Tricks of the Trade (21 page)

“Y'know, I've scraped up a lot of trace in the past year,” I said. “I've poked into a lot of weird places, and talked to a lot of crazy people.”

There was a muffled almost-laugh from the wall-hangers. Nick, I thought.

“And?” Stosser was standing behind me, lurking like a bored teacher making sure nobody used the wrong pencil, only a lot more intent.

“And that's weird shit.”

Stosser had guided me into the smallest conference room, which also happened to be the one without windows, and the one with the best warding on it. Normally we used wardings to make sure that gleanings and signatures remained uncontaminated, like putting something between glass slides. Here, with this? I was thinking that the warding was to keep the trace from getting
out.
I finished what I was doing, and stepped back, shaking my arms out, trying to release the tension that had crept in.

“Although I would normally resist that sort of vague description,” Stosser said, stepping forward to put his seal on the current-jar, overlaying my own closure in a notable mark of paranoia, “in this instance, I think it's appropriate.”

The seal on the current-jar shimmered, then went dormant, but I could still feel it, holding steady. I could also feel the scrapings contained inside, dark and still but not inert, not by a long shot. Stosser looked at it, then shook his head. “I don't think we should linger here. Everyone, out.”

I was all too glad to leave the room, and Lou and Nifty were moving even faster than me, but I noted that Sharon and Nick were both more reluctant. Figured. Sharon was more stubborn than the rest of us put together, and Nick had absolutely no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. Nicky was a current-hacker, one of the rarest of all skill sets, and I was beginning to think they were rare not because the skill was unusual, but because they got themselves overrushed or crispy-killed at a faster-than-normal rate.

Instead of going into the larger room next door, Stosser herded us down to the break room, as far away as you could get without actually leaving the office. Nobody questioned it, if they even realized what he was doing. We settled in as though it was totally normal for Stosser to hold a meeting here, Nifty taking his usual armchair, me and Nick and Sharon on one sofa, Lou and Pietr pulling up the ottoman and perching on that, and Stosser pacing between. The absence of Venec was like a real, palpable hole in the room. For me, anyway. I didn't know if anyone else felt it. Nobody had mentioned him; either they'd gotten an update already, or they were afraid to ask.

I checked, unable to stop myself. Still in morphine-land.

We all watched Stosser pace back and forth a few times, then I rested my head against the back of the sofa, and closed my eyes. Now that I'd actually stopped, or at least paused, I was so very, very tired. And my feet hurt. But I was too tired to bend down and take off my boots.

“Hey, Nick,” I said.

“No.”

“C'mon, Nick…”

“Why don't you wear something you can just slip off, like normal people?”

Because J never let me wear sneakers except when I was going to the gym, and I wasn't a dress-pump kind of girl, normally. But it was too much effort to say all that, so I just whined a little.

Nick ignored me.

“So, whatever Bonnie found and brought back. What is it?” A year ago, Sharon would have been all bristling and annoyed that I'd found something she'd missed. Now, she just sounded curious.

I could hear Stosser pause in his pacing, off to my left. “Easier to say what it isn't.”

“Okay.” Lou took the straight role willingly. “What isn't it?”

“It's not human,” Sharon said flatly. “We're all agreed on that?”

Quick nods around the room. Everyone had gotten a chance to feel what I'd been unloading. We all were agreed.

“Fatae, then. We suspected that already, from the amount of damage that was done, and the claw marks. This had to come from that, right?” Sharon continued.

There was a silence, the kind that comes when everyone's waiting for someone else to say something first, and nobody does.

“Right?” Nick said, hesitantly.

“It has to be,” Nifty agreed.

“There are a lot of different fatae breeds that have claws
that could manage the damage done,” Lou said. “I've barely been able to start a file on the known ones, here in the city. There are a whole bunch who are singular, or isolated, but it has to be a fatae.”

“It has to be fatae,” I agreed, sealing it superstitiously with my thirding, or fourthing, or whatever we were up to. It had to be. Because if it wasn't…

Then it was something else.

