Staying Dead

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Denise had worked for Oliver Frants most of her adult life. She knew what he was asking. And, to her credit, she didn’t flinch as he reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out a small, intricately woven straw box with an oddly liquid design, like an hourglass but not, on the lid. He slid the box across the table toward her, and something inside it shhhhhssssssshhhed like old grass in the wind.

  The assistant still sitting at her desk heard a noise in the main office. A sibilant, sharp noise, like metal on metal. A wet slap, like flesh on flesh, and a muffled moan of agony. And then silence.

  She placed her hands palm down on her desk, stared at the well-manicured fingers that cost fifty dollars every single week to keep in ideal condition, and swallowed hard.

  Wren spent the rest of the afternoon reading up on the newest generation of motion detectors—not her idea of light reading, but essential to keeping up to date in her particular line of work. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you couldn’t use current. Wren refused to be caught with her pants down if and when that happened to her.

  Sprawled on the carpet in the third bedroom, which was otherwise filled with her considerable research library, engrossed despite herself by journals with ten-point type and convoluted electrical diagrams, time got away from her.

  “Ah, hell,” she muttered when she actually glanced down at her watch. She shuffled the journals into a messy pile and left them there, closing the bedroom door firmly behind her. One finger pressed against the knob and a narrow thread of current flowed from her to wrap around the metal mechanism, locking the tumblers in place. Not that it would keep out anyone determined to get in, but the spell was tied to her just enough to let her know if the attempt was made. She could have coaxed some elementals into baby-sitting for her, to act like a siren if the thread was broken, but the reality was that when she saw elementals clustered, that drew her attention to the lock rather than away. And why put up a sign saying “important things behind this door” if you were trying to keep people out?

  She grabbed her keys from the bowl in the kitchen, shoving her feet into a pair of low-heeled boots as she headed out the door, locking it carefully behind her with the more commonplace and nonmagical dead bolts every New Yorker installed as a matter of course.

  Three-quarters of the way down the narrow apartment stairs, she realized that she had left the folder P.B. had given her on the kitchen table.

  “Grrrr…urrrggghh.” She reversed herself midstep and dashed back up, knocking open the four dead bolts and grabbing the bright orange folder. Locking up took more precious time, and she was swearing under her breath in some colorful Russian phrases she had picked up from Sergei by the time she finally hit the street.

  With all that, despite the fact that she was only walking a few blocks, it was closer to seven forty-five before she made it to Marianna’s. She paused on the street outside the tiny storefront, clutching the folder in her hand as though she might forget it again somewhere, and checked her appearance in the reflective glass door.

  She thought about the lipstick she had left untouched on her bathroom counter, and made a face at herself. You don’t need to put on a face for Sergei, for God’s sake, she snarled mentally. He’d seen her at three in the morning, drenched in sweat and splattered with both their blood, and not blinked. So long as she didn’t actively embarrass him in a social setting, she could paint herself in blue-and-green stripes and he’d just say something like, “Interesting outfit, Genevieve.”

  And why did it matter, anyway? If there was one thing she knew, without a doubt, it was that Sergei gave a damn about what was inside, not out. So why did that thought, increasingly, make her feel depressed instead of comforted?

  Job, Valere. Job.

  Squaring her shoulders, she pushed open the door. Callie looked up from her seat at the bar, saw it was her, and merely nodded toward the table where Sergei was waiting.

  Wren shook her head in mock disgust, although she wasn’t sure if it was at herself or her partner. Well, of course he was there before she was. Odds were good that he had arrived at exactly seven-twenty-nine, trench coat over one arm, briefcase at his side, taken one look at the restaurant, saw she wasn’t there yet, sighed, and requested a table in the back and a glass of sparkling water, no ice.

  “Been here long?” she asked, slipping into the seat opposite Sergei. He looked up from his notepad, then looked at his watch. “A little over fifteen minutes,” he said, confirming her suspicion.

