Tricks of the Trade

four

Thursday morning I woke up with a head filled with unsettling dreams and an intense desire to kick some investigative ass, since it seemed like that was the only part of my life that held any upside, right now. I bopped into the shower, scrubbed myself down, and practically threw myself into my work-clothes. The solid sound of my boots on the sidewalk was like a drumbeat moving me forward, and even a delay on the subway and a busker trying to play an out-of-tune ukulele couldn’t ruin my mood.

The boyos who used to always linger on the stoop between the subway and the office, catcalling in a friendly way, weren’t there, and I realized suddenly that I hadn’t seen them in weeks. And I hadn’t even noticed until now, getting to the office so early, and leaving at odd hours. Had they all gotten jobs, or gone back to school? I didn’t know – and had no easy way to find out. I didn’t even know their real names.

I decided that yes, they had gotten their asses back into class, or were gainfully employed. Anything else was... not acceptable, today.

“Hi, honey, I’m home!” I chucked my coat into the closet, and checked the sign-out board in the front room. Lou had put it up when she decided she was tired of trying to remember who had gone where. Everyone’s name was listed, even Stosser’s, and there were columns for “in,” “lunch,” “out,” and a wider space for details of where we were and what we were doing there. Half the time we even remembered to use it.

Nick, the board informed me, had been sent out to do follow-up interviews on the break-in. Everyone else was in. I checked myself as “in,” grabbed a cup of coffee and went in search of the rest of the team.

I found Sharon, Pietr, and Venec in the main conference room, where Sharon was glowering at my report from yesterday like I’d done something to personally offend her.

“What?” I asked, trying to curb my instinctive defensive reaction.

She didn’t even bother to look up. “You didn’t test the body.”

“Test it for what?” My hackles rose, slightly. “There wasn’t any current on it, the bastard had drowned to death from the water in its lungs, which I did test, yes, to verify, and the rope burns were pretty clear indicators of why it didn’t swim to shore. Unless you have some hidden store of knowledge about the breed you’d like to share with the class?”

“What kind of water was it?”

I stopped, mid-rant, and stared at her. “Son of a bitch.”

I’d checked that there was water in the corpse’s lungs. I hadn’t checked to see if it was salt or fresh. The East and Hudson rivers were both tidal – they were salty. If it had been freshwater...

Freshwater would mean that our Bippis had been killed somewhere else, in another body of water, and tossed into the river after the fact.

When I screw up, I own it. Nodding an apology to Sharon, I turned to Venec, who was in his usual hold-up-the-wall pose, his eyes closed and his face not showing much of anything at all, a stone-cold poker player. I couldn’t get even a tremor of sensation out of him: both our walls were up, and holding. “I fucked up. Boss, you want I should – ”

“Send Pietr.” He opened his eyes to look at me, and I tasted that hot candied ginger again, even though neither wall budged. “I want to hear about that scrying you did last night.”

Pietr, who had already hauled himself out of the chair and was heading for the door, checked himself, barely, before moving on. He didn’t have even a hint of foresee in him – most Talent didn’t – and was fascinated by it. While I’d read his tarot cards once or twice as a lark, I’d refused to scry for him. I don’t scry for people as a rule, least of all friends. I didn’t always get something, but when I did it was always accurate, probably due to the additional whammy of the kenning. Nobody needs to know their personal fate, and I didn’t need to be the one to give it to them.

I stopped, struck by that thought. Was that why I was so pissed about this stupid Merge? Not because it was trying to make me do something, but because I thought it was trying to tell me what my capital-F Fate would be? If so, that was pretty stupid. No matter how strong this Merge thing ended up being, or how it would change my life if I let it, that wasn’t fate, or destiny.

I could feel a crease etch between my eyebrows. Was it?

I really wanted to follow that thought, the analytic cast of my mind and my Need to Know warring with the fact that I was on office-time, and Venec was standing there, waiting for my report.

“Now?” I asked, stalling. We weren’t exactly a formal organization, but usually reports were written – or presented in front of the entire team – for brainstorming. Nifty and Nick and Stosser were conspicuous by their absence, even though the board said they were in the office. Ian could be anywhere, from his back office to Timbuktu. He ignored the board unless someone else checked him in or out.

Venec frowned at me, all Big Dog. “Now.”

Verbal report, then, not written. “It was mostly visual. Fire-current-fire and real fire. Metal spires, shattered, but I think they were representational, not real.” It was tough to tell how, exactly, but real things felt different somehow. A lot had been written up about scrying, but as usual with current, it seemed to work slightly different with each person. That was part of what made our job... interesting.

