Praise for laura anne gilman

Staying Dead “An entertaining, fast-paced thriller set in a world where cell phones and computers exist uneasily with magic and a couple of engaging and highly talented rogues solve crimes while trying not to commit too many of their own” —Locus

Curse the Dark “With an atmosphere reminiscent of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose by way of Sam Spade, Gilman’s second Wren Valere adventure … 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 “This fourth book in Gilman’s engaging series delivers … Wren and Sergei’s relationship, as usual, is wonderfully written. As their relationship moves in an unexpected direction, it makes perfect sense—and leaves the reader on the edge of her seat for the next book.” —RT Book Reviews, 4 stars

Free Fall “An intelligent and utterly gripping fantasy thriller, by far 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

About the Author

LAURA ANNE GILMAN took the plunge into murky writing waters in 1994 when she sold her first short story. Four media tie-in novels and a respectable number of short story sales later, she made the move to full-time writer in 2003. She is the author of the Cosa Nostradamus books for LUNA Books (the “Retrievers” and “Paranormal Scene Investigations” urban fantasy series), a young adult fantasy series for Pocket, and more than thirty shorter works of science fiction, fantasy and horror. She also writes paranormal romance as Anne Leonard. Laura Anne lives in New York City. You can contact her at LAG@lauraanne gilman.net, or find her online at suricattus.livejournal.com and www.lauraannegilman.net.

Hard Magic

Laura Anne

Gilman

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Dear Reader,

Sometimes the most colourful characters are the ones you don’t plan for. When Bonnie Torres first appeared in the Retrievers series, she was a walk-on character, a bit player.

Bonnie, though, wasn’t having any of it. She insisted on playing a larger part, becoming part of the ongoing story. And then, when I paused for breath, she insisted on getting her own story, “Illumination” in the anthology Unusual Suspects. And then she demanded the chance to tell her own adventure—and that of her fellow PUPIs, the Private, Unaffliated Paranormal Investigators of the Cosa Nostradamus.

New York City’s a tough place for a twentysomething Talent to make her mark. But I suspect Bonnie’s up to it….

Laura Anne Gilman

For Sioux. Who else?

You might say that it all started with a phone call, that morning in my hotel room. Only it didn’t, not really. The wheels of my life were in motion long before then. Before the first murders, before the first job. Before I had ever heard of PUPI: before there was a PUPI for anyone to hear of. Before all hell broke loose, and the Cosa Nostradamus was almost destroyed …

For me it started years earlier, when I was still in college, and my dad had gone missing for the last time, with just a cryptic letter left behind, and with a stranger listening in on my thoughts. That was when my life changed, when everything that was to come, began.

But I didn’t make the connection, not then, and not for a while later.

I’m better at putting the pieces together, now. I have to be.

It’s what I’m trained to do.

The world changes.

If you’re lucky, you know it’s happening.

If you’re really lucky, you know you’re part of it.

This is my part.

prologue

The second body wasn’t quite dead yet. The eyes stared up; not asking questions, just staring. The killer was tempted to finish the job, but instead focused on adding the final touches to the scene. It was almost perfect … and yet, something remained undone. Something felt off.

Outside, a car passed down the street, its engine clearly needing a tune-up. The noise made the killer scowl; why didn’t people take better care of their tools? That idiot was going to find himself by the side of the road, his car overheated at best, at worst….

Contrary to what they show on television and movies, cars don’t catch fire easily. They’re designed better than that, even the older vehicles. It takes serious effort to blow one up: pouring on accelerant, or explosives …

Or magic.

The killer paused, fingers curled around the car’s door-latch, and thought about that, humming over the possibilities. The idea of the car going up in flames was pleasing. It would burn hot, blue and white. The flames would rise up from the upholstery, lick at the roof, fill the entire garage and, if the fire-fighters didn’t arrive soon enough, take the entire house with it. Easy enough to accomplish: just a controlled match of current, and a single directed thought.

Pleasing, and satisfying, that thought. Artistic, even. A fitting end to the entire matter.

But it would also draw too much attention. This wasn’t about headlines, or media coverage. The fewer people who noticed, in fact, the better. And fire might spread, injure others. That wasn’t the plan, either.

So, regretfully, the car was left intact and unscorched, the two bodies arranged in the front seat as though they’d just come home from an evening away, and simply forgotten to get out of the car.

The killer did not wear a watch, but there was a sense of valuable time passing, seconds ticking away and the window of opportunity closing. Setting everything up had taken exactly the time allotted in the plan, but the woman had fought harder than expected, losing a shoe in the process, and disposal had made more of a mess than expected. That was unacceptable.

Using a plastic garbage bag taken from the workbench, the debris was quickly packed away, and the last traces of struggle tidied up. Pack it in, pack it out, the killer thought without any sense of irony. Sorting through what was normal trash and what might carry identifiable trace was too difficult to judge: everything visible had to be considered potentially incriminating, even if nobody ever investigated. That was the hallmark of success.

Within minutes the garage was clean and peaceful again, a proper abode for the gleaming chrome beast stalled within. The attached mini mansion had never been disturbed; there would be no evidence found there.

There were no last looks, no photographs taken for posterity. It was done. Lights were turned out, the door closed, and silence claimed the space.

Inside the garage, the second body stirred, death held at bay a few seconds more. Vision gone, the fingers spread as though searching for something beside it on the car seat, stilling inches away from its goal—the already cooling hand of the other figure slumped in the passenger seat.

one

The dream was back. It always came back when I was stressed.

The site was deserted; I sneaked through the fence and into the house. Lucky for me the alarms hadn’t been turned on yet.

As usual, my brain was telling me that it was only a memory; that I already knew what I would find, that it was okay for my heart to stop pounding so fast, but the dream was in control.

The door called to me. I could feel it, practically singing in the rain-filled dusk. My flashlight skittered across the floor, allowing me to pick my way around piles of trash and debris. No tools left out; the carpenter’s daughter approved.

“Hello, beauty,” I said to the door. Or maybe to the woman in the door: in the darkness, in the beam of light, she was nakedly apparent now, a sweet-eyed woman who gazed out into the bare bones of the room with approval and fondness.

Even now, the beauty of Zaki’s work astounded me, and I mourned again for that loss.

“Who are you, then? That’s the key to all this. Who are you?”

The door, not too surprisingly, didn’t answer. But I knew how to make it talk.

Or I thought I did, anyway.

It was all instinct, but J had always told me that instinct was the way most new things were discovered—instinct and panic.

I held my hand over the door the way I had with the tools, carefully not making physical contact with it, and touched just the lightest levels of current, like alto bells sounding in the distance.

The woman’s hair stirred in a breeze, and her face seemed softer, rounder, then she disappeared behind the leaves again.

I hated her, this woman I’d never known, never met. Hated her for being the reason my father was dead.

Zaki really had been an artist, the bastard. I could feel him in the work. But I didn’t know, yet, what he had been feeling.

*evidence doesn’t lie*

Shut up, I told the voice. I’m working.

I touched a deeper level of current, bringing it out with a firm hand and splaying it gently across the door so that it landed easily, smoothly.

Oh, how I love her, such a bad woman, such a wrong woman, and I cannot have her, but I will show her my love….

Zaki, melancholy and impassioned, his hand steady on the chisel, his eyes on the wood, sensing even through his distraction how to chip here, cut there, to make the most of the grain. He was concentrating, thinking of his object of affection, the muse who inspired him.So focused, the way all Talent learned to be, that he never saw the man coming up behind him, the man who had already seen the work in progress, and recognized, the way a man might, the face growing out of the wood.

I knew what was about to happen, in my dream-mind, and tensed against the memory.

The blow was sudden and sharp, and the vision faded.

No, I told my current. More.

It surged, searched, and found…nothing. No emotions from the killer. No residue of his actions. It had been too long, or he had been too good, too quick. Or I needed to be better, sharper.

You were a kid, I wanted to tell my then-self. You did what you could, and you did as well as you could. But you can’t talk back to memories, only relive them.

“Damn it.” My flashlight’s beam dropped off the door; I was unwilling to look at the face of the woman who had cost my father his life.

*there is always evidence*

The voice was back. And probably right. I let the beam play on the floor, unsure what I was looking for. Scan, step, scan. I repeated the process all the way up to the door, then turned around and looked the way I had come.

“There.”

On the floor, about two feet away. A spot where the hardwood floor shone differently That meant that it had been refinished more recently than the rest of the floor, or been treated somehow…. Zaki would have known. All I knew was that it was a clue.

I touched it with current, as lightly as I could. Something warned me that a gentle touch would reveal more than demanding ever would.

“The killer’s actions, I beg you wood, reveal.”

J’s influence: treat current the way you would a horse; control it through its natural instincts. Current, like electricity, illuminated.

A dent in the floor, sanded down and covered up. The point of a chisel stained with blood? No. The harder end, sticking out of a body as it landed, falling backward …

Oh, Zaki, you idiot was all I could find inside myself, following the arc of the body. For a woman? For another man’s woman when you had Claire at home?

And then I saw it, the shadow figure of the killer, indistinct even in his own mind—shading himself. That meant the killer was a Talent, if of even less skill than Zaki. Had that been a factor? The man—the foreman, I knew now—jealous not only of the carpenter’s attraction to his wife, but of his skill to display it, driven to murder?

The chisel was removed, wiped down, and …

I still flinched, even years and dreams later.

The blood alone flared bright in the pictorial, a shine of wet rubies in the shadows as the foreman dipped the chisel into a cloth still damp with the blood, laying the trace for me to find, a week later.

Find, and be unable to do anything about, save live with the knowledge that my father had been murdered, and the murderer still walked, unpunished ….

I woke up, and the still-powerful sadness of dream faded, although it never really went away. Zaki had been dead for three years, though, and I’d learned to live with it. My depressing reality was more immediate: three months out of college, and I still didn’t have a job.

I thought about putting the feather pillow over my face until I turned a proper shade of blue and suffocated. Even knowing that it was the overblown act of a spoiled five-year-old didn’t stop me from contemplating it, running through scenarios of who would find me and what they might say or think or do. Eventually, though, I shoved the pillow to the side and stared glumly up at the ceiling.

No, I wasn’t quite that desperate. But it was close.

Nobody wanted to hire me. It wasn’t that I didn’t have brains. Or enthusiasm. Or dedication, for that matter. I just … didn’t know what to do with any of what I had. I guess that was showing up in my interviews, because nobody was saying “welcome aboard.”

Something had to break soon, or I was looking at a short-term career goal of flipping burgers or, if I was lucky, pulling beers at a semidecent pickup bar.

“Oh, the hell with that.” I got out of bed and stripped down my sweat-soaked T-shirt and panties, replacing them with my sweat-dried gym clothes, fresh socks, and my sneakers, and headed down to the hotel’s gym. The only way to interrupt a self-pity party was with a good hard run.

I got back to my room, feeling only a little bit better, just in time to take possession of my breakfast order. I let the room-service guy in and tipped him, the door barely closing behind his back when the phone rang. I dropped the receipt on the table and picked up the phone, telling myself not to make any assumptions or unfounded leaps of hope. This early, though, it might be good news. Did people really call at 9:00 a.m. with bad news? Didn’t they put that off as long as possible? “Bonita Torres.”

“Ms. Torres? This is Sally Marin, at Homefront Services.”

I could tell by the sound of her voice that the news wasn’t going to be good. Damn. Deep breathing is supposed to be good for panic, wasn’t it? I took a breath, held it, and then let it out. Nope, didn’t help.

I shifted the phone to the other ear, and tried to relax my shoulders, kicking off my sneakers and peeling off my socks. There was no reason to panic. My checkbook was still decently in the black, I wasn’t in debt, if you could ignore a credit card or three coming due at the end of the month, and I had a degree from a top school packed with all my belongings in storage while I lounged around in a swank little suite on the Upper East side of Manhattan on a lovely, not-too-hot summer day.

Life could be worse, right?

Life could be a hell of a lot worse. I knew that firsthand. I took another deep breath and stared at my feet—I’d painted the toenails dark blue, to keep myself from thinking about the demure pale pink that was on my fingernails—and wiggled them. Yeah, things could be worse. But they could be shitloads better, too.

The brutal truth of the matter was that I needed a job, and not a minimum-wage one, either. Joseph kept telling me to relax, that I’d find something, but much as I love J, and he loves me, I couldn’t mooch off him for the rest of my life, letting him pay for this hotel, my food, and my clothing. Sure, he had money but that wasn’t the point. Comes a time, you’ve got to do for yourself, or self-esteem, what’s that?

The problem was, J’s been doing for me for so long, I think we’ve both forgotten how for him not to. Not that he spoiled me or anything, just … He’s always taken care of me. Ever since I was eight years old, and an instinctive cry for help had literally pulled him off the street and into my life.