  In a simple but expensive gray suit and burgundy tie, Sergei could have passed unnoticed in the carpeted halls of any brokerage house. Broad-shouldered, with a close-cropped head of dark hair and a nose that was just a shade too sharp for good looks matched to an astonishingly stubborn square chin, he could just as easily have been a former quarterback-turned-minor-league newscaster, or a successful character actor.

  What he was, in fact, was the owner and operator of a very discreet, wildly overpriced art gallery. It was through the gallery that he made the contacts who often had need of Wren’s services: private citizens, mostly, but also the occasional museum or wholesaler who didn’t want to go through the police or—even worse—the insurance companies to reclaim their stolen artwork.

  And, on occasion, something a little more…unusual. Like this case. Sorry, she amended even though Sergei couldn’t hear her thought, this situation.

  Callie came over, wiping her hands on the front of the white apron tied around her waist, and stood by their table, one bleached-blond eyebrow raised. “Your usual?” she said to Wren.

  “Nah, I think I’ll live dangerously.” She scanned the chalkboard behind the bar with a practiced eye. “Give me the Caesar salad and the filet of sole.”

  “Which is exactly what you’ve had the past three times. Experiment a little, willya?” Callie had the flat-toned voice of someone trying to pretend they weren’t from around here, but unlike almost every other waiter and waitress in town, she wasn’t waiting for the big break to sweep her off to Hollywood.

  “And a glass of Chianti.”

  “Ooo, red instead of white. You are living dangerously.” Not that being a professional waitress made her any more respectful of her clientele. Just the opposite, actually.

  “See why I love this place?” Wren asked her companion.

  “Indeed. A tossed salad and the halibut, please. Nothing else to drink.”

  “You guys have really got to calm your wild lives down,” the waitress said in disgust, stalking off to the kitchen with a practiced flounce.

  “We’re such a disappointment to her.”

  Wren snorted. Callie had been flirting madly with Sergei for two years now, ever since Wren moved into the neighborhood and they started coming here regularly, and he remained serenely unresponsive. Disappointment didn’t even begin to cover it. Wren could understand Callie’s point of view, though. If she wasn’t so sure he’d look at her blankly, or worse yet give her the “we’re partners, nothing more” speech, she might have made a play for him, too. Well, maybe not when they first partnered. But lately…it was weird, how someone so familiar could suddenly one day, totally out of the blue and with a random thought, become…interesting. In that way.

  Damn it, Valere, focus! “Whatcha got for me?”

  Sergei lifted a plain manila envelope out of his briefcase and handed it to her. “The names of all the highly-placed executives, both within the Frants Corporation and at rival organizations, who would have reason to hold a grudge of this magnitude, and the financial wherewithal to hire someone to perform magic of this level. You?”

  “Bunch of folk with the mojo to do the job themselves, almost all carrying a mad-on of one kind or another for our client. Strictly low-budget grievances, though.” She pulled out a legal-size piece of paper from the file and handed it to him in exchange. It was a copy of the original list P.B. had given her, with her own notes added under each name. “Doubt they’d be in any of your databases.”

  “Don’t ever underestimate my
resources,” he told her severely. “Many people who think they’re invisible often—”

  “Leave a fluorescent trail. Yeah, yeah, I know.” One of the few “resources” of his that Wren had ever met in person was a former forensic investigator named Edgehill, who was paying off some unnamed but very large favor done in the distant past. He was a slight, frantic-eyed man with wildly-gesturing hands. Listening to him talk was sort of like watching an episode of CSI on fast forward while taking speed. But his shit was almost always on the money.

  “Would the police have anything on file?”

  Wren snorted. “Nobody on this list. Strictly no-see-um talents.”

  “Noseeyum?”

  “Too good to get caught.”

  “Ah.” He grinned at her, the expression softening his face and putting an appealing glint in his dark brown eyes. Behind that hard-assed, hard-pressed agent façade, she thought not for the first time, Mr. Sergei Didier had a real wicked sense of humor that didn’t get nearly enough air time. “Kin of yours?”

