Dragon Justice (25 page)

Chapter 17

I woke up before dawn, my muscles loose and sore and
curled up against a warm body. That part wasn’t unusual for me—although rarer in
the past year than it had been since I hit puberty. The humming feeling deep in
my core, though, was new.

“Forget about it,” I whispered to it. “I’m on birth
control.”

Damned if the humming didn’t sound smug. I allowed myself
exactly twenty seconds to imagine a kid between us—strong-boned and willful,
with a sharp mind and a sharper Talent—and then put that thought away. I wasn’t
ready to mentor, much less be a parent.

There was nothing more powerful in the
Cosa Nostradamus
than the mentor relationship. Nothing. The eleventh
murder…weighed on me, even in my dreams, leaving me feeling uncertain and ill at
ease. What could have driven him to that? Had it been the other way around, the
older man killing his student… How much rage could a boy carry? What had
happened between the two?

If we were lucky, and Wren was as good as she claimed, we’d
have more information. Assuming she had taken the job and not just disappeared
on me.

I couldn’t really blame her if she had.

The boy, the killer, would be, what—late thirties, early
forties now. In the prime of his life, driven by some hunger to attack and kill,
to dig and scrape men his mentor’s then-age, over and over again.

The thought was there, dangling just out of reach. Instead of
taking it, I got up, got dressed, and, closing my eyes, went home.

Not New York. Boston.

* * *

“Bonita.”

J was never surprised at anything I did. Amused, often.
Worried, occasionally—more now than when I was a teenager. But never surprised,
even when I showed up in his kitchen at oh-dog-early, just the time I knew that
he would be staggering into his gleaming, professional-quality kitchen to fix
that first dose of coffee. He was wearing an old pair of gray sweatpants and an
equally faded Red Sox sweatshirt: he had worn some variant of that every morning
all the years of my mentorship. He would make coffee and fetch the newspaper
from outside his door and settle in with Rupert to read it, front to back. When
he—and Rupert—were both younger, a jog would have happened, too, but neither of
them were young anymore.

Hell, neither of them were middle-aged anymore. The knowledge
that I’d lose them was always present: J’s worries about my job aside, I’d be
the one left alone, sooner rather than later. To cause that pain intentionally,
to strike at him…to kill him?

I think the bear hug I gave him surprised him. A little.

J had connections in high places, lines of gossip that could be
useful. But I wasn’t going to ask him to use them, not yet. Not unless all other
lines failed. I didn’t want him anywhere near this one. Thankfully, he didn’t
ask any questions.

I didn’t talk about my job with J, at his request. Ask advice,
yes. Come home for reassurances, definitely. Let him feed me, absolutely. But he
didn’t want to know what I was doing, anymore. He said he worried the same,
knowing or not-knowing, but not having details allowed him to sleep better, once
he was done worrying. So this morning he just accepted the hug, and then pushed
my hair away from my face and said, simply, “You will have breakfast with
me?”

“Please.” Translocating back to Boston in the middle of a job
wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done, but they could do without me for an
hour. And J would Transloc me back, if I asked him, so I wouldn’t drain
myself.

An hour, to spend making sure my mentor was well and healthy
and knew I loved him. That was all I asked.

* * *

Venec woke up with a headache and an empty space next to
him on the bed where he’d been sure there’d been a body. This had been a common
occurrence once in his life, but not recently, so he took a minute to identify
the details.

Bonnie, check. He could still feel the warmth of her body in
the sheets, so she hadn’t been gone long. He cracked open one eye and managed to
see that there was no note. Not that he had expected one. The slightest tendril
of current let into the world came back with a sense of well-being, and buttered
toast and coffee. She was well and would be back soon.

The headache was harder to place. They hadn’t been drinking, he
hadn’t eaten anything with peanuts, there wasn’t a matching pain anywhere else
to explain it. He let another tendril of current rise up through his body,
moving along his veins from core to the front of his skull, delicately touching
his own awareness for the cause. Healing yourself with current was a fool’s
game—it was too easy to overestimate the current needed and do more harm than
good—but self-diagnosis was easier. But, no, there was nothing… There! He found
the faintest twinge and followed it…outside his body.

Venec sat upright on the bed, the faint headache now a pounding
migraine as the current-built door opened and the full alarm blared through.
Someone—not someone, he knew damn well who—had gone after the museum again.

