Dragon Justice
Authors: Laura Anne Gilman
WE KNEW THE JOB WAS IMPOSSIBLE WHEN WE TOOK IT...
In my time with PUPI, formally known as Private, Unaffiliated
Paranormal Investigations, I’ve seen a lot. Learned a lot. And not all of it’s
been good. But what we do—make people accountable for crimes committed with
magic—is important work.
Still. Even I need to take a break every now and again. Or so
I’ve just been told (ordered).
So hey, vacation. Maybe I’ll finally figure out what’s going
on with the “special bond” between me and the boss man, Benjamin Venec. Venec
seems to like that idea—he’s invited me down to join him on a jaunt to Philly.
But no sooner do I arrive in the City of Brotherly Love than we’re called in to
look at a dead body.
And that’s when life gets
really
complicated....
Praise for
PARANORMAL SCENE INVESTIGATIONS
Hard Magic
“Readers will
love the
Mythbusters
-style
fun of smart, sassy people solving mysteries through experimentation, failure
and blowing stuff up.”
—Publishers Weekly,
starred
review
“The mystery is solid, the characterization strong, the plot
fast-paced and the final product solid. This is a great start to a new
series.”
—
Green Man Review
Pack of Lies
“Bonnie’s
intelligence and perceptiveness really make this book go, and readers will root
for her and the team to solve their investigation.”
—
RT Book
Reviews,
Top
Pick
“
Pack of Lies
is not to be missed by urban fantasy fans looking for a great
mystery.”
—
Reading with Tequila
Tricks of the
Trade
“Innovative world building coupled with rich characterization
continues to improve as we enter the third book of this series.”
—
Smexy
Books Romance Reviews
“I want the next book now! I was not ready to leave this world
when I finished
Tricks of the
Trade.
”
—
Reading Reality
Also available from
Laura Anne Gilman
and
Harlequin LUNA
Paranormal Scene Investigations
Hard
Magic
Pack of Lies
Tricks of the Trade
Retrievers
Staying
Dead
Curse the Dark
Bring It On
Burning Bridges
Free
Fall
Blood from Stone
To all the readers who have, over the years, joined the Cosa
Nostradamus. None of this would have happened without you.
Prologue
Yesterday was, unofficially, the second anniversary of
PUPI. Two years ago, we were hired, me and Nick, Nifty, Pietr, and Sharon.
Nobody brought cupcakes. Nobody said a word. But we all
knew.
You can spend your entire life wondering if you’ve made a
difference. We know. Two years. A lot accomplished. A long way to go.
There’s no sign on our building; it’s just another mixed-use
brickwork like hundreds of others in Manhattan. Too far uptown to be
fashionable, too well kept to be fashionably seedy, seven stories and a clean
but boring lobby with a row of nameplates and buzzers. Ours simply read
P.U.P.I.
The plaque outside our door, on the seventh—top—floor repeated
the terseness etched in bronze. If you came this far, you knew who we were and
what we did.
My name is Bonnie Torres. A long time ago not so long ago, I
was a newly minted college grad with a degree and enthusiasm—and not a clue
where to go with it. Now I’m lead investigator with PUPI, the Private,
Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigators of the
Cosa
Nostradamus
. I spend my days looking underneath the rocks of the
magical community, finding the things my fellow Talent want to keep hidden. We
use magic to fight magic, to find the evidence the cops can’t, to prove the
crimes the rest of the world can’t see.
Sounds pretty glam, right?
So far, in those two years, I’ve been shot at, verbally abused,
nailed with a psi-bomb, physically threatened, seen people—human and
otherwise—die and been unable to prevent it, and had most of my illusions about
the inherent fairness of life yanked out from under me. Some days, it’s hard to
get out of bed in the morning.
And then I think about what we’ve done, and I haul myself out
and get my ass to the office. Because this, PUPI, what we do? It matters.
The boss likes to give a lecture about how we’re not crusaders
or superheroes. The world’s too big a place for us to save all of it. He
lectures us, and he knows that we’re listening, but we don’t believe him. Hell,
he doesn’t even believe himself, not really, otherwise he wouldn’t be here with
the rest of us, training us, teaching us enough to stay alive and get our job
done.
If he—and Ian Stosser, our founder—didn’t believe that we could
save someone, maybe not the world, but someone who might otherwise fall, there
wouldn’t be a PUPI at all.
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.