Hard Magic (4 page)

“More than that,” Nick said, pulling out a battered old-fashioned windup pocket watch and looking at it. “It’s almost 2:20, and we’re the only ones here.”

Four heads swiveled as though we were pulled on a string, to look at the closed door behind us, leading into the rest—I presumed—of the office.

The door remained closed.

“Anyone know the protocol of how long you wait before you assume you’ve been blown off?” I asked, and like we’d rehearsed it or something, the four of us looked at Sharon, who was the only one who seemed as if she might have a clue.

“What, I’m mother hen now?”

“Cluck, cluck,” Nick said, unabashed when she glared at him. Nifty laughed, and she split the glare between the two of them. Oh, Miss Blonde did not like being mocked, even gently.

I’m not much as peacemaker—I never got the hang of being soothing, and while I can dance around the truth I’m crap at lying—but it looked as if it was gonna be my job anyway, just to keep things nonviolent. “Look, I’m straight out of college, don’t know a damned thing, and I know Nifty’s the same, considering he’s only a year older than I am. I don’t know what Pietr’s background is, but getting anything straightforward out of him is impossible. I know that already, after ten minutes.” He made a seated, ironic bow in response. “You and Nick, on the other hand, already have jobs, so you must’ve gone through this successfully before, and I’d trust your opinion over Nick’s on something like this.”

“Hey!” Nick sounded like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take offense or not. I did say peacemaking wasn’t my thing, right? But it seemed to work, because I could practically see the hackles under Sharon’s chignon subside, and she gave a grudging nod.

“By now, I would expect someone to at least check on us, see who was here, maybe call one of us in,” she said. “Unless they have this room on closed-circuit camera…”

“They don’t. I checked.” Nick sounded quite certain of that. “And anyway, the bunch of us in one small room, nervous or anticipating, and a seeing-eye camera? Would last about ten minutes.”

“Speak for yourself,” I told him. “Some of us have actual control.”

“I don’t,” Nifty admitted. “Local stations stopped interviewing me before a game, after their cameras kept fritzing.”

Probably another reason why he decided against a career in pro football. He wasn’t going to make it as a sportscaster, either, with that handicap. Corporate America was definitely a better bet.

“So by now,” I said, “someone should have come out to count noses?”

Sharon nodded. That’s what I had thought. My nerves were starting to hum again. Was anyone even back there, behind the closed door I’d been assuming was the main office? If not, then who had let us in? “And nobody’s had the slightest urge to get up and walk out, despite the fact that we don’t know crap-all, and this mysterious voice has kept us waiting almost half an hour already without any explanation?”

“I thought about it,” Sharon admitted. “I’m still thinking about it. But…”

“Yeah,” I said. “But.” But we were all there, anyway.

The five of us sat there in silence, uncomfortable now, for another ten minutes. The time ticked by in my head, each tick louder than the last, and finally I’d had enough.

Stubborn, I am, yes. Also curious enough to kill a dozen cats, and not really good with the patience thing. When I think about something, I have to follow it all the way through to the end.

“Hell with this.” I put my mug of coffee—still undrunk, because it really was disgusting—on the floor and stood up. “I want to know what the deal is.”

“What, you’re just going to barge in there?” Nick looked somewhat taken aback, but Pietr had a gleam in those eyes that made me think he’d been about three seconds behind me. He liked trouble, yeah. Being in, or causing, or both, I didn’t know. I had a tiny tremor of precog that I was going to find out, though.

“Yep,” I said in response to Nick’s question, and I marched my boots over to the door, knocked once soundly, and waited.

No answer. Not even the sound of someone shuffling around on the other side. That wasn’t good.

I knocked again, and then tried the door handle, fully expecting it to be locked.

It wasn’t.

My current swirled once, deep inside me, then went still. I could Translocate out of here now, if I wanted to. I could yelp for J, ask his opinion. I could…

I pushed the door open and stepped inside, hearing at least one person get up and move behind me. Nice to know someone had my back. I was betting on it being Pietr.

The door opened up into a larger room, done up like your basic office—beige carpeting and walls painted to match—and furnished with a large wooden desk with a leather chair behind it, two upholstered visitors’ chairs, a bunch of framed inspirational-looking prints on the walls, and basic white blinds on the windows, two of them, on the far wall. There was one sickly looking plant I immediately wanted to rescue, and a couple of photos on the desk, facing away from us, but not much personality otherwise.