There was a little quiet, after all that, and then the arguing began. We were all determined that it wasn't human, and therefore it had to be fatae, but nobody could come up with a suggestion as to what breed, even with Lou's beautifully indexed database, and Stosser's additional knowledge.

“What about a…” Nifty squinted at the name on the page, then shifted the paper so we could all see. “One of those? Serious claws.”

“They're arctic-based?”

“Oh.” Nifty scowled and turned the page.

“You think it could have been a demon?” I'd only ever seen one, that I knew about—the courier known as PB—but its claws had been scary-looking, even if the demon itself was too short to do this kind of damage. They came in all sizes, though….

“I would have known if it were demon,” Stosser said, and that was that.

The discussion went on. And on. And if we were working so hard to keep from worrying about Venec, then nobody said anything.

Or maybe it was just me.

Thanks to Stosser leading us, and not Venec, we
worked right through dinner, and probably would have gone all night if Stosser hadn't gotten pinged by someone, and told us all to take a break until morning.

“And Ben's still out cold,” he added, carefully not looking at me, “so stop worrying.”

What, us, worry? But, yeah, there was no point checking in; they'd let us know if anything changed, even if I somehow missed it.

At that point, I was running on fumes and muscle memory. By the time I got home it was nearly 10:00 p.m. and I was wiped out, physically, emotionally, and magically. Even the thought of climbing the stairs to my apartment was enough to make me cry, but there was no way in hell I had the energy to Translocate. If I'd been halfway thinking, I would have had someone Transloc me from the office to my bed. God, the commute would be so much easier if we could do that. Why didn't we do that?

Proof that I was exhausted: I knew damn well why we didn't. And it had nothing to do with wasted current or overextending ourselves, of becoming too dependent on magic, or any of the other reasons our mentors hammered into us from the time of our first lesson. It wasn't even because Translocation was damned difficult to do properly. It was because, of all the things that Talent could do, all the things that set us apart, Translocation was one of the few that Nulls couldn't dismiss as a trick of their eye, or a misunderstanding, or some other rational non-magical explanation. And it hadn't been that long ago, by anyone's measure, that the cry of “witch” was more than a Halloween greeting.

Talent wasn't a genetic thing, exactly, but it did gallop in some families, and there wasn't an American Talent who hadn't gotten stories of the Burning Times hammered into their head about the same time they started to get stupid with what they'd learned. Salem was the most publicized, but it wasn't close to the worst.

I sighed, and resigned myself to having to sludge up the stairs like a regular Jane, when there was a commotion, and I looked up to see lights flickering brightly from…

Hey. My apartment. What the hell?

I had the front door opened, the inner security door opened, and was up the stairs to my landing before I was aware I'd taken my keys out of my coat pocket. It might even have been faster than Translocating.

However fast I was, though, the super was faster. He was standing outside my door, glaring at me like it was all my fault. Clearly he had been waiting for me.

“What the hell's been going on?” he greeted me. “All day, all night, noises and thumps, and now you're leaving untended flames when you're out? And locking the door so I can't get in? I was about to call the fire department, have them bust down the door.”

I stared at him, totally lost. “I haven't been home all day,” I said. “I've been at work.”

“This has been going on too long,” he said. “I'm tired of hearing the complaints about your parties which were bad enough, but this…”

I moved past him, putting my keys into the lock, in tent on proving him wrong, that I hadn't left any flames burning, tended or otherwise. At the same time, the
memory of the flickering lights in my window taunted me. What the hell?

I opened the door—and it opened easily, with the standard key he had, too—into a reassuring darkness. Reaching out to flip the light switch, so I could see the super's face when I told him off, was a mistake, though. The entire apartment was a disaster, furniture shoved utterly out of place, the mattress down on the floor, the sheets piled up in the center of the room like a giant nest.

And my mosaic, my beautiful, delicate, shimmering rainbow glass mosaic, was in a hundred thousand pieces on the floor.

It was too much, on top of the worry about Venec, and the sheer exhaustion of everything else. I almost cried.

“Enough,” the super said, not seeming to care that whatever flames we'd both seen were not only gone, but were never there. “You seemed like a nice kid, but this is enough. There are too many complaints already, this is just the last straw. Building management's got cause to cancel your lease, for this.”

