Authors: Laura Anne Gilman
He was furious—we’d risked ourselves, and his wounds were still
too raw to accept that. But he knew why we’d done it, why we’d had to. They’d
trained us to finish the hunt.
“You all need showers. And a drink.”
“We found them, boss.” Sharon, already on her feet, although
she looked like muddy hell. “Or, we found where…we found where the killings took
place. I took soundings. We can find it again easy, and—”
“Showers. Dry clothing. Food. Then we discuss.” The Big Dog
wasn’t open to discussion.
* * *
“They weren’t there.”
Just as well: we hadn’t actually thought through what we’d do
once we found them. None of us were thinking as clearly as we’d thought. Venec
didn’t bother pointing that out.
“But this is where they do their killings?” He wanted us to be
absolutely sure. Fortunately, there wasn’t a hint of doubt in anyone’s mind.
“That table, that wasn’t just thrown together. It’s old, at
least a decade, and probably more. They’ve used it before. And they’re not going
to abandon it. It’s…” I hesitated, looking for the right word. “Not fetishized,
exactly, but I think there’s something about that table that’s important to our
killer.”
“Consistency. He keeps moving cities, but the table remains the
same. We already know that he likes patterns, so this might be part of that.
Boss—” and Pietr was shaking his head “—we need to hire a psychologist next,
because this is way above our pay grade.”
“So noted. Do your best.”
That was all we were ever asked to do, and being the massive
overachieving obsessionists we were, we could do no less. But I wasn’t sure that
it was going to be enough this time.
“We need to find them. But there’s… The place was washed clean.
Bastard is either obsessively clean, or he knew enough to wash his own trace
off, same as he did with the bodies before dumping them. Even if we went in with
a fine-tooth comb, I don’t think we’d find anything to use for trace. Not unless
someone’s figured out how to get trace off an elemental.”
They all looked at me, and I held up my hands, shaking my head.
“Oh, hell, no. I’m good, but nobody’s that good.”
“Time’s running out,” Venec said, saying what we all knew.
“There’s going to be another body—they still have seven more to go, to satisfy
the pattern, and short of watching over that place night and day until they
bring someone back…”
“We could. I mean, now that we know where it is…we could just
tell the cops.” Sharon, speaking reluctantly. It made perfect sense: Talent were
being killed by Talent, but it wasn’t a magical killing, as such. The cops could
handle it.
“On what evidence?” Pietr held up his hand, fingers curled into
his palm, and then lifted his index. “One wooden table that might or might not
still have useful DNA after being hosed down, and might not even be there by the
time the cops show up. If they’ve used it in other cities, they can move it—and
won’t willingly abandon it if threatened. Two—” and his middle finger joined the
index “—the collective impressions of a bunch of elementals confirming that
there was magic and violence done where. Yeah. That will go over well.”
He had a point. Even among the
Cosa,
there were a lot of people who thought elementals were like
fruit flies, not anything with an actual awareness. Bringing up evidence based
on them… And we needed evidence. PUPI was based entirely on facts and evidence.
We might know the killers had been there, but we couldn’t prove it before the
Cosa Nostradamus.
“These guys aren’t classic serial killers or maniacs who will
make a sloppy mistake,” Pietr went on. “They’re careful and clean and they don’t
leave anything behind to glean. How do we get proof?”
Venec lifted his head and stared at the wall, then said, “We go
in and take it.”
* * *
“Oh, man. This place gives me serious jeebies.”
Nifty shuddered, and it wasn’t playacting, either; his entire
body was reacting to the atmosphere of the neighborhood, and we hadn’t even
gotten to the cement bunker yet. I had to admit, I was glad to see the big guy,
and not just because of the physical protection he added. While we all worked
different cases these days, it was unusual to go this long out of the office,
and I’d missed him. I missed Nicky, too, but he’d gotten drained out working his
hacker mojo, and Venec had benched him. He and Lou were now riding herd on the
new kids, keeping them calm and busy in the office.