The body sprawled facedown on the floor next to the desk didn’t contribute much to the room’s decor, either.

“Holy shit.” The words came from my throat the moment they hit my brain. Maybe not the most articulate of reactions, and I don’t have much of a filter, sometimes, but…hello? Dead body. A little freaked-out. I think I could be forgiven.

Sharon looked over my shoulder to see what I was reacting to, and then slid past me while I was still standing there, trying to take it all in. She knelt by the guy with careful precision and lifted his wrist, I guess to try for a pulse. I almost snorted. Not much point; even from the doorway I could tell he was dead. You didn’t lie facedown that way if you were just sleeping, not even if you’d passed out. Trust me, I’ve seen a lot of people passed out.

“Holy shit,” I said again.

There was a dead body in the office. We’d been sitting there, just talking, drinking coffee, and there had been a dead body in there all that time.

“I guess the interviews are canceled?” a voice said in my ear, and I dug an elbow into Nick’s side. Not that it wasn’t funny, in a sick way, but it didn’t really seem…respectful. Or something, I don’t know.

Did I mention the freaked-out part? Dead body. There. My current was very still, deep inside me, and I stirred it just to reassure myself that it hadn’t suddenly disappeared. I didn’t carry a lot of mojo around with me—why would I?—but touching it was like having a blankie or a stuffed bear; the need for comfort was a natural human instinct. I’d place even odds everyone else in the room was doing exactly the same thing. Like checking for your wallet after someone else’s been robbed: maybe stupid, but almost impossible to stop yourself.

Nifty moved past us, too, nowhere near as smoothly or gently as Sharon, and that made me think maybe we should get out of the way—or at least stop standing in the doorway before someone decided to go
through
us, one way or the other. I didn’t really want to get closer to the body, but the only other alternative was to go back into the waiting room, and I didn’t think that would look good.

Why I cared what looked good in front of people I’d just met and wasn’t sure I liked and was probably going to be competing for a job against was left unanswered.

“There’s no blood,” Pietr said, and I jumped. Despite thinking he was the first one behind me, I hadn’t seen him until he spoke. He’d somehow faded into the blah-colored walls of the office like some kind of two-legged chameleon. How a good-looking guy can disappear from my awareness… I guess it showed how freaked-out I was.

“Wha?” My voice came back with a croak, and I cleared my throat and tried again. “What?”

“On the carpet. There’s no blood.”

I forced myself to ignore the fact that the body was a body, and looked again, starting with the torso—I didn’t want to look at the face, not yet—and moving over the probable track he’d taken to land there. Pietr was right. No blood, no signs of violence, spilled drink or food on the desk—no sign whatsoever of what had happened.

By now, all of us had moved through the doorway and into the room, although Nick and I were still hanging back. I felt I should be doing something, but I didn’t know what, so I just stood there and watched.

Sharon and Nifty were turning the body over, gently, like it was going to matter to the guy now. I kept cataloging details, focusing on that so I didn’t have to really see what they were doing, in case blood suddenly spurted or something. Clothing. The guy had on a nice suit, gray pinstripe, that looked more expensive than the office would suggest. He was also missing his shoes, gray dress socks visible as they turned him. That was weird. A head of dark hair, thick and curly, and I couldn’t tell in this light if he was going gray or not. I looked, finally, but couldn’t see much of his face, because Nifty was blocking the view. I was kind of relieved, actually. A face would make it—him—real. A real dead body.

“Should we be moving the body?” I asked. “Aren’t the cops going to want it to be left alone, for investigation?”

“You going to call the cops?” Pietr sounded horrified by the idea. I stopped. Wasn’t I? Weren’t we? Wasn’t that what you were supposed to do if you found a guy dead? I had no idea what the protocol was for this kind of thing. J would know. I reached out, instinctively, to ping him and then stopped. He’d hear “dead body” and freak, and yank me home, and that wouldn’t solve anything.

