I couldn’t say when it happened. I’m not sure it actually did happen, that there was a moment of Before and then After, or if things that always had been were suddenly surfacing. I didn’t feel any different, didn’t think any different; all the things I’d quietly, subconsciously worried about not happening, at least as far as I could tell.
I was me, still. Ben was Ben. I wasn’t overwhelmed, or undercut. Just...
Aware.
Really, really Aware.
*weird*
His voice, my thoughts, or the other way around. A sense of wonder and oddness and agreement and not a little awe.
And a sense, from both of us, of “this far, no further.” The Merge pushed; like a living thing: it wanted more. We resisted, and it subsided again, taking what it could get.
A moment passed, then another, and the sense of oddness faded.
Still aware, though. Like breathing for two, or... I had no frame of reference, and from the look on Ben’s face, neither did he.
“Now what?” Ben asked. “Here, Roblin, Roblin, Roblin?”
I had no idea.
“Well, while you figure it out, we still have an investigation to handle.” He walked past me to get to the door, and I reached out, almost instinctively, and touched his hip. The cloth of his slacks felt rough, abrasive under suddenly oversensitive fingertips, and he paused, as though I’d grabbed at him.
I could hear him swallow, without even looking, and felt guilty for the pain that must have caused his throat.
“I’m all right,” he said immediately. “It’s like having a bad sore throat, mostly, only on the outside. You can’t tell?”
“I didn’t try.”
That seemed to reassure him, and he nodded, heading out the door.
I let him go; he was the boss, he got to give the orders. But I mentally followed him down the hallway, anyway, the echo of his movements in my head, almost but not quite like hearing, or seeing, or smelling something familiar.
There weren’t any words to describe it. I wondered if, over time, I’d figure it out. I wondered if we’d get the chance to figure it out.
I didn’t wonder, any longer, if I wanted that chance.
“Here Roblin, Roblin, Roblin,” I said. “You want something that’s going to mess up my life, make me pissed off? Come try and rearrange the furniture here.”
I waited, but there was no indication that I’d been heard, no evil chuckle or high-pitched giggle or even a passing whiff of sulfur, or whatever presaged the appearance of an imp.
I waited another few minutes, then got up and went to join the rest of the team.
“We already know that the trace isn’t anything any of us have seen before,” Sharon was saying when I came in. It took me a minute to catch up with what she was talking about, my brain so filled with The Roblin, and Venec, and how much more trouble I’d just gotten myself into.
Right. The trace I’d picked up in the house. The thing locked in a warded jar, hopefully inert.
“We’ve been trying to come up with some way to test it, if we can figure out where it comes from, but there’s barely enough to poke at, and... ” She hesitated. “And it makes me feel queasy just being in the room with it. That’s not normal.”
Yeah. It had made all of us feel uneasy, hadn’t it, the moment we were aware of it. Why? Something stirred in my awareness; not me, but Venec. I glanced sideways at him, but nothing showed on his expression or body language, and the stirring faded, as though he hadn’t been able to get a grip on it, either.
Sharon hadn’t been comfortable with the guy from the start, certain he was lying but unable to prove it. Venec had investigated a missing kid, and now both kid and wife were gone, the wife dead, the kid missing-presumed-dead... and now this.
Could all be coincidence, the end run of some really bad luck on the part of Mr. Wells.
Or maybe not.
“So without knowing who broke in, or why they wanted those objects, or why they were so pissed off at the client, we’ve got nothing. No clues, no witnesses... ”
“We do have witnesses,” Pietr said, suddenly. “The house itself. The things that were broken, you said they were still there?”
“Yeah,” I said, sliding into a chair and waiting to see where he was going with that. “But how do you ask – oh.”
The Merge had nothing on a well-run pack when it came to sharing thoughts. No sooner had Pietr raised the idea than the rest of us were running with it.
“What about the simple scoop?”
Pietr was talking about a spell we’d been working on earlier, the one that was supposed to simplify the recreation process. The one that had blown up in Nifty’s face.
