Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [2]
Or protection spells.
Wren had been part of the magic-using community since she was fourteen. She’d never once used a protection spell, or known anyone else who did, either. But a lot of people swore by them, apparently. And were willing to pay good money to get them back.
She drummed her fingers on her denim-clad thigh, thinking. Sometimes you needed to know all the facts. Sometimes, knowing anything more than the essentials just clogged the works. The trick was knowing which situation called for what method. She glanced up the length of the building, then blinked and looked away again quickly. The view made her dizzy, not so much from the sunlight reflecting off the glass as the sense of…no, not menace, exactly. But a looming emptiness that was disturbing. As though something more vital than a chunk of rock had been stolen away.
Wren frowned, redirecting her attention to the building’s foundation again, squinting as though hoping to suddenly be struck with X-ray vision. Not one of the recorded skill sets of Talent, worse luck. But if a Talent couldn’t get the job done, it was time to use your brain, and she had a pretty decent one if she did say so herself. Eliminating the impossible, you’re left with the obvious; it would take magic to get the missing slab out without doing major damage to the entire building. And that was exactly the feat someone had apparently mastered on this very building, at approximately 11:32 the night before. So, magic. Which narrowed the playing field not only for culprits, but motives.
She nodded to herself, twirling the recorder absently in one hand. A rather impressive act of vandalism, in more ways than one; it showed off the vandals’ abilities without making a fuss the usual authorities could follow, assuming they would even be interested in a case like this; it in no way harmed the integrity of the building and therefore didn’t put anyone working there at risk; and it struck deep in the heart of the building’s owner and prime resident’s deepest, ugliest fear.
It was a hacker’s trick, showing how easy it would be to really harm the target, without doing anything they could easily be prosecuted for. Only in this case, it wasn’t all just show. Damage had been done, if not anything you could explain on a police report, or an insurance waiver.
Their employer had two very simple questions: who did this, and how soon can you get it back? Right now Wren was more concerned with how it had been done. In her experience, once you found the tools, it was generally a simple matter to find the workman. And once they’d found him, the fun part began.
Only problem was, this bastard didn’t seem to have left any external traces at all. Wren was—grudgingly—impressed.
Clicking on the ’corder again, she continued making her comments, pacing down the sidewalk.
“The night watchman finished his rounds at 4:45 a.m. At that point, he claims not to have seen anything out of the ordinary—nothing that would have given him even an instant’s pause at all.” She hesitated, continued. “Which raises the question, I guess, if the theft was done remotely, or if the guard was under the influence of a spell himself.”
A jogger went past her at a heavy-breathing clip, and she moved out of the way with the instinctive radar that big-city residents evolve by instinct, but didn’t pause in her recitation. Even if the jogger had been inclined to listen in—selective deafness being another big-city survival trait—Wren doubted that he would have recalled it—or her—an instant later. Being invisible was one of