Dragon Justice, page 28
“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.
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.
