Laura Anne Gilman - Tales of the Cosa Nostradamus

by Laura Anne Gilman

  "Picture gone missing

  hands not meant, not deserving

  Retriever reclaims."

  It wasn't great verse, but it didn't have to be. It just had to be meaningful, in form and function. Her mother loved haiku, so using that form made her think of her mother, which made the form meaningful. And she needed to get that picture back. Which made the content meaningful. And…there it was. Her hands itched as the current she had generated reached like a magnet to lodestone, forcing her forward, stepping over the old man's body, to where the painting was tacked up with thumb pins—Sergei's going to shi —on the wall behind the counter.

  "Looks like the old boy was trying to make a getaway... pity he didn't make it." She took the painting down, the tingling fading once she made contact with the spelled item. She looked around for the tube, but didn't see it. Refusing to muck around any longer looking for it, she pulled the scrunchie out from her hair, letting the ponytail fall loose, and wrapped it around the re-rolled painting. Ready to get the hell out of there, something made her look back over her shoulder to the body lying on the floor.

  "Ah... hell." She sighed, tucking the roll under one arm and retracing her steps. Stooping low, she put her hand out, palm down and flat. A hesitation, a centering, and then she touched the corpse. Spirits fled in the moment of death, unless there was a damn good reason—or a very strong spell—holding them in place. But while the animus might be gone, the body still had current caught in the biofield every living being generated, the natural electricity that made Kirlian photography possible.

  "What? No! No, mine, mine, mustn't take, mustn't...” a fast-moving figure in front of him, angry, full of rage. "Where is it? She didn't have it on here when she left, which means you have it, now where? Where. Is. It?"

  Whimpering, then another heavy blow. The old man spins under the force, falls to the ground. "Useless old fool.."”

  The sound of something whistling down a shock of red-flaring pain, and...

  Nothing

  Wren came out of the connection like a dog shaking off water, breathing heavy. "Damn damn damn Damn!" He'd been killed for the painting. Killed…and she might have been… No time to think about it, she'd already stayed too long. Not that she was worried about cops showing up to investigate: poor bastard had been dead a day at least.

  Her eyes narrowed at the thought. "Ah…hell." Nobody deserved to rot like that. Slipping out the front door, she wiped the handle clean, then uncoiled a narrow rope of current from her inner pool and reached out with it, brushing the surface of the burglar alarm.

  The loud wail of the alarm covered the sound of her boot heels on pavement, moving in the general direction of away.

  oOo

  The painting remained untouched on the coffee table where Wren had tossed it when she came in the door to Sergei's apartment. Wren was curled up on the sofa, while Sergei paced back and forth in front of her.

  "Who the hell are we working for, Sergei? Because I get the feeling there's something they didn't tell us. Something that almost got me killed. And did get that poor bastard —"

  "Bob Goveiss."

  "Bob, killed. So give."

  "Yes. That's what doesn't make sense."

  "What?"

  "The violence." He shook his head. "Those paintings were on loan from the French government. The same government that's about to splinter apart from the inside, which could have awkward repercussions on the current political scene."

  "So sayeth CNN, amen," Wren said, but she was listening. "And…?"

  "And, the organization that hired us was planning on holding that painting hostage, to force the various factions to come back to the table."

  Wren stared at her partner. "Okay, huh?"

  He paced back and forth, gesturing with his hands as he spoke. "It's rare, but there have been a number of cases where an item is taken to force two sides to cooperate or risk being shown in public as the destroyer of a priceless work of art. Most recently in the theft of a Chagall painting: a ransom note was sent demanding peace in the Middle East before the painting would be returned. A useless demand, really, but it made a splash in the news."

  Wren considered that, a small smile appearing on her face. "I like that," she said finally.

  "Yeah. It does have appeal. But it doesn't always work. Anyway, it still doesn't make sense. Why would anyone who know about the heist want to —"

  "Play a round of Kill the Retriever?"

  "Yes."

