For Geoff. For taking my hand, and holding on.

My name is Bonnie Torres, and I’m a student of (in)human nature. More specifically, and according to the business cards we don’t actually have yet, I’m a Paranormal Scene Investigator. What that means is that I look at the world a little differently than most, even among my fellow Talent.

I used to be an idealist of sorts. Not that everyone was good – I knew firsthand that we were all filled with conflicting impulses, some positive and some negative, and sometimes the negative ones got out and did damage. I also knew that there were people who didn’t feel any guilt about the damage they did. But a year ago, I would have claimed that responsibility was all about your intent; that if you meant well, did your best, and didn’t hurt anyone, you could sleep with a clear conscience. Then I was recruited to join PUPI, Ian Stosser’s dream of an unbiased, impartial investigative unit designed to ferret out the truth behind crimes of a magical nature or cause.

Ian Stosser had been a certified boy wonder, once upon a time: Golden Boy of the Midwest Council, high-res Talent and general scary-ass smart guy. But something happened in Chicago, something they still don’t talk about, and he came to New York with his business partner Benjamin Venec, to hang their shingle here.

Ian said there was a need, that the Cosa Nostradamus needed us, to save it from itself. The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t all that thrilled to be saved, but Ian had been right – there was a need. After only a few months we – the Private, Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations team – got our first case, a bad one: a double murder. We solved it, proved what had happened, let the authorities – such as the Cosa has – handle the punishment. And then, once we’d demonstrated we could be trusted to be fair in our investigations, impartial in our discoveries, we were approached to investigate a few more, and they were all bad.

They only call us when it’s bad.

Magic isn’t an instinct; for most of us it requires forethought to pull current and direct it against someone else. That means Talent mostly don’t commit crimes of passion, but ones of forethought and malice. By the time we get called in? The crime’s been committed, and all we see is the tarry residue left in the aftermath, the pain and the grief and the greed and the malice and the denial – and, sometimes, the regret and remorse, too late to do any good.

When I took this job, my mentor had warned me: you rarely see anyone’s shining better nature in this job. He’d been right.

PUPI did good work, though. We got people answers, closure. We were making sure that there were consequences to actions. From the lonejacks and gypsies on the street to the Council members in their hushed private offices, the word was spreading: we were smart, we were sharp, and we were unaffiliated – something rare in the highly political world of magic. If you came to us with a mystery, we would find the answers, no matter where they led.

We investigated events. We stuck to the facts. But there’s no way, I was learning, that you could separate facts and events from the people who drive them. And people? People are complicated. Responsibility is complicated.

Every case we took, from the cold-blooded killer-for-hire to the regret-stricken being who let terrible things happen for love, taught me that some acts cannot be excused, no matter the intent... and that it’s possible to sleep soundly, your conscience clear as a cloudless sky, after inflicting terrible harm on someone. People aren’t good. They’re not bad, either, mostly. They’re actions and reactions, pushed this way and that by things we have so little control over.

There is a black and a white, yeah. And a thousand shades of gray, between. Most of us? We think our shade of gray is a hell of a lot lighter than it is. But we each have the choice – maybe not where we stand, but how aware we are of what we do.

Responsibility is complicated. Also, uncomfortable.

Being a pup isn’t easy. We look. We observe. We don’t turn away.

And if I don’t sleep soundly some nights... I have to believe it’s worth it, in the end.

Every Talent in the city probably felt it when The Roblin arrived, but most of them didn’t know what it was, not even after everything was done and dusted. There was maybe a sense of unease, a niggling in the back of their minds, not like they’d forgotten something but that something was happening that they should know about, that was going to affect them.

And then it was gone: fading into the still-chilly predawn air, lost in the quiet bustle of hospital workers changing shifts, police cars idling on street corners, short-order cooks strapping on fresh aprons and firing up grease-skimmed griddles. Those particularly sensitive to bad vibes, Null and Talent alike, shifted restlessly in their sleep, or woke feeling particularly anxious or alert, but there was nothing to tell them why they felt that way, and most of them forgot it after the first cup of coffee, and the first crisis of the day.

But because it was forgotten didn’t mean it was gone.

The malaise started downtown, and spread, like fingers of a hand stretching out to cover all five boroughs of New York City. Barely touching anything, yet sensing, feeling, absorbing the pulse of the city, finding the weak points, the delicate spots, the danger zones.

And, finding them, narrowing in for the kill.

Pietr had been waiting, semipatiently, in the break room. He took one look at my face and bit back whatever he was going to say, just handing me my case and holding the door to the hallway. One of the great things about our office was that we were only a block away from the subway. The downside was that it was the 1 line, which meant leaving the west side required a crosstown bus, or a lot of walking. Fortunately, it wasn’t a bad day, weather wise.

We made it to the subway without speaking to each other, heading downtown toward the floater, and all the related joy therein, our kits – the assorted and alchemical tools of our trade – stashed at our feet, where nobody could walk by and grab them. And with every rattle and spark along the track, I felt more and more guilty about his being sent along with me. Normally, we take the assignments as they come and try not to whine too much. It’s not like we ever get handed a bouquet of spring flowers to investigate, after all, and if we did it would be infested by hornets and nose-rot. But I felt like I had to say something to Pietr, anyway.

“Sorry.”

Pietr turned his head slightly to look at me, surprised. “Why?”

“Venec’s punishing me for the hair disaster, and you’re stuck with it by association.”

“Oh.” His face went all closed and quiet, the way it does when he processes, and I watched him curiously. For all that he liked to cause mischief, Pietr tended to take his time to consider things. He was one of our thinkers – not that he couldn’t improvise, and quickly, but not in the instinctive, nearly impulsive way Nick did. Or me for that matter, although I used to pride myself on how well I thought shit through. Not enough, apparently.

Pietr didn’t have to think long, though. “You sure it’s the hair that’s chafing his... mood? Or that you’re the real target?”

Ow. I groaned, and looked away. “Don’t you start.”

The fact that Venec and I had sparks going on – okay, sparks like Macy’s fireworks – wasn’t something you could hide from a blind fish, much less an office of trained investigators. The guys liked to tease me about that occasionally. Not meaning any harm, just... the usual shit you get, when the job is tense and the laughs few. Pietr, though, had a different take on the situation. He and I were – on a very specifically, intentionally casual basis – sexual partners. So naturally, he figured that was also why he got stuck with the floater – because there was no way an investigator like Benjamin Venec, with more experience than the rest of us slammed together, didn’t also know about our off-hours agreement, no matter how much we kept it on the q.t.

He might have been right, in ordinary conditions. But Pietr, and the others, were missing a really important part of the puzzle. The pack knew there were sparks. They also knew I wasn’t exactly shy, normally, about going after what or who I wanted. So they had to figure I didn’t want to get involved with the boss, or that the boss had shot me down, for work-reasons. Which was all sorta true.

They didn’t know about the damned Merge, though. Venec and I both agreed to keep it that way. The fact that our current had somehow recognized each other and decided we’d make pretty babies, or some weird and seriously annoying thing like that, didn’t impress me at all, and Venec, well, he really did not like being told what to do by some biomagical force.

All right, it was more complicated than that, and according to Venec’s research the Merge is Serious Doings, but I kept control over my sex life my own self, thanks, anyway, Fate, and be damned if I was going to risk not being taken seriously in my career because my current wanted me to make babies.

I have nothing against babies. Eventually. When and if I decided to have them.

But every day we worked together, the pull got stronger. If I let down my mental walls even a little bit, I knew his mood, and if I reached just an inch, I’d get my fingers into his thoughts.

Same for him, with me.

It was making us... cranky. Venec was a fair guy, for all that he was a bastard, and wouldn’t play favorites or punish someone for a screwup once the lesson was learned. My hair color was only an excuse for him to blow off some of that crank into an actual reason. Knowing that rationally didn’t make the scolding hurt any less, though.

And Lou thought I never doubted myself? That was almost funny. The Merge had made me doubt my entire personal philosophy, change the way I interacted with people, second-guess every flicker and twinge of my emotions... . I needed to get a handle on myself. A distracted investigator could not do her job, and leaving this job was... not an option.

Pietr touched his hand on mine, lightly. “Bonnie... ”

I shook my head, staring at the advertisement across the subway car instead of looking at him, listening to the chunk-chunk-whirr of the car’s movement, focusing on the subtle but real hum of current running along the third rail, instead of listening to him. “No. Stop. Work hours.”

I wasn’t talking about the touch, but what he was going to say. How the two of us blew off steam and gave comfort off-hours was off-hours. Neither of us wanted it to spill into the workday, especially if there was half a chance that it would screw up our professional relationship. Pietr and I worked well together. He backed me up, I pushed him on... we got things done.

That was why Venec had paired him with me, today. Probably. Anything else would be petty, and Benjamin Venec wasn’t petty.

Except, of course, when he was.

We rode the rest of the way in a more comfortable, companionable silence, switching from the train downtown for a crosstown bus that dropped us off at the Manhattan Bridge, and we walked the rest of the way, stopped by the usual tangle of the FDR Drive. Finding a safe place to cross would require some backtracking. Mass transit sucked when you were working a crime scene, but without a siren, cars could be even slower, and Translocation, using current to move someone from point A to point B, was a serious drain on the core of the person doing the sending, with the additional inherent risk of finding a safe place to land. You couldn’t actually land “on” someone – magic follows the same rules as physics, mostly, and two objects can’t occupy the same space – but you could get knocked over or hit by a moving object or person. As usual with magic, the odds of actually being seen doing anything was small. Nulls didn’t see what they didn’t want to see.

Oh, hell, Talent didn’t, either.

We stood there, and watched the traffic moving along the FDR, a steady stream of cars going too fast, and I heard a thoughtful hrmm rise from my companion.

“I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely no desire to become a greasy splat on the highway.”

The hrmm turned into a heavy exhale that wasn’t quite a sigh. “Me, neither.”

Especially since there was no guarantee that, in racing across the street, Pietr wouldn’t ghost out of sight, and get hit by an otherwise-paying-attention driver. After you worked with him for a while, you started thinking about things like that.

I looked around to make sure nobody was watching us, and pointed to a spot across the wide highway. He followed my finger with his gaze, and nodded.

Three seconds later, we were both on the other side, intact and unrun-over, the traffic now at our back. The sharp smell of the East River hit my nostrils, overwhelming even the smell of diesel behind us, and for a brief moment I was homesick for Boston, and J’s apartment overlooking the bay, where the smell of salt air was a daily greeting.

The moment passed, the weight of the kit in my hand reminding me what we were here for. I checked my core, making sure that it was settled, because the last thing you wanted to do was walk onto a scene with your core-current ruffled. I glanced over at Pietr, who looked to be doing the same.

“Ready?”

“Yeah.”

A short walk farther, the smell of the river getting stronger, and we were on a concrete dock that housed a parking lot, a warehouse of undetermined ownership, and, I presumed, a dead body.

We were met on the scene by a cop who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else but there. She was little, by cop standards, with thick black hair cut short, and a tea-stained complexion I’d have killed for. Talent – I thought I recognized her, but wouldn’t swear to it. New York’s a big city, and Talent don’t really clump together outside of Council functions and cocktail parties – or the occasional impromptu gossip session – but only a Talent, a magic-user like us, would have been left to guard this particular body. The NYPD had at least half a clue, even on bad days.

“You the pups?”

As questions went, it was pretty stupid, but there was a protocol that needed to be followed: I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know us. “Bonita Torres, Pietr Cholis,” I said. I waited for her to ask for official identification, but I guess she really didn’t care that much. We were here, which meant it wasn’t her responsibility anymore.

Pietr bypassed the cop and crouched to look under the orange tarp, and then backed up a step, almost involuntarily.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“You’re the investigator,” she said, looking bored. “You tell me.”

I gave her a sideways stare, and she took it without flinching. Great, now I was trying to tough-out the NYPD? Right.

I thought about pointing out that covering the body was not SOP, and that she might have ruined evidence, then decided that she already knew that and had her reasons.

“Bippis,” Pietr said. I was the nominal specialist on fatae politics, but Pietr knew a lot more about the various breeds than I did

“A what?” Distracted, I tried to place the word, and couldn’t.

“Bippis. I think that’s how it’s pronounced, anyway. I recognize the arms.”

I went to look at the body under the tarp, and saw what Pietr was talking about. The corpse looked almost human, if you could ignore the dark green skin that glittered like mica, but the arms were twice as thick around as mine, and all muscle, and extended like an orangutan’s down to its knees. And the head, which was hairless, and shaped like an anvil, almost. No wonder she’d covered it. Even in NYC, even out here where tourists didn’t wander, a corpse like that might draw notice.

“Is the color normal, or did it react to the water?” Weird question, but when it came to the fatae, it paid to ask. Or, actually we were paid to ask.

“Damned if I know.” He knelt down on the grass and touched the skin before I could remind him that we were supposed to wear gloves. Not because we might interfere with evidence – we collected data a little differently from Null CSIs – but because, well, look at what happened to poor Nifty. Some things bit even without teeth. Or even dead.

“Skin’s cool, but dry. I’m thinking the color’s natural.” He rubbed his fingers together thoughtfully. “No flaking, either.”

“You people freak me out.” That was our cop, looking a little queasy now, rather than bored.

“Human floaters are better?”

“At least they’re human,” she said, distaste evident in her voice.

Ah, bigotry, alive and stupid in New York City. She should be glad it wasn’t summer, yet. I didn’t think this guy would smell too good, a few hours in the heat.

“Somebody tied him up,” I said, taking Pietr’s lead and ignoring the cop, who returned the favor, wandering off to pointedly look away from whatever we were doing. I crouched beside him and pulled the tarp aside a little more without touching the corpse itself. “Hands and feet – they didn’t want him to be able to swim at all.”

“Assuming the breed could even swim. He looks solid, all muscle... might have sunk to the bottom, anyway,” Pietr said. “Alive or dead when he went in?”

“Oh, sure, give me the crap jobs.” I shook out my left hand, and mentally reached in to gather some current, selecting threads from the neat coil of multicolored, static-shivering magic inside my core, and drawing them up my rib cage, along my arm, and down into the fingers I’d just loosened.

Like so many of the cantrips and preset spells we’d been working on in the office the past year, this one hadn’t actually been tested in the field yet. It should work, but should and did weren’t always reading from the same page, and we’d had a few go rather spectacularly sour when tried under real-life conditions.

At least nobody was watching, or grading, this time.

I selected a specific thread, a glittery glinting dark blue that was almost purple, and directed it down away from me, into the corpse’s chest. The thread slipped through the flesh like a needle, and I could feel it tunneling down into the lungs. I don’t care who you are or what you did, the sensation of current moving like that at your command never got old.

Older spells, and modern traditionalists, used words to direct their current. Venec frowned on that: we weren’t here to entertain or impress – or intimidate – but to work. So I kept it simple. “Wet or dry?” I asked down the line of current, imbuing a sense of what I was looking for into the words, and waited. A scant second later, the current sent back its answer.

“Water in the lungs,” I said. “Our boy was tossed in still breathing. Cause of death probably drowning, unless there’s something funky about the Bippis physiology?”

“Not so far’s I know,” Pietr said. That meant absolutely nothing; there were more breeds within the Cosa Nostradamus than any human could ever encounter, or even read about, and most of ’em had at least a small community living here. New York City: melting pot of the world, and not all the ingredients were human.

“So, it was caught, tied up, and tossed in the water... ” Pietr knelt again, opening his kit and taking out a brush and a small vial of something glittering. The brush was just a makeup brush, a very expensive one, and the glittery powder was fine-ground, electrically charged metal shavings. Metal conducted current the same way it did for electricity, allowing us to use the lightest possible touch and lowering the risk that we’d disturb evidence. He added a pinch of shavings to the brush, and swirled it over the top of the bindings, careful this time not to touch anything with his bare hands. His personal current could affect the shavings, even through the latex.

The dust settled, and Pietr cocked his head, studying the results. His current was so light, so subtle, I couldn’t even see a hint of it in the air over the bonds. Impressive, as always. I was good at gleaning, my memory capturing details I didn’t even notice I’d seen, but when it came to this kind of physical collection, Pietr had me beat.

I waited, shivering a little as the wind off the river reached through my jacket, while Pietr focused on the spell’s results. The shavings carried the spell into the dead body’s tissue, showing him the muscles that had last been used, and how much energy they had burned. “Yeah, it struggled. Another ten minutes, maybe, and the ropes would have given way.” They were thick twine, but definitely frayed, I had noticed that. On a human, they would have been enough to immobilize someone indefinitely. “But that kind of struggling would have used oxygen, and sped up the drowning. Whoever tossed it in knew what they were doing.”

I exhaled heavily, feeling the air leave my lungs, thinking about what was being said – and what wasn’t. “Which probably means Cosa, not just some scared humans looking to clean the world of a freak.” We’d been having trouble in the city – actually, we’d been having Troubles: humans – Talent and Null – bashing up against the fatae, and everyone coming out the worse for it. During the ki-rin “he said, she said” disaster, it had looked like the entire city was going to combust, but when we’d been able to prove that both humans and fatae had been involved, the flames died down to coals again.

Died down, but hadn’t gone out. I still had nightmares, sometimes, about the sound of the ki-rin’s voice when it admitted its guilt... regret and remorse that came too late, after four lives were ruined, one fatally.

I’d always been a sunny-side-up girl, but the world was a very gloomy place, some days.

“Maybe. Probably, yeah.”

“Joy.” And trying to get answers out of the fatae community was always such a pleasant experience. Even when they were human-friendly, they didn’t like to tell us anything. Except when they were telling us things we didn’t want to know, or trying to talk us into something to their benefit, of course.

“All in a day’s work,” Pietr said, putting away the dust and brush, and locking his case again. There were still things to be done, but you didn’t leave your kit open, ever.

“You gonna take the body, or not?” the cop asked, coming back from her wander of the perimeter to stand over my shoulder, getting way too close inside my personal space.

“You rush your lab techs this much?” I snapped, annoyed at being interrupted.

The cop showed a wide, toothy, happy-to-annoy-you grin. “Yep.”

“Great. Try to rush me again, and I’ll hotfoot you in ways that won’t wear off for a week.” She could try to match me, but we both knew she’d lose. I might not be a natural powerhouse the way some of my pack mates were, but you didn’t get to be a pup without picking up some serious skills, and I’d a year’s worth of training under my belt now.

She backed off.

I looked over at Pietr, who was still studying the body. “You want to do the gleaning?” It was normally my job, but there didn’t seem to be anything particularly difficult, and the Big Dogs like everyone to keep at least their pinkie in with that particular spell.

“Not really. But I will.”

Gleaning is our version of videography: we collect all the visual evidence, and replay it, back in the office, into a three-dimensional display. We tried, at first, to glean the emotional record, since current leaves trace, and a strong Talent can usually pick up strong emotions after the fact. Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that when you’re talking about the sort of violence we tend to uncover, that’s not always the smartest idea. We’d been caught up in it, and our first case had almost been our final one. So Venec laid down the law: physical evidence only.

While Pietr went into fugue-state to glean, I wandered down to the East River, or as close as I could get to it, standing on a man-made concrete pier. It looked like... water. Bluish-gray, little ebbs and currents swirling the surface, underneath... Who the hell knew what was underneath. The rivers, Hudson and East, were a hell of a lot cleaner than they had been once upon a time, but a tidal river could hide anything... at least until it pushed it to shore.

