Murder by Magic (21 page)

“Walk me through it.”

That was the thing about Sergei. You could flap him for maybe, oh, ten seconds. Then he was back in the groove. Which was good. She needed grooveness right now.

“Body. Dead. Propped up in front of the painting like a rag doll, only ickier. Blood, pooled and dried.” She could feel herself calming down as she recited, the act of talking it out giving her some distance. “Head wound, looked like. He was wearing slicks”—the outfit of choice for the well-kitted burglar—“but his hood was back, like he’d stopped; like he thought he was in the clear.”

She had been cruising up until then. It was a flyby, an easy job. They’d been hired by an insurance company who suspected that their well-to-do client hadn’t actually been relieved of certain heavily insured paintings in a recent robbery as he claimed. So they’d come to Sergei, who had a certain . . . reputation . . . of being able to retrieve missing objects, and offered him a hefty check to ascertain the truth of the matter. Quietly, of course. Bad business to look as though you doubted the word of a wealthy client.

So Sergei took their check, shook their hands, told them they’d have an answer by the next Monday. And then he’d called her. He was the money guy, the deal guy. The face people saw.

She did the dirty work. The physical stuff. Ego aside, when it came to Talent, there were maybe fifty Mages who could manipulate current the way she did, with the results she got. Skills, maybe another twenty thieves working today who could finesse the way she did. There were maybe ten other people in the world who combined the two. And only one of them was better than she was.

But she was the only one who kept it legal. Ish. And dead bodies had no place in a legal game.

Wren didn’t believe in ghosts. Dead was dead was dead. But . . .

She exhaled once, slowly, letting all the remaining tension flow from her neck, through her shoulder muscles, down her arms and legs until she could practically feel it oozing out of her feet and fingers like toxic sludge. And with it, the buzz of unused current-magic still running in her system was drawn back into the greater pull of the earth below her.

When she opened her eyes again, the world seemed a little more drab somehow, her body heavier, less responsive. Current was worse than a drug; it was like being addicted to your own blood, impossible to avoid. All the myths and legends about magic, and that was the only thing they ever really got right: you paid the price with bits of yourself.

She reached almost instinctively, touching the small pool of current generated by her own body. It sparked at her touch, like a cat woken suddenly, then settled back down. But she felt better, until she looked up and saw Sergei staring at her, a question in his eyes. And the ghostly presence she had felt on seeing the stiff weighted on the back of her neck again.

What?
she asked it silently.
What?

Wren bit the inside of her lip. Scratched the side of her chin. Then she sighed.

It didn’t matter if you believed in ghosts or not, if they believed in you.

They had stored the body in one of the rooms in the basement, where Sergei kept the materials needed to stage the gallery’s ever-changing exhibits: pedestals, backdrops, folding chairs. Wren opened the door and turned on the light, half expecting the corpse to be sitting up and looking around.

But the body lay where they had left it, on its back, on the cold cement floor. “Hi,” she said, still standing in the doorway. That sense of a presence was gone, as though in bringing it here she had managed to appease its ghost. But it seemed rude somehow, to poke and pry without at least some small talk beforehand . . .

“I don’t suppose you can tell me what happened to you?” She closed the door behind her and locked it. Sergei’s gallery assistants were gone for the night, but better overcautious than having to explain.

Wren swallowed, then put the book she was carrying down on the nearest clear surface. No point trying to recall anything from her high school biology courses—that, as her mentor used to say, was what we had books for. “Rigor mortis,” she said, and flicked two of her fingers in its direction. The book opened, pages riffling until the section she needed lay open. Taking a small tape recorder out of her pocket, she pressed “record” and put it next to the book.

“The body is that of an older male, maybe a really rough fifties. He’s wearing jeans, sneakers, and a long-sleeved button-down shirt. Homeless, probably—his skin looks like he hasn’t washed in a while.” She walked around the body, trying to look at it objectively. “Hair, graying brown. Long—seriously long. This guy hadn’t been to the barber in a long time.”

