Dragon Justice (11 page)

Chapter 8

Several hours later, that cheesesteak sandwich sitting
heavy in my stomach, my nerves nicely awake, I was standing in the brightly lit
hallway of the Ravenwood Museum. The museum was closed, so we had the paintings
and sculptures in the dozen or so small galleries to ourselves. The Met, it
wasn’t, but the stuff was quality; I’d spent enough years living with J to
recognize art, even if it wasn’t a familiar brushstroke.

“They specialize in American painters,” Ben told me when we
came in. “Private funding. The Board is highly paranoid and slightly panicky
about security. Smaller museums tend to be more attractive targets, since they
have less funding, and often their works are easier to fence.”

It made sense: disposing of a Degas or Picasso—or an O’Keefe or
Cassatt—took some doing. A Reid or Gilbert, grabbing names off two of the pieces
we’d passed, probably less work, even if less money.

The what, I thought, was less interesting to me than the how. I
had a blueprint in one hand, my other hand flat on the wall nearest me, and Ben
was lecturing me on how to sense the electrical wires and to tell the difference
between the lines, identifying and “plucking” at the ones that connected to the
alarm system. This was more to my taste than babysitting newbies or facing down
sullen teenagers.

“The trick is to sensitize them without actually setting them
off. That way, when someone else touches them with current, trying to overload
them, a warning is set off.”

A warning that was tied to a batch of elementals lurking in the
walls, tiny semisentient creatures drawn by the excess of electricity the
building provided. I’d encountered them once before, on a site, but using them
this way, as part of a system rather than merely relying on their reaction to an
intrusion, was new to me.

It sounded simple, and it was…but simple didn’t mean easy. Ben
had let me try, just a single unconnected strand, and I’d broken it with my
lightest, most delicate touch.

“How long did it take you to learn how to do this?”

Another shrug, but this one was too casual.

“Dammit, you invented this, didn’t you?” I was torn between
irritation and admiration, and just a hint of…

Wow. I almost stopped, shocked once I identified the emotion.
Pride. For him, in him. Not the sort of attaboy feeling I got when one of my
fellow pups did something smart, either. It was…

“Bonnie. You still with me?”

“Yeah, right, sorry.” I tucked that soft, warm thing away
carefully and focused on my hand on the wall. “So you make, like, a really fine
thread and needle?” I asked, envisioning a thread of current so fine I could
barely see it, only sense it.

“Yeah, I guess.” I suspected any attempt Ben made at sewing had
involved surgical thread, not embroidery floss, but you picked the image that
worked for you. I let the thread spin out, snaking from my palm down into the
wall, reaching…

Something hard and sharp slammed into me, like a dozen icy-cold
needles. “Holy mother of fu— What the hell was that?”

Ben was already moving, grabbing at one of the security guards
who had been watching us without trying to be obvious. “There’s a breach. Call
the security desk now!”

Holy shit. So now I knew what it felt like when the alarm was
triggered. I swallowed, still feeling the sharp sting that had jagged its way
through my flesh, and then started running after Ben, damning the vanity that
had made me wear my pretty, utterly impractical-for-running boots. They made a
nice clattering noise on the floor, though, as I followed the constant tug that
told me where Ben was, his annoyance and glee clear to my oversensitive
awareness. Glee because he had proof the system worked. Annoyance…

I could feel my ears burn, clear sign that I was blushing.
Annoyance because his rather carefully detailed plans for tonight involving a
bottle of wine, a very nice meal, and maybe some skin-to-skin had been
disrupted.

Whatever I’d maybe, possibly had in mind coming down here, Ben
was a step ahead of me. Maybe two. Guess I wasn’t the only one tired of treading
water.

All that was shelved for now, though.

I caught up with him as he hit the staff elevator, slipping in
as the doors closed, his hand reaching out to hold them for me.

“Run faster next time,” he said. I would have stuck my tongue
out if I weren’t breathing so heavily. He, of course, was barely breathing hard.
Bastard.

The moment the door opened onto a sparse basement floor, Venec
was already talking. “What’s going on, people?”

