Tricks of the Trade

eight

It was one thing to gather intel and come up with what we thought was a brilliant deduction. It was another, entirely, to lay it out in front of Venec, and wait for his reaction. We didn’t have to wait long. The moment I finished, he exhaled heavily, the kind of surprised-pleased-thinking exhale, and leaned back a little. You could practically see the thought process racing through his neurons like current.

“Lawrence. How’s the itching?”

“Totally gone,” Nifty replied, although I’d seen him scratching his elbow against the chair arm not five minutes before. Either Venec had missed that – unlikely – or he was willing to pretend it hadn’t happened, because he nodded. “You and Pietr go track down the coworkers last seen with our corpse. Ask them a few pointed questions about their feelings about his relations – or lack thereof – with their employers, and how it was affecting them. Don’t be coy. If Bonnie’s info is right, these guys are not going to understand subtle. You may have to lean a little.”

Well, that explained why he was sending Nifty, who outmassed all of us put together, practically. I guessed Pietr was going along to provide the potential good cop in that scenario?

“But – ” And Venec held up a hand as the guys stood up from the table, clearly anticipating a nice day out of the office trying to intimidate witnesses. “Any questioning you do, make sure it’s in full view of at least two others, not involved. Do not go with them anywhere, no matter how good an idea it might seem.”

Pietr really didn’t need the reminder, but Nifty tended to think with his bulk, and while that was fine when facing down humans, against fatae who could maybe, if we were right, restrain a Bippis, maybe less so. From the annoyed “do you think we’re idiots?” expression on their faces, I suspected that the fact that they were being sent to question suspected murderers hadn’t quite filtered into their awareness. But they nodded seriously, and went off to do their dirty work with probably more enthusiasm than was healthy.

I don’t know why I’d expected more from Pietr – smart guys were still guys, sometimes.

“All right, that’s being dealt with. Where do we stand on the break-in?” Venec asked, turning his attention to those of us left in the room. I hrrmmmmed and errrred a bit, not having any idea. Thankfully, Nick and Sharon – whose case it had been, originally – had more clue.

“We finally got a report of what was missing,” Nick said, and from his expression I was guessing that “we” meant “him.” “And confirmed what the owner claimed, that for all the damage that was done, there were only two objects taken – a silver pocket watch, ordinary, and a glass dagger, which looked like an ordinary paperweight, but was actually a memory-glass.”

A memory-glass was a Talent-trinket. Nulls get to use digital frames and downloads, we store images and voices a different way. They were low-res, incredibly basic so anyone could use it, even Nulls, and it probably wasn’t all that surprising that the client – who had fallen for the “magical defense” line – had one. It was odd that anyone had stolen it, though. They’re not lockable, so odds were he hadn’t hidden any blackmailable memories in there, even assuming he trusted a Talent enough to share it in the first place, for storing... .

But they were taken, so that had to mean something.

“What was stored in the glass?” Venec asked, probably matching my thoughts exactly.

Sharon picked up the narrative. “Nothing sensitive according to the client. Some memories that he didn’t want to forget, family trips, things about his wife, that sort of whatnot. Sentimental value, nothing more. Ditto the watch. Pretty, but not particularly valuable or unique. He didn’t even have photos taken for insurance purposes, never saw the need, which for this guy means he really didn’t think it was valuable – he had photo, acquisition cost and market value on every other thing that was broken.

“Client is convinced that someone stole them in order to put a hex on him, and before you ask, yeah, he’s got the usual string of ‘nice guy, fair businessman’ testimonials that could have come from a playbook, they’re so generic. If he has enemies they’re playing it cool.”

She paused. “I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not, but I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth that they were only sentimental memories, not anything worth stealing. And since he wasn’t the one who installed the memories... I’m not sure anyone could actually use it for a hex, at least not on him. Could they?”

Lou shook her head. “The only thing to latch onto would be the signature of the Talent who made it. Anyway, anyone who could do this wouldn’t bother with a hex, if they wanted to hurt the guy. There are more direct, more impressive ways to do damage.”

Venec frowned, leaning forward again. “Wife’s dead?”

