Someone had paid attention to the details.
Part of him was immediately alert and suspicious, looking for the hook. The other part felt the incipient stress headache fade away, and was grateful.
This was not an enemy. This was not an interrogation. There was no danger here, except what might—and might not—come out of what Wren had to report, and that danger was not to them. He hoped.
Bart was there to meet them, along with Rorani, a grizzled otter of a Talent named Eddie whom Sergei vaguely remembered meeting at some point, and a tall black woman he didn’t recognize, who was introduced merely as Jane. Rorani turned from the window and smiled at Wren and Sergei both, the smile reflecting in her bark-brown eyes and the movements of her willowy body. It was, he realized, good to see the dryad again, like discovering a favorite aunt would be at a family gathering you were dreading. It might still be bad, but you had someone you could trust to keep calm and listen instead of just reacting.
He had come a long way from the Fataephobic Silence operative he had once been, yes.
“I’m glad you were able to come down,” Bart said, once the greetings were done. Unlike everyone else in the building until now, the stocky lonejack’s gaze went directly to Wren. Bart was a bastard, but he was a straightforward, straight-talking bastard, and he didn’t waste anyone’s time. Sergei didn’t like the guy—a building contractor when he wasn’t handling Cosa matters—but he’d do business with him any day. Bart didn’t deal in bullshit, and he had stood with Wren on the Bridge, coming out of that battle with a shattered leg that would never fully support his weight again, requiring him to wear a metal brace, and use a cane. That hadn’t changed his hard-ass persona a bit, though. “You said you had something important to tell us, and for you to actually call means it actually is important, unlike the rest of these two-bit wusses who want us to wipe the snot out of their noses. So, tell.”
Wren hesitated, visibly steeled herself, and then took the plunge. “Two things, actually. One that’s just an FYI, and one that’s…for you to deal with, I guess. Because I can’t.”
Bart took a seat, and waved them to a spot on the sofa. Wren sat down with her legs curled up underneath her, clunky boots and all. In someone else that might have indicated comfort, but Sergei could read Wren-sign. She wasn’t relaxed, but curled to spring, if needed. He understood: these people had that effect on him, as well. Even Rorani.
“So.” His partner kept speaking, keeping everyone’s attention on her so he was able to observe, unobserved. “First thing first. I ran into The Alchemist yesterday.”
She said it so casually that, even braced for something of import, it took a few seconds for the meaning to hit them. When it did, the reaction was…satisfying.
“You did what?” Rorani leaned forward as though struck by a heavy wind, her face creasing in worry, her branches—her arms, he reminded himself—coming forward in the urge to hug Wren to her in protection.
Bart was more practical. “Is anything in the area still left standing?”
Eddie just let out a pent-up breath in a whoosh of air, as if he’d been sucker punched. Or was deeply impressed.
The black woman was the only one to ask “Who the hell is The Alchemist?” That confirmed to Sergei that she was, like him, a Null. Even he, reasonably plugged into the Cosa Nostradamus, would never have heard of The Alchemist if it hadn’t been for Wren’s previous runins with him—one of which he had the misfortune of witnessing.
The memory of her almost going over the edge of the cliff, him too far away to do anything useful, would give him nightmares even in his grave.
“I did, yes there is, and he is one of our elder wizzarts,” Wren said calmly to all three questions, as though that weren’t a damned mouthful and a half. “We managed to muddle through without damage to anyone, actually.” She had clearly thought about how much to tell them—Sergei wasn’t even sure that she had told him everything. He wasn’t okay with that, but he knew better than to push. Right now. They weren’t pushing each other on anything, right now. There would be time later to coax the details, and see how much damage had actually been inflicted. “I was on a job, and he warned me off the site. I think…” She was clearly filtering what she would and would not tell them, but nobody was about to challenge her. “I think that he’s claimed that area.”
“Where?” Bart asked, and she told him. He nodded, making a note on a small pad of paper. That area would become off-limits not by order—the Tri-Com had no authority to issue such an order, even if the lonejacks as a whole would honor it—but out of courtesy and common sense.
The rule in the Cosa, as far as Sergei had been able to learn, was “live and let live” when it came to wizzarts, with a large dollop of “and stay the hell out of their way.” Care for them when you can—the more organized and financially able Mage Council actually had halfway homes for those still able to function in society—and avoid pissing them off in every other way. Like bears and cougars wandering suburbia, your only other option was to shoot them, and unlike bears and cougars, they could and would shoot back faster, with higher-powered weapons.
“One wizzart, however disturbing, isn’t enough to get you down here,” Rory said, settling herself on the sofa next to Wren. Her fingers were long and gnarled, but gentle on Wren’s arm. The dryad was one of the oldest Fatae in the city—she might even be one of the oldest in the country. Her oak had been growing when Central Park was planned around it, and she could rattle off the histories of every Fatae clan known to the Cosa. It occurred to him to wonder if Wren had specifically requested that she be here today, for this. Not for the news about Max, but what she was really here for.
Wren licked her lips, and slanted a glance sideways toward Sergei. He nodded, but didn’t say anything. This was her call, but he would support her, either way. They had the advantage in that it was unlikely the client would ever discover what she had done. Unlikely, but not impossible. And even if they never found out, she would always know that confidence had been broken.