I stared out across the surface, anyway, looking. They’d pulled the body out here – I saw a little yellow flag fluttering in the breeze – but odds were it had gone into the river somewhere uptown and floated down. All the landing site would tell me was what size shoe the finders had worn, and how far they’d dragged him before he’d been wrapped up in official sailcloth and brought up here, in direct contradiction of every rule of Standard Operating Procedure the NYPD was supposed to follow. I looked, anyway. You never knew where or when or how something useful might turn up.

In this instance, though, I didn’t even find a candy wrapper that looked suspicious, just a lot of gunky mud I had to knock off my shoes when I got back up on the pier. I guess I understood why they’d moved the body, but it still pissed me off. I’d bet the NYPD hadn’t even bothered to do a basic sweep of the area before calling us in – something this obviously Cosa business, their protective filters snapped up and they didn’t see anything, didn’t know anything, didn’t have to write up anything.

I turned back to stare at the water again. I would do a deeper read, but it didn’t matter: between the fatae that lived in the local rivers and the ocean waters that fed it, and the power plant upriver, and the general ambient noise of however many thousands of Talent in this area on a daily basis, there was enough magical white noise to cover a multitude of clues, and not even Venec’s nose was good enough to sniff anything out of this.

I gave up, and went back to the body.

“I got it,” Pietr said, standing up and wincing as his knees cracked loud enough for me to hear.

“You’re getting old, old man.”

“It’s not the years, it’s the damned mileage,” he said, and he wasn’t joking. We were in our twenties, everyone except the Big Dogs and Lou, but some days I woke up feeling like the tail end of a forty-year-old. Current took it out of you. What we were doing, what we were seeing... that took it out of you, too.

I looked at the tarp. Someone had taken it out of our vic, too.

You didn’t end up bound-and-drowned by accident. Someone had killed this fatae, for whatever reason. We didn’t know who it was, if it left a family, if it had been murdered for cause or on a lark, or if there were other bodies waiting to be found, or if the killing was a one-off or if they would strike again. Hell, we didn’t even know the victim’s gender, or how to check.

I’d be carrying all those unknowns with me tonight when I tried to get to sleep, and keeping me company in my dreams, and when I woke up again, hoping against hope we’d be able to find even one answer... and knowing we might not.

Sometimes, this job sucked large, pointed rocks.

Pietr pulled the tarp back over the body and nodded to the cop that we were done. They’d cart the body off to the city morgue, to the little cold room in the back that nobody talked about, and stash it there until we figured out who the next of kin were. “You think Shar and Nick are having more fun?”

I glared up at the clear blue sky. “They’d better be.”

Not every aspect of PUPI involved investigation. Some times, it required suasion and statistics. That particular part of running the company they left to Ian Stosser.

Or, more to the point: that part, he kept for himself.

Ian stood in front of his audience, making eye contact with selected members seemingly at random, and infused his words with the firm and fervent belief he had in his team, his methods, and his results. “In the year we have been accepting clients, our success rate has been a rather significant 87%. Of the remaining 13%, we still managed to bring up enough information to pass along to Null authorities. The fact that my team has not yet been able to close the case you referenced – ” organ-leggers, an open ticket that still annoyed Ian “ – merely emphasizes the difficult and delicate nature of the work we do. More, that we are the only force that is both willing and capable of taking on cases involving magic.”

He did not emphasize the willing part, but knew that his point had been taken, here among those who could do good, and instead chose to hamstring his efforts.

Someone in his audience tapped a gold-plated pen on the table, impatiently. “There are others who work with magic, Stosser. You’ve been involved with some of them yourself.”

“Private investigators, working on a borrowed shoestring and their own instincts.” That was damning the half-fatae detective, who was actually reasonably capable, but Ian Stosser did not let anyone get the upper hand in presentations he was making. “My team is trained to use science as well as magic, harnessing their instincts into verifiable and logical routes, using teamwork to pool our respective skills into something greater. Perhaps more importantly, we determine the evidence not by who hires us, but by what the investigation reveals as facts.”

The feel of the room remained resistant. The individuals gathered here didn’t want to hear, didn’t want to know, and most especially didn’t want to have to change their minds.

Ian Stosser was too trained, too skilled to sigh, and to turn up his current-driven charisma in a room filled with already-suspicious Talent of comparable skill would be a disaster. Instead, he ratcheted his body language up a notch, using the cast of his shoulders, the cant of his hip, even the way he rested his arm to project a calm, reasoned, pragmatic appeal that would – hopefully, ideally – reassure them without their knowing why they were reassured. That was the trick with the Council: most of them so relied on current, they forgot the basics of human psychology, too.

“What I am asking of you is a rational decision, not an emotional one,” he continued. “When a crime has been committed, the offender must be determined, and punished. We are all in agreement about that.” A firm, if subtle nod, and he was pleased to see several in his audience nod back, almost automatically. “I am offering you, again, the way to determine, fairly and without prejudice, where the responsibility might rest, in any given situation. That way the proper individuals will be taken to task.”

A voice from the far end of the table, previously quiet, spoke up then. “And what happens when you cannot determine, for certain, who that party is? Or, worse, when you accuse the wrong person?”

Once. Once, they had... Ian beat down his irritation.

“We do not claim to be perfect,” he said smoothly. “We do claim to be extremely good. And that, sirs, madams, is more than you have right now, with your refusal to accept the results of our investigations into your deliberations.”

It was the same song and dance he’d done twice before, for each regional Council, crafting his argument to each specific region’s objections, designed to entice each specific Council with what he thought they wanted.

According to Cosa history, the Mage Council had been split into regional areas back in the 1800s to keep them from becoming too powerful and overshadowing the lonejacks, or unaffiliateds, in each region. In theory. In practice, it was because the seated Council members didn’t trust each other any more than the lonejacks trusted the Councils et al. So far, two Councils had voted to accept his people’s testimony to their deliberations. The Eastern Council was not one of those, and their refusal, here in PUPI’s base of operations, where they could see the good being done directly, stuck in Ian’s craw. He took that personally.

“Already, the Midwest Council has benefited from our work. You know this.” The pups had determined the truth of a murder, causing some embarrassment to the Council, true, but saving them considerable danger going forward by revealing the presence of a stone killer for hire, who also happened to be a Talent. “And you, yourself, saw the results of our efforts.” He did not go into detail; he didn’t have to. The events of the previous spring, where they had exposed a scam that might have set human against fatae, had been covered up for fiscal and political reasons, but they all knew the truth. Had it not been for PUPI, the damage could have been devastating – and bloody.

“You make strong points.” Madame Howe, the leader of the Eastern Council, was a delicate woman, but nobody ever made the mistake of thinking her frail or gentle. The Talent who worked for her called her the electric dragon, and it wasn’t an affectionate nickname. “And we appreciate your restraint while making this presentation.”

She might have been speaking for the entire Council. Or she might have been using the royal “we.” Ian merely inclined his head to her, accepting both the reminder that they were his equals, in current-usage, and that his part in this meeting was over.

“I shall leave you to your discussions, then. Madame, Council members.”

He left the wood-paneled conference room at exactly the right pace, neither hurried nor lingering, counting off the steps deep in his head. When the door closed behind him, he did not stop or breathe a sigh of either relief or disgust, but kept moving, headed not for the elevator, but the stairs. He needed to move.

The hard sound of his shoes in the stairwell gave him something to focus on, and once out on the street, he let his stride lengthen, taking full advantage of the mid-morning lull in street traffic. He pushed all his excess energy, both physical and magical, down through his hips, down his legs, and out into the pavement, a sort of walking meditation and grounding all at once.

Everything was working; it was working exactly the way he had planned. They had enough work coming in that – for the first time since starting this venture – he wasn’t paying the bills out of his personal account. If the Council relented, and approved PUPI to their members, they might actually have more work than they could handle. He would need to rearrange the office structure, bring in another investigator, maybe set up a separate lab, so they could work out new spells without worrying about shorting out the entire building... .

His mentor would warn him against building a business plan on ifs. Stosser believed that it was almost impossible to fail, betting on the trouble that the combination of magic and human folly could create. Even if this Council refused to approve them, eventually they would gain clients from within these ranks, as well as beyond. Ian Stosser took a long view, always. In the long view, PUPI was needed, and therefore would thrive.

Now that the presentation was over, however, another worry insisted on worming its way into his thoughts.

Benjamin.

Ian frowned, a sudden surge of irritation and worry sparking the air around him, and setting off a car alarm on the street as he passed by. They had been friends since they were teenagers, the kind of friendship you counted on, even if you didn’t see each other for years. Ian hadn’t hesitated for a moment when thinking of a partner for this venture, hadn’t hesitated in dragging the other man away from his life in another city, from whatever else he might have planned, and handing him the team of green Talent to mold into proper investigators.

Ben, as Ian expected, had taken to the new venture perfectly. It had given the other man a focus, a mission, a purpose he had been lacking before, wasted on jobs that were beneath his skills. The fact that the mission served his, Ian’s own vision... well, they all benefited.

But the past few months, his partner had been... off his game. Distracted, and even more short-tempered than usual. Ben never took it out on anyone, but Ian, a trained reader of what people didn’t want known or seen, saw the pressure building under his friend’s skin.

Whatever it was, whatever the cause, it had to be lanced and drained, before it got infected. Ian had his suspicions about what was going on, but he didn’t act on suspicions alone.

Stepping off the curb to hail a cab, Ian reached up and undid the clip that had held his flame-red hair in a respectable fashion, letting the strands fall down his back, spreading with current-static against the fabric of his suit. The tension in his scalp lessened only slightly. When a cab pulled to the curb to deposit its passenger, he strode forward and claimed it ahead of some schlub half a step behind.

“Uptown,” he said to the driver, then gave the office address. The car jerked forward into traffic, and he tried to relax against the plastic upholstery. His attempts to figure out what was wrong had, so far, met with “leave it alone, Ian,” and then a crankier, more laden “back off, boss,” when he approached Torres. Ian would be the first to admit that he wasn’t any sort of relationship guru, but when even he could see something simmering... .

Were it anyone else, once the direct approach was blocked, Ian Stosser would have gone the circuitous route, finding a weak spot in someone else’s armor, cajoling and coaxing and out-and-out pulling as needed, wiggling the information he wanted that way. He was a trained politician, a born schmoozer. If he wanted to know something, he could and would discover it.

Except... this was Ben. His best friend. Possibly, if he was going to be blunt, his only friend. And for the first time in his life, Ian Stosser didn’t feel comfortable about getting what he wanted, not if it meant digging into Ben’s personal life after he’d been warned off.

Ben wanted to deal with it, whatever “it” was, himself. And so, Ian was going to have to accept that.

For now.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to keep an eye on the situation. And, if needed, step in. Ben’s life was his own; except where it had an impact on PUPI. Then, he belonged to Ian.

Thursday morning I woke up with a head filled with unsettling dreams and an intense desire to kick some investigative ass, since it seemed like that was the only part of my life that held any upside, right now. I bopped into the shower, scrubbed myself down, and practically threw myself into my work-clothes. The solid sound of my boots on the sidewalk was like a drumbeat moving me forward, and even a delay on the subway and a busker trying to play an out-of-tune ukulele couldn’t ruin my mood.

The boyos who used to always linger on the stoop between the subway and the office, catcalling in a friendly way, weren’t there, and I realized suddenly that I hadn’t seen them in weeks. And I hadn’t even noticed until now, getting to the office so early, and leaving at odd hours. Had they all gotten jobs, or gone back to school? I didn’t know – and had no easy way to find out. I didn’t even know their real names.

I decided that yes, they had gotten their asses back into class, or were gainfully employed. Anything else was... not acceptable, today.

“Hi, honey, I’m home!” I chucked my coat into the closet, and checked the sign-out board in the front room. Lou had put it up when she decided she was tired of trying to remember who had gone where. Everyone’s name was listed, even Stosser’s, and there were columns for “in,” “lunch,” “out,” and a wider space for details of where we were and what we were doing there. Half the time we even remembered to use it.

Nick, the board informed me, had been sent out to do follow-up interviews on the break-in. Everyone else was in. I checked myself as “in,” grabbed a cup of coffee and went in search of the rest of the team.

I found Sharon, Pietr, and Venec in the main conference room, where Sharon was glowering at my report from yesterday like I’d done something to personally offend her.

“What?” I asked, trying to curb my instinctive defensive reaction.

She didn’t even bother to look up. “You didn’t test the body.”

“Test it for what?” My hackles rose, slightly. “There wasn’t any current on it, the bastard had drowned to death from the water in its lungs, which I did test, yes, to verify, and the rope burns were pretty clear indicators of why it didn’t swim to shore. Unless you have some hidden store of knowledge about the breed you’d like to share with the class?”

“What kind of water was it?”

I stopped, mid-rant, and stared at her. “Son of a bitch.”

I’d checked that there was water in the corpse’s lungs. I hadn’t checked to see if it was salt or fresh. The East and Hudson rivers were both tidal – they were salty. If it had been freshwater...

Freshwater would mean that our Bippis had been killed somewhere else, in another body of water, and tossed into the river after the fact.

When I screw up, I own it. Nodding an apology to Sharon, I turned to Venec, who was in his usual hold-up-the-wall pose, his eyes closed and his face not showing much of anything at all, a stone-cold poker player. I couldn’t get even a tremor of sensation out of him: both our walls were up, and holding. “I fucked up. Boss, you want I should – ”

“Send Pietr.” He opened his eyes to look at me, and I tasted that hot candied ginger again, even though neither wall budged. “I want to hear about that scrying you did last night.”

Pietr, who had already hauled himself out of the chair and was heading for the door, checked himself, barely, before moving on. He didn’t have even a hint of foresee in him – most Talent didn’t – and was fascinated by it. While I’d read his tarot cards once or twice as a lark, I’d refused to scry for him. I don’t scry for people as a rule, least of all friends. I didn’t always get something, but when I did it was always accurate, probably due to the additional whammy of the kenning. Nobody needs to know their personal fate, and I didn’t need to be the one to give it to them.

I stopped, struck by that thought. Was that why I was so pissed about this stupid Merge? Not because it was trying to make me do something, but because I thought it was trying to tell me what my capital-F Fate would be? If so, that was pretty stupid. No matter how strong this Merge thing ended up being, or how it would change my life if I let it, that wasn’t fate, or destiny.

I could feel a crease etch between my eyebrows. Was it?

I really wanted to follow that thought, the analytic cast of my mind and my Need to Know warring with the fact that I was on office-time, and Venec was standing there, waiting for my report.

“Now?” I asked, stalling. We weren’t exactly a formal organization, but usually reports were written – or presented in front of the entire team – for brainstorming. Nifty and Nick and Stosser were conspicuous by their absence, even though the board said they were in the office. Ian could be anywhere, from his back office to Timbuktu. He ignored the board unless someone else checked him in or out.

Venec frowned at me, all Big Dog. “Now.”

Verbal report, then, not written. “It was mostly visual. Fire-current-fire and real fire. Metal spires, shattered, but I think they were representational, not real.” It was tough to tell how, exactly, but real things felt different somehow. A lot had been written up about scrying, but as usual with current, it seemed to work slightly different with each person. That was part of what made our job... interesting.

“A dragon, turning overhead.” That had felt real. Physical. There was something else, something I wasn’t remembering... .

“A dragon?” Sharon had been trying not to listen in, but that caught her attention. I kept my gaze on Venec, the way his eyes drooped a little at the corners, and his nose really didn’t fit the rest of his face, and the tiny imperfection in his lip, that made it seem almost crooked. It should have been distracting, but somehow his features focused my memory into its usual razor-sharp perfection. “It could have been a projection of emotions, anger, or power. Maybe.” My tone would have told a deaf person I didn’t believe that. “I was being shoved from viewpoint to viewpoint – ” that had been the bungee cord “ – so a lot of people are going to be involved, somehow. I don’t think it’s associated with this job,” I said. I looked at Sharon as though waiting for some connection to kick in – or not – and then considered the residue of the scrying. “Either job. It feels... ”

“Another scrying of danger.” He stared at me. “Still in the future?”

Right. That was why it all seemed familiar. I’d had a shimmer of something months ago, during the ki-rin job. That was what I’d told Stosser and Venec, then; that there was a distant sense of danger, of something off-kilter, but I couldn’t identify the source.

“Yes. Closer now. But not immediate.”

I hoped. If I was wrong, and that beast was circling overhead even now, even if it was, please god, only metaphorical...

Venec picked up on what I wasn’t saying, although that was probably just his own instincts working again. “Bad?”

His words triggered details I didn’t remember seeing the first time; I saw the splatter of blood against the snow, smelled the stink of something burning, the feel of those claws on my skin, and nodded slowly. “It will be, yeah.” I hadn’t known that for certain before, hadn’t even known until he asked. But I knew, now. That’s how the kenning worked. You don’t always know what you know, and sometimes you don’t know what it was until someone else tells you. Combine it with a strong scrying, and I was never, ever wrong. Even when I wished I were. “In winter, I think.” There had been snow, ice. “Not now.”

“All right.” He seemed satisfied, for the moment. I didn’t trust it. “You wrote it down?”

I swallowed, tasting the stink of that burning and the blood in the back of my throat, as though I’d breathed it in, deep. “Most of it, yeah. In my notebook.” I’d had to, dumping it out before I could fall asleep.

“Get me a copy.” He switched gears. “I’m switching you up on the cases – Sharon has your notes, you take hers. See if there’s anything that bites you on the nose.”

That was the PUPI philosophy – nobody got ownership of a case; we all worked everything. It hadn’t been a problem when we started out, and had one job every couple of months; everyone was chomping to get their teeth into something and who was working what didn’t matter so much. Now, with different cases at cross-times, things might get a little complicated, even confusing. Venec wasn’t going to let that slow him down, though, and we’d damned well better keep up. Like the in/out board, we needed to track things. Lou, bless her, was working on a system for that, too.

I hadn’t lied when I’d told her we were a stronger team for her being part of it.

With Venec’s gaze still on me, I sat at the table across from Sharon, creating a tiny spot of current on the table to act as a combination coaster and coffee-warmer. It was a crappy waste of current, but I hated the taste of even lukewarm coffee. Sharon shoved a folder of notes across the table at me, and raised one of those elegant eyebrows at my current-coaster, but didn’t say anything. We were still not forgiven for the pizza-grease stains faintly outlined in the middle of the table.

I opened the file. Sharon’s notes were neatly handwritten, readable as a printed page. Nick’s... not so much. And it wasn’t a guy-thing, because the others all managed to make their notes legible, and Nifty’s handwriting was better than mine, for all that his hand dwarfed most pens.

“Someday, one of us is going to have to put some effort into a current-run printer,” I said, trying to puzzle out a word in Nick’s initial overview. The bastard had run over into the margins, and not rewritten his notes for the file when he got back to the office. I was so going to kill him. “A dictation machine or something.”

“Nice retirement plan. You go for it.”

Sharon wasn’t being sarcastic – I was one of the better improvisers in the office, and something like that, if I could make it work, could be worth a small but nice bundle in the community. Something to think about later. Much, much later.

I gave up on Nick’s notes, and moved over to Sharon’s, figuring that I could use his to add color commentary, later. I’d just gotten into a nice comfortable groove, making checkmarks where something caught my eye, when a roar tore through the office.

“Goddamn it!”

Once I’d gotten my heart back into my chest enough to determine that (a) the bellow belonged to Nifty, and (b) he sounded more pissed off than angry or scared, I drew the current that had automatically sparked on my skin in defensive mode back down into my core, and spent a minute getting my control – and my heartbeat – back to normal levels.

