Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,98

box of current. Not motionless – current itself was never motionless by its very nature – but not doing anything, either. Normally you could feel a tracebox working, the steady, staticky not-quite-noise of current set in an ongoing spell. That’s all a tracebox was: current shaped by the controlling influence of more current – a spell – into a solid form. Okay, a mostly solid form.

Now, I not only didn’t feel the box working, I didn’t feel the trace inside it, although the glow told me that it was still there. I had a sudden panicked thought that, while we were distracted, it had escaped, somehow – that The Roblin had let it out, leaving a decoy behind, and it was roaming the hallways even now, the two of them, plotting some terrible, dire trick.

“You’re getting paranoid,” I said in disgust. “Half an hour’s exposure to Venec, and you’re totally paranoid.”

The box sat there on the table, glimmering and glowering with current-light, and I could swear it was taunting me, like there wasn’t anything I could do or think up that would crack the mystery of what was in there, and why I couldn’t feel it, now.

The only thing I hate more than being manipulated was being told I wasn’t capable of doing something. The combination? Oh, that just pissed me off. Knowing it was dumb, knowing I was being played, I slipped down into fugue-state, and “lifted” the lid of the box.

It was still there, settled at the bottom of the box like a handful of ashes, lacy and harmless-looking.

“Who are you?” I asked it. Not what – who. The part of my brain that wasn’t busy being incredibly stupid noted that for later.

It answered me. A hiss of current slithered back at me, heavy and dark, and filled with echoes a thousand miles deeper than anything I could reach, licked from below by the flames of something that might have been the devil’s laugh.

That laugh froze me in place while those flames crawled all over the skin of my hands, tried to reach deeper inside, gunning for my core, wanting to eat me, down to the last glittering drop of Me. I panicked, slammed the lid down and threw an extra layer of current into the lock, praying that would do the job, even as I was screaming along the Merge-connection for help.

*VENEC!*

The spell wasn’t a complicated one; Pietr had the suspicion that was probably why the others had trouble with it. They applied too much force, and when you forced current, it lashed back at you. The trick was to be gentle, almost not asking anything of it even as you invoked the words. Negative space needed negative force. He thought about trying to explain that to the intent-looking blonde to his left, and almost laughed. Sharon was more of a blunt force object. No, this was a spell only Bonnie, with her ability to see multiple layers of gray in every shadow, could have thought of... and he was probably the only one who could do it properly, existing as he did so often in those shadows.

“Anything?”

“Not yett.”

The two areas that had been the most trashed in the client’s office were the desk and the bookcase behind the desk. So they had focused there; anything that might have been on the surface would have been found when Sharon and Nick cased the place originally, and by the time Stosser and Bonnie arrived, anything but the most obvious or persistent trace would have been obliterated.

Except, of course, for what wasn’t there.

He had the notebook in his jacket pocket, but the words were easy to remember.

“Shadow of air and weight of light, make clear what now is not.”

Even as he spoke the words, he reached into his core and, with gentle spectral fingers, lifted a handful of spar kling threads of current, letting them run through their range of colors before shading toward a peaceful, calm blue that let itself be drawn up by the words of the spell, spinning out into a thick, darkly neon-blue vapor that settled into one... two... three different spots where the bookcase had rested.

“Three?” His gaze flicked from one to the other and then to the third, his face still with concentration. “What did we miss?”

Sharon, standing off to the side and not able to see the results of his spell, said nothing, understanding that he wasn’t actually asking her.

“Talk to me,” Pietr said. It wasn’t a command, wasn’t even a spell,