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I reached up and touched my short blond curls self-consciously. I’d thought the blue streaks were kicky. Venec had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that they were distracting, and unprofessional. And, apparently, they made me easy to pick out of a crowd.
We weren’t supposed to stand out; we were supposed to blend in, the better to find out things people didn’t want known. Or, as he put it, “This isn’t a peacock show, damn it.”
He was right, okay, he was absolutely right. But I’d spent most of my life standing out, gleefully and with encouragement from my mentor, and this…
This drabbing down to dullness was hard.
Even as I let that thought slip, there was a mental touch of something, not quite sympathy—never sympathy—but a rough buck-up sort of pushback, and I sighed. Of course Venec would know I was indulging in self-pity.
There was no such thing as telepathy, beyond the ping—a quick burst of information that was more visual than heard or seen—but about eight months ago we’d discovered that Venec and I could pick up each other’s emotions, even thoughts.
Worse and weirder than that: our current kept getting tangled together without our willing it, something that was supposedly impossible. Magic didn’t work that way.
The old texts, what Venec had been able to find, called it the Merge. It was rare, annoying, and not something either of us had wanted: We still didn’t want it. But, like Nifty’s rash, we had to deal with it and not let it interfere with the job.
I, at least, was dealing with it by total denial. So far, so good.
“You had wanted to give us a break?” Sharon asked, her coffee mug—a robin’s-egg-blue color that matched her blond perfection, well, perfectly—halfway to her lips. “Implying that you’re not going to…or not able to?”
Sharon liked to have things nailed down definite-like, the better to tear them apart. She was probably our best in-field operative. That scalpel-sharp brain, matched to the fact that she looked like a 1940s movie goddess, cool and lush at the same time, made her a killer investigator: people got distracted, and then she zoomed in without mercy, finding exactly what they were trying to hide.
The fact that she had the ability to sense when they were actively lying was just icing on that cake.
“Not able to,” Nifty said. As usual, he and Sharon were jockeying for lead dog spot, having to prove they were smarter, sharper, more alpha than the other. Then he ruined the superior attitude by scratching at his arm, making a face like a box turtle’s, all scrunched up and sour. We all glared at him, and he stopped, shamefaced.
The rash spread by contact. Venec might be able to treat the infection, but I didn’t want to be stuck under house arrest, too, because Nifty couldn’t let it heal. If he wasn’t careful, we were going to make him stay home.
“Not able to,” Venec agreed, carefully not seeing Nifty’s lapse so he didn’t have to yell at him again. “Ian handed over two files this morning.”
“Two?” I was surprised, yeah. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have two jobs going, these days; the Council overall might still not officially recognize us, but word had gotten out that they’d use us in need, and so the ordinary members of the Cosa Nostradamus were calling. But two coming in on the same day? That meant Nifty’s desk assignment wasn’t make-work; there wasn’t time or manpower to do that, even with Lou around.
“And where is Master Stosser, anyway?” Nick looked around like the boss might suddenly pop out of the woodwork—and he might, actually.
Ian Stosser might be the genius behind PUPI, but lately he’d left more and more of the day-to-day stuff to his partner. Since Venec was better at that anyway I hadn’t thought much about it. But Nick was right; Ian had been least-in-sight, recently.
“I’ll worry about Ian,” Venec said, his voice more of a growl than usual, reminding me why we called him Big Dog, other than the obvious PUPI pun. “You focus on what we pay you for. Two jobs. First’s a break-in, up in Fieldston. Sharon, you and Nick take that one.” He slid a plain brown folder across the table, and Sharon took it.
Ah, paperwork. Magic—current, in the modern parlance—runs in every human, but only a very small percentage of humans can actually manipulate it. They—we—are called Talent, and the ones who can’t use it are, rather condescendingly, called Nulls. Magic makes a lot of things easier, yeah. One of the prices we pay for Talent, though, is that we don’t interact well with things that run on current’s kissing cousin, electricity. You find a Talent who carries a cell phone or a PDA, and doesn’t have to replace it every other month, and I’ll show you a Talent who can’t use current worth a damn.
Okay, unfair. But even those of us who don’t use current every day found anything more sophisticated than a debit card got fritzed pretty fast. I hadn’t been able to carry an MP3 player since I was fourteen.
I’ve spent most of my life in openly Talented society, but some days I watch people using netbooks or smartphones, while we have to juggle paper and pen and memory, and I wonder if we really got the better part of the deal, after all.
