Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,87

a tape recorder could get fried by a sudden defensive twitch.

Fortunately, I ran cool, which meant...

I stopped dead on the corner. “That’s it.”

“What?”

“The Roblin. It didn’t go after the stronger ones – it went after the weirder ones. I run cool, and Nick – oh, shit, Nick!”

I was surrounded by stronger Talent, and carefully not being active. Nick, on the other hand, was probably nose-forward right this fucking moment into tricky, weird, prone-to-chaos-anyway magic. He’d be like a carnival target to something like The Roblin.

My ping was instinctive: not to Nick, for fear of distracting him at a bad moment, but Stosser, who might be within reach – and had the power and the control to risk getting between a hacker-mage and a mischief imp.

“I need to get back,” Ben said suddenly, a faraway look in his eyes. “Bonnie... ”

I felt the same sharp urgency he did, filtered through his connection to Stosser. “We’ll take the subway,” I said. “Go.”

* * *

eleven

Either intentionally or not, Venec left that faint connection open, so by the time Nifty and I made it to the office, I already knew that Nick was mostly all right, his computer was utterly fried, and while the rest of the team was nervous and edgy, and Stosser was annoyed, Venec was furious.

Not at Nicky, not even at the imp. He was furious at Ian, who had, as Nifty would say, sidelined him from the game, telling him that his injuries were serious enough to keep him on office-duty, same as Nifty had been. I walked into an office that was practically simmering with frustration and resentment.

Part of me wanted to avoid the entire thing, make like the others in obliviousness, just go directly to Nick, make sure he was okay, and then get my orders with the rest of the team.

I’d been raised to deal with my responsibilities, though, even when I was the only one who knew what they were. And the first responsibility, like it or not, want it or not, was getting Ian and Ben back on track.

I just wasn’t quite sure, even as I walked into the Big Dogs’ lair, how I was going to do that.

The two of them were sitting in chairs at opposite ends of the small office, glaring at each other. “Shune’s fine,” Ian said as I walked in, not even bothering to look at me. “The Roblin singed his fingers and fried his hair a bit, that’s all.”

Being a Talent means, by definition, that you can handle a load of current – and electricity – running through your body. Something that singed Nick’s fingers might have killed a Null. Stosser wouldn’t have thought of that, probably.

I knew that Venec had.

“I think our original guess was right. If The Roblin’s here to make mischief, its biggest challenge would be the ones who investigate mischief. So long as it’s targeting us, it’s not harassing others,” I said, addressing Ben’s worry first. “If we can keep it focused on us, nobody else will get hurt.”

Except maybe us. Still. Did a mischief imp, even the grandmother of imps, intend to kill? Then I thought about what some fatae considered harmless pranks, historically, and reconsidered.

“We can’t have it interfering with the ongoing investigation,” Stosser said. “You’ve probably wrapped up the body dump, and that was good work, but this break-in has already caused too much trouble. The client lied to us, hid details of the story, and nearly got Ben killed. I want to know exactly what is going on.”

“It goes for the unique,” I said, following my earlier thought. “I think that’s the trigger. That’s why me, and Nick.” I’d had time to think it through, on the subway ride back, lay it out into a semblance of a formal report. “We’re not the strongest of the pack, but our skills are unusual – I run cool so I bet that it was trying to make me angry, breaking all my stuff and getting me kicked out of my building, to see what I could do, what trouble it could cause. But Nick’s – ” I paused; even among ourselves we didn’t often vocalize Nick’s skill “ – Nick’s a challenge it wasn’t going to get many other places. So he’s going to be the real target... . But it might get bored, anyway. We need to find something... ”

A thought struck me, and the way Ben’s head lifted, his dark eyes looking even more shadowed with exhaustion and pain, I could