Hard Magic (19 page)

Make no assumptions, bring no bias. Just the evidence. Right.

So. The client’s son, the victims’ grandson, and a female relative, were here. That was fact. Move on. What else do we see?

The bidding seemed to be slowing a bit as the numbers climbed higher, and I followed the auctioneer’s gaze to see who was still in the game. Two men, older, one distinguished looking, the other scruffier but still looking like the kind of guy who would drive this kind of car. Was there a type who would drive a high-end Mercedes-Benz? I mean, other than rich, and having a garage. I couldn’t see this car being regularly parked out on the street, not even on the Upper East Side.

On the other side of the room there was an older woman who, despite her participation, might have been buying groceries for all the excitement she was showing. A broker, probably—she had a Bluetooth in her ear, so might have been taking direction from someone else. Or maybe she was just so Important that she couldn’t be out of touch for five minutes….

Current twitched, and I patted it down. I had, maybe, been known to fry the occasional cell phone or PDA because the owner annoyed me, but that woman hadn’t done anything, either to me or the investigation. This was no time to indulge in random pettiness.

My gaze slid past her, and stopped.

Will.

I could practically hear Stosser’s unspoken “I told you so” in my ear. Damn it.

He didn’t seem to be bidding. That was, I suppose, a good thing. Maybe. Maybe he, like Jack, was just here out of curiosity, to see the vehicle where his former business partners had died. Maybe he had a macabre streak. Maybe.

And maybe not.

The facts were: he was here, halfway across the country, same as me. Only I had a reason that didn’t involve guilt. Did he?

The hammer slammed on the podium, and I almost jumped. The bidding was over. Someone had bought the car.

“Did you see who?” I asked Pietr without taking my sideways attention off Will.

“A woman in the back,” he replied. “Two friends with her. Younger than most of the women here, giddy with the winning. I think this was their first auction. Don’t recognize the faces.”

“We’ve got two known—client’s son, and the guy I interviewed.”

“The lawyer?”

“Yeah.”

“The one you thought was telling the truth about not having a reason to kill them?”

Damn it. “Yeah, him.”

“The one you had dinner with?”

Ow. Note to self: secrets do not exist in the pack.

“Yeah, him.”

“Uh-huh. You want to follow him, while I take the girls, or other way around?”

It would make sense to have Pietr follow Will, lessen the risk of being discovered, and a gaggle of girls would probably be less suspicious of a woman near them than a single lurking male, no matter how good-looking that male was. But the thought that Will had maybe pulled one over was starting to burn, and I needed to know, myself, and not rely on anyone else’s notes.

We split up, Pietr to shadow the winner, and me to follow Will. That could have gotten tricky—we didn’t have any transport, and contrary to old movies, saying “follow that car” works only in deserted streets where anyone would be able to spot you following them anyway, even assuming your driver understood what you were asking and was willing to do it. Fortunately for me, the auction facility—an old civic center of some kind—had a cab stand down the street for those of us not fortunate enough to make a winning bid, and I was able to hear the address Will gave the cabbie. It took me a few minutes, staying back enough in line to not be seen, to get my own car, and give the same address.

Hopefully, Pietr was managing, as well.

The cab drive didn’t take long, despite my fears of a two-hour, two-hundred-dollar fare I’d have to explain to the Guys. We pulled up in front of a pleasant-looking café, which was good, because it was almost dinnertime on the East Coast, and all I’d had to eat all day was a rushed breakfast in the office, and then a packet of roasted peanuts while we were waiting for the auction to start. Combining surveillance with food was an excellent idea.

I got out of the cab and paid the driver off, feeling suddenly absurdly surreal; neither a hardened detective following a dangerous suspect nor a spurned lover following her man to a rendezvous, but maybe somewhere in between and hopelessly foolish with it. It was an odd moment, realizing that I really would rather have been back in the office.

I guess Stosser knew what he was doing, sending me out. It wasn’t a test, it was a damned punishment.

