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We did the quiet chitchat for a while; he’d been down to NYC to take me out to dinner just last week, so there really wasn’t much new to share, unless I wanted to talk about the non-thing that kept showing up between me and Venec, which I didn’t, or the cold empty echoing thing where my emotions should be, which I really didn’t.
“Hey,” I said suddenly, realizing that something was missing. “Where’s Rupert?” Rupert was J’s dog, an aged sheepdog who had as much to do with raising me as J did.
“Vet. His stomach decided to disagree with him. I’m having them do a full checkup, just in case. He’ll be home tomorrow morning, don’t worry.”
Rupe was almost fifteen. Anything that required an overnight stay at the vet worried me. And I knew it was worrying J, but if he didn’t want to talk about it, we weren’t going to talk about it. Time to change the subject. I thought about regaling him with the story of Jennie’s party last night, or the way the hot doctor across the way from my apartment threw her most recent lover out wearing only his boxers and one sock—but finally had to accept the fact that I hadn’t come here for distraction, but after-the-fact mentoring.
“We have a new job.” He’d heard already; I knew he’d heard from the way his expression didn’t change at all. J was a damned good listener, though; he just sat back and let me talk, or not, as I wanted.
I didn’t want. It came out anyway.
“Girl, a Talent, barely out of mentorship, probably. Companion to a ki-rin.” J was one of the most traveled, most experienced Talent I’d ever met. He knew how rare they are, here and in their native country. It’s not like griffons, breeding two kits at a time, or the damned piskies, who populate like squirrels. Ki-rin are magical, even to us. If the perps had hurt it … I shuddered at the thought. If the ki-rin had been hurt, those rubberneckers would have been an angry mob of fatae, not human looky-loos. “They were out for a night clubbing, or she was, and he’s keeping her company. Two guys, Talent, jump them on the way home. Jump her. The ki-rin had fallen behind a little. It was late, his mane is pure white so he isn’t a youngster anymore, I guess.” I paused, suddenly struck by the thought. “How old do ki-rin get, anyway?”
J hadn’t moved while all this was pouring out of me, sitting in his usual armchair, legs crossed at the ankle. “I don’t know. It’s considered quite rude to ask.”
“Huh. Well, it … didn’t get to her in time. Killed the first attacker, wounded the second, I guess it didn’t kill him because he didn’t get the chance to do anything?” My hands were colder than the bottle I was holding. “The story seems straightforward, you know? Bad guys do bad thing, are killed—or maimed—by the good guy, survivor gets jail time. We’ve been asked to investigate only to make sure everything’s clean, that it was self-defense, I guess. Stosser didn’t say outright, but the only one who’d hire us for something like this, where there’s no money involved, or a revenge motive, would either be family or Council, and I got the feeling it wasn’t family. Don’t know why Council would be taking such a hard-line interest, though.”
Council was for Council members, which meant human, not fatae; even if a ki-rin was involved, their instinct would be to sweep it under the rug as fast as possible to protect their people. Had the dead guy been Council? It wasn’t impossible—Council was the country club association of Talent, and there were as many ass-wipes in country clubs as there were hanging on street corners. But then they’d be trying to cast blame away from their man, not hire us to find out the actual facts.
No, something didn’t feel right. I wondered what Venec thought of this case, and in that thought I could almost feel his hand on mine again, the smooth, firm touch sending another round of current-shock through my system, then flowing back out again, leaving me with a hitch in my breath.
“PR concerns, I suspect,” J said. “There has been some … unpleasantness toward the fatae recently.” He shifted, leaning forward from the hips. It was a tell he had, a giveaway sign when he was thinking hard about something. “In New York, and in Philly. Nothing here in Boston that I’ve heard. Minor annoyances, mostly, although some have become physical. Bigotry picking up a stick. I can imagine that the Council is concerned that this incident of yours not spark a greater conflagration. As it might, with a ki-rin involved.”
