Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Is this about the meetings they’ve been having?”

  “What have you heard about it?” Michael was a lonejack and Seta was Council, but neither of them worked with their Talent: he was a lawyer, she taught history at a charter school in midtown. They were about as close as you could get to the Cosa’s middle class, if such a thing existed.

  “Not much.” Michael took a sip of his coffee. “That there were meetings going on, high-level stuff, the Council coming down among the unwashed masses, more fatae seen in town than anyone can remember…Is it true, that someone’s hunting them?”

  Seta sighed. “You are so painfully out of touch…. Didn’t you hear about the Moot Massacre?”

  Wren blinked. All right, she had missed that particular nickname for the attack….

  “I figured it had been exaggerated, or something.” Michael didn’t seem too abashed.

  “Lonejacks,” Wren said with a long-suffering sigh. “They just don’t care.”

  “Damn straight,” Michael agreed.

  “Well, you have to care, now,” she said, suddenly serious. “Because it’s true, all of it. True and serious and in your face, right here, right now.”

  Wren suddenly felt a tingle on the back of her neck, as though someone was staring at her. But when she glanced casually around the Starbucks, everyone seemed intent on their own business. She looked out the glass window, thinking it might have come from out there. For once, there was no snow actively falling, but the streets were slushy, and the curbs and sidewalks were still coated with a dingy gray-white mix of slush and ice that caused pedestrians to walk with particular care or risk going down on their backsides. Preoccupied with staying upright, none of them were looking in at her.

  Wren shook her head, telling herself that it was probably just someone’s fur coat against the gray of sky and street that had flickered in the corner of her eye.

  Whatever it was, it was gone now.

  “Yo, you with us?” Michael asked, peering at her intently. “You zoned for a moment.”

  “Did you…” She shook her head, dropping the unasked question. “Yeah. I’m here. So, now you know the deal. My question is—would you join a patrol if they were organized, all three groups together? Keep an eye on things, report back, be willing to be part of a multipronged, organized approach to what’s going down?”

  Michael nodded once, firmly, without having to consider the question very long.

  Wren added, because she had to know: “Even if the Council voted against it?”

  Seta looked like she’d just felt the rough brick of a wall come up against her back, hard. “Voted…” She sighed, and stared down into her cup. “Look, if the Council says no, we—Council members—jump no. You know that. But if they don’t say anything specifically that is shaped like a no and sounds like a no and smells like a no…”

  “Then it’s not actually a no.”

  “Not actually, no.”

  Wren nodded. It wasn’t good enough, but it was the best she was going to get. And there were others she needed to meet with before she could call it a day. No rest for the weary…

  six

  Sergei walked into the main room and came to a full stop, staring at the disaster that greeted him. “Merry Christmas?”

  Wren made a face, glaring at the pile of cards she still had to sign, stamp, and mail out. She’d conned Sergei into printing up her address lists on his computer at the office the month before, so all she had to do was peel off the labels and stick them on. Her mother would be horrified—“holiday cards should always be handwritten, Genevieve”—but she figured the Miss Manners points she’d lose she’d make up in ego-points with her fellow lonejacks, who would know that she’d somehow managed to use not only a computer, but a printer, as well.

  That time-saver hadn’t managed to keep her piles of envelopes, cards, and colored pens in any semblance of order, however. Nor had it gotten her ass in gear any earlier, despite everything being ready and waiting for weeks now.

  In her own defense, she had been a little busy. And, damn. Tea. The urge to make it arrived, a little late.

  Sergei was going to have to make his own this time.

  Sergei closed the door, unwound the muffler from his neck, took off his coat, and hung them both in the closet. The snow was falling again outside, based on the dampness of his shoulders and hair. Normally snow on Christmas Eve would be a thing to delight in. This year, it was just cause for sighing and shrugging. The weatherfolk were reporting a record seven feet of the cold stuff so far for the winter, coming up on the record from 2001, and there were still two months of the season to go.

  She’d gotten too used to Sergei being here, maybe, for the old early warning tea-urge to kick in.

  Wren had all the curtains drawn across the windows, and in the corner, instead of a tree, there was a metal candelabra in the shape of a Christmas tree with thirteen green candles burning. She saw her partner studying it, and knew that he was seeing Lee’s work in the turn of the metal branches, and the solid but somehow delicate design of the base. It hurt, still, to look at it, but it was a good kind of a hurt, now. It was a remembering kind of a hurt, as well as a missing hurt.

  For a borderline klepto, she didn’t have many belongings—she’d take something she liked, and then discard it when she got bored—but this, and the fabric painting Shin had sent her all the way from Japan, were more than things. They were gifts.

  She looked up at her partner, now, indicating the piles of holiday cards in front of her. “Why do I send these things out, anyway?”

  “I have no idea.”

  If you sent them out early, they were an unwelcome reminder that the holidays were coming and you still had too many things to do. If they arrived during the holidays, they were just tossed with the rest of the cards in some sort of display that just meant another thing to clean up after. And if you sent them too late, you looked like a slacker. You just couldn’t win. But this year at least it gave her hands something to do, and occupied a portion of her brain so that she wasn’t always circling around back to the thing she couldn’t actually do anything about.

