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Authors: Laura Anne Gilman

Hard Magic (10 page)

BOOK: Hard Magic
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Huh. Maybe I’d be able to put a security deposit down on a decent apartment, after all.

They went out of the break room and into the main office. The door closed behind them, and the glamour dropped, much to my relief. It was great that Stosser could make clients see us that way, but it was damned uncomfortable to see it yourself and know how far from the truth it was.

Nick collapsed in the nearest chair, craning his neck to look back at the door. “You think we’re supposed to hang around and find out what’s going on?”

I shrugged. “Probably.” And even if we weren’t, I sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere now, not even if Venec dismissed us early for the day and personally kicked us out the door. My mind was racing too hard with possibilities to think about anything else; beer and social chitchat just couldn’t compete.

Where would the boss have taken her? Probably the chat room, which was the smallest of our spaces, down at the far end of the office, and the only one that didn’t look as though it was braced for impact. The other three rooms, while they had chairs and tables, also doubled as work spaces, and had suffered at least one explosion, implosion, or unfortunate incident in the past month, in the course of our on-the-job education and the occasional gremlins. Oh, please don’t let anything happen while she was in there….

“The alley’s probably clear by now,” Nick said, swinging his body out of the chair and standing up. “Let’s go find the others.”

The alley was the hallway that connected the two parts of the office. A couple of weeks ago, someone had painted a dark green line down the lower third of the far wall, so it was no longer quite so sterile looking, but you’d never mistake it for anything other than a way to get from point A to point B, and nobody lingered there.

With Stosser and the mysterious maybe client safely tucked away, we stuck our noses into the nearest workroom and found Sharon, her chin in her hand, still sulking.

“I think I know where it went wrong,” she said when we came in, not even looking up to see who it was.

“Yeah? Okay, no, don’t distract me,” Nick said impatiently. “We’ve got news.”

We might all be different, personality-wise, and maybe we didn’t always have a lovefest going on, but the Guys had it dead-on about us being curious. Sharon dropped whatever she’d been mulling over and turned in her chair to face us, those wide blue eyes alert.

“What?”

Nick got there before I could. “Stosser’s in with a maybe-client.”

“Seriously?” She looked to me for confirmation—that’s me, detail girl—and I imitated Nick’s usual half-arm shrug, clumsily, sitting in the sole armchair in the room, the one that Stosser usually claimed.

“Female, well dressed, looking stressed and more than a little worried. Fifty-something. Money, if not filthy rich. Maybe more important, Stosser was expecting her, since he knew her name and must have buzzed her in through the lobby—” we still hadn’t figured out how they did that, damn it “—and he was wearing meet-and-greet duds.”

Sharon picked up on that immediately. “He wasn’t before. He had on that awful shirt, so he had to have changed, and fast.”

“Yeah.” Nick was pacing, door to window, and then back again. As usual, the shade—an expensive double-baffled one—was drawn, so that you couldn’t see out…or in. Wasn’t much of a view, anyway.

“So what do you think is up?” Sharon asked. “We have a job?”

I raised my hands, palm up, to show my total ignorance. “Maybe. Hope so. Haven’t a damned clue, nor where to find one. But I figure we’ll get told, if anything actually happens.”

Pietr appeared out of nowhere, already in the room. “Hey, did you guys hear—?”

“There’s a maybe-client in-office. Yeah,” Sharon said, as though she’d known about it for hours. By now, we were used to Pietr’s disappearing-reappearing act. He swore he didn’t do it on purpose, but nobody except maybe Pietr believed that.

“God, I’d love to actually have something to
do,
” he said, sitting on the floor next to my chair and resting his head against my knee in a way that was becoming habit with us. I petted his hair absently, the way you might a puppy’s head. Silky hair. So unfair, when guys get great eyelashes and great hair, and, hell, Pietr had pretty much great everything.

“Are you crazy, or just out of your mind?”

The three of us looked at Nick like he’d just displayed wings or something over his polo-shirted shoulders.

