Staying Dead
Staying Dead
Laura Anne Gilman
Manhattan's night life just got weirder… It starts as a simple job — but simple jobs, when you're dealing with the magical world, often end up anything but. As a Retriever, Wren Valere specializes in finding things gone missing — and then bringing them back, no questions asked. Normally her job is stimulating, challenging and only a little bit dangerous.But every once in a while… Case in point: A cornerstone containing a spell is stolen and there's a magical complication. (Isn't there always?) Wren's unique abilities aren't enough to lay this particular case to rest, so she turns to some friends: a demon (minor), a mage who has lost his mind, and a few others, including Sergei, her business partner (and maybe a bit more?). Sometimes what a woman has to do to get the job done is enough to give even Wren nightmares…
Staying Dead
Laura Anne Gilman
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For Mom and Dad, of course.
And for Mir and ElaineMc,
who have some small blame in all this…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Because no writer works alone,
no matter what it feels like at 3:00 a.m.,
I need to praise and thank the following people:
Jennifer Jackson (agent) and
Mary-Theresa Hussey (editor). Finestkind.
Peter, who understood that there was something I
needed to do, and gave me the space to get it done.
The Cross-Genre Abuse Group, for smacking this
around the room more than a few times.
eluki, who said “yes” to my kids before anyone else,
and Dana and Lynn, all of whom took time out
to pay forward.
The folk in my newsgroup who came up with the info
when I needed it (and the Hounds, who howl on cue).
James, who told me to shut up and get back to work.
Marina Frants, who taught me all sorts of lovely Russian
phrases…some of which even made it into the book.
To you all, if I haven’t said it recently,
grazie. Molto grazie.
The Mississippi’s mighty, but it starts in Minnesota
At a place where you could walk across
with five steps down…
—Indigo Girls
“Ghost”
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
one
“Hey, lady! Move it or lose it!”
The cyclist sped past her, a blur of expensive aluminum, narrow wheels and Lycra-clad body topped by a screaming-orange helmet. He—she? it?—hopped off the curb and dove into the light traffic moving up Madison Avenue, almost slamming into a cab that was cruising around the opposite corner looking for an early-morning fare. The cabbie slammed on the brakes and the horn at the same time, and the bike messenger made a rude gesture as he wove in and out of the middle of the street, heading downtown.
“Oh, for a stick to spoke his wheels,” Wren said wistfully, staring after the cyclist with annoyance. The man standing next to her smothered a surprised burst of laughter. Wren blinked. She hadn’t been kidding; bicycle messengers were a menace.
Dismissing the incident with the single-minded focus she brought to every job, Wren turned her attention back to the building in front of her; the reason she was standing out on the corner at this ungodly hour of the a.m. on a Monday. What terrible sin had she committed in a past life, to get all the morning gigs in this life? She made a soft, snorting noise, amused at her own indignation. At least it was a pretty morning as those things went.
In fact, Manhattan in the spring was a pretty decent place to be. Winter meant slush and biting winds, while summer had a range of heat-induced smells that ranged from disgusting to putrid. You could live in the city then, but you generally didn’t like it. But spring, she thought, spring was the time to be here. The sun was warming up, the breeze was cool, and people were in the mood to smile at each other. Even bad days had an edge of promise to them.
But right now, spring weather aside, Wren couldn’t find a damn thing to be happy about. Seven in the morning was way too early, and the job that had sounded like quick and easy money at first was rapidly going deep into the proverbial shitter. She was going to have to do some actual work for her paycheck on this one.
“Maybe that will teach you to answer the phone before six,” she said out loud.
“Excuse me?”
Rafe, the guard who had been detailed to “help” her, had a cute little wrinkle between his eyebrows, totally spoiling his until-now perfect Little RentACop look.
“Nothing. Never mind.” Don’t talk to yourself in front of civilians, Valere. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Even if she had ignored the phone’s ringing two hours ago, before either she or the sun had thought about getting up, the sound of Sergei’s voice on the machine would have made her pick the receiver up. She might have the skills that people paid for, but her partner was the one with a nose for jobs that was slowly but surely making them moderately well-off, if not obscenely wealthy. Only a fool would pass up a call from someone like that, no matter what the time.
And while Wren Valere was many things, a fool had never been one of them.
“Rafe? Can you go get me a refill of water?” she asked, handing him the plastic sports bottle she had been holding. He wasn’t thrilled at being an errand boy, she could tell, but his orders had been explicit. Give Ms. Valere all the help she needed. Type of help not specified. So he went.
Freed from observation, she sat back on her heels and closed her eyes slowly, holding them shut for a count of ten. She had been doing this long enough that it didn’t take her any longer than that to slip into a state of clear-minded awareness. The sounds of early-morning traffic, the smells of exhaust and fresh-budding greenery all faded, leaving her with a clear, concentrated, settled mind. As she opened her eyes slowly, not rushing anything, her gaze went back to the sleek marble foundation in front of her, as though there might have been some change in those ten-plus seconds of blackout.
Nope. Nothing. It still looked as ordinary and commonplace as before, one of any of a hundred-plus buildings throughout the city built in the same time period. No bloody handprint, no chisel marks or dust left on the pale gray surface, no sign of any kind of disturbance at all. Nothing to suggest there was something different about this northeast corner of the building, as opposed to the southeast, the southwest or the northwest sides. The four corners of this building stretched out over a full city block, and she’d just spent the past hour becoming far too familiar with all four.
God, she hated prep work! But you had to check everything before you started looking for anything. Even the stuff you knew you wouldn’t find. Except, of course, the fact that one corner, or rather one small block inside of this corner, wasn’t really there anymore.
A deliberate letting-go of her concentration, and the fugue state slipped away. Wren stood, arching her back to release some of the tension that had gathered there. Magic—current, in the post-eighteenth century terminology—was easy enough to use, if you had the Talent, but that didn’t make it easy.
Her throat felt like sandpaper. She looked around, but Rafe wasn’t back yet with her water. He must have gone all the way up to the executive lunchroom for San Pellegrino.
She clicked on the miniature recorder in her hand, and spoke into it, remembering to speak slowly enough that she would be able to transcribe correctly later on that day. “No indications of newly-made marks or disturbances on the site, not that that means anything—I bet they have a team of sanitation experts who come in every morning and sluice the building down, just in case a pigeon poops on it accidentally.”
All right, she thought. A slight exaggeration. But not by much. The guy who’d designed this had obviously had some penile issues that needed to be worked out, though.
The building in question was a thirty-eight-floor skyscraper, gleaming steel and glass in the early-morning light. A troop of window washers could spend a full year just wiping and polishing the expanse of windows. An edifice built to proclaim the owner’s ego to a city already overwhelmed with capital-P Personalities.
“From the exterior, the building looks intact. This is supported by the engineer’s report—” And how the hell had they found someone willing and able to do a full review of the building this morning? Money not only talked, it must have bellowed.
But the report she had found in the folder left at her door by one of Sergei’s ever-efficient contacts was clear on that. The missing piece had been removed from within the building, without cracking the concrete and steel surrounds. The building itself had not been harmed in any way by the alleged disruption to its structural integrity. Therefore, it was only her imagination that made the headquarters of Frants Enterprises tilt ever-so-slightly to the left. Cornerstones didn’t actually support any weight in modern buildings, or so she had been informed by a quick skim through the multitude of building and construction sites on the Internet while she waited for her coffee to brew. They were there for show, to display the construction date, as tradition. Sometimes, as receptacles of time capsules, or good-luck charms—
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 the things she did very best. Part of it was by design: her jeans, white button-down shirt and leather jacket were quality enough that she would be categorized as “employed,” and the temporary security badge that came with the reports was now hung around her neck, giving her a reason to be in the building. Most people didn’t look any further than that. But the real secret to her success was a carefully cultivated result of the genetic lottery. Not a winning ticket; more like a “sorry, try again” one. Her shoulder-length hair was the color that could only be described as “brownish,” and her features were unremarkably regular. Average height, average weight, unremarkable measurements—she never warranted more than a swift once-over by anyone, male or female. Her appearance was neither unpleasant nor remarkable. Forgettably average.
Sometimes she wondered if dying her hair bright screaming red, or bleaching it platinum blond would make any difference to the way the world didn’t see her. But it never seemed worth the bother to experiment. And why screw with success? Besides, Sergei would kill her.
“The fact that there is no sign from the exterior of the building of digging, or any kind of disturbance at all, confirms the suspicion that it was a purely magical theft.”
Well, duh. But you checked everything anyway, just so it didn’t come back later and bite you on the ass.
“A remote grab seems more and more probable.” And narrowed her eventual list of suspects. Far easier to steal line-of-sight, especially something this size.
Rafe appeared by her shoulder, holding out a water bottle glistening with fresh condensation. Wren shut off the recorder and tucked it into the inside pocket of her bomber jacket, then took the bottle from him and poured a stream of the water down her throat.
“Thanks. Let’s go take a look at the inside, shall we?” The we was ironic, and they both knew it. Rafe wasn’t so cute when he was annoyed. Oh well. She shouldered her way through one of the large revolving glass doors that led to the lobby, and walked inside the building, her eyes scanning the floor and walls with a practiced eye. She was looking for any indication that something might have been chalked or painted on the gleaming marble surfaces. Especially if it was a remote grab, signposts would show up somewhere. Remotes were tough enough, easier to focus if you had something there to guide you in. Leaving something of your own was best, but risky if you couldn’t pull it on your way out.
Admittedly, it would have been difficult for anything to adhere to that expensive marble-and-brass slickness, but the lobby would be the logical—easiest—place for the thief to lay a marker. Wren was surprised when her scan didn’t turn up anything. Markings were a safer way to do the job than actually being on-site at the time, something you could do well in advance of the job, and assuming that the victim knew enough to call in someone like herself afterward. If she had been doing the grab, she would have marked…the ceiling. Wren scanned upward, squinting against the overhead light, and let out a soft triumphant “hah!” There, up on the ceiling behind her, by the door. A faint streak, difficult to find even if you knew where and how to look for it. Wren did a rough calculation and decided that if you followed the end of the streak down and at an angle, it would point directly to where the northeast cornerstone was laid.
“Now, how did you get up there…and is it worth my time to go up and check you out?”
Probably not, she decided. Maybe later, if need be. But for now, the evidence was enough. Nobody was going to go up there and erase it, after all. Not without leaving even more trace for her to follow.
Something beeped. Rafe excused himself, going off into the far corner to talk into his walkie-talkie. He looked upset. Somebody must have seen him snatching the water, she thought with an evil grin.
Nodding to the morning guard at his station, she stopped so that he could compare the code of her temporary security pass against the list in the computer.
“Anyone else come in last night with a visitor’s pass?” Overlook nothing; assume the perp was either insanely clever or astonishingly dumb. You never knew when a simple question could get you an important answer.
“Nope. Heard there was a problem last night?” The guard was a short black guy in a standard-issue polyester blue jacket and tie a shade darker than Rafe’s. Although the tie might have been silk—he looked like a guy who would upgrade when possible. He sat the long security desk like a command center. Which, based on the number of blinking lights and constantly-changing screens set into the five-foot-wide surface, it was. Like something out of Star Trek, only without the nifty beeps and pings and whirring red alerts. This console was sleek and silent, even when a knob flicked red. He glanced at it, flipped a switch, and corrected whatever the problem was, all without taking his attention off her.
“You asking me, or telling me?” Wren asked. She heard the hardness in her voice, and winced inwardly, trying to tone it down a little. Don’t antagonize the witnesses, you idiot! A slight cock of the head to the right, like the bird she was nicknamed for, and a faint smile that could be mistaken for encouragement softened her words.
It worked enough to take the edge off his initial reaction. “They told me there was going to be a full-scale shakedown later today. That says trouble.”
She nodded, shifting her weight slightly to convey interest, and a willingness to hang around and listen to him for as long as he wanted to talk.
“And it had to be last night,” the guard—his name tag read Blair—continued. “’Cause when I came in this morning, Joe had already gone off shift, and there were two guys here in way-too-expensive suits, working the desk instead of him. And here you are, full clearance pass, asking to see my log book. So, you with FullTec?”
The name was familiar from her predawn briefing materials. FullTec was the name of the company that had installed the security system for this building back when it was built in 1955, and rewired it every ten years or so thereafter. She’d checked them out online, too. They’d been ahead of their time even then, and were still riding the cutting edge of security technology now. No building wired by them had ever been broken into, held hostage, or otherwise menaced. The upper level executives who gathered for multibillion-dollar conference calls rested easy in a FullTec building. Said so right on their Web site.
But, according to her job notes, they hadn’t been the ones to prepare the missing item. Which meant that they—probably—didn’t know anything at all about the special protections built into it. That had been Talented work: a mage, probably, or maybe one of the earliest lonejacks. Special protections that kept the owner, the ruler of this little financial empire, safe and secure in his dealings with the outside world.
A protection that had disappeared at 11:32 p.m. last night.
She banished those thoughts for later, returning her full attention to the guard and the here-and-now.
“No, actually, I’m a freelancer. Called in special to double-check some of the systems.”
Blair nodded his head, sagely impressed. The tie was definitely silk. “Ah. Watching the watchdogs, huh?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“So, you a tech? Some kind of whiz-kid hacker?”
Wren laughed, thinking of Sergei’s caustic comments while he watched her fumbling attempts to upgrade her computer last weekend. Current—the power source of magic—screwed with electronics, so her relationship with her computer was at best user-cautious. “Nope.” She paused, a germ of mischief making her tell this poor bastard the truth. “I’m a thief.”
Twenty minutes later, she was alone with the main control box for the building’s wiring system. The guard had laughed at her words, but the look in his eyes had been cool, and suddenly she’d been given an escort down into the basement. Not Rafe, either. A new guy, still polite but bulkier and much less cute. Not quite a goon, but with definite goonlike tendencies only barely tamed by the neatly pressed blue blazer that didn’t quite hide the bulk of a stun gun at his hip. Nor, she suspected, was it supposed to.
“That’ll teach me to be honest,” she muttered, opening the box and surveying the neatly laid-out and labeled assortment of wires. A stun gun would only take her out for about half the time of a normal human, since her body was used to channeling electrical energy in the search for current, but it would still be unpleasant, if she were taken unprepared. “Sergei’s right. Never gets me anywhere except in trouble.”
“Did you say something, miss?”
“No, nothing, sorry. I talk to myself when I work. Just ignore me.”
And she wasn’t really a thief, anyway. She was a retriever, thank you very damn much. A person, as Sergei would say, of specialized skills, who could bring objects back to their rightful—the client was always rightful—owner without the fuss of a police investigation, or the bother of insurance companies getting involved. Sergei had a way of making everything sound so damn high-class.
All right, so sometimes a legality or two got bent out of shape, in the course of a retrieval. But bending wasn’t breaking. Not so long as she wasn’t caught, anyway. And nobody told her mother.
Reaching out, Wren traced a wire gently, pressing just enough to make it resist her touch. According to the label under it, this section of wires connected to the fire alarm system. Probably not what she was looking for, since those things were notoriously temperamental. Dropping her hand several inches, she came to the security alarm. Again, not likely. That would have been the very first thing they would have checked.
When he’d called with the details, Sergei had made it clear to her that the client wanted this done with an absolute nil of noise. Which meant, ideally, she’d be the only one on the job. But the guard’s words indicated, to no real surprise at all, that that was already screwed. If the “mondo suits” at the board this morning hadn’t been Mage Council troubleshooters, high-powered magic-users-for-hire, she’d eat her hat, if she owned one. Oh well. Never assume the client’s going to tell you the truth. Especially if it involves anything that might actually let you get the job done.
But she had one advantage—high-powered magic-users tended to think in high-powered ways. Which she didn’t, as a rule. Start low on the spectrum, work your way up. Nobody uses more power than they have to. Call it Valere’s Strop to Occam’s Razor.
Closing that control box, she opened the one directly below it and snorted without amusement. The labeling confirmed her initial suspicion: the electrical system for the entire building. Everything that had an On button was initially powered from this one place. She tsked under her breath. Sloppy, sloppy. With the quick close-and-yank of current, she could give every overworked, underpaid secretary a day off.
And then end up explaining to Sergei why the job went south. From a jail cell. Not one of your better impulses, no.
Reaching in, she touched her index finger to one of the wires, and instantly felt a familiar answering hum in the blood running under the skin. You could describe magic any way that worked, and one mage’s science was another wizzart’s chaos. It all boiled down to using the existing energy that was generated by almost everything knocking about the universe. Call it electricity, call it life force, or chi: hell, call it Norman if it works. Wren didn’t pay much attention to any of the various and contentious schools of magic theory. She wasn’t much for schooling, period. You used what you had.
Every human living could use magic—theoretically. In actual practice, only a small portion of the population could conduct the charge, like living lightning rods, and an even fewer percentage of them were what her mentor had called pure conductors. Pures were the elite, the ones who made it to full mage status. They were generally co-opted by the Council, the strongest and most secretive union ever to collect dues. The rest of the magic-using population muddled along at various levels of ability, doing the best they could, finding their strong points and sticking to them.
Technically Wren was a pure, but she didn’t see the point in bragging on it. It was like having a high IQ—wasn’t much unless you worked it, did something with it. Drawing down the power was easy for her, siphoning off the energy from an external source to flow through her, as though she were running water through her hands. Any source would do, but current that was already tamed and channeled made it so much easier. Like called to like—energy was energy, and where there was one, there was the other. The electronic age was a godsend to magic users, despite what the fairy tales said. If she’d been a little better at channeling out what came in, she’d have been Council material for sure. The thought still made her shudder.
Five fingers now extended, she touched wires at random, discarding anything that sang back to her, looking for a discordant note, something that might indicate a flaw, a clog…or the remnant of supernatural tinkering. In short: look for an elemental.
“Ah-hah!” she said as her thumb grazed a wire that felt different from the others. “Gotcha, you sneaky little…” Pushing with that finger, she listened to the difference.
Elementals were exactly what they sounded like—entities that existed in an elemental state. Very small, and barely sentient, they were nonetheless useful, if you knew how to coax them. Now that she had a handle on one, Wren could sense a flurry of elementals within the wire she had tapped—hardly surprising. Barring a thundercloud, there were few places an elemental flocked to like a live wire; it must be like an amusement park, or an opium den to them, pick your metaphor. Now, to see how long they had been there, and if they’d noticed anything.
“Right. Come to mama…”
Having already gone into the fugue state once that morning, it was like stepping off a curb to find it again. No thought, no effort, just a sudden snapping into awareness, chasing glittering tendrils up and down her neural paths…
“Excuse me, miss?”
She blinked, shaken out of her intense concentration by the goon placing a paw on her shoulder. He looked nervous.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, but, whatever it is you’re doing—could you stop? They’re reporting power outages on several floors….”
Wren grinned sheepishly. “Right. Sorry.” She must have gone too deep, and drained some of the charge down accidentally. She flexed her neck and arched her back as though to straighten out stiff muscles, feeling for the natural current within herself. It hummed and snapped with vigor, confirming her suspicion. She’d gone for an automatic skim, copping a buzz off the charge of magic that could be found even in man-made electricity and storing it in the pool that every current-sensitive person carried, knowingly or not, within them.
Oops. Technically, that would be theft. Never a good idea, to steal from your employers. Probably on the level of office supplies; a pen here, a ream of paper there…Wren shook her head, dismissing that train of thought. It didn’t matter. She had gotten what little information was there. The trick now was going to be figuring out what it all meant, if anything.
Making nice to the goon-guard so that he would “forget” about what he hadn’t really seen anyway took a few minutes. Then she was riding up in the freight elevator, back up to the main lobby. It was crowded with suits now, male and female, armed with briefcases and brown paper bags, some of them already open to let loose the aroma of fresh-brewed Starbucks, or the cheaper stuff from one of the ubiquitous corner bagel carts. The starting bell had rung, and all’s well with the corporate world. Wren shook her head, moving against traffic. How the hell did people live like this?
It was with decided relief that Wren left her security badge with the guard at the front desk and went home. Now the real work—the fun stuff—could begin.
two
The message light on her answering machine was blinking, a quick red flash that caught her eye the moment she came in the door. She dropped her keys in the small green ceramic bowl on the counter of her square little kitchenette, her mail next to that, and reached over to press the play button.
Opening the fridge, Wren pulled out the orange juice, pouring a long draught down her throat without bothering to get a glass.
“Wren, it’s 9:15.” Sergei’s perfectly enunciated voice filled the sparse confines of her kitchenette, almost as though he were actually there. “I just accessed your account, and half of your fee has been deposited, as agreed upon.”
She raised the O.J. carton in salute to that fact.
“Need I remind you that the client is paying for a timely resolution to this situation?”
Sergei never referred to them as cases, or jobs. No, the “client” had a “situation.” Situations paid better.
“Jesus wept, Sergei. Even Christ took three days to rise from the dead! Gimme a break here!”
“And need I remind you that today is the thirteenth? Please mail your rent check today.”
“Yeah yeah, I already have a momma nag, I don’t need another,” she complained to the empty apartment as the tape clicked off. Not that it wasn’t sort of nice, having someone to remind her of the stuff that always managed to slip her mind. Like dropping a check in the mail.
That was the way their partnership worked, too. Sergei handled the money side of it, set up the deals, worked the angles. She did the jobs—or, in Sergei’s parlance, “rectified the situations.” The stuff that took Talent, as opposed to talent. From each according to their abilities, although she had been known to bargain sharply, and Sergei wasn’t above getting his hands a little dirty, if needed. She knew for a fact that the man lied with the fluidity and believability of a gypsy prince if it suited him.
A nice skill for your agent to have. It had certainly saved their asses more than once, including one memorable evening where he had played both her father and her husband to two different people in the space of an hour. He hadn’t been sure which role was more annoying, especially when she insisted on calling him “dad-dikins” for the rest of the month.
The memory of that made her smile, the comforting awareness of Sergei as always tucked somewhere along her spine. It wasn’t anything particularly magical; just the knowledge born of ten years’ partnership that, all joking aside, he was there for her, that all she had to do was yell.
Well, maybe it was a little bit magical. Sergei wasn’t a total null, and maybe she’d sampled a little more of his internal energies than she’d ever told him about…but it was only so that she’d be able to pick him out in a dark room, in a crowd, if the need ever arose.
Not that she’d ever admit to needing him, even when she was asking. Bastard would enjoy that far too much. He’d be more than happy to take over handling her personal finances, too, if she let him. It wasn’t that he didn’t think she was capable. She hoped, because otherwise she’d have to kill him. He just…was overprotective that way. Every way. Sometimes she thought he still saw her as the seventeen-year-old she’d been when they first hooked up, her still foundering in her abilities, and him with a pair of severely pissed-off mages on his tail.
Putting the orange juice back into the fridge, Wren turned out the light in the kitchen with a casual slap of the hand against the switch as she went across the narrow wood-floored hallway and into the main room. She turned on the stereo, letting the soft jazz clear out the silence. The music tugged at the tension between her shoulder blades, pulling it down off her body. A world with saxophones in it wasn’t a bad world at all.
Other than the stereo, two huge speakers, and a comfortable brown tweed armchair, the room was empty of furniture. The acoustics of the room were—astoundingly—perfect. It would have been blasphemy to in any way disturb it.
Her fifth-floor walkup had five rooms—downright palatial by Manhattan standards, even if the rooms themselves were tiny. In addition to the music room and kitchenette, there were three shoebox bedrooms against the back wall, each with its own window that overlooked the brick wall of the next building over. A bathroom with facilities that had been upgraded within the last decade sent the rent soaring from barely reasonable to moderately painful.
Okay, so maybe the neighbors weren’t all they could be, in terms of minding their own business. The five flights of stairs were murder, especially in the summer. And the sounds of traffic from over on Houston Street could be pretty bad. Wren didn’t care. Two years ago she had walked in the door half a step behind the real estate broker, a hyperkinetic woman glued to her cell phone, and had felt a sense of comfort soak into her bones, like walking onto a ley line, those semi-legendary sources of power. This was home. This was her sanctuary. The moment the building went co-op, as every decent apartment building seemed to, sooner or later, she was going to buy her apartment. That’s where all of her money went, right into the savings account that was not ever, on pain of pain, touched. No vacations, no expensive toys or impulse splurges.
Well, maybe a few. Mostly, though, she stole what she really wanted. Just to keep her hand in, of course.
Wren was a pragmatist. She was very good at what she did, but no career goes on forever. Especially not one with risks like hers. So she planned. And prepared. And kept praying that human nature would maintain a demand for her particular skills.
So far, no problem on that front. Someone always wants what they’re not supposed to have, and someone’s always equally willing to pay to get that something back.
