Tricks of the Trade (19 page)

“Ow!” She glared down at me, indignant through her worry.

“M'okay,” I managed again. “It's not me. S'Venec.”

She shook her head, not understanding. “Venec!” I managed again, and some control came back as though I was asserting ownership of my body, despite the waves of pain and fear that were still battering my core. Damn it, what was going on?

I ignored Sharon for a moment, now that she had her fingers out of my mouth, and dived down into my core.

Instead of my normally calm, settled mass of current, I landed in the middle of a molten disaster. Swells of electric-bright orange and neon-green made like a roiling vortex; jagged sparking waves and indigo thunder cracking overhead. It was mine, but it terrified me, and for an eternity of an instant I struggled to maintain control.

*venec!*

The call went unanswered, and the panic swamped me. Impossible. I hadn't realized how much I depended on that immediate response, hadn't understood how much—despite my resisting it—the Merge had, well, merged us. I knew, instinctively, that he should be here, within my core, if I only reached out….

I let down my walls, all my walls, shattering them into crackling dust.

*benjamin!*

*….here…*

Faint, weak, hurting, but clear. The relief I felt was run through with the pain he was in, the awareness that he needed help, and he needed it now.

Then, through his ears, I heard sirens, and the sound of human voices snapping orders, similar to the ones Sharon was calling over me, and the fear retreated enough for me to get control back.

*hang on* I sent him, hoping he was able to hear me, and came back up out of my core, stilling my limbs and regulating my breathing even as I did so, trying to ignore the pain that was still racking my brain and core, if not my actual body.

“Enough,” I said. “It's not me.” I hesitated, knowing the next words out of my mouth were going to open a major can of worms, and not really caring, at this point. “It's Venec. He's been hurt. He's being taken to Saint Joe's.” The information came to me even as I said it, the connection still holding, even though the pain had tamped down to bearable levels. Oh, god, he was in so much pain, why couldn't they do something for his pain?

And then, blessedly, they did, and my body was mine again.

“How do you…” Sharon caught herself. “Never mind. Where's Stosser? Does he know?”

I shook my head. Great, I was going to have to explain this to the boss, too. “Don't know where he is.” And then, suddenly, I did.

*boss*

The ping came back from Stosser, sharp and worried. We didn't ping him, usually, he called us, or had Venec do it.

*ben. hospital* Less words or emotions than impressions, filtered through me, straight from Ben. I had no idea how we were doing it—I didn't think Ben knew, either. It was enough that we could do it.

The connection cut off, but not before I got a sense of understanding, of being en route already, and…

Gratitude.

Someone cut all the strings holding me together, and I collapsed backward, into Nick's arms, this time with relief. It was being taken care of. Ben was hurt, but he would be okay. Stosser was on the case.

I shuddered, then looked up at the others, steadfastly ignoring the need to go follow, to be there when they brought Ben in. Those weren't our marching orders; we would only be in the way. Colder still: if I was going to refuse the Merge, I had no right to be there. “Boss's on it. We're supposed to get back to work.”

“But…” Lou looked like she wanted to argue, probably try to send me to bed with a book and a bowl of her
sopa verde,
which sounded oh my god so tempting, but wasn't possible. Not right now.

“I'm fine.” I wasn't, and they all knew that, but they allowed me the fiction, even as I was forcing myself to sit up, unaided. “I'm all right. It was…”

“It was that thing. Between you and Venec.”

“What?”

I stared at Nick, blinking stupidly.

“Come on, Bonnie, we're not dumb. That little display a couple of days ago was the most overt, but you two spark at each other every time you're in the same room, and it's not just sexual shit, because I've seen you when you're interested in someone and that's not it. And you're off your game, have been for months.”

Ow.

“So what's going on?”

They were all staring at me, expecting an answer. Oh, crap.

I stopped trying to get up off the floor, and just sat up
more comfortably, checking each inch of the way that I wasn't wobbling. I'd underestimated them. How, after more than a year, had I managed to do that?

“We're not sure what's going on.” Slight prevarication there: we were sure; we just didn't know what it meant, or how much longer we could keep it at bay. Venec thought forever… I hadn't been so sure, and I was even less sure now. Based on what just happened, it was probably already too late to try. “It's called The Merge. It's…complicated.” Probably impossible to explain to anyone who wasn't a pup, who hadn't already gone through the training to work together, that we had.

