Hard Magic

Six

“Focus. Stay focused….”

“I am focused!” Or I would be if Nifty would stop hovering over me like a huge, dark-winged moth on steroids. “Back off, big guy. You’re supposed to be helping, not pestering.”

Trying to ignore my partner’s looming presence—no easy thing considering the sheer bulk of him—I returned my attention to the pattern on the paper in front of me.

I could do this. I knew I could. It was easy, once you knew the steps, and the steps had been hammered into us for two weeks now. I could do it.

When Stosser had told us, that first day, that we were going to learn, I’m not sure what we were expecting. Handouts, maybe, or lectures, based on how many books there were in the office? What we got was hands-deep in the guts of magic theory. Most of what you learn in mentorship, past the basics, involves memorizing spells handed down, tested and true, that have a distinct result to a specific invocation. What we were doing here, now, was none of that. It was stripped-to-basics logic and intent-to-cause current-use. If anyone had ever thought that magic was a game, that current was a soft skill, they knew better now. This was pure New Ways—current as hard science.

The past two weeks we’d been under a strict no-use rule in the office—no current allowed for anything. Instead, the time was filled with lectures, and readings, and theoretical exercises designed to break down what we thought we knew, and rebuild it in the service of whatever Benjamin Venec and Ian Stosser told us to do; reading up about blood splatter and bullet trajectories, fingerprinting and footprint identification as it was done in the Null world—and then talking, endless talking, about how it might be done with current—and, more important, how it might be hidden by current. Because that was the thing; using current to bring down current. Theoretically. We were, as Nick said more than once, making this up out of hope and whole current. And that meant we had to understand it.

I’d never been on the cutting edge of anything before. I wasn’t sure I was enjoying it.

It wasn’t helping that in the past week, anything that could go wrong seemed to be doing so with a gleeful glint in its eye. First the coffeemaker had died in a splutter of sparks that had us all looking accusingly at each other. Then Sharon had gotten stuck in the elevator with Nifty when both of them were coming back from lunch—not together—and I don’t know what they said to each other but body language when we finally got them out said it probably wasn’t polite. And, just yesterday, Stosser had hit the table with his fist, trying to get some point or another into our heads, and the entire table—a solid wood table—collapsed as though termites had taken up residence in the legs.

“Gremlins,” Nick had diagnosed. “We definitely have gremlins.”

“There aren’t any such thing,” Sharon said. “It’s just a myth Nulls made up to explain a series of noncatastrophic events.”

“Uh-huh.”

Normally, I’d side with Sharon on this one. Sometimes crap happening was just crap happening, and we were under enough stress that any mechanical failure in the building could easily be explained by someone’s current getting a little frisky, even without them realizing it. But I couldn’t see the Guys not noticing—especially since they were the ones driving us so hard. And I didn’t know of any current-flare that would take out the legs of a wooden table….

So, gremlins? I didn’t know. But I was looking around carefully whenever I entered a room, and taking the stairs whenever possible, rather than the elevator. Just to be cautious.

Somehow, we managed to survive without anyone getting killed, or saying anything too regrettable, and finally, reluctantly—as much to shut us up as because they thought we were ready—the Guys were letting us try actual physical tests of what we’d been discussing. I was so very tired of theory at this point, being able to actually use current rather than just talking about it was a relief. Except for the part where translating theory into practice was damned difficult.

“You going to stand there and stare at it all day, or what?” Nifty wasn’t quite as annoying as Sharon, but he had the needling thing down to a damn art.

“Shut up.” Dipping a mental finger into my core, I drew out a slender cord of current, waiting while it soothed from a deep blue to dark green, responding to my will. I saw it as a malleable cord, just so long and just so wide, and it became that cord. Behind me, I could feel Nifty grounding himself, creating a pocket of current that would, ideally, support and balance me while also protecting anyone passing by. Ideally.

He was doing his job. I needed to do mine. The trick was to do it delicately, with just the right touch, and not overdo it, not overstress the powder…. You just touch the tip of the current to the paper, and—

The next thing I knew, I was flat on my ass about six feet away, and there was a large lump of ex-football player lying on top of me.

“Normally I don’t mind being on the bottom,” I managed to get out, “but damn it, Nifty, off!”

