Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,83

the wardings. And then do the same in everyone’s apartments. I don’t like this, not at all.”

“And me, boss?” Be damned if I was going to sit here while everyone else got to work.

Ian turned and looked at me. “You stay here until Venec arrives. Lawrence and Cholis came back with new information on the body dump case, and I want you three to close it today. If we’re being targeted by a mischief imp as powerful as the Old Man thinks, I don’t want any dangling threads left it can possibly yank.”

Given our marching orders, we marched. Or Nick did, anyway. I’d helped him a time or two with his hacker-magic, and was just as glad not to be anywhere near when he did his thing. It made me feel like I was going to throw up, and I hated throwing up.

“You really think The Roblin’s after us? I mean, not just you but all of us?” Sharon asked, sitting on the sofa next to me.

I lifted my hands palm-up, to show my utter ignorance and frustration. “Don’t know. Makes sense, doesn’t it? The warning, the break-in here, the break-in at my apartment... we’re a natural focus.” Bobo had said as much, when he warned us. We investigate chaos. The Roblin causes it. Peanut butter and jelly.

“But why you, and Nick specifically?”

Why not her, was what she wasn’t asking. How was The Roblin picking its victims.

“Damned if I know,” I said. “Just be glad, if you’re not on the short list, not insulted.”

“I’m not. I’m just curious. Like Venec always says, if we know why, then we can figure out the rest of it. Nick’s skill set is unusual, so maybe that’s it, but you’re not... ” She stopped, aware she’d been about to go somewhere seriously not-complimentary.

“Not unusual? Not special? Not exceptionally strong?” I kept my tone mild. I was moderately high-res, as the general population went, but not in this crowd, no.

“You’re practically perfect in every way,” she said, and I thwapped her on the arm, laughing for the first time in what felt like days. Maybe even weeks. Since we’d gone to the Devil for drinks, maybe. That felt like a month ago, with everything that had happened.

“You think the attack on Venec was... ” She trailed off, as though not wanting to follow that train of thought.

I sobered, turning the suggestion over in my mind in a way I hadn’t been able to, when Nick suggested it.

“No. It doesn’t feel right. The Roblin is about confusion and chaos, the more people involved the better, probably. Even my apartment, he got the entire building in an uproar. A single attack, and the cause easily put down? Anyway, the client had just hired the dog a few days after you cleared the site,” I said. “Stosser said the trainer was recommended by a friend of a friend, the same idiot who suggested the mage-alarm. The housekeeper was so terrified of the thing when it showed up, she refused to go near it, so it was prowling the grounds on its own. Sheer bad luck.”

“Oh, lovely,” Sharon said, in the tone of voice that was very much not-lovely. “Do we have a line on the trainer?”

“Stosser said that it was taken care of.” The look on the boss’s face had told me that the trainer was a name he knew, which meant either high-placed Council, or lowdown scummy. Stosser might be useless on the scene, but he was the best we had at getting high-level people to sit up and listen.

Venec was the one who handled the lowdown. With Ben in the hospital –

Like my thoughts conjured him, I felt Venec come through the main door downstairs, like a trickle of warm air against my skin.

“There’ve been so many complaints about hellhound breeders, you’d think somebody would have tried regulating them, or something,” Sharon said.

“They tried to ban them entirely, about a hundred years ago,” I said absently. “Huge yowl of complaints, said true hellhounds were so rare, anyway, they were doing a service by continuing the breed.” Like anything that was supposed to harry the souls of the damned was going to make a cuddly pet for junior.

“How could the housekeeper just let it run around like that? If she was so scared of it, why not shut it up somewhere?”

“Seriously? You wanted her to do something about a hound? She was probably afraid to do anything beyond coexist. It was introduced to her, so it knew