Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Not a monk. Not a Brother of the Binding. Those particular individuals were safe in Italy, minding—with more common sense now, she hoped—the deadly treasures entrusted to them. They were not her problem anymore.

  “If I were going to strike at them, I’d make it count,” Clara countered. “Psi-bomb’s nothing but a media hound’s Tinkertoy—lots of sound but not a lot of fury.”

  Obviously Clara’s car hadn’t been parked on the street when the bomb went off.

  “So, what’re you suggesting?” The velour monk leaned forward, interested.

  “Take them down. Take them all down. We can do it, all of us. They’re so hidebound, so lockstep, they can’t think outside the box and that’s all we do. All it would take is everyone working together—”

  “Because we’re so good at that?” The velour monk had a good point. Lonejacks didn’t get that name by being team players.

  “You’d rather let them pick us off, one by one? Strike now, before we lose any more of our kind!”

  “God, people! Is violence all you can think about?” That outburst from a woman in the back broke the dam of fascinated silence, and the room erupted into comment and countercomment, voices rising as everyone tried to be heard, everyone adding their own voice to the din.

  “Now?” Wren asked her inner voice, slouching down and trying to stay out of the way if chairs started flying.

  Not yet.

  “Violence is all they’ve left us,” Clara said, shouting everyone else down with a voice that was clearly Talent-enhanced. “You heard how they responded to our letter of protest!”

  Wren sat up in her chair at that. She hadn’t heard, no. They had sent the letter? As it was? Idiots. But at least her name wasn’t on it. Unless the bastards had forged it…. If they had, there was going to be some significant beatings applied after the fact, as God was her witness, yes.

  “So it proves that the Mage Council is a pile of diseased wankers. This isn’t news. We can’t assume—”

  “The hell we can’t! What about Shona? Francine? Janny? What about Mash?”

  Talents, all. Lonejacks. Pillars of the lonejack community, all gone missing in the past three months; missing in the way only magic could silence.

  “What happened with the letter?” she asked the man next to her, a redhead who had restricted himself to muttering agreement with some of the more bloody-minded comments, so far.

  “They sent the damn thing back—imprinted on the courier’s skin, like a damned tattoo.”

  Wren’s vision swam with a disturbing shade of red, and she felt faint. If they had hurt P.B…

  “Human, or demon?” she asked.

  “You think we’d leave something that important to a nonhuman?” He seemed both startled and disgusted at the thought, but Wren didn’t care about his fataephobia, in her relief. Only after did she wonder if the human messenger had been someone she knew. By then, her informant had gotten up and moved closer into the fray—or farther away from her, she wasn’t sure which. By the time she got caught up on the various threads of argument, her mind had cooled down enough to think rationally again. The Council’s reaction had been crude, for them, but not really anything more or less than what she had expected. So long as they weren’t taking action against the specific names, or tracking down people who had contributed, she was—

  Hearing her name?

  “Everyone not for us is against us, haven’t you figured that out yet? Ask The Wren, if you can find her. She’s the one they’ve targeted the most.”

  Wren started. She was? Other than the psi-bomb…okay, and the Council trying to shut her livelihood down. And the bugging they did of her apartment, while she was away in Italy. The guy who shot at her during the Frants case had just been to sic her back onto Frants; just business, nothing personal.

  All right, yeah. They were screwing with her because she challenged them, which was why she’d been willing to sign the damn letter in the first place, if they’d just made those changes. But the Council had been trying to take her out of the game, not punch her ticket entirely. Not like, oh, that idiot fatae, who got in the way on the last case; the one who had gotten Lee killed. Not like the ones who had gone missing. She was still here, wasn’t she?

  Sobering thought, that. Under all that, why was she still here?

  “Hah. She doesn’t care—she shut us down, last time. Told us to wait. Wait! And while we waited, more lonejacks were taken out of play. She’s a traitor.”

  Now, the voice inside her said. Now.