Therefore, her choice.
“No. It’s not. There was a child.” She carefully didn’t say why there was a child, or how she knew about it. Nobody asked. “Young, about four. Parents were Null—highly probable the mother, definitely the father.” She recited the facts mechanically, as though someone else had told her them a long time ago. “No history of Talent in either family tree, up to four generations back.” They had checked, using Bonnie’s mentor, a man with some standing and even more pull in the Council, late last night. Wren leaned back and delivered the money shot. “This kid? He’s Talent.”
“That’s not possible,” Jane said. Sergei was obscurely pleased that her reaction was the same as his own, on first hearing it.
“Except it was.” Wren stared off into the distance, carefully not looking at anyone. “Believe me, it was.”
Nobody in the room had any desire to doubt her certainty.
Talent appeared unexpectedly, occasionally. Very occasionally. Mostly, there was trace within two generations, even if the grandparent or great-uncle wasn’t ever identified as such. To come out of nowhere, strong enough to be recognized at such a young age, was…improbable, if not impossible.
“The child was adopted?” Rory suggested. Sergei could see the wheels churning in her ancient memory, trying to come up with an explanation.
“Not unless they hid it, with the complicity of the hospital staff.” Sergei had a copy of the birth certificate in his possession, along with some other useful and official papers. Wren might not worry about the legalities, but if she were transporting a minor across state lines, he felt better knowing that she had the permission and blessing of the actual custodial parent, even if they obviously had no written contract or agreement for the job.
“Wrong parent?” Bart countered.
Wren grinned tightly, her gaze landing on him. “Nicely put. But no. Custody battle, DNA tests were ordered, came back positive.” She hadn’t known that at the time, Se
rgei had seen no reason to put it in the initial briefing, and he was right, at the time it had no bearing on the actual job. Still didn’t. “Kid is blood offspring of two non-Talent, in a family tree of non-Talent, and yet is Talent. Possibly a pretty strong Talent, to be showing this early, without any training or examples…”
“And you are telling us this why?” Jane, the newcomer, asked that. Her expression was intrigued but still doubting. She might not understand the importance of what Wren was saying. No reason she should, if she was Null, not tied into the Cosa Nostradamus. Yet. She would learn. You had no choice, when you got involved with all this. That he knew from personal experience.
Wren gave an eloquent shrug, as though to say that if this woman couldn’t figure out the implications, it wasn’t Wren’s problem. “Maybe because the kid’s caught in a custody battle, and the person who was set up to receive the kid for the custodial parent did not have the boy’s best interests at heart.” She paused to let that sink in a little.
“It’s possible that one or the other of the parents just trusted the wrong person with what their little boy could do—for money or mistake, I don’t know—but leaving a cute little boy unwatched, with parents like that…It’s not a thought I’m comfortable with. Are you?”
The woman had the grace to look embarrassed.
“I took care of it this time, and I think daddy dearest learned his lesson, but someday this kid might need us.” The “us” was clearly meant to mean not the Tri-Com, but the Cosa. “It’s not enough to contact social services and file a complaint that might or might not be followed up on. He’s a Talent. We’ve lost so many, it seems a crime to let this one slip through our fingers just because he wasn’t expected or identified.”
Because we need to replace the ones we lost. The ones who died. She was clearly thinking it, and they were clearly thinking it, even Sergei thought it, but nobody said it. Some scars were still too raw.
“This is the name of the custodial parent,” she said, handing them a slip of paper, folded over. Printed off a printer in a Kinko’s down the street, so there was no handwriting possible to trace, no home-office machine to track down. If anyone let anything slip, there was nothing to bring the trail back to her. Nothing to prove—or support—the suggestion that The Wren might have broken contract with a client. His suggestion: still looking out for the business side. It was still what he did best.
“Keep an eye on the kid,” she went on. “He’ll be safe enough for now—like I said, I made sure of that. But he’s going to need training. Plus, the custody battle might get ugly again, and I can’t protect him from that. You can.”
And that was the crux of it, and why Wren—and he, yes—had agreed that it was worth breaking client confidentiality. Kids were known to be stupid. Talent just upped the odds of that stupidity being dangerous. That’s why they had the mentorship program. Like fostering, it put the onus of training on someone who wasn’t a parent, and could be trusted to be brutal as and if needed.
More important to Sergei’s way of thinking was putting the Tri-Com on alert in case whatever push Wren had put on the dad failed. Kids weren’t the only ones who could be stupid, Talent or not, and Sergei had less faith in human nature than his partner did. Or maybe had had more, and it was all bad.
“We could always take out the parents, and bring the kid in,” Bart said thoughtfully, and ducked just as Rorani’s slender arm swung at his head. Despite the grin on the man’s face, Sergei was pretty sure the Talent hadn’t been joking. From the glare Jane sent him, she didn’t think he had been, either.
Wren just looked quiet and thoughtful, which was never a good sign, and Sergei was reminded, suddenly, that she had been raised by a single parent with no idea about Talent or the Cosa, as well. That she had not known what she was until she was a teenager, and her mentor took her under his wing.
