Dragon Justice (21 page)

A swoop, and we were airborne, the world
falling away too quickly below me like a parachute drop in reverse. I
squirmed, tucked against the scaled belly of the beast, and my flesh flowed
and reformed around the claws, giving me room to wiggle. My rib cage
adjusted to the pressure, so I was able to breathe, and once I was able to
breathe I could look around.

Or rather, look down. The back of my head
was cradled against the warm scales of the beast, and the view to either
side was obstructed by the great wings, rising and declining like a
heartbeat. The dragons I’d seen before, in person, soared more like raptors.
But then, I’d never been this close to one in flight.

All of which was my dream-brain’s way of
not-looking down. I risked a quick glance and closed my eyes again, my
dream-stomach roiling. Too high up now, too dizzy-making.

Look.

It was a command, rumbling through the
bones of my head, and I knew that it came from the dragon above me. Since
you did not refuse a dragon, I swallowed hard and opened my eyes.

We were over a great body of water now,
which was somehow easier to look at. It was the view most people saw from an
airplane, I supposed—J and I had always Translocated when we traveled, since
he, like most high-res Talent, didn’t trust any machine that relied on
electrical equipment to stay in the air. The dragon dropped several hundred
feet, leaving my stomach behind, and we were close enough to see the
individual waves, tiny white caplets breaking and re-forming in a restless
tangle that reminded me—in a more monochrome way—of the threads of current
within my own core. Then a pod of sleek gray dolphins broke the surface, and
I forgot everything else, in the sheer joy of watching them fly.

Look.

I was looking, but the feeling came that I
wasn’t looking the right way. Gathering faith that the dragon would not drop
me, at least not until I had seen what it wanted to show me, I exhaled
against the scaled restraints and slipped into fugue state.

And then I looked again.

Current. Everywhere. Slipping through the
waves… No, it
was
the waves. The
creatures
within
the waves. I could see through
the gray-green water into the depths and beyond, where slow-moving,
coldblooded creatures glowed with life, an endless routine of swim and eat
and swim and eat and breed and swim and die. Fish and octopuses and whales
and things I had no name for, ancient and terrifying. Merfolk, the deep-sea
cousins no human ever encountered and lived, more vicious than their coastal
kin, bared teeth at me, seeing me as I saw them, but not daring to attack,
not while the dragon carried me.

And then the dragon rose and I realized we
had dipped to skim the water, so close that my face was wet with salt-spray,
my clothing soaked and hanging heavy off my limbs, even as we were rising
and banking, turning over a coastline now, and with fugue-sight, mage-sight,
I saw the power in the earth itself, the ley lines clearly visible,
following fissures in the world, tracing veins across the rock, the entire
world bound up by it, bound by it.

The immensity of it all was too much, and
I closed my eyes, but the mage-sight remained.

Look.

I looked.

Remember.

And then the dragon released me, and I
fell.

Chapter 14

“Bonnie! Bonnie!”

The sound came from too far away, and then it was right in my
face, no transition whatsoever from dreamspace and waking. I sat upright, the
sweat already drying on my skin, and stared blankly at Sharon. “What?” Had I
woken her with my dreaming? Except it was too clear, too sharp in my head, and I
knew damn well it hadn’t been a dream. Not the way Nulls call it, anyway.

What had the dragon wanted me to see?

“Was I… What’s wrong?” I might be awake but I wasn’t coherent.
Sharon didn’t seem to notice.

“Come on. Get dressed.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Pietr pinged me, woke me up. I guess he couldn’t
reach you.”

The kenning-dream had taken me too far to reach, even by Pietr.
Maybe Venec could have, but—

“Is Pietr okay? Venec?” I had already grabbed my pants off the
chair and was pulling them on, trying to remember where my boots had ended
up.

“They’re fine. It’s Stosser.”

* * *

I guess somehow we always thought that Ian Stosser was
indestructible. He just kind of absorbed what the world tried to hit him with
and…I don’t know, ignored it. Even when his own sister took current-shots at us,
he’d shaken it off and gone on with the job.

We knew better, of course. Ian Stosser might not show weakness
to the world, not even to us, but he was only human, and he could be hurt.

The sight of the blood on his skin and clothing was still a
shock. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was even paler than usual, which meant he
was practically translucent.

“What happened?” Sharon, who had gotten her EMT certification
last year, was our default medic. She immediately took the dampened towel away
from Pietr and started clearing away the mess from Stosser’s hands. The fact
that he let her was proof that something was terribly wrong.

“God, did you wake the entire hotel?” Stosser might have been
passive but he was not polite.

“Don’t start with me, Ian. I swear to god, do not start with me
right now. You knew you were at risk, and you went walking. In Philadelphia.
Alone. At two in the goddamned morning.” It would have been less frightening if
Venec had been yelling, the way he yelled at us when we fucked up, instead of
the cold, low, too-calm voice he was using.

“What happened?” I asked, since Sharon was too busy to insist
on an answer.