I didn’t envy them that job, even knowing what we were about to
face.
The bunker was actually an old warehouse of some sort, just
beyond the outskirts of the city, beyond the shiny office buildings and the
gentrified row houses. It was not the sort of area the tourists got to see,
although there were plenty of indications that the locals didn’t avoid it: the
trash can on the corner had fast-food wrappers and newspapers in it, sodden from
the previous night’s storm but not decomposing, so they hadn’t been there long,
and the graffiti on the walls was more the “look at me” street-runner sort than
“stay out” gang tags.
Rundown but not abandoned. Safe enough for strangers to come in
and set up shop, but nobody would question the whys or wheres of what they were
doing.
“Nift, you and Bonnie take lead. Sharon, up.” Venec jerked his
chin to indicate a rickety fire escape that had definitely not passed inspection
on the closest building to our destination. It would have made more sense to
send me up, since I was lighter, but I was also better at close-up fighting, if
need be. Sharon still resisted hitting someone first.
There were two doors to the main floor, that we could see.
According to the blueprint Andrulis had dropped off, with a “don’t ask, don’t
tell” look on his face, there had been three doors, once. One was now bricked
up. It might be a problem, but we weren’t going to worry right now. Sharon got
into position with a minimum of creaking metal and pinged us with a go-ahead:
she could see the back door and was ready to incapacitate anyone who came out—or
give us warning if anyone started in.
“Ready?”
“Do I look like a damned SWAT team?” I asked in return. I
probably did, actually. Black jeans, black T-shirt, dark blue waterproof jacket,
and high-top black sneakers—at least the socks were dark blue. And my bra and
panties underneath were screaming yellow, even if only I knew that.
I wasn’t used to having to think in terms of stealth: the point
of PUPI was that we were aboveboard, totally in the
Cosa’s
eye. Venec, though, seemed really comfortable in it, and
Pietr…well, Pietr hadn’t disappeared entirely the way he did when stressed, but
his lean silhouette was almost impossible to see, his olive-hued skin blending
into the night better than Nifty’s black.
Me, I was like a damned flashlight, if anyone was looking, but
Venec had vetoed Nifty’s suggestion that they camo-paint Sharon and me to blend.
I could only imagine the acne I’d have from that greasepaint…
*ready steady* came Nifty’s touch inside my thoughts, and I
nodded, moving forward as carefully as I could in his wake. Nifty outmassed me,
and all of it was muscle. Let him be the target, if needed, while I was the
unseen backup. That was the idea, anyway.
We got across the street without any obvious incident. In the
distance a siren rose and fell, and there was a burst of men shouting, then some
dogs barking, but nothing nearby and nothing coming closer.
The front door was a metal sheet set in a reinforced frame that
had probably been seriously impressive once upon a time. Now, without any alarm
system set up, it would be a simple matter of picking the locks and stepping
in.
I put my hand on Nifty’s forearm before he could do anything,
and shook my head. This was why I was there.
My hand still on his thick forearm, trusting him to have my
back, I slipped into a light fugue state, barely a breath between aware and
gone, then opened my eyes again, waiting for them to refocus. I studied the door
first, not wanting to go beyond just yet. It was metal, solid all the way
through: ideal for spell-casting, as it would amplify the current and shove it
right into anyone who touched it.
There was a faint tremor deep inside the door, and I nodded,
satisfied. *doorbell* Basic spell, designed to inform the owner of who was
knocking at his door; sort of a closed-circuit television for Talent. Nobody
would think twice about this being here, especially sitting passively; at most
they’d assume someone was squatting.
*nothing else?*
*not outside*
He bent down, his knees creaking a little, and pulled out his
lock-pick kit. I had a matching one tucked into an inside pocket of my jacket,
but Nifty had a better touch, for all that his hands were designed to catch a
football, not do fine motor work. Pietr’s trick with current wouldn’t work here:
that would set off the alarm the way Null tools wouldn’t. That was why the Big
Dogs didn’t let us rely entirely on current.
