Dragon Justice (15 page)

There was a deep sigh, the sound of him going into fugue state,
and I waited, slipping the antacids into my jacket pocket. The tang of fresh air
faded, and I was aware again of the smells layering one on top of each other,
like a strata of stink.

“Our killer…was…not excited. Not anticipating.” His hand moved
lower, and I could feel his current relax, which seemed contradictory, but that
was how Pietr worked: the more he focused, the less you noticed him. “He
was…hopeful.”

“Hopeful of what?” I kept my voice even, not wanting to break
him from his concentration. Emotional gleaning was verboten, but Pietr, of all
of us, could keep his distance, not get caught up in it. And he wasn’t going
after the victim, so that should save him from any death throes. I hoped.

I stayed alert, anyway.

The woman who had led us in had disappeared; I hadn’t even
noticed her leaving. That let us talk more openly: unlike Andrulis, we had no
idea if she knew what we were or about the
Cosa
at
all. It was strange interacting with people on the job where that was an
issue....

“I don’t know. I can’t even tell what kind of hope it was.”

That surprised me, although I wasn’t sure why. “There are
different kinds of hope?”

Pietr moved his hands down the corpse’s legs, then back up,
hovering over the stomach. “Of course there are. There’s joyful and painful and
the sort of sick hope when you’re expecting bad news....”

It made sense when he explained it that way. But I was still
trying to figure out why someone would be hopeful when he cut into someone
living…

“Like a surgeon, maybe, hoping to… No, that doesn’t make any
sense. What—”

“Hey!”

We both turned at the shout, since it had clearly been directed
at us. A woman stood there, dressed in the kind of suit that, to me, labeled her
“midlevel admin and self-conscious of status.” I groaned inwardly. Here came
trouble.

*stay quiet* I pinged to Pietr. Probably needlessly: from the
way her gaze refocused on me, he had already faded from sight.

“What are you doing here? Who let you in?”

“We have passes,” I started to say, showing her the plastic bit
hanging around my neck.

“Of course you do. You couldn’t have gotten down here without
one. But why are you here? Who gave you permission to inspect a body?” She
picked up my pass between two fingers and inspected it, but since it was
legitimate, she couldn’t find anything wrong.

She peered over my shoulder at the body we had been examining
and made a reproving sound. “You need to leave now.”

Our very first case, we’d been looking over a piece of evidence
when security came to kick us out. Then, Nick had made with the Jedi mind tricks
and convinced the man what we were supposed to be there, that we were
legitimate, and we got out without being arrested. I was crap at that sort of
thing, and Pietr was effectively useless right now, so despite the fact that we
were legitimate and we did have permission to be there, I merely ducked my head
under the woman’s wrath and let her escort us out.

Andrulis could explain to her later why he put two civilians on
the visitors’ list. That wasn’t my headache.

“We didn’t get to see the other body.”

I leaned against the wall of the building, out of the direct
flow of traffic, and watched people going about their business, seemingly
oblivious to the death behind the building’s facade. I couldn’t decide if it was
a good thing or not that people could accept the presence of the dead so
easily.

“It was a few days older—odds are you wouldn’t have gotten
anything more from it.” Although it had been the first— “Oh, god.”

“What?”

“We’ve been assuming that these are the first. What if they’re
not, and they just haven’t found the others yet?”

“Jesus. Torres.”

He leaned against the wall next to me, his arms crossed over
his chest, and we stared out at the street. It was greener here than in New
York, and the streets were less crowded. Or maybe it just felt that way to us,
here and now.

“Y’know, it doesn’t matter,” I decided. “The cops are looking,
and we can put the word out about anyone going missing, but we need to look at
the evidence we have, not what might still be out there. Like Venec said, we
can’t do anything about what might already have happened.”

“So.” Pietr drummed his fingers absently on his knee, as though
he were counting off. “Hopefulness. And a scalpel with an unknown
current-signature that gives you the wiggies. That’s what we’ve got that the
police don’t.”

