Pack of Lies

four

By the time we reached the pecan tart, I’d gotten the ground under me, again, and was feeling kind of silly for overreacting. “Dinner was, as always, delightful.” It was—J was a fabulous cook, and an even better conversationalist. “But I should scoot—they’re going to expect us in the office at Oh-god-Early again.”

J smiled briefly, honestly amused. “The thought of you being a nine-to-fiver…”

“More like eight-to-eight,” I said, and like that was a trigger, a yawn almost cracked my jaw open, loud enough that I was embarrassed. “It’s not the company, I promise.”

“You used to run three days without sleep,” he observed, standing to gather plates from the table. “You’re getting old, Bonita.”

“And you’re getting younger,” I said, standing to help him clear the table. A wave of exhaustion hit me, almost knocking me back into my chair.

“Bonita?” J moved pretty fast for an old guy. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, just…” I had to double-check to make sure what the problem was. “Wow. My tank sprang a leak somewhere.” I wasn’t about to tell J how much our work took out of me—it would just be another thing for him to worry about.

There is no sigh like a mentor’s sigh. “When was the last time you sourced, Bonnie? Not merely a hit here or there, either.”

I couldn’t remember, so I just shrugged, a bit of body language that I knew would drive him crazy. Even as a kid I’d forgotten to recharge regularly…back then, it hadn’t really mattered. I could go months, sometimes, without hitting empty. Now? Two days seemed to be the max.

There were different ways to recharge, but mostly it came down to choosing between wild current, or man-made. Wild current was exactly that—magic that formed from a natural charge. Current ran alongside electricity, in ways we still didn’t quite understand but were more than happy to use. So thunderstorms, ley lines, any focused electrons we can lay magical hands on, that was how we sourced wild current. Nick claimed he knew someone who could pull current directly from the atmosphere, but I think he was full of shit, because you’d either get so little it would be useless, or overrush your brains out and leave you a twitching, grinning wreck. No thanks.

Fortunately for us, anything that carried electricity also carried some amount of current. That was where man-made current came from—modern generators. The old stories were a crock—modern technology didn’t kill magic, it enhanced it, gave it another burst of always-accessible power in the form of generated electricity. Thank god, because I really hated sourcing wild. A portable computer or phone: that was a small hit. An apartment building’s electrical system: more. A power plant? Smorgasbord. That’s why so many of us lived in cities: 24-hour access where something was always turned on and working.

And why, every now and again, the entire power grid went dark, because some nitwit Talent had pulled too much, too hard. Bad enough to short out your own electronics. Taking down the grid got you Idiot Hall of Fame status.

“Bonnie…”

I smiled up at him, as innocent a look as I could manage, and he gave up. “I’ll send you home, but you have to promise to recharge, all right?”

I held up my hand in solemn oath, and he believed me.

J was a master craftsman: he dropped me neatly into the middle of my living space, with only a slight wooziness that passed with a blink and refocusing. I sat down on the nearest love seat and did another quick check of my core. Mmm. All right, yeah. There wasn’t anything nearby that would give me a full soak, but I could fix the immediate damage, at least.

I sank into a half fugue, and siphoned off a thin trickle, not from my own building, but the newer, nicer one across the street. They had cleaner wiring, so I was less likely to cause a burp in their service, or fry someone’s computer. I’d do better this week, when I had time to hunt down a stronger source.

The recharge took care of the wobblies, enough that I could have gone through my normal bedtime routine. Instead, I stayed where I was. Talking to J had helped, the way it always did—that was what a mentor did, once they finished kicking you into shape—but I still felt worn down. Was it just this case hitting me hard? Or was it the job itself? Was I not hacking it? The thought scared me more than anything else ever had.

I loved this job. I couldn’t, I wouldn’t wash out.

At that moment I wished that I had a dog. Or a cat, or even a gerbil. Something I could pet when I came home, and cuddle, and know that it loved me. Okay, maybe not a gerbil. Rodents were nasty. But a cat, maybe. A cat would be good.

I’d never had a pet before; there was only room for one animal in J’s apartment and Rupert was it, in no uncertain terms.

“Worry about a cat later,” I told myself, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. “If one is meant to come, it’ll come. Isn’t that how cats worked?” I yawned, aware that, even recharged, my brain was getting fuzzy. I should go to bed. Should. Yeah. Right.

Even though I love my loft bed—it’s big enough for two, comfortable enough to live in, and sturdy enough for a pillow fight, or any other kind of energetic activity—the thought of climbing up there right now was too much effort. It wasn’t just the current-drain, or even the emotional seesaw I’d been riding. We’d been pushing hard, the organ-leggers case and now this, with no real downtime between. Was this what it was going to be like once we convinced the naysayers, and cases came on a regular basis?

The thought both thrilled and horrified me.

I ended up dozing on and off, curled up on the sofa, instead. I woke up a few times during the night, once from a dream of a large black cat sleeping on my chest, and then again when a truck rumbling by set off a series of car alarms down on the street, and then finally overslept, waking up only when the sound of kids on the street outside wormed their way into my consciousness.

Oh, fuck. I wasn’t late—yet. But there was no time for my usual putter-around-the-apartment wake-up routine. A fast shower got me clean, and a rummage in my closet resulted in an easy-to-manage outfit of long black skirt, leggings, and black cotton sweater over my lace-up stompy boots. I managed to make it out the door by ten after seven, feeling like crap, but still on time. Thank god we didn’t have a particular dress code.

Manhattan in the morning is a living stream of purpose; everyone’s got a place to be and a problem on their mind. That doesn’t mean it’s an unfriendly place—just busy and preoccupied. Personally, I love it. I’m a social creature but there are times and places you just don’t want to do more than grunt at your fellow human being.

This morning, though, my usual comfort level was replaced by something a lot less…comfortable. Walking to the station, and standing on the platform waiting for my train, I was acutely aware of everyone around me, not in the usual “get your elbow/cell phone/coffee away from me” sense but judging distances, evaluating body language, watching anyone who got too close…specifically anyone male.

Huh. It wasn’t that I didn’t do this sort of thing all the time. You have to, wherever you are. It’s just basic common sense and security, and when you’re being trained to observe and detect, that goes into overdrive. But normally it was background processing, something I did without being really aware, unless a warning signal pinged my forebrain. Today…it was all front-and-center consciousness, and very much focused on gender. The difference was like between healthy skin and abraded flesh. Every whisper of touch, every possible glance from a stranger, made me shudder in almost physical discomfort.

It wasn’t worse than the cold numbness of yesterday, but it sure as hell wasn’t better, either. What the fuck was going on?

I managed to clamp down on it long enough to get on the arriving train without screaming or snarling at anyone. Once on, I slipped and slid my way into an empty seat at the far end of the car, between a young Asian woman in a suit, eyes closed as though she were sleeping, and a large, middle-aged black woman with a bundle of knitting in her hands. She radiated a don’t-mess-with-me-this-morning attitude that was soothing.

I exhaled, forcing myself to calm down. The car was full but not packed, and there was actually enough room that people weren’t in each other’s personal space, which always made for a more relaxed atmosphere. I had a book in my kit, but it didn’t feel like a reading morning. I looked down, and only then noticed that in my rush I’d put on mismatched socks. Great. My fashion style was a little on the fashion-risk side sometimes, but that was going to be tough to carry off as intentional. I pushed the brown one down into the ankle of my boots and closed my eyes instead, trying to get into work mindset.

Usually it wasn’t a problem. While I’m not a morning person, the hum of the subway’s electrical power and the jolting of the train typically eased me into the day, while the promise of a puzzle—either a training session exercise or, as now, an actual job—to chew on got my brain to agree to function.

But this case… Damn it, I was the one who stayed cool. But my brain wasn’t cooperating, even after a night’s sleep and a recharging hit, so I couldn’t blame it entirely on exhaustion.

It couldn’t be the job itself: we had all the answers already. All we had to do was organize and present the evidence. But I needed to be in a nicely grounded state of mind to do that kind of sorting and organizing, and it wasn’t happening, even after spending time with J. The sleeplessness, the raw nerves, and the lack of ability to dress myself decently were all warning signs that I was off-kilter, still. The unease, the cold numbness, the discomfort within my own skin…not good.

When I forced myself to look at the emotional side, rather than the facts, it was—duh—obvious. The girl, what had happened to her. It was tough for me to see what happened to her as a puzzle to be solved, a question to be answered, and nothing more.

I tried to focus again on the hum of current in the third rail, letting it trickle into me like bittersweet honey. That helped, but the tinny crap music pumping out way too loud through the ear-buds of the guy standing in front of me was seriously annoying, and I almost wished that I had a cup of coffee just so I could accidentally-on-purpose slosh some over his expensive sneakers. When the sound suddenly spluttered and died—I suspected that another Talent in the car had taken offense and sporked him—it cheered me significantly.

Small revenge is large comfort, some days.

Between that and the hum of current, by the time the train dumped me out at my stop, my mood was better and my nerves under control. I tromped up the stairs, enjoying the ringing noise my boots made in the stairwell because some days I really am seven, pushed open the office door, and headed directly for the coffeemaker, shedding my coat as I went.

“Hey, girl.”

“’Morning.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and leaned over to see what Nifty was doing with the bits of paper he had laid out on the coffee table. It was a casual move, nothing I hadn’t done dozens of times in the past six months, but this time I hung back just an inch or two more distant than I normally did, not resting my hand on his shoulder for balance. It took me a minute to realize it, and another one to realize why.

Damn it, this was Nifty. He was a good guy. He was on our side.

He was a guy.

I guess my nerves weren’t quite as under control as I thought.

Whatever calm I’d gotten went sizzle like water on a griddle, my core shifting from its usual cool loops of neon to something more jagged and hot. Bad. Very bad normally, and even worse here, in the office. Be calm, Bonnie, I told myself. Be still and controlled, that’s what you do, remember? You’re the one who has the most excellent control.

Knowing why I was reacting this way, and that logic wasn’t going to work, not right now, didn’t help. All I could do was deal with it, and try not to let it get in the way of the work. With that in mind, I consciously leaned forward to get a better look at what he was doing, even as I smoothed the jagged spikes back down into cool loops through sheer force of will. I would not let nerves show. Would not.

“I really wish I had a camera right now.”

