Hard Magic

by Laura Anne Gilman

  I couldn’t stay mad, or distanced. I was too fascinated. “That is totally awesome. Are you tracing it through the metallic elements in the ink, or something else? Is there a way to judge the depth of the impression, see if the same person was doing all the writing, or if there was more than one?”

  Venec laughed, and I double-heard it through the current like warm butterscotch. “You’re a geek,” he said, and there was nothing I could do but agree. Who knew?

  “Let’s take a look, shall we?” The orange flared, and turned three-dimensional, making me dizzy as hell. It paused until I adjusted, and then dipped again.

  “Two signatures, repeated twice each. The pen looks like it went into the paper the same depth, each time. Same with the initials.”

  I saw what he was pointing at. “Looks like we have two people, each signing their names with the same pen, in the same period of time.”

  The stream of energy let me out, more abruptly than I was expecting, and I was back in my own body, seeing with my own normal eyes again. “So. It’s legit?”

  “Assuming both those signatures belong to the right people, yes.”

  “So…” My brain was processing everything, and starting to hurt. “If the Reybeorns refused to honor the paper, that meant that Kate Walker, the silent partner, was out in the cold—no legal claim on the property, and already out the cash she paid to Will. He might have paid her back—and he might not have had the money to do so, anymore, if he’d already bought that new property.”

  “He had,” Venec murmured.

  “So she could have brought them to court, sued them for damages?”

  “She might have, and it might have gone either way, especially with them not being able to say why they had refused to honor the papers, not without sounding like crazy people, since they couldn’t guarantee they’d get a Talent judge.”

  Well, maybe they could; Venec and I both knew it was possible to buy anything, if you had enough money—but it still wasn’t a sure thing, and could expose them to a lot of publicity they seemed to have spent their lives avoiding.

  “Whatever they might have done, the Reybeorns died two days after this paper was signed. Leaving Arcazy, since the Reybeorns refused the paper, the only living participant of the deal, legally. He gets the money from his partner…and the property.”

  Venec looked at me with something that might have been pity. “Which means that we have means and motive for him, too.”

  “But not the right gender,” I said. Even if Will had been involved up to his elbows, he hadn’t done the actual killing. I had to hold on to that, and Venec let me.

  For now.

  twenty-one

  The whole butterfly-and-hurricane theory, boiled down, means nothing stands alone. You make one move, even a small one, even in reaction to another move, and something else happens, maybe nearby, maybe far away. It’s one of the reasons why we don’t play with the weather, even though a powerful thunder storm is one of the best ways to source wild current. You increase the force of a thunderstorm in one place, and halfway around the world, someone gets hit with a drought. Or a tsunami.

  We pushed Will. Will pushed back. Someone else got hit with a tsunami.

  When the phone in her office rang, Kate Walker didn’t even glance at the caller ID before picking it up, so the panicked voice at the other end of the line took her by surprise. “Katie. What the hell have you been doing?”

  Her breath hitched in her throat. “What do you mean?”

  “Katie, please. Don’t do this. We were friends for a long time.”

  “Were? That sounds like past tense, William.” She tried for surprised and casually mocking, but a tick started just over her right eye, clicking faster and faster until it was like a moth beating at her face. The four gargoyles placed one in each corner of her office suddenly seemed less protective and more mocking, as though laughing at her.

  “You killed them. Didn’t you? Somehow. And then sat there and offered condolences on my loss. You idiot. Why didn’t you come to me? Did you really think that the Council would allow this to go unpunished? Did you think that nobody would find out?”

  “Will, you’re talking crazy, and I’m not going to have this conversation with you. Calm down, sober up, and then we’ll talk, okay?”

  She had barely hung up the phone when she felt the shiver of air behind her. By now, it was a familiar sensation, even if she didn’t understand quite how the other woman did it. Magic. Always and forever that damned magic. It was a tool, she knew that. A tool, and occasionally a weapon, but nothing more than a thing to be used. It didn’t make them any better, any more high-and-mighty, those damned freaks…. They died just as easily as regular humans did.

  “Something’s gone wrong,” she said to the newcomer. “Will knows. How the hell does he know?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” The familiar, soothing voice reassured her, just long enough for the loop of rope to drop over her neck, and yank violently upward. Her neck broke instantly, leaving her body to flop in the air, even as the end of the clothesline knotted itself to the stair railing.

  The killer stared at the results, judging, then shrugged in acceptance. It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do. The job had suddenly gotten more complicated, and needed cleaning up. Quickly, and all the way down the line.

  *incoming!*

  “You have got to be shitting me,” Venec said, even as the warning ping slammed into our brains. The room was warded, so we only got the sense of something slamming into us, rather than the actual impact. Even so, the hangover I’d been fighting all day intensified, until my brain felt as though it was being squeezed into my nasal passages.

  “Who the hell…”

  But I knew, even my own current rose up in an involuntary and somewhat disturbing response. Sister Stosser. It had to be. So much for “taking care of things.”

  “We need to—”

  “We need to stay here,” Venec said. “We have no idea what’s going on out there, and undoing the seal might make it worse, not better.”