“You don’t?” Sharon asked. “Then why the hell are you here, for the fun times of getting your head handed to you by our esteemed taskmasters?”

Nick patted the air at her, telling her to back off. Usually they got along fine, because Nick was mellow enough to get along with anyone, but even he had a limit. “Sure, I want a case, want to be able to prove myself, do something with all this. But I also want to not make a total idiot out of myself. Let’s face it, so far we’ve got a handful of useful tricks, but we’re a bunch of twenty-somethings with a handful of tricks, that’s all. None of us has any kind of background to be doing this, not and get listened to, not even Stosser and Ben, really. I joked about making it all up as we went along but we’re not even doing that—we’re
hoping
that we’re making it up. The truth is all the spells and the skills might be completely useless, because we have no idea what spells or skills are going to be needed!”

You ever driven really fast, in a car, or on a bike, and then hit a brick wall? Me neither, but I knew what it felt like, now. Nick was right, damn him. From the looks on everyone else’s faces, they were having the same come-to-Jesus moment.

Okay, yeah, we’d all wondered it, when the Guys first proposed the job, and maybe since then, deep down and quiet. But facing the question out loud like that, after all the work we’d been doing, that was a whole ’nother thing. Out loud, we asked
when,
not what if it doesn’t work?

Nick wasn’t done with us. “And even if we do manage to figure out the whodunit of whatever whatdunit we get, who are we going to tell, anyway? It’s not like we’ve got a police force to back us up or anything. So who enforces what we discover? Did any of you stop to think about that, while we were blowing up blood splatter and highlighting broken locks?”

That, I could answer. My words to J back at the beginning came back to me in a rush of renewed conviction. “Anyone,” I said. “We tell anyone who will listen, and people who won’t, and we don’t hold back what we know, once we’re sure. We let the truth be known.”

“And that will do…what, exactly, Bonnie?” Nick didn’t sound angry or scared, just tired. “I haven’t let myself think that far, just going day to day and hoping it all makes sense, but what then?”

What, he thought I had all the damn answers? “Then we let someone else take over. Our job’s just to get the truth out. To not let people get away with crimes, just because they’re magical ones. We’re investigators, not cops or prosecutors. We point ’em out, not lock ’em up.”

“So who does?” Pietr asked. “Not Null cops or courts, that’s been proven time and again, usually to our cost. Witch hysteria’s been the least of it.”

“No, not Nulls,” I agreed. “Council has means to deal with people, once they have proof, and lonejacks…you guys probably have the same, only it’s not formal or organized, but it’s there. It has to be.” Didn’t it? The Guys had to have thought of all this—why hadn’t anyone asked them?

“And if it’s not?” Sharon was being devil’s advocate, and didn’t seem to care what the outcome was. Her previous job as a paralegal coming to the fore, I guessed. “We shout our proof into the wind, and nothing changes.”

“Knowing the truth changes everything.”

Unlike Pietr’s stealth-walk, we heard Venec push open the door and come in. I still jumped when he spoke up, though—don’t ask me why. Maybe I just figured he was going to lurk and listen until we ran ourselves into the ground, and then bail us out, as usual.

Unlike Stosser, he hadn’t changed clothing, still in shirt and jeans, and wasn’t projecting anything other than his usual intensity. He took one of the other chairs, and leaned his elbows on the table.

He looked tired. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before. Those eyes got me, every time, and distracted from the lines of exhaustion on his face, I guess. I wondered if he counted on that, used it…

“If you had doubts about our process, why didn’t you ask us?”

I looked to see if anyone else was stupid enough to respond to that. Nick looked at Venec with a wide-eyed little boy expression, like he’d never doubted Santa Claus
ever.
Pietr, I swear to god, faded into the paint like a chameleon. Venec’s gaze passed over me, and I just shook my head a little, and smiled. Not me, Boss. Go chew on someone else, this time.

“Do you really have a process for that, or are you just going to play the dice however they roll?”