The ease with which the lock opened was almost anticlimactic,
except we hadn’t even gotten to the really exciting stuff yet.
Seeing the space with physical eyes was strange—the angle was
different, and things that had seemed large were smaller, the shadows less
menacing somehow. It was just a warehouse, the smell of dry rot and mice shit
stronger than any trace of blood or fear.
But the table was still there, in the middle of the open space.
Where before it had seemed like some kind of mystical altar, draped in the
residue of its victims, now the resemblance to a surgical table—the morgue table
the bodies had been laid out on—was clearer. Change wood for steel, and they
would have been identical.
“That can’t be coincidence,” I said, and Nifty shot me an odd
look, having no idea what I was talking about. But Venec, brushing up against my
thoughts, agreed.
*doesn’t matter right now. get on with it*
I gave a mental salute that mainly involved my middle finger,
and felt his reluctant chuckle.
“Torres, your attention, please?” Nifty didn’t bother to
whisper: if there was anyone else in the building, they knew we were here. The
point of this exercise wasn’t to hide.
“We really could have used a third person here,” I muttered,
moving to position at the head of the table. We needed Stosser.
We didn’t have him.
I didn’t want to touch the table: washed down or not, trace or
no, there was going to be residue deep in the wood. But that was exactly why I
needed to be the one to touch it.
Ellen was a seer: I was the one who could scry.
*clear* from Sharon, letting us know we had time. Pietr and
Venec had us covered on the ground. The job was down to me and Nifty.
“I should have been a waitress.”
“Yeah, and I should have been in the Hall of Fame. Maybe in
another life. Stop stalling.”
Nifty was going to be a fabulous mentor someday. He had the
comforting, no-bullshit tone down perfect. I shifted my feet, let my shoulders
relax, and placed my hands on the table as though I were going to give someone a
massage—or was holding them down to be cut apart.
The wood was cold under my fingers, and inert. Something inside
me let out a shivering sigh, but I didn’t drop my guard. Not yet; not ever.
Nifty took up his place at the other end of the table, his face
still and calm, like a mannequin’s. He took a deep breath, preparing himself,
and then nodded to me.
“In death, setting to life,” I whispered, pulling current out
of my core and sending it deep into the wood, even as I could feel Nifty doing
the same thing to the air. “In death, setting to life.”
You didn’t need an actual spell to work current; that went out
around the same time Founder Ben laid down the foundation of modern Talent.
Venec, in fact, frowned on it, the same way he frowned on my scrying crystals
and Lou’s Magic 8 Ball. But he never refused a tool that worked, and right now,
doing what we were doing…
Messing with the dead was Not Done. With properly directed
current you could animate corpses, yeah, but that was someone’s grandmother or
brother you were messing with, and eventually, someone would find out. And
souls… Wren had told me about her one and only encounter with a ghost. It was
the only time I’d ever seen the Retriever cry. Spirits should not be held to the
world, once they were gone. That was just selfishness and cruelty.
But there was a killer out there, even now looking for his next
victim, and it had to stop now. We would not allow him to escape, kill seven
more people, and then come back ten years from now to do it again. Because
whatever he was looking for—he wasn’t going to find it this way. And he wasn’t
going to stop.
“In death, setting to life.”
And under my hands, a body formed. Not real—but real enough.
The eyes of the victim stared up at me, green…no, brown…no, blue and then brown
again, and my hands clenched around nonexistent flesh.
We’d done our job too well, or the victims had not gone far:
we’d called them all.
No time to hesitate, to pause now would upset the balance of
the spell, and as bad as it was to mess with the dead, I suspected it would be
even worse to lose control of them.
“In death, setting to life,” I finished, letting the current
seethe through the table, holding the forms against the blood-soaked wood. The
body/bodies struggled, but those shifting eyes kept staring up at me,
unblinking, unwavering.
I expected to feel distaste, unease, a kind of regret. Instead,
that gaze soothed me, urged me on.
The dead demanded satisfaction.