  “You think it’s Ian’s sister again?”

  He nodded, a tight little nod.

  “Why does she hate him so much?”

  That almost got a laugh out of him. A bitter laugh, but a laugh. “Oh, she doesn’t. In fact, they used to adore each other. Totally devoted siblings, them against the world.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I did. He won’t tell me.”

  “It had to do with what went down in Chicago?”

  He didn’t look at me, staring instead at the door, as though he could somehow see what was happening out there, beyond my seal. “You know about that?”

  “A little. My mentor told me some. He went up against the Council, and won, and walked. That took guts. And a lot of…”

  “Stupidity?”

  “Integrity.”

  There was Council, and then there was Council. If you bucked the sitting members, you had two choices. Lose, or win. And if you won, you usually weren’t left to float around as a reminder of that win—you became a sitting member by default, because Council wasn’t going to let someone with that reputation be a free-floater.

  Ian Stosser had left, rather than join a Council he disagreed with. Had given up an amazing amount of influence and power, for a principle. Never mind I didn’t know what the fight had been about, or what that point of principle was, it still impressed me.

  It didn’t seem to have that same effect on Venec, though.

  “He was an idiot. We could have done all this so much easier, if he’d stayed. No scrambling, no scurrying for a client…”

  “And no sibling trying to blow us out of the water?”

  “If Aden wanted us dead, we’d already be dead. She’s trying to teach him a lesson.”

  “About what?” But I thought I already knew, and from the look Venec shot me, he knew I already knew.

  You might walk away from a Council seat, if you had some cr
azy reason for it. That could be forgiven—J had done the same thing, although more diplomatically and without severing all his ties. You could even walk away from Council entirely—it was called Crossing the River, when you jumped affiliations, Council to lonejack, or vice versa. The one thing you never, ever did was take Council issues outside.

  Whatever the fight had been, back in Chicago, PUPI was the result. Ian had gone Outside.

  I was about to say something—I have no idea what—when another blast hit the building, cutting right through my seal and slamming into us.

  *bonnie?* J, distant through the layers of protection around us, but clearly worried. He’d felt that, too, all the way in Boston, through some remnant connection.

  *not now* I sent back, and shut him out. I opened my eyes expecting to feel my body mashed into slime against the far wall. I was still intact, barely—and Venec was up and at the door. “Open it!” he roared back at me, a trickle of blood coming from his nose. “Now!”

  I dropped the seal instinctively. He could have broken it himself, but even in his fury, Venec had manners. The door opened, and he was out into the maelstrom, disappearing down the hallway.

  I raised a hand to my own face, and found a matching stream of blood coming from my left nostril. This wasn’t gremlins, or an ego-driven slapfight. The second attack had been different. The second attack had meant to kill.

  Part of me wanted to pull myself under the table and cower until it was all over. Instead, I got up, wobbling a little, and followed Venec.

  This was my office, too, goddamn it.

  Ian was standing in the hallway, his long red hair loose and flying around his head with the amount of current he was handling, like some primer in static electricity. He was yelling, directing the others in the office, plugging problems as soon as they developed. Venec reached his side and, without touching him or saying a word, slipped into that weird mirroring stance I’d noticed the first time I saw them standing together, each a bookend of the other. Current jumped from Ian to Venec, bright to dark, and my breath hitched in awe. Tandem spell-casting. So rare, so very rare, not because it was difficult but because it required an absolute trust, a willingness to let another into your core, to use your core, without limitation or restriction….

  Everything we had done until then, everything we had achieved together, faded into insignificance.

  *don’t be an idiot, torres*

  Venec, scornful and sarcastic in my head, and that made me feel better, long enough to get my shit back together and add my current to the battle.

  Council training was to throw your current toward the clear-cut leader, and let him or her do all the directing. Lonejacks tended to do their own thing, a massed attack rather than a directed one. This…wasn’t either of those things. Almost naturally, we fell into the same formation as the healing-adapted spell, our core-icons familiar to each other. The scream of a hawk stooping for the kill was new, but easily identifiable: Ian. And yet, there was no single leader, no one mind directing the action. We saw a weakness and attacked it; felt a break and reinforced it; thought of a new plan, and implemented it. Not a perfect hive mind—we were all still distinct, still pushing and pulling for the decision, but…

  *a sled team* An image came to us. *one direction, many legs*

  *many baying voices* another thought agreed, only a little sarcastic.

  I was tempted to respond, but could feel the wiring shivering in the building, overwhelmed with the current, and couldn’t spare the energy. As fast as we could suck it out, our assailant shoved more in.

  “This isn’t Aden,” Ian said, his voice almost lost in the static filling the hallway. “This isn’t her.”

  Another blast hit the building, making the lights flicker.

  “That was,” Venec said grimly, his face set in hard lines, his eyes narrowed in concentration. “At this point, I know her signature as well as I know yours. I put up with this because you were certain she was just having a temper tantrum. I even overlooked her shooting at our people because you were certain she wouldn’t harm anyone, and I thought you were right. But enough is enough. If you won’t spank her, I will.”

