Tricks of the Trade (20 page)

We passed by the library, which according to Sharon and Nick was the room that had gotten the most damage, first. Peeking in, I saw that it was covered with sheets, the kind you use when you put a house up for the season, not
the kind workers use, so I figured they hadn't gotten the insurance evaluation yet. No matter how rich you were, insurance companies made you wait, I guessed.

The office where m'lady chatelaine brought us was uncovered; most of the damaged furniture had obviously been cleared away, but the space otherwise untouched. If Wells was anything like J in his desk management, the staff was afraid to do anything in here without his express orders.

“The missing objects were kept here.”

She stood in the doorway and didn't offer any more information. I wasn't sure if she was being recalcitrant, or she just honestly didn't know anything more. In my experience among J's friends and colleagues, housekeepers knew everydamnthing, especially the stuff they weren't supposed to know, so I was betting on recalcitrant. She was possessive of her boss's privacy, and felt that we were just as bad as the goons who'd broken in originally; maybe even worse, because we hadn't already made the problem go away.

Stosser stepped into the room, and I could swear, even from behind him, I could see his nose twitch.

While he was doing whatever the hell he was doing, I surveyed the room from the doorway, ignoring the housekeeper, who sniffed and retreated, apparently not worried that we would sticky-finger anything left behind.

Deciding I wasn't going to discover anything standing there, I leaned against the doorway, crossed my arms over my chest, and watched the boss do his thing.

“Are you looking for something in particular, or just sniffing in general?” I wasn't being snarky; the only way
to learn, Venec constantly reminded us, was to ask when we didn't know something. And I had no damn idea what he was doing, or why we were here.

Well, no, I knew why we were here. We were here because Ben was in the hospital, and Ian Stosser was angry, and worried, and needed to do something, even if there wasn't anything to do. Also, it kept my thoughts off Venec, away from the bite marks I could still feel ghosting on my skin. The hellhound had, obviously, been dealt with, and it wasn't illegal as such to own or hire one, so we couldn't do anything about the owner in that regard…especially since Venec had, in some respects, been trespassing….

My brain was starting to ache, so I shut down that line of thought and waited for Ian to answer me.

“There was something about those objects.”

“Yeah,” I said, because he seemed to be waiting for a response, even without looking at me. His hair was pulled back and tied at the base of his neck, but even as I watched, the strands quivered, as though touched by a wind nobody else could feel. Current-use rising from his core, so subtle and powerful you couldn't sense it any other way.

Sometimes, the boss scared the hell out of me.

“And what is that something?” I asked, when he didn't offer anything more.

“If we knew, we'd know why someone would take it, and then we'd know who.”

“Well, yes.” I didn't even think the “duh” because he'd probably pick it up and neither of us needed that right now.

He was waiting for something else from me. It was
like being in fifth grade and having a surprise pop quiz first thing in the morning, while you were still trying to wake up and remember what subject you were in.

“And…?” I gave up, baring my throat, figuratively, in submission.

Stosser sighed. “And that is exactly what the client doesn't want us to know.”

I blinked. “How the hell…” I started to ask, but Stosser was already moving on farther into the room, inspecting the floorboards with the air of someone who has answered all the questions he intends to acknowledge.

Working with a genius? Not all that it's cracked up to be.

I stood and watched him work—or whatever it was he was doing, and then retraced my steps, back to the main room, where Nick and Sharon thought the perps had come in. There were the French doors that had been boarded up with plywood. It was a decent job, and I left it in place—I had no desire to bring the wrath of the housekeeper down on me. They'd already checked for magic-trace on all the entrances, I knew that from the report, and ditto the physical lock on the other side, but it was possible—not probable, but possible—that they'd missed something.

Stepping back until I was in the middle of the room, more or less, I slipped into fugue-state with an ease that I wouldn't have thought possible even six months ago, when I'd still needed to do the counting-backward thing. I didn't call up a spell, or even consciously touch my current the way I normally do, just opened my eyes and
looked
at the room.

Mage-sight is sort of like viewing things, not underwater, exactly, but close enough. You can “see” normally but it's wavery and blurred, and there's current flickering everywhere, dipping and flaring with its own natural energy, influenced by and influencing everything around it. Cantrips or spells can focus it, but then you risk missing something that your cantrip didn't take into account.

Sharon and Nick were right: the only major source of current in the room right then was me, and I knew how to identify and tune out my own signature. That left the normal dark-hued streaks in the walls and floors—current ran alongside electricity, which meant that every house had at least some, hanging with the everyday wiring that Nulls took for granted. Normally it was baby-level, tiny threads that wouldn't give you much of a jolt at all. But the threads seemed thicker here, somehow. How had they missed that? Was the room specially wired, maybe the “anti-magic” system the client had been sold? Or…

I moved closer to the wall without thinking, lifting my hand to summon the current to me. If it had been installed by a Talent, their signature might still be lingering….

What I got was the magic equivalent of a spluttering raspberry, and the sense of something skittering away. The shock was enough to kick me out of fugue-state, embarrassingly enough.

“What the hell?”

Like that, Stosser was in the room with me. I didn't know how the hell he moved that fast—there had been no inrush to indicate he'd Transloc'd; he must already have been heading down the hallway when he heard me.

“What?”

I was staring at the wall, my shock fading into annoyance at having been caught off guard. “There was something…in the current.”

Rather than looking worried, the boss actually laughed, although his eyes were still shadowed, and his body language more tense than amused. “Tiny, scurrying, giving an impression of a lot of eyes and not much sense?”

That was it, exactly. “What…?”

“Elementals.”

“Oh.” I felt stupid. Of course. Elementals were…well, creatures, I guess, that lived within the current-stream. They weren't really alive, as such, or maybe they were, in some way nobody could quite explain, but they had a certain crude awareness. Usually, unless they were grouped together, you wouldn't even notice them. What I had sensed was definitely a flock. Like pigeons, fluttering and scattering.

