Tricks of the Trade

seven

Once upon a time, I’d been a regular at most of the dance clubs in Boston. Since coming back to New York, I’d gotten to know most of the better places, where you could dance and not get hassled or hit on if you weren’t in the mood, but the time and energy demands of the job kept me from really doing the rounds. Still, when you have to burn unease out of your system, sweat the uncertainty out of your brain, there’s still nothing like a hot, crowded, dark, noisy dance floor.

I didn’t stagger home until 3:00 a.m., something I hadn’t done since graduation, with the peaceful satisfaction you only get when you’ve had exactly the right amount of booze and socializing, going home alone be cause you wanted to, not because you had to. On the dot of 6:00 a.m. I opened my eyes, and practically slithered down from the bed and into the shower, and emerged half an hour later feeling every pore in my body glowing with energy, enthusiasm and health.

Bad behavior, in small doses, could be really good for you.

I rubbed a clear space in the steam-coated mirror, and scrunched my face at the damp, tousled fluff that passed for my hair. Dandelion, yeah. Now that I’d let my hair revert to its natural white-blond coloring, Nicky’s pet name for me was really apt. After Venec’s scolding over the hair dye, the tousled white-blond mop suddenly bothered me as being too flashy, too visible, nowhere near as serious-looking as Sharon’s sleek styling or Lou’s classic French braid. Maybe if I toned the color down to brunette... no, I hadn’t gone dark since a brief pass at sable my sophomore year, and that had been really unfortunate for my skin tone. Black was effective for gothing, but it made me look older and more tired, and that wasn’t what I was looking for, right now.

Professional, the boss wanted. Right. There’s no way I could do sleek without also going butch, so I spritzed gel into my curls, shaped them into a slightly neater frame, and abandoned the mirror for the closet. After yesterday’s clothing wreck, I felt the need to put my best face – or knee – forward. Black trousers and a pale blue silk shirt, with onyx cuff links I’d borrowed from J about ten years ago and never given back, plus a pair of black half boots, and I felt professional and kickass. Perfect.

I grabbed my kit, and my bag, and a pair of sunglasses, and headed off to do my usual battle with the morning commute.

It was a couple of blocks’ walk from my apartment to the nearest subway, which when the weather was nice – like today – was enjoyable. Fresh air, a little morning sunlight, the sidewalks not too crowded yet, this far uptown. Normally I slip into an almost fugue-state, calm and ready, but heading down into the subway station this particular morning, I got a slightly creepy feeling on the back of my neck. Not that that’s anything unusual at any given time, with mass transit – when anyone can ride, it stands to reason a percentage will be creepy, if not downright dangerous. You stay alert, you practice safe subway, and most of the time it never touches you. But this was strong enough – creepy enough – to break through my earlier fabulous feeling, and make me take notice.

I studied the feeling the way I would any bit of evidence. It wasn’t just the feeling of someone staring, or even leering... it was actual, palpable unease, the sense of a storm about to break, but without the good fizzy feelings a massive weather change brings with it.

It wasn’t a kenning: I determined that right off. This wasn’t that same sort of certainty. Just... unease. Creeping, skittering, unhappy-making dis-ease. Normal situation, I’d pay attention to that. After the images that hit me during my scrying? I was hyperalert.

The train came rattling into the station, and as we all shuffled forward, the feeling of being watched fading back to the normal levels. Whatever it was, it seemed to have stayed on the platform. Good.

I wasn’t lucky enough to get a seat, and found myself caught between an older guy who smelled of ink and smoke, and two teenage girls who had never heard of personal space, because they were all up in mine. My earlier sense of enthusiasm and health fled, revealing a deeper layer of cranky bitch underneath. When an elbow came too close to my face as one of them extolled the annoyances of her morning class, I gave in to temptation and sent just a tiny zip of current into her foot.

Venec had taught us that. It was safest to tag someone there, farthest away from the heart and any potential medical problems that might be lurking. You only zapped someone in the chest if you were willing to risk killing them.

I was cranky, not murderous. The girl yelped a little under her breath, and shifted onto her other foot, swinging her body away from me subconsciously. I moved into the cleared space, claiming it as my own. The girls glared at me, but moved just enough so that they were the problem of the guy on their other side, instead.

I smirked a little, then froze.

The creepy feeling was back, stronger, like whoever it was had gotten on another car and lost me, back at the station, then followed the origin of my current-spark to this car. Great; with my luck and the way things were going, I’d just gotten myself a Talent-stalker.

Humans were split into two groups: Null, and Talent. But in each group there were gradations. Talent were defined as high-res or low-res, depending on how well they could channel current. Nulls... well, they had splits too, from almost-Talent to utterly Talent-blind, someone who couldn’t even see the use of current when it was right in front of them, would look right past the most obvious fatae standing in front of them, stuff like that. Sometimes, a high-functioning Null would develop an almost pathological need to be near someone using Talent. If they didn’t know about Talent, and most didn’t, they only understood that there was this need driving them, to follow some people, stalk them, be as near to them as possible.

