Dragon Justice, page 30
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.
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.
