Tricks of the Trade

ten

I suppose I should have, as per orders, reported in immediately. The thought, though, of facing everyone, of dealing with more questions and what-ifs... it was too much. It was all just too much and I needed the quiet to just not-think, for once.

Also, if The Roblin was following me, targeting me, I wanted to be somewhere well-warded to even discuss it.

So instead I spent the rest of the night cleaning up the shards of the mosaic, and putting things back to order, best I could. Current was surprisingly crap at moving physical objects – you needed more energy than it took to move it physically – and I didn’t want to risk even more pissed-off complaints from my neighbors, so mostly I left the heavy stuff where it was for now, and focused on getting my mattress and sheets back up onto the loft platform where they were supposed to be. I’d hoped that the activity would wear me out enough so that I’d be able to fall asleep and not think or dream about either Venec or the weird trace we’d found or The Roblin, sniffing at my heels.

No such luck. The adrenaline rush finally wore off, but my brain was way too revved up to shut down enough to sleep. Unfortunately, it was also too exhausted to do any real thinking. So I ended up sitting on the off-skew sofa, wrapped in a blanket and clutching a mug of cocoa heavily dosed with peppermint schnapps, trying very very hard not to reach out to the sense of Benjamin Venec, in a hospital bed several miles to the north. My trying not to do something, though, apparently had the exact opposite effect, because there was a sliver into my awareness, as though responding to a ping I hadn’t sent.

*sleep?*

*yes, baby* I responded without thinking. *sleep*

Benjamin Venec, drugged to the gills, had a soft, almost little boy feel to his thoughts, and I wasn’t strong enough to resist the urge to brush against it, the emotional equivalent to patting someone’s hair until they settled down again. I needed the comfort, and he wasn’t going to remember anything, come morning and sobriety.

I hoped.

*something wrong*

Damn. He was more alert than I thought. There was an instant when I was going to lie to him, and the instant passed. Drugged or not, this was Venec, and this was me. We’d never lied to each other, not before, not in all the crap that we’d already been through, and sure as hell not now.

*case stuff * True enough, if I counted The Roblin as a case. *worried about you* Also true. It wasn’t words I sent him, any more than he was forming them in his drug-sleepy mind. It was... like water flowing from one container to another, if one was colored blue and the other gold. If that made any sense, which it did to me.

*i’ll sleep if you will*

And because I never lied to him, the moment I got his water-flow assent, I put the mug down on the table, snuggled myself into the blanket, and went to sleep.

If I dreamed anything, I didn’t remember it in the morning.

The next morning guilt and responsibility trumped my disinclination to have anyone poking at my personal life, and I geared myself to tell all. Well, mostly all.

For once, though, Nick and I were the only ones in the office at 8:00 a.m. He took one look at my face, and handed me a doughnut, fresh out of the box.

We had made a serious dent in the box before I finished.

“Sounds like The Roblin, yeah,” Nick said. “I mean, not that I’d know, particularly, but the circumstances had way too much going on for it to be sheer coincidence. How come you got so lucky, Dandelion?”

“No damned idea. First it stalks, and then it splats my apartment, and what’s next? Is it going to chase me across the city, hound me for the rest of my life?” On waking up I’d found a note from the super under my door, confirming that they were going to claim I was in violation of my lease for noise issues. That hadn’t helped my mood any, either.

All right, I’d taken the apartment out of a panic to get out of the hotel I’d been staying in – on J’s dime – and now that I’d been working, and didn’t expect to be fired, probably... I could afford something a little nicer, in a better part of town. But still, it was a pain and a hassle.

On the third hand, this would give me a reason to get in touch with The Wren again, like Stosser had strongly suggested would be a good idea. “Hi, just checking in to see if there’s an apartment coming open in the building, like we’d talked about... ” That had been an awesome building, in a perfect location – okay, I wouldn’t be able to walk to work on nice days anymore, and the commute would take longer, but it would be a straight shot up the 1... .