  Standing up, Wren made her way into the loose knot of people standing in each others’ faces, yelling; she moved carefully around those still seated with caution, uncertain if any of them might try to stop her, for some reason or another. But none of them did, and she all too soon found herself in the center of that knot. The noise was like an overwhelming crackle of static, and it took her a moment to realize that the static was real, the result of so much riled current being loosed, not at a specific target, but allowed to shift around without directed.

  Waste. Utter and total waste. So much the better for her, who was conserving, hoarding, waiting to use…

  Now!

  All right, all right, she told it. No need to shout.

  She tapped the spell, hard, and commanded it to kick in. Her vision sharpened, her skin tightened, and tingles of energy raced form her core, up her spine, and into her throat, soothing and lubricating her vocal cords. It wasn’t doing any of those things, actually. Nothing physical was actually happening, as far as she had ever been able to determine. But the sensations felt real. And, more to the point, the results were real.

  “Traitor? Traitor?”

  The words cut through the yelling, a shark speeding directly to flesh, and caused the same sort of sudden stillness.

  “Watch what words you use, people. How can I be a traitor when the only truth to being a lonejack is ‘Take care of yourself and your own’?”

  A beat, waiting for someone to respond. Not surprisingly, nobody did.

  She wished she was wearing a pair of kick-ass thigh-high, stiletto-heeled boots, instead of more practical ankle boots. Or something sleek and shiny, instead of jeans and jacket, however stylish she looked. No matter. She felt like she was decked for battle.

  “You use as your ‘proof’ the fact that I’ve been targeted. True. And how many of you stepped forward when it was only me being targeted? How many of you crossed the street rather than give me aid, rather than come under the eye of the Council?”

  Too many, she remembered. Sources had dried up, gazes been averted when she came by. Only Lee had damned the consequences and stood by her. And look where that had gotten him.

  “How many of you?” she demanded again. “And you call me a traitor? Because I won’t join in your little crusade? Because I told you all, months ago, that trying to use violence against the Council, that giving them a single large target to aim against, was suicide? For that, I’m a traitor?”

  “That’s The Wren?” she heard a voice ask, one sound picked out of the din. “She’s not what I expected, at all.”

  Wren didn’t—couldn’t—let it faze her. The spell had kicked in, good and strong, and she was on a roll. Her voice felt like strong honey, and her core practically purred, and she hated it. The weight of so many eyes on her was like a brand on her skin, making her want to turn tail and flee the apartment, the street, the city. There was only so much even the best spell could do, and not even an act of God would turn her into a public speaker by choice.

  “Wren Valere. Here to tell us what to do, again? You got some sort of insider information, gonna clear it all up for us lesser mortals?”

  “Oh for…. No.” She almost recognized the man who stepped forward, face twisted into an ugly sneer, and after a second her brain supplied his name: Geordie Whatsisname, who made a public tag-challenge the year before, and looked properly stupid when the other participant not only declined, but had no idea what Geordie was so irate over. A w
oman, if Wren remembered. Like being fought over was some sort of compliment.

  “The only one of you who gave a damn, the only one of you I personally gave a damn about, is dead. You could all join him, for what I care.”

  She paused, letting the truth of that sink in, for them, and for herself. She really didn’t care. There was nothing in her, where concern for general humanity should have been. Interesting. So why was she here? Other than a Seer telling her she had no choice.

  “You’re still telling us, then, to just sit here and be picked off, one by one?”

  “No.” She knew that wasn’t an option anymore. Not as angry as they were. Not with the Council pulling showy, message-sending stunts like they did with the courier. A horse’s head in someone’s bed would have been more subtle. She didn’t care about them…but she had an obligation to them. For Lee. For Neezer. For the sake of this city, which really, really couldn’t handle the additional stress of a Talent-war—but was going to get one now, anyway.

