Dragon Justice, page 22
“The same strokes, over and over again.” The fact that we’d already identified it as a control group—a scientific experiment—made it worse, not better; confirming the fact that, unless we stopped it, he’d keep going.
The pattern was seriously bugging me, as I watched the knife rise and fall. “We need more detail on the actual deaths. That’s what will turn the lock—understanding what he’s doing, why.”
Venec shook his head. “We don’t have access to the local cops anymore, and bringing anyone else up to speed would take too long, too many channels to wade through. Pietr—”
“Already on it. Nick’s going to fire up his scrying machine and see what he can do.”
I should offer to deep-scry, too. I didn’t want to. I wanted to not look at this anymore, turn away, forget that anyone could do this not just once, or twice, but so many times.
PUPI didn’t turn away. We didn’t forget. Not until we had all the facts.
“All right, then,” Stosser said, “we need to—”
“Someone order a pizza?”
The smell hit my nose the same instant the unfamiliar voice did. I was pretty sure I didn’t lunge at the poor hotel security guy holding our dinner, but it was a close thing. Venec moved in front of the table, his build sort of blocking the guy’s view of the table, should he happen to wonder what the hell was going on, while Sharon pulled her wallet from her purse slung over the chair and tried to pay the guy.
“Nah, they put it on your master room charge,” the guy said, waving her off. “And the tip. Manager’s orders.”
They were probably afraid we’d stiff them or something. Venec had worked some fast-talking to get us this room but I had no idea what he’d said. The manager was a Null—most of the staff were, too. No idea if the pizza guy was, but nobody wanted to risk him asking questions about what he might or might not see down here.
I took the boxes from the guy and body checked him gently out the door, making sure he went straight to the elevator before looking around for a place to put the pies. Even if the display hadn’t been off-putting for dinner, there were still piles of paper scattered over the surface that would not be improved by grease stains.
“Over here.” Sharon pulled forward a battered metal stool from the corner of the room, even as Pietr rescued the plastic bag of sodas from the top of the pizzas. “I hope they gave us napkins.”
They had. And then there was silence, save for the sound of soda fizzing and jaws chewing, while five hungry Talent refueled, the scalpel lifting and cutting in pantomime behind us.
* * *
After pizza, Stosser had pulled rank and told us all to call it quits for the night. Another one of the Rules: we didn’t pull all-nighters. We might not sleep, but we needed to rest our brains for a few hours every twelve, for them to work effectively.
Resting your brains didn’t mean turning them off, though.
Sharon raised one perfectly waxed eyebrow when I showed up at her door, bags in hand, but let me in, anyway.
“So. You and Venec.”
I sighed, aware I wasn’t going to be able to dodge, this time. “He and Stosser are having a Big Dog talk. I decided discretion was the better part of not getting bit.”
“Should I be flattered?”
That I’d decided to crash with her, rather than Pietr, she meant. I thought that was what she meant, anyway.
“Life…has gotten a little complicated,” I admitted.
“Good.” Sharon sounded disgustingly smug and relieved at the same time. “You two were going past cute and into annoying, and we were about to draw lots to see who had to lock the two of you into a room until this got settled.”
While I tried to decide if I even wanted to respond to that, Sharon went back to sitting on the edge of her bed, brushing out her hair. She had utterly gorgeous blond hair, thick and silky, and it was a shame that she always kept it pulled back, even though I totally understood not wanting to have to fuss with it during the day: it was the same reason I kept my curls short and simple.
“So, the museum thing. The one The Wren’s involved in?”
“A side job Venec took on, invited me down to watch and learn.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Oh, shut up. Lou told me to take a break, and he invited. That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
I guess my exasperation showed, because she laughed and put down her brush, turning to look at me. Sharon was not only a straight shooter, but she also had the ability to tell when someone was not telling her the truth. It made her an excellent PUP—and a pain in the ass when you were playing poker.
“So, the fact that you guys only had the one room—with the one bed?”
“The first night, we came back to the room after midnight and fell asleep on top of the covers, fully dressed, surrounded by files. And last night…we were on a case.”
“Uh-huh.” She watched me; that perfectly sculpted face no longer a disguise for the equally sculpted brain inside. “And if Valere hadn’t tried to break in, while you were there?”
I made a face but didn’t dodge. “I don’t know.”
I didn’t. I didn’t think Ben knew, either. We’d tried denial; we’d tried running parallel. They’d all worked—for a while. But it wasn’t going away, and neither were we, so… The fact that we’d both given way at the same time might have been coincidence, or the Merge, but it happened. No point in poking at it now; time to move on.
“So we’re still at status quo,” Sharon said, standing up to put her brush back on the dresser.
“Why, your call-date coming up?” I knew that the pack had started betting on when we’d break—even before they knew about the Merge, they’d money on it.
