burning bridges
laura anne gilman

www.LUNA-Books.com

For James: Even now

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Chapter twenty-one

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter twenty-three

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The IM Brigade:

Arwen Rosenberg

Tom Powers

Sarah (Bear) Wishnevsky

Kathy Kimbriel

Nea Dodds

Jules Lee

“A safe place for all the pieces that scattered/

learn to pretend there’s more than love that matters.”

—“Love will come to you”

Indigo Girls

one

January 23rd 6:25pm

Fresh snow could make even the dingiest, most urban part of Manhattan into a magical place. The colors and noises all faded away, the city’s usual frenetic pace slowing to a more studied waltz of snow falling, white against the bare black limbs of trees and outlines of buildings. Drifts pushed up against maildrop boxes, covered fire hydrants, and shut down traffic except for the unstoppable city buses and madman-driven taxi cabs zipping through the night.

It might have been lovely, but Wren Valere wasn’t paying attention to the scenery. She was a professional working her craft. Or trying to, anyway. Two new high-end locks had hit the market, supposedly proof against the “bump-and-enter” method, and she wanted to make sure she understood how they worked before she actually encountered one in the field, when time might be against her. In her particular profession, you didn’t get many second chances, and Wren was pretty sure the past twelve months had used up all the ones she was going to get in a lifetime.

Sometimes, honestly, she didn’t know what got into her. For a mind-her-own-business Retriever, she’d spent a hell of a lot of time muddling around in things she should have left alone. Curses and politics and meetings, for God’s sake.

Never mind that she’d done it to save her own skin, after the Mage Council tried to use her and her partner, Sergei; never mind that she’d done it to help out her friends among the fatae, the nonhuman members of the Cosa Nostradamus. All of that might have made what happened inevitable, but none of it made it smart.

“Hey, Valere.” The voice came from the other side of the room, about three feet to the right and a foot down. And speaking of fatae….

Wren Valere didn’t sigh, but she wanted to.

Retrieval wasn’t easy. She had studied her craft, learned from masters, and kept up-to-date on all the most recent developments, not only in her own field, but anything that might come in handy. In addition to mastering the current-magic that flowed from within her, she had trained her body, as well; toning and strengthening her muscles, increasing her lung capacity, maintaining her flexibility. She had forced mind and body into partnership, more than once spending hours waiting in a cramped, close situation, anticipating the perfect moment to move on a job. She knew all about patience. About focus. About dedication.

And that focus and dedication was being destroyed, not by a stubborn client, or impossible mark, or even the weight of the snow outside and what was happening in the city beyond, but by her companion.

She didn’t bother looking in the direction of the voice, not wanting to encourage him.

“Valere,” the voice said again. “What does this do?”

She looked, then, briefly. “Opens locks.”

The room’s other occupant—and the subject of her irritation—put the tool back down on the small table next to him and picked up another. “And this?”

She reached for patience, found it. “Opens a different kind of lock.”

“And this one?”

Patience threw up its hands in disgust and fled the room. “It gets the gunk out from between my teeth. Damn it, P.B., will you please leave my kit alone? Those extremely delicate tools you’re paw-handling cost me a fortune, and half of them are custom-made.” She reached up from her cross-legged position on the floor, and snagged the instrument in question out of P.B.’s paws. A thin ceramic shape with a non-reflective black coating, it actually did look like something that might be found in a very trendy Goth’s toothbrush holder, except that the fiberglass pick at the end was attuned to more delicate vibrations than enamel generally gave off.

“Sheesh. Someone’s snappy.” The short, white-furred demon settled on the padded bench under the room’s single window and stared at her with his dark, dried-bloodred eyes. He wandered over to the corkboard that hung above her desk and tapped one curved black claw on a color pencil sketch tacked there. “This the bansidhe-horsie you been chasing? How long you been working that case?”

“Five years.” She refused to look up from her notes, hoping against hope he would finally take the hint and go elsewhere.

P.B. snorted, a wet, vaguely disgusting noise his flattened snout of a nose seemed designed to make. “That’s dedication. You get paid for any of that time?”

“Five years ago, yeah,” It wasn’t always about money. A lot of the time, it was about reputation. The Wren never gave up. Never left a job unfinished. No matter what.

Okay, maybe some of it was about money. Her mother had spent most of her life worrying about money: how much, never enough. Having money-savvy Sergei Didier become her manager when she was a teenager had given Wren the opportunity—and the education—she needed to change that. Over the years, her reputation—and her fees—had grown. If she was careful, and kept working, her savings would be enough to buy her apartment when it finally—inevitably—went co-op. More, Wren was now in the position of being able to have ego spur her to do things, rather than need.

Financial need, anyway.

The demon and the human were occupying the spare bedroom/library of Wren’s East Village apartment, surrounded by three stacks of books, a scattering of papers, and the remains of two pizzas. The air was heavy with the scent of pepperoni, cheese, and a dry heat coming up through the building’s ancient radiators, making her sinuses itch.

Ego had its own need in it, too. The bansidhe—Old Sally—was the one job Wren hadn’t been able to close. Yet. Her clients—descendants of the original owner—had, she suspected, long since written off their initial deposit, but she couldn’t let go.

No, the whereabouts of one taxidermied warhorse, no matter that it was a portent of doom, didn’t really matter a damn to her. But professional pride was involved. With her last dying breath, if need be, she was going to bring that damn sawdust-stuffed equine doomsayer back in. Someday. When everything else got settled.

The thought made her laugh, bitterly. The Cosa was in the middle of a battle for survival against enemies it hadn’t been able to identify, who were determined to wipe them out of the city. Her partner’s former employers had screwed them over and left them to hang. The Mage Council was playing their usual we-know-nothing, did-nothing game with the rest of the Cosa. All in all, “settled” wasn’t something Wren expected to see anytime soon.

Although these past few weeks of the new year had been oddly if pleasantly calm: nobody had set a psi-bomb off anywhere near her; nobody had tried to bribe, threaten, hijack or otherwise annoy her or any of her friends; Sergei was off on a legitimate business trip for his gallery; and she was actually catching up on her filing, bill-paying, and her exercise routine. The entire city seemed to have come to a pause.

Hell, the entire city had come to a pause, thanks to the weather.

“It’s still snowing.” P.B. had given up staring at her, now looking out the window, one white-furred, black-clawed paw pushing aside the dark green drape. His short muzzle, which—along with the plush white fur and rounded bear-like ears—had been the cause of his nickname of “Polar Bear,” pressed up against the glass, his breath causing the window to fog over.

“It’s been snowing for the past seven hours,” Wren said as patiently as she could manage. “This isn’t a news flash.” After two months of winter, snow of any sort wasn’t news.

The constant curtain of white was making her stir-crazy, too, but she could live with it. Without the snow, Wren had no confidence that the agreement she helped broker—that the Eastern Mage Council and tristate lonejacks would sit down and shut up and play nice together, at least while they had murdering bigots out for their blood—would have held together longer than a week, much less the month-and-counting.

It helped that attacks by those bigots who had been trying to “cleanse” Manhattan of anything supernatural had all but stopped. She didn’t think they were gone, though. The threat of the Cosa finally working together, in however limited a fashion, wasn’t enough to work that miracle, no matter what some of her fellow members might want to believe. No, it was far more likely that frostbite was a hell of a deterrent—as was the fact that their prospective victims were wisely staying inside, where it was warm.

No matter. She’d take whatever reason, if it gave them a breather.

P.B. turned away from the window and hopped down off the bench, kicking the pizza box with one clawed foot as he moved. “Hey. There’s still a slice left.”

“Yours.”

“I’m full,” he said, by his voice, borderline perturbed by that admission.

“You’re full?” That got her to look up. She stood, creaking unpleasantly in the knees, and went over to look out the window, as well. “The Stomach that Digested Manhattan is full? Damn. There’s the fourth horseman, riding past.”

“Oh, shut up,” he snarled, uncharacteristically. “I wanted kung pao chicken, remember? But you didn’t want to order Chinese. For the first time ever, speaking of the end of the world.”

Wren didn’t snarl back at him, but only because she could feel current coil in her core, the power looking for an excuse to get funky. Control. She needed to maintain control. P.B. knew why she didn’t want Chinese food. Or he should know, anyway. With Chinese food came Chinese fortune cookies. Fortune cookies, in this city, had an unpleasant tendency to be written by actual Seers. Sometimes, not knowing what was about to fall on your head was a blessing.

Wren counted backward from ten in English, then up again in Russian, the only thing she knew in that language except for a few useful swear words. Stay calm, Valere. He was cranky. She was cranky. Stir-crazy didn’t look good on either one of them.

This was the third day of snow this week, snowing hard since dawn the day before, and P.B. had been bunking with her for two days of it. She would have told him to go home, but Sergei had been caught out of town when the airports shut down, and she had been glad enough for the company at that point to tell the demon that he could stay as long as he liked.

Apparently, he liked overnight.

Besides. She had no idea what P.B’s home was actually like, much less if it was currently livable. The law said landlords had to provide heat when it dropped below a certain temperature, but the demon was unlikely to call the tenant complaint hotline, much less appeal to a disciplinary board.

“We need to get out,” she said. “Do something.” Something other than eat and prod unruly paperwork, anyway. She wasn’t able to focus properly on the lock schematics, so long as P.B. was restless.

“As you just pointed out, it’s been snowing all day. There’s, like, a foot of snow out there. This, in case you missed it, is a problem for me.”

Wren turned and looked at the demon, all four feet of him standing upright and reaching. The vision of him lost in a snowbank, only the black tips of his claws and the black tip of his nose visible, made her laugh for the first time in days. She didn’t think he would appreciate her sharing the image, though.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said again. “Come on.”

It only took a few minutes for Wren to lace up her boots, pull on a sweater, and grab her heaviest coat out of the closet. The cold air was like a slap against her face, after the dry heat of her apartment, and she stuck out her tongue to catch a snowflake, just because she could.

P.B. promptly went out and measured himself against the nearest plowed-in snowbank, coming out about six inches the victor.

Her street hadn’t been plowed in hours, and the sidewalks were impassible. They trudged through ankle-deep snow in the middle of the street, watching their breath crystallize in the night air.

Most of the population was safe indoors, watching out windows, catching updates on the television, or determinedly pretending that this latest storm Wasn’t Happening. But a few equally snow-loving souls were out and about: Wren saw a couple of teenagers building a scraggly looking snowman wearing a Yankees cap; a young gay couple walking slowly glove in glove; and at least three groups of kids, dashing about madly as though they had never seen snow before.

Maybe they hadn’t, not on this scale. The Winter of Snows was a long time ago now, for all that she remembered it vividly, and the past few winters had been pretty dry.

Her brow furrowed under the wool watch cap as she thought about that. Was there anything potentially worrisome about that, other than from a drought perspective? No, after the heat wave of the summer past, it would make sense they’d be due for another extreme winter. No need to assume anything more sinister—or supernatural—than that.

Anyway, other than the occasional thunderstorming, lonejacks and Council both knew better than to mess with the weather. Mother Nature was a bigger badass than any ten Talents, and less predictable than your average blissed-out, neurotic, brain-fried wizzart.

Spring would come. Eventually. In the meantime, she should just be thankful for the peace and quiet the storms were bringing to a city that badly needed it. Having to layer blankets at night was a decent trade, for that.

All right, the rest of the city, unaware of what was going on, might not know that they needed it, but she did. Wren had been starting to feel worn decidedly thin by all the new demands on her: the endless Negotiating and Line-walking and Behaving when all she wanted to do was kick everyone out and lock the door behind them.

She was not good at playing with others. Not at all. In fact—

“Hey, Valere!” P.B. called.

Wren turned in the direction of his voice, and got a faceful of cold white powder smack on the left side of her face.

“Argh!” Tears came to her eyes, but she was grinning, ear to ear. Wiping away the stinging cold snow, she shot back, “You’re dead meat, you polar bear wannabe!”

Bending down to scoop the snow into her fist, she whispered a soft incantation she had memorized as a kid, to melt the snow just enough for it to pack easily. But before she could do more than sight on the spot right between the demon’s black-lashed eyes, his wide mouth grinning at her from over a snowbank almost as tall as he was, the soft shushing noise of falling snow was overridden by a deep, jagged scream.

“What the hell?” P.B. yelled, clapping furry paws over his rounded ears as though that would do anything to stop the sound.

Wren staggered and slipped in the snow, unable to mimic P.B.’s actions as the wave of current associated with that scream slapped into her like a windstorm, almost knocking her over. “Over there,” she managed, forcing herself back up and forward. “It came from over there!”

They moved as quickly as they could through the snow, but by the time they got there, it was too late.

“Oh, damn.” It was less a curse than a brimstone-fueled prayer, coming from her companion’s mouth. He rubbed his palms against his fur in a nervous reaction, wanting to look away but held by the gruesome display.

Wren had seen an angeli die before, left to bleed out in a back alley after being beaten and abused by human bigots. It wasn’t a sight you forgot, one of the angeli brought low.

This was ten, a hundred times worse.

“Jesus wept for mercy,” she said softly, feeling a long-gone impulse to cross herself.

“Much as I hate them, individually and as a tribe,” P.B. muttered, then said again: “Damn.”

Angeli were the oldest of the winged fatae, the nonhumans. Despite being part of the Cosa Nostradamus for almost two decades, Wren had never seen one with its wings completely displayed. The great feathered muscles of this angeli stretched out almost seven feet tip to tip, near as she could estimate. It was difficult to tell for certain, though, since the angel was hung upside down, its feet tied together with rope and strung from a lamppost in front of a tall, nondescript office building. Its front had been cut open, messily, from groin to chest: only an empty cavity remained, slowly gathering snowfall.