“Goddammit,” he snarled. reaching for his clothing.
“Goddammit.”

By the time he Translocated to the museum, his shirt barely
tucked in and his teeth unbrushed, the alarm had been cut off. Allen was
waiting, his troll-like body radiating extreme annoyance.

“They got through. You said nobody could get through before the
alarms would go off. We didn’t catch anything on the cameras, nothing in any of
the current-traps.”

“No.” Venec was grim. “No, you wouldn’t. Damn it. What did she
take?”

“She?” Allen knew about current, but he wasn’t
Cosa,
wasn’t hooked into the normal gossip
channels.

“You were hit by The Wren. What did she take?”

“A single painting, from the new collection. It’s not even
particularly valuable, so I don’t know why…”

“Don’t try to figure it out,” Venec advised him, carefully not
grinding his jaw in annoyance, although he wanted to. “That’s not your worry,
and it will only give you a headache with no upside.”

“But…the Board…”

“I’ll deal with them. Give me a name.”

* * *

The chairman of the board was not particularly surprised
to have a man appear in his office without his secretary announcing anyone or
buzzing them in. He did, however, have a pistol aimed directly at Venec’s
chest.

“Relax,” Ben said in disgust. “I’m the good guy.”

“You’re the man who was hired to do our secondary security
system.” The guy was either very smart or a very good actor. Venec was betting
on both. But not smart enough and not quite a good enough actor.

“I’m the guy who was hired to take the fall when something was
stolen, you mean.”

“I don’t—”

“Cut the crap. I don’t have time for it. The Wren doesn’t steal
for herself—she steals for other people. There’s no reason for anyone to steal
one painting from a new installation that hasn’t even had previews yet—if a
thief were going for this collection, they’d take more than one. This sort of
cherry-pick shows something else is going on.”

“And you think we arranged this robbery?” The man’s voice was
amused, but there was a tremor in his throat that said otherwise.

“I know you did.” Didier had admitted the Board had hired Wren,
but he’d assumed they were ignorant of who had been hired to do security. Ben
was less trusting. All this pointed to the giant red button that said Setup. He
had no time for this bullshit right now.

The man filled his chest with air and started to bluster. “I
assure you—”

“I don’t care. Whatever reason you had for it, whatever issues
were involved, I don’t care.” He bit the words off, leaning forward and getting
in the man’s space. The gun rested in the man’s hand, nearly forgotten and
pointing at the floor. “But if you try to collect insurance on this, if you
publicize this in any way shape or form, or attempt to punish anyone for this
theft, I will take you down. You, personally.”

They stared at each other, and something seemed to click in the
man’s head. He placed the gun gently on the desk and sat down again.

“Ah.”

Venec waited. Ian was better at negotiation than he was, but he
knew that the strongest stick was silence. Wait them out, and they usually begin
to babble. This guy wasn’t some alley hood, and he’d be tougher to crack—but he
would crack. All Venec had to do was hold his cards close and let him assume
there was a better hand underneath.

It took a few minutes, but the chairman cracked.

“If we stay silent about the theft, if we let it go, your
reputation will not be damaged, for not building a sufficient defense. I see
your point…but I’m not sure where there is a benefit to the museum.”

Venec reached into his pocket, slowly, not wanting the man to
suddenly think he was threatened again—at least not physically—and pulled out a
slip of paper. He had pinged Nicky after talking to Allen and—after waking him
out of a sound sleep—had gotten a few useful details.

“Whatever the motive, insurance is a secondary benefit. The
painting wasn’t insured for that much, as an individual piece. If you were
really looking for a payoff, you would have had something else stolen. So
there’s something about that specific painting that you wanted gone. Am I
right?”

The board member swallowed faintly, but otherwise his
expression didn’t change.

“Am I right?” Venec asked again and let just a flare of current
rise from his core. The man in front of him was Null but not blind: he could
feel the power rise and reacted to it in small ways that Venec was trained to
spot: accelerated pulse, increased sweat production, and the tightening of
muscles in a preliminary fight-or-flight reaction. Back him into a corner, and
he would stop thinking and merely react.

But a cornered man was also a dangerous man. Venec showed him
the stick, then offered a carrot.

