Tricks of the Trade (26 page)

In the hallway, I found myself heading for the small
est conference room, my decision both unconscious and unhesitating. Wrapped up in not thinking about the thing between me and Venec, it took me the length of the hallway to remember that the small conference room was where the scraping we'd taken from the house was locked away.

I really, really didn't want to go in there, especially not alone, but what were my options? No matter my feelings, there was work to be done and it wasn't as though fleeing the office would help. It was either make myself useful here, or hang out in the break room and feel useless and spend, inevitably, too much time thinking about the things I didn't want to think about. At least if I was doing something proactive, I'd maybe feel less exposed, waiting for The Roblin to come back and take another shot at us? It was as good a theory as any.

I let myself into the room and reset the warding behind me, then sat at the table. The box—a purely current-based construct—rested in front of me, glinting balefully, dark reds and a particularly ugly neon-yellow, like a filthy fast-food restaurant's decor.

I studied the box, not reaching for my own current, not slipping into a working fugue-state, doing nothing that might alert the trace within that it was being watched because, all common sense be damned, I was pretty sure it would know.

Use more than magic, Venec instructed us, over and over. We're more than the sum of our skills, and the physical world is just as useful as the magic one—and covers a lot more territory. So: what did my basic senses tell me?

Once upon a time, that time being a year ago, I went through most of my day without drawing on current. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy using it, I just…didn't. Most Talent are like that; magic is the something extra, not so much used in the day to day. Now? Now it was an effort to not default to current, not to reach for it instinctively, even if only to make sure I was prepared.

I wasn't sure I liked that. Now, though, wasn't the time to stress about it: whoever I'd become, she was needed.

I'd already covered sight. My nose didn't smell anything different. Sometimes even a Null could pick up a whiff of a spell, like burnt ozone after a storm, but not here. My ears…was there a hum, low in the background? No; I was putting it there because I thought there should be. No noise at all, other than the usual old-building, multi-tenant grumbles and thumps that you ignored after the first couple of days.

Taste… I made a scrunched-up face. There was no way I was so much as licking that thing without a direct order from the boss.

Touch I already knew: it was slick and smooth and vibrated slightly under my fingertips, what was inside reaching directly to my core of current, making it curl in on itself in unease. No need to touch it again.

That thought struck me harder than it should have, and I turned my head slightly, instinctively, looking at it again. That last thought hadn't been mine. I know the feel of my own head, and that wasn't me. The feeling wasn't the now-identifiable static swirl of the imp, but heavier, slower.

Don't look, it whispered. Go away.

I so very much dislike being manipulated. It wanted me to stay away? I'd touch it.

And yeah, I knew that was dumb. I wasn't going to mock horror-movie heroines anymore.

There was a faint, familiar touch against my awareness, coming up against the gossamer-thin wall I'd put up and stopping there, asking if everything was all right. Irrationally, that touch made me even more determined to poke the box, as though dealing with the trace inside the lockbox was preferable to dealing with Venec.

“You're classic, totally textbook avoidance,” I muttered to myself, even as my hand lifted, and touched the top of the box.

It was…a box of current. Not motionless—current itself was never motionless by its very nature—but not doing anything, either. Normally you could feel a tracebox working, the steady, staticky not-quite-noise of current set in an ongoing spell. That's all a tracebox was: current shaped by the controlling influence of more current—a spell—into a solid form. Okay, a mostly solid form.

Now, I not only didn't feel the box working, I didn't feel the trace inside it, although the glow told me that it was still there. I had a sudden panicked thought that, while we were distracted, it had escaped, somehow—that The Roblin had let it out, leaving a decoy behind, and it was roaming the hallways even now, the two of them, plotting some terrible, dire trick.

“You're getting paranoid,” I said in disgust. “Half an hour's exposure to Venec, and you're totally paranoid.”

The box sat there on the table, glimmering and glow
ering with current-light, and I could swear it was taunting me, like there wasn't anything I could do or think up that would crack the mystery of what was in there, and why I couldn't feel it, now.

The only thing I hate more than being manipulated was being told I wasn't capable of doing something. The combination? Oh, that just pissed me off. Knowing it was dumb, knowing I was being played, I slipped down into fugue-state, and “lifted” the lid of the box.

