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, fast-paced, 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

Bring It On
laura anne gilman

Dear Reader,

Some people say that New York City is a magical place. They’re right. Some people also say that magic died in the modern age. They’re wrong….

And, with that, a Public Service Announcement: People have asked me if it’s possible to use the places and names in the Retrievers series as a map for visitors to Manhattan. You can, but I wouldn’t advise it, as the contents tend to shift during reading. More to the point, the West Village, where Wren lives, is merely odd in fiction: in reality it’s a neighborhood of strange turns and three-cornered buildings, where West 10th Street intersects with West 4th…and you never know who—or what—you may meet on any given corner!

So venture forward and have fun…but turn the page—and corners—carefully!

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

Laura Anne Gilman

For my Muse.

Without whom I might sleep better at night,

but not have such interesting dreams.

Acknowledgments

Again, a shout out to my editor, Matrice, and my agent, Jenn, who are lovely, patient, kind, considerate, patient…Did I say patient?

Deb Grabien, who is a goddess—quite mad, of course, but all the best goddesses are.

And to my “baby bro” Keith, who was there, every time.

Bring It On

No one gets to miss the storm of

What will be

Just holding on for the ride…

—Indigo Girls, “The Wood Song”

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Prologue

Darkness. Not merely night, which mankind had banished ages ago with the first, stuttering campfire, but an absolute, terrifying dark. No moon sailed, no stars glittered. No light reached into the cold heart and set the blood to pumping again.

“Do so swear to it.” One voice. Confident. Neither demanding nor coercing, not inviting or seducing. It did not echo in the darkness but rather settled into the corners, softening the edges, herding those within hearing distance into a tighter group, although few of them did more than shuffle in place.

“I do so swear.” More than one voice, less than a dozen. Muted, one or two uncertain, but all with an underlying note of—determination? Fear?—carrying them forward. Like most initiations, it was less about wanting to belong, and more about the fear of being left behind—or left out.

“Then I hereby declare the overwrought and pretentious portion of this meeting to be concluded.”

Faint, relieved laughter, and the lights flickered and came up, revealing an open courtyard surrounded on three sides by thick stone walls, the center one with a simple doorway set into it. Directly opposite it, similar stones framed an open window running the length of the wall, showcasing what, in daylight, would have been an impressive view. Tonight, the river below glimmered darkly, black against black.

“Please, come inside and join us.” The woman who had spoken last came forward. A tiny, elegant silver-haired woman, immaculately dressed in a gray wool suit and sensible heels, she made a welcoming gesture that included everyone. Turning with the assumption that they would all follow her, she walked through the door in the far wall. The stones underfoot were smoothed with generations of use, and as the others followed, expensive suits and elegant dresses mingling in a casual dance of friendly power, one might think it was the opening moves of an ordinary cocktail party, lacking only the waiters passing trays of canapés and champagne.

As they left the courtyard, something sparked in the distance, over the river flowing below them. Thunder, or an electrical fire on the other side, or something else. One of the participants turned to look, barely a twitch in the middle of conversation, and frowned, as though suddenly reminded of a minor chore left undone.

“Has any of this been discussed with the Others?” he asked, the capitalization plain in his tone.

“Those avenues were explored.” The response was smooth, cool, conciliatory.

“Indeed?” He sounded surprised. “I had heard nothing—odd, as my contacts on that side of the river are usually quite vocal about everything.”

That got him some appreciative, and sympathetic, laughter. He went on, warming to the topic. “I would hope that each of those avenues was indeed thoroughly explored, as you say. I would not want to go home and discover that anyone had—”

The knife appeared between heartbeats, turned under the third rib, and shoved in deep.

“We cannot afford to be distracted,” his killer said calmly, as the knife withdrew and disappeared back from wherever it had appeared. “All avenues are closed to us now, save this one.”

The three remaining conversationalists in that group stifled whatever reaction they might have had, and merely nodded, stepping over the body to continue their move into the mansion.

Without seeming to look, other attendees managed to somehow stream around their former fellow initiate, moving past him without hesitation; his body might have been one of the stone columns framing the room for all the attention they gave it. The message, if messy, had been perfectly clear. Accept your status as one of the elite—or lose it, and more.

The body lay on the stones as the courtyard emptied. A moment passed, then another, and the blood pooled, congealing even as more flowed from the wound. Another woman came out, this one dressed in a simple scarlet dress that set off her brunette curls to perfection.

“Idiot,” she said to the dying man, not without regret. “You should have known better. They’ll only replace you with someone less prone to asking questions.”

Shaking her head at the stupidity of it all, she placed her hands, palms down, in the air over the body.

“Allow no secrets uncovered, no confidences broken, no vows released, but hold this body to the darkness until time has time to erase the traces.”

The body shimmered with a faint silver glow, then disappeared. In the distance, there was the sound of a faint splash, the kind a fish might make as it leaped into the air and crashed down again. Or a body, slipping deep into the waters, might make as it sank and was carried out into the ocean.

“It’s too late to change course. Too much has already been done.”

The woman went back into the mansion, leaving the courtyard completely empty, even the pool of blood gone as though it had evaporated entirely in the cool autumn air. After a few moments, the lights slowly began to fade out, until only one illuminated the doorway. Soon enough, it too went out.

1

The demon in her kitchen was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“How the hell did things get so bad, so fast?” Wren asked him, staring down at the sheets of paper on the table in front of her. Nothing to make her break into a cold sweat, on first or even second glance. It was just paper. Nice paper, but nothing expensive. Three double-spaced sheets, neatly typewritten, with decent margins. It had arrived in a manila envelope with her name written on the front in dark blue ink, carried in a courier bag slung over the shoulder of the demon, who had handed it to her wordlessly and then gone to investigate the innards of her refrigerator.

“Do you really want me to answer that?” the demon asked now, curious. The butter knife looked odd in his clawed paw, as though he should not be able to handle it, but he wielded the dull blade with surprising dexterity.

“Only if you’re going to reassure me that everything’s peaches, and the city’s about to break out into spontaneous song and dance,” she said. “And I don’t mean West Side Story kind of dancing, either.”

She forced her eyes away from the letter, and looked at her companion. There was a smear of jelly on the counter, and another one in his coarse white fur. And he had used the last of the peanut butter. So much for a midday snack. She sighed, and looked away again. Other than that, it was the kind of late autumn day that Wren Valere loved the most: cool and crisp, the sky a bright blue, what little of it she could see out her kitchen window and past the neighboring buildings. Almost like Mother Nature was apologizing for the hell she had put everyone through over the summer.

And, as always, thoughts of that summer made Wren close her eyes and take a moment to center and ground, emotionally.

The entire summer had sucked. The deal with the devil that her business partner Sergei had made with his former employers to keep her safe when the Council of Mages had threatened her and her livelihood had come back to haunt them—literally. The Silence—a group of mysterious do-gooders with a sizable checkbook—had offered what had seemed like a lifesaver of a job, but—

Her grounding faltered, then came back.

Lee’s death during that job hadn’t been her fault, no. But it was her responsibility. And the simple fact of it made her core—the inner storehouse of magic that every Talent carried within them, like a power pack—seethe under the weight of the guilt she carried. It felt like snakes in her gut, tendrils in her brain. It felt like—

“Ow!”

A furry, leather-palmed paw struck the side of her face, not as hard as it might have, but harder than a love tap. “What the hell was that for?” she asked, her hand going to her face as though expecting to feel blood, or at least heat rising from the skin. Thankfully, he’d kept his long, curved black claws away from delicate human flesh.

“Self-pity.” The demon climbed back onto his chair, bringing his sandwich with him and watching her with those dark red eyes that were the mark of his breed. “Doesn’t look good on you.”

“Great. The entire lonejack community is freaking out over what might or might not be Council-directed attacks on them, the fatae are claiming that humans are targeting them, my love life is going seriously weird, and I’m getting slapped for self-pity by a four foot tall polar bear with attitude. Who has jelly in his fur.”

P.B. took a bite out of his lunch, and swallowed, ignoring her last crack. “You’re wallowing, Valere. Lee’s dead. He’s gone. Move on, or you’re going to be distracted at the wrong time, and get yourself dead, too.” He relented, only a little bit. “Damn it, I liked him, too. I trusted him.”

“You didn’t get him killed.”

“Didn’t I?”

That made her look up and meet his gaze.

She had known the demon presently sitting in her kitchen for years. Almost ten, in fact. In all that time, he had been effective in his job as courier of privy information and items, witty in his comments, and aggressive in his refusal to get involved in anything other than his own life. In short, the perfect lonejack, even if he was a fatae, one of the non-humans who were part of the Cosa Nostradamus, the magical community.

All that had changed over the past six months, when P.B. had somehow, for some reason, gotten tangled up in the vigilante attacks against other fatae; human vigilantes, preaching hate with guns and bats.

Wren had friends among the fatae, more than just this one demon. She was ashamed now to admit that she had shrugged the first attacks off as random violence; not acceptable, but normal enough. Prejudice happened. Violence happened. That was life, unfortunately. She had been angry—but not proactive. The question of who these humans were affiliated with, how they knew about the fatae: those things hadn’t been dealt with the moment the severity of and prep behind the attacks became clear. The fact that she had been ears-deep in a job was no excuse.

She had been worried enough to ask her friend Lee to keep an eye on the demon when she and Sergei had left for Italy to Retrieve the Nescanni parchment, the “little job” the Silence had hired them for. But that had been just to keep her friends out of trouble. P.B. had then inveigled Lee into helping him with his investigation into the human vigilantes who seemed to be targeting the non-human population. That investigation had led to the two of them meeting with various fatae leaders, trying to prevent the anger against humans—specifically, Talents—from growing out of control. What had been a relatively simple case of hate crimes then blossomed into a potential Cosa-wide chasm.

And then a fatae had tried to kill Wren, for some reason seeing her as the human behind those meetings, and Lee paid the price for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Grow up,” P.B. advised, not unkindly. “You did everything you could do, more than anyone else bothered to. If you want to beat yourself up because you’re not some perfect goddess of unfailing generosity and loving kindness, do it when I’m not around. That sort of thing makes me sick.” He took a bite of his sandwich and said again, “Really. Grow up.”

“Growing up sucks.” It really did. “And you still have jelly in your fur. Left shoulder. Messy eater.” He was right. Miserable bastard. She wasn’t any kind of goddess. She was a selfish, self-interested, puny excuse for a sentient being. She also couldn’t change what had happened.

Nobody had enough current to do-over the past.

She picked up the paper and stared at it again. Deal with what’s happening now, Valere.

The paper still said the same thing it had the first three times she read it. Another Talent has gone missing. Tally up to seven. WTF is going on? And why? Are you doing this? Godless bastards, why?

Not on those words, of course. Not to the Council. The language was formal. The wording was polite. The passion behind it unmistakable. And the paranoia practically leaking out of the ink. A manifesto, if ever she’d seen one. Which, actually, she hadn’t.

The Talents who had drafted this document weren’t calling it that, of course—they fell back, as Talents tended to do, on historical precedent, and called it a—she checked to make sure she had the wording correct—“a petition to address the grievances of,” etc., etc.

This wasn’t exactly unexpected, even if it was annoying. Fatae were blaming all humans for the attacks on their kind. Lonejacks were blaming the Council for Talents who had gone missing, or were otherwise assaulted. There was just enough truth in all their suspicions to make violence in return seem like a logical response.

Wren didn’t know who the Mage Council was blaming for what, but she was pretty sure it was someone, for something.

“Am I the last sane person left in this city? Don’t answer that,” she warned the demon. “A petition to the Council—Jesus wept. All right, all right. I don’t know what they think this is going to do, but…” She made a few final additions in the margin with a red ballpoint pen, and then signed her initials next to them in a small, neat hand. She wasn’t ready to sign onto this version, not yet. But if they made those changes, moderated the paranoia, asked for specific things rather than a blanket admission of guilt that hadn’t been proven yet…

“Take this back. Tell them to…don’t tell them anything, just give it back to them.” She caught a glimpse of the small, battery-operated clock on the far wall. Almost 4:00 p.m. “And scoot. I have a client coming.”

“Here?”

“Yes, here.” She picked up the courier’s bag from where he had dropped it, and handed it back to the demon, giving him clear indication that this conversation was over. He looked as though he might argue, but simply sighed and took the bag from her. Dropping the paperwork into the internal pocket, he slung it back over his shoulder.

“Go. Get paid. Go home. And next time you have to deliver anything here,” she said as he crawled back out the small kitchen window onto the fire escape, “bring your own damn lunch. Or at least clean up after yourself!”

The mess actually wasn’t too bad; P.B. was a mooch, but not a slob. Wren had managed to give the entire kitchen a wipe-down, throw the dark green coverlet over her bed—covering night-rumpled sheets—and straighten the books and papers in her office before the client was actually due to arrive. Not that the client should be seeing either bedroom or office, but her mother’s training seemed to kick in at the most inconvenient times. God forbid someone should be in the house when a bed was unmade.