“If you forego that insurance bonus, take your main
accomplishment and let this all fade into never-happened-land, then I will walk
away. If you don’t…”

Venec smiled without showing any teeth at all. “Then your
problems right now will suddenly seem very small. I promise you that.”

He walked out of the office feeling like things were almost
under control.

And then they weren’t.

* * *

I was just finishing my plate, sliding the last scraps
to Rupert under the table, while J as ever pretended not to notice, when the
ping reached me.

*bonnie*

It took me half a second to identify Lou, the ping almost too
soft to hear, soft and tentative: two things I would never have associated with
her.

And in the next instant, I understood why.

Chapter 18

Of all the scenarios I had ever run in my head, of all
the worst-case possibilities, this one had never occurred to me. My kenning
hadn’t even given me a hint of this.

“The alarm was for real. We had them shut it off…because of all
the false alarms, I guess…” Lou was shaking, the envelope of calm that had
carried her through until now finally shredding.

The ambulance had come and gone, the report filed. If it had
been an ordinary citizen, there wouldn’t have been a lifted eye among the cops,
but the brass knew who Ian Stosser was—had been—and the fact that it looked like
an ordinary, stupid tragic accident still had them come out and poke around. The
alarm was found to be honestly faulty—the false alarms we’d been having were the
result of something funky in the main system. Not our fault, not job related.
Just One of Those Things.

“No chance to Translocate out. No warning, no…” The laugh Ben
gave raised the hair on the back of my neck, and not in a good way. “All the
crap in his life, the high-placed tails he yanked, and a gas leak kills him. The
indignity of it must be burning a hole in his gut, right now.”

Lou, as office manager, had gotten the call from the police
when they couldn’t reach Ben at home. She in turn had summoned us all. The
newbies hadn’t been called in; they hadn’t been here long enough to understand.
The office was closed for the day, we told them. A day…probably no more.

They believed us.

The ambulance had taken the body away, and the office cleared,
certified safe for us to go in. New detectors were in every room, temporary
until the system could be overhauled. We were all supposed to go to the
hospital, get checked out, make sure we hadn’t been exposed to any long-term
slow leak that might’ve done damage.

It happened every year. You read about it in the papers, saw it
on the news. People leaving the stove on for warmth, during a winter’s night,
and never waking up. Batteries dying, or not having an alarm put in, and a
leak…

It seemed so surreal, it couldn’t be true.

It felt real.

Sharon was curled up on the sofa, Nicky next to her, his head
resting on her shoulder. Nifty was on the floor at their feet—the most
submissive pose I’d ever seen him in, ever, especially around Sharon. Lou had
pulled in a straight-backed chair, turned it around and was sitting on it, her
arms wrapped around the frame like it was all that kept her upright. She had
been the last to see him; she blamed herself, even though there was no blame to
be laid. She kept saying something in Spanish, too low for me to hear, but it
sounded like a prayer.

Pietr had claimed the armchair, but you had to look closely to
see him there, a mug of something held in both hands, his high cheekbones in
such sharp profile I almost expected blood to seep through the skin.

Ian hadn’t bled. The amount of carbon monoxide they’d found in
the office, it killed him so quickly, there wasn’t a chance for damage. He had
looked peaceful when they wheeled him out, the sheet drawn back at our request,
the EMTs impatient but not unkind.

How the hell had this happened? After so many false alarms, for
the gas to come in, so much, so fast?

“She’s gonna blame us for this,” Nifty said, his voice too
thin, as though the air had been sucked out of his broad chest, too.

She—Aden, Ian’s sister. She had hated everything about her big
brother’s idea, had hated us as the embodiment of it…but she had loved Ian, as
much as he had loved her. It had been majorly fucked up, that relationship,
yeah.

“Let her. It doesn’t matter.” I felt like my body was made of
lead; drained from the fight, the stress of the case. I should have been
enjoying one last cup of coffee with J and then going back to work: instead, I’d
come here, and found the rest of the team already on-site, and cops who wouldn’t
let us into the building until the all clear had been sounded.

Five hours ago, the world had made some kind of sense. Now…I
felt gutted. And it wasn’t just me.

“So what do we do now?” Nicky asked.

“About Aden? There’s nothing to be done, unless she makes a
move. And I’m not sure she will.” Venec frowned deeper, his face caught in the
pained expression he’d worn since we arrived. “Whatever their differences,
whatever drove them apart, there was still such a bond between them, I’m not
sure she’ll have the heart to destroy the last thing he left.”

