Staying Dead

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Okay, totally useless, thank you very much.” Wren deleted the first e-mail, and went on to the next one. It claimed to be from a psychic channeling the spirit of Old Sally, with a list of demands to be met before she would rest.

  “Give me a break,” Wren muttered in disgust, using her toe to pull off one sneaker, then returning the favor with the other foot. “She’s a horse, and one stuffed with sawdust, making her dumber than the average equine. Which is saying something.”

  Wren didn’t have much use for psychics. There might be real ones out there, just like there might be actual spirits haunting the airwaves, but she wasn’t going to hold her breath until someone proved it. Generally speaking, dead was dead, and telepathy only worked in fantasy novels.

  The last e-mail had information that might be of more use, involving several potential scandals that might break in the next month or so. Old Sally could be expected to show up at any of them.

  Unfortunately, four of them involved people on the West Coast, and another two were up North. She would have to call in too many favors to cover them all.

  “Nothing to do about them for the moment,” she said in disgust. It wasn’t a rush job, thankfully. She could postpone it a few weeks, and worst-case scenario involved somebody getting some bad news a little ahead of the fact. Wren could live with that, so long as the client didn’t get too antsy.

  God, she hated working two jobs. Surefire way to get something screwed up, make her look like an idiot.

  Moving that e-mail into the folder for current cases, she looked at what was left.

  One from her mother, without a subject line. Wren hesitated, her finger over the delete button. Then she sighed, and hit the enter button instead.

  “Hi, Mom,” she said to it. “No Mom, I’m not. Yes Mom, I am. Yes, I will call Aunt Missy. Someday. No, I don’t need a loan. Yes, I’m remembering to lock my doors at night…no, I don’t want to meet a nice boy. I don’t even want to meet a bad boy!”

  How could she lose an argument with a woman who wasn’t even there? It was a gift, she supposed. A decade past Margot Valere had trusted a well-spoken stranger in a suit and tie to give her daughter a better life than the one she’d had, waiting tables and living in a trailer. For that reason alone—ignoring the first eighteen years of pretty good times despite themselves—Wren knew that she would always owe her mother a debt which made it impossible for her to deny the older woman anything. She couldn’t imagine a life in which she wasn’t Sergei Didier’s partner. Even if he did make her crazy with the overprotectiveness sometimes.

  The rest of the e-mail looked innocuous enough: she belonged to several listservs, some professional, some personal, and they all were pretty high-volume during the week. Weekends, they slowed down. The friends, at least, were out having lives.

  “I need to get me one of those, some day,” she said to herself, pushing the chair back and stretching. Her jaw cracked open in a yawn, and she looked at the clock at the lower right hand of her monitor screen.

  Only 8:00 p.m. Then again, it had been a damn long day. And dodging wizzart current took a lot out of you. Getting up, she padded down the T of the hallway to her bedroom, sloughing off her jeans and top and draping them over the end of her bed. The bedroom was the smallest of the three rooms, holding the bed, an old mahogany dresser that belonged in a much nicer home, and a matching table by the head of the bed that held a beat-up lamp, an old-fashioned windup alarm clock, a bottle of aspirin, and a slender, worn volume of koans. The walls were painted a dark forest green, and the carpet underfoot was pale green. Her bra and socks made splashes of white lying on top of it. The one window had heavy dark-green velvet drapes that were held off to one side by a gold scarf. She tugged at the scarf, releasing the drapes and plunging the room into complete darkness, cut only by the red glow of the clock.

  She turned on the lamp, then sat on the bed and pulled on a pair of cutoff sweatpants and a tank T-shirt. Bed looked damn inviting. But it was too early yet to call it a night. Sleep now would mean she was up at three in the morning, and while this might be the city that never slept, there were limits.

  No, a nap was probably a bad idea. Now that she was more comfortable, she’d pour herself some coffee and head back to the computer. Maybe something new would have come in. And if not, maybe exhaustion would make something she had learned today stand out, jump out of her subconscious and tell her where the damn marble block masquerading as a spell was, so she could wrap it up and get some justified sleep.