Blood dripped from a slash in the neck, falling to the snow-covered sidewalk, staining the white a deep crimson black.

“It’s started again,” Wren said.

So much for the storms keeping people safe.

two

December, one month earlier

Wren Valere was spitting mad. Literally. She rinsed her mouth out again and spat into the sink, watching the red foam mix with the green of the mouthwash into a truly disgusting mess before being washed down the drain. The taste of mud and blood remained. Her arms ached, her leg muscles still burned, and she could feel the adrenaline still running in her body like a drug, despite having been home, safe, for twenty minutes and more.

“I hate my job, some days.”

She was speaking to her reflection only, and it didn’t even bother to look unimpressed.

Her partner was down the hall in the office, actually one of the three tiny shoe-box bedrooms in her apartment, and so he didn’t hear her words. She rinsed again, and, this time, satisfied that there was more mouthwash-green than bloodred, reached for a towel to clean her face off, and went down to bitch to him in person.

He was sitting at her desk, a white cardboard box the size of a small cake in front of him, his cell phone pressed to his ear. Sergei was taller than she was by almost a foot, and he looked oddly scrunched in her chair. His long legs were stretched in front of him, resting on an old, beat-up leather hassock under the desk. Middle age was starting to show in the strands of silver in his hair, and the lines on his face—not to mention the slight thickening of his waist—but he was, still and all, an impressively elegant figure, and a pleasure to watch.

He saw her standing in the doorway and held up a hand to keep her from coming in. She stopped and waited, not at all put out to be barred from her own office. Being a Talent—witch, mage, magic-user, in more superstitious times—meant that electronic objects often had total meltdowns in her presence, especially when she wasn’t in complete control of herself.

She was pretty well locked down right now, but that hadn’t been the case when she came home half an hour ago, dripping with the now-washed-off mud, blood, and hellhound feces. Wise, for her partner to be cautious. He’d already gone though half a dozen cell phones because of her, not to mention three PDAs, to the point where he claimed it would be cheaper to hire a scribe to follow him around everywhere with a quill and paper.

“Yes. I understand,” he was saying into the phone. “Excellent. Much appreciated.”

Wren snorted, but softly. Sergei had a way of sounding urbanely pleasant even when he was ripping someone a new one. When he turned the charm on, men and women both had been known to slide out of their pants before they knew what was going on. Only she could see the way his face was still a little gray, his hand still a little shaky. He hadn’t quite recovered from seeing her walk in the front door, that no-doubt lovely snapshot the instant before she dropped the white box in his hands and went into the bathroom to scrape the gunk off her skin and brush her teeth. It wasn’t a visual she had wanted, either.

Her partner was getting slammed with, she suspected, a combination of fear—for her safety—and anger—at her, at the client for not warning them, at the universe in general—mixed with just a dash of envy. As he said as she came in, with only a little bit of irony, she always got to have all the fun.

She would have gladly given him all the “fun” of this job, if he really wanted it. She’d stay home and work the clients—

All right, no. She wouldn’t. They’d tried that and it hadn’t gone all bad but it hadn’t gone all right, either.

“Yes, of course,” he continued, his voice smooth but his eyes hard. “And we will complete the transaction tomorrow morning, as planned. Pleasure doing business with you.”

He had been talking to the client, then. Good. She waited until he had turned off the phone and put it away before coming completely into the room. “Is he gonna cough up more money to cover the cost of my slicks?” Her specially treated bodysuit, the most overpriced piece of gear she owned, had been torn into shreds by hellhound claws. While she had been able to seal up the cuts in her own flesh so that, although not healed, they already looked several days old, Talent weren’t very good at mending fabrics.

And the way the cabbie had acted when she got in his car, she was pretty sure word had already spread never to pick up anyone matching her description, ever again. Not that anyone could remember what she looked like, from day to day—that was part of the innate talent that made her a natural Retriever.

Her partner/business manager smiled the way that flashed dollar signs in the ether, and his almost-too-sharp nose practically quivered…okay, that last bit was her imagination. But if his nose did twitch, it would have been twitching now. The smell of money was in the water. “Enough to get you that fabric upgrade you were lusting after, even.”

“Oh, good.” No wonder he sounded so pleased with himself. Still, it was no more than she deserved. “Easy job” her aunt ’Tunia. The Retrieval had been a bitch and a half, way beyond what they’d been promised, and she’d earned every penny of that bonus. “And, partner, before you throw something out, patting yourself on the back? That’s twice now I’ve run into targets with ’hounds. Unpleasant, and unfun. Let’s make that a standard check in the background file from now on, okay?”

Sergei didn’t flush easily, but he did now. Background checks were, mostly, his responsibility, and her getting almost torn to bits by the massive, nasty-tempered hellhounds was not something either of them thought of with pleasure. At least this time there had only been one of the bruisers. Last time, she’d faced off against an entire pack, and she never ever wanted to even think about that again.

“Right. Sorry.” His pale brown eyes looked honestly remorseful, but he was a salesman with a heart of granite when it came to business. And, as she’d be the first to point out in any other situation: she’d gotten the job done, hadn’t she?

Only this time, he wasn’t the one who had faced down a slavering beast almost twice her size, with less brain and more teeth, she thought sourly. Her mood clearly communicated itself, and he added:

“The client was impressed—a lesser Retriever wouldn’t have finished the job.”

She waved her hands as though swatting flies away, then reached up and started undoing the pins holding her hair in a tight knot. She had cut a good six inches off, so it barely reached her shoulders, and her old French braid didn’t do the job anymore. “Yeah, yeah, I’m the best, that’s what he was paying for. Flattery will get you everywhere, but I’m still angry.” She wasn’t, exactly. But she had Right on her side in this argument, and wasn’t about to let it go. “You can start making it up to me by taking me out to dinner.”

He coughed, then shook his head. “Some other time, fine. Right now, you need to go take a shower and get ready.”

“What?” She looked at him, her righteousness overtaken by befuddlement.

He pinched the bridge of his nose, and didn’t look at her. “It’s Tuesday. Tuesday night?”

Wren had to backtrack a bit, then shook her head, coming up blank. Her head was still filled with the specifics of the Retrieval. “What?”

He didn’t even bother sighing, a decade of experience with her having trained him to lower standards. “You ran late on this job. We’re supposed to be uptown at the Cosa meeting in—” he checked his watch “—ninety minutes.”

Wren blinked, then made an explosive gesture with both of her hands. That damned meeting!

“We can always cancel…”

Wren didn’t even bother responding to that as she ran back to the bathroom, shedding the remains of her once-sleek black working slicks in the hallway as she went. There had been a time when she’d had weeks off between gigs. Time to hit the gym, go shopping, hang out, sleep in…

“Get me something to wear!” she shouted back over her shoulder, even as she was turning the shower on. “And more coffee! I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”

She didn’t wait for the water to run to her usual heating standards before she was soaping up her hair, muttering to herself. This meeting had been scheduled two weeks ago; circled in red, for God’s sake, on the calendar in her office. And she still managed to forget about it, totally out of her head like it never existed. That wasn’t like her. Not at all.

This job had come on the heels of another one, a museum snatch-and-grab, and if she hadn’t been so twitchy from the dry spell of the summer, she would have had Sergei turn it down. Her preference was to take downtime between jobs, recover and rest. But being blacklisted by the Mage Council last year had made her aware of how fine the line between “comfort” and “concern” was, financially. And in the crush of all that, she’d forgotten—clean-wiped it off her slate—that she had other obligations.

Stupid meeting. Stupid, essential meeting.

She heard the door open and close, the steam in the bathroom cooling slightly. The click of ceramic on tile was Sergei placing the mug of coffee on the counter; the swish of fabric was him taking the towel off the towel bar, and the silence that followed was him standing there, towel in hand, waiting for her to finish up and get out.

She tilted her head back into the hot water one last time, even though the soap was totally rinsed by now, and let her skin soak up a little more warmth before reaching down to turn off the flow.

“Dry first, then coffee,” Sergei said, his hand reaching around the shower curtain to give her the towel.

She took it, not even bothering to growl. So long as the coffee was waiting for her, she’d be okay.

Truth was, she’d wanted to forget about this other obligation. She’d wanted it to not exist. She had wanted the entire scenario—Mage Council, her fellow lonejacks, the fatae, hate groups, political backstabbing, murders and suspected murders—to all disappear into a bad dream, so that she was just Wren Valere, thief-for-hire and girl-about-town. She had wanted time to actually sit down and figure out where her relationship with her partner was going, now that they’d added sex to the list of options. She’d wanted time to sit at a coffee shop, drink way too much café americano, and gossip about nothing more important or dangerous than rent or fare increases or what fatae breed was pissing off what other fatae breed this week.

What she wanted, and what she was getting these days, had a really annoying gap between them. There had to be somewhere to lodge a complaint….

“Valere.” Sergei didn’t quite tap his watch, but the implication was clear in his voice. Ninety minutes included travel time from her apartment in the Village up to the meeting site in midtown, and with their luck, every minute she lingered was another minute the trains would probably be delayed.

“Yeah, yeah.” She wrapped the towel around her and went into the bedroom to get dressed.

The trains behaved, for once, and they actually made it to the designated meeting place before anyone else except Michaela. The lonejack representative had picked the short straw and had to attend this meeting, while the other three were off doing God knew what. Four representatives—three original and a replacement for the late, unlamented turncoat Stephanie—for the four sections of lonejack life in the Metro NY area: city-dwellers, NJ/NY/PA commuters, Connecticut, and the gypsy population, the lonejacks who didn’t have a fixed address. Wren had never realized that there were enough gypsies to warrant their own representative, before all of this, but the general disdain for authority that made a Talent become a lonejack seemed to extend to paying rent and taxes, too. Reportedly, there was a family that lived out of a huge-ass, stripped-down RV, using the rubber wheels as insulation from the kids’ occasionally misdirected current. Wren still wasn’t going to believe that until she saw it, but she didn’t doubt the probability of it, now.

Michaela was the gypsy’s representative, but today she spoke for the entire lonejack community. She was seated in a chair off in one corner, clearly meditating when they came in. Wren and Sergei took their place at the table without disturbing her.

Wren sat down gingerly in her chair, trying to determine if she could sit all the way back and still have her feet touch the floor. She couldn’t. As usual, she had the choice to either be comfortable, or feel like a ten-year-old swinging her legs under the table.

All right, so five-foot-nothing was short, even for women, but it annoyed her nonetheless. She wasn’t about to get on her hands and knees in order to see if the chair’s height could be adjusted, though. With her luck, she’d be halfway under the table the moment the others walked in, and that was no way to create a serious impression.

Instead she continued the discussion they had begun on the ride up from her apartment. “The real problem is there are too many civilians in the City.”

Sergei Didier leaned back in his own chair and raised one extremely well-manicured eyebrow in a move his partner had been trying to achieve for years. “And by civilians you mean…?”

“Humans. Non-Talents. All right, yeah, Nulls. Okay?” Wren tapped her fingers on the table in front of her in irritation. “Something’s going to blow, and it’s going to blow soon, and there are too many…God, what’s the term…?”

“Incidental casualties. Collateral.”

“Right.” Wren tried again to get comfortable, then gave up and pushed away from the table a little so that she could slump. It didn’t look professional, but it hurt her calves a lot less. She looked around the room—gray flannel wallpaper and subdued lighting—and then stared down at her booted toes, wondering if she shouldn’t have worn something dressier than slacks and a sweater. Even if the weather outside was threatening to turn ugly with more snow. No. Nowhere in any of the small print did it say that she had to wear a skirt. Or, God help her, a suit. Sergei had picked this out for her, and he was way more of a stickler for appropriate clothing, so she was okay. Or maybe he just knew they didn’t have time for a fight over pantyhose. Not that she actually owned any.

“Not to mention,” she went on a little bitterly, “several thousand fatae who, for whatever reason of stupidity have no idea what’s going on.”

“I thought the Quad was taking care of that?” he said, clearly taken aback by that intelligence. “Wasn’t that the entire idea, that they would pass word along, whatever was happening, whenever?”

Since her hair was, for once, actually coiled neatly at the back of her head and gelled into submission, she settled for slapping the table one last time, rather than running her fingers through her hair, then looked up at her companion. Sergei looked every inch the well-heeled businessperson: expensive white button-down shirt tucked into dark gray wool slacks, a just-ever-so-slightly-artsy tie knotted under his collar, and his hair trimmed back in a fashionable cut that had obviously been rumpled more than once by an exasperated hand raking through it, but still looked good. Clearly, his hair product was better than hers.

She snorted at Sergei’s comment. Now and again she forgot how little he knew about that side of her life. “What, you think humans have the lock on Don’t Know, Don’t Care? Half of the fatae are convinced it’s a human plot, anyway, and the Quad’s just a tool being used to herd them to their doom, etc. etc. grassy knoll, bleat bleat bleat.”

The Quad were the four fatae—nonhuman—representatives for the area, each with their own constituency to match the four lonejack leaders. Wags within the Cosa quickly started using “the Double-Quad” when referring to both sets of leaders—and it was just as often “that damned Double-Quad.”

Wren still marveled not only that the fatae had managed to elect leaders without too much obvious politicking among the hundreds of breeds, but that in the months since, nobody had—to the best of her knowledge—tried to change horses midstream. They were trusting their chosen leaders.

