“I’ll check,” Sergei said, “but I think they were giving off ‘me-first, right now!’ vibes.”
“Bother. Then no. See? I’m learning to say no.” It hurt, though. Probably hurt her partner, too: Sergei had a pretty expensive lifestyle he worked hard to maintain, starting with that lovely uptown condo of his. But the final call was always hers.
“Good.” Sergei took that strip and tore it in two, then dumped it into the recycling bin. “Next, we’ll teach you how to take a vacation.”
“Hah. Mr. Pot, is that your pager going off?” The last “vacation” he had taken in her memory had been a business trip for the gallery, where he spent every day hopping from workshop to workshop trying to decide who to bring in for a show and keeping her from bringing anything home “accidentally.” Still, she supposed that for him, that was a vacation…“Anyway, lonejacks don’t get a vacation. It’s in our charter.”
He wasn’t going to let her get away with that. “You don’t have a charter. None of you could agree on any thing long enough to write one.”
“Nitpicker.” She grinned, settling herself more com fortably on the couch, seeing him wince as her boots came into contact with the upholstery. Tough, too much effort to take them off. And anyway, they were new and clean. Mostly. “And that’s not entirely true anymore, anyway, thanks to the Tri-Com. And you’re stalling on the important stuff.” She leaned forward, letting go of the easy, casual dialogue they had been maintaining.
“What do you have for me?”
The advantage of Sergei’s other career, and the reason it dovetailed so well with their work together—his re sources were varied, and international, and always could be counted on to come through, one way or the other.
Now, he pulled out an entirely new set of notes, these jotted on pale yellow index cards that she recognized from the desk in his apartment. For these he pulled out his glasses, looking up as though daring her to make a comment, risqué or otherwise. She looked back as innocently as she could, considering the sight of him in those things always sent a flicker through her that wasn’t current-related at all.
“P.B.’s recollections of his earliest history were quite accurate,” he said finally. “The folk at the Amsterdam Historical Society would very much like to talk to him.”
She snorted, picking up a sofa cushion and rubbing the nubby surface absently. “Yeah, good luck with that. What did they tell you?”
“Let’s see.” He glanced down at the notes. “In 1890, a noted naturalist and certified loon—their words, by the way—named Herr Doktor Zee left Amsterdam by boat a few hours ahead of a lynch mob armed with the legendary pitchforks and fire. He was reportedly part of a small group of, and again I quote, ‘rather progressive crackpots and theorists’ who made the mistake of actually talking about their theories where too many people could hear them. The term ‘heretics’ and ‘grave robbers’ were reportedly thrown around, although much of that may have been fueled by desire for Herr Doktor’s reportedly extensive collection of art rather than any doctrinal conflict.”
He put the notes down and looked up at her, speaking from memory now.
“Anyway, he and much of his household was spirited away in the night, ending up in Transvaal, in South Africa. Interesting place, back then. A few years later he was reportedly killed in a particularly pointless and otherwise unnotable battle during the Second Boer War. His body was never recovered, but the house he was renting was burned to the ground.”
Wren didn’t think it smart to interrupt his recitation to ask what a Boer was and why they had two wars. She’d look it up later.
“The sole remaining member of his family, a nephew who had remained in Holland, sold everything that survived to a small museum there, without ever investigating what his inheritance might be. A few decades later, the museum closed and the contents were sold off.”
“Dead end?” She didn’t think so. Not the way Sergei was holding back, as though he had something he wanted to tell her, but only after a proper setup. He’d dug deep into his contacts for this one, playing all the strings he had out there, and she had time, so she let him grandstand the delivery. It was good to see him play again.
“A lesser man might conclude that,” he said, practically smirking. “I, however, do not conclude so easily. Karl gave me the name of someone who gave me the name of someone who turned out to be Council and maybe had heard of me.”
He paused, and she smirked. Her name might be one that made Council double-check their valuables, but Sergei’d gotten in their faces a few times, too.
“Fortunately he saw no harm and some possible good in sharing seemingly useless information with me. The contents of that museum were sold off to individual collectors. After that, Herr Doktor’s legacy disappeared for a number of years, probably into some good citizen’s attic. The trail went cold for at least fifty years.”
She waited.
He lowered his head and looked at her over the tops of his glasses, the gleam in his eye suggesting that he was about to drop the proverbial whammy on the table. “Further investigation, with the aid of Karl’s antiquities database and an intern—did you know he had an intern? I think we need an intern—revealed that in the 1960s, several papers and various scientific objects of undetermined provenance or usage bearing our man’s name on them appeared in auction. Since he wasn’t anyone of note, they didn’t go for much—another small museum bought the entire packet, exhibiting it as part of a crackpot science display, before they too went belly-up.”
He paused, clearly expecting her to say something. So she did.
“And the contents of that museum were bought by…?”
“Nobody. They were put into storage for another fifty years or so, the fate of things too interesting to simply toss but too unimportant to preserve.”
She decided that she had given him enough playtime. “Sergei. Where. Are. The. Papers?”
Mischief peeked out again from behind the businessman with another glance over the rims of his eyeglasses, and she braced herself. He was going to rock her world….
