Dragon Justice (28 page)

The man screamed, the wind-torn shriek of a falcon, and then
stopped, cut off like someone flicked a switch. He fell to his knees, and at
first I thought he’d fallen out of grief or rage, until I saw the stream of
blood coming from his nose, puddling on the washed-clean floor, red-black and
sticky.

Venec exhaled, a harsh, ragged noise. And then there was
silence.

Venec got a disposable cell phone out of the car we’d hired to
get down here, and called Andrulis. Sharon and Pietr took the car and left,
heading for Union Station and the haul back to NYC. None of us had the energy
left to Translocate a sheet of paper, and I think they were just as happy to
spend a few hours surrounded by the normalcy of the world, being lulled into a
doze by the steady current-flow of the Amtrak rails.

Two cop cars pulled up about twenty minutes after, lights off
and sirens quiet. There was no need for urgency now. Andrulis got out and met
Venec at the door. They and the three cops with him went inside.

I waited for him, sitting outside on the cracked stoop of an
abandoned warehouse down the street.

Half an hour later, Venec came out alone. I waited as he stared
up into the sky. I thought maybe that he was counting the stars, even though
they weren’t really visible this close to the city. I could feel him breathing,
as though he were standing right next to me, and knew that he was trying to
decide what to do.

I took the decision out of his hands and went to meet him.

He didn’t even look as I came up, but lifted his left arm and I
slid underneath, like we’d been doing it all our lives instead of maybe three or
four times.

“They’ll take care of the cleanup. Call it, hell, I don’t know,
a fall-out among killers. Or maybe they won’t call it anything at all.”

“How long do you think it’s been going on? Mentor to student,
passing on the obsession, training them… Where did it begin?”

“I don’t care. It ends here. Bonnie, that’s enough.”

He’d killed two men tonight. We all had. Never mind that they’d
been mad dogs, a danger to the entire
Cosa
Nostradamus
; never mind that they’d, in the end, given us little
choice. We had not brought them to justice, only brought them down.

That wasn’t what Stosser had created us for. I needed to
understand the progression, the causes, so we could dissect it, lay out the
facts and display them, to make sure that we’d recognize something like this if
it happened again. If it had happened before. Find the pattern so we could
prevent it.

Ben heard me without my saying a word. “You’re a scientist at
heart. You want things to make sense, to follow a logical progression. It
doesn’t. Not always. You have to just let it go. Otherwise, you won’t be able to
do the job.”

I didn’t agree, and he knew I didn’t agree, but that was
okay.

Three men had died in Philly. Five, if you counted the killers.
But that meant seven men had not died, and ten more wouldn’t die a decade from
now.

I let Ben hold on to that thought and let him hold on to
me.

* * *

Ian Stosser was cremated, as per his will, and we
gathered—all the PUPs, and J, and a dozen other people I didn’t recognize—on a
narrow beach facing the Atlantic at dawn to say farewell.

The sky was still cloud-cast, but it did not rain. People
spoke. I saw their mouths move and heard their voices, but I couldn’t remember a
single word that was said. My ears remembered the sound of the waves, and the
hollow echo of the wind, and the calls of gulls and terns overhead, and how the
sun warmed on our skin, even moments after it rose.

We wore black and walked barefoot on the golden sand.

Aden did not show up.

* * *

Two days later—nearly twenty hours of that sleeping in
Ben’s bed, his arms wrapped around me—I felt almost normal again. For some new
definition of normal, anyway.

The doorman nodded to me as I came into the lobby, and the
elevator door opened smoothly as I walked toward it, so I guessed Wren hadn’t
taken my name off her list, despite recent events. I shifted the foil-wrapped
package in my hands and tried to focus on that, the good things.

I’d stopped by, on my way over, to check in with Danny. He’d
looked like hell, but the grim, satisfied kind of hell. His girls had, in fact,
been among those in the Park. The situation was, he said, “sorted.”

He didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t have the energy to
push. Not now.

The apartment door opened, before I knocked. “Bonnie,
hey—that’s lasagna.”

“Ever a master of the obvious. Do you ever go home now?”

