Tricks of the Trade

nine

“No... ”

“Sir, relax. Everything will be fine.”

“No... ” They were rattling him down out of the ambulance, two young men and an older woman, their faces intent but calm. Normally Venec would have found their competence reassuring. He was fond of competence. But he could feel the thumping of his heart and the hissing of his core, and the taste of the current simmering in the place they were rolling him toward was too dangerous to let him anywhere near it.

“No!” He managed to make his hand reach up and grab the woman’s wrist. “No!”

“Sir, we have to... ” She tried to, gently, pry his hand off her, but desperation gave him additional strength.

“You can’t. Not in there.”

They didn’t understand, wouldn’t listen, trying to place a clear plastic oxygen mask over his face. He could feel the tendrils of his core reaching out, his control almost gone, the blood loss and drain from fighting off the hell-hound making him desperately crave the recharge that current offered... .

“You can’t take me in there!” he told them, his voice muffled, already resigned to what would happen.

“What’s going on?” Another man in white, no, he was wearing pale blue scrubs. A doctor? Ben tried to focus on the man’s face, willing him to understand.

“Dog savaging victim,” one of the paramedics reported. “He’s hallucinating, possibly. Disorderly.”

The hand holding the oxygen mask hesitated, torn between training and the doctor’s interference, and Ben used the distraction to make one more plea. “Don’t let me in there. Too dangerous.” Talent in emergency rooms were bad in the best of times, their pain and panic causing things to go haywire. As shocky and drained as he was... If his core went down too far, he would pull from the nearest source to protect himself. It would be instinctive, unstoppable except by his death, and without meaning to he could pull so much off that their entire system could fail. People could die.

“Hold up,” the doctor said, putting a hand down on the gurney to stop their progress. “Sir?”

Ben tried to focus, again, on his face.

“Sir, are you Talent?”

He almost cried in relief, managing to give a quick, sharp nod of agreement.

The doctor turned to the paramedic trying to affix the oxygen mask and snapped off an order. “Bring him into the overflow room.”

“But – ”

The other male EMT, either quicker on the uptake or more experienced in the whims of doctors, slapped his companion on the arm, hard, and nodded in agreement to the doctor. Ben felt the gurney shift slightly, rolling in a different direction, the pace picking up as they went down another hallway, not into the main emergency room but a smaller, quieter space. The same off-white walls, the same smell of disinfectant and urine and sweat filling the air, the same undertone of concerned voices speaking too softly, and then a cry or a shout breaking the tension and causing a flurry of activity... .

But the seductive, dangerous hum of high-powered machinery was less, as though the room was wrapped in a protective bubble.

You didn’t take a panicked, injured Talent into an emergency room filled with expensive, high-maintenance, highly calibrated electrical life-giving equipment. Not without precautions. Not when other people’s lives depended on those machines.

The doctor leaned in closer, his voice now pitched only for Venec to hear. “Do you need a sedative?” In other words, was he still a danger to anyone in the hospital?

Ben managed to shake his head. The urge, the panic, was fading, removed from the direct lure. Whatever they’d done to block out the current in this space, it was effective.

He might not need the sedative, but he wanted it, badly. The lacerations in his throat and arms were agony, and although the drip in his arm was dulling the pain, it didn’t do anything for the memory of the beast coming for him, the hot stench of its breath on his face, the acrid burn of its drool... .

It hadn’t been a full-on purebred hellhound. If it had been, he would be dead. A crossbreed, or maybe even a quarter-breed, something with mastiff or –

His mind went over the details, trying to determine what the beast was, so that he could find out where the client had gotten hold of one – and why – and then go find the breeder and issue a smack-down for letting a Null have a goddamned hellhound, even one that watered down. It was pointless obsessive work, but it kept his mind occupied and away from what they were doing around him, shifting him onto another surface, drawing white curtains around him, switching out the drip in his arm for another and the doctor was there again, his face covered but his eyes dark gray and focused the way a real professional got when they were in the groove, and Ben was able to let go of the last bit of conscious thought and let them do what needed to be done.

