Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,17

that.

For now.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to keep an eye on the situation. And, if needed, step in. Ben’s life was his own; except where it had an impact on PUPI. Then, he belonged to Ian.

“You gonna eat that?”

“Yes.” I glared at Pietr, clutching at my pastry defensively. “Paws off.”

After we’d come back and filed our report of the scene, complete with a dump of our gleanings, Pietr and I ended up in the front break room with Nifty, pouring pitch-black coffee into ourselves and hoovering up the crumbs from a box of really disgustingly stale doughnuts, trying to figure out what sort of fatae could have taken down our floater.

We’d all agreed that it couldn’t have been human, not short of five strong men, anyway. Bippis were not only strong, apparently, they were dense; their bones weighing twice what a human’s would. Hard to break, even harder to shove around. Pretty easy to drown, though; Pietr had been right about that. So that meant looking through our roster of the fatae breeds to see if any of them matched the required muscle, and of those, if we knew of any that had a bad relationship with Bippis, or cause to do one harm. Bippis didn’t harm each other – it was some kind of built-in safe lock in the breed.

“The problem with looking at possible conflicts,” Nifty said now, “is that the odds were this was a totally personal thing, one-on-one rather than breed-specific. So it could be some fatae breed who’s coexisted peacefully with everyone for generations, just suddenly having a freak-out. Statistically – ”

Pietr groaned. Nifty did love his stats.

“Statistically,” Nifty went on, undeterred, “most killings are unplanned, spur-of-the-moment, rage-or-jealousy driven kind of things, and the fact that the vic wasn’t human doesn’t change any of that.”

“They’d tied its hands and legs with rope it couldn’t break, and thrown it into the river, still alive. That feels like something more than spur-of-the-moment anger.” I looked at the others, and got nods, Nifty’s more grudging than Pietr’s. “So we start big, determining which breeds could actually manage to do the deed, and then work our way down to the smaller scale of motive.”

Somewhere, I was pretty sure, someone had collected data on every single fatae breed ever. It was the kind of thing mages used to do, assigning their students twenty pages a night to copy, or something. Not even Venec’s mentor, who was a pretty notable scholar in this age, had access to records like that now, though; they’d probably been lost in one of the Church purges, or during the Burning Time here in America.

What we had was a wooden, four-drawer filing cabinet, très old-fashioned, that was starting to fill up with folders on each breed as we encountered it, all the notes and specifics, and whatever photos or drawings we could lay paws on. I was looking through the Ds, glancing and discarding, when I saw the file for “demon.” The label wasn’t in my handwriting; it was Venec’s. I had the urge to open it, see what he had put in there, and if he’d mentioned the one we’d seen in the diner downtown, last winter. And if he had mentioned it, if he’d mentioned anything about why we were down there.

Stupid. Stupid, and pointless, and the kind of poking around a lovesick twelve-year-old did, damn it. If he did mention being there, the citation would be entirely about seeing the demon, maybe something about the case we were working on then.

He wouldn’t have mentioned the fact that I’d tracked him down to a goth club, off-hours, or that we’d ended up in that diner to talk, for the first time, about the damned connection we had that was supposed to make us lifetime soul mates or something.

Neither of us wanted that, particularly, or intended to follow up on it, and sure as hell were not about to put it down anywhere even semiofficial, in writing.

No. He wouldn’t have mentioned any of that, no more than I mentioned it to anyone, not even J, my mentor.

My secret. My headache.

Even now, if I let my wall down a little, I could feel Venec’s current-presence. I could tell you where he was, more or less, and if I concentrated I could tell you what he was feeling.

And if he let down his walls at the same time, I could tell you what he was thinking. By all research and rules, that was supposed to