“Oh, hell. Our current matches. Like puzzle pieces. And the more we're in proximity, the more it wants to, well, merge.”

That was the bare bones working version, anyway.

“So you were able to hear him, when we couldn't.” Sharon sounded, inevitably, annoyed. She hated being left out of anything, or one-upped on current-skills. I was too tired to try and correct her.

“No.” Interestingly, it was Lou who got it, first. “It means he couldn't stop himself from reaching her. And she couldn't shut him out. Like overrush, but coming from someone else.”

I wasn't wobbling anymore, but every inch of my body hurt, inside and out. “Yeah. Like that.”

When Nicky looked like he wanted to ask more questions, I glared him off, which wasn't easy, sitting on the floor like I was. Time enough to avoid questions about what it all actually meant, later. Much, much later.

“No…”

“Sir, relax. Everything will be fine.”

“No…” They were rattling him down out of the ambulance, two young men and an older woman, their faces intent but calm. Normally Venec would have found their competence reassuring. He was fond of competence. But he could feel the thumping of his heart and the hissing of his core, and the taste of the current simmering in the place they were rolling him toward was too dangerous to let him anywhere near it.

“No!” He managed to make his hand reach up and grab the woman's wrist. “No!”

“Sir, we have to…” She tried to, gently, pry his hand off her, but desperation gave him additional strength.

“You can't. Not in there.”

They didn't understand, wouldn't listen, trying to place a clear plastic oxygen mask over his face. He could feel the tendrils of his core reaching out, his control almost gone, the blood loss and drain from fighting off the hell-
hound making him desperately crave the recharge that current offered….

“You can't take me in there!” he told them, his voice muffled, already resigned to what would happen.

“What's going on?” Another man in white, no, he was wearing pale blue scrubs. A doctor? Ben tried to focus on the man's face, willing him to understand.

“Dog savaging victim,” one of the paramedics reported. “He's hallucinating, possibly. Disorderly.”

The hand holding the oxygen mask hesitated, torn between training and the doctor's interference, and Ben used the distraction to make one more plea. “Don't let me in there. Too dangerous.” Talent in emergency rooms were bad in the best of times, their pain and panic causing things to go haywire. As shocky and drained as he was… If his core went down too far, he would pull from the nearest source to protect himself. It would be instinctive, unstoppable except by his death, and without meaning to he could pull so much off that their entire system could fail. People could die.

“Hold up,” the doctor said, putting a hand down on the gurney to stop their progress. “Sir?”

Ben tried to focus, again, on his face.

“Sir, are you Talent?”

He almost cried in relief, managing to give a quick, sharp nod of agreement.

The doctor turned to the paramedic trying to affix the oxygen mask and snapped off an order. “Bring him into the overflow room.”

“But—”

The other male EMT, either quicker on the uptake or
more experienced in the whims of doctors, slapped his companion on the arm, hard, and nodded in agreement to the doctor. Ben felt the gurney shift slightly, rolling in a different direction, the pace picking up as they went down another hallway, not into the main emergency room but a smaller, quieter space. The same off-white walls, the same smell of disinfectant and urine and sweat filling the air, the same undertone of concerned voices speaking too softly, and then a cry or a shout breaking the tension and causing a flurry of activity….

But the seductive, dangerous hum of high-powered machinery was less, as though the room was wrapped in a protective bubble.

You didn't take a panicked, injured Talent into an emergency room filled with expensive, high-maintenance, highly calibrated electrical life-giving equipment. Not without precautions. Not when other people's lives depended on those machines.

The doctor leaned in closer, his voice now pitched only for Venec to hear. “Do you need a sedative?” In other words, was he still a danger to anyone in the hospital?

Ben managed to shake his head. The urge, the panic, was fading, removed from the direct lure. Whatever they'd done to block out the current in this space, it was effective.

He might not need the sedative, but he wanted it, badly. The lacerations in his throat and arms were agony, and although the drip in his arm was dulling the pain, it didn't do anything for the memory of the beast coming for him, the hot stench of its breath on his face, the acrid burn of its drool….

