordered another glass of wine to placate the bartender, and picked up the bar food menu in front of me to buy more time while I listened.

  “I don’t suppose I could talk you into reinvesting?”

  Will laughed, the same sweet laugh he had used for my jokes. “Neither of us have the touch, Katie. That ship has sailed.”

  “Still. We have an opportunity, and it seems a shame to waste it.”

  He started to say something in response, then stopped. “Did you hear something?”

  “What? Hear what?” She sounded puzzled, as though he’d asked her if she noticed the invisible elephant that had just sat down next to them. Shit. He had picked up on me, somehow. And she hadn’t. Null, or just really low-res?

  “Huh.” He didn’t clarify, so it was probably safe to assume she was not only Null, but didn’t know that he was Talent. We don’t advertise much, for obvious reasons. This may be a modern age, but the cry of “witch” still has unfortunate memories in some Talent families. So she was a Null’s Null. That fact was possibly unimportant, but it was part of the investigation, and I filed it into my brain for reporting.

  There was silence, and I felt a gentle wave of current rise through the café, not searching so much as filtering the air, trying to identify whatever it was that had triggered his awareness. I unraveled the cable, dropping the edge quickly, before it could be traced back to me. I hoped.

  Paying for the wine I’d ordered and not tasted, I walked away from the bar, heading not toward the exit, where I might be spotted, but the back of the restaurant, where the ladies’ room was probably located. Locking myself in the single-use lavatory, I ran the water cold, and splashed some on my face.

  “Damn. Also, damn.” My hands were shaking, and my skin was paler than usual under the crappy lighting. I knew what Will’s signature felt like…and that meant that, if he’d been paying attention at all, he probably knew mine, too. If he’d been a little bit faster, or if he were stronger than I thought, he could have gotten me back there. He might still, if he decided to push beyond a basic filter, if I’d left any trace hanging in the air. I didn’t think I had, but…

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The urge to Transloc rose, and was squashed. And I couldn’t call for a Translocation, either. That would be like sending up a flare, now that he was aware, and even with someone else doing the work, he could maybe still find a trace of me….

  I needed to be subtle, and tricky, and unobtrusive, things I generally wasn’t really strong at. Whatever I did, it was definitely going to require more work than my usual blunt forward on all thrusters.

  Or was it? I stared at myself in the mirror, and thought hard. Only one possible escape came to me: when subtle couldn’t work, sometimes being obvious was the only answer. I was going to have to brazen it out; walk through the restaurant and out onto the street, praying that some of Pietr’s disappearing skill rubbed off on me, enough to get me away unnoticed.

  On the plus side, I realized as I stared into the mirror, Will had seen a curly-haired strawberry-tinged blonde. The woman looking back at me had blonder, straighter hair, in another city, in a totally unfamiliar context. All right, I could work that.

  Taking another deep breath, I slicked back my hair so that I looked sleek and sexy, then I dried my face and hands, straightened my shoulders, and put my very best “bite me, yon inferior beings” swing into my stride as I walked out of the café and out into the street.

  I had no idea where I was going, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I looked like I had a purpose and a destination, and that I just keep going, until I was far enough away that a current-surge wouldn’t register. I walked right past the seating patio, and didn’t let my gaze slide. Straight ahead, attention firmly on something else, and only when I was at the end of the block, swallowed in the crowd and out of sight, did I let myself breathe again.

  Looking around to make sure nobody was paying undue attention, I sidestepped into an alcove, where a wrought-iron bench was placed under a leafy tree, and sent a ping back to the office.

  *ticket home, please?*

  sixteen

  The Guys kept me waiting for almost half an hour, pacing back and forth, worried that Will was going to appear and ask me what I was doing there, or a cop was going to cruise by and accuse me of loitering, or half a dozen other real and baseless worries.

  My nerves weren’t helped by a chittering of noise in the tree above me. It sounded too heavy for a bird, and too…intelligible for a squirrel. I really didn’t want to look up, but eventually, of course, I did.

  The ugliest mug God ever wrapped around a nose stared at me from a low-hanging branch, like the unholy love child of a bat and a Kewpie doll. Another damned piskie.

  “Oh. What?” I really wasn’t in the mood, but ignoring it would probably make things worse.

  “You’re new around here, buttercup,” the mug chirped at me.

  There was nothing wrong with piskies that a good hard sauté wouldn’t cure. Winged pranksters, they were the most common, annoying, and irritating of all the fatae. Not even Nick could get excited about being accosted by one, and I didn’t want to risk attracting attention by using current to make this one go away, the way I had back home.

  “I’m not in the mood,” I warned it. “Try pranking me and I’ll singe your fur down to your bones.”

  “Ooooh. Cranky.” It tsk-tsked like an old Irish granny, and I couldn’t help myself; I laughed.

  “Better,” the piskie said, and leaped higher into the tree, its wings spreading just enough to help it rise—piskies could fly, but seemed to enjoy soaring, more. “Cranky no good, buttercup,” it said, and then it was gone.

