Staying Dead

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “What? Tell me it’s not the government again,” she pleaded. The first and only and hopefully last time they had trod on the toes of the FBI, even Sergei’s best contacts had been forced to do some very fast talking to smooth things over. The government’s top-secret official position was that there was no such thing as magic, no such thing as Talent, and absolutely no such thing as the Cosa Nostradamus. But they came down pretty hard on anyone using that nonexistent Talent anywhere near them.

  “No, not this time. Our motive is greed, pure, and not-so-simple. Not financial—aesthetic. I was right, Prevost is a collector.”

  “How do you know that? And how do you know it’s the right guy? We got a couple of Prevosts on this coast—he’s been to your gallery? We have an address? Wait a minute, collector of what? Fine art and chunks of concrete don’t exactly match, hanging on the wall. Even the weird-ass shi—stuff you sell.”

  “A collector of things other people don’t have,” he clarified, ignoring her usual slur on his artists. “He came off the broom—” Sergei’s less-than-fond way of describing the Players, or magic wannabes, who came into the gallery “—a few years ago, trolling for items that might be one of a kind. Items of a magical provenance. Which means that he was plugged in enough to know I might be a source, which means he’d also know enough to keep asking in the right places. And he would keep at it—he had those vibes, which was why I remembered him. He’d keep digging until someone actually was stupid or hungry enough to give him what he wanted—or tell him where and how to get it. It seems a damned likely match, yes?”

  Wren stared at him. “Yes. Damn, yes. Which means you were right, if this guy’s not a Talent himself—”

  Sergei shook his head. “I’d lay money he’s not.”

  “—then our thief was probably on retainer, maybe had been from when you first encountered this collector-guy, or soon after. A steady job, no need to advertise his or her abilities, which would explain the lack of flash.” She shook her head, considering all the ramifications. “A collector. Great. I hate this job. Have I told you how much I hate this job?”

  “Not yet,” he sighed, sitting back down in the chair. “But I suspect I’ll be hearing it a great deal.”

  A good retriever could get into any building ever built. And Wren was the best retriever working in the United States, maybe in all of North America today. Some locations might take less time, some might take more, but they were all accessible if you had the Talent. But collectors were an entirely different animal. As Sergei once pointed out, the true collector has read the evil overlord’s rules, the most important one being “don’t gloat about your plan in the face of your enemy, captive or not.” And the second most important being “pay your hired help well, so they can’t be bought out by rivals.”

  Plus, a real mental-case collector—the obsessive, aggressive, doesn’t mind breaking the law to own something type—kept his spoils well-guarded. In fact, he didn’t care if anyone else knew he owned something or not. What’s important was that he knew that he owned something that no one else could have, either because it was one-of-a-kind, or impossible to obtain, or some variation on that theme. He wouldn’t need to advertise, to show off, or to gloat. So there would be fewer weak chinks in his armor for Wren to wiggle through.

  But there was money at stake here. A lovely lot of money, even if Sergei had, in retrospect, underbid the deal. And if there was one thing that could motivate both of them, it was the thought of that money sliding its way into their own pockets. Well, that and the challenge of it all.

  Sergei and Wren grinned at each other, a little anticipation mixing in to go with the aggravation. One of the things that had bound them from the very beginning was an awareness that it wasn’t enough to be the best. You had to prove it. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. Council, Wren admitted ruefully, weren’t the only ones with ego.

  Money. Prestige. Face. Ego. A little hamster, racing in her brain. What’s the connection, what’s the thread that binds it all? Let it rest, Wren, she warned herself. Let it unravel in its own time, its own pace.

  “Noodles?” he asked, offering her a plate. She took it, and a pair of chopsticks, and started shoveling food into her mouth. It was going to be a very long night.

  For the next few hours the only sound to come from the office was the sound of chewing, paper turning, and the tapping of Wren’s fingers on the keyboard. She couldn’t remember how many late-night sessions they’d had like this, hunting down some detail that would make a puzzle piece fall together. Sometimes a case—situation—was a question of trolling, like she had been doing with Old Sally, sending out lures and waiting for the answer to fall into your lap and close the case. But more often a job prep session involved chasing down dead end after dead end, until Sergei started to mutter the most interesting curses in Russian, which was how she discovered that a particularly pungent and heartfelt curse could and did sear the air with an interesting shade of blue electricity. Prep wasn’t fun, even if this was more enjoyable than the earlier know-nothing, assume-nothing stages. But prepping every step of the way was how you got the job done. Going in half-assed, as Sergei was forever saying, was the mark of an amateur or a glory hound.

  The fact that he usually said this right after she had gone in half-assed was beside the point.

  Tonight they had split the workload: he was sorting through gallery records his assistant had—under protest and with a few comments about overtime not quite under his breath—brought over, while she searched the Internet for any mention of one Matthew Prevost, art collector and obscenely wealthy person. Occasionally one of them would find something of interest, and put it in the “follow-up-on” pile. That pile was depressingly small, but around 10:00 p.m. Wren thought that she might have gotten a pipeline into his main home on this coast.