The buzzer rang before she could start to contemplate the state of the kitchen floor, all five square feet of it.

“Is this…do I have the right address?”

The voice on the other side of the intercom was female. Attractively nuanced. Young. Educated, but not hoity-toity, to use one of her mother’s most annoying phrases. You could tell the difference, if you listened. People gave so much away in their voices, you could close your eyes and see their emotions in the tenor of their throat. And that had nothing whatsoever to do with current.

Wren waited.

“Is this The Wren?” The voice was coming as though from farther away than street level. “It’s Anna Rosen. We spoke yesterday?”

Upstairs, Wren leaned against the wall, pressing her forehead against the cool plaster as though to ward away the headache that had kicked in the moment the buzzer sounded. Bad sign. Very, very bad sign.

Finally her hand came up and—despite the headache, despite the forebodings—hit the door buzzer, letting the client in.

The intercom was new. Or rather, not new, but newly working. Sergei had hired an electrician to come in and fix it after years of waiting for the landlord to do something, paying triple-time to get it done over Labor Day weekend, and making her promise to use it. No matter who she knew was coming, no matter how silly it made her feel.

The fact that the first time anyone used it was a potential client, a potential client that she was meeting behind his back and without his knowledge, wasn’t something she was willing to think about, yet. Maybe not ever.

She hadn’t had a secret—a real secret—from Sergei since she was twenty-four.

Rosen took the stairs at a decent pace, and wasn’t breathing heavily when she stood in front of the apartment door. Wren gave her points for that, then promptly took those points away when she saw the ridiculously expensive and useless shoes the client was wearing. Still, if she could afford those, she could afford Wren’s fees. And then some. Well-heeled, you betcha.

Young, maybe midtwenties. Long, naturally blond hair pulled back into a thick braid, classic Princess WASP features enhanced by just the right amount of cosmetics, darkening the blond eyebrows and enhancing the pale peach mouth to be noticeable but not stand out. Everything about the girl said Money—but her dark green eyes were sharp, and showed a wry understanding of where she was and what she was doing.

Hiring a Retriever.

“You’re…The Wren?”

“None other.” And she didn’t offer any more information than that. Within certain ever-expanding circles, her identity was well-known, but for various reasons she preferred to go by the nickname she worked under.

And you screw all secrecy-for-a-reason by inviting her to meet here? In your home?

Shut up, she told the voice, and focused her attention outward, honing herself into a version of Sergei’s “All Business, All The Time” persona, as best she could. Beside. Wasn’t as though the Council didn’t know where she lived. The Silence, too. And pretty much every fatae in the city, since this summer and Lee’s wake, which she still sometimes had nightmares about. Might as well just put a sign over her door: Wren Valere, Available Here.

Focus, Valere.

Miss Rosen’s peach mouth quirked into a smile that showed perfect, perfectly white teeth and meant absolutely nothing. Wren returned the same, aware that her own beige features—brown hair, brown eyes, and pale beige skin—never made that much of an impression. Curse and a blessing: if asked by anyone Official, this Anna Rosen wouldn’t be able to remember anything about Wren that could be used to identify her. She hoped.

“Come in,” Wren said, opening the door all the way.

The apartment was large by Manhattan standards—three tiny shoebox bedrooms off a narrow hallway, a kitchenette to the right, and one large main room to the left of the front door—but it was almost painfully bare of furniture. Despite living there for dog years, Wren had never really had the time to think about buying chairs. Or a sofa. Or putting anything on the landlord-white walls.

Clients never, but never saw her home. She had lived here a year, in fact, before anyone other than her mother and Sergei walked through the door. There had been more people in this space in the past four months than in all the time previous, and Wren hated it. But it also made her look around and notice that her nest was missing a few items most folk would consider essentials. Like, oh, furniture.

Given the choice of using the two narrow and more than a little beat-up chairs in the kitchen for this meeting, or sitting on the floor, Wren had finally broken down and, after confirming the appointment, bought a small wooden table and two reasonably comfortable wooden chairs to go with it from a secondhand junk/antique dealer a few blocks away. Those, and the over-stuffed upholstered chair that had seen better decades, were still the only pieces of furniture in the main room, other than the stereo system set against the far wall, and two extremely expensive speakers in either corner.

Maybe the client would think that she rented the place. That would work, yeah.

“Nice system. Acoustics must rock.”

Rosen looked to be in her midtwenties, but she spoke younger. Twenty-three, according to the dossier Wren had put together after the initial contact. Not as complete as what Sergei could have done, but she’d done all right, if she did say so herself.

“Anna Rosen. Born in Glendale, raised in Madison, went to school in Boston, came home to work at the law firm of which Daddy was a partner two years ago, just before his death of a heart attack.” There. Taking control of the meeting. Establishing herself as the person with the knowledge.

“Alleged heart attack.” Rosen took the left-hand chair and sat down without being asked, placing her oxblood briefcase by her expensive shoes and resting her well-manicured hands on the table surface. “He was murdered.”

Wren stood in the doorway and looked at the client. “I don’t do murders.”

Not intentionally, anyway. Not by name, as such. Only the dead never seemed to stay properly, quietly dead, around her.

“Not asking you to.” Rosen looked at Wren directly, then; the humor in her eyes was muted by pain that hadn’t had the chance to scab yet. The death hadn’t been that recent; she was carrying around some significant emotional issues, then. “I’m Null, not stupid.”

Wren opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. There wasn’t anything she could say at this point that wouldn’t come out all wrong, anyway, even if the girl had been looking for soothing platitudes.

Null meant a human without any Talent, without the ability to channel current, or magic. Almost half of her jobs came from the Null world. They hired her as a thief, not a Retriever, but that was a distinction without a difference to most people. In fact, it probably only meant something significant to another Retriever, and there were only a dozen or so in the world, as far as Wren knew.

The fact that this Miss Rosen used the word Null with such casualness meant that she was aware of Talents, by reputation if not personally. Interesting. Possibly totally irrelevant, but interesting. Wren filed that fact away for later contemplation.

The fact that the client had contacted her directly in the first place might be a little more telling—people who heard about her via the Talent gossip networks usually knew to approach Sergei, first.

She was starting to get too well-known. She’d been too high profile, lately. A good Retriever wasn’t in the spotlight. A good Retriever—a successful Retriever—needed to be invisible, known only for her actions, not herself. Wren wasn’t much for game-playing; she left that to Sergei. Except here she was, playing games, inviting clients into her home, buying furniture that didn’t suit her…

“Let me get directly to the point,” Miss Rosen said, crossing her legs in a ladylike fashion, the sheen of her shoes expensively muted.

Thank God, Wren thought, forcing herself to gather her scattered thoughts and pay attention to what was going on in the here and now. Focus! Don’t screw the pooch so early in the game, Valere! Damn it, she wasn’t a negotiator. She didn’t even like to debate. Her thoughts scattered again like butterflies in the wind. Why had she agreed to meet with this chick anyway, instead of handing it over to Sergei the moment the nibble came in? This was his job, his part of the partnership, to deal with the prejob details.

But the call had come directly to her, and she had taken it on directly. So there wasn’t any Sergei here to fall back on. Her choice, so hers to deal with. Grow up, she heard P.B. say again.

“My father was killed last year. His will entered probate.” Rosen spoke without emotion in that lovely voice, as though all that had happened to someone else. “Now his widow is claiming that a particular piece of jewelry is hers, not mine. It belonged to my mother, and she has no claim to it.”

There was more emotion in the last sentence than the girl had shown, total, up until then. Whatever the piece was, it meant a lot to her. And she really, really didn’t like her stepmother. Did she suspect the woman in her father’s murder? Not your problem, Valere.

Not Wren’s business, who felt what about who, except as it impacted what she was hired to do. Her business was the job, and only the job. “She has it in her possession?”

Rosen nodded. Apparently, the widow did.

A straight-ahead break-and-grab. Nice, Wren thought to herself. Just what the doctor might have ordered, to keep her mind busy while she waited for the Talent-storm forming overhead to either break or disperse.

“I want to keep this low-key,” the girl went on. “She’s going to know it’s me—there’s no way she can’t know. But without proof, without a way to trace it back to me, she won’t be able to do anything about it. That’s why I came to you.”

“Because I’m a Retriever?”

“Because you’re the best.”

All right, that was a fact Wren wasn’t going to argue; although she could name half a dozen non-Cosa thieves who were at least as good at lifting things, they weren’t always as careful about giving the merchandise back over to the client. It was a highest-bidder market out there, for items without clear ownership and no binding contract.

That was the difference between a Retriever and a thief. Not just current, but good work ethics. A Retriever, once bought, stayed bought.

“I need the best. I also need someone with a connection to magic. Can you, I don’t know, do something so that she knows magic is used? To throw her off my trail?”

Covering her ass. Wren could approve. But she hated having anyone tell her how to do a job. Not even Sergei ever did that. If it called for current, she used it. If it called for the more pragmatic, practical skills she had picked up over the years—lock picking and door-jimmying—then she used those. That was what made her the best, not just an accident of Talent.

Wren didn’t say any of that, however. She avoided sitting in the other chair, feeling more comfortable on her feet. At just over five feet tall and otherwise unmemorable, one of the best ways to keep someone focused on you was to present a moving target. Make them just nervous enough to pay attention.

“I am the best, yeah. I’m also not inexpensive.” Okay, so that wasn’t patented Sergei Didier smooth. She wasn’t Sergei, and she did things her way, damn it. “I’m not going to insult you by suggesting that you can’t afford me, but are you sure that this is going to be worth it?”

“You’re suggesting that I shouldn’t hire you?” Rosen seemed less surprised than amused, like her pet dog had done something cutely annoying.

Wren shrugged. She found it hard to care, one way or another, what this girl did. Fake that sincerity, Wrenlet, she could hear Sergei say in the back of her mind. Clients love to believe you’re giving two hundred percent.

“I hate buyer regrets. Especially when I’m the one getting regretted.”

Whatever Rosen was going to say in response was drowned in the blast that reached the building just as she opened her mouth.

What the hell?

Wren grabbed the girl by the shoulders and had them both flat on the hardwood floor by the time the shock wave hit them completely.

“What the hell?” Rosen echoed Wren’s first thought.

“Shut up.” Every sinew in Wren’s body was trembling, far in excess of what the noise should have caused. She willed herself to stop shaking, but couldn’t do anything about the cold sweat on the back of her neck. Current sizzled inside her, and she wanted, very badly, to throw up from the pain expanding inside her head.

“Something…” The girl was clearly puzzled by the strength of Wren’s reaction, proving that she was, in fact, completely Null. “Something hit us. The building. Was that an earthquake?”

“Not an earthquake,” Wren said, not sure how she knew but knowing, without hesitation. “Not even close.”

That was current. A lot of it. And all of it sent with nasty intent.

2

Nothing in the apartment seemed to be broken, although a stool in the kitchen had fallen over, and Wren didn’t want to think about what her research library, a bedroom in the back of the apartment, toward the front of the building, might look like. Some of those books were old, and expensive, and damned rare, and a lot of them were only on loan from people who would kill her if anything happened to them.

“Stay here.”

“But…” The client looked around, clearly remembering the shock of the explosion, and decided that obedience was the smarter move right now, no matter how unfamiliar the sensation might be. Walking cautiously down the hallway, as though an additional attack might come at any second, Wren did a once-over of the rest of the apartment.

Amazingly not only were all the books still on the shelves in the first bedroom, but nothing had even slid off the desk in the second room, which served as her office—and when she booted up her computer, holding her breath and mentally reciting prayers to whatever saints she could recall, it came up without a hitch.

“Oh thank you, God.” If that blast hadn’t been current-shaped, she’d hand in her lonejack ID. Somehow, though, it hadn’t done what current typically did, which was fry every bit of electronics in the vicinity.

Wren didn’t know why she had been spared; she was just thankful.

There was no dial tone on the phone when she first picked it up, but as she held it, thinking that maybe she had given thanks too soon, the tone came back.

“Well, that’s a switch,” she said in mild surprise. Typically things broke when she held them, not the other way around and getting fixed. Putting the receiver down before it changed its mechanical mind, Wren reached over to shut down the computer. Other people might have the luxury of leaving their system up and running all the time, but not Talents. Not even in this seemingly super-insulated building, bless its pre-War, plaster-coated walls.

Giving the room another quick once-over to make sure that nothing had moved since she came in, Wren went into the third and smallest room, the one she used as a bedroom. Her wind-up alarm clock had stopped ten minutes ago, and the water glass on her nightstand had cracked, but thankfully she had downed the last of the water in it that morning.