I forced myself to focus on his words, not the echo of tingling on my skin. “Yeah. I can see why they’d want this handled without a hint of impropriety on their part.” And that would explain the crowd that had gathered—they weren’t there for the ki-rin, not to support or gawk at it, anyway. And the Council boys had been there to protect it, not confine it. “Nice to know the Council thinks we can be of some use, even if it’s only to use us.”
All right, so I was bitter. The Council was split into regional areas, and half of them had refused to authorize their members to hire us … but the leadership was willing to use us when it suited their needs, to protect their privileged asses.
“Bonita …” J’s tone of voice was the same he’d used when I was missing the point during a lesson.
“Yeah, I know. It’s going to take time to win them over. I know.” My stomach wasn’t queasy anymore, and my skin didn’t tingle, but now my entire body was so very cold, so cold I couldn’t even shiver. It didn’t feel like shock or trauma, though—I knew those. It wasn’t even the emptiness of waiting to break, from before. It felt more like … like something had been cut out of me, where the outrage and fear should have been.
Weird. Very weird, discomforting, and I did not like. But if I said anything at all about it, J would freak.
I took a hit off my beer, and tried to wash the feeling away. “Well, we’re on the job now, and first look says this probably won’t take more than a day or two to wrap up and write a report. Yay us. What do you think will happen to the ki-rin?”
“For killing his companion’s attacker? A slap on the hooves, maybe. He would be within rights to demand reparation from the dead man’s kin, on the girl’s behalf. Every Council from here to Beijing would back him on that, if he did, and lonejacks …” He made a palms-up gesture. “Well, who knows how lonejacks will react to anything.”
I shook my head, rolling my beer bottle back and forth between my hands. I love J, but he’s a bigot in his own liberal way. Council and lonejack and fatae: the carefully delineated, political world that J lived in. I’d never had to worry about any of this before I became a Pup.
“And the girl?” I asked him, instead. “What rights does she have in all this?”
“She can take the survivor to court, if she …” J’s voice trailed off.
The bitterness surged to the fore again, and I grabbed onto it; anything other than that cold empty feeling. “Yeah. Take him to court, and not only does she have to relive the attack, but she has to explain what happened to the other guy, the one who actually attacked her. Oh, my oversize, horned intelligent magical companion killed him. With his horn. Yeah, a single slender horn, right in the middle of his forehead …”
I hiccupped, and took a long pull of the beer to cover the crack in my voice. “J?”
“Yes, Bonita?”
“Why?”
He didn’t pretend not to know what I was asking; he’d known me too long. “I don’t know, Bonita.” J had been a great mentor; still was, in a lot of ways. He’d always been straight with me, never lied, not even when I almost wished he would. “There are theories, and psychological jingo, but I’ve never understood how it translates into the human mind, thank god. I’ve just always been thankful that you grew up without encountering that sort of male, firsthand.” His voice was quiet, but I could hear the sorrow in it, for that girl, for me, for every girl who had something beautiful and joyful and honest taken from them for nothing more than selfish cruelty.
The cold forming under my skin cracked a little under the touch of his voice, and the itchy heat in my eyes promised a buildup of tears, but they didn’t come. We just sat there, and breathed in the quiet security of the library, of civilized behavior, until the daylight faded, leaving us in the shadows.
J reached out and turned on a lamp, bringing an amber glow into the room. “You’ll stay for dinner.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. “Please.”
A few hundred miles south in Manhattan, the same dusk was settling over the skyscrapers and brownstones, the sunset reflecting off the water and flashing last spears of light against the glass walls and windows of the financial district. Uptown, traffic was at rush-hour peak, but in the halls outside the PUPI offices, it was quiet. The seven-story building housed a dentist, a handful of CPAs, two lawyers, and a few offices whose signs didn’t give away their contents or purpose. On the bottom floor, there was a photographer who was rarely there, and a literary agency. Neither office had many visitors outside of UPS and FedEx deliveries, although those seemed to come every day.
By contrast, the office across the hall had a steady stream of people going in and out, the same seven people, usually in a group and often, as now, in the middle of a seemingly continuous conversation.
