Tricks of the Trade (18 page)

Nothing. For all of Wells's talk of deterrence and alarms, the gates weren't electrified or current-reinforced. They were simply for show? Odd, but not impossible. People with money did strange things.

He walked past the metal gateposts, moving up the driveway toward the house, when he first heard the noise. A low rumbling, as though someone had started up a lawn mower somewhere, or revved an ancient engine, rough and ragged.

He was halfway up to the house when the sound came
again, this time more clearly. Not metallic but organic, wet and angry. And coming closer.

He barely had time to mutter “oh, fuck” before the hellhound was on him.

 

I'd started to work on restructuring the diorama one more time, after Sharon pointed out—logically, as Sharon was prone to—that we might need it if the guys didn't get a confession from the suspects. I thought she was way overestimating what the diorama might be capable of, but then, we didn't know until we tried, did we?

I knew why I'd resisted: given a choice, I'd rather have been doing almost anything else—setting the base in place again was screwing around with my nerves. The room was still overshielded, so even if the diorama-spell snapped, odds were that I'd be protected from the worst of the blast, but reworking a spell was a tricky thing. Reworking it in the exact same place, using the exact same patterns, meant I was building up even more energy than before, which meant that if anything went wrong, it could snap even harder.

I could smell my own sweat, and the underlay of the lemon-scented cleanser we used on the floor and furniture, and felt my legs cramp from tension, and the pushpins of a headache starting at the back of my skull. Pressure, inside and out.

I suddenly understood why witches and mages in the Old Time went crazy, trying to pull too much magic without understanding it was their own body they were using as the conductor, not knowing how important it was to modulate it, control it. We call that wizzing
now, when your body just gets overwhelmed by the pure power you were using, and…

And it didn't do anyone any good to think about it. Control was how you kept control, and the moment you started to doubt, control cracked.

Like Venec, and the Merge. If I let down my guard…

And with that thought, my control totally went out the window, and the structure shattered into annoying sparks and sparkles.

“Damn it…” Even nowhere in sight, the man was a distraction.

“This isn't going to work,” I said, trying to dislodge the sense of failure that was dogging me. “I'm overthinking, second-guessing what I saw. Anything I build now is going to be contaminated.” Probably. It had been too long, anyway, and there was too much else in my head—not to mention too many people in the room. I worked better alone.

Giving up, I let the base disperse, taking back the current into my core, and turned to look more carefully at the other construct at the other end of the table. Sharon, ignoring my outburst, was still building her own diorama, holding it steady with control that was worth admiring. Nick was watching, adding in a comment or suggestion every now and again in a low voice. Theirs wasn't as detailed as mine; her gleaning skills and memory weren't as strong, yeah, but also a house was more detailed and complicated than the concrete pier, so there were, inevitably, blank spots.

“Nick tried to fill in the details with what he saw,” Sharon said, looking up and seeing where my gaze had
lingered. “But we couldn't get his gleaning and mine to merge.”

The word sent a shiver down my back, but I didn't think any of the others noticed. Or if they did, they didn't say anything. Why would they? The word didn't mean anything to them other than the dictionary definition.

“We'll figure that out, eventually,” Nick said with confidence. I wasn't so sure. As a group, we could do it, but not every Talent could work together one-on one, even when they were friends or relatives. Current sometimes sparked like that. Yeah, we'd done well as a team before, when we tried to glean the emotional evidence from the murder scene in the Reybourne case, and again when we'd seen the confrontation with the ki-rin through Stosser's awareness, but those times had been under Venec's control, his lead. We gave up control to him. Sharing, one-to-one, the way that would be required to build something together, rather than follow in a predetermined route? That was a lot more delicate.

I studied the finished diorama, letting my eyes take in details without actively looking for anything, while my mind chased after that thought. Pietr and I could slip in and out of each other's current-bubble—we'd done it before, to show each other things through mage-sight. But I'd never had to do it with any of the others, didn't know if I would trust them that much, to let them slide into my core, without feeling the need to control the intrusion, trust them not to look, instinctively, where they hadn't been invited.

