Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  His arms came around her as though he wasn’t ever going to let go. “You’re going to freeze to death. Go back to bed.”

  “Oh sure, wake me up, give me coffee, then tell me to go back to bed.” She was awake now, and no help for it. “Sadist.”

  “Which would make you a masochist.”

  She smiled, the way he knew she would. “Go already, if you’re going, before your fare hits triple digits.”

  By the time she had wrapped herself in her robe and reclaimed the coffee, he was already down on the street, folding himself into the waiting cab. He didn’t look up to see if she was watching, but she knew that he knew she was.

  As though on cue, the moment the cab pulled away, the clouds overhead darkened, and small snowflakes began to fall.

  “Great,” Wren said in disgust. “More snow.” At least the last batch had—mostly—melted and been cleared away. But she had been looking forward to unobstructed street corners for a few days longer.

  “Lord, please. If you love me? No more accumulation, okay?”

  There was no response, and Wren shrugged, let the curtain drop back to cover the window, and went to take her shower. Snow or not, there was more job-planning to be done. If the materials P.B. was bringing were going to be useful, she had to have everything else lined up first.

  “Yo. You order a buncha documents, lady?”

  Wren looked up from the sink full of dishes to see a white-furred, snow-dusted face grinning at her from the small kitchen window. “That was the worst Cagney impersonation I’ve ever heard,” she told the demon, reaching over with a sudsy hand to open the window enough to allow him in, wincing as that let a blast of snow-flecked cold air in, as well.

  “Oh good Lord.” She looked out the window for the first time since that morning, and sighed. “So much for God listening to prayers. Or the hope of cleared streets.” She gave a passing thought to Sergei’s flight, but then mentally shrugged it away. If flights were being cancelled, he’d be in full rearrangement mode, and would call her later. If he was already in the air, then hopefully he was out of the worst of it already.

  “Oh, it’s snowing like a small mother out there,” P.B. agreed cheerfully, dropping the courier bag—thickly stuffed—onto the counter and brushing snow off his fur. Since that fur was thick and white to begin with, the overall visual was that of the Abominable Snowman, miniaturized, coming in out of the cold. Only the dark slouch-brim fedora on his head ruined the image.

  “Where’s the scarf I gave you?” she asked. “It doesn’t do you much good if you don’t wear it.”

  The demon gave her a Look. “Valere, my neck does not get cold. Yours gets cold, you wear a scarf. Anyway, orange isn’t my color.”

  “What, it clashes?”

  He ignored her, moving sideways to get at the fridge. “Ooo, someone hasn’t been shopping again. What are we going to have for dinner? Why don’t you just give in and order online like everyone else?”

  “Because I get frustrated with the interface being slow and wonky, and I’m tired of trying to explain why I’m plagued with brownouts to the Dell service guys, who barely speak English enough to go off-script, anyway.”

  “You need to get some therapy for those frustration issues, babe.”

  “You need to get out of my fridge, boy.”

  The demon shut the fridge. “Let’s order Chinese.” He took a look at her face, and backtracked. “Pizza? Ribs? Let’s get ribs!”

  She was exhausted, but amused. “Do you ever eat anywhere other than my apartment?”

  “No. Dial. I’m starved.”

  Some things were as predictable as sunrise. “You dial. I’m busy. Get me an order of chicken, burned, and extrasalty fries.”

  If she was lucky, he’d eat and leave, and she’d be able to get some work done, because while P.B. was an entertaining companion, a good friend, and a solid presence in a fight, he was king of the short attention span when it came to sitting around watching someone else work. Although she did feel more relaxed—less wound up—when he was there. Somehow, she was able to focus, rather than jumping from thoughts of one crisis to another.

  “Money’s in the usual spot. Take out enough for dinner, too.” She opened the courier case and pulled out the manila folder that had the sigil he used for her orders on it, then left him still staring into the fridge as she took it back to the office.

  By the time the ribs came, the snow was six inches deep on the cars outside, and she tipped the delivery guy an extra fiver because he’d actually got the food there still warm.