It hadn't been a full-on purebred hellhound. If it had been, he would be dead. A crossbreed, or maybe even a quarter-breed, something with mastiff or—

His mind went over the details, trying to determine what the beast was, so that he could find out where the client had gotten hold of one—and why—and then go find the breeder and issue a smack-down for letting a Null have a goddamned hellhound, even one that watered down. It was pointless obsessive work, but it kept his mind occupied and away from what they were doing around him, shifting him onto another surface, drawing white curtains around him, switching out the drip in his arm for another and the doctor was there again, his face covered but his eyes dark gray and focused the way a real professional got when they were in the groove, and Ben was able to let go of the last bit of conscious thought and let them do what needed to be done.

 

When he had first approached Benjamin with the idea—then only a glimmer born out of frustration and anger—for PUPI, Ian Stosser had thought about things like justice, and conscience, and how to win people over to his cause.

Ben Venec had thought about things like training, licensing, and hospital authorizations. Making his signature on the seventh page of tagged forms, Ian was thankful, once again, that his partner had a grasp on the practicalities he sometimes forgot. Trying to reach Ben's family in time…wouldn't have happened.

“Fortunately, he hadn't lost much blood, and there doesn't seem to have been any infection in the wounds.
From the size of the bite marks, I'd say it was a mastiff or some other large breed. We gave him a rabies shot as a precaution, but…”

The doctor's voice trailed off, and he looked at Stosser with a steady gaze. He was young, maybe barely out of residency, but Ian had a suspicion that he'd ended up in the E.R. not by chance but choice. Ex-military, maybe. Calm in crisis and able to think no matter what the shift threw at him. Not a Talent, but he knew what he was about—and had recognized what Ben was. Ian owed him.

“Hellhound.”

The doctor's eyes went a little wider, but he only nodded. “So rabies probably not an issue, but better safe than really sorry. It will be taken care of?”

“It has already been dealt with.”

You didn't send cops or ASPCA workers in after a hellhound, not even a half-breed. The moment Bonnie had shown him what had happened, Ian had put the call in to the local Council, who had sent a team in to take down the animal. They had found it, bleeding, in a corner of the client's property, and taken it in.

Ian regretted the inevitable ending to this story. It wasn't the hound's fault; crossbred and properly trained by someone who knew what they were doing, a hellhound was an amazing creature. Smart, loyal, fierce…and deadly without the proper ownership and continued handling. The client was damned lucky the animal hadn't turned on him, or one of his staff—if Ben hadn't shown up, and been strong enough to beat it back with current, someone would have died, eventually.

Ian was willing to bet that the client had been told the beast would be a good guard dog, prevent anyone who had come the first time from returning. Same idiot who had sold him the “magic-proofing” alarm system in the first place, probably. If the Council didn't take care of that, too, Ian and Ben would pay the fellow a visit when this was all over, and explain to him that fleecing Nulls was one thing, but endangering them—and anyone else in the damned vicinity—was another entirely.

“Boss.”

He wasn't at all surprised to hear Torres's voice behind him. In fact, now that he thought about it, he was surprised she hadn't been at the hospital when he arrived. Whatever was going on between the two of them, it clearly did not allow for indifference.

And that was another thing he was going to look into, now. Ben owed his life to her reaction—but it was clearly something that involved the agency, not just their personal lives. And that meant he, Ian, had to know what the hell was going on.

“Torres. Where's the rest of the pack?”

“Working.” She looked past his shoulder once, briefly, then her gaze came back to him. “I drew the short stick, to brief you.”

He didn't believe that for a minute. From the look on her face, she didn't expect him to, either. He let it pass. Now was not the time.

“You know why Ben was there,” she asked, “the connection between him and the client?”

He did not. “Tell me.”

 

I updated Stosser on everything that had happened, standing there in the hallway, hospital staff and patients going past us as though we were nothing more than furniture. Part of my brain wondered at that: normally Stosser commands at least a first look from everyone in the vicinity, his natural charisma is just that damn impressive. But today, he had the mute button taped down, or something.

“There was no reason for the client to connect the P.I. his wife hired, with us,” Stosser said, when I was finished. “Ben was acting in a purely Null capacity, then. I don't see why he thought there might be anything suspicious about the connection now.”

“Venec thinks there's something suspicious about everything.”

That almost got a laugh out of the boss, mainly because it was true. Venec wasn't cynical, or jaded, just really wary.