“I wonder if anyone else had trouble last night. Would explain why everyone’s late. Hey, you think The Roblin had anything to do with Venec... ”

“No.” That came out more sharply than I intended, but the thought unnerved me too much to consider. Mischief, all right. But that attack had nearly been fatal.

“How much damage could a mischief imp do, assuming a mischief imp did do damage?” Nick stumbled over the last few words, and pursed his lips as though trying to limber them up. He looked like a demented goldfish.

“What damage did it do?”

Stosser, with Sharon in tow, came in through the front door. The almost-frantic Ian Stosser of yesterday had been wiped clean, leaving behind the usual smooth-faced, dapper-dressed Big Dog, his hair slicked back and his nicely tailored Euro-style suit hanging without a wrinkle. Half the time he dressed like a color-blind granola-cruncher, and the other half he could have posed for GQ. I’d learned to read Stosser-sign, a little: granola was his downtime, when he was trying to be Just Another Guy. He really wasn’t very good at it, and it kind of, honestly, freaked me out a little. Seeing him in a suit was like having the sun rise on the proper side of the city: you didn’t know what kind of day it would be, but at least it wasn’t starting with a pre-apocalyptic warning.

“We think The Roblin made its first real move last night,” I said, before Nick could tell my story. I gave them a quick rundown, ending, “Something tore up my place – moved furniture, loudly, tossed my linen closet, broke a piece of glass-art – ” damn it, I was still weepy about that “ – and made everyone in the building believe that there were open flames in my apartment. I’m just lucky I got home when I did, or they would have called the fire department and maybe hacked down my door to get in.”

Which might have been funny, seeing my super trying to explain to the fire department... but no, thanks.

“You saw The Roblin?” Stosser went on alert.

“No.” Seriously? I would have told him that, instead of sitting here bitching. “The place was empty when I got there. The windows were all locked, the door secured... . I guess imps can Translocate.”

“Or walk through walls.”

“Comforting thought, that,” Sharon said dryly. “So it’s gone from following you to fucking with you. Why you?”

“It was here.”

“What?” We all looked at Stosser at that revelation.

“A few nights ago. I have an alarm set up, similar to the spell Ben has on the front door that recognizes us, and challenges anyone it doesn’t recognize. It went off, but by the time I got here – twenty minutes, tops – the place was empty. And also a mess. Whoever it was, it had been going through our personnel files. Based on the timing of it first stalking Torres, and the tossing of her place, I think that it is a reasonable assumption that it was The Roblin, looking for... whatever it was looking for. Your address, one supposes.”

“Great. So flattered.” What the hell made me such irresistible imp-bait?

Stosser looked at the other two. “Have either of you had anything odd happen? Not just the general weirdness we’ve been seeing, anything out of the usual at all?”

Sharon shook her head, but Nick looked thoughtful. “Maybe. I didn’t think anything of it, or, at least, I figured it was just under the ‘shit happens’ category. But yesterday morning I was tweaking my netbook – ” And that still freaked me out, that Nick could use a personal computer. Most of us, a heavily warded desktop was the best we could do, and even then we had to be careful, but the rules were different for current-hackers. “ – And something surged.”

“Surged.” Ian had a look on his face that meant he knew what Nick was talking about. “You’re all right?”

“Yeah, I was more surprised than anything else.”

“You should have told me.”

“Yah, well, I was going to mention it to Venec, and... ” Nick’s voice trailed off. “How is he, anyway?”

And, damn it, he looked at me when he asked that, not Stosser. Damn it... I gave back a blank face like I didn’t know anything. Which I didn’t, other than the fact that I hadn’t gotten any Merge-inspired alarms, so he was probably doing fine and either still sedated or had his walls up tight.

“They are releasing him later this morning,” Stosser said. “Knowing Ben, he’ll be here as soon as he finds his clothing and hails a cab.”

“You let him check out alone?” Sharon turned on Stosser, probably as pissed as she got. Sharon was a prima donna and a pain in the neck, but she was also in a lot of ways the mom of the group, her and Pietr, and apparently moms did not let people check out of hospitals alone.

