Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Wren made a mental note to buy the PUP flowers, or something. She hadn’t given the Retriever anything of specific use tonight…but you never knew when something might come around.

  There was a flat manila packet propped up against her apartment door. Wren stooped to pick it up, checking—as had become habit—for any disturbance in the elementals she had left clustered around the entrance. They were mostly mindless creatures, satisfied to bask in any pooling of current they could find, but there was enough coherent thought in a mass of them to make semireliable watchdogs, as needed. And they worked cheap; all she had to do was siphon off a bit of power and leave it there for them.

  They were still there, like old ladies clustered around the bingo table, chatting to each other about nothing at all. She stroked her way past them, and went inside.

  After the warm cheeriness of Bonnie’s apartment, Wren’s own place seemed depressingly bare. Even the lovely, delicate Japanese silk-painting hanging on the hallway wall outside her bedroom just served to point up the fact that, despite best intentions, she still hadn’t managed to do any sort of significant decorating at all.

  “I’m just not the nesting sort,” she told the empty apartment. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. At all.”

  She dumped a plastic bag filled with fresh-baked dinner rolls on the counter, stored her baked salmon leftovers—in a container marked Poison For Demon—in the fridge, and opened the manila packet.

  Inside was a series of clippings she had requested, involving her client: the guest list of every gathering—social or otherwise—he had held in his Forest Hills apartment in the past year. If this had been a theft of opportunity, as so many blackmail-related thefts were, that person had access to the client’s belongings at some point, probably more than once.

  “Hrmmm.” Her brain clicked over, almost an audible sound, from Cosa to Retrieval mode.

  Blackmail was always ugly, no matter what the cause or cost. Although it was odd that the man hadn’t received a blackmail demand yet, for the return of those papers, no? Might there be another reason—maybe the material stolen had more going for it than they’d been told? It wouldn’t be the first time a client had lied to them, God knew. Sergei had provided a list of proposals that would be coming up for vote in the next few months…she’d have to double-check that list against this one, see if any names jumped out at her.

  Dropping the lists off on her desk, she switched on the computer. As she did every time, Wren held her breath and sent up a quick prayer to whatever saint watched over foolhardy Talent who owned computers that the machine would boot up without problems. Cell phones and PDAs, being carried on the body, were more subject to current fluctuations, but computers were notoriously unreliable, and the longer you owned it, the more so they became; she’d had this desktop for almost two years now, and every moment she expected it to go up in a flare of sparks and put-upon indignation.

  Even more so, considering it had survived—barely—a drop-in visit from a wizzart not so long ago. Wren paused to wonder where Max was these days, if he was still functional, or if the damage had finally taken him over the cliff. He had been mad, bad, and definitely dangerous to be around, but she hoped he was okay.

  This time, the computer behaved itself, and she was able to log onto the Internet and check her e-mail without too much difficulty. There hadn’t been time to do that for almost a week, and there was more than the usual number of list mails and spam to go through, plus a couple of personal e-mails, all of which were sorted into the proper folders, to be ignored until she had time and energy to deal with them. Most of her lists were on digest, these days: she missed the mostly friendly exchanges, but simply couldn’t deal with them right now. Someday, maybe, things would go back to normal, if she could even recognize it by then.

  When she was done, there were three e-mails that looked to require immediate dealing. One was a follow-up to a previous case: a curator at the Meadows Museum wanted her help in evaluating a proposed new security system. The e-mail had been sent to Sergei, and he had forwarded it to her, with a question mark.

  “Sure,” she typed back, amused. The museum in question was one she’d hit numerous times, so much so that she’d suggested, gently, to the curator that they just give her a key and be done with it. It sounded like they were finally giving in to the inevitable and making use of it; use a thief to keep out other thieves—especially since the other thieves were the ones who would likely do more financial damage.

  She assumed the fiscal offer was enough to warrant Sergei even forwarding it on to her, although she’d do it for free, just for the fun factor. Her life was sadly lacking in fun, these days.

  The second e-mail was from her friend Katie in California, announcing the arrival of labor pains. She had sent the e-mail via her cell phone in the back of a taxi on the way to the hospital. Wren looked at the time stamp, and—based on Katie’s previous pregnancies, made a mental note to check back tomorrow to see if they were allowing texting from the delivery room.

  The third e-mail was probably useless, but the header—“sidhe sighting”—was guaranteed to pique her interest.

  Sure enough, the e-mail was in response to a query she’d placed on an electronic bulletin board a few months ago, about the stuffed horse she’d been chasing since forever. Her mind clicked over again, switching between jobs.

  Saw what I think you’re looking for, two nights running. Greengrove, Connecticut. Nothing dire’s happened yet, but I’m keeping an eye out.

  Two nights. Traditionally, the bansidhe showed for three nights, and then disaster struck. And here she was, snowbound, stuck….

  Or not. It all depended on how badly she wanted to track down this horse. Wren made a face, then sent a quick ping downstairs to see if Bonnie was still awake.

