Bring it down. Bring it on.
“Hoo.” A long, drawn-out exhalation of air, and he collapsed on top of her, still comfortably inside her. His weight was a pleasant, solid reminder of the world around them, and she was reminded again that grounding could be done more than magically.
“Ow.” He winced, and she found the energy to slide out from under him—carefully—and pushed him gently facedown onto the bed, stripping the sheets off to inspect his skin.
Sure enough, there were telltale marks where their skin had been in contact. Nothing too bad, but bad enough to see. The temptation to yell at him was intense, but she knew from experience that he’d shrug it off. Nothing was worse than Sergei when he didn’t want to deal with something.
She reached into her nightstand for the tube of Bactrin she kept there and, sliding back down next to him, she squeezed a little out and soothed it into his skin where the marks seemed worst—his ass, thighs and stomach. Interesting, that the groin area seemed unmarked, although there might have been burn marks under his pubic hair. If he wasn’t complaining, she wasn’t going to force the issue. Yet.
He nuzzled at her neck, sleepy, satiated, and even in her annoyance she felt desire stroking her nerve endings again.
“S’okay, Wrenlet.”
No, it wasn’t. But it wasn’t not okay, either. She didn’t know if the ointment did any good, even, except make her feel less bad about hurting him…except it wasn’t hurting him, he kept telling her that. It was a balance, a constant dance for her, between letting go and being swept away, and the awareness that Sergei would not tell her if she were actually, physically burning him. In fact, she suspected that he might prefer more of a burn; he clearly found it a turn-on. Within reason. She hoped within reason. She didn’t know what to do, if it went beyond reason.
Capping the tube, she let it drop to the floor and lay down next to him again, letting the day’s exhaustion take her down into sleep as well.
And then it hit her, just as her eyes were too heavy to keep open any longer, what had felt so strange about the deep-voiced shadow.
His accent wasn’t from around here. Not even close. The A was all wrong, and the emphasis on certain syllables had been just ever so slightly…off. Unfamiliar.
Not local talent. Either the Mage Council was importing their bully-boys now, or…
Too much. Her brain hurt. So she turned it off.
6
It was 3:00 a.m. and Wren was wide-awake, while Sergei snored lightly next to her, the coverlet drawn up to his chin. She slid out of bed and went to the single window in the bedroom, pulled open the heavy green curtain and looked outside.
Three in the morning in Manhattan looked like nothing so much as…3:00 a.m. in Manhattan. The sky was black, the streets oddly empty and silent, although she could still hear, faintly, the noise from the club down the street and around the corner. Ordinances against excessive standing-outside-club-doors had cut down on the really annoying street noise, in recent years; the clubs policed themselves pretty well, not wanting to risk the fines that could make the difference between breaking even or going under.
Wren had never been a club kid; no money for it when she was a teenager, no time or patience for it once she was earning decent money on her own. She also suspected that a Talent might not be welcome in most of those tech-heavy clubs; fire regs were usually over-taxed enough without some drunk current-user taking a hit off their power system to finish off the night.
Who needed drugs when you had a supercharged soundboard with umptygillion amps, and an entire room full of superheated lights to drain down? At least one major prank that she knew of had involved selective pinging of lights during the height of the disco craze, in one of the most popular clubs. She had been a toddler at the time, but the story was good enough to be retold—even Neezer, who generally disapproved of pranking overall, had loved that story, probably because everyone involved got exactly what they deserved.
But at 3:00 a.m. on a Tuesday night, in this decade, everything was quiet and low-key. Peaceful, even. Someone was walking under the streetlight, hands shoved into the pockets of a leather coat, intent on their own thoughts. The lamplight picked out glimmers in the thick black hair, but from the distance and the angle Wren couldn’t even tell if the figure was male or female, human or fatae. Just a faceless, nameless New Yorker, on his or her way home.