  She turned slowly, trying to catch as many gazes as she could, pushing the limits of her spell as hard as she could to make sure that they by-God heard her. “I’m telling you to be smart. Be savvy. Be fighters, damn it, not sheep scattering under the scent of wolf.”

  She paused, then said the thing that none of them wanted to hear. “Be smart. Take the allies you’ve been offered.”

  “Allies?” someone asked, incredulous.

  “She means the nonhumans.” Geordie again, with the sneer you couldn’t sandblast out of his voice.

  “The fatae, yes.” She ignored Geordie—all you could do, with that type—and focused instead on the faces that seemed responsive, the auras that weren’t entirely shut down. Her senses were wide-open, all eight of them, and if anyone had tried to take a whack at her then, she’d have been hard-pressed to defend. But nobody did.

  “Think about it! The Council has threatened them, too. The vigilante groups are targeting them. The fact that we Talents—their cousins, damn it, in magic—have done nothing about either of those things is turning them against us. And we need them. We need their strength, their numbers, their cunning. We need them to watch our backs. Be our ears where we’re deaf, our eyes where we’re blind.

  “Offer them a trade. Make treaties with the different clans. Make plans, and use their strengths with ours. Offer them our protection, in exchange for theirs. That way, we both have a chance to survive.”

  In short, plan their response to the Council, their plan of attack, the way she and Sergei planned a Retrieval. Smart. Careful. Allowing for every possible option, making use of every potential bit of luck.

  “It’s the only way you—we—have any chance at all.”

  A bad slip, that, and one that made some of them waver, she could sense it. Damn.

  “If you’re so set against this, why help us? Why not throw your lot in with the fatae, then? Or just leave town entirely?” That from the thin black man, who had been silent since the shouting began.

  She gave him the only answer she had. “Because this is my home, too. And I can’t stand to see a job bungled for lack of thinking.”

  In retrospect, getting up in front of an angry and volatile crowd had been the easy part.

  “You did what!”

  “Calm down and shut up, okay?” She handed P.B. his beer, and sat down across the table from her partner, who was already nursing his drink, some unidentified amber liquid on ice. His expression would have been funny, if it wasn’t directed at her. “It’s not like I got stuck leading anything. If I had to shock everyone into remembering I was there every time I wanted to tell them something, I’d be a lousy leader. Hell, I’d be a lousy leader even if everyone could see me without opening their eyes.”

  “So instead you get to be the brain behind the bedpan.”

  “Shut up, P.B.”

  She had told them both to meet her at a bar halfway between her place and Sergei’s, in the neighborhood she suspected was near P.B’s crash space, dropped her bomb-shell, and escaped with their drink orders, hoping that by the time she fought through the crowd and back, they’d have calmed down a bit.

  P.B., rather than being upset or horrified, looked like he was about to burst into giggles. After all the comments she had made over the years about idiots who volunteer, she supposed she deserved that. Her partner’s reaction was less acceptable.

  “I can’t believe you actually…I knew I shouldn’t have let you go alone.”

  “Excuse me?” She was not shrill. She was never shrill. But her voice did rise alarmingly on those two words. P.B. looked torn between wanting to dive under the table, and staying to watch the fight play out.

  “You don’t think I’ll make a good second-in-command?”

  Sergei put down his drink and reached over to touch her hand reassuringly. “I think you’ll do an excellent job. Better than they deserve. But was it a smart thing for you to do?”

  Wren snorted into her glass. “Of course it wasn’t.” Honestly, did he think she had totally lost all sense?

  “All right…” He drawled the words out, totally at odds with his usual crisp enunciation. “Explain this to me once again. Slowly, and without commentary from the fatae gallery, if you please.”

  P.B. tried to pout, but his face simply wouldn’t bend that way.

  Wren took a deep breath, trying to remember the exact sequence of events. “They were determined to organize into some kind of pseudo-paramilitary defense organization.”

  Sergei nodded his head, remembering the Moot he had attended during the summer, when Wren had called down lightning in the middle of the meeting in order to put an end to that idea.

