Hard Magic

Fifteen

After pulling an all-nighter to get my report done and on the boss-Guy’s desk as ordered, I still managed to get in at eight-fifty the next morning, and found the pot of coffee already half-gone and a buzz of voices flowing throughout the office. The rest of the day was pretty tense, everyone wound up tight with the waiting, and the coffeepot barely ran dry before another was made. Even so, Venec had to order us out around 8:00 p.m. before anyone would leave, and we were all back by 8:00 a.m. the next morning, looking sheepish but determined.

Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be us.

We needed another go at that car, but according to Venec’s contact in the Chicago P.D., it was scheduled for auction this week, meaning that they were busy cleaning and prepping that sucker. Any evidence we might have missed was now hopelessly compromised. We’d have to find another route.

Now, if someone could just come up with a brilliant idea what that route might be, we’d be all set. Until then, we were spinning our own wheels and fiddling thumbs, and generally getting on each other’s nerves. We’d had a taste of what action would be like, and we wanted more of it.

Interestingly enough, other than a few blown fuses, we were all controlling our current pretty well, and the gremlins seemed to have taken a short break from pestering us.

On the nonwork side, Venec seemed to have dropped the entire question of how I spent my personal time, and I was avoiding the new voice mail on my hotel phone from Will, asking if he could see me again. It was easier to spend time at the office, helping Nick recraft the illumination spell so that it hit only the thing we were looking for, without giving the very retro disco flare. So far, no luck. How difficult could “find and illuminate” be?

“Careful!” Nick threw up his hands to protect his eyes, and I ducked and turned away a half second too late.

Apparently, really difficult.

After the last dose of neon-green sparkles left me with blurred vision and an oncoming headache, I left him to it, and went for more coffee.

“You know, if you’re right—and I’m not saying you are, but if you are and the killer did choose the car for emotional reasons…he or she might want it back. You know, as a trophy.”

Pietr was kicking on the sofa in the main room, talking out loud, while Sharon read the morning’s Times and Stosser stared at the popcorn-treated ceiling as though he was contemplating putting in a skylight, and never mind the fact that we were only renting the place.

Interestingly enough, the entry/waiting room seemed to be becoming our main gathering spot, and not just because the coffee was there, or because the sofa was comfortable, although neither of those things hurt.

I finished doctoring my coffee—whatever beans Venec was buying, they were too bitter to drink black—and sat on the chair opposite Pietr, knocking his feet off the edge. “That’s nasty thinking,” I told him.

“Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” Sharon said without lifting her head from the paper.

“No, it actually means it probably is true. Human nature tends toward the nasty when nobody’s looking. Good thought, Pietr.”

From the gratified look on Pietr’s face, I don’t think he’d thought the boss was actually listening to him. He should have known better, by now. The Guys were always listening. Especially when you wished they weren’t.

“So, let’s follow up on that. Without any legal paper trail and no current-trail, we can’t backtrack, so we’ll have to go forward. I want you at that auction, to see who bids on it. Bonnie, you go with him. Get the auction details from Ben.”

I didn’t know why Stosser was sending me, considering my near-monumental screwup, but I wasn’t going to argue. If this was another test, I wasn’t going to fail. And if it wasn’t—it got me out of the office, and away from that message on my answering machine.

I got up and checked in with Venec.

“What do you want, Bonnie?”

“A raise, for one,” I said, and only after the words left my mouth realized that they could have been taken a number of different ways. Ooops. “Also world peace, a decent apartment for three hundred a month, and to be ten pounds lighter without giving up chocolate. What I’ve got is the day’s orders, from Stosser.”

“Humph.”

“I’m supposed to get the information on the auction from you.”

“You’re going?”

“What, am I supposed to be grounded?”

We stared at each other for what felt like forever, and I could feel my core start to simmer again, little crackles of energy that were probably going to give me some kind of magical indigestion. Something moved under that iron control of his, and I’d swear I felt an answering surge from his core…and then it was gone, as if nothing had ever happened between us.

“Here you go.” He handed me a slip of paper, and went back to whatever it was on the table that had his attention before I walked in.

I took the slip and left, shutting the door behind me as though it was made of spun sugar. Men. Maybe I’d start looking for a girlfriend; the drama was higher but the overall stress was usually a lot less.

I took the info to Pietr, and we made plans. The auction wasn’t until the next afternoon, and since our budget wasn’t exactly up to multiple airplane tickets cross-country, it looked like Translocation time again for us. Great. Translocation was a fabulous time-saver, and having someone else do it meant you didn’t waste any of your own current. But the unavoidable seconds between looking and jumping meant that you always ran the risk of someone being there when you arrived, and that sometimes got sticky.

