Pack of Lies

“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 take them,” Venec said to Ian as we grabbed coats and kits out of the closet and headed for the door. “I’ll see what I can drag out of the unusual suspects.”

Overhearing that made me feel better about this case. Based on the rather interesting individuals he brought in to lecture us on lock picking, surveillance, scams, and other things your mother wouldn’t want you to know, Venec had collected an assortment of contacts in various low places. When we got back, I’d lay money that he’d have a full dossier on anything and everything there was to know about the people involved, even better than the official files.

Stosser looked like he was going to argue, then nodded instead. He wasn’t happy about it, though, and shoved us into the elevator with a look on his face that made us all hush our usual chatter. Not that anyone was feeling much in the way of wisecracks. Organ-leggers lent themselves to the bad jokes, the more disgusting or punny the better. Attempted rape and actual disembowelment, not so much. Add in a ki-rin … We were all quiet, locked in our own thoughts, in the time it took to get to the lobby and out to the avenue.

There was an SUV with TLC plates already waiting outside our building. Obviously the boss had made some calls before he brought us in. Stosser got shotgun, the rest of us were in back, elbow-to-rib and knee-to-knee. The car came with a manic driver who swung through the morning traffic like he’d been a Shanghai cabbie in another life, shoving us around even as packed-in as we were. Nobody complained. The subway might have had more room, but it would have taken too long. Since we opened our doors for business, the main problem had been that we weren’t called in until after everyone else had tromped all over the scene and made things harder for us to sort out. Today, we’d been given time to get in and take a look while things were clean … but the clock was ticking and the twenty minutes it took us was nineteen minutes too long.

I sat back in the seat, stuck in the middle, trying to ignore Nifty’s elbow hitting my ribs, and Nick’s cheap, toxic cologne in my nose, while Sharon and Pietr got the very back seat with all our kits. Four basic black hardcases and one bright red one: Pietr’s, as though to make up for his unwanted but useful ability to disappear when you were looking straight at him. Sharon had added a discreetly stylin’ silver tag to hers, and mine had a glittering 3-D ice-spider decal on the side, just where anyone looking to steal it would see it and be freaked out. Nifty and Nick didn’t bother with anything, far as I could tell.

I stared up at the ceiling as we zoomed through lights that were yellow-turning-red, trying not to guess at what we were going to find on the scene. The trick to scene investigations was to look without expecting to find anything, examine without assumption. Current was directed by what we desired; even without the words of a spell, you could possibly create something just by assuming strongly enough that it was there.

Or so Venec warned us, at least twice a week.

The driver let us out on the corner, and zoomed off like he had to be in Queens three seconds later. The minute we got out, I was shivering inside my coat, but it wasn’t because of the sharp wind coming off the river. Something had walked over my spine, and that was never a good thing. I had a slight touch of precog, what my mentor J called “the kenning,” and it told me this was a bad place to be. Bad things happened here.

No choice, though. This was the job: investigating bad things.

The others were already walking toward the scene, and I had to stretch my legs to catch up. We weren’t the only ones interested; there was a small crowd already gathered around the scene of the attack, maybe twenty people, and even from the street you could tell that the mood was not good. Sometimes there was a weird party atmosphere when people rubbernecked a crime scene. Not here. I could practically smell the current on them, crackling like ozone, and I knew the rest of the team was getting the same vibe: Talent, wanting to know why another Talent was dead, and a second wounded, at the hands—horn—of a fatae.

Normally interactions between fatae and humans in the Cosa Nostradamus were cautious but healthy, but something like this … I didn’t need Stosser’s warning still ringing in my ears to know that things would get a lot worse, and fast, if we didn’t get the evidence sorted and delivered, soon.

I wondered, suddenly, why so many Talented bystanders were here. Coincidence? Or had someone put the word out, in the time it took for us to get called in? And if so … why, and who?

Questions I didn’t have answers for, yet.

Someone in the crowd noticed our arrival, and a low mutter went up, like the first roll of thunder. Hot and ugly. Ian had it on the nose.

