said, as though only just thinking of it, “you would remain within the reach of human agencies. Meaning that your misuse of current to imprison innocent lives would come under the purveyance of the Mage Council.”
It wouldn’t, actually. They’d be pissed, maybe, but he was a Null, and the people imprisoned were Null, and the Council therefore wouldn’t give a damn. But Wells had dabbled without doing his homework, and so he didn’t know that.
I wish I could say I felt bad about lying to him. I didn’t. I felt bad about that, though.
“Decide now,” Nick said, resting a not-meant-to-be-comforting hand on his shoulder. “Your choices are waiting.”
“If it was me,” I said, switching back into the kind-and-thoughtful mode I’d learned at J’s knee, “I’d go with inanimate. Much more... restful, that way. And who knows, maybe you’ll find something to trade yourself out of there with, after a few decades. God knows, it’s got to be better than having the imp after you – and risking the Old One coming after you again, pissed off because you hadn’t paid up.”
The Old One wouldn’t; the terms had been satisfied. Again, Wells didn’t know that, and in his own mind, of course someone would be out for every bit he could claim, because that’s what he would do.
I wondered, briefly, watching the calculations cross his face, what the payment due had been. Somehow I didn’t see the Old One, or whatever was left of it, being interested in coin, gold or otherwise.
The sweat that broke on his skin when I mentioned the unpaid obligation suggested it wasn’t something I wanted to know about.
“All right.” His voice practically squeaked with frustration and anger. “All right, I agree.”
“To... ?”
The words needed to be said.
“I accept the terms of your offer,” he said, spitting out the traditional wording with little drops of venom.
And like that, he was gone.
And so was the lurking presence in the stone beneath us.
There wasn’t a celebratory wrap-up party for this case. Stosser had taken the dagger and the watch, carefully wrapped and protected, off to some bigwig Council magefest, to see if they could find a way to return them to human form. Sharon had, at his request, gone with him; I had a feeeling, like it or not, she was going to learn how to deal with the Council. Better her than me; she could tell when they were lying, while I just had to assume they always were. Nifty was off getting some bite marks treated – I didn’t ask; he’d had a really bad year, medically speaking – and Lou and Pietr and Nick all seemed to share my slightly depressed, disconcerted mood. Yeah, we’d won, we’d closed the case, but the things we’d had to do...
The world was messy. Sometimes, when you held something up to the light... you had no choice but to clean it up, too, so nobody else stepped in it. That was a good thing, right?
“There was a message for you, by the way,” Lou said, pulling a piece of paper off the message tree and waving it at me when I wandered through the break room looking for I-didn’t-know-what. “Some woman called, said you were in luck, there was a vacancy. You’re supposed to stop by when you can.”
“You getting a new place?” Nick raised himself up off the sofa enough to look at me. “Aw, I liked your apartment.”
“It was a little too noisy for me,” I said, taking the paper from Lou’s hand. “We’ll see how this place does.”
Pietr just smiled up at the ceiling, a kind of sad, nostalgic smile, like he knew he wasn’t going to get any more invites to stay over, in the new place. Instinctively, I reached out – and was met by a hard, impenetrable surface. Huh.
“I’ll catch you guys tomorrow,” I said. “Gotta go see a man about a wall.”
I found him exactly where, no magic involved, I’d known he would be: on the stoop of my soon-to-be-old apartment building. He didn’t look up when I stopped in front of him, so I sat down beside him, feeling the cool brick soak through my pants and numb my ass.
There were any of a dozen things I could have said, from the funny to the horrifyingly blunt, from the excruciatingly personal to the offhandedly polite. What came out was: “Would you really have given Wells to the imp, if he’d balked?”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” I echoed.
Of course he would have. Benjamin Venec didn’t