And there was Sharon, striding in where even fools might tiptoe. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to cheer her on, or hide under the table until the fireworks were over.

To my surprise, the fireworks fizzled. “I see that you’ve already figured out our visitor may change things around here a bit,” he said instead, not so much sidestepping her question as ignoring it with a completely straight face. “Maybe more change than you think.”

Venec let us hang on to that thought just long enough to Translocate a soda out of the fridge in the break room, open it, and take a sip. It was so casual, you didn’t quite realize how much current it had to take to make it look that casual. One-upmanship, the demonstration of why he was the boss and not to be questioned, or just unconscious arrogance? With Stosser, the answer would be both A and B. With Venec, who knew? Not me. Not yet, anyway.

“Ms. Reybeorn was recommended to us through a friend of a friend who had heard we might be able to help her,” he went on. “Torres is correct. That’s what we are here for, what we’re meant to do. Not to put criminals in jail, but to determine if there is in fact a criminal act. To help people find the truth, pleasant or not.”

“Mostly not,” Sharon said. “I’m betting.” She didn’t push on the unanswered question—maybe she didn’t really want to know, either.

“Speaking of betting, and being practical, does this Ms. Reybeorn have money to pay?” Pietr asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said without thinking, still looking at that soda can. “She’s Council. And I mean
Council
Council.” The name had finally kicked something loose in my brain, once I stopped poking at it. “Or if not her, her family.” Being a seated member didn’t earn you a paycheck, but it did bring you connections, and those connections almost always came with business benefits.

“Yeah?” That had Venec’s attention, fast. Ooo, I knew something the Guys didn’t! Or one Guy, anyway. I didn’t have time to treasure the moment, though, because Venec and the others were looking at me like a particularly tasty slab of informational meat. It was unnerving, a little, having your own curiosity turned on you….

“Council? Yeah…not here, though. Chicago.”

“Ah.” Venec leaned back and looked almost smug. I was going to take a wild guess that he and Stosser had a bet going, where the first client would come from, and he’d just won. Wasn’t just Sharon and Nifty who played tug-of-war over lead position I guessed.

“Midwest Council hadn’t told us where to get off, had they?” Sharon recalled.

“No. They were still fence-sitting as to whether we might be more useful than disruptive,” Venec said, and the others started to discuss what that fence-sitting might mean, if anything, if a Council member—maybe even a sitting member—had hired us.

I let the conversation wash over me, still focusing on the soda can in Venec’s hand as if it was a scrying crystal. My memory had always been good, but there was so much stuffed into it now I was having trouble doing a straight recall. If I could only remember why I knew the name… It had to be something J had said; that was the only connection I had to the Midwest, but what?

That thought in turn reminded me that I needed to reschedule dinner with J, soon. He wouldn’t pry about a job—all right, he would, but not before working himself into a lather about it. Better to call him. As soon as I had time.

Damn it, what the hell had I heard about the Reybeorn family? It was in there, I could feel it, but every time I went digging for it, the thought disappeared. Damned frustrating. I
never
forgot stuff!

Before I could puzzle it out, a faint chime sounded in the air, the shimmer that accompanied it marking it as current-noise, not electronic. A summons, unmistakably, not so much urgent in the feel as quietly demanding our obedience. Since we were all here—except Nifty, and I didn’t think Nifty would generate that kind of noise even if he was ballsy enough to try summoning anyone that way—there was only one place and one person it could have come from.

“Children, grab your kit bags and brush out your hair,” Venec said, standing up and confirming my guess. “We’ve got a client.”

eight

I hadn’t been keeping track of time, so I don’t know how long that meeting actually took—not very long, certainly. There was still light outside the window, but in the summer that meant nothing in terms of time-telling. Ms. Reybeorn was nowhere in sight by the time we trooped into the chat room. Nifty joined up with us along the way, wiping still-damp hands on his trousers and looking inquiringly at us. Wherever he’d been—and I could take a guess—he’d missed the recent events.