“If I’d shown up, I would have told him to go home, not come here, and we would have gotten into an argument,” Stosser said calmly. “This way, we avoid the fight, which I would have lost, anyway.”

When the hell did Stosser develop a sense of humor? He wasn’t wrong, though. That would have been Ben all over.

Big Dog turned to me, then. “Your apartment’s okay?”

“For now,” I said. I really didn’t want to get into the details, not until I had a new place lined up.

“All right. Nick, I want you to work with the netbook, here, where we’re properly warded, so we can determine if it’s infested.”

“Infected,” Nick said, correcting his terminology.

Boss scowled at him. “With a mischief imp, infested might be the better word. Go. Sharon, when Lou and Pietr get here, do a full sweep of the office, and double the wardings. And then do the same in everyone’s apartments. I don’t like this, not at all.”

“And me, boss?” Be damned if I was going to sit here while everyone else got to work.

Ian turned and looked at me. “You stay here until Venec arrives. Lawrence and Cholis came back with new information on the body dump case, and I want you three to close it today. If we’re being targeted by a mischief imp as powerful as the Old Man thinks, I don’t want any dangling threads left it can possibly yank.”

Given our marching orders, we marched. Or Nick did, anyway. I’d helped him a time or two with his hacker-magic, and was just as glad not to be anywhere near when he did his thing. It made me feel like I was going to throw up, and I hated throwing up.

“You really think The Roblin’s after us? I mean, not just you but all of us?” Sharon asked, sitting on the sofa next to me.

I lifted my hands palm-up, to show my utter ignorance and frustration. “Don’t know. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The warning, the break-in here, the break-in at my apartment... we’re a natural focus.” Bobo had said as much, when he warned us. We investigate chaos. The Roblin causes it. Peanut butter and jelly.

“But why you, and Nick specifically?”

Why not her, was what she wasn’t asking. How was The Roblin picking its victims.

“Damned if I know,” I said. “Just be glad, if you’re not on the short list, not insulted.”

“I’m not. I’m just curious. Like Venec always says, if we know why, then we can figure out the rest of it. Nick’s skill set is unusual, so maybe that’s it, but you’re not... ” She stopped, aware she’d been about to go somewhere seriously not-complimentary.

“Not unusual? Not special? Not exceptionally strong?” I kept my tone mild. I was moderately high-res, as the general population went, but not in this crowd, no.

“You’re practically perfect in every way,” she said, and I thwapped her on the arm, laughing for the first time in what felt like days. Maybe even weeks. Since we’d gone to the Devil for drinks, maybe. That felt like a month ago, with everything that had happened.

“You think the attack on Venec was... ” She trailed off, as though not wanting to follow that train of thought.

I sobered, turning the suggestion over in my mind in a way I hadn’t been able to, when Nick suggested it.

“No. It doesn’t feel right. The Roblin is about confusion and chaos, the more people involved the better, probably. Even my apartment, he got the entire building in an uproar. A single attack, and the cause easily put down? Anyway, the client had just hired the dog a few days after you cleared the site,” I said. “Stosser said the trainer was recommended by a friend of a friend, the same idiot who suggested the mage-alarm. The housekeeper was so terrified of the thing when it showed up, she refused to go near it, so it was prowling the grounds on its own. Sheer bad luck.”

“Oh, lovely,” Sharon said, in the tone of voice that was very much not-lovely. “Do we have a line on the trainer?”

“Stosser said that it was taken care of.” The look on the boss’s face had told me that the trainer was a name he knew, which meant either high-placed Council, or lowdown scummy. Stosser might be useless on the scene, but he was the best we had at getting high-level people to sit up and listen.

Venec was the one who handled the lowdown. With Ben in the hospital –

Like my thoughts conjured him, I felt Venec come through the main door downstairs, like a trickle of warm air against my skin.

“There’ve been so many complaints about hellhound breeders, you’d think somebody would have tried regulating them, or something,” Sharon said.

“They tried to ban them entirely, about a hundred years ago,” I said absently. “Huge yowl of complaints, said true hellhounds were so rare, anyway, they were doing a service by continuing the breed.” Like anything that was supposed to harry the souls of the damned was going to make a cuddly pet for junior.

