Praise for the Retrievers novels of
laura anne gilman

Staying Dead

“An entertaining, fast-paced thriller set in a world where cell phones and computers exist uneasily with magic and a couple of engaging and highly talented rogues solve crimes while trying not to commit too many of their own.”

—Locus

“An exciting…unpredictable story that never lets up until the very end…I highly recommend this book to fans of urban fantasy, especially [the works of] Jim Butcher, Charlaine Harris, Kim Harrison or Laurell K. Hamilton.”

—SF Site

Curse the Dark

“Gilman has managed the nearly impossible here: a cleverly written and well-balanced fantasy with a strong romantic element that doesn’t overpower the main plot.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews [4 1/2 stars]

“With an atmosphere reminiscent of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose by way of Sam Spade, Gilman’s second Wren Valere adventure…features fast-paced action, wisecracking dialog and a pair of strong, appealing heroes.”

—Library Journal

Bring It On

“Fans of Charlaine Harris, Kelley Armstrong and Kim Harrison will find Bring It On a very special treat. The author is an expert worldbuilder and creates characters that are easy to care about.”

—Affaire de Coeur [5 stars]

“Gilman has outdone herself…The revelations are moving, the action is fantastic and the ending is something that makes you wonder what will happen next.”

—In the Library Reviews

Burning Bridges

“Wren’s can-do magic is highly appealing.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This fourth book in Gilman’s engaging series delivers…Wren and Sergei’s relationship, as usual, is wonderfully written. As their relationship moves in an unexpected direction, it makes perfect sense—and leaves the reader on the edge of her seat for the next book.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews [4 stars]

“I’ve been saying it all along, and I’ll say it again, this is an excellent series, well worth picking up, and I haven’t been let down yet.”

—Green Man Review

“Valere is a tough, resourceful heroine, a would-be loner who cares too much to truly walk alone. A strong addition to urban fantasy collections.”

—Library Journal

Free Fall

“An intelligent and utterly gripping fantasy thriller, by far the best of the Retrievers series to date.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Compulsively readable, fast-paced and deadly serious…Wren continues to be an engaging and likable protagonist, one the reader can root for with all her heart.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

Curse The Dark
Laura Anne Gilman

Dear Reader,

Welcome, or welcome back, to the world of the Cosa Nostradamus, where the person walking next to you on the sidewalk may not be…entirely human, and magic not only didn’t fade away in the modern age, it got stronger.

In Curse the Dark, a lot changes for Wren and Sergei as they take on a job for the mysterious—but well-paying—Silence. Decisions are made, surprises are sprung and consequences are dealt out, both tragic and joyful. Life isn’t always easy, it’s rarely ever fair. But when Wren’s around, you know it’s always going to be an adventure!

And don’t miss Wren’s other adventures in Staying Dead, Bring It On, Burning Bridges and Free Fall, available now, and Blood from Stone, coming in May 2009.

Enjoy!

Laura Anne Gilman

For Amy and Sue.

Even if they did want to trade me in for a puppy.

Acknowledgments

The past year was probably the toughest ever in my life, and a number of people were much-needed, much-appreciated lifelines.

Keith R. A. DeCandido

Jenn Saint-John

James A. Hartley

Lesley McBain

Lisa Sullivan

Jennifer Jackson

Susan Shwartz

Peter Liverakos

Howard Shaw

And in the memory of Kath Lawrence, who reminded me to take those lifelines and hold on tight.

Curse The Dark

Secure yourself to heaven.

Hold on tight, the night has come.

Fasten up your earthly burdens,

You have just begun.

—Indigo Girls, “Secure Yourself”

Contents

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

Epilogue

Chapter One

“Next time,” Sergei muttered out of the corner of his mouth, not taking his eyes off the security guard leaning against a wall several paces ahead of them, “we’re taking a boat.”

“Sorry, okay?” Wren said, doing her best not to snap at him. “I’m trying. I really am.” And she was. It just wasn’t helping.

Her partner’s deep sigh was the only response she got. They’d had variations of this conversation ever since she threw her bag into the cab outside her apartment that morning, and things had only slid downhill since getting to the airport. If they could have gotten through all this quickly, and not given her so much time to think about it…But, well, that wasn’t going to happen. And the weird feeling of being stared at, even though there wasn’t anyone paying any attention to her, was just making things worse.

The line shuffled in place, people shifting bags and checking watches. Sergei took a small case out of his suit coat pocket, opened it and removed a slender brown cigarette, then put the case away. He rolled the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, then started rotating it end to end, as though practicing for a coin trick he already knew how to do.

Another person made it through the metal detector and escaped into the depths of the airport. There was only one line feeding along roped-off lanes into seven different metal detectors, three of which were currently out of service, with technicians standing around them looking puzzled and not a little annoyed. One of the techs did something to a touch pad, and shrugged helplessly.

I hate airports, Wren thought. As though overhearing her thought, Sergei flicked a glance sideways at her, one dark brown eyebrow raised in inquiry over paler brown eyes. After ten years of working together, he didn’t have to say anything; the message came through loud and clear. Get it done.

“Right.” It wasn’t that he wasn’t sympathetic. He was. She knew that. But it was her problem and she was the one who had to deal with it. And sympathy didn’t actually help. Adjusting her sweaty grip on her brand-new carry-on (finest you could buy on sale on two days’ notice), Wren closed her eyes and refocused her attention inward, to where the tendrils of current coiled and flickered within her like snakes in a pit.

She wasn’t a good flyer even under the best of circumstances. No, call a spade a spade and admit that she was a terrible flyer. She avoided traveling by air whenever possible. Sometimes, though, it wasn’t possible. Sometimes, you just had to suck up the phobia and get on with it.

Unfortunately, the only thing worse than a phobic Talent under stress was a phobic Talent under stress near a lot of electronics. Such as, oh, the one found when going through departure security at a major airport just outside of New York City.

We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t have taken this job. Don’t think about it, Valere. Focus. Stay calm. Or everything’s going to get ugly.

“The usual mess,” a man behind her grumbled to his companion. “And what do you want to bet once we get on the plane we’ll be stuck on the tarmac for another hour anyway?”

Oh, God. So much for calm and serenity. Just the thought of that was enough to make her nerves—and the current inside her—roil. The “snakes” hissed sparks of current, seething in her own agitation. Damn, damn and—

There was another snap-ping! noise, and the lights on one of the still-working metal detectors went out, then came back on. The security guard swore under his breath and said something into his walkie-talkie. The seven people in front of Wren and Sergei on the security check line groaned. Wren felt a twinge of helpless guilt, opening her eyes and looking at the chaos she was, however unwillingly, creating. Admittedly, one of the machines had been out of commission by the time they got on line. She was pretty sure she wasn’t to blame for that one. But the other two had died in a rather spectacular array of sparks not thirty seconds after they arrived. That was in addition to the meter of the cab that dropped them off, the check-in desk computer that decided to crash in the middle of confirming their seats, and the cell phone of the guy next to them on the escalator.

All those old stories about magic being wiped out by technology so had it wrong. Magic didn’t hate tech. It loved it. So much so that a Talent instinctively wanted to reach out and drag all the lovely bits of power floating through the wires and tubes and chips of modern society into his or herself. Especially if she was, even subconsciously, preparing for a worst-case scenario in which she might need all the power she could grab.

Sergei had suggested a sedative when she started to hyperventilate in traffic this morning, but Wren was terrified of what she might do if she were too relaxed when the inevitable panic hit.

“Last time I got stuck in security I missed my connection and had to wait three hours for another flight,” Wren heard the woman ahead of them say to her companion, more resigned than annoyed.

Oh, God. A muffled whimper escaped her, and sparks danced on the backs of her hands until she shoved them into the pocket of her pale blue linen jacket, bought new for this trip and already stained under the arms with sweat. “I hate airports,” Wren muttered. “They’re full of planes.” She could hear the panic in her voice and hated herself for it.

“Hang in there.” Sergei shoved the cigarette back into its case and shuffled in line, moving bags and his laptop case until he stood just behind her, a little closer than the crush of people demanded. At six-two he was almost a foot taller than she, and broad-shouldered into the bargain, creating a comfortable barrier at her back. The defense might have been mostly psychological, but it worked. She welcomed the closeness, breathing deeply of the scent of warm spice and musk that was so perfectly and only her partner. She could almost ground herself into it the way she would into rock or soil; emotionally, anyway, if not magically. Not that she thought she was going to do anything stupid, but…

Well, they called them phobias because they were irrational, after all.

“I’m here, Zhenchenka,” he said. “I’m here, and everything’s okay. Just focus. Keep it under control…” It was equal amounts order and a gentle reminder. Sergei might have finally given up that “senior partner” thing he’d been carrying for the past decade, but old habits died hard.

Fortunately, this was one directive she was willing to follow.

She took a deep breath, released it, nodded, and then closed her eyes again, shutting out everything around her: the white noise of the busy airport, the palpable irritation of the people around her, the smell of her own nervous sweat. Last to go was her physical awareness of Sergei, standing guard over her. Narrowing down further, shutting the mental chute until all that existed was her awareness of her own awareness, and the enticing, invigorating current. Black silk covered with static electricity, jumbled fireworks of a thousand colors. It was beautiful, and tempting, and only with a severe force of will did she keep herself from falling into those fireworks, narrowing even further until all that existed was the current within herself, the natural core that was inside every human Talent.

She had described it to Sergei once as being dropped into a tank of virtual snakes, sinuous electric beasts, bright blue and red and orange and green and silver, like some cyberpunk wet dream. The core of what she was, what she could do. You couldn’t ever show fear as they curled around you, hissing in a reflection of her own unreasonable panic about flying, because if you ever lost control current would destroy you.

Dangerous. At the same time, they were beautiful. And hers. She moved closer, soothing the snakes, gathering them in. There was no fear, no loss of control. They were part of her, and would do as she willed them, damn it—

“Miss?”

Wren started as someone touched her shoulder. She could sense Sergei swinging into action even as she gasped, putting his well-tailored bulk between her and the intruder.

Wren wasn’t used to being noticed—she normally cultivated her slight, innocuous appearance into invisibility. She must be screaming tension in her body language. Not good. The last thing she needed was attention from security making her even more nervous.

“Yes?” she said, moving around her overprotective partner and shoving the current-snakes down even more firmly. Everyone stay cool, she thought, not sure if it was directed at herself, the current, or Sergei. Or all of the above.

The guard took a hard look at her, glanced at the passport held out to him and then reached out one hand, palm up and fingers flat, as though calming a nervous horse. His hand was covered with fine lines, a webbing of creases run amok, and there was a callus on the pad of his index finger. Wren thought that someone who read palms could have a blast with him. “Are you all right, Ms. Valere?”

Sergei started to answer him, but Wren shook her head at him in warning. Let me handle this. “Yes, thank you.”

She shifted her carry-on, and took Sergei’s hand in her own. The cool, firm skin of his hand was like a lifeline, and she squeezed it once, gently, feeling him return the pressure. It’s okay, that squeeze said.

Rather than restraining the current any further, Wren focused it instead, turning her full attention to the guard. Seeing the suspiciously twitchy passenger relax under his gaze, the guard—a baby-faced blonde in his mid-twenties, if that, probably just out of training on how to use the gun in his holster—began to relax. His watery blue eyes were kind, at odds with the weary boredom on his face. You’re feeling sorry for me, she thought, her brain taking on an intensely dreamy but sharp-edged feel of a working fugue stage. You think I look terrified of flying—true—and it’s a shame I have to be put through all of this.

The “Push” was one of her strongest gifts. It was also the one she hated to use the most, for purely embarrassingly moral reasons—more than any other skill, it had the potential to be abused. The problem was, it was so damn useful. Coupled with her ordinary looks and slight frame, it was enough to get her into the most closely guarded places without being seen. But sometimes you wanted to draw someone’s attention to you, not away…and once you had it, you could move it to other places…other thoughts. And they would never know, if you were careful, how they had been coerced. Get me through this…get me past these machines so I don’t have a screaming fit and set off every single security measure you have….

“Bad flyer, huh?” the guard asked conversationally.

“Bad doesn’t even begin to cover it,” Wren admitted, squelching her self-disgust into a tight box and locking the lid. Her mother would have a fit if she knew how badly her only daughter was messing with some poor guy’s mind. But when needs must, as her own mother forever said—if about other, way more ordinary things—you did what you had to do….

Sergei Didier watched his partner wind the security guard around her little finger, and stifled a smile of relief. With luck, having something to focus on other than her fear of flying would keep anything…dramatic from happening. He’d been intentionally not thinking of all the ways a panicked Talent could create chaos in an airport, especially one as tightly wound as Newark, as though that blankness in his mind would prevent anything from happening. Talismanic magic, the ancient kind Wren scoffed at.

His feeling was, don’t knock anything that might work.

He glanced at the decadently expensive and self-indulgent wind-up gold watch on his wrist and made a bet with himself that it would take her less than three minutes to “push” the guard into hand-walking them through security. There was much less risk in her being wanded off to the side than walking through one of their damned machines, in the state she was in. If she managed that, it would be the first thing that had gone right since they’d taken this damned job.

No, scratch that. The first thing to go right since May. Since that damned Frants case, since that damned Council—since everything had changed.

He rested his gaze on his Wren, currently being ushered out of the line by the solicitous guard, and smiled again. Not that everything that had happened in May was so bad.

She looked back, making sure that he was okay with her being taken out, alone, and he made a small go-ahead gesture. It wasn’t as though they were joined at the hip. She’d catch up with him on the other side of the security gate. Once she was out of the way, things were bound to go more smoothly.

Picking up his bag, Sergei shuffled forward with the rest of the line to fill the space Wren had left. Yes, things would go more smoothly without her there. But he missed her presence already.

