Pack of Lies

six

What happened in New York City didn’t always stay in New York City. In this case, what happened there was of great interest to a man in a quiet office building in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Two men, actually, although Ray West was more concerned with his brother’s interest than his own.

William West did not, at first glance, appear particularly important or imposing, despite the luxurious corner suite he occupied. Seen on the street a bystander would notice that his hair was brown and slightly shaggy, his suit was nice but not particularly stylish, and that he had the attitude of a man who had somewhere to be, right now, and get out of his way. And that bystander would, if he or she were a smart human, get out of his way.

Ray had worked for his brother for twenty years now, and not even the memory of the scrawny kid with a lisp Bill used to be kept him from feeling a sense of awe and menace hanging around his brother as an adult. Something had changed in Bill during college, or maybe it had just come to the fore once he had enough power to not worry what others thought, but Ray didn’t question it. Not when that hard, cold willingness to use people made them all a great deal of money.

As his right-hand man, Ray worked very hard to keep Bill from getting upset. Some days it wasn’t possible—there seemed to be so many things that annoyed his brother. Today, though, would be different. He had just gotten in from the airport, barely stopping to drop his bags off before coming to report on the results of his trip. “She agreed to your proposal. Things are already in motion.”

Ray had brought their pet Talent—a young man with the ability to do what they called the Push—with him, ready to start work, assuming that his negotiation would be successful. You assumed success, you got it; that was the West way.

The fact that their target was Talent as well was no barrier: human or fatae, Talent or not, they were all tools to be used.

Bill nodded, placing the dossier he had been reading down on his desk, and getting up from behind his desk and going to the oversize sideboard that ran the length of his office. He lifted the hinged door and took two wineglasses down, holding one up in question. Ray nodded. It was first thing in the morning, but they had both clearly been up all night—he on the plane, his brother doing whatever his brother did in this chilly office, all alone.

“Of course she has,” Bill said in response to his brother’s comment. “It’s an obsession with her, to stop her brother from successfully establishing his plan to keep Talent accountable for their actions. She will snap at any straw, and we offered her a very tempting one.” He poured a measure of ruby-red liquid from a decanter into the glasses and offered one to Ray, who took it with pleasure. They clinked glasses lightly, toasting to their new venture.

Oskar, their Talent, wasn’t good for much else—he was a straw of a human, jumping and starting at every noise, but he could convince a nun to do a striptease, if that’s what you wanted from him. Their Talent, augmented by Aden Stosser’s knowledge of her brother’s personality and thought process, and especially his weaknesses…it was a perfect match. With her directing their Pusher, they could undermine not only her brother, but also his partner. With both of them incapacitated by doubt and uncertainty, their cadre of half-trained investigators would be ineffective at best, and ideally fall apart completely. Even if anything were traced back… Aden was the one with the known grudge, and the black mark already attached to her name. Oskar would claim that she hired him, and nobody would doubt it for a moment.

Neither Ray nor Bill were Talent. Ray never felt the lack; he couldn’t say if his brother did or not. Certainly they had enough Talent working for them, one way or another. West Enterprises, Inc. was a consulting firm with specialized clientele worldwide, ranging from media to military, with fingers in both the Null and Talent communities.

You could work with Talent, but you didn’t have to like them. Ray felt that Talent were…not quite normal, not quite predictable, like cats. Dangerous cats. Having met with the woman, unlike his brother, Ray had a hesitation—not to the plan itself, but the possible consequences. He thought about phrasing it delicately, or not mentioning it at all, then shrugged. Bill was in a good mood; it was probably safe to say something.

“You know she’s nuts, right? We can’t trust her a step without our hand on the back of her neck, because god knows what she’ll hare off to do, and take our Talent with her.” Not that he was worried Oskar would implicate them in any way; he was well-paid to behave, and his heirs would be even better-paid if he died loyal.

“She is not crazy,” his brother said in correction as he returned to his desk and sat down in the chair, motioning for Ray to sit down as well. Bill’s voice was calm, almost amused, and deeply confident, as though the universe would not dare order itself any way other than he planned. “She is obsessed. Much the same way her brother is, ironically, if toward a conflicting goal. A family characteristic I am quite pleased to make use of, for my own purposes.”

Ray sat down and looked into his glass, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

Bill had read the dossier; he knew how Aden Stosser thought, and how she would react—that was his skill, in judging people’s basest instincts, and then making use of them to accomplish his goals. That, he always said, was the secret to his success. Aden Stosser was just another such tool.

