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

Curse the Dark

“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 (after Staying Dead) features fast-paced action, wisecracking dialog and a pair of strong, appealing heroes.”

—Library Journal

Bring It On

“Ripping good urban fantasy, fast-paced and filled with an exciting blend of mystery and magic…this is a paranormal romance for those who normally avoid romance, and the entire series is worth checking out.”

—SF Site

Burning Bridges

“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]

Free Fall

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

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Laura Anne Gilman
Blood From Stone

AUTHOR NOTE

Blood from Stone was an easy book to write—and a difficult one at the same time.

Easy, because I’ve lived with these characters, their personalities and problems, for the length of six books now. We’ve been together for the long haul, and each book is like visiting with old and dear friends.

Difficult, because with this book their story comes to a (temporary) close. The Cosa Nostradamus universe continues with Hard Magic, but Wren and Sergei will be taking a short break to let Bonnie and her crew take center stage. While I’m sad to see them go, I’m thrilled that Bonnie’s getting her chance to shine. You can read a teaser for that book at the end of this one.

Meanwhile, you have Blood from Stone yet to read, wherein Wren and Sergei are faced with a new challenge—one that involves Wren’s sidekick P.B. and the fate of all demon-kind!

Enjoy!

Laura Anne Gilman

May 2009

There’s only one person this book could be dedicated to:

my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, who has put up with this entire

crew and their writer for six books now, and come back and

asked for more….

And maybe that’s all that we need is to meet in the middle of impossibility.

—“Mystery”

Indigo Girls

Contents

Prologue

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

prologue

“Why do you think you need it?”

“I…” He wants to say that he doesn’t know, but that’s already been established as a cop-out. He may not know, but there is a reason. There is always a reason. So he says what he already knows. “It feels good. The pain. But it’s not about masochism. It’s about trust.” That was true. It felt true. “The pain means that something bad is happening, but I trust that nothing will go wrong.”

“But things do. You’re damaging yourself. Every time you do it, you’re hurting yourself.”

“I didn’t…I don’t care. I still need it.” A pause, because he has always been honest in his own way. “I don’t need it. I want it. I want it enough to risk everything. And it will cost me everything. That’s why I’m here.”

“It” was current, magical energy. Talent could use it, manipulate it. To a Null like himself, it was deadly, screwing with the internal organs. Being caught in a current backlash was like being repeatedly hit with lightning bolts. Nobody in their right mind would find it a turn-on.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d wondered if he was crazy.

“What do you what to accomplish here? Do you want to not want it?”

That was the damned thing about therapists. They ask the kinds of questions you don’t want to think about, much less answer. He shifts in the chair, his legs suddenly too long for comfort, his hands too large, his skin too tight around his frame.

“What do you want?” The voice probes again, soothing but insistent.

“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

“Indeed.”

“I hate it when you say that. I hate everything about this.”

“Then why are you here?”

Sergei shifts again, wishing desperately for his cigarette case. He hasn’t had a cigarette in years, but right now, the feel of the thin cylinder in his fingers would be just as soothing as the hit of nicotine ever was. Because he doesn’t know why he is here, doesn’t know what he is supposed to do or say, or bring out of it.

“I don’t know.”

Except he does know. Wren. Always, ever, Wren Valere. Partner, lover, best friend…the source of his addiction, and the thing he would lose, if he couldn’t get it under control.

He just doesn’t know how to do that, without walking away from her, too.

one

In the middle of a copse of trees, bordered on one side behind her by a dry creek bed and on the other in front of her by a low stone wall covered with moss and bird shit, Wren Valere crouched, her backside an inch off the leaf-strewn ground, her palms resting on her knees, and her knees complaining about the whole situation. She was tired, sweaty and pissed-off at the universe in general and one person in particular.

“Annoying, ignorant woman,” she scolded that person, hidden inside the house on the other side of that wall. “You couldn’t have taken the kid to Boston, or Philadelphia, or somewhere semicivilized? No, you had to go all bucolic and pastoral and…leafy.” Wren reached up to pull another twig out of her braid, and wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. It was a lovely, autumn-crisp day, pale blue skies overhead, and she was sure that there were hundreds of people driving up and down the winding county road a few miles back for the sole purpose of enjoying the scarlet-and-orange display of the maples and oaks and whatever else those trees were. More power to them.

Wren Valere was not a nature girl. The leaves were pretty, and she was glad it was a nice day, but she wanted to be home, on concrete and steel, surrounded by the familiar and comforting hum of current running through the city. Home was Manhattan, where magic fed on and was fed by the torrents of electricity running in the city’s veins. A Talent like her—a current-mage, a practitioner of modern magics—had no business being out here in the woods, miles from anything more powerful than a solar powered bug-zapper.

Genevieve, you’re exaggerating, she heard her mother’s voice say, exasperated. All right, she admitted that she might be overstating things slightly. It still felt like middle-of-no-wheresville to her: too quiet, too green and too still, electrically speaking.

The thought made her reach instinctively, a mental touch stroking the core of current nestled inside her, deep in a nonexistent-to-X-rays cavity somewhere in her gut, just to make sure it was still there. Like a bank, you could overdraw and forget to refill, and even though she knew she had enough in there, it was a nervous twitch, obsessive-compulsive, to make sure, and then make sure again.

Current was similar to—but not quite identical to—the electrical energy the modern world had harnessed to do its bidding. They were, so far as anyone could determine, generated off the same sources, and appeared in the same natural and man-made situations, but with a vastly different result when channeled by their natural conductors. Metal, in the case of electricity: Talent, in the case of current.

The more abstract and technical distinctions between current and electricity were lost on most of the Cosa Nostradamus, the worldwide magical community, except those very few who made an actual study of it.

Wren wasn’t one of those few. She wasn’t an academic; she was a Retriever. She came, she stole, she went home, with no interest in the whys, so long as it worked. Although she freely admitted that the feeling of it simmering inside was nice, too. Some Talent described their internal core of magic, the power they carried with them at all times, as a pool of potent liquid, or birds flocking together, their feathers rustling with power. For her, it was a pit of serpents, thick-muscled neon beasts sliding and slithering against each other. The touch filled her with a quiet satisfaction, a sense of power resting under her skin, ready if she needed it.

Reassured, she moved forward through the trees, only to be pulled up short by something tugging on her braid, before realizing that it wasn’t an attack—or at least, not one she needed to worry about.

Reaching back, Wren removed her braid from the grasp of a branch and scowled at it, as though it alone were responsible for her bad mood. “I hate camping. I hate bugs. I hate trees.”

She didn’t really hate trees—Rorani, one of her oldest friends, was a dryad in fact, which made her an actual, honest-to-God tree hugger. Wren had never needed to go camping to know how she felt about it. She preferred luxury hotels to sleeping on the ground.

She did hate bugs, though. Wren grimaced, and reached a hand down the back of her outfit, scratching at something irritating her skin. She pulled her hand away and made a face, shaking the remains of the unidentifiable insect off her fingers. She especially hated bugs that kept trying to crawl under the fabric of her slicks to reach the bare skin underneath.

“Ugh.” She wiped her fingers on the grass. “Next job? High-rise. Climate controlled. Coffee shop on the corner.” She kept her voice low, more from habit than belief that there was anyone around to hear her. “God, I’d kill for a cup of halfway decent coffee….”

She really shouldn’t be in a bad mood at all, even with bugs and twigs. Coffee and the rest of civilization would be waiting for her when she got home, same as always. This was just a job, and it would be over soon. And money in the bank made every job better, in retrospect.

Tugging the hood of her formfitting black bodysuit over her ears, making sure that the braid was now tucked comfortably inside the fabric, Wren kept crawling forward until she reached a low hedge of some prickly-leaved bushes. Rising up to her knees, she scowled over the shrubbery at the perfectly lovely little cottage on the other side of nowhere.

All right, she told herself, enough with the griping and the moaning. Showtime.

She let herself reassess the scenario, just to get the brain in the right place. The area was on the grid. She could feel the quiet hum of electrical wires—man-made power—overhead, not far away. There wasn’t a lot, but if she suddenly had a need it was there to draw down on. Comforting. And the house wasn’t totally isolated—despite the screen of trees, a half-hour hike would bring her back to the highway, and it was probably only a few minutes’ drive from the front door to the nearest coffee joint. If, of course, you had a car.

The job had specified no traces, though, which meant that renting a car, even using one of her many fake IDs, was out. Frustrating, but manageable. The client was paying large sums for this to be a spotless, trouble-free Retrieval, and that was what The Wren would deliver. No muss, no fuss, no anything the courts could use at a later date against the client. Everything had to be perfect.

It was more than just ego at stake, that perfection, although she was always about that. This particular job had come to Sergei, her partner/business manager, not through the usual route of the Cosa Nostradamus or his art world contacts, but through a retired NYC cop now living upstate, a guy named McKierney who moonlighted as a bounty hunter. The client had gone to him originally, but this kind of grab wasn’t McKierney’s scene. He had heard about The Wren through his own contacts, and had given the client her name and Sergei’s contact number as the go-to girl for this particular job.

She didn’t get many jobs out of the urban areas, where most of the Cosa congregated. A satisfied client here, among human Nulls, could open up a whole new market for her, and there was no way she was going to give less than everything to it, even if it involved trees and bugs and crawling around in the dirt. Sergei had drummed that career advice into her head years ago: you never knew when the next client was going to be the million-dollar meal ticket.

Yeah, the job stank, on a bunch of levels. Money—and clients with money—got her into a lot of situations she didn’t enjoy. But this job had something even better than money to offer: there was absolutely no stink of magic to the Retrieval. After spending a year of their lives immersed in a literal life-and-death struggle, when what seemed like half the city suddenly set out to wipe the streets clear of anything that looked as though it might be magical, and then having to give over another nine months to the job of cleaning up the aftermath—and getting her own life back into some kind of order—Wren was more than ready for something distinctly unmagical. Even a be-damned custodial he-said-she-said, with a four-year-old kid as the prize.

That was the job she was on, right now. Mommy had grabbed the kid and run. Wren was here to Retrieve him for Daddy, who was the client.

Wren shifted on her haunches, still feeling the creepy-crawling sensation of bug legs on her skin. That was the real reason she was griping, not the green leafy buggy nature thing. Live Retrievals were a bitch. She’d only done two before, and both of them had involved adults. One she’d been able to reason with, the other she’d had Sergei along to help conk the target over the head when the reasoning didn’t work.

She steadfastly didn’t think of the third live Retrieval she had done. That had been different. That…hadn’t been her, entirely.

Hadn’t it?

Nobody had judged. Nobody had said anything after, except thank you. She had restored a dozen teenagers to their family, broken the spine of the anti-Cosa organization, the Silence. But Wren didn’t list that Retrieval in her nonexistent CV. She didn’t talk about it. She tried not to remember anything about it, the hours of cold rage and hot current spinning her out of control, making her—for the second time in her life—into a killer, however justified those deaths were, to save the lives of others. No matter that she hadn’t been entirely sane at the time.

Inanimate things were easier to Retrieve, every way up and down. Adult live retrievals were bad enough: seriously tough to stash a four-year-old in your knapsack. They tended to squirm.

And yet…the challenge was irresistible. The benefits for a job well done were deeply rewarding. So here she was.

Wren didn’t let herself think about the morality of the Retrieval, either way. If possession was nine-tenths of the law, The Wren was the other tenth. Not that she didn’t have standards about what was just or fair; she just didn’t let them get in the way of an accepted job. If something set off Sergei’s well-honed antenna for fishy, she trusted him to say no before she ever knew the offer had been made. That was his job.

“And you need to be getting on with yours already,” she muttered, annoyed at herself. Taking a deep breath, she felt her annoyance, acknowledged it, and then let it go, slipping away like water down a drain.

Shifting to rise up a little more, risking exposure, she reached into the pouch strapped to her ribs, pulling out a pair of tiny, old-fashioned binoculars. She raised the ’nocs to her eyes and looked at the target. The lens allowed her to zoom in, picking up the details that blueprints and aerial shots couldn’t give. Nothing like on-the-spot reconnaissance, no matter what the tech-types might claim.

The cottage was a build-by-numbers kit, probably prefab. Nice, though. One story, with a half attic, and windows designed to let in light without giving a direct view in. Brown wood and shingles with blue trim, and an off-white matte roof that, she had been told, was supposed to be more fuel-efficient than the traditional black ones. So, new, or at least with a newish roof. A roof, she noted, that overhung the windows just enough to allow someone with a decent amount of agility to drop down and reach those windows. Bad architect, and worse contractor, to let that get past.

Someone hadn’t considered the landscaping from a security angle, either. The cottage faced into a small lawn and a gravel road that led down to the main road, but the back was set into a copse of mature trees. The contractor had managed to build into the existing site, rather than bulldozing and replanting. Pretty. Lousy security, but pretty.

