Tricks of the Trade (8 page)

“Yes or no?”

Lou, stung by the cold tone, met his question with a flat stare I admired, knowing firsthand how knee-quaking his glare could be. “Yes.” If she had any doubts whatsoever, you couldn't tell from her voice, or her body language.

“Good. Do so. Sharon, stop that. You're Lou's second. Make sure she doesn't go splat, too. Bonnie, go fetch Nick and get back to work. When Nifty finishes cleaning up, update him on the break-in. I want to see dioramas of both scenes when I get back.”

We didn't exactly snap off salutes, but nobody argued.
And nobody asked Venec where he was going, when he headed past Nick, and down the hallway toward the elevator.

 

Ben didn't let himself relax until he was in the elevator, and the doors had shut securely in front of him. Then there was a brief pause, and his shoulders began to shake and his eyes teared, as the laughter he'd been holding back finally escaped.

It really wasn't funny. The scene that had met him when he burst in: Lawrence flat on his back and covered in spell-soot, Lou crawling out from under the table like a morning-after reveler, had damn near stopped his heart. Now that everyone was safe and accounted for, he let the laughter come, knowing that it was as much stress-release as amusement.

Nifty could have been hurt—Lou could have been seriously hurt, if the explosion had caught her off guard. But it hadn't. His newest pup might not be able to control her current well enough to be a field operative, but there was nothing wrong with her brains or her reflexes, and she'd gone under the table fast enough to avoid being hit with the spell's debris. He hadn't chosen poorly when he hired her. That was a relief.

Alone in the elevator, laughter dying down, Ben allowed his muscles to relax, the exhaustion he'd been repressing finally surfacing for a moment, and he found himself considering the ramifications of the event. Some days it seemed as though the simplest of spells—simple in theory, anyway—caused the biggest boom when they went wrong, and went wrong more often than the com
plicated ones. And those booms were happening more and more often, in the past few weeks. It wasn't because his pups were being careless: he'd beaten that out of them the first month they were on the job. No, there had to be something more to it.

Bad luck? Ben didn't believe in it. A hex? Those he did believe in, having seen them placed—and dismissed—more than once. There was an old-style conjure woman back in Texas who could hex up a mess of trouble, if you gave her reason. Just because they hadn't heard of anyone like that in town didn't mean they weren't here. And there were people who'd have cause to hex the pups, either in payment for what they'd done, or to keep them from doing something in the future.

He wished to hell he'd been able to talk Ian out of accepting both jobs, giving the pups the chance to not only hone their skills but stand down for a bit, but his partner wanted—
needed
—to prove something. That meant never backing down from a challenge. Understanding the goal that drove the other man didn't make it any easier to deal with the inevitable cock-ups that would happen because of it. All he could do was try to limit the damage done if someone dropped the ball due to exhaustion or inexperience.

But, god, he was so tired. Between the job, and keeping Ian focused, and trying to find out what was going on with this Merge, without letting it get its hooks into him…

Giving in to a rare self-indulgent impulse, Ben let his mental wall down a bit, and reached out deliberately with a thin tendril of current, like the streamer of a pea plant
unfolding. Bonnie was distracted, her thoughts tangled, but her core hummed like a well-tuned car, focused on her task, and the sound of it soothed him. If there was anything bothering her, he couldn't tell, not without going deeper.

He pulled the tendril back and rebuilt the wall, ignoring the hum within him that protested the loss of contact. Bonnie might fling her emotions and affections around, but that wasn't his thing. He needed privacy, distance. The urge to know where she was, what she was doing or feeling: that was the Merge pushing him, not his own needs.

The elevator doors opened, and he strode out into the lobby, nodding politely at the older woman waiting to enter.

“Have a nice day,” the woman called after him, as the doors closed. There were a dozen offices in the building, and he wondered, sometimes, what the other tenants thought of them, the odd assortment of twenty-somethings, their eccentric leader, and the dour man riding herd on them all hours of the day.

