Blood from Stone

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Neat, precise handwriting, familiar to her from a year of tests and homework assignments with comments printed on the back. He had handwriting like a woman’s, each curl and line carefully placed. He did what he said and he meant what he wrote, and his handwriting showed the planning behind it all.

  John Ebeneezer had been a planner. He did nothing without thinking it through, seeing all the possible outcomes and pitfalls, collecting data and details.

  The notebook was like a gift, the past and present colluding to present it to her, years after she had gotten it and, sick with pain and loss, shoved it into a box, but it was a gift that she wasn’t sure she wanted. Reading about yourself, seeing yourself observed and judged…. How much of that could a person take? How much was healthy, and where did it become masochism?

  How much history could you ingest, even your own?

  Still, she kept turning pages, and his voice came back to her, line after line.

  I think she’s using current to shoplift. That will have to stop, now.

  The date on that page—two days before he had intercepted her in the Five and Dime. Two days before he had interrupted and changed her life completely, forever.

  His voice, fading for so long, had come back to her, in full force. Damn that job, for putting her on an unexpected collision course with her past, all in one loosely wrapped package.

  There were no coincidences. Didn’t mean the Universe didn’t have a nasty sense of humor.

  Wren put down the notebook, using one of Sergei’s business cards to mark her place. Suddenly, she didn’t feel like reading any more.

  The blueprints neatly folded on the floor next to the sofa were the obvious next step. She should already have memorized them, really. It wasn’t any different from any other job…except it was. And she couldn’t pin down why.

  They had done jobs for other friends before. Most of them had turned out fine. Almost all, in fact. She went in, Retrieved, made client happy. The competition factor, of someone else trying for the same prize? Pffft. Yeah, she was worried about getting there first, but she also had the home ground advantage. Plus, Talent. Unlike Null thieves, she had that in her tool kit. If her competition tried to hire another Talent to do it? Unlikely, but if they did, unlike most other Retrievers she had met or read about, she had a full complement of traditional skills—lock-picking, gymnastics training—to round out her more esoteric skill sets. Best of both worlds made her the best in both, that was her theory.

  So what was her trauma?

  The stakes, came the answer, gut-deep and undeniable. This wasn’t for money, or ego, or even reputation. It wasn’t to save the world, or even to save a city. All those things were real and valid, but they were either petty enough to be tucked inside, or huge enough that you couldn’t think about them.

  This was for a friend. For a friend’s life. For his freedom.

  For P.B.’s freedom.

  Wren reached over and picked up the prints, feeling their weight in her palm. No time like right now to get things done. Sitting upright and cross-legged on the sofa, she opened the plans and got to work memorizing the pertinent, the potentially pertinent, and the probably-never-pertinent-but-can’t-hurt details.

  This time, the sound of the buzzer did break her concentration, and only then did she realize that the smell of something hot, greasy, and good was drifting into the office.

  “Our dinner’s here,” Sergei said, somewhat unnecessarily. She folded the blueprints back into their square, and uncurled herself from the sofa, feeling the stiffness in her hips and knees. She wasn’t twenty-five anymore, that was for sure.

  They left the quiet cocoon of the office, and joined Lowell, who had spread the pizza boxes and sodas on the counter, and was already opening up a container of what looked like fried squid. Wren bit her tongue and didn’t say anything as she reached for her own eight-inch pizza. Lowell cast his own disparaging glance at her food, but was likewise restrained.

  Sergei looked from one to the other as though suspecting a trick, but was wise enough to just enjoy the truce for as long as it lasted.

  Wren passed him a slice of garlic bread and then, almost as an afterthought, slid the container across the counter to Lowell, too.

  Burp.

  The sound echoed throughout the office, followed by the faint aroma of cheese and anchovies. Both individuals looked surprised, as though it had appeared out of thin air, and not the depths of Wren’s stomach, as though the meal of an hour before had been two days earlier, instead.

  “Thank you, P.B.,” Sergei said, going back to his paperwork.

  Wren chuckled, not at all abashed by her bodily functions. “Nah, his have more—what’s the word? Resonance. His tummy’s a little echo chamber or something.”

  “Nice. Thank you for sharing.”

  She moved the straw around in her cup, trying to get the last of the now-flat soda before admitting it was gone. “If you were looking for ladylike, I think you made a wrong turn at Pismo Beach.

  “I think I know a way in,” she said, changing the subject midstride even as he snorted in agreement with her previous comment. “It’s not perfect, but it should avoid the mistakes their guy made.”

  “Like getting caught?”

  Like getting killed, she thought, but didn’t say.

  “I trust you have—” The phone interrupted whatever trust he was going to impart, and he picked it up with a brusque motion. “Didier. Yes, this is he—Agent Chang, thank you for calling me back so quickly.”

  Wren sat up, ignoring the overfed ache in her stomach, and watched his expression. Her partner was a damn good poker player when he wanted to be, but times like this, she could read him like a newspaper. Something was breaking. Something useful.

  “Yes, I am fine, thank you, and will be better if you tell me that your resources turned something up on the question.”

