Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Yes, run,” she urged the fatae in a whisper, then louder “Run over here!” If the two of them could hear the humans, maybe the fatae could hear them, as well. If it could make it to the apartment, she would be able to protect them all…

  The fatae, rather than running, let out another squeal, twin to the one that had alerted them. Run, or stay, it could not defend itself three-to-one, and the attackers started to move in for the kill.

  “Screw this!” P.B. was halfway to the apartment door when Wren caught him by the arm and pulled him back. “Don’t,” she said urgently.

  “What, you don’t think I can handle them?”

  “I know you can,” she said. He had already dispatched one of these bigots’ dogs, and she never wanted to know the details of how. But there were two humans, as well, and she was a shit fighter, even at her best. She wasn’t going to let him get killed, not when there was another way. “Let the Patrols handle it. That’s what they’re here for.”

  “Truce’s broken, Valere. Nobody’s going to come.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” She had seen the Patrols reporting in. The Council Mouthpiece had been right, if annoying: there was more going on there, on the front lines, than following orders. If there was anything of what they had tried to build, it would last beyond petty politicking. She hoped. Oh how she hoped…

  “There. Did you feel that?” A vibration, starting in the hollow behind her earlobe, only deeper in, sliding down her neck like a caress. Her call had gone through, after all. Or someone’s had, anyway. She doubted they were the only ones looking out their windows. Hopefully if anyone actually called the NYPD, the right people had gotten the call and forwarded it on.

  “Nuh-uh.” P.B. was still straining against her hold, but not seriously: if he’d wanted to, he could have broken the grip—and her hand into the bargain. “Valere, I’ve got to, we’ve got to stop that.”

  “It’s okay. She’s been heard. Let them do it.”

  “Them” was the pair walking up the snow-coated street, an easy lope that seemed as though they had all the time in the world, even as they covered the ground in no time at all. Wren couldn’t help but expect to hear the soundtrack from an old Western start to play in the background, the shussshing of the snow substituting for the blowing of tumbleweeds.

  With the newcomers’ backs to them, Wren and P.B. couldn’t hear what was being said, but the body language was clear. The two Patrollers, one with a long, slender tail twitching underneath the ankle-length coat, confronted the attackers. The dog snarled and lurched at the one with the tail, and his companion reacted with a flash of current that set the dog back on its haunches, looking up at its owner as though to ask “what the hell was that?”

  “Not the dog’s fault,” Wren murmured, to which P.B. gave an eloquent and disagreeing snort. He wasn’t fond of dogs on a good day; she had never asked why.

  Tail-guy turned out to have claws P.B. might have envied, and he used them well, springing into action without any warning whatsoever. Wren had no idea what breed he was, either, but she knew that she never wanted to meet him in a dark alley. Or a well-lit one, for that matter.

  His companion, the Talent, seemed content to hang back and let the fatae do his thing. Once he was convinced that things were well in-hand, er, claw, he turned to the would-be victim and, hand held out in what was meant to be a soothing manner, seemed to be asking permission to approach.

  The streetlight fell on him as he moved into the direct glow, and Wren was able to make out a secondary armband under the Patrol one. White, with crossed red stripes through it. A medic. Smart—she didn’t think the Double Quad had come up with that, it was something that the Patrols had thought of on their own. A symbol everyone recognized, in one form or another: if not “I come in peace” then “I come with bandages.”

  “It’s okay. They’ve got it under control,” she said to P.B., who was still quivering with the need to get into the scrum. “Look.” One of the vigilantes was on the ground, not moving. The dog was nowhere to be seen; Wren just hoped it had run off, and not gone down someone’s gullet as an after-dinner snack. The other human was backing up, slowly, limping a little, as the tailed fatae advanced on him; a two-step pushing the human up off the street, onto the sidewalk.