  Another surge went through the building before Ian could respond, and the hairs on my arms and the nape of my neck went up, because that felt different. It felt like a killing strike. It felt like the taste of murder in an empty car.

  Our killer was here.

  “What the hell…”

  Something broke in the building, and my stomach plum meted with it. “The elevator!” I was already down the hallway as the words left my mouth, even as I heard the scream I’d been dreading. Oh hell no, no…

  The front door opened without a hand on it, even as I was dropping everything else and mobbing current from my core into as strong a net as I could, then casting it out and down. Another current-net went under mine, and something coated on top, making it stronger, more elastic, and I thought maybe that we had it, maybe…

  Until the impact slammed me to the ground, face into the carpet, and I could feel the shock of a metric ton of elevator cage crashing into the basement.

  And one small light, caught in our tsunami, flickering out of existence.

  “No…” It was less a word than a moan, and less a moan than a purely physical reaction, gut-to-skin.

  I’d never tried to save someone before. I’d never failed like that before, never felt anything like the gut-wrenching agony of feeling that life slip through my awareness and dissipate. Even the awareness of others around me, of the psi-blasts slamming into the building and making the electrical systems hiss and flare in protest, couldn’t move me one inch farther.

  Then a wave came along, green-black like the deepest ocean, cold and furious and implacable, tasting of brine and tears and ancient magics, and washed it all out of me. There was no awareness save the foremost wave, the directing intelligence that gathered us, focused us, and let us fly.

  I knew that current. It was Ben taking lead, moving us out along a single line, curled and yellowing-white, like the edge of a toenail. Magical DNA, a dowsing stick; useful now that our killer had come within reach, within range. Her mistake: thinking that we would not be ready and waiting.

  We slammed down hard, the wave crashing at her knees. All along the avenue lamppost lights burst, neon signs shattered, wiring sparked and died, and the tiny howls of a million elementals evicted from their cozy homes echoed in my core.

  I could also see her, almost taste her signature, but the cool lack of emotion that had shielded her before extended to the current she used. Slick, smooth, and polished, the current attacking us came from everywhere and nowhere, totally impersonal, totally unidentifiable.

  *hold!* It was a command, thundering through the wave like fucking Neptune throwing his trident. We tried. We really did. But there wasn’t enough, we didn’t know enough, and she squirmed free, slick and smooth, and was gone.

  The wave collapsed, and we were left, sweaty and disoriented, in our own bodies, our own cores diminished and dizzy. I was on my knees in front of a silent elevator shaft, and in the distance I could hear a siren—an ambulance coming, too late.

  “Damn,” a voice murmured over my head. Ian, sounding as wiped out as I felt.

  “Sorry, boss,” I said.

  “No.” And his hand rested on my shoulder. “You kids did good. You did better than good. I just—”

  Another psi-bomb exploded, our weakened defenses allowing it access inside the office, and I heard the yelp of someone who’d been too close to whatever piece of electronics exploded.

  “Oh for…” Ian said, and I could feel him draw in a deep breath, preparing to raise our shields again.

  “Stupid stubborn bitch, this is over,” Venec muttered, and reached out a hand, closing it abruptly, as though grabbing something out of thin air.

  A woman appeared, shocked out of thin air. She was tall, pale, and thin, and had dark red hair like a fox’s tail over her shoulders.

  Sna
tching someone—Translocating them without their consent—was rude at best. I didn’t think Venec was much caring. She whirled around and stared at us.

  “Benjamin. How dare you!”

  “I dare because you’ve gone a mile too far, Aden. Your idiotic attack distracted us, left us unable to properly defend ourselves, and others in this building, when someone with a nastier agenda than yours came calling. Because of that, an innocent just died.”

  “I didn’t—” She looked to her brother, who looked away. Sharon and Nick appeared in the doorway, holding Pietr up between them. His face was bleeding from cuts, and Sharon’s left arm hung awkwardly at her side, but otherwise they seemed okay. Nifty came up out of the stairwell, a length of pipe in his hand as if he knew how to use it and a look in his eyes like desolation.

  “The kid was twelve, if he was that,” he said, and his voice was like broken glass.

  Venec took the news, and spun it into venom. “Do you hear that, Aden? A boy is dead. Because you had a temper tantrum about your beloved brother disagreeing with you. Because you thought that he had humiliated you, disgraced your oh so proud and useless family name, and so you were set on making sure that he failed, you distracted us when a real killer needed to be taken down.”

  “I didn’t— I would never—!”

  “You might not have killed that boy directly,” Venec said, biting off the words as though he’d rather have been biting off her head, “but his blood is on your hands, you stupid, thoughtless brat. It will be there for the rest of your worthless life.”

  When Benjamin Venec spanked someone, they didn’t sit down for a month. I felt no sympathy for her at all.

  “Ian, I…”

  Ian turned and looked at her. “Go away, Aden.” He stood straight and tall and anyone else might have thought he was unmarked. I knew better. Our Alpha was weak, and tired, and even a few days ago one of us might have tried to find the advantage.

  Not now. Not in front of outsiders.