Kitabı oku: «Pack of Lies»

Praise for

laura anne gilman

PARANORMAL SCENE INVESTIGATIONS

Hard Magic “Gilman’s deft plotting and first-class characters complement her agile blend of science and spell craft, and readers will love the Mythbusters-style fun of smart, sassy people solving mysteries through experimentation, failure, and blowing stuff up.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

RETRIEVERS

Staying Dead “An entertaining, fast-paced thriller set in a world where cell phones and computers exist uneasily with magic and a couple of engaging and highly talented rogues solve crimes while trying not to commit too many of their own.” —Locus

Curse the Dark “Features fast-paced action, wisecracking dialogue, and a pair of strong, appealing heroes.” —Library Journal

Bring It On “Ripping good urban fantasy, fast-paced and filled with an exciting blend of mystery and magic … this is a paranormal romance for those who normally avoid romance, and the entire series is worth checking out.” —SF Site

Burning Bridges “Wren and Sergei’s relationship, as usual, is wonderfully written. As their relationship moves in an unexpected direction, it makes perfect sense— and leaves the reader on the edge of her seat for the next book.” —RT Book Reviews [4 stars]

Free Fall “An intelligent and utterly gripping fantasy thriller, by far the best of the Retrievers series to date.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

About the Author

LAURA ANNE GILMAN is the author of the popular Cosa Nostradamus books for LUNA (the Retrievers and Paranormal Scene Investigations urban fantasy series), and the Nebula award-nominated The Vineart War trilogy from Pocket, as well as the YA trilogy Grail Quest for Harper. Her first story collection, Dragon Virus, will be out in winter 2010, and she continues to write and sell short fi ction in a variety of genres. She also writes paranormal romances under the name Anna Leonard.

Laura Anne lives in New York City.

More information can be found online at www.lauraannegilman.net. Readers can email her at LAG@lauraannegilman.net, or follow her on Twitter @LAGilman.

Pack of Lies

Laura Anne Gilman

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Lisa: pour le voyage entre lectrice et amie

prologue

My name is Bonita Torres. I am an investigator with the Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations team of New York. And I love saying that.

Funny, how life can change really fast. Eight months ago, I was an unemployed college graduate without a clue what I was going to do with my life. Seven months ago, PUPI was created out of the wild inspiration of Ian Stosser and his best friend, Benjamin Venec, and we—a team of five twentysomething Talent—were hired, green as grass and still wet behind the ears. Six months ago we solved a double murder, and earned the chance to show the rest of the Cosa Nostradamus, the magical community, what we could do.

A chance isn’t acceptance, though. The Cosa is naturally suspicious, and there were still a lot of folk out there who didn’t want us around, either because they didn’t trust us, or they were afraid we’d find out what they’d been up to. And in New York City, believe me, there are a lot of people who are up to something. Magic’s been around forever, but mostly on the honor system for how you used it. And some Talent? Not the nicest people around, always.

So we busted our tails, and learned as fast as we could, perfecting the spells we’d already created and crafting new ones to fit our training scenarios, wondering if we’d ever get a chance to use them. In the months since the Reybeorn murders, we’d gotten one missing person case that ended well, and an organ-stealing case that didn’t, so we’re going fifty-fifty. Not great, but the bills—and our paychecks—were getting paid. Barely. Maybe more to the point, I had a job that meant something to me, coworkers I liked, and I got to live in the Electric Apple, New York City, where I could work twelve hours and then play for seven, sleep five and do it all over again. Life was pretty good.

All we needed were a few more jobs to really get going, establish ourselves. The only problem was that even now that we’d showed the Cosa what we could do, nobody ever called us until it got ugly….

one

We were surrounded, outnumbered, and out of luck. I risked a glance at my partner, and saw the same desperation on his face. We needed to think of something, something brilliant, something fast.

Too late. There was a crack like thunder, lightning filling the entire room, and we both fell to the ground like someone slammed a two-by-four over our heads.

A deep male voice pronounced our doom. “You’re dead. Also, stupid.”

There really wasn’t much to say to that. Of the four PUPIs in the room, Nick probably would have milked the death scene. Sharon would have argued her way into a second chance. Nifty wouldn’t have been dead or stupid, probably.

Pietr and I lay on the floor and were dead. Also, stupid.

The deep voice continued. “Now. Can one of you surviving idiots tell me where your cohorts fucked up?”

The voice belonged to Benjamin Venec. Top-notch magical Talent, experienced private investigator, owner of a pair of gorgeously intense brown-black eyes, and, along with Ian Stosser, one half of the leadership of Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations, also known as PUPI. Yeah, Puppy. The jokes just write themselves, and we’d already made most of them.

If we were PUPIs, though, Venec was Big Dog, and obedience school was in session. I loved my job, but this seriously was not my idea of how to start out a Monday morning, especially the Monday after my old college roommate’s annual April Fool’s Bacchanalia. My eyes felt like sandpaper, and I was cranky over more than getting killed. Even on a good day, I was emphatically not a morning person.

Since Venec had moved on to his next victims, I risked raising my face from the carpet to see who of the remaining three PUPIs was going to chime in first. What, as Venec was always asking, did the available evidence tell me? Nick’s shoes needed polishing, and the way he was rocking back into his heels suggested he wasn’t going to volunteer. Sharon had toed off her two-inch heels, and there was a run in her left hose. That was unlike her, and I wondered briefly what epic catastrophe had hit her wardrobe that morning. Also, she was humming under her breath. She only did that when she was stumped, and was trying to scramble for an answer.

That left only one person, but he was out of my line of sight.

“Mister Lawrence?”