Trust. What a simple word, Wren thought, not for the first time. What a deceptively simple, shrapnel-laden word it was. And how little of it there was to go around, even on a good day.

There hadn’t been many good days in Manhattan, lately.

In the past year, factions had formed, gotten paranoid, and turned against each other; all fueled, as far as anyone could tell, by the double-edged sword of antifatae thugs killing anything even vaguely nonhuman, and the Mage Council trying to strong-arm lonejacks, unaffiliates, into joining their lockstep union. It had all gotten too bloody to allow. Hence, the Quad, and the Double-Quad. And hence, this meeting, where all sides were going to put cards on table, eggs in basket, pick your cliché.

“Okay, good point,” he allowed. “So what do we do about it?”

Wren slumped even further. “I haven’t a goddamned clue. All depends on what happens here.”

“Here” was a rented conference room, complete with a huge fake mahogany table, a whiteboard, pads of paper and pens, and a sideboard filled with pastries and large urns of coffee. All the teleconferencing materials typical to such rooms had been removed prior to the meeting time. Wren approved whoever had thought of that, and then wondered uneasily if that was supposed to have been her job. Nobody had ever been able to tell her exactly what she was supposed to be doing as the so-called lonejack advisor, other than “observing and advising” the lonejack leaders.

They had wanted her to be one of the leaders, back when this all started. Only the fact that she had become a Retriever, partially because people consistently and completely overlooked her, had saved her from that fate: tough to follow a leader nobody could remember seeing!

She had never been so damn grateful for that particular quirk of Talent and genetics before.

Michaela finished her meditation, and quietly moved her chair back to the table, looking over last-minute notes and pretending not to hear anything Sergei and Wren were saying to each other. The lonejack representative was dressed in her usual posthippie, protogypsy style, only now the skirt and soft, flowing top were made of a thick, nubby, warm-looking material, rather than the silks and gauzes she favored in the summer, and her feet were encased in practical boots. She should have looked ridiculous, sitting in that corporate setting. Instead, she looked cool, confident, and powerful. All of which she was, and then some. Bart, Rick, and Susan, the other three members, were all strong Talent, and with other skills that made them the right choice to speak for their respective areas, but Michaela could outpower them, on sheer current.

She also kept her temper better than any of them, which was the true reason she was in the room today, and they weren’t. There was no such thing as a fair straw-pull among Talent.

“I mean it, Sergei,” Wren went on. “Things are way too tense right now. Everyone’s walking cross-eyed and pigeon-toed from trying to predict the next move.”

Manhattan was a huge city, even if it didn’t technically qualify as more than a borough. It was also a very small island, especially when filled with paranoid paranormals.

Sergei had nothing to say in response to her words, and so they sat in silence while his outrageously expensive gold watch ticked off another minute, then another, and the door to the conference room opened to allow two more humans to walk in.

“Ayexi. Jordan.” Wren rose to meet them. Sergei stayed seated until she kicked him in the shins, at which point he rose, but remained silent.

“Valere.” The dark-haired, middle-aged man named Jordan didn’t seem happy to see her, but the other, a slight, almost frail-looking man in his eighties, came forward with a delighted smile on his face. “My dear, my dear. Ah, you look so well. John would be so proud of you.”

“Neezer would kick my ass for getting conned into this,” Wren retorted, kissing both offered cheeks, European-style, and receiving the same in turn from the elderly Talent. “And you. Gone all Council. The shame!”

Ayexi had been her mentor John Ebeneezer’s mentor more than four decades earlier. Lines of mentoring were the closest thing Talents had to a family tree, and although she had not seen Ayexi since she was a teenager, and then only infrequently, the bonds remained strong.

“What can I say? The body grows old and weak. The health-care benefits begin to appeal.”

“They bought you, you mean.”

“And paid very well for the privilege, I assure you.” His gray eyes twinkled, and Wren shook her head.

It was impossible to be angry at Ayexi. He simply deflected negative energy, and returned only good humor. It was probably the only reason he was still alive, considering the trouble he used to get into. Neezer used to say that the mischief gene had clearly skipped a generation, as he—the middle generation—was so well-behaved.

Neezer was also the only one who had wizzed, who had been overwhelmed by his current and driven mad by it. Someday, when she actually had some downtime, she might do a little research into that fact. Or not.

“Ayexi, my partner, Sergei Didier.”

For all that Sergei had partnered with her for more than a decade now, he still didn’t know most of the major players, not even on their own team. Hell, being honest, Wren didn’t know most of them, either. Just the ones she had used, or had used her at some point.

Introductions made, the two men sized each other up and down, and she could practically see both of them file the other under “ally, for now.” About as much as anyone could hope for, these days.

The two Council members nodded with significantly less enthusiasm at the lonejack representative also seated at the table. Ayexi was there to support Jordan, the same way Wren was there to support Michaela. Sergei was there because nobody had said a Null couldn’t attend, and ever since the Council had accepted him as her proxy for a meeting during that damned Frants job, everyone pretty much took the two of them as one player. She wasn’t complaining: since she had gotten involved in Cosa politics, getting attacked by a slavering hellhound intent on protecting his master’s property seemed like small change, danger-wise. Sergei was a good man to have at her back. Or at her front…

She shoved those thoughts down as being totally inappropriate and distracting, but a faint smile twitched her lips upward, anyway.

“Who are we waiting for?” Jordan had taken a seat on the opposite side of the table, resting his hands palm flat on the table. His fingers matched the rest of him: squared-off and well-manicured. Ayexi, by contrast, was disorganization personified: his hair looked like current had run through it and his clothes as though he had just come from an assignation, with the tails of his shirt not quite tucked into gray wool slacks, and his leather shoes scuffed around the toes.

“The fatae representative. I don’t know who they are sending.” She had hopes, though. If only it weren’t winter, Rorani would be awake and the obvious choice. But in winter she was dormant, and even if they could coax her from her tree, the dryad would be too groggy to handle negotiations.

The door opened again, and a young female human held it open for the newcomer. “Good afternoon, gentlemen, mademoiselle,” the fatae entering said, nodding to them all inclusively.

Wren let out a sigh of relief. “Good afternoon, Beyl.”

There was a God, and he did listen to prayers. Wren took her seat next to Sergei, allowing Beyl’s assistant—a gray-skinned, flat-eared gnome—to clear a space for the griffin to crouch at the table.

Griffins were born negotiators—the breed was herd-based, so they thought in terms of group benefits, but they were also meat-eaters, so they had a predator’s instinct. And Beyl had led her herd for longer than Wren could remember, so she knew how to face down challenges.

Plus, her claws and hooked beak kept opponents wary and a little nervous. Making a Council member nervous was never a bad thing, in Wren’s book. Even if they were all supposed to be on the same side, right now. Or coming to the same side, which was what this meeting was all about.

Wren closed her eyes for a moment as the greetings and seatings went on, feeling a headache threatening. It was the kind her mother used to complain about on really bad days, the kind with the little man with a sledgehammer standing on the bridge of her nose.

Oh yes, she told the little man, this was going to be so very, very ugly. The Council had tried to intimidate lonejacks into Council-approved behavior, the fatae were skittish around all humans, and lonejacks never behaved well under stress, ever.

And you have nobody to blame but yourself for being stuck in the middle of it all. She could have walked away. She could have said no when the lonejacks had asked her—cornered her—to help represent them. She could have said no when the fatae asked her to bring the Talents to discussion. She absolutely should have said no when the Council started to make inclusionary noises.

She seemed incapable, these days, of saying no. Not to jobs, not to personal appeals, not to anything. She was going to have to have a word with herself about that at some point, when she had another one of those near-mythical spare moments.

Michaela went straight to the chase, while Beyl was still getting her tail set in the chair. “Thank you for agreeing to meet here today, gentles. Here’s the deal—we’ve been faced for almost a year now with the reality that there is a strong, scary group out there, going after supernaturals. We’ve been calling them vigilantes, after their own advertisement, but in truth they are nothing but bigots with baseball bats. And while they’re confining the bulk of their bloody activities to the fatae at this moment, the assault on the All-Moot last month is a strong indication that any member of the Cosa Nostradamus will be considered fair game to them.”

There were nods of agreement all around the table. Council members had given the All-Moot—the Cosa’s version of a town hall meeting—a pass, but even they knew what had happened; someone had given word to the vigilantes that there would be a gathering of fatae that night, and they hadn’t bothered to pull their blows when a human lonejack got in the way. Part of the reason the Council had come to the table now was a desire not to be blamed for that disaster by the rest of the Cosa. The other part had to do with more internal politics: the head of the Council was trying to protect her own ass in the wake of some less-than-stellar behavior on her part, and she couldn’t afford to have enemies on the outside of the Council, as well.

“In short,” Michaela went on, “if we don’t stop chewing on each other’s tails, they’re going to have us all by the throat. So it stops. Here. Now. At this table.”

A little blunt, but Wren couldn’t argue with the approach. If you’re going to hit them over the head with an ax, might as well get it over and done with in the first stroke, right?

Bad analogy—the little man with the sledgehammer took another whack, and she tried not to wince too obviously, for fear of being seen and misunderstood by others at the table.

“As the individuals most directly menaced by these humans,” Beyl said, her beak creating an oddly clipped, almost British colonial-sounding accent, “the fatae have come to the table willingly, looking to create an alliance which will—”

“Save your feathered posteriors.”

“Protect us all,” Beyl said, ignoring the Council snark. Ayexi looked as though he was kicking Jordan under the table, were he so ill-bred as to do such a thing.

“Indeed,” Michaela said, as though Jordan hadn’t spoken. “And we thank our cousins within the Cosa, both for their aid in recent days, during the All-Moot and the days since then, and for their assistance in years past.” A reminder to lonejacks and Council alike, that the fatae had been there for humans before in days of war and danger, here and in other continents, other times.

“The Council has officially gone on record as being dismayed and disgusted by the attacks on our fatae cousins,” Jordan said. “And we have agreed to call a cessation in recent developments, in light of this external threat.”

The general mental snort at that particular word-weaseling was audible to everyone, and Jordan went on quickly, as though to drown it out with his words. “However, we have yet to see any reason to believe that this is more than the actions of some confused, if hostile Nulls, acting against individuals they see as being dangerous.”

“The Omaa-nih are dangerous?” Beyl sounded as angry as Wren had ever heard the fatae. “Startling-looking, yes—” the four-legged ’nih had almost-but-not-quite-human faces, which tended to freak Nulls out, if and when they noticed “—but peaceable to a fault. They eat grain, do not use weapons, and yet three of them alone have been killed in the past year!”

“To us, no,” Jordan said, shaking his head in a manner that Wren supposed was meant to convey some kind of deep, paternal sadness and, well, didn’t. “To a Null who sees nothing other than—forgive me, honored representative—a speaking beast? Especially a Null who, for whatever reason, has let their sense of wonder lapse? Indeed, then dangerous an Omaa-nih is.”

Wren never wanted to agree with Jordan on anything, but the bastard was right. The Omaa-nih were the size and shape, mostly, of elk, and most humans didn’t want their reindeer to talk, no matter how popular Rudolph and the rest of Santa’s crew might be this time of year. Jordan was also missing—intentionally, she suspected—the point. She tapped her finger on the table, catching Michaela’s gaze.

“The vigilantes did not discriminate when they attacked the Moot,” Michaela said, picking up the current-whiff of suggestion Wren sent her. “Human Talents were harmed, and killed, as well. If they were not aware that the fatae had human connections before, they do now—and have shown no hesitation to attack.”

“A onetime event, in the confusion of battle…”

“Council member!” Beyl had the best mock-shocked voice Wren had ever heard, like a fourth grade schoolteacher. The Retriever stifled the totally inappropriate urge to giggle. “Are you defending these vigilantes?”

“Of course he is not,” Ayexi said, so smoothly Jordan didn’t even have a chance to get huffy at the accusation. “He is merely playing, dare I say it, devil’s advocate. We must be aware of all possible interpretations, in order to make the best countermoves in our defense.”

Ayexi was good. He was cool, and smooth, and on the surface you might think he was discussing china patterns, or the price of something he had no interest in buying. But Wren could see the faint twitch over his left brow, the one that meant he was sweating inside. The Council was taking this seriously. Good. It was their fat in the fire, too: you didn’t get a stamp on your forehead that said “council” when you joined; anyone gunning for Talents wouldn’t discriminate based on your internal allegiances. That much, Wren was pretty damn sure about. More, Madame Howe, the head of the Eastern Council, was pretty damn sure about it, too. Enough to cover all her bases, by sending her people to this table for parlay even after doing her damnedest to break the local lonejack community to the Council’s yoke. It might only be for appearance’s sake, but if Jordan and Ayexi were willing to take it seriously, they could maybe accomplish something despite the politics.

“No matter their reasons, by attacking indiscriminately, both human and fatae, these…vigilantes showed that they do not distinguish. They chose not to distinguish.” Beyl was definite on that.

“The associate of my enemy is my enemy,” Ayexi said.

“Exactly.” Beyl’s feathered head gave a decided nod of agreement.

Wren could feel Sergei wince, beside her, even though he didn’t move. The answer to that was not to be the associate of the enemy, an answer they couldn’t afford the Council to make.

So far, everyone was falling into their preconceived roles: the fatae calling for attack, the Council wanting to hold the status quo without too much risk, and the lonejacks wary of either position—and of making any decision at all. Time to shake things up a bit.

“There have been reports.” Michaela looked down at the material Wren had given her before the meeting started, all the details she and P.B. could recall, from all their meetings and discussions and overheard conversations over the past twelve months. “There have been reports of these…bigots taunting fatae. Calling them animals, yes…but also calling them on their use of magic.”