There were a few more exchanges, and the meeting was over. Rorani, ignoring Bart, reached over and hugged Wren, her brown lips whispering something in her ear. His partner smiled a little, and shook her head, but seemed pleased.
And then they were out, down the hallway and onto the street, and Wren let out a heavy sigh, the tension even he hadn’t been able to see in her flowing out into the evening air.
“You’re all right with this?” he asked. The kid was taken care of, no longer her responsibility, which was what she had wanted, and Max’s territory would be respected. She’d done everything possible, but something was still bothering her and he didn’t know what it was, or how to kill it for her.
“Yeah. Yeah. It’s…” Her voice strengthened. “I want ice cream.”
He nodded gravely, and tucked her hand onto the crook of his arm, escorting her across the street toward a strip mall with a Baskin Robbins sign. One of the things he was learning in therapy was how to not control everything, how to let go and see what the moment brought.
At the moment, it seemed to be bringing ice cream.
She broke the news of what else was on her mind over chocolate-chocolate-mint chip.
“Building’s going condo. Do I have enough in the bank to cover it?”
Sergei put his legs out in front of him, under the café-style table outside the ice-cream shop, and licked a drip of ice cream off his spoon. He was, she told him, a philistine for insisting on cup instead of cone. He claimed a long-ago traumatic incident with a dog and a double scoop; she claimed he was afraid of going to a meeting with ice-cream stains on his tie.
A building conversion wasn’t enough to put that faraway look in her eyes. Not when it was something she’d thought of, before. But she knew him: he’d let it run that way for a while. Until she was ready to tell him everything.
“You can’t just check your own accounts?”
That wasn’t fair. Yes, she could, but that would involve either finding time to stop by the bank when it was open, which she never could manage to do, or booting up her computer and checking online. The latter might work for the majority of the population, but Talent had this tendency to kill electronics they came into extended contact with, and while she had surge-protected her computer every way she could think of and a few others besides, her increased flow made even that risky. It was much easier to ask her business partner.
She licked her own cone, and glared at him over the top of it.
Bastard laughed.
“All right,” he said. “The market’s recovered from the last tanking, but there are still a lot of open units available at the high end”—he should know, since he lived in one—“which means that it will be tough for them to get top dollar. Assuming nothing changes drastically, you should be able to swing it with a minimal mortgage, if you choose to stay there.”
Wren wasn’t sure what made her tense more, the “assuming nothing changes drastically” or the casual “if you choose to stay.”
“That was always the plan. It’s why I’ve been shoving money into the account instead of buying new shoes every month or taking cabs everywhere.”
“I know.” He was still casual. Too casual. Her eyes narrowed and her gaze tightened on his face. “But things have changed a little since then.”
Oh. Oh.
“Are we about to have That Discussion?” She made sure that he could hear the capital letters in her words.
“That Discussion?” His damned manicured eyebrow rose in the way she was constantly trying to imitate, without success, and his pale brown eyes widened in innocence.
“The ‘your apartment or mine’ discussion,” she clarified, trying to decide if she should be really annoyed or not.
He shrugged, going back to his ice cream. “Eventually, it’s going to have to be dealt with,” he said calmly. “Either when your lease came up for renewal, or now. I already own my place.”
The fact that he was right didn’t make her stomach feel any less twitchy. She’d rather face down a hellhound than have That Discussion.
“You really think that we’re in any shape whatsoever to live together,
24-7?”
Sergei ate another spoonful of his ice cream.
“No.”
Wren was bemused to discover she was disappointed by his assessment, despite the fact that she agreed with it.
“Ignoring the other things we’re still working out…”
Like ignoring a cockroach in the bathtub; it could be done, but you didn’t enjoy the shower.
“I like my space,” he went on. “You like yours. You like quiet and I’m playing music most of the day. You’re tolerant. I would throw P.B. out a window the first time he mooched the prime rib.”
She laughed, the way he intended her to do.
“And yet, you raise the question—” she started to say, when he interrupted her.
“Because we do need to discuss it. We need to discuss a lot of things we’ve shoved under the table until there was time. And there’s time, now.”
He was right. Damn him. There were some things they could avoid until a better time, and some things…some things, the time was now.
Then he took the pressure off as suddenly as he had applied it. “Building conversions don’t happen overnight. We don’t have to make any decisions right now. I haven’t thought this through, anyway, and neither have you. So eat your ice cream before it drips down your chin.”
Part of That Discussion included progress on his therapy, she suspected. He wasn’t ready for that, either. But closer. They were getting closer. It was good.
She wiped her face with the back of her free hand, and took an icy bite that sent shock waves through her teeth. Ow.
“What kind of push did you put on the guy, to protect the kid against daddy undearest changing his mind?” he asked, switching the topic back while she was recovering from the brain freeze. “In a purely professional, cover-our-asses-if-needed way of requesting.”
She grinned again, remembering. “Dad didn’t seem like a bad guy, and was genuinely glad to see the kid. So I figured if he had been the one to sell off the kid, he hadn’t done anything out of malice but maybe stupidity or scaredyness.”
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