His voice amused, our former college linebacker made the call. “They zigged when they should have zagged.”

Pietr, his face still down on the carpet, made a rude noise. Venec kicked him in the ribs, gently, and he subsided. Dead puppies weren’t supposed to talk back.

“Right,” Venec said, his voice thick with disgust. “I stand corrected, you’re all stupid. Dead bodies, off to the side. Sharon and Nick, you’re up. Don’t expect the attack to come in the same pattern. I’m not going to make it that easy for you.”

Easy. Hah.

Pietr rolled over and jumped to his feet with annoying agility. Show-off. I sat up slowly, feeling my back crack in protest. Venec reached down and hauled me to my feet without taking his attention off the rest of the team, like he had some kind of sonar that told him where I was. Maybe he did: Venec was occasionally scary like that.

Benjamin Venec. Not much scared me, but I was willing to admit that this particular Big Dog could unnerve me occasionally. His hand was dry and strong, his fingers wrapping around my wrist with a casual familiarity. I was so tired, I guess my control wasn’t as strong as it usually was, and the touch sent sparks—of the purely incendiary, nonmagical sort—through my veins. Hoo-cha.

I took the lift, and ignored the sparks with the strength of months of self-denial and fierce rationalization. Unnerving, in the sexually charged way. We’d been doing a weird sort of dance since the first day on the job, me and the boss man—well, me anyway. Venec played everything close to the vest, and I had no idea if he felt it, too.

From across the room, Nick caught my eye, and gave me a slight but unmistakable smirk.

Yeah, Venec was undeniably hot, if you liked the brilliant, dark-eyed, moody, remote sort, and I knew damn well that he felt some of those sparks, too. I’d been around that block a time or two before, and I could tell when someone was reacting. He was also the boss, and that was more important than any fireworks show. I might be dead and stupid, but I wasn’t dumb. A bed partner was easy enough to find. A good job? Lots tougher. Especially for someone with our … call them specialized skills. I wasn’t going to risk that, not for anything.

“Move the chairs over here. Lawrence, shove the chest into the middle of the room. No, more to the left.” Venec was barking orders like a B-grade movie director, resetting the stage for the next test. Nifty and Pietr lifted and toted, while Sharon paced around the edges, checking the layout as it emerged and trying to get one step ahead of whatever Venec was going to throw at them.

I snorted. Good luck with that. We were all damned good, but we were damned good because Venec taught us to be. He still knew shitloads more than we did all put together, with a decade more experience, and there was no way to predict the way his brain was going to jump.

Ian Stosser, Venec’s business partner and the public face for PUPI, was widely acclaimed to be brilliant. For my money, though, I’d place the bet on Benjamin Venec. Ian was a flashy thinker, but my mentor always told me to watch the quiet ones.

“Pay attention,” Venec said sharply, and I jerked a little, sure he was scolding me. But no, he was glaring at Nifty. Good. Nifty could use the occasional slap down to remind him he was only two-thirds as smart as he thought he was.

Everything was finally rearranged to the Big Dog’s satisfaction. Out of the game, Pietr and I sat on the chairs now shoved against the far wall of the office conference room, while Nifty leaned against the wall like a bouncer on break, and we watched Venec put Sharon and Nick through their test.

Venec was re-creating a scenario we’d run into last week: lung-runners, illegal organ-leggers, working out of a warehouse on Staten Island. They’d been a mixed group, Null and Talent, operating off the grid—literally—so that law enforcement was having trouble finding them. The pirates used current to keep the tissue fresh until they found buyers, which was a particularly nasty bit of work, and exactly the kind of thing PUPI had been founded to track down: magic used in the commission of a crime.

The hospital the tissue had been stolen from had hired us on the recommendation of a Board member who was also a Talent—our first “corporate” client.

We’d followed the traces of current they left behind, and confirmed the site, catching them with a half-dozen coolers filled with stolen human tissue. We had meant to alert the cops to come in and arrest them, but things got a little messy, and then they’d been tacky enough to try to kill us, rather than surrendering or running away. Venec took it personally when someone tried to kill us. Especially since the bastards got away. The fact that we’d recovered the coolers and gotten enough information to put the lung-runners on the radar for more traditional investigations was enough to get us paid—but not enough to avoid one of Venec’s lecture/training sessions. “Fail better” was probably tattooed on his ass somewhere.

The good thing was that we were just as fanatical about learning as he was about drilling this stuff into our heads and reflexes. That had been one of the requirements to become a PUPI—the desire to learn how to do something new, and do it better, instead of following the worn track.

Sharon had put her shoes back on, and was kneeling by the foam chest that was standing in for the medical cooler of tissue. Nick had her back, the way he should—good boy. Nicky-boy was really good at his specialization, but sometimes a little flaky outside that, and I’d had to remind him more than once to keep his eye on the game.

Venec stepped forward and raised his left hand, indicating the show was about to start.

I wished deeply for a bucket of popcorn, because once you’re dead, and not worrying about what’s going to hit you next or how you’re about to screw up, Venec’s fun to watch. He has what my mentor calls an economy of motion that tells anyone paying attention just how damn good he is at manipulating current. No muss, no fuss, no showboaty waste of energy, just results. You can learn a lot by watching carefully.

The fact that he was hot like a hot thing was just a distracting plus. I’m a red-blooded twentysomething female who hadn’t had a date, much less sex with another person, in three months thanks to the demands of this new job and all it was throwing at us. I might only be able to look, in Venec’s case, but look I would, and appreciate.

