Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Mmrrrmmmph.” She could feel every strand of her hair, and each one hurt. They had gone from drinks to dinner, and then back to drinks to toast the birth of this new, as-yet-unnamed evolution in lonejack history, and her own intense stupidity in becoming part of it. Sergei had bailed after one-thirty, and P.B. had decided that they needed to try every single odd-sounding drink the bar had to offer. Including a few she was pretty sure they made up on the spot. Stupid, stupid, and even more stupid, for all it seemed like a good idea at the time. That seemed to be the theme of her life, right now.

  “Note to self—demon digestion is not that of mortal systems.”

  When they had finally staggered out after last call, the memory of the Moot had faded under the liquid sloshing in her gut. Throwing up helped slightly, but not enough.

  “Momma, why you raise such a fool of a daughter?”

  That thought led to another, which made her sit bolt upright in bed.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “What?”

  Wren shrieked, then subsided back under her covers as her brain processed the fact that the voice was familiar. And coming from the door, not the bed next to her. Or the floor, which would have been only a little less disturbing.

  “Morning,” the voice continued, and P.B. waved a paw, the other one busy with a white mug of something steaming hot.

  “That better be for me,” she grumbled, refusing to react further to the fact that the demon had spooked the hell out of her.

  “I can get you one,” he offered magnanimously

  “You can give me that one and get yourself another.”

  Apparently Wren-in-morning-with-hangover was scary enough to give a demon pause. Useful to remember. After the second sip of coffee, she felt calm enough to deal with the thought that had jolted her to full awareness, earlier.

  She was supposed to have lunch with her mother today.

  By the time the mug was halfway through, she was able to get out of bed and slog over to her dresser, pulling out clean underwear, a bra, and a clean white T-shirt. A pair of khaki slacks that somehow still had proper creases in them and a dark brown linen blazer came out of the closet.

  “Suburban sweetie,” she dubbed the outfit. Perfect for soothing motherly concerns before they could even get aired.

  Dropping the pile of clothing on the bed, she took the coffee with her into the hallway, down to the bathroom.

  “You want a top-up?”

  “You enjoy asking stupid questions?” She lowered the mug slightly so that P.B. could refill it from the pot he held, then went into the bathroom and, with her free hand, turned the shower on, hot.

  She could deal with fatae running amok. Lonejacks working together for something other than a paycheck, for longer than a few hours. The Council taking out random lonejacks for some dire purpose. Even taking a case that left her working for a Null against a Talent, without her partner’s knowledge or participation.

  Her mother? Lunch, and the related Inquisition? Made her break out in a cold sweat. Resting her forehead against the tile and letting the hot water run down her scalp, soaking into her hair and making the abused tissue feel somewhat better, she realized that she was every adult daughter cliché. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier.

  The routine of getting from her apartment to the restaurant where she was meeting her mother was, contrary to most Manhattanites’ theories about the terrors of suburbia, actually pretty soothing. The bus across the George Washington Bridge left her off a couple of blocks away, and the day was nice enough that she enjoyed walking slowly along streets that were far quieter, wider, and greener than her own. The Patterdon Inn wasn’t quite as quaint as the name sounded, had hundred-year-old plank floorboards and siding to match, and made a killer open-faced roast beef sandwich with real gravy.

  “Jenny.”

  “Mother.”

  The woman who rose out of the green upholstered chair to kiss her cheek with real warmth was clearly, obviously, inevitably Wren Valere’s mother, although on her frame—ten inches taller, before heels—what was forgettable on Wren became memorable, what was everyday became special. It was more than simply her slightly darker coloring, or even the far more noteworthy cleavage; it was more than the spicy orange scent she always wore. Margot Elizabeta Valere was just simply memorable in a way that Wren wasn’t.

  And it wasn’t current-derived, either. Margot was more than a Null, she was an Absolute. Not only could she not handle current, she could barely even sense it, even when she carried Wren in her womb. She couldn’t even remember it, not anything to do with magic, even when it stared her in the face.

