Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,2

100% behind my career choice, but he tries to be supportive. I’m not sure Dashiell Hammett wrote about Istiachi, myself. More Lovecraft’s style. The land-squid were fatae, technically full and valued members of the Cosa Nostradamus, but you didn’t invite them to Gathers, and certainly never to lunch.

“Besides,” Venec went on. “I need you here to work on those files with Lou.”

There was a faint snicker that sounded like it came from down the table, which meant Nick, which wasn’t a surprise. Boy still didn’t have an inch of self-preservation in him. Nifty glared around the table, and went back to sulking. Lou merely nodded her head, accepting both the assignment and the partnering.

Nick was one of the Original Five. He looked like your basic geek... and okay, he was. But he had skills nobody else could match. Lou was new to our pack – she’d come on board two months ago, when the cases started coming faster and Stosser decided we needed more hands. The oldest of us by a decade, she had actual experience, having worked for a Null P.I.’s office before, but the first time she went out into the field as an active PUPI...

Well. It had been spectacular, and not in a good way. Lou’s control was fabulous under training conditions, and not so much in the real world. Now she worked the back office, making sure the research records were in order, the supplies properly kept, and we’re never caught without proper background files. At that, she’s a whiz. We didn’t know how badly we needed an office manager until we had one in place.

Venec waited to see if anyone was going to make any other comments. We weren’t. “After the backlog last week – ” The Big Dog held up a hand to keep anyone from trying to explain or protest. “Yah, I know. That job was a goddamned disaster, and we were all stressed. But not a single one of you filed paperwork all case, and then every damn one of you dumped it on Lou’s desk Thursday afternoon. Tacky, people. She’s already gone through her initiation.”

“As mero!” Lou muttered, leaning back in her chair, and I tried not to crack a grin. My father might not have taught me much Spanish before handing me over to J, but I’d learned enough over the years to know what she’d said – and even if I hadn’t understood the particular slang, her tone made it clear. The rest of my cohorts – middle-class whitebread to the core, even Nifty – were clueless.

“As I was saying, after the backlog of last week, I had wanted you all to do some skill-work – Sharon, you still need to work on your binding spells, and Pietr and Bonnie are due for a refresher course in ducking a tail.”

How someone who could disappear as thoroughly as Pietr when he was stressed couldn’t manage to shake a tail still amazed me. But it was true: for a ghost-boy, he stuck out like a sore thumb when he was focused on following someone.

My problem, according to Venec, was my hair.

I reached up and touched my short blond curls self-consciously. I’d thought the blue streaks were kicky. Venec had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that they were distracting, and unprofessional. And, apparently, they made me easy to pick out of a crowd.

We weren’t supposed to stand out; we were supposed to blend in, the better to find out things people didn’t want known. Or, as he put it, “This isn’t a peacock show, damn it.”

He was right, okay, he was absolutely right. But I’d spent most of my life standing out, gleefully and with encouragement from my mentor, and this...

This drabbing down to dullness was hard.

Even as I let that thought slip, there was a mental touch of something, not quite sympathy – never sympathy – but a rough buck-up sort of pushback, and I sighed. Of course Venec would know I was indulging in self-pity.

There was no such thing as telepathy, beyond the ping – a quick burst of information that was more visual than heard or seen – but about eight months ago we’d discovered that Venec and I could pick up each other’s emotions, even thoughts.

Worse and weirder than that: our current kept getting tangled together without our willing it, something that was supposedly impossible. Magic didn’t work that way.

The old texts, what Venec had been able to find, called it the Merge. It was rare, annoying,