It was still there, settled at the bottom of the box like a handful of ashes, lacy and harmless-looking.

“Who are you?” I asked it. Not what—who. The part of my brain that wasn't busy being incredibly stupid noted that for later.

It answered me. A hiss of current slithered back at me, heavy and dark, and filled with echoes a thousand miles deeper than anything I could reach, licked from below by the flames of something that might have been the devil's laugh.

That laugh froze me in place while those flames crawled all over the skin of my hands, tried to reach deeper inside, gunning for my core, wanting to eat me, down to the last glittering drop of Me. I panicked, slammed the lid down and threw an extra layer of current into the lock, praying that would do the job, even as I was screaming along the Merge-connection for help.

*VENEC!*

 

The spell wasn't a complicated one; Pietr had the suspicion that was probably why the others had trouble with it. They applied too much force, and when you forced
current, it lashed back at you. The trick was to be gentle, almost not asking anything of it even as you invoked the words. Negative space needed negative force. He thought about trying to explain that to the intent-looking blonde to his left, and almost laughed. Sharon was more of a blunt force object. No, this was a spell only Bonnie, with her ability to see multiple layers of gray in every shadow, could have thought of…and he was probably the only one who could do it properly, existing as he did so often in those shadows.

“Anything?”

“Not yet.”

The two areas that had been the most trashed in the client's office were the desk and the bookcase behind the desk. So they had focused there; anything that might have been on the surface would have been found when Sharon and Nick cased the place originally, and by the time Stosser and Bonnie arrived, anything but the most obvious or persistent trace would have been obliterated.

Except, of course, for what wasn't there.

He had the notebook in his jacket pocket, but the words were easy to remember.

“Shadow of air and weight of light, make clear what now is not.”

Even as he spoke the words, he reached into his core and, with gentle spectral fingers, lifted a handful of spar kling threads of current, letting them run through their range of colors before shading toward a peaceful, calm blue that let itself be drawn up by the words of the spell, spinning out into a thick, darkly neon-blue vapor that
settled into one…two…three different spots where the bookcase had rested.

“Three?” His gaze flicked from one to the other and then to the third, his face still with concentration. “What did we miss?”

Sharon, standing off to the side and not able to see the results of his spell, said nothing, understanding that he wasn't actually asking her.

“Talk to me,” Pietr said. It wasn't a command, wasn't even a spell, just a request. “Please,” he added, to be polite. When something was unknown, his mentor had told him a hundred and ten times, be polite. It cost nothing, and could save your unworthy life.

Something shimmered, and Pietr slid deeper into fugue-state, letting the shimmer form more clearly in his awareness.

And that was the last thing he remembered, before blacking out.

 

Ever hear someone describe an anthill that's been overturned? That was what the office reminded me of, thirty seconds after I realized what we'd got trapped in that box. I got yanked—there's no other word for it—
yanked
out of the conference room by the scruff of my shirt, not by Venec but Nifty, who had a manic gleam in his eye that would have scared me if I didn't think there was a similar wild-eyed look in my own. The door slammed shut behind us, and I slammed my hand on it, engaging the wards and adding another layer of my own, wishing I'd had time to study that elemental thing the client had—I might be able to make it work.

“Come on,” Nifty said, dragging me away before I'd barely had time to finish the lock.

“Hey, there's—”

Nifty barely slowed. “Is it gonna blow up or bite someone in the next five minutes?”

I had to think about that. “No.”

“Then it can wait. We got bigger problems.”

I doubted that. A lot. But I let him drag me back to the break room, where the furniture had been shoved to the side in obvious haste, and Sharon and Venec were both on their knees beside—

“Pietr!” I broke from Nifty's hold and pushed through, almost but not quite displacing Sharon, who was doing CPR.

Or rather, she was doing
Cosa
-style CPR, which involved less thumping, and more gentle current-shocks direct to the heart while Venec did the breathing thing.

I counted off in my head, helpless to do anything, knowing any distraction could be fatal, my chest clenched tight in agony until Venec sat back and Pietr's chest fell and rose on its own. He turned his head to the side and hiccuped painfully, and I turned on Sharon so I didn't have to deal with how I felt right then.

“What the hell happened?”

