Laura Gilman - Pack of Lies

I forced myself to focus on his words, not the echo of tingling on my skin. “Yeah. I can see why they’d want this handled without a hint of impropriety on their part.” And that would explain the crowd that had gathered—they weren’t there for the ki-rin, not to support or gawk at it, anyway. And the Council boys had been there to protect it, not confine it. “Nice to know the Council thinks we can be of some use, even if it’s only to use us.”

All right, so I was bitter. The Council was split into regional areas, and half of them had refused to authorize their members to hire us … but the leadership was willing to use us when it suited their needs, to protect their privileged asses.

“Bonita …” J’s tone of voice was the same he’d used when I was missing the point during a lesson.

“Yeah, I know. It’s going to take time to win them over. I know.” My stomach wasn’t queasy anymore, and my skin didn’t tingle, but now my entire body was so very cold, so cold I couldn’t even shiver. It didn’t feel like shock or trauma, though—I knew those. It wasn’t even the emptiness of waiting to break, from before. It felt more like … like something had been cut out of me, where the outrage and fear should have been.

Weird. Very weird, discomforting, and I did not like. But if I said anything at all about it, J would freak.

I took a hit off my beer, and tried to wash the feeling away. “Well, we’re on the job now, and first look says this probably won’t take more than a day or two to wrap up and write a report. Yay us. What do you think will happen to the ki-rin?”

“For killing his companion’s attacker? A slap on the hooves, maybe. He would be within rights to demand reparation from the dead man’s kin, on the girl’s behalf. Every Council from here to Beijing would back him on that, if he did, and lonejacks …” He made a palms-up gesture. “Well, who knows how lonejacks will react to anything.”

I shook my head, rolling my beer bottle back and forth between my hands. I love J, but he’s a bigot in his own liberal way. Council and lonejack and fatae: the carefully delineated, political world that J lived in. I’d never had to worry about any of this before I became a Pup.

“And the girl?” I asked him, instead. “What rights does she have in all this?”

“She can take the survivor to court, if she …” J’s voice trailed off.

The bitterness surged to the fore again, and I grabbed onto it; anything other than that cold empty feeling. “Yeah. Take him to court, and not only does she have to relive the attack, but she has to explain what happened to the other guy, the one who actually attacked her. Oh, my oversize, horned intelligent magical companion killed him. With his horn. Yeah, a single slender horn, right in the middle of his forehead …”

I hiccupped, and took a long pull of the beer to cover the crack in my voice. “J?”

“Yes, Bonita?”

“Why?”

He didn’t pretend not to know what I was asking; he’d known me too long. “I don’t know, Bonita.” J had been a great mentor; still was, in a lot of ways. He’d always been straight with me, never lied, not even when I almost wished he would. “There are theories, and psychological jingo, but I’ve never understood how it translates into the human mind, thank god. I’ve just always been thankful that you grew up without encountering that sort of male, firsthand.” His voice was quiet, but I could hear the sorrow in it, for that girl, for me, for every girl who had something beautiful and joyful and honest taken from them for nothing more than selfish cruelty.

The cold forming under my skin cracked a little under the touch of his voice, and the itchy heat in my eyes promised a buildup of tears, but they didn’t come. We just sat there, and breathed in the quiet security of the library, of civilized behavior, until the daylight faded, leaving us in the shadows.

J reached out and turned on a lamp, bringing an amber glow into the room. “You’ll stay for dinner.”

It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway. “Please.”

A few hundred miles south in Manhattan, the same dusk was settling over the skyscrapers and brownstones, the sunset reflecting off the water and flashing last spears of light against the glass walls and windows of the financial district. Uptown, traffic was at rush-hour peak, but in the halls outside the PUPI offices, it was quiet. The seven-story building housed a dentist, a handful of CPAs, two lawyers, and a few offices whose signs didn’t give away their contents or purpose. On the bottom floor, there was a photographer who was rarely there, and a literary agency. Neither office had many visitors outside of UPS and FedEx deliveries, although those seemed to come every day.

By contrast, the office across the hall had a steady stream of people going in and out, the same seven people, usually in a group and often, as now, in the middle of a seemingly continuous conversation.

“We could …”

“No.”

“But …”

“No.” Venec’s growl warned the speaker not to push further. He had been itchy all day, morose and snappish, as though someone had shoved unbalanced current into his core, and he was in no mood to deal with the carping of overtired puppies.

There was a moving tangle of arms being thrust into coat sleeves and bags and backpacks being swung carelessly, and then they exited the office, Venec closing and locking the office door behind them.

“I don’t see why you don’t let us,” Nifty said, his voice calm and reasonable in a way that set Venec’s teeth on edge. “It’s not like—”

He cut the overeager PUPI off midsentence. “Because I said no and how many times will it take for me to say that until at least one of you listens?”

“Seven.” Sharon was positive.

“Four,” Nifty contradicted her.

“Eleven?” That was Nick, looking thoughtful.

Venec shook his head, feeling the exasperation simmer just under his skin. He really should know better by now, he really should. He’d scouted each of them, chosen them, trained them. The talkback came with the other traits he’d selected them for, no way around it. Mouthy and Talented, the pack of them.

On that thought, he paused and looked around for Pietr, who was the only one who hadn’t ventured a guess. “Where the hell is Pietr? Did we leave him in the bathroom or something?”

“I’m here.”

Sharon jumped, as the voice seemed to come from just at her left shoulder.

“I swear, I’m going to bell you,” she muttered. “Can’t you cough on a regular basis, or something?”

“I would, but you wouldn’t hear me.”

Venec frowned, listening in, this time intentionally. That had to be getting to be a sore point—Pietr swore he didn’t intentionally disappear when he got stressed, it just happened. God knew, there was enough stress in the office right now, after the day they’d had.

The usual reaction to having a stressful problem was to chew at it until it was solved. That was good, if they were on a hot trail. But they didn’t have enough information yet to solve it, so they’d start chewing on each other, instead. Part of his job was to prevent that. Bonnie’s need to get the hell out had been one he supported, even though he wished she’d said something to him beforehand. Now he needed to get the rest of them to go home as well, before he had to put a boot under their tails.

“Children, enough.” He put extra exasperation into his tone, not difficult to do right then. “Everyone go home. Or go to a bar, or a strip club or whatever it is that you do to blow off steam. You just can’t stay here.”

That was the rule he had invoked to get them to leave: nobody stayed late, not when neither of the Big Dogs—and yes, he knew what the team called them—were around. He had made that rule after their first investigation. His partner believed that, with his sister scolded and publicly shamed for her part in the death of the Null boy, her posse of anti-PUPI protesters wouldn’t do anything more against them. Ben was less certain of that, and not willing to trust any of his team on that chance. Besides, it gave him a good excuse to make sure they got a decent night’s sleep. His pups thought they were tough and tougher, and they were, but it wasn’t a much-older couple this time, or disembodied bits packed neatly in a cooler. It was a young girl, their own age. He might only be ten years older, but he had seen more than all of them put together. The case was shaking them, even if they didn’t realize it. Better they take a step away now, get a breath, do something normal.