“Fatae do not use magic!”

Jordan sounded almost outraged at the thought, as though a fatae had dared snitch something of his own possession. But he was right. Fatae, for the most part, were magic, deep in their bones and sinews, but they didn’t use it. They weren’t designed to channel current the way Talents were. In their own way, they were as Null as…as Wren’s mother.

Okay, she amended that thought. Nobody is as Null as my mother.

“You’re missing the point,” Michaela said.

“You’re pushing the point. And I’m not entirely sure I buy into your argument.”

Beyl leaned into the table, a feather coming loose and floating, slowly, to the floor. Wren found her attention focusing on that, and had to bring herself back to the discussion at hand—and talon—with an effort.

“We are the Cosa Nostradamus. If that is to mean anything, it must mean something now. It must mean solidarity. It must mean accountability. It must mean that we can count on each other—for support—and for shared defense. In their eyes, we are all one, and worthy of disdain, fear, and violence. We must show them that we are also one in our response, and that response must be worthy of respect—and teach them to leave us alone.”

Beyl built a pretty good case for a counterattack against their enemy—except that she couldn’t, for certain, say where the attacks were coordinated from, assuming they had any single source at all. Any attack the Cosa made would be based on reactive information, not proactive. Wren wouldn’t have wanted to go on a Retrieval with such sketchy info, ignoring the fact that she already had, once.

And see where that landed you? Learn from it!

“We can’t afford that sort of attack.” Michaela was parroting what Wren had been beating into their heads from the beginning: that without something concrete and significant, any large-scale act of aggression would be met with even fiercer aggression and even more justification from their enemy. She had been talking about the Council at the time, but it was even more true here.

Although lonejacks were better at violence than they were at organization, as a rule.

“We can’t afford not to, either.” Ayexi looked surprised to be agreeing with the fatae—almost as surprised as Jordan looked, to hear his advisor taking the lead. He went on, undaunted. “You are correct, Michaela, Madame Griffin. If this threat is to all Talents—to all the Cosa—then we need to take action. Before it spreads beyond this city.”

Wren got it. From the exhalation of breath from her partner beside her, he figured it out at the same moment, as well. Michaela was a little slower, but she got there. Beyl’s feathered eyebrows rose in puzzlement. The fatae were clearly not as au courant—pun intended—on Talent politics as they should be.

The de facto leader of the New York City-area Council, KimAnn Howe, had just brokered a significant—and tradition-breaking—merger with the San Diego Mage Council, bringing their leader into a subordinate level to her own. It was a risky, distinctly ballsy move that, if it hadn’t been for the attacks, would have been the primary concern facing the lonejacks—had, in fact, been the primary concern just a few months earlier, when the Council was being twitchy while she made her moves.

If Madame Howe could not now prove to the local members of the Council—and the other Councils across the country—that she could control things in her own city, then she would lose the power amassed by that merger.

KimAnn Howe did not let go of power easily, if at all. Especially not after what she had gone through to get it.

“You are proposing…?”

“A truce. A…cessation of any probing for weaknesses, or maneuverings, or any kind of hostilities, overt or otherwise. On all sides.”

Wren, by sheer force of effort, didn’t roll her eyes in disgust. In other words, do nothing.

“Too passive. And entirely within your best interest, but doing nothing for the fatae. What can you give to us?” Beyl asked.

Jordan started to spread his hands, as though to say he was out of ideas, when a new voice piped up.

“What about reinstituting the patrols?” Beyl’s assistant, the until-now silent gnome, poked his head up over the tabletop and peered at them all, black eyes sparkling with interest. “They did the job proper, they did, back then.”

Wren almost fell off her chair. Oh, perfect! Damn it, as one of those former patrollers, she should have been the one to think of that! They’d done it twice, actually; once when the piskies decided to take their pranking to near-dangerous levels, and had to be sat on, and then again more recently, when there had been a series of attacks on the fatae—attacks that, in hindsight, were probably the first inroads of vigilantism, the early attempts of the so-called “pest exterminators” to clear the city of what they perceived as an infestation of nonhumans. So it had the value of precedent, wasn’t so proactive as to unnerve the Council, but gave the fatae something real to work with….

“It was only a short-term cure,” Michaela was saying, dubious. “A preventative…”

“A deterrent,” Beyl said, warming to the idea as though she’d been proposing it all along. And perhaps she had. Wren admired griffins in general and Beyl in particular for many reasons, and sneaky maneuverings was high on the list of why. “Earlier, we used volunteers, whatever was available. It was lonejacks, mainly, then. Here…we can recruit specifically, from all the Talent. Match partners together, Talent and fatae, to create an effective pairing, as your Wren Valere and the demon P.B. have created such an effective team on their own.”

Ouch. Zing. Yeah, they had clearly thought this out beforehand. But that didn’t make it any less a usable solution for being tricksy.

“A pairing that will scare the hell out of any would-be assailant?” Jordan sounded like he rather enjoyed that idea, as well.

“Long enough to give us a chance to trace their source. Find out who is funding them—and why. Who is behind all of this.”

Wren sat back in her chair, and reached for the diet soda she had placed on the floor next to her feet, popping it open with a hiss that earned her dirty looks from Jordan and the gnome. Now they were getting to the meat of the problem….

“Well. That was fun.”

“It was?”

“Zhenchenka. Hush.”

They were standing in the lobby of the building, pulling on gloves and wrapping scarves before going out into the wintry weather. It wasn’t snowing, but the wind was fierce, and the bare limbs of the saplings outside looked to be shivering. Sergei had bought her a pair of fleece-lined leather gloves when the first snap of cold weather hit, and while they were an almost decadent buttery lambskin, she was still breaking them down to a usable flexibility.

“I was useless in there,” she continued, flexing her fingers inside the leather. “I came up with nothing, contributed nothing…I might as well have stayed in the shadows, for all the good I did.”

“You were extremely useful in there.” Michaela was firm on that. “Both in the briefing you gave me beforehand and the advice you were able to give me ongoing, about our esteemed companions.”

True, Wren had been able to head off a few potential missteps, as Michaela had never worked with griffins before, and made the usual errors of thinking of them, however subconsciously, as smart animals instead of peers.

“And now you will be even more valuable. To us, and to the Cosa overall.”

Sergei’s managerial antenna perked up, and he looked at Michaela, his eyes squinting suspiciously at her too-innocent tone.

“How valuable?”

“Beyond price.”

“By which she means, beyond payment.” The two women grinned at each other, more a grimace of stress than real amusement, and then Wren sighed, resigned again to her fate. “All right, what are you about to sign me up for, now?”

“Keep the lines of communication open.”

“Huh?”

“Keep them talking to each other,” Michaela elaborated.

“Keep who what?”

“Don’t be dense, Valere.” Michaela pushed the door open and went outside, leaving the other two no choice but to follow her. Wren gasped a little as the cold air hit her face. You forgot, sitting in an overheated conference room, how cold cold actually was. “All three sides of the equation—lonejack, fatae, and Council. The idea of a truce, while we figure out what’s going on, is all well and good, but we need to also be able to figure things out. Which means communication. They’re going to need a push, all of them, to remember why it’s important to play nice. We need someone who can get close enough to make that push.”

“You can do that,” Sergei said, nodding. He took her arm, and then crooked his other so that Michaela could slide her hand under his elbow, which she did.

“Do what?” Wren felt like an idiot, but she had lost them at the last sharp turn in the conversation.

“Keep everyone talking,” Michaela repeated, as though speaking to a child. “You and the demon. You started that, created the first bridge, with your friendships among the Council, your familiarity with the fatae breeds. Now we need you to maintain it.” Her voice softened. “It’s what Lee—”

“Michaela. Don’t. Go. There.” She might be willing to be manipulated, in a good cause, if they really needed her, but she would not allow them to use Lee’s memory to do it. Not yet. Not ever.

Lee had died during a Retrieval gone wrong—not because of the Retrieval itself, but because a fatae got stupid, and Lee had to be a hero. His widow still refused to speak to Wren.

“Think about it,” Michaela said. It wasn’t a request. Wren didn’t dignify it with a response.

The three of them walked down the street to the subway station in silence, heads down against the wind. The Council members had been picked up by car service, of course. Ayexi had given a faint wave as he folded himself into the sedan, while the moment they left the conference room Jordan had acted as though the others had disappeared from sight. Typical. Ayexi was never going to survive in the Council, if he kept being friendly like that.

Beyl had been bundled into the back of a van in the loading bay, and her gnome companion had driven away, heading uptown, doubtless heading out of the city to wherever her herd was based for the winter.

Wren bit back a sigh. Michaela was right, damn her. This had started long before today. Before she attended her first Moot. Before she had gotten the first flyer advertising a “pest removal” company that was the vigilantes’ first cover for their activities, when they were soliciting and recruiting new members. Before P.B. and Lee had used her apartment as a meeting place, to get the fatae talking about what was going on, to get them to open up and trust someone outside their closed, clannish communities.

It had started the first day she had met her first fatae, and called him “cousin,” as Neezer had taught her. It had started the afternoon P.B. brought the first courier package to the then-newbie Retriever, and she merely handed him a napkin when he snitched a slice of pizza.

The fatae trusted P.B., despite the fact that demon were generally not among the most outgoing or social of the fatae breeds, and through him, they trusted her. The lonejack didn’t trust her, exactly, but the Troika, as Sergei called the leadership, was relying on her, and that was more weight on her shoulders; weight she didn’t want, didn’t need. And the Council…well, that was going to be the unknown they were solving for, wasn’t it? What reminders, what nudges would keep the Council at the table?

She knew Ayexi. She knew people on that side of the river. More, KimAnn and her Council flunkies knew her, Wren. Knew and maybe possibly a little bit respected her, by now. Listened to her, they’d proven that, as much as KimAnn listened to anything other than her ego.

Michaela got on the uptown 5 train. Wren and Sergei caught the downtown 6. The moment they were inside, and the doors closed behind them, Sergei wrapped his arms around her, pulling Wren into an awkward, but oddly comforting embrace, resting his chin on the top of her head. The hair that had escaped the pins holding the coil in place tickled against the back of her neck, under her scarf, and she was sweating in the stale air of the overheated, overcrowded subway, but she didn’t move.

“I don’t know if I can do this.” Her words were muffled against the wool of his overcoat, but he understood her.

“They hired you. Why?”

Damn his oh so logical, analytical habits…“They didn’t hire me, I volunteered. Because I’m a moron.”

He didn’t sigh, but he might as well have. “Work with me on this, Genevieve. They brought you on board to do the job because…why?”

“Because I’m the best.” Best Retriever, yeah. This wasn’t a Retrieval. It was…

“It’s the same.” Like he was reading her mind. Which he couldn’t. Except somehow he did. “It’s about seeing the details and creating a plan. About adapting to situations as they change. Playing the scenario as it evolves, bringing back—Retrieving—the information the Troika needs. You can do it. Just finish the job.”

His ever-repeated advice, in every situation. The magic mantra. Finish the job. The act of finishing the job proves it’s possible. So long as you’re focused on the job, the practical details of the job, you don’t have time to panic over the magnitude. The potential pitfalls. The ramifications.

She knew the logic behind the magic. Somehow, it wasn’t as reassuring as it used to be.

And he left something out of the equation. Payment. Everything costs. That was his mantra, as well, what he had taught her better than any community college business course. Value for value, preferably in their favor. And Wren couldn’t help wondering, as she snugged closer into his embrace, what the cost of all this would be, when the blood and dust all settled.

three

When Wren got to the landing of her fifth-floor walk-up apartment, the phone was ringing. Odds were it wasn’t Sergei, who had stopped at the bank on the corner to hit his ATM, sending her on ahead. Teller machines normally ignored all but the most overt current displays, but she was, as he indelicately pointed out, a bit tight-wound from the meeting, and likely to be twitchy with current. Better safe than sorry when her partner was down to a handful of singles in his wallet.

Wren never used ATMs, herself. It wasn’t about the risk, however minimal, of frying the machine; she just liked to have a face to go with the figures who had their fingers all over her money. Sergei, on the other hand, never used anything but, despite constantly griping to anyone who would listen about not being able to get anything smaller than a twenty-dollar bill. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t get to the bank during their normal hours—what was going to happen, the boss would yell at him for being late? But no, he was never willing to take the extra few minutes it took to go into the lobby and deal with a teller in person, during actual work hours.

Some days, she really didn’t understand her partner at all.

Locks undone and door opened, no rush, and the phone was still ringing. It was either someone who was very determined, or someone who knew a. that she didn’t have an answering machine and b. that she was home.

Or…

“Hello?”

Or it was her mother, a woman of determination, certitude, and the stubborn conviction that her daughter wouldn’t dare not pick up the phone if she was on the other line.

Her mother was, of course, completely right in that assumption.

Wren dropped her keys into the dish on the counter, and shoved her gloves into her coat pocket. “Hey Mom. How’s Seattle?”

Her mother had, at her request, gone on an extended vacation back in September, when things first got significantly ugly. Wren hadn’t been sure when things were going to break open, but she knew she wanted her totally magic-Null mother as far away from it as possible. It would have been unthinkable, previously, to consider someone going after a Null relative in order to injure a Talent…but there were so many other unthinkables suddenly being thought that Wren had figured better safe than sorry.

Some days Wren thought it would be better—certainly easier—if her mother moved out of the area entirely, to somewhere that the name “Valere” wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in any circles. Hell, some days she thought she should move….

