Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Oh. Well. This suddenly got all sorts of interesting….

  That pretty much ended the meeting. Stosser went into the chat room and shut the door firmly; not that anyone had any desire to follow him. Venec looked at us for a minute, then shook his head and went off somewhere else.

  “His sister is trying to kill him.” Nick looked weirdly impressed. “Man, I’m suddenly glad I’m an only child.”

  “She’s not trying to kill him. Just stop him.”

  “Right. By killing him. And maybe us, too.”

  “You scared?”

  “Hell, yes. Ian Stosser is a Talent of significant ability, by all public and private accounts. Smart, savvy, sharp, and scary. His sister, if she’s able to make him nervous, is at least at the same level.”

  “Talent isn’t genetics. Just because one member of a family is strong…”

  “You’re not even remotely worried?”

  “Of course I am. It would be stupid not to be worried that someone wants to shut us down. But I’m not scared.”

  “Potato, potahto.”

  Pietr and Sharon were going back and forth over the remains of dinner, and I wanted to slap both of them. I’d rather have someone scared of us than someone objecting on a more philosophical basis. Fear was a logical motivator. Theology? Not so much. And it was crazy, besides. Current might not be a science the way, say, chemistry was, but the days of superstition and ignorance about what we did were long gone—current was a verifiable, measurable source of power, shaped and manipulated by the force of your own will and skill. The only thing that tied it to the old magic was that not everyone could use it…but even back then, in the old days of hedge witches and alchemists, they still had set-spells and incantations….

  “Don’t even try,” Nick said, glancing over at me.

  “What?”

  “I can practically see the water-wheel turning over your head. You’re trying to make sense of Aden Stosser’s reasons. Don’t even try. There’s no way to do it, not without walking the same path to crazytown. And we need you here, not there.”

  I rolled my eyes. “When did you suddenly get to be the wise old man around here?”

  He laughed, and patted my arm in a way that was surprisingly reassuring. “Somebody has to be,” was all he said, and then switched the subject. “Jack Reybeorn is in the clear, by the way. Turns out, through a very neat twist of rulings, the family is getting part of the proceeds from the auction. Don’t ask me how or why. The legal system makes my head hurt. But that’s why he was there, to watch, and to collect a check. I guess he didn’t trust the City of Chicago to do direct deposit.”

  “Oh, I can’t imagine why,” I said, not quite as drily as he managed. “I don’t suppose anyone’s been able to get an identification of the woman our other suspect—” I couldn’t call him Will, not now, not here, not anymore “—was talking to?”

  “I’m going to be working on that. Tomorrow, because as tired as I am right now I’d be no good to anyone. And no, you may not ask how I am going to do it.”

  I hadn’t been about to—all right, maybe I had. But his statement just made me even more curious, where before it had been just an idle question.

  “Nicholas Merriweather Shune? What tricks do you have up your sleeve that you’re not sharing with the rest of the pack?”

  “Nothing.” Not even the use of his full name—which he’d never told us—made him give.

  “Uh-huh…”

  “It’s nothing I can share,” he said, finally. “Really. Just let me do my job and you’ll be the first to know as soon as I get something, okay?” His brown eyes met mine directly. “Even before I tell Ian or Benjamin. I’ll tell you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I was not going to get choked up, damn it. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t.

  Nick just nodded, as if he could hear my thoughts and didn’t believe them, and stood up. “I’m packing it in, people. Dump the leftovers and shut off the lights when you leave, we don’t have Brownies here yet to clean up after you.”

  About half an hour later, the last of the garbage was tossed, the table was wiped, and I was more than ready to pack it in and go to the hotel. At least that was drawing to a close—the paperwork from the broker had been delivered and signed and sent back along with my first month’s rent check to go with the godawful deposit check I’d had to write, and I could take possession of my new apartment as soon as the credit check cleared me.

  Even that thought wasn’t doing much to cheer me up. I felt…it took a minute for me to identify what I was feeling. I felt totally useless.

