Tricks of the Trade. Laura Anne Gilman
of a great beast moving even farther overhead, blotting out everything, even the fire, its spread wings wheeling overhead.
Dragon, my mind told me.
I knew a Great Worm. She was an ancient, elegant lady, who would never project such anger, such fury….
The head turned and stared at me, and in its great, glimmering eye I saw nothing but madness and hunger. And deep inside, the shock of recognition, awareness. It knew me. It knew me, and it did not like me.
The feeling of hard, sharp claws pressing against my skin, pulling me down into the gaze, was purely magical, not physical, but that made it more dangerous, not less, as open as I was just then. The dizziness came back, along with the need to throw up.
Bonnie!
Not a ping, the brief current-carried shorthand we used among friends. This was deeper, like the hit of an axe into a hundred-year-old tree, and the shock of it shook me free of those devouring eyes, knocked me out of the clawed grip.
My physical body jerked backward, my hand releasing the crystal, my head hitting the ceiling with a reassuringly painful thunk.
“Ow.”
I blinked against the sting of tears and stared at the crystal, trying to recapture what I had seen, but it was already starting to dissipate. Visions faded like that, unreal and therefore impossible to hold. Even so, I had the oddest feeling that I’d kenned something like it before, not recently but within the past year or so. Not the visuals, nothing at all like those visuals, but the sense of something angry, something wild circling, hunting…coming closer.
If I’d felt it before, odds were it had nothing to do with the case at hand. But the increase in intensity, the addition of visuals, meant it was coming closer on the timeline, whatever it was. I reached for my notebook and a pen. My hand was shaking, but I got the details down, best I could, before they were gone entirely.
You never ignored a kenning, especially not one that came that strongly, that tied to a scrying.
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.
four
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