Laura Gilman - Hard Magic

Nifty knelt beside me, not touching me. “Is it the same signature?”

I had to think about that, too. Signature’s the specific feel/taste/sound of current. Wild current’s like springwater—fresh and pretty much signatureless. Canned current, the stuff that comes out of electrical wiring, has a specific and easily recognizable signature. Core-current? J’s I could recognize a mile and a millimeter away. Some unknown guy? Tougher. Maybe impossible. But if it was the same, it meant that the killer had been in my brain before I even got here. It meant the killer knew me.

I went cold, locking down everything except the question at hand.

“Nothing I could recognize,” I said, finally. “It was sharp, like a lightning bolt, but if it was wild, it was a while ago.” There was a flavor to it, or more like a lack of flavor, like flavor had been stripped out of it. But I didn’t know how to say that without sounding like a crackpot, or that the hit to my head had been worse than it looked.

Nifty was working his jaw like he had a hard thought between his molars, and my gaze, untethered from anything my brain was doing, watched it in fascination.

“Someone … one of us did this?” Sharon sounded as though it was something unthinkable, something … obscene. As though somehow being Talent made you immune from the urge to kill.

I wished that were true. I knew all too well that it wasn’t.

“It came from through here,” Nick said. He was looking up at the ventilation system, holding a hand up like he was trying to coax something out of it. Which he was, actually. The arm moved, tracing a path down through the wall. “There’s wiring here that’s not normal. You’d expect to see it in a modern high-rise, not this place. Too jazzed, too much power. Like laying in a midnight snack of current.” He saw us all staring at him, and shrugged those skinny shoulders with a sort of rueful embarrassment. “I spent a summer working as a runner at a construction copyshop. I stared at a lot of blueprints, got a feel for wiring.”

“So whoever it was, they had to have planned this.” My brain was totally focused now, no hesitations or freaked-out gibbering. For the first time in months, I felt that I had, if not a direction, then at least a path underfoot. “Or at least knew that the wiring was there. Question is, was this guy the actual target? Or was someone just trying out the available power, and he was in the wrong place at the right time?”

“No.” Pietr’s voice was coming from the door, this time. How the hell did he do that? “The question is—why the hell are we still here, poking around trying to figure out who and why? What the hell does it have to do with us, other than we’ve now put our fingerprints all over the room for the cops to find?”

That was a damn good question.

“I’m not in the system,” Nick said, shrugging.

“I am,” Sharon said. “Standard security profile for some of the clients my firm works with. And having my profile flagged for a suspicious death would not be good for my career, since it looks like this job’s not going to pan out to anything.”

“So why are you still here?” Nifty asked, not quite getting up in her face, but close to it: he was challenging her to leave, to abandon us. And when the hell, I wondered, did we become “us”?

“Because …” Sharon let the sentence trail off, obviously trying to put her thoughts into some kind of order before speaking them.

“Because we’re curious,” I said, jumping in. “We don’t give a damn about this guy, particularly. We don’t know who he is, and we’ve got every reason to be pissed off and scared. But we want to know why, more.”

“That’s insane.” Nifty sounded like I’d just insulted his mother.

“Sure, but you got another reason for standing there with a dead guy’s day planner in your hand?”

Nifty looked down, and put the book back on the desk as though it was about to bite him. I’d made my point, though, and I could practically see his hackles go down.

“So what now, genius,” Sharon asked, but not pissed-sounding, more like she really did wonder what I was going to suggest.

So did I.

“Now you congratulate yourselves on a successful job interview.”

Sharon shrieked. So did Nifty, in a deeper but no less shrieky voice. Nick jumped back a full foot, and sparks of current appeared in his hands, deep blue and arcing all over his fingers. And Pietr, I swear to god, I was looking right at him and I saw him fade out of sight this time.

They all seemed like reasonable things to do, when a dead body sits up and starts talking to you.

“Stand down, people.” A door none of us noticed before slid open and another guy walked in. He was tall, taller even than Nifty, if half his mass, with orange-red hair tied back in a ponytail. The color looked natural, and a guy wearing four-hundred-dollar boots probably isn’t the sort to do Day-Glo dye jobs anyway. Flame-head walked past where Pietr had just been and offered a hand to our dead body. The DB took it, hauling himself to his feet.

They didn’t look a thing alike: flame-head was tall and skinny, and DB was squared-off and dark, but they stood together like bookends, totally unconscious of how they mirrored each other. My fifth-grade dance teacher used to try to hammer that kind of unconscious grace into us, mostly with abject failure.

I also noted now that DB was seriously hot. Not good-looking, the way Pietr was, or even Nifty’s dark, corn-fed handsome, but hot.

“How did you create the illusion you were dead?” Sharon demanded. “You had no pulse, no breath, no nothing!”

Flame turned to DB and smirked. “I told you I could do it.”

“And you were right,” DB said easily. “Get over it. Gloating’s bad for your digestion.”

That voice. That was the same voice I had heard on the answering machine.

“What the hell is going on here?” Nifty demanded, his body pulling up so he looked the way he must’ve to the guys who’d faced him across the scrimmage line: big, bad, and needing to hit something, hard. “Who the hell are you people?”

“You’re the guy who called,” Pietr said, looking at DB. “I recognize your voice.”

I wanted to say me, too, but I think the shock had seized up my vocal cords, because I couldn’t say a thing. Probably just as well; standing up and breathing, DB was the yummy, intense sort I really like, and I’d probably have embarrassed myself if I had been able to say anything. Flame wasn’t quite as yummy, but when you looked at him magically, oh wow. He had an inner core that seriously radiated, like …

The current that had knocked me sideways. It felt familiar because it was—it was the same signature as the current that shattered my scrying crystal last night.

Son of a spavined bitch. They had damn well better hire me. These bastards owed me.

“You wanted people who didn’t freak when faced with freakiness,” Nick said, as if he’d just figured out the last missing piece of a puzzle. “Whose first thought wasn’t to run, but to look.”

“And you all passed, with flying colors,” Flame said. He seemed to be the spokesperson of the two, stepping forward, literally, and taking the floor. “Even in the face of … unfortunate circumstances, all of you stepped forward and used your respective skills to observe and gather details, integrating information as it was brought forward rather than choosing a conclusion and then sticking to it no matter what.” Flame smiled at us, a wide, approving smile that looked false but somehow felt real. “You all worked together, as a team, despite having no reason to do so. Not a prima donna among the bunch.”