“A dragon, turning overhead.” That had felt real. Physical. There was something else, something I wasn’t remembering... .

“A dragon?” Sharon had been trying not to listen in, but that caught her attention. I kept my gaze on Venec, the way his eyes drooped a little at the corners, and his nose really didn’t fit the rest of his face, and the tiny imperfection in his lip, that made it seem almost crooked. It should have been distracting, but somehow his features focused my memory into its usual razor-sharp perfection. “It could have been a projection of emotions, anger, or power. Maybe.” My tone would have told a deaf person I didn’t believe that. “I was being shoved from viewpoint to viewpoint – ” that had been the bungee cord “ – so a lot of people are going to be involved, somehow. I don’t think it’s associated with this job,” I said. I looked at Sharon as though waiting for some connection to kick in – or not – and then considered the residue of the scrying. “Either job. It feels... ”

“Another scrying of danger.” He stared at me. “Still in the future?”

Right. That was why it all seemed familiar. I’d had a shimmer of something months ago, during the ki-rin job. That was what I’d told Stosser and Venec, then; that there was a distant sense of danger, of something off-kilter, but I couldn’t identify the source.

“Yes. Closer now. But not immediate.”

I hoped. If I was wrong, and that beast was circling overhead even now, even if it was, please god, only metaphorical...

Venec picked up on what I wasn’t saying, although that was probably just his own instincts working again. “Bad?”

His words triggered details I didn’t remember seeing the first time; I saw the splatter of blood against the snow, smelled the stink of something burning, the feel of those claws on my skin, and nodded slowly. “It will be, yeah.” I hadn’t known that for certain before, hadn’t even known until he asked. But I knew, now. That’s how the kenning worked. You don’t always know what you know, and sometimes you don’t know what it was until someone else tells you. Combine it with a strong scrying, and I was never, ever wrong. Even when I wished I were. “In winter, I think.” There had been snow, ice. “Not now.”

“All right.” He seemed satisfied, for the moment. I didn’t trust it. “You wrote it down?”

I swallowed, tasting the stink of that burning and the blood in the back of my throat, as though I’d breathed it in, deep. “Most of it, yeah. In my notebook.” I’d had to, dumping it out before I could fall asleep.

“Get me a copy.” He switched gears. “I’m switching you up on the cases – Sharon has your notes, you take hers. See if there’s anything that bites you on the nose.”

That was the PUPI philosophy – nobody got ownership of a case; we all worked everything. It hadn’t been a problem when we started out, and had one job every couple of months; everyone was chomping to get their teeth into something and who was working what didn’t matter so much. Now, with different cases at cross-times, things might get a little complicated, even confusing. Venec wasn’t going to let that slow him down, though, and we’d damned well better keep up. Like the in/out board, we needed to track things. Lou, bless her, was working on a system for that, too.

I hadn’t lied when I’d told her we were a stronger team for her being part of it.

With Venec’s gaze still on me, I sat at the table across from Sharon, creating a tiny spot of current on the table to act as a combination coaster and coffee-warmer. It was a crappy waste of current, but I hated the taste of even lukewarm coffee. Sharon shoved a folder of notes across the table at me, and raised one of those elegant eyebrows at my current-coaster, but didn’t say anything. We were still not forgiven for the pizza-grease stains faintly outlined in the middle of the table.

I opened the file. Sharon’s notes were neatly handwritten, readable as a printed page. Nick’s... not so much. And it wasn’t a guy-thing, because the others all managed to make their notes legible, and Nifty’s handwriting was better than mine, for all that his hand dwarfed most pens.

“Someday, one of us is going to have to put some effort into a current-run printer,” I said, trying to puzzle out a word in Nick’s initial overview. The bastard had run over into the margins, and not rewritten his notes for the file when he got back to the office. I was so going to kill him. “A dictation machine or something.”

“Nice retirement plan. You go for it.”

Sharon wasn’t being sarcastic – I was one of the better improvisers in the office, and something like that, if I could make it work, could be worth a small but nice bundle in the community. Something to think about later. Much, much later.

I gave up on Nick’s notes, and moved over to Sharon’s, figuring that I could use his to add color commentary, later. I’d just gotten into a nice comfortable groove, making checkmarks where something caught my eye, when a roar tore through the office.

“Goddamn it!”

