Blood from Stone

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Another player in the mix, and Wren could feel the noose getting tighter around P.B.’s neck. If she didn’t get her hands on everything his creator—he should rot in a seventh hell—had ever written, the demon would never be able to relax again. Crap hell, this job wasn’t paying anything except in headaches.

  She had to know who she was dealing with, and fast, and one hundred percent accurate.

  Tomorrow, she’d swallow her pride and go see Morrie.

  fifteen

  She was up on her roof the next morning before the sun rose, standing on the tar papered surface, wearing a ragged pair of back sweatpants and a tank top, thick socks and sneakers on her feet. The sky was filled with narrow wisps of clouds that told any Talent with basic weather forecasting skills that there was damn little electrical energy to work with in the upper atmosphere. The view almost made up for that lack: pale red glints of sunlight reflecting off hundreds of glass-fronted buildings and the pale blue of the rivers bordering her island. At that moment it was her island; she could have been the only living human anywhere.

  Then the blare of an early-morning taxi rose from the street, and the sounds of the city were back, if slightly muted, and she had to share the city with almost two million other bodies, human and otherwise.

  Wren breathed in deeply, and stretched her hands over her head, fingers pointing into the sky, then brought them together, palms touching, and bent at the waist, fingertips now reaching down to her toes. Her spine cracked, not unpleasantly, and she felt the muscles pull from her calves to her forearms.

  Holding that position, she let her palms rest flat on the tar paper surface of the roof, feeling the vibrations of the building rumble through her. Somewhere down there, Bonnie was dreaming, current weaving around her restlessly. Wren skirted around it, slipping deeper through the building, letting the vibes of the building itself guide her to what she was looking for.

  Ley lines, some people called them. Convergence points. Mystical alignments of energy. Current was lazy; given the option, like water it followed established paths rather than creating its own. Ley lines ran through this building, in the structure of it, roof to foundation, after fifty-plus years infusing every brick and timber with a tinge of natural current.

  “Hello, darlings,” she said to it now, but didn’t touch it. She wasn’t looking for a quick skim, but something a little…deeper. A little harder.

  Down through the basement, past the building’s boiler, the masses of wiring coiled and simmering to a Talent’s eyes.

  She remembered the feel of the deep bedrock underneath it all, the foundation of Manhattan itself. Living. Breathing. Imbued with current that had been building since before Europeans came to these shores, when local Indian tribes walked the woodlands and paddled the creeks and rivers…

  If she let it, the history would pull her down and hold her, the inanimate current turning her into stone, as well.

  Not this time. Not now. I just need a touch, a touch…

  Somewhere, a hundred miles away, she felt a resonance in the stone. A cave dragon, twitching on its pile of treasure, thinking someone was stalking it.

  Not you, cousin, she reassured it.

  Hidden cousin, came back the sleepy, reassured acknowledgement, the nickname the Fatae had given her for once not pissing her off. If you need, take.

  The casualness of it floored her. Not the generosity—dragons never gave anything away without cost to the borrower, but they did give—but the fact that it was offered without the asking.

  Thank you. But not today.

  What she wanted was deeper than living things. Stronger. Sturdier. More still.

  Bedrock, she thought, and let the stillness of the rock, the natural current baked into the rock by the heart of the earth itself, trickle into her. Blood from stone. Slow, so slow. But strong.

  She was going to need that strength, today.

  “You like to challenge me, don’t you?” Morrie glared down at the Retriever as though expecting her to be intimidated. Seven feet tall and three feet across, with a face like a hardened, semisuccessful prizefighter, Morrie probably looked intimidating as hell. If—and this was a big if—you didn’t know that underneath that granite facade beat the heart of the biggest show-off on the entire northern continent.

  Wren knew. It didn’t always help.

  “I live to challenge you,” she said in response. “It’s what gives my life meaning, my lungs breath, my loins heat, my—”

  “Oh, for fucks’ sake, stop. You’ll make the cat laugh.”