I twitched, and looked up at Pietr, who had been his usual silent self until now, meaning I hadn’t even realized that he was in the room. He had an amused look in his gray eyes, so I looked down to see what the hell he was talking about, and started to laugh. Me, my white-blond hair, pale skin, and black outfit, and Nifty’s dark skin and white sweater—yeah, I could see where we’d make an irresistible target.

The tension broke, a little, and I could function again, control slipping back into place naturally.

“You try bringing a camera in here,” Nifty said, mock-scowling, “I give it a week, tops, before it goes snap, fizzle, pop.” Warding could only do so much; the moment current was free of either core or spell, it looked for an electrical stream to hook up with, the more powerful the better. That was why we’d trashed the original expensive coffeemaker for a simpler, if still wicked, brewmaster, and why there was only one phone and one computer, and both were down in Stosser’s office, where nobody did any workings by order of the Big Dogs.

“So what’re you doing?” I asked Nifty, leaning in a little more easily now.

“Girl had a bunch of scraps in her pocket, got ’em in this morning, courtesy of one of Venec’s contacts. Looks like they were napkins or something, but there’s writing on them.”

I took a closer look. They were smudged and incomplete, but I recognized them. “Oh. She was collecting numbers.”

“Numbers?”

“Phone numbers.” I looked at him in astonishment. “Dear god, Nift, for a jock you sure are innocent….”

He stared down at the bits of paper, trying to see what I saw. “That’s a lot of numbers for a virgin to be collecting.”

I resisted the urge to pat him on the top of his buzz-cut head. “It’s not about calling them, it’s about getting them.” He looked at me and I raised my hands palm-up in a don’t ask-me gesture. “Not my kind of game, but some do it. So our girlfriend was playing the game but not paying the pot.”

“Looks like.”

Quiet fell in the room as we both stared at the pieces of paper. Magic was all sorts of fun and splashy, but this was how we did most of the grunt work: Everyone put some elbow grease and some brain sweat into the mix, and we stirred it with a big stick until it smelled right. Another Venec quote.

Pietr put down the file he’d been reading and looked over the table at the napkins, too. “There are three different bars there, at least.”

Nifty looked up at him, then down again at the table. “How can you tell that?”

“Different paper. Look at the textures.”

“We supposed to go check each bar, see who she might have chatted up?” He sounded discouraged.

“We should,” Pietr said.

“Why?” I tilted my head and looked at my coworker, playing devil’s advocate. “You going to claim that she asked for it, somehow? That maybe she blew one of these guys off, before, and that’s why they attacked her? Doesn’t matter, to our job. We’re not here for the why, just the who and the how. We know who did it. One guy’s dead, the other’s in custody, and the cops will get the story out of him. All we have to do is make sure the ki-rin’s skewing was clean, or whatever the cop terminology is, and the case is closed. No need to poke around anything that happened before, right?”

“Right.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

I looked at Nifty, who looked back at me and shrugged. He didn’t know what was up with ghost-boy, either.

“It’s not about poking into her personal life or accusing her of being a tease, Bonnie. I just have a bad feeling about this. Like there’s something under the surface, and it’s going to bite us if we’re not careful.” Pietr was too mellow, as a rule, to be defensive, but he was skirting awfully close. Considering my own twitchiness, I wasn’t going to rag on him for it.

“You got precog?” Nifty asked, interested. If so, he’d been holding out on us. Precog wasn’t a common skill set, but it did happen, and would be amazingly useful in this job. My own kenning worked mostly on people I already knew and cared about, so it didn’t quite qualify.

“No. I don’t think so. I just…” He exhaled hard. “How would I know?”

That, I could tell him. “It feels bizarre, like a goose walking over your grave, only in your brain.”

Pietr considered that a moment, rubbing his fingers along the front of his shirt. “No. It’s more like an itch somewhere I can’t reach.”

“There’s probably something you’re seeing, but haven’t identified. Did you…” I hesitated. “Did you look at the gleaning?”

He shook his head, a little stiffly. “Venec said no.”

“So it has to be something you saw on the site, maybe, or talking to people?”

“Yeah, I guess. But what? And how the hell would I know, if it didn’t strike me enough to consciously remember?”

Good point. I had no answer.

“Did anyone say anything that gave you a wiggy feeling,” Nifty asked. “Was there anything in your report that you hesitated over, or rethought?”

I looked at Nifty in surprise. That sounded like something J would have asked me. Mr. Lawrence had better think about mentoring at some point, because he had the knack for it.

Pietr was considering the question. “I don’t know. No.” He shrugged. “This whole thing, it’s making me feel…urgh. Uncomfortable. Dirty.”

Huh. It might not have been something he saw, but something he was feeling. Like me. Of all the guys, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pietr reacted that way. Nick got it on an intellectual level, but all those years of being overlooked and near-invisible because of a quirk he had no control over had given Pietr a level of empathy you didn’t normally find in the average twentysomething male.

“Hey, guys.” Speak of the devil and he pops in. Nick wandered over to the coffee station and refilled his mug. Sharon had bought us all individual—and individualized—mugs a month ago, after one too many “wrong coffee” incidents. Nick’s was a bright blue, with a yellow happy face with a bullet in the forehead. It had an odd sort of fascination for me, in a way that my own—a beautifully appropriate black one with a colorful but dead parrot on the side—didn’t. “You hear the news?” he went on. “Girl’s not going to press charges.”

“What?”

Pietr’s yelp was outraged. I discovered that I wasn’t even slightly surprised by the revelation. Depressed, but not surprised. Like I’d said to J last night, it’s hard enough even today to come forward with sexual-assault charges. Having to explain how your attacker died? How about doing that without mentioning the ki-rin, Talent, the Cosa Nostradamus or anything else that would get you locked in the psych ward for evaluation? The very best scenario involved a Cosa-sympathetic cop and judge, where she’d still have to relive every minute of the attack; worst case brought up the possibility that they’d think she had killed the guy and nail her for manslaughter, provoked or not. And it’s not like they could punish the guy who died, or bring back her relationship with the ki-rin….

Nifty didn’t look surprised, either. I bet he’d seen a lot of that kind of scared-silent, all the years he spent playing high school and college football. The bitterness in my own brain surprised me again. I knew, with the rational portion, that I was being unfair, tarring Nifty just ’cause he’d been a jock. But the rational part wasn’t leading in this dance.

Nick was nodding sagely. “Stosser told Venec, who just told me. I think she thought the ki-rin was going to pretend it didn’t happen, or something. She went totally hysterical in the emergency room.”

“Nicky, you’re an insensitive asshole,” I said. Nick must have realized how his words sounded, because he blushed. “I didn’t…”

“The ki-rin is refusing to acknowledge her now, isn’t it?” Pietr asked

The bitterness in my brain escaped into my voice. “You expected anything different? That’s how ki-rin are—it’s like asking a dryad not to put down roots, or a griffon not to fly. It’s what they are—she had to know that before she agreed to the terms, and evidence is that she’d adhered to her part of it all the way up to that night. Being a ki-rin’s companion isn’t something you pull out of a Cracker Jack box. There’s no greater honor, by fatae standards, a human can aspire to, and one asshole with more brawn than humanity took that away from her, for his own jollies. You think you’d be calm and rational right now, if it was you in that emergency room?”

That pretty much put a damper on the entire conversation, and Nick took his coffee and his mug out with enough speed that I almost felt sorry for snapping at him. Almost.

“So if we can’t do anything for her, and the guy who did the attacking is dead…are we still on the job?” Nifty wondered, giving up on his napkin-puzzle. “I mean, what does it matter? Christ, I’m sorry for the girl, but I can’t see our client paying for our time if the girl is going to sweep it under the rug her ownself. It’s over and done with, nothing to see here, move along, thanks for your time. Right?”

He probably wasn’t wrong, and I’d wondered the same thing myself. Except… “J says—” it wasn’t really a secret in the office that my mentor had Connections into all the best gossip lines, or that I tapped into them as needed “—that there’s been a bunch of fatae-related incidents in town already. Folk are tetchy, rumbly—like the crowd we saw at the scene.” I saw the guys process that, then nod. “He thinks the Eastern Council thought that if they did some proactive digging into this, or had us do it…”

“They’d be off the hook for whatever happened after,” Pietr finished for me. “Nice.”

“Council.” The disgust in that single word dripped from Nifty’s mouth and splashed into a thick puddle. “So that’s who we were working for—again?”

Other than Stosser, I was the only Council-side member of the pack, and even my connection was only through J. Lonejacks didn’t have much use for the Council, either the actual seated members who made the rules or the general members who followed those rules. Lonejacks didn’t have much use for anyone who followed rules, period, which made for interesting group interactions—and probably why Stosser and Venec kept us on such a loose rein most of the time, when we weren’t in training.

“You didn’t guess that?” Pietr sounded surprised. “Most of our work’s going to come through Council contacts, at the very least, not lonejacks. Lonejacks settle their own scores. They’re not going to suddenly step back and let us determine who’s at fault—not until we have a lot more street cred, anyway.”

I had a feeling Pietr’s family was Gypsy—they tended to be more clannish than the independent lonejacks, but just as regulation-scorning, hence the nickname—but he had a strong pragmatic streak that put even Venec to shame.

“Council leads may be callous bastards,” he went on, “but they’re the callous bastards with a checkbook. And their checks clear faster than most. Get used to it.”

Nifty looked like he wanted to argue the point, but couldn’t.

“Doesn’t matter, anyway,” I reminded them. “Until we’re told otherwise, we’re still on the job.”

“Here…” Pietr held out the file he’d been reading, offering it to me. “The dossier Ben put together, plus what we were able to add in the follow-up.”

“Give me the highlights,” I said, not taking the file. I thought better hearing information than I did reading it.

“Right. Dead would-be rapist was a local boy—lonejack, but his mentor’s long dead and his only remaining family’s crossed the river down in Ohio.” Crossing the river meant going from lonejack to Council, or vice versa. It happened, but not all that often. “Not very well-liked, from what the people who were willing to talk about him said.”

“Nasty? Or did he owe everyone money?”

“Had a less than savory reputation with women. No criminal charges, but a restraining order against an ex, and rumors he didn’t always take no for an answer. Nobody’s surprised he moved up—or down—to assault.”

Nifty made a note in his pad. “Someone should have taken him out before this. Ten minutes in the alley would’ve done it.”

