Hard Magic. Laura Anne Gilman
don’t give a damn about this guy, particularly. We don’t know who he is, and we’ve got every reason to be pissed off and scared. But we want to know why, more.”
“That’s insane.” Nifty sounded like I’d just insulted his mother.
“Sure, but you got another reason for standing there with a dead guy’s day planner in your hand?”
Nifty looked down, and put the book back on the desk as though it was about to bite him. I’d made my point, though, and I could practically see his hackles go down.
“So what now, genius,” Sharon asked, but not pissed-sounding, more like she really did wonder what I was going to suggest.
So did I.
“Now you congratulate yourselves on a successful job interview.”
Sharon shrieked. So did Nifty, in a deeper but no less shrieky voice. Nick jumped back a full foot, and sparks of current appeared in his hands, deep blue and arcing all over his fingers. And Pietr, I swear to god, I was looking right at him and I saw him fade out of sight this time.
They all seemed like reasonable things to do, when a dead body sits up and starts talking to you.
“Stand down, people.” A door none of us noticed before slid open and another guy walked in. He was tall, taller even than Nifty, if half his mass, with orange-red hair tied back in a ponytail. The color looked natural, and a guy wearing four-hundred-dollar boots probably isn’t the sort to do Day-Glo dye jobs anyway. Flame-head walked past where Pietr had just been and offered a hand to our dead body. The DB took it, hauling himself to his feet.
They didn’t look a thing alike: flame-head was tall and skinny, and DB was squared-off and dark, but they stood together like bookends, totally unconscious of how they mirrored each other. My fifth-grade dance teacher used to try to hammer that kind of unconscious grace into us, mostly with abject failure.
I also noted now that DB was seriously hot. Not good-looking, the way Pietr was, or even Nifty’s dark, corn-fed handsome, but hot.
“How did you create the illusion you were dead?” Sharon demanded. “You had no pulse, no breath, no nothing!”
Flame turned to DB and smirked. “I told you I could do it.”
“And you were right,” DB said easily. “Get over it. Gloating’s bad for your digestion.”
That voice. That was the same voice I had heard on the answering machine.
“What the hell is going on here?” Nifty demanded, his body pulling up so he looked the way he must’ve to the guys who’d faced him across the scrimmage line: big, bad, and needing to hit something, hard. “Who the hell are you people?”
“You’re the guy who called,” Pietr said, looking at DB. “I recognize your voice.”
I wanted to say me, too, but I think the shock had seized up my vocal cords, because I couldn’t say a thing. Probably just as well; standing up and breathing, DB was the yummy, intense sort I really like, and I’d probably have embarrassed myself if I had been able to say anything. Flame wasn’t quite as yummy, but when you looked at him magically, oh wow. He had an inner core that seriously radiated, like …
The current that had knocked me sideways. It felt familiar because it was—it was the same signature as the current that shattered my scrying crystal last night.
Son of a spavined bitch. They had damn well better hire me. These bastards owed me.
“You wanted people who didn’t freak when faced with freakiness,” Nick said, as if he’d just figured out the last missing piece of a puzzle. “Whose first thought wasn’t to run, but to look.”
“And you all passed, with flying colors,” Flame said. He seemed to be the spokesperson of the two, stepping forward, literally, and taking the floor. “Even in the face of … unfortunate circumstances, all of you stepped forward and used your respective skills to observe and gather details, integrating information as it was brought forward rather than choosing a conclusion and then sticking to it no matter what.” Flame smiled at us, a wide, approving smile that looked false but somehow felt real. “You all worked together, as a team, despite having no reason to do so. Not a prima donna among the bunch.”
“Which means what?” Sharon asked, her hands fisted on her hips, like she was going to walk out if she didn’t get answers, stat. Hah. Flame’s definition of a prima donna was clearly different from mine.
“It means you’re hired,” DB said, his expression almost—not quite, but almost—looking pleased about the prospect. “All of you.”
There was a slight popping noise, and four more chairs appeared in the office, distributed neatly around the desk. Someone was showing off. From the look DB shot his … partner? I was guessing it was Flame.
“Please,” he was saying, gesturing to the chairs. “Sit. I will explain.”
“That would be nice,” Nick said, sitting in one of the chairs and leaning back in it as though he had all the time in the world. “Starting with who the hell you are.”
Pietr stuck to his position against the wall, but the rest of us took the offered chairs, mainly because, at least for me, my knees were still wobbly. DB righted the overturned leather desk chair and sat in it, effectively reclaiming the desk as his territory, while Flame rested his right hip against the edge of the desk and gazed at us as though he was about to start a lecture.
“Ah. Where to start. At the beginning, yes, Ben, I know,” he said before DB could say anything. I was right, they were partners—not sexual, not unless I was reading them all wrong, and I didn’t do that very often. But business partners, in whatever this was, yes.
“My name is Ian Stosser.” He waited, like we were supposed to have heard of him. “Ah. My partner here, whom you have already met under … awkward circumstances, is Benjamin Venec.”
Venec nodded once at us, his gaze sweeping restlessly from face to face. It wasn’t boredom but evaluation; I knew, having used the same sweep myself more than once. The look of a people-watcher. Stosser was the talker, Venec the looker. One prodded, the other collated responses. Good teamwork. Good cop/bad cop. Or whatever they were.
“Several years ago, there was an incident in Seattle. The Madeline case.” Stosser paused, probably for dramatic effect. “Do any of you remember it?”
I did. Nifty shook his head, and so did Pietr and Sharon. Nick was the only one who spoke up.
“The girl who was raped and murdered. They never found the killer. She was Cosa,” he said to the others. “Sixteen, still in mentorship.”
That meant that she was still a kid, supposed to be protected, taken care of, not just by her mentor but by every adult Talent. That’s the theory, anyway.
“She was killed by strangulation, but the coroner was never able to say exactly how, because there wasn’t any of the usual marks or indications in the autopsy. There were rumblings, maybe she’d been killed by someone within the Cosa. That someone had used current to subdue and kill her. Madeline’s mentor offered a huge reward, but nobody ever came forward.”
I knew about the case because Madeline and her mentor had been Council. J had been part of the investigating team flown out to look into the alibis of a couple of the guys they suspected. Nothing had ever been proven, nothing had ever been done. He’d come home and hugged me really tight, and never said a word about it after that.
“That’s right. A dead end, totally untraceable, unprovable … Then.” Stosser started pacing, forcing us to follow his movements. “But it got us, Ben and me, to thinking. Why was it untraceable? We all know how to detect current—it’s one of the first things we’re taught in mentorship. We gather it, manipulate it, direct it, imprint it … A current-signature is like a fingerprint, and therefore, like a fingerprint, it should lead you back to the owner,