  The cat in question, a smooshed-face orange Persian, didn’t even bother to look up at either one of them, being more intent on napping in the sun-filled window seat, on a black velvet cushion.

  It was just Morrie and the cat in the entire house, an old Victorian at the far tip of Long Island, about as far away from everyone as he could get and still be considered a local celebrity of sorts by Manhattan’s Cosa, if by “celebrity” you meant “the guy everyone wanted it to be known they knew, but nobody actually wanted to know.”

  Once, Wren had been told, his kind had lived all up and down the East Coast. Now, he was the only one left. Or, at least, she amended to herself, the only one who still had contact with the rest of the Cosa. Like pandas, stone giants were secretive, shy, and really not good in crowds. There could be a dozen of them in the area, and they just never felt the need to come down and mingle.

  Like demons, actually, except that demons tended to make a living off others, and so had to be out and about, couriering and body-guarding. Giants never seemed to need to make a living. Morrie only did what he did because it meant he got to score points off lesser and less-knowing mortals. He didn’t ask for money, or food, or goods of any kind, just the knowledge that people had to come to him to get what they needed.

  He made it a point of pride to always deliver. But you had to beg, first. That was what he got off on, making people beg.

  “Morrie. Come on, you’re killing me.” She jumped up on the table, a solid piece of wood polished to a high gleam, in order to be able to see him eye to eye. Or eye to chin, anyway. A stone giant might not be one of the big guys of yore, but they were still plenty big, in her book. “A simple, little favor. The kind you do better than anyone else.” She waited, and he stared back at her, impassive. “You won’t even tell me you can dig up something for me? Two easy-peasy names?”

  Wren wasn’t good at begging. She touched her core, and felt the cool immobility of bedrock, let it ooze a little out of her. Not overt, but enough for Morrie to feel, even if he didn’t know why, or where it came from. Stone to stone.

  He crossed his arms across his bare chest and scowled down at her feet. “Get the hell off my table. I can dig up anything. Tell me why I’d want to.”

  “Because I want to know?” She got down off the table, noting that her feet hadn’t left a smudge on the wood. That was some serious high-gloss.

  “Not good enough.” He turned away and clucked at the cat, who continued to ignore them both.

  “Because they’re bad, bad people who need to be stopped?”

  “By you?” A stone giant’s snort was not a thing to underestimate. Wren had to take a full step back under the gust. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to take offense at his dismissal or take it as a compliment that she, too, was a bad, bad person—or at least someone who wasn’t overly bothered by bad, bad people. Morrie was weird even for a giant; it was tough to know what went on in his head. Although he did have a few known weaknesses….

  She sighed deeply, reached down into her bag of tricks, and played her trump card. “It would mean a lot to Sergei if you did this for us.”

  Morrie gave her a half glare from under his heavy lids. “Don’t play me, Retriever. He’s gorgeous, but not that gorgeous.” He shifted in his chair, a huge, reinforced throne of hardwood that weighed about as much as a VW Bug, and stared out the plate glass window. He had a view of the Long Island Sound that was probably worth a midsize fort
une, and all Wren could think about was how cold it must be in the winter, with nothing to stop the winds rushing in off the water. The wind off the East River was bad enough to knock her backward when she stepped off the curb downtown; this would probably send her flying.

  Stone giants didn’t have that kind of problem. The “stone” in their names didn’t just come from the way their skin looked; they were rock-solid bastards, epidermis to marrow. Morrie was wearing pants—a leather job that must have cost a fortune to custom-make, unless he did the work himself—only as deference to her modesty, not because his skin needed the protection.

  She had dragged her ass all the way out here, dealing with insane Friday-morning commuters, and the bastard was going to make her sweat even more. God, she hated dealing with the Fatae, sometimes. Most of the time. The clock was ticking, damn it, and she was doing this to protect one of their own!

