Pack of Lies (15 page)

Once we were all settled, Stosser came in from whatever back corner he'd been hiding in, and joined the party. Unlike Venec, Stosser looked surprisingly unkempt, wearing the dress-down crunchy granola jeans and flannel that never quite looked right on his tall frame, like a CEO playing woodsman. His face was the normal deadpan, but there
were shadows under his eyes that suggested that Sharon and I weren't the only ones who didn't sleep well last night.

Venec was in the process of filling the others in on what Sharon and I had been discussing earlier, so I zoned a little, slipping almost without thought into a light fugue-state where I was almost hyperaware of my surroundings, and studied my coworkers.

Sharon had already surprised me once today, but I knew that her Perfect Princess attitude was backed by a sharp mind, so even being surprised by her wasn't all that much of a surprise. If we'd met in a bar somewhere I'd have been angling for her phone number by the second drink—and she would have shot me down with style and élan.

I watched her for a minute, just for the pleasure of it, then turned my attention to the boys of our group.

Boys. No, men. The tinge of unease that had been dogging me since the gleaning tried to stage a comeback, but I pushed it away. They were my coworkers. My friends, damn it. My pack.

Nick was still the slightly built kid I'd first tagged him as, although the past few months he'd bulked up a little to slender rather than scrawny. You'd think there couldn't be a strand of guile in that entire body…until you discovered that he was a current-hacker, one of the rarest of Talent who could actually interact with computers, using current to get what they needed. Every government organization willing to admit we existed had wanted their paws on him—and a few illegal organizations, as well. But PUPI had gotten him. He said it was because they'd promised nobody would shoot at him…but since in the past months we'd gotten shot at, psi
bombed, tied up, and threatened with loss of bodily organs, I think he might have made a mistake, myself. Why-ever, I was glad he was with us.

Nifty…was still an enigma. On the surface, he seemed an obvious choice for the corporate world: college football superstar; middle-class black kid who made good, then took a look at his odds and decided not to go pro. He claimed that he was planning on going to grad school, and yet he ended up here, with us. Ambitious, aggressive, and loyal; I still had no idea how his brain worked, or what drove him. He was listening intently to Stosser, jotting comments in his spiral notebook without looking down, even though I was pretty sure he was memorizing it all, too, the way he used to memorize game plays.

And Pietr, our ghost. By not looking for him, I could find him easily: in his usual spot at the corner of the table, chair tipped back slightly, gray eyes watching everyone the same way I was. Not a buddy, the way Nick was, but we worked really well together, quietly and without a fuss. He reminded me of J, which was funny because if there were two people more opposite than my upper-crust, high-profile mentor and Gypsy-bred, invisible-under-stress Pietr, I hadn't met them.

The PUPI team. My packmates. They were all good guys. Complicated, yeah. Moody, occasionally. Violent…maybe. If provoked. But not one of them would ever, ever hurt me. I knew that like I knew the layout of my apartment: 3:00 a.m. and pissed out of my mind, I could still walk it without bumping into anything. There was no reason
that each and every one of them, today, sent a faint unease through my blood, like a distant alarm.

Disturbed, I moved my attention to Stosser. At least with him, I knew to be uneasy. High-res, high-powered, high-energy, and would do whatever it took to achieve his goals, including moving us around a board of his own creating. J had warned me about Ian Stosser, but the threat was all up-front and obvious, and we'd accepted the risks when we took the job. He would use us…but for something we'd signed on for, and believed in. That made a difference, didn't it?

“I want results today, come hell or high water and I mean that literally. This guy's going to be released from the hospital and if there're no charges pressed he may just disappear, and then we are screwed.” Ian's long, orange-red hair was moving as though a breeze was stirring it, a sign that he was seriously upset, even though his current-core was under tight control—there was no repeat of his heat-shimmer from earlier. “We are going to comb the damn site, yes, again. Somewhere there's a piece of evidence that will tell us what really happened out there. Because if those bastards really did attack that girl, and destroy her innocence enough that the ki-rin had no choice but to repudiate her, then the survivor has to be punished. Otherwise, he'll think he can get away with it again. And if he didn't, if…something else happened, then a man is dead at the ki-rin's hooves, and I want to know why.”