Since May…although he wondered again how much had actually changed, and how much was just finally being dragged out into the light of day.

Two days earlier…

“Why the hell don’t you get an air conditioner?”

Wren looked at her partner as though that was the stupidest thing she had ever heard. He flushed slightly, the color rising over his damnably fine cheekbones, although that might have been the heat. It was seven o’clock in the evening, and the temperature was still hovering in the low nineties. Summer in Manhattan. God, how Wren hated it.

They were sitting on the hardwood floor of the largest room in her apartment, not that large meant much in the city. The space was empty save for the stereo system against one wall and an overstuffed armchair at the perfect midway point between speakers. All the windows in the apartment were open, on the off-chance of catching a breeze to supplement the low-tech floor fans that were pretty much just redistributing the warm air. But at least they were low-risk, compared to running an air conditioner. She wasn’t going to be the Talent who shorted out the entire city because she couldn’t stand a little heat.

She could, she supposed, have drawn the oppressive heat off her body magically. But even thinking about it made her exhausted. Actually doing something was beyond her ability right now.

Sergei, who didn’t have that option, looked as exhausted as she felt. Still dressed in the grey summer-weight wool slacks and long-sleeved cotton shirt he had worn during the day, he was sprawled on his back, a clear plastic cup on the floor near his hand, the dregs of a squeezed lemon and the last drops of iced tea at the bottom of the cup. His collar was undone, and his sleeves had been unbuttoned and then left, as though it were too much effort to roll up the cuffs. He wouldn’t be caught dead in anything more casual, not when he needed to be “Sergei Didier, owner and proprietor of Didier Gallery, home of overpriced artwork,” anyway. Sergei, her partner in we-don’t-call-it-crime, it’s-Retrieval-thank-you-muchly, could dress down as needed. Although she could probably count on two hands the number of times she’d seen him in jeans. Pity, that. For thirty-nine-ish, her partner’s ass was worthy of well-fitting jeans. Not that slacks weren’t a good look on him, too….

She shook her mind away from those thoughts with an effort, aware he was waiting for a response.

“You could have gone back to your own place, you know,” she said. He had central air. And tile flooring, which was much nicer to lie on when it was really hot outside. Not that she’d done that…more than once or twice. Two weeks of ninety-degree-plus temperatures. It wasn’t fair.

“God.” He shuddered like a tired horse as though he’d been following along with her thoughts. “The idea of getting on the subway tonight…” His voice was a low growl, unlike his usual precise newscaster enunciation. “Too many sweaty people, all unhappy. If we all weren’t so tired the murder rate would be skyrocketing. Besides, we need to talk, and you’ve been avoiding me.”

“Have not.” She had been, of course. And lying to her partner was supposed to be reserved for times of real need, not just because she was a candy-coated wuss.

She’d been avoiding everything, lately. Not good. Trust him to call her on it.

“Genevieve…” Another growl. God, as much as she hated her given name, she loved the sound of him saying it. It made her feel like her spine was melting. Even when he was scolding her, the way he was now.

“No calls, huh?” Stupid question. If there had been, he would have told her.

“None,” he confirmed anyway. “And it’s starting to show.”

She knew that. It just all added to the avoidance factor. Bad enough to be in this miserable heat wave. Adding a dry spell to it was the proverbial insult to injury. She hadn’t gotten a single job since June. Three months, and Sergei hadn’t fielded a single solitary badly-paying inquiry.

She might be the best Retriever in the business, but being the best didn’t mean anything if you weren’t getting the jobs.

“Everyone scrams from the city in August,” she offered, fanning herself halfheartedly with a paper fan made out of a folded take-out menu. Someone told her once that the action used more energy than it cooled her down, but Wren didn’t care. It felt good.

“Wren.” He sighed, rolling over on his side to look at her. “Face it. You know what’s going on.”

Unable to meet his steady brown gaze any longer, Wren stared instead at the can of Diet Sprite waiting by her feet. The polish on her big toe was starting to flake off, and she rubbed at it idly with her free hand, thinking that she was long overdue for a pedicure. Knowing didn’t mean wanting to admit. Because admitting would mean also admitting that maybe she’d really messed things up.

And worse, that she’d messed up by doing the right thing. A simple job—Retrieve a stolen chunk of concrete, spell intact, and return it to the rightful owner—that turned out to have politics and underhanded dealings and paybacks written all over it. And a ghost with trouble staying dead. And murder. Never forget the murder part of it.

A fifty-year-old murder she had tried to avenge. She might even have succeeded, although it probably would be a few more decades before she’d know for sure.

Along the way, she had also managed to piss off the Mage Council, the self-proclaimed hall monitors of the Talent world, by letting it be known the part they had played in that murder. Not that they had anything against snuffing out a life or two, especially if the victim was a Null, a nonmagic user. But they hadn’t exactly played by their own rules, and that was supposed to be a no-no.

That disclosure had led them to the dilemma under discussion. At least partially—mostly—because of that job, the Mage Council had put Wren on their Most Annoying list.

Well, big whoop, she had thought at the time. The Council and lonejacks, the unaffiliated Talents, had been sparring for generations. As a lonejack, Wren always figured she came under the general Council evaluation of “shiftless, undisciplined, and not worthy to polish our expensive shoes.” Apparently not. Instead, they were looking closely at her. Way too closely. And plotting…something. Wren didn’t see what it was about her specifically that made the Council so particularly nervous. But whatever it was, it did. And a nervous Council was a nasty Council.

“They’ve started a whisper campaign,” she said finally, reluctantly. “Tree-taller—Lee—told me when he and Miriam stopped by for drinks last week.” The lonejack artist and his wife had made a point since all this started of dropping in regularly, as much a “bite me” to the Council as anything else. Although the fact that Miriam, like Sergei, was a Null, a non-Talent, and maybe—Wren bit that thought back before it could go anywhere. Now was not the time to be worrying at what anyone else thought of her romantic relationship (or present lack thereof) with her partner. Another thing she was avoiding.

“The Council, that is. Whisper something in one ear, whisper something else in another. Nothing obvious, nothing anyone can pinpoint, but—”

“And you’re just now getting around to telling me this?” Sergei was pissed. You could tell by the way his face went totally stone, except that little twitch at the corner of his left eye.

Well, yes. Because, as he pointed out, she had been avoiding him. For any number of really uncomfortable reasons. “I was hoping…I don’t know. That maybe Lee was overstating the case? That it wouldn’t work? That the weather would break and we could have this discussion without it disintegrating into a snit-fight?”

“I don’t take snits.”

Sergei sounded wounded, and even under these conditions she had to grin. “Partner, you are the King of Snits. And it’s too damn hot to deal with that, okay?”

Ten years of working together allowed her to interpret the heavy sigh that came out of him this time. He was letting it go. “You still should have told me.”

“I’m telling you now. And it’s not like you could have done anything, anyway. My rep’s too good for them to actually say I’m incompetent, or anything. Whatever they say, it’s harmless until you actually try to counter it.” She hoped. “But if you do protest, then people start to wonder if there’s something to make you deny it…. Only I guess they’re saying more than that, if the jobs are drying up that fast.” She hadn’t honestly expected it to get this bad this quick. Which was why she wasn’t supposed to be handling the business end of things. Sergei was.

“Probably not saying much at all, actually. Just enough to make people wonder if maybe hiring this particular lonejack is such a good idea after all,” he said now. “Especially if they’re not anxious to get any scent of publicity about their situation.” Which was pretty much the point of hiring a Retriever rather than one of the more traditional and legal forms of getting back missing property. A thief who used magic to get the job done was a thief much less likely to come under official attention, at least in the Null world, and was the only type of thief you’d want to consider if the situation had even a whiff of magic about it. The fact that Wren, rather than depending solely on her Talent, combined it and general more everyday illegal Talents to perform her jobs, made her able to move effectively against any kind of surveillance or countermeasures, and made her very popular for “normal” world jobs as well.

She was good, she was smart, and she had been very, very lucky. Until now.

“Yeah. I’m guessing that’s the plan.” She frowned at the thought, and twirled the end of her shoulder-length braid between two fingers as she thought. “Most of the Cosa—” the Cosa Nostradamus, the magical community made up of human Talents and the nonhuman fatae “—knows it’s bullshit. At least from what Lee says. But they’re going to lay low anyway, until whatever’s going on is gone.”

“The Cosa are not the ones who usually hire us,” her partner said. He was the one who handled the offers, so he knew that for a fact. A lot of their commissions came from Nulls, those who had no ability to work current, the stuff of modern magic. Most, in fact, knew nothing about how the Retriever known as The Wren did her work, only that she was the best available for the job. Whatever the job might be. Hell, most of them thought that Sergei was The Wren. Which was how both Wren and Sergei liked it.

But the Council had its hooks set in flesh outside the Cosa as well, and was proving they had no hesitation about using that influence. And they knew damn well who she was.

Wren put down the fan and finished off what was left of her now warm, now flat soda. “At least they’re not trying to kill me anymore,” she said, trying for cheerful.

Sergei only grunted, shaking the plastic glass as though more iced tea would suddenly appear in it. “I’d almost rather they were.”

Wren slanted a dirty look at him, but didn’t ask him to elaborate on that comment.

“No,” he went on, oblivious, “you were right. Any overt move by the Council would only set the lonejacks even more in opposition, and maybe even force a direct revolt against perceived Council interference. They don’t want that.

“But they don’t want you in any position to be a focal point of unrest, either. Shutting you down reduces your influence, and sends a message to the rest of the lonejack community as well. Time-honored tactics.”

“Jesus wept. The Council being subtle. Now that’s scary.” She scraped up the few tendrils of coca-brown hair that were plastered against her neck and tried without much hope of success to shove them back into her braid. “They don’t need to shut me down! I don’t want to be a focal point! Why does everyone think I want to be any kind of leader?” The whole point of being unaffiliated, a lonejack, was to not have to worry about anyone but yourself. And your partner, yeah.

Sergei shifted with another grunt, the back of his shirt plastered to him with sweat. “It’s not what you want that matters to them, Wren. It’s the perception. You’ve told them to take a leap before.”

Wren winced at the reminder of a more youthful and astonishingly stupid incident in her life. That was the problem with working with someone for so long, especially if they had a good memory.

Her partner, he of the most excellent memory, was relentless in ticking off more reasons. “You hang out with lonejacks and Nulls and fatae equally, which we already knew made them nervous. Especially the fatae.” Nonhumans, the fantasticals. “And then, adding injury to insult, you—we—faced them down over the Frants deal this spring. And won. People know that. Gossip spreads. And that’s what they’re afraid of.”

Wren looked at him through narrowed eyes. He could be such a plainspoken bastard sometimes, for all that he made his living making nice in order to close the deal. Although his suit jacket had been dropped on the back of a kitchen chair with no regard for how much it had cost, and the well-polished oxblood loafers had been kicked off the moment he got inside the apartment, he still looked far too trendy-normal to be lying on the floor of an East Village apartment trying to figure the politics of a world most of humanity had no clue existed.

You could see him easily in the center of his art gallery. Or going nose-to-nose with the Council in a war of words, like he did during the Frants job. Not so easy to recognize the guy who pulled a gun to get her out of a job gone bad, last winter. But they were both in there. Plus the guy who held her when she was too sore and scared to move, while she slept, but refused to do her laundry.

Wren gave up on trying to catch any sort of breeze sitting up and lay facedown on the floor, spreading her body so as to get the maximum amount of coolness from the hardwood. She turned her face so that she could look at her partner but still feel the wood under her cheek, and whimpered pitifully, her feelings about the heat, the Council, and her current lack of available funds all rolled into one convenient sound.

He smiled at that, his narrow, expressive lips begging for her hand to reach up and touch them. Even now, she was always astonished that the skin there was so soft.

“Things’re bad, huh?” she said instead, curling her fingers in against her palm to keep them still.

He sighed again. “Not so bad, but not good, either. You have cash in the retirement fund, of course—” she actually had an IRA, plus a separate savings account from which to buy the apartment when and if it went coop, being a practical bird “—but in the short term it’s probably going to get a little tight, unless you’ve been saving even more than you’ve told me.”

“Not much more, no. Rent to pay. Groceries to buy. P.B. to feed.”

“You should make that little fur-covered mutant get a job.” But despite Sergei’s long-standing xenophobia, it was said without heat. The two of them, demon and human, had come to some sort of…she hesitated to call it an agreement, but a cease-fire, since she was injured by a sniper’s bullet during the Frants situation. Through his own choice or Sergei’s suggestion, the demon had become Wren’s semiconstant companion, not leaving her side until he judged her able to defend herself physically again. Sweet. And totally unexpected. She had spotted him more than once since then, out of the corner of her eye, lurking within running-to-help distance. It was tough to miss a four-foot-tall white-furred, white-fanged, red-eyed demon, after all. Despite the fact that three quarters of the city managed it on a regular basis.

The fatae, the nonhumans, the magical ones, are always with us, she could hear her mentor saying, years now in the past. But it takes looking with an open mind as well as open eyes. Most people don’t bother.

“Their loss,” she said quietly. “Their loss.”

“What?”

She looked at her partner and gave in to the impulse, running one finger along his lower lip until he nipped at the offending fingertip, then propped himself up on one elbow and heaved himself to his feet, surprisingly agile for a man his size.

“You hungry?” he asked, his body language pretty clearly moving them on from that moment of physical contact like metal shutters coming down. “I could go for some Thai tonight.”

Story of our lives, she thought as she reached up one arm and let him help her up off the floor. Give us business, give us danger and mayhem, and we’re good to go. Personal stuff…not so good. Hence, avoidance.

