Laura Anne Gilman - Tales of the Cosa Nostradamus

by Laura Anne Gilman

  What? She asked it silently. What?

  Wren bit the inside of her lip. Scratched the side of her chin. Then she sighed.

  It didn’t matter if you believed in ghosts or not, if they believed in you.

  oOo

  "You did what?"

  "Shut up, Sergei," Wren snarled, slamming the door behind her. He was glad they had gotten a mage-tech in last year to reinforce the office with current: she was practically emitting sparks of frustration. "I couldn't just leave him there."

  "Why the hell not?"

  Sergei knew that he had a great voice for yelling. The same person who had told him that, a woman, had also told him that when he got really pissed, his lips flattened into a whiplash line, and his square-tipped fingers went so still you just knew he wanted to wrap them around someone's neck. Wren’s, tonight.

  "I said, shut up."

  Sergei opened his mouth, shut it, stared at her. It shouldn't have been a contest–he had ten years, a hand-tailored suit, and the weight of being the senior partner behind him. She glared right back. He blinked first.

  "All right. Suppose you tell me why you felt the need to risk a well-executed job in order to remove this…gentleman from his last stand and bring him back to my office?"

  Sergei leaned back into the leather chair, steepling his fingers and watching over them as she paced. His office was a luxury in dark brown leather and burnished chrome. The clients who came in here to write obscenely large checks for obscenely overpriced works of art were reassured that this was a man who knew Good Taste and Quality. Wren normally perched on the edge of his desk instead of sitting on the leather sofa. But tonight, she was clearly too wired to sit. "I don't know. I just had this feeling that it wouldn't be good to leave him there alone."

  "He's dead, Genevieve. Being alone probably wasn't going to bother him." He waited, then, when she didn’t say anything more, he finally did sigh, running one hand through his expensively styled hair, leaving it tousled, hanging down over his eyes. "I'm going to assume you didn't incriminate the scene in any way? Leave an untidy fingerprint as you were hauling him off?" The glare she shot him answered that. "No, I didn't think so. All right. What do you want to do?"

  "I think...I need to know how he died."

  Which would mean actually examining the body. Her partner grimaced. “Better you than me.”

  “Mulder hung around when Scully did autopsies.”

  “Mulder didn’t have anything better to do. I do.”

  As though on cue, the phone lit up, and he made a shooing motion in her direction as he picked up the receiver, automatically making the sea change from retrieval agent of dubious legality to legitimate art dealer. Wren stuck her tongue out at him, and left.

  oOo

  They had stored the body in one of the rooms in the basement, where Sergei kept the materials needed to stage the gallery’s ever-changing exhibits: pedestals, backdrops, folding chairs. She opened the door, and turned on the light, half expecting the corpse to be sitting up and looking around.

  But the body lay where she had left it, on its back, on the cold cement floor. “Hi,” she said, still standing in the doorway. That sense of a presence was gone, as though in bringing it here she had managed to appease its ghost. But it seemed rude, somehow, to poke and pry without at least some small talk beforehand.

  “I don’t suppose you can tell me what happened to you?” She closed the door behind her, and locked it. Sergei’s gallery assistants were gone for the night, but better overcautious than having to explain a dead body.

  Wren swallowed, and put the book she was carrying down on the nearest clear surface. No point trying to recall anything from her high school biology courses–that, as her mentor used to say, was what we had books for. “Rigor mortis,” she said, and flicked two of her fingers its direction. The book opened, pages riffling until the section she needed lay open. Taking a small tape recorder out of her pocket, she pressed “record” and put it next to the book.

  “The body is that of an older male, maybe…a really rough fifties. He’s wearing jeans, sneakers, and a long-sleeved button down shirt. Homeless, probably–his skin looks like he hasn’t washed in a while.” She walked around the body, trying to look at it objectively. “Hair, graying brown. Long–seriously long. This guy hadn’t been to the barber in a long time.”

