Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

“You were at the Moot. I saw you.”

  “You and everyone else in the room,” Wren grumbled. The Moot everyone kept referring to had pretty much ended when she called down lightning, literally, on thickheaded skulls. It had been, in her defense, the only way to get past the usual no-see-me vibes she generated like breathing, and make them actually listen to what she was saying. The end result had been, shock of shocks, to win her a few more enemies, both those who didn’t like the fact that she advised moderation and caution, and the ones who felt that she had humiliated them, by making it impossible to ignore the fact that she was stronger than they were, could channel more current, more effectively.

  But the Moot had failed; no combined action had been taken, no violence offered. No retribution taken.

  At the time, it had seemed like the smart course. The only course. But it hadn’t stopped Lee’s death. Hadn’t stopped other freelancers from continuing to poke the tiger that was the Mage Council, even if they used words rather than sticks.

  “No. I wasn’t there at that one.” Sarah shook that past meeting off as unimportant. “The one that’s to come. I saw you there.”

  “Oh…damn,” Wren said, wanting very badly to say something stronger. She knew those idiots weren’t going to be able to stop with that damned letter to the Mage’s Council. She just knew it.

  “I’m sorry.” The Seer shrugged, helpless in the face of her own information.

  Unable to take her frustrations out on anyone within reach, Wren settled for waving over a waiter—large, surly, and cute in a large and surly way—and ordered a beer.

  “Make it two,” Sarah said. “And a whiskey shot.” Proggies, of all the Talents, drank copiously. The current in their wires that opened them to the future also overrode the usual dangers of drinking. The theory was that they Saw themselves getting stupid, and so automatically corrected to avoid that future. If true, Wren thought, it would be the first time anyone ever managed to completely avoid a Seer’s foreseen fortune. Christ knew, she had never been able to manage that.

  “So what am I doing at this Moot that hasn’t happened but will? And do we have a time frame for it?” That was another neat trick of Seers: they didn’t come with time stamps on their visions.

  Sarah looked Wren over carefully, actually seeing her the way most people didn’t. The weird magical hitch in her makeup—what made most Retrievers take up the career, and Wren called no-see-me—made peoples’ eyes skip over her, leaving nothing but a blur in the memory. But Sarah was noticing details.

  It made Wren surprisingly uneasy.

  “Soon,” she said, after their beers had been delivered. “You look the same. Everyone around you is angry. Shadows rising. Bring it…down? Bring them down.” Sarah frowned. “No, that’s not quite right, either.”

  Great. Not only a Seer, but a brain-fried one at that. Not wizzed—if Sarah had been wizzed every Talent within ten feet of her would have known, and acted appropriately; to wit, walking casually but quickly in the direction of Away. But the beer and chasers had clearly done their job, over time, on her brain.

  So. Bring what or who down? And, specifically, how? Wren glared at her beer. Another useless Seer fortune, and not even a cookie to sweeten the deal.

  To give her hands something to do, and to fill the awkward, postprediction moment, Wren raised her beer in a silent toast, then sipped at the dark, slightly bitter brew appreciatively. It had been too long since she’d kicked back and had a real lager. Sergei was a wine guy, not so much for the beers. Lee had been the one…

  I’m sorry, she said to her friend, toasting him with the next sip. And I know what you’d want me to do. Lee had been a free market man, a lonejack’s lonejack…but in the end, events had stuck too much in his throat to swallow comfortably.

  Shadows rising. Rising and rising and rising, until you couldn’t see the sun anymore. Wren didn’t have a single thread of precog in her core, but the sense of foreboding that phrase sent through her couldn’t be ignored. Bring it down. Bring what down? Shadows bringing something down? Was she supposed to bring something down?

  “I don’t suppose you can give me anything that’s actually useful? What I’m supposed to say, who I’m supposed to say it to?” She already knew the answer.

  Sarah shook her head regretfully, then lifted the shot glass of golden amber liquid and kicked it back without hesitation. “I wish I could. I’d sleep better at night.”

