Praise for
laura anne gilman
PARANORMAL SCENE INVESTIGATIONS

Hard Magic

“Readers will love the Mythbusters-style fun of smart, sassy people

solving mysteries through experimentation, failure, and blowing stuff up.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Pack of Lies

“Bonnie’s intelligence and perceptiveness really make this book go and

readers will root for her and the team to solve their investigation.”

—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick

RETRIEVERS

Staying Dead

“An entertaining, fast-paced thriller.”

—Locus

Curse the Dark

“Features fast-paced action, wisecracking dialogue,

and a pair of strong, appealing heroes.”

—Library Journal

Bring it On

“Ripping good urban fantasy, fast-paced

and filled with an exciting blend of mystery and magic…

this is a paranormal romance for those who normally avoid

romance, and the entire series is worth checking out.”

—SF Site

Burning Bridges

“Leaves the reader on the edge of her seat for the next book.”

—RT Book Reviews, 4 stars

Free Fall

“The best of the Retrievers series to date.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Blood from Stone

“Extreme fun, nicely balanced with dark stuff…

and a scene in a museum that had me whimpering with joy.”

—Green Man Review

Tricks of the Trade
Laura Anne Gilman

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Geoff. For taking my hand, and holding on.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

prologue

My name is Bonnie Torres, and I’m a student of (in)human nature. More specifically, and according to the business cards we don’t actually have yet, I’m a Paranormal Scene Investigator. What that means is that I look at the world a little differently than most, even among my fellow Talent.

I used to be an idealist of sorts. Not that everyone was good— I knew firsthand that we were all filled with conflicting impulses, some positive and some negative, and sometimes the negative ones got out and did damage. I also knew that there were people who didn’t feel any guilt about the damage they did. But a year ago, I would have claimed that responsibility was all about your intent; that if you meant well, did your best, and didn’t hurt anyone, you could sleep with a clear conscience. Then I was recruited to join PUPI, Ian Stosser’s dream of an unbiased, impartial investigative unit designed to ferret out the truth behind crimes of a magical nature or cause.

Ian Stosser had been a certified boy wonder, once upon a time: Golden Boy of the Midwest Council, high-res Talent and general scary-ass smart guy. But something happened in Chicago, something they still don’t talk about, and he came to New York with his business partner Benjamin Venec, to hang their shingle here.

Ian said there was a need, that the Cosa Nostradamus needed us, to save it from itself. The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t all that thrilled to be saved, but Ian had been right—there was a need. After only a few months we—the Private, Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations team—got our first case, a bad one: a double murder. We solved it, proved what had happened, let the authorities—such as the Cosa has—handle the punishment. And then, once we’d demonstrated we could be trusted to be fair in our investigations, impartial in our discoveries, we were approached to investigate a few more, and they were all bad.

They only call us when it’s bad.

Magic isn’t an instinct; for most of us it requires forethought to pull current and direct it against someone else. That means Talent mostly don’t commit crimes of passion, but ones of forethought and malice. By the time we get called in? The crime’s been committed, and all we see is the tarry residue left in the aftermath, the pain and the grief and the greed and the malice and the denial—and, sometimes, the regret and remorse, too late to do any good.

When I took this job, my mentor had warned me: you rarely see anyone’s shining better nature in this job. He’d been right.

PUPI did good work, though. We got people answers, closure. We were making sure that there were consequences to actions. From the lonejacks and gypsies on the street to the Council members in their hushed private offices, the word was spreading: we were smart, we were sharp, and we were unaffiliated—something rare in the highly political world of magic. If you came to us with a mystery, we would find the answers, no matter where they led.

We investigated events. We stuck to the facts. But there’s no way, I was learning, that you could separate facts and events from the people who drive them. And people? People are complicated. Responsibility is complicated.

Every case we took, from the cold-blooded killer-for-hire to the regret-stricken being who let terrible things happen for love, taught me that some acts cannot be excused, no matter the intent…and that it’s possible to sleep soundly, your conscience clear as a cloudless sky, after inflicting terrible harm on someone. People aren’t good. They’re not bad, either, mostly. They’re actions and reactions, pushed this way and that by things we have so little control over.

There is a black and a white, yeah. And a thousand shades of gray, between. Most of us? We think our shade of gray is a hell of a lot lighter than it is. But we each have the choice—maybe not where we stand, but how aware we are of what we do.

Responsibility is complicated. Also, uncomfortable.

Being a pup isn’t easy. We look. We observe. We don’t turn away.

And if I don’t sleep soundly some nights… I have to believe it’s worth it, in the end.

one

Every Talent in the city probably felt it when The Roblin arrived, but most of them didn’t know what it was, not even after everything was done and dusted. There was maybe a sense of unease, a niggling in the back of their minds, not like they’d forgotten something but that something was happening that they should know about, that was going to affect them.

And then it was gone: fading into the still-chilly predawn air, lost in the quiet bustle of hospital workers changing shifts, police cars idling on street corners, short-order cooks strapping on fresh aprons and firing up grease-skimmed griddles. Those particularly sensitive to bad vibes, Null and Talent alike, shifted restlessly in their sleep, or woke feeling particularly anxious or alert, but there was nothing to tell them why they felt that way, and most of them forgot it after the first cup of coffee, and the first crisis of the day.

But because it was forgotten didn’t mean it was gone.

The malaise started downtown, and spread, like fingers of a hand stretching out to cover all five boroughs of New York City. Barely touching anything, yet sensing, feeling, absorbing the pulse of the city, finding the weak points, the delicate spots, the danger zones.

And, finding them, narrowing in for the kill.

“All right, people, settle down.”

The noise level hadn’t been high to begin with, but the restless movements stilled almost immediately. It was Wednesday, and we were all gathered in the main conference room in the PUPI offices, which were on the seventh floor of a nondescript seven-story brick building uptown in Harlem. Outside I could hear the muffled sounds of traffic, trucks and buses and cabbies in their usual dance, sirens cutting in and out like a soprano having diva-fits in a cast of baritones. Seven of us: me, and Sharon, Pietr, Nifty, Nick, and our newest hire, Lou. And Benjamin Venec, our boss.

“After the past few weeks I had planned on spending time working on your defensive work, but—”

“We’ve got a job? Do I get to—?”

Venec scowled at the interruption. “No.”

Nifty was getting itchy. Literally: he’d had a run-in with a molting Istiachi two weeks ago, which was unfortunate, since molting made them both pissy and toxic. He’d ended up with a bad rash—startlingly bright green against his black skin—that he was under strict orders not to scratch. He was also stuck on office duty until it healed, while we’d been out on a case, and that was really making his skin itch.

The first time I’d ever seen Nifty during our group interview/audition for this job, I’d thought “well-dressed jock” and assumed he was all bulk and no brain. Working with him for the past year had proved that assumption wrong: he was smart and surprisingly sophisticated. But right now, he was more like a petulant ten-year-old than a pro-quality athlete turned paranormal P.I.

“Why can’t I…” he started to ask again, his voice not quite whining, but getting awfully close.

“Because you’re still contagious,” Venec said, not even looking at him. “That’s fine here, where we can protect ourselves, but letting you out among Nulls, who’d freak if they started coming over in sparkling green itches? Forget about it, Lawrence.”

I hid a smile. Venec would not appreciate knowing how very much more like a parent than a boss he sounded, right then. Benjamin Venec was many, many things: smart, savvy, fierce, an utter bastard when it suited him, and hotter than hell, with dark eyes that I still couldn’t identify the color of, because every time I looked into them I got seriously distracted, but he was absolutely not daddy material.

Nifty didn’t have the same physical—or emotional—reaction I did to Benjamin Venec, but Venec was the Big Dog, so Nifty subsided, spreading his hands—plate-size, and equally capable of pulling a pigskin out of the air or dragging a suspect to the ground—flat on the conference room table to keep from rubbing at his arms or legs. Since I’d been right behind him when the Istiachi lifted its tail and sprayed, I was sympathetic. That could have been me, if my coworker hadn’t massed twice my weight, and protected me from the attack.

It was funny, really. When I’d agreed to work for the mad Talent combination of Ian Stosser and Benjamin Venec, I never thought it would result in me facing down a foot-long land-squid and ducking toxic urine in order to get the skinny on a bank robbery.

J, my mentor, says I need to read more noir mysteries, to expand my expectations about this job. J still isn’t really 100% behind my career choice, but he tries to be supportive. I’m not sure Dashiell Hammett wrote about Istiachi, myself. More Lovecraft’s style. The land-squid were fatae, technically full and valued members of the Cosa Nostradamus, but you didn’t invite them to Gathers, and certainly never to lunch.

“Besides,” Venec went on. “I need you here to work on those files with Lou.”

There was a faint snicker that sounded like it came from down the table, which meant Nick, which wasn’t a surprise. Boy still didn’t have an inch of self-preservation in him. Nifty glared around the table, and went back to sulking. Lou merely nodded her head, accepting both the assignment and the partnering.

Nick was one of the Original Five. He looked like your basic geek…and okay, he was. But he had skills nobody else could match. Lou was new to our pack—she’d come on board two months ago, when the cases started coming faster and Stosser decided we needed more hands. The oldest of us by a decade, she had actual experience, having worked for a Null P.I.’s office before, but the first time she went out into the field as an active PUPI…

Well. It had been spectacular, and not in a good way. Lou’s control was fabulous under training conditions, and not so much in the real world. Now she worked the back office, making sure the research records were in order, the supplies properly kept, and we’re never caught without proper background files. At that, she’s a whiz. We didn’t know how badly we needed an office manager until we had one in place.

Venec waited to see if anyone was going to make any other comments. We weren’t. “After the backlog last week—” The Big Dog held up a hand to keep anyone from trying to explain or protest. “Yah, I know. That job was a goddamned disaster, and we were all stressed. But not a single one of you filed paperwork all case, and then every damn one of you dumped it on Lou’s desk Thursday afternoon. Tacky, people. She’s already gone through her initiation.”

“Así mero!” Lou muttered, leaning back in her chair, and I tried not to crack a grin. My father might not have taught me much Spanish before handing me over to J, but I’d learned enough over the years to know what she’d said—and even if I hadn’t understood the particular slang, her tone made it clear. The rest of my cohorts—middle-class whitebread to the core, even Nifty—were clueless.

“As I was saying, after the backlog of last week, I had wanted you all to do some skill-work—Sharon, you still need to work on your binding spells, and Pietr and Bonnie are due for a refresher course in ducking a tail.”

How someone who could disappear as thoroughly as Pietr when he was stressed couldn’t manage to shake a tail still amazed me. But it was true: for a ghost-boy, he stuck out like a sore thumb when he was focused on following someone.

My problem, according to Venec, was my hair.

I reached up and touched my short blond curls self-consciously. I’d thought the blue streaks were kicky. Venec had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that they were distracting, and unprofessional. And, apparently, they made me easy to pick out of a crowd.

We weren’t supposed to stand out; we were supposed to blend in, the better to find out things people didn’t want known. Or, as he put it, “This isn’t a peacock show, damn it.”

He was right, okay, he was absolutely right. But I’d spent most of my life standing out, gleefully and with encouragement from my mentor, and this…

This drabbing down to dullness was hard.

Even as I let that thought slip, there was a mental touch of something, not quite sympathy—never sympathy—but a rough buck-up sort of pushback, and I sighed. Of course Venec would know I was indulging in self-pity.

There was no such thing as telepathy, beyond the ping—a quick burst of information that was more visual than heard or seen—but about eight months ago we’d discovered that Venec and I could pick up each other’s emotions, even thoughts.

Worse and weirder than that: our current kept getting tangled together without our willing it, something that was supposedly impossible. Magic didn’t work that way.

The old texts, what Venec had been able to find, called it the Merge. It was rare, annoying, and not something either of us had wanted: We still didn’t want it. But, like Nifty’s rash, we had to deal with it and not let it interfere with the job.

I, at least, was dealing with it by total denial. So far, so good.

“You had wanted to give us a break?” Sharon asked, her coffee mug—a robin’s-egg-blue color that matched her blond perfection, well, perfectly—halfway to her lips. “Implying that you’re not going to…or not able to?”

