Hard Magic

Nineteen

“Mother of freaking God!”

If the words hadn’t hurt my head so much, I’d have echoed them. Maybe I did, but there was too much pounding and thudding inside my skull for me to hear it.

A much quieter voice asked: “Is everyone still with us?”

It was a valid question. I’d had overrush described to me, the way current burned you up from the inside, and this didn’t feel like it, but the memory of that flaring pain had to have been something dire….

“We felt them die.”

My eyes cracked open, expecting to be blinded by nasty bright lights, but it was blessedly dark. Someone had thought to turn off the lights. Or, possibly, we’d blown the fuses again.

“We were them dying.”

Nobody contradicted Venec’s correction. The memory—the experience—was still too much with me, and probably the others, too, to quibble.

A cold sort of clammy hand slid into mine, grasping it firmly. My fingers were probably just as cold, from the way the rest of me felt. I couldn’t tell whose hand it was, holding mine, but it didn’t really matter. They were living hands. Clammy, but living.

“Lawrence? Shune?”

“Here, boss,” came a low voice, and I lifted my head enough to see two bodies sitting on the floor, leaning against each other like the rubble of a bombed-out building. If that was them, then the hand in mine was probably Pietr’s. I managed to move my head slowly enough that the pounding and thudding didn’t up the intensity, and looked across my body to the form curled up alongside me. Yeah, that sleeve was connected to the shirt that was on Pietr. He hadn’t disappeared.

“Hi,” I said. Lame, but it was all I could think of. The head burrowed into my rib cage lifted, and his gray eyes looked into mine, and any thought I ever had of Pietr as just good-looking was pretty much gone. He was still a fine piece of flesh, don’t get me wrong. But I didn’t see the physical there, then. I saw Pietr.

And he saw me. I don’t know what it was, exactly, he saw…but it was me.

“Sharon and Ian?” I asked, not looking away from that shadowed gaze.

*okay* came back the ping, not okay by a long shot but the awareness of them both breathing and recovering, and coming home soon.

“Everyone’s okay.” Venec, recovering faster, turned on one of the lamps, shading the light away from us, moving around and touching us on the shoulder or arm, making physical contact with a gentleness that I should have been surprised to encounter in him, but wasn’t. “We made it out. Next time, we’ll know better.”

“What went wrong?” I needed to know. The spell had been working perfectly, we had been totally on the track of the actual moment of the murder, and…

“Nothing went wrong. It went too right.”

That made sense, I guess. “But if the spell worked, and it had to, for us to get that much from the echoes of dead people, then why didn’t we feel anything from the killer?”

“I don’t know,” Venec admitted, sitting down on the floor next to the sofa, his left shoulder about even with my rib cage. I felt the urge again to pet his hair in reassurance, the same way I would Pietr, and before I could stop myself, that’s what my hand was doing.

Amazingly, he let me. His hair was coarse, not soft, and thicker than I’d thought it would be. It didn’t feel anything like touching Pietr, at all.

“We need to try again.”

“Agreed.”

“And go through that again?” But Nifty sounded more annoyed than protesting.

“Not a chance in hell.” Ian, standing in the doorway, Sharon half-hidden behind him. He was paler than I thought a human being could get, and his suit was rumpled, but his expression was determined.

“We have to. We were so close….”

“We were so close to dying!”

Ian seemed taken aback by his own shout, and he shuddered once, a faint full-body ripple. “That much emotion, it almost pulled us all in. We meddled with a form of blood-magic there, not even realizing, siphoning off the power of their death. Necromancy is a nasty word for a reason. Not moral, but practical. Death only begets death.”

Even falling-over wiped, Ian could still make pretty with the words. I’d have been impressed, if I had the energy. We. Not you, not I, not us: we. Pack was right; and not just any pack, but his pack.

“We won’t go there,” Nick said. “We know now that’s a dead end.”

Someone groaned at the unintentional pun.