  “Yeah. Does that—” Wren gestured at the now empty shot glass “—help?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “But it makes the rest of me hurt to match.”

  “Waiter,” Wren called, doing her best cool, lean-back-and-gesture-lazily-with-one-arm movement she could, considering the crowd. “Another round. Same again for both of us.”

  The walk home seemed longer than the walk over. The air had chilled off once the moon rose, and she was glad for the warmth of her jacket, not to mention the beer in her system, although she had pissed away a lot of it before leaving the Red Light. Sarah was still sitting in the bar, drunkenly morose. Wren made a mental note to never, ever, ever drink with a Seer again. They were just so damn depressing.

  Still, as she walked, Wren felt her mood lifting slightly. Manhattan was a city made for nights. Daylight, it was rush-and-bustle, even the early mornings having an energy in them that made you feel the need to walk faster, be more aggressive, tougher than the next bastard scheming next to you. Nighttime, the lights came on, and a different sense of magic flowed up from the pavement. Made possibilities into probabilities. Renewed hope, faith. Sang like a siren in a good mood. Not even the mutterings of a sodden Seer could totally wipe that out, although to give Sarah credit, she had tried.

  Traffic flowed, all the traffic lights synchronized perfectly the way drivers only dreamed of, and nobody felt the need to lay into their horn to protest being cut off by a manic cabbie swerving from East to West to drop off or pick up a passenger. Life in the big city was as it ought to be, for at least this instant. Prediction of shadows or no.

  Shadows are mainly in the day, anyway. Night’s all shadows…moon doesn’t cast enough light for a shadow to be dangerous. All right, that wasn’t exactly, technically, true. But night’s shadows didn’t feel dangerous to her. Not Manhattan shadows, cast out of neon and street lamps. To her, they were old friends, feral cats who lounged in your windowsill and stole your leftovers but never quite let you pet them.

  She had just crossed Eighth Avenue and was turning downtown when her sense of pleasure in the evening was tempered by the awareness that one of those friendly shadows, wasn’t.

  Someone was walking too close, with too much intent. Intent, and current, damped down and controlled, but with the distinct tang of Council style, Council training blending with his individual current-scent.

  “What now?” she asked. Resigned, because after all, how else could this day possibly have ended?

  “What’s the creed of the lonejacks?” Male voice, too close to her ear, so not a tall man, but depth to the voice, so broad, and probably strong, so stay calm, Valere, don’t do anything stupid like take a swing because, after all, it’s been that kind of a day. She had yet to win a physical confrontation with anyone, anyway. She fought with her words, as needed, not her fists. Not that she didn’t have a decent left hook, if that was what it took.

  “Don’t get involved,” she said to him. It was almost automatic, the way the words come from her mouth. First rule was “Don’t get involved.” Second was “Pick your jobs. Don’t let them pick you.” Third…didn’t matter, when you’d blown the first two so spectacularly.

  “Maybe you should pay more attention to what little your mentor managed to teach you and stay out of things that don’t concern you.”

  The truth of the advice didn’t stop anger from rising in her, hot, sweet and hungry, burning away the last of the beer; like current and unlike. Nobody but nobody talked about Neezer, poor, mad, lost John Ebeneezer, the only father she’d ever come close to having, wit
h that dismissive tone in his voice. Nobody.

  “You’ve made it my concern,” she said, bitterness flowing with the anger. “The moment your people tried to play me.” Almost six months ago, now, when the Council used her to try to cover up their own dirty history, and a bad deal by one of their own. A play that got so involved Sergei agreed to lease their souls to the Silence for protection, and things went from bad to worse, and no way to stay uninvolved.

  Everything else—lonejacks, Moots, fatae meetings held in her own apartment, thanks ever so much, P.B.—it all came from that, somehow. Wren was certain of it. She had no proof, only a sense of patterns forming in chaos. An inevitable chain of events, movements within movements that set the entire set of works into motion, and it was all the Council’s fault.