  Except most of the Fatae didn’t really think of demons as one of their own; if they didn’t like admitting tails, they liked admitting created cousins even less. Especially created-by-human. Wren supposed she understood that, but enough was goddamned enough. She could feel something inside her stirring, wanting to get moving, and it was becoming more and more of an effort to keep it tamped down, even with the aid of the bedrock-current. They needed details before she could move, and she needed to move now, without anyone else knowing what she knew or that she knew it. That meant that they needed Morrie.

  The stone giant was still staring out the window when he finally spoke, and it took her a moment to realize he was talking to her. “Two names. Fine. Time frame?”

  She didn’t stop to wonder why he had finally agreed. She really didn’t care. “They got into town last week-ish. Address and all known info I got, you got. I need to know who they know, who they’re taking instructions from, who they’re meeting with, what makes them jump. And I need to know now.”

  “Now as in, this week, or…”

  “Now as in, I’ll wait right here.”

  The giant grumbled at that. “You’re not staying anywhere near me while I work, lonejack. Like as not kill all my tech. Go into the kitchen and make yourself a sandwich. Put some flesh on those bones of yours. Humans, phagh. No idea how to stay healthy, all over too skinny and soft, like jellyfish.” He flapped one thick-fingered hand at her. “Go, out of my sight.”

  His kitchen was as oversize as everything else, and just as empty of furnishings. Giants weren’t much on furniture, or any kind of normal-size comfort. But there was a fresh-baked baguette in the bread bag, and some kind of fish spread and half-a-dozen cheeses in the fridge, along with the makings of a green salad. No coffee or soda, but there was overly tart lemonade that was surprisingly refreshing once she cut it with seltzer. By the time Morrie bellowed her name, Wren had managed to make a sizable dent in the food, and was feeling a postgorge satiation. If this were a fairy tale, she thought sleepily, sitting on the floor with the remains of her meal spread out in front of her, the giant would be in the other room preparing a nice toasty fire to broil her on for his dinner.

  She wondered, just as sleepily, if she should have told someone where she was going, before she left the city, and if Sergei would find her bones or if Morrie would use them for toothpicks.

  “Retriever! You want this information or not?”

  She did.

  The train ride back to the city seemed to take forever, but the alternative would have been to rent a car, and no matter what Sergei said Wren was shying away from any additional expenses right now. If her apartment was really about to go private-ownership, every penny counted. Besides, dealing with traffic on the Long Island Expressway would have made her so frustrated, she wasn’t sure if the car would survive. Bad form to return a rental car with its entire electrical system melted into a nervous breakdown.

  So she sat on the train and tried to get some sleep, despite the chatty ladies-who-lunch in the seats behind her, talking about the play they were going to see. Screaming children were easier to tune out than Madge and Midge and Dolores. Every time she dozed off, though, either one of the ladies would hit an excited high-note screech, or the train would jounce and knock her head against the window, waking her up.

  Control, Valere. You will not lose your temper. You will not fry Dolores’s perm, hotseat the train conductor for crap driving, or short out the lights just because you want to be home already. Misery does not love company, misery just wants to be left the hell alone to sulk.

  She was actually in a decent enough mood all things considered. Considering those things, though, she’d be happier once she was home and could get things moving.

  Dolores—or was it Midge?—hit another high note. Wren stilled the tremor in her legs through sheer determination, and practiced deep breathing exercises to calm the matching tremor in her core, and only she knew how close the Ladies who Lunched came to being squelched.

  When the train finally pulled into Penn Station, only half an hour late, she waited until the day-trippers had gotten off the train. It wasn’t courtesy but common sense: tourists moved too slow, blocked aisles and generally confounded and annoyed those who knew what they were doing. In her mood? Better to wait for the herd to thin out a little, and actually get where she was going more quickly.

  Once freed, she bypassed the warren of subways and tunnels, and went up the stairs to the sidewalk level. It was nice enough that Wren decided to walk to the gallery rather than waiting for a bus to make it across town. Once out of the immediate area, the pedestrian traffic became more manageable, and she was able to lengthen her stride—as much as her legs could manage, anyway. One advantage of hanging out with height-gifted people all her life; she had learned how to walk taller than she actually was.

