Tricks of the Trade. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ binding spells, and Pietr and Bonnie are due for a refresher course in ducking a tail.”

      How someone who could disappear as thoroughly as Pietr when he was stressed couldn’t manage to shake a tail still amazed me. But it was true: for a ghost-boy, he stuck out like a sore thumb when he was focused on following someone.

      My problem, according to Venec, was my hair.

      I reached up and touched my short blond curls self-consciously. I’d thought the blue streaks were kicky. Venec had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that they were distracting, and unprofessional. And, apparently, they made me easy to pick out of a crowd.

      We weren’t supposed to stand out; we were supposed to blend in, the better to find out things people didn’t want known. Or, as he put it, “This isn’t a peacock show, damn it.”

      He was right, okay, he was absolutely right. But I’d spent most of my life standing out, gleefully and with encouragement from my mentor, and this…

      This drabbing down to dullness was hard.

      Even as I let that thought slip, there was a mental touch of something, not quite sympathy—never sympathy—but a rough buck-up sort of pushback, and I sighed. Of course Venec would know I was indulging in self-pity.

      There was no such thing as telepathy, beyond the ping—a quick burst of information that was more visual than heard or seen—but about eight months ago we’d discovered that Venec and I could pick up each other’s emotions, even thoughts.

      Worse and weirder than that: our current kept getting tangled together without our willing it, something that was supposedly impossible. Magic didn’t work that way.

      The old texts, what Venec had been able to find, called it the Merge. It was rare, annoying, and not something either of us had wanted: We still didn’t want it. But, like Nifty’s rash, we had to deal with it and not let it interfere with the job.

      I, at least, was dealing with it by total denial. So far, so good.

      “You had wanted to give us a break?” Sharon asked, her coffee mug—a robin’s-egg-blue color that matched her blond perfection, well, perfectly—halfway to her lips. “Implying that you’re not going to…or not able to?”

      Sharon liked to have things nailed down definite-like, the better to tear them apart. She was probably our best in-field operative. That scalpel-sharp brain, matched to the fact that she looked like a 1940s movie goddess, cool and lush at the same time, made her a killer investigator: people got distracted, and then she zoomed in without mercy, finding exactly what they were trying to hide.

      The fact that she had the ability to sense when they were actively lying was just icing on that cake.

      “Not able to,” Nifty said. As usual, he and Sharon were jockeying for lead dog spot, having to prove they were smarter, sharper, more alpha than the other. Then he ruined the superior attitude by scratching at his arm, making a face like a box turtle’s, all scrunched up and sour. We all glared at him, and he stopped, shamefaced.

      The rash spread by contact. Venec might be able to treat the infection, but I didn’t want to be stuck under house arrest, too, because Nifty couldn’t let it heal. If he wasn’t careful, we were going to make him stay home.

      “Not able to,” Venec agreed, carefully not seeing Nifty’s lapse so he didn’t have to yell at him again. “Ian handed over two files this morning.”

      “Two?” I was surprised, yeah. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have two jobs going, these days; the Council overall might still not officially recognize us, but word had gotten out that they’d use us in need, and so the ordinary members of the Cosa Nostradamus were calling. But two coming in on the same day? That meant Nifty’s desk assignment wasn’t make-work; there wasn’t time or manpower to do that, even with Lou around.

      “And where is Master Stosser, anyway?” Nick looked around like the boss might suddenly pop out of the woodwork—and he might, actually.

      Ian Stosser might be the genius behind PUPI, but lately he’d left more and more of the day-to-day stuff to his partner. Since Venec was better at that anyway I hadn’t thought much about it. But Nick was right; Ian had been least-in-sight, recently.

      “I’ll worry about Ian,” Venec said, his voice more of a growl than usual, reminding me why we called him Big Dog, other than the obvious PUPI pun. “You focus on what we pay you for. Two jobs. First’s a break-in, up in Fieldston. Sharon, you and Nick take that one.” He slid a plain brown folder across the table, and Sharon took it.

      Ah, paperwork. Magic—current, in the modern parlance—runs in every human, but only a very small percentage of humans can actually manipulate it. They—we—are called Talent, and the ones who can’t use it are, rather condescendingly, called Nulls. Magic makes a lot of things easier, yeah. One of the prices we pay for Talent, though, is that we don’t interact well with things that run on current’s kissing cousin, electricity. You find a Talent who carries a cell phone or a PDA, and doesn’t have to replace it every other month, and I’ll show you a Talent who can’t use current worth a damn.

      Okay, unfair. But even those of us who don’t use current every day found anything more sophisticated than a debit card got fritzed pretty fast. I hadn’t been able to carry an MP3 player since I was fourteen.

      I’ve spent most of my life in openly Talented society, but some days I watch people using netbooks or smartphones, while we have to juggle paper and pen and memory, and I wonder if we really got the better part of the deal, after all.

      “Where the hell is Fieldston?” Sharon asked, scanning the paperwork. “I swear, if we have to lug out to Long Island again…”

      “End of the 1 line, up in the Bronx,” Nifty told her, capping the one-upmanship for the moment.

      “Oh. Okay.” She wasn’t happy about heading all the way out there, but apparently so long as it didn’t involve having to leave the city, she could deal with it. Shar was our only born-and-bred New Yorker—I didn’t count, having spent most of my teens in Boston—and sometimes that just shone through.

      “Client’s a Null, he owns a house up there, it got tossed last night and he thinks it was a Retriever. No idea why he thinks that, but if it is…”

      I couldn’t stop myself from interrupting. “Venec, when was the last time someone actually pinned anything on an active Retriever?”

      Retrievers were the cat burglars of the Cosa Nostradamus, Talent who naturally went invisible, like Pietr, only they controlled it, used it to get away with everything short of murder. If this guy’d been burgled by a Retriever, odds were that even if we could prove it, nobody would ever get the stuff back.

      Those dark, irritated eyes glared at me, but I didn’t feel any actual irritation coming off him, just annoyance. “If the client thinks it was a Retriever, then that’s his call. You will determine the facts and find out who is responsible. And, if possible, get back the stolen items. Yeah,” he said when Sharon would have protested, “I know, you’re not the lost-and-found. If this guy did get hit by a Retriever, think about the egoboo, to hit back.”

      There was that.

      “Bonnie, you and Pietr get a floater on the East Side, off 14th.”

      “Oh, maaaaaaan,” Pietr said, СКАЧАТЬ