Tricks of the Trade

twelve

I think we all heard the words, but couldn’t process them, as though they weren’t in English, or they were, but we’d suddenly lost the ability to translate it in our own brains.

“People,” Pietr said again, seeing that we weren’t getting it, his voice rising in frustration. “They’re people!”

“In the objects?” Sharon frowned, trying to imagine how.

“They are the objects.” A growl, low and dangerous.

Venec got it first. I stared at him, hearing what he’d just said but shaking my head.

“That’s not possible,” Nick said.

“Yeah, it is.” The words were drawn out of me reluctantly, like someone else was talking with my mouth. “Or it could be.” Everyone turned to look at me, then. I suspected I didn’t look much better than Pietr did, honestly. I felt about the same level of shocky-cold and dizzy. It was all starting to make an ugly kind of sense, all the bits we’d seen and not recognized. “The sample we took, from the house? I think Pietr... I think the spell he used woke up more of it, and it slapped back at him.”

“Woke it up? How, it’s not – ”

Venec lifted a hand, cutting Sharon off mid-word.

I swallowed. I didn’t want to say it, but... I knew what I knew. “It’s Old.”

“You mean it was there before the crime, or... ?”

“I mean it’s Old,” I repeated, trying to put enough emphasis on the word that they’d hear the capitalization, so I wouldn’t have to actually spell it out.

“Old... Impossible.” But Nick didn’t sound convinced, and Sharon, who always knew if someone was lying, was staring at my face, her own expression stricken.

“An Old One was there? In the house? Connected to the client? But he’s a Null!”

“It makes sense,” Pietr said, although he didn’t look happy about it. “That’s the only thing that would be able to... do that.”

Old Ones were legend. No, not legend, because we knew that they were real. They were just... old. Older than the Ancients, like dragons and klassvaaks. Ancient was a courtesy title, the way you used a call-name like The Roblin. Old Ones? You didn’t talk about them, not even with reverence and certainly not with affection; they had no use at all for humans, every story was quite clear on that. They were few and dying, and good riddance to a bad age... .

Except that, apparently, not all of them were quite gone. And maybe, and we were so very fucked, one was paying attention to human affairs. Through an intermediary, because we would have known if an Old One was around, but... Even once removed, the thought made us all obviously uneasy.

We had thought that The Roblin was our biggest problem?

I was suddenly all too aware of how fragile my physical and magical selves actually were, how damned... breakable we all were.

*gently*

I wanted to cling to that mental touch, but it was gone, casting its lighthouse-touch on us all, in turn, and then Venec turned to Pietr, focusing on that almost-more-reasonable side of the case, first. “People. One male, one female?”

“Yeah.” Pietr looked stunned, as much that Venec believed him as the gender guess. Then realization hit him. “Oh, fuck. That bastard.”

I got the gut-sick feeling that had to come from Venec, because it was his knowledge that drove it. The wife. And the son. Not dead, not missing. Transformed.

From the expressions of my pack mates, they were thinking the same thing.

“Wait, why are we assuming he’s the bastard?” Nifty said. “I mean, he... maybe they were transformed, and he was protecting them, and... ”

“I’ve never heard of anything even remotely like this.” We all turned to find Stosser standing behind us, his expression as close to Zeus on a tear as I ever want to see. Before, he’d been worried and upset. This... this was fury.

He knew everything we knew; Venec must have told him, somehow, in the way the two of them had. Or maybe he just put two and two together and came up with seventeen. How the hell did I know what scary-brilliant brains could do?

“Magic of that sort cannot be hushed, not on a human level. If it were an accident or a threat, if he had ever tried to seek help, or find an answer, it would have been whispered about, and those whispers would have reached the Council.”

“Or it would have gotten into the lonejack underground,” Venec said, and then glared right back at Stosser. “Don’t give me that, Ian. Lonejacks know as much or more than the highest Council wonk. They just don’t always give a damn.”

That was true, and Stosser just shook his head, the thunderbolts and static shimmering around him not diminishing at all.

“So he knew, and kept them like that, and didn’t try to change them back. He kept them on a shelf, in his office, so he could see them like that, every single damned day. Even if he didn’t arrange for it, he’s a bastard.” Sharon summed it up neatly, still kneeling on the floor where Pietr had been. She reached up and gathered her hair back into its knot, securing it with a silver pin that looked like it could do damage in a fight. “So this robbery wasn’t a theft but a kidnapping? Did they mean to rescue them? Or hurt Wells by taking them away?”

“And how did the Old One play into this? If it had been there, taken them... ”

“There wouldn’t be a house standing,” Venec said dryly. “No, I think it’s safe for us to assume that whoever was there merely left the trace of its master. Accidentally or as a warning, yet unknown.”