Setting the volume level to where she could hear the music throughout the apartment, Wren grabbed the mail off the counter, sorting it as she walked down the hallway into the bedroom that was set up as her office. “Phone bill, credit card, junk junk junk, more junk, political junk.” She tossed all but the bills into the recycling bin next to the desk, and thumbed through the flyers that had been stuck in the doorjamb, setting aside one menu and tossing the rest into the bin. That was the third flyer she’d gotten for pest removal. At this point, they were more annoying than her nonexistent cockroaches, current being a great and totally—in her mind—underutilized way to keep a location insect-free.
“If I could only market that little side effect right,” she told the photo of her mother tacked to the board on the wall in front of her, “I’d be able to make us both filthy rich overnight. And Sergei, too.”
The office was the largest of the three bedrooms, but barely managed to hold the small dark wood desk where her computer and a headset phone reigned, a comfortably upholstered office chair, and a tall potted plant against one wall. The corkboard hung on the wall over the desk was cluttered with papers, takeout menus, and the one posed photo of her mother. Five two-drawer file cabinets marched along the opposite wall, pulling double-duty as a table for an assortment of odd but useful objects she didn’t know where else to put. That wall also held a closet. Its door had been removed, and half a dozen shelves installed, to serve as a makeshift bookcase. The window was covered by a rice paper shade, allowing light during the day, but keeping prying eyes out 24/7.
She sat down at the desk and turned on the computer. While it hummed to life, she reached over to the phone, dialing a number from memory while she hooked the wireless headset up, pulling her hair clear where it tangled with the mouthpiece with a mutter of disgust. She hated using the thing, but the phone—like her computer—had been rigged with so many surge protectors to make it safe for her to use on a regular basis that you couldn’t move the damn thing without creating disaster.
One ring, and then a crisp, efficient “Yes?”
“It’s me.”
Sergei’s raspy tenor voice changed, so subtly it would have taken someone paying close attention to recognize the new, softer tone for affection.
“You looked at the job site?”
“Yeah, for whatever that was worth.” Wren leaned back and swung her feet up on the desk. Her loafers needed polishing. “External was clean, but there was one possible smudge-marker up on the ceiling inside. Although, in retrospect, it could’ve been there since Adam went figless. Anyway, ruled out anything else. Distance grab, no doubts. A pro.”
“But it was definitely a magic-user?”
Sergei was, like so much of the human population, in that nether area between Null and Talent, but after so many years as her partner he was well-versed enough in the uses of it to make certain assumptions. Besides, realistically, what else could it have been?
“Yeah.” She refrained from sarcasm. Barely. “Whoever it was used the building’s wiring to convey the spell. Probably had every person in the building so hocused, they couldn’t have told you what color their socks were.”
“And then got the cornerstone out—how?”
Wren’s mouth twisted in frustration, making her look for a moment like a five-year-old given brussels sprouts. “Okay, that part I haven’t quite figured out yet. Translocation, probably.”
Translocation of an inanimate or inert object wasn’t a difficult spell for someone with any kind of mojo and open channels, but the actual performance took a lot out of the caster. Especially if he wasn’t present on-site, preferably within eyesight of the object. That was impossible in this case, since the object to be retrieved wasn’t accessible without the breaking and entering of a kind that hadn’t happened. So. A distance grab of that magnitude would make the hire-price prohibitively expensive, and the cost would increase the further the object was moved. Or it should, anyway. Even the best Talent had to eat and pay the rent, and a Transloc like that would wipe you for anything else for a week. “Might have intended to replace the stone with something else, to maintain volume consistency—” the hobgoblin of all translocations “—but the alarms going off must have wigged him.”
“Alarms?” Sergei sounded a little alarmed himself. Wren reached out and sorted the pile of papers on her desk with one finger. Blueprints of the Frants building, cut into twelve-by-twelve squares for easy shuffling, covered with red ink—Sergei’s handwriting—and her pencil smudges. “Yeah, alarms. I could feel the echoes when I went into the basement. Nice little mage-triggers. Someone is a smidge nervous down there. I wonder if the perp knew about them before he went down, or if he was expecting a simple grab-and-run, so to speak. And before you panic, no, I didn’t set it off again. The parameters were set way too high for little old me.”
Actually, that was a lie. She had sensed the threads of magic and slipped under and between them. While she wasn’t ever going to be called to serve on the Council—even assuming they lobotomized her long enough for her to agree to sign on—that was more a matter of attitude than Talent. Where she was strong she was very strong, and distracting attention from herself, be it magical or physical, was as natural as breathing to her. Her mentor had called it Disassociation, which was basically a fancy way of saying that she could make people—or things, specifically things like an alarm system—believe that she wasn’t there.
The problem, as far as anyone had been able to explain to her, was that for all her undeniable talent she was just a little too dense, magically speaking. The current channeled fine—she had the skill, no doubts there—but it sometimes channeled in weird ways, denying her access to a lot of the major skills like levitation and translocation. Pity, as they would have been damned useful in her career.
“You think maybe the thief meant to use it for blackmail? Or maybe ransom? Hey, got your protection spell here, what do you want to give me for it?”
“Or possibly to open up the door just enough for a direct attack by someone else?” Sergei sounded like he’d given this some serious thought while she was out doing the hard work.
“Maybe. I know, I know, not our problem. I’d prefer blackmail, though. Easier to find someone if they’re going to be so obliging as to send back a calling card.” If she were a better conductor…ah, well.
On the plus side of that density, the risk of her wizzing out—losing her mind to the magic flow—was probably lower than anyone else at her comparable Talent level. There were always going to be portions of her brain the current couldn’t get into.
“They also serve those who hum in choir,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. Look, whoever this was, he’s a subtle guy, definitely strong, but not too bright. He squelched the elementals but forgot to sedate them.”
“Which, in English, means what?” Sergei did exasperated like a guy with years of practice.
Wren grinned, forgetting he couldn’t see her. Tweaking Sergei was always so much fun. He did the staid businessman thing so well, sometimes he forgot to take it off. “It means exactly that, which if you would ever remember anything I’ve told you about elementals you’d, well, remember.” He had the weirdest mental block about certain aspects of current—she’d almost given up trying to figure it out. Then again, non-Talents should be uneasy around current. She shouldn’t blame him if even knowing things wigged him out enough to not want to think about it. “I tapped into the wiring, and there was a horde of elementals there. Quiet, but jazzed, like something’d shoved a massive current up their tails, but told them to lay low about it.
“But when I stirred them up, they came shooting out, like they were hoping whatever it was had come back.”
And once they had come to her hand, she had been able to stroke them into giving up the residue from that burst of magic. That was another one of her stronger skills—reading magic like some people could read Braille, or maps, or any other code. It made her useless in a really powerful thunderstorm, stoned like kitty on catnip from the overload of power, but the rest of the time it was part of her stock-in-trade. Where one magic-user had gone, she could go, recreating their trail with remarkable accuracy. Well, mostly. Unlike her other skills, which had names and entries in the skillbooks her mentor had shown her, this one seemed to be particular to her and the way her brain worked. Or if other Talents had it, they were keeping just as quiet about it as she was. The end result either way was that she had no real idea how it worked, or why, or how to control it.
Then again, she didn’t understand any of that about her computer either, and it still worked fine. Most of the time.
“I skimmed off a decent enough emotional memory of the thief to recognize him or her again. Pretty sure of it, anyway.”
Sergei made an unhappy-sounding noise in the back of his throat. She didn’t think he was aware he did it—she couldn’t imagine him making it during negotiations with clients, or the highbrow, hoity-toity art collectors who made his gallery so obnoxiously successful, which meant it was a Wren-specific complaint. The thought made her grin again. “Even if you were sure, that doesn’t help us unless you actually run into him—”
“Or her.”
“Or her, in the near future. Wren…” A sigh, and she knew he was fiddling with one of the slender brown cigarettes he carried with him everywhere and never smoked.
“Yeah, I know. Doesn’t help worth diddly, realistically. But what, you expected this guy to leave a calling card? It happens, sure, but not real often. Which is good, otherwise we’d both be out of work.”
Sergei made a noncommittal noise that might have been agreement, amusement or a growl.
“Look, all I need is a reasonably-sized list of people with something to gain by the client losing his big block o’ protection, and I can backtrack from there. We do a little digging, to see who has the skills, or the money to hire a mage of that power, and then I can retrieve the cornerstone, which you know I can do in my sleep. Easy money. So no worries.”
“So, who’s worried?” Sergei asked, sounding worried.
Wren hit the disconnect button, not bothering to say goodbye. Swinging her legs back down to the floor, she winced a little at their stiffness. Time to hit the gym—she had gotten a little too out of shape over the winter again. Too many of their recent cases had been deskwork, not action.
She filed the thought under “when I have a spare hour,” pulled out the keyboard drawer and went to work composing and sending out e-mails to contacts, some human, and some not quite so, looking for any chatter happening in the Cosa Nostradamus.
The one advantage to being part of a community that the majority of the world didn’t even know existed was that you didn’t have anywhere else to talk about what was going on. So the gossip network was tight, fast, and frighteningly efficient. She’d lay decent odds with her own money that she’d have a lead by lunchtime.
Speaking of which…Wheels set in motion, she sat back and dialed the phone again.
“Hi, yeah, it’s Valere in 5J. Medium sausage, and a liter of diet ginger ale. Just slap it on the tab.” She listened for a moment, laughed. “Yeah, you too. Thanks.” Taking off the headset, she draped it on its stand, running fingers through her hair to fluff it up again.
Her mother’s photo managed to emit waves of disapproval despite the smile still fixed to her lips. “Ah, come on, Mom. Breakfast of champions, right? What’s the point of having a 24-hour pizza place on the corner if you don’t take advantage of it?”
Besides, it was either that or leftover Thai from the back of the fridge, and she’d mentally tagged that for lunch.
She had about half an hour before Unray’s buzzed with her pizza. Might as well make it a billable half hour. Pulling the ’corder out of her jacket pocket, she put it on the desk and swung the keyboard into position. With a quick, silent prayer that her moderate use of current while the ’corder was in her pocket hadn’t totally futzed the batteries, she hit Play and began to transcribe her notes, wincing a little at the static that had crept into the tape just because it was near her body.
“Come on, brain cells,” she muttered as her fingers hit the keys. “Give me something I can use. Momma wants to wrap this up fast and have the weekend free, for once!”
three
The room was remarkable for being completely unremarkable. The walls were painted a soft matte white, the floor made from wide planks of fine-grained wood. The lighting came from discreet spots that directed attention rather than illuminated.
There was one door. No windows. The overall impression was of endless space somehow made cozy. An architect had labored over the lines and arches of this space, a designer had meditated on the perfect shade of white for the walls and ceiling, a feng shui specialist had dictated the ordering of the floor’s wooden planks, the exact placement of the three objects which resided therein in relation to the door.
It was for those three objects that the room existed.
In one corner, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a simple green marble pillar, three feet around and seven feet high. Etched onto its surface were crude symbols that hadn’t seen the light of day for over three thousand years.
In the opposite corner, an ebony wood pedestal was lit from above, highlighting a chunk of clear, unfaceted crystal that looked as though it had just been pulled from the ground, hosed down, and dropped onto that base.
And in the farthest corner, two men maneuvered a low wooden tray set on wheels into position. It was a mover’s trolley, its bed covered with a quilted pad similar to the kind used for fine furniture and grand pianos. Another pad wrapped up over a four-foot by six-foot square, and was sealed with heavy gray tape. The hard rubber wheels moved soundlessly on the floor, despite the weight they bore.
The two men were burly, but not brutish looking. One was perhaps forty, with graying hair cut short. The other was ten years younger, and completely bald. They wore simple white coveralls that had only one pocket in the left sleeve, too small to carry anything larger than a cigarette lighter. There were no names sewn over the chest: no logos, cute or otherwise on their backs.
They finished adjusting the trolley, and the younger man knelt by its side, producing a slender but sharp-looking pocket knife from his sleeve pocket, carefully cutting through the tape, peeling it away from the pad and unfolding the pad from its enclosed prize. About the length of a small bench, the marble’s silvery-gray surface was marked and pitted, making the once-glossy surface look dull and battered. A smaller rectangle on the top surface looked as though it had been carved out and then filled in with concrete.
“All this, for that?”
The older man sounded disgusted. No one else was in the room, but his partner cast a worried look over his shoulder, as though expecting someone to appear there and overhear the criticism.
“If the owner says it’s art, it’s art,” he told his older companion firmly. “Let’s just get it settled, and get out of here.” Personally, the object gave him the creeps. Hell, the entire place gave him the creeps. But he was a professional, damn it. He was going to act like one.
A low matte black platform, installed when the room itself was built and unused until now, waited to receive its burden. The two men took wide canvas slings that had been hung on the trolley’s handle, and fitted them around two corners of the marble block. The younger man’s hand brushed the surface of the stone where the cement plug was, and he shuddered involuntarily, stopping to look down at his hand as though expecting to see a spider, or something else less pleasant on top of it.
“Will you stop that?” the other man snapped. “Concentrate on the job. I don’t need you getting sloppy and dumping it all on me.”
Stung, his co-worker glared at him, shook his hand out unobtrusively, as though to get feeling back into a sleeping limb, and counted to three under his breath, just barely loud enough to hear. On three, they heaved, and with a seemingly effortless movement and a pair of grunts that destroyed that illusion, the stone settled into its new home.
“That’s strange. Wonder if it’s been hollowed out? I thought marble that size would be heavier.”
“Don’t complain, man, don’t complain! And for God’s sake, don’t ask,” the younger man begged, his eye closed against the sweat that was rolling off his forehead. “We on the mark?”
The stone was square on its base, with a full three feet between it and the walls on two sides; room enough for a person to walk around it, should they so desire.
“Yep,” the other workman replied. “Perfect, as always.” It was as close to a compliment as they would get from anyone. They were hired via the company’s Web site, informed of the details by e-mail, paid by wire transfer, and never knew what any of it was all about. And they liked it that way. Some folk you just didn’t want to know any more about than you had to.
Their work completed, the two rolled up the quilted pad and tossed it onto the trolley, pushing it out ahead of them as they left. They didn’t look again at the object they had delivered, nor did they pause to consider the other two objects already in place.
No one waited at the door to show them out; they had been given their instructions before arrival, when they were assigned the job. They would walk down the bland, security-camera-lined hallway they had entered through, down a flight of stairs, and follow a row of lights through a basement maze that would deposit them through a four-inch-thick metal door in a ten-foot-high wall that ran along an unpaved country road. A livery car with darkly-tinted windows waited there to take them back to the city, where they would be dropped off without once having seen another person.
Their employer wanted his privacy. They were paid well enough not to wonder why. And the legalities of what they had done never entered their minds at all.
When the last echoes of the workmen’s feet had faded into silence once again, silence reclaimed the building. In another wing, a door opened, and footsteps sounded, walking calmly, with no apparent haste or urgency, the owner of all within those walls. Occasionally the walker would pause to admire a painting, or caress a sculpture, but for the most part the priceless objects were accorded no more attention than the carpet underfoot, or the ceilings above.
Eventually, the door into the white room was pushed open, and the owner of the house entered, walking with those same unhurried strides to the corner holding the newly-installed fixture. He paused in front of it, cataloguing every detail and comparing it to his expectations.
“You’re not much to look at, are you?”
The slab of stone didn’t respond to the voice.
“But they do say, you can’t judge something by its looks. It’s not what’s on the outside that counts, after all, but the inside. Isn’t that right?”
The figure knelt by the cornerstone, trailing one well-manicured finger along its rough surface, shivering pleasurably at the sensation. “But no matter. No matter. I know what you are, what you were. And all that really counts is that you’re mine, now.”
four
“Hey. Babe. Let me in!”
The very first time Wren had met P.B., she had giggled. The second time, she had screamed. By now, when he showed up on her fire escape, she merely flipped the safety latch on the kitchen window, and let the demon come in.
“Thanks. Man, this neighborhood of yours is totally not safe anymore. Some loon started chasing me down the street, yelling something about a cleansing to come. You got much business with Holy Rollers, Valere?”
She shrugged. “You must just bring it out in ’em, pal. You got something for me?”
P.B. shook out his fur, a faint mist coming off him. “Damn, I hate rain. Makes my skin itch.” He took a battered-looking manila envelope out from the messenger’s bag strapped across his barrel-shaped chest and tossed it on the table, then scooped up a slice of the remaining pizza. The slice was halfway gone by the time Wren had opened the envelope. She sighed, and shoved the rest of the grease-lined box closer toward him. “Here. Eat. You’re looking frail.”
The decidedly unfrail P.B. snorted, but didn’t hesitate in devouring his first slice and reaching for a second one. “I get first prize for speed?” he asked in between slices, referring to the material in her hand.
“As always,” she said, licking one finger and using it to sort through the pages, scanning the delicate copperplate that seemed so incongruous coming from P.B.’s clawed hands.
P.B.’s real name was all but unpronounceable. The nickname came from an inauspicious moment back in the early days of their acquaintance, when an innocent bystander had been heard to shriek, “Oh my God, it’s a monster!” To which Wren, somewhat short-tempered at the time, had snapped back, “No, it’s an effing polar bear!” The description had been apt, and the nickname had stuck.
P.B. wasn’t her only source, but he was one of the best. Certainly the most reliable. Demons mostly made their living as information conduits, there not being much of a job market for them outside of bodyguarding and freak-show gigs. There wasn’t anything that one of them didn’t know, or couldn’t find out, and what one of them knew, another would hear, sooner or later.
Sooner, if the money was right. And they didn’t play politics: you got what you paid for, no matter who—or what—you were. It was refreshing, in a disgustingly capitalistic pig kind of way. She wished more of the Cosa worked that way. But no, the ineptly-named angels had their endless feuds, and the various fatae-clans their more-special-than-thou attitudes, and humans—sometimes she thought humans were the worst of all, with the mages and their rules and regulations and Shalt Nots worse than Sunday School for fear of someone breaking rank and having a little fun. “Someone” in the mages’ case mostly being the lonejacks, the Talents who refused affiliation. Unions and scabs, Sergei had described it, but it wasn’t that simple, really. Everyone had a different reason for going lonejack.
And, tossed into that mix, always the snarling between the races, like they weren’t all in it together, more or less. But some people—humans and fatae—just couldn’t handle the idea of something shaped or colored a little differently walking, talking and working alongside their precious selves. Wren didn’t have much patience with that. You do your job, stay out of her way, she didn’t much care if you lived in brimstone or used your hind paws at the dinner table.
Sometimes, she thought it would have been a lot easier being Null. Then she watched the Suits scuttle to work every morning, hustling for a window office, and decided she was happy where and what she was.
P.B. burped, the sound like baritone chimes rising from his rotund stomach. “So what’s the job?”
She just looked at him, a wealth of disbelief in her expression. He stared back, his flat, fur-covered face blandly innocent. Anything she shared with him without a for-hire agreement would be sold to his next client before she’d had a chance to act on it herself. Not in this lifetime or the next three, pal.
“Right. Don’t tell me anything, just send me out to fetch like a dog….”
She considered responding, then decided that it really wasn’t worth the effort. It was enough that she wasn’t pitching him out the window already.
Wren had only met three demons in the flesh in her lifetime—that she knew about, anyway. Looks varied wildly, and she was told that some of them could pass for human, if you weren’t looking carefully. The three she had encountered weren’t those kind. And of those three, P.B. was the only one she could deal with for more than a few minutes at a time. It wasn’t that she was prejudiced; she simply couldn’t handle the relatively high voltage most of the full-sized demons emitted, like some kind of ungrounded magical wire that set her teeth on edge. Fatae—the elves and piskies and whatnot—were, by contrast, easy on the nerves. And angels never hung around long enough to do more than freak you out.
For a few moments, the only sound in the kitchen was P.B.’s jaws chewing crust, and the scritching-soft noise of paper against paper as she read what he had brought her. Finally she reached the last page, and shook them back into order and replaced them in the envelope, folding the metal closure back down again. Names, jobs, capabilities…P.B. had done his usual bang-up job of getting exactly what she needed. Some of the names on the list were familiar, in the heard-about-them kind of way.
And one was all too familiar, in a gut-clenching way. She forced herself not to focus on it. All the names were equal possibilities right now. Don’t jump to conclusions. Conclusions without facts get people killed, possibly even her own very important self. File it, Valere. File it and deal with it later. When you’re alone.
“Thirteen names?” She raised an eyebrow at the fur-coated being now lounging in her other kitchen chair.
He belched, then shrugged. “Lotsa folk interested in your boy,” he said unapologetically. “He’s made himself some enemies. And those’re just the ones who have a profile with us.” Us being the entire magic-using community, the Cosa Nostradamus. Human and nonhuman alike. We might squabble amongst ourselves, often to the point of a passing wave of bloodshed, but in the end it was always us against them—“them” being what her long-gone mentor used to call Kellers; the Nulls, who were mostly blind and deaf to what was around them. Not much love lost there. To some of the Cosa, her working with Sergei on an equal footing was betrayal. He wasn’t too fond of them, either.
P.B. went on. “Probably lots of otherwise upstanding humans who hate his guts too.”
“What, he kicks old ladies and molests farmyard animals?” She’d gotten info on the client, but it was all public relations bullshit, not anything actually helpful. Sergei usually did a full write-up highlighting anything she needed to know, but this looked like a time-of-urgency kind of deal. Besides, he was the client, not the mark. They didn’t ask too much about the clients.
“Nah.” The demon cleared a piece of cheese from between his serrated teeth and flicked it into the garbage can. “Sounds like he gets his jollies the old fashioned way—with money. Preferably other people’s money, which he then turns into more money for himself. Real power-hungry, in the nasty-with-it way.”
Wren shrugged one shoulder, the tilt of her head conveying supreme indifference. “Most people with power are, that’s why they get to stay on the top of the predator heap. Anything I don’t already know?”
“Yeah. He’s apparently in real bad odor with the local wizzart’s gathering.”
“Wow.” Crossing wizzarts took serious guts. Or a total lack of brains. Possibly both. Unless of course he didn’t know what he was doing. If he only knew about the public face the Council sold…. Wizzarts weren’t exactly talked about outside the Cosa. Not too much inside it, either, truthfully. Mention not, see not, become not.
In fact, “gathering” was an ironic term to refer to wizzarts overall. The only time you got more than two wizzarts gathered anywhere was if they were all using the bathroom. And even then most of them would rather burst a bladder than share space with their own kind. And they weren’t much sweeter on other humans. Most wizzarts didn’t want to live within a hundred miles of another person. They were all crazy, chaos-ridden by taking too much current into their brain. From what little she’d been able to learn, the entire human race made them feel like she did around P.B., and twice that for another of their kind. It almost gave her some sympathy for them.
Not much, though. Last time she dealt with a wizzart, he’d tried to throw her over a cliff.
“Nice. And the Council?”
Dangerous or not, Wren would take a wizzart over a Council mage any day. Mages—cold, calculating bastards that they were—made her feel like she needed to take a bath after talking to one. And scrub hard.
“Street rumor is he stiffed ’em once, but managed to squirm out of retribution. No word on how, and believe you me there are folks who want to know that little trick, if it’s true.” The demon extended one three-inch-long claw and dug into the thick white fur on his neck, sighing in satisfaction when he hit the itch.
Wren watched in amusement. P.B. looked like an escapee from some demented toy shop, four feet of thick white fur and button-black nose offset by four sets of lethal claws and a voice that could scrape tar off the highway. But if the initial impression was of a cuddly bear, it was his eyes that were the giveaway to his true nature: oversized and pale red, with pupils that were slitted like a cat’s. Occasionally, he would don a hat and trench coat, which made him look like a diminutive Cold War-era spy, but more often than not he wore a pair of jeans, and not much else. She didn’t ask how he managed to get around in public like that without, as far as she could tell, the slightest bit of Talent beyond his own demon nature, and he didn’t volunteer the information. Professional courtesy, such as it was.
“That it?” she asked, indicating the material.
He nodded. “That’s it.”
“Great.” Her tolerance level had reached its breaking point and she was starting to get a headache. “Sergei will do the usual deposit. Now get out.” She was already reaching for the kitchen phone, her back turned to him when she added, “And leave the rest of the pizza.”
“Spoilsport,” he muttered, but left the box untouched. He also left the window open, in petty retaliation, and the sounds of an argument from the apartment below floated up to her over the pad-clatter of his clawed feet on the fire escape.
A tenor: voice spoiled and high-pitched by anger. “And another thing, I don’t like the tone of your voice!”
Oh wonderful. The couple in 1B were on that rant again. She was convinced the landlord paid them to leave their apartment whenever prospective tenants looked at a place. That had been the last time she hadn’t heard them. They were either arguing, or having sex. And one rather memorable morning, they had managed to do both.