She sat back on her heels, her hair totally fallen out of its chignon, her makeup still perfect. “I don't know. I was trying to keep the housekeeper off our backs while he went into working fugue, and the next thing I know we've got current ricocheting all over the place, everyone's ducking, and he's out on the floor, not breathing.” Sharon wasn't hysterical—it wasn't in her nature any
more than it was any pups, but her voice was tight and high and she looked like she wanted to hit something. I could relate. A lot.

“People.”

“What?”

We all turned to look at Pietr, who was, with Venec's help, slowly sitting up. His pale skin looked parchment-thin, and I'd swear he'd aged since I saw him last, only a few hours ago. I wanted to cuddle him, and I wanted to shake him to get an answer, all in one really complicated, crazy moment.

“They're people.” He shook his head, a violent shuddering, and grabbed at Venec's hand where it was holding his other arm, directing his words to the boss. “The dagger, and yeah, the watch, too. The client lied to us. They're not magic, they were
magicked.
”

I think we all heard the words, but couldn't process them, as though they weren't in English, or they were, but we'd suddenly lost the ability to translate it in our own brains.

“People,” Pietr said again, seeing that we weren't getting it, his voice rising in frustration. “They're people!”

“In the objects?” Sharon frowned, trying to imagine how.

“They
are
the objects.” A growl, low and dangerous.

Venec got it first. I stared at him, hearing what he'd just said but shaking my head.

“That's not possible,” Nick said.

“Yeah, it is.” The words were drawn out of me reluctantly, like someone else was talking with my mouth. “Or it could be.” Everyone turned to look at me, then. I suspected I didn't look much better than Pietr did, honestly. I felt about the same level of shocky-cold and dizzy. It was all starting to make an ugly kind of sense, all the bits we'd seen and not recognized. “The sample we took,
from the house? I think Pietr… I think the spell he used woke up more of it, and it slapped back at him.”

“Woke it up? How, it's not—”

Venec lifted a hand, cutting Sharon off mid-word.

I swallowed. I didn't want to say it, but…I knew what I knew. “It's Old.”

“You mean it was there before the crime, or…?”

“I mean it's Old,” I repeated, trying to put enough emphasis on the word that they'd hear the capitalization, so I wouldn't have to actually spell it out.

“Old… Impossible.” But Nick didn't sound convinced, and Sharon, who always knew if someone was lying, was staring at my face, her own expression stricken.

“An Old One was there? In the house? Connected to the client? But he's a Null!”

“It makes sense,” Pietr said, although he didn't look happy about it. “That's the only thing that would be able to…do that.”

Old Ones were legend. No, not legend, because we knew that they were real. They were just…old. Older than the Ancients, like dragons and klassvaaks. Ancient was a courtesy title, the way you used a call-name like The Roblin. Old Ones? You didn't talk about them, not even with reverence and certainly not with affection; they had no use at all for humans, every story was quite clear on that. They were few and dying, and good riddance to a bad age….

Except that, apparently, not all of them were quite gone. And maybe, and we were so very fucked, one was paying attention to human affairs. Through an intermediary, because we would have
known
if an Old One was
around, but… Even once removed, the thought made us all obviously uneasy.

We had thought that The Roblin was our biggest problem?

I was suddenly all too aware of how fragile my physical and magical selves actually were, how damned…breakable we all were.

*gently*

I wanted to cling to that mental touch, but it was gone, casting its lighthouse-touch on us all, in turn, and then Venec turned to Pietr, focusing on that almost-more-reasonable side of the case, first. “People. One male, one female?”

“Yeah.” Pietr looked stunned, as much that Venec believed him as the gender guess. Then realization hit him. “Oh, fuck. That bastard.”

I got the gut-sick feeling that had to come from Venec, because it was his knowledge that drove it. The wife. And the son. Not dead, not missing. Transformed.

From the expressions of my pack mates, they were thinking the same thing.

“Wait, why are we assuming he's the bastard?” Nifty said. “I mean, he…maybe they were transformed, and he was protecting them, and…”

“I've never heard of anything even remotely like this.” We all turned to find Stosser standing behind us, his expression as close to Zeus on a tear as I ever want to see. Before, he'd been worried and upset. This…this was fury.

He knew everything we knew; Venec must have told him, somehow, in the way the two of them had. Or maybe he just put two and two together and came up
with seventeen. How the hell did I know what scary-brilliant brains could do?

