Pack of Lies

eight

Much to my surprise, what had felt like a half hour, max, in the hot seat had actually eaten away what was left of the afternoon. Stosser and Sharon’s debriefing—making me relive every detail, every feeling and frustration, so they could figure out how to modify the spell—took us into the evening. The late lunch kept me going, but when I staggered out to find the rest of the team hanging around like vultures, I demanded someone buy me dinner and a drink. Possibly lots of drinks.

My coworkers, bless ’em, are usually up for a challenge like that. Sharon was understandably wiped out from controlling the spell and just wanted to go home, and Nifty claimed a previous engagement, but Pietr and Nick took on the obligation.

Venec and Stosser were pointedly not invited. I don’t think they even noticed.

After a brief but intense negotiation, we ended up in the bar around the corner from my apartment. The guys could stagger home on the subway: I wanted to be able to hop, skip, and stumble into my own lobby.

“Bonita, chica, cómo está?”

“Bien, gracias, Paula.”

Paula, the weeknight bartender, spoke seven different languages, four of them fluently and three well enough to get her face slapped. I only spoke three with any comfort— English, Spanish, and German—but that was enough to play an interesting game of Russian roulette: each drink had to be ordered in a different language, and if I screwed it up, I had to buy her a drink, too. Things always got expensive late at night.

“Hey, Paula,” Nick said, sliding onto a barstool, even as she was pulling a Stella for him, then sliding it onto the counter with a smooth motion. My drink changes with my moods and how crappy a day it’s been; Nick was born with Stella at the teat, and never looked back.

“Labvakar, Paula. Bourbon, lūdzu.”

“Labs vakars, mans labs draugs.” Whatever language they were speaking, from the way Paula was careful with her pronunciation, I was betting it wasn’t one of her seven. Good for Pietr. Keep the barkeep on her toes.

“I’ll have whatever you’re giving him.” I was tempted for a shot of tequila, but that was for really, really bad days. This was just bad and cranky. Bourbon would do for that.

Paula leaned on the bar, her forearms threaded with lean muscle I could only dream of managing. “Uh-huh. You want to talk about it, or just sit and throw peanuts at each other?”

Paula’s not Talent, but I don’t think there’s a professional bartender in town who doesn’t know about the Cosa. Fatae may not drink, but a lot of drunks see them. She knew who we were, and what we did for a living.

“Peanuts,” Nick said.

“Right you are.”

Dermody’s was the kind of place you’d take a first date—and probably back again for the third date, if things went well. There were intimate tables with comfortable chairs, and a long granite bar with stools that encouraged long-term loitering, all under lighting that let you see your companion, but not so bright that it showed imperfections. Overall, the bar was comfortable without being cute, friendly but not loud, and you could strike up a conversation or sulk over your drink, and either choice got equal respect. And it was a five-minute walk from my apartment. If only it weren’t so damned expensive, I might live here.

“So, do you think Sharon—”

“Nuh-uh.” Pietr cut Nick off before I could. “No shop talk. It’s well after office hours even for the workaholic, and we are relaxing, not stressing.”

“But…”

“Do you want to turn into Sharon?” I asked.

Pietr winced appreciatively. “Ouch. That was cold. Funny, but cold.”

Nick took the top off his drink, wiping away the foam from his mouth. “You guys can really just turn it off? Just… end of day, not talking about it anymore, not thinking about it anymore?”

“No.” I had to be honest—maybe some remnant of the spellwork? No, just my natural bluntness again. “No, I can’t just turn it off. But the first thing I learned, on our first case, was that there comes a time you have to just…let go. For a little while.”

Our first case, when I’d almost fallen hard for a suspect. Will Arcazy, of the dark red hair and easy smile. He’d been a person of interest in the murders we were investigating, a couple killed over a real estate deal gone bad. Will had turned out to be…well, not guilty of murder, if not exactly innocent of responsibility, but the damage had been done. Once the case was over, he wanted nothing to do with me for the sin of having investigated him. I hadn’t loved him—but I had liked him a lot, and being given the cold shoulder had hurt.

I’d been sitting in this bar, in fact, nursing that hurt, when Venec had found me, poured me into my apartment, and given me a piece of good advice. “This is a tough job. You’re going to be asked to pick up a lot. Carry it on your skin, not your spine.”

I didn’t share that with the guys, though, just repeated my own advice. “Let it go. At least until tomorrow morning. It will wait.”

