Pack of Lies

thirteen

Ben had seen his partner exalted, exhausted, despondent and in the grips of a terrifying and dangerous euphoria. He had never seen Ian look quite the way he did right now. It wasn’t sadness, it wasn’t exhaustion, or resignation, but some terrible blend of them all, on a base of fury.

The moment the pups had left on their various missions, his partner had let his facade slip, making Ben leap to the only possible conclusion.

“Aden.”

His partner nodded curtly. Only his beloved little sister could so tangle Ian up that he didn’t know what to do.

“She really doesn’t learn, does she.” Ian wanted to remember the little girl she had been, once upon a time, who adored her big brother and would do anything for him. Ben knew better. That little girl had grown into a woman who still adored her brother—and would do anything to stop him.

Although Aden probably called it “bringing him back to his senses.”

“She was behind the most recent rumors, too? I’d have thought she could do better than that.”

“Oh, she did. She went several steps better.” A strand of Ian’s hair lifted, staticky with current, and he smoothed it down, focusing until his core settled again. “Our Pusher was there, in the meeting.”

“I assume you had him taken out and beaten.” Ben wasn’t joking.

“After he told me who hired him, yes. The meeting was adjourned rather quickly after that. Nobody wanted to admit that they had been manipulated by a Null. Oh, yes. Aden only gave the man his doorway into me. The rumors were the work of someone else—Aden’s partner. A Null.” His mouth twisted like he’d bitten into something rotten.

“She brought an outsider in?” The only thing Aden Stosser hated more than her brother’s pet project was mixing Nulls with what she saw as Council business.

“I suspect they brought her in,” Ian said. “Which means that her obsession has become a commonly known thing beyond the Council. She needs to be warned.”

Ben had his own opinions about that—namely, that it would do her a world of good to be taken down by a Null; teach her some humility—but this was his best friend’s sister they were talking about. So he merely nodded, and twenty minutes later, without permission of or warning to their target, Ian Translocated them directly into the house Aden had been renting, down on the Carolina shoreline.

It took a minute to recover, and by then Ian was already striding forward.

She was sitting in an oversize living room, a glass of tea resting on the table beside her, a book open on her lap, and soft music playing from speakers in another room. Behind her, the shoreline ebbed and flowed under overcast skies.

“You’re being used.” Ian’s voice was like molten lava, cutting through Aden’s protestations at their unannounced entrance, and practically making the air sizzle in reaction.

Aden didn’t even bother to deny his implicit accusation by asking what he meant. “Maybe I’m using them?”

Ben bit the inside of his lip, knowing any comment he made right now would only make things worse. Aden thought she was far more of a player than she was. She was formidable, yes—she was a Stosser, after all—but she still wasn’t as good as she thought she was.

Ian and Aden stared at each other, the family resemblance striking in both the physical and the feel of the current rising in both of them. They had been born of the same family, trained by the same mentor…they were so very similar, and yet completely opposed in this matter.

“Pick better tools,” Ian said, finally. “This one will cut you, too. And I’m tired of bandaging up your damned booboos, especially when you get them working against my people.”

His sister stood up and stalked forward to face him. She was a foot shorter, but carried herself with the same arrogance that made her seem taller. “Your people? Your puppies. Your little lapdogs, sniffing and peeing everywhere.” She pulled back her words, and tried again. “My Pusher was only supposed to make you both reconsider. But something went wrong with your partner. He—” her voice dripped venom; she had never liked Ben much “—was warded somehow, the Push kept getting misdirected.”

Ben checked himself slightly at that—misdi…oh. Damn. Bonnie, the connection between them, had she gotten hit with it? But there was no time to worry about it now.

“Ian, stop this.” Aden sounded sincerely worried. “Stop this before someone gets hurt.”

“And by someone you mean…what?” Ian had his temper on but good now. “A Council member who did something they shouldn’t have, and gets called on it? Or a Null teenager killed because current got out of control? Which is the greater sin, Aden?”

Her temper flared again to match his own. “Don’t you blame that on me! It was your fault for starting this. The Council has been taking care of their own for generations, and doing a good job of it, and lonejacks are lonejacks, they deal with their own people. That’s the way it’s always been, and it’s a good system.”

“It’s a crap system. You of all people should know that.”

Ben tensed. Any mention of Chicago was thin ice, even in the best of situations. This…wasn’t that.

“Is there a problem, Aden?”

Two men in the hallway, suddenly, and a large dog next to them. Ben felt his skin prickle. If they were Talent, they were holding back, hiding themselves. But Nulls could be just as deadly. And dogs…

For all that he joked about the puppies, Benjamin Venec was afraid of dogs. And Aden, that bitch, knew it.

“Is there a problem?” one of the men repeated.

“There’s no problem,” Ian said, his voice practically oozing the confidence and sincerity that got them out of—and into—trouble on a regular basis. But the speaker had his eyes on Aden, and gave no sign of having heard him.

“Bill. This is my brother, Ian. He stopped by to see if we couldn’t work our little differences out.” Aden’s voice was high and brittle, filled with…anger, Ben decided. He didn’t know her well, not as well as he did her brother, but he could tell that much. She was angry, and a little bit afraid—but of Ian? Or this Bill? Was this their mysterious businessman?

“Ian Stosser. What an…unexpected pleasure.”

Ben, thus ignored, felt free to step back from the scene, even as the man with Bill did the same, taking the dog with him. They were not the players in this little playlet, just understudies.

Or stagehands.

“So. You’re the scum trying to use my sister’s delusions for your own purposes.”

Ben groaned. Ian had gone from Player to Big Brother. Damn it, this was no time to protect the crazy little bitch….