The subject of my ruminations dropped his hand, and a wall of current-fire rose around Sharon and Nick, pushing them away from the cooler. They shifted fast, standing back-to-back. There was no heat, but the sparks were sharp and bright, crackling in the air as Venec directed them with just a flicker of a glance. I almost lost track of what he was saying, watching the neon-bright strands weave through the air.

Current—magic—had one aspect that people always seemed to forget: it was pretty.

It was also dangerous, and Sharon and Nick were giving the strands their full and complete attention. Just because Venec was controlling it didn’t mean it couldn’t hurt them, as per our prime example a few minutes before. My skin still itched from the bolt that had taken us out.

“All right,” Venec said, his deep voice patient, but still rock-hard. “You’re in the middle of a warehouse, the perps have outsmarted you and backed you against the wall, and your evidence is across the room. What are you going to do?”

The wall of fire was new—Pietr and I’d gotten hit from above, suddenly, in a literal rain of energy—but it was the same question. What are you going to do? I leaned forward, waiting to see what bit of brilliance they came up with that had escaped us. I am, unabashedly, a geek about this sort of thing. We were inventing procedures as we went—magic had been around forever, but paranormal investigations as a formal, scientific, proof-oriented gig was something new—and I totally got off on it.

“Come on, people,” Venec said, still patient. “Time’s passing. Suspect’s gonna flit on you.”

“Let them flit,” a new voice said.

The current-wall faded and flickered out, Venec’s hand closing shut and pulling it back in a graceful movement, like a conductor halting the symphony, and we all turned to the door where the other Big Dog, our founder and public leader, leaned in the doorway. Where Venec was square-shouldered and dark, Ian Stosser looked like a beeswax candle—tall, skinny, and pale, topped with a long ponytail of orange-red hair that was too healthy-looking not to be natural. Today he was wearing a dark gray suit, tie still tied, which meant he’d been in a meeting and just gotten back.

“This had better be good, Ian,” Venec said, but he wasn’t even half as cranky as he sounded. Stosser wouldn’t have interrupted unless it was important.

“We have a case.”

That was important.

Our office was on the seventh floor of a seven-story building far enough uptown in Manhattan to be decidedly untrendy in a neighborhood nobody was going to mistake for Park Avenue. We didn’t get so many visitors that we had to worry about appearances, and not being in midtown suited me just fine, although it was a hell of a commute for Sharon, coming up from Brooklyn. The Guys had used the correlating savings in rent to rent a second suite, once they knew we were going to stick around, and restructured our half of the floor into a warren of workrooms and meeting spaces that gave the illusion of privacy.

Location and privacy were important.

PUPI had a problem that most small start-ups didn’t face: We were routinely tossing around a lot of current during training. Current, the source of our magic, ran alongside electricity like horses in a herd, and sometimes they did the dominance thing. When that happened … well, you learned to be careful, and work as far away from delicate electronics as you could.

Going out into the forest for privacy the way they used to in the Bad Old Days wasn’t really feasible, though—Central Park was just as wired as SoHo these days, anyway, and having a bunch of twentysomethings spellcasting in public might raise an eyebrow or two. Or maybe not; this was New York City, after all. Venec liked to keep our training in the office, though, so the Guys had modified the wiring when they did the other renovations to make sure that we didn’t short out the entire building’s electrical system, no matter what we threw at it.

But while we did most of our training in the largest workroom, and almost all the casual gatherings in the break room—where, not coincidentally, the coffeemaker lived—the briefings were held in the smallest office at the far end of the hall where Ian Stosser now held court.

We didn’t have many meetings here—maybe one a month—but we’d already established a routine, doing a subtle push-and-shove to get at the three armchairs that fit in the space in front of Ian’s desk. As usual, Nifty claimed the largest one, since he held on to the muscled bulk that had made him such a hot draft prospect in college. Sharon claimed the other on the basis of a short skirt not really suited for sitting on the floor, and Pietr ghosted into the third chair in that spooky way he had before anyone saw him moving.

Nick and I were relegated to sitting on the floor. Again. Thankfully I’d opted for black cargo pants and a black hip-length sweater today, in honor of the still-raw April weather outside. Spring in New York City was better than spring in Boston, but not by much. I tucked my legs up in front of me, elbows on my knees, and watched while Venec took his usual spot, holding up the wall behind Stosser’s desk.

Ian Stosser and Benjamin Venec. The Big Dogs. The two men were an interesting contrast, and not just physically. Even after all these months, we didn’t know much about Benjamin Venec, who was a closemouthed bastard when he wasn’t tearing us new ones in the name of keeping us smart and alive, but Ian Stosser was—on the surface—an open book. High-placed in the Midwest Council once upon a time, he had made a very public break with them about a year ago. A few months after that, he came to the East Coast with the idea of holding Talent—both Council and the Unaffiliateds, or lonejacks—accountable for criminal misbehavior of magic. To do that, he created PUPI.

Why? What had happened in Chicago to send him here? That was where the book closed and not even my mentor, a man of considerable high-level connections himself, could get a read.

With Stosser’s reputation, and the tendency of some Talent to misuse their skills, you’d think people would welcome us with open arms, glad that someone was there to ferret out wrongdoers … not exactly. The first few months we’d been open for business had been tough. Not everyone in the Cosa Nostradamus thought having us poking our noses into magical crimes was the best thing since sliced bread. Stosser’s own sister was opposed to the very idea of PUPI, enough that she tried to get us shut down by any means possible.

Having the office rewired had saved us when one of those means, involving a current-strike against the building, coincided with the killer we were trying to take down deciding to take us on directly. Saved us—but not a teenage boy who had been in the elevator when the rest of the building went off-line.

I still occasionally had nightmares about that.

