Pack of Lies. Laura Anne Gilman
two kits at a time, or the damned piskies, who populate like squirrels. Ki-rin are magical, even to us. If the perps had hurt it … I shuddered at the thought. If the ki-rin had been hurt, those rubberneckers would have been an angry mob of fatae, not human looky-loos. “They were out for a night clubbing, or she was, and he’s keeping her company. Two guys, Talent, jump them on the way home. Jump her. The ki-rin had fallen behind a little. It was late, his mane is pure white so he isn’t a youngster anymore, I guess.” I paused, suddenly struck by the thought. “How old do ki-rin get, anyway?”
J hadn’t moved while all this was pouring out of me, sitting in his usual armchair, legs crossed at the ankle. “I don’t know. It’s considered quite rude to ask.”
“Huh. Well, it … didn’t get to her in time. Killed the first attacker, wounded the second, I guess it didn’t kill him because he didn’t get the chance to do anything?” My hands were colder than the bottle I was holding. “The story seems straightforward, you know? Bad guys do bad thing, are killed—or maimed—by the good guy, survivor gets jail time. We’ve been asked to investigate only to make sure everything’s clean, that it was self-defense, I guess. Stosser didn’t say outright, but the only one who’d hire us for something like this, where there’s no money involved, or a revenge motive, would either be family or Council, and I got the feeling it wasn’t family. Don’t know why Council would be taking such a hard-line interest, though.”
Council was for Council members, which meant human, not fatae; even if a ki-rin was involved, their instinct would be to sweep it under the rug as fast as possible to protect their people. Had the dead guy been Council? It wasn’t impossible—Council was the country club association of Talent, and there were as many ass-wipes in country clubs as there were hanging on street corners. But then they’d be trying to cast blame away from their man, not hire us to find out the actual facts.
No, something didn’t feel right. I wondered what Venec thought of this case, and in that thought I could almost feel his hand on mine again, the smooth, firm touch sending another round of current-shock through my system, then flowing back out again, leaving me with a hitch in my breath.
“PR concerns, I suspect,” J said. “There has been some … unpleasantness toward the fatae recently.” He shifted, leaning forward from the hips. It was a tell he had, a giveaway sign when he was thinking hard about something. “In New York, and in Philly. Nothing here in Boston that I’ve heard. Minor annoyances, mostly, although some have become physical. Bigotry picking up a stick. I can imagine that the Council is concerned that this incident of yours not spark a greater conflagration. As it might, with a ki-rin involved.”
I forced myself to focus on his words, not the echo of tingling on my skin. “Yeah. I can see why they’d want this handled without a hint of impropriety on their part.” And that would explain the crowd that had gathered—they weren’t there for the ki-rin, not to support or gawk at it, anyway. And the Council boys had been there to protect it, not confine it. “Nice to know the Council thinks we can be of some use, even if it’s only to use us.”
All right, so I was bitter. The Council was split into regional areas, and half of them had refused to authorize their members to hire us … but the leadership was willing to use us when it suited their needs, to protect their privileged asses.
“Bonita …” J’s tone of voice was the same he’d used when I was missing the point during a lesson.
“Yeah, I know. It’s going to take time to win them over. I know.” My stomach wasn’t queasy anymore, and my skin didn’t tingle, but now my entire body was so very cold, so cold I couldn’t even shiver. It didn’t feel like shock or trauma, though—I knew those. It wasn’t even the emptiness of waiting to break, from before. It felt more like … like something had been cut out of me, where the outrage and fear should have been.
Weird. Very weird, discomforting, and I did not like. But if I said anything at all about it, J would freak.
I took a hit off my beer, and tried to wash the feeling away. “Well, we’re on the job now, and first look says this probably won’t take more than a day or two to wrap up and write a report. Yay us. What do you think will happen to the ki-rin?”
“For killing his companion’s attacker? A slap on the hooves, maybe. He would be within rights to demand reparation from the dead man’s kin, on the girl’s behalf. Every Council from here to Beijing would back him on that, if he did, and lonejacks …” He made a palms-up gesture. “Well, who knows how lonejacks will react to anything.”
I shook my head, rolling my beer bottle back and forth between my hands. I love J, but he’s a bigot in his own liberal way. Council and lonejack and fatae: the carefully delineated, political world that J lived in. I’d never had to worry about any of this before I became a Pup.
“And the girl?” I asked him, instead. “What rights does she have in all this?”
“She can take the survivor to court, if she …” J’s voice trailed off.
The bitterness surged to the fore again, and I grabbed onto it; anything other than that cold empty feeling. “Yeah. Take him to court, and not only does she have to relive the attack, but she has to explain what happened to the other guy, the one who actually attacked her. Oh, my oversize, horned intelligent magical companion killed him. With his horn. Yeah, a single slender horn, right in the middle of his forehead …”
I hiccupped, and took a long pull of the beer to cover the crack in my voice. “J?”
“Yes, Bonita?”
“Why?”
He didn’t pretend not to know what I was asking; he’d known me too long. “I don’t know, Bonita.” J had been a great mentor; still was, in a lot of ways. He’d always been straight with me, never lied, not even when I almost wished he would. “There are theories, and psychological jingo, but I’ve never understood how it translates into the human mind, thank god. I’ve just always been thankful that you grew up without encountering that sort of male, firsthand.” His voice was quiet, but I could hear the sorrow in it, for that girl, for me, for every girl who had something beautiful and joyful and honest taken from them for nothing more than selfish cruelty.
The cold forming under my skin cracked a little under the touch of his voice, and the itchy heat in my eyes promised a buildup of tears, but they didn’t come. We just sat there, and breathed in the quiet security of the library, of civilized behavior, until the daylight faded, leaving us in the shadows.
J reached out and turned on a lamp, bringing an amber glow into the room. “You’ll stay for dinner.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. “Please.”
A few hundred miles south in Manhattan, the same dusk was settling over the skyscrapers and brownstones, the sunset reflecting off the water and flashing last spears of light against the glass walls and windows of the financial district. Uptown, traffic was at rush-hour peak, but in the halls outside the PUPI offices, it was quiet. The seven-story building housed a dentist, a handful of CPAs, two lawyers, and a few offices whose signs didn’t give away their contents or purpose. On the bottom floor, there was a photographer who was rarely there, and a literary agency. Neither office had many visitors outside of UPS and FedEx deliveries, although those seemed to come every day.
By contrast, the office across the hall had a steady stream of people going in and out, the same seven people, usually in a group and often, as now, in the middle of a seemingly continuous conversation.
“We could …”
“No.”
“But …”
“No.” Venec’s growl warned the speaker not to push further. He had been itchy all day, morose and snappish, as though someone had shoved unbalanced current into his core, and he was in no mood to deal with the carping of overtired puppies.
There was a moving tangle of arms being thrust into coat sleeves and bags and backpacks being swung carelessly, and then they exited the office,