“We may be in business,” Nick told him as we walked, and Nifty’s entire face brightened, like a kid being told Santa had managed to shove a pony into his sled. Did little boys dream of having a pony the way little girls did?

Just as well that Ms. Reybeorn had already left the premises; this was our smallest room, and the five chairs and a narrow table pretty much filled the space before everyone was inside. Why Stosser didn’t come to us, rather than bringing us down here… From someone else—Sharon or Nifty, for example—I’d have guessed a power play. But he was already the boss; why would he need to do that?

Whatever the reason, it was seriously cramped with all seven of us jammed in there, and I only hoped that the air-conditioning was up to the job, and nobody blew the fuses again.

The chime faded away, and like a magical case of musical chairs, everyone tried to find a place to park their butts.

Sharon took the seat next to Stosser, resting her elbows on the arms of the chair so that she took up as much space as possible, as though mimicking Nifty’s much-larger bulk. He had taken the chair at the other end of the table, so rather than being at Stosser’s left hand, he anchored the table for him. Pietr slid in between Nifty and Venec, taking the last chair pulled up to the table. His clear gray gaze met mine, and he dropped me a wicked wink.

Joy. More maneuvering, and because I wasn’t fast enough, now wherever I sat would be seen as choosing sides.

Nick and I ended up avoiding the table entirely and perching along the windowsill, close enough to contribute, but without the pesky placement implications. That was my plan, anyway. I suspect Nick just wanted an excuse to cozy up. There was enough room on the ledge for his skinny ass, but I had to sit half on, half off. Nick shifted, pulling at my arm to bring me closer. We fidgeted a bit until achieving a compromise, our hips bumping against each other.

Nick was a skinny geek, but he had manners. And he smelled good. I really did like folk who smelled good; it was even more of a turn-on than looking good. I hadn’t dated anyone seriously since months before graduation—my last steady had decided to take a job in California, and I’m not about long-distance relationships, so we’d cooled it off mutually, and without too much trauma. It was clearly past time to find a new playmate—especially if daily exposure to Venec didn’t lessen the hormonal impact he had on me, which didn’t seem likely at this point.

Keeping coworkers off-limits raised the question of
where
and
when
I was going to find that new playmate, though. Or even finding someone long-term. I wasn’t averse to long-term, just ’cause I’d never been able to manage it just yet. I—

“Are you with us, Torres?”

I blinked, hoping to hell I hadn’t just said anything out loud. No, just caught not paying attention. Damn. “Yessir.” The curse of a true blonde—when I blush, I blush hard. By the time everyone looked back to Ian, I probably matched my old hair dye, and wanted to sink through the floor. I tilted my head a little, letting my hair fall forward to hide me while I recovered, and caught Venec watching me. He saw me watching him watching me, and I swear to god, that gaze of his intensified until I felt like the only person in the room.

Which I wasn’t. I looked away before the blush went farther than my face, and tried to pay attention to what was going on outside of my libido.

“All right,” Stosser said briskly. “If you haven’t figured out the what of things by now, you’re fired. Here’s the who.

“Two months ago, Charles and Patty Reybeorn, ages seventy-five and seventy-two, respectively, were found dead in the front seat of a brand-new Benz sedan, parked in their garage in a rather exclusive and well-to-do suburb of Chicago. The exhaust had been backed up, and the initial cause of death was listed as vehicular suicide.”

“Nice car,” Nifty said. I had to take his word for it—I could recognize basic logos, and knew the difference between a coupe and a sedan, but that was about it.

“Initial? There was cause to doubt it?” Sharon had pulled in a notepad from somewhere and was jotting down notes. Boss’s pet, I thought uncharitably, annoyed that I hadn’t thought to carry one with me, too.

“No, not initially. Both the local police and the Midwest Council, to which the deceased both belonged, were satisfied with the conclusion. However, there were a few details that raised eyebrows.”

“Such as?” Sharon paused with her pencil over the pad.

