Blood from Stone

by Laura Anne Gilman

  She lowered the binoculars and looked at the cottage unaided. It still looked like an invitation to larceny. Perfect. Now she just had to find a way in, and the job was halfway done. Unfortunately, the hard half was still to come.

  Dropping back down behind the hedge entirely, Wren settled herself into a more comfortable crouch on the damp soil, and let herself sink into fugue state.

  It used to take her the count of five-seven, when she was still in training. Now, the thought was no sooner thought than it became action. The outside world didn’t fade so much as become irrelevant; she could still see and hear and sense everything that went on around her but it was less real than the world she could “see” inside. In that world, every living thing was colored with vivid current, from the shadowy, flickering purple of the insects around her to the solid, slow-pulsing silver of the trees, and the passing bright red of something the size of a large cat, or maybe a fox. Stronger flickers up in the branches suggested that there might be piskies in the area. No other Fatae, not even the hint of a dryad or wood-knocker. Interesting. Not indicative, necessarily, but…interesting.

  Everything carried current within itself; sliding into a fugue state allowed a Talent—a witch, a mage, or a wizard, if you liked the older terms—to find, access and use it more efficiently. Strong Talent—traditionally called “Pures”—could sense and use more current; weaker Talent, obviously, less.

  Wren had always been strong, with little interrupting the flow of current in her veins. Last year, she had become—however temporarily—the recipient of current gifted by the Fatae, the nonhuman members of the Cosa Nostradamus. That blast had temporarily unblocked every channel in her system, kicking her from mostly Pure to too Pure. Talent bodies might be able to handle that much magic, but human brains weren’t designed for it. She had been able to work amazing things in the short term, but it had also screwed with her in ways she was still discovering.

  One of those new long-term results was that, once in fugue state, she could sense the presence of current in almost every animate thing, and a few inanimate things, as well.

  A nice little side effect, yeah. She could, if she had to, find a refueling station almost anywhere. Unfortunately, using fugue state now also gave her cramps that made PMS feel like a walk in the proverbial park. Everything had a price.

  So don’t linger. Get it done and get out, she reminded herself even as she reached out to gather as much information as she could about the structure in front of her. Just because there was no visible sign of defenses, either physical or magical, didn’t meant they weren’t there. Careless got you dead or caught, and both were bad news.

  She pulled current from her core, shaping it with her will and intent until greedy tendrils of neon-colored power stretched outward, touching and tasting the air, searching for any hint of either current or electricity.

  Nothing. A void stretched in front of her: no defenses, and no house, either. Nothing but trees. Impossible, if she believed what her eyes told her. Even if they had built a house without any electrical wiring whatsoever, she should have been able to sense the natural current within the wood, stone and metals, much less the flesh-and-blood entities moving within those walls.

  Some Talent trusted their magical senses more than their physical ones. Wren wasn’t that arrogant, or that dumb. When the two senses disagreed, something was hinky. Either the house itself was an illusion, or something she couldn’t sense was blocking it from being found by magic. Both options were…disturbing.

  Giving her Talent one last try, she stretched a tendril of current out, not toward the building, but down, sinking it deep into the soil and stone, reaching for anything that might have been laid in the foundations, deep enough to be hidden to even a directed search. Wren felt a cramp starting, low in her belly, and ignored it, extending herself even as she remained firmly grounded in her body. Sink and stretch, just a little more, just to make sure…

  What the…? She touched a warmth—a hard, sharp warmth—tucked underneath the crust, deep in the bedrock where there should only have been cold earth. It spread beyond the house, covering a wider range, suggesting that the house was only secondary, protected as an afterthought. Was that what was blocking her? She pushed a little more, trying to determine the cause. Wh—

  At her second touch, something shoved back at her, hard. Unprepared, the magical blow almost knocked her over, physically.

  The hell? she thought, pissed off as much at being caught by surprise as at the assault itself. She touched it again with a handful of current-tendrils, not quite a shove in response, but not gentle, either.

