Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,29

talk Ian out of accepting both jobs, giving the pups the chance to not only hone their skills but stand down for a bit, but his partner wanted – needed – to prove something. That meant never backing down from a challenge. Understanding the goal that drove the other man didn’t make it any easier to deal with the inevitable cock-ups that would happen because of it. All he could do was try to limit the damage done if someone dropped the ball due to exhaustion or inexperience.

But, god, he was so tired. Between the job, and keeping Ian focused, and trying to find out what was going on with this Merge, without letting it get its hooks into him...

Giving in to a rare self-indulgent impulse, Ben let his mental wall down a bit, and reached out deliberately with a thin tendril of current, like the streamer of a pea plant unfolding. Bonnie was distracted, her thoughts tangled, but her core hummed like a well-tuned car, focused on her task, and the sound of it soothed him. If there was anything bothering her, he couldn’t tell, not without going deeper.

He pulled the tendril back and rebuilt the wall, ignoring the hum within him that protested the loss of contact. Bonnie might fling her emotions and affections around, but that wasn’t his thing. He needed privacy, distance. The urge to know where she was, what she was doing or feeling: that was the Merge pushing him, not his own needs.

The elevator doors opened, and he strode out into the lobby, nodding politely at the older woman waiting to enter.

“Have a nice day,” the woman called after him, as the doors closed. There were a dozen offices in the building, and he wondered, sometimes, what the other tenants thought of them, the odd assortment of twenty-somethings, their eccentric leader, and the dour man riding herd on them all hours of the day.

He was halfway down the block, wishing that he’d brought his leather jacket with him against the cooler-than-expected breeze, before his brain finally started to sort out why his body had taken him outside. He could have escaped to Ian’s little back office if he just needed to laugh without being seen or heard, so clearly he needed to walk something out, away from the confines and demands of the office.

The thought occurred to him that, outside the warded office, he was vulnerable, but he dismissed it as occupational paranoia. Nobody was gunning for him; not right now, anyway.

He lengthened his stride, moving quickly to keep warm, and let his body go on autopilot, allowing his brain to do what it did best: process and place.

Ian was the brilliant Idea Guy, the Concept Man, and the consensus-wooer. He, Ben, was along to kick those ideas and concepts – and employees – into productive, working shape. “You’re my gut instincts,” Ian said, when his old friend had first called him with the idea for an investigative team that would keep the Cosa in line. “I can see what they’re doing, even when they don’t want me to, but you know what they’re up to.”

Ben was starting to think that his partner had overestimated his abilities. Because right now his brain kept returning not to the cases on hand, or even the mental or magical state of his pup-pack, but a greater – and harder to track – uncertainty. His gut instincts were telling him that the human/fatae trouble they’d seen earlier in the year during the ki-rin job, was still there, simmering... waiting for a single spark to blow up under their feet. There hadn’t been any proof – the flyers advertising the so-called “exterminators” had disappeared, and the whispers of violence had died back down to their normal level – but his gut wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t let him sleep without worry. Bonnie’s new kenning added fuel to that, so much that he couldn’t focus on the jobs at hand.

Bonnie... He was tired enough that the thought of her was like a mild gut-punch of a different sort, taking him unaware even when he knew that it was coming. He let it roll over him, still walking. Bright eyes and a ready smile, her expression almost fey, with her short curls and pointed chin, a mind that was tough and sharp and moved almost as fast as his own. And her body... She was slender, and slightly built, and under the long-sleeved Ts and pants or long skirts she wore most