There was a sort of collective sigh within the room, although nobody made a sound. This wasn't about the Council's mandate anymore. It wasn't even about our reputation. This was about Ian Stosser's rather overdeveloped and manic
need for justice. Right now, I was good with that. I got the feeling everyone else was, too.

Stosser leaned back, and Venec took over the briefing. “Sharon, what you were saying earlier about levels of truth? I want you to follow up on that. Do you think that you could create a spell that would sort out degrees of truth?”

“Truthiness?” Pietr asked.

“That's not a word,” Nifty retorted.

“Yeah, it is.”

“Children, hush. Sharon, can you do it?”

Sharon thought it over. A lot of what we did was using old spells in a new way, a very specific, repeatable, consistent way. Magic as science. That was part of why Council was so uneasy about us: they weren't real big fans of innovation unless they controlled it, and you can't control something that's designed to give the same result no matter who uses it. Especially in the hands of someone using it to find answers, not prove a point.

While Sharon was thinking, I turned my gaze on Venec, the only member of the team I hadn't done a quick-check on, and at that exact instant he looked up from his notes and looked right at me. I mean, right
at
me, like he had mage-sight on in full force. There was an instant of disorientation, his familiar, exhaustion-lined face somehow becoming the mask of a stranger, and something hit me in the gut, stirring my core like a lightning bolt.

Benjamin Venec. The first time I saw him he was playing a dead body, to test us—our job interview, to see if we had what it took to be pups. Even then, I'd been drawn to him, physically. But this…this was different. I surfaced out of
my own fugue-state and back to normal space with a gasp, feeling like I'd gone two rounds with a zero-gravity roller coaster. What the
hell
was that?

When I looked at him again, cautiously, his attention was back at his notes, like nothing had ever happened. My skin was sizzling, and he didn't think anything had happened?

I stared at him, and there was just the tiniest twitch in the muscle next to his eye, above his ear, and a drop of sweat at the hairline.

It could have been from anything, but it wasn't. He was as damned-full aware of what had just happened—whatever had happened—as I was. But he wasn't going to acknowledge it. I knew that, the way I knew…

Hell. I just knew. The spark during the training session, this… I couldn't analyze it, not the way my nerves were singing at me, but this was new. This was…

Was going to have to wait, whatever it was. I took a deep breath, found my core, and grounded and centered quickly, forcing myself to focus on the briefing, and only the briefing.

“There are truth-scrying spells,” Sharon was saying. “But mostly they're useless, the same way polygraph tests are. Once someone's aware that you're testing them, they can cheat the system. It would have to be indirect, something they couldn't sense and respond to….”

Sharon's voice trailed off and she tilted her head back, and her “let me think, let me think” humming started again.

“Right.” Stosser took over the discussion when Venec didn't say anything, still too busy studying his notes. “Lawrence, you work with her on that.”

Sharon and Nifty were constantly warring for alpha spot, but they were also both really good at brainstorming. It made sense to put them both on it.

“The rest of you—”

“And Nick,” Sharon said, breaking off her humming to lay claim.

Stosser looked surprised: we didn't often interrupt him.

“I think what I'm going to do…it's going to need his specialization.”

Nobody ever actually said “hacker” out loud. You didn't even think about it too much. It was an amazing, rare skill…but it was also one of the ones that could go most spectacularly blooey, so it was like not mentioning certain breeds of the fatae—if you don't name them, they won't come by and screw things up.

“All right. Shune, you get to stay inside. Torres, take Pietr back to the scene and don't come back without something useful.”

Well. That was nicely non-directed and open-ended. And completely unhelpful.