This room seemed to be less protected. And yet, there was nothing different about it from the first two rooms in terms of construction. In fact, there was nothing at all that should have attracted current—no electronics, no magical implements, no tools of the trade. Not where she slept, where unconsciousness might allow current to slip in or out unguarded.

“Um, excuse me? Hello?”

The client, her voice wavering down the hallway. Damn it. Wren needed to get the girl out of there. She needed to think, to find out what had happened, and there was no way she could do that with Miss Old Money pacing the main room. A Null who knew she was a Null was still a Null. Sergei was the only non-Talent she trusted with lonejack business, and even then it was with regret, because he just wouldn’t stay out of it.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, it’s okay. You can get up now.”

If it hadn’t been okay, they’d both be dead by now, anyway.

When she went back into the main room, Rosen had picked herself up and was dusting nonexistent debris off her slightly mussed outfit with an expression of distaste on her face. Guess the client didn’t like being tossed to the ground, no matter what the cause. Some people were just so picky.

“Is your building often bombed?”

“Yeah. All the time.” She was channeling pure P.B. now, and Wren made a conscious effort to choke that back. One was not snarky to the client, no matter how much their tone pissed you off. About them, yes. But not to their faces.

Thankfully Rosen’s livery driver had been waiting around the block reading a newspaper when the shock wave hit her building. Wren waited while the client paged him, then helped her down the stairs, carefully not answering the girl’s questions beyond a vague “This sort of thing, Manhattan, you know. It happens.”

No New Yorker worth her Metrocard—even ones with hired cars—could deny it. Things happened in Manhattan.

Wren waited while the livery car—a clichéd black Town car with smoked windows, so ordinary and commonplace it always raised curious eyebrows—slid down the narrow street and stopped in front of them. Packing the girl into the back seat, Wren started to close the door, but Rosen pushed a hand against the frame to stop her.

“You’re taking the job, then?”

Wren stared at the girl’s pretty green eyes, and thought about it for a second or three. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll take it.” She wasn’t so far out of the financial hole the bastards on the Council had dug for her this summer to turn down work, especially something as basic as this sounded.

“I can write you a check—” Rosen started to say, but Wren waved her off. She didn’t want to be bothered by actually dealing with the nitpicky business details now. Not when she was this jumpy, and the client had already verbally agreed to whatever price Wren set. Bad business, but right now she had other things on her mind. Like getting this Null child the hell out of range of…whatever it was that had just happened.

“Make a deposit to this account, in this amount.” And she jotted down the numbers for the blind account she and Sergei used to accept funds, plus her usual retainer fee to get things started. “I’ll be in touch with the rest of the details as soon as I have a better feel for the job.”

Not satisfied, but realizing that she wasn’t going to get any more out of her new hire right now, Rosen tucked herself all the way into the car and allowed Wren to close the door.

Wren stared down the street, watching but not really seeing the brake lights of the Town car, itching to find out what the hell had happened upstairs. She was beginning to run through places to start asking questions, when someone came up behind her on the street. She heard the footsteps, aware that there was no threat-aura to them, and dismissed them from her awareness with a skill that was more classic New Yorker than Talent. The tap on her shoulder, therefore, startled her so violently that she almost let loose with a spray of current: full fight or flight reflexes kicking in.

“Christ. Jumpy much, Valere?”

Her almost-assailant backed up and leaned against the building behind him, arms crossed against his oh-so-pretty-if-you-liked-beefcake chest. If she didn’t have a pounding reaction-headache, she’d have appreciated the visual more.

“Danny.” Cowboy boots and dress shirts worked better in Houston than they did in Manhattan, but Danny still managed to make them look good. And the boots had the advantage of hiding his hooves.

“Danny,” she said again, this time in a different voice. Shaking off the quiver of nerves, she looked around for the first time at the mild disaster the blast had left: car windows blown out, tires flattened, trees wilted. Whatever hadn’t hit her apartment had done some significant work just outside it. Interesting. “What the hell happened?”

“I was going to ask you that.”

Glass crunched under his heels as they walked together, both of them checking out the damage. Wren was thankful she’d thought to pull on work boots before coming downstairs. Her usual soft-soled loafers wouldn’t have offered as much protection from the sharp-edged shards.

“No sign of explosives,” Danny went on as they walked down the street, past her building and down to the end, then started back again. Of course he’d already done a preliminary sortie. She didn’t ask how he’d gotten there so quickly. That was what Danny did. “No car bombs, no blown manhole covers, no dead guy bits with wires and whatnot strapped to him. Nobody heard a thing.

“And yet, every single Talent in the area felt the blast, and hey, look at that, half a dozen car windows got blown out. Right in front…” He paused for dramatic effect as they reached her stoop. “Of your building. That sort of narrows it down, don’tcha think?”

Danny had been a damn good beat cop, before tabloid-driven pressures made it tough for fatae to advance in the ranks. He made an even better insurance investigator. His network of Talents in the NYPD was the match of any small-town gossip chain. In fact, in a lot of ways it was a small-town gossip chain. When something weird happened, they let him know. And he got to be piggie-on-the-spot, asking all the nasty questions.

“So who in the Cosa you piss off this time?”

Like that one. The Cosa Nostradamus: the magical community, the human Talents and the supernatural fatae, with or without usable magics. The “family” part was closer to Manson than Brady, unfortunately.

“You been tuned into some other universe the past couple of months?” The only people in the Cosa she hadn’t pissed off lately were the ones from out of town. And maybe she’d annoyed a few there, too.

“If I knew how to get out of this one, I’d buy you a ticket,” he said, proving that he had too been paying attention lately. “One-way. You’re becoming a target for way too much shit.”

Ow. “Not my fault this city’s going to hell,” she said defensively. It wasn’t. In fact, she was part of the reason it hadn’t gotten a hell of a lot worse. The vigilantes? Guilt aside, she had been one of the first to figure out the connection between the “exterminators” advertising with their cryptic flyers, and the attacks on the nonhuman members of the Cosa. The surge in general crankiness that couldn’t be blamed on the heat wave? She was the one who had gotten rid of the semisentient manuscript that incited and fed off increased levels of negative emotions. The Mage Council going after the lonejacks to prove who was top dog in the city? No way that she was taking the shit for whatever was chewing at their brains.

“And yet…” He looked around and gestured tellingly at the dark blue mailbox directly in front of her door, crushed like it was made of tinfoil instead of riveted steel. “Someone was sending you a message of some sort. Sounds like ‘back off’ to me.”

She didn’t even try to deny the fact that she had been the target. “Damn it, Danny. I didn’t ask for any special attention from anyone. It just…happened.”

He snorted like the centaurs of his paternal line. “Nothing just happens, Valere. Nothing ever just happens.”

“City filled with Yoda wannabes, and I gotta look like a swamp. Go catch a criminal, Danny. Leave me alone.”

“Valere.” He touched her arm. Danny didn’t touch anyone, much. “You got a headache?”

“Yeah.”

“So does every Talent within five blocks, I bet. And this was a bitty baby psych-bomb. A warning shot.

“Twelve months ago, the biggest talk in the Cosa was who was sleeping with what. Six months ago, we were talking about those damn vigilantes, targeting us.”

By us, he meant the fatae, the nonhumans of the Cosa. No Talents had been attacked by that particular group of bigots, as far as Wren knew.

That fact had been the beginning of the split in the Cosa, along racial lines: us versus them. Well, that and the fact that most Talents were selfish and lazy, and couldn’t be bothered to deal with something that didn’t affect them directly. Wren wasn’t particularly special, in that regard.

“Four months ago, it was the flameouts.” The wizzarts, or crazed Talents, who had been killed by someone or someones still unknown. Wren had tried to find the killers, but had only been able to force them out of town. But Danny didn’t know that part of the story. She thought.

“Today?” he went on. “Today we’re talking about Talents gone missing. Fatae gone dead. You—and a bunch of others—getting blacklisted by the Council. The fact that there’s been a Talent Moot, and you knocked heads together.”

Wren winced at that. The Moot, or gathering, had been a bad idea, and her telling them all it was a bad idea had been an even worse idea, for all that it made sense at the time. All it did was bring her notoriety she didn’t want and couldn’t use. And, if Danny was right, which she suspected he was, had led to this.

“What it all comes together as, girl, is you in the middle of shit, like it or not, want it or not. You is standing there with a great big red target painted on your nice peachy-skinned forehead.”

“So what do you think I should do, oh wise one?” She was trying for sarcasm, but it came out too sincere a question for comfort.

Danny didn’t hesitate. “Run, babe. Run like hell.”

By the time she got back to her apartment and tossed her boots back into her bedroom closet, the news trucks had already shown up. They were cruising up and down, narrowly missing the cars parked on either side, looking for some hapless passing pedestrian to interview for the news. The timing sucked for witnesses, though; the lunchers were back in their cubicles, and the afternoon dog walkers hadn’t started hitting the streets yet. They were probably going to be stuck interviewing the same firefighter or cop on every channel.

Run, babe.

She had never run in her entire life. Not when she discovered what she was, not when her mentor disappeared on her, rather than risk exposing her to his madness, not when the Council had first targeted her, not even when the relatively low-risk life of a Retriever started getting downright dangerous.

If it was just herself, she’d be rabbiting like a, well, like a rabbit. But it wasn’t just her, was it?

She made a bet with herself—a water main break, something serious but impossible to blame anyone for—and sat down on the bed and waited for the phone to ring.

It took seven minutes after the first camera set up and started broadcasting live. She picked up the phone and held it a cautious distance from her ear.

“Damn it, woman, what have you been doing?”

That was her partner, always willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

“Water main break, or electrical fires?”

There was a pause, then the muted sound of the television in the background. “Manhole cover explosion, no suspicious activity suspected.”

Wren wondered sometimes what might happen if a Talent decided to go terrorist. So far—and by that she meant the entire history of Council and lonejacks—it hadn’t happened. Not even the IRA or PLO had ever claimed a Talented member. Something about channeling current, it seemed to burn out any kind of political or nationalistic fervor. Thank God.

“So what’s going on?” Sergei asked again, this time with an edge to his voice. Bless the man, he did worry.

“Buy me dinner, and I’ll tell you all about it.” What little she knew, anyway. Hopefully, by then, she’d know more. Or at least, what to tell him.

His immediate reaction was a long, drama-queen sigh. “Why is it that I always seem to end up buying you dinner?”

She had actually opened her mouth to respond when he added, “Don’t answer that. Make it early. I was too busy talking at my lunch meeting today to actually eat anything.”

Wren hung up the phone without saying goodbye, and stared at the wall in front of her. She really needed to hang some artwork. She really needed to buy some artwork. The place really did look like she rented it. Her partner ran a damned art gallery, and her walls were bare. What was she waiting for? Some windfall of millions? To move to some larger, better-lit space? To suddenly develop artistic taste? None of that was going to happen, not in this lifetime.

“And this suddenly bothers you now, why?” she asked herself out loud. “Because some chickie comes in and sneers at your apartment?”

Or maybe, a little internal voice suggested, because this was the third time in less than a year someone had maybe-probably tried to seriously harm her. She had always acted like life was long and amenable to planning. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. She’d gotten Sergei into bed on a whim, and that had worked out well, hadn’t it?

Hadn’t it?

The little voice had nothing to say on that matter.

Enough of that. She had four hours before she had to meet Sergei for dinner. Work to be done. First up, send out some feelers on the client, see if anything ugly came back before she actually cashed the retainer check. Paranoia was a lovely thing, and so useful, too. Then, maybe a wander down to the usual cafés, have some coffee, see if anyone else had gotten a package via demon-courier…

“Nope. Not a thing. Guess they don’t think I’m important enough.”

“Oh, give me a break.” Wren downed the last of her coffee and made a grimace. That was her fourth cup of the afternoon, it having taken this long to get her companion around to the topic of interest. She should probably switch to decaf at some point. It wouldn’t taste any better, but she’d feel a little less spring-wound.

“Seriously, Wren.” Bill leaned across the Formica table, his black eyes intent on her face. “Last I heard of any of this, you had shot all the battle-mongers down at the Moot. Things quieted down after that. I thought that was the end of it.”

She’d thought that was the end of it, too. The Moot had been a meeting between the local lonejacks that had taken place over the summer, to discuss what to do about the apparent aggression the Council was showing against lonejacks, in general and in particular. She’d pointed out then, rather dramatically, how piss-poor of an idea trying to fight the Council was. No lonejack knew a damn thing about organizing, or, more importantly, was any good at it. Lonejacks were all about individual action, individual concerns. The Council was where all the joiners landed. The followers, the order-takers. No less selfish…just differently oriented with it.

For lonejacks to form some kind of Talented militia, that was just asking to get stomped on by the big kid on the block, especially when the big kid’s already got stomping boots on. She’d believed—she still believed—that their best chance to survive the Council’s newfound aggression was to stay true to who they were, and not make big honking red-shirted targets of themselves. The Council would burn off whatever insanity was infecting them, and everything would go back to normal.