“I…”

“Not me,” Pietr said firmly. “Natural-born non involver, that’s me. I say we back out and pretend we never saw anything.” He talked scared, but he didn’t move, and his gaze was sweeping the room to make sure he didn’t miss something. He might not like cops, but he wasn’t scared. Far from it.

“I guess we should call someone,” Sharon said, but she sounded weirdly reluctant. Not scared or even unnerved, but reluctant, like a dog that didn’t want to give up a bone. “The guy’s definitely dead. No visible wounds, no spilled blood, but there’s no pulse, no lung movement.” She sounded as if she’d memorized a medical handbook on how to tell someone was dead. For all I knew, she had.

Nifty had a small mirror in his hand, holding it over the DB’s face. He flipped it shut, like a compact, and put it back in his jacket pocket. Wow. I hadn’t known anyone actually did that anymore, checking for breath. Did it really work? The thought distracted me for a moment, then I came slamming back. How had the guy died? How long had he been dead? Had it been while we were sitting there, and if so, oh shit, could we have done anything to save him?

That thought made me feel vaguely ill.

“I think he had a heart attack,” Sharon said, although her voice was, for the first time, lacking what I’d already assumed was a customary take-charge sharpness. “Totally natural, probably instantaneous. No sign of any kind of external violence.”

My throat closed up at her words, and I had to force myself to breathe normally, shards of my dream coming back like an acid flashback. External violence. Murder? I hadn’t even thought…

Nifty looked as confused as I felt. “We just found him here like this. Natural reaction would be to call the paramedics first, even if he is dead, and let them deal with the cops. Right? So why not call the cops, too? What if they have questions for us?”

Sharon looked at him as though he’d just suggested she take up pole dancing. “You think the five of us, here in an unmarked office, with no reason to be here except a mysterious phone message, and a dead body just happens to be in the other office, aren’t going to become the immediate persons of interest to the cops, no matter how he died? You think they’re going to believe how we all ended up here on the basis of some strange phone message from god knows who, for an unspecified interview for an unnamed, unknown company none of us sent a résumé to? I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that shit in my life.”

Nifty blinked, processed, and nodded reluctantly. Nick let out a sigh, and even Pietr seemed to agree with her logic. I obviously had a different take on the police than my companions. Then again, I’d never actually ever had any dealings with the police. So what if they asked me a few questions? I didn’t have anything to hide. Then it hit me. “You guys…all lonejacks?”

They nodded.

“You’re not?” Pietr moved away from me, as though I’d just admitted to having cooties. I shrugged. “Dad was lonejack. My mentor’s Council. I never really thought about it.” Wasn’t quite true, but explaining would take too much time and energy.

The
Cosa Nostradamus
wasn’t exactly one big happy family. Or we were, but there were two distinct branches of the family tree. Council was organized, focused, and monied, mostly. Not more or less law-abiding than any given lonejack, but less likely to take heat for it, I suppose. Council policed themselves: that was the point of Council. Lonejacks were on their own, and liked it that way. If my dad had been any indication, they really didn’t appreciate official-type people asking questions about their private lives, even if they hadn’t done anything wrong.

J and I, we ran in our own little world, I guess. He’d never pushed me to go Council, or kept me from having lonejack friends, but mostly I sort of floated between the two worlds, and never felt I belonged particularly in either one. I’d always thought of myself as child-of-a-lonejack, but would probably identify as Council if pushed. I’m not sure they’d acknowledge me, though. It hadn’t ever been an issue before, but now I felt it like an ache: where would I go, if they had to take me in?

“Don’t let your guard down just yet, if you were smart enough to raise it in the first place,” Pietr said, breaking into my thoughts. “It wasn’t a heart attack, not the way you meant, anyway.” He’d somehow gone from standing against the wall to standing next to the body, and the way the others reacted I don’t think they saw him move, either.

“You can tell, just by looking at him?” Sharon’s voice got real cold. “You have a doctoral degree you forgot to mention?”

“Idiots.” He sounded totally disgusted with the lot of us. “Can’t you feel it?”

The moment he mentioned it, I understood. There was a hum in the room, something faint but unmistakable. The sound of current, simmering in the wires, normal in any modern building, yeah—except the humming was in the body, too.