Wren held the phone at arm’s length, dialing Sergei’s number with her thumb as she leaned backward to shut the window. “I have enough drama in my own life, thank you very much. I don’t need yours too.”
“Yes?”
“Me again,” she said into the phone. “Take me out to dinner.”
There was a pause. Warily…“And I should do this because…?”
“Because you haven’t actually seen me in, what, ten days? Two weeks, maybe, and are worried that I’m not eating properly.”
Her partner snorted. She was joking, but there was some truth to it; she had forgotten to eat for two days once when she was on the job, and Sergei had totally freaked when he found out. “And the other, more convincing reason?”
Wren made a snarling noise that completely failed to impress him. She thought maybe once it had. Years ago.
“Look, Genevieve—” She rolled her eyes. He rarely used her hated given name, usually only when he wanted her to think he was pissed off about something. “I have other accounts, responsibilities which require my attention. I can’t just walk out when you whistle.”
Ooo, someone was pissy. Market must be down again. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a hotshot high roller. This is work stuff, okay? Do I have to remind you that I make you more on one job than all your other clients, thereby keeping you in your suits and toys, and that—as you’re so often telling me—if I don’t get the job done—I—and you—don’t get paid?”
Sergei made a noise that might have been a protest—or could have been suppressed laughter. You never could tell with Sergei, not even when he was sitting in the room with you. Part of his incredibly annoying charm, and why she was never bored around him.
As amusing as this game was, she didn’t want to risk frying the lines by talking too long. “Just get your well-dressed rear up here, okay? Seven-thirty, Marianna’s. And bring whatever info you have on the client’s business compadres, so I can cross-reference the players before I do something stupid.”
“Thought before action. What a refreshing novelty.”
“Oh, bite me,” she said rudely, and broke the connection before she could hear him laugh. She sat and looked at the phone for a few moments, smiling absently. He was a pain in the posterior, but he was her pain in the posterior.
An expensively upholstered chair crashed against an equally expensively-paneled wall, rattling the oversized photograph of the desert at dawn which hung there.
“Idiots! Incompetents!”
The topmost floor but two of the Frants building was split into nine offices around a center lobby. Eight of those offices were large, lush spaces with a commanding view of the city, with a slightly smaller office directly off and to the inside where each inhabitant’s administrative assistant sat. The ninth office was twice again as large, and three assistants guarded access like Cerberus at the gates of the underworld.
At that moment, two of the assistants were cowering in the bathroom, while the third tried to pretend nothing at all unusual was going on in her boss’s sanctum.
“Sir, we merely feel that it would be wisest—”
“Don’t!” Oliver Frants held one finger up in the younger man’s direction, his florid, freshly-shaven face turning an ill-omened shade of pink. “Do. Not. Tell. Me. What. To. Do.” Each word was bitten off with precision, as though his perfectly capped teeth were holding back longer, uglier words.
The three executives glanced at each other, uncertain what to say next. They were all in their mid- to late forties; healthy, well-groomed, impeccably dressed. The kind of people you would normally see at the head of a boardroom table, having highly placed people report to them.
But in here, they cowered.
“I will not abandon this building. I will not abandon any of my scheduled meetings. And I will. Not. Hide.”
He looked at them each in turn, until they dropped their gaze like chastened children.
“Sir?” The woman, Denise Macauley, had dredged up enough courage to speak. Frants smiled. She had been a particular protégé of his, years ago, and her sharp wits had never failed him.
“Yes, Denise?”
“If I may suggest, sir, that we add to the building’s defenses?”
“And just how do you suggest we do that,” he asked, “since the mages have made it quite clear that they will not allow their members to work for us any longer? Are you suggesting I hire another freelancer?” When the Council had, after looking things over, refused to help, despite it being their people who had set the spell in the first place, the only alternative had been to look for someone among the so-called lonejack community. The Council’s spin would have you believe that they were nowhere near as talented as their own members, but reports had said that one seemed particularly suited for the job, and so Frants had authorized it. But retrieval was one thing. His security—especially his long-term security—was another. “Or do you think that we should perhaps hire a wizzart?”
“No sir,” she said, properly dismissing that idea as unthinkable. You couldn’t hire a wizzart; they were the flakes of the magic-using world, just as likely to forget what they were doing, and for whom. Or to bring your solution to your enemies, just for kicks. They were too unpredictable for a well-ordered business plan. He could see her mind working at a breakneck speed, choosing and discarding alternatives until she came up with one she thought he could accept. “There has been some talk about a freelance mage down in New Mexico; very powerful, but a little too…creative in his ways for the rest of his kind. Solid reputation—has never once sold out or otherwise failed a client. Council-trained, but no longer under their strictures. He’s opened his doors to bidders—I think that we would be able to come to an agreement with him that would be mutually beneficial.”
A well-trained, thinking associate was a blessing to their manager. “Excellent. Marco, see that it’s done.”
One of the men nodded his head, and turned to leave the room. His pace was perhaps a shade too swift for propriety, but Frants didn’t call him on it. A little fear, leavened by generous bonuses, made for excellent working conditions.
Denise had stiffened when he gave her idea to someone else, but she didn’t allow any resentment or anger to show on her face. Good girl. He would have to reward her when all this was done.
“Randolph?”
The remaining man came to attention, his shoulders going back in an automatic response. You could take the boy out of the Corps, but…
“Could you please speak to Allison in Human Resources, have her write up a press release stating that we had an unfortunate attempt on our security, but that we have every faith in the systems we use, and do not feel that there is any need for alarm, etc. If this bastard did take the stone to try and undermine Frants Industries, he will have to work harder than that. Much, much harder.”
Randolph nodded and performed a sharp about-face, covering the plush carpeting between him and the door with a steady, measured stride.
“Sir?” Denise said, when he sat down behind his heavy mahogany desk, to all appearances having forgotten she was still there.
“Ah yes, Denise.” He looked at her, his pale blue eyes cold, dispassionately calculating. “It may be that this is not the act of a business competitor, but someone perhaps a bit more…directly connected with the particular object which was taken. If that is—an extreme possibility, I agree—but if that is so, then I think that we may need to take further steps than even the ones you had suggested. If you would give me your arm, please?”
Denise had worked for Oliver Frants most of her adult life. She knew what he was asking. And, to her credit, she didn’t flinch as he reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out a small, intricately woven straw box with an oddly liquid design, like an hourglass but not, on the lid. He slid the box across the table toward her, and something inside it shhhhhssssssshhhed like old grass in the wind.
The assistant still sitting at her desk heard a noise in the main office. A sibilant, sharp noise, like metal on metal. A wet slap, like flesh on flesh, and a muffled moan of agony. And then silence.
She placed her hands palm down on her desk, stared at the well-manicured fingers that cost fifty dollars every single week to keep in ideal condition, and swallowed hard.
Wren spent the rest of the afternoon reading up on the newest generation of motion detectors—not her idea of light reading, but essential to keeping up to date in her particular line of work. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you couldn’t use current. Wren refused to be caught with her pants down if and when that happened to her.
Sprawled on the carpet in the third bedroom, which was otherwise filled with her considerable research library, engrossed despite herself by journals with ten-point type and convoluted electrical diagrams, time got away from her.
“Ah, hell,” she muttered when she actually glanced down at her watch. She shuffled the journals into a messy pile and left them there, closing the bedroom door firmly behind her. One finger pressed against the knob and a narrow thread of current flowed from her to wrap around the metal mechanism, locking the tumblers in place. Not that it would keep out anyone determined to get in, but the spell was tied to her just enough to let her know if the attempt was made. She could have coaxed some elementals into baby-sitting for her, to act like a siren if the thread was broken, but the reality was that when she saw elementals clustered, that drew her attention to the lock rather than away. And why put up a sign saying “important things behind this door” if you were trying to keep people out?
She grabbed her keys from the bowl in the kitchen, shoving her feet into a pair of low-heeled boots as she headed out the door, locking it carefully behind her with the more commonplace and nonmagical dead bolts every New Yorker installed as a matter of course.
Three-quarters of the way down the narrow apartment stairs, she realized that she had left the folder P.B. had given her on the kitchen table.
“Grrrr…urrrggghh.” She reversed herself midstep and dashed back up, knocking open the four dead bolts and grabbing the bright orange folder. Locking up took more precious time, and she was swearing under her breath in some colorful Russian phrases she had picked up from Sergei by the time she finally hit the street.
With all that, despite the fact that she was only walking a few blocks, it was closer to seven forty-five before she made it to Marianna’s. She paused on the street outside the tiny storefront, clutching the folder in her hand as though she might forget it again somewhere, and checked her appearance in the reflective glass door.
She thought about the lipstick she had left untouched on her bathroom counter, and made a face at herself. You don’t need to put on a face for Sergei, for God’s sake, she snarled mentally. He’d seen her at three in the morning, drenched in sweat and splattered with both their blood, and not blinked. So long as she didn’t actively embarrass him in a social setting, she could paint herself in blue-and-green stripes and he’d just say something like, “Interesting outfit, Genevieve.”
And why did it matter, anyway? If there was one thing she knew, without a doubt, it was that Sergei gave a damn about what was inside, not out. So why did that thought, increasingly, make her feel depressed instead of comforted?
Job, Valere. Job.
Squaring her shoulders, she pushed open the door. Callie looked up from her seat at the bar, saw it was her, and merely nodded toward the table where Sergei was waiting.
Wren shook her head in mock disgust, although she wasn’t sure if it was at herself or her partner. Well, of course he was there before she was. Odds were good that he had arrived at exactly seven-twenty-nine, trench coat over one arm, briefcase at his side, taken one look at the restaurant, saw she wasn’t there yet, sighed, and requested a table in the back and a glass of sparkling water, no ice.
“Been here long?” she asked, slipping into the seat opposite Sergei. He looked up from his notepad, then looked at his watch. “A little over fifteen minutes,” he said, confirming her suspicion.
In a simple but expensive gray suit and burgundy tie, Sergei could have passed unnoticed in the carpeted halls of any brokerage house. Broad-shouldered, with a close-cropped head of dark hair and a nose that was just a shade too sharp for good looks matched to an astonishingly stubborn square chin, he could just as easily have been a former quarterback-turned-minor-league newscaster, or a successful character actor.
What he was, in fact, was the owner and operator of a very discreet, wildly overpriced art gallery. It was through the gallery that he made the contacts who often had need of Wren’s services: private citizens, mostly, but also the occasional museum or wholesaler who didn’t want to go through the police or—even worse—the insurance companies to reclaim their stolen artwork.
And, on occasion, something a little more…unusual. Like this case. Sorry, she amended even though Sergei couldn’t hear her thought, this situation.
Callie came over, wiping her hands on the front of the white apron tied around her waist, and stood by their table, one bleached-blond eyebrow raised. “Your usual?” she said to Wren.
“Nah, I think I’ll live dangerously.” She scanned the chalkboard behind the bar with a practiced eye. “Give me the Caesar salad and the filet of sole.”
“Which is exactly what you’ve had the past three times. Experiment a little, willya?” Callie had the flat-toned voice of someone trying to pretend they weren’t from around here, but unlike almost every other waiter and waitress in town, she wasn’t waiting for the big break to sweep her off to Hollywood.
“And a glass of Chianti.”
“Ooo, red instead of white. You are living dangerously.” Not that being a professional waitress made her any more respectful of her clientele. Just the opposite, actually.
“See why I love this place?” Wren asked her companion.
“Indeed. A tossed salad and the halibut, please. Nothing else to drink.”
“You guys have really got to calm your wild lives down,” the waitress said in disgust, stalking off to the kitchen with a practiced flounce.
“We’re such a disappointment to her.”
Wren snorted. Callie had been flirting madly with Sergei for two years now, ever since Wren moved into the neighborhood and they started coming here regularly, and he remained serenely unresponsive. Disappointment didn’t even begin to cover it. Wren could understand Callie’s point of view, though. If she wasn’t so sure he’d look at her blankly, or worse yet give her the “we’re partners, nothing more” speech, she might have made a play for him, too. Well, maybe not when they first partnered. But lately…it was weird, how someone so familiar could suddenly one day, totally out of the blue and with a random thought, become…interesting. In that way.
Damn it, Valere, focus! “Whatcha got for me?”
Sergei lifted a plain manila envelope out of his briefcase and handed it to her. “The names of all the highly-placed executives, both within the Frants Corporation and at rival organizations, who would have reason to hold a grudge of this magnitude, and the financial wherewithal to hire someone to perform magic of this level. You?”
“Bunch of folk with the mojo to do the job themselves, almost all carrying a mad-on of one kind or another for our client. Strictly low-budget grievances, though.” She pulled out a legal-size piece of paper from the file and handed it to him in exchange. It was a copy of the original list P.B. had given her, with her own notes added under each name. “Doubt they’d be in any of your databases.”
“Don’t ever underestimate my resources,” he told her severely. “Many people who think they’re invisible often—”
“Leave a fluorescent trail. Yeah, yeah, I know.” One of the few “resources” of his that Wren had ever met in person was a former forensic investigator named Edgehill, who was paying off some unnamed but very large favor done in the distant past. He was a slight, frantic-eyed man with wildly-gesturing hands. Listening to him talk was sort of like watching an episode of CSI on fast forward while taking speed. But his shit was almost always on the money.
“Would the police have anything on file?”
Wren snorted. “Nobody on this list. Strictly no-see-um talents.”
“Noseeyum?”
“Too good to get caught.”
“Ah.” He grinned at her, the expression softening his face and putting an appealing glint in his dark brown eyes. Behind that hard-assed, hard-pressed agent façade, she thought not for the first time, Mr. Sergei Didier had a real wicked sense of humor that didn’t get nearly enough air time. “Kin of yours?”
“Hardly.” Without false modesty, Wren knew her worth, and so did Sergei, to the penny. These guys were good, but she was better. Which was why she didn’t appear on other people’s little lists. Even Sergei, with all his surprisingly good contacts and connections, hadn’t known about her way back when until sheer coincidence—and a nasty accident caused by someone trying to kill him—brought them into contact.
Wren’s mentor, a man named John Ebenezer, had taught her from the very beginning to keep a low personal profile for a great many reasons, all of them having to do with staying alive and under her own governance. There were three kinds of current-mages in the world: Council-mandated, lonejackers and dead. Just because a Talent had no interest in being under the Council’s thumb didn’t mean they might not want her there, now or someday later. Better not to take the chance. That was the lonejacker’s first law: steer clear of the Mage Council.
Their salads arrived at that moment, and they paused long enough to accept their plates, and wave away Callie’s offer of freshly ground pepper.
“I’ve never understood that.”
“What?” He looked at her, his forehead scrunching together in puzzlement.
“The fresh pepper thing. Who puts pepper on their salad?”
Sergei shrugged. “Someone must, otherwise they wouldn’t offer it.”
“I think they do it just to see who’s stupid enough—or sheep enough—to say yes.”
“You have a suspicious mind.”
Wren grinned at him. “You do say the sweetest things.”
“Eat your salad,” he told her, lifting his own fork with a decided appetite. Her list lay just to the side of his plate, so he could skim it without distracting himself from his food, or running the risk of getting salad dressing on the paper. Wren watched him eat and read for a moment, then picked up her own fork and dug into the pile of greens. She was going to wait until the dishes were cleared away to go through the neatly-clipped-together, ordered, indexed and color-coded material properly.
“Hey, this name was on my list,” he said suddenly.
“What?” That got her attention fast.
“This name.” He stabbed one well-manicured finger at the paper as though it were somehow at fault. “It was on my list.”
Wren took the paper from him. “Which one?”
“Third from the bottom. George Margolin.”
Wren scanned the list, coming to the name he indicated. “Huh. Talent, yeah, but not buckets of it. Not affiliated, not really a lonejack—he’s passing.” In other words, he wasn’t using current in any way, shape, or form that was obvious to the observer, and probably didn’t use it at all. At least, not consciously. But you never knew for certain. And some folk were just naturally sneaky about it.
“Great. Move that guy up to the top of the suspects list. Anyone in a suit that P.B. hears about is going to be dirty, one way or another.”
“P.B.?” Sergei didn’t roll his eyes—that would have been beneath him—but his voice indicated his level of unimpressedness.
“Hey, don’t dis my sources,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “That furry little bastard always comes through, which is more than I can say for some of your people. I seem to recall a little screw-up with IDs that almost got me shot by the cops in Tucson.”
“All right, all right. Point taken.”
She had to give Sergei that. He was a xenophobic bastard when it came to things like demons and fatae, but he didn’t cut humans any slack when they screwed up, either. Especially when it was their own lives on the line.
She flattered herself that he might have been just as annoyed at that snitch if he hadn’t ended up in that Tucson jail along with her.
“So how come this guy’s on your list?”
“You have the file, you look.”
“Why? You’ve memorized the important stuff already.” Wren never understood why people wasted brain-space on anything they didn’t need right at hand. That was the magic of writing stuff down, so you didn’t have to cram it all in your head. But Sergei was incapable of letting go of anything to do with a job, at least while the file was hot. For all she knew, he did an info dump at the end of every case, mentally shredding all that info in order to make room for the new stuff.
She had a mental image of Sergei running his brain through a shredder, and had to stifle a snort of laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” She bit the inside of her lips, made a “go on” gesture. “Tell me about Margolin.”
He frowned at her, dark eyes narrowed in suspicion, but complied. “Mid-forties. Computer genius of sorts, chief technical officer for Frants Incorporated. Odd, for a Talent.”
“But not unheard of, especially if he’s passing. That low-level a Talent, probably enhances the tech stuff rather than shorting it out. Lucky bastard.” Wren didn’t carry high-tech toys because it was an exercise in frustration, not because she didn’t like them.
“According to this, he’s smart, savvy, and very very disgruntled. RUMINIT says he felt that he was passed over for promotion because of his religious beliefs.”
“What, he’s a Scientologist?”
It was Sergei’s turn to laugh. “No, agnostic. Rather militantly so. As in ‘I don’t know, and you don’t either.’”
Wren tried to raise only one eyebrow and failed, pretty sure that the resulting expression made her look like an inquisitive owl. “I can see where that could get up someone’s nose, yeah. But if he’s passing…Yeah.” She checked her notes. “Nope, no real training, far as anyone knows. No mentor ever claimed him.” That was how Talents worked, mostly; one-on-one apprenticeships. Went all the way back to when it wasn’t safe to work together—or tell anyone what you were, so you tied the knowledge up in secrecy and oaths. “He doesn’t have the firepower to do it himself, and I can’t see him having enough information without a mentor to track down and hire a mage to do something like this, either.” She narrowed her eyes as a sudden thought hit her. “Unless he’s from a Talented family that’s stayed low-profile, flying under the radar? Neezer said sometimes it ran in the bloodline like that. But not often, not so’s you could track it, anyway. So maybe he’s not private enemy number one after all.” She paused. “I wonder how he got on P.B.’s list.”
Sergei squinted at the list, trying to make out the handwriting. “Ursine?”
“Usury. Somebody’s got a light wallet, if he’s paying out the loan sharks, hey? Odd, you’d think he’d be making plenty of money. Kids’ tuition go up? He a gambler? The Cosa’s not pretty on people who welsh on debts.”
“No information on either. And they run some pretty heavy scans on people for exactly that. I’ll take it back and see what some determined digging can produce.”
Sometimes, Wren wondered about Sergei’s snitches. Not their ability—their origins. Mostly they were the usual: artists who heard every bit of gossip that rumbled through the collectibles world, high-rent agents who knew where the money was buried and the bodies bankrolled—that sort of thing. But every now and then she needed information you couldn’t get from a cocktail party, or through a discreet inquiry, and then his clear brown eyes would go dark and shadowed, and he’d refuse to say yea or nay…but the information always came through. And unlike his other sources, and her own, the information they gave was always straight-up. Always.
So she wondered, but never pried. For all that they pretty much lived in each other’s pockets during cases, weeks could go by otherwise when they only talked briefly on the phone. There was an awful lot about Sergei’s life she didn’t have clue one about.
Oh, Wren had known back when they first hooked up that her new partner was a man with secrets, not the least of which was how he’d even known about Talents and the Cosa in the first place. It wasn’t as though they took out ads in the local trades or anything. But he did know, and he never said how, and that had actually made her trust him more, not less. If she was going to let him in on her secrets, after all, she had to respect that he held others as securely, right? But oh, the desire sometimes to crack him open and see what secrets came rolling out…
In a purely mental, informational way. Of course. She’d seen the women he socialized with, had even met a few of them over the years when their social paths overlapped. Lovely women, Nulls each and every one; elegant and articulate and educated, usually artistic as hell. And visible. Always highly visible. Memorable, even. Unlike her own eminently forgettable self.
And so it goes, Valere. You are what you are. And so is he, and so are the both of you together. Concentrate on the job.
“Anyone on your list you think is likely?” Sergei asked.
Pulled from personal to professional musings without warning, Wren shook her head, replaying his words as she chewed on a particularly leafy green. Likely as a thunderstorm in summer. There was someone on her list who had the talent to pull something like this, and the probable grudge and twisted sense of humor to make it seem like a good idea. All she had to do was name him, and Sergei would be able to run a complete dossier. But the words didn’t come out of her mouth.
She tried not to lie to Sergei. It was just bad business, and stupid besides. But she wasn’t ready to say anything to him just yet. Not before she knew more.
Some things, when you got down to it, were more important than business. Some loyalties you couldn’t just walk away from. And anyway, with any luck Sergei wouldn’t figure out who she was protecting until she had her answers and it wasn’t an issue anymore one way or the other.
Callie came by to take their salad plates away and bring the main course, saving her from having to reply. By unspoken consent they moved away from shop talk while digging into their meals, catching up on the small details that made up each day. Sergei had a new show beginning that week, and he was full of the near-disasters and minor crises that came with every installation.
“So Lowell gestures like he’s some off-off-off Broadway magician, only his arm gets tangled in the hangings, which in turn get tangled in the wires. And the wires come down like the wrath of God, sending the piece soaring through the air like it thought it was Peter Pan.”
Wren snickered, imagining the scene. “Anyone get hurt?”
“Only the artist, who chose that moment to walk in the door, demanding an update. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”
“You hoped he would have a heart attack,” she corrected him. “You could have doubled the prices on everything.”
His brief grin made her laugh around a forkful of sole. “Trebled. But there would have been paperwork, and the show would have had to have been delayed, so it’s probably best he didn’t.”
“Spoken like a true patron of the arts. You’re a marvel and a wonder, you know that, Didier?”
“I do my humble best, Valere. I truly do. Some day I might even make an honest man out of me.”
With perfect timing, they both said “yeah, right” in matching tones of disgust, and his sudden bark of laughter made Wren laugh again as well from the sheer joy of the noise.
He went on to detail the results of the show while Wren finished her meal. Shamelessly scraping the last of the sauce up with her finger and licking it off with relish, she checked to make sure Callie had finally reseated herself at the bar and was engrossed in a magazine before giving in to temptation and retrieving the file from the floor beside her chair. Sergei continued with his meal, now silently watching her as she skimmed through his data.
“Truthfully, these all look pretty doubtful as our boy,” she said finally. “I mean, we need someone who has a pretty major grudge against the client, enough know-how about magic to do the job, and—most importantly—they had to know about the spell in the first place. I’d say that’s a triumvirate that lets out all but three or four of these folks. I’d rather concentrate on the ones who would actually have gotten their hands dirty, see if I can’t match the readings I took from the site with their signatures.”
“Which would mean your list?” Sergei placed his knife and fork down precisely on the table. On cue, Callie swooped down and cleared their table, scraping the crumbs off the tablecloth with a small metal tool and handing them each a dessert menu. She might be an annoying eavesdropper, but she was an excellent waitress. “How many of them would fit those criteria?”
“All of them, probably.” She pushed aside the menu without even looking at it. Time to tell the truth—if not all of it. “Like I said, they may not be as highly placed, but they all have grudges, and the means to execute them.”
“So…?” Oh, she knew that tone of voice. Damn. And twice damn. He knew she was hiding something—he always knew, somehow. Like a vulture knows when dinner’s about to pass over. She looked up into deep brown eyes and wanted to tell him everything. Only a decade’s worth of resisting that lure—and seeing it work on too many others—gave her the ability to look away.
Sorry, partner. This one I’ve got to deal with on my own. You’d only freak, anyway.
“So I’ll try to narrow the list down. See if I can’t talk to some of them, face-to-face.”
Sergei kept his face calm, and only the little tic at the corner of his jaw gave him away. “Any of them wizzarts?” Casual. Too casual. She could hear enamel grind. Their partnership had taught him when to step back and let go, too. He just didn’t always—ever!—listen to what he knew.
“A couple. All recent, though, nothing to worry about. I can handle myself, big guy.”