But when the joiners start looking cross-eyed at the individuals, even the most anti-organizational types can get nervous. Especially when violence—even unproven—gets added to the picture. And nervous made for snap decisions. But sometimes, she was starting to think, that was what the job needed.

There was no proof that the Council was behind anything that had and was happening. If you wait around for proof, sometimes you get it—and sometimes you got dead.

“Would you have signed it?” she asked him now, after the fact.

Bill relaxed back into the hard-stuffed bench of their booth, and shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe. Probably. What’s been going down, it’s some scary shit. Making a scary noise back might not do anything, but sitting around waiting for them to come for me? Lost most of my family, that way.”

Bill looked Generic WASP, down to the Top-Siders on his feet and the natural blond of his hair, but his genetics included a long line of steppe-riding wildmen and witches, only some of whom had made it to America on the last Cosa express out of Germany in 1939. He was also the best damn Translocator in the city, which had earned him the much-hated nickname of “Scotty.” One of the few who could—or would—create spell-sticks for Talents like Wren, for whom Translocating was, at best, a chancy operation.

If she were part of a group looking to garner support among the lonejacks, Bill would have been at the top of her list. The fact that he hadn’t been approached meant—what? That they had no interest in this letter being circulated among lonejacks. That they had no intention of building a consensus, or circulating it further. That the people putting it together—otherwise intelligent, if hotheaded Talents—had an agenda that probably did not include getting the Council to back down, but rather force their hand.

She hoped to hell the Council didn’t take the bait, but suspected they rather would. And that that had been the plan all along.

And you fell for it. You went along and blithely jotted your initials on the damned thing without thinking it through, giving them your fingerprints over the damn thing, which could be just what’s needed to make the Council move overtly—and therefore make a lonejack coalition needful. Brilliant, Valere. Fucking brilliant. You got played.

She downed the last of her coffee, and waved the waitress over for a refill, already mentally composing the “stop the press” response she was going to scorch into their hides, via demon express. She’d do it herself, if she thought they’d left themselves open to any kind of directed attack. But they were smart, these bastards. Almost smart enough to pull it off, worse luck.

The bells from the church up the street were tolling six when Wren came up out of the subway. She was late. As usual. Knowing her partner, he had arrived exactly on time.

At some point, they had stopped even specifying where and when they were going to meet for dinner. Before they were sleeping together, but after she’d moved into the apartment on Hanover Street. And wasn’t it sad, that she marked her life not by years, but events? She couldn’t even remember, without looking at her lease papers, what month she had moved in. Autumn, she knew that, because her mother had been worried about an early snow or some other insane thing interrupting the move. All four pieces of furniture she had, at the time, and two suitcases of clothing…

Things like that, now, made her laugh. God, what she wouldn’t give for a life where a little snow was a major catastrophe.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the window front, and paused to check her teeth for lipstick. She still hadn’t gotten used to wearing it. She still wasn’t sure why she even bothered. Even if he noticed, he never said anything.

Of course he notices, she told herself with mild irritation. Sergei notices everything. Even me.

“You’re late,” Callie said when the Retriever walked through the front door. It was early enough that the restaurant was mostly empty, the very last of the very late lunchers cleared away but the local dinner crowd still caught in their nine-to-whenever office jobs.

“I’m always late,” she said, and then, just to get it over with, “No, don’t bother to get up, I’ll find my own way.”

The hostess/waitress just waved an indulgent hand in acquiescence as Wren moved between the tables of the small restaurant, moving unerringly to the table for two at the back corner where Sergei was already waiting. Her partner was reading a paperback while he waited, which was unusual. Typically he had his face buried in one of the endless trade rags the art world produced, or the apricot-colored pages of the Financial Times. The years had been gentle on him; the guy she had met more than a decade ago had worn his hair shorter, carried a dozen fewer pounds around the torso, and had more of a military precision in his posture. But the lines of the jaw were still as square and clean, and his wide-set brown eyes still had that same pale glow to them.

Or maybe it was just the way he looked at her. Saw her, the way the rest of the world seemed incapable of managing. It was, damn it, sexy as hell.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“I ordered you a diet ginger ale. I thought you might need it, to ease the headache.”

They had been partners for almost eleven years now. Lovers for less than a year. She really did love him for his mind.

And, okay, the bod that housed that mind, too. But mostly his mind. And the way he did shit like that.

“Headache, huh? Someone’s been doing some research while they were waiting.” Good. If he knew what was going on, that would make life easier for her, in the “what the hell is going on” category. And maybe he could explain the “why” of it to her, too.

“Actually Doblosky called me, after we talked.” Ben Doblosky was a beat cop in the Midtown South precinct whom they had met three—no, four jobs prior, when the vigilantes were still a new threat on the block. He was also a Talent, and so part of Danny’s network. “All he said was that you were going to have a nasty current-back-lash headache, and would probably need a place to crash, somewhere out of attack-range of your apartment.”

His tone was still mild, but there were undercurrents there only someone who had known him a long time would hear; striations of, “Were you going to tell me you were the target?” blended with, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

She sat down and picked up the menu, just to have something to do with her hands. “I really wish that people would stay out of my personal life. I already have a mother, and she’s more than enough.” Wren didn’t appreciate people deciding that she needed taking care of. Not even Sergei. Especially not when she was fine, damn it.

Her mom went through fourteen hours of labor to push Wren into the world. She got dispensation to fuss, much as she wanted. Nobody else.

She looked around. “Where’s the chalkboard?” The specials were always written on a chalkboard.

“Broken. There’s a sheet in the menu.”

She signed, opening the menu and staring at it. She didn’t know why she bothered. She had been on a veal kick lately, and that’s what she had gotten the last six times they were in. Or maybe seven.

“The incident outside your apartment, the one on the news. It was—”

“Cosa business.” Wren suddenly wasn’t in the mood to discuss it. She hadn’t been able to figure out why the blast was bothering her so much. Or, not the blast, but the why of it. “Just someone being cranky.”

“At you.” Sergei stared at her over the top of his reading glasses.

“Probably.” Definitely. Danny was right, there wasn’t anyone else the message could have been for. She was the only lonejack on her street, unless someone had moved in over the summer. Council members waging a little intramural rivalry she’d gotten caught up in? Unlikely. Council membership had its perks, and one of them involved protection from things like this—both from other members, and from outsiders. That was the appeal of the Council, the carrot they were offering lonejacks.

Ignoring the fact that the main problem they seemed to be offering protection from was—according to lonejack paranoia—the Council itself.

“Some sort of mini-blast. Danny stopped by. He’s looking into it.”

“You’re staying with me tonight.” Sergei caught himself before she could even give him a Look, proving that he knew exactly how she was going to take that particular pronouncement. A deep breath, his hands flat on the table, fingers not clenching by sheer force of will that she could appreciate. “If you want to stay with me tonight, I’d be glad of the company. I’m a little unnerved by anyone setting off explosives in your general vicinity.”

Slightly mollified, Wren lifted her water glass and studied the way the fluid inside it moved around the ice cubes. “You think they’re not going to set them off if you’re around?”

“My building is a little more secure. Not to mention my apartment’s farther from the street.”

A psi-bomb could be set off right next to his window. Right next to his bathroom sink, if he’d left the window open even a crack. No need to tell him that, if Doblosky—that blabbermouth—hadn’t.

“You gonna cook me breakfast?” He might be the master negotiator, but she could haggle a bit, too.

“I think I’ve got a few eggs I could scramble, somewhere in the fridge, yes. You’d know that, if—”

“Don’t go there, lover.”

There was no way she would ever give up her apartment, bare walls and unnerving memories aside. But even at her most stubborn she had to admit that there were real plusses to Sergei’s place, not the least of which was a state-of-the-art kitchen, and an owner who knew how to use it.

“Let me guess.” Callie appeared tableside, despite the fact that Wren still had the menu open. “You’re going to have hanger steak, rare, and she’s going for the veal scaloppine. You want a glass of wine, too?” That last was to Wren.

“No, I’m good, thanks.” Callie was a professional waitress, not an actor-waiting-break. More, she was a New York professional waitress. But as used to them as Callie might be, they were accustomed to her as well, which took half the fun out of it. She just nodded like some sort of benign dictator, picked up the menus, and walked away.

“Now that that’s settled. What kind of Cosa business, that involves things exploding and Ben worrying about your safety?”

Figured. Trust Didier not to be distracted, not when it involved her. She had to give him something, or he’d be impossible. Make that more impossible. “The kind everyone tells me they want me to stay out of while they keep dragging me in. P.B. came by earlier.”

“Oh?” He took a sip of his wine, swallowed appreciatively, and raised one narrow, probably professionally plucked eyebrow, inviting her to continue.

In for a dollar, in for a euro, or whatever the saying was. She took a deep breath, let it out. “Some of the more usual suspects have put together a letter to the Council, wanting to know if they’re behind the recent…problems. Walks a real pretty line between threat and whimper, I have to admit. And despite my advice to the contrary, I suspect that they’re going to send it.” Hopefully a revised version. Hopefully using her suggestions. If not…

Sergei digested that; she could almost see the wheels and gears turning in his brain. “And it will do…what?”

Wren drained half her water, and put the glass down with a thunk on the table. “Not a damn thing, if we’re lucky. If we’re not, which we never seem to be, it’s going to piss off the Council, whether they had anything to do with the disappearances in the first place or not. And then the real fun begins. Not. Fuck. Look, you’ve reassured yourself that I’m okay, can we just drop it?”

Sergei frowned, wrinkles forming between his eyes as he stared at her. She met his gaze with as much inner calm as she could manage with her head still aching, willing him to accept the fact that she was okay, all right, present and accounted for.

She knew what he was afraid of. Had been afraid of, deep down inside that stoic business-guy exterior, ever since all this began, six months ago.

Afraid that the lonejack paranoia was true. That the Council was behind the disappearances of the Talents. That the Council had been behind the attacks on the fatae, had been funding the so-called vigilantes. That they—the Council—were plotting something. And that Wren, by taking a public stand against them and winning, during the Frants case, had put herself on their to-do list.

And that their do-ing was of the fatal kind.

She didn’t know how to reassure him. She wasn’t immortal. She didn’t even heal particularly well. And Lee’s death over the summer had just driven that home all the harder. No matter that the other Talent had died because of fatae politics raising its ugly head at exactly the wrong moment, or that the violence had been driven by the malign influences of the job she had been working on, an influence now, hopefully, locked away in a lead-lined, current-sealed box and sunk a mile deep into the floor of some cold ocean somewhere.

Death sobered you. It made you think about things like the people you loved, term life insurance, next of kin, and how badly your friends were going to screw up your wake if you didn’t leave them explicit instructions.

“Y’know what I really want to do?” she said suddenly.

“Get dinner in a doggie bag, go back to the apartment, and screw like maddened weasels?”

Wren widened her eyes in mock shock, even as she felt the heat rise in her face. “I was thinking about getting a hot fudge sundae for dessert, actually, but that sounds good, too.”

Sergei smiled, that half grin that made her insides do a nice-feeling woogly, and gestured for Callie to make their order to-go.

She really did love him for his mind. Really.

“Did she give you a message?”

P.B. didn’t like this guy. At all. The feeling seemed to be mutual, from the glare the human was giving him. Maybe he was a bigot. Maybe he just didn’t like demon. Maybe he glared that way at his mother, too.

“No, she didn’t give me a message. She gave me the paper, which I gave to you. That’s what I do.” The rhyming pattern, unintentional, made P.B. think of the spells Wren used to direct her current. She didn’t rhyme, but the words always had this singsong pattern to them. If he had access to magic, he’d use it to turn himself invisible and get the hell out of here. “Here” being a small, smoke-filled room like he didn’t think they made anymore, with way too many hard-eyed humans who smelled like stale fear.

Demon didn’t sweat. When nervous, P.B. blinked a lot. He hoped that these humans didn’t know that, and ascribed his constant twitch to the layers of smoke.

“What did she say?” That gravelly voice belonged to a seated human; grossly overweight, like Santa gone bad. He might have been jolly once, but not now. The stub of a cigar rested between thick pink fingers.

“She didn’t say anything,” P.B. started to explain again, when he realized the man was speaking to the guy holding the papers.

“That we were idiots, but if we were determined to slit our own throats, she wouldn’t stop us.” He looked past the scrawled note on the top sheet and skimmed the rest of the papers. “She marked up the actual letter with red pen, made some suggestions about wording.”

“And…?” A third human, this one covered in dark hair like a badly evolved orangutan and a surprisingly squeaky voice. It should have been funny, but P.B. didn’t ever want to meet that guy in a dark alley.

“And nothing. That’s it.”