He stirred, but didn’t get off me, and his elbows were pointy as hell.

“I mean it, Lawrence, you’re crushing my damn ribs. Move!”

“I’m trying,” he muttered, digging his elbows in even more, just as the door crashed open and the workroom was filled with people.

Or three people, anyway. When you’re flat on the floor, even one body’s too much of an audience.

“Everyone all right?” Venec asked.

“Don’t know yet,” I said, still trying to get air back into my lungs.

“Man, Torres, you really blew that one,” a voice said from somewhere to the left of Venec.

I was in no mood for puns, and just turned my head and glared at Nick from under Nifty’s tree-trunk arm. I’d done some hand-to-hand with the guy—that was part of our training, too—but somehow he seemed heavier now.

I was just about to use current to shove him off me when someone beat me to the push. His body lifted smoothly—more smoothly and way more gently than I would have done it—until he was standing on his feet again. Sharon went over to check him out, but he waved her off. They weren’t exactly buddy-buddy with each other, and there was no way he was going to let her see any weakness. “I’m okay. Just gotta get the ringing out of my ears.”

He wasn’t talking about a possible concussion; we had—all right, I had—managed to set off the office’s internal alarms. Again.

“Torres? Are you all right?” Venec asked again.

“Yeah.” Everything felt okay, anyway. I was sore, and pissed off, and probably bruised seven ways from Sunday, but nothing was broken.

Thankfully, the alarm shut off then, and I felt a little better.

“Maybe you should just give up on the delicate jobs,” Sharon suggested, managing to sound both concerned and bitchy in the same tone. I glared at her. Snooty bitch, just because she got it right the first time…

Venec interrupted then. “All right, everyone, back to work. Lawrence, take ten. Outside. Let Mendelssohn fuss at you. It will make her feel better. Torres, let’s do it again. Without the explosions this time, if you please.”

He didn’t offer me a hand—or current—up. I didn’t expect it. The one thing I’d learned over the past few weeks of training was that if you screwed up, you had to get yourself out. The Guys were all about building teamwork—that’s why we worked in pairs or groups, not alone—but they’d hammered into us that you also had to be ready to deal on your own in an emergency, too. There just weren’t enough of us to go around, and not all of us, apparently, worked well with each other. Nifty and I were fair enough, and Sharon and Nick were a charm. Me and Nick complemented each other surprisingly well, but put Pietr and Nifty together and all you got was ugly, et cetera. Pietr and I got along so well they’d stopped pairing us together, which was disappointing. And Nifty and Sharon? Not even Stosser was optimistic enough to pair them together without supervision. Not until they got their respective egos under control, anyway.

Sharon, also, we’d discovered, had paramedic training, and that made her the de facto medic for the group. Venec was right. Being able to boss us around like that always put her in a better mood, especially when she could do it to Nifty.

I really hoped to hell that Venec and Stosser knew what they were doing, pairing us all up and down like this.

“Torres? Today, please.”

I crawled to my feet and limped back to the table. The paper with the gunshot residue was ash now, naturally, but I was pretty sure…yep. Venec slid another sheet onto the table, and stood there, his arms crossed, watching me.

“Again.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

Some of the others were…not scared of Venec, exactly, but cautious around him. You got the sense that he had a nasty edge, if pushed, and god knows that he didn’t hesitate in telling you when you hadn’t met his standards. Nifty seemed to soak it up; I guess it was a lot like training camp.

Okay, it was training camp. Only without the Gatorade.

Me? I don’t know. I guess I’m just not easily intimidated. Venec was trying to change that. If he could shake me, he’d know where my weakness was, and then he could hammer on that until it wasn’t a weakness anymore. The Guys had been up-front about what they would be doing, and why.

So far, I felt relatively unhammered. By them, anyway: this gunpowder trace was kicking my ass. Literally.

Unlike Nifty, Venec didn’t crowd me, physically or currentwise. He stood nearby, close enough that I could smell whatever cologne it was that he used, something with lime and spice and something stale, like tobacco. It didn’t sound nice, but it made me want to put my nose to his skin and just inhale.

Uh-oh. I pulled my libido in for a scolding. Bad form, that. If you don’t fish off the company pier, you sure as hell don’t cast your line off the corporate yacht, either. The image was amusing enough that the moment of heat faded away. Not gone—once you’re aware that someone’s hot it never quite goes away—but under the surface, where it wouldn’t embarrass me.