“I wonder if that's what they were using as the alarm system,” Stosser said. “If so, it was a failure, of course. Anyone with a lick of current could calm them down, even assuming you could train them to react and sound an alarm.”

“You really think elementals could remember anything that long?”

One narrow red eyebrow rose over a mocking gaze as he turned to look at me. “It doesn't have to work,” he said. “Whoever's selling the alleged security system only has to talk it up as though it does. Not like a Null would know any better.”

Boss was feeling better, if he was being snarky. Didn't mean he was wrong, though.

“Pity we can't glean their memories,” I said. I parsed that thought, then shook my head. Too scattered, anything I picked up would be fragmented at best. Stosser might be high-res enough to hold them still long enough to get something significant, but he didn't have a clue how to glean. He was management, not tech. I supposed we could teach him….

Still in mage-sight, I watched him prowl around the room, lifting sheets and poking under furniture without a clue where he was stepping or how many delicate tangles of remnant signature he might have been wrecking with the unmoderated swirl of his own core, and shuddered. No. Even now, with the scene already processed, without any trace to pick up, he was doing damage. The thought of him actually trying to work a hot scene…

I squinted, my thoughts interrupted by the glint or glimmer of something. “Boss? Freeze.”

Stosser hesitated, his hand halfway to the cloth covering a sofa, and started to turn back toward me.

“Freeze!” I said, far more sharply. “Tamp down your core.”

It was newbie instruction, the kind of thing you'd tell a first-year mentoree, and I could see the expressions on his face range from shock to frustration to acceptance. Even as he gained control over his core, the continual sparks and static we had gotten used to around him smoothing into a quieter pool of energy.

“What?”

I ignored him, now that he was no longer interfering with my ability to follow the spike of current.

Tracking trace was a delicate thing. You have to look and not-look at the same time, as though you were trying to spot the picture-within-a-picture, but do it with your mage-sight, which meant that you were open to every other spike of current within range, even the stuff you couldn't see directly. Like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, while roller-skating. Backward.

“There's something in the room. Something we missed.” “We” meaning Sharon and Nick, anyway. “Hang on, I'm trying to get a read on it…there.” I moved past him, going to the far wall, where the French doors had been boarded up.

“Signature?”

“No. Wait. I don't know.” It was current, yes; shaped, which meant that someone had been carrying it around for a while, the way you did when you took it into your core, but it didn't feel like a signature. This was…smudgy, for lack of a better term. Current was hot neon, sharp and sparkly, not smudged. It reminded me, a little, of the dark current we'd found by the memorial sites during the ki-rin case; current that had been touched by the darkest kind of hatred, that verged on madness, but even that darkness had been sharp and neon-bright. This was smooth and…not so much dark as totally without light.

“I don't know what this is,” I said, almost to myself. Almost, but not quite. Without thinking, without planning, I reached out with a tendril of current, not toward the smudge, but away, toward my sense of Venec…

And found myself met by a different kind of smudginess: he was unconscious, still drugged into a motionless sleep by the painkillers.

“Damn.”

“Torres?”

Stosser was standing where I'd left him, his core still quiet, but his expression did not bode well for that lasting much longer. Big Dog was not the patient sort, unless he was the one with the plan.

“I need to try to glean this,” I told him. “And then I'm going to need you to get me back to the office without disturbing it. Okay?”

We'd been practicing flinging—the skill of throwing magical evidence from one person to another—but it wasn't easy or precise, and with this, something I didn't know, didn't understand…better to keep it under wraps, if I could. Who the hell knew what flinging it could wake up.

The fact that I was thinking about current-trace like a live thing was disturbing. I blamed it on being surprised by the elementals a few minutes ago. That didn't change my feeling that I was taking a risk in gleaning this to begin with. No need to mention that, though. Stosser cared about results, not risks, and Venec…

Ben was out of commission. He could yell at me later.

“Ready when you give the word, boss,” Stosser said, and for once there was neither arrogance nor irony in his voice. Unfortunately, I was too focused on what I was about to do to really enjoy the moment.

Normally, gleaning a scrap of current is the magical equivalent of removing a splinter from your own thumb—you need to be careful, but it's not particularly difficult. This was like trying to do that in the dark, with a splinter that had a tendency to shimmer and wiggle out
of your grip the moment you thought you had it. Like a splinter made of Jell-O.

“Relax.” Stosser's voice, but there was an echo of Venec in it, too. “Whatever you're trying to do, you're focusing too hard. Let go of your control a little.”

“What?” That made no sense. Control was what let us—

“Trust me. Let go a little, relax, and try again.”

Ian Stosser didn't know crap about fieldwork, or the details of forensic magic, but he knew more about the elevated theoretical applications of current than I'd ever understand even if I lived to a hundred. I took a shallow breath and, on the exhale, let my control ease just a fraction.

The fragment of current slowed, as though it were trapped in molasses. I unrolled several strands of my own current, stretching them wide and ruffling them so that they were static-sticky, then rolled the fragment up inside them, containing it best I could.

“Now,” I told Stosser, keeping my entire awareness on that fragment, maintaining the isolation between it and me so intently, I was barely aware when Stosser's current rolled over me the same way I'd rolled the fragment, and took us home.

Our arrival made a bit of a flutter in the office, and the rest of the team trailed after us, not asking questions—quelled by Stosser's glare, or my own tense aura, I don't know—but lining up against the wall quietly, watching while I did the hard work.

Scraping the trace out of my holding-space was easier than lifting it, interestingly. It was almost as though it
didn't want to stay within the container-of-me. I would have been insulted, if I hadn't been so relieved.