The dream came back to me, and I shoved it away. My dad, rest his soul, always meant well, and I’d never had a moment’s doubt that he loved me, but Zaki Torres had been a crap parental figure, and his decisions weren’t always the best even for himself, much less me. J had taken one look that day, and arranged to become mentor to that mouthy, opinionated eight-year-old. He taught me everything I needed to know and a bunch of stuff he figured I’d want to know, and then, ten years later, had the grace and wisdom to let me go.

Not that I went far—just off to college for four years. But even then, J was there, the comforting shadow and sounding board at my elbow, not to mention the tuition check in the mail. Now that phase was over, and it was time to be an adult.

Somehow.

And that was why I was starting to panic.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Torres,” the woman on the other end of the phone line was saying. “Your résumé was quite good, of course, but … “

I kinda tuned her out at that point. It was the same thing everyone had been saying for the past three months. I’m smart, I’m well educated—the aforementioned four years at Amherst will do that—and I’m a hard worker. All my references were heavy on that point. I’ve never shied away from a challenge.

Only these days, nobody wanted to hire someone with a liberal-arts degree and minimal tech skills, no matter how dedicated they might be.

It wasn’t my fault, not really. I know how to use computers and all that. It’s just that I can’t. Or, I can, but it doesn’t always end well.

I’m a Talent, which is the politically correct way of saying magic user. Magician. Witch. Whatever. Using current—the magical energy that floats around the world—is as natural to me as hailing a cab is to New Yorkers. Only problem is, current runs in the same time-space whatever as electricity, and like two cats in the same household, they don’t always get along. They’re pretty evenly balanced in terms of power and availability, but current’s got the added kick of people dipping in and out, which makes it less predictable, more volatile. Which means a Talent … well, let’s just say that most of us don’t carry cell phones or PDAs on our person, or work with any delicate or highly calibrated technology.

I’m actually better than most—for some reason my current tends to run cool, not hot, meaning I don’t have as many spikes in my—hypothetical—graph. Nobody’s been able to explain it, except to say I’m just naturally laid-back. I guess it’s because of that I’ve never killed a landline, or any of the basic household appliances just by proximity the way most Talent do, but there’s always the risk.

Especially when we’re under stress. You learn to work around it, and I wouldn’t give up what I am, not for anything, but sometimes current is less a gift and more a righteous pain in the patoot. Especially when you’re trying to find a job in the Null world.

Ms. Marin had finished making apologies, finally.

“Yes, thank you. I do appreciate your taking the time to speak with me.” J taught me manners, too. I hung up the phone, and stared at my toes again. The sweat of my treadmill workout seemed far away, and the dream-sweat closer to my skin, somehow.

Damn it. I had really hoped something would come out of that interview. Something good, I meant.

Lacking any other idea or direction, I wandered over to the desk, where a pile of résumés, a notepad, and my breakfast—a three-egg omelet with hash browns and ketchup—waited for me to get my act together. There were still half a dozen places I needed to call, to follow up on applications and first interviews. I sat in the chair and stared at the notepad, with its neatly printed list—the result of ten weeks of intensive job-hunting—and felt a headache starting to creep up on me. At this rate, I really was going to be begging for temp jobs or—god help me—going back to retail. My life’s ambition, not really. I might not know what I wanted to do, but I knew what I didn’t want.

I forked up a bit of the omelet and took a bite, less because I was hungry and more because it was there. Other Talent found their niche, why couldn’t I? All right, so a lot of them became artists, or lawyers, or ran their own companies, where their weirdness wasn’t noticed, or was overlooked. None of that really interested me, even if I’d had an inch of artistic or entrepreneurial talent, which I didn’t. Academia maybe, but the truth was that while I loved learning, school mostly bored me.

Me bored was a bad idea. When I was bored I did things like create a spell that would burn out selected letters in neon signs all over town, until it looked as though there was a conspiracy against the letters Y and N. Listening to people’s crackpot theories about what had really happened for the rest of the week had been fun, but …

But I needed something to do.

They say you should follow your interests, go for what you’re passionate about. To do something that mattered would be nice. I needed to be able to get my teeth into something, to feel that it was worthwhile. Other than that … I didn’t know. I guess that works if you’ve got some kind of artistic talent, or want to make the world a better place, or have an isotope named for you. Me, not so much.

There had been a while, after Zaki’s murder, when I’d thought about going into law enforcement, but it was tougher these days for Talent to make it—less shoe leather and more high-tech toys. I might make it through the Academy, but spending the rest of my life pounding the pavement, unable to advance, didn’t thrill me. And J was even less happy with the idea. He wanted me in a nice, safe office. Preferably a corner office, with an assistant to handle the heavy lifting and typing.

I scowled at the list again. Three advertising agencies, two trade magazines, and a legal aid firm. That was all I had left.

“Screw it. Shower first.” Whatever the cause, I was sticky and sweaty, and my hair was kind of gross. Maybe washing it would get my brain going.

The bathroom was reasonably luxe, with scented shampoos and conditioners and soaps, and I took my time. I thought I heard the phone ring, but since I was soaking wet and had just lathered up, I ignored it. This place wasn’t quite pretentious enough to rate a telephone in the bathroom. I’m not sure J would have let me stay here if there had been one—he’s sort of old-fashioned and genteel, and things like taking a phone call while you’re on the crapper would give him frothing fits.

The thought, I admit, made me giggle, even in my depression. J is such a gentleman in a lot of ways, old school, and yet he kept up with me pretty well. I wonder sometimes what crimes he committed as a young’un, that he was the one to be landed with me.

Far as I could tell, his only mistake had involved being in the wrong place at the right time. Zaki had enough sense to know he wasn’t a strong enough Talent, and didn’t have enough patience to mentor me, but his first choice was a disaster waiting to happen, and even as a kid I knew that the moment he introduced us. The guy was … well, he wouldn’t have sold me to pay off his gambling debts, but I wouldn’t have learned a whole lot, either.

The moment was still crystal-sharp in my memory: Zaki’s worried presence, hovering; Billy’s pleasure at being asked to mentor someone for the first time in his life; the smell of a freshly washed carpet that didn’t hide the years of wear and tear …

With an amazing lack of tact that still dogs me, I’d used my untrained, just-developing current to yelp for help. That had attracted the attention of a passerby on the street below, who—despite having already done his time as a mentor, and being way out of our league—came up the stairs, took one look, and took on the job.

Zaki had been lonejack, part of the officially unofficial, intentionally unorganized population of Talent. J was Council—the epitome of structural organization. Despite that, they both got along pretty well, I guess because of me. I wasn’t the only lonejack kid mentored by a Council member, but I was the only one we knew of who stayed at least nominally a lonejack.

“Maybe if you’d crossed the river, you’d have had a job offer waiting for you when you graduated,” I grumbled. “Why do you insist on thinking that nepotism’s a dirty word?”

Truth was, I didn’t think of myself as either one group or the other, and maybe that was part of the problem. Born to one magical community, raised in another, Latina by birth and European by training, female imprinted on a—oh god, use the word—metrosexual male … Issues? I probably should have subscriptions at this point.

My hair’s short enough that it doesn’t take long to wash, and by the time I got out of the bathroom, toweled off, and wrapped in one of the complimentary bathrobes, the strands were almost dry. I’m a natural honey-blonde, thanks to my unknown and long-gone mother, but it hasn’t been that shade since I was fourteen—I was currently sporting a dark red dye job that I had thought would look more office-appropriate. So much for that thought doing me any good. Maybe I’d go back to purple, and the hell with it.

Contemplating an interviewer’s reaction to that, I walked to the bedroom, and saw that the light on the phone was blinking. Right, the call I’d missed. Whoever called, they’d left me a message.

My heart did a little scatter-jump, and my inner current flared in anticipation, making me instinctively take a step away from the phone, rather than toward it. Normally, like I said, my current’s cold and calm, especially compared to most of my peers, but I’d been out of sorts recently, and wasn’t quite sure what might happen. Bad form to short out your only means of communicating with potential employers. Plus, the hotel would be pissed, and complain to J.

Once I felt my current settle back down, I let myself look at the blinking light again. You could call first thing in the morning with bad news. Okay. You didn’t call and leave a message with bad news, did you? I didn’t know. Maybe. Just because everyone seemed eager to tell me no to my face didn’t mean that was the only way to do it.

All right, this was me, keeping calm. Hitting the replay button. Stepping back, out of—hopefully—accidental current-splash range …

“This message is for Bonita Torres. Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.” The speaker gave an address that I didn’t recognize, not that I knew damn-all about New York City, once you get past the basic tourist spots. “Take the 1 train to 125. Be on time.”

No name, no indication of where they got my name or number, just that message, in a deep male voice.

An interesting voice, that. Not radio-announcer smooth, but … interesting.

Someone smart would have deleted the message. Someone with actual prospects would have laughed and said no way.

I’ve always been a sucker for interesting.

two

One of the first things J taught me was, before I decided on anything with repercussions, to step back and consider that decision from every possible angle. It only took a few minutes of thought, and sanity reasserted itself. The voice-mail message was weird, but intriguing. Or maybe it was intriguing because it was weird. Did that make it a good idea? No. In fact, it probably made it a very bad idea.

J said I should consider, and think sanely. He didn’t say anything about listening to that sane voice, and very bad ideas were often a lot of fun.

The guy hadn’t left a phone number for me to call back and say I’d be there, though. Oh god, and if this was from one of the résumés I’d sent out, I’d look a proper idiot calling now to follow up, if I’d already gotten an interview.

I picked up the phone and was about to dial the callback code when I realized that, idiot, the call had to have come through the hotel switchboard. So I dialed 0 for the front desk, instead.

“Hi. This is room 328? I just had a call come in, and they didn’t leave a name or number to reach them at, I don’t suppose …?”

No, the woman at the front desk told me regretfully, they couldn’t. I didn’t know if it was a technological thing or a legal thing, and I didn’t bother to ask. The reason didn’t make a difference. I hung up the phone, still clueless, and stared at the paper with the details written on it, on top of the list of names and places I was supposed to call back. Handwriting was supposed to tell you about a person, right? My handwriting’s like J’s—squared and solid, and easy to read. I’d have made a crappy doctor.

Maybe it was one of these places I’d already submitted my résumé to. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was through a contact of J’s who had thought my mentor would tell me to expect the call. That didn’t sound right—-J would never forget to tell me something like that—but it was a possibility. Maybe it was a joke, a prank, or a weird cold-call solicitation. I had no idea, and no way of finding out—except for showing up.

Tomorrow afternoon. All right. That gave me the rest of the day to follow up on my other résumés, and still get out and wander around the city before dinner with J. And then tomorrow … would bring whatever tomorrow would bring. Maybe J would have some idea what all this was about. I was pretty sure he’d have an opinion, at least.

The carrot of playtime in Manhattan dangling in front of me, I made short work of the remaining names on my list. Not that it took much; two résumés were still “under consideration”; two were thanks-no-thanks; at one place the HR person was out and would get back to me at some point before the next millennium, maybe; and one place, hurrah, they wanted to see me again on Friday!

The fact that this was Monday didn’t fill me with huge levels of optimism, since if I was a hot prospect they’d get me in quick, right? But it was the best offer I’d gotten so far, so I thanked the nice guy on the phone, confirmed the time and place, and hung up the phone not quite as terminally depressed as I’d been earlier. Also, I’d determined that the mysterious phone call hadn’t come from any of these places, so that option was dealt with.

Was I going to show up tomorrow? I honestly didn’t know.

But for now, I had the afternoon to myself. I threw on a pair of black pants and a hot-pink T-shirt and my boots, left my stress at the door, and made my escape.

Johnny, the twenty-seven-year-old engineering student from Tehran, was doorman today. He wished me a nice day and held the large glass door open, and I hit the sidewalk like a greyhound sighting a rabbit.

I grew up in Boston, went to school outside the city, had been to Rome and Paris and London and Dubai and Tokyo and a dozen other major cities with J dragging me around. All that travel gave me a reasonable sense of sophistication, but drop me in the middle of New York City and I felt like a little kid again. There’s not more current running through the wiring of Manhattan than anywhere else; it’s not any more vibrant or powerful … but somehow it always feels that way to me.

Not just me, either. J says there’re more Talent in New York, Chicago, and Houston than anywhere else, and more of the fatae, the nonhumans of the Cosa Nostradamus—those with and of magic—too. I wasn’t so blasé that I wouldn’t be excited about the chance to see more fatae. Sure, there were some up in Amherst; my freshman composition teacher had been a dryad, and a couple of centaurs used to hang around the stables I rode at, taunting the ponies and stealing grain and treats. But the exotics, the rare breeds, they were in New York, where nobody even looked once, much less twice.