As evidence went, that wasn’t much. But it was what we had.

“The knife… The trace was part of it, not just a smudge from
the person using it.” The more I thought about it, the more certain I was about
that. “My first thought had been current-forged, but it could be a sharpening
spell that’s been maintained long enough to work its way into the metal.” Metal
took to current the way a pole called down lightning, only current tended to
stick.

“Are there metalsmiths who make knives with current?” Pietr
hummed under his breath. “They’d be lonejack or gypsy, then, probably.” Pietr’s
family were gypsy—more clannish than lonejacks, but not willing to toe the
Council line. “I’ll check on that. I’d like a current-blade myself.”

“Yeah, so the cops can frisk and arrest you?” The banter made
me feel a little better, distancing myself from the contents of the rooms behind
us, the tables and boxes filled with bodies unclaimed, unnamed, or just waiting
to be stamped “officially deceased.”

“There are so many reasons a weapon could pick up a signature.
I’m more concerned about the emotions I picked up. Hoping…what?”

“If we knew that, we’d know motivation,” I said. My nose caught
the scent of a grease truck down the block, and my stomach rumbled. A little too
early for cart food, probably. But I’d have to eat and remind Pietr to, too. If
they’d had breakfast, it had been hours ago.

“We know that all the victims have been Talent. But we don’t
know if the killer was. Even a Null can use a knife that’s been spell-cast, with
or without knowing it. Hell, we don’t even know if the killer’s human!”

I thought about the idea that a fatae could be doing this. It
was certainly possible—and had historical precedent. “God, what a mess that
would be.” Rorani and the Fey might be willing to work with us now, but if we
accused a fatae of going wholesale on humans…everyone would be protecting their
own backsides and leaving ours out to hang. “You’re the one who gleaned
emotion—what do you think?”

Pietr signed, a long, slow exhale, as he ran over the memory.
“Human,” he said finally. “It felt human.”

I thought about the sensation I’d picked up from the cuts and
agreed. Which was disturbing, actually. I’d rather someone who could do that to
another living being—many living beings—would feel a little less human.

“Is there a spell that would be able to show him?”

I had a nearly perfect memory, so the pack tended to use me as
a portable library for spells and research. I let my brain ponder the question
for a minute. “Every spell and cantrip I know requires that we have something
with a connection to the subject. If we had the weapon, we could force something
out of it. But if we had the weapon…”

Every Talent put their own mark on their magic, called a
signature. The longer they held current in their core, the stronger the
signature. If our killer was a Talent and had been intensely emotional while
killing…it was almost inevitable that trace would be left on the weapon,
too.

But we didn’t have the weapon, only the small bit I’d been able
to feel of it, and that…hadn’t felt right. A signature was…like a scent. You
could take the same perfume, and it would smell different on each person,
becoming distinct, so you could pick it out of a dark room full of other smells.
The feeling I’d picked up under the cuts had been…more like a low rumble of
noise, not distinct enough to identify.

“Damn it.” Pietr wasn’t much for cursing, so the swear caught
me by surprise. “He’s out there. He’s still killing. And we’re just sitting
here....”

I felt his frustration myself, too. By now we should have had
something tangible, something we could use to pin down the next step, find the
next clue. We didn’t always win, but damn it, we didn’t just sit around and
wait!

*anything?* I reached out to Venec, hoping to hear that Sharon
and Nick had better luck with their research, or come up with something that
would slot into what Pietr and I had and give us some kind of a lead. There was
an echoing sort of silence, which was unusual between the two of us, these days,
and then a response. But not the sort I was expecting.

*get back here. now*

Chapter 11

A summons like that, you don’t screw around with
finding a cab and risking city traffic. We found a quiet space behind one of the
pillars guarding the entrance, out of direct sight of anyone passing on the
street, and waited until the entrance itself was clear. With a quick visual
confirm from Venec that the inner hallway was also clear, we Translocated back
to the one place we knew well enough: the hotel.