“No, I mean…what now?” Nick waved a hand around the room,
indicating us, it…everything. “What do we do now?”

Venec’s arm was heavy around my neck, his breathing warm and
steady beside me, but he didn’t say anything.

None of us did.

PUPI had been Ian Stosser’s dream. His idea, his drive, his
vision that made any of this, any of us possible. He had argued in front of the
Councils to make us legitimate, had faced down the lonejack doubters who
challenged us. Had chosen us, shaped us, even Ben, into visions of what he
wanted—what he needed us to be.

But we had been the ones who made it real.

“Now we find a killer,” Venec said, finally. “Before anyone
else dies.”

Sharon exhaled and reached up to ruffle Nick’s shaggy hair,
exactly the way he hated. As though that broke some kind of stasis spell, Nifty
stretched his arms out in front of him and got up in a supple move that someone
half his bulk would have envied. “We need to eat, then. Pizza?”

Pizza. Food. Fuel to keep moving. Right. Someone’s stomach
growled.

“Anchovies,” I said, anticipating the sounds of disgust from
Pietr and Sharon.

“Half plain, half fishies. We’ll split it.”

“Gross.” Sharon’s fine features scrunched into a moue of
distaste “Tell them to put up a barrier between the fishies, and maybe I’ll
consider it.”

We weren’t back to normal; we were going to have to redefine
whatever the hell “normal” was. But we were moving again.

“His death doesn’t wipe out the loan,” I said to Ben, softly,
turning halfway into his chest. “Cave-dragon loans don’t work that way.” His
hand stroked my hair, tangling his fingers in the curls.

“I know. He’d already signed the paperwork to bring me into the
deal, so it should…”

With that paperwork done, the burden would land on Ben, not
Aden as the next of kin. The irony of it amused me: she would have had to either
pay up and keep us in business or default and pay the penalty. Much as I hated
the Bitch… No, this was our responsibility.

It would just be a matter of getting the cash together. We
could do it. His death might make things more difficult, but it could also work
to our advantage. I could work on that later. Later would be soon enough.

I rested my face against Ben’s chest, breathing in the musky,
slightly smoky smell that always lingered on his skin, finding an unbearable
comfort in it. The Merge shifted inside us, adjusting, and we let it.

Grief, I knew too well, took its own damn time. For now…we went
on.

* * *

Later that day, the three of us were back in
Philadelphia. Nobody wanted to be there—but we weren’t going to give up, and
somehow, it seemed easier to work here, in this basement room, than the office.
Here, we could focus. Here, we didn’t have to remember. Not yet.

A storm front had rolled in while we were in New York, and
everyone had shivery-skin even with the thick walls of concrete and steel
between us and the weather. We could feel the storm building, getting ready to
hit. The first distant boom of thunder was almost a release, as though giving us
permission to start breathing again.

Venec hadn’t come down with us: I couldn’t feel him, and I
didn’t want to push.

*bonnie*

There was a painful leap of hope, then I identified the ping:
Wren. I took a step away from the others and acknowledged her.

*i heard. i’m so sorry*

I acknowledged the sympathy and waited.

*there’s no file*

I had almost been expecting that. Council might have kept it
for years just in case, but the moment more killings emerged, and they might be
held accountable…

*recent purge, or…?*

*long time ago. i found a reference to it in a logbook, both
the crime and the decision to pretend it had never happened*

There was a smugness in her tone that made me think that one,
she’d gotten the logbook through particularly satisfying ways, and two, there
was more in that logbook she wasn’t planning on sharing. If it had nothing to do
with the case, I was okay with that.

The Council hadn’t even kept the records; they’d been covering
their asses years ago. Why had I hoped for anything else?

*thanks anyway. and…be careful* Ian was dead, and nothing to do
with dragons, but Ellen had seen them both in her vision.

*you too*

I blinked and came back to the group to find both Venec and
Pietr watching me. I shook my head: nothing new to report.

Thunder crashed overhead, and we all jumped, then laughed. Of
all the things that could spook a Talent, a thunderstorm should not be on the
list.

The noise of the storm covered the sound of the elevator
opening down the hall, so the first we knew we had a visitor was the squeaking
of wet shoes on the linoleum tile outside our room.