Sharon liked to have things nailed down definite-like, the better to tear them apart. She was probably our best in-field operative. That scalpel-sharp brain, matched to the fact that she looked like a 1940s movie goddess, cool and lush at the same time, made her a killer investigator: people got distracted, and then she zoomed in without mercy, finding exactly what they were trying to hide.

The fact that she had the ability to sense when they were actively lying was just icing on that cake.

“Not able to,” Nifty said. As usual, he and Sharon were jockeying for lead dog spot, having to prove they were smarter, sharper, more alpha than the other. Then he ruined the superior attitude by scratching at his arm, making a face like a box turtle’s, all scrunched up and sour. We all glared at him, and he stopped, shamefaced.

The rash spread by contact. Venec might be able to treat the infection, but I didn’t want to be stuck under house arrest, too, because Nifty couldn’t let it heal. If he wasn’t careful, we were going to make him stay home.

“Not able to,” Venec agreed, carefully not seeing Nifty’s lapse so he didn’t have to yell at him again. “Ian handed over two files this morning.”

“Two?” I was surprised, yeah. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have two jobs going, these days; the Council overall might still not officially recognize us, but word had gotten out that they’d use us in need, and so the ordinary members of the Cosa Nostradamus were calling. But two coming in on the same day? That meant Nifty’s desk assignment wasn’t make-work; there wasn’t time or manpower to do that, even with Lou around.

“And where is Master Stosser, anyway?” Nick looked around like the boss might suddenly pop out of the woodwork—and he might, actually.

Ian Stosser might be the genius behind PUPI, but lately he’d left more and more of the day-to-day stuff to his partner. Since Venec was better at that anyway I hadn’t thought much about it. But Nick was right; Ian had been least-in-sight, recently.

“I’ll worry about Ian,” Venec said, his voice more of a growl than usual, reminding me why we called him Big Dog, other than the obvious PUPI pun. “You focus on what we pay you for. Two jobs. First’s a break-in, up in Fieldston. Sharon, you and Nick take that one.” He slid a plain brown folder across the table, and Sharon took it.

Ah, paperwork. Magic—current, in the modern parlance—runs in every human, but only a very small percentage of humans can actually manipulate it. They—we—are called Talent, and the ones who can’t use it are, rather condescendingly, called Nulls. Magic makes a lot of things easier, yeah. One of the prices we pay for Talent, though, is that we don’t interact well with things that run on current’s kissing cousin, electricity. You find a Talent who carries a cell phone or a PDA, and doesn’t have to replace it every other month, and I’ll show you a Talent who can’t use current worth a damn.

Okay, unfair. But even those of us who don’t use current every day found anything more sophisticated than a debit card got fritzed pretty fast. I hadn’t been able to carry an MP3 player since I was fourteen.

I’ve spent most of my life in openly Talented society, but some days I watch people using netbooks or smartphones, while we have to juggle paper and pen and memory, and I wonder if we really got the better part of the deal, after all.

“Where the hell is Fieldston?” Sharon asked, scanning the paperwork. “I swear, if we have to lug out to Long Island again…”

“End of the 1 line, up in the Bronx,” Nifty told her, capping the one-upmanship for the moment.

“Oh. Okay.” She wasn’t happy about heading all the way out there, but apparently so long as it didn’t involve having to leave the city, she could deal with it. Shar was our only born-and-bred New Yorker—I didn’t count, having spent most of my teens in Boston—and sometimes that just shone through.

“Client’s a Null, he owns a house up there, it got tossed last night and he thinks it was a Retriever. No idea why he thinks that, but if it is…”

I couldn’t stop myself from interrupting. “Venec, when was the last time someone actually pinned anything on an active Retriever?”

Retrievers were the cat burglars of the Cosa Nostradamus, Talent who naturally went invisible, like Pietr, only they controlled it, used it to get away with everything short of murder. If this guy’d been burgled by a Retriever, odds were that even if we could prove it, nobody would ever get the stuff back.

Those dark, irritated eyes glared at me, but I didn’t feel any actual irritation coming off him, just annoyance. “If the client thinks it was a Retriever, then that’s his call. You will determine the facts and find out who is responsible. And, if possible, get back the stolen items. Yeah,” he said when Sharon would have protested, “I know, you’re not the lost-and-found. If this guy did get hit by a Retriever, think about the egoboo, to hit back.”

There was that.

“Bonnie, you and Pietr get a floater on the East Side, off 14th.”

“Oh, maaaaaaan,” Pietr said, in an uncanny imitation of Nick, while I took the file with a grimace. Yeah, Venec was still pissed about the blue hair-dye job.

Lou and Nifty, for a change, looked relieved to be stuck in the office. Nobody wanted a floater. Ever.

Everyone else filtered out, but I stayed in my chair, looking at the folder.

“You guys make it look so easy.”

I twisted in my chair and looked at Lou, who had left, and then come back, standing in the doorway. “What?”

“Easy.” She made a gesture with one hand at some vague thing in front of her. “I know it’s not—god, how I know—but you never seem to hesitate. Stosser gives you an assignment, you absorb it, and head out. You call on your current, and you just assume that the current will do what you want. And it does.”

“If you’re still worrying about the incident with the piskies, they do that to everyone, first case….” I started to say, but she waved me off. That wasn’t it.

I waited. That was the first thing Venec had taught us: if you wait quietly long enough, people will tell you what you need to know.

“You’re what, twenty-four?” She made it sound like a disease.

“Yeah.” Twenty-three and a half, actually, but I didn’t think correcting her was going to make things better.

Lou stared at the apple in her other hand like she couldn’t remember picking it up, then shook her head and looked back at me. She had a serious face to start, and the look in her eyes now, a sort of despairing resignation, just deepened that impression. “I’m a decade older than you. I had solid training, good training. I’m high-res enough to hold my own. And I’m smart enough to understand how everything works, break it down, and make it better.”

All of that was true, and she knew it and she knew I knew it, so I just kept my mouth shut and waited for her to get to her point. But she didn’t. She just stood there, that apple in her hand, one bite taken out of it like Snow White’s last dinner.

I twisted back and stared at the paperwork in front of me, wanting nothing more than to pack up and head out to the floater, get it over with, if Lou wasn’t going to say anything more. But she stood there, and the silence drew out and got uncomfortable until the weight of social responsibility as hammered into me by J was like a third person in the room.

“You wouldn’t be on the team if you weren’t good,” I said, hoping that would be enough.

“I know that.”

“And you’ll learn the control needed to—”

Her snort interrupted me, and I was thankful. I could lie reasonably well, but I hated doing it. Honestly, though, I had no idea what she wanted me to say, or why she hadn’t gone to Sharon, instead. They were closer in age, had more in common… Why me?

“I’m never going to get it. Not out there, during an open case, with all that pressure. It’s just…like saying Pietr’s suddenly going to stop ghosting.”

She was probably right. Pietr hated the fact that he couldn’t control the way he faded from sight under stress, even though it was probably going to save his life some day.

“I just… I keep wondering why I can’t do it, what’s wrong with me…and then I wonder what else is wrong with me, what am I missing, and what happens if we discover that thing during a case? What happens if we screw up because I can’t handle something in the field, or one of you gets hurt, or…” She stopped, and took a bite out of the apple, teeth crunching into the flesh with maybe a little too much violence.

I was flailing, trying to figure out what she needed to hear. “That’s why we work together. So if one of us misses something, the other’s there as backup. We all make mistakes. Venec will be happy to remind you of that fact, if you’d like.”

Another snort. “You never doubt yourself, do you, Bonnie? Never once wonder if you’re not good enough, worry that you’ll do something so wrong there’s no recovering from it?”

“Of course I do. But everything short of death can be recovered from, and death kinda takes the worry out of the situation.” I hoped.

“Nice. I don’t think I was ever that cocky. Maybe that’s the problem.”

She didn’t mean to be cruel, but the words stung. I had a flash of J, years ago, sitting in his favorite chair in the library. The reading lamp was on, and Rupert, who had just been a brown-and-white mop of a puppy then, was sleeping at his feet. He had been gone for a few days, and I’d been happy to have him home, but he didn’t talk much and I’d come in to see what was up, if he maybe wanted dinner, or a drink. And in the light of the lamp, a pale umber glow against his skin, I’d seen the damp track of tears on his cheek.

Whatever he’d been doing, it hadn’t gone well.

“J?” I could have closed the door and left; he’d known I was there but he hadn’t acknowledged me, and so we could both pretend I hadn’t seen anything. But that wasn’t how our household worked.

“Not now, Bonnie,” my mentor had said, his voice a flat, gentle tone. “Right now I am not able to deal with anything beyond my own inabilities.”

I’d been fourteen then, and filled with a sense—nurtured by J—that hard work and skill could get me through anything. The idea that there was something J couldn’t do, that he might doubt his own abilities, was as foreign to me as the thought that he might sprout wings and fly.

I was older now, and had seen more of what life could and would throw at you on a daily basis, things that overwhelmed and dispirited as much as they lifted us and showed us joy. But…

“I’m sorry.” I was. “I didn’t mean to make light of what it is you’re saying…”

“But you have no idea what I’m saying, do you?”

I shook my head, then nodded. “No. I mean, I know what you’re saying, I just…”

Lou laughed, and it was tired but amused, not mocking. “But you’re twenty-four and have never failed at anything, have you?”

I had failed to bring my dad’s killer to justice. The bitterness of that still made my throat ache. But I’d dealt with it, accepted the failure as inevitable—and PUPI was my guarantee that never happened again. The failure had not been my inability, but the lack of a mechanism.

So I said the only thing that I knew was true. “We’re a stronger team, because you’re part of it.”

There was silence, and I risked looking back at Lou. She was staring out the window, and the look on her face was one I recognized: deep, fast-moving thoughts under the surface. I saw that look a lot, around here.

“Yeah,” she said, finally. “Okay.”

She tossed the half-eaten apple into the waste can in the corner, and left. I didn’t get the feeling I’d helped her solve anything.

Hopefully, I’d have better luck with the floater.

two

Pietr had been waiting, semipatiently, in the break room. He took one look at my face and bit back whatever he was going to say, just handing me my case and holding the door to the hallway. One of the great things about our office was that we were only a block away from the subway. The downside was that it was the 1 line, which meant leaving the west side required a crosstown bus, or a lot of walking. Fortunately, it wasn’t a bad day, weather wise.

We made it to the subway without speaking to each other, heading downtown toward the floater, and all the related joy therein, our kits—the assorted and alchemical tools of our trade—stashed at our feet, where nobody could walk by and grab them. And with every rattle and spark along the track, I felt more and more guilty about his being sent along with me. Normally, we take the assignments as they come and try not to whine too much. It’s not like we ever get handed a bouquet of spring flowers to investigate, after all, and if we did it would be infested by hornets and nose-rot. But I felt like I had to say something to Pietr, anyway.

“Sorry.”

Pietr turned his head slightly to look at me, surprised. “Why?”

“Venec’s punishing me for the hair disaster, and you’re stuck with it by association.”

“Oh.” His face went all closed and quiet, the way it does when he processes, and I watched him curiously. For all that he liked to cause mischief, Pietr tended to take his time to consider things. He was one of our thinkers—not that he couldn’t improvise, and quickly, but not in the instinctive, nearly impulsive way Nick did. Or me for that matter, although I used to pride myself on how well I thought shit through. Not enough, apparently.

Pietr didn’t have to think long, though. “You sure it’s the hair that’s chafing his…mood? Or that you’re the real target?”

Ow. I groaned, and looked away. “Don’t you start.”

The fact that Venec and I had sparks going on—okay, sparks like Macy’s fireworks—wasn’t something you could hide from a blind fish, much less an office of trained investigators. The guys liked to tease me about that occasionally. Not meaning any harm, just…the usual shit you get, when the job is tense and the laughs few. Pietr, though, had a different take on the situation. He and I were—on a very specifically, intentionally casual basis—sexual partners. So naturally, he figured that was also why he got stuck with the floater—because there was no way an investigator like Benjamin Venec, with more experience than the rest of us slammed together, didn’t also know about our off-hours agreement, no matter how much we kept it on the q.t.

He might have been right, in ordinary conditions. But Pietr, and the others, were missing a really important part of the puzzle. The pack knew there were sparks. They also knew I wasn’t exactly shy, normally, about going after what or who I wanted. So they had to figure I didn’t want to get involved with the boss, or that the boss had shot me down, for work-reasons. Which was all sorta true.