Occasionally you got a Talent-stalker who was smart enough to figure it out, who could identify their pathology and how it was triggered. The Cosa Nostradamus didn’t hide, exactly; we were there for anyone who wanted to see. Once they identified themselves – and most did – it was easy enough to deal with; the local Council stepped in, discreetly, and matched them with a high-res Talent, one of the ones who couldn’t even go near major electronics without everything going haywire. Pathology and handicap were both dealt with, making them useful to each other, like symbionts. Most of the cases I’d read about, it worked out surprisingly well.

But sometimes you got mouth-breathers who just knew they had to get up close and personal with the object of their fascination. Those, with no awareness of what they needed or why, could become deeply frustrated, and occasionally dangerous to both the Talent of their affections, and anyone around them.

When we sense a threat, magical or non, a Talent’s instinct is to touch the core, to stoke it into readiness, in case you had to do something sudden. In this case, that would also be exactly the wrong move. My self-defense classes in college came back to me: if you’re tense, you make a more attractive target, because you’re scared and not thinking straight. Relax, show confidence, and the mugger will look for someone they have a better chance of overpowering. Relax... and don’t do anything – like gather current – that might drive them to action.

I kept that like a mantra in my head the rest of the trip, until the words merged with the thump-thud beat of the train and got into my pulse. When we hit my stop, I moved with the crowd, walking at exactly the same pace as everyone else, that not rushing yet ground-covering stride New Yorkers excel at.

The sensation followed me off the train, up the steps, and out onto the street. Damn. Despite my best intentions, even as I saw our building down the street, my muscles tensed, and I let myself reach for my core; not quite there, but poised. When someone touched me on the shoulder, I almost screamed, even as I fell into a defensive position, grabbing current and pivoting, turning to –

“Oh.” All the air went out of me, and my muscles went limp again. “Bobo.”

The Mesheadam looked at me, his normally placid Wookie-face expressing the most concern I’d ever seen him show. “You’re being stalked by The Roblin, Bonnie. That’s not good.”

I stared up at my occasional bodyguard, blinking stupidly. “I’m what?”

Bobo hustled me inside the building, ignoring the occasional odd looks we got – New Yorkers are pretty blasé about most things, but I guess seeing what looked like a muscle-bound Wookie that got shrunk in the wash out in daylight forced some folk to actually acknowledge the weird – and into the office, refusing to explain further until he had the Big Dogs’ ears, too. Just us four, in Stosser’s office.

“The Roblin has its eye on her. This is not good.” Bobo practically radiated worry, and he hadn’t taken his paw off me, as though he thought if he did, I’d get swiped out from under his guard.

“The Roblin? The mischief imp?” Stosser looked at me, then Venec.. “We should be worried?”

“Yeah. Madame warned me... ” I started to say, then stopped.

“Did she now?” I had Venec’s undivided attention, now. Uh-oh.

I hadn’t meant to tell them, since she hadn’t given me anything we didn’t already know, and I didn’t want to look like I’d been distracted from the case, but that seemed dumb now, and I try not to be dumb. My report went over better than I’d expected, with Stosser only raising one narrow red eyebrow, and Venec just grunting in acknowledgment, then turning the conversation back to Bobo’s announcement.

“You saw it?”

Bobo didn’t take offense at being questioned. “Nobody ever sees it. We know it is there. It cannot be mistaken for anything else.”

I thought about the feeling I’d had, at the back of my neck, and nodded. Oh, hell, yeah. If that was The Roblin, then I’d know if I felt it again.

“Like... ?” Venec was looking at both of us, now, but Bobo answered. “Like the feeling that everything not only will, but must go wrong. As though the stars have aligned against you, and it would be best only to stay in bed and even there, you will not be safe from misfortune.”

I nodded once, then shook my head. “It didn’t feel that bad for me, but it could be because I’m human. It seems like the fatae are the ones who are most freaked out by it.”

“We are wiser than humans,” Bobo said, his voice deep in his chest like the roll of thunder, impossible to argue with.

I didn’t even try.

“You’re certain it’s stalking her?”

Bobo’s neck wasn’t really designed for turning, but he managed it, anyway, this time giving Stosser a Look that translated into “I know you’re not stupid so why are you acting like you are?” and despite myself I felt an urge to giggle. I risked looking at Venec, who was holding up the wall in Stosser’s office as usual, to see if he was amused, too. If he was, he wasn’t letting it leak, not in expression or aura.

Ian and I were the only ones sitting – there’s no way Bobo could have fit in any of the chairs, and Ben liked to lean-and-lurk. The office, which could fit the entire team with a little squishing, felt about half its normal size just then. I could feel sweat starting to pool under my arms, and my shoes pinched, suddenly. All psychological. I breathed in through my nose, then breathed out, quietly.

“I know what I know,” the Mesheadam said. “The Roblin has been in town much of a week. Everyone knows this.” Everyone being the fatae, clearly. “You haven’t noticed the weirdness it brings?”