“Where the hell is Fieldston?” Sharon asked, scanning the paperwork. “I swear, if we have to lug out to Long Island again…”
“End of the 1 line, up in the Bronx,” Nifty told her, capping the one-upmanship for the moment.
“Oh. Okay.” She wasn’t happy about heading all the way out there, but apparently so long as it didn’t involve having to leave the city, she could deal with it. Shar was our only born-and-bred New Yorker—I didn’t count, having spent most of my teens in Boston—and sometimes that just shone through.
“Client’s a Null, he owns a house up there, it got tossed last night and he thinks it was a Retriever. No idea why he thinks that, but if it is…”
I couldn’t stop myself from interrupting. “Venec, when was the last time someone actually pinned anything on an active Retriever?”
Retrievers were the cat burglars of the Cosa Nostradamus, Talent who naturally went invisible, like Pietr, only they controlled it, used it to get away with everything short of murder. If this guy’d been burgled by a Retriever, odds were that even if we could prove it, nobody would ever get the stuff back.
Those dark, irritated eyes glared at me, but I didn’t feel any actual irritation coming off him, just annoyance. “If the client thinks it was a Retriever, then that’s his call. You will determine the facts and find out who is responsible. And, if possible, get back the stolen items. Yeah,” he said when Sharon would have protested, “I know, you’re not the lost-and-found. If this guy did get hit by a Retriever, think about the egoboo, to hit back.”
There was that.
“Bonnie, you and Pietr get a floater on the East Side, off 14th.”
“Oh, maaaaaaan,” Pietr said, in an uncanny imitation of Nick, while I took the file with a grimace. Yeah, Venec was still pissed about the blue hair-dye job.
Lou and Nifty, for a change, looked relieved to be stuck in the office. Nobody wanted a floater. Ever.
Everyone else filtered out, but I stayed in my chair, looking at the folder.
“You guys make it look so easy.”
I twisted in my chair and looked at Lou, who had left, and then come back, standing in the doorway. “What?”
“Easy.” She made a gesture with one hand at some vague thing in front of her. “I know it’s not—god, how I know—but you never seem to hesitate. Stosser gives you an assignment, you absorb it, and head out. You call on your current, and you just assume that the current will do what you want. And it does.”
“If you’re still worrying about the incident with the piskies, they do that to everyone, first case….” I started to say, but she waved me off. That wasn’t it.
I waited. That was the first thing Venec had taught us: if you wait quietly long enough, people will tell you what you need to know.
“You’re what, twenty-four?” She made it sound like a disease.
“Yeah.” Twenty-three and a half, actually, but I didn’t think correcting her was going to make things better.
Lou stared at the apple in her other hand like she couldn’t remember picking it up, then shook her head and looked back at me. She had a serious face to start, and the look in her eyes now, a sort of despairing resignation, just deepened that impression. “I’m a decade older than you. I had solid training, good training. I’m high-res enough to hold my own. And I’m smart enough to understand how everything works, break it down, and make it better.”
All of that was true, and she knew it and she knew I knew it, so I just kept my mouth shut and waited for her to get to her point. But she didn’t. She just stood there, that apple in her hand, one bite taken out of it like Snow White’s last dinner.
I twisted back and stared at the paperwork in front of me, wanting nothing more than to pack up and head out to the floater, get it over with, if Lou wasn’t going to say anything more. But she stood there, and the silence drew out and got uncomfortable until the weight of social responsibility as hammered into me by J was like a third person in the room.
“You wouldn’t be on the team if you weren’t good,” I said, hoping that would be enough.
“I know that.”
“And you’ll learn the control needed to—”
Her snort interrupted me, and I was thankful. I could lie reasonably well, but I hated doing it. Honestly, though, I had no idea what she wanted me to say, or why she hadn’t gone to Sharon, instead. They were closer in age, had more in common… Why me?
“I’m never going to get it. Not out there, during an open case, with all that pressure. It’s just…like saying Pietr’s suddenly going to stop ghosting.”
She was probably right. Pietr hated the fact that he couldn’t control the way he faded from sight under stress, even though it was probably going to save his life some day.
“I just… I keep wondering why I can’t do it, what’s wrong with me…and then I wonder what else is wrong with me, what am I missing, and what happens if we discover that thing during a case? What happens if we screw up because I can’t handle something in the field, or one of you gets hurt, or…” She stopped, and took a bite out of the apple, teeth crunching into the flesh with maybe a little too much violence.