“I think…” I hesitated, not because I wasn't certain, but because I wasn't sure how to tell a Big Dog what I thought without him asking why I thought that.

“You think, or Ben thinks? And does he know that you know what he thinks?”

Ow. I guess the boss could do direct as well as he did politically indirect, yeah.

“It's called the Merge,” I said, just as blunt. “You ever hear of it?”

Stosser blinked, as surprised by my counter serve as I was, and then shook his head no.

“Me, neither. It's rare, and stupid, and it boils down
to we're stuck with each other. Current-wise, I mean.” I should have given him more detail than I'd given the rest of the team, probably, but I wasn't in the mood for details, and if he was so damn brilliant, he could figure it out.

“Your current…merges.” He wasn't asking for confirmation; I'd been right, and his scary-brilliant brain had already leapfrogged over the basics and was going into the possibilities. And, knowing the boss, his possibilities had nothing to do with the personal lives or preferences of either of us, but what it would mean for PUPI.

Considering the sideways looks and uncomfortable body language I'd left behind in the office, I actually preferred Stosser's reaction.

“Can you hear him now?” he asked.

“No. They have him drugged too deeply.” I could feel him, this close, and with his walls down under the drugs' influence; restless fingers fluttering at the edge of my awareness. If I dipped in, I knew I'd be inside his morphine-dreams. So I stayed out.

“All right. There's nothing we can do here—they'll keep him drugged for a few more hours, and he won't welcome either of us hovering. Come on.”

“Where?” But I knew, even as I followed him. The client had put Ian Stosser's best friend and partner in the hospital. The boss was going to take a direct hand in the investigation, now.

Part of me wanted to stay in the hospital, lurking in the god-awful waiting room, to be there when Venec woke up, and to hell with what he would or wouldn't welcome. But I went with Stosser. Boss was brilliant, and way more
high-res than the rest of the office put together…but he had no damned idea what to do on a crime scene, and would probably do more harm than good, if unsupervised.

Besides. I'd know the instant Ben woke up.

We exited the hospital through the main door, and I blinked in the sunlight, relaxing a little now that we were out of direct surround of all that technology.

I figured that we would take a cab back to the site, because there was no way Ian Stosser used mass transit, but I hadn't taken into account the fact that the high-res do things different than us peons. The only warning I got was his hand coming down on my shoulder, and the quick tingle of current, and we'd Translocated.

Most people knew better than to Transloc blind, out of line-of-sight, without prepping the destination, if it wasn't an emergency. Ian Stosser was not most people. I guess he was arrogant enough to assume everyone would get the hell out of his way, somehow.

Apparently he was right, because we hit the street without so much as a bump or stare, mainly because, unlike the crowded avenue outside the hospital, there was nobody on this residential street to bump or stare.

The house looked pretty much exactly the way Sharon had re-created it in the diorama, at least from the street. Ian landed us just inside the shrubbery surround, on the well-trimmed, if muddy lawn. I took two steps toward the house, and almost fell to my knees.

The grass wasn't muddy. It was bloody. Ben's blood. I knew it without even looking, the way the images flooded my brain like my own memories. A wave of
woozy nausea hit me, like it was my own blood there, flushed from tears in my own flesh. Oh, god. I'd almost lost him. Oh, god.

“Keep moving.”

It was an order, not a suggestion, and my feet kept moving, carrying me forward onto dryer ground. The memory remained, but its hold on me faded enough that I no longer felt it in my own flesh.

I didn't think Stosser noticed anything except his own thoughts. I was wrong. “This Merge-thing. It can be a problem, too.”

“Yeah.” Boss had that right, and then some.

We were met at the door by the housekeeper. She seemed a little less together than Sharon and Nick had described; I guess a break-in, however damaging, was easier to deal with than a guy almost dying on your front lawn.

“Mr. Wells is not home….”

“We're not here to see him,” Stosser said, walking past her as though she'd invited us in. “I want to see the room where the missing objects were kept.”

She looked at me, and I gave her my best “I'm just the flunky” look. “Best to give the man what he's asking for,” I suggested. “He's kind of cranky about one of his people almost being puppy chow.” The flippancy cost me, but it worked. Her lips tightened, but she led us to the office.