“What about it?” Sharon asked, not following his logic. Neither was I, to be honest.
“The scoop. It pulls everything from a scene, like a photograph, right? I mean, ideally. But what if we turn it into a mirror? To reflect what happened?”
“It wasn’t designed to do that,” Nifty said, his expression doubtful. Like Sharon, Nift was a damn good field op, and definitely tops in the decision-making, judgment-calling area, but they were crap at developmental magic. I was already feeling out the possible threads, and so was Lou, from the expression on her face.
“We designed it... we can redesign it,” Lou said, pulling out her notebook and flipping to a spot midway through. She studied that page, and nodded. “Yeah. Okay, maybe. Bonnie, we have the impetus of the spell aimed at retaining information – that’s why it kept imploding on us, because it couldn’t hold it the way a human brain can. What if we switched that to reflect, not retain?”
“Make it shiny instead of sticky?” My brain had already kicked into high gear. I’m a decent field op and crap at management, but when it comes to developmental magic... well, Pietr had the chops, and Lou might someday be as good, but honestly and with all due modesty, I doubted it.
“What exactly do we want it to do?” I asked the rest of the team. “Clarity is important, if we want the cleanest result. I mean, do we want a reflection, or a re-creation, or... ”
“We need the evidence to talk,” Nick said. “Literally, we have to be able to pose questions to it – ‘what happened here?’ and have it answer.”
I glared at the notebook, biting the inside of my lip while I thought. “No.” I hated to say it but, “No. You can’t make things act against their nature, Nick. Reflecting what happened around them is one thing, that’s basic science.” For Talent iterations of science, anyway. “Asking an inanimate object to react and respond? This isn’t Disney. We don’t do talking teacups.”
There was grumbling and an overall letdown in the mood of the room, as we tried to reshuffle our thoughts, and pick up another lead. I took out my own notebook and started jotting notes down, starting with a box in the middle labeled “evidence” and then drawing lines out in radiating spokes, trying to draw my brain out the same way, to give me an answer.
As though it were being poked, as well, my core shifted slightly, swirling warmth alerting me to something... .
Ben?
No, it wasn’t the Merge, but he was alert, too; I could feel him come to a higher awareness, even though his physical attention was on the conversation he was having with Nifty and Lou.
Something had just poked at us.
*ignore it* The thought was deeper than a ping, fuzzy and muted like a morning whisper.
The Roblin? Maybe. I took Ben’s advice and went back to my notes, intensely aware of the connection shimmering between us, silent but real, luring the imp out to play.
“There was no magic trace in that house,” I said out loud, thinking my way through. “Nothing except the one bit we found, that we can’t identify.” Sludge, I decided. Icky sludge. “We haven’t been able to identify the source of the claw marks.”
“We haven’t even been able to confirm they were claw marks,” Nick said. “There wasn’t any residue in any of the grooves, to test. I don’t know if they were calcium based, or
metal, or... ”
“They had to be of a specific hardness to dig into that wood,” Lou said. “I’ve been able to eliminate some breeds based on that, but... it still leaves too many to be useful.”
“So without a known enemy, or trace to work from, all we have are the objects that were taken... a glass dagger, and a pocket watch.” Nifty got up and paced. “Why them? Was it for their sentimental value, or something else?”
“You think the dagger is more than a memory-glass?” Sharon frowned, then shook her head. Her blond chignon was starting to come loose, and she had stuck a pencil in it at some point, and forgotten about it. It was unlike her, but cute. I decided against mentioning that to her. Right now, anyway. “But there was no trace of anything more powerful. I mean, not even a hint of a smidge, anywhere in the house.”
“Not all magical items are obvious,” Nifty said. “Some of them don’t even register as magical, because they don’t actually do anything. They just are. Like the fatae.”
