Hard Magic (8 page)

“He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a bad fairy in his closet,” Venec said, like it slipped out without his brain’s knowledge. He shut down right after that, his entire body language denying he’d ever said any such thing about his partner.

Too late. I managed not to laugh, but felt better. Even the bastard taskmaster had a snarky side. Good to know.

Venec recovered fast. “But there, you just made my point for me. A recall like yours—the ability to not only observe quickly but to retain accurate impressions hours later—is as useful a skill as any Sharon, or any of the others, bring to the table. If you all repeated the same skills, you would be a horribly one-dimensional team, and that’s useless to us.”

I lifted the paper and used a breath of current to wipe the debris back onto the sheet. “You think we’re ever going to actually get to use any of this stuff? I mean, for real?”

Since we’d signed on, the Guys had been running our asses ragged learning how to sift physical debris without compromising it, raise fingerprints off a dozen different surfaces, and extrapolate blood splatter and gunpowder residue, along with a few classes in lock picking and identifying basic current manipulations. It was all interesting, and every day we figured out new ways to use current, but that was all that had happened. The
Cosa
was keeping their distance. Nobody—as far as we knew, anyway—had come calling for our services.

Sure, we got paid, and learned stuff, and the Guys seemed unconcerned about how long it was taking for us to start earning our keep, but I wasn’t about to sign a lease on any of the apartments I’d seen, just yet. Not that any of them had been blowing my socks off. Two weeks of searching the ads and calling after leads, and I had my choice of either crap apartments in neighborhoods that would give J nightmares but were within my price range, or getting a roommate in a better area. I really didn’t want a roommate. Did that for three years of college, and that was three years too many. Waking up in the morning with a roommate giving me the hairy eyeball because there was someone sharing my bed, or trying to lecture me on self-respect was not my idea of good living conditions. I had no self-esteem issues, thanks muchly, and my personal life was nobody’s business but my own.

“What’s the matter, Torres?” Venec goaded me, instead of answering. “Worried that you’re going to be running scenarios for the rest of your life?”

“Or at least until the money runs out.”

There was a flash of something on Venec’s face; I’d hit a nerve, I guess. I went back to staring at the gunpowder residue, coaxing it into cleaning itself onto the sheet of paper. Stosser had money, and from the way Venec looked and talked I’d guess he had access to some, too, but I was betting they’d mortgaged everything they had on this, and it had to pay out, probably sooner rather than later.

Not even cave dragons wait forever for repayment. The Guys needed PUPI to work, and fast.

The rest of the week was more of the same, with the added joy of the ventilation system breaking down on the warmest day of the summer yet. Dog days, yeah. That could totally have been coincidence, or bad building management…but it
felt
like gremlins mocking us, especially after the coffee machine died for the third and final time when Pietr tried to prep a spell in the break room, and Sharon and Nifty got into it over the finer points of historical magic, which I don’t think either of them knew a damn about, causing the lights to flicker badly enough to give us all headaches.

Of course, the latter wasn’t gremlin-provoked, just the two of them butting heads—and current—as usual. But all told, it was a tough five days, and when Friday afternoon rolled around, Stosser kicked us out with firm directions to take the weekend off and do nothing even remotely current related. “You guys have been stretching, and while that’s good, we don’t want you to stretch until you break,” he said. “So take a few days to recover, and we’ll see you back in here on Monday.”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I made some arrangements to look at a couple of apartments on Sunday and, when I woke up—reluctantly, groggily—to a Saturday filled with glorious sunshine, declared it a total R & R day. I sorted through the pile of clean laundry, found appropriate day-off clothing—a long black linen skirt with deep pockets and a T-shirt with a green-haired punk troll giving the world the finger printed on it—and got dressed before I could let myself fall back asleep. Grabbing a book off my to-be-read pile without even caring what it was, I shoved it into my backpack with my notepad and a couple of pens, stopped by the local overpriced deli to buy a sandwich and a bottle of water, and headed out to the Park with the rest of the known city-dwelling universe.