“Not much,” the demon admitted, taking the package from my
hands, not even wincing at the remnant heat. The pads of his claw-tipped paws
were probably a lot tougher than my skin. “I’ll shove this in the fridge—they’re
in the living room. Go on.”

A demon as housekeeper was probably one of the more amusing
things I’d seen in months, but I wasn’t able to muster more than the knowledge
that it was amusing. I went into the main room, as directed.

Sergei was standing in front of the huge wall of windows,
staring out, his hands clasped behind his back, and if I didn’t know him I’d
have sworn that he was posing that way. But I could see the tension in his back
and knew that his hands were clasped to keep them steady.

“I brought a lasagna.”

Wren appeared practically in front of me: my experience with
both her and Pietr kept me from showing any surprise. “I think we’re the ones
supposed to bring you food, or something, aren’t we? Bonnie.” She paused. “I’m
sorry.”

For Ian’s death, for not being able to find the file we’d
needed, for something only she understood and I was too tired to chase down. And
that was it. Sometimes you have to let it go for the world to move on.

“I came to—” I looked around, even though I knew already that
Ellen wasn’t in the room—or, in fact, in the apartment. “I came to see what you
were going to do about Ellen.”

“We were just discussing that.”

Suddenly PB’s desire to be elsewhere made more sense. Normally
he’d be egging on the fight, but not this. This was too fragile a matter.

“She’s with my mother.”

Wren’s mom was a Null. Nice woman, but couldn’t see magic if
you waved it in front of her face. I didn’t know anything about Wren’s dad and
had never asked. She never asked about my folks, either.

“And…?”

Wren took a deep breath, let it out. “God, I really thought I
was ready for this? She’s almost an adult, Bonnie. Untrained but formed. I was
young when I started, all my experience is there. We need somebody…” The Wren
laughed, looking—for the first time since I’d known her—a little embarrassed.
“She needs someone more flexible, strong enough to keep her safe, who can keep
that already formed brain of hers occupied, while she’s learning.”

“So, back to the drawing board.” The temptation to dump the
problem on them was intense, but that wasn’t how J had raised me. “She’s okay
with your mom, for now. Between the two of us, and my mentor, we should be able
to find someone.”

I knew, firsthand, what a bad mentor could do. We had to find
the right person. Problem was, I’d thought I
had
.

“She seemed to enjoy working with you. Maybe…” Wren hesitated,
aware that she was stepping into a mess. “I know things are going to
be…complicated for a while, but…”

“We’re none of us strong enough. Maybe Venec, but…”

But Benjamin Venec had his hands full already. This morning,
he’d headed out to the office, going through Ian’s paperwork. No more trying to
go it alone.

That meant us, too. I still wasn’t sure how I felt about that
but…like Ian said, there’s only so long you can be stubborn before it starts to
spell stupid.

“Shame, really. She’s got a useful skill set, for your line of
work, once she figures out how to use it. It would certainly give her a reason
to learn....”

Sergei, who had been staying out of the conversation until
then, turned around. “Having had some dealings with young, undertrained Talent
myself—” a snark at Wren, whom he’d met when she was still a teenager “—might I
make a suggestion?”

I waited, and Wren gave him a look I couldn’t decipher, part
amusement and part…something else.

“Stay with her, Genevieve. If you give up on her now, she’s
going to take it to mean that she’s not trainable, not worthwhile. From what
you’ve told me, she’s had a gullet of that already.”

“But…” Something passed between them. Not the way Ben and I
could ping; more like the way he and Stosser could—had.

The disbelief, the desire to not-accept, was still a physical
pain, deep inside.

“He’s right. I’m sorry. But he’s right. Wren, if you give up on
her…even if we find someone else…” I was a crap liar, as a rule; I could do it,
but I hated it. Pietr had told me once that the secret was not to think about it
like a lie, but a story. You were trying to get someone to react emotionally in
the way you wanted—directing them, the way a writer or a musician or an actor
did.

For Ellen, I could do that.

“Bastards.” She flapped her hands, like she wanted to hit
something, and then gave in. “Yeah, okay. I like her, I just…I don’t want to
screw this up.”

“The fact that you don’t is a pretty good indicator that you
won’t.”

