Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Anna, you’re being a foolish child.”

  Melanie’s voice had gone sharp and hard, exactly like the parent of a five-year-old pushed to the final limit, and Wren could hear the train alarms ringing, signaling blood about to hit the tracks.

  Right. She was out of there. The maid could do cleanup. She was a Retriever, not a referee.

  “Child? I’m a child? I’m more woman than you could ever be, relying on your tricks and toys.”

  “You ungrateful little…”

  “Go on, say it.” Anna taunted her stepmother, moving farther into the room. “You always wanted to call me that. I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t Talented enough. Too bad you didn’t manage to pop out any real kids, make my daddy forget all about me.”

  Oh God, yeah. Wren was out of there. Now.

  “Don’t mind me, I’ll let myself out,” she said to the maid, who looked like she wanted to join her, and backed out of the apartment, deciding to take the stairs rather than risk waiting around for the elevator. She’d rather face a twisted ankle than be in the vicinity of those two another moment.

  In the night’s distance, a low-sounding horn called over water, a low-riding metal beast looking for its mate. Union rules had called it quits for the night, but lights still burned here and there, in small corrugated-side shacks and sturdier wood-and-brick buildings, as accountants and harbormasters went over accounts.

  The rifle was a black, dulled-looking thing, more plastic than metal, but the ki-lyn facing the business end of it didn’t doubt for a moment that it could hurt him. Probably kill him. If it didn’t, he might wish he were. He knew the fate of his kind, taken by hunters. The black market was active in organ meats, giving false hope to the hopeless.

  The human holding the weapon was a child, as the ki-lyn could judge such things; its head barely came to his withers. An older woman stood behind him, a weapon of her own—smaller, but no less ugly—held loosely in her left hand, ready to bring to bear the instant the child might falter.

  Foolish old man, he thought to himself. You were warned.

  They had found him down by the docks, where he had been waiting for transport home. This city had become unfriendly in recent months, and many of the fatae were fleeing, those who had an elsewhere to flee to, but he had wanted to finish his business out in a calm and dignified manner, not run like a startled doe.

  At first, he had thought it a game, as the child darted out at him. Children were a gift, a treasure. He would never have thought to fear one, even as the small wooden bat it held came down first on one leg, then another, then a third before he could react.

  “Why?” he asked now, as reasonably as he could while trying to hold himself upright despite what he was pretty sure were cracked kneecaps in three of his four legs. “What did we ever do to you? What crime did I commit, to so offend you?”

  The child seemed unable to answer, his eyes wide and very very dark in his pale face. The woman had no such hesitation.

  “You’re a thing,” she spat. “An animal. It’s against God’s will for animals to speak.”

  The ki-lyn considered that for a moment, as his kind considered all things: taking the four quarters of each question fairly, in turn, and with equal weight. “And yet, I speak, and think, and reason. Perhaps I am not an animal at all?”

  He knew, the moment those words left his mouth, that they were the wrong thing to say. The woman’s face twisted into such rage that anyone watching might have thought that she was the beast, and not he.

  This was it. He would see his beloved homeland no more. Would never again see his own children, his mate of three-dozen decades.

  “Monster! Abomination of magic!” Her eyes grew wide, the whites visible even in the dim lights overhead

  He could have lowered his head and charged, even now, even with his legs giving way under him. But it was not right. Not the way a child should see its parent die, and he did not wish to kill a child. Not even a child such as this. Not even if it meant that he die instead.

  If this was the Will of the Wheel, so be it. The child still stared at him, the rifle too large and too heavy for his hands.

  “Kill it, baby,” the woman crooned. “Show me what you’ve learned. Clean the earth of this filth.”

  The ki-lyn bowed his great horned head, and waited for the inevitable.

  Forgive them, he thought to the Creator. They act in fear, and fear is all that they know.

  “Momma…” he heard the child say, his voice wavering, and then there was a silvery ringing noise, a song too lovely to be deadly, and an impact, burning-hot and angry in his chest, and it was done.

  The scaled and horned beast collapsed to the wooden docks. The boy, his rifle unfired, stared at it as though expecting the creature to rise and fight.

  “Huh,” the woman said. “Thought they’d be harder to kill, those scales and all.”

  They left the ki-lyn lying in a heap on the old docks, with only the seagulls sleeping on the light posts to bear witness.

  5

  His cell phone was ringing. Or rather, it was vibrating, in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Sergei was pretty sure it was Wren, just from the way the vibrations seemed to be off, somehow. Not that her current-magic could affect the phone that way, at a distance. At least, he didn’t think it could. Wren kept finding new ways to surprise him, though. Being able to destroy his electronics just by calling was entirely within the realm of possible, if not probable.

  He let it vibrate, and eventually it stopped. The lack of a beep said that whoever it was, they hadn’t left a message.

  “I don’t want to get involved,” he said to his companion. They were sitting in a small wine bar in midtown, surrounded by other men and women, also in suits, also drinking wine and picking at overpriced plates of dried meats, roasted peppers, and sliced cheeses before they went wherever they were going for dinner. After spending even the few days in Italy over the summer, Sergei couldn’t work up the enthusiasm for what was called mortadella in Manhattan. Not even when the other person was paying.