“Sorry. I mean…we still need to find the killer. Now that we know the spell does work, we just have to look harder, more carefully, for the trace that leads back to him. Or her. Everything leaves a trace.”

“I don’t…”

Venec interrupted his partner, his voice still and calm, but firm. “If we stop now, if we come this close and the killer still gets away…what have we accomplished, Ian? What have we done, other than prove the naysayers right, that current is not meant to be used for anything other than personal gain? Is that what you want?”

“You know it isn’t. But the cost—”

“The cost is what it always was. You and I knew that. Now, so do they. And they want to go on. They believe, Ian. You can’t give with one hand and take away with the other.”

I wasn’t quite sure what was going on between those two, but something was about to simmer over, and as wasted as my body was, I could feel every inch of me leaning toward Venec, willing Ian to hear, to understand. I didn’t know what it was that I believed, exactly, but it meant we couldn’t stop now. We had to know.

Ian looked over his shoulder at Sharon, who gave a small but firm nod. He looked at us, sprawled on the floor and furniture. We looked back at him, all of us looking like hell and probably shaking in our metaphorical boots, but we didn’t even have to check with each other. We were a team. We were in.

“All right.” He sounded resigned, but his shoulders were straighter than they’d been just a minute ago, and there was a little tinge of color back in his skin. Boss was proud of us.

It turned out that we hadn’t actually blown the fuses; Venec had shut out the lights as an immediate reaction, when he came to. Good thing, that, since our eyes were all sparkle-dazed from the not-memory of flames up around us, when we were trapped inside the Reybeorns’ last minutes. It took a while for the headache to subside and a while longer for our eyes to adjust again to normal lighting. Once we did, Nifty was the first one to point out what was wrong with the whole experience.

“There wasn’t any fire.”

Sharon stopped with her forkful of pizza halfway to her mouth. “You noticed that too, huh?”

We had expected the spell to take a chunk out of us, current-wise. Interestingly, though, we were less drawn-down than expected. We were ravenous, though. Ian had taken one hard look at us, and placed an order for our now-usual pizzas and caffeine that arrived with impressive speed. At some point we had apparently established an account at the pizza place on the corner, because no money changed hands when the delivery guy appeared at the door.

Yeah, I could see myself getting really tired of pizza, fast. There was a Thai place a couple of blocks over, maybe I’d stage a take-out coup.

If we made it to next week. If we didn’t get killed, or fired. If I wasn’t standing on the unemployment line, trying to make rent on a place I suddenly couldn’t afford…

“It could just have been a visual representation of the pain, their brains trying to translate suffocation into something they could see, and try to fight?”

“Maybe it was hell,” Pietr said.

“You think they went to hell?” Nifty asked, surprised.

“I have no idea. I just said maybe it was.”

“I don’t believe in hell.” Of course Sharon didn’t.

“Ah,” Nifty said, waggling his finger in her face. “But does hell believe in you?”

I shoved the crust of my slice into my mouth, to keep from laughing.

“My head hurts,” Sharon grumbled. “Now is not the time to start any pseudo rational theistic conversations that will result in you getting your face bashed with a pillow.”

Our wannabe lead dogs were doing their usual dominance squabble, turning every possible conversation into a can-you-top-this, and Pietr was just egging them on for a distraction. Finished with my dinner, I tuned the three of them out, and tried to focus on the graph paper Nick had just put down on the table in front of me.

“If we arrange ourselves that way, we should be able to disperse the emotional energy evenly, keep it moving at a steady rate and not let it pool in any one of us.” He wasn’t trying to ignore the others, he had totally shut them out. Yay for geek focus.

I looked carefully at the sheet, then back up at him. “You know that’s a pentagram, right?”

He made that spastic shrug movement thing. “There was a reason it was traditional?”

Made as much sense as anything else. Venec came over, a slice of pizza in his hand, and leaned over my shoulder to see what Nick had drawn. The smell of pepperoni battled with his own scent and made me dizzy. I grabbed a garlic knot from the container in front of me, and told myself it smelled just as good.