Sharon recovered faster than I did, and was on her feet and poking her nose out into the hallway. I noted in passing that the previously closed door now looked like it had been pulled off its hinges, hanging sideways like a post-Mardi Gras reveler, and that Venec was nowhere to be seen. The two facts were not unrelated. Big Dog had scary-fast reflexes.

Sharon followed her nose out into the hallway, and I followed her. The hallway was empty, but the door into the second conference room was open, if still attached to both hinges. Looking in, we encountered Venec, his back to us, a rather sheepish-looking Nifty, who was covered in a soft gray soot, and Lou, who looked...

Smug. Really, quietly smug.

I laughed, reading the scene quickly, with the ease of familiarity. Nifty had done something stupid, and Lou felt she was finally out from under the mockathon. If he’d blown anything up, she was right.

“Anybody dead?” I asked. Venec turned his back on the tableau, and glared at me.

Oh, boy. His hair looked like he’d just run his hands through it in exasperation, his eyes were dark like whoa, and if you really looked at his body language you’d think he was about to start swearing, but his wall was down just enough that I got hit with a full-body blast of tight-wound hysterics just waiting for privacy to explode.

Whatever had happened, Venec thought it was funnier’n hell, and I was the only one who knew. Laughing, though? Not a good idea right now. Especially if Venec had to read Nifty the riot act over something he’d done wrong. I turned away, looking out the sole window in the room to give myself time to recover, and blinked.

A pigeon had just flown past the window... backward. Oooookay. Maybe J was right when he said I needed some downtime, maybe a vacation in the tropics somewhere... .

I was still staring out the window trying to decide if I’d really seen that or just hallucinated it, most of my awareness still on the scene behind me, when the sound of the office’s front door slamming open bought me back to the scene in the room.

“Lawrence, go get cleaned up. Make sure you get all of that off your skin, or it will just make the itching worse.” Venec’s voice was the usual low rumble, not even a hint of amusement in it. “Lou, can you re-create the steps prior to Mr. Lawrence’s mishap?”

Uh-oh. I didn’t quite hold my breath, but I bet Sharon did. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that Lou’s smirk had turned to uncertainty. Damn it, I thought, but kept it within my own walls, don’t push her like that!

Lou was just as skilled as the rest of us in theory – she wouldn’t have been hired, otherwise – but her control of anything external was crap, making her use of active forensic magic... iffy. So far the calm of the office kept her steady, but this would be the first real under pressure test since her rather public screwup with the garbage truck.

Although blowing it up like that had exposed the body hidden inside that we hadn’t known about. So in the end, it had actually been a plus.

Lou didn’t see it that way, though, and neither had Venec.

At the moment, she looked exactly like she had the moment the spell went bad, wide-eyed and panicked. “Ah... ”

I would swear under oath that Sharon started edging out of the conference room without seeming to move at all. She’d clearly been taking lessons from Pietr, who was almost Retriever-like in his ability to disappear when stressed. I was torn between wanting to beat Shar out the door, and being fascinated by what Lou might do.

“Yes or no?”

Lou, stung by the cold tone, met his question with a flat stare I admired, knowing firsthand how knee-quaking his glare could be. “Yes.” If she had any doubts whatsoever, you couldn’t tell from her voice, or her body language.

“Good. Do so. Sharon, stop that. You’re Lou’s second. Make sure she doesn’t go splat, too. Bonnie, go fetch Nick and get back to work. When Nifty finishes cleaning up, update him on the break-in. I want to see dioramas of both scenes when I get back.”

We didn’t exactly snap off salutes, but nobody argued. And nobody asked Venec where he was going, when he headed past Nick, and down the hallway toward the elevator.

Much to my surprise, I’d managed a hard seven hours of dead-to-the-world sleep, got up in time to not rush through my shower, and still made it to the office by 8:00 a.m, even stopping on the corner to grab a bagel with a-schmear from the coffee cart guy.

The teenagers were missing from the stoop again.

I forced myself to take the elevator, shivering slightly as I did so. But the doors opened safely on the seventh floor, and that felt like victory. Someone had just gone into one of the two offices across the hall – the photographer’s – closing the door softly behind them, but other than that the hallway was empty.

I unlocked our door, shucked my jacket, and hung it in the closet. Only one coat there – Pietr’s – but the weather was nice enough that that didn’t mean anything. There was the low murmur of conversation from the small workroom, and a light showing under the door, down the hallway in Stosser’s office. Since we’d long ago tossed the idea of nine to five out the window, I wasn’t surprised not to be the first one in, despite being early.

I went back to the break room and grabbed my mug – Sharon’s gift, with a brightly feathered, very dead parrot painted on the side – out of the cabinet, filling it with coffee and doctoring it to a proper consistency, and took a long hit, feeling my brain start to kick in for real. There were, as I saw it, two options. I could hang around and see what was happening, or I could get to work.

I got to work.

As per the Big Dogs’ rules, we were supposed to take off at least one day every six, and if it wasn’t a matter of life or death, two days in a row were preferred. It’s not a suggestion, either: they know that we’re all a little... compulsive, mainly because they trained us to be that way. So when Friday night rolled around, we were kicked out of the office and told not to show our faces again until Monday morning.

Or, as Stosser put it “go pretend to have a life.”

Obediently, I spent the weekend doing things that had nothing to do with the job. Or tried to, anyway. There were just too many questions about too many things unanswered for me to really relax. But I stayed away from the office, didn’t pick up my crystals, and if I did some quiet digging into the name “Roblin” and spent most of my Sunday night dinner with my mentor asking him about potential inter-fatae politics involving Bippis, well... what did the Big Dogs expect, really?

“I’m sorry, Bonita,” J said. He had made veal piccata, deceptively simple and mouthwateringly delicious. “What little I know matches what you have already discovered. I could ask around, see if my contacts know anything, but... ”

But his network was at a considerably higher pay grade than the vic’s, so they weren’t going to be much help with the specifics. Now, if we had some kind of high-end political collision going on... .

I made a quick “avert” sign with my fingers, discreetly hidden by a linen napkin. J frowned on my more old-world superstitions, although he’d just sigh and look away, if he caught me doing it.

“I wish I could be of more help. I worry about you – which you know.”

He did. But he also had stood by our agreement, never to poke his nose in unless specifically requested. For a moment – not even a moment – I was tempted to tell him about The Roblin, to see if he could elaborate on Madame’s comments. But odds were he wouldn’t be able to add anything, and then he would really worry.

My mentor wasn’t a young man anymore. I couldn’t stop doing my job, but I didn’t need to tell him every whisper of trouble that floated in.

So I went home – J giving me a Translocation-lift from Boston back to New York – without any useful answers, and first thing Monday morning showed up in the office, filled with well-fed energy, ready for something to break wide open.

Unfortunately, nothing did. In fact, Monday was filled with nothing but a lot of frustration, despite working until nearly ten in the evening trying to tear everything known apart, and put it back together usefully. Nearly a week after the cases landed on our desk, there wasn’t a single peep on the street about who might have ransacked our client’s house, or why, and I had utterly failed to reconstruct my diorama, even with Pietr’s help. And we were no closer to knowing what The Roblin was or why we were involved. Morale, in a word, sucked.

We gave up on the diorama for the moment, since frustration did not lead to fine-tuned current, and instead spent most of Tuesday morning loading the whiteboard with every detail we had been able to dredge up on the floater, going through the last-time-seen and the river tides to put together a timeline, and not coming up with any plausible leads. The break-in investigation didn’t seem to be going anywhere – the client was stalling us on a list of things that were taken, for some reason having to do with his insurance company – and none of the fatae wanted to talk about the dead Bippis, not one bit. Since the only thing the fatae as a rule liked more than themselves was gossip about other beings, we weren’t sure if they were scared of something, or nobody had an honest, or dishonest, clue. I’d even tapped Bobo, the Mesheadam my mentor had hired as an off-again on-again bodyguard for me, more for J’s peace of mind than my actual safety. Bobo was always willing to help, but he hadn’t come up with anything yet, either.

Around noon my stomach rumbled, so I left Pietr staring at the board like it was the Rosetta stone, and booked out to grab some fresh air, and lunch.

Heading down the street, mindfully breathing in the air and letting it clear both my lungs and my brain, I spotted one of “my” missing boys sitting on the stoop. Weirdly, that made me feel better. I ended up in a little corner deli down the street from the office, getting an extra-loaded ham-and-Swiss grinder to go and contemplating adding a couple of cookies to that, when Nifty walked in, clearly in the same “feed me or die” mood. Chasing leads and current-use both burned calories at an impressive rate, and it wasn’t like he was any kind of a delicate flower.

In fact, Nifty’s dark-skinned bulk seemed to almost spark in the air as he walked, his core getting past him in ways that would have made any mentor worth their salt send him back to schooling. I didn’t say anything. An entire office filled with frustrated Talent? It’s a wonder things weren’t sparking and failing throughout the entire building: I guess the money the guys had put in for shielding and grounding was paying off. And knowing that The Roblin was out there somewhere was making the fact that nothing had actually hit us even worse: we all knew that the quiet was not going to last. Venec had told us he would look for signs of unrest elsewhere, and we were supposed to focus on the cases, but... well, that was a lot easier to say than do.

My coworker leaned over the counter and gave his order. “Two tuna subs and a large Coke.”

Nifty was a big guy, I was surprised he hadn’t just gone down another block and gotten a whole pizza.

“How’s the rash?” I asked him, when I saw he had noticed me.

“Rashy.” He watched as I pushed money across the counter, and pocketed my change while the guy behind the counter wrapped up my order. “I’m more itchy to get the hell out in the field again, cause I can’t still be contagious after this long. Hell, I’ll wear full-length opera gloves, set a new fashion. You think you can put in a good word with Venec for me?”

I thought about playing dumb, decided it wasn’t worth it. Even as my irritation boiled over, everything I’d been worrying about, everything I’d been repressing, escaped in a single unguarded, overtired moment.

“I’m not sleeping with him, and even if I were, what makes you think he’d listen to a damn thing I said if he thought otherwise?” I didn’t wait for Nifty to answer, but took my lunch and stalked out of the deli.

I knew it. I knew it. Never mind that Nifty hadn’t actually implied that he disapproved of whatever he thought was going on, or given me real grief, it changed the dynamic. The fact that they suspected something was going on inevitably made me less one of the pack and more... what? Venec’s chew-toy, someone he kept around merely for his own amusement?

No. I took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. I was pissed, but not so pissed off I lost track of reality. Nobody who’d ever met Venec would think he took chew-toys. Me, yeah, maybe. But not Venec.

Did they think that Venec was my chew-toy? The thought was so delightfully absurd I actually stopped dead on the sidewalk, and then had to apologize when a very irritated older woman nearly bumped into me. She glared at me from under perfectly dyed purple bangs, and moved on past.

Huh.

I grinned, my unusual spurt of temper fading, and decided that I would not mention that chew-toy thought to Venec. Not that the topic would ever come up, but if it did I suspected he wouldn’t find it as amusing as I did.

For the first time in weeks, I was able to think about the Merge with something other than annoyance. Yeah, okay. Maybe, as long as I was rolling with it, I’d see if I couldn’t get myself cut into the betting action in the office, after all.

“You work for Stosser.”

I stopped, a chill hitting my veins. The growling voice came from behind me, slightly to the right, which meant the speaker was on the curb or in the street, and lower down than my shoulder, which meant that they weren’t human-adult height. And the question wasn’t asked like they were looking for someone to hire.

“I do,” I said. No point in denying it. I reached into my core with a mental hand and gathered a pool of current, letting it slow around imaginary fingers, passive, but ready.

“Tell him to lay off. Nobody wants his nose in this.”

This? This what? The break-in? The dead body? Something else Stosser was looking at without bothering to tell any of us? Some case we hadn’t even taken on yet? I hated imprecise threats.

“If you want me to carry a message,” I said, proud of how calm my voice sounded, “you’re going to have to give me more detail than that. Stosser puts his pointy nose into a lot of things.”

The voice didn’t think that was funny. It growled, and then something hard and sharp hit me just behind the knees, and I went down onto the pavement, hands flat to keep me from going nose-to-gravel, exactly the way we weren’t supposed to fall.

“Humans have no place in fatae business,” it said. “Keep to your own kind.”

I lay there as the sound of heavy footsteps – bare skin, flat feet, I noted mentally – stopped, and the sound of a car door being slammed and a car taking off replaced it.

The floater, then, most likely. All righty.

I waved off the offer of help from a passerby who had carefully not seen anything odd happening, and got back to my feet, checking to make sure my sandwich was unmushed. It was. I wish I could say the same for my pants; there was a tear in the left knee that not even a skilled tailor was going to fix. Damn it, I’d liked these pants, too. They were a dark gray wool that moved like silk, and had cost me a small fortune.

The front door to our office building had been magicked way back when by Venec to recognize our signatures, so I didn’t have to worry about trying to get my keys out of my jacket pocket, but merely pushed the handle with my elbow, and slipped inside. Someone came up behind me, and I held the door open with my foot, just out of common courtesy, without looking. If it was my fatae unfriend come back for another round, it was welcome to come up to the office and make its case to Stosser directly.

“That’s particularly stupid,” a gravelly male-human-voice said. “What if I’d been a mugger or rapist?”

“Then I’d kick you in the balls and fry your nerve endings with current,” I said, letting Danny move past me. The P.I. was looking his usual hot self in jeans, leather jacket over a button-down, and scuffed-up cowboy boots, an NYPD cap jammed over his brown curls. The cap was less for weather protection than it was to hide the small nubby horns that peeked out through those curls. Danny was half fatae, half human, and all guy. He’d be a fabulous chew-toy if it weren’t for the fact that I’d sussed right away that he was waiting, if unconsciously, for True Love. Poor bastard.

“You’re out and about early,” I said. Fauns weren’t night owls as a rule, but Danny had told me once that he got most of his real work done between four in the after noon and four in the morning. It was barely 1:00 p.m., which meant that for him to get here, dressed and awake, he had to have gotten up at least an hour ago.

“I had a morning meeting with a client,” he said. “Figured as long as I was in your neighborhood, I’d stop by and steal some coffee.”

“Bullshit. You have something. What do you have?” I started for the stairs, expecting Danny to follow, rather than wait for the elevator. The clomp of his boots on the metal stairs told me he had. Normally, a cutie on my tail like that, I’d put an extra wiggle in my backside just for the heck of it, but this was a business visit. And, anyway, I wasn’t feeling it, today.

Danny, being Danny, was checking out my ass, any way. I don’t think he could help it. Genetics are a bitch, especially faunish ones.

“Is it about a pending case, or a future one?” I asked on the second landing, when he didn’t respond to my earlier question. He usually didn’t hold back, not with me, but this might be more than gossip.

“In the office,” he said when we hit the third landing, his voice not at all winded. I’d expect no less from him, either the discretion or the physical conditioning. When it came to business, Danny was 100% human.

There was someone coming out of the office across the hallway from our door, which surprised the hell out of me – twice in one week, seeing those doors open, was unusual. We’d taken over two of the office suites on the east side of the building; the other two on the west side housed a tiny literary agency and a one-person photography office, both of which got a lot of mail delivered, but very little actual foot traffic. I let the woman – a pretty blonde, but too hard-edged to be my type – pass, and then ushered Danny into our office.

He went straight for the coffee machine, not even bothering to take off his coat or say hello to Nick, who was sitting on the sofa weaving current between his fingers. Some people doodled when they thought; he played with current.

“I don’t know how you people do it, but your coffee’s the best in the city.”

“Because it’s free?” I suggested.

“Well, there’s that. Also, the surroundings are pretty.”

Danny and I flirted like other people took in oxygen, but neither of us were really in the mood today. I knew what my reasons were... what was up with him? He lounged against the kitchenette counter and looked at Nick, his gaze flickering back and forth between fingers, watching the threads of blue and green and orange and red weave in and out like some kind of electric cat’s cradle.

Actually, I realized, that’s exactly what it was.

“Anyone else here?” Danny asked, while I shucked my coat and put it in the closet, then sat down on the sofa – a careful distance away from Nick and his thought-process – to eat my lunch before I collapsed from hunger. The vague warning-and-shove from my mysterious fatae could wait until after I ate. It wasn’t as though Stosser was going to listen to it, anyway. The first rule of the office, even before “don’t work at night alone” was “don’t let yourself forget to eat.” Most Talent didn’t have to worry about being called on for a sudden burst of current, without warning. We weren’t most Talent. Also, I had a bad tendency, still, not to top off my core on a regular basis – holdover from being raised, as J said, like a civilian. Being hungry just made the problem worse.

“Sharon’s in the workroom,” Nick said. “I don’t know where Nifty and Pietr disappeared to.”

“Nift was getting lunch right behind me,” I said around a mouthful of grinder. “He should be back soon, if he doesn’t eat there.” Mostly we came back to the office, but I could understand him needing a little away-time. I wouldn’t snitch him out to Venec. “Pietr was down the hall half an hour ago – hell, he could be anywhere.”

As though on cue, we all peered around the room, trying not to look obvious. But no Pietr materialized out of invisibility. He must have gone somewhere else for food.

“How about your fearless leaders?”

“They’ve been in the back office powwowing all morning,” Nick said, finally getting tired of his cat’s cradle and letting the current-threads slide back under his skin. “You want we should call them out, or you want to go back in?”

If Danny went private with what he knew, expecting the Big Dogs to dole out what we needed to know, I’d kill him. He knew it, too.

“Call ’em,” he said. “Politely – it’s interesting but not urgent.”

I let Nick do the honors. I might be getting the hang of dealing with the Merge pushing at me all the time, but ever since Venec walked me to my door last week, and that little spark-show in the office, we’d been keeping a very careful distance from each other; walls up, if not so thick we couldn’t sense each other at all. And now, with Nifty’s comment still warm in my ear... yeah. Let Nick ping him.

Thinking about that, I decided to hold off telling Stosser about the warning a little longer, until Venec wasn’t around. It had been a message for Stosser, anyway, right? No need to stress Venec about it.

The sigh I heard in the back of my head was definitely a memory-remnant from my mentor, disappointed in my decision-making, or my avoidance skills. Or both. I ignored it.

“We’re supposed to go back to the main room,” Nick said.

Once upon a time, I’d been a regular at most of the dance clubs in Boston. Since coming back to New York, I’d gotten to know most of the better places, where you could dance and not get hassled or hit on if you weren’t in the mood, but the time and energy demands of the job kept me from really doing the rounds. Still, when you have to burn unease out of your system, sweat the uncertainty out of your brain, there’s still nothing like a hot, crowded, dark, noisy dance floor.

I didn’t stagger home until 3:00 a.m., something I hadn’t done since graduation, with the peaceful satisfaction you only get when you’ve had exactly the right amount of booze and socializing, going home alone be cause you wanted to, not because you had to. On the dot of 6:00 a.m. I opened my eyes, and practically slithered down from the bed and into the shower, and emerged half an hour later feeling every pore in my body glowing with energy, enthusiasm and health.

Bad behavior, in small doses, could be really good for you.

I rubbed a clear space in the steam-coated mirror, and scrunched my face at the damp, tousled fluff that passed for my hair. Dandelion, yeah. Now that I’d let my hair revert to its natural white-blond coloring, Nicky’s pet name for me was really apt. After Venec’s scolding over the hair dye, the tousled white-blond mop suddenly bothered me as being too flashy, too visible, nowhere near as serious-looking as Sharon’s sleek styling or Lou’s classic French braid. Maybe if I toned the color down to brunette... no, I hadn’t gone dark since a brief pass at sable my sophomore year, and that had been really unfortunate for my skin tone. Black was effective for gothing, but it made me look older and more tired, and that wasn’t what I was looking for, right now.