She stopped, stared at the corpse, trying to decide what it was that struck her as being
wrong
. “There are no signs of trauma. In fact, there’s no sign of anything. Unless he died from an overdose of dirt.” It might have been a heart attack or something internal, she reminded herself. The only way to tell would be to cut him open . . . “Ew,” she said aloud. “Rigor mort. Tell me about it.”

There was a faint hum, like that of a generator somewhere starting up, and a voice rose from the book: “The stiffening and then relaxing of muscles after death, as caused by the change in the body’s chemical composition from alkaline to acid. Process typically begins in the face and spreads down the body, beginning approximately two hours after death and lasting twelve to forty-eight hours. A body in full rigor will break rather than relax its contraction.”

Wren flicked her fingers again, and the voice stopped. “The body was stiff but not rigid when I picked it up,” she said thoughtfully. “And it stretched out okay when we got it in here—nothing broke off or went
snap.
” She grimaced, then bent down to touch the skin, at first gently, then jabbing harder. “The skin is plastic, not hard. So I guess it’s safe to say rigor’s pretty much wearing off. So he’s been dead at least half a day, maybe more. Not too much more, though—he doesn’t smell anywhere near that bad.”

Sitting back on her heels, she looked at the book. “Next paragraph,” she told it. The voice continued: “Also to be considered is liver mortis, or postmortem lividity. When a person dies, the red blood cells will settle at the lowest portion of the body. This can be identified by significant marking of the skin. Markings higher on the body would indicate the victim was moved after death.”

Wren made a face, then she sighed, gave herself a quick, silent pep talk, and reached down to take off his shirt.

“There better not be anything disgusting hiding in there,” she warned him. “Or I’m so going to throw up on you.”

Her fingers touched the skin at the base of his neck, and the jolt that went through her knocked her backward on her rear and halfway across the room.

“The hell?”

“What am I looking for?”

Wren shook her head. “If I tell you, you—just touch him.”

Sergei shot her a look, but knelt to do as she asked. He was still wearing a tie, but his shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows. Long, manicured fingers touched the corpse’s hair, then the side of his cold cheek, flinching slightly away from the feel of dead flesh. You never got used to it, he thought.

“Go on. His torso.”

Sergei placed the palm of his hand flat over the corpse’s chest, where Wren had left the shirt half-undone. He waited. Then frowned. “What the hell?”

“You feel it?”

Sergei nodded, astonished. He was reasonably sensitive to the natural flow of magic—magic was how they’d first met—but this was different somehow. “I feel . . . something. What is it?”

“Overrush.”

Sergei pulled his hand away, wiping it on his slacks as though that would erase the taint of death. “Which is . . . ?”

“Current. Only, more than that. There’s current residue in him that’s impossibly high. This guy’s—God, I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t even know what it is! But it feels right. That’s what you’re feeling. It’s the only thing that could explain—”

“Genevieve!”

He hated shouting at her, but it seemed to do the trick; she pulled herself together. “Right. It looks like he got caught up in current, major mondo current, pulled it in—and got ungrounded. Which is impossible. I mean, any lonejacker worth their skin knows how to ground. You don’t make it past puberty if you can’t.”

“So this fellow should have been able to ground and dispel any current he couldn’t use.”

“Unless,” Wren said, even slower than before, “unless somehow, he was stopped . . .”

Sergei stared at the body. “How? By whom?”

Wren shrugged, hugging herself. “Damned if I know. I didn’t think it was possible. Grounding’s as much mental as physical—like breathing. Which he’s not doing, either, anymore.”

Sergei sat down heavily on a velvet-covered stool and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You couldn’t have just left him there?”

She didn’t even bother glaring at him, looking at her watch instead. “Almost seven,” she told him. “You’d better get upstairs and meet our new client. I’ll see about finding the old boy a more final resting place.”

Sergei caught her by the arm. “Be careful,” he told her. “I don’t like this.”

She put her hand over his. “That makes two of us, partner.”

