Dragon Justice (18 page)

I wasn’t on my own. I had my pack.

“Spill.” Pietr swung his chair around to face her, and I went
back to my chair, resting my elbows on the table and cupping my chin in my
hands. “Come on,” I said when she hesitated. “What did you just stub your toe
on?”

“I don’t think we should be looking at who or the how. I think
we should be looking at what and why.”

“But we don’t know either of those things.”

“Maybe…maybe we do.” She started to say something else, then
lifted her fingers to her mouth and pressed them to her lips, as though
silencing herself while her brain thought things through. “Vivisection. The
reports were all clear on that. This guy wasn’t carving them up like a turkey or
slashing—he was cutting them open in the same exact way, with nearly surgical
precision. All males, all within an age range… What does that sound like?”

“A control group,” Pietr said.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

* * *

*ben*

He felt Bonnie reaching for him; the touch-back was
instinctive, unthinking, and more than he could afford to give just then. He
shut it down and went back to the chore at hand. Literally.

“Don’t piss me off, Sparky.” Benjamin Venec cultivated a veneer
of calm control, but nobody who had ever pissed him off underestimated his
temper.

“I swear, I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I mean, sure, I
know who has it in for your partner—bloody well everyone, that’s who. Anyone who
doesn’t have it in for you, anyway. But that ain’t news!”

No, it wasn’t. He and Ian had managed to make a great number of
people—and not-people—unhappy in recent years, even without direct contact. The
fact that they existed was enough of an affront. The PUPs, for now, were seen as
their tools, rather than individual threats in and of themselves. Ben was
determined to keep it that way as long as possible, and no matter that their
feelings might be hurt if they realized it. But that thought, too, was a
distraction.

“Someone specific. Someone who’s been mouthing off more than
usual or gotten quieter than usual?”

The human shook his head. “I swear, Venec. I don’t like you
much, but I’m not going to lie to your face, not when you’re in that kinda mood.
You’ve got too long a memory.”

“You’re a smart man, Sparky.”

He was. He was also the front for a euphemistically named
“greeting service” that hired out fatae as exotic escorts—and Venec suspected
that not all the fatae had gotten into the gig of their own free will. Someday,
the company would do something demonstrably over the line, and things would get
interesting. But this wasn’t that day.

“If you hear anything…it will be worthwhile for you to come to
me first. And fast.” Flash the stick and then show ’em the carrot. It wasn’t
smooth, but it worked.

“Yeah. Yeah, I will.”

Ben left the plush office, nodding at the mer-girl lounging in
the massive tank in the waiting room. She opened her sea-green eyes and watched
him go, not bothering to wave: he clearly wasn’t a potential client.

“Damn it, Ian, where are you?” His partner was ignoring him,
and that never, ever boded well. *IAN!*

*what?* The mental sensation was so calm, almost puzzled,
exactly like a little kid who had no idea the adults all thought he was missing
and didn’t understand what all the shouting was about, that Ben stopped dead in
his tracks, not sure if he wanted to laugh or scream.

*get your ass over here* he said instead.

* * *

When you didn’t have windows or a clock—and none of us
carried watches anymore, since even wind-up ones went kerflooey after a
while—time could get away from you. So it wasn’t until Sharon’s back made an
audible crack when she straightened up that we realized we’d been at it well
past dinnertime, and the tension in the room was starting to become an almost
palpable stink.

Pietr had gone through his gypsy contacts and found nothing on
the knife, and Lou’s research on dragons had turned up nothing useful to our
current case.

“We’re spinning our wheels,” Pietr said in disgust, and I was
forced to agree. The more we looked at the facts we did have, the more Pietr’s
theory seemed laughably obvious: our killer was choosing the same victim, over
and over again, and doing the same thing, over and over again.

“But what the hell does he want?” Sharon asked.

And that was where we’d been stuck.

Sharon reached up to undo and rebraid her hair. The braid had
been perfect until then; it was just a frustrated twitch. Pietr’s was to
disappear from sight. I…had no idea what mine was.