“Right.” Nick didn’t sound too certain, and I didn’t have anything to add, so we sat there, drinking our drinks, in quiet reflection for a while. Paula refilled the peanut dish, and set us up with a pitcher of water and three tumblers. I guess she knew a long drinking night when she saw one coming in.

“So,” Nick said finally, proving my suspicion that he was purely incapable of going ten minutes without talking. “When’re you going to throw another party?”

“When my neighbors forgive me for the last one, probably.” It hadn’t been particularly loud, or run all that late, but someone on the floor below had taken offense and left a nasty note on my door. I guess it was all adding up. “Anyway, isn’t it time someone else hosted a party, for once?”

“Pietr won’t let us near his place because it’s too nice, Sharon lives too far away—” Translocation when drunk was usually a really bad idea, and the subway ride home from Brooklyn where Sharon lived was a pain in the ass after midnight “—and you can barely turn around in my apartment.”

Nobody volunteered Nifty’s place; we’d all been there. Once.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll host—if you let me dye your hair.”

“What?” His hands went, protectively, to the brown mop on his head.

“Seriously. I’ll even let you choose the color.” I figured we could talk him out of anything seriously objectionable. Unlike Pietr, Nick’s taste was…dubious.

“Dye my hair?” He was still stuck on that thought.

“Why not? Chicks dig it.”

“They do?” He looked to Pietr, who spread his hands in a “why you asking me?” expression, then to Paula, who had been listening with a third of an ear. She winked, but left what that wink meant open to interpretation.

“A guy who dyes his hair?” I nodded seriously. “Open to new things, experiences…maybe wild things…” I waggled my eyebrows like a cartoon lech.

“All right. Deal.” We shook on it, Pietr and Paula our witnesses.

A few more drinks and a plate of chicken nachos, and the guys started acting like guys, rating the other women in the bar. Normally I’d join in—give the female point of view, maybe undercut a few sexist observations with the cold claws of feminism—but I wasn’t in the mood tonight.

Drunk and annoyed, the things I’d been trying not to think about came out.

“Why do guys do that? Use violence, I mean?”

Nick stopped, mid-rating of a redhead with too much shelf showing. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about the case.”

“We’re not. This isn’t about the case. It’s just…wondering.”

Pietr didn’t seem surprised. “If it weren’t for the case, you wouldn’t be asking. But I get where you’re coming from, I think,” he said, putting his drink on the bar with a definite clink. “It’s not about sex, those guys. It’s about power. Control.”

“Yeah. I know. And I even understand the whole S&M thing, kind of. I mean, the role-playing aspects of it, the pain-for-pleasure stuff, it’s not my game but I know enough people who play it. That’s different. It’s mutual, agreed upon…it’s play. But how does forcing someone to have sex give you power…my brain just doesn’t go there. Is it because I’m female?”

“No.” Pietr was definite on that. “It’s because you’re gentle.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure I understood that, or that I bought it, entirely, but when nothing makes sense anyway…

“I mean, not gentle like soft, gentle like considerate,” he tried to clarify. “You like people. You want to help them, make things better. And what those guys did, or tried to do…that kind of mentality, the personality that can do that, it’s not just about forcing women, or even forcing sex. It’s about making someone do something they don’t want to do. It’s about seeing them as tools, or pets, not people.” He frowned, picked up his drink again, and then frowned down into it, too.

“So what is it? A need for power? Anger?” I knew hatred—I hated the man who had killed my father, even now, years later—but the kind of anger that made you hurt someone…maybe Pietr was right; I’d never thought of myself as particularly gentle, but that kind of anger just wasn’t in me. Maybe that was why I couldn’t understand what I’d gleaned from the scene.

“I think that they’re bullies, mostly. The studies I’ve read say the weak are the ones who need violence to get off, not the strong ones.”

Okay. That, I understood. It was as good a theory as any, anyway. And it was interesting, that Pietr had read up on that. I raised my glass in toast. “To taking down the bullies.”

“To taking down the bullies,” Pietr echoed, and Nick raised his glass in silent agreement, tipping the rims gently—or as gently as we could, after half a dozen drinks.

“Hey, Bonnie, you were working the main scene—did you get to see the ki-rin, up close?” Nick asked me, obviously wanting to change the subject.

“Not up close, no. I didn’t want to, honestly. It scared me a little.”