Chapter 19
“Hurry, hurry,” I whispered, not meaning it: some
things couldn’t be rushed. But my arms ached from holding down a nonexistent
body that pushed up against me, my core was draining too rapidly, feeding an
endless strand of current into the table to maintain the body I was restraining,
and my heart was breaking at the look in the ever-changing eyes that gazed back
at me, stoic in death, giving me their agony without question or hesitation.
Around me, current snapped and cracked, making the air feel
twice as thick with power. Nifty moved through it like a barge through fog, not
letting it stop him as he mimed the cuts, over and over again, laying waste to
bodies already gone, pausing to study, echoing the dance we had seen in the
rolling display days before, when we didn’t know what it meant.
Cut, and cut, and cut…
Now, the table under my fingers, the ghosts in my veins, I
understood. It had lingered in the blade, their core sticking to it when the
blood had not, tying them to it…driving the killer on, turn after turn, with the
lingering taste of what he could not consume. The secret the killer was
searching for, the key he tried to grab. The thing that made us Talent, that
made some of us stronger and others less so, that defined Null from Talent and
even the full-on Nulls from sensitives. I could feel it, just enough to know
that it could not be taken this way, could not be transferred like an organ,
taken from a donor and grafted in to increase another. Maybe someday, maybe by
some magic. But not now, not this way.
I understood that and shoved that understanding as deep into
myself as I could manage, marveling instead at the flow of power being generated
within the table. Blood magic was avoided not because it was inefficient or
morally wrong but because it was powerful—and addictive. Whatever reason our
killer had to begin his spree, I was amazed it allowed him to take ten years
off, and only ten victims at a time.
*!*
Venec’s reminder put me back on track. I tore my gaze away from
those staring eyes and looked up at Nifty, who was in a downward strike of his
imagined scalpel, laying open what would have been an arm. I could see the skin
slice open down to the bone, smell the blood, feel the body shudder under my
hands as pain ripped through them, their current focused on trying to heal
themselves…
A wash of nausea washed over me. Healing yourself was almost as
dangerous as leaving the wound open: without training, you were as likely to
fuse the wrong things or stop your heart entirely. That was why the cause of
death was so screwed; the killer had taken too long, let them focus their
current on the wounds. They had killed themselves trying to save themselves…and
he felt cheated, because he had not controlled the moment of death. The madness
was driven by frustration, the frustration fueled by madness. But…
Trying to understand a psychotic’s mindset was not a good place
to go, particularly surrounded by the ghosts of his victims. I could feel them
push against me, unsure now if I was savior or a torment of hell. My throat was
dry and my skin slicked with sweat and I wanted to scream at Nifty to hurry up,
to do something different, because, dammit, this wasn’t going to work.
*incoming!*
Sharon’s ping, hot and high-pitched, was all the warning we got
before the swirl of current and a gust of cool, wet air told us someone had
Translocated in.
Our proof had arrived.
*holy shit, it worked* came from someone, flush with surprise
and shock. I would have laughed except the ping could have been mine, and then
there was no time to think, only react, as a wash of current swept across the
room like a tsunami. The ghosts surged and then disappeared, banished by the
presence of their killer, and only the living were left.
Our theory had said that the killer, outraged by the invasion
of his space, the use of his table, and surprised by our
apparent—feigned—success where he had repeatedly failed, would be on the
defensive, his opening blows distracted and—with four trained PUPS
present—easily overwhelmed.
Theory didn’t have a clue. The killer struck first, and hard.
It caught me off balance and I fell forward, my knees buckling and my head
slamming down against the cold surface of the table. Then there was another
swirl of current, familiar as my own breath, and Venec and Pietr were there.
Four against one, except it was four against two, with another
body appearing behind me just as I was getting up, grabbing my arm in an attempt
to throw me back down again.
When I was twelve that might have worked. Might. After two
years of sparring practice, it wasn’t even a joke. I moved into his space,
turning on my bent knee into his pace and coming back with my elbow into
whatever I could reach. It felt like his rib cage—solid but bony—and I didn’t
have enough oomph to do any real damage. My next move, bringing my booted heel
down on his instep, though; that worked.