She lowered the binoculars and looked at the cottage unaided. It still looked like an invitation to larceny. Perfect. Now she just had to find a way in, and the job was halfway done. Unfortunately, the hard half was still to come.

Dropping back down behind the hedge entirely, Wren settled herself into a more comfortable crouch on the damp soil, and let herself sink into fugue state.

It used to take her the count of five-seven, when she was still in training. Now, the thought was no sooner thought than it became action. The outside world didn’t fade so much as become irrelevant; she could still see and hear and sense everything that went on around her but it was less real than the world she could “see” inside. In that world, every living thing was colored with vivid current, from the shadowy, flickering purple of the insects around her to the solid, slow-pulsing silver of the trees, and the passing bright red of something the size of a large cat, or maybe a fox. Stronger flickers up in the branches suggested that there might be piskies in the area. No other Fatae, not even the hint of a dryad or wood-mocker. Interesting. Not indicative, necessarily, but…interesting.

Everything carried current within itself; sliding into a fugue state allowed a Talent—a witch, a mage, or a wizard, if you liked the older terms—to find, access and use it more efficiently. Strong Talent—traditionally called “Pures”—could sense and use more current; weaker Talent, obviously, less.

Wren had always been strong, with little interrupting the flow of current in her veins. Last year, she had become—however temporarily—the recipient of current gifted by the Fatae, the nonhuman members of the Cosa Nostradamus. That blast had temporarily unblocked every channel in her system, kicking her from mostly Pure to too Pure. Talent bodies might be able to handle that much magic, but human brains weren’t designed for it. She had been able to work amazing things in the short term, but it had also screwed with her in ways she was still discovering.

One of those new long-term results was that, once in fugue state, she could sense the presence of current in almost every animate thing, and a few inanimate things, as well.

A nice little side effect, yeah. She could, if she had to, find a refueling station almost anywhere. Unfortunately, using fugue state now also gave her cramps that made PMS feel like a walk in the proverbial park. Everything had a price.

So don’t linger. Get it done and get out she reminded herself even as she reached out to gather as much information as she could about the structure in front of her. Just because there was no visible sign of defenses, either physical or magical, didn’t meant they weren’t there. Careless got you dead or caught, and both were bad news.

She pulled current from her core, shaping it with her will and intent until greedy tendrils of neon-colored power stretched outward, touching and tasting the air, searching for any hint of either current or electricity.

Nothing. A void stretched in front of her: no defenses, and no house, either. Nothing but trees. Impossible, if she believed what her eyes told her. Even if they had built a house without any electrical wiring whatsoever, she should have been able to sense the natural current within the wood, stone and metals, much less the flesh-and-blood entities moving within those walls.

Some Talent trusted their magical senses more than their physical ones. Wren wasn’t that arrogant, or that dumb. When the two senses disagreed, something was hinky. Either the house itself was an illusion, or something she couldn’t sense was blocking it from being found by magic. Both options were…disturbing.

Giving her Talent one last try, she stretched a tendril of current out, not toward the building, but down, sinking it deep into the soil and stone, reaching for anything that might have been laid in the foundations, deep enough to be hidden to even a directed search. Wren felt a cramp starting, low in her belly, and ignored it, extending herself even as she remained firmly grounded in her body. Sink and stretch, just a little more, just to make sure…

What the…? She touched a warmth—a hard, sharp warmth—tucked underneath the crust, deep in the bedrock where there should only have been cold earth. It spread beyond the house, covering a wider range, suggesting that the house was only secondary, protected as an afterthought. Was that what was blocking her? She pushed a little more, trying to determine the cause. Wh—

At her second touch, something shoved back at her, hard. Unprepared, the magical blow almost knocked her over, physically.

The hell? she thought, pissed off as much at being caught by surprise as at the assault itself. She touched it again with a handful of current-tendrils, not quite a shove in response, but not gentle, either.

That something in the bedrock expanded, filled with thick, hot anger and a wild swirling sense of frustration swamped her own current and tendrils. Angry, yes, and sullen, all that and a feeling of bile-ridden resentment that threatened to consume her, and something worse underneath, something darker and meaner and rising fast.

Yeeeah, outta here, she thought in near panic. Outta here now.

Dropping out of fugue state, Wren blinked a few times to let her eyesight return to normal, and then moved away from the hedge as carefully and as quickly as she could manage. A branch crackled underfoot, and she froze, and then moved backward again. Too clumsy, she was making too much noise. Damn. Her skills as a Retriever were legend, but moving invisibly through an occupied house was a different kind of ability than being able to move silently through trees and shrubs, complete with a carpeting of annoyingly crunchy leaves underfoot.

She was shaking, and sweating, and it annoyed her.

Once her nerves told her that she had gotten far enough away to feel secure, she dropped to the ground, placing her bare palms flat against the soil, letting the extra current in her system run off into the earth, grounding herself, bringing everything back into balance and soothing the restless, roiling shimmer of her core.

“Jesus wept,” she whispered, too shaken to really care if a squirrel or Piskie or too-curious wood-knocker heard her at this point. “What the hell was that?”

two

The sound of her own voice seemed to shock the air around her, like chemicals dumped into a pond, because she could swear that she saw it shimmer around her. In the branches far overhead a bird of some kind chirped, and something else squawked in response, and a third, deeper voice chattered a command for them both to shut it. Wren could relate to that third voice.

After a few minutes of waiting nervously for something—anything—to come raging out of the trees or rising up from the soil after her, Wren gathered her legs underneath her more comfortably into a cross-legged position in the dirt. Her palms now rested flat on her knees, and she pushed back, feeling her spine unkink and straighten, and her heart slowly return to a more normal beat, while her skin slowly lost the warm, red flush of fear.

Think, Valere. Don’t just react. She had been caught in current backlash before—she had been the cause of current backlash before—and it had never felt like that. And yet it was, undeniably, current that she had felt. Thick, angry current, black like tar and strangely familiar…

Black tar. Angry.

Her heart stilled, but her body shivered in recognition. She had felt that combination before, yes. Inside herself, in her core, in her veins and under her skin, like sludge instead of blood and bone. She had felt it inside herself when she wizzed last year, when the pileup of trouble, cumulating with several Nulls trying to rape and murder her had sent her into current overload. The greatest fear of any and every Talent, to be so lost to the current inside and out that all sense of self-control disappeared into the storm. It had been days before she realized what was happening, and once she did, the situation had gotten so bad that insanity had been all that allowed her to survive and do what needed to be done.

In the dark hours of the Blackout, when she had been the focal point of the Fatae-donated current, when she had led the Cosa in striking back against their enemies, sanity would have gotten her killed.

Nobody came back from wizzing. Not ever. She should have been lost in that abyss, too, driven by despair, overwork and too much current use. Instead, her partner, Sergei, and the demon P.B. had dragged her back out of the abyss, barely and by the skin of their teeth. It had taken a magical bond P.B. had created—or allowed to be created—between them, and by extension, between P.B. and her partner/on-again-off-again lover; a bond that had never before—so far as they knew—been attempted, much less established.

That triangular bond of friendship had saved her sanity, and her life. Whoever she had touched out there just now wasn’t so lucky. It was still lost within the maelstrom, howling and alone.

Had it been alone? She remembered feeling something deeper, below the blast, like the echo of a scream….

The feel of that anger made her start to shake all over again, and she backed away, retreating to a safer distance from even the memory. Jesus wept. He wept for the sinners and blessed them in his name. She wasn’t religious, her upbringing casually Protestant and left behind when she went to college, but those two words, Jesus wept, had resonated with her, curse and prayer all in one. And in this case, both curse and prayer were wholly appropriate.

Wizzarts were dangerous. Not just because the overload made them crazy, but because crazy made them—what was the word Sergei used? Feckless. Without control, without any concern for their own well-being, they could access more current than was safe…and that much power in the hands of a madman—or woman—was never a good thing.

She brought the shaking under control, schooling her body into obedience. That wasn’t her, hiding her essence deep within the earth’s crust. That wasn’t her core, so dark and tarry, rather than clear and sharp. She wasn’t wizzed. She was in control, damn it. She wasn’t a danger to herself, or anyone else, not any more.

Whatever—whoever—had snapped at her back there was a danger. And yet, the wizzart hadn’t hurt her, even though he—definitely he, she thought, remembering the taste of the current’s signature—he had been angry enough to do some serious damage. Angry and frustrated and quite mad.

But he hadn’t hurt her. She kept coming back to that, above and beyond the anger and the crazy; that and the inescapable fact that that current-signature had been oddly, confusingly familiar. How could she know…?

Wren swallowed hard, a sick queasiness rising in her gut that had nothing to do with fear. “Oh damn it to hell and back. Max?”

It was half question, half realization, and it had the unexpected, unplanned, and unwanted result of bringing him to her.

Unlike the last time Max appeared, there was no blowout of electronics, no sudden windstorm of energy. He was just there. Older than she remembered him being, still dressed in his usual sloppy sweatshirt and khaki shorts showing off knobby knees, but his face was even more like a dried apple, surrounded by a mane of shaggy, white hair. His blue-green eyes were still bright—too bright, and too wild to trust. She could feel the current crackling within him, making him unsafe to touch, unsafe to be near.

This time, though, his body shimmered outwardly, too; the current visibly feeding on him even as he fed on it, some unholy symbiotic frenzy. It was terrifying, and terrifyingly beautiful, like a fire raging out of control. Which, she supposed, it was. An electrical fire, destroying him from within. Destroying anything too close.

Some part of Wren’s mind that wasn’t busy panicking wondered if he had always been like this, if everyone who wizzed looked like that, and her descent into the same maelstrom was what allowed her to see it now—and if she, too, looked like that to his eyes.

Those bright eyes stared at her without blinking. “Hey hey hey, brat. Hey, little girl.” His voice was rusty, as though he hadn’t used it in a long time.

Wren took a deep breath, and calmed down. For the moment, at least, Max seemed to be, well, not sane, but in control. She hadn’t been a little girl in years—decades—but he had been a friend to her mentor for decades before she was born, and would probably always see her as a thirteen-year-old with braids and no brains.

Right now, she was okay with that. It was probably why she wasn’t dead, those few random, faded, fond memories still caught somewhere inside the crazy. Just don’t rely on it, Valere, she reminded herself. Don’t assume a damned thing. He could and probably will snap at any instant.

“Max.” Her voice sounded surprisingly calm, considering how her insides were churning. “It’s really not so good to see you.”

He cackled at that, a scary-ass sound. “You’ve been busy, brat.”

Stewart Maxwell, also known as The Alchemist for reasons that she’d never had explained. Every time she encountered him she barely got away with her life. Not that he had any grudge against her specifically—he was fond of her, the girl-child she had been—but wizzarts just naturally tended to the homicidal. So far he’d tried to pitch her over a cliff—seven years back—and then brought up a current-storm to wipe her off the face of the earth a few years ago. She didn’t really want to know how he’d think appropriate to kill her this time. Or what she might be capable of now, to try to stop him.

Try, and fail. She had no illusions about that. She was good. He was crazy. Crazy trumped even very good, every time. But they could do significant damage to anyone caught up in the area during the battle. Better not to get into it at all.

There was a reason nobody in their right mind stayed near a wizzart. Their entire maddened existence was dedicated toward channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every living cell turned toward the goal of becoming the perfect, one hundred percent Pure magical conductor. And that included their brain cells.

Because of that, wizzarts lived in the moment, the instant of action, without any thought to consequences or responsibility, only more and more and more of the lovely, seductive, orgasmic power. There was never enough to satisfy, and chasing it made them irascible, ornery, obnoxious, and deeply dangerous. She had to get away; but carefully, carefully.

“What happened to the dog?” she asked, trying to buy time, figure out how she was going to get out of this without further head-butting.

The last time she had seen him, he had a dog with him. Big, floppy-eared mongrel. He had named it Dog, of course. Even sane, she didn’t remember Max having much in the way of imagination.

A look of something sad and hungry passed over Max’s face, and was gone.

“Killed him,” he said without inflection, dismissing man’s best friend that easily.

Wren almost laughed. Of course Max had. Poor Dog. She hoped it had been quick.

Those bright eyes squinted, and Max scowled at her. “You can’t be here,” he said with obvious irritation.

All right, that was not what she was expecting to come out of his mouth. Although what she had expected, Wren didn’t know. She didn’t know why he was here, miles and miles away from the last place she had seen him, right in the middle of her damn job, or why he was so pissed off, not that wizzarts needed a reason for anything.

“You should have gone away when I told you to,” he said, his hair sparking with agitation. His hands weren’t moving yet, though. It was when his hands started to move that the storm was about to hit. Assuming that telltale sign still worked, anyway.

“When you told…” she started to say, then stopped. Oh. The void covering the area where the house should have been. Right. Suddenly the twigs and bugs and dirt-sore knees seemed the least of her problems. Was he tied up somehow in this job? But how? No, that didn’t…feel right. There was something else underlying it all, something she could almost taste, almost recognize, but it slipped away when she tried to chase it. Why was he here? Why now? Why had he bothered to show himself?