  “Real estate records have an M. Prevost signing off on the loan. It was buried…looks like he did it through a second party or something.” The house was in upstate New York, north and west of Albany. Far enough away from the original site that his pet mage probably couldn’t translocate the stone directly—unfortunately reducing the chance that someone like Wren could sniff it back to him—but close enough that they could transport it by normal, and less traceable means, rather than use the effort of translocating it again. And that meant there should be some record of it. Or not, she thought, if they hauled it themselves. Better to burn that bridge when and if they came to it.

  She squinted at the screen and frowned. They needed a Realtor on-call, to help them figure this mess out. “Okay, does that make any sense to you?”

  Sergei leaned over her to look at the display, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder. “No…maybe.” Out came the ubiquitous cell, and he punched in a preset phone number.

  “Good morning. It’s Sergei.”

  “Good morning?” Wren mouthed at him, one eyebrow raised. She did the math quickly in her head. Too early for London, unless this person was a real early riser: Asia? Her suspicion was confirmed when Sergei switched into what sounded like Chinese. She hadn’t even known he knew any Asian languages, although once she thought about it, it didn’t seem too strange at all.

  Makes me feel about as smart as a rusty nail, though. That’s four languages he knows, English, Russian, French and Chinese. That I know about. Wren could barely manage a smattering of French, and knew a handful of words in Spanish, most of them rude.

  To make herself feel better, she drew down on the current humming in the walls and made a fortune cookie rise from the debris of dinner, stripped the cellophane from it, and sailed it through the air into her hand.

  Sergei shot her a glare. “Sorry,” she mouthed. Active current—even controlled doses—did terrible things to cell phone reception, which was why she never bothered to carry one.

  She unrolled the slip of paper in her hand, and read her fortune. It is not the dying which is so bad, but the staying dead. Confucius say “huh?”

  Jimmy had a see
r writing his fortunes. Made for occasionally unnerving experiences. She considered the slip of paper and then tossed it into the garbage. Sometimes you had to let the really obscure ones go. It would make sense when it made sense, and probably not an instant before, if she knew anything at all about seers. She had enough trouble dealing with today, much less what might happen tomorrow.

  “Okay, thanks.” He replaced the phone in his pocket and leaned forward, as serious as a man six foot three inches tall could look, sitting on the floor.

  “So?” She prepared herself for the worst, not knowing what she thought that might be. The room smelled stale, her mediocre ventilation not handling the layers of Chinese food spices and sweat.

  Unexpectedly, he laughed, his smooth chuckle washing out over the room and easing muscles she didn’t know had tensed. “You look like I’m about to bring an ax down on your neck, Genevieve.”

  “Bastard. Who was that? What do you have?” Something clicked in her memory then. “That was Stephen?”

  “It was indeed.” Stephen Langwon was a former Treasury agent—and occasional art collector, preference for watercolors and a damn good eye, according to Sergei—who had retired and gone into, of all things, real estate. They did have a Realtor on-call after all. “He’s in Seoul for a family reunion.”

  “Bastard,” she said again, with more heat, realizing that he’d spoken whatever that language was just to piss her off. “You messed with me on purpose!” Wren kicked out at him, surprised when her bare foot actually managed to connect with his thigh. He grabbed her heel and held on to it with one hand as he continued.

  “Stephen thinks that our target probably bought this house through a corporate blind, something to keep taxes off his back. And maybe deflect attention from any suspicion he might be under.”

  “Right.” She tried to pull her foot away but he held on to it. “So who does own it?”

  “Nobody?” He shrugged. “Maybe a holding company, I’m not sure how it works, and I didn’t want to keep him on the line that long to explain it to me. Besides, static was terrible.”

  She ignored the slam. She had already apologized, what more did he want?

  “So if it’s owned by some corporation, can he weasel out if, say, stolen goods are found there?” Wren whistled. “Sweeeeet. But where does that leave us?”

  “With a place to look for answers.” He yanked on her foot, and she slid out of the chair with a startled yelp, landing on her ass on the floor. Before she could recover, he had unfolded himself and stolen the chair.

  “Where’re we going?” she asked, recovering enough to stand and lean over his shoulder. Sergei accessed a Web site with a .gov suffix and then dove deeper, past a flurry of password demands and allegedly invader-proof protections. He wasn’t a hacker any more than she was, so Wren assumed that meant Stephen had given him the details. Tsk. Bad Stephen. Then she blinked as names, addresses and taxpayer ID numbers scrolled by. “Whoa. Is that…gimme that.” He fended her hands away with ease. “Hey, it’s my computer, I’m the one going to jail they trace you back. At least let me have the fun of it.”

  He found the information he was looking for, and clicked on the link to access the file. Wren practically danced behind him, aware that he found her impatience amusing but unable to stop herself. When he printed out the information and then closed the window, she whined in disappointment.

  “Serrrrrgggggg…”

  “God. Never do that again.” She just grinned, pleased to discover another thing that could put his teeth on edge, and filed it mentally under “just in case,” sub file “extreme measures.” In some ways it might be easier to work with someone who didn’t know you so well—fewer buttons for the pushing—but what was the challenge in that? He stood up and gestured her back to her seat. “Stephen took a risk, and gave me that information for a specific use. I’m not going to abuse his trust. Not without damn good reason, anyway. You have your road map. Follow it.”