Nifty had two little sisters still living back home, I suddenly remembered. I wasn’t going to argue the pros and cons of presumptive justice, though, not right now. Especially when I pretty much agreed with him.

“His friend, on the other hand, the guy who landed in the recovery ward, is fourth gen lonejack, and a first-time offender. Hangs out with a stupid crowd, reportedly, but stupid isn’t a crime, more’s the pity. The two of them don’t have any connections before about a month ago, when they reportedly met in a bar, and hit it off. So we’ve got bad seed leading bent sapling astray….”

“Or giving him the courage to do what he wanted to, anyway,” I said. The fact that the guy was there in the first place made him just as responsible for what happened as the dead guy. The ki-rin might only be interested in actions. Me, I thought about intent, too.

Sharon came in from the outside hallway, her hair for once not in the sleek coif I coveted, but rather loose down to her shoulders, and her china-blue eyes were tired-looking. There was a lot of that going around today. She took off her coat and handed it to Pietr, who automatically hung it in the closet for her. I don’t think either of them realized they’d done it; Sharon just had that aura around her—alpha female—and Pietr was our omega. “Is Venec around?”

“In back,” Pietr said. “Why, what’s up?”

“You finally quitting?” Nifty asked.

She shot him a glare, but you could tell that her heart wasn’t in it. Considering that the two of them usually wrassled for alpha spot in the team with gleeful ferocity, that set off all sorts of alarms in my head. In Nifty’s, too, because he actually sat up straight. “You’re not, are you?”

“No. I’m not. You don’t win that easily.” She suddenly realized we were still on alert, and waved her hand. “It’s nothing. I’m fine, it’s nothing to do with the case. Just something Venec asked me to look into last night, is all.”

Huh. I was going to make a crack about being teacher’s pet, but whatever it was, it must have been grim, and she obviously didn’t want to talk about it—or couldn’t, if it was on Venec’s orders—so we let her go in search of the Big Dog without further comment.

“So if we’re all here, cheer, cheer, where’s Stosser?” I asked, curious, after she’d gone.

None of the guys had an answer for that. “Haven’t seen him since the scene,” Nifty admitted. He sank back into the sofa, and put his feet up on the table, dislodging the napkin bits. “You think something’s up?”

“With Stosser? You think I have a clue what’s in Stosser’s mind?” I paused, and gave a delicately staged little shudder. “You think I want to go there?” Genius minds were scary places.

I sat down on the other end of the sofa, not so meh-depressed that I didn’t notice I was still keeping an unusual distance between the guys and myself…but I hadn’t twitched when Sharon came in, and the women on either side of me on the subway hadn’t triggered it, either. My brain gratefully seized on something concrete to analyze. Gender, definitely, and not mitigated by the size of a guy, since Nifty was all bulk and Pietr was slender. Raw nerves again, survival sense kicking in overtime when a male someone, known or otherwise, got into my personal space.

If you weren’t used to noticing things, it probably wasn’t, well, noticeable. Problem was that PUPI training was to be investigators, to notice things, and look for their causes. I saw it. I had to believe that the guys saw it, too. And nobody commented on it, which meant they were treating me as damaged, or at least delicate goods. Damn it.

I could feel my teeth grind, and had to consciously relax my jaw. Damn it; I was not going to let an atavistic fear make me change my behavior in useless and unhelpful ways. That would piss me off more than anything else, and it would cramp my ability to do my job, which was unacceptable.

I started to move forward, sliding along the sofa cushion, when the sound of the door being slammed open made all three of us jump. The boss man stalked in looking like seven years of bad luck, his long orange-red hair loose and charged with energy that might have been static but wasn’t.

When a high-res Talent gets angry in your immediate vicinity, it’s time to ground and duck.

“Boss?” Nifty got to his feet fast, blocking Stosser’s progress without actually touching him. “Boss, dampen it down or you’re going to short the entire building out. Again.”

Stosser stopped hard and stared down at Nifty. The air practically crackled, and my skin twitched. A little voice in my head told me to get down, under the sofa, away from the rush of current being raised in front of me—and another part was fascinated, like a little kid watching fireworks, or a pyromaniac in front of a roaring blaze.

“Boss.” Nifty’s voice was soft, but firm, the way you’d handle a scared dog. I didn’t think that was going to work, not the way the boss was radiating current. My heart was pounding, my bp way up in the stratosphere.

*ben! trouble!*

I never called Venec by his first name. Ever. It was…too personal. But the emotion of that mental ping came out without conscious thought. By the time I realized what I’d done, there was the faint inrush of air and current that indicated someone had Translocated into the room.

“Ian!”

Anyone who thought that Benjamin Venec was the secondary force in PUPI, a mere sidekick to Ian Stosser’s star turn, would’ve had that notion knocked right out of their head. Stosser’s head snapped up and his entire body turned toward Venec like he was pulled on strings.

“Stand down, Ian. Whatever it is, stand down. I will not have another Chicago here.”

Like that, like someone turned a switch off, the current dancing around Stosser’s core went silent, his hair falling flat around his shoulders, and his skin flushed, then went back to his normal pallor. As Stosser’s presence faded from the ether, I could feel Nifty’s current curved around us like a protective barrier, and wasn’t sure if I should kick him for thinking he was stronger than we were, or kiss him for being such a damned nanny.

“Lawrence.” Venec’s voice was still hard, and Nifty reacted with the same speed that Ian had, dropping his barrier and pulling the current back into his core.

Man, oh, man, oh, Man o’ War. I started to breathe again, a little irregularly, and felt my heartbeat go back to almost normal.

Stosser had calmed down enough to talk, his voice clipped and red-hot. “I just heard from the head of the Eastern Council. Our vic in the hospital—the survivor—is now claiming it was a setup. That the girl lured them in, and the ki-rin attacked them, unprovoked. That it was a bias attack, fatae against Talent, and the girl was bait.”

“Oh, fuck,” Venec said, with feeling.

I echoed that, mentally. Our open-and-shut case? No longer open or shut. And I noted Stosser’s word-use—from alleged assailant to potential victim. We now had to think about everyone as both possible wrongdoer and potentially wrong-done. Shit.

Sharon and Nick both reappeared at the doorway from the inner office, although I don’t know if they followed the noise, or if one of the Guys had called them. Ian looked around, his eyes still cold and mad, and nodded curtly. “This is worst-case scenario. We need to look at everything again. New eyes, new brains, absolutely no damned assumptions or notions. If this was anything other than what it seemed at first, we need to know, and we need to know now, before anybody gets any stupid ideas about retribution.”

He’d obviously heard the same stories J had told me about. Not surprising—they were plugged into a lot of the same sources.

“We still working for the Council?” Nifty asked, fishing for details.

“We’re working for the answers, Lawrence.”

As answers went, that was totally true, and totally not useful. But if Ian wasn’t worried about where the paycheck was coming from, I wasn’t going to, either. We were on the scent of a more interesting puzzle than I’d thought at first, and I could feel the anticipation in the room. As everyone adjusted their thinking and processed the shit that had just been thrown our way. The hounds were on a new scent…or we would be, soon enough.

“All right.” If I’d thought he was charged before, when he stormed into the office, I didn’t know shit. Under control, Stosser was even scarier, practically shimmering like a heat vibration, and his voice was molten lava, sliding fast. “Pietr, fill Sharon and Nick in on the details, then you two start tracking down possible witnesses. Half the damn city’s nocturnal, someone had to have been out there, and not just gawked after the fact! Bonnie, you, Pietr and Ben run through the gleaning again, maybe they can see something you missed. Nifty, have you gotten anything from those scraps yet? Now, people! Move!”

We moved.

The workroom still smelled like musty vomit and citrus cleaner, as expected. Next time we reorganized the office I was going to suggest that we use one of the offices with a window, instead. It might be harder to ward, but the fresh air would be welcome. Not that every gleaning caused people to toss their cookies…but I had a bad feeling going forward it might be more common than not.

The shudder I’d described to Pietr rippled through me, even as I thought that. Not the depression that had been dogging me since the day before, but something more familiar—and more unnerving.

“Oh, fuck,” I said to myself, barely a whisper, heavy on the k sound.

“What?” Venec had come in behind me, and was in the process of pulling a chair out to sit down. Bad timing and worse luck he looked up in time to see me react. “Torres?”

I couldn’t not answer. “Something just tagged the current. Something kenning.”

“About the case?” The Guys knew about my kenning, but they also knew it was something that happened in its own time, not an on-demand party trick.

“I…don’t know. It came and went so fast…whatever it is it’s going to involve me. Maybe everyone. But…maybe not.” Not every kenning came true. Just most of them. I wished I were home, to follow through—I had scry-crystals that helped me focus, but I didn’t keep them in the office anymore. Too many people made woo-woo jokes.

“Triggered by the case?” One of the things that made Venec good to work for; he knew how to ask for something rather than demanding it. It was easier to think things through, that way.

I tried to hold on to the feeling, analyzing it as best I could. “I don’t know.”

“By the conditions around the case?”

“I…yeah. That felt right.” It was like being brushed by a tornado when it hit the house next door. Something in all this was going to affect me…no, us, directly. I just didn’t know what, or when, or why. Yay for the damned impreciseness of the future.

“Something we need to react to immediately?”

“No.” That I was definite on. Whatever I had felt, it was down the road a bit. A mile or a hundred miles, I didn’t know, but it wasn’t going to hit us in the next couple of days.

“All right, then.” That was the other thing that made Venec good to work for. He didn’t do Drama. “Where’s Pietr?”

I made an effort to look around the room before answering. My coworker had shared a few sparse details of his life with me, back during our first case, that made me determined never to crack a joke about his chameleonlike ability to disappear, but that didn’t make him any easier to spot. But no slender form revealed itself, leaning nonchalantly against the wall.

“Not here yet. Should I start the reel anyway?”

“No. We need to see it from start to finish.” Left unsaid, but evident in his voice if you were listening, was the fact that he wasn’t looking forward to seeing it again, either. That made me feel…not better, exactly. Less bad, maybe.

“Hey.”

As usual, Pietr appeared as though he’d been there for ten minutes. If he’d gone to the other side of the force, he’d have been a hell of a Retriever.

“Got the others caught up to speed.” He slid into the chair next to me, boneless as a snake. Venec sat in the other chair, and the lights came down. “How much did you manage to pick up in your gleaning? I don’t think I could have gotten anything, not after all the looky-loos muddled up the scene.”