“Shoved you away,” he muttered. “Don’t go poking where you’ve been told off, like you got no manners. Be smart, stupid brat. For your own good.”

He was making a faint bit of sense, which worried her even without understanding it. If she were smart she’d nod her head, pack up, forget about the job, and listen to the not-so-nice, very crazy man.

She was smart. She was also stubborn. And, according to one of P.B.’s favorite new rants, she had developed a recent and rather disturbing case of can’t-kill-me-nyah-nyah. And nobody told her to do something for her own good, not without telling her why.

Wren stood up, her five-foot-and-no-inches barely noticeable against Max’s sinewy height, and pulled down enough current to make her own flesh sparkle. A statement: Don’t push me, old man. Maybe P.B. was right to worry.

“I’m on a job, Max. A job that’s got nothing to do with you.” That she knew of, anyway. Shit, let it have nothing to do with him, please. No such thing as coincidence, but let it not be connected. “Let me get it done and we’re out of your hair. But you will let me get it done.”

Her voice stayed even and low, even as everything inside her was turning into wobbling Jell-O. She was stronger than she had ever been, stronger than she really wanted to be. Maybe one of the strongest, Purest Talent of her generation, no lie. But the thought of going against a full wizzart scared the shit out of her.

That fear was reassuring, actually. It meant that she was still sane.

“You can’t be here” he said again, as though her defiance hadn’t even happened. To him, it probably hadn’t. He could be a single-minded bastard.

The wind rose around them, filled with static and dry leaves. Him or her, she wasn’t sure who was doing it. Reaching down into the core, where her own reservoir of current seethed like a pool of dry-scaled, neon-colored snakes, she soothed it, coaxed it back under her control. Controlled herself, which meant controlling her core. Control had been what saved her. It made her weaker than Max, able to channel less current through her body, but she could direct it better, focus her strikes.

She let that knowledge show on her face. “I can and I will. Max. Max!” She shouted his name, seeing his eyes glaze over, and was relieved when they focused back on her. Having a wizzart’s attention was unnerving, but letting him go spastic was when it got deadly. Suddenly the words tumbled out of her, desperate to be heard while she still had his mostly sane attention. “Max, there’s a way out. To unwiz. To come back. I did it. You can, too.”

She actually didn’t know if there was, if it had been too long, was too late for him. Once you wizzed, you never went back, that was what everyone knew. Except she had. Sort of. Because of P.B. There was only one P.B. Would she share? Could she? Would he?

Wren shoved that doubt back into a box in her mind and latched it shut. Never mind that boxing difficult things up had probably led to her wizzing in the first place; it was still a useful tool. No time, no place for doubts. She was fine, she was functional, and she owed it to Max—to Neezer, her long-gone mentor, who had introduced them—to try. To at least pass the knowledge on. And if the possibility distracted him from his you-can’t-be-here shtick, so much the better.

“Way out? I’m already way out, brat.” He grinned at her, a death’s-head grin, and the hair rose on the back of her neck even under the slicks that covered her head to toe. The light-absorbing, water-repelling, tear-resisting material was great for avoiding cameras, motion detectors, nosy guards and aggressive tree branches, but it didn’t do a damn thing against the heebie-jeebies.

This wasn’t the Max she remembered. That Max was unnerving, dangerous, his hair trigger halfway pulled. This Max was…

Scared.

Jesus wept. The concept made her sweat. Anything that scared a wizzart…

Wren swallowed, and went for broke. “Max, what aren’t you telling me?”

His voice dropped into a growl. “I’m telling you to go. Don’t be here. You don’t want to be here, not…not here. Not here.”

She was definite about her first impression, now. He was scared, and he was hiding something. From her. Scared, and trying to get rid of her, rather than tell her. Something he didn’t want her near, didn’t want her to know about. Why? What was hiding down there, deep in the bedrock?

Did it really matter? It did not.

“I’ll go as soon as I get what I came for, Max.”

The static was crackling in her hair now, making her eyes itch. The song of it was alluring, enticing. She could tell him endless years that there was a way back from the edge, and he wouldn’t hear because he wouldn’t want to hear. That was the thing about wizzing that the others—the ones who hadn’t been there—didn’t realize: it’s so damn dangerous because it feels so damn fabulous. You really don’t care that the cost is your sanity.

And she couldn’t honestly tell him it was better on the sane side of the street.

“Go away now!”

His hands flickered, a tiny sprinkling-of-water motion. She didn’t have time to brace herself before the blast threw her backward, landing her hard on her ass, knocking her head against a tree and stealing the air from her lungs. She rolled even as she hit, expecting a bolt of current to follow, to finish her off.

Another gust slammed into her, bruising her from hip to rib, but no bolt.

Run run run the voice inside her head was chanting, the natural, smart, sane response when dealing with a pissed-off wizzart. Max might be scared, but he wasn’t scared of her. Wren kept rolling, coming up on elbows and knees, her head still ringing from the blow but her senses clear enough to know exactly where the old bastard was. A thick rope of current, dark purple and scarlet, uncoiled from her core and lashed out. She felt the hit more than saw it, felt Max’s shock and anger recoil back through the connection. How dare she strike at him?

“You’re the one who attacked me, you stupid wizzed son of a bitch!” she yelled, not caring if the target, the state troopers, and half of Saratoga County heard her.

Another blast was his only response, still not a bolt but a cold, salt-filled wind, shoving her hard enough to send her back on her ass and scoot her a half-dozen feet farther into the woods. Leaves and branches scratched at her slicks, and the hard roots bruised her ass and elbows.

“Go!” echoed in her head, a roar like a waterfall, a jet engine, a lion in full fury.

Scrabbling to her feet, Wren fled deeper into the trees.

It took her three hours and seventeen minutes after she stopped running to work up the nerve to head back to the target site. This time she came in from the opposite direction, circling around and coming up along the access road. The approach wasn’t as good for a Retrieval—the road was public access, and anyone might come along at exactly the wrong moment—but with luck maybe Max wasn’t watching there, or didn’t care so much about it. Maybe whatever it was that he was hiding, or protecting, was only on the other side of the woods.

Maybe was a pretty flimsy word, when it came to wizzarts.

She tried to focus on the job and only the job—timing and distance, plus the approximate weight of the Retrieval as given by the client, equaling effort to get back to the road and across the state line—but her brain kept skittering back to Max’s words.

No, not his words. His emotions. The bastard had been angry, and he was crazy as a sewer rat with rabid mange, but unless he’d dropped way under the wizzart sanity range, such as it was, in the past year, he’d been overreacting. Last time she had gotten full warning before he went psycho on her. This time he came in primed at the pump. Why? What had scared him enough that he came out specifically to scare her, to warn her?

Enough she thought. It doesn’t matter why, not right now. Focus. Job. With Max possibly still in the neighborhood, she didn’t dare draw down current, for fear of alerting him to the fact that she’d come back. That meant changing more than the direction of her approach; she had to change the mode, too.

Walking up to the pull-off to the house, Wren made sure that her thigh-pack was securely fastened, drew in a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then exhaled. Calm. Calm and collected and loose and all those other things that made you aware of every inch of your body but not so aware that you were distracted by it. Normally she would have invoked her no-see-me, that inner and innate skill of deflecting attention that made her a natural Retriever, but she wasn’t sure if even that would be enough to trigger Max’s return.

Instead, she had to do it the old-fashioned way, crawling through the shin-high grass toward the house, keeping herself as low-profile as possible, alert to every sound and smell that might mean danger or discovery.

Breaking into a house in the middle of the day was something best left to either rank amateurs or seasoned pros. She enjoyed it, herself—during nighttime most people tended to be paranoid, and early morning or dusk was tricky—the few times she’d gotten shot at, it was at dusk. Daylight, targets were relaxed, less likely to start at an unexpected noise or shadow, less likely to call the police or trigger an alarm.

“Hi.” A voice piped a greeting unnervingly close to her ear.

Plus, people tended to be a lot more understanding of someone caught in their backyard midday, as opposed to midnight.

“Hi,” she said back after she got her heart down from where it had lodged in her throat, rolling onto her side but staying down and as relaxed as possible. The grass—probably not mown all summer—tickled her nose.

“Whatcha doin’?”

Her interrogator was blond, blue-eyed, and two feet tall. All right, maybe three. Shorter than she was, but since she was lying down, it was hard to judge for sure by how much.

“Your dad sent me to get you.” Sometimes honesty was so startling, it worked.

“Oh.” The target considered that for a moment, thankfully not sucking his thumb or whatever else disgusting or otherwise unhygienic that small children did, and then nodded. “Okay.”

He dropped to his own stomach and looked at her as though expecting something.

Well, she thought, amused. If it’s as easy as that, who the hell am I to argue? She tilted her head to indicate the way she had come, and he nodded, getting up on his elbows and knees, echoing her posture. She turned, keeping him in sight out of the corner of her eye, and they started to snake-crawl back through the grass. Kid was a pretty good wriggler, although he kept his butt too high in the air. His cute little denim coveralls were going to be ruined, though.

“Marc? Marc, where are you?”

A woman’s voice, clear and far too close: coming from inside the house. Back of the house, through an open window, Wren estimated. The voice was slightly concerned, maybe a little annoyed, but not really worried. Not yet. Damn. From the way the target froze, it was mommy dearest. His blue eyes flicked toward the house, and then back to her, clearly looking for guidance. His skin was milk-pale, as if he never got much sun and would burn badly if he did.

“She won’t let you go back to your dad,” Wren whispered, feeling like several different kinds of sleaze. Never mind who the actual custodial parent was—she hadn’t bothered to ask Sergei—Daddy was the client and she worked for the client and anyway, the court would decide eventually unless Daddy did a runner with junior, too, and she was thinking too damn much again.

“I don’t like either of them right now.” Such a serious little voice, confiding such a huge secret. Wren swallowed, and forced herself to meet that blue gaze.

“Wiggle this way, and keep your butt down,” was all she said.

Once she had gotten the kid away from the house and down the road a bit, she coaxed him back to his feet, and they had headed back to the main road. Only one car had driven past them, heading toward the house, and Wren made sure the kid was tucked against her side, barely visible against the deflecting properties of her slicks, unless you were looking specifically for a wee one. From there, it was a relatively easy walk to her job-cache, an abandoned tree house in the back of someone’s summer home, where she had stowed her regular clothes, wallet, and other forms of identification and civilization. Her slicks packed away securely, they walked on toward the previously arranged rendezvous site. The kid had kept up reasonably well, staying quiet and only needing to be carried the last mile into town. He didn’t whimper, sniffle, or pick his nose, for which Wren was endlessly thankful.

As they walked she tried to sort through everything that had happened in some kind of calm and distanced way. It was no use: whatever had happened back there needed more thought and calm than she had right now. Finish the job, then worry about crazy Max.

To that end, now dressed in a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt under her leather jacket, her hair pulled into a careless ponytail, Wren looked to the casual observer like a young mother out for an afternoon with her offspring, waiting for Daddy. The thought made her cringe, but she had to admit that it was perfect camouflage in this SUV-and-picket-fence town.

By the time she found a pay phone and checked in with her partner back in Manhattan, her sense of humor about the entire situation had returned, and she could—almost—laugh about it. Her partner wasn’t quite so sanguine.

“Max? Stewart Maxwell? Our least favorite loon of all the loons we know?” Sergei’s normally calm and crisp voice was less doubting than exasperated.

Wren kept most of her attention on the kid sitting on the curb eating an ice-cream cone with both hands and his entire face. “Yeah. That one.”

“You’re sure? Of course you’re sure. Never mind. Damn. I’d hoped he was dead already.”

There was no love lost between her partner and Max. In fact, they pretty much loathed each other.

“He was acting pretty weird,” she continued, ignoring Sergei’s last comment.

There was a telling silence at the other end of the phone line, and Wren leaned against the open booth and grinned despite herself. “Weird even for wizzed,” she clarified.

“I don’t like this,” Sergei was saying, back in his office in the city. She pictured him, sitting behind his huge wooden desk, the one he wouldn’t let them have sex on, even though he got a glint in his eye every time she brought it up, surrounded by paperwork and expensive artwork, and the lovely hum of the city outside the gallery’s door.

“You and me both, partner,” she responded. “But I finished the job, and as soon as I drop off the package, I’ll be on my way home, away from whatever it was Max was so wound up about. Which should make him happy, for whatever values of happy he understands. I’m keeping low-profile until then.” She paused, wondering if she should ask, then plunged in. “How are you doing?”

There was a faint hesitation on the other end of the line. “I’m fine.”

Like hell he was. They had been partners too long for her not to pick up the signs. There was tension in his voice that had been there even before she dropped her little Max-shaped bombshell, and she could practically feel how tight he was holding the phone from her end of it. Something was up. Something had gotten him seriously wound. She made herself drop it, leave it alone, for now. Anything that made him that tense would probably make her unhappy, and getting a Talent upset while using the phone usually resulted in bad things for the phone. Current and electricity traveled along the same paths, and current trumped electricity every time.