“She won’t sign on with us?” Human #4, with skin as black as P.B. could ever remember seeing, and deep green eyes that were absolutely not natural—and not colored contacts, either. The Force was strong in that one, and it was Sith, all the way. “Even after they tried to kill her?”

“She didn’t say she would.” Back to the first speaker, who held the papers.

“Damnation! We need her!”

“She didn’t say she would,” the fifth and last man said. A small, weedy, whiskery-looking man, wearing Bermuda shorts that showed off impressively knobby knees, he held a cigar that was still unlit, and looked like it had been chewed at by a nervous rat. “But does she say that she won’t?”

The four other men and one demon stared at him. He shrugged, twirling the cigar idly. “If she says she will, she will. If she says she won’t, she won’t. If she hasn’t committed…she’s thinking. She hasn’t ruled either answer out. She’s being a smart lonejack, and keeping her options open and her opinions to herself.” He sounded like he envied her. From what P.B. knew of lonejacks, he probably did. The first order of business was something like “don’t take jobs you hate,” or something like that.

“We don’t have that option anymore.”

“Neither does she,” the fat man said. “Demon, thank you. Payment will be made in full, by the end of the workday. Now, go.”

P.B. would have hung around, despite the smoke and the glare from Human #1, just to hear what was being said. Even if it hadn’t involved Wren, knowledge was currency. Especially these days. But the choice wasn’t his.

The door of the town house shut firmly behind him, and the demon took a breath of the relatively cleaner air outside. But the stink of smoke clung to his lungs, and made him feel dirty.

“They’re going to get themselves killed. All of them.”

Not that it should matter. Humans, even Talents, even lonejacks, were none of his concern. He was demon, the stepchild of the fatae. None of them were his concern, just like he had never been theirs. Wasn’t just lonejacks who played by those rules.

For most of his life, all he had wanted to do was survive. When the vigilantes started targeting the fatae last year, he had thought about leaving town. But he had stayed, to help the only fatae breed more helpless, more friendless than he was: the piskies.

And then, when Wren had been targeted by her own kind, he had come to her aid. He had brought her information and watched her back, hers and her partner’s. He hadn’t even seriously considered abandoning her, not while she needed him. Not only because she had played fair with him all the years they’d known each other. But because he liked her.

That had been new. Nice, but new.

And when the other fatae had started coming to him—to him!—with their worries, their concerns, he had listened. And done something, become part of bringing the lonejacks and fatae together, using Wren to create the possibility of…something. A bridge. A chance.

The ties he had avoided for so long were tight around him now. And he still didn’t know how it had happened, or why.

Or maybe, he thought, looking down the street and watching the usual flow of bodies and cars doing their usual oblivious-to-each-other dance of the crosswalks, he did.

Whistling a disturbingly cheerful dirge, P.B. put his slouch hat slantwise on his head, and set off down the street, confident in the fact that this was New York, and nobody would even take a second look at a four foot tall white-furred demon walking past them. In their minds, if they processed it at all, they’d shrug and think “well, why shouldn’t there be something that looked like that walking down the street?”

This was his city, damn it. His home. If it was going to go down in flames, he would go down with it.

3

She is in her apartment, filled with twisted bodies, sweat-sheened faces, like something out of a mid-Level of Hell: cocktails and damnation. She turns, looks for the door, and suddenly there’s something holding her, pulling her arms off like a little boy tugging fly wings. It hurts. She twists, trying to get free, back arching until her leg muscles strain in sympathy, tendons snapping, sweat pouring off her, and the current would. Not. Come.

“Help me!” A silent scream, and she aches worse than her body inside to answer that plea. But she can’t do more than twist in death throes, unable to do more than relive the agony of realization, the moment of Lee’s death, even knowing that this wasn’t how he had died, this wasn’t the way it went at all—

Her arms finally free, her body falling forward, landing hard on the floor, and she inches forward like a worm to the tall, bleeding form and looks on his face to say goodbye, and…

The face that looks back at her, eyes wide and staring with madness, isn’t Lee’s but John Ebeneezer’s. Her mentor. Her father, in all the ways that mattered.

And he stares at her, and says:

You killed me.

Sergei’s bed took up most of the sleeping loft of his apartment. It was huge, comfortable, and damned difficult to get out of in the morning, like a feather-bed hug. He was a solid lump of heat, and the urge to snuggle in next to him, rest her head on his chest and go back to sleep, was so overwhelming Wren almost gave in.

Almost. Not quite. Not after that particular nightmare.

Easing out of bed with more care than was needed—he could sleep through an earthquake, when he was in his own bed—Wren located the nearest shirt from the pile of hastily dropped clothing on the floor and slipped it on over her head, then went down the spiral staircase that led from the sleeping loft to the rest of the apartment. Large, open and modern, it was the total opposite of her own place. Hi-tech, carefully furnished, and very, very expensive.

She liked it, but always felt like she was going to break something by accident. Like, oh, the coffeemaker. He’d upgraded from the piece of shit percolator he’d bought when he realized she wasn’t much more than a lump of mobile meat without real caffeine, and every time she looked at the gleaming testament to fine Italian caffeine know-how, she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to press a button or genuflect.

She settled for measuring out the coffee, adding water, then pressing the right buttons and walking away to let it do its magic. Let the blessings of the kahve rain upon her, and all would be well. Or at least washed clear for the day, so she could do what she needed to do.

Sergei’s laptop was set up on a sleek Danish Modern desk in a far corner of the loft, surrounded on all sides by ledgers and paperwork. Sergei might make a sizable chunk of money moonlighting as her business manager, but the Sergei Didier Gallery—Fine Art and Collectibles—was what the taxes were taken out of.

She walked cautiously over to the desk. What was once a simple wireless setup had been complicated in recent months by a tangle of surge protectors and duct tape. The surge protectors weren’t actually hooked into the wall outlet—they weren’t meant to protect the computer from wild energy coming in through power lines, but from her. She had a much more intricate system set up on her own computer, as well as the phones, her stereo system, and the toaster. She didn’t even dare have a television—one moment of irritation with network programming, and there went the entire set, shorted out under peevy current.

Sitting down and logging in, she checked her e-mail. Nothing. Not even her usual mailing lists were stirring, much less any response to the feelers she had sent out yesterday on the client.

There was, however, an e-mailed sighting of that damned stuffed horse she’d been chasing for too many years. Another pin in the map that had too many pins already. Someday she was going to catch that bansidhe in equine-and-sawdust form, and stuff it back into the glass museum case it came from, be damned if she didn’t.

Next step was her bank account. Yes, there it was: a lovely, lovely overnight deposit. Bless Miss Rosen and her bank of good repute, neither of whom had wasted any time despite Wren’s short-tempered, high-handed manner. That went a long way toward improving her mood, dissipating the last remnants of her nightmare.

What that meant, however, was that Wren was now officially on the clock.

“All right. First things first.”

She called up her preferred search engine, and typed in “Melanie Worth-Rosen.” The hits that came back seemed to indicate that the grieving widow was a woman of some social distinction and obligation. Vice president of the Gotham Historical Center, Secretary for the Uptown Foundation of Arts, quite hoity-toity, but also Secretary of the Manhattan Mission for Animals…and chair for the local Literacy Campaign. “All that we’re missing for you to be All American is a stint as the May Queen. So, was this paragon of virtues on the socialite’s parade float, or did she get down in the trenches, protesting the imperialist waste?”

A few more searches gave her the answer.

“Protesting. Good for you!” An arrest back in college, for trespassing with intent to distribute pamphlets. An actual arrest, even if there was no conviction on-file, so somebody made a bargain. Wren was impressed. Back then, companies hadn’t been so lawsuit-shy; they’d actually sent lawyers after penny-ante offenders like that, giving them their day in court—and in the newspapers. Protestors got media-savvy, and the corporations got weaselier, exchanging prosecution for no video footage on the evening news…but to stand there, back then, and give The Man the finger—that took guts.

So. Wren pushed back a little from the desk in order to think. A widow, younger than her husband and older than her stepdaughter, within socially acceptable parameters but a bit of a conscience as well. Attractive woman: not a blonde, which showed a refreshing change. Auburn, maybe; it was difficult to tell in the photographs. Decent bone structure, and wonder of wonders, a smile that didn’t look like it was about to crack her face. Wren suspected that this was a woman who knew how to laugh.

In several of the photos, Anna Rosen and Melanie were together. In one, they had their arms around each other, with body language that seemed neither forced nor uncomfortable.

All right, that was significant. Anna had not given off warm and fuzzy vibes towards stepmomma when she hired Wren, but there they were, chummy-buddies and smiling, not just for the cameras. So why was Melanie holding on to the one thing that darling stepdaughter wanted? Where had it gone wrong? With Daddy’s death? Or after, when the will was read out?

Knowing the answer might not make any difference. Not knowing the answer might make all the difference in the world. That was the thing about Retrievals. You never knew what was important until you realized you didn’t know or have it. Better to be safely obsessive, and end up with useless trivia. Might come in handy some-when else, you never knew.

Hitting the print key for several different screens, Wren got up to go check on the coffee’s progress.

“Bless you,” she said to the machine, grabbing one of the black, surprisingly delicate-looking china cups from the cabinet and pouring herself a long dose. It needed sugar, but for now, this was manna from the gods just as it was.

The computer was still printing—the photos were taking forever—so she headed for the sofas, curling her feet under her and making sure to set her cup down on a coaster rather than directly on the surface of the coffee table. Sergei protected the high-gloss surface of the furniture with the ferocity of a momma bear protecting cubs. She didn’t understand it—growing up, a coffee table was what you put your feet up on—but she was willing to humor him, within reason.

A flash of recent memory—she grabbed the headboard, arching back, thankful the bed was wood, and sturdy, as they rocked back and forth. His teeth were bared in a fierce, taunting, smug grin that made her want to wipe it off through sheer exhaustion.

“You like that?” he asked. Totally unnecessarily, in her opinion. She wasn’t sure what she had been vocalizing just now, but she was pretty damn sure it hadn’t been “stop.”

“Not bad,” she managed to say, then rocked forward again, rewarded by his hiss of purely physical satisfaction. Current stirred within her, woken by the intense emotions running her brain. Normally she could only “see” them when she was in a fugue state, but the sense of them was always there, in this particular instance dark blue and purple strands eeling around her inner core, sparking and sizzling in her arousal.

“Lyubimaya. Yessssss.” Sergei was practically crooning his approval as she moved on him, and the current reacted to that, streaking up and out, exiting her pores like highly charged mist. Where her skin met his, flesh sizzled, and his croon became a loud, exuberant yell of climax as he thrust upward and came, almost violently, within her.

The memory ended abruptly, Wren shaking herself out of the reverie she had fallen into. Coffee. Drink coffee, Valere. Then back to work. Only she knew from experience that she wouldn’t get much work done, not with a still-naked, warm, sleepy and morning-eager Sergei still in bed. Sex was just such a great way to procrastinate.

Drinking her coffee, she went back into the gleamingly clean kitchen to find a piece of paper and a pen to leave a note. By the time she had figured out what to say, gone back up the staircase, found her clothing and—quietly—gotten dressed, the printer had finished kicking out her materials. She gathered them up, shoved them into a folder, and let herself out of the apartment. After a moment of indecision—library? Starbucks? Home?—she headed back downtown to her own place, where she could spread out without fear of interruption or overpriced coffee-lures.

“Zhenchenka?” A hand reached out from underneath the sheets, stretching blindly into the space where Wren had been sleeping. It patted the mattress, as though thinking the body might still be there, then gave up.

Rolling over, Sergei Didier opened his eyes, blinking against the faint sunlight reaching up into his sleeping loft, and calculated the time. The semifamiliar smell of coffee rose from the main level. So much for an early morning roll call.

Getting out of bed, he noted that Wren’s clothing was gone from the pile. Tossing his castoffs into the laundry basket, he pulled fresh socks and underwear from the dresser drawer, and went down to shower. The burns on his chest and thighs were tender, but already healing.

He knew it worried Wren, the way her current would occasionally overflow while they were making love, but he didn’t mind. Yes, he knew what current could do. He had seen the remains of the wizzarts killed by the overrush of current, during that case last year. On her insistence, he had even read a book about electricity and the ways it had been used to kill, over the years. Interesting book. That probably hadn’t been the reaction she had intended to provoke in him.

He trusted her, even when she wasn’t sure she trusted herself, not to hurt him.

Much, anyway. And a little pain mixed in with the pleasure…well, sometimes, with the right person, it just added to the pleasure. That was a new realization for him, and he was still poking around the edges of it. Carefully, the way he did everything, but not shying away from the facts, either.

He turned on the water, and stepped under the spray.

Besides, she’d been grounding in him for years. He doubted that had left him totally untouched—his most recent medical exam had shown some interesting striations on his kidneys that hadn’t been there before that fiasco in Maine, and the incident in Italy over the summer couldn’t have helped any.