Sergei never asked what she’d done with the body. She never offered to tell him. He told her, instead, about the new client. “It’s something a little different,” he said. Different was good. Different required planning, plotting. That was what they did best, the different ones. The difficult ones. That was why they were the best Retrievers in the business, on either side of the law.

And different distracted her from the memory of a man torn apart from the inside by too much of the stuff she depended on to exist.

Talents were all current junkies. Didn’t matter that you were Mage or lonejacker; it got in your blood, your bones, and if you could jack, you did. And if you jacked too much . . .

Her mentor had gone crazy from current. She had always thought that was the worst thing that could happen. Maybe it wasn’t.

Sergei’s hand touched her waist, his breath warm in her ear. “Stop thinking. We’re on.”

Wren nodded once. It wasn’t the usual run for Sergei to be with her on a job, but you had to mix it up every now and again. If they start expecting one, give them two. If they expect two, don’t hit them at all that night, that week, that place. And when they expect stealth, walk in the front door.

“Mr. Didier, a pleasure, a pleasure indeed . . .” Wren tuned out the host’s nervous bubbling. If lonejackers were bad about hanging around each other, gallery owners were worse. At least a lonejacker would let you see the knife before it went into your back. She detached herself from Sergei’s side and began to wander around the gallery. It was larger than Sergei’s and more eclectic. There was a series of oddly twisted wire shapes that she thought she might like. Then she saw them from a different angle and shuddered. Maybe not. Snagging a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter, she took a ladylike swig, licked her lips, and in a heartbeat effectively disappeared from the awareness of everyone else in the room. There wasn’t any real magic to it—herd-mentality clothing, a perfectly ordinary body and face, and a strong desire not to be noticed, sewn together by the faintest of mental suggestions that wafted along the current that was humming in the lights strung along the room, illuminating the exhibits.

Walking slowly, she made a half-circuit of the main floor, then moved up the short, straight staircase against the back of the wall. Nobody saw her lift the velvet rope barricading the steps, nobody saw her move up into the private areas of the gallery.

She barely paused at the primary security system at the top of the stairs. Her no-see-me cantrip was passive, neither defensive nor aggressive, and she passed through the barrier of current without a hitch.

Wren cast one look back down the stairs, picking Sergei out of the crowd with ease. He was leaning in to hear what an older woman was saying, his shoulders relaxed, his right hand holding a glass, his left gesturing as he replied, making the woman laugh. If you didn’t know what to look for, you’d never recognize the break in the line of his coat as a holster. The one time Wren had picked up the compact, heavy handgun, she’d spent the next hour dry-heaving over the toilet. Psychometry wasn’t one of her stronger skills, but she could
feel
the lives that gun had taken.

But hating something didn’t mean it wasn’t a good idea to bring it along.

Moving down the hallway, Wren counted doorways silently, stopping when she came to the seventh. A touch of the doorknob confirmed that there were elementals locking it. Trying to use magic to force them out would bring smarter guards down to investigate, exactly what she didn’t want.

Going back to the stairs, she leaned against the wall, just below the protective barrier, and took a deep breath. As she exhaled, slowly, she touched the current, sending a wave of disturbance racing down the stairs.

The twinkling lights in the gallery window went out with a satisfying
pop,
followed in quick succession by the lights over the exhibits. As the crowd milled about in confusion, Wren raced back down the hallway and slipped inside the seventh room, trusting the chaos downstairs would hide her own intrusion.

Inside, the room was dimly lit, three paintings stacked against the wall like so much trash. Sergei would have had conniptions if he’d seen them treated like that. But Wren wasn’t interested in their artistic value. A razor let her slice the bottom painting out of its frame and remove the piece of carved bone pressed between two layers of canvas. The relic went into a small, rubber-lined case that fit in her pocket, and the painting was placed back into the frame. A finger run along the serrated edges and a tiny drawdown of power, and the two layers sealed themselves together again. Done, and prettily, too, if she did say so herself.

“Sssst!”

She managed not to freak by the skin of her teeth, turning to glare at Sergei standing behind her.

“They’re frisking everyone downstairs,” he told her, heading off any questions. “We need another exit.”