“If it was just for torture, then I’d think there would be more
damage done, yeah? Something that inflicted more pain, before they died.” I
thought back to what I’d felt, under the cuts, and how the ME’s report had said
things were…missing. “Why was he scraping under the skin, and what happened to
the scrapings?”

“Lunch?”

The fact that we had to consider that possibility made me, for
an instant, really hate my job.

“Maybe he’s reliving something that was done to him, some
trauma he saw.” Sharon tapped her fingers against the table. “Trying to
understand it, maybe, or get back what was taken? And, no, I have no idea what
or how.”

“That makes as much sense as anything else. If we had access to
the bodies…”

“We don’t. We got kicked out once already, and without any kind
of official standing I doubt we’ll get back in.” Not without pulling strings
that might be too expensive, in terms of favors owed. “Anyway, corpses only last
so long, and even a preservation cantrip won’t keep decay from coming to visit
eventually.”

“Nice image, thanks.” Pietr looked a little green. Apparently
he was okay with cannibalism but not decay. “What about from the photos? I know,
it’s 2-D and mostly useless, but…”

Sharon and Pietr both looked at me: they were good field techs,
but I was better at re-crafting existing spells to suit our specific needs.

“There’s an old spell that hunters used to use,” I said slowly,
trying to chase down the memory. Sitting in the library of J’s apartment, Rupert
still a puppy, all tail and fur, sleeping at J’s feet; me curled into the
leather armchair across from them, listening while J told me about the change
from old magic to current and how spells were adapted…and some fell by the
wayside. “To appease the spirits of the animals they killed.”

“That’s religion, not magic. Or what passed for it, back then.”
Sharon, Lou, and Farshad were the only ones in our pack who could be considered
religious: I guess Shar was a bit of a snob about deism.

“Old magic is all about faith. For our purposes, it counts.”
Sharon’s mentor had advocated a less-is-better mode of current use; she had a
bunch of blocks in her history, too. Or maybe, just as likely, I was overstuffed
with details nobody else cared about.

Until we needed them, anyway.

“Faith like a priest would define it, or…?”

Yeah, a snob. And annoyed at having her snobbery called out.
She’d done it to me often enough; we both survived.

“That the animal spirits would hear them, and understand that
their lives were not taken lightly, and be appeased—and not scare away game in
the next hunt. I think. The point is, the spell I’m thinking of used cave
paintings. Flat, two-dimensional paintings…”

“Like crime-scene photographs.” Pietr nodded. “You think you
can use the photos to…what? Link the killer to the evidence somehow?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

There were a handful of ways to re-create a scene from the
evidence, depending on what kind of evidence you had. But I’d never—none of us
had ever tried doing it from secondhand evidence like a photograph, mainly
because our few attempts at using cameras ended up in dead cameras and
overexposed film. The digital experiment had ended even worse.

“You’re going to need to eat before you do anything,” Sharon
said, her momentary pique forgotten. “And I’m starving. Think the hotel will let
us order a pizza down here?”

The moment she said that I realized how hungry I was, and
Pietr’s stomach, almost on cue, let out a growl.

“Right. I’m going to go up to the front desk and call in an
order. Bonnie, go take a walk, clear your lungs, and see if the hotel has a
backup power source you can draw down on because I know damn well you’re running
half-loaded.”

She was right, so I didn’t bother to complain about her being
bossy. It wouldn’t have helped, anyway.

Pietr came with me, down the dreary hallway and out the service
door. There was a little courtyard behind the hotel that you could only access
from there: guests could look out at the greenery but not get down into it. The
noise of the generator was muted, but for a Talent, it might as well have been
ringing bells to announce its location.

“There’s a bench over there,” Pietr said, steering me toward
it. It was small, wooden, obviously more to look at than use, but I sat, anyway.
I could go into fugue state standing up, but it was easier not to.

I tilted my head and looked up at the sky. Buildings rose
around us, but there was a square patch of blue just overhead, and I let myself
focus on the impossible depth of it. Some people’s cores are in a constant roil,
snapping and sparking every time they get upset. I tend to run cool, more core
coiling around itself in layers. It wasn’t good or bad, just who I was, like my
memory recall and my kenning. But right now, with the situation with Venec
starting to simmer, and a killer on the loose, and my boss and a friend maybe
going to end up dead soon, I almost wished that my current mirrored the
uncertainty in my life, just once.