“All right.” She started to say something else, feeling the urge again to dig a little around the topic, then shut her mouth with a snap. If there was anything seriously wrong, he would tell her. Or not. Wasn’t as though she could do anything about whatever it was from here, anyway. “I’ll see you tonight.”

She hung up the phone, but despite their mutual reassurances of all-rightitude, Wren still felt uneasy. It had to be Sergei affecting her. Job was almost done. Money was in the bank. She should feel calm and satisfied, not wound like a damned spring. Please let it be Sergei’s mood affecting me…

“Hey.”

The kid looked up from his seat on the curb, his entire face covered with chocolate ice cream, those blue eyes still totally wide and innocent. “You’re a mess. Go over to that water fountain and wash your face.”

“I don’t have a towel,” he protested.

“Use your sleeve.”

The thought seemed to astonish him. Or maybe it was the fact that an adult was giving him permission to do it. Wren didn’t know and honestly didn’t care. The hair on the back of her neck was flat, but she still had the sense of something hinky in the air, even now. This was where they were supposed to be, when they were supposed to be there—early, even. Everything should have been fine, and yet…

She trusted her instincts. She just didn’t know what to do with them, in this case.

Obeying her order, the kid walked across the street to the park, where there was a stone structure with three water fountains—one adult-sized, one kid-sized, and one down so low to the ground that Wren stared at it for a moment before realizing that it was for animals, operated by a paw-pedal on the ground.

Kid went to the kid-sized one, and seemed to be trying to puzzle it out, as though he had never used one before. Wren frowned. Okay, he was a little kid, and maybe not all that bright, but there was something seriously off about him. Almost as though he’d lived his entire life, if not in isolation then damn near close. Trusting a total stranger enough to come with her? Not knowing how to use a water fountain?

“Drop him off and walk away,” she told herself sternly. “Wondering about shit, getting involved, is never a good idea. You should have learned that, if nothing else, by now.”

Getting involved led to things like politics, and betrayals, and pitched battles where people—friends—died. Enough already. She had done enough. Back to the lonejack creed: self first, second and third, and the devil take the hindmost.

“Hey kid, get a move on!” she shouted. He turned his blond head, and as he did so a Frisbee came soaring out of the park, arching on a downward motion that, Wren realized, was going to collide directly with the kid’s head.

Oh hell. Visions of a concussion, a hospital trip, questions about parental authority and authorization…. Without thinking, she used just a thread of current to knock the projectile off course, but by the time her touch got there, the Frisbee had already been knocked down out of the air, landing at the kid’s feet.

Wren tensed. Someone else had used current on the disk to knock it away, she could feel it. Fuck. It might have been a Good Samaritan, looking out for a toddler. Or it could have been someone letting her know that she was under observation, for a range of possible reasons, only some of them positive. Until the kid was handed over, she was still on the job; she couldn’t afford to relax, or make any dangerous assumptions.

Wren looked around as inconspicuously as she could, trying to catch anyone who might be paying the kid—or her—unwanted attention. Mothers playing with their kids, a couple of teenagers shoving each other on the sidewalk, the kids who threw the Frisbee in the first place, coming to get their toy, an old man—or maybe a woman—sitting on a bench a block away. None of them gave off any kind of vibe, good or bad. She felt hamstrung, frustrated, blind in both eyes without current to inform her other senses. Damn Max and damn caution. She opened up, just a sliver of a slice of access.

The kid reached down to pick up the Frisbee, and as he did so the skin on her arms prickled, reacting to current still in the air, crackling around the rim of the toy.

The kid had done it. The kid was Talent.

Damn it, this sort of shit was supposed to be in the briefing!

three

Wren didn’t normally curse—much—but in her head she was running through every single rude and offensive word she knew, in three different languages, English, Spanish and Russian.

Goddamn briefing. Khrenoten briefing.

The briefing Sergei gave her before every job was based on a combination of the client’s own details and—assuming that the client either lied, was an idiot, or withheld “didn’t think it was important” information, all things that had proven true in the past—all the Intel Sergei himself had been able to dig up. Before Wren ever looked at a single blueprint or plotted a basic approach, she knew what she was dealing with.

So much for no damn magic in this job.

A target who was also a Talent—even if just a kid—should have been in the damn dossier. Not because it would have made the job more difficult, but because it would have made the entire damned thing that much easier! Talent generally meant a certain understanding of things, up to and including—as she had just seen—the ability to defend yourself when attacked. That was how most Talent discovered themselves at first, reacting in a way that they or their parents or their friends know wasn’t possible, and trying to do it again. It also created a bond among Talent—at least until they got to know one another.

Jesus wept, if I’d known he was a Talent, I could have called the damn kid from the edge of the yard, lured him out that way! Although if he had panicked, things could have gotten ugly. Four was too young—by about eight years—to have started any kind of real training, even if it was obvious that the kid did have enough ability to protect himself….

But who would have trained him? Incomplete dossier aside, Wren was pretty damn sure neither parent was a Talent—in fact, mommy dearest had to be damn near Null, not to have been able to set up a security cordon, or track her kid—her stolen kid—leaving the yard. Unless she had…unless Max had been part of it after all…

Wren was checking the street even as she crossed it, her senses working overtime. Damn it, damn Max and the paranoia he left her with; if she’d been using current she would have known for a fact if anyone was on their tail and could have dealt with them, and now they were blind, blind and exposed, because the kid using current could have called Christ-knew-what down on them, even if she didn’t think Max would care what one kid did—but then, why had he cared about what she did?

Her head hurt, inside and out.

“Kid, get over here!” she barked, stopping him from picking up the Frisbee. Those innocent blue eyes blinked, as if he was about to cry, but she didn’t care. She dived down into her core and grabbed the first strand she could find, letting it crawl up her arm like a boa constrictor until it flowed out, separating into a dozen, then a hundred strands, invisible to the eye but there nonetheless. *Find,* she told them. *Find and bind.*

There was a black-paneled van down the street, the engine off and cold, two bodies motionless in the back. Alive and breathing regularly, she noted with relief. Sleeping off a big lunch, maybe. Two cars farther down, one of them parked illegally, engines still warm, drivers behind the wheel. She didn’t have even a smidge of empathy or true telepathy—she didn’t know anyone who did, actually, those skills were so rare they might be myth only—so the thoughts of those drivers were hidden from her. But the electrical signals she could pick up said that the muscles of the guys behind the wheel were slack, waiting but not tense, and didn’t seem to pose a threat. They might have been part of the pickup, but she didn’t think so. The agreement had said a Jeep—anything else and she had no requirement to hand the kid over.

She might not like kids, or care who had actual legal custody, but she wasn’t going to hand him over to someone without the proper cues and codes. And not just because it would be bad business. Lonejacks—the freelancers and independent contractors of the Cosa Nostradamus—might not play together well, traditionally, but kids got breaks adults didn’t. Survival of the species, if you were being blunt about it.

That motivation—that need—had sent Wren into the proverbial, nonactual dragon’s lair to rescue teenagers last summer, and she had almost died because of it. This sweet-eyed kid could have—probably would have—been one of them, if he were a decade older—lost, disenfranchised, unaffiliated Talents in their teens, looking for the brass ring. She could have been one, if John Ebeneezer hadn’t grabbed her ear in a candy store one day almost fifteen years ago and read her the riot act about using Talent for shoplifting. There was a reason Talent used the one-on-one mentoring system—okay, mostly it was because of hidebound issues of paranoia and security. But also because you needed to care about your student to keep them safe, and you had to care about your teacher in order to learn. This kid didn’t have anyone.

*Kid* She risked pinging him, the current so soft as to barely reach across the street. It was easier if you had a sense of the person you were trying to reach—if you knew them personally, or had a blood-tie to them—but line of sight was almost as good.

Confusion flooded into her brain, answering at least one question—the kid was acting purely on instinct, not a scrap of training in him. And if she wasn’t careful, she could send him into panic. Not good. Wren pulled back the ping, raising a careful barrier between the two of them. If he tried to reach out, he’d encounter null space, and think that he had just imagined the call. She hoped.

She calmed herself, pasted an open, reassuring expression on her face. “Come on, kid. Time to hook up with your dad.”

His hand was still wet, but she took it anyway, feeling the little fingers curling into her palm. His little legs had to walk twice as fast to keep up with hers, but she resisted the urge to pick him up, just in case she suddenly needed her arms free, for whatever reason.

God, please, let this transfer go smoothly. She really just wanted to go home and have a drink.

An hour later, she was willing to forgo the drink, just to be home without a sticky little paw or pair of big, blue eyes anywhere near her. The kid was cute, but enough was enough. Where the hell was his pickup?

“Daddy was a blond, huh?”

Wren turned to face the man who had spoken.

“I beg your pardon?” She and the kid had walked a circuit of the park, and were now sitting on the swings, as per instructions. Or she was, anyway. The kid had taken one look at the swings, far too high up for his little legs, and promptly sat down in the dirt at her feet, scratching at it intently with a stick.

“His coloring and yours, they don’t quite match up. So I figured Daddy was a blond.” The voice was friendly, even jovial, but the face—surprisingly round—was set in grim lines. Mocha-colored skin and black walnut eyes, shaved head, full lips, and artificially whitened teeth. He did not look like a man who would ordinarily care about genetics, kids, or the combination thereof, not even to hit on their supposed momma.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It was dark.”

Spoken, the code exchange sounded even worse than it had on paper. But the words matched. This was the handover.

“Hey, kid.”

Kid looked up at her, then looked at the man, doubtfully.

“He’s going to take you to your dad,” she told him.

“No he’s not.” Kid sounded pretty damn definite about that.

The guy laughed. Not nervously, not overconfidently. It sounded as though he really was honestly amused.

Wren looked at the kid again. Talent. Untrained, possibly totally clueless, and four years old. His judgment wasn’t to be trusted.

Except that it was marching with her own. Something about this guy was off. Damn it, and things had been going so well until now. For her usual values of “going well,” anyway.

“Is there a problem?” the guy asked her, not sitting down on the swing beside her, but standing, not quite too close, next to the kid. His body language was calm, open, and approachable. He could be grim because he didn’t like little kids. Or because he didn’t like her. Or maybe he had trouble finding a parking space. Maybe he was just a grim but otherwise likable guy.

“No. No problem.” The code phrases matched. Her part of the job was over. Wasn’t that what she had wanted?

Grim-faced guy looked down at the target. “Marc junior, is there a problem?”

Kid looked up at the man, his expression still blandly innocent, and said “No sir. No problem.” He had the slightest lisp when he said ‘sir.’ His hand was clammy, reaching up and gripping her hand again. Great.

“Then let’s get this done,” the guy said. “The kid goes with me.”

Wren wasn’t a precog, but she did have a significant skill in psychometry. Touching something, especially something with a lot of emotional importance, gave her the history of the object. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, but always accurate.

Moving swiftly, letting go of the kid’s hand, she stood and shifted so that the guy had to pivot to follow her As he did so, her now-free hand darted out under his sports coat, slipping his wallet out of his back pocket even as she opened up to her current, letting the information flow into her brain.

The images were clear: Guy had bought the kid, cold hard cash. Wren didn’t know if the seller was Mom or Dad but she did know that both had been approached, by either this guy or his employer, and both Mom and Dad had been willing to listen. One of them had closed the deal, probably Dad, and now Wren was being used to deliver.

Kid was right. She didn’t like either one of his parents, either.

The moment her hand let go of the leather of his wallet, she was in motion, grabbing the kid up and running like hell, expecting any minute to hear the sound of a gun being cocked, feel the burning sensation of bullets entering her skin, or the shouts for her to stop, the claims of child-napping, or something else that would galvanize other people in the park against her.

Damn, what she wouldn’t give to be able to Translocate right now!

The swings were just off the paved walkway, barely inside the park proper, along with one of those round whirling things, a slide, and a couple of seesaws. There was maybe a hundred yards of grass ahead of that, then a grove of trees. Too manicured to be really useful, but it was the only cover around.

The gunfire came just as she started to think that they were going to make it to that relative safety. The screams of parents as kids scattered off the playground made her heart jump into her throat, but she didn’t stop running. The kid was a heavy weight under her arm, but she didn’t dare put him down. Her legs were short but his were even shorter, and there was no way he’d be able to keep up.

A bullet zinged past her ear—from the front. “Oh, fuck this,” she muttered, realizing that the guy had brought backup. Would they risk hitting the kid?

No more time to worry about maybes and mights, she decided. Nulls with guns now scared her more than the risk of Max at his worst.

Without missing a stride, she reached down with two mental hands and dragged up current, spinning it with a thought into a tent of magical energy deflecting not only bullets but eyesight from finding them.