I nodded, underscoring the center box in my drawing. “Exactly. By their very nature they won’t call attention to themselves, unless you know what you’re looking for.” Like trying to pick a fatae out of a crowded subway car. Unless it had a particularly unusual physical appearance – a rack of antlers, or flames instead of a face – mostly they blended, your eye slipping right over them. It took knowing that they were there, and actively looking for them, to pick one out.
“My mentor called it inert magic, present but not accounted for.” Nifty was nodding, and Lou’s eyes were bright with thought, but Sharon, Nick, and Pietr either hadn’t had the same style of training we did, or just weren’t seeing it yet.
Right, Sharon’s mentor had been of the “have but don’t use” school, whatever it was called, so theoretical magic probably wasn’t on the agenda.
“Look, all current has a... a presence, call it. Right? We can channel and manipulate it. So it leaves an impression in the world, no matter how slight, even if our human senses can’t quite see it.” It sounded like I was talking out of my ass but there was something there, if I could just keep talking long enough to grab it.
“So we can’t see it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. And if it was there and now it isn’t, can we see its absence?”
“Negative space,” Nifty said. “You’re talking about negative space. That’s insane, and possibly brilliant.”
“So you think that the objects themselves can tell why they were taken, even though the objects aren’t actually there now?” Nick looked like his brain hurt.
“Well... yeah.” It sounded more stupid than brilliant, put that way. But I had the feeling that it would work, and I’d gotten a lot done over the years, listening to my instincts. Only one way to find out... . I was nodding even as my pencil flew over the page, everyone’s comments blending into an idea being constructed under my fingers. Lou leaned over to watch, and Pietr ghosted to my side, but I barely noticed.
“Empty space impressions,” he said. “The current-weight of what isn’t there.” Pietr was almost classically handsome, with a jawline and nose that would make a Roman sculpture cry in envy, but right then he reminded me of nothing so much as a jowly, rheumy-eyed bloodhound, lifting his head and preparing to bay to the world that he’d caught the scent.
“Yeah.” Lou sounded pleased and satisfied. “I think we can do that, push energy into the blanks, let it sift around... . We just need someone with a really light touch.”
That would emphatically not be her. Or Nifty, for that matter.
“Bonnie, you’re the one who came up with it, you should do it,” Sharon said, like she was gifting me with something.
“I can’t.”
“What?”
I paused, and looked up at Venec, trying to figure out what to tell them.
“Bonnie and I are bait for The Roblin.”
Oh, okay. Blunt was how we were going to tell them, then.
“Bait? How bait?”
“If it is targeting us, taking the mischief to the investigators, the way we’d thought, then it’s going to look for ways in which to cause the most mischief. The situation we have, Bonnie and I, the ability to communicate directly the way we do, is... ripe for mischief.”
That was a mouthful. It also managed to skirt the fact that we knew damn well what was causing the connection, not to mention the physical and emotional affects and effects, and how much more than just communication it was enhancing. It also avoided any possible hurt feeling that could come up from our theory on why Nick and I had been targeted earlier, so long as Nifty kept his mouth shut, for now. And he would; nobody wants to be told that, even high-res, they’re still commonplace. Of course, I’d rather not be told I was odd, either. But there it was.
“So, either Sharon or Pietr... or Stosser?”
“Not Stosser,” I said without thinking, and everyone looked at me. I threw up my hands in a gesture of disgust and helplessness. “I saw him on-site, guys. The boss is brilliant, yeah, and way high-res, and he doesn’t have clue one what to do with evidence.”
Nifty snickered, and swallowed it almost immediately, but even Venec looked amused – and not surprised. “Ian doesn’t like situations where he can’t manipulate the results.”
Being born with plus-ten charisma and a mind that made both Venec and J look about as subtle as a rock... yeah, I could see where Stosser got used to being able to finagle scenes. But you couldn’t do that to evidence, not and keep it usable, and the boss knew it, and he must have found it howl-inducingly frustrating.
I almost felt bad for him. Almost.
“Sharon,” Pietr said. “She’s got the truth-sensing mojo working, so it makes sense for her to try, first.”