Stosser had already given the crowd a once-over, and was issuing orders. “Cholis. Run the tape. Lawrence, crowd-watch.”

“On it, boss,” Nifty said, and he and Pietr moved toward the crowd, walking like men with purpose. The tape wasn’t the yellow crime-scene tape so beloved of Null cops, but a thin red extrusion of current that flickered and snapped in the cold air as they spun it out, walking a circuit around the scene. The tape was invisible to Nulls, but warned Talent and fatae alike away from the investigation. If they trespassed, Pietr, our rope-man, would know.

“Hey!” Pietr scowled at a lanky figure that brushed against the wire leaning in to get a better look. “Back off!”

“Or what, little man?” The intruder—your basic suburban white-boy macho wannabe in clothing too expensive to be tough—loomed over Pietr, who seemed to almost fade from sight, the way he did when stressed. There was an instinctive urge to go to Pietr’s defense, but I checked it. We would all be given our particular assignments, and that wasn’t mine. Nicholas James Lawrence wasn’t all that big, for an ex-college linebacker, but he presented like a big-ass mofo when he wanted to. Nobody threatened a coworker when Nifty was around.

Satisfied that the guys had things in-hand, I turned my attention back to the boss. Ian’s long orange-red hair was covered by a black wool watch cap, making him tougher to identify at a distance. I wasn’t sure if that was intentional or not, since he was normally a flamboyant publicity-magnet. Oh, hell, Ian never did anything unintentionally. He was letting us go public, and playing it close and quiet himself. Interesting. Not useful, right now, but interesting.

“How virgin is the scene?” I heard the word come out of my mouth and winced. I’m not normally big on tact, but that had been particularly ill-chosen even for me.

Stosser didn’t even seem to notice, although Sharon’s cheek twitched a little in response. “Thankfully, one of ours was with the first responders, and was quicker on the draw than most of his peers. Paramedics took the human bodies, but the cops haven’t gone over the scene yet.” A grim smile touched his face. “New York’s finest decided to wait for someone to come down and take care of the ki-rin before they approached the scene itself, so the area’s about as untouched as we’re going to get.”

I couldn’t blame the cops—I wouldn’t want to deal with a ki-rin in a bad mood, either.

“Not that there’s any doubt of who did what,” Stosser went on, “but I am informed that the fatae community’s already screaming for blood—more blood, I mean. They don’t like that a ki-rin’s been shown disrespect, disrespect being anything other than kissing its hooves in abject adoration.”

Wow. That was the bitterest I’d ever head the boss man get. Normally he left the snide comments to Venec.

“What kind of blood do they want?” Nick asked.

“Who the hell knows.” He seemed to remember he was talking to staff, not himself, and I saw the usual cool exterior go back up. “Our contact thinks the fact that there was any investigation by Nulls at all set them off. They’re already demanding that the ki-rin be released, and nobody’s even questioned it yet.

“The one thing everyone agrees on is that this needs to be cleared up and closed down as soon as possible, if not sooner. That means we have to determine exactly what happened, who did what, and in what order.”

“That’s what you built us to do,” I said. And then, since he hadn’t really answered me before, I prompted him again. “The scene?”

Stosser looked up at the sky, checking the thickness of the clouds. Normally we—Talent—like storms, since electrical storms are natural generators of current, but rain right now would seriously screw things up by compromising the scene. Magical trace washed away the same as physical, especially if there’s lightning involved—current from the electric bolts could wipe the slate clean in one flash—and being wet made me look like a drowned albino rat.

“Like I said, reasonably untouched, for NYPD values of reasonable. Ground’s been trampled by a couple-three cops, one of whom is our first-responder lonejack.”