Fortunately, her mother had found that trip so enjoyable that it had turned into a series of cross-country relative visitations, a new one every few weeks as Margot could get away from her job. The fact that it also made Margot into a moving—and therefore less appealing—target was something Wren wisely kept to herself.

In payment for that peace of mind, Wren was now getting the color commentary blow-by-blow by phone. Currently, it was cousin Jeanne’s turn for a Royal Visit, out in not-so-sunny Seattle.

“Uh-huh. Yeah?”

Wren shrugged out of her coat one arm at a time, transferring the phone from ear to ear as she did so. Measuring the distance to the closet against the length of the phone cord, she draped the coat on the counter, and dropped her bag and keys on top of it. Sergei would put everything away when he came upstairs.

“And the kitten?” she asked her mother, having reached the end of a recital on Jeanne’s present condition, which was fine, loving her new job, still not dating anyone new after dumping her most recent significant other.

The kitten was Jeanne’s son, Kit. He would be…Wren searched her memory, coming up blank. Ten? Eleven? There wasn’t all that much family on her mother’s side, and none that she knew of on her male genetic donor’s side, that she should have such a blank spot on that information.

Not that it mattered. Her mother, hopeless when it came to seeing or remembering anything odd or unpleasant in her daughter’s life, had excellent recall for things familial, and a willingness to share it at the drop of a hint. All Wren had to do was make interested noises until the older woman ran down.

Wren perched herself on one of the stools, and settled in, reaching across the counter for a pen and scratch paper to write down her thoughts about the morning’s meeting, while she listened.

Nothing like a little multitasking to keep your mind off how impossible her to-do list was. But hey, look on the bright side, she thought. At least you know the depth of the kimchi you’ve been thrown into, right?

“Isn’t that a little young?” she interrupted her mother. “No, I don’t remember what I was like at that age, sorry.”

1 get feedback from Beyl on meeting for Quad

2 talk up the idea of Patrols on the street, see who jumps. Esp. fatae.

3 …

Sergei came in through the door before she could think of a third thing. He heard her talking on the phone, obviously made an instant—and correct—evaluation of who was on the other end of the line, and waggled his fingers in greeting to her mother, with whom he had a rather strained, you’re-sleeping-with-my-daughter relationship.

When Wren nodded, not pausing in either her monosyllabic responses to her mother or her pencil-twirling, he put her bag and keys on the counter and hung her coat up alongside his in the closet, then disappeared down the hallway.

Either the bathroom, or her office, she guessed. Sergei had been away from the office all day, and while he was getting better at letting his assistant, that kiss-ass weasel Lowell, handle things, he still liked to have a hand on the spoon if things were actively cooking. Which was a terrible metaphor, but she was distracted, damn it.

“Wait a minute, he did what?” Wren put her pen down, to-do list half-made, and listened more carefully to her mother’s story. Family politics were as intricate as Cosa politics, but far more entertaining….

Down the hall, Sergei sat down at Wren’s computer and booted it up. Her voice carried down the hallway, and the sound of laughter lightened his own dark mood considerably.

There had been very little laughter in this apartment, lately. Too much tragedy, tension, trauma, and all sorts of words beginning with T. Very little laughter in their lives, overall, actually. Since…Since Lee died, probably. Before then, even when things were making them crazy, even when Wren was injured and he was losing his mind over keeping her safe, and they didn’t know when—or if—the next job would come in, there had still been laughter. Strained, sometimes; but laughter. When had it gone wrong?

Sergei knew when: the moment he had negotiated that deal with his former employers, abandoning ten years of hard-won independence on his part in order to make sure Wren was protected from the Council. And for what? The Silence had their own issues, and that agreement put him—and Wren—smack-dab in the middle of those issues, exactly where they couldn’t afford to be.

He had put them there; it was his responsibility to get them out. But it was as delicate a process as the original deal had been, and small steps that took forever. He didn’t tell Wren everything; she didn’t need to know. But she knew he wasn’t telling her everything, and that was adding to the tension between them.

He had begun to wonder if he’d imagined the flashing brightness of her smile, or the liquid sound of her giggle, it had been so long since he’d encountered either.

Then a peal of delighted laughter came down the hallway, and he smiled. No, he hadn’t imagined it.

The computer’s Talent-proof, safety-rigged-seven-ways-from-Sunday system finally powered up and he logged on, surfed to the gallery’s site and checked his e-mail, humming softly under his breath as he did so.

It wasn’t a lot, that one surge of laughter. It was barely anything.

To him, it was everything.

And he would do whatever it took to keep things that way.

To: a_felhim@shhhh.info

We need to settle this. Call me.

—S.

He hit Send, and waited.

Across and far uptown, there was considerably less humor. The building could have been deserted, for all the noise that filtered down into the lower levels, where a coded key was needed to call the elevator, and a simultaneous retinal scan and biometric scan were needed to choose a floor destination. The technology used was on par, or in some cases excelled anything the government had, mainly because this organization could afford to pay for it—and had no need to justify to anyone where the money went.

Two figures emerged from the elevator doors, walking with an unconscious unison of movement down the hallway, so much so that it was difficult to see who was mirroring whom. Both wore wool slacks, button-down shirts of lightly starched white cotton, and expensive shoes. An educated consumer might note that the younger man was more fashionably dressed, but the older man’s shoes were the more expensive, and better maintained.

A female figure with a dark blue lab coat over her street clothes moved past them in the other direction, barely acknowledging them with a preoccupied nod.

“Denise Vargha. One of our better people. She’s in charge of the seventh team.” The speaker—the younger man—was clearly aware that he wasn’t telling his companion anything that his superior didn’t already know, but felt the need to say something to fill the space.

“Indeed.” The older man’s voice was modulated for extreme politeness, bordering on boredom, with just a hint of “don’t annoy me.” As director, he signed off on all of the forms for R&D; he knew all the players, down to the laboratory’s off-hour sanitation crew.

The subordinate took the hint, and went back to silence for the rest of their walk, until they came to the end of the hallway and went through another set of security measures to gain entrance to the rooms beyond that doorway.

“Director.” The human element of the security partition didn’t quite salute, but his spine did straighten noticeably. The guard nodded to the other man. “Doctor Hackins.”

“You’ve made some improvements since I was here last,” the older man said, looking around at the cold-tiled walls and cement floor with drains set at two-foot intervals. This time, a hint of approval colored his words; a carefully calculated effect, negated by his adding, “No more fire starters?”

“No, sir.” The reprimand stung, but Hackins—as manager of the project—had already taken responsibility for that incident; it was over and there was no need to apologize. Apologies were a weakness worse than the original mistake.

The two men were passed through the security buffer and into the main lab, the reason for the entire building. Two more doors, each one a simple steel slab which could be opened only by a triple-checked thumbprint of a verified team member, or the director’s personal override.

The room they were in now, after the second door, was capital-C clean; white walls, tiled floor, and stainless fixtures. A man in a white lab coat over his shirtsleeves was seated in front of a glass window, while the subject he was working with rested in an elongated, dentist-type chair on the other side. The chair might have been comfortable if it weren’t for the leads affixed to her scalp and pulse points, and the leather restraints around her ankles, wrists, and neck. She was a slender, freckle-faced blonde, who looked as though she should have been running through a meadow with Disney-style animals leaping at her heels, not tied down inside an underground laboratory.

“Bethany. One of our more valued resources. I will admit to resisting putting her to this use; however, it does seem—”

“Gareth. To the point.”

“Ah. Yes.” Gareth Hackins didn’t do anything as clichéd as tug nervously at his collar, but had he been less well trained he would have wanted to. “This is the third team’s pet project, as was detailed in the yearly report.”

He paused, and when there was no response, he continued as though given an enthusiastic go-ahead.

“It is a variant of conditioning response we have been working on for the past few years. Ideally, we will create a reaction against using magic except under direct command. Specifically, our command. Past attempts to accomplish this have used more traditional brainwashing procedures, with variable results. The effects would not last long enough for the subject to remain useful, and most of the projects, as you saw in the report, had to be terminated. A waste, really. With this approach, we are using their own abilities to create a loop, so that the more they use their magic, the more they tie themselves to the structure we create, emotionally.”

“And how is that coming along?”

Hackins gave a faint, almost unobservable shrug. “Putting their magic under restraint is simple enough. They are already predisposed to take orders from the basic training all of our operatives go through. However, the next step has proven to be slightly more…problematic. Seven of the subjects have responded by shutting down all access to what is commonly referred to as ‘current,’ in effect lobotomizing themselves. One other—subject nine—accepts commands, but only of the most passive sort. Bethany, subject eight, seems to have the most potential to work on an active level. However, she has been resisting the final breakdown.”

The director leaned in to look at the subject. “Touch her again.”

The technician tapped a key, and the girl in the padded chair convulsed once, and then lay still. Her brown eyes were open wide, staring at the pale cream-tiled ceiling, and sweat trickled down the side of her face, dripping into her tangled hair and onto the padding of the couch.

“Response?”

“None.”

“Move it up.”

The tech used his thumb to slide the lever up, and then went to tap the key again. A slight hesitation, a glimpse backward at his boss, and he touched the key.

“Fffffuck you,” the girl managed around her clenched jaw. Her gaze flickered off to the side, taking in the two newcomers, then went back to her direct tormenter.

“Interesting,” Hackins said. “Most of them have broken by now. She’s, yes, most interesting. The higher level of Talent seems to indicate a higher level of stubbornness, as well.” He turned to the tech and checked the readouts the man was monitoring. “There’s been no push back along the leads?”

“We had to replace the first two sets,” the tech replied, “but once she realized that we’d insulated the main boards, she stopped wasting her time. Bethy’s a smart one, she is.”

“Yes. Very smart.” Hackins looked through the glass at the subject, thoughtfully. “Interesting.”

“This insulation allows you to stop their magic?” the director asked the technician.

“Sir. Not exactly, sir. It merely routes it through several layers, slowing it down with each turn. If she really wanted to do damage, she could, but we suspect that it would burn her out to generate that much energy.”

“You suspect?” The man’s face went still, and the tech and Dr. Hackins both felt the temperature of the room drop significantly with his disapproval.

“Despite our resources, there is still a great deal about these Talent that we do not understand,” Hackins said. “That is why the work is progressing more slowly than anticipated. A wrong step, a push too hard, and we burn them out before the desired result is accomplished. But if this new procedure works, we should be ready for the next level quite quickly.”

“She will not balk at commands?”

“She would be incapable of distinguishing between our wishes and her own,” Hackins assured him.

“Excellent. On with your work, then. Gareth, you said that you had the remains of the other subjects on storage? I would like to see the results of the autopsies.”

“Of course. This way, please.”

The two men exited out the door at the other end of the control room, abandoning tech and subject without a backward glance.

Left alone with his work, the tech’s shoulders sagged slightly in relief. He was very good at his job, but the ratio of failures in this project had been higher than anticipated, and the Boss was not a man you wanted to disappoint. Ever. Especially not when you were in his direct line of sight. The head of R&D was a fair man, nobody ever said he wasn’t, and a good man to work for, if you pleased him, but he had no tolerance for anything he considered sub-par effort.

A tapping noise drew his attention to the other side of the glass. “Loosah,” the girl managed, her face stretching into something that might have been a snicker, as though she had read his mind. “Sssssuckbutt.”

Snarling in response, the tech tapped the button again, and electricity surged through the electrodes attached to her skin, rocketing through the nerve endings—and the extra channels that made her a Talent, overloading her core into painful quivers that wasn’t quite what her kind called overrush, when the core exploded into the rest of the body, but close enough to give her a taste of what it might feel like.

Her body arched off the padded chair, her upper torso shaking in a scream that didn’t escape her throat. Muscles in her arms corded against the restraints, trying to break free, and the monitors in front of him red-flagged as her current reached out, trying to find him, destroy him.

“Don’t struggle so much, Bethy,” the tech advised in a mock-sympathetic voice, watching as the monitors subsided out of red into yellow. “Like we’ve been telling you all along, it doesn’t hurt if you don’t resist it.” He paused, then pushed a lever up a notch. “Unless of course I make it hurt.”

The girl shuddered again, but the monitors stayed within the yellow range. Her lips pulled back again, this time clearly in a grimace, but she refused to give him the satisfaction he craved. She could clearly feel the things they were doing to her brain, was aware of the insinuations, the subtle suggestions they were whispering to her, feeding into her through every pulse of current around her. But Bethany was more than stubborn. She might have taken employment, against her mentor’s advice, with the men who had betrayed her, strapped her into this chair and tried to use her for their own purposes. But she was Talent. She was Cosa. She would not break.

She would not betray her family.

four

Wren stared up at the ceiling and wondered what idiot had first decided that sheep were a soothing image. Sheep did not, in her mind, equal sleep.

The dark paint on the walls and the heavy curtains on the window were usually comforting, making her bedroom a restful hideaway, conducive to sleep, sleep, and more sleep. Tonight, the combination made the room feel like a coffin. Wren stared at the ceiling where dark shadows rested and tried to understand why.

It was too quiet, she finally concluded. That sounded like a cliché but it was true: Wren was so used to the constant rumble of traffic coming down the avenues, the hum of news copters and Coasties off the river, the thud-boom of construction, and the ever-present counterpoint of horns…even at night, there was enough motion to justify the city’s claim to never sleep. But the recent snowfall was also muffling the usual nighttime sounds. And without it, she couldn’t sleep.