She hoped.
five
Although it was nearing noon, activity on Blaine Street, deep in the so-called “artist’s maze” favored by trendy galleries, was better suited to early morning, with half the stores just beginning to see an early trickle of customers. The short, narrow street had clearly once been the home to warehouses, metal steps rising up from the curb to oversized metal doors set in otherwise stark brick buildings. But where most of the other converted buildings that now housed trendy stores and galleries had clear glass windows, the better to display their contents in a carefully designed presentation, the narrow glass front on 28 Blaine had been replaced with artisan-made stained glass. The deep blues, reds and greens seemed at first to be randomly placed, but if you stepped back a moment, the wavy striations in the glass and the choice of colors created the appealing effect of an underseascape.
Between the window and metal double doors, a small bronze plaque announced that this was the home of The Didier Gallery.
Inside the gallery, the floor was covered in a muted gray carpet, and walls painted Gallery White were hung with paintings in groupings of three or four, interspersed occasionally with a three-dimensional piece on a pedestal. The works displayed this month were brash, almost exhibitionist in their use of color. A curved counter ran through the middle of the space, and behind it a sturdy wrought-iron staircase rose to the second-floor gallery, where smaller pieces were displayed. A young blond man sat at the desk, flipping through a catalog. He looked as though he belonged in a catalog himself: perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed and bored out of his overbred skull.
Sergei blew through the door, setting the chime alert jangling. The young man looked up, gauged the expression on his boss’s face, and wisely decided not to speak unless spoken to. One look around told Sergei that no one else was in the gallery, and with a grunt that could have been satisfaction or disgust, he nodded to his associate and went to the back wall of the gallery, where touching a discreet wall plate opened the door to his private office.
The door closed behind him, and the young man went back to flipping through the catalog.
“Of all the stupid, harebrained…” Sergei had managed to keep a hold on his temper all the way home from Genevieve’s apartment, which meant that by now, although he was just as angry as before, he was unable to let go and have the temper tantrum he so righteously desired.
She hadn’t answered the phone when he had called this morning. She hadn’t been home when he had arrived on her doorstep an hour later. Not that she didn’t have a perfect right to go off on her own. He was her partner, her agent, not her damned keeper. That would have been a full-time job alone. But he had known she was hiding something, damn it. Had known sitting there across from her during dinner, and let it go, and that was his fault.
It hadn’t been until this morning, as he was taking his morning walk, that one of the names on the list had jumped out of his brain and thwapped him soundly across the face. He hadn’t recognized it at first, because he only thought of the man by the nickname the Cosa had given him.
Stuart Maxwell. She was going to confront Stuart Maxwell, otherwise known in Talented circles as The Alchemist. The man so hooked into the current he could turn wishes into water, and water into wine. The man who, the last time Wren encountered him, had tried to kill her. A certified, over the bend, wind whistling through his brains, wizzart.
Wren knew he wouldn’t have let her get within a mile of that man ever again, no matter if he had been the first, last, and only name on their suspects list. And so she conveniently forgot to point him out.
He felt his teeth grinding together, and slowly forced his jaw to unclench. His partner only thought he was overprotective. And then she went and did something like this that only proved he wasn’t damn near vigilant enough!
If she survived—she would survive, she would—Sergei swore to himself, he was going to put her over his knee. And he meant it this time!
Okay, so he wasn’t being rational. She had the astonishing ability to do that to him, did his Wren. And it drove him insane.
Exhaling, and muttering a curse under his breath, Sergei finally took off his coat and hung it on the wooden coat rack in the corner, smoothing his hair back and settling himself into his skin. Calm. He needed to be calm. When Wren was in the field, the game was hers. The fact that he could—and had—imagine any of two dozen things that could go wrong did not mean anything would go wrong. And even if it had—he paused a moment to make a quick gesture with his fingers to avert ill luck—there was nothing he could do about it until she bothered to check in.
He took a deep breath, let it out. This was Wren. She would check in. His partner was occasionally reckless, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew what she was doing. He had to believe in that. Believe in her. Don’t make her asinine fears—that he didn’t trust her enough—any worse.
And, in the meantime, he had a gallery to run.
“Lowell,” he said into the intercom. “Please bring me the week’s invoices, if they’re ready? And tomorrow’s guest list as well.”
The building was more of a shack than anything you could properly call a house. Derelict in the middle of an oversized lot given over to wildflowers and knee-high grasses, the two-story building boasted a wraparound porch and tall windows, but the wood sagged, the white paint was cracked, and the windows were blurred with grime.
“Lovely.”
Wren pulled her rental car—an innocuous dark-blue sedan—to the side of the dirt road, and stared at the structure. There was no need to check the address against the information written in her notepad. There wasn’t anything else that could be her destination on this isolated road miles from the nearest town. Besides, there wasn’t a house number anywhere to be seen.
With a sigh, she tossed the notepad into her bag, slung the strap over her shoulder, and got out of the car. Dust swirled around her heels, the dryness at odds with the riot of greenery on the property. She couldn’t feel anything, but that was hardly surprising. You never could—until the trap was sprung, and it was way too damn late.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
“Max. I want to help you.” The Wren-self in the memory was years younger, her hair longer, tied into a braid halfway down her back. Sergei in the distance. Too far away. Far enough away to be safe.
“I’m already damned, girl. Didn’t you learn anything?”
His eyes had still been sane, then. Thirty seconds later, he had tried to kill her.
Wren stopped just shy of the border of grass, and sighed again. Then sneezed, her sinuses reacting to the overabundance of green growing things.
“Great. He couldn’t have holed up in a concrete warehouse somewhere? Max!”
Approach protocol thus satisfied, she waited, shifting her weight from one sneaker to the other, wiping her palms on denim-clad thighs.
“Max, you shit, I just want to talk to you!”
There was no answer. She hadn’t been expecting any, but it would have been nice to get a surprise. Wren was tempted to reach out, to try and feel for the currents she knew were floating around the house, but she didn’t. Bad manners, and dumb besides. This was her last stop of the day, and she was tired, short-tempered, and really not looking forward to this at all.
“Max!” A pause. “You mangy bastard, it’s Wren!”
A harsh bark of laughter right in her ear startled her, but she schooled her body, refusing to let it jump. Sound waves were easy to manipulate. A cheap trick.
“Come in then, you brat. Before I forget you’re out there.”
That had been easier than she expected. Suspicious, she stepped onto the grass, watching as the blades bent out of her way, creating a path directly to the porch steps.
Far too easy. She had a bad feeling about this.
The inside of the house was actually quite comfortable, if you liked extreme lo-tech living. The front door opened onto a large room, encompassing the entire front of the house. A fireplace took up all of the far wall, and bookshelves covered much of the other three walls. No television, no computer, no phone in sight. Just books and the occasional piece of what might have been artwork. Not that she had anything against books, but there was only so long you could live in someone else’s head. Wren didn’t trust anyone who didn’t get out and do for themselves.
Not that she trusted The Alchemist worth a damn to begin with. Not anymore. She learned slow, but she did learn. But this wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could do over the phone. Assuming he had access somewhere, somehow, to one. And that it didn’t go snap-crackle-pop the moment he touched it. Wizzarts were even more prone to short-circuiting electronics than your average Talent, because they didn’t think to be careful.
Some would say that they didn’t think at all.
There was no sound at all in the house, not even the hum-and-whir of appliances somewhere, or the clink-clink of water draining through pipes. It made Wren nervous, that absence of sound. So what if she’d grown up in the ’burbs, back when you might still see deer or fox or occasionally a bear in your backyard; she was too much a city girl now to feel comfortable without the endless background accompaniment of screeching brakes, sirens and horns.
Even the damn crickets outside had been better than this. Silence wasn’t a thing; it was the absence of a thing, of noise. And her mind always wanted to know what had swallowed the noise, how, and when was it coming for her.
To distract herself from that thought, she looked around again. Two overstuffed sofas and a leather reclining chair were matched with sturdy wooden tables, obviously handmade. The plaid upholstery was worn and comfortable-looking, and the floor was wood, scarred with years of use, and covered with colorful cloth rugs scattered with more concern for warmth than style. A large dog of dubious parentage lay on one of the sofas. It lifted its head when she came in, and contemplated her with brown eyes that didn’t look as though they had been surprised by anything in the past decade, or excited about anything in twice that time.
“Hi there,” she said. The narrow tail thumped once and then lay still, as though that much effort had exhausted it. “Let me guess—Dog, right?”
“Don’t see any reason to change a perfectly workable name,” the voice said from off to her left. “I’m the man, he’s the dog, and we both know our places.”
“And his, obviously, is on the sofa.”
Max let out a snort as he came completely into her line of sight. He was wearing an old, worn blue cotton sweater and khaki safari-style shorts that showed off knobby knees, red-banded tube socks sagging around his ankles. “That one’s his, this one’s mine. We stay out of each other’s way. Which is more than I can say for you. Didn’t my throwing you off a cliff teach you anything? Why you bothering me again?”
Wren hadn’t seen Max in almost five years. But for a wizzart, that was crowding.
“Your name came up in very uncasual conversation,” she said, sitting down in the chair, but not relaxing into it. Max seemed reasonably rational right now, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. She actually had learned a great deal from going off that cliff, most of which involved the fact that she couldn’t fly. She wasn’t eager to relearn that particular lesson.
“Whoever it was, they deserved killing.” He sat down on his sofa and put his feet up on a battered wooden table. His socks were filthy, dirt and grass stains worn into the weave of the fabric, but they somehow managed not to stink.
“No killing,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”
“You bring any chewing gum? I could use a spot of chewing gum. So if they’re not dead, what’s the hassle? And if they are dead, what’s the hassle anyway?” He held his hands out in front of him, as though about to clasp them in prayer, and spread his fingers as wide as they could go, staring intently at the space between his palms. The pressure in the room increased, fed by the energies the old man was bouncing throughout his system like some kind of invisible pinball game.
Wren swallowed a third, much heavier sigh. Wizzarts.
“Max. Focus.”
“I’m listening,” he said, cranky as an old bear with arthritis. “Get on with it before I decide you might make good fertilizer for the grass.”
He was making an effort for her. That was nice to see. Wren organized her thoughts quickly, compiling and discarding arguments and appeals. Finally, feeling the pressure of his current-games pushing at her eardrums, almost to the point of pain, she went for broke.
“Why did you threaten to kill Oliver Frants?”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew that she had made a mistake. The question was too vague, too loosely-worded. He could answer her without telling a damn thing, whatever obligation or guilt or connection he felt satisfied, and she’d be out on her ear before she got another chance.
“Man’s a waste of piss.”
And that was it, the sum and total of his elaboration. Typical, she thought in disgust. A wizzart didn’t need to have a reason to do something. They thought it, they did it. For that quirk alone Wren could have written Max off the suspect list—this kind of indirect assault on the client required planning, thought—some kind of long-term intent behind it. And nobody in their right mind would have hired a wizzart to do a job like this—there was too much risk that the wizzart would get bored, and deposit the stone in the middle of the local police chief’s bedroom, just because.
The problem was, a wizzart simply didn’t have anything left over after the magic. Their entire existence was dedicated towards channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every cell turned towards the goal of becoming the perfect conductor. And that included their brain cells.
Because of that, wizzarts lived in the moment, the instant of action. It made them irascible, ornery, obnoxious—name your adjective and someone would double it without hesitation. “Waste of current” was the popular view. But the Council, in one of its few and far-between acts of mercy, had forbidden anyone to harm wizzarts. There but for the grace of God go you, was their official line. Truth was, Wren knew, the Council used wizzarts. When it came to the major mojos, to understanding the byplay of forces, the correlation of events and probabilities, they were the chaos-theory scientists of the Cosa Nostradamus.
Unstable, yeah. But the very fact that they were that unpredictable also meant that Max could have done it, either for a client, or a passing whim. The only prediction you could make about the unpredictable is that they’re going to do something you didn’t even have in the list of possibilities.
“I have a problem,” she said quickly, before his attention went into a sideslip. “Someone pulled a nasty job on my client. Someone with a bad sense of the funny. Your name was on the list, and I—” The pressure against her eardrums rose dramatically, and the energies between his hands manifested in zizzing spurts of static electricity. He giggled in pleasure. She had lost him.
A night spent chasing down leads, checking up on suspects’ alibis and whereabouts, coupled with a morning of phone calls and in-person follow-ups on local suspects, topped by the two-hour drive to this godforsaken town that wasted even more time she probably didn’t have, finally made her temper snap. Ignoring all known procedures and common sense for dealing with wizzarts, she reached forward and slapped her hands over his, forcing the energy into a cage of her own flesh. Energy channeled took on the signature of its user. And right now, trapped between her hands, was a solid buzz of Max-imprinted magic, ready for the scrolling.
hey hey HEY brat. bitch. A flash of herself, much younger, all eyes and ears and good intentions flickering like a beacon from him. She countered with her own self-image, foot tapping in impatience. It was a little like the icons people used in chat rooms, she’d been told. what what WHAT?
Irritation came back from him, some resignation—a flash of pride, that she had learned so much since their first meeting. Some disgust, that she sold herself that way, to the highest bidder. And a complete, total lack of information about what she needed to know. He had never even met the client, merely read a newspaper article about the man that annoyed him and spouted off about it in the wrong place.
“Oh, Max.”
She released his hands, not apologizing for the hijacking. The formal dance of manners slowed down the mental process, interfered with conductivity.
That was the popular theory, anyway. Sergei had a long-standing, loudly-spoken opinion that Talents were just naturally rude.
Dog yawned, his tongue hanging out of his mouth when he was done. Max stared at her, his blue-green eyes trying to dig under her guard, ferret out whatever he was looking for. Wren ignored him the way Dog was ignoring them, waiting for his reaction. Her body appeared relaxed, but that very casualness was preparedness. Whatever hit, she would be ready to dodge out of the way, roll and slip out of range.
Ignoring the fact that even on an off day Max’s range was further than she could run—to the edge of the property, at least, and likely a full line of sight beyond that. If he got pissed, she was screwed. It was that simple. And that was why wizzarts rarely had houseguests.
“You’re looking in the wrong place,” he said finally, his voice old and scratchy, as though her insight had worn him out in some measure.
“Where should I look then?” If he was going to offer aid, she was going to take it. Her mama might have raised a fool, to be here in the first place, but that didn’t mean she had to be stupid about it.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged, the cotton sweater showing new holes as he moved. “I’ll poke through the ether, see what I can find out.”
There was a tension about him, in the way the pressure pulled in tight around him, that suggested this little get-together was just about over. Dog whined, and rolled onto his other side, facing away from them. Wren stood, looking across the room at the wizzart. “Why?”
He laughed, a manic sound that made the hair on the back of her arms stand straight up. “’Cause you came to me. ’Cause not killing you’s the last thing I managed to do right. Maybe ’cause you’re all that’s left of John on this green earth.”
John Ebenezer. Teacher. Friend. Father figure. Gone, ten years and more. It still hurt, the memory.
“You might want to get out, now.”
Wren got. The grass didn’t move out of her way this time, instead straining towards the house, as though there was a stiff wind blowing them inward.
There was. Only it was brewing inside: the center of the whirlwind, a black hole of current. Lightning flashed in the clear blue sky, and Wren felt it shiver down her back, like the first stroke of a massage. She got into the car, tossing her bag onto the seat next to her, and almost flooded the engine in her haste to get the hell out of there.
Wizzarts. Jesus wept.
The drive back to the city seemed endless, her brain chasing after one detail or another until she shut it all down with a blast of rock and roll. She might be a jazz kind of girl, but there was nothing like the sound of sledgehammer guitars to get you rolling down the highway. Wren handed in the rental with a kind of regret, patting the hood in farewell as she waited for the attendant to finish checking it out. He was a tiny little guy, bandy-legged, who looked as though he should have been fussing over spindly Thoroughbreds, not standard issue Chevys.
Once he’d given the other attendant the all-clear, she signed off on the X’d line, collected her copies of the paperwork, and caught the subway home, standing-room-only as everyone else headed home from a tough day at the office, too. Normally an irritation, today she welcomed the press of humanity, sweaty and rude though it might be. The fact that she could stand them, could rub skins with the rest of humanity without freaking, reassured her that she still was one of them. Still sane, normal…as normal—
As normal as you could be, with the buzz of magic running through your cells when the rest of the world doesn’t feel a thing. When John Ebenezer had first discovered her using Talent to pilfer sodas and candy from the local five-and-dime, he’d dragged her out of the store by one ear. He’d read her the riot act, fed her a lecture on morals, and hadn’t let go until she knew what it was she was doing—what she was. It hadn’t seemed so scary then. He’d been a lot closer to normal then; he’d taught high school, in fact. Biology. Before he too had given himself over to the current, made riding the wave his entire reason for existing. Wizzed out.
By the time she graduated high school, he was long gone; the toll of his own Talent overwhelming what had been his life. But by then, he’d managed to change her life, almost as much as he finally changed his own. “Maybe ’cause you’re all that’s left of John on this green earth.”
Sometimes she wished Neezer had just minded his own business that day in the five-and-dime.
Wren wasn’t a wizzart. She didn’t want to be one, wasn’t, for various fate-be-thanked reasons, likely to become one. But how much had Neezer wanted it, back then? Had Max? Had they told themselves, whistling in the dark, that it couldn’t happen to them?
“God, woman, stop it!”
An old Chinese man looked at her sideways, his expression clearly showing what he thought of crazy women who talked to themselves.
She got off at her stop, taking the steps up to the street two at a time. The fresh air on her face was like a benediction, and she stopped to draw a lungful in. The sky was just beginning to darken, and the shadows of the buildings shaded into dark blue the way only city shadows could. Yes! Max could keep the countryside—she felt alive in the city, with its constant hum of energy that nonetheless managed to remain completely impartial. Too many people could be better than none, sometimes.
Especially if their presence meant you were sane.
She strode down the street and up to the six-story brick apartment building. It was the tallest building in the neighborhood, standing out against the three-story townhouses and one-story storefronts of Chinese takeout places, psychics, and the ever-present corner delis/flower stores/supermarkets. Depending on what part of town you lived in, they were Korean grocers, or bodegas, or quick-marts.
She thought about swinging by Jackson’s to get some fresh milk, maybe play the Lotto, but decided against it. She’d do the shopping this weekend, when she had a little more energy.
But in the instant her feet slowed, contemplating and deciding, her nerves twitched. Back-of-the-neck, millennia of evolution stripped away kind of twitching, what Sergei called the lizard brain. The survival nerve. She sped up again, scanning the sidewalk-side without turning her head too obviously. It could have been one of the kids sitting on the stoop across the street, giving her a too-close once-over. Most people ignored her, even when she wasn’t Disassociating—it made her very nervous when someone didn’t. Or it might have been something as simple, and ignorable, as a mugger in the shadows, sizing her up as a potential meal ticket. That happened on occasion, but they almost always ended up passing her by for the next person coming down the street.
Nerves, probably. Justifiable, in the aftermath of the day. It couldn’t have been anything else. The Wren was invisible, far as most of the world was concerned. She never met with clients, never had any direct contact with them, and she knew damn well there wasn’t anything she was working on right now that might have followed her home. And yet…
The question isn’t “are you paranoid.” It’s “are you paranoid enough?”
She spun on one heel, her keys clenched in her left hand in a defensive hold, ready to scrape the face off anything coming up on her.
There was nobody there. Two buildings down, the teenagers made rude catcalls that only increased when she glared at them. A flash of current would teach them a lesson…and be a waste of energy she didn’t have right now.
“You’re getting as bad as Max,” she told herself, turning back and heading up the stairs into her building, praying her words weren’t true.
On the street, a figure stopped just shy of Wren’s building, watching as she unlocked the door and stepped inside. Wearing a stylish leather coat open over a well-tailored suit, he exuded professional menace that silenced the teenagers even before they noticed the unmistakable leather of a belt holster showing under the coat. Pale eyes looked at them without blinking, and they stared back half in apprehension, half in awe. He smiled at them, not showing any teeth, and they turned tail and fled.
A glance at his wrist to check the time, and he reached into a coat pocket, extracting a small, very expensive cell phone. Staring up at the fifth floor, where a light had just gone on, he touched a button, and waited for someone to answer on the other end.
“Bird’s flown home.”
He waited while the other person relayed the news, his gaze never leaving the window where Wren’s form could be seen, barely, through the rice-paper shade. Then another person took the phone, the deep voice filling the phone’s receiver.
“No, she was alone. Should I take care of it?”
The answer was clearly negative. “Right.”
He hung up and returned the phone to his pocket. With one last look at the window, he turned and walked down the street, disappearing into the growing shadows as though he had never been there.
Wren tossed her bag on the kitchen counter, and opened the fridge, pulling out a can of Diet Sprite and popping the top. She took a long sip, sighing with pleasure as the ice-cold liquid soothed her throat. Always hydrate, Neezer had told her one summer when she passed out after a particularly exhausting workout. Rehydrate, eat, sleep. You might look like you’ve just been sitting there half-asleep, but the insides of your body will know they’ve been abused. If you don’t take care of them, they won’t take care of you.
Dropping her jacket, she left it in the middle of the floor, walking down the short hallway into her office. No messages on the machine. She’d check in with Sergei later, after the gallery closed. She frowned. No, damn it, today was—Tuesday, the gallery was open late tonight. She’d talk to him later, then. No rush.
She flipped the light switch, then turned on the computer. While it booted up, she flipped through the mail, snorting in disgust at the amount of junk mail and more useless circulars that had been shoved into the front door, making it almost impossible to open. She supposed that hand-delivering them employed someone…she just wished they’d pay attention to the “no menus, no flyers” sign on the apartment building’s door! She sorted through them on the off chance something was actually interesting, and spotted yet another pale-blue flyer advertising Village Pest Removal services. “‘Let us remove infestations and unwanted visitations.’” Well, poetic, anyway. Then she frowned, looking more closely at the wording on the sheet of paper: Tired of coming home to unwanted visitations? Concerned about the infestation of your building? Your neighborhood? Call us. We can clean things up for you.
“Your entire neighborhood?” Hell of a claim, in Manhattan.
A hunch tingled at the back of her head, her brain reaching for two and two in order to stretch it into five. Something about the wording sounded unpleasantly familiar. She put the paper down flat on her desk and reached over to pick up the phone and headset. Dialed the phone number listed on the flyer, pacing as she did so.
“Hello. Yes, I’d like to speak to someone about an…infestation.”
The voice on the other end of the line was enthusiastic. Perky. Oh so happy and eager to please.
“Yes, they’re huge…winged, too. I just saw them tonight, and then I saw your flyer…” She was a pretty good actress, if she did say so herself. Wren almost believed that her apartment had been invaded.
“What? No, I have no idea how they got in, haven’t seen them anywhere else. Well, of course, who goes poking about looking for cockroaches—hello?”
The perky, friendly boy on the other line had hung up.
“Expecting something different, were we? Oh yeah. I know who you are now.” They weren’t here for pests—at least not the way New Yorkers usually used the term. Wren snarled and tossed the crumpled-up flyer across the room, missing the wastebasket by an embarrassing margin.
It was the NYADI—New Yorkers against Demonic Infestation—all over again, she’d eat someone else’s hat if it wasn’t. They had first appeared about three-four years before, when she was still living uptown, made life hell for everyone, Talent and Null alike, before they finally disappeared as suddenly as they’d arrived.
“Jesus wept, I so don’t need this now!” All it took were a couple of newcomers to the city, who didn’t know enough not to look directly at the strangers sitting next to you on the subway car, and you got spooked vigilantes trying to save humanity from demonkind. Wren snorted. As though demons were some big threat. She blamed the endless repeats of Buffy for that. And The X-Files. Some people really just couldn’t separate fact from fiction.
But this was way more directed than the ranting street-corner attacks had been. Way more careful, subtle even, which meant someone was thinking. Which was never good when it came to extremist loonies.
“Bastards. If it is them I swear I’ll…”
The familiar sound byte of her log-in interrupted her, and she exhaled heavily, forcing herself to relax. Slowly, as though tracking current, she lowered her shoulders, opened her hands, and let the tension slide out through her pores.
Leaving the rest of the mail in a pile on the top of a filing cabinet near the window, she took the headset off and sat down again at the desk. Work, Valere. Deal with those bastards later. And there will be a later….
Entering in the series of passwords, she logged into her server, downloading the day’s e-mail. Most of it was junk and spam, a few were from old high-school friends she managed somehow to keep in touch with, and three were headed “Old Sally.” She clicked on those first.