In the eight months since the boy died, and Little Sister had been disciplined, nobody had taken potshots at us—physical or magical. We’d even gotten a few jobs; a jewelry heist, the organ-legging gig, but that didn’t mean we were wanted yet, or trusted. We had to do everything perfect just to be considered acceptable, and never mind that what we were doing—creating investigative tools that gave measured and quantified results out of a naturally chaotic and individualized power source—was totally made up as we went along. No pressure, right. I knew for a fact that Sharon was developing an ulcer, and I’d started chewing my fingernails again.

And all that got us here, waiting in Stosser’s de facto office, hoping that this might be the job to finally break that last hesitation, and make us legitimate.

Venec closed the door behind us, for some reason—if someone Translocated into the office, we’d have bigger problems than them overhearing us—and Stosser dropped the news.

“No time to give you a full briefing—this one’s hot, and might get hotter. But for once, somebody with a bit of authority used their brains instead of their hair spray, and had us called in right away, so we have a chance to actually pull something off the scene.” Ian paused, his gaze meeting each of us in turn, assessing us the way he always did, like he was ready to demand the impossible. “It’s hot, and it’s ugly. A girl was attacked early this morning, downtown, an attempted rape. Her companion murdered one of the assailants and partially disemboweled the other.”

I could feel Nick, who was sitting beside me, shudder a little, although I wasn’t sure which of the events caused him to react that way. I wasn’t exactly cackling with glee at this assignment, either. Murder was … I wasn’t jaded, but I’d seen a lot of death already. Rape? Okay, that was a trigger-point for any female, no matter how tough you were, but he’d said attempted rape. The disembowelment … that was, um, new. And carried a nasty visual I wanted very badly to get rid of. Thanks, boss.

Behind Stosser, Venec’s heavy gaze held steady, but there was a twitch over his left eye that gave it away. Big Dog was a hard-ass, but I knew from personal experience that there was actual give-a-damn under that bastardized exterior.

“So why’d we get called in? I mean, if they caught the guy, and it was obviously self-defense or near enough …” Nifty was asking the practical question, beating Sharon to the punch. We were, in theory, all equal to each other, but like any pack there were alphas and omegas, and those two competed for lead the same way they fought for the chairs, using every angle they had short of stomping over each other. Sometimes I thought it was just Venec’s glare that kept the stomping from happening. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other—they did. We all got along fine. They were just fierce competitors; stomping was what they did for fun.

“You’re right,” Stosser said. “It should have been an open-and-shut case, none of our business, except for two things.” He paused, as though he was trying to choose his words carefully. Anything that made Ian Stosser hesitate was not going to be pretty. I braced myself, mentally.

“One, both the victim and the perps are Talent—” someone snorted, Talent being no proof against being a scumbag “—and two, the accused killer is a ki-rin.”

That made the room go quiet. I felt something catch in my chest: not pain, but something fierce and hot. A ki-rin. Dear god and a merciful universe, a ki-rin, here, in the city. A ki-rin, accused of murder.

I suddenly understood why things moved so fast on this one—and why we were called in. If anything went wrong, we were going to take the fall.

“This needs to be as clean and as tight as a waterproof drum,” the boss man said, standing up, his words confirming my fears. “I want everyone on this, right now. So let’s move, people.”

We moved.

two

Normally we didn’t all haul ass to a site—we didn’t really have a normal yet, even after eight months—but Stosser had indicated all of us, and so all of us went.

Well, all but one. “You take them,” Venec said to Ian as we grabbed coats and kits out of the closet and headed for the door. “I’ll see what I can drag out of the unusual suspects.”

Overhearing that made me feel better about this case. Based on the rather interesting individuals he brought in to lecture us on lock picking, surveillance, scams, and other things your mother wouldn’t want you to know, Venec had collected an assortment of contacts in various low places. When we got back, I’d lay money that he’d have a full dossier on anything and everything there was to know about the people involved, even better than the official files.

Stosser looked like he was going to argue, then nodded instead. He wasn’t happy about it, though, and shoved us into the elevator with a look on his face that made us all hush our usual chatter. Not that anyone was feeling much in the way of wisecracks. Organ-leggers lent themselves to the bad jokes, the more disgusting or punny the better. Attempted rape and actual disembowelment, not so much. Add in a ki-rin … We were all quiet, locked in our own thoughts, in the time it took to get to the lobby and out to the avenue.

There was an SUV with TLC plates already waiting outside our building. Obviously the boss had made some calls before he brought us in. Stosser got shotgun, the rest of us were in back, elbow-to-rib and knee-to-knee. The car came with a manic driver who swung through the morning traffic like he’d been a Shanghai cabbie in another life, shoving us around even as packed-in as we were. Nobody complained. The subway might have had more room, but it would have taken too long. Since we opened our doors for business, the main problem had been that we weren’t called in until after everyone else had tromped all over the scene and made things harder for us to sort out. Today, we’d been given time to get in and take a look while things were clean … but the clock was ticking and the twenty minutes it took us was nineteen minutes too long.

I sat back in the seat, stuck in the middle, trying to ignore Nifty’s elbow hitting my ribs, and Nick’s cheap, toxic cologne in my nose, while Sharon and Pietr got the very back seat with all our kits. Four basic black hardcases and one bright red one: Pietr’s, as though to make up for his unwanted but useful ability to disappear when you were looking straight at him. Sharon had added a discreetly stylin’ silver tag to hers, and mine had a glittering 3-D ice-spider decal on the side, just where anyone looking to steal it would see it and be freaked out. Nifty and Nick didn’t bother with anything, far as I could tell.