Nick picked up this time. “Cancer. Kid disappeared soon after, packed a bag and gone. Cops investigated – husband filed a missing persons report – kid had run away before. There were no known enemies, no domestic complaints, so... Guy’s had a crap life, for all the money – wife’s dead, kid gone a year later, I guess it makes sense he’ll pull out all the stops, even magic, to reclaim stuff that holds good memories, even without fear of a hex.”

Venec had a look on his face I couldn’t quite decipher. The temptation nibbled, to lower my walls and see if I could read his emotions, but I didn’t. Wasn’t kosher, and, anyway, if I did that he’d be able to read me even easier, and that wasn’t kosher, either.

“What was this guy’s name again?”

“Wells.”

“Huh. Okay, no.” Whatever it was that niggled him, he wasn’t sharing. “So we have a guy whose very nice little mansion was ransacked and trashed – ”

“Portions of it were trashed,” Sharon clarified. “Only the two rooms downstairs, the office and the... call it a library, I guess. Nothing upstairs, the kitchen and front parlor were left alone.”

“Right, two rooms taken apart. Specifically, the two rooms where someone might store something valuable, either physical or electronics, not just current-based memory-keepers. Magical thieves do not mean only a magical theft, people.”

I hadn’t even thought about that, and from the lack of notes, neither had Sharon or Nick. Damn it, that was sloppy. The client was a Null, so we should have thought about digital records. We weren’t allowed blind spots like that.

Venec didn’t stop for us to beat ourselves up. “So our violence-prone intruder was possibly looking for something specific, either business or personal, but all they took were trinkets? And our client has no known enemies, no business rivals, nobody who’d get a thrill out of seeing him get taken down a few notches?”

“Seven names on the list,” Lou said, touching the pad of paper in front of her. “Three of them are totally Null, so it’s almost improbable they’d have been able to hire anyone from within the fatae community.”

It was a weird tick to Nulls – the more current-blind they were, the more they managed to float through life without even a glancing interaction with the Cosa Nostradamus, at least within a magical range of interaction. Not only were they not going to hire supernaturals, they wouldn’t hire anyone who would then hire supernaturals. J said there was some kind of physics explanation to it, but I’d never cared enough to look it up.

I pulled out my own pad and made a note to myself: it was time to do some reading about that. If that Null aversion field was a way to eliminate suspects, we needed to know. While I had the pad out, I wrote “electronic files as motive” and underlined it. Twice. Next time, we wouldn’t forget to consider it.

“I was hoping that one of the rivals would turn out to be useful,” Nick said. “Rumor was he’d had an affair with the dead wife, years ago, and blamed our client when the kid went missing, but the guy, Isaacs, came up clean, and – ”

“What?”

Venec’s voice didn’t rise, and his body didn’t move – in fact, if anything, his tone dropped and he went incredibly still, exactly like the air before a tornado hit.

“Ah, he came up clean?”

“The name.”

“Isaacs. Jerry Isaacs.”

Venec moved then, his hand snatching out to grab the file from in front of poor Nick. “Damn it.”

That simple, heartfelt swearword was more chilling than any invective he might have unleashed, because it brought a storm I hadn’t felt coming, slamming against my walls in a wave of emotion I was pretty sure he hadn’t meant to unleash.

Anger. Annoyance. And... guilt. Overwhelming, agonizing guilt. The hell?

“Boss?” Lou had picked up something, too, while Nick was flicking his gaze from the file in Venec’s hand, up to his face, then back again.

The wave of emotions stopped, his wall slamming back up, and I discovered that my heart was pounding and my body was wobbly, like I’d just dashed up all seven flights of stairs in record time, during a fire alarm.

When Venec spoke again, it was as though nothing had ever harshed his calm. “An interesting development. Possibly of importance, possibly merely coincidence.” He paused to consider his words. “Or possibly not coincidence, but inevitability.”

Whatever he was about to say, I didn’t think we were going to like it.

“I was employed, years ago, by the now-dead wife.

Christine.”

Before PUPI, Venec had been a PUI on his own, that was why he taught us, handled the day-to-day stuff. But he’d been based down in Atlanta, or somewhere, not New York. So how...

