on what Sharon was saying.
“Last night, I was building my own diorama, and I was worried, being alone – I didn’t stay late,” she added quickly, “but I was the last one out and I was worried if there was a problem, if my concentration broke like Bonnie’s did, I wouldn’t be able to get help.”
Which was exactly why Venec didn’t let us work late, when the Big Dogs weren’t around. There wasn’t anyone else in the building we could call on, and by the time someone heard and Translocated, it could be too late.
“So I... sort of upped the wardings. A little.”
I wondered if Venec was aware that his thumb had started stroking the inside of my palm, in slow, thoughtful strokes; it was less seductive than reassuring, but the action still sent a shiver right up my spine.
“Enough to dampen the shock of a break in control?” Now that she had his full attention, the thumb motion paused while he looked at her. He didn’t let go of my hands, though.
“I don’t know. I guess so? I thought I’d taken them down, after, but it might have lingered in the wardings we already had established?” Sharon sounded uncertain, which was unusual for her.
Wardings were old-school, something Venec had taught us when we started. Unlike the Old Times, most modern Talent work on the go, so you don’t have specific places set up for rituals or anything like that, which was all very nineteenth century. It made sense that Sharon hadn’t really thought about what layering in protections on established protections, building up over time, might do.
“Thank you,” I said, breaking into what I could tell was some heavy-duty self-questioning going on in her brain. I meant it. Sharon might not have left it there on purpose, but I would have been in a lot of pain – and felt really stupid in front of our visitor – if I’d gotten burned while it was speaking.
“No problem. And speaking of that stuff, um, you, um, think you guys could stop that, now?”
I blinked, surprised at her blunt reference, and looked down at my hands, and then blinked again as I saw what she was referring to: lazy sparks of deep purple current arcing from my hands to his, or maybe the other way around.
For all my awareness of Ben’s touching me, I hadn’t even noticed. From the way Venec reacted, neither had he. He dropped my hands so fast I almost felt them go into free fall, and my nerve endings protested even as I was taking a step back, out the door.
As I fled down the hallway, I heard someone – Nick – snicker, and Pietr offer to up the bet-holdings.
I didn’t want to know what, specifically, they were betting on, or what the under/over was. I retreated into the workroom and closed and warded the entrance behind me, then leaned against the door like I’d just outrun a giant purple Talent-eater.
“That,” I said to the empty room, “was Not Good.”
And then, because I was a professional, damn it, I went to work trying to reconstruct the diorama, one memory-detail at a time.
Ben waited for a moment, giving his remaining pups a glare that dared them, just dared them to make a single comment, and then made as dignified a retreat as he could. The moment his back was turned, he heard them upping bets about when he and Torres would admit that something was up, and sighed. Not that he would have wanted them to be cowed by him, exactly, but it would be nice if they had a little bit of fear to go with the resppect.
Bonnie was back in the workroom; he could feel the hum of her current as she, he presumed, tried to reconstruct the busted diorama. He was curious as to what she’d found, but there was no point in pushing; when she was ready, she would be ready. Jumping to present evidence was as bad as waiting too long and letting it grow stale.
He had barely gotten back to the small office at the far end of the hallway that Ian had claimed for his own private retreat, and thrown himself into his usual chair in the corner, when there was a whisper of incoming current and Ian himself Translocated in from god knew where.
It took their fearless leader a second to recover from the shift in location, and notice that he had company. “You look particularly pissed. Which of the