The hotel was only a ten-minute walk from my destination: the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Specifically, the Temple of Dendur, the reconstructed ruins of a building once dedicated to Isis. Anytime the museum’s open, you’ll find people standing there under the glass walls, staring at the installation, soaking up the ancient ambience. Some of us are soaking up more than that. The Temple by itself may or may not have been anything especially mystical or magical in its original location, beyond whatever the faith of its followers gave it, but when it was relocated to the museum, they managed to place the sandstone structure directly over a major ley line convergence, one of the sweetest in the city.

Ley lines are like a funnel for natural current, the energy of the earth itself, the basic stuff magic is formed around. I wasn’t going to suck any of it up today, just say hello, make my curtsy, as J always said. It’s only polite.

Someone came up next to me. I assumed another tourist, someone who didn’t know not to stand so close, gawking at the Temple, same as me. Half-right, anyway.

“You’re new.”

Oh lord. Not that I didn’t appreciate attention, when I was in the mood, but … “You’re using a very old line.”

“Old and tested and true. I’m none of those things.”

I laughed, and turned to consider the owner of the voice. Tall, well above my own five-six, and nicely built, with deep blue eyes and raven-black hair setting off evenly tanned skin. Might be too old for me, by a smidge, but if he didn’t mind I wasn’t going to say anything.

Oh, the outlook for the afternoon had definitely improved.

“I’m Gerry,” he said, offering one nicely formed hand, the fingertips bitten but not torn up. There were just enough calluses to make his skin firm, rather than soft, and he shook like a guy who had nothing to prove, a single solid pump. “I’m harmless in public, entertaining in private, and up-to-date on all my shots and papers. May my old lines and I buy you a cup of coffee?”

This hadn’t exactly been the distraction I’d been thinking of, but when you’re made such a very nicely packaged offer … I cast a look over the Temple, and be damned if I didn’t feel a very distinct smirk coming off the energy rising out of it. Or maybe that was just me, projecting.

“You may, indeed.”

Three hours and more than one cup of coffee later, I knew enough about Gerry to know that he would be a disaster long-term, even if I had been thinking that way. I also knew that he had a very confident appeal and a sweetly coffee-scented kiss, and if I hadn’t been otherwise promised for the evening, we might have gotten better acquainted. Not that well acquainted, no; I’m an unabashed flirt, not a skank. But he was sweet, and he gave me his phone number and e-mail, with strict instructions to get in touch.

Maybe I would. Maybe not. Gerry was sweet, but he didn’t have even a twitch of Talent, didn’t seem to know anything about the Cosa Nostradamus—I’d been subtle but thorough on that—and I’ve always been shy about getting involved with Nulls. It gets … complicated. Better to stick to your own kind, who already know the deal.

I made it back to the hotel just in time to change for dinner. J’s not a fuddy-duddy, even if he is Council, but there are standards for our dinners together, and I appreciate them as much as he does.

Promptly on the dot of 6:00 p.m. I was dressed in my favorite red dress, a Monroe-style haltertop, pearl drops in my ears and rings on my fingers, feet cased in strappy gold sandals and my hair combed into a semblance of tidy curls. A spritz of perfume, and I was ready to go.

At the dot of 6:02 p.m., the touch of current that felt like J wrapped around me, and a second later the Translocation took effect, moving me from my hotel room in Manhattan a hundred-plus miles north to J’s place in Boston.

Translocation’s a basic current-skill. I’m decent at it. J’s prime. I landed in his living room like I’d stepped in from the hallway, not a hair out of place.

“Good evening, my dear.” He was pouring wine, a deep red liquid that made my mouth water. I was more of a vodka martini girl, but my mentor had a fantabulous wine cellar, too.

He was looking good, and I told him so.

“Well, I had a hot date tonight, had to brush off the good suit.”

Joseph Cetala had just pushed over seventy, and looked it, but every year had been kind. His hair was still thick, if bone-white, and his patrician cheekbones were hidden under still-firm skin. I have no objections to my looks—they do the job and pale skin and a pointy-pixie chin suit me—but man did I used to wish I were his biological daughter, just for those cheekbones.

I took a glass from him, and sat on the sofa. The shaggy white-and-brown throw rug got to its feet and shuffled over. “Hey there, good boy. How’s my good boy?”

“He’s getting old, same as me.”

“Nah. You guys are never gonna get old. Are you, boy?”

Rupert woofed, and shoved his wet nose into my hand. I wasn’t much for pets, but Rupe was less a pet than a member of the household. J said all Old English sheepdogs were smart, but I personally thought Rupe got a double helping of brains. I always got the feeling he wasn’t so optimistic about me.

J took his own glass over to the leather chair and sat, crossing one leg against his knee, and looking, I swear to god, like an ad for something upscale and classy aimed at the Retirement Generation. Even in my nice dress and pearls, I still felt outclassed.

Funny, really. I leaned into the sofa and looked around. The only way to describe J’s place was “warm.” Rosewood furniture against cream-colored walls, and touches of dark blue and flannel gray everywhere, broken by the occasional bit of foam green from his Chinese pottery collection. You’d think I’d have grown up to be Über Society Girl, not pixie-Goth, in these surroundings. Even my bedroom—now turned back into its original use as a library—had the same feel of calm wealth to it, no matter how many pop-culture posters I put up or how dark I painted the walls. And yet, J was just as likely to wear jeans and kick back with a beer when he was in the mood, so I guess I should know by now that you can’t judge a body by the decor.

J used to tell me, when I was, oh, thirteen and felt particularly floundering-ish, that I would grow up into who I always was. It sounds nice, I guess, but I’m still not quite sure who that is. She uses a lot of hair dye and has an interestingly eclectic wardrobe, and might have a lead on a job, though. So that was all right.

“What’s for dinner?” I asked.

“I’m trying something new.”

From some people, that news would make me nervous. J, I swear to god, was born in the kitchen. I don’t think he owned a single cookbook or has any of his recipes written down, but he’s never fed me anything that was less than really good, and it frequently goes into orgasmic culinary experience range. I learned how to cook by the time I was ten, just by osmosis, and had my first set of proper knives when I was fourteen. Haven’t done much cooking lately, though. Nobody around to feed since graduation, I guess.

“You are looking particularly glowy tonight, dearest. Either the job hunt has resulted in a hit, or you have met a new admirer.”

I think J gets a kick out of my social life, although he tsk-tsks periodically over my inability—lack of desire, really—to settle into one steady relationship. So long as I’m happy, he’s happy. I mean, he didn’t blink the first time I showed up with a new girlfriend, and never asked when she went away and a new boyfriend showed up.

I’m not particularly into labels. I just like people, is all. Doesn’t matter what body parts they’ve got, so long as there’s a brain and a sense of humor and a healthy idea of companionship.

“Both, maybe,” I told him. “But it’s the job thing that’s interesting. I was in the shower when the call came in ….”

J listened the way he always did, with his entire body leaning forward, his hands cupped around his glass, his gaze not unblinking but steady on my face. When I finished, he leaned back, took a sip from his glass, and didn’t say anything.

“What?”

“You intend to follow through on these instructions?”

“I’d planned to, yeah. You think it’s a bad idea? Are you getting a vibe?” I had what J called the kenning, not quite precog but a sort of magical sense about things. But he’d been honing his current for a lifetime before I came along, and that meant he picked up more than I did on a regular basis.

“Nothing so strong as a premonition, no. I will admit, however, to a sense that something is slightly … What is that horrible word you used to use? Hinky Something feels hinky about it.”

That made me laugh. “Well, yes. That probably goes without saying. Anyone calls out of the blue, doesn’t give basic details, all mysterious and like?” I didn’t roll my eyes, but my voice conveyed the “well, duh” more than J deserved. “That’s half the fun!”

My mentor shook his head and mock-sighed. I love J more than life, but he and I diverge pretty seriously on our ideas of fun.

“If you wanted me to, I could get you a job …” He let the offer trail off, the same way he did every time he made it. J had, once upon a time, worked for the State, and then did some work for a high-powered law firm that still listed him on the masthead, even though he hadn’t, as far as I knew, taken on a case in over a decade. If I couldn’t be a cop, I guess his reasoning went, why not be a lawyer?

Just the idea made me want to tear my fingernails off and use them to dig an escape route. I never, ever told him that, though I suspected he knew.

“There’s just something about that message,” I said, doing my usual not-a-response to his offer. “Something that makes my ears prick up, and no, I don’t know why. I figured I might do a scrying, see what comes forward.”

“You and your crystals.” The disgust in his voice this time was real.

“Just because we’ve gone all modern and scientific with current doesn’t mean some of the old ways aren’t valid.” It was an old argument, older even than the split between Council and the scruffy freelancer lonejacks. When Founder Ben—Benjamin Franklin to Nulls—nailed the connection between electricity and current with his kite-and-key trick, most Talent changed, too, working the scientific angle to figure out more and more efficient ways to do things—and how to work this increasingly electric world to our benefit. A lot of the theories and practices of Old Magic got tossed, and good riddance, but I’d discovered that I could scry better with a focus object than with current alone, and the smoother and rounder the shape, the better.

So yeah, I have a crystal ball. Deal.

“I just …” It was difficult to vocalize what I wasn’t really sure of. J was patient, waiting. I might have mentioned the dream, but I didn’t. Talking about Zaki always made J feel guilty, as if there was some way he could have prevented it, or stopped me from finding the killer, or done something.

“There’s something familiar about the voice. No, it’s not someone I’ve ever met. I’m not even sure I’ve ever heard the voice before, either, so it’s not a radio announcer or anything. But it’s still familiar, like I’ve got memories associated with it, except I can’t access those memories, either.” I’m usually pretty good at that, too, so J didn’t press further.

“Hinky,” my mentor instead diagnosed with confidence, putting his glass down and heading into the kitchen as something chimed a warning. Rupert abandoned my petting and trudged after his master. I could have followed, but we’d survived this long by not crowding each other in the kitchen. Tonight he was showing off.

J was probably right. Whatever that mysterious call was about, it was not going to be for an entry-level office management job with decent pay and benefits. But it wasn’t as though I had anything else urgent or particularly interesting to do, except maybe give Gerry a call.

This mysterious meeting sounded like it might have more potential.

“Dinner’s ready,” J came back to announce. “Bring your wine. And you’ve made up your mind already, haven’t you?”

J long ago taught me not to shrug—he said that it was an indelicate movement that indicated helplessness—so instead I lifted my free hand palm up in supplication for his understanding. “It’s not like anything else is panning out. And if it is hinky … I may not be as high-res as some, but I can take care of myself. You taught me well, Obi-Wan. Worst case scenario and it’s for a sleazy, low-paying call-girl job, I Translocate out and have a good story about it later.” I wasn’t quite as breezy as that sounded, but I did a pretty good job of selling it, because J’s shoulders relaxed just a bit.

I knew what he was worried about, even if he didn’t say so. J was twice-over retired now, but once upon a time he’d been a serious dealmaker in the Eastern Council, maybe even a seated member although if so he never admitted it, and even now if he said jump a lot of people made like frogs, both here and in the Midwest. There were also a lot of people he’d pissed off along the way, some of whom might want to take a late hit, if not directly on him, then through his family. And to the Cosa Nostradamus, the mentor-mentee relationship was as tight as it got, even more than blood.

He’d had another mentee, years ago, but Bobby was not going to be the target for anyone, anyhow. Not now. Full Council honors out in San Francisco, and you’d better have a topped-up core to take a whack at him or he’d eat you alive. So it was just me J got to worry about.

“And you’ll ping me as soon as you’re out?”

He had to be worried to ask me to ping. It was a good way to send a quick message, but not much on the formal manners, and most of the older Talent seemed to think the way we used it now was a sign of the coming Apocalypse or something.

“Yes, Joseph.” The use of his full name was my sign that the discussion was over, and since he knew better than anyone how like unto a pit bull I could be in the stubbornness category, he let it go and fed me, instead.

* * *

Later that night, back in my hotel room, I got out my crystals. The plain wooden box, about the size of a shoe box, was lined in thick, nubby linen—silk was so clichéd—and held three scrying pieces: a rose quartz ball about the size of my palm, a clear quartz shard the size of a pencil, and my traditional, kerchief-and-skirts scrying globe, also clear quartz. The third piece wasn’t entirely clear all the way through, with an imperfection about midway, but that really didn’t matter for my purposes.

The rose quartz stayed in the box; I wasn’t going to need that one tonight. Sitting cross-legged on the hotel-room bed, the lights out and the television off, I put the ball down in front of me and kept the shard in my hand.