  Sergei slipped off his shoes and sat down on the floor next to her, wincing as his expensive slacks came into contact with the floor. “Been cleaning again, have you?”

  Wren sniffed, smelling the wood oil she had used on the floor. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “And it was on my to-do list.”

  “You’ve never had a to-do list in your entire life.” She wrote things down, but for memory-jogs and references, not to keep things orderly or organized.

  “In my head. My head is stuffed full of to-do lists.” A whole list of things to keep her hands busy. “Here,” and she pushed a small pile of cards across the floor to him. “As long as you’re here, be useful and stuff these in the envelopes.”

  He obligingly started placing the cards inside the addressed envelopes, and tabbed the stamps on them without being asked.

  “I miss licking stamps.”

  She shook her head; her hair, still wet from the shower she had taken once the bathroom was spotless, slid pleasantly on the back of her neck. She had taken extra care with her appearance tonight: a long velvet skirt and sleeveless top in a deep purple the exact shade of shadows. She had even used eyeliner to give herself what she thought was a slightly exotic look. But her hair was merely combed through and left to dry by itself. There was only so much fuss she was willing to go through, even for Sergei. “You’re a sick, sick man.”

  “True. But I brought dinner, so I’m forgiven.”

  She had heard him messing about in the kitchen just after he entered the apartment, even before he took his coat off. “Yeah? And do we have a Christmas goose resting in the oven?”

  She looked up at him again as she said it, and did a classic double take at the crestfallen look of “surprise ruined” on his face.

  “A goose?” She did not squeal—she never squealed—but the noise was apparently enough to restore so
me of Sergei’s self-satisfaction, even as she launched herself onto him in an exuberant hug. “Goose!”

  The world, apparently, could go to hell in a snow-covered hand basket, so long as one had goose for dinner.

  “I invited some people over for dessert, later,” she said, letting him up after appropriate thanks had been offered and accepted.

  “Oh?” They had never actually spent Christmas Eve together before, so he couldn’t know if this was normal or not.

  “Well, Bonnie. And P.B.”

  “You had to actually invite him? I expected him to appear the moment the refrigerator door was opened.”

  “Hush. Yes, for dessert. Also a couple of Bonnie’s friends, a bunch of PUPs”—the rather grandiosely named Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigators—“and P.B. said he would bring some ‘cousins’ he wanted me to meet.”

  “So this is more of a working get-together, then.”

  Wren twisted her mouth as though tasting something sour. “I like Bonnie, and she is a neighbor. And it’s never a bad thing to be on good terms with PUPs. And although most of the fatae don’t seem to have any religion as such, I have yet to meet one who didn’t love sweets.”

  “Then I’d best get dinner warmed up, or we might not have a chance to finish before the sugar-craving hordes descend.” He leaned forward to kiss her again, and then got up off the floor, more slowly than he’d sat down.

  “I’m getting too old for this,” he said, stretching out his back. “Would you mind terribly actually buying some comfortable chairs, at some point?”

  A year ago, he would have insisted that they go to his apartment, or just said nothing and kept his discomfort to himself, aware of how touchy Wren could be about her personal space. She supposed that this was progress, that he felt comfortable enough to make suggestions—and that he was phrasing it so delicately.

  “I had been thinking about getting a few beanbag chairs—they’re all popular again, you know?”

  Sergei just groaned and went off to the kitchenette, her laughter following him.

  She had just finished off the last of the cards when a series of mouthwatering smells tickled her nose and made her salivate. She gathered up the cards and went in search of her dinner.

  “Where’s that table you bought?” he asked as she poked her nose into the kitchenette.

  “Office.” She had bought it in order to have a place to meet with a client, but had decided after that it didn’t fit in the main room.

  “Get it. I’m not eating Christmas dinner either at the counter, or on the floor.”

  Grinning, she went in search of the table and chairs. She added a white cotton tablecloth, draping it over the inexpensive wood, then stood back to admire the effect.

  “Much better.”

  Somewhere, she was pretty sure that she had napkins, too….

  Going back into the office, she pulled open the dresser drawers and rummaged through the fabrics stored there, coming up—much to her surprise—with a set of dark burgundy napkins, and a narrow runner to match. She couldn’t remember buying those, or stealing them….

  “Mother,” she said with a sigh, taking them out and closing the drawer with her hip. Someday, her mother would accept the fact that her only daughter had all the social graces and homemaking skills of a stick. Until then, these sort of secreted-away “gifts” would continue.

  Still, she was using these. So maybe there was hope for her yet.

  They had barely cleared the dishes when a white form appeared at the kitchen window, black nose pressed to the glass like an urchin in a Charles Dickens novel. Then he scratched on the glass with his claws, and Wren amended that reference to something out of a Stephen King novel.

  “Should I let the little moocher in?” her partner asked.

  “Might as well, or he’ll freeze there, and I won’t get rid of him until spring.”

  Sergei pushed up the window, and P.B. came in, followed by a form draped in a heavy dark cloth. They shook the snow off themselves, letting it fall to the tile floor, and then P.B. helped his companion out of the cloak, revealing not one but two fatae.