Magically, it was easier to relax into him. Reaching out with those other senses, I could feel him next to me, solid and grounded like he was made of flexible concrete, ready to catch whatever needed catching, without breaking.

Reassured that he had that side of things handled, I brought my attention back to the assignment.

Current, check. Pull and extend, steady hand, strong but gentle control, like petting a skittish kitten….

Some Talent used spoken spells, or waved their hands, or some other way to focus their will. We weren’t allowed to do any of that. “Senseless showmanship,” Stosser called it, ignoring the fact that he was the showiest showman I’d ever met. Venec practiced what his partner preached, though; when he showed us something, it was stripped down and sparse. That was what we were supposed to be. Efficient and understated.

“I’ve never been understated in my entire life,” I muttered, even as the slender cord of current touched the residue.

No explosion this time. Current glimmered, then sank into the gunpowder dust, filling it the way water filled a sponge.

Now, the next step. Remembering to breathe slowly, evenly, I called the current back to me.

“Steady,” Venec said, as if I needed the reminder. My ass and back still ached, and I had no desire to take another flyer across the room. Calm, calm. The rumble of disturbed current subsided back into my normal cool swirl; my control held; and the grains of gunpowder, plumped with current, rose off the paper they had been caught against and reassembled in the air. The next step was to draw out from their scattered display something more compact and readable.

Venec’s voice was soft in my ear: there, but not interrupting my concentration. “Let them show you. Don’t force your will on them.”

I nodded, feeling a trickle of sweat drop down the side of my face. Using current burned calories; the more you called down—or the more focused your control—the more you burned. Right now I was dying for a chocolate milkshake, a thick hamburger, and a plate of pommes frites.

Hunger aside, my current behaved itself, drawing the gunpowder off the page and then allowing it, as directed, to retrace its original trajectory, back to the point of explosion.

“There. The shooter was standing at a…forty-degree angle. Approximately.” I studied the hovering display, and tried to translate it into a horizontal display, rather than a vertical one. “To the left. About two feet away?”

“To the right, and closer to three feet,” Venec said, totally ruining my sense of accomplishment. I drooped, and the powder fell back onto the table, scattering in a totally useless pattern.

“Damn.”

“Oh for— Torres.” His hand came down on my shoulder and turned me around to face him. The interesting thing about Venec was that, yeah, he was good-looking, but his dark eyes overpowered the rest of his face, pure damned charisma pulling you hip-deep and close to drowning. Egomaniacs and geniuses had eyes like those. “You just manipulated gunpowder remnant with current. Without blowing anything up. That alone should have you feeling pretty damn cocky. So you didn’t get every detail right—you managed to perform the test properly. That’s all this is about, right now. We don’t expect perfection.” He dropped his hand away from my shoulder as though he’d just realized he had touched me. “Yet.”

“I bet Sharon nailed it,” I muttered, aware I was sulking and not really caring if the boss saw it or not.

Venec’s gaze stayed on me, but it wasn’t quite so piercing, letting me breathe a little. “Sharon is older than you are—” all of five years, yeah “—and you each have different strengths.” I was going to argue, but he overrode me. “What was Ian wearing this morning?”

I had barely seen Stosser before we were sent off to practice, and it took me a minute to remember. “Ah, jeans, blue, acid-washed, so he probably got them in some thrift store somewhere, but they didn’t have any holes so they might have been really expensive jeans made to look like they came from a thrift shop. On top, a red dress shirt, three-quarters buttoned over a blue rib tank. Hiking boots, brown. Don’t know about socks or underwear. Hair was pulled back with a leather clasp. He really can’t work the crunchy granola look, you know.”

“He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a bad fairy in his closet,” Venec said, like it slipped out without his brain’s knowledge. He shut down right after that, his entire body language denying he’d ever said any such thing about his partner.

Too late. I managed not to laugh, but felt better. Even the bastard taskmaster had a snarky side. Good to know.

Venec recovered fast. “But there, you just made my point for me. A recall like yours—the ability to not only observe quickly but to retain accurate impressions hours later—is as useful a skill as any Sharon, or any of the others, bring to the table. If you all repeated the same skills, you would be a horribly one-dimensional team, and that’s useless to us.”