It was warm, as if it had been waiting for me to pick it up. J taught me that everything had current, even inanimate objects, but I wasn’t sensitive enough—what the old-timers called Pure—to pick it up.

Pure or low-res, all Talent use current, and we all use it about the same way, but I’ve never heard anyone describe it exactly the same way. It’s like sex, or religion, I guess; you gravitate toward whatever works for you. Me, I like things tangible. As in life, so in my head; as in my head, so created in current.

The smaller crystal helped me ground and center. I had an even smaller black quartz one that I wore on a chain when I thought I’d need a boost on the go, but J thought that was sloppy, and reflected badly on his training, so I didn’t use it too often.

“Breathe in, breathe out. 10. 9. 8. 7. 6 … “

By five, as usual, I was deep in my own core, the current I carried with me all the time. You could source current from outside, either tame—man-made wiring, power plants, stuff like that—or wild. Wild was ley lines, electrical storms, that sort of thing. Nature’s own energy. There were pluses and minuses to both, which was why you always wanted to maintain your own power, filtered, tamed, and tuned to your own quirks. Core-current was safer to use, faster to call up, and no surprises lurking in the power stream.

I put the fragment down, and placed my hand on the globe, palm curved over the top. The stone was cool at first, and then my fingers began to prickle. I opened my eyes and looked down. Sparks were flicking inside the globe, running from my fingertip down to the imperfection, where they fractured and bounced back to the surface. They were mostly red, which wasn’t what I wanted. I focused, turning one strand this way, another that, and the hues faded to a more useful blue. Like cooking, you could do a lot with basic ingredients and a few pots, but it was easier when you had everything properly prepped.

“All right, baby, show me what you got. What’s waiting at tomorrow’s interview for me?”

That was about the level of specifics I hung at. There might be a way to get actual details out of the future, but I’d never known anyone who could do it consistently—and then there was the problem of interpreting those details. What seems perfectly obvious in a precog has a tendency to go another way entirely when it’s all happening.

But vague? Vague I could do.

The crystal was filled with blue sparks now, and I lifted my hand slowly, not wanting to startle anything. “Whatcha got for me? What’s waiting for me?”

The sparks began to settle, and I opened myself up to whatever visual might come.

Letters. Black against pale blue, hard and spiky letters, like someone writing fast and angry.

No Cheating.

And then the crystal—my damned expensive quartz globe—cracked like overheated safety glass, shards and chunks scattering all over the bed.

I stared down at the mess, feeling the sting on my skin where tiny fragments must have nicked me.

“Sheeesh.” I pulled a shard out of my hair, and dropped it into the largest pile of debris. “All right, fine. I can take a damned hint.”

At least I knew one thing for certain. Whoever had called, whoever was setting this up? Way stronger Talent than me. And there was something else to seriously consider: that blast could have hurt me. Any of those shards might easily have done damage—but didn’t.

I got up, yanked the cover off the bed and wrapped up the useless corpse of my crystal in it, and dropped it to the side of the room, where Housekeeping could deal with it later, then put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.

Big day tomorrow. I needed my sleep.

three

My interview—or whatever that mysterious summons actually ended up being—wasn’t until 2:00 p.m. So, of course, I slept through the wake-up call, and the usual breakfast knock, and even the construction work being done on the street outside, courtesy of ConEd, finally waking up a little before noon. This wasn’t as unusual as it should be; I was born a night owl, and J never really trained it out of me. The one single 8:00-a.m. class I had in college, I dealt with by staying up all night and going to sleep afterward.

The sight of the crumpled-up bedspread in the corner was a sobering thing to wake up to, though. Last night I was tired and well fed and probably more than a little inebriated—we had knocked off that bottle of wine, and then another during dinner—and the real hit hadn’t settled into my brain. This morning, it was all cold hard facts. I was going into an unknown situation that was clearly run—or at least guarded by—someone with way more mojo than I had. Someone alert to, and unhappy about, anyone scrying what they had planned. Suddenly, J’s concerns weren’t quite so dismissible.

I was still going—pit-bull stubborn, that’s me—but with caution, damn it. And, I decided suddenly, without pretending to be anyone I wasn’t. Screw that—it hadn’t gotten me anywhere so far, and whoever this was, they were the ones who came calling, not the other way around. Let them get what I got.

Out went the demure, if very nice, navy blue interview suit, and the sleeked-down, styled hair. My own, comfortable clothing, and my own comfortable look, thank you much. When I got out of the shower I applied my makeup and then ran my fingers through my hair and ruffled it madly. The image that stared at me from the full-length mirror was a hell of a lot more familiar now: my hair, still dark red but the short strands now fluffed around my face like a bloody dandelion puff, my eyes lined with a discreet amount of black kohl and mascara, and three basic gold studs in my left ear, while my right ear displayed a single sapphire stud, a fourteenth-birthday present from J.

I’d been tempted to finish it off with buckled cargo pants and a mesh T-shirt, all in black, but common sense won out. I was going for me-hireable, not Goth club-kid. So a bright red silk shirt; sleeveless, like a fitted vest, went over my favorite skirt, a long black linen circle with enough pockets and loops to carry everything you might need in a daily routine, up to and including a carpenter’s hammer. J might be hoity-toity lawyer-man, but Zaki’d been a craftsman, and I learned early on about always having room for your tools.

I didn’t like the way using the pockets interfered with the swing of the skirt, though, so everything—date book, newspaper, wallet, sunglasses—got tossed into my carryall. It was a graduation present from J—soft black leather, and probably the most expensive thing I owned—so I didn’t think I’d lose presentation points for using it instead of a briefcase.

There was a moment’s hesitation at the shoes, but I squashed J’s voice in my head and went for my stompy boots instead of the more interview-acceptable, sensible heels. Shoving my feet into them felt like coming home, and when I stood up again, I felt ready to take on the whole damn world.

Never underestimate the power of a pair of good, stompy engineer boots.

Leaving the hotel, the daytime doorman—an older Asian guy named Walter—wished me good luck, making him third after the two chambermaids in the hallway on my floor. I thanked him, too, not sure if I should feel good that they bothered, or depressed that everyone in the hotel seemed to know I was job-hunting. Still, the entire staff had been really nice to me, and it wasn’t like I was in a position to turn down good wishes.

The smart thing probably would have been to take a cab once I got cross-town, but the racket-clack of the subway was like a siren’s lure. They’re noisy, and usually overcrowded, but I could get a pretty current-buzz off the third rail without trying, and you see way more interesting people on mass transit. I’m all about the people-watching. Unfortunately, Tuesday at 1:30 p.m., heading uptown, seemed to be the dead time on the 1 train, and it was just me and an old guy reading a day-old newspaper, and two teenage girls in Catholic-school uniforms, whispering and giggling to themselves.

It took about twenty minutes to get uptown, with me obsessively checking the subway route map on the wall behind my seat at every station. Damn, I was going to be late …. I got off at what I hoped was the right stop, and left the guy to his paper, and the girls to their giggles. Places to go, people to impress!

The office—or whatever it was—didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The address was a mostly kept-up building off Amsterdam Avenue, seven stories high and nine windows across. Brick and gray stone: that looked like the norm in this neighborhood. We weren’t running with a high-income crowd, here. Still, I had seen and smelled worse, and the neighborhood looked pretty friendly—lots of bodegas and coffee shops, and the kids hanging around looked as if they’d stopped there to hang on the way home from school, not been there all day waiting for their parole officer to roll by.

And only one of them, a short kid with Day-Glo green hair, shouted out a comment to me, and yeah it was rude, but it wasn’t insulting, so I gave him a grin and told him to call me as soon as he could grow some facial hair, too. His friends hooted and shoved him hard enough to knock him off the stoop. Normal stuff.

I could work around here, yeah. Assuming this wasn’t just some recruiter’s office, or … Nerves surfaced again, and got shoved down. Come on, I chided myself, hoisting my bag more firmly over my shoulder, you faced off against a cave dragon when you were nineteen … how much more difficult could this be?

I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to that, actually.

Pushing the appropriate intercom button in the foyer got me buzzed in through the lobby doors. There was no camera lens visible, so either they were really trusting, or they were using current to watch the door. I couldn’t sense anything, but that could just mean that it was subtle—meaning well-done. The office was on the top floor, just to the right as I came out of the elevator. From the hallway, it looked as though there were two office suites on each side. I went to the correct door, marked by a brass 7-C, and turned the handle.

Walking into the office itself was reassuring; the space was clean, well lit, and surprisingly large. It was also filled with people.

All right, four other people. Three guys and another woman, seated on what looked like almost-comfortable upholstered chairs. None of the usual waiting-room coffee tables filled with out-of-date magazines, thank god. In fact, no coffee table at all, although there was a coffee machine and a bunch of mugs on a counter against the far wall, along with what looked like a working sink and a mini fridge. Nobody else was drinking coffee, although one of the guys had an oversize travel mug with him.

I let a flutter of current rise, and it got one, two, three, four equally polite touches back in response. Everyone here was a Talent, nobody was masking, and nobody was going to make a fuss about it. The fact that there were other people there was both worrying—competition for the job—and comforting—it probably wasn’t a setup or sideways attack on J after all. But that left the question: what the hell was it? I had no idea what the percentage of Talent was to the entire human population, but even in New York it had to be single digits. This was either deliberate selection, or a massive coincidence.

Based on the backlash last night, I wasn’t counting on coincidence.

I lifted my hand in greeting. “Hi.”

“Hello.” The woman responded first, giving me a once-over that reminded me eerily of my old junior-high math teacher. Not that this woman was old or stern or anything, just … assessing, that was the word. Tall, blond, and cool, with curves that could probably stop a truck. I let my eyes linger, I admit it. “I’m Sharon. That’s Nick.” She pointed to the one with the travel mug, a dark-skinned moose of a guy who barely fit into his armchair. He nodded, his expression not changing from one of resigned boredom. If he hadn’t played football at some point, maybe even college level, I’d tear up my people-watching skills and eat them without sauce. So, was he muscle, or was there something in the brainpan, too?

“That’s Pietr.” She pointed that finger at the second guy in line, a slender guy in khakis and pale blue button-down shirt matched to a screamingly expensive tie, and with a profile that would make a classical sculpture cry in envy. He was almost pretty, with skin as pale as mine, but something about the way he held himself kept the impression in check; like a serpent—shiny, but not cuddly. He met my gaze evenly, his pale gray eyes possibly the sweetest things I’d seen in weeks, and a smile flickered and was gone. Oh, he was trouble, you could tell it right away. And not all good trouble, either.

“And that’s Nick, too.”

No problem telling them apart—if NickOne was a jock, then NickTwo was a nerd. Short and scrawny, brown hair and brown eyes, and totally unimpressive in the same kind of khakis Pietr was wearing, but a less expensive-looking shirt and tie. NickTwo was the kind of guy you’d either ignore … or pick first for your team. I didn’t know which yet, but I was suspecting the latter. That probably meant that NickOne had brains, too, because whatever this gig was, I was starting to get a feeling they weren’t hiring for sheer meat-power.

They were all dressed more formally than I was, but only Sharon looked like she actually belonged in an office, with her tailored blue skirt and suit jacket, and stylish, low-heeled pumps. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, or it was applied so well you couldn’t tell, and with simple gold jewelry on her fingers and in her ears, she could have just come from a meeting where she wasn’t serving the coffee. She was also, I guessed, older than the rest of us, by anywhere from five to ten years, so make her maybe thirty.

“I’m Bonnie. You guys all summoned by a nameless message on your answering machine?”

Four nods; obviously they’d exchanged more than names before I got there.

“Anyone know what this is all about?”

Four headshakes.

“Great.” Talkative bunch. “Anyone want some coffee?”

Nobody did. “All they have is skim milk,” NickTwo warned me, and I nodded. Fine by me, so long as it wasn’t powdered nondairy crap. I went to the counter and pulled out a mug, pouring a dose of black tarry stuff I wouldn’t feed a rat, and adding as much sugar and milk to it as I could, to try to make it palatable. Didn’t really help, but it was something to do.

Sharon went back to her newspaper, and NickOne stared into space, as if he was having some in-depth conversation with space aliens. That left NickTwo and Pietr as possible conversationalists. I sat on the only remaining chair, balanced my mug of coffee on my knee, and waited. Time passed. Finally, bored out of my skull, I turned to Pietr on my left. “So why are you here?”

“My parole officer said I needed to prove I’d gone on a job interview, to keep from going back to jail.”

NickTwo blinked—I guess they hadn’t gotten around to that topic of conversation yet—but Pietr looked dead serious, so he was either dead serious, or a better joker than I could ever manage. Or, possibly, both.

“Seriously?” NickTwo asked, his brown eyes going wide and kidlike in awe.