  “I never had a beef with you. Never got in your way. Council lied to me when I asked them—” through Sergei, as proxy, and that’s why he was in danger, too “—if they were involved in the Frants case. Tried to kill me, then tried to ruin my rep. I’m a lonejack, for Christ’s sake. Did you expect me to be a meek little sheep and take it?”

  Her current sparked, and felt an answering leap from the person next to her, responding to the challenge. No, she told her core, and locked it back down. This was only a messenger.

  “So go take that back to Madame Howe and her band of merry mages. I didn’t pick this fight. I didn’t want it. I still don’t, damn it. But you people wouldn’t leave it alone.”

  The deep-voiced shadow dropped away, and Wren walked on, a voice rising out of her memory, speaking inside her skull.

  There’s a line we dance on. On one side, control. On the other side, chaos. Both are terribly, terribly appealing. But neither is safe, and neither’s very smart, either. Either one of them will suck you in, and never let you go.

  Neezer had been talking about the risk of wizzing, when he said that, of going insane, as he eventually did. As too many Talents did, the really strong ones. The Pures, who didn’t have junk in their systems, reducing the level of current they could channel. But it applied here, too.

  The only way to win, to stay free, was not to play the game. But she’d already bought a ticket, suited up, signed on, whatever metaphor you wanted to use. She’d allowed P.B. to use her name to gather information, had acted on the information he had given her. Had spoken, even if it was only to say that she didn’t want to get involved, in front of people who were already involved, already had her painted into the picture they were designing.

  A Seer had Seen her. Had given her a fortune that did not allow for disappearing off the sidelines.

  She was, in a word, fucked.

  “Ti durak.” It felt so good, she said it again. “Ti durak.” She was pretty sure she was calling herself an idiot…that was the translation she’d gotten out of Sergei, anyway, who had a tendency to mutter it a lot when things weren’t going well.

  She was still muttering it to herself, savoring the sound, when she let herself into her apartment and knew that she wasn’t alone.

  This time, however, the sensation was a good one. Her partner had a…call it an aroma, for lack of a better term, that was unlike anything else she had ever sensed. It allowed her to find him in a darkened warehouse, to track him through a garden maze in the rain, and to know when he was sitting in her apartment, quietly thinking his own quiet thoughts. Some of it was his cologne, and the natural scent of his sweat, but there was an edge of something mental to it, as well. Not current—Sergei was mostly Null, if not entirely—but similar, as close to it as electricity itself was to current-proper. She thought sometimes it might be as simple as the living life force, what Eastern therapies called the chakra points, but had never had the time or energy to research it further. It was enough for her that that particular mix of taste and scent and mental touch was what she identified as “Sergei.”

  “Hi,” she said quietly into the room where he was sitting, then went into the kitchen to deposit her keys into the bowl on the counter. Slinging her jacket and bag onto one of the stools, she wandered back to the main room to see if he had responded to her greeting yet or not.

  He was still sitting deep in the brown tweed-upholstered chair, staring at the wall. The light from the kitchen played gently against the basic off-white paint, raising faint shadows that echoed in Wren’s own unsettled mind.

  “Hi,” he said finally, just when she was going to leave him to it and go to bed. He shifted in the chair, and looked up at her. In the dim light, his face looked pale and desperate.

  “Serg?”

  “Come here.” It was more of a command than she felt comfortable with, but she let herself walk into the room, enfolded into his arms as he stood to embrace her. She rested her cheek against his chest and felt the steady thrum of his heart against her bones.

  “Wh-ha!” she squeaked as he suddenly, without warning, turned and scooped her up into his arms. She almost went flying, her hands grabbing at the air in a failed attempt to regain some sort of control.

  “Don’t.” His voice was harsh, still a whisper, and she subsided, letting him carry her down the hallway and into the bedroom. Her curtains were pulled back, letting just enough of the street lamp’s light in for them to see the bed, the covers still rumpled, two pillows at the head, another tossed carelessly onto the floor.

