Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  J said that a lot of paramedics, Talent or Null, learned to recognize current in victims, and knocked us out with the good stuff en route, to keep us from going all overrush and making a bad situation worse—or deadly.

  “Pain management. Maybe. There’s a spell I learned for that, a long time ago.” Nifty saw the look Venec shot him, and shrugged, grinning ruefully. “Okay, when I was in high school. My coach was Talent, and he saw no reason for me to risk getting hooked on painkillers when a little current could do the trick and get me through the game.”

  Sharon’s sharp glare made it clear what she thought of that—probably equated it with taking steroids or something. Me, I just wanted to know if it would work on menstrual cramps.

  “Anyway,” Nifty said, ignoring Sharon, “it’s not really what we’re looking for, but it might be a place to start. First, you have to know where the pain is coming from….”

  As usual, the basics were simple. Adapting it to the particulars we needed it to do; that was where it got tricky.

  Because Nick and I had been at the impound center, and the auction, it was decided that we should sit this one out. Nick made like he was going to protest, but I kicked his shins and he subsided.

  “You and I need a break,” was all I said to him. Let the Guys explain their theory of a multipurpose, multidisciplinary team, if folk hadn’t figured it out yet. I was just as happy to let someone else do the heavy lifting for a change.

  Not that we were getting left out entirely. The only way we’d been able to cobble together an emotion-finding-and-tracking-and-catching spell required the current to be spread around among multiple players, so we’d be working remotely once Sharon and Stosser made contact.

  Until then, we were stuck in the office, recharging and getting antsy.

  The spell itself wasn’t so difficult, really. It’s just what we were doing, and what we were going to have to do, that really didn’t stand up to thinking about. We had created a spell that would use control to take down lack-of-control, spreading it out among seven people, and using it on the fly, without any trial runs. When the Guys promised us on-the-job training, I don’t think this was what we’d envisioned.

  Less thinking, Bonnie. More preparing.

  I staked out the sofa in the main lounge before anyone else could get to it, and draped myself over the full length, my feet propped up on the arm, my head on a cushion. Closing my eyes, I dived down inside, the same way I had to ground, only this time instead of looking for an external security, I was spreading my awareness throughout my entire system, checking to make sure that everything was flowing. Sort of like balancing your chi, I guess; making sure all the nodes were unblocked and happy. All right, happy might have been pushing it—I’d been asking a lot, and not giving much back—but it was all well enough. Admitting that Venec might have had something to his “fill-up” orders after all, I let a few tendrils drift off, looking for an open source of current I could siphon a bit from. Taking from our own building, except in emergency, was probably tacky, and I wasn’t sure how well we’d recovered from that attack, anyway.

  That led me off to wonder what Stosser was doing about his oh so uncivil sibling. I did note that we hadn’t been bothered by any more gremlins since the psi-bomb, which could mean she’d left off the low-level attacks—or it had been our own current and we were shielding better now.

  As to Aden, Stosser had assured us that she was being dealt with, and he said it in such a way that you didn’t ask again. I didn’t doubt it was going to be the same sort of putting-down that got him asked to leave Chicago. Hopefully, it would be more final this time.

  That thought set me back on my mental heels, a bit. Had I just, even to myself, advocated fratricide? I looked long and hard at the thought, and realized that yeah, I had. Okay, take a step back, Bloodthirsty Bonita, and get some perspective. She hadn’t killed anyone. Hadn’t even really tried.

  Yet.

  Innocent until proven an asshole, as J used to say. And right now, not my problem. Venec was holding the wards around the office, I didn’t need to tense up. Relax, relax, and look for a quick hit….

  There was a spare generator in a building a few blocks over. Probably hitched up to one of the bodegas’ refrigeration units, in case ConEd flaked again and left us in a blackout. The generator was turned on and humming along quietly, so I felt no guilt about slipping in and skimming current off the top. There would be a slight fluctuation in the energy consumption, but since I was taking current, which they couldn’t use, and not Null power, it wasn’t a crime. Really. You just had to be careful….