“For serious, yes.” Then he cracked a smile, and shook his head. “Nah. But it was strongly suggested to me by persons of importance that I get a job to keep me out of trouble. So when this call came I figured, what the hell.”

“I think they’d need a lot more than a job to keep you out of trouble,” NickTwo said, leaning back in his chair with a vaguely disgruntled look. Looked as though I wasn’t the only one to have pegged Pietr straightaway.

He didn’t take offense—just the opposite, actually. “You’re probably right. What’s your excuse for being here?”

NickTwo shrugged, his skinny arms rising in a very Gallic shrug. “I graduated, got a part-time job that pays pretty well, doesn’t eat my life … and it’s boring the hell out of me. The message I got said I’d find this of interest. So …. I’m waiting for them to interest me.”

“Same here,” Sharon said, raising her head from the newspaper without even pretending that she hadn’t been eavesdropping. “I’m a paralegal. Good money, no future, boring as hell. My message told me that, if I wanted to stop wasting my life, to show up here, at this time.” She folded the newspaper and put it on the floor next to her chair. “How ‘bout you, big guy?”

NickOne blinked and came back to us. “Nifty.”

“What?”

“My teammates call me Nifty.”

I mentally patted myself on the back. Teammates, yep. Point to me. And ohmahgawd and holy shit. “You’re Nifty Lawrence.” I didn’t mean for my voice to squeak, but it did anyway. I’d dated a guy in college who was totally into football, not the pros but the college games, and Nifty Lawrence was supposed to be hot enough for the first round of the draft when he graduated, which would have been last year. “Hands like a god, could catch anything on the field, including low-flying seagulls,” my ex had claimed. So why the hell was he here, instead of sweating out the coaching appraisals and counting his cash?

“I am.” He looked sort of embarrassed by that fact, and tugged at the sleeve of his navy jacket as though he’d just realized he was wearing it and wondered how that happened. “And before you ask, I looked around, and decided that maybe just being good enough to go pro wasn’t reason to do it. I mean, I’m good but I didn’t love it. Getting my MBA and finding a corner office somewhere seemed smarter than spending five or ten years getting my head knocked to the turf. Only it takes money to pay for grad school, even with loans. So, I need a job, too.”

My opinion of his brains went up, considerably.

“So what about you?” he asked me. “Boredom, or desperation, or something else entirely?”

“All of the above, I think. A whim? I was curious to see what the deal was.” I looked around, suddenly struck by a thought. “You guys all had messages—did they all say 2 p.m.?”

“Yeah,” Nick said, and Nifty nodded. Sharon frowned, obviously thinking the same thing I was, but Pietr was the one who said it. “Who schedules five interviews all at the same time?”

“More than that,” Nick said, pulling out a battered old-fashioned windup pocket watch and looking at it. “It’s almost 2:20, and we’re the only ones here.”

Four heads swiveled as though we were pulled on a string, to look at the closed door behind us, leading into the rest—I presumed—of the office.

The door remained closed.

“Anyone know the protocol of how long you wait before you assume you’ve been blown off?” I asked, and like we’d rehearsed it or something, the four of us looked at Sharon, who was the only one who seemed as if she might have a clue.

“What, I’m mother hen now?”

“Cluck, cluck,” Nick said, unabashed when she glared at him. Nifty laughed, and she split the glare between the two of them. Oh, Miss Blonde did not like being mocked, even gently.

I’m not much as peacemaker—I never got the hang of being soothing, and while I can dance around the truth I’m crap at lying—but it looked as if it was gonna be my job anyway, just to keep things nonviolent. “Look, I’m straight out of college, don’t know a damned thing, and I know Nifty’s the same, considering he’s only a year older than I am. I don’t know what Pietr’s background is, but getting anything straightforward out of him is impossible. I know that already, after ten minutes.” He made a seated, ironic bow in response. “You and Nick, on the other hand, already have jobs, so you must’ve gone through this successfully before, and I’d trust your opinion over Nick’s on something like this.”

“Hey!” Nick sounded like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take offense or not. I did say peacemaking wasn’t my thing, right? But it seemed to work, because I could practically see the hackles under Sharon’s chignon subside, and she gave a grudging nod.

“By now, I would expect someone to at least check on us, see who was here, maybe call one of us in,” she said. “Unless they have this room on closed-circuit camera … “

“They don’t. I checked.” Nick sounded quite certain of that. “And anyway, the bunch of us in one small room, nervous or anticipating, and a seeing-eye camera? Would last about ten minutes.”

“Speak for yourself,” I told him. “Some of us have actual control.”

“I don’t,” Nifty admitted. “Local stations stopped interviewing me before a game, after their cameras kept fritzing.”

Probably another reason why he decided against a career in pro football. He wasn’t going to make it as a sportscaster, either, with that handicap. Corporate America was definitely a better bet.

“So by now,” I said, “someone should have come out to count noses?”

Sharon nodded. That’s what I had thought. My nerves were starting to hum again. Was anyone even back there, behind the closed door I’d been assuming was the main office? If not, then who had let us in? “And nobody’s had the slightest urge to get up and walk out, despite the fact that we don’t know crap-all, and this mysterious voice has kept us waiting almost half an hour already without any explanation?”

“I thought about it,” Sharon admitted. “I’m still thinking about it. But … “

“Yeah,” I said. “But.” But we were all there, anyway.

The five of us sat there in silence, uncomfortable now, for another ten minutes. The time ticked by in my head, each tick louder than the last, and finally I’d had enough.

Stubborn, I am, yes. Also curious enough to kill a dozen cats, and not really good with the patience thing. When I think about something, I have to follow it all the way through to the end.

“Hell with this.” I put my mug of coffee—still undrunk, because it really was disgusting—on the floor and stood up. “I want to know what the deal is.”

“What, you’re just going to barge in there?” Nick looked somewhat taken aback, but Pietr had a gleam in those eyes that made me think he’d been about three seconds behind me. He liked trouble, yeah. Being in, or causing, or both, I didn’t know. I had a tiny tremor of precog that I was going to find out, though.

“Yep,” I said in response to Nick’s question, and I marched my boots over to the door, knocked once soundly, and waited.

No answer. Not even the sound of someone shuffling around on the other side. That wasn’t good.

I knocked again, and then tried the door handle, fully expecting it to be locked.

It wasn’t.

My current swirled once, deep inside me, then went still. I could Translocate out of here now, if I wanted to. I could yelp for J, ask his opinion. I could …

I pushed the door open and stepped inside, hearing at least one person get up and move behind me. Nice to know someone had my back. I was betting on it being Pietr.

The door opened up into a larger room, done up like your basic office—beige carpeting and walls painted to match—and furnished with a large wooden desk with a leather chair behind it, two upholstered visitors’ chairs, a bunch of framed inspirational-looking prints on the walls, and basic white blinds on the windows, two of them, on the far wall. There was one sickly looking plant I immediately wanted to rescue, and a couple of photos on the desk, facing away from us, but not much personality otherwise.

The body sprawled facedown on the floor next to the desk didn’t contribute much to the room’s decor, either.

four

“Holy shit.” The words came from my throat the moment they hit my brain. Maybe not the most articulate of reactions, and I don’t have much of a filter, sometimes, but … hello? Dead body. A little freaked-out. I think I could be forgiven.

Sharon looked over my shoulder to see what I was reacting to, and then slid past me while I was still standing there, trying to take it all in. She knelt by the guy with careful precision and lifted his wrist, I guess to try for a pulse. I almost snorted. Not much point; even from the doorway I could tell he was dead. You didn’t lie facedown that way if you were just sleeping, not even if you’d passed out. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of people passed out.

“Holy shit,” I said again.

There was a dead body in the office. We’d been sitting there, just talking, drinking coffee, and there had been a dead body in there all that time.

“I guess the interviews are canceled?” a voice said in my ear, and I dug an elbow into Nick’s side. Not that it wasn’t funny, in a sick way, but it didn’t really seem … respectful. Or something, I don’t know.

Did I mention the freaked-out part? Dead body. There. My current was very still, deep inside me, and I stirred it just to reassure myself that it hadn’t suddenly disappeared. I didn’t carry a lot of mojo around with me—why would I?—but touching it was like having a blankie or a stuffed bear; the need for comfort was a natural human instinct. I’d place even odds everyone else in the room was doing exactly the same thing. Like checking for your wallet after someone else’s been robbed: maybe stupid, but almost impossible to stop yourself.

Nifty moved past us, too, nowhere near as smoothly or gently as Sharon, and that made me think maybe we should get out of the way—or at least stop standing in the doorway before someone decided to go through us, one way or the other. I didn’t really want to get closer to the body, but the only other alternative was to go back into the waiting room, and I didn’t think that would look good.

Why I cared what looked good in front of people I’d just met and wasn’t sure I liked and was probably going to be competing for a job against was left unanswered.

“There’s no blood,” Pietr said, and I jumped. Despite thinking he was the first one behind me, I hadn’t seen him until he spoke. He’d somehow faded into the blah-colored walls of the office like some kind of two-legged chameleon. How a good-looking guy can disappear from my awareness … I guess it showed how freaked-out I was.

“Wha?” My voice came back with a croak, and I cleared my throat and tried again. “What?”

“On the carpet. There’s no blood.”

I forced myself to ignore the fact that the body was a body, and looked again, starting with the torso—I didn’t want to look at the face, not yet—and moving over the probable track he’d taken to land there. Pietr was right. No blood, no signs of violence, spilled drink or food on the desk—no sign whatsoever of what had happened.

By now, all of us had moved through the doorway and into the room, although Nick and I were still hanging back. I felt I should be doing something, but I didn’t know what, so I just stood there and watched.

Sharon and Nifty were turning the body over, gently, like it was going to matter to the guy now. I kept cataloging details, focusing on that so I didn’t have to really see what they were doing, in case blood suddenly spurted or something. Clothing. The guy had on a nice suit, gray pinstripe, that looked more expensive than the office would suggest. He was also missing his shoes, gray dress socks visible as they turned him. That was weird. A head of dark hair, thick and curly, and I couldn’t tell in this light if he was going gray or not. I looked, finally, but couldn’t see much of his face, because Nifty was blocking the view. I was kind of relieved, actually. A face would make it—him—real. A real dead body.

“Should we be moving the body?” I asked. “Aren’t the cops going to want it to be left alone, for investigation?”

“You going to call the cops?” Pietr sounded horrified by the idea. I stopped. Wasn’t I? Weren’t we? Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do if you found a guy dead? I had no idea what the protocol was for this kind of thing. J would know. I reached out, instinctively, to ping him and then stopped. He’d hear “dead body” and freak, and yank me home, and that wouldn’t solve anything.

“I … “

“Not me,” Pietr said firmly. “Natural-born non involver, that’s me. I say we back out and pretend we never saw anything.” He talked scared, but he didn’t move, and his gaze was sweeping the room to make sure he didn’t miss something. He might not like cops, but he wasn’t scared. Far from it.

“I guess we should call someone,” Sharon said, but she sounded weirdly reluctant. Not scared or even unnerved, but reluctant, like a dog that didn’t want to give up a bone. “The guy’s definitely dead. No visible wounds, no spilled blood, but there’s no pulse, no lung movement.” She sounded as if she’d memorized a medical handbook on how to tell someone was dead. For all I knew, she had.

Nifty had a small mirror in his hand, holding it over the DB’s face. He flipped it shut, like a compact, and put it back in his jacket pocket. Wow. I hadn’t known anyone actually did that anymore, checking for breath. Did it really work? The thought distracted me for a moment, then I came slamming back. How had the guy died? How long had he been dead? Had it been while we were sitting there, and if so, oh shit, could we have done anything to save him?

That thought made me feel vaguely ill.

“I think he had a heart attack,” Sharon said, although her voice was, for the first time, lacking what I’d already assumed was a customary take-charge sharpness. “Totally natural, probably instantaneous. No sign of any kind of external violence.”

My throat closed up at her words, and I had to force myself to breathe normally, shards of my dream coming back like an acid flashback. External violence. Murder? I hadn’t even thought …

Nifty looked as confused as I felt. “We just found him here like this. Natural reaction would be to call the paramedics first, even if he is dead, and let them deal with the cops. Right? So why not call the cops, too? What if they have questions for us?”

Sharon looked at him as though he’d just suggested she take up pole dancing. “You think the five of us, here in an unmarked office, with no reason to be here except a mysterious phone message, and a dead body just happens to be in the other office, aren’t going to become the immediate persons of interest to the cops, no matter how he died? You think they’re going to believe how we all ended up here on the basis of some strange phone message from god knows who, for an unspecified interview for an unnamed, unknown company none of us sent a résumé to? I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that shit in my life.”