  She stopped, stared at the corpse, trying to decide what it was that struck her as being wrong. “There are no signs of visible trauma. In fact, there’s no sign of anything. Unless he died from an overdose of dirt.” It might have been a heart attack, or something internal, she reminded herself. The only way to tell would be to cut him open… “Ew,” she said out loud. “Riger mortis. Tell me about it.”

  There was a faint hum, like that of a generator somewhere starting up, and a voice recited: “The stiffening and then relaxing of muscles after death, as caused by the change in the body’s chemical composition from alkaline to acid. Process typically begins in the face, and spreads down the body, beginning approximately two hours after death and lasting twelve to forty-eight hours. A body in full rigor will break rather than relax its contraction.”

  Wren flicked her fingers again, and the voice stopped. “The body was stiff, but not rigid when I picked it up,” she said thoughtfully. “And it stretched out okay when we got it in here–nothing broke off or went snap.” She grimaced, then bent down to touch the skin, at first gently, then jabbing harder. “The skin is plastic, not hard. So I guess it’s safe to say rigor’s pretty much wearing off. So he’s been dead at least half a day, maybe more. Not too much more, though–he doesn’t smell anywhere near that bad.” At least, not for a body that had been lying in a filthy alley.

  Sitting back on her heels, she looked at the book. “Next paragraph,” she told it. The voice continued: “Also to be considered is liver mortis, or post-mortem lividity. When a person dies, the red blood cells will settle at the lowest portion of the body. This can be identified by significant marking of the skin. Markings higher on the body would indicate the victim was moved after death.”

  Wren made a face, then she sighed, gave herself a quick, silent pep talk, and reached down to take off his shirt.

  “There better not be anything disgusting hiding in there,” she warned him. “Or I’m so going to throw up on you…"

  Her fingers touched the skin at the base of his neck, and the jolt that went through her knocked her backwards on her rear and halfway across the room.

  "The hell?"

  oOo

  "What am I looking for?"

  Wren shook her head. "If I tell you, you–just touch him."

  Sergei shot her a look, but knelt to do as she asked. He was still wearing a tie, but his shirt sleeves were rolled to his elbows. Long, manicured fingers touched the corpse's hair, then the side of his cold cheek, flinching slightly away from the feel of dead flesh. You never got used to it, he thought.

  "Go on. His torso."

  Sergei placed the palm of his hand flat over the corpse's chest, where Wren had left the shirt half undone. He waited. Then frowned. "What the hell…?"

  "You feel it?"

  Sergei nodded, astonished. He was reasonably sensitive to the natural flow of magic—that was how they’d first met–but this was different somehow. "I feel …something. What is it?"

  "Overrush."

  Sergei pulled his hand away, wiping it on his slacks as though that would rid of the taint of death. "Which is…?"

  "Current. Only, more than that. There’s current residue in him that’s impossibly high. This guy's…God, I don't know how to explain it. I don't even know what it is! But it feels right. That's what you're feeling. It's the only thing that could explain –"

  "Genevieve!"

  He hated shouting at her, but it seemed to do the trick; she grabbed onto it, pulling herself together. "Right. It looks like he got caught up in current, major mondo current, pulled it in–and got ungrounded. Which is impossible. I mean, any lonejack worth th
eir skin knows how to ground. You don't make it past puberty if you can’t."

  "So this fellow should have been able to ground, and dispel any current he couldn't use."

  "Unless," Wren said, even slower than before, "unless somehow, he was stopped."

  Sergei stared at the body. "How? By whom?"

  Wren shrugged, hugging herself. "Damned if I know. I didn't think it was possible. Grounding’s as much mental as physical–like breathing. Which he’s not doing either, any more."

  Sergei sat down heavily on a dark green velvet-covered stool and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "You couldn't have just left him in the alley?"

  She didn’t even bother glaring at him, looking at her watch instead. “Almost seven,” she told him. “You’d better get upstairs and meet our new client. I’ll see about finding the old boy a more final resting place.”

  Sergei caught her arm, nor harsh, but firm. New client be damned. "Be careful," he told her. "I don't like this."

