Hard Magic (5 page)

“What? When?”

I had to think for a second, then the memory connected with something else, and I had it. “Last night. I tried to scry, get some detail on this interview, and got kicked back, hard.”

Nifty knelt beside me, not touching me. “Is it the same signature?”

I had to think about that, too. Signature’s the specific feel/taste/sound of current. Wild current’s like springwater—fresh and pretty much signatureless. Canned current, the stuff that comes out of electrical wiring, has a specific and easily recognizable signature. Core-current? J’s I could recognize a mile and a millimeter away. Some unknown guy? Tougher. Maybe impossible. But if it was the same, it meant that the killer had been in my brain before I even got here. It meant the killer
knew
me.

I went cold, locking down everything except the question at hand.

“Nothing I could recognize,” I said, finally. “It was sharp, like a lightning bolt, but if it was wild, it was a while ago.” There was a flavor to it, or more like a lack of flavor, like flavor had been stripped out of it. But I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like a crackpot, or that the hit to my head had been worse than it looked.

Nifty was working his jaw like he had a hard thought between his molars, and my gaze, untethered from anything my brain was doing, watched it in fascination.

“Someone…one of us did this?” Sharon sounded as though it was something unthinkable, something…obscene. As though somehow being Talent made you immune from the urge to kill.

I wished that were true. I knew all too well that it wasn’t.

“It came from through here,” Nick said. He was looking up at the ventilation system, holding a hand up like he was trying to coax something out of it. Which he was, actually. The arm moved, tracing a path down through the wall. “There’s wiring here that’s not normal. You’d expect to see it in a modern high-rise, not this place. Too jazzed, too much power. Like laying in a midnight snack of current.” He saw us all staring at him, and shrugged those skinny shoulders with a sort of rueful embarrassment. “I spent a summer working as a runner at a construction copyshop. I stared at a lot of blueprints, got a feel for wiring.”

“So whoever it was, they had to have planned this.” My brain was totally focused now, no hesitations or freaked-out gibbering. For the first time in months, I felt that I had, if not a direction, then at least a path underfoot. “Or at least knew that the wiring was there. Question is, was this guy the actual target? Or was someone just trying out the available power, and he was in the wrong place at the right time?”

“No.” Pietr’s voice was coming from the door, this time. How the hell did he do that? “The question is—why the hell are we still here, poking around trying to figure out who and why? What the hell does it have to do with us, other than we’ve now put our fingerprints all over the room for the cops to find?”

That was a damn good question.

“I’m not in the system,” Nick said, shrugging.

“I am,” Sharon said. “Standard security profile for some of the clients my firm works with. And having my profile flagged for a suspicious death would not be good for my career, since it looks like this job’s not going to pan out to anything.”

“So why are you still here?” Nifty asked, not quite getting up in her face, but close to it: he was challenging her to leave, to abandon us. And when the hell, I wondered, did we become “us”?

“Because…” Sharon let the sentence trail off, obviously trying to put her thoughts into some kind of order before speaking them.

“Because we’re curious,” I said, jumping in. “We don’t give a damn about this guy, particularly. We don’t know who he is, and we’ve got every reason to be pissed off and scared. But we want to know
why,
more.”

“That’s insane.” Nifty sounded like I’d just insulted his mother.

“Sure, but you got another reason for standing there with a dead guy’s day planner in your hand?”

Nifty looked down, and put the book back on the desk as though it was about to bite him. I’d made my point, though, and I could practically see his hackles go down.

“So what now, genius,” Sharon asked, but not pissed-sounding, more like she really did wonder what I was going to suggest.

So did I.

“Now you congratulate yourselves on a successful job interview.”

Sharon shrieked. So did Nifty, in a deeper but no less shrieky voice. Nick jumped back a full foot, and sparks of current appeared in his hands, deep blue and arcing all over his fingers. And Pietr, I swear to god, I was looking right at him and I
saw
him fade out of sight this time.

They all seemed like reasonable things to do, when a dead body sits up and starts talking to you.

