Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Um, excuse me? Hello?”

  The client, her voice wavering down the hallway. Damn it. Wren needed to get the girl out of there. She needed to think, to find out what had happened, and there was no way she could do that with Miss Old Money pacing the main room. A Null who knew she was a Null was still a Null. Sergei was the only non-Talent she trusted with lonejack business, and even then it was with regret, because he just wouldn’t stay out of it.

  “Hello?”

  “Yeah, it’s okay. You can get up now.”

  If it hadn’t been okay, they’d both be dead by now, anyway.

  When she went back into the main room, Rosen had picked herself up and was dusting nonexistent debris off her slightly mussed outfit with an expression of distaste on her face. Guess the client didn’t like being tossed to the ground, no matter what the cause. Some people were just so picky.

  “Is your building often bombed?”

  “Yeah. All the time.” She was channeling pure P.B. now, and Wren made a conscious effort to choke that back. One was not snarky to the client, no matter how much their tone pissed you off. About them, yes. But not to their faces.

  Thankfully Rosen’s livery driver had been waiting around the block reading a newspaper when the shock wave hit her building. Wren waited while the client paged him, then helped her down the stairs, carefully not answering the girl’s questions beyond a vague “This sort of thing, Manhattan, you know. It happens.”

  No New Yorker worth her Metrocard—even ones with hired cars—could deny it. Things happened in Manhattan.

  Wren waited while the livery car—a clichéd black Town car with smoked windows, so ordinary and commonplace it always raised curious eyebrows—slid down the narrow street and stopped in front of them. Packing the girl into the back seat, Wren started to close the door, but Rosen pushed a hand against the frame to stop her.

  “You’re taking the job, then?”

  Wren stared at the girl’s pretty green eyes, and thought about it for a second or three. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll take it.” She wasn’t so far out of the financial hole the bastards on the Council had dug for her this summer to turn down work, especially something as basic as this sounded.

  “I can write you a check—” Rosen started to say, but Wren waved her off. She didn’t want to be bothered by actually dealing with the nitpicky business details now. Not when she was this jumpy, and the client had already verbally agreed to whatever price Wren set. Bad business, but right now she had other things on her mind. Like getting this Null child the hell out of range of…whatever it was that had just happened.

  “Make a deposit to this account, in this amount.” And she jotted down the numbers for the blind account she and Sergei used to accept funds, plus her usual retainer fee to get things started. “I’ll be in touch with the rest of the details as soon as I have a better feel for the job.”

  Not satisfied, but realizing that she wasn’t going to get any more out of her new hire right now, Rosen tucked herself all the way into the car and allowed Wren to close the door.

  Wren stared down the street, watching but not really seeing the brake lights of the Town car, itching to find out what the hell had happened upstairs. She was beginning to run through places to start asking questions, when someone came up behind her on the street. She heard the footsteps, aware that there was no threat-aura to them, and dismissed them from her awareness with a skill that was more classic New Yorker than Talent. The tap on her shoulder, therefore, startled her so violently that she almost let loose with a spray of current: full fight or flight reflexes kicking in.

  “Christ. Jumpy much, Valere?”

  Her almost-assailant backed up and leaned against the building behind him, arms crossed against his oh-so-pretty-if-you-liked-beefcake chest. If she didn’t have a pounding reaction-headache, she’d have appreciated the visual more.

  “Danny.” Cowboy boots and dress shirts worked better in Houston than they did in Manhattan, but Danny still managed to make them look good. And the boots had the advantage of hiding his hooves.

  “Danny,” she said again, this time in a different voice. Shaking off the quiver of nerves, she looked around for the first time at the mild disaster the blast had left: car windows blown out, tires flattened, trees wilted. Whatever hadn’t hit her apartment had done some significant work just outside it. Interesting. “What the hell happened?”

  “I was going to ask you that.”

  Glass crunched under his heels as they walked together, both of them checking out the damage. Wren was thankful she’d thought to pull on work boots before coming downstairs. Her usual soft-soled loafers wouldn’t have offered as much protection from the sharp-edged shards.

  “No sign of explosives,” Danny went on as they walked down the street, past her building and down to the end, then started back again. Of course he’d already done a preliminary sortie. She didn’t ask how he’d gotten there so quickly. That was what Danny did. “No car bombs, no blown manhole covers, no dead guy bits with wires and whatnot strapped to him. Nobody heard a thing.

  “And yet, every single Talent in the area felt the blast, and hey, look at that, half a dozen car windows got blown out. Right in front…” He paused for dramatic effect as they reached her stoop. “Of your building. That sort of narrows it down, don’tcha think?”

  Danny had been a damn good beat cop, before tabloid-driven pressures made it tough for fatae to advance in the ranks. He made an even better insurance investigator. His network of Talents in the NYPD was the match of any small-town gossip chain. In fact, in a lot of ways it was a small-town gossip chain. When something weird happened, they let him know. And he got to be piggie-on-the-spot, asking all the nasty questions.

  “So who in the Cosa you piss off this time?”

  Like that one. The Cosa Nostradamus: the magical community, the human Talents and the supernatural fatae, with or without usable magics. The “family” part was closer to Manson than Brady, unfortunately.