Venec’s voice was low and soft, like he was talking to himself. “Christine was referred to me. Her son had gone missing while he was in college, down my way. She wanted me to find him. That was my specialization, finding people who had jumped the track. Usually people who had skipped out on a bond, but runaways, too. She had used that guy’s name, though. Isaacs. That’s why I didn’t recognize this... and Isaacs, he had come with her, I thought he was her husband.”

Okay, the boring break-in case had suddenly gotten a hell of a lot more interesting. I didn’t think that was a good thing.

From the feeling I got off Venec, neither did he.

Venec left them to rechecking their information with a focus on Isaacs – in their business you couldn’t discount someone just because he was dead – and headed for the garage on the East Side where he kept his bike. It was a fast ride uptown from there, up the Henry Hudson and into the Bronx, and the private community of Fieldston. The house looked the same as Ben remembered it. It had been full summer, then, with everything in bloom, under a lazy heat that had felt cool to him, having flown out of the Atlanta airport that morning. He had been there to examine the boy’s room personally and see if there was any clue the parents and the cops had missed.

There hadn’t been.. The room had been utterly, completely normal, for the only child of a well-off family. Ben had wondered, then, if he’d missed anything important. He knew he had, now. He just didn’t know what.

Dismissing old memories, he drove past the house, not even bothering to look for parking on the street; in this neighborhood, that was a good way to get a ticket for not having a resident sticker. His bike took the corner easily, down the street and out of the elite neighborhood, to the more blue-collar areas where a motorcycle parked on the street wouldn’t raise an eyebrow from anyone, or gather notice from an overzealous private security force.

He left his helmet with the bike, running his hands through his hair to smooth it out, and tugged at his hip-length leather coat to make sure it was hanging properly. He might not be as appearance-savvy as Ian, but he knew the importance of looking the part.

He walked back, observing the neighborhood from foot. A wide range of house styles, but they all had the same thing in common: distance from the street, and from each other. Privacy was important to these people... and that meant there wasn’t going to be anyone to confirm or deny the owner’s report other than his own staff, who couldn’t be trusted.

He didn’t fault Sharon or Nick for not second-guessing Wells. They were sharp, but they still had an innate hope that humans would do the right thing. Even Sharon, with her truth-sense, still had hope.

He wasn’t going to beat that out of them. Life would do it soon enough. Life, and this job.

He had found the son a few weeks after his visit, living in a group house in New Orleans. He’d told the boy his mother was looking for him, asked for permission to give her his current address. The boy had resisted, at first, but the longing and loneliness had won out. The boy had been maybe fifteen; healthy and clean. Whatever else might have been going on in that house, he’d loved his mother a great deal, and she had loved him.

The boy had gone back home. According to the dossier Nick and Lou put together, the mother, Christine, died about a year later. A sudden, fast-moving cancer. There was no mention of what had happened to the boy. Probably he had hit the road again, this time for good. If his mother was using another man’s name when she searched for him, odds were there wasn’t much love between the father and anyone else in the house.

According to the report, Wells had taken residence in his summer home, up in the Catskills, while the repairs to the damaged rooms were being made. The housekeeper remained, to oversee things. He had never met the housekeeper on that first visit, if she was even the same woman, so he wasn’t worried about any awkward questions. So far as they knew, he would merely be the supervising investigator, coming out to check on his employees’ work.

Assuming the housekeeper saw him at all. He was going to try to avoid that.

There was a gate at the base of the driveway, but nothing surrounding the lawn itself save low shrubbery. He frowned, trying to remember if the gate had been there back then.

It hadn’t.

So. Something new the grieving father had installed? Or an insurance requirement? Ben touched the metal briefly with one finger, letting himself reach for anything, electrical or magical, that might be waiting within.

Nothing. For all of Wells’s talk of deterrence and alarms, the gates weren’t electrified or current-reinforced. They were simply for show? Odd, but not impossible. People with money did strange things.

He walked past the metal gateposts, moving up the driveway toward the house, when he first heard the noise. A low rumbling, as though someone had started up a lawn mower somewhere, or revved an ancient engine, rough and ragged.