Unfortunately, her other option: wake Sergei up and make him suffer with her, would require actually waking him up. And that, she was discovering, had been easier when it involved a phone call rather than rolling over and poking him. Not because he would be annoyed with her, but because he was just so damn cute when he slept. The stern features that worked so well in his Business-guy persona relaxed and softened, and his ruthlessly groomed hair fell into his face, rising and falling with the exhalation of his breath.

She watched him for a few moments, as best she could in the dim light. It was rare to see him this relaxed: the past few months had both of them all tied up in knots, between the Council’s power games, the vigilantes, and the threat of some shadowy power behind that bigoted organization, directing and arming them….

And now, the added stress of the three-way negotiation between lonejacks, fatae, and Council was making her stomach ache, and putting new lines between Sergei’s eyes.

The next round of that particular joyride was this afternoon, and she needed to be well rested, on the top of her game, not exhausted and fretful. And staring at the ceiling, listening to Sergei snore, wasn’t going to get her there.

Wren slid out of bed, shivering as her feet hit the carpeting, and grabbed her robe, wrapping it around herself before turning back to tuck the quilt around her partner’s still-sleeping form.

When in doubt, act. When outnumbered, run. When insomniac, obsess. It was a simple creed, but one that worked for her. Without turning on any lights despite the 2 a.m. darkness, she padded down the hallway to the kitchen, pulled out a can of diet Sprite and a half-eaten package of Oreos cookies, and padded back down the hallway to her office. Once the door was closed behind her, she flicked the overhead light on, blinking at the sudden illumination. “Ow.” Another flick, and the hum of her computer started up. Sitting in the chair, the soda placed carefully away from the mess of wires and electronics, she reached in and grabbed a cookie, crunching down with gastronomic satisfaction. There was nothing better than the gritty-and-creamy combination of crisp cookie and sludge filling.

Her computer came alive, running through screens until the familiar icons appeared. She pulled up the tabbed files for Old Sally, and started reading through the last known sightings, both verified and alleged, for the bad-news-bearing bansidhe. There hadn’t been anything to add to the file in almost three months, but it was entirely possible that her sleep-deprived state would see something, or make some connection she hadn’t before.

It would be nice if her job was all adrenaline and action, but, regrettably, more and more it seemed to be all about the paperwork. Wren didn’t know if it was because Sergei was giving her more to do on that side, or she was just getting jobs that required more than a blueprint and a prayer—or if it was the fact that she was so frustrated all the time that was making her feel like the job wasn’t fun anymore.

“Probably the last,” she said out loud. There had always been workups and research. She just used to enjoy it more.

“Oh, screw this.” She closed the file, and stared at the screen, then reached over and made a few keystrokes. It had been a while since she’d had the time or energy to just sit and chat. The moment she logged into her IM account, however, she was pounced on—

<ohsobloodytalented> Hey figgie!

Figgie, short for ‘figment of your imagination.’ Wren found herself smiling as she typed a response.

<downtowntalent> hey. de-figged.

<ohsobloodytalented> Been worried. How goes?

Wren had no idea who was behind the screen name, other than the fact that she was a member of the Cosa, female, and lived in the Southern hemisphere. And, based on their last conversation, was a member of the Council down there. Wren had asked her—delicately, as it wasn’t really a topic for casual conversation—about Wren’s then-fear that the Council had been involved in the attacks on the fatae, as well as trying to intimidate the lonejacks into coming under their protection. The Australian Talent had denied the possibility of both actions—denied it so strongly that she had fried the system with her current-powered outrage.

<ohsobloodytalented> I owe you an apology.

<downtowntalent> s’okay, my system was fine.

<ohsobloodytalented> *whew* But no, not that, well, yes that but I meant, about how I reacted, not just how I reacted. Or, why I reacted…

Wren waited. The other Talent wasn’t normally a ditherer, but the situation had been, well, embarrassing. Losing control of your current and frying electronics happened on a regular basis, even with the best control, but you always felt like an idiot, after.

<ohsobloodytalented> I asked around. Listened. Gossip’s the only thing faster than current and the minute I put an ear to the ground I heard more than I wanted to. Blessed Goddess, woman!

<downtowntalent> um…

She honestly didn’t know how to react. It was bad enough to find that her reputation had spread via gossip to Italy, but to literally go halfway around the globe…

Don’t assume, Valere. You don’t know what she heard. You don’t even now that she knows who you are, just a New York-area lonejack….

<downtowntalent> so…. what’re They saying?

<ohsobloodytalented> Council’s gone wrong up there. Bad-wrong.

Oh. Not anything about her, then. That was good. Except Wren would rather it had been about her; her own behavior she could get some control over. If the situation within the New York Council was so bad even Council members in another continent were talking about it…

<ohsobloodytalented> They’re a disgrace.

Wren couldn’t imagine what it had taken the other Talent to type those words; the first rule of Council membership was unity, the second rule was line up neat and narrow behind your local Council, and the third rule was don’t screw with the first two rules. To gossip inside was one thing, and nobody doubted there was a lot of that. But to admit it to not only an outsider, but lonejack and a doubter?

<downtowntalent> I’m sorry.

She risked the electronics to send a pulse of regret along the connection, to give her words more weight.

<ohsobloodytalented> Oh for fuck’s sake…don’t apologize! You guys have your hands full and then again, even if half of what we’re hearing is true.

A pulse back, of gentle exasperation and a hint of concern.

<ohsobloodytalented> Are you okay?

Wren blinked, then smiled a little, and typed back:

<downtowntalent> yeah. mostly. it’s…complicated up here, but we’re managing. you?

There was a question in that one word that Wren wasn’t able to elaborate on. The one thing she and the rest of the Quad were afraid of—so afraid that they hadn’t been able to do more than dance around the possibility out loud—was the threat of KimAnn’s attitude spreading; of Council turning against lonejacks, trying to force them into lockstep, across the country and elsewhere.

<ohsobloodytalented> Yeah. We’re okay. And…we’re watching.

Words hidden inside words. No promises, but a promise, nonetheless. Whatever was going on here, it would not be allowed to take root down under, not while this woman and her friends were on guard.

<downtowntalent> good.

So why did she have the feeling that neither of them actually felt so good?

<ohsobloodytalented> Time for me to log off. Take care, downtown.

<downtowntalent> you too.

Wren stared at the screen for a few minutes after the other account signed off.

It’s not growing. But people are paying attention. Whatever we do, people are going to notice. We’re setting precedent. And if we lose…

Her stomach ache suddenly got worse, and the Oreo cookies weren’t so appealing any more.

“I need coffee.”

Three hours later Wren blew on her fingers, trying to keep them warm enough to stay nimble, even as her ass threatened to turn into paired ice cubes through the heavy denim and silk underwear. The small storefront she was studying across the street was dark and closed, the iron grating pulled down over the windows. She could feel the electrical shimmer of the alarm system running through the store. Door and windows, plus a motion detector.

As pawnshops went it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but there was an object there she intended to Retrieve before the night was over. Nothing special: a gold locket that had been pawned a week before. A small locket with nothing but emotional significance. Nothing inside except one faded picture of a man long-gone.

“Why couldn’t we stay inside, where it was warm?”

“You could have stayed there.”

The demon huffed in response. His mistake, showing up at dawn looking for breakfast and companionship. He had been twiddling his claws as even more snow fell for the umpteenth storm of the winter, and he had known, somehow, that Wren would be awake. And she was right, he could have stayed in with Sergei, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, or gone home to stare at the TV, instead. He had, in fact, just decided to do the latter when Wren announced that she wanted to “take a walk.” Wren never just took a walk.

He and the sleepy-eyed human male had exchanged glances, doing a quick mental paper-rock-scissors. P.B. still wasn’t sure if he’d won or lost.

“Stay here. Hold this.”

She handed him a plastic stopwatch, and took the small black bag he was holding from him, closing it up. When he would have asked another question, she stood up, stretching her legs out as she did so. The snow coating the sidewalk was soft and slippery, and her boots made a faint crunching noise as she strode forward.

“Valere…”

“Stay there. Run the clock.”

He stayed, looking more like his nick-namesake, the polar bear, than he ever had before, surrounded by snowdrifts taller than he was.

“Piece of cake,” she muttered, stepping through the slush of the street and up onto the curb on the other side. She was the best Retriever in the area, probably the best Retriever on the entire damned continent. This was easy. This was almost too easy.

The electrical current of the burglar alarm was thicker than an ordinary alarm; the strands were woven with magical current, as well. The owner was a member of the Cosa Nostradamus, the magical community, just as she and P.B. were. He knew all the ways that a fellow Talent could break in, and protected against them.

She was the best. She could do this in her sleep.

Closing her eyes, Wren let the cold night air seep into her skin, feeling the contrast between the cold and the warmth of current inside her. A deep well, where neon-flashed snakes slithered and coiled around each other, sparking in anticipation as she slid into a light fugue state.

“Easy. Easy…”

She wasn’t sure who she was talking to: the live current within her, the alarm in front of her, or herself. Maybe all three. They all listened; her breathing slowed, her hand steadied, the current inside her slipped along the pattern she created, and the two types of current touched, her own magic slipping into the shopkeeper’s system and convincing it that she was an extension of the system, an accepted guest, not an intruder.

It was simple, but it sure as hell wasn’t easy. Even in the cold air, Wren felt sweat drip under the wool cap, down the side of her face. Using current burned a huge amount of calories.

In contrast, the door really was easy: a turn and a bump, and the lock gave way.

Inside the store, the air was thick and dark. A few faint red lights indicated emergency exits, while a white glow illuminated the glass cases behind the wooden counter. The locket was in one of those cases.

Wren was a Retriever; she was hired to take items belonging to her client, and nothing more. Even on a training run like this, you kept discipline. But there were so many pretties sparkling there, abandoned by their owners, just waiting to find new homes….

Watch it, she thought sternly. That’s how people end up with Bad Things following them home.

Selecting one thin thread of current, she shaped it with a picture of the locket, and released it like a butterfly into the store.

The current was blue and yellow, like a butterfly itself, and the strength of her visual made it move like one as well, flittering from one glass case to another before finally alighting on one in the far corner.

“Gotcha” she whispered. The butterfly broke into tiny sparkles, fading into the air as Wren approached the case. Keeping her tool bag balanced on her leg—you never, ever put your kit down on the floor, for fear of leaving a trace—she withdrew the thin pick P.B. had been looking at earlier and made short work of the sliding lock.

She picked the locket up off the small acrylic stand without touching anything else, and slipped it into her pocket.

And that was that.

“Seven minutes thirty-two seconds,” P.B. said, checking the stopwatch as she came back across the street, having carefully closed the door behind her, and allowed the alarm system to reconnect without a tremor.

Wren shook her head in disgust. “That’s just…sad.”

“You get distracted in there?”

“No. Okay, a little. But not more than ten seconds’ worth. Simple job, no problems, I should have been in and out in six minutes, tops. Damn.”

“Yeah, obviously you’re getting old and sloppy, and the hot new Talent’s gonna come up behind you and take all your jobs.” He handed her the stopwatch and dusted snow off his backside. “Watching you train is about as exciting as watching snow fall. I expected at least something blowing up. Can we grab breakfast, now?”

Wren looked up at the sky, as though expecting to see the sun—or an answer of sorts—appear from behind the clouds.

“Valere?” He looked up, as well, then up at her face.

“Something’s building. And we’re not even close to being ready.”

The demon shrugged. “One thing I’ve learned? Nobody’s ever ready, cause what happens is either worse or better than what we were expecting, and never exactly what we planned for.”

She reached into her pocket and touched the locket again. The cool metal filled her with a sense of calm, but no voice came out of her memory to advise her. “So what do you do?”

P.B. scratched his muzzle, and shrugged again. “Burn that bridge when you get to it?”

Wren laughed, the way he meant her to. She let the locket fall back into the depths of her pocket, and she pulled her gloves back on. “Right. Let’s go make Sergei make us pancakes.”

five

The minor adrenaline rush of her training run had worn off completely by the time lunch came around, and Wren was struggling with the desire to chew her leg off, if it would give her a way to escape.

She had once joked with Sergei about the terrifying prospect of an organized Cosa. Sitting in the now overly familiar meeting room, she had proof to back up her own incredulous laughter at the joke; a week of discussions and negotiations and yelling at each other, and maybe an hour’s worth of progress had been made. If that.

She looked around now, taking in the room the way she might a Retrieval site, half out of boredom, half just to keep in the habit. The remains of a platter of sandwiches and flaccid pickles, the notepads and pens, paper coffee cups and soda cans littering the table. The scene could have been any conference room anywhere, in any office. Or maybe, she thought, the better analogy was a teacher’s staff room. Less tech, more opinions.

And a considerably wider range of species than in your average boardroom or school.

The Truce Board—a boring but practical name someone had come up with—now officially met in an empty apartment of a building belonging to one of the Council members. Wren had scoped the place out when she came in, the never-ending habit of a renter in Manhattan, and decided that—even with the upgraded facilities and parquet flooring, she’d rather keep her own place. But the apartment had a large main room that, when filled with a long table and a bunch of faux leather padded folding chairs, could hold everyone who was required to be there. And the kitchen had not one but two coffee machines running. She approved.

Turning her head slightly to the left, she let her gaze touch on the players: the four lonejack representatives, Jordan and another Council member she didn’t know, and four fatae: Beyl the griffin, a piskie named Einnie, a solid, square-faced trauco with the unlikely name of Reynaldi, and a strange, frail, lovely young woman dressed in veils, whose back was hollow like a dead tree. She wasn’t introduced, and nobody seemed to pay much heed to her, which made Wren pay careful attention to everything she did.