  “You been tuned into some other universe the past couple of months?” The only people in the Cosa she hadn’t pissed off lately were the ones from out of town. And maybe she’d annoyed a few there, too.

  “If I knew how to get out of this one, I’d buy you a ticket,” he said, proving that he had too been paying attention lately. “One-way. You’re becoming a target for way too much shit.”

  Ow. “Not my fault this city’s going to hell,” she said defensively. It wasn’t. In fact, she was part of the reason it hadn’t gotten a hell of a lot worse. The vigilantes? Guilt aside, she had been one of the first to figure out the connection between the “exterminators” advertising with their cryptic flyers, and the attacks on the nonhuman members of the Cosa. The surge in general crankiness that couldn’t be blamed on the heat wave? She was the one who had gotten rid of the semisentient manuscript that incited and fed off increased levels of negative emotions. The Mage Council going after the lonejacks to prove who was top dog in the city? No way that she was taking the shit for whatever was chewing at their brains.

  “And yet…” He looked around and gestured tellingly at the dark blue mailbox directly in front of her door, crushed like it was made of tinfoil instead of riveted steel. “Someone was sending you a message of some sort. Sounds like ‘back off’ to me.”

  She didn’t even try to deny the fact that she had been the target. “Damn it, Danny. I didn’t ask for any special attention from anyone. It just…happened.”

  He snorted like the centaurs of his paternal line. “Nothing just happens, Valere. Nothing ever just happens.”

  “City filled with Yoda wannabes, and I gotta look like a swamp. Go catch a criminal, Danny. Leave me alone.”

  “Valere.” He touched her arm. Danny didn’t touch anyone, much. “You got a headache?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So does every Talent within five blocks, I bet. And this was a bitty baby psych-bomb. A warning shot.

  “Twelve months ago, the biggest talk in the
Cosa was who was sleeping with what. Six months ago, we were talking about those damn vigilantes, targeting us.”

  By us, he meant the fatae, the nonhumans of the Cosa. No Talents had been attacked by that particular group of bigots, as far as Wren knew.

  That fact had been the beginning of the split in the Cosa, along racial lines: us versus them. Well, that and the fact that most Talents were selfish and lazy, and couldn’t be bothered to deal with something that didn’t affect them directly. Wren wasn’t particularly special, in that regard.

  “Four months ago, it was the flameouts.” The wizzarts, or crazed Talents, who had been killed by someone or someones still unknown. Wren had tried to find the killers, but had only been able to force them out of town. But Danny didn’t know that part of the story. She thought.

  “Today?” he went on. “Today we’re talking about Talents gone missing. Fatae gone dead. You—and a bunch of others—getting blacklisted by the Council. The fact that there’s been a Talent Moot, and you knocked heads together.”

  Wren winced at that. The Moot, or gathering, had been a bad idea, and her telling them all it was a bad idea had been an even worse idea, for all that it made sense at the time. All it did was bring her notoriety she didn’t want and couldn’t use. And, if Danny was right, which she suspected he was, had led to this.

  “What it all comes together as, girl, is you in the middle of shit, like it or not, want it or not. You is standing there with a great big red target painted on your nice peachy-skinned forehead.”

  “So what do you think I should do, oh wise one?” She was trying for sarcasm, but it came out too sincere a question for comfort.

  Danny didn’t hesitate. “Run, babe. Run like hell.”

  By the time she got back to her apartment and tossed her boots back into her bedroom closet, the news trucks had already shown up. They were cruising up and down, narrowly missing the cars parked on either side, looking for some hapless passing pedestrian to interview for the news. The timing sucked for witnesses, though; the lunchers were back in their cubicles, and the afternoon dog walkers hadn’t started hitting the streets yet. They were probably going to be stuck interviewing the same firefighter or cop on every channel.

  Run, babe.

  She had never run in her entire life. Not when she discovered what she was, not when her mentor disappeared on her, rather than risk exposing her to his madness, not when the Council had first targeted her, not even when the relatively low-risk life of a Retriever started getting downright dangerous.

  If it was just herself, she’d be rabbiting like a, well, like a rabbit. But it wasn’t just her, was it?

  She made a bet with herself—a water main break, something serious but impossible to blame anyone for—and sat down on the bed and waited for the phone to ring.

  It took seven minutes after the first camera set up and started broadcasting live. She picked up the phone and held it a cautious distance from her ear.

  “Damn it, woman, what have you been doing?”

  That was her partner, always willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  “Water main break, or electrical fires?”

  There was a pause, then the muted sound of the television in the background. “Manhole cover explosion, no suspicious activity suspected.”

  Wren wondered sometimes what might happen if a Talent decided to go terrorist. So far—and by that she meant the entire history of Council and lonejacks—it hadn’t happened. Not even the IRA or PLO had ever claimed a Talented member. Something about channeling current, it seemed to burn out any kind of political or nationalistic fervor. Thank God.

  “So what’s going on?” Sergei asked again, this time with an edge to his voice. Bless the man, he did worry.

  “Buy me dinner, and I’ll tell you all about it.” What little she knew, anyway. Hopefully, by then, she’d know more. Or at least, what to tell him.

