Laura Gilman - Hard Magic

Nifty blinked, processed, and nodded reluctantly. Nick let out a sigh, and even Pietr seemed to agree with her logic. I obviously had a different take on the police than my companions. Then again, I’d never actually ever had any dealings with the police. So what if they asked me a few questions? I didn’t have anything to hide. Then it hit me. “You guys … all lonejacks?”

They nodded.

“You’re not?” Pietr moved away from me, as though I’d just admitted to having cooties. I shrugged. “Dad was lonejack. My mentor’s Council. I never really thought about it.” Wasn’t quite true, but explaining would take too much time and energy.

The Cosa Nostradamus wasn’t exactly one big happy family. Or we were, but there were two distinct branches of the family tree. Council was organized, focused, and monied, mostly. Not more or less law-abiding than any given lonejack, but less likely to take heat for it, I suppose. Council policed themselves: that was the point of Council. Lonejacks were on their own, and liked it that way. If my dad had been any indication, they really didn’t appreciate official-type people asking questions about their private lives, even if they hadn’t done anything wrong.

J and I, we ran in our own little world, I guess. He’d never pushed me to go Council, or kept me from having lonejack friends, but mostly I sort of floated between the two worlds, and never felt I belonged particularly in either one. I’d always thought of myself as child-of-a-lonejack, but would probably identify as Council if pushed. I’m not sure they’d acknowledge me, though. It hadn’t ever been an issue before, but now I felt it like an ache: where would I go, if they had to take me in?

“Don’t let your guard down just yet, if you were smart enough to raise it in the first place,” Pietr said, breaking into my thoughts. “It wasn’t a heart attack, not the way you meant, anyway.” He’d somehow gone from standing against the wall to standing next to the body, and the way the others reacted I don’t think they saw him move, either.

“You can tell, just by looking at him?” Sharon’s voice got real cold. “You have a doctoral degree you forgot to mention?”

“Idiots.” He sounded totally disgusted with the lot of us. “Can’t you feel it?”

The moment he mentioned it, I understood. There was a hum in the room, something faint but unmistakable. The sound of current, simmering in the wires, normal in any modern building, yeah—except the humming was in the body, too.

Everyone carries electrical current in them: it’s how our bodies work. Muscles moving, heart pumping, neurons firing, etc. Once the body dies, the electricity does, too. If you’re Talent, you’ve got current in there, too, not just in your core-supply but everywhere, filling your entire body. But it flits even faster than electricity when the person dies and control’s released. Everyone knows that.

If current was still in the body, and the body was dead, then it meant that the current we were sensing was from an external source—and still keeping a grip on the body.

That … probably wasn’t good.

“You think current killed him?” Nifty sounded less surprised or horrified than fascinated.

It happened sometimes, when a Talent overloaded, took too much current on, either by accident or ego, and it shorted out their system. Mostly it just made you nuts, frying the brain cells, but it could kill, too. Sometimes it killed everyone in the area, too, just for the sin of being too close. I was suddenly really glad I hadn’t gotten close, and from the look on Nifty’s face, he was wishing he were another ten feet or more away. Sharon didn’t seem to be bothered at all, still kneeling by the body, her skirt folded neatly under her knees.

“But overrush shouldn’t still be lingering,” she said. “It should fade once the final flare-out happens, not hold on to him.”

A damned good point. I didn’t think I wanted to hear Pietr’s response.

“I think someone used current to kill him,” he said anyway, and that stopped everything cold. Even Sharon blanched.

I knew I didn’t want to hear it.

“You think one of us did it?” Nifty asked, his deep voice a little tight and rising. “But we were all there, together—hell, Sharon and I arrived at the same time, first, and the rest of you … “

Nick started to babble. “We don’t know anything about each other. This could be a setup—”

“Stop it!” Sharon’s voice cut through Nick’s stream of denial like forged steel, cold and hard. “None of us did anything.”

“And you know that how?”

“I know.”

“How?” Pietr was like a damn terrier with a bit of meat; he wasn’t going to let go, even standing over a dead body.

“I just do, all right?” Our cool blonde was pissed, and not in the mood for being questioned. I got the feeling she was like that a lot. “I could tell if any of you were lying, or trying to keep something from us. It’s what I do. So just shut up with the paranoia. None of us killed this guy.”

“Venec.”

“What?” That distracted her from her pissiness, at least a little.

Nifty had gotten up and gone around to the desk. “His name’s Venec, Ben Venec. Or at least, he’s reading a newspaper that was mailed to a Mister Benjamin Venec at this address.” Nifty pointed a finger down at the New York Times folded on the desk, but didn’t touch it. “There’s nothing else here. This guy wasn’t using the desk.” He took a piece of tissue out of his pocket and used it to pull open the drawer. “Nothing in here, either. Definitely not using the desk. That’s weird. People usually dump stuff into the desk drawers first off, even before they bring in plants or photos.”

By now, Sharon had gotten up and moved away from the body, smoothing her skirt and looking like she was about to start issuing orders again. Something got me walking across the carpet the three feet it took to take her place.

“What are you doing?” Nick asked, watching me.

I put my palm over the guy’s chest, still not looking at his face—this was easier if I didn’t think about him as a person.

“Asking the current,” I said, already sinking into my core and not really aware of anything else, other than the idea that this wasn’t a very good idea. I’d done this sort of scrying before, but only with people I knew, or things that belonged to them. The last time I’d done it, in fact, had been with tools that belonged to my dad, just after he’d been killed, which was why I’d thought of it. Death just seemed to call out for a final scrying.

Tell me something, I whispered to the hum of current wrapped around this guy’s chest. Tell me something about why you’re there. Tell me why I dreamed of death, again.

That last bit slipped in, but I let it go rather than worrying. Sometimes I’d get something, maybe detailed, maybe vague. More often I wouldn’t get anything. In light of the past twenty-four hours, what I got this time really shouldn’t have surprised me.

I got tossed on my ass, back into the side of the desk.

“Motherf—Ow!” I don’t swear much, but it felt warranted. That hurt.

“You all right?”

“What happened?

“Holy hell, girl, what did you do?”

The voices broke out over my head, surprised and concerned, in varying registers. “I didn’t do a damn thing,” I said, as soon as the birds stopped tweeting in circles around my head. It took a second, and then something slammed into my head, like the tail end of an aftershock. “Damn. Whatever’s wrapped itself around that guy, I’ve felt it before.”

“What? When?”

I had to think for a second, then the memory connected with something else, and I had it. “Last night. I tried to scry, get some detail on this interview, and got kicked back, hard.”