  "Dunno. That's your job to find out. I'm going to home before I forget what it looks like, catch some sleep before my next turn playing peacemaker. Call me when you find out anything." She got up, stretched, looked at her partner. "But do me a favor? Lock the doors when I leave. And don't be careless."

  Sergei shook his head, his squared-off face softening as he smiled. "I'm always careful, Zhenechka."

  Wren thought briefly of the nasty little gun he carried on some jobs, and shuddered. "Right. Better them than us and all that jazz." She kissed him goodbye, rubbing her cheek against his five o'clock stubble, and let herself out.

  oOo

  The next evening he caught up with her on Park duty. A piskie had decided to pick on her, spluttering insults on her paternity, her maternity and the general state of her underwear. Since piskies were, on average, twenty inches high and five pounds soaking wet, Wren's reaction was closer to embarrassed annoyance than anything else. She kept trying to kick it, but it would dance out of the way and come back a few moments later, still talking.

  "Goid, you're annoying," she said to it.

  "And you could use a drag into the lake. Wanna try?"

  "Remember what happened last time you tried dunking a lonejack?"

  Clearly it did, dancing back again until it was just out of reach. "Annoying human. Spoil all our fun."

  "Be glad that's all I'm spoiling, you annoying little wart."

  "Want me to shoot him?" Sergei asked, falling into step beside her.

  "You got a bullet small enough?"

  "I hear tell that's all he's got," Goid crowed, then bit his tongue with an audible yelp when Sergei turned to glare at it. It was no secret in the Cosa that The Wren's partner had little love for the fatae, the purely supernatural creatures of the Cosa Nostradamus.

  "Scoot," he said to it. Goid scooted.

  "Damn. Next time the Cosa calls, you can answer, okay? What's up?"

  "Nothing." His voice was sharp, and she could practically feel the irritation rising off him, now that the distraction of the fatae was gone. "As in, not a god-damned thing. As in, my contact seems to have disappeared."

  "The rest of the payment got deposited?"

  One or two of the lines in Sergei's forehead eased out. "The rest was deposited this afternoon, soon as they got their hands on the painting."

  "Well then." Wren let out a little sigh. "What's a possible attempt on my life, so long as we're paid."

  He cast a sideways look at her. "You mean that?"

  They walked a few more paces along a tree-shrouded path, ignoring the faint giggles and rustling branches following them. "No," she said finally, on a sigh. "No, I don't. Not after…I felt him. And I felt him die. I can't walk away from that."

  "Right. Lowell did a rundown on this organization for me. They check out clean, he says—but he was very surprised that they had the money to pay us. Not a dime in their collective kitty, and no fundraisers going on in their name."

  "Breaks my heart, it does." She didn't like Sergei's assistant, to say the least, but the twit did know how to do his research. "So they hocked the furniture to pay us?" The giggles got louder as they reached a particularly large tree, and Wren put a hand on Sergei's arm to stop him. "Hang on."

  She slipped out of her sneakers and planted her bare feet in the grass by the side of the road. Safely grounded, she opened herself to the current of the world around her. Colors swirled, electrons danced, and she sorted through the information tugging at her senses until she was able to discern th
e slightly off pattern twined around the tree. A tendril snaked out, stroking the ends of the pattern, then retracting in a flash as the pattern snapped out, attempting to snare her within its own tendrils.

  She came back to herself with a blink, after confirming that the trap had been sprung. A chorus of disappointed "Awwwws…" trailed after them as she slipped her shoes back on and they walked on.

  "Okay. So: no money. And yet they manage to scrape together 17 thou to pay us. So what's the deal? They borrow the money from someone to pay for the retrieval, and then that someone decides they'd rather have the painting than the promise of money?"

  He shot her a sideways glance. "Maybe. Or it was never actually the organization who wanted it, at all. We might have been set up."

  "But then why make the final payment? I mean, we're tough, but we're not that tough. Are we?"

  "More to the point, do they think we are? If so, not a bad thing."

