Loe raamatut: «Dragon Justice»

Chapter 1

We hit the scene, and I started delegating. “All right, I want you to get a perimeter reading—”

“Oh, god. Again?”

I stopped and looked at my companion, puzzled. “What do you mean, again?”

“Again. This.” Farshad made a helpless little gesture, indicating the room we’d just walked into.

I put my kit down on the floor and tried to see whatever it was he was reacting to. It was a nice room. It was a nice house, from what I’d seen on the walk through it. The room in front of us had just the right amount of furniture, less than fifty years old but well crafted, not Ikea specials or en suite acquisitions from a “fine furnishings” catalog. Paintings on the wall were original, if not spectacular, the rugs underfoot quality but not hand-woven. It seemed pretty straightforward and ordinary. For a crime scene, anyway.

“What?” I asked again, aware, even if Farshad wasn’t, that the client was waiting in the hallway outside the room, impatient for us to get on with it. I’d gotten to the office that morning and been handed a job ticket and a trainee. I hadn’t even had time to grab a cup of coffee before we were off to the scene, and my patience might not have been all that patient.

My trainee shook his head, clearly resigned to the fact that I just wasn’t getting it. “Don’t you ever get tired of all this? Perimeter readings, scan-and-pan, collect evidence, sort and discard? You don’t find it boring?” Far swept his hand over the scene, an expression of almost comical resignation on his face. I looked again, then looked back at him.

“Not really, no.”

Farshad was one of our new hires; he’d only been on the job for three months. If he was bored with the routine already, he wouldn’t last to his half-year evaluation.

He opened his mouth to say something, and I held up a hand to stop him. “Just go into fugue and see what you can find, okay?”

Far nodded, sinking onto his haunches and resting his hands on his knees. I counted silently with him as he slipped into the fugue state that made concentrating current easier, and then followed down after him. Once, when I’d been a new-made pup, I’d had to count back, too. Now it was a matter of breathing deep, once, and sliding into my core.

This was Far’s third site. I’d lost count around twenty-five. We’d gotten busy over the past year. That was why we’d hired new staff—and why I was stuck training them.

All right, not entirely fair; everyone was doing newbie-training. But I seemed to be the only one who hated it. Griping, though, did not close the case, and the client was waiting.

An exhale, and I opened my eyes to examine the site again. Seen in mage-sight, the rug and sofa were splattered with a dark stain. Not blood or ichor; that would have shown up with normal eyesight. It didn’t carry any of the neon-sharp trace of current, either, so it wasn’t magical. Something new? Part of me groaned—an open-and-shut investigation would have been nice, considering the paperwork waiting for me back at the office. On the other hand…something new?

Every sense I had perked up at the thought.

* * *

We made it back to the office before lunch, despite the usual Monday transit snafus. At least it hadn’t been raining; it had rained every day for the past week. Summer would be starting soon—maybe the sun would show up eventually.

Venec had set up shop today in the smallest conference room, spreading his gear over the table. When we came in, he leaned back in the single chair at the table, an interesting contrast to his usual hold-up-the-wall stance.

“Report.”

I’d written my own evaluation of the site while we were there, taking samples both magical and physical, but I let Farshad make his initial report unassisted. Far quavered a little under Venec’s sharp bark, but then stood tall and delivered. Good pup.

The job was open-and-shut after all—the client’s son had tried to exorcise a family ghost who was annoying him and ended up attracting a succubus. The ghost escaped; the boy did not. We had the succubus’s trace now, though, so the client could negotiate for her idiot offspring’s return—or not, as she still had two other kids who looked to be smarter than their brother. Whatever happened, it wasn’t our concern any longer. PUPI investigated and handed over our findings; we were not judge, jury, or negotiator.

In slightly longer words, Far was telling Venec exactly that. Minus the comment about possibly not ransoming the teenager: it was a common office opinion that three-year-olds had more tact than I did.

*he’s doing well*

The thought came to me, not in the push of emotions or sensations the way pinging—current-to-current communication—usually did, but a soft voice in my ear, clear and defined. It was unnatural as hell, but after a year of it, I didn’t even flinch.

