Tricks of the Trade (7 page)

As I was writing, trying to force the ink to flow steadily, there was another push at me, somewhere between core and gut, except it wasn't physical at all. No words this time, just a sense of concern, and a willingness to pull back, if shoved.

I knew who it was. There was only one person it could be, with that kind of a connection. He was worried, and he was annoyed, but the feelings were distinct from each other. He wasn't annoyed at
me.

As much as the Merge irritated me, it pissed Venec off even more. I got the feeling that he was constantly riding the need to check up on all of us, anyway, and not knowing where the line between boss/trainer/Big Dog ended and the Merge began meant he'd been constantly second-guessing himself. For a guy like Venec, who was totally used to being the one calling the shots and making the decisions? Oh, yeah, having something external trying to shove him anywhere would not be appreciated. Unlike me, though, he couldn't ignore it. Hence the
annoyance. And if he'd felt even a little of what I did, with that eye glaring at me…no wonder he'd reacted. Normally I'd tell him to MYOB. This was work-stuff, though, even though he didn't know it, so I reached out with just a hint of current to ping back, keeping it brief and impersonal. *scrying. report tomorrow*

His acknowledgment was equally curt, but when I put the crystals and files away and crawled under the spread to sleep, I could feel the flavor of him lingering, like candied ginger on my tongue. Even when we tried to shut the Merge off entirely, it was creeping in.

Yeah. Time to do something about that. Eventually.

My last coherent thought was that I should probably stop by and pay Madame a courtesy visit. If there were any others dragons in town, she would know.

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, mak
ing 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.