  When she came back into the apartment, the phone started ringing. She handed the bag off to P.B., who opened it and started unloading white cartons onto the counter, and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  It was Sergei.

  “Hey. What’s up? How’s St. Louis? Oh.” She listened a few minutes more, her hand curling in the telephone cord. “Damn.”

  P.B. looked up, and she waved him down.

  “Okay. No, nothing you can do. Might as well make the most of it. Yeah, P.B.’s here.” The demon paused midmunch on a baby back rib bone to wave one greasy paw hello. “He says hello. Yeah. Okay. No, we’re good. Yes, I have candles, you know I have candles.” She grinned, and a flush started at the base of her neck, turning her pale skin a gentle red as he said something low and rude.

  “Don’t even start, not while you’re there and I’m here. Yeah, you, too. Sleep well. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” She hung up the phone, untangling the cord with exaggerated care, and stared at it as though there was some answer just waiting to leap out at her.

  “He’s in St. Louis?” P.B. asked, not even pretending not to have eavesdropped.

  “Yeah. Business trip. He was supposed to come home tomorrow morning, only he doesn’t think he’ll make it. Storm’s slamming everyone. They were one of the last flights out of JFK, and one of the last to land in St. Louis. They’re shutting down there, too, he says. Snow’s supposed to last all night, most of tomorrow, maybe even through the night again, here. If the weather guys aren’t shitting us.”

  The demon shook his head, waving the rib bone like a pointer. “We pissed off momma nature but good, this year, seems like.”

  “Yeah.” She turned to look at P.B., a long, considering kind of look.

  “What?” He got nervous suddenly.

  She didn’t want to do it, wanted to have her apartment all to herself, tonight, but…“You should stay here tonight. If it’s that bad out, I don’t want you trying to walk through it, maybe get hit by a bridge-and-tunnel driver who can’t tell you from a mobile snowbank.”

  “Sweet, but—”

  “Wasn’t a request. You eat my food, you have to indulge my whims. You’re crashing here tonight.” She played her trump card early, not wanting to argue. “I’ve got fixings for French toast for breakfast.”

  He showed her white fangs, showcased by black-rimmed lips smeared with barbecue sauce. “Sold.” A pause, purely for effect. “Can I have the feather pillows?”

  There was concern, and then there was no way. “Not a chance in hell. Hey! How did you know I have down pillows? If you’ve been snooping in my bedroom, you half-sized excuse of a…”

  “Jesus, Valere, mellow. I was on sick-Wren watch, remember? You on sleep-cure, me fetching and carrying soup and coffee?”

  After the Frants case, when she’d drained her core almost to empty, trying to save her worthless client from a revenge-crazed ghost. God, it felt like years ago, lifetimes ago.

  “Everything was different then, wasn’t it?” P.B. sounded wistful.

  “Yeah.” The Council had been a gnat-shaped annoyance, she had never even heard of the Silence, and the vigilante attacks were just a dark rumor even among the fatae. On the plus side, she and Sergei had been dancing around their feelings for each other like the protagonists in a bad Lifetime movie, leaving them both wordlessly frustrated without knowing why. They still had a ways to go on the relationship stuff, bu
t frustration? Not a problem anymore. Well, sexually, anyway. In the sense of itches getting scritched. There were still problems in the bedroom, but she wasn’t going to worry about that tonight, not while she had a houseguest.

  “I’ll give you one pillow,” she said. “And the air mattress, if you promise to keep those claws of yours under control.”

  “And the green quilt. I like that quilt.”

  “Quilt. Right. So you can shed all over it again? Why don’t you go make up your own damn bed. I’m going back to work.”

  If she was lucky, the snow would stop by morning, the forecasters would apologize for jumping the gun, and she could get on with everything that needed doing.

  It didn’t quite work out that way, though.

  eleven

  “It’s started again.”