When he had first approached Benjamin with the idea – then only a glimmer born out of frustration and anger – for PUPI, Ian Stosser had thought about things like justice, and consscience, and how to win people over to his cause.

Ben Venec had thought about things like training, licensing, and hospital authorizations. Making his signature on the seventh page of tagged forms, Ian was thankful, once again, that his partner had a grasp on the practicalities he sometimes forgot. Trying to reach Ben’s family in time... wouldn’t have happened.

“Fortunately, he hadn’t lost much blood, and there doesn’t seem to have been any infection in the wounds. From the size of the bite marks, I’d say it was a mastiff or some other large breed. We gave him a rabies shot as a precaution, but... ”

The doctor’s voice trailed off, and he looked at Stosser with a steady gaze. He was young, maybe barely out of residency, but Ian had a suspicion that he’d ended up in the E.R. not by chance but choice. Ex-military, maybe. Calm in crisis and able to think no matter what the shift threw at him. Not a Talent, but he knew what he was about – and had recognized what Ben was. Ian owed him.

“Hellhound.”

The doctor’s eyes went a little wider, but he only nodded. “So rabies probably not an issue, but better safe than really sorry. It will be taken care of?”

“It has already been dealt with.”

You didn’t send cops or ASPCA workers in after a hellhound, not even a half-breed. The moment Bonnie had shown him what had happened, Ian had put the call in to the local Council, who had sent a team in to take down the animal. They had found it, bleeding, in a corner of the client’s property, and taken it in.

Ian regretted the inevitable ending to this story. It wasn’t the hound’s fault; crossbred and properly trained by someone who knew what they were doing, a hellhound was an amazing creature. Smart, loyal, fierce... and deadly without the proper ownership and continued handling. The client was damned lucky the animal hadn’t turned on him, or one of his staff – if Ben hadn’t shown up, and been strong enough to beat it back with current, someone would have died, eventually.

Ian was willing to bet that the client had been told the beast would be a good guard dog, prevent anyone who had come the first time from returning. Same idiot who had sold him the “magic-proofing” alarm system in the first place, probably. If the Council didn’t take care of that, too, Ian and Ben would pay the fellow a visit when this was all over, and explain to him that fleecing Nulls was one thing, but endangering them – and anyone else in the damned vicinity – was another entirely.

“Boss.”

He wasn’t at all surprised to hear Torres’s voice behind him. In fact, now that he thought about it, he was surprised she hadn’t been at the hospital when he arrived. Whatever was going on between the two of them, it clearly did not allow for indifference.

And that was another thing he was going to look into, now. Ben owed his life to her reaction – but it was clearly something that involved the agency, not just their personal lives. And that meant he, Ian, had to know what the hell was going on.

“Torres. Where’s the rest of the pack?”

“Working.” She looked past his shoulder once, briefly, then her gaze came back to him. “I drew the short stick, to brief you.”

He didn’t believe that for a minute. From the look on her face, she didn’t expect him to, either. He let it pass. Now was not the time.

“You know why Ben was there,” she asked, “the connection between him and the client?”

He did not. “Tell me.”

I updated Stosser on everything that had happened, standing there in the hallway, hospital staff and patients going past us as though we were nothing more than furniture. Part of my brain wondered at that: normally Stosser commands at least a first look from everyone in the vicinity, his natural charisma is just that damn impressive. But today, he had the mute button taped down, or something.

“There was no reason for the client to connect the P.I. his wife hired, with us,” Stosser said, when I was finished. “Ben was acting in a purely Null capacity, then. I don’t see why he thought there might be anything suspicious about the connection now.”

“Venec thinks there’s something suspicious about everything.”

That almost got a laugh out of the boss, mainly because it was true. Venec wasn’t cynical, or jaded, just really wary.

“I think... ” I hesitated, not because I wasn’t certain, but because I wasn’t sure how to tell a Big Dog what I thought without him asking why I thought that.

“You think, or Ben thinks? And does he know that you know what he thinks?”

Ow. I guess the boss could do direct as well as he did politically indirect, yeah.

