Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  But she needed it. He’d been around humans for a lot longer than Wren—than anyone except another demon—suspected. He had seen a lot, some good, more bad, and he’d picked up a bit of knowing about the breed.

  After that case last summer, when Lee died, Wren had drawn into herself in a way that was distinctly…unWrenlike. Not that she was ever a social butterfly, or particularly fond of people in general, for that matter, but she had a real enthusiasm for what she did that had been lacking, even when the jobs finally started to come in again. She was trying, he’d give her that, but the spark was gone.

  And sparks were what The Wren was all about. Sparks were what had drawn him to her, the first time he had seen her. On a job she’d been, hadn’t she? Some stupid horse-thing she was tracking, focused and intent and totally self-involved, in the most wonderful way. He’d been captivated. He had followed her home, just to find out who she was.

  She’d been a nobody then. New to the city, new to the game. But he’d picked the star to hitch himself to, that day, without even realizing it. After more than ten decades, he had finally found a new master.

  That she became a friend was…a gift.

  He dumped last of the pots into the drying rack and reached for a towel to try and soak some of the water out of his fur when a faint noise caught his triangular, tufted ears and made them twitch slightly. He lifted his head and sniffed the air, then slipped off the stepstool as quietly as he could, still wiping his hands. Not Wren’s scent. Not Sergei’s, either. The only other person who had a key to the apartment, as far as he knew, was Wren’s mom. He had only met her once, but the scent had been close enough to Wren’s that he should have recognized it again.

  This was human, male, and unfamiliar.

  Unfamiliar and human, in these days, meant danger. Hell, these days, unfamiliar meant danger. P.B. didn’t know who was coming in the door, or why, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. The kitchen window was open, as usual, to catch a breeze, and if he could just get there before—

  Before the guy in the window came inside, holding a gun.

  P.B.’s claws were thick black half-moons, and not there for decoration. His legs were short, stumpy, and corded with muscle under the thick white fur that made everyone at first glance think that he looked adorable and soft. He had no temper to speak of, no ability to hold a grudge, no need ever to have learned how to snarl.

  But he knew how to kill.

  A fast, hard leap and he had the newcomer backed up against the wall, claws at his throat, eyes the color of dried blood staring into the human’s faded green ones.

  “Live or die, your choice.”

  The human let the gun drop from his hands, even as the smell of urine filled the kitchen. P.B., straining at the hardwired instinct that kept him from ripping the human’s throat out, let the terrified intruder drop to the ground. Giving him a kick with one callused foot in a place guaranteed to keep him down for a while longer, he then turned to deal with the other intruder.

  Big mistake. Even as he turned, something slammed him hard against the back of his skull, and he went down, hard, onto the linoleum floor.

  His last thought was that he did not want to die with his nose pushed up into a puddle of urine.

  10

  Wren was glad that she’d decided to stop at the gym after her lunch with her mother. Really. Not because it made her feel any better, or any of the rot exercise-junkies gave. Not even because it gave her an excuse to sweat the last bits of the job into place. Not even because she was proud of her six-pack abs, because she didn’t have any. Fortunately, using current burned calories at an impressive rate, and it took significant gluttony to cause a Talent to become seriously overweight.

  No, she went because getting winded, or not being able to get over a fence, or lift something, would be worse than embarrassing during a job. It could be fatal.

  Workouts, therefore, were necessary, but not fun. She had been looking forward, the entire time she spent on the machines of torture, to going back to the apartment, taking a long hot shower, and curling up with a month’s backlog of trade magazines to skim through. But the closer she got to her front door, the more she wanted to be Elsewhere.

  She loved her apartment, no matter her words to OhSoBloody. It was her home, her refuge, her haven. And yet, in the past few months she had been shot at through her kitchen window, spy-bugged, and hosted the wake of a dear friend there.

  Cigarette smoke would have been easier to clear out of the air than the memories that were starting to build up.

  “Oh, screw this.” She shifted the plastic bag holding a quart container of squash soup from Balducci’s from one hand to the other, and marched determinedly toward her building.

  “Miss Valere.”

  Wren stopped. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Andre Felhim was sitting on her stoop, the elegant sixty-something black man in an equally elegant suit and matte-shined shoes sitting on cold cement steps as though the seat of his pants didn’t cost more than she paid in rent every month.

  “I apologize for simply appearing like this, without warning, but I had reason to believe, based on our last exchanges, that you would not accept a phone call. Or, if you did, your emotional reaction might…create some static on the line.”

  “Oh, ya think?” Sarcasm dripped like butter on a baked potato. Static was the least she was going to give that smarmy, slimy, no-good, people-using bastard…

  “Miss Valere, I had nothing to do with your difficulties during the Nescanni situation. I was not aware until after the fact that your contact had been intercepted—” taken out in a staged—and fatal—car accident, Wren interjected mentally “—and I most certainly was not aware that your dossier on the situation was not complete. I would never intentionally send my people out—”

  “We’re not your people.” God, he understood nothing.