  Although the prosciutto was not bad.

  “You are involved,” his companion said, swirling the glass of wine thoughtfully, as though seeing answers in the straw-colored liquid. “As I go, boy, you go. Even now. Never think you don’t. Never think, because we let you run your leash a bit, anything ever changed.”

  The bile that rose in Sergei’s throat had nothing to do with what he was eating. That had always been Andre’s mantra: where he led, they were expected to follow. You never felt the collar until you tried to balk.

  “You didn’t own me even then.” Back when he had been a willing, in fact eager employee of the Silence, working tirelessly to use his brains, his wits, and his weapons to solve the world’s more esoteric problems. “You don’t own me now.”

  “Dear boy.” Avuncular Andre replaced Tough Guy Andre. “Not a word was said about ownership. Merely…ties which cannot be unbound. Or cut.”

  “Everything can be cut.” Sergei’s words were as sharp as his meaning.

  “Not without bleeding to death in the process.” It wasn’t a warning. Exactly. Andre sounded as though he were discussing a theoretical point of academic interest. Andre always sounded like that, even when the interest was life and death. Maybe especially then. He stepped back from emotional intensity, preferring to keep a shield between himself and those he helped. Sergei had never gotten the hang of that. Had never wanted to.

  Life and death were too gritty, too messy, to be polite, or refined. Money, yes. He could be as refined as the next high-end salesman when it came to money. But blood was a different matter.

  Especially his own blood.

  Especially Wren’s blood.

  There were limits to his loyalty.

  Andre had asked for this meeting. Not him. He didn’t want to be involved. He couldn’t afford to be involved. There were three priorities in his life: Wren, the gallery, and Wren’s career. The second and third place priorities mi
ght move around, but the first was always first. It had been that way for over a decade now, since he’d fallen out of a wrecked car and seen those eyes in that pale face, and put a person to the name in a coded file. You could fall in love in minutes, even if you didn’t know it for years.

  “Boy…Sergei.” Andre fiddled with the stem of his wineglass, and Sergei could feel his resolve wilt.

  There were limits to his loyalty. But obligation lasted until death.

  “You’ve got a problem,” Sergei said, finally. That was an understatement. Andre had a disaster. “Withholding intel from you on the Nescanni case—it could just have been someone unhappy with Wren’s retainer, someone trying to cause us to fail, make us look bad, so that the Silence would reconsider the entire arrangement. But more than that?” He looked at the notes he had, purely out of habit, jotted down as they talked. “A long-term pattern of disinformation, willful misinformation? No.” He shook his head. “That’s your problem, Andre, not mine.” Not ours, he thought. Not Wren’s.

  And that’s what this was all about: Andre trying to drag him back in, headfirst, to Andre’s problems. Ironic, really. When he’d left them the first time, the Silence had let him live only because he had found Wren, and they wanted to use him to get to her. And so they had, through the Mage Council’s arrogance driving her to them.

  And now Andre, after playing the Silence’s game for his entire adult life, suddenly smelled a skunk, and wanted Sergei’s help in rooting it out of the woodpile.

  For Andre—for the man who had taken a know-it-all, idealistic college graduate under his wing and taught him how to get by in the world with more than book-learning? For that man, Sergei would be willing to play the dog, do what needed to be done.

  If there were no other considerations.

  “Yes, that was what I had thought,” his former boss was saying. “What I had originally hoped—that it was merely my workload, someone targeting your partner, as you suggested, or me directly. But it has become a pattern, this withholding of vital information, within the Silence itself. Not only in my cases, but others as well.”

  Andre tapped the table in front of him with slender, dark-skinned fingers as he spoke. They looked like the hands of a much younger man. Sergei compared them to his own, equally-well-manicured if less tapered, and then thought of Wren’s hands: delicate and yet somehow battered, capable and somehow more honest than his or Andre’s.

  “You’ve been told this?” Sergei still didn’t quite believe that. The Silence did not show weakness, especially not to your peers, and admitting that R&D wasn’t giving you the full story meant not only weakness but vulnerability. Desk-pushers were worse than sharks; if they smelled blood, they would not rest until the injured member was not only taken down, but all traces of them were removed.

  It was a depressing view of an organization that worked for the public good, however privately, but depressing made it no less true. Operatives—men and women like himself, who worked outside of the building’s confines—were actually safer in many ways than those inside, in positions of power.

  It was like Wren often said about being a Retriever: the trick wasn’t in being invincible, the trick was being invisible.

  “The fourth horseman rides by, I know,” Andre said in response to his question. “Yes. I’ve been told. People are becoming nervous, finally. And nervous people do one of two things; they clam up and go very still, or they chatter.”

  “And you’ve been chattering?” Sergei was openly dubious now; too many years exposure to his former boss made him doubt the man ever chattered—without an ulterior motive, anyway.

  “They have been chattering. I’ve been very still…and listening.” He swirled the wine remaining in his glass, a pale, golden-white liquid that caught the light in its depths, and placed the glass back down on the tablecloth, untasted. “And the one thing that seems to connect all of the cases where information has been withheld has been the supernatural element.”