Fortunately, most people seemed interested in either sprawling on the Great Lawn, or strolling, and I found a pretty granite fountain in the middle of a circular walkway that wasn’t overcrowded, and claimed a spot on the rim. It was surprisingly comfortable, with the sun on my legs and arms but not in my eyes. I dropped my backpack, pulled out my book, and started to read.

I’d made it about three chapters in when I was interrupted by a familiar voice.

“Hey.”

I looked up, and sighed in resignation at the familiar form trying to loom over me. “You know, this city’s too big for this to happen.”

“Welcome to New York, girl. Biggest small town in the world.”

Nick sat down without asking, and, incidentally, blocked my ray of sunlight.

“Move over,” I told him, pushing at his rib cage with one finger to show I was serious. He slid over, stretched his legs out in front of him, and leaned back.

“That line about the biggest small town in the world? I thought that was Paris.”

“Nah.” Nick sounded certain of that, so I let him have it. A minute passed without him saying anything more, so I tried to go back to my book.

“You been to Paris?”

“Yes.” I turned a page, maybe a little more ostentatiously than was really needed.

“A lot?”

Clearly, the hint was lost on my coworker. “A few times.” It wasn’t really any big deal.

“Wow.”

The tone of his voice made me pause. All right, maybe it was. I forgot, sometimes, that J and I didn’t exactly lead the normal Americana life.

I lifted my head from my book and frowned at Nick. “Did you follow me?”

“Nope.” He crossed his heart like a five-year-old telling a lie. “Was on my way home from work when I saw you, figured I’d be cohort-ly and stop. If you want to be alone…”

He made as though to get up, and I stopped him. “Home from work? Were we supposed to…?” A flutter of panic hit my rib cage. Had I missed something? We were all still on probation; I couldn’t afford to miss anything….

“Relax, Torres. Home from my other job. All right? I want to pay off my student loans before I’m thirty, and I can’t rely on this job to cover me. Not all of us have a comfy background to fall back on.”

“Bite yourself, Shune.” I hadn’t mentioned J’s background, or J much at all, but it didn’t surprise me the others had done some digging. I’d done the same on them. Nifty I already knew about. Sharon Mendelssohn was exactly what she seemed: well-educated daughter of a middle-class family who blended really well with the Null world. Nick was the eldest son of gypsies—lonejacks who chose not to settle within any one region—who’d really only appeared on the radar when he went to college. Pietr Cholis, like Sharon, was mainstream all the way, except for a stint in the juvie facilities when he was thirteen. Me, they’d get the whole story: lonejack daughter turned Council mentee, Phi Beta Kappa goth-girl, one arrest for trespassing with intent to protest, no convictions. I doubted my investigation into my father’s death was on any record; to the rest of the world, Zaki Torres just disappeared one day, same as my mother did, three months after I was born. No foul play on her part—she just decided she didn’t want to be a mom, handed me over to Zaki, and split. All I’d ever gotten from her was fair hair and paler skin that—thank god—didn’t burn or freckle.

Nick had gone quiet, his head tilted back to let the sunshine wash over him, but I was totally distracted from my book now. “Hey.”

“What?”

“You wanted to see a fatae, right?”

His eyes opened, and his head came into an alert position so fast I swear I heard it crack. “What? Where?”

“Over there.” I pointed with my chin, trying not to be obvious. Some fatae didn’t mind, but some got really pissy about being outed. “In the leather jacket.” It was too nice a day for that jacket, which was why I’d noticed him in the first place.

“He’s not…” Nick started to say in disgust, and then stopped. It wasn’t obvious—the obvious ones didn’t stroll around Central Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon—but once you actually looked, the evidence was there to be noticed.

“What is it?”

“He, and I have no idea.” I’d met a few over the years, obviously, and J had trained me on the basics: the different kinds of breeds and where they came from, and how to not be an idiot when confronted with one, but without a checklist I couldn’t do more than land-based, air-breathing, bipedal. “That jacket on a day like today, he’s probably from one of the warmer countries, not Nordic or northern. Land-based, obviously. No gills visible.”