*he’s not going to make it* I sent back, with the added implication of a money bet.

There was a sense of snorting amusement and acceptance of my bet. You took your amusement where you could some days.

The source of that mental snort was now leaning forward in his chair, listening to Far’s report, not a twitch indicating that he wasn’t giving the boy one hundred percent attention. Benjamin Venec. One of the two founding partners of PUPI—Private, Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigations. Tall, dark, and cranky. Sexy as hell, if you liked the type. My boss. And, much to our combined and considerable dismay, my “destined merge,” according to every magical source and Talent we could consult.

That had been, putting it mildly, an unpleasant, unwanted surprise. To both of us.

The Merge was—according to legend, because there were no modern references—what happened when two matched Talent encountered each other, when our cores blended or swirled or something equally annoying and sparkly.

The best hypothesis we could put together was that the Merge was some kind of coded breeding program to make sure there were little baby magic users for the next generation. Talent wasn’t purely genetic, but it did seem to bud in family trees more often than not.

The idea of magic having an ulterior goal was bad enough; being its means was worse. I was twenty-four and in no mood to become a broodmare, even if Venec had been so inclined. More to the point, neither of us took very well to anyone telling us what—or who—our destiny was, especially since it would totally screw with the dynamics of a job we both put first, second, and occasionally third in our lives.

In true rational, adult fashion, we’d therefore both spent the first few months ignoring it. That had been pretty much a failure; when you literally spark around someone, you notice. And so does everyone else. So then we tried managing it, maintaining our distance and shutting down everything except essential contact. That hadn’t worked so well either, especially after Ben was attacked by a hellhound about seven-eight months ago, and I caught the pain-rebound through our connection.

The cat had been out of the bag then; we’d had to tell the others. Awkward didn’t even begin to cover it. But the team dealt with it, mostly. Truthfully, being able to communicate so easily, share information along the thinnest line of current other Talent wouldn’t even sense, made the job much easier. Only problem was, using it bound us together even more, until it became impossible to shut the other out entirely. The Merge was as stubborn as we were, it seemed.

I kept my walls all the way up off-hours, though, and Venec did the same. We stayed out of each other’s personal lives.

Mostly.

Right now, it was all work. Venec now had his gaze fixed on Far in a way that generally made even us old-timers nervous, wondering what we’d missed that the Big Dog was about to point out.

Venec finally relented on the stare and asked, “If you were to approach the scene again, fresh, what would you do differently?”

The right answer to that was “nothing.” You approached every scene the same way: with no expectations or assumptions. Far fumbled it the way all the newbies did, trying to determine what he’d missed that the Big Dog was going to slap him down for. I tuned it out and let a tendril of current skim out into the office. My coworkers’ individual current brushed against me in absent greeting, the magical equivalent of a raised hand or nod, giving me a sense of the office moving: people coming in and out, talking, working out evidence, or just refilling their brains with caffeine and protein.

Lunchtime was serious business in this office. Current burned calories, and a PUP used more current on a daily basis than most Talent did in a month.

The sense of movement was comforting, like mental white noise. All was right with the world, or at least our small corner of it, and I’d learned enough to cherish the moment.

Far stumbled to a halt in his report and risked looking at me. I kept my face still, not sure if I should be frowning or giving an approving nod.

“All right. Good job, you two.” Venec nodded his own approval, making Far sag a little in relief. “Farshad, write up the report and file it. Lou will invoice and close the file. And then go get some lunch. You look paler than normal.”

Far grinned at that, accepting the usual joke—he was about as pale as a thundercloud—and beat a hasty retreat.

“You’re wrong,” Venec said out loud. “He’ll make it.”

Big Dog was still a better judge of people than I could ever hope to be, so I didn’t argue. But the truth was, we’d gone through seven new-hired PUPs in the past nine months, hire-to-fire. One of them, rather spectacularly, had only made it a week before giving notice. Venec had hired all of them; occasionally, even he was wrong.

* * *

I was amazed, sometimes, when I came into the office in the morning and there were so many people here. We’d started out with five PUPs. We had nine in the field right now, plus our office manager, Lou, and her cousin’s daughter Nisa, who helped out in the back office part-time while she went to school. And Venec and Stosser, of course. Thirteen people. Crazy, right?