He was halfway up to the house when the sound came again, this time more clearly. Not metallic but organic, wet and angry. And coming closer.

He barely had time to mutter “oh, fuck” before the hellhound was on him.

I’d started to work on restructuring the diorama one more time, after Sharon pointed out – logically, as Sharon was prone to – that we might need it if the guys didn’t get a confession from the suspects. I thought she was way overestimating what the diorrama might be capable of, but then, we didn’t know until we tried, did we?

I knew why I’d resisted: given a choice, I’d rather have been doing almost anything else – setting the base in place again was screwing around with my nerves. The room was still overshielded, so even if the diorama-spell snapped, odds were that I’d be protected from the worst of the blast, but reworking a spell was a tricky thing. Reworking it in the exact same place, using the exact same patterns, meant I was building up even more energy than before, which meant that if anything went wrong, it could snap even harder.

I could smell my own sweat, and the underlay of the lemon-scented cleanser we used on the floor and furniture, and felt my legs cramp from tension, and the pushpins of a headache starting at the back of my skull. Pressure, inside and out.

I suddenly understood why witches and mages in the Old Time went crazy, trying to pull too much magic without understanding it was their own body they were using as the conductor, not knowing how important it was to modulate it, control it. We call that wizzing now, when your body just gets overwhelmed by the pure power you were using, and...

And it didn’t do anyone any good to think about it. Control was how you kept control, and the moment you started to doubt, control cracked.

Like Venec, and the Merge. If I let down my guard...

And with that thought, my control totally went out the window, and the structure shattered into annoying sparks and sparkles.

“Damn it... ” Even nowhere in sight, the man was a distraction.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said, trying to dislodge the sense of failure that was dogging me. “I’m overthinking, second-guessing what I saw. Anything I build now is going to be contaminated.” Probably. It had been too long, anyway, and there was too much else in my head – not to mention too many people in the room. I worked better alone.

Giving up, I let the base disperse, taking back the current into my core, and turned to look more carefully at the other construct at the other end of the table. Sharon, ignoring my outburst, was still building her own diorama, holding it steady with control that was worth admiring. Nick was watching, adding in a comment or suggestion every now and again in a low voice. Theirs wasn’t as detailed as mine; her gleaning skills and memory weren’t as strong, yeah, but also a house was more detailed and complicated than the concrete pier, so there were, inevitably, blank spots.

“Nick tried to fill in the details with what he saw,” Sharon said, looking up and seeing where my gaze had lingered. “But we couldn’t get his gleaning and mine to merge.”

The word sent a shiver down my back, but I didn’t think any of the others noticed. Or if they did, they didn’t say anything. Why would they? The word didn’t mean anything to them other than the dictionary definition.

“We’ll figure that out, eventually,” Nick said with confidence. I wasn’t so sure. As a group, we could do it, but not every Talent could work together one-on one, even when they were friends or relatives. Current sometimes sparked like that. Yeah, we’d done well as a team before, when we tried to glean the emotional evidence from the murder scene in the Reybourne case, and again when we’d seen the confrontation with the ki-rin through Stosser’s awareness, but those times had been under Venec’s control, his lead. We gave up control to him. Sharing, one-to-one, the way that would be required to build something together, rather than follow in a predetermined route? That was a lot more delicate.

I studied the finished diorama, letting my eyes take in details without actively looking for anything, while my mind chased after that thought. Pietr and I could slip in and out of each other’s current-bubble – we’d done it before, to show each other things through mage-sight. But I’d never had to do it with any of the others, didn’t know if I would trust them that much, to let them slide into my core, without feeling the need to control the intrusion, trust them not to look, instinctively, where they hadn’t been invited.

That might be the next exercise for Venec to run us through, when we had some downtime.

Oddly, that thought didn’t give me any flutter of panic, and yet the idea that Venec might be able to do that, slip under my walls at will... Totally different thing.

“These were the only rooms that were disturbed, that we know about. The client didn’t let us wander around, so although I think we saw everything, I can’t swear to it.” Sharon sounded annoyed about that. Considering that Pietr was able to disappear from most peoples’ awareness, it would have been a simple matter for him to go anywhere he wanted, if he had been assigned the initial survey of the scene... except it was mainly a defensive reaction, brought about by stress or fear rather than direct control. I was sort of surprised that the Big Dogs hadn’t been working with him on that; but then again, maybe they had, and nobody mentioned it to me. No reason they would, after all.