  “They have a special today that sounds wonderful,” Margot was saying, waving one hand to bring the waiter over. “Veal.”

  “Sounds great, Mom.”

  She did like veal, but Wren went with the roast beef instead, to her mother’s resigned sigh.

  She couldn’t help it. Patterdon-roast beef. She always returned to familiar foods when stressed. It was why the local delivery places all knew her address by heart.

  At least, for the next few hours, the tension in her bones and muscle had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fatae or Council or her fellow lonejacks.

  No, this was purely Mom-stress. The last time they had met face-to-face, it had been to argue over Wren’s choice of bed-partners. Margot Valere liked Sergei| Didier—as a partner and supposed mentor for her daughter, not as a lover. But, as Wren said once to Sergei, her mother not only had issues with men, she had an entire subscription, and nobody was ever going to be good enough for her little girl.

  “So.”

  Wren braced herself, but instead of the expected inquisition, her mother launched into a recitation of the latest follies of the Lakeside Dental Associates. Growing up, Margot Valere had supported her daughter by taking any job she could find, including diner waitress and taxi dispatcher, but the past five years she had been office manager for the small practice within walking distance of the small A-level house Wren had helped her buy.

  It was the only financial help Margot had ever accepted from her daughter, and Wren expected, any year now, to get a check back for every penny. Her stubbornness came down to her honestly, along the maternal line. Her mother’s mother was…well, “tyrant” came to mind. Also “bitch on wheels.” But she cared, in her own way; had Margot been willing to name the man who got her pregnant and then abandoned her, Elizabeth Valere would have moved heaven and earth to find the guy, and force him, not to take emotional responsibility—nobody could force that—but financial, certainly.

  “And so…”

  Here it came.

  “How is Sergei?”

  Wren looked at her mother across the table. Her mother returned the look blandly, her eyebrow arched, her face as composed as it ever was. Nothing—not first learning about current, or her daughter’s minor brushes with the law, not even running into P.B. at Wren’s apartment over the summer—had ever shaken her mother’s calm assurance.

  Suddenly she wanted to shake that assurance, badly.

  “Sergei’s great. Working too hard, as usual. Mom…I need to know about my father.”

  Margot Valere blinked, then put her fork down and looked, long and hard at her only daughter.

  “In all the years since you figured out that there needs to be a daddy somewhere in the equation, at least to start, that’s the first time you’ve ever just come right out and asked.”

  Wren shrugged. “I figured, if you wanted to tell me, you would have.”

  “And you’re right. So what’s changed now?” An expression of alarm swept over her face, so fast Wren wasn’t even sure she saw it. “Jenny. You’re not—”

  “God, no!” Wren’s response was instinctive, and just a smidge too loud. “No, I’m not pregnant, Mom,” she said in a lower voice, ducking to avoid the glances of the other diners. “I just…I’ve been thinking, a lot. Lately. About…what I do. And where it comes from.”

  Her mother knew ab
out Talent—that had been Neezer’s doing. He wouldn’t take on any student without parental knowledge and approval. But magic didn’t fit into Margot Valere’s basic worldview, so she conveniently “forgot” about it, just as she “forgot” about the fact that she had met a demon on her daughter’s doorstep, or the truth about what Wren did for a living.

  There were things Wren wished she could forget so easily.

  “Mom, please.”

  Margot picked up her fork and poked at the remnants of her veal. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it over something with more calories.” She put her fork down again determinedly and called the waiter over, demanding the dessert menu.

  Small talk dominated the table until a plate of miniature éclairs were delivered, along with two massive mugs of coffee.

  “Your…I can’t even call him “your father.” Father implies a lot more than donating sperm. And I can’t believe I just said ‘sperm.’”

  “Mother.” Wren was torn between amusement and exasperation, resisting the urge to throw one of the éclairs at her.