“If he’s doing so well, you’ll take me off babysitting duty?” I asked, hopeful but not really expecting a positive response. “Seriously, Venec, I’m better in the lab than I am riding herd. Pietr is way better, and so is Sharon.”

“Objection noted,” he said calmly. “Again.”

“Ben…” I wasn’t whining. I wasn’t begging, either. The fact that I was using his first name, though, was a warning sign to both of us. Usually I didn’t slip in the office. I tested my walls: half-up, so anyone could reach me, but enough that I shouldn’t be leaking anything through the Merge. Just like the rest of the magic we worked with, we’d gotten it down to a science. Everything was totally under control—except the sparks that flared through both our cores when we touched, that is. We just made damn sure not to touch anymore.

Which, by the way, sucked. He was nice to touch, toned and muscular, with just enough flesh under the skin to feel good. Months after my hand last touched him, the feel remained.

From the flicker in his gaze, he remembered, too. “You go where you’re needed, and right now we need you riding herd as well as being brilliant. Now put some food in your stomach, too. I can hear it growling from here.”

Benjamin Venec could be a right proper and deeply irritating bastard when he wanted to be. He was also the boss. And he was right, damn it.

I saluted sloppily and turned on my three-inch boot heel, a flounce of which I was justifiably proud. I did not slam the door shut behind me. That would have been rude.

By the time I’d stalked down the hallway to the break room, the soothing green-and-cream decor had done its job, and my brain had stopped fizzing at me. Calmer now, I was able to see his point: it wasn’t about teaching the newbies but working with them. The things we did on a regular basis required everyone to be comfortable with each other, on a level most people aren’t ready for—lonejack or Council, we’re trained one-on-one, not classroom-style, and group-work takes some getting used to.

So, by putting me in the training rotation, the newbies got used to me being in their personal space, both physical and magical. And vice versa—I might be used to working in a group, but I still needed to learn each individual’s signature.

The fact that I hated teaching, would much rather have been in the office working up a new cantrip or spell, didn’t matter. Venec was pushing me, making me get out of my comfort zone, and making sure I stayed a viable member of the team.

Making sure I did the best job possible by challenging me in the area of my least competence.

Knowing that you’re being manipulated isn’t always a bad thing: you can either fight it or let it do its job. Since its job was to ensure that I could do my job, I let it go.

The smell of something warm and meat-filled came through the doorway, drawing me into the break room, my stomach even louder now. The need for more coffee was officially secondary to the need for food.

I noted there was someone else in the break room even as that person greeted me with a wave and “heya, dandelion.” I returned the wave, going straight for the fridge.

“Hey, yourself,” I said, grabbing a packet of chocolate pudding and an anonymous wrapped sandwich, then turning to face my coworker. “You close your ticket?”

Nicky shook his head mournfully. “Held over by popular demand. Seems our client wasn’t quite forthcoming on all that was stolen.”

I snorted in a way that would have made my mentor shake his head in genteel dismay. “Surprise. Not.”

After the ki-rin disaster we’d somehow gotten a few more jobs, but then came the Tricks case, that damned prankster, and the horse-trading Venec had indulged in to satisfy his sense of fair play. In the aftermath, there had been a month of utter silence when we’d figured it was all over, nobody would trust us to find a missing gerbil. I’d even started browsing the want ads, not that there was anything there I was qualified for, much less interested in.

Then, all of a sudden, it was like the floodgates opened. Okay, a steady trickle through the gates. The Eastern Council hadn’t given us their gold seal of approval yet, but the rank-and-file Council were bringing us their troubles.

The problem was, most of them held the “above the rules” attitude that had made Ian Stosser decide there was a need for us in the Cosa Nostradamus to begin with. It’s tough to solve a supernatural crime. It’s almost impossible when the client doesn’t give over all the gory details at the start.

Nicky had gotten one of those.

I’d gotten pretty good at holding back exasperated sighs. “At some point, they’re going to have to realize that we’re not going to judge them. Right?”

Nick snorted in response, and I flopped down on the sofa next to him, swinging my feet up into his lap and unwrapping the sandwich. “Okay, maybe not.”