“Interesting. That should work. But we only have five points?”

“That leaves someone to be the grounding wire,” Nick said. “Like I used Bonnie, before. If we’re going to do this again, or any other kind of spellwork, we really should have a grounder outside the activity. Just in case. One less person in the wave, before, and I don’t know if we all would have made it out.”

I wasn’t sure what made Nick the expert, but Venec nodded in agreement. “Solid strategy. I don’t suppose you play chess?”

“Not against you, I don’t,” Nick said.

I played chess, and well, too. I decided to keep that fact to myself, for now, and ate another garlic knot.

So, we’d be playing chess this time. Going in not like a healer, the way we’d approached it the first time, but as a strategic…not an attack, but an opening move. Invite the other player—the ghost of the killer’s emotions, to step onto the board. I was probably mangling metaphors, but I knew what I meant.

“I’ll ground,” Ian said. He had changed out of his suit, and was back in his usual grungies. There was even a faint shadow of beard growth that I’d swear hadn’t been there an hour ago. Could current hold back hair growth? I was so going to look into that, once shorts season came around again. I hate waxing.

“You’re planning on going back there?”

“I made an excuse rather swiftly to the Johbs family, and left my briefcase there. It would make perfect sense for me to swing by and pick it up again, once my companion had recovered. From her dizzy spell.”

“Yeah, because you didn’t look like you were about to toss cookies yourself,” Sharon said. “Tell them it was bad tuna salad at lunch. Anyone who’s ever been to a conference will understand that.”

Ian scanned all of our faces, as if he was looking for something, some sign that we shouldn’t go through with it. Whatever he saw, it seemed to satisfy him, because he just gave a nod and was gone. Poof. No shimmer, no flicker, not even the crack of electricity you sometimes got when you Transloc’d yourself.

“Day-um.” Nifty said it for everyone.

“I’d tell you to take notes on how it should be done,” Venec said, “but we have other things to do right now. Everyone pick a point on the graph, and hold it.”

The sense of connection was fading, and Ian hadn’t been hard in it to begin with, but we still knew the moment he was back in place. It was like hearing a door open down the hallway; unless you knew the slight squeak it made halfway on the hinges, you’d miss noticing it entirely, but once you knew, it was impossible to miss.

The pizza sat heavy in my gut, and I could feel the indigestion building up, along with the tension.

“Hang in there, people. A little more, and we’re done. Just a little more.”

“Please would be nice,” Nifty said, and got a glare from everyone. But that focused us, and the count from ten to five got us into sync, and *here*

Ian’s pointer, bringing us around from the outside, rather than the internal approach we took the last time. The wave flowed around the car, surrounding it, avoiding the front seat and the hotspots that caught us last time, just in case.

*down and out* someone suggested, and we flowed along the sides of the car, touching every inch, over paint and under chrome, into keyholes and around the handles….

The sense of stale mint returned.

*catch that?*

We caught it. Cool, stale, flat. Definitely minty, like mouth-wash. Distantly, a sense of flames; not the agonizing burn of before, but a cool crackling, like an artificial log in a gas-powered fireplace.

Cool. Practical. Distanced. Uninvolved. Smooth and slick like fresh Plexiglas, and absolutely nothing we could use.

It took Ian a little longer to get back than it did for him to go out. I guess he had to make actual goodbyes this time. We spent the time waiting coming up with—and shooting down—theories.

“Fatae? A fatae could have killed them, easy, and even if someone saw something they’d never admit to it.” Nick was, I guessed, reacting to the one fatae he’d seen, rather than going home and reading up on the fairy tales the way I told him to. Not all of them were big and scary. In fact, a lot of them were small and scary, and, according to J, you never saw them until they’d already drowned you in the bog.

J had laughed when he said that. I never really thought it was funny.

“Fatae don’t use current,” Pietr pointed out. “We’ve established that current was used, was in fact essential to them dying that way.”