“But that means... ”

“That an Old One is somehow connected to all this. Yeah.” Venec sounded about as unhappy about that as I felt.

“So what the hell do we do now?” Pietr asked, not unreasonably. We’d taken on some heavy hitters before, but this...

“We go ask the client a few pointed questions,” Stosser said, in a tone that made me very glad I wasn’t going to be anywhere near that questioning. Only his tight control kept every electronic device in the office from shorting out. The client had lied to us – which we were kind of getting used to, at this point – and landed Venec in the emergency room, and now we discover he was using magic to abuse his family. Stosser was all out of forgiveness, charity, or compassion.

The office got really quiet, once the Big Dogs left – Stosser bitching because there was no reason for Venec to come along, still looking like something the dog tried to drag out, and Venec grim and stubborn all the way out, refusing to let Stosser do this alone.

It was doubtful, considering the “magical defenses” crap that the client had fallen for, and how little he seemed to know about the Cosa Nostradamus, that he would be a real threat. The hellhound was gone, and Venec and Stosser were both forewarned and alert. Unless the client brought out the Old One itself... and Ben was right, if he did, he’d most likely be the first to go down in a bloody puddle.

But Venec wasn’t taking chances, and we were glad they were both gone.

Except I really didn’t want to let Venec out of my sight. Or be out of his, one or the other. It took all my self-control not to reach out and make sure that the connection between us was still there – I knew it was, the instinct was the same that drove me to dig mental hands into my own core, stroking and soothing the strands of current resting there. A security blanket, a reassurance that I wasn’t undefended, or alone.

The urge annoyed the hell out of me, and quashing it felt good. For about thirty seconds.

“So what now?” Nick asked, voicing what we’d all been sort of tap-dancing around. “What the hell do we do now?”

“Now we wait,” Sharon said grimly, getting up and stretching her legs out, toes pointed like a dancer, her sensible and yet stylish pumps badly scuffed from recent events.

She was right, unfortunately. The body-dump case was closed, to all intents and purposes, and the break-in case had morphed into something totally other. We could muck about with what we had, see if anything else got stirred up and gave us new evidence, but we had no evidence to process except the gleaning, and there wasn’t enough money in the world to get me to go in there again. Everyone else seemed to feel the same way.

At the same time... nobody wanted to leave, either. I joked about the pups being a pack, but we really do tend to huddle, tail-to-nose, when the weather gets rough. I glanced at the coffee machine, and sighed when I saw that the light was out. It had gotten fried at some point during the ruckus, probably when they were working on Pietr. The fridge was probably dead too, then. They were simple machines, and usually proof against current, but...

Coffee was probably a bad idea, anyway.

“I’m going to go over the police reports again,” Sharon said. “Maybe there’s something in there about the dead guy, the one Venec met with the wife.”

“Yeah.” It was make-work, at this point, but being occupied was better than sitting here biting our cuticles until they bled, or sniping at each other.

Pietr, who I already knew had a “sleep whenever possible” mentality, took over the sofa; within ten minutes he was sound asleep and snoring lightly. Sharon picked up the case-file and settled in on the chair opposite him.

I shook my head and slipped off his shoes, and he tucked his legs underneath him like a little kid. He was probably still shocky from the effects of the spell going haywire. I studied him closely, to make sure he wasn’t showing any signs of distress; he might shrug it off, but getting hit by the backlash couldn’t have been pretty. I knew the spell, how it worked, and shock aside, I suspected he had gotten more than just the knowledge of what he was looking at.

Had he felt their emotions? Heard their voices? I could ask, but I wouldn’t. Not unless Pietr indicated he wanted to talk about it, and I didn’t think he would. Not until we had the objects back safe, and found a way to restore them to their proper, human forms.

Bored by the quiet, Nick and Nifty disappeared down the hall; I could hear voices, the sound of heavy objects being moved, and then some soft thumps that made me think they were practicing defensive moves in the large conference room.

Left to myself, I took over Stosser’s office, closed the door behind me, and picked up the phone.

“Bonita. What’s wrong?”

Trust a mentor to always know. I bit back a laugh that was totally inappropriate, and put my feet up on Stosser’s expensive wooden desk, admiring the dull sheen of my boots. “Nothing. Okay, everything, but nothing urgent and nothing you can do anything about. I just... we haven’t talked in a while, and I wanted to say hi. Did you hear we have a mischief imp in town?”

I managed to skirt over the details, making it sound more amusing than it had felt, and didn’t say a damn thing about the Merge, or The Roblin, and especially not how Venec and I had set ourselves up as bait. Dancing around J always took some doing, since he was smarter than the average smart bear especially where I was concerned, and focused my mind nicely. Exactly what I’d wanted, when I called him.