The call of the generator reached out to me, and I slid a
mental hand into its warmth, letting electricity run through my fingers the way
someone might test bathwater. I really didn’t need a lot: contrary to Sharon’s
assumption, I wasn’t low, but it was soothing to top off.

Creating a spell from scratch was hard work, but relatively
simple. Adapting an existing one was trickier. Adapting an old spell thousands
of years old, off a retold memory?

Venec and Stosser didn’t allow false modesty in their pups. I
was good enough to do it. But it wasn’t going to be easy.

I cupped those mental hands and scooped out current from the
electrical power, letting it slide into my own core and settle. It was a little
like drinking soup on a rainy day: smooth and warm and comforting.

I opened my eyes—not having even realized I’d shut them—and
brought my head forward, wincing a little as my neck protested. I must have been
sitting there longer than I thought.

Pietr was holding a yoga pose that made my knees hurt just
looking at it, his arms lifted, one leg raised and bent. As I watched, he bent,
slowly, carefully, and placed his palms on the ground, his raised leg steady, as
though he were carved from stone.

“I could really hate you for that,” I said.

“It’s a question of regular practice. You’re too lazy to do it,
that’s all.” His voice was muffled until he raised himself out of the folded
pose, as graceful—and boneless—as a snake. His muscles were both strong and
supple, I knew that from firsthand experience, but it was still impressive to
watch.

“Let’s go see if the pizza’s en route,” he said. “And then we
can get started.”

“We?” I stood up and tried to raise one eyebrow at him.

“What, you think you were going in alone? Oh, hell, no. I’ll
shadow, Sharon will spot. I have no desire to get another lecture from Venec
about one of us hotdogging it.”

And Venec would know, too, if I tried. I swear, I couldn’t
decide if the Merge was a royal pain in my ass with occasional benefits or just
a royal pain in the ass.

We retraced our steps, only to discover that the door had swung
shut and needed a key to get in. We both stared at it in disbelief, like that
would be enough to make it swing back open.

It wasn’t.

“Oh, for…” I was ready to ping Sharon, have her come and let us
in—and deal with the inevitable ribbing—when Pietr merely reached down and
touched his index finger to the lock, then with his other hand turned the handle
and opened the door.

“I hang out with the thief, and you can lock-pick without
tools. It figures.”

“It’s not lock-picking. It’s alternative keying.”

“Uh-huh.”

Sharon came out of the bathroom and saw us. She started down
the hallway when at the same exact moment the service elevator pinged and the
door opened, and I felt Venec’s touch slipping against my walls.

“Hey.”

Sharon turned on her heel, and she and Pietr both gawked at the
new arrival.

“He doesn’t have our pizza,” Pietr said, focused on the
obvious.

“That’s because he’s not the delivery guy. Charles Andrulis,
Philly P.D.” I made the introductions quickly: “Sharon Mendelssohn, Pietr
Cholis.” I glanced at the file in his hand and made a logical leap: “More info
on the case?”

“Not the way you’re thinking.” If possible, Andrulis’s dark
features got even more locked-down. “We’ve got another body.”

Expecting it didn’t make the gut-jolt any easier to bear.

“You might want to poke or prong or whatever it is you do to
get Ben down here.”

That had been the gist of Venec’s touch. “They’re on their
way.”

“They?”

There was a faint crackle of energy, and Andrulis stepped back
instinctively, just as Ian Stosser Translocated in, his long orange-red hair
loose and static-y. Whatever Big Dog had been doing, he was not in a good mood.
Venec appeared a second after, looking only slightly less grumpy.

Andrulis handed Venec the files without blinking: if he hadn’t
seen someone Transloc before, he was a damn good poker player. “I wasn’t here.
Everything we know so far’s in there.”

“If we need anything more,” Stosser started to say, and
Andrulis shook his head. “Don’t call me. Two’s bad luck. Three’s about to become
a media event. The moment the press picks up on the fact that this guy’s killed
before? All hell breaks loose. And we can’t even release the single thing they
all have in common, other than being middle-aged males....”