“We’ve been looking, but in this town? How would you notice?”

I suddenly remembered the bird I’d seen, flying back ward, and felt like an idiot. We’d been assuming that something big would hit, some obvious, catastrophic chaos, if The Roblin made a move, but maybe we should have been looking closer at the everyday weird, the small, strange things that make people superstitious? J taught me that very little of what we humans historically considered “supernatural” or “magical” actually was... but he might have been wrong.

“We were warned that The Roblin was in town,” Venec said, jumping back into the conversation. “A fatae came to tell us, specifically.” No more details than that; Big Dog was playing it close to the vest, as usual. “But since there was no further detail given, nor in fact any specifics of what this Roblin might do, we did not see any reason to place it above our open cases in terms of allocating resources.” He glared at me, like Madame’s information might have made a difference. I stared back, mentally telling him to back off.

“We know that it’s a mischief imp,” he went on, “but all our research was able to turn up was that the name’s a polite nomen, what you use when you don’t want to risk offending one of the breeds.”

Like “the Good Neighbors” or “Old Scratch.”

“Without those specifics, it didn’t seem like something we should – or indeed, could – investigate further.” I could sense anger inside Venec; at himself, for underestimating the problem, for not responding more strongly to a threat. Then, like he was aware I could feel it – and he probably was – the walls thickened and the sense was gone. “So tell us now, if you would. What the hell is going on?”

“The Roblin it is an imp,” Bobo said. “But not just any. It is the grandfather of imps, the grandmother of mischief, the child of chaos and boredom.”

That was about as eloquent – and incoherent – as I’d ever heard Bobo, considering his usual mode was to slip into “you white man, me play dumb” routine when confronted.

“We gathered that much.” Venec had turned on the icy sarcasm. “But why does it worry the Ancients so much? And why is it following one of my people?”

Yeah. I was wondering that last bit, too.

Bobo shrugged his massive, furry shoulders. “I don’t know. I saw, and I came to warn. But... ” He frowned, which on him was a very odd look. “You investigate paranormal. It causes paranormal. You are opposed to each other, before you even do anything.”

Like I said, Bobo only played dumb.

The Big Dogs looked at each other, and there was a humming in the air that wasn’t really there, the way it always was when they were doing the not-quite-pinging thing they did. Telepathy was a myth – the closest I’d ever even heard of was the tight-wound connection Venec and I could have when we both let the walls down and reached – but those two weren’t even using magic, just years of knowing each other really well.

“Anything that worries both our visitor and Madame worries me,” Stosser said finally. “Especially if it is taking a specific interest in one of us. Ben, tell the others, tell them we’ve officially bumped this from casual observance to high priority. I want them alert for anything even slightly out of whack. No matter if it is in reference to one of our jobs, or life in general – I want to know everything.”

“Will you alert the Council?” I couldn’t tell, from Venec’s voice, if he thought Ian should or not.

“You know I have to.”

Like J – like me, technically – Ian Stosser was Council. The rest of our team were lonejack or, more formally, unaffiliated. They didn’t understand the obligations even nominal Council membership put on you. Or, actually, they understood just fine, and wanted no part of it.

We – meaning Venec and myself – showed Bobo out. He rested one of his massive paws on my shoulder again, and shook his head at me. “I will be there. Even if you do not see me.”

“I know,” I said, and touched his hand with mine. J had hired Bobo originally, but he hung around for friendship. That meant a lot to me, even if I sometimes forgot to say so.

The door closed behind him, and it was just me and Venec in the break room. The office was, for once, utterly silent. Everyone else was either running late, or had gotten to work already, and Stosser was likely Translocated to the nearest Council office by now. I knew why he felt obligated, but there was a growing part of me that agreed with the others: the Council repeatedly refused to grant us approved status, meaning their members would not easily or officially come to us with cases, so why should we do anything gratis for them?

“Massive unease?” Venec asked me, referring to my earlier description.

I put aside questions of Council and loyalty, and focused on the more immediate problem. “Unease and discomfort, yeah. Like big test and you didn’t study kind of thing.”

“But not dread like you realized you studied for the wrong thing?”

That made me laugh, a little. “You did that, too? No, not like that. Venec, a couple of days ago, I saw a pigeon fly by. Backward.”

“Uh-huh.” He gave me one of Those Looks. “And you didn’t think to mention that little detail?”

We had been a little preoccupied with other things at the time. “I figured... okay, fine, all right, I fucked up. If I see something that makes me wonder if I’m hallucinating from lack of sleep, I promise, I’ll file an immediate report.” I was joking, sort of, but also sort of not. The tension was weirdly thick in the room, and I could feel something almost like it was pushing me forward, like a hand between my shoulder blades.

Taking that one step forward would have put me square inside Ben’s personal space.

I’d been that up close and personal once before. Downtown, the night I’d confronted him about this thing between us. We’d been off-hours then, both dressed for the occasion, and I’d danced with him, just long enough to get his attention. I wondered if he was remembering that, now, the way I was. From the way his breathing had gone shallow, and his eyes had gotten heavy-lidded, and the way he suddenly reached up and shoved a lock of hair off his face with way more force than the offending hairs deserved, I was betting he was.