It had been four months since the combination of a seriously crazy ghost, a Council sniper, and the opening of Sergei’s Deep Dark Secrets Closet had forced them to admit that there was more to their partnership than, well, partnership. And here they were, still at the hand-holding and awkward kissing stages. Not that Wren particularly wanted to go leaping into bed…well, okay, there were days when that was all she wanted. But this geeky awkwardness was so…embarrassing. They could talk about everything and anything else. Why was this so different?

“Y’know,” she said, suddenly unable to face another night of pretending everything was okay, that they were intentionally taking things slow and casual. “I’m really not hungry. You go on. I think I’m just going to make it an early night.”

She pretended not to see the disappointed expression on his face, reaching up to give him a quick kiss at the door. But her hands found themselves threading into his hair almost without meaning to, and the quick kiss turned into something a little longer than that. God, his lips were soft. And warm. And the way he nipped at her mouth, just like that…

But just when she was starting to reconsider the whole “sending him away” thing, Sergei dropped his hands from her shoulder and was out the door before she could react.

“Damn,” she said, leaning her back against the closed and locked door. “And, well, damn.” And she really didn’t understand why she was crying. Maybe it was the heat finally getting to her.

“I need to get away,” she said to herself. “Away from the city. Away from Sergei. Away from this damned heat, and my own damned brain.”

In short, she needed a job.

Chapter Two

Wren wasn’t sure how long she had been leaning against the door staring blankly down her apartment’s short hallway like the answer to her problems was going to appear in front of her. Might have been five minutes, might have been fifteen. So when she heard the heavy footsteps coming up the stairwell outside, she thought that maybe Sergei had changed his mind, turned around outside and come back. But that mixed hope/fear died quickly. That wasn’t her partner’s tread. And the usual weird but familiar desire to brew a mug of tea that always preceded his arrival was missing, although it might have gotten confused, since he had just been there.

The footsteps stopped on her tiny landing, which made sense since the next-floor apartment was currently vacant, the nudist with the craving for curry having moved out last month. Whoever this was hadn’t had to ring to be let in, which could mean it was a fellow tenant from the lower floors—unlikely, as most of them would have leaned out the window and yelled up in their usual way of communicating—or someone had once again left the front door ajar for a delivery person.

“So glad we paid all that money to have the new security intercom put in,” Wren muttered to herself just as the rarely used door buzzer sounded.

“Oh, now you’ll ring, huh?” Still, it was hotter than hell out there, and someone had climbed five stories to ring her doorbell. If it was a burglar or wannabe rapist, the heat alone would take care of him.

“Ms. Valere? Are you there?”

Wren closed her eyes and leaned more heavily against the hollow metal security door; excellent for keeping fires out, not so good with the soundproofing. She would rather have dealt with a burglar.

The bell rang again.

Avoidance. Not a good thing. Even when it seemed like a really good thing. Besides, if she knew anything about her visitor, it was that he wasn’t going to just go away. He’d stand out there all night if he had to. Politely. Apologetically. But he’d be there.

“Right.” She swung around and started undoing the locks she had just done up in Sergei’s wake.

“Andre. So not a pleasure to see you again.”

Andre Felhim. Serpent in an Armani suit. Handler—middle management spymaster, according to Sergei—for the Silence, an organization that was prime offender in her partner’s Deep Dark Secrets Closet. Fanatic dogooders with boatloads of money and very specific ideas of who defined what was good and who got helped. The organization that had grudgingly offered salvation when the Council tried to take her down in various lethal ways—but only after Sergei negotiated out some of the nastier bits of their contract.

The organization whose monthly retainer fee was all that presently stood between her and total unemployment. Right. Damn. The fiscally responsible part of her brain kicked in and opened her mouth for a second take.

“Andre. Such a pleasure. Why don’t you come in?”

His grin at the second greeting, said in the same tone as the first, was appreciatively sardonic, and for a moment Wren could believe that this dapper, oh-so-controlled figure was the man who had allegedly trained her partner in all ways sneaky and manipulative.

Not that Sergei ever tried to manipulate her. Much. Consciously. Anymore.

Andre walked across the doorway, and Wren, channeling her mother for a terrifying moment, panicked. The thing about her apartment was that there was nowhere to invite someone in to sit for polite conversation. She just didn’t have that kind of a life.

Kitchen, she decided, escorting her guest into the small room. There were seats here, and a table she could lean on, to put between them. At least he hadn’t brought his junior associate, whatsisname, Jorgunsomethingorother, along this time. So they could skip the physical threats portion of the discussion. Probably.

“You just missed Sergei.” She barely paused before going on, “I’m thinking that’s intentional?”

Andre settled himself into one of her battered kitchen chairs, not reacting at all to her comment, as far as she could tell. Instead, he put his best avuncular expression on and said “It’s time for you to earn that retainer we pay you.”

He might have preferred subtle and sneaky and all those other serpent words, but he’d learned that polite chitchat wasn’t her thing when they had met during her last job. Which also happened to be when everything in her life started to go to hell. Coincidence? She thought probably not.

“We have an assignment that suits your skills,” he went on, “and—”

Or maybe he hadn’t quite learned. Once a serpent…“And nothing.” Wren really didn’t feel up to playing games. It was too damn hot, and she was too frustrated. Professionally and sexually, thank you very much.

“You know the deal. Sergei handles the arrangements, I do the job. Talk to him about the details. You’re no different than any other client.”

“We’re rather different,” Andre corrected her. “And at the moment, you have no other clients, if I’m not mistaken.”

Smarmy bastard. But he was right, no matter how he’d gotten the information; they couldn’t afford to piss the Silence off. Not yet, anyway. Sergei could loan her cash, sure, but it wasn’t like his art gallery did more than pay for the lifestyle he had to maintain in order to keep the gallery making money. And be damned if she was going to dip into her retirement fund. That was for then. She had to worry about the now, now.

Damn it, she hated not having options. A good lonejack always had options. Always had an escape route. Never had to take a job that smelled of brimstone, either literally or figuratively, if they didn’t want to.

Damn it, Sergei, where are you?

“All right. Talk. But whatever you say is going directly to Sergei and he’ll get back in touch with you with our terms. You got both of us in this deal, remember?”

That was a directed dig. They had really only wanted her; whatever relationship they’d had with him ten years ago, now Sergei was merely the means to an end, the former troublesome employee who led them to the new employee. Yeah, well. Not even the Silence got exactly what they wanted all the time.

Whatever else the Didier-Valere relationship might or might not be morphing into, they were partners, first, last and always.

“We have a situation that needs…a particular touch.”

God, she so hated dealing with negotiations. Sergei, damn it, why’d you have to go and run off just ’cause I told you to? “Something’s gone missing, you need it retrieved. I get that. What’s the deal?”

Andre looked nonplused for about a millisecond, then buried it down under the veneer of smooth he always wore. “A manuscript. Circa tenth century. Italian. Handwritten, one sheet of vellum, quite valuable. It has disappeared, and we require it returned. A simple enough job.”

Wren snorted. Old manuscripts. Riiiight. Give me a fricking break. Anything that old, handwritten, and gone missing equated Big Trouble. Especially if they had to hire a Talent to retrieve it. What, they thought she was stupid? Probably.

She turned her back on Andre, filling the teakettle and putting it on the stovetop, then reaching into the cabinet for a pair of mugs, the nice matched set her mother had bought her at Crate & Barrel last summer, in despair at the mismatched assortment of mugs that Wren normally used.

“And?” she asked, turning back to him, arms crossed in front of her.

“And?” Andre parroted, one eyebrow raised politely.

“Stop yanking my chain, it’s getting old. And what’s the story? Who stole it, why, what’s the time frame…. Come on, pal. I may be Talented but I’m not godlike. I need information to work on. Who, where, why, and how fast, to start.” She smiled at him, making sure to show all her small, even, very white, teeth.

Sergei Didier prided himself on his business acumen. His negotiation skills. An ability to read the client. And the physical conditioning that allowed his six-foot-plus frame to jog up five flights in a dimly lit stairwell in truly disgusting heat without passing out.

He had intended to go home. To his nice, cool, air-conditioned-without-fear-of-magically-shorting-out-because-Wren-got-careless apartment. Where he fully intended to make himself a brutal martini and take a cold shower. Probably, although not necessarily, in that order.

That was before the hairs on the back of his neck prickled in a way that had nothing to do with the sweat running under his collar and everything to do with intuition and a finely honed sense of danger nearby, two skills he’d tried his best for ten years to ignore, to bury under the facade of a desk-bound businessman of mostly legal endeavors.

It wasn’t anything magical—he wasn’t a Talent—just animal instinct. But he trusted it as much as he did his partner’s ability to channel current, the magic that was her genetic inheritance. And it led him unerringly back to Wren’s door.

Which was closed, but unlocked.

Don’t assume. She was upset, probably—definitely—and maybe she just forgot to lock the door after you left.

That thought was discarded as soon as it formed. He clearly remembered hearing the bolt slide home as he stood on the other side, trying to get a grip on himself. The overriding desire to wrap her around him, skin and sweat and the sweet-salty mint chocolate of her mouth, was driving him moderately insane. And he didn’t trust that in himself, not at all, and especially not with Wren.

Not if exploring those tantalizing lures she kept casting and then pulling back risked damaging the relationship they already had. The partnership—the friendship—that was all that kept him afloat, some days. He knew his weaknesses, too well. He hadn’t wanted her to become another one. But you can’t always get what you want, as Jagger once said.

If everything was okay, she’d yell at him for fussing. And he’d take it, gratefully. Only let everything be okay….

He pushed open the door gently, wishing feverishly that he had his gun with him. It had once been as much a part of his wardrobe as his shoes or tie, back when he worked full-time for the Silence. Wren hated it; she had just enough psychometry to be able to tell there was blood on it, and just having it around disturbed her. So for the past ten years he had carried it only when he knew—or strongly suspected—there would be trouble. But recent events were making him think that there was always going to be trouble.

Trouble that historically came in the pocket of the man whose voice was currently coming from Wren’s kitchen.

Sergei ran a hand through his hair, shoving the thick strands back off his face. He settled his breathing, then walked the four steps into the apartment, down the hallway, and into the long alcove his partner insisted was an eat-in kitchen.

Wren turned away from the counter and looked at him, then looked down at the mug of tea in her hand as though surprised to see it there. Her eyes narrowed, finely curved eyebrows communicating dismay, amusement, and a little bit of disgust before she shook her head, and those lips he spent far too much time thinking about curved in a smile. She handed him his tea, and turned back to the counter to pick up the other mug still steeping.

“Andre was just telling me all about our new assignment.”

Was Andre, indeed? Sergei didn’t like the tone in her voice. It was light, cheerful, almost perky, and boded not well for anyone who pushed her even one inch farther.

The temptation to let Andre hang himself was great, but odds were he’d regret it. Not right away, but eventually.

“A situation?” he asked, turning to face his former boss. Andre was seated on one of the chairs at the narrow kitchen table, his suit as impeccably tailored as always. Andre Felhim. A dapper black man somewhere in his well-kept sixties, clearly out of place in the homey disaster of Wren’s apartment, but seemingly unaware of the fact. And if he was dismayed to see Sergei appear when Andre had obviously hoped to avoid him, none of that showed on the older man’s face.

Then Sergei looked closer, and took a sip of his tea, suddenly thoughtful. No, Andre wasn’t unaware. There was a look in those hawk’s eyes that wasn’t as in control as he wanted to portray. Interesting. Worrisome. When Andre got worried, it was time for his agents to get very worried.

All his instincts were telling him to shove Andre out the door, possibly without bothering to open it first. But he couldn’t, for the same reason that had probably led Wren to let him into the apartment in the first place. The retainer he, Sergei, had negotiated for her. The retainer that allowed the Silence to call on them for occasional jobs. Jobs, he knew from experience, that the Silence could and would pay handsomely for. And Wren needed that money. Damn it.

Andre had them by the short hairs, and everyone in the room knew it. All Sergei could control now, even a little bit, was how they played it.

“The deal was you’d work through me,” he said, just to make sure all the protocols were followed, then leaned against the counter next to Wren, their elbows almost but not quite touching. “So talk to me.”

Wren wasn’t sure if she was annoyed that Sergei had come barging in when she’d finally gotten control of the situation, pleased to see him, or disgusted at the wave of relief she’d felt when she heard him come through the door. And there was absolute disgust at the fact that she’d made two mugs of tea without clicking onto what it meant. She was slipping, totally slipping.

“It’s a simple enough Retrieval,” Andre was telling her partner. “A monastery outside of Siena, in Italy, has requested our help in reclaiming a parchment that was taken from them last month.”

“Taken, as in…?” Sergei really had the most wonderful poker face, Wren thought, watching him watching Andre. The lightly sun-reddened skin stretched nicely over cheekbones that were just enough to envy but not enough to make him look male model-ish, and his chin could get so damnably stubborn…like right there, the way he shoved it forward just a hint. Uh-oh.

“Walked off on its own, from what Andre’s been able to not tell me,” she said, heading off a potential testosterone fit.

“We—and the monks—are unsure of what happened to it,” Andre admitted. “It is possible that someone stole it. Or…” He shrugged, a subtle gesture meant to imply that anything under God’s hand was possible.

“Or?”

“Or there may have been an unknown magical element involved, considering the nature of the manuscript.”

Oh-ho. Wren really wished she could do the one-eyebrow-raised thing. That was new in the telling. She knew, damn it, she knew old manuscripts always meant trouble. And if it was that old, and maybe magic, she’d lay heavy odds with any bookie in town that it was old-style magic, too. The kind that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore but everyone except the most obsessive, tech-happy Mage knew did. Same power, different channels. Unpredictable channels. If you did A with current, you got B. Consistent, quantifiable. Mostly. Wish up folk-style magics—hedgewitchery, voudon, faith-healing—and you never knew what might come out.