“Have we? There are a lot of different breeds, and we don’t know all that much about all of them,” Sharon said. “One of them might be able to kill, and not leave a trace, and the rest is all just our conjecture and could be wrong.”

It was an interesting theory. I hadn’t met enough fatae personally to say yes or no, but Venec, it seemed, had. “We’re forgetting one thing, in that otherwise plausible theory. Fatae aren’t much for secrecy or keeping quiet after the fact. There would be a lot fewer fairy tales if they could—you think that we started all those myths?”

Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. From the looks on everyone else’s faces, neither had they.

“Anyway,” Venec went on, “Midwest Council isn’t totally incompetent. They checked for that, thoroughly. Pinning it on a breed would have been easier all around.”

“Council would rather it be a fatae killer than a human,” I agreed. “Just makes their life easier.” Lonejack and Council both were human organizations; the nonhuman members of the Cosa Nostradamus tended to stay within their own enclaves, associating mostly with their own kind. That made me think of Bobo, and wonder if maybe he’d take me somewhere fatae tended to hang out, in the city. Maybe we could take Nick, really make his weekend. Except I was going to tell J to can it with the bodyguard. Wasn’t I?

“Well, are we absolutely sure that the killer’s female?” Nifty asked. “Could the toenail shred be a plant, to distract us?”

Nick made a rude noise. “If the killer was going to plant something, why the hell would it be a toenail? And where would he get it? Okay, please don’t answer that. I’m really not up for the Cosa to have their very own foot fetishist killer.”

Without thinking, I sent out a thread of current, rocking him back in his chair. “Oh, thank you so much for that image, Shune.”

He recovered and pushed back, just enough to let me know he knew it was me, and made a mocking half bow for the comment.

“Hey, Torres, did your guy have a foot thing?”

“It’s not Will,” I shot back, still kind of distracted by what I’d just done. I mean, not that it was a big deal, but I’d never done that even to J, and it happened so casually, as natural a reaction as reaching out a hand—and it was that natural, I guess. But…

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure, damn it!” I got up and started pacing through the office, wishing that we had a single room large enough to really get some good stomping going. I wanted to stomp. Hard.

Ian took that moment to walk in through the door, and I veered to avoid crashing into him. I kept talking, though.

“What we felt—that was the killer. We didn’t miss anything. There just wasn’t anything to get. We were wrong, our killer didn’t feel anything, no strong emotions at all, and Will’s not a sociopath, okay? I’d recognize that. And even if I didn’t, Sharon would have picked it up when she scanned my memories.”

Ian, managing to pick up what we were talking about, looked over at Sharon, waiting patiently in one of the chairs. She nodded. “I’ve met one or two, in my last job. Not killers, but definitely at least borderline socios, and there’s no mistaking that total and utter ick. Even secondhand. Her Will’s not our guy.”

He wasn’t my Will, not my guy. Not yet, and after I’d blown his messages off, maybe not anytime soon. But maybe we had a chance, if we could just close this damn case.

“So we’re looking for a female sociopath who also happens to be a Talent?” Pietr summed it up pretty well, and with an expression of doubt. “Man, I don’t know much about killers, crazies, or odds-making, but that seems, um, damned unlikely?”

“Our killer’s not a sociopath,” Venec said, after doing some sort of subdued, nonverbal exchange with his partner that we could see but not follow.

“How can you be so sure about that?” Nifty was all puffed up and aggressive, and I could see Sharon bristling in response, even though he wasn’t challenging her, directly. I guess he’d invested in the whole crazy killer idea. It was easier to think of a deviant doing this sort of thing, but…

“A sociopath may not think of others as being human, or equal, but he—or she—still has emotions. Only a paid killer is that distanced.”

“A what?” That got Pietr’s attention, enough that I think he almost faded a bit, even as I was looking right at him.

“A professional,” Ian clarified.