  He placed her down on the mattress, letting his elbows hold the weight of his own body off her, while still leaning in close enough to breathe on her neck, a warm, gentle breath that made a long shiver glide down her spine, right down to her groin. She hadn’t walked in the door thinking about sex—but she certainly was now!

  “Let me…” His hands slid under her tank, lifting it up. Her arms raised to help him, blinded for a moment while it went over her head and was tossed to the floor.

  “Get you out of those jeans…” His voice was muffled by the fact that he had bent to her now bared breasts, not so much kissing as nuzzling her. The five o’clock shadow scratched pleasantly, the uncertainty and the adrenalin and the beer of the evening making her feel inclined to go along with his obvious plans. Her jeans and underwear joined her top on the floor, and she attacked the buttons of his shirt with growing enthusiasm. Your partner’s need, sometimes, was the best turn-on.

  She had read somewhere, once, that having sex with your socks on indicated a certain lack of commitment to the moment. That might have been true, but she wasn’t worrying about it right now. Besides, Sergei wore cashmere blend socks, and there was absolutely no bad to cashmere on any part of the body, in Wren’s opinion.

  And then his body was naked—except for the socks—and he was touching every part of her body he could reach, skin-to-skin, and she was returning the favor, hands stroking and kneading and tugging closer, until he was positioned above her in a nicely classic missionary, his eyes still dark and shadowed but desperate in a very different way than before.

  “Need to be inside you,” he said, grabbing a condom from the nightstand, slamming the drawer shut in his haste.

  “Need you there.” No less than the truth, and when he slid inside, it was as though all of him were moving in her flesh, not just his cock. It still felt brand-new to her, sometimes, the sense of wonder, of fascination she felt for his body, something she knew so well, for so long, and now understood in a totally different way.

  She could feel current wakening in response, her natural core of the stuff thickening its strands, engorging itself on the tension building in her body, the changes in her natural electrical charge. Sex-magik was old magic, and not something Talents were taught, as a rule…but some things you didn’t need to be taught. Not when your body hummed along to it naturally. That was why so many people got into trouble with old magic.

  She had never been tempted: sex was enough, as sex. But the power called to her now, seductive, appealing; the chance to feed her core off the power they were building, to use it to strengthen herself, to protect herself. Protect them both. Protect them all.

  Shadows com
ing. Bring it down. Bring it on.

  Not smart, she told the Seer, pulling back a little. Not smart. Not smart at all, no. Besides, no way even the most mind-blowing orgasm could generate that kind of current.

  Shadows coming, the Seer insisted. Be ready.

  “It’s okay,” Sergei told her, pausing midthrust as though he could hear her thoughts. Maybe he could. She knew what she took from him…maybe he was taking from her, too. Most of the population wasn’t entirely Null…

  He shifted, kissing her forehead, driving farther inside her, and that thought skipped town while current sizzled just under her skin in approval.

  “Not…not smart…” He had no idea what she was talking about. No idea, even now, what he was telling her to do. She grounded in him, sometimes, when there was need. When she was working, and the overflow got to be too much, or something went wrong and she couldn’t find bedrock. He was her bedrock. And that wasn’t good, wasn’t smart; he was human, and not Talent, and too much current could kill, if you weren’t hardwired just right, and too much current could wiz, even if you were hardwired perfect.

  “Let go. Zhenchenka, let go.”

  No matter what he was talking about, what he thought he was saying, she couldn’t deny him, not when he asked with that tone in his voice. She opened the vein of power just a little bit, letting current spark though. Dark purples and greens danced along her skin, rising out of her shoulder to skip down her arm, running off her fingers where they spasmed, digging into the flesh of his backside. Where the current met his skin, the purple flared black-red for an instant, then disappeared into his body, sending a shockwave directly into his system, like a live wire touching water.

  He came roughly, his fingers digging into the skin over her hips hard enough to bruise the bone, neck corded from the effort not to yell, his face contorted in pleasure that was easily mistaken for agony.

  Wren closed her eyes, and let the waves of satisfaction coming off her partner send her down a similar chute, current safely contained within her own body coiled and sparking as she came.