They didn’t know about the damned Merge, though. Venec and I both agreed to keep it that way. The fact that our current had somehow recognized each other and decided we’d make pretty babies, or some weird and seriously annoying thing like that, didn’t impress me at all, and Venec, well, he really did not like being told what to do by some biomagical force.

All right, it was more complicated than that, and according to Venec’s research the Merge is Serious Doings, but I kept control over my sex life my own self, thanks, anyway, Fate, and be damned if I was going to risk not being taken seriously in my career because my current wanted me to make babies.

I have nothing against babies. Eventually. When and if I decided to have them.

But every day we worked together, the pull got stronger. If I let down my mental walls even a little bit, I knew his mood, and if I reached just an inch, I’d get my fingers into his thoughts.

Same for him, with me.

It was making us…cranky. Venec was a fair guy, for all that he was a bastard, and wouldn’t play favorites or punish someone for a screwup once the lesson was learned. My hair color was only an excuse for him to blow off some of that crank into an actual reason. Knowing that rationally didn’t make the scolding hurt any less, though.

And Lou thought I never doubted myself? That was almost funny. The Merge had made me doubt my entire personal philosophy, change the way I interacted with people, second-guess every flicker and twinge of my emotions…. I needed to get a handle on myself. A distracted investigator could not do her job, and leaving this job was…not an option.

Pietr touched his hand on mine, lightly. “Bonnie…”

I shook my head, staring at the advertisement across the subway car instead of looking at him, listening to the chunk-chunk-whirr of the car’s movement, focusing on the subtle but real hum of current running along the third rail, instead of listening to him. “No. Stop. Work hours.”

I wasn’t talking about the touch, but what he was going to say. How the two of us blew off steam and gave comfort off-hours was off-hours. Neither of us wanted it to spill into the workday, especially if there was half a chance that it would screw up our professional relationship. Pietr and I worked well together. He backed me up, I pushed him on…we got things done.

That was why Venec had paired him with me, today. Probably. Anything else would be petty, and Benjamin Venec wasn’t petty.

Except, of course, when he was.

We rode the rest of the way in a more comfortable, companionable silence, switching from the train downtown for a crosstown bus that dropped us off at the Manhattan Bridge, and we walked the rest of the way, stopped by the usual tangle of the FDR Drive. Finding a safe place to cross would require some backtracking. Mass transit sucked when you were working a crime scene, but without a siren, cars could be even slower, and Translocation, using current to move someone from point A to point B, was a serious drain on the core of the person doing the sending, with the additional inherent risk of finding a safe place to land. You couldn’t actually land “on” someone—magic follows the same rules as physics, mostly, and two objects can’t occupy the same space—but you could get knocked over or hit by a moving object or person. As usual with magic, the odds of actually being seen doing anything was small. Nulls didn’t see what they didn’t want to see.

Oh, hell, Talent didn’t, either.

We stood there, and watched the traffic moving along the FDR, a steady stream of cars going too fast, and I heard a thoughtful hrmm rise from my companion.

“I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely no desire to become a greasy splat on the highway.”

The hrmm turned into a heavy exhale that wasn’t quite a sigh. “Me, neither.”

Especially since there was no guarantee that, in racing across the street, Pietr wouldn’t ghost out of sight, and get hit by an otherwise-paying-attention driver. After you worked with him for a while, you started thinking about things like that.

I looked around to make sure nobody was watching us, and pointed to a spot across the wide highway. He followed my finger with his gaze, and nodded.

Three seconds later, we were both on the other side, intact and unrun-over, the traffic now at our back. The sharp smell of the East River hit my nostrils, overwhelming even the smell of diesel behind us, and for a brief moment I was homesick for Boston, and J’s apartment overlooking the bay, where the smell of salt air was a daily greeting.

The moment passed, the weight of the kit in my hand reminding me what we were here for. I checked my core, making sure that it was settled, because the last thing you wanted to do was walk onto a scene with your core-current ruffled. I glanced over at Pietr, who looked to be doing the same.

“Ready?”

“Yeah.”

A short walk farther, the smell of the river getting stronger, and we were on a concrete dock that housed a parking lot, a warehouse of undetermined ownership, and, I presumed, a dead body.

We were met on the scene by a cop who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else but there. She was little, by cop standards, with thick black hair cut short, and a tea-stained complexion I’d have killed for. Talent—I thought I recognized her, but wouldn’t swear to it. New York’s a big city, and Talent don’t really clump together outside of Council functions and cocktail parties—or the occasional impromptu gossip session—but only a Talent, a magic-user like us, would have been left to guard this particular body. The NYPD had at least half a clue, even on bad days.

“You the pups?”

As questions went, it was pretty stupid, but there was a protocol that needed to be followed: I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know us. “Bonita Torres, Pietr Cholis,” I said. I waited for her to ask for official identification, but I guess she really didn’t care that much. We were here, which meant it wasn’t her responsibility anymore.

Pietr bypassed the cop and crouched to look under the orange tarp, and then backed up a step, almost involuntarily.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“You’re the investigator,” she said, looking bored. “You tell me.”

I gave her a sideways stare, and she took it without flinching. Great, now I was trying to tough-out the NYPD? Right.

I thought about pointing out that covering the body was not SOP, and that she might have ruined evidence, then decided that she already knew that and had her reasons.

“Bippis,” Pietr said. I was the nominal specialist on fatae politics, but Pietr knew a lot more about the various breeds than I did

“A what?” Distracted, I tried to place the word, and couldn’t.

“Bippis. I think that’s how it’s pronounced, anyway. I recognize the arms.”

I went to look at the body under the tarp, and saw what Pietr was talking about. The corpse looked almost human, if you could ignore the dark green skin that glittered like mica, but the arms were twice as thick around as mine, and all muscle, and extended like an orangutan’s down to its knees. And the head, which was hairless, and shaped like an anvil, almost. No wonder she’d covered it. Even in NYC, even out here where tourists didn’t wander, a corpse like that might draw notice.

“Is the color normal, or did it react to the water?” Weird question, but when it came to the fatae, it paid to ask. Or, actually we were paid to ask.

“Damned if I know.” He knelt down on the grass and touched the skin before I could remind him that we were supposed to wear gloves. Not because we might interfere with evidence—we collected data a little differently from Null CSIs—but because, well, look at what happened to poor Nifty. Some things bit even without teeth. Or even dead.

“Skin’s cool, but dry. I’m thinking the color’s natural.” He rubbed his fingers together thoughtfully. “No flaking, either.”

“You people freak me out.” That was our cop, looking a little queasy now, rather than bored.

“Human floaters are better?”

“At least they’re human,” she said, distaste evident in her voice.

Ah, bigotry, alive and stupid in New York City. She should be glad it wasn’t summer, yet. I didn’t think this guy would smell too good, a few hours in the heat.

“Somebody tied him up,” I said, taking Pietr’s lead and ignoring the cop, who returned the favor, wandering off to pointedly look away from whatever we were doing. I crouched beside him and pulled the tarp aside a little more without touching the corpse itself. “Hands and feet—they didn’t want him to be able to swim at all.”

“Assuming the breed could even swim. He looks solid, all muscle…might have sunk to the bottom, anyway,” Pietr said. “Alive or dead when he went in?”

“Oh, sure, give me the crap jobs.” I shook out my left hand, and mentally reached in to gather some current, selecting threads from the neat coil of multicolored, static-shivering magic inside my core, and drawing them up my rib cage, along my arm, and down into the fingers I’d just loosened.

Like so many of the cantrips and preset spells we’d been working on in the office the past year, this one hadn’t actually been tested in the field yet. It should work, but should and did weren’t always reading from the same page, and we’d had a few go rather spectacularly sour when tried under real-life conditions.

At least nobody was watching, or grading, this time.

I selected a specific thread, a glittery glinting dark blue that was almost purple, and directed it down away from me, into the corpse’s chest. The thread slipped through the flesh like a needle, and I could feel it tunneling down into the lungs. I don’t care who you are or what you did, the sensation of current moving like that at your command never got old.

Older spells, and modern traditionalists, used words to direct their current. Venec frowned on that: we weren’t here to entertain or impress—or intimidate—but to work. So I kept it simple. “Wet or dry?” I asked down the line of current, imbuing a sense of what I was looking for into the words, and waited. A scant second later, the current sent back its answer.

“Water in the lungs,” I said. “Our boy was tossed in still breathing. Cause of death probably drowning, unless there’s something funky about the Bippis physiology?”

“Not so far’s I know,” Pietr said. That meant absolutely nothing; there were more breeds within the Cosa Nostradamus than any human could ever encounter, or even read about, and most of ’em had at least a small community living here. New York City: melting pot of the world, and not all the ingredients were human.

“So, it was caught, tied up, and tossed in the water….” Pietr knelt again, opening his kit and taking out a brush and a small vial of something glittering. The brush was just a makeup brush, a very expensive one, and the glittery powder was fine-ground, electrically charged metal shavings. Metal conducted current the same way it did for electricity, allowing us to use the lightest possible touch and lowering the risk that we’d disturb evidence. He added a pinch of shavings to the brush, and swirled it over the top of the bindings, careful this time not to touch anything with his bare hands. His personal current could affect the shavings, even through the latex.

The dust settled, and Pietr cocked his head, studying the results. His current was so light, so subtle, I couldn’t even see a hint of it in the air over the bonds. Impressive, as always. I was good at gleaning, my memory capturing details I didn’t even notice I’d seen, but when it came to this kind of physical collection, Pietr had me beat.

I waited, shivering a little as the wind off the river reached through my jacket, while Pietr focused on the spell’s results. The shavings carried the spell into the dead body’s tissue, showing him the muscles that had last been used, and how much energy they had burned. “Yeah, it struggled. Another ten minutes, maybe, and the ropes would have given way.” They were thick twine, but definitely frayed, I had noticed that. On a human, they would have been enough to immobilize someone indefinitely. “But that kind of struggling would have used oxygen, and sped up the drowning. Whoever tossed it in knew what they were doing.”

I exhaled heavily, feeling the air leave my lungs, thinking about what was being said—and what wasn’t. “Which probably means Cosa, not just some scared humans looking to clean the world of a freak.” We’d been having trouble in the city—actually, we’d been having Troubles: humans—Talent and Null—bashing up against the fatae, and everyone coming out the worse for it. During the ki-rin “he said, she said” disaster, it had looked like the entire city was going to combust, but when we’d been able to prove that both humans and fatae had been involved, the flames died down to coals again.

Died down, but hadn’t gone out. I still had nightmares, sometimes, about the sound of the ki-rin’s voice when it admitted its guilt…regret and remorse that came too late, after four lives were ruined, one fatally.

I’d always been a sunny-side-up girl, but the world was a very gloomy place, some days.

“Maybe. Probably, yeah.”

“Joy.” And trying to get answers out of the fatae community was always such a pleasant experience. Even when they were human-friendly, they didn’t like to tell us anything. Except when they were telling us things we didn’t want to know, or trying to talk us into something to their benefit, of course.

“All in a day’s work,” Pietr said, putting away the dust and brush, and locking his case again. There were still things to be done, but you didn’t leave your kit open, ever.

“You gonna take the body, or not?” the cop asked, coming back from her wander of the perimeter to stand over my shoulder, getting way too close inside my personal space.

“You rush your lab techs this much?” I snapped, annoyed at being interrupted.

The cop showed a wide, toothy, happy-to-annoy-you grin. “Yep.”

“Great. Try to rush me again, and I’ll hotfoot you in ways that won’t wear off for a week.” She could try to match me, but we both knew she’d lose. I might not be a natural powerhouse the way some of my pack mates were, but you didn’t get to be a pup without picking up some serious skills, and I’d a year’s worth of training under my belt now.

She backed off.

I looked over at Pietr, who was still studying the body. “You want to do the gleaning?” It was normally my job, but there didn’t seem to be anything particularly difficult, and the Big Dogs like everyone to keep at least their pinkie in with that particular spell.

“Not really. But I will.”