“First, there was no known or probable reason for the couple to commit suicide. They were both in decent health, financially secure, and on good terms with each other, which might rule out a murder-suicide scenario.”

“People off themselves for reasons that seem perfectly valid to themselves, but nobody else even noticed,” I said. “Not having a clear motive doesn’t seem like enough to reverse the ruling.”

“True. And the local police did not. Over the daughter’s objections, the case was closed.”

“And the daughter is our client?” Nifty had missed seeing her come in, and had to be caught up on that detail, Nick listing the vitals, including the fact that I’d spotted her gem-stones and known the name.

“I remember her now.” That got everyone looking at me again, this time with various levels of startlement and anticipation. “No, I never met her, never saw her before today. But my mentor has friends out in the Midwest region, they’re major players there. Or were, anyway, I guess. Oh man, the daughter, Rose Reybeorn. Damn. She doesn’t just have money. She’s got strings on people, and she doesn’t mind pulling them.”

“So our new client wants to use us to yank chains?” Sharon didn’t sound really pleased about that. I wasn’t, either, honestly. Made it all seem…petty. I wondered, idly, if there was insurance involved, since it was so important it
not
be suicide. Except the last thing the Reybeorns needed was money….

Okay, I was going on gossip, and gossip about money was almost always wrong. But even so, I didn’t see a Reybeorn needing a death settlement to make ends meet. Even if her ex-husband had sucked up in the settlement, she’d done well for herself since then.

No, there was something else about the deaths, something that had made it so gossipworthy….

“There was one other thing that bothered our client,” Stosser went on. “The police can’t explain it, either. The Benz, the car they allegedly committed suicide in…didn’t belong to either one of them. It wasn’t a recent purchase, a rental, or a friend’s loaner, so far as the police have been able to determine. In fact, nobody seemed to know
who
it belonged to.”

Yeah. That was it, the detail I was trying to remember. The unclaimed death-car.

Pietr exhaled with a sharp whooshing noise. “That could raise an eyebrow, yeah. And the cops pooh-poohed a possible murder weapon of unknown ownership? Nice. Not.”

“I can see why they called it a suicide,” Nifty said, taking up the mantle of devil’s advocate the way Sharon had, only with less ’tude and more calculation. Sharon was contrary by nature. Nifty, I was starting to understand, used it as a tool, or maybe a weapon. “No matter who the car belonged to, it was in their garage, and I’m guessing there wasn’t any forced entry, no signs of a fight….”

“Yes, without any signs of foul play, which I’m assuming there weren’t—” Sharon started to say, when Venec cut in.

“Never assume anything unless you have evidence in front of you.” He let the rebuke sting, and then added, “However in this case, you are both correct—the medical examiner found no signs of violence committed on the bodies other than those attributable to the means of death.”

They hadn’t found any unexplainable marks or wounds on Madeline’s body, either.

“So, what do we do? I mean, the cops have been all over the case, and probably half a dozen private investigators, before she had no choice but to turn to us.” Nifty raised his hands in a “don’t shoot the messenger” pose when Stosser looked at him. “Hey, man, it’s the truth. We’re not going to be second-string, much less first. So what does she expect us to do that nobody else could?”

And we were back to the original question, like Nifty and Stosser had planned it. I didn’t think they had, of course…but Stosser took the on-a-silver-platter lead-in like a pro.

“To use magic to discover who killed her parents, and why.”

Oh. Right. “Uh-huh.” Sharon, of course, put all our thoughts into words. “That easy?”

Venec took ownership of the conversation then, his smile showing way more teeth than it had to for social comfort. “If it were easy, none of you would have jobs.”

Game and match, Venec.

 

The first trick, everyone agreed, was to get our hands on the death-car itself. Exactly how we were going to do that was a mystery to us, since we were in New York, without any official standing, and the car was, presumably, still in Chicago, but the Guys seemed to have an idea. While they hammered it out, we were sent off like tardy schoolchildren to read a case study Stosser had put together on identifying the different species of midsize winged fatae based on flying patterns and wingspread, as seen from the ground.

