LITMIR.BIZ

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that the presentation was over, however, another worry insisted on worming its way into his thoughts.

      Benjamin.

      Ian frowned, a sudden surge of irritation and worry sparking the air around him, and setting off a car alarm on the street as he passed by. They had been friends since they were teenagers, the kind of friendship you counted on, even if you didn’t see each other for years. Ian hadn’t hesitated for a moment when thinking of a partner for this venture, hadn’t hesitated in dragging the other man away from his life in another city, from whatever else he might have planned, and handing him the team of green Talent to mold into proper investigators.

      Ben, as Ian expected, had taken to the new venture perfectly. It had given the other man a focus, a mission, a purpose he had been lacking before, wasted on jobs that were beneath his skills. The fact that the mission served his, Ian’s own vision…well, they all benefited.

      But the past few months, his partner had been…off his game. Distracted, and even more short-tempered than usual. Ben never took it out on anyone, but Ian, a trained reader of what people didn’t want known or seen, saw the pressure building under his friend’s skin.

      Whatever it was, whatever the cause, it had to be lanced and drained, before it got infected. Ian had his suspicions about what was going on, but he didn’t act on suspicions alone.

      Stepping off the curb to hail a cab, Ian reached up and undid the clip that had held his flame-red hair in a respectable fashion, letting the strands fall down his back, spreading with current-static against the fabric of his suit. The tension in his scalp lessened only slightly. When a cab pulled to the curb to deposit its passenger, he strode forward and claimed it ahead of some schlub half a step behind.

      “Uptown,” he said to the driver, then gave the office address. The car jerked forward into traffic, and he tried to relax against the plastic upholstery. His attempts to figure out what was wrong had, so far, met with “leave it alone, Ian,” and then a crankier, more laden “back off, boss,” when he approached Torres. Ian would be the first to admit that he wasn’t any sort of relationship guru, but when even he could see something simmering….

      Were it anyone else, once the direct approach was blocked, Ian Stosser would have gone the circuitous route, finding a weak spot in someone else’s armor, cajoling and coaxing and out-and-out pulling as needed, wiggling the information he wanted that way. He was a trained politician, a born schmoozer. If he wanted to know something, he could and would discover it.

      Except…this was Ben. His best friend. Possibly, if he was going to be blunt, his only friend. And for the first time in his life, Ian Stosser didn’t feel comfortable about getting what he wanted, not if it meant digging into Ben’s personal life after he’d been warned off.

      Ben wanted to deal with it, whatever “it” was, himself. And so, Ian was going to have to accept that.

      For now.

      But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to keep an eye on the situation. And, if needed, step in. Ben’s life was his own; except where it had an impact on PUPI. Then, he belonged to Ian.

      “You gonna eat that?”

      “Yes.” I glared at Pietr, clutching at my pastry defensively. “Paws off.”

      After we’d come back and filed our report of the scene, complete with a dump of our gleanings, Pietr and I ended up in the front break room with Nifty, pouring pitch-black coffee into ourselves and hoovering up the crumbs from a box of really disgustingly stale doughnuts, trying to figure out what sort of fatae could have taken down our floater.

      We’d all agreed that it couldn’t have been human, not short of five strong men, anyway. Bippis were not only strong, apparently, they were dense; their bones weighing twice what a human’s would. Hard to break, even harder to shove around. Pretty easy to drown, though; Pietr had been right about that. So that meant looking through our roster of the fatae breeds to see if any of them matched the required muscle, and of those, if we knew of any that had a bad relationship with Bippis, or cause to do one harm. Bippis didn’t harm each other—it was some kind of built-in safe lock in the breed.

      “The problem with looking at possible conflicts,” Nifty said now, “is that the odds were this was a totally personal thing, one-on-one rather than breed-specific. So it could be some fatae breed who’s coexisted peacefully with everyone for generations, just suddenly having a freak-out. Statistically—”

      Pietr groaned. Nifty did love his stats.

      “Statistically,” Nifty went on, undeterred, “most killings are unplanned, spur-of-the-moment, rage-or-jealousy driven kind of things, and the fact that the vic wasn’t human doesn’t change any of that.”

      “They’d tied its hands and legs with rope it couldn’t break, and thrown it into the river, still alive. That feels like something more than spur-of-the-moment anger.” I looked at the others, and got nods, Nifty’s more grudging than Pietr’s. “So we start big, determining which breeds could actually manage to do the deed, and then work our way down to the smaller scale of motive.”

      Somewhere, I was pretty sure, someone had collected data on every single fatae breed ever. It was the kind of thing mages used to do, assigning their students twenty pages a night to copy, or something. Not even Venec’s mentor, who was a pretty notable scholar in this age, had access to records like that now, though; they’d probably been lost in one of the Church purges, or during the Burning Time here in America.

      What we had was a wooden, four-drawer filing cabinet, très old-fashioned, that was starting to fill up with folders on each breed as we encountered it, all the notes and specifics, and whatever photos or drawings we could lay paws on. I was looking through the Ds, glancing and discarding, when I saw the file for “demon.” The label wasn’t in my handwriting; it was Venec’s. I had the urge to open it, see what he had put in there, and if he’d mentioned the one we’d seen in the diner downtown, last winter. And if he had mentioned it, if he’d mentioned anything about why we were down there.

      Stupid. Stupid, and pointless, and the kind of poking around a lovesick twelve-year-old did, damn it. If he did mention being there, the citation would be entirely about seeing the demon, maybe something about the case we were working on then.

      He wouldn’t have mentioned the fact that I’d tracked him down to a goth club, off-hours, or that we’d ended up in that diner to talk, for the first time, about the damned connection we had that was supposed to make us lifetime soul mates or something.

      Neither of us wanted that, particularly, or intended to follow up on it, and sure as hell were not about to put it down anywhere even semiofficial, in writing.

      No. He wouldn’t have mentioned any of that, no more than I mentioned it to anyone, not even J, my mentor.

      My secret. My headache.

      Even now, if I let my wall down a little, I could feel Venec’s current-presence. I could tell you where he was, more or less, and if I concentrated I could tell you what he was feeling.

      And if he let down his walls at the same time, I could tell you what he was thinking. By all research and rules, that was supposed to be impossible. I really wished that were true.

      As extra-special treats went, the Merge wasn’t. I had no interest in being told by some magical mojo who I was supposed to be knocking boots with, or cuddling up thoughtwise, and I sure as hell didn’t want some mystical force determining who I extraspeshul magically bonded with. Oh, hell, no.

      Thankfully, Venec had the same opinion of the entire thing. Unlike the downtime thing Pietr and I had going, there was no way to cordon off what was between us, safely; even I, queen of let’s-try-anything, knew that. It would change everything, disrupt everything, and neither of us had any desire to screw up the most important thing in our lives—this job—for…

      For whatever the Merge actually was. Venec might still be digging at it, trying to find answers, or at least explanations. If he’d found anything, he hadn’t told me, and I hadn’t asked. For once

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