“What, because you’re not lily-pure virginal?” From someone else that would’ve been insulting. From Nick, it was an invitation to whap him upside the head. So I did.

“No, you moron. Because it had blood dripping from its horn and hooves and even if I’d been a vestal virgin I’d have been careful about going near anyone who’d just been through that kind of trauma.”

Pietr caught the tail end of that statement. “You think it was traumatized?”

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. “No, it was perfectly mellow and unfussed. Give me a break, of course it was traumatized. Or at least seriously upset and angry. It saw its companion attacked, and killed another being, a Cosa- cousin, even if he didn’t know it at the time, and I suspect it did—”

Memory of my earlier thought came back, and I stopped. “Damn. Pietr, we looked for emotional resonance, and then we were distracted by the crap we found in the memorial piles, and I think we screwed up. Did anyone think to check for trace of actual current-use at the scene?”

“We looked for emotional trace….” he began, not sure where I was going.

“Yeah, but not actual current-trace. Damn it!”

Nick scowled at me. “It was a physical attack, not a current-blast. The guy died of horn-and-hoof disease.”

“Think, Nick,” I said, feeling a surge of energy run through my legs, making me want to swing around on my stool. That meant I was on the right track, somehow, even if I didn’t know what it was, yet. “It was physical, yeah, but all three of them were Talent. Something like this, even a lo-res player like our girl should give off sparks. A guy fighting for his life against a ki-rin?”

“We looked for emotional trace carried on current, but not the current-trace itself. Damn.” Pietr got a sort of hazy look in his eyes. “I pinged Sharon, gave her a sense of what we’re worried about. She’ll check it out in the morning.”

Sharon’s train passed by the site, coming in, so that made sense. My brain raced on ahead, trying to figure out how to use that new evidence, if there was any. Odds were, there wasn’t anything left to find, but if there was, Nifty had been talking a couple of weeks ago about sifting current-trace into a time-graph. If he could manage that, we’d be able to tell who shot first, as it were. That would be a huge piece of the puzzle, especially if we could prove that the girl tried to defend herself after the attack, but before the ki-rin waded in, supporting her version of the story.

And if we didn’t find anything, or Nifty couldn’t make the time-sift work, well then, no need to mention to the Big Dogs that we’d overlooked it in the first go-round.

“Do you think it can be trusted?”

My thoughts were on the bosses, so it took me a minute to figure out what Nick was saying, and about whom. The ki-rin. The creature everyone’s original assumptions rested on, because ki-rin could not lie.

“As much as anyone or anything with their own reasons for doing things can be trusted, yeah,” I said, finally. “You used to be a total fanboy about the fatae. Why the doubts now?”

Nick got a little puffed about that. “I’m not…most of the fatae we’ve met so far have been okay, if a little standoffish. But this—ki-rin are supposed to be perfect. Everyone says the ki-rin can’t lie, don’t lie, paragons and champions of virtue, et cetera. But can it really be trusted? I mean, it doesn’t seem to have much use for humans overall, except its companion, and look at how fast it dumped her.”

He had a point. I didn’t pretend to understand the fatae, but would it have killed the ki-rin to go with the girl to the hospital, or visit after, or something? Hell, maybe it would. We didn’t know enough. Nobody knew enough, thanks to the ki-rin’s fetish about privacy.

The burst of energy ran out, and I stopped swiveling in my seat, suddenly exhausted again.

Nick went on, oblivious to my mood change, building up steam. “And why virgins, anyway? Like not having had sex makes you a good person or something?”

Ooooo. I suddenly wondered if we’d hit a nerve…and if the ki-rin would have been willing to talk to Nicky-boy. The thought was…novel. Also slightly horrifying.

“It’s not the virginity per se,” Pietr said. “From what I’ve read, they’re not looking for a lack of a sex life so much as lack of desire.” He paused. “They’re not real big on the passion or drama sex stirs up, the ki-rin. I guess virgins are restful.”

“Hah. Here’s to being unrestful,” I said. We clinked glasses again, and called for a refill.

“You should sleep with Venec,” Nick said suddenly, doing one of his wild topic-changes.

Next to me, Pietr made a noise I don’t think I’d ever heard before, and I turned to see him gasping, tears in his eyes, and his glass held out from him as though protecting it.