Will went in, and was seated at the patio outside, at a table where someone was already waiting. A woman. Slender, dark-haired, olive skin, dressed nicely in a skirt and top, a leather briefcase at her feet. It looked as though this was a business meeting of some sort, not a tryst. Not that I had any interest one way or the other, damn it. We’d had dinner—okay, we’d had a date—and I’d gotten a good vibe and obviously given off a good vibe, and I was just going to have to deal with the stupidity of that on my own. Feeling betrayed because he was sitting in public with another woman—a woman he seemed to be quite comfortable with, if that kiss on the cheek hello was any indication—wasn’t going to do me a damn bit of good. Especially since I was the one who wasn’t returning messages, not him.

Thankfully, I was dressed well enough in a blue, knee-length dress and sandals that could be either office wear or Ladies who Lunch Informally wear to blend with the late-afternoon crowd. I waved off the maître d’ and took a seat at the bar. It was just out of direct line of sight, and a casual eavesdropper wouldn’t have been able to hear anything.

I wasn’t being casual, though.

It still didn’t feel natural, tapping current like this for a premeditated offense, rather than a reactive defense, but it was getting easier. All those hours of practice in the lab did make a difference, allowing me to form and hold the spell in my head, order a glass of wine, and look totally casual chatting with the bartender without losing focus.

All the old stories, about magicians and wizards and all that, with magic blazing and spells thundering? Bullshit. You try that and I swear, thirty seconds later you’d be dead, because we’re just not that coordinated. It would be like a Null trying to walk and chew gum and pat themselves on the head while rubbing their belly and oh yeah, whistling Dixie at the same time. On key.

I pulled a few threads of current from my core, my control braiding them together into a thicker cable until it
felt
right for what I wanted it to do. Slow and steady, that was the trick. Venec had warned us against trying to do anything too quick, because if someone was paying attention they might be able to sense the current being used. I’d never really thought about it; being sneaky took more work than I’d expected.

Once the cable felt ready, I directed it out, around the corner and, gently, slowly, indirectly, attached it to the bottom of the patio table where Will and his companion sat. I could have used a more direct route, maybe even attached it to them directly, but that would have raised a higher chance that they would notice something was up.

Attention was the last thing I wanted.

A tickle of current went along the cable, and then returned to my core. If I’d worked this properly, the spell would turn the cable into a ’scope, bringing me whatever they were saying without allowing any noise from my end to go back.

It was a damn big
if,
but short of trying to get a table next to theirs and straining to listen in without being noticed, it was the best we’d come up with.

I took a deep breath, and willed myself to be confident. Without control and confidence, no spell would ever work worth a damn.

“You saw that the vehicle sold?”

“At a surprisingly low price, yes.” Will’s voice was low, but clear. The woman with him was slightly more muffled, and I heard the clink of a glass. Maybe she’d had something near her mouth? “I would have thought a car like that…well.”

“A sad ending, yes. But at least it is ending. Let the dead rest. A pity. Our deals with them were quite profitable.”

“And profit is all you care about, isn’t it, Katie?” Will didn’t sound as though he was complimenting her.

She didn’t seem to think he was, either. “I’m sorry that you think I am cold, Will. But if you recall, I didn’t know them, I never met them, and I can’t pretend any great personal loss, or mouth polite platitudes.”

“All right, yes. But you could at least show a little human decency.”

It didn’t sound as if all was well in patio-land. It didn’t sound as if Will had been there to claim a trophy, either. But maybe we’d been wrong about that. Maybe the killer just wanted to make sure the last bit of possible evidence got out of police custody?

The waiter came, and they gave their order. The woman, Katie, had a hanger steak, while Will ordered a chicken Caesar salad. I felt my mouth curl in disdain, almost instinctively. Neither choice showed any imagination or joy in food at all; I had expected better of Will, somehow. I ordered another glass of wine to placate the bartender, and picked up the bar food menu in front of me to buy more time while I listened.

“I don’t suppose I could talk you into reinvesting?”