Nifty blinked, processed, and nodded reluctantly. Nick let out a sigh, and even Pietr seemed to agree with her logic. I obviously had a different take on the police than my companions. Then again, I’d never actually ever had any dealings with the police. So what if they asked me a few questions? I didn’t have anything to hide. Then it hit me. “You guys … all lonejacks?”

They nodded.

“You’re not?” Pietr moved away from me, as though I’d just admitted to having cooties. I shrugged. “Dad was lonejack. My mentor’s Council. I never really thought about it.” Wasn’t quite true, but explaining would take too much time and energy.

The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t exactly one big happy family. Or we were, but there were two distinct branches of the family tree. Council was organized, focused, and monied, mostly. Not more or less law-abiding than any given lonejack, but less likely to take heat for it, I suppose. Council policed themselves: that was the point of Council. Lonejacks were on their own, and liked it that way. If my dad had been any indication, they really didn’t appreciate official-type people asking questions about their private lives, even if they hadn’t done anything wrong.

J and I, we ran in our own little world, I guess. He’d never pushed me to go Council, or kept me from having lonejack friends, but mostly I sort of floated between the two worlds, and never felt I belonged particularly in either one. I’d always thought of myself as child-of-a-lonejack, but would probably identify as Council if pushed. I’m not sure they’d acknowledge me, though. It hadn’t ever been an issue before, but now I felt it like an ache: where would I go, if they had to take me in?

“Don’t let your guard down just yet, if you were smart enough to raise it in the first place,” Pietr said, breaking into my thoughts. “It wasn’t a heart attack, not the way you meant, anyway.” He’d somehow gone from standing against the wall to standing next to the body, and the way the others reacted I don’t think they saw him move, either.

“You can tell, just by looking at him?” Sharon’s voice got real cold. “You have a doctoral degree you forgot to mention?”

“Idiots.” He sounded totally disgusted with the lot of us. “Can’t you feel it?”

The moment he mentioned it, I understood. There was a hum in the room, something faint but unmistakable. The sound of current, simmering in the wires, normal in any modern building, yeah—except the humming was in the body, too.

Everyone carries electrical current in them: it’s how our bodies work. Muscles moving, heart pumping, neurons firing, etc. Once the body dies, the electricity does, too. If you’re Talent, you’ve got current in there, too, not just in your core-supply but everywhere, filling your entire body. But it flits even faster than electricity when the person dies and control’s released. Everyone knows that.

If current was still in the body, and the body was dead, then it meant that the current we were sensing was from an external source—and still keeping a grip on the body.

That … probably wasn’t good.

“You think current killed him?” Nifty sounded less surprised or horrified than fascinated.

It happened sometimes, when a Talent overloaded, took too much current on, either by accident or ego, and it shorted out their system. Mostly it just made you nuts, frying the brain cells, but it could kill, too. Sometimes it killed everyone in the area, too, just for the sin of being too close. I was suddenly really glad I hadn’t gotten close, and from the look on Nifty’s face, he was wishing he were another ten feet or more away. Sharon didn’t seem to be bothered at all, still kneeling by the body, her skirt folded neatly under her knees.

“But overrush shouldn’t still be lingering,” she said. “It should fade once the final flare-out happens, not hold on to him.”

A damned good point. I didn’t think I wanted to hear Pietr’s response.

“I think someone used current to kill him,” he said anyway, and that stopped everything cold. Even Sharon blanched.

I knew I didn’t want to hear it.

“You think one of us did it?” Nifty asked, his deep voice a little tight and rising. “But we were all there, together—hell, Sharon and I arrived at the same time, first, and the rest of you … “

Nick started to babble. “We don’t know anything about each other. This could be a setup—”

“Stop it!” Sharon’s voice cut through Nick’s stream of denial like forged steel, cold and hard. “None of us did anything.”

“And you know that how?”

“I know.”

“How?” Pietr was like a damn terrier with a bit of meat; he wasn’t going to let go, even standing over a dead body.

“I just do, all right?” Our cool blonde was pissed, and not in the mood for being questioned. I got the feeling she was like that a lot. “I could tell if any of you were lying, or trying to keep something from us. It’s what I do. So just shut up with the paranoia. None of us killed this guy.”

“Venec.”

“What?” That distracted her from her pissiness, at least a little.

Nifty had gotten up and gone around to the desk. “His name’s Venec, Ben Venec. Or at least, he’s reading a newspaper that was mailed to a Mister Benjamin Venec at this address.” Nifty pointed a finger down at the New York Times folded on the desk, but didn’t touch it. “There’s nothing else here. This guy wasn’t using the desk.” He took a piece of tissue out of his pocket and used it to pull open the drawer. “Nothing in here, either. Definitely not using the desk. That’s weird. People usually dump stuff into the desk drawers first off, even before they bring in plants or photos.”

By now, Sharon had gotten up and moved away from the body, smoothing her skirt and looking like she was about to start issuing orders again. Something got me walking across the carpet the three feet it took to take her place.

“What are you doing?” Nick asked, watching me.

I put my palm over the guy’s chest, still not looking at his face—this was easier if I didn’t think about him as a person.

“Asking the current,” I said, already sinking into my core and not really aware of anything else, other than the idea that this wasn’t a very good idea. I’d done this sort of scrying before, but only with people I knew, or things that belonged to them. The last time I’d done it, in fact, had been with tools that belonged to my dad, just after he’d been killed, which was why I’d thought of it. Death just seemed to call out for a final scrying.

Tell me something, I whispered to the hum of current wrapped around this guy’s chest. Tell me something about why you’re there. Tell me why I dreamed of death, again.

That last bit slipped in, but I let it go rather than worrying. Sometimes I’d get something, maybe detailed, maybe vague. More often I wouldn’t get anything. In light of the past twenty-four hours, what I got this time really shouldn’t have surprised me.

I got tossed on my ass, back into the side of the desk.

“Motherf—Ow!” I don’t swear much, but it felt warranted. That hurt.

“You all right?”

“What happened?

“Holy hell, girl, what did you do?”

The voices broke out over my head, surprised and concerned, in varying registers. “I didn’t do a damn thing,” I said, as soon as the birds stopped tweeting in circles around my head. It took a second, and then something slammed into my head, like the tail end of an aftershock. “Damn. Whatever’s wrapped itself around that guy, I’ve felt it before.”

“What? When?”

I had to think for a second, then the memory connected with something else, and I had it. “Last night. I tried to scry, get some detail on this interview, and got kicked back, hard.”

Nifty knelt beside me, not touching me. “Is it the same signature?”

I had to think about that, too. Signature’s the specific feel/taste/sound of current. Wild current’s like springwater—fresh and pretty much signatureless. Canned current, the stuff that comes out of electrical wiring, has a specific and easily recognizable signature. Core-current? J’s I could recognize a mile and a millimeter away. Some unknown guy? Tougher. Maybe impossible. But if it was the same, it meant that the killer had been in my brain before I even got here. It meant the killer knew me.

I went cold, locking down everything except the question at hand.

“Nothing I could recognize,” I said, finally. “It was sharp, like a lightning bolt, but if it was wild, it was a while ago.” There was a flavor to it, or more like a lack of flavor, like flavor had been stripped out of it. But I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like a crackpot, or that the hit to my head had been worse than it looked.

Nifty was working his jaw like he had a hard thought between his molars, and my gaze, untethered from anything my brain was doing, watched it in fascination.

“Someone … one of us did this?” Sharon sounded as though it was something unthinkable, something … obscene. As though somehow being Talent made you immune from the urge to kill.

I wished that were true. I knew all too well that it wasn’t.

“It came from through here,” Nick said. He was looking up at the ventilation system, holding a hand up like he was trying to coax something out of it. Which he was, actually. The arm moved, tracing a path down through the wall. “There’s wiring here that’s not normal. You’d expect to see it in a modern high-rise, not this place. Too jazzed, too much power. Like laying in a midnight snack of current.” He saw us all staring at him, and shrugged those skinny shoulders with a sort of rueful embarrassment. “I spent a summer working as a runner at a construction copyshop. I stared at a lot of blueprints, got a feel for wiring.”

“So whoever it was, they had to have planned this.” My brain was totally focused now, no hesitations or freaked-out gibbering. For the first time in months, I felt that I had, if not a direction, then at least a path underfoot. “Or at least knew that the wiring was there. Question is, was this guy the actual target? Or was someone just trying out the available power, and he was in the wrong place at the right time?”

“No.” Pietr’s voice was coming from the door, this time. How the hell did he do that? “The question is—why the hell are we still here, poking around trying to figure out who and why? What the hell does it have to do with us, other than we’ve now put our fingerprints all over the room for the cops to find?”

That was a damn good question.

“I’m not in the system,” Nick said, shrugging.

“I am,” Sharon said. “Standard security profile for some of the clients my firm works with. And having my profile flagged for a suspicious death would not be good for my career, since it looks like this job’s not going to pan out to anything.”

“So why are you still here?” Nifty asked, not quite getting up in her face, but close to it: he was challenging her to leave, to abandon us. And when the hell, I wondered, did we become “us”?

“Because …” Sharon let the sentence trail off, obviously trying to put her thoughts into some kind of order before speaking them.

“Because we’re curious,” I said, jumping in. “We don’t give a damn about this guy, particularly. We don’t know who he is, and we’ve got every reason to be pissed off and scared. But we want to know why, more.”

“That’s insane.” Nifty sounded like I’d just insulted his mother.

“Sure, but you got another reason for standing there with a dead guy’s day planner in your hand?”

Nifty looked down, and put the book back on the desk as though it was about to bite him. I’d made my point, though, and I could practically see his hackles go down.

“So what now, genius,” Sharon asked, but not pissed-sounding, more like she really did wonder what I was going to suggest.

So did I.

“Now you congratulate yourselves on a successful job interview.”

Sharon shrieked. So did Nifty, in a deeper but no less shrieky voice. Nick jumped back a full foot, and sparks of current appeared in his hands, deep blue and arcing all over his fingers. And Pietr, I swear to god, I was looking right at him and I saw him fade out of sight this time.

They all seemed like reasonable things to do, when a dead body sits up and starts talking to you.

“Stand down, people.” A door none of us noticed before slid open and another guy walked in. He was tall, taller even than Nifty, if half his mass, with orange-red hair tied back in a ponytail. The color looked natural, and a guy wearing four-hundred-dollar boots probably isn’t the sort to do Day-Glo dye jobs anyway. Flame-head walked past where Pietr had just been and offered a hand to our dead body. The DB took it, hauling himself to his feet.

They didn’t look a thing alike: flame-head was tall and skinny, and DB was squared-off and dark, but they stood together like bookends, totally unconscious of how they mirrored each other. My fifth-grade dance teacher used to try to hammer that kind of unconscious grace into us, mostly with abject failure.

I also noted now that DB was seriously hot. Not good-looking, the way Pietr was, or even Nifty’s dark, corn-fed handsome, but hot.

“How did you create the illusion you were dead?” Sharon demanded. “You had no pulse, no breath, no nothing!”

Flame turned to DB and smirked. “I told you I could do it.”

“And you were right,” DB said easily. “Get over it. Gloating’s bad for your digestion.”

That voice. That was the same voice I had heard on the answering machine.

“What the hell is going on here?” Nifty demanded, his body pulling up so he looked the way he must’ve to the guys who’d faced him across the scrimmage line: big, bad, and needing to hit something, hard. “Who the hell are you people?”

“You’re the guy who called,” Pietr said, looking at DB. “I recognize your voice.”

I wanted to say me, too, but I think the shock had seized up my vocal cords, because I couldn’t say a thing. Probably just as well; standing up and breathing, DB was the yummy, intense sort I really like, and I’d probably have embarrassed myself if I had been able to say anything. Flame wasn’t quite as yummy, but when you looked at him magically, oh wow. He had an inner core that seriously radiated, like …

The current that had knocked me sideways. It felt familiar because it was—it was the same signature as the current that shattered my scrying crystal last night.

Son of a spavined bitch. They had damn well better hire me. These bastards owed me.

“You wanted people who didn’t freak when faced with freakiness,” Nick said, as if he’d just figured out the last missing piece of a puzzle. “Whose first thought wasn’t to run, but to look.”

“And you all passed, with flying colors,” Flame said. He seemed to be the spokesperson of the two, stepping forward, literally, and taking the floor. “Even in the face of … unfortunate circumstances, all of you stepped forward and used your respective skills to observe and gather details, integrating information as it was brought forward rather than choosing a conclusion and then sticking to it no matter what.” Flame smiled at us, a wide, approving smile that looked false but somehow felt real. “You all worked together, as a team, despite having no reason to do so. Not a prima donna among the bunch.”