“There’s nothing on the monitors.”

The man talking was about the size and shape of a troll, with
one of the loveliest voices I’d ever heard. Even the fact that he was clearly
pissed off didn’t lessen the beauty of his tenor.

“What about the tripwires?” Venec asked.

“Nothing. We didn’t have a clue until the alarm went off.”

Concerned satisfaction hummed from Ben: he was in his element,
proven right and in control of the situation. I studied him, slightly disturbed
at how much of a turn-on that arrogance was.

“Someone tried to make a play on the museum here.” His finger
traced a line over the digital display, not getting any closer to it than he had
to. Even so, several of the displays were breaking up into static. I moved back
a few paces so I could still hear what was going on but was out of immediate
range of what looked like a massive amount of very expensive technology.

Usually, unless we were under a lot of stress, or pulling down
a lot of current, it took extended exposure to wreck electronics. But I didn’t
want to be the one who exceptioned the rule. Ben was on the payroll; let him
worry about it.

His attention was focused on “listening” to the current.
“Whoever it is, they’ve backed off. They must have realized that they tripped a
wire somewhere.”

“So you think that’s it?” The troll frowned, and his voice
deepened, sending involuntary shivers along my back. I’d always been a sucker
for smooth, dark voices, even in the most inappropriate time and place.

“It depends on who it was and what they were trying for. Some
thieves, yeah, they’ll stand down now. There’s no point to them overreaching and
getting caught—no score is worth that to a professional.” Implied, if unsaid,
was the fact that no amateur could have gotten that far. Not against one of his
systems. Arrogance again; definitely hot. Also, kinda cute.

“Some thieves. But not all?” Troll was staring at him,
expecting an answer, pronto.

Ben looked thoughtful, but I couldn’t read anything from him at
all now. He wasn’t keeping me out; he was just so focused on this, there wasn’t
room for anything else. I suspected I got like that, too.

“Not all,” he agreed. “And then there are those who will take
my system as a personal affront and keep trying until they break it.”

Well. I guess I knew what we were doing tonight.

* * *

A few blocks away from the museum, Wren Valere wrapped
her hands around a mug of tea and scowled into the tepid liquid. The initial
approach had gone smoothly, slipping through the front ring of security without
them even having a whisker-twitch of alarm. Any Retriever worth their name could
bypass Null guards—The Wren could tap-dance naked, painted purple, and clapping
castanets, and they shouldn’t even blink.

And they hadn’t. But she’d not gotten cocky; even the best
could get caught. The next stage had been the basic alarms, the motion detectors
and tripwires every modern museum set up to keep patrons from getting too close.
She’d made it through to the staff-only areas without anyone seeing her, much
less asking what she was doing there, without a security badge or escort, when
suddenly there had been…

Fingers on her.

Not physical, actual fingers, but the sense of being touched,
patted down, like being pushed through some weird, magical combination of a
security gate and a car wash. It was similar to the sensation she had when
encountering elementals, tiny semi-aware creatures that gathered in
current-streams and could sometimes be used as a basic alarm system, but…

Less excited, more controlled. Elementals were random, even
when you got them set in one place: they reacted randomly. This had been a
specific reaction, a security lock using a level of magic, of sophistication,
that Wren hadn’t run into before.

And the moment she became aware of it, she knew that whoever
had set up the system was aware of her, too.

What she didn’t know was if they knew that she knew that they
were aware of her.

Wren parsed that sentence in her head and scowled more deeply
at the tea. The waitress at the diner a few blocks from the museum where she’d
taken refuge approached her, thinking she needed more hot water, and then backed
off, warned by some job-honed sense that this wasn’t a customer who wanted to be
disturbed.

Wren didn’t even like tea; that was Sergei’s drink. But it
comforted her to hold the warmth and smell its scent, as though her partner was
there to advise her.

Not that it took much thinking. The Wren always followed
through, always completed the job. That was why Sergei could ask for—and
get—such high fees: discretion and success were a potent combination for the
majority of her clients. Plus, this one, with its potential double paycheck of
getting paid once to steal the artwork and then again to sell it, was too
profitable to screw up. That would be Sergei’s take, anyway.