Nick shoved my feet back onto the ground and went back to marking something in his notebook. Since current messed with electronics something fierce, most Talent couldn’t use recorders or cameras, so we all carried notebooks around like twentieth-century beat cops. I’d added a sketchbook to my kit, but Nick couldn’t draw a straight line if you gave him a ruler. I know, I’d tried.

“Just be glad you weren’t here when the smoke detector went off again,” he said.

I groaned. “What’s that, the third time this month?”

“Yeah. Scared the crap out of Nisa.”

“Poor kid. She so doesn’t deserve to be stuck here with us.”

Nicky just snickered.

“I didn’t see anything on the board—I wonder if I could get tomorrow off,” I said, biting into my lunch. Ham and cheese. Not bad. Time off would be nice. I’d gotten an invite to go sailing from a woman I’d met the week before, and I wanted to take her up on it before she decided I wasn’t interested. Despite the Merge, I was trying to keep some semblance of a normal social life, even if very few of my hookups ended up with an actual hookup these days.

“Doubtful,” Nick said, not looking up. “Stosser took a new client into the back office about ten minutes ago. Got your name all over it.”

“Oh, gods above and below.” I took another bite, that news suggesting that lunch might be abbreviated. “Can’t someone else handle it?”

“Fatae.”

That one short word made me put down my sandwich, thoughts of my new acquaintance and a lazy afternoon on the water not quite forgotten but shoved aside. “Seriously?”

Nick finally looked up from his notebook. “Serious as a heart attack. No idea the breed. They were cloaked like it was midwinter. Human-tall, human-wide, no visible tails or fur.”

That didn’t rule much out—most of the fatae in New York City were human-shaped, enough to get by on a casual glance, anyway. There were a few horned and hooved types, and a few clearly not-human breeds living in the parks or underground, but they were the minority. And when they had a problem, most of them dealt with it internally. In fact, most of the breeds dealt with their own shit. For one of them to come to us…

It could be good, or it could be seriously bad. The last time we’d gotten tangled in fatae business, we’d had to drag a ki-rin into disgrace. Never mind that the Ancient had brought it on itself; we were still the ones who had exposed it. The fact that the honored one had chosen suicide rather than live with the knowledge of what it had done…

Technically, and what passed for legally among the fatae, what happened wasn’t our fault, nor our responsibility. But I still felt sick about it and suspected the others did, too. I didn’t want to deal with a fatae case.

“Still.” I was running through excuses and justifications in my head, if only for the practice. “Someone else could handle it. What about Sharon? She’s good with delicate situations.”

“You’re the fatae specialist,” Nick pointed out with damnable reasonableness. “Stosser will put you on it, if there’s anything to be put on.”

Right on cue, there was a touch of current against my awareness. *torres*

The feel of that ping was unmistakable. I sighed and got to my feet. “I hate it when you’re right,” I grumbled, shoved my lunch back into the fridge, and headed into the office to face my fate.

We had started two years ago with one suite, taking up a quarter of the seventh floor. About a year back the guys acquired the second suite of offices on our side of the building and combined the space, repurposing the original layout into a warren of rooms that gave the illusion of privacy without sacrificing an inch of workspace. Nice, except when you were doing the Tread of Dread, as Nifty had dubbed the walk from the break room to Stosser’s office at the very end of the long hall.

I knocked once, and the door opened.

“Sir?”

Usually I’d have started with “you rang, oh great and mighty?” but what worked with humans could backfire spectacularly with fatae. The fact that I knew that—the result of years more experience interacting with the nonhuman members of the Cosa than anyone else in the office except possibly Venec—was why I’d been called here. Nick had it in one.

“Torres. Come in.”

I came in, closing the door behind me, uncertain of where to go after that. The office was large enough to hold five people comfortably, seven if we all squeezed. Right then, there were only four—me, Stosser, and two figures, cloaked, with their backs to me—but it felt crowded as hell.

Then they turned around, and all the air left my lungs in a surprised, if hopefully discreet, whoosh.