  “Lonejacks don’t organize well. We’re all trained to be self-centered, self-interested, and selfishly survival-oriented.”

  “Freelancers,” P.B. said sagely, nodding his furry head in agreement. Demon didn’t play well together, either, for much the same reason as far as Wren had been able to tell.

  “Yeah. But then I started to think, organizing might not be such a bad thing, in theory—if they actually organized the gossip lines, the way you and Lee were starting up before…” Her voice trailed off, then she spoke again. “But they had no clue what they were doing, or even what they wanted to do, except make some sort of stand. A physical stand. A violent stand.”

  “So you’re going to tell them what to do?” P.B. didn’t have eyebrows to raise, the way Sergei did, but he made a decent try. “You’re not so good at that, Wren. Goes back to that whole ‘people not seeing you’ thing.”

  “Not people in general, you furry-footed doubter. Just four. A duly Mooted quad, one from each community, the way the fatae have things set up.” She glared at P.B. before he could say anything. “And no, I didn’t tell them anything about the fatae elders. It’s just sort of a common sense thing, and yes, even lonejacks occasionally have common sense moments.”

  “Hey, I didn’t say anything!” the demon protested. “No fair dissing me for anything I didn’t say!”

  “Back up. Lonejacks have communities? As in actual, formal groupings?” Sergei was practically quivering with the scent of new information. A momentary pause—did she really want to tell him anything that was just going to get funneled back to the Silence—was put down firmly. At this point, what the Silence knew or didn’t know about Talents seemed seriously unimportant.

  “Not so much, no. God, nothing formalized, are you kidding me? The first person to try to make us pay dues would end up flayed and roasting on the end of a stick. And it’s not really—it’s not the way the fatae have tribes, or the Council has territories. But there are vague identifications, yeah, based on where you settle.

  “We managed to split it into four basics—the city and immediate commuter area, Connecticut, south Jersey and northern Pennsylvania, and the gypsies, the ones without any fixed address.”

  “The wizzed?”

  Wren took a chug of her beer and shook her head. “They won’t come to Moot, they won’t s
peak—God knows they’re not going to actually send someone or listen to anyone who got sent for them.” Talents who had wizzed—gone insane from too much current in their bodies—were another thing she couldn’t worry about now. So far, they weren’t being targeted. Nobody had said anything about them being targeted. How would anyone know if they were being targeted, considering most of them could barely communicate with the external world anymore?

  She and Sergei had tried to protect the wizzed, once. It hadn’t worked very well.

  All right, stop that now, Valere. Tail chasing, bad. And useless, more to the point.

  “Look, it’s a done deal, okay?” Listening to them voice their doubts was making her even less certain she had done the right thing, and she needed to be certain now. No doubts. Doubts would be deadly. “I need you guys behind me.”

  “The power behind the power behind the thrones?” Off her dirty look, the demon subsided. “Sorry.”

  Sergei put down his drink and reached across the table to touch the back of her hand again, this time lingering. His fingers were cool, familiar, and impossibly soothing, just in that touch. “I’m here for you. Always.”

  The knot of tension that had been with her ever since the Seer told her of what she had seen—or even longer, since Lee’s wake—loosened just a bit more. Always. No matter what she did.

  Wren wasn’t sure she believed in always. But Sergei did. Occasionally that scared the hell out of her. Tonight, it was exactly what she needed to hear.

  Cherish the memories, Lee told her.

  “So what are you going to do?” Sergei asked, pulling his touch away and putting on what she thought of as his Business Planning Face. Reassuring, and—even more than the supportive lover—exactly what she needed right now.

  “Clean up a few details, first,” she said. “Then…we’re going to war.”

  9

  The next morning was a perfect late-autumn dawn: crisp, fresh air coming off the river, under a clear blue sky. Wren pulled the covers over her head, burrowing facedown into the pillow, even though very little sunlight actually came through the heavy green drapes.