I heard him, but it barely registered, staring at the disaster of my once-beautiful apartment. The utter chaos…

Chaos. Causing trouble.

My eyes narrowed, even as my brain started to work again. The Roblin. It had to be. Damn it, what did I ever do to that damned imp?

I suppose I should have, as per orders, reported in immediately. The thought, though, of facing everyone, of dealing with more questions and what-ifs…it was too much. It was all just too much and I needed the quiet to just not-think, for once.

Also, if The Roblin was following me, targeting me, I wanted to be somewhere well-warded to even discuss it.

So instead I spent the rest of the night cleaning up the shards of the mosaic, and putting things back to order, best I could. Current was surprisingly crap at moving physical objects—you needed more energy than it took to move it physically—and I didn't want to risk even more pissed-off complaints from my neighbors, so mostly I left the heavy stuff where it was for now, and focused on getting my mattress and sheets back up onto the loft platform where they were supposed to be. I'd hoped that the activity would wear me out enough so that I'd be able to fall asleep and not think or dream about either Venec
or the weird trace we'd found or The Roblin, sniffing at my heels.

No such luck. The adrenaline rush finally wore off, but my brain was way too revved up to shut down enough to sleep. Unfortunately, it was also too exhausted to do any real thinking. So I ended up sitting on the off-skew sofa, wrapped in a blanket and clutching a mug of cocoa heavily dosed with peppermint schnapps, trying very very hard not to reach out to the sense of Benjamin Venec, in a hospital bed several miles to the north. My trying not to do something, though, apparently had the exact opposite effect, because there was a sliver into my awareness, as though responding to a ping I hadn't sent.

*sleep?*

*yes, baby* I responded without thinking. *sleep*

Benjamin Venec, drugged to the gills, had a soft, almost little boy feel to his thoughts, and I wasn't strong enough to resist the urge to brush against it, the emotional equivalent to patting someone's hair until they settled down again. I needed the comfort, and he wasn't going to remember anything, come morning and sobriety.

I hoped.

*something wrong*

Damn. He was more alert than I thought. There was an instant when I was going to lie to him, and the instant passed. Drugged or not, this was Venec, and this was me. We'd never lied to each other, not before, not in all the crap that we'd already been through, and sure as hell not now.

*case stuff * True enough, if I counted The Roblin as
a case. *worried about you* Also true. It wasn't words I sent him, any more than he was forming them in his drug-sleepy mind. It was…like water flowing from one container to another, if one was colored blue and the other gold. If that made any sense, which it did to me.

*i'll sleep if you will*

And because I never lied to him, the moment I got his water-flow assent, I put the mug down on the table, snuggled myself into the blanket, and went to sleep.

If I dreamed anything, I didn't remember it in the morning.

The next morning guilt and responsibility trumped my disinclination to have anyone poking at my personal life, and I geared myself to tell all. Well, mostly all.

For once, though, Nick and I were the only ones in the office at 8:00 a.m. He took one look at my face, and handed me a doughnut, fresh out of the box.

We had made a serious dent in the box before I finished.

“Sounds like The Roblin, yeah,” Nick said. “I mean, not that I'd know, particularly, but the circumstances had way too much going on for it to be sheer coincidence. How come you got so lucky, Dandelion?”

“No damned idea. First it stalks, and then it splats my apartment, and what's next? Is it going to chase me across the city, hound me for the rest of my life?” On waking up I'd found a note from the super under my door, confirming that they were going to claim I was in violation of my lease for noise issues. That hadn't helped my mood any, either.

All right, I'd taken the apartment out of a panic to get
out of the hotel I'd been staying in—on J's dime—and now that I'd been working, and didn't expect to be fired, probably…I could afford something a little nicer, in a better part of town. But still, it was a pain and a hassle.

On the third hand, this would give me a reason to get in touch with The Wren again, like Stosser had strongly suggested would be a good idea. “Hi, just checking in to see if there's an apartment coming open in the building, like we'd talked about…” That had been an awesome building, in a perfect location—okay, I wouldn't be able to walk to work on nice days anymore, and the commute would take longer, but it would be a straight shot up the 1….

