He wasn’t a cruel man. He didn’t mistreat his toys. He simply preferred them…compliant.
And he had plans for Denise, as soon as the time was right. When he had everything in place. Plans far beyond the minor amusement she gave him in bed. A good corporate soldier, Denise would fulfill the vow she took when she accepted the terms of employment, and truly give her all for the company. For him.
Smiling at the thought, he turned back to watch the city slowly come back to life.
It was a dream, only a dream. More, a memory she was dreaming. Old, dead, harmless. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier….
The lab room was empty, the only light the afternoon sun slanting in through the second-floor windows. Behind her, down the hallway, Wren could hear the sound of the girls’ soccer team running wind sprints in the nearest stairwell, the heavy fire door propped open. The noise of their sneakers, the heavy breathing and occasional yell or catcall or burst of laughter could have come from another planet.
She took another step forward, could feel the change in air pressure, still standing in the hallway. Like walking into a sauna, the heaviness of it repelled her, made her want to back away and never come back. Like a horror movie, only it was all around her, not flat, on a screen. Nervously she chewed on the nail of her middle finger, tugging at the cuticle. Danger, it whispered. Every prickle on her skin urged her to back away. Leave the building; hide, stay low, stay unseen. She had survived for so long, being unseen. Fading into the woodwork. Letting predators—of which there were too many, in high school—look for more obvious prey.
“Mr. Ebenezer?” The voice that came out of her throat was faint, hesitant, squeaky.
She knew he was there. She could feel him, even through that heavy air, the gentle hum in the currents that identified John Ebenezer to her as vividly as sight or sound. Magic, like everything else, left its mark in the environment.
Sometimes, she thought, the mark went too deep. It caught you unawares, tugged you from the shadows, made you think there was something better…and then slapped you for assuming too much.
Closing her eyes, Wren braced herself, counting backward from ten to settle her emotions. Never go into anything half-cocked, she could hear her mentor say. Think before you charge.
When her pulse beat with the same tempo as the currents in the air around her, she opened her eyes. Her slender, pale face was set in determined lines new to her, a decade too early.
Resolved, she walked steadily into the heaviness, into the classroom and straight on into the back of the room; raised her hand and pushed open the lab office door.
That room was in darkness, too, save one small desk lamp. It illuminated the intent, dreamy-eyed face of a man in his early forties. Black hair, hazel eyes, pale skin. On a good day, those features snapped with intelligence and vigor, a lively sense of humor that swept his students along with his enthusiasms. His hands were held over the lamp, palms facing each other, straining as though forcing something obdurate between them. His fingers shook from the effort, and his body language—hunched shoulders, bent legs—screamed tension of another sort. The pressure in the air came from him, shoved against him; a storm front waiting to happen.
“Oh, Neezer…”
Her mentor, still dressed from class in his khakis and lab coat, stared into the space between his palms, not acknowledging her entrance or her words. Not aware of either, she knew.
“There’s a line we dance on. On one side, control. On the other, chaos. Both are terribly, terribly appealing. But neither is safe, and neither’s very smart, either. Either one of them will suck you in, and never let you go.”
Neezer’s voice, three years past. She was fourteen again, sitting in the diner, drinking a bottomless glass of diet Pepsi, listening, but not really hearing. When you’re fourteen, the idea of losing yourself like that seems impossible. Unthinkable. It hadn’t seemed much more real at seventeen, either. Not until it happened to Neezer.
“There’s a price to be paid for magic. That much of every story is true.” Too much control and the joy dies. You can’t create, can’t improvise. Current becomes a tool, not a gift. That was the road the Council walked. Wren knew Neezer would have slit his own throat rather than go that road. But chaos…
Chaos meant wizzing, turning yourself over to the currents of magic. Letting it overwhelm you until there was no “you” left, not really. Until you were a current junkie, unable to separate from the magic at all. Not wanting to, at all. Endlessly creating, dissolving, creating…
Her breathing was harsh, strained. Pale brown eyes filled with tears, itching as if she had a sudden attack of allergies, hay fever in the middle of winter. She blinked the tears away, reaching for that balanced edge of control.
Ground. Focus, find the center within her, where her own current lay coiled, waiting. Know it, manipulate it. Reach out to the currents humming within the building, laced into the walls, twined into the electrical wiring of the high school. Power to power. She touched it, felt it gentle under her touch, calming her own nerves in return. Wren wiped one sweaty palm against her jeans, then covered his fingers with her own. They were cold, tingling.
“Neezer?”
He didn’t respond. Panic wound in her stomach, spitting acid.
“Neezer, wake up!”
In the real history, he had woken, at least for a little while. But in her dream he stayed silent, still staring…
No! I will stop this now. I will wake up NOW.
Her eyes shot open and she stared up at the ceiling. It was dark, the still-quiet that comes before false dawn, the only time a city can ever be said to be quiet. Sweat dampened her skin, clumping her hair and making it stick to the back of her neck. Tears pooled in the corner of her eyes, and her throat felt tight not with fear, but sorrow. Sorrow, and loss. A dull aching pain that never, ever went away, not any moment she was awake or asleep. Don’t leave me alone….