  Wren couldn’t get warm. Her skin was flushed, like she had a fever, but her fingers and toes felt snow-bitten; painfully numb and strangely thick. She had put on a heavy sweater, one that Sergei had left behind one evening, over her turtleneck and jeans. It still smelled of him, but even that wasn’t working its usual magic.

  Her blood was ice. Her core was molten. It wasn’t a good combination.

  She wrapped her hand around the phone cord, and focused. Control. She had to stay in control.

  “You there?”

  “Yes, Wrenlet, I’m here. What happened?”

  Sergei’s voice was crackly and staticky over the phone, and Wren didn’t think it was just from the distance between them. The entire Cosa was twitching, and it was a wonder the phone lines were even working, right now. Three subway lines were down for the count; two counties in Jersey were in brownout due to a generator blowing rather spectacularly. Things were…tense.

  “Someone strung up an angel. Left him to bleed out and die.”

  “I got that part. How did the vigilantes get close enough? I thought everyone was on guard?”

  His voice was thin, even over the phone line. “It wasn’t them.” His tension was affecting her, stretching her already worn nerves. She turned the control up a notch, until her ribs ached from the effort, just to stay calm.

  Her words took an instant to sink into his awareness, then that flat voice rounded and deepened in shock. “What? How—and who? How do you know?”

  She took a deep breath, feeling her fingers cramp on the phone. Control…“The PUPs. They said…there were traces of current all over his body.”

  “Cosa?” Sergei’s tone was clearly disbelieving, even through the static. “Who? And why break the Truce? Do you think it’s the—”

  She cut him off before he could speak specifics. “I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know. It might be anyone. Anything.” Her voice cracked, and she felt the slithers of current reach up her spine, trying to break free and do damage. She needed to ground, badly, but there wasn’t any room: everyone was so locked down that all of Manhattan’s bedrock had toe-marks in it. “Look, I gotta go. Board’s meeting.” She didn’t refer to it as the Truce Board anymore. Both of them noted it. Neither of them commented on it.

  “Valere.” Michaela came to the door. Her face was marked by a lack of sleep and sunshine, tension holding her eyes tight and making her mouth a narrow line. “Everyone’s here.”

  She nodded once roughly. “I’ll call you later,” she told Sergei.

  “You do that.” The line went dead, and Wren followed Michaela inside, to a conference room filled with enough nervous tension to run all mass transit in the city for a month, assuming it didn’t short the system out first. Fatae stayed down the bottom half of the room, humans at the upper end. Nobody was actually sitting at the table. Not good. Not good at all.

  Twelve hours since she and P.B. had found the angel. Twelve hours, and she couldn’t remember much of it; a blur of movement, wrapped in snow that didn’t seem as white as it should, anymore. Shadows and snow, and flames flickering in between, threatening to take the entire city down with it.

  “Back to the beginning,” she said, almost under her breath. The first fatae death she observed had been one of the angeli, too. That one had been taken down and beaten with bats, or metal bars; a less dramatic but equally fatal end.

  Who would do this? Current ruled out the vigilantes, the exterminators; no one with an ounce of current would be involved with them, not even the most radically Human-first extremist. Not after they started going after Talents, too. But for a Talent to go after an angel…

  They were among the most obnoxious, annoying of all the breeds, God knows that’s the truth. But killing one like that is more than annoyed-off-the-deep-end. That was hatred, and fear, and making a point with a capital P.

  Beyl made her way to the table, her wings unfurling just enough to get everyone to look at her. Those within wingspan moved away, just in case she decided to go full-mast. A griffin’s wings might look pretty, but they were all muscle and bone; instruments of fighting as much as flying. “We don’t know who did this…” she started to say, and was immediately shouted down.

  “Of course we do!”

  “They broke the Truce!”

  “Humans will be the death of us all!”

  “Council’s behind this, you know they are!”