I was flailing, trying to figure out what she needed to hear. “That’s why we work together. So if one of us misses something, the other’s there as backup. We all make mistakes. Venec will be happy to remind you of that fact, if you’d like.”
Another snort. “You never doubt yourself, do you, Bonnie? Never once wonder if you’re not good enough, worry that you’ll do something so wrong there’s no recovering from it?”
“Of course I do. But everything short of death can be recovered from, and death kinda takes the worry out of the situation.” I hoped.
“Nice. I don’t think I was ever that cocky. Maybe that’s the problem.”
She didn’t mean to be cruel, but the words stung. I had a flash of J, years ago, sitting in his favorite chair in the library. The reading lamp was on, and Rupert, who had just been a brown-and-white mop of a puppy then, was sleeping at his feet. He had been gone for a few days, and I’d been happy to have him home, but he didn’t talk much and I’d come in to see what was up, if he maybe wanted dinner, or a drink. And in the light of the lamp, a pale umber glow against his skin, I’d seen the damp track of tears on his cheek.
Whatever he’d been doing, it hadn’t gone well.
“J?” I could have closed the door and left; he’d known I was there but he hadn’t acknowledged me, and so we could both pretend I hadn’t seen anything. But that wasn’t how our household worked.
“Not now, Bonnie,” my mentor had said, his voice a flat, gentle tone. “Right now I am not able to deal with anything beyond my own inabilities.”
I’d been fourteen then, and filled with a sense—nurtured by J—that hard work and skill could get me through anything. The idea that there was something J couldn’t do, that he might doubt his own abilities, was as foreign to me as the thought that he might sprout wings and fly.
I was older now, and had seen more of what life could and would throw at you on a daily basis, things that overwhelmed and dispirited as much as they lifted us and showed us joy. But…
“I’m sorry.” I was. “I didn’t mean to make light of what it is you’re saying…”
“But you have no idea what I’m saying, do you?”
I shook my head, then nodded. “No. I mean, I know what you’re saying, I just…”
Lou laughed, and it was tired but amused, not mocking. “But you’re twenty-four and have never failed at anything, have you?”
I had failed to bring my dad’s killer to justice. The bitterness of that still made my throat ache. But I’d dealt with it, accepted the failure as inevitable—and PUPI was my guarantee that never happened again. The failure had not been my inability, but the lack of a mechanism.
So I said the only thing that I knew was true. “We’re a stronger team, because you’re part of it.”
There was silence, and I risked looking back at Lou. She was staring out the window, and the look on her face was one I recognized: deep, fast-moving thoughts under the surface. I saw that look a lot, around here.
“Yeah,” she said, finally. “Okay.”
She tossed the half-eaten apple into the waste can in the corner, and left. I didn’t get the feeling I’d helped her solve anything.
Hopefully, I’d have better luck with the floater.
two
Pietr had been waiting, semipatiently, in the break room. He took one look at my face and bit back whatever he was going to say, just handing me my case and holding the door to the hallway. One of the great things about our office was that we were only a block away from the subway. The downside was that it was the 1 line, which meant leaving the west side required a crosstown bus, or a lot of walking. Fortunately, it wasn’t a bad day, weather wise.
We made it to the subway without speaking to each other, heading downtown toward the floater, and all the related joy therein, our kits—the assorted and alchemical tools of our trade—stashed at our feet, where nobody could walk by and grab them. And with every rattle and spark along the track, I felt more and more guilty about his being sent along with me. Normally, we take the assignments as they come and try not to whine too much. It’s not like we ever get handed a bouquet of spring flowers to investigate, after all, and if we did it would be infested by hornets and nose-rot. But I felt like I had to say something to Pietr, anyway.
“Sorry.”
Pietr turned his head slightly to look at me, surprised. “Why?”
“Venec’s punishing me for the hair disaster, and you’re stuck with it by association.”
“Oh.” His face went all closed and quiet, the way it does when he processes, and I watched him curiously. For all that he liked to cause mischief, Pietr tended to take his time to consider things. He was one of our thinkers—not that he couldn’t improvise, and quickly, but not in the instinctive, nearly impulsive way Nick did. Or me for that matter, although I used to pride myself on how well I thought shit through. Not enough, apparently.
Pietr didn’t have to think long, though. “You sure it’s the hair that’s chafing his…mood? Or that you’re the real target?”
