I hid a smile. Venec would not appreciate knowing how very much more like a parent than a boss he sounded, right then. Benjamin Venec was many, many things: smart, savvy, fierce, an utter bastard when it suited him, and hotter than hell, with dark eyes that I still couldn’t identify the color of, because every time I looked into them I got seriously distracted, but he was absolutely not daddy material.
Nifty didn’t have the same physical – or emotional – reaction I did to Benjamin Venec, but Venec was the Big Dog, so Nifty subsided, spreading his hands – plate-size, and equally capable of pulling a pigskin out of the air or dragging a suspect to the ground – flat on the conference room table to keep from rubbing at his arms or legs. Since I’d been right behind him when the Istiachi lifted its tail and sprayed, I was sympathetic. That could have been me, if my coworker hadn’t massed twice my weight, and protected me from the attack.
It was funny, really. When I’d agreed to work for the mad Talent combination of Ian Stosser and Benjamin Venec, I never thought it would result in me facing down a foot-long land-squid and ducking toxic urine in order to get the skinny on a bank robbery.
J, my mentor, says I need to read more noir mysteries, to expand my expectations about this job. J still isn’t really 100% behind my career choice, but he tries to be supportive. I’m not sure Dashiell Hammett wrote about Istiachi, myself. More Lovecraft’s style. The land-squid were fatae, technically full and valued members of the Cosa Nostradamus, but you didn’t invite them to Gathers, and certainly never to lunch.
“Besides,” Venec went on. “I need you here to work on those files with Lou.”
There was a faint snicker that sounded like it came from down the table, which meant Nick, which wasn’t a surprise. Boy still didn’t have an inch of self-preservation in him. Nifty glared around the table, and went back to sulking. Lou merely nodded her head, accepting both the assignment and the partnering.
Nick was one of the Original Five. He looked like your basic geek... and okay, he was. But he had skills nobody else could match. Lou was new to our pack – she’d come on board two months ago, when the cases started coming faster and Stosser decided we needed more hands. The oldest of us by a decade, she had actual experience, having worked for a Null P.I.’s office before, but the first time she went out into the field as an active PUPI...
Well. It had been spectacular, and not in a good way. Lou’s control was fabulous under training conditions, and not so much in the real world. Now she worked the back office, making sure the research records were in order, the supplies properly kept, and we’re never caught without proper background files. At that, she’s a whiz. We didn’t know how badly we needed an office manager until we had one in place.
Venec waited to see if anyone was going to make any other comments. We weren’t. “After the backlog last week – ” The Big Dog held up a hand to keep anyone from trying to explain or protest. “Yah, I know. That job was a goddamned disaster, and we were all stressed. But not a single one of you filed paperwork all case, and then every damn one of you dumped it on Lou’s desk Thursday afternoon. Tacky, people. She’s already gone through her initiation.”
“As mero!” Lou muttered, leaning back in her chair, and I tried not to crack a grin. My father might not have taught me much Spanish before handing me over to J, but I’d learned enough over the years to know what she’d said – and even if I hadn’t understood the particular slang, her tone made it clear. The rest of my cohorts – middle-class whitebread to the core, even Nifty – were clueless.
“As I was saying, after the backlog of last week, I had wanted you all to do some skill-work – Sharon, you still need to work on your binding spells, and Pietr and Bonnie are due for a refresher course in ducking a tail.”
How someone who could disappear as thoroughly as Pietr when he was stressed couldn’t manage to shake a tail still amazed me. But it was true: for a ghost-boy, he stuck out like a sore thumb when he was focused on following someone.
My problem, according to Venec, was my hair.
I reached up and touched my short blond curls self-consciously. I’d thought the blue streaks were kicky. Venec had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that they were distracting, and unprofessional. And, apparently, they made me easy to pick out of a crowd.
We weren’t supposed to stand out; we were supposed to blend in, the better to find out things people didn’t want known. Or, as he put it, “This isn’t a peacock show, damn it.”
He was right, okay, he was absolutely right. But I’d spent most of my life standing out, gleefully and with encouragement from my mentor, and this...
This drabbing down to dullness was hard.
Even as I let that thought slip, there was a mental touch of something, not quite sympathy – never sympathy – but a rough buck-up sort of pushback, and I sighed. Of course Venec would know I was indulging in self-pity.
There was no such thing as telepathy, beyond the ping – a quick burst of information that was more visual than heard or seen – but about eight months ago we’d discovered that Venec and I could pick up each other’s emotions, even thoughts.
Worse and weirder than that: our current kept getting tangled together without our willing it, something that was supposedly impossible. Magic didn’t work that way.
The old texts, what Venec had been able to find, called it the Merge. It was rare, annoying, and not something either of us had wanted: We still didn’t want it. But, like Nifty’s rash, we had to deal with it and not let it interfere with the job.
I, at least, was dealing with it by total denial. So far, so good.
“You had wanted to give us a break?” Sharon asked, her coffee mug – a robin’s-egg-blue color that matched her blond perfection, well, perfectly – halfway to her lips. “Implying that you’re not going to... or not able to?”
Sharon liked to have things nailed down definite-like, the better to tear them apart. She was probably our best in-field operative. That scalpel-sharp brain, matched to the fact that she looked like a 1940s movie goddess, cool and lush at the same time, made her a killer investigator: people got distracted, and then she zoomed in without mercy, finding exactly what they were trying to hide.
The fact that she had the ability to sense when they were actively lying was just icing on that cake.
“Not able to,” Nifty said. As usual, he and Sharon were jockeying for lead dog spot, having to prove they were smarter, sharper, more alpha than the other. Then he ruined the superior attitude by scratching at his arm, making a face like a box turtle’s, all scrunched up and sour. We all glared at him, and he stopped, shamefaced.
The rash spread by contact. Venec might be able to treat the infection, but I didn’t want to be stuck under house arrest, too, because Nifty couldn’t let it heal. If he wasn’t careful, we were going to make him stay home.
“Not able to,” Venec agreed, carefully not seeing Nifty’s lapse so he didn’t have to yell at him again. “Ian handed over two files this morning.”
“Two?” I was surprised, yeah. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have two jobs going, these days; the Council overall might still not officially recognize us, but word had gotten out that they’d use us in need, and so the ordinary members of the Cosa Nostradamus were calling. But two coming in on the same day? That meant Nifty’s desk assignment wasn’t make-work; there wasn’t time or manpower to do that, even with Lou around.
“And where is Master Stosser, anyway?” Nick looked around like the boss might suddenly pop out of the woodwork – and he might, actually.
Ian Stosser might be the genius behind PUPI, but lately he’d left more and more of the day-to-day stuff to his partner. Since Venec was better at that anyway I hadn’t thought much about it. But Nick was right; Ian had been least-in-sight, recently.