No job was without risks. So why not take the benefits, too?

Not that he was going to tell her any of that. The last thing she needed to do was start pulling back in the middle of a job because she was worried about his internal organs.

Resting his head against the wall and letting the hot water pound against his skin, Sergei tried to force himself to relax. Wren was going to be okay. She was tough; toughest woman he’d ever met, in some ways. Lee’s death was a blow, but she’d recover. All he had to do was keep her busy, somehow. Find her a job. Keep her body going—jobs as he can, sex when he can’t. It was all he could think of, and it wasn’t enough to stave off the feeling of disquiet he had, holding her while she slept, watching while tears flowed from under her closed eyelids.

A shudder swept over him, like a horse trying to shake off flies. In all his life, Sergei Didier had only failed once. The thought of it happening again—losing someone because he wasn’t strong enough to save them—wasn’t one he could accept.

By the time he came out of the shower, tying his robe around his midsection, the smell of coffee had faded, and the apartment was completely quiet, the way only a very expensive, modern building could manage in the middle of a bustling city. So he knew, even before he saw the note on the kitchen counter, that she was gone.

A scrawl on the back of a used envelope. Stuff’s cooking. Nothing to worry, just details. Thanks for dinner—and dessert! Will stop by later.

And that was all. Vague even for Wren, who thought you should never preface anything with more than, “Hey, watch this!”

Rinsing out the coffeepot and setting it out to dry, Sergei put on the kettle for his own tea, toasted a bagel, and spread it with a schmear of cream cheese, and went to check his e-mail. She had left the machine on—unlike her. Very unlike her, normally as cautious around expensive electronics as a soldier in a minefield.

It had taken him longer than he liked to admit to Talent-proof his apartment for Wren, and the sight of the surge protectors and add-ons still made him do a faint double-take of “how’d that get there?” The kitchen had likewise been proofed, although it was less visible there. Expensive and unsightly, but the ability to use his electronics was one less excuse Wren could use to rush home, rather than staying the night. He’d found that he liked having her stay until morning. Purely selfish, and he made no excuses for it.

Plus, he liked his apartment much more than hers. A better shower, for one, and a much larger, more comfortable bed. At five-foot and inches, she could get away with a twin mattress. He was considerably taller, and liked to sprawl.

“Incoming!” the computer sang out, and he looked to see what had landed in his in-box. Most of it sorted into “gallery” files, some to “clientele,” which meant potential jobs or leads for Wren, and the rest went directly into the main folder to be sorted by hand.

One of those e-mails was red-tagged as urgent. The return-reply name was simply “bossman.” That was enough.

Sergei opened it.

We need a meet. Sigma GG.

That was all it said, and all Sergei needed to read. “Bossman” was Andre Felhim, his former superior officer and current contract liaison with the Silence, the organization that had saved their bacon last year and then tossed it right back into the fire with the Nescanni Parchment job. The job that had—indirectly—gotten one of Wren’s best friends, Lee, killed, and landed Sergei in the hospital with severely bruised kidneys the doctors were at a total loss to explain. Wren had treated him like he was made out of spun glass for a month after that.

Turnabout on the traditional role-play, he supposed, and no more than he deserved, but it had made him even more determined to keep his partner as far away from the Silence as he could. Just the mention of his former employer made her eyes go cold and hard in a way that wasn’t natural to her.

No, even without the GG coding—Greta Garbo, for “tell no one, come alone”—he wouldn’t have mentioned it to his partner. Keeping her busy was only part of the plan. Keeping her unstressed, so she had time to work through her thoughts, that was key. She wasn’t the type to talk it out, or act it out, or any other “out.” All you could do was stand by and wait for the storm to pass.

Deleting the message, and then wiping it from his system seven ways from Sunday, so that only the most determined snoop would be able to reconstruct it, Sergei started to reconfigure his workday. He needed to be able to get away long enough to meet with Andre without either Wren or his gallery assistant noticing that he was missing. Sending the revised schedule to Lowell for him to sync with the gallery’s computer, Sergei browsed the morning’s headlines, did one last check of his e-mail, then shut down the computer and went back upstairs to get dressed.

The last thing he did, before leaving the apartment, clad in his usual expensively subdued suit and tie, was to retrieve the delicate-looking but vicious handgun from his lockbox, count out a handful of bullets, and place the pistol in the holster snugged into the small of his back. You didn’t call for a meet—something outside of the office—without there being trouble. And trouble, when it came from Andre, meant going armed.

I hate that thing. Wren’s voice, floating around inside his brain. She had a more than decent touch of psychosymmetry that made her actively ill around guns, especially this one, which had his touch all over it. She didn’t like to be reminded of the fact that he was capable of taking life. Even when it was to save her own.

Don’t go. Her voice again. Or, call me. Let me be your backup, not that thing.

“Sorry, Wrenlet. But there are some parts of the Silence you still don’t know about. And that’s how I’m going to keep it.”

He owed her that much. It was his fault the Silence had found her at all. It was his fault that Lee was dead.

So much blood staining his hands, no matter how much he tried to step away from it all.

But he was a loyal dog. Always had been. And Andre had been his master, once upon a time.

4

The man sitting behind the mahogany desk might have been carved out of the same wood, so still was his expression and body. Only his eyes moved, black pupils bright and alert.

The messages had all been sent. Some would come right away. Others would play out the anticipation, measuring the years and the miles between against the urgency of his request. But they would come. They would all come.

Andre knew his people well. Had chosen them, trained them. In some cases, let them go. All, always, waiting against a day like this.

The location of his office had once been a matter of significance to him; a corner space with a custom-made desk, and an in-box that was constantly filled with urgent projects and situation files. And when he had demanded extra filing cabinets moved into the office, so that he didn’t have to wait for someone else to look something up, they had arrived paneled in matching wood.

Now, those filing cabinets mocked him, filled with information from past situations, solved situations. How much of that had been complete? he wondered. How many of his situations could have been closed sooner, if he’d gotten more, faster, more accurately? How many of the situations still open could have been closed, if he’d gotten one piece of information withheld? Who was behind this? What was their goal?

How soon would he go insane, wondering what-ifs without any basis, replaying scenarios without ever knowing for certain?

Andre Felhim was not a man who lingered overmuch on “what-ifs.” He dealt with facts and responsibilities. Actions and counteractions. Situations and solutions.

He saw the road, and took it.

“Sir?”

The voice that broke into his thoughts came from Darcy Cross, standing in the doorway. Brilliant, dedicated Darcy, who never failed him, not once. His office manager, Bren, lurked behind her, the Amazonian blonde towering over tiny, sparrow-boned Darcy. Andre had trained more than a dozen field agents in his career, knowing that most would come and go, but these two were his constant. He would have been hard-pressed to replace either one of them.

“Come in, both of you. Sit, please. Would you like some tea?”

Darcy and Bren looked at each other, then nodded.

“Yes, please,” the researcher said. “Would you like me to pour?”

“Please.”

The teapot was an elegant silver Art Deco set, the tea poured into tall glasses with silver chasers. Sugar lumps, not packets, from a silver bowl. Bren poured out, and sat back with the glass balanced easily on one knee, waiting for it to cool. Bren, bless her, was dog-loyal. He had no doubts of her.

“Sir?” Darcy asked again. She moved the glass from one hand to another, her delicate hands making the glass seem oversized. He hated to see that look of fearful anticipation in her hazel-blue eyes. Still, she was valued within the Silence not for her courage, but her almost frightening ability to uncover things other people tried to hide. If Darcy did not know something, there was nothing to know. Her knowing; that made it real. She knew that there was a problem. Therefore, there was a problem.

The thought that she might be party to this disinformation, that she might be hiding or redirecting that lifeblood of the Silence—unthinkable. Not because—unlike everyone else he had trained—she had any undying loyalty to him, but because her true love and loyalty was to information. She truly believed that it needed to be free. The thought of impeding it would make her head implode.

Despite this, he trusted her to know who had protected her, who continued to ease the way for her to do her job without outside interference, or undue political influences. She would file away what was said here, would bring her mind to bear on what he pointed her at, and know everything there was to know—but she would not sell it to another player. Not while he continued to protect her.

He therefore merely held up a hand, indicating that she should drink her tea, and wait.

Jorgunmunder, his protégé/lieutenant would arrive soon, the third of the three he had called to this specific time and place. And then, they could begin.

One of the great dividing lines between Manhattan residents, even more than Mets versus Yankees, was “subway or bus?” Wren was firmly on the subway side. Subways had track problems, yes. And they ran late, and occasionally stank, especially in the summer. Buses were just as crowded, and got stuck in traffic, to boot. Add to that her tendency to be “overlooked” even when she was jumping up and down trying to flag a bus down…at least the subway trains stopped at every stop, no matter if they saw someone waiting on the platform or not.

Unfortunately it was also the middle of the morning rush hour, which meant that no matter what sort of mass transit you took, it was going to be packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Thankfully today was that in-between sort of day; cool enough that the levels of human sweat were down, and not cold enough yet that people were wearing bulky coats that took up twice the available room.

Some people claimed that New Yorkers were rude. Wren had asked Sergei about that once; he, being from Chicago, had merely shrugged, as confused as she was. It wasn’t until she had spent time riding the subways waiting for a target to appear before she understood what it was outsiders were reacting to; not rudeness, but extreme politeness. Everyone in Manhattan was living in their own space, the lack of eye contact or acknowledgment others bemoaned actually allowing their neighbors the illusion of privacy, keeping noses down in newspapers or books, or eyes closed and shoulders moving to noises from their iPods.

Wren’s fingers twitched—the desire to Take overwhelming, for an instant, the fact that she had no desire to own an iPod, nor any market to sell one, even assuming she was interested in that. Which she wasn’t. She was a Retriever, not a garden variety thief.

But sometimes, sometimes, that itch hit, a throwback to her adolescent stint as a thrill-shoplifter.

The moment passed, the way they always did. Self-control was key. Focus was everything, the only thing, and the foremost part of focus was self-determination. Wren found a spot in the corner, leaned against the wall, and rested her eyes on nothing, letting her mind run over the material she had read that morning online until an inner-timing sense warned her that the train was approaching her stop. She slipped through the crowded car, shoulder and elbow acting like the prow of a small boat, moving people aside without them even realizing that they had been moved.

Neezer had taken her to see Chicago, back years ago when it was on Broadway, when she was still a teenager and he was still sane. A birthday outing, it had been. That evening had convinced Wren that Manhattan wasn’t so much a ballet as it was a Bob Fosse jazz routine, all hands and shoulders and feet constantly moving. If you did it right, you looked cool. Wrong, and you were a spaz.

When she had told Neezer that, expecting her mentor to laugh, he had merely blinked at her, long and slow, and nodded his head as though he’d never thought of it that way before but it made everything make perfect sense.

God, but she missed the old man. A lot. If he’d stayed, if he hadn’t wizzed…

Is as it is, Jenny-Wren. His voice, sad and slow, across the years. He hadn’t, he had, and she only had his memory to consult with, now. A memory that was starting to fade, no matter how tightly she clung to it. The things people think are forever? They’re dust before you know it. Wren was surprised by how bitterly angry that thought left her.

Coming up the stairs to street level, Wren stepped over the homeless person sleeping in the entryway, resisting the sudden urge to shove him out of the way with her foot. If you didn’t want to go to a shelter, that was your own choice. But there was no reason to sprawl in the path of people just trying to go about their day.

A tingle of guilt struck, and she shoved it down. Get rid of that anger, Valere. It just messes with you. She wasn’t a bad person—a bad person would have kicked him. She was just cranky, was all. Maybe she should have gone to Starbucks, gotten a mocha mood-adjustment or something, before heading for home….

Let yourself start to procrastinate and you’ll wallow in it for weeks, she told herself sternly. Go home. Get it done. Then it’s mocha-time. Maybe even a gingerbread latte. The only good things about November—molasses mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving, and gingerbread latte at Starbucks.

Her shoes crunched leaves that had fallen onto the sidewalk; random, not the thick, colorful carpet of leaves she remembered from her childhood. But it was enough to put her back into a more peaceful frame of mind, the crunch and crackle mixed with the odd, almost-unpleasant smell of autumn in the air.

By the time she walked the three blocks from subway to her apartment, Wren had decided on a preliminary course of action. Identify the piece of jewelry. Case the location. Blueprint entry and exit points. Execute. Cash checks. Nice, simple, unfussy. A photo of the item would be ideal, but unless Rosen got hold of a digital photo for insurance purposes, that was unlikely. So, a sketch, or, more likely, a verbal description. Aldo, on the first floor, was a decent enough pencil artist—she’d used him before to turn vague verbals into something she could identify.