“I wonder if anyone else had trouble last night. Would explain why everyone's late. Hey, you think The Roblin had anything to do with Venec…”

“No.” That came out more sharply than I intended, but the thought unnerved me too much to consider. Mischief, all right. But that attack had nearly been fatal.

“How much damage could a mischief imp do, assuming a mischief imp did do damage?” Nick stumbled over the last few words, and pursed his lips as though trying to limber them up. He looked like a demented goldfish.

“What damage did it do?”

Stosser, with Sharon in tow, came in through the front door. The almost-frantic Ian Stosser of yesterday had been wiped clean, leaving behind the usual smooth-faced, dapper-dressed Big Dog, his hair slicked back and his nicely tailored Euro-style suit hanging without a wrinkle. Half the time he dressed like a color-blind granola-cruncher, and the other half he could have posed for
GQ.
I'd learned to read Stosser-sign, a little: granola was his downtime, when he was trying to be Just Another Guy. He really wasn't very good at it, and it kind of, honestly, freaked me out a little. Seeing him in a suit was like having the sun rise on the proper side of the city: you didn't know what kind of day it would be, but at least it wasn't starting with a pre-apocalyptic warning.

“We think The Roblin made its first real move last night,” I said, before Nick could tell my story. I gave them a quick rundown, ending, “Something tore up my place—moved furniture, loudly, tossed my linen closet, broke a piece of glass-art—” damn it, I was still weepy about that “—and made everyone in the building believe that there were open flames in my apartment. I'm just lucky I got home when I did, or they would have called the fire department and maybe hacked down my door to get in.”

Which might have been funny, seeing my super trying to explain to the fire department…but no, thanks.

“You saw The Roblin?” Stosser went on alert.

“No.” Seriously? I would have told him that, instead of sitting here bitching. “The place was empty when I got there. The windows were all locked, the door secured…. I guess imps can Translocate.”

“Or walk through walls.”

“Comforting thought, that,” Sharon said dryly. “So it's gone from following you to fucking with you. Why you?”

“It was here.”

“What?” We all looked at Stosser at that revelation.

“A few nights ago. I have an alarm set up, similar to
the spell Ben has on the front door that recognizes us, and challenges anyone it doesn't recognize. It went off, but by the time I got here—twenty minutes, tops—the place was empty. And also a mess. Whoever it was, it had been going through our personnel files. Based on the timing of it first stalking Torres, and the tossing of her place, I think that it is a reasonable assumption that it was The Roblin, looking for…whatever it was looking for. Your address, one supposes.”

“Great. So flattered.” What the hell made me such irresistible imp-bait?

Stosser looked at the other two. “Have either of you had anything odd happen? Not just the general weirdness we've been seeing, anything out of the usual at all?”

Sharon shook her head, but Nick looked thoughtful. “Maybe. I didn't think anything of it, or, at least, I figured it was just under the ‘shit happens' category. But yesterday morning I was tweaking my netbook—” And that still freaked me out, that Nick could use a personal computer. Most of us, a heavily warded desktop was the best we could do, and even then we had to be careful, but the rules were different for current-hackers. “—And something surged.”

“Surged.” Ian had a look on his face that meant he knew what Nick was talking about. “You're all right?”

“Yeah, I was more surprised than anything else.”

“You should have told me.”

“Yah, well, I was going to mention it to Venec, and…” Nick's voice trailed off. “How is he, anyway?”

And, damn it, he looked at me when he asked that, not Stosser. Damn it…I gave back a blank face like I didn't
know anything. Which I didn't, other than the fact that I hadn't gotten any Merge-inspired alarms, so he was probably doing fine and either still sedated or had his walls up tight.

“They are releasing him later this morning,” Stosser said. “Knowing Ben, he'll be here as soon as he finds his clothing and hails a cab.”

“You let him check out alone?” Sharon turned on Stosser, probably as pissed as she got. Sharon was a prima donna and a pain in the neck, but she was also in a lot of ways the mom of the group, her and Pietr, and apparently moms did not let people check out of hospitals alone.