  “Well, we never even had that puberty discussion. Suddenly I’m supposed to be comfortable discussing this?”

  “So call him my genetic donor?”

  “That works as well as anything, I suppose. He was…” Margot stared off into the distance, less wistful than actively trying to remember details. “Tall, with broad shoulders. The first man who ever made me feel delicate.” Wren was just a smidge over five foot tall, and her five-foot-ten-inch mother had always seemed an Amazon to her. If he had made her feel delicate…oh dear.

  “So who the hell am I a throwback to?”

  “Your grandfather,” Margot answered. “You don’t remember him, but he was built like Fred Astaire, all leg and lean, but not much taller than you are.”

  “And Grandma led him around by the hand, dancing backward and wearing heels?”

  “That’s your grandmother,” Margot agreed, smiling for the first time since ordering dessert.

  Grandmother Valere was legend among anyone she met—tougher than rawhide, classier than college, and more stubborn than anyone except her daughter.

  So where did you meet? What was he like? What was his name? slid onto her tongue, but Wren bit it back. That was the one thing she knew from experience that her mother would never tell her. Not even now.

  “I don’t…it’s embarrassing, but I can’t remember now what he looked like, exactly. Lovely eyes…dark blue, like velvet, and thick black hair…” She reached out to ruffle her daughter’s hair, lighter brown, but just as thick.

  “Well, at least we know where my overlookability comes from.”

  “Stop saying that,” Margot said, returning her attention to her dessert. It was a long-running battle, and one neither of them fought with any vigor, anymore.

  “We met in a subway car, if you can believe that. I was trapped in the middle of a crowd, trying to get out to join my friends, and he cleared a path—but got stuck outside the train with me when the doors closed again. So we invited him to join us. And the next morning…he was gone.”

  “Oh, God.” Wren stared at her mother. “I was a one-night stand baby? Mother!”

  Margot refused to blush.

  “I need more coffee,” Wren said, downing the last dredges in her cup and waving down the nearest waitress. She had originally just wanted to mess with her mother’s mind. This, though—this was getting interesting!

  But that was all her mother could—or was willing to—say. In the end, Wren had to be satisfied with finally understanding her mother and grandmother’s running battles, from her mother’s point of view. Did she play the disobedient pregnant single daughter, or admit that she had been foolish enough to have unprotected sex with a stranger? As much as Wren knew that her mother loved her—of all the things she had doubted in her life, that had never even made the list—there was no doubt that she would have had a vastly different—better—life if she’d not gotten pregnant at nineteen.

  The last of the éclairs consumed over more general family gossip, and the argument over who was paying duly haggled over, Margot walked her daughter to the bus stop. Even in her demure white cardigan and business-length blue pencil skirt, she attracted far more admiring glances than Wren. Mother and daughter were both so used to that, it didn’t even register.

  It wasn’t until the bus came into sight down the broad street that Wren said the thing she had actually intended to say, over lunch, before getting distracted by the family history.

  “I need to ask you a favor. And I need you to do it for me, and not ask any questions, and not try to dance around actually doing it.”

  Margot waited. She did not make promises before hearing the details.

  “I need you to leave town. Leave the area. Go visit Great-Aunt ’Tunia over in Chicago, if you have to, but don’t be here. Not for the next couple of weeks, okay? Not until I tell you it’s okay to come home.”

  Margot looked up to the sky as though asking the Lord for patience, then gave her only child a tight hug as the bus pulled to the curb.

  “Whatever you’re involved in…I’m not going to ask any questions. I don’t want to know and you don’t want to tell me. Yes, I’ll do what you ask—although I’m not going to see that old hag. But be careful, Genevieve. Be careful. You’re still my daughter and I will be very upset if anything happens to you.” She paused. “Or Sergei. And if he ever hurts you…”

  “You’ll be second in line to kick his ass, I promise.”