  Six hours later, Wren was knee-deep in snow, puking her guts up. Even with Bonnie’s help, Translocation still made her insides try to turn into outsides, with nasty results. Finally, the retching subsided, and Wren used a handful of clean snow to cool down her face and rehydrate her parched throat, then pulled one of Bonnie’s dinner rolls from her pocket and used a bite of it to clean the taste out of her mouth, shoving the remains back into the pocket. Only then was she able to look around, and get her bearings.

  Greengrove, Connecticut was more rural than she’d expected, this close to Boston. Not that she knew anything about Connecticut, or Massachusetts, for that matter, but she’d always assumed it was cities surrounded by acres of suburbia. The field she was in seemed to be attached to a house some distance away, and its neighbors were even more distant, all in the “don’t mind me and I won’t mind you” way that had long since given up the ghost to McMansions and high-rise condos everywhere else.

  Despite growing up in the suburbs, Wren was a city girl, bone and marrow. This much open space, without the reassuring sound of traffic in the near distance, was unnerving. The snow had stopped, but the sky was still a leaden gray shading to dirty white where dawn touched the tree line, and she could taste the metallic glint of bad weather coming in the back of her throat. Whatever she was going to do, she needed to do it quickly.

  Pity she didn’t have a clue what that whatever was.

  “All right, there’s the barn.” She hoped. It looked like the barn the e-mail had described, and Bonnie was pretty good with the map-scrying which had sent her here, but how the hell did you tell one barn from another, anyway? They were all the same color, and they didn’t have numbers painted on them, and every single one was the same barn-shape….

  She yelped, and jumped a little, as current zinged from deep inside the bedrock and raced up through the soles of her boots, into her veins, and shot directly into her core, shocking the relatively somnolent current-serpents into a hissing pile.

  “Jesus wept,” she swore, reaching down to calm them back under control, while one part of her tracked the source of the current. It hadn’t felt directed, like a tag, or like a widespread attack, the way a psi-bom
b did. This was more…like Mother Nature twitching.

  Something prickled on the back of her neck, and Wren spun in place, in time to see a green shimmering glow appear in the distance, just in front of the barn. A green, shimmering, horse-shaped glow.

  “There you are at last, you annoying stuffed beast.” Over the years she’d started to wonder if someone wasn’t having the longest-running prank on her; it wasn’t beyond the capability of several Talent she knew, but even the most dedicated prankster couldn’t generate something like what was in front of her, not unless they were so crazy-wizzed they’d risk pulling out current from the magma itself, and no wizzart would be able to hold a prank together that long.

  Which meant that it was real. She had finally done it, finally finished the damn job. She was looking at one of the rarest and least pleasing manifestations in the supernatural world: a bansidhe, a harbinger of misfortune.

  Why this particular one had chosen to manifest inside the sawdust-stuffed remains of a moth-eaten war mount was one mystery; why it had, several years back, decided to go a-wandering out of its ancestral glass-cased housing was another. Wren wasn’t being paid to solve those mysteries. Just to get it back to the family the warhorse belonged to.

  Problem was, she had absolutely no idea how to do that. All of her energy until now had been spent on finding the damn thing; tracking it down before it moved on to the next disaster announcement. Wren had never actually come up with a plan to capture it, mainly because she had no idea of the form, power or intelligence level of the thing. Now she knew two of the three, at least…

  As far as she had been able to determine, like most supernatural entities the bansidhe had no magical abilities of its own, neither old style nor currentical. That was a plus: it couldn’t actively negate anything she tried. It was also a negative: current was unlikely to be able to impact it significantly. But what the hell; try the most obvious, first.

  She moved, slowly and cautiously, closer to the beast, stopping when she was about ten feet away. The snow between them was untouched, covered with a thin crust that wouldn’t support the weight of a sparrow.

  She stared at it, trying to come up with the right words to match the visual in her head: a circle of power, glowing around it, rising up to form a corral of sorts, as best she could re-create one from too infrequent viewing of Westerns on TV.

  “Equine form of doom

  Long I’ve been searching for you;

  Stay put where you are.”

  The bansidhe tossed its head and stared across the distance: Wren could almost see the derision in its glowing eyes as it deliberately moved several paces sideways. Across the line of current.

  “Bitch.” The body it was occupying was that of a stallion, but the bansidhe were traditionally female. Why a woman always got stuck handing out bad news, Wren didn’t know—probably all the male bansidhe refused to get involved, leaving the dirty work to the females.

  But this indicated a certain level of intelligence, to understand what was being done, and a definite stubborn will, to override the current. More information to add to the equation.

  So. Current was out, at least of the passive sort. Wren supposed a lasso of current wouldn’t work any better, even if she thought she could “toss” it with enough accuracy to get anywhere near the beastie.

  “What now? ‘Here, horsey, horsey, horsey?’ It’s not a damned horse!”

  Although…

  It’s been in horse-shape for a long time. Stuffed with sawdust, yeah, but with the hide and hooves of a horse. Intelligent, but maybe that intelligence is limited to what a horse might have?

  The problem was, Wren knew damn-all about horses, other than you fed one end, saddled the middle, and avoided the backside. Carrots. Horses like carrots. She had no carrots. She hated them with a passion, in fact. Grass… Would be a good idea, if everything wasn’t covered under a foot of snow. Even if she dug some up, it would be dead and probably not all that appealing to either a horse or a bansidhe, no matter how hungry.