  She knew the moment he got what he was looking for, even before he reached over to flick two switches on his desk. One enabled a low-level electronic hum in the walls that served a dual purpose: to confound any Null who might be trying to listen in, and to distract any less-than-tight-focused Talent who was doing likewise. To Wren it was like smelling food cooking in another apartment, and—after enough practice—was easy enough to tune out. The second switch put Agent Chang on speakerphone.

  “Wren is here, as well,” he said.

  “Heya, Anea.”

  “Wren. I have news, I’m not sure if it’s good or bad.” The agent’s voice was flattened by the speaker, and, possibly, by exhaustion. Wren wondered if the other woman took phone calls sitting upright at her desk, feet flat on the floor, or if she had kicked back, toed off her sensible shoes, maybe with her feet on the desk like a satisfied car dealer. Not that it mattered, but you could learn a lot about a person through their body language, especially when they thought nobody could see them.

  “Let us decide that,” Sergei said, impatient. Case in point—his body language was practically shouting, although she was the only one who was impressed by it.

  Agent Chang was cool, but wound up. “Your boys are definitely up to something. I had a friend in the…in another office check, and there has been some significant bank activity in their names in the past twenty-four hours. They’ve been transferring funds from overseas, clearing them in a local bank, through an account that’s about two years old. All the legal T’s have been crossed and the I’s dotted. It’s sort of reflex for my friend to check for that sort of thing, but there’s no reason he could find to raise a red flag other than the suddenness of the transactions, and that wasn’t enough to shove through, without priors. Not without getting someone coming down in their defense, or alerting them to the fact that they’re being watched, which I figured you didn’t want happening. Sorry.”

  The fact that Chang had even thought to think about that impressed Wren—she supposed it came with the job, to think like a criminal. Danny did the same thing.

  Funny, really. She was a crimin
al, and she didn’t think like one.

  “They also bought airline tickets this afternoon. From JFK to Gatwick. Three days from now.”

  The day their hotel stay ended. So they weren’t planning on moving somewhere cheaper, which had been a passing thought in Wren’s head. “Both of them?’

  “Three, actually. Three seats, specifically. Requested all three together in the center row, not aisle or window seat, which is unusual.”

  Wren and Sergei exchanged looks across the desk. It might be nothing. It could be they were taking P.B.’s shadow back with them. They might be meeting another member of their group here, someone already on the ground, who planned to go back with them. It might be a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a sibling…

  An unwilling companion?

  Sergei scratched something on a sheet of paper and shoved it across the desk at her. She took it, but already knew what it would say.

  Is he safe?

  She read it, and shrugged helplessly. Who knew? She told him to go to ground, and he had, but the demon was as stubborn as she was: when he said he was done with running that was exactly what he meant. The bedrock of Manhattan would be easier to budge, and she couldn’t check on him without risking his security, and alerting his shadow to a possible connection between them. Even if they didn’t make the demon-Talent assumption, it would still get their attention exactly when she needed them to not be looking at her.

  “Anything else?” Sergei was more brusque than she would have been to a woman who’d just not only done them a favor but been really good about not even asking why.

  Chang didn’t seem to be offended by his tone, though. “They’re booked on Virgin, the evening flight.” She rattled off a series of numbers—their seat numbers. “That may change, though. I’ll let you know if it does. They’ve arranged for car service to pick them up three hours before the flight—not near enough time to deal with traffic and security, but I tend to get there early, it’s easier on my stomach lining.”

  Listening, Wren decided that Chang definitely had her shoes off, even if she was in otherwise perfect office posture. There was just that hint of “now you owe me” in her voice, and in Wren’s experience that sort of smugness didn’t happen if your toes were shoved into even the most expensively comfortable of shoes.

  She looked up at her partner again and noted his own body language, which had changed over the course of that brief exchange. Sergei had heard the same tone in Chang’s voice that Wren noticed, and was now both resigned and amused. This was a game that he knew, and he knew that he was better at it than Agent Chang, but he didn’t know how much better, and that uncertainty amused him.

  If he would bet on her mother against Chang, she would bet on him…but not forever. She knew why he introduced them, and it wasn’t because he needed Wren’s take on the other woman; it was because he was worried that Wren might see her and be paranoid because the other woman was so attractive, and so totally his usual type.

  Wren was pretty damn sure that Chang had enough self-awareness to know the reaction she got from men, and was enough of a gambler to bet how one Sergei Didier was likely to react to that reaction, specifically his reaction to her and Wren’s possible reaction to that, and was not above using all of it to get her the direct introduction she wanted.

  Her partner had been played.

  Wren wouldn’t mention that chain of probables to him, though. Not yet, anyway. It was more fun sometimes just to watch.

  Chang and he exchanged farewells, and Sergei ended the call feeling as though he still had the upper hand, but not as much as he was comfortable with. He also had a feeling that his partner was laughing at him, although she had already gone back to the blueprints during the farewells, and was making quick chicken-scratches on a pad she had taken from his desk.