A major drawback to doing something as brand-new as investigative magic was that there wasn’t a tradition for our group to fall back on—and the Cosa Nostradamus was all about tradition. If Talent or fatae wanted to gawk, we didn’t have the oomph to stop them. Yet.

Another reason for us to slam-dunk this job, so we could hold it up as an example and justification for “get the hell out of my way.”

Pietr was still waiting for me to respond. I really didn’t want to talk about what I’d done, so I just toggled the mental image of a switch, and the display appeared in front of us.

“Oh.”

Even smaller-than-life, a gleaning representation packs a wallop. Like watching a movie where you know what’s going to happen, and the director knows you know what’s going to happen, so rather than mess it up with soundtrack and fancy camerawork, just lets it play out straightforward, in absolute silence. I could feel my skin tighten on my arms, and a knot of tension form in my chest, somewhere inside my lungs.

*no preconceived perceptions*

The warning ping felt private, but Pietr nodded his head once, slightly, so he heard it, too. I focused my attention on the display, trying to let it run in front of my eyes as though it hadn’t already been seared into my brain. Look as though it’s all new, everything a shiny dispassionate fact….

The scene, still and dark, the lamps casting just enough light to create deep shadows. A flicker of movement…down there, off-camera. Then two figures; the girl, slight and cute in her club clothes: short skirt, jacket carelessly open to the night wind. She had legs like a colt’s, and hair that was long and tangled from dancing. The ki-rin came to her shoulder, its head slightly above hers when it was lifted, even-level when it ducked down as though to say something. I don’t know why anyone ever described them as horselike. Seeing it now, with distance, it was built more like a deer than a horse, and the dragon’s head should have seemed odd on top of that muscled neck, but didn’t. The horn, about the length of a forearm and twisted the way you traditionally see it in pictures, seemed too ethereal to do anything like gore a man to death.

“They’re walking really slowly.” Pietr’s voice, out of the room’s darkness.

“They’re tired,” I said.

“It’s cold. You’d think they’d move it along?” Venec, to my left.

“If she’s been dancing, the cold air probably feels pretty good, if she’s even aware of it. The clubs can get really close and hot.”

They took my word for it. I guess neither of them was much for clubbing.

The two were walking forward, fully in view now, within the range I’d gleaned from. The wind tossed bare branches on the trees along the path, and even if the girl didn’t shiver, I did, imagining how cold it must have been, that hour before sunrise. She leaned in against the ki-rin, put her arm over its neck, ruffling the white lion’s mane the way you would a beloved friend’s hair. Such total, thoughtless comfort made what was about to happen even harder to watch. If the vic was right, if the ki-rin had set her up as bait, used her trust…the thought just—

“Did you see that?”

“What?”

“Over there. To the left.”

Where the attack happened. I brought the display back a few seconds, and looked where Pietr had indicated.

Two deeper shadows in the shadows. That I’d seen before. The brief red glint of something…I’d missed that. A cigarette butt? Yes, the flick of ash about hip-height: someone pausing to have a cigarette. Two shadows: two figures. Two men, waiting in the shadows…smoking?

No preconceptions. I let the display roll.

The ki-rin fell back, the way I’d noted before. I let my brain just take it in, as dispassionately as I could. In a human, you would have expected it to kneel down and tie its shoe, perhaps. The girl, so affectionate a moment before, went on her way, seemingly not noticing that her companion had dropped away. Was she still talking? No way to tell. She was walking with a distinct kick to her step. If she was sober, she was floating on the endorphins of the night.

One figure stepped out of the shadows. The cigarette smoker. The girl stopped, her body language… I’d said at first that it was patient, the way you are when a stranger approaches you when you’re in a good mood, and you’re going to give them real directions, or whatever spare change is in your pocket. But looking now, she seemed…expectant. Flirty? She leaned in and put a hand on the stranger’s arm. Damn, how had I missed that before? Could the second man’s claim that they were set up be right?

What happened next was fast and brutal. The second figure came out, grabbed her, dragged her back into the bushes. My stomach rose up again in protest but this time I held it down, forcing my eyes to stay on the display. Next to me I heard Pietr swear in a language I didn’t recognize, his body convulsing as though forcibly keeping himself from getting up to help the three-quarter-size figure in need. On the other side of me, Venec was perfectly still and quiet. The current in the room sparked and sizzled with their agitation, and I had to focus to keep my own current steady and unaffected, to keep the display from shorting out in response.

*control* I heard, a whisper of a ping, and the current in the room cooled, still unsettled, but not dangerous.

The ki-rin raced forward, after a pause that seemed to take forever, but couldn’t have. Just long enough for her to be thrown to the ground, her clothing torn, her skin bruised and mauled…

*stop* Venec’s voice in my head, layers of reminder in that one-word sense. Stop projecting. Stop assuming. Stop. I stopped, and let the visual evidence unfold.

Five minutes, maybe, from the first grab to the ki-rin’s arrival. Why had it been so slow? Then the dragon’s-head jaw opened in what must have been a roar, and a shadow jerked away. The second vic? The ki-rin ignored it, that graceful body rearing back and hooves and head coming down in attack mode, the horn angled down, and the darkness was suddenly the brighter for blood splattered across that pale body…

“Stop it.” Pietr’s voice, hard.

I managed to pause the display. It was getting easier to control it, although I still had to concentrate. Pietr leaned forward. “That second figure. He was the one who approached, but he never did anything. His cigarette stayed lit the entire time, I didn’t see it move at all. He was just standing there.”

“He wasn’t part of the actual attack,” Venec said, confirming my initial theory. “That’s why the ki-rin let him live.”

“He was the hook,” I said, seeing where Pietr was heading, looking with my brain instead of my emotions. “He brought her close enough to grab. But he wasn’t acting as the lookout. Otherwise he would have seen the ki-rin coming, and warned his buddy. He didn’t.”

“And he wasn’t expecting trouble, either,” Venec said, rolling off our thoughts the way we did when we hit stride. “The positioning was all wrong. He was…more like he was waiting while his buddy had a go, but not expecting to have to restrain her, or help. As though she approached them, hot off the club scene, looking for some action. Just like our perp claimed.”

“But the guy did grab her. It wasn’t the other way around.” I looked at the others, and they nodded. However she approached them, she hadn’t gone to the ground willingly. “Hang on….” I let the display go, and we watched as the ki-rin pulled back, then turned on its back hooves and lashed out at the second figure. He didn’t escape unscathed.

“Punishment to fit the crime,” I said. “But he didn’t run. Why didn’t he run? He should have, at that point.”

“Unless he was in shock,” Venec said thoughtfully, trying the idea out.

“Like he wasn’t expecting a ki-rin?” Pietr wasn’t buying it. “If I had been part of that, and saw my buddy get gored, I’d be running like hell, especially if I originally thought the girl had been alone.”

“Not expecting it…or he wasn’t expecting it to attack him?”

The guys both turned to look at me. I leaned back and stared at the frozen display, a weird coldness stroking my spine, the way it did when my mood went from dark to pitch-black. The emptiness and the depression were both gone, and anger filled the space, but I wasn’t sure where to direct it…not yet. “He stood there…not part of it, but part of it. He approached her…but never touched her, didn’t seem to be part of the attempt…the ki-rin ignored him until well after the fact…. You were right, Pietr, earlier. I’ve got a really hinky feeling about this, too.”

We were done—for now, anyway. I shut down the display and tucked it back into the carefully constructed nonspace it was stored in. There was already some degradation occurring. No matter how good my memory, eventually it would fade, especially if we kept watching it over and over. Nothing lasted forever. The thought was comforting, actually.

When I’d finished closing up, we went not to the break room, but to the largest of our workspaces, with a large conference table, and eight chairs. There were only seven of us, but I guess the eighth chair came with the set, and nobody ever moved it to another room.

Nifty was already there, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair impatiently, a notebook open on the conference table in front of him. “Four different clubs, all in the same area,” he said to Venec when we came in. “I pinged Nick with the names, and he and Sharon are checking them out.”

“What clubs?” I asked.

“Daylight, Roseroom, the Woogie, and Mei-Chan’s.”

“I know them.”

“Of course you do,” Venec said dryly, and Pietr snickered. Hey, I never made any bones about being a club kid, and I wasn’t going to apologize, especially if it gave us information we needed.

“Roseroom and the Woogie are fatae-friendly, so it makes sense they’d go there. Daylight’s new, I went there once and wasn’t impressed. Retro-trance, wasn’t my thing. Mei-Chan’s, that’s classy. Very expensive. Was our girl in the money?”

“Not particularly, no. But she might have been hoping to meet someone who was?”

“A sugar daddy who wasn’t looking for a bed-toy? Unlikely.”

“A sugar mommy?” Nifty asked.

I snorted. “Virginity isn’t dependent on a penis, Nift.”

He blinked, and then blushed a little, like his brain had never gone there before. Yeah, right.

“Well, until the others get back, that’s all I got. You?”

Venec filled Nifty in on our revised evaluation, while I looked over the notepad he’d been working on. A penciled map, linking the four clubs, trying to figure out the possible routes that would land them on the park walkway at that hour. No direct lines anywhere.

“So, someone’s lying,” Nifty said.

“We knew that already.” Venec, tired-sounding. “You don’t get two wildly dissenting stories without someone being full of shit. The hell with the client—they just wanted to cover their asses. Well, we were on the scene, so now no matter what happens, it’s our reputation that’s on the line. We can’t back off, not without looking incompetent.”

There was a brief silence as everyone digested that fact. Had we been set up, more than just the Council using us as a splatter-sheild? We’d screwed ourselves by taking the case so fast, without knowing more detail, but we’d been so hyped to actually be on scene first, not last-called…

Oh, hell, I would have made the same decision Ian did. We knew that we were being used, but we were in the business to be used, when it all boiled down to bones. Eventually, people would learn that we didn’t give a damn what their games and goals were: we were after the facts.

“We need to get answers, and we need to prove what happened, without any room for doubt. If we don’t, this will never be settled to anyone’s satisfaction, and that doubt’s going to come back and bite us on the ass hard enough to take a chunk out right when we can least afford it.”

In other words, it was not only this case that was on the line, but also our ability to function down the road. But no pressure, puppies.