That might be the next exercise for Venec to run us through, when we had some downtime.

Oddly, that thought didn't give me any flutter of panic, and yet the idea that Venec might be able to do that, slip under my walls at will… Totally different thing.

“These were the only rooms that were disturbed, that we know about. The client didn't let us wander around, so although I think we saw everything, I can't swear to it.” Sharon sounded annoyed about that. Considering that Pietr was able to disappear from most peoples' awareness, it would have been a simple matter for him to go anywhere he wanted, if he had been assigned the initial survey of the scene…except it was mainly a defensive reaction, brought about by stress or fear rather than direct control. I was sort of surprised that the Big Dogs hadn't been working with him on that; but then again, maybe they had, and nobody mentioned it to me. No reason they would, after all.

My ego took the hit with reasonable grace and a little relief—I didn't
have
to know everything, even if I sometimes wanted to—and I leaned in to look more closely at their diorama. It was the first time I'd seen Sharon's work, and while the detail wasn't as precise as mine, it was still solidly built. That was harder than it sounded—I was pretty sure neither Nick nor Nifty could have done it as well. Pietr, maybe.

“We think the perp or perps came in through here.” Sharon held her finger over the far side of the diorama, indicating the back patio. “There was a set of French doors that led directly to the main room, where most of the damage was done. The doors were damaged from the
inside, so we'd assumed it happened during the search, but the fact that we didn't see any damage to the locks on the external side doesn't mean it wasn't there.”

Maybe not. We'd all learned how to recognize the signs of old-fashioned lock-picking, but it was still tough, especially when something with claws had been at it.

“Anyway, from there it was a straight shot down the hall to the office, where the objects were taken. For them to do that much damage in that period of time, they had to have grabbed those items pretty fast, probably before they started the wreckage.”

“They knew what they were looking for,” Nick said. “It wasn't random.” The client was right about that, at least.

“Or they were just there to cause damage, and those two items caught their eye for no reason we can fathom,” Sharon said, shooting him an ice-blue glare before I could tell him he was making a sloppy assumption. “Or, they couldn't find what they were looking for.”

“I like my idea better. If they wanted those items we just have to figure out why and we'll know who. Your theory, we have no way of figuring out who did it.”

Nicky-boy had a point.

“All right.” Sharon relented, a little. “If they did come in looking for those two objects…why? What is it about them? We know they're not Artifacts—” Artifacts were known magic-shaped objects, with a history if not provenance. They were supposed to be registered, so everyone knew them and what they could do. It was a slow process, though, since most Artifacts were family heirlooms with a dark history, and not every Talent wanted to fess up—
or admit to having access to them, if they even knew what they were. “And the watch is, by the client's claim, just a watch. But could there be something more to the dagger than memories?”

“Guy who allegedly built it doesn't have the skill set to do anything more,” Lou said, standing in the doorway.

Damn, she was starting to move as quietly as Pietr!

“So he claims,” I retorted, more annoyed at being startled than by the comment, and Sharon nodded, but looked hesitant.

“You're thinking something. What?” I tried to mimic the tone Stosser used when he was in high-glamour coaxing mode. It must have worked, because the words spilled out of her, like she wasn't stopping to consider them first; not normal for her.

“The client is moderate-Null. He can charge the dagger—” That was how memory-glass worked; it charged off its owner, the low-level hum of current all but the most Null of humans has naturally. “That would be why he kept it close at hand, to make sure it stayed charged. But wouldn't that make the watch stop?”

A windup pocket watch would survive being near cur rent longer than a digital, but it, too, eventually, would be affected.

“Maybe he wound it every day,” Lou said.

“Still.” Sharon frowned. “Why keep them both together?”

“He didn't know any better? Whatever he knew about the
Cosa,
it was probably secondhand information, and most of it wrong,” Nick said. “There wasn't a damn thing
else in that house that had even a come-hither of magic, I'd swear to it.”