  “Hardly.” Without false modesty, Wren knew her worth, and so did Sergei, to the penny. These guys were good, but she was better. Which was why she didn’t appear on other people’s little lists. Even Sergei, with all his surprisingly good contacts and connections, hadn’t known about her way back when until sheer coincidence—and a nasty accident caused by someone trying to kill him—brought them into contact.

  Wren’s mentor, a man named John Ebenezer, had taught her from the very beginning to keep a low personal profile for a great many reasons, all of them having to do with staying alive and under her own governance. There were three kinds of current-mages in the world: Council-mandated, lonejackers and dead. Just because a Talent had no interest in being under the Council’s thumb didn’t mean they might not want her there, now or someday later. Better not to take the chance. That was the lonejacker’s first law: steer clear of the Mage Council.

  Their salads arrived at that moment, and they paused long enough to accept their plates, and wave away Callie’s offer of freshly ground pepper.

  “I’ve never understood that.”

  “What?” He looked at her, his forehead scrunching together in puzzlement.

  “The fresh pepper thing. Who puts pepper on their salad?”

  Sergei shrugged. “Someone must, otherwise they wouldn’t offer it.”

  “I think they do it just to see who’s stupid enough—or sheep enough—to say yes.”

  “You have a suspicious mind.”

  Wren grinned at him. “You do say the sweetest things.”

  “Eat your salad,” he told her, lifting his own fork with a decided appetite. Her list lay just to the side of his plate, so he could skim it without distracting himself from his food, or running the risk of getting salad dressing on the paper. Wren watched him eat and read for a moment, then picked up her own fork and dug into the pile of greens. She was going to wait until the dishes were cleared away to go through the neatly-clipped-together, ordered, indexed and color-coded material properly.

  “Hey, this name was on my list,” he said suddenly.

  “What?” That got her attention fast.

  “This name.” He stabbed one well-manicured finger at the paper as though it were somehow at fault. “It was on my list.”

  Wren took the paper from him. “Which one?”

  “Third from the bottom. George Margolin.”

  Wren scanned the list, coming to the name he indicated. “Huh. Talent, yeah, but not buckets of it. Not affiliated, not really a lonejack—he’s passing.” In other words, he wasn’t using current in any way, shape, or form that was obvious to the observer, and probably didn’t use it at all. At least, not consciously. But you never knew for certain. And some folk were just naturally sneaky about it.

  “Great. Move that guy up to the top of the suspects list. Anyone in a suit that P.B. hears about is going to be dirty, one way or another.”

  “P.B.?” Sergei didn’t roll his eyes—that would have been beneath him—but his voice indicated his level of unimpressedness.

  “Hey, don’t dis my sources,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “That furry little bastard always comes through, which is more than I can say for some of your people. I seem to recall a little screw-up with IDs that almost got me shot by the cops in Tucson.”

  “All right, all right. Point taken.”

  She had to give Sergei that. He was a xenophobic bastard when it came to things like demons and fatae, but he didn’t cut humans any slack when they screwed up, either. Especially when it was their own lives on the line.

  She flattered herself that he might have been just as annoyed at that snitch if he hadn’t ended up in that Tucson jail along with her.

  “So how come this guy’s on your list?”

  “You have the file, you look.”

  “Why? You’ve memorized the important stuff already.” Wren never understood why people wasted brain-space on anything they didn’t need right at hand. That was the magic of writing stuff down, so you didn’t have to cram it all in your head. But Sergei was incapable of letting go of anything to do with a job, at least while the file was hot. For all she knew, he did an info dump at the end of every case, mentally shredding all that info in order to make room for the new stuff.

  She had a mental image of Sergei running his brain through a shredder, and had to stifle a snort of laughter.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing.” She bit the inside of her lips, made a “go on” gesture. “Tell me about Margolin.”

  He frowned at her, dark eyes narrowed in suspicion, but complied. “Mid-forties. Computer genius of sorts, chief technical officer for Frants Incorporated. Odd, for a Talent.”