“We could …”
“No.”
“But …”
“No.” Venec’s growl warned the speaker not to push further. He had been itchy all day, morose and snappish, as though someone had shoved unbalanced current into his core, and he was in no mood to deal with the carping of overtired puppies.
There was a moving tangle of arms being thrust into coat sleeves and bags and backpacks being swung carelessly, and then they exited the office, Venec closing and locking the office door behind them.
“I don’t see why you don’t let us,” Nifty said, his voice calm and reasonable in a way that set Venec’s teeth on edge. “It’s not like—”
He cut the overeager PUPI off midsentence. “Because I said no and how many times will it take for me to say that until at least one of you listens?”
“Seven.” Sharon was positive.
“Four,” Nifty contradicted her.
“Eleven?” That was Nick, looking thoughtful.
Venec shook his head, feeling the exasperation simmer just under his skin. He really should know better by now, he really should. He’d scouted each of them, chosen them, trained them. The talkback came with the other traits he’d selected them for, no way around it. Mouthy and Talented, the pack of them.
On that thought, he paused and looked around for Pietr, who was the only one who hadn’t ventured a guess. “Where the hell is Pietr? Did we leave him in the bathroom or something?”
“I’m here.”
Sharon jumped, as the voice seemed to come from just at her left shoulder.
“I swear, I’m going to bell you,” she muttered. “Can’t you cough on a regular basis, or something?”
“I would, but you wouldn’t hear me.”
Venec frowned, listening in, this time intentionally. That had to be getting to be a sore point—Pietr swore he didn’t intentionally disappear when he got stressed, it just happened. God knew, there was enough stress in the office right now, after the day they’d had.
The usual reaction to having a stressful problem was to chew at it until it was solved. That was good, if they were on a hot trail. But they didn’t have enough information yet to solve it, so they’d start chewing on each other, instead. Part of his job was to prevent that. Bonnie’s need to get the hell out had been one he supported, even though he wished she’d said something to him beforehand. Now he needed to get the rest of them to go home as well, before he had to put a boot under their tails.
“Children, enough.” He put extra exasperation into his tone, not difficult to do right then. “Everyone go home. Or go to a bar, or a strip club or whatever it is that you do to blow off steam. You just can’t stay here.”
That was the rule he had invoked to get them to leave: nobody stayed late, not when neither of the Big Dogs—and yes, he knew what the team called them—were around. He had made that rule after their first investigation. His partner believed that, with his sister scolded and publicly shamed for her part in the death of the Null boy, her posse of anti-PUPI protesters wouldn’t do anything more against them. Ben was less certain of that, and not willing to trust any of his team on that chance. Besides, it gave him a good excuse to make sure they got a decent night’s sleep. His pups thought they were tough and tougher, and they were, but it wasn’t a much-older couple this time, or disembodied bits packed neatly in a cooler. It was a young girl, their own age. He might only be ten years older, but he had seen more than all of them put together. The case was shaking them, even if they didn’t realize it. Better they take a step away now, get a breath, do something normal.
“We go to Bonnie’s,” Nick said in response. “But she’s not home. I called and got her answering service, and she’s not responding to a ping.”
“Oh, god, she’s not still dating what’s-his-name, is she?” Nifty asked, distracted. “The doink with the goofy smile?”
Nick threw up his hands in a dramatic gesture of disgust. “What, you think she tells me everything?”
“Yeah.” Sharon, Pietr and Nifty all responded in the same instant. Venec just closed the door quietly behind him while they were all preoccupied. He had no interest in their personal lives beyond how it affected their professional behavior, not even their sharp young technician, had no interest in her at all beyond her skills in the office.
“Right. No, she’s not,” Nick said. “I think we scared him off.”
“We did no such thing.”
“Of course we did,” Sharon said. “He took one look at us and ran for the hills. No great loss, he wasn’t right for her anyway. Too …”
“Stable? Sturdy? Much a productive member of society?” Nifty asked.