“I think Pietr should do it,” I said. Pietr faded from sight when stressed, the same protective invisibility that Retrievers specialized in. In fact, I probably could never have come up with this idea, if I didn’t know Pietr so well, how he felt when he faded, and how to find him again once he did. Huh. That was interesting, and worth mulling over – later.
“Both of you go,” Venec said. “Two attempts will give us a better chance of success.”
Fair enough; Lou, Nick, and Nifty would keep following up on our other leads, like the guy who had been with the missus, before he died, and our yet unidentified memory-glass maker.
“All right,” I said, pushing my paperwork toward them, so they could see better. “This is what I think you need to do. Instead of directing the current at the surfaces of what’s there? I want you to go into what’s not there.”
“What?” Sharon was our logical thinker, and I had a feeling the b-ass-ackward way this spell had to work was going to confuse her. Pietr got it, though. The spell was probably going to be almost intuitive for him, since we were looking for something that wasn’t there anymore.
There wasn’t any time to do a test run, not with The Roblin lurking around waiting for the chance to screw things up for its own entertainment. Also, odds were that the client had realized by now that we had figured out that there was something hinky about his missing objects, maybe even realized that Venec had worked for his dead wife and knew dirt on his past. Rich people very much did not like people investigating outside the lines, and they liked even less when we had dirt on them to fuel the investigation. Even when they were, nominally, our client.
Unlike Danny, who would do whatever it took to satisfy the client’s needs, we worked for the evidence, not the individual. They knew that when they hired us, but most of them didn’t really understand what that meant. Once Wells figured it out, he would kick us off the case, shut down our access to protect whatever he was hiding, whatever had drawn the housebreakers to him.
We would still investigate – once you set the pups on something, we decided when the case was closed – but it would be harder to run tests, or get anything resembling a straight answer.
Venec tapped on the table, getting everyone’s attention. “Pietr, Sharon, are you confide
nt that you can handle this?”
My pack mates nodded, because what else could they say? They had a good hold of the original identification spell I’d riffed on, and this wasn’t really all that different, but nothing remained the same once it was implemented; your own personal current adapted to it, so everyone ended up with a slightly different result – ideally within a set range, but not always.
“Yeah. We got it,” Sharon said.
“So, go,” Venec told them, waving a hand in dismissal.
Pietr held up my notebook, asking permission, and I nodded. I’m not sure that I would have let anyone else take my notebook – we put down all our working thoughts there, almost like a traditional grimoire, now that I thought of it – but this was Pietr. I’d had sex with the guy – more, I’d slept with him. I trusted him at my back – or inside my notebook.
I felt a twitch of unease; what happened if the spell backfired? What if...
No. Not me. That prickly, poking swirl was back, a little harder than before, and it was difficult to ignore it. Acting on impulse, I leaned toward Ben – not physically, not even with current, exactly, but with an awareness that was something else, as though seeking reassurance or comfort.
The swirl caught at that movement, swarmed it, and I swore I could feel a hundred tiny little teeth latch on, like being nibbled on by itty-bitty alligators. It took effort not to flinch, not to let it know we’d felt it, were luring it further in.
I saw the edge of Ben’s mouth turn up, barely a movement, but a definite smirk.
Our imp had taken the bait. Now, to wait and see what the little bastard did with it.
“Nick, give me your notes, too,” Sharon said. “If we’re going to be doing this negative space thing, maybe I can tell if anything’s changed since the first visit.”
“You want me to come?” he asked, even as he removed a section of pages and handed them to her. “If nothing else, to watch your backs?”
“Thanks, but I think we’ll be okay.”
Although nobody had said anything, it was inevitable that we were all a little leery of that house, now. The hellhound had been dealt with, one presumed, and the client wasn’t going to be idiot enough to hire another – we hoped – but who knew what else a scared Null with a penchant for magical security devices would get up to?
Laura Anne Gilman - PUPI 03 - Tricks of the Trade Page 22