“Ian. Be polite to my partner.” Aden’s voice was sharp…the fear was rising. Why? Ben reconsidered Bill. Tall and well-dressed, with a face that could pass as comfortably handsome…but there was something about him that set Ben’s hackles on alert. This was a nasty bastard. A sadist, possibly. Mean, definitely.

“Why?” Ian stalked forward, circling the man. “I know you,” he said flatly. “Bill West. You were involved in the Sagara incident, back last autumn. Eight people died.”

“Hardly involved. We employed one of the consultants who worked for the company in question. The Sagara field was completely out of—”

“Eight people died because your consultant said it was all right to drill. Right into an unquiet ley line.”

Venec hadn’t heard about that. The Council must have hushed it up. That meant this man had his hooks into at least one Council member, somewhere.

West made an elegant gesture with his hands. “Sometimes, people die. That is the price of risk. You know that, certainly, of all people. Or have I heard the story of the Chicago incident incorrectly?”

Ian turned on his sister, his teeth bared in a snarl. Ben stepped forward, realizing as he did so that he was intending to protect Aden, not Ian. Both Stossers had tempers that could combust in an instant, and regrets would only come later. The dog snarled, and Ben stopped cold.

“You told him?” Ian’s hair lifted with static. “Private Council matters—that Council matter—you told to an outsider? Have you totally taken leave of your senses, Aden? And they say that I’m a loose cannon? You are the one who endangers us!”

Infuriated, she raised her hand, wreathed in dark blue current like a neon torch. Ben swore, pulling current from his own core to form a shield. Ian would do anything for a cause…but he would not believe his sister could willingly kill.

The current in her hand said differently.

“I told him nothing.” Her voice was tight: she was afraid of her partner. That made him the priority.

Getting between two Stossers was not something he would recommend, but he would have done it if the first man, Bill, hadn’t raised his hand as well, summoning not current, but his companion. Ben hesitated, feeling the current rising in him, waiting for direction.

“If they die now,” West said, almost conversationally, “our problems are solved. Such a shame, the siblings driven to this…”

Even as Ian and Aden turned at that comment, the second man moved forward, and Ben saw that he was holding a nasty-looking handgun.

“Idiot Null,” Ben muttered, and shifted his aim, the lash of current he had planned for Aden instead flickering out and wrapping itself around the gunman’s hand. The man yelped as it burned the skin, jerking his hand upward even as he pulled the trigger.

The bullet escaped the muzzle, smashing into something that broke with a hard crash. The current wove around the metal, fusing the internal workings. If that bastard tried to fire again, it would explode in his hand.

“Don’t bring a goddamn gun to a goddamn current fight,” he snarled. Guns worked against Talent if they were unprepared, not expecting the blow, but Venec was never unprepared.

“You dare?” Aden asked West, her voice a perfect match for Ian’s: hard and hot and outraged. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Ben felt the urge to roll his eyes. There were days he sympathized with people who wanted to kill this family.

“I dare whatever I please,” West said, somehow refraining from showing the sneer that was in his voice, as though his gunman hadn’t just been unarmed and rendered useless. “I told you I wanted to stop him…. And you’ve just given me the perfect scenario. Nobody will doubt that you two let your tempers get the better of you, his loyal partner tried to intervene, and tragedy ensued….”

He let his other hand dip into his pocket, and came out with a long black tube. “One of my associates came up with this,” he said, lifting it so that they could see it clearly. “It’s a prototype, but I am assured that it works quite well. Try to use current against me, and you will regret it, I assure you.”

“There are many things in life I regret,” Aden said flatly. “Killing you won’t be one of them.”

Current flashed, a hot orange neon that filled the room and made Ben blink, but before he could recover there was a backlash like he’d never seen before, the current somehow twisted on itself and sent back toward the caster. Aden absorbed most of it, the shock dancing across her skin like the static globes they sold in novelty stores that mimicked lightning storms. Ian recovered first, slapping a dark blue bolt at their attacker’s torso, aimed directly at the heart. This time, Ben saw the wand lift, and the current redirect itself to the mouth of the tube, regurgitating at only slightly less power, heading directly back at Ian.

In the afterflash, Ben also saw the second man pulling a long, narrow knife from somewhere and lunging at Aden.

Personally, he’d let her take a blade, if he thought it would get her out of their hair. But explaining that to Ian could get dicey. So he lunged in turn, going low under the current streams, and knocked the guy’s feet out from under him, bringing them both onto the hardwood flooring. He was tired, and annoyed, and worried about that tube-thing, so he didn’t use any finesse, shoving his hand down on the man’s chest and stopping his heart with one swift blow of current.

The body ran on electricity. Current ran alongside electricity. Killing someone with current was easy, if you had the stomach for it.

He rolled, as soon as the job was done, and came up behind West, crouching. The tube, he assessed quickly, was enough to hold off one Talent, but not two: the combined brother-and-sister attack was making West stagger. All it would take to finish him off would be one distraction.

Ben shoved forward, grabbing West’s arm and tearing it downward, so the current he was redirecting went down into the floor. He felt a sharp tingle run through him, but a Talent was grounded to prevent that sort of thing from doing damage.

Bill West wasn’t that fortunate. He let out a scream, even as the current surged through him like ground-to-cloud lightning, frying his entire system.

He fell to his knees, his nice suit barely mussed, and dropped forward.

Silence, and the scent of burnt flesh, filled the room.

“I hope you didn’t put too much of a security deposit down on this place,” Ian said, stepping forward to pick up the tube. It had melted under the current rush; the plastic was fused into a solid, misshapen rod. There was no way to determine what it had been or how it had worked.