Gleaning is our version of videography: we collect all the visual evidence, and replay it, back in the office, into a three-dimensional display. We tried, at first, to glean the emotional record, since current leaves trace, and a strong Talent can usually pick up strong emotions after the fact. Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that when you’re talking about the sort of violence we tend to uncover, that’s not always the smartest idea. We’d been caught up in it, and our first case had almost been our final one. So Venec laid down the law: physical evidence only.

While Pietr went into fugue-state to glean, I wandered down to the East River, or as close as I could get to it, standing on a man-made concrete pier. It looked like…water. Bluish-gray, little ebbs and currents swirling the surface, underneath… Who the hell knew what was underneath. The rivers, Hudson and East, were a hell of a lot cleaner than they had been once upon a time, but a tidal river could hide anything…at least until it pushed it to shore.

I stared out across the surface, anyway, looking. They’d pulled the body out here—I saw a little yellow flag fluttering in the breeze—but odds were it had gone into the river somewhere uptown and floated down. All the landing site would tell me was what size shoe the finders had worn, and how far they’d dragged him before he’d been wrapped up in official sailcloth and brought up here, in direct contradiction of every rule of Standard Operating Procedure the NYPD was supposed to follow. I looked, anyway. You never knew where or when or how something useful might turn up.

In this instance, though, I didn’t even find a candy wrapper that looked suspicious, just a lot of gunky mud I had to knock off my shoes when I got back up on the pier. I guess I understood why they’d moved the body, but it still pissed me off. I’d bet the NYPD hadn’t even bothered to do a basic sweep of the area before calling us in—something this obviously Cosa business, their protective filters snapped up and they didn’t see anything, didn’t know anything, didn’t have to write up anything.

I turned back to stare at the water again. I would do a deeper read, but it didn’t matter: between the fatae that lived in the local rivers and the ocean waters that fed it, and the power plant upriver, and the general ambient noise of however many thousands of Talent in this area on a daily basis, there was enough magical white noise to cover a multitude of clues, and not even Venec’s nose was good enough to sniff anything out of this.

I gave up, and went back to the body.

“I got it,” Pietr said, standing up and wincing as his knees cracked loud enough for me to hear.

“You’re getting old, old man.”

“It’s not the years, it’s the damned mileage,” he said, and he wasn’t joking. We were in our twenties, everyone except the Big Dogs and Lou, but some days I woke up feeling like the tail end of a forty-year-old. Current took it out of you. What we were doing, what we were seeing…that took it out of you, too.

I looked at the tarp. Someone had taken it out of our vic, too.

You didn’t end up bound-and-drowned by accident. Someone had killed this fatae, for whatever reason. We didn’t know who it was, if it left a family, if it had been murdered for cause or on a lark, or if there were other bodies waiting to be found, or if the killing was a one-off or if they would strike again. Hell, we didn’t even know the victim’s gender, or how to check.

I’d be carrying all those unknowns with me tonight when I tried to get to sleep, and keeping me company in my dreams, and when I woke up again, hoping against hope we’d be able to find even one answer…and knowing we might not.

Sometimes, this job sucked large, pointed rocks.

Pietr pulled the tarp back over the body and nodded to the cop that we were done. They’d cart the body off to the city morgue, to the little cold room in the back that nobody talked about, and stash it there until we figured out who the next of kin were. “You think Shar and Nick are having more fun?”

I glared up at the clear blue sky. “They’d better be.”

Sharon’s report later was the usual tersely professional recounting, but no, they hadn’t been having more fun.

Mass transit didn’t reach into their destination, so they had to walk from the bus stop, pausing to check their directions several times.

“Huh. Nice.”

Sharon let out a sniff that wasn’t entirely disagreement. “Gaudy.”

Nick shoved his hands into his jacket pocket and smirked. “I like gaudy. It takes a lot of money to be that tasteless.”

The house they were looking at wasn’t actually tasteless, although it leaned that way: a gleaming white, pseudo-Federalist structure on a lot not much larger than the house itself. There was enough frontage, barely, to allow for an imposing driveway from the street, and enough shrubbery to suggest privacy without hiding the grandeur of the house from the peasants driving by. Peasants were, clearly, supposed to be aware of their own insignificance in the face of such a house.

Sharon said as much, as they walked up the driveway, each of them carrying their kit in their off-hand, so as not to bump against each other. Nothing in the kits was terribly unstable, but some of their equipment was best neither shaken nor stirred.

“In this neighborhood, any peasants would get kneecapped by the private security force,” Nick said, not really joking. They had noted the discreet but blunt signs when they walked down the street: nonresidents were not welcome here, unless invited.

The double doors were white, with lions’-head knockers in brass, and a simple buzzer underneath.

Sharon touched the buzzer, and they waited.

“Yes?”

The woman who opened the door for them wasn’t the owner—she was dressed in a neat cream pantsuit that had the feel of a uniform, and had an air to her that was pride but not ownership.

Nick took the lead. Women of a certain age and position, Venec said, would respond more automatically to a man than a younger woman, especially a good-looking man. You used whatever tools you were given. “We’re from PUPI. Mr. Wells is expecting us.”

“Oh.” The woman wasn’t flustered, just checking them out, her gaze taking in the details of Sharon’s neat, dark blue suit and pumps, and Nick’s more casual slacks and loafers. He was wearing a leather jacket, but it was quality enough to pass muster, apparently, because the housekeeper nodded once, and stepped back to let them in.

“Mr. Wells is in the sunroom,” she said. “Please follow me.”

They both took in the details, not obviously scanning their surroundings. The foyer was larger than either of their apartments, with marble floors and a carpet that was probably worth more than they earned in a year.

“Ouch,” Nick said softly, and Sharon’s gaze followed his as the housekeeper led them down the wide hallway. The left-hand side of the hallway boasted only closed doors, but to the right there were archways opening to a great room with soaring ceilings and expensive furniture—that had been torn apart. Fabric was shredded, as though huge claws had used it as a scratching post, and cabinet doors were ripped off their hinges, antique-looking carpets shoved in a crumpled pile against the walls.

“I don’t think this was a Retriever,” Nick said softly.

“No?”

“It just doesn’t feel right. Retrievers are pros. They don’t leave behind any trace, much less damage.”

Sharon nodded. “Although, it could just have been the owner’s temper tantrum after being robbed.”

“You really think one guy could get that mad?”

Sharon merely looked at Nick, one delicate eyebrow raised. Anger could make even the calmest, most sedate people do things you wouldn’t expect; they both knew that. And they had no idea who—or what—their client might be.

“In here, please,” the housekeeper said, pushing open an interior door, and ushering them inside.

The sunroom was a surprisingly cozy place after the grandeur of the rest of the house, filled with orchids and small potted trees placed to catch the appropriate light coming in through oversize windows, and a series of comfortable-looking chairs upholstered in dark gray fabric. Each chair had a small table next to it, perfect for a newspaper or drink.

Nothing in this room appeared to have been disturbed, not even a trace of dirt on the parquet floor where a plant might have been knocked over.

The woman stopped the moment they entered the room. “Mr. Wells.”

It was less an introduction than an announcement, the way a museum docent might say “The Mona Lisa.” The client was—to all appearances—an ordinary sixty-something-year-old male. Tall and well built, with skin just naturally dark enough to avoid assumptions of WASPy wealth but not so much that an observer assumed any particular ethnicity. His head was clean-shaven, his face lined and slightly creased around the eyes and mouth. His clothing was rich-man’s casual—a pair of expensive twill slacks, and a black pullover sweater that obviously was cashmere, and not a cheap single-ply weave, either.

“These are the—”

“The investigators I hired.” His voice was cultured, almost lazy, with an oddly clipped drawl. “Yes. Thank you, Joyce. You may go now. Please remind the staff not to touch anything in the affected rooms.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please,” the client said, waving to a grouping of cloth-upholstered chairs off to the side of the room. “Be seated.”

They sat. The chairs weren’t as comfortable as they looked.

“You had a break-in last night.” Nick took the lead without checking with Sharon, continuing how they had begun with the housekeeper. It was fifty-fifty how the client would respond, but Sharon’s truth-sensing would be a strength here, and it was easier to use it when she could focus her attention entirely on the subject, without worrying about how to phrase the questions. And Nick, while not diplomatic, could do a solid guy-to-guy thing. So Sharon sat and watched, and listened.

“Yes. It happened early this morning, actually. Around 3:00 a.m. We heard the noise.”

“We?” They knew already, from the original report, but the more the client talked, the more detail they could pick up, even if the client didn’t think it was important.

“My staff—Joyce, my housekeeper, and Clark, my cook. I live alone, otherwise.”

“And you did not go down to investigate?”

Wells looked surprised, and a little amused. “I think not. I assumed that the silent alarm had gone off and the police would be arriving soon. Joyce and Clark both know to stay in their rooms in such a case, to ensure that they are not mistaken for the intruder by the police. That would be most unfortunate.”

“Indeed. And the police came…”

“They did not. The intruder managed to bypass all the sensors. Neither my security firm nor my local police department knew anything had occurred until I informed them.” His voice boded not-well for both security firm and police. “It was then I suspected something out of the usual had occurred.”

Magic, he meant, although like most Nulls he resisted actually saying the word.

“When I came down this morning, after the noise had ended, I found…” He sighed, shaking his head. “Wanton destruction.”

So it hadn’t been a temper tantrum. Or the client was lying. Nick didn’t look at Sharon, keeping all of his attention on the client. “What valuables were taken?”

Wells frowned, a slight furrowing of his expression more than any downturn of his lips. “Very little. A few…trinkets, things I’ve had for a long time, but nothing of particular value beyond the sentimental. The cash in the safe, but none of the papers—securities and whatnot. Most of the truly valuable items are kept in my vault in the bank, of course.”

“Of course,” Sharon echoed, almost involuntarily. Neither pup believed it for a moment. This was the sort of man who kept everything he really valued close at hand. Sharon would also have said he wasn’t a man who had sentimental attachment to anything that wasn’t also worth a great deal, financially.

She’d worked for the type before; they made your life miserable, watching over everything you did no matter how good you were because they didn’t trust anyone, not really, no matter how many times you’d proved yourself.

It made sense now, that Venec had sent the two of them, and not Bonnie or Nifty. They were good, but Nifty could get his ego tied up in the job, and Bonnie was so honest, someone like this would assume her openness meant she was hiding something. Both those things, with someone like Wells, could cause a problem if he took it the wrong way. Sharon and Nick, on the other hand, looked like exactly what they said they were, and that any sneaky bits they invoked were working for the client, not against him.

Sharon, particularly, excelled in making people believe that she was totally, unquestioningly, on their team. Wells barely gave her a glance now; she had become an appendage, the same as his housekeeper and his gardener.

“I have put together a list of everything I saw that was missing. You will want to examine the site of the intrusion, now?” It was less a question than a gentle order.

“Yes, thank you,” Sharon said, standing up when it looked like Nick was going to try and continue the questioning. Her partner, used to following his coworker’s cues, shut his mouth and stood up, as well. Rather than call his housekeeper back, Wells escorted them himself.

“The report said that you suspected a Retriever,” Sharon said, both because she was curious, and because he would wonder why they hadn’t asked, if they didn’t. If he had been a member of the Cosa it would make sense, but Wells was, unquestionably, Null. “Did you have specific reason to believe…?”

“I have reason to believe that the alarm system I have set up is suitable to detect any normal means of intrusion,” he said. “I also paid a great deal of money to install a spell-detector on the perimeter of my property, to prevent any—” he paused and Sharon and Nick both had the sense that he was about to say “of you people” and changed in the last breath— “unwanted intrusions of a magical sort. Therefore clearly it had to be someone of exceptional skill.”

Nick coughed, smothering a laugh. Sharon kept her face poker-still. Their client had been sold a bill of goods—there was no way to detect a spell being cast, short of actually being there when it hit. Venec and Bonnie had been working on it as a side experiment, and the current just wouldn’t hold in place long enough to be useful—you could do a short-term thing, maybe a few hours, but after that, it just faded.

The only thing worse than Nulls who were current-blind were Nulls who thought they knew all about current…and didn’t have a clue.

Sharon noticed that the client hadn’t really answered the question about why he suspected a Retriever specifically, which was interesting. Was that deliberate or was he avoiding giving them some piece of information? She had no chance to follow up on that thought, however. Wells stopped in front of a heavy wooden door, and slid it open. “This is where the worst damage was done.”