Once I’d gotten my heart back into my chest enough to determine that (a) the bellow belonged to Nifty, and (b) he sounded more pissed off than angry or scared, I drew the current that had automatically sparked on my skin in defensive mode back down into my core, and spent a minute getting my control – and my heartbeat – back to normal levels.

Sharon recovered faster than I did, and was on her feet and poking her nose out into the hallway. I noted in passing that the previously closed door now looked like it had been pulled off its hinges, hanging sideways like a post-Mardi Gras reveler, and that Venec was nowhere to be seen. The two facts were not unrelated. Big Dog had scary-fast reflexes.

Sharon followed her nose out into the hallway, and I followed her. The hallway was empty, but the door into the second conference room was open, if still attached to both hinges. Looking in, we encountered Venec, his back to us, a rather sheepish-looking Nifty, who was covered in a soft gray soot, and Lou, who looked...

Smug. Really, quietly smug.

I laughed, reading the scene quickly, with the ease of familiarity. Nifty had done something stupid, and Lou felt she was finally out from under the mockathon. If he’d blown anything up, she was right.

“Anybody dead?” I asked. Venec turned his back on the tableau, and glared at me.

Oh, boy. His hair looked like he’d just run his hands through it in exasperation, his eyes were dark like whoa, and if you really looked at his body language you’d think he was about to start swearing, but his wall was down just enough that I got hit with a full-body blast of tight-wound hysterics just waiting for privacy to explode.

Whatever had happened, Venec thought it was funnier’n hell, and I was the only one who knew. Laughing, though? Not a good idea right now. Especially if Venec had to read Nifty the riot act over something he’d done wrong. I turned away, looking out the sole window in the room to give myself time to recover, and blinked.

A pigeon had just flown past the window... backward. Oooookay. Maybe J was right when he said I needed some downtime, maybe a vacation in the tropics somewhere... .

I was still staring out the window trying to decide if I’d really seen that or just hallucinated it, most of my awareness still on the scene behind me, when the sound of the office’s front door slamming open bought me back to the scene in the room.

“Lawrence, go get cleaned up. Make sure you get all of that off your skin, or it will just make the itching worse.” Venec’s voice was the usual low rumble, not even a hint of amusement in it. “Lou, can you re-create the steps prior to Mr. Lawrence’s mishap?”

Uh-oh. I didn’t quite hold my breath, but I bet Sharon did. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that Lou’s smirk had turned to uncertainty. Damn it, I thought, but kept it within my own walls, don’t push her like that!

Lou was just as skilled as the rest of us in theory – she wouldn’t have been hired, otherwise – but her control of anything external was crap, making her use of active forensic magic... iffy. So far the calm of the office kept her steady, but this would be the first real under pressure test since her rather public screwup with the garbage truck.

Although blowing it up like that had exposed the body hidden inside that we hadn’t known about. So in the end, it had actually been a plus.

Lou didn’t see it that way, though, and neither had Venec.

At the moment, she looked exactly like she had the moment the spell went bad, wide-eyed and panicked. “Ah... ”

I would swear under oath that Sharon started edging out of the conference room without seeming to move at all. She’d clearly been taking lessons from Pietr, who was almost Retriever-like in his ability to disappear when stressed. I was torn between wanting to beat Shar out the door, and being fascinated by what Lou might do.

“Yes or no?”

Lou, stung by the cold tone, met his question with a flat stare I admired, knowing firsthand how knee-quaking his glare could be. “Yes.” If she had any doubts whatsoever, you couldn’t tell from her voice, or her body language.

“Good. Do so. Sharon, stop that. You’re Lou’s second. Make sure she doesn’t go splat, too. Bonnie, go fetch Nick and get back to work. When Nifty finishes cleaning up, update him on the break-in. I want to see dioramas of both scenes when I get back.”

We didn’t exactly snap off salutes, but nobody argued. And nobody asked Venec where he was going, when he headed past Nick, and down the hallway toward the elevator.

Ben didn’t let himself relax until he was in the elevator, and the doors had shut securely in front of him. Then there was a brief pause, and his shoulders began to shake and his eyes teared, as the laughter he’d been holding back finally escaped.

It really wasn’t funny. The scene that had met him when he burst in: Lawrence flat on his back and covered in spell-soot, Lou crawling out from under the table like a morning-after reveler, had damn near stopped his heart. Now that everyone was safe and accounted for, he let the laughter come, knowing that it was as much stress-release as amusement.