“Boring. Bonnie should not be with someone boring.”
“Right.” Nick rolled his eyes, still being dramatic. “And we’re all having such good luck on the dating front, we can give her advice.”
It seemed that nobody wanted to touch that comment, from the brief silence that fell.
“So if she’s not home where are we going to go?” Nifty asked.
“We might try our own homes?” Sharon suggested caustically. “Since Big Bad Dad here won’t let us work any longer, ‘cause he’s got a hot date or something….”
There was a flyer stuck to the nameplate on the door. Annoyed, Venec plucked it off, telling himself that his annoyance had to do with the solicitation, and not the way Bonnie’s love life was being batted around. Too young, too much an employee. Too much trouble, damn it.
“We’ve done everything we can right now,” he said to them. “Ian will be back in the morning with the girl’s testimony and the ki-rin’s deposition—” he hoped; his partner hadn’t pinged to say he’d be late, but Ian was not what you’d call a steady-goer “—and then we’ll be able to start putting the pieces together for our report. Right now, you’re just chewing on your tails, and that’s starting to chafe mine. So. Go. Home.”
He shooed them down the hall, noting with concern that they didn’t even stop at the elevator, but headed for the stairs at the end of the hallway. He understood their aversion—none of them were going to forget the boy who had died anytime soon—but it wasn’t good that they were now so conditioned to avoid it. He was going to have to do something about that, as well as the situation with Pietr.
He stopped to push the button for the elevator, meaning to set an example, and realized that he still had the flyer in his hand. Curious, he unfolded the salmon-colored paper and scanned the text, and then stopped and read it again, more carefully. On the surface it was an advertisement for a fumigation service. On the surface …
He had seen the wording before, on a different flyer, on his own door.
Do you have problems with unwanted creatures in your space? Looking for a way to evict them forever without chemicals or fuss? Call us.
He hadn’t thought anything about it then, piled with the other flyers and junk mail that seemed to accumulate every week; current use was one of the best natural cockroach repellents, and his building didn’t have a rat problem that he was aware of. Now, on its own, the wording seemed somehow more … something. He didn’t know what, but it made him uncomfortable.
He was a cautious, suspicious sort by training as well as natural inclination, and he didn’t believe in ignoring his instincts when they said something was wrong.
It was probably nothing; he might simply be overreacting. Or it could be important. That was his job, too; to scout things that might be important, and keep Ian informed. More, he didn’t like something about the wording of these flyers—or the fact that there was no company name on it, no website or email, only a phone number. That sort of thing raised a definite red flag—it meant someone was trying not to leave a trace. Pay-as-you-go cell phones were easier to dump than websites these days.
It wasn’t all current, this gig. Sometimes you had to use Null methods, too.
“Sharon,” he called, stopping her before she went into the stairwell. “Hang on a minute. You still in contact with the legal types you used to work with?”
She had come to them via a Talent-heavy law firm, specializing in discrimination cases and medical malpractice.
The blonde stepped back into the hallway, letting the others go on down the stairs without her, and looked at him inquiringly, switching easily from off-duty grousing to professional competence. “Yeah, why?”
He uncrumpled the paper, and handed it to her. “I need you to do some digging for me. Quietly.”
It had been a long day filled with not much of anything, and Aden was tired. She heard the door open, the sound of Carl’s steps in the hallway, but felt no urge to get up and meet him. The divan she was sitting on was comfortable, and he would come to her if there was anything to say. There was a skitter of claws as the dog was released from its leash and went into the kitchen to see if there was anything in its bowl.
His footsteps moved along the tiled hallway, down into the sunken living room, then stopped. She could feel the change in the air, but kept her back to him, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the wall. The beach was empty save for a single jogger coming down the sand toward then. The high season was still months away, and she would be gone by then, the lease on this house expired. She didn’t know where she would go, then. Maybe Miami. Maybe Canada. Not home, not yet. She was not yet ready to deal with them. Not while they still slunk about like whipped dogs, too hesitant to do what was needed.