“Damn you, Ian.” Aden sounded more tired than angry, however. “West was…out of line. I want to stop you, not kill you. I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“And yet,” Ben said, unable to stop himself, “people keep dying every time you get involved. Maybe that should be something that you consider?”

“Ben,” Ian said, cautioning him. Then he turned to face his sister. “We did good work together here. Teamwork, even.”

She almost smiled, and for an instant Ben could see the little girl she had been, the one his partner still saw when he looked at her. Then it was gone. “Don’t get used to it.”

“You have to stop this. Ben is right. If you’re going to ally yourself with people who don’t have the same scruples you maintain…either yours will get bent, or they will get you dead. Is that what you want?”

“I can’t stop, Ian.”

Ian sighed, the sound of an old man, too tired to go on fighting. “And neither can I.”

Ben really, really wanted to tell them both off, but Ian’s expression stopped him. Of all the things he had gone through with Ian, this one thing he could not follow. Ben didn’t have family. He didn’t understand, he could not share the pain…or whatever odd joy his friend got from having her around, even when they were fighting. He could only be there when the pieces fell apart. And with Aden, inevitably, they would. But it could not be tonight.

They still had a job to finish.

It was nearly midnight when Pietr and I ended up back at my apartment, our last target tagged and bagged. It wasn’t anything planned…we just ended up there, without discussion. Without expectation, either; the entire evening had been companionable but totally…packlike, I guess. No vibes, uncomfortable or otherwise. Part of my ego, I think, was a little bruised—what, I wasn’t so irresistible that he was dying for another taste?—but mostly it was just…comfortable.

Thinking of sex made me think of Venec, and even in my exhaustion I knew with him it would never be comfortable. Comforting, maybe. But never comfortable.

Pietr went facedown on the sofa when we staggered in, not even bothering to take off his shoes, and didn’t move. Poor thing. I thought about getting a blanket and draping it over him, but it was too much energy to move. I slumped in the chair, and stared at the mosaic.

We had figured that it would take about twenty-four hours for the seeds we’d planted to grow into anything useful. That meant we were in waiting mode until tomorrow, maybe even longer. In the meanwhile, I decided, it was time to deal with other things.

Current could purge booze from your system, but it wasn’t fun or pretty. After I’d rinsed my mouth out a couple of times, I took a long hot shower and took a long, slow and steady hit off the building next door’s electrical system. I wasn’t taking enough to raise their costs, but it was starting to become a regular habit, and that was rude. Maybe I should send their super a bouquet of flowers? I really was going to have to find some kind of regular refueling station, something that wouldn’t impact other people. I’d have to ask the pack, see what they were doing. It wasn’t the kind of thing you discussed casually, usually, but I figured we’d pretty much gone beyond normal Cosa manners our first case, and not looked back.

Out of the shower, I styled my hair into its spiked, sparkly best, then did myself up in what J used to refer to as my out-of-gum clothes. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, but when I finished lacing up the corset and lining my eyes until I looked like an Egyptian queen, I felt like I could kick ass from one end of the city to the other without breaking a single purple-tinted nail. I stopped to consider myself in the mirror. The scarlet brocade corset and black skirt could run the gamut from SCA glam to urban goth, but the kitten-heeled boots whispered “slinky.”

Benjamin Venec wasn’t going to know what hit him.

I stalked out of the bathroom, my heels making a satisfying clatter on the hardwood, and Pietr let out a low whistle. He was still sprawled on the sofa, but he’d turned onto his back, and was flipping through a bunch of magazines. The hour it had taken me to get ready seemed to have revived him somewhat, and I suspected I was going to have to make that bouquet of flowers for the next-door super larger than planned.

“You planning to go break hearts or crush gonads?” he asked, once I’d curtsied in response to the whistle. Thankfully, there was only admiration in his voice, and no jealousy.

“Maybe both, maybe neither. Depends on what I find when I get there,” I said. He didn’t ask any more questions, just shook his head and went back to the magazine. I swooped over to drop a kiss on his forehead, staining his skin with mochaberry gloss. “You crashing here tonight?”

“I’m still too drunk to move,” he said without apology. “Try not to step on me when you stagger home.”

“If I come home, dear boy. If I come home.”

He laughed, and waved me out the door.

I wasn’t just heading out to club, despite what Pietr thought. No, I had a specific goal in mind; or rather, a specific quarry. I just didn’t know where he was. But I knew how to find him.

That damned connection could be useful, as well as annoying.

The spring night air was cool on my bare arms, and a faint breeze moved the fabric of my skirt against my legs as I stood on the sidewalk outside my building and slowly, carefully, let down my wall.

Like water flowing over a dike, the awareness of Venec entered me, an ordered rush of sensations and current-hum. Not signature, not quite, but something more raw, more…disordered. I’d never thought anything to do with Venec would be disordered. The thought amused me.

He was downtown, all the way downtown. Somewhere noisy and crowded and loud. Good. I took a hit off the streetlamps, the shot of current curling like a swirl of static in my core, and headed toward him.

“Well, well, Big Dog. I wouldn’t have thought it of you.” The trail led me to Mei-Chan’s, one of the bars Mercy had been at the night of the attack. Was Venec working, or had he been intrigued enough to go take a look-see? Or was this how he blew off steam, and I never knew? Whatever reason, he was on my ground now, not his. I liked that.

There was a line at the door, even at 1:00 a.m., but the bouncer took one look and let me through. I wasn’t a goth chick, not really, but that wasn’t what the bouncers looked for. Their checklist was simple: does he have money? Is she hot? Will they look good on the dance floor or in the gossip rags?