  “Hey.”

  I opened my eyes, and saw Pietr standing over me.

  “We’re a go.”

  I nodded and sat up, maybe a little too quickly. The current I’d lifted ran shimmering through my body, pooling in my core and being absorbed into the threads already there. In a few hours, the new current would be almost indistinguishable from the pre-existing core, all imbued with my own signature. I’d always thought of that as comforting—it was mine—but now I was starting to wonder. Not that I ever thought I’d be driven to commit a crime, but if we learned how to track Talent…who was to say the bad guys couldn’t, too?

  Bad guys, and maybe even just people who wanted to shut us down. Like Stosser’s sister. My throat felt weirdly tight, and I reached for my iced coffee, trying to ease it.

  We didn’t have to be physically gathered for this, but somehow we all ended up in the lounge, Nifty and me on the sofa, Nick taking over the armchair, and Pietr leaning against the wall like usual. Venec sat on the arm of the sofa, next to me.

  *ready?*

  As usual with Stosser’s pings, it was less words and more a sensation. Funny, considering he was so good with spoken words. By contrast, Venec could come through with an actual sound, when he pinged.

  *we’re all here* Venec sent back.

  Just like that, the connection opened, and it was as if we were standing in the garage with Ian and Sharon and another male—older, well-dressed, impatient-looking. The father of the new owner, I guessed. He looked as though he regretted ever giving Darling Daughter the checkbook.

  The origin spell had been used to clean up bruising and torn muscles just under the skin of another person. We’d dumped that part, and focused on the way the bruises and tears had been found, by following the awareness of pain in the patient. Strong emotions and current would, we hoped, create a sort of mini-record, intense enough for us to pick it up even months later.

  It was a little more difficult here, natch, because there wasn’t a conscious—or even unconscious—entity to touch. That was why all of us were needed. Like when I collected the trace, we were going to create a net, only this time it was going to be a tighter-woven one, sticky on all the strands, and we were going to cast it not over empty space, but Stosser’s own memory of the victims. That was why he was there, to hold that memory, while Sharon directed us over the actual physical space.

  *give* It was less a command than a plea, and the surprise of that let the current flow out of me in a smoother pattern than I’d anticipated, threads weaving and unweaving as they went. My threads were dark green, and I saw them merging with darker blue cables—Nifty, my brain identified—winding around and disappearing, then adding themselves to red snakes—Pietr—snapping and hissing until they became part of the whole as well, weaving docilely into a golden-brown wave of silky water that felt like Venec.

  *nick?*

  A loop of bright yellow came down with a flicker, giggling an apology. He’d gotten lost.

  Nicky had just gotten himself a new nickname, we all agreed without speaking a word. He protested, but the image of a swooping, blushing yellow butterfly was already set.

  *attention* Stosser told us, then we were in his hands, our current, still attached to ourselves, being woven into a spell by the sheer force of his will.

  To say that it was a weird sensation was an understatement. My usually mellow temper got a spla
sh of ire, and then cool sadness, sweet intelligence, and a warmly burning flame of affection, and then all the emotions of the entire group merged, even as I was trying to sort them out. There was a moment of panic, and then a sense of calm imposed from within. It was all right. This was what I/We intended to do.

  I/We made a sweep over the car, a flowing wave of intermingled current, each point distinct, but linked. One pass, then another, looking for any surface emotions, anything that might connect to the scrap of physical evidence in Stosser’s hand, the nail clipping the “injury” I/We were working from.

  Nothing. Nothing but a faint cool minty-stale sensation, like canned air.

  *all right. move on.*

  If I/We couldn’t find the killer, we would work backward from the victims. The emotional image formed in our awareness, not the physical aspects of what they had looked like, but the sense of them, the affection they’d had for each other, the joy they had taken in their work.