Will laughed, the same sweet laugh he had used for my jokes. “Neither of us have the touch, Katie. That ship has sailed.”

“Still. We have an opportunity, and it seems a shame to waste it.”

He started to say something in response, then stopped. “Did you hear something?”

“What? Hear what?” She sounded puzzled, as though he’d asked her if she noticed the invisible elephant that had just sat down next to them. Shit. He had picked up on me, somehow. And she hadn’t. Null, or just really low-res?

“Huh.” He didn’t clarify, so it was probably safe to assume she was not only Null, but didn’t know that he was Talent. We don’t advertise much, for obvious reasons. This may be a modern age, but the cry of “witch” still has unfortunate memories in some Talent families. So she was a Null’s Null. That fact was possibly unimportant, but it was part of the investigation, and I filed it into my brain for reporting.

There was silence, and I felt a gentle wave of current rise through the café, not searching so much as filtering the air, trying to identify whatever it was that had triggered his awareness. I unraveled the cable, dropping the edge quickly, before it could be traced back to me. I hoped.

Paying for the wine I’d ordered and not tasted, I walked away from the bar, heading not toward the exit, where I might be spotted, but the back of the restaurant, where the ladies’ room was probably located. Locking myself in the single-use lavatory, I ran the water cold, and splashed some on my face.

“Damn. Also, damn.” My hands were shaking, and my skin was paler than usual under the crappy lighting. I knew what Will’s signature felt like…and that meant that, if he’d been paying attention at all, he probably knew mine, too. If he’d been a little bit faster, or if he were stronger than I thought, he could have gotten me back there. He might still, if he decided to push beyond a basic filter, if I’d left any trace hanging in the air. I didn’t
think
I had, but…

Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The urge to Transloc rose, and was squashed. And I couldn’t call for a Translocation, either. That would be like sending up a flare, now that he was aware, and even with someone else doing the work, he could maybe still find a trace of me….

I needed to be subtle, and tricky, and unobtrusive, things I generally wasn’t really strong at. Whatever I did, it was definitely going to require more work than my usual blunt forward on all thrusters.

Or was it? I stared at myself in the mirror, and thought hard. Only one possible escape came to me: when subtle couldn’t work, sometimes being obvious was the only answer. I was going to have to brazen it out; walk through the restaurant and out onto the street, praying that some of Pietr’s disappearing skill rubbed off on me, enough to get me away unnoticed.

On the plus side, I realized as I stared into the mirror, Will had seen a curly-haired strawberry-tinged blonde. The woman looking back at me had blonder, straighter hair, in another city, in a totally unfamiliar context. All right, I could work that.

Taking another deep breath, I slicked back my hair so that I looked sleek and sexy, then I dried my face and hands, straightened my shoulders, and put my very best “bite me, yon inferior beings” swing into my stride as I walked out of the café and out into the street.

I had no idea where I was going, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I looked like I had a purpose and a destination, and that I just keep going, until I was far enough away that a current-surge wouldn’t register. I walked right past the seating patio, and didn’t let my gaze slide. Straight ahead, attention firmly on something else, and only when I was at the end of the block, swallowed in the crowd and out of sight, did I let myself breathe again.

Looking around to make sure nobody was paying undue attention, I sidestepped into an alcove, where a wrought-iron bench was placed under a leafy tree, and sent a ping back to the office.

*ticket home, please?*

The Guys kept me waiting for almost half an hour, pacing back and forth, worried that Will was going to appear and ask me what I was doing there, or a cop was going to cruise by and accuse me of loitering, or half a dozen other real and baseless worries.

My nerves weren’t helped by a chittering of noise in the tree above me. It sounded too heavy for a bird, and too…intelligible for a squirrel. I really didn’t want to look up, but eventually, of course, I did.

The ugliest mug God ever wrapped around a nose stared at me from a low-hanging branch, like the unholy love child of a bat and a Kewpie doll. Another damned piskie.

“Oh. What?” I really wasn’t in the mood, but ignoring it would probably make things worse.

