Dragon Justice (26 page)

“Ellen.”

Pietr, stepping forward, his voice soft and smooth. Once upon a
time he would have watched and waited, protected himself. Where working with the
PUPs had toughed me, it had softened Pietr, allowed him to show the gentleness
inside to strangers. How had I never seen that before?

“Ellen, it’s okay. Nobody’s upset, nobody’s blaming you. We
understand. It’s not your fault. You saw it, you didn’t cause it. We know how it
works. You’re among family now, and we’re going to take care of you and teach
you how to take care of yourself, so you understand all this.” He talked her
down like you would a junkie, no sudden moves, no raised voices, and not even
the hint of current escaping him. In fact, I was pretty sure that he was
absorbing some of hers, sliding it off her skin and enclosing it within his own
core, which had to be giving him a serious case of the itches. But whatever he
was doing, it worked: she stopped shuddering, and her entire body collapsed a
little on her frame, like someone let half a squeak of air out.

Sharon half turned to me. “You should ping The Wren, tell her
Ellen’s here.”

“Yeah.” Except Wren was currently up in Canada, and
Translocating had never been her best skill.

I suddenly remembered Wren’s words to me, in the courtyard
garden last night. “I was going to go to the office tonight, but…” If she had
gone, would she have been in the building when the alarm went off? Had my
sending her into danger, trying to steal from the Council, saved her life? If
so, the irony was more than I could appreciate.

Sergei unnerved Ellen, Wren wasn’t around—maybe hooking her
with Wren hadn’t been the best idea, after all.

“You want to stay here with us today?” It was a terrible idea,
but the look of sudden, cautious hope in Ellen’s eyes made it seem workable.
“You’ll need to stay out of the way, but—”

“I can do that,” she said, sounding like a five-year-old hoping
to get a bedtime extension, and something in my chest hurt.

*bonnie?*

Sharon, asking me if I was certain. I just shrugged, and while
her mouth set in the flat line that meant she didn’t approve, she didn’t say
anything out loud.

“Check in with the others, see if they’ve uncovered anything we
can use, yet.” Lou and Nicky were still in New York, working off-site, but
Nick’s netbook could work its magic anywhere.

“I hate working split up like this,” Sharon muttered but
nodded, heading into the hallway where the current-levels wouldn’t be tainted by
Ellen’s display. As she did so, yet another bolt of thunder hit, close enough
that we could hear windows rattling, and the hair along my arms and on my scalp
lifted slightly. This was a doozy of a storm, and the thunder was bringing
lightning with it. Pure, wild current in its natural form. I wasn’t much for
sourcing wild, but in a storm like this knocking on our door, shoving current
into the air above us until we were practically breathing it in…

“Sharon!” I yelled, startling both Pietr and Ellen. “Forget
about that. Get back in here.” I had an idea.

* * *

“This is the craziest idea you’ve ever had, and that’s
saying something,” Sharon said. She was muttering, but she wasn’t refusing,
which meant it was either crazy but brilliant, or we were really that much at a
shithole dead end with time running out.

It had been a few days since the third body was found. If our
boy was on schedule, another Talent was going to be taken, held, tortured, and
killed before we knew who was doing it. I took a quick read of the room: we were
worn to shreds already; another body might break us.

“I don’t think I can do this,” Ellen said.

“You’re not doing it alone,” I said. I was trying for patience,
but her uncertainty was starting to get on my nerves. I was in no way shape or
form decent mentor material. “We’re with you. We’ll guide and protect you.”

I’d have felt better—we all would have—if Venec had come back.
But he was still gone and still had his walls up thick enough that I knew better
than to try to knock through them, and the others knew better than to ask
me.

And no Stosser to call in. Damn it. No, I thought fiercely.
Don’t think. Work.

The little garden space was deserted—not surprising,
considering the rain pelting down. You could barely look up without your vision
being destroyed by water, but none of us needed to look up to know that there
were thick, dark clouds filling the sky, turning it near-black, or that there
were bolts of lightning crackling within those clouds, occasionally exploding
between them or slamming down into the ground. We felt it, inside us, like the
shiver of too-cold ice cream on your teeth, painful and kinda sexy-hot at the
same time.