“In 2000, a researcher in Cape Town came across the storage facility while working on a novel about the Boer Wars. The museum having long ago abandoned them, the contents, including Herr Doktor’s papers and some, and again I quote, ‘disturbing artifacts’ were sold off…”
He paused dramatically then took pity on her. “To the Museum of Historical Science and Nature.”
Wren felt her heart lurch like a drunken sailor, up into her throat and then down into her gut. She sat up, feet flat on the carpeted floor.
“Our Museum of Historical Science and Nature?” she asked cautiously, not willing to make any assumptions. It couldn’t be that easy. It just couldn’t.
Sergei grinned, the refined businessman’s veneer cracking entirely to show the predator underneath. Apparently, it was that easy.
For impossible values of easy, anyway.
The HSN-NY. The museum she had spent half of her lifetime wandering in and out of, fascinated by the old-fashioned displays of early technology and dioramas of exotic and extinct—and occasionally thoroughly debunked—creatures. The museum she knew practically blindfolded, top to bottom and side to side. One of the best-funded, most esoteric small private museums in a city filled with them, at the edge of the so-called “Museum Row” along the eastern edge of Central Park, living forever in the figurative shadow of the grand dame Museum of Natural History, but no less fascinating for it. A museum that took its security seriously. A challenge.
“Oh, dear and kind God. Tell me it’s not on display.” She thought she might have noticed that, but there had been so many special exhibits over the years they all sort of ran together, and she’d been a little busy lately. A challenge was one thing, but temporary exhibits tended to be extremely well-guarded even inside those parameters, with lots of people paying attention to them, in the novelty of it all. A smash-and-grab from a temporary exhibit was a showboat gig, something you did for maxim
um splash to advertise how good you were. Wren didn’t want any splash at all; she wanted to get in and out without anyone even noticing anything had been taken. If they were part of a permanent exhibit it might be easier, although she had never actually cased their security system; she tended to have more work around fine art collections, not dinosaur bones and six-foot-tall stuffed penguins. And there wasn’t enough money in the world to entice her to try for the exotic minerals exhibits. She had it on good authority that the last time that was tried was in the 1940s, and the Retriever who took the job was never heard from again. Not the museum’s responsibility—there was a meteor in their collection that was less than obliging about being stolen.
“Well now. That’s where it gets…interesting,” her partner said slowly, leaning back in his chair and letting his long legs stretch out under the wooden desk. He looked every inch the smug corporate boss, and she resisted—barely—the urge to move his chair out from under him with a swipe of current.
“You know I hate that word.” She really did. It never made her happy, not in that context. “Spill.”
“Nobody knows what was done with the acquisition.”
Yeah, she knew it. She wasn’t happy. “They…lost the papers.”
He kept leaning back, and she had a passing thought that if he fell over backward and cracked his head, she was going to laugh, no matter how inappropriate or cruel it might be.
“Not only the papers, and not so much lost as…misplaced,” he corrected her. “Nobody’s really sure, since most of their mothballed collections are stored due to their space restrictions, where the boxes were actually placed after they were purchased. The person who bought them died soon after—nothing suspicious, he was in his eighties by then—and nobody else had any real interest in that sideline of research, to put it kindly.”
“They didn’t throw it out?” She had a horrid vision of having to go through decades-old landfills, cursing all demons, Talent and Null partners as she did so.
“Museums never throw anything out, Wren. That’s what makes them museums. But according to the information I was able to dig up, the file cabinet with those records seems to have gone missing in a recent office move.”
“Great. Remember what I say about coincidences?” Suddenly she had a throbbing headache. And Sergei’s expression of almost unholy glee wasn’t helping. “I’m good, but I’m not that good, Didier. Unlike some people, I don’t believe my own press.”
“Oh, it gets better.”
She squinted at him. “And by better you mean worse, don’t you?”
“The clock is ticking. We’re not the only ones to have queried about Herr Doktor and his estate in the past six months. Which, by the way, is about when those files went missing—six months ago.”
The headache had officially become a full-blown crawl-back-into-bed-and-die throb. Despite herself, and the pain, Wren felt flickers of interest, exactly the way Sergei had anticipated she would, damn him.
“Somebody knows what’s in there? But how? Who? Why now?” Even as she asked, Wren thought she knew the answer. Because of her. It had to be. It all went back to their bond, the one P.B. instigated in order to save her life last year. Someone had found out about it, had realized how it connected to P.B.’s origins, and started hunting. Someone who knew what demons had been created for. That was the only thing that made any sense, and would explain the letter P.B. had gotten.
He had been right, that letter was real, and it was probably written under duress that was almost certainly fatal.
Her fault. Not that there were people out there with evil intent, she wasn’t that much of a guilt-ridden ego-maniac. But that they knew there was a reason to go after demons, that P.B., specifically, might be a target…that was her responsibility.
In the moment of truth months ago, torn up and worn down by events around her, Wren had gone beyond her limits, not caring what it did to her system so long as she could strike out against those who had harmed her and those around her. She had done it to end, once and for all, the fear and distrust that was shattering the Cosa, to end the efforts of the Silence, who had decided that the modern world had no place for magic, to rid the city of that “abomination.”