On the plus side, that allowed me time to go take a look at a couple of apartments before we left. I made a phone call, got grudging permission from Stosser to leave early, and hit the A train, heading even farther uptown with newspaper under my arm and a notepad in my bag.

Apartment-hunting in New York City isn’t like finding a place to live anywhere else. Okay, first you have to know your neighborhoods; that’s like anywhere. And you need your list of must-haves, and a budget, right. Only that list and that budget would probably put anyone outside of London, Tokyo, and San Francisco into a perpetual state of what-the-fuck? Because the three places I looked at, each in a semidecent but not fabulous neighborhood, were studios the size of a shoe box with kitchenettes the size of a postage stamp, and although the bathrooms were clean and functional, that was about all you could say for them.

On the plus side, two of the three were on the top floor, meaning I wouldn’t have to worry about someone stomping overhead when I was trying to sleep, and one of those two actually had a reasonably pretty view out the largest window—a small park, complete with a dog-run. I didn’t have a dog, and didn’t want a dog, but they were fun to watch. It was a walk-up, but that also meant I never had to worry about the elevator breaking down, right? And the neighborhood, although not great, was trendy right now, which meant that there was an upside just waiting to happen.

J would be horrified, and demand that I look for somewhere in midtown with a doorman, never mind the extra cost. But there was something about the place, despite the flaws, that appealed to me. It was prewar, so the detailing was nice and the ceilings were high, meaning I could put in a loft bed, something that had always sounded like fun.

“Put a deposit down now,” the broker told me, “and it’s yours.”

The rent would come near to killing me. I’d be stuck drinking office coffee, no more lattes from around the corner. On the other hand, the apartment was near the subway, only about twenty minutes from the office, and yeah the kitchen was sad, but the view was pretty….

“I need to think about it,” I hedged.

The broker, an impatient-looking guy in his forties, with the body of a teddy bear and the face of a street brawler, sighed heavily. “Chicklet, there is no thinking. Either you take it, or the next person in will write a check and you’re shit outa luck. Move fast or be homeless.”

It might have been a sales pitch, but everyone else in the office already had a place…why was I waiting?

I walked around the one room, taking note of the paint, the worn tiles, the hum of the refrigerator in the otherwise-empty space, and thinking. It didn’t take long, either the walking or the thinking. I was really, really tired of living out of a hotel room, even if that room was just about the same size as this entire apartment. And I could afford this place, if barely, and okay, the kitchen was sad, I could work with that because what other choice did I have? A place with a kitchen that met my standards would cost me another couple of hundred in rent, minimum, assuming I could even find one, and…

I was really tired of living out of J’s pocket, no matter how comfortable that pocket might feel. And then there was that whole “mine and nobody else can come in” thing, too.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

That night in the hotel room, I almost erased the message from Will. Almost.

In the end, I went to bed with his voice still caught in electronic format, and I dreamed of a mastodon trying to take a shower in my new apartment.

I have no idea how the two were connected, but I was pretty sure they were.

Translocation the next morning went off without a problem, dropping me in the upper level of a parking garage near the location of the auction. Pietr appeared at the same time, a reassuring distance away. I’d never heard of a Translocation collision, but then again, who would be left to talk about it?

Chicago was pretty today, blue skies and a soft breeze. Perfect Autumn weather. The auction, though, was about as bare bones and depressing as such a thing could get. Forget about Sotheby’s and think more closeout or lost-our-lease sale. For all that, though, there were a lot of people wandering around, some of them surprisingly well dressed, and the energy was pretty high with the anticipation of getting a deal, I guess. We sat in the back row, damped down and subdued, trying not to attract any attention while taking in as much detail as we could. I liked Pietr—he was good to work with—but I didn’t really know him, not the way I’d gotten to know Nick. That made small talk difficult, even for me.

“You really think the—” I almost said killer, and changed it at the last moment to “—person we’re looking for will try to buy the car, keep it like some kind of trophy?”

“It’s possible,” Pietr said, crossing his legs in front of him and flipping through the catalog idly. They were featuring cars today, but there was a lot of other stuff, too: a houseboat—not currently on the lot, but they had pictures—and a couple of speedboats. Vehicle seizure and resale was big business in Chicago, apparently.

“People are sick.”

“People are not sick,” he said, surprising me. “People are basic. The stuff that drives us is basic. Hunger. Hatred. Lust. Fear. Sometimes even love. Revenge is hatred and lust and fear all in one neat package, and packs three times the kick as any one of those things alone. That’s why we crave it.”