Bad stuff, sometimes. The older the magics, the less human-friendly they were. She’d never dealt with any of that herself. There were stories, though. Even the Cosa had bogeymen.

“So, what’s this unknown, maybe-magical bit of paper do?” she asked, focusing herself on the problem at hand. Don’t worry about the long-term stuff, Valere. You’re not in this to save the world. You’re not even in this to save the innocents and uninformed, the way the Silence claimed to be. You’re in it for the paycheck, and the smug satisfaction of a job decently done.

“It’s a parchment. And we don’t know,” Andre said, finally looking back at her. Guy didn’t look like he wanted to give them that particular bit of information, either, but she wasn’t sure if it was because he was worried about Silence secrecy, or he just didn’t want to tell them anything on principle. Probably both. Sergei had warned her, and warned her, and then warned her again that the Silence liked to play things close.

“It’s a difficult situation, as all we know is that a number of people have disappeared after coming in contact with it. With no other available information, save that the monks were most insistent that it be returned to them, we have to assume there’s danger.”

“So you’re acting as agent for them, not taking this on your own?” Sergei, wheelin’ the deal.

“In this instance, yes. Although we would have taken steps of our own, had they not contacted us.”

“If you’d heard about it,” Wren said, her tone intentionally doubting.

“We would have.”

Andre was solid, confident. Wren had her doubts, but it wasn’t really important here and now.

Sergei exhaled, a sharp, loud breath of air that recaptured Andre’s attention, his head turning as though he were watching a slow-motion tennis game. “You said that people disappeared after coming in contact with the manuscript? As in, they put it down and walked away, or…?”

The older man hedged uncomfortably, and Wren took malicious and unashamed pleasure in it, after that little omission of information, earlier.

“We’re not sure,” he said, finally.

“Where did it go?” Sergei asked with marked patience.

“We don’t know.”

“Okay, so what’s written on this parchment?”

“We don’t know. Everyone who has read it has disappeared.”

Sergei exchanged a glance with Wren, who made a “what do you want from me?” gesture back at him. He was the guy who got the details, she was the one who acted on them.

Sergei’s mouth set in a really tight line. “So, basically, you’re sending us in after an unknown factor in an unknown location with an unknown threat vector.”

“Yes.”

She couldn’t help it; she’d swear it on a stack of bibles, the words just came out. “And you people wonder why you can’t keep help….”

She might as well not have said anything, the way the two of them were still staring at each other, cobra to mongoose.

“We have arranged for you to take a flight out from Newark airport tomorrow evening. When you arrive in Milan—”

“Monday.”

That stopped Andre, who was clearly not expecting to be interrupted at this point, and certainly not by her. “Beg pardon?”

“Monday,” Wren repeated firmly. “No way I can just up and leave the country in twenty-four hours. Nuh-uh. Forget about it. I need two days, at least.” Leave the country? That meant flying. She didn’t want to fly. Anywhere. “A week would be better. I don’t even know where my passport is—hell, I don’t even know if it’s still valid!”

“We can and will take care of that,” Andre said, trying to be reassuring.

Wren was already running off a checklist in her mind. “Yeah, today’s what, Wednesday? Saturday, earliest. I have to let my mom know, and—how long do you think I’ll be gone? I need…luggage. Sergei, can I steal a suitcase? Borrow. I meant borrow. You must have something I can use. And I’ll need to stop my mail. And pay bills. And—”

“Wren. Be still.” Sergei didn’t use that tone of voice very often. Not in years, she thought. But the ice-sharp tones worked. She stopped cold, the panic that was threatening to take over her brain subsiding to somewhat more manageable levels. Negotiations. Let him handle it. Right.

“Two tickets. For Friday,” Sergei said to Andre in that same tone of voice. It didn’t work quite so well on his former boss.

“Ah. Actually.” Andre tapped his fingers on the kitchen table, and the sound immediately pulled Wren out of her own internal nosedive and put her on alert. That was the tap-tap-tap of doom. She shot a sideways glance at Sergei, and was not reassured by what she saw. His shoulders were broad to begin with, but now the way his head had lifted, and he was looking at Andre, she swore he’d gained another couple of inches across, all of it annoyed.

Andre didn’t seem to notice the storm brewing. “We had hoped that, while Ms. Valere was otherwise occupied with this situation, you would be available to work on another project back—”

“Two tickets.” The faint rose flush over his cheekbones was subsiding, but the jaw and neck muscles were still corded. “Two, or none.”

There was a brief testosterone-fueled staring match that broke when Andre looked away. Wren suddenly remembered to breathe again. Score one for the home team. But the thought was a little shaky.

“Wren doesn’t speak Italian,” Sergei said. It was almost as though, Wren thought, he were apologizing for winning.

Maybe he was. She still so didn’t get their relationship, her partner and Andre. Yes, she knew they’d been coworkers, back in Sergei’s We Don’t Discuss It days with the Silence. And that Andre had been the one to train him. But other than that, a big blank nothingness of information. A mistake, letting that go on. She counted on her partner to get her the necessary details so she could do her job, damn it. And if the two of them were going to have Dramatic and Meaningful pauses in the conversation, she needed to know why.

She hated being out of the loop in her own life. And she already hated this job.

“I do hope you’re not going to insist on business class,” Andre said, finally, dryly.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sergei said in return. She was relieved to see that he’d dropped the menacing body language, not that he wasn’t a tall bastard to begin with, at least by her standards. Kitchen wasn’t large enough for all the egos in here.

“Fine, fine, details settled. One last really important question Sergei seems to have forgotten to ask.” When the two men looked at her she put on her very best, guaranteed-annoying chipper and chirpy inquisitive face, this time smiling without showing teeth. “How much—in addition to the stipend—are we getting paid for this?”

Chapter Three

“Andre Felhim. Code 28-J8-199-6.”

“Good afternoon, sir.” A chime followed the almost-human-sounding voice, and the door of the restricted elevator opened with a soft hum, giving him access to the inner building where the Silence had its unmarked, unremarked world headquarters, on a side street in a side corner of Manhattan.

Andre put his keycard back into his pocket, touched the display pad on the wall, and rode in silence up to the seventh floor. It was quiet, now; most of the activity on seven occurred in the morning, when new reports were compiled and distributed. Friday afternoon was a time to catch up, to cover all your bases and plot strategy for the next week. Or, for managers like himself, for the weekend. The Silence slept, but not for long. There was a review meeting scheduled for Saturday morning, and he still had to look over the agenda.

“Ho, the glamorous life,” he said wryly, walking down the hall toward his office, a plain square of space carved out of the floor plan by three walls and a window. He still wasn’t quite sure how he rated one of those rare windows, but the first lesson you learned was take what you can get and never let anyone think it might have been a mistake.

While he’d been out of the office this morning, meeting with an extremely particular and paranoid new client, someone had dumped a dozen or so files into his in-box, threatening to topple the stack that was already there. A series of salmon-pink “while you were away” slips were taped to the back of his chair, fluttering slightly under the flow of air from the vent overhead. Andre pulled them off the fabric, flicking through them while he checked to see if his message light was on.

It was.

“It never stops,” he muttered, more amused than annoyed. Far worse if it were to stop. Information was the lifeblood of the Silence. And the more information you had, the more essential you were. If anyone thought, however rightly or wrongly, that you didn’t have access to new information…

The only thing equal in sin was not to bring money into the coffers, to pay for the less lucrative situations they had been founded to deal with. Endowments, even impressive ones, only went so far when you had the entire world to save.

Well. For the moment, anyway, he didn’t have to worry about either of those sins. Bringing The Wren—and Sergei—onto the Silence’s roster had been a coup he could rest on for a while longer yet, information-wise. Especially with this new client, who thought that the island estate she had just inherited might be infested with something unworldly. It was probably nuclear-irradiated cockroaches, considering where she lived, but the Silence would earn a pretty penny checking it out and cleaning it up, whatever the cause.

He almost hoped it was glow-in-the-dark cockroaches. They were still collecting royalties on the movie that got filmed after the last one of those Man-meets-Nature, Screws-it-up situations.

But that sort of project was a sideline. The supernatural screwing with the natural was their raison d’être; specifically, the Italian situation was where his focus needed to be, right now. Matthias would be annoyed not to have Sergei’s help on his current project, but Andre was not entirely unhappy that his former protégé had dug in his heels about letting the girl work alone.

He’d refrained from giving them anything more than the official, filed details of the situation, as per policy, but this felt…wrong. Bad, in his gut. And not only because they had so little information on the missing manuscript itself. Something about this had put his hackles up, and only the knowledge that these two really were the very best he could put on it made him sign off on the assignment.

That, and the fact that “I have a bad feeling about this” was not an acceptable reason within these hallways.

“You’re back.”

“You’re a master of the obvious.” He regretted his tone the moment he saw his assistant’s expression. “I’m sorry. It’s been a hellish twenty-four hours, and I’m a proper bastard for taking it out on you.”

“Make it two boxes of truffles at Christmas this year and you’re forgiven. As always.” Bren was office manager and dogsbody to three managers, Andre included, and they all ran her ragged. Chocolate once or twice a year seemed to him the least he could do.

“Anyway, you can see that disaster has once again struck while you were off-premises.”

She twiddled two red-nailed fingers in the direction of his desk, and Andre sighed dramatically. “Indeed. Any actual corpses?”

“None you have to dispose of. Coffee?”

He considered the offer briefly, then shook his head. “Thank you, but no. I’m irritable enough already without adding that swill to the mix this late in the day.”

“True, too true. Just yell if you change your mind.”

Andre paused a moment to enjoy the view of Bren’s backside as she strode down the hallway to her desk. He had an acknowledged weakness for tall, leggy blondes. Pity she’d prefer him to be Andrea.

With a chuckle at his own foolishness—the first even faint laugh he’d had since being handed the Italian project three days ago—he moved to the door and closed it against the external office distractions. And in that time his brief good humor fell away as though it had never existed.

Magic. This entire situation smelled of magic. Stank of it, actually.

Andre had been among the first, years ago, to endorse the use of Talents within the Silence. He knew their value, in an organization that dealt with the results of magic in more than three-quarters of their situations. But magic itself—the basic, unpredictable power—still made him uneasy, despite or maybe because of his continued exposure to it. For all their talk of current and channeling, it wasn’t the same as building a generator, and then flipping a switch. It was random, unpredictable—untrustworthy. Uncontrollable. Almost as uncontrollable as this unaffiliated Talent, his best (former) student at the reins or no. It was a pity he was becoming so fond of the girl. That might become a problem, eventually.

Sitting down at the glass-and-brass table he used for a desk, Andre spread the message slips out in front of him, scanning the names and sorting them into order of importance.

“Damn, damn, and damn.” It was the strongest expression of displeasure he would allow himself in the office. Andre leaned forward and stared at the blank wall opposite him. Two of the messages were from Alejandro, wanting to know with increasing levels of impatience what was happening with the Italian situation.

Alejandro wasn’t his superior…technically they were both on the same management level, and Andre in fact had seniority in years. But he was the person with oversight in that area of the world, and so despite having to come to Andre for aid, he still kept the upper hand. Levels and negotiations. The Silence was a masterpiece of levels, and every level you went up there were more appearing above you.

There were levels of trustworthiness, as well. His—what was the term? His lonejack didn’t trust him at all. Her handler trusted him just so far. How much did he trust them?

And how much of what they trusted him with could he in turn place in trust with others?

Last night, Sergei had called him. At home, not ten minutes after walking through the door, which meant the Handler had been waiting for him since Andre kept no set routine. When Andre tried to trace the call back, he discovered that the call had been routed through two different pay phones, ending up with one of those prepaid mobiles that was bought for cash. It was a level of paranoia the other man had never shown, even when he was in the thick of situations a decade ago, and normally Andre would have been amused by it, but for what his operative told him.

Not that Sergei’s cause of concern—a whisper campaign to discredit one of their operatives—was anything to worry about, not when the whispering wasn’t about the Silence itself. If anything, the Council’s attempts to discredit Wren worked to the Silence’s benefit, binding her more closely to them, if only fiscally.

But part of their deal with Sergei had been that they would protect Wren in the case of attack by the Council, and the means of attack had not, in their agreement, been specified as purely physical.

And it bothered Andre a great deal that no one in the organization had heard about this “whisper campaign” earlier. Information wasn’t the name of the game, it was the game.

Picking up the phone, he ignored the glowing message light and dialed a three-digit number. You didn’t keep Logan waiting.

“You got my report?” Andre asked.

The answer was affirmative, followed by an interrogative.

Andre picked up a rough-edged chunk of marble from his desk and rolled it in his right hand as he spoke. “I don’t know. It could be nothing, it could be good for us—or it could be potentially very ugly.”

The baritone on the other end of the phone got louder, just a shade too vehement for it to have been a polite comment. You didn’t hedge in front of Logan, either.

“We don’t know enough about what the Council knows. Truthfully, we don’t know anything, really. If our sources were compromised, then everything in the file is suspect.” He didn’t think that had happened, but it was a contingency they had to cover. That was the real reason the upper levels of the Silence needed Wren working for them; she was their conduit into the Cosa Nostradamus and the gossip therein. Gossip about the magical world that was so often the cause of the situations the Silence existed to clean up.

Although her admittedly extraordinary ability as a Retriever was a very useful thing to have in the toolbox, indeed. And the P.R. value of letting it be known—selectively, oh so selectively—that she was on their roster, that could not be overlooked or undervalued, either. “We didn’t hear anything because we’re not the ears they’re whispering into, no…and none of our clients have reported anything in their nets. It’s not likely…Sir, yes…Yes, sir. Yes, I would say that it is entirely possible that our involvement is being whispered as well.”