But Ray remembered the look in the woman’s eyes, the way she had practically quivered at the thought of getting another chance at her brother’s organization, and a faint unease settled in his mind. Tools could break, or slip, even under the most cautious hand. No. He was tired from the flight, that was all. Aden Stosser was crazy, and powerful, and that made her dangerous, yes. But his brother was just as powerful and, Ray admitted to himself, just as crazy in his own way.

Bill didn’t seem to notice his brother’s unease. “I have to go to Cincy tomorrow, for a meeting. You’ll be able to keep an eye on things here?” He didn’t look up to see his brother’s reaction: of course Ray would cover things. That was his job.

“You’ll be back on Thursday?” Ray leaned back in his chair, a heavy mahogany piece older than he was, and forced himself to appear unconcerned and in control of things, taking another sip of his wine. Aden was the last piece they had needed, and now she was theirs. Nothing would go wrong. Nothing would dare go wrong.

“Friday at the latest. I’m not expecting any difficulties.”

“Difficulties. No, I can’t imagine they would give you any at all.” The two brothers smiled at each other, for once in perfect accord. The project Bill would be closing—the acquisition of a particular piece of legislative support—had been in the works for a year, and the final deal was a foregone conclusion.

But the word plucked at the unease, again. Difficulties. Humans were always the variable, the thing you couldn’t be sure of, and when you brought magic into the equation…. Ray chewed at the inside of his mouth, thinking, then brought the subject up again, despite his better judgment.

“This Aden, why does her brother’s little project bother her so much?”

Bill looked at him, and Ray wished he’d kept his mouth shut and his hesitations hidden. But it was too late now—falling back was worse than stumbling forward. “Much as I don’t want Stosser’s eye turned on me, personally,” he went on, “you’d think these Talents would want everyone in compliance with their own laws, not breaking them.” It didn’t make sense, and he wasn’t comfortable with things that didn’t make sense. Human reactions weren’t always logical or practical, but they made sense, once you understood the players and their desires. Aden Stosser…her desires were contradictory, confusing, making an already unpredictable situation even more difficult to gauge. “So what’s her game?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Bill said. He took a sip of his wine, looking deep into the glass, following some thought of his own. Ray got the feeling that he was barely in the same room anymore. “I know what she wants, though, and it’s what I want, too. If she can stop him, then we won’t have to worry about his brats causing trouble, later.”

West Enterprises was legal…but their clients weren’t always. And for that reason, it was in the interests of West Enterprises, Inc., et al to ensure that the so-called Private Unaffiliated Private Investigators never became any sort of player. Bill West believed in taking care of potential problems before they became actual ones. That was how his business had thrived over the years.

“I won’t have one of our projects derailed because they were sniffing around.”

Ray let himself chuckle, considering the expensive wine in his glass. “Careful, you’re one step away from sounding like the foiled villain in a Scooby-Doo cartoon.”

Bill stared at his brother, his gaze even and cold, making Ray immediately regret his moment of levity. “I have no intention of being either foiled, or a villain. Merely successful.”

And what Bill West wanted, he got. No matter how many bodies it took.

Dreams stalked me though the night, some of them in black and white, like the movie Sharon and I had watched, and some so saturated with color it made my eyes hurt. And there were faint mutterings, like someone in the room next door speaking my name over and over, so I couldn’t hear details but couldn’t tune it out, either. Kenning while you slept was a one-way ticket to headacheville.

Despite the dreams, I somehow managed to sleep through the usual garbage trucks and car alarms my neighborhood was heir to, but a sharp noise inside my own apartment finally woke me up. I lay in bed, tangled in my sheets and still groggy from crap sleep, and tried to figure out what the hell that noise was. I didn’t own an alarm clock—hadn’t since my freshman-year roommate’s alarm had shorted out the third time. So what the hell…

The third ring gave it away. The phone. Right. Half the time I forget I even have a phone, because nobody ever uses it. If the team wants to reach me, they pinged, and…there wasn’t really anyone else these days who needed to talk to me.

Except one.

A glance out the window showed me it was still early, although well past dawn. He would have been up and had breakfast already, counting down the minutes until he could risk calling without me snarling in his ear. Sometimes having someone who knew you that well was…

Well, it was nice. Even if he was a morning person with a morning person’s impatience to get things started.

I slid down off the loft bed and padded naked across the space to pick up the phone. “Heya, J.”

“Bonita.”

Uh-oh. J only used my full name when he’s in formal mode. Well, two could play that game. “Yes, Joseph?”