  He had Sergei’s attention again, as he must have known he would. “Talents?”

  “I’d hesitate to narrow it quite that much. Call it supernatural.”

  Magic, then. Old, or new—unlike Wren, Andre didn’t distinguish between the two variants. Sergei wasn’t sure he could, even if he cared to. “Andre, that’s barely, what, two percent of the Silence’s caseload?”

  “When you were full-time, perhaps. Things have changed since then.” Andre’s slick veneer slipped, and for an instant Sergei saw the face of an old, worried man. “Now the number of situations we handle, that involve the supernatural element in some way or another, has risen to almost forty percent.”

  Sergei almost choked on his Prosecco. To borrow one of Wren’s favorite phrases, Jesus wept.

  There wasn’t much more to say, after that. Andre called for the check and headed back to the office, leaving Sergei sitting at the small table, pushing around the remains of his food and wishing, for the first time in almost twenty years, that he still smoked the cigarettes he carried around with him everywhere, like a talisman of will over cravings.

  Forty percent. Forty percent.

  Was it because they were the only ones left, the only ones interested in and able to deal with malign supernatural interferences? Or were the number of those interferences rising—and rising damn quickly?

  The Silence had been founded in the early 1900s by wealthy men with guilty consciences, tired, finally, of earning money while others suffered. Their primary mission: to right wrongs. Their secondary mission: to prevent wrongs from being committed. Things had expanded, since then.

  His code name there had been Softwing: the owl. Bringer of wisdom in some cultures—death, in others. He had found it amusing, once. Fitting. Had enjoyed being the blade that cut Gordian Knots.

  He had specialized in knots with supernatural elements. Had been one of only three, then, who did so. They had not needed more.

  How many, he wondered, were handling FoCAs, agents with Talent, now? How many of them—and their charges—were being put at risk because someone was withholding information?

  More—how were they defining “supernatural”? Sergei hadn’t bothered to ask Andre, and that might have been a mistake, of the sort he rarely made. The Silence was relentlessly humancentric; they barely recognized most of the fatae races that existed, much less granted them sentient status. By Silence standards, most of the arguments Sergei had observed over the years—including some rather spectacular bar brawls—involving fatae would have been seen as attacks against humans. A Situation to be cleared up, a wrong to be righted.

  And never mind that a third of the time humans started it, and often all the participants ended up drinking at the same bar together the very next night.

  Wren doesn’t know what to make of what she calls my fataephobia…Andre’s would knock her backward into tomorrow. And he didn’t even want to think about the rest of the Silence, the ones who either had no exposure to the nonhuman races, or, worse yet, had been conditioned to see them only as troublemakers and wrongdoers.

  “Svyataya deva.”

  When he had walked away from the Silence more than a decade ago, he had thought that was the end of it. Even hooking up with Wren, then a wise but inexperienced teenager with more Talent than she knew what to do with, had pointed him in a different direction. No more do-gooding through violence. No more trying to fix wrongs for someone else. Himself, and his partner, and the devil take the hindmost.

  That had lasted for ten years, until the Council’s threat to Wren seemed a greater threat than the Silence’s possible or potential agenda.

  Now, Sergei wasn’t so sure.

  Obligations were one thing, and all very well to honor. But first, he had a responsibility to Wren. To himself. To the people they both cared about. Andre, for all the older man had trained him, was not on that very short list.

  The Red Light was just what the doctor ordered: crowded but not packed, noisy but not to the point of overwhelming your ears. The ta
ble was already occupied by the time Wren arrived, having stopped to change into something a little more suitable for bar-slumming—jeans and her battered leather jacket over a skimpy pink tank top.

  Sarah looked older than Wren’s memory of her. She supposed everyone did—memory stood still, time moved on, etc., etc., etc. But it was still disconcerting to expect to see someone in their energetic forties, and be confronted by an old woman.

  On second look, Sarah wasn’t old—but her hair, raven-black in memory, was now shot with silver, and the laugh lines around her mouth and eyes had been cut even deeper with worry.

  Wren had never actually met the Seer who worked at Noodles her favorite Chinese restaurant, but she suspected that she or he was older than their physical years, too. Knowing too much weighed on you, aged you. Especially if you also—the way most Seers did—had the compulsion to tell others what you knew. Cassandra never did get to wash her hands and go dancing, instead.

  “Valere.”

  Sarah’s voice was the graveled rumble that came from vocal chord damage, not smoking. Like she had spent a lot of her early years screaming. Wren took a seat across the table from the woman, careful not to touch her or anything of hers. Psychometry was a skill that usually needed to be invoked—unless there was a lot of strong emotion invested in the object or person. Something told her that Sarah had a lot of emotion, and damned little of it got vented.

  “I’m here. Talk to me.” Digame, digame. She remembered none of the Spanish she heard as a child in the diner where her mother had worked, except that phrase, and the casual urgency it invoked. Sarah shouldn’t wear all black. It just made her look more tired, if that were possible.