Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,28
itching worse.” Venec’s voice was the usual low rumble, not even a hint of amusement in it. “Lou, can you re-create the steps prior to Mr. Lawrence’s mishap?”
Uh-oh. I didn’t quite hold my breath, but I bet Sharon did. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that Lou’s smirk had turned to uncertainty. Damn it, I thought, but kept it within my own walls, don’t push her like that!
Lou was just as skilled as the rest of us in theory – she wouldn’t have been hired, otherwise – but her control of anything external was crap, making her use of active forensic magic... iffy. So far the calm of the office kept her steady, but this would be the first real under pressure test since her rather public screwup with the garbage truck.
Although blowing it up like that had exposed the body hidden inside that we hadn’t known about. So in the end, it had actually been a plus.
Lou didn’t see it that way, though, and neither had Venec.
At the moment, she looked exactly like she had the moment the spell went bad, wide-eyed and panicked. “Ah... ”
I would swear under oath that Sharon started edging out of the conference room without seeming to move at all. She’d clearly been taking lessons from Pietr, who was almost Retriever-like in his ability to disappear when stressed. I was torn between wanting to beat Shar out the door, and being fascinated by what Lou might do.
“Yes or no?”
Lou, stung by the cold tone, met his question with a flat stare I admired, knowing firsthand how knee-quaking his glare could be. “Yes.” If she had any doubts whatsoever, you couldn’t tell from her voice, or her body language.
“Good. Do so. Sharon, stop that. You’re Lou’s second. Make sure she doesn’t go splat, too. Bonnie, go fetch Nick and get back to work. When Nifty finishes cleaning up, update him on the break-in. I want to see dioramas of both scenes when I get back.”
We didn’t exactly snap off salutes, but nobody argued. And nobody asked Venec where he was going, when he headed past Nick, and down the hallway toward the elevator.
Ben didn’t let himself relax until he was in the elevator, and the doors had shut securely in front of him. Then there was a brief pause, and his shoulders began to shake and his eyes teared, as the laughter he’d been holding back finally escaped.
It really wasn’t funny. The scene that had met him when he burst in: Lawrence flat on his back and covered in spell-soot, Lou crawling out from under the table like a morning-after reveler, had damn near stopped his heart. Now that everyone was safe and accounted for, he let the laughter come, knowing that it was as much stress-release as amusement.
Nifty could have been hurt – Lou could have been seriously hurt, if the explosion had caught her off guard. But it hadn’t. His newest pup might not be able to control her current well enough to be a field operative, but there wwas nothing wrong with her brains or her reflexes, and she’d gone under the table fast enough to avoid being hit with the spell’s debris. He hadn’t chosen poorly when he hired her. That was a relief.
Alone in the elevator, laughter dying down, Ben allowed his muscles to relax, the exhaustion he’d been repressing finally surfacing for a moment, and he found himself considering the ramifications of the event. Some days it seemed as though the simplest of spells – simple in theory, anyway – caused the biggest boom when they went wrong, and went wrong more often than the complicated ones. And those booms were happening more and more often, in the past few weeks. It wasn’t because his pups were being careless: he’d beaten that out of them the first month they were on the job. No, there had to be something more to it.
Bad luck? Ben didn’t believe in it. A hex? Those he did believe in, having seen them placed – and dismissed – more than once. There was an old-style conjure woman back in Texas who could hex up a mess of trouble, if you gave her reason. Just because they hadn’t heard of anyone like that in town didn’t mean they weren’t here. And there were people who’d have cause to hex the pups, either in payment for what they’d done, or to keep them from doing something in the future.