  From that, it seemed as though outlines rose up from the car in front of Me/Us, shadowed bodies, half translucent, half filled with an intensity, a bright sharp flare of—

  Oh god. Oh god oh god please make it stop make it stop!

  nineteen

  “Mother of freaking God!”

  If the words hadn’t hurt my head so much, I’d have echoed them. Maybe I did, but there was too much pounding and thudding inside my skull for me to hear it.

  A much quieter voice asked: “Is everyone still with us?”

  It was a valid question. I’d had overrush described to me, the way current burned you up from the inside, and this didn’t feel like it, but the memory of that flaring pain had to have been something dire….

  “We felt them die.”

  My eyes cracked open, expecting to be blinded by nasty bright lights, but it was blessedly dark. Someone had thought to turn off the lights. Or, possibly, we’d blown the fuses again.

  “We were them dying.”

  Nobody contradicted Venec’s correction. The memory—the experience—was still too much with me, and probably the others, too, to quibble.

  A cold sort of clammy hand slid into mine, grasping it firmly. My fingers were probably just as cold, from the way the rest of me felt. I couldn’t tell whose hand it was, holding mine, but it didn’t really matter. They were living hands. Clammy, but living.

  “Lawrence? Shune?”

  “Here, boss,” came a low voice, and I lifted my head enough to see two bodies sitting on the floor, leaning against each other like the rubble of a bombed-out building. If that was them, then the hand in mine was probably Pietr’s. I managed to move my head slowly enough that the pounding and thudding didn’t up the intensity, and looked across my body to the form curled up alongside me. Yeah, that sleeve was connected to the shirt that was on Pietr. He hadn’t disappeared.

  “Hi,” I said. Lame, but it was all I could think of. The head burrowed into my rib cage lifted, and his gray eyes looked into mine, and any thought I ever had of Pietr as just good-looking was pretty much gone. He was still a fine piece of flesh, don’t get me wrong. But I didn’t see the physical there, then. I saw Pietr.

  And he saw me. I don’t know what it was, exactly, he saw…but it was me.

  “Sharon and Ian?” I asked, not looking away from that shadowed gaze.

  *okay* came back the ping, not okay by a long shot but the awareness of them both breathing and recovering, and coming home soon.

  “Everyone’s okay.” Venec, recovering faster, turned on one of the lamps, shading the light away from us, moving around and touching us on the shoulder or arm, making physical contact with a gentleness that I should have been surprised to encounter in him, but wasn’t. “We made it out. Next time, we’ll know better.”

  “What went wrong?” I needed to know. The spell had been working perfectly, we had been totally on the track of the actual moment of the murder, and…

  “Nothing went wrong. It went too right.”

  That made sense, I guess. “But if the spell worked, and it had to, for us to get that much from the echoes of dead people, then why didn’t we feel anything from the killer?”

  “I don’t know,” Venec admitted, sitting down on the floor next to the sofa, his left shoulder about even with my rib cage. I felt the urge again to pet his hair in reassurance, the same way I would Pietr, and before I could stop myself, that’s what my hand was doing.

  Amazingly, he let me. His hair was coarse, not soft, and thicker than I’d thought it would be. It didn’t feel anything like touching Pietr, at all.

  “We need to try again.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And go through that again?” But Nifty sounded more annoyed than protesting.

  “Not a chance in hell.” Ian, standing in the doorway, Sharon half-hidden behind him. He was paler than I thought a human being could get, and his suit was rumpled, but his expression was determined.

  “We have to. We were so close….”

  “We were so close to dying!”

  Ian seemed taken aback by his own shout, and he shuddered once, a faint full-body ripple. “That much emotion, it almost pulled us all in. We meddled with a form of blood-magic there, not even realizing, siphoning off the power of their death. Necromancy is a nasty word for a reason. Not moral, but practical. Death only begets death.”