Between the delegates and the advisors each of them had brought along, like reluctant seconds to a mob-scene duel, it was controlled chaos. The voices were loud, but involved, not angry, and there were more arms waving in emphasis than she’d thought could be attached to the number of bodies in the room. Everyone had an opinion about how to implement the Patrols, and enforce the Truce, and nobody wanted to hear anyone else’s points or rebuttals, and at least once the trauco threatened one of the older Council gentlemen with bodily harm for the crime of being—direct quote—a dweeb.

Bored. Yes. She was very, very bored. And there wasn’t anything worth stealing here, even for the practice value. The owner had made damn sure of that before offering it up.

Wren leaned back in her chair, feeling it creak dangerously as she balanced on two legs. “Looks like everything’s under control, here.”

The gnome sitting next to her—Beyl’s assistant—snorted, sounding enough like P.B. that Wren did a double take at it. Demon were a created breed: was it possible that there were gnome bloodlines involved? The height was close…

And when she started contemplating the genetic makeup of the fatae breeds, it was time and past for her to get the hell out of there. Three hours of waiting around for someone to say something she could contribute to, and all she’d gotten was a bad case of numb-butt. Her time was worth more than this.

Wren put the chair back on all fours and got up, moving through the bodies until she got to the one she needed to speak to.

“And if you think that we’re going to allow—”

“Bart.”

“I’m busy here, Valere.” The NYC representative was brusque even when he was in a good mood, which he decidedly was not, right now.

“Yeah, I can see that. I can also see you guys have got everything under control, and I hate fiddling my thumbs. When you need me, call.”

“Or you’ll wipe yourself out of my line of sight anyway?” he asked.

Ooops. Nailed.

“Go,” he said in dismissal, and went back into his argument without missing a beat. He hadn’t even turned his head to look at her.

Wren slipped out of the room without anyone noting her pass by, without having to actively invoke her no-see-me. Boredom apparently brought it forward naturally. That explained why she’d never gotten caught when she cut English class, back in junior high. Odd, that she’d never made the connection before. Then again, she wasn’t often bored, either. She—and Sergei—spent much of their waking time ensuring that.

The kitchen was busy—someone was refilling one coffee machine, so there was a line at the other. Wren didn’t even bother to queue up, but grabbed her coat and hat from the indecently large hall closet, and went down the elevator and out of the building into the cold morning air.

She found a working pay phone on the corner, and—after asking someone passing on the street what time it was—placed a quick call.

You’ve reached my cell. Try to speak clearly and repeat your number twice.

“Me. It’s a little before two, and I’m fleeing the scene of the crime for some window shopping. If you can get away, I’ll meet you at Rock Center, at the rink.”

She hung up the phone, and checked how much cash she had in her wallet.

“’Tis the season to overindulge and splurge,” she said with satisfaction, and stepped off the curb to catch a cab discharging a fare.

Forty minutes and two stores later, she found her partner leaning against the window of one of the high-end stores that flanked the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. Sergei was watching the crowds of warmly dressed tourists milling about, splitting their attention between the garishly lit tree and the skaters frolicking on the rink directly below.

She tucked the small shopping bag into her shoulder bag, and came up alongside him.

“Hey. Been here long?”

He turned to smile down at her. “Not much, no. I picked up your message and escaped as quickly as I could. Gallery’s been a madhouse this morning. Everyone’s doing their usual ‘oh dear god it’s the holiday I must buy something that shows I spent a lot’ dash.”

“You are a bad and cynical man.”

“I am not. I’m observant. The people who love art, the ones who are buying for someone who loves art, they did their shopping months ago, most of them. It’s already been bought and paid for, and is waiting on delivery. These people…” He shook his head.

She flushed, guiltily, at her own last-minute purchase. “Are they at least buying?”

“Enough to pay to stay open,” he said. “And it’s good training for Lowell. It makes him happy to help them load up their credit cards with debt. So why did you want to meet here? I thought you hated crowds. No, I know you hate crowds.”

She brushed away his comments with an air wave of her hand. “This is different. It’s the Tree! Plus, it’s too cold to stay out here for long. Just enough to soak it in, and then we can go get hot chocolate.”

Sergei didn’t understand the appeal of standing in the cold and staring up at a garishly lit, oversized tree that definitely had looked better standing in its original field, covered with bird shit and squirrel nests, but then, he didn’t have much holiday spirit at the best of times. Or so he’d been told. Christmas was midnight mass, and presents exchanged in the morning, and then you went back to work. But Wren’s childhood, as far as he’d been able to determine, had been about scrimping and saving and making festive with whatever they had. He’d rather get frostbite than cut into her enjoyment of the season, as much as she let herself indulge in. Especially this year.

“I wonder how many volts it takes to run those lights,” she said now, her eyes dangerously dreamy. “Do you think Christmas lights have a different flavor than regular lights?”

“What, you never shorted out your own Christmas tree, as a teenager?”

“My mother would have killed me,” she said. “Anyway, we usually had one of those tabletop dealies. Night-lights used more voltage than those.”

She stared up at the tree, and he could almost see the moment she went away from him, sliding into what she called the fugue state, where she could draw most easily on the core of current within her. As best he could understand, it was a little like meditation, and a little like orgasm, and the smile on her face made him more than a little nervous.

“Wren, I really don’t want to be trapped inside a crowd of thousands of pissed-off tourists a week before Christmas, when you put the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree out of commission.”

“Spoilsport.” But she shook the fugue off, and came back to him. “Come on. Buy me a massive hot chocolate. No, a peppermint mocha. Two shots. With extra whipped cream, and one of those cookie straws.”

“Because a sugar high combined with a caffeine rush is just so what you need right now,” he grumbled, but slid his arm into hers, and escorted her away from the crowd, down the stairs into the lower level of Rock Center.

It was a maze down there, filled with hallways and stores and subway entrances, but they both knew where they were headed: there was a food court off to one side, with a Starbucks. The line was as long as expected, so Wren went to find them a table while Sergei stood to place their order. One tall tea, one grande peppermint mocha with extra whipped cream. They weren’t serving those crunchy cookie-straws here, so he grabbed her a chocolate-dipped biscotti instead. It wasn’t the same, but it was the thought that counted. Plus the chocolate-dipped part.

“Ooo, Santa,” she joked when he sat down at the little table next to her, and handed her the drink and the biscuit. “I guess I’ve been very, very good this year, huh?”

He merely smiled, thinking of the gift already wrapped and hidden in her apartment—she might search his place, but never think to look in her own space. He hoped. They’d agreed, early-on in their partnership, that one gift each for Christmas was a reasonable limit. But this year he’d gone on a little splurge, as she would say. This year was special: being partners as well as partners required something…more. Difficult as it was to buy presents for a woman who didn’t wear much jewelry, couldn’t use personal electronics, and had a deep-set habit of stealing whatever she liked, he thought he’d done well.

“I take it that the meeting this morning did not require your taking minutes?”

“Hah.” She sipped at the mocha, making a happy little contented noise as it hit her taste buds. “They’re going along gangbusters, yowling and screaming and waving arms and generally accomplishing absolutely nothing.”

Sergei’s experience with meetings was more along the lines of small groups being told what to do; he almost wished that he had been able to sit in on this one, simply to see how the Cosa did it. Then again, considering the Cosa members he already knew, he suspected that her description was, if anything, underplaying the chaos.

“In the end, though…?”

“Oh, in the end, they’ll hammer the details out. Bart and Beyl won’t let anyone out of the door until they do. But they didn’t need me there to get to that point. And, honestly? Being in the room with that many people was starting to make me itch. Nobody had a damn thing worth lifting except Ayexi’s wallet, and if I asked him he’d just hand it over to me. What’s the fun in that?”

Sergei drank his tea rather than answer. While he understood and appreciated his partner’s need to keep her hand in, as it were, he sometimes understood her mentor’s reported exasperation with her light-fingered tendencies. For Wren, Retrieval wasn’t just something she did—it was what she was. And if she wasn’t either working on a job, or recovering from a job, she was wondering where the next job was going to be. Time to find something for her to do.

“At the risk of being rude, I gotta go pee.” She grinned at the expression on his face. “Sorry—I have to use the facilities to relieve my dainty female form, how’s that?”

“Worse,” he said.

“Don’t drink the last of my mocha,” she warned, and grabbed the last chunk of the biscotti to nibble on as she walked, as though not willing to trust him with it while she was gone. It was amazing, the calories she managed to put away. Current burned a lot of energy, even in passive mode, but she used to at least moderate her intake. The past few months…

The past few months she’s been using current almost continuously, between the Cosa and the jobs, and the general chaos…and you. She didn’t touch him with current every time they had sex, but often enough that he was starting to feel the cumulative effect internally—and he knew that it had to be draining her, too. He tried not to ask for a jolt, but it was like putting a chocoholic into a fudge factory and handing them one of those little plastic knives; you were just asking for something to snap.

Thankfully, Wren was well trained; he had never met Neezer, but even by the time Wren was a teenager, she had some of the best emotional and physical control he had ever seen, and her mental control—as befitted an almost-Pure Talent—was even more developed. As she often said, current was power, and skill was all about controlling that power.

And yes, he admitted, he got off on that, too. Like a high-level sports car, knowing that there was so much horsepower under the attractive frame. You didn’t have to be in the driver’s seat to appreciate the surge of speed.

He thought about getting her another biscotti, but to do so he’d have to get up and stand in line, and then they’d lose the table to one of the groups cruising the food court, looking for an empty space. He watched a few of them; people-watching was something he didn’t do very often, but it was always interesting. His gaze moved past the gaggle of teenaged girls exclaiming over something one of them had bought, paused on two overbulked teenage males long enough to rate them not a threat, then lingered for an enjoyable moment on an attractive woman with skin the color of Wren’s mocha, wearing a bright red shirt and skirt. She was moving with the long stride of someone who only had so long to do something before she had to be back upstairs in her office, and he felt a moment’s smug superiority before something else snagged his attention.

A single bright green sheet, tucked under a plate on the now-empty table next to him. He didn’t know why it attracted his attention, but he knew better than to ignore that kind of mental hijacking. As nonchalantly as he could, Sergei leaned forward and snagged it from the abandoned tray.

Tired of coming home to unwanted visitations? Concerned about the infestation of your building? Your neighborhood? Call us. We can clean things up for you.

The company was Midtown Pest Control Services, and there were two phone numbers and a Web site listed at the bottom of the page. A plain sheet, black type against the green paper: impossible not to read, once your eye found it.

Scanning the food court, aware now, Sergei could see half a dozen of the lime-green sheets and a packet more of them on one counter, in a plastic dispenser. Son of a…

He crumpled the sheet in his fist, and tossed it into the nearest trash can, taking grim satisfaction at making the shot. Could he grab all the sheets and the dispenser, too, before Wren got back? Or would she come back and see him, and see the ads, and make everything worse?

He decided to risk it. If this was an innocent bug-disposal company, he’d feel guilty later. But the wording they used was exactly the same as the ads Wren had gotten, the ads the vigilantes used to spread their “services” back when this all began. And that was a coincidence he wasn’t willing to ignore. Not if they were advertising again, soliciting “business.” Recruiting new bigots to the cause. Building their troops against the coming confrontation. Or even just spreading their own brand of intolerance and filth into a city that already had enough, thanks.

Sergei wasn’t unaware of the irony; he had once been deeply uncomfortable in the presence of any fatae, even before he knew how many were out there, passing as human. Even now, the thought of them occasionally made his skin crawl in a way he didn’t care to investigate. But these people…They were targeting not only the fatae, but anything magical.

And that included Wren.

Keeping one eye on their table, with the coats draped over chairs to indicate it was still in use, Sergei snagged four of the sheets and shredded them methodically into strips before dumping them in the trash can. He moved back to the table just in time to prevent three office workers from sitting down, despite the coats, and glared at them until they backed away.

There probably wasn’t any way to get the pile of flyers off that counter, without attracting someone’s—

“Sergei. What a surprise.”

All thoughts of the flyers got tucked away for later, as he turned to face the speaker.

Andre Felhim, dapper as ever in a charcoal-gray suit and a burgundy tie that emphasized the dark mahogany of his skin. He was followed a step behind by a taller blond-haired, pale-skinned man: Poul Jorgenmunder, his second-in-command.

Sergei used to stand just that way, at Andre’s elbow. For about two years, before they started to disagree on almost everything. He didn’t envy Poul his spot, although Poul was clearly jealous of Sergei’s history with Andre.

Relationships were the most confusing of all human inventions. That was a quote from somewhere, but Sergei couldn’t remember who had said it.

“Andre.” He didn’t acknowledge the other man. It was petty, but satisfying.

The two men had laminated ID tags around their necks, with Visitor stamped on them in large red letters. That explained what they were doing here, then, although Sergei wondered what company in this complex had cause to call on the Silence. He hoped it wasn’t NBC, although their fall lineup had certainly been a crime of inhuman proportions….

“Here alone? How…unusual for you, these days.” Poul looked around, obviously looking for something. “No, no obvious freaks here, unless they’re hiding.”

Lonejacks weren’t the only ones who knew how to control their emotions. Poul’s baiting was too obvious; what was he really trying to get at?

“I received your letter. And your e-mail,” Andre said quietly, ignoring Jorgenmunder.

“And filed them appropriately, since you declined to respond?”

His former boss spread tapered, manicured fingers in an openhanded gesture. “I wish that you would reconsider…”

“You know I can’t. And won’t.” They had been over this ground in previous meetings, before he sent the letter.