Once, she would have needed a cantrip or spell to help focus her thoughts and direct the current. If she’d had time, she still would have used one, just to make sure her intent was clear and focused. But her ability to channel was greater than it had been then, and she didn’t need words any more than she needed hand-waving or a wand.

She found, channeled, and created, all in one swoop. Wizzing did have its perks.

Then the cramps hit her, and she almost dropped the kid as she doubled over in agony. Perks, my ass. She managed not to drop Marc Jr, mainly because his arms were wrapped around her neck.

“We gotta run,” a soft, serious voice piped near her ear.

“I know, kid, I know.”

But she couldn’t move, not for all the little hands tugging at her. The pain was too intense; it took all her energy to keep the shield up and still remain functional. They were going to have to hope that the shield was enough, that they could outlast the threat, hope that once they started attracting attention, the bad guys would give up and go away.

“Over there!” A voice shouting, alerting: bringing danger. Backup troops, she had been right, the guy wasn’t alone. And nobody seemed to be willing to get involved, not that she blamed them. Gunfire sent smart people for the general direction of down and away. The only people crazy enough to get involved—heroes, professional or otherwise—were not the sort she wanted involved in this, either. Best case scenario, they’d ask to see ID, and the kid didn’t have any. Nor did she have any proof he belonged with her. That would lead to…questions.

A guy came running up, gun in hand, his face red with the exertion of chasing after her, and the first guy, the contact, was close behind. They weren’t giving up—they knew she was there, somewhere.

Her shield wasn’t going to be enough. If these guys were aware, and trained, they might even be able to see through her shield. You could fool all of the people some of the time, but not if they knew what they were looking for. Not even she could do that. Or at least, she thought, she never had been able to before….

Wren reached deep inside herself for another double handful of current. Dark blue and reds, a shimmer of orange, an etching of silver, all coiling around her hands, sliding up her shoulders, setting fire to her bones. The power that possessed her almost overwhelmed the cramps, reminding her of how good it could feel to simply let go, to let the current run through her.

Kill them.

The thought—an echo of her own voice, her own memory—shot through her like a lightning bolt, familiar and terrifying. Suddenly she was no longer in a green suburban park, but surrounded by concrete and metal, pressure slamming against her brain, her pulse racing, the weight of an entire city crushing her with the need to strike, to destroy, to kill any and everything that stood against her, that threatened her and hers.

No. No more. Never again. The thought was hers, supported by deeper, masculine voices.

She could kill. She had killed. She had been backed into a corner and struck out, and destroyed those who threatened her and hers.

The knowledge no longer devastated her. She had killed. She was not a killer. She was not. She would not allow that reaction, that desire, to rule her, to control her. She would not.

The current scorched her skin, but she controlled it. Controlled herself.

Survive. Do not kill. Survive. The two warring instincts—the two opposing needs—battled for primacy over her reactions.

*Idiot female.*

The roar of words in her head was fire and brimstone, treacle and mud, coming down over her barriers like brackish high tide over the breakers.

*Max?* A mixed wash of relief and fear. She had been right; her current called him, even here. He scared the hell out of her, but hell was what she needed to get rid of, right now. Better the devil in someone else than the devil in you?

*Max, I…need help*

Admitting that to anyone was difficult for her. Admitting it to a crazy man, a fellow lonejack who had just tried to run her off the job, who was as likely to kill them both as help them, to a wizzart who might do anything, or nothing, in response to her plea…

*Let me in*

Oh God. What a very, very, very bad idea that was. She had no choice. There wasn’t anyone strong enough, near enough. Trust wasn’t an issue in the face of survival.

She grabbed the kid more tightly, and let down her barriers just enough to let Max slide in.

Given access to her inner self, he swept up and over her like a storm front, his intent rising up before her, his intent to do what she could not. His tarry current was vile and yet beautiful, black lightning sparking and flashing inside a dark storm cloud of his awareness. Battered, barely holding herself together, somehow she fought it.

*No! No killing.*

His disgust at what he saw as her weakness was a physical blow in a psychic battle. Wren took it, absorbed it, did not strike back but merely—merely!—demanded that he adhere to her command.

She was not strong enough to command a wizzart, not without going there herself. Not without losing her own tenuous control. But he could allow himself to be directed, if he chose.

If he chose.

*Hurt them,* she suggested. *Scare the shit out of them. But don’t snuff them.*

He resisted, and she pushed harder. *Harder to scare away than to kill* she challenged him, risking the taunt to get his dander up and aimed where she needed it. *Just keep the kid safe.* She hesitated, then added *and me, too!* just in case he was unclear on the concept of “help.”

Push and shove, push and shove, an endless space of a second, and then she felt his reluctant acquiescence, felt the brimstone and treacle mass sweep around until her current and his slammed against each other, their differing masses and density creating virtual thunderclaps where they came into contact. The kid shuddered, caught between them, racked by the current. She didn’t dare reach down to comfort him, all of her focus on keeping Max with them and in the game plan.

*Follow me* A visual with the words, a thick black anvil of a storm cloud opening up, a stovepipe chimney down into the heart of the storm, swirling around her with all the power of The Alchemist’s overpowered, overfull brain.

She grabbed the kid with both hands, keeping him down on the ground with her, trying to send some reassurance, and leaped into the maelstrom.

Inside, there was a second of calm, the winds howling around outside them, and then monsters leaped at her, claws black and bloody, their teeth serrated and their scales slick with oily, viscous substances she didn’t want to think about. Once they would have terrified her; once they would have made her run like hell.

She had walked on the wrong side of madness since then. She had led people to their deaths, had taken lives from the undeserving, and decided who was deserving and who was not.

Her own monsters inside were just as frightening as anything Max carried. Worse, because she had birthed them.

*You know nothing* Max spat, even as he was laying his own current over hers, forcing them to integrate and work together. *You understand nothing.* The monsters grabbed onto her, digging their claws in, their bilious blood dripping into her veins, sending directions of what to do and how to do it directly to her core. It was a little like rape, and a lot like school, and entirely horrible. That was exactly the impact he intended, she was pretty sure. Bastard.

Her only consolation was the thought that whatever she was seeing, the guys after them were probably getting a taste of the same feedback in their un Talented skulls, under the force of Max’s wild energy. She hoped that they did shit their pants, and then some.

Whatever they were getting, it was working. The bullets didn’t so much miss them as decide to veer erratically away from them, zinging into trees and puffing up dirt where they hit the ground. If they could hold out…no, they couldn’t. The goons might run out of bullets, and the cops might show up, but that wasn’t going to solve the problem of getting the hell out of here.

Her brain formed the thought, but Max’s finished it.

*now* was the only warning they got, and the ground moved under their feet, disappearing into the storm along with sound and sight, smell and taste. They did not exist, except in Max’s overstimulated, current-overrun mind, his will the only thing holding them in reality.

And then the ground dropped in under their feet, their stomachs dropped in after them, and sensation returned.

Wren threw up.

So, she was oddly reassured to note, did the kid.

“Fool brat. Fool. Deserve to get herself killed.”

Max was behind them, his clothing filthy, his shoulder-length white hair literally standing on end from the static he was generating.

“You’re not listening. You never listen, you didn’t listen and then you listen to someone else. You think that gets overlooked? Never diss crazy people, little girl. ’Specially when they crazy for you. You came back?” he spat. “You almost died. Brain’s dead, there is no coming back. Back is the new front and front and center means get the hell back.”

He was being typically cryptic, and she didn’t have the energy to argue with him. Sprawled on the floor—tile, black-and-white squares, the smell of disinfectant in the air, she determined from the clues that the old bastard had translocated them into some bathroom somewhere—she didn’t have the energy to do anything more than wipe her mouth and blink the tears from her eyes.

“You okay, kid?” she asked instead, turning her head to look at the boy.

He sat in a puddle of his own vomit, and looked at her with eyes that were huge, blue, and scared.

“No.”

“Smart kid,” Max observed, calming down a little, smoothing his hair down with hands that crackled with current and just made things worse. “Might actually survive to grow some hair, that one. Might. Maybe.”

“I don’t like him,” the kid told Wren.

“Nobody does, kid,” she said, hauling herself up to her knees and testing if she felt strong enough to get all the way up yet or not. “But he just saved our asses. Say thank you.”

The kid looked up at Max and, politely, said “Thank you.”

“Didn’t do it for you. Or for you, either,” he added irritably, when Wren started to say something. “Did it for…neveryou-mind. Just can’t stand Nulls think they got the right to interfere in our business.”

Wren shook her head, too tired to respond to that, either. Max had been a bigot when he was sane, too. The first time she had met him, Neezer had warned her…

Neezer.

For some reason, the “sense” of her old mentor was stronger than it had been in years. She had begun to forget what he looked and sounded like, over the past few years, but suddenly the memories were all there again, strong and clear. John Ebeneezer had been the one to tell her what she was, train her how to use current safely, had got her through most of high school without failing out or cracking up—and then disappeared when he felt himself start to wizz, rather than risk her safety with his madness.

She had yet to forgive him for that. Especially now, knowing what she knew.

She could almost see him, sitting behind his desk in the lab, marking papers, looking up to utter some annoyingly right bit of wisdom she was too much of a teenager to appreciate….

Wren froze the memory in midprogress, and turned to stare at Max. She sniffed at him once, twice, like a dog scenting a bone. Familiar. Familiar in a way the body never forgot, the mind never let go of.

The grizzled old wizzart took a step backward. The wrinkles around his bright eyes deepened, and his lips drew back from rotted old teeth.

“Where. Is. He?”

The words were growled out, her voice dropping a full octave, making the kid forget his own misery long enough to scoot away from both of the adults, his blue eyes wide.

She had the pleasure of seeing uncertainty and a smidge of caution flicker in Max’s eyes. “I don’t—”

“Max. Where. Is. He.” A definite growl now, edged and hungry. She could sense the current-signature all over the old man now that she was looking, the specific flavor of someone else’s magic. Someone not Max, and not her, but familiar all the same. Neezer. Neezer had been near him, had worked current around him. Recently.

In the bedrock, in those woods. Hidden, wizzed: but alive.

Neezer was alive.

“Old man, you tell me…”

“No.” He could growl better than she could. “Told you to go. Shouldn’t have been there. Shouldn’t have known. Won’t go back, too late now. Gone. Keeps moving. Pissed at you, girl.” Max glared at her, and like a sea change, or clouds moving, there was a spark of sanity in those eyes again, and his words were clear and to the point.

“He doesn’t want to see you, brat. He doesn’t want you to see him. You grok?”

Knowledge hit her like a brick to the head. Oh yes, she understood. Didn’t mean she liked it. Or that she was going to accept it. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” she said softly.

“Yeah. It does. You escaped. Good for you, maybe. But you did it your way. Us, we are what we are. And we’re dangerous, brat. You had your chance, maybe, and didn’t take it. School’s over. So stop looking for us.”

“I wasn’t looking for you, you fell over me!” she said, distracted by his comment, the way he had probably intended. Damn Max: crazy or not he knew how to play her.

“Pish.” The sanity faded, and the wizzart was back. “Men’s room. Pretty thing. You wanna see my dick, you’re sprawled on the floor like that?”

If he was trying to shock her with being crude, he needed to work up better material than that. But the point was made: she wasn’t going to get anything more out of him on anything useful, and going back to the site wasn’t going to turn up Neezer—Max was right, by now he had moved on, or hidden himself again.

Besides, there was the kid to worry about. The handover had been blown, but she still had to deliver to get the final part of the payment. Assuming daddy dearest still wanted the kid. Christ, don’t borrow trouble, Valere. The client gets the goods, you’re within letter of the agreement, everything’s peachy. He’s not a puppy you can adopt, damn it.

“This isn’t over, Max,” she warned him, standing up.

“Yes,” he whispered, his eyes level with her own, not blinking, not once, until her own eyes hurt. “Oh yes, it is. All over everything.”

And with a manic grin and an inrushing of air that smelled like burned ozone, he was gone.

“Where he go?” the kid asked, looking around as though expecting to see Max lurking in one of the stalls.

“Hell, hopefully.” She looked down at the kid, and sighed. “All right, come on, full cleanup this time. Grab some paper towels and get your disgusting self over to the sink….”

This was so not in the job description.

four

It took her almost half an hour to get the kid presentable again, including rinsing his T-shirt out and holding it under the air dryer until it was okay to put on again, if still, based on his grimace, a little damp. Wren, with more experience in being Translocated, had managed to miss her clothing when she threw up. She washed her hands and face, rinsed her mouth out and gargled with warm water, and figured that was as good as she was going to get, right then. But oh God, did she want that hot shower and a long nap. Not to mention that drink.

“Ready?”

The kid nodded, but looked less certain than he had since all this began. She didn’t blame him a bit. In fact, it was a damned wonder the kid was still there, and not running for the first noncrazy adult he could find.

It made you wonder what the hell his home life was like.