“Oh man, someone worked you over but good, didn’t they?” I would never have said that in the group, or if we were alone, but surrounded by strangers, waiting to spy on strangers, the words just came out of my mouth.

“Nobody ever worked me over, good or bad.” He flipped a few more pages of the program. “Nobody ever noticed I was there long enough to do anything at all.”

Pietr said it so quietly, so calmly, it took me a moment to process.

“You’ve always …sorta disappeared under stress, huh?”

“Sometimes I didn’t even need stress. When I was a kid—” he laughed, and it wasn’t a ha-ha laugh “—my folks used to routinely leave without me, because they didn’t remember I wasn’t in the car with them. I thought it would get better, once we moved to the States, but… My junior prom, my date left with someone else, because she thought I’d skipped out on her.”

“Oh…man.” I really wanted to do something, or say something that would make, I don’t know, all those crap memories go away, or never have happened. Wasn’t a damn thing to do, though. The past isn’t ever really gone. Everything we’ve been through, it makes us what we are now. For me, it was finding J, and losing Zaki. For Pietr…

I watched the people in the rows ahead of us, and determined that I would never, ever again make a comment about his disappearing on us. Not ever.

Most of the crap cars went first, sold for cheap enough I wondered if the local cops made back their costs, or if they got to take it as a tax deduction. A couple of them were in bad enough shape I wasn’t sure they’d be drivable off the lot—I guess you could buy for scrap and parts, too.

“And here’s lot 389, one a lot of people may have been waiting for. A beauty of a machine…”

We were on. The car was rolled out into the display area so everyone could get a good last look. It gleamed under the overhead fluorescents, practically begging for someone to take it for a mad spin down a deserted highway.

“Suicide scene,” I heard someone say. “No bloodstains, though. Should go for a decent price.”

The bidding started, and I tuned everything out, letting my eyes do all the work. Pan and scan, one end of the crowd to the other, looking at everything and not looking for anything in particular. I had no idea what Pietr was doing, although it was probably some variation of the same. There were a lot of people intent on the car, and even more who weren’t paying a damn bit of attention. The auctioneer was hopping around and talking fast, and the numbers he was chanting kept going up.

Something caught my attention, and I slowed the pan down a bit, enough for that blur of color to come into focus.

Jack Reybeorn, and an older woman with him. Not the client, but maybe the other woman who had been part of the conference? Yes. An aunt or sister, some female relative, from the looks.

All right, they had a legitimate, if morbid reason to be here, I supposed. They were paying close attention, but didn’t seem to be part of the bidding. Someone could be doing it for them, a broker or dealer, but…they might also just be here for some kind of closure. Maybe.

Make no assumptions, bring no bias. Just the evidence. Right.

So. The client’s son, the victims’ grandson, and a female relative, were here. That was fact. Move on. What else do we see?

The bidding seemed to be slowing a bit as the numbers climbed higher, and I followed the auctioneer’s gaze to see who was still in the game. Two men, older, one distinguished looking, the other scruffier but still looking like the kind of guy who would drive this kind of car. Was there a type who would drive a high-end Mercedes-Benz? I mean, other than rich, and having a garage. I couldn’t see this car being regularly parked out on the street, not even on the Upper East Side.

On the other side of the room there was an older woman who, despite her participation, might have been buying groceries for all the excitement she was showing. A broker, probably—she had a Bluetooth in her ear, so might have been taking direction from someone else. Or maybe she was just so Important that she couldn’t be out of touch for five minutes….

Current twitched, and I patted it down. I had, maybe, been known to fry the occasional cell phone or PDA because the owner annoyed me, but that woman hadn’t done anything, either to me or the investigation. This was no time to indulge in random pettiness.

My gaze slid past her, and stopped.

Will.

I could practically hear Stosser’s unspoken “I told you so” in my ear. Damn it.

He didn’t seem to be bidding. That was, I suppose, a good thing. Maybe. Maybe he, like Jack, was just here out of curiosity, to see the vehicle where his former business partners had died. Maybe he had a macabre streak. Maybe.

And maybe not.

The facts were: he was here, halfway across the country, same as me. Only I had a reason that didn’t involve guilt. Did he?

The hammer slammed on the podium, and I almost jumped. The bidding was over. Someone had bought the car.

“Did you see who?” I asked Pietr without taking my sideways attention off Will.

“A woman in the back,” he replied. “Two friends with her. Younger than most of the women here, giddy with the winning. I think this was their first auction. Don’t recognize the faces.”

“We’ve got two known—client’s son, and the guy I interviewed.”

“The lawyer?”

“Yeah.”

“The one you thought was telling the truth about not having a reason to kill them?”