  And the damn thing’s stuffed with sawdust. What makes you think it’s going to be hungry, anyway?

  Instinct. Just hope there was a horsey instinct in there, somewhere…

  Any food might do the trick in that case. Horses were herbivores, herd animals, grazers. The body the bansidhe was inhabiting had been a warhorse, trained to respond to its rider’s signals without hesitation. Maybe it would react to other human body language, too.

  “Hey there, bitch. Lookie what I got for you.” She dug in her pocket, then held out her fist with the half-eaten roll in it. It was whole wheat; maybe that would be close enough to oats to appeal. “I was going to finish it myself, for breakfast, but if you come here and let me get hold of you, I’ll share.” She thought of horse-slobber on the roll, and changed her mind. “I’ll let you have all of it, even.”

  Old Sally made a noise that sounded like the horsey version of a laugh—or a snicker—and tossed her head, looking away.

  “Don’t play hard to get, darling. You’ve already proven you’re hard to get—your reputation’s secured. Just come here and eat the damn roll, and let me get hold of you….”

  And do what? If she could Translocate, no worries. But even with Bonnie’s help, that was a bad idea. Alone? She could do it, but it wouldn’t be pretty. And there wouldn’t be any guarantees they’d all come out in the right place, or intact, or…

  Another, better idea, then.

  Maybe… She had been playing with an idea that had grown out of all the cages she’d been making lately, for various Artifacts she kept falling over: rather than the restraining spell she had tried before, maybe a variant on the self-reinforcing, self-containing lock-down she had made for the damned parchment, something that built on the object’s own power, set on a constant loop so every time it tried to get out, it fed the spell, not itself.

  That required a certain intelligence level for it to work—useless on most inanimate, unaware objects. Maybe, maybe…

  But to use that spell, she needed to actually lay hands on the object. This led her back to the immediate, nonmagical problem.

  “C’mere, c’mere. There’s a good horse. You’re a wise horse, an old horse, and your job here’s done. It’s time to come in, out of the cold, yes, no more racing around, you’ve earned your rest, haven’t you…”

  After a few words she had no idea what she was actually saying; her tone was the important thing: projecting all the calming, coaxing, reassuring notes into it she could manage, talking both to the bansidhe, who had been working endlessly for so many generations, and the valiant, gallant horse-body which housed it.

  Amazingly, it seemed to be working.

  The bansidhe rolled an eye at her, but didn’t move when she stepped forward, the bread outstretched in her palm.

  “There’s a good girl, good horse, good horse. Yeah, stay right there, Jesus wept, what am I doing? Stay there, good horse, good horse.”

  She deliberately soothed the coils of current roiling in her core, not drawing on it for fear of spooking the bansidhe out of its equine instincts. When the time came, she would have to move quickly, but she couldn’t worry about it now.

  “There you go. Here I come. Steady now, steady…”

  Her hand trembled, and she stilled it. Horse instincts: they were pack animals, weren’t they, so if she got spooked, it would probably get spooked, and then she’d be screwed, but good.

  “There you are. There you are, oh such a good horse, good horse…”

  Quiet voice, hand with the bread held palm up, fingers flat. Huge flat white teeth were revealed under thick horse lips, making her start to sweat even in the cold air. The great head reached forward, lowering slightly, and taking the bread from her with a surprisingly delicate touch.

  “Hi there.” She placed her free hand against the thick neck, just under the mane, which was cut like a Marine’s, standing up in thick bristles. The hide was cool, not warm, but surprisingly supple, and she could almost, al
most imagine the beat of blood pumping underneath.

  She had been right—the bansidhe had inhabited the body long enough for horse-memories to bind with sidhe-memories.

  Horse, horse, horse, she thought quickly, reinforcing the instincts, even as she reached down into herself and grabbed quickly at the nearest snake of current, pulling it up with such speed that her conscious mind couldn’t catch up and alert the creature in front of her.

  The current sprang into being, crackling in cold, dry air around them.

  “Into existence;

  Bind the creature before me

  With its own power.”

  The current flowed downward, into the horse-frame, and Wren could sense it shedding her own signature and taking on the bansidhe’s own flavor and structure. As it did so, it also formed the “sense” of a glass case around it, similar in appearance to pictures of the glass case Old Sally had been stored in, before it decided to go a-wandering. There were details to it, however, that Wren had never seen or imagined, and she sighed in relief—the bansidhe was adding to it from its own memories, re-creating the place it felt was “home,” where it felt safe and secure.

  Like any animal, when threatened, it just wanted to go somewhere enclosed and protected.

  At the last minute, just when Wren was starting to feel that she’d nailed the job, the bansidhe woke. Thankfully, there was still enough horse-memory in control that, rather than use its own magic to escape, it merely curved around and kicked out with its powerfully muscled hind legs. Sawdust or no, the damn thing packed a nasty blow. Wren felt the impact in her side, and went down hard on her ass. Snow cushioned her landing, and went down her jacket, front and back.