I lifted the paper and used a breath of current to wipe the debris back onto the sheet. “You think we’re ever going to actually get to use any of this stuff? I mean, for real?”

Since we’d signed on, the Guys had been running our asses ragged learning how to sift physical debris without compromising it, raise fingerprints off a dozen different surfaces, and extrapolate blood splatter and gunpowder residue, along with a few classes in lock picking and identifying basic current manipulations. It was all interesting, and every day we figured out new ways to use current, but that was all that had happened. The Cosa was keeping their distance. Nobody—as far as we knew, anyway—had come calling for our services.

Sure, we got paid, and learned stuff, and the Guys seemed unconcerned about how long it was taking for us to start earning our keep, but I wasn’t about to sign a lease on any of the apartments I’d seen, just yet. Not that any of them had been blowing my socks off. Two weeks of searching the ads and calling after leads, and I had my choice of either crap apartments in neighborhoods that would give J nightmares but were within my price range, or getting a roommate in a better area. I really didn’t want a roommate. Did that for three years of college, and that was three years too many. Waking up in the morning with a roommate giving me the hairy eyeball because there was someone sharing my bed, or trying to lecture me on self-respect was not my idea of good living conditions. I had no self-esteem issues, thanks muchly, and my personal life was nobody’s business but my own.

“What’s the matter, Torres?” Venec goaded me, instead of answering. “Worried that you’re going to be running scenarios for the rest of your life?”

“Or at least until the money runs out.”

There was a flash of something on Venec’s face; I’d hit a nerve, I guess. I went back to staring at the gunpowder residue, coaxing it into cleaning itself onto the sheet of paper. Stosser had money, and from the way Venec looked and talked I’d guess he had access to some, too, but I was betting they’d mortgaged everything they had on this, and it had to pay out, probably sooner rather than later.

Not even cave dragons wait forever for repayment. The Guys needed PUPI to work, and fast.

The rest of the week was more of the same, with the added joy of the ventilation system breaking down on the warmest day of the summer yet. Dog days, yeah. That could totally have been coincidence, or bad building management…but it felt like gremlins mocking us, especially after the coffee machine died for the third and final time when Pietr tried to prep a spell in the break room, and Sharon and Nifty got into it over the finer points of historical magic, which I don’t think either of them knew a damn about, causing the lights to flicker badly enough to give us all headaches.

Of course, the latter wasn’t gremlin-provoked, just the two of them butting heads—and current—as usual. But all told, it was a tough five days, and when Friday afternoon rolled around, Stosser kicked us out with firm directions to take the weekend off and do nothing even remotely current related. “You guys have been stretching, and while that’s good, we don’t want you to stretch until you break,” he said. “So take a few days to recover, and we’ll see you back in here on Monday.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I made some arrangements to look at a couple of apartments on Sunday and, when I woke up—reluctantly, groggily—to a Saturday filled with glorious sunshine, declared it a total R & R day. I sorted through the pile of clean laundry, found appropriate day-off clothing—a long black linen skirt with deep pockets and a T-shirt with a green-haired punk troll giving the world the finger printed on it—and got dressed before I could let myself fall back asleep. Grabbing a book off my to-be-read pile without even caring what it was, I shoved it into my backpack with my notepad and a couple of pens, stopped by the local overpriced deli to buy a sandwich and a bottle of water, and headed out to the Park with the rest of the known city-dwelling universe.

Fortunately, most people seemed interested in either sprawling on the Great Lawn, or strolling, and I found a pretty granite fountain in the middle of a circular walkway that wasn’t overcrowded, and claimed a spot on the rim. It was surprisingly comfortable, with the sun on my legs and arms but not in my eyes. I dropped my backpack, pulled out my book, and started to read.

I’d made it about three chapters in when I was interrupted by a familiar voice.

“Hey.”

I looked up, and sighed in resignation at the familiar form trying to loom over me. “You know, this city’s too big for this to happen.”

“Welcome to New York, girl. Biggest small town in the world.”

Nick sat down without asking, and, incidentally, blocked my ray of sunlight.

“Move over,” I told him, pushing at his rib cage with one finger to show I was serious. He slid over, stretched his legs out in front of him, and leaned back.