It was the angel. That’s all. That’s enough.
Rolling onto her side, Wren kicked the sheets away, letting the night air cool her skin slightly. The sense of emptiness lingered. Her left hand reached out, almost without conscious thought, and lifted the phone off her nightstand. Speed dial number one, and the sound of ringing filled her ear.
“Didier.” A sleep-drenched sound, groggy. He had only left her apartment three hours ago. Even with his usual difficulty catching a cab, at that hour of the morning there shouldn’t have been any traffic. More than enough time to make it up and across town to his apartment, peel off his clothing and fall into bed. He wasn’t much on bedtime rituals when he was that wiped out.
Suddenly guilt washed over her, making her voice almost too soft to be heard. “Bad time?”
“Never.” She could hear him moving about, the sound of pillows being fluffed and the creak of the bed as he shifted his weight. “I was only sleeping. Who needs too many hours of that?”
In the darkness, his voice in her ear, she could almost pretend he was there with her. Imagined his weight sinking the mattress, his too-long legs taking up half the bed. She knew he liked to sleep sprawled on his back, while she curled on her side. More than once they had both managed to fit onto an undersized motel mattress, or—once—a tarp spread under the leaking roof of a falling-down woodshed. It hadn’t always been contracts and bank accounts and reputations doing half the work.
“Bad dream, Zhenechka?” His tenor was like caramel, the normally clipped syllables softening. His nighttime voice, she thought of it. The voice he used only for her, and the cat he didn’t want anyone to know he fed, in the alley behind the gallery.
“Yeah. No. It….” She hesitated, her free hand playing with the edge of the sheet. Silly, this hesitation. Stupid, to call him and then not talk. But she couldn’t find the words right away.
“I dreamed about Neezer,” she said finally. “That…that day.” The Day, she thought of it. The day her mentor had finally admitted out loud what they both knew, that he was on the edge of wizzi
ng—of becoming a danger to himself, and to her. The day when being a Talent had stopped being a game, and gotten deadly, dangerously serious.
She listened to the long, warm sounds of Sergei’s breathing, and felt oddly comforted, as though he had put his arms around her and cradled her to him.
“I’m scared,” she said finally. And she wasn’t referring to just the aftermath of the dream. Something was happening. Things were changing. She could feel it, like thunder in the air, even if she didn’t know the cause.
“I know. So am I.” He wasn’t talking about the dream either.
And that was what she loved the most about her partner. That in the dark, separated by half a city, connected only by the faintest wisps of technology, he could make her feel better by giving validation to her fears. The thought struck her as horribly funny, and she started to giggle for the second time in five hours.
“Wren?” But there was no real worry in his voice now, only understanding. “It’s okay, little wren. Let it out. It’s been an impossible day, even for a tough little bird like you.”
Something grabbed her inside the ribs at his words, grabbed and clenched and caught her short of breath, aching and expanding in the hollowness. “Don’t ever leave me,” she asked, not even aware of what she was saying.
There was a long silence.
“I won’t. Not ever. Now go back to sleep, Zhenechka. I’m here. I’ll stay right here.”
With that promise, she curled herself around the receiver, and slowly slid back into a dreamless sleep.
“Don’t leave me…” A whisper, a child’s terrified command. Or a woman’s heartfelt request.
He could stay with her…or he could protect her. He might not be able to do both, not anymore.
Give the devil his due, he protected what was his. And right now, some insurance didn’t sound like such a bad idea.
On the other side of the island, Sergei Didier lay in his bed, staring out his window at the pale pink light creeping into the sky, and knew what he had to do.
ten
In a building without any identifying signs or the usual indicators of occupancy, on a street that nobody in the city thought to walk down without a good reason for it, the Fatal Friday cocktail party was in full swing in a room off the second-floor lobby.
The room itself was warm and inviting, paneled in cherry-stained wood and filled with glossy-polished furniture. Thick cream carpeting muffled the sound of heels and conversation alike. Easily two dozen men and women moved about the glassed-in room, drinks in hand and gossip on their lips. It could have been any group of lawyers or accountants unwinding after a tough week in the system. Could have been, but wasn’t.
They were the Silence. What one well-placed insider had once called the real world’s answer to MacGyver: two-hundred-plus operatives armed with nothing more than their wits and a pocket knife.
And the resources of a multimillion-dollar endowment, renewed annually by donors who remained distant and unnamed.
But for the operatives for whom Fatal was a tradition, albeit an ironic one, the who and the why of the Silence’s benefactors wasn’t something they thought about every day, if at all. It was enough that they were there, doing what they did. And part of what they did involved appearing in front of the Action Board on the third Friday of every month.
The Silence took no fees, accepted no credit, courted no publicity. A truly secret society in a world with a long history of pretenders to the name. But there were always holes, always flaws. No organization had perfect security, perfect information. And so the Silence regularly drained their direct operatives of whatever info they held, no matter if it seemed useful or not at the time.
And to that end, every Handler on the continent, and a few who had to fly in from overseas, stopped by to unload their month’s worth of reports in person, and get a grilling on every detail in return. Praise was allocated, and occasionally blame or reprimands.
