Hard Magic (9 page)

“You promise you won’t tell anyone?”

I sketched an X against where I figured my heart was, more or less, hopefully with more élan than Nick had managed. “Promise.” How bad could it be?

“I’mamassagetherapist.”

Once my brain untangled his hurried mumble, I sat up and looked at him with, I’m afraid, a gleam in my eye.

He saw it. “See? People only love me for my hands.”

“Awwwww. We’d like you even if you didn’t have hands at all. Can you massage with your toes, too?”

“Hmmph.” He didn’t quite stick his tongue out at me, but I swear I could hear him thinking about it. “All right. I need to go home and collapse for a while. See you Monday, if we’re still employed.” He hauled himself upright, and waggled his fingers at me, a sort of dorky goodbye wave. I waggled my fingers back, and he walked off, heading toward the east side of the park. I wondered suddenly where he lived, and if there were any apartments for rent in his building. Why hadn’t I asked him that?

Well, there was always Monday, if I didn’t see anything tomorrow.

And, as he said, if we were still employed.

I picked up my book, but the fascination of reading about the life and times of an eighteenth-century courtesan had dimmed, somehow. The flash of that fatae’s teeth, and talking about fairy tales, however briefly, had stirred some depth of unease in me that I couldn’t blame entirely on stress or overwork. Or gremlins.

Was it kenning? Was I having one of my rare moments of precog? No. It didn’t feel right. But something was wrong.

I closed the book and shoved it into my backpack, wrapped up what was left of my sandwich and tossed it into the nearest green trash can, deciding on my direction because I had already turned that way to find the trash. J used to say that he could think better while he was walking; maybe it would work for me, too. If nothing else, I’d been spending way too much time the past week sitting on my ass. Exercise was a good idea.

The path I was on seemed to circle endlessly on itself since I never seemed to get closer to the buildings in the distance, but rather kept diverging past seemingly endless fields, rocky outcrops, and tiny scenic ponds. It was hard to believe the entire thing was man-made, but if you looked again, more closely, there was a perfection under the natural surface that could only be crafted. Nobody out enjoying the day seemed to care, so I let that thought drop and waited to see what else came to replace it.

My mind remained blank. All right, maybe Stosser had been right, and we did need the break, and all this was just stress-related. I rolled with the blankness, and let my body go on automatic—until something hit the back of my head and bounced off.

“Hey!” All the paranoia came slamming back, and some instinct made me look, not behind me, but up.

The branches shook, but I couldn’t see anything moving.

Not that it mattered. I had a pretty good idea, once my heart rate calmed, what was up there.

A good idea, though, wasn’t a fact. I looked up at the branches, judging from the movement which ones had been disturbed. There was a cantrip we had been testing that, if it worked, would show us the way a suspect had run, based on the displacement of air. So far it had failed pretty miserably, but if I applied the basics to the pattern of the leaves rustling…

I thought hard and fast, drawing a few threads of current up out of my core and casting them into the air, toward the branches.

“Follow the trail of the passage unseen,” I directed it. With established spells you didn’t need to actually speak them out loud, but the words helped focus the intent, and right now that cantrip needed all the help it could get. The threads hovered midair, as though they were confused, or uncertain. Current didn’t actually have emotions, or any kind of sentience, so that meant that I was uncertain. More focus was needed. All right, then.

“Follow the trail of the passage unseen. Lead me to the pranking hand.”

The air shimmered as the current went to work, like the heat signature of a fire, and a handful of leaves changed from dark, healthy green to a sickly looking yellow, as if they’d aged immediately. Then the shimmer moved on, changing another set of leaves, and the first set went back to green, moving along deeper and higher into the tree, until I couldn’t see it any longer.

There was a startled squawk and a loud rustle of leaves, and a branch swayed as though something had tried to escape being turned yellow. I caught a glimpse of fluttering wings, and a shock of hair a color even I wouldn’t dare try.

Hah, I’d been right. A piskie. Winged pranksters of the
Cosa
. It probably thought I was a Null, and would have spent time looking for the person who threw that nut at me, rather than retaliating.

I made a mental note of the wording I’d used—specifics were clearly needed to get the proper results. I hadn’t used enough current to actually catch someone, but that could be amended in later test trials. Maybe even use current to tag someone, so we could find a culprit in a crowd? Odds were we’d never need something like that, if we were called in after the fact, but a Talent cop could use it….