“That line about the biggest small town in the world? I thought that was Paris.”

“Nah.” Nick sounded certain of that, so I let him have it. A minute passed without him saying anything more, so I tried to go back to my book.

“You been to Paris?”

“Yes.” I turned a page, maybe a little more ostentatiously than was really needed.

“A lot?”

Clearly, the hint was lost on my coworker. “A few times.” It wasn’t really any big deal.

“Wow.”

The tone of his voice made me pause. All right, maybe it was. I forgot, sometimes, that J and I didn’t exactly lead the normal Americana life.

I lifted my head from my book and frowned at Nick. “Did you follow me?”

“Nope.” He crossed his heart like a five-year-old telling a lie. “Was on my way home from work when I saw you, figured I’d be cohort-ly and stop. If you want to be alone…”

He made as though to get up, and I stopped him. “Home from work? Were we supposed to…?” A flutter of panic hit my rib cage. Had I missed something? We were all still on probation; I couldn’t afford to miss anything….

“Relax, Torres. Home from my other job. All right? I want to pay off my student loans before I’m thirty, and I can’t rely on this job to cover me. Not all of us have a comfy background to fall back on.”

“Bite yourself, Shune.” I hadn’t mentioned J’s background, or J much at all, but it didn’t surprise me the others had done some digging. I’d done the same on them. Nifty I already knew about. Sharon Mendelssohn was exactly what she seemed: well-educated daughter of a middle-class family who blended really well with the Null world. Nick was the eldest son of gypsies—lonejacks who chose not to settle within any one region—who’d really only appeared on the radar when he went to college. Pietr Cholis, like Sharon, was mainstream all the way, except for a stint in the juvie facilities when he was thirteen. Me, they’d get the whole story: lonejack daughter turned Council mentee, Phi Beta Kappa goth-girl, one arrest for trespassing with intent to protest, no convictions. I doubted my investigation into my father’s death was on any record; to the rest of the world, Zaki Torres just disappeared one day, same as my mother did, three months after I was born. No foul play on her part—she just decided she didn’t want to be a mom, handed me over to Zaki, and split. All I’d ever gotten from her was fair hair and paler skin that—thank god—didn’t burn or freckle.

Nick had gone quiet, his head tilted back to let the sunshine wash over him, but I was totally distracted from my book now. “Hey.”

“What?”

“You wanted to see a fatae, right?”

His eyes opened, and his head came into an alert position so fast I swear I heard it crack. “What? Where?”

“Over there.” I pointed with my chin, trying not to be obvious. Some fatae didn’t mind, but some got really pissy about being outed. “In the leather jacket.” It was too nice a day for that jacket, which was why I’d noticed him in the first place.

“He’s not…” Nick started to say in disgust, and then stopped. It wasn’t obvious—the obvious ones didn’t stroll around Central Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon—but once you actually looked, the evidence was there to be noticed.

“What is it?”

“He, and I have no idea.” I’d met a few over the years, obviously, and J had trained me on the basics: the different kinds of breeds and where they came from, and how to not be an idiot when confronted with one, but without a checklist I couldn’t do more than land-based, air-breathing, bipedal. “That jacket on a day like today, he’s probably from one of the warmer countries, not Nordic or northern. Land-based, obviously. No gills visible.”

There were some fatae breeds with horn or antlers, but this guy’s head was bare, except for a crop of dark curls. It was what was under the hair that gave him away. His ears were not only elongated, they were tasseled with tufts of fur at the tip and lobe, and the skin at the back of his neck, where it showed above the coat’s collar, was dappled with close-cropped, fawn-colored fur.

His hands were in his pocket, and his feet were covered by boots, but I would have laid down money that his nails were more like a horse’s hooves than a human’s. His face was humanlike, too, close enough to pass if you didn’t stare, but the lower half moved oddly, as if the bone structure of his mouth wasn’t quite the same as ours. I had the sudden thought that a lot of FX guys in Hollywood might be fatae, or know some pretty well.

We watched as he walked past us. I got the feeling he knew we were watching, but there was no way to tell, not without being either obvious or rude, or both.