“Magic of that sort cannot be hushed, not on a human level. If it were an accident or a threat, if he had ever tried to seek help, or find an answer, it would have been whispered about, and those whispers would have reached the Council.”

“Or it would have gotten into the lonejack underground,” Venec said, and then glared right back at Stosser. “Don't give me that, Ian. Lonejacks know as much or more than the highest Council wonk. They just don't always give a damn.”

That was true, and Stosser just shook his head, the thunderbolts and static shimmering around him not diminishing at all.

“So he knew, and kept them like that, and didn't try to change them back. He kept them on a shelf, in his office, so he could see them like that, every single damned day. Even if he didn't arrange for it, he's a bastard.” Sharon summed it up neatly, still kneeling on the floor where Pietr had been. She reached up and gathered her hair back into its knot, securing it with a silver pin that looked like it could do damage in a fight. “So this robbery wasn't a theft but a kidnapping? Did they mean to rescue them? Or hurt Wells by taking them away?”

“And how did the Old One play into this? If it had been there, taken them…”

“There wouldn't be a house standing,” Venec said dryly. “No, I think it's safe for us to assume that whoever was there merely left the trace of its master. Accidentally or as a warning, yet unknown.”

“But that means…”

“That an Old One is somehow connected to all this. Yeah.” Venec sounded about as unhappy about that as I felt.

“So what the hell do we do now?” Pietr asked, not unreasonably. We'd taken on some heavy hitters before, but this…

“We go ask the client a few pointed questions,” Stosser said, in a tone that made me very glad I wasn't going to be anywhere near that questioning. Only his tight control kept every electronic device in the office from shorting out. The client had lied to us—which we were kind of getting used to, at this point—and landed Venec in the emergency room, and now we discover he was using magic to abuse his family. Stosser was all out of forgiveness, charity, or compassion.

The office got really quiet, once the Big Dogs left— Stosser bitching because there was no reason for Venec to come along, still looking like something the dog tried to drag out, and Venec grim and stubborn all the way out, refusing to let Stosser do this alone.

It was doubtful, considering the “magical defenses” crap that the client had fallen for, and how little he seemed to know about the
Cosa Nostradamus,
that he would be a real threat. The hellhound was gone, and Venec and Stosser were both forewarned and alert. Unless the client brought out the Old One itself…and Ben was right, if he did, he'd most likely be the first to go down in a bloody puddle.

But Venec wasn't taking chances, and we were glad they were both gone.

Except I really didn't want to let Venec out of my sight. Or be out of his, one or the other. It took all my self-control not to reach out and make sure that the connection between us was still there—I knew it was, the instinct was the same that drove me to dig mental hands into my own core, stroking and soothing the strands of current resting there. A security blanket, a reassurance that I wasn't undefended, or alone.

The urge annoyed the hell out of me, and quashing it felt good. For about thirty seconds.

“So what now?” Nick asked, voicing what we'd all been sort of tap-dancing around. “What the hell do
we
do now?”

“Now we wait,” Sharon said grimly, getting up and stretching her legs out, toes pointed like a dancer, her sensible and yet stylish pumps badly scuffed from recent events.

She was right, unfortunately. The body-dump case was closed, to all intents and purposes, and the break-in case had morphed into something totally other. We could muck about with what we had, see if anything else got stirred up and gave us new evidence, but we had no evidence to process except the gleaning, and there wasn't enough money in the world to get me to go in there again. Everyone else seemed to feel the same way.

At the same time…nobody wanted to leave, either. I joked about the pups being a pack, but we really do tend to huddle, tail-to-nose, when the weather gets rough. I glanced at the coffee machine, and sighed when I saw that the light was out. It had gotten fried at some point during the ruckus, probably when they were working
on Pietr. The fridge was probably dead too, then. They were simple machines, and usually proof against current, but…

Coffee was probably a bad idea, anyway.

“I'm going to go over the police reports again,” Sharon said. “Maybe there's something in there about the dead guy, the one Venec met with the wife.”

“Yeah.” It was make-work, at this point, but being occupied was better than sitting here biting our cuticles until they bled, or sniping at each other.

Pietr, who I already knew had a “sleep whenever possible” mentality, took over the sofa; within ten minutes he was sound asleep and snoring lightly. Sharon picked up the case-file and settled in on the chair opposite him.

