Dragon Justice. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ rank-and-file Council were bringing us their troubles.

      The problem was, most of them held the “above the rules” attitude that had made Ian Stosser decide there was a need for us in the Cosa Nostradamus to begin with. It’s tough to solve a supernatural crime. It’s almost impossible when the client doesn’t give over all the gory details at the start.

      Nicky had gotten one of those.

      I’d gotten pretty good at holding back exasperated sighs. “At some point, they’re going to have to realize that we’re not going to judge them. Right?”

      Nick snorted in response, and I flopped down on the sofa next to him, swinging my feet up into his lap and unwrapping the sandwich. “Okay, maybe not.”

      Nick shoved my feet back onto the ground and went back to marking something in his notebook. Since current messed with electronics something fierce, most Talent couldn’t use recorders or cameras, so we all carried notebooks around like twentieth-century beat cops. I’d added a sketchbook to my kit, but Nick couldn’t draw a straight line if you gave him a ruler. I know, I’d tried.

      “Just be glad you weren’t here when the smoke detector went off again,” he said.

      I groaned. “What’s that, the third time this month?”

      “Yeah. Scared the crap out of Nisa.”

      “Poor kid. She so doesn’t deserve to be stuck here with us.”

      Nicky just snickered.

      “I didn’t see anything on the board—I wonder if I could get tomorrow off,” I said, biting into my lunch. Ham and cheese. Not bad. Time off would be nice. I’d gotten an invite to go sailing from a woman I’d met the week before, and I wanted to take her up on it before she decided I wasn’t interested. Despite the Merge, I was trying to keep some semblance of a normal social life, even if very few of my hookups ended up with an actual hookup these days.

      “Doubtful,” Nick said, not looking up. “Stosser took a new client into the back office about ten minutes ago. Got your name all over it.”

      “Oh, gods above and below.” I took another bite, that news suggesting that lunch might be abbreviated. “Can’t someone else handle it?”

      “Fatae.”

      That one short word made me put down my sandwich, thoughts of my new acquaintance and a lazy afternoon on the water not quite forgotten but shoved aside. “Seriously?”

      Nick finally looked up from his notebook. “Serious as a heart attack. No idea the breed. They were cloaked like it was midwinter. Human-tall, human-wide, no visible tails or fur.”

      That didn’t rule much out—most of the fatae in New York City were human-shaped, enough to get by on a casual glance, anyway. There were a few horned and hooved types, and a few clearly not-human breeds living in the parks or underground, but they were the minority. And when they had a problem, most of them dealt with it internally. In fact, most of the breeds dealt with their own shit. For one of them to come to us…

      It could be good, or it could be seriously bad. The last time we’d gotten tangled in fatae business, we’d had to drag a ki-rin into disgrace. Never mind that the Ancient had brought it on itself; we were still the ones who had exposed it. The fact that the honored one had chosen suicide rather than live with the knowledge of what it had done…

      Technically, and what passed for legally among the fatae, what happened wasn’t our fault, nor our responsibility. But I still felt sick about it and suspected the others did, too. I didn’t want to deal with a fatae case.

      “Still.” I was running through excuses and justifications in my head, if only for the practice. “Someone else could handle it. What about Sharon? She’s good with delicate situations.”

      “You’re the fatae specialist,” Nick pointed out with damnable reasonableness. “Stosser will put you on it, if there’s anything to be put on.”

      Right on cue, there was a touch of current against my awareness. *torres*

      The feel of that ping was unmistakable. I sighed and got to my feet. “I hate it when you’re right,” I grumbled, shoved my lunch back into the fridge, and headed into the office to face my fate.

      We had started two years ago with one suite, taking up a quarter of the seventh floor. About a year back the guys acquired the second suite of offices on our side of the building and combined the space, repurposing the original layout into a warren of rooms that gave the illusion of privacy without sacrificing an inch of workspace. Nice, except when you were doing the Tread of Dread, as Nifty had dubbed the walk from the break room to Stosser’s office at the very end of the long hall.

      I knocked once, and the door opened.

      “Sir?”

      Usually I’d have started with “you rang, oh great and mighty?” but what worked with humans could backfire spectacularly with fatae. The fact that I knew that—the result of years more experience interacting with the nonhuman members of the Cosa than anyone else in the office except possibly Venec—was why I’d been called here. Nick had it in one.

      “Torres. Come in.”

      I came in, closing the door behind me, uncertain of where to go after that. The office was large enough to hold five people comfortably, seven if we all squeezed. Right then, there were only four—me, Stosser, and two figures, cloaked, with their backs to me—but it felt crowded as hell.

      Then they turned around, and all the air left my lungs in a surprised, if hopefully discreet, whoosh.

      * * *

      Benjamin Venec took good care of his investigators. If they were stressed, he gave them something to snarl at. If they were worried, he could provide a sounding board. If they were pissed off, he was willing to fight with them. But he couldn’t force them to relax; even if that had been his style, his pups were stubborn. They’d decide when they went down, not someone else, opponent or boss.

      So he could have told Torres to go home and get some sleep. She might even have gone—or at least started to. But he knew her: something shiny would catch her attention, either a case or a person, and she’d be off again. That was just…Torres.

      The fact that he had given up any right to be jealous of either things or people she deemed shiny didn’t seem to help the slight burning sensation to the left of his gut when he felt her sudden rush of surprise, followed by a shimmer of glee and anticipation that was uniquely Bonita Torres.

      Her signature was like coconut liquor, spicy and warm, and he let himself enjoy the taste—offsetting the burning sensation, or enhancing it, he wasn’t sure.

      The pleasure was balanced by a sense of moral discomfort, though. They’d agreed to stay out of each other’s headspace unless invited. Bonnie had been scrupulous about maintaining that agreement. He hadn’t. And claiming that it was part of his job, as her boss and teacher, nothing more than he did for the others, only went so far in justifying what his mentor would have called a blatant misuse of Talent.

      Ben didn’t even try to justify it, not to himself. He might be a bastard, but he was an honest one. He simply couldn’t avoid the overlap: even with his walls up, he was hyperaware of every strong emotion that passed СКАЧАТЬ