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Laura Anne Gilman
Manhattan's night life just got weirder… It starts as a simple job — but simple jobs, when you're dealing with the magical world, often end up anything but. As a Retriever, Wren Valere specializes in finding things gone missing — and then bringing them back, no questions asked. Normally her job is stimulating, challenging and only a little bit dangerous.But every once in a while… Case in point: A cornerstone containing a spell is stolen and there's a magical complication. (Isn't there always?) Wren's unique abilities aren't enough to lay this particular case to rest, so she turns to some friends: a demon (minor), a mage who has lost his mind, and a few others, including Sergei, her business partner (and maybe a bit more?). Sometimes what a woman has to do to get the job done is enough to give even Wren nightmares…
Staying Dead
Laura Anne Gilman
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
For Mom and Dad, of course.
And for Mir and ElaineMc,
who have some small blame in all this…
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Because no writer works alone,
no matter what it feels like at 3:00 a.m.,
I need to praise and thank the following people:
Jennifer Jackson (agent) and
Mary-Theresa Hussey (editor). Finestkind.
Peter, who understood that there was something I
needed to do, and gave me the space to get it done.
The Cross-Genre Abuse Group, for smacking this
around the room more than a few times.
eluki, who said “yes” to my kids before anyone else,
and Dana and Lynn, all of whom took time out
to pay forward.
The folk in my newsgroup who came up with the info
when I needed it (and the Hounds, who howl on cue).
James, who told me to shut up and get back to work.
Marina Frants, who taught me all sorts of lovely Russian
phrases…some of which even made it into the book.
To you all, if I haven’t said it recently,
grazie. Molto grazie.
The Mississippi’s mighty, but it starts in Minnesota
At a place where you could walk across
with five steps down…
—Indigo Girls
“Ghost”
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
one
“Hey, lady! Move it or lose it!”
The cyclist sped past her, a blur of expensive aluminum, narrow wheels and Lycra-clad body topped by a screaming-orange helmet. He—she? it?—hopped off the curb and dove into the light traffic moving up Madison Avenue, almost slamming into a cab that was cruising around the opposite corner looking for an early-morning fare. The cabbie slammed on the brakes and the horn at the same time, and the bike messenger made a rude gesture as he wove in and out of the middle of the street, heading downtown.
“Oh, for a stick to spoke his wheels,” Wren said wistfully, staring after the cyclist with annoyance. The man standing next to her smothered a surprised burst of laughter. Wren blinked. She hadn’t been kidding; bicycle messengers were a menace.
Dismissing the incident with the single-minded focus she brought to every job, Wren turned her attention back to the building in front of her; the reason she was standing out on the corner at this ungodly hour of the a.m. on a Monday. What terrible sin had she committed in a past life, to get all the morning gigs in this life? She made a soft, snorting noise, amused at her own indignation. At least it was a pretty morning as those things went.
In fact, Manhattan in the spring was a pretty decent place to be. Winter meant slush and biting winds, while summer had a range of heat-induced smells that ranged from disgusting to putrid. You could live in the city then, but you generally didn’t like it. But spring, she thought, spring was the time to be here. The sun was warming up, the breeze was cool, and people were in the mood to smile at each other. Even bad days had an edge of promise to them.
But right now, spring weather aside, Wren couldn’t find a damn thing to be happy about. Seven in the morning was way too early, and the job that had sounded like quick and easy money at first was rapidly going deep into the proverbial shitter. She was going to have to do some actual work for her paycheck on this one.
“Maybe that will teach you to answer the phone before six,” she said out loud.
“Excuse me?”
Rafe, the guard who had been detailed to “help” her, had a cute little wrinkle between his eyebrows, totally spoiling his until-now perfect Little RentACop look.
“Nothing. Never mind.” Don’t talk to yourself in front of civilians, Valere. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Even if she had ignored the phone’s ringing two hours ago, before either she or the sun had thought about getting up, the sound of Sergei’s voice on the machine would have made her pick the receiver up. She might have the skills that people paid for, but her partner was the one with a nose for jobs that was slowly but surely making them moderately well-off, if not obscenely wealthy. Only a fool would pass up a call from someone like that, no matter what the time.
And while Wren Valere was many things, a fool had never been one of them.
“Rafe? Can you go get me a refill of water?” she asked, handing him the plastic sports bottle she had been holding. He wasn’t thrilled at being an errand boy, she could tell, but his orders had been explicit. Give Ms. Valere all the help she needed. Type of help not specified. So he went.
Freed from observation, she sat back on her heels and closed her eyes slowly, holding them shut for a count of ten. She had been doing this long enough that it didn’t take her any longer than that to slip into a state of clear-minded awareness. The sounds of early-morning traffic, the smells of exhaust and fresh-budding greenery all faded, leaving her with a clear, concentrated, settled mind. As she opened her eyes slowly, not rushing anything, her gaze went back to the sleek marble foundation in front of her, as though there might have been some change in those ten-plus seconds of blackout.
Nope. Nothing. It still looked as ordinary and commonplace as before, one of any of a hundred-plus buildings throughout the city built in the same time period. No bloody handprint, no chisel marks or dust left on the pale gray surface, no sign of any kind of disturbance at all. Nothing to suggest there was something different about this northeast corner of the building, as opposed to the southeast, the southwest or the northwest sides. The four corners of this building stretched out over a full city block, and she’d just spent the past hour becoming far too familiar with all four.
God, she hated prep work! But you had to check everything before you started looking for anything. Even the stuff you knew you wouldn’t find. Except, of course, the fact that one corner, or rather one small block inside of this corner, wasn’t really there anymore.
A deliberate letting-go of her concentration, and the fugue state slipped away. Wren stood, arching her back to release some of the tension that had gathered there. Magic—current, in the post-eighteenth century terminology—was easy enough to use, if you had the Talent, but that didn’t make it easy.
Her throat felt like sandpaper. She looked around, but Rafe wasn’t back yet with her water. He must have gone all the way up to the executive lunchroom for San Pellegrino.
She clicked on the miniature recorder in her hand, and spoke into it, remembering to speak slowly enough that she would be able to transcribe correctly later on that day. “No indications of newly-made marks or disturbances on the site, not that that means anything—I bet they have a team of sanitation experts who come in every morning and sluice the building down, just in case a pigeon poops on it accidentally.”
All right, she thought. A slight exaggeration. But not by much. The guy who’d designed this had obviously had some penile issues that needed to be worked out, though.
The building in question was a thirty-eight-floor skyscraper, gleaming steel and glass in the early-morning light. A troop of window washers could spend a full year just wiping and polishing the expanse of windows. An edifice built to proclaim the owner’s ego to a city already overwhelmed with capital-P Personalities.
“From the exterior, the building looks intact. This is supported by the engineer’s report—” And how the hell had they found someone willing and able to do a full review of the building this morning? Money not only talked, it must have bellowed.
But the report she had found in the folder left at her door by one of Sergei’s ever-efficient contacts was clear on that. The missing piece had been removed from within the building, without cracking the concrete and steel surrounds. The building itself had not been harmed in any way by the alleged disruption to its structural integrity. Therefore, it was only her imagination that made the headquarters of Frants Enterprises tilt ever-so-slightly to the left. Cornerstones didn’t actually support any weight in modern buildings, or so she had been informed by a quick skim through the multitude of building and construction sites on the Internet while she waited for her coffee to brew. They were there for show, to display the construction date, as tradition. Sometimes, as receptacles of time capsules, or good-luck charms—
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 the things she did very best. Part of it was by design: her jeans, white button-down shirt and leather jacket were quality enough that she would be categorized as “employed,” and the temporary security badge that came with the reports was now hung around her neck, giving her a reason to be in the building. Most people didn’t look any further than that. But the real secret to her success was a carefully cultivated result of the genetic lottery. Not a winning ticket; more like a “sorry, try again” one. Her shoulder-length hair was the color that could only be described as “brownish,” and her features were unremarkably regular. Average height, average weight, unremarkable measurements—she never warranted more than a swift once-over by anyone, male or female. Her appearance was neither unpleasant nor remarkable. Forgettably average.
Sometimes she wondered if dying her hair bright screaming red, or bleaching it platinum blond would make any difference to the way the world didn’t see her. But it never seemed worth the bother to experiment. And why screw with success? Besides, Sergei would kill her.
“The fact that there is no sign from the exterior of the building of digging, or any kind of disturbance at all, confirms the suspicion that it was a purely magical theft.”
Well, duh. But you checked everything anyway, just so it didn’t come back later and bite you on the ass.
“A remote grab seems more and more probable.” And narrowed her eventual list of suspects. Far easier to steal line-of-sight, especially something this size.
Rafe appeared by her shoulder, holding out a water bottle glistening with fresh condensation. Wren shut off the recorder and tucked it into the inside pocket of her bomber jacket, then took the bottle from him and poured a stream of the water down her throat.
“Thanks. Let’s go take a look at the inside, shall we?” The we was ironic, and they both knew it. Rafe wasn’t so cute when he was annoyed. Oh well. She shouldered her way through one of the large revolving glass doors that led to the lobby, and walked inside the building, her eyes scanning the floor and walls with a practiced eye. She was looking for any indication that something might have been chalked or painted on the gleaming marble surfaces. Especially if it was a remote grab, signposts would show up somewhere. Remotes were tough enough, easier to focus if you had something there to guide you in. Leaving something of your own was best, but risky if you couldn’t pull it on your way out.
Admittedly, it would have been difficult for anything to adhere to that expensive marble-and-brass slickness, but the lobby would be the logical—easiest—place for the thief to lay a marker. Wren was surprised when her scan didn’t turn up anything. Markings were a safer way to do the job than actually being on-site at the time, something you could do well in advance of the job, and assuming that the victim knew enough to call in someone like herself afterward. If she had been doing the grab, she would have marked…the ceiling. Wren scanned upward, squinting against the overhead light, and let out a soft triumphant “hah!” There, up on the ceiling behind her, by the door. A faint streak, difficult to find even if you knew where and how to look for it. Wren did a rough calculation and decided that if you followed the end of the streak down and at an angle, it would point directly to where the northeast cornerstone was laid.
“Now, how did you get up there…and is it worth my time to go up and check you out?”
Probably not, she decided. Maybe later, if need be. But for now, the evidence was enough. Nobody was going to go up there and erase it, after all. Not without leaving even more trace for her to follow.
Something beeped. Rafe excused himself, going off into the far corner to talk into his walkie-talkie. He looked upset. Somebody must have seen him snatching the water, she thought with an evil grin.
Nodding to the morning guard at his station, she stopped so that he could compare the code of her temporary security pass against the list in the computer.
“Anyone else come in last night with a visitor’s pass?” Overlook nothing; assume the perp was either insanely clever or astonishingly dumb. You never knew when a simple question could get you an important answer.
“Nope. Heard there was a problem last night?” The guard was a short black guy in a standard-issue polyester blue jacket and tie a shade darker than Rafe’s. Although the tie might have been silk—he looked like a guy who would upgrade when possible. He sat the long security desk like a command center. Which, based on the number of blinking lights and constantly-changing screens set into the five-foot-wide surface, it was. Like something out of Star Trek, only without the nifty beeps and pings and whirring red alerts. This console was sleek and silent, even when a knob flicked red. He glanced at it, flipped a switch, and corrected whatever the problem was, all without taking his attention off her.
“You asking me, or telling me?” Wren asked. She heard the hardness in her voice, and winced inwardly, trying to tone it down a little. Don’t antagonize the witnesses, you idiot! A slight cock of the head to the right, like the bird she was nicknamed for, and a faint smile that could be mistaken for encouragement softened her words.
It worked enough to take the edge off his initial reaction. “They told me there was going to be a full-scale shakedown later today. That says trouble.”
She nodded, shifting her weight slightly to convey interest, and a willingness to hang around and listen to him for as long as he wanted to talk.
“And it had to be last night,” the guard—his name tag read Blair—continued. “’Cause when I came in this morning, Joe had already gone off shift, and there were two guys here in way-too-expensive suits, working the desk instead of him. And here you are, full clearance pass, asking to see my log book. So, you with FullTec?”
The name was familiar from her predawn briefing materials. FullTec was the name of the company that had installed the security system for this building back when it was built in 1955, and rewired it every ten years or so thereafter. She’d checked them out online, too. They’d been ahead of their time even then, and were still riding the cutting edge of security technology now. No building wired by them had ever been broken into, held hostage, or otherwise menaced. The upper level executives who gathered for multibillion-dollar conference calls rested easy in a FullTec building. Said so right on their Web site.
But, according to her job notes, they hadn’t been the ones to prepare the missing item. Which meant that they—probably—didn’t know anything at all about the special protections built into it. That had been Talented work: a mage, probably, or maybe one of the earliest lonejacks. Special protections that kept the owner, the ruler of this little financial empire, safe and secure in his dealings with the outside world.
A protection that had disappeared at 11:32 p.m. last night.
She banished those thoughts for later, returning her full attention to the guard and the here-and-now.
“No, actually, I’m a freelancer. Called in special to double-check some of the systems.”
Blair nodded his head, sagely impressed. The tie was definitely silk. “Ah. Watching the watchdogs, huh?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“So, you a tech? Some kind of whiz-kid hacker?”
Wren laughed, thinking of Sergei’s caustic comments while he watched her fumbling attempts to upgrade her computer last weekend. Current—the power source of magic—screwed with electronics, so her relationship with her computer was at best user-cautious. “Nope.” She paused, a germ of mischief making her tell this poor bastard the truth. “I’m a thief.”
Twenty minutes later, she was alone with the main control box for the building’s wiring system. The guard had laughed at her words, but the look in his eyes had been cool, and suddenly she’d been given an escort down into the basement. Not Rafe, either. A new guy, still polite but bulkier and much less cute. Not quite a goon, but with definite goonlike tendencies only barely tamed by the neatly pressed blue blazer that didn’t quite hide the bulk of a stun gun at his hip. Nor, she suspected, was it supposed to.
“That’ll teach me to be honest,” she muttered, opening the box and surveying the neatly laid-out and labeled assortment of wires. A stun gun would only take her out for about half the time of a normal human, since her body was used to channeling electrical energy in the search for current, but it would still be unpleasant, if she were taken unprepared. “Sergei’s right. Never gets me anywhere except in trouble.”
“Did you say something, miss?”
“No, nothing, sorry. I talk to myself when I work. Just ignore me.”
And she wasn’t really a thief, anyway. She was a retriever, thank you very damn much. A person, as Sergei would say, of specialized skills, who could bring objects back to their rightful—the client was always rightful—owner without the fuss of a police investigation, or the bother of insurance companies getting involved. Sergei had a way of making everything sound so damn high-class.
All right, so sometimes a legality or two got bent out of shape, in the course of a retrieval. But bending wasn’t breaking. Not so long as she wasn’t caught, anyway. And nobody told her mother.
Reaching out, Wren traced a wire gently, pressing just enough to make it resist her touch. According to the label under it, this section of wires connected to the fire alarm system. Probably not what she was looking for, since those things were notoriously temperamental. Dropping her hand several inches, she came to the security alarm. Again, not likely. That would have been the very first thing they would have checked.
When he’d called with the details, Sergei had made it clear to her that the client wanted this done with an absolute nil of noise. Which meant, ideally, she’d be the only one on the job. But the guard’s words indicated, to no real surprise at all, that that was already screwed. If the “mondo suits” at the board this morning hadn’t been Mage Council troubleshooters, high-powered magic-users-for-hire, she’d eat her hat, if she owned one. Oh well. Never assume the client’s going to tell you the truth. Especially if it involves anything that might actually let you get the job done.
But she had one advantage—high-powered magic-users tended to think in high-powered ways. Which she didn’t, as a rule. Start low on the spectrum, work your way up. Nobody uses more power than they have to. Call it Valere’s Strop to Occam’s Razor.
Closing that control box, she opened the one directly below it and snorted without amusement. The labeling confirmed her initial suspicion: the electrical system for the entire building. Everything that had an On button was initially powered from this one place. She tsked under her breath. Sloppy, sloppy. With the quick close-and-yank of current, she could give every overworked, underpaid secretary a day off.
And then end up explaining to Sergei why the job went south. From a jail cell. Not one of your better impulses, no.
Reaching in, she touched her index finger to one of the wires, and instantly felt a familiar answering hum in the blood running under the skin. You could describe magic any way that worked, and one mage’s science was another wizzart’s chaos. It all boiled down to using the existing energy that was generated by almost everything knocking about the universe. Call it electricity, call it life force, or chi: hell, call it Norman if it works. Wren didn’t pay much attention to any of the various and contentious schools of magic theory. She wasn’t much for schooling, period. You used what you had.
Every human living could use magic—theoretically. In actual practice, only a small portion of the population could conduct the charge, like living lightning rods, and an even fewer percentage of them were what her mentor had called pure conductors. Pures were the elite, the ones who made it to full mage status. They were generally co-opted by the Council, the strongest and most secretive union ever to collect dues. The rest of the magic-using population muddled along at various levels of ability, doing the best they could, finding their strong points and sticking to them.
Technically Wren was a pure, but she didn’t see the point in bragging on it. It was like having a high IQ—wasn’t much unless you worked it, did something with it. Drawing down the power was easy for her, siphoning off the energy from an external source to flow through her, as though she were running water through her hands. Any source would do, but current that was already tamed and channeled made it so much easier. Like called to like—energy was energy, and where there was one, there was the other. The electronic age was a godsend to magic users, despite what the fairy tales said. If she’d been a little better at channeling out what came in, she’d have been Council material for sure. The thought still made her shudder.
Five fingers now extended, she touched wires at random, discarding anything that sang back to her, looking for a discordant note, something that might indicate a flaw, a clog…or the remnant of supernatural tinkering. In short: look for an elemental.
“Ah-hah!” she said as her thumb grazed a wire that felt different from the others. “Gotcha, you sneaky little…” Pushing with that finger, she listened to the difference.
Elementals were exactly what they sounded like—entities that existed in an elemental state. Very small, and barely sentient, they were nonetheless useful, if you knew how to coax them. Now that she had a handle on one, Wren could sense a flurry of elementals within the wire she had tapped—hardly surprising. Barring a thundercloud, there were few places an elemental flocked to like a live wire; it must be like an amusement park, or an opium den to them, pick your metaphor. Now, to see how long they had been there, and if they’d noticed anything.
“Right. Come to mama…”
Having already gone into the fugue state once that morning, it was like stepping off a curb to find it again. No thought, no effort, just a sudden snapping into awareness, chasing glittering tendrils up and down her neural paths…
“Excuse me, miss?”
She blinked, shaken out of her intense concentration by the goon placing a paw on her shoulder. He looked nervous.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, but, whatever it is you’re doing—could you stop? They’re reporting power outages on several floors….”
Wren grinned sheepishly. “Right. Sorry.” She must have gone too deep, and drained some of the charge down accidentally. She flexed her neck and arched her back as though to straighten out stiff muscles, feeling for the natural current within herself. It hummed and snapped with vigor, confirming her suspicion. She’d gone for an automatic skim, copping a buzz off the charge of magic that could be found even in man-made electricity and storing it in the pool that every current-sensitive person carried, knowingly or not, within them.
Oops. Technically, that would be theft. Never a good idea, to steal from your employers. Probably on the level of office supplies; a pen here, a ream of paper there…Wren shook her head, dismissing that train of thought. It didn’t matter. She had gotten what little information was there. The trick now was going to be figuring out what it all meant, if anything.
Making nice to the goon-guard so that he would “forget” about what he hadn’t really seen anyway took a few minutes. Then she was riding up in the freight elevator, back up to the main lobby. It was crowded with suits now, male and female, armed with briefcases and brown paper bags, some of them already open to let loose the aroma of fresh-brewed Starbucks, or the cheaper stuff from one of the ubiquitous corner bagel carts. The starting bell had rung, and all’s well with the corporate world. Wren shook her head, moving against traffic. How the hell did people live like this?
It was with decided relief that Wren left her security badge with the guard at the front desk and went home. Now the real work—the fun stuff—could begin.
two
The message light on her answering machine was blinking, a quick red flash that caught her eye the moment she came in the door. She dropped her keys in the small green ceramic bowl on the counter of her square little kitchenette, her mail next to that, and reached over to press the play button.
Opening the fridge, Wren pulled out the orange juice, pouring a long draught down her throat without bothering to get a glass.
“Wren, it’s 9:15.” Sergei’s perfectly enunciated voice filled the sparse confines of her kitchenette, almost as though he were actually there. “I just accessed your account, and half of your fee has been deposited, as agreed upon.”
She raised the O.J. carton in salute to that fact.
“Need I remind you that the client is paying for a timely resolution to this situation?”
Sergei never referred to them as cases, or jobs. No, the “client” had a “situation.” Situations paid better.
“Jesus wept, Sergei. Even Christ took three days to rise from the dead! Gimme a break here!”
“And need I remind you that today is the thirteenth? Please mail your rent check today.”
“Yeah yeah, I already have a momma nag, I don’t need another,” she complained to the empty apartment as the tape clicked off. Not that it wasn’t sort of nice, having someone to remind her of the stuff that always managed to slip her mind. Like dropping a check in the mail.
That was the way their partnership worked, too. Sergei handled the money side of it, set up the deals, worked the angles. She did the jobs—or, in Sergei’s parlance, “rectified the situations.” The stuff that took Talent, as opposed to talent. From each according to their abilities, although she had been known to bargain sharply, and Sergei wasn’t above getting his hands a little dirty, if needed. She knew for a fact that the man lied with the fluidity and believability of a gypsy prince if it suited him.
A nice skill for your agent to have. It had certainly saved their asses more than once, including one memorable evening where he had played both her father and her husband to two different people in the space of an hour. He hadn’t been sure which role was more annoying, especially when she insisted on calling him “dad-dikins” for the rest of the month.
The memory of that made her smile, the comforting awareness of Sergei as always tucked somewhere along her spine. It wasn’t anything particularly magical; just the knowledge born of ten years’ partnership that, all joking aside, he was there for her, that all she had to do was yell.
Well, maybe it was a little bit magical. Sergei wasn’t a total null, and maybe she’d sampled a little more of his internal energies than she’d ever told him about…but it was only so that she’d be able to pick him out in a dark room, in a crowd, if the need ever arose.
Not that she’d ever admit to needing him, even when she was asking. Bastard would enjoy that far too much. He’d be more than happy to take over handling her personal finances, too, if she let him. It wasn’t that he didn’t think she was capable. She hoped, because otherwise she’d have to kill him. He just…was overprotective that way. Every way. Sometimes she thought he still saw her as the seventeen-year-old she’d been when they first hooked up, her still foundering in her abilities, and him with a pair of severely pissed-off mages on his tail.
Putting the orange juice back into the fridge, Wren turned out the light in the kitchen with a casual slap of the hand against the switch as she went across the narrow wood-floored hallway and into the main room. She turned on the stereo, letting the soft jazz clear out the silence. The music tugged at the tension between her shoulder blades, pulling it down off her body. A world with saxophones in it wasn’t a bad world at all.
Other than the stereo, two huge speakers, and a comfortable brown tweed armchair, the room was empty of furniture. The acoustics of the room were—astoundingly—perfect. It would have been blasphemy to in any way disturb it.
Her fifth-floor walkup had five rooms—downright palatial by Manhattan standards, even if the rooms themselves were tiny. In addition to the music room and kitchenette, there were three shoebox bedrooms against the back wall, each with its own window that overlooked the brick wall of the next building over. A bathroom with facilities that had been upgraded within the last decade sent the rent soaring from barely reasonable to moderately painful.
Okay, so maybe the neighbors weren’t all they could be, in terms of minding their own business. The five flights of stairs were murder, especially in the summer. And the sounds of traffic from over on Houston Street could be pretty bad. Wren didn’t care. Two years ago she had walked in the door half a step behind the real estate broker, a hyperkinetic woman glued to her cell phone, and had felt a sense of comfort soak into her bones, like walking onto a ley line, those semi-legendary sources of power. This was home. This was her sanctuary. The moment the building went co-op, as every decent apartment building seemed to, sooner or later, she was going to buy her apartment. That’s where all of her money went, right into the savings account that was not ever, on pain of pain, touched. No vacations, no expensive toys or impulse splurges.
Well, maybe a few. Mostly, though, she stole what she really wanted. Just to keep her hand in, of course.
Wren was a pragmatist. She was very good at what she did, but no career goes on forever. Especially not one with risks like hers. So she planned. And prepared. And kept praying that human nature would maintain a demand for her particular skills.
So far, no problem on that front. Someone always wants what they’re not supposed to have, and someone’s always equally willing to pay to get that something back.
Setting the volume level to where she could hear the music throughout the apartment, Wren grabbed the mail off the counter, sorting it as she walked down the hallway into the bedroom that was set up as her office. “Phone bill, credit card, junk junk junk, more junk, political junk.” She tossed all but the bills into the recycling bin next to the desk, and thumbed through the flyers that had been stuck in the doorjamb, setting aside one menu and tossing the rest into the bin. That was the third flyer she’d gotten for pest removal. At this point, they were more annoying than her nonexistent cockroaches, current being a great and totally—in her mind—underutilized way to keep a location insect-free.