  They parted with laughter, but as Wren settled into her seat on the bus, her expression sobered again. She wanted to follow up on the information her mother had given her—was his lack of memorableness due to being ordinary? That hadn’t seemed likely, the way Margot had described him. You’d remember the guy who knocked you up, right? Or—more possibly—had he, too, been a Talent, with skill sets like her own? It was a question that dug at her, at stuff she’d been lugging around since she was a kid, but there was no time to do anything with it, not right now. She hadn’t been overreacting, she didn’t think, in asking her mother to be elsewhere. Clouds were forming around the city, coming in low and dangerous, all shaped like the Mage Council, and filled with violence.

  And she still had a job to finish before the storm started to break. Time to clear the decks, tie everything down, any other storm-related metaphor she could think of, and time to retire it once and for all.

  For now, she had done the important thing.

  “I love you, too, Mom,” she said, ignoring the odd look her seatmate gave her. “Be safe.”

  And then she put everything not related to the case in a small mental box, locked it, and shoved the key out of sight. The first rule was: Finish the job.

  By the time the bus crossed the GW Bridge and disgorged its passengers into the narrow stairwells that led down from the bus lanes into the terminal proper, Wren had the basics of a plan in mind. Travel did that for her: something about enforced inaction, coupled with the hum of an engine, made her brain just work better, more effectively.

  All right, it wasn’t much of a plan, but then, it wasn’t, all things considered, much of a job. Both client and target could have worked things out, but instead decided to draw lines in the cement and then spit insults across them, playing dare-me like they were still in grade school.

  She used her transit pass to catch the subway home, on autopilot but still aware of the bodies moving around her as she jostled for a seat.

  This entire job stunk like dead fish. Life was too short. Love was too precious and easily abused. Whining about how neither of those things was fair wasted time and energy and caused people like Wren to have to get involved for no reason other than pride. No matter. Her job wasn’t to mediate petty little litter-box fights, just to Retrieve the object they were squalling over with minimal fuss and absolutely no muss.

  So the target was Talent, and Council to boot. Whoop. Mages weren’t any more powerful than lonejacks, just better-dressed.
This was at heart a smash-and-grab; no real finesse or skill needed. The client had called Wren not because the job was difficult, but because she was used to hiring the best for everything. The Wren was the best. No argument there.

  Some folk might get their noses put out of joint by being asked to do something below their skills, something that wasn’t a challenge. Wren wasn’t one of those folk. Sergei might have passed on this job, thought it would be a waste of her time. Wren hadn’t. She had, in fact, been hoping for something simple, something that wasn’t going to require anything more than a chance to stretch a few B and E skills. Well, she had it. So the timing sucked; maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. Give her body something to do while her brain worked on the larger problems the Cosa was handing her.

  Yeah. That was workable. And if Miss Rosen was so used to paying for the best? Wren could deal with that, too, mentally adding a jumped-up fee to the nest egg she was building for her eventual retirement.

  Stretching her legs to their inconsiderable length, touching the plastic seat in front of her, Wren closed her eyes and drew on all the materials she’d gathered so far, sketching in the details of the Retrieval in her mind.

  This bit, here. That fact, there. And thus, to connect the two…

  The sink was too high for him to reach comfortably, but there was a footstool in the small closet that made it workable. P.B.’s claws weren’t ideal for dishwashing, as they didn’t retract all the way, but an opposable thumb made all the difference in keeping the dish steady while he rinsed.

  Housekeeping hadn’t been the original purpose behind his body design, but you made do with what you had.

  Run water. Add liquid detergent. Dump every dish he could find into the sink. Scrub and put in the drainer to air-dry. There was a soothing rhythm to it, even if his fur was soaking wet up to the elbows. You could wash dishes and think—or not think, whatever your pleasure.

  P.B. would rather not be thinking. It was enough, right now, that Wren was back on the hunt again, even if she was still denying that she wanted any of it. Maybe she didn’t.