  Even falling-over wiped, Ian could still make pretty with the words. I’d have been impressed, if I had the energy. We. Not you, not I, not us: we. Pack was right; and not just any pack, but his pack.

  “We won’t go there,” Nick said. “We know now that’s a dead end.”

  Someone groaned at the unintentional pun.

  “Sorry. I mean…we still need to find the killer. Now that we know the spell does work, we just have to look harder, more carefully, for the trace that leads back to him. Or her. Everything leaves a trace.”

  “I don’t…”

  Venec interrupted his partner, his voice still and calm, but firm. “If we stop now, if we come this close and the killer still gets away…what have we accomplished, Ian? What have we done, other than prove the naysayers right, that current is not meant to be used for anything other than personal gain? Is that what you want?”

  “You know it isn’t. But the cost—”

  “The cost is what it always was. You and I knew that. Now, so do they. And they want to go on. They believe, Ian. You can’t give with one hand and take away with the other.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what was going on between those two, but something was about to simmer over, and as wasted as my body was, I could feel every inch of me leaning toward Venec, willing Ian to hear, to understand. I didn’t know what it was that I believed, exactly, but it meant we couldn’t stop now. We had to know.

  Ian looked over his shoulder at Sharon, who gave a small but firm nod. He looked at us, sprawled on the floor and furniture. We looked back at him, all of us looking like hell and probably shaking in our metaphorical boots, but we didn’t even have to check with each other. We were a team. We were in.

  “All right.” He sounded resigned, but his shoulders were straighter than they’d been just a minute ago, and there was a little tinge of color back in his skin. Boss was proud of us.

  It turned out that we hadn’t actually blown the fuses; Venec had shut out the lights as an immediate reaction, when he came to. Good thing, that, since our eyes were all sparkle-dazed from the not-memory of flames up around us, when we were trapped inside the Reybeorns’ last minutes. It took a while for the headache to subside and a while longer for our eyes to adjust again to normal lighting. Once we did, Nifty was the first one to point out what was wrong with the whole experience.

  “There wasn’t any fire.”

  Sharon stopped with her forkful of pizza halfway to her mouth. “You noticed that too, huh?”

  We had expected the spell to take a chunk out of us, current-wise. Interestingly, though, we were less drawn-down than expected. We were ravenous, though. Ian had taken one
hard look at us, and placed an order for our now-usual pizzas and caffeine that arrived with impressive speed. At some point we had apparently established an account at the pizza place on the corner, because no money changed hands when the delivery guy appeared at the door.

  Yeah, I could see myself getting really tired of pizza, fast. There was a Thai place a couple of blocks over, maybe I’d stage a take-out coup.

  If we made it to next week. If we didn’t get killed, or fired. If I wasn’t standing on the unemployment line, trying to make rent on a place I suddenly couldn’t afford…

  “It could just have been a visual representation of the pain, their brains trying to translate suffocation into something they could see, and try to fight?”

  “Maybe it was hell,” Pietr said.

  “You think they went to hell?” Nifty asked, surprised.

  “I have no idea. I just said maybe it was.”

  “I don’t believe in hell.” Of course Sharon didn’t.

  “Ah,” Nifty said, waggling his finger in her face. “But does hell believe in you?”

  I shoved the crust of my slice into my mouth, to keep from laughing.

  “My head hurts,” Sharon grumbled. “Now is not the time to start any pseudo rational theistic conversations that will result in you getting your face bashed with a pillow.”

  Our wannabe lead dogs were doing their usual dominance squabble, turning every possible conversation into a can-you-top-this, and Pietr was just egging them on for a distraction. Finished with my dinner, I tuned the three of them out, and tried to focus on the graph paper Nick had just put down on the table in front of me.

  “If we arrange ourselves that way, we should be able to disperse the emotional energy evenly, keep it moving at a steady rate and not let it pool in any one of us.” He wasn’t trying to ignore the others, he had totally shut them out. Yay for geek focus.