Ow. I groaned, and looked away. “Don’t you start.”
The fact that Venec and I had sparks going on—okay, sparks like Macy’s fireworks—wasn’t something you could hide from a blind fish, much less an office of trained investigators. The guys liked to tease me about that occasionally. Not meaning any harm, just…the usual shit you get, when the job is tense and the laughs few. Pietr, though, had a different take on the situation. He and I were—on a very specifically, intentionally casual basis—sexual partners. So naturally, he figured that was also why he got stuck with the floater—because there was no way an investigator like Benjamin Venec, with more experience than the rest of us slammed together, didn’t also know about our off-hours agreement, no matter how much we kept it on the q.t.
He might have been right, in ordinary conditions. But Pietr, and the others, were missing a really important part of the puzzle. The pack knew there were sparks. They also knew I wasn’t exactly shy, normally, about going after what or who I wanted. So they had to figure I didn’t want to get involved with the boss, or that the boss had shot me down, for work-reasons. Which was all sorta true.
They didn’t know about the damned Merge, though. Venec and I both agreed to keep it that way. The fact that our current had somehow recognized each other and decided we’d make pretty babies, or some weird and seriously annoying thing like that, didn’t impress me at all, and Venec, well, he really did not like being told what to do by some biomagical force.
All right, it was more complicated than that, and according to Venec’s research the Merge is Serious Doings, but I kept control over my sex life my own self, thanks, anyway, Fate, and be damned if I was going to risk not being taken seriously in my career because my current wanted me to make babies.
I have nothing against babies. Eventually. When and if I decided to have them.
But every day we worked together, the pull got stronger. If I let down my mental walls even a little bit, I knew his mood, and if I reached just an inch, I’d get my fingers into his thoughts.
Same for him, with me.
It was making us…cranky. Venec was a fair guy, for all that he was a bastard, and wouldn’t play favorites or punish someone for a screwup once the lesson was learned. My hair color was only an excuse for him to blow off some of that crank into an actual reason. Knowing that rationally didn’t make the scolding hurt any less, though.
And Lou thought I never doubted myself? That was almost funny. The Merge had made me doubt my entire personal philosophy, change the way I interacted with people, second-guess every flicker and twinge of my emotions…. I needed to get a handle on myself. A distracted investigator could not do her job, and leaving this job was…not an option.
Pietr touched his hand on mine, lightly. “Bonnie…”
I shook my head, staring at the advertisement across the subway car instead of looking at him, listening to the chunk-chunk-whirr of the car’s movement, focusing on the subtle but real hum of current running along the third rail, instead of listening to him. “No. Stop. Work hours.”
I wasn’t talking about the touch, but what he was going to say. How the two of us blew off steam and gave comfort off-hours was off-hours. Neither of us wanted it to spill into the workday, especially if there was half a chance that it would screw up our professional relationship. Pietr and I worked well together. He backed me up, I pushed him on…we got things done.
That was why Venec had paired him with me, today. Probably. Anything else would be petty, and Benjamin Venec wasn’t petty.
Except, of course, when he was.
We rode the rest of the way in a more comfortable, companionable silence, switching from the train downtown for a crosstown bus that dropped us off at the Manhattan Bridge, and we walked the rest of the way, stopped by the usual tangle of the FDR Drive. Finding a safe place to cross would require some backtracking. Mass transit sucked when you were working a crime scene, but without a siren, cars could be even slower, and Translocation, using current to move someone from point A to point B, was a serious drain on the core of the person doing the sending, with the additional inherent risk of finding a safe place to land. You couldn’t actually land “on” someone—magic follows the same rules as physics, mostly, and two objects can’t occupy the same space—but you could get knocked over or hit by a moving object or person. As usual with magic, the odds of actually being seen doing anything was small. Nulls didn’t see what they didn’t want to see.
Oh, hell, Talent didn’t, either.
We stood there, and watched the traffic moving along the FDR, a steady stream of cars going too fast, and I heard a thoughtful hrmm rise from my companion.
“I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely no desire to become a greasy splat on the highway.”
The hrmm turned into a heavy exhale that wasn’t quite a sigh. “Me, neither.”
Especially since there was no guarantee that, in racing across the street, Pietr wouldn’t ghost out of sight, and get hit by an otherwise-paying-attention driver. After you worked with him for a while, you started thinking about things like that.