The cocktail party afterward was a civilized veneer on the heavy drinking which invariably followed those reports.
It used to be a looser affair, but after the one “safe” bar in the neighborhood burned down during a labor disagreement, the Silence brass established this in-house gathering. Free booze was better than stuff you had to pay for, and the Silence had a way of keeping tabs on who was saying what in their drunken stupor.
Sergei hadn’t been to one of these gatherings in almost seven years. Purposefully absent, as though least in sight would mean least in mind, the minor flow of information he used to maintain his and Wren’s freedom fed to them over the phone, from a distance. Obviously, that distance hadn’t been enough. A phrase from The Godfather sprang inevitably, ironically, to mind. “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
But there was never loss without gain. He hoped, anyway.
The press of a body nearer to his than was comfortable was his only warning. “What is your deal, anyway?”
“Excuse me?” Turning, Sergei raised one eyebrow, and looked down his admittedly patrician nose at the much shorter speaker, to no effect. He prided himself on the ability to freeze out unwanted conversational interlopers, but Dancy had never been able to take a hint. Sledgehammer or otherwise.
“Take the promotion, man.” Dancy leaned forward, the alcohol plain on his breath. Five foot nothing, squarely muscled like a bulldog, he had been around forever, gone up the ranks from messenger to Handler, and the scars of it were in his eyes. “You know they get what they want anyway, and they want your girl, bad. So why not take the bennies too?”
The Silence’s interest in Wren was open gossip. Bad sign. But it was their obvious need that gave him the leverage he was here trying to use. That didn’t make Dancy’s comments any easier to take. “Get. Away. From. Me.” His teeth didn’t quite grit together, but it was a near thing. He did not like being talked about. He never had, even in his glory days as an Active. He liked it even less when Wren was involved.
Dancy blinked, taken aback by the other man’s reaction to what he had intended as friendly advice.
“Right. Still the same old team player, huh?” That stung, more than it should have. More than he should have let it. “See you around, Softwing.”
Softwing. His nickname in the Silence. He’d always found that…amusing. Ironic. The owl and the wren. Birds almost of a feather.
Sergei took a cigarette out of the silver case he always carried and rolled it between his fingers. Fifteen years since he’d inhaled nicotine, and the urge was still there, a smoky siren’s song. He tested himself, every day, some days every hour. Masochism? Martyrdom? Was there really much difference between the two?
He shouldn’t have been so hard on Dancy. You couldn’t be in the game and not get talked about, and that’s what this all was, a very deadly serious game. And the moment he walked into the building, people knew. He might call it gossip…active Handlers would call it intel. Their lives sometimes depended on it.
“Didier?”
He turned, bracing himself until he saw who the speaker was.
“Adam.”
“I never thought I’d see you at one of these again.” There was an unspoken question on Adam’s lean face, a concern that dated back twenty years, when they were both raw recruits in the Silence’s ongoing battle. Adam never seemed to age, damn him. A little more silver in the reddish hair, a few more lines around the eyes and mouth, but still the same. His companion, a younger woman with dark brown ringlets and an open, curious face, watched the two of them as though she had her eye to a microscope.
“I had need of the Library. Sheer bad luck to pick today, but figured as long as they were pouring…”
Adam pursed his mouth. You didn’t go to the Library unless and until you had exhausted all your usual resources. But Sergei had just enough of a reputation as a renegade that he might do anything at all.
“Did she let you in?”
A twist of the mouth that might have been a smile. “Sent me to Douglas.”
“Ouch.” The Library was harsh on people who wasted her—its—time. But Douglas was almost worse. “Was it worth it?”
Sergei shrugged. “Won’t know until I know.”
The Silence was small by most corporate standards, but it still had an organizational chart with three branches: Action, Information and Operations. Douglas was Operations. He pulled strings, and Action—the branch that oversaw Handlers and their agents in the field—danced.
Douglas knew where the bodies were buried, how deep, and what it might take to dig them up again. You went to him only when you had something of value to trade.
Adam looked at Sergei with renewed interest, but his companion finally had enough, and elbowed Adam in the ribs just hard enough to make her point.
“Ooof. Right. Sorry. Clara, Sergei Didier. Sergei, Clara Maroony.”
“You were a Handler,” she said, sizing him up with a cool eye he might have found appealing at another time, on another day.
“Not anymore.”
“Not right now,” Adam said, and returned Sergei’s glare with a cool eye of his own. “He’s freelancing at the moment. I’m thinking of taking him as my mentor.”
Clara snorted, and turned on her heel, leaving them in search of more interesting conversation.
“Heard of me, has she?”
Adam made a “what can you do?” move with his hands. “There are those who still like to talk about the lad who told the Silence to take a long walk off the short pier. If it helps, most of the young’uns haven’t a clue who you were. Still are.” He held up a hand to stop anything Sergei might say in response. “Spare me, okay? We’ve been friends for too long to fight over this. Even if you are stingy with the Christmas cards. Just remember that you do still have friends here.” His expression grew intent. “And that you can do more with friends than enemies.”
Staying Dead Page 14