Oddly, what I was remembering, even more than those few seconds of body contact, was the way he had, unconsciously, taken my hand when we walked, and the way his scent had lingered on my skin, after.

The sound of someone in the hallway outside broke the moment, thank god, before either of us did anything stupid. By the time Sharon and Nick came into the office, we were standing a respectable distance apart, and talking about the developments regarding The Roblin like there was nothing else on our minds.

“Hi, sorry we’re late, got held up on the subway,” Nick said in greeting, seeing Venec standing there like the Fount of Doom.

“People, listen up,” Venec said it loud enough that doors down the hallway opened, and Nift, Pietr, and Lou popped their heads out to see what was up. He waved them down, and waited while everyone gathered.

“We’re taking the situation with The Roblin to active status. There’s reason to believe that he may be looking at us, specifically.”

“Meaning what?” Sharon narrowed her eyes, trying to figure out what he wasn’t saying.

“Meaning I want all of you to keep your eyes out. Anything even the slightest shade off, be it winning the lottery, polar bears in your bathroom or – ” he shot me a glare “ – pigeons flying backward, I want to know about, and I want to know the instant you see it.”

“And?” Nick looked poised to be given some new, more exciting task.

“And that’s it. Don’t change your lives, keep your focus on the two cases we already have.”

The message was clear: no matter what warning we might get, mischief – no matter the source – was not our priority.

Somehow, from the look in his eyes, the way he watched me for a long minute before excusing himself, I didn’t think Venec was going to let go of it that easily, himself.

Everyone scattered again, and I went to get my delayed coffee, swearing under my breath when the only milk in the fridge was chunky. No time to go buy fresh: the meeting was about to start.

A few months ago, we – meaning the pups, not the Big Dogs – had started holding Wednesday morning meetings in the midsize conference room, as opposed to the largest one where we did brainstorming sessions with the whole team. We’d gotten rid of the table that came with the lease, and brought in a bunch of padded benches and armless chairs. It wasn’t as comfortable as the break room, and didn’t have instant access to the kitchenette, but it was quiet, and more private for brainstorming. Venec and Stosser stayed out, unless specifically invited in.

It was a pretty somber group that eventually gathered, once everyone’d had a chance to digest the news. In an obvious change of agenda, our first item was sharing any information we had found on The Roblin’s proclivities since last week. I started out, reluctantly, by telling them about Bobo’s warning. I’d gotten enough shit from certain coworkers previously for having a fatae bodyguard, I didn’t want to bring it up again, but for once, Nicky kept his mouth shut.

Everyone had seen things that were, in retrospect, weird, but other than my creepy-crawly sensation, nobody had noticed anything that really tipped the scales. Mostly it was small stuff, pranks rather than what you’d expect from an imp with The Roblin’s reputation: traffic signals flashing “better run” instead of “walk,” PETA protesters finding bacon in their tofu sandwiches during a protest outing – which had Sharon audibly wishing she’d thought of it – to every TLC meter in the city spinning wildly out of control, resulting either in negative cab fares, or tabs of $100 to go crosstown. The resulting fistfights that inevitably broke out from that were bad, but the cops handled it. It wasn’t anything that should be calling for our attention. We weren’t sure, in light of the most recent events, if that was good, or bad.

The pigeons flying backward thing had the potential to freak tourists out, and it seemed like that was a pretty widespread occurrence, but when Pietr checked with a birder he knew, we discovered that the falcons that lived in the skyscraper cliffs had caught on quickly, and had no trouble catching an awkwardly flying, and therefore slower than usual, lunch.

“The problem is, in a city this size, with this many of the Cosa? Weird is sort of the default mode. How do we know what’s The Roblin’s fault, and what’s just, y’know, Life in New York?”

Like most of Lou’s questions, it was a damn good one, and echoed what I had been thinking, earlier.

“When things start to go right, that’s when you know it’s weird,” Sharon said, with the voice of experience. “I know that’s no help whatsoever but it’s the truth.”

Yeah. Default mode in any large city was to assume that everything that could go wrong, would. You left early because you assumed traffic or transit delays. You left an extra pair of shoes under your desk because you assumed a heel would break. You carried extra cash and a spare MetroCard somewhere other than your wallet, assuming you might get mugged. It wasn’t paranoia, just planning.

But I’d been specifically targeted, according to Bobo.

“So we should be looking for sudden outbreaks of peace, joy, and happiness?” Pietr suggested.

“Well, that would be weird,” Nick said.

“No, your protector said chaos, right?” Lou had an inward-turning look on her face that made her black eyes seem even larger. If I’d taken after my dad instead of my mom, I might have gotten eyes like those.