I stared up at the ceiling as we zoomed through lights that were yellow-turning-red, trying not to guess at what we were going to find on the scene. The trick to scene investigations was to look without expecting to find anything, examine without assumption. Current was directed by what we desired; even without the words of a spell, you could possibly create something just by assuming strongly enough that it was there.

Or so Venec warned us, at least twice a week.

The driver let us out on the corner, and zoomed off like he had to be in Queens three seconds later. The minute we got out, I was shivering inside my coat, but it wasn’t because of the sharp wind coming off the river. Something had walked over my spine, and that was never a good thing. I had a slight touch of precog, what my mentor J called “the kenning,” and it told me this was a bad place to be. Bad things happened here.

No choice, though. This was the job: investigating bad things.

The others were already walking toward the scene, and I had to stretch my legs to catch up. We weren’t the only ones interested; there was a small crowd already gathered around the scene of the attack, maybe twenty people, and even from the street you could tell that the mood was not good. Sometimes there was a weird party atmosphere when people rubbernecked a crime scene. Not here. I could practically smell the current on them, crackling like ozone, and I knew the rest of the team was getting the same vibe: Talent, wanting to know why another Talent was dead, and a second wounded, at the hands—horn—of a fatae.

Normally interactions between fatae and humans in the Cosa Nostradamus were cautious but healthy, but something like this … I didn’t need Stosser’s warning still ringing in my ears to know that things would get a lot worse, and fast, if we didn’t get the evidence sorted and delivered, soon.

I wondered, suddenly, why so many Talented bystanders were here. Coincidence? Or had someone put the word out, in the time it took for us to get called in? And if so … why, and who?

Questions I didn’t have answers for, yet.

Someone in the crowd noticed our arrival, and a low mutter went up, like the first roll of thunder. Hot and ugly. Ian had it on the nose.

Stosser had already given the crowd a once-over, and was issuing orders. “Cholis. Run the tape. Lawrence, crowd-watch.”

“On it, boss,” Nifty said, and he and Pietr moved toward the crowd, walking like men with purpose. The tape wasn’t the yellow crime-scene tape so beloved of Null cops, but a thin red extrusion of current that flickered and snapped in the cold air as they spun it out, walking a circuit around the scene. The tape was invisible to Nulls, but warned Talent and fatae alike away from the investigation. If they trespassed, Pietr, our rope-man, would know.

“Hey!” Pietr scowled at a lanky figure that brushed against the wire leaning in to get a better look. “Back off!”

“Or what, little man?” The intruder—your basic suburban white-boy macho wannabe in clothing too expensive to be tough—loomed over Pietr, who seemed to almost fade from sight, the way he did when stressed. There was an instinctive urge to go to Pietr’s defense, but I checked it. We would all be given our particular assignments, and that wasn’t mine. Nicholas James Lawrence wasn’t all that big, for an ex-college linebacker, but he presented like a big-ass mofo when he wanted to. Nobody threatened a coworker when Nifty was around.

Satisfied that the guys had things in-hand, I turned my attention back to the boss. Ian’s long orange-red hair was covered by a black wool watch cap, making him tougher to identify at a distance. I wasn’t sure if that was intentional or not, since he was normally a flamboyant publicity-magnet. Oh, hell, Ian never did anything unintentionally. He was letting us go public, and playing it close and quiet himself. Interesting. Not useful, right now, but interesting.

“How virgin is the scene?” I heard the word come out of my mouth and winced. I’m not normally big on tact, but that had been particularly ill-chosen even for me.

Stosser didn’t even seem to notice, although Sharon’s cheek twitched a little in response. “Thankfully, one of ours was with the first responders, and was quicker on the draw than most of his peers. Paramedics took the human bodies, but the cops haven’t gone over the scene yet.” A grim smile touched his face. “New York’s finest decided to wait for someone to come down and take care of the ki-rin before they approached the scene itself, so the area’s about as untouched as we’re going to get.”

I couldn’t blame the cops—I wouldn’t want to deal with a ki-rin in a bad mood, either.

“Not that there’s any doubt of who did what,” Stosser went on, “but I am informed that the fatae community’s already screaming for blood—more blood, I mean. They don’t like that a ki-rin’s been shown disrespect, disrespect being anything other than kissing its hooves in abject adoration.”

Wow. That was the bitterest I’d ever head the boss man get. Normally he left the snide comments to Venec.

“What kind of blood do they want?” Nick asked.

“Who the hell knows.” He seemed to remember he was talking to staff, not himself, and I saw the usual cool exterior go back up. “Our contact thinks the fact that there was any investigation by Nulls at all set them off. They’re already demanding that the ki-rin be released, and nobody’s even questioned it yet.

“The one thing everyone agrees on is that this needs to be cleared up and closed down as soon as possible, if not sooner. That means we have to determine exactly what happened, who did what, and in what order.”

“That’s what you built us to do,” I said. And then, since he hadn’t really answered me before, I prompted him again. “The scene?”

Stosser looked up at the sky, checking the thickness of the clouds. Normally we—Talent—like storms, since electrical storms are natural generators of current, but rain right now would seriously screw things up by compromising the scene. Magical trace washed away the same as physical, especially if there’s lightning involved—current from the electric bolts could wipe the slate clean in one flash—and being wet made me look like a drowned albino rat.

“Like I said, reasonably untouched, for NYPD values of reasonable. Ground’s been trampled by a couple-three cops, one of whom is our first-responder lonejack.”