When my mentor was reassured – and had wrangled a promise from me that I’d head up to Boston and have dinner with him, as soon as our cases were wrapped – I hung up the phone, and then stared at it again, the moment of quiet letting me consider lesser emergencies.

“Oh, what the hell.” Taking a card out of my pocket, I dialed the number, practically holding my breath.

A man’s voice answered. “Didier Gallery, how may we help you?”

“Yes. I would like to leave a message for Wren Valere, please.”

There was a pause, as though the speaker was holding the phone away from his ear, and then I was clicked through to another voice, also male, who took my message and repeated it back to me to ensure he had it right. I thought he sounded amused. He also didn’t promise that she would get back to me.

I hoped she would. If I had to move again, The Wren’s building had felt... comfortable. And the idea of living in the same building as one of my generation’s most notable Retrievers amused me.

I needed amusement, badly.

That done, I contemplated going out to find today’s newspaper, to look through the apartment rental ads, but the disinclination to leave hung over me still, and instead I fetched my notebook back from Pietr’s case and went back to Stosser’s office. I wasn’t sure why I went there – there were more comfortable places to do research – but the chair was comfortable, and nobody would be wandering by unless something urgent happened, so it seemed as good a place as any.

The fact that Ben’s usual chair was directly opposite the desk had nothing whatsoever to do with it. What was I, a moonstruck twelve-year-old?

I was working through my notes, notebook open in my lap, pen clenched in my teeth, and totally lost to the outside world, when the air in my head filled with the heavy weight of one word.

*ass*

It wasn’t a ping; more like a muted thought that came from me, except I didn’t think it. More like an echo, the emotion so thick and layered that it couldn’t be contained. Ben was annoyed, but not angry. I was curious, but not enough to inquire. I flipped my notebook closed, though, and waited to see if anything more came along.

About five minutes later: *incoming*

That was a ping, and it was directed at me, as though he knew I was in the office – he probably did. I had just enough time to get my feet off the desk and my ass out of the chair before the Big Dogs Translocated into the office.

They looked... tired. Stosser’s hair was staticky again, like he was barely holding his core quiet, and Venec –

I didn’t think; I don’t think I could think. I moved around the desk and slipped my arms around him, resting my head against his chest, feeling his heart beating, slow and hard.

I’m not a caretaker, damn it; I was raised to be self-sufficient, and I expect everyone else to be, too. But the pain in his eyes was more than I could bear.

There was a hesitation, and then his arms came up around me, resting loosely across my shoulders. It wasn’t a hug, but he wasn’t rejecting the comfort, either. We leaned against each other, not saying anything, just breathing.

Whatever they had done, whatever they had heard, I knew I didn’t want to know. But the job was about knowing. We were the investigators, the witnesses-after-the-fact. The ones who didn’t look away.

Thankfully, both Big Dogs seemed willing to just let it be, for a moment. I let Benjamin’s warmth under my hands soothe me, and tried to send it back into him, knowing that he was blocking me, holding his walls firm, and The Roblin be damned. He didn’t want me to see what he had done.

The fact that Venec could be a badass wasn’t news to me. If he had done something that was hard by his standards... it was only what was needful and necessary. But I’d be just as thankful not having it in my own brain, yeah.

“He had them transmuted.” Stosser’s voice, like it was coming from far away, through a stone tunnel. “The watch, his son. The dagger... ”

“His wife. Christine.” Ben’s voice was hard and ragged, like a cold wind. The moment he spoke I could feel the anger and the frustration in him, held tight against his spine like it was all that was holding him upright. He had no regret for the way he’d gotten the news out of our former client – and he was a former client, I knew that instantly.

Even without the Merge, I understood why Ben was reacting the way he was. Years ago, he had worked for the woman. He had met her, taken responsibility for finding her son. He was thinking that if he’d been better at his job, been able to do what was needed, seen the danger she was in, they’d both still be human, be free, right now.

Being Venec, there was no way he could be thinking anything else.

I wanted to reassure him, to tell him that he’d done the job he was hired to do, that he’d had no idea the danger the woman and her son were really in. Thankfully, the Merge didn’t make me stupid. He knew all that, and he still felt responsible. I didn’t understand it, but I understood him, if that made any sense.

Whatever had happened between then and now, if Wells had always been batshit insane or something had caused him to totally lose his shit and dabble in things even the most high-res Talent would blanch at, it didn’t matter. I’d hoped... I don’t know what I’d hoped. That the objects had been his parents, maybe, gone willingly into another form rather than die of old age. That they’d been volunteers, trapped in an experiment gone wrong, and the client was safeguarding them. Anything but this.

Because however Wells had managed to do this, whatever price he had paid, it was a crime worse than any I’d ever heard of, one of the prime and undeniable crimes of the Cosa Nostradamus: to remove free will from another. Talent or Null, it didn’t matter.