“So, obviously, the first thought is it’s the second attacker who is lying.” Pietr was thinking out loud. “His buddy’s dead, he’s laid up with serious medical bills piling up, so he’s trying to blame the girl, saying she was a willing partner so the cops have no reason to get involved, and the ki-rin…did what? Overreacted? Got jealous?”

Stosser came in as we were talking. He looked calmer, but his body language still sang tension, and it hit a note in me, too. I could feel myself tense up. The others seemed oblivious, focusing on their own notebooks.

“Would a ki-rin’s companion give that up for a quick lay, suddenly?” Venec asked, testing the theory. “Or maybe there wasn’t as much respect between the two of them as we’d been assuming…trouble in paradise?”

“No.” I was definite about that. “They had been physically affectionate, just minutes before, really comfortable with each other. If she was going to break ties there are ways to do that, formally, so both can go their way with honor. This…that sort of thing would be a slap to the ki-rin.” I thought. My knowledge of ki-rin was pretty much what J had told me over dinner, and even that was mostly hearsay and legend. None of the fatae were open with their lives—except the piskies who shared too damn much—and unlike some of the older European breeds, who made their living off their reputations. The Asiatic breeds weren’t exactly inking tell-alls for TV.

“What about the girl,” Pietr said. “What reason would she have to lie? She didn’t shy away from the first guy, our survivor, at first. Could his story be true, that she went willingly—or changed her mind at the last minute? Could the cry of attempted rape be a way to protect herself, so nobody would know about her betrayal of the ki-rin, and that’s why she won’t press charges? Because she doesn’t want anyone actively investigating her story?”

It was a fair, if ugly, question. The Cosa reaction would be exactly what we were seeing—a willingness to shove it under the table, and allow the ki-rin historical rights to revenge, not rock any boats. But it didn’t say nice things about the girl if she flip-flopped like that. My immediate response was to leap to her defense, but Venec’s injunction made me keep it in check. Was it possible?

“She was attacked, and injured, even though the bastard was interrupted before he managed penetration,” Ian said. He had been the one to see her in person, so he’d know. “She’s shaken and scared, physically and emotionally damaged…no. I think the refusal to press charges has more to do with shame than fear of being revealed as a liar.”

Stosser was a pretty good judge of character when he wanted to be, so we were willing to accept his take on the situation. The fact that she had injuries also supported her version of the story…unless she liked that sort of thing. I didn’t want to bring that up, but…

“Also, she’s Talent, although so lo-res as to be practically Null, and being a companion was serious status uptick to her,” he said, echoing my earlier point. “I can’t see her letting that go, and certainly not in such an insulting manner. The news that this guy is countering her claims made her—”

“You told her?”

“Boss! You said you’d be gentle!”

Stosser looked taken aback when Pietr and I both jumped on him for that. “Well, yes. I went back while you were working, after I got the news. I wanted to see her reaction.”

Oh. My. Dog. I’d known Stosser was a cold bastard, but that…wow. Even Venec looked a little sick.

“Shame or fear, the counterclaim raised the possibility that she might not be an innocent victim.” I guess everyone’s expression was the same, because this was the first time ever I’d heard Stosser be defensive. “It was our best chance to gauge her response to the news, before anyone had a chance to warn her.”

Might not being the operative term. I could understand why he’d done it, I guess; fast and brutal was sometimes the best attack, and we were fighting for our professional lives, but damn.

“Damage done,” Nifty said, shaking his head like he still couldn’t believe Ian had done that. “What was her reaction, as though we don’t already know?”

Stosser looked way from us, admitting just a sliver of guilt with that action. “She burst into tears and refused to speak to me any longer.”

I would have thrown something at him, myself. And that something would have hit him, too.

Venec touched my arm, like he knew how close I was to saying something that might get me fired, and I felt annoyance settle down, my temper going back to its normal even tone.

“So we have a he-said/she-said situation,” Venec said, with a look at his partner that didn’t bode well for later out-of-office discussions about tact and human kindness. Good. Although the thought of Venec lecturing anyone about tact was kind of funny.

“If the actual attacker is dead,” Venec went on, “and the ki-rin will say only that he was retaliating within his rights for his former companion’s dishonoring…what does that leave us with? I know the myths about this breed, but most of the fatae have a historical association with…twisting the truth, in order to get their way. Could the ki-rin be lying?”

“No.” Stosser answered that one. “You can’t judge them by the standards of the rest of the fatae, Ben. I’m not sure a ki-rin is even capable of lying. The unicorn mythos is right about that as well as the virginity obsession. Pure and true, loyal and loving, et cetera, et cetera. Fierce bastards, too. I saw what was left of the dead guy. I’m not sure there’s enough left to do an autopsy, although the ki-rin thoughtfully left the face intact for identification.”

“Kind of it, I’m sure,” Pietr said.

“I don’t think kindness was in its plans,” Nifty said. “Maybe the girl is scared of the ki-rin, now that she’s not protected? It may choose human companions, for whatever reason, but I’ve yet to meet a fatae that wouldn’t choose the nonhuman side in a heartbeat. They’re just as happy to stamp us into the ground, most of them, given the chance.”

“Wow, fataephobic a bit, aren’t you?” Pietr asked, echoing my own reluctant thought.

“I like most of ’em fine,” Nifty said, scowling at Pietr. “I just don’t trust ’em. Not with my life and not with yours, either. I read my histories. For every good fairy godmother or kindly elf, you get a dozen bog-spirits and water-sprites just cackling about the chance to put us down.”

I wanted to argue, but he was right. On the other hand, we’d written those stories, we humans. I wondered what the fatae had to say about us?

“Y’know,” Pietr said, breaking into my thoughts, “I’d have expected a black man to be a little less bigo—”

“Hey! Watch it!”

Pietr held his ground, even when Nifty stood up, leaning across the table, and I tensed, not sure if I would get between them or dive under the table, if it came to that.

“Down!” Stosser didn’t have the deep voice Venec did, but he could do a command as well as any dog trainer I’d ever seen. Nifty sat down, if reluctantly, and Pietr leaned back, nonverbally letting go of the argument.

Stosser wasn’t appeased. “Do I have to assign you two scutwork until you learn to play well with each other?”

“No, sir,” Nifty said quickly. Too quickly for the Big Dog’s satisfaction, because he glared at Nifty. It should have been funny, stick-skinny Stosser trying to physically cow the former football player, but it wasn’t. It was scary. Nifty blinked and looked down, and Ian turned to the other culprit, waiting for his response.

“No, boss.” Pietr shook his head, looking much more rebuked than Nifty had managed. I wasn’t sure I trusted his response any more, but it came across better.

For some reason Stosser looked at me, and I looked back, as wide-eyed and quiet as I could manage.

“Right now,” Venec said, and he was talking to Stosser, not us; you could tell when he put on his Big Dog-to-Big Dog voice, “we have a record of events that could be used to support either claim—there’s just enough leeway to allow reasonable doubt on anyone, especially without anything more than torn clothing and bruising that could have been consensual roughhousing.”

Oh, good. I didn’t have to be the one to bring that up. Wasn’t my thing, but I knew plenty of people who were in the Life, and being thrown down on the ground and restrained with force was their idea of a cozy Tuesday-night date.

“Damn it.” Stosser was still pissed, but I was right, it wasn’t that cold fury anymore. Thankfully. I much preferred calculating Stosser to furious Stosser. “It’s going to come down to the weight, not the quality. That puts the onus on us to collect everything, and I do mean everything, I don’t care how small or insignificant or duplicated the effort.”

Yeah, we’d already gotten that, boss. But I kept my mouth shut, and so did Nifty and Pietr, for once. When the Big Dogs went at it, you didn’t get involved. We all stayed very still and quiet, and listened really hard.

“Are Sharon and Nick still out?”

Venec nodded. “They’re checking on the clubs the girl hit that night.”

“Right. Pietr, Bonnie, I want you talking to the fatae, any one you can lay fingers on. See what they’re chattering about. Ben, you and I will deal with the Null aspects. Nifty—” He looked consideringly at the big guy, and I could see Nifty bracing himself for some kind of punishment detail.

“There was a cop first on-scene, one of ours.” Talent, he meant. “The guy who called the Council in. I need you to find him, talk to him. See if you can jog anything loose from his memory, anything that seemed out of place, or didn’t jibe with protocol.”

Nifty nodded, trying not to show his relief. It’s not a job I’d have wanted, but he could do guys-together-shooting-shit better than anyone else on the crew.

Ian nodded at us all, his gaze steady as a basilisk’s, and just as unnerving. “We’re still on the job, even if the parameters have changed. A crime was committed—we just don’t know what crime anymore. That’s what we need to determine. It’s important to get this one right, the first time, and have it locked down solid—you know what’s riding on this.”

A girl’s reputation. A man’s death. A Cosa shitstorm. Our professional survival. Yeah, we knew.

“No mistakes, no slipups or oversights. Take all day, all night if you have to. Be back here in the morning with something to give us. I don’t want theories or hypothetical situations. Facts only. Everything else is useless.”

five

The four of us were heading out on our fatae—and fact-finding—missions, Stosser on our heels heading who knows where, when Sharon and Nick came into the lobby.

“Changing of the guard?” Nick asked, but his face didn’t match the lighthearted tone, and I could tell he was making an effort.

“Any success?” Stosser asked them, before either of us could make a response.

“They all have a CCTV setup, but the recording’s wiped after twenty-four hours if nobody files a complaint,” Sharon said. “All legal by current laws, if incredibly skanky.” Sharon sounded disgusted; she might have been a great legal researcher but she’d have been lousy in court. “And if anyone knew or remembered anything, they weren’t talking. We should have sent Bonnie—she’d have been able to get something out of somebody there, turning on her trashy charm.”

I made a shallow, mocking bow. Sharon wasn’t being obnoxious, much; her country club-style lush blondeness might turn some heads, including mine, but when it came to ferreting my way into the good graces of Goth-club bartenders and hyped-up bouncers, I’d perfected the art by the time I was sixteen. Like I said, I never made any secret of being a club kid.

Stosser didn’t like being second-guessed, and we’d already gotten the lecture months ago about learning to adapt, and not to rely on another teammate’s strengths to get the job done. Thankfully, he spared us another sounding of it. “Go upstairs and put together a report of everything you saw, everything you heard, even if it doesn’t seem useful. Total brain-dump, down to the faintest flicker. Then go get something to eat and take a nap. You both look like shit.”