  But by 10:30, Wren had gotten her second wind, courtesy of a natural inclination to evening hours, and a carafe of fresh-brewed Jamaican blend. The office was covered in crumpled-up pieces of paper, and another half-dozen sheets were tacked to the wall, creating an odd mosaic of evidence and theories.

  Of the thirteen names on her list, Max had seemed the most probable. He had the grudge and the mojo to pull off a stunt like this, even if his brain stem was a bit too jittery these days to do it clean. He’d only been a full-blown wiz for four, five years now, he might have been able to focus long enough. The energy she had picked up on-site hadn’t been all too stable either, a crackpot waiting to happen. Either the thief was borderline wizzing, or…

  “Or,” she thought out loud, “the snatcher was being influenced by the client who hired the theft in the first place. Stable Talent, crazy client? And it would have to be a long-term-ish relationship, not a once-off deal.”

  It was a theory, and a pretty wild one, but right now she was flying on theories alone. “I take it back, Lord. I don’t want challenges in my life. Nice, boring, easygoing retrievals, that’s what I’m after.”

  She tapped the eraser end of a pencil against her current list, running through the remaining names one more time, beginning with the ones she had checked out today.

  “Sandy Hall. Career snitch with the boost—” the ability to use a current of magic to move objects, otherwise known as telekinesis “—but not much in the way of brains.” His pattern would fit what she had felt, too. Not a bad fit, except for the fact that according to his wife he was probably dead, anyway. Not that being thrown into a working incinerator was an impossible hurdle to get over, but…

  “Emilio Lawson. A better thief than Hall, currently AWOL.” Rumor had it an Appalachian cave-dragon had eaten him. If so, strike that name. What the cave-dragons took, they kept. Digested or not.

  “Katya Arkady.” She had been tossed from the Council’s mage roster for conduct unbecoming. Wren snorted. Already she liked the woman. P.B.’s notes suggested she was the one who Frants weaseled out from under. If so, she’d have the grudge motive down cold. Unfortunately, she was currently in the hospital for surgery. While being incinerated might not stop someone really determined, open-heart surgery would probably slow them down considerably. With a sigh, Wren crossed her name off the list, pushing down so hard she broke the point of the pencil.

  “Margery and Alexander Freiner. Last seen taking sanctuary from a seriously peeved gnome.” They’d be holed up at the Vatican for a while, if she knew anything about gnomes. And no magic was going to get worked under the patrician nose of Rome if they didn’t condone it.

  She briefly played with the idea of a Papal plot, but gave it up for lack of anything remotely resembling believable logic.

  That left seven names she hadn’t been able to learn anything significant about, one way or the other, to clear them or move them up on the list. She chewed the eraser tip, then made a face at the taste and started tapping it on the desktop again.

  “Seven magic-users with enough mojo and snitch-smarts to pull this off, who were still up and about enough to pull this off without leaving anything more than the reading I was able to scrape up or—more importantly—without blabbing it to anyone else. Damn it, this shouldn’t be so tough.”

  Current made you chatty as well as rude, and people loved to brag. By now, there should be some chatter on the street.

  “Arrrgh. This is total bullshit,” she said
in disgust. Dropping the pencil, she stood up and stretched, palms flat and arms reaching for the ceiling. Abandoning the enclosed space and by-now-stale air of her office, she paced down the hallway, her bare feet adding to the furrows worn in the faded brown carpet.

  “I’m never going to find out who pulled this off without more evidence. It would take me a year to run through everyone who was in town, much less winnowing out who might have a motive, or who was showing ready green from a job.”