My ego took the hit with reasonable grace and a little relief – I didn’t have to know everything, even if I sometimes wanted to – and I leaned in to look more closely at their diorama. It was the first time I’d seen Sharon’s work, and while the detail wasn’t as precise as mine, it was still solidly built. That was harder than it sounded – I was pretty sure neither Nick nor Nifty could have done it as well. Pietr, maybe.

“We think the perp or perps came in through here.” Sharon held her finger over the far side of the diorama, indicating the back patio. “There was a set of French doors that led directly to the main room, where most of the damage was done. The doors were damaged from the inside, so we’d assumed it happened during the search, but the fact that we didn’t see any damage to the locks on the external side doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”

Maybe not. We’d all learned how to recognize the signs of old-fashioned lock-picking, but it was still tough, especially when something with claws had been at it.

“Anyway, from there it was a straight shot down the hall to the office, where the objects were taken. For them to do that much damage in that period of time, they had to have grabbed those items pretty fast, probably before they started the wreckage.”

“They knew what they were looking for,” Nick said. “It wasn’t random.” The client was right about that, at least.

“Or they were just there to cause damage, and those two items caught their eye for no reason we can fathom,” Sharon said, shooting him an ice-blue glare before I could tell him he was making a sloppy assumption. “Or, they couldn’t find what they were looking for.”

“I like my idea better. If they wanted those items we just have to figure out why and we’ll know who. Your theory, we have no way of figuring out who did it.”

Nicky-boy had a point.

“All right.” Sharon relented, a little. “If they did come in looking for those two objects... why? What is it about them? We know they’re not Artifacts – ” Artifacts were known magic-shaped objects, with a history if not provenance. They were supposed to be registered, so everyone knew them and what they could do. It was a slow process, though, since most Artifacts were family heirlooms with a dark history, and not every Talent wanted to fess up – or admit to having access to them, if they even knew what they were. “And the watch is, by the client’s claim, just a watch. But could there be something more to the dagger than memories?”

“Guy who allegedly built it doesn’t have the skill set to do anything more,” Lou said, standing in the doorway.

Damn, she was starting to move as quietly as Pietr!

“So he claims,” I retorted, more annoyed at being startled than by the comment, and Sharon nodded, but looked hesitant.

“You’re thinking something. What?” I tried to mimic the tone Stosser used when he was in high-glamour coaxing mode. It must have worked, because the words spilled out of her, like she wasn’t stopping to consider them first; not normal for her.

“The client is moderate-Null. He can charge the dagger – ” That was how memory-glass worked; it charged off its owner, the low-level hum of current all but the most Null of humans has naturally. “That would be why he kept it close at hand, to make sure it stayed charged. But wouldn’t that make the watch stop?”

A windup pocket watch would survive being near cur rent longer than a digital, but it, too, eventually, would be affected.

“Maybe he wound it every day,” Lou said.

“Still.” Sharon frowned. “Why keep them both together?”

“He didn’t know any better? Whatever he knew about the Cosa, it was probably secondhand information, and most of it wrong,” Nick said. “There wasn’t a damn thing else in that house that had even a come-hither of magic, I’d swear to it.”

“Not even his magical deterrent system?” I asked.

Nick and Sharon both snorted at that. “Worth about as much as a wet paper towel,” Nick said. “Seriously, Sharon’s right, if there was anything current-based in that house, we should have felt it, even after it was gone, especially if it had been there for a long time. There wasn’t anything, not even the trace you’d feel if someone was trying to cover it up. Not even the dagger. Like someone high-res wiped the slate clear.”

“So that means... what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But it bothers me, and anything that bothers me – ”

“Has to be investigated.” We made it a three-way chorus, hitting Venec’s inflection perfectly.

“Well, even if you didn’t get anything from the client, Venec will,” Lou said. I winced. It was true, yeah, but showed a level of tactlessness that made even me flinch. And I still wasn’t happy he’d gone off alone, not that I’d said anything when he signed out. I was neither stupid, nor crazy.