“And how would you introduce that into the court records?” I asked myself. “Your honor, I know that it was him because he had a bright yellow splotch on his forehead?”

I wasn’t too worried about the piskie being chased too far by the spell—if she or he went far enough away the spell would wear off. I thought it would, anyway.

“Not that having bright yellow fur would stop the bugger. Idiot piskie would probably think it was some strange badge of honor, almost but not quite getting caught.” Piskies were pranksters, but they were pranksters who respected competent opponents far more than they enjoyed clueless ones. That was probably why they hadn’t been hunted down and eaten over the years.

It hit me then—I’d not only used current offensively, I’d done that before, although not quite so easily or without planning—but I’d done it automatically, with an eye not for the immediate result, but a long-term refinement for job use.

Huh. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad, being so—call it proactive—but there was an extra lift in my step as I continued on my way through the park, and the unease and paranoia of earlier slowly faded away.

Sunday passed without me shouting eureka! at any of the apartments I was shown, and then Monday morning rolled around again, and we were back at it—studying, practicing, refining, and wondering when—if—we were ever going to get a chance to actually use any of this on a case.

A male voice shouting “What the hell?” down the hallway was the first and only warning I had that it was going to be one of Those Days. The overhead lights were the victim of the office gremlins this time, a trail of them blowing out with tiny little implosions, like the sound of someone popping their bubble gum.

“Do we have to replace those, or is it the landlord’s responsibility?” Nick wanted to know. Stosser looked—as much as I could tell, in the dim emergency lighting—grim, while Venec just looked pissed. We all stayed low while they had a short, closed-door session that left them looking, respectively, more grim and more pissed. But a little mage-light got us through the morning, and when we came back from lunch, the lights had been replaced.

Nobody asked if the landlord had actually done it or not.

On the plus side, reporting my fine-tuning of the tracer cantrip during our morning meeting got me praise from Stosser, a snort from Venec that was almost like praise, and a glare from Nifty, who’d apparently been fiddling with an alternate refinement that hadn’t worked so well.

“Lawrence is good on the power stuff,” Pietr said, when I brought the topic up. We’d escaped Nifty’s glower to hit the little Indian place on the corner, just the two of us. Nick had brought in his own lunch, and Sharon had declined, as always. I couldn’t tell if she was being antisocial, or just saving money. “Full-on power, and quick planning, stuff he used on the field, probably. That’s how his brain is trained. I’d want him on my side in a fight, for damn sure. But I don’t think he’s very good with finicky details. You, that’s what you’re really good at.”

“Gee, thanks.”

My coworker waved a piece of naan at me, scolding. “That was a compliment, Bonnie. Finicky details are what make things work. Like…like needing an engineer to make a building safe, while the construction workers are making it solid.”

I thought about it, and decided to let him live after all. Especially since he’d offered to pay for lunch. And it was a pretty good lunch, too. Not haute cuisine by any stretch of the imagination, but the place was clean, the bread fresh, and the food spicy. And it was reasonably priced. Another plus to being here rather than in midtown.

But the topic at hand interested me more than food. “Venec says that they hired us because our skills complemented each other.”

Pietr narrowed those gray eyes and tapped his fork against the side of his plate in a quick, almost syncopated rhythm. “Makes sense. Only…” And he caught the same thing I had. “How did they know, that quick?”

I had my theory about that. But I’d have to check it against other people’s experiences, and I wasn’t quite ready to share the particulars of my history with anyone just yet, so I couldn’t bring it up.

“Same way they knew to call us, I guess,” was all I said for now, and the conversation moved on to the ever-popular “Nifty versus Sharon” sweepstakes. Right now, Sharon was ahead on sheer skill, but Nifty was a favorite for style.

We went back smelling of cardamom and cinnamon, and were once more under the hammer: my attention to finicky detail might be my strength, but apparently Venec thought I should be able to lift steel and tote cable, too.

“Is that all you’ve got? I could snap you in two and not even raise a sweat!”

Bastard. That was my new nickname for Benjamin Venec. Much more appropriate than DB, although there were times I wanted him to be that, too…. Right now the most amazing eyes and gorgeous forearms meant a lot less to me than the fact that he was a sadistic sonofabitch.

The pressure in the room was unbearable, and I didn’t mean that in a metaphorical way. Venec had lowered the ceiling on us, magically, and I thought my spine was about to snap. Nick, across the room from me, was bent double, too, a look of frustrated agony on his face.