“It’s called the Merge,” I said, just as blunt. “You ever hear of it?”

Stosser blinked, as surprised by my counter serve as I was, and then shook his head no.

“Me, neither. It’s rare, and stupid, and it boils down to we’re stuck with each other. Current-wise, I mean.” I should have given him more detail than I’d given the rest of the team, probably, but I wasn’t in the mood for details, and if he was so damn brilliant, he could figure it out.

“Your current... merges.” He wasn’t asking for confirmation; I’d been right, and his scary-brilliant brain had already leapfrogged over the basics and was going into the possibilities. And, knowing the boss, his possibilities had nothing to do with the personal lives or preferences of either of us, but what it would mean for PUPI.

Considering the sideways looks and uncomfortable body language I’d left behind in the office, I actually preferred Stosser’s reaction.

“Can you hear him now?” he asked.

“No. They have him drugged too deeply.” I could feel him, this close, and with his walls down under the drugs’ influence; restless fingers fluttering at the edge of my awareness. If I dipped in, I knew I’d be inside his morphine-dreams. So I stayed out.

“All right. There’s nothing we can do here – they’ll keep him drugged for a few more hours, and he won’t welcome either of us hovering. Come on.”

“Where?” But I knew, even as I followed him. The client had put Ian Stosser’s best friend and partner in the hospital. The boss was going to take a direct hand in the investigation, now.

Part of me wanted to stay in the hospital, lurking in the god-awful waiting room, to be there when Venec woke up, and to hell with what he would or wouldn’t welcome. But I went with Stosser. Boss was brilliant, and way more high-res than the rest of the office put together... but he had no damned idea what to do on a crime scene, and would probably do more harm than good, if unsupervised.

Besides. I’d know the instant Ben woke up.

We exited the hospital through the main door, and I blinked in the sunlight, relaxing a little now that we were out of direct surround of all that technology.

I figured that we would take a cab back to the site, because there was no way Ian Stosser used mass transit, but I hadn’t taken into account the fact that the high-res do things different than us peons. The only warning I got was his hand coming down on my shoulder, and the quick tingle of current, and we’d Translocated.

Most people knew better than to Transloc blind, out of line-of-sight, without prepping the destination, if it wasn’t an emergency. Ian Stosser was not most people. I guess he was arrogant enough to assume everyone would get the hell out of his way, somehow.

Apparently he was right, because we hit the street without so much as a bump or stare, mainly because, unlike the crowded avenue outside the hospital, there was nobody on this residential street to bump or stare.

The house looked pretty much exactly the way Sharon had re-created it in the diorama, at least from the street. Ian landed us just inside the shrubbery surround, on the well-trimmed, if muddy lawn. I took two steps toward the house, and almost fell to my knees.

The grass wasn’t muddy. It was bloody. Ben’s blood. I knew it without even looking, the way the images flooded my brain like my own memories. A wave of woozy nausea hit me, like it was my own blood there, flushed from tears in my own flesh. Oh, god. I’d almost lost him. Oh, god.

“Keep moving.”

It was an order, not a suggestion, and my feet kept moving, carrying me forward onto dryer ground. The memory remained, but its hold on me faded enough that I no longer felt it in my own flesh.

I didn’t think Stosser noticed anything except his own thoughts. I was wrong. “This Merge-thing. It can be a problem, too.”

“Yeah.” Boss had that right, and then some.

We were met at the door by the housekeeper. She seemed a little less together than Sharon and Nick had described; I guess a break-in, however damaging, was easier to deal with than a guy almost dying on your front lawn.

“Mr. Wells is not home... ”

“We’re not here to see him,” Stosser said, walking past her as though she’d invited us in. “I want to see the room where the missing objects were kept.”

She looked at me, and I gave her my best “I’m just the flunky” look. “Best to give the man what he’s asking for,” I suggested. “He’s kind of cranky about one of his people almost being puppy chow.” The flippancy cost me, but it worked. Her lips tightened, but she led us to the office.