A tune sounded from his pocket, and he took out a cell phone and answered it. His hands were shaped like human hands, but with three thick fingers instead of five more slender ones, and each curved down, ending with what looked like a soft miniature hoof. He managed the phone like a pro, though.

He turned, as he passed, and looked directly at us. It was then that I realized the reason his mouth looked strange was because of his double rows of teeth.

Sharp teeth.

The urge to pull current wiggled in my belly, but I held steady. Carnivore did not mean threat, automatically. Not anymore, anyway. Probably. But the fact was that he saw us—more, he saw us—not just as human but Talent…. I forced myself to relax. Some fatae could sense current, even though they didn’t use it the way we did. That was all, no need to be jumpy. Gremlins or no, we weren’t in anyone’s crosshairs.

And then the fatae was walking past us, talking urgently into his cell, and I heard Nick let out a little sigh.

“You’re disappointed?” I asked.

“No. Okay, maybe a little. I guess I thought he’d be more…impressive.”

He’d missed the teeth, obviously. “Some of them are scary as hell,” I said. “Someday, if you’re a good boy, I’ll take you to meet a cave dragon.”

“You do not know a cave dragon.” He sounded indignant, and I laughed at him.

“I do, actually.” I even really did have an invitation to return. And I was pretty sure it was meant in a “stop by and say hello” manner, not “stop by to be lunch.”

Nick started to get excited about the thought. “How about a dryad? I heard there are a lot of them in the Park.”

“Probably are,” I said. “It’s an old park. But they’re tough to meet, and not always good to meet, either.”

“What do you mean?”

I put down my book, resigned to the fact that Nick wasn’t going to shut up anytime soon. “You ever read any fairy tales when you were a kid, Nick? The real ones—the Grimm versions, not the Disneyfied ones.”

“Sure. Um. No, not really.” He shrugged. “I mean, I got my basic history during mentorship, so…”

“Well, you should. Read them, I mean. Because a lot of them aren’t so much stories as lessons. About how to behave—and not get sunk in a swamp, or cooked and eaten, or run out of your home or any of the other things that happen to idiots who disrespect the fey folk.”

I wasn’t sure how much of it I believed, really. But the breeds had been around forever, since before the Old Magic days, when we were still trying to figure out why some people could start fire by staring at a stick, and other people burned those people with those same sticks. The fatae didn’t use magic, but they were Cosa Nostradamus, same as us. Cosa-cousins. It paid to keep up-to-date with what your relatives were up to, and what family feuds were dead and which ones still simmered.

I didn’t say any of this to Nick, though. I didn’t know how to verbalize it without sounding preachy and uncool, and I was discovering, much to my surprise, that I really wanted to fit in. It wasn’t just about being good at the job, although I wanted that, too. Sharon’s elegance, Nifty’s charisma and pull, Pietr’s total cool and calm, even Nick’s fumbling geeky charm, it all made me want to be part of the group. Where did I fit in? I had no idea. But Venec and Stosser thought we could be a team.

Why had that fatae looked at us? Was it just a case of Cosa acknowledgment? Was that creeping sense of menace and uncertainty real, or just a remnant of the crap from the previous week? I couldn’t tell, so I let it go.

“So, what’s your other job, anyway?” Maybe he could get me part-time work there, if I needed it. If this all went south on us and we got kicked to the curb.

“You promise you won’t tell anyone?”

I sketched an X against where I figured my heart was, more or less, hopefully with more élan than Nick had managed. “Promise.” How bad could it be?

“I’mamassagetherapist.”

Once my brain untangled his hurried mumble, I sat up and looked at him with, I’m afraid, a gleam in my eye.

He saw it. “See? People only love me for my hands.”

“Awwwww. We’d like you even if you didn’t have hands at all. Can you massage with your toes, too?”

“Hmmph.” He didn’t quite stick his tongue out at me, but I swear I could hear him thinking about it. “All right. I need to go home and collapse for a while. See you Monday, if we’re still employed.” He hauled himself upright, and waggled his fingers at me, a sort of dorky goodbye wave. I waggled my fingers back, and he walked off, heading toward the east side of the park. I wondered suddenly where he lived, and if there were any apartments for rent in his building. Why hadn’t I asked him that?

Well, there was always Monday, if I didn’t see anything tomorrow.

And, as he said, if we were still employed.