“He’s not my... ” All right, maybe he was, technically. “Yeah. Chaos and mischief. Which isn’t wrongness, not exactly. We’re looking at it from a human viewpoint. The Roblin’s not human.” Things started clicking in my head, loud enough I’d swear the others could hear it. “Okay, logical thinking here, which sets us apart from those poor schlubs who don’t get paid to investigate. What’s the one thing all the stories say consistently about the fatae?”

“That they lie?” Nick.

“Other than that.”

“That they have rules,” Nifty listed, ticking things off on his fingers. “They like things tidy and organized. They like to count things to make sure, sometimes, or sort through things to make sure it’s all there... ”

Yeah. Dragons didn’t actually count their treasure for value, but to ensure nothing had gone missing. I knew that one firsthand.

“So we look for rules and regs being broken, and that’s our imp?” Lou nodded. “Okay. Makes as much logic as anything else. And then what?”

Sharon made a hands-up gesture she’d gotten from me, to indicate “damned-if-I-know.” “And then we throw a net over it? Hell if I know. We tell Venec and Stosser and they come up with something brilliant. Can anyone come up with something more immediately useful?”

No one could.

“We done?”

Apparently, we were.

Sharon kept the floor as we moved into preexisting business. “Okay, so what’s the status on the floater?”

Everyone looked at me and Pietr, but it was Lou who claimed the floor.

“I took the files you had been going through, earlier,” she said, “and sorted through them according to breed characteristics, narrowing down to the ones who might have been able to take down our vic.”

“And?” Nifty said.

Lou pulled three files out of thin air – a bit of showing off I didn’t begrudge her – with the air of a woman who has cleaned the damned Augean stables after Hercules failed. “And we now have a database of over seventy-five different breeds currently known to be residing within the city limits, broken down into harmless, mostly harmless, and potentially harmful.” God, I loved that woman, in a purely platonic but undying fashion. She might be useless in the field, but to sort through that much paper work and come up with answers was an awesome kind of magic of its own.

“You are a goddess, and totally rock my world,” I told her with utter honesty. “Tell Stosser I said you deserve a raise.”

“Hah.” The sharp bark of laughter was all that comment deserved. We had a surprisingly decent benefits package – health care not something the Big Dogs took lightly, considering the number of times we’d been put in harm’s way already – but our paychecks were barely enough to get by.

Nick took the files out of her hand, passing two of them around. Sharon got one, Pietr the other. He flipped his open, and scanned the contents.

“The red-tagged folder,” Lou said, directing their attention. “Those are the top candidates.”

“If we go by the timeline you put together for the body-drop,” Sharon said, “ – and yes, I’m going by your timeline, don’t give me that look! – then our perp had to be a day-mover.”

Lou gave her a withering look Venec would have been proud to claim. “Already sorted,” she said. “Anyone who would have problems moving under any kind of sunlight was filtered out, likewise any breed that would be too noticeable to pass without comment.”

“We have fatae who are that noticeable?” I was surprised.

“One. Literally – there’s reports of a Nriksha up near the Cloisters.”

“A what?” I’d never heard of that.

“Flesh-eater. Decent enough creature, according to those who didn’t get eaten, but the aroma is... unmistakable.”

Suddenly my egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich wasn’t so appetizing anymore.

“According to Pietr’s exam notes, there were two sets of bruise-marks on the body,” Nick said. “So that rules out one perp... . Or if there was one, he has four hands.”

“No four-handed fatae currently residing within the city limits,” Lou said. “Although god knows what’s out in the ’burbs.”

“I doubt they’d haul in here to dump a body in our river when they’ve got better spots for it there,” Nick said.

“They couldn’t be imported bone-breakers?” I hadn’t thought of that before – mostly we’re territorial, and you don’t bring in outsiders to do your own dirty work, because outsiders can’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut – but we’d already encountered a Talent killer-for-hire, so it was a possibility. “Our vic worked construction... Hey, you think the Mob’s gotten in with the fatae?”

There was a moment of silence, and then Nick laughed, and Lou shook her head, and we went back to the realistic possibilities.

Nifty slapped the table with one oversize palm. “Nick, give me a checklist. What do we know?”

“We know that it wasn’t a domestic thing – the vic lived alone, didn’t seem to be interested in anyone of any breed, and only owed the usual amount of money.”

“And that someone wanted it dead enough to use a significant amount of force... and wanted to make sure the body was found,” Lou added. “There are places to dump the body where you won’t ever find it again, even for Nulls. You think the fatae are any less creative?”

Damn it. She seriously deserved that raise. We were so caught up in how the DB was offed, we forgot to wonder about the whys of the dumping. And that was important.

“Someone wanted to send a message. But if not the Mafia, and we’ve already ruled out any kind of union goon squad... do the fatae have their own goodfellas?”

“Like a union, that would require them organizing,” I said dryly. “They’re even worse at it than lonejacks.” Not to mention that the different breeds only played well with each other when they were playing against humans. But that gave me an idea. “Maybe we’re looking at this wrong.” I thought it through out loud, listening to how the logic sounded. “We were warned off from investigating by a fatae, right? And the killing was probably done by a fatae, so we’ve been assuming, based on the available evidence, that it was an intrabreed thing.”