“If I could only market that little side effect right,” she told the photo of her mother tacked to the board on the wall in front of her, “I’d be able to make us both filthy rich overnight. And Sergei, too.”
The office was the largest of the three bedrooms, but barely managed to hold the small dark wood desk where her computer and a headset phone reigned, a comfortably upholstered office chair, and a tall potted plant against one wall. The corkboard hung on the wall over the desk was cluttered with papers, takeout menus, and the one posed photo of her mother. Five two-drawer file cabinets marched along the opposite wall, pulling double-duty as a table for an assortment of odd but useful objects she didn’t know where else to put. That wall also held a closet. Its door had been removed, and half a dozen shelves installed, to serve as a makeshift bookcase. The window was covered by a rice paper shade, allowing light during the day, but keeping prying eyes out 24/7.
She sat down at the desk and turned on the computer. While it hummed to life, she reached over to the phone, dialing a number from memory while she hooked the wireless headset up, pulling her hair clear where it tangled with the mouthpiece with a mutter of disgust. She hated using the thing, but the phone—like her computer—had been rigged with so many surge protectors to make it safe for her to use on a regular basis that you couldn’t move the damn thing without creating disaster.
One ring, and then a crisp, efficient “Yes?”
“It’s me.”
Sergei’s raspy tenor voice changed, so subtly it would have taken someone paying close attention to recognize the new, softer tone for affection.
“You looked at the job site?”
“Yeah, for whatever that was worth.” Wren leaned back and swung her feet up on the desk. Her loafers needed polishing. “External was clean, but there was one possible smudge-marker up on the ceiling inside. Although, in retrospect, it could’ve been there since Adam went figless. Anyway, ruled out anything else. Distance grab, no doubts. A pro.”
“But it was definitely a magic-user?”
Sergei was, like so much of the human population, in that nether area between Null and Talent, but after so many years as her partner he was well-versed enough in the uses of it to make certain assumptions. Besides, realistically, what else could it have been?
“Yeah.” She refrained from sarcasm. Barely. “Whoever it was used the building’s wiring to convey the spell. Probably had every person in the building so hocused, they couldn’t have told you what color their socks were.”
“And then got the cornerstone out—how?”
Wren’s mouth twisted in frustration, making her look for a moment like a five-year-old given brussels sprouts. “Okay, that part I haven’t quite figured out yet. Translocation, probably.”
Translocation of an inanimate or inert object wasn’t a difficult spell for someone with any kind of mojo and open channels, but the actual performance took a lot out of the caster. Especially if he wasn’t present on-site, preferably within eyesight of the object. That was impossible in this case, since the object to be retrieved wasn’t accessible without the breaking and entering of a kind that hadn’t happened. So. A distance grab of that magnitude would make the hire-price prohibitively expensive, and the cost would increase the further the object was moved. Or it should, anyway. Even the best Talent had to eat and pay the rent, and a Transloc like that would wipe you for anything else for a week. “Might have intended to replace the stone with something else, to maintain volume consistency—” the hobgoblin of all translocations “—but the alarms going off must have wigged him.”
“Alarms?” Sergei sounded a little alarmed himself. Wren reached out and sorted the pile of papers on her desk with one finger. Blueprints of the Frants building, cut into twelve-by-twelve squares for easy shuffling, covered with red ink—Sergei’s handwriting—and her pencil smudges. “Yeah, alarms. I could feel the echoes when I went into the basement. Nice little mage-triggers. Someone is a smidge nervous down there. I wonder if the perp knew about them before he went down, or if he was expecting a simple grab-and-run, so to speak. And before you panic, no, I didn’t set it off again. The parameters were set way too high for little old me.”
Actually, that was a lie. She had sensed the threads of magic and slipped under and between them. While she wasn’t ever going to be called to serve on the Council—even assuming they lobotomized her long enough for her to agree to sign on—that was more a matter of attitude than Talent. Where she was strong she was very strong, and distracting attention from herself, be it magical or physical, was as natural as breathing to her. Her mentor had called it Disassociation, which was basically a fancy way of saying that she could make people—or things, specifically things like an alarm system—believe that she wasn’t there.
The problem, as far as anyone had been able to explain to her, was that for all her undeniable talent she was just a little too dense, magically speaking. The current channeled fine—she had the skill, no doubts there—but it sometimes channeled in weird ways, denying her access to a lot of the major skills like levitation and translocation. Pity, as they would have been damned useful in her career.
“You think maybe the thief meant to use it for blackmail? Or maybe ransom? Hey, got your protection spell here, what do you want to give me for it?”
“Or possibly to open up the door just enough for a direct attack by someone else?” Sergei sounded like he’d given this some serious thought while she was out doing the hard work.
“Maybe. I know, I know, not our problem. I’d prefer blackmail, though. Easier to find someone if they’re going to be so obliging as to send back a calling card.” If she were a better conductor…ah, well.
On the plus side of that density, the risk of her wizzing out—losing her mind to the magic flow—was probably lower than anyone else at her comparable Talent level. There were always going to be portions of her brain the current couldn’t get into.
“They also serve those who hum in choir,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. Look, whoever this was, he’s a subtle guy, definitely strong, but not too bright. He squelched the elementals but forgot to sedate them.”
“Which, in English, means what?” Sergei did exasperated like a guy with years of practice.
Wren grinned, forgetting he couldn’t see her. Tweaking Sergei was always so much fun. He did the staid businessman thing so well, sometimes he forgot to take it off. “It means exactly that, which if you would ever remember anything I’ve told you about elementals you’d, well, remember.” He had the weirdest mental block about certain aspects of current—she’d almost given up trying to figure it out. Then again, non-Talents should be uneasy around current. She shouldn’t blame him if even knowing things wigged him out enough to not want to think about it. “I tapped into the wiring, and there was a horde of elementals there. Quiet, but jazzed, like something’d shoved a massive current up their tails, but told them to lay low about it.
“But when I stirred them up, they came shooting out, like they were hoping whatever it was had come back.”
And once they had come to her hand, she had been able to stroke them into giving up the residue from that burst of magic. That was another one of her stronger skills—reading magic like some people could read Braille, or maps, or any other code. It made her useless in a really powerful thunderstorm, stoned like kitty on catnip from the overload of power, but the rest of the time it was part of her stock-in-trade. Where one magic-user had gone, she could go, recreating their trail with remarkable accuracy. Well, mostly. Unlike her other skills, which had names and entries in the skillbooks her mentor had shown her, this one seemed to be particular to her and the way her brain worked. Or if other Talents had it, they were keeping just as quiet about it as she was. The end result either way was that she had no real idea how it worked, or why, or how to control it.
Then again, she didn’t understand any of that about her computer either, and it still worked fine. Most of the time.
“I skimmed off a decent enough emotional memory of the thief to recognize him or her again. Pretty sure of it, anyway.”
Sergei made an unhappy-sounding noise in the back of his throat. She didn’t think he was aware he did it—she couldn’t imagine him making it during negotiations with clients, or the highbrow, hoity-toity art collectors who made his gallery so obnoxiously successful, which meant it was a Wren-specific complaint. The thought made her grin again. “Even if you were sure, that doesn’t help us unless you actually run into him—”
“Or her.”
“Or her, in the near future. Wren…” A sigh, and she knew he was fiddling with one of the slender brown cigarettes he carried with him everywhere and never smoked.
“Yeah, I know. Doesn’t help worth diddly, realistically. But what, you expected this guy to leave a calling card? It happens, sure, but not real often. Which is good, otherwise we’d both be out of work.”
Sergei made a noncommittal noise that might have been agreement, amusement or a growl.
“Look, all I need is a reasonably-sized list of people with something to gain by the client losing his big block o’ protection, and I can backtrack from there. We do a little digging, to see who has the skills, or the money to hire a mage of that power, and then I can retrieve the cornerstone, which you know I can do in my sleep. Easy money. So no worries.”
“So, who’s worried?” Sergei asked, sounding worried.
Wren hit the disconnect button, not bothering to say goodbye. Swinging her legs back down to the floor, she winced a little at their stiffness. Time to hit the gym—she had gotten a little too out of shape over the winter again. Too many of their recent cases had been deskwork, not action.
She filed the thought under “when I have a spare hour,” pulled out the keyboard drawer and went to work composing and sending out e-mails to contacts, some human, and some not quite so, looking for any chatter happening in the Cosa Nostradamus.
The one advantage to being part of a community that the majority of the world didn’t even know existed was that you didn’t have anywhere else to talk about what was going on. So the gossip network was tight, fast, and frighteningly efficient. She’d lay decent odds with her own money that she’d have a lead by lunchtime.
Speaking of which…Wheels set in motion, she sat back and dialed the phone again.
“Hi, yeah, it’s Valere in 5J. Medium sausage, and a liter of diet ginger ale. Just slap it on the tab.” She listened for a moment, laughed. “Yeah, you too. Thanks.” Taking off the headset, she draped it on its stand, running fingers through her hair to fluff it up again.
Her mother’s photo managed to emit waves of disapproval despite the smile still fixed to her lips. “Ah, come on, Mom. Breakfast of champions, right? What’s the point of having a 24-hour pizza place on the corner if you don’t take advantage of it?”
Besides, it was either that or leftover Thai from the back of the fridge, and she’d mentally tagged that for lunch.
She had about half an hour before Unray’s buzzed with her pizza. Might as well make it a billable half hour. Pulling the ’corder out of her jacket pocket, she put it on the desk and swung the keyboard into position. With a quick, silent prayer that her moderate use of current while the ’corder was in her pocket hadn’t totally futzed the batteries, she hit Play and began to transcribe her notes, wincing a little at the static that had crept into the tape just because it was near her body.
“Come on, brain cells,” she muttered as her fingers hit the keys. “Give me something I can use. Momma wants to wrap this up fast and have the weekend free, for once!”
three
The room was remarkable for being completely unremarkable. The walls were painted a soft matte white, the floor made from wide planks of fine-grained wood. The lighting came from discreet spots that directed attention rather than illuminated.
There was one door. No windows. The overall impression was of endless space somehow made cozy. An architect had labored over the lines and arches of this space, a designer had meditated on the perfect shade of white for the walls and ceiling, a feng shui specialist had dictated the ordering of the floor’s wooden planks, the exact placement of the three objects which resided therein in relation to the door.
It was for those three objects that the room existed.
In one corner, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a simple green marble pillar, three feet around and seven feet high. Etched onto its surface were crude symbols that hadn’t seen the light of day for over three thousand years.
In the opposite corner, an ebony wood pedestal was lit from above, highlighting a chunk of clear, unfaceted crystal that looked as though it had just been pulled from the ground, hosed down, and dropped onto that base.
And in the farthest corner, two men maneuvered a low wooden tray set on wheels into position. It was a mover’s trolley, its bed covered with a quilted pad similar to the kind used for fine furniture and grand pianos. Another pad wrapped up over a four-foot by six-foot square, and was sealed with heavy gray tape. The hard rubber wheels moved soundlessly on the floor, despite the weight they bore.
The two men were burly, but not brutish looking. One was perhaps forty, with graying hair cut short. The other was ten years younger, and completely bald. They wore simple white coveralls that had only one pocket in the left sleeve, too small to carry anything larger than a cigarette lighter. There were no names sewn over the chest: no logos, cute or otherwise on their backs.
They finished adjusting the trolley, and the younger man knelt by its side, producing a slender but sharp-looking pocket knife from his sleeve pocket, carefully cutting through the tape, peeling it away from the pad and unfolding the pad from its enclosed prize. About the length of a small bench, the marble’s silvery-gray surface was marked and pitted, making the once-glossy surface look dull and battered. A smaller rectangle on the top surface looked as though it had been carved out and then filled in with concrete.
“All this, for that?”
The older man sounded disgusted. No one else was in the room, but his partner cast a worried look over his shoulder, as though expecting someone to appear there and overhear the criticism.
“If the owner says it’s art, it’s art,” he told his older companion firmly. “Let’s just get it settled, and get out of here.” Personally, the object gave him the creeps. Hell, the entire place gave him the creeps. But he was a professional, damn it. He was going to act like one.
A low matte black platform, installed when the room itself was built and unused until now, waited to receive its burden. The two men took wide canvas slings that had been hung on the trolley’s handle, and fitted them around two corners of the marble block. The younger man’s hand brushed the surface of the stone where the cement plug was, and he shuddered involuntarily, stopping to look down at his hand as though expecting to see a spider, or something else less pleasant on top of it.
“Will you stop that?” the other man snapped. “Concentrate on the job. I don’t need you getting sloppy and dumping it all on me.”
Stung, his co-worker glared at him, shook his hand out unobtrusively, as though to get feeling back into a sleeping limb, and counted to three under his breath, just barely loud enough to hear. On three, they heaved, and with a seemingly effortless movement and a pair of grunts that destroyed that illusion, the stone settled into its new home.
“That’s strange. Wonder if it’s been hollowed out? I thought marble that size would be heavier.”
“Don’t complain, man, don’t complain! And for God’s sake, don’t ask,” the younger man begged, his eye closed against the sweat that was rolling off his forehead. “We on the mark?”
The stone was square on its base, with a full three feet between it and the walls on two sides; room enough for a person to walk around it, should they so desire.
“Yep,” the other workman replied. “Perfect, as always.” It was as close to a compliment as they would get from anyone. They were hired via the company’s Web site, informed of the details by e-mail, paid by wire transfer, and never knew what any of it was all about. And they liked it that way. Some folk you just didn’t want to know any more about than you had to.
Their work completed, the two rolled up the quilted pad and tossed it onto the trolley, pushing it out ahead of them as they left. They didn’t look again at the object they had delivered, nor did they pause to consider the other two objects already in place.
No one waited at the door to show them out; they had been given their instructions before arrival, when they were assigned the job. They would walk down the bland, security-camera-lined hallway they had entered through, down a flight of stairs, and follow a row of lights through a basement maze that would deposit them through a four-inch-thick metal door in a ten-foot-high wall that ran along an unpaved country road. A livery car with darkly-tinted windows waited there to take them back to the city, where they would be dropped off without once having seen another person.
Their employer wanted his privacy. They were paid well enough not to wonder why. And the legalities of what they had done never entered their minds at all.
When the last echoes of the workmen’s feet had faded into silence once again, silence reclaimed the building. In another wing, a door opened, and footsteps sounded, walking calmly, with no apparent haste or urgency, the owner of all within those walls. Occasionally the walker would pause to admire a painting, or caress a sculpture, but for the most part the priceless objects were accorded no more attention than the carpet underfoot, or the ceilings above.
Eventually, the door into the white room was pushed open, and the owner of the house entered, walking with those same unhurried strides to the corner holding the newly-installed fixture. He paused in front of it, cataloguing every detail and comparing it to his expectations.
“You’re not much to look at, are you?”
The slab of stone didn’t respond to the voice.
“But they do say, you can’t judge something by its looks. It’s not what’s on the outside that counts, after all, but the inside. Isn’t that right?”
The figure knelt by the cornerstone, trailing one well-manicured finger along its rough surface, shivering pleasurably at the sensation. “But no matter. No matter. I know what you are, what you were. And all that really counts is that you’re mine, now.”
four
“Hey. Babe. Let me in!”
The very first time Wren had met P.B., she had giggled. The second time, she had screamed. By now, when he showed up on her fire escape, she merely flipped the safety latch on the kitchen window, and let the demon come in.
“Thanks. Man, this neighborhood of yours is totally not safe anymore. Some loon started chasing me down the street, yelling something about a cleansing to come. You got much business with Holy Rollers, Valere?”
She shrugged. “You must just bring it out in ’em, pal. You got something for me?”
P.B. shook out his fur, a faint mist coming off him. “Damn, I hate rain. Makes my skin itch.” He took a battered-looking manila envelope out from the messenger’s bag strapped across his barrel-shaped chest and tossed it on the table, then scooped up a slice of the remaining pizza. The slice was halfway gone by the time Wren had opened the envelope. She sighed, and shoved the rest of the grease-lined box closer toward him. “Here. Eat. You’re looking frail.”
The decidedly unfrail P.B. snorted, but didn’t hesitate in devouring his first slice and reaching for a second one. “I get first prize for speed?” he asked in between slices, referring to the material in her hand.
“As always,” she said, licking one finger and using it to sort through the pages, scanning the delicate copperplate that seemed so incongruous coming from P.B.’s clawed hands.
P.B.’s real name was all but unpronounceable. The nickname came from an inauspicious moment back in the early days of their acquaintance, when an innocent bystander had been heard to shriek, “Oh my God, it’s a monster!” To which Wren, somewhat short-tempered at the time, had snapped back, “No, it’s an effing polar bear!” The description had been apt, and the nickname had stuck.
P.B. wasn’t her only source, but he was one of the best. Certainly the most reliable. Demons mostly made their living as information conduits, there not being much of a job market for them outside of bodyguarding and freak-show gigs. There wasn’t anything that one of them didn’t know, or couldn’t find out, and what one of them knew, another would hear, sooner or later.
Sooner, if the money was right. And they didn’t play politics: you got what you paid for, no matter who—or what—you were. It was refreshing, in a disgustingly capitalistic pig kind of way. She wished more of the Cosa worked that way. But no, the ineptly-named angels had their endless feuds, and the various fatae-clans their more-special-than-thou attitudes, and humans—sometimes she thought humans were the worst of all, with the mages and their rules and regulations and Shalt Nots worse than Sunday School for fear of someone breaking rank and having a little fun. “Someone” in the mages’ case mostly being the lonejacks, the Talents who refused affiliation. Unions and scabs, Sergei had described it, but it wasn’t that simple, really. Everyone had a different reason for going lonejack.
And, tossed into that mix, always the snarling between the races, like they weren’t all in it together, more or less. But some people—humans and fatae—just couldn’t handle the idea of something shaped or colored a little differently walking, talking and working alongside their precious selves. Wren didn’t have much patience with that. You do your job, stay out of her way, she didn’t much care if you lived in brimstone or used your hind paws at the dinner table.
Sometimes, she thought it would have been a lot easier being Null. Then she watched the Suits scuttle to work every morning, hustling for a window office, and decided she was happy where and what she was.
P.B. burped, the sound like baritone chimes rising from his rotund stomach. “So what’s the job?”
She just looked at him, a wealth of disbelief in her expression. He stared back, his flat, fur-covered face blandly innocent. Anything she shared with him without a for-hire agreement would be sold to his next client before she’d had a chance to act on it herself. Not in this lifetime or the next three, pal.
“Right. Don’t tell me anything, just send me out to fetch like a dog….”
She considered responding, then decided that it really wasn’t worth the effort. It was enough that she wasn’t pitching him out the window already.
Wren had only met three demons in the flesh in her lifetime—that she knew about, anyway. Looks varied wildly, and she was told that some of them could pass for human, if you weren’t looking carefully. The three she had encountered weren’t those kind. And of those three, P.B. was the only one she could deal with for more than a few minutes at a time. It wasn’t that she was prejudiced; she simply couldn’t handle the relatively high voltage most of the full-sized demons emitted, like some kind of ungrounded magical wire that set her teeth on edge. Fatae—the elves and piskies and whatnot—were, by contrast, easy on the nerves. And angels never hung around long enough to do more than freak you out.
For a few moments, the only sound in the kitchen was P.B.’s jaws chewing crust, and the scritching-soft noise of paper against paper as she read what he had brought her. Finally she reached the last page, and shook them back into order and replaced them in the envelope, folding the metal closure back down again. Names, jobs, capabilities…P.B. had done his usual bang-up job of getting exactly what she needed. Some of the names on the list were familiar, in the heard-about-them kind of way.
And one was all too familiar, in a gut-clenching way. She forced herself not to focus on it. All the names were equal possibilities right now. Don’t jump to conclusions. Conclusions without facts get people killed, possibly even her own very important self. File it, Valere. File it and deal with it later. When you’re alone.
“Thirteen names?” She raised an eyebrow at the fur-coated being now lounging in her other kitchen chair.
He belched, then shrugged. “Lotsa folk interested in your boy,” he said unapologetically. “He’s made himself some enemies. And those’re just the ones who have a profile with us.” Us being the entire magic-using community, the Cosa Nostradamus. Human and nonhuman alike. We might squabble amongst ourselves, often to the point of a passing wave of bloodshed, but in the end it was always us against them—“them” being what her long-gone mentor used to call Kellers; the Nulls, who were mostly blind and deaf to what was around them. Not much love lost there. To some of the Cosa, her working with Sergei on an equal footing was betrayal. He wasn’t too fond of them, either.
P.B. went on. “Probably lots of otherwise upstanding humans who hate his guts too.”
“What, he kicks old ladies and molests farmyard animals?” She’d gotten info on the client, but it was all public relations bullshit, not anything actually helpful. Sergei usually did a full write-up highlighting anything she needed to know, but this looked like a time-of-urgency kind of deal. Besides, he was the client, not the mark. They didn’t ask too much about the clients.
“Nah.” The demon cleared a piece of cheese from between his serrated teeth and flicked it into the garbage can. “Sounds like he gets his jollies the old fashioned way—with money. Preferably other people’s money, which he then turns into more money for himself. Real power-hungry, in the nasty-with-it way.”
Wren shrugged one shoulder, the tilt of her head conveying supreme indifference. “Most people with power are, that’s why they get to stay on the top of the predator heap. Anything I don’t already know?”
“Yeah. He’s apparently in real bad odor with the local wizzart’s gathering.”
“Wow.” Crossing wizzarts took serious guts. Or a total lack of brains. Possibly both. Unless of course he didn’t know what he was doing. If he only knew about the public face the Council sold…. Wizzarts weren’t exactly talked about outside the Cosa. Not too much inside it, either, truthfully. Mention not, see not, become not.
In fact, “gathering” was an ironic term to refer to wizzarts overall. The only time you got more than two wizzarts gathered anywhere was if they were all using the bathroom. And even then most of them would rather burst a bladder than share space with their own kind. And they weren’t much sweeter on other humans. Most wizzarts didn’t want to live within a hundred miles of another person. They were all crazy, chaos-ridden by taking too much current into their brain. From what little she’d been able to learn, the entire human race made them feel like she did around P.B., and twice that for another of their kind. It almost gave her some sympathy for them.
Not much, though. Last time she dealt with a wizzart, he’d tried to throw her over a cliff.
“Nice. And the Council?”
Dangerous or not, Wren would take a wizzart over a Council mage any day. Mages—cold, calculating bastards that they were—made her feel like she needed to take a bath after talking to one. And scrub hard.
“Street rumor is he stiffed ’em once, but managed to squirm out of retribution. No word on how, and believe you me there are folks who want to know that little trick, if it’s true.” The demon extended one three-inch-long claw and dug into the thick white fur on his neck, sighing in satisfaction when he hit the itch.
Wren watched in amusement. P.B. looked like an escapee from some demented toy shop, four feet of thick white fur and button-black nose offset by four sets of lethal claws and a voice that could scrape tar off the highway. But if the initial impression was of a cuddly bear, it was his eyes that were the giveaway to his true nature: oversized and pale red, with pupils that were slitted like a cat’s. Occasionally, he would don a hat and trench coat, which made him look like a diminutive Cold War-era spy, but more often than not he wore a pair of jeans, and not much else. She didn’t ask how he managed to get around in public like that without, as far as she could tell, the slightest bit of Talent beyond his own demon nature, and he didn’t volunteer the information. Professional courtesy, such as it was.
“That it?” she asked, indicating the material.
He nodded. “That’s it.”
“Great.” Her tolerance level had reached its breaking point and she was starting to get a headache. “Sergei will do the usual deposit. Now get out.” She was already reaching for the kitchen phone, her back turned to him when she added, “And leave the rest of the pizza.”
“Spoilsport,” he muttered, but left the box untouched. He also left the window open, in petty retaliation, and the sounds of an argument from the apartment below floated up to her over the pad-clatter of his clawed feet on the fire escape.
A tenor: voice spoiled and high-pitched by anger. “And another thing, I don’t like the tone of your voice!”
Oh wonderful. The couple in 1B were on that rant again. She was convinced the landlord paid them to leave their apartment whenever prospective tenants looked at a place. That had been the last time she hadn’t heard them. They were either arguing, or having sex. And one rather memorable morning, they had managed to do both.
Wren held the phone at arm’s length, dialing Sergei’s number with her thumb as she leaned backward to shut the window. “I have enough drama in my own life, thank you very much. I don’t need yours too.”
“Yes?”
“Me again,” she said into the phone. “Take me out to dinner.”
There was a pause. Warily…“And I should do this because…?”
“Because you haven’t actually seen me in, what, ten days? Two weeks, maybe, and are worried that I’m not eating properly.”
