Staying Dead

by Laura Anne Gilman

  The problem was, a wizzart simply didn’t have anything left over after the magic. Their entire existence was dedicated towards channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every cell turned towards the goal of becoming the perfect conductor. And that included their brain cells.

  Because of that, wizzarts lived in the moment, the instant of action. It made them irascible, ornery, obnoxious—name your adjective and someone would double it without hesitation. “Waste of current” was the popular view. But the Council, in one of its few and far-between acts of mercy, had forbidden anyone to harm wizzarts. There but for the grace of God go you, was their official line. Truth was, Wren knew, the Council used wizzarts. When it came to the major mojos, to understanding the byplay of forces, the correlation of events and probabilities, they were the chaos-theory scientists of the Cosa Nostradamus.

  Unstable, yeah. But the very fact that they were that unpredictable also meant that Max could have done it, either for a client, or a passing whim. The only prediction you could make about the unpredictable is that they’re going to do something you didn’t even have in the list of possibilities.

  “I have a problem,” she said quickly, before his attention went into a sideslip. “Someone pulled a nasty job on my client. Someone with a bad sense of the funny. Your name was on the list, and I—” The pressure against her eardrums rose dramatically, and the energies between his hands manifested in zizzing spurts of static electricity. He giggled in pleasure. She had lost him.

  A night spent chasing down leads, checking up on suspects’ alibis and whereabouts, coupled with a morning of phone calls and in-person follow-ups on local suspects, topped by the two-hour drive to this godforsaken town that wasted even more time she probably didn’t have, finally made her temper snap. Ignoring all known procedures and common sense for dealing with wizzarts, she reached forward and slapped her hands over his, forcing the energy into a cage of her own flesh. Energy channeled took on the signature of its user. And right now, trapped between her hands, was a solid buzz of Max-imprinted magic, ready for the scrolling.

  hey hey HEY brat. bitch. A flash of herself, much younger, all eyes and ears and good intentions flickering like a beacon from him. She countered with her own self-image, foot tapping in impatience. It was a little like the icons people used in chat rooms, she’d been told. what what WHAT?

  Irritation came back from him, some resignation—a flash of pride, that she had learned so much since their first meeting. Some disgust, that she sold herself that way, to the highest bidder. And a complete, total lack of information about what she needed to know. He had never even met the client, merely read a newspaper article about the man that annoyed him and spouted off about it in the wrong place.

  “Oh, Max.”

  She released his hands, not apologizing for the hijacking. The formal dance of manners slowed down the mental process, interfered with conductivity.

  That was the popular theory, anyway. Sergei had a long-standing, loudly-spoken opinion that Talents were just naturally rude.

  Dog yawned, his tongue hanging out of his mouth when he was done. Max stared at her, his blue-green eyes trying to dig under her guard, ferret out whatever he was looking for. Wren ignored him the way Dog was ignoring them, waiting for his reaction. Her body appeared relaxed, but that very casualness was preparedness. Whatever hit, she would be ready to dodge out of the way, roll and slip out of range.

  Ignoring the fact that even on an off day Max’s range was further than she could run—to the edge of the property, at least, and likely a full line of sight beyond that. If he got pissed, she was screwed. It was that simple. And that was why wizzarts rarely had houseguests.

  “You’re looking in the wrong place,” he said finally, his voice old and scratchy, as though her insight had worn him out in some measure.

  “Where should I look then?” If he was going to offer aid, she was going to take it. Her mama might have raised a fool, to be here in the first place, but that didn’t mean she had to be stupid about it.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged, the cotton sweater showing new holes as he moved. “I’ll poke through the ether, see what I can find out.”

  There was a tension about him, in the way the pressure pulled in tight around him, that suggested this little get-together was just about over. Dog whined, and rolled onto his other side, facing away from them. Wren stood, looking across the room at the wizzart. “Why?”

  He laughed, a manic sound that made the hair on the back of her arms stand straight up. “’Cause you came to me. ’Cause not killing you’s the last thing I managed to do right. Maybe ’cause you’re all that’s left of John on this green earth.”

  John Ebenezer. Teacher. Friend. Father figure. Gone, ten years and more. It still hurt, the memory.

  “You might want to get out, now.”

  Wren got. The grass didn’t move out of her way this time, instead straining towards the house, as though there was a stiff wind blowing them inward.

  There was. Only it was brewing inside: the center of the whirlwind, a black hole of current. Lightning flashed in the clear blue sky, and Wren felt it shiver down her back, like the first stroke of a massage. She got into the car, tossing her bag onto the seat next to her, and almost flooded the engine in her haste to get the hell out of there.

  Wizzarts. Jesus wept.

  The drive back to the city seemed endless, her brain chasing after one detail or another until she shut it all down with a blast of rock and roll. She might be a jazz kind of girl, but there was nothing like the sound of sledgehammer guitars to get you rolling down the highway. Wren handed in the rental with a kind of regret, patting the hood in farewell as she waited for the attendant to finish checking it out. He was a tiny little guy, bandy-legged, who looked as though he should have been fussing over spindly Thoroughbreds, not standard issue Chevys.