It was, clearly, his study, and Wells was right, the damage was far worse here than even the room they’d seen before. There was an oversize desk made of some deep red, clearly exotic, wood, that had at one point been placed against the far wall, based on the indentations in the carpet. Now, though, it lay on its side, in the middle of the room. That alone would have taken a lot of muscle power—or a serious push of current. The client was a normal, late-middle-aged human Null. Unless he was hiding a Hulk-like alter ego, he was out from under suspicion in the damage, at least.

The books on the built-in shelves had all been crashed to the floor, and pages lay scattered like feathers after a plucking. A floor lamp lay on its side, the shade shredded much like the upholstery they had seen earlier, and there was the sparkle of glass in the Persian carpet. Out of the corner of her eye, Sharon saw Nick pull a pair of latex gloves out of his pocket, and stretch them on quietly, without fuss.

Not that the gloves mattered in terms of evidence—most of what they collected couldn’t be smudged by a physical touch—but protection would keep any of the tiny shards from sticking in his fingers.

“You look over the floor and shelves,” Sharon said, with a nod at his gloves. “I’ll look over the desk, see if our intruder left any hints behind.” If the intruder had used current, there should still be signature left, especially if he was feeling strong emotion when he went on his rampage. So long as she was only testing for it, and not actually trying to collect it, she should be within Venec’s safety guidelines.

Neither of them were Bonnie-level in terms of their reading and gleaning abilities, but they could do what was needed.

Sharon set down her own kit, and took out a small object wrapped in a silvery chamois. Unwrapping it revealed a chunk of crystal about the size of her thumb, a hazed pale pink chunk of rose quartz.

It had been a birthday present from Bonnie, a few months ago. Sharon wasn’t big on aids, but Bonnie swore that using a focus would help her, and none of them were going to refuse anything without at least testing it. Sharon had planned to do that testing in a more controlled circumstance, but…

The crystal felt warm in her hand, but otherwise it just lay there, more a distraction than not. Bonnie had claimed that it would warm to her, connect her to herself more fully, and deepen her fugue-state without losing touch with the actual world.

Nothing happened. Sharon slipped the stone back into her chamois, and went to work without it

The client stood and watched them for a few minutes, but when they didn’t do anything more interesting than run their hands lightly over the furniture, seemingly lost in thought, he gave a quiet snort and left them to it.

That was exactly why Venec had them work low-key, not showy. People who were bored were less likely to hang around and interfere.

After giving the desk a full once-over, Sharon sighed and shook her head, waiting until Nick blinked his way out of his own fugue-state, and looked at her.

“I’m not picking up anything,” she said. “You?”

“Annoyance,” he said. “But I’m not sure if it’s his, or mine. Otherwise, this place is clean as a washed-down whistle.”

“Like someone cleaned up after themselves?” The perp, she meant, not the victims.

“Maybe,” he said. “Or like they weren’t here at all.”

Not a Talent, he meant. “Client may not know as much as he thinks he does,” Sharon said, “but I’m inclined to agree with his conclusions, whatever I think of his logic. There’s no way a Null could have gotten in, and done all this. Not in the time he claimed, without a clear point of entry.”

Nick lifted one narrow shoulder in a shrug, a move he had stolen from Pietr. “Fatae? Some of them are pretty good at fast and sneaky, and those slashes might have been claws. That’s a guess, though. I’m nowhere good enough to pick up an unknown fatae trace. Hell, I’m not even sure I could pick up a known breed, unless I’d encountered it before. We need to find out more about the client, see if he might have pissed off any of the Cosa- cousins.”

Sharon considered it, then put the crystal into her suit pocket, and lifted her kit up off the carpet. “If he did, Lou will turn it up, and Venec will let us know. Come on, let’s check the other rooms.”

They both had the bad feeling they weren’t going to find anything useful, but by god, they’d check every inch, first.

three

Not every aspect of PUPI involved investigation. Some times, it required suasion and statistics. That particular part of running the company they left to Ian Stosser.

Or, more to the point: that part, he kept for himself.

Ian stood in front of his audience, making eye contact with selected members seemingly at random, and infused his words with the firm and fervent belief he had in his team, his methods, and his results. “In the year we have been accepting clients, our success rate has been a rather significant 87%. Of the remaining 13%, we still managed to bring up enough information to pass along to Null authorities. The fact that my team has not yet been able to close the case you referenced—” organ-leggers, an open ticket that still annoyed Ian “—merely emphasizes the difficult and delicate nature of the work we do. More, that we are the only force that is both willing and capable of taking on cases involving magic.”

He did not emphasize the willing part, but knew that his point had been taken, here among those who could do good, and instead chose to hamstring his efforts.

Someone in his audience tapped a gold-plated pen on the table, impatiently. “There are others who work with magic, Stosser. You’ve been involved with some of them yourself.”

“Private investigators, working on a borrowed shoestring and their own instincts.” That was damning the half-fatae detective, who was actually reasonably capable, but Ian Stosser did not let anyone get the upper hand in presentations he was making. “My team is trained to use science as well as magic, harnessing their instincts into verifiable and logical routes, using teamwork to pool our respective skills into something greater. Perhaps more importantly, we determine the evidence not by who hires us, but by what the investigation reveals as facts.”

The feel of the room remained resistant. The individuals gathered here didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to know, and most especially didn’t want to have to change their minds.

Ian Stosser was too trained, too skilled to sigh, and to turn up his current-driven charisma in a room filled with already-suspicious Talent of comparable skill would be a disaster. Instead, he ratcheted his body language up a notch, using the cast of his shoulders, the cant of his hip, even the way he rested his arm to project a calm, reasoned, pragmatic appeal that would—hopefully, ideally—reassure them without their knowing why they were reassured. That was the trick with the Council: most of them so relied on current, they forgot the basics of human psychology, too.

“What I am asking of you is a rational decision, not an emotional one,” he continued. “When a crime has been committed, the offender must be determined, and punished. We are all in agreement about that.” A firm, if subtle nod, and he was pleased to see several in his audience nod back, almost automatically. “I am offering you, again, the way to determine, fairly and without prejudice, where the responsibility might rest, in any given situation. That way the proper individuals will be taken to task.”

A voice from the far end of the table, previously quiet, spoke up then. “And what happens when you cannot determine, for certain, who that party is? Or, worse, when you accuse the wrong person?”

Once. Once, they had… Ian beat down his irritation.

“We do not claim to be perfect,” he said smoothly. “We do claim to be extremely good. And that, sirs, madams, is more than you have right now, with your refusal to accept the results of our investigations into your deliberations.”

It was the same song and dance he’d done twice before, for each regional Council, crafting his argument to each specific region’s objections, designed to entice each specific Council with what he thought they wanted.

According to Cosa history, the Mage Council had been split into regional areas back in the 1800s to keep them from becoming too powerful and overshadowing the lonejacks, or unaffiliateds, in each region. In theory. In practice, it was because the seated Council members didn’t trust each other any more than the lonejacks trusted the Councils et al. So far, two Councils had voted to accept his people’s testimony to their deliberations. The Eastern Council was not one of those, and their refusal, here in PUPI’s base of operations, where they could see the good being done directly, stuck in Ian’s craw. He took that personally.

“Already, the Midwest Council has benefited from our work. You know this.” The pups had determined the truth of a murder, causing some embarrassment to the Council, true, but saving them considerable danger going forward by revealing the presence of a stone killer for hire, who also happened to be a Talent. “And you, yourself, saw the results of our efforts.” He did not go into detail; he didn’t have to. The events of the previous spring, where they had exposed a scam that might have set human against fatae, had been covered up for fiscal and political reasons, but they all knew the truth. Had it not been for PUPI, the damage could have been devastating—and bloody.

“You make strong points.” Madame Howe, the leader of the Eastern Council, was a delicate woman, but nobody ever made the mistake of thinking her frail or gentle. The Talent who worked for her called her the electric dragon, and it wasn’t an affectionate nickname. “And we appreciate your restraint while making this presentation.”

She might have been speaking for the entire Council. Or she might have been using the royal “we.” Ian merely inclined his head to her, accepting both the reminder that they were his equals, in current-usage, and that his part in this meeting was over.

“I shall leave you to your discussions, then. Madame, Council members.”

He left the wood-paneled conference room at exactly the right pace, neither hurried nor lingering, counting off the steps deep in his head. When the door closed behind him, he did not stop or breathe a sigh of either relief or disgust, but kept moving, headed not for the elevator, but the stairs. He needed to move.

The hard sound of his shoes in the stairwell gave him something to focus on, and once out on the street, he let his stride lengthen, taking full advantage of the mid-morning lull in street traffic. He pushed all his excess energy, both physical and magical, down through his hips, down his legs, and out into the pavement, a sort of walking meditation and grounding all at once.

Everything was working; it was working exactly the way he had planned. They had enough work coming in that—for the first time since starting this venture—he wasn’t paying the bills out of his personal account. If the Council relented, and approved PUPI to their members, they might actually have more work than they could handle. He would need to rearrange the office structure, bring in another investigator, maybe set up a separate lab, so they could work out new spells without worrying about shorting out the entire building….

His mentor would warn him against building a business plan on ifs. Stosser believed that it was almost impossible to fail, betting on the trouble that the combination of magic and human folly could create. Even if this Council refused to approve them, eventually they would gain clients from within these ranks, as well as beyond. Ian Stosser took a long view, always. In the long view, PUPI was needed, and therefore would thrive.

Now that the presentation was over, however, another worry insisted on worming its way into his thoughts.

Benjamin.

Ian frowned, a sudden surge of irritation and worry sparking the air around him, and setting off a car alarm on the street as he passed by. They had been friends since they were teenagers, the kind of friendship you counted on, even if you didn’t see each other for years. Ian hadn’t hesitated for a moment when thinking of a partner for this venture, hadn’t hesitated in dragging the other man away from his life in another city, from whatever else he might have planned, and handing him the team of green Talent to mold into proper investigators.

Ben, as Ian expected, had taken to the new venture perfectly. It had given the other man a focus, a mission, a purpose he had been lacking before, wasted on jobs that were beneath his skills. The fact that the mission served his, Ian’s own vision…well, they all benefited.

But the past few months, his partner had been…off his game. Distracted, and even more short-tempered than usual. Ben never took it out on anyone, but Ian, a trained reader of what people didn’t want known or seen, saw the pressure building under his friend’s skin.

Whatever it was, whatever the cause, it had to be lanced and drained, before it got infected. Ian had his suspicions about what was going on, but he didn’t act on suspicions alone.

Stepping off the curb to hail a cab, Ian reached up and undid the clip that had held his flame-red hair in a respectable fashion, letting the strands fall down his back, spreading with current-static against the fabric of his suit. The tension in his scalp lessened only slightly. When a cab pulled to the curb to deposit its passenger, he strode forward and claimed it ahead of some schlub half a step behind.

“Uptown,” he said to the driver, then gave the office address. The car jerked forward into traffic, and he tried to relax against the plastic upholstery. His attempts to figure out what was wrong had, so far, met with “leave it alone, Ian,” and then a crankier, more laden “back off, boss,” when he approached Torres. Ian would be the first to admit that he wasn’t any sort of relationship guru, but when even he could see something simmering….

Were it anyone else, once the direct approach was blocked, Ian Stosser would have gone the circuitous route, finding a weak spot in someone else’s armor, cajoling and coaxing and out-and-out pulling as needed, wiggling the information he wanted that way. He was a trained politician, a born schmoozer. If he wanted to know something, he could and would discover it.

Except…this was Ben. His best friend. Possibly, if he was going to be blunt, his only friend. And for the first time in his life, Ian Stosser didn’t feel comfortable about getting what he wanted, not if it meant digging into Ben’s personal life after he’d been warned off.

Ben wanted to deal with it, whatever “it” was, himself. And so, Ian was going to have to accept that.

For now.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to keep an eye on the situation. And, if needed, step in. Ben’s life was his own; except where it had an impact on PUPI. Then, he belonged to Ian.

“You gonna eat that?”

“Yes.” I glared at Pietr, clutching at my pastry defensively. “Paws off.”

After we’d come back and filed our report of the scene, complete with a dump of our gleanings, Pietr and I ended up in the front break room with Nifty, pouring pitch-black coffee into ourselves and hoovering up the crumbs from a box of really disgustingly stale doughnuts, trying to figure out what sort of fatae could have taken down our floater.

