Tricks of the Trade (11 page)

I blinked, and leaned back against the door frame. Okay, that was tricksy, worthy of a fatae. I was impressed, and admitted I'd never have thought of it. My thought process was too linear, in a lot of ways, but Nick more than made up for it, the way he could swerve and dodge.

“No.” Venec was positive of that. “Unless this Roblin's a shape changer, that's not it.”

There were seven known, verified shape changers among the fatae breeds, and each of them moved from one specific form to another, not whatever caught its fancy. Of course, if there was a breed that could do that, how would we ever know?

That thought gave me the very unpleasant woogies.

“All right, everyone back to work,” Venec said, breaking the shocky, contemplative mood. “We can't do fuckall right now, until we get more information, and meanwhile there are paying clients waiting on us. Bonnie, why were you so het over leaving the diorama, before this?”

I had completely, utterly forgotten about the diorama. With an unpleasant jolt, I reached back to check the status of the current-hold…and found nothing

“Damn it.” I smacked the flat of my hand against the door frame, taking a weird comfort in the sting against my flesh. “I lost the diorama, and I had something useful there, too.” Or I thought it was useful, anyway. And I hadn't had time to really study it, worse luck, so my near-perfect memory was utterly useless.

“Did it burn you?” Venec was in my face all of a sudden, taking both my hands in his and turning them over like he was expecting to see current-burns scarring my skin.

“No.” And that was weird. No, that was really weird. Not only should I have felt it, I should have gotten at least a current-zing, like a first-degree burn, when the control snapped, even distracted by our visitor.

I stared at my hands, like the answer would ooze from the lines on my palms. “It was like it melted, instead of breaking. I didn't even notice it, and I should have…”

“Um. That might be my fault.”

Sharon stood next to us, although I noted, vaguely, that she was keeping a little more distance than was normal when we were in the office, like she was afraid to intrude on a private conversation. Pietr was hovering on the edges, the others hanging even farther back.

“How?” Venec asked, not letting go of my hands. I didn't mind, exactly, but it made it kind of difficult to focus on what Sharon was saying.

“Last night, I was building my own diorama, and I was worried, being alone—I didn't stay late,” she added quickly, “but I was the last one out and I was worried if there was a problem, if my concentration broke like Bonnie's did, I wouldn't be able to get help.”

Which was exactly why Venec didn't let us work late, when the Big Dogs weren't around. There wasn't anyone else in the building we could call on, and by the time someone heard and Translocated, it could be too late.

“So I…sort of upped the wardings. A little.”

I wondered if Venec was aware that his thumb had started stroking the inside of my palm, in slow, thoughtful strokes; it was less seductive than reassuring, but the action still sent a shiver right up my spine.

“Enough to dampen the shock of a break in control?” Now that she had his full attention, the thumb motion paused while he looked at her. He didn't let go of my hands, though.

“I don't know. I guess so? I thought I'd taken them down, after, but it might have lingered in the wardings we already had established?” Sharon sounded uncertain, which was unusual for her.

Wardings were old-school, something Venec had taught us when we started. Unlike the Old Times, most modern Talent work on the go, so you don't have specific places set up for rituals or anything like that, which was all very nineteenth century. It made sense that Sharon hadn't really thought about what layering in protections on established protections, building up over time, might do.

“Thank you,” I said, breaking into what I could tell was some heavy-duty self-questioning going on in her brain. I meant it. Sharon might not have left it there on purpose, but I would have been in a lot of pain—and felt really stupid in front of our visitor—if I'd gotten burned while it was speaking.

“No problem. And speaking of that stuff, um, you, um, think you guys could stop that, now?”

I blinked, surprised at her blunt reference, and looked down at my hands, and then blinked again as I saw what she was referring to: lazy sparks of deep purple current arcing from my hands to his, or maybe the other way around.

For all my awareness of Ben's touching me, I hadn't even noticed. From the way Venec reacted, neither had he. He dropped my hands so fast I almost felt them go into free fall, and my nerve endings protested even as I was taking a step back, out the door.