A pause, and he reached for the bottle of antacid sitting on his desk, shaking out three pills but not taking them just yet. Bad form to chew while getting chewed out by your boss.

“Yes, sir. We’re already on it.”

Andre hung up the phone and exhaled sharply through pursed lips. That hadn’t been as bad as it might have been. Logan was a bastard, even for the Silence, but a decent Division manager despite that. Or perhaps because of it; he knew that praise and beatings had to be carefully balanced for maximum result. Being reamed by a senior administrator the way Andre just had was always a learning experience.

And the only thing to do with experiences like that was to learn from them.

Andre mentally sorted through the list of people available to him, and jabbed a button on the phone.

“Darcy. Pronto.”

While he waited for his researcher to arrive, Andre went through the list of “while you were aways” and dropped almost half into the shredder placed discreetly beneath his desk. The rest could wait until he had a spare moment to deal with them.

“You rang, oh mighty one?”

When Darcy Cross was born, office gossip claimed, the presiding doctor had asked her mother if she wanted to file a complaint, since clearly not everything had been delivered. The ensuing years hadn’t done anything to refute the doctor’s comment: now in her mid-thirties, Darcy could claim four foot five inches if she wore heels, and her bone structure was so frail it reminded one, inevitably, of a baby chick. People always stepped carefully around her, as though she might shatter from a sharp word. But the mind in that delicate body was first-rate, and the Silence paid very well for the use of it.

“Two of our ops are getting pressured from an external source, creating doubt as to their effectiveness, their veracity. Subvert, nothing concrete, nothing provable.” He pulled a three-inch-thick folder from the pile to his left and handed it to her. Everything was on disk, of course, but the surest way to keep something secure these days was to keep it offline.

“You want me to find the source?” The remote expression in Darcy’s hazel-blue eyes made it clear that she thought she was being undertasked.

“Not exactly.” His headshake made her perk up, more interested. She perched on the edge of the sole guest chair and waited to hear more.

“We know who is doing it, and why—more or less. The current situation is to our benefit, but only so long as it remains…imprecise.” So long as his players remained off balance and uncertain, but not irreparably damaged in mind or reputation. Logan had been quite emphatic about that. “We need to know exactly what is being said, and to whom, on an ongoing basis. Monitor the flow. And if the pressure is ramped up in any way, or you feel that there is any cause for alarm—”

“Insert counterpressure in such a way that it would appear to issue from the same source as the original pressure to confuse the issue and weaken the first source.” Skin that sunlight rarely saw had its own glow as she processed the intricacies of the assignment. “Will I have support on this?”

“No.” The fewer people who knew anything other than “we’re looking into it” the better, just in case. “But you’re hereby released from anything below a St. George-level priority.” He’d catch hell for that, but Logan would have to cover for him.

“Most excellent.” She weighed the folder in her hand, as though that could tell her anything. Who knew, maybe it could. She wasn’t a Talent, but her mind was nonetheless impressive. And not a little terrifying, if she looked at you the wrong way. Santa Claus might know if you were naughty or nice, but Darcy could give you details about what, with whom, when and how much you paid for it.

He was quite reasonably glad that she and he worked for the same side.

“Go on, then. Shoo.” He made a “go away” motion at her. “Go be dangerously brilliant elsewhere. I know for a fact that your office is larger than mine.”

“Because you’re never actually in your office,” she said in return, then stood to leave, folder in hand. But as she turned to go she hesitated, as though something in her brain had clicked over unexpectedly.

“Yes?” He leaned back in his chair, watching as whatever it was she was processing worked its way to the front.

“I was just remembering—it may be nothing…but I was working on another situation, and part of that involved interviewing a couple of FocAs, and one of them said something…okay, Cross, what did he say?”

FocAs was slang for Focused Actives, field agents who were also Talents. There weren’t many, and none of them were overly gifted—until Wren Valere—but still useful enough to warrant their own category.

“Right.” She snapped her fingers, making Andre blink. “He said that there’d been rumblings back home…. They were talking to each other, actually, so I was only half-listening, and yeah, ‘my dad says there’s a schism in the community, something coming big and ugly.’” She broke off, her voice rising back to her normal tones. “Think it’s related?”

“No, it’s not—wait.”

This might not be related to the specific item he had set her on, but from what he knew of the political structure among human Talents—and damn Sergei for the tight-lipped bastard he was—the relationship between the Mage’s Council and the rest of the Talent community was a fault line just waiting to rupture. As he understood the gist of Sergei’s reports, the Council wanted to be the sole arbiter of what all Talents did or didn’t do within their community. Lonejacks, the freelancers to the Council’s union, if you would, were the largest, loudest—if totally disorganized—voice in opposition to those plans.

Wren Valere was a lonejack—and one already in the Council’s crosshairs. Any trouble would certainly impact her. And now, by association, the Silence. That was reason enough to follow up on any gossip, no matter how vague.

“Sir?”

He held up one finger, to indicate that she should allow him a moment longer to process.

Even if this newest information were completely unrelated—unlikely but possible—the information could still be useful, long-term. While all Talents were considered part of what they referred to slightly tongue-in-cheek as the Cosa Nostradamus, not all of the Cosa were lonejacks or Council members. None of the Talents successfully recruited by the Silence Handlers, for example, had affiliations to either group; few of them knew much about the Cosa other than the fact that it existed. Like any large family, Andre thought without amusement, there were always branches that hadn’t spoken in generations.

That was the main reason why the Silence knew a little about the Cosa, but until Sergei had met up with his Wren, nothing at all about the Council. Cosa members were gossips, and the Cosa creed was inclusionary. The Council was neither.

While they might have been able to pry details from their FocAs, Handlers were instructed never to place their active’s personal obligations against the Silence’s interests, to the point where Andre had taken people off situations entirely if it was deemed a conflict of interest.

It had nothing to do with compassion and everything to do with practicality. The Silence needed their people to be one hundred percent on the job, and conflict impaired judgment. And that was even more emphasized with FocAs. They were too few, too valuable to risk.

Not to mention, Andre thought mordantly, that having even a low-level Talent gunning for you could make life in this electronic age…uncomfortable.

“So…?” Darcy was still standing in his doorway, waiting while his thoughts chased each other to a decision.

“Get him in here, without his Handler,” Andre said. It was a risk, but since the boy had already had contact with Darcy, less of one than sending someone else might have been. “Quickly, but quietly. And—no, wait. Send him directly to me.” That was a risk, but knowledge was power. And this might be—or become—something it would be wiser to keep for himself, rather than sharing.

After she left, he picked up the phone once again and dialed an outside number.

“Poul. I have an assignment for you.”

It was going to be a longer afternoon than he had planned.

“You think P.B.’s going to be okay while we’re gone?”

Sergei finished putting their carry-on luggage in the overhead bin and looked down at his partner.

“Yeah. I think the obnoxious little walking blanket will be fine.” He shifted to let another passenger drag his luggage by, and then closed the bin, unlacing and removing his shoes and placing them in their fabric carry bag, then storing them under the seat in front of their row. Wren had already kicked off her own shoes, practical and comfortable leather skimmers, and curled up on her own seat. The only good thing about being short, she thought, was that she got to be sort of comfortable in airplane seats.

“And Andre’s check cleared?”

“Cleared before I let you start packing.”

She knew all this. She just liked hearing Sergei say it again. His voice was deep and raspy, like a lion’s purr. It made her feel better. He could probably be reciting the back ads in the Village Voice and it would still make her feel better. You’re so astonishingly easy, Valere.

“Passport?”

“In my pocket with all our other papers.” He was fighting back a smile behind that stern expression, she could tell. In any other situation it would annoy the hell out of her. But not right now. Now she was out of the airport, with all the worried-looking people and loudspeaker announcements and hurry-hurry-wait-wait and all those windows looking out at all those…planes.

The fact that she was currently sitting in one of those planes hadn’t escaped her attention. But somehow being in one was better than looking at and planning on getting in one.

Wren knew it didn’t make any sense. And thinking about it just emphasized the fact that she was in a plane rather than a weirdly shaped train, or something. And if she thought in that direction too long, bad things would start to happen again.

“Emergency rations?”

“Are in your bag, next to the newspaper. And yes, I packed those disgusting maple nut things.” He sat down next to her, raising the armrest between them to put his arm around her more comfortably. “Wren. Hush. It’s going to be okay.”

Easy for him to say, she thought a little resentfully. He didn’t feel this beast singing beneath him, all filled with electronic devices practically begging to be drained. What happened if they ran into trouble, and she panicked, and tried to reach for current? What if—

“You’re thinking too much,” he said.

Guilty as charged, Officer. But he was right. If she just stopped thinking about it, her instinct for self-preservation—incredibly strong, as she knew from previous close calls—would kick in and keep her from doing anything suicidal in her panic. Probably. So. Change the subject.

“Do you think that Andre wasn’t telling us everything?”

Sergei snorted at that. “Andre never tells anyone everything. But no, I think that he was as up-front as he’s capable of being on Silence business.”

Oh, that was reassuring. She felt totally reassured. Really.

“Did I mention that I’m hating this job already? Even without the being on this thing I’m not thinking about being on?”

“I don’t like it either, woman. If you’ve any better ideas, I would love to hear them.”

“Bet Noodles would hire me.”

“Yes, I can see you spending your life as a Chinese short-order cook. Or a bicycle delivery girl. If you could Translocate better, maybe.”

“All right, that was low.” Her recent attempts at Translocation had been done under only extreme duress, once to save their own lives during a job gone bad, and once to keep a client from getting killed. But she’d gotten the job done, hadn’t she? So what was a little vomiting and current-spillover between friends?

“It will all be fine. Just another job.” Sergei took out the newspaper and checked to make sure that the business section was intact, then put it away and pulled a burgundy folder from his bag and extracted a sheaf of typewritten pages from it.

“See? All the information we need, hand-delivered by Andre’s little messenger boy this morning, including names, dates, places, and driving directions. Why don’t you try to sleep, okay? It’s a long flight, and we’re going to have to hit the ground running when we get there.”

She rested her head against his shoulder, feeling the comforting familiarity of him. None of the awkwardness or uncomfortableness of recent months, just…Sergei. The thought almost made her cry. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…only it’s not gone. Still here. Still Sergei. He was right. P.B. was a big—well, okay, full-grown demon, he could take care of himself. And if he did run into trouble, Tree-taller was around, had promised to keep an eye out. The other Talent had no beef with the fatae, the nonhuman members of the Cosa Nostradamus, and would listen if P.B. came to him. And anything Andre hadn’t told them in that packet, they’d figure out on their own. Wasn’t like they needed the Silence, the Silence needed them.

“Wren?”

They’d probably only be gone a couple-five days, anyway. A week, tops.

“Yeah. Sleep. Right. Okay. I’ll try.”

Twenty minutes later, the plane pulled away from the gate. Sergei looked up from the papers he was reading as the safety instructions tape began to play, then down at his companion. She was still leaning against his shoulder, strands of chestnut hair falling into her eyes, and he could hear the faintest completely unladylike snore coming from her half-open mouth.

“Rest well, Wrenlet,” he whispered. “Tough job ahead.”

Chapter Four

“Oh God, there’s fur on my teeth.”

Sergei winced. “That’s a lovely image, thank you so much for sharing.”

“You’re oh-so-welcome. Bleah.” Wren twisted her mouth up in disgust. “I need my toothbrush. Or some sandpaper.”

“Wait until we’re through customs, okay?”

“If I breathe on a customs inspector they’re not going to let us into the country.”

“Wren, I’ve smelled your morning breath. It’s not that bad. It’s not good, but it’s not that bad.”

“This is worse. This is overnight-in-an-airplane morning breath.”

They were walking through the Malpensa airport, having just picked up their bags from the luggage carousel. It was seven o’clock Saturday morning local time, but her body was claiming it was one o’clock in the morning, and since she had only managed to sleep the first hour of the flight, every cell in her body was clamoring for a shower, a nap, and a king-size candy bar. In exactly that order.

“Where is everyone, anyway?” A stark contrast to the chaos of Newark airport, there seemed to be only a dozen or so people walking with them toward customs, and only one very bored-looking security guard leaning against the wall farther down near the doors. The wheels on her luggage stuck and she stopped, swearing slightly, to get them straightened out. She really wanted to take her jacket off, but that would be one more thing to somehow carry, and it just wasn’t worth it. Besides, her T-shirt was probably a mess of wrinkles. And not the fashionably acceptable kind, either. Her partner, on the other hand, looked as pressed and proper as he had when he got on the damn plane the night before. It ought to be illegal. It was probably some as-of-yet-unknown skill set of Talent, and he’d been holding out on her all these years.

Sergei shrugged, pausing to let her catch up. “Not a very busy airport, I guess. Mostly businesspeople. Tourists all fly into Rome, probably.”

“Why couldn’t we have flown into Rome?” Not that Wren cared much, one way or the other—all flights were hellish, no matter where you ended up.

“I didn’t make the flight arrangements, Genevieve.”

His voice sounded brittle, suddenly, and Wren backed off. He hadn’t slept much either, and Sergei without sleep was a total bear. She ran her tongue over her teeth again and grimaced. She felt so disgusting, it was barely human. She knew there was a travel bottle of mouth-wash in her kit, if she could just convince him to stop for a minute so she could duck into the bathroom…

Not that there were any bathrooms to be seen. Stifling a sigh, she picked up her carry-on and yanked the handle of her wheeled case, following after her partner. The moment they were through customs, she was rinsing her entire body out.

“Signore? Signorina? Vieni con me, per favore.” They had reached the end of the hallway, and the guard—a middle-aged woman who looked bored behind belief—was pointing them toward a group of people standing patiently in several different queues.