We knew Venec wasn’t actually going to crush us. Probably. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going for the maximum hurt, to make his point.

“All you have to do is
push,
children. Push! Shove it back at me!”

I wanted to shove it, all right. All the way down his damned throat until he choked. But the more current I pulled into forcing the downward pressure away from me, the more the pressure seemed to increase. This wasn’t getting us anywhere. I just didn’t have the brute force, and neither did Nick. We’d tried combining forces about ten minutes into this exercise, and all that did was double the pressure in response. I didn’t see any way other than going totally flat and letting it…

Wait a minute. Just…wait…

Oh hell. If I thought about it any longer, I’d never have the nerve to try it. Without warning Nick, I dropped to my stomach on the floor, pulled all my current from the upward push, and reconfigured it in my head from a solid form to a ball of lightning that rumbled across the carpeted floor, picking up more and more static charge as it went, until, instants later, it slammed into Venec’s ankles and sparked against his own current-use.

The thump as he hit the floor was, I purely and gleefully admit, seriously satisfying.

“Oh. That was sneaky,” Nick said, dropping to the floor in exhaustion as the pressure suddenly disappeared. “Wish I’d thought of it.”

I acknowledged the praise with a weary grin. My body hurt too much to do anything more.

“What were you doing?” Venec asked him. The bastard had already recovered and was sitting up, cross-legged on the floor like he’d planned to do that all along. I was pleased—hell, gratified—to see that the neckline of his off-white shirt was gray and damp with sweat.

“Working on a way to negate the friction and slide out of range,” Nick said, rolling over on his back and speaking to the ceiling, now back up on the ceiling where it belonged. “Elementals do it, right?” Elementals were microentities, not fatae exactly, but some weird offshoot of current that lived in and off the flow of electricity itself. Jury was still out on how intelligent they were. J said they were only borderline aware and in his opinion about as smart as your average goldfish. “So I’d reverse the static charge, make it slippery instead, and force an escape route that way.”

“Huh. An interesting solution, and it might have worked. Keep trying, and once you’ve got it, see if you can find a way to speed it up.”

Nick rolled his eyes. That was Venec’s response to almost anything: assume it can be done, and then find a way to make it work faster. The fact that he was right—if we needed something like that we’d need it to hand immediately—didn’t make the instructions any the less annoying.

Without saying anything more, Venec got up and walked out of the room, leaving us still lying there. That was how lessons ended—we’d gotten the point, now we had to follow up on the assignment. At some point, one or the other of the Guys would find us, and give us some other impossible task.

“I bet Nifty just shoved the ceiling and it got the hell out of his way,” I said, too tired to really be cranky.

“And Sharon glared at it, and it whimpered and retreated into a corner,” Nick said, not disagreeing.

“And Pietr convinced it that he wasn’t there to be crushed.”

Nick snorted. It was funny ’cause it was probably true.

“You were pretty sneaky there yourself, too,” he said. “So much for your straight-shooter persona. I’m onto you now, Torres.”

Straight shooter? Me? I guess that was funny ’cause it was true, too.

And then we got up, and went back to work.

That was how the days passed, working and sniping and working some more, and then it was Friday again, and after a month, the weeks developed a recognizable pattern: get up five days out of seven, get hammered all day by one or the other or both of the Guys, stagger out too exhausted to do anything but go back to the hotel, order room service, and fall asleep, then take a day off to recover, and spend Sunday unsuccessfully apartment-hunting.

I felt bad, not having any time to spare for J, but he told me he understood, and I’d see him as soon as things got settled. I could hear the hurt in his voice, though, and I hung up the phone feeling worse, not better.

I also took the time to strip out the last of the red dye from my hair, and was reacquainting myself with my natural hair color, a shade and texture that inspired Nick and Pietr to try and come up with appropriate nicknames for me. I responded by dubbing them, respectively, “Ferret-boy” and “Fade.” Nifty was still Nifty. Sharon seemed to defy nicknaming.

Between coffee and a seemingly unending supply of junk food and pizza, we managed to survive the workload, and even learn some new things without passing out or killing each other. The gremlins kept up their work, too, but we—almost—got used to it.

By the end of the second month on the job, everyone seemed to have gotten a second wind. The work was still killing us, and I thought my brain was going to explode from the sheer volume of information we were being given to read and hear and hands-on learn, but there was more life in everyone, come quitting time, than there had been before.