“Oh, good job,” I said to Nick, trying very hard not to think about what he had actually just said. “You made him snarf his bourbon. Man, that’s gotta sting.”

“Motherf— Yes,” Pietr managed to reply. “It did.”

“You totally should,” Nick went on. “You think nobody noticed that little goo-up back in the office?”

I started—how the hell?

“Au contraire, my dear Dandelion. You held each other’s gaze a bit too long and moved away a bit too fast for a room full of investigators not to notice.”

Oh. He’d only seen the physical reaction, the first time. All right. That I could explain away. If I wanted to. I decided to just smirk, instead. That was more in character. Less likely to raise suspicions, or give either of them anything to chew over.

“Anyway, it will do you both good,” Nick said, clearly not sensing that the conversation needed to end. “I’m your bestest buddy and I know what you need.” He made a determined little nod that was disgustingly cute, and I had to bite back a giggle despite my annoyance. “Reduce stress, give you a lilt to your step…keep Venec from being such a hard-ass on the rest of us…”

“Good luck with that,” Pietr muttered. I had to agree. Even assuming I ever went there, which I wasn’t going to, I suspected he’d still be a hard-ass. I’m not sure I’d want him to be anything else, either. It would be…weird. Like…like seeing J in a dress, or something.

That image made me blanch, and I finished the rest of my drink in a rush, hoping the booze would burn it away.

“I’m not sleeping with the boss.”

“So don’t sleep with him during office hours,” Nick said, with the air of a man solving all the world’s problems, and Pietr choked on his booze again.

Paula came over then, and leaned against the bar like an old-timey barkeep from a Western. “Don’t you kids have to go to work tomorrow?” It was almost last call—or maybe past it, I realized, looking around the almost-empty bar.

“Do we?” Pietr asked me. I gave him a wide-eyed stare back, my best “you’re asking me this why?” look.

“We do,” Nick decided. “’Cause there are still bullies out there to be put down, virgins to be rescued, and paychecks to be deposited. Not in that order, though.”

“You’re drunk,” I told him.

“I am.” Nick sounded proud of it, too.

Pietr snorted. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he gets home,” he told Paula, hauling Nick off the stool with one hand while he slid his credit card across the bar to cover the tab. Pietr and I were the only members of the pack who could carry credit cards with us on a regular basis—like cell phones and laptops, the magnetic strip on credit cards reacted badly to constant exposure to a Talent’s too-often unstable core.

We walked out into the cold night air, and I could feel myself sober up. “You guys go on….”

“Hell we will,” Nick said. His voice was a little slurred, but he was standing and walking fine, and Pietr let go of him. “Two blocks out of our way isn’t going to damage either of us, and I have ghost-boy here to take care of me on the way back to the subway.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Unlike my acceptance of Nick’s pet naming habits, Pietr let it get to him. Nick usually knew better—he really was drunk.

A shadow fell over us, noticeable even in the darkness, and I flinched, while Nick’s body language went into tough-guy mode, and Pietr became a shadow within the shadow. If you didn’t know what to look for, you’d swear he had disappeared.

“Bonnie. Pietr. And Other Human.”

“Bobo.” I relaxed. “I should have known.”

“Yes, you should have.” The pidgin English of before was gone, his normal conversational tones much more comforting.

“What the hell is…” Nick caught himself when I glared. “Sorry. Who the hell is this?”

“Bobo, this is Nick. You already know Pietr.” I really didn’t feel like explaining anything to Nick right now—friend or no friend, drunk or not, he’d just insulted both Pietr and Bobo in the space of three minutes, and I was annoyed at him.

“You’ll take our girl from here?” Pietr asked.

“That is the plan,” the fatae said.

“Good. ’Cause I’m knackered. ’Night, Bonnie. See ya tomorrow. Come on, Shune. Walk, or I’ll leave your drunk ass on a street corner somewhere.”

The two of them strolled down the almost-empty street, bumping shoulders and insulting each other loudly. Men. I swear, I loved ’em, but I completely did not understand them, and did not, most of the time want to.

Next to me, Bobo coughed gently, a reminder that we were standing outside on a cold street corner, and offered me his very large, very hairy arm. “Home?”

“Home,” I agreed, suddenly very, very tired.