  The medic turned from his patient and made an impatient gesture toward his partner, telling him to stop playing with the human-toy and get over there. The fatae hesitated, clearly wanting to finish what it had started, and the medic made the gesture again. The fatae’s tail lashed once, angrily, but backed down from the human, going to his partner’s side.

  The human, freed from direct threat, ran, disappearing into the white-frosted shadows, and the falling snow quickly filled in his footsteps. Meanwhile, the medic was picking up the smaller fatae, cradling her—him? It?—in his arms as they headed back down the street, presumably to better medical facilities. Wren thought, only then, to call them inside, where it was warm. But they were halfway down the street, and she didn’t know what kind of supplies P.B. had in here, anyway. Better to let them take the victim somewhere they were set up to treat her, and hopefully get useful information out of the report.

  “We should—”

  “We are not going after them.” P.B. snarled at her, black gums pulled away from gleaming white teeth, and Wren snarled right back at him.

  They pulled themselves back into the apartment, shaking snow off fur and hair, and P.B. shut the window with a firm slam, probably more than was needed. “Maybe you’re right,” the demon said in bloodthirsty satisfaction. “That human excuse for garbage will go back and tell the rest of them we’re not to be messed with.”

  “Yeah,” Wren said, but more in sadness than agreement. She sat back down on the sofa and drew her feet up underneath her, resting her chin on her hands and staring out the window, even though there was nothing out there anymore except snow. “It will teach them that we’re dangerous. We’re deadly. We’re even more to be feared than the animals they already thought we were.” Even without the Truce Board to back them up and direct them.

  “That’s a bad thing?” P.B. clearly didn’t think so. Rather than sitting down, he paced the perimeter of the room, restlessly touching objects, as though reassuring himself. His paws, rather than being clumsy, were remarkably agile, and Wren thought, not for the first time, that whoever had first created the demon breed had made certain they would be tool-using creatures.

  “Bad?” she said in response. “No. Not bad. They saved lives here, now, by being deadly.” She had nothing against violence, as a tool. “But where does it stop? Where do we draw the line, and go home?”

  “When they’re all gone.” P.B. was definite on that. Wren wished she could be so sure. Working with Sergei had taught her that you had to look at the smaller picture within the larger one; always calculate the repercussions before you acted. Otherwise, one simple ripple could come back as a tsunami.

  Nothing was simple. Especially the things that, on the surface, looked simple.

  “It’s not enough to stop them.” She tilted her head back to watch him. “They’re like ants, these bigots. We need to find their source, their funding. That’s what the Truce was supposed to do.”

  “Truce is broken.” He gave up on wandering, to the relief of her aching neck, and sat on the love seat opposite her.

  “Yeah. But who broke it?”

  He didn’t know. She didn’t know. But she knew someone who might have the resources to find out. Only problem was, she’d thrown away her right to call on them for anything.

  fifteen

  “No, no, you did the right thing. The Patrol handled it.”

  It was probably the first time Wren had ever heard Bart being consoling. It was…unnerving, was the best word for it, she decided. He was far better at being bracingly abrasive. Even the fact that he was supporting her take on the situation didn’t make it sound any better.

  Wren wasn’t sure if P.B. really resented not being able to get a claw
into the fight, or if he was feeling guilty that he hadn’t really wanted to get involved and so was talking loud to get over it. He could have shaken her off, easy—but in the process might have broken her arm. More guilt, if he did that. Some days she really did feel sorry for the demon. He just couldn’t win.

  They were sitting in Bart’s apartment, huddled over mugs of coffee so strong Wren was surprised her hair hadn’t spontaneously curled. The Manhattan representative looked like crap: his beard was unshaven, his eyes heavy-lidded and red-lined, and his posture more like a question mark. In short, he looked like a stretch of bad road after an ugly storm, and she would have guessed a wild round of drinking with sailors on leave, if she didn’t know for a fact that he had been doing damage control up at Truce Central until daybreak.

  Jesus wept, and wept again. Was it really only four days since the angel was killed? She blinked, calculated the hours. It was.