  “Oh!”

  Wren couldn’t help it; the sound escaped her without thought. Sergei muttered something in Russian that was probably turning the air blue, but she didn’t have time to slip into fugue state and check.

  The first fatae was delicate as a reed, with skin like mother-of-pearl and a face that could have launched a thousand alien sighting reports. And on that pearlized skin, from oversized eyes to pointed chin, was a clear and unmistakable bruise in the shape of a human hand-print. The bruise was, undoubtedly, what had caused Sergei to swear—the fatae itself caused Wren’s exclamation. She quickly averted her eyes, as much to give it privacy as for her own recovery.

  The second fatae was a gnome—short and sturdy, only the leathery gray skin set it apart, at first glance, from a slightly overweight toddler. It removed the watch cap from its skull, and ran its knobby fingers through the coarse gray hair, trying without luck to fluff it up.

  “Ma’am,” he said, bowing to Wren, cap held at his waist. “Many thanks for your invite. I’m far from my family and welcome the chance to not be alone on Christmas Eve.”

  All right, so much for my assumption that the fatae don’t celebrate Christmas…

  “You’re quite welcome. Please, join us—P.B.!” Her voice sharpened slightly. “Stop shaking your fur! Go get a towel, if you need one. Not like you stand on ceremony around here.”

  By now she had her emotions under control, and was able to turn and meet the fairy, as well.

  “And welcome, as well, to our home.”

  The fairy inclined its head, as regal as a swan, and those huge eyes blinked once, and then looked around itself in fascination. The fairies were one of the oldest, purest breeds, and now that she had experienced her delight in encountering one, the thought of someone—a human—lifting a hand to one outraged her at the deepest level of her core. If there was any breed that ought to be sacrosanct, a hill-fairy was it.

  P.B came back with a towel, rubbing it briskly over his fur, bringing the moment back into the realms of the ordinary. “So, Valere, where’s the chocolate?”

  “Oh, did I say there would be chocolate?” she asked him innocently, making a moue of surprise.

  He didn’t even bother to respond to that, but opened the fridge and started poking around.

  “There are too many bodies in this kitchen,” she announced. “Sergei, could you please show our guests to the living room,” and bring in some chairs she suggested mentally, already running through the seating available. As much as she loved her apartment, right now she would have traded it for Sergei’s to-die-for sofas, and the gourmet kitchen, and…

  “Valere.” She jumped, looking down at her friend, who was staring at her with unaccustomed gentleness. “They’re here for you, not fancy surroundings or snooty service. Cookies and milk are the traditional gifting, and half the time they’re left on the hearth, anyway. You ever try to eat a soot-or dust-covered cookie? Bleargh.”

  She laughed, the way he meant her to, and reached over his head to pull down the bakery box from on top of the refrigerator. “There’s a platter in the cabinet behind you, on the bottom shelf. Get it for me?”

  By the time Bonnie thudded up the stairs to join them, the main room had been turned into a surprisingly comfy gathering space. The one bit of real furniture in the room, an overstuffed armchair, had been taken by Sergei, while the gnome was comfortably ensconced on the small matching footstool Wren had almost forgotten she owned. P.B., Wren and the fatae were sprawled on her dark green velvet quilt, stolen off her bed and folded twice, and surprisingly comfortable. The tray of miniature pastries was on the floor between them, and several glasses in various stages of fullness were scattered among the seats.

  “How many of your kind have been reported missing?” the gnome was asking, sipping his cider with surprising delicacy.

  Wren got up to answ
er the knuckled rat-tat-tat at the door, and so missed Sergei’s reply. Bonnie came in the moment the door was unlocked, a bottle of spiced wine in hand and a gangly male with straw-red hair and a crooked smile at her heels.

  “Hi. Sorry we’re late. I couldn’t get rid of my folks.” She was wearing a black lace sweater over a knee-length black leather skirt and black hiking boots, laced with red and green laces. “Here, a present.” She gestured with the bottle. “Alphie couldn’t make it. Got stuck on-call tonight, poor bastard. Who’s—wow.”

  Bonnie, like Wren, simply stopped and stared at Aloise. Her companion—more traditionally dressed in dark brown cords and a sweater with a cross-eyed reindeer on it—took the bottle out of her hands before she could drop it, and handed it to Sergei, who carried it off into the kitchen.

  “Hi. I’m Bonnie. You’re amazing.”

  Aloise laughed soundlessly, and her eyes sparkled. Wren didn’t know if all fairies were silent, if Aloise was unusual or—God forbid—the attack on her had rendered her voiceless—but she seemed perfectly able to communicate without vocal cords. She seemed to find Bonnie just as fascinating.

  “You already know P.B.,” Wren said, making the introductions around. “And Sergei, who absconded with the wine. This is Aloise, and Gorry.”

  “I’m Nick,” the redhead said, reaching around the still-fay-struck Bonnie to shake Gorry’s hand. “I’m Bonnie’s partner.”

  “Oh?” Wren started to reconsider the vibes she had been getting from Bonnie.

  “Work partner,” he clarified. “Although if she’d have me, I’d fall at her feet in an instant.”