“But…” Sharon had started to protest. Stosser didn’t even hear her, already working on the next thing and dismissing us from his awareness in that way he had, so it was Venec who laid down the law.

“The car’s not going to go anywhere or have anything new done to it overnight, Mendelssohn. This is a case, yes. It’s our first case, and it’s important that we do good and look good. So everyone will get their hands dirty. But don’t think it’s your sole responsibility. Life goes on, and so does your training. Flying fatae, people. There will be a quiz.”

“I’m an investigator, not a bird-watcher,” Nick had grumbled to me, but quietly, and Venec pretended not to hear him. For a guy who had been all excited about the chance to see fatae, Nick didn’t seem all that excited about learning to recognize them. I thought about pointing out the inconsistency, but decided it probably would just make him crabbier. Getting a green light and then seeing it turn to yellow was frustrating; I was with him on that.

Orders were orders, though. We all took our packets, loaded up on coffee and doughnuts from a platter that had appeared out on the front counter while we were in the meeting, and headed off to separate areas of the office to do the assignment. Stosser had been very clear about that: hands-on material we did in groups, but reading was a solitary occupation. I think he figured we needed the time away from each other during the day, too.

My usual favorite spot—the sofa in the entry room—was claimed almost immediately by Pietr, who settled himself with the complete and total self-consciousness of someone who knows he’s being a pig. I shot him an evil glare, and went off to find somewhere else previously unclaimed.

“If you want us to do our job, you must allow us to do our job.”

Oh. I stopped halfway through the door of workroom #3 as the voice hit me. Damn it, we needed to have In Use placards put up outside the offices: I had almost walked in on Venec holding a conference call with a bunch of other people. Their figures shimmered like holograms in the space, and I flattened myself against the wall instinctively to keep out of range. I had absolutely no damn idea how they were managing this, and walking into the middle of an unknown current-spell was always a bad idea.

There were three floating busts, two women and a man. The women were older, the man younger. I recognized one as Ms. R, and the others had enough of a staticky resemblance to assume they were members of the family.

Venec didn’t look away from this display, but made a subtle, unmistakable hand gesture to indicate that I should come into their range of vision. I’d never seen him use it before, but I knew exactly what he wanted me to do. I wished, briefly, for Stosser’s gilding-the-lily spell, squared my shoulders and tried to look professional as possible, and walked into view.

“This is Bonita Torres, who leads our initial evaluation team.”

I did? Most excellent. I channeled J at his Council best, as much as I could, and inclined my head gravely first to Ms. R, as our client, and then to the others. “I regret the circumstances of our meeting,” I said. “Sympathies on your loss.”

“Indeed,” Ms. R said. “You seem rather young to be leading a team.”

“Ms. Torres led her first investigation while she was still in college,” Venec said smoothly. “And to a successful conclusion, as well. You are in excellent hands here, I assure you. But in order to begin, we must be able to examine the car itself.”

I kept my face professional, but inside things were chasing around each other going “what the fuck?” because how the hell had Venec known about that? Nobody knew about that, except me and J and my dad’s girlfriend Claire and a nameless cave dragon up in the Adirondacks…

And the strange presence that had shadowed me the entire time I was digging into my dad’s disappearance. The one that had congratulated me on a job well done, given me a vague idea about maybe going into law enforcement, and then disappeared….

I had almost forgotten about it, written the voice off as a hallucination, my understandably overstressed brain dealing with my father’s murder as best it could. Even the dreams had forgotten it, for the most part.

Because it couldn’t be Benjamin Venec, three years before I even knew he existed, or he had any reason to know I existed. It wasn’t impossible, no, but it was damned improbable and that was as good as impossible. Right?

Or was that why he felt so familiar to me, why I knew when he was in the room, why he watched me, sometimes, like…I didn’t know what it was like. But it was intense, and overwhelming, and it made me want, very badly, to crack open his brain and see what was inside.

BOOK: Hard Magic
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