“Thank you.” There really wasn’t anything else he could say. And friends were always good to have. He might have need of them. Soon.
Adam clapped him on the shoulder, and turned to follow Clara. Sergei stood in the middle of the growing crowd, feeling it swirl around him in an intricate two-step of office politics. Sharks and lampreys, circling, looking for something struggling in the water.
An ugly image, and probably not fair. The Silence operatives were the good guys. He had to remember that.
If Sergei was going to be honest with himself, there was a lot of truth in what the two men had said. If he were to return to the Silence, bringing Wren with him, he would be their golden boy again, a position he’d held for most of his adult life.
Look at it logically, old man. On the one hand, if he agreed to be Wren’s Handler, he would be in a position to help her adjust to the…particulars of the organization. If he balked, and they coerced her anyway, he would be locked out. The Silence would make sure of that.
The thought of her turning to someone else, taking guidance from someone else, made his stomach twist. Ten years they’d been partners. Three times longer than anyone else he had ever worked with. A truer partnership than anything he’d known before.
Those thoughts brought up memories he had been repressing since he walked into the building, the memories that had driven him out in the first place. Poor Jordan. Young, Talented, eager. So eager to please, he claimed he could do more than he could. And current wasn’t kind to those who overreached themselves.
Wren thought that there wasn’t anything worse than wizzing. He had seen that there was. The Silence had asked that of Jordan. Had demanded it. Taken it.
Destroyed all that talent, that eagerness. And he, as Jordan’s Handler, had been complicit. Guilty.
Wren wasn’t that compliant, that obliging. The very thought made him grin in relief and memory as he raised his glass to his mouth.
But if everything he’d planted today grew as it should, he would have to return here. That was the offer he had made to Douglas: he would return to the fold, and they would leave Wren alone. Return to the thing that had almost destroyed him, to protect the thing that had saved him.
Douglas had promised to consider it, to take the partial victory rather than lose entirely. Sergei would still be free to continue his association with Wren, after his responsibilities to the Silence. And that association would earn her the Silence’s protection as well. But active status would put a strain on their relationship, their partnership: one he wasn’t sure it could survive.
And how long would the trade hold for? The Silence wanted Wren—how much time could he buy her, realistically? Was it a trade worth making, or would he be selling himself for no real gain?
He would do it, in a heartbeat, if he felt that it was the right move. If it were a winning move. But he didn’t trust the Silence anymore. And, in this matter, he no longer trusted his own instincts.
Sergei kicked back what was left of his drink and left the glass on the table. Suddenly the amber liquid didn’t taste as appealing as it had before. The cocktail party was building in energy. There were people arriving whom he hadn’t seen in years, people he had once considered allies, but he didn’t want to mingle, didn’t want to talk to anyone else, and have to decipher what games they were playing, what agendas they were pursuing or alliances they were building. He pushed through the crowd, nodded to the few people there he respected, and went out the door and down the escalator—the Silence didn’t like elevators, too easy to tamper with—and out to the street.
The question lingered, like the aftertaste of the Scotch. Why was he trying so hard to avoid the inevitable? Adam thought the Silence could be useful to him, Sergei. And Douglas believed that Wren could be useful to the Silence. That message came through loud and clear. She could probably write a half-decent ticket for herself, maybe stay out of the worst of the assignments.
But there was always a price to pay for power. In this case, Wren’s freedom. The chance for her to remain a lonejack, answerable to no one save herself. The option to do or not, as she felt best.
In short, what was at stake was her soul. It was clichéd, old-fashioned, but he didn’t know any other way to express it.
He glanced back up at the building, its façade innocuous, unthreatening, almost not there to the casual passersby. There was a price to pay for everything. Wren might, given the choice, think losing him, at least for a little while, a fair price to pay. And yet he had promised never to leave her. Did this qualify or not? And if it came to that, would he be able to honor that promise?