There hadn’t been any warnings since my pushy visitor, but it had only been a few days, and maybe they were waiting to see how hard we pushed back. Or maybe we had read the situation wrong.

“Huh. Maybe it’s not a fatae thing at all. Or, at least, not entirely.”

I looked around the room, and saw that I had everyone’s attention.

“My dad was a carpenter,” I said, the words coming almost as fast as I was thinking. “A damned good one, and he got called in on a lot of jobs out of the city because people talked about his work, passed his name along. There’s a – hell, call it a brotherhood, why not – of people who do finer work like that. They share job leads, information, news about who pays well and who stiffs or treats their workers like shit.”

“But not a union?”

“Not a union. No dues, no leadership, no organization except as how they felt like it at that moment. All totally under the radar.”

“And?” Lou asked, waiting.

Pietr was thinking along my brain tracks. “And you think that it’s this brotherhood, or something like that, that offed him? Because... what?”

That was as far as my thinking had thought out. “I don’t know. But it makes as much sense – more – than looking for an individual with a grudge, or some breed-on-breed hostility that nobody else is whispering about.” Especially after recent events, when human-fatae relations had taken a seriously negative turn. We’d heard buckets about that. “You said that he didn’t owe enough money to get killed over. That means he was working regularly... but he doesn’t seem to have been on a job when he died. We need to find out what he was doing the days before he took his swim. I’ll bet you next round of drinks that someone says something that points us toward the reason he was killed, and once we have the reason... ”

“We have the killer,” Nick finished.

Ian Stosser knew that the pups were having their weekly meeting, no bosses invited, so he wasn’t too worried about them poking their noses in at the wrong moment when he took the phone call, already knowing who was on the other end.

“I want to see you. Alone.”

The meaningful emphasis in Aden’s voice made it clear who she meant: no pups. Particularly, no Benjamin Venec.

His sister hadn’t always hated hiis best friend, had she? Ian pinched the bridge of his nose, and shook his head. “We have nothing to talk about, Addy. The Council is deliberating my most recent proposal. Go politic at them – leave me alone.”

There was a pause, the click of china cup against saucer, and then she spoke again. “This isn’t about that.”

Her voice was still the cold, dry tone she had used with him ever since he had first gone up against their home Council, years ago. But Ian remembered the little sister who had clung to his leg when he was a teenager, who had called him every Thursday night when she went away to college to ask his advice about classes, and dating, and talk about what books she had just read.

Across the office, Ben frowned, but didn’t say anything, aware that on speakerphone she would be able to hear him as clearly as he heard her. Ian didn’t need to ping his partner to know what he was thinking. Ben didn’t trust Aden not to have something else up her ever-fashionable sleeve. That was wise, probably. Aden was not to be trusted any more than he, Ian, was to be trusted. Not when it came to the survival of this office, or of the idea behind it, that no Talent could escape accountability for their actions.

Aden truly believed that rank had privileges, and one of those was being accountable only to others of that same rank. Or, in the case of Talent, of equal or greater ability.

She was also his little sister.

“My choice of time and place,” he told her.

“Agreed.”

Ben looked startled, and then covered it up behind his usual stone-faced exterior. For Aden to agree so readily, either she was plotting something interesting, or she genuinely needed to talk to him about something other than their ongoing disagreement. Ian wasn’t sure which one worried him more.

“Half an hour. The old diner, down in Philly. You know the one?” Ian would have had her come here, but she was still under Council ban from entering New York City limits, and even his direct invite could not put that aside. And in that short a period of time she would not be able to adapt any schemes to the location, or call in backup. Hopefully.

The click of the phone being hung up on the other end was his only answer.

“This should be... interesting,” Ian said, his voice as dry as hers had been.

Ben shoved his hand through his hair, a move that harkened back to when they were teenagers, and scowled. “What do you think she’s up to?”

Ian laughed: a real laugh, with real amusement. “This is Aden we’re talking about, Ben. Who the hell knows?” He shook his head, dismissing the question for another thirty minutes. “The cops are starting to push for some kind of answer on the floater. They want to know if they can bury the report. And the client called this morning, he’s getting pushy about the break-in – he wants to know what happened to his trinkets. He also wants to know why his anti-magic protections didn’t work.”

“Oh, Christ.” The cops were a known headache, but Benjamin Venec had no use for fools, Talented or Null.

“Let’s just get this solved, all right? Take them off the floater if you have to – he’s not going anywhere and if no more bodies have turned up odds are we aren’t looking at the start of a serial killer.”

“You’re asking us to give priority to a break-in over a murder?”

“Not priority, no. Just an additional push on that front, for now.”

Ben wasn’t happy. Ian understood that. Murder should always be the first priority. But the dead have patience. The living did not.

“Right, fine, whatever. I’ll tell them soon’s their powwow’s over.” Ben stood up, stretching his arms overhead until something cracked, then moved his head side to side, as though loosening knots there, as well.

