Location and privacy were important.
PUPI had a problem that most small start-ups didn’t face: We were routinely tossing around a lot of current during training. Current, the source of our magic, ran alongside electricity like horses in a herd, and sometimes they did the dominance thing. When that happened … well, you learned to be careful, and work as far away from delicate electronics as you could.
Going out into the forest for privacy the way they used to in the Bad Old Days wasn’t really feasible, though—Central Park was just as wired as SoHo these days, anyway, and having a bunch of twentysomethings spellcasting in public might raise an eyebrow or two. Or maybe not; this was New York City, after all. Venec liked to keep our training in the office, though, so the Guys had modified the wiring when they did the other renovations to make sure that we didn’t short out the entire building’s electrical system, no matter what we threw at it.
But while we did most of our training in the largest workroom, and almost all the casual gatherings in the break room—where, not coincidentally, the coffeemaker lived—the briefings were held in the smallest office at the far end of the hall where Ian Stosser now held court.
We didn’t have many meetings here—maybe one a month—but we’d already established a routine, doing a subtle push-and-shove to get at the three armchairs that fit in the space in front of Ian’s desk. As usual, Nifty claimed the largest one, since he held on to the muscled bulk that had made him such a hot draft prospect in college. Sharon claimed the other on the basis of a short skirt not really suited for sitting on the floor, and Pietr ghosted into the third chair in that spooky way he had before anyone saw him moving.
Nick and I were relegated to sitting on the floor. Again. Thankfully I’d opted for black cargo pants and a black hip-length sweater today, in honor of the still-raw April weather outside. Spring in New York City was better than spring in Boston, but not by much. I tucked my legs up in front of me, elbows on my knees, and watched while Venec took his usual spot, holding up the wall behind Stosser’s desk.
Ian Stosser and Benjamin Venec. The Big Dogs. The two men were an interesting contrast, and not just physically. Even after all these months, we didn’t know much about Benjamin Venec, who was a closemouthed bastard when he wasn’t tearing us new ones in the name of keeping us smart and alive, but Ian Stosser was—on the surface—an open book. High-placed in the Midwest Council once upon a time, he had made a very public break with them about a year ago. A few months after that, he came to the East Coast with the idea of holding Talent—both Council and the Unaffiliateds, or lonejacks—accountable for criminal misbehavior of magic. To do that, he created PUPI.
Why? What had happened in Chicago to send him here? That was where the book closed and not even my mentor, a man of considerable high-level connections himself, could get a read.
With Stosser’s reputation, and the tendency of some Talent to misuse their skills, you’d think people would welcome us with open arms, glad that someone was there to ferret out wrongdoers … not exactly. The first few months we’d been open for business had been tough. Not everyone in the Cosa Nostradamus thought having us poking our noses into magical crimes was the best thing since sliced bread. Stosser’s own sister was opposed to the very idea of PUPI, enough that she tried to get us shut down by any means possible.
Having the office rewired had saved us when one of those means, involving a current-strike against the building, coincided with the killer we were trying to take down deciding to take us on directly. Saved us—but not a teenage boy who had been in the elevator when the rest of the building went off-line.
I still occasionally had nightmares about that.
In the eight months since the boy died, and Little Sister had been disciplined, nobody had taken potshots at us—physical or magical. We’d even gotten a few jobs; a jewelry heist, the organ-legging gig, but that didn’t mean we were wanted yet, or trusted. We had to do everything perfect just to be considered acceptable, and never mind that what we were doing—creating investigative tools that gave measured and quantified results out of a naturally chaotic and individualized power source—was totally made up as we went along. No pressure, right. I knew for a fact that Sharon was developing an ulcer, and I’d started chewing my fingernails again.
And all that got us here, waiting in Stosser’s de facto office, hoping that this might be the job to finally break that last hesitation, and make us legitimate.
Venec closed the door behind us, for some reason—if someone Translocated into the office, we’d have bigger problems than them overhearing us—and Stosser dropped the news.
“No time to give you a full briefing—this one’s hot, and might get hotter. But for once, somebody with a bit of authority used their brains instead of their hair spray, and had us called in right away, so we have a chance to actually pull something off the scene.” Ian paused, his gaze meeting each of us in turn, assessing us the way he always did, like he was ready to demand the impossible. “It’s hot, and it’s ugly. A girl was attacked early this morning, downtown, an attempted rape. Her companion murdered one of the assailants and partially disemboweled the other.”
I could feel Nick, who was sitting beside me, shudder a little, although I wasn’t sure which of the events caused him to react that way. I wasn’t exactly cackling with glee at this assignment, either. Murder was … I wasn’t jaded, but I’d seen a lot of death already. Rape? Okay, that was a trigger-point for any female, no matter how tough you were, but he’d said attempted rape. The disembowelment … that was, um, new. And carried a nasty visual I wanted very badly to get rid of. Thanks, boss.
Behind Stosser, Venec’s heavy gaze held steady, but there was a twitch over his left eye that gave it away. Big Dog was a hard-ass, but I knew from personal experience that there was actual give-a-damn under that bastardized exterior.
“So why’d we get called in? I mean, if they caught the guy, and it was obviously self-defense or near enough …” Nifty was asking the practical question, beating Sharon to the punch. We were, in theory, all equal to each other, but like any pack there were alphas and omegas, and those two competed for lead the same way they fought for the chairs, using every angle they had short of stomping over each other. Sometimes I thought it was just Venec’s glare that kept the stomping from happening. It wasn’t that they didn’t like each other—they did. We all got along fine. They were just fierce competitors; stomping was what they did for fun.
“You’re right,” Stosser said. “It should have been an open-and-shut case, none of our business, except for two things.” He paused, as though he was trying to choose his words carefully. Anything that made Ian Stosser hesitate was not going to be pretty. I braced myself, mentally.
“One, both the victim and the perps are Talent—” someone snorted, Talent being no proof against being a scumbag “—and two, the accused killer is a ki-rin.”
That made the room go quiet. I felt something catch in my chest: not pain, but something fierce and hot. A ki-rin. Dear god and a merciful universe, a ki-rin, here, in the city. A ki-rin, accused of murder.
I suddenly understood why things moved so fast on this one—and why we were called in. If anything went wrong, we were going to take the fall.
“This needs to be as clean and as tight as a waterproof drum,” the boss man said, standing up, his words confirming my fears. “I want everyone on this, right now. So let’s move, people.”
We moved.
two
Normally we didn’t all haul ass to a site—we didn’t really have a normal yet, even after eight months—but Stosser had indicated all of us, and so all of us went.
Well, all but one. “You