The room was surprisingly crowded. Venec, as usual, was holding
up a wall, his arms crossed against his chest. He was utterly still in a way
that meant something was wrong, but I’d known that from the feel of his ping.
Sharon was perched on the desk, her shoes off and legs swinging gently. When she
was calm, she was utterly still. She wasn’t calm now.

The surprise guests were a tall, handsome man with dark hair
liberally shot with gray and an equally tall, dark-skinned girl.

I knew them both.

“Sergei. Is Wren all right? Is—” Had trying to run through
Venec’s security wall gotten her hurt? I thought it but didn’t speak the thought
out loud. If Ben’s system had hurt her… Shit shit shit.

“Wren’s fine,” her partner told me, his gaze the same warm,
reassuring brown as always. Sergei Didier was the kind of guy who, if he told
you it would be okay as the Titanic sank under you, you’d believe him. “But we
seem to have an…interesting development.”

I turned to the girl with him. “Ellen?” She didn’t meet my
eyes. She wasn’t meeting anyone’s eyes, in fact, staring at the carpet like it
was the most fascinating thing in the room. It wasn’t.

I checked her over once, visually, looking for any injuries,
anything that might explain her behavior, then looked at Venec, who shook his
head slightly, meaning that he didn’t know what was going on, either.

That meant Sergei had brought Ellen down here himself. He was a
Null, and Wren was crap at Translocating—and Ellen didn’t have a clue about
Talent, much less any training, so there was no way she’d done it.

That meant they’d taken the train—or driven. Knowing Sergei, I
was pretty sure he could drive, New Yorker or not.

And they’d come to us, not Wren, who was still somewhere in the
area. Had known to come to us…how? More to the point, why?

I shook off my dithering and just asked. “What happened?”

“It would seem, if I have my terminology right,” Sergei said,
his voice slow and deliberate and just a little too aware of the show he was
making, “that our girl here is a storm-seer.”

You know that old saying about being able to hear a pin drop?
It’s not true. When it gets that quiet, all you can hear is the sound of the
blood in your skull, thump-thump-thumping.

“Bloody hell,” Pietr said in a whisper, his voice somewhere
between disbelief and awe, and then the sound came back, cranked to eleven.

“There hasn’t been a certified aeromancer in…” My memory failed
me. “Fifty years, maybe. Maybe more.”

“Yes. That’s what I was told, too.” Sergei’s voice was still
dry, still enjoying the show a little too much, but there was an undercurrent of
worry there, too.

“What happened? And why bring her to us?” Venec tried to take
back control of the situation, uncrossing his arms and stepping away from the
wall.

“I saw Wren.” Ellen lifted her head and looked at me. Her eyes
were filled with misery that made my heart—admittedly an easy target—hurt for
her. “I saw Wren, and I saw another man. Tall, pale, with hair like a
night-candle.

“They were both dead.”

* * *

An aeromancer is the fancy name for a storm-seer,
someone who sees the past—and the future—through pure current. I could scry
reasonably well and had more than a touch of the kenning that told me when
things were happening, but those were just trickles, faint awareness of the
patterns that were flowing through our present, hitting the immediate past and
future. I couldn’t actually see anything, and not very far into the future—and
not really into the past at all.

Ellen had seen Wren, whom she knew, and a man who could only be
our other Big Dog, the flame-headed, pale-as-a-satantic-candle himself, Ian
Stosser.

And they were, she claimed, dead.

“Not yet.” It wasn’t a question Pietr was asking, but Ellen
shook her head, anyway. “Not yet. But soon. I don’t know how I know, but I
know.”

Her voice was shaking, and she still wouldn’t look at anyone
except me, but the certainty was in her voice like bedrock. You could ground
yourself in it.

Venec already had that gone-away look on his face that meant he
was pinging Ian. “Where’s Wren?” I asked Sergei. “No, don’t give me bullshit. I
know she’s down here—she’s making a run on the museum.”

Sergei opened his mouth to deny everything, and then I could
see the pieces start to click in his brain.