“Are you getting enough sleep?” The question slipped out before Ian could stop it.

Ben looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. “Who are you, my mom? Go worry about your sister, Ian. I’ll whip the puppies into shape. Sleep is for people who don’t have things to do.”

The moment the door closed behind Ben, Ian stood, as well, moving to the bare corner of the room. Technically you could Translocate from anywhere, so long as you knew that your destination was clear, but it was less of a current-drain if you left from a familiar place, so that your mind and body both knew what to do, instinctively.

He closed his eyes, visualized the booth in the diner that was always left empty in case a Council member wanted to have a meeting in that city, without fuss or formality. Technically he no longer had the right to use the booth... but the deli’s present owners were old friends of his from college, and would not tell anyone.

More, they would not give Aden any succor, should this be a trap.

Drawing in his current, Stosser dropped down into fugue-state, and disappeared.

In the hallway, Venec felt the gentle movement of current that indicated a Translocation, and shook his head. He wouldn’t trust Aden Stosser to pet a dog without there being trouble for the dog, but it wasn’t his call to make.

There were raised voices coming from the conference room, indicating that the door had been unlocked and the bosses-out portion of the meeting was over, so he headed in that direction.

“Mafia!” Nick, gleeful in a way that meant he was intentionally trying to goad someone.

“There is no Cosa mafia.” Sharon, still patient, so no bloodshed was imminent.

“You know the name was a joke, right?” Lou, amused.

“Sort of a joke.” Bonnie. “Okay, not really a joke. But that would require way too much structure. So would a trade union. We don’t enforce, that’s always been the problem.”

“Someone wants to change that, looks like.” Nifty, the somber note.

“Yah.” Nick, less gleeful now.

He paused before opening the door, listening to their voices layering over each other, barely space to breathe in between. He didn’t have to hear her voice to know Bonnie was there, and that she was excited about something. They all were, even Nifty: the pack had gotten a clear scent, and were baying as they tracked it down.

He thought about leaving them to it, and remembered Ian’s words, and pushed the door all the way open.

“Hey, boss.” Lou spotted him first, her normally solemn face looking as animated as he could remember it being, since she failed her first field run and had been assigned in-office responsibilities.

“We figured it out.” Nick looked equally triumphant, although he was always an easier show. “The dead body. We know who killed him.”

“Technically,” Bonnie said, and her voice was less readable, although she was practically radiating excitement to his awareness, “we don’t know who, as in, a person we can point to. But we’re pretty sure we know why, and the why will lead to who.”

The others in the room were surprisingly quiet, but no less wound-up. Ian’s instructions would wait – if they could shut this down and get the NYPD off their backs, so much the better.

He went into the room and pulled out a chair, turning it around and straddling it, leaning his forearms on the back, and catching each of their gazes in turn. “Tell me.”

It was Bonnie’s case, even though he’d yanked her off it briefly, so she took the lead. “Before it went splooey, my diorama showed me that the body was probably dumped, not way upstream, like we’d thought, but just a little bit above. Anywhere else, the current would have dumped it somewhere else. So that threw our estimated timing off. For it to reach that spot when it did, the body wasn’t dumped in the middle of the night, but early morning.”

Ben nodded, indicating he understood.

“So, you have a guy, you want to off him, but even bound hands and feet you don’t slit his throat and toss him into the nearest trash heap. Instead they toss him into the river, right there, at that exact spot. Why? You want to drown the schmuck, okay. Nasty way to kill someone, but why there instead of tossing him off the pier, or dumping the corpse in the landfill, or any of the many many ways there are to dispose of a body? The only reason you’d toss him into the river there is if you wanted the body to be easily found, because if you really want to hide something, you don’t toss it right into the nets. Right?”

Her logic was convoluted, but sound.

“They might not have known about the net,” Nifty said, clearly playing devil’s advocate, a role Sharon normally took.

Lou jumped in, there. “Even if they couldn’t see, or read the signs warning boaters, the net system was on the news two nights before the murder. The city was thinking about cutting the budget and pulling some of the nets, and every network rehashed old stories about stuff that’s been caught in there, over the years.”

“All right, so if our killer watched the news, he knew. And?” Venec waited; they wouldn’t be this excited if they hadn’t already reached near endgame.

“The DB worked construction, off-radar, right?” Fatae, except in specific, unusual cases, were all off-the-books. “The off-books construction gig is a tight one,” Bonnie went on. “A few months in the game, and you know pretty much everyone who’s any good, and the ones who are really bad, too. Our DB, being in the freelance construction business, was good... but he hadn’t been working lately.”

Bonnie’s father had been in construction, Ben remembered. Clearly she had kept some contacts, even after Zaki Torres died. “Because?”

“Mainly because, according to one of my dad’s old compadres whom I just checked with... ”

He’d been right, and Bonnie had that canary-aperitif grin just waiting to burst out.

“Our vic was in the middle of a squabble with several of the folk who slipped him money under that freelance table, about money he says they owe, and they say they don’t.”