Wren just couldn’t stand being beaten.

Chapter 9

Luisa Novoa had once dreamed of being something
special, someone admired and imitated. She had no skill at singing or painting
or acting, so had thrown herself into the business world, only to discover that
she was merely competent there, as well.

PUPI had been her last hope; when Ian Stosser had recruited
her, she had thought that now, finally, she would excel…

“Come on. Give me something.”

“I can’t re-create something out of nothing.” Lou wasn’t the
smartest of the pups. She wasn’t the most skilled or the highest res. She wasn’t
even the most inventive, or the best at spotting evidence or trace. But she had
discovered that there was one way that she did, finally, shine. More, it made
her indispensable.

Ian Stosser let the charming, coaxing, charismatic tone drop
from his voice, which was a relief to both of them. “All this information, and
you can’t find anything?”

Lou could compile data. All the information that PUPI cleaned,
or learned, or put together, and used to solve a case—or discarded as being
irrelevant to the case—she gathered, and ordered, and made sense out of. And she
could find it, later, when it was needed.

“I can’t find what doesn’t exist, boss.”

He didn’t swear or scowl, or prod her into trying again, the
way Venec did. He simply stared at her, those pale eyes cold and unnervingly
keen. “It has to.”

When Ian Stosser got something in his head, it was impossible
to dislodge it. He was determined that Lou had facts at her disposal, and
therefore she needed only to find them.

“Seriously, boss. Before Bonnie told us, I’d never even heard
about the Merge. None of us had—not even you. And the only stuff I’ve gotten
since then—” and she had researched, because that was what she did “—just
repeats the same thing over and over again, that the Merge is meant to draw two
Talent together, to create something greater.”

She held up a hand to stop him before he could even open his
mouth. “And the only places I have found that are in texts that are, like, a
hundred years old. If it’s happened since then, nobody’s talking about it. At
all.”

She shook her head, stretching her fingers out, palms down over
the table, and stared at them as though the answer was there. “Hell, I don’t
even know that it ever happened before, either. It’s all…theory and claims, not
any specifics.”

“It’s happening now, which means it’s happened before. Venec
and Torres are special, but they’re not that special. I don’t like operating
blind. It’s too much of a variable, and we can’t afford it, not now.” Stosser
wasn’t the sort to show worry by anything as obvious as chewing his nails or
pacing, but there was a certain level of anxiety under the surface that—if you
knew him well enough—you could pick up.

Lou hadn’t been a pup long, but she had been working with
Stosser every day since she started. At this point, she could read him better
than anyone else, except Venec. What she didn’t understand was why he was
anxious.

“Boss…it’s their lives. Not a case. Why don’t you just let them
deal with it? They’ve got it under control.” She thought about the sparks that
still simmered whenever the two of them sat next to each other, which was more
often these days, and amended that. “Mostly.” Then she tilted her head and gave
him a stern look that rivaled his own. “Unless you’re thinking about trying to
use this somehow. Because if you are, Ian Stosser, that is right out.
De ninguna manera, no se cómo.
You don’t do that to
your own people. You don’t do that to anyone. It’s not right.”

“Yes,
mami.
”

She studied him, not appeased by his apparent meekness nor his
attempt at humor. “I am serious, boss. You screw with one of us, we assume you
will screw with any of us, and you lose us. You know that, right? And I’m not
talking about your charisma enchantment cantrips
de
mierda
—that’s the job. You mess with our heads, or our hearts…and not
a single pup will ever trust you again.”

Stosser held his hands up as though making a vow. “I solemnly
swear I am not going to nor am I contemplating using the Merge in any way.” The
anxiety slipped through, just a hint more, with a whiff of exhaustion that
worried Lou more than anything else. “But I want to know what it is, every
detail, to make sure that nobody else can use it, either. Because eventually,
somebody’s going to slip, somebody’s going to notice. And if the wrong person
does…it goes from being their own business to ours.
Tu
entiende?
”

Their gazes held, and neither of them blinked.
“Sí. Entiendo.”