I shook my head and slipped off his shoes, and he tucked his legs underneath him like a little kid. He was probably still shocky from the effects of the spell going haywire. I studied him closely, to make sure he wasn't showing any signs of distress; he might shrug it off, but getting hit by the backlash couldn't have been pretty. I knew the spell, how it worked, and shock aside, I suspected he had gotten more than just the knowledge of what he was looking at.

Had he felt their emotions? Heard their voices? I could ask, but I wouldn't. Not unless Pietr indicated he wanted to talk about it, and I didn't think he would. Not until we had the objects back safe, and found a way to restore them to their proper, human forms.

Bored by the quiet, Nick and Nifty disappeared down the hall; I could hear voices, the sound of heavy objects being moved, and then some soft thumps that made me
think they were practicing defensive moves in the large conference room.

Left to myself, I took over Stosser's office, closed the door behind me, and picked up the phone.

“Bonita. What's wrong?”

Trust a mentor to always know. I bit back a laugh that was totally inappropriate, and put my feet up on Stosser's expensive wooden desk, admiring the dull sheen of my boots. “Nothing. Okay, everything, but nothing urgent and nothing you can do anything about. I just…we haven't talked in a while, and I wanted to say hi. Did you hear we have a mischief imp in town?”

I managed to skirt over the details, making it sound more amusing than it had felt, and didn't say a damn thing about the Merge, or The Roblin, and especially not how Venec and I had set ourselves up as bait. Dancing around J always took some doing, since he was smarter than the average smart bear especially where I was concerned, and focused my mind nicely. Exactly what I'd wanted, when I called him.

When my mentor was reassured—and had wrangled a promise from me that I'd head up to Boston and have dinner with him, as soon as our cases were wrapped—I hung up the phone, and then stared at it again, the moment of quiet letting me consider lesser emergencies.

“Oh, what the hell.” Taking a card out of my pocket, I dialed the number, practically holding my breath.

A man's voice answered. “Didier Gallery, how may we help you?”

“Yes. I would like to leave a message for Wren Valere, please.”

There was a pause, as though the speaker was holding the phone away from his ear, and then I was clicked through to another voice, also male, who took my message and repeated it back to me to ensure he had it right. I thought he sounded amused. He also didn't promise that she would get back to me.

I hoped she would. If I had to move again, The Wren's building had felt…comfortable. And the idea of living in the same building as one of my generation's most notable Retrievers amused me.

I needed amusement, badly.

That done, I contemplated going out to find today's newspaper, to look through the apartment rental ads, but the disinclination to leave hung over me still, and instead I fetched my notebook back from Pietr's case and went back to Stosser's office. I wasn't sure why I went there—there were more comfortable places to do research—but the chair was comfortable, and nobody would be wandering by unless something urgent happened, so it seemed as good a place as any.

The fact that Ben's usual chair was directly opposite the desk had nothing whatsoever to do with it. What was I, a moonstruck twelve-year-old?

I was working through my notes, notebook open in my lap, pen clenched in my teeth, and totally lost to the outside world, when the air in my head filled with the heavy weight of one word.

*ass*

It wasn't a ping; more like a muted thought that came from me, except I didn't think it. More like an echo, the emotion so thick and layered that it couldn't be con
tained. Ben was annoyed, but not angry. I was curious, but not enough to inquire. I flipped my notebook closed, though, and waited to see if anything more came along.

About five minutes later: *incoming*

That
was
a ping, and it was directed at me, as though he knew I was in the office—he probably did. I had just enough time to get my feet off the desk and my ass out of the chair before the Big Dogs Translocated into the office.

They looked…tired. Stosser's hair was staticky again, like he was barely holding his core quiet, and Venec—

I didn't think; I don't think I could think. I moved around the desk and slipped my arms around him, resting my head against his chest, feeling his heart beating, slow and hard.

I'm not a caretaker, damn it; I was raised to be self-sufficient, and I expect everyone else to be, too. But the pain in his eyes was more than I could bear.

There was a hesitation, and then his arms came up around me, resting loosely across my shoulders. It wasn't a hug, but he wasn't rejecting the comfort, either. We leaned against each other, not saying anything, just breathing.