  P.B. was still arguing. “I thought the point was to get involved?”

  “If the Patrol hadn’t been there, you would have been. That’s involved. But letting them handle it…gives them purpose. Shows the rest of the Cosa that even if the Truce has been unofficially broken, we’re still working together.”

  Wren raised an eyebrow at that. “Unofficially?”

  Bart sighed, leaning back on the overstuffed plaid sofa and resting his arms along the back in a pose that might have been relaxed except for the tension practically humming off his sinews. “Yeah. The Council swears that they had nothing to do with the angel’s death, that they have not, in fact, had any contact of any sort with any non-Cosa group since the Truce went into effect, and that they are as outraged and sickened as we are. That’s a direct quote, by the way. Makes me wonder if spinmeistering’s an undocumented Talent.”

  “Just a Human one,” Wren said. P.B. came out of his funk long enough to riposte. “Don’t overestimate your species. If it breathes, it Spins. Except demons.”

  She was never able to resist the lure. ‘What, you’re more noble?”

  “No, just fewer and a lot less involved. We stopped caring what other species thought a couple-three generations ago.” He shrugged, dismissing the entire discussion. “Tough to spin the truth when everyone was either there, or doesn’t care, anyway.”

  In the past twenty-four hours, Wren had learned more about demon than she’d ever known before. She might now, in fact, be the reigning expert in the Cosa on the subject. Pity there was no real call for an expert on the topic. Not exactly the sort of thing that popped up on Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit, either.

  Her brain felt like it had been rolled in sand and left to bake on the beach for too long, and her eyes were just as gritty. I’m not thinking straight anymore.

  She and P.B. had spent the entire night—after giving up on any thoughts of sleep—sitting in an all-night coffee shop, replacing adrenaline shakes with caffeine ones, trying to trace back everything they had done, seen, and said, since the very beginning of all this, starting when P.B. first encountered the vigilantes on the street, and Wren called the “pest exterminators” number on the flyer she had been given.

  “Do you think we caused this?” Wren had asked at one point, coming to the thing that was digging at her. “By not ignoring it? Because that’s what we’ve always done—put our heads down and worked around it, and eventually they give up and go away or something else distracts them, or…”

  “Or a lot of Talent die under stones, or in fire, or by gunshot or drowning or gassing…”

  “Right. I guess ostriching’s not so effective.”

  “It can be.” P.B.’s dark red eyes got even darker for a moment, as though shadows were moving behind them. “You said it yourself. A lot of times the threat gets bored and goes away. Victims aren’t fun when they stop squealing, or don’t have anything more to give….”

  Wren blinked at him, her too-tired brain latching onto his words in a way they wouldn’t have if she’d been thinking clearly.

  “That’s an angle we haven’t looked at, have we?”

  “What, squealing?”

  “No…advantage. It’s been all about bigotry and intolerance and yadda yadda discrimination against us, woe is us. But what if it’s even more basic than that?”

  “Cui bono?”

  “Huh?”

  “Who will profit?” he clarified.

  “Right. Who comes out ahead, if we’re gone, or torn apart?”

  “The Council.” Then P.B. stopped, frowned, and said the same thing that Wren had been thinking. “Except they wouldn’t, because suspicion would naturally fall on them, because it’s so obvious…everything about this has obviously pointed to them, even the fact of one of the angeli being killed to break the Truce, because only a Talent could do that, right? We’ve been trained from the first steps to be suspicious of them, and them of us.”

  “So.”

  “So,” he echoed.

  At that point, they had paid their bill, and hotfooted it over to Bart’s. Not only was he the closest in terms of location—Wren wasn’t even sure where the other Quad representatives lived, actually—but he was good at poking holes in other people’s theories. “So,” Bart said to them now, living up to her expectations. “It’s an interesting theory, and I’m as much a fan of a good conspiracy theory as anyone—but it’s sort of limited by the fact that there isn’t anyone out there who would really profit by us eating each other, as it were.”