“How could the housekeeper just let it run around like that? If she was so scared of it, why not shut it up somewhere?”

“Seriously? You wanted her to do something about a hound? She was probably afraid to do anything beyond coexist. It was introduced to her, so it knew she was allowed on and off the property, but I doubt she trusted it beyond that,” I said, listening without trying to be obvious for the sound of someone coming down the hallway. “And it wouldn’t go beyond the lines of the property, so she didn’t have to watch it. That’s why they’re so in-demand – smarter than any mortal dog, even quarter-bred, and most human guards, too. Plus, they’re vicious.”

The door opened, and proof of that viciousness walked in.

I thought I was prepared – Stosser said that the doctor had to do some serious stitching – but he’d been released, right? So it couldn’t have been that bad?

I hadn’t thought about the fact that this was Benjamin Venec, and his release was almost certainly AMA – against medical advice.

I think Sharon started to say something; I couldn’t hear it. My entire focus was not on the thick white bandage covering his neck, or the arm in a cloth sling, or even the blue-and-purple stippling of bruises on his face that looked like they’d been made by a giant paw, or the tiny stitched scar by his left eye, too painfully close.

My entire awareness was taken up by the look in that eye; pupils pinpointed way too much for the casual over head lighting. He looked at us, blinked, and the pupil remained narrowed.

Benjamin Venec, Mr. Control, was stoned on painkillers. That would explain the utter lack of discomfort I felt coming off him; in fact, he was remarkably muffled. I’d thought it was because he had his wall up again but... nope.

And Ian wanted us to take him out in the field? Oh, hell, no.

“I’m fine, Bonnie.” His voice sounded solid, almost amused, and he moved into the office with his normal graceful prowl. “A lot of stitches, and some lectures on what to look for, infectionwise, and I’ll have to go for a follow-up to make sure everything’s healing all right. But it was just a bite.”

“It almost tore your throat out,” Sharon said, but in a much calmer voice than I would have managed. I don’t think – even with all the worrying – that had really sunk in, for any of us.

When it did, I needed to be ready for a meltdown. Hopefully somewhere private.

“Almost doesn’t count,” he said, with a dismissive air that made me want to shake him – or tie him back down to a hospital bed. I did neither. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Stosser’s got us all off and running. You and I are supposed to go help Nifty close the body-dump case. The break-in gets all our attention, after that.” I decided not to say anything about The Roblin, right now, and hoped Sharon had the same thought.

She did.

“All right.” He sat next to me, maybe just a bit too close, and I should have moved away. I didn’t. The smell and the fear of the hospital came back to me, and the urge was to do something totally and wholly inappropriate, especially in the office, with Sharon watching us with far too much lively curiosity.

“All right?” I blinked at him, his words finally making it through my brain.

“You were expecting argument?”

Actually, I was. Even with the muted, mellowed-out feel, this was still Benjamin Venec, hard-ass and Big Dog.

He smiled: barely a lift of his lips, like it hurt too much to use most of his lower face, but a definite smile. “Believe me, I have no desire to tear open these stitches, or do anything likewise idiotic. Nifty will do any required heavy lifting, and you will do the lighter lifting, and I will stand back and glower as required, with these wounds undoubtedly adding to the impression of a team too tough to tangle with. Ian is annoying but no fool.”

And that, actually, was pretty much what we did. When Nifty came in, we headed out, following up on the name they’d gotten as a possible Person of Interest, one Nico Kaufman, a freelance dockworker who’d had a sketchy alibi for the hours our DB went missing, and – more relevant to our interests – had been working for the same company that stiffed the DB financially.

And if I stayed a little too close to Venec’s side, was too aware of his every move, trying very hard not to flinch every time he was jostled by someone, neither he nor Nifty commented on it.

The building – a four-story walk-up down in Alphabet City – was, in a word, dingy. In two words, run-down. The moment we knocked on the door of Kaufman’s apartment, I was really glad Nifty and Venec were with me. The info we’d gathered had neglected to mention that our suspect was a minotaur.

