Turn Coat (Page 44)

I know. Me. Shocking, right?

I stood there treating her the same way she had treated me, saying nothing, until Evelyn Derek exhaled impatiently through her nose and turned a cool and disapproving stare toward me.

"Hi, cuddles," I said.

I’ll give the lady this much-she had a great poker face. The disapproval turned into a neutral mask. She straightened slightly in her chair, though she looked more attentive than nervous, and put her palms flat on the desktop.

"You’re going to leave smudges," I said.

She stared at me for a few more seconds before she said, "Get out of my office."

"I don’t see any Windex in here," I mused, looking around.

"Did you hear me?" she said, her voice growing harder. "Get. Out."

I scratched my chin. "Maybe it’s in your secretary’s desk. You want me to get it for you?"

Spots of color appeared on her cheeks. She reached for the phone on her desk.

I pointed a finger at it, sent out an effort of will, and hissed, "Hexus."

Fouling up technology is a fairly simple thing for a wizard to do. But it isn’t surgical in its precision. Sparks erupted from the phone, from her computer, from the overhead lights, and from something inside her coat pocket, accompanied by several sharp popping sounds.

Ms. Derek let out a small shriek and tried to flinch in three directions at once. Her chair rolled backward without her, and she wound up sprawled on the floor behind her glass-topped desk in a most undignified manner. Her delicate-looking glasses hung from one ear, and her deep green eyes were wide, the whites showing all around them.

Purely for effect, I walked a couple of steps closer and stood looking down at her in silence for a long moment. There was not a sound in that room, and it was a lot darker in there without the lights.

I spoke very, very quietly. "There are two shut doors between you and the rest of this office-which is mostly empty anyway. You’ve got great carpets, solid-oak paneling, and a burbling water feature out in the hallway." I smiled slightly. "Nobody heard what just happened. Or they would have come running by now."

She swallowed, and didn’t move.

"I want you to tell me who had you hire a detective to snoop on me."

She made a visible effort to gather herself together. "I-I don’t know what you’re talking about."

I shook my head, lifted my hand, and made a beckoning gesture at the liquor cabinet as I murmured, "Forzare," and made a gentle effort of will. The door to the cabinet swung open. I picked a bottle of what looked like bourbon and repeated the gesture, causing it to flit from the opened cabinet across the room to my hand. I unscrewed the cap and took a swig. It tasted rich and burned my throat pleasantly on the way down.

Evelyn Derek stared at me in pure shock, her mouth open, her face whiter than rural Maine.

I looked at her steadily. "Are you sure?"

"Oh, God," she whispered.

"Evelyn," I said in a chiding voice. "Focus. You hired Vince Graver to follow me around and report on my movements. Someone told you to do that. Who was it?"

"M-my clients," she stammered. "Confidential."

I felt bad scaring the poor woman. Her reaction to the use of magic had been typical of a straight who had never encountered the supernatural before-which meant that she probably had no idea of the nature of whoever she was protecting. She was terrified. I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to hurt her.

But I was the only one in the room who did.

The thing about playing a bluff is that you have to play it all the way out, even when it gets uncomfortable.

"I really didn’t want this to get ugly," I said sadly.

I took a step closer and put the bottle down on the desk. Then I slowly, dramatically, raised my left hand. It had been badly burned several years before, and while my ability to recover from such things was more intense than other human beings, at least in the long term, my hand still wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t quite horror-movie special effects anymore, but the molten scars covering my fingers, wrist, and most of my palm were still startling and unpleasant, if you hadn’t ever seen them before.

"No, wait," Evelyn squeaked. She backed across the floor on her buttocks, pressed her back to the wall and lifted her hands. "Don’t."

"You helped your client try to kill people, Evelyn," I said in a calm voice. "Tell me who."

Her eyes widened even more. "What? No. No, I didn’t know anyone would get hurt."

I stepped closer and snarled, "Talk."

"All right, all right!" she stammered. "She-"

She stopped speaking as suddenly as if someone had begun strangling her.

I eased up on the intimidation throttle. "Tell me," I said, more quietly.

Evelyn Derek shook her head at me, fear and confusion stripping away the reserve I’d seen in her only moments before. She started shaking. I saw her open her mouth several times, but only small choked sounds emerged. Her eyes lost focus and started flicking randomly around the room like a trapped animal looking for an escape.

That wasn’t normal. Not even a little. Someone like Evelyn Derek might panic, might be cowed, might be backed into a corner-but she would never be at a loss for words.

"Oh," I said, mostly to myself. "I hate this crap."

I sighed, and walked around the desk to stand over the cowering lawyer. "Hell, if I’d known that someone had…" I shook my head. She wasn’t really listening very hard to me, and she’d started crying.

It was one of about a thousand possible reactions when someone’s free will has been directly abrogated by some kind of psychic interdiction. I’d just created a situation in which every part of her logical, rational mind had been completely in favor of telling me who had hired her. Her emotions had been lined up right behind her reasoned thoughts, too.

Only I was betting that someone had gotten into her head. Someone had left something inside her that refused to let Ms. Derek speak about her employer. Hell, she might not even have a conscious memory of who hired her-despite the fact that she wouldn’t just hire some detective to spy on somebody for no reason.

Everyone always thinks that such obvious logical inconsistencies wouldn’t hold up, that the mind would somehow tear free of the bonds placed upon it using those flaws. But the fact is that the human mind isn’t a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn’t make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.