Laura Gilman - Pack of Lies

The apple tasted sour in my mouth, and my beloved, comfortable space suddenly felt shabby and sad. I spit the apple into my hand, tossed the entire thing into the garbage can, and without a ping of warning—or asking permission—I Translocated my sorry ass to J’s place.

When a teenager starts showing signs of magical ability, they’re assigned a mentor, someone who will take them through the stages, teach them what they need to know and help them figure out their strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes it’s a parent or cousin, but more often it’s someone not related, a friend of the family with a skill level close to yours, or a particularly good rapport with kids.

Ideally everyone mentors, at some point, but the reality is that not everyone’s good at it. And it’s important to be good at it—you’ve got another person’s life depending on your ability to teach them properly. We’re taught one-on-one, not in classrooms, and the mentor-student relationship trumps almost every other bond we have, even after the mentorship ends.

In my case, Joseph Cetala was more than a mentor—he’d been standing in loco parentis since I was eleven. Long story-short version was I went from being the only child of a ne’er-do-well lonejack carpenter to the live-in student of a Boston lawyer/Council muckety-muck with contacts in the White House … and maybe even the Kremlin, for all I knew. By the time I came along he’d retired from all that, and just did some very quiet and occasional consulting of the sort you don’t talk about. J hadn’t been real happy with my going to work for Stosser and Venec—he wanted me somewhere safer, like a paralegal for a cushy law firm, or teaching in an inner-city school—but he was experienced enough and honest enough to admit that PUPI was needed, and that I was good at what I did.

That didn’t mean he didn’t worry. I might not tell him the shit that went down when we were on a case, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think that he didn’t hear about it, eventually. We’d reached a compromise. There was a lurking fatae with the inappropriate name of Bobo who occasionally showed up late at night to walk me home when things got rough—or Bobo thought they might get rough—that soothed J’s discomfort, and we never talked about the dangers of my job.

Translocation only takes a few seconds, but it’s a major power drain for most of us, messing with natural physics in ways that supported the whole “indistinguishable from magic” thing Zaki—my dad—used to quote. Nifty, who was our best practical theorist, had tried more than once to explain it, but all I cared about tonight was that it took me home.

“Bonita.” J was in his early 70s, with fine patrician features and a shock of immaculately groomed white hair, and you’d think he’d greet you in the library of his ten-room apartment wearing a tuxedo and carrying a brandy snifter. Reality wore a pair of ratty jeans and a Harvard sweatshirt, and carried a bottle of Stella. He didn’t look at all surprised to see me. He never did. “Would you like a beer?”

I would.

I dumped my shoes on the outrageously expensive carpet, curled up in the security of a leather club chair, and cradled my bottle in both hands, letting the condensation soak into my skin. The antiques in my apartment all came from J’s collection, but he’d never had a hands-off attitude; to him, furniture was what you sat on, and a sofa was for naps as well as tête-à-tête. I knew better than to put my bottle down without a coaster, though.

We did the quiet chitchat for a while; he’d been down to NYC to take me out to dinner just last week, so there really wasn’t much new to share, unless I wanted to talk about the non-thing that kept showing up between me and Venec, which I didn’t, or the cold empty echoing thing where my emotions should be, which I really didn’t.

“Hey,” I said suddenly, realizing that something was missing. “Where’s Rupert?” Rupert was J’s dog, an aged sheepdog who had as much to do with raising me as J did.

“Vet. His stomach decided to disagree with him. I’m having them do a full checkup, just in case. He’ll be home tomorrow morning, don’t worry.”

Rupe was almost fifteen. Anything that required an overnight stay at the vet worried me. And I knew it was worrying J, but if he didn’t want to talk about it, we weren’t going to talk about it. Time to change the subject. I thought about regaling him with the story of Jennie’s party last night, or the way the hot doctor across the way from my apartment threw her most recent lover out wearing only his boxers and one sock—but finally had to accept the fact that I hadn’t come here for distraction, but after-the-fact mentoring.

“We have a new job.” He’d heard already; I knew he’d heard from the way his expression didn’t change at all. J was a damned good listener, though; he just sat back and let me talk, or not, as I wanted.

I didn’t want. It came out anyway.

“Girl, a Talent, barely out of mentorship, probably. Companion to a ki-rin.” J was one of the most traveled, most experienced Talent I’d ever met. He knew how rare they are, here and in their native country. It’s not like griffons, breeding two kits at a time, or the damned piskies, who populate like squirrels. Ki-rin are magical, even to us. If the perps had hurt it … I shuddered at the thought. If the ki-rin had been hurt, those rubberneckers would have been an angry mob of fatae, not human looky-loos. “They were out for a night clubbing, or she was, and he’s keeping her company. Two guys, Talent, jump them on the way home. Jump her. The ki-rin had fallen behind a little. It was late, his mane is pure white so he isn’t a youngster anymore, I guess.” I paused, suddenly struck by the thought. “How old do ki-rin get, anyway?”

J hadn’t moved while all this was pouring out of me, sitting in his usual armchair, legs crossed at the ankle. “I don’t know. It’s considered quite rude to ask.”

“Huh. Well, it … didn’t get to her in time. Killed the first attacker, wounded the second, I guess it didn’t kill him because he didn’t get the chance to do anything?” My hands were colder than the bottle I was holding. “The story seems straightforward, you know? Bad guys do bad thing, are killed—or maimed—by the good guy, survivor gets jail time. We’ve been asked to investigate only to make sure everything’s clean, that it was self-defense, I guess. Stosser didn’t say outright, but the only one who’d hire us for something like this, where there’s no money involved, or a revenge motive, would either be family or Council, and I got the feeling it wasn’t family. Don’t know why Council would be taking such a hard-line interest, though.”

Council was for Council members, which meant human, not fatae; even if a ki-rin was involved, their instinct would be to sweep it under the rug as fast as possible to protect their people. Had the dead guy been Council? It wasn’t impossible—Council was the country club association of Talent, and there were as many ass-wipes in country clubs as there were hanging on street corners. But then they’d be trying to cast blame away from their man, not hire us to find out the actual facts.

No, something didn’t feel right. I wondered what Venec thought of this case, and in that thought I could almost feel his hand on mine again, the smooth, firm touch sending another round of current-shock through my system, then flowing back out again, leaving me with a hitch in my breath.

“PR concerns, I suspect,” J said. “There has been some … unpleasantness toward the fatae recently.” He shifted, leaning forward from the hips. It was a tell he had, a giveaway sign when he was thinking hard about something. “In New York, and in Philly. Nothing here in Boston that I’ve heard. Minor annoyances, mostly, although some have become physical. Bigotry picking up a stick. I can imagine that the Council is concerned that this incident of yours not spark a greater conflagration. As it might, with a ki-rin involved.”