Professional, the boss wanted. Right. There’s no way I could do sleek without also going butch, so I spritzed gel into my curls, shaped them into a slightly neater frame, and abandoned the mirror for the closet. After yesterday’s clothing wreck, I felt the need to put my best face – or knee – forward. Black trousers and a pale blue silk shirt, with onyx cuff links I’d borrowed from J about ten years ago and never given back, plus a pair of black half boots, and I felt professional and kickass. Perfect.

I grabbed my kit, and my bag, and a pair of sunglasses, and headed off to do my usual battle with the morning commute.

It was a couple of blocks’ walk from my apartment to the nearest subway, which when the weather was nice – like today – was enjoyable. Fresh air, a little morning sunlight, the sidewalks not too crowded yet, this far uptown. Normally I slip into an almost fugue-state, calm and ready, but heading down into the subway station this particular morning, I got a slightly creepy feeling on the back of my neck. Not that that’s anything unusual at any given time, with mass transit – when anyone can ride, it stands to reason a percentage will be creepy, if not downright dangerous. You stay alert, you practice safe subway, and most of the time it never touches you. But this was strong enough – creepy enough – to break through my earlier fabulous feeling, and make me take notice.

I studied the feeling the way I would any bit of evidence. It wasn’t just the feeling of someone staring, or even leering... it was actual, palpable unease, the sense of a storm about to break, but without the good fizzy feelings a massive weather change brings with it.

It wasn’t a kenning: I determined that right off. This wasn’t that same sort of certainty. Just... unease. Creeping, skittering, unhappy-making dis-ease. Normal situation, I’d pay attention to that. After the images that hit me during my scrying? I was hyperalert.

The train came rattling into the station, and as we all shuffled forward, the feeling of being watched fading back to the normal levels. Whatever it was, it seemed to have stayed on the platform. Good.

I wasn’t lucky enough to get a seat, and found myself caught between an older guy who smelled of ink and smoke, and two teenage girls who had never heard of personal space, because they were all up in mine. My earlier sense of enthusiasm and health fled, revealing a deeper layer of cranky bitch underneath. When an elbow came too close to my face as one of them extolled the annoyances of her morning class, I gave in to temptation and sent just a tiny zip of current into her foot.

Venec had taught us that. It was safest to tag someone there, farthest away from the heart and any potential medical problems that might be lurking. You only zapped someone in the chest if you were willing to risk killing them.

I was cranky, not murderous. The girl yelped a little under her breath, and shifted onto her other foot, swinging her body away from me subconsciously. I moved into the cleared space, claiming it as my own. The girls glared at me, but moved just enough so that they were the problem of the guy on their other side, instead.

I smirked a little, then froze.

The creepy feeling was back, stronger, like whoever it was had gotten on another car and lost me, back at the station, then followed the origin of my current-spark to this car. Great; with my luck and the way things were going, I’d just gotten myself a Talent-stalker.

Humans were split into two groups: Null, and Talent. But in each group there were gradations. Talent were defined as high-res or low-res, depending on how well they could channel current. Nulls... well, they had splits too, from almost-Talent to utterly Talent-blind, someone who couldn’t even see the use of current when it was right in front of them, would look right past the most obvious fatae standing in front of them, stuff like that. Sometimes, a high-functioning Null would develop an almost pathological need to be near someone using Talent. If they didn’t know about Talent, and most didn’t, they only understood that there was this need driving them, to follow some people, stalk them, be as near to them as possible.

Occasionally you got a Talent-stalker who was smart enough to figure it out, who could identify their pathology and how it was triggered. The Cosa Nostradamus didn’t hide, exactly; we were there for anyone who wanted to see. Once they identified themselves – and most did – it was easy enough to deal with; the local Council stepped in, discreetly, and matched them with a high-res Talent, one of the ones who couldn’t even go near major electronics without everything going haywire. Pathology and handicap were both dealt with, making them useful to each other, like symbionts. Most of the cases I’d read about, it worked out surprisingly well.

But sometimes you got mouth-breathers who just knew they had to get up close and personal with the object of their fascination. Those, with no awareness of what they needed or why, could become deeply frustrated, and occasionally dangerous to both the Talent of their affections, and anyone around them.

When we sense a threat, magical or non, a Talent’s instinct is to touch the core, to stoke it into readiness, in case you had to do something sudden. In this case, that would also be exactly the wrong move. My self-defense classes in college came back to me: if you’re tense, you make a more attractive target, because you’re scared and not thinking straight. Relax, show confidence, and the mugger will look for someone they have a better chance of overpowering. Relax... and don’t do anything – like gather current – that might drive them to action.

I kept that like a mantra in my head the rest of the trip, until the words merged with the thump-thud beat of the train and got into my pulse. When we hit my stop, I moved with the crowd, walking at exactly the same pace as everyone else, that not rushing yet ground-covering stride New Yorkers excel at.

The sensation followed me off the train, up the steps, and out onto the street. Damn. Despite my best intentions, even as I saw our building down the street, my muscles tensed, and I let myself reach for my core; not quite there, but poised. When someone touched me on the shoulder, I almost screamed, even as I fell into a defensive position, grabbing current and pivoting, turning to –

“Oh.” All the air went out of me, and my muscles went limp again. “Bobo.”

The Mesheadam looked at me, his normally placid Wookie-face expressing the most concern I’d ever seen him show. “You’re being stalked by The Roblin, Bonnie. That’s not good.”

I stared up at my occasional bodyguard, blinking stupidly. “I’m what?”

It was one thing to gather intel and come up with what we thought was a brilliant deduction. It was another, entirely, to lay it out in front of Venec, and wait for his reaction. We didn’t have to wait long. The moment I finished, he exhaled heavily, the kind of surprised-pleased-thinking exhale, and leaned back a little. You could practically see the thought process racing through his neurons like current.

“Lawrence. How’s the itching?”

“Totally gone,” Nifty replied, although I’d seen him scratching his elbow against the chair arm not five minutes before. Either Venec had missed that – unlikely – or he was willing to pretend it hadn’t happened, because he nodded. “You and Pietr go track down the coworkers last seen with our corpse. Ask them a few pointed questions about their feelings about his relations – or lack thereof – with their employers, and how it was affecting them. Don’t be coy. If Bonnie’s info is right, these guys are not going to understand subtle. You may have to lean a little.”

Well, that explained why he was sending Nifty, who outmassed all of us put together, practically. I guessed Pietr was going along to provide the potential good cop in that scenario?

“But – ” And Venec held up a hand as the guys stood up from the table, clearly anticipating a nice day out of the office trying to intimidate witnesses. “Any questioning you do, make sure it’s in full view of at least two others, not involved. Do not go with them anywhere, no matter how good an idea it might seem.”

Pietr really didn’t need the reminder, but Nifty tended to think with his bulk, and while that was fine when facing down humans, against fatae who could maybe, if we were right, restrain a Bippis, maybe less so. From the annoyed “do you think we’re idiots?” expression on their faces, I suspected that the fact that they were being sent to question suspected murderers hadn’t quite filtered into their awareness. But they nodded seriously, and went off to do their dirty work with probably more enthusiasm than was healthy.

I don’t know why I’d expected more from Pietr – smart guys were still guys, sometimes.

“All right, that’s being dealt with. Where do we stand on the break-in?” Venec asked, turning his attention to those of us left in the room. I hrrmmmmed and errrred a bit, not having any idea. Thankfully, Nick and Sharon – whose case it had been, originally – had more clue.

“We finally got a report of what was missing,” Nick said, and from his expression I was guessing that “we” meant “him.” “And confirmed what the owner claimed, that for all the damage that was done, there were only two objects taken – a silver pocket watch, ordinary, and a glass dagger, which looked like an ordinary paperweight, but was actually a memory-glass.”

A memory-glass was a Talent-trinket. Nulls get to use digital frames and downloads, we store images and voices a different way. They were low-res, incredibly basic so anyone could use it, even Nulls, and it probably wasn’t all that surprising that the client – who had fallen for the “magical defense” line – had one. It was odd that anyone had stolen it, though. They’re not lockable, so odds were he hadn’t hidden any blackmailable memories in there, even assuming he trusted a Talent enough to share it in the first place, for storing... .

But they were taken, so that had to mean something.

“What was stored in the glass?” Venec asked, probably matching my thoughts exactly.

Sharon picked up the narrative. “Nothing sensitive according to the client. Some memories that he didn’t want to forget, family trips, things about his wife, that sort of whatnot. Sentimental value, nothing more. Ditto the watch. Pretty, but not particularly valuable or unique. He didn’t even have photos taken for insurance purposes, never saw the need, which for this guy means he really didn’t think it was valuable – he had photo, acquisition cost and market value on every other thing that was broken.

“Client is convinced that someone stole them in order to put a hex on him, and before you ask, yeah, he’s got the usual string of ‘nice guy, fair businessman’ testimonials that could have come from a playbook, they’re so generic. If he has enemies they’re playing it cool.”

She paused. “I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not, but I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth that they were only sentimental memories, not anything worth stealing. And since he wasn’t the one who installed the memories... I’m not sure anyone could actually use it for a hex, at least not on him. Could they?”

Lou shook her head. “The only thing to latch onto would be the signature of the Talent who made it. Anyway, anyone who could do this wouldn’t bother with a hex, if they wanted to hurt the guy. There are more direct, more impressive ways to do damage.”

Venec frowned, leaning forward again. “Wife’s dead?”

Nick picked up this time. “Cancer. Kid disappeared soon after, packed a bag and gone. Cops investigated – husband filed a missing persons report – kid had run away before. There were no known enemies, no domestic complaints, so... Guy’s had a crap life, for all the money – wife’s dead, kid gone a year later, I guess it makes sense he’ll pull out all the stops, even magic, to reclaim stuff that holds good memories, even without fear of a hex.”

Venec had a look on his face I couldn’t quite decipher. The temptation nibbled, to lower my walls and see if I could read his emotions, but I didn’t. Wasn’t kosher, and, anyway, if I did that he’d be able to read me even easier, and that wasn’t kosher, either.

“What was this guy’s name again?”

“Wells.”

“Huh. Okay, no.” Whatever it was that niggled him, he wasn’t sharing. “So we have a guy whose very nice little mansion was ransacked and trashed – ”

“Portions of it were trashed,” Sharon clarified. “Only the two rooms downstairs, the office and the... call it a library, I guess. Nothing upstairs, the kitchen and front parlor were left alone.”

“Right, two rooms taken apart. Specifically, the two rooms where someone might store something valuable, either physical or electronics, not just current-based memory-keepers. Magical thieves do not mean only a magical theft, people.”

I hadn’t even thought about that, and from the lack of notes, neither had Sharon or Nick. Damn it, that was sloppy. The client was a Null, so we should have thought about digital records. We weren’t allowed blind spots like that.

Venec didn’t stop for us to beat ourselves up. “So our violence-prone intruder was possibly looking for something specific, either business or personal, but all they took were trinkets? And our client has no known enemies, no business rivals, nobody who’d get a thrill out of seeing him get taken down a few notches?”

“Seven names on the list,” Lou said, touching the pad of paper in front of her. “Three of them are totally Null, so it’s almost improbable they’d have been able to hire anyone from within the fatae community.”

It was a weird tick to Nulls – the more current-blind they were, the more they managed to float through life without even a glancing interaction with the Cosa Nostradamus, at least within a magical range of interaction. Not only were they not going to hire supernaturals, they wouldn’t hire anyone who would then hire supernaturals. J said there was some kind of physics explanation to it, but I’d never cared enough to look it up.

I pulled out my own pad and made a note to myself: it was time to do some reading about that. If that Null aversion field was a way to eliminate suspects, we needed to know. While I had the pad out, I wrote “electronic files as motive” and underlined it. Twice. Next time, we wouldn’t forget to consider it.

“I was hoping that one of the rivals would turn out to be useful,” Nick said. “Rumor was he’d had an affair with the dead wife, years ago, and blamed our client when the kid went missing, but the guy, Isaacs, came up clean, and – ”

“What?”

Venec’s voice didn’t rise, and his body didn’t move – in fact, if anything, his tone dropped and he went incredibly still, exactly like the air before a tornado hit.

“Ah, he came up clean?”

“The name.”

“Isaacs. Jerry Isaacs.”

Venec moved then, his hand snatching out to grab the file from in front of poor Nick. “Damn it.”

That simple, heartfelt swearword was more chilling than any invective he might have unleashed, because it brought a storm I hadn’t felt coming, slamming against my walls in a wave of emotion I was pretty sure he hadn’t meant to unleash.

Anger. Annoyance. And... guilt. Overwhelming, agonizing guilt. The hell?

“Boss?” Lou had picked up something, too, while Nick was flicking his gaze from the file in Venec’s hand, up to his face, then back again.

The wave of emotions stopped, his wall slamming back up, and I discovered that my heart was pounding and my body was wobbly, like I’d just dashed up all seven flights of stairs in record time, during a fire alarm.

When Venec spoke again, it was as though nothing had ever harshed his calm. “An interesting development. Possibly of importance, possibly merely coincidence.” He paused to consider his words. “Or possibly not coincidence, but inevitability.”

Whatever he was about to say, I didn’t think we were going to like it.

“I was employed, years ago, by the now-dead wife.

Christine.”

Before PUPI, Venec had been a PUI on his own, that was why he taught us, handled the day-to-day stuff. But he’d been based down in Atlanta, or somewhere, not New York. So how...

Venec’s voice was low and soft, like he was talking to himself. “Christine was referred to me. Her son had gone missing while he was in college, down my way. She wanted me to find him. That was my specialization, finding people who had jumped the track. Usually people who had skipped out on a bond, but runaways, too. She had used that guy’s name, though. Isaacs. That’s why I didn’t recognize this... and Isaacs, he had come with her, I thought he was her husband.”

Okay, the boring break-in case had suddenly gotten a hell of a lot more interesting. I didn’t think that was a good thing.

From the feeling I got off Venec, neither did he.

“No... ”

“Sir, relax. Everything will be fine.”

“No... ” They were rattling him down out of the ambulance, two young men and an older woman, their faces intent but calm. Normally Venec would have found their competence reassuring. He was fond of competence. But he could feel the thumping of his heart and the hissing of his core, and the taste of the current simmering in the place they were rolling him toward was too dangerous to let him anywhere near it.

“No!” He managed to make his hand reach up and grab the woman’s wrist. “No!”

“Sir, we have to... ” She tried to, gently, pry his hand off her, but desperation gave him additional strength.

“You can’t. Not in there.”

They didn’t understand, wouldn’t listen, trying to place a clear plastic oxygen mask over his face. He could feel the tendrils of his core reaching out, his control almost gone, the blood loss and drain from fighting off the hell-hound making him desperately crave the recharge that current offered... .

“You can’t take me in there!” he told them, his voice muffled, already resigned to what would happen.

“What’s going on?” Another man in white, no, he was wearing pale blue scrubs. A doctor? Ben tried to focus on the man’s face, willing him to understand.

“Dog savaging victim,” one of the paramedics reported. “He’s hallucinating, possibly. Disorderly.”

The hand holding the oxygen mask hesitated, torn between training and the doctor’s interference, and Ben used the distraction to make one more plea. “Don’t let me in there. Too dangerous.” Talent in emergency rooms were bad in the best of times, their pain and panic causing things to go haywire. As shocky and drained as he was... If his core went down too far, he would pull from the nearest source to protect himself. It would be instinctive, unstoppable except by his death, and without meaning to he could pull so much off that their entire system could fail. People could die.

“Hold up,” the doctor said, putting a hand down on the gurney to stop their progress. “Sir?”

Ben tried to focus, again, on his face.

“Sir, are you Talent?”

He almost cried in relief, managing to give a quick, sharp nod of agreement.

The doctor turned to the paramedic trying to affix the oxygen mask and snapped off an order. “Bring him into the overflow room.”

“But – ”

The other male EMT, either quicker on the uptake or more experienced in the whims of doctors, slapped his companion on the arm, hard, and nodded in agreement to the doctor. Ben felt the gurney shift slightly, rolling in a different direction, the pace picking up as they went down another hallway, not into the main emergency room but a smaller, quieter space. The same off-white walls, the same smell of disinfectant and urine and sweat filling the air, the same undertone of concerned voices speaking too softly, and then a cry or a shout breaking the tension and causing a flurry of activity... .

But the seductive, dangerous hum of high-powered machinery was less, as though the room was wrapped in a protective bubble.

You didn’t take a panicked, injured Talent into an emergency room filled with expensive, high-maintenance, highly calibrated electrical life-giving equipment. Not without precautions. Not when other people’s lives depended on those machines.

The doctor leaned in closer, his voice now pitched only for Venec to hear. “Do you need a sedative?” In other words, was he still a danger to anyone in the hospital?

Ben managed to shake his head. The urge, the panic, was fading, removed from the direct lure. Whatever they’d done to block out the current in this space, it was effective.

He might not need the sedative, but he wanted it, badly. The lacerations in his throat and arms were agony, and although the drip in his arm was dulling the pain, it didn’t do anything for the memory of the beast coming for him, the hot stench of its breath on his face, the acrid burn of its drool... .

It hadn’t been a full-on purebred hellhound. If it had been, he would be dead. A crossbreed, or maybe even a quarter-breed, something with mastiff or –

His mind went over the details, trying to determine what the beast was, so that he could find out where the client had gotten hold of one – and why – and then go find the breeder and issue a smack-down for letting a Null have a goddamned hellhound, even one that watered down. It was pointless obsessive work, but it kept his mind occupied and away from what they were doing around him, shifting him onto another surface, drawing white curtains around him, switching out the drip in his arm for another and the doctor was there again, his face covered but his eyes dark gray and focused the way a real professional got when they were in the groove, and Ben was able to let go of the last bit of conscious thought and let them do what needed to be done.

I suppose I should have, as per orders, reported in immediately. The thought, though, of facing everyone, of dealing with more questions and what-ifs... it was too much. It was all just too much and I needed the quiet to just not-think, for once.

Also, if The Roblin was following me, targeting me, I wanted to be somewhere well-warded to even discuss it.

So instead I spent the rest of the night cleaning up the shards of the mosaic, and putting things back to order, best I could. Current was surprisingly crap at moving physical objects – you needed more energy than it took to move it physically – and I didn’t want to risk even more pissed-off complaints from my neighbors, so mostly I left the heavy stuff where it was for now, and focused on getting my mattress and sheets back up onto the loft platform where they were supposed to be. I’d hoped that the activity would wear me out enough so that I’d be able to fall asleep and not think or dream about either Venec or the weird trace we’d found or The Roblin, sniffing at my heels.

No such luck. The adrenaline rush finally wore off, but my brain was way too revved up to shut down enough to sleep. Unfortunately, it was also too exhausted to do any real thinking. So I ended up sitting on the off-skew sofa, wrapped in a blanket and clutching a mug of cocoa heavily dosed with peppermint schnapps, trying very very hard not to reach out to the sense of Benjamin Venec, in a hospital bed several miles to the north. My trying not to do something, though, apparently had the exact opposite effect, because there was a sliver into my awareness, as though responding to a ping I hadn’t sent.

*sleep?*

*yes, baby* I responded without thinking. *sleep*

Benjamin Venec, drugged to the gills, had a soft, almost little boy feel to his thoughts, and I wasn’t strong enough to resist the urge to brush against it, the emotional equivalent to patting someone’s hair until they settled down again. I needed the comfort, and he wasn’t going to remember anything, come morning and sobriety.

I hoped.