Of course, lying in bed, every inch of my body whimpering for Morpheus to put me out of my exhausted misery, I couldn’t actually fall asleep. My brain was too wound up to stop, but too tired to do anything useful. Thoughts about the case, about the weirdness with Venec, about how much we were drinking these days, about the fact that I really needed to recharge before my core collapsed, they all chased around my brain and kept me awake but without any results.

I considered pinging J, thinking maybe the old man would still be awake and willing to chat, but squelched the urge. I’d made it clear to him—and he had, however grudgingly, accepted the fact—that I’d made my career choice and he had to respect it. Touching base with him mentor-to-mentee was well within our ground rules, and I could always call on him professionally if needed, but turning to him every time I had a bad day…not so much.

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem. The best way to get out of your head, when it got too messy in there, was to focus on your body. Good clean healthy distraction. Going for a long hike, or dancing up a storm, or…yeah, sex would have been nice, but doing it alone was getting depressing, and while I had that little black book of people I could call—new friends and old, and even a number of exes, since I liked to end things on a positive note—the thought of calling any of them left me feeling surprisingly…uninterested. Not just because of the unease brought on by the case, either. The moment my brain went there, my body remembered that hot, intensely sexual charge I had gotten from Venec earlier. It wanted more of that, please.

It wasn’t going to get more of that, damn it. I might be casual about my relationships, but they were always relationships, and I was not going to fall into bed—or against the wall, or any other place—with my boss. Either of my bosses, although the thought of having sex with Stosser was enough to cool my libido down considerably. Ew, and also, no thanks.

I sighed again, and punched up the pillow under my head, as though that would make me able to sleep, suddenly. Times like this, I really resented not having a television, even if I would have to replace it on a regular basis.

Why was I suddenly insomniac? I’d gotten a handle, I thought, on the fear—hanging out tonight with the guys had restored most of my natural equilibrium. So why was I still feeling this discomfort, this doubt, deep in my bones, stirring my current uneasily? It wasn’t natural for me, at all.

I followed the thought back to the source: it wasn’t natural. Therefore, it was external, the weight pressing on me from outside, not in. All right. It’s not as though I couldn’t identify the stress, easy enough: I’d seen what should have been pleasurable physical release turned into a crime. The thought wasn’t new, but it sunk into a new spot this time, a slow glide through my brain that set up a tingle of disturbance. Crime. Assault. The mutation, the mutilation of affection into violence. My own feelings about casual intimacy, turned into something terrible. I was doubting myself, because if she could have been wrong, so could I.

Okay, that made sense.

I frowned up at the ceiling, just a few feet over my head. It made sense, but it didn’t fit. Something like that would explain my skittishness, maybe, and I’d taken steps to deal with that, facing it down and dissecting it to harmless bits. But the self-doubt…that felt different.

I just couldn’t think of anything else that might have triggered it.

Easier to turn the searchlight on our victim. Why had she been so casual about meeting the two men at first? Why hadn’t the ki-rin been with her, to protect her? Had she trusted them? Why? The shadowy images flickered inside my lids, the gleaning echoing inside me, and wouldn’t shut down, even when the skittery panic and uncertainty flared again, and I tried to slam that door shut.

My core flared in distress, and a responding flicker of current touched it, as though it had been waiting for a summons.

Venec. I knew even before the signature identified itself.

*all right?*

A sparse thought, touched with a glimmer of worry, and a sharp tingle that ran from the top of my spine all the way down my arms to my fingertips, sharp enough that I lifted my hands above the covers, expecting to see current sparking above the skin.

I was used to feeling sparks between us, but this was different; way more intense, if not quite on the same groin-searing level of that earlier connection. And just like that the burn was gone, instead becoming a soothing coolness, easing my tumbled and troubled thoughts. It was invasive, the touch on a level with that first recruitment a year ago, but for some reason this time it didn’t bother me. It should have…but it didn’t.

*all right?* he repeated, more urgent this time.

*yes. no*

His touch soundlessly asked permission to go even deeper, and I granted it without asking what, or why. A cool touch, like menthol on the skin, only inside me. It should have freaked me out; I knew, intellectually, that I should be freaked out and objecting, but I had let him in, and it felt…good. Not orgasmic. But like the time after, when you’re soothed and sated and too comfortable to move to clean up.

*sleep* he whispered. *for this moment, forget, and sleep*

My eyes closed, and I slept.