  "Also besides the point, your ego aside," and she squeezed his hand to soften the words. "Ignore who hired us for a minute. Who went after me? Did that same person kill poor old Bob? What do we have? An organization, poor as proverbial church mice, who still manages to retain us to retrieve an object that they claim they're going to use to force political unity.

  "Okay, here's a question for you."

  Sergei nodded, indicating he was listening.

  "Why did they bother to tell you what they'd be using it for?"

  He let out a huff of breath. They walked in silence through the park, past human joggers running in pairs, and the occasional biker in bright spandex zipping through at high speeds. If any of the fatae were still watching them, they were being quieter about it now.

  "I've been wondering about that too. At first I thought the guy was just a talker. But then I started to wonder if maybe his verbal diarrhea had a purpose. The assignment was the kind of thing you can't help talk about, because it's so different from the usual. But we don't talk about clients outside the office…"

  "You would have if I'd turned up dead. Especially if they'd done it in such a way to suggest that, rather than waiting to be handed the painting, they'd stolen it from us."

  Sergei stopped like he'd walked into a wall. "Chyort! Stolen it back and then used it to make peace. With your blood. Damn straight I would have talked. I would have blackened their reputation until they couldn't stand under the weight of it."

  "And the talks would be undermined by doubt, maybe just enough to break them."

  Sergei started swearing again, alternating between Russian and English, until Wren was certain that she could see blue current sparking and shimmering in front of his mouth.

  "We're going to have to do something about them using us like that," she said thoughtfully, almost to herself. "Bad for business, otherwise…"

  oOo

  Sergei had called the dinner-date, his voice on the answering machine filled with such glee she could only imagine the retainer he'd managed to con out of someone. She wasn't in the mood to party, her brain still filled with the annoyance of having been tricked into getting involved in politics, not to mention the attempt on her life, but dinner was dinner was dinner, especially if Sergei was buying. She threw herself into the shower, grabbed the first summer-weight dress she could find that wasn't wrinkled, and threw it on. Things had changed enough in their relationship over the past year that she slicked on lipstick and mascara, and tied her hair up in a looked-more-complicated-than-it-was knot before heading out the door. Not that any of that was going to turn her into a raving beauty, but Sergei appreciated the effort. And she appreciated his appreciation.

  They were regulars at Marinana's, to the point where Callie, the waitress, didn't even bother getting up to show her to their table. Of course, it wasn't that large a place, either. She could see Sergei sitting in the back the moment she walked in. And he was grinning like he was about to choke on wee yellow feathers.

  "You're scaring me. What?"

  "I had a little chat with an old friend of mine who was shocked, shocked to hear that criminals had their hands on any part of the "Fabulous Finds." A few hours later, this job came in. Since we are, after all, the only team who could pull something like this off…"

  He slid a piece of paper across the table to her. She picked it up, noting first the weight of the paper, then the fact that it was letterhead stationery, and then her mind took in the words and she started to laugh as Sergei called Callie over to open the wine.

  "The Meadows Museum board would like to make use of your services to Retrieve a painting which went missing from our premises on the night of July 14th…"

  Getting paid to take back what they took in the first place, and undercut any attempt the organization might make to go ahead with their plan anyway.

  "I love this job," Wren said, raising her glass.

  "To karma," Sergei agreed. "To karma, and the joy of being the boot that gives it a kick in the ass. Zdorov'ye!"

  The PUPIs – private, unaffiliated, paranormal investigators–first appeared in BRING IT ON, but the full story of their founding will be told in HARD MAGIC (May 2010

  This story first appeared in the anthology UNUSUAL SUSPECTS, edited by Dana Stabenow (Ace 2008), and gave readers the 'origin story' of Bonnie Torres, paranormal investigator.

  Illumination

  The boat was long and lean, and so was the guy pulling the oar. I leaned out so far over the bridge, I probably would have fallen if Joseph hadn’t grabbed the back of my belt.

  “Darling, the water level is high enough. No need to add your drool to it.”

  “But…pretty!”

