Laura Anne Gilman - PUPI 03 - Tricks of the Trade

by Laura Anne Gilman - [PUPI 03]

  On another day I might have been tempted to send a spark from the metal door into his hand, for being a jerk, but my focus was all inward, right then.

  Fact one: the thing I’d worried about was here, the Merge was impacting work. That it wasn’t happening exactly how I’d feared didn’t change the fact. So, one excuse for avoiding it, blown out of the water. Or, at least, taking on water and sinking fast.

  Fact two: my coworkers were right; this reluctance to plunge into new adventures with someone attractive and attracted was... very much not like me.

  Or, at least, not like me-who-was.

  J had always claimed that there would come a day when I’d settle down with, as he resignedly put it, “a nice little household.” Even he, who’d known me since I was eight, couldn’t imagine me being happy with just one person, either male or female. I had always liked – I still did like – variety.

  And it wasn’t that my sex drive was shut off entirely. Pietr might not set off sparks but it had never been about that; we used each other for mutual comfort and release, full knowledge of what it was, and I...

  I...

  By the time my train had dumped me out at my stop, and I’d climbed the stairs to street level, the stutter in my brain and the rawness of my nerves had finally resolved itself into fact number three.

  I felt guilty.

  I felt guilty because I wasn’t cheating on a guy I wasn’t in a relationship with, who knew I was having sex with someone else and had agreed with me that he had no right or cause to say anything other than “don’t let it get tangled in the job.” And we hadn’t.

  But the stress of it all – and the guilt – was starting to bleed over into my relationship with Pietr, too. The fact that he understood, even if he didn’t understand all of it, just made me feel worse. I liked Pietr. A lot. He was easy to be with, he understood me, and didn’t ask for anything I couldn’t give.

  Not even explanations.

  “Damn it.”

  That did get me a look from the woman coming down the stairs, more mild curiosity than anything else. I ducked my head and went back to thinking quietly.

  J was right. I was changing. And I resented, not the fact of change – that would be like resenting breathing, or rain: you needed those things for life to go on, and not changing in the face of new experiences and knowledge was just dumb and counterproductive. But I resented the hell out of the fact that this had been shoved on me, without so much as a by-your-leave or instruction booklet, and was demanding change without, as far as I could see, giving a damn thing back in return.

  “Gonna have a lot of cold showers until you get this thing licked,” I said to myself as I unlocked the front door of my building and dragged myself inside. “And, okay, licked may not be the best word to use, in context... ”

  As always, just being inside my apartment soothed me. The space itself wasn’t much, and the building was drafty, but inside... Someone else might find the vibrant burgundy-and-pale-gold walls too exotic, the mix of antiques and thrift store finds too distracting, but to me, it said “home.”

  I pulled off my boots and dropped them on the parquet floor, wincing at the sound. It was still early, but my downstairs neighbors were always on my case about every pinprick of noise.

  Yeah, the decor was me, but the building... not so much.

  I dropped my bag on the nearest sofa, and walked across the open space into the kitchen alcove. It was a decent-size studio, as things went, and got gorgeous sunlight, the few times I was home during daylight hours. The glasswork mosaic that hung on the wall where most people would put a flat-screen TV glittered when I turned on a lamp, a pale reflection of what it did during the day, and I noticed with dismay that a few of the colored glass pieces had somehow slipped from the frame and shattered on the ground.

  “Well, damn.”

  I was way more upset about the broken glass than it deserved, taking my frustrations out on a random bit of bad luck. What was that saying my dad’s girlfriend Claire used to trot out, about if it weren’t for bad luck she’d have none? I stared at the shards, feeling the cranky surge through me, then let it go. It was just glass, and unlike my personal life it could be fixed easily enough.

  I held my hand out, palm down over where most of the shards were, and pulled the faintest trickle of current from my core. Not too much; I didn’t want the shreds to come flying up and embed themselves in my palm, just lift off the floor and come together in a glittering little lump, and then follow me back to the trash can, where I released the current-strands, and let the tiny shards fall into the bin.