“If I'd shown up, I would have told him to go home, not come here, and we would have gotten into an argument,” Stosser said calmly. “This way, we avoid the fight, which I would have lost, anyway.”

When the hell did Stosser develop a sense of humor? He wasn't wrong, though. That would have been Ben all over.

Big Dog turned to me, then. “Your apartment's okay?”

“For now,” I said. I really didn't want to get into the details, not until I had a new place lined up.

“All right. Nick, I want you to work with the netbook, here, where we're properly warded, so we can determine if it's infested.”

“Infected,” Nick said, correcting his terminology.

Boss scowled at him. “With a mischief imp,
infested
might be the better word. Go. Sharon, when Lou and Pietr get here, do a full sweep of the office, and double the wardings. And then do the same in everyone's apartments. I don't like this, not at all.”

“And me, boss?” Be damned if I was going to sit here while everyone else got to work.

Ian turned and looked at me. “You stay here until Venec arrives. Lawrence and Cholis came back with new information on the body dump case, and I want you three to close it today. If we're being targeted by a mischief imp as powerful as the Old Man thinks, I don't want any dangling threads left it can possibly yank.”

Given our marching orders, we marched. Or Nick did, anyway. I'd helped him a time or two with his hacker-magic, and was just as glad not to be anywhere near when he did his thing. It made me feel like I was going to throw up, and I hated throwing up.

“You really think The Roblin's after us? I mean, not just you but all of us?” Sharon asked, sitting on the sofa next to me.

I lifted my hands palm-up, to show my utter ignorance and frustration. “Don't know. Makes sense, doesn't it? The warning, the break-in here, the break-in at my apartment…we're a natural focus.” Bobo had said as much, when he warned us. We investigate chaos. The Roblin causes it. Peanut butter and jelly.

“But why you, and Nick specifically?”

Why not her, was what she wasn't asking. How was The Roblin picking its victims.

“Damned if I know,” I said. “Just be glad, if you're not on the short list, not insulted.”

“I'm not. I'm just curious. Like Venec always says, if we know why, then we can figure out the rest of it. Nick's skill set is unusual, so maybe that's it, but you're not…” She stopped, aware she'd been about to go somewhere seriously not-complimentary.

“Not unusual? Not special? Not exceptionally strong?” I kept my tone mild. I was moderately high-res, as the general population went, but not in this crowd, no.

“You're practically perfect in every way,” she said, and I thwapped her on the arm, laughing for the first time in what felt like days. Maybe even weeks. Since we'd gone to the Devil for drinks, maybe. That felt like a month ago, with everything that had happened.

“You think the attack on Venec was…” She trailed off, as though not wanting to follow that train of thought.

I sobered, turning the suggestion over in my mind in a way I hadn't been able to, when Nick suggested it.

“No. It doesn't feel right. The Roblin is about confusion and chaos, the more people involved the better, probably. Even my apartment, he got the entire building in an uproar. A single attack, and the cause easily put down? Anyway, the client had just hired the dog a few days after you cleared the site,” I said. “Stosser said the trainer was recommended by a friend of a friend, the same idiot who suggested the mage-alarm. The housekeeper was so terrified of the thing when it showed up, she refused to go near it, so it was prowling the grounds on its own. Sheer bad luck.”

“Oh, lovely,” Sharon said, in the tone of voice that was very much not-lovely. “Do we have a line on the trainer?”

“Stosser said that it was taken care of.” The look on the boss's face had told me that the trainer was a name he knew, which meant either high-placed Council, or lowdown scummy. Stosser might be useless on the scene, but
he was the best we had at getting high-level people to sit up and listen.

Venec was the one who handled the lowdown. With Ben in the hospital—

Like my thoughts conjured him, I
felt
Venec come through the main door downstairs, like a trickle of warm air against my skin.

“There've been so many complaints about hellhound breeders, you'd think somebody would have tried regulating them, or something,” Sharon said.

“They tried to ban them entirely, about a hundred years ago,” I said absently. “Huge yowl of complaints, said true hellhounds were so rare, anyway, they were doing a service by continuing the breed.” Like anything that was supposed to harry the souls of the damned was going to make a cuddly pet for junior.