Nifty could have been hurt – Lou could have been seriously hurt, if the explosion had caught her off guard. But it hadn’t. His newest pup might not be able to control her current well enough to be a field operative, but there wwas nothing wrong with her brains or her reflexes, and she’d gone under the table fast enough to avoid being hit with the spell’s debris. He hadn’t chosen poorly when he hired her. That was a relief.

Alone in the elevator, laughter dying down, Ben allowed his muscles to relax, the exhaustion he’d been repressing finally surfacing for a moment, and he found himself considering the ramifications of the event. Some days it seemed as though the simplest of spells – simple in theory, anyway – caused the biggest boom when they went wrong, and went wrong more often than the complicated ones. And those booms were happening more and more often, in the past few weeks. It wasn’t because his pups were being careless: he’d beaten that out of them the first month they were on the job. No, there had to be something more to it.

Bad luck? Ben didn’t believe in it. A hex? Those he did believe in, having seen them placed – and dismissed – more than once. There was an old-style conjure woman back in Texas who could hex up a mess of trouble, if you gave her reason. Just because they hadn’t heard of anyone like that in town didn’t mean they weren’t here. And there were people who’d have cause to hex the pups, either in payment for what they’d done, or to keep them from doing something in the future.

He wished to hell he’d been able to talk Ian out of accepting both jobs, giving the pups the chance to not only hone their skills but stand down for a bit, but his partner wanted – needed – to prove something. That meant never backing down from a challenge. Understanding the goal that drove the other man didn’t make it any easier to deal with the inevitable cock-ups that would happen because of it. All he could do was try to limit the damage done if someone dropped the ball due to exhaustion or inexperience.

But, god, he was so tired. Between the job, and keeping Ian focused, and trying to find out what was going on with this Merge, without letting it get its hooks into him...

Giving in to a rare self-indulgent impulse, Ben let his mental wall down a bit, and reached out deliberately with a thin tendril of current, like the streamer of a pea plant unfolding. Bonnie was distracted, her thoughts tangled, but her core hummed like a well-tuned car, focused on her task, and the sound of it soothed him. If there was anything bothering her, he couldn’t tell, not without going deeper.

He pulled the tendril back and rebuilt the wall, ignoring the hum within him that protested the loss of contact. Bonnie might fling her emotions and affections around, but that wasn’t his thing. He needed privacy, distance. The urge to know where she was, what she was doing or feeling: that was the Merge pushing him, not his own needs.

The elevator doors opened, and he strode out into the lobby, nodding politely at the older woman waiting to enter.

“Have a nice day,” the woman called after him, as the doors closed. There were a dozen offices in the building, and he wondered, sometimes, what the other tenants thought of them, the odd assortment of twenty-somethings, their eccentric leader, and the dour man riding herd on them all hours of the day.

He was halfway down the block, wishing that he’d brought his leather jacket with him against the cooler-than-expected breeze, before his brain finally started to sort out why his body had taken him outside. He could have escaped to Ian’s little back office if he just needed to laugh without being seen or heard, so clearly he needed to walk something out, away from the confines and demands of the office.

The thought occurred to him that, outside the warded office, he was vulnerable, but he dismissed it as occupational paranoia. Nobody was gunning for him; not right now, anyway.

He lengthened his stride, moving quickly to keep warm, and let his body go on autopilot, allowing his brain to do what it did best: process and place.

Ian was the brilliant Idea Guy, the Concept Man, and the consensus-wooer. He, Ben, was along to kick those ideas and concepts – and employees – into productive, working shape. “You’re my gut instincts,” Ian said, when his old friend had first called him with the idea for an investigative team that would keep the Cosa in line. “I can see what they’re doing, even when they don’t want me to, but you know what they’re up to.”

Ben was starting to think that his partner had overestimated his abilities. Because right now his brain kept returning not to the cases on hand, or even the mental or magical state of his pup-pack, but a greater – and harder to track – uncertainty. His gut instincts were telling him that the human/fatae trouble they’d seen earlier in the year during the ki-rin job, was still there, simmering... waiting for a single spark to blow up under their feet. There hadn’t been any proof – the flyers advertising the so-called “exterminators” had disappeared, and the whispers of violence had died back down to their normal level – but his gut wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t let him sleep without worry. Bonnie’s new kenning added fuel to that, so much that he couldn’t focus on the jobs at hand.