Besides, odds were he’d picked up my mood, anyway, even through tight walls.

“If he doesn’t get himself kicked out, first,” Sharon said, echoing my own thoughts. “He’s going to go in like a bull in a china shop, probably, and piss the client off.”

“Bulls aren’t actually... ” Nick started to say, then saw the look on everyone’s faces, and shut up.

“Let’s do a two-pronged approach, then,” Lou said, coming into the room and sitting down. J would approve of her posture: she sat with her butt all the way back in the chair, shoulders up, legs crossed neatly at the ankle. It made me want to instinctively sit up straight and put both feet flat on the floor.

I stayed exactly the way I was, one leg curled underneath me, my ankle-length skirt hiked up enough that it didn’t catch under the chair’s wheels.

“Two-pronged? Us and Venec?”

“Two possible causations,” Lou said. “One way, this was random violence. Hooligans or someone looking for drug money, or just someone with an urge to screw with rich people for kicks, and sheer bad luck something magical got nicked, bringing us into the equation. Second, that they came in looking for something specific, either the objects taken or something else, and the damage was to cover it up, maybe distract from the owner realizing anything was missing.”

“Except he’d know, immediately,” Sharon said. “Believe me, this is not a guy who lost track of anything. If our perps knew that these objects were important, they’d know enough to know that, too.”

“So... maybe the objects missing were taken because they knew the owner valued them personally, and that was the distraction, even more than the destruction?”

“But it – ” I forgot what I was going to say, as my entire body convulsed, my throat closing up in terror, cutting off air to my lungs. My legs twitched wildly, then my entire body spasmed, knocking me off my chair. I could feel my body thrashing, but all I could focus on was the wave of panic, coming from the fact that I couldn’t breathe, a metal band snapped around my chest, compressing at an alarming rate. My pack mates’ voices were hollow-sounding, like I was at the bottom of a pool of water, listening to them. They were around me, surrounding me, and I had the hazy sensation that they were touching me, but everything hurt so much I overloaded, unable to distinguish what was real and what was in my brain. I wanted to scream, warn them off, but my throat was locked, my voice silenced, and my body out of control, struggling to breathe, to think clearly, to regain control over myself. I was Talent, damn it. I did not lose control.

For that brief flash, the pain cleared enough to hear the voice almost hidden under the pain, wrapped around the pain, driving it toward me, into me.

Pain. Teeth. Can’t breathe... .

And I knew it wasn’t me, the pain wasn’t mine, but Venec’s, and the knowledge was like a solid blow to the gut, clearing my throat enough that I could draw a deep, harsh breath, bringing oxygen back into my lungs, and my brain.

“She’s having a seizure!” Sharon’s voice, cool and in control. “Lou, hold her head steady. Nick, get my medical kit, now!”

“Mmmmokay,” I managed to get out, but since my body was still flailing, and my voice was slurred even to my ears, they ignored me. Sharon tried to stick her fingers in my mouth, I guess to make sure I didn’t swallow my tongue, and I bit her.

“Ow!” She glared down at me, indignant through her worry.

“M’okay,” I managed again. “It’s not me. S’Venec.”

She shook her head, not understanding. “Venec!” I managed again, and some control came back as though I was asserting ownership of my body, despite the waves of pain and fear that were still battering my core. Damn it, what was going on?

I ignored Sharon for a moment, now that she had her fingers out of my mouth, and dived down into my core.

Instead of my normally calm, settled mass of current, I landed in the middle of a molten disaster. Swells of electric-bright orange and neon-green made like a roiling vortex; jagged sparking waves and indigo thunder cracking overhead. It was mine, but it terrified me, and for an eternity of an instant I struggled to maintain control.

*venec!*

The call went unanswered, and the panic swamped me. Impossible. I hadn’t realized how much I depended on that immediate response, hadn’t understood how much – despite my resisting it – the Merge had, well, merged us. I knew, instinctively, that he should be here, within my core, if I only reached out... .

I let down my walls, all my walls, shattering them into crackling dust.