  “But not unheard of, especially if he’s passing. That low-level a Talent, probably enhances the tech stuff rather than shorting it out. Lucky bastard.” Wren didn’t carry high-tech toys because it was an exercise in frustration, not because she didn’t like them.

  “According to this, he’s smart, savvy, and very very disgruntled. RUMINIT says he felt that he was passed over for promotion because of his religious beliefs.”

  “What, he’s a Scientologist?”

  It was Sergei’s turn to laugh. “No, agnostic. Rather militantly so. As in ‘I don’t know, and you don’t either.’”

  Wren tried to raise only one eyebrow and failed, pretty sure that the resulting expression made her look like an inquisitive owl. “I can see where that could get up someone’s nose, yeah. But if he’s passing…Yeah.” She checked her notes. “Nope, no real training, far as anyone knows. No mentor ever claimed him.” That was how Talents worked, mostly; one-on-one apprenticeships. Went all the way back to when it wasn’t safe to work together—or tell anyone what you were, so you tied the knowledge up in secrecy and oaths. “He doesn’t have the firepower to do it himself, and I can’t see him having enough information without a mentor to track down and hire a mage to do something like this, either.” She narrowed her eyes as a sudden thought hit her. “Unless he’s from a Talented family that’s stayed low-profile, flying under the radar? Neezer said sometimes it ran in the bloodline like that. But not often, not so’s you could track it, anyway. So maybe he’s not private enemy number one after all.” She paused. “I wonder how he got on P.B.’s list.”

  Sergei squinted at the list, trying to make out the handwriting. “Ursine?”

  “Usury. Somebody’s got a light wallet, if he’s paying out the loan sharks, hey? Odd, you’d think he’d be making plenty of money. Kids’ tuition go up? He a gambler? The Cosa’s not pretty on people who welsh on debts.”

  “No information on either. And they run some pretty heavy scans on people for exactly that. I’ll take it back and see what some determined digging can produce.”

  Sometimes, Wren wondered about Sergei’s snitches. Not their ability—their origins. Mostly they were the usual: artists who heard every bit of gossip that rumbled through the collectibles world, high-rent agen
ts who knew where the money was buried and the bodies bankrolled—that sort of thing. But every now and then she needed information you couldn’t get from a cocktail party, or through a discreet inquiry, and then his clear brown eyes would go dark and shadowed, and he’d refuse to say yea or nay…but the information always came through. And unlike his other sources, and her own, the information they gave was always straight-up. Always.

  So she wondered, but never pried. For all that they pretty much lived in each other’s pockets during cases, weeks could go by otherwise when they only talked briefly on the phone. There was an awful lot about Sergei’s life she didn’t have clue one about.

  Oh, Wren had known back when they first hooked up that her new partner was a man with secrets, not the least of which was how he’d even known about Talents and the Cosa in the first place. It wasn’t as though they took out ads in the local trades or anything. But he did know, and he never said how, and that had actually made her trust him more, not less. If she was going to let him in on her secrets, after all, she had to respect that he held others as securely, right? But oh, the desire sometimes to crack him open and see what secrets came rolling out…

  In a purely mental, informational way. Of course. She’d seen the women he socialized with, had even met a few of them over the years when their social paths overlapped. Lovely women, Nulls each and every one; elegant and articulate and educated, usually artistic as hell. And visible. Always highly visible. Memorable, even. Unlike her own eminently forgettable self.

  And so it goes, Valere. You are what you are. And so is he, and so are the both of you together. Concentrate on the job.

  “Anyone on your list you think is likely?” Sergei asked.

  Pulled from personal to professional musings without warning, Wren shook her head, replaying his words as she chewed on a particularly leafy green. Likely as a thunderstorm in summer. There was someone on her list who had the talent to pull something like this, and the probable grudge and twisted sense of humor to make it seem like a good idea. All she had to do was name him, and Sergei would be able to run a complete dossier. But the words didn’t come out of her mouth.