Bonnie... He was tired enough that the thought of her was like a mild gut-punch of a different sort, taking him unaware even when he knew that it was coming. He let it roll over him, still walking. Bright eyes and a ready smile, her expression almost fey, with her short curls and pointed chin, a mind that was tough and sharp and moved almost as fast as his own. And her body... She was slender, and slightly built, and under the long-sleeved Ts and pants or long skirts she wore most of the time her muscles were warm and firm. He remembered that from the few times he’d touched her, before the Merge made that too complicated to even consider.

He wanted her, physically. Not a big deal. He’d wanted women who were off-limits before. Knowing how to look and not touch was part of surviving adolescence. It was more than that. He wanted to listen to her talk, to dig into her mind and see what was there, how she thought and why she reacted. He wanted to – Not own her, it wasn’t that kind of crazy, but a level of possession that made him feel deeply uncomfortable, like someone else was poking at him, trying to dig into his secrets.

“Enough,” he muttered. “You’ve already got it covered, sorted, and spliced. Worry about the stuff you don’t know about. Like where the hell Ian is, and what he’s up to.”

Even as he was talking to himself, Ben felt the tingling awareness that someone was watching him. Not the same tingling, poking sensation he’d just shaken off, something external, and less magical than physical. He’d followed enough people to know when someone was watching him – and when that watching went from casual interest to a focused hunt.

“All right, then,” he said, his lips barely moving out of habit, in case someone was watching him. “Shall we play a game?”

He picked up the pace a little, not fast enough to lose anyone but moving past the other pedestrians with the air of a man late for something. He went the length of the block, and then stopped, bending down as though to tie the lace of his shoe.

The sense of someone watching stayed close, but no closer than it had been before. A maintained distance.

That meant his stalker was human, not fatae. The fatae tended to let him know they were there, to try to make him uneasy with their regard. Only humans hid. Ben felt his mouth draw into an unamused smile. He could test the air, see if his tail was Talent or not, but that risked letting the other know he or she had been spotted, and spoiling the game. There were other ways to tell, though.

Slowing his steps to a more casual pace, he circled around the block, and headed for the nearest cogeneration building.

The miniature power generators that had become popular recently didn’t have the same catnip appeal of the big’un power plant, but a cogen attracted the attention of every Talent who walked by the same way a pretty girl caught the eye. If his tail was Talent, he would know the moment they crossed the street; they wouldn’t be able to help themselves.

I spent the rest of the day looking over Sharon’s notes, not so much looking for something as looking for what wasn’t there, a missing element or fact that would open up a new level of questions. All I got was a slight case of eyestrain: Sharon might not have my perfect memory, or Nick’s ability to make intuitive leaps, but she was exactly as methodical as you’d expect for someone originally trained as a paralegal.

“You checked the rest of the house?”

“Yes.” Nothing in Nick’s tone let me know what an insulting question that had been, which I appreciated. “The kitchen was spotless, and surprisingly Spartan. I guess he doesn’t entertain much, or have any interest in foood.

“Upstairs was nicer, but still pretty plain,” he went on, tapping a finger on the table as though the beat would jog his memory. Hell, maybe it did. “I mean, nice but not lush, the way you’d think somebody that rich would do it.”

My mentor had that kind of money, or maybe even more. His apartment in Boston was... I thought about the casual way he slouched in a nineteenth-century armchair, and how Rupert was allowed to sleep on a hand-knotted Persian rug, and allowed as how maybe my idea of lush was kind of skewed.

“Cheap-looking, or... ?” If he was skimping on the private rooms, that might mean a lack of ready cash, or some other cause for trouble.

“No. I mean, not that I’m any judge of it, but no I don’t think so. I’ve seen enough of your stuff to know quality, and this was all good. Just not... ” He was struggling to put what he’d seen into words. I waited.

“Sparse. Like he only cared about the rooms where he spent time, where people saw him. Everything else had the minimum for living but... ” And I could practically smell Nicky making another one of his leaps, sussing out people in a way I could only wonder at. “He doesn’t care about other people. Not about making them comfortable, or seeing to their needs. It’s all about him.”

“A narcissist?”

“No. That’s all about perception and self-interest, right? This is more... he isn’t aware that anyone might have needs or wants, beyond where they connect to him, or that they even exist, when he can’t see them? Like a sociopath.”

Oh. Oh, that was not what I wanted to hear. At all.

“So... what does that add to the case?”

Nick shrugged, which drove me crazy. I hated shrugs; they were so utterly useless as communication because they could mean too many things. Lazy, my mentor used to say, and he was right. “Nothing, really. Not yet, anyway.”