“Stand down, people.” A door none of us noticed before slid open and another guy walked in. He was tall, taller even than Nifty, if half his mass, with orange-red hair tied back in a ponytail. The color looked natural, and a guy wearing four-hundred-dollar boots probably isn’t the sort to do Day-Glo dye jobs anyway. Flame-head walked past where Pietr had just been and offered a hand to our dead body. The DB took it, hauling himself to his feet.

They didn’t look a thing alike: flame-head was tall and skinny, and DB was squared-off and dark, but they stood together like bookends, totally unconscious of how they mirrored each other. My fifth-grade dance teacher used to try to hammer that kind of unconscious grace into us, mostly with abject failure.

I also noted now that DB was seriously hot. Not good-looking, the way Pietr was, or even Nifty’s dark, corn-fed handsome, but
hot.

“How did you create the illusion you were dead?” Sharon demanded. “You had no pulse, no breath, no nothing!”

Flame turned to DB and smirked. “I told you I could do it.”

“And you were right,” DB said easily. “Get over it. Gloating’s bad for your digestion.”

That voice. That was the same voice I had heard on the answering machine.

“What the hell is going on here?” Nifty demanded, his body pulling up so he looked the way he must’ve to the guys who’d faced him across the scrimmage line: big, bad, and needing to hit something, hard. “Who the hell are you people?”

“You’re the guy who called,” Pietr said, looking at DB. “I recognize your voice.”

I wanted to say
me, too,
but I think the shock had seized up my vocal cords, because I couldn’t say a thing. Probably just as well; standing up and breathing, DB was the yummy, intense sort I really like, and I’d probably have embarrassed myself if I had been able to say anything. Flame wasn’t quite as yummy, but when you looked at him magically, oh wow. He had an inner core that seriously radiated, like…

The current that had knocked me sideways. It felt familiar because it was—it
was
the same signature as the current that shattered my scrying crystal last night.

Son of a spavined bitch. They had damn well better hire me. These bastards
owed
me.

“You wanted people who didn’t freak when faced with freakiness,” Nick said, as if he’d just figured out the last missing piece of a puzzle. “Whose first thought wasn’t to run, but to look.”

“And you all passed, with flying colors,” Flame said. He seemed to be the spokesperson of the two, stepping forward, literally, and taking the floor. “Even in the face of…unfortunate circumstances, all of you stepped forward and used your respective skills to observe and gather details, integrating information as it was brought forward rather than choosing a conclusion and then sticking to it no matter what.” Flame smiled at us, a wide, approving smile that looked false but somehow felt real. “You all worked together, as a team, despite having no reason to do so. Not a prima donna among the bunch.”

“Which means what?” Sharon asked, her hands fisted on her hips, like she was going to walk out if she didn’t get answers, stat. Hah. Flame’s definition of a prima donna was clearly different from mine.

“It means you’re hired,” DB said, his expression almost—not quite, but almost—looking pleased about the prospect. “All of you.”

There was a slight popping noise, and four more chairs appeared in the office, distributed neatly around the desk. Someone was showing off. From the look DB shot his…partner? I was guessing it was Flame.

“Please,” he was saying, gesturing to the chairs. “Sit. I will explain.”

“That would be nice,” Nick said, sitting in one of the chairs and leaning back in it as though he had all the time in the world. “Starting with who the hell you are.”

Pietr stuck to his position against the wall, but the rest of us took the offered chairs, mainly because, at least for me, my knees were still wobbly. DB righted the overturned leather desk chair and sat in it, effectively reclaiming the desk as his territory, while Flame rested his right hip against the edge of the desk and gazed at us as though he was about to start a lecture.

“Ah. Where to start. At the beginning, yes, Ben, I know,” he said before DB could say anything. I was right, they were partners—not sexual, not unless I was reading them all wrong, and I didn’t do that very often. But business partners, in whatever this was, yes.

“My name is Ian Stosser.” He waited, like we were supposed to have heard of him. “Ah. My partner here, whom you have already met under…awkward circumstances, is Benjamin Venec.”