“Thanks, boss,” Sharon said, but Nick looked relieved. Knowing Sharon, I’d bet good money she’d been running them both ragged all day.

Down on street level, we split up to go our separate ways, Nifty downtown to the 6th precinct to hunt down his cop, Venec hailing a cab to go god knew where to talk to god knew who, and me and Pietr left standing on the street corner, looking at each other.

“So.”

“So, I said.” It wasn’t funny, at all, but I felt the urge to start laughing, mainly because the depression and weird vibes off Stosser were gone, leaving me feeling suddenly light-headed. Stress was seriously whomping my ass. “Where the hell do you find fatae when they’re not asking to be found?”

“A Gather,” a familiar voice said from over my left shoulder.

Seeing Pietr jump and yelp was fair payback for all the times he’d managed to scare a month off my life with his random disappearing/reappearing act, but I had sympathy. The first time I’d met Bobo, he’d done the same to me.

I turned to deal with the newcomer. “Damn it, aren’t you only supposed to lurk nights? No, don’t tell me, your employer broadened the terms of your contract?”

Bobo looked moderately sheepish, which on him was a good trick, considering he was a brown-furred, black-eyed fireplug that could have been the inspiration for Wookies, only shorter and sweeter-tempered. Proof that Manhattan was home of the terminally jaded; people passed right by us and didn’t even blink.

“Ahem?” My companion coughed gently, but pointedly.

“Oh, sorry. This is my coworker, Pietr Cholis. Pietr, this is Bobo. He’s…” How do you explain having a Mesheadam bodyguard? “He’s under obligation to my mentor to keep me—” I almost said “unmolested,” but changed words between throat and tongue “—out of trouble.”

“That’s full-time work” was all Pietr said. “What’s a gather?”

A Gather—capital G—was, apparently, exactly what it sounded like. A bunch of fatae in a local area gathering together to eat, talk, eat some more, and generally make nice and reform alliances—or smooth over harsh words before they caused real trouble. Sort of like a neighborhood cocktail party, except without the alcohol. Most of the fatae never developed a taste for the stuff, which was lucky for them. And lucky for us, too. Some of the breeds were nerve-wracking enough without having to worry about them being drunk.

Normally, we’d never even know about a Gather, much less be allowed to attend. Bobo figured he’d be our ticket in.

“Thank you,” Pietr said.

Bobo shrugged, which on his bulk was a particularly impressive thing. Pietr and I looked like skinny kids next to him. Skinny, furless kids, specifically. “Hireman says watch out for her, keep her safe. You two go wandering around looking to stick your noses in fatae business…. Not so safe. Better we keep it in a controlled situation, where folk are already in a good mood.”

We hailed a cab that was willing to stop for us, Bobo barely fitting into the yellow sedan, and directed the driver to drop us off on 72nd and Central Park West, where Bobo said a Gather was happening today. I didn’t know if they were regular things, or we just got lucky, but I’d take it, either way.

The local fatae had chosen the Pintum, a small section of Central Park next to the Great Lawn specially planted with pine trees, for their meeting place. It was nice: There were swings, and a circular walking path, and a bunch of wooden picnic tables, and signs that forbade any kind of sports or unleashed dogs. A place specifically set up for lazy lounging, according to the signs posted everywhere. I approved.

A quick glance around as we walked down the path showed about twenty fatae, half a dozen different breeds ranging from small, winged creatures clinging to posts like large bats, to a griffon and her cub playing catch with a soccer ball. Years ago, before I’d met more than a handful of piskies, I’d gotten my hands on a DVD of Labyrinth, that movie with David Bowie as the Goblin King. Singing, dancing, insane giggling, the whole works. It built up certain expectations. This Gather was…nothing at all like that. I think Pietr was disappointed. I know I was.

“You expected a bonfire and roasting oxen?” Bobo asked, I guess sensing our mood.

I glared up at him. “Thanks. Now I’m hungry.”

“Oi! And…oi!”

A man strode up to us, his cowboy hat askew on his head, a glass bottle of Coke in his hand and stuck a warning finger up in Bobo’s face. Wow, that was ballsy. “You’re new in town so maybe you don’t know the rules, but no humans here, pal!”

Funny, he looked human enough to me. But a closer look showed that his ruggedly good-looking face was a little too symmetrical, his ears a little too pointed, and his hat, when removed for emphasis, showed small nubby horns peeking through the curly brown hair.

A faun. A taller, bulkier, more human-looking faun than I’d ever heard of before, but seeing the ki-rin had been a reminder that pictures and descriptions could and often did lie. First-person observation. No preconceptions.

Fauns were just as cute as they were alleged to be. That I observed firsthand.

“They with me. I bring.”

Bobo, despite his name, spoke excellent English. Gerunds and everything. He was playing dumb-big-brute for a purpose. I was put on alert.

“I don’t care if they’re king and queen of the prom.” The faun gave us a once-over, then stopped and gave me a once-over again. I smiled at him the way I would one of J’s business contacts: not quite showing teeth but letting him know they were there. Polite, but promising nothing. He smiled in return, but showed his own teeth, white and even and too perfect to be real, except they probably were.

“You’re puppies,” he said.

“We are.” I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, from his tone.

“You’re here about the incident yesterday morning? The one down in the meatpacking district?”

There were enough incidents he felt the need to be specific? “We might be. We might want to talk to anyone who was there, if they want to talk to us.”

“And if they don’t?”

I tilted my head, working the little girl cute for every dollar it was worth. “Then I’ll talk to you.”

Pietr had totally disappeared from the faun’s sights. So had Bobo, probably. The thing about fauns is that they could be serious sons of bitches, until you got their…ears pricked up. Then they could only think with their pants.

“Are you trying to seduce me, girly?”

Bastard had the startled “Mrs. Robinson” inflection down perfectly, and I started to laugh. All right, honors about even. If we’d met outside of work situations, I might have tried to seduce him, in fact. Not that it would have taken much doing. I’d never had sex with a fatae before, but fauns were historically polyamorous and not all that shy about species lines. They were also supposed to be impressively inventive, and gloriously hedonistic.

And he wasn’t tripping any of my “caution-male” alarms, the ones that had been going subvocal-but-strong since this damn case started. Interesting. Was I recovering, or was it a nonhuman thing, like the mer’s come-on?

“We’re trying to find out what happened,” I said, switching over to a more professional manner, lechery off the table for the moment. “If you know about PUPI, then you know we’re not here to take sides or run an agenda. We’re here for the facts.”

The faun looked cautiously scornful. “Not the truth?”

Ow. What do you say in response to that? I took the fallback position. “Truth is subjective.”

His eyes narrowed, but there was suddenly a spark of humor in his expression. “Kierkegaard wanted to eat his cake and have it, too.”

Smart and horny, and he got the cake quote right. I really might be able to love this guy.

“I’m Bonnie,” I said, extending my hand.

“Danny.” He shook my hand, the palm-to-palm contact showing me a guy with a firm grip and well-manicured nails—maybe his feet were hoofed? Hmmm.

Pietr gave me a quick shove in the back with his elbow. Oops, had I said that last bit out loud? From the twinkle in Danny’s eyes, I had. As J often lamented, I didn’t have an ounce of shame, and just smiled cheerfully at my companions. Pietr was used to it; Danny recovered quickly, as I’d suspected he would.

“Let me introduce you around, introduce you to a few people. No offense, pal,” he said over his shoulder to Bobo, “but like I said, you’re new. They’re not going to trust your vouching for her…or her Retriever friend. Is he here to work, or…?”

“I’m not a Retriever,” Pietr said wearily. He got that a lot, along with the jokes. Retrievers were Talent who were supposed to be able to use current to disappear even when you were looking right at them, making them natural-born thieves. Pietr was too damn stand-up for that, though.

“No?” Danny looked mildly surprised at Pietr’s denial. “Man, you should be. Okay, come on, both of you. And try not to rile anyone, okay? Things are a little jumpy these days, and even vouched-for humans might not get a nice reception from everyone.”

Danny hadn’t been kidding. The fatae were mostly social—nobody hissed at us, or turned their backs, or brought out poisoned claws or quills—but there were a few conversations that dropped dead as we approached, and nobody really seemed to know anything at all about what happened except as how the ki-rin really couldn’t be blamed, could it?

“No, sir,” I said for the tenth or thirteenth time to a grizzled lizard-fatae wrapped up in sweaters against the raw spring air. I wondered if it was related to a salamander, and what it was doing out and about before the temperature got above 70. “I don’t see as how any blame could be assigned. A ki-rin has honor to consider.”

It nodded, and Danny took my arm like we were strolling through the park…which, actually we were. The thought almost made me laugh. Thankfully, Danny either didn’t notice or didn’t want to know what made me grin this time, and we moved on through the crowd. The pattern was the same with every fatae; Danny would introduce us, and then one of us—Danny, Pietr or myself, Bobo having stayed off to the side—would slide the conversation along to where we wanted it. It wasn’t subtle, and I don’t think anyone didn’t know what was up, but they were talking to us. I prided myself on the fact that Council-sent investigators—even the diplomatic types like J—wouldn’t have been able to get so far. They were talking to us, not because they were scared, or needed something, but because of who—and what—we were. For the first time, being a pup meant something. But was it enough?

“It’s really a matter between humans,” the griffon said, when Pietr asked her if she’d heard anything about the incident. “You are all so…difficult to understand. I can barely tell you apart, half the time, it amazed me you find so much to disagree about.”

“They’re not investigating a political dispute, Hrana,” Danny said. “A girl was attacked.”

“Oh. Well, the ki-rin took care of it?”

And that was it, as far as she was concerned. Honor had been satisfied.

“You PUPI should stay on your side of the fence,” a schiera said suddenly, looking at me from its upside-down perch with oversized, almost liquid-black eyes. Its claws flexed nervously, and I shoved Pietr a few inches back, away from the implied threat. This breed was one J had made me read up on. Schiera were not only obnoxious, but they were also deeply poisonous, and I had my doubts anyone was carrying antitoxin—or that they would share any with us, if they decided we’d deserved to be scratched. “We don’t need you, and we don’t want you. We don’t want any humans.”

A few of the fatae around him looked amused or wearily patient, as though they’d heard that rant before, but some others nodded their heads in agreement. So much for goodwill….