Too scared to risk everything on the roll of the dice, when you know someone else had the loading of it. He was too old for this. Too unwilling to rock the small, patched boat he had fashioned for himself.
Walking down the street, he forced the tension out of his shoulders, breathing in the soft spring air and letting it settle in his lungs, carrying away the smoke and cologne-scented air from inside. What-ifs and maybes were theory. He wouldn’t borrow any more trouble than he already had to hand. And right now, with Douglas appeased for the moment, that trouble was the current situation.
Wren had taken off earlier that afternoon, saying she had a few things to deal with before doing the job. Magic things, he knew. It was frustrating, being left out of that part of her life. Oh, he’d gone along on a job a time or three, but almost always as an adjunct, or a distraction. He didn’t delude himself into thinking that what he did wasn’t important—they were a functional team, neither side as effective alone. But the fact of the matter was that she was the Talent, the retriever. He was just…the money man. The dealmaker. The borderline Null.
He knew the bitterness in his thoughts was silly, and he also knew its source. There was a canker of worry eating away deep in the pit of his stomach, and not all the confidence in the world in their abilities could soothe it. Not about this case, or at least not only, but about what the Silence planned to do. Wren sensed changes in the air, things that frightened her. He hadn’t told her that fear came from him, that she was picking up on his own emotions. He had been a successful agent because he could sense threads being spun around him before they were visible, could take action against them before they became a problem. But he couldn’t get a grip on anything right now.
He had made promises: to his partner, to her mother, hell, even to Neezer, although he’d never met the man. And tied into all that, the growing fear that he wasn’t thinking clearly when it came to Wren Valere. Was he honestly trying to keep her safe? Or just keep her dependent on him?
“You don’t want to be controlling her?” Douglas had said. “Then stop controlling her.”
A five-year-old memory surfaced, brought up by the events of the previous night and the sudden reemergence of The Alchemist in their lives. Wren, bruised, battered, grinning from ear to ear. “You were fabulous!” Her voice was shaky, her eyes bright with the adrenaline rush of having been thrown over a cliff and dragged back by the sheer power of his one hand on her ankle, almost too late. He wanted to bury himself in her static-wild hair, and never come out. Never face a world again where he could see her falling, falling down to the cliffs and the water below…
“Gahhh…” Shaking his head violently to rid himself of the image, he shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and strode off with renewed energy down the street. Too many years ago, too many scrapes and close calls, and that was still the nightmare that made him break out in a cold sweat. Overprotective? Me?
He would talk to her. Tell her what was going on. Somehow. And then it would be up to her to decide. To judge his choices. And he would put his own fate into her hands as well.
“Only you would find walking down 8th Avenue at one in the morning to be relaxing.”
Sergei chuckled, a low, contented sound. “Look around you, Wren. Hookers and johns, drug dealers and buyers…and cops. Everyone’s out on the street watching everyone else. This is the safest, most intere
sting place to be in the entire city at night.”
“You’re insane,” she said, just to hear him laugh again. He’d shown up at her apartment around midnight, pacing and fidgety like a cat overdosed on catnip. When she tried to get him to tell her what was wrong, he’d grabbed coats in one hand, her arm with the other and said: “Let’s take a walk.”
“And you’re with me,” he said now. “What does that make you?”
“Your bodyguard.” She nodded at a cop who was talking to two hookers, an Asian transvestite and a skinny little redheaded girl who looked all of fourteen and was probably twelve. The cop stopped in midlecture and gave them both a professional once-over, then nodded, the action a little more than casual.
“One of yours?” Sergei asked in a low voice.
“Uh-huh.”
There were Talents everywhere, some of them barely functional, others rivaling Merlin at his prime. Of the ones who were aware, active and trained, about one third were lonejacks, the freelancing scum of the universe. According to the Council, anyway.
The cop went back to his unwilling audience, and Wren and Sergei walked on without any further interaction. You noted, but you didn’t out a fellow Talent. It was rude. And possibly dangerous.