In a prewar apartment building across the Hudson River in New Jersey, with a very expensive half-view of the Statue of Liberty, Benjamin Venec folded his newspaper in two, carefully, and placed it on the desk in front of him. His gaze was distant, as he looked at something far beyond the walls of his home, and his expression was troubled.

“Is there a problem?” his companion asked, stretching lazily on the sofa where she had been paging through a book.

“No,” he said. “No problem.” And there wasn’t. Bonnie was sleeping peacefully, now. His mentor would have had him doing laps with a twenty-pound backpack if she’d known what he’d done: there were rules for those who had the Push, rules and ethics drummed into your bones from the first flash of current in your core. He wasn’t a stickler for rules—for himself, anyway—but that one stuck and held. You didn’t Push casually or without consent, and never mind he told himself it was within the job description, that he had her tacit, if sleepy, permission.

He’d gone too far, though; he had only intended to make sure Bonnie got a good night’s sleep. But once there, the lure of her psychic scent had almost overwhelmed him, the ease of contact drawing him far deeper than he’d intended, and what started as a gentle Push to soothe her restless thoughts, to direct them toward something peaceful so that she could sleep, had…

Had what? What had happened between them, in the space of those few seconds of contact? He didn’t know, and that made him uneasy as hell. His lips twisted into a rueful almost-smile, and he shoved his fingers through his hair, pulling at his scalp gently as though that would make the headache he could feel building go away. Hell, the entire situation with Bonnie had started with uneasiness, and with yesterday’s fireworks it was rapidly escalating into… What? He didn’t know, but it wasn’t anything good.

He was very used to being in control—demanded it, in fact. Of himself, if not the situation, and this…

Had not been under his control. Not the attraction, not the spark, not the way he had known that she was startled and upset—and certainly not how he had responded instinctively, current gathered as though he himself were under attack.

“Ben?” Malia was looking at him, her lovely eyes narrowed as though she knew that his thoughts were on someone else entirely. If she really knew, she’d cut his throat.

“I’m fine. Just thinking.”

All the events of the past few days—it was too much for coincidence, too intense to brush off as part of the physical attraction they’d been dealing with since day one. It was also obvious that their current-spark wasn’t Bonnie’s doing, as he’d thought at first; her emotions tonight had been almost painfully innocent of guile.

And it wasn’t him; he’d checked on the others before without anything like that ever happening, nudging and corralling as needed, just as he’d done since he’d started recruiting, back when PUPI was just a glint in his partner’s eye. Ian was brilliant, no doubt, and burned with the desire to put things to rights, but it was a cold fire, at heart. He saw people, even his own people, as extensions of himself, and assumed they reacted the way he did. It would never occur to Ian Stosser to check on how a case was affecting the team, because it wouldn’t affect him.

Ben didn’t mind, really. Let Ian handle the publicity, the schmoozing, the bright light and glare of the Council’s scrutiny. He’d take care of the people side of things, make sure the team was working well, no jars or cracks, no exhaustion or doubts keeping them from doing what needed to be done. For the most part, it was a matter of nudging them one way or other, of making sure that their teammates were aware of something, and letting them handle it from there.

Trouble was, what had happened tonight went well beyond that, beyond anything he could justify as work-related. The fact that Bonnie had allowed him in, the fact that she had…hell, they both had enjoyed it, he admitted to himself, remembering the cinnamon-sweet taste of her in his mind, the warm feel of her current twining against his; none of that mattered. Combined with the current-spark they’d shared, that he would swear neither of them had intended, the situation was dangerous as hell on several levels.

So he wouldn’t do it again. He’d stick to purely physical interactions—and there was irony in that that he wasn’t willing to examine. Work only. Nothing personal. It wasn’t as though there wasn’t enough on his plate already to keep him occupied.

Like the situation he was looking into, off-hours, with these alleged “exterminators.” The thought made him frown, distracting him from the memory of Bonnie, warm and restless in her loft bed. The advertisement had seemed simple enough at first—a basic sheet of paper, white with black print, offering an office extermination service. He had seen four now, all with slightly different ads. Tonight’s, stuck in the poster-frame in the PATH car on his way home, had been more overt:

Tired of your clients encountering unwanted visitations? Concerned about the infestation of your building? Your neighborhood? Call us. We can clean things up for you.

