talk to us, clearly done and dealt with. It wanted to go now.
“Thank you,” Venec said, standing and bowing like a Japanese diplomat. Our unexpected visitor didn’t even bother to acknowledge it, but was zippity gone. I didn’t know anything that old could move that fast. At least, not without wings.
I rubbed at my eyes, feeling a headache building.
“What the hell was that, and what the hell is a Roblin?” Nick was the first one to speak after the door closed, of course. From being fanboyishly intrigued with fatae when he first started, through to a deep distrust of them, Nicky now usually projected a very New Yorker attitude of “yeah, yeah, whatever.” But this had been bizarre even by our standards.
“I have no idea.” Venec turned the straight-backed chair he’d been sitting in around, and sat back down on it, straddling it like a cowboy. I forced my brain not to go where my body wanted. “Lou, go through every source you can find, look for any reference at all for this ‘Roblin,’ any spelling variants you can think of. Don’t limit yourself to the Cosa – if it’s as old as our guest, you’re more likely to find it in the fairy tales.”
Lou nodded, and whipped out her notepad, taking notes, I presumed of any variant spellings she could come up with. Nifty leaned over her shoulder, idly scratching at his arm, to make suggestions.
“Can we trust it? I mean, it’s fatae, and... ” Nick saw the look I gave him, and stared back, refusing to be cowed. “Give me a break, Bonnie. I’m not being a bigot – you know what I mean. Fatae – especially the older breeds, the ones that don’t much like humans – they’re tricksy. History proves that, over and over. What if our visitor is this Roblin, or whatever, messing with us, trying to get us chasing after something, distracting us from, hell, I don’t know, something going on, or something it wants to do?”
I blinked, and leaned back against the door frame. Okay, that was tricksy, worthy of a fatae. I was impressed, and admitted I’d never have thought of it. My thought process was too linear, in a lot of ways, but Nick more than made up for it, the way he could swerve and dodge.
“No.” Venec was positive of that. “Unless this Roblin’s a shape changer, that’s not it.”
There were seven known, verified shape changers among the fatae breeds, and each of them moved from one specific form to another, not whatever caught its fancy. Of course, if there was a breed that could do that, how would we ever know?
That thought gave me the very unpleasant woogies.
“All right, everyone back to work,” Venec said, breaking the shocky, contemplative mood. “We can’t do fuckall right now, until we get more information, and meanwhile there are paying clients waiting on us. Bonnie, why were you so het over leaving the diorama, before this?”
I had completely, utterly forgotten about the diorama. With an unpleasant jolt, I reached back to check the status of the current-hold... and found nothing
“Damn it.” I smacked the flat of my hand against the door frame, taking a weird comfort in the sting against my flesh. “I lost the diorama, and I had something useful there, too.” Or I thought it was useful, anyway. And I hadn’t had time to really study it, worse luck, so my near-perfect memory was utterly useless.
“Did it burn you?” Venec was in my face all of a sudden, taking both my hands in his and turning them over like he was expecting to see current-burns scarring my skin.
“No.” And that was weird. No, that was really weird. Not only should I have felt it, I should have gotten at least a current-zing, like a first-degree burn, when the control snapped, even distracted by our visitor.
I stared at my hands, like the answer would ooze from the lines on my palms. “It was like it melted, instead of breaking. I didn’t even notice it, and I should have... ”
“Um. That might be my fault.”
Sharon stood next to us, although I noted, vaguely, that she was keeping a little more distance than was normal when we were in the office, like she was afraid to intrude on a private conversation. Pietr was hovering on the edges, the others hanging even farther back.
“How?” Venec asked, not letting go of my hands. I didn’t mind, exactly, but it made it kind of difficult to focus