Poor guy must have shit a brick when he saw the ki-rin, and realized what he’d gotten. Ki-rin were not only rare, they were ancient, as a breed. Like dryads and greater dragons, they were given respect by every other fatae breed, and any Talent with a lick of sense or tradition. We were lucky our first responder didn’t panic, and luckier still that he called the Council, and not one of the lonejack elders. The Cosa Nostradamus’s relationship with the NYPD is a long and fragmented one, but something like this was going to get every alarm jangling everywhere, and the Council—much as a lonejack would hate to admit it—was the best way to handle things. Council had the protocol.

“We have a signature on the cop?” Signature was the way we identified Talent, the way their current “felt.” It was individual, like a fingerprint—but you had to know what it looked like, first. Problem was there wasn’t a database for us to check, which mostly made identifying a particular signature near-impossible unless we had access to everyone on the scene, to tag them for comparison, and rule them out of any evidence we collected.

“Not yet. Nick, go find and fetch.”

Nick rolled his eyes, then saluted crisply, and turned on his heel and headed out into the crowd. That left me and Sharon.

“The deceased has been carted off to the morgue, while his companion is on his way to the hospital, presumably doped to the gills.” That was standard for Talent in those situations—current is only under our control by conscious effort: when stressed, we can go haywire. Pietr was unusual in that he faded from view as a protective measure—most of us just shorted out sensitive electronics like, oh, lifesupport systems and finely calibrated medical apparatuses. Emergency-room staff hated to see us coming.

Ian went back to issuing orders. “Mendelssohn, I want you working the crowd. Listen, don’t talk. If there’s anyone out there with more than a prurient interest, or says anything—anything—that gives you a twitch, I want to know, immediately.” While the Guys had us stretch in training, or on low-intensity cases, when we were on a sticky job they preferred to match people up with their native skills, and Sharon had a seventh sense about if people were lying or not. My teammate, characteristically stylish in a long black suede coat and a black wool beret over her blond hair, nodded and went off to do our master’s bidding

And that left me. And the scene. No surprise. I didn’t need to hear the band playing to know what my marching orders were.

“You okay with this?” Ian generally played the compassionate soul to Venec’s hard-ass, but he really wasn’t much on the touchy-feely when it came to us, more likely to toss us in without a by-your-leave. I blinked at his concern, wondering what triggered that, and then shrugged it off. No way I was going to make him think I couldn’t handle it.

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

He lifted the wire, the spell recognizing his signature and not sending an alarm, and we entered the crime scene.

Like I said, everyone on the team had their strength. If Sharon was a truth-scryer, I was a gleaner. I figured that my recall, both visual and factual, was one of the reasons I’d been recruited. Venec had run me through endless tests and scenarios, honing that ability and tying it into a cantrip we used to capture the scene intact. They’d tried, first, to teach everyone the spell—that hadn’t worked out well. So unless it was an emergency, it was just me. My job here was to walk the scene, gathering as much information as I could, both physical and magical, and re-create it later for the rest of the team to study.

Since joining PUPI, I’d gleaned murder scenes, dipped into the minds of pathological abusers, and—Venec’s idea of training—skimmed the hot emotions of a rabid Salamander. Reading the scene of a self-defense killing where we knew the identity of all the players should have been a piece of proverbial.

Except the guy’d been killed because he’d tried to rape a ki-rin companion. Scum, and stupid, and I was not looking forward to getting my mental fingers into what that left behind.

That thought drew my attention to what Stosser had said, about the NYPD not wanting to touch the scene until the ki-rin had been dealt with. What sort of trace did a ki-rin leave behind? I let my gaze pass over the scene, looking and yet not looking, and found myself noticing a shadowed corner near one of the riverside buildings about a hundred yards from the scene where two men—older, suited, officious-looking, and couldn’t be more obviously Council if they’d had it branded on their left buttocks—had the accused killer contained.

My breath caught in my throat, despite my determination not to be impressed. I’m hardly a country bumpkin, but a ki-rin … my god. One of the most exotic and magnificent of the fatae, the nonhumans. They’re sometimes called Asian unicorns, but that was so far off the mark to be useless. A unicorn was a horse with a horn and an attitude. The ki-rin were … It was too far away to see details, but I knew the description, same as any halfway-trained Talent. Body of a stag, mane of a lion, head of a dragon—and yeah, a single slender horn growing from the center of the dragonlike head. Wise, fierce, compassionate, truth-seeking … and, like European unicorns, associating only with women of untouched virtue.

Okay, obviously I wasn’t going to get close-up and personal with one anytime soon. Considering the sole example present was currently pacing back and forth, making the suits with him display some seriously cautious body language, that was fine by me. Some glorious legends could remain legend.

It did make me wonder about the sexual experience of the guys talking to it, though, and—more to the investigation—why they were keeping it there instead of whisking it off … somewhere. Especially if the fatae community already had their knickers in a twist about anyone questioning it. Oh. Oh, no …

“We don’t have to …” I asked Stosser, with a twitch of my fingers in the ki-rin’s direction.

He followed my fingers, and shook his head. “No.”

“Good.” Because if the local looky-loos were upset about it being asked to step aside while the scene was cleared, I didn’t want to think about what they’d do to the person who actually interrogated it.

That left one unpleasant bit still to be done. “You going to … interview the woman?”

She’d been taken to the local hospital—the same one her accused assailant was currently being treated in—and released. But we needed her statement, before things got even more muddled in her head.

“I thought that would be best,” he said.

Understatement. Ian Stosser was the public face of PUPI not only because he was the founder, but also because he was a PR schmoozer par excellence. He looked you in the eye and every bit of his compassion and empathy and intelligence was focused on you, your problem, and he existed only to solve that problem for you. It was not entirely a sham—he did care, and he did want to solve the problem, otherwise he would never have gotten into this line of work. But Ian could and would kick it up a notch or seven. In a word: charisma. Natural, and magical. But he was also a bulldog when he was after something, as we knew to our own bruises.