“I thought the report said he didn’t owe... ” Venec stopped, feeling the grins break out across the room, even though they were all mostly work-sober, waiting for him to twig in. “He doesn’t owe. They owe him. Or so he claims... but I bet nobody will back up his accusation?”

Nick confirmed it. “Because if they do, if they piss off the hiring guys, and then they lose work, too. Yeah. That’s how we’re seeing it.”

“Was he agitating against these hiring guys?”

Bonnie nodded, a subtle dip of the chin. “So my dad’s old buddy implied, yeah.”

“And you think, suddenly, these hiring guys had someone shut him up?”

“Nope.” And the grin came out in full force, totally inappropriate but infectious nonetheless. “We think his fellow freelancers did.”

Aden slid into the booth exactly twenty-nine minutes after Ian arrived. She was wearing jeans and a college-logo sweatshirt, and her red hair, darker than his own, was tousled, her face clean of any obvious makeup.

She barely looked as old as the pups, until he looked into her eyes and saw the utter weariness there. Weariness, and wariness.

“What’s wrong?” he asked again, and this time he meant it. She was his sister, damn it. Anything that made her look like that, he had the urge to hunt down and hurt.

She hesitated, her pale fingers twining against each other like a nervous schoolgirl. Ian resisted the urge to put his hand over hers, to warm that chilled-looking flesh. “What’s wrrong?”

She took a deep breath, and lifted her gaze again to meet his.

“You’ve been so busy with your... experiment, I don’t know how much attention you are paying to the chatter, these days.”

By chatter she meant Council gossip, specifically; the constant exchange of information and suggestion that tied the social and political bonds tight. Ian listened in, but not with the finely tuned ear he used to have; too many other things demanding his attention these days, and if it didn’t affect PUPI... “You’ve heard something that upsets you.”

“There’s... not talk. Not even whispers. Suggestions of whispers. Madame Howe is not content with the status quo.”

Madame Howe. Leader of the regional Council of the Eastern seaboard and known – with both fear and respect – as the electric dragon. He visualized her in his mind as he’d seen her at their last meeting: a delicate, older woman who didn’t try to hide the spine and balls of steel under the demure and elegant lady-of-an-older-generation exterior. She was a powerhouse of both current and political savvy, with a family history of leadership, both on her own side and through her late husband.

“Not content, how?” Each Council was independent, and strictly forbidden to interfere with the affairs of other regional Councils. That was deliberate, done with the full knowledge of the personalities who might rise to power within the Council, and had held for over two hundred years, almost as long as the Cosa Nostradamus itself had been in America. Even the old-world members adhered, mostly, to the Council restrictions, these days, and for much the same reasons.

“She wants to... expand. The whispers say she’s already made outreach to other leaders, offered them... deals.” Aden said the last as though the word tasted foul.

Ian almost smiled, despite her obvious distress and the seriousness of what she was saying. His baby sister was a traditionalist to the core – her argument with him had never been about the need for oversight and accountability, merely the idea that someone outside of the Council would be allowed to investigate Council matters. The idea that another Council member – a leader as respected as Howe – would go against tradition in such a manner, so obviously forbidden by the very structure and history of the Council itself...

Ian was older than Aden, and far more cynical, and found the idea of shake-up within the Council less horrifying than intriguing. What new fault lines were developing, in that rarified ground? And how could he use that to forward his cause?

“What do you want me to do, Aden?” The waitress brought him a glass of iced tea, and he sipped it, more to buy time than any desire for the liquid itself.

“You still have standing with the Midwest Council.” Standing that, thanks to her recent attempts to shut him down, she had lost. “Talk to them, find out what’s going on, find out if it has spread there.”

“Investigate, you mean? Use my contacts to find out what she’s planning, and stop it?”

Aden didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”

The irony was heartbreaking. “I can’t.”

She glared at him like he had just kicked her puppy. “What do you mean you can’t? You have to! Find out what she’s doing, and stop it!”

He wanted to. He wanted to do whatever his baby sister asked of him, above and beyond any benefit he or his project might gain from it. But if she was a traditionalist then he acknowledged himself as an idealist, and he could no sooner go against his ideals than she could break tradition.

“Aden, it doesn’t work that way. You’ve bitched so much about PUPI, you should know how we operate. We investigate, yes. But that is all. We remain neutral, only gathering information, not acting on it. And we cannot go into anyone’s business, most especially the Council’s, without cause. A complaint. A client.” Especially right now, when he was so close to finally gaining their approval.

There was only one way he could justify poking his nose into this, right now. “Are you hiring us, Aden?”

She glared at him, and Translocated out in a sulk.

The waitress reappeared, not at all surprised by one of her customers disappearing. “So, you’re not going to be wanting to order, then, hon?”

“Short stack of applejacks, extra syrup, and another iced tea, please.”

He couldn’t investigate, not the way Aden wanted. But he could ask around. If the electric dragon was planning a power grab, he wanted to be well aware of it before the shitstorm broke.

This was his town now, too. He’d be damned if he let her ruin his plans.