Poor guy must have shit a brick when he saw the ki-rin, and realized what he’d gotten. Ki-rin were not only rare, they were ancient, as a breed. Like dryads and greater dragons, they were given respect by every other fatae breed, and any Talent with a lick of sense or tradition. We were lucky our first responder didn’t panic, and luckier still that he called the Council, and not one of the lonejack elders. The Cosa Nostradamus’s relationship with the NYPD is a long and fragmented one, but something like this was going to get every alarm jangling everywhere, and the Council—much as a lonejack would hate to admit it—was the best way to handle things. Council had the protocol.

“We have a signature on the cop?” Signature was the way we identified Talent, the way their current “felt.” It was individual, like a fingerprint—but you had to know what it looked like, first. Problem was there wasn’t a database for us to check, which mostly made identifying a particular signature near-impossible unless we had access to everyone on the scene, to tag them for comparison, and rule them out of any evidence we collected.

“Not yet. Nick, go find and fetch.”

Nick rolled his eyes, then saluted crisply, and turned on his heel and headed out into the crowd. That left me and Sharon.

“The deceased has been carted off to the morgue, while his companion is on his way to the hospital, presumably doped to the gills.” That was standard for Talent in those situations—current is only under our control by conscious effort: when stressed, we can go haywire. Pietr was unusual in that he faded from view as a protective measure—most of us just shorted out sensitive electronics like, oh, lifesupport systems and finely calibrated medical apparatuses. Emergency-room staff hated to see us coming.

Ian went back to issuing orders. “Mendelssohn, I want you working the crowd. Listen, don’t talk. If there’s anyone out there with more than a prurient interest, or says anything—anything—that gives you a twitch, I want to know, immediately.” While the Guys had us stretch in training, or on low-intensity cases, when we were on a sticky job they preferred to match people up with their native skills, and Sharon had a seventh sense about if people were lying or not. My teammate, characteristically stylish in a long black suede coat and a black wool beret over her blond hair, nodded and went off to do our master’s bidding

And that left me. And the scene. No surprise. I didn’t need to hear the band playing to know what my marching orders were.

“You okay with this?” Ian generally played the compassionate soul to Venec’s hard-ass, but he really wasn’t much on the touchy-feely when it came to us, more likely to toss us in without a by-your-leave. I blinked at his concern, wondering what triggered that, and then shrugged it off. No way I was going to make him think I couldn’t handle it.

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

He lifted the wire, the spell recognizing his signature and not sending an alarm, and we entered the crime scene.

Like I said, everyone on the team had their strength. If Sharon was a truth-scryer, I was a gleaner. I figured that my recall, both visual and factual, was one of the reasons I’d been recruited. Venec had run me through endless tests and scenarios, honing that ability and tying it into a cantrip we used to capture the scene intact. They’d tried, first, to teach everyone the spell—that hadn’t worked out well. So unless it was an emergency, it was just me. My job here was to walk the scene, gathering as much information as I could, both physical and magical, and re-create it later for the rest of the team to study.

Since joining PUPI, I’d gleaned murder scenes, dipped into the minds of pathological abusers, and—Venec’s idea of training—skimmed the hot emotions of a rabid Salamander. Reading the scene of a self-defense killing where we knew the identity of all the players should have been a piece of proverbial.

Except the guy’d been killed because he’d tried to rape a ki-rin companion. Scum, and stupid, and I was not looking forward to getting my mental fingers into what that left behind.

That thought drew my attention to what Stosser had said, about the NYPD not wanting to touch the scene until the ki-rin had been dealt with. What sort of trace did a ki-rin leave behind? I let my gaze pass over the scene, looking and yet not looking, and found myself noticing a shadowed corner near one of the riverside buildings about a hundred yards from the scene where two men—older, suited, officious-looking, and couldn’t be more obviously Council if they’d had it branded on their left buttocks—had the accused killer contained.

My breath caught in my throat, despite my determination not to be impressed. I’m hardly a country bumpkin, but a ki-rin … my god. One of the most exotic and magnificent of the fatae, the nonhumans. They’re sometimes called Asian unicorns, but that was so far off the mark to be useless. A unicorn was a horse with a horn and an attitude. The ki-rin were … It was too far away to see details, but I knew the description, same as any halfway-trained Talent. Body of a stag, mane of a lion, head of a dragon—and yeah, a single slender horn growing from the center of the dragonlike head. Wise, fierce, compassionate, truth-seeking … and, like European unicorns, associating only with women of untouched virtue.