  “Hey.” Stosser was standing in the doorway. I guess I wasn’t the last one out, after all. He was dressed for a long night in another granola-grungy outfit, his hair tied back, and an oversize mug of something that smelled like crap in his hand. Green tea, my brain finally identified the smell. Usually Pietr drank that stuff; I wondered if Stosser had lost a bet, or something.

  “I feel totally useless,” I told him, out of nowhere.

  “I can understand that,” Stosser said, nodding his head without surprise. “I mean, you haven’t carried your weight once since you signed on. Haven’t done a damn thing to add to the knowledge of the case, haven’t figured out a single bit of evidence, or…”

  I was amused despite myself, despite knowing that he was mocking me. “You know what I mean. I feel like we’re standing still. Worse, like we’re running in place.”

  “It always feels like that,” he said, serious now. “No matter how much we gather, no matter how much we know that we didn’t before, it always feels like nothing, not enough. The curse of giving a damn.” He took a sip from his mug, and made a face. “This stuff is disgusting, but Pietr swears it will settle my guts better than Maalox. I should know better than to eat Chinese food. Anyway, yeah. From start to finish, mostly we’re always going to be wading through muck, thinking we’re not going anywhere—or worse, we’ll think we’re getting somewhere and then the hot lead becomes a cold dead end. All the way until we finally make the one connection that’s needed to break it open and give us an answer. If you thought we were giving you an exciting, glamorous life of intuitive glory…sorry. No.”

  He looked at me, and I could feel the honey-ooze of his current stroking my skin. Normally that sort of thing would creep me out, but from him it was…okay. Soothing. Even knowing he was manipulating me somehow, I didn’t mind, because he was doing it honestly, letting me see it in progress.

  “We’ve only been on the case for a week, Bonita. A week, and we’ve already determined that they didn’t commit suicide, and that a Talent, probably female, had a hand in their deaths. The client now knows that her parents didn’t give up, that they didn’t abandon her and the rest of her family. It’s a sort of peace she didn’t have, before.”

  It sounded good, and reasonable, and yet… “We’re not here to give peace,” I said. “We’re here to get answers.” I sounded, even to my own ears, sulky.

  “And we will. But not tonight.” He turned to leave, then stopped and, over his shoulder, threw back, “You’ve done nothing wrong, Bonnie. A little stupid, maybe, but nothing wrong, and nothing that can’t be recovered from. Sleep on that, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

  There really wasn’t much to do after that except grab my coat and bag, and leave. The streets were oddly deserted, considering it wasn’t that late, and I found myself walking a little faster toward the subway. I reached down and touched my core not to soothe, but to stir it up, to let a solid ribbon of dark red curl around my mental wrist, ready to use. It was an unfamiliar and unnerving instinct. Flickers of that neon thread wrapped tighter, reassuring me. If something came out of the still night air, I’d be prepared.

  A siren rose and fell in the near distance, someone shouted at someone else through an open window, and the tension in the back of my neck eased a little.

  “You shouldn’t be out alone.”

  I swear to god, at first I thought it was that da
mn piskie returning to torment me. Then I remembered that it was back in Chicago, and the current-threads flared into thick cables, pulsing with the desire to wrap around someone’s neck.

  I’d never used current for violence. I didn’t even think I was capable of it. But if I were…the power was there. Yeah. New thing to learn about myself, and one I wasn’t sure I was liking.

  I forced those cables to relax, and turned to look at the speaker.

  “You’re Bonita, yes?” He was short and broad, like a fireplug, and coated in brown fur that made my fingers ache to dig into it. The body could have belonged to half a dozen fatae breeds, but the face—flat, yet curiously mobile, with dark brown eyes that slanted at the edges—gave my brain the clues it needed. The fatae in front of me was Mesheadam, and the current-cables softened a little in response to that knowledge.

  “Depends on who’s asking, and why,” I told him, flippant now that I could place the breed and knew it was—generally—human-friendly.

  “I’m Bobo, your escort.”

  It was nice to know that shit could still surprise me. “Beg pardon?”