“Good. Keep at it.”

* * *

Whatever Ben had originally planned for dinner, my
expectations had been…well, non-expectant. If I’d guessed where we’d end up for
dinner, it could have been anywhere from a five-star restaurant to a burger dive
to a Tibetan soup kitchen. Benjamin Venec was a man of varied tastes, all of
them intriguing.

I would not, however, have guessed that I’d end up sitting on
an overturned crate, eating pizza in a mostly empty storeroom in the museum’s
subbasement, with not only Venec but his friend Allen, who was the spectacularly
ugly man I’d met earlier. Allen not only had a lovely speaking voice, but he
could sing, too, as he kept proving by breaking out into improvised, completely
rude riffs on Gilbert and Sullivan that made me fall off my crate
laughing—twice.

The laughter was a welcome break, considering the intensity of
what we were doing. The crate next to our makeshift table was covered with
layers of blueprints, far more complicated than the one I’d been using earlier.
Most of them detailed the physical layouts of the building, but two of them were
electronic schemata, and one, on incredibly fine onionskin, was the hand-drawn
plans for Venec’s security system. When you placed it over the schemata, you
could see the entire security picture, Null- and current-based. We’d been going
over every inch, determining what had been broken by our would-be thief, and
how, and how to prevent it from happening again.

And the clock was ticking: whoever it was had to try again soon
or risk us closing all the potential windows.

“So you think that they’re going to come in here?” Allen jabbed
one gnarled finger at the topmost sheet, the grease from his pizza leaving a
smudge.

“It’s the weak spot, so if they know their job, yeah, they
will.”

“You left me a weak spot? In the security system I am paying
you massive sums of money for?”

“Your idea of massive is like a john’s measurement of his own
sex appeal. And, yes, there’s a weak spot. So anyone who takes a go at your
museum will go there, and they can be trapped easier. Christ, you hired me—trust
me to do my thing, willya?”

Someone who came down looking for a romantic wooing—or at least
some hot and heavy sexing—might have felt cheated at being cooped up in a dank
subbasement listening to two guys bicker as they worked. I was, god help me,
enchanted. Venec, fierce and growly and smart, was sexy as hell. Benjamin, the
off-duty side, had a surprisingly deep reservoir of compassion and kindness that
always made me melt.

Benjy, as apparently only Allen was allowed to call him, was
just as intense and engaged and fucking adorable.

He looked up and caught me watching him, and grinned. No guards
up, no reserve, no hesitation, just this arrogant “I know you’re watching me, I
know you think I’m hot” grin. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hit him or kiss
him.

Probably both. I settled for grabbing another slice of pizza.
It wasn’t as good as what we got back home, but this chicken-pizza thing wasn’t
entirely an abomination. Maybe.

“All right, fine.” Allen took a hit off his soda and let out a
soft belch. “’Scuse me. And you were going to tell me about this sticky spot
before you finished up?”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Bah. I—”

Whatever he was going to say was cut off by the sound of
something beeping. He grabbed at his belt, already unfolding his legs and
walking away from us as he answered the cell phone. He might be willing to risk
us near the security console, apparently, but not his phone.

“What? How’d you know? I— Yeah, yeah, he’s with me.”

He shot a glance over his shoulder at us, clearly worried. We
both went on alert, immediately: Who was calling him, and why were they asking
after Venec?

“Yeah. All right. I’ll bring them down. What? Oh, ah, one of
his people is here, too. I assume you’ll want both of ’em for this.”

Business, not social. I put the remains of my slice down,
half-eaten. Sometimes it was better to have an empty stomach when you went out
on a scene.

Allen listened to a few more sentences, then closed the phone
and put it back on his belt without saying goodbye to whoever it was. Or maybe
they hadn’t said goodbye to him.

“I’m sorry, but that was my friend Charles, down at the
station. He heard you were here, and…”

“And?” Ben’s voice was guardedly curious, not committing to
anything.

“He wondered if you’d come down and take a look at something.
Officially.”

“The Philly P.D. is hiring us?”