*benjamin!*

*... .here... *

Faint, weak, hurting, but clear. The relief I felt was run through with the pain he was in, the awareness that he needed help, and he needed it now.

Then, through his ears, I heard sirens, and the sound of human voices snapping orders, similar to the ones Sharon was calling over me, and the fear retreated enough for me to get control back.

*hang on* I sent him, hoping he was able to hear me, and came back up out of my core, stilling my limbs and regulating my breathing even as I did so, trying to ignore the pain that was still racking my brain and core, if not my actual body.

“Enough,” I said. “It’s not me.” I hesitated, knowing the next words out of my mouth were going to open a major can of worms, and not really caring, at this point. “It’s Venec. He’s been hurt. He’s being taken to Saint Joe’s.” The information came to me even as I said it, the connection still holding, even though the pain had tamped down to bearable levels. Oh, god, he was in so much pain, why couldn’t they do something for his pain?

And then, blessedly, they did, and my body was mine again.

“How do you... ” Sharon caught herself. “Never mind. Where’s Stosser? Does he know?”

I shook my head. Great, I was going to have to explain this to the boss, too. “Don’t know where he is.” And then, suddenly, I did.

*boss*

The ping came back from Stosser, sharp and worried. We didn’t ping him, usually, he called us, or had Venec do it.

*ben. hospital* Less words or emotions than impressions, filtered through me, straight from Ben. I had no idea how we were doing it – I didn’t think Ben knew, either. It was enough that we could do it.

The connection cut off, but not before I got a sense of understanding, of being en route already, and...

Gratitude.

Someone cut all the strings holding me together, and I collapsed backward, into Nick’s arms, this time with relief. It was being taken care of. Ben was hurt, but he would be okay. Stosser was on the case.

I shuddered, then looked up at the others, steadfastly ignoring the need to go follow, to be there when they brought Ben in. Those weren’t our marching orders; we would only be in the way. Colder still: if I was going to refuse the Merge, I had no right to be there. “Boss’s on it. We’re supposed to get back to work.”

“But... ” Lou looked like she wanted to argue, probably try to send me to bed with a book and a bowl of her sopa verde, which sounded oh my god so tempting, but wasn’t possible. Not right now.

“I’m fine.” I wasn’t, and they all knew that, but they allowed me the fiction, even as I was forcing myself to sit up, unaided. “I’m all right. It was... ”

“It was that thing. Between you and Venec.”

“What?”

I stared at Nick, blinking stupidly.

“Come on, Bonnie, we’re not dumb. That little display a couple of days ago was the most overt, but you two spark at each other every time you’re in the same room, and it’s not just sexual shit, because I’ve seen you when you’re interested in someone and that’s not it. And you’re off your game, have been for months.”

Ow.

“So what’s going on?”

They were all staring at me, expecting an answer. Oh, crap.

I stopped trying to get up off the floor, and just sat up more comfortably, checking each inch of the way that I wasn’t wobbling. I’d underestimated them. How, after more than a year, had I managed to do that?

“We’re not sure what’s going on.” Slight prevarication there: we were sure; we just didn’t know what it meant, or how much longer we could keep it at bay. Venec thought forever... I hadn’t been so sure, and I was even less sure now. Based on what just happened, it was probably already too late to try. “It’s called The Merge. It’s... complicated.” Probably impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t a pup, who hadn’t already gone through the training to work together, that we had.

“Oh, hell. Our current matches. Like puzzle pieces. And the more we’re in proximity, the more it wants to, well, merge.”

That was the bare bones working version, anyway.

“So you were able to hear him, when we couldn’t.” Sharon sounded, inevitably, annoyed. She hated being left out of anything, or one-upped on current-skills. I was too tired to try and correct her.

“No.” Interestingly, it was Lou who got it, first. “It means he couldn’t stop himself from reaching her. And she couldn’t shut him out. Like overrush, but coming from someone else.”

I wasn’t wobbling anymore, but every inch of my body hurt, inside and out. “Yeah. Like that.”

When Nicky looked like he wanted to ask more questions, I glared him off, which wasn’t easy, sitting on the floor like I was. Time enough to avoid questions about what it all actually meant, later. Much, much later.