Dragon Justice (19 page)

The rest of the world, some of them know about Talent, some of
them suspect, but mostly they like being ignorant of anything they’re not part
of. Mostly that was a good thing—most humans shouldn’t know about the fatae.
Like the man says, they can’t handle the truth. But that means the risk of
someone like Ellen, utterly lost. And sometimes…sometimes it would be really
nice to be able to go on the TV and announce that non-Talent need not fear, but
look out for anyone sniffing at power lines…

Wishes were horses, but nobody knew how to ride, my dad used to
say. Of course, Zaki—my dad—had been notorious for wishing his way through most
of life. My mentor had trained me better.

“Good luck,” Venec said, and Andrulis nodded, glum. “Yeah. You,
too. If you do find the guy…” There was a pause, then his massive shoulders
lifted in something that wasn’t quite a shrug. “I don’t think the taxpayers
would mind too much if he never comes up for trial, you know?”

“We only investigate. We don’t prosecute,” Stosser said
sharply.

“Yeah, okay, whatever.” Andrulis clearly didn’t believe the
disclaimer. Looking over the past year, I wasn’t sure I did, either.

“Remember—I was never here, and you never got any of this from
me.”

Taking him at his word, I guess, Stosser turned and went into
the room we’d been using without saying goodbye or thanks, and Sharon and Pietr
followed on his heels. I looked at Venec, then turned and left, too.

Ben came in a minute later, walls up and not meeting my eyes.
Something was up. I didn’t pry: he’d either share it with me later, or he
wouldn’t. Neither of them said anything about Ellen’s vision, but I was assuming
Stosser knew. If not, I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to say
anything.

Sharon, uncharacteristically, looked uncertain. “Should we
still go ahead with the spell, Bonnie, or…?”

“Yeah.” Then with more determination, “Yeah. The new info,
whatever it is, will help. Two points are okay but three points of reference are
better.”

I hadn’t even looked once at the new file, and already the body
was not a person, not even a db, but a point of reference. The fact that it was
necessary, that it was what allowed us to do our job and keep someone else,
hopefully, from being a point of reference…well, it helped, some. And I tried
not to think about the rest.

“Spell? Did you put it in the book?”

For all that Venec worked directly with us while Stosser
handled the front-man gig, both Big Dogs kept a close eye on the spells we were
crafting. In theory, you didn’t really need a spell to direct current: it was a
question of Talent and focus, and the words were just an aid to the focus. But
forensic spellwork, as Venec tagged it, needed to be consistent. When we did A
it had to result in B, every single time, or our results could be challenged,
and a single challenge could make it—and us—useless. So once we figured out how
to do something effectively, we codified the wording in the book—an
old-fashioned grimoire—and made sure everyone had it memorized, so that there
was no margin for oops.

“Still in the figuring-it-out stage, boss,” I said. “It’s still
theory.” Theory, unlike fieldwork where he was useless, was something Stosser
was good at.

He took the bait. “All right. Talk me through it.”

* * *

While I ran through the basics of my idea for the Big
Dog, I watched out of the corner of my eye as Sharon and Pietr spread the file
on the table, keeping it separate, for now, from the rest of the materials. New
info, then compare and contrast: that was how you built a case. My stomach
rumbled, reminding me that the pizza still hadn’t gotten here, and now we were
going to have to share with the Big Dogs, too. I hoped Sharon had ordered
enough.

“I don’t think it’s going to work,” Stosser said. He had
commandeered one of the chairs and was sitting back, his hands steepled under
his chin, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Dressed all in black
today, his long orange-red hair now pulled back again, he could have been a
beatnik escaped from a different decade—or a classic wizard updated by way of
Prada.

The fact that my slacks and silk T-shirt probably cost almost
as much as his outfit failed to make me look or feel anywhere near as sleek.
Fluffy blond curls and a delicate bone structure do not make one sleek. Nicky
calls me “dandelion,” not “iris” or “lily.”