  His immediate reaction was a long, drama-queen sigh. “Why is it that I always seem to end up buying you dinner?”

  She had actually opened her mouth to respond when he added, “Don’t answer that. Make it early. I was too busy talking at my lunch meeting today to actually eat anything.”

  Wren hung up the phone without saying goodbye, and stared at the wall in front of her. She really needed to hang some artwork. She really needed to buy some artwork. The place really did look like she rented it. Her partner ran a damned art gallery, and her walls were bare. What was she waiting for? Some windfall of millions? To move to some larger, better-lit space? To suddenly develop artistic taste? None of that was going to happen, not in this lifetime.

  “And this suddenly bothers you now, why?” she asked herself out loud. “Because some chickie comes in and sneers at your apartment?”

  Or maybe, a little internal voice suggested, because this was the third time in less than a year someone had maybe-probably tried to seriously harm her. She had always acted like life was long and amenable to planning. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. She’d gotten Sergei into bed on a whim, and that had worked out well, hadn’t it?

  Hadn’t it?

  The little voice had nothing to say on that matter.

  Enough of that. She had four hours before she had to meet Sergei for dinner. Work to be done. First up, send out some feelers on the client, see if anything ugly came back before she actually cashed the retainer check. Paranoia was a lovely thing, and so useful, too. Then, maybe a wander down to the usual cafés, have some coffee, see if anyone else had gotten a package via demon-courier…

  “Nope. Not a thing. Guess they don’t think I’m important enough.”

  “Oh, give me a break.” Wren downed the last of her coffee and made a grimace. That was her fourth cup of the afternoon, it having taken this long to get her companion around to the topic of interest. She should probably switch to decaf at some point. It wouldn’t taste any better, but she’d feel a little less spring-wound.

  “Seriously, Wren.” Bill leaned across the Formica table, his black eyes intent on her face. “Last I heard of any of this, you had shot all the battle-mongers down at the Moot. Things quieted down after that. I thought that was the end of it.”

  She’d thought that was the end of it, too. The Moot had been a meeting between the local lonejacks that had taken place over the summer, to discuss what to do about the apparent aggression the Council was showing against lonejacks, in general and in particular. She’d pointed out then, rather dramatically, how piss-poor of an idea trying to fight the Council was. No lonejack knew a damn thing about organizing, or, more importantly, was any good at it. Lonejacks were all about individual action, individual concerns. The Council was where all the joiners landed. The followers, the order-takers. No less selfish…just differently oriented with it.

  For lonejacks to form some kind of Talented militia, that was just asking to get stomped on by the big kid on the block, especially when the big kid’s already got stomping boots on. She’d believed—she still believed—that their best chance to survive the Council’s newfound aggression was to stay true to who they were, and not make big honking red-shirted targets of themselves. The Council would burn off whatever insanity was infecting them, and everything would go back to normal.

  But when the joiners start looking cross-eyed at the individuals, even the most anti-organizational types can get nervous. Especially when violence—even unproven—gets added to the picture. And nervous made for snap decisions. But sometimes, she was starting to think, that was what the job needed.

  There was no proof that the Council was behind anything that had and was happening. If you wait around for proof, sometimes you get it—and sometimes you got dead.

  “Would you have signed it?” she asked him now, after the fact.

  Bill relaxed back into the hard-stuffed bench of their booth, and shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe. Probably. What’s been going down, it’s some scary shit. Making a scary noise back might not do anything, but sitting around waiting for them to come for me
? Lost most of my family, that way.”

  Bill looked Generic WASP, down to the Top-Siders on his feet and the natural blond of his hair, but his genetics included a long line of steppe-riding wildmen and witches, only some of whom had made it to America on the last Cosa express out of Germany in 1939. He was also the best damn Translocator in the city, which had earned him the much-hated nickname of “Scotty.” One of the few who could—or would—create spell-sticks for Talents like Wren, for whom Translocating was, at best, a chancy operation.

  If she were part of a group looking to garner support among the lonejacks, Bill would have been at the top of her list. The fact that he hadn’t been approached meant—what? That they had no interest in this letter being circulated among lonejacks. That they had no intention of building a consensus, or circulating it further. That the people putting it together—otherwise intelligent, if hotheaded Talents—had an agenda that probably did not include getting the Council to back down, but rather force their hand.

  She hoped to hell the Council didn’t take the bait, but suspected they rather would. And that that had been the plan all along.

  And you fell for it. You went along and blithely jotted your initials on the damned thing without thinking it through, giving them your fingerprints over the damn thing, which could be just what’s needed to make the Council move overtly—and therefore make a lonejack coalition needful. Brilliant, Valere. Fucking brilliant. You got played.

  She downed the last of her coffee, and waved the waitress over for a refill, already mentally composing the “stop the press” response she was going to scorch into their hides, via demon express. She’d do it herself, if she thought they’d left themselves open to any kind of directed attack. But they were smart, these bastards. Almost smart enough to pull it off, worse luck.

  The bells from the church up the street were tolling six when Wren came up out of the subway. She was late. As usual. Knowing her partner, he had arrived exactly on time.