“Which means what?” Sharon asked, her hands fisted on her hips, like she was going to walk out if she didn’t get answers, stat. Hah. Flame’s definition of a prima donna was clearly different from mine.

“It means you’re hired,” DB said, his expression almost—not quite, but almost—looking pleased about the prospect. “All of you.”

There was a slight popping noise, and four more chairs appeared in the office, distributed neatly around the desk. Someone was showing off. From the look DB shot his … partner? I was guessing it was Flame.

“Please,” he was saying, gesturing to the chairs. “Sit. I will explain.”

“That would be nice,” Nick said, sitting in one of the chairs and leaning back in it as though he had all the time in the world. “Starting with who the hell you are.”

Pietr stuck to his position against the wall, but the rest of us took the offered chairs, mainly because, at least for me, my knees were still wobbly. DB righted the overturned leather desk chair and sat in it, effectively reclaiming the desk as his territory, while Flame rested his right hip against the edge of the desk and gazed at us as though he was about to start a lecture.

“Ah. Where to start. At the beginning, yes, Ben, I know,” he said before DB could say anything. I was right, they were partners—not sexual, not unless I was reading them all wrong, and I didn’t do that very often. But business partners, in whatever this was, yes.

“My name is Ian Stosser.” He waited, like we were supposed to have heard of him. “Ah. My partner here, whom you have already met under … awkward circumstances, is Benjamin Venec.”

Venec nodded once at us, his gaze sweeping restlessly from face to face. It wasn’t boredom but evaluation; I knew, having used the same sweep myself more than once. The look of a people-watcher. Stosser was the talker, Venec the looker. One prodded, the other collated responses. Good teamwork. Good cop/bad cop. Or whatever they were.

“Several years ago, there was an incident in Seattle. The Madeline case.” Stosser paused, probably for dramatic effect. “Do any of you remember it?”

I did. Nifty shook his head, and so did Pietr and Sharon. Nick was the only one who spoke up.

“The girl who was raped and murdered. They never found the killer. She was Cosa,” he said to the others. “Sixteen, still in mentorship.”

That meant that she was still a kid, supposed to be protected, taken care of, not just by her mentor but by every adult Talent. That’s the theory, anyway.

“She was killed by strangulation, but the coroner was never able to say exactly how, because there wasn’t any of the usual marks or indications in the autopsy. There were rumblings, maybe she’d been killed by someone within the Cosa. That someone had used current to subdue and kill her. Madeline’s mentor offered a huge reward, but nobody ever came forward.”

I knew about the case because Madeline and her mentor had been Council. J had been part of the investigating team flown out to look into the alibis of a couple of the guys they suspected. Nothing had ever been proven, nothing had ever been done. He’d come home and hugged me really tight, and never said a word about it after that.

“That’s right. A dead end, totally untraceable, unprovable … Then.” Stosser started pacing, forcing us to follow his movements. “But it got us, Ben and me, to thinking. Why was it untraceable? We all know how to detect current—it’s one of the first things we’re taught in mentorship. We gather it, manipulate it, direct it, imprint it … A current-signature is like a fingerprint, and therefore, like a fingerprint, it should lead you back to the owner, if you only know how. They had suspects, and my contacts tell me that the signature connected to one of them. So why couldn’t they do that, why couldn’t they make that connection for Madeline?”

“Because nobody could agree on the validity of the identification, because there were too many personal conflicts … and not everyone agreed on the validity of the identification, leaving enough doubt that they couldn’t do anything about it.” I hadn’t learned about that from J—I’d done some digging myself, after. All this had been just after Zaki had been killed, and murder was a lot on my mind.

“Right.” Stosser gave me a look of approval, professor to bright student. “But what if … a large what-if, but work with me here, what if there was someone who could and would do the work, tracking down the evidence and building a case based only on the evidence … totally unbiased by any other allegiance than a dedication to the facts … to an insatiable desire to know What Happened?”

I could hear the capitalization in his voice, even before he made quote signs with his hands around those last two words.

“What if there was a place that people could turn to, for crimes committed outside the abilities of the Null police force and court system—crimes by Talent against Talent?”

His comment cut so close to my own pain that I was literally breathless for an endless second.

“There isn’t,” Sharon said, her I-know-everything voice back. That tone was already starting to irk me, even though I knew she was right. “Council won’t trust anything not Council, and lonejacks … “

“Lonejacks won’t trust anyone,” Nifty said.

“That has been true, traditionally,” DB said, and I really needed to stop thinking of him like that, since he wasn’t actually dead anymore. “But traditionally, Talent did not attack Talent, either. The Madeline case was high profile, but even that didn’t get much chatter. So what you don’t know is that there have been others … and the numbers are growing.”

I felt a chill in my spine. Zaki had been one of those numbers, killed by another Talent. I hadn’t realized … I had always thought he was an aberration, a tragic fluke. Talent killing Talent … there weren’t that many of us to begin with; the lines of community had always kept us safe from each other. What had changed?

“The world is changing. We’re changing …” Stosser did that dramatic pause thing again, while I reminded myself that there was no way he could have been reading my mind, that not even the purest Talent could do that without permission. “And we need to change other things in order to keep up. Including how we react to those changes.”

“And you want to be part of that change,” Pietr said, sounding intrigued despite himself. “How?”

“Puppy.”

“What?” I couldn’t have been the only one hearing that wrong.

“P-U-P-I.” DB—Venec—spelled it out. “Private, Unaffiliated, Paranormal Investigations. The name was Ian’s idea—” he shot his partner a rueful glance “—but it has the benefit of being easily remembered. A team of trained forensic Talents, shorn of their normal affiliations of lonejack or Council, answerable only to the evidence, the truth. A handpicked group of investigators who don’t care why, only how, and who. A group who can deliver evidence to be used to prosecute and punish Talent who think they can escape detection by ordinary methods.”

“And you want to hire … us.” Pietr’s voice was carefully noncommittal.

“Any of you can get up and walk out at any time,” Stosser said, coming to rest by his partner’s side, hands clasped behind his back as though to keep them from waving about while he talked. “There’s nothing keeping you here against your will. We chose your names not by random chance, but because each and every one of you met our criteria for intelligence, independence, determination, curiosity, and a certain … dogged stubbornness.”

Nifty coughed deep in his throat, like a strangled laugh, and I had to grin in self-recognition. All the traits J occasionally despaired of, suddenly touted as employable virtues. That was funny.

“You’re free to walk,” Venec said. “But none of you will. The fact that you made it this far, through all of our tests, means that you are perfect for this challenge … and the job is perfect for you.”

He smiled then, an arrogant, challenging smile, and a shiver ran through me that had nothing whatsoever to do with the ghoulishness of what we’d been discussing. He was yummy, yeah, and intense … and offering me what just might be the job of a lifetime.

This was either going to be a clusterfuck of monumental proportions … or a whole lot of fun.

five

My mentor took the news about as well as I’d expected.

“Absolutely not! Impossible! You need a real job, not this … irresponsible pipe dream! Stosser—bah, Ian Stosser has always been a troublemaker, and this partner of his, this Ben Venec … I’ve never heard of him. Who is he? What are his credentials? Where is their funding coming from?”

J had been ranting for almost an hour now, ever since I Translocated into his Beacon Hill apartment and told him the results of the afternoon’s meeting. Periodically I used a strand of current to check his blood pressure, an intimacy he allowed me only because he was too distracted to slap the tendril away, and then went back to my own thoughts. Eventually he would run down, and we could have a reasonable discussion.

Not that it mattered. I had already made up my mind.

It took another ten minutes, but finally my mentor dropped into his chair and stared gloomily across the room at me. I lifted my head up from the paperwork I’d been flipping through, and met his gaze evenly.

“And you didn’t hear a word I said, did you?” he asked.

“I heard every syllable,” I said in the same measured, reasonable tone he was using now. “I even agreed with some of them.”

“But you disagree with the overall conclusion.”

I scratched the tip of my nose and tossed the folder of papers onto the end table. The salary they were offering was passing-decent, the benefits not worth mentioning, and none of it mattered, really. None of it had since The Guys, as I’d started thinking of them, had given us the pitch.

“Joseph. You know they’re right. About the need for this—for unbiased investigators for the Cosa—and about how very good I’d be at it.”

J knew what I was talking about, and I knew that he really didn’t want to think about that. His expression didn’t change, but he shifted in his chair, just enough to let me know he was uncomfortable.

“That was different,” he said, not meeting my gaze.

“Of course it was,” I agreed. “I was just a kid looking to see what had happened to her dad, after he left me a mysterious letter and then disappeared. All I did was poke around into a few dark holes—” including one that belonged to a loan-sharking cave dragon “—and ask a few questions, and use current to trace down the clue that led to the guy who killed my father … “

I played dirty then. “And then I couldn’t do anything.” I paused, letting that statement drill down a little. “There was no one to go to with what I knew, then. Not even you could do anything. I had no evidence, nothing that could be used in an ordinary court of law, and no way to give Zaki justice. He wasn’t Council, so Council wouldn’t get involved. There was no way to get closure, unless I was willing to do the deed myself.”

Zaki hadn’t been much of a dad, but he’d been a good person. He didn’t deserve to get killed over a woman he hadn’t even touched. And he would have hated me having blood on my hands, especially in his name. That, not legalities, not any sense of civilized behavior, had been all that had stayed me. But J never needed to know that, if he hadn’t twigged already.

“Child, you are a dirty pool player.”

“Equal parts nature and nurture,” I said in reply, and it was true. I might be the child of drifters and grifters, but J hadn’t gotten to where he had in his career by always playing by the strict interpretation of the rules. Always legit, sure, but maybe not always kosher. There was no way I was going to grow up a delicate, idealistic flower, under those conditions.

J had a crease between his eyebrows, meaning that a headache was creeping down from his scalp. I didn’t want to cause the old man any worry—I never wanted him to worry about me ever—but I couldn’t back down. Not about this.

Meanwhile, I had my own forehead-crease forming. There was something niggling at the back of my brain, about this job. Not a bad thing, just a thing I needed to remember, or a connection I needed to make. If I left it alone, it would come crawling out on its own.

“Dirty pool,” J said again, then leaned back in the chair, letting his legs sprawl in front of him. Rupe appeared from wherever he’d been hiding during the rant and settled his shaggy body on the carpet next to J’s chair. “You really think that this … wannabe investigational unit can accomplish anything? Do you think they will make a difference?”

“We won’t know unless we try.” And then I played even dirtier. “Would you have been able to use us, something like this, out in Seattle?”

I didn’t have to say anything more; part of loving someone is knowing what still bothers them. He sighed, and all the argument went out of him, just like that. He reached down to pet Rupe’s head. “I hate to say it, and when I say hate I do mean hatred, but … yes. We could have, and by god, we would have, if I had anything to say about the matter.”

J was a stickler for honesty, even when it hurt.

“You are correct, Bonita. This may be exactly what the Cosa needs … and, more to my regret, it may be exactly what you need.”

It wasn’t a paternal blessing, exactly, but it would do.

The question of my employment settled for the moment, J gathered all the paperwork from me and spent about an hour explaining it all, in excruciating detail. His grudging approval of their having health insurance and a 401(k) set up would have been funny if it wasn’t all so surreal, and I signed in the places he marked without really paying much attention. The paycheck had suddenly—and probably stupidly—become secondary to me. I was never going to make a good mercenary.

The initial argument, followed by what seemed like endless paperwork, took so much out of us that I vetoed his cooking, and we ended up doing take-away Thai and beer instead. J sometimes forgets he isn’t fifty anymore.

We had a few more rounds of “do you think this is a good idea” over the last of the six-pack, and I went back to New York under his current, a little before midnight. All this Translocating back and forth between Boston and New York was starting to make my neck ache. Next time, I thought as I crawled into bed, I was going to take the Chinatown bus. Or, considering I now had a paying job, maybe I’d go crazy and take Greyhound. Or hey, Amtrak! Or maybe, once I got an apartment, I could drag J down here for dinner, for a change. I hadn’t cooked for anyone in a long time ….

That thought consoled me as I put my head on the pillow and was out almost before my eyes were closed. I slept well, no dreams intruding, so the wake-up call at 6:00 a.m. was a rude shock. I rolled over, snagged the receiver, grunted something into the phone. and then dropped it back into the cradle. “Oh god,” I moaned, and then rolled out of bed for what I supposed would be my first day at work.

Supposed, because at the end of the interview yesterday, they’d just handed us the papers, and told us to think it over, and they’d either see us today, or not.

I got out of the shower and stood in front of the closet, hesitating over what to wear. For some reason, a perfectly office-appropriate slim blue skirt and white blouse didn’t feel right. I dithered for a while, then finally opted for a V-neck sweater the same shade of red as my hair, and black pants with subdued buckles and loops over a pair of heeled black half boots. Not quite my stompy boots, but they’d do for confidence. You couldn’t be wimpy, wearing boots.