She could not have done it alone, not even as Talented as she was. But the sudden infusion of current from the Fatae, through a tricky bit of electrical manipulation that she prayed would never be repeated, had allowed her access to the power.
And, already three-quarters of the way into wizzing, that jolt sent her over the edge.
In the darkness that tried to eat her, in that instant, she had been lost…until she heard not her own voice calling out, but two others. Sergei…and P.B.
She had never told a soul, not even those two, exactly what had happened inside her that night. But rumors spread, expanded, and became, somehow, more believable than the truth. Spread…and were heard by the wrong people.
She didn’t know for sure that was what had happened, but the guilt weighed just as heavy, proven or not.
“Everyone wants their own damn personal demon.” Exactly what she had promised P.B. would never happen.
“Not everyone.” Sergei came around to sit next to her, his much larger hands capturing her own, stilling their restless fidgeting. “Even among those who might suspect, mostly they either don’t care, or they’re not strong enough for it to matter.” You had to be at a certain level in order to channel enough current for wizzing to be a danger. Most Talent were blocked, could only use fifty or sixty percent of what was available. Wren had a few blocks—she couldn’t Translocate herself without being ill, even now—but she figured she was maybe eighty percent unblocked.
Maybe more, now.
“It won’t matter,” she said. “He’ll become a status symbol, a way to show you’re Pure enough…even if you’re not.” And not just P.B. Her demon protected himself even before the events of the past year made things dicier. But other demons, ones who didn’t have his experience, or weren’t as savvy—even the strongest of bodies could be captured. Given enough muscle, even P.B. could be taken down, despite his precautions.
Her hands were like ice, and all she could think about was the promise that she had made to P.B., before she even knew what he was, what he could do.
I will never take anything you do not willingly offer.
And yet, to stop anyone from ever wizzing again…to keep people from the madness that had claimed Max, Neezer, so many others who could have given so much good to the world if they hadn’t…. Again the thought came to her: to save Neezer, would she…No. Not ever. She felt sick inside, as if sudden vertigo mixed with a gut full of too much sugar was making her feel light-headed and sweaty. To choose between her father and her brother…
“Wren. Wren!”
*Wren.*
Sergei was Null. That ping hadn’t come from him.
*Wren. Are you all right?*
P.B. didn’t use magic. None of the Fatae did; they were magic. That was how they had been able to gift her with the power to destroy the Silence, like giving blood at the scene of an accident. No, not blood: marrow. Prime and potent and nearly overwhelming with power.
Demons were not like the rest of the Fatae, nor were they like humans. Somewhere in between, created to be a living bridge. The strength P.B. gave her blended into her own, rather than overpowering. Someday they were going to have to figure out exactly what that meant, and how far it could be pushed. Today wasn’t that day.
*I’m okay. Bad day,* she sent back, and cut the connection. He would have to know the deal, know her guilt, but not right now. Not until she was sure what the deal was, and how much trouble they might be in.
Her attention returned to her partner, all business now. “I need you to get me the blueprints to the museum and every single damn storeroom they have—everything and anything available, and the stuff that’s not available, too. Plus the name of anyone working there who might be even slightly bribeable, influenceable or on vacation at any point in th
e next month.” And then she had to convince P.B. to get in touch with his fellow demons, no matter how he did it. They needed to know if anyone else had been approached, if anyone else had gone missing. If she had competition in this Retrieval, and it sounded as if she might, she wanted to know who, and when, as well as why.
She reached over and picked up one of the slips of paper off Sergei’s blotter. “Meanwhile, it looks like I have a favor to pay back. Joy.”
ten
“Dear universe. Why does paying back favors never seem to involve lying on a towel somewhere on a beach with sweet-tempered cabana boys rubbing tanning oil all over hard-to-reach spots?”
She wasn’t really expecting an answer. She didn’t get one.
Instead of warm tropical breezes scented with coconut oil, the air was cold, and filled with the less-than-delightful smells of a working sea-wharf and the wind coming off Newark Bay. Moreover, there were absolutely no cabana boys of any temperament, anywhere to be seen. Port Newark wasn’t exactly a hopping social spot on a Sunday night—correction, early Monday morning—for a reason.
Despite that, there was a steady if slow rumble of activity behind her, from the Container Terminal. The city might occasionally sleep, but the ocean never did, and dawn would arrive to find the 930 square acres of the Port already hard at work.
Wren leaned against a damp wooden post, shivering in her jacket, and tried not to think about how damned tired she was. Soonest started, soonest home, soonest back in a comfy, warm, occupied bed.
With that pleasant thought, she pursed her lips and whistled lightly, the sound carrying a filament of current with it. It was a trick she had learned purely by accident, trying to whistle along with Billy Joel’s “The Stranger.” Sound conveyed current, of course; that was the point of cantrips; that the words helped focus and direct the magic. But a whistle, the pure sound without words, was even better for that. It just wasn’t always practical, and not everyone could whistle well enough to hold the focus. She could.
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