“I’m playing the odds,” Sharon said. “Spread my cash around. Feel free to take your time. I think Nifty’s got next week, though.”
“Gee, thanks.” I layered the sarcasm extra heavy, there.
Sharon had a lovely laugh, and I didn’t hear it anywhere near enough. She went to use the bathroom, and I lay on the second bed and contemplated the ceiling. No, I decided, it didn’t bother me that the question of what we were going to do had been tabled by the job: we’d taken the first step toward wherever we were going, and we’d get there, eventually. At our own pace, though, not according to whatever agenda the Merge might have.
The thought of the Merge—some mystical matchmaking force—as a little old woman scowling at us because we were making her wait made me smile. And on that note, listening to the sound of water running in the bathroom, I fell asleep.
Dragons
Not again, part of my mind thought. I’ve already gotten the message. And then the dream took over, and the giant claw wrapped around my midsection squeezed out any thoughts other than I can’t breathe.
A swoop, and we were airborne, the world falling away too quickly below me like a parachute drop in reverse. I squirmed, tucked against the scaled belly of the beast, and my flesh flowed and reformed around the claws, giving me room to wiggle. My rib cage adjusted to the pressure, so I was able to breathe, and once I was able to breathe I could look around.
Or rather, look down. The back of my head was cradled against the warm scales of the beast, and the view to either side was obstructed by the great wings, rising and declining like a heartbeat. The dragons I’d seen before, in person, soared more like raptors. But then, I’d never been this close to one in flight.
All of which was my dream-brain’s way of not-looking down. I risked a quick glance and closed my eyes again, my dream-stomach roiling. Too high up now, too dizzy-making.
Look.
It was a command, rumbling through the bones of my head, and I knew that it came from the dragon above me. Since you did not refuse a dragon, I swallowed hard and opened my eyes.
We were over a great body of water now, which was somehow easier to look at. It was the view most people saw from an airplane, I supposed—J and I had always Translocated when we traveled, since he, like most high-res Talent, didn’t trust any machine that relied on electrical equipment to stay in the air. The dragon dropped several hundred feet, leaving my stomach behind, and we were close enough to see the individual waves, tiny white caplets breaking and re-forming in a restless tangle that reminded me—in a more monochrome way—of the threads of current within my own core. Then a pod of sleek gray dolphins broke the surface, and I forgot everything else, in the sheer joy of watching them fly.
Look.
I was looking, but the feeling came that I wasn’t looking the right way. Gathering faith that the dragon would not drop me, at least not until I had seen what it wanted to show me, I exhaled against the scaled restraints and slipped into fugue state.
And then I looked again.
Current. Everywhere. Slipping through the waves… No, it was the waves. The creatures within the waves. I could see through the gray-green water into the depths and beyond, where slow-moving, coldblooded creatures glowed with life, an endless routine of swim and eat and swim and eat and breed and swim and die. Fish and octopuses and whales and things I had no name for, ancient and terrifying. Merfolk, the deep-sea cousins no human ever encountered and lived, more vicious than their coastal kin, bared teeth at me, seeing me as I saw them, but not daring to attack, not while the dragon carried me.
And then the dragon rose and I realized we had dipped to skim the water, so close that my face was wet with salt-spray, my clothing soaked and hanging heavy off my limbs, even as we were rising and banking, turning over a coastline now, and with fugue-sight, mage-sight, I saw the power in the earth itself, the ley lines clearly visible, following fissures in the world, tracing veins across the rock, the entire world bound up by it, bound by it.
The immensity of it all was too much, and I closed my eyes, but the mage-sight remained.
Look.
I looked.
Remember.
And then the dragon released me, and I fell.
CHAPTER 14
“Bonnie! Bonnie!”
The sound came from too far away, and then it was right in my face, no transition whatsoever from dreamspace and waking. I sat upright, the sweat already drying on my skin, and stared blankly at Sharon. “What?” Had I woken her with my dreaming? Except it was too clear, too sharp in my head, and I knew damn well it hadn’t been a dream. Not the way Nulls call it, anyway.
What had the dragon wanted me to see?
“Was I… What’s wrong?” I might be awake but I wasn’t coherent. Sharon didn’t seem to notice.
“Come on. Get dressed.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Pietr pinged me, woke me up. I guess he couldn’t reach you.”
The kenning-dream had taken me too far to reach, even by Pietr. Maybe Venec could have, but—
“Is Pietr okay? Venec?” I had already grabbed my pants off the chair and was pulling them on, trying to remember where my boots had ended up.
“They’re fine. It’s Stosser.”
* * *
I guess somehow we always thought that Ian Stosser was indestructible. He just kind of absorbed what the world tried to hit him with and…I don’t know, ignored it. Even when his own sister took current-shots at us, he’d shaken it off and gone on with the job.