There were some fatae breeds with horn or antlers, but this guy’s head was bare, except for a crop of dark curls. It was what was under the hair that gave him away. His ears were not only elongated, they were tasseled with tufts of fur at the tip and lobe, and the skin at the back of his neck, where it showed above the coat’s collar, was dappled with close-cropped, fawn-colored fur.

His hands were in his pocket, and his feet were covered by boots, but I would have laid down money that his nails were more like a horse’s hooves than a human’s. His face was humanlike, too, close enough to pass if you didn’t stare, but the lower half moved oddly, as if the bone structure of his mouth wasn’t quite the same as ours. I had the sudden thought that a lot of FX guys in Hollywood might be fatae, or know some pretty well.

We watched as he walked past us. I got the feeling he knew we were watching, but there was no way to tell, not without being either obvious or rude, or both.

A tune sounded from his pocket, and he took out a cell phone and answered it. His hands were shaped like human hands, but with three thick fingers instead of five more slender ones, and each curved down, ending with what looked like a soft miniature hoof. He managed the phone like a pro, though.

He turned, as he passed, and looked directly at us. It was then that I realized the reason his mouth looked strange was because of his double rows of teeth.

Sharp
teeth.

The urge to pull current wiggled in my belly, but I held steady. Carnivore did not mean threat, automatically. Not anymore, anyway. Probably. But the fact was that he saw us—more, he
saw
us—not just as human but Talent…. I forced myself to relax. Some fatae could sense current, even though they didn’t use it the way we did. That was all, no need to be jumpy. Gremlins or no, we weren’t in anyone’s crosshairs.

And then the fatae was walking past us, talking urgently into his cell, and I heard Nick let out a little sigh.

“You’re disappointed?” I asked.

“No. Okay, maybe a little. I guess I thought he’d be more…impressive.”

He’d missed the teeth, obviously. “Some of them are scary as hell,” I said. “Someday, if you’re a good boy, I’ll take you to meet a cave dragon.”

“You do not know a cave dragon.” He sounded indignant, and I laughed at him.

“I do, actually.” I even really did have an invitation to return. And I was pretty sure it was meant in a “stop by and say hello” manner, not “stop by to be lunch.”

Nick started to get excited about the thought. “How about a dryad? I heard there are a lot of them in the Park.”

“Probably are,” I said. “It’s an old park. But they’re tough to meet, and not always good to meet, either.”

“What do you mean?”

I put down my book, resigned to the fact that Nick wasn’t going to shut up anytime soon. “You
ever
read any fairy tales when you were a kid, Nick? The real ones—the Grimm versions, not the Disneyfied ones.”

“Sure. Um. No, not really.” He shrugged. “I mean, I got my basic history during mentorship, so…”

“Well, you should. Read them, I mean. Because a lot of them aren’t so much stories as lessons. About how to behave—and not get sunk in a swamp, or cooked and eaten, or run out of your home or any of the other things that happen to idiots who disrespect the fey folk.”

I wasn’t sure how much of it I believed, really. But the breeds had been around forever, since before the Old Magic days, when we were still trying to figure out why some people could start fire by staring at a stick, and other people burned those people with those same sticks. The fatae didn’t use magic, but they were
Cosa Nostradamus
, same as us.
Cosa
-cousins. It paid to keep up-to-date with what your relatives were up to, and what family feuds were dead and which ones still simmered.

I didn’t say any of this to Nick, though. I didn’t know how to verbalize it without sounding preachy and uncool, and I was discovering, much to my surprise, that I really wanted to fit in. It wasn’t just about being good at the job, although I wanted that, too. Sharon’s elegance, Nifty’s charisma and pull, Pietr’s total cool and calm, even Nick’s fumbling geeky charm, it all made me want to be part of the group. Where did I fit in? I had no idea. But Venec and Stosser thought we could be a team.

Why had that fatae looked at us? Was it just a case of
Cosa
acknowledgment? Was that creeping sense of menace and uncertainty real, or just a remnant of the crap from the previous week? I couldn’t tell, so I let it go.

“So, what’s your other job, anyway?” Maybe he could get me part-time work there, if I needed it. If this all went south on us and we got kicked to the curb.