I headed off any questions he might have, while Venec was
preoccupied. “Not me, not us officially. A side project of Venec’s. Which is all
fun and games when it was just them butting heads but not now.” Not if someone
was kenning her and the Big Dog being dead. “You need to call her in now.”

“I tried.” His voice was a growl of frustration. “I left a
message for her the minute Ellen had her—” he was about to say
fit,
I could sense it, then changed it to “—vision.
But she didn’t respond, and…”

And he was a Null and couldn’t ping her, and she was Talent and
working, so wouldn’t have any electronics on her, certainly not a cell phone. So
he came to us.

“How did you know where to find us?”

“Your office manager.”

Lou. Of course.

“She didn’t know where Stosser was but said that Venec was down
here. I would have called the hotel, but…” He sat down now at the desk chair
that had been pulled away from where Sharon was sitting. “I thought this was
something that needed to be dealt with in person.”

Emotions caused current-spike. Phones were durable, in the
short-term, but, no, he was right. This… And Lou would have thought it better to
hear it from him, not her, so she hadn’t told us anything. I wasn’t sure I
agreed with that, and I was pretty sure Venec was pissed.

“A storm-seer.” Sharon didn’t know Wren and had a supreme
confidence that Ian could beat even death itself, I guess, because she was more
stuck on Ellen’s ability than anything else. “And we— Nobody knew about her
until now?”

“She didn’t know about herself until now,” I said. “Ellen, are
you okay?”

I guess nobody had thought to ask her that before, because she
just crumbled like a cookie, her face scrunching up and her body collapsing in
on itself, falling to her knees on the carpet before anyone could react.

“Oh, shit.” I was next to her before anyone else: when I looked
up, expecting help, my brave cohorts were staring at us like we’d just grown
wings or something. Only Sergei came forward, kneeling and putting a gentle hand
on Ellen’s shoulder. But his expression, turned to me, said plainly he had no
idea what to do.

Hell, neither did I. Bad enough Ellen had grown up not knowing
what she was or why things happened around her. Then to be abandoned, the way
her family obviously had abandoned her, and not wanted by the group where you
were supposed to fit in… All that could sucker-punch anyone. But then suddenly
to learn that you were not only special but rare?

The scullery-maid-turned-princess story might sound like a
fairy tale, but I could see where it came with its own special hell.

“Ellen. Ellen, look at me.”

Dammit, she was one of those women who looked good when they
cried. I’d hate her if I didn’t feel so bad for her.

“I know this is all tough, and confusing, and things I can’t
even begin to understand. But I promised you we’d see you through this,
remember?”

“You left, and then Wren left, and he…” She sniffled and her
words were lost, but I had a pretty good idea what she was saying.

“He’s not one of us, no, but he knows us. And he knows what
it’s like to be surrounded by people like us and not know what the hell is going
on.” I was guessing there, actually, but it was an educated guess.

“I don’t want this. I thought I did but I don’t. I just want…I
want…” Her voice trailed off into messy hiccups. I looked up and tried to catch
Sharon’s eye—she had way more of a capable mom mode than I did. But she shook
her head and pulled away, backing up without actually moving, her eyes wide with
a sort of nuh-uh denial. Pietr looked like he wanted to help but didn’t know
what to do any more than I did.

Venec was behind me, but I could feel him through the Merge, as
though he were whispering in my ear.

*we need her. we need to know what she saw. if it’s anything we
really need to worry about or not*

Because it might not be. If she was a storm-seer, she was
totally untrained, and that meant she could have misinterpreted what she saw, or
seen it wrong, or…

I’m purely incapable of telling comforting lies to myself.
Storm-seers didn’t see things “wrong,” and they didn’t misinterpret. They
couldn’t. That’s what made them seers.

“Ellen, I know this is hard. Believe me, I know. I’ve got a
touch of it myself, so I know how scary it can be.”

That got her attention.

“But you have a gift, a lot stronger than mine, and it’s maybe
given us a warning that could save lives. So we need to know everything you saw,
okay? Even if it doesn’t make any sense to you, it might to us.”