  Then the stirrings of current wrapped around me, fair warning, and the Translocation sucked me from Chi-town back to upper Manhattan.

  “I hear lawyer-boy was among the attendees,” greeted me before I’d even managed to take my first breath of East Coast air. Obviously, Pietr had gotten back before me.

  “So was Jack Reybeorn,” I growled, my crankiness in full force, and I had the satisfaction of seeing Nifty blink in surprise and shut up. I might look delicate-boned and feminine to the big bad football-player, but I could slap him down as good as any defensive lineman, if he got in my face. “Are you going to interrogate me here, or do we get to wait until everyone else arrives?”

  “Sorry. I…” Nifty Lawrence was many things—arrogant, aggressive, etc.—but an asshole wasn’t one of them, and he was smart enough to know by now that I wasn’t competition, damn it. “I was jabbing, and I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” I let it go; we had other things to deal with. “Where’s the huddle?”

  “Main conference room. Ian ordered in pizzas, figured you guys hadn’t had a chance to eat dinner.”

  “They’re going to start docking our pay if they have to feed us, too.” I reached down and took off my shoes, wiggling my newly freed
toes against the rough carpeting. The sandals were adorable, and the heels made my legs look fabulous, but they were going-out-to-dinner shoes, not stomping-around-after-suspect shoes.

  “We don’t solve this, we may not have to worry about that anymore.”

  I stopped luxuriating in the feel of free toes, and looked at my coworker. More than one-upmanship had been in his voice. “What?”

  “Somebody fried our electronics while you were gone. That’s why we had to hold off on bringing you back—we wanted to make sure the building was current-stable.”

  My first thought was a sort of generalized so what—we’d had enough gremlins running in the office to be blasé about it, and anyway, power fries happened in major cities and it wasn’t always the fault of a Talent. Then I heard the emphasis in his voice when he said “our” electronics, and stopped.

  “Just our building? You think someone’s trying to shut us down? I mean, it couldn’t just have been some cadet making his mentor nuts?”

  Nifty was shaking his head, and I noticed that his close-cropped hair had been allowed to grow out into tiny black ringlets. “Venec checked around. Not just our building—it only hit our offices. Not even anyone else on this floor. But every wire in the wall’s been crisped. Going to cost a small fortune to replace.”

  “Damn.”

  “On the plus side,” he said with forced cheerfulness, “we’ll be able to customize it all now. And maybe open up a few walls, put in a larger kitchenette, maybe another bathroom…”

  “Dreamer,” I snorted, following him along the hallway, the lights dimmer than usual. Obviously, not everything was back up and running, underscoring what all his big talk didn’t cover up: someone was gunning for us. Based on the evidence, someone Talented. Someone who seemed to have a really strong desire to not have PUPI succeed. All the gremlin incidents, which we’d been ascribing to our own twitches and coincidence, could have been someone trying out our defenses. Psi-bombs, current-strikes? They were all used for only one purpose: to crisp the short-hairs. The fact that neither attack—none of the three, if we counted the security guard shooting at us—were fatal could have meant that someone was only trying to scare us, or that they were bad shots. In either case, intentions could change, and aim could be improved.

  The escalation happened when we went from “training” to “under contract.” I didn’t think that was a coincidence. I suspected the Guys didn’t think so, either.

  Enemies were bad. Unknown enemies were really bad. Unknown enemies and no allies was about as bad as it could get.

  We needed allies.

  But first, we needed to solve this damn case, and prove we were worth allies.

  “Please tell me you got something,” Pietr greeted me when we walked into the conference room. The windows still boarded up, and the lights on half power, the room felt smaller and strangely ominous, despite the comforting smell of sausage and cheese. “Please tell me two hours spent listening to spoiled rich girls giggle over a car not one of them is smart enough to drive was not suffered in vain.”

  I dropped my shoes by the door and glared at Nick until he got up and gave me his chair. To the on-site investigator went the padded seating, damn it.

  The body language in the room was grim, but not hopeless. I hoped.

  “So your girlies were a washout? Did you at least get their phone numbers?”

  He shot me a pained look. “I’d sooner date a waxed ape. The conversation would be better.”

  Ouch.

  “Torres.” Stosser was in pacing mode. Looking at him made me dizzy, so I reached across the table and scored a greasy slice of pepperoni pizza instead. Sharon shoved a plate toward me and a couple of napkins. “Do you have anything to give us?” he asked, not waiting for me to put my dinner together.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. The suspect went to a café to meet with a woman. I managed to eavesdrop on some of their conversation. It sounded like they were business partners on at least one deal with the victims. They discussed the sale of the car, but only in passing, and Will didn’t say why he had been there. It might have just been idle curiosity, if he was meeting this woman anyway. Oh, and she’s Null, so that pretty much rules her out as a suspect, right?”