“You’re new around here, buttercup,” the mug chirped at me.

There was nothing wrong with piskies that a good hard sauté wouldn’t cure. Winged pranksters, they were the most common, annoying, and irritating of all the fatae. Not even Nick could get excited about being accosted by one, and I didn’t want to risk attracting attention by using current to make this one go away, the way I had back home.

“I’m not in the mood,” I warned it. “Try pranking me and I’ll singe your fur down to your bones.”

“Ooooh. Cranky.” It tsk-tsked like an old Irish granny, and I couldn’t help myself; I laughed.

“Better,” the piskie said, and leaped higher into the tree, its wings spreading just enough to help it rise—piskies could fly, but seemed to enjoy soaring, more. “Cranky no good, buttercup,” it said, and then it was gone.

Then the stirrings of current wrapped around me, fair warning, and the Translocation sucked me from Chi-town back to upper Manhattan.

“I hear lawyer-boy was among the attendees,” greeted me before I’d even managed to take my first breath of East Coast air. Obviously, Pietr had gotten back before me.

“So was Jack Reybeorn,” I growled, my crankiness in full force, and I had the satisfaction of seeing Nifty blink in surprise and shut up. I might look delicate-boned and feminine to the big bad football-player, but I could slap him down as good as any defensive lineman, if he got in my face. “Are you going to interrogate me here, or do we get to wait until everyone else arrives?”

“Sorry. I…” Nifty Lawrence was many things—arrogant, aggressive, etc.—but an asshole wasn’t one of them, and he was smart enough to know by now that I wasn’t competition, damn it. “I was jabbing, and I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” I let it go; we had other things to deal with. “Where’s the huddle?”

“Main conference room. Ian ordered in pizzas, figured you guys hadn’t had a chance to eat dinner.”

“They’re going to start docking our pay if they have to feed us, too.” I reached down and took off my shoes, wiggling my newly freed toes against the rough carpeting. The sandals were adorable, and the heels made my legs look fabulous, but they were going-out-to-dinner shoes, not stomping-around-after-suspect shoes.

“We don’t solve this, we may not have to worry about that anymore.”

I stopped luxuriating in the feel of free toes, and looked at my coworker. More than one-upmanship had been in his voice. “What?”

“Somebody fried our electronics while you were gone. That’s why we had to hold off on bringing you back—we wanted to make sure the building was current-stable.”

My first thought was a sort of generalized so what—we’d had enough gremlins running in the office to be blasé about it, and anyway, power fries happened in major cities and it wasn’t always the fault of a Talent. Then I heard the emphasis in his voice when he said “our” electronics, and stopped.

“Just our building? You think someone’s trying to shut us down? I mean, it couldn’t just have been some cadet making his mentor nuts?”

Nifty was shaking his head, and I noticed that his close-cropped hair had been allowed to grow out into tiny black ringlets. “Venec checked around. Not just our building—it only hit our offices. Not even anyone else on this floor. But every wire in the wall’s been crisped. Going to cost a small fortune to replace.”

“Damn.”

“On the plus side,” he said with forced cheerfulness, “we’ll be able to customize it all now. And maybe open up a few walls, put in a larger kitchenette, maybe another bathroom…”

“Dreamer,” I snorted, following him along the hallway, the lights dimmer than usual. Obviously, not everything was back up and running, underscoring what all his big talk didn’t cover up: someone was gunning for us. Based on the evidence, someone Talented. Someone who seemed to have a really strong desire to not have PUPI succeed. All the gremlin incidents, which we’d been ascribing to our own twitches and coincidence, could have been someone trying out our defenses. Psi-bombs, current-strikes? They were all used for only one purpose: to crisp the short-hairs. The fact that neither attack—none of the three, if we counted the security guard shooting at us—were fatal could have meant that someone was only trying to scare us, or that they were bad shots. In either case, intentions could change, and aim could be improved.

The escalation happened when we went from “training” to “under contract.” I didn’t think that was a coincidence. I suspected the Guys didn’t think so, either.