  He grinned, and the flat, plant-crunching teeth were a relief, even though I’d already identified the breed as being typically nonhostile. “Your escort. Hired for the evening to make sure you get back to your hotel in one piece. Tonight, and any night you leave after 10 p.m., although I promise that, if you’re with someone, neither you nor they will see me unless I’m needed. I’d advise you not to argue, my employer seems like a stubborn kind of human.”

  J. Of course. Why I thought he’d back off and let me run my own life…

  Still. Considering everything that had been going on recently, including Stosser’s little surprise announcement about his sister, a little muscular company on the subway wasn’t the worst thing in the world. The Guys might be training us to be proactive, but I still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of using current to hurt someone. This guy looked as though he could just flex, and would-be assailants would pass out in fear.

  “All right, Bobo.” His name really was Bobo. There was no justice and much mockery in the Universe. “For now, I won’t argue. But don’t expect this to be a long-running gig.” Until we knew that Aden Stosser had backed down, at least, I’d go along with it. But tomorrow, J and I were going to have a serious and possibly loud discussion about personal boundaries, letting fledglings leave the damn nest, and no-means-no, even for him.

  Bobo offered me his fur-coated arm, and I took it. The urge to whistle “We’re Off to See the Wizard” flickered through my head, and was quashed. I really needed to get a decent night’s sleep….

  But when I got back to the hotel room, the message light was blinking on the phone. The credit check had cleared, and the apartment was mine. J must have greased wheels. Or palms. I was too tired, and too relieved, to be upset about that, right now. The desire to be in my own place swamped everything else, but there was no way I was going to be able to move my stuff, much less hunt for furniture, while this case was hot.

  It was late, but I picked up the phone and dialed the only number I knew from heart.

  “All right,” I said when my mentor picked up. “You win. I need your help.”

  seventeen

  After rearranging my life, I finally fell into bed at oh-god-late and then got knocked out of bed at just after five in the morning by the phone ringing and an urgent *ping* in my head, all at once.

  “Wha?” The phone got dealt with first, because my muscles worked better than my brain, when I first woke up.

  “Office. Now.”

  Venec’s voice. The ping tasted like Stosser, flavored with urgency and a bit of anxiety. Since I suspected he’d tell me the same thing, I batted it down with a sense of being awake and on my way, and it faded, satisfied.

  Based on that wake-up call, I didn’t bother to shower, but threw myself into jeans and a black mesh shirt, pulled on my stompy boots, and was out the door, remembering only halfway to work that I’d forgotten to brush my teeth. Gah. A pause at the bodega to pick up a pack of gum and an extra large, extra strong coffee—in case they hadn’t gotten the coffee machine up and running after yesterday’s fuse-out—and I felt almost ready to deal with whatever crisis was going down. Thankfully Bobo was nowhere in sight—I guess his shift ended with sunrise, or something. Explaining him to the pack would have been embarrassing— “Hi, my mentor thinks I’m still fourteen.” Way to go establishing competence, yeah.

  I ran into Sharon when I got on the subway, proving, I’m sure, something deep and profound about Fate, Karma, and the NYC mass transit system. She looked about as wrecked as I felt.

  “If this doesn’t involve blood, steel, or fire, I’m going to kill them and sleep on their pelts,” Sharon said, taking a hard pull out of an expensive-looking chrome thermos. She took a good look at me, and offered a sip.

  Expecting coffee, or maybe tea, I almost choked as the sharp scent of whiskey hit me, but I downed it anyway. Tea, yes, and honey, and the golden warmth of Kentucky’s finest slid down my throat and made my eyes open a little wider. I assumed it was the finest, anyway. What I knew about whiskey could be fit in a shot glass, but Sharon didn’t seem the sort to own rotgut, much less drink it, and nothing that hot-smooth could possibly be cheap or crap.

  I returned the flask to her and had a chaser of coffee to settle my stomach. At our stop I pulled out the pack of gum and offered Sharon a piece. We ascended to the street, chewing spearmint in perfect, grumpy accord. The homeboys were sound asleep, the bodegas were just opening their doors, and the traffic was humming along at a pace you only ever saw before 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday.