Damn it. “Yeah, him.”

“The one you had dinner with?”

Ow. Note to self: secrets do not exist in the pack.

“Yeah, him.”

“Uh-huh. You want to follow him, while I take the girls, or other way around?”

It would make sense to have Pietr follow Will, lessen the risk of being discovered, and a gaggle of girls would probably be less suspicious of a woman near them than a single lurking male, no matter how good-looking that male was. But the thought that Will had maybe pulled one over was starting to burn, and I needed to know, myself, and not rely on anyone else’s notes.

We split up, Pietr to shadow the winner, and me to follow Will. That could have gotten tricky—we didn’t have any transport, and contrary to old movies, saying “follow that car” works only in deserted streets where anyone would be able to spot you following them anyway, even assuming your driver understood what you were asking and was willing to do it. Fortunately for me, the auction facility—an old civic center of some kind—had a cab stand down the street for those of us not fortunate enough to make a winning bid, and I was able to hear the address Will gave the cabbie. It took me a few minutes, staying back enough in line to not be seen, to get my own car, and give the same address.

Hopefully, Pietr was managing, as well.

The cab drive didn’t take long, despite my fears of a two-hour, two-hundred-dollar fare I’d have to explain to the Guys. We pulled up in front of a pleasant-looking café, which was good, because it was almost dinnertime on the East Coast, and all I’d had to eat all day was a rushed breakfast in the office, and then a packet of roasted peanuts while we were waiting for the auction to start. Combining surveillance with food was an excellent idea.

I got out of the cab and paid the driver off, feeling suddenly absurdly surreal; neither a hardened detective following a dangerous suspect nor a spurned lover following her man to a rendezvous, but maybe somewhere in between and hopelessly foolish with it. It was an odd moment, realizing that I really would rather have been back in the office.

I guess Stosser knew what he was doing, sending me out. It wasn’t a test, it was a damned punishment.

Will went in, and was seated at the patio outside, at a table where someone was already waiting. A woman. Slender, dark-haired, olive skin, dressed nicely in a skirt and top, a leather briefcase at her feet. It looked as though this was a business meeting of some sort, not a tryst. Not that I had any interest one way or the other, damn it. We’d had dinner—okay, we’d had a date—and I’d gotten a good vibe and obviously given off a good vibe, and I was just going to have to deal with the stupidity of that on my own. Feeling betrayed because he was sitting in public with another woman—a woman he seemed to be quite comfortable with, if that kiss on the cheek hello was any indication—wasn’t going to do me a damn bit of good. Especially since I was the one who wasn’t returning messages, not him.

Thankfully, I was dressed well enough in a blue, knee-length dress and sandals that could be either office wear or Ladies who Lunch Informally wear to blend with the late-afternoon crowd. I waved off the maître d’ and took a seat at the bar. It was just out of direct line of sight, and a casual eavesdropper wouldn’t have been able to hear anything.

I wasn’t being casual, though.

It still didn’t feel natural, tapping current like this for a premeditated offense, rather than a reactive defense, but it was getting easier. All those hours of practice in the lab did make a difference, allowing me to form and hold the spell in my head, order a glass of wine, and look totally casual chatting with the bartender without losing focus.

All the old stories, about magicians and wizards and all that, with magic blazing and spells thundering? Bullshit. You try that and I swear, thirty seconds later you’d be dead, because we’re just not that coordinated. It would be like a Null trying to walk and chew gum and pat themselves on the head while rubbing their belly and oh yeah, whistling Dixie at the same time. On key.

I pulled a few threads of current from my core, my control braiding them together into a thicker cable until it felt right for what I wanted it to do. Slow and steady, that was the trick. Venec had warned us against trying to do anything too quick, because if someone was paying attention they might be able to sense the current being used. I’d never really thought about it; being sneaky took more work than I’d expected.

Once the cable felt ready, I directed it out, around the corner and, gently, slowly, indirectly, attached it to the bottom of the patio table where Will and his companion sat. I could have used a more direct route, maybe even attached it to them directly, but that would have raised a higher chance that they would notice something was up.

Attention was the last thing I wanted.

A tickle of current went along the cable, and then returned to my core. If I’d worked this properly, the spell would turn the cable into a ’scope, bringing me whatever they were saying without allowing any noise from my end to go back.

It was a damn big if, but short of trying to get a table next to theirs and straining to listen in without being noticed, it was the best we’d come up with.

I took a deep breath, and willed myself to be confident. Without control and confidence, no spell would ever work worth a damn.

“You saw that the vehicle sold?”

