Oh, hell, Talent didn’t, either.
We stood there, and watched the traffic moving along the FDR, a steady stream of cars going too fast, and I heard a thoughtful hrmm rise from my companion.
“I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely no desire to become a greasy splat on the highway.”
The hrmm turned into a heavy exhale that wasn’t quite a sigh. “Me, neither.”
Especially since there was no guarantee that, in racing across the street, Pietr wouldn’t ghost out of sight, and get hit by an otherwise-paying-attention driver. After you worked with him for a while, you started thinking about things like that.
I looked around to make sure nobody was watching us, and pointed to a spot across the wide highway. He followed my finger with his gaze, and nodded.
Three seconds later, we were both on the other side, intact and unrun-over, the traffic now at our back. The sharp smell of the East River hit my nostrils, overwhelming even the smell of diesel behind us, and for a brief moment I was homesick for Boston, and J’s apartment overlooking the bay, where the smell of salt air was a daily greeting.
The moment passed, the weight of the kit in my hand reminding me what we were here for. I checked my core, making sure that it was settled, because the last thing you wanted to do was walk onto a scene with your core-current ruffled. I glanced over at Pietr, who looked to be doing the same.
“Ready?”
“Yeah.”
A short walk farther, the smell of the river getting stronger, and we were on a concrete dock that housed a parking lot, a warehouse of undetermined ownership, and, I presumed, a dead body.
We were met on the scene by a cop who looked like she’d rather be anywhere else but there. She was little, by cop standards, with thick black hair cut short, and a tea-stained complexion I’d have killed for. Talent – I thought I recognized her, but wouldn’t swear to it. New York’s a big city, and Talent don’t really clump together outside of Council functions and cocktail parties – or the occasional impromptu gossip session – but only a Talent, a magic-user like us, would have been left to guard this particular body. The NYPD had at least half a clue, even on bad days.
“You the pups?”
As questions went, it was pretty stupid, but there was a protocol that needed to be followed: I didn’t know her, and she didn’t know us. “Bonita Torres, Pietr Cholis,” I said. I waited for her to ask for official identification, but I guess she really didn’t care that much. We were here, which meant it wasn’t her responsibility anymore.
Pietr bypassed the cop and crouched to look under the orange tarp, and then backed up a step, almost involuntarily.
“What is it?” I asked her.
“You’re the investigator,” she said, looking bored. “You tell me.”
I gave her a sideways stare, and she took it without flinching. Great, now I was trying to tough-out the NYPD? Right.
I thought about pointing out that covering the body was not SOP, and that she might have ruined evidence, then decided that she already knew that and had her reasons.
“Bippis,” Pietr said. I was the nominal specialist on fatae politics, but Pietr knew a lot more about the various breeds than I did
“A what?” Distracted, I tried to place the word, and couldn’t.
“Bippis. I think that’s how it’s pronounced, anyway. I recognize the arms.”
I went to look at the body under the tarp, and saw what Pietr was talking about. The corpse looked almost human, if you could ignore the dark green skin that glittered like mica, but the arms were twice as thick around as mine, and all muscle, and extended like an orangutan’s down to its knees. And the head, which was hairless, and shaped like an anvil, almost. No wonder she’d covered it. Even in NYC, even out here where tourists didn’t wander, a corpse like that might draw notice.
“Is the color normal, or did it react to the water?” Weird question, but when it came to the fatae, it paid to ask. Or, actually we were paid to ask.
“Damned if I know.” He knelt down on the grass and touched the skin before I could remind him that we were supposed to wear gloves. Not because we might interfere with evidence – we collected data a little differently from Null CSIs – but because, well, look at what happened to poor Nifty. Some things bit even without teeth. Or even dead.
“Skin’s cool, but dry. I’m thinking the color’s natural.” He rubbed his fingers together thoughtfully. “No flaking, either.”
“You people freak me out.” That was our cop, looking a little queasy now, rather than bored.
“Human floaters are better?”
“At least they’re human,” she said, distaste evident in her voice.
Ah, bigotry, alive and stupid in New York City. She should be glad it wasn’t summer, yet. I didn’t think this guy would smell too good, a few hours in the heat.
“Somebody tied him up,” I said, taking Pietr’s lead and ignoring the cop, who returned the favor, wandering off to pointedly look away from whatever we were doing. I crouched beside him and pulled the tarp aside a little more without touching the corpse itself. “Hands and feet – they didn’t want him to be able to swim at all.”
“Assuming the breed could even swim. He looks solid, all muscle... might have sunk to the bottom, anyway,” Pietr said. “Alive or dead when he went in?”
“Oh, sure, give me the crap jobs.” I shook out my left hand, and mentally reached in to gather some current, selecting threads from the neat coil of multicolored, static-shivering magic inside my core, and drawing them up my rib cage, along my arm, and down into the fingers I’d just loosened.
Like so many of the cantrips and preset spells we’d been working on in the office the past year, this one hadn’t actually been tested in the field yet. It should work, but should and did weren’t always reading from the same page, and we’d had a few go rather spectacularly sour when tried under real-life conditions.
At least nobody was watching, or grading, this time.
I selected a specific thread, a glittery glinting dark blue that was almost purple, and directed it down away from me, into the corpse’s chest. The thread slipped through the flesh like a needle, and I could feel it tunneling down into the lungs. I don’t care who you are or what you did, the sensation of current moving like that at your command never got old.
Older spells, and modern traditionalists, used words to direct their current. Venec frowned on that: we weren’t here to entertain or impress – or intimidate – but to work. So I kept it simple. “Wet or dry?” I asked down the line of current, imbuing a sense of what I was looking for into the words, and waited. A scant second later, the current sent back its answer.
“Water in the lungs,” I said. “Our boy was tossed in still breathing. Cause of death probably drowning, unless there’s something funky about the Bippis physiology?”
“Not so far’s I know,” Pietr said. That meant absolutely nothing; there were more breeds within the Cosa Nostradamus than any human could ever encounter, or even read about, and most of ’em had at least a small community living here. New York City: melting pot of the world, and not all the ingredients were human.
“So, it was caught, tied up, and tossed in the water... ” Pietr knelt again, opening his kit and taking out a brush and a small vial of something glittering. The brush was just a makeup brush, a very expensive one, and the glittery powder was fine-ground, electrically charged metal shavings. Metal conducted current the same way it did for electricity, allowing us to use the lightest possible touch and lowering the risk that we’d disturb evidence. He added a pinch of shavings to the brush, and swirled it over the top of the bindings, careful this time not to touch anything with his bare hands. His personal current could affect the shavings, even through the latex.