He chuckled, letting me know that there wasn’t a catastrophe waiting to leap, just him yanking my chain. “Will you be joining me for dinner this weekend?”

This wee…ah, shit.

“Of course I will,” I said with an assurance that I don’t think even he could tell was faked. I hadn’t ever missed J’s birthday dinner, not even when I was doing my semester in Madrid. And this year I’d totally, completely forgotten about it.

Damn it, I was total crap. I bet Bobby—J’s first mentoree, now a high-powered lawyer out in California—had not only remembered, but already booked his flight home.

I reached across the desk and grabbed a pen, and scribbled dnr J Sat on the back of an envelope that came in yesterday’s mail. “The usual for gifties?”

“What, I should suddenly change my stripes now?”

I laughed at that, despite feeling that I was a disappointment, a loosah, all that crap. I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to work out the kink there that was making my head ache. “Just figured I’d ask….”

We made some more small talk, and then hung up, leaving me feeling not quite out of sorts, but moderately fey and feckless. Loosah, the voice muttered in the back of my brain. Disappointment. Failure.

I hated not being the perfect student for J. On top of being an overachiever, I loved him as much as I’d loved my dad—maybe more, part of me admitted—and it hurt to think I might have missed his annual birthday dinner. Especially since he wasn’t a young man, and each one, god forbid, could be the last.

I sat at the desk, and stared down at my phone. It was a battered relic of the pre-cell phone age, and wasn’t safe-wired—because my core ran cool, it didn’t usually interfere with the phone lines—but I’d grown up in a household that had everything grounded to a fare-thee-well, and it still bothered me, a little, that I didn’t need to take those same precautions. J had reassured me, over and over, that my running cool didn’t mean I was any less powerful than anyone else, but it was true, I wasn’t high-res the way Nick was, or Pietr. Even Sharon and Nifty could generate more buzz than I could, and the Big Dogs? They could take us all in a blackout, and not raise a sweat, I suspected.

Yeah, I had the recall, and the kenning, and a fair hand at crafting useful spells but…in the Cosa you weren’t judged by how much money you had or how good-looking you were, but by how much power you could channel. Current was currency. At least if you were a Talent. The fatae had other ways of counting, but they did count.

I frowned, two fingers drumming the top of the receiver as the thoughts sparked and jumped in my brain, driving the doubts to the sideline. Counting. Who counted?

The scene at the Gather emphasized that there was politics everywhere. Lonejack, Council, even the fatae had their levels, from the piskies at the bottom and the greater dragons at the top, second only to the old ones nobody ever talked about anymore. It was all about how much power you could contain and control.

Power. Power and prestige. It was starting to come together in my brain, although I wasn’t quite sure what “it” was, yet. Status. That girl had been—was—lo-res. The dossier Venec had put together said she was blue collar through and through, the first in her family to go to college, probably at the ki-rin’s urging. Her mentor had disappeared from the picture when she was seventeen, not unusual, but… The ki-rin had shown up the year after, and had seen something in her, something special. I got the feeling that she’d hung her entire sense of self, her well-being, on that, on being a chosen companion, and now that was gone, or at least damaged, broken.

If you suddenly weren’t special anymore, couldn’t stand out in the crowd, what chance did you have?

I shook my head violently, trying to knock the thought out of my head. Enough self-pity, Bonnie-girl, I told myself sternly. That was her. That wasn’t me. My self-esteem was and always had been perfectly fine and not hung on any one thing, thank you very much.

I stood up and headed for the shower, hoping that hot water would soak this mood off me. I’d been living with shortcomings, current-wise, my entire life. I had achieved more than my dad had, and less than J, and that was all right with me.

Look where wanting to be special had gotten our victim.

That shower, and the unexpected gift of a subway car sliding into the station the moment I passed through the turnstile, didn’t quite banish my fey and gloomy mood, and I climbed the stairs at my destination still distracted.

It was a block from my subway stop to the office, taking me past a row of brownstones that had seen better decades. The weather was dry and reasonably warm, so some of the boyos were there, hanging out.

“Hey, mama!”

I shot a dirty glare at the one who had shouted, all of fourteen, wearing a pair of jeans so new they squeaked, and a battered Rangers jersey.

“Ai mama, pretty lady,” he said, staggering back with his hands to his chest like I’d actually wounded him, “who done you wrong this morning?”

I reined in my mood and slapped it soundly. No need to take it out on someone just trying to say good morning.

“Do yourself a favor, Jack-O,” I said to him. “Don’t ever miss church. God gets you. Maybe not that Sunday, but eventually.”