  “I don’t care about your little internal screwups and backbiting and political one-upmanship.” She bit off each word as though if she got them sharp enough, he might just keel over and bleed to death. “I told you once and I’ll tell you again—keep away from me, and keep your paws off my partner. We work for you—fine. Although I don’t see how you’re doing your bit, protecting me from the Council. But you have no call on us other than that. None. Don’t contact us unless it’s a paid job. Got me?”

  “I got you,” Andre said. “I had hoped that we could establish some sort of rapport, but if it is not meant to be…”

  “It’s not.”

  He stood and turned to go, then turned back to issue one parting shot.

  “We are maintaining our side of the agreement,” he said. “Why else do you think that both you and Sergei are still alive?”

  And with that, he walked off down the street, lacking only a cane to be the stereotypical Mysterious Stranger.

  If he meant to unnerve Wren with that last comment…he succeeded. But it made sense; they might not have many Talents in their organization, but they dealt with them—and magic in general—all the time. It would be logical that they’d developed some defenses against it, somehow. Not all fairy tales were bunk, after all. You could dispel glamours, ward your home against fairies, that sort of thing.

  She pulled her keys out of her bag and unlocked the door, thudding wearily up the stairs. And stopped cold.

  The apartment door was open. She didn’t think it was Andre’s doing. He had too much style, too much class, much as she despised him, to be that obvious.

  Wren stepped backward, moving into the shadows of the landing, and sent out a quick burst of current, a faint yellow tracer that would let her know if there was anyone in her home who meant her ill. It was a nifty bit of spellwork, something she’d read about in one of those old books and been messing around with to see if she could make it work.

  The pulse came back negative. Nothing moving. Nothing dangerous. Whoever or whatever had come to visit, they were long gone. Assuming the spell was working properly,
that was. Always a risk.

  She entered the apartment, her knees bent, ready to fight or flee as the situation needed, still wired from the sugar and caffeine and trip home spent putting herself into a working frame of mind, to say nothing of the gym workout.

  Nothing.

  “I need to get new locks,” she said, grousing to herself as she turned to do up the dead bolt and the chain lock behind her. What used to be normal and acceptable-for-Manhattan paranoia now clearly wasn’t doing the job. And be damned if she was going to move. Housing in the city was insane, and the bubble didn’t look to be bursting anytime soon. Besides, this place was going to go co-op sooner rather than later, and she was going to be on the inside to buy when it did.

  This was home, damn it. No matter what sort of…

  Sort of groaning noises she heard.

  What now? Wren flexed her hand, trying to remember a single defensive cantrip that wouldn’t also damage her home. The power she had pulled down from the power station was still in her, and the current practically sparked, but she had no desire to have to patch and re-paint anything just because some joker thought it would be amusing to burgle her home.

  “Get out get out wherever you are,” she called in a soft, singsong voice.

  Nothing answered. She moved forward into the apartment barely aware of the fact that silvery twitches of current were jumping from fingertip to fingertip. Neezer would have slapped her silly for wasting current like that.

  The kitchen was the source of the noise: a pile of what looked like fur coat, tossed in one corner.

  “P.B.!” She dropped to her knees beside him, grimacing when one knee came into contact with a sticky puddle of something disgusting. It wasn’t his—demon blood was black, and their urine was blue-tinged. Unless he’d taken to throwing up yellow, the way one of her mother’s cats had, when they were growing up…

  “P.B.?” A hand came up to touch him; tentative, almost terrified, and the current sparked, jumping into the coarse fibers of his fur and burrowing down into his skin

  “Urrrgghh,” he said again in response. “Uuuurrrgh?”

  Wren exhaled, long and thankful. “Open your eyes, you ungrateful walking carpet,” she said, using one of Sergei’s favorite descriptive phrases for the demon. “Come on, damn you, open your eyes.”

  “I don’t have a concussion,” he said, opening his eyes slowly and staring directly into her own worried brown ones.

  “How would you know?” She dropped the question as pointless. “What happened?”

  P.B. struggled to sit up. Her hands, now bare of visible current, pushed him back down, carefully examining his head through the fur, checking for anything that might indicate real damage or bleeding or…she had no idea what she was looking for; anything that seemed wrong.

  He put up with it for about twenty seconds, then slapped her concern away weakly. “Two guys. Humans. One through the door, one through the window. Have you ever thought about moving, Valere? This address is getting way too busy.”

  “And whose fault is that, that everyone knows where I live?” While she was in Italy, P.B. and Lee had used her apartment as a meeting-place for the fatae who would powwow with them. She had forgiven them—mostly. But not entirely.

  Satisfied that he wasn’t about to expire on the spot, she helped him sit up, propping him up against the wall.

  There was a lump the size of a walnut that she was pretty sure wasn’t normal, but other than that he seemed to be recovering just fine.

  “Valere, I’m fine…” he said, echoing her thoughts.

  “Yeah. I seem to remember me saying that to you a few times, too. Didn’t listen to me then, why should I listen to you now?”

  He managed to stand up, then swayed a little, blinking nervously as though the room had moved with him.

  “Room spinnies.” He sounded surprised.

  “Oh, for—Go lie down, demon, and be thankful you’ve got such a thick skull.”