Inside, the club was pretty much as I remembered it: loud, crowded, and high-end trying to be dangerous. I was probably in the upper end of age for the girls on the floor, and rather than depressing me, the thought made me want to laugh. I could outdance most of them, and still get up in the morning to go to work, if I wanted to. Right now, though, I had a different kind of dancing in mind.

I bypassed the bar, three deep and doing a rousing business, and headed into the crowd on the dance floor, following my instincts and the deep-tingle that said “Venec.”

He was dancing with a girl. Actually, as I watched, I changed my initial impression. She was dancing with him. His body was there with her, but he wasn’t.

“Honey, you’re missing the best part,” I told her. She was too far away to hear, even if the music hadn’t been pumping, but Venec looked up, pinpointing me without hesitation. Wherever his thoughts had been before, they were present and accounted for now.

I stalked across the floor, sliding one hand between them before the girl even knew I was there. “Sorry, darling,” I told her in my best dangerous purr. “I’m not in the mood for cute and cuddly tonight, and I’m really not up for sharing.”

She was cute, in a Barbie-goth way that never did much for me, but she was also smart enough to know when to back off. I slid my arms around Ben’s neck, and stared up into dark, very annoyed eyes. Not annoyed with me, though; I could tell that, even through both of our walls. No wonder Barbie hadn’t been able to engage him; he was totally inside his own head.

Good. That’s where I needed to be, too.

“You and I, we have to talk,” I told him. Even with the noise, he heard me perfectly.

“Talk?”

“Talk,” I repeated, not without a little reluctance. In office gear, Venec was quietly hot. In black leather pants and a soft blue-black shirt showing just the right amount of neck, he was unfairly hot. If you liked the mussed, cranky, deep-thinking type, anyway.

I liked.

There was no way you could talk in Mei-Chan’s, not even in the allegedly “quiet” rooms. I got my hand stamped in case I decided to come back later and blow off some steam, and led Ben out to the sidewalk. The usual pack of smokers was gathered by a lamppost, talking quietly as they filled their lungs and rested their ears.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked him.

Ben had the decency not to look surprised, or to try and pretend that we were still in work mode, with the generally accepted boss-to-worker protocols. This was a straight guy-girl thing.

“I don’t know. I really don’t.”

Oh. Well. I hadn’t expected that.

He sighed, and went over to one of the smokers to bum a cig. I also hadn’t expected that. What else was I going to learn about Benjamin Venec tonight?

“Walk with me,” he said.

If I’d known we were going to be strolling, I’d have worn a top with a little more top to it. I unfurled a little current to warm up my exposed skin, and used the remnant to light his cigarette with a flicker of fire coming out of my fingertip, a trick I’d picked up back in high school.

“Cute,” he said, leaning in until the cig caught, and then pulling back to study me with those dark eyes. “Two hundred years ago you’d have been stoned as a witch.”

“Two hundred years ago I’d have been stoned as a witch for a lot more than that.”

He didn’t smile. “You and Pietr have something going on?”

“Who’s asking?” Boss or not-boss, I meant. Was this office-concern, or personal?

He didn’t respond for the length of half a block. I realized suddenly that we were following the same path that Mercy and the ki-rin had taken, that night a week before.

“Have you ever heard of a current merge?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, taking a hit off his cigarette as though he hated the taste of it. “I hadn’t, not until I did some research.

“Most of us use the same current but on different, call it wavelengths. That’s part of what makes up a signature. Merge is a kind of shared wavelength. Rare, but not unheard of. You could go your entire life without ever finding someone who is a match, even if you’re riding the same subway every morning, but once you interact…”

The shiver of sparks flickering from my core out into his skin, the sensation of his current sparking mine, then coming back to me. I shivered again, despite the fact that I was comfortably warm.

“Is that what happened? We’ve got a merge?”

“I think so.”

“Huh.” I considered that. I’d been prepared for…I don’t know what, something more tangled, complicated, maybe even mystical. Knowing it could be quantified, that there was a way to understand what was going on, made it manageable. Maybe.

“And that means…?”

“I don’t know. My sources are from the Old Days, so they’re couched in…annoying phraseology.”

“Oh, god. They don’t say soul mates or anything, do they?”

He laughed, but it wasn’t an amused sound. “They do.”

I was chewing over that when I realized suddenly that at some point, we’d started walking hand-in-hand. And neither of us had noticed. And it felt…familiar. Right. I had never, ever been a hand-in-hand girl. Ever.

“What else did your research turn up?” I decided not to mention the hand thing, if he wasn’t noticing.

“On the useful side? The ability to find each other, pretty much anywhere. You seem to have already discovered that. Useful but annoying? You may not be able to shut out a ping from me, now. And vice versa.”

“So far, nothing I can’t live with. Um. You can’t actually hear my thoughts through my wall, can you?”

“Thank god, no.”

It was tempting to be annoyed at the relief in his tone, but I was too busy trying to untangle the specifics of this merge-thing. I dismantled my wall halfway. “How about now?”

He cocked his head, as though listening. “No.”

The wall came down all the way. “And now?”

He dropped the cigarette, half-unsmoked, on the ground, and used the tip of his shoe to grind it out. “I can hear…white noise. Like someone murmuring in another room. But nothing specific, and I can only tell it’s you because I know it’s you.”

Huh. “Does it bother you?”

I don’t know if he was aware of the fact that he had crooked his arm so that I was pulled in closer, but I’d noticed it. “It should,” he replied. “It should piss me the hell off, and annoy me, and distract me. It doesn’t. I think that bothers me more than if it did distract me.”

As he was talking, I felt a pressure building up. No, not pressure; more like the weight of a cat pushing against your leg, asking to be noticed, only against my core. Ben was taking down his wall, too, letting me sense him.