Enemies were bad. Unknown enemies were really bad. Unknown enemies and no allies was about as bad as it could get.

We needed allies.

But first, we needed to solve this damn case, and prove we were
worth
allies.

“Please tell me you got something,” Pietr greeted me when we walked into the conference room. The windows still boarded up, and the lights on half power, the room felt smaller and strangely ominous, despite the comforting smell of sausage and cheese. “Please tell me two hours spent listening to spoiled rich girls giggle over a car not one of them is smart enough to drive was not suffered in vain.”

I dropped my shoes by the door and glared at Nick until he got up and gave me his chair. To the on-site investigator went the padded seating, damn it.

The body language in the room was grim, but not hopeless. I hoped.

“So your girlies were a washout? Did you at least get their phone numbers?”

He shot me a pained look. “I’d sooner date a waxed ape. The conversation would be better.”

Ouch.

“Torres.” Stosser was in pacing mode. Looking at him made me dizzy, so I reached across the table and scored a greasy slice of pepperoni pizza instead. Sharon shoved a plate toward me and a couple of napkins. “Do you have anything to give us?” he asked, not waiting for me to put my dinner together.

“I don’t know. Maybe. The suspect went to a café to meet with a woman. I managed to eavesdrop on some of their conversation. It sounded like they were business partners on at least one deal with the victims. They discussed the sale of the car, but only in passing, and Will didn’t say why he had been there. It might have just been idle curiosity, if he was meeting this woman anyway. Oh, and she’s Null, so that pretty much rules her out as a suspect, right?”

Venec looked at Stosser for a second opinion, then he nodded reluctantly. “It would be difficult, if not impossible, for a Null to subdue both victims without leaving any sign. However, we can’t overlook the possibility that they worked together, since the toenail paring we found was most likely a woman’s. I don’t suppose you were able to get a look at her toes?”

Damn it, I hadn’t even thought of that. Not that it would have been possible anyway, but…

“Her toes, no. Her hands…” I tried to remember, then shook my head. “I’m sorry. I remember that she was dark-skinned, Mediterranean, maybe, but I don’t remember anything about her hands. Which might mean she wasn’t wearing polish, or it just didn’t stand out.”

“Pity we can’t just do an info-dump of everything you saw, share it out among all of us. Maybe we’d find something that way.”

“There is a way to do that,” Stosser said, “but it would not be helpful in this instance. We cannot afford to risk blurring the lines between observation and interpretation. Some of the evidence we have collected already has been compromised.”

“What? How?” This was the first I’d heard about that.

“Not your fault, Bonnie,” Nick said. “The retrieval procedure’s flawed. I went into the locker to get something, and it was all…smudged, is the best way to describe it. We just need to find another way to keep it, I guess.”

I deflated, my sole real contribution to the case now useless. “Man, the bad news just keeps on coming, doesn’t it. Do you think it might have happened during the attack? Yeah, Nifty told me about it. Am I alone in thinking there’s a pattern there, starting with the gremlins, and…”

The expressions around the table told me that my teammates, at least, were on the same page.

“Great. Any idea who’s behind it?”

“Oh, that we know,” Venec said grimly.

“What?”

“Why?”

“Who?”

The last question got the most volume, with me and Nick both asking at the same time. I don’t know; that seemed more important than the why, since
knowing
who is a step closer to
stopping
it.

“And if you say ‘it’s not your concern,’ we’re going to stomp you, boss or not,” Sharon warned Venec without the slightest hint of irony.

“Even if it’s not?” Stosser asked, deflecting attention away from Venec in a smoothly timed interruption. “Because it has less than nothing to do with you all individually, than—”

“In this room, there is no us, individually,” Nifty said. “Not anymore.”

Stosser’s pale blue eyes got really wide, and I think maybe his jaw dropped open a little. Venec just snorted, which from him might have been disgust, amusement, or approval. I’m pretty sure nobody expected Nifty to suddenly sprout up with that comment, all things considered.