I don’t think Jack or his buddies had been inside a church since the last time their mothers dragged them in by the ears. That was okay: it had been at least that long for me, too. But the comeback amused them enough that I was forgiven for not playing our usual flirting game.

They were good kids, mostly. Bored and restless, but good kids.

“Kids, hah. They’re all of maybe six years younger than you,” I reminded myself as I went into the lobby, the current-lock on the door buzzing me through without a pause. When we started, that buzz-in had been a puzzle, a challenge. Once I’d figured out how Venec set it up, it was just another useful bit of current-tech.

Those six years might as well be a lifetime; I felt at least a decade older than my street-corner homeboys. I was being too good a girl, that was all. Upstanding Citizen Blues. All work and no play was making Bonita a very sober girl. This weekend? I was dying my hair again. Definitely. Magenta. Or maybe a nice dark purple. Give Nick something new to rag me about. Hell, maybe I’d get him to dye his hair, too. Strawberry-blond would look good on him. And then we’d go clubbing all damn night.

I stopped in front of the elevator, intending to brave my inner turmoil there, too.

A spark of life, suddenly gone out, even as we heard the clang and crash of the metal box hitting the basement floor.

I chickened out before the doors opened, and took the stairs instead, justifying it as exercise. There wasn’t anyone in the break room, but the coffeepot was hot and half-full, so I wasn’t the first one in. I grabbed my mug and poured a shot, then tested the milk for consistency. Still liquid, still safe to drink. All it took was one solid mass glopping into your morning coffee to make you forever suspicious.

My movie-watching buddy came in from the inner office. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” I saluted Sharon with my mug, and took a sip. The brain cells stirred, then shook off the last of the morning’s unease and resettled themselves into something closer to work-mode. I probably could just make coffee at home, but had never gotten around to buying a coffeemaker. Why bother, when by the time I got into the office someone had almost always prepped a fresh pot?

“You sleep last night?” Sharon asked.

“A little.” Like a rock, hard but uncomfortable, thanks to the dreams.

“I didn’t,” Sharon said, her voice glum.

That made me give her a long hard look. Last night she’d been in black wool slacks and a dark blue blouse, over loafers, her hair in a French braid—about as casual as she got. Today, a dark blue suit, subtle check pattern, skirt at regulation-knee, plain stockings, black low heels, lilac silk blouse, blond hair in its usual chignon and her curves still as kill-a-trucker lush as ever. Like her 1940s movie heroines, Sharon was cool class all the way. But the woman I’d met back in August would never have admitted to the slightest hint of weakness, even if she’d had a week of insomnia.

I wasn’t sure if the change made me feel better or not.

“Bad dreams?” If I could blame it on the popcorn we’d shared, or the coffee, I’d feel a lot better.

“No, I just couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking. There’s something wrong about this entire case. You feel it.” She wasn’t asking a question.

“You mean other than the he said/she said, the potential fatae-versus-human crap, and the overall ickiness of rape that makes me want to scrub my skin?”

“Yeah. Other than that.”

I considered my teammate more closely. She didn’t flinch under the scrutiny, maybe understanding that I wasn’t looking at her, exactly. Sharon could tell if people were lying. Or maybe she could tell if they were telling the truth. I wasn’t sure which, or if there was even a difference. It wasn’t precog or kenning, but the fact that she was feeling hinky about this case, too… Just like Pietr.

The Big Dogs hired us for our instincts, not our looks.

“You’ve done the most interviewing—what are you getting off the people you talked to? What did you put in your report?”

She pursed her lips, then her face twisted like she didn’t know what to say, and she looked away. “I don’t know. I… The humans are all so filled with emotion, so that confuses the issue. And fatae are tough to read. Their vibes aren’t the same, not to us, and not even to each other, so I can’t get a baseline. And some of them…their inherent magic just screws with me.”

Fatae didn’t use magic, not the way we did. They were magic, living breathing current. For Sharon, it must have been like trying to ground and center in the middle of a lightning storm. Possible, but really damned difficult with all the distractions.

I felt Venec come in, even with my back to the door, and I held up a hand to keep him from saying anything, not even thinking about how the boss might take it. “So what did you get from the humans, other than emotions?”

The words came more easily this time, as though she’d been thinking about it, subconsciously, just waiting for the right question to be asked. “Everyone feels the same. I can’t… The eyewitness stories don’t add up, they contradict and cross each other, but they all feel the same. There’s none of the disruption I get when someone’s breaking from the truth. They’re all totally and absolutely convinced that they’re telling the truth, even when they can’t be. It’s making me uncomfortable.” She stopped, tapped her fingers on the counter, her polished nails clicking. “This…this whole case is making me uncomfortable, and I haven’t even had to talk to the victim,” she said thoughtfully.