“Like a waterfall,” I said. “Steady, quiet…yeah. It’s not disturbing at all, now that I know what the hell it is.”

*and this?*

I jumped, literally, straight into the air.

“Damn.” I’d never had a ping come through like that, clear and solid as an actual voice. No, it was an actual voice, silent but audible inside my head. And all he’d done—I knew, but I didn’t know how I knew—was think the words.

Telepathy wasn’t possible. People had been trying forever and ever amen to manage it, but all we’d gotten were strong pings and—if you knew the person really well, or had a butt-load of power behind it—a stream of emotions or visuals. Ben’s Push probably helped, but this…

Wow. And also, uh-oh. As intriguing as it might be to have this whole new area to dig around in, and the possibilities for what this could mean for stuff we could manage on the job—no wonder I’d been able to send him the stuff from Mercy’s apartment!—it still meant something else entirely when we were off the clock.

I realized I’d been watching him as we walked, just soaking in the view, and forced myself to look away. “Um. Did you walk this way intentionally?” Because we’d followed Mercy’s path all the way to the waterfront.

“No. I was wondering if you had.”

It was subtle, like the waterfall backdrop in my awareness, but I felt the slide sideways, as Ben went back to being Venec, and we were on the job again. And, like the awareness of him, it didn’t bother me at all.

We had walked all the way to the edge of the city. New York may never sleep, but it does occasionally doze, and other than the siren of an emergency vehicle racing uptown, the night was quiet. There weren’t even any cars on the street in front of us, making the flashing traffic light and walk signs seem somehow surreal.

We crossed the street against the light, our heels echoing oddly.

“They would have come this way. She was ahead of the ki-rin. It was all choreographed. She had to look like she was alone….”

“The hug she gave the ki-rin, before the attack.” The knowledge came to me, as I retraced her steps one final time. “It wasn’t a sudden burst of affection. She was saying goodbye.”

Venec nodded. He had let go of my hand as we crossed the street, and I moved ahead, finding myself bouncing a little as I did so, exactly the way Mercy had, in my gleaning.

I stopped before I reached the site of the attack, though. Venec caught up with me, standing at my shoulder, looking at the path.

“There are fewer offerings,” he noted. “On both sides.”

I nodded. “People are starting to reconsider their initial flush of outrage?”

“Or maybe they’ve just found new things to be outraged over. All it will take is one burst of news and they’ll be back here, so don’t relax. Where was the dark current you felt?”

Okay, time to see if this merge was good for anything useful. I thought about how to direct him to what I “saw,” and a thin thread of current dipped into the awareness of the waterfall, coming out with droplets of water clinging to it, like a sheathing of liquid ice, if that made any sense at all. I turned and looked at the offerings, and Venec’s current followed mine.

Unlike sharing the view with Pietr, I couldn’t tell what Venec was thinking, or if he was even seeing the same thing—we weren’t seeing it together, just side-by-side. Some of my worries about this thing we had faded. I wasn’t the most private of people, okay, yeah, but Venec was. I didn’t want him to feel imposed on or anything. At least, not when I didn’t intend to impose.

*thank you* But the thought, although dry, was gentle, almost affectionate, not cutting.

On the verbal surface, we were all business. “I see it. It’s not fresh, though. Whoever left it, they haven’t been back.”

“Is that good, or bad?”

“They’re still out there,” he said, responding to what I hadn’t asked. “But right now, it’s not our problem. Nothing we can do tonight. Come on. There’s a diner around the corner that’s still twenty-four-hour. I need coffee.”

How he knew about this diner I don’t know—it was about the size of a phone booth, covered in shiny aluminum siding, and had room for six tables along its length, and a cracked Formica countertop that had probably been there since they installed it in 1951.

The waitress had probably been there that long, too.

We slid into the table farthest at the back, and ordered coffee.

“This thing…I called my mentor earlier, asked her about the merge, in a purely hypothetical formation,” Ben said. “Most of my books came from her, anyway—she’s an archivist at Founder Ben’s.”

Okay, I was impressed. Back in the 1800s some smart rabbit got the idea to collect every bit of historical data he could on verified magic—the stuff we know for true, not the legends or myths—and store it somewhere safe, so no matter if there was another Burning, or we suddenly lost all sense of ourselves, there would be a place our history was safe. Naming it for Franklin—the founder of modern Talent in America—had been a no-brainer. Venec having an archivist as a mentor…it didn’t really match the picture I had of him, but it didn’t not match, either.

He seemed oblivious to me switching around my mental picture of him, playing with the spoon in his coffee. “She’s used to me asking about odd bits of spells, especially once I started back with Ian. All she could turn up was that it was something that was celebrated, and yes, it usually had a sexual component to it, too.”

Not that I had asked, or anything.

“That’s a problem. Sex would be a very bad idea.” He stopped stirring his coffee, and stared at the murky brown liquid. “I mean…” He sighed, and I knew—the link—that the sigh was as much at himself as me or the situation. “I mean because of the situation. Not…” He stopped and raised his head to glare at me, like I’d been the one to trap him in that sentence.

I thought about letting him dangle a little longer, but the glare had as much confusion as annoyance in it. “Ben. It’s okay. I get it. I agree. Sex between boss and employee, not good for office politics.” His shoulders lowered a little in relief, and he lifted the coffee to his lips.

“Although Nick totally thinks we should get it on.”

I timed that just right, and coffee sprayed everywhere. The waitress glared at us, like a snarf was declaration of war, or something.

“He does, does he?” There was that lamb nom-nomming look in Venec’s eyes again, the one that made me feel a little nervous and a lot intrigued, before it was shuttered behind the usual distanced amusement.

“For the good of the rest of the office, yeah.” This conversation felt a little surreal, even for me, but he was rolling with it….