That wasn’t entirely true. Zaki—my dad—hadn’t ever wanted to
screw things up, but he pretty much did all the time, right up to the time it
got him killed. I didn’t say that, though.

I left them contemplating the changes in their own lives,
closing the door softly behind me. One last stop to make, and then I could go
home.

* * *

Aden Stosser wasn’t allowed within a set range of New
York City, after her last attempt to “distract” us got a young boy killed. But I
suspected she wasn’t far away, and Aden Stosser had never learned the meaning of
“under the radar.” A few phone calls to a few boutique hotels in Philadelphia
and Boston with news of her brother’s death, wasn’t it terrible, but there were
legal matters that had to be cleared up, and that easily, I had her
location.

“I thought one of you would show up.”

Aden Stosser was a feminine, stylish version of her brother,
and it hurt to look at her. But her voice was nothing at all like his: cool and
distanced, with none of the passion that had flared in his voice, filling him
with heat and movement even when he stood still.

I was doing this on my own. I had to. I owed Ian that much,
Council to Council.

“Guilty conscience?”

“What?”

“Did you kill him, Aden?”

She stared at me like I’d suddenly turned a shade of blue she
wasn’t sure was attractive or not. “He died of carbon-monoxide poisoning. Your
idiot, cheap-end building had faulty wiring. The police report was utterly clear
on that.”

Of course she’d already gotten access to the reports.

“None of us had any signs of CO poisoning.” We’d gotten checked
out by a local doctor who handled a lot of Talent patients; the tests had taken
longer, but they’d come out clean. “That means there was no leaking…until the
last time, when it suddenly came out in lethal doses. At a time when the
building was mostly empty—but Ian was still there. A leak that only seemed to
hit our office.”

She looked as though she were considering my words. “If someone
wanted to kill him—why go through all the fuss with the false alarms?”

I didn’t rise to her “you silly girl” voice. “That meant
someone used the leak—studied our office, looked for a way in, and found it. A
preexisting condition, to prevent it from being considered a homicide.”

Her elegant eyebrows lifted at that. I guess I’d surprised her.
“I still don’t understand why you think it was a homicide.”

“Because someone like Ian Stosser doesn’t die of an accidental
gas inhalation.”

That got a laugh out of her, an elegant, pained sound. “I wish
you were right.”

Part of me wanted to believe her. Love should never turn to
murder. But this was Aden Stosser, as poker-faced a player as her brother ever
had been. And she had killed, indirectly, before.

“I can’t prove anything. You know that. But if I even scent
your signature anywhere near us…”

“What? You’ll kill me?”

No, not that. Worse. “I’ll use every contact I have in the
Council—and out—to have you shunned forever, not just for a year.”

I was the only pup who spoke fluent Council, the only one with
contacts that could do what I was threatening. Like lying, threats weren’t
something that came easily to me. For Ian, who had given me my purpose in life,
for the PUPI, who spoke for those who’d been silenced…I’d do it.

“You killed him, Aden. I know it.” We had been warned. Seers
don’t see accidental deaths; that’s too random for them to focus on. There was
intent behind it, trying to shape the universe.

The dragons had indicated a debt that needed to be paid. Power,
and payback, and balancing of the scales.

Aden stared at me, and something was going on in her head, but
I had no access, I couldn’t read her.

Then she blinked, and sorrow—and rage—were clear on her
face.

“Go away,” she said, her face shutting down again, even as she
turned away to stare out the window at the Philadelphia cityscape.

I went, for once in my life managing a perfect exit, and landed
on my knees in the middle of the living room of my apartment, wincing as the
shock radiated through my bones.

“Should I give you the lecture about topping off your core
before you start Transloc’ing anywhere, or should we just mark it as
‘done’?”

“Not tonight, Ben.”

I wasn’t surprised he was there, even though I’d never given
him a key or told him it was okay to just show up, unannounced, and make himself
at home. I lifted my head, slowly getting to my feet in the proper fashion,
making sure I didn’t smack myself with vertigo or a headrush, and studied him.
He was on the velvet sofa where he should have looked silly, his feet on the
floor, a square-cut glass on the antique Chinese chest next to him, properly on
a coaster. He’d helped himself to the booze, too.