She was soaked through, the water glistening on her skin, her
hair plastered flat against her skull. She should have looked pitiful, or sad,
or like a large, drowned rat, and she was all of those things but you couldn’t
remember it for long, under the sheer current rippling under her skin.

Thunder slammed outside, directly overhead this time, and I’d
swear I saw her skin tremble in resonance.

Storm-seer. I had known the term since forever, had understood
what it meant…but I hadn’t, really. The way Ellen moved and looked—the girl I’d
met in the Park was still there, but something else was, too. Not just current
but wild current, streaming through her like a massive flock of birds, a murder
of crows, rising and swooping in the air, like they were all controlled by one
single brain, one single thought. Power that was only barely under control.

“Wha—” Sharon started to ask, and I slapped her arm, hard,
almost instinctively trying to make her shut up. You didn’t interrupt a seer;
you didn’t even think about interrupting a seer, even if she hadn’t started to
talk yet. God, was I the only one with a mentor versed in the classics? Sharon
glared at me, those glorious blue eyes narrowed, but I couldn’t give her my full
attention right now, and after a second or two she gave up. I knew that Pietr
was on the other side of me, but when I made a reflexive check for him, he was
gone.

No, not gone. With practice and familiarity, I could feel him
next to me. But visually, he had disappeared.

*ben* Not even a ping; a tight-focused tendril of awareness,
reaching out and telling him something was happening—not dangerous, don’t bull
in, but come quietly. And quickly.

There was a snap of understanding, a brush of reassurance, and
then I was a hundred percent in my own head, walls up and ready for anything our
untrained seer might do. I hoped.

“I saw him again. Not her. His skin was blue with current and
his eyes were black and there was a smell of burning around him.” She shook a
little, like a dog waking from a dream, and her pupils narrowed again like
coming into the light, and she looked at me—and saw me, this time.

“Why do I keep seeing him? Isn’t it enough that I warned
him?”

The others, cowards, looked to me.

“Ellen.”

Her eyes focused on me, and I guess my face was enough.

“He’s dead.” Her voice had gone flat and terrible.

“This morning. It was an accident, Ellen. A gas leak. There was
nothing… No warning would have been enough.” I hoped. I hoped to hell that there
was nothing anyone could have done. Even the hint of it would gnaw at us
forever.

“Nothing…” She stared at me, and I could see a hint of that
hot-tempered girl moving underneath the shock. “Then why? Why do I see any of
this? What’s the point?”

If I knew that…I’d know what to say to her.

“We don’t know enough to say what you’re really seeing. When
you learn how to control it— Where’s Sergei?” He should not have let her come
here alone. What the hell was the man thinking?

She swallowed, looked nervous. “I didn’t tell him I was coming.
He doesn’t think… He thinks I should just stay quiet, that no good comes from
anyone knowing when they’re going to die. But it’s not my fault I saw them, keep
seeing them. He doesn’t like me. Because I saw her dead. But she’s alive, still,
and he’s dead, and that doesn’t make any sense, either.”

“You’re new and still learning,” Sharon said, shaking off
whatever paralysis I’d put on her tongue. “You might not be seeing things right,
or misinterpreting them. That happens.”

“Maybe.” She didn’t look convinced. “I just wanted—”

I don’t know what she wanted, because a clap of thunder hit the
air over the building so hard and so loud that even our basement fortress
shuddered slightly.

“Oh.”

Ellen’s eyes had gone dark again, and she swayed. I took a step
forward to help her, then hesitated. Yeah, she was green as guacamole and maybe
in distress, but she was also filled with an unknown, potentially active
current, and there was an electrical storm over us. Basic training taught us how
to ground and center so’s not to be overrushed by a wild storm like this, how to
pull down only what we needed and ignore the rest, but…she was full-grown and
ignorant and a storm-seer.

And any one of those things could backlash on me, on any of us,
if we touched her or even went near her at the wrong time. That she’d be sad and
sorry afterward wouldn’t help, if we were crisped in a defensive backlash.

Or, worse, if she tried to pull it back, too late, and hurt
herself. As pups, we could handle backlash, even though it was never nice, like
getting on a roller coaster right after a massive meal when you already had a
stomach virus kind of not-nice.