We’d all agreed that it couldn’t have been human, not short of five strong men, anyway. Bippis were not only strong, apparently, they were dense; their bones weighing twice what a human’s would. Hard to break, even harder to shove around. Pretty easy to drown, though; Pietr had been right about that. So that meant looking through our roster of the fatae breeds to see if any of them matched the required muscle, and of those, if we knew of any that had a bad relationship with Bippis, or cause to do one harm. Bippis didn’t harm each other—it was some kind of built-in safe lock in the breed.

“The problem with looking at possible conflicts,” Nifty said now, “is that the odds were this was a totally personal thing, one-on-one rather than breed-specific. So it could be some fatae breed who’s coexisted peacefully with everyone for generations, just suddenly having a freak-out. Statistically—”

Pietr groaned. Nifty did love his stats.

“Statistically,” Nifty went on, undeterred, “most killings are unplanned, spur-of-the-moment, rage-or-jealousy driven kind of things, and the fact that the vic wasn’t human doesn’t change any of that.”

“They’d tied its hands and legs with rope it couldn’t break, and thrown it into the river, still alive. That feels like something more than spur-of-the-moment anger.” I looked at the others, and got nods, Nifty’s more grudging than Pietr’s. “So we start big, determining which breeds could actually manage to do the deed, and then work our way down to the smaller scale of motive.”

Somewhere, I was pretty sure, someone had collected data on every single fatae breed ever. It was the kind of thing mages used to do, assigning their students twenty pages a night to copy, or something. Not even Venec’s mentor, who was a pretty notable scholar in this age, had access to records like that now, though; they’d probably been lost in one of the Church purges, or during the Burning Time here in America.

What we had was a wooden, four-drawer filing cabinet, très old-fashioned, that was starting to fill up with folders on each breed as we encountered it, all the notes and specifics, and whatever photos or drawings we could lay paws on. I was looking through the Ds, glancing and discarding, when I saw the file for “demon.” The label wasn’t in my handwriting; it was Venec’s. I had the urge to open it, see what he had put in there, and if he’d mentioned the one we’d seen in the diner downtown, last winter. And if he had mentioned it, if he’d mentioned anything about why we were down there.

Stupid. Stupid, and pointless, and the kind of poking around a lovesick twelve-year-old did, damn it. If he did mention being there, the citation would be entirely about seeing the demon, maybe something about the case we were working on then.

He wouldn’t have mentioned the fact that I’d tracked him down to a goth club, off-hours, or that we’d ended up in that diner to talk, for the first time, about the damned connection we had that was supposed to make us lifetime soul mates or something.

Neither of us wanted that, particularly, or intended to follow up on it, and sure as hell were not about to put it down anywhere even semiofficial, in writing.

No. He wouldn’t have mentioned any of that, no more than I mentioned it to anyone, not even J, my mentor.

My secret. My headache.

Even now, if I let my wall down a little, I could feel Venec’s current-presence. I could tell you where he was, more or less, and if I concentrated I could tell you what he was feeling.

And if he let down his walls at the same time, I could tell you what he was thinking. By all research and rules, that was supposed to be impossible. I really wished that were true.

As extra-special treats went, the Merge wasn’t. I had no interest in being told by some magical mojo who I was supposed to be knocking boots with, or cuddling up thoughtwise, and I sure as hell didn’t want some mystical force determining who I extraspeshul magically bonded with. Oh, hell, no.

Thankfully, Venec had the same opinion of the entire thing. Unlike the downtime thing Pietr and I had going, there was no way to cordon off what was between us, safely; even I, queen of let’s-try-anything, knew that. It would change everything, disrupt everything, and neither of us had any desire to screw up the most important thing in our lives—this job—for…

For whatever the Merge actually was. Venec might still be digging at it, trying to find answers, or at least explanations. If he’d found anything, he hadn’t told me, and I hadn’t asked. For once in my life, I was perfectly content to not know about something.

Yeah, I admitted it. I was afraid that if I started poking at it, explored the possibilities even in my thoughts, it would get stronger just by being exposed to air or something. For once in my life, I wasn’t going to take the risk.

I’d just moved my hand away from the demon file and pulled the next one on my list when Sharon came out of the back rooms, Nick half a step behind her. She was as immaculate as ever, Nick was rumpled and scrawny as ever, and yet they shared the exact same look of annoyance. Whatever they’d gotten on their assignment, it wasn’t open and shut.

“Bad scene?” I asked, putting the file down.

“Useless scene,” Sharon said, dropping herself onto the sofa next to Pietr. “The place was trashed, no sign of entry or exit, no way any of the three people in the house could have done it, even if they had cause, and while the place was wrecked, there were only a handful of things actually taken, according to the owner. He’s dead set on it being a Retriever, mainly I think because that makes him feel important, that someone hired a pro. My bet is some Talent with a grudge, and most we’d be able to get them for would be breaking and entering.”

“What she’s really pissed about,” Nicky said, “is that the client must lie for a living. Even I could tell he was full of shit, but she couldn’t pinpoint anything specific to call him on.”

“What does he do?” I asked, prepared to hear banker, or lawyer, or CEO of a pharmaceutical company.

“Owns a national rental car franchise,” she said. “I wouldn’t rent from them even if I knew how to drive.”

Huh. “What did Venec say?” I asked. I knew he was lurking in the back office; even with my walls up I could feel him, the way you feel a storm coming, the static in the air almost a solid, living thing. He must have just finished debriefing them.

“He told us that lack of trace was a roadblock not a disaster, the client was probably an ass but he was still the client. And to get the hell out of the office, clear our brains, and let the investigation wait until the morning.” Sharon had an odd look on her face, and the more I looked the less it seemed like annoyance, and more like she’d bitten into what she thought was a lemon and gotten a peach, instead. “I don’t think he’s taking this case seriously.”

Nifty pointed out the logic-fail in that. “Venec takes everything seriously.”

Sharon rubbed at her face, and nodded. “Yeah, I know. I just… The client’s an idiot, the house is trashed but nothing of serious value was taken…. I’m not sure I’m taking it seriously, either.”

Sharon, like Venec, took everything seriously. I was starting to wonder about this case. It was almost enough to be thankful for a floater. Almost.

“Screw it.”

I looked over at Pietr, who had spoken far louder than his norm. “It’s not like we’re getting anywhere with this, either.” He scowled at our piles of so-far-useless paperwork. “Any trace there might have been was washed by the river. You know it, I know it, even the cop knew it. We could stare at files all night and get nowhere, and it’s not like the NYPD will appreciate our exhaustion.”

We dealt with the weird shit in an exchange of favors, keeping the unspoken lines of communication open, but nobody ever took formal notice of anything; he was right.

“And it’s not like the stiff’s in any rush. So I say screw it. We have birthdays to celebrate, anyway.”

“We do?” That was news to me; we’d just celebrated Sharon’s, and I couldn’t think of anyone else….

Pietr closed his own file, and stood up. “Someone, somewhere, is being born. That calls for a drink.”

It was tough to argue with that logic. So we didn’t.

The after-work crowds at Printer’s Devil, down by Port Authority terminal, was the usual mix of depressed-looking newspaper geeks and overly cheerful tourists who’d gotten lost off Times Square. I couldn’t remember why we kept coming here, except for the fact that it wasn’t convenient to anyone’s place, and therefore was neutral ground. Also, they made the best damn spicy empanadas north of Miami.

We’d gotten one of the high narrow tables in the back and crowded around it. With six of us, there was barely enough room for our drinks and elbows, but it beat the hell out of trying to stand in that crowd. Nick, on his second mojito, was waving his arms, retelling a story that we’d all heard three times already. “I swear, I thought the conductor was going to blow something out his ear. And Lou’s sitting there, looking at him…”

Lou rolled her eyes, not saying anything. She was still figuring out how to fit in with us, but when you get razzed by Nick you can’t really get annoyed, because he takes it so cheerfully when the tables are turned.

But it was maybe time to step in. “Oh, come on, that one wasn’t her fault,” I said.

“Yeah, but she thought it was!”

Nick cracked up as he delivered the line, and even Lou smiled a little. He was right; that had been what made it so funny.

We were all still wound up, but it wasn’t quite so bad. Venec and Stosser had meant to make us efficient when they molded the pack, but it had also created a sort of safety zone. We knew the kind of shit we’d seen; we didn’t have to talk about it, to explain why we needed distraction.

“Don’t turn around, you’ve got an admirer,” Pietr said, leaning across the narrow table to shout in…my ear? Nifty’s? I couldn’t tell. So, of course, we both looked.

Speaking of distraction. Contrary to some people’s wet dream of bisexuality, I didn’t drool over everything that breathed. Pietr, yes. Venec, yes, even without the Merge. Sharon had piqued my interest briefly, but Nick, Nifty, and Stosser weren’t my type either physically or emotionally. This woman, on the other hand….

She looked right back at me, and smiled, the kind of smile I recognized: Hi, it said. Will you smile back at me?

So I did. She was a redhead, the kind of shaggy strawberry that only comes naturally or with a lot of money, and her eyes were wide-set and light-colored, and she had a body that probably wouldn’t raise the pulse of any red-blooded American male, unless he recognized the lean and agile muscles flexing as she walked. Toward me. There was a god, and she was gracious.

“Once again, Bonnie scores, and the rest of us strike out,” I heard Nifty mutter, and I spared him a consoling pat on the hand. “You do all right for yourself, guy. But this one seems to be more about the girl parts.”

“I’m allll about the girl parts,” Nick said in a singsong falsetto, picking up the tail end of our conversation. I wasn’t looking at him, but from the solid whap-noise, I was guessing that someone—probably Sharon—had just slapped him upside the head to shut him up before my visitor made it to our table.

“Hi.” She had an ordinary but pleasant voice, blandly Northeast, and her smile was even nicer up close.

“Hi. I’m Bonnie.” I slid off my chair to move away from my usually-but-not-always-discreet coworkers, and tilted my head to better look at my new friend. She was taller than me, and her eyes were definitely hazel-green and very pretty.

“Joan.” She gave me her hand, and it was smooth and soft and strong, and…

I didn’t feel anything. Not even the shiver of anticipation that usually came when someone gave me that kind of once-over.

Oh, damn it. Just, damn it.

It wasn’t that I was in a guy-phase, either. I’d gotten hit on last week by a very nice example of my type, slightly scruffy and broad-shouldered, and enough smarts to balance out the bad-boy looks…and I’d smiled and felt nothing other than a passing admiration for the package.

Even my recent off-work time with Pietr had been about release and comfort, not the sort of enjoyable, mutual passion I was used to feeling. I was…not dead inside, but rather unnervingly calm. Like a very still lake, when you’re used to an ocean.

I’d liked to have blamed it on some kind of off-season flu, or overwork, or maybe some horrible current-disease that was eating my libido but that wasn’t it, not exactly. If I let my guard down, or lingered too long, late at night, in my deepest thoughts, my entire body came alive like someone had dunked me in liquid current, every nerve tingling and wanting.

Just not for any of these would-be playmates.

The Merge. The stupid, unwanted, unasked for Merge, and Benjamin Venec’s own innate, dark-eyed appeal. Damn it, thrice.

I knew it was probably a lost cause, but Joan was cute as hell, and I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. Maybe getting to know her over a few drinks….

“You want to join us?” I asked, turning to indicate my for-now demure coworkers. A look of disappointment touched Joan’s face: no, she really didn’t. She wanted me to go with her, somewhere else, right now.

Some of the shiny rubbed off at that. Even if I’d been at loose ends and hot to trot, a quick hit wasn’t my thing. I’m a bit of a hedonist, yeah, but I liked to know the person I was with, more than just a name and a favorite drink. So with a regretful smile, and not really any regrets, I let that fish slip back into the sea and went back to my team.

“You feeling all right, dandelion?” Nick almost, almost managed to sound like he was seriously concerned for my well-being.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I twisted on a grin. “She was…too young for me.”

“Young.” Nifty sounded like he wanted to challenge me on that—and rightfully so, because she clearly had been well above the age of consent, but he didn’t. That, in a way, was worse than if he had ragged on me. It was either pity or worry, neither of which I could deal with right now, even if I had anything to tell them.