*something wrong*

Damn. He was more alert than I thought. There was an instant when I was going to lie to him, and the instant passed. Drugged or not, this was Venec, and this was me. We’d never lied to each other, not before, not in all the crap that we’d already been through, and sure as hell not now.

*case stuff * True enough, if I counted The Roblin as a case. *worried about you* Also true. It wasn’t words I sent him, any more than he was forming them in his drug-sleepy mind. It was... like water flowing from one container to another, if one was colored blue and the other gold. If that made any sense, which it did to me.

*i’ll sleep if you will*

And because I never lied to him, the moment I got his water-flow assent, I put the mug down on the table, snuggled myself into the blanket, and went to sleep.

If I dreamed anything, I didn’t remember it in the morning.

The next morning guilt and responsibility trumped my disinclination to have anyone poking at my personal life, and I geared myself to tell all. Well, mostly all.

For once, though, Nick and I were the only ones in the office at 8:00 a.m. He took one look at my face, and handed me a doughnut, fresh out of the box.

We had made a serious dent in the box before I finished.

“Sounds like The Roblin, yeah,” Nick said. “I mean, not that I’d know, particularly, but the circumstances had way too much going on for it to be sheer coincidence. How come you got so lucky, Dandelion?”

“No damned idea. First it stalks, and then it splats my apartment, and what’s next? Is it going to chase me across the city, hound me for the rest of my life?” On waking up I’d found a note from the super under my door, confirming that they were going to claim I was in violation of my lease for noise issues. That hadn’t helped my mood any, either.

All right, I’d taken the apartment out of a panic to get out of the hotel I’d been staying in – on J’s dime – and now that I’d been working, and didn’t expect to be fired, probably... I could afford something a little nicer, in a better part of town. But still, it was a pain and a hassle.

On the third hand, this would give me a reason to get in touch with The Wren again, like Stosser had strongly suggested would be a good idea. “Hi, just checking in to see if there’s an apartment coming open in the building, like we’d talked about... ” That had been an awesome building, in a perfect location – okay, I wouldn’t be able to walk to work on nice days anymore, and the commute would take longer, but it would be a straight shot up the 1... .

“I wonder if anyone else had trouble last night. Would explain why everyone’s late. Hey, you think The Roblin had anything to do with Venec... ”

“No.” That came out more sharply than I intended, but the thought unnerved me too much to consider. Mischief, all right. But that attack had nearly been fatal.

“How much damage could a mischief imp do, assuming a mischief imp did do damage?” Nick stumbled over the last few words, and pursed his lips as though trying to limber them up. He looked like a demented goldfish.

“What damage did it do?”

Stosser, with Sharon in tow, came in through the front door. The almost-frantic Ian Stosser of yesterday had been wiped clean, leaving behind the usual smooth-faced, dapper-dressed Big Dog, his hair slicked back and his nicely tailored Euro-style suit hanging without a wrinkle. Half the time he dressed like a color-blind granola-cruncher, and the other half he could have posed for GQ. I’d learned to read Stosser-sign, a little: granola was his downtime, when he was trying to be Just Another Guy. He really wasn’t very good at it, and it kind of, honestly, freaked me out a little. Seeing him in a suit was like having the sun rise on the proper side of the city: you didn’t know what kind of day it would be, but at least it wasn’t starting with a pre-apocalyptic warning.

“We think The Roblin made its first real move last night,” I said, before Nick could tell my story. I gave them a quick rundown, ending, “Something tore up my place – moved furniture, loudly, tossed my linen closet, broke a piece of glass-art – ” damn it, I was still weepy about that “ – and made everyone in the building believe that there were open flames in my apartment. I’m just lucky I got home when I did, or they would have called the fire department and maybe hacked down my door to get in.”

Which might have been funny, seeing my super trying to explain to the fire department... but no, thanks.

“You saw The Roblin?” Stosser went on alert.

“No.” Seriously? I would have told him that, instead of sitting here bitching. “The place was empty when I got there. The windows were all locked, the door secured... . I guess imps can Translocate.”

“Or walk through walls.”

“Comforting thought, that,” Sharon said dryly. “So it’s gone from following you to fucking with you. Why you?”

“It was here.”

“What?” We all looked at Stosser at that revelation.

“A few nights ago. I have an alarm set up, similar to the spell Ben has on the front door that recognizes us, and challenges anyone it doesn’t recognize. It went off, but by the time I got here – twenty minutes, tops – the place was empty. And also a mess. Whoever it was, it had been going through our personnel files. Based on the timing of it first stalking Torres, and the tossing of her place, I think that it is a reasonable assumption that it was The Roblin, looking for... whatever it was looking for. Your address, one supposes.”

“Great. So flattered.” What the hell made me such irresistible imp-bait?

Stosser looked at the other two. “Have either of you had anything odd happen? Not just the general weirdness we’ve been seeing, anything out of the usual at all?”

Sharon shook her head, but Nick looked thoughtful. “Maybe. I didn’t think anything of it, or, at least, I figured it was just under the ‘shit happens’ category. But yesterday morning I was tweaking my netbook – ” And that still freaked me out, that Nick could use a personal computer. Most of us, a heavily warded desktop was the best we could do, and even then we had to be careful, but the rules were different for current-hackers. “ – And something surged.”

“Surged.” Ian had a look on his face that meant he knew what Nick was talking about. “You’re all right?”

“Yeah, I was more surprised than anything else.”

“You should have told me.”

“Yah, well, I was going to mention it to Venec, and... ” Nick’s voice trailed off. “How is he, anyway?”

And, damn it, he looked at me when he asked that, not Stosser. Damn it... I gave back a blank face like I didn’t know anything. Which I didn’t, other than the fact that I hadn’t gotten any Merge-inspired alarms, so he was probably doing fine and either still sedated or had his walls up tight.

“They are releasing him later this morning,” Stosser said. “Knowing Ben, he’ll be here as soon as he finds his clothing and hails a cab.”

“You let him check out alone?” Sharon turned on Stosser, probably as pissed as she got. Sharon was a prima donna and a pain in the neck, but she was also in a lot of ways the mom of the group, her and Pietr, and apparently moms did not let people check out of hospitals alone.

“If I’d shown up, I would have told him to go home, not come here, and we would have gotten into an argument,” Stosser said calmly. “This way, we avoid the fight, which I would have lost, anyway.”

When the hell did Stosser develop a sense of humor? He wasn’t wrong, though. That would have been Ben all over.

Big Dog turned to me, then. “Your apartment’s okay?”

“For now,” I said. I really didn’t want to get into the details, not until I had a new place lined up.

“All right. Nick, I want you to work with the netbook, here, where we’re properly warded, so we can determine if it’s infested.”

“Infected,” Nick said, correcting his terminology.

Boss scowled at him. “With a mischief imp, infested might be the better word. Go. Sharon, when Lou and Pietr get here, do a full sweep of the office, and double the wardings. And then do the same in everyone’s apartments. I don’t like this, not at all.”

“And me, boss?” Be damned if I was going to sit here while everyone else got to work.

Ian turned and looked at me. “You stay here until Venec arrives. Lawrence and Cholis came back with new information on the body dump case, and I want you three to close it today. If we’re being targeted by a mischief imp as powerful as the Old Man thinks, I don’t want any dangling threads left it can possibly yank.”

Given our marching orders, we marched. Or Nick did, anyway. I’d helped him a time or two with his hacker-magic, and was just as glad not to be anywhere near when he did his thing. It made me feel like I was going to throw up, and I hated throwing up.

“You really think The Roblin’s after us? I mean, not just you but all of us?” Sharon asked, sitting on the sofa next to me.

I lifted my hands palm-up, to show my utter ignorance and frustration. “Don’t know. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The warning, the break-in here, the break-in at my apartment... we’re a natural focus.” Bobo had said as much, when he warned us. We investigate chaos. The Roblin causes it. Peanut butter and jelly.

“But why you, and Nick specifically?”

Why not her, was what she wasn’t asking. How was The Roblin picking its victims.

“Damned if I know,” I said. “Just be glad, if you’re not on the short list, not insulted.”

“I’m not. I’m just curious. Like Venec always says, if we know why, then we can figure out the rest of it. Nick’s skill set is unusual, so maybe that’s it, but you’re not... ” She stopped, aware she’d been about to go somewhere seriously not-complimentary.

“Not unusual? Not special? Not exceptionally strong?” I kept my tone mild. I was moderately high-res, as the general population went, but not in this crowd, no.

“You’re practically perfect in every way,” she said, and I thwapped her on the arm, laughing for the first time in what felt like days. Maybe even weeks. Since we’d gone to the Devil for drinks, maybe. That felt like a month ago, with everything that had happened.

“You think the attack on Venec was... ” She trailed off, as though not wanting to follow that train of thought.

I sobered, turning the suggestion over in my mind in a way I hadn’t been able to, when Nick suggested it.

“No. It doesn’t feel right. The Roblin is about confusion and chaos, the more people involved the better, probably. Even my apartment, he got the entire building in an uproar. A single attack, and the cause easily put down? Anyway, the client had just hired the dog a few days after you cleared the site,” I said. “Stosser said the trainer was recommended by a friend of a friend, the same idiot who suggested the mage-alarm. The housekeeper was so terrified of the thing when it showed up, she refused to go near it, so it was prowling the grounds on its own. Sheer bad luck.”

“Oh, lovely,” Sharon said, in the tone of voice that was very much not-lovely. “Do we have a line on the trainer?”

“Stosser said that it was taken care of.” The look on the boss’s face had told me that the trainer was a name he knew, which meant either high-placed Council, or lowdown scummy. Stosser might be useless on the scene, but he was the best we had at getting high-level people to sit up and listen.

Venec was the one who handled the lowdown. With Ben in the hospital –

Like my thoughts conjured him, I felt Venec come through the main door downstairs, like a trickle of warm air against my skin.

“There’ve been so many complaints about hellhound breeders, you’d think somebody would have tried regulating them, or something,” Sharon said.

“They tried to ban them entirely, about a hundred years ago,” I said absently. “Huge yowl of complaints, said true hellhounds were so rare, anyway, they were doing a service by continuing the breed.” Like anything that was supposed to harry the souls of the damned was going to make a cuddly pet for junior.

“How could the housekeeper just let it run around like that? If she was so scared of it, why not shut it up somewhere?”

“Seriously? You wanted her to do something about a hound? She was probably afraid to do anything beyond coexist. It was introduced to her, so it knew she was allowed on and off the property, but I doubt she trusted it beyond that,” I said, listening without trying to be obvious for the sound of someone coming down the hallway. “And it wouldn’t go beyond the lines of the property, so she didn’t have to watch it. That’s why they’re so in-demand – smarter than any mortal dog, even quarter-bred, and most human guards, too. Plus, they’re vicious.”

The door opened, and proof of that viciousness walked in.

I thought I was prepared – Stosser said that the doctor had to do some serious stitching – but he’d been released, right? So it couldn’t have been that bad?

I hadn’t thought about the fact that this was Benjamin Venec, and his release was almost certainly AMA – against medical advice.

I think Sharon started to say something; I couldn’t hear it. My entire focus was not on the thick white bandage covering his neck, or the arm in a cloth sling, or even the blue-and-purple stippling of bruises on his face that looked like they’d been made by a giant paw, or the tiny stitched scar by his left eye, too painfully close.

My entire awareness was taken up by the look in that eye; pupils pinpointed way too much for the casual over head lighting. He looked at us, blinked, and the pupil remained narrowed.

Benjamin Venec, Mr. Control, was stoned on painkillers. That would explain the utter lack of discomfort I felt coming off him; in fact, he was remarkably muffled. I’d thought it was because he had his wall up again but... nope.

And Ian wanted us to take him out in the field? Oh, hell, no.

“I’m fine, Bonnie.” His voice sounded solid, almost amused, and he moved into the office with his normal graceful prowl. “A lot of stitches, and some lectures on what to look for, infectionwise, and I’ll have to go for a follow-up to make sure everything’s healing all right. But it was just a bite.”

“It almost tore your throat out,” Sharon said, but in a much calmer voice than I would have managed. I don’t think – even with all the worrying – that had really sunk in, for any of us.

When it did, I needed to be ready for a meltdown. Hopefully somewhere private.

“Almost doesn’t count,” he said, with a dismissive air that made me want to shake him – or tie him back down to a hospital bed. I did neither. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Stosser’s got us all off and running. You and I are supposed to go help Nifty close the body-dump case. The break-in gets all our attention, after that.” I decided not to say anything about The Roblin, right now, and hoped Sharon had the same thought.

She did.

“All right.” He sat next to me, maybe just a bit too close, and I should have moved away. I didn’t. The smell and the fear of the hospital came back to me, and the urge was to do something totally and wholly inappropriate, especially in the office, with Sharon watching us with far too much lively curiosity.

“All right?” I blinked at him, his words finally making it through my brain.

“You were expecting argument?”

Actually, I was. Even with the muted, mellowed-out feel, this was still Benjamin Venec, hard-ass and Big Dog.

He smiled: barely a lift of his lips, like it hurt too much to use most of his lower face, but a definite smile. “Believe me, I have no desire to tear open these stitches, or do anything likewise idiotic. Nifty will do any required heavy lifting, and you will do the lighter lifting, and I will stand back and glower as required, with these wounds undoubtedly adding to the impression of a team too tough to tangle with. Ian is annoying but no fool.”

And that, actually, was pretty much what we did. When Nifty came in, we headed out, following up on the name they’d gotten as a possible Person of Interest, one Nico Kaufman, a freelance dockworker who’d had a sketchy alibi for the hours our DB went missing, and – more relevant to our interests – had been working for the same company that stiffed the DB financially.

And if I stayed a little too close to Venec’s side, was too aware of his every move, trying very hard not to flinch every time he was jostled by someone, neither he nor Nifty commented on it.

The building – a four-story walk-up down in Alphabet City – was, in a word, dingy. In two words, run-down. The moment we knocked on the door of Kaufman’s apartment, I was really glad Nifty and Venec were with me. The info we’d gathered had neglected to mention that our suspect was a minotaur.

“We come in?” The way Nifty said it, it wasn’t a question, or even a request. The bull-headed fatae glared at him, but took a step back, and made a gesture with his thickly muscled arm that translated into “yeah, whatever.”

The apartment was bare and barren, matching the building, and pretty much the way you’d expect a minotaur to live. There were beautiful photos on the wall, though, of sweeping blue seas and clear skies.

Greece. J and I had been there once, when he was still working on expanding my horizons. I wondered if this guy was an immigrant, or if he just longed for the ancestral home.

We’d discussed our plan of attack in the cab ride down – with the Big Dog along, injured, we weren’t worried about having to justify the expense report – and now it fell into place like we’d had time to rehearse.

“You worked with Aodink,” Nifty said without lead-in or introductions.

“Yeah. What’s it to you?”

No accent, beyond the basic stereotypical Noo Yawkah I’d learned to recognize as actually being from Queens. Local boy, then. Dreaming of a better time and place?

He took the only seat in the apartment, a sofa that looked like it had been retrofitted to support his mass. Minotaur weren’t actually that large – no bigger than your average pro wrestler – but they massed something fierce. Venec leaned against the wall, as usual. With his arms folded against his chest – the sling having lasted halfway through the cab ride, before he took it off with a muttered swear and shoved it into my kit – and the white bandage stark against his black jeans and sweater, he really did look the part of annoyed and potentially violent hard-ass.

Nifty, to contrast, perched himself on the edge of the wood table and leaned forward to talk to our suspect, his body language going for the big-man-to-big-man thing. I leaned against the now-closed door, my arms loose by my side, and looked at the minotaur, trying to channel Stosser’s best “I know something you don’t want me to know” expression, which mainly involved a perfectly emotionless face that still managed to smirk. The smirk was easier than holding my arms loose. Now I understood why Venec crossed his arms when he leaned; it helped you balance.

“He’s dead.”

No surprise. No reaction at all. Not that it was easy to tell, on that bull head, but not even his ears twitched.

“You and he had some words. You wanted him to stop bitching about the company that wasn’t paying him, Elliot Packing.”

The bull shrugged, and on him the gesture looked less like, in J’s words, “an inelegant expression of uselessness,” and more of a threat. “Wasn’t just me wanted him to shut up. He opened his mouth, and work dried up. They didn’t know one beast from another, so they stopped hiring us all.”

“And you put an end to that.”

“You’re the pups, you tell me.”

Interesting. We hadn’t identified ourselves. I felt a pulse of interest and – amusement? – coming from Venec, while Nifty frowned. This was changing the plan a little. I reached down and pulled up some extra current, playing the neon-bright strands between my mental fingers, remembering Nicky’s cat’s cradle, keeping the current cool but limber, ready for anything.

Fatae were magic, could sense magic, they didn’t use magic. I kept repeating that to myself, even as Nifty picked up the change in direction and ran with it.

“How did you get him into the river?”

The minotaur looked at Nifty like he was insane. “I threw him.”

Venec laughed. “Ask a stupid beast, get a stupid answer.”

That wasn’t to the script, either; Ben was trying to rile the minotaur, get it to attack him, so we’d have an excuse to take it down. My guys all had death wishes.

“You’re admitting that you killed Aodink?” Nifty asked, pulling the bull’s attention back to him.

“I ain’t admitting nothing. Threw him in the river, is all.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not smart enough to figure out that if you shut Aodink up, the work would start to flow again,” Nifty said. “So who gave you the orders?”

That wasn’t going to work; I could tell already. The minotaur wasn’t ashamed of being bottom of the brain-pile; that was just the way the breed was; strong but not built for cognitive functions. And it wasn’t intimidated by current, either. We weren’t going to get an admission of the actual killing, and he wasn’t going to attack us, either; he was dumb but not a fool.

“You were used,” I said, totally breaking the plan. I was supposed to watch, not talk. “You were used and then set up to take the fall, just like your ancestor. And for nothing. The jobs aren’t coming back, cousin. Elliot Packing has already moved on, hired other people to do their work. Bought machinery that can go 24/7, without being fed, without giving back talk. Machinery that humans will work – legal, licensed humans, not fatae.”

I was using everything I’d heard from Danny and Bobo, playing into the worst fears of the fatae underground; of being replaced not with others of their kind, but humans, the majority population, with legal papers and legal standing. I did it, knew I was doing it, hated myself for doing it, and did it, anyway.

“They said... ” the minotaur blurted, and then stopped. But Nifty caught whatever it was he wasn’t saying.

“They said if you took one for the team, it would all go back to the way it was before? Do this for them, and they’d take care of you? All one team, working for the same goal, and everyone has a specific job... ”

“All I had to do was take him down and throw him in,” the minotaur said, like he was complaining. “That was all. Then they’d hire us all back.”

It was so sad I was almost angry. At the fatae for believing, at the humans who had manipulated them, at the world where fatae had to work in the shadows, taking this kind of crap, killing their own just to survive.

“But they didn’t,” Nifty said.

“They didn’t call. It’s been days, and they haven’t called.” The minotaur sounded aggrieved.

Venec glanced at me, and I nodded. My ability to run cool with my current was paying off; I had the minotaur’s voice down on tape, the small recorder hidden in the leg pocket of my pants. It wouldn’t hold up in a Null court of law, but it didn’t have to. We were hired to find out the truth of an event, without worrying about right or wrong. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was better than what used to exist, where even if someone asked who-what-why, they couldn’t get an answer because too many people were invested in Talent being above the law. Like my dad’s killer, still walking around, unpunished.

I had a more-than-suspicion that Stosser’s grand plan involved actual courts of enforcement, someday. But that wasn’t my headache.

