Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,103

a caretaker, damn it; I was raised to be self-sufficient, and I expect everyone else to be, too. But the pain in his eyes was more than I could bear.

There was a hesitation, and then his arms came up around me, resting loosely across my shoulders. It wasn’t a hug, but he wasn’t rejecting the comfort, either. We leaned against each other, not saying anything, just breathing.

Whatever they had done, whatever they had heard, I knew I didn’t want to know. But the job was about knowing. We were the investigators, the witnesses-after-the-fact. The ones who didn’t look away.

Thankfully, both Big Dogs seemed willing to just let it be, for a moment. I let Benjamin’s warmth under my hands soothe me, and tried to send it back into him, knowing that he was blocking me, holding his walls firm, and The Roblin be damned. He didn’t want me to see what he had done.

The fact that Venec could be a badass wasn’t news to me. If he had done something that was hard by his standards... it was only what was needful and necessary. But I’d be just as thankful not having it in my own brain, yeah.

“He had them transmuted.” Stosser’s voice, like it was coming from far away, through a stone tunnel. “The watch, his son. The dagger... ”

“His wife. Christine.” Ben’s voice was hard and ragged, like a cold wind. The moment he spoke I could feel the anger and the frustration in him, held tight against his spine like it was all that was holding him upright. He had no regret for the way he’d gotten the news out of our former client – and he was a former client, I knew that instantly.

Even without the Merge, I understood why Ben was reacting the way he was. Years ago, he had worked for the woman. He had met her, taken responsibility for finding her son. He was thinking that if he’d been better at his job, been able to do what was needed, seen the danger she was in, they’d both still be human, be free, right now.

Being Venec, there was no way he could be thinking anything else.

I wanted to reassure him, to tell him that he’d done the job he was hired to do, that he’d had no idea the danger the woman and her son were really in. Thankfully, the Merge didn’t make me stupid. He knew all that, and he still felt responsible. I didn’t understand it, but I understood him, if that made any sense.

Whatever had happened between then and now, if Wells had always been batshit insane or something had caused him to totally lose his shit and dabble in things even the most high-res Talent would blanch at, it didn’t matter. I’d hoped... I don’t know what I’d hoped. That the objects had been his parents, maybe, gone willingly into another form rather than die of old age. That they’d been volunteers, trapped in an experiment gone wrong, and the client was safeguarding them. Anything but this.

Because however Wells had managed to do this, whatever price he had paid, it was a crime worse than any I’d ever heard of, one of the prime and undeniable crimes of the Cosa Nostradamus: to remove free will from another. Talent or Null, it didn’t matter.

And how it had been done – all the evidence we had suggested that he had done it by bargaining with an Old One, or an agent of an Old One. God. Of all the arrogant, oblivious stupidity... And had he found it, or had it found him? I wasn’t sure which thought was more distressing.

No, wait: I knew.

The hard beat of Venec’s heart was slowing to a softer thump, and I slid away from him as discreetly as I could, before he suddenly realized what he’d allowed and pulled back first. I’d offered; I wanted to be the one to control when it ended.

Stosser, thankfully, didn’t say anything, or even look at us; he might be staring at the far wall, but his attention was somewhere else entirely.

“You think the... whoever cast the spells, came to take them back?” I had to ask.

“We know so.” Stosser again. Now that the tableau had been broken, he moved, as well, sitting behind his desk like a guy twenty years older. I’d only ever seen the boss so beat-down once before, when a teenager died in our building, because of something his little sister did. “Apparently, a few years