“Why not?” I asked, affronted. “We have all the elements—the
image of the victims, the continued hunt…”

“You didn’t kill the victims, didn’t know them or need them.
Without the emotional impact, there’s no real connection, the way there was
between hunter and prey.”

“Oh.” I slumped into my own chair and thought about that for a
minute. “Damn.” He was right, of course. Ian Stosser was usually right with
things like this. That made him both useful and damned annoying, and I could
understand how he got up a lot of people’s noses. Okay, that and his insistence
that we be held accountable for the actions we—Talent—take with magic. That was
particularly irksome to a lot of people, including his own sister. Somehow I
didn’t think they were going to object to us taking on this particular case,
though, since…

“Guys?”

All four of them looked up, with varying expressions of
“what?”

“All the victims are Talent,” I said. “We know that. But we
have no confirmation about the killer.”

“You said that you picked up something from the blade?” Venec
asked.

“There was something under the cuts, yeah, but I told you, it
felt like the knife itself leaving a trace, not the user. And there wasn’t any
trace of external current on the victims, either caught in the wounds or left on
the skin.” That didn’t disprove Talent, but it made it less likely.

“Could the killer have washed the bodies himself, before
dumping them? To remove any trace?” Pietr asked.

“Possible—but why?” Until we’d come on the scene, only a Talent
cop would have noticed evidence like that, and there were few enough of those
that the odds of them being on the case were low to start. We were getting
known, yeah, but the specifics of what we did were still vague—and we kept them
that way intentionally. And we didn’t normally work in Philly.

“Because…” Pietr stopped and second-guessed himself. “Because I
was assuming only another Talent would be able to catch and bind a Talent to
this extent, without physical restraints. Which isn’t true.”

“It’s mostly true,” Venec said. “If the Talent in question was
willing to use current to defend himself. But these guys… Most of them were in
good shape, and not so active in the community that their deaths made much of a
ripple in the gossip.”

If there was one thing that united the
Cosa Nostradamus,
it was gossip. We’d called around on some of the
biggest gossips, but no one had info to share on these kills—especially as we
were still trying to keep the current kills a secret, to avoid a nationwide
panic breaking out. We just didn’t have enough information yet.

“So odds are, they relied on physical strength, same as Nulls
would. And it wasn’t enough—by the time they were panicked enough to use
current, it was too late. But Torres is right, that doesn’t tell us one way or
the other about the killer.”

Except that, if he was Talent and the lack of signature was
deliberate, he thought about being traced-back, which meant he was aware of us,
or at least the possibility of us being called in. That made our job
tougher.

“If this is the same guy as was in Montreal and San Diego, I
bet he was more careless back then. We weren’t around to hunt him.”

“If he is aware of us, though, your spell might be able to
work,” Stosser said. “Think at it a different way.”

“Huh?”

I was at a loss, but thankfully Sharon got it. “Not hunter to
prey, but hunter to hunter?”

“Oh.” I swung my brain around and tried to see where he was
pointing. “Use the photos not as a connection to the victims, but the killer…and
see what he saw when he left the bodies?” One hunter to another, with the same
mindset, the emotional need to stop him? Huh. If we could make that work…

“Not go into his mind, though, right? Because, um, crazy
sociopath vivisectionist?” Sharon waved her hand around, as though to emphasize
that this might be a bad thing.

“It’s like the negative-space cantrip,” I said. “Not to get
inside, but to show what was around.” To see the space where the victim fit. And
the knife—if I could get a decent idea of the weapon…then we could identify that
sense of current. Maybe. I could feel the pieces start to slot into place, my
mind pulling forward bits of other spells and fitting them in with the original
idea.

“Is there anything other than the photographs you can use?”
Pietr asked, sorting through the piles. “There’s some decent scene
reports....”

“No. Nobody else’s interpretation. Just the visuals, the last
thing the killer saw before he left them.” I was on the right track now, I could
feel it, the way current was shivering through my skin, gathering itself even
before I called it. Sharon was a great investigator, Nicky was a current-hacker,
Nifty could probably match current-for-current with Venec, if not Stosser, and
Pietr was the sneakiest thinker I’d ever met, but when it came to lab work and
crafting cantrips…I was the top dog, and everyone knew it.