  She put her hand over his. "That makes two of us, partner."

  oOo

  Sergei never asked what she’d done with the body. She never offered to tell him. He told her, instead, about the new client. “It’s something a little different,” he said. Different was good. Different required planning, plotting. That was what they did best, the different ones. The difficult ones. That was why they were the best Retrievers in the business, on either side of the law.

  And different distracted her from the memory of a man torn apart from the inside by too much of the stuff she depending on to exist.

  Lonejackers were all current junkies. The mages’ council might try to rein their people in, keep them under strict control, but the jones was the same. It got in your blood, your bones. If you could jack, you did. End of story. And if you jacked too much…

  Her mentor had gone crazy from current. She had always thought that was the worst thing that could happen. Maybe it wasn’t.

  Sergei's hand touched her waist, his breath warm in her ear. “Stop thinking. That’s my job.”

  Wren nodded once, making her mind go blank. It wasn’t the usual run for Sergei to be with her on a job, but you had to mix it up every now and again. If they start expecting one, give them two. If they expect two, don’t hit them at all that night, that week, that place. And when they expect stealth, walk in the front door.

  “Mr. Didier, a pleasure, a pleasure indeed…” Wren tuned out the host’s nervous bubbling. If ‘jackers were bad about hanging around each other, gallery owners were worse. At least a ‘jacker would let you see the knife before it went into your back.

  She detached herself from Sergei’s side and began to wander around the gallery. It was larger than Sergei’s, and more eclectic. There were a series of oddly-twisted wire shapes that she thought she might like. Then she saw them from a different angle, and shuddered. Maybe not. Snagging a glass of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter, she took a ladylike swig, licked her lips, slanted her gaze around the space as though looking for someone to share her shallowest thoughts with.

  A heartbeat, and she had effectively disappeared from the awareness of everyone else in the room. There wasn’t any real magic to it–herd mentality clothing, a perfectly ordinary body and face, and a strong desire to not be noticed, sewn together by the faintest of mental suggestions wafted along the man-made current that hummed in the lights strung along the room, illuminated the exhibits.

  Walking slowly, seemingly at random, she made a half-circuit of the main floor, then moved up the short, straight staircase against the back of the wall. Nobody saw her lift the velvet rope barricading the steps, nobody saw her move up into the private areas of the gallery. If she hadn't been so intensely focused, she might have felt pride in her skill.

  She barely paused at the primary security system at the top of the stairs. Her no-see-me cantrip was passive, neither defensive nor aggressive, and she passed through the barrier of current without a hitch.

  Reaching into her fashionably useless purse, Wren pulled out a silver compact, from which she took a folded index card. The sketchy lines were a poor substitute for the schematics Sergei had downloaded to his PDA, but that was off-limits on gigs like this one. Anything protected by current the way this gallery was could be set off by electricity as well–even cell-powered. You stayed out of trouble by assuming the worst.

  Once satisfied she knew where she was going, she cast one look back down the stairs, picking Sergei out of the crowd with ease. He was leaning in to hear what an older woman was saying, his shoulders relaxed, his right hand holding a glass, his left gesturing as he replied, making the older woman laugh. Charming the marks. If you didn't know what to look for, you'd never recognize the break in the line of his coat as a holster. The one time Wren had picked the compact, heavy handgun up, she'd spent the next hour dry-heaving over the toilet. Psychometry wasn't one of her stronger skills, but she could feel the lives that gun had taken.

  But hating something didn't mean it wasn't a good idea to bring it along.

  Moving down the hallway, Wren counted doorways silently, stopping when she came to the seventh. A touch of the doorknob confirmed that there were elementals locking it. Trying to use magic to force them out would bring smarter guards down to investigate, exactly what she didn't want to risk.

  Going back to the stairs, she leaned against the wall, just below the protective barrier, and took a deep breath. As she exhaled, slowly, she touched the current, sending a wave of disturbance racing down the stairs.

