Pack of Lies. Laura Anne Gilman
already, slice of pizza in one hand, pen in the other, frowning intently, while the guys were bullshitting about baseball. Still no sign of Stosser. I leaned against the wall and watched them. Although my stomach gave another slow, queasy roll from the smell and sight of the pizza, I didn’t feel the urge to throw up again. I didn’t feel much of anything, in fact, the earlier unease drained from my body while I talked to Venec. While I was normally pretty calm—that was part of why I was so good at this job—that sudden loss of emotion didn’t feel right. It was as though someone had siphoned the emotion out of me, and I knew enough psychology to know that probably wasn’t a good thing.
I needed to get out of here, put some distance between myself and the display room, so when it all came slamming back, I could break in private.
I went to the closet, and pulled out my coat. They already had my report. If Venec or Stosser wanted me, they knew how to get in touch.
“Hey, where you going?” Nifty asked, wadding up his napkins and tossing them into the trash.
“Home,” I said.
My apartment isn’t much, by my mentor’s standards, but it’s better than what I’d been born into, and more importantly right then, it’s all mine. My refuge. A cash payoff to the landlord, and I’d painted the walls of the main room a pale purple, and the kitchen dark gold. The furniture was a clash of expensive antiques and trash-day rescues that looked pretty damn fine, if I did say so myself.
I kicked my shoes off and dumped my coat and bag on the floor. There was a pitcher of sweet tea in the fridge, and I drank it straight, like I’d spent the past week being dehydrated in the Sahara, then grabbed an apple and went back into the main room. Most people who had studio apartments separated out their living and sleeping space—not me. My bed was on a loft platform in one corner, but my dining table was shoved underneath, and got pulled out whenever someone came over for dinner or stayed for breakfast. There were two love seats, reupholstered in gold velvet a shade lighter than the kitchen walls, and a black lacquered Chinese chest that held all my dishes and silverware. I’d had a coffee table at one point, but the glass chipped during a party when I first moved in, and I hadn’t had time to find a replacement. Something sturdier this time …
Although … another party like the last one would get me kicked out of the building, payoff to the landlord or no. I’d been in such a rush to take the apartment before someone else could steal it from me, I hadn’t thought to ask about the neighbors. They weren’t bad, just mostly older and settled, and not really happy with parties, even quiet ones, that went on all night. Not that there had been all that many. Since moving to the city last summer, I’d tried to build up a network of friends, people who liked to go clubbing, to party not heavily but well, but the past few months the job had overrun all of that. If I hung out at all, it was mostly with the team, and when I did go out, it was weird … sometimes now even in the middle of a hot dance floor I’d feel this sudden urge to be home—alone.
I took a bite out of the apple, absently, and stared at the wall opposite me. Where most people would have a flat-screen television, I’d hung a mosaic made out of hundreds of colored glass tiles. The sunlight from the windows hit it just-so twice a day, and rainbows streamed all over the place. Magic. Right now, it was still, just bits of colored glass doing nothing special at all, except reflecting my image back to me, fractured and broken.
The apple tasted sour in my mouth, and my beloved, comfortable space suddenly felt shabby and sad. I spit the apple into my hand, tossed the entire thing into the garbage can, and without a ping of warning—or asking permission—I Translocated my sorry ass to J’s place.
When a teenager starts showing signs of magical ability, they’re assigned a mentor, someone who will take them through the stages, teach them what they need to know and help them figure out their strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes it’s a parent or cousin, but more often it’s someone not related, a friend of the family with a skill level close to yours, or a particularly good rapport with kids.
Ideally everyone mentors, at some point, but the reality is that not everyone’s good at it. And it’s important to be good at it—you’ve got another person’s life depending on your ability to teach them properly. We’re taught one-on-one, not in classrooms, and the mentor-student relationship trumps almost every other bond we have, even after the mentorship ends.
In my case, Joseph Cetala was more than a mentor—he’d been standing in loco parentis since I was eleven. Long story-short version was I went from being the only child of a ne’er-do-well lonejack carpenter to the live-in student of a Boston lawyer/Council muckety-muck with contacts in the White House … and maybe even the Kremlin, for all I knew. By the time I came along he’d retired from all that, and just did some very quiet and occasional consulting of the sort you don’t talk about. J hadn’t been real happy with my going to work for Stosser and Venec—he wanted me somewhere safer, like a paralegal for a cushy law firm, or teaching in an inner-city school—but he was experienced enough and honest enough to admit that PUPI was needed, and that I was good at what I did.
That didn’t mean he didn’t worry. I might not tell him the shit that went down when we were on a case, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think that he didn’t hear about it, eventually. We’d reached a compromise. There was a lurking fatae with the inappropriate name of Bobo who occasionally showed up late at night to walk me home when things got rough—or Bobo thought they might get rough—that soothed J’s discomfort, and we never talked about the dangers of my job.
Translocation only takes a few seconds, but it’s a major power drain for most of us, messing with natural physics in ways that supported the whole “indistinguishable from magic” thing Zaki—my dad—used to quote. Nifty, who was our best practical theorist, had tried more than once to explain it, but all I cared about tonight was that it took me home.
“Bonita.” J was in his early 70s, with fine patrician features and a shock of immaculately groomed white hair, and you’d think he’d greet you in the library of his ten-room apartment wearing a tuxedo and carrying a brandy snifter. Reality wore a pair of ratty jeans and a Harvard sweatshirt, and carried a bottle of Stella. He didn’t look at all surprised to see me. He never did. “Would you like a beer?”
I would.
I dumped my shoes on the outrageously expensive carpet, curled up in the security of a leather club chair, and cradled my bottle in both hands, letting the condensation soak into my skin. The antiques in my apartment all came from J’s collection, but he’d never had a hands-off attitude; to him, furniture was what you sat on, and a sofa was for naps as well as tête-à-tête. I knew better than to put my bottle down without a coaster, though.
We did the quiet chitchat for a while; he’d been down to NYC to take me out to dinner just last week, so there really wasn’t much new to share, unless I wanted to talk about the non-thing that kept showing up between me and Venec, which I didn’t, or the cold empty echoing thing where my emotions should be, which I really didn’t.
“Hey,” I said suddenly, realizing that something was missing. “Where’s Rupert?” Rupert was J’s dog, an aged sheepdog who had as much to do with raising me as J did.
“Vet. His stomach decided to disagree with him. I’m having them do a full checkup, just in case. He’ll be home tomorrow morning, don’t worry.”
Rupe was almost fifteen. Anything that required an overnight stay at the vet worried me. And I knew it was worrying J, but if he didn’t want to talk about it, we weren’t going to talk about it. Time to change the subject. I thought about regaling him with the story of Jennie’s party last night, or the way the hot doctor across the way from my apartment threw her most recent lover out wearing only his boxers and one sock—but finally had to accept the fact that I hadn’t come here for distraction, but after-the-fact mentoring.
“We have a new job.” He’d heard already; I knew he’d heard from the way his expression didn’t change at all. J was a damned good listener, though; he just sat back and let me talk, or not, as I wanted.
I didn’t want. It came out anyway.
“Girl,