“Yeah, you schiera’d do really well without humans to mooch off of.” A foxlike kitsune snickered, but I noticed that it kept its distance from the schiera’s claws, too. The fact that the bat-winged fatae were garbage-eaters was definitely not the sort of thing that you brought up at a polite gathering—or Gather.

“Are you saying we’re parasites?” the schiera asked, its screech making my ears ring and my head ache. Obnoxious, poisonous, and loud, I amended my earlier description.

The kitsune fluffed its three tails slightly in what might have been amusement. I got the feeling it wasn’t so much defending us as settling an old score—or just causing trouble. “If the shoe fits, as our human cousins say…”

“They’re no Cosa-cousins of mine,” bat-wing screeched, and my headache went up a notch. Next to me, I could feel Pietr wince. “No cousin at all!”

Oh, shit. I tensed, not sure what was going to happen next.

“Am I a cousin, Ardo?” Danny asked the schiera abruptly, and the kitsune’s tails went still, his eyes brightening with interest as his gaze flicked between the two. Uh-oh… What was about to go down?

The schiera glared at the faun from its upside-down perch. “You are fatae.”

Wow, that was grudging.

“Am I?” Danny demanded again, stepping forward into the schiera’s personal space, and making a big deal about exposing himself, arms spread, to a 360-degree view. “Am I a cousin?”

There was a short silence after that, and my new friend’s appearance suddenly made sense to me. Cross-breed. Wow. That was…unusual didn’t begin to cover it.

“Am I a cousin, Ardo?” he demanded again, waiting.

“You are Cosa-cousin,” Ardo said, finally, its liquid-black eyes rimming a little with red. It wasn’t happy, no, but it wasn’t going to deny the faun. Interesting. My new friend might be more important than he was letting on.

“Then these humans are my cousins,” Danny said, maintaining eye contact. “And therefore they are your cousins, as well. You will treat them with at least a smidge of your usual gracious and delightful courtesy—” there was a smothered laugh from someone at a safe distance “—or I will be deeply annoyed with you.”

The two locked stares, one upside down and one right side up, like cats measuring up who was boss-tom. It reminded me a lot of Stosser and Nifty’s dance earlier, except that there wasn’t the accompanying buildup of current, since fatae didn’t use it that way. And this one felt nastier.

“Do you understand me, Ardo?”

Hitting his breaking point, the schiera launched itself off the perch, claws out, a shrill noise that nearly shattered my eardrums coming from its throat like a miniaturized war cry. Danny managed to jump aside and push me out of the way, all one almost-smooth gesture. Pietr, of course, had already disappeared, although he could have been right beside me for all I knew.

Bobo was standing over me before I could do more than blink, growling deep in his furry chest, a seriously scary noise. His thick fur was ruffled, making an impressive barrier against claw or fang, and while his own teeth were canines, not fangs, they were capable of biting through the schiera’s wing with one hard munch.

The schiera, being mean and bigoted but not stupid, got the hell out of Dodge, straight up and away.

“You all right?” Bobo didn’t look down at me, but scanned the crowd, waiting to see if anyone else was going to be stupid. The kitsune snickered, but everyone else suddenly needed to Be Elsewhere in the crowd.

“Yeah.” I did a quick self-check. Bruised and out of breath, but okay. “Danny?”

The faun was already back on his feet, and I noticed, from my vantage point on the ground, that he was wearing seriously scuffed but gorgeously tooled brown cowboy boots.

“You little fucker!” he yelled, slamming his hat down on the ground and yelling into the now-empty sky. “You come back here and try that again! I’ll turn you into schiera jerky with your own damn venom, you little ass-wipe excuse for a flying rat!”

All of a sudden, it was all too much. The stress of repeatedly viewings the attack, the chasing after news, the sudden reversals and the sniping…and now a half-faun cowboy wannabe having a hissy fit in the middle of Central Park.

I lay back on the cold, pine-needle-coated ground, and howled with laughter until my eyes started to water and my ribs hurt, and Pietr reappeared next to me, looking worried, like I’d finally gone around the bend.

“Bonnie?”

I was laughing too hard to answer, and finally he just left me alone until I calmed down and could hoist myself up to a sitting position, still giggling a little. It wasn’t funny, but I felt a lot better. Most of the remaining fatae had moved off to another area of the Pintum, and the party went on, although it looked and sounded a lot more subdued.

“Better?” Danny was sitting on a nearby bench, watching me.

“Yeah. Thanks.” I didn’t hold a lot of emotion pent-up inside me, normally; this blowout had been unnerving, but useful. “You?”

“I’m used to it.”

Ouch. Yeah, I could imagine being a half-breed wasn’t fun at the best of times.

Danny stared at a nearby pine tree with that thousand-yard stare that meant he wasn’t really looking at anything in the park, and then turned back to us, his good-looking features composed, like he was about to recite a speech someone else wrote for him.

“Look—” he seemed hesitant, which I already knew was not normal for the man “—shit’s going to go down, there’s no avoiding it. We need to share information, so nobody gets caught with their britches down and no paper on the roll.”

“Elegantly put,” Pietr said, and Danny’s facade almost cracked.

“But not here,” I said, asking a question—not about the location, but about the wisdom of talking in the middle of so many already-overcautious fatae.

“No. Not here.” The facade melted, and his face softened into more relaxed lines, once he knew that we understood what he was offering. “There’s a place in midtown where the steaks are fine and the martinis beyond compare.”

And there was proof, if I needed it, that his human half was dominant, since the fatae rarely drink, and even more rarely with that kind of connoisseurship. Also, that he was quite possibly as interested in me as I was in him. He wasn’t playing coy, but we were both on company manners, so it was tough to determine his ulterior motivation.

Not that it mattered. I wasn’t going to Mata Hari, but I was totally not adverse to flirting to get what I needed. I had a feeling Danny would respect that.

Bobo begged off—steaks and silverware weren’t his thing, and I wasn’t sure even the most accepting of restaurants was ready for him. Pietr and I accepted with pleasure; a half-fatae favorably inclined to our doings could be a damned useful ally to have, especially if he was making the offer unsolicited. Venec would kick our asses if we didn’t pump him for all he was worth. Lunch was going to be all business. Totally all business. Really. I nodded firmly to myself even as Danny led us out of the park, and we caught the B/D train down to the restaurant. Business, yeah. I think Pietr might actually have believed that.

The Tavern had heavy red drapes and cute young waitstaff and Danny was right, they made killer steaks and devilish martinis. I sipped one, and put it down on the table firmly. I’d be back here, some time when I wasn’t on the job.

“You don’t like it?”

“My body mass, one of these might kill me.”

Danny laughed, and passed me the basket of breadsticks. He’d taken off his cowboy hat, and fluffed up his curls enough that the nubs of his horns were mostly covered, but the staff didn’t even look twice. At least one of them had casually identified as Talent when we came in—we made up a lot of the professional waitstaff in the city, because it was a steady, relatively low-tech job—and that meant this place was probably fatae-friendly.

Or so I would have said, before today. Now—I wasn’t sure how much being a Cosa-cousin meant. But if Danny came here, it was probably going to be okay.

“So how much do you know about what we do at PUPI?” Pietr asked. “You looking for a job?”

“Hah. You are looking at former Patrolman Daniel Hendricks. Before the physical exams got so, erm, invasive. Went into the private sector, after that. Investigations for hire. So it’s my job to know when there are new players in town.”

Oh, that was interesting. Danny’s value as an informant just skyrocketed—which, sadly, also meant that his potential as a playmate went down. Drat. “I thought we were the only ones doing what we do” was all I said.

Danny downed half his drink in one smooth swallow. “You are. I’ve got an unapologetic bias—I’m working for my client’s interests, whatever they may be, and will do what’s required to get them forwarded, within legal limits. You’re…you’re more like cops.”

“Now you’re getting nasty,” Pietr said, only half joking.

“Hah. You don’t know half of it.” Danny got serious. “What I do, there’s a call for it, but it is what it is, and sometimes it doesn’t come out clean. Like I said, I have a bias. The city needs you guys, hell of a lot more than they need me.” He finished off his drink, and lifted it so the bartender would know he needed a refill. “Used to be maybe a fifth of the force was Cosa, or knew their partner was Cosa, and we could actually do something about a current-based or fatae-specific incident, even if not officially. Now? Not so much. And forget about a Talent moving up in the ranks, especially if he’s lonejack. So stuff that we used to be able to slap hands over gets out of control, because the lonejacks can’t get their shit together and Council doesn’t see anything that’s not served upon china platters.”

Harsh, but I couldn’t say it was untrue. Council—and therefore us—were involved here only because of the ki-rin, and the potential for political fallout.

“I’m not going to ask you anything about the case ’cause I don’t want to know. I’m only snoopy when I’ve got a paycheck on it. But I will tell you what you need to know, if you don’t already, no charge for the telling. City’s on edge. Your reception this afternoon? I’m seeing it, more and more. And you guys’re Talent. Nulls?” Danny shook his head, and forked a bunch of green beans into his mouth.

“I wouldn’t want to be a Null in a dark alley if that schiera was in a pissy mood. I’m not saying he’d attack unprovoked…but I’m not confident he wouldn’t, either. Not anymore. And nobody’s paying any attention. It’s just…simmering.”

“This is recent,” I said. “I mean, really recent. When I came to New York this past summer it…it was off, a little, but not this bad.” There had been that fatae in Central Park, the one I’d pointed out to Nick our first month here, but he hadn’t menaced us, just…not been friendly, not even in the Cosa-passing-on-the-street way I’d been used to, in Boston. There hadn’t been active dislike—or fear.

“Yeah.” Danny thought about it. “Yeah, it started around then. Whispers and rumors, mostly.”

Beside me, Pietr was taking notes in the little spiral books we all carried for exactly that, while I kept Danny talking. For all the cantrips and current-tricks we were learning, in the end it all came down to information.

“When something simmers,” I said, keeping Danny focused on me so that he wouldn’t get self-conscious about Pietr writing down his words, not that I didn’t think he didn’t know exactly what we were doing, “it means that the heat’s being kept on it, at a steady pace. Coincidence—or is someone monitoring the heat?”

Danny didn’t have an answer for me, not that I’d really been expecting one. “I’ve been hearing about a friend of a friend, a guy he knew, or her cousin’s lover…but the stories were all the same. Fatae, roughed up by a human.”