We passed by the library, which according to Sharon and Nick was the room that had gotten the most damage, first. Peeking in, I saw that it was covered with sheets, the kind you use when you put a house up for the season, not the kind workers use, so I figured they hadn’t gotten the insurance evaluation yet. No matter how rich you were, insurance companies made you wait, I guessed.

The office where m’lady chatelaine brought us was uncovered; most of the damaged furniture had obviously been cleared away, but the space otherwise untouched. If Wells was anything like J in his desk management, the staff was afraid to do anything in here without his express orders.

“The missing objects were kept here.”

She stood in the doorway and didn’t offer any more information. I wasn’t sure if she was being recalcitrant, or she just honestly didn’t know anything more. In my experience among J’s friends and colleagues, housekeepers knew everydamnthing, especially the stuff they weren’t supposed to know, so I was betting on recalcitrant. She was possessive of her boss’s privacy, and felt that we were just as bad as the goons who’d broken in originally; maybe even worse, because we hadn’t already made the problem go away.

Stosser stepped into the room, and I could swear, even from behind him, I could see his nose twitch.

While he was doing whatever the hell he was doing, I surveyed the room from the doorway, ignoring the housekeeper, who sniffed and retreated, apparently not worried that we would sticky-finger anything left behind.

Deciding I wasn’t going to discover anything standing there, I leaned against the doorway, crossed my arms over my chest, and watched the boss do his thing.

“Are you looking for something in particular, or just sniffing in general?” I wasn’t being snarky; the only way to learn, Venec constantly reminded us, was to ask when we didn’t know something. And I had no damn idea what he was doing, or why we were here.

Well, no, I knew why we were here. We were here because Ben was in the hospital, and Ian Stosser was angry, and worried, and needed to do something, even if there wasn’t anything to do. Also, it kept my thoughts off Venec, away from the bite marks I could still feel ghosting on my skin. The hellhound had, obviously, been dealt with, and it wasn’t illegal as such to own or hire one, so we couldn’t do anything about the owner in that regard... especially since Venec had, in some respects, been trespassing... .

My brain was starting to ache, so I shut down that line of thought and waited for Ian to answer me.

“There was something about those objects.”

“Yeah,” I said, because he seemed to be waiting for a response, even without looking at me. His hair was pulled back and tied at the base of his neck, but even as I watched, the strands quivered, as though touched by a wind nobody else could feel. Current-use rising from his core, so subtle and powerful you couldn’t sense it any other way.

Sometimes, the boss scared the hell out of me.

“And what is that something?” I asked, when he didn’t offer anything more.

“If we knew, we’d know why someone would take it, and then we’d know who.”

“Well, yes.” I didn’t even think the “duh” because he’d probably pick it up and neither of us needed that right now.

He was waiting for something else from me. It was like being in fifth grade and having a surprise pop quiz first thing in the morning, while you were still trying to wake up and remember what subject you were in.

“And... ?” I gave up, baring my throat, figuratively, in submission.

Stosser sighed. “And that is exactly what the client doesn’t want us to know.”

I blinked. “How the hell... ” I started to ask, but Stosser was already moving on farther into the room, inspecting the floorboards with the air of someone who has answered all the questions he intends to acknowledge.

Working with a genius? Not all that it’s cracked up to be.

I stood and watched him work – or whatever it was he was doing, and then retraced my steps, back to the main room, where Nick and Sharon thought the perps had come in. There were the French doors that had been boarded up with plywood. It was a decent job, and I left it in place – I had no desire to bring the wrath of the housekeeper down on me. They’d already checked for magic-trace on all the entrances, I knew that from the report, and ditto the physical lock on the other side, but it was possible – not probable, but possible – that they’d missed something.

Stepping back until I was in the middle of the room, more or less, I slipped into fugue-state with an ease that I wouldn’t have thought possible even six months ago, when I’d still needed to do the counting-backward thing. I didn’t call up a spell, or even consciously touch my current the way I normally do, just opened my eyes and looked at the room.