Right now, my headache was in front of me, starting to radiate faint tremors of pain. The drugs were wearing off. We had what we needed; now it was time to go.

*enough* I sent to Nifty, a sense of finality and a tinge of urgency, with the flavoring of Venec. I wasn’t sure how much of that he actually picked up, but it was enough.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Nifty told the minotaur, standing up, looking down at the fatae. He didn’t use current, not even a gleam of a spark, but he managed to project a sense of Official Doom. “If you do, we’re going to be really unhappy with you.”

We left the bull sitting on his sofa, moaning about how life wasn’t fair, and walked down to the street level in silence – me acutely aware of the fact that Venec’s pain meds were starting to fade, and he was holding that injured arm close to his chest. We made it as far as the curb, looking for a cab to flag down, before Nifty put his hand out, asking for the tape recorder.

“Hell, no,” I said. “You touch it, it will go up in sparks.” I took a few steps away from him. “In fact, get the hell away from me.”

Venec shouldered Nifty aside neatly with his good arm, giving me room to walk unmolested.

“Bonnie, the tape?”

Because he asked politely, I pulled the mini-corder out of my pocket and showed it to him, hitting the play button just enough that we could hear the minotaur’s voice rumbling, low but intelligible. I really didn’t think there was any danger; it took a couple of days of steady core-contact to kill something that low-tech, and we’d managed to get through the confrontation without active use of current. But shit happened, and even dumb tech like a tape recorder could get fried by a sudden defensive twitch.

Fortunately, I ran cool, which meant...

I stopped dead on the corner. “That’s it.”

“What?”

“The Roblin. It didn’t go after the stronger ones – it went after the weirder ones. I run cool, and Nick – oh, shit, Nick!”

I was surrounded by stronger Talent, and carefully not being active. Nick, on the other hand, was probably nose-forward right this fucking moment into tricky, weird, prone-to-chaos-anyway magic. He’d be like a carnival target to something like The Roblin.

My ping was instinctive: not to Nick, for fear of distracting him at a bad moment, but Stosser, who might be within reach – and had the power and the control to risk getting between a hacker-mage and a mischief imp.

“I need to get back,” Ben said suddenly, a faraway look in his eyes. “Bonnie... ”

I felt the same sharp urgency he did, filtered through his connection to Stosser. “We’ll take the subway,” I said. “Go.”

Either intentionally or not, Venec left that faint connection open, so by the time Nifty and I made it to the office, I already knew that Nick was mostly all right, his computer was utterly fried, and while the rest of the team was nervous and edgy, and Stosser was annoyed, Venec was furious.

Not at Nicky, not even at the imp. He was furious at Ian, who had, as Nifty would say, sidelined him from the game, telling him that his injuries were serious enough to keep him on office-duty, same as Nifty had been. I walked into an office that was practically simmering with frustration and resentment.

Part of me wanted to avoid the entire thing, make like the others in obliviousness, just go directly to Nick, make sure he was okay, and then get my orders with the rest of the team.

I’d been raised to deal with my responsibilities, though, even when I was the only one who knew what they were. And the first responsibility, like it or not, want it or not, was getting Ian and Ben back on track.

I just wasn’t quite sure, even as I walked into the Big Dogs’ lair, how I was going to do that.

The two of them were sitting in chairs at opposite ends of the small office, glaring at each other. “Shune’s fine,” Ian said as I walked in, not even bothering to look at me. “The Roblin singed his fingers and fried his hair a bit, that’s all.”

Being a Talent means, by definition, that you can handle a load of current – and electricity – running through your body. Something that singed Nick’s fingers might have killed a Null. Stosser wouldn’t have thought of that, probably.

I knew that Venec had.

“I think our original guess was right. If The Roblin’s here to make mischief, its biggest challenge would be the ones who investigate mischief. So long as it’s targeting us, it’s not harassing others,” I said, addressing Ben’s worry first. “If we can keep it focused on us, nobody else will get hurt.”

Except maybe us. Still. Did a mischief imp, even the grandmother of imps, intend to kill? Then I thought about what some fatae considered harmless pranks, historically, and reconsidered.

“We can’t have it interfering with the ongoing investigation,” Stosser said. “You’ve probably wrapped up the body dump, and that was good work, but this break-in has already caused too much trouble. The client lied to us, hid details of the story, and nearly got Ben killed. I want to know exactly what is going on.”

“It goes for the unique,” I said, following my earlier thought. “I think that’s the trigger. That’s why me, and Nick.” I’d had time to think it through, on the subway ride back, lay it out into a semblance of a formal report. “We’re not the strongest of the pack, but our skills are unusual – I run cool so I bet that it was trying to make me angry, breaking all my stuff and getting me kicked out of my building, to see what I could do, what trouble it could cause. But Nick’s – ” I paused; even among ourselves we didn’t often vocalize Nick’s skill “ – Nick’s a challenge it wasn’t going to get many other places. So he’s going to be the real target... . But it might get bored, anyway. We need to find something... ”

A thought struck me, and the way Ben’s head lifted, his dark eyes looking even more shadowed with exhaustion and pain, I could see the thought reached him in that exact instant.

I said it first. “If it wants something unique, something different to play with... ”

“No.” Venec-voice. Boss-voice.

I didn’t let that stop me. “It makes sense. And if it’s already here, there’s no way to avoid it. We need to make it work for us, not against us.”

“Bonnie, no.” And then, suddenly, it wasn’t boss-voice anymore. “It’s too dangerous, especially without knowing how far it will go to get its jollies.”

Stosser was looking between us, his expression caught between knowing we had a juicy bone, and frustration that he didn’t have a chunk of it himself, and knowing that if he was patient, we’d work it out and then present it to him.

“If we’re ready for it, we’ll be okay.” Probably.

Venec was still shaking his head, even as I could tell he was running through how it might work. “We would have to... ”

“I know.” It would require that we open the very doors we’d shut, take down the walls we’d built. Make a target of ourselves, and use the Merge as a trap.

And neither of us knew if it was a trap that we would be able to escape, if we’d be able to rebuild those walls, once The Roblin was dealt with.

The idea terrified me.

“This thing we have,” I said to Stosser, before Venec could say, absolutely, that he wouldn’t do it. “The Merge. It’s unique enough to attract The Roblin’s attention, distract it from anything or anyone else. Even more than Nick.” And Venec was higher-res than Nick and me both; he’d be better able to handle anything The Roblin might try. I’d be the weak link here, but I was willing to take the risk. Okay, not willing, but I didn’t see any other choice.

“Trick the Trickster?”

“Exactly. And when we have it caught, then we can figure out how to make it go away,” I finished, keeping one eye on Stosser to see how he would react, and the other on Venec, to see if he was going to try to stop me from pitching the plan. There was always a way to banish imps, either through magic or bribery. We just had to get the upper hand, somehow.

I expected Ben to be angry that Ian knew, since he’d been as much about keeping it quiet, for his own reasons, as I had, but he just looked resigned, which was how I felt about it – resigned, and glad it was out in the open, sort of.

“You think it would be enough?” Stosser asked, considering what I’d suggested.

“I think it’s a crap idea.” Ben’s voice was flat, low, not at all growly. I hated the sound of it, hated being the one who took the growl out of his voice, but I honestly didn’t know what else to do. The Roblin was focused on us right now, but what happened if it got distracted? How ADD were mischief imps? What happened if someone less-grounded, unaware of what was happening, was its next target? Madame was wary of The Roblin. The other Ancient had come to the office to warn us, specifically. And the unease from my scrying was still riding between my shoulders like an imp itself, telling me trouble was in the neighborhood. Not good, not good, and not good. We couldn’t look away. Not us, not now.

“You have anything less crappy?” I asked Venec, letting him see where my thoughts were leading.

He glared at me, then deflated, shaking his head. “No.”

Stosser intervened, then. “She’s right. It’s the best plan we’ve got, and allows the others freedom to continue the investigation of the ongoing cases.” I got the feeling that Stosser really didn’t give a damn about the imp – it was an annoyance to him, not a problem. Keeping our solve rate up, that was the problem.

“Yeah. Oh. And here.” I pulled the recorder out of my pocket, popped the tape and handed it to Stosser. “You might want to go play this for whoever it is needs to hear it. Incriminates the company, and our minotaur friend.”

He took the tape, his long fingers cool against mine. I swear, the guy really did have ice water in his veins. “I have no idea how this one will play out,” he admitted. “The NYPD has no authority over the fatae, and the Council will deem it a matter between the business and their employees, and no concern of theirs.”

The Council was kind of bloodless that way, no matter what region you went to, yeah.

“Don’t take it to the Council,” Venec said, and there was a faint growl back in his voice. “Take it to the local unions. Dockworkers, garbage haulers, anyone you can find.”

“Null unions?” I was surprised; Stosser looked utterly shocked.

Venec reached up to touch the bandage around his throat, and almost smiled, but it was the smile of a dog that knew it had you cornered. “My dad used to tell me that the unions were all that stood between the working schlub and indentured servitude, not out of the goodness of their heart, but because they wanted the power of those working schlubs organized to their direction, not someone else’s. Let’s see if their desire to swell the membership rolls trumps fataephobia.”

Oh. That was twisty, so very twisty. Appeal not to someone’s desire to see justice done, but to prevent anyone else from taking advantage of someone they could make mutual advantage from. I forgot, most of the time, that straight-shooter no bullshit Benjamin Venec had a brain as devious as my mentor’s, and utterly lacked most of J’s ingrained social graces.

“It might not work,” Stosser said, tapping a finger against the back of his other hand, like a metronome for his thoughts. “But it’s definitely worth a try. If nothing else, it will bring Elliot Packing to the attention of others – and once they start looking for violations of objectionable practices, change might come.”

And that, really was why we did this gig, holding the actions of the Cosa up to the light. People – whatever their species – did shitty things to each other, for a whole range of reasons and justifications. We weren’t going to change human – or fatae – nature, but if there were consequences to those actions, then maybe it would stop them from happening again. Maybe.

Stosser stood up, my tape in his hand, and walked out of the office without another word, leaving Ben and me trying hard not to look at each other, but not able to look away.

Wow. Talk about an elephant in the room.

“You know I’m right. If this is as rare as you say it is, and we already know how much trouble it can cause, it will be like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The Roblin won’t be able to resist.”

“Bulls are color-blind, you know.”

I didn’t even bother to glare, instead reaching inside to slowly, carefully, dismantle the wall I’d built, one brick of control at a time. I wasn’t going to take it down all the way; I wasn’t quite willing to do that, not even to stop The Roblin, but enough. I could feel the pressure brushing against me, shifting against the exterior of my core, like... I couldn’t describe it; there were no words in my experience. Like waves rolling over each other, separate to the eye but not really, not in composition, water drops from one merging into the other, and then reforming... .

That wasn’t right, either, but it was the visual that stuck with me, even as I could feel Ben unbuilding his own wall, coming down less like bricks than a melting sheet of ice.

The image of two lovers undressing for the first time? Really not far off the mark. That thought didn’t help my nerves any.

I couldn’t say when it happened. I’m not sure it actually did happen, that there was a moment of Before and then After, or if things that always had been were suddenly surfacing. I didn’t feel any different, didn’t think any different; all the things I’d quietly, subconsciously worried about not happening, at least as far as I could tell.

I was me, still. Ben was Ben. I wasn’t overwhelmed, or undercut. Just...

Aware.

Really, really Aware.

*weird*

His voice, my thoughts, or the other way around. A sense of wonder and oddness and agreement and not a little awe.

And a sense, from both of us, of “this far, no further.” The Merge pushed; like a living thing: it wanted more. We resisted, and it subsided again, taking what it could get.

A moment passed, then another, and the sense of oddness faded.

Still aware, though. Like breathing for two, or... I had no frame of reference, and from the look on Ben’s face, neither did he.

“Now what?” Ben asked. “Here, Roblin, Roblin, Roblin?”

I had no idea.

“Well, while you figure it out, we still have an investigation to handle.” He walked past me to get to the door, and I reached out, almost instinctively, and touched his hip. The cloth of his slacks felt rough, abrasive under suddenly oversensitive fingertips, and he paused, as though I’d grabbed at him.

I could hear him swallow, without even looking, and felt guilty for the pain that must have caused his throat.

“I’m all right,” he said immediately. “It’s like having a bad sore throat, mostly, only on the outside. You can’t tell?”

“I didn’t try.”

That seemed to reassure him, and he nodded, heading out the door.

I let him go; he was the boss, he got to give the orders. But I mentally followed him down the hallway, anyway, the echo of his movements in my head, almost but not quite like hearing, or seeing, or smelling something familiar.

There weren’t any words to describe it. I wondered if, over time, I’d figure it out. I wondered if we’d get the chance to figure it out.

I didn’t wonder, any longer, if I wanted that chance.

“Here Roblin, Roblin, Roblin,” I said. “You want something that’s going to mess up my life, make me pissed off? Come try and rearrange the furniture here.”

I waited, but there was no indication that I’d been heard, no evil chuckle or high-pitched giggle or even a passing whiff of sulfur, or whatever presaged the appearance of an imp.

I waited another few minutes, then got up and went to join the rest of the team.

“We already know that the trace isn’t anything any of us have seen before,” Sharon was saying when I came in. It took me a minute to catch up with what she was talking about, my brain so filled with The Roblin, and Venec, and how much more trouble I’d just gotten myself into.

Right. The trace I’d picked up in the house. The thing locked in a warded jar, hopefully inert.

“We’ve been trying to come up with some way to test it, if we can figure out where it comes from, but there’s barely enough to poke at, and... ” She hesitated. “And it makes me feel queasy just being in the room with it. That’s not normal.”

Yeah. It had made all of us feel uneasy, hadn’t it, the moment we were aware of it. Why? Something stirred in my awareness; not me, but Venec. I glanced sideways at him, but nothing showed on his expression or body language, and the stirring faded, as though he hadn’t been able to get a grip on it, either.

Sharon hadn’t been comfortable with the guy from the start, certain he was lying but unable to prove it. Venec had investigated a missing kid, and now both kid and wife were gone, the wife dead, the kid missing-presumed-dead... and now this.

Could all be coincidence, the end run of some really bad luck on the part of Mr. Wells.

Or maybe not.

“So without knowing who broke in, or why they wanted those objects, or why they were so pissed off at the client, we’ve got nothing. No clues, no witnesses... ”

“We do have witnesses,” Pietr said, suddenly. “The house itself. The things that were broken, you said they were still there?”

“Yeah,” I said, sliding into a chair and waiting to see where he was going with that. “But how do you ask – oh.”

The Merge had nothing on a well-run pack when it came to sharing thoughts. No sooner had Pietr raised the idea than the rest of us were running with it.

“What about the simple scoop?”

Pietr was talking about a spell we’d been working on earlier, the one that was supposed to simplify the recreation process. The one that had blown up in Nifty’s face.

“What about it?” Sharon asked, not following his logic. Neither was I, to be honest.

“The scoop. It pulls everything from a scene, like a photograph, right? I mean, ideally. But what if we turn it into a mirror? To reflect what happened?”

“It wasn’t designed to do that,” Nifty said, his expression doubtful. Like Sharon, Nift was a damn good field op, and definitely tops in the decision-making, judgment-calling area, but they were crap at developmental magic. I was already feeling out the possible threads, and so was Lou, from the expression on her face.

“We designed it... we can redesign it,” Lou said, pulling out her notebook and flipping to a spot midway through. She studied that page, and nodded. “Yeah. Okay, maybe. Bonnie, we have the impetus of the spell aimed at retaining information – that’s why it kept imploding on us, because it couldn’t hold it the way a human brain can. What if we switched that to reflect, not retain?”

“Make it shiny instead of sticky?” My brain had already kicked into high gear. I’m a decent field op and crap at management, but when it comes to developmental magic... well, Pietr had the chops, and Lou might someday be as good, but honestly and with all due modesty, I doubted it.

“What exactly do we want it to do?” I asked the rest of the team. “Clarity is important, if we want the cleanest result. I mean, do we want a reflection, or a re-creation, or... ”

“We need the evidence to talk,” Nick said. “Literally, we have to be able to pose questions to it – ‘what happened here?’ and have it answer.”

I glared at the notebook, biting the inside of my lip while I thought. “No.” I hated to say it but, “No. You can’t make things act against their nature, Nick. Reflecting what happened around them is one thing, that’s basic science.” For Talent iterations of science, anyway. “Asking an inanimate object to react and respond? This isn’t Disney. We don’t do talking teacups.”

There was grumbling and an overall letdown in the mood of the room, as we tried to reshuffle our thoughts, and pick up another lead. I took out my own notebook and started jotting notes down, starting with a box in the middle labeled “evidence” and then drawing lines out in radiating spokes, trying to draw my brain out the same way, to give me an answer.

As though it were being poked, as well, my core shifted slightly, swirling warmth alerting me to something... .

Ben?

No, it wasn’t the Merge, but he was alert, too; I could feel him come to a higher awareness, even though his physical attention was on the conversation he was having with Nifty and Lou.

Something had just poked at us.

*ignore it* The thought was deeper than a ping, fuzzy and muted like a morning whisper.

The Roblin? Maybe. I took Ben’s advice and went back to my notes, intensely aware of the connection shimmering between us, silent but real, luring the imp out to play.

“There was no magic trace in that house,” I said out loud, thinking my way through. “Nothing except the one bit we found, that we can’t identify.” Sludge, I decided. Icky sludge. “We haven’t been able to identify the source of the claw marks.”

“We haven’t even been able to confirm they were claw marks,” Nick said. “There wasn’t any residue in any of the grooves, to test. I don’t know if they were calcium based, or metal, or... ”

“They had to be of a specific hardness to dig into that wood,” Lou said. “I’ve been able to eliminate some breeds based on that, but... it still leaves too many to be useful.”

“So without a known enemy, or trace to work from, all we have are the objects that were taken... a glass dagger, and a pocket watch.” Nifty got up and paced. “Why them? Was it for their sentimental value, or something else?”

“You think the dagger is more than a memory-glass?” Sharon frowned, then shook her head. Her blond chignon was starting to come loose, and she had stuck a pencil in it at some point, and forgotten about it. It was unlike her, but cute. I decided against mentioning that to her. Right now, anyway. “But there was no trace of anything more powerful. I mean, not even a hint of a smidge, anywhere in the house.”

“Not all magical items are obvious,” Nifty said. “Some of them don’t even register as magical, because they don’t actually do anything. They just are. Like the fatae.”

I nodded, underscoring the center box in my drawing. “Exactly. By their very nature they won’t call attention to themselves, unless you know what you’re looking for.” Like trying to pick a fatae out of a crowded subway car. Unless it had a particularly unusual physical appearance – a rack of antlers, or flames instead of a face – mostly they blended, your eye slipping right over them. It took knowing that they were there, and actively looking for them, to pick one out.

“My mentor called it inert magic, present but not accounted for.” Nifty was nodding, and Lou’s eyes were bright with thought, but Sharon, Nick, and Pietr either hadn’t had the same style of training we did, or just weren’t seeing it yet.

Right, Sharon’s mentor had been of the “have but don’t use” school, whatever it was called, so theoretical magic probably wasn’t on the agenda.

“Look, all current has a... a presence, call it. Right? We can channel and manipulate it. So it leaves an impression in the world, no matter how slight, even if our human senses can’t quite see it.” It sounded like I was talking out of my ass but there was something there, if I could just keep talking long enough to grab it.

“So we can’t see it, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. And if it was there and now it isn’t, can we see its absence?”