“Impossible.” Nifty sounded so final, so confident in his dismissal of the idea. I didn’t think it was just because he liked the whole crazy thing, either. The thought was unthinkable, impossible. Of all the scenarios we had created and considered, the thought of a hired hit man—hit woman—had never occurred, not to me, and not to the others, based on their reaction to that bombshell. Talent might kill, in passion or fear, but to do it for pay? Thinking about it made me feel queasy, as though I’d been dunked by a wave, and swallowed too much seawater.

“There’s never been—”

“There’s never been a lot of things,” Ian said calmly, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Never been an us before, either. May not be coincidence they both appear about the same time.”

“Cause and effect?” I guess I hadn’t shaken college off my heels as much as I’d hoped, because my first thought was what an awesome paper that would make for my sociology class. Maybe I’d write it anyway. If we were going to have deviants, we’d need paperwork on them eventually, right? And here I was, ground floor on an exciting new field: not even J could find fault with an academic aside, right?

“Maybe.” Ian actually looked worn down, showing how damn tired we all were by this point. “May be just that the world is changing. It does that every now and again. That’s why we’re needed.”

“To hunt Talent who take money to kill other Talent.”

“Among other things, yes.”

Ian looked tired, but he didn’t sound as taken aback by the idea as the rest of us, even Venec. I guess because he was the one who thought of it. Also, I was starting to suspect, that smooth slick-talking guy facade of his covered up a significantly hard core. A guy who could face down an entire Council, and his own family, to do what he felt was right.

And I wondered, for the first time, what had made him so hard, and so determined.

“All this is just great,” Nifty said in disgust, not sounding as if any of it was great at all, “but if you’re right, we have no way at all to track this guy. Woman. Whatever.”

“We don’t have to,” Venec said. “We just have to figure out who hired her.”

I walked out of the office, blinking against the setting sun. After the bombshell of who our killer might be, and the mental reshuffling demanded, Venec had decided that we needed to switch gears and shove all of the case stuff to the background before we got stuck in a rut. His words, not mine. So we’d spent all afternoon working on identifying spell residue, which meant focusing on such a tight detail that, after a while, your eyes crossed and your brain felt condensed into the size of a walnut, but we’d made real progress in establishing a spell that not only worked, but we could pull up at need. Having to let go of the case even for a few hours was really frustrating, but, damn him, he had been right. Ending the day on a positive note was a much better thing.

After all that, though, seeing the outside world was a shock to the system, and a painful one at that. All these people, these buildings, this huge, noisy, busy world going on around us, without a clue… My brain wasn’t used to jumping around between perspectives like this. It hurt.

“New experiences are good for you, Bonita.” J’s voice, from way back when I was, what, eleven? The first time I’d ever eaten roasted pigeon, and had to deal with the fact that this bird was both the same and very different from the winged rats that infested Boston. Not quite the same thing, but I understood why I’d remembered it now.

I started to walk toward the subway station, and realized I was going to the wrong line. No more hotel. I got to go home. The thought, despite the exhaustion of the day, made me smile, as did the fact that, although Bobo had said he was only supposed to be on-duty when I left after 10:00 p.m., I could swear I’d seen him when I left the office. I didn’t need a bodyguard, or a nursemaid, or whatever he was. Still, the idea that someone was keeping an eye out was…nice. Especially when that eye was attached to a near ton of furry muscle.

I was still smiling when I made it all the way up the stairs of my building, closed the door behind me, and was confronted by the reality.

My apartment. I said it out loud a few times, just because I could. “My apartment. Mine.”

All right, so it was my very empty apartment, at the moment. During our late-night confab, J had offered to send my bedroom furniture, but I’d—as nicely as I could—said no.

“It’s…it’s nice furniture, J. Really.” It was fucking fabulous furniture, actually. Way better than anything I could afford on my own. “But…”

“But it was what you used when you were a teenager, and you’re not a teenager now, and you need your own stuff and I need to start accepting that?”

“Um. Yeah?”