  That something in the bedrock expanded, filled with thick, hot anger and a wild swirling sense of frustration swamped her own current and tendrils. Angry, yes, and sullen, all that and a feeling of bile-ridden resentment that threatened to consume her, and something worse underneath, something darker and meaner and rising fast.

  Yeeeah, outta here, she thought in near panic. Outta here now.

  Dropping out of fugue state, Wren blinked a few times to let her eyesight return to normal, and then moved away from the hedge as carefully and as quickly as she could manage. A branch crackled underfoot, and she froze, and then moved backward again. Too clumsy, she was making too much noise. Damn. Her skills as a Retriever were legend, but moving invisibly through an occupied house was a different kind of ability than being able to move silently through trees and shrubs, complete with a carpeting of annoyingly crunchy leaves underfoot.

  She was shaking, and sweating, and it annoyed her.

  Once her nerves told her that she had gotten far enough away to feel secure, she dropped to the ground, placing her bare palms flat against the soil, letting the extra current in her system run off into the earth, grounding herself, bringing everything back into balance and soothing the restless, roiling shimmer of her core.

  “Jesus wept,” she whispered, too shaken to really care if a squirrel or piskie or too-curious wood-knocker heard her at this point. “What the hell was that?”

  two

  The sound of her own voice seemed to shock the air around her, like chemicals dumped into a pond, because she could swear that she saw it shimmer around her. In the branches far overhead a bird of some kind chirped, and something else squawked in response, and a third, deeper voice chattered a command for them both to shut it. Wren could relate to that third voice.

  After a few minutes of waiting nervously for something—anything—to come raging out of the trees or rising up from the soil after her, Wren gathered her legs underneath her more comfortably into a cross-legged position in the dirt. Her palms now rested flat on her knees, and she pushed back, feeling her spine unkink and straighten, and her heart slowly return to a more normal beat, while her skin slowly lost the warm, red flush of fear.

  Think, Valere. Don’t just react. She had been caught in current backlash before—she had been the cause of current backlash before—and it had never felt like that. And yet it was, undeniably, current that she had felt. Thick, angry current, black like tar and strangely familiar…

  Black tar. Angry.

  Her heart stilled, but her body shivered in recognition. She had felt that combination before, yes. Inside herself, in her core, in her veins and under her skin, like sludge instead of blood and bone. She had felt it inside herself when she wizzed last year, when the pileup of trouble, cumulating with several Nulls trying to rape and murder her had sent her into current overload. The greatest fear of any and every Talent, to be so lost to the current inside and out that all sense of self-control disappeared into the storm. It had been days before she realized what was happening, and once she did, the situation had gotten so bad that insanity had been all that allowed her to survive and do what needed to be done.

  In the dark hours of the Blackout, when she had been the focal point of the Fatae-donated current, when she had led the Cosa in striking back against their enemies, sanity would have gotten her killed.

  Nobody came back fr
om wizzing. Not ever. She should have been lost in that abyss, too, driven by despair, overwork and too much current use. Instead, her partner, Sergei, and the demon P.B. had dragged her back out of the abyss, barely and by the skin of their teeth. It had taken a magical bond P.B. had created—or allowed to be created—between them, and by extension, between P.B. and her partner/on-again-off-again lover; a bond that had never before—so far as they knew—been attempted, much less established.

  That triangular bond of friendship had saved her sanity, and her life. Whoever she had touched out there just now wasn’t so lucky. It was still lost within the maelstrom, howling and alone.

  Had it been alone? She remembered feeling something deeper, below the blast, like the echo of a scream….

  The feel of that anger made her start to shake all over again, and she backed away, retreating to a safer distance from even the memory. Jesus wept. He wept for the sinners and blessed them in his name. She wasn’t religious, her upbringing casually Protestant and left behind when she went to college, but those two words, Jesus wept, had resonated with her, curse and prayer all in one. And in this case, both curse and prayer were wholly appropriate.