“And how does Pietr fit into this?”

Big Dog had a bone, and didn’t want to let go of it. This had to be settled now, while we were still being civil to each other.

“Does the merge give you any say over what I do with my life?”

“No. It doesn’t. I apologize.” He looked annoyed again, but same as before I could tell it wasn’t me he was annoyed with, but himself for being annoyed. That could come in handy, yeah, when he was reaming us out in the office. Or maybe not. I didn’t want to know everything he was feeling, and I sure as hell didn’t want him to know what I was feeling. Unless I wanted him to, that was. Damn it, this was all getting way too complicated. Complicated made me cranky.

“You feel it, too. Sparks. Serious sparks. And you’re the kind of guy who wants to—” I almost said “control” and switched it out at the last instant to “—know what’s happening every step of the way. I get that. But if we’re going to be smart and civilized about this, you’ve got to accept the fact that I haven’t been celibate since I was fourteen, and I’m not going to start now.”

“Fourteen?” Those dark eyes mock-widened, even as he accepted my slap-down.

“Don’t start on me, I was a smart girl, I knew my sex ed, and I have a pretty good radar for partners. There’s only one I’m embarrassed about, and that’s…not a story I really want to tell you.”

Two people walked into the diner behind me, and Venec stopped laughing. I craned my neck as discreetly as I could in order to see what had changed his mood.

“Oh. Wow.”

The guy on the left looked totally normal. Human, or close to it. His companion… Not so much. I’d never even seen a picture of anything like that. About half my height, wearing a leather trench coat and slouch hat that didn’t do a thing to hide the fact that its body was covered with thick, coarse white fur. It was gesturing with one arm, showing a padded paw with thick black claws that looked deadly.

“Don’t stare,” Venec murmured. “It’s bad manners, and you don’t want to piss him off.”

I dropped my gaze down into the dregs of my coffee, and picked up the spoon to stir it, to give myself something to do. I was pretty sure I was blushing, which I never did. “What is it?”

“Demon.”

I swear I strained something, resisting the urge to swivel in my seat and gawk openly. Demon were rare. Not ki-rin rare, but unusual enough to merit gawking. “Do they all look like that?”

“No. Each one looks different.”

“Then how do you know…?”

“Red eyes. Dark red eyes, the only fatae who have ’em. Also, bad-tempered. Although not as nasty as the angeli. You can talk to a demon, even work with one. Angeli? Not so much.”

That I knew—the fatae breed known as angels took their name way too seriously, looking down at any species that wasn’t them, especially humans.

“How’d you know it was a demon, then?”

“You live in New York long enough, you know P.B. He’s a courier, carries messages that are too important to be trusted to the post office or a standard messenger. Rumor has it the last person who tried to steal something he was carrying ended up looking like dog food.”

“I’m telling you, Jock, it’s bad news. The entire city’s twitching over it.” The demon’s—P.B.’s—voice carried in the sudden stillness. “And the last thing we need right now, people wondering if any of us can be trusted, after all, feeding into those damned…” He suddenly seemed to realize his voice was too loud for secrecy, and dropped to a lower murmur as they took a table as far away from us as they could get.

“The gossip’s spreading,” I said. “You think this is going to work?”

“It has to. I can’t think of any other way to get the ki-rin to talk to us, and if it doesn’t… Right now the scales are balanced—the fatae don’t trust humans and humans aren’t trusting the fatae. The assault pushed everything to breaking point. We have to be able to take the tension back down again. Everyone has to have equal liability in the events for there to be equal trust.”

“And if we can’t bring it back down? If we can’t prove the ki-rin and Talent were equally involved?” I knew the answer, but I was hoping he’d be able to tell me something different.

“You said it already. Then we could have a very nasty intra-Cosa showdown. And nobody will win.”

Yeah. But there was more in his words, or the tone, or something, that caught my attention. “There’s something you aren’t telling me.”

He was surprised, then tried to pull but…but I was already on the scent. “It’s Aden, isn’t it? She was…doing something. Feeding someone information? Causing trouble?”

“What do you…” His expression changed, his jaw hardening and then relaxing as he realized I hadn’t intentionally gone digging, and he gave up trying to hide anything. “It’s taken care of.”

“You tie her up and toss her overboard?”

That got a quick rueful smile that made my toes curl a little inside my shoes. “I wish. No. But it’s dealt with.”

“That was where Ian was, the oil he had to pour. To calm the trouble she was stirring up, as usual.”

I wanted to be angry, but what good would it do? Ben knew Aden was trouble. Hell, Ian knew Aden was trouble. But we’d figured out already that he would never act against little sister, so we just had to deal with it. And it sounded like they had, at least for now.

“Is it going to come back and bite us on the ass?”

“Probably. Aden… She’s doing what she believes is right. She just…lacks the ability to get perspective.”

I had no idea what he meant by that, but it didn’t feel like the right time or place to dig. So we sat there drinking our coffee and talking about nothing—first pets and school memories—until the old-fashioned white-faced clock on the wall informed us that it was 3:00 a.m., and the waitress came around to close out our tab, since she was going off-shift.

“We’re going to feel like hell in the morning,” Venec observed.

“So why are we still sitting here?” Not that I minded, exactly, but he was the one who’d told me, months ago, that he expected us all to get a full night’s sleep.

He shrugged. On him it didn’t look quite so annoying, more like a complete sentence than an incoherent exasperation. “I haven’t been sleeping much, lately.”

My hand found his across the table, and I curled my fingers around his palm. His skin was weirdly chilled, despite the coffee. “Ben… We didn’t start this, the violence or the prejudice. It’s always been there, in one form or another. We didn’t cause it, and we can’t solve it, not all of it.” I was beginning to see why Stosser was so exasperated with his partner, sometimes.