Mage-sight is sort of like viewing things, not underwater, exactly, but close enough. You can “see” normally but it’s wavery and blurred, and there’s current flickering everywhere, dipping and flaring with its own natural energy, influenced by and influencing everything around it. Cantrips or spells can focus it, but then you risk missing something that your cantrip didn’t take into account.

Sharon and Nick were right: the only major source of current in the room right then was me, and I knew how to identify and tune out my own signature. That left the normal dark-hued streaks in the walls and floors – current ran alongside electricity, which meant that every house had at least some, hanging with the everyday wiring that Nulls took for granted. Normally it was baby-level, tiny threads that wouldn’t give you much of a jolt at all. But the threads seemed thicker here, somehow. How had they missed that? Was the room specially wired, maybe the “anti-magic” system the client had been sold? Or...

I moved closer to the wall without thinking, lifting my hand to summon the current to me. If it had been installed by a Talent, their signature might still be lingering... .

What I got was the magic equivalent of a spluttering raspberry, and the sense of something skittering away. The shock was enough to kick me out of fugue-state, embarrassingly enough.

“What the hell?”

Like that, Stosser was in the room with me. I didn’t know how the hell he moved that fast – there had been no inrush to indicate he’d Transloc’d; he must already have been heading down the hallway when he heard me.

“What?”

I was staring at the wall, my shock fading into annoyance at having been caught off guard. “There was something... in the current.”

Rather than looking worried, the boss actually laughed, although his eyes were still shadowed, and his body language more tense than amused. “Tiny, scurrying, giving an impression of a lot of eyes and not much sense?”

That was it, exactly. “What... ?”

“Elementals.”

“Oh.” I felt stupid. Of course. Elementals were... well, creatures, I guess, that lived within the current-stream. They weren’t really alive, as such, or maybe they were, in some way nobody could quite explain, but they had a certain crude awareness. Usually, unless they were grouped together, you wouldn’t even notice them. What I had sensed was definitely a flock. Like pigeons, fluttering and scattering.

“I wonder if that’s what they were using as the alarm system,” Stosser said. “If so, it was a failure, of course. Anyone with a lick of current could calm them down, even assuming you could train them to react and sound an alarm.”

“You really think elementals could remember anything that long?”

One narrow red eyebrow rose over a mocking gaze as he turned to look at me. “It doesn’t have to work,” he said. “Whoever’s selling the alleged security system only has to talk it up as though it does. Not like a Null would know any better.”

Boss was feeling better, if he was being snarky. Didn’t mean he was wrong, though.

“Pity we can’t glean their memories,” I said. I parsed that thought, then shook my head. Too scattered, anything I picked up would be fragmented at best. Stosser might be high-res enough to hold them still long enough to get something significant, but he didn’t have a clue how to glean. He was management, not tech. I supposed we could teach him... .

Still in mage-sight, I watched him prowl around the room, lifting sheets and poking under furniture without a clue where he was stepping or how many delicate tangles of remnant signature he might have been wrecking with the unmoderated swirl of his own core, and shuddered. No. Even now, with the scene already processed, without any trace to pick up, he was doing damage. The thought of him actually trying to work a hot scene...

I squinted, my thoughts interrupted by the glint or glimmer of something. “Boss? Freeze.”

Stosser hesitated, his hand halfway to the cloth covering a sofa, and started to turn back toward me.

“Freeze!” I said, far more sharply. “Tamp down your core.”

It was newbie instruction, the kind of thing you’d tell a first-year mentoree, and I could see the expressions on his face range from shock to frustration to acceptance. Even as he gained control over his core, the continual sparks and static we had gotten used to around him smoothing into a quieter pool of energy.

“What?”

I ignored him, now that he was no longer interfering with my ability to follow the spike of current.

Tracking trace was a delicate thing. You have to look and not-look at the same time, as though you were trying to spot the picture-within-a-picture, but do it with your mage-sight, which meant that you were open to every other spike of current within range, even the stuff you couldn’t see directly. Like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, while roller-skating. Backward.

“There’s something in the room. Something we missed.” “We” meaning Sharon and Nick, anyway. “Hang on, I’m trying to get a read on it... there.” I moved past him, going to the far wall, where the French doors had been boarded up.