Despite her concerns, nobody gave Wren or the kid a second glance when they walked out of the bathroom. She still felt horribly exposed and vulnerable, same as she did every time someone else Transloc’d her. The loss of control over your own molecules was disturbing, even without the throwing-up part. If she could do it herself with any kind of accuracy or reliability…

If you could, many things would be different. But since you only manage it under extreme stress and with massive stomach upset, let it go already!

Max had dropped them off in the men’s room of a chain restaurant off Route 95 in Connecticut, just north of New York City. It was more than a hundred fifty miles from the aborted handoff site, far beyond what most Talent could manage. Show-off, Wren thought bitterly as she looked out the plate glass windows at the visible highway signs.

Then the white lettering on that sign really sank in, giving her a start. This was the client’s hometown, where he lived and, more important, where he worked. Which meant that either luck had finally smiled on her, or—and this was the unpleasant thought—that Max had done some digging in her brain while he was hauling them around.

She strongly suspected the latter, and made a nasty promise to return the favor, if she ever got the chance, just on principle. She hated the thought of anyone in her brain. It made her feel…rumpled.

Despite her foul mood and worries, the smell coming from the kitchen of the restaurant made Wren salivate, and the look on the kid’s face suggested he felt the same, even though he was too polite—or scared—to ask. She didn’t want to stay here, though, just in case anyone—Max, or…anyone—decided to come back for them. Instead, she dragged the kid next door to a fast-food restaurant and dug into her sparse cash to get a burger and a kid’s meal. They had little containers of chocolate milk, and she got three, two for him and one for her. It was milk, so that was almost like healthy food, right? She told herself to stop making like a mother; the kid wouldn’t keel over from one junk food meal.

They ate as they walked, heading on instinct into the more crowded downtown area. The client, according to Sergei, was senior partner at a decent-sized law firm. Some questioning of local-looking people on the street finally got her an address. By the time their meals were done and the last of the chocolate milk slurped, Wren found the building.

“You ready?”

The kid looked less than thrilled. “I guess.”

Kid of few words. And he didn’t suck his thumb or throw tantrums or squirm, or anything that made her hate kids. Not bad, as kids went.

“I’m tired.”

“Yeah. It’s almost over now, kid.”

He seemed to be thinking that through, then finally nodded and set his face into very solemn lines. “Okay.”

She tossed the garbage into a nearby trash can, looked the kid over to make sure he looked as unmussed and untraumatized as possible, and then marched him into the lobby of the brick-and-chrome low-rise. There were only four companies listed: two law firms, a CPA firm, and something that didn’t identify what they did but had five names on the masthead.

The directory sent them to the third floor, where the lobby was warm paneled wood and comfortable-looking chairs. If she ever needed a law firm she’d like it to look as upscale-comfortable as this one. Somehow she didn’t think that they handled the kind of work she’d bring them, though; their criminal cases were probably more insider trading and whatnot. She put on an air of confident authority, best she could, and told the surprised receptionist—a large, elegant woman with glorious cornrows down her back—that there was a package for her boss. The kid seemed to know the woman, and more to the point actually like her, so Wren had no hesitation whatsoever in triggering her no-see-me lurk mode the moment he launched himself into the woman’s arms. That was a handoff she felt a hell of a lot better about, yes.

Dad showed up a few minutes and a frantic page later, and while he scanned the lobby with an intent gaze, he didn’t have a chance of spotting her standing in plain sight by the elevator doors. Retrievers were both born and made—you stayed at the top through training and skills, but you started out because you had the natural ability to go unnoticed. She suspected that was true for a lot of Null thieves, as well.

She studied Dad for a few minutes. Expensive suit and well-groomed hair, and he seemed really uncomfortable when the receptionist handed junior over. But the kid—despite his earlier statement—threw chubby little arms around Dad’s neck without a second thought. The man’s expression was one of guilty relief rather than annoyance or fear—or disappointment—and he hugged the boy back immediately, like something precious he hadn’t expected to hold again. Maybe he wasn’t such a shmuck after all. Maybe. Maybe he’d just made a mistake, had trusted the wrong people to do the right thing. It was a risk, but…

Take care of your son, she thought into the man’s skull, making it into a pointed, current-driven command, and then went home.

The MetroNorth train southbound got her into Grand Central just in time to deal with the crush of early-evening commuters. The mass of people heading out of the city on a Thursday evening made it tough walking, but the irritation with crowds was a familiar thing, and she almost welcomed it, after the rest of the day. The subway downtown was packed as well, but she slid into the first train that came along, found a bit of wall to lean against, and was home without any significant delay.

As always when she had been away for even a day, the sensation of coming up out of the subway station and turning onto her street was akin to having someone lift a twenty-pound weight off her shoulders. Home.

The narrow brownstone was quiet—there were five floors, one apartment per floor, and most of her neighbors weren’t the wild party-throwing type ever since the nudists on the third floor moved out and her friend Bonnie moved in…. All right, Bonnie threw parties, but they were clothed and respectable. Mostly.

Wren shook her head and shifted her backpack to the other shoulder as she climbed the stairs. Her thoughts were starting to get scattered, which was normal when a job ended. All that concentration fractured and the only thing she could think about was that strong drink, a hot shower, and going to sleep. Not necessarily in that order, either.

She lived on the top floor; normally that was a blessing in terms of privacy and air flow. Sometimes, though, that last turn of the landing was more than she could handle. She could use current to carry herself—or at least make her weight seem lighter—but the energy drain was too much to even consider. It had been a very, very long day, and that burger and chocolate milk was a long time ago.

Her apartment door was locked with multiple physical locks and a current-lock, primed with elementals, tiny creatures that gathered in electrical streams to feed. They weren’t bright, but they could be trained—mostly—to respond to intrusions and report back. A quick touch indicated that none of the locks had been disturbed since she left that morning. She flipped two of the physical locks—the third was unlocked, and turning it would have secured the door against someone not aware of Wren’s security quirk. The fourth lock was current-based; it only activated if a stranger tried to pass. Right now, it was keyed to five different people: two Talent—herself and Bonnie—and two Nulls—Sergei, and her mother, and one Fatae—the demon P.B., who was sitting on the sofa in her main room, bare feet propped up on the coffee table, reading the salmon-colored pages of the Financial Times.

She was too tired to even be surprised. How he had managed to get in without triggering the locks…He must still be using the fire escape and picking the lock on the kitchen window. Old habits died hard, apparently.

“Hey.” She dropped her bag on the kitchen counter, threw her keys into the bowl, and went back out to hear why her former temporary roommate was back in her space.

“You got mail,” he said, pointing a clawed paw to the pile of letters and catalogs on the coffee table by his claw-tipped toes.

“I often do,” she replied drily. The furniture was new, and she had warned the four-foot-high demon what would happen if he scored claw marks in any of it. She had forgotten to warn him against shedding, but so far he seemed to be keeping his coarse white fur to himself.

“You know,” she said to nobody in particular, “I have problems nobody else in this world does.”

A snort was his only response: he had gone back to reading the paper. He clearly wasn’t impressed with her trauma.

She went back into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

You have reached this number, I assume by intent. Leave a coherent message and I will get back to you.

“Your dossier was missing a rather important bit of information, Didier. But everything’s copacetic, I’m home, I’m done, I’m going to bed. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

She hung up the phone, wishing not for the first or last time that she could use a cell phone without frying the innards seven ways from Sunday. Being able to call him from the road, and not relying on finding a working pay phone…

Might as well wish for another four inches of height, while you’re at it, Valere. Besides, you as a Null? She couldn’t imagine it, not even for a laugh.

Turning around in the galley space, she opened the fridge and considered the half-drunk bottle of wine—Sergei’s contribution to last night’s dinner—and the various beers, and instead grabbed a diet Sprite. Popping the top and slugging half of it, she went into the main room.

“You here for dinner?” she asked her uninvited guest, meaning it as a prelude to kicking him out.

“So long as you’re not cooking.” He snickered when she glared, then relented. “Bonnie came up and offered to cook dinner, if you got home before ten.”

Bonnie, the other Talent who lived in the building, was a fabulous cook. Wren didn’t cultivate a friendship with her for that—the younger woman was fun just to hang around with—but it was a much-appreciated benefit. Suddenly, staying awake a little while longer gained appeal.

*yo* she pinged downstairs.

A faint sense of awareness and busyness, and a tantalizing mental aroma replied.

“She’s already cooking,” she told the demon, sitting on the new brown-and-cream geometric pattern rug on the hardwood floor and gathering the mail onto her lap. As long as she was staying awake, might as well deal with the domestic shit. “Half an hour, we should go down.”

“Gotcha.” The demon didn’t even bother looking up from his newspaper, turning pages with surprisingly delicate, claw-tipped paws.

What to do for dinner settled; Wren went to work organizing the pile. Catalogs were tossed, credit card bills were put to one side for paying, and anything that looked like junk mail was thrown back onto the table. One envelope looked like an invitation, and she slit it open and pulled out the card. A gallery opening. She didn’t recognize the name, but that didn’t mean anything—Sergei was the one in that field, not her. She didn’t know from art, just what she liked. Often as not, it wasn’t the stuff that sold well.

Because of who she was sleeping with—Sergei having reached a certain level of Impressive in the New York gallery world—she got added to the invitation lists at some of the weirdest places—and some of the toitiest, too. From the address, this one was on the upscale mark.

A few years ago she would have panicked, worried about what to wear, and then had a miserable time comparing herself to the inevitable models and high-gloss money-movers. Now…Well, she’d still worry about what to wear. Everything else got less important after you almost died a couple of times.

There was one remaining envelope, looking ominously business-like. She frowned at it, and took another slug out of the soda can. Slitting the envelope open, she removed a single sheet with a very severe-looking letterhead.

Dear Ms. Valere. We are pleased to inform you that we have acquired your building from Machi Management. In the coming year, we plan to make considerable improvements to the building with the goal of selling the units. As a current tenant, you will of course have the first option to purchase your unit….

Wren stopped reading. She refolded the letter very carefully, placing it on the coffee table, and then went back into the kitchen and grabbed the bottle of wine out of the fridge. She didn’t bother with a glass.

“Trouble?” P.B. put down the newspaper and looked at her, a worried expression in his dark red eyes. He didn’t have eyebrows, just a faint ridge under the fur. She had never noticed that before, really.

“No. Not really. Sort of.” She shook her head, then nodded, then shook her head again, not quite sure what she felt. Her demon’s expression as he tried to follow her head motions almost made her laugh. “Maybe. My building’s going condo.”

The New Yorker’s nightmare and dream, all in one. P.B. winced, his muzzle drawing back to show sharp white teeth and black gums in an expression you had to know meant sympathy for it to not be menacing. “Ow.”

‘Yeah, ow.” Bonnie had to have gotten one, too. Suddenly, the offer of dinner made more sense. Bonnie was younger, with less money in the bank, and had only just moved in the year before. She was probably freaking more than a little bit over this letter.

“This has been a hell of a day, my friend,” Wren said heavily. “A hell of a day. Let’s go get us some home cooking. And a drink before dinner.”

As expected, that proposed drink before dinner turned into two, and then more with dinner, and a late night overall, ending with human and demon staggering up the stairs trying to sing the chorus of a disreputable sea shanty in Norwegian, a language neither of them spoke—or sang—a word of.

When Wren finally crawled out of the bedroom somewhere between oh God and semihuman the next morning to make coffee, there was a tall, well-built, reasonably good-looking man with a hawkish nose drinking a mug of tea at the kitchen counter.

“When’d you get here?” She knew he hadn’t been here last night; the bed had been cold when she fell into it. Even drunk off her ass, she knew when Sergei was in bed with her. He was an excellent bed-warmer.

“The client was surprised that the handoff wasn’t done as arranged,” her partner said by way of greeting, without bothering to respond to her question. “And by ‘surprised’ I mean more than vaguely upset. You delivered the package to his office?”

Coffee was suddenly too much effort, if she was expected to talk coherently about business while figuring out how many scoops she had already put in. She waved a hand and muttered something vaguely in English at him, promising to return, then went to the bathroom and splashed water on her face. The reflection in the mirror looked worse than she felt, which was saying something. Her shoulder-length brown hair was mussed and tangled, and her eyes were red-rimmed. Her skin, normally a healthy if pale color, was decidedly green.

Bonnie Torres could out-drink a demon, much less one slightly built Retriever. Someday, both demon and Retriever would remember that. Ideally, before the evil bitch pulled out the “after dinner, one last drink” brandy to toast the encroaching condo-ization of their building.

God. Condo. Don’t even think about it right now, Valere. Her partner was waiting. He wouldn’t thank her for skimping on her shower, though. Not if he needed her brains this morning.

The bathroom was old-fashioned, with a simple pedestal sink and pipes that clugged and clunked when you were waiting for hot water, but the heater did work and the pressure was fabulous, and a quick shower turned her into something closer to human.