Okay, obviously I wasn’t going to get close-up and personal with one anytime soon. Considering the sole example present was currently pacing back and forth, making the suits with him display some seriously cautious body language, that was fine by me. Some glorious legends could remain legend.

It did make me wonder about the sexual experience of the guys talking to it, though, and—more to the investigation—why they were keeping it there instead of whisking it off … somewhere. Especially if the fatae community already had their knickers in a twist about anyone questioning it. Oh. Oh, no …

“We don’t have to …” I asked Stosser, with a twitch of my fingers in the ki-rin’s direction.

He followed my fingers, and shook his head. “No.”

“Good.” Because if the local looky-loos were upset about it being asked to step aside while the scene was cleared, I didn’t want to think about what they’d do to the person who actually interrogated it.

That left one unpleasant bit still to be done. “You going to … interview the woman?”

She’d been taken to the local hospital—the same one her accused assailant was currently being treated in—and released. But we needed her statement, before things got even more muddled in her head.

“I thought that would be best,” he said.

Understatement. Ian Stosser was the public face of PUPI not only because he was the founder, but also because he was a PR schmoozer par excellence. He looked you in the eye and every bit of his compassion and empathy and intelligence was focused on you, your problem, and he existed only to solve that problem for you. It was not entirely a sham—he did care, and he did want to solve the problem, otherwise he would never have gotten into this line of work. But Ian could and would kick it up a notch or seven. In a word: charisma. Natural, and magical. But he was also a bulldog when he was after something, as we knew to our own bruises.

“Yeah. Boss?”

He paused, one narrow red eyebrow cocked under that stupid watch cap.

“The girl …” I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say. Actually, I knew exactly what I wanted to say, I just wasn’t sure how to do it without getting fired.

He showed his teeth in a reassuring smile, a Stosser specialty. “I’ll be gentle, Torres. Get to work.”

With that, Stosser headed off for, I presume, the hospital. I watched him disappear into the crowd, then turned back to look over the scene. He was right: Time for me to do what I did, before anyone muddied the scene, or the cops came back and kicked us out, or anything else came along to make the job tougher.

I hesitated a moment, looking over the ground. We were down in what had once been the meatpacking district, alongside the Hudson River. It’d been prettied up over the past few years, and the city had put in walkways and greenery so during the summer it was a nice enough place to skateboard or bike, or walk your dog, but on an overcast, blustery almost-but-not-quite-yet spring day? Not so nice. Why had they been out here before dawn? A ki-rin wasn’t the sort to club it up … but he wouldn’t be able to say no to his companion, I bet. She might not be having sex, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t like to dance.

So. Run through the probable scene, capture the details, gather the pieces. I turned slowly, letting my gaze take in the entire area. The woman and her companion, maybe flushed and tired after a night out, had been walking along the path, there. It’s not quite dawn, the visibility’s crap, maybe some of the streetlamps flickered or went out. They’re talking, maybe laughing, maybe arguing. Had she been drinking, drugging? Ki-rin companions were virgins, but I never heard they had to be pure every other way, too. And who knew what a ki-rin did for entertainment. So. Maybe not too steady on all six legs, maybe not seeing so well, and they came up to the building there, where the shrubs were planted, and … two men had … approached them? Jumped out at them?

I cast another glance over to where the two Council flunkies had been. As though they’d heard me wondering, they were now leading the ki-rin away, flanking it like a suited honor guard, to where a small trailer-van had pulled up to the curb. The ki-rin was smaller than they looked in pictures, with a pattern of marks on its linen-white neck that didn’t look natural—bruises, maybe, or current-burns? A Null, someone who couldn’t use current, didn’t know about the fatae, might have been confused in the predawn light, might have thought that it was a really large dog, or maybe the girl was walking alongside a pony, or something. Or maybe not even seen it, if they were completely Null. That happened, sometimes: Something in a Null’s brains just refused to acknowledge the presence of the supernatural, even when it was right in front of them, like not being able to see blue or green: current-blind.

