LITMIR.BIZ

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involved—current from the electric bolts could wipe the slate clean in one flash—and being wet made me look like a drowned albino rat.

      “Like I said, reasonably untouched, for NYPD values of reasonable. Ground’s been trampled by a couple-three cops, one of whom is our first-responder lonejack.”

      Poor guy must have shit a brick when he saw the ki-rin, and realized what he’d gotten. Ki-rin were not only rare, they were ancient, as a breed. Like dryads and greater dragons, they were given respect by every other fatae breed, and any Talent with a lick of sense or tradition. We were lucky our first responder didn’t panic, and luckier still that he called the Council, and not one of the lonejack elders. The Cosa Nostradamus’s relationship with the NYPD is a long and fragmented one, but something like this was going to get every alarm jangling everywhere, and the Council—much as a lonejack would hate to admit it—was the best way to handle things. Council had the protocol.

      “We have a signature on the cop?” Signature was the way we identified Talent, the way their current “felt.” It was individual, like a fingerprint—but you had to know what it looked like, first. Problem was there wasn’t a database for us to check, which mostly made identifying a particular signature near-impossible unless we had access to everyone on the scene, to tag them for comparison, and rule them out of any evidence we collected.

      “Not yet. Nick, go find and fetch.”

      Nick rolled his eyes, then saluted crisply, and turned on his heel and headed out into the crowd. That left me and Sharon.

      “The deceased has been carted off to the morgue, while his companion is on his way to the hospital, presumably doped to the gills.” That was standard for Talent in those situations—current is only under our control by conscious effort: when stressed, we can go haywire. Pietr was unusual in that he faded from view as a protective measure—most of us just shorted out sensitive electronics like, oh, lifesupport systems and finely calibrated medical apparatuses. Emergency-room staff hated to see us coming.

      Ian went back to issuing orders. “Mendelssohn, I want you working the crowd. Listen, don’t talk. If there’s anyone out there with more than a prurient interest, or says anything—anything—that gives you a twitch, I want to know, immediately.” While the Guys had us stretch in training, or on low-intensity cases, when we were on a sticky job they preferred to match people up with their native skills, and Sharon had a seventh sense about if people were lying or not. My teammate, characteristically stylish in a long black suede coat and a black wool beret over her blond hair, nodded and went off to do our master’s bidding

      And that left me. And the scene. No surprise. I didn’t need to hear the band playing to know what my marching orders were.

      “You okay with this?” Ian generally played the compassionate soul to Venec’s hard-ass, but he really wasn’t much on the touchy-feely when it came to us, more likely to toss us in without a by-your-leave. I blinked at his concern, wondering what triggered that, and then shrugged it off. No way I was going to make him think I couldn’t handle it.

      “Yeah. I’m okay.”

      He lifted the wire, the spell recognizing his signature and not sending an alarm, and we entered the crime scene.

      Like I said, everyone on the team had their strength. If Sharon was a truth-scryer, I was a gleaner. I figured that my recall, both visual and factual, was one of the reasons I’d been recruited. Venec had run me through endless tests and scenarios, honing that ability and tying it into a cantrip we used to capture the scene intact. They’d tried, first, to teach everyone the spell—that hadn’t worked out well. So unless it was an emergency, it was just me. My job here was to walk the scene, gathering as much information as I could, both physical and magical, and re-create it later for the rest of the team to study.

      Since joining PUPI, I’d gleaned murder scenes, dipped into the minds of pathological abusers, and—Venec’s idea of training—skimmed the hot emotions of a rabid Salamander. Reading the scene of a self-defense killing where we knew the identity of all the players should have been a piece of proverbial.

      Except the guy’d been killed because he’d tried to rape a ki-rin companion. Scum, and stupid, and I was not looking forward to getting my mental fingers into what that left behind.

      That thought drew my attention to what Stosser had said, about the NYPD not wanting to touch the scene until the ki-rin had been dealt with. What sort of trace did a ki-rin leave behind? I let my gaze pass over the scene, looking and yet not looking, and found myself noticing a shadowed corner near one of the riverside buildings about a hundred yards from the scene where two men—older, suited, officious-looking, and couldn’t be more obviously Council if they’d had it branded on their left buttocks—had the accused killer contained.

      My breath caught in my throat, despite my determination not to be impressed. I’m hardly a country bumpkin, but a ki-rin … my god. One of the most exotic and magnificent of the fatae, the nonhumans. They’re sometimes called Asian unicorns, but that was so far off the mark to be useless. A unicorn was a horse with a horn and an attitude. The ki-rin were … It was too far away to see details, but I knew the description, same as any halfway-trained Talent. Body of a stag, mane of a lion, head of a dragon—and yeah, a single slender horn growing from the center of the dragonlike head. Wise, fierce, compassionate, truth-seeking … and, like European unicorns, associating only with women of untouched virtue.

      Okay, obviously I wasn’t going to get close-up and personal with one anytime soon. Considering the sole example present was currently pacing back and forth, making the suits with him display some seriously cautious body language, that was fine by me. Some glorious legends could remain legend.

      It did make me wonder about the sexual experience of the guys talking to it, though, and—more to the investigation—why they were keeping it there instead of whisking it off … somewhere. Especially if the fatae community already had their knickers in a twist about anyone questioning it. Oh. Oh, no …

      “We don’t have to …” I asked Stosser, with a twitch of my fingers in the ki-rin’s direction.

      He followed my fingers, and shook his head. “No.”

      “Good.” Because if the local looky-loos were upset about it being asked to step aside while the scene was cleared, I didn’t want to think about what they’d do to the person who actually interrogated it.

      That left one unpleasant bit still to be done. “You going to … interview the woman?”

      She’d been taken to the local hospital—the same one her accused assailant was currently being treated in—and released. But we needed her statement, before things got even more muddled in her head.

      “I thought that would be best,” he said.

      Understatement. Ian Stosser was the public face of PUPI not only because he was the founder, but also because he was a PR schmoozer par excellence. He looked you in the eye and every bit of his compassion and empathy and intelligence was focused on you, your problem, and he existed only to solve that problem for you. It was not entirely a sham—he did care, and he did want to solve the problem, otherwise he would never have gotten into this line of work. But Ian could and would kick it up a notch or seven. In a word: charisma. Natural, and magical. But he was also a bulldog when he was after something, as we knew to our own bruises.

      “Yeah. Boss?”

      He paused, one narrow red eyebrow cocked under that stupid watch cap.

      “The girl …” I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to say. Actually, I knew exactly what I wanted to say, I just wasn’t sure how to do it without getting fired.

      He showed his teeth in a reassuring smile, a Stosser specialty. “I’ll be gentle, Torres. Get to work.”

      With that, Stosser headed off for, I presume, the hospital. I watched him disappear into the crowd, then turned back to look over the scene. He was right: Time for me to do what I did, before anyone muddied the scene, or the cops came back and kicked us out, or anything else came along

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