No, she hadn’t. Stosser should have brought her with him—but who knew that we’d have to question two different stories? The evidence we had should have been enough to settle what happened. Next time, we’d know better. Even if the Boss Dog insisted he would do it himself; he was the boss, but we were the investigators.

“There’s too much belief,” Sharon went on, her expression changing slightly, like a shift of light. You only saw it if you were watching for it. “Too much certainty for it to be real.”

I almost understood what she was saying. Almost. “Didn’t someone feel more certain, more…whatever truth feels like? I mean, everyone can’t be lying.”

“No?” She sounded like she was up against the ropes, emotionally, and something Danny had said tickled something in my brain, about truth and subjectivity.

“Sharon…can everyone be telling the truth?”

Her head jerked up like I’d yanked a cord, and there was a sparkle back in those lovely eyes. “Oh. Huh. Okay, that’s trickier.”

The thought was a wicked nasty one, and I was talking it through even as she processed the suggestion. “Is that even possible? I mean, if one person’s telling the truth, and the other has a story that contradicts it… I know truth is subjective but that’s… Someone has to be lying!”

I listened to my words a second, and then added, “Or at least…they have to be not telling the truth. Right? I mean, even through a filter, there’s truth and then there’s not-truth. Right?”

Oh, god, my head hurt. Behind me, I heard Venec start to say something, then check it. I wasn’t sure Sharon even noticed that he was there, as she sank into the sofa with a graceful movement that I envied madly. “There’s an old joke one of the partners used to tell,” she said, indirectly responding to my question. “I don’t remember the setup but the punch line was ‘the truth, the other truth, and the legal interpretation.’ I never worried about the legal side, because that’s not…it’s not truth so much as it is best-supported-belief. But what I’m getting now…maybe if two people believe something with equal ferocity, they’re both true? I mean, isn’t that all religion is, anyway—strongly held beliefs claimed as The Truth? And maybe if the perps, being Talent, believed it strongly enough, it affected people who were there, watching?”

Venec made a louder noise that could have been either a cough or a laugh, and Sharon stopped, as though she suddenly realized he was there, but I ignored him. We were not going to get into another religious “discussion” like happened last week. Not without referees handy, anyway.

“Yeah but…the difference between sexual assault and a girl coming on to you isn’t like arguing over whose burning branch or dust-devil spoke louder,” I asserted, not looking at Venec, even though I could feel him coming closer.

Sharon focused on me again. “I don’t know about then, but now—the guy got beat up pretty bad, saw his buddy smashed into dead pulp in front of him. There could be brain injuries they haven’t found yet. Maybe he really does believe what he’s saying? Or maybe he can’t tell the difference anymore between what he did and how he justified it?”

“Could you tell, if you spoke to him?” Venec asked, finally joining into our confab directly.

Sharon considered the question, hard, humming under her breath. Finally she said, “I don’t know. I’ve taken depositions from people in injury cases before, but… Hell, Ben, it would be easier to talk to the ki-rin. I could get a baseline from it….”

“Not possible,” Venec said, moving all the way into the office to stand between us. His dark curls were slicked down as usual, and he looked rested, but deeply annoyed. Not at us, though, I was pretty sure about that. “We have been informed that the ki-rin, overset by recent events and in mourning for the loss of its companion in such a brutal manner, has decided to return home, and will speak with no one while it undergoes a period of reflection and preparation prior to its travel. End quote.”

Not unexpected, really, but the news still settled like doom on the two of us.

“It’s ducking us,” I said. Ki-rin didn’t lie, so anything it said would be taken as a hundredweight of gold—like Sharon said, the baseline we could measure everyone else by—and the Council would accept it. Hell, everyone would accept words as gospel, from a ki-rin. So if the girl’s story was true, why wasn’t it talking?

“Or, equally possible,” Venec said, “all of the above claim is also true. It is in mourning and reacting perfectly within character. So far, every player in this scene has acted exactly to character.”

In character, telling contradicting truths… “You know what we need? We need a way to talk to the dead guy.”

“Bonnie!” Sharon, for the first time since I’d known her, looked seriously horrified. “That’s…!”

“A joke, Shar. Okay? A joke.”