“We’re just people, boss. We can only do a little bit, here and there. Even all of us together can only do a little bit.”

“I want everything,” he admitted, ruefully, like he was admitting something shameful.

“Yeah, I’m getting that.” Who knew the Big Dog had the heart of a Knight Errant? “But sometimes, all you get is some of it.”

We weren’t talking about the case, not entirely. Not anymore. But I’d already given him my speech on that; it was up to him to decide if he could handle it. Better to keep us focused right now.

“You were the one who told me…what did you tell me, Venec?”

He knew what I was talking about. “Carry it on the skin, not the spine.”

“Right. So now I’m going back home to get a few hours of sleep, and I suggest that you do the same. Normal people need sleep before they try to save the world…or even one big-ass city.”

I left him sitting there with the check—he was the boss, he could damn well afford to pick up the cost of two cups of coffee—and went home. Pietr was passed out on the sofa, facedown and snoring. I threw a blanket over him, shucked out of my gear, and crawled up into my loft bed, pretty sure I was going to be asleep before I hit the pillow.

I woke up groggy and my head filled with dreams of other people’s voices. Venec hadn’t gone to bed, after all; he’d been arguing with Stosser—and been annoyed enough that he hadn’t kept his walls up. Gah. Thankfully, it was just voices, and not words. As much as having an inside track might be useful, it would probably get me into more trouble than it was worth.

“Hey.”

Unlike me, Pietr stuck around in the morning. I glared at him, well-aware that I’d forgotten to take my eye makeup off last night, and my eyes were a gummy mess.

He didn’t flinch, but just waved in the direction of my kitchenette. “I got some coffee.”

That was the smell that had woken me up. “Thanks.”

Pietr had also gotten the newspaper from my front door—I was probably the only person in the entire building who still took an actual newspaper, but the delivery guy still placed it, folded neatly, against my door every morning, Monday through Saturday.

“What time is it?”

“A little after seven. We still have time.”

He’d managed to take a shower, too, I noticed; his hair was still wet, and his face had a scrubbed look, clean and fresh-shaved.

“You didn’t use my razor, did you?” Because, friend or no, if he had…

“Hell no. And I didn’t touch your shampoo, either. I didn’t want to go in smelling like…what the hell do you use, anyway?”

“Tea tree. My scalp’s sensitive.”

“Yeah, well, you dye your hair that many times, it’s a wonder it hasn’t gotten pissed and left.”

“That line works better coming from Nick,” I said, recognizing the pattern of comebacks. “You can do nastier.”

He grinned, and snapped the paper back into its proper folds. “So. Have good hunting last night?”

I had to think about it for a minute. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Good. Go wash your face. You look like a raccoon after a week-long bender.”

After that crack, I didn’t talk to him the entire way into the office. Venec was already there, wearing the same shirt he’d had on that night—and I was right, it was hand-tailored; under the office lights I could tell—but he’d changed into a pair of black jeans, and taken a shower somewhere along the line. The waterfall noise came forward out of the background, and I realized it had never left, just faded to not-noticeable status. I gave it a mental shove back, and my awareness of him faded. Good. Maybe familiarity—and knowing what it was—would be enough to keep it contained.

Then he looked at me, and every hope of that went out the window. My breath caught somewhere between my chest and my throat, and there was an ache in my thighs that the tumble with Pietr should have put down for a few more days at least, damn it. I’d thought knowing what was going on would make it easier, not harder, but based on the oomph we just gave each other with a single look, keeping sex out of this thing was going to be trickier than we’d hoped.

Fortunately, we were both stubborn as sin.

Nick tossed me a glazed donut, and I caught it with one hand, even distracted. Nifty held up six fingers, rating my catch. I gave him one in return.

We had apparently walked into an ongoing discussion of the way the rumor-net was spreading. Nifty was the only pup who didn’t seem worried.

“Relax, people,” he was saying. “We primped the pump, but good. It will come forward—or someone will make it come forward. Like Venec said, the word on the street is that they’re afraid this will make them look even worse, feed the antifatae feelings. It’s a shonda for the goyim.”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Nifty had a way of coming up with Yiddishism that a good ol’ black kid from Philly really shouldn’t be using. “Let me guess. Your coach again?”

“Ex-girlfriend, actually.”

Venec held his hand up, and I could feel the tension in him, a different sort from last night’s, like a crack of thunder through the waterfall. “Hush,” he said, listening intently. The current strands around him were almost visible, and I got a sense of our rumor-net vibrating like a spider’s web with a juicy fly caught somewhere in the sticky mess.

*stosser* a whisper of thought told me, identifying the ping Ben was listening to. I couldn’t hear it myself, but I knew.

Somewhere out there, our lures had gotten a bite. But was it enough?

We waited, polishing off what was left of the box of donuts on the table, while Venec held a silent debate with Stosser, wherever he was.

“Heads up, puppies,” he said suddenly. “Ian wants to bring you in on this.”

“Bring us in?” Sharon asked, and I could see the others bracing themselves for a Translocation.

“Like a conference call,” Venec said. “The way you share mage-sight, only in a group. Ian will be lead, I’m the conduit.”

“Have you guys ever done a group like this before?” Nifty asked, which was the exact same thing I’d been wondering. Sharing the bubble with Pietr had been stressful enough. Holding seven of us? Over a distance? Stosser was damn good, but…

“No time like right now to learn something new,” Venec said. “Get ready. In ten.”

I started counting back, sliding into fugue-state, but somebody was off a beat because I was still at three when I felt a tug somewhere around my midsection and midbrain, and fell into a group-fugue.