“Client can bite me,” she said, walking into the kitchen wrapped in a towel, in search of coffee. Her partner was dressed in his usual suit and tie; the suit a beautifully cut dark gray pinstripe, the tie a nonregulation purple tie-dye. Friday morning, the gallery was closed; he must have a meeting with a new agent, or maybe a private client. Money, definitely. She took a good long look at him, just for the pleasure of it. His hair had more gray in it than even a year ago, but it was still full and swept back from a hawk’s face; sharp brown eyes and an even sharper nose. She thought the nose was one of his better features. He didn’t agree. “The guy who showed up had bought the kid.”

That stopped the tea mug halfway to his mouth and raised a dark eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

She repeated herself, speaking slowly and precisely. “The guy who showed up had bought the kid. Cash on the barrel. I picked it up from him, clear and true. I don’t know how much he paid, but it was a lot.”

“From the father.” His mouth tightened into a thin line and his entire body tensed. She reached up and patted him on one shoulder, and then shoved him gently out of the way so that she could get to the coffee maker, annoyed that he hadn’t started it for her already.

If she moved, she could find a place that had a larger kitchen, with room for an actual table where people could sit down and eat meals together, maybe. That was something to think about. She could trade in the three tiny rooms at the end and maybe have a single bedroom large enough to turn around in. And a real closet? There were a lot of upsides to moving.

Maybe she could “forget” to give anyone her new address.

“Don’t know,” she said in response to his comment, going up on her toes to try to snag a mug out of the cabinet. “Could be the mother—she’s the one who did the initial grab, after all. Guy had contact with them both, I got that much from reading him. And Dad didn’t…he didn’t seem like the type. He was really glad the kid was back and safe.” She had gotten details wrong before. Not often, though. Not at that level.

Sergei looked carefully at his partner’s closed-off expression, then grabbed the mug for her and handed it down, not making a fuss out of his much greater height. “You picked that all up from one contact?”

“Yeah.” Her voice said do-not-ask-how. He didn’t. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know. He had been there for the results, when she’d been the recipient of a “battery” of current during the events of last summer, and he knew that it had changed her, changed her ability. That, combined with the pressures and stresses they were under, on a daily basis…

Admit it, to yourself if nobody else. She wizzed. She wizzed, and she came back, and she hasn’t figured out what it all means yet. And neither have you.

The one thing he knew for sure was that her ability to channel current was stronger than it had been, which meant that she had to keep a tighter rein on it as well, or risk overflowing into whatever was nearby—electronics, storm fronts, receptive humans….

Wren grabbed the sugar tin and a spoon, and placed them next to the mug, ready and waiting for when the coffee finished percolating, and turned to face him. He knew that annoyed, sweetly inquisitive look, and braced himself for what was about to land.

“So. How was your session?”

As expected, and speaking of pressure and stress. She knew that he was seeing Doherty; she had in fact been the one to suggest, without much delicacy at all, that the therapist—as a Talent himself—would be the only person who might be able to understand Sergei’s particular problem. She didn’t know more than that, except that he was still going, and that was the way he wanted to keep it.

He was willing to do this, for her, but he didn’t want to talk about it.

“It was fine.” He gave back the do-not-ask tone and saw her bite the inside of her cheek, making her look like a chipmunk with a hangover, but she didn’t press. For all of about a minute and forty seconds. Then her hand reached up into her hair, and curled a strand around her finger, sure sign she was about to say something she wasn’t sure he was going to like.

Sergei felt a sigh building, and repressed it firmly. Once upon a time, he had been the senior partner, the guy with the answers, the one who had final say. After due consideration and a weighing of the pros and cons, he decided that he didn’t miss those days at all.

All right, maybe a little. Sometimes. But if he never saw her finger-curl her hair ever again, it would be too soon.

“So why did you give the kid back?” he asked, not put off by her attempted change of topic, and not giving her a chance to dig further into the state of his mental or emotional health. “Isn’t the guy going to sell the kid again?”

“Maybe.” She didn’t seem too disturbed by the fact.

“Genevieve!” He only used her given name when he was really annoyed. Or scared witless, but annoyed pretty much did the job right now. “Do you know what happens to kids who—” He stopped himself. Of course she did. More, she knew what happened to Talented kids who ended up in the wrong hands. No matter her personal opinion of kids, which was usually that they were best served braised on a bed of spinach—she would not keep from protecting the boy if she thought there was a need.

He fixed her with a Look, brows lowered, eyes narrowed, lips downturned, trying to channel his father’s best “come clean now” expression. “Genevieve, what did you do?”

His father’s look had worked much better on a preteen Sergei. His partner merely showed him an evil little smile and poured herself some of the coffee, yelping when a drop of it hit her rather than the pot. She shook her hand to cool it off, but her expression remained smugly satisfied. “Nothing he didn’t deserve.”

Good luck, you poor bastard, Sergei thought, managing to spare some sympathy for the client, whatever else he might or might not have done. Wren didn’t just get even, she got ahead. Sergei suspected that if the guy even thought about being other than The Perfect Father for the next ten years, he would break out in a bad case of crotch-itch, or something equally attention-getting.

Since Sergei totally approved of such an action, he merely shook his head and gestured out the window at the blue sky showing. “I don’t have to be at my meeting until this afternoon,” he said conversationally. “You up for a walk around the duck pond?”

She wasn’t fooled for even a minute, he knew, but he also knew that without distraction she would go back to sleep for the rest of the day in a classic case of post-job slump, and that usually was enough to throw her off schedule, which in turn made her cranky. Like jet lag, it was better to keep her up and moving until the evening, when she could then justifiably collapse. Plus, and he knew that she knew this, too, he wanted to be able to check out her mental state firsthand. There was something going on there, something she hadn’t told him about. Something maybe more disturbing than an unexpected run-in with the Alchemist.

The name alone was enough to make him shudder. Talent was commonplace, the Fatae still unnerved him a little, but wizzarts…He had seen firsthand what even the least of them could do, had almost lost Wren to the bittersweet darkness of that madness. He would never be able to shrug it off. Never. And never the threat of a man as powerful as Stewart Maxwell.

The walk was as much for him was it as for her. He should have been there for her last night when she got home, and not left it to P.B, no matter how good the demon was at Wren-sitting. Until he was certain that everything was all right, that whatever she wasn’t telling him wasn’t something he needed to worry about, he didn’t want to let her out of his sight again.

“Yeah,” she said, obviously buying into his pretense for his sake, not hers. “Sure. I could use a good chance to get nibbled to death by rabid and unruly geese.” She gestured with her coffee. “Lemme finish this, and go get dressed.”

He still has trouble saying it, trouble going back to that moment. And so, over and over again, they return to it.

“She almost died then. Worse.”

“Worse?”

“There’s worse than dying, and she was there, right on the edge….”

“What happened? What put her there, on the edge?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? What happened. He knows the why, and they’ve figured out, mostly, the how, but…I don’t know. Not the details. But it was bad. It was…

It was hell. The memory played out behind his eyes whenever he was too tired to hold it back: Wren splayed on the ground, her body too still, too cold; her eyes bloodshot and staring, drained of all the vitality that normally filled her body. She had gone in after the FocAs, the Talent who had been trained and turned against their own people. The Lost, they were called now. Lost, and then Retrieved.

“But that wasn’t where it began. That wasn’t where the damage was done. All that came before, and then…She never told me what happened, but I know when…when they attacked her. Those men, those…”

“Take a breath. Hold, and now let it out, easy, the way we talked about. She’s all right.”

She is all right. Except she isn’t. His Wrenlet isn’t a killer. He is. He wants to be a killer again, even though they were long-dead already.

At his Zhenchenka’s hands.

“The men who attacked her, who pushed her up onto the razor’s edge. They deserved to die?” No condemnation, no offer of expiation, just the question.

“Yes.” He has no doubt on that subject. “But her magic should never have been used to murder.”

“You feel that you failed her.”

“I did fail her. And—” The bitterness, here, and nowhere else “—she let me fail her.” He still doesn’t know how to deal with that.

five

On that same morning that Sergei was dragging his partner out to decompress with the ducks, miles south from Manhattan, in a surprisingly well-known high-security building outside of D.C., other people were ignoring the glorious autumnal weather outside, trapped within four walls by professional obligations and legally sanctioned if not officially approved obsessions.

“Damn it, where was that file? Aha, there you are. Thought you could hide, did you?”

The office was reasonably sized, but badly designed and dark, despite the fluorescent light overhead. An interior space, there were no windows to bring any natural light or air in; circulation was dependent upon the old-fashioned air ducts, and an almost-as-old desk fan perched on the seat of a battered metal stool. One wall appeared to be held up by the number of black metal filing cabinets marching along it, the line broken only by a doorway. The frosted-glass-paned door was ajar, with hinges that hung in such a way as to indicate the door was rarely all the way closed. The other three walls were painted a standardized white that had seen better decades. Each of those three walls supported a whiteboard, covered in various scrawls in several different ink colors and handwriting styles, and a corkboard, filled with newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and printed reports following half a dozen different cases.

It was an office built around and decorated by people who obsessed, and followed through, and then obsessed some more.

There were three desks crammed into the space, one for each wall, but only one figure was currently in the room.

That figure was sitting behind one of those desks, hunching forward in an expensive ergonomically correct chair, looking at the just-found file under the illumination of a battered office-issue desk lamp. In addition to the file, the lamp, a black in-box filled to the rim, and a matching plastic pen holder, the desk was covered with more reports, sheets of scrawled notes, a dozen red and black pens, and half a dozen pretzel sticks with the salt gnawed off and the remains abandoned in a pile.

A box with still-salted pretzel rods had been pushed to the side, as though the gnawer were aware of the addiction, and trying only half heartedly to break it.

The agent date-stamped a report, signed it, and filed it, then picked up a new pretzel stick and flipped through the remaining paperwork still awaiting closure.

Dismissing the pending cases, the agent got up and, current pretzel in hand, strode over to look at the nearest corkboard. The boards had the look of items tacked up in a hurry and riffled through frequently; the edges of the papers were tattered and some of the articles were faded, although the older ones had been laminated at some time in the past. But the pinholes were fresh, and the impression was of an overcrowded in-box rather than a layered archaeological dig. Things changed, progress was made, items were taken down and replaced by new ones. The newspaper clippings in the upper right corner were all from New York City papers, mostly covering crimes committed during the previous winter and spring, with the more violent and unsolved ones circled in red marker. A few of the more colorful tear sheets were from lurid magazines, proclaiming the coming of the Lord as evidenced by the glow coming down from the sky and landing in, of all places, Brooklyn, N.Y.

The tear sheets dated back to the 1970s, and some of the reports went all the way back to World War II, but the majority of them were less than two years old. It was these that the agent focused on, one well-groomed hand lifting the most recent to look below it at the one before then, silently comparing facts and observations.

A long strip of the remaining salt was taken off the pretzel rod, as buffed nails tapped the sheets in thought.

An observer would note that the reports were of a similar nature, following a track of murders and assaults, gang-related crimes and break-ins. A blue-and-red graph charted the rise—and the sudden decline—in those crimes over a two-year period. The chart ended on a flat line near zero, the most recent data point charted being last month.

Whatever it was causing the activity, it seemed to have ended.

The agent knew that sometimes cases were like that. You accepted the fact that you’d never get an answer, and moved on to the next, because the one thing you knew was that there would always be a next. The world was like that.

It was why there were people like them, in offices like this. To catch the ones they could, and not drive themselves crazy over the ones they couldn’t.

And yet, something about this case still bugged the brain, itched the instincts, and left questions hanging. You couldn’t let those cases go.

The agent went back to the desk, dropping the pretzel stick long enough to reach for a yellow-tagged file, pick up a pen and jot down a new comment in the margin of one of the sheets. The motion held the weary but still determined air of someone who is no closer to a solution than a week before, but can’t stop. It didn’t matter that the search had been going on for almost a year now: if you are determined enough, the Bureau teaches, and you follow all the leads through to the end, luck will be on your side. Eventually.

A phone rang somewhere, outside the office and down the hall. Someone answered it on the third ring, and the echo of low voices carried faintly into the office and was swallowed by the shadows. The figure didn’t even look up.

The annotated paper was returned to the file, and two photos were pulled out: one, of a tall, lean man in a dark suit, talking to two other men in the middle of a crowded food court. The other was of that same man, more casually dressed, in a subway car. A much shorter woman stood with him, their body language suggesting both familiarity and tension. Both photos were clearly taken without their knowledge, the angle and grainy texture suggesting a surveillance camera of some sort.

Two years ago she had heard whispers of something the higher-ups knew, of a group or organization in various American cities that the government might or might not consider a threat, a group that might or might not be causing those ups and downs in specific crimes. Of individuals who were more than human. Casual queries had gotten her stonewalled, left with the impression that this was a Secret only a few select were allowed to know.

Very few things got up the nose of an obsessive investigator like a Secret they were told they couldn’t share.