“Right.” Because why should even simple cases be easy? I went back to my notes, and let Nick do the same with mine.

And if there was a part of me that was listening for the touch of Venec’s core against mine, I wasn’t going to admit to anything.

It said a lot about how trained we’d gotten in the past year that when Venec didn’t come back that afternoon and Stosser never made an appearance all day, we still remembered Venec’s Law: Nobody Pulls an All-Nighter without Big Dog Approval. At least, I think we all did – when I left at six, Sharon was still going over her notes, looking at the diorama she and Nick had started putting together. But of all of us, she was the least likely to lose track of time – or to use that as an excuse to disobey standing orders.

Lou, who had managed not to blow herself up during the spell trials, was putting on her coat when I headed out, and we walked out together, after I made sure the coffeemaker had been turned off for the night.

I’d headed for the stairs at the end of the hallway when Lou stopped me with a puzzled question. “Why don’t any of you use the elevator?”

It was a good question. Easy to answer, except for the fact that none of us were willing, or able, to talk about it, even now. Also, if I made Lou paranoid, too, Venec would kick my ass. So I didn’t tell her about the teenage boy who had been killed during an attack on us when we first opened shop, when power shorted out and the elevator plummeted into the basement. I just shrugged, and pushed open the door, giving her a lesser truth. “It keeps us in shape.”

Truth, but not the entire truth, and it came out as natural as honey. As a painfully self-aware teenager, I used to insist on the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because anything else was a lie. I’d thought black was black, and white, white, and the right answers were obvious to anyone, if you only thought about it.

I had been an arrogant twit back then, and it’s a wonder J didn’t lock me in a closet until I was thirty.

With everything else going on, between the two new cases and the underlying worry about where Venec had disappeared to, that thought about lying should have come and gone. Instead it nagged at me. Lou and I went our separate ways on the sidewalk and I – on a whim – decided to walk home rather than taking the subway. It was only a couple of miles, and I felt the need for fresh air, rather than being packed into rush-hour mass transit. I stopped in the local bodega for a bottle of water and a halvah bar to have for dessert, and started walking.

We had been funded not to hand out judgment but to establish the facts – the where and the who – of a crime, which would lead us to the why and the how. But facts didn’t exist in a vacuum, neatly cut and packaged. We had to shake them out of the messier tangle of human emotions and motivations.

Black and white. Truth and lies. The ki-rin hadn’t been able to lie, but it had deceived. Aden Stosser, our boss’s sister, lied about us and what we did, and thought that it was the truth. Sharon suspected that our newest client was lying about the break-in but he was so good at it, she couldn’t tell. Sociopath. Maybe.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Sir Walter Scott, not Shakespeare. Deception and truth and half truths. It was the reason we did this job; so that nobody could hide behind magic and deny their actions or deeds. And if sometimes we allowed those actions to be buried again, for the greater good...

“It’s not our job.”

I swear, I thought I’d said it out loud until I realized that Venec was walking alongside me.

“Motherofgod.” It came out in a hot breath, and I shuddered at how easily he’d managed to come up next to me, without my even noticing. “Also, goddamn it. I thought you said this thing would make us more aware of each other, not less?”

The one time we’d talked about it. God knows what he’d have discovered by now. I swear, every time I adjusted to this shit, the universe smirked at me.

“I found you,” Venec pointed out, sounding like he was talking about a particularly boring weather report.

Yeah. He had. How? I touched my wall, and was surprised at how thick it was. He found me through that? Hell. I thinned it a little, and the heat of his presence came through, like standing next to a sunlamp. We walked the rest of the block in silence, as I tried to adjust it so that I could tell where he was, but not feel like he was quite so damn close.

Except he was. His arm kept touching the sleeve of my leather jacket, and I would almost swear he was walking close enough that the fabric of my black skirt brushed his thigh more than once, but when I looked down, there was a professional foot-plus between us.

I thought about asking him where the hell he’d disappeared to, this afternoon, but didn’t.

“It’s not our job,” he said again, finally. “To save the world. It’s not even our job to tell the world that they’re in danger.”

I had no idea what the hell he was talking about now. But he wasn’t really talking to me; I knew that even without the Merge. He was working something out in that twisty, very smart brain of his, and I was just the audience. So I just walked, and waited.

“I was followed this afternoon,” he said finally, not so much getting to the point as putting it aside. “Human, but not Talent. He, I’m pretty sure it was a he, or a very butch woman, followed me for almost an hour, always keeping half a block behind. Didn’t do anything, just watched.”