The first floor apartment door was closed, which meant that Aldo was either working or sleeping. She left a note on the glossy white-painted splotch on his door with the grease pencil he left tied to his door for just that purpose. Just her apartment number and an exclamation point. He’d know what it meant.

In the meanwhile, she didn’t have the luxury of sitting around and waiting for people to bring the answers to her. Time to hit the paperwork trail, earn that retainer, at least.

At least it was something to do, rather than waiting for another psi-bomb to land, or another fatae friend to be attacked, or another lonejack to go missing….

She took the last few steps to her apartment with caution, listening with her ears as well as her core. “May you live in interesting times” was great if you were a newscaster, or a photojournalist. But for a simple Retriever trying to make a living, it was a pain in the ass.

Nothing. For the first time in what seemed like months, there wasn’t anyone lurking in the hallway. No spybugs planted in her ceiling. No demon waiting to pass news. Just her, and her new furniture, and the spotlessly clean apartment rebuking her for the amount of time she was spending away from it.

The door locked behind her, Wren dropped her keys in the dish on the counter and placed her obnoxiously yellow—and impossible to lose—bag next to it, shrugging out of her leather jacket and hanging it up, carefully. One lecture from Sergei about the care and feeding of good leather was all she ever wanted to sit through, thanks.

She opened the bag, pulling out the printouts she had shoved in there at Sergei’s place. The lump of papers made the shoulder bag bulge strangely, and once again she thought that she might need to break down and buy a briefcase to replace the old one. It had died a grisly death, eaten by a disgusting bio-sludge that Walter, a Coast Guard ensign and moderate-level Talent, had accidentally let loose over the summer while he was trying to encourage a newborn kelpie harboring just off Ellis Island to eat all her proteins.

Humming under her breath, Wren set the coffeemaker to work, pulled a diet Sprite from the fridge to tide her over in the meanwhile, then grabbed the printouts and went down the hallway to her office. She could work anywhere in the apartment, but the vibes for concentration were best in that room.

“Damn. Also, damn.”

Wren carefully placed the printout she was reading down on the floor in front of her, and stared at it as though the words were about to leap off the page and bite her. In a way, they just had.

She was sitting, as usual, on the floor, with her research materials in small piles around her. Also as usual, she had begun by sorting all the available material into “useless,” “possible,” and “bingo.”

That printout absolutely went into the bingo pile. And then some. That changed everything. Or at least a few certain, possibly very important, things.

“I hate it when clients don’t give you all the details.” Although, to be fair, Rosen had told her everything Wren needed to know. The Retriever just hadn’t realized it at the time.

“So that’s how you knew the term Null,” she said to her client. “Stepmomma used it on you one time too many?”

Because Melanie Worth-Rosen was a Talent. Like Wren, but unlike. Because one of the many social-page articles Wren had printed out that morning mentioned stepmomma as being a member of the Greater Hartford Crafting Society. The GHCS—a group that Wren knew from firsthand experience accepted only Talented members. Specifically, Talents who were also Council members, as opposed to lonejacks. Like the D.A.R., only magical.

“Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” she wondered out loud. Being a Council member in and of itself wasn’t a black mark, despite Wren’s negative experiences with the leaders of the Council itself. She had tried explaining it to Sergei once, the difference between Council and being a Council member, but the best she could manage was that it was sort of like the difference between being a dues-paying member of a union, and being Jimmy Hoffa. That wasn’t quite exact, but close enough for horseshoes, and he had pretended to understand.

Normally Wren didn’t give a damn about the target of a Retrieval, so long as she knew ahead of time anything they might counterpunch with. Null or Talent, museum or private citizen, government or nonprofit. The situation outside of the Retrieval, though, was anything other than normal, and the last thing she needed was more reason for the Council (the Hoffa version) to start spreading rumors that she was targeting Council (union joe version) members.

“All right. Stop a minute, think this through. Client, Null. Target, Talent.” She got up to pace as she talked, feeling her knees pop and crackle as she stretched. It was still easier for her to be in action than it was to sit still.

As much as she loved her apartment, as good as the vibes were, it had one major drawback: the rooms were too small to pace in. The T-shaped hallway leading from the bedrooms to the front door, however, was perfect.

“Client is a Null. Stepmomma is Council. What about dearly departed Daddy?” Nothing in her research had said, one way or another. It was easy enough to keep secret, if you didn’t make a fuss about it, but Talent tended to marry Talent. Which would mean that Momma had also been a Talent?

The jury was still out on the influence of genetics in Talent, but it did seem to cluster in families more often than not. So odds were that one of the birth parents was Null, too. Based on Rosen’s attitude…yeah, odds were it was Momma of blessed memory. So there might be some bias involved to go with the estate-squabbling. Did it matter? Maybe.

What bothered Wren more was stepmomma’s affiliation.

“Council has made my life miserable for the past year, because they think I’m some sort of threat. Threat to what? Unknown. Council may or may not be—probably is—behind the recent disappearances of lonejacks of a specific age and ability. Mainly older ones, strong ones, who haven’t wizzed or otherwise gotten anti-social. Rumor is: Council is up to something.”

Seven, eight, nine steps, reach the door, pivot. Walk back to T. Go right, three steps. Pivot. Three, and another two, always forgetting that the top of the T hallway was off balance, and pivot again. Two steps, turn right again, walk down to the front door. There should have been grooves worn in the floor, after all the times either she or Sergei had done this, working through the details of a job.

“So. Assuming a suitable level of paranoia…is this also something they’re up to? Or did I just get caught in a relentlessly normal family squabble?”

Worth-Rosen might be exactly what she looked like—a Talent who got greedy on the wrong Null. Or she might be a dupe of the Council, if not actually one of their catspaws. And if so…Sometimes, as her partner was fond of saying, paranoia was the only thing between you and the sharks.

So. A change in plans.

A phone call started things rolling, but it would take several hours before she would know the results. In the meanwhile, she still had to get the description from Rosen and talk to Aldo, then get her hands on the layout of the mark and…

And somewhere in there she needed to do some food shopping. She had tried ordering online, but after the sixth or seventh time she crashed the system because she got frustrated at not finding what she needed, Wren had decided that the old-fashioned way worked better for her.

Stopping in the bedroom-office, Wren grabbed the client info sheet off the floor. On her next pass down the hallway, Wren snagged the phone off the wall and dialed the number penciled at the top of the sheet.

“Anna Rosen? Yes, I’m calling about the discussion we had yesterday.” Was it really only yesterday? Almost exactly yesterday, in fact. Twenty-four hours and all the chaos of the psi-bomb seemed to fade into happened-last-month. “I’m going to need a description of the item in question…you have a photo? No. All right, then.” And she grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper out of the junk drawer, leaning on the counter to write more easily. “Could you describe it for me, please? As completely as you can.”

Rosen clearly had studied the necklace at length—she was able to describe it quite well. A silver mask of a woman’s face, eyes closed and a slight smile—a smirk, Rosen said, but not an unkind one—surrounded by a silver-beaded headdress/cowl with tendrils off to one side, like a showgirl’s headdress. A small silver skull was set on a chain hanging from the headdress, over her forehead.

All in all, Wren thought it sounded like a horribly gaudy bit of junk, the kind that Great-Aunt Hortense bequeathed to you and you sold at the rummage fair the week after, but the client clearly loved it enough to hire her to steal it back, so she wasn’t about to judge. Everyone had different levels of emotional attachment, God knew. Maybe it was a Null thing.

Hanging up the phone, Wren looked at her notes, making sure everything was legible enough to read back to Aldo. She should have gotten all this from the client yesterday, during their meeting. Sergei would have. Sergei would have gotten the description, and the address of the target, and all the little things that yes, Wren could track down now but would have made life so much easier to have already.

“And you decided to do this one on your own, why again?” The answer wasn’t as clear as it had been when the first nibble came in. The nightmare still jangled on her nerves, and the normally comforting vibes of her apartment, the thing that had made her decide the first time she walked in behind the Realtor that this place was hers, was just making her feel jumpy and twitchy now.

She really, really wanted to feel the urge to brew tea that meant Sergei was walking up the stairs. Which, considering she had run from him—and the entire sense of being too-much-togetherness—this morning, meant that she was probably losing her mind.

Speaking of minds, and details, and the slacking off on them, she should check in with Danny, see if he’d found out anything about that psych-bomb. If it was Council work, that was another thing to consider. The timing was odd…Jesus wept, if it were tied into the Rosen case, and not the general intimidation shit they kept trying to pull…

“It would mean what, exactly?”

The voice was hers, but the logic was Sergei’s.

“Would it change what you’ve already decided to do?”

“No,” she answered herself. “In which case, stop worrying, and get back to working.”

She picked up the phone again and dialed a number, this time from memory.

“Joey. It’s Jenny. I know you’re there, Joey, pick up. You really don’t want me getting annoyed with you while I’m on the phone.”

All Joey Tagliente knew about Jenny Valere was that his electronics had a way of going bad when she was around, which was why she was restricted to call-ins and e-mail. And why she always got fast service.

“Babe. So good to hear your voice. Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you what it costs.” He oozed, but it was a mostly harmless ooze.

“The address for a Melanie Worth-Rosen.” She spelled the name out, just to be sure. “The real address, not a mailing drop or her bodyguards, or whatever well-to-do people are doing these days.”

“You want the phone numbers, too?”

“Sure. Why not.” The cost would all be added to Rosen’s invoice at the end of the job, anyway. What wasn’t covered by the retainer already sitting pretty in Wren’s account. And, since she brokered the deal herself, did she have to give the usual cut to Sergei? God, she hadn’t even thought about that.

“Anything else?”

“You got blueprints for that address, too?” Of course he did. Or he would, for the right money. He was an efficient little snoop, Joey was.

“Maybe yes, maybe no. Two for the first, another five if I can come through on the second.”

She could have haggled him down to four hundred, probably, but Sergei had taught her that it was better to overpay a little to the valuable people. Make them think of you fondly, not with a curse. You saved the haggling for the really detailed, expensive jobs, where a percentage point or two made a difference, and they were padding the bill, anyway.

“How fast can you come through?” There was a sense of urgency riding her shoulders that Wren didn’t think had anything to do with the job itself; the storm clouds were building, and her core was pricking in response. But life went on, bills came in, jobs needed to be done…

“The lady in question has two addresses. One in Martha’s Vineyard, the other in Manhattan. She is currently in residence in your fair city.” He gave her the addresses, plus the lady’s mobile phone number. Her main number, surprisingly, was publicly listed. Wren, used to folk who guarded their privacy, hadn’t even thought to look first. Trusting lady, Ms. Worth-Rosen. Or one with reason to let people contact her without prior arrangement. Wren not only wasn’t publicly listed, but she paid extra money every month to have her phone number “dropped” from the phone company’s system.

The fact that this meant that the phone company had no record of her having a phone, and therefore never billing her, was a nice plus to the privacy, of course.

“As always a pleasure doing business. I’ll drop payment later today.” For a guy who lived for his tech, Joey wasn’t much for banking, electronic or otherwise. Cash in a post office box, thanks much, and good manners got you twenty-four hours credit, like now. Her first year dealing with him, she had to pay in advance. That had given Sergei minor conniptions until Joey proved he was solid on delivery.

Leaving the notes on the kitchen counter, Wren went around the corner into the bathroom and turned the water on in the shower, shedding clothing as steam filled the tiled room. Her shoulder-length hair was unbearably tangled and she brushed it out, wincing as she hit knots, until the water had reached the perfect temperature. Shampoo, soap, loofa, and all the while she was mentally rearranging her brain. Identifying herself to Tagliente as “Jenny” had solidified the vague thoughts about approaching Worth-Rosen. Risky, on several fronts, but it had a strange sort of appeal, too. Being someone other than Wren Valere—a nice thought: shedding the responsibilities to friends and Cosa, if only for a little while.

Proving to Sergei that he wasn’t the only one who could change personas was part of it, too; she was willing to admit that as she rinsed the last of the conditioner from her hair. He was so damn good at what he did, it was a challenge to try it, too. Being able to say, “Look, I can do this, too” would…well, she had no idea what it would do. Probably nothing. But what was done was done, now.

Not that you can tell him about it until you tell him that you took on a client without his knowledge…which you’re going to have to fess up to, you know. He’ll want to know where you are, what you’re doing. Where the money you’re going to deposit in his checking account came from.

“Nag nag nag,” she muttered at the voice, turning off the water and reaching for a towel.

The clicking of her heels on the pavement was, in a word, unnerving. Wren kept thinking that someone was following her, until she recalled that she was wearing actual dress shoes, not her usual sneakers or soft-soled loafers. Charlie was sweeping the leaves and dust off the pavement in front of Jackson’s E-Z Shopper; he waved, and she nodded in acknowledgment, but didn’t stop to talk.

Hey!

At first, Wren thought it was just a random thought of her own, the nagging voice come back uncalled-for, until the nudge came back with a firmer swipe.