Never bring dress shoes to a stomping fight.
I’d thought, when he attacked physically, that the assistant
was a Null or low-res. The flow of current that hit me like a slap put paid to
that idea. He wasn’t as powerful as his partner, at quick estimate, but he was
no Null, either. Young, untrained. A student; a new mentee. I pulled my current
in from the table, taking the harsh recoil, and turned it back out again.
Drained as Nifty and I were, the plan had been for the other three to do the
heavy lifting on this part, but we’d underestimated.
*need some backup*
Sharon’s assent came with a sense of a minute to hold on: with
a current-fight going on, she wasn’t going to risk Translocating in. Physics
made that a bad idea, in terms of power and flesh occupying the same space.
“Yield.” The shout, magnified by current, echoed against the
concrete walls like the roll of thunder, ringing inside our ears. It was a
magnificent gesture and had about as much effect as Nifty might have expected.
My opponent took another current-slap at me, and I pulled back and wailed him
one hard, sparks of green and black encasing my palm as I added the physical
measure just for satisfaction.
He was just a kid. A mentee. But if we were right, he had held
the bodies down. Had looked into those eyes and let them die in agony. Three
deaths under his hands, maybe more, although the form that ducked and weaved
around me didn’t seem old enough to have been around for the past decade’s
murders.
I landed another blow, this one to the shoulder blades as I
ducked under and around, and my suspicion firmed. This was either the
slightest-built adult I’d ever fought or a teenager.
The same age group as my fierce
chica
and her cohorts in Central Park.
The
Cosa Nostradamus
can be a rough
place. You survive by your wits, your skill, and your connections, and all’s
fair, but there was no way I was going to hurt a kid. No way in hell.
My hesitation got me a spin-kick in the gut and a sharp spark
of current that jammed from the bottom of his dress shoes into my flesh,
stinging and spreading along my nerves. I howled and probably cursed, gathering
all my current together into a net of strands, planning to bring this son of a
bitch down.
Then the shape of the fight changed, with a scuffle and a crack
behind me, and instead of one-on-one I was suddenly part of a larger whirl, as
the first guy came around and slammed me one across the back of the neck, Pietr,
Nifty, and Venec on his heels.
The sound of the door slamming against the wall was the only
announcement, and then Sharon was there, too, five against two, and we were
barely holding even.
One guy and a teenager should not be able to fight together,
physically and magically, well enough to hold off five pissed-off pups, even if
two of us were drained down.
*mentor*
The ping came from Venec, to all of us, and a sense of
comprehension that I didn’t quite get. But it made sense: you were more tuned to
your mentor than anyone else—the only thing that had ever trumped it for me was
the Merge. If your mentor taught you how to fight, physically, then, yeah, it
made sense....
And then it hit me. This kid had held the bodies down, had done
so because his mentor told him to. A mentor who was supposed to train and
protect him had instead turned him into an accessory to murder. Instead of
protecting, this son of a bitch had destroyed.
I hadn’t known I was capable of that kind of rage. It hurt,
swamping me, searing the current in my skin with a shivering, crackling noise. I
couldn’t tell where it had come from: me, or the others, because without thought
or intent, we slid into the fugue-blend Venec had spent years teaching us. An
utter and instant awareness of each individual, calibrated to within a breadth
of movement, aware of each other’s core the way you knew how close you stood to
a bonfire, close enough to warm but not get burned.
“Yield.” This time Nifty’s command was a whisper, but it
carried equally well, the hiss of a cobra before it struck, giving you one last
chance to get out of the way.
They didn’t even bother to respond, just stood in the center
and glared at us. I could see the kid more clearly now: he wore a baseball cap
jammed over his head, shading his face, but there was a squared-off jaw with the
suggestion of a shadow and scrawny, pale hands under a windbreaker that was just
a smidge too short in the arms, like he’d grown out of it and his mentor hadn’t
noticed. Slacks, not jeans, and the dress shoes I’d noticed before. This wasn’t
some kid in the hood; I bet that if I knocked that cap off, the hair underneath
would be neatly cut, too.