  Blocks later, Wren crossed Houston and continued downtown, dodging the little tables of a café that was holding on to summer with both hands, and made her way to Blaine Street. The sunlight hit the stained glass front just so, and she paused, despite her hurry, to look at it. Sergei had commissioned the glass specifically for the gallery, and the soft blues and greens reminded her of the ocean outside Morrie’s window. In the winter, the waters were often as not gray, but right now, with the sun hitting them, they had been those shades.

  She forgot, sometimes, that Manhattan was an island, that Long Island was an island, that they were all just a bunch of little islands connected by bridges and tunnels and cable wires. Wire and tunnels. Blood and bone. Blood and stone. A living city.

  Either you’re getting deep, or you’re getting stupid, she told herself, and went inside.

  The gallery was empty. Literally: all the artwork from the previous installation had either gone on to new homes or back to the artist, and the new show hadn’t been brought in yet, so there were empty pedestals and cardboard boxes throughout the space, and a sense of echoing emptiness, otherwise. No customers, browsing or otherwise. The second-level catwalk still had a display of watercolors by a group of artists from New Mexico that Wren rather liked, but nobody was up there right now. She kept meaning to talk to Sergei about buying one of the smaller paintings but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. She needed him to be with her when she chose, not because she didn’t trust her taste, but because she was afraid to go up the narrow steps in case she accidentally came down with all of them in her bag.

  She didn’t just Retrieve; she was a Retriever. It went beyond training and into bone-deep instinct. When she was a teenager, she sometimes came home with things she honestly had no memory of taking. That hadn’t happened in years, but she remembered how mortifying the realization could be—especially after Neezer and her mom made her return a few of the items they knew about.

  No, better not to even go up there, at least not alone.

  Lowell was leaning against the dark wood of the front desk, perfect as always in dark blue trousers and a paler blue shirt that set off his frat boy blondness. He looked as though he was surgically attached to the phone headset, arguing with someone about a delivery date
. He looked up when she came in, prepared to deal with a would-be customer, but then just waved her toward the back office. No sneer, no scornful up-and-down dismissal that he usually gave, even when Sergei was standing there. The walk across town had mellowed her enough that she merely nodded in acknowledgement and went past him without comment of her own. Between this, and not snarking at each other earlier…maybe they were both finally growing up?

  Perish the thought, she decided. It was just a temporary truce while they were both busy. She’d get back to him later.

  “Morrie came through, as expected,” Wren announced as she went through the door and saw that Sergei was alone, and not on the phone or otherwise occupied with uninterruptible things. The door closed behind her before she continued. “Our friends are from the right area, anyway. One is a naturalized American, born in Canada of Dutch parents. The other’s a German national, travels a lot on business, is frequently in Amsterdam for gatherings he refers to as family reunions.”

  “Actual family members?” He was sitting on the edge of the desk and shuffling papers as he spoke, sorting them into two piles. One went back into his inbox, a hideous burlwood thing with carved gargoyle legs he had picked up somewhere, and the other pile was tossed onto the desk behind him.

  “If so, it’s a rather extended family. And it includes our Canadian-born friend. The last meeting was over six months ago. Yes, I know that’s over our time frame. But—” when Sergei looked up, Wren held up a finger to forestall anything he might say “—just last week our Canadian-born friend, Rogier, got a phone call from one of those members. The very next day he was traveling down here. The woman who called him, a—” and she had to check her notes for this one “—a Sophia Roos, had met the day before with two other members of this ‘family’—” and she used air quotes when she said the word, in case he missed her irony “—in Amsterdam.”

  “It’s not enough to convict, but it would be enough for a warrant,” Sergei said, putting the remaining papers away, and Wren thought that yes, he had been spending too much time with Danny the ex-cop, to think that way. The Cosa didn’t have warrants. All right, the Cosa didn’t have much by way of law enforcement, period; that was why the PUPIs were so useful, and so controversial.