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СКАЧАТЬ right now, but interesting.

      “How virgin is the scene?” I heard the word come out of my mouth and winced. I’m not normally big on tact, but that had been particularly ill-chosen even for me.

      Stosser didn’t even seem to notice, although Sharon’s cheek twitched a little in response. “Thankfully, one of ours was with the first responders, and was quicker on the draw than most of his peers. Paramedics took the human bodies, but the cops haven’t gone over the scene yet.” A grim smile touched his face. “New York’s finest decided to wait for someone to come down and take care of the ki-rin before they approached the scene itself, so the area’s about as untouched as we’re going to get.”

      I couldn’t blame the cops—I wouldn’t want to deal with a ki-rin in a bad mood, either.

      “Not that there’s any doubt of who did what,” Stosser went on, “but I am informed that the fatae community’s already screaming for blood—more blood, I mean. They don’t like that a ki-rin’s been shown disrespect, disrespect being anything other than kissing its hooves in abject adoration.”

      Wow. That was the bitterest I’d ever head the boss man get. Normally he left the snide comments to Venec.

      “What kind of blood do they want?” Nick asked.

      “Who the hell knows.” He seemed to remember he was talking to staff, not himself, and I saw the usual cool exterior go back up. “Our contact thinks the fact that there was any investigation by Nulls at all set them off. They’re already demanding that the ki-rin be released, and nobody’s even questioned it yet.

      “The one thing everyone agrees on is that this needs to be cleared up and closed down as soon as possible, if not sooner. That means we have to determine exactly what happened, who did what, and in what order.”

      “That’s what you built us to do,” I said. And then, since he hadn’t really answered me before, I prompted him again. “The scene?”

      Stosser looked up at the sky, checking the thickness of the clouds. Normally we—Talent—like storms, since electrical storms are natural generators of current, but rain right now would seriously screw things up by compromising the scene. Magical trace washed away the same as physical, especially if there’s lightning involved—current from the electric bolts could wipe the slate clean in one flash—and being wet made me look like a drowned albino rat.

      “Like I said, reasonably untouched, for NYPD values of reasonable. Ground’s been trampled by a couple-three cops, one of whom is our first-responder lonejack.”

      Poor guy must have shit a brick when he saw the ki-rin, and realized what he’d gotten. Ki-rin were not only rare, they were ancient, as a breed. Like dryads and greater dragons, they were given respect by every other fatae breed, and any Talent with a lick of sense or tradition. We were lucky our first responder didn’t panic, and luckier still that he called the Council, and not one of the lonejack elders. The Cosa Nostradamus’s relationship with the NYPD is a long and fragmented one, but something like this was going to get every alarm jangling everywhere, and the Council—much as a lonejack would hate to admit it—was the best way to handle things. Council had the protocol.

      “We have a signature on the cop?” Signature was the way we identified Talent, the way their current “felt.” It was individual, like a fingerprint—but you had to know what it looked like, first. Problem was there wasn’t a database for us to check, which mostly made identifying a particular signature near-impossible unless we had access to everyone on the scene, to tag them for comparison, and rule them out of any evidence we collected.

      “Not yet. Nick, go find and fetch.”

      Nick rolled his eyes, then saluted crisply, and turned on his heel and headed out into the crowd. That left me and Sharon.

      “The deceased has been carted off to the morgue, while his companion is on his way to the hospital, presumably doped to the gills.” That was standard for Talent in those situations—current is only under our control by conscious effort: when stressed, we can go haywire. Pietr was unusual in that he faded from view as a protective measure—most of us just shorted out sensitive electronics like, oh, lifesupport systems and finely calibrated medical apparatuses. Emergency-room staff hated to see us coming.

      Ian went back to issuing orders. “Mendelssohn, I want you working the crowd. Listen, don’t talk. If there’s anyone out there with more than a prurient interest, or says anything—anything—that gives you a twitch, I want to know, immediately.” While the Guys had us stretch in training, or on low-intensity cases, when we were on a sticky job they preferred to match people up with their native skills, and Sharon had a seventh sense about if people were lying or not. My teammate, characteristically stylish in a long black suede coat and a black wool beret over her blond hair, nodded and went off to do our master’s bidding

      And that left me. And the scene. No surprise. I didn’t need to hear the band playing to know what my marching orders were.

      “You okay with this?” Ian generally played the compassionate soul to Venec’s hard-ass, but he really wasn’t much on the touchy-feely when it came to us, more likely to toss us in without a by-your-leave. I blinked at his concern, wondering what triggered that, and then shrugged it off. No way I was going to make him think I couldn’t handle it.

      “Yeah. I’m okay.”

      He lifted the wire, the spell recognizing his signature and not sending an alarm, and we entered the crime scene.

      Like I said, everyone on the team had their strength. If Sharon was a truth-scryer, I was a gleaner. I figured that my recall, both visual and factual, was one of the reasons I’d been recruited. Venec had run me through endless tests and scenarios, honing that ability and tying it into a cantrip we used to capture the scene intact. They’d tried, first, to teach everyone the spell—that hadn’t worked out well. So unless it was an emergency, it was just me. My job here was to walk the scene, gathering as much information as I could, both physical and magical, and re-create it later for the rest of the team to study.

      Since joining PUPI, I’d gleaned murder scenes, dipped into the minds of pathological abusers, and—Venec’s idea of training—skimmed the hot emotions of a rabid Salamander. Reading the scene of a self-defense killing where we knew the identity of all the players should have been a piece of proverbial.

      Except the guy’d been killed because he’d tried to rape a ki-rin companion. Scum, and stupid, and I was not looking forward to getting my mental fingers into what that left behind.

      That thought drew my attention to what Stosser had said, about the NYPD not wanting to touch the scene until the ki-rin had been dealt with. What sort of trace did a ki-rin leave behind? I let my gaze pass over the scene, looking and yet not looking, and found myself noticing a shadowed corner near one of the riverside buildings about a hundred yards from the scene where two men—older, suited, officious-looking, and couldn’t be more obviously Council if they’d had it branded on their left buttocks—had the accused killer contained.

      My breath caught in my throat, despite my determination not to be impressed. I’m hardly a country bumpkin, but a ki-rin … my god. One of the most exotic and magnificent of the fatae, the nonhumans. They’re sometimes called Asian unicorns, but that was so far off the mark to be useless. A unicorn was a horse with a horn and an attitude. The ki-rin were … It was too far away to see details, but I knew the description, same as any halfway-trained Talent. Body of a stag, mane of a lion, head of a dragon—and yeah, a single slender horn growing from the center of the dragonlike head. СКАЧАТЬ