The subway was packed with people going off to their jobs, some of them slow-eyed and grumpy, others bopping along to their music, or nose-deep in newspapers or magazines. I didn’t even bother to try to get a seat, just grabbed a handrail and concentrated on not focusing on the hum of current running through the subway, for fear of accidentally damaging someone’s electronics. I was used to ignoring the hum of electronics in the dorm, but that was familiar ground … hopefully in a few weeks, this would be, too.

I got out at my stop, along with a dozen other people, and wasn’t all that surprised to see Nick loitering outside the building when I walked up. I’d figured he’d take the offer, too. He was wearing dark blue jeans and a cotton sweater over it, brown like his eyes, and he looked less scrawny than he had on Tuesday. Weird.

“I did some looky-loo on our bosses,” he said, without even a good morning. “Ian Stosser’s Council, like you. Major hotshot. Sat on the Council itself, out in Chicago.”

I’d known that already, thanks to J’s ranting. See, there’s Council, and then there’s Council. They’re split into regions and each Council Board—also less formally known as Mage Council, from waybackwhen days—handles the stuff that comes up in their region. Each one’s independent, and while a couple of Councils can get together to do something specific, nobody’s got more say than the other, and you don’t get say over anything that happens outside your region. It’s all pretty strict, and goes on the philosophy that if there’s trouble, Talent will find it, fling it, and generally make it worse, if left to their own devices. J hadn’t been very complimentary on Stosser’s attitude or his ideas during his rant last night, but he’d been forced to admit that the man got things done, mainly by a combination of hard-nosed arrogance and sheer slippery charm.

“He got kicked out of Chicago for something nobody’s talking about,” Nick went on. “Which means it was probably seriously embarrassing to someone, else the gossip would be everywhere.”

“Several someones, is what I heard,” I agreed. “My mentor knows people who know people, and even they don’t know what happened. But Stosser wasn’t kicked out. He left under his own power. That means he won, whatever it was.” If he had lost, he’d have been buried. Powerwise, not literally, far as I knew, although there was that risk, too. That was how it worked, at those levels.

“Huh. Means he’s got smarts as well as power, probably. Reason enough to throw in with him,” Nick said. “Even if he is Council.”

“Venec isn’t,” I said, trying to ignore the slam on the Council. Wasn’t anything to me, was it?

“Nope, he’s pure lonejack. Quiet, though. Wherever he’s been, it was behind the scenes. Don’t know how those two hooked up. Every source I checked knew Venec’s name, but nobody had anything to say, good or bad.”

“He’s the dangerous one,” Pietr said, making us both jump.

“How the hell do you do that?” I demanded, more than a little irritable. “Damned Retriever, that’s what you are.”

“Not really,” Pietr said. “Don’t you want to know why he’s dangerous?”

“No.” I did, of course I did. But be damned if I’d give him the satisfaction, after he made me jump like that. His gray gaze lingered on me, solemn as a judge, and I couldn’t read a damn thing that might be going on inside.

Unlike Nick, seeing Nifty come around the corner was a surprise. He’d said he needed a job, yeah, but I just hadn’t gotten a joining-up kind of vibe from the former athlete.

“Are you people going in, or are you waiting for the bagel fairy to come by and drop off a pump and a schmear?”

Nick and Pietr looked blankly at Nifty, like he’d just spoken Swahili or something. I just shook my head, amused.

“You totally stole that line from someone else,” I accused him, following the boys into the foyer, where the same invisible someone buzzed us in the moment we approached the door. I listened, but still couldn’t pick up any hint of current in use, which just made me more determined to track it down as soon as I had a spare moment.

“My coach,” he admitted, holding the door for me. “I don’t even know what a pump is. I just hope it’s not rude.”

“Pumpernickel. A kind of bread. Or bagel, in that case. You haven’t been in New York long, have you?” If he was a native East Coaster, I’d eat J’s favorite hat.

“Nope. I was in Detroit, talking to someone about another job, when I got the message. I guess I’m going to have to find a place to live … you know of anywhere?”

“Soon as I find something, I’ll let you know.” The hotel was nice for a short term, but I needed to find an apartment. Something I paid for, not J, and that was going to be another argument. Or maybe not. We’d see. Part of the directed, non-mercenary vibe I was grooving on right now included less of a need to be totally independent. NYC was expensive.

The office door now had a small, nicely discreet copperplate sign on it: PUPI Inc.

“Woof,” Nick said, half joking.

“Woof-woof,” Nifty echoed, an octave deeper, as though he had to prove he was the bigger dog. Like there was any doubt of that, physically at least. Save me from boys and their egos ….

“That makes me the bitch, and don’t you forget it.” I really hoped Sharon was going to take up the job offer, too. Much as being surrounded by males could be fun, it also got boring after a while, and being the only female in the pack was not going to be a laugh riot on bad days. The vibe I’d gotten off Sharon yesterday was that she might be a control freak know-it-all, but she wasn’t going to be a tight-ass about it. We’d be fine.

I hoped. I really, really hoped. I liked having female friends, but my college buds were scattered to the winds of employment now, and without e-mail or a cell phone, it was going to be tough to keep up with them. Knowing that it was inevitable didn’t make the knowledge any less painful, so I tried not to linger on it, instead looking forward. New job. New friends. New—

“Wow.”

Nifty had gone in through the office door first, and stopped so suddenly I almost broke my nose against his back. “Hello? What? Brick wall, do you mind moving?”

“Oh, sorry.” He went all the way into the office, and I heard Nick behind me say something rude when he ran into my back as I stopped dead, too.

“Sorry,” I muttered in turn, and moved aside. Nick, still pissed, didn’t even look, just walked in … and then stopped dead.

“Ah, glad you’re here.” Stosser was sitting on a new, damned comfy-looking chocolate-brown sofa, looking up at us over a clipboard on his lap. His orange-red hair was tied back in a braid, and he was dressed in black jeans and a black pullover, making him look even more like some kind of satanic candle. “Try to be prompt in the future. We have a lot to hammer into your heads and not a lot of time to do it in.”

“Good morning to you, too,” Nick muttered, sounding offended, and not just because we’d done a three-body pileup in front of the boss.

“Right. Good morning. Sorry.” Stosser’s reportedly famous charm made a brief appearance, and then he turned it off. “You all dressed appropriately, good. Come with me.”

He stood up and walked through the now totally redecorated space that had blown our minds for a moment, clearly expecting us to follow. The half-assed kitchenette of yesterday was now a full beverage station, with a brand-new coffee-maker, a hot-water dispenser, a wet-sink, and an open cabinet filled with plain white mugs and boxes of really nice teas and coffees. There was also a larger refrigerator that, I was guessing, had real cream in it now. The old rental-style waiting room furniture had been replaced with the brown sofa and a matching loveseat over a dark cream carpet where there’d been linoleum before. A bookcase took up the entire length of the wall, next to the door into the inner office, and was filled with what looked like textbooks. The room seemed larger now, somehow, although I knew that it had to be an optical illusion. Right?

Obviously, the office design fairies had been through overnight. J’s concerns about them not having enough money to back up their paycheck promises seemed less likely now. Unless, of course, they were putting all the money into set-dressing …

“Are you four coming, or not?” Stosser asked over his shoulder, and walked through the inner door.

We were.

It was easier to accept the transformation of the inside office, but only because we were all a little numb at this point. Instead of the cheap mock-executive layout, the room was now dominated by a dark wood table, oval shaped, with nine conference chairs placed around it. The walls were covered with more bookcases, filled with more textbooks, and I had a sudden thought that I’d walked right back into college. It wasn’t a good thought. I knew we were going to need training, but I could do without the reading assignments.

There wasn’t anyone else in the room, and Stosser didn’t stop, either, walking across the room and reaching for a sliding door I was embarrassed to realize I hadn’t noticed before.

Or maybe it hadn’t been there before to notice. Current can’t bend time or space, but if you’ve got enough money, enough mojo, or enough people working hard, you can do a lot of internal renovations. Evidence to date was pointing to Stosser and Venec having major mojo and money, both.

A hallway, painted a flat white with a neutral pale green carpet, led to three doors on the left-hand side, and a blank wall on the right. I figured at this point they had put at least two of the offices on this floor under lease, a long enough term lease to allow them to connect doors. No wonder they hadn’t taken space farther downtown; even if the Guys were made of money, this still had to be taking a major crunch out of their funds.

We turned at the first anonymous door and went in.

“About time you got here.”

The room was likewise flat white, with one window, the shade drawn, and more of the green carpet. Sharon was sitting at a small conference table, about large enough to sit five comfortably, and all seven of us if we squeezed. DB—all right, Venec—was there with her, still looking as sleepy-bored as he had yesterday. I guess we were all on board, then. Even dressed down in black slacks and a plain white shirt, Sharon still looked classier than anyone else in the room. Some people had it; some didn’t. She did. At least I could enjoy looking, since I didn’t get any vibes she’d be interested in me, even if I hadn’t gotten the lecture last night from J, over his second beer, about not dating in the workplace.

As if I didn’t know that already. Sometimes he really did forget I wasn’t fourteen anymore.

“I wish we had time to ease you into things, allow for a gradual learning curve. But we don’t. You all have a lot to learn, and fast. We either sink or swim from the word go, and we are determined to swim.” Venec was up and moving this time, while Stosser took one of the empty chairs around the table, and we followed suit. My boots kicked the table with a solid thunk, and I flinched, but nobody else seemed to notice. I made sure my soles were planted firmly on the green carpet, where they couldn’t make any more noise.

“I’m glad that you all decided to join us—not surprised, but pleased. Knowing you as well as we do, I’m sure you all did your due diligence the moment you left yesterday, and have determined that the majority of those who know us are convinced that we’re lunatics. How dangerous a lunatic seems to still be open for debate.”

It was funny, but nobody laughed. Stosser seemed to have gotten all the showboat comic timing of the pair.

“Make no mistake,” Venec went on, fixing that dark gaze on each of us in turn. “We are not lunatics. But we have the potential to be quite dangerous. Not to each other, and not to the Cosa as a whole, but to individuals within the community. To those who have had a stake in upholding the status quo, in remaining out of the light, beyond any official notice or censure. And there will be some who do not want that to happen.”

Venec talked like J did, not so much with the big words and flourishes Stosser used, but a quiet deliberation, knowing exactly what each word meant and how best to use it. Stosser was the showboat, the ringmaster. Venec … I didn’t know what Venec was, yet. But I thought, with the part of me that thought like my mentor, that it might be smart to watch Venec’s hands whenever Stosser was talking.

“What he’s trying to say,” Stosser interjected, “is that the Cosa as a whole is not on board with what we’re trying to do—particularly the lonejack community. Although getting them all to agree that they disagree with us is … a slow process.”

There were several snorts at that. What made lonejacks lonejacks was an inability to play well with each other. It made sense that they’d resist anyone policing them.

“What they don’t understand is that we’re not here to police them.”

I started guiltily, then decided it was sheer coincidence, not Stosser somehow reading my mind or, god forbid, me using my thinking-out-loud voice.

“We are not here to enforce laws, or interpret them, or pass judgment in any way, shape or form.” Venec picked up the narrative again. “We will investigate, and report our findings to all concerned, evenly and without bias. If you have an agenda, dump it on the table now. If you can’t … get out.”

There was a short silence, and both of the Guys watched us carefully. Convinced that nobody was leaving, Venec went on. “The lonejacks will, as always, make up their minds on an individual basis—”

Nick snorted, and Sharon almost smiled, and I sensed an inside joke I wasn’t privy to. Venec ignored them, and kept talking.

“While not actively opposing us, the Council has formally renounced our organization. This is what we are up against: They will not demand that their members comply with any requests we make, nor will they be held by anything we discover. We have, in fact, been told that the Eastern and South Councils have refused to allow us access to … pretty much anything they can control, up to and including their members. The Midwest Council hasn’t ruled in or out yet, nor has California.”

Midwest—which meant Chicago for all intents and purposes—was the closest to lonejacks Council ever got: they were pretty rough and ready, and seriously cranky about their independence. California? The San Diego Council never said anything before they had to. I bet a lot of them remembered the Madeline case, too.

Stosser’s turn. “We’ve been dubbed CSI wannabes.” His pale skin flushed a little, but his voice remained steady. “It’s a fair, if unkindly meant, assessment—Cosa crimes, as committed by Cosa members, investigated by Cosa members.”

Nick raised his hand then, as though we were back in grade school, and I swear his nose twitched. “Does that include the fatae, too?”

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