  If a fatae had called him demon in that way, it would have been an insult, a way to remind him that he had no real place in the structure of breeds and clans, that he was part of a created race, a created being, fused together to serve, not evolve.

  In Wren’s mouth, the word sounded like…affection. Mulling that, P.B. let himself be shoved into her bed, careful to retract his dewclaws so that they didn’t snag on the sheets, and suffered her to bring up the coverlet and turn out the light on him.

  His head did hurt. A lot. He figured that he’d yell at her—and figure things out—later. After a nap.

  Wren closed the door softly behind her and walked down the hallway before she realized that she was shaking. Not from cold, or fear, but anger. She had been attacked before; she’d even been shot at, before. People had tried to sabotage her career, spied on her, withheld information, shot at her, set off psi-bombs, made her open her mouth and get involved in a campaign she knew was doomed for failure, and generally made the past six months hellish.

  But all the attacks, even the one that caused Lee’s death, had been aimed at her. This time, even if the goons had come into her apartment, looking for her, they had attacked P.B., and there was no way anyone was going to tell her they thought she had suddenly grown a thick white coat of body hair.

  It might have been a serious case of wrong place wrong time. It might even have been because he was a fatae. Hell, it might even have been because he was P.B.—the demon had a way about him that was the opposite of endearing, to most folk. Hell, he’d been attacked before, just for being a demon. It didn’t matter. This time it happened here, in her home, to her friend, because he was here, in her home, because he was her friend.

  She stopped halfway down the hallway, backtracked and went into her office. Sitting down at the desk, she picked up the phone, careful not to dislodge any of the jury-rigged wiring as she fit the headset over her ear. A number, recently memorized, and she was listening to the sound of a phone across town ringing.

  “Speak.” The voice was low, raspy, and almost hyper-naturally alert.

  “Someone crashed my party today. I want a puppy over here pronto, to take readings.”

  The voice actually slowed down a little, as it recognized the caller, and processed the words. “You think it was Council? Already?”

  “What, you thought they’d wait for one of your pretty lettered invites?” Sarcasm was too much of an effort for her even on a good day and she’d already used up her allotment on Andre; she let it drop. “I don’t know who it was, damn it. At this point, nobody’s getting ruled out, not even you folk. But you’re the only ones I can call on.”

  “Bitterness noted and filed. I’ll have a kid over there in fifteen.”

  “Make it ten.”

  She disconnected and removed the headset, then checked to make sure that her irritation hadn’t futzed with the wiring any. Nope, still had dial tone, and the computer was still functional.

  “I’m getting better at this,” she said. Which was good, because she suspected that there would be a lot of tension, nerves, and irritation in her immediate future, and while blowing out tech could be a nice stress-reliever, it also tended to get expensive. And she already had a damn modem to replace.

  She went into the kitchen and stared at the coffeemaker. It would probably be a really bad idea, to add more caffeine to her system. Not that something being a bad idea had ever stopped her before.

  The faintest smell of ozone and a prickling of the skin that indicated a lightning bolt—or a wafting of directed current—was the only warning she got before someone knocked on the door.

  She put the coffeepot down and went to the door, looking out through the spy hole.

  Nothing there.

  “Yes?”

  “You called for a PUP?”

  Wren unlocked the locks and opened the door. The P.U.P.I—private, unaffiliated paranormal investigator—was, literally, a kid; maybe legal to smoke, not to drink. Wren wasn’t put off. Most of the PUPs were young—it was a pretty new
and nervy field—and to find someone who could Transloc over so fast, they were probably not the highmost of techs.

  That was okay. What she needed didn’t take a magister.

  “I’m Bonnie.”

  Bonnie was about twenty, short, thin, and pale, and white-blond the way that never comes out of a bottle. She was also dressed entirely in red—red silk shirt, red cargo pants, red sandals on her pale white feet. Her toes and fingernails were painted black, and she carried a metallic black toolbox on a strap over one shoulder.

  “Come in.”

  Bonnie came in, gliding like a scarlet swan through the doorway. “So, where’s the stink?”

  “Kitchen.” She had no idea where else the goons might have been, but the most residue was probably where P.B. had been slammed. “Think you’ll be able to pick anything up?”

  Bonnie patted her toolbox with territorial pride. “If it’s there, we can sniff it out. Just give me a little time and space…Oh man. Totally retro kitchen. I love it. This entire place is just so totally—are there any other apartments available in this building?”

  Wren blinked in surprise. “One, actually. Downstairs.”

  “Most excellent. The vibes in this place are…”

  “Yeah, I know.” Wren had rented this apartment because the moment she walked in the door, the space had called out to her, like some kind of ley line convergence, or natural pooling of current. For some reason, she had never thought to wonder why other Talent hadn’t felt the same thing. You had to be in the right place at the right time, listening with the right sort of ears, probably. Maybe they’d just never come looking in this neighborhood. It wasn’t like it was the very best address, after all. Just one of the more interesting ones.

  “Right.” Bonnie put her toolbox down on the floor and got down on her hands and knees to look around. Wren could practically see her gathering current, pulling it down and spreading it around the room.