As I fled down the hallway, I heard someone—Nick—snicker, and Pietr offer to up the bet-holdings.

I didn't want to know what, specifically, they were betting on, or what the under/over was. I retreated into the workroom and closed and warded the entrance be
hind me, then leaned against the door like I'd just outrun a giant purple Talent-eater.

“That,” I said to the empty room, “was Not Good.”

And then, because I was a professional, damn it, I went to work trying to reconstruct the diorama, one memory-detail at a time.

 

Ben waited for a moment, giving his remaining pups a glare that dared them, just dared them to make a single comment, and then made as dignified a retreat as he could. The moment his back was turned, he heard them upping bets about when he and Torres would admit that something was up, and sighed. Not that he would have wanted them to be cowed by him, exactly, but it would be nice if they had a little bit of fear to go with the respect.

Bonnie was back in the workroom; he could feel the hum of her current as she, he presumed, tried to reconstruct the busted diorama. He was curious as to what she'd found, but there was no point in pushing; when she was ready, she would be ready. Jumping to present evidence was as bad as waiting too long and letting it grow stale.

He had barely gotten back to the small office at the far end of the hallway that Ian had claimed for his own private retreat, and thrown himself into his usual chair in the corner, when there was a whisper of incoming current and Ian himself Translocated in from god knew where.

It took their fearless leader a second to recover from the shift in location, and notice that he had company.
“You look particularly pissed. Which of the children are misbehaving?”

Ben was in no mood to play. “Where the hell have you been?”

Ian gave a slight shrug, shaking out the nonexistent wrinkles in his dress shirt. “I had things to deal with. You were handling everything here perfectly well without me. Was I wrong?”

Ben stared at his partner. Beyond the unusually flippant speech, Ian's normally narrow face was even more drawn, and his hair had a dull sheen to it, making it seem more orange than red. He was dressed in an expensive-looking suit, with his hair tied back, and looked not only tired, but dispirited. That was not only unusual, but alarming.

“If I asked you for details, would you give them?”

Translation: is it your idiot sister Aden causing trouble again? Do I get to dump her in the river, this time?

“It's nothing that involves the team,” Ian said, taking a seat behind his desk and leaning back to stare at the ceiling, and Ben knew that was all he was going to get. But at least it wasn't his partner's crazy-ass sibling making more mischief; Ian would have dodged that question differently.

Without looking away from the acoustic tile overhead, Ian deflected the question back at him. “What's been going on here, to make you look so off-color? Is there a problem with one of the cases?”

Benjamin Venec could do an end run around a question just as well as his partner. Ian was his best friend as well as his partner, but there was no way in hell he was
going to tell the other man anything about the unexpected current-surge he'd shown—in front of the entire damn pack—with Torres. That loss of control was something he was going to deal with himself.

Fortunately, there was enough to tell Ian, without going anywhere near that.

“We had a visitor. A klassvaak.”

Just that one word, and Ian abandoned all fascination with the ceiling, leaning forward across the desk, and listening intently.

 

Normally, focusing on a problem isn't a problem for me: Nick may call me “Dandelion” but I'm not at all scattered—what I might lack in relative current-power, I made up for in control and concentration. And yet, after an hour or so of trying to manipulate my memory of the scene back into diorama-shape, I gave up. It wasn't going to happen; my brain was too busy buzzing around all this new information to really focus.

I shut everything off, took down the wards, and checked out at the board, leaving a Post-it to say that I was following up on a long shot lead.

And then I went to see Madame.

The difference when you traveled from our not-quite the-Barrio to Madame's neighborhood was significant. No teenagers hung out on the stoop, here, only rows of uniformed doormen, and livery cars cruising the street. The same little maid as from my previous visit met me at the door of the penthouse suite and took my coat with a welcoming smile. Unlike last time, though, because it
was after 5:00 p.m., there was a small cut-crystal glass of sherry waiting on the sideboard.