Carl cleared his throat. “They’ve hired your brother.”
The bile swirling in her throat at his words was an old, not-unwelcome friend. There was only one “they” in this house. The Mage Council. Specifically to her, the Midwest Council, her home and kin, but she knew he meant the Eastern Council, the region her brother lived in now. They were all the same in the end, even if they claimed autonomy and embraced geographic limitations. The elite of the elite; the decision-makers, the voice of reason and control against the human tendency to excess. She had spent her entire life living up to their standards, hoping to one day be strong enough, respected enough to be asked to join the seated members, to be a decision-maker herself.
Her childhood idols had feet of clay.
She sighed, hugging her knees more tightly to her, still watching the blue-gray waves rolling up onto the shore. “And what should I do about that, rush in to protest? Try to save them from their folly? Because that ended so well, last time.”
“The boy’s death was not your fault.” His reaction was automatic, but heartfelt.
“Of course it wasn’t.” She had not attacked with lethal force, only attempted to warn her brother, to force him to acknowledge the wrongness of his path. It was pure sad chance that the killer they had been chasing attempted to take them out at the same time, and that the elevator had failed in the resulting current cross fire and fallen, with the boy inside. Regrettable of course, but responsibility had to go to the owners of the building, who had not maintained their power grid properly. It merely reinforced her belief that Ian’s foolhardy quest would bring only grief and disaster to their people, no matter his good intentions. “But the Council needed someone to blame, and my brother was once again golden. He challenges their decisions, denies their authority, abandons everything that we were raised to believe … and they not only do not slap him down, they hire him. It would make me laugh, if it wasn’t so horrifying.”
Carl came farther into the room, but did not sit down, instead standing behind her. She could see him reflected faintly in the glass; hands behind his back, silver hair uncovered, like a soldier reporting to his general. The thought pleased her.
“And so he is allowed to spread his theory further….”
Aden looked at the reflection as she spoke. “And there is nothing that I can do to stop him. I am still banned from going within two miles of his precious puppies, forbidden to speak against them for another year.” The injustice of it made her want to spit. Never mind that within a year they would inevitably be out of business, their methods reviled, and her brother doubtless disgraced and discredited again. Who knew what damage they could do to the fabric of the Cosa Nostradamus in a year? “There is nothing I can do,” she said again, this time more softly, and her fingers unclenched, smoothing the nubby fabric of the divan underneath her as though petting a cat.
“Not directly, perhaps.”
She didn’t move, didn’t stop stroking the fabric, or watching the waves rise and unroll. Both soothed her, kept her from dwelling on the injustices of the world. “And … indirectly?”
He didn’t respond, his glass-shadow not moving, waiting at relaxed attention, and eventually curiosity forced her to turn around on the divan and look directly at him.
“Indirectly? And don’t give me that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ crap. I have no desire to align myself with some radical group or lunatic antimagic front.” Her voice was sharp, and she was pleased to see him flinch. Aden was a Stosser: she had objections to her brother’s actions, yes, but she would be damned if she would lend her legitimacy to some nutcase who wanted them to deny their heritage and abandon current, or something equally insane.
“What about ‘the enemy that can be used is a useful tool’?”
He looked entirely too poker-faced—there was something he was pleased about. She studied him a moment, putting her thoughts in order. She disliked speaking before she knew exactly what she was going to say, especially on matters of such importance. Carl was far too good a planner to bring her smoke and mirrors; something was up. Something that pleased him, and thought it would also please her.
“All right,” she allowed, leaning back and nodding. “You have my attention.”
four
By the time we reached the pecan tart, I’d gotten the ground under me, again, and was feeling kind of silly for overreacting. “Dinner was, as always, delightful.” It was—J was a fabulous cook, and an even better conversationalist. “But I should scoot—they’re going to expect us in the office at Oh-god-Early again.”
J smiled briefly, honestly amused. “The thought of you being a nine-to-fiver …”
