Dragon Justice (29 page)

If I’d a dog, it probably would have fetched him slippers.

“This building, it’s…peaceful.”

“Yeah.” I sat down on the sofa next to him and reached for the
glass. Not my usual; he’d brought his own whiskey. All right, I could deal with
that.

“The building’s on a good site,” I said. “Everyone—every Talent
who comes here notes the same thing. Wren used to live upstairs. That’s how I
found out about it.”

“Something’s upset you.”

It was a stupid comment: had there been anything the past week
that hadn’t been upsetting? But he wasn’t talking about any of that.

Dragons were about power and balancing the scales, about paying
back every inch that was due. A dragon’s sense of justice was cold, measured,
and utterly merciless, to take the thing that mattered most to a person. Aden
had already lost her brother: I had taken her chance for revenge.

Benjamin Venec, of all people, wouldn’t judge what I’d done. Or
if he did, it would probably be approvingly. Probably. But I wasn’t ready to
talk about it. Not now. Maybe not ever.

Dragons.
I blinked, the memory
creeping out of wherever it had been hiding. Fire in the sky, the deep, burning
chasm of emotion, the hunger and anger…and the sense of something still
waiting.

“It’s been a miserable week,” I said and handed him back his
glass.

“Yeah.” His right hand, the one not holding the glass, rested
on his knee, palm up, and my left hand covered it, our fingers curling together,
palm to palm. I’d lost my boss, my guidepost. Ben had lost his best friend. How
the hell did you ease that pain? Even with the Merge, I felt helpless. So I did
the only thing I could: I held his hand, rested my head against his shoulder,
and matched my breathing to his, slow and steady, until I thought he might have
fallen asleep.

Remember.
Skimming, caught up tight
against a dragon’s chest, watching the threads of current bind us, earth and sky
and water and even pain and joy…everything was connected.
Remember.

Dragons. A dragon, holding and teaching. Why? The kenning still
haunted me, so there was something left undone. What?

Into the silence, Ben said, “I brought files. Three new
potential clients.”

It used to be Ian’s job, to vet the clients and decide which
jobs we’d take on. Then he’d pass the details on to Lou, who’d sort out the
details and work with Ben to decide who’d be assigned to what.

The pieces didn’t so much shift in my mind as melt, flow, and
re-form.

Once, not so long ago, Stosser had made a vague threat about
making me his third in command, working the schmoozing side Ben was so terrible
at. I thought I’d convinced him otherwise.

Bastard was getting the last laugh.

“There’s someone we have to talk to, first,” I said.

* * *

“I should have put on a tie.”

“Do you even own a tie?”

“One. Ian bought it for me. Are you sure…”

“Relax. Honestly, you’d think you’d never—”

The elevator door opened before I could finish the sentence,
and I could feel Venec tense up next to me.

“Bonnie.” The maid was subdued, her face not wreathed in its
usual greeting smile. “We heard. Are you all right?”

“Not really. But we need to speak with Madame, please? If she
is available?”

“For you, she is always at home. You know that.”

There was no sherry in cut-glass waiting on a silver tray, this
time. We went directly into Madame’s salon, a high-ceilinged greenhouse at the
top of her Manhattan town house. She was curled, as usual, her long tail tucked
alongside the hoard she had been collecting since well before Venec or I were
born. Her elegant neck curved like a swan’s, and her head lowered until she was,
more or less, eye to eye with us.

*holy mother of…*

*no, just Madame*

There was no “just” about it. She was the Great Worm of New
York, massive and powerful and not to be trifled with, and only the fact that
she was fond of J—and thereby, by extension, fond of me—gave me the right to
impose on her like this.

“The Stosssser. Our regretsssss for your lossss.”

“Thank you, Madame.” I dug an elbow into Venec’s side, and he
recovered with a subdued “many thanks.”

Madame’s head turned and tilted, her great, faceted eyes
studying him. Her red-rimmed nostrils flared, and I caught my breath. I should
have expected that.

“Ssssssssso.”

“Madame.” I put as much gentle reproof into the word as I
dared.

She huffed a little, delicate sulfur-scented flames escaping—a
dragon’s laughter—and pulled her head back, just enough for Venec’s comfort.

“Madame, we…”

I hadn’t thought this through. Or rather, I had thought it
through endlessly, while getting dressed, while sitting in the cab heading
uptown, to the one block of Harlem that had never needed gentrification, had
never dared fall into disrepair, not in four decades, or more, and I still had
no idea what I was going to say.

“Madame, if we don’t raise two hundred thousand dollars
immediately, our founder’s debt will be taken out on us. On Venec.”

She did not blink, did not react at all, despite my graceless
haste and fluster. I reminded myself that she had known me when I was a
teenager, that she was fond of me, that I had bargained with dragons
before....

Lesser dragons, I had bargained with. Never a Great Worm.

“Gathering the money from other sources…would take too long,
expose us to those who would take us down, shut us down.” My hand slipped into
Venec’s, without intent. “Expose him to harm.”

She had smelled the Merge, had scented out the connection.
Would her fondness for J, that had extended to me, extend to him?

She contemplated us, letting the tension build. Never let it be
said Madame did not enjoy her drama.

“For all thingsssss, there is a price, little Bonnnnita.”

I swallowed and squeezed Ben’s hand, warning him not to say
anything. “I know.” Dragons were Collectors. They were greedy. But they were
also fair.

“I have watched you. I watch everything in thissss city.”

Dragons, circling. Watching. Aware at all
times of the ley lines that bind and shape this world. Not Old Ones, the
Great Worms, but the oldest of us all. My kenning had told me it would come
to this....

I had known. Before I came here, I had
known. I just hadn’t known that I knew.

She named her price.

