Pack of Lies. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ to Zaki set me free. He was coming to terms with what I did, the physical and magical risks, but that didn’t mean he liked it, and he’d like this bit of current-risk even less. J’s always—some part of him—going to see me as the kid he took under his wing, someone he needs to protect. So, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t telling him everything.

      I sat back, relaxed as much as I could, and closed my eyes. The current-camera rolled, the virtual film unreeled, and the figures took form in front of me, one-third of the size but every bit as real. The shiver I’d had at the scene intensified, until it racked my entire body, a seemingly endless rolling wave of cold rippling along my skin. I’d known it was going to happen, it happened every time, even in training, which was why I was doing this alone. Unloading sucked.

      The problem was, you couldn’t disengage from what you gleaned, not after you took it inside. Visuals, sound, magical trace, it all carried emotional residue—a thousand tiny fishhooks that caught at you. We’d learned that the hard way, going in to gather trace on murder victims during our first case. Then, we’d gotten caught up in the last moments of the victims’ lives, almost been swamped by the experience. We’d refined the process since then, so it was an external view only that kept the hooks to a minimum. What we missed in information we avoided in agony and near-death. I was all about that.

      Freaky shivers, I could live with.

      The image flickered with the current I infused into it, and came to life. Girl, check, dressed in cute clubbing clothes totally unsuited for the weather, her coat open to the air. She was bubbly, bouncing. I could almost feel her adrenaline rush in the way she moved. I knew that rush, had been caught up in it myself over the years, when you’re so tired and so energized you don’t think you could sleep even if you were dead. Your brain’s going a hundred miles an hour, and you know you’re not making sense anymore, and you just don’t care, because you feel so damn good.

      I forced myself to look away from her. Where was … there was the ki-rin. For something so pale, it blended really well with the predawn shadows. She skipped ahead, and it fell back a couple of paces … and that was when it happened.

      I made it about halfway through before I threw up, but my concentration stayed steady on the job, even while I was heaving the remains of coffee and bagels onto the floor.

       three

      When I unsealed the wards and opened the door, Venec was standing there in the hallway. You know how some guys just make you feel better by looking at them? Not comforting or daddylike, just …”all right, you’re here, the ground is solid” kind of way? Venec was like that. Well, sometimes, anyway. When he wasn’t making you feel like an idiot.

      He handed me a mug, and I took it automatically, my hand shaking more than I wanted. Venec took note, his gaze sharp, but he didn’t say anything. Tea, not coffee. Not Pietr’s green tea: herbal. My face screwed up in distaste even as I was drinking it. Heavy on the sugar, and I could feel my energy level starting to pick up again. Burning too many calories, using up too much current. I had to remember to watch that.

      “You done in there?” he asked.

      “Yeah.”

      Venec stood there and watched me drinking, his gaze on my face like a nanny—or a dark-feathered falcon, watching a rabbit to see which way it was going to hop. He didn’t touch me, or try to offer any kind of comfort, which was good, because I didn’t want any. I needed the rawness, the bitter taste in my mouth that not even sweet tea could erase, the acid burning in my gut. I needed to remember every detail of what I had seen, what I had felt. It wasn’t even close to what any of the actual participants had felt, distanced by being third-person, but it would keep me going when we hit dead ends or inconsistent facts, give me the energy to push through and keep working.

      The truth was I hadn’t seen much of anything of the attempted assault, just a scuffle in the shadows. The flash of hooves and horn, after, had been far more clear. My brain was filling in more of those shadowed details than was healthy, but I didn’t know how to stop it. Curse of an overactive empathy, one woman to another. If one of the guys on the team had been better at gleaning …

      No. My instinctive reaction to that thought was, well, instinctive. As bad as it was that I had eavesdropped like this … even if the girl never knew we were poking around in her trauma, somehow I felt I had a responsibility to her now, to take care of that trauma. I couldn’t protect her, but I could protect her memories.

      The fact that I couldn’t, really, that it was evidence now, preserved for anyone on the team to look at … well, they still had to go through me, in order to view it. That was a distinction without a difference but somehow, it helped

      It did strike me as worrisome that while the initial attack made me feel ill, the ki-rin’s murder of the assailant didn’t seem to affect me; it was as though I’d been watching a real—nonmagical—movie, like the blood and gore and dying wasn’t real. Maybe because the ki-rin was fatae, I hadn’t picked up its emotions from the gleaning, and I was reacting to that blank space? The dead guy had been a real human being, and he was dead. Why wasn’t I feeling anything?

      Because he’d assaulted her. Because I was glad he was dead. The thought bothered me, a lot. Justifiable, yeah, but we were supposed to see the facts, and I couldn’t do that if I let my emotions cloud judgment, maybe make me overlook something. That was as bad as trying to protect the victim, in its own way.

      The tea was doing its job, settling my stomach enough that I didn’t feel like I was going to puke again. I finished the rest of the liquid, and held it upside down to show the boss I’d been a good little girl.

      Venec looked like he was going to say something else, then stopped and tilted his head, looking at me like I was some new bit of evidence. That feeling that tiptoed into me whenever he did that came back, little muddy cat feet.

      “What?” I heard the defensiveness in my voice, and reached down to touch my core, almost in reflex. But no, the current there was still and calm. Damn it, I would not let him get to me, not just by looking at me with that heavy gaze, like I was being weighed and judged, and the jury was still out. Nobody, not even J, not even my dad, had ever made me feel like that. I didn’t like it, at all.

      “Trigger the display for me, please,” Venec said, and I got the feeling that wasn’t what he had meant to say, but I was still unnerved enough that I didn’t push. He could trigger it himself, with a little effort, and I was almost tempted to tell him to do so, but my mentor had taught me manners, and I had some natural smarts to go with it. The office mood was informal, but I never made the mistake of thinking that orders weren’t meant to be obeyed, even if they weren’t phrased as orders.

      “There’s soup in the ready-room,” the Big Dog went on, still staring at me. “Go eat something before you fall over.”

      I stared back at him, not quite sure he was speaking in English. Soup. Soup … sounded okay. My stomach could handle soup.

      And it hadn’t been a suggestion. The sugar in the tea had helped, but it was going to drop me into a crash pretty damn soon, if I wasn’t careful.

      I went back into the room to reset and trigger the display, then pushed past him and headed for the kitchenette. Venec went into the room and I heard him sigh. Ah, give me a break, I thought; I’d cleaned up the worst of it. It was just going to smell a little musty in there for a while, was all.

      The break room was still empty, and I found the soup in the fridge easily enough, tossing it into our small, battered microwave СКАЧАТЬ