  Her mother was always after her to get a cat. Somehow, to her mother, talking to a cat was less harmful to one’s sanity than talking to oneself. Wren had always thought best out loud, for as long as she could remember, but it had really gotten out of control—in her mother’s opinion—when Neezer was training her. Even now sometimes with Sergei, going over a plan, she would pace and walk, while he sat there at his desk and was amused by her. Or, more often than not lately, they would pace back and forth past each other. Wasn’t that supposed to be a warning sign of co-dependency, when you start picking up each other’s habits like that?

  “Screw this. What would Perry Mason say?”

  She waited, pausing in her pacing, as though expecting Perry Mason to come to her aid.

  “Okay, fine. What would Peter Wimsey say?” Her mother had hooked her on those books, the summer she had mono and had to spend almost three weeks in bed too tired to even think about doing anything more strenuous than turning a page.

  She turned left rather than continuing down the hallway, finding herself filling the tea kettle and putting it on the burner. “Lord Peter would have charmed the guard into telling him the one thing he needed to learn from the scene, and Bunter would have found out the other essential clue, and Harriet would have put it all together in time for a little emotional angst with their tea. Christ, Wren, get a grip.” She pulled down a mug from the cabinet, snagging the tea canister as well. “Ignore the evidence, evidence lies. What’s the starting point in all this? What’s the source? Old man Frants. His building. His protection spell swiped.

  “So, logic would say, look to who would stand to benefit. One of his competitors? No…one of his underlings. They’d have access to the building, they’d have something to gain from eroding the old man’s power base. So…who’s hungry? Who’s downtrodden?”

  The kettle whistled, and she removed it from the heat. She filled a tea ball with pungent leaves from the canister, and dropped it into the mug, then poured the water over it, letting it steep as she stared at it in deep thought.

  “You think I’m losing my touch?”

  Sergei closed the door behind him, accepting the tea mug from her gratefully. “I most sincerely hope not.”

  The whole tea-making thing was like a Sergei-alert. He started up the stairs, and she got an urge to make tea. It was deeply weird. But, like so much of the weirdness in her life, quite useful.

  She perched herself comfortably on the counter, watching her partner/business agent sip his tea. He was dressed casually this evening, in dark gray slacks and a white button-down shirt under an expensive leather coat he hadn’t bothered to take off. Even though his hair was its usual sleeked-back perfection, with only a hint of the natural curl visible, he looked tired, the skin under his eyes faintly discolored and pouchy. She felt the urge to tuck him into bed, and squelched it. Not only would he not appreciate it, even if he was dog-tired, he also looked pissed. That, plus the fact that he’d obviously come straight from the gallery—she risked a look at the stove clock and amended that; he had cut out before the place closed down, meant he’d finally recognized one of the names on the list. Two guesses which one, and the first doesn’t count.

  Assuming he’d figured it out by the time he woke up, that gave her a full day’s head start on his mad-on. If he only twigged midday, she was in for a meltdown.

  “Was your trip today not a success?” he asked.

  She did an instant Sergei-translation in her head: Are you okay? He was tired, pissed…but not angry. Not anymore. All to the good. Sergei angry was impressive unless it was you he was angry at.

  “Wiped our most promising suspect right off the chart.” Wren-translation: I’m fine, the day was a bust.

  “Well, that’s a success of sorts, I suppose,” he said. There was a pause while they both processed the information, then he circled right back to the question at hand. “Why do you believe you might be losing your touch?”

  Wren hated having to admit to a screw-up. But better to get it done, and move on. He wouldn’t let up until he got it out of her, anyway.

  “I let possibilities distract me from the probabilities,” she admitted. “I took the most likely suspects instead of the most logical ones.”

  “Which were…?”

  “That you were right. Nearest and dearest having the motive with the mostest.”

  Sergei shook his head sadly, letting Wren know that her theory was about to get shot down in multicolored flames. He put the mug down on the counter next to her and shrugged out of his coat. Wren caught the collar, holding it for him as he slid his long arms from the sleeves. It was buttery soft, sleek enough to sleep under, which Wren had done on a few notable occasions. Much nicer than her own battered and scarred bomber jacket, but hers could stand up to abuse and shake it off, while his, she suspected, would go into a pout if there was so much as a scratch inflicted on it.