  Joseph has known me since I was eight. He was there when my hormones kicked in, there when I went through the “boys or girls” agita. He was there for all of my not-too-stellar high school career and he was there when I settled into semi-responsible adulthood. I don’t think he’s blinked once.

  Well, maybe when I got into Amherst. I think he blinked then. He wouldn’t admit to crying.

  “Your mind on the crisis at hand, please?” he said without too much hope.

  The crisis was my dad. As usual.

  J.. held the letter in his hand. It had come a few days before, but I hadn’t gotten around to opening it until the previous night. I’d read halfway through and pinged J.. In every way that counted, he was my real father. Zaki Torres was just my genetic donor and occasional pain in the posterior.

  “I think he’s dead this time,” I told J.. I wasn’t sure, but it felt probable.

  “Is that gut instinct, or something else?”

  I had to think about that for a minute. “I don’t know. Maybe both.”

  Gut instinct was the normal everyday “I got a bad feeling about this” sort of thing. Something else was, well, something else. And it had a lot less to do with feeling that knowing. Or, as J. put it, with kenning.

  Magic worked like that, sometimes.

  I cast a longing look after the sculler, by then halfway up the river, and sighed. J.. hadn’t brought me there for the scenery, more’s the pity. There’d be time for that later, if I was lucky. If not, well, there were always new boys all over the place.

  “Bonnie…”

  “Right.” I leaned against the stonework of the bridge and tried to soak up the cool spring sunlight into my skin. I’m pale like skim milk, with the annoyingly white-blonde hair to match, but I keep hoping that some melanin will sneak into my epidermis, somehow.

  “Let’s review the facts. My father, also known as Zaki the King of the Shiftless Losers..”

  J made an inarticulate sound of protest, but it was mainly a formality. He’s known my dad since I was eight, too. Zaki’s Talent was slight enough to make him almost a Null, so he’d known he had to get someone else to mentor me. Thank God for great favors. Unfortunately, Zaki’s idea of an acceptable mentor for his rather–modesty aside–strongly Talented eight-year-old daughter would probably make a slumlord blush. J had been walking by on the street below the apartment when
Zaki tried to make the introductions, and I had been a pretty good judge of character even then. Desperate to find an alternative–any alternative–I had let out what J later described as a mental all-points-bulletin, asking for a mentor who didn’t suck. My exact wording, apparently.

  J had been upstairs and talking to my dad before either of them knew what was happening. Which was how a backstreet lonejack kid got a hoity-toity Council mentor, and don’t think that didn’t raise a few eyebrows and almost as many hackles on both sides.

  But it worked. For us, anyway.

  “He is, J. No use candy-coating it. He has, according to this letter, managed to get himself once again in debt to not only a loan shark, but a loan shark that would think nothing of roasting him over the coals for a human BBQ. What the hell possessed him to borrow from a cave dragon, anyway?”

  “Because cave dragons always have money, and they take a long view. Usually.”

  “Yeah. Usually.” North American cave dragons, from what J had gotten around to telling me, weren’t all that much like their older cousins in Europe and Asia. They were small–only around ten feet long–and sort of dingy-looking, and generally didn’t hold with the eating of maidens, razing of homestead, or wholesale stealing of livestock.

  They did like their pretties, though, and stuffed their mattresses with cash, just like all misers. And they liked a nice return on their investments.

  Only an idiot did a runner on a debt owed to them.

  An idiot, apparently, like my genetic donor.

  oOo

  A dutiful daughter probably would have rushed out into the mountains and demanded an answer–or at least the personal effects and whatever was left of the body. But it was spring, an the mountains were damned cold and muddy just then. And J didn’t raise a dummy.

  I went to the source, instead.”

  “Bonnie! Baby!”

  I dodged the attempted embrace, and sidestepped my way into the apartment. Claire, my dad’s girlfriend, wasn’t bad as they went–she was clean, sober, and actually cared about him. She was also intent on turning me into the daughter she’d never gotten around to raising, and at nineteen I wasn’t interested in suddenly having a mommy.