Her partner snorted. She was joking, but there was some truth to it; she had forgotten to eat for two days once when she was on the job, and Sergei had totally freaked when he found out. “And the other, more convincing reason?”
Wren made a snarling noise that completely failed to impress him. She thought maybe once it had. Years ago.
“Look, Genevieve—” She rolled her eyes. He rarely used her hated given name, usually only when he wanted her to think he was pissed off about something. “I have other accounts, responsibilities which require my attention. I can’t just walk out when you whistle.”
Ooo, someone was pissy. Market must be down again. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a hotshot high roller. This is work stuff, okay? Do I have to remind you that I make you more on one job than all your other clients, thereby keeping you in your suits and toys, and that—as you’re so often telling me—if I don’t get the job done—I—and you—don’t get paid?”
Sergei made a noise that might have been a protest—or could have been suppressed laughter. You never could tell with Sergei, not even when he was sitting in the room with you. Part of his incredibly annoying charm, and why she was never bored around him.
As amusing as this game was, she didn’t want to risk frying the lines by talking too long. “Just get your well-dressed rear up here, okay? Seven-thirty, Marianna’s. And bring whatever info you have on the client’s business compadres, so I can cross-reference the players before I do something stupid.”
“Thought before action. What a refreshing novelty.”
“Oh, bite me,” she said rudely, and broke the connection before she could hear him laugh. She sat and looked at the phone for a few moments, smiling absently. He was a pain in the posterior, but he was her pain in the posterior.
An expensively upholstered chair crashed against an equally expensively-paneled wall, rattling the oversized photograph of the desert at dawn which hung there.
“Idiots! Incompetents!”
The topmost floor but two of the Frants building was split into nine offices around a center lobby. Eight of those offices were large, lush spaces with a commanding view of the city, with a slightly smaller office directly off and to the inside where each inhabitant’s administrative assistant sat. The ninth office was twice again as large, and three assistants guarded access like Cerberus at the gates of the underworld.
At that moment, two of the assistants were cowering in the bathroom, while the third tried to pretend nothing at all unusual was going on in her boss’s sanctum.
“Sir, we merely feel that it would be wisest—”
“Don’t!” Oliver Frants held one finger up in the younger man’s direction, his florid, freshly-shaven face turning an ill-omened shade of pink. “Do. Not. Tell. Me. What. To. Do.” Each word was bitten off with precision, as though his perfectly capped teeth were holding back longer, uglier words.
The three executives glanced at each other, uncertain what to say next. They were all in their mid- to late forties; healthy, well-groomed, impeccably dressed. The kind of people you would normally see at the head of a boardroom table, having highly placed people report to them.
But in here, they cowered.
“I will not abandon this building. I will not abandon any of my scheduled meetings. And I will. Not. Hide.”
He looked at them each in turn, until they dropped their gaze like chastened children.
“Sir?” The woman, Denise Macauley, had dredged up enough courage to speak. Frants smiled. She had been a particular protégé of his, years ago, and her sharp wits had never failed him.
“Yes, Denise?”
“If I may suggest, sir, that we add to the building’s defenses?”
“And just how do you suggest we do that,” he asked, “since the mages have made it quite clear that they will not allow their members to work for us any longer? Are you suggesting I hire another freelancer?” When the Council had, after looking things over, refused to help, despite it being their people who had set the spell in the first place, the only alternative had been to look for someone among the so-called lonejack community. The Council’s spin would have you believe that they were nowhere near as talented as their own members, but reports had said that one seemed particularly suited for the job, and so Frants had authorized it. But retrieval was one thing. His security—especially his long-term security—was another. “Or do you think that we should perhaps hire a wizzart?”
“No sir,” she said, properly dismissing that idea as unthinkable. You couldn’t hire a wizzart; they were the flakes of the magic-using world, just as likely to forget what they were doing, and for whom. Or to bring your solution to your enemies, just for kicks. They were too unpredictable for a well-ordered business plan. He could see her mind working at a breakneck speed, choosing and discarding alternatives until she came up with one she thought he could accept. “There has been some talk about a freelance mage down in New Mexico; very powerful, but a little too…creative in his ways for the rest of his kind. Solid reputation—has never once sold out or otherwise failed a client. Council-trained, but no longer under their strictures. He’s opened his doors to bidders—I think that we would be able to come to an agreement with him that would be mutually beneficial.”
A well-trained, thinking associate was a blessing to their manager. “Excellent. Marco, see that it’s done.”
One of the men nodded his head, and turned to leave the room. His pace was perhaps a shade too swift for propriety, but Frants didn’t call him on it. A little fear, leavened by generous bonuses, made for excellent working conditions.
Denise had stiffened when he gave her idea to someone else, but she didn’t allow any resentment or anger to show on her face. Good girl. He would have to reward her when all this was done.
“Randolph?”
The remaining man came to attention, his shoulders going back in an automatic response. You could take the boy out of the Corps, but…
“Could you please speak to Allison in Human Resources, have her write up a press release stating that we had an unfortunate attempt on our security, but that we have every faith in the systems we use, and do not feel that there is any need for alarm, etc. If this bastard did take the stone to try and undermine Frants Industries, he will have to work harder than that. Much, much harder.”
Randolph nodded and performed a sharp about-face, covering the plush carpeting between him and the door with a steady, measured stride.
“Sir?” Denise said, when he sat down behind his heavy mahogany desk, to all appearances having forgotten she was still there.
“Ah yes, Denise.” He looked at her, his pale blue eyes cold, dispassionately calculating. “It may be that this is not the act of a business competitor, but someone perhaps a bit more…directly connected with the particular object which was taken. If that is—an extreme possibility, I agree—but if that is so, then I think that we may need to take further steps than even the ones you had suggested. If you would give me your arm, please?”
Denise had worked for Oliver Frants most of her adult life. She knew what he was asking. And, to her credit, she didn’t flinch as he reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out a small, intricately woven straw box with an oddly liquid design, like an hourglass but not, on the lid. He slid the box across the table toward her, and something inside it shhhhhssssssshhhed like old grass in the wind.
The assistant still sitting at her desk heard a noise in the main office. A sibilant, sharp noise, like metal on metal. A wet slap, like flesh on flesh, and a muffled moan of agony. And then silence.
She placed her hands palm down on her desk, stared at the well-manicured fingers that cost fifty dollars every single week to keep in ideal condition, and swallowed hard.
Wren spent the rest of the afternoon reading up on the newest generation of motion detectors—not her idea of light reading, but essential to keeping up to date in her particular line of work. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you couldn’t use current. Wren refused to be caught with her pants down if and when that happened to her.
Sprawled on the carpet in the third bedroom, which was otherwise filled with her considerable research library, engrossed despite herself by journals with ten-point type and convoluted electrical diagrams, time got away from her.
“Ah, hell,” she muttered when she actually glanced down at her watch. She shuffled the journals into a messy pile and left them there, closing the bedroom door firmly behind her. One finger pressed against the knob and a narrow thread of current flowed from her to wrap around the metal mechanism, locking the tumblers in place. Not that it would keep out anyone determined to get in, but the spell was tied to her just enough to let her know if the attempt was made. She could have coaxed some elementals into baby-sitting for her, to act like a siren if the thread was broken, but the reality was that when she saw elementals clustered, that drew her attention to the lock rather than away. And why put up a sign saying “important things behind this door” if you were trying to keep people out?
She grabbed her keys from the bowl in the kitchen, shoving her feet into a pair of low-heeled boots as she headed out the door, locking it carefully behind her with the more commonplace and nonmagical dead bolts every New Yorker installed as a matter of course.
Three-quarters of the way down the narrow apartment stairs, she realized that she had left the folder P.B. had given her on the kitchen table.
“Grrrr…urrrggghh.” She reversed herself midstep and dashed back up, knocking open the four dead bolts and grabbing the bright orange folder. Locking up took more precious time, and she was swearing under her breath in some colorful Russian phrases she had picked up from Sergei by the time she finally hit the street.
With all that, despite the fact that she was only walking a few blocks, it was closer to seven forty-five before she made it to Marianna’s. She paused on the street outside the tiny storefront, clutching the folder in her hand as though she might forget it again somewhere, and checked her appearance in the reflective glass door.
She thought about the lipstick she had left untouched on her bathroom counter, and made a face at herself. You don’t need to put on a face for Sergei, for God’s sake, she snarled mentally. He’d seen her at three in the morning, drenched in sweat and splattered with both their blood, and not blinked. So long as she didn’t actively embarrass him in a social setting, she could paint herself in blue-and-green stripes and he’d just say something like, “Interesting outfit, Genevieve.”
And why did it matter, anyway? If there was one thing she knew, without a doubt, it was that Sergei gave a damn about what was inside, not out. So why did that thought, increasingly, make her feel depressed instead of comforted?
Job, Valere. Job.
Squaring her shoulders, she pushed open the door. Callie looked up from her seat at the bar, saw it was her, and merely nodded toward the table where Sergei was waiting.
Wren shook her head in mock disgust, although she wasn’t sure if it was at herself or her partner. Well, of course he was there before she was. Odds were good that he had arrived at exactly seven-twenty-nine, trench coat over one arm, briefcase at his side, taken one look at the restaurant, saw she wasn’t there yet, sighed, and requested a table in the back and a glass of sparkling water, no ice.
“Been here long?” she asked, slipping into the seat opposite Sergei. He looked up from his notepad, then looked at his watch. “A little over fifteen minutes,” he said, confirming her suspicion.
In a simple but expensive gray suit and burgundy tie, Sergei could have passed unnoticed in the carpeted halls of any brokerage house. Broad-shouldered, with a close-cropped head of dark hair and a nose that was just a shade too sharp for good looks matched to an astonishingly stubborn square chin, he could just as easily have been a former quarterback-turned-minor-league newscaster, or a successful character actor.
What he was, in fact, was the owner and operator of a very discreet, wildly overpriced art gallery. It was through the gallery that he made the contacts who often had need of Wren’s services: private citizens, mostly, but also the occasional museum or wholesaler who didn’t want to go through the police or—even worse—the insurance companies to reclaim their stolen artwork.
And, on occasion, something a little more…unusual. Like this case. Sorry, she amended even though Sergei couldn’t hear her thought, this situation.
Callie came over, wiping her hands on the front of the white apron tied around her waist, and stood by their table, one bleached-blond eyebrow raised. “Your usual?” she said to Wren.
“Nah, I think I’ll live dangerously.” She scanned the chalkboard behind the bar with a practiced eye. “Give me the Caesar salad and the filet of sole.”
“Which is exactly what you’ve had the past three times. Experiment a little, willya?” Callie had the flat-toned voice of someone trying to pretend they weren’t from around here, but unlike almost every other waiter and waitress in town, she wasn’t waiting for the big break to sweep her off to Hollywood.
“And a glass of Chianti.”
“Ooo, red instead of white. You are living dangerously.” Not that being a professional waitress made her any more respectful of her clientele. Just the opposite, actually.
“See why I love this place?” Wren asked her companion.
“Indeed. A tossed salad and the halibut, please. Nothing else to drink.”
“You guys have really got to calm your wild lives down,” the waitress said in disgust, stalking off to the kitchen with a practiced flounce.
“We’re such a disappointment to her.”
Wren snorted. Callie had been flirting madly with Sergei for two years now, ever since Wren moved into the neighborhood and they started coming here regularly, and he remained serenely unresponsive. Disappointment didn’t even begin to cover it. Wren could understand Callie’s point of view, though. If she wasn’t so sure he’d look at her blankly, or worse yet give her the “we’re partners, nothing more” speech, she might have made a play for him, too. Well, maybe not when they first partnered. But lately…it was weird, how someone so familiar could suddenly one day, totally out of the blue and with a random thought, become…interesting. In that way.
Damn it, Valere, focus! “Whatcha got for me?”
Sergei lifted a plain manila envelope out of his briefcase and handed it to her. “The names of all the highly-placed executives, both within the Frants Corporation and at rival organizations, who would have reason to hold a grudge of this magnitude, and the financial wherewithal to hire someone to perform magic of this level. You?”
“Bunch of folk with the mojo to do the job themselves, almost all carrying a mad-on of one kind or another for our client. Strictly low-budget grievances, though.” She pulled out a legal-size piece of paper from the file and handed it to him in exchange. It was a copy of the original list P.B. had given her, with her own notes added under each name. “Doubt they’d be in any of your databases.”
“Don’t ever underestimate my resources,” he told her severely. “Many people who think they’re invisible often—”
“Leave a fluorescent trail. Yeah, yeah, I know.” One of the few “resources” of his that Wren had ever met in person was a former forensic investigator named Edgehill, who was paying off some unnamed but very large favor done in the distant past. He was a slight, frantic-eyed man with wildly-gesturing hands. Listening to him talk was sort of like watching an episode of CSI on fast forward while taking speed. But his shit was almost always on the money.
“Would the police have anything on file?”
Wren snorted. “Nobody on this list. Strictly no-see-um talents.”
“Noseeyum?”
“Too good to get caught.”
“Ah.” He grinned at her, the expression softening his face and putting an appealing glint in his dark brown eyes. Behind that hard-assed, hard-pressed agent façade, she thought not for the first time, Mr. Sergei Didier had a real wicked sense of humor that didn’t get nearly enough air time. “Kin of yours?”
“Hardly.” Without false modesty, Wren knew her worth, and so did Sergei, to the penny. These guys were good, but she was better. Which was why she didn’t appear on other people’s little lists. Even Sergei, with all his surprisingly good contacts and connections, hadn’t known about her way back when until sheer coincidence—and a nasty accident caused by someone trying to kill him—brought them into contact.
Wren’s mentor, a man named John Ebenezer, had taught her from the very beginning to keep a low personal profile for a great many reasons, all of them having to do with staying alive and under her own governance. There were three kinds of current-mages in the world: Council-mandated, lonejackers and dead. Just because a Talent had no interest in being under the Council’s thumb didn’t mean they might not want her there, now or someday later. Better not to take the chance. That was the lonejacker’s first law: steer clear of the Mage Council.
Their salads arrived at that moment, and they paused long enough to accept their plates, and wave away Callie’s offer of freshly ground pepper.
“I’ve never understood that.”
“What?” He looked at her, his forehead scrunching together in puzzlement.
“The fresh pepper thing. Who puts pepper on their salad?”
Sergei shrugged. “Someone must, otherwise they wouldn’t offer it.”
“I think they do it just to see who’s stupid enough—or sheep enough—to say yes.”
“You have a suspicious mind.”
Wren grinned at him. “You do say the sweetest things.”
“Eat your salad,” he told her, lifting his own fork with a decided appetite. Her list lay just to the side of his plate, so he could skim it without distracting himself from his food, or running the risk of getting salad dressing on the paper. Wren watched him eat and read for a moment, then picked up her own fork and dug into the pile of greens. She was going to wait until the dishes were cleared away to go through the neatly-clipped-together, ordered, indexed and color-coded material properly.
“Hey, this name was on my list,” he said suddenly.
“What?” That got her attention fast.
“This name.” He stabbed one well-manicured finger at the paper as though it were somehow at fault. “It was on my list.”
Wren took the paper from him. “Which one?”
“Third from the bottom. George Margolin.”
Wren scanned the list, coming to the name he indicated. “Huh. Talent, yeah, but not buckets of it. Not affiliated, not really a lonejack—he’s passing.” In other words, he wasn’t using current in any way, shape, or form that was obvious to the observer, and probably didn’t use it at all. At least, not consciously. But you never knew for certain. And some folk were just naturally sneaky about it.
“Great. Move that guy up to the top of the suspects list. Anyone in a suit that P.B. hears about is going to be dirty, one way or another.”
“P.B.?” Sergei didn’t roll his eyes—that would have been beneath him—but his voice indicated his level of unimpressedness.
“Hey, don’t dis my sources,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “That furry little bastard always comes through, which is more than I can say for some of your people. I seem to recall a little screw-up with IDs that almost got me shot by the cops in Tucson.”
“All right, all right. Point taken.”
She had to give Sergei that. He was a xenophobic bastard when it came to things like demons and fatae, but he didn’t cut humans any slack when they screwed up, either. Especially when it was their own lives on the line.
She flattered herself that he might have been just as annoyed at that snitch if he hadn’t ended up in that Tucson jail along with her.
“So how come this guy’s on your list?”
“You have the file, you look.”
“Why? You’ve memorized the important stuff already.” Wren never understood why people wasted brain-space on anything they didn’t need right at hand. That was the magic of writing stuff down, so you didn’t have to cram it all in your head. But Sergei was incapable of letting go of anything to do with a job, at least while the file was hot. For all she knew, he did an info dump at the end of every case, mentally shredding all that info in order to make room for the new stuff.
She had a mental image of Sergei running his brain through a shredder, and had to stifle a snort of laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” She bit the inside of her lips, made a “go on” gesture. “Tell me about Margolin.”
He frowned at her, dark eyes narrowed in suspicion, but complied. “Mid-forties. Computer genius of sorts, chief technical officer for Frants Incorporated. Odd, for a Talent.”
“But not unheard of, especially if he’s passing. That low-level a Talent, probably enhances the tech stuff rather than shorting it out. Lucky bastard.” Wren didn’t carry high-tech toys because it was an exercise in frustration, not because she didn’t like them.
“According to this, he’s smart, savvy, and very very disgruntled. RUMINIT says he felt that he was passed over for promotion because of his religious beliefs.”
“What, he’s a Scientologist?”
It was Sergei’s turn to laugh. “No, agnostic. Rather militantly so. As in ‘I don’t know, and you don’t either.’”
Wren tried to raise only one eyebrow and failed, pretty sure that the resulting expression made her look like an inquisitive owl. “I can see where that could get up someone’s nose, yeah. But if he’s passing…Yeah.” She checked her notes. “Nope, no real training, far as anyone knows. No mentor ever claimed him.” That was how Talents worked, mostly; one-on-one apprenticeships. Went all the way back to when it wasn’t safe to work together—or tell anyone what you were, so you tied the knowledge up in secrecy and oaths. “He doesn’t have the firepower to do it himself, and I can’t see him having enough information without a mentor to track down and hire a mage to do something like this, either.” She narrowed her eyes as a sudden thought hit her. “Unless he’s from a Talented family that’s stayed low-profile, flying under the radar? Neezer said sometimes it ran in the bloodline like that. But not often, not so’s you could track it, anyway. So maybe he’s not private enemy number one after all.” She paused. “I wonder how he got on P.B.’s list.”
Sergei squinted at the list, trying to make out the handwriting. “Ursine?”
“Usury. Somebody’s got a light wallet, if he’s paying out the loan sharks, hey? Odd, you’d think he’d be making plenty of money. Kids’ tuition go up? He a gambler? The Cosa’s not pretty on people who welsh on debts.”
“No information on either. And they run some pretty heavy scans on people for exactly that. I’ll take it back and see what some determined digging can produce.”
Sometimes, Wren wondered about Sergei’s snitches. Not their ability—their origins. Mostly they were the usual: artists who heard every bit of gossip that rumbled through the collectibles world, high-rent agents who knew where the money was buried and the bodies bankrolled—that sort of thing. But every now and then she needed information you couldn’t get from a cocktail party, or through a discreet inquiry, and then his clear brown eyes would go dark and shadowed, and he’d refuse to say yea or nay…but the information always came through. And unlike his other sources, and her own, the information they gave was always straight-up. Always.
So she wondered, but never pried. For all that they pretty much lived in each other’s pockets during cases, weeks could go by otherwise when they only talked briefly on the phone. There was an awful lot about Sergei’s life she didn’t have clue one about.
Oh, Wren had known back when they first hooked up that her new partner was a man with secrets, not the least of which was how he’d even known about Talents and the Cosa in the first place. It wasn’t as though they took out ads in the local trades or anything. But he did know, and he never said how, and that had actually made her trust him more, not less. If she was going to let him in on her secrets, after all, she had to respect that he held others as securely, right? But oh, the desire sometimes to crack him open and see what secrets came rolling out…
In a purely mental, informational way. Of course. She’d seen the women he socialized with, had even met a few of them over the years when their social paths overlapped. Lovely women, Nulls each and every one; elegant and articulate and educated, usually artistic as hell. And visible. Always highly visible. Memorable, even. Unlike her own eminently forgettable self.
And so it goes, Valere. You are what you are. And so is he, and so are the both of you together. Concentrate on the job.
“Anyone on your list you think is likely?” Sergei asked.
Pulled from personal to professional musings without warning, Wren shook her head, replaying his words as she chewed on a particularly leafy green. Likely as a thunderstorm in summer. There was someone on her list who had the talent to pull something like this, and the probable grudge and twisted sense of humor to make it seem like a good idea. All she had to do was name him, and Sergei would be able to run a complete dossier. But the words didn’t come out of her mouth.
She tried not to lie to Sergei. It was just bad business, and stupid besides. But she wasn’t ready to say anything to him just yet. Not before she knew more.
Some things, when you got down to it, were more important than business. Some loyalties you couldn’t just walk away from. And anyway, with any luck Sergei wouldn’t figure out who she was protecting until she had her answers and it wasn’t an issue anymore one way or the other.
Callie came by to take their salad plates away and bring the main course, saving her from having to reply. By unspoken consent they moved away from shop talk while digging into their meals, catching up on the small details that made up each day. Sergei had a new show beginning that week, and he was full of the near-disasters and minor crises that came with every installation.
“So Lowell gestures like he’s some off-off-off Broadway magician, only his arm gets tangled in the hangings, which in turn get tangled in the wires. And the wires come down like the wrath of God, sending the piece soaring through the air like it thought it was Peter Pan.”
Wren snickered, imagining the scene. “Anyone get hurt?”
“Only the artist, who chose that moment to walk in the door, demanding an update. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”
“You hoped he would have a heart attack,” she corrected him. “You could have doubled the prices on everything.”
His brief grin made her laugh around a forkful of sole. “Trebled. But there would have been paperwork, and the show would have had to have been delayed, so it’s probably best he didn’t.”
“Spoken like a true patron of the arts. You’re a marvel and a wonder, you know that, Didier?”
“I do my humble best, Valere. I truly do. Some day I might even make an honest man out of me.”
With perfect timing, they both said “yeah, right” in matching tones of disgust, and his sudden bark of laughter made Wren laugh again as well from the sheer joy of the noise.
He went on to detail the results of the show while Wren finished her meal. Shamelessly scraping the last of the sauce up with her finger and licking it off with relish, she checked to make sure Callie had finally reseated herself at the bar and was engrossed in a magazine before giving in to temptation and retrieving the file from the floor beside her chair. Sergei continued with his meal, now silently watching her as she skimmed through his data.
“Truthfully, these all look pretty doubtful as our boy,” she said finally. “I mean, we need someone who has a pretty major grudge against the client, enough know-how about magic to do the job, and—most importantly—they had to know about the spell in the first place. I’d say that’s a triumvirate that lets out all but three or four of these folks. I’d rather concentrate on the ones who would actually have gotten their hands dirty, see if I can’t match the readings I took from the site with their signatures.”
“Which would mean your list?” Sergei placed his knife and fork down precisely on the table. On cue, Callie swooped down and cleared their table, scraping the crumbs off the tablecloth with a small metal tool and handing them each a dessert menu. She might be an annoying eavesdropper, but she was an excellent waitress. “How many of them would fit those criteria?”
“All of them, probably.” She pushed aside the menu without even looking at it. Time to tell the truth—if not all of it. “Like I said, they may not be as highly placed, but they all have grudges, and the means to execute them.”
“So…?” Oh, she knew that tone of voice. Damn. And twice damn. He knew she was hiding something—he always knew, somehow. Like a vulture knows when dinner’s about to pass over. She looked up into deep brown eyes and wanted to tell him everything. Only a decade’s worth of resisting that lure—and seeing it work on too many others—gave her the ability to look away.
Sorry, partner. This one I’ve got to deal with on my own. You’d only freak, anyway.
“So I’ll try to narrow the list down. See if I can’t talk to some of them, face-to-face.”
Sergei kept his face calm, and only the little tic at the corner of his jaw gave him away. “Any of them wizzarts?” Casual. Too casual. She could hear enamel grind. Their partnership had taught him when to step back and let go, too. He just didn’t always—ever!—listen to what he knew.
“A couple. All recent, though, nothing to worry about. I can handle myself, big guy.”
She hoped.
five
Although it was nearing noon, activity on Blaine Street, deep in the so-called “artist’s maze” favored by trendy galleries, was better suited to early morning, with half the stores just beginning to see an early trickle of customers. The short, narrow street had clearly once been the home to warehouses, metal steps rising up from the curb to oversized metal doors set in otherwise stark brick buildings. But where most of the other converted buildings that now housed trendy stores and galleries had clear glass windows, the better to display their contents in a carefully designed presentation, the narrow glass front on 28 Blaine had been replaced with artisan-made stained glass. The deep blues, reds and greens seemed at first to be randomly placed, but if you stepped back a moment, the wavy striations in the glass and the choice of colors created the appealing effect of an underseascape.
