Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,30
of the time her muscles were warm and firm. He remembered that from the few times he’d touched her, before the Merge made that too complicated to even consider.
He wanted her, physically. Not a big deal. He’d wanted women who were off-limits before. Knowing how to look and not touch was part of surviving adolescence. It was more than that. He wanted to listen to her talk, to dig into her mind and see what was there, how she thought and why she reacted. He wanted to – Not own her, it wasn’t that kind of crazy, but a level of possession that made him feel deeply uncomfortable, like someone else was poking at him, trying to dig into his secrets.
“Enough,” he muttered. “You’ve already got it covered, sorted, and spliced. Worry about the stuff you don’t know about. Like where the hell Ian is, and what he’s up to.”
Even as he was talking to himself, Ben felt the tingling awareness that someone was watching him. Not the same tingling, poking sensation he’d just shaken off, something external, and less magical than physical. He’d followed enough people to know when someone was watching him – and when that watching went from casual interest to a focused hunt.
“All right, then,” he said, his lips barely moving out of habit, in case someone was watching him. “Shall we play a game?”
He picked up the pace a little, not fast enough to lose anyone but moving past the other pedestrians with the air of a man late for something. He went the length of the block, and then stopped, bending down as though to tie the lace of his shoe.
The sense of someone watching stayed close, but no closer than it had been before. A maintained distance.
That meant his stalker was human, not fatae. The fatae tended to let him know they were there, to try to make him uneasy with their regard. Only humans hid. Ben felt his mouth draw into an unamused smile. He could test the air, see if his tail was Talent or not, but that risked letting the other know he or she had been spotted, and spoiling the game. There were other ways to tell, though.
Slowing his steps to a more casual pace, he circled around the block, and headed for the nearest cogeneration building.
The miniature power generators that had become popular recently didn’t have the same catnip appeal of the big’un power plant, but a cogen attracted the attention of every Talent who walked by the same way a pretty girl caught the eye. If his tail was Talent, he would know the moment they crossed the street; they wouldn’t be able to help themselves.
I spent the rest of the day looking over Sharon’s notes, not so much looking for something as looking for what wasn’t there, a missing element or fact that would open up a new level of questions. All I got was a slight case of eyestrain: Sharon might not have my perfect memory, or Nick’s ability to make intuitive leaps, but she was exactly as methodical as you’d expect for someone originally trained as a paralegal.
“You checked the rest of the house?”
“Yes.” Nothing in Nick’s tone let me know what an insulting question that had been, which I appreciated. “The kitchen was spotless, and surprisingly Spartan. I guess he doesn’t entertain much, or have any interest in foood.
“Upstairs was nicer, but still pretty plain,” he went on, tapping a finger on the table as though the beat would jog his memory. Hell, maybe it did. “I mean, nice but not lush, the way you’d think somebody that rich would do it.”
My mentor had that kind of money, or maybe even more. His apartment in Boston was... I thought about the casual way he slouched in a nineteenth-century armchair, and how Rupert was allowed to sleep on a hand-knotted Persian rug, and allowed as how maybe my idea of lush was kind of skewed.
“Cheap-looking, or... ?” If he was skimping on the private rooms, that might mean a lack of ready cash, or some other cause for trouble.
“No. I mean, not that I’m any judge of it, but no I don’t think so. I’ve seen enough of your stuff to know quality, and this was all good. Just not... ” He was struggling to put what he’d seen into words. I waited.
“Sparse. Like he only cared about the rooms where he spent time, where people saw him. Everything else had the minimum for