Her first probe had gotten her a name, and that had led to another name, and she’d pulled enough strings to get a temporary watch put on those subjects, and who they interacted with. But the lead had faded and gone cold, and when there were no more incidents in that city, her line of investigation was cut off. Officially.

A man came to the office door, pushing it open just enough more to stick his head in. “The Old Lady wants to see us,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” The room’s original resident didn’t seem impressed with the news.

“I don’t think it was a request, Chang. I think it was something like an order. As in, right now she wants to see us.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.” Chang said, reaching for another pretzel rod, then being distracted midthought by a new possibility.

“Christ. You are trying to get yourself fired, aren’t you?”

“She won’t fire me. I work too cheap.”

“Nothing’s cheap enough for this place,” the second agent said with mordant humor, then shook his head, coming into the office and looking at the papers on the desk. “Are you still working that lead? Give it up, already. I think someone’s pulling your leg. All you’re doing is wasting Bureau time, and you know how they feel about that.”

The only response he got was the wave of one arm, middle finger extended in universal sign language. He shrugged. “Your funeral. I’ll see you upstairs. Now, Chang. Seriously. The Old Lady is not in a good mood today.”

The figure pushed the chair back with a squeak of wheels and a muttered curse, reaching with the right hand for one of the less-chewed pretzels, the left hand being preoccupied with writing something down. Numbers, possibly, or some sort of intricate code. The muttering was cut off as teeth slid across the length of the pretzel, harvesting the salt with the heedless competence of a beaver stripping bark.

The photographs were joined by several pencil sketches of another figure, this one much shorter and, at first glance, wearing some sort of furry costume under a trenchcoat. The only color in those sketches was the dark red used to indicate the eyes, and the comments written in navy-blue ink along the margins. Having recovered them from the pile, Chang was sorting through those now, shuffling them like some sort of static cartoon book as though hoping to see it suddenly start to move.

A phone rang, this time in the office.

“Agent Chang.”

A familiar voice was on the other line; the same voice that had originally brought in the lead a year ago, off her half-joking comment about a seemingly impossible, almost supernatural event that had occurred on her watch.

He was an old friend, a trusted source, and a general pain in the ass. Chang half suspected that the other agent was right, and he was playing this out for his own twisted amusement, to see how far she’d buy into his claims of something powerful and weird just out of reach.

The thought that it might be true, that there might be a source of power—of information—out there that she might be able to tap into, to use, was the only reason she hadn’t told him to take a flying leap, and his wild stories with him. But maybe it was time. There were other ways to climb the ladder, other sources she could cultivate, if she spent the time and energy…

“Either give me something useful or go the hell away,” Chang said now, and this time she meant it.

Surprisingly, her source came through. “I can get you a meeting.”

“Why now?” The timing seemed suspect; why now, just when she was about to give up? How had he known?

Her contact, surprisingly, answered that, too. “He wouldn’t talk to you before, would have shut you down, hard. But things have changed. If you can convince him you’re useful to them.” A pause, and then, in a thoughtful voice that made her believe him, “I really think you two should talk. And soon.”

Chang agreed to let him arrange it—as if she was going to argue?—and hung up the phone. Was it more of his game? Or was the situation, as he suggested, really reaching a point where the contact—one of these alleged supernaturals—might welcome a Federal ally?

Suddenly recalling the Old Lady’s summons, Chang swore, then grabbed a thick file out of the in-box perched precariously on the edge of the desk and headed out the door, forgetting to turn off either the desk or overhead lights before heading upstairs. Despite her coworker’s jokes, she wasn’t obsessed enough to forget to handle the current caseload before going off on a wild-goose chase, no matter how interesting the goose might look.

six

Given her druthers, Wren Valere would prefer to spend her Saturday morning lazing around on the sofa with hot, quality coffee and fresh bagels, a New York Times, and absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to go except maybe the gym, if she felt like being good and dutiful.

Wren Valere did not want to spend her morning getting dressed up and going across the river to New Jersey. Wren rarely wanted to go to Jersey, except to meet with her mother, who still lived there in the town Wren had grown up in, although not—thanks to Wren’s urgings—in the same crappy place Wren had grown up in. One of the benefits of being reasonably successful was that she had convinced her mother to move to a much nicer condo several years before.

“Over there. That building.” She pointed, and they stepped off the curb in almost perfect physical accord.

Given her druthers, Wren would definitely never have spent her morning getting dressed up and going anywhere near a Tri-Com meeting, in Jersey or anywhere else for that matter. But Sergei had suggested it, reluctantly bringing up the possibility during the postjob rundown that recent events were something that the Tri-Com should know about. Despite her initial, immediate, rather strong response, he was right. Damn it.

No, she absolutely did not want to be walking across the street, heading toward the second-to-last-people in the world she ever wanted to talk to again. But she would do it. Because she had stuff that needed dealing with, and that’s what the Tri-Com was all about—taking care of loose ends and undealt-with problems.

Despite a long history of not playing well with each other, the humans and Fatae of the Cosa Nostradamus in the New York area had finally gotten their act together during the recent Troubles. Out of that had come the Truce Board, a joint program of street guards and organized information-sharing, a way to protect themselves from the Silence-funded human vigilantes who wanted them out of the city—on cold slabs, if possible.

The vigilantes had lost. So had Wren. Lost friends, lost faith, lost her way…and then gotten it all back, if shattered into a pile of bits and pieces. When the dust and blood had been cleared away, all she had wanted was to enjoy life again, work and love and figure out how all the pieces fit back together. She knew everything was stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, but she didn’t know how well those stitches would hold, if she put too much weight on them. She didn’t want to find out the hard way, either. So, walking delicate and not getting heavy in deed or thought, if she could help it. Not yet.

Meanwhile, the Truce Board had also collapsed in the messy, finger-pointing aftermath, and the re-cobbled-together remains dissolved soon after she’d Retrieved the Lost from the Silence’s distinctly unpaternal hold. But when life came back to what passed for normal, some of the lessons they learned in the process sank in, and enough lonejacks remembered the benefits of hanging together to try and keep those lessons alive.

Tri-Com—the Trilaterial Communications Group—was the result, created to facilitate the flow of communications between the Fatae breeds, the human Talent, and the human Null community. Direct quote. A neat trick, that, considering that most Nulls didn’t know that either the Fatae or Talent existed. But considering the rather high-profile and public—and messy—events during the Troubles, enough people who did know had started to get nervous. “Head small problems off now, and we have fewer nasty problems later,” Bart, one of the leaders of the Truce Board had said, when he told her what they were planning, and he was entirely correct. After Burning Bridge, the entire Cosa had nothing but distrust for any and all Nulls, even ones they had known for years, even members of their own flesh-and-blood families. Even Sergei, who had done more for them than most.

That might have become a fatal rift, doing the work of the Silence after the fact—except that during the last of the Trouble, the night now just referred to as Blackout, Nulls had gathered to protect the Talent within their ranks, most notably the firefighters at the Plank Street station. The smoke-eaters there had not only defended their Talent coworker, they had become a rallying point for the counterstrike, giving everything they had—and it was considerable—to help save the day. Or, in that particular case, the night. Bringing outsiders in had been a risk, but one she approved of—so long as they were careful about who they brought in. So far, brains prevailed, and rather than politicians, the Nulls chosen were taken from the working levels of the city—firefighters, sanitation workers, social workers. People who would actually be on the front lines, if anything happened again.

Wren herself had come out with a particular fondness for New York City’s Bravest, as it was one of their trucks that had gotten Sergei and P.B. to her in time to keep her alive when the Silence and overrush combined to take her down. That fondness didn’t mean she wanted to get involved again, though, no matter how good an idea this new oversight board or whatever was. She had paid her dues, damn it. So when Bart came to her with his new idea earlier that year, Wren had wished them Godspeed, and beat feet out of the room before they could “suggest” that she take part in the new organization.

They had respected her wishes; not once since then had they called, officially. The fact that she hadn’t consulted or even considered any of the major players when she went after the Silence probably had a lot to do with that; some noses were still out of joint at being ignored. Unofficially, Bart sometimes called to see if she wanted to meet for coffee, and Wren had gone, a time or two. They talked about books and movies, bitched about New York City politics and the weather, and never once, not once, talked shop, or about any of the people they had lost in those days.

She would have been very happy to keep it that way. Unfortunately, that little walk in the park yesterday—and the discussion she and Sergei had about the job—now drove her, oh so reluctantly, to make a report. In person, because that was how lonejacks did things. You looked people in the eye, and lied to their faces.

“Stop shaking. They’re not going to rope you into anything.”

That reassurance would have been more reassuring if Sergei had sounded as if he believed it. They both had very clear memories of how they both had gotten roped into things before, by some of the same people. Things that had almost gotten them both killed.

“Go in, give report, get out.” Wren shifted, thankful that at least the Tri-Com didn’t have any kind of dress code. Bad enough she had to get dressed, hell if she had to actually wear a skirt and heels, as you did to get in the front door of the much more formal—and tight-assed—Council. Jeans and a dark brown pullover sweater, and clunky hiking boots that made comfortable, clunky noises on the hardwood floor made her feel slightly better about the whole deal.

What made her feel even better than that was the fact that, despite the clunky boots and her own not inconsiderable notoriety within some circles, people in the building were saying hello to Sergei and ignoring her—almost as though they couldn’t see her standing right there.

Which, in point of magic, they couldn’t. She grinned, feeling the current hum quietly under her skin, making her slide from people’s sight without any conscious effort. After a lifetime of walking in shadows, it had made her deeply uneasy when suddenly she had been front and center and being noticed during the Troubles. This was better. This was much, much better.

So too was the hand Sergei had slipped into her own as they entered the building, palm to palm, fingers twined together. His hand was firm without being hard, calloused but not rough, dry and warm; the hand of a man who could turn that hand to just about anything he needed to do.

The hand of a man who was there, totally and without hesitation.

They’d been through rough times, the past few years: moving from business partners to lovers, with the added complications of divided loyalties and a war coming between them. But that was in the past. They’d survived, in all the ways that mattered. The only thing they still had to deal with was Sergei’s kink about current-touch during sex.

It was her fault. She knew that, even if he was in denial. She had started grounding in him as an emergency measure, during some jobs that had gotten a little squirrelly and she’d pulled too much current, and neither of them had thought much of it. They had discovered, purely by chance, that it enhanced the sexual experience for him, when she let some of her current ground in him during orgasm, as well. In another Talent, that wouldn’t have been a problem. But Sergei was a Null, which meant that the current was doing damage to his internal organs.

The thing was, it turned out not to be just a kink. It was an addiction for him, that pain-pleasure thing. Thankfully, it seemed to start and stop with her, and specifically during sex. She didn’t have to worry about him being out alone among other Talent, or being on a job with her. But it was putting a serious damper on the physical side of their relationship, and that meant that the emotional side was hurting, too.

He couldn’t stop asking, and she couldn’t always resist. But not having sex wasn’t a solution either of them was happy about.

Still. He was here. Holding her hand. It was sappy enough to make you sick.

She gave his fingers a squeeze, and then reached out with her other hand to push open the door to the conference room.

The Tri-Com headquarters was actually a surprisingly relaxing place; Sergei was impressed. Unlike his former employers, the late, unlamented Silence, the Tri-Com had no budget at all to speak of, and was renting the first floor of an undistinguished office building across the river in Jersey City on a middling-to-respectable block. The space was filled with basic metal and pressboard office furniture that could have come from any rent-a-desk store. Despite that, the feel of the office itself was homey and welcoming. Once you got past the generic lobby, the walls were painted a golden cream, the lights set to daylight-neutral, and there were huge potted plants in every alcove, leaves swaying gently under the air vents.

The receptionist checked their names against a printed sheet of paper, and sent them on to where, she informed them, “The pooh-bahs were waiting.”

“Pooh-bahs?” Sergei mouthed, looking at his partner, who merely shrugged.

When they reached their destination at the end of the hallway, the expected conference room decor had been replaced by a much more domestic look, complete with sofas instead of a traditional table and chairs, and a small water feature that filled the background with gentle, soothing noises.

Someone had paid attention to the details.

Part of him was immediately alert and suspicious, looking for the hook. The other part felt the incipient stress headache fade away, and was grateful.

This was not an enemy. This was not an interrogation. There was no danger here, except what might—and might not—come out of what Wren had to report, and that danger was not to them. He hoped.

Bart was there to meet them, along with Rorani, a grizzled otter of a Talent named Eddie whom Sergei vaguely remembered meeting at some point, and a tall black woman he didn’t recognize, who was introduced merely as Jane. Rorani turned from the window and smiled at Wren and Sergei both, the smile reflecting in her bark-brown eyes and the movements of her willowy body. It was, he realized, good to see the dryad again, like discovering a favorite aunt would be at a family gathering you were dreading. It might still be bad, but you had someone you could trust to keep calm and listen instead of just reacting.

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