  “I am a god, and you will all bow down before me,” Nick announced as we walked into the office. If he was a god I’d hate to see what his creations looked like, because he was a mess. He was still wearing the clothing he’d been in last night, and his hair, never exactly well-groomed, was tangled and matted, as if he’d fallen asleep leaning against a wall in a wind tunnel. But his nose was twitching. Something was up.

  “I bow before no one who looks like you do,” Sharon said, following my thoughts. “I assume from your ’tude that you know what’s going on?”

  “He’s the cause.” Venec came in from the inner office and went directly to the coffee counter, pouring more into the mug already in his hand. “And he may actually be half as good as he thinks he is.”

  “Praise from Caesar,” Nick said. “I won’t ask him to bow, though.”

  Ferret-boy definitely hadn’t slept, because he was punchy as hell.

  “Are you going to tell us, or just taunt us until we snap and dump your body off the GWB?” Sharon asked.

  It took me a minute to remember she meant the George Washington Bridge. There was a slang locals used I hadn’t quite gotten down yet, much as I had always loved the city. “Patience, rose of the north, patience,” Nick said. “Not until we’re all here.”

  He crooked his finger at us, backing out into the main hallway as though luring us into his lair—or as though he was afraid to turn his back on anyone. Playing a hunch, I slipped into current-sight, and looked at him. Sure enough, his aura was static-filled and jagged, like he was running on fumes. However he’d been spending the night, it had required hard current, and a lot of it.

  “You might want to give him a hit off that flask,” I said to Sharon. “I think he needs it, just to sit.”

  Sharon looked doubtful, but offered him the thermos anyway. I was pretty sure the first hit made his hair uncurl, and the second, more cautious sip evened out the lines around his mouth.

  “I love you both, and I mean that in a purely nonplatonic fashion. Come, children. Come and grab a seat so that you won’t be blown away by the sheer scope of my mad skills and Talent.”

  “You cracked the case?” That was the only reason he would be so manic, and the Guys so determined that we be here at oh-fuck-early.

  “Like a crowbar, my dear dandelion, like a goddamned crowbar.”
>
  “Only problem is, inside we’ve got a tighter nut,” Venec said, bringing up the rear in our sleep-deprived parade. Ah. And that would explain the level of frustration in the manic, yeah. Also why there was the urgency. If they were almost-there but still locked out, all brains were going to be needed, even half-asleep.

  There were doughnuts on the conference room table; hot, glazed, disgusting-looking pastries that had clearly come right off the conveyer belt and been Translocated directly to us. Domino’s delivery had nothing on a Talented friend in the right—or wrong—place. Nick fell on them like a ravening hound, and I waited until he’d filled a paper plate and retreated to his chair before risking my own hand to reach in.

  “Those things are fried death,” Stosser said. He had been sitting in the chair at the far end of the table, his hair pulled back and his eyes closed, and I’d almost thought he was asleep until he spoke.

  “No Talent has ever died of coronary infarction,” Venec said. “Relax and let the children gorge.”

  Sharon passed on the doughnuts. There was a reason why she was lean and elegant, and even with current-burn I needed to spend more time in the gym—as soon as I found a gym to join, anyway. By the time Pietr and Nifty showed up, the box held a few crumbs and a scattering of greasy sugar.

  “Took you long enough,” Stosser said, annoyed.

  “I was in Pittsburgh,” Pietr said. “It took some explaining why I had to leave.”

  “She still speaking to you?” Nifty asked, probably thinking that he was being funny.

  “They promised to consider it, if I groveled prettily enough.”

  Nifty choked on his bagel, and Sharon rolled her eyes. Nick and Stosser seemed oblivious. Me, I just wondered what gender “they” were, and if they knew people in this town. I’d never done a threesome, interestingly enough. I wasn’t sure it was something that actually appealed to me…but I wasn’t going to rule it out, either, until the question came up.