  Once he’d given the other attendant the all-clear, she signed off on the X’d line, collected her copies of the paperwork, and caught the subway home, standing-room-only as everyone else headed home from a tough day at the office, too. Normally an irritation, today she welcomed the press of humanity, sweaty and rude though it might be. The fact that she could stand them, could rub skins with the rest of humanity without freaking, reassured her that she still was one of them. Still sane, normal…as normal—

  As normal as you could be, with the buzz of magic running through your cells when the rest of the world doesn’t feel a thing. When John Ebenezer had first discovered her using Talent to pilfer sodas and candy from the local five-and-dime, he’d dragged her out of the store by one ear. He’d read her the riot act, fed her a lecture on morals, and hadn’t let go until she knew what it was she was doing—what she was. It hadn’t seemed so scary then. He’d been a lot closer to normal then; he’d taught high school, in fact. Biology. Before he too had given himself over to the current, made riding the wave his entire reason for existing. Wizzed out.

  By the time she graduated high school, he was long gone; the toll of his own Talent overwhelming what had been his life. But by then, he’d managed to change her life, almost as much as he finally changed his own. “Maybe ’cause you’re all that’s left of John on this green earth.”

  Sometimes she wished Neezer had just minded his own business that day in the five-and-dime.

  Wren wasn’t a wizzart. She didn’t want to be one, wasn’t, for various fate-be-thanked reasons, likely to become one. But how much had Neezer wanted it, back then? Had Max? Had they told themselves, whistling in the dark, that it couldn’t happen to them?

  “God, woman, stop it!”

  An old Chinese man looked at her sideways, his expression clearly showing what he thought of crazy women who talked to themselves.

  She got off at her stop, taking the steps up to the street two at a time. The fresh air on her face was like a benediction, and she stopped to draw a lungful in. The sky was just beginning to darken, and the shadows of the buildings shaded into dar
k blue the way only city shadows could. Yes! Max could keep the countryside—she felt alive in the city, with its constant hum of energy that nonetheless managed to remain completely impartial. Too many people could be better than none, sometimes.

  Especially if their presence meant you were sane.

  She strode down the street and up to the six-story brick apartment building. It was the tallest building in the neighborhood, standing out against the three-story townhouses and one-story storefronts of Chinese takeout places, psychics, and the ever-present corner delis/flower stores/supermarkets. Depending on what part of town you lived in, they were Korean grocers, or bodegas, or quick-marts.

  She thought about swinging by Jackson’s to get some fresh milk, maybe play the Lotto, but decided against it. She’d do the shopping this weekend, when she had a little more energy.

  But in the instant her feet slowed, contemplating and deciding, her nerves twitched. Back-of-the-neck, millennia of evolution stripped away kind of twitching, what Sergei called the lizard brain. The survival nerve. She sped up again, scanning the sidewalk-side without turning her head too obviously. It could have been one of the kids sitting on the stoop across the street, giving her a too-close once-over. Most people ignored her, even when she wasn’t Disassociating—it made her very nervous when someone didn’t. Or it might have been something as simple, and ignorable, as a mugger in the shadows, sizing her up as a potential meal ticket. That happened on occasion, but they almost always ended up passing her by for the next person coming down the street.

  Nerves, probably. Justifiable, in the aftermath of the day. It couldn’t have been anything else. The Wren was invisible, far as most of the world was concerned. She never met with clients, never had any direct contact with them, and she knew damn well there wasn’t anything she was working on right now that might have followed her home. And yet…

  The question isn’t “are you paranoid.” It’s “are you paranoid enough?”

  She spun on one heel, her keys clenched in her left hand in a defensive hold, ready to scrape the face off anything coming up on her.

  There was nobody there. Two buildings down, the teenagers made rude catcalls that only increased when she glared at them. A flash of current would teach them a lesson…and be a waste of energy she didn’t have right now.

  “You’re getting as bad as Max,” she told herself, turning back and heading up the stairs into her building, praying her words weren’t true.

  On the street, a figure stopped just shy of Wren’s building, watching as she unlocked the door and stepped inside. Wearing a stylish leather coat open over a well-tailored suit, he exuded professional menace that silenced the teenagers even before they noticed the unmistakable leather of a belt holster showing under the coat. Pale eyes looked at them without blinking, and they stared back half in apprehension, half in awe. He smiled at them, not showing any teeth, and they turned tail and fled.

  A glance at his wrist to check the time, and he reached into a coat pocket, extracting a small, very expensive cell phone. Staring up at the fifth floor, where a light had just gone on, he touched a button, and waited for someone to answer on the other end.

  “Bird’s flown home.”

  He waited while the other person relayed the news, his gaze never leaving the window where Wren’s form could be seen, barely, through the rice-paper shade. Then another person took the phone, the deep voice filling the phone’s receiver.

  “No, she was alone. Should I take care of it?”

  The answer was clearly negative. “Right.”

  He hung up and returned the phone to his pocket. With one last look at the window, he turned and walked down the street, disappearing into the growing shadows as though he had never been there.