Chapter 20

To be a sorcerer, you needed to be high-res, highest of
the high-res, even to be considered for their club. They forgot that high-res
meant you were powerful, not invincible. Paranoia and suspicion only protected
you against enemies you could see.

She and Ian used to play at this when they were children.
Creeping up, current muted so low that they couldn’t be sensed, bodies so
controlled that they couldn’t be heard. Then: a leap, a pounce, sometimes hands
smeared with mud or aimed to tickle until their victim fell to the floor,
giggling madly, calling for mercy, giving up.

Aden had no mud in her hands today, and they did not giggle.
Their current surged up to protect them, but too late: she pulled her entire
core, her hate and her fears, and struck not at them but against them, burning
the air in their lungs the way they had done to her brother.

The mighty should be careful who they allowed into their
homes.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said to the bodies at her
feet when she was done. Her breath was faster than she liked, but her voice was
calm. “You were only supposed to box him in, not kill him. I would have been a
useful ally, if you’d left what was mine alone.”

Blood dripped from her mouth and nose, her knees holding her
upright only so long as she locked them in place; the moment she released
control, she knew she would fall.

She could feel the gathered current surging around her, looking
for a place to ground. Temptation rose: she calculated the odds of wizzing, of
losing herself in the maelstrom, if she took the current into herself, and found
the results unacceptable.

The pup had thought she’d done it herself. She hadn’t. Ian had
been wrong, and dangerous, and if the only way to stop him had been to take him
out of the picture entirely, she would have done it; but not that way. Not
without honor, not without letting him know who was doing it. Not without giving
him one last chance to back down with—there was honor in bowing to a stronger
force. There was no honor in the way he had died.

She had only wanted them to cage him, to limit his influence.
But they had seen her brother as a threat to themselves. She hadn’t expected
that. Hadn’t assessed their paranoia—or his influence—properly. Her fault, for
bringing them together.

And despite that, despite the fact that he had to know that, in
his last breath, his last thought, Ian had called to her.

Honor required she answer. Honor had required that she write
down what she planned to do and leave it where Benjamin Venec—and by extension,
the rest of PUPI—would find it. There would be no question as to the rightness
of her actions.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said again, although there
was no one left to hear. Her knees gave way suddenly, blood loss making her
dizzy, and she folded gracefully to the floor of the town house, and waited.

* * *

Monday morning was tough. After our visit to Madame I’d
spent nearly twenty-four hours curled in my loft bed, sometimes with Ben,
sometimes alone. He’d done a lot of walking, standing up and leaving the
apartment without a word, just…walking. Sometimes he came back with ice cream.
Once, he brought back a single lily, the scent almost overpowering.

Funeral flowers.

On Monday morning, he threw the wilted flower out, we got
showered and dressed, and went to the office.

The pack was waiting for us.

“Anyone who didn’t sleep more than two hours last night, fess
up and go home,” Venec said, cutting off any questions, even as he hung up our
coats in the closet, the simple familiarity of the act weirdly soothing.

Nobody fessed up.

I went over to the kitchenette and started prepping my coffee,
almost out of instinct. I’d wondered how it would feel to be back here, after
everything....

“I smudged the office last night,” Nifty said, maybe picking up
on my apprehension. “I don’t know if it helped, but…”

“It did—” Sharon said, and Ben nodded. “Thank you. I should
have thought of that.”

Nobody gave that the scorn it deserved. He was Big Dog, but he
didn’t have to do everything. He’d remember that, soon enough.

Nifty said it first. “What are we going to do?”

“What we were trained to do,” I said. “What did you think?”

They all wanted to protest, wanted to say they couldn’t, we
couldn’t, that we weren’t able to move on without Stosser’s hands on the reins.
But nobody said a word.

Stosser would have kicked our asses if we’d curled up and died
just because he was gone.

“What about the debt?” Nick asked.

I swallowed, hard. “It’s taken care of.”

“How? Bonnie, none of us have anything worth hocking, and
anyone we borrowed the money from would have the same control over us, we’d
never be seen as being impartial!”

Dragon Justice. It was cold, took in equal measure, and once
the terms were set, there were no further strings.

“Madame has covered our debt.”

“You bargained with a dragon?” Nicky’s voice broke on the last
word, like he was a scrawny preteen again. “A dragon?”

“She had been watching us,” Venec said. “Judging.” He still
wasn’t comfortable with that idea, but it wasn’t as though he could do anything
about it. Especially not now.

“We bring balance,” I said. “She approves.”

“So what, she just gave us the money as a gesture of good
will?” Nifty was understandably dubious.

“No.” I didn’t want to share this part, but Venec and I had
agreed: this affected them, too. “It’s a birth-gift.
Cosa
-cousin to
Cosa
-daughter.” Like a
godmother, a cross-species mentor. The kenning of being held close and flying
had not been for me, only for me to remember, when the time came.

My child. Our child, bound to the fatae, as well as Talent.

* * *

Intent shaped what a seer saw, what the kenning
suggested, but the future wasn’t set. Venec and I could have told the Merge to
take a hike. Stosser could have left the building when Lou did. Aden could have
accepted PUPI and saved us all some trouble. Wren could have gone to the office
that night and choked on toxic fumes—like a dragon’s breath—with Stosser.
Precognition wasn’t Fate. All you ever got was a warning—and some advice.

There were blank stares from the rest of the pack while they
digested what I’d said, and then the realization began to settle in.

Sharon’s eyes went wide, and a look of unholy glee illuminated
her, one step ahead of the others. “Bonita Torres, is there something you’re not
telling us?”

“What? Oh,
hell,
no,” I spluttered,
and I could feel Venec’s shock turning to amusement and just a hint of
wistfulness.

Eventually. Someday. When we were damn well and ready. Madame
would just have to
wait.

In the meanwhile, we were open for business, again.

* * * * *

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