Mostly a joke. It was possible. Theoretically, technically possible. Current was akin to electricity, and electricity was what the body ran on, and for someone, as the saying goes, “only mostly dead” you could… But it wasn’t done. In fact it Wasn’t Done At All. Necromancy was one of the really old magics, the stuff that got left behind when Founder Ben—that’s Ben Franklin to Nulls—codified the rules of current, and moved us away from superstition and into rational usage.

You might still find people practicing hedge magics; sympathetic magic, or charm-making, stuff like that. If you were Talent, they’d work, mostly. If you weren’t…well, you might believe that they worked.

Messing with the not quite dead? No thanks. I’d let someone crazier and more high-res than me play in that minefield. Like the old ones, that was stuff best left uncalled. Venec just looked at us and didn’t say anything, which made me wonder, a little uneasily, what his stance on necromancy was.

Nifty and Pietr showed up then, breaking the mood with a rather heated discussion about baseball that had obviously been going on for a while. While they were hanging up jackets, bitching to each other about stats of some incomprehensible function or another, Nick staggered in, and Venec kicked us into the main conference room.

Just walking into the room and sitting down, I felt the last lingering shreds of doubt and mental fuzziness fade. The break room was more comfortable to hang out in, but the moment I sat down at the conference table, I felt…energized? Maybe. More confident, less distracted. I guess J was right, and your surroundings really do make a difference: sofas were for schmoozing; straight-back chairs were for strategizing.

Or maybe it was just being surrounded by my pack that made me ready to get back on the hunt. I wasn’t going to question it, right now.

Once we were all settled, Stosser came in from whatever back corner he’d been hiding in, and joined the party. Unlike Venec, Stosser looked surprisingly unkempt, wearing the dress-down crunchy granola jeans and flannel that never quite looked right on his tall frame, like a CEO playing woodsman. His face was the normal deadpan, but there were shadows under his eyes that suggested that Sharon and I weren’t the only ones who didn’t sleep well last night.

Venec was in the process of filling the others in on what Sharon and I had been discussing earlier, so I zoned a little, slipping almost without thought into a light fugue-state where I was almost hyperaware of my surroundings, and studied my coworkers.

Sharon had already surprised me once today, but I knew that her Perfect Princess attitude was backed by a sharp mind, so even being surprised by her wasn’t all that much of a surprise. If we’d met in a bar somewhere I’d have been angling for her phone number by the second drink—and she would have shot me down with style and élan.

I watched her for a minute, just for the pleasure of it, then turned my attention to the boys of our group.

Boys. No, men. The tinge of unease that had been dogging me since the gleaning tried to stage a comeback, but I pushed it away. They were my coworkers. My friends, damn it. My pack.

Nick was still the slightly built kid I’d first tagged him as, although the past few months he’d bulked up a little to slender rather than scrawny. You’d think there couldn’t be a strand of guile in that entire body…until you discovered that he was a current-hacker, one of the rarest of Talent who could actually interact with computers, using current to get what they needed. Every government organization willing to admit we existed had wanted their paws on him—and a few illegal organizations, as well. But PUPI had gotten him. He said it was because they’d promised nobody would shoot at him…but since in the past months we’d gotten shot at, psibombed, tied up, and threatened with loss of bodily organs, I think he might have made a mistake, myself. Why-ever, I was glad he was with us.

Nifty…was still an enigma. On the surface, he seemed an obvious choice for the corporate world: college football superstar; middle-class black kid who made good, then took a look at his odds and decided not to go pro. He claimed that he was planning on going to grad school, and yet he ended up here, with us. Ambitious, aggressive, and loyal; I still had no idea how his brain worked, or what drove him. He was listening intently to Stosser, jotting comments in his spiral notebook without looking down, even though I was pretty sure he was memorizing it all, too, the way he used to memorize game plays.

And Pietr, our ghost. By not looking for him, I could find him easily: in his usual spot at the corner of the table, chair tipped back slightly, gray eyes watching everyone the same way I was. Not a buddy, the way Nick was, but we worked really well together, quietly and without a fuss. He reminded me of J, which was funny because if there were two people more opposite than my upper-crust, high-profile mentor and Gypsy-bred, invisible-under-stress Pietr, I hadn’t met them.

The PUPI team. My packmates. They were all good guys. Complicated, yeah. Moody, occasionally. Violent…maybe. If provoked. But not one of them would ever, ever hurt me. I knew that like I knew the layout of my apartment: 3:00 a.m. and pissed out of my mind, I could still walk it without bumping into anything. There was no reason that each and every one of them, today, sent a faint unease through my blood, like a distant alarm.