“We come in?” The way Nifty said it, it wasn’t a question, or even a request. The bull-headed fatae glared at him, but took a step back, and made a gesture with his thickly muscled arm that translated into “yeah, whatever.”

The apartment was bare and barren, matching the building, and pretty much the way you’d expect a minotaur to live. There were beautiful photos on the wall, though, of sweeping blue seas and clear skies.

Greece. J and I had been there once, when he was still working on expanding my horizons. I wondered if this guy was an immigrant, or if he just longed for the ancestral home.

We’d discussed our plan of attack in the cab ride down – with the Big Dog along, injured, we weren’t worried about having to justify the expense report – and now it fell into place like we’d had time to rehearse.

“You worked with Aodink,” Nifty said without lead-in or introductions.

“Yeah. What’s it to you?”

No accent, beyond the basic stereotypical Noo Yawkah I’d learned to recognize as actually being from Queens. Local boy, then. Dreaming of a better time and place?

He took the only seat in the apartment, a sofa that looked like it had been retrofitted to support his mass. Minotaur weren’t actually that large – no bigger than your average pro wrestler – but they massed something fierce. Venec leaned against the wall, as usual. With his arms folded against his chest – the sling having lasted halfway through the cab ride, before he took it off with a muttered swear and shoved it into my kit – and the white bandage stark against his black jeans and sweater, he really did look the part of annoyed and potentially violent hard-ass.

Nifty, to contrast, perched himself on the edge of the wood table and leaned forward to talk to our suspect, his body language going for the big-man-to-big-man thing. I leaned against the now-closed door, my arms loose by my side, and looked at the minotaur, trying to channel Stosser’s best “I know something you don’t want me to know” expression, which mainly involved a perfectly emotionless face that still managed to smirk. The smirk was easier than holding my arms loose. Now I understood why Venec crossed his arms when he leaned; it helped you balance.

“He’s dead.”

No surprise. No reaction at all. Not that it was easy to tell, on that bull head, but not even his ears twitched.

“You and he had some words. You wanted him to stop bitching about the company that wasn’t paying him, Elliot Packing.”

The bull shrugged, and on him the gesture looked less like, in J’s words, “an inelegant expression of uselessness,” and more of a threat. “Wasn’t just me wanted him to shut up. He opened his mouth, and work dried up. They didn’t know one beast from another, so they stopped hiring us all.”

“And you put an end to that.”

“You’re the pups, you tell me.”

Interesting. We hadn’t identified ourselves. I felt a pulse of interest and – amusement? – coming from Venec, while Nifty frowned. This was changing the plan a little. I reached down and pulled up some extra current, playing the neon-bright strands between my mental fingers, remembering Nicky’s cat’s cradle, keeping the current cool but limber, ready for anything.

Fatae were magic, could sense magic, they didn’t use magic. I kept repeating that to myself, even as Nifty picked up the change in direction and ran with it.

“How did you get him into the river?”

The minotaur looked at Nifty like he was insane. “I threw him.”

Venec laughed. “Ask a stupid beast, get a stupid answer.”

That wasn’t to the script, either; Ben was trying to rile the minotaur, get it to attack him, so we’d have an excuse to take it down. My guys all had death wishes.

“You’re admitting that you killed Aodink?” Nifty asked, pulling the bull’s attention back to him.

“I ain’t admitting nothing. Threw him in the river, is all.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not smart enough to figure out that if you shut Aodink up, the work would start to flow again,” Nifty said. “So who gave you the orders?”

That wasn’t going to work; I could tell already. The minotaur wasn’t ashamed of being bottom of the brain-pile; that was just the way the breed was; strong but not built for cognitive functions. And it wasn’t intimidated by current, either. We weren’t going to get an admission of the actual killing, and he wasn’t going to attack us, either; he was dumb but not a fool.

“You were used,” I said, totally breaking the plan. I was supposed to watch, not talk. “You were used and then set up to take the fall, just like your ancestor. And for nothing. The jobs aren’t coming back, cousin. Elliot Packing has already moved on, hired other people to do their work. Bought machinery that can go 24/7, without being fed, without giving back talk. Machinery that humans will work – legal, licensed humans, not fatae.”