Sergei tugged Wren’s arm gently, and led her into one of the lines. She blinked at him, then grinned, her pique forgotten. “They’re speaking Italian!”

“Welcome to Italy.” He took her passport out of her hand, checked over the documents, and then put them with his. She barely even noticed.

“No, I know, but…it’s so neat!” All right, so yes she had understood they were going to a foreign country. And that they spoke a different language. She grew up just outside of Manhattan, so people speaking foreign languages were no big deal. But an entire country that wasn’t the same….

She had a sudden thought, and reached out gently with the inner sense that made her a Talent to tap at the wiring running through the place. Gently, carefully, just in case.

“Huh.”

Sergei looked at her sharply, and she realized she must have said that out loud. “What?”

“Nothing. I just thought…I guess I thought the current would feel different. But it doesn’t.” She shrugged, suddenly annoyed at herself. “I mean, it does, yeah; different voltages, different flow, like a stream versus a creek versus a…whatever. But I thought…”

“It would have an accent?”

She looked up at him accusingly. Sure enough, he was smiling at her in that annoyingly amused way.

“Yeah. Okay? I thought it would have an accent.”

He did laugh then, and she thought briefly about kicking him. “Too much effort to beat you the way you deserve,” she grumbled.

“I’m sorry. Honestly. I am.” But he kept chuckling.

Wren didn’t mind, really. Smiling Sergei was always better than grumpy Sergei, especially when they were being gestured at by pissed-off looking guys in uniforms.

“Signore?”

“I think we’re being summoned,” she said, poking her partner in the ribs and jerking her chin in the direction of the customs counter.

“Right.” He grabbed his bags and moved forward, Wren close on his heels. “Buon giorno.”

“Buon giorno. I passaporti?”

Sergei handed over their passports and entry paperwork, and the official gave them a cursory once-over. “Vieni in Italia per affari commerciale o come turista?”

“Affari.”

Wren’s attention wandered. Having touched the current in this place, she was now overly aware of it. And of the fact that dipping into it would be almost as good as a shower.

Then she caught a glimpse of an armed guard standing just beyond the security gate, clearly ready and able for trouble, and her exhausted-into-quiet nerves pinged again.

Maybe not. Somewhere not quite so…stressed. This airport didn’t have the same tension as back home, but it was still an airport, and screwing up in airports was still very much not a good idea. Especially since she didn’t know any of the Cosa in town, assuming there even were any. Oh. That was a twist she hadn’t thought of. Not that it mattered so much here, but when they got to where they were going she would have to check things out, see if she could meet up with someone, maybe get the lay of the land. It would be rude to be in town and not even try to say hello, right?

And then Sergei was nudging her, indicating that they were done, moving her through the doors and into the terminal itself. Here was the noise and bustle Wren had been expecting, although it was still relatively empty.

“Coffee!” She started forward, then stopped. “ATM first. Then coffee. Then…wasn’t someone supposed to meet us?”

Sergei looked around. “Yes.” He reached into his carry-on and pulled out the burgundy folder again. “One Marina Fabrizio. She’s supposed to be our contact person here.”

“Fine. You look for her. I’m gonna hit an ATM and then get some coffee. You want anything?”

“A double espresso, please. And bring back a couple of sugar packets.”

“A double?” She gave him a dubious look. Sergei was a tea drinker—he drank coffee reluctantly, and without any real enjoyment.

“It’s a long drive to where we’re going,” he reminded her. “I need to stay awake.”

“Right. One double, extra sugar. Oh boy.”

Sergei watched Wren head off into the terminal, slipping past the few travelers like a ghost. His partner was statistically ordinary with a capital O—five-four, well built but not in any way that would draw undue attention, brown hair and brown eyes and skin the color of…of pure vanilla ice cream. Tasty, yes, but unless you knew that, decidedly ordinary. And when you added in her ability to warp current into a sort of no-see-me force field…

Many years ago, she had told him that when she tapped into current she could dye herself blue, wrap herself in bells, and waltz naked through Grand Central Terminal at rush hour without anyone noticing her. He had believed it then. He knew it for a fact now. Not that she had ever actually done that particular—at least, he didn’t think she had.

Sergei also suspected that, despite knowing perhaps five words in Italian, his partner would have no trouble at all finding an ATM, buying coffee, and possibly finding their missing contact while she was at it. Invisible to the casual eye did not mean incapable. Far from it. He had told Andre that he was along because he was the one with the language skills. The truth was…

Sergei raked one hand through his hair, impatient with himself. The truth was that their…relationship, for lack of a more accurate word, was far too fragile for her to be out of his sight for very long. Or him, hers.

Not that he had any real worries about her being wooed and pursued by the stereotypical dashing Italian loverboy, but he still wasn’t about to let her go haring off on her own. Not until they’d actually gotten past this damned push-me-pull-you thing they’d fallen into. The past few months had been hellish. First her getting shot, and recovering—it had been okay then; taking it slow, discovering the sweetness of her mouth, the pleasure in just being able to hold her while she rested. But the moment she was back on her feet, everything went sour.

His fault. He knew that. He’d spent so many years in stasis, emotionally. Intentionally. Trying to avoid repeating the one impossible mistake that had driven him from the Silence. And still she’d managed to get under his skin. Into his heart in a way that couldn’t be safely packaged up by “friend,” or even “partner.”

Time for denial is over, old man. Over, gone, kaput.

He was hoping that this trip, away from the preexisting patterns their partnership fell into, they would be able to stop overthinking everything and just feel. For good or ill, but the fiddling about was going to kill him. And he didn’t think she was doing much better.

Feeling his shoulders start to tense up he forced them down, extending and flexing his fingers toward the ground, trying to remember the basic grounding exercises Wren had taught him back in the earliest days of their working relationship. Grounding was essential to a Talent, who routinely drew the magical essence from electricity and sent it back out again through their bodies. For him, it was a way to destress, forcing the anxiety out of his pores the way Wren said she handled current.

And thank God she’d been able to handle it on the plane, he thought, not for the first time. In the airport, he’d only been worried that they would be delayed if something blew up spectacularly, or if she sent the airport into a blackout. In a plane…

But he had kept his fears tightly to himself, and she’d managed admirably. Although he suspected that the entertainment system going on the blink two-thirds of the way through the movie had been her fault.

He’d seen the film before, anyway.

“Where are you, Ms. Fabrizio?” he asked the airport at large. “I don’t like it when things go wrong this early in the plan.” A good Handler prepared his agents for all probabilities. The information Andre had given them was far sketchier than he had let on to Wren, and not up to the old man’s standards, as Sergei remembered them. So it was time for him to stop being Sergei the businessman, or even Sergei the Retriever’s partner, and become the Handler. Keep control. Maintain confidence in the active agent.

Checking his watch only informed him that he’d forgotten to change it when they got on the plane. Unfastening the slender gold timepiece from his wrist, he moved the hands forward, all the while looking around to see if there was anyone who looked like they might be looking for them. Or, better yet, holding up a sign that said Silence Operatives, Report Here.

He didn’t think they were going to get that lucky.

By the time Wren returned, balancing two small paper cups and a handful of sugar packets, he knew they weren’t going to be lucky at all.

“Did we get stood up?”

“Looks that way.” He took the smaller cup from her, took off the lid and dumped four packets in without tasting it first. Wren, more cautious, sipped hers delicately, then reached over and snagged two unopened packets out of his hand.

“That’ll put hair on your everything,” she said, stirring the sugar granules until they dissolved and then trying it again. “Oh yeah. Way better. So?”

“So?” Maybe he was more jet-lagged than he thought, but he’d lost track of what she was talking about. Perhaps he should have gotten two coffees.

She gave him a wide-eyed look of impatience. “So how late is our alleged contact?”

Oh. Right. Sergei checked his watch again, needlessly since the hands had only moved five minutes since the last time he’d checked. “Two hours from the time we landed, minus the time it took us to actually make it through customs, including the time I’ve been waiting for you to get back—”

“Yeah, I stopped in the bathroom, okay?” She bared her teeth at him. “No more fur. Anyway. I’m voting this chick isn’t going to show. Ya think?”

He thought so as well, but was hesitant to agree too quickly. It wouldn’t do to blow off their Silence contact on their very first assignment. Wren was cheerfully, aggressively able to ignore anything that wasn’t in the process of attacking her. But he was supposed to be the business guy, and part of business was dealing with the political aspects of it all. Maintain confidence in the active agent. But be cautious. “There might have been a delay….”

“Two hours’ worth? And she couldn’t delegate someone else to meet us, or maybe, y’know, call us about the delay?” He flinched, and reached for the mobile clipped to his belt. No, it was turned on, and still working. Good. Carrying a cell phone in close proximity to Wren was always a risky thing, but staying in touch was more important. And she was pretty good about warning him before a major current pull so he could turn it off in time. Mostly.

“Sergei, is there anything she could tell us that they couldn’t have given us beforehand, or called in? Or, maybe, have waiting for us at our hotel?”

He shook his head. “Unlikely, no. I mean, it’s unlikely that they, or rather she—” He gave it up as a bad job and took another gulp of the coffee, finishing it off. The brew was heavy and bitter, and even the sugar didn’t make it easy to drink, but he could practically feel it slapping his neurons into firing properly.

“Then screw this, and screw her.” Wren said, crumpling her coffee cup and looking around for a convenient trash bin. “Let’s go.”

It galled him to abandon a meet, even if the other person had flaked on them, but she was right; the contact was probably only a courtesy. And they had waited. The important thing now was to get to the monastery where the manuscript had disappeared from, and start their search. Anything the Silence needed to tell them—well, the Milan office had made the damn hotel reservation, too, so they could pick up a phone and call the hotel, or send a fax. Although it would probably be a good idea to find an Internet café somewhere if he could and check e-mail, even before they got to the hotel.

He took the cup from her, and threw it out with his own, then looked around to take his bearings.

“This way,” he said finally, leading her to the elevator, down two floors and then through a covered walkway to where the car rental offices were. “Stay put,” he told her, depositing her in the corner with their luggage. “If I remember anything about Italian bureaucracies, this will take forever.”

However, his expectations were unfulfilled, and the registration went smoothly enough. He collected Wren and the luggage, and they found their way without too many problems to the car assigned to them. He unlocked the doors, then did a double-take. “Damn. I had forgotten about that.”

“Forgotten about what?” Wren dropped her carry-on into the back seat of the battered, dark blue sedan and looked at him. “BMW. Sweet.”

“They’re like Chevrolet over here, don’t get too excited. And I haven’t driven overseas in so long I forgot to request an automatic transmission.”

Wren’s brow creased, and she reached up to tug at the short braid she’d gathered her hair into at some point. “I can’t drive stick,” she admitted.

“I can. But it’s been…a while.”

“Oh boy,” was his partner’s only comment as she got into the passenger seat and strapped the safety belt on. “Oh boy.”

Chapter Five

The drive from Malpensa to the monastery in the hills just north of Siena took five hours, most of it on an endless winding highway where driving under one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour got you flashed lights and eloquent hand gestures as they zoomed past. Finally Sergei had gotten the hang of changing gears, and they’d moved up to speed themselves.

“So how does the Silence end up with this gig, anyway?” Wren asked, more out of idle curiosity than anything else. “Do they hand out flyers on street corners? ‘Lose something magical? Call us!’ Hey, there’s an idea. Maybe—”

“Nothing quite so crassly commercial,” Sergei said, cutting that bad idea off at the knees while shifting to pass a double-axle truck going one hundred kph. “The Silence is a watchdog organization, for the most part. Think of it as analogous to the United Nations.”

“Yeah, so you’ve said before. ‘Always on the lookout for things gone wrong to set right,’ like the Marines meet Quantum Leap.”

“I never said that.”

“Close enough. But what you never said was how the Marines got called.”

“Networking, mostly. ‘Someone knew someone who was helped in that sort of situation, let me put in a call’ kind of thing. And then they parcel out the assignments, based on who has the best skills to handle it.”

“And how many of those someones are actually Silence employees?”

“Cynical woman. Not as many as you would think. The Silence does do good work. The fact that the rest of the world hasn’t imploded yet, from means magical and otherwise, is proof of that.”

Privately, Wren thought her partner was still showing signs of Silence brainwashing. But saying that would probably be poking the bear with the grumpy stick. Fun, sure, but ultimately a bad idea.

“So. Where are we going, anyway?” she asked, in order to move the conversation on.

“A small town in Umbria called…something or another in Italian. The monastery where the object was kept is there. We’ll take a look around, see what you can pick up, and go from there. Okay?”

He was making plans without her. Normally that would lead to some harsh words—she was the Retriever, not him, and she knew what needed to be done—but the need for a nap was winning over the planning portion of her brain, and the yawn she could feel coming on overruled anything else. For now.

“Yeah. Okay.”

The rest of the trip was a blur, to her, of speeding cars, rolling green and yellow hills, and Sergei’s muttered curses forming a melody that finally sent her off into dreamland.

“We’re here.”

Wren opened her eyes to afternoon sunlight bathing her vision with a soft golden tinge. She got out of the car and stretched, then looked around. “Sorry, didn’t mean to sleep all the way.” She paused. “Where are we?” The car was parked on a small patch of gravel surrounded on three sides by tall, narrow trees. It all looked the part of a scenic destination, but the low stone building on the rise of hill behind them didn’t look like any hotel she’d ever stayed at before. She sniffed the air. It was fresh, clean, filled with allergens, and…off, somehow. She sniffed again. No, just your ordinary fresh air. Then why was there this weird trickle of unease down her spine? Jet lag. Italian coffee. Could be anything. Where the hell are we? “Sergei…”

He reached into the back seat for his jacket, but didn’t put it on right away. The expression on his face was one she knew all too well: him about to try and talk her into a job that he knew she wasn’t going to like. Except that they were already on a job she didn’t like. “I thought it might be a good idea to stop in and let the monks know that we’re here.”