  The twinkling lights in the gallery window went out with a satisfying pop, followed in quick succession by the lights over the exhibits. As the crowd milled about in confusion, Wren raced back down the hallway and slipped inside the seventh room, trusting the chaos downstairs would hide her own intrusion.

  Inside, the room was dimly lit, three paintings stacked against the wall like so much trash. Each one cost more than her mother's house. Sergei would have had conniptions, if he'd seen them treated like that. But Wren wasn't interested in their artistic value. A razor taped to the sole of her shoe let her slice the bottom painting out of its frame and remove the piece of pink-hued bone that had been pressed between two layers of canvas. The relic went into a small, rubber-lined case that fit in her pocket, and the painting was placed back into the frame. A finger run along the serrated edges, and a tiny draw-down of power, and the two layers sealed themselves together again. Done, and prettily, too, if she did say so herself.

  "Sssst!"

  She managed not to freak by the skin of her teeth, turning to glare at Sergei standing behind her.

  "They're frisking everyone downstairs," he told her, heading off any questions. "We need another exit."

  "Chyort," she swore, using one of his personal favorites. "Right. This way."

  "This way" ended up being a long hallway without a single door off it until they came to a T intersection. Sergei looked decidedly unhappy, his gun now out and ready in his hand. Wren barely spared it a glance, too busy listening to the hum of current throughout the building. It was alert now, singing in activity, but very little of it was directed at them. The building was locking down, tucking itself up tight. "No, down here," she said suddenly, grabbing his free hand and tugging him to the left, concentrating on the patterns.

  Four steps down, Sergei stopped so suddenly she was pulled backwards by his weight. She recovered, looked up into something big, ugly, and smelling of wet fur. The wide metal collar around its dog-like neck shimmered with controlling current-marks. It pulled back, its mouth opening to show huge, silvery-white teeth in double rows like a shark's. Behind it, Wren could hear the faint noises of the rest of its pack. They were screwed, now.

  "Shoot it! Shoot it!" she yelled, but Sergei was already moving, pushing her behind himself.

  Wren flattened herself against the wall as he sighted, steadied, and slowly squeezed the trigger. The sharp crack of the .38 echoed down the hallway past them like a miniaturized sonic boom. The creatu
re checked it pace as the bullet hit it square in the chest. It shook its head, as though annoyed by horseflies, and snorted, a wet, sticky sound.

  Sergei cursed. "Now what?"

  Wren didn't bother replying, sliding forward against the plaster wall, feeling for the wiring hidden underneath, pulling whatever energy she could find into herself. It was going to hurt, but not as much as getting eaten. Then she sprang at the creature, grabbing at the collar. Sparks flew as current met current, and Wren yelped but didn't let go. The beast staggered, fell back, died. Wren unclenched her fingers, staggering a little in pain and dizziness.

  "Let's go!" Sergei said, holstering his gun and grabbing her by the scruff of the neck.

  Wren yelped again, but ran with him. Down the hall, through a heavy fire door, a pause on the landing to determine–up or down?–then up to another fire door and into a hallway that was the exact replica of the one they'd left behind.

  "What did you do to that thing, anyway?" he asked, breathing hard.

  "Short circuit," she said. He grimaced, as though he should have known better than to ask. They took a corner at a full out run, and stopped.

  "Oh hell."

  Wren stared at the blank wall. She could hear the hounds still on their trail, despite the fire doors, could smell the sweat on her skin, Sergei's. She could feel the thrum of blood racing in her veins. Panic bubbled just below the surface. But Sergei's voice, next to her, was calm.

  "Get us out of here."

  She knew what he was asking.

  I can't!

  We're dead either way. Or worse…

  She reached, grabbing every available strand of current, draining every power source in the building, siphoning off Sergei until he staggered. Filled and overflowing, practically sparking and glowing from within, she grabbed her partner in a bear hug and threw—

  There was no transition. Her chin to the ground, palms abraded by macadam, vomit pouring from her mouth as everything she'd ever eaten came back in double-time. Her body ached and quivered and she was drenched in cold, sticky sweat.