“Negative space,” Nifty said. “You’re talking about negative space. That’s insane, and possibly brilliant.”

“So you think that the objects themselves can tell why they were taken, even though the objects aren’t actually there now?” Nick looked like his brain hurt.

“Well... yeah.” It sounded more stupid than brilliant, put that way. But I had the feeling that it would work, and I’d gotten a lot done over the years, listening to my instincts. Only one way to find out... . I was nodding even as my pencil flew over the page, everyone’s comments blending into an idea being constructed under my fingers. Lou leaned over to watch, and Pietr ghosted to my side, but I barely noticed.

“Empty space impressions,” he said. “The current-weight of what isn’t there.” Pietr was almost classically handsome, with a jawline and nose that would make a Roman sculpture cry in envy, but right then he reminded me of nothing so much as a jowly, rheumy-eyed bloodhound, lifting his head and preparing to bay to the world that he’d caught the scent.

“Yeah.” Lou sounded pleased and satisfied. “I think we can do that, push energy into the blanks, let it sift around... . We just need someone with a really light touch.”

That would emphatically not be her. Or Nifty, for that matter.

“Bonnie, you’re the one who came up with it, you should do it,” Sharon said, like she was gifting me with something.

“I can’t.”

“What?”

I paused, and looked up at Venec, trying to figure out what to tell them.

“Bonnie and I are bait for The Roblin.”

Oh, okay. Blunt was how we were going to tell them, then.

“Bait? How bait?”

“If it is targeting us, taking the mischief to the investigators, the way we’d thought, then it’s going to look for ways in which to cause the most mischief. The situation we have, Bonnie and I, the ability to communicate directly the way we do, is... ripe for mischief.”

That was a mouthful. It also managed to skirt the fact that we knew damn well what was causing the connection, not to mention the physical and emotional affects and effects, and how much more than just communication it was enhancing. It also avoided any possible hurt feeling that could come up from our theory on why Nick and I had been targeted earlier, so long as Nifty kept his mouth shut, for now. And he would; nobody wants to be told that, even high-res, they’re still commonplace. Of course, I’d rather not be told I was odd, either. But there it was.

“So, either Sharon or Pietr... or Stosser?”

“Not Stosser,” I said without thinking, and everyone looked at me. I threw up my hands in a gesture of disgust and helplessness. “I saw him on-site, guys. The boss is brilliant, yeah, and way high-res, and he doesn’t have clue one what to do with evidence.”

Nifty snickered, and swallowed it almost immediately, but even Venec looked amused – and not surprised. “Ian doesn’t like situations where he can’t manipulate the results.”

Being born with plus-ten charisma and a mind that made both Venec and J look about as subtle as a rock... yeah, I could see where Stosser got used to being able to finagle scenes. But you couldn’t do that to evidence, not and keep it usable, and the boss knew it, and he must have found it howl-inducingly frustrating.

I almost felt bad for him. Almost.

“Sharon,” Pietr said. “She’s got the truth-sensing mojo working, so it makes sense for her to try, first.”

“I think Pietr should do it,” I said. Pietr faded from sight when stressed, the same protective invisibility that Retrievers specialized in. In fact, I probably could never have come up with this idea, if I didn’t know Pietr so well, how he felt when he faded, and how to find him again once he did. Huh. That was interesting, and worth mulling over – later.

“Both of you go,” Venec said. “Two attempts will give us a better chance of success.”

Fair enough; Lou, Nick, and Nifty would keep following up on our other leads, like the guy who had been with the missus, before he died, and our yet unidentified memory-glass maker.

“All right,” I said, pushing my paperwork toward them, so they could see better. “This is what I think you need to do. Instead of directing the current at the surfaces of what’s there? I want you to go into what’s not there.”

“What?” Sharon was our logical thinker, and I had a feeling the b-ass-ackward way this spell had to work was going to confuse her. Pietr got it, though. The spell was probably going to be almost intuitive for him, since we were looking for something that wasn’t there anymore.

There wasn’t any time to do a test run, not with The Roblin lurking around waiting for the chance to screw things up for its own entertainment. Also, odds were that the client had realized by now that we had figured out that there was something hinky about his missing objects, maybe even realized that Venec had worked for his dead wife and knew dirt on his past. Rich people very much did not like people investigating outside the lines, and they liked even less when we had dirt on them to fuel the investigation. Even when they were, nominally, our client.

Unlike Danny, who would do whatever it took to satisfy the client’s needs, we worked for the evidence, not the individual. They knew that when they hired us, but most of them didn’t really understand what that meant. Once Wells figured it out, he would kick us off the case, shut down our access to protect whatever he was hiding, whatever had drawn the housebreakers to him.

We would still investigate – once you set the pups on something, we decided when the case was closed – but it would be harder to run tests, or get anything resembling a straight answer.

Venec tapped on the table, getting everyone’s attention. “Pietr, Sharon, are you confident that you can handle this?”

My pack mates nodded, because what else could they say? They had a good hold of the original identification spell I’d riffed on, and this wasn’t really all that different, but nothing remained the same once it was implemented; your own personal current adapted to it, so everyone ended up with a slightly different result – ideally within a set range, but not always.

“Yeah. We got it,” Sharon said.

“So, go,” Venec told them, waving a hand in dismissal.

Pietr held up my notebook, asking permission, and I nodded. I’m not sure that I would have let anyone else take my notebook – we put down all our working thoughts there, almost like a traditional grimoire, now that I thought of it – but this was Pietr. I’d had sex with the guy – more, I’d slept with him. I trusted him at my back – or inside my notebook.

I felt a twitch of unease; what happened if the spell backfired? What if...

No. Not me. That prickly, poking swirl was back, a little harder than before, and it was difficult to ignore it. Acting on impulse, I leaned toward Ben – not physically, not even with current, exactly, but with an awareness that was something else, as though seeking reassurance or comfort.

The swirl caught at that movement, swarmed it, and I swore I could feel a hundred tiny little teeth latch on, like being nibbled on by itty-bitty alligators. It took effort not to flinch, not to let it know we’d felt it, were luring it further in.

I saw the edge of Ben’s mouth turn up, barely a movement, but a definite smirk.

Our imp had taken the bait. Now, to wait and see what the little bastard did with it.

“Nick, give me your notes, too,” Sharon said. “If we’re going to be doing this negative space thing, maybe I can tell if anything’s changed since the first visit.”

“You want me to come?” he asked, even as he removed a section of pages and handed them to her. “If nothing else, to watch your backs?”

“Thanks, but I think we’ll be okay.”

Although nobody had said anything, it was inevitable that we were all a little leery of that house, now. The hellhound had been dealt with, one presumed, and the client wasn’t going to be idiot enough to hire another – we hoped – but who knew what else a scared Null with a penchant for magical security devices would get up to?

“Where is he getting this stuff, anyway?” I wondered, after Pietr and Sharon left. “The dagger – okay, that’s easy enough for someone to craft, it could be anyone in the damn Cosa, but the rest of it? Is there a storefront somewhere, hawking magical protections, or are they working out of someone’s kitchen? Shouldn’t that shit be licensed?”

“Selling protections is a time-honored profession,” Venec said idly, sounding more like J than I really felt comfortable with. “A hedgewitch or village wizard specialized in that sort of thing, especially against the wee folk as went boojum in the night.”

“Yeah, three hundred years ago,” Nifty said.

“Not hardly,” Lou corrected him, a little more snappishly than usual. Venec looked sideways at her, and she bit her lip, but he didn’t say anything and she didn’t apologize. The Roblin, even without doing something, was already doing its thing: everyone was on edge, waiting for something, anything to happen.

Having a theoretical discussion was one of the better ways to keep occupied, without actually doing anything important. Also, Venec always said that we came up with our better ideas when we argued things off-topic. So...

“There are still hedgewitches,” I said, trying to keep the peace. “They might not call themselves that, but everything but the name’s the same. Off the grid, low-res and small workings, but savvy enough to know the deal and how to deal with it.” I’d run into more than a few when I was traveling with J, and not always in the places you’d expect. “There was a Talent who had a little storefront in Florence. She sold religious relics and love spells over the same counter.”

“Were her love spells any good?” Nick asked, his face a mix of real curiosity and mischief.

“Probably better than the relics. My point is, she did a good business there, and not just from the tourists, but it was small, handmade stuff, like the memory-glass. What Wells is getting his hands on... current-run security system? Hellhound rentals? That takes more skill, more res. A lot more money involved. And probably not so much a one-person gig.”

“Spell Rentals R Us,” Nifty said. “Nice sideline. You think Stosser would go for it?”

“No.”

The opinion on that was pretty much universal.

We batted around a few more ideas, most of them just arguing for argument’s sake. I tuned out a little, and went down inside, dropping into my core the way you might a hot tub, slowly, with muscle easing as you sank. I’d been eating regularly, and making sure to recharge my core – mostly – but that didn’t explain the incredible feeling of well-being. I let a tendril wander off, not directing it anywhere in particular, and wasn’t at all surprised to feel it make its way, like it was following a ley line, to where Venec sat, sliding into his aura and disappearing... but not disconnecting.

A sense like a sigh, and a faint touch, and a reassurance, then he pushed me away, not dismissively, but almost playfully.

And the sense of being watched, of being pricked at with a hair-thin needle, came back.

My good mood faded a little: we were putting on a show for the imp; that was all.

*we’re here*

The ping came from Pietr; I recognized the mental flavor immediately, and also that the ping was directed to me, not broadcast to anyone else in the room. The impression I got was that they’d run into slight but non-violent resistance, but persevered.

“I don’t think the housekeeper is too fond of any of us right now,” I said into the room. “But they’re in the house.”

“How come they reported to you, and not Venec?” Nifty looked like he’d been the one insulted. I guess, after fighting so hard for lead pup spot, he would be offended by someone not following the organizational flow chart. Still, it annoyed me that he was annoyed.

“Pietr and I partner a lot – it’s probably easier for him to reach me.” I didn’t say a damn thing about sleeping with Pietr – if Nifty hadn’t realized that by now, it was none of his damn business, and he’d probably get a bug up his nose because he assumed I was sleeping with Venec, too. They all did, even Stosser; you could tell from the things they weren’t saying, the way they weren’t talking about it even to joke about it anymore, like we were doing something wrong.

The fact that we’d not done anything more suggestive than hold hands – and that, almost by accident – wasn’t going to fly with anyone. They just assumed... .

*careful* The thought came low and soft along the connection, and I touched it, took reassurance from it. Reassurance, and clarity: the anger I was feeling wasn’t mine, or Venec’s. It was the imp coming back, trying to push us, manipulate us. Cause mischief among the pack.

“So that’s how we’re playing it, are we?” I said softly.

Nifty heard me, and misunderstood. Of course.

“Playing it? Only one here playing is you, seems... ” He stood up, and then stopped, as though surprised to find himself standing. I looked up, remembering again, suddenly, how damn big Nifty was; not only way taller than my five foot six but twice as wide in the shoulders, with bulk to match. Anyone else, I might have been worried.

Anyone else, anyone other than a pack mate, and I wouldn’t have seen surprise, and then a slow dawn of understanding cross his face. Nifty was a big guy; he used to hit people as part of his sport. He perfected control even better than most of us, out of necessity, and he knew that the anger, the frustration he suddenly felt wasn’t real, wasn’t his.

The Roblin was used to manipulating Nulls, and civilian Talent. It had never taken on pups before.

Before Nifty could retract his words, though, Venec stood up, facing him down. Bulk for bulk it wasn’t a contest, but this wasn’t about bulk but alpha dominance.

Nifty might want to be top dog, but Venec was a Big Dog. Nifty automatically began to back down, physically, then Venec grabbed him by the shoulder, shaking his head in warning even as the words came out of his mouth.

“You have something to say, mister? You want to get it off your overinflated chest?”

Nick gaped, and looked at me. I spared him the briefest smile before looking back to the pseudo-confrontation. Lou looked concerned but not really worried; I wasn’t sure if she understood what was going on. I could only hope that Nifty did.

*?*

Pietr’s query came through the swirl, and I hesitated, not sure if I could risk taking my attention away from what was going on.

“Yeah, I got something to say, all right.” Nifty’s voice was loud, but his expression was almost panicked, like he was trying to remember lines he didn’t know he was supposed to have memorized. “You playing favorites now, boss?”

“I always liked some of you more than others,” Venec said. His tone was cold, but his body language relaxed just a hint, the hand holding Nifty’s arm not gripping so tightly. You had to look for the signs, though. Like finding a fatae, you had to know what you were looking for – and what it looked like. If you didn’t know the incredible control Venec had, the discipline Nifty embraced as a matter of a lifetime’s training; if you hadn’t seen them training together, before, you might think those two were about to go head-to-head, possibly with violence.

*?*

*imp* I tossed back to Pietr, hoping it would be enough to explain.

Apparently it was, because there were no more pings.

“Yeah, well, for a guy who was dumb enough to walk onto a live site without any backup, you’re maybe talking a little too loudly... ”

“He pays our salary,” Lou said. She didn’t get up, and, in fact, she looked almost bored, but her tone was pitched just right to be someone sucking up to the boss. Nick was staring at the three of them, barely daring to breathe, then looked at me for some kind of reality check. I shook my head, just a little. Neither of us were worth a hard shit at dissembling; he’d overplay it, and I’d be an utter flop; when I get angry I get angry, but when I’m not... well, I don’t fake anything well, that’s all.

“Careful what you say, boy.”

My eyes went round at that. Just the wrong inflection, and Nifty’s shoulders shook as though he was forcibly restraining himself from attacking Venec. I tensed in reaction, my instinctive reaction to scoop current and shape it into readiness. The sharp poking swirl came back, pricking the skin against my back and up my scalp, like it was trying to find a way in, and I held on to the fear and worry, even as I realized that Nifty’s body language wasn’t rage at the implied insult, but the result of hard-held laughter, trying to escape.

“Hold it... ” I murmured, a double meaning in the words, and they stood there, tensed and fierce, until the prickling sensation ebbed, the imp maybe realizing it was being too obvious, and sliding away again.

“All right.”

The letdown in tension was immediate, and I could feel the change in Venec’s core, sliding from a tight, hard knot into a softer coiling. My own, almost frozen, thawed a little. But not entirely. I could still feel that pricking awareness on my skin, and I knew that the imp had only retreated, not gone away for good.

“Well. That was fun,” Nick said, leaning back and breathing again. “Next time warn me before we go all reality show showdown, okay?”

Lou hit him, hard, before I could.

*pietr?* I risked pinging him, just to let him know that the situation was on hold for the moment, and got back a flash of excitement and concern and... something else, I wasn’t quite understanding. It flooded over me, and then was gone, the way pings did. Damn it. Already I was getting spoiled by how much deeper the communication between me and Venec was; the annoyance and fear of being always-connected that I’d been fretting over seemed a long way away, right then.

I blinked, coming back to the moment, and looked around the room. The others had settled back down after that bit of excitement: Nifty and Venec in a tight little tête- -tête that looked to be some serious dog-to-pup reassurances, while Lou was scribbling something in her notebook, and Nick busied himself pouring coffee out of the carafe in the middle of the table, trying very hard not to eavesdrop on the other two guys.

I studied Nifty and Venec for a moment, trying to be less obvious than Nick. Funny; Nifty was always so confident, so assured, that you forgot that he spent most of his life following a coach’s direction, one way or another. But Venec never forgot.

Even now, his attention on one pup, I’d swear I could feel this roving lighthouse spotlight sense coming from him, swooping around the room to touch on each of us in a constant, passive loop. It should have felt awkward, or annoying, but... it wasn’t anything I hadn’t already suspected he did, only now I knew he did it. More, because he was letting me see it.

No walls. No barriers. The only secrets we were keeping were the ones we let the other keep; a gentleman’s agreement not to look. It was a level of trust I’d never really imagined, even in my most open relationship, and I don’t think Venec ever believed it existed. I was pretty sure he didn’t think it was healthy.

He might be right. I remembered the feeling of not being able to lie from the ki-rin case, when Sharon had used me as a test case for her truth-spell. It had driven me into a near panic. I don’t think people are meant to share that much, that openly, without the option to say no. It goes against all our self-protective instincts, that loss of choice, and having to trust someone else to keep those private places safe.

And yet, even with all that, those thoughts going through my head, I couldn’t find any upset at the sense of Ben so close, so... intimate.

I tried to remind myself not to get used to it, that it wasn’t real any more than The Roblin’s manipulated emotions, just the Merge, and the moment The Roblin was caught – or got bored – we’d be back to walls and distances.

Assuming we could. The thought caught at me like a fishhook into flesh, and the more I tried to ignore it, the deeper it settled into my brain. Would we be able to rebuild those walls? Just sitting here, not even trying, I could feel his presence like flesh to flesh, sense the gentle patience at war with his frustration – not directed at Nifty, but the world in general, and his bandage specifically. It was chafing him.

A lot of the world chafed him.

I didn’t want to know that about him, but I did. Without looking, without trying to look, I also knew that his sweater had an emotional memory attached to it, which was why he wore it so often, and that he was worried about Sharon and Pietr, and that he knew where Stosser was and what he was doing, and was deliberately not thinking about it.

And that he was as hyperaware of me as I was of him.

That realization got me up and out of the room, muttering an excuse I forgot the moment it left my mouth, feeling the need to hyperventilate charging against my breastbone.

And Venec knew that, too. And I felt him letting me go, not because he wasn’t worried but because he knew I needed to deal with whatever was bothering me elsewhere, and he had other things to do, and at that point I had no choice but to put up the frailest, flimsiest wall, just so I could breathe.

In the hallway, I found myself heading for the smallest 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 glowering 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!*

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 contained. 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.

Whatever they had done, whatever they had heard, I knew I didn’t want to know. But the job was about knowing. We were the investigators, the witnesses-after-the-fact. The ones who didn’t look away.

Thankfully, both Big Dogs seemed willing to just let it be, for a moment. I let Benjamin’s warmth under my hands soothe me, and tried to send it back into him, knowing that he was blocking me, holding his walls firm, and The Roblin be damned. He didn’t want me to see what he had done.

The fact that Venec could be a badass wasn’t news to me. If he had done something that was hard by his standards... it was only what was needful and necessary. But I’d be just as thankful not having it in my own brain, yeah.

“He had them transmuted.” Stosser’s voice, like it was coming from far away, through a stone tunnel. “The watch, his son. The dagger... ”

“His wife. Christine.” Ben’s voice was hard and ragged, like a cold wind. The moment he spoke I could feel the anger and the frustration in him, held tight against his spine like it was all that was holding him upright. He had no regret for the way he’d gotten the news out of our former client – and he was a former client, I knew that instantly.

Even without the Merge, I understood why Ben was reacting the way he was. Years ago, he had worked for the woman. He had met her, taken responsibility for finding her son. He was thinking that if he’d been better at his job, been able to do what was needed, seen the danger she was in, they’d both still be human, be free, right now.

Being Venec, there was no way he could be thinking anything else.

I wanted to reassure him, to tell him that he’d done the job he was hired to do, that he’d had no idea the danger the woman and her son were really in. Thankfully, the Merge didn’t make me stupid. He knew all that, and he still felt responsible. I didn’t understand it, but I understood him, if that made any sense.

Whatever had happened between then and now, if Wells had always been batshit insane or something had caused him to totally lose his shit and dabble in things even the most high-res Talent would blanch at, it didn’t matter. I’d hoped... I don’t know what I’d hoped. That the objects had been his parents, maybe, gone willingly into another form rather than die of old age. That they’d been volunteers, trapped in an experiment gone wrong, and the client was safeguarding them. Anything but this.

