thoughts interrupted by the glint or glimmer of something. “Boss? Freeze.”
Stosser hesitated, his hand halfway to the cloth covering a sofa, and started to turn back toward me.
“Freeze!” I said, far more sharply. “Tamp down your core.”
It was newbie instruction, the kind of thing you’d tell a first-year mentoree, and I could see the expressions on his face range from shock to frustration to acceptance. Even as he gained control over his core, the continual sparks and static we had gotten used to around him smoothing into a quieter pool of energy.
“What?”
I ignored him, now that he was no longer interfering with my ability to follow the spike of current.
Tracking trace was a delicate thing. You have to look and not-look at the same time, as though you were trying to spot the picture-within-a-picture, but do it with your mage-sight, which meant that you were open to every other spike of current within range, even the stuff you couldn’t see directly. Like patting your head and rubbing your stomach, while roller-skating. Backward.
“There’s something in the room. Something we missed.” “We” meaning Sharon and Nick, anyway. “Hang on, I’m trying to get a read on it... there.” I moved past him, going to the far wall, where the French doors had been boarded up.
“Signature?”
“No. Wait. I don’t know.” It was current, yes; shaped, which meant that someone had been carrying it around for a while, the way you did when you took it into your core, but it didn’t feel like a signature. This was... smudgy, for lack of a better term. Current was hot neon, sharp and sparkly, not smudged. It reminded me, a little, of the dark current we’d found by the memorial sites during the ki-rin case; current that had been touched by the darkest kind of hatred, that verged on madness, but even that darkness had been sharp and neon-bright. This was smooth and... not so much dark as totally without light.
“I don’t know what this is,” I said, almost to myself. Almost, but not quite. Without thinking, without planning, I reached out with a tendril of current, not toward the smudge, but away, toward my sense of Venec...
And found myself met by a different kind of smudginess: he was unconscious, still drugged into a motionless sleep by the painkillers.
“Damn.”
“Torres?”
Stosser was standing where I’d left him, his core still quiet, but his expression did not bode well for that lasting much longer. Big Dog was not the patient sort, unless he was the one with the plan.
“I need to try to glean this,” I told him. “And then I’m going to need you to get me back to the office without disturbing it. Okay?”
We’d been practicing flinging – the skill of throwing magical evidence from one person to another – but it wasn’t easy or precise, and with this, something I didn’t know, didn’t understand... better to keep it under wraps, if I could. Who the hell knew what flinging it could wake up.
The fact that I was thinking about current-trace like a live thing was disturbing. I blamed it on being surprised by the elementals a few minutes ago. That didn’t change my feeling that I was taking a risk in gleaning this to begin with. No need to mention that, though. Stosser cared about results, not risks, and Venec...
Ben was out of commission. He could yell at me later.
“Ready when you give the word, boss,” Stosser said, and for once there was neither arrogance nor irony in his voice. Unfortunately, I was too focused on what I was about to do to really enjoy the moment.
Normally, gleaning a scrap of current is the magical equivalent of removing a splinter from your own thumb – you need to be careful, but it’s not particularly difficult. This was like trying to do that in the dark, with a splinter that had a tendency to shimmer and wiggle out of your grip the moment you thought you had it. Like a splinter made of Jell-O.
“Relax.” Stosser’s voice, but there was an echo of Venec in it, too. “Whatever you’re trying to do, you’re focusing too hard. Let go of your control a little.”
“What?” That made no sense. Control was what let us –
“Trust me. Let go a little, relax, and try again.”
Ian Stosser didn’t know crap about fieldwork, or the details of forensic magic, but he knew more about the elevated theoretical applications of current than I’d ever understand even if I lived to a hundred. I took