Between the window and metal double doors, a small bronze plaque announced that this was the home of The Didier Gallery.
Inside the gallery, the floor was covered in a muted gray carpet, and walls painted Gallery White were hung with paintings in groupings of three or four, interspersed occasionally with a three-dimensional piece on a pedestal. The works displayed this month were brash, almost exhibitionist in their use of color. A curved counter ran through the middle of the space, and behind it a sturdy wrought-iron staircase rose to the second-floor gallery, where smaller pieces were displayed. A young blond man sat at the desk, flipping through a catalog. He looked as though he belonged in a catalog himself: perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed and bored out of his overbred skull.
Sergei blew through the door, setting the chime alert jangling. The young man looked up, gauged the expression on his boss’s face, and wisely decided not to speak unless spoken to. One look around told Sergei that no one else was in the gallery, and with a grunt that could have been satisfaction or disgust, he nodded to his associate and went to the back wall of the gallery, where touching a discreet wall plate opened the door to his private office.
The door closed behind him, and the young man went back to flipping through the catalog.
“Of all the stupid, harebrained…” Sergei had managed to keep a hold on his temper all the way home from Genevieve’s apartment, which meant that by now, although he was just as angry as before, he was unable to let go and have the temper tantrum he so righteously desired.
She hadn’t answered the phone when he had called this morning. She hadn’t been home when he had arrived on her doorstep an hour later. Not that she didn’t have a perfect right to go off on her own. He was her partner, her agent, not her damned keeper. That would have been a full-time job alone. But he had known she was hiding something, damn it. Had known sitting there across from her during dinner, and let it go, and that was his fault.
It hadn’t been until this morning, as he was taking his morning walk, that one of the names on the list had jumped out of his brain and thwapped him soundly across the face. He hadn’t recognized it at first, because he only thought of the man by the nickname the Cosa had given him.
Stuart Maxwell. She was going to confront Stuart Maxwell, otherwise known in Talented circles as The Alchemist. The man so hooked into the current he could turn wishes into water, and water into wine. The man who, the last time Wren encountered him, had tried to kill her. A certified, over the bend, wind whistling through his brains, wizzart.
Wren knew he wouldn’t have let her get within a mile of that man ever again, no matter if he had been the first, last, and only name on their suspects list. And so she conveniently forgot to point him out.
He felt his teeth grinding together, and slowly forced his jaw to unclench. His partner only thought he was overprotective. And then she went and did something like this that only proved he wasn’t damn near vigilant enough!
If she survived—she would survive, she would—Sergei swore to himself, he was going to put her over his knee. And he meant it this time!
Okay, so he wasn’t being rational. She had the astonishing ability to do that to him, did his Wren. And it drove him insane.
Exhaling, and muttering a curse under his breath, Sergei finally took off his coat and hung it on the wooden coat rack in the corner, smoothing his hair back and settling himself into his skin. Calm. He needed to be calm. When Wren was in the field, the game was hers. The fact that he could—and had—imagine any of two dozen things that could go wrong did not mean anything would go wrong. And even if it had—he paused a moment to make a quick gesture with his fingers to avert ill luck—there was nothing he could do about it until she bothered to check in.
He took a deep breath, let it out. This was Wren. She would check in. His partner was occasionally reckless, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew what she was doing. He had to believe in that. Believe in her. Don’t make her asinine fears—that he didn’t trust her enough—any worse.
And, in the meantime, he had a gallery to run.
“Lowell,” he said into the intercom. “Please bring me the week’s invoices, if they’re ready? And tomorrow’s guest list as well.”
The building was more of a shack than anything you could properly call a house. Derelict in the middle of an oversized lot given over to wildflowers and knee-high grasses, the two-story building boasted a wraparound porch and tall windows, but the wood sagged, the white paint was cracked, and the windows were blurred with grime.
“Lovely.”
Wren pulled her rental car—an innocuous dark-blue sedan—to the side of the dirt road, and stared at the structure. There was no need to check the address against the information written in her notepad. There wasn’t anything else that could be her destination on this isolated road miles from the nearest town. Besides, there wasn’t a house number anywhere to be seen.
With a sigh, she tossed the notepad into her bag, slung the strap over her shoulder, and got out of the car. Dust swirled around her heels, the dryness at odds with the riot of greenery on the property. She couldn’t feel anything, but that was hardly surprising. You never could—until the trap was sprung, and it was way too damn late.
“You shouldn’t have come.”
“Max. I want to help you.” The Wren-self in the memory was years younger, her hair longer, tied into a braid halfway down her back. Sergei in the distance. Too far away. Far enough away to be safe.
“I’m already damned, girl. Didn’t you learn anything?”
His eyes had still been sane, then. Thirty seconds later, he had tried to kill her.
Wren stopped just shy of the border of grass, and sighed again. Then sneezed, her sinuses reacting to the overabundance of green growing things.
“Great. He couldn’t have holed up in a concrete warehouse somewhere? Max!”
Approach protocol thus satisfied, she waited, shifting her weight from one sneaker to the other, wiping her palms on denim-clad thighs.
“Max, you shit, I just want to talk to you!”
There was no answer. She hadn’t been expecting any, but it would have been nice to get a surprise. Wren was tempted to reach out, to try and feel for the currents she knew were floating around the house, but she didn’t. Bad manners, and dumb besides. This was her last stop of the day, and she was tired, short-tempered, and really not looking forward to this at all.
“Max!” A pause. “You mangy bastard, it’s Wren!”
A harsh bark of laughter right in her ear startled her, but she schooled her body, refusing to let it jump. Sound waves were easy to manipulate. A cheap trick.
“Come in then, you brat. Before I forget you’re out there.”
That had been easier than she expected. Suspicious, she stepped onto the grass, watching as the blades bent out of her way, creating a path directly to the porch steps.
Far too easy. She had a bad feeling about this.
The inside of the house was actually quite comfortable, if you liked extreme lo-tech living. The front door opened onto a large room, encompassing the entire front of the house. A fireplace took up all of the far wall, and bookshelves covered much of the other three walls. No television, no computer, no phone in sight. Just books and the occasional piece of what might have been artwork. Not that she had anything against books, but there was only so long you could live in someone else’s head. Wren didn’t trust anyone who didn’t get out and do for themselves.
Not that she trusted The Alchemist worth a damn to begin with. Not anymore. She learned slow, but she did learn. But this wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could do over the phone. Assuming he had access somewhere, somehow, to one. And that it didn’t go snap-crackle-pop the moment he touched it. Wizzarts were even more prone to short-circuiting electronics than your average Talent, because they didn’t think to be careful.
Some would say that they didn’t think at all.
There was no sound at all in the house, not even the hum-and-whir of appliances somewhere, or the clink-clink of water draining through pipes. It made Wren nervous, that absence of sound. So what if she’d grown up in the ’burbs, back when you might still see deer or fox or occasionally a bear in your backyard; she was too much a city girl now to feel comfortable without the endless background accompaniment of screeching brakes, sirens and horns.
Even the damn crickets outside had been better than this. Silence wasn’t a thing; it was the absence of a thing, of noise. And her mind always wanted to know what had swallowed the noise, how, and when was it coming for her.
To distract herself from that thought, she looked around again. Two overstuffed sofas and a leather reclining chair were matched with sturdy wooden tables, obviously handmade. The plaid upholstery was worn and comfortable-looking, and the floor was wood, scarred with years of use, and covered with colorful cloth rugs scattered with more concern for warmth than style. A large dog of dubious parentage lay on one of the sofas. It lifted its head when she came in, and contemplated her with brown eyes that didn’t look as though they had been surprised by anything in the past decade, or excited about anything in twice that time.
“Hi there,” she said. The narrow tail thumped once and then lay still, as though that much effort had exhausted it. “Let me guess—Dog, right?”
“Don’t see any reason to change a perfectly workable name,” the voice said from off to her left. “I’m the man, he’s the dog, and we both know our places.”
“And his, obviously, is on the sofa.”
Max let out a snort as he came completely into her line of sight. He was wearing an old, worn blue cotton sweater and khaki safari-style shorts that showed off knobby knees, red-banded tube socks sagging around his ankles. “That one’s his, this one’s mine. We stay out of each other’s way. Which is more than I can say for you. Didn’t my throwing you off a cliff teach you anything? Why you bothering me again?”
Wren hadn’t seen Max in almost five years. But for a wizzart, that was crowding.
“Your name came up in very uncasual conversation,” she said, sitting down in the chair, but not relaxing into it. Max seemed reasonably rational right now, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. She actually had learned a great deal from going off that cliff, most of which involved the fact that she couldn’t fly. She wasn’t eager to relearn that particular lesson.
“Whoever it was, they deserved killing.” He sat down on his sofa and put his feet up on a battered wooden table. His socks were filthy, dirt and grass stains worn into the weave of the fabric, but they somehow managed not to stink.
“No killing,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”
“You bring any chewing gum? I could use a spot of chewing gum. So if they’re not dead, what’s the hassle? And if they are dead, what’s the hassle anyway?” He held his hands out in front of him, as though about to clasp them in prayer, and spread his fingers as wide as they could go, staring intently at the space between his palms. The pressure in the room increased, fed by the energies the old man was bouncing throughout his system like some kind of invisible pinball game.
Wren swallowed a third, much heavier sigh. Wizzarts.
“Max. Focus.”
“I’m listening,” he said, cranky as an old bear with arthritis. “Get on with it before I decide you might make good fertilizer for the grass.”
He was making an effort for her. That was nice to see. Wren organized her thoughts quickly, compiling and discarding arguments and appeals. Finally, feeling the pressure of his current-games pushing at her eardrums, almost to the point of pain, she went for broke.
“Why did you threaten to kill Oliver Frants?”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew that she had made a mistake. The question was too vague, too loosely-worded. He could answer her without telling a damn thing, whatever obligation or guilt or connection he felt satisfied, and she’d be out on her ear before she got another chance.
“Man’s a waste of piss.”
And that was it, the sum and total of his elaboration. Typical, she thought in disgust. A wizzart didn’t need to have a reason to do something. They thought it, they did it. For that quirk alone Wren could have written Max off the suspect list—this kind of indirect assault on the client required planning, thought—some kind of long-term intent behind it. And nobody in their right mind would have hired a wizzart to do a job like this—there was too much risk that the wizzart would get bored, and deposit the stone in the middle of the local police chief’s bedroom, just because.
The problem was, a wizzart simply didn’t have anything left over after the magic. Their entire existence was dedicated towards channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every cell turned towards the goal of becoming the perfect conductor. And that included their brain cells.
Because of that, wizzarts lived in the moment, the instant of action. It made them irascible, ornery, obnoxious—name your adjective and someone would double it without hesitation. “Waste of current” was the popular view. But the Council, in one of its few and far-between acts of mercy, had forbidden anyone to harm wizzarts. There but for the grace of God go you, was their official line. Truth was, Wren knew, the Council used wizzarts. When it came to the major mojos, to understanding the byplay of forces, the correlation of events and probabilities, they were the chaos-theory scientists of the Cosa Nostradamus.
Unstable, yeah. But the very fact that they were that unpredictable also meant that Max could have done it, either for a client, or a passing whim. The only prediction you could make about the unpredictable is that they’re going to do something you didn’t even have in the list of possibilities.
“I have a problem,” she said quickly, before his attention went into a sideslip. “Someone pulled a nasty job on my client. Someone with a bad sense of the funny. Your name was on the list, and I—” The pressure against her eardrums rose dramatically, and the energies between his hands manifested in zizzing spurts of static electricity. He giggled in pleasure. She had lost him.
A night spent chasing down leads, checking up on suspects’ alibis and whereabouts, coupled with a morning of phone calls and in-person follow-ups on local suspects, topped by the two-hour drive to this godforsaken town that wasted even more time she probably didn’t have, finally made her temper snap. Ignoring all known procedures and common sense for dealing with wizzarts, she reached forward and slapped her hands over his, forcing the energy into a cage of her own flesh. Energy channeled took on the signature of its user. And right now, trapped between her hands, was a solid buzz of Max-imprinted magic, ready for the scrolling.
hey hey HEY brat. bitch. A flash of herself, much younger, all eyes and ears and good intentions flickering like a beacon from him. She countered with her own self-image, foot tapping in impatience. It was a little like the icons people used in chat rooms, she’d been told. what what WHAT?
Irritation came back from him, some resignation—a flash of pride, that she had learned so much since their first meeting. Some disgust, that she sold herself that way, to the highest bidder. And a complete, total lack of information about what she needed to know. He had never even met the client, merely read a newspaper article about the man that annoyed him and spouted off about it in the wrong place.
“Oh, Max.”
She released his hands, not apologizing for the hijacking. The formal dance of manners slowed down the mental process, interfered with conductivity.
That was the popular theory, anyway. Sergei had a long-standing, loudly-spoken opinion that Talents were just naturally rude.
Dog yawned, his tongue hanging out of his mouth when he was done. Max stared at her, his blue-green eyes trying to dig under her guard, ferret out whatever he was looking for. Wren ignored him the way Dog was ignoring them, waiting for his reaction. Her body appeared relaxed, but that very casualness was preparedness. Whatever hit, she would be ready to dodge out of the way, roll and slip out of range.
Ignoring the fact that even on an off day Max’s range was further than she could run—to the edge of the property, at least, and likely a full line of sight beyond that. If he got pissed, she was screwed. It was that simple. And that was why wizzarts rarely had houseguests.
“You’re looking in the wrong place,” he said finally, his voice old and scratchy, as though her insight had worn him out in some measure.
“Where should I look then?” If he was going to offer aid, she was going to take it. Her mama might have raised a fool, to be here in the first place, but that didn’t mean she had to be stupid about it.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged, the cotton sweater showing new holes as he moved. “I’ll poke through the ether, see what I can find out.”
There was a tension about him, in the way the pressure pulled in tight around him, that suggested this little get-together was just about over. Dog whined, and rolled onto his other side, facing away from them. Wren stood, looking across the room at the wizzart. “Why?”
He laughed, a manic sound that made the hair on the back of her arms stand straight up. “’Cause you came to me. ’Cause not killing you’s the last thing I managed to do right. Maybe ’cause you’re all that’s left of John on this green earth.”
John Ebenezer. Teacher. Friend. Father figure. Gone, ten years and more. It still hurt, the memory.
“You might want to get out, now.”
Wren got. The grass didn’t move out of her way this time, instead straining towards the house, as though there was a stiff wind blowing them inward.
There was. Only it was brewing inside: the center of the whirlwind, a black hole of current. Lightning flashed in the clear blue sky, and Wren felt it shiver down her back, like the first stroke of a massage. She got into the car, tossing her bag onto the seat next to her, and almost flooded the engine in her haste to get the hell out of there.
Wizzarts. Jesus wept.
The drive back to the city seemed endless, her brain chasing after one detail or another until she shut it all down with a blast of rock and roll. She might be a jazz kind of girl, but there was nothing like the sound of sledgehammer guitars to get you rolling down the highway. Wren handed in the rental with a kind of regret, patting the hood in farewell as she waited for the attendant to finish checking it out. He was a tiny little guy, bandy-legged, who looked as though he should have been fussing over spindly Thoroughbreds, not standard issue Chevys.
Once he’d given the other attendant the all-clear, she signed off on the X’d line, collected her copies of the paperwork, and caught the subway home, standing-room-only as everyone else headed home from a tough day at the office, too. Normally an irritation, today she welcomed the press of humanity, sweaty and rude though it might be. The fact that she could stand them, could rub skins with the rest of humanity without freaking, reassured her that she still was one of them. Still sane, normal…as normal—
As normal as you could be, with the buzz of magic running through your cells when the rest of the world doesn’t feel a thing. When John Ebenezer had first discovered her using Talent to pilfer sodas and candy from the local five-and-dime, he’d dragged her out of the store by one ear. He’d read her the riot act, fed her a lecture on morals, and hadn’t let go until she knew what it was she was doing—what she was. It hadn’t seemed so scary then. He’d been a lot closer to normal then; he’d taught high school, in fact. Biology. Before he too had given himself over to the current, made riding the wave his entire reason for existing. Wizzed out.
By the time she graduated high school, he was long gone; the toll of his own Talent overwhelming what had been his life. But by then, he’d managed to change her life, almost as much as he finally changed his own. “Maybe ’cause you’re all that’s left of John on this green earth.”
Sometimes she wished Neezer had just minded his own business that day in the five-and-dime.
Wren wasn’t a wizzart. She didn’t want to be one, wasn’t, for various fate-be-thanked reasons, likely to become one. But how much had Neezer wanted it, back then? Had Max? Had they told themselves, whistling in the dark, that it couldn’t happen to them?
“God, woman, stop it!”
An old Chinese man looked at her sideways, his expression clearly showing what he thought of crazy women who talked to themselves.
She got off at her stop, taking the steps up to the street two at a time. The fresh air on her face was like a benediction, and she stopped to draw a lungful in. The sky was just beginning to darken, and the shadows of the buildings shaded into dark blue the way only city shadows could. Yes! Max could keep the countryside—she felt alive in the city, with its constant hum of energy that nonetheless managed to remain completely impartial. Too many people could be better than none, sometimes.
Especially if their presence meant you were sane.
She strode down the street and up to the six-story brick apartment building. It was the tallest building in the neighborhood, standing out against the three-story townhouses and one-story storefronts of Chinese takeout places, psychics, and the ever-present corner delis/flower stores/supermarkets. Depending on what part of town you lived in, they were Korean grocers, or bodegas, or quick-marts.
She thought about swinging by Jackson’s to get some fresh milk, maybe play the Lotto, but decided against it. She’d do the shopping this weekend, when she had a little more energy.
But in the instant her feet slowed, contemplating and deciding, her nerves twitched. Back-of-the-neck, millennia of evolution stripped away kind of twitching, what Sergei called the lizard brain. The survival nerve. She sped up again, scanning the sidewalk-side without turning her head too obviously. It could have been one of the kids sitting on the stoop across the street, giving her a too-close once-over. Most people ignored her, even when she wasn’t Disassociating—it made her very nervous when someone didn’t. Or it might have been something as simple, and ignorable, as a mugger in the shadows, sizing her up as a potential meal ticket. That happened on occasion, but they almost always ended up passing her by for the next person coming down the street.
Nerves, probably. Justifiable, in the aftermath of the day. It couldn’t have been anything else. The Wren was invisible, far as most of the world was concerned. She never met with clients, never had any direct contact with them, and she knew damn well there wasn’t anything she was working on right now that might have followed her home. And yet…
The question isn’t “are you paranoid.” It’s “are you paranoid enough?”
She spun on one heel, her keys clenched in her left hand in a defensive hold, ready to scrape the face off anything coming up on her.
There was nobody there. Two buildings down, the teenagers made rude catcalls that only increased when she glared at them. A flash of current would teach them a lesson…and be a waste of energy she didn’t have right now.
“You’re getting as bad as Max,” she told herself, turning back and heading up the stairs into her building, praying her words weren’t true.
On the street, a figure stopped just shy of Wren’s building, watching as she unlocked the door and stepped inside. Wearing a stylish leather coat open over a well-tailored suit, he exuded professional menace that silenced the teenagers even before they noticed the unmistakable leather of a belt holster showing under the coat. Pale eyes looked at them without blinking, and they stared back half in apprehension, half in awe. He smiled at them, not showing any teeth, and they turned tail and fled.
A glance at his wrist to check the time, and he reached into a coat pocket, extracting a small, very expensive cell phone. Staring up at the fifth floor, where a light had just gone on, he touched a button, and waited for someone to answer on the other end.
“Bird’s flown home.”
He waited while the other person relayed the news, his gaze never leaving the window where Wren’s form could be seen, barely, through the rice-paper shade. Then another person took the phone, the deep voice filling the phone’s receiver.
“No, she was alone. Should I take care of it?”
The answer was clearly negative. “Right.”
He hung up and returned the phone to his pocket. With one last look at the window, he turned and walked down the street, disappearing into the growing shadows as though he had never been there.
Wren tossed her bag on the kitchen counter, and opened the fridge, pulling out a can of Diet Sprite and popping the top. She took a long sip, sighing with pleasure as the ice-cold liquid soothed her throat. Always hydrate, Neezer had told her one summer when she passed out after a particularly exhausting workout. Rehydrate, eat, sleep. You might look like you’ve just been sitting there half-asleep, but the insides of your body will know they’ve been abused. If you don’t take care of them, they won’t take care of you.
Dropping her jacket, she left it in the middle of the floor, walking down the short hallway into her office. No messages on the machine. She’d check in with Sergei later, after the gallery closed. She frowned. No, damn it, today was—Tuesday, the gallery was open late tonight. She’d talk to him later, then. No rush.
She flipped the light switch, then turned on the computer. While it booted up, she flipped through the mail, snorting in disgust at the amount of junk mail and more useless circulars that had been shoved into the front door, making it almost impossible to open. She supposed that hand-delivering them employed someone…she just wished they’d pay attention to the “no menus, no flyers” sign on the apartment building’s door! She sorted through them on the off chance something was actually interesting, and spotted yet another pale-blue flyer advertising Village Pest Removal services. “‘Let us remove infestations and unwanted visitations.’” Well, poetic, anyway. Then she frowned, looking more closely at the wording on the sheet of paper: Tired of coming home to unwanted visitations? Concerned about the infestation of your building? Your neighborhood? Call us. We can clean things up for you.
“Your entire neighborhood?” Hell of a claim, in Manhattan.
A hunch tingled at the back of her head, her brain reaching for two and two in order to stretch it into five. Something about the wording sounded unpleasantly familiar. She put the paper down flat on her desk and reached over to pick up the phone and headset. Dialed the phone number listed on the flyer, pacing as she did so.
“Hello. Yes, I’d like to speak to someone about an…infestation.”
The voice on the other end of the line was enthusiastic. Perky. Oh so happy and eager to please.
“Yes, they’re huge…winged, too. I just saw them tonight, and then I saw your flyer…” She was a pretty good actress, if she did say so herself. Wren almost believed that her apartment had been invaded.
“What? No, I have no idea how they got in, haven’t seen them anywhere else. Well, of course, who goes poking about looking for cockroaches—hello?”
The perky, friendly boy on the other line had hung up.
“Expecting something different, were we? Oh yeah. I know who you are now.” They weren’t here for pests—at least not the way New Yorkers usually used the term. Wren snarled and tossed the crumpled-up flyer across the room, missing the wastebasket by an embarrassing margin.
It was the NYADI—New Yorkers against Demonic Infestation—all over again, she’d eat someone else’s hat if it wasn’t. They had first appeared about three-four years before, when she was still living uptown, made life hell for everyone, Talent and Null alike, before they finally disappeared as suddenly as they’d arrived.
“Jesus wept, I so don’t need this now!” All it took were a couple of newcomers to the city, who didn’t know enough not to look directly at the strangers sitting next to you on the subway car, and you got spooked vigilantes trying to save humanity from demonkind. Wren snorted. As though demons were some big threat. She blamed the endless repeats of Buffy for that. And The X-Files. Some people really just couldn’t separate fact from fiction.
But this was way more directed than the ranting street-corner attacks had been. Way more careful, subtle even, which meant someone was thinking. Which was never good when it came to extremist loonies.
“Bastards. If it is them I swear I’ll…”
The familiar sound byte of her log-in interrupted her, and she exhaled heavily, forcing herself to relax. Slowly, as though tracking current, she lowered her shoulders, opened her hands, and let the tension slide out through her pores.
Leaving the rest of the mail in a pile on the top of a filing cabinet near the window, she took the headset off and sat down again at the desk. Work, Valere. Deal with those bastards later. And there will be a later….
Entering in the series of passwords, she logged into her server, downloading the day’s e-mail. Most of it was junk and spam, a few were from old high-school friends she managed somehow to keep in touch with, and three were headed “Old Sally.” She clicked on those first.
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Laura Gilman
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Эзотерика, оккультизм
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Manhattan′s night life just got weirder… It starts as a simple job – but simple jobs, when you′re dealing with the magical world, often end up anything but. As a Retriever, Wren Valere specializes in finding things gone missing – and then bringing them back, no questions asked. Normally her job is stimulating, challenging and only a little bit dangerous.But every once in a while… Case in point: A cornerstone containing a spell is stolen and there′s a magical complication. (Isn′t there always?) Wren′s unique abilities aren′t enough to lay this particular case to rest, so she turns to some friends: a demon (minor), a mage who has lost his mind, and a few others, including Sergei, her business partner (and maybe a bit more?). Sometimes what a woman has to do to get the job done is enough to give even Wren nightmares…