“Hey hey hey. In for a night on the town?”
Sergei froze the huckster with one chill glance, and he faded back into the garishly lit doorway.
“I thought the mayor had gotten rid of that.”
“You can’t get rid of sin, Wren. Not while there’s blood and breath.”
“Not the theaters, the talkers. Aren’t they supposed to stay off the sidewalks?”
“More laws are observed in the breaking than the following. But I don’t need to tell you that, do I?” A stranger’s voice. The cop had followed them after all.
“Just walking, Officer…Doblosky,” she read off the badge that was clipped to his NYPD windbreaker.
“Just talking,” the cop replied. He was a big guy, built like a linebacker, with close-cropped blond hair and faded blue eyes that squinted naturally. “You sassed the cleaners come to town?”
A frown, then comprehension. Did she know about the vigilantes. “Yeah. You know ’em?”
“They’re sloppy. They can tag their grime okay, but the mop slaps everyone, you know? And sometimes I’m not too sure they know grime from honest dirt.” He nodded once, his eyes still squinted into some nonexistent light. “Walk careful-like.”
“Plan to. Thanks.”
The cop faded back into the night-flow of pedestrians, and Wren shivered even with her jacket over jeans and T-shirt. Sergei moved closer to her, as though contact would ward off the nonexistent chill. She leaned against his arm, resting her head against his shoulder briefly. “I didn’t know they were in more than my neighborhood.”
“Makes sense. Lot of the fatae hang around Central Park, right? Probably along Riverside, too. Go where the hunting’s good is probably their motto. Sorry, where the cleaning’s good.”
“You’re such a bigot.” She shook her head; it was an old argument, and one they weren’t going to get anywhere with tonight. “Not all the fatae are like the pole-vik your grandmother told you nightmare stories about. You’d actually like P.B. if you ever tried to talk to him.”
“I’ll pass, thanks. Look, I don’t wish them ill. You know that. I just…”
“Don’t like them.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. So, you said you wanted to walk and talk. We’re walking…”
“We’re talking.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, and stared straight ahead, the comfortable closeness of a moment ago chilled slightly.
“Uh-oh. Sergei’s going all Mister Didier on me.” She slapped his arm, not gently. “I thought I’d broken you of that habit years ago. You only do it when you’ve got something to say you don’t want to say and once you do that I know you’ve got something ugly to say so you might as well say it.”
“It frightens me that I didn’t need a translator to follow that.” He was delaying, and they both knew it.
“Know me, love me. Talk to me.”
He didn’t want to, she could see that. Had probably, honestly, known it the moment he suggested taking a walk. Men, she thought in disgust. “All right, we’re going to be that way.” She tucked her arm into his and intentionally matched her pace to his longer stride, so they were walking in unison. “So we can talk about…hrm. The stock market? Nah, too scary. The government? Scarier. Job’s just about set, so there’s nothing more to gnaw over there. Oh, I know! We can talk about the fact that my fricking rent is going up. Again. Is it always wrong to kill people? I mean, landlord-like people?”
“Yes.” This too was an argument they’d had before.
“Darn. Okay, then let’s talk about the case anyway. I’m set for tomorrow, only need to—” A homeless person weaved too close to them, and Sergei swerved, pulling Wren with him. They’d had a bad experience with a homeless person, a year or so before, and he was still a little wiggy about it.
The swerve had brought them into an open doorway, and Sergei turned his head, frowning at a faint noise.
“What?”
“Probably nothing.” He looked over his shoulder for the cop, but he was gone. There was another probable cop, in a similar windbreaker, down the street, but too far away to call without attracting too much attention.
“Stay here,” he said, his right arm pushing Wren against the wall as his left bent, his hand reaching to the small of his back.
Gun? All that talk about how safe it was and he brought that damn gun?