On the surface, it read like a hundred and ten other flyers that circulated regularly around any decent-size city, fly-by-night companies feeding on the city-dwellers’ eternal infestations. But Benjamin Venec had years of listening to Ian and his Council cronies speaking the fine art of doublespeak, and he knew propaganda when he heard it, especially when it was escalating like that. The malice practically oozed off the page of the most recent flyer, if you were sensitive. Malice and hatred, and a particular scent that came from fear. These exterminators might be out to rid the world of something, but Ben would bet every bill in his wallet it wasn’t bedbugs and cockroaches.

The moment he thought that, he was surprised by an odd twinge of doubt. It touched on his call on this, then spread to his ability to handle all the things pressing for his attention, the idea that he was capable of keeping so many things in the air and under control at the same time. It felt like the whisper of rot in his ear, and he frowned, forcing himself to stillness.

That wasn’t him. Those weren’t his thoughts. When he doubted himself—which he often did, although he would never admit it to anyone other than Ian—it came loud and harsh, not sickly sweet and slithering.

Outwardly, he was still contemplating the wall, to all observances a man deep in thought. Inside, a single spider silk–thin filament of current, shivering with energy, reached up from his core, slinking like a cat in the grass, intent on its prey. Keeping a steady, grounded control, barely daring to breathe, Ben let the hunter flow over his skin, and then snapped it forward, lashing out at the sensation of that whisper, trying to trace it back to its source. It disappeared, half a second ahead of his attack, and Ben clenched his molars together, forcing himself to show no reaction, even as the current dissipated into the air. If there had been someone there, trying to Push him, they’d gotten away clean. But if they tried again, he’d know.

Pushers were rare, but not unknown. It wasn’t the first time someone had taken a shot at him, and it wouldn’t be the last; he had pissed off too many people in his career, and he would doubtless piss off many more. He noted the attack, filed it under “problem; later,” and went back to his real concern: the rising sentiment against the fatae, the violence that was seething under the melting-pot veneer of New York City. The “tributes” at the attack site. These flyers. The general mood: something was up. Something ugly.

Lizard had sworn he didn’t know anything, nobody knew anything about any violence, but other sources had been more forthcoming, about things whispered in dark corners and private cafés where humans weren’t invited, of violence committed against the weakest of the fatae, the defenseless. Of piskie nests being destroyed, and nets thrown where selkies slept, drowning them in the night. What Bonnie and Pietr had learned from their faun contact had just confirmed the things he had already heard.

And Sharon’s investigations tied these flyers to it; no Talent was willing to admit hiring the service, but at least one person had commented to her on how much better, how much cleaner their neighborhood was, for someone else having that service in. Fatae were in danger—and starting to react with violence to that danger.

There was nothing in anything he’d learned to tie that into an attack on a young girl, companion to a ki-rin…but nothing to say they weren’t connected, either.

If the angeli, those human-hating sociopaths, got involved…

“Damn it.” He got up and stalked across the apartment, stopping in front of an oversize photograph of a lightning storm at sea, and frowned again, this time letting his irritation and frustration rise to the surface.

“Ben? Seriously, what is it?” Malia had abandoned her practiced kitten-pose, and was looking at him with real worry now.

He started, having completely forgotten that she was there. “It’s nothing. I’m sorry. I’m just not very good company tonight. You probably should just go home.”

A look of hurt flashed across her face, and he felt like a shit, but he suddenly needed his own space back; space and quiet to think.

Malia picked up her things and left, noisily, without her usual kiss goodbye. He noted it and then forgot it, already back in his somber thoughts.

Something was happening in the city; something that involved the fatae. He couldn’t run the risk of it involving PUPI, too. Not without knowing what “it” was, anyway. There was already too much pressing at them, too many people eager to see them fail, and they couldn’t afford the distraction of violence breaking the surface. And that meant, if nobody else was going to do something about it…they had to. Ian had to take these problems seriously, now, before they erupted.

Convincing his partner to do anything outside of his narrow, if diamond-focused, vision…that would take some doing. And yelling. But that was part of his job, too.

The visual, of Bonnie now sound asleep in her bed, came back to him, and he smiled a little. She slept like a little girl, sprawled and careless. As though drawn by the thought, a tendril of her dream reached out and enfolded him. It didn’t negate the concern or urgency, but in that one instant, he was somewhere far more peaceful, far more sweet.

So sweet and peaceful and natural, he didn’t wonder how that tendril had escaped her sleeping mind and touched his wakeful one without conscious thought or intent—a thing he had always been taught was impossible.