  Wren lifted the printout off the printer feed and scanned it as she sat down. “Okay, yeah.” Now they were in her territory, more interesting than having government reports. She clicked the mouse, bringing up the browser and scrolling down to a bookmarked page. The header read Anything for a Price. In smaller letters the webmaster advertised “Information for the Discerning Seeker.”

  Typing one-handed, Wren entered her access code, then the information off the printout. Hitting enter, she turned to hand the paper back to her partner. “See what you can dig up on that company, the ones who set up the alarms. Start with their bonding licenses, work from there. I want to know who they work with, if there are any contacts at all to anyone in the Cosa.”

  Sergei nodded. Dealing with the Cosa Nostradamus—especially but not limited to the Council—was very much like dealing with the mob in the nonmagical world, in several ways. The first and foremost was that you gave them respect. For retrievers, that meant asking permission before hitting something that belonged to them. They had done the equivalent of due diligence earlier, clearing the background with the Council. But now that they had a target, every p and q had to be lined up before Wren went in.

  The computer screen had changed to an expectant cursor blinking in the middle of a plain dark-red screen. It hurt the eyes to look at it directly for more than a moment at a time. Cracking her fingers like a concert pianist with pretensions, Wren held her hands over the keyboard, focused her inner current, and began to type. The red screen flickered, and an odd, four-dimensional effect seemed to stir within the monitor. Sergei, taught by experience, looked away until it had flattened into something a little more bearably two-dimensional. Wren held the tip of her tongue between her teeth and coaxed the swirling display to form and hold the proper connection.

  Using current on electronics was, putting it mildly, stupid, and possibly dangerous. Certainly to the electronics in question, probably to the person using it. But the system didn’t seem to have suffered any aftereffects from Max’s visit, and she’d protected it as best she could figure how, and it was just so damned useful. And the unknown person who had set up this Web site didn’t accept any other key. Tricky bastard.

  Taking a deep breath, she rested a hand palm down over her chest, feeling her heart beating a little too fast under her T-shirt. Mellow, mellow… Gathering a coil of current from the inner pool up her spine, down her left arm and into her pinky, she gently touched the center of the display.

  Electricity crackled around her, and her awareness fell into the database.

  Behind her, Sergei shook his head, sitting down on the floor so that he could work while still keeping an eye on her motionless body.

  Sometime around one in the morning, Sergei, finished with the papers he had been searching through, reluctant to make any more phone calls at that hour and bored with looking over her shoulder, started to get restless.

  “Go home,” Wren said, her fingers flying over the keyboard. The remains of dinner had been stacked in a pile on one corner of her desk, and she occasionally took a pull off the liter of soda at her elbow, barely aware that it had gone flat and gotten warm more than an hour before. She had come out of the database around midnight, and had begun typing what she had learned, working faster than she had thought she could type. You basically got an infodump, and then it was up to you to sort through it. Problem was, if you didn’t get it down one way or another real fast, it went zip out of your brain and all the money you’d put into the meter was for nothing.

  Not to mention the fact that data-dipping made her cranky, sore, and hungry as a bear after hibernation.

  “I’m fine.” Sergei shifted his legs under him again, and swore as several papers fell off the lap desk he was using and onto the floor.

  Wren shot him a Look that had no effect except to make him go pace the hallway instead. Ten minutes later her fingers finally started to slow down, and then stopped. She shook them out to see if there was any nerve damage, pushed back from the desk, and stretched hard enough to hear things cr
eak.

  “Didier!”

  He leaned into the room. “Done?”

  “Mmm, I think so. Need to let it sit and then come back to see if it’s in English. Come on. I feel the need for dietary disaster. It’s ice cream time.” She took him by the hand and dragged him out of the apartment and down the stairs.

  “I don’t want ice cream,” he said, trying to dig his heels in. “It gives me gas.”

  “You’re giving me gas. So if you won’t go home or at least take a nap, then shut up and walk with me. Ice cream helps me think. You can just keep me company, okay?”

  They left the building, Sergei taking her hand off his forearm and enfolding it with his own much larger hand, an apology for his behavior. His fingers were warm, their palms sliding against each other with the smoothness of flesh-to-flesh, and Wren leaned her head against his shoulder briefly. “See? You feel better already.”

  “I was fine,” he said, shoving her away with a nudge of his arm, as though embarrassed to have her leaning on him. His fingers remained laced with hers.

  “You were fine. Now you’re better.” The night air felt wonderful on her face, and in the distance she could hear late night traffic, and the occasional chop-chop-chop of a helicopter flying overhead. Maybe a news crew heading out to New Jersey, or a Coast Guard crew on patrol. A few other couples were strolling along the street, coming off the bar scene in Greenwich Village a few blocks away.

  “Besides, you’ve never had Marco’s gelato. It’s awesome, in all the best ways. He makes it with—” She stiffened, her hand convulsing around his before her fingers fell slack and dropped from his grasp.