Everyone carries electrical current in them: it’s how our bodies work. Muscles moving, heart pumping, neurons firing, etc. Once the body dies, the electricity does, too. If you’re Talent, you’ve got current in there, too, not just in your core-supply, but everywhere, filling your entire body. But it flits even faster than electricity when the person dies and control’s released. Everyone knows that.

If current was still in the body, and the body was dead, then it meant that the current we were sensing was from an external source—and still keeping a grip on the body.

That…probably wasn’t good.

“You think current killed him?” Nifty sounded less surprised or horrified than fascinated.

It happened sometimes, when a Talent overloaded, took too much current on, either by accident or ego, and it shorted out their system. Mostly it just made you nuts, frying the brain cells, but it could kill, too. Sometimes it killed everyone in the area, too, just for the sin of being too close. I was suddenly really glad I hadn’t gotten close, and from the look on Nifty’s face, he was wishing he were another ten feet or more away. Sharon didn’t seem to be bothered at all, still kneeling by the body, her skirt folded neatly under her knees.

“But overrush shouldn’t still be lingering,” she said. “It should fade once the final flare-out happens, not hold on to him.”

A damned good point. I didn’t think I wanted to hear Pietr’s response.

“I think someone used current to kill him,” he said anyway, and that stopped everything cold. Even Sharon blanched.

I
knew
I didn’t want to hear it.

“You think one of us did it?” Nifty asked, his deep voice a little tight and rising. “But we were all there, together—hell, Sharon and I arrived at the same time, first, and the rest of you…”

Nick started to babble. “We don’t know anything about each other. This could be a setup—”

“Stop it!” Sharon’s voice cut through Nick’s stream of denial like forged steel, cold and hard. “None of us did anything.”

“And you know that how?”

“I know.”

“How?” Pietr was like a damn terrier with a bit of meat; he wasn’t going to let go, even standing over a dead body.

“I just do, all right?” Our cool blonde was pissed, and not in the mood for being questioned. I got the feeling she was like that a lot. “I could tell if any of you were lying, or trying to keep something from us. It’s what I do. So just shut up with the paranoia. None of us killed this guy.”

“Venec.”

“What?” That distracted her from her pissiness, at least a little.

Nifty had gotten up and gone around to the desk. “His name’s Venec, Ben Venec. Or at least, he’s reading a newspaper that was mailed to a Mister Benjamin Venec at this address.” Nifty pointed a finger down at the
New York Times
folded on the desk, but didn’t touch it. “There’s nothing else here. This guy wasn’t using the desk.” He took a piece of tissue out of his pocket and used it to pull open the drawer. “Nothing in here, either. Definitely not using the desk. That’s weird. People usually dump stuff into the desk drawers first off, even before they bring in plants or photos.”

By now, Sharon had gotten up and moved away from the body, smoothing her skirt and looking like she was about to start issuing orders again. Something got me walking across the carpet the three feet it took to take her place.

“What are you doing?” Nick asked, watching me.

I put my palm over the guy’s chest, still not looking at his face—this was easier if I didn’t think about him as a person.

“Asking the current,” I said, already sinking into my core and not really aware of anything else, other than the idea that this wasn’t a very good idea. I’d done this sort of scrying before, but only with people I knew, or things that belonged to them. The last time I’d done it, in fact, had been with tools that belonged to my dad, just after he’d been killed, which was why I’d thought of it. Death just seemed to call out for a final scrying.

Tell me something,
I whispered to the hum of current wrapped around this guy’s chest.
Tell me something about why you’re there. Tell me why I dreamed of death, again.

That last bit slipped in, but I let it go rather than worrying. Sometimes I’d get something, maybe detailed, maybe vague. More often I wouldn’t get anything. In light of the past twenty-four hours, what I got this time really shouldn’t have surprised me.

I got tossed on my ass, back into the side of the desk.

“Motherf— Ow!” I don’t swear much, but it felt warranted. That
hurt
.

“You all right?”

“What happened?

“Holy hell, girl, what did you do?”

The voices broke out over my head, surprised and concerned, in varying registers. “I didn’t do a damn thing,” I said, as soon as the birds stopped tweeting in circles around my head. It took a second, and then something slammed into my head, like the tail end of an aftershock. “Damn. Whatever’s wrapped itself around that guy, I’ve felt it before.”