If I let them, the team would ply me with drinks and do their best to console me on whatever they thought was wrong, distract me with bad jokes or horrible stories, maybe try to fix me up with someone they knew who would be perfect…and normally I’d let them, accepting their own odd ways of showing they cared. But suddenly, my skin was too raw, my nerves too exposed, and I just needed to be by myself.

“Okay, I’m out,” I said, finishing my drink. “This little puppy is going home. Alone. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.” I grabbed my bag, paid out enough to cover my drinks, and waved goodbye before anyone could get a wiseass crack in about me being the first to leave. Okay, it was unusual but it wasn’t totally unheard-of.

Not recently, anyway.

I worked with trained investigators, each and everyone of them hired because they were obsessively curious, and incapable of walking away from a puzzle. I would lay odds they were playing paper-rock-scissors even now, to determine who got to ask me what was going on, tomorrow. And once they started digging, they weren’t going to let up. Not them.

Great.

I walked out into the night with the beginnings of a killer headache under my scalp, and a roil in my stomach that had nothing to do with the empanadas I’d eaten.

The Merge was starting to interfere, not with my ability to do the job, but my coworkers’. They were going to be focusing on the mystery of me, and maybe not on the work at hand. Of all the problems I thought this might cause, that hadn’t been one I’d considered.

“So what now, Bonita?”

The great thing about New York City—you can carry on an entire conversation with yourself, and even without an earpiece nobody gives you a second look. The usual chaos of Port Authority in the evening was weirdly soothing to get caught up in. If you know how to walk with the flow, you can get lost in the swirl of people, like being a single grain in a sandstorm, carried around and dropped off where you needed to be by some weird magic. All you had to do was not consciously think about what you were doing or where you were going, and let the universe carry you there.

I caught the A train uptown. Spring is the best time to ride the subway: everyone’s dropped off the heavy coats that overstuffed trains during the winter, and the summer’s sweat hasn’t begun yet. Considering how full the train was, that was a blessing. Bad enough some hip-hop wannabe teenager tried to hold the door for his pack of slower-moving friends, causing the conductor to bawl something incomprehensible until they were all inside and he let the door go.

On another day I might have been tempted to send a spark from the metal door into his hand, for being a jerk, but my focus was all inward, right then.

Fact one: the thing I’d worried about was here, the Merge was impacting work. That it wasn’t happening exactly how I’d feared didn’t change the fact. So, one excuse for avoiding it, blown out of the water. Or, at least, taking on water and sinking fast.

Fact two: my coworkers were right; this reluctance to plunge into new adventures with someone attractive and attracted was…very much not like me.

Or, at least, not like me-who-was.

J had always claimed that there would come a day when I’d settle down with, as he resignedly put it, “a nice little household.” Even he, who’d known me since I was eight, couldn’t imagine me being happy with just one person, either male or female. I had always liked—I still did like—variety.

And it wasn’t that my sex drive was shut off entirely. Pietr might not set off sparks but it had never been about that; we used each other for mutual comfort and release, full knowledge of what it was, and I…

I…

By the time my train had dumped me out at my stop, and I’d climbed the stairs to street level, the stutter in my brain and the rawness of my nerves had finally resolved itself into fact number three.

I felt guilty.

I felt guilty because I wasn’t cheating on a guy I wasn’t in a relationship with, who knew I was having sex with someone else and had agreed with me that he had no right or cause to say anything other than “don’t let it get tangled in the job.” And we hadn’t.

But the stress of it all—and the guilt—was starting to bleed over into my relationship with Pietr, too. The fact that he understood, even if he didn’t understand all of it, just made me feel worse. I liked Pietr. A lot. He was easy to be with, he understood me, and didn’t ask for anything I couldn’t give.

Not even explanations.

“Damn it.”

That did get me a look from the woman coming down the stairs, more mild curiosity than anything else. I ducked my head and went back to thinking quietly.

J was right. I was changing. And I resented, not the fact of change—that would be like resenting breathing, or rain: you needed those things for life to go on, and not changing in the face of new experiences and knowledge was just dumb and counterproductive. But I resented the hell out of the fact that this had been shoved on me, without so much as a by-your-leave or instruction booklet, and was demanding change without, as far as I could see, giving a damn thing back in return.

“Gonna have a lot of cold showers until you get this thing licked,” I said to myself as I unlocked the front door of my building and dragged myself inside. “And, okay, licked may not be the best word to use, in context…”

As always, just being inside my apartment soothed me. The space itself wasn’t much, and the building was drafty, but inside… Someone else might find the vibrant burgundy-and-pale-gold walls too exotic, the mix of antiques and thrift store finds too distracting, but to me, it said “home.”

I pulled off my boots and dropped them on the parquet floor, wincing at the sound. It was still early, but my downstairs neighbors were always on my case about every pinprick of noise.

Yeah, the decor was me, but the building…not so much.

I dropped my bag on the nearest sofa, and walked across the open space into the kitchen alcove. It was a decent-size studio, as things went, and got gorgeous sunlight, the few times I was home during daylight hours. The glasswork mosaic that hung on the wall where most people would put a flat-screen TV glittered when I turned on a lamp, a pale reflection of what it did during the day, and I noticed with dismay that a few of the colored glass pieces had somehow slipped from the frame and shattered on the ground.

“Well, damn.”

I was way more upset about the broken glass than it deserved, taking my frustrations out on a random bit of bad luck. What was that saying my dad’s girlfriend Claire used to trot out, about if it weren’t for bad luck she’d have none? I stared at the shards, feeling the cranky surge through me, then let it go. It was just glass, and unlike my personal life it could be fixed easily enough.

I held my hand out, palm down over where most of the shards were, and pulled the faintest trickle of current from my core. Not too much; I didn’t want the shreds to come flying up and embed themselves in my palm, just lift off the floor and come together in a glittering little lump, and then follow me back to the trash can, where I released the current-strands, and let the tiny shards fall into the bin.

There were leftovers and some salad in the fridge, but I’d eaten enough at the Devil that I wasn’t tempted. Instead, I stripped down to undies, intending to crawl into my bed with a book and read until I fell asleep.

Instead, I found myself climbing the loft ladder with, not a book, but the case file in my hand.

Sketches of drowned corpses and detailed descriptions of said remains were not high up on my bedtime reading. But I wasn’t planning on going over the details again. Pietr was right; it was a dead end, pun intended. Without evidence, that area of investigation didn’t lead anywhere.

A trained pup, though, had more options than what could be found on the body or around the scene. There was also what was caught in the flow of the universe. More, I could try using the particular skill set that my mentor called the kenning, a foresight that sometimes gave me tiny glimpses of the future, sensing when something was coming down the pike. Sometimes, if I was very focused, I could see the present, too, or at least how it intersected with the future.

Focus, though, required a little help. Mostly a kenning came without being called, without warning, at the absolute worst time possible. That was just how the universe seemed to work. To bring it to heel, I’d have to start with a scrying.

Sitting cross-legged on the mattress, careful not to bump my head on the ceiling, I put the file down on the bedspread in front of me and reached to the little shelf, where I kept my crystals.

Yeah, crystals were ridiculously old-fashioned and quaint according to most modern Talent, including J and half my coworkers. They could go jump; crystals helped me scry, and anything that helped was worth keeping.

Venec had broken my favorite shard, back when I tried to scry who was calling me in for the interview. He called it cheating, then. I suspected now he’d call it a “useful tool,” so long as I used it for work, and not to see what he was up to. I didn’t plan on asking his permission, or for his approval.

Something stirred on the fringes of my awareness and I quashed it. I did not need, nor want, the Merge anywhere near me, right then.

For once, it took the hint, and subsided.

I reached for the plain wooden box, flipping open the lid. It was about the size of a shoe box, and lined in thick, nubby, cream-colored cloth. Inside rested my two remaining pieces: a rose quartz ball about the size of my palm, and my traditional, kerchief-and-skirts style scrying globe of clear quartz, with a jagged imperfection, like a cloudy lightning bolt, through the center.

I really needed to replace the clear shard, someday. I’d gotten good workings with it then; who knew what I could do now that I had hard-core training?

Distracted by the thought, my hand reached for the rose quartz as though by instinct, but I stopped just before my palm touched it.

Rose quartz was really useful for me; I resonated to it, found details I didn’t always with another color, or clear. But it worked on a more emotional level, instinctive and visceral. I had the gut feeling—pun intended—that if I picked that one up, all the walls in the world weren’t going to protect me from knowing Venec a bit more than I wanted to.

I didn’t want to know what he was up to, not that way.

And I really didn’t want him to know that I was checking what he was up to, or think that I cared enough to look.

It wasn’t logical, I knew it wasn’t logical, and that was probably why I hated what the Merge did to me so much. I was completely in touch with my hedonistic, sensual side, sure, but, I still thought rather than emoted, considered rather than reacted. It was how I was built, to bulldog through everything in as practical a manner as possible, and this…this threatened to overwhelm all that.

No, better to stick with the clear crystal, until I had a better balance going.

Coward, a little voice whispered in my ear, a rusking, rattling voice like dry leaves and empty husks, and then was gone. I acknowledged the charge, and ignored it, along with everything else I was ignoring.

Current required control, and being in control. Especially if you were going to open yourself up to scry.

The clear globe was heavier than I remembered, filling both my hands and forcing them down to the bed with its weight. I let my arms lower, relaxing my shoulders, letting the breath ease out of me on a slow exhale. The moment the back of my hand touched the files spread out in front of me, I felt the downward-upward spiral of current that meant something was stirring, and I had to scramble, mentally, to get into proper fugue-state before it hit me.

“Ten…nine…eight…”

Too much, too fast, before I hit seven I was in it, caught up in a net of current-threads, sparkling deep green and blue around me. I pulled a breath in before I got dizzy, but it wasn’t enough. Sparks flickered like lightning strikes against the inside of my eyelids, leaving a shimmer of sparkles behind that made me want to throw up, the way you do when vertigo hits. It was almost a struggle to stay grounded, something I would die rather than admit to anyone. And then I found my ground like a click and a snap and I could soothe the current swirling in and around my core, taming it back into something useful, something controlled.

I opened my eyes, mage-sense firmly in place, and looked down at the globe.

Sparks were already flicking inside the stone, mimicking what I had seen with my eyes closed, running from my fingertips down to the imperfection in the crystal, where they fractured and bounced back to the surface. More blues and greens, but darker, emitting a faint but clear warning of danger.

Current was dangerous, and it could give off a definite sense of menace, if the signature was malign enough, but my own current? That made no sense.

“Ground and center,” I whispered. “Control what you see.”

There wasn’t any control at all in the actual scrying. That was one of the reasons why it wasn’t popular anymore: you opened yourself up and waited for something to show up. Like deer hunting, J said, although the thought of my oh-so-patrician mentor actually sitting in a blind, freezing his ass off…

Actually, he probably had done it, at least once. There was a wicked-looking crossbow hanging in his library that I’d always assumed was a gift from someone, but he’d be able to pull it, no problem. When he was younger, anyway.

Useless thought, Bonnie. Distractions. Clear the mind. Ground the core. Open your awareness, Bonnie, and see what waits.

Scrying requires trust as well as Talent, because that lack of control cuts both ways. You don’t ask for specifics, just open and wait, and brace yourself for what might or might not come.

There was no way I could brace myself for the scrying that hit.

I was wide open when the kenning came hard on its heels, the two of them twining into a braided rope that nearly knocked me off my magical ass. My vision—my entire awareness, was filled with a night-blue sky filled with electrical fire, tilting on dragons’ wings and shattered spires. Hissing, out-of-control cables: lashing and spitting like a serpent’s tongue. I tried to focus, to draw the vision in more closely, and was dropped into a long nauseating swoop down, like a bungee cord from hell, and then stark white filled that awareness, splattered and stained with the red that’s only and ever the color of spilled blood. The cord brought me back up again with a spine-breaking snap, flinging me up into the sense of a great beast moving even farther overhead, blotting out everything, even the fire, its spread wings wheeling overhead.

Dragon, my mind told me.

I knew a Great Worm. She was an ancient, elegant lady, who would never project such anger, such fury….

The head turned and stared at me, and in its great, glimmering eye I saw nothing but madness and hunger. And deep inside, the shock of recognition, awareness. It knew me. It knew me, and it did not like me.