I was using everything I’d heard from Danny and Bobo, playing into the worst fears of the fatae underground; of being replaced not with others of their kind, but humans, the majority population, with legal papers and legal standing. I did it, knew I was doing it, hated myself for doing it, and did it, anyway.

“They said... ” the minotaur blurted, and then stopped. But Nifty caught whatever it was he wasn’t saying.

“They said if you took one for the team, it would all go back to the way it was before? Do this for them, and they’d take care of you? All one team, working for the same goal, and everyone has a specific job... ”

“All I had to do was take him down and throw him in,” the minotaur said, like he was complaining. “That was all. Then they’d hire us all back.”

It was so sad I was almost angry. At the fatae for believing, at the humans who had manipulated them, at the world where fatae had to work in the shadows, taking this kind of crap, killing their own just to survive.

“But they didn’t,” Nifty said.

“They didn’t call. It’s been days, and they haven’t called.” The minotaur sounded aggrieved.

Venec glanced at me, and I nodded. My ability to run cool with my current was paying off; I had the minotaur’s voice down on tape, the small recorder hidden in the leg pocket of my pants. It wouldn’t hold up in a Null court of law, but it didn’t have to. We were hired to find out the truth of an event, without worrying about right or wrong. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was better than what used to exist, where even if someone asked who-what-why, they couldn’t get an answer because too many people were invested in Talent being above the law. Like my dad’s killer, still walking around, unpunished.

I had a more-than-suspicion that Stosser’s grand plan involved actual courts of enforcement, someday. But that wasn’t my headache.

Right now, my headache was in front of me, starting to radiate faint tremors of pain. The drugs were wearing off. We had what we needed; now it was time to go.

*enough* I sent to Nifty, a sense of finality and a tinge of urgency, with the flavoring of Venec. I wasn’t sure how much of that he actually picked up, but it was enough.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Nifty told the minotaur, standing up, looking down at the fatae. He didn’t use current, not even a gleam of a spark, but he managed to project a sense of Official Doom. “If you do, we’re going to be really unhappy with you.”

We left the bull sitting on his sofa, moaning about how life wasn’t fair, and walked down to the street level in silence – me acutely aware of the fact that Venec’s pain meds were starting to fade, and he was holding that injured arm close to his chest. We made it as far as the curb, looking for a cab to flag down, before Nifty put his hand out, asking for the tape recorder.

“Hell, no,” I said. “You touch it, it will go up in sparks.” I took a few steps away from him. “In fact, get the hell away from me.”

Venec shouldered Nifty aside neatly with his good arm, giving me room to walk unmolested.

“Bonnie, the tape?”

Because he asked politely, I pulled the mini-corder out of my pocket and showed it to him, hitting the play button just enough that we could hear the minotaur’s voice rumbling, low but intelligible. I really didn’t think there was any danger; it took a couple of days of steady core-contact to kill something that low-tech, and we’d managed to get through the confrontation without active use of current. But shit happened, and even dumb tech like a tape recorder could get fried by a sudden defensive twitch.

Fortunately, I ran cool, which meant...

I stopped dead on the corner. “That’s it.”

“What?”

“The Roblin. It didn’t go after the stronger ones – it went after the weirder ones. I run cool, and Nick – oh, shit, Nick!”

I was surrounded by stronger Talent, and carefully not being active. Nick, on the other hand, was probably nose-forward right this fucking moment into tricky, weird, prone-to-chaos-anyway magic. He’d be like a carnival target to something like The Roblin.

My ping was instinctive: not to Nick, for fear of distracting him at a bad moment, but Stosser, who might be within reach – and had the power and the control to risk getting between a hacker-mage and a mischief imp.

“I need to get back,” Ben said suddenly, a faraway look in his eyes. “Bonnie... ”

I felt the same sharp urgency he did, filtered through his connection to Stosser. “We’ll take the subway,” I said. “Go.”