  From the drawer in his desk, actually. And he hadn’t even noticed. There were times he almost forgot what it was she did, what she was. And then things of his own appeared in her possession, things he knew he hadn’t brought over, and he was reminded all over again. Wren wasn’t a Retriever because she was good at stealing: she was good at stealing because she was a Retriever.

  We are what we are. Human, Null, Talent, Fatae, demon. Are those racing against us as trapped in their roles as we are? He shrugged, dismissing the thought as irrelevant. They were threatening his people. He reacted badly to that, no matter why it was done.

  He watched her, knowing that she didn’t mind being observed, that she in fact found it comforting that he always saw her, unless she was using current to disappear. There was a sense of urgency to the way she was writing out her notes, a sense that he now shared. Chang’s information had turned the “little time” to act into “no time.” Whatever plan Wren had in mind, it had to be ready to go within the next twenty-four hours, if not sooner. It was a calculated risk: that the competition would not want to stay in the city any longer than they had to, once the papers were in their hands, but would not cut things so tight that anything going wrong might cause them to miss their flight or otherwise raise red flags. That gave the would-be Frankensteins a rather specific window to slip through. Wren had to be ready to slip through just before them.

  Sergei picked up the phone again, and dialed the number of a friend of his who worked in the security industry. He had installed the system that protected the gallery, and did enough work for other galleries and private collectors that he was bound to have contacts among some of the bigger players, as well.

  “Mike. Hi, it’s Sergei. No, everything’s fine here, why do you always assume something’s wrong? That little faith in your own work?”

  A pungent curse came back through the wires. Pleasantries concluded; Sergei began the delicate tightrope of trying to get information without actually asking anything. It helped that he didn’t actually want to know anything about the system the museum had installed—they had the electrical specifics noted in the material he had already gotten for her, and if it was enhanced by anything magical, Wren was better suited to sniffing it out and dealing with it. No, he wanted to know about the museum itself, and the people who worked there.

  You could tell a lot about a place from the gossip surrounding its employees. If payroll was late, or benefits had been cut, or the boss was known to be a tosser, or hip-deep in gambling debts, it all meant something he could use, something that could give them a better idea of the situation Wren would be walking into.

  As he fenced verbally with Mike, he was making notes on a pad of his own. He’d rather use his computer, or his PDA, but those were out of the question with his partner concentrating so hard in the same room. He wasn’t sure how much current she touched when she was preparing like this, but from what she’d said over the years he got the idea that she used it like a cat when she was stressed, petting it for reassurance. That alone probably wouldn’t hurt his computer, which was surge-protected as though it were based in Storm Alley, or the phones, which were likewise grounded, but why take the risk? And his PDA…he knew better than to even bring it out of the case when she was around. He had gone through three in their first year of partnership alone, and they weren’t cheap.

  The shape taking place on his pad was a rough draft of the building shown on Wren’s blueprints. He was working mostly from memory, but the museum was large enough that the basics were, well, basic; two old-style townhouses—mansions by most standards—on Museum Mile, also known as Fifth Avenue above 80th. They’d been bought over fifty years ago, renovated into one building for the sole purpose of creating a museum. A narrow alley still ran between them, for what looked like trash collection, with a walkway connecting them two stories overhead.

  There were bus stops in front, entrances on these sides, construction there—he needed to double-check that.

  Wren worked alone. He had gone in with her on a few jobs over the years, mainly when she needed a driver, a cover, or a body to help haul, but she worked alone. To suggest otherwise now would imply that he had doubts, and that was the l
ast thing she needed—and the last thing he meant to say.

  The doubts were on his side. About himself.

  Doc managed to dig up doubts he hadn’t even known he had, and now they wouldn’t go away.

  She used to ground in him, when there was need. Now, she had P.B., and that was better for everyone, all-around. He had gotten far enough in therapy to admit that, and to actually really mean it. She had proven that, in need, she could handle the business side of things, although she didn’t like it, and wasn’t anywhere near as good at it as he was.

  She didn’t need him. That was good, even as the awareness caused him an occasional pang for the days when he was the senior partner, the one who made the decisions. How could he not be pleased when his partner came into her own, became the woman he had seen in that mouthy, scared, Talented teenager so many years ago?

  But P.B. might not be available. Whether or not the others knew that the demon was—what was the word, viable—they still knew that he was here, that he worked with Talent, and they were following him. If the Dutchmen failed to grab the materials, the third seat might be intended for the demon. Even if they did get the papers, they might want the additional prize, the living proof. From what P.B. had said and not said, it didn’t sound as if any of the other demons were serving any Talent, at least not currently.

  He winced at the pun, but kept to the line of thought. Despite Wren’s hopes of keeping the connection hidden, enough people in town knew of the friendship between P.B. and Wren for him to assume that bit of information was known, and from there it was a logical jump to suspect that P.B. might be the only extant demon capable of serving—the only intact working model of the mad bastard’s work.

  He used a red pen to mark possible line-of-sight points, even as Mike was dodging his questions. Even if P.B. was safe and sound and able to be there, Sergei knew he needed to be on-scene for the Retrieval, as well. He had one advantage, if you could call it that, that she didn’t. An advantage that he didn’t want her to have.