“Stosser decided to take a walk to clear his head.” After
they’d finished arguing or during? I didn’t ask.

Normally, Stosser wandering alone at night wouldn’t be an
issue. It wasn’t like he couldn’t handle a mugger or even a gang of unruly
bikers looking to pick on the metrosexual redhead. Except it looked like he
hadn’t been able to handle it.

Since Venec was still fuming, I turned to the other Big Dog.
“I’m assuming the other guys look worse?”

That earned me a tight smile. “Much.”

Venec was pacing the confines of the room, which—with all of us
gathered—meant he was constantly having to turn around. It was making me dizzy,
but stopping him would have been worse.

“I swear to god, Ian. You knew—you knew someone was going to be
gunning for you, and still you went out alone.” So he had been warned about
Ellen’s vision. Good. Not that it seemed to have had much impact on him.

“I am supposed to spend the rest of my life wrapped in current
and locked away, then?”

“No. Just until we have some idea of who plans to make you
dead.”

If this was how they’d been arguing before, I was almost sorry
I’d decamped. They sounded like an old married couple. It was serious—maybe
deadly serious—but I had the terrible urge to giggle.

“Did you ever think that maybe nobody does? That maybe what the
girl saw, if she really saw it, was the result of some natural demise? And that
maybe it isn’t going to be for another ten years?”

“That’s not how it works, boss.” I’d been quiet until now,
keeping out of the line of potential fire, but this was something I knew about.
And Stosser, for all his brilliance, apparently didn’t. “If she’s a true
storm-seer, even untrained, then what she sees is tied up in possibilities and
violence, not a peaceful and inevitable conclusion. Both you and Wren… Something
you’re doing now is going to get you killed. Soon.”

It might not be tied together—Ellen knew Wren, and she knew me
and I was tied to Stosser, so the connection might be that vague—but the threat
was real.

Stosser looked away, only the tightness of his neck giving away
the fact that he was in any discomfort under Sharon’s competent ministrations.
Or maybe it was just having to admit that he might have been wrong. “If so, then
I should be safe so long as the Retriever isn’t around, correct?”

“Or the same person kills you at different-but-close times,
thereby establishing a connection. Or if the only connection is the fact that
Ellen knows Bonnie.” That was Sharon, making the same connections probably
everyone else was, too. Ironic, really, since Stosser was the one who had set me
on the missing-kid case, which led me to Ellen, which led to her having a vision
about Stosser being dead.

“This seer would be a lot more useful if she could give
specifics, the way you do when you scry,” Stosser grumbled.

Proof that the boss wasn’t as unshook as he claimed: my scrying
was about as specific as a fortune cookie. You had to have details before it
made sense. We were just really good at ferreting out the details.

“Yeah, well, if it was easy, anyone could do it, right?”

He was smart enough not to respond to that.

Sharon finished with the towel and was inspecting the cuts on
his hands. From the way her forehead scrunched I could tell that she was worried
about something, but sending him to a hospital… Even if Venec bodily put him
into an ambulance, an MRI would probably short out under Stosser’s current,
anyway—intentionally or not. So she contented herself with wiping away the blood
and making sure the cuts were clean before she bandaged them up. You could heal
with current, but there was always a real risk of current screwing with the
body’s natural electrical system, rather than fixing it.

Ben might have been able to make a difference, but he wasn’t
going to do Stosser any favors, right now. Venec was old-fashioned that way: you
earned a bruise, you got to live with it. Especially if you made him worry.

“All right,” Stosser said, finally, clearly no longer talking
to me. “Yes. It was careless of me.”

I would have said stupid, but I wasn’t going to. Ben’s fury,
and his fear, were obvious to everyone, and from the looks Pietr kept shooting
me when he thought nobody was looking, he thought I should do something about
it, before a real argument broke out.

I wanted to tell him that wasn’t how it worked; just because
you could reach someone more deeply, maybe even without them realizing it,
didn’t mean you had the right to do so. If he was angry and worried, he had
cause to be, and it wasn’t my place to tell him to calm down. Or, worse, make
him calm down. That was not what the Merge was for.

Okay, technically and best we’d been able to determine from the
few really old texts that mentioned it, the Merge was only interested in two
people with strongly connecting current-cores creating new babies. And maybe
Pietr was right, although not the way he thought he was. This might not be what
the Merge had intended, but nothing said we couldn’t use what it offered for our
own purposes. Ben had refilled me when I needed it; what could I do, while still
respecting his sense-of-self? Not to calm his rightful anger down but to ease
the pressure of it.

I didn’t so much take down my walls as let them soften; become
permeable. If something unwanted pushed at them, they’d react by snapping back,
but for now, things could come and go freely, if not easily.

And through that I could feel Ben, letting my core reach out
and brush against his. Not an invasion, not even a push, merely the awareness
that I was there. He would either ignore me or…

Let me in, with a sensation not of falling but sinking, softly
and smoothly, without any panic or fear, the way your skin melts when a lover
touches you with intent. I did not push, did not reach, but simply settled into
the space given. I was still me, still within my own awareness—the loss-of-self
I’d feared when the Merge first appeared had been beaten off with the club of my
own strong self-image—but I could touch Ben’s core, share his feelings, the
occasional stray wisp of thought or action-to-be. If I focused I could “hear”
his heart beat, although it was more the echo of electrical action through his
own current than the actual noise.