“Signature?”

“No. Wait. I don’t know.” It was current, yes; shaped, which meant that someone had been carrying it around for a while, the way you did when you took it into your core, but it didn’t feel like a signature. This was... smudgy, for lack of a better term. Current was hot neon, sharp and sparkly, not smudged. It reminded me, a little, of the dark current we’d found by the memorial sites during the ki-rin case; current that had been touched by the darkest kind of hatred, that verged on madness, but even that darkness had been sharp and neon-bright. This was smooth and... not so much dark as totally without light.

“I don’t know what this is,” I said, almost to myself. Almost, but not quite. Without thinking, without planning, I reached out with a tendril of current, not toward the smudge, but away, toward my sense of Venec...

And found myself met by a different kind of smudginess: he was unconscious, still drugged into a motionless sleep by the painkillers.

“Damn.”

“Torres?”

Stosser was standing where I’d left him, his core still quiet, but his expression did not bode well for that lasting much longer. Big Dog was not the patient sort, unless he was the one with the plan.

“I need to try to glean this,” I told him. “And then I’m going to need you to get me back to the office without disturbing it. Okay?”

We’d been practicing flinging – the skill of throwing magical evidence from one person to another – but it wasn’t easy or precise, and with this, something I didn’t know, didn’t understand... better to keep it under wraps, if I could. Who the hell knew what flinging it could wake up.

The fact that I was thinking about current-trace like a live thing was disturbing. I blamed it on being surprised by the elementals a few minutes ago. That didn’t change my feeling that I was taking a risk in gleaning this to begin with. No need to mention that, though. Stosser cared about results, not risks, and Venec...

Ben was out of commission. He could yell at me later.

“Ready when you give the word, boss,” Stosser said, and for once there was neither arrogance nor irony in his voice. Unfortunately, I was too focused on what I was about to do to really enjoy the moment.

Normally, gleaning a scrap of current is the magical equivalent of removing a splinter from your own thumb – you need to be careful, but it’s not particularly difficult. This was like trying to do that in the dark, with a splinter that had a tendency to shimmer and wiggle out of your grip the moment you thought you had it. Like a splinter made of Jell-O.

“Relax.” Stosser’s voice, but there was an echo of Venec in it, too. “Whatever you’re trying to do, you’re focusing too hard. Let go of your control a little.”

“What?” That made no sense. Control was what let us –

“Trust me. Let go a little, relax, and try again.”

Ian Stosser didn’t know crap about fieldwork, or the details of forensic magic, but he knew more about the elevated theoretical applications of current than I’d ever understand even if I lived to a hundred. I took a shallow breath and, on the exhale, let my control ease just a fraction.

The fragment of current slowed, as though it were trapped in molasses. I unrolled several strands of my own current, stretching them wide and ruffling them so that they were static-sticky, then rolled the fragment up inside them, containing it best I could.

“Now,” I told Stosser, keeping my entire awareness on that fragment, maintaining the isolation between it and me so intently, I was barely aware when Stosser’s current rolled over me the same way I’d rolled the fragment, and took us home.

Our arrival made a bit of a flutter in the office, and the rest of the team trailed after us, not asking questions – quelled by Stosser’s glare, or my own tense aura, I don’t know – but lining up against the wall quietly, watching while I did the hard work.

Scraping the trace out of my holding-space was easier than lifting it, interestingly. It was almost as though it didn’t want to stay within the container-of-me. I would have been insulted, if I hadn’t been so relieved.

“Y’know, I’ve scraped up a lot of trace in the past year,” I said. “I’ve poked into a lot of weird places, and talked to a lot of crazy people.”

There was a muffled almost-laugh from the wall-hangers. Nick, I thought.

“And?” Stosser was standing behind me, lurking like a bored teacher making sure nobody used the wrong pencil, only a lot more intent.

“And that’s weird shit.”