Disturbed, I moved my attention to Stosser. At least with him, I knew to be uneasy. High-res, high-powered, high-energy, and would do whatever it took to achieve his goals, including moving us around a board of his own creating. J had warned me about Ian Stosser, but the threat was all up-front and obvious, and we’d accepted the risks when we took the job. He would use us…but for something we’d signed on for, and believed in. That made a difference, didn’t it?

“I want results today, come hell or high water and I mean that literally. This guy’s going to be released from the hospital and if there’re no charges pressed he may just disappear, and then we are screwed.” Ian’s long, orange-red hair was moving as though a breeze was stirring it, a sign that he was seriously upset, even though his current-core was under tight control—there was no repeat of his heat-shimmer from earlier. “We are going to comb the damn site, yes, again. Somewhere there’s a piece of evidence that will tell us what really happened out there. Because if those bastards really did attack that girl, and destroy her innocence enough that the ki-rin had no choice but to repudiate her, then the survivor has to be punished. Otherwise, he’ll think he can get away with it again. And if he didn’t, if…something else happened, then a man is dead at the ki-rin’s hooves, and I want to know why.”

There was a sort of collective sigh within the room, although nobody made a sound. This wasn’t about the Council’s mandate anymore. It wasn’t even about our reputation. This was about Ian Stosser’s rather overdeveloped and manic need for justice. Right now, I was good with that. I got the feeling everyone else was, too.

Stosser leaned back, and Venec took over the briefing. “Sharon, what you were saying earlier about levels of truth? I want you to follow up on that. Do you think that you could create a spell that would sort out degrees of truth?”

“Truthiness?” Pietr asked.

“That’s not a word,” Nifty retorted.

“Yeah, it is.”

“Children, hush. Sharon, can you do it?”

Sharon thought it over. A lot of what we did was using old spells in a new way, a very specific, repeatable, consistent way. Magic as science. That was part of why Council was so uneasy about us: they weren’t real big fans of innovation unless they controlled it, and you can’t control something that’s designed to give the same result no matter who uses it. Especially in the hands of someone using it to find answers, not prove a point.

While Sharon was thinking, I turned my gaze on Venec, the only member of the team I hadn’t done a quick-check on, and at that exact instant he looked up from his notes and looked right at me. I mean, right at me, like he had mage-sight on in full force. There was an instant of disorientation, his familiar, exhaustion-lined face somehow becoming the mask of a stranger, and something hit me in the gut, stirring my core like a lightning bolt.

Benjamin Venec. The first time I saw him he was playing a dead body, to test us—our job interview, to see if we had what it took to be pups. Even then, I’d been drawn to him, physically. But this…this was different. I surfaced out of my own fugue-state and back to normal space with a gasp, feeling like I’d gone two rounds with a zero-gravity roller coaster. What the hell was that?

When I looked at him again, cautiously, his attention was back at his notes, like nothing had ever happened. My skin was sizzling, and he didn’t think anything had happened?

I stared at him, and there was just the tiniest twitch in the muscle next to his eye, above his ear, and a drop of sweat at the hairline.

It could have been from anything, but it wasn’t. He was as damned-full aware of what had just happened—whatever had happened—as I was. But he wasn’t going to acknowledge it. I knew that, the way I knew…

Hell. I just knew. The spark during the training session, this… I couldn’t analyze it, not the way my nerves were singing at me, but this was new. This was…

Was going to have to wait, whatever it was. I took a deep breath, found my core, and grounded and centered quickly, forcing myself to focus on the briefing, and only the briefing.

“There are truth-scrying spells,” Sharon was saying. “But mostly they’re useless, the same way polygraph tests are. Once someone’s aware that you’re testing them, they can cheat the system. It would have to be indirect, something they couldn’t sense and respond to….”

Sharon’s voice trailed off and she tilted her head back, and her “let me think, let me think” humming started again.

“Right.” Stosser took over the discussion when Venec didn’t say anything, still too busy studying his notes. “Lawrence, you work with her on that.”

Sharon and Nifty were constantly warring for alpha spot, but they were also both really good at brainstorming. It made sense to put them both on it.

“The rest of you—”

“And Nick,” Sharon said, breaking off her humming to lay claim.

Stosser looked surprised: we didn’t often interrupt him.

“I think what I’m going to do…it’s going to need his specialization.”

Nobody ever actually said “hacker” out loud. You didn’t even think about it too much. It was an amazing, rare skill…but it was also one of the ones that could go most spectacularly blooey, so it was like not mentioning certain breeds of the fatae—if you don’t name them, they won’t come by and screw things up.