“Hold hands,” Sharon said, taking up Ellen’s left even as Pietr
took her right. I completed the circle, the four of us looking like some kind of
demented ring-around-the-rosy, if anyone staying in the hotel happened to look
out the window.

“We’ll ground you,” I heard Sharon say. “Just, whatever you do,
don’t let go. Okay?”

Ellen nodded. Her eyes were bright, and she was looking less
worried and more excited. I had a sudden glimpse at the girl who wanted so badly
to be part of the Park coven and the pain she must have felt, to be
rejected....

“You’re part of this now,” I said. She looked up at me, even
though I wasn’t sure she’d heard me, and smiled. Totally, absolutely not my
type, not even a whisper of interest, but my heart almost melted and burst,
seeing that smile.

“Ready…steady…” Pietr was barely whispering, but we all heard
him even over the storm. I flexed my toes against the ground—we’d left our shoes
back in the conference room—and felt for the rock, deep below. Grounding was
more a mental and magical thing than it was physical, but it never hurt to
remember that we were meat and bone, too.

The photographs were tucked inside my shirt, shoved under my
bra strap. They were sharp and uncomfortable, digging into my skin, but that was
sort of the point: close to the heart, the electrical pump that fueled us all,
Talent and Null, digging into the flesh that formed us, the urge and the desire
for more power singing through the storm-raddled air and connecting me…not to
the victims, but to the hunters.

If they were hunting tonight, the photos, the sense of their
methods, the image of their blow… Add in Ellen’s particular skills channeling
this storm to
see,
and it should all lead us to
them.

Cave paintings in the rain. Cave paintings in current. The
oldest magic, in the newest time…

I slipped into fugue state even as thunder rumbled overhead.
The familiar hum of current slipped through me as they slid into fugue state as
well, practice making perfect in a way that the would-be leader of the coven
might have envied.

*steady*

Pietr, taking lead. Then Sharon’s brightness, and the darker
spark I could already identify as Ellen, muted but strong. I matched them, fit
into them, and slid into the storm.

Hunger. Need. Power. Curiosity. Those were the threads we were
reaching for, the current-bubble-bond between us stretching over the city, using
the storm as a power source and a highway, moving up and down in-between
lightning bolts.

It was incredibly, stupidly dangerous. Alone, we could never
have done it. Without Ellen and her natural affinity for storms, I would never
have suggested trying it. As current crackled in my bones, and the smell of
burnt hair and skin filled my nostrils, I understood addiction for the first
time.

*focus*

We followed each hint of those emotions, using my scrying to
find them, and Sharon’s truth-sensing to discard them, Pietr our anchor to the
ground and Ellen our tie to the storm. It was slow, painstaking work that took
only seconds per dive.

*there?*

*there*

*here*

And we dived, following another hint. The closer we got, the
more the sensation grew, until part of me wanted to pull out, pull away, back
off, but it was too late, and anyway, that wasn’t the job, to run away.

Lightning flashed down, and we followed it, riding current into
the source of the hint: a small cement building where lightning should not have
hit. It was low to the ground and lacked nearly anything but the most basic of
electronics: more a garage or warehouse than anything else.

Normally, riding current required that you have someone on-site
to see through. Ideally, that someone was strong enough to corral and control
the other awarenesses riding him: Stosser had done it the first time we tried
this, and Venec after that in training. With only the four of us here, we had to
scatter and improvise.

I didn’t want to let go of anyone, but so long as we held onto
each other, back in our flesh, it should be all right. “Should” being, as
always, the operative term. Even when you’d codified a spell, there were still
external events that could change the results.

The smell of bitter copper and musk refocused me, and I opened
my “eyes” with mage-sight, looking out over the space. The shock made me aware
of my physical body, bent over double and gagging, only the death-tight grip on
my hands keeping me part of the circle.

