Pack of Lies Read Online Free PDF

it, make it do what you wanted and only what you wanted. As I counted down from ten, I closed my eyes and pushed the soles of my boots firmly against the asphalt of the jogging track. My body was still, but my current was reaching down, finding the bedrock deep underneath, grounding in that solid base. That allowed me to use more current without worrying about affecting anyone around me—or, hopefully, their electronics.
    When I opened my eyes again, deep in a working fugue-state, it was as though someone had dropped a scrim over the stage, and rolled back time to just before dawn. It wasn’t real—but it was, too. Places hold memories, same as people. Not for long, and they’re easily scattered and corrupted, but if you’re fast and good, you can capture it. Like spirit photography, Ian had said during training, only I was doing it with current instead of light-sensitive paper and chemicals. I could see, using mage-sight, the splatters of blood and other bodily fluids like Day-Glo paint on a gray background, and felt my stomach do a slow roll-and-turn. I didn’t want to see this, I didn’t want to see this, I didn’t…
    Enough. Everyone else was doing their thing; I wasn’t going to go back to Stosser and tell him I couldn’t hack it, after all. A hard shove set aside the whining inner voice, and a sort of Zen calm settled over my core. That was anotherthing that made me good at my job; like Pietr, I didn’t get staticky and disruptive when my emotions were involved. I got very, very precise.
    Ideally I’d let the scene play out in real time, getting it with my eyes as well as my senses. I could faintly hear the rumble of voices outside that suggested the guys in blue were back, and I needed to be gone. Just because we’d been called in didn’t mean we had any actual authority, and pressure would come down soon enough to get all this dealt with.
    I did a hard-and-fast scoop, pressing everything I could find into a strand of current, and sealing it away so the rest of my own personal memories or emotions couldn’t tamper with it. Hopefully. We were still working out some of the kinks in that particular procedure.
    â€œMiss?”
    I opened my eyes to see a cop—maybe a few years older than me, clean-shaven and anxious-looking—staring down at me. Rookie, probably, sent over to get rid of the pretty little girl, while his partner did the real work. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, miss. This…”
    â€œYeah, it’s okay,” I said. He had a faint telltale glint, seen with fugue-sight, that told me he was Talent, and so he probably-maybe knew who I was and what I was doing there. Or maybe not; just because you could didn’t mean that you did. There were a lot of Talent who ignored anything magical. Lonejacks especially didn’t care, if it didn’t affect them directly and personally.
    Either way, I wasn’t going to give him cause to get annoyed. Our window had slammed shut. I gave my “packet” a mental touch, just to reassure myself it was there, and got lost.
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    There wasn’t much point to waiting around for the others to finish up; they’d do their job and get back to the office when they were done. I walked over to the nearest 1 line stop and caught the next train uptown, keeping myself as still and focused as I could, the magical equivalent of walking with a glass of water on your head. Only if I “spilled,” it would contaminate the entire gleaning and ruin our only record of the scene, and every minute I spent with it inside me, the greater the chance of contamination.
    Not that anything I picked up was admissible in the court of law, even perfectly preserved, but we didn’t exactly deal with the courts, or law, as most of the world knew it. We were of the Cosa, for the Cosa, and the Cosa determined what—if any—punishment would be handed out, based on what we