  Wizzarts were dangerous. Not just because the overload made them crazy, but because crazy made them—what was the word Sergei used? Feckless. Without control, without any concern for their own well-being, they could access more current than was safe…and that much power in the hands of a madman—or woman—was never a good thing.

  She brought the shaking under control, schooling her body into obedience. That wasn’t her, hiding her essence deep within the earth’s crust. That wasn’t her core, so dark and tarry, rather than clear and sharp. She wasn’t wizzed. She was in control, damn it. She wasn’t a danger to herself, or anyone else—not anymore.

  Whatever—whoever—had snapped at her back there was a danger. And yet, the wizzart hadn’t hurt her, even though he—definitely he, she thought, remembering the taste of the current’s signature—he had been angry enough to do some serious damage. Angry and frustrated and quite mad.

  But he hadn’t hurt her. She kept coming back to that, above and beyond the anger and the crazy; that and the inescapable fact that that current-signature had been oddly, confusingly familiar. How could she know…?

  Wren swallowed hard, a sick queasiness rising in her gut that had nothing to do with fear. “Oh, damn it to hell and back. Max?”

  It was half question, half realization, and it had the unexpected, unplanned and unwanted result of bringing him to her.

  Unlike the last time Max appeared, there was no blowout of electronics, no sudden windstorm of energy. He was just there. Older than she remembered him being, still dressed in his usual sloppy sweatshirt and khaki shorts showing off knobby knees, but his face was even more like a dried apple, surrounded by a mane of shaggy, white hair. His blue-green eyes were still bright—too bright, and too wild to trust. She could feel the current crackling within him, making him unsafe to touch, unsafe to be near.

  This time, though, his body shimmered outwardly, too; the current visibly feeding on him even as he fed on it, some unholy symbiotic frenzy. It was terrifying, and terrifyingly beautiful, like a fire raging out of control. Which, she supposed, it was. An electrical fire, destroying him from within. Destroying anything too close.

  Some part of Wren’s mind that wasn’t busy panicking wondered if he had always been like this, if everyone who wizzed looked like that, and her descent into the same maelstrom was what allowed her to see it now—and if she, too, looked like that to his eyes.

  Those bright eyes stared at her without blinking. “Hey hey hey, brat. Hey, little girl.” His voice was rusty, as though he hadn’t used it in a long time.

  Wren took a deep breath and calmed down. For the moment, at least, Max seemed to be, well, not sane, but in control. She hadn’t been a little girl in years—decades—but he had been a friend to her mentor for decades before she was born, and would probably always see her as a thirteen-year-old with braids and no brains.

  Right now, she was okay with that. It was probably why she wasn’t dead, those few random, faded, fond memories still caught somewhere inside the crazy. Just don’t rely on it, Valere, she reminded herself. Don’t assume a damned thing. He could and probably will snap at any instant.

  “Max.” Her voice sounded surprisingly calm, considering how her insides were churning. “It’s really not so good to see you.”

  He cackled at that, a scary-ass sound. “You’ve been busy, brat.”

  Stewart Maxwell, also known as The Alchemist for reasons that she’d never had explained. Every time she encountered him she barely got away with her life. Not that he had any grudge against her specifically—he was fond of her, the girl-child she had been—but wizzarts just naturally tended to the homicidal. So far he’d tried to pitch her over a cliff—seven years back—and then brought up a current-storm to wipe her off the face of the earth a few years ago. She didn’t really want to know how he’d think appropriate to kill her this time. Or what she might be capable of now, to try to stop him.

  Try, and fail. She had no illusions about that. She was good. He was crazy. Crazy trumped even very good, every time. But they could do significant damage to anyone caught up in the area during the battle. Better not to get into it at all.

  There was a reason nobody in their right mind stayed near a wizzart. Their entire maddened existence was dedicated toward channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every living cell turned toward the goal of becoming the perfect, one hundred percent Pure magical conductor. And that included their brain cells.