That letter had merely been a formal breaking of their contract, the devil’s bargain that had tied Wren to the Silence, in return for a monthly retainer. Effective next month, January 1, the deal was null and void. If he could get Andre to sign off on it.

Sergei went on, quoting the letter almost verbatim. “The situation has changed on both sides, making the agreement impossible. If you try to fight it—”

“The Silence will not contest your right to end the agreement,” Andre said. He looked older, more tired than even the last time Sergei had seen him. The difference between this man and the man who had recruited him out of college, trained him, was striking; far more than could be accounted for simply by the passing of years. “I made the offer in good faith and yet, as you rightly pointed out, we have not followed suit.”

The weight of guilt settled again on Sergei’s shoulders. It wasn’t Andre’s fault, entirely. He, Sergei, should never have gotten Wren tied up with them, no matter how much they thought they had needed the Silence’s help.

Once he had called himself an Operative with pride. Even when he left, it was burnout from the cost of the job, not dissatisfaction with what they did. Now…Now, he was afraid that the Silence was the greater threat than the Council; their motives less clear, their end purposes more shadowed. The organization he had once sworn his life to no longer existed; he was unsure what stood in its place, now.

He did know that he would mortgage the gallery rather than allow Wren to take any more of their money, and risk her life for their ends.

“I really don’t have anything more to say to you,” he said to the older man. “Andre, I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“Afraid someone will see you talking to us?” Poul asked, still looking for a place to push the verbal needle.

“No,” Sergei said, turning to look at him full-on for the first time. “You merely bore me.”

Sergei picked up the coats off the chair, snagged Wren’s mocha in his free hand, and walked away. With perfect timing, he intercepted Wren at the hallway leading from the food court to the bathrooms.

“Hey,” she said, surprised. “Sorry, there was a line like you wouldn’t believe…You have to get back to the gallery?”

He grabbed at the excuse, which had the virtue of not being a lie. “Yes, I’m sorry. If I’d time I’d take you out for lunch, but…”

“S’okay, I’m not hungry, anyway. I’ve got some more errands to run, as long as I’m in midtown. And then I suppose I should go back and see if our fearless leaders have a new assignment for me, or if they’re still wrangling over how to arrange the patrols.” She rolled her eyes, and he chuckled: he had more faith in the Cosa than most of the Cosa did.

“Maybe I’ll get you a new job.”

“That would be nice. Something—”

“Without hellhounds. Yes, I remember.”

She laughed. “Catch you later tonight?”

“Absolutely. I’ll pick up dinner on my way home.”

He helped her into her coat, gave her the mocha and kissed her, lingering a little more than he usually did, in public.

“Stay safe, Zhenchenka.”

“They won’t even see me going,” she replied, and he smiled; it was what she used to say, when he sent her off on a job, back in their early days.

When had she stopped saying that? He didn’t remember. Probably around the time he stopped sending her off personally, every job. He thought he might start doing that, again.

“Stay safe,” he said again. But she had disappeared into the crowd, and even he couldn’t find her.

Wren hadn’t actually gone anywhere, using the crowd to backtrack to the food court. From there, she watched two men sitting at a table, one of them drinking a coffee, the other flicking an unlit cigarillo between elegant dark-skinned fingers. She had seen that restless motion before; Sergei, with his thin-rolled cigarettes. She had never seen him actually light one, never known him to inhale anything other than the aroma of a good wine. But he would roll a cigarette between his fingers like a magician with a coin, whenever he was deep in thought. Or nervous.

Now she knew where he had learned it.

“Idiot man.” If she’d come back and surprised the three of them together, she would have known by Sergei’s reaction what was up, end of story. He could pull the poker face only so far on her, these days. She thought, anyway. But the way he rushed her off…

It didn’t matter. Much. Keeping her and his Excellency Andre Felhim far apart was an excellent idea, no matter the circumstances. Someday she really was going to forget what manners Neezer had taught her, and give that arrogant, supercilious know-little a good shocking-to.

So. Sergei probably had the very best of intentions. Let it go, Valere. She really did have errands to run, of a sort, and this was as good a place as any to do them.

She found a quiet place to sit, on the edge of an indoor planter, with weird frondy things that almost hid her from sight. Closing her eyes and letting the clatter around her fade into white noise, she grounded and centered, reached inside and stroked one thin snake of current inside her. Prepared, she sent out a flurry of pings, directed mental knocks, to half a dozen Talent that she knew worked or lived in the immediate area.

Then she sat back to wait. It took exactly six and a half minutes for the first response to come in.

Wren lifted the lid of her gingerbread latte and inhaled the aroma as though it were oxygen, and she hyperventilating.

“Are you going to drink that, or have sex with it?”

“I can’t do both?”

There were three of them around the small, round table: Wren, in jeans and sweater dressed for warmth and comfort, an older man with a smooth-shaven head and dark blue eyes, wearing a white shirt over dark cords, and a woman with a thick black ponytail setting off her red sweaterdress. She looked like a college student compared to their crisp professionalism.

The man watched while she took a deep sip, tracking the liquid as it slid down her throat.

“You must be a hell of a co—”

“Michael!” The woman in the dress slapped his arm before he could finish the thought.

Michael’s eyes twinkled innocently, and Wren managed to swallow before laughing.

“Seriously,” he went on. “You called. We’re here. What do you want from us?”

Wren put her drink down on the table, needing to take a moment to collect her thoughts. The last time she had tried to canvass for information, half the Cosa had crossed the street rather than talk to her, and the ones who couldn’t get away balked at every question. Now, all she had to do was ping a Talent, and they showed up. And paid for the coffee. All it took was a rumor that you were responsible for lifting the darkness of the summer heat wave, even if nobody was quite sure what the darkness had been or how it ended; of being the lonejack who faced down the Council; of being…all things she wished she’d never become. But today, it was useful. So she’d use it.

“Is this about the meetings they’ve been having?”

“What have you heard about it?” Michael was a lonejack and Seta was Council, but neither of them worked with their Talent: he was a lawyer, she taught history at a charter school in midtown. They were about as close as you could get to the Cosa’s middle class, if such a thing existed.

“Not much.” Michael took a sip of his coffee. “That there were meetings going on, high-level stuff, the Council coming down among the unwashed masses, more fatae seen in town than anyone can remember…Is it true, that someone’s hunting them?”

Seta sighed. “You are so painfully out of touch…. Didn’t you hear about the Moot Massacre?”

Wren blinked. All right, she had missed that particular nickname for the attack….

“I figured it had been exaggerated, or something.” Michael didn’t seem too abashed.

“Lonejacks,” Wren said with a long-suffering sigh. “They just don’t care.”

“Damn straight,” Michael agreed.

“Well, you have to care, now,” she said, suddenly serious. “Because it’s true, all of it. True and serious and in your face, right here, right now.”

Wren suddenly felt a tingle on the back of her neck, as though someone was staring at her. But when she glanced casually around the Starbucks, everyone seemed intent on their own business. She looked out the glass window, thinking it might have come from out there. For once, there was no snow actively falling, but the streets were slushy, and the curbs and sidewalks were still coated with a dingy gray-white mix of slush and ice that caused pedestrians to walk with particular care or risk going down on their backsides. Preoccupied with staying upright, none of them were looking in at her.

Wren shook her head, telling herself that it was probably just someone’s fur coat against the gray of sky and street that had flickered in the corner of her eye.

Whatever it was, it was gone now.

“Yo, you with us?” Michael asked, peering at her intently. “You zoned for a moment.”

“Did you…” She shook her head, dropping the unasked question. “Yeah. I’m here. So, now you know the deal. My question is—would you join a patrol if they were organized, all three groups together? Keep an eye on things, report back, be willing to be part of a multipronged, organized approach to what’s going down?”

Michael nodded once, firmly, without having to consider the question very long.

Wren added, because she had to know: “Even if the Council voted against it?”

Seta looked like she’d just felt the rough brick of a wall come up against her back, hard. “Voted…” She sighed, and stared down into her cup. “Look, if the Council says no, we—Council members—jump no. You know that. But if they don’t say anything specifically that is shaped like a no and sounds like a no and smells like a no…”

“Then it’s not actually a no.”

“Not actually, no.”

Wren nodded. It wasn’t good enough, but it was the best she was going to get. And there were others she needed to meet with before she could call it a day. No rest for the weary…

six

Sergei walked into the main room and came to a full stop, staring at the disaster that greeted him. “Merry Christmas?”

Wren made a face, glaring at the pile of cards she still had to sign, stamp, and mail out. She’d conned Sergei into printing up her address lists on his computer at the office the month before, so all she had to do was peel off the labels and stick them on. Her mother would be horrified—“holiday cards should always be handwritten, Genevieve”—but she figured the Miss Manners points she’d lose she’d make up in ego-points with her fellow lonejacks, who would know that she’d somehow managed to use not only a computer, but a printer, as well.

That time-saver hadn’t managed to keep her piles of envelopes, cards, and colored pens in any semblance of order, however. Nor had it gotten her ass in gear any earlier, despite everything being ready and waiting for weeks now.

In her own defense, she had been a little busy. And, damn. Tea. The urge to make it arrived, a little late.

Sergei was going to have to make his own this time.

Sergei closed the door, unwound the muffler from his neck, took off his coat, and hung them both in the closet. The snow was falling again outside, based on the dampness of his shoulders and hair. Normally snow on Christmas Eve would be a thing to delight in. This year, it was just cause for sighing and shrugging. The weatherfolk were reporting a record seven feet of the cold stuff so far for the winter, coming up on the record from 2001, and there were still two months of the season to go.

She’d gotten too used to Sergei being here, maybe, for the old early warning tea-urge to kick in.

Wren had all the curtains drawn across the windows, and in the corner, instead of a tree, there was a metal candelabra in the shape of a Christmas tree with thirteen green candles burning. She saw her partner studying it, and knew that he was seeing Lee’s work in the turn of the metal branches, and the solid but somehow delicate design of the base. It hurt, still, to look at it, but it was a good kind of a hurt, now. It was a remembering kind of a hurt, as well as a missing hurt.

For a borderline klepto, she didn’t have many belongings—she’d take something she liked, and then discard it when she got bored—but this, and the fabric painting Shin had sent her all the way from Japan, were more than things. They were gifts.

She looked up at her partner, now, indicating the piles of holiday cards in front of her. “Why do I send these things out, anyway?”

“I have no idea.”

If you sent them out early, they were an unwelcome reminder that the holidays were coming and you still had too many things to do. If they arrived during the holidays, they were just tossed with the rest of the cards in some sort of display that just meant another thing to clean up after. And if you sent them too late, you looked like a slacker. You just couldn’t win. But this year at least it gave her hands something to do, and occupied a portion of her brain so that she wasn’t always circling around back to the thing she couldn’t actually do anything about.

Sergei slipped off his shoes and sat down on the floor next to her, wincing as his expensive slacks came into contact with the floor. “Been cleaning again, have you?”

Wren sniffed, smelling the wood oil she had used on the floor. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “And it was on my to-do list.”

“You’ve never had a to-do list in your entire life.” She wrote things down, but for memory-jogs and references, not to keep things orderly or organized.

“In my head. My head is stuffed full of to-do lists.” A whole list of things to keep her hands busy. “Here,” and she pushed a small pile of invites across the floor to him. “As long as you’re here, be useful and stuff these in the envelopes.”

He obligingly started placing the cards inside the addressed envelopes, and tabbed the stamps on them without being asked.

“I miss licking stamps.”

She shook her head; her hair, still wet from the shower she had taken once the bathroom was spotless, slid pleasantly on the back of her neck. She had taken extra care with her appearance tonight: a long velvet skirt and sleeveless top in a deep purple the exact shade of shadows. She had even used eyeliner to give herself what she thought was a slightly exotic look. But her hair was merely combed through and left to dry by itself. There was only so much fuss she was willing to go through, even for Sergei. “You’re a sick, sick man.”

“True. But I brought dinner, so I’m forgiven.”

She had heard him messing about in the kitchen just after he entered the apartment, even before he took his coat off. “Yeah? And do we have a Christmas goose resting in the oven?”

She looked up at him again as she said it, and did a classic double take at the crestfallen look of “surprise ruined” on his face.

“A goose?” She did not squeal—she never squealed—but the noise was apparently enough to restore some of Sergei’s self-satisfaction, even as she launched herself onto him in an exuberant hug. “Goose!”

The world, apparently, could go to hell in a snow-covered hand basket, so long as one had goose for dinner.

“I invited some people over for dessert, later,” she said, letting him up after appropriate thanks had been offered and accepted.

“Oh?” They had never actually spent Christmas Eve together before, so he couldn’t know if this was normal or not.

“Well, Bonnie. And P.B.”

“You had to actually invite him? I expected him to appear the moment the refrigerator door was opened.”

“Hush. Yes, for dessert. Also a couple of Bonnie’s friends, a bunch of PUPs”—the rather grandiosely named Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigators—“and P.B. said he would bring some ‘cousins’ he wanted me to meet.”

“So this is more of a working get-together, then.”

Wren twisted her mouth as though tasting something sour. “I like Bonnie, and she is a neighbor. And it’s never a bad thing to be on good terms with PUPs. And although most of the fatae don’t seem to have any religion as such, I have yet to meet one who didn’t love sweets.”

“Then I’d best get dinner warmed up, or we might not have a chance to finish before the sugar-craving hordes descend.” He leaned forward to kiss her again, and then got up off the floor, more slowly than he’d sat down.

“I’m getting too old for this,” he said, stretching out his back. “Would you mind terribly actually buying some comfortable chairs, at some point?”

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