Suddenly Wren wanted to talk to someone. Not just anyone, but someone who understood. Who grokked. Time was, she would have tracked down Lee, who was often working in his studio all hours of the night. That time was gone. Lee was gone.
Dropping the curtain, she padded in the darkness down the hallway to her office. Lighting a thick pillar candle for light, she booted up the computer, then went to use the bathroom in the meanwhile. Just getting the computer up and running took forever, compared to most systems of comparable age, simply because of all the safeguards she had installed around it. Not virus protections, although she had those, too, but surge protections of the sort most super-secret government installations didn’t worry about. Everything was routed and rerouted in ways she had absolutely no understanding of, courtesy of an MIT professor who was doing an ongoing and completely unofficial study of current, and still, every time she turned the damn thing on she held her breath. Current was the proverbial dual-edged sword—power on the one hand, irritation and annoyance on the other. There was so much you could do, if your body was set up to channel current, that was denied to Nulls. But Nulls could use cell phones and iPods and portable CD players, and all the things Wren could only look longingly at.
Life was fair, in its own way. It didn’t play favorites, and kept the balance of perks pretty even-handed, in that regard. Besides, her computer start-time might take forever, but she wasn’t entirely cut off from the online world. And some nights, that was the really important thing.
She came back to find the screen ready and waiting for her. Sitting down, she pulled the keyboard to her, scooted the chair out so that she could put her feet up on the desk, and logged in to check her e-mail.
For a person who couldn’t use tech easily or comfortably, she was on an impressively high number of mailing lists. Most of them were low-traffic—one was old friends from high school, another a group of self-employed or small businesswomen, who traded tax information and medical insurance news in with the usual laments of working for yourself. Wren mostly lurked—of course—but she had picked up some valuable tips, which made it worth her time, and the risk.
She wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. While a lot of the more conservative types shied away from getting online, or even close to tech—she didn’t think Neezer had ever willingly gone near a copier, instead bribing the bio department’s secretary to do whatever admin work was needed for his classes—there were just as many Talents who used their computer the way millions of Nulls did—as a social conduit to people you otherwise would never have met.
She sorted her e-mail quickly into “of interest,” spam, and possible spam. The spam she wiped, and cleared out considerable space. The possible spam she skimmed over, and deleted anything that had off-kilter headers. Maybe yes, maybe no, but she had enough problems without hackers, viruses, or worms.
That left about a dozen e-mails from people she knew, or with headers that looked legit. Two, maybe three were maybe-possibly Cosa-related. And absolutely none of them were anything she wanted to deal with right now.
Taking a deep breath, she clicked on another software application. Intellectually she knew that how many screens she had running made no difference; it was her control that was the issue, not the RAM or hard drive, or anything actually inside the computer. But running too many things still made her anticipate disaster, and anticipating disaster seemed more often than not to create it, so she just avoided it over all.
No sooner was the new program running than she was pounced on.
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Wren had never met the person on the other side of the connection. All she knew was that she was in her late fifties, had lived all over the world before settling in New Zealand, and was, like Wren, a Talent.
Wren didn’t know if she was lonejack or Council. It had never seemed to come up in conversation before this, and she didn’t know how to ask now without sounding rude. It was enough that she was there, at three in the morning—a decent hour of the afternoon tomorrow, Ohsos time—and ready and willing to talk.
Wren started to say no thanks, then paused. Why not?
Wren doubted that. But the distance made it all seem safer, somehow.
Wren stopped, amazed at what had just poured out of her fingers. She hadn’t even known that she felt that way until she started typing.
Most people would think that. Either “their problem” or “who cares?” Wren still wasn’t sure how she ended up being so concerned, either. It had to be P.B.’s fault. P.B. who looked so tough and sounded so tough, and actually was so tough, but there was only so much one tough midget-sized polar bear–shaped demon could do when faced with half a dozen humans with large sticks and ugly in their eyes. And Rorani? What would the dryad do if someone tried to hurt her tree, that beautiful centuries-old oak that shaded an entire picnic area in Central Park? It would be dire and dreadful, Wren didn’t doubt that…but in the end, the tree would be damaged, and Rori would die, and the most the killers would get would be destruction of City property.