Allen shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Well, then.” And that quickly, Benjy disappeared, and Venec
showed up. I was, weirdly, relieved. Benjy might be adorable, but I knew
Venec.

* * *

Allen piled us into his car and drove us, not to the
nearest precinct house, but to a more modern-looking building, set on the corner
of a busy, tree-lined street. The morgue.

I was going to behave, I swear I was, but while we were waiting
in the soothingly bland waiting area for someone to come get us, the words just
slipped out. “I see dead people.”

“Yeah, we get that a lot.”

I turned around to face the voice, and looked up. And up.

“Chuck, this is Ben Venec and Bonita Torres.”

Charles Andrulis was the tallest, darkest man I had ever met.
Taller than Venec, he had to be at least six four, and three feet wide at the
shoulder, and skin you could lose current in, with a clean-shaved head and, I
quickly discovered, a handshake like the slap of god. It was like running into
Nifty’s big brother, emphasis on
big.

Having done the introductions, Allen left us, muttering
something about getting back to work that didn’t involve the smell of
formaldehyde. Andrulis looked at Venec and then looked back at me, and I could
practically feel him sizing us up. Venec went totally still, the way he did, and
we waited.

“All right.” Whatever he’d decided, I guess we’d passed muster,
because he went into his spiel, even as he was ushering us past the security
desk and into the Holy of Holies. He spoke directly to Venec, but I didn’t take
offense. Ben was, in Ian Stosser’s absence, the official face of PUPI. Being
ignored meant I had a better chance of being left alone to do my job, rather
than peppered with questions or told useless info a Null thought I’d need.

“We have a corpse here, came in from a murder scene. Name of
Warren Shultz. Upstanding citizen, no record, no slander, no foul. But somebody
wanted him very much slabbed, to the point where they not only killed him, they
scraped out his insides.”

“Beg pardon?” Venec actually sounded surprised. I wasn’t used
to that happening.

Andrulis was leading us along a narrow hallway that was clearly
not for public use: the walls needed repainting, and the tile underfoot was
cracked. He pushed open a single swinging door and held it with one arm for us
to enter. “You’ll see.”

I’d never actually been in a morgue before; my dead bodies had
all been fresh, so to speak, or reconstructed through current-trace back in the
office. I didn’t know what to expect—some sense of death, all the grubby, messy,
emotional bits of it, being present, maybe.

Instead, I could have been back in college, hanging out in the
chem lab watching two of my more insane friends mix concoctions just to hear
them go
boom.
I’d been more on the humanities side
of things, but chem majors knew how to party.

“Over here.” He gestured to the young man who had turned when
we came in. “Joey, we need Shultz. Number 32, I think.”

The tech nodded like Andrulis had just ordered a double
cheeseburger, then pulled out a gurney and brought it over to us. He pulled
aside the sheet and stepped back.

It was a body. Not gruesome, or scary, just sort of cold and
clean and kind of sad. There were ugly-looking incisions along the arms and legs
and torso, and you could tell that it had been done with something really sharp.
The seams on the limbs, unlike the torso, didn’t quite match up perfectly.
Curious, I lifted my hand over the body.

“Hey!” Andrulis protested, stepping forward as though to knock
my hand away.

“It’s okay.” Venec. “Bonnie?”

I let my hand rest a few inches over the flesh, feeling the
coolness of not-life between us. It was just flesh. Meat, organs, skin, bone,
same as me, and all of it was made up of the same atoms, whirling really fast,
and if one was living and one was dead, the only difference was a matter of
time.

I’d never been what Nicky would call a delicate flower.

There wasn’t any visible dirt or markings, but the skin was
off-color, and there wasn’t even the hint of current on his skin. Had he been
washed?

“Was the body hosed down?”

I heard the rustle of paper: Andrulis checking his notes? “No.
Not even a sponge-bath.”

So there should be some trace…but there wasn’t. Huh.

“He was a Talent,” I said.

“Yeah, we know.” Andrulis didn’t sound impressed. “That’s why
we brought you here.”

“But he wasn’t killed by current.”

“You sure?” Andrulis again; Venec knew if I said something like
that, it was because I was sure.