His current sizzled just underneath his skin: he wanted to use
it, badly, but was holding back, waiting for a command.
The older man still hadn’t said anything. Not tall, not short,
not pale or dark, he was as close to a nonentity as I could imagine—enough that
he reminded me a bit of Wren Valere, who took don’t-see-me to a magical extreme,
even more than Pietr because she did it intentionally. But this guy wasn’t a
Retriever—I’d been around Wren enough to know that. He was just…forgettable.
Until you looked with mage-sight and saw the current roiling
under his skin, like living neon tattoos, forming and reforming shapes until it
made you nauseous to watch. He hadn’t found the secret to handling more current,
he hadn’t made himself more high-res…but he had figured out how to skim the edge
of wizzing without falling over, inevitably, into madness.
*that doesn’t mean he’s sane* Ben, more worried than his face
showed. And with reason: once someone wizzed, they didn’t care about protecting
themselves; all they wanted was more and more current-sensation. It wasn’t so
much a madness as an utter inability to give a damn about anyone else, a junkie
in search of the fix they knew would destroy them. The fact that he had survived
this long…
The kid. The pieces started to fit together, almost too late.
Mentor and mentee, student and teacher. The bond was the most important thing
among Talent, the way we counted lineage, the way we found our place in the
world. And it was a two-way bond: I’d never once doubted J’s love for me, ever.
Making the boy part of this, he wasn’t just a partner. He was an anchor. The
more he probed for a way to steal current, the more he killed, the more the
madness infected him. Having the boy there kept him grounded enough—prevented
overrush. Kept him intact just enough to keep killing.
*over and over* Sharon, adding her own piece. *neither of
them’s not old enough to be our first killer*
Ten years between each binge. Time enough for the student to
become the mentor? The first death, the mentor…the start of a bloody cycle, how
many years?
“What you’re looking for. It doesn’t exist.” Venec stepped
forward, breaking our circle, forcing the perps to watch him as well as us. The
boy shifted, but his mentor didn’t move. “You must know that by now. All the
deaths, all the hiding and the running, the secrets…for nothing. Stand down. Let
it go.”
Ben didn’t believe it would work. He was already steeling
himself for what was to come. I exhaled and let what was left of my current
slide back into my core, coiling it back into a ready position.
Cold, Bonnie. Cold like a winglet focused on repayment. Cold as
a dragon forged in heat.
That slight movement was enough to distract the boy, who had
started to think of me as “his” target, rather than keeping alert to the entire
room. Bad move, not up to PUP standards, but then, he’d been trained on one
target at a time.
“Say something, damn you,” Venec said, stepping forward even
closer, too close, inside the killer’s arm-reach, a rookie mistake. Worse, a
deadly mistake, and it could only have been intentional, with the boy distracted
and the killer’s attention on him.
A chance. A last chance, the last chance ever…
And then the killer struck, a howl of current rising out of the
gut and blood and bone, his core emptying out into that one final strike, the
knowledge of all lost and nothing left to gain, abandoning sense to sensation
and the brain to current.
Overrush.
And as it hit, the boy struck in backup, as though following a
long-held plan. He would not be left behind.
Even as the blast hit Venec, I was ready. My hands came up and
found first Nifty’s ham-size palm, then Pietr’s more slender fingers curled
around mine, and I felt Sharon connect, and we closed the circle, keeping the
current contained.
I felt the power strike Venec, flinched and bore up under it.
The urge to give him my strength, to let current flow into him, was squelched: I
was too drained already, and my job, my responsibility, was here, to make sure
that the killers did not escape. Venec would—
The circle faltered, the boy darting, trying to make a physical
escape, crashing hard against Sharon, thinking she might be a weak link. Our
combined power surged and struck, almost without intent.