“All right. Shune, you get to stay inside. Torres, take Pietr back to the scene and don’t come back without something useful.”

Well. That was nicely non-directed and open-ended. And completely unhelpful.

*how the hell are we supposed to know if it’s useful or not?*

Pings didn’t actually use words, but emotions and intents that our brains transcribed into something comprehensible. This one came on an arrow of frustration wrapped with a hint of amusement, shaded with Pietr’s unmistakable mental flavor, and I ducked my head to hide the smile I could feel rising. Ian Stosser thought we were all nearly as capable, competent, and borderline-brilliant as he was…and expected us to perform to those standards.

We did our best, and our best was pretty damn good, but our brains weren’t Stosser-level.

“I’ll follow up on that other matter,” Venec said. Stosser looked surprised, and I knew some ping went back and forth between them, but Ian just nodded and that was that. Whatever the other matter was, it was need-to-know, and we didn’t need to know.

The others filed out, talking animatedly about ideas for a spell. Part of me really, really wanted to be going with them. I was good at crafting spells, and seeing where we could improvise—the Guys had said that I was their best tech, hands down. I should have been working with them.

Instead, I got to go back to the site. Again. Like I wasn’t going to see it in my dreams for the rest of the year, already?

“Bonnie.”

I didn’t jump when Venec came up behind me, despite my general unease. Like before, in the common room, like all the time, he had the ability to slip into my personal space without me reacting—even now, when every other human male other than my mentor set my nerves jangling. Freaky. Although considering the first time we’d met he’d already been in my head, scouting me while I hunted Zaki’s killer, maybe I’d gotten so used to second-guessing his motives and intentions that it felt normal to have him in my personal space.

And, after what had just happened, whatever had just happened, him being able to do anything didn’t surprise me, although it was starting to really piss me off.

Venec glared at me. “None of that made any sense.”

My brain hit a brick wall, and I blinked, gaping at him. What the hell? I knew damn well I hadn’t said anything, and that wasn’t the kind of thing you say out of the blue, so he had to have heard my thoughts without me knowing, which was impossible, so therefore he hadn’t done it. But he had.

Even as I was chasing that logic tangle, I was answering him. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but you have a better explanation?”

He’d gotten into my brain before, during that scouting expedition. That’s why I knew how damn strong he was; that sort of eavesdropping took immense control and power, as well as the particular skill set called the Push. But even then I’d known someone was lurking, and I’d been strong enough to shove him out.

All right. He knew the feel of my brain, we worked together closely, and right now I was so wound up, it was probably inevitable that I’d leak something. Venec was already always monitoring us, so…

No. That still didn’t explain it, or the weird dizzying zing I’d felt earlier from him just looking at me, or… It was weird and disturbing, and I really wanted it to not happen again. I didn’t like things I couldn’t track down and nail to the wall and break down into basic, comprehensible facts. I especially didn’t like things that disturbed and distracted me during a job. The only thing that made me feel better was that I was pretty sure Venec felt the same way about not liking it.

He hesitated, like he was going to say something, and then his hand came down on mine, just a brief contact, palm to the back of my hand. It wasn’t anything special: we’d knocked into each other more than once, walking in the office, and there’d been taps on the shoulder, a hand up from the floor…but this one felt different. This wasn’t the correction of a teacher, or the help of a coworker. This was a touch.

Everything that had been happening until then, the past eight months of building tension, suddenly hit flash point, and I barely had time to think holy shit and Shinola before everything exploded.

Not physical, not emotional, not even metaphorical. Magical. More than what I’d felt before, more and worse and totally not anything I’d ever felt before. For a second I swore I could feel the thump of his brain working inside mine, and then current slipped from his core into mine, or maybe the other way around, or maybe both, and it was like an entire storm’s worth of lightning inside your underwear. Literally, because in addition to the current-shock, I got a sexual jolt like I hadn’t had since the first time a guy went down on me.

My control tightened and my walls went up like they hadn’t since my first high-school dance, and we stared at each other, my pulse racing like I’d just realized I’d missed a flight I was supposed to be on.

What the hell?

I wasn’t sure if it was his thought or mine. It felt like mine but it sounded like his, and—

“Hey.” Pietr stuck his head back into the conference room, his expression a little annoyed. “You coming, Torres, or do I carry this solo?”

“Yeah.” Venec sounded dazed, like he’d just seen—or felt—something he wasn’t expecting. That made two of us, Big Dog. “Bonnie, go.”

I didn’t just go—I fled.