“Yeah. Boss?”

He paused, one narrow red eyebrow cocked under that stupid watch cap.

“The girl …” I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say. Actually, I knew exactly what I wanted to say, I just wasn’t sure how to do it without getting fired.

He showed his teeth in a reassuring smile, a Stosser specialty. “I’ll be gentle, Torres. Get to work.”

With that, Stosser headed off for, I presume, the hospital. I watched him disappear into the crowd, then turned back to look over the scene. He was right: Time for me to do what I did, before anyone muddied the scene, or the cops came back and kicked us out, or anything else came along to make the job tougher.

I hesitated a moment, looking over the ground. We were down in what had once been the meatpacking district, alongside the Hudson River. It’d been prettied up over the past few years, and the city had put in walkways and greenery so during the summer it was a nice enough place to skateboard or bike, or walk your dog, but on an overcast, blustery almost-but-not-quite-yet spring day? Not so nice. Why had they been out here before dawn? A ki-rin wasn’t the sort to club it up … but he wouldn’t be able to say no to his companion, I bet. She might not be having sex, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t like to dance.

So. Run through the probable scene, capture the details, gather the pieces. I turned slowly, letting my gaze take in the entire area. The woman and her companion, maybe flushed and tired after a night out, had been walking along the path, there. It’s not quite dawn, the visibility’s crap, maybe some of the streetlamps flickered or went out. They’re talking, maybe laughing, maybe arguing. Had she been drinking, drugging? Ki-rin companions were virgins, but I never heard they had to be pure every other way, too. And who knew what a ki-rin did for entertainment. So. Maybe not too steady on all six legs, maybe not seeing so well, and they came up to the building there, where the shrubs were planted, and … two men had … approached them? Jumped out at them?

I cast another glance over to where the two Council flunkies had been. As though they’d heard me wondering, they were now leading the ki-rin away, flanking it like a suited honor guard, to where a small trailer-van had pulled up to the curb. The ki-rin was smaller than they looked in pictures, with a pattern of marks on its linen-white neck that didn’t look natural—bruises, maybe, or current-burns? A Null, someone who couldn’t use current, didn’t know about the fatae, might have been confused in the predawn light, might have thought that it was a really large dog, or maybe the girl was walking alongside a pony, or something. Or maybe not even seen it, if they were completely Null. That happened, sometimes: Something in a Null’s brains just refused to acknowledge the presence of the supernatural, even when it was right in front of them, like not being able to see blue or green: current-blind.

A Null might not have seen it. The would-be rapists had been Talent, both of them. A Talent, ignoring the presence of a ki-rin? Impossible. Insane. Maybe they were high, or drunk, or …

Staring at the landscaping wasn’t going to tell me anything, and we only had a small window before the NYPD came back to reclaim the scene. Time to stop avoiding, and do my job.

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven …” In the exhale, I sank into myself, burrowing down into my core, gathering my magic to me.

During my mentoring period, J told me that everyone saw their core differently; for me, it was a tangle of threads and cables, neon-bright blues and greens and yellows. Personal magic, gathered from external sources and hoarded; like a tank of gas, if you ran out you were screwed.

For once, I had more than enough current gathered and stored; the trick was to control it, make it do what you wanted and only what you wanted. As I counted down from ten, I closed my eyes and pushed the soles of my boots firmly against the asphalt of the jogging track. My body was still, but my current was reaching down, finding the bedrock deep underneath, grounding in that solid base. That allowed me to use more current without worrying about affecting anyone around me—or, hopefully, their electronics.

When I opened my eyes again, deep in a working fugue-state, it was as though someone had dropped a scrim over the stage, and rolled back time to just before dawn. It wasn’t real—but it was, too. Places hold memories, same as people. Not for long, and they’re easily scattered and corrupted, but if you’re fast and good, you can capture it. Like spirit photography, Ian had said during training, only I was doing it with current instead of light-sensitive paper and chemicals. I could see, using mage-sight, the splatters of blood and other bodily fluids like Day-Glo paint on a gray background, and felt my stomach do a slow roll-and-turn. I didn’t want to see this, I didn’t want to see this, I didn’t …

Enough. Everyone else was doing their thing; I wasn’t going to go back to Stosser and tell him I couldn’t hack it, after all. A hard shove set aside the whining inner voice, and a sort of Zen calm settled over my core. That was another thing that made me good at my job; like Pietr, I didn’t get staticky and disruptive when my emotions were involved. I got very, very precise.

Ideally I’d let the scene play out in real time, getting it with my eyes as well as my senses. I could faintly hear the rumble of voices outside that suggested the guys in blue were back, and I needed to be gone. Just because we’d been called in didn’t mean we had any actual authority, and pressure would come down soon enough to get all this dealt with.

I did a hard-and-fast scoop, pressing everything I could find into a strand of current, and sealing it away so the rest of my own personal memories or emotions couldn’t tamper with it. Hopefully. We were still working out some of the kinks in that particular procedure.

“Miss?”

I opened my eyes to see a cop—maybe a few years older than me, clean-shaven and anxious-looking—staring down at me. Rookie, probably, sent over to get rid of the pretty little girl, while his partner did the real work. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, miss. This …”

“Yeah, it’s okay,” I said. He had a faint telltale glint, seen with fugue-sight, that told me he was Talent, and so he probably-maybe knew who I was and what I was doing there. Or maybe not; just because you could didn’t mean that you did. There were a lot of Talent who ignored anything magical. Lonejacks especially didn’t care, if it didn’t affect them directly and personally.