  There were leftovers and some salad in the fridge, but I’d eaten enough at the Devil that I wasn’t tempted. Instead, I stripped down to undies, intending to crawl into my bed with a book and read until I fell asleep.

  Instead, I found myself climbing the loft ladder with, not a book, but the case file in my hand.

  Sketches of drowned corpses and detailed descriptions of said remains were not high up on my bedtime reading. But I wasn’t planning on going over the details again. Pietr was right; it was a dead end, pun intended. Without evidence, that area of investigation didn’t lead anywhere.

  A trained pup, though, had more options than what could be found on the body or around the scene. There was also what was caught in the flow of the universe. More, I could try using the particular skill set that my mentor called the kenning, a foresight that sometimes gave me tiny glimpses of the future, sensing when something was coming down the pike. Sometimes, if I was very focused, I could see the present, too, or at least how it intersected with the future.

  Focus, though, required a little help. Mostly a kenning came without being called, without warning, at the absolute worst time possible. That was just how the universe seemed to work. To bring it to heel, I’d have to start with a scrying.

  Sitting cross-legged on the mattress, careful not to bump my head on the ceiling, I put the file down on the bedspread in front of me and reached to the little shelf, where I kept my crystals.

  Yeah, crystals were ridiculously old-fashioned and quaint according to most modern Talent, including J and half my coworkers. They could go jump; crystals helped me scry, and anything that helped was worth keeping.

  Venec had broken my favorite shard, back when I tried to scry who was calling me in for the interview. He called it cheating, then. I suspected now he’d call it a “useful tool,” so long as I used it for work, and not to see what he was up to. I didn’t plan on asking his permission, or for his approval.

  Something stirred on the fringes of my awareness and I quashed it. I did not need, nor want, the Merge anywhere near me, right then.

  For once, it took the hint, and subsided.

  I reached for the plain wooden box, flipping open the lid. It was about the size of a shoe box, and lined in thick, nubby, cream-colored cloth. Inside rested my two remaining pieces: a rose quartz ball about the size of my palm, and my traditional, kerchief-and-skirts style scrying globe of clear quartz, with a jagged imperfection, like a cloudy lightning bolt, through the center.

  I really needed to replace the clear shard, someday. I’d gotten good workings with it then; who knew what I could do now that I had hard-core training?

  Distracted by the thought, my hand reached for the rose quartz as though by instinct, but I stopped just before my palm touched it.

  Rose quartz was really useful for me; I resonated to it, found details I didn’t always with another color, or clear. But it worked on a more emotional level, instinctive and visceral. I had the gut feeling – pun intended – that if I picked that one up, all the walls in the world weren’t going to protect me from knowing Venec a bit more than I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to know what he was up to, not that way.

  And I really didn’t want him to know that I was checking what he was up to, or think that I cared enough to look.

  It wasn’t logical, I knew it wasn’t logical, and that was probably why I hated what the Merge
did to me so much. I was completely in touch with my hedonistic, sensual side, sure, but, I still thought rather than emoted, considered rather than reacted. It was how I was built, to bulldog through everything in as practical a manner as possible, and this... this threatened to overwhelm all that.

  No, better to stick with the clear crystal, until I had a better balance going.

  Coward, a little voice whispered in my ear, a rusking, rattling voice like dry leaves and empty husks, and then was gone. I acknowledged the charge, and ignored it, along with everything else I was ignoring.

  Current required control, and being in control. Especially if you were going to open yourself up to scry.

  The clear globe was heavier than I remembered, filling both my hands and forcing them down to the bed with its weight. I let my arms lower, relaxing my shoulders, letting the breath ease out of me on a slow exhale. The moment the back of my hand touched the files spread out in front of me, I felt the downward-upward spiral of current that meant something was stirring, and I had to scramble, mentally, to get into proper fugue-state before it hit me.