  Venec looked at Stosser for a second opinion, then he nodded reluctantly. “It would be difficult, if not impossible, for a Null to subdue both victims without leaving any sign. However, we can’t overlook the possibility that they worked together, since the toenail paring we found was most likely a woman’s. I don’t suppose you were able to get a look at her toes?”

  Damn it, I hadn’t even thought of that. Not that it would have been possible anyway, but…

  “Her toes, no. Her hands…” I tried to remember, then shook my head. “I’m sorry. I remember that she was dark-skinned, Mediterranean, maybe, but I don’t remember anything about her hands. Which might mean she wasn’t wearing polish, or it just didn’t stand out.”

  “Pity we can’t just do an info-dump of everything you saw, share it out among all of us. Maybe we’d find something that way.”

  “There is a way to do that,” Stosser said, “but it would not be helpful in this instance. We cannot afford to risk blurring the lines between observation and interpretation. Some of the evidence we have collected already has been compromised.”

  “What? How?” This was the first I’d heard about that.

  “Not your fault, Bonnie,” Nick said. “The retrieval procedure’s flawed. I went into the locker to get something, and it was all…smudged, is the best way to describe it. We just need to find another way to keep it, I guess.”

  I deflated, my sole real contribution to the case now useless. “Man, the bad news just keeps on coming, doesn’t it. Do you think it might have happened during the attack? Yeah, Nifty told me about it. Am I alone in thinking there’s a pattern there, starting with the gremlins, and…”

  The expressions around the table told me that my teammates, at least, were on the same page.

  “Great. Any idea who’s behind it?”

  “Oh, that we know,” Venec said grimly.

  “What?”

  “Why?”

  “Who?”

  The last question got the most volume, with me and Nick both asking at the same time. I don’t know; that seemed more important than the why, since knowing who is a step closer to stopping it.

  “And if you say ‘it’s not your concern,’ we’re going to stomp you, boss or not,” Sharon warned Venec without the slightest hint of irony.

  “Even if it’s not?” Stosser asked, deflecting attention away from Venec in a smoothly timed interruption. “Because it has less than nothing to do with you all individually, than—”

  “In this room, there is no us, individually,” Nifty said. “Not anymore.”

  Stosser’s pale blue eyes got really wide, and I think maybe his jaw dropped open a little. Venec just snorted, which from him might have been disgust, amusement, or approval. I’m pretty sure nobody expected Nifty to suddenly sprout up with that comment, all things considered.

  “He’s right.” Sharon sounded sort of disgusted, too, although I couldn’t tell if it was because of what Nifty said, or the fact that he was the one to say it. “You hired us as a team. Isn’t that what you keep saying? Then in here, we are a team. So what involves one of us involves us all. Especially violence. Especially violence committed against the office, while we’re all in it.”

  “Three strikes,” I added. “The security guard, or cop, or whatever, who shot at us. The psi-bombing. The current-fry on our electronics, which could have been harassment, or it could have been a try at frying one of us, too. If anyone had been taking a hit off the tame current…” I wasn’t sure what might have happened then, but at the very least, a few nose hairs would have gotten seriously real-time fried. “It all adds up to someone gunning for us as a team, and that means we have…” I almost said the right to know, but even I knew that wasn’t going to fly with the Guys. “We have a nee
d to know, so we can protect ourselves—and each other.”

  Stosser looked as though he was going to argue but, to my surprise, it was Venec who coughed up, earning him a really filthy look from his partner.

  “This isn’t about the case. Not directly, anyway,” he said. “You already know that there are people who don’t want us to succeed. For their own reasons, some of which I can, reluctantly, understand. We’re going to be stirring up hornets going forward, and hornets aren’t always particular about who they sting. That’s why we’re being careful, only taking assignments from direct clients, people involved in the incidents under question.” The “for now” was silent but seriously implicit. “We have turned away several potential clients, under those guidelines.”

  Oh now, that was interesting….

  “Hopefully,” Venec went on, not letting anyone question him about that little bombshell, “our discretion will ease fears and reduce concerns. But there is…” He paused, trying to gather his words, which made me wildly curious. Stosser, the wordsmith, was silent, and Venec was trying to moderate himself? Oh boy.

  “There are people who think that what we are doing is an abomination. That using current in this fashion is…wrong.”

  “What, to find out the truth?” Pietr shook his head, his forehead creasing in confusion. “We’ve had soothsayers and scryers since before anything else, how—”

  “Not what we are doing, but how we are doing it. Turning current from a personal, individualized craft to a—how did she put it?” he asked his partner. “‘A petrified work of noncreativity’?”

  “Close enough,” Ian said, looking like the words hurt like a mouthful of glass.

  “She?” Sharon asked.

  “Don’t be so sexist,” Nifty said. “Women can be the villains, too, right?”

  “Bite me, Lawrence. She?”

  Stosser was the one who answered this time, as though the words were getting dragged out with fishhooks. “She. My sister. Aden.”