He was halfway down the block, wishing that he'd brought his leather jacket with him against the cooler-than-expected breeze, before his brain finally started to sort out why his body had taken him outside. He could have escaped to Ian's little back office if he just needed to laugh without being seen or heard, so clearly he needed to walk something out, away from the confines and demands of the office.

The thought occurred to him that, outside the warded office, he was vulnerable, but he dismissed it as occupa
tional paranoia. Nobody was gunning for him; not right now, anyway.

He lengthened his stride, moving quickly to keep warm, and let his body go on autopilot, allowing his brain to do what it did best: process and place.

Ian was the brilliant Idea Guy, the Concept Man, and the consensus-wooer. He, Ben, was along to kick those ideas and concepts—and employees—into productive, working shape. “You're my gut instincts,” Ian said, when his old friend had first called him with the idea for an investigative team that would keep the
Cosa
in line. “I can see what they're doing, even when they don't want me to, but you know what they're up to.”

Ben was starting to think that his partner had overestimated his abilities. Because right now his brain kept returning not to the cases on hand, or even the mental or magical state of his pup-pack, but a greater—and harder to track—uncertainty. His gut instincts were telling him that the human/fatae trouble they'd seen earlier in the year during the ki-rin job, was still there, simmering…waiting for a single spark to blow up under their feet. There hadn't been any proof—the flyers advertising the so-called “exterminators” had disappeared, and the whispers of violence had died back down to their normal level—but his gut wouldn't shut up, wouldn't let him sleep without worry. Bonnie's new kenning added fuel to that, so much that he couldn't focus on the jobs at hand.

Bonnie… He was tired enough that the thought of her was like a mild gut-punch of a different sort, taking him unaware even when he knew that it was coming. He let it roll over him, still walking. Bright eyes and a
ready smile, her expression almost fey, with her short curls and pointed chin, a mind that was tough and sharp and moved almost as fast as his own. And her body… She was slender, and slightly built, and under the long-sleeved Ts and pants or long skirts she wore most of the time her muscles were warm and firm. He remembered that from the few times he'd touched her, before the Merge made that too complicated to even consider.

He wanted her, physically. Not a big deal. He'd wanted women who were off-limits before. Knowing how to look and not touch was part of surviving adolescence. It was more than that. He wanted to listen to her talk, to dig into her mind and see what was there, how she thought and why she reacted. He wanted to— Not own her, it wasn't that kind of crazy, but a level of possession that made him feel deeply uncomfortable, like someone else was poking at him, trying to dig into his secrets.

“Enough,” he muttered. “You've already got it covered, sorted, and spliced. Worry about the stuff you don't know about. Like where the hell Ian is, and what he's up to.”

Even as he was talking to himself, Ben felt the tingling awareness that someone was watching him. Not the same tingling, poking sensation he'd just shaken off, something external, and less magical than physical. He'd followed enough people to know when someone was watching him—and when that watching went from casual interest to a focused hunt.

“All right, then,” he said, his lips barely moving out of habit, in case someone was watching him. “Shall we play a game?”

He picked up the pace a little, not fast enough to lose anyone but moving past the other pedestrians with the air of a man late for something. He went the length of the block, and then stopped, bending down as though to tie the lace of his shoe.

The sense of someone watching stayed close, but no closer than it had been before. A maintained distance.

That meant his stalker was human, not fatae. The fatae tended to let him know they were there, to try to make him uneasy with their regard. Only humans hid. Ben felt his mouth draw into an unamused smile. He could test the air, see if his tail was Talent or not, but that risked letting the other know he or she had been spotted, and spoiling the game. There were other ways to tell, though.

Slowing his steps to a more casual pace, he circled around the block, and headed for the nearest cogeneration building.

The miniature power generators that had become popular recently didn't have the same catnip appeal of the big'un power plant, but a cogen attracted the attention of every Talent who walked by the same way a pretty girl caught the eye. If his tail was Talent, he would know the moment they crossed the street; they wouldn't be able to help themselves.