I picked up my book, but the fascination of reading about the life and times of an eighteenth-century courtesan had dimmed, somehow. The flash of that fatae’s teeth, and talking about fairy tales, however briefly, had stirred some depth of unease in me that I couldn’t blame entirely on stress or overwork. Or gremlins.

Was it kenning? Was I having one of my rare moments of precog? No. It didn’t feel right. But something was wrong.

I closed the book and shoved it into my backpack, wrapped up what was left of my sandwich and tossed it into the nearest green trash can, deciding on my direction because I had already turned that way to find the trash. J used to say that he could think better while he was walking; maybe it would work for me, too. If nothing else, I’d been spending way too much time the past week sitting on my ass. Exercise was a good idea.

The path I was on seemed to circle endlessly on itself since I never seemed to get closer to the buildings in the distance, but rather kept diverging past seemingly endless fields, rocky outcrops, and tiny scenic ponds. It was hard to believe the entire thing was man-made, but if you looked again, more closely, there was a perfection under the natural surface that could only be crafted. Nobody out enjoying the day seemed to care, so I let that thought drop and waited to see what else came to replace it.

My mind remained blank. All right, maybe Stosser had been right, and we did need the break, and all this was just stress-related. I rolled with the blankness, and let my body go on automatic—until something hit the back of my head and bounced off.

“Hey!” All the paranoia came slamming back, and some instinct made me look, not behind me, but up.

The branches shook, but I couldn’t see anything moving.

Not that it mattered. I had a pretty good idea, once my heart rate calmed, what was up there.

A good idea, though, wasn’t a fact. I looked up at the branches, judging from the movement which ones had been disturbed. There was a cantrip we had been testing that, if it worked, would show us the way a suspect had run, based on the displacement of air. So far it had failed pretty miserably, but if I applied the basics to the pattern of the leaves rustling…

I thought hard and fast, drawing a few threads of current up out of my core and casting them into the air, toward the branches.

“Follow the trail of the passage unseen,” I directed it. With established spells you didn’t need to actually speak them out loud, but the words helped focus the intent, and right now that cantrip needed all the help it could get. The threads hovered midair, as though they were confused, or uncertain. Current didn’t actually have emotions, or any kind of sentience, so that meant that I was uncertain. More focus was needed. All right, then.

“Follow the trail of the passage unseen. Lead me to the pranking hand.”

The air shimmered as the current went to work, like the heat signature of a fire, and a handful of leaves changed from dark, healthy green to a sickly looking yellow, as if they’d aged immediately. Then the shimmer moved on, changing another set of leaves, and the first set went back to green, moving along deeper and higher into the tree, until I couldn’t see it any longer.

There was a startled squawk and a loud rustle of leaves, and a branch swayed as though something had tried to escape being turned yellow. I caught a glimpse of fluttering wings, and a shock of hair a color even I wouldn’t dare try.

Hah, I’d been right. A piskie. Winged pranksters of the Cosa. It probably thought I was a Null, and would have spent time looking for the person who threw that nut at me, rather than retaliating.

I made a mental note of the wording I’d used—specifics were clearly needed to get the proper results. I hadn’t used enough current to actually catch someone, but that could be amended in later test trials. Maybe even use current to tag someone, so we could find a culprit in a crowd? Odds were we’d never need something like that, if we were called in after the fact, but a Talent cop could use it….

“And how would you introduce that into the court records?” I asked myself. “Your honor, I know that it was him because he had a bright yellow splotch on his forehead?”

I wasn’t too worried about the piskie being chased too far by the spell—if she or he went far enough away the spell would wear off. I thought it would, anyway.

“Not that having bright yellow fur would stop the bugger. Idiot piskie would probably think it was some strange badge of honor, almost but not quite getting caught.” Piskies were pranksters, but they were pranksters who respected competent opponents far more than they enjoyed clueless ones. That was probably why they hadn’t been hunted down and eaten over the years.

It hit me then—I’d not only used current offensively, I’d done that before, although not quite so easily or without planning—but I’d done it automatically, with an eye not for the immediate result, but a long-term refinement for job use.

Huh. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, being so—call it proactive—but there was an extra lift in my step as I continued on my way through the park, and the unease and paranoia of earlier slowly faded away.