We knew better, of course. Ian Stosser might not show weakness to the world, not even to us, but he was only human, and he could be hurt.
The sight of the blood on his skin and clothing was still a shock. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was even paler than usual, which meant he was practically translucent.
“What happened?” Sharon, who had gotten her EMT certification last year, was our default medic. She immediately took the dampened towel away from Pietr and started clearing away the mess from Stosser’s hands. The fact that he let her was proof that something was terribly wrong.
“God, did you wake the entire hotel?” Stosser might have been passive but he was not polite.
“Don’t start with me, Ian. I swear to god, do not start with me right now. You knew you were at risk, and you went walking. In Philadelphia. Alone. At two in the goddamned morning.” It would have been less frightening if Venec had been yelling, the way he yelled at us when we fucked up, instead of the cold, low, too-calm voice he was using.
“What happened?” I asked, since Sharon was too busy to insist on an answer.
“Stosser decided to take a walk to clear his head.” After they’d finished arguing or during? I didn’t ask.
Normally, Stosser wandering alone at night wouldn’t be an issue. It wasn’t like he couldn’t handle a mugger or even a gang of unruly bikers looking to pick on the metrosexual redhead. Except it looked like he hadn’t been able to handle it.
Since Venec was still fuming, I turned to the other Big Dog. “I’m assuming the other guys look worse?”
That earned me a tight smile. “Much.”
Venec was pacing the confines of the room, which—with all of us gathered—meant he was constantly having to turn around. It was making me dizzy, but stopping him would have been worse.
“I swear to god, Ian. You knew—you knew someone was going to be gunning for you, and still you went out alone.” So he had been warned about Ellen’s vision. Good. Not that it seemed to have had much impact on him.
“I am supposed to spend the rest of my life wrapped in current and locked away, then?”
“No. Just until we have some idea of who plans to make you dead.”
If this was how they’d been arguing before, I was almost sorry I’d decamped. They sounded like an old married couple. It was serious—maybe deadly serious—but I had the terrible urge to giggle.
“Did you ever think that maybe nobody does? That maybe what the girl saw, if she really saw it, was the result of some natural demise? And that maybe it isn’t going to be for another ten years?”
“That’s not how it works, boss.” I’d been quiet until now, keeping out of the line of potential fire, but this was something I knew about. And Stosser, for all his brilliance, apparently didn’t. “If she’s a true storm-seer, even untrained, then what she sees is tied up in possibilities and violence, not a peaceful and inevitable conclusion. Both you and Wren… Something you’re doing now is going to get you killed. Soon.”
It might not be tied together—Ellen knew Wren, and she knew me and I was tied to Stosser, so the connection might be that vague—but the threat was real.
Stosser looked away, only the tightness of his neck giving away the fact that he was in any discomfort under Sharon’s competent ministrations. Or maybe it was just having to admit that he might have been wrong. “If so, then I should be safe so long as the Retriever isn’t around, correct?”
“Or the same person kills you at different-but-close times, thereby establishing a connection. Or if the only connection is the fact that Ellen knows Bonnie.” That was Sharon, making the same connections probably everyone else was, too. Ironic, really, since Stosser was the one who had set me on the missing-kid case, which led me to Ellen, which led to her having a vision about Stosser being dead.
“This seer would be a lot more useful if she could give specifics, the way you do when you scry,” Stosser grumbled.
Proof that the boss wasn’t as unshook as he claimed: my scrying was about as specific as a fortune cookie. You had to have details before it made sense. We were just really good at ferreting out the details.
“Yeah, well, if it was easy, anyone could do it, right?”
He was smart enough not to respond to that.
Sharon finished with the towel and was inspecting the cuts on his hands. From the way her forehead scrunched I could tell that she was worried about something, but sending him to a hospital… Even if Venec bodily put him into an ambulance, an MRI would probably short out under Stosser’s current, anyway—intentionally or not. So she contented herself with wiping away the blood and making sure the cuts were clean before she bandaged them up. You could heal with current, but there was always a real risk of current screwing with the body’s natural electrical system, rather than fixing it.
Ben might have been able to make a difference, but he wasn’t going to do Stosser any favors, right now. Venec was old-fashioned that way: you earned a bruise, you got to live with it. Especially if you made him worry.
“All right,” Stosser said, finally, clearly no longer talking to me. “Yes. It was careless of me.”
I would have said stupid, but I wasn’t going to. Ben’s fury, and his fear, were obvious to everyone, and from the looks Pietr kept shooting me when he thought nobody was looking, he thought I should do something about it, before a real argument broke out.
I wanted to tell him that wasn’t how it worked; just because you could reach someone more deeply, maybe even without them realizing it, didn’t mean you had the right to do so. If he was angry and worried, he had cause to be, and it wasn’t my place to tell him to calm down. Or, worse, make him calm down. That was not what the Merge was for.