Stosser had guided me into the smallest conference room, which also happened to be the one without windows, and the one with the best warding on it. Normally we used wardings to make sure that gleanings and signatures remained uncontaminated, like putting something between glass slides. Here, with this? I was thinking that the warding was to keep the trace from getting out. I finished what I was doing, and stepped back, shaking my arms out, trying to release the tension that had crept in.

“Although I would normally resist that sort of vague description,” Stosser said, stepping forward to put his seal on the current-jar, overlaying my own closure in a notable mark of paranoia, “in this instance, I think it’s appropriate.”

The seal on the current-jar shimmered, then went dormant, but I could still feel it, holding steady. I could also feel the scrapings contained inside, dark and still but not inert, not by a long shot. Stosser looked at it, then shook his head. “I don’t think we should linger here. Everyone, out.”

I was all too glad to leave the room, and Lou and Nifty were moving even faster than me, but I noted that Sharon and Nick were both more reluctant. Figured. Sharon was more stubborn than the rest of us put together, and Nick had absolutely no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. Nicky was a current-hacker, one of the rarest of all skill sets, and I was beginning to think they were rare not because the skill was unusual, but because they got themselves overrushed or crispy-killed at a faster-than-normal rate.

Instead of going into the larger room next door, Stosser herded us down to the break room, as far away as you could get without actually leaving the office. Nobody questioned it, if they even realized what he was doing. We settled in as though it was totally normal for Stosser to hold a meeting here, Nifty taking his usual armchair, me and Nick and Sharon on one sofa, Lou and Pietr pulling up the ottoman and perching on that, and Stosser pacing between. The absence of Venec was like a real, palpable hole in the room. For me, anyway. I didn’t know if anyone else felt it. Nobody had mentioned him; either they’d gotten an update already, or they were afraid to ask.

I checked, unable to stop myself. Still in morphine-land.

We all watched Stosser pace back and forth a few times, then I rested my head against the back of the sofa, and closed my eyes. Now that I’d actually stopped, or at least paused, I was so very, very tired. And my feet hurt. But I was too tired to bend down and take off my boots.

“Hey, Nick,” I said.

“No.”

“C’mon, Nick... ”

“Why don’t you wear something you can just slip off, like normal people?”

Because J never let me wear sneakers except when I was going to the gym, and I wasn’t a dress-pump kind of girl, normally. But it was too much effort to say all that, so I just whined a little.

Nick ignored me.

“So, whatever Bonnie found and brought back. What is it?” A year ago, Sharon would have been all bristling and annoyed that I’d found something she’d missed. Now, she just sounded curious.

I could hear Stosser pause in his pacing, off to my left. “Easier to say what it isn’t.”

“Okay.” Lou took the straight role willingly. “What isn’t it?”

“It’s not human,” Sharon said flatly. “We’re all agreed on that?”

Quick nods around the room. Everyone had gotten a chance to feel what I’d been unloading. We all were agreed.

“Fatae, then. We suspected that already, from the amount of damage that was done, and the claw marks. This had to come from that, right?” Sharon continued.

There was a silence, the kind that comes when everyone’s waiting for someone else to say something first, and nobody does.

“Right?” Nick said, hesitantly.

“It has to be,” Nifty agreed.

“There are a lot of different fatae breeds that have claws that could manage the damage done,” Lou said. “I’ve barely been able to start a file on the known ones, here in the city. There are a whole bunch who are singular, or isolated, but it has to be a fatae.”

“It has to be fatae,” I agreed, sealing it superstitiously with my thirding, or fourthing, or whatever we were up to. It had to be. Because if it wasn’t...

Then it was something else.

There was a little quiet, after all that, and then the arguing began. We were all determined that it wasn’t human, and therefore it had to be fatae, but nobody could come up with a suggestion as to what breed, even with Lou’s beautifully indexed database, and Stosser’s additional knowledge.

“What about a... ” Nifty squinted at the name on the page, then shifted the paper so we could all see. “One of those? Serious claws.”

“They’re arctic-based?”

“Oh.” Nifty scowled and turned the page.