And how it had been done – all the evidence we had suggested that he had done it by bargaining with an Old One, or an agent of an Old One. God. Of all the arrogant, oblivious stupidity... And had he found it, or had it found him? I wasn’t sure which thought was more distressing.

No, wait: I knew.

The hard beat of Venec’s heart was slowing to a softer thump, and I slid away from him as discreetly as I could, before he suddenly realized what he’d allowed and pulled back first. I’d offered; I wanted to be the one to control when it ended.

Stosser, thankfully, didn’t say anything, or even look at us; he might be staring at the far wall, but his attention was somewhere else entirely.

“You think the... whoever cast the spells, came to take them back?” I had to ask.

“We know so.” Stosser again. Now that the tableau had been broken, he moved, as well, sitting behind his desk like a guy twenty years older. I’d only ever seen the boss so beat-down once before, when a teenager died in our building, because of something his little sister did. “Apparently, a few years back, Wells had been browsing for someone to help him with a domestic problem.”

“The problem of a wife who wanted to leave him, and a son who didn’t want to listen to dear old dad,” Venec interjected, his voice still low and bitter.

“And he found an Old One?” Most people, Talent or Null, who ran across one of the old races, would have backed away as fast and as quiet as they could, and prayed that it didn’t follow. But it was better than an Old One actively trolling for humans.

“Wells has no idea who the source of the original spell was,” Stosser went on. “He only spoke with a magician.”

In other words, Wells was an idiot. But if nothing else, we knew now who had sold Wells his so-called magical protections. “Magician” was a damning phrase, in the Cosa. It meant someone who was still using old magics more than current, relying on tricks, and supplementing their own natural core by deals with the fatae, just like the old tales. A magician couldn’t shape or form a transformation spell; it was totally beyond their capabilities. Had he made a deal with an Old One for power? Wow, talk about a classic Bad Idea. And then to turn around and deal with Nulls, who had no idea what they were doing or getting into? Lovely.

“The spells were maintained on a regular basis, with a payment due every season-change.” Traditional old magics ritual bullshit. “Wells... defaulted on the payments. Several of them, in fact.”

I went still. I’d once had passing contact with a cave dragon, the loan sharks of the Cosa Nostradamus. It had been a misunderstanding, and he’d been only pleasant to me, all things considered, but just the memory of that glare directed at me was enough to make me pay my bills on time even now. Cave dragons were short-tempered when it came to breaking your bond. How much worse...

“What happened?”

“What do you think?” Ben’s voice was way too calm. “The magician came, with what sounds like a hell spawn pet, jaws like a sabertooth, and demanded payment. Wells refused – he felt that he had paid long enough.”

Wells was damn lucky he was still intact and breathing. The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t exactly invisible – we were part of the day-to-day world, and enough people knew about us, interacted with us on a daily basis, so I guess I’d gotten used to them knowing enough to stay out of trouble. It wasn’t difficult. Like I’d told Nick more than a year ago – read your fairy tales; everything you need to know to stay clean is right there.

Nobody ever read Wells fairy tales when he was a kid, clearly.

“I assume the goon was what tore the place up.” You did not fuck with hell spawn. Ever. They were the badass creatures hellhounds had been bred down – way down – from.

“The magician... ?” I let the question trail off, not sure how to phrase it.

Venec answered me. “The name went to an empty storefront. Whoever and wherever our guy might have been, he’s in the wind, now.”

Or gone, in a more permanent fashion. No loss whatsoever to the world. And whoever, or whatever he had been working for would now be impossible to find; that went without saying. I wasn’t sure even Stosser was angry enough to go after an Old One, no matter how many claws it had in the modern world. If we didn’t bother it, maybe it would go bother someone else.

Even the Big Dogs knew there was only so much we could bite off at a time.

I tried not to think about the scrapings in the conference room, and refocused on what we could handle. “And Wells called us to investigate, when he already knew damn well what had happened?”

“He’s used to being in control,” Stosser said dryly. “He thought he could still control the game, get his toys back without admitting anything, and without having to pay the fees, in the future.”

Venec’s dark eyes looked at the far wall, his face expressionless. “Yeah. He knows better now.”

I was surprised and a little alarmed by the surge of vicious satisfaction I felt at those words, until I realized that it was coming from Venec, not me. All right. My Dog was a fierce bastard. I knew that.

And yeah, I knew what I’d just thought, and how possessive it sounded, and I’d deal with that later, when the walls were all the way up and we had time to breathe. If the barn door was open and the horse was gone... well, neither Zaki nor J had raised a dummy. I’d deal with it then.

“So what now?” I asked.

Venec looked at me like he couldn’t believe I’d actually asked that question.

“Now, we get them back.”

Oh. Right. Of course.