I thought about that for a few steps. “You think it was the Bitch, sending someone?”

I didn’t really think that naming Aden Stosser would summon her... exactly. But I wasn’t going to take the chance. Big Dog’s sister hated us, for reasons only she and Ian and maybe Venec understood, and had tried to shut us down before, first through intimidation and then direct attack.

Ben sighed at my use of the extremely unaffectionate nickname, but he didn’t bother scolding us any longer. She had earned it. “Maybe. Ian swears the Council is watching her too closely, after the last dustup. Won’t stop her – nothing short of a nuclear blast stops her – but he expects she’ll go through the Council now, try to worm her way into influencing votes, keeping us from being recognized, maybe block anyone from aiding us. And that sort of manipulation is Ian’s territory, not ours. Thank god.” He shook his head, and I felt the overwhelming need to run my hand through those messy curls, push the dark hair away from his face so that I could see him better.

My fingers stayed locked by my side.

We were two blocks from my apartment, and I was starting to wonder where this was going. If he asked to come in... what was I going to say?

The old Bonnie wouldn’t have blinked: a hot guy with good manners, smart and built, and definitely interested? Duh! Only I’d already determined that I wasn’t the old Bonnie.

And I couldn’t afford to take a tumble with Benjamin Venec. Not because I thought he’d fire me if things went bad. I knew better, now. That wasn’t his style. I wasn’t even worried that it would make working together uncomfortable, at least, not between the two of us. I knew me, and I knew him. It was the rest of the team. For all that they joked, I had a feeling that they would freak if they knew what was really going on, and Stosser...

Did Ian know? Had Ben told him? My brain couldn’t even go there. Anyway, I wasn’t going to and he wasn’t going to and that had been decided already. And even if they handled it fine, I chose my partners, damn it. I didn’t need some mystical matchmaker shoving me.

I could hear J sigh, all the way from Boston.

We walked another block, but he didn’t say anything more.

“We need to fine-tune the organ-check spell,” I said, moving the conversation back firmly onto work ground, where we both knew what the hell was going on. “I knew that there was water in the lungs, so our DB definitely drowned, but the body’s already been released, which means no way to check what kind of water.” There was an organization that claimed fatae bodies when they ended up in the morgue, and disposed of them either through the breed representative, or on their own. Bad luck for us; this once they weren’t backed up. “Anyway, even if I’d thought of it... salt water from fresh? I’m not sure we can do that, the way the cantrip is structured right now.”

You had to be very specific when you were working with forensic magic; we’d learned that the hard way. Ask a vague question, and you got run over with too much information. Too much information was worse than none, because you couldn’t figure out what was important. But finding the right balance meant that it was harder to create a one-spell-fits-all cantrip; everything had to be more specialized than we’d thought.

That was where I excelled; fine-turning the details. But we couldn’t spare me from the field, not with two open jobs.

Venec nodded, accepting my assessment. “Do you want to work on it, or should I put it in the fishbowl?”

The fishbowl was exactly that – a glass bowl on a table in the smaller conference room, the windowless one that was best shielded for current-use. If you had an idea, or a problem, you wrote it down and tossed it into the bowl, and whenever someone had spare time and energy, they’d go fishing for a problem to solve.

“Fishbowl, for now, although I’ll keep poking at it. The body’s already been disposed of, so no way to go back and check.” I’d never asked what the fatae normally did with their dead; I suspected asking would be rude, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, anyway. J always said that sex and burial traditions were where most cultural misunderstandings happened.

We turned a corner, our steps almost perfectly matching. I wondered if he was aware of that.

“What’s your working theory?” he asked.

“On the drowning? It was either a personal grudge – ” the most likely explanation when dealing with the fatae, who tended to have short fuses and long memories “ – or money.” If it wasn’t some personal insult, it was money. The fatae just didn’t get het up about sex the way some humans did – at least far’s I’d ever heard. Money, though, they were just as wound up as any spending species. “Why else do you get dumped in the East River?”

“Drugs? There was a nice little trade in heroin a while back, nasty pure stuff that would kill a human in one dose.” Venec went thoughtful again. “The craze seems to have faded, but there could be a new joyjuice on the market. You might want to ask Danny.”

Danny Hendrickson, former NYPD, current P.I., and one of the few human/fatae crossbreeds I knew about. Danny was a good guy, and had helped us out before, so long as it didn’t interfere with his own cases. He was also fun to go drinking with, not that we’d had time to do that, much. I nodded. “I’ll call him when I get home. He keeps weird hours, I might be able to reach him, or leave a message.”