I waited for her to take all that in. “Can you do that?”

A long, shuddery breath, and out of somewhere the glint of
steel shone through. “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”

She found her way back to her feet, and I followed her every
inch, ready if she needed me but not touching her. Not because I thought that
was the right thing to do, but because I was terrified of doing the wrong
thing.

“Water?”

She took the glass from Pietr’s hand gratefully, chugging it
down like she was parched. It was probably going to give her a stomachache, but
we’d worry about that later.

“All right. Tell me what you remember, in as much detail as you
can. Don’t worry about it making sense. Just talk it through.”

“I was sitting in Sergei’s living room. Drinking tea.”

Of course she was. Sergei made tea like pups made coffee:
instinctively in times of both relaxation and stress.

“I was looking at the pattern of the cup,” Ellen said, her
voice already calmer, more meditative. “It looked fragile, but it felt sturdy,
strong. And I was going to ask him about it, where it was made, how old it was,
because it felt maybe old, and there was a surge in the building.”

“They were running tests on the alarm system that morning,”
Sergei said quietly, so quietly I barely heard it, but each word clear in my
ears. Neat trick, that, for a Null.

“And then I saw them. Not doing anything, not anywhere, just
standing there. Wren and the man. They weren’t looking at each other. I don’t
think they were even aware of each other… No, they were looking away from each
other. And I knew…I knew that they were dead.

“And then I dropped the cup. And it broke, and they were
gone.”

“That’s it?” Sharon sounded disappointed.

“Sometimes that’s all you get,” I said, but I was a little
surprised, too. Scrying could give you vague shit and suggestions, yeah, but I’d
thought a seer would have something more…specific. Maybe it was because she was
so new to it all—or maybe the trigger, the current-rush in his building, hadn’t
been strong enough or wasn’t clean enough. Aeromancers traditionally sourced
wild. Of course, “traditional” meant over a hundred years ago, with less shaped
current available, so who knew…

“It doesn’t help, does it?” Ellen sounded like she was going to
cry again.

“What was he wearing? The man, what kind of clothing was he
wearing?” Venec’s question made her close her eyes and think back.

“Dark clothing. They made his hair look brighter, like it was
backlit. And it was…it was moving, like there was a breeze.”

“It was loose?”

“Mmm-hmm. No. Part of it was tied back, but strands were loose.
Dark pants and a jacket, tailored, and a shirt…a white shirt? Not white, no, but
pale-colored. He looked annoyed.”

Stosser had three clothing styles: crunchy-granola jeans and
flannel, when he was thinking hard; casual metro-chic for normal days; and
obscenely expensive suit-and-tie. This sounded like the third, and that meant he
had been dealing with the Council. The fact that his hair was moving meant not
that it was windy, but that his core was up. Ian Stosser was a powerhouse on a
good day. When he was upset… Yeah, suit and annoyed equaled Council. Or his
sister. Oh, hell.

“Ben?”

“No Council meetings, not that I knew about. But you know he
doesn’t tell me everything. Last I heard from him, you two were closeted with
the new clients. I have no idea what he’s up to right now. What about Valere?
Where’s she?”

Sergei coughed into his fist, and I bit back an utterly
inappropriate giggle.

Never let it be said that Benjamin Venec wasn’t quick on the
uptake, even half-exhausted and worrying about other things. “Goddammit.” He ran
a hand through his hair, ruffling it even more, and glared at me. “And you knew?
Were you going to tell me this little fact anytime soon?”

As always, when we got into it, everyone else in the room
disappeared. I felt an answering flicker of current rise out of my core—not
offensive or defensive but definitely reactive. “Would it have made a
difference? And, anyway, you were having fun. Knowing who it was would be
cheating.”

“That’s not cheating. It’s…” He looked irritated and sounded
annoyed, but I could feel the resigned amusement simmering in him, so I just
waited. “Next time, if I happen to be going up against The Wren, please let me
know, all right?”

“Gotcha.” Next time, I intended to know nothing and say
less.