Either way, I wasn’t going to give him cause to get annoyed. Our window had slammed shut. I gave my “packet” a mental touch, just to reassure myself it was there, and got lost.

There wasn’t much point to waiting around for the others to finish up; they’d do their job and get back to the office when they were done. I walked over to the nearest 1 line stop and caught the next train uptown, keeping myself as still and focused as I could, the magical equivalent of walking with a glass of water on your head. Only if I “spilled,” it would contaminate the entire gleaning and ruin our only record of the scene, and every minute I spent with it inside me, the greater the chance of contamination.

Not that anything I picked up was admissible in the court of law, even perfectly preserved, but we didn’t exactly deal with the courts, or law, as most of the world knew it. We were of the Cosa, for the Cosa, and the Cosa determined what—if any—punishment would be handed out, based on what we reported. That was why the “Unaffiliated” part of “Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations” was so important. The Cosa entire wasn’t exactly filled with love and trust: Council looked down at lonejacks, lonejacks sneered at Council, and the fatae thought most humans were jumped-up Johnny-come-latelies, Talent only a little bit better. And what most Talent thought of the fatae could be summed up in two words: treacherous bastards. Have you read a fairy tale lately? Not the Disney kind; the real stuff. Even the good fairies are not the type you’d invite in for tea.

I no sooner had the thought than I looked up and had my attention caught by a good-looking guy sitting across the train from me, slouched in his seat, leather jacket nicely scruffed and jeans worn white in interesting places. While normally I’m all about the good-looking bad boy—or, occasionally, girl—I shook my head and smiled, to his obvious disappointment. The gills at the side of his neck were a dead giveaway, if you knew what you were looking for. Pickups were all well and fun, but I’d learned my lesson about playmates on office time. Anyway, mer-folk weren’t my thing. Sardine-breath was a total turnoff.

Although it was reassuring to know that some human/fatae relations were still going strong.

The subway dumped me out at my stop, and I emerged into a distractingly normal scene: bright sunshine and busy traffic; people going in and out of the stores and buildings that lined our street. There were only two teenagers lounging on the stoop of the building next to ours—either the usual gang had decided to go to school today, or they’d gotten jobs. I gave the two a distracted wave, but didn’t pause for our usual exchange of friendly catcalls.

I was buzzed into our lobby by the current-lock the Guys had put there to let team members in without needing to worry about a key, and took the stairs slowly, feeling the burn in my legs. We had an elevator, but I didn’t like using it. It wasn’t fear, or guilt, exactly. None of us used it anymore, unless Stosser herded us into it, like he had this morning. There were bad vibes in that shaft. And the exercise was good for me, anyway. Current burned calories, but it didn’t build muscles.

“Anyone home?”

The office was quiet, and the coffeemaker was turned off; two signs that I was the first back. Where the hell was Venec? It was almost lunchtime; maybe he had run out to get a sandwich? If so, I hoped he brought back extras: I suddenly realized that I was starving. There was a bodega on the corner that made a fabulous meatball grinder, if he hadn’t brought in food….

I dumped my coat in the front closet, and ran my fingers through my hair, trying to fluff it up. It was cut short again, curling around my ears, and was my normal wheat-blond color, for now. I had been contemplating going back to bright red, but the almost translucent whiteness of the ki-rin’s mane stuck in my head, and I started to wonder if it was time to bleach it all out again….

“And spend half a year waiting for your hair to recover? Maybe not.” I used to change my hair color the way Nick changed his socks—once every week or so—but bleaching wasn’t one of my favorite pastimes.

Even as I was debating styles with myself, I was moving down the carpeted hallway, the weight of my gleanings a solid, unwelcome presence in my brain. Food, hair, everything my brain was churning over was just a distraction. I didn’t want the gleanings in there any longer … but I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the unloading, either. I loved my job, but I hated this part.

The room next to Ian’s office was the best-warded one; the walls had been painted a soothing shade of off-white, and the pale green carpet everywhere else had been pulled up and bamboo flooring put down. There was a single wooden table and a single wooden chair in the room, and nothing else. I closed the door behind me, and leaned against it, trying to let my center settle itself.

“Seal and protect,” I said, triggering the wards we had set up to keep things inside the room inside the room. Once I felt the wards click into place, I pulled out the chair and sat down at the table.

Wood. Everything in our office was wood or plastic; no metal if it could be avoided. Wood didn’t conduct current the way metal did, which meant we didn’t have to be quite so careful all the damned time. I placed my hands down on the surface, my palms sweaty against the varnish, and exhaled.

“All right,” I said to the packet inside me, reaching down with a gentle mental urge. “Come on out and show me what we’ve got.”

We’d originally tried to create a virtual lockroom for things we pulled from scenes, both magical trace and physical debris. It worked great on the deposit, but got corrupted whenever someone tried to access it. We still hadn’t licked that problem. This dump-and-display was something that Stosser and I had invented out of old spells and new needs. Some of the stuff the team came up with worked, and some didn’t. We had to be flexible, adapt. Find better ways to fail, and then find a way not to fail.

Visuals were the easiest to process and share. Anyone could do it, theoretically. In practice, not so much. Nick and Sharon both made a total hash out of every try on their own, Pietr was around sixty-five percent, and even Nifty only got about eighty percent of each gleaning back in one piece.

I had a consistent ninety-three percent return rate on visuals, and a decent eighty-two percent on the other senses. That was why, no matter what happened in practice, it was me in the barrel, every time, and the hell with everyone taking turns.