“Madame is in a good mood,” Li told me, her wide eyes sparkling with delight. “A someone sent her roses.”

I took the glass of sherry and sipped at it. I wasn't a huge fan of the stuff, but it was only good manners to accept the house's hospitality. “Roses, hmm?” I had an instant's image of Madame holding a bouquet up to her snout, sniffing delicately.

But no, when I entered the solarium where she held court, it was to find the Great Worm not sniffing roses, but eating them.

“Thorns and all, Madame?”

“Bonnnnita.” She delicately spat a peach petal out of her mouth, and I watched as it lazily floated its way down to the parquet floor. “If you would like, take sssssome home with you. They are a treat, but my digestion is nnnnnot what it once wassss.”

“Thank you, Madame. Will your admirer mind?”

“If he doesssss, he will nnnnnot dare sssssay anything,” she said, a delicate whiff of rose-scented air accompanying her words. “He wishessssss a favor of me? Let him earn it through kinnndnessss to my friennnds.”

Being named the friend to a Great Worm is…it takes your breath away. Never mind that I claimed her acquaintance solely because J had once done a rather diplomatic favor for her back when he was my age, and she now found me amusing; I treasured the moment.

I knelt to pick up the petal, and placed it in the pocket of my skirt, thankful I'd thought to dress nicely this morning. Madame might not note the difference between
cargo pants and a skirt on humans, but I did. Respect was earned, but it was also demanded in certain situations, and I would have felt awkward coming here in my grubbies. As it was, I hid my stompy boots under the hem of the skirt, and was glad I'd at least buffed them to a gloss over the weekend past.

“But you did not come to discusssss horticulture with me.” Madame's great head came closer as her neck arched down, her body adjusting so that she could meet me, more or less, eye to eye. “Yesssss? Thissss isss a work call, little Bonnnnita?”

“I am afraid that it is, Madame.” I met her gaze, struck again by the jeweled tones of her eyes. Her much lesser cousin, the cave dragon, had eyes the color of fired clay bricks, his entire body barely twice the length of her neck. His voice had been like hers, though: smooth and cultured, like rose water and honey. The old legends of serpents with smooth tongues? They'd been speaking, literally, of dragons.

“So.” Madame settled herself comfortably, a great-aunt indulging a favorite niece. “What isss it you wissssh to know?”

What did I want to know? That was the question, wasn't it? What didn't I want to know? Madame was an Ancient, older and wiser even than today's visitor. Anything I asked her, she would either know, or know someone—or something—who knew.

But even before I'd gone to study with J, my dad had me reading fairy tales. And one of the first rules ever when dealing with dragons, no matter how polite, is
don't waste your questions on things you can find out for yourself—or things you really
don't
want to know.

“Madame, you know I have the kenning?” It wasn't the sort of thing that you brought up in polite conversation, but the skill set was unusual enough that odds were J had told her, sometime over the years I'd been his student.

She tilted her head slightly, waiting. Yes, she knew. My pulse raced slightly, my heart pounding a little harder. I wasn't frightened of Madame…exactly. No more than I should be, at least. But I didn't know if I was violating a protocol here, pushing a boundary I couldn't see, and that unnerved me more than I'd realized.

“Last evening, I scryed a dragon, Madame.” She knew me, she knew J, she knew I didn't scry lightly, or speak often of what I saw. “My vision showed it flying overhead. Filled with rage and fire…attacking the humans below.”

Her head pulled back, sharply, and the half-dozen bouquets of peach-petaled roses crashed to the ground, the vases spilling water over the parquet floor.

“You sssssaw thisssss?”

“Madame. I did.” I was so very damn impressed that my voice didn't shake or stutter, and that my body hadn't flinched at her outburst. “But I do not know what it means. Have any Ancients bearing ill will toward humans come to ask your leave to enter this island?”

Because this was Madame's territory, from South Ferry to Inwood, Hudson to East River, and no one would dare intrude without her permission…unless they meant to take it from her.