Hey!

She reached in and grabbed the mental touch, tagging it in return, a sort of delivery receipt to let the person pinging her know she was paying attention now.

Tagging was a game younger Talents played, fine-tuning their controls, typically as the setup for a practical joke. Or, with adults, as a way of challenging another Talent, letting them know that they were moving into territory that was already claimed.

This didn’t feel like either.

She stroked a filament-thin strand of current, coaxing it up out of her core until it coiled down her arm, into her left index finger, ready for the next tag.

Valere. A sense of parlay, of truce, like a mental white handkerchief floating in the breeze. Nobody she knew, at least not well enough to recognize the taste of their mind, but the really good taggers could disguise that.

Lee had been one of the really good ones. The thought sent a spasm of loss through her, and she shoved it down ruthlessly. Not while she was working, damn it. A flick of her finger, and the current went out into the ether, following the swiftly fading trail the last tag had left.

Who?

She continued walking down the street; her only external acknowledgment of anything happening was a change of direction the moment the first tag landed. The subway was faster and cheaper, but a cab was more secure, if someone was trying to screw with her. Besides, she rationalized, the persona she was playing would take a cab, not the subway. Small, concrete details made the illusion complete.

Sarah.

The name carried with it no sense of recognition.

Need to talk to you. Soon.

Wren wasn’t naturally suspicious of other Talents, but nothing in her life was normal these days, and just accepting any tagger’s invitation to a sit-down was potential suicide.

Who? she asked again, even as she came to the corner of Hudson Street and raised her hand for a cab.

Sarah. This time the name came with a sense of self: tall, ebony-skinned, teeth that should flash in an exuberant laugh now hidden behind a grim line of lips, eyes almond-shaped and shadowed like an Egyptian queen’s. A scent of good, dark beer, and stale cigarette smoke, and Wren placed her in the jumble of memories. Council-raised, only she crossed the stream two, no three years ago, now. That’s when Wren met her, at the party a friend of Lee’s had thrown to welcome her to the lonejack fold.

Wren hadn’t stayed long; coming down off a job that had sucked all the sleep out of her, the last thing she wanted to do was stand in a crowded bar and down overpriced beer until she stank like last call. But one thing about the evening had stood out, even three years later, and made her interest in this unexpected tagging spike sharply.

Sarah was a Proggie. A Prognosticator.

A Seer.

Oh, shit.

A cab slowed, and Wren opened the door and got in before it had fully stopped, still immersed in the inner conversation.

“Where to?” The driver pulled into traffic without waiting for an answer, flicking the meter on as he did so. The heat was on, and the windows were rolled down all the way. Crazy.

“Central Park West and Sixty-eighth. Thanks.” With luck, Eighth Avenue would be clear enough that they’d only pick up traffic going crosstown, so the meter wouldn’t ratchet up too much.

Hello? A reminder that she had left Sarah hanging.

Another tug of current from her core, and Wren sent a final tag. Tonight. Red Light? A bar that had perfect acoustics for conversation—pick the right table, and while you could hear every word said, someone standing a foot away wouldn’t be able to make out anything—and dark enough to make lip reading problematic.

Electronic eavesdropping wasn’t really a problem, not with two Talents at one table. And, the way Wren was feeling, pity the bastard who tried to plant current-bugs on her again. She’d fry them, and him, and any unrelated electronics in the path between.

Will be there. A sense of the table Sarah was thinking of, the same one Wren had in mind.

You read my mind, Wren sent, and signed off just as the snort of psychic amusement reached her.

The sound of swearing in some foreign language made her look up just in time to see the cabbie slap the small black box set into the dashboard with the palm of his hand. The impact did nothing to reset the electric meter, which had gone from clicking off the quarter-miles to flashing “00.00.”

Ooops.

And then the cab was turning the corner, gliding through clogged sidestreets to her destination. When he pulled to the curb, she handed the guy a twenty. Probably twice what the fare would have been, but she felt bad about wrecking his meter. Cabbies, like lonejacks, got shafted enough without her adding to it.

Taking a deep breath, Wren shut down the part of her that was awareness of her own life, letting the current rise and reach into every square inch of her body, tampering with her self-image.

Exiting the car, Wren gave herself over to the current entirely. She could feel her legs getting longer, the slim skirt and button-down blouse she had put on giving her the impression of height, while the professional-looking black leather pumps added a reassuring nudge of respectability. Her hair was coiled in a soft bun at the back of her neck, and the gentle smudges of eyeliner and lipstick gave the overall feeling of overworked competence. She based the look on the women she saw on their lunch breaks, not the ones rushing back and forth, but the ones who stopped, walked slowly, their faces up to the sunlight, taking time to remember to be thankful they were out of the office even for a few moments. That was who she needed to be: a woman who cared about the small moments, the shared intimacies. Who could coax the same out of another woman.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Worth-Rosen.”

Even with her Talent-enhanced appearance, the doorman still would have turned her away without an appointment. He was that kind of employee, the sort who took the well-being of “his” building more seriously than the residents did themselves. But the woman had a listed phone number, which meant that she wasn’t as peon-phobic as others in her position, and as a competent, well-tuned doorman, he had to be aware of that as well.

Scooping some of the current sizzling just under her skin, Wren gave the uniformed gatekeeper a shy, diffident smile, and Pushed a sense of her total innocence and usefulness toward him. Of all the skill sets Talents had at their use, the Push was the most useful—and the most open to abuse. The fact that she still worried about that, according to Sergei, was proof she wasn’t about to run amok with it. Wren still worried.

“I’m Jenny Wreowski? The mediator from Darsen, Darsen and Kelvin?” Assume complicity, and most people will rise to the occasion. The doorman was no different; he knew that Mrs. Worth-Rosen was going through a tough time, and a legal mediator in the form of this soft-spoken, delicate-looking, Southern-sounding woman was surely harmless, if not proven helpful. He went to get the appointment book, already expecting to see her name listed there.

If you can get someone to that point, of anticipating, it almost doesn’t take much Talent to convince them to see what you want them to see. In a matter of minutes she was in the tastefully ornate elevator, being shuttled up to the fifteenth floor where “Miss Melanie” resided.

“I’m sorry,” the woman who opened the door said. “I don’t know why Jordan let you up here, but I don’t see anyone without an appointment and I’m sure…”

“No, you didn’t make the appointment, Mrs. Worth-Rosen. Another party hired me, to use my skills to prevent a small problem from becoming larger.”

The target looked Wren up and down, puzzled, then the light of comprehension cleared the confusion from her eyes. “Anna. Anna hired you to talk to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Half-truth qualified as whole truth, under the circumstances. This was the decision point. Either Melanie let her in, or she shut the door in Wren’s face. No safe ground between the two…

“All right. Come in.”

Tea and biscuits were served out by a young Filipina girl with large dark eyes and delicate hands, in a sitting room filled with light and pastel watercolors hanging in too-close profusion on the walls. Working with the owner of an art gallery might not have changed Wren’s tastes much, but she had learned to recognize good presentation, and that wasn’t it.

“I still don’t understand quite how things went wrong.” The target shook her head, the soft waves falling just so around her face, so carefully made-up her features appeared completely natural in the muted sunlight filtering through sheer curtains. The room itself was larger than Wren’s entire apartment. “It’s as though Anna overnight became a different person. The sweet, loving girl I knew became shrill, coarse, accusing me of trying to cut her out, of stealing…. Anything of her mother’s was hers, of course. That had been established long ago, before her father even fell ill.”

Fell ill, Wren noted. Not died, or Anna’s blunt “was murdered.”

Melanie continued, holding her teacup in her hand and staring down into the oolong-scented liquid as though her script was printed there. “But the necklace was a gift, from her father to me. Anna refused to accept that.”

Melanie’s confusion over her stepdaughter’s attitude seemed real. But Wren knew that the Push could be used on Talents, too, and if the older woman were better at it than she, Wren wouldn’t be able to tell. That was always the risk; you could use your skills on a fellow Talent, and maybe they wouldn’t realize it…and maybe they would. Wren preferred to fly under the radar, depending on defensive skills rather than offensive ones. The current keeping her appearance intact was subtle, so subtle almost as to not register, according to Neezer, back when he was first teaching her, and she’d only gotten better at it in the decade-plus since then. But Melanie was older, had been practicing longer, and so Wren couldn’t take any emotional response at face value.

“She seemed so certain,” Wren said, picking out a flaky-delicate butter cookie and biting into it with relish, wishing for a mug of coffee to dunk it into. That would probably give the maid a heart attack, if not Melanie. “May I ask…why not just give it to her, if it’s so important? Forgive me if I intrude, but it seemed not a particularly valuable piece…”

Melanie’s face twisted for just an instant, those lovely well-bred features showing an unpleasant cast before returning to their socially acceptable sweetness. Something Wren had just said struck home, hard. “Valuable? Not in the way most would think of it, no. But it has certain…properties that make it better to remain in my possession.”

Mmm. Wren hadn’t even blinked when the target’s expression changed, but she had filed the moment down for later contemplation. Properties, huh? There was something going on there, something more than just sentimental—or even financial—value. Wren suspected suddenly that she was being played. She hated being played.

“I see,” she replied, in a voice that said clearly that she was merely being polite. There were a handful of pointed questions Wren would have loved to have asked, but from the tone in Melanie’s voice when she said the last, the Retriever didn’t think she was going to get anything more out of her, no matter what the “legal mediator” might have to say.

“Well, still, this has been useful, indeed. Knowing where you’re coming from? Helps me help my client understand, too. And maybe we can all get out of this without too much more upset?”

“That would be lovely,” Melanie said with evident relief. “I miss my stepdaughter, Jenny. I truly do.”

Wren believed her. But she also believed that the woman was not going to give up the necklace, not to Anna, not to anyone. There was something going on that was not sitting well with the sweetness and light and perfectly blended family pose she was giving off.

So. Back to plan the first. Retrieval, the old-fashioned way.

“Miss Melanie?” The maid was back, her serene expression broken by a frown. “Miss Anna. She’s…here.”

Damn it. Wren thought, struggling to not be thrown totally out of character by this new and extremely unwelcome news. Thankfully Miss Melanie seemed almost as disturbed, and for a moment Wren hoped the older woman would simply refuse to allow the girl access. But that, apparently, wasn’t stepmomma’s way.

“Mel, you bitch! I can’t believe you changed the—” Anna stormed in, then stopped, taken aback to see Wren sitting there.

“Anna, honey.” Wren stood, hoping that by taking the lead she could get them both out of there without further incident. “If you were going to hire me to talk to your stepmomma, you’ve got to let me talk to your stepmomma, no?”

Anna was upset, not stupid. “I hired you before I knew what she was doing. This is my home, too, you old witch, and you can’t keep me out!”

She turned to Wren, her lovely eyes glittering with tears. Wren couldn’t tell if they were of sadness, rage, or something in-between.

“She used her magic on the doors! The one thing Daddy would never ever let her do, and the moment he’s gone…”

“Anna!” Melanie appeared flustered beyond measure, and for a moment Wren couldn’t understand why. Oh. Right. Me not knowing. The last thing Wren wanted was to be outed as a Talent, so she headed that one off at the pass, as best she could.

“Anna, sweetheart, I think you’re a little overemotional.” She placed one hand on the girl’s elbow, just below where her lacy little sleeve ended, expecting to be shaken off, but Anna let the hand remain there long enough for Wren to exert a very specific Push to make Anna trust her. God, she hated doing that. It made her feel dirty. “Why don’t we just go sit down together, and Melanie and I can—”

Damn. Too much Push.

Because Anna turned on her then, irate as a betrayed lover. “You and Mel, huh? Since when has it been you and Mel? Take my money, say you’ll help me, and suddenly she’s got your ear and it’s all ‘cozy on the sofa’?” The anger pouring off her was so palpable, Wren and Melanie both took a step back. Anna might be a Null, but by God, she could project!

“Anna, you’re being a foolish child.”

Melanie’s voice had gone sharp and hard, exactly like the parent of a five-year-old pushed to the final limit, and Wren could hear the train alarms ringing, signaling blood about to hit the tracks.

Right. She was out of there. The maid could do cleanup. She was a Retriever, not a referee.

“Child? I’m a child? I’m more woman than you could ever be, relying on your tricks and toys.”

“You ungrateful little…”

“Go on, say it.” Anna taunted her stepmother, moving farther into the room. “You always wanted to call me that. I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t Talented enough. Too bad you didn’t manage to pop out any real kids, make my daddy forget all about me.”

Oh God, yeah. Wren was out of there. Now.

“Don’t mind me, I’ll let myself out,” she said to the maid, who looked like she wanted to join her, and backed out of the apartment, deciding to take the stairs rather than risk waiting around for the elevator. She’d rather face a twisted ankle than be in the vicinity of those two another moment.