The feeling of hard, sharp claws pressing against my skin, pulling me down into the gaze, was purely magical, not physical, but that made it more dangerous, not less, as open as I was just then. The dizziness came back, along with the need to throw up.

Bonnie!

Not a ping, the brief current-carried shorthand we used among friends. This was deeper, like the hit of an axe into a hundred-year-old tree, and the shock of it shook me free of those devouring eyes, knocked me out of the clawed grip.

My physical body jerked backward, my hand releasing the crystal, my head hitting the ceiling with a reassuringly painful thunk.

“Ow.”

I blinked against the sting of tears and stared at the crystal, trying to recapture what I had seen, but it was already starting to dissipate. Visions faded like that, unreal and therefore impossible to hold. Even so, I had the oddest feeling that I’d kenned something like it before, not recently but within the past year or so. Not the visuals, nothing at all like those visuals, but the sense of something angry, something wild circling, hunting…coming closer.

If I’d felt it before, odds were it had nothing to do with the case at hand. But the increase in intensity, the addition of visuals, meant it was coming closer on the timeline, whatever it was. I reached for my notebook and a pen. My hand was shaking, but I got the details down, best I could, before they were gone entirely.

You never ignored a kenning, especially not one that came that strongly, that tied to a scrying.

As I was writing, trying to force the ink to flow steadily, there was another push at me, somewhere between core and gut, except it wasn’t physical at all. No words this time, just a sense of concern, and a willingness to pull back, if shoved.

I knew who it was. There was only one person it could be, with that kind of a connection. He was worried, and he was annoyed, but the feelings were distinct from each other. He wasn’t annoyed at me.

As much as the Merge irritated me, it pissed Venec off even more. I got the feeling that he was constantly riding the need to check up on all of us, anyway, and not knowing where the line between boss/trainer/Big Dog ended and the Merge began meant he’d been constantly second-guessing himself. For a guy like Venec, who was totally used to being the one calling the shots and making the decisions? Oh, yeah, having something external trying to shove him anywhere would not be appreciated. Unlike me, though, he couldn’t ignore it. Hence the annoyance. And if he’d felt even a little of what I did, with that eye glaring at me…no wonder he’d reacted. Normally I’d tell him to MYOB. This was work-stuff, though, even though he didn’t know it, so I reached out with just a hint of current to ping back, keeping it brief and impersonal. *scrying. report tomorrow*

His acknowledgment was equally curt, but when I put the crystals and files away and crawled under the spread to sleep, I could feel the flavor of him lingering, like candied ginger on my tongue. Even when we tried to shut the Merge off entirely, it was creeping in.

Yeah. Time to do something about that. Eventually.

My last coherent thought was that I should probably stop by and pay Madame a courtesy visit. If there were any others dragons in town, she would know.

four

Thursday morning I woke up with a head filled with unsettling dreams and an intense desire to kick some investigative ass, since it seemed like that was the only part of my life that held any upside, right now. I bopped into the shower, scrubbed myself down, and practically threw myself into my work-clothes. The solid sound of my boots on the sidewalk was like a drumbeat moving me forward, and even a delay on the subway and a busker trying to play an out-of-tune ukulele couldn’t ruin my mood.

The boyos who used to always linger on the stoop between the subway and the office, catcalling in a friendly way, weren’t there, and I realized suddenly that I hadn’t seen them in weeks. And I hadn’t even noticed until now, getting to the office so early, and leaving at odd hours. Had they all gotten jobs, or gone back to school? I didn’t know—and had no easy way to find out. I didn’t even know their real names.

I decided that yes, they had gotten their asses back into class, or were gainfully employed. Anything else was…not acceptable, today.

“Hi, honey, I’m home!” I chucked my coat into the closet, and checked the sign-out board in the front room. Lou had put it up when she decided she was tired of trying to remember who had gone where. Everyone’s name was listed, even Stosser’s, and there were columns for “in,” “lunch,” “out,” and a wider space for details of where we were and what we were doing there. Half the time we even remembered to use it.

Nick, the board informed me, had been sent out to do follow-up interviews on the break-in. Everyone else was in. I checked myself as “in,” grabbed a cup of coffee and went in search of the rest of the team.

I found Sharon, Pietr, and Venec in the main conference room, where Sharon was glowering at my report from yesterday like I’d done something to personally offend her.

“What?” I asked, trying to curb my instinctive defensive reaction.

She didn’t even bother to look up. “You didn’t test the body.”

“Test it for what?” My hackles rose, slightly. “There wasn’t any current on it, the bastard had drowned to death from the water in its lungs, which I did test, yes, to verify, and the rope burns were pretty clear indicators of why it didn’t swim to shore. Unless you have some hidden store of knowledge about the breed you’d like to share with the class?”

“What kind of water was it?”

I stopped, mid-rant, and stared at her. “Son of a bitch.”

I’d checked that there was water in the corpse’s lungs. I hadn’t checked to see if it was salt or fresh. The East and Hudson rivers were both tidal—they were salty. If it had been freshwater…

Freshwater would mean that our Bippis had been killed somewhere else, in another body of water, and tossed into the river after the fact.

When I screw up, I own it. Nodding an apology to Sharon, I turned to Venec, who was in his usual hold-up-the-wall pose, his eyes closed and his face not showing much of anything at all, a stone-cold poker player. I couldn’t get even a tremor of sensation out of him: both our walls were up, and holding. “I fucked up. Boss, you want I should—”

“Send Pietr.” He opened his eyes to look at me, and I tasted that hot candied ginger again, even though neither wall budged. “I want to hear about that scrying you did last night.”

Pietr, who had already hauled himself out of the chair and was heading for the door, checked himself, barely, before moving on. He didn’t have even a hint of foresee in him—most Talent didn’t—and was fascinated by it. While I’d read his tarot cards once or twice as a lark, I’d refused to scry for him. I don’t scry for people as a rule, least of all friends. I didn’t always get something, but when I did it was always accurate, probably due to the additional whammy of the kenning. Nobody needs to know their personal fate, and I didn’t need to be the one to give it to them.

I stopped, struck by that thought. Was that why I was so pissed about this stupid Merge? Not because it was trying to make me do something, but because I thought it was trying to tell me what my capital-F Fate would be? If so, that was pretty stupid. No matter how strong this Merge thing ended up being, or how it would change my life if I let it, that wasn’t fate, or destiny.

I could feel a crease etch between my eyebrows. Was it?

I really wanted to follow that thought, the analytic cast of my mind and my Need to Know warring with the fact that I was on office-time, and Venec was standing there, waiting for my report.

“Now?” I asked, stalling. We weren’t exactly a formal organization, but usually reports were written—or presented in front of the entire team—for brainstorming. Nifty and Nick and Stosser were conspicuous by their absence, even though the board said they were in the office. Ian could be anywhere, from his back office to Timbuktu. He ignored the board unless someone else checked him in or out.

Venec frowned at me, all Big Dog. “Now.”

Verbal report, then, not written. “It was mostly visual. Fire-current-fire and real fire. Metal spires, shattered, but I think they were representational, not real.” It was tough to tell how, exactly, but real things felt different somehow. A lot had been written up about scrying, but as usual with current, it seemed to work slightly different with each person. That was part of what made our job…interesting.

“A dragon, turning overhead.” That had felt real. Physical. There was something else, something I wasn’t remembering….

“A dragon?” Sharon had been trying not to listen in, but that caught her attention. I kept my gaze on Venec, the way his eyes drooped a little at the corners, and his nose really didn’t fit the rest of his face, and the tiny imperfection in his lip, that made it seem almost crooked. It should have been distracting, but somehow his features focused my memory into its usual razor-sharp perfection. “It could have been a projection of emotions, anger, or power. Maybe.” My tone would have told a deaf person I didn’t believe that. “I was being shoved from viewpoint to viewpoint—” that had been the bungee cord “—so a lot of people are going to be involved, somehow. I don’t think it’s associated with this job,” I said. I looked at Sharon as though waiting for some connection to kick in—or not—and then considered the residue of the scrying. “Either job. It feels…”

“Another scrying of danger.” He stared at me. “Still in the future?”

Right. That was why it all seemed familiar. I’d had a shimmer of something months ago, during the ki-rin job. That was what I’d told Stosser and Venec, then; that there was a distant sense of danger, of something off-kilter, but I couldn’t identify the source.

“Yes. Closer now. But not immediate.”

I hoped. If I was wrong, and that beast was circling overhead even now, even if it was, please god, only metaphorical…

Venec picked up on what I wasn’t saying, although that was probably just his own instincts working again. “Bad?”

His words triggered details I didn’t remember seeing the first time; I saw the splatter of blood against the snow, smelled the stink of something burning, the feel of those claws on my skin, and nodded slowly. “It will be, yeah.” I hadn’t known that for certain before, hadn’t even known until he asked. But I knew, now. That’s how the kenning worked. You don’t always know what you know, and sometimes you don’t know what it was until someone else tells you. Combine it with a strong scrying, and I was never, ever wrong. Even when I wished I were. “In winter, I think.” There had been snow, ice. “Not now.”

“All right.” He seemed satisfied, for the moment. I didn’t trust it. “You wrote it down?”

I swallowed, tasting the stink of that burning and the blood in the back of my throat, as though I’d breathed it in, deep. “Most of it, yeah. In my notebook.” I’d had to, dumping it out before I could fall asleep.

“Get me a copy.” He switched gears. “I’m switching you up on the cases—Sharon has your notes, you take hers. See if there’s anything that bites you on the nose.”

That was the PUPI philosophy—nobody got ownership of a case; we all worked everything. It hadn’t been a problem when we started out, and had one job every couple of months; everyone was chomping to get their teeth into something and who was working what didn’t matter so much. Now, with different cases at cross-times, things might get a little complicated, even confusing. Venec wasn’t going to let that slow him down, though, and we’d damned well better keep up. Like the in/out board, we needed to track things. Lou, bless her, was working on a system for that, too.

I hadn’t lied when I’d told her we were a stronger team for her being part of it.

With Venec’s gaze still on me, I sat at the table across from Sharon, creating a tiny spot of current on the table to act as a combination coaster and coffee-warmer. It was a crappy waste of current, but I hated the taste of even lukewarm coffee. Sharon shoved a folder of notes across the table at me, and raised one of those elegant eyebrows at my current-coaster, but didn’t say anything. We were still not forgiven for the pizza-grease stains faintly outlined in the middle of the table.

I opened the file. Sharon’s notes were neatly handwritten, readable as a printed page. Nick’s…not so much. And it wasn’t a guy-thing, because the others all managed to make their notes legible, and Nifty’s handwriting was better than mine, for all that his hand dwarfed most pens.

“Someday, one of us is going to have to put some effort into a current-run printer,” I said, trying to puzzle out a word in Nick’s initial overview. The bastard had run over into the margins, and not rewritten his notes for the file when he got back to the office. I was so going to kill him. “A dictation machine or something.”

“Nice retirement plan. You go for it.”

Sharon wasn’t being sarcastic—I was one of the better improvisers in the office, and something like that, if I could make it work, could be worth a small but nice bundle in the community. Something to think about later. Much, much later.

I gave up on Nick’s notes, and moved over to Sharon’s, figuring that I could use his to add color commentary, later. I’d just gotten into a nice comfortable groove, making checkmarks where something caught my eye, when a roar tore through the office.

“Goddamn it!”

Once I’d gotten my heart back into my chest enough to determine that (a) the bellow belonged to Nifty, and (b) he sounded more pissed off than angry or scared, I drew the current that had automatically sparked on my skin in defensive mode back down into my core, and spent a minute getting my control—and my heartbeat—back to normal levels.

Sharon recovered faster than I did, and was on her feet and poking her nose out into the hallway. I noted in passing that the previously closed door now looked like it had been pulled off its hinges, hanging sideways like a post-Mardi Gras reveler, and that Venec was nowhere to be seen. The two facts were not unrelated. Big Dog had scary-fast reflexes.

Sharon followed her nose out into the hallway, and I followed her. The hallway was empty, but the door into the second conference room was open, if still attached to both hinges. Looking in, we encountered Venec, his back to us, a rather sheepish-looking Nifty, who was covered in a soft gray soot, and Lou, who looked…

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