He’d hired workmen to build my sleeping loft, in between the crazy work-stuff, so he’d be able to sleep knowing it wasn’t going to collapse some night with me in it. For now, a mattress and box spring rested on the bare floor underneath, waiting to get carried up into the loft area. A beat-up but amazingly comfortable chaise lounge in paisley velvet was shoved against the far wall next to a floor lamp and a bookcase—boxes of books still on the floor next to it. On the other side of the space, under the window, there was an old table and two chairs that had been taken out of storage and polished until the chestnut inlay gleamed. I didn’t know much about furniture, but I had a strong suspicion that I could sell that table to an antique dealer and pay the rent for half a year. Using it as a dinner table/desk seemed almost sacrilegious, but it was so pretty I couldn’t say no when it arrived. All my clothing, except the dirty laundry, was still in a huge wardrobe box.

The kitchenette was the only thing that was fully unpacked and stocked, from the cabinets to the fridge. I guess it was pretty obvious where J’s priorities were.

There was a sharp bzzzt in the air, and I jumped half a foot before realizing that it was the doorbell.

I walked over and pressed the door switch without thinking, then shook my head. This wasn’t the hotel, where everyone got vetted. I had to remember to hit the talk button first, and ask who was there, not just let anyone in!

Fortunately, I hadn’t let any serial killers into the building. Just a lot of crazy people.

“Greetings, salutations, happy housewarming, where’s the booze?”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this invasion, but I wasn’t given any time to think about it. A parade of coworkers streamed into my studio, making what had just seemed like a reasonable space into something the size of a closet. They must have gathered and left right after I did, based on the objects they brought with them.

“Jesus, woman, this place is so small, you’re going to have to go next door to change your mind!” Nifty stood in the middle of the main room and looked horrified.

“That’s just because you’re a moose,” Pietr said. “People who are normal-size find this perfectly—Ai! Oh my god, look at this floor! Real hardwood parquet! Do you know how much money you could get for this, from someone redoing their place?”

Sharon thwapped Pietr on the back of the head. “She’s renting, you idiot. Pulling up the floor is probably cause to break the lease.”

“Or at least raise the rent,” I agreed, taking the handoff of a bunch of daisies, two bottles of wine, and a bakery box wrapped in red string and juggling them until I could get them safely onto the counter. “Do I want to know how you guys found me?”

Sharon looked at me in disbelief. “We’re investigators, Torres.”

“Also, Stosser told us,” Nick said, sitting on the mattress and bouncing slightly. “Hey, nice bed. Wanna…?”

“Forget about it, Shune.” But his attempt at lechery was so puppy-dog cute, I couldn’t help laugh. “Not even if you were the second-to-last hetero boy in town.”

Nifty was in my kitchen, rummaging through the drawers. “Bonnnnnita, where the hell do you keep the corkscrew?”

“Left drawer. Glasses are in the left-hand cabinet.” I ducked around him to get to the fridge, where there was a chunk of cheese and a bag of ripe pears and…yep, some crackers and fresh figs. J had taught me to always be prepared in case unexpected company arrived. I just hadn’t thought they’d show up the same day I officially moved in!

“Wow! Check that view! Torres, you have one seriously smokin’ hot neighbor!” Nick, of course.

“Her name is Jennie,” I said. “She’s twenty-nine, five-ten, never married, not seeing anyone, works at Saint Vincent’s.” I’d already gotten the details, when the workmen were building my bed.

“She’s a nurse?” His grin almost ate his face. “Oooo, mama!”

“She’s a doctor,” I said, cutting off his fantasies at the knees. “And you’re not her type.”

“Figures. That’s the story of my luck. If you’re her type, can I watch?”

I wasn’t her type, either—she liked them big and Italian. “No.”

Then Nifty got the first bottle open, and things started to get a little hazy. I woke up the next morning with a serious headache, half a dozen wine bottles—all empty—in the sink, and the feeling that my little apartment had just been dubbed PUPI party central.

It was… A pretty good feeling, actually.

I lay in bed, stared at the ceiling, and, for the first time since all this started, I let myself believe that it was going to last.

But first, I had to get through today.