  Wren tossed her bag on the kitchen counter, and opened the fridge, pulling out a can of Diet Sprite and popping the top. She took a long sip, sighing with pleasure as the ice-cold liquid soothed her throat. Always hydrate, Neezer had told her one summer when she passed out after a particularly exhausting workout. Rehydrate, eat, sleep. You might look like you’ve just been sitting there half-asleep, but the insides of your body will know they’ve been abused. If you don’t take care of them, they won’t take care of you.

  Dropping her jacket, she left it in the middle of the floor, walking down the short hallway into her office. No messages on the machine. She’d check in with Sergei later, after the gallery closed. She frowned. No, damn it, today was—Tuesday, the gallery was open late tonight. She’d talk to him later, then. No rush.

  She flipped the light switch, then turned on the computer. While it booted up, she flipped through the mail, snorting in disgust at the amount of junk mail and more useless circulars that had been shoved into the front door, making it almost impossible to open. She supposed that hand-delivering them employed someone…she just wished they’d pay attention to the “no menus, no flyers” sign on the apartment building’s door! She sorted through them on the off chance something was actually interesting, and spotted yet another pale-blue flyer advertising Village Pest Removal services. “‘Let us remove infestations and unwanted visitations.’” Well, poetic, anyway. Then she frowned, looking more closely at the wording on the sheet of paper: 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.

  “Your entire neighborhood?” Hell of a claim, in Manhattan.

  A hunch tingled at the back of her head, her brain reaching for two and two in order to stretch it into five. Something about the wording sounded unpleasantly familiar. She put the paper down flat on her desk and reached over to pick up the phone and headset. Dialed the phone number listed on the flyer, pacing as she did so.

  “Hello. Yes, I’d like to speak to someone about an…infestation.”

  The voice on the other end of the line was enthusiastic. Perky. Oh so happy and eager to please.

  “Yes, they’re huge…winged, too. I just saw them tonight, and then I saw your flyer…” She was a pretty good actress, if she did say so herself. Wren almost believed that her apartment had been invaded.

  “What? No, I have no idea how they got in, haven’t seen them anywhere else. Well, of course, who goes poking about looking for cockroaches—hello?”

  The perky, friendly boy on the other line had hung up.

  “Expecting something different, were we? Oh yeah. I know who you are now.” They weren’t here for pests—at least not the way New Yorkers usually used the term. Wren snarled and tossed the crumpled-up flyer across the room, missing the wastebasket by an embarrassing margin.

  It was the NYADI—New Yorkers against Demonic Infestation—all over again, she’d eat someone else’s hat if it wasn’t. They had first appeared about three-four years before, when she was still living uptown, made life hell for everyone, Talent and Null alike, before they finally disappeared as suddenly as they’d arrived.

  “Jesus wept, I so don’t need this now!” All it took were a couple of newcomers to the city, who didn’t know enough not to look directly at the strangers sitting next to you on the subway car, and you got spooked vigilantes trying to save humanity from demonkind. Wren snorted. As though demons were some big threat. She blamed the endless repeats of Buffy for that. And The X-Files. Some people really just couldn’t separate fact from fiction.

  But this was way more directed than the ranting street-corner attacks had been. Way more careful, subtle even, which meant someone was thinking. Which was never good when it came to extremist loonies.

  “Bastards. If it is them I swear I’ll…”

  The familiar sound byte of her log-in interrupted her, and she exhaled heavily, forcing herself to relax. Slowly, as though tracking current, she lowered her shoulders, opened her hands, and let the tension slide out through her pores.

  Leaving the rest of the mail in a pile on the top of a filing cabinet near the window, she took the headset off and sat down again at the desk. Work, Valere. De
al with those bastards later. And there will be a later….

  Entering in the series of passwords, she logged into her server, downloading the day’s e-mail. Most of it was junk and spam, a few were from old high-school friends she managed somehow to keep in touch with, and three were headed “Old Sally.” She clicked on those first.

  Old Sally was a mare who had been stuffed and stored in a glass cabinet by a grieving owner, way back in the bad old days of battles on horseback. She had gone a-walking one night during a nasty electrical storm about one hundred years ago, caught up in some unknown spell sent out of control.

  Since then, she had turned up in a variety of locations across England, most recently in the Dowager Queen’s own bedroom. Much like the bansidhe of old, in that she gave warning of terrible times to come. For the Queen Mum, it had heralded the breakup of Charles and Diana’s marriage. Not that that had required anything supernatural to herald it.

  From there, Old Sally had disappeared for several years. Apparently, somehow, she had found her way across the Big Wet to the New World.

  As of yet, nobody had been able to figure out what was animating this poor Great Horse so long past her natural life. Nor had they been able to determine her choice of victims, or mode of transport. Mostly, she had been a new tidbit for folklorists and arcanologists to haggle over in irritable and occasionally (but only occasionally) amusing letters to the editor. But now, some crazed collector wanted possession of Old Sally. Enough that they were willing to pay the outrageous sums Wren—via Sergei—could command. Assuming they could locate and get their hands on her, that was. Wren’s average job took between three and nine days, from contract to completion. She’d been working this for eighteen months already, on and off, more off than on.

  The Wren had a rep for never failing once an assignment was taken. The fact that that rep was as much careful PR as actual fact didn’t make it any easier to admit defeat.