I’d been fourteen then, and filled with a sense – nurtured by J – that hard work and skill could get me through anything. The idea that there was something J couldn’t do, that he might doubt his own abilities, was as foreign to me as the thought that he might sprout wings and fly.
I was older now, and had seen more of what life could and would throw at you on a daily basis, things that overwhelmed and dispirited as much as they lifted us and showed us joy. But...
“I’m sorry.” I was. “I didn’t mean to make light of what it is you’re saying... ”
“But you have no idea what I’m saying, do you?”
I shook my head, then nodded. “No. I mean, I know what you’re saying, I just... ”
Lou laughed, and it was tired but amused, not mocking. “But you’re twenty-four and have never failed at anything, have you?”
I had failed to bring my dad’s killer to justice. The bitterness of that still made my throat ache. But I’d dealt with it, accepted the failure as inevitable – and PUPI was my guarantee that never happened again. The failure had not been my inability, but the lack of a mechanism.
So I said the only thing that I knew was true. “We’re a stronger team, because you’re part of it.”
There was silence, and I risked looking back at Lou. She was staring out the window, and the look on her face was one I recognized: deep, fast-moving thoughts under the surface. I saw that look a lot, around here.
“Yeah,” she said, finally. “Okay.”
She tossed the half-eaten apple into the waste can in the corner, and left. I didn’t get the feeling I’d helped her solve anything.
Hopefully, I’d have better luck with the floater.
two
Pietr had been waiting, semipatiently, in the break room. He took one look at my face and bit back whatever he was going to say, just handing me my case and holding the door to the hallway. One of the great things about our office was that we were only a block away from the subway. The downside was that it was the 1 line, which meant leaving the west side required a crosstown bus, or a lot of walking. Fortunately, it wasn’t a bad day, weather wise.
We made it to the subway without speaking to each other, heading downtown toward the floater, and all the related joy therein, our kits – the assorted and alchemical tools of our trade – stashed at our feet, where nobody could walk by and grab them. And with every rattle and spark along the track, I felt more and more guilty about his being sent along with me. Normally, we take the assignments as they come and try not to whine too much. It’s not like we ever get handed a bouquet of spring flowers to investigate, after all, and if we did it would be infested by hornets and nose-rot. But I felt like I had to say something to Pietr, anyway.
“Sorry.”
Pietr turned his head slightly to look at me, surprised. “Why?”
“Venec’s punishing me for the hair disaster, and you’re stuck with it by association.”
“Oh.” His face went all closed and quiet, the way it does when he processes, and I watched him curiously. For all that he liked to cause mischief, Pietr tended to take his time to consider things. He was one of our thinkers – not that he couldn’t improvise, and quickly, but not in the instinctive, nearly impulsive way Nick did. Or me for that matter, although I used to pride myself on how well I thought shit through. Not enough, apparently.
Pietr didn’t have to think long, though. “You sure it’s the hair that’s chafing his... mood? Or that you’re the real target?”
Ow. I groaned, and looked away. “Don’t you start.”
The fact that Venec and I had sparks going on – okay, sparks like Macy’s fireworks – wasn’t something you could hide from a blind fish, much less an office of trained investigators. The guys liked to tease me about that occasionally. Not meaning any harm, just... the usual shit you get, when the job is tense and the laughs few. Pietr, though, had a different take on the situation. He and I were – on a very specifically, intentionally casual basis – sexual partners. So naturally, he figured that was also why he got stuck with the floater – because there was no way an investigator like Benjamin Venec, with more experience than the rest of us slammed together, didn’t also know about our off-hours agreement, no matter how much we kept it on the q.t.
He might have been right, in ordinary conditions. But Pietr, and the others, were missing a really important part of the puzzle. The pack knew there were sparks. They also knew I wasn’t exactly shy, normally, about going after what or who I wanted. So they had to figure I didn’t want to get involved with the boss, or that the boss had shot me down, for work-reasons. Which was all sorta true.
They didn’t know about the damned Merge, though. Venec and I both agreed to keep it that way. The fact that our current had somehow recognized each other and decided we’d make pretty babies, or some weird and seriously annoying thing like that, didn’t impress me at all, and Venec, well, he really did not like being told what to do by some biomagical force.
All right, it was more complicated than that, and according to Venec’s research the Merge is Serious Doings, but I kept control over my sex life my own self, thanks, anyway, Fate, and be damned if I was going to risk not being taken seriously in my career because my current wanted me to make babies.
I have nothing against babies. Eventually. When and if I decided to have them.
But every day we worked together, the pull got stronger. If I let down my mental walls even a little bit, I knew his mood, and if I reached just an inch, I’d get my fingers into his thoughts.
Same for him, with me.
It was making us... cranky. Venec was a fair guy, for all that he was a bastard, and wouldn’t play favorites or punish someone for a screwup once the lesson was learned. My hair color was only an excuse for him to blow off some of that crank into an actual reason. Knowing that rationally didn’t make the scolding hurt any less, though.
And Lou thought I never doubted myself? That was almost funny. The Merge had made me doubt my entire personal philosophy, change the way I interacted with people, second-guess every flicker and twinge of my emotions... . I needed to get a handle on myself. A distracted investigator could not do her job, and leaving this job was... not an option.
Pietr touched his hand on mine, lightly. “Bonnie... ”
I shook my head, staring at the advertisement across the subway car instead of looking at him, listening to the chunk-chunk-whirr of the car’s movement, focusing on the subtle but real hum of current running along the third rail, instead of listening to him. “No. Stop. Work hours.”
I wasn’t talking about the touch, but what he was going to say. How the two of us blew off steam and gave comfort off-hours was off-hours. Neither of us wanted it to spill into the workday, especially if there was half a chance that it would screw up our professional relationship. Pietr and I worked well together. He backed me up, I pushed him on... we got things done.
That was why Venec had paired him with me, today. Probably. Anything else would be petty, and Benjamin Venec wasn’t petty.
Except, of course, when he was.
We rode the rest of the way in a more comfortable, companionable silence, switching from the train downtown for a crosstown bus that dropped us off at the Manhattan Bridge, and we walked the rest of the way, stopped by the usual tangle of the FDR Drive. Finding a safe place to cross would require some backtracking. Mass transit sucked when you were working a crime scene, but without a siren, cars could be even slower, and Translocation, using current to move someone from point A to point B, was a serious drain on the core of the person doing the sending, with the additional inherent risk of finding a safe place to land. You couldn’t actually land “on” someone – magic follows the same rules as physics, mostly, and two objects can’t occupy the same space – but you could get knocked over or hit by a moving object or person. As usual with magic, the odds of actually being seen doing anything was small. Nulls didn’t see what they didn’t want to see.