Wren laughed so suddenly at that, she choked on air. “Thank you for not saying that while I was drinking coffee,” she told her long-distance companion. She could have pinged “Ohso” with the image/irritation, but that always felt like cheating, somehow. Besides, using current while at the computer, even in that relatively low-current way, was really tempting fate.
Although it was, of course, but not in a way she was going to discuss with anyone, even another Talent.
She knew she should stop there, but her fingers wouldn’t stop typing.
There was a long moment of silence, that might have been distraction on OSBT’s part, or the time it took her to type, or anything totally nonworrying….
Just when Wren began to suspect she’d pushed too far, a response came.
Actually they didn’t know that anyone was dead. They were just gone. Missing. Unreachable. In order to block a Talent from even the faintest ping, in order to make them untraceable, you had to either kill them—tough, if they’re forewarned, but hardly impossible, even for the smart, strong ones—or block them off thoroughly enough that a concerted effort can’t break through. The second possibility was even more damning to the Council, in a lot of ways. Anyone might have a grudge against Talents. It might be a coincidence that all the missing ones were lonejacks. It might even be coincidence that the missing lonejacks were outspoken in their opposition to the Council having any more weight in the Cosa’s doings.
The charter. Wren had heard it referenced, but never actually seen it. She didn’t know anyone who had seen it, not even her few and far between Council friends. Supposedly a list of Don’ts to guide the then newly formed Council in their benevolent dictatorship, written by several of the founding members who knew all too well what power could do to people, even well-intentioned. Maybe even especially the well-intentioned.
Another Council member who had never seen the charter. For the object that claimed to be the basis of everything the Council was, it seemed to not get around much. Honestly, people were too lazy to care. How many Americans, even well-educated ones, had ever actually read the Constitution, after all?
That much was true. Back in the electric age, when Edison was dreaming of lights in every home, and streets were being torn up to lay wires, every magic user in the country—and across the globe, as power lines went up and down—got flooded with more current than they’d ever had access to before. Ben Franklin had preached moderation when he captured current, but that old Talent had never been given such a feast. It took a saint—or someone with a totally nonconductive will—to resist.
Very few Talents were saints. In fact, Wren couldn’t think of a single one. Tree-taller—Lee—had been as good a man as she knew, and he had been miles from sainthood, by choice.
Then again, he had been a lonejack, hadn’t he? For a reason.
The Council had been created to protect Talents from themselves. Balancing current’s edge, especially in those early, heady days of easy-access power, was a dangerous thing. Open yourself up too much, and you wizzed, went mad from the overrush. The percentage of Talents lost to the flood in that first decade had reportedly quadrupled.
Wren felt her irritation level jump, and she tamped it down as gently as she could. Ohso was getting too upset, too angry, and the last thin
g Wren wanted to do was feed that.
Wren yelped and jumped backward as her modem—the modem that her tech guru swore could withstand a direct thunderstorm hit—sparked and gave off a whiff of something deeply unpleasant and all too familiar.
Wren pushed the chair forward gingerly, expecting at any moment for the entire computer system to blow up into a shower of burning sparks and flying electronic bits. But it remained intact, if offline.
The Councils had been established to keep Talents on an even keel, by grouping them into locale-based enclaves and giving decision-making abilities to chosen leaders. It was supposed to keep everyone honest—and safe. Lonejacks had rejected the need for it, gone their own way, made their own decisions, good or bad. The way the Council had been set up, they could have forced the issue, made every Talent join them or face penalties, ostracized until they fell into line. They hadn’t, so long as the rebels didn’t overreach themselves. Over time, it had evolved into a live-and-let-live philosophy. Mostly. Until now.
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