“You think it could have been a demon?” I’d only ever seen one, that I knew about – the courier known as PB – but its claws had been scary-looking, even if the demon itself was too short to do this kind of damage. They came in all sizes, though... .

“I would have known if it were demon,” Stosser said, and that was that.

The discussion went on. And on. And if we were working so hard to keep from worrying about Venec, then nobody said anything.

Or maybe it was just me.

Thanks to Stosser leading us, and not Venec, we worked right through dinner, and probably would have gone all night if Stosser hadn’t gotten pinged by someone, and told us all to take a break until morning.

“And Ben’s still out cold,” he added, carefully not looking at me, “so stop worrying.”

What, us, worry? But, yeah, there was no point checking in; they’d let us know if anything changed, even if I somehow missed it.

At that point, I was running on fumes and muscle memory. By the time I got home it was nearly 10:00 p.m. and I was wiped out, physically, emotionally, and magically. Even the thought of climbing the stairs to my apartment was enough to make me cry, but there was no way in hell I had the energy to Translocate. If I’d been halfway thinking, I would have had someone Transloc me from the office to my bed. God, the commute would be so much easier if we could do that. Why didn’t we do that?

Proof that I was exhausted: I knew damn well why we didn’t. And it had nothing to do with wasted current or overextending ourselves, of becoming too dependent on magic, or any of the other reasons our mentors hammered into us from the time of our first lesson. It wasn’t even because Translocation was damned difficult to do properly. It was because, of all the things that Talent could do, all the things that set us apart, Translocation was one of the few that Nulls couldn’t dismiss as a trick of their eye, or a misunderstanding, or some other rational non-magical explanation. And it hadn’t been that long ago, by anyone’s measure, that the cry of “witch” was more than a Halloween greeting.

Talent wasn’t a genetic thing, exactly, but it did gallop in some families, and there wasn’t an American Talent who hadn’t gotten stories of the Burning Times hammered into their head about the same time they started to get stupid with what they’d learned. Salem was the most publicized, but it wasn’t close to the worst.

I sighed, and resigned myself to having to sludge up the stairs like a regular Jane, when there was a commotion, and I looked up to see lights flickering brightly from...

Hey. My apartment. What the hell?

I had the front door opened, the inner security door opened, and was up the stairs to my landing before I was aware I’d taken my keys out of my coat pocket. It might even have been faster than Translocating.

However fast I was, though, the super was faster. He was standing outside my door, glaring at me like it was all my fault. Clearly he had been waiting for me.

“What the hell’s been going on?” he greeted me. “All day, all night, noises and thumps, and now you’re leaving untended flames when you’re out? And locking the door so I can’t get in? I was about to call the fire department, have them bust down the door.”

I stared at him, totally lost. “I haven’t been home all day,” I said. “I’ve been at work.”

“This has been going on too long,” he said. “I’m tired of hearing the complaints about your parties which were bad enough, but this... ”

I moved past him, putting my keys into the lock, in tent on proving him wrong, that I hadn’t left any flames burning, tended or otherwise. At the same time, the memory of the flickering lights in my window taunted me. What the hell?

I opened the door – and it opened easily, with the standard key he had, too – into a reassuring darkness. Reaching out to flip the light switch, so I could see the super’s face when I told him off, was a mistake, though. The entire apartment was a disaster, furniture shoved utterly out of place, the mattress down on the floor, the sheets piled up in the center of the room like a giant nest.

And my mosaic, my beautiful, delicate, shimmering rainbow glass mosaic, was in a hundred thousand pieces on the floor.

It was too much, on top of the worry about Venec, and the sheer exhaustion of everything else. I almost cried.

“Enough,” the super said, not seeming to care that whatever flames we’d both seen were not only gone, but were never there. “You seemed like a nice kid, but this is enough. There are too many complaints already, this is just the last straw. Building management’s got cause to cancel your lease, for this.”

I heard him, but it barely registered, staring at the disaster of my once-beautiful apartment. The utter chaos...

Chaos. Causing trouble.

My eyes narrowed, even as my brain started to work again. The Roblin. It had to be. Damn it, what did I ever do to that damned imp?