Wow. This was weird. I was pretty sure that thought was mine, but I couldn’t swear to it. A bunch of different flavors melting into each other, like too many scoops in a sundae. Then a coating of something heavy on top…Venec as hot fudge? Yeah, that was about right. Bittersweet fudge. Yum.

I managed not to share that thought with the group, and then we were all in the same pipeline, looking through Stosser’s eyes. I knew that immediately, because the point of view was too damn high, and there was the shadow of a long narrow nose just at the edge of my awareness.

*focus* a cranky reminder came.

Heh. I wasn’t the only one noticing the nose.

We were in a large room…no, a warehouse of some sort, or a repair bay. Concrete floors, metal walls, lighting far overhead, glaringly white. And, in front of us, the ki-rin.

The first and last time I’d seen a ki-rin, other than through my projected gleanings, was at the scene of the crime, when it was at a distance and covered in someone else’s blood. I hadn’t looked too closely then. Now, I—through Stosser’s awareness—stared.

The fatae was about the size of a large pony, like I’d already noted, but its body was more like an elk’s than a horse’s. Dun scales sparkled at throat and belly, but a plush golden coat covered its legs and torso, leading to the long neck with the white-gold lion’s mane, and scaled dragon’s head. It was looking directly at us, and I noticed with a sense of shock that it had whiskers similar to Madame’s. Well, I suppose that made sense. Ironically, the horn in the middle of its forehead—the murder weapon—was the last thing you noticed. It was smaller than I’d thought it would be, barely a foot long, and not ivory the way a unicorn’s was, but dun brown and slightly curved, more like an antler than a horn. Under the horn, looking directly at us, two large, deep-set eyes the color of coal and filled with an impossible sadness.

He killed a man, I reminded myself. He let his companion sell herself, and conspired to cover up murder.

I did only what was within my right to do.

I flinched, thinking that it was responding to me. But no, that musical voice was echoing in the warehouse; we were hearing it through Stosser’s ears, via the current-link.

“We know, Si-Ja. We know.” Ian’s voice, as filled with sadness and regret as I had ever heard. How could you not feel regret, confronting such a magnificent being? And how could there not be sadness, seeing the sadness in the ki-rin’s gaze?

Sadness would not bring back the dead. Regret would not undo the harm.

You spread lies. It attacked my companion.

“Yes, he did,” Stosser agreed. “But did we lie? Or merely misrepresent the truth? Nobody is denying that the guy was scum. You were within your rights, by the standards of the fatae, to claim retribution, and defend her honor. But the truth is not truth when only part of the story is told, noble one.”

The ki-rin snorted, and I swear flames came from its black-rimmed nostrils. Stosser stood his ground, despite the angry response.

You accuse me of lying?

“Ki-rin do not lie. And yet, I know that you do not tell all that you know.”

The ki-rin raised its head and stared directly at him/us. It attacked my companion. She was in dishonor.

“You took money to be in that place at that time. She took money to approach those men, and to accept the consequences of what happened. I do not condone nor do I dismiss that man’s actions—they were of his own volition and deserved punishment. But you knew what would happen. You were complicit in the attack, and premeditated the murder.”

Her honor…

“Her honor was sold. As was yours.” The sadness was still there, but it was delivered on a cold steel blade. Ian Stosser did not like being used, played, or made a fool.

There was a long pause, and those great coal-black eyes shone with tears.

The action was his. He could have walked away. He could have listened to her saying no.

“It’s called entrapment. There is no honor in it.”

The ki-rin’s head dropped, and something inside me crumbled. No Ancient should ever be cast down so, not even by its own actions. It was…it was painful to watch. Like Mercy’s agony, this was private. We should not be here, we should avert our eyes….

Our job was to see what others would not, could not. We were there to make sure all the pieces fit together, that the entire story was told, not just one side of it. Stosser did not turn away, and so neither did we.

“Why, Si-Ja? What reason…?”

I could refuse her nothing, my beloved child, my companion. She had such talent…and dreams, dreams I had fed, to grow and to see, but such things took money. I am old, human. Old even for my kind, and when I die she will be alone…and my wealth, what little remains, will not pass on to her.

The missing artwork on the wall. Not knickknacks—her own work. Destroyed, in a fit of rage, of shame, of despair. I knew it, kenned it, the way I knew Mercy’s own signature. The information flowed from me into the rest of the pack…and Stosser, our point man.

“You wanted to send her overseas to study?”

There were people I knew, connections I had made over time—she would have had the best of teachers…but she would not be able to find work there to support herself, and such a life is not inexpensive. I had miscalculated the market, lost too much to recover in time. A man knew a man who knew my broker: we were approached, an offer was made. Mercy was not to be damaged—her virtue maintained. The price…

It sighed, and the tears fell. We did not understand. The price was too great.

She was not to have been raped…but the price was paid nonetheless. Traditions were a bitch like that. Sometimes the magic cared about the literal interpretation, and sometimes it went for the heart, the soul of the agreement.

Mercy wasn’t innocent any longer. Her purity had been destroyed the moment the deal was carried out. The ki-rin had no choice but to reject her. And it had broken both their hearts.

Ian turned to his left, finally looking away, and we saw that the two of them were not alone. Three figures waited as witness. Two were human, a burly man in a leather jacket who looked more like a biker than a Talent, and a young woman in an elegant suit and expensively styled hair. They both nodded at him, indicating that they had heard the ki-rin’s confession. Next to them, a tall, slender female with dark green hair and skin the color of birch bark closed her eyes once, and nodded as well, her hair falling in front of her face like the limbs of a willow tree. The Cosa Nostradamus, Talent and fatae, had their proof.