But his hand came away empty, so either he hadn’t brought the pistol, a nasty-looking thing she hated with a passion, or he had second thoughts about pulling it there and then. “Stay,” he said again, like he was talking to a mostly trained dog, and slid noiselessly into the open doorway.
Wren waited all of three seconds before she followed. Stay my Aunt Petunia. She actually did have a Great-Aunt ’Tunia. Oh yeah, partner, we’re so going to have to talk someday real soon about this overprotective thing you have going…Between this and the whole not telling me things, we are so going to have a talk.
But conversation was going to have to wait, Wren realized when she caught up with her partner. He was struggling with a guy—a kid—dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. Another teenager was on his knees, bent over. Wren could sympathize—Sergei had taught her the move that left you like that, and it wasn’t fun for a woman, either.
As her eyes adjusted a little more, she realized that the shape she had taken for a pile of rags or something was moving. A pale, narrow-fingered hand reached up to grasp the wall, pulling itself up bit by bit. First a shoulder, curled in, then a straightening spine, and then a head, square-shaped, with a fine Roman nose and an impressive rack of antlers, six pointers, with shards of velvet still hanging from them.
Fatae. One of the rarer types, too. Not one you’d ever expect to see in the concrete jungle. The fatae shook its head, as though its slender, slightly pointed ears were ringing, then curled its shoulder again and head-butted—antler-butted?—a third assailant who had been drawing his leg back to kick the fatae while it was down.
Wren winced as the human hit the wall and bounced off. He didn’t look quite stunned enough, so she wrapped a ball of current around her fist and threw it as hard as she could, recalling every softball game she’d ever pitched. She’d been a lousy pitcher, but current was forgiving, and it caught the guy directly in the breastbone, barely an inch above where he’d been gored by antlers.
This time, he went down and stayed down.
The fatae turned to look at her, and she saw its brown-lined eyes widen in alarm just as she felt her arms being grabbed and held from behind.
“Interfering witch.” The voice was accompanied by incongruously sweet-smelling breath, as though he had brushed and flossed before heading out for a night of fatae-bashing.
“Wren!” She heard Sergei call, and then the gr
ip in her arms was loosed and she whirled, another ball of current forming in her fist. But the attacker was down, and she was confronted by a man, coffee-skinned and on the older side, dressed too well to be either a cop or a street person, and with too direct a gaze to be either john or druggie.
“Thanks,” she said, gesturing to the junior-sized baseball bat he held in his hands.
“No prob,” he said, his eyes wary. She realized suddenly her palm was still sparking and fizzing, and damped the current immediately, reabsorbing it as quickly as she could. “That, um, I…”
The stranger shrugged it off. “After a while, you see stuff, you can’t blame the drugs for it, man. Just didn’t want to see you or the deer-boy get bashed by some fucking out-of-towners.”
Sergei limped to her side, watching as the dealer hooked the bat into his belt and went back out to the street to finish his business. “I love New York. Such an insane town. And what’s most insane of all is that it’s perfectly sane.”
The fatae got to its feet. It was taller than both humans, but not as much as Wren had expected. Of course, just about anyone or thing past puberty was taller than her, so that scale was skewed a bit.
“My thanks,” it said. “I was…uncertain if I would be able to take all three.”
“You probably could have,” Sergei said. He was favoring his right hip a little, and Wren tried to move his jacket aside to take a look at it. He slapped her hand away, gently. “I just hate seeing those odds in a fight.”
“You’re all right,” she asked it. “Can we…well, can we help you get to where you are going?”
“I live here,” it told her, then grimaced as though aware that the empty hallway, its wallpaper faded and peeling, didn’t quite suit it. “I needed to be in the city for a few days. Business to conduct. This is…known as a safehouse.”
“Not anymore,” Sergei said grimly.
“No. Not anymore.” It made a futile attempt to knock some dust out of its pelt. “I will inform the owners of this in the morning. For now, again, thank you, and good night.”
Staying Dead Page 15