  “The government?” It was the first thing she could think of.

  Bart almost laughed. “The government doesn’t care, one way or the other, about us. They never have, not the Democrats, the Republicans, the Socialists, the Fascists…we’re neither thorns to pluck or shit with which to fertilize.”

  “Nice image,” P.B. said, wrinkling his muzzle in disgust.

  Bart shrugged. “Talents have been useful to the government at various points, but it’s always been on an individual basis, and as far as anyone’s been able to determine the Powers that Be have no clue that we have anything even remotely like organization. As far as they’re concerned, their Talents are random sports within the general population. They like thinking that, so they’re going to continue thinking that.”

  “They’d not be so blasé about the fatae. If they knew.”

  “If they knew, you’d all be lumped under illegal immigrants, not contributing to the economy, Homeland Security’s problem,” Bart said in agreement. “Has any brownshirt approached you?”

  P.B. showed teeth in a way that was surprisingly comforting. “If they had, they wouldn’t be doing it again.” He caught sight of Wren’s grimace, and shook his head. “You said I could do what I wanted to people, so long as I didn’t eat any more dogs.”

  “That’s not what I said!” Wren exhaled like someone had sucker punched her, swiveling in her chair to look at him in outrage.

  “Children. Back to the topic at hand, please?”

  The two of them glared at each other, the demon stuck his dark blue tongue out at the lonejack, and she responded by giving him the finger. It was almost, for a moment, like easier, kinder days.

  Bart seemed reluctant to break it up, but did so anyway. “Children? On your own time, please, not mine.”

  “Right.” The moment passed, Wren was all business again. “So in order to make this work, we need someone who a. knows that there is a Cosa to be manipulated, b. knows how to manipulate us, and c. has something to gain from doing so.”

  “It does all scream Council,” P.B. said. He tipped an invisible hat in Wren’s direction. “Despite what you said, before.”

  “Uh-huh.” Wren had a bad itchy feeling at the back of her scalp that had nothing to do with not having had a chance to take a shower that morning.

  “What?” Bart looked at her as though expecting something.

  “I dunno. You have a phone?” There were times—days at a stretch—when she didn’t mind not being able to carry a cell phone like the rest of the known, Null population. But sometimes
it really would be useful.

  Bart looked at her as though she’d suddenly turned green and sparkly and dangerous. “In the study. Down the hall.”

  “Thanks.” She forgot, sometimes, that not everyone turned electronics into quivering masses of uselessness just by standing near them. It was a matter of pride, mostly; the stronger your core was, the purer your connection to current, the less time you could spend in contact with electronics before they went kablooey. Wren was strong; she’d killed three of Sergei’s cell phones just by stroking her current, much less using it. Bart wasn’t at the same level. It wasn’t a breach of manners to remind another lonejack of that; one-upmanship was more highly regarded than manners anyway, especially by someone like Bart. But her innocent question could also have been seen as a put-down, or some kind of power play. Rather than try to explain herself, she went down the hallway to make the phone call.

  His apartment was like hers: sparse, and mostly undecorated. She stared at the phone, a plain beige plastic number the kind they sold in discount stores for $9.99. He had basic protections hooked up to it, but nothing like her own. And no answering machine—although he might have a service, which someone with money and sense would have, just to keep electronics to a minimum. Although there was no computer, either, even if this was clearly his office area. Computers were almost as vulnerable as PDAs to current, no matter how many ways you safeguarded it. Either his control wasn’t all that hot, or he did most of his business in person. Or both.

  Calm. Controlled. Centered. Grounded. She felt her core, and was reassured that it was smooth and unworried, despite the bad feeling in her scalp, and her own distaste for what she was about to do. Picking up the phone, she dialed a number she had, reluctantly, under protest, memorized.

  The phone rang at the other end. And rang. And rang some more, until the click of a voice mail system came on.

  “You have the number, you know who this is. Tell me what you want.”