 

I spent the rest of the day looking over Sharon's notes, not so much looking for something as looking for what wasn't there, a missing element or fact that would open up a new level of questions. All I got was a slight case of eyestrain: Sharon might not have my perfect memory, or Nick's ability to make intuitive leaps, but she was exactly
as methodical as you'd expect for someone originally trained as a paralegal.

“You checked the rest of the house?”

“Yes.” Nothing in Nick's tone let me know what an insulting question that had been, which I appreciated. “The kitchen was spotless, and surprisingly Spartan. I guess he doesn't entertain much, or have any interest in food.

“Upstairs was nicer, but still pretty plain,” he went on, tapping a finger on the table as though the beat would jog his memory. Hell, maybe it did. “I mean, nice but not lush, the way you'd think somebody that rich would do it.”

My mentor had that kind of money, or maybe even more. His apartment in Boston was… I thought about the casual way he slouched in a nineteenth-century armchair, and how Rupert was allowed to sleep on a hand-knotted Persian rug, and allowed as how maybe my idea of
lush
was kind of skewed.

“Cheap-looking, or…?” If he was skimping on the private rooms, that might mean a lack of ready cash, or some other cause for trouble.

“No. I mean, not that I'm any judge of it, but no I don't think so. I've seen enough of your stuff to know quality, and this was all good. Just not…” He was struggling to put what he'd seen into words. I waited.

“Sparse. Like he only cared about the rooms where he spent time, where people saw him. Everything else had the minimum for living but…” And I could practically smell Nicky making another one of his leaps, sussing out people in a way I could only wonder at. “He doesn't care
about other people. Not about making them comfortable, or seeing to their needs. It's all about him.”

“A narcissist?”

“No. That's all about perception and self-interest, right? This is more…he isn't aware that anyone might have needs or wants, beyond where they connect to him, or that they even exist, when he can't see them? Like a sociopath.”

Oh. Oh, that was not what I wanted to hear. At all.

“So…what does that add to the case?”

Nick shrugged, which drove me crazy. I hated shrugs; they were so utterly useless as communication because they could mean too many things. Lazy, my mentor used to say, and he was right. “Nothing, really. Not yet, anyway.”

“Right.” Because why should even simple cases be easy? I went back to my notes, and let Nick do the same with mine.

And if there was a part of me that was
listening
for the touch of Venec's core against mine, I wasn't going to admit to anything.

It said a lot about how trained we'd gotten in the past year that when Venec didn't come back that afternoon and Stosser never made an appearance all day, we still remembered Venec's Law: Nobody Pulls an All-Nighter without Big Dog Approval. At least, I think we all did—when I left at six, Sharon was still going over her notes, looking at the diorama she and Nick had started putting together. But of all of us, she was the least likely to lose track of time—or to use that as an excuse to disobey standing orders.

Lou, who had managed not to blow herself up during the spell trials, was putting on her coat when I headed out, and we walked out together, after I made sure the coffeemaker had been turned off for the night.

I'd headed for the stairs at the end of the hallway when Lou stopped me with a puzzled question. “Why don't any of you use the elevator?”

It was a good question. Easy to answer, except for the fact that none of us were willing, or able, to talk about it, even now. Also, if I made Lou paranoid, too, Venec would kick my ass. So I didn't tell her about the teenage boy who had been killed during an attack on us when we first opened shop, when power shorted out and the elevator plummeted into the basement. I just shrugged, and pushed open the door, giving her a lesser truth. “It keeps us in shape.”

Truth, but not the entire truth, and it came out as natural as honey. As a painfully self-aware teenager, I used to insist on the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because anything else was a lie. I'd thought black was black, and white, white, and the right answers were obvious to anyone, if you only thought about it.

I had been an arrogant twit back then, and it's a wonder J didn't lock me in a closet until I was thirty.