Laura Gilman - Hard Magic

The subway was packed with people going off to their jobs, some of them slow-eyed and grumpy, others bopping along to their music, or nose-deep in newspapers or magazines. I didn’t even bother to try to get a seat, just grabbed a handrail and concentrated on not focusing on the hum of current running through the subway, for fear of accidentally damaging someone’s electronics. I was used to ignoring the hum of electronics in the dorm, but that was familiar ground … hopefully in a few weeks, this would be, too.

I got out at my stop, along with a dozen other people, and wasn’t all that surprised to see Nick loitering outside the building when I walked up. I’d figured he’d take the offer, too. He was wearing dark blue jeans and a cotton sweater over it, brown like his eyes, and he looked less scrawny than he had on Tuesday. Weird.

“I did some looky-loo on our bosses,” he said, without even a good morning. “Ian Stosser’s Council, like you. Major hotshot. Sat on the Council itself, out in Chicago.”

I’d known that already, thanks to J’s ranting. See, there’s Council, and then there’s Council. They’re split into regions and each Council Board—also less formally known as Mage Council, from waybackwhen days—handles the stuff that comes up in their region. Each one’s independent, and while a couple of Councils can get together to do something specific, nobody’s got more say than the other, and you don’t get say over anything that happens outside your region. It’s all pretty strict, and goes on the philosophy that if there’s trouble, Talent will find it, fling it, and generally make it worse, if left to their own devices. J hadn’t been very complimentary on Stosser’s attitude or his ideas during his rant last night, but he’d been forced to admit that the man got things done, mainly by a combination of hard-nosed arrogance and sheer slippery charm.

“He got kicked out of Chicago for something nobody’s talking about,” Nick went on. “Which means it was probably seriously embarrassing to someone, else the gossip would be everywhere.”

“Several someones, is what I heard,” I agreed. “My mentor knows people who know people, and even they don’t know what happened. But Stosser wasn’t kicked out. He left under his own power. That means he won, whatever it was.” If he had lost, he’d have been buried. Powerwise, not literally, far as I knew, although there was that risk, too. That was how it worked, at those levels.

“Huh. Means he’s got smarts as well as power, probably. Reason enough to throw in with him,” Nick said. “Even if he is Council.”

“Venec isn’t,” I said, trying to ignore the slam on the Council. Wasn’t anything to me, was it?

“Nope, he’s pure lonejack. Quiet, though. Wherever he’s been, it was behind the scenes. Don’t know how those two hooked up. Every source I checked knew Venec’s name, but nobody had anything to say, good or bad.”

“He’s the dangerous one,” Pietr said, making us both jump.

“How the hell do you do that?” I demanded, more than a little irritable. “Damned Retriever, that’s what you are.”

“Not really,” Pietr said. “Don’t you want to know why he’s dangerous?”

“No.” I did, of course I did. But be damned if I’d give him the satisfaction, after he made me jump like that. His gray gaze lingered on me, solemn as a judge, and I couldn’t read a damn thing that might be going on inside.

Unlike Nick, seeing Nifty come around the corner was a surprise. He’d said he needed a job, yeah, but I just hadn’t gotten a joining-up kind of vibe from the former athlete.

“Are you people going in, or are you waiting for the bagel fairy to come by and drop off a pump and a schmear?”

Nick and Pietr looked blankly at Nifty, like he’d just spoken Swahili or something. I just shook my head, amused.

“You totally stole that line from someone else,” I accused him, following the boys into the foyer, where the same invisible someone buzzed us in the moment we approached the door. I listened, but still couldn’t pick up any hint of current in use, which just made me more determined to track it down as soon as I had a spare moment.

“My coach,” he admitted, holding the door for me. “I don’t even know what a pump is. I just hope it’s not rude.”

“Pumpernickel. A kind of bread. Or bagel, in that case. You haven’t been in New York long, have you?” If he was a native East Coaster, I’d eat J’s favorite hat.

“Nope. I was in Detroit, talking to someone about another job, when I got the message. I guess I’m going to have to find a place to live … you know of anywhere?”

“Soon as I find something, I’ll let you know.” The hotel was nice for a short term, but I needed to find an apartment. Something I paid for, not J, and that was going to be another argument. Or maybe not. We’d see. Part of the directed, non-mercenary vibe I was grooving on right now included less of a need to be totally independent. NYC was expensive.

The office door now had a small, nicely discreet copperplate sign on it: PUPI Inc.

“Woof,” Nick said, half joking.

“Woof-woof,” Nifty echoed, an octave deeper, as though he had to prove he was the bigger dog. Like there was any doubt of that, physically at least. Save me from boys and their egos ….

“That makes me the bitch, and don’t you forget it.” I really hoped Sharon was going to take up the job offer, too. Much as being surrounded by males could be fun, it also got boring after a while, and being the only female in the pack was not going to be a laugh riot on bad days. The vibe I’d gotten off Sharon yesterday was that she might be a control freak know-it-all, but she wasn’t going to be a tight-ass about it. We’d be fine.

I hoped. I really, really hoped. I liked having female friends, but my college buds were scattered to the winds of employment now, and without e-mail or a cell phone, it was going to be tough to keep up with them. Knowing that it was inevitable didn’t make the knowledge any less painful, so I tried not to linger on it, instead looking forward. New job. New friends. New—

“Wow.”

Nifty had gone in through the office door first, and stopped so suddenly I almost broke my nose against his back. “Hello? What? Brick wall, do you mind moving?”

“Oh, sorry.” He went all the way into the office, and I heard Nick behind me say something rude when he ran into my back as I stopped dead, too.

“Sorry,” I muttered in turn, and moved aside. Nick, still pissed, didn’t even look, just walked in … and then stopped dead.

“Ah, glad you’re here.” Stosser was sitting on a new, damned comfy-looking chocolate-brown sofa, looking up at us over a clipboard on his lap. His orange-red hair was tied back in a braid, and he was dressed in black jeans and a black pullover, making him look even more like some kind of satanic candle. “Try to be prompt in the future. We have a lot to hammer into your heads and not a lot of time to do it in.”

“Good morning to you, too,” Nick muttered, sounding offended, and not just because we’d done a three-body pileup in front of the boss.

“Right. Good morning. Sorry.” Stosser’s reportedly famous charm made a brief appearance, and then he turned it off. “You all dressed appropriately, good. Come with me.”

He stood up and walked through the now totally redecorated space that had blown our minds for a moment, clearly expecting us to follow. The half-assed kitchenette of yesterday was now a full beverage station, with a brand-new coffee-maker, a hot-water dispenser, a wet-sink, and an open cabinet filled with plain white mugs and boxes of really nice teas and coffees. There was also a larger refrigerator that, I was guessing, had real cream in it now. The old rental-style waiting room furniture had been replaced with the brown sofa and a matching loveseat over a dark cream carpet where there’d been linoleum before. A bookcase took up the entire length of the wall, next to the door into the inner office, and was filled with what looked like textbooks. The room seemed larger now, somehow, although I knew that it had to be an optical illusion. Right?