Wren thought of a few particularly good comebacks, but settled for an unhappy grunt. She had fallen asleep and left the driving to him. That put him in the decision-making seat, and his instincts were pretty damn good about stuff like this. Even if she was still in dire need of that shower and a candy bar.

“Besides…” He looked down at the view, but his attention was clearly elsewhere. The breeze ruffled his hair slightly, and made her wish she were wearing a long-sleeved shirt for the first time in weeks.

“Besides?” she prompted him.

“It’s nothing. I just wanted to get started, is all.”

“You sure they’re going to want drop-in visitors?” she asked mildly. “I mean, monastery, monks, isolation, etcetera, right?”

“We’re hardly unexpected. And I don’t think it’s a cloistered monastery in the way you’re thinking—according to the sign we passed on the way up, they have a gift shop.”

“Oooookay….” For some reason, Wren had the sudden visual of pasta in the shape of the Crucifixion, with red sauce, and shook her head violently until the image was gone. She was already probably going to Hell, but why make it even worse? “But monks and prayers and bell-tolling, right?”

“Indeed. And we even wear robes occasionally.” They both spun around to see a middle-aged man in a pale grey robe that should have looked silly but didn’t, standing in the grass to the side of the parking area, smiling at them. “Forgive me. I heard the car coming up the hill and came down to see who it could be. I am Brother Teodosio. And you, obviously, are our visitors from the States.”

“Sergei Didier,” Sergei’s hand was engulfed in the other man’s. They were about the same height, but Teodosio had at least fifty pounds on him, and very little of it was muscle. His face was round, but not jolly, and Wren didn’t think many people challenged him twice.

“Wren Valere,” she said, and had her own hand swallowed in turn. His skin was warm, and a little moist, but nothing unpleasant. His eyes were surprisingly blue, under the black hair peppering into grey, and Wren noted that he didn’t have a tonsure like she’d always thought was required style for monks.

And he’s wearing jeans under that robe. And sneakers. Another fine myth shot to…okay, maybe not hell, for a monk.

“I hope that your drive down was a pleasant one. Welcome to the Sienese, and specifically to I Monaci delle Sante Parole—better known to some as the House of Legend.”

“House of…?” Sergei’s ears practically perked up, probably hoping it had something to do with artwork he could cart back home and make a nice chunk of change on the side.

“Legend.” Teodosio’s attention went back to Sergei, promptly dismissing—forgetting about—Wren. That was a side effect of her particular blend of skills, and part of what made her so effective. And why her mentor, Neezer, had nicknamed her Jenny-wren. Because nobody ever saw the small brown bird—but she saw them.

“Indeed,” the monk continued, “as with any building over a century or two old, there are stories attached to it. And the House is quite old, indeed. It is our heritage, our reason for being here. And, indeed, the reason for your being here as well, sadly.”

“As to that—my information said that you would be able to fill us in on the specifics?”

“You were not told?” The monk seemed taken aback by that, then shrugged as though asking why the works of man should be any less obscure than the works of God.

“To understand, you must first understand who we are, and what we do here. The story is—” and he made a gesture to indicate that they should walk with him along the path Wren now saw leading through the field and up the rise to the building she had noted earlier “—that in the early years of the thirteenth century, four monks came north, fleeing the aftermath of one or another of the endless squabbles between the city-states and the papacy.”

Sergei fell easily into step beside their guide, leaving Wren to take up position behind them on the path.

“Their abbey had been destroyed?” Sergei was in smooth mode, she noted. She kept her ears open and took mental notes, in case anything seemed relevant—or might become so, later on.

“They kept no records of where they came from—we don’t even know their names, as they simply referred to themselves as, how would it translate?” He shook his head as though searching for something inside. “As ‘the brothers of the gathering word’? Close enough. And that is the assumption, yes. Destroyed, or taken as spoils of victory by whichever princeling had control of that town on that particular month.”

Sergei was nodding, drawing the monk on to tell the rest of the story.

“With them, so the story goes, they had little money, no supplies, and two chests filled with manuscripts they had taken from their abbey when they fled. That, we assume, is why they took the name they did, referring to the gathering of the manuscripts into a library of sorts. They arrived here, and with the permission of the local Ghibelline nobility and the local bishop, built the House first, not for their own protection, but for the books they carried with them. And so it has been ever since; we are the caretakers of learning, of the wisdom established by those who have come before us.”

“Librarians, you mean.”

Rather than looking offended, Teodosio smiled and nodded. “Exactly.”

Somehow Wren doubted that it had been anywhere near as simple or neatly tied up as that. From what little she knew of history, the rivalries he mentioned had been pretty nasty, and making an alliance with the wrong person could be deadly. So what had those four monks offered the local bishop that he gave them—homeless, with no money or military strength—permission to build their own independent housing on what looked like some seriously prime property? Sergei’s notes said, for all they were Catholic monks in name, there wasn’t any direct control of the order from Rome. She was just a nice lapsed Protestant girl, but that seemed really odd to her. Wasn’t there a whole chain of command thing, orders of obedience, ad extreme nauseum?

She made a mental note to follow up on that particular question, when she had time. It might be nothing—or it could be everything. You never knew.

They came around a bend in the path, and were on a cliff overlooking a valley town that could have come out of a tourist’s guide.

“Wow,” Wren said, taking a step closer to the edge. Absolutely prime property, yeah. You could see for miles, the horizon a smudge of sun-yellowed fields intersected by the occasional ribbon of black road and dotted by random buildings that were probably either barns or farmhouses.

“Indeed. It reminds one of the glory around us, every morning, when I come out here.”

Not to mention being totally defensible, Wren thought, casting a look over her shoulder to where the low stone building was revealed to be a more elaborate structure than it had first appeared. Yeah, red stone fortresslike building put on the top of a hill, near a cliff, sure they’d just hand that view over to a couple of rabbitting monks, no questions asked, out of the goodness and charity in their hearts.

Wren didn’t much believe in the goodness of anyone’s heart. Not without references.

“You speak excellent English,” Sergei said finally.

Teodosio laughed. “I went to university in Boston,” he said. “M.I.T. I thought I was going to be a mathematician, but God had other plans for my curiosity.” Wren looked away from the view at that, but his face seemed as serenely unlined as before.

“Come, you’ll want to visit the room where the manuscript was taken from, and see what you may see, yes?”

“Yes, please,” Sergei said, shooting Wren a warning glance. She returned it with a look of wide-eyed innocence. They had played out variations of this scenario before. The big, well-dressed man would take the lead, asking the questions and hogging the attention. After a few more carefully smart but not too imaginative questions, Wren would start to fade from their awareness, leaving her free to do the real looking around. Not that there was much to see.

“The building to your left is our dormitory.” It looked like a traditional rustic farmhouse; three stories high with wide windows framed by wooden shutters, two grey chimneys, one on either end; and faced entirely of the same brick used in the larger building. But something about it said modern construction, without being obvious about it. A carefully tended garden ran the entire length of the left side, filled with tall green leafy things and splashes of red and yellow that Wren couldn’t identify. Vegetables came from the supermarket, usually wrapped in plastic. She didn’t think about it much beyond that. It was surprisingly quiet, just the sounds of birds and wind, and the occasional low thump and murmur, like someone moving something somewhere else. Her skin prickled uneasily.

Two men came out of the front door, talking in low voices to each other. They were dressed in plain brown trousers and button-down shirts rather than Theo’s robe, but their postures were more hunched over, more defensive. They caught sight of the newcomers, and froze.

“Ah, just who I wanted to see,” Teodosio said. If he wanted to see them, they clearly had not wanted to see Teodosio. Although it might have been the Americans they were reacting to, the way the duo scuttled around to the other side as they approached.

“Brothers Alain and Frederich. This is Signor Didier, from the States, and his associate, Signorina Valere. They work with Signor Mattenni and are here representing the signor’s interests.”

Wren kept a straight face, and managed not to shoot her partner a glance. She supposed that name would have come up in the briefing their no-show contact would have given them, because there had been no Mattenni mentioned anywhere in the quickie briefing they got before leaving, including all the paperwork Sergei was hauling around.

Or maybe they hadn’t planned on giving them that particular info at all.

Gee, Silence information not up-to-date or fully accessible. The shock. Sergei was right, their motto really is know all, tell nothing. Even to their own people.

“Alain, if you would inform Jacob that our guests are here?” Brother Alain made a hunched-forward gesture that looked like it started out as a bow, and ran back into the farmhouse. “Frederich, come with me, please.”

Frederich looked even less happy than before, but obediently fell into step with them as they continued toward the larger building.

Now that she was on a level with it, the structure looked even more like a fortress than before—a rectangular shape, two stories high, with narrowly arched windows at odds with the larger, square openings of the farmhouse-dormitory. The facade was arched, and the double-door opening could have taken a full-size Cadillac and not scratched the chrome on either side. In the afternoon sunlight, it glowed against the summer-blue sky, like something out of one of those paintings, the ones where it always looked as though it were about to thunder. Hudson Valley school, right. She had retrieved one back in, what, ’97?

Teodosio led them right up to the doors and unlocked the left-hand door with an old-fashioned metal key. “Any time you wish to enter the House, either I or Frederich must be with you. We have many treasures within these walls, you must understand, and we are the entrusted caretakers of them.”

“Of course,” Sergei said politely. Personally, Wren figured the lock would take her about seven seconds to tumble, even without using current. And there didn’t seem to be any other kind of security, no alarms or tripwires or—

The doors closed behind them, and Wren felt herself shiver not from the sudden dark, or the echoing quiet, but from the fact that she knew, instantly, that she was inside a building with absolutely no electrical wiring at all. The walls were thick brick and mortar, and insulated to a fare-thee-well. Current could not find her there.

She could not find current here.

The uneasy prickle turned into full-fledged worry, just one small step down from panic, and she touched the magic inside her, warming suddenly-cold nerves on the responsive flickers deep in her core.

“Wren?” Sergei cast a concerned look sideways, obviously having sensed her reaction.

“I’m fine.” She wasn’t, not by a long shot, but couldn’t let it throw her. What she was going to do now was seriously low-power anyway; even as tired as she was, it would barely disturb her natural level of current. And if anything happened, well, she’d been told there were ways to get current from stone, if you needed it badly enough. And there was a lot of stone around her that had likely never been tapped, if the building was as old as it looked. As old as Brother whatsisname, Teodosio, said it was.

“If you will come with me, please.” Teodosio turned a knob on the wall, and the gas lamps placed along the main hallway flared brighter. “I apologize for our old-fashioned ways of doing things. We try to remain true to our traditions. And besides—” a brief smile flashed on his basset hound face “—the money is not there to upgrade.”

He was lying. Wren didn’t know how she knew that, but he was. Which meant they had a reason for not having electricity available. Old-fashioned? Or cutting a Talent off from an easy source of energy? Don’t get paranoid, Valere. Not yet. Not while you’re still gathering information.

They went up a shallow stone staircase, ten steps, then a landing, then turned and another ten steps to the second floor. The torches seemed brighter up here, or somehow more light was getting through the narrow windows, because Wren could see more details around her. The walls had been plastered over with a slightly rough-textured white coating, and the wooden beams of the ceiling were blackened with age, creating a pleasing contrast. At intervals along the walls there were alcoves holding wooden carvings of figures—saints, she supposed—in various benevolent poses. Wren, with her lapsed Protestant background, didn’t have a clue who any of them were. Her mother might have. Sergei probably did.

There were five doorways on either side of the hallway, each arched in a smaller echo of the main entrance. Passing by several of them, Wren caught a glimpse of glass-fronted cases and heavy cabinets. It wasn’t so much a library, she thought, as a book prison….

“In here, please.”

They were ushered through a doorway on the left, into a room that seemed incandescent compared to the gloom of the hallway. Light came in through the windows, split into prisms by the leaded glass. There were a number of the heavy cabinets here as well, plus thick glass-topped desks with obviously old manuscripts displayed underneath. One of them was conspicuously empty, the faded green backing noticeably darker where something had been removed.

“It was there?” Sergei asked, pointing to the empty space.

“What? Oh, no, no. That is an illuminated manuscript we’ve out on loan to a brother organization. The Nescanni parchment, that was never left on display, no. No, never that.” Teodosio was flustered, far beyond what the question would seem to merit, until Wren remembered what Andre had said. Everyone who has read it has disappeared. Right. Displaying it where anyone could lean over and take a looksee…not such a good idea, no. Although the way he’s reacting, I bet that’s exactly what they did once. Wonder who went and disappeared? And how long ago?

“How did you even know it was gone?” Wren spoke without thinking, earning her a sharp glance from everyone, Sergei because she wasn’t supposed to be talking, the two monks because they had almost forgotten she was there. In for a penny… “If nobody ever read it, how did you know it was gone?”

“Ah. The parchment was bound between two sheets of slate, like a sandwich. We would check the edges every six months, to ensure that there was no water or spore damage to it, as we do all of our charges. At the most recent check three weeks ago, the young brother whose assignment it was sensed something wrong and opened the slate perhaps a bit more than was wise. Fortunately for him, the paper that had been left in the manuscript’s place did not have the same effect on him as the original would have.”

“He’s still around, then?”

“Oh, yes. You will wish to speak with him?”

“Please.” Seemingly taking back control of the situation, Sergei turned to Wren with the air of someone used to delegating. “Stay here, look around, learn whatever you can. I will meet with the young man and see what he has to say.” Wren—recognizing the voice he used with Lowell, his gallery associate when the well-bred wonder got a shade too uppity—had to make an effort to keep a straight face as she nodded her understanding of her assignment. An assignment that was exactly what she had planned to do, anyway, had she been scouting the scene on her own.