  “Ten... nine... eight... ”

  Too much, too fast, before I hit seven I was in it, caught up in a net of current-threads, sparkling deep green and blue around me. I pulled a breath in before I got dizzy, but it wasn’t enough. Sparks flickered like lightning strikes against the inside of my eyelids, leaving a shimmer of sparkles behind that made me want to throw up, the way you do when vertigo hits. It was almost a struggle to stay grounded, something I would die rather than admit to anyone. And then I found my ground like a click and a snap and I could soothe the current swirling in and around my core, taming it back into something useful, something controlled.

  I opened my eyes, mage-sense firmly in place, and looked down at the globe.

  Sparks were already flicking inside the stone, mimicking what I had seen with my eyes closed, running from my fingertips down to the imperfection in the crystal, where they fractured and bounced back to the surface. More blues and greens, but darker, emitting a faint but clear warning of danger.

  Current was dangerous, and it could give off a definite sense of menace, if the signature was malign enough, but my own current? That made no sense.

  “Ground and center,” I whispered. “Control what you see.”

  There wasn’t any control at all in the actual scrying. That was one of the reasons why it wasn’t popular anymore: you opened yourself up and waited for something to show up. Like deer hunting, J said, although the thought of my oh-so-patrician mentor actually sitting in a blind, freezing his ass off...

  Actually, he probably had done it, at least once. There was a wicked-looking crossbow hanging in his library that I’d always assumed was a gift from someone, but he’d be able to pull it, no problem. When he was younger, anyway.

  Useless thought, Bonnie. Distractions. Clear the mind. Ground the core. Open your awareness, Bonnie, and see what waits.

  Scrying requires trust as well as Talent, because that lack of control cuts both ways. You don’t ask for specifics, just open and wait, and brace yourself for what might or might not come.

  There was no way I could brace myself for the scrying that hit.

  I was wide open when the kenning came hard on its heels, the two of them twining into a braided rope that nearly knocked me off my magical ass. My vision – my entire awareness, was filled with a night-blue sky filled with electrical fire, tilting on dragons’ wings and shattered spires. Hissing, out-of-control cables: lashing and spitting like a serpent’s tongue. I tried to focus, to draw the vision in more closely, and was dropped into a long nauseating swoop down, like a bungee cord from hell, and then stark white filled that awareness, splattered and stained with the red that’s only and ever the color of spilled blood. The cord brought me back up again with a spine-breaking snap, flinging me up into the sense of a great beast moving even farther overhead, blotting out everything, even the fire, its spread wings wheeling overhead.

  Dragon, my mind told me.

  I knew a Great Worm. She was an ancient, elegant lady, who would never project such anger, such fury... .

  The head turned and stared at me, and in its great, glimmering eye I saw nothing but madness and hunger. And deep inside, the shock of recognition, awareness. It knew me. It knew me, and it did not like me.

  The feeling of hard, sharp claws pressing against my skin, pulling me down into the gaze, was purely magical, not physical, but that made it more dangerous, not less, as open as I was just then. The dizziness came back, along with the need to throw up.

  Bonnie!

  Not a ping, the brief current-carried shorthand we used among friends. This was deeper, like the hit of an axe into a hundred-year-old tree, and the shock of it shook me free of those devouring eyes, knocked me out of the clawed grip.

  My physical body jerked backward, my hand releasing the crystal, my head hitting the ceiling with a reassuringly painful thunk.

  “Ow.”

  I blinked against the sting of tears and stared at the crystal, trying to recapture what I had seen, but it was already starting to dissipate. Visions faded like that, unreal and therefore impossible to hold. Even so, I had the oddest feeling that I’d kenned something like it before, not recently but within the past year or so. Not the visuals, nothing at all like those visuals, but the sense of something angry, something wild circling, hunting... coming closer.