  There was a less vocal outburst from the human side of the room, mostly protesting the claims of the fatae, or denying responsibility for the murder. It was an obvious conclusion, one that Sergei had leaped to, almost immediately, and not entirely beyond the Council…but it was out of character, even under Madame Howe’s leadership. KimAnn Howe broke rules, yes, but only when it benefited her, and her plans. This…she was the one who had brought the Council to the table in the first place. Unless something had drastically changed, this made no sense. Wren was suspicious of any assumption that required a traditional, hidebound organization like the Council to act out of character simply because the result would fit the prevailing theory.

  But it was possible.

  The majority of humans here today were lonejack; Wren saw maybe a dozen faces she knew were Council, including Jordan and Ayexi, who were staying very still and quiet, taking in the tenor of the room. Ayexi was a strong enough Talent to protect himself; she had to assume Jordan was at least as good. If things got ugly, they were on their own.

  Michaela tried to inject some calm into the scene. “Nobody knows for certain who did this, why, or even when it happened! You came to the Truce Table in good faith—let us investigate likewise in good faith! I give you my solemn oath, there will be a full inquiry, and no lead will be overlooked or refused. On wing and tail, heart and head.”

  There were still catcalls and jeers, but some of the outbursts were silenced by her words. The oath she had given was one the fatae used, not humans. Wren was impressed; she didn’t think Michaela knew it.

  “This murder has many of the same aspects of attacks we know the antifatae humans, the so-called vigilantes, made. The PUPs are still working the scene. But the snow is making things difficult, as are the sheer number of individuals trying to get a look.”

  Some of the fatae, and not a few humans, looked abashed by that.

  “So please, people. You’ve all watched enough crime dramas to know that the PUPs need their space to work, and crowding in to watch is only going to make their work harder. Not to mention the fact that you might, accidentally, destroy a clue they need.”

  Someone in the fatae-side crowd made a rude noise. “The PUPs are—”

  Beyl spread her wings a little wider, the feathers lifting as though air was circulating under them, and let the light glint off her four-inch-long claws. The voice cut off midword, as though someone had put the speaker in a chokehold.

  She clacked her beak together in grim amusement, then went on. “The PUPs are ego-driven, not agenda-driven. We can trust them to come up with the truth, because to do anything else would be an insult to their training and their abilities. I trust we can all understand and appreciate the ego?”

  The fatae weren’t entirely appease
d, but Wren spotted a few reluctant smiles among the humans. Yes, the Cosa knew about ego, all right.

  Colleen and Michaela were standing next to Beyl now, each under her wing. The symbolism wasn’t lost on any but the most obtuse. For a moment, it seemed almost as though sanity would prevail.

  But this was the Cosa. Nothing was ever easy.

  “Why should we trust anything the humans say or do?” a small, clay-colored figure asked from up near the ceiling where it was perched. “There are no fatae among these so-called puppies, only humans, and humans are who kill our kind.”

  “Humans, but not Talent,” a piskie retorted, hovering up near a window with several others of its kind. Of all the fatae, piskies lived the most closely with humans; they understood the difference between Null and Talent that some others might miss. Mainly, for a piskie, that a Null would never be able to catch them when they pranked, while a Talent would and did. In the strange logic of piskies, that made Talent worthy of respect. More specifically, it made the lonejacks worthy of respect: the Council had shown itself less willing to take a prank in good humor, even when it came from a human; piskie pranks were insults.

  “How do we know that? There was current! How could a mere human kill one of the angeli?”

  “Angeli are difficult to kill,” other voices agreed. “Tough bastards, too mean to die easy.”

  A human Wren didn’t know raised his voice from the other end of the table. “In both cases we know of, the angel was left to bleed out. If you have blood, and you lose too much, you die. This is pretty basic stuff. And even the most Null of humans can kill the most powerful of fatae, if they have numbers and weapons on their side. Or did the recent Moot show you nothing at all?”

  “What about the current-trace?” another voice demanded. A human voice, interestingly enough.

  Bart answered that one. “The PUPs have not yet determined that the current is linked to the murderer, merely that current was used near the body at some point. It may even have been long before the attack occurred.”