Because however Wells had managed to do this, whatever price he had paid, it was a crime worse than any I’d ever heard of, one of the prime and undeniable crimes of the Cosa Nostradamus: to remove free will from another. Talent or Null, it didn’t matter.

And how it had been done – all the evidence we had suggested that he had done it by bargaining with an Old One, or an agent of an Old One. God. Of all the arrogant, oblivious stupidity... And had he found it, or had it found him? I wasn’t sure which thought was more distressing.

No, wait: I knew.

The hard beat of Venec’s heart was slowing to a softer thump, and I slid away from him as discreetly as I could, before he suddenly realized what he’d allowed and pulled back first. I’d offered; I wanted to be the one to control when it ended.

Stosser, thankfully, didn’t say anything, or even look at us; he might be staring at the far wall, but his attention was somewhere else entirely.

“You think the... whoever cast the spells, came to take them back?” I had to ask.

“We know so.” Stosser again. Now that the tableau had been broken, he moved, as well, sitting behind his desk like a guy twenty years older. I’d only ever seen the boss so beat-down once before, when a teenager died in our building, because of something his little sister did. “Apparently, a few years back, Wells had been browsing for someone to help him with a domestic problem.”

“The problem of a wife who wanted to leave him, and a son who didn’t want to listen to dear old dad,” Venec interjected, his voice still low and bitter.

“And he found an Old One?” Most people, Talent or Null, who ran across one of the old races, would have backed away as fast and as quiet as they could, and prayed that it didn’t follow. But it was better than an Old One actively trolling for humans.

“Wells has no idea who the source of the original spell was,” Stosser went on. “He only spoke with a magician.”

In other words, Wells was an idiot. But if nothing else, we knew now who had sold Wells his so-called magical protections. “Magician” was a damning phrase, in the Cosa. It meant someone who was still using old magics more than current, relying on tricks, and supplementing their own natural core by deals with the fatae, just like the old tales. A magician couldn’t shape or form a transformation spell; it was totally beyond their capabilities. Had he made a deal with an Old One for power? Wow, talk about a classic Bad Idea. And then to turn around and deal with Nulls, who had no idea what they were doing or getting into? Lovely.

“The spells were maintained on a regular basis, with a payment due every season-change.” Traditional old magics ritual bullshit. “Wells... defaulted on the payments. Several of them, in fact.”

I went still. I’d once had passing contact with a cave dragon, the loan sharks of the Cosa Nostradamus. It had been a misunderstanding, and he’d been only pleasant to me, all things considered, but just the memory of that glare directed at me was enough to make me pay my bills on time even now. Cave dragons were short-tempered when it came to breaking your bond. How much worse...

“What happened?”

“What do you think?” Ben’s voice was way too calm. “The magician came, with what sounds like a hell spawn pet, jaws like a sabertooth, and demanded payment. Wells refused – he felt that he had paid long enough.”

Wells was damn lucky he was still intact and breathing. The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t exactly invisible – we were part of the day-to-day world, and enough people knew about us, interacted with us on a daily basis, so I guess I’d gotten used to them knowing enough to stay out of trouble. It wasn’t difficult. Like I’d told Nick more than a year ago – read your fairy tales; everything you need to know to stay clean is right there.

Nobody ever read Wells fairy tales when he was a kid, clearly.

“I assume the goon was what tore the place up.” You did not fuck with hell spawn. Ever. They were the badass creatures hellhounds had been bred down – way down – from.

“The magician... ?” I let the question trail off, not sure how to phrase it.

Venec answered me. “The name went to an empty storefront. Whoever and wherever our guy might have been, he’s in the wind, now.”

Or gone, in a more permanent fashion. No loss whatsoever to the world. And whoever, or whatever he had been working for would now be impossible to find; that went without saying. I wasn’t sure even Stosser was angry enough to go after an Old One, no matter how many claws it had in the modern world. If we didn’t bother it, maybe it would go bother someone else.

Even the Big Dogs knew there was only so much we could bite off at a time.

I tried not to think about the scrapings in the conference room, and refocused on what we could handle. “And Wells called us to investigate, when he already knew damn well what had happened?”

“He’s used to being in control,” Stosser said dryly. “He thought he could still control the game, get his toys back without admitting anything, and without having to pay the fees, in the future.”

Venec’s dark eyes looked at the far wall, his face expressionless. “Yeah. He knows better now.”

I was surprised and a little alarmed by the surge of vicious satisfaction I felt at those words, until I realized that it was coming from Venec, not me. All right. My Dog was a fierce bastard. I knew that.

And yeah, I knew what I’d just thought, and how possessive it sounded, and I’d deal with that later, when the walls were all the way up and we had time to breathe. If the barn door was open and the horse was gone... well, neither Zaki nor J had raised a dummy. I’d deal with it then.

“So what now?” I asked.

Venec looked at me like he couldn’t believe I’d actually asked that question.

“Now, we get them back.”

Oh. Right. Of course.

“It’s too dangerous.” Nifty crossed his arms and looked... well, like a large dark wall of muscle, which was what he was. “I get what our job is, and I get what our obligations are, but what the hell do you think we’re going to be able to do against an Old One? Seriously. You’re damn good, Ian, ain’t nobody denying that. All of us together, we’ve got a decent level of firepower. We’re a damn good team – at investigating and discovering. That isn’t going to mean crap, here.”

“We don’t even know the level of Old One,” Sharon said, not quite so outwardly defiant, but clearly set against the plan, such as it was. The alphas of the pack, facing off against the Big Dogs. It was fascinating, if not exactly what I wanted to be dealing with, right now. “No idea as to how much power it actually holds, what its intentions are. The last time an Old One was actually involved in human affairs was, what, 1917?”

“It was 1924, actually.”

Sharon accepted my correction with a tip of her chin, indicating – rightfully – that the difference in years didn’t mean squat. “Our information about them is hearsay and hundred-year-old history. If this is an Old One... ”

“After a hundred years, what’s the real chance that it is?” Lou asked, tapping her pen thoughtfully against the table. The noise was soft, but annoying. “I mean, I know what Bonnie and Pietr felt, but all we know is that it’s powerful enough to transmutate... ”

“That’s not a Talent skill set,” Pietr said. “Not s’far as I’ve ever heard or read, anyway. All the alchemists in the world never tipped to the secret.”

“Rumpelstiltskin,” I said quietly. Straw into gold. Borrow a fatae’s ability and you could do things humans only dreamed of. You made your promise and you paid your price. If you kept to the bargain, all ended well. But humans seemed almost incapable of keeping their bargains.

“So it might be a fatae?”

“What do you think Old Ones are, Nick?” I asked, and was proud of the fact that I neither rolled my eyes nor let anything other than matter-of-factness into my voice. Seriously, was I the only one with a mentor who taught them anything?

It was closing in on midnight, we’d been at this all night, and I felt unutterably weary, as though the entire week of stress was catching up with me all at once, and wanted nothing more than to ditch this scene for a nice long soak in a power plant. That wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, though. Someday the lectures Venec kept giving about topping off our cores was going to sink in with me, so I didn’t get caught short like this.

“But fatae don’t use magic.”

Fatae didn’t use magic; they were magic. That was why they were able to disappear, to change form, to fly, to create glamour, and live far longer than we frail mortals. But those were all things they did of themselves, not projecting onto others, or even creating something separate. The fatae needed humans – Talent – to actually work magic, to control and shape current. It took something more, to do this. The miller’s beautiful daughter had made a bargain with an Old One, who worked straw into gold... and then she reneged on the deal, refusing to give up her infant when the Old One came to claim it.

Read the story today, and she was clever enough to come out on top. That was where stories were different than real life: you could rewrite the ending, over the years, until it came out happy.

Stosser took up the lecture-voice. “Old Ones are like the fatae we know like... dinosaurs are like chickens.”

“Old ones old ones beware the really really old ones,” the refrain to one of the stories went, and it was true. They were the fatae who had been around since forever, since when humans were learning how to save fire, and most of the other breeds were hiding in trees or lurking in bogs, waiting for something edible to come along. We’d grown up since then, but we were no match for the masters of old, their memories dark and filled with resentment. All we could do was hope that they left us alone, that the worst we ever saw were the Ancients, who mostly held no malice toward us.

There was something there, in that thought, and part of me wanted to follow after it, but the conversation was moving on and I needed to focus there. I tucked the story behind my ear, and brought myself back to the table.

Apparently, they’d all come to terms with the fact that it was an Old One of some sort – no shit, guys – and now the argument was raging over what the hell we were supposed to do about it.

Which was pretty much where we’d been all night.

“Seriously,” Nifty repeated again. “How are we going to make... anything that powerful cough up two objects it probably thinks it reclaimed in fair terms? We just don’t have that kind of juice, and anyone who did... we’d have to convince them to do it out of the, what, goodness of their own hearts?”

“Or the guilt in them,” Stosser said, like Nifty had just given him an idea.

Venec shot him a look that went from curious to annoyed to worried, like the strobe of a flashing light, 1-2-3. “Ian, no.”

“It will work.”

“It’s insane.” Venec was using the tone of voice that normally ended discussions, all dark and jagged, like lava rock that might not be entirely cooled. “Also, incredibly stupid.”

Stosser leaned back, tugged at the end of his long flame-colored ponytail, and lifted his elegant eyebrows at his partner with exaggerated curiosity. His voice, by contrast, was mild, almost disinterested. “You have another idea? Other than charging in there on your own, like a time-delayed White Knight to put right what you think you should have solved before it happened?”

Oh, boy. Usually the Big Dogs took their squabbles private. This one was out in full display. I wanted to kick Stosser for being such an ass – guilt over a failed sense of responsibility had gotten Venec’s throat nearly torn out, for chrissakes... you had to add onto it? But I kept my mouth shut and my fingers curled into the arm of my chair. Not my fight.

“Ah... ” Nifty shut his mouth with a snap – someone had kicked him under the table to tell him to shut up.

“You want this done?” Stosser didn’t even look at Nifty, probably hadn’t even heard him. “Then that’s how it will get done. Lawrence is right... we don’t have enough firepower to compel, and there’s no time for me to build a consensus. Isn’t that the argument you would make? Do it now, not wait, and mumble our way through protocol?”

It felt like a direct quote, and from the way Venec’s eyes stormed up, I knew it was his, used against him.

“Let me go with you, then.”

“No.” Stosser might have considered the idea, but if so it was only for a second, then he shook his head. “You two in the same room makes things worse, not better.”

“Oh, fuck,” Nick said, not quite under his breath, and I echoed that, more quietly. There was only one person I could think of who was a powerful Talent, whom Stosser could influence that quickly, and whom Venec hated – and hated him in return.

Aden Stosser, Ian’s sister.

The way Ben accepted Ian’s words, I knew I was right. “You still shouldn’t go alone.”

Whatever their plan was, I already knew I didn’t like it. Not if it involved Aden Stosser. From the look on everyone else’s faces, they were of like mind. Nifty, though, unfolded his arms and nodded. “Take Pietr with you. He’s unobtrusive, but sneaky. If you need backup, he’ll do, without setting her off.”

I figured Stosser would brush off the suggestion, but he looked at Venec, who gave a tight little nod. “He’s decent with his protections, and can double-up a Translocation. Any help you need, it’s not going to involve bulk or muscle.”

The slur on Pietr’s build went unanswered; I knew full well Pietr had a deceptive strength, and Stosser – who had worked with us all, closely – knew the same, if for different reasons. I refused to believe that Ben was jealous; we’d agreed he had no cause or right to be jealous, but... it sure felt like jealousy, to me.

It wasn’t funny, nothing about any of this was funny; but when I looked up, Pietr had a warm humor in his eyes that meant he was amused, even if I wasn’t.

I scowled at him, and he laughed. It was totally inappropriate, and stupid, and lightened the mood in the entire room, just a little.

“Don’t feel left out, Torres.” Venec pointed at me, then at Nick, and there was a look in his eye that was all Big Dog. “I have a job for you two, too.”

The contact with Bonnie was brief but thorough, summing up her Situation in the time it took her to think it. Ben was almost grateful to the Merge; trying to explain it all via pings would have been tiresome, and distracting at a time he needed to focus here-and-now.

Fortunately, he wasn’t working alone. “Hold up a minute,” he said to Nifty. The pup’s shoulders lowered, but he didn’t let go of the hold he had on the two figures, one in each hard hand, and outside the barrier, in the larger, shadowy space of the garage, Sharon and Lou waited, specially modified stun-sticks locked and loaded in case the warding failed.

“Pull yourself together,” Venec told The Roblin. “I have a deal for you.”

The Roblin stopped struggling, and the two forms slid together, merging back into one, a gnarled, gray-skinned figure, like tree limbs bound over in badly tanned hide. Venec wondered, idly, how many times it could split like that, and if they each caused equal amounts of trouble, or if it diminished geometrically with each split.

He suspected he wouldn’t ever get an answer to that.

“Let it go, Lawrence.”

“What?” The pup was moderately outraged. “After the crap we went through – ”

“Let it go. It’s not going anywhere. Not so long as I have its attention – and interest. Right?”

The gnarled, gray-skinned figure folded its thick arms across its chest, and glared at the human. “But only so long as you are of interest,” it said, in a voice to match its form, scratchy and bitter.

Venec nodded at Nifty, who reluctantly released his grip on the imp’s shoulders, stepping back a half pace; still within reach if the imp tried to do anything.

They could practically see the fatae testing the wardings again, and knew when it determined that they were still holding.

The garage was cold and damp, but this late at night – or early in the morning – the only other people around were the two guys in the cashier’s box at ground level, and they weren’t going to come out no matter what noises they heard.

The moment Bonnie and Nick had Translocated out – in a moment of intense frustration that he had to send them out, splitting the team at a time when his every instinct was to gather them together, creating a barrier against all possible threats – Venec had known how to trap the imp.

With minimal instructions to the rest of the pack, he had headed out across town, shrugging into his jacket, letting himself think – no, not think but feel intensely about Bonnie, and how frustrating she was. His current swarmed around that thought, the Merge building and intensifying his emotion, almost but not quite reaching the point of him losing control, until the cab’s meter stopped working with a little whimper of shorted-out protest, and he had to get out a block early, shoving a handful of bills at the driver, and walk the rest of the way to the garage where his bike was stored. The streets were empty, at this hour, and he was painfully aware of the streetlights that died as he passed underneath.

He had also been aware of the prickling, swirling sensation just outside his awareness. The Roblin was being cautious, watching, waiting... but unable to resist.

The moment Nifty had appeared in the garage, bellowing at him for abandoning them, leaving them at the mercy of the Old One while all he could think about was Bonnie, the damn fatae had scampered in like a rat on the scent of an overturned Dumpster, thinking to catch him away from the warded office, ripe for chaos.

Sharon and Lou had been waiting in the shadows to raise a warding around them; they’d all been locked down so hard and tight, there was nothing for the damned imp to get its claws into, even if it had sensed them.

It had been a risk, but it had worked, and in the end that was all that mattered.

Once inside the wardings, with Nifty’s bulk and his own current-lock, no matter how the imp had wriggled or threatened, or how many parts it had split itself into – four, and that had been a surprise – the trap had held, and they had the bastard fair and square.

And if there was one thing a mischief imp hated, it was anything fair and square.

“What?” the imp demanded of Venec, still glaring.

Before they got to the deal-making, Venec wanted to get one thing clear, so there would be no room for misunderstandings. “You had your fun, imp. Christ knows, we were probably irresistible to you, from a certain viewpoint. But Bonnie and I are dealing with this now, so the fun’s going to end.” Venec was sure he saw the corners of the imp’s mouth droop a little at that. “We’d therefore appreciate you getting the fuck out of our city.” As tempting as it was to ask for more than that, a mischief imp was a mischief imp, and The Roblin couldn’t not be true to its nature. Venec would have to be very careful about what he demanded, and what was promised.

“Big city. Lots of people.” The Roblin’s fingers twitched, like it was counting all the possible toys it could find.

“Lots of people who are used to dealing with shit on a regular basis,” Ben replied. “You’d have to ramp it up pretty high, for that, and while I’ve no doubt that you’re more than capable of it – we know you’re here. We can very easily spread the word that anything odd or unusual is your doing. Once people know that... it’s not as much fun, is it? Not so much fun to fuck with people if they can see your hands pulling the strings.”

Whatever The Roblin muttered under its breath, then, Ben was pretty sure it wasn’t polite.

“So yeah, big city. Lots of people. But also, us.”

The Roblin managed, without moving its body, to look at Nifty behind him, and the other two just beyond the barrier, and then back at Venec.

“Us... and the rest. And every contact we have, every ally we’ve made, all spreading your name, telling your every secret.”

The Roblin’s eyes narrowed, their golden fire brightening. “Not believing you.”

Venec shrugged, like it didn’t matter a damn’s worth to him. “Your boredom, then. Stay as long as you want. But you’re not leaving this garage.”

“What?”

“Did you think we’d come here without a backup plan?” Of course they had; they’d barely had a front plan to begin with, but none of that tainted Venec’s smug confidence. “You’ll stay here, trapped, only able to reach those who come here... and everyone will know that you are here. They will laugh at you. The Roblin will become a name not of fear and awe, but amusement and scorn.”

He was probably laying it on too thick; Ian used to warn him about that.

“But it doesn’t have to be that way. In exchange for your agreement, we will release you, allow you to leave the city unharmed and intact. But! – ” and he cocked his head slightly, giving back as fierce a glare as anything The Roblin managed “ – only if you agree not only to leave town without any parting shots, but not come back for a period of... seventy years.” Nearly a human lifetime, but barely an inconvenience to an imp. “Is that agreeable?” Before the imp could reply, Venec held up a finger, and caught The Roblin’s gaze with his own.

“If you cross me,” he told the imp, “I will come after you. No matter where you go or how long it takes. And I will be in no mood for mischief. And if you behave... there may be something in it for you, too.”

The imp scowled, his old-man face looking even more like a dried apple as he did so. “How can we resist an offer like that? And what is this parting gift?”

Venec smiled then, a cold smile that gave Nifty the chills, even though they were on the same side. “The scent of a human in this city, a man proud of his power, who thinks himself above judgment or punishment, and the promise that we will not retaliate, if you go after him.”

The Roblin considered, trying to see where the catch might be lurking, and then nodded. “Deal.”

“Nifty, apologize to the nice imp for breaking its arm.”

“Twice,” The Roblin said, its mood souring again.

“Twice breaking its arm. But you only have to apologize once.”

While the pup and imp glared at each other – The Roblin had gotten some nasty bites in during their struggle, and showed no signs of apologizing for those – Venec turned away slightly, craving the illusion of privacy even though it was only the five of them in the garage. It cost him a small fortune to rent the entire space for only his bike, but occasionally it came in handy when he needed a place nobody would wander into accidentally. Admittedly, he had never thought to use it for this, but life was a series of learning experiences, and you either learned, and adapted, or you died.

Benjamin Venec had no intention of dying.

*bonita* He didn’t mean to call her that, had meant to use her last name, or even her usual nickname, but it slipped out. He was more tired than he wanted to think about, if his control was that shaky.

*okay?* Her response was immediate, as though she’d been on hold for however long the deal-making had taken. Maybe she had.

*i’m fine. we have a solution for everyone’s problems* If they could pull this off. He rather thought they could, though. All it would require was some fast talking, and confidence. *open up*

Staying Dead

Curse the Dark

Bring It On

Burning Bridges

Free Fall

Blood from Stone

Hard Magic

Pack of Lies

Damage Control