Teodosio and Sergei exited, leaving Wren alone with Frederich, who looked as though he’d still rather be anywhere else, although that expression had been softened a little by boredom.

What had boyo been expecting? Clearly they were told we would be coming, but what exactly were they told they’d be getting? That was a valid question—Teodosio had not specified the Silence, and Sergei told her that more often than not their operatives worked totally detached from the main organization, so you could be working for them through a series of—what had Sergei called them? Cutouts, that was it. You could be working through cutouts and never know who was actually footing the bill. If that was the case here, then this Mattenni might not have said anything more than “two Americans coming, give them assistance.” Or he might have told them exactly what she was, and what she did.

Not knowing limited her options considerably. They had agreed, on the flight over, to keep Wren’s status as low-profile as possible. Especially since the Catholic Church—Rome just down the block, as it were—was still a little hinky about the whole magic thing. The Holy See could be awfully touchy about anyone using current on their turf, sans dispensation. Without knowing if this particular little subsect was Cosa friendly or not, she’d have to be totally closeted.

Moving over to the cabinet where Teodosio said the missing manuscript had been stored, Wren looked over at Frederich for permission, then slid the drawer open. It was shallow, maybe two or three inches deep, and the wood had been polished until it gleamed with the patina only really old, well-used furniture got. She took a deep breath, feeling for the stone around her. Normally she preferred to ground on wood or earth, more familiar, human-friendly bases, but she was focusing on something made of wood, so that wouldn’t work as well.

Cool, firm, solid…. Standing in place, forever and yesterday….

She had been right, there was a faint trickle of current in the stones, but it was deep and buried and sleeping. She left it alone. Satisfied that her body was settled, Wren reached down into her core, pushing a mental hand down and coaxing up one vivid blue tendril. It climbed up into her arm, pulsing with raw possibility.

This was the tricky part, to engage but remain passive, receptive instead of proactive.

And three and two and one and… She felt herself fall into the familiar working fugue state, where the entire world was narrowed down to what was exactly in front of her, the familiar hazy sharpness kicking her Talent into gear.

Opening her palm over the surface of the drawer, Wren let the current flow gently out of her like a sprinkling of multicolored confetti falling in slow motion. Watching the current-confetti, she directed it to show her the item which had been there before, the shape and outline and concept of it, but not the details, not yet.

Normally this worked better with words to shape the intention, but she didn’t want to tip her hand in front of her already unhappy observer, not when she was supposed to be in the closet, as it were.

The current swirled, as though confused by her instructions, then seemed to catch on, flowing and coalescing into a rectangular shape. It seemed as though it were taking hours, but she didn’t dare look away to see what Frederich was doing.

Wren blinked at what was forming under her hand, and had to hold on to her temper for fear of disrupting the current. A blank surface…that couldn’t be right. Oh. Duh. Show me the shape of what was in between the slate, she amended her direction, annoyed beyond belief at her own stupidity. Hadn’t Teodosio just told them about it being stored in an envelope of sorts, to protect it?

She committed the image that appeared before her to memory, and slowly released the current, allowing the now-useless particles to dissipate.

Pulling her hand back, she cast a quick look at Frederich. He had only moved a few paces, and from his still-bored expression she figured that only a minute or two had passed. Closing the drawer carefully, she pulled up another spark of current and fed it the memory she had in her mind of the parchment and its covering. Shaping the current into a bloodhound, she set it on the trail of the missing item. Where had it been? Where was it moved to? The spark flitted back and forth as though confused. Either the tracks were too old for it to follow, or it had been moved too often, to too many places in the room for it to settle on any one trail.

Neither of those options made sense. Teodosio had told them that the parchment was checked every six months like clockwork, no less and no more, and that it was never taken out of its slate envelope, the implication being that it shouldn’t have moved very far from the drawer except on the occasion of it being stolen.

Normally, on something like this, she would be looking for elementals to question. They were mindless bits of electrical fluff, but they were occasionally useful, if you could get them focused long enough. But elementals were lazy things that preferred to gather where there was already a source of current for them to rest in. A building without electrical wiring was not going to appeal to them.

Appeal…current…elementals…slate covers…Something about that—

Suddenly she was back in the tiny office off the bio lab in her old high school. John Ebeneezer perched on his usual stool, lecturing her about what she needed to know, to control her Talent, to be an effective conductor of current…

Wren unconsciously pulled more current up out of her core, molding it in her hand like clay as she tried to remember. It was an old habit, from back when Neezer was on her constantly to think of current as an extension of her own body.

Think, Valere, think. Slate was graphite, at least partially. Graphite conducted electricity. But slate was the least conductive form of the natural graphites, which is why it was okay for roofing…Why had they used slate to protect the parchment? Were they trying to keep current out? Or bring it in? Something was wrong. Something didn’t fit.

“Ehi! Che cosa fai?”

The sudden noise startled her, and she lost control of the strand of current. It leaped from her hand, hitting the ceiling and bouncing back at her, expanding onto a sparkling, sparking jellyfish shape as it stretched out like a living thing, visible to anyone, Talent or Null.

Frederich screamed, and Wren swore, trying to recapture the current before it did damage to any of the furnishings. Frederich could take care of his own damn self and whatever happened he deserved, spooking her like that when she was working!

“Damn, damn, damn, damn,” she singsonged. Calm, damn it, be calm! She reached out, coaxing it back into her hand. As each bit touched her skin, she took it back down through her epidermis, through the muscle tissue, and down into her core. She was too tired, too suddenly hyped on adrenaline, to be as thorough as she should, and it fought her, sparking and burning wherever it could.

“Diavolo! Strega!” Frederich was screaming at her now, but she couldn’t focus on what he was saying, even if she’d been able to understand it. He was waving his arms and making faces. She hoped, with whatever attention she had to spare, that he wasn’t having an epileptic fit or anything.

“Wren!”

Sergei burst into the room, followed hard on by Teodosio and two other men. She assumed they were monks. She didn’t particularly care, at that point. The last of the current sank below her skin and disappeared with a sharp, stinging slap on her flesh. Sinking to her haunches, she curled her arms around herself and tried to force the current all the way down, down to where it couldn’t do any harm, couldn’t give her away.

“Wren?” And then Sergei was there, his arms around her, and she felt herself fall apart. “I’m sorry,” she thought she whispered, but didn’t know quite what she was apologizing for.

“What do you mean, mellow out? She’s never been out of the country before, you know.” P.B. bit back a growl, feeling his ears go flat against his head in agitation. The water fountain against the far wall made a metallic plinking noise as drops fell, turning wheels and gears that powered the ceiling fan circling lazily overhead. Through the one window the sounds of midday traffic came through, sounding farther away than it actually was.

“I mean, relax, okay? Genevieve’s a big girl. She knows how to take care of herself. And anyway, she went to Vancouver last year.”

P.B. waved a clawed paw in dismissal. “Vancouver. Pfffhah. Canada. That’s not a real border. And they speak English there. Mostly. They do, don’t they? Yeah, ’cause they filmed X-Files there. And Forever Knight. And SG-1.”

“You watch way too much TV.”

“Oh yeah, ’cause there’s so much else in my life that needs to be doing. Gimme a break. Cable is all that makes Western civilization worthwhile.”

The demon was pacing back and forth in the open area of Lee’s studio, tapping his claws together in a way that Wren had once told Lee indicated extreme emotional agitation. So far, the lanky artist had been forced to redirect P.B. at least once, when his pacing path came too close to the work in progress, a surprisingly delicate apple tree, four feet high and made entirely of copper and pewter. Sergei had promised him a show if he could come up with works smaller than his usual garden installments of bronze and steel, and Lee rather thought this piece was the start of that show. Be damned if he’d let some hyper-tense fatae screw it up by waving an arm in the wrong place.

“What’s really bothering you? The fact that she’s out of the country—or the fact that Didier’s with her?”

P.B. stopped, turned, and stared at Lee. While the human was glad that he’d gotten the demon’s attention, having those dark red eyes stare at him was…unnerving. He mentally ratcheted his opinion of their mutual friend up from “brave but crazy” to “brave but insane” for describing the fatae in front of him as “adorable.” Even if she had added “like a rabid mongoose” to that.

“You think—that I—I could…” He finally spluttered down, and returned to glaring at the Talent. “It’s not that I don’t like the guy, okay? ’Cause, well, I don’t. Much. Okay, he’s okay for a human. And Wren loves him, even if she’s way too freaked by the whole concept of a relationship to admit it—”

Lee did a mild second take at that bit of information. He had noticed that things seemed a little more tense around the partners than before, but hadn’t realized they were heading in that direction. Suddenly, a few things made a little more sense. He made a mental note to discuss that turn of events with his wife, once he got rid of his surprise guest.

“No, the fact that her fataephobic partner is with her is…actually reassuring. In that if I’m not there to look out for her he will, as much as his wussy human reflexes allow him to. If the Council comes gunning for her, ’cause you know they will, they’ve got their people everywhere. But, see, I could do it better. But did they ask me? No! All I get is ‘P.B., gotta go, watch the apartment, willya?’ Like I was some kind of plant-watering petsitter.”

“Oh for…” Suddenly Lee had had it with the demon’s self-pity party. The bastard was lonely—which explained why he’d made this unexpected drop-in to the human’s studio only a day after the two had left—and he just had to get the hell over it. “That’s not what they asked you to do at all.”

P.B. threw his compact body onto the only other chair in the room, a brown leather recliner that must have seen better decades, and was in the studio as a stopping point on its way to the dump. A disconsolate snarl rose from his throat, and Lee’s skin prickled. Then the noise stopped, as though P.B. had suddenly realized it was coming from him, and the demon sighed instead, a remarkably human sound. “Yeah, I know. But it felt like that. They get to go off and do exciting things, and I’m stuck behind. Ignoring the whole ‘how the hell could you get on a plane’ thing ’cause yeah, know that, live that. It sucks living in a human world, you know that?”

Demons, unlike any of the other known fatae races, were created—according to one story, somewhere back in the mists of magic, a mad Talent had manipulated several races into creating what he had thought would be an interesting subspecies of servant. Over the generations since then the bloodline had gone in several different directions as the parent genes reasserted themselves, but they were all immediately recognizable by their blood-red eyes. The Cosa referred to them all collectively as “demon,” with all the implicit emotional and psycho logical baggage attached.

“I know.” Being a Talent was no picnic either, even if he only used current to weld his sculptures. The fact that he had married outside of the Cosa was a constant source of amazement to all concerned; it was rare to find a Null that you could tell about magic, much less admit that you used it on a regular basis.

Maybe that was why Wren and Sergei felt, once he got over the shock, like such an obvious idea. They already knew each other’s secrets, after all. After Wren, even the most fascinating socialite on the Manhattan art scene was probably a bit…tame.

“Look, P.B., the truth is I know for a fact that Wren asked you to do something really important, because she asked me to be your backup. So take that for what it’s worth—you’re point person, and I’m office support. How’s that supposed to make me feel?”

P.B. made a rude, wet noise through his nose. “Relieved?”

Lee laughed at that. Point, made and well taken. His reputation for noninvolvement in Cosa affairs was widely known. He heard more gossip that way. And nobody expected him to actually act on any of it. Which meant he could—when he chose to.

“So, what have you heard?” P.B. leaned forward, his chin resting on the pads of his hands—claws now semi-sheathed—and looking unnervingly like a petite, white-fur-covered version of Rodin’s “The Thinker.”

Lee leaned back in his own chair, legs the length of P.B.’s entire body stretched out in front of him. “The gossip mills have been churning,” he admitted. “It’s mostly low-level stuff, no more boneheaded moves like they did last spring, locking down anyone who bucked them, Mage or not. But I don’t think they’ve backed off. That’s not Council style, much as those bastards have any.

“Stuff that might affect us directly? I’ve already told Wren most of it, the stuff the Council’s spreading about her. But that’s personal, not…” Lee picked up a scrap of iron and smoothed it with his hands, almost absently softening the edges until the metal flowed into gentle undulations. “I’ve heard some talk, though. Not even rumors, but hints and whispers of rumors. That the Council’s gearing up for another push against unaffiliates—” lonejacks, he meant. “A push that’s going to be ugly.”

“It ain’t never been anything but,” P.B. said strongly. “Not when it comes to the Council. Just you guys, or all the fatae who ain’t them? And any idea if Wren’s going to be the primary target again, like this spring, or…?”

“Not a clue. I think, though, they’re going to go for less…alerted targets.” He grimaced. “Christ, listen to me. I sound like a bad made-for-TV war movie.”

For the first time, Lee was able to discern a distinct and recognizable emotion on the demon’s flat, furred face. Unhappiness. “It is a war,” he said sadly, his claws flexing again. “Or if not yet, soon. Really, really soon. And we’re gonna be right in the middle of it.”

Chapter Six

Despite the optimistic words of the forecasters that morning, the heat was, if anything, worse when Andre finally left the unmarked, unremarkable building that housed the Silence at seven o’clock on Saturday evening. There was still a stack of work on his desk, but all the reachable fires had been put out, the recalcitrant cats herded into a corner, and only one last item of business to deal with before he could collapse with a brandy and the book he had been trying to finish now for almost a month.

The asphalt was soft underfoot, and he winced as he stepped onto it, mentally tabulating the cost to get the marks off his shoes. God how he hated summers in the city.

A plane roared overhead, and he looked up instinctively. His two reluctant operatives must be on the job in Italy by now, hopefully with the bit firmly between their teeth. Giving them a tip of his nonexistent hat, he continued across the street and on to his meeting.

His assistant was waiting in a far booth, out of the busy flow of traffic.

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