*how the hell are we supposed to know if it's useful or not?*

Pings didn't actually use words, but emotions and intents that our brains transcribed into something comprehensible. This one came on an arrow of frustration wrapped with a hint of amusement, shaded with Pietr's unmistakable mental flavor, and I ducked my head to hide the smile I could feel rising. Ian Stosser thought we were all nearly as capable, competent, and borderline-brilliant as he was…and expected us to perform to those standards.

We did our best, and our best was pretty damn good, but our brains weren't Stosser-level.

“I'll follow up on that other matter,” Venec said. Stosser looked surprised, and I
knew
some ping went back and forth between them, but Ian just nodded and that was that. Whatever the other matter was, it was need-to-know, and we didn't need to know.

The others filed out, talking animatedly about ideas for a spell. Part of me really, really wanted to be going with them. I was good at crafting spells, and seeing where we could improvise—the Guys had said that I was their best tech, hands down. I should have been working with them.

Instead, I got to go back to the site. Again. Like I wasn't going to see it in my dreams for the rest of the year, already?

“Bonnie.”

I didn't jump when Venec came up behind me, despite my general unease. Like before, in the common room, like all the time, he had the ability to slip into my personal space without me reacting—even now, when every other human male other than my mentor set my nerves jangling. Freaky. Although considering the first time we'd met he'd already been in my head, scouting me while I hunted Zaki's killer, maybe I'd gotten so used to second-guessing his motives and intentions that it felt normal to have him in my personal space.

And, after what had just happened, whatever had just happened, him being able to do anything didn't surprise me, although it was starting to really piss me off.

Venec glared at me. “None of that made any sense.”

My brain hit a brick wall, and I blinked, gaping at him. What the hell? I knew damn well I hadn't said anything, and that wasn't the kind of thing you say out of the blue, so he had to have heard my thoughts without me knowing, which was impossible, so therefore he hadn't done it. But he had.

Even as I was chasing that logic tangle, I was answering him. “I know it doesn't make sense, but you have a better explanation?”

He'd gotten into my brain before, during that scouting expedition. That's why I knew how damn strong he was; that sort of eavesdropping took immense control and power, as well as the particular skill set called the Push. But even then I'd known someone was lurking, and I'd been strong enough to shove him out.

All right. He knew the feel of my brain, we worked together closely, and right now I was so wound up, it was probably inevitable that I'd leak something. Venec was already always monitoring us, so…

No. That still didn't explain it, or the weird dizzying zing I'd felt earlier from him just looking at me, or… It was weird and disturbing, and I really wanted it to not happen again. I didn't like things I couldn't track down and nail to the wall and break down into basic, comprehensible facts. I especially didn't like things that disturbed and distracted me during a job. The only thing that made me feel better was that I was pretty sure Venec felt the same way about not liking it.

He hesitated, like he was going to say something, and then his hand came down on mine, just a brief contact, palm to the back of my hand. It wasn't anything special: we'd knocked into each other more than once, walking in
the office, and there'd been taps on the shoulder, a hand up from the floor…but this one felt different. This wasn't the correction of a teacher, or the help of a coworker. This was a
touch
.

Everything that had been happening until then, the past eight months of building tension, suddenly hit flash point, and I barely had time to think
holy shit and Shinola
before everything exploded.

Not physical, not emotional, not even metaphorical.
Magical
. More than what I'd felt before, more and worse and totally not anything I'd ever felt before. For a second I swore I could feel the thump of his brain working
inside
mine, and then current slipped from his core into mine, or maybe the other way around, or maybe both, and it was like an entire storm's worth of lightning inside your underwear. Literally, because in addition to the current-shock, I got a sexual jolt like I hadn't had since the first time a guy went down on me.

My control tightened and my walls went up like they hadn't since my first high-school dance, and we stared at each other, my pulse racing like I'd just realized I'd missed a flight I was supposed to be on.