“Not even his magical deterrent system?” I asked.

Nick and Sharon both snorted at that. “Worth about as much as a wet paper towel,” Nick said. “Seriously, Sharon's right, if there was anything current-based in that house, we should have felt it, even after it was gone, especially if it had been there for a long time. There wasn't anything, not even the trace you'd feel if someone was trying to cover it up. Not even the dagger. Like someone high-res wiped the slate clear.”

“So that means…what?”

“I don't know. Maybe nothing. But it bothers me, and anything that bothers me—”

“Has to be investigated.” We made it a three-way chorus, hitting Venec's inflection perfectly.

“Well, even if you didn't get anything from the client, Venec will,” Lou said. I winced. It was true, yeah, but showed a level of tactlessness that made even me flinch. And I still wasn't happy he'd gone off alone, not that I'd said anything when he signed out. I was neither stupid, nor crazy.

Besides, odds were he'd picked up my mood, anyway, even through tight walls.

“If he doesn't get himself kicked out, first,” Sharon said, echoing my own thoughts. “He's going to go in like a bull in a china shop, probably, and piss the client off.”

“Bulls aren't actually…” Nick started to say, then saw the look on everyone's faces, and shut up.

“Let's do a two-pronged approach, then,” Lou said, coming into the room and sitting down. J would approve
of her posture: she sat with her butt all the way back in the chair, shoulders up, legs crossed neatly at the ankle. It made me want to instinctively sit up straight and put both feet flat on the floor.

I stayed exactly the way I was, one leg curled underneath me, my ankle-length skirt hiked up enough that it didn't catch under the chair's wheels.

“Two-pronged? Us and Venec?”

“Two possible causations,” Lou said. “One way, this was random violence. Hooligans or someone looking for drug money, or just someone with an urge to screw with rich people for kicks, and sheer bad luck something magical got nicked, bringing us into the equation. Second, that they came in looking for something specific, either the objects taken or something else, and the damage was to cover it up, maybe distract from the owner realizing anything was missing.”

“Except he'd know, immediately,” Sharon said. “Believe me, this is not a guy who lost track of anything. If our perps knew that these objects were important, they'd know enough to know that, too.”

“So…maybe the objects missing were taken because they knew the owner valued them personally, and that was the distraction, even more than the destruction?”

“But it—” I forgot what I was going to say, as my entire body convulsed, my throat closing up in terror, cutting off air to my lungs. My legs twitched wildly, then my entire body spasmed, knocking me off my chair. I could feel my body thrashing, but all I could focus on was the wave of panic, coming from the fact that I couldn't breathe, a metal band snapped around my chest,
compressing at an alarming rate. My pack mates' voices were hollow-sounding, like I was at the bottom of a pool of water, listening to them. They were around me, surrounding me, and I had the hazy sensation that they were touching me, but everything hurt so much I overloaded, unable to distinguish what was real and what was in my brain. I wanted to scream, warn them off, but my throat was locked, my voice silenced, and my body out of control, struggling to breathe, to think clearly, to regain control over myself. I was
Talent,
damn it. I did not lose control.

For that brief flash, the pain cleared enough to hear the voice almost hidden under the pain, wrapped around the pain, driving it toward me,
into
me.

Pain. Teeth. Can't breathe….

And I knew it wasn't me, the pain wasn't mine, but Venec's, and the knowledge was like a solid blow to the gut, clearing my throat enough that I could draw a deep, harsh breath, bringing oxygen back into my lungs, and my brain.

“She's having a seizure!” Sharon's voice, cool and in control. “Lou, hold her head steady. Nick, get my medical kit, now!”

“Mmmmokay,” I managed to get out, but since my body was still flailing, and my voice was slurred even to my ears, they ignored me. Sharon tried to stick her fingers in my mouth, I guess to make sure I didn't swallow my tongue, and I bit her.