* * *

Benjamin Venec took good care of his investigators. If they were stressed, he gave them something to snarl at. If they were worried, he could provide a sounding board. If they were pissed off, he was willing to fight with them. But he couldn’t force them to relax; even if that had been his style, his pups were stubborn. They’d decide when they went down, not someone else, opponent or boss.

So he could have told Torres to go home and get some sleep. She might even have gone—or at least started to. But he knew her: something shiny would catch her attention, either a case or a person, and she’d be off again. That was just…Torres.

The fact that he had given up any right to be jealous of either things or people she deemed shiny didn’t seem to help the slight burning sensation to the left of his gut when he felt her sudden rush of surprise, followed by a shimmer of glee and anticipation that was uniquely Bonita Torres.

Her signature was like coconut liquor, spicy and warm, and he let himself enjoy the taste—offsetting the burning sensation, or enhancing it, he wasn’t sure.

The pleasure was balanced by a sense of moral discomfort, though. They’d agreed to stay out of each other’s headspace unless invited. Bonnie had been scrupulous about maintaining that agreement. He hadn’t. And claiming that it was part of his job, as her boss and teacher, nothing more than he did for the others, only went so far in justifying what his mentor would have called a blatant misuse of Talent.

Ben didn’t even try to justify it, not to himself. He might be a bastard, but he was an honest one. He simply couldn’t avoid the overlap: even with his walls up, he was hyperaware of every strong emotion that passed through Torres, and the girl never felt anything halfway. It should have been annoying to his more cynical, jaded self, the way she threw herself wholeheartedly into every step of her life and dragged him along, via the Merge, without even realizing it. Instead, the experience amused, exasperated, frustrated, and invigorated him, sometimes all at once.

He let it ride. The first rule of dealing with the Merge, they had discovered, was not dealing with the Merge, and so far, he had been able to ignore the other, totally unprofessional urges. Mostly.

The fact that Bonnie took other lovers had been established—by her—early on. Also established: it was none of his damn business. She kept her private life private, but the Merge… If she knew how much leaked, even when she thought her walls were up, she’d be horrified. And mortified. Thankfully, she was as particular as she was omnivorous, and they had been few and far between lately. He always knew, though.

He waited a minute, just letting the Merge-connection wash over him, and the sense of surprise and excitement faded, her thoughts settling into the focused hum that meant that whatever was making her quiver was work-related.

Work was within his purview. Ben tapped his pencil against the desk, resisting temptation for all of ten heartbeats.

*new job?* he queried his partner.

*interesting problem* Ian sent back, not so much words as a perception of something sharp and dark, versus Bonnie’s sense of shiny.

Ben tapped the pencil harder.

*too much* he suggested, with just the sense of scales tilting too far to one side. The past few months they’d been getting a steady stream of work, from piddling jobs like the one they’d tested Farshad on to the more complicated blackmail-and-possible-murder case he’d given Sharon, Pietr, and Jenna.

There was silence from Ian, which could mean anything from disagreement to his being attacked at knifepoint by the supposed client.

No, if that were the case, even if Ian were his usual cool self, Torres would have reacted. So: he was being ignored.

In its own way, that was reassuring. Torres and Stosser both had the kind of focus that didn’t miss much. Whatever was going on there, he could safely ignore it for now in favor of…

Ben paused his pencil-tapping. Actually, there was nothing pending on his desk. Lou, their office manager, had the day-to-day things running smoothly, and with the exception of Ian’s new project, whatever it was, nothing new had come in needing his attention.

Ben exhaled, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nothing did. Everyone was either out on a job or finishing up their paperwork. Nothing new needed to be evaluated and assigned. That meant he was free to pick up the job that had come across his desk this morning. Not a PUPI investigation; something from his previous line of work. He’d given up his sidelines while they got PUPI running, but not gotten out of the game entirely.

This project would only take a day or three, and it would be good to get out of Big Dog mode, use his other skills before they got rusty…and, he admitted, get himself out of Bonnie’s immediate vicinity, give the connection between them time to cool off a bit. She’d been single for a couple-three months now, but every time she did hook up with someone, he could feel himself hovering between an all-out confrontation or sliding the knife in deep, in places only he knew about. He was capable of both, he knew. Both would end badly.