  He took the coat back, going back out into the hallway to hang it up in her tiny closet. “At the level of employ where they would presumably know about the protection spell, they’re all fiercely loyal to their boss—almost illogically so.”

  Sound traveled well, and she could hear him clearly as he came back into the kitchen.

  “Certainly enough that he hasn’t lost anyone to a competitor in fifteen years. Even our Mr. Margolin checks out. He was approached three months ago by InterLox, a rival corporation, offered twice his current salary to come over. He refused. They rise up through the ranks, and they stay within the ranks, disgruntled or no.”

  He paused, tilting his head in thought. “I wonder…”

  Wren sighed, all too aware of the way his brain worked in matters like this. “It’s none of our business. Nobody’s paying us to snoop interoffice politics.”

  He grinned. “Yet. Never turn down the chance for some potentially lucrative blackmail material, Zhenechka.”

  But Wren wasn’t appeased by the Russian diminutive of her name. His occasional pirate tendencies made her wonder how horribly overpriced the art he sold actually was. Then a thought occurred to her, and a pained expression settled on her face, creasing the skin between her eyebrows. “So if your boys are above suspicion, and mine aren’t panning out…we’re out of home-grown information. And you know what that means, don’t you?”

  Sergei’s look was a sympathetic one. “We have to go to the Council.”

  “Not we.” Wren shook her head decidedly. “You.”

  six

  It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. That’s what Wren told herself, anyway. Normally she tossed the postcards that arrived like clockwork and proved that whatever mailing address one gallery knew about every other one did, too. She was still on the clock, after all. She should stay home, curl up in a blanket and go over…something. There had to be something she could do. Research a little more into methods of translocation, maybe. Or study up on the client’s history, to see if she could find a lead on who had a grudge with this kind of expenditure and the know-how to pull it off…Or maybe…

  But Sergei had spoken well of the second artist in this exhibit, and while they rarely agreed on matters of art, she trusted his judgment when he said she might like something.

  Besides, sitting here alone was making her twitchy, like there were fire ants under her skin. Maybe it was the warm clear evening air, or the noise from the couples and groups walking along the sidewalks and sitting outside sipping coffee. Or maybe it was the fact that she’d spent all day digging through the available information, and had only frustration to sho
w for it.

  Whatever the reason, she’d found herself pulling a sleeveless red dress from her closet, piling her hair up in as fashionable a mess as she could manage, shaking the dust bunnies off her high-heeled black sandals, putting on makeup and catching a cab downtown.

  The place was, predictably, a madhouse. All the lovely young things, and more than a few who were neither young nor lovely but wafted the scent of money, holding glasses of sparkling wine and grouped around pedestals displaying what looked like large misshapen chunks of Lucite and sailcloth.

  “Excuse me.” She tried to move around one group, and got no response. “Excuse me!” A little louder, emphasized by a shoulder and elbow applied to the worst offender, a tall, anemic-looking blonde with sharp features. The blonde went on talking as though nobody were there.

  Even wearing a screaming red dress I’m invisible, Wren thought in disgust. Even with cleavage! She fought down the impulse to give the blonde a spark-charge and instead looked for another way around the chaos.

  “Excuse me,” a gentle, deep voice said, and the crowd parted as though the speaker were Moses. An equally warm hand touched her shoulder, shepherding Wren away from the Lucite and toward the back of the gallery, where the drink-swilling crowd was thinner. Here, the pedestals were wider, lower, and arranged in threes.

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Sergei stood back and let Wren join the handful of people who were circling one trio. She restrained herself, with effort, from touching one curving, sinuous stone that begged to be stroked.

  “It’s alive,” she said in awe. “How did he—?”

  “He’s an artist,” Sergei said, accepting a glass of wine from a server and toasting the sculptures with it. “Rare, true, and treasured.”

  “If one of these were to walk home with me…” she said, only half-teasing.