“He’s right.” Sharon sounded sort of disgusted, too, although I couldn’t tell if it was because of what Nifty said, or the fact that he was the one to say it. “You hired us as a team. Isn’t that what you keep saying? Then in here, we are a team. So what involves one of us involves us all. Especially violence. Especially violence committed against the office, while we’re all in it.”

“Three strikes,” I added. “The security guard, or cop, or whatever, who shot at us. The psi-bombing. The current-fry on our electronics, which could have been harassment, or it could have been a try at frying one of us, too. If anyone had been taking a hit off the tame current…” I wasn’t sure what might have happened then, but at the very least, a few nose hairs would have gotten seriously real-time fried. “It all adds up to someone gunning for us as a team, and that means we have…” I almost said the right to know, but even I knew that wasn’t going to fly with the Guys. “We have a need to know, so we can protect ourselves—and each other.”

Stosser looked as though he was going to argue but, to my surprise, it was Venec who coughed up, earning him a really filthy look from his partner.

“This isn’t about the case. Not directly, anyway,” he said. “You already know that there are people who don’t want us to succeed. For their own reasons, some of which I can, reluctantly, understand. We’re going to be stirring up hornets going forward, and hornets aren’t always particular about who they sting. That’s why we’re being careful, only taking assignments from direct clients, people involved in the incidents under question.” The “for now” was silent but seriously implicit. “We have turned away several potential clients, under those guidelines.”

Oh now, that was interesting….

“Hopefully,” Venec went on, not letting anyone question him about that little bombshell, “our discretion will ease fears and reduce concerns. But there is…” He paused, trying to gather his words, which made me wildly curious. Stosser, the wordsmith, was silent, and Venec was trying to moderate himself? Oh boy.

“There are people who think that what we are doing is an abomination. That using current in this fashion is…wrong.”

“What, to find out the truth?” Pietr shook his head, his forehead creasing in confusion. “We’ve had soothsayers and scryers since before anything else, how—”

“Not what we are doing, but how we are doing it. Turning current from a personal, individualized craft to a—how did she put it?” he asked his partner. “‘A petrified work of noncreativity’?”

“Close enough,” Ian said, looking like the words hurt like a mouthful of glass.

“She?” Sharon asked.

“Don’t be so sexist,” Nifty said. “Women can be the villains, too, right?”

“Bite me, Lawrence. She?”

Stosser was the one who answered this time, as though the words were getting dragged out with fishhooks. “She. My sister. Aden.”

Oh. Well. This suddenly got all sorts of interesting….

That pretty much ended the meeting. Stosser went into the chat room and shut the door firmly; not that anyone had any desire to follow him. Venec looked at us for a minute, then shook his head and went off somewhere else.

“His sister is trying to kill him.” Nick looked weirdly impressed. “Man, I’m suddenly glad I’m an only child.”

“She’s not trying to kill him. Just stop him.”

“Right. By killing him. And maybe us, too.”

“You scared?”

“Hell, yes. Ian Stosser is a Talent of significant ability, by all public and private accounts. Smart, savvy, sharp, and scary. His sister, if she’s able to make him nervous, is at least at the same level.”

“Talent isn’t genetics. Just because one member of a family is strong…”

“You’re not even remotely worried?”

“Of course I am. It would be stupid not to be worried that someone wants to shut us down. But I’m not
scared.
”

“Potato, potahto.”

Pietr and Sharon were going back and forth over the remains of dinner, and I wanted to slap both of them. I’d rather have someone scared of us than someone objecting on a more philosophical basis. Fear was a logical motivator. Theology? Not so much. And it was crazy, besides. Current might not be a science the way, say, chemistry was, but the days of superstition and ignorance about what we did were long gone—current was a verifiable, measurable source of power, shaped and manipulated by the force of your own will and skill. The only thing that tied it to the old magic was that not everyone could use it…but even back then, in the old days of hedge witches and alchemists, they still had set-spells and incantations….