  If I’d felt it before, odds were it had nothing to do with the case at hand. But the increase in intensity, the addition of visuals, meant it was coming closer on the timeline, whatever it was. I reached for my notebook and a pen. My hand was shaking, but I got the details down, best I could, before they were gone entirely.

  You never ignored a kenning, especially not one that came that strongly, that tied to a scrying.

  As I was writing, trying to force the ink to flow steadily, there was another push at me, somewhere between core and gut, except it wasn’t physical at all. No words this time, just a sense of concern, and a willingness to pull back, if shoved.

  I knew who it was. There was only one person it could be, with that kind of a connection. He was worried, and he was annoyed, but the feelings were distinct from each other. He wasn’t annoyed at me.

  As much as the Merge irritated me, it pissed Venec off even more. I got the feeling that he was constantly riding the need to check up on all of us, anyway, and not knowing where the line between boss/trainer/Big Dog ended and the Merge began meant he’d been constantly second-guessing himself. For a guy like Venec, who was totally used to being the one calling the shots and making the decisions? Oh, yeah, having something external trying to shove him anywhere would not be appreciated. Unlike me, though, he couldn’t ignore it. Hence the annoyance. And if he’d felt even a little of what I did, with that eye glaring at me... no wonder he’d reacted. Normally I’d tell him to MYOB. This was work-stuff, though, even though he didn’t know it, so I reached out with just a hint of current to ping back, keeping it brief and impersonal. *scrying. report tomorrow*

  His acknowledgment was equally curt, but when I put the crystals and files away and crawled under the spread to sleep, I could feel the flavor of him lingering, like candied ginger on my tongue. Even when we tried to shut the Merge off entirely, it was creeping in.

  Yeah. Time to do something about that. Eventually.

  My last coherent thought was that I should probably stop by and pay Madame a courtesy visit. If there were any others dragons in town, she would know.

  * * *

  four

  Thursday morning I woke up with a head filled with unsettling dreams and an intense desire to kick some investigative ass, since it seemed like that was the only part of my life that held any upside, right now. I bopped into the shower, scrubbed myself down, and practically threw myself into my work-clothes. The solid sound of my boots on the sidewalk was like a drumbeat moving me forward, and even a delay on the subway and a busker trying to play an out-of-tune ukul
ele couldn’t ruin my mood.

  The boyos who used to always linger on the stoop between the subway and the office, catcalling in a friendly way, weren’t there, and I realized suddenly that I hadn’t seen them in weeks. And I hadn’t even noticed until now, getting to the office so early, and leaving at odd hours. Had they all gotten jobs, or gone back to school? I didn’t know – and had no easy way to find out. I didn’t even know their real names.

  I decided that yes, they had gotten their asses back into class, or were gainfully employed. Anything else was... not acceptable, today.

  “Hi, honey, I’m home!” I chucked my coat into the closet, and checked the sign-out board in the front room. Lou had put it up when she decided she was tired of trying to remember who had gone where. Everyone’s name was listed, even Stosser’s, and there were columns for “in,” “lunch,” “out,” and a wider space for details of where we were and what we were doing there. Half the time we even remembered to use it.

  Nick, the board informed me, had been sent out to do follow-up interviews on the break-in. Everyone else was in. I checked myself as “in,” grabbed a cup of coffee and went in search of the rest of the team.

  I found Sharon, Pietr, and Venec in the main conference room, where Sharon was glowering at my report from yesterday like I’d done something to personally offend her.

  “What?” I asked, trying to curb my instinctive defensive reaction.

  She didn’t even bother to look up. “You didn’t test the body.”

  “Test it for what?” My hackles rose, slightly. “There wasn’t any current on it, the bastard had drowned to death from the water in its lungs, which I did test, yes, to verify, and the rope burns were pretty clear indicators of why it didn’t swim to shore. Unless you have some hidden store of knowledge about the breed you’d like to share with the class?”