*let me* I offered and felt him shift inside, letting me carry
some of his distraction. It was like holding a scrying crystal, a massive one,
and then passing over a ley line while you tried to scry: the bits that were
cloudy came clear, and the things that had seemed clear before were now so sharp
they sliced the sky.

Dragons

*what?*

*nothing. later*

While I was holding down the fort, so to speak, Venec continued
the interrogation. “You drove them off?”

“I told you that already.”

“How many were there? How did they get a drop on you? I’m
assuming they used current, that you didn’t get jumped by a bunch of Null
hoods.”

Venec’s voice had gone sharp, goading, and Stosser reacted
perfectly, even though he had to know that he was being goaded.

“I could handle Nulls and not even get dusty,” he said,
annoyed. “They used a current-net to stick me, then came down. Four of them, a
nicely organized ambush. And, no, I don’t know who they were, and, no, I don’t
need to know. Let it alone, Ben. Those aren’t the droids we’re looking for.”

“You do know.” Pietr had been quiet, but he broke in now and
then looked as surprised as anyone that he’d said anything. “You know who they
were…and they knew who you were, which means they jumped you for a reason. But
this isn’t a case anyone should want to scare us away from, so it’s not
that…”

“What are you tangled in, Ian?” Ben’s voice, cooled from his
earlier anger under my touch, but still intense. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing we need to worry about.”

“The last time you said that—the last three times you said
that—it was Aden, and it was something we needed to worry about. No more, Ian.
Not with a death vision hanging over your head and a serial killer running
around not exactly waiting for us to catch him. I can’t be distracted like that.
None of us can be distracted like that.”

The air pressure increased, and the damp strands of Stosser’s
hair lifted just enough off where it hit his shoulders that you’d think a storm
front had just hit town. Which it had.

I eased off a little more from Ben’s core, sliding my own sense
of calm and rightness into the space left behind. And, oddly enough, I was calm.
Normally, two high-res Talent start with a stare-down, you duck and ground and
hope to hell none of the current hits you. But these were the Big Dogs, and they
would never let any of their internal conflict touch us.

I was pretty sure of that, anyway. Maybe the Merge was
shielding me: Pietr and Sharon were still as mice, their attention carefully not
on either Stosser or Venec, waiting to see how the storm would break.

“Sonofabitch.” It was an exhalation of sound more than actual
words out of Stosser’s mouth, but the current-pressure retreated, and we could
breathe again.

The Big Dog got up, pushing Sharon aside gently, and stalked to
the door. The way he was walking, I could tell his ribs hurt. I also knew better
than to suggest he have someone look at them.

“It’s Chicago,” he said, his hand on the door. “Just Chicago.”
And then he was gone, leaving the four of us standing, abandoned, in his hotel
room.

“Boss?”

A multitude of questions in that one word. What just happened?
What happened in Chicago? What should we do? What could we do?

I’d been shoved out. Venec was as walled-up and tied down as
I’d ever felt him: I couldn’t get the slightest read, not without digging, and
that was the very last thing I wanted to do, right then. Not because it would be
rude, but because one wrong tap, and he might explode.

He answered Pietr with another question. “Can you follow him
without being seen?”

“What will he do to me if he sees me?”

“Bad things.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Pietr waited a beat and then left the
room, already beginning to fade around the edges. They’d been working on getting
his tendency to disappear under stress under control—it made a belated kind of
sense that they’d want ways to induce it, as well as reduce it.

“I am… I’m going to get rid of these rags—” Sharon held up the
bloodstained washcloths “—and then, um, go back to sleep. Because there’s
nothing else to do right now, right?”

“Right,” Venec agreed, but he sounded like he had barely heard
her and had no idea what he was responding to. That was very much not Benjamin
Venec. Sharon shot me a very pointed look and beat feet out the door. Her silent
comment had been totally unnecessary: I wasn’t going to leave Ben alone.

Not in any sense of the word.

“What happened? In Chicago?”

Venec had never lied to me. Not ever. He had refused to tell me
things and expected me to respect that—and I had. But not this time. We couldn’t
afford to be working blind. Not with everything else that was going on.

“It’s not—”

“Don’t give me that shit.” Suddenly, looking at his drawn and
tired face, at wheneverthehell in the morning it was, I was furious. I don’t get
mad often but when I do, I don’t hold back. “Somebody just hauled down on
Stosser, hard enough to draw blood. And I don’t see any new smoking craters on
the sidewalk, so that means he didn’t fight back. Not really, not the way he
could, if somebody he didn’t know attacked him, or if he felt he could let go.
Pietr was right.” And there was only one possible answer to that. “Was it her?
Was it his bitch of a sister?”