“At a surprisingly low price, yes.” Will’s voice was low, but clear. The woman with him was slightly more muffled, and I heard the clink of a glass. Maybe she’d had something near her mouth? “I would have thought a car like that…well.”

“A sad ending, yes. But at least it is ending. Let the dead rest. A pity. Our deals with them were quite profitable.”

“And profit is all you care about, isn’t it, Katie?” Will didn’t sound as though he was complimenting her.

She didn’t seem to think he was, either. “I’m sorry that you think I am cold, Will. But if you recall, I didn’t know them, I never met them, and I can’t pretend any great personal loss, or mouth polite platitudes.”

“All right, yes. But you could at least show a little human decency.”

It didn’t sound as if all was well in patio-land. It didn’t sound as if Will had been there to claim a trophy, either. But maybe we’d been wrong about that. Maybe the killer just wanted to make sure the last bit of possible evidence got out of police custody?

The waiter came, and they gave their order. The woman, Katie, had a hanger steak, while Will ordered a chicken Caesar salad. I felt my mouth curl in disdain, almost instinctively. Neither choice showed any imagination or joy in food at all; I had expected better of Will, somehow. I ordered another glass of wine to placate the bartender, and picked up the bar food menu in front of me to buy more time while I listened.

“I don’t suppose I could talk you into reinvesting?”

Will laughed, the same sweet laugh he had used for my jokes. “Neither of us have the touch, Katie. That ship has sailed.”

“Still. We have an opportunity, and it seems a shame to waste it.”

He started to say something in response, then stopped. “Did you hear something?”

“What? Hear what?” She sounded puzzled, as though he’d asked her if she noticed the invisible elephant that had just sat down next to them. Shit. He had picked up on me, somehow. And she hadn’t. Null, or just really low-res?

“Huh.” He didn’t clarify, so it was probably safe to assume she was not only Null, but didn’t know that he was Talent. We don’t advertise much, for obvious reasons. This may be a modern age, but the cry of “witch” still has unfortunate memories in some Talent families. So she was a Null’s Null. That fact was possibly unimportant, but it was part of the investigation, and I filed it into my brain for reporting.

There was silence, and I felt a gentle wave of current rise through the café, not searching so much as filtering the air, trying to identify whatever it was that had triggered his awareness. I unraveled the cable, dropping the edge quickly, before it could be traced back to me. I hoped.

Paying for the wine I’d ordered and not tasted, I walked away from the bar, heading not toward the exit, where I might be spotted, but the back of the restaurant, where the ladies’ room was probably located. Locking myself in the single-use lavatory, I ran the water cold, and splashed some on my face.

“Damn. Also, damn.” My hands were shaking, and my skin was paler than usual under the crappy lighting. I knew what Will’s signature felt like…and that meant that, if he’d been paying attention at all, he probably knew mine, too. If he’d been a little bit faster, or if he were stronger than I thought, he could have gotten me back there. He might still, if he decided to push beyond a basic filter, if I’d left any trace hanging in the air. I didn’t think I had, but…

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The urge to Transloc rose, and was squashed. And I couldn’t call for a Translocation, either. That would be like sending up a flare, now that he was aware, and even with someone else doing the work, he could maybe still find a trace of me….

I needed to be subtle, and tricky, and unobtrusive, things I generally wasn’t really strong at. Whatever I did, it was definitely going to require more work than my usual blunt forward on all thrusters.

Or was it? I stared at myself in the mirror, and thought hard. Only one possible escape came to me: when subtle couldn’t work, sometimes being obvious was the only answer. I was going to have to brazen it out; walk through the restaurant and out onto the street, praying that some of Pietr’s disappearing skill rubbed off on me, enough to get me away unnoticed.

On the plus side, I realized as I stared into the mirror, Will had seen a curly-haired strawberry-tinged blonde. The woman looking back at me had blonder, straighter hair, in another city, in a totally unfamiliar context. All right, I could work that.

Taking another deep breath, I slicked back my hair so that I looked sleek and sexy, then I dried my face and hands, straightened my shoulders, and put my very best “bite me, yon inferior beings” swing into my stride as I walked out of the café and out into the street.

I had no idea where I was going, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I looked like I had a purpose and a destination, and that I just keep going, until I was far enough away that a current-surge wouldn’t register. I walked right past the seating patio, and didn’t let my gaze slide. Straight ahead, attention firmly on something else, and only when I was at the end of the block, swallowed in the crowd and out of sight, did I let myself breathe again.

Looking around to make sure nobody was paying undue attention, I sidestepped into an alcove, where a wrought-iron bench was placed under a leafy tree, and sent a ping back to the office.

*ticket home, please?*