Venec nodded once at us, his gaze sweeping restlessly from face to face. It wasn’t boredom but evaluation; I knew, having used the same sweep myself more than once. The look of a people-watcher. Stosser was the talker, Venec the looker. One prodded, the other collated responses. Good teamwork. Good cop/bad cop. Or whatever they were.

“Several years ago, there was an incident in Seattle. The Madeline case.” Stosser paused, probably for dramatic effect. “Do any of you remember it?”

I did. Nifty shook his head, and so did Pietr and Sharon. Nick was the only one who spoke up.

“The girl who was raped and murdered. They never found the killer. She was
Cosa
,” he said to the others. “Sixteen, still in mentorship.”

That meant that she was still a kid, supposed to be protected, taken care of, not just by her mentor but by every adult Talent. That’s the theory, anyway.

“She was killed by strangulation, but the coroner was never able to say exactly how, because there wasn’t any of the usual marks or indications in the autopsy. There were rumblings, maybe she’d been killed by someone within the
Cosa
. That someone had used current to subdue and kill her. Madeline’s mentor offered a huge reward, but nobody ever came forward.”

I knew about the case because Madeline and her mentor had been Council. J had been part of the investigating team flown out to look into the alibis of a couple of the guys they suspected. Nothing had ever been proven, nothing had ever been done. He’d come home and hugged me really tight, and never said a word about it after that.

“That’s right. A dead end, totally untraceable, unprovable…Then.” Stosser started pacing, forcing us to follow his movements. “But it got us, Ben and me, to thinking. Why was it untraceable? We all know how to detect current—it’s one of the first things we’re taught in mentorship. We gather it, manipulate it, direct it, imprint it… A current-signature is like a fingerprint, and therefore, like a fingerprint, it should lead you back to the owner, if you only know how. They had suspects, and my contacts tell me that the signature connected to one of them. So why couldn’t they do that, why couldn’t they make that connection for Madeline?”

“Because nobody could agree on the validity of the identification, because there were too many personal conflicts…and not everyone agreed on the validity of the identification, leaving enough doubt that they couldn’t do anything about it.” I hadn’t learned about that from J—I’d done some digging myself, after. All this had been just after Zaki had been killed, and murder was a lot on my mind.

“Right.” Stosser gave me a look of approval, professor to bright student. “But what if…a large what-if, but work with me here, what if there was someone who could and would do the work, tracking down the evidence and building a case based only on the evidence…totally unbiased by any other allegiance than a dedication to the facts…to an insatiable desire to know What Happened?”

I could hear the capitalization in his voice, even before he made quote signs with his hands around those last two words.

“What if there was a place that people could turn to, for crimes committed outside the abilities of the Null police force and court system—crimes by Talent against Talent?”

His comment cut so close to my own pain that I was literally breathless for an endless second.

“There isn’t,” Sharon said, her I-know-everything voice back. That tone was already starting to irk me, even though I knew she was right. “Council won’t trust anything not Council, and lonejacks…”

“Lonejacks won’t trust anyone,” Nifty said.

“That has been true, traditionally,” DB said, and I really needed to stop thinking of him like that, since he wasn’t actually dead anymore. “But traditionally, Talent did not attack Talent, either. The Madeline case was high profile, but even that didn’t get much chatter. So what you don’t know is that there have been others…and the numbers are growing.”

I felt a chill in my spine. Zaki had been one of those numbers, killed by another Talent. I hadn’t realized… I had always thought he was an aberration, a tragic fluke. Talent killing Talent…there weren’t that many of us to begin with; the lines of community had always kept us safe from each other. What had changed?

“The world is changing. We’re changing…” Stosser did that dramatic pause thing again, while I reminded myself that there was no way he could have been reading my mind, that not even the purest Talent could do that without permission. “And we need to change other things in order to keep up. Including how we react to those changes.”

“And you want to be part of that change,” Pietr said, sounding intrigued despite himself. “How?”