Someone had pulled the relevant photos out of the files and
laid them on the table in a sort of triangle.

“Do you want the older photos, too?” That was Venec, not quite
hovering, but steady at my shoulder. His presence was so familiar now, I hadn’t
even been aware of him standing there.

“Not yet. Let me see if this works, first.” More than three
points would be good, but too many and too old… I was worried that it might
dilute, rather than enhance, the connection.

First step: fugue state. Lean back, breathe. Let everyone else,
everything else, fade from my conscious awareness. It was all still there, still
noted: fugue state enhanced your awareness rather than limiting it, but you were
so aware you could ignore it without endangering yourself. Sharon: bright and
sharp. Pietr: deeper tones, fading into mist at the edges but fierce and strong.
Stosser was, as always, like a pillar of current-fire, tight-wrapped with
control like barbed wire around a tornado.

I wished I could take credit for that line, but it was
Pietr’s.

And Venec.

I could feel him just underneath my skin, even when I wasn’t in
fugue state. It wasn’t sexual—well, mostly it wasn’t sexual. In fugue state, the
walls might as well not even be there: we overlapped, our cores not snapping and
sparking the way current should, but tangling into thicker, more complicated
knots.

*??*

Not so much question, or worry, as the awareness of a question
and worry and reassurance and support. Someone else—some other person—might have
embraced the Merge, welcomed the way it tied us together. Venec and I fought it
at first, each for our own reasons, but he had come to terms with the reality
much better than I.

I guess it wasn’t surprising that he had made the first move
toward truce.

My father had been functionally useless as a parent; my mother
had abandoned us before I could walk. J had been an excellent mentor, as much a
father as Zaki couldn’t manage, but I’d always known I was one of many people he
loved. And my lovers—I had loved them all, just never enough to give myself over
to them. Not deep down. Not at core-level.

I suspected Ben had, once. And the experience had taught him
something I still didn’t know. But I thought maybe I could learn.

*focus*

*yes, sir* I sent back and let go of even the awareness of
Venec behind me, narrowing the universe down to the three photographs in front
of me. Seeing them as images, but also seeing them as more, connectors to the
bodies themselves. Current flickered inside my core, like a miniature lightning
storm amid swirling black-and-green clouds.

The old spell tied hunter to prey, based on the element of
respect and need. I wasn’t able to muster respect—this person was a sick
bastard—but need, that I could do. On the strands of current, I wove not a net
but a rope, a cord that pulsed with the need, first from me and then, carefully
braided in, from everyone else in the room. They felt me touch, ask, and gave, a
silent opening of themselves that was a hallmark of what we did, who we
were.

This was what Stosser and Venec had created. I felt a momentary
flash of awe and pride, and let it go, focusing on that braided cord. When it
felt ready I reached through the images, pulling on the emotional representation
of the violence the victims suffered, adding that to our need, reinforcing it,
hunting for what lingered on the other end.

“Hunter, favor us.”

The original chant had talked about feeding familie, and
allowing the spirits of the prey to return in the spring. I hadn’t thought
specifically of how to adapt those words to my modern needs, but once I started,
it seemed to rise naturally, as though the words had always been there.

Maybe they had.

“Hunter, favor us. Guide my hand to the hand that binds, the
hand that bleeds, the hand that cuts, the hand that kills. Guide my spell to the
one who hunts.”

Tricky here. The current flowed under my touch, linking me to
the photographs, and I had to be careful to work this just right. Too vague, and
it would dissipate. Too specific, and…

Too specific and I might get nothing, missing the mark—or I
could be pulled into my quarry’s thoughts, his emotions; his core, if he was
Talent. And in the pulling, I could be lost.

*got your back*

Pietr this time, like a warm hand between my shoulder blades.
Less backup—I didn’t need anyone watching my back here in our own space—and more
reassurance that anything I needed was there for the asking.