The space was dimly lit to human eyes, but mage-sight saw
things differently. No people, alive or dead, just an open space with high
ceilings and thick walls painted a drab beige over the cement. The only
electricity was being used to power the lights that hung from the ceiling at
regular intervals, flickering dimly. A large slab table, at least three feet
wide and six feet long, made of wood, polished…no, not polished. Worn down with
use and stained a dark reddish-brown that I knew, instinctively, even without
the stink, was not the original color of the grain. There were objects next to
it, tall and skinny, and covered with tarps. I sent a finger of current toward
them, gently, and was rewarded with a twitch of electricity: battery-operated
floodlights.

The floor below was tile, either ceramic or something like, and
it was too clean to belong with this cement-block warehouse—it had been washed
down, and recently.

There was nothing that could wash down the air itself, thick
with the scent of sweat, blood, and fear…and an even more disturbing excitement.
Not sexual, thank god; I’d had to investigate that once, at a torture scene, and
once was twice too much. This was cleaner, if you could use that word,
and…colder.

But there was something else in the space, too. Even if you
looked with mage-sight, you could barely see them, a faint buzzing glow that
shimmered and moved like tiny hummingbirds.

Elementals, the same things Venec used in his security-net
spell, only utterly disorganized here. They were drawn to current, the more
intense the better, and normally swarmed inside major power lines, like cats
sleeping in sunlight. So why were they here, in this cold, empty place?

I reached out, carefully, not wanting to spook and scatter
them, and felt my pack mates doing the same.

*corral* I suggested, the image of horses penned inside a
fence, and felt instant assent. It would be easier if we were still working as
one entity, but we’d practiced this before, although on larger creatures. Moving
slowly in a nearly choreographed dance, out current swirled inward, not so much
boxing the elementals in as removing the space they could roam, encouraging
their natural inclination to crowd together.

*gently…*

Like I didn’t know that, I thought irritably, and my Self had
another flash of my physical body, soaking wet and sour-mouthed from vomit,
wanting only to be warm and dry and not here…

Focus. The body was the anchor but Self was the sail, the
wheel, the… I gave up with the bad metaphors—I’d never been good with them—and
did the thing I’d been avoiding. I touched the outer ring of elementals and
asked them what they’d seen.

You don’t get actual answers from elementals, of course. You
don’t even really get visuals, since they have no eyes, no sense of “seeing.”
It’s all current, all impressions and…textures is the best way any of us were
able to describe it.

Textures of screams and silence. The shiver of skin parting and
silence falling, of the scrape of steel against bone and the slush of a wet mop
on tile. The sensations of an abattoir.

We’d found it.

* * *

Coming back into your body is painful at best, even when
you’re in a controlled situation, comfortably arranged somewhere, dry and safe
and knowing you had backup in case something went wrong. Dropping from a
thunderstorm knowing it’s about to leave the area, feeling the power drain from
you and crashing into a body that’s already traumatized, coming aware again
knees-down in the mud and your hands covered with vomit, your throat sore like
you’d been screaming—or sobbing?

That purely sucked.

“Oh, shit. Oh, holy shit.” Ellen, muttering over and over to
herself. I looked up, wiping my hands uselessly on my sodden jeans, and saw that
she was sitting on her haunches, her face held up to the sky, her eyes
closed.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” Her voice was steady, not shaking, but there was a note
in it that I couldn’t recognize. “You people do that shit all the time?”

“Not all the time, no.”

“Holy shit.” She shuddered. “That… What we saw… That was real.
Someone…did all that.”

“Yeah.”

She turned her head then, and her eyes gleamed even in the
darkness, like whatever was left of the storm had snugged deep inside her.
“Catch him.”

“We will.”

I looked up at the new voice, not at all surprised to see Venec
there. He’d had the sense to wear a coat, a dark slicker of some kind, and a
wide-brimmed hat kept the rain off his face, so he was really just a looming
black shadow in the background, but I’d have known him even without the voice.
Now that I was back in my body, as disgusting as it felt, my awareness of him
returned, as well. Or rather, my awareness of my awareness. Thinking about it
made everything hurt, so I stopped.