The fatae, being of magic but not using magic, could enjoy the benefits of modern technology like laptop computers, cell phones, and answering machines. I tried not to be too jealous.

“Do you think we might have a drug war among the fatae? Christ.” The idea kind of creeped me out. Fatae were scary enough on their own; they didn’t need drugs, especially drugs that led to violence, added to the mix.

Venec went from peer voice to Big Dog voice without blinking. “Don’t rule anything out until we know it’s not a viable theory.”

I winced. Okay, I deserved that. “Right. Drugs, or drug-trafficking. Danny. I’m on it.”

And then we were at the stoop of my building, and I paused, my hand reaching out for the railing. The air around us was the dusky thickness that made it almost impossible to read someone’s expression, even if they were right next to you. I could have let down the walls a little more to feel what was going on... but I didn’t.

There was a hesitation in the air, like the entire damn city was waiting to see what we’d do.

I wanted him. Every damn cell of my body wanted him, and even knowing that it was one of my worst ideas didn’t dull the ache.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he said. “Sleep well.”

And then he was gone, walking down the street like the UPS guy who’d knocked-and-dropped, and was on to his next delivery.

A wave of hurt swept through me, so unexpected that I almost called after him to demand an explanation, an apology.

Instead, I pulled my key from my shoulder bag, and let myself inside.

The shiver of unease that passed over the city days before had settled, for the moment, at the edge of Central Park. The usual steady noise of evening traffic on the avenue had been overlaid with a snarling mess of human voices and barking dogs. Two of the ubiquitous food carts that lurked along the perimeter had somehow slammed into each other, causing their contents – roasted nuts, for one, and hot pretzels and soda for the other – to spill all over the walkway, and the two owners to stand over the disaster, screaming at each other in two different languages, neither English, clearly insulting each otheer’s patrimony, while the two cops called to the scene tried to get someone to tell them, in English, what had happened.

Another vendor, off to the side and out of the direct line of sight, served up sodas to people who were drawn in to see what the fuss was about. The atmosphere had become less bucolic and more like an arena, spectators gathering to watch the blood spill.

“What happened?” one of them, a tall blonde with a small blond dog at the other end of a bright green leash, asked. The dog looked mournfully up at his mistress, who seemed oblivious, so the vendor slipped it half a hot dog that had fallen on the ground earlier.

“Damnedest thing. One minute they were doing bang-up business, you should pardon the expression,” the vendor said, deftly fitting the woman’s hot dog onto a bun and handing it to her, “and the next thing there’s a crash like you wouldn’t believe, and they’re going at each other like gangbusters. If the cops hadn’t shown up, I bet there would have been blood.”

“You didn’t see it?”

“Lady, I got a rule. I don’t see nothing if it don’t involve me. One guy hits another, somebody steals some lady’s purse, your dog snitches one of my hot dogs... ”

The blonde looked down just in time to see the last of the purloined sausage disappear into the dog’s mouth, and let out a horrified cry. “Damn it, Snooks, you’re going to throw it all up tonight, aren’t you? Damn it.”

The vendor grinned, as though pleased at the distress in the woman’s voice, but when she looked up again, his leathery face was solemn, and his gaze was more on the still-arguing combatants than his customers. The cops had managed to calm them both down, hauling them to separate corners to get their reports, and, show over, the bystanders had started to move on. “Huh.” The vendor sounded disappointed. “I really thought they’d have done more than yell at each other.”

“It’s a good thing the cops were nearby,” another man said, coming to the front of the line. “Pepsi, please.”

“Did you hear about the fight that broke out on the 72 crosstown last month?” his companion asked. “Speaking of cursing. The driver had to pull over and haul them off each other. Man, never ever piss off the little old ladies. They’re fierce.”

They accepted their sodas and walked on, leaving the square that, fun over, was rapidly emptying of people. The hot dog vendor cocked his head and pursed his rubbery lips thoughtfully, his nostrils flaring as though scenting something pleasant. “Buses. I hadn’t thought of buses. And subways!” The eyes that had seemed sunken and tired before now sparkled with a literal light, a muted dark gold. “Everyone trapped, tired, and anxious... Oh, that will be fun!”

His hand – oddly gnarled and twisted in the wrong direction, if you looked at it carefully – made a flat pass over the top of his cart, and the metal construct – hot dogs, sodas and all – disappeared.

A second later, so did the vendor.