A Null might not have seen it. The would-be rapists had been Talent, both of them. A Talent, ignoring the presence of a ki-rin? Impossible. Insane. Maybe they were high, or drunk, or …

Staring at the landscaping wasn’t going to tell me anything, and we only had a small window before the NYPD came back to reclaim the scene. Time to stop avoiding, and do my job.

I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven …” In the exhale, I sank into myself, burrowing down into my core, gathering my magic to me.

During my mentoring period, J told me that everyone saw their core differently; for me, it was a tangle of threads and cables, neon-bright blues and greens and yellows. Personal magic, gathered from external sources and hoarded; like a tank of gas, if you ran out you were screwed.

For once, I had more than enough current gathered and stored; the trick was to control it, make it do what you wanted and only what you wanted. As I counted down from ten, I closed my eyes and pushed the soles of my boots firmly against the asphalt of the jogging track. My body was still, but my current was reaching down, finding the bedrock deep underneath, grounding in that solid base. That allowed me to use more current without worrying about affecting anyone around me—or, hopefully, their electronics.

When I opened my eyes again, deep in a working fugue-state, it was as though someone had dropped a scrim over the stage, and rolled back time to just before dawn. It wasn’t real—but it was, too. Places hold memories, same as people. Not for long, and they’re easily scattered and corrupted, but if you’re fast and good, you can capture it. Like spirit photography, Ian had said during training, only I was doing it with current instead of light-sensitive paper and chemicals. I could see, using mage-sight, the splatters of blood and other bodily fluids like Day-Glo paint on a gray background, and felt my stomach do a slow roll-and-turn. I didn’t want to see this, I didn’t want to see this, I didn’t …

Enough. Everyone else was doing their thing; I wasn’t going to go back to Stosser and tell him I couldn’t hack it, after all. A hard shove set aside the whining inner voice, and a sort of Zen calm settled over my core. That was another thing that made me good at my job; like Pietr, I didn’t get staticky and disruptive when my emotions were involved. I got very, very precise.

Ideally I’d let the scene play out in real time, getting it with my eyes as well as my senses. I could faintly hear the rumble of voices outside that suggested the guys in blue were back, and I needed to be gone. Just because we’d been called in didn’t mean we had any actual authority, and pressure would come down soon enough to get all this dealt with.

I did a hard-and-fast scoop, pressing everything I could find into a strand of current, and sealing it away so the rest of my own personal memories or emotions couldn’t tamper with it. Hopefully. We were still working out some of the kinks in that particular procedure.

“Miss?”

I opened my eyes to see a cop—maybe a few years older than me, clean-shaven and anxious-looking—staring down at me. Rookie, probably, sent over to get rid of the pretty little girl, while his partner did the real work. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, miss. This …”

“Yeah, it’s okay,” I said. He had a faint telltale glint, seen with fugue-sight, that told me he was Talent, and so he probably-maybe knew who I was and what I was doing there. Or maybe not; just because you could didn’t mean that you did. There were a lot of Talent who ignored anything magical. Lonejacks especially didn’t care, if it didn’t affect them directly and personally.

Either way, I wasn’t going to give him cause to get annoyed. Our window had slammed shut. I gave my “packet” a mental touch, just to reassure myself it was there, and got lost.

There wasn’t much point to waiting around for the others to finish up; they’d do their job and get back to the office when they were done. I walked over to the nearest 1 line stop and caught the next train uptown, keeping myself as still and focused as I could, the magical equivalent of walking with a glass of water on your head. Only if I “spilled,” it would contaminate the entire gleaning and ruin our only record of the scene, and every minute I spent with it inside me, the greater the chance of contamination.