“Talent?” It wasn’t impossible—piskies were pranksters just asking for a beating, and other fatae like redcaps and the angeli didn’t always play nice, and some grudges were species-wide and went back generations. A Talent looking for payback wouldn’t be unusual, although mostly they knew better. A Null, on the other hand, could be unpredictable as hell, if they suddenly found themselves confronted with something out of a fairy tale—or a bad acid trip.

Danny actually laughed at that, a dry, husky chuckle. “You think most fatae can tell the difference? You’ve got two legs, no wings, no horns, no fur. Hrana was right about that much. You all look the same.”

Ow. The feeling of depression and self-doubt that had fled earlier returned, settling against the back of my neck like the push of a ten-pound weight.

“Fatae don’t trust Council,” he went on, “and everyone knows lonejacks won’t do shit about other lonejacks unless there’s profit in it for them. That leaves you guys. Maybe.”

There really wasn’t much you could do with the topic, after that. The rest of the meal we tried to talk about other things: Danny was a fabulous storyteller, in addition to being good-looking, and more than once I got the feeling he, at least, would be interested in something off-the-clock. He might be more subtle than his full-blood kin, but not by a hell of a lot.

But I wasn’t going there. Partially because I’d learned my lesson the hard way about playing with anyone who might be relevant to the case, even remotely, and partially because I had the feeling that, unlike his fatae kin, Danny was looking for a One True Love. Me? Not so much. So when the meal was over, and we’d argued over who was picking up the tab—we won, since it was a business expense—I shook his hand, got his card, and went home. Alone.

I had just come up out of the subway when someone knocked politely at my awareness.

*busy?*

My visitor was pretty much the last person I expected to have ping me after hours: Sharon.

*wassup?*

The ping came back not in words, but an image—of the local art-house theater halfway between her place and mine—and a time. She was inviting me to the movies.

I totally had not been expecting that. Sharon and I worked well together, and the entire team socialized off-hours, but she and I weren’t buddy-friends, not the way Nick and I were.

Thinking about what waited for me back at my apartment; an empty space, a cold bed, I made my decision.

*be there in thirty*

And so the night I’d planned to spend following my mentor’s directive to rest and recharge, I instead spent at a moth-eaten movie house with my coworker, eating overly buttered popcorn and watching a Cary Grant movie. Her idea, not mine, but I have to admit, the acting was great, the plot—even as silly as it was—didn’t make me wince, and the eye candy, although stylized, was quality. And watching it gave me a little unexpected insight into my coworker. Plus, getting outside my head for a while made the self-doubt and depression take a powder. All good.

After, neither of us seemed to want to go home, and so we ended up in a 24-hour restaurant the size of a shoebox, and drank too much bad coffee and didn’t talk about anything other than the movie. It was…nice.

“Y’know, if you think Irene Dunne was cute, I have a friend I should introduce you to.”

I was weirdly touched. “Shar. You fixing me up with your friends?”

“Friend, singular. If you’re interested. She’s about a year out of a bad breakup, so the worst of the psychotic behavior should be over, and the rest would probably just amuse you.”

I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or not that she had such an accurate read on me. But then, that was what Sharon did. I read scenes; she read people.

“It doesn’t bother you? That I double-up my dating pool?” I’d wondered that; she and Nifty were both such straight arrows, pun intended.

Sharon arched one of those neatly shaped blond eyebrows at me. “You’re bi. Big deal. I’m more worried that you’ll go through the available dating pool here and we’ll have to import people from the left coast to keep you occupied.”

I made a ha-ha noise. “Not likely. Y’know, thanks for the offer but…not right now. I’m not really in the dating mood right now.”

Sharon paused before taking a sip of her coffee and looked at me over the top of her mug. “Who are you and what have you done with Bonita Torres?”

“Very funny.” Okay, it was. I had a definite reputation, and normally I didn’t mind it at all. But it was more reputation than fact, these days, and not just because of this case.

A sudden flash of dark eyes and the memory of a touch, skin-to-skin, shivered through me, and I shut it down, hard. “I just…I’m tired, Sharon. Aren’t you?”

“Yes. Of course I am. You’re the Energizer Bunny, not me.”

Sharon was the oldest of the pack by six years, but we’d mostly broken her of reminding us of that fact. Mostly.

Now that we’d gotten on the topic, sort of, I wanted to ask her about the case, to find out if anything about it was bothering her, if she was finding her reactions to people slightly off-kilter or unusual, if she was feeling the same depression and doubts that I could feel hovering, just waiting for a way back in. But the nonwork atmosphere we’d established over popcorn and bad coffee was like a mist around us, keeping the words from getting said. I wanted to know, but I didn’t know how to ask, and the moment passed.

Around 2:00 a.m. I finally staggered back to my apartment for the second time that night. My sheets were cold, and even a quick hit of current to warm them up didn’t replace the feel of another body next to me. I could’ve had a warm companion for the asking. Hell, I had a little black book with names I could have called, even now, if I didn’t want to be alone.

“There was a time,” I told the dark blue ceiling, “when my bed had hot-and-hotter running company. I was young and energetic and… And god, now I just want to come home and sleep.”

All right, that was just a smidge of exaggeration. But I had told Sharon the truth—I was tired. And right now, the way I was feeling, it was probably better I not have anyone in my space who wasn’t me. My nerves were shot and my sense of the universe needed adjusting.

The world wasn’t any colder or darker than it had been a week before. I hadn’t discovered any terrible truth about males of any species I didn’t already know before. I hadn’t learned anything about my own gender that I didn’t know.

Intellectually.

Emotionally, that was another issue entirely.

I pulled the covers over my head, snuggled into my pillows, and searched for a happy place to take into my dreams. It was a long time coming.

Benjamin Venec wanted to be in bed. It was almost dawn, and good, law-abiding, reasonable adults were snuggled in comfortable beds, or just waking up to face the day, not shaking down dubious characters in even more dubious back offices.

“Man, I don’t know nothing!”

Venec let a sigh escape him, not entirely feigned. “That? I find very easy to believe.”

Lizard was a skinny skank of a human, skin like the underside of a rock and the morals of a squid. He ran a massage parlor—legit, not a skin house or gambling cover—down in Chinatown that was gossip central for a certain type of Talent, “certain” meaning criminally minded. That was why Venec had decided to pay him a little social visit.

Well, that, and the need to actually do something more than just sit around and worry. Let Ian ride the desk and deal with the theory and the politics and the make-nice with clients. He was more the hands-on sort, and sometimes hands-on was exactly what was needed. For the situation—and his own sanity. Being the boss was starting to make him a little crazy, like someone was pushing on his chest and the back of his neck at the same time, trying to squeeze him thin, and not even the training sessions with his pups were really scratching the itch to do.

Not that he was down here on PUPI business, tonight. Not officially. Tonight he was conducting his own investigation, for his own peace of mind. The two “exterminator” flyers he had found had sent him out into the street, talking and listening, and the gossip he got back was making him uneasy. While he didn’t have Bonnie’s kenning, or Ian’s skill of reading the moment, or even Sharon’s ability to truth-sense, uneasy feelings usually meant problems coming down the road, things you sensed, even if you couldn’t quite see them yet. Maybe not now…but eventually. Benjamin Venec was a firm believer in being prepared for problems.

“Liz, if I find out that you’ve been withholding information, I’m going to be deeply disappointed in you.”

The speech, and his pose, was right out of a diet of too many mafia movies as a teenager. It seemed to work, though, because the Lizard turned an even nastier shade of pale, and his stubby little nose twitched like a rabbit’s.

“I swear.” He made a production out of shuffling paper on his desk, but never let his hands go anywhere near the intercom, or the panic button set on the side of the desk. Not when Ben was watching. Lizard wasn’t Talent, but he knew enough to predict what a pissed-off Talent could do. “We got some hotheads come in here after a day of work, talking trash, but that’s it. Nothing like what you’re talking about. No violence, not even a shove. The supernaturals, they’re good folk, mostly. Everybody gets along down here, so long as they’re not the IRS.”

Cash-and-carry industry; rake in the dollars and don’t worry about anything except not getting caught. Ben felt a sneer curl at his lips. He’d brought in coked-up bikers and current-wizzed Talent, and they’d all been good folk—when they weren’t trying to take his limbs off or fry his brain.

“All right.” He leaned back, giving Lizard some breathing room. “If you do happen to hear something, anything, from anyone, you’ll let me know, right?”

“Of course.” Lizard, deciding that the danger had passed, plastered on an ingratiating smile. “So, why don’t you stay a while, relax, now that business is done? I have a new masseuse working, hands like silk over steel, she’d work those tension-knots out of you like something indecent I’m too much of a gentleman to mention.”

The offer was tempting, Christ knew. Two years ago, before Chicago and the fallout from there, he’d been a single operator chasing down bail jumpers and errant spouses, hiring himself out for short-term security gigs on the side. Not much glamour, and damn few thanks, but only himself to ride herd on, and the money was good. But when Ian had called him, out of the blue and ten years after they’d last said goodbye, he’d dropped everything and gone up to the Midwest. And then…and then Chicago, and everything After. That was how he judged time these days: before, and After.

But After had PUPI. Ian wanted perfection, and Ben had to ride herd on the kids every minute, make sure they were as good as they thought they were, and then build them back up when they realized that they weren’t. Keep them focused on the job, and not their hormones or…

Especially not their hormones. Or his own, for that matter.

His brain served him a flash of impossibly fluffed hair, and laughing eyes, perfume like warm peaches, and the whisper of an impossible blend of Boston upper crust and New York Latina in her voice, and he felt himself grow hard at even that memory.

Bonnie Torres. The moment he had first sensed her, searching the ether for her father’s killer, he had known there was something about her, something they would be able to tap for the still-nascent PUPI team. He’d been intrigued by the feel of her thoughts, at first, the way she balanced passion and logic so cleanly. He hadn’t expected the impact her physical presence would have on him. His own personal hell every day, the way she could flick his switches without even trying. And at night…

At night, when he didn’t have to be Big Dog, didn’t have to be the boss, the teacher…in the privacy of his own overheated imagination, sometimes her face overrode his current partner’s appearance, and he let himself pretend, just for a moment.

“Thanks, but no,” he told Lizard, not without some regret. “I kind of like my knots where they are.”