Knowing the Guys, that just meant next week was going to ramp up a notch and hammer us all over again. But for now, the moment was good. It was Thursday, which was almost Friday, and I had a line on an apartment that I thought might work, overpriced and undersized, but in a good location, and an appointment to see it tomorrow morning before work. It would be nice to have that settled, at least. I was on first-name basis with all of the staff at the hotel now, and didn’t want to think about what it was costing, even if J had gotten a long-term deal.

“Hey. You want to grab a drink?”

I was sitting in the break room, trying to get my eyes to refocus after Sharon flubbed—rather impressively—a basic illumination spell. Even Nifty’d been quiet after that disaster, mainly because he hadn’t been able to do much better. We were trying to rework it to illuminate specific things—blood splatter, fingerprints, random body parts—on order, but so far, all it would do was act like a dimmer switch set on spastic. I’d been up half the night before, trying to break down the components of the spell to see where we were going wrong, but hadn’t been able to come up with anything yet.

“What?” My train of thought broken, I looked blankly up at my coworker.

Nick clarified his offer with exaggerated patience. “Drink. Alcoholic. Bar. After work. Any of this sounding familiar? Nifty found this absolutely horrible place downtown. Gives dives a bad name, but excellent brews on tap.”

“We having a team-building exercise?”

Nick smirked. “Call it whatever you want, the hangover’s still the same.”

Hard to argue with that kind of logic. The thought of a little social interaction sounded good. I was starting to go stir-crazy, even through my exhaustion, and the staff of the hotel, while nice, were being professionally friendly, not real friendly. My dating life was stagnant. Although Nick had indicated once or twice that he wouldn’t be adverse to a little after-hours research, I liked him but not in that way. Sharon was clearly not into girls, and Nifty wasn’t my type—too self-important. Pietr, while undeniably cute, and a good guy…unnerved me a little. Not in a bad way—I didn’t think he was crazy-stalker type or anything, just…unnerving. I was going to have to go looking, eventually, but when did we have time? Another reason to get an apartment; maybe I’d meet someone in the building…. For now, though, just not being in the office was a good start.

“Yeah, sounds good,” I decided. “Did you ask Sharon?”

An expressive roll of the eyes was answer enough. Nick worked well with her, but I don’t think they were buddies outside of the office. He was right. Sharon probably wouldn’t be caught dead in the kind of dives he and Nifty seemed to enjoy. Although we might be doing her a disservice, now that I thought about it. Just because someone carries off classy doesn’t mean they always are. I should know that, having lived with J for more than a decade. “Ask, anyway. It’s polite.”

“All right. I—”

The sound of the buzzer made both of us jump, and Pietr appeared in the doorway, looking as startled as I felt.

“The door,” he said. “Someone’s at the door.”

Christ. Two months we’ve been here, and I didn’t even know we
had
a doorbell.

Stosser came out, the black jeans and unfortunate yellow pullover he’d been wearing earlier in the day now changed out for dress slacks and a pressed, button-down shirt just the right shade of white to make his hair seem muted. Damn it, I’d just seen him five minutes ago, when he told us to take a break! If he was hiding a changing room and closet in this place, I wanted to know about it. Especially if there was a shower in there.

“Look competent, children,” was all he said, almost offhand, and then it was like a nuclear blast went off under his redheaded scalp, the charm practically oozing like honey out of him as he opened the door and ushered the newcomer into our office.

“Ah, Ms. Reybeorn, welcome. Please, come into my office, and we can discuss your situation in more comfortable surroundings. May I fetch you coffee? Some tea?”

The honey filled the entire room, and for an instant Nick and I went from being exhausted twenty-somethings to alert, intense investigators; professionally going about our business and yet aware of the newcomer, in a nonintrusive way. I could
feel
Stosser’s current gilding over me as he walked what had to be our first potential client into the back office, but be damned if I knew how he did it.

Our Ms. Reybeorn was around fifty or so and carrying it off well; short brunette hair styled carefully to play up her cheekbones and downplay her chins, minimal makeup applied well enough to look like no makeup. She was wearing black, but so did three quarters of this city, so that didn’t mean anything. Her shoes were screamingly expensive pumps in a demure two-inch heel, and the glint on her fingers when Stosser took her arm in his said diamonds, plural. Real diamonds, too, not fakes. Talent could tell, don’t ask me how.