  Because of that, wizzarts lived in the moment, the instant of action, without any thought to consequences or responsibility, only more and more and more of the lovely, seductive, orgasmic power. There was never enough to satisfy, and chasing it made them irascible, ornery, obnoxious and deeply dangerous. She had to get away; but carefully, carefully.

  “What happened to the dog?” she asked, trying to buy time, figure out how she was going to get out of this without further head-butting.

  The last time she had seen him, he had a dog with him. Big, floppy-eared mongrel. He had named it Dog, of course. Even sane, she didn’t remember Max having much in the way of imagination.

  A look of something sad and hungry passed over Max’s face, and was gone.

  “Killed him,” he said without inflection, dismissing man’s best friend that easily.

  Wren almost laughed. Of course Max had. Poor Dog. She hoped it had been quick.

  Those bright eyes squinted, and Max scowled at her. “You can’t be here,” he said with obvious irritation.

  All right, that was not what she was expecting to come out of his mouth. Although what she had expected, Wren didn’t know. She didn’t know why he was here, miles and miles away from the last place she had seen him, right in the middle of her damn job, or why he was so pissed off, not that wizzarts needed a reason for anything.

  “You should have gone away when I told you to,” he said, his hair sparking with agitation. His hands weren’t moving yet, though. It was when his hands started to move that the storm was about to hit. Assuming that telltale sign still worked, anyway.

  “When you told…” she started to say, then stopped. Oh. The void covering the area where the house should have been. Right. Suddenly the twigs and bugs and dirt-sore knees seemed the least of her problems. Was he tied up somehow in this job? But how? No, that didn’t…feel right. There was something else underlying it all, something she could almost taste, almost recognize, but it slipped away when she tried to chase it. Why was he here? Why now? Why had he bothered to show himself?

  “Shoved you away,” he muttered. “Don’t go poking where you’ve been told off, like you got no manners. Be smart, stupid brat. For your own good.”

  He was making a faint bit of sense, which worried her even without understanding it. If she were smart she’d nod her head, pack up, forget about the job an
d listen to the not-so-nice, very crazy man.

  She was smart. She was also stubborn. And, according to one of P.B.’s favorite new rants, she had developed a recent and rather disturbing case of can’t-kill-me-nyah-nyah. And nobody told her to do something for her own good, not without telling her why.

  Wren stood up, her five-foot-and-no-inches barely noticeable against Max’s sinewy height, and pulled down enough current to make her own flesh sparkle. A statement: don’t push me, old man. Maybe P.B. was right to worry.

  “I’m on a job, Max. A job that’s got nothing to do with you.” That she knew of, anyway. Shit, let it have nothing to do with him, please. No such thing as coincidence, but let it not be connected. “Let me get it done and we’re out of your hair. But you will let me get it done.”

  Her voice stayed even and low, even as everything inside her was turning into wobbling Jell-O. She was stronger than she had ever been, stronger than she really wanted to be. Maybe one of the strongest, Purest Talent of her generation, no lie. But the thought of going against a full wizzart scared the shit out of her.

  That fear was reassuring, actually. It meant that she was still sane.

  “You can’t be here” he said again, as though her defiance hadn’t even happened. To him, it probably hadn’t. He could be a single-minded bastard.

  The wind rose around them, filled with static and dry leaves. Him or her, she wasn’t sure who was doing it. Reaching down into the core, where her own reservoir of current seethed like a pool of dry-scaled, neoncolored snakes, she soothed it, coaxed it back under her control. Controlled herself, which meant controlling her core. Control had been what saved her. It made her weaker than Max, able to channel less current through her body, but she could direct it better, focus her strikes.

  She let that knowledge show on her face. “I can and I will. Max. Max!” She shouted his name, seeing his eyes glaze over, and was relieved when they focused back on her. Having a wizzart’s attention was unnerving, but letting him go spastic was when it got deadly. Suddenly the words tumbled out of her, desperate to be heard while she still had his mostly sane attention. “Max, there’s a way out. To unwiz. To come back. I did it. You can, too.”