Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  The waiter came over with a menu, and she took it. She was going to need protein for this, she suspected.

  11

  “I hate everyone,” Wren announced to the world at large. The world seemed unimpressed.

  Ten-thirty was an off hour for NYC subways: after the last trickle of rush hour, but before the club-goers started heading home. In the city that never slept, this was the hour for mass transit to catnap.

  Wren was seated in a row all to herself; the only other person in the car was an old man halfway down, reading his newspaper and occasionally muttering to himself about something he read there. She had a notebook filled with notes from dinner, and the discussion after, but had put them aside in favor of the sketches Aldo had made for her. Time enough to hate her fellow Talents and their idiotic arguments later. She needed to get some serious cash-paying work accomplished. The city might go down in current-fueled flames, but the bills still needed to be paid.

  By now, she had committed almost all the details of the sketch to memory, and thought that, if needed, she would be able to track the necklace by her own sense of it. She wasn’t a very good Tracer, though, so hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary.

  The blueprints had likewise been memorized, and she entertained herself for a bit by mentally walking through the apartment, the two rooms she had actually been in filled with detail, the ones she hadn’t been in shadowy blanks. Trying to imagine what might be there was a bad idea: you got too hung up on filling in the details that inevitably were wrong, and that could throw you off when the job went down.

  Tomorrow, she thought. A few hours sleep, and she’d get it done tomorrow. There was no point in procrastinating; she was only going to get more wound up and caught up in the Cosa crap.

  Family, indeed. It was all about family, this job, and how much shit they could drop into your life. Mainly because, as far as Wren could tell, they could.

  She folded the sketches and put them back in her bag, then leaned her head back and stared at the ads that ran along the top of ever car. Half of them were in Spanish, and Wren read along with the familiarity of someone who spoke not a word of the language but recognized words from content and repeated overexposure.

  She didn’t need life insurance to take care of her children, or a fast, discreet AIDS test, so the ads only held her interest another two or three minutes. So when the train pulled into the Twenty-third Street station and someone got on, she looked up, hoping for a distraction.

  “Man, just piss off, all right?”

  “Aw, wassamatter? Can’t take a joke?”

  There were five words in the English language that when put together, were reason enough for justifiable homicide, to Wren’s way of thinking. And those were, “Can’t you take a joke?”

  From the look on the boy’s face, he agreed. But the two kids who had followed him into the car out-muscled him by at least three-to-one odds. Wren frowned, watching the boy move. Something…

  He hunched his shoulders under the bright red Rutgers University sweatshirt he wore, and that something clicked in her brain. Hunching like that, and that look of intense concentration, like something you needed to itch but couldn’t? Winged. Wings bound, so you can’t spread them: specifically, a feathered wing, bound down.

  Angel. The boy was an angel.

  Wren had nothing against the angeli. She had nothing for them, either. Arrogant little snots, most of them. But this was just a kid—okay, so he might have been four centuries old. But he looked like a kid. And not every angel was a shit—although it would be tough to prove that based on her own experience. If demon were mellow and mostly mild-tempered, angels were cranky, full of themselves, and…

  Outnumbered, two to one.

  The taller of the two humans leaned into the angel’s personal space, features that might have been handsome ruined by a cruel sneer. “Not so tough now, are you? Not so tough, all alone.”

  “I’m never alone.” The angel might have sounded more convincing if his voice hadn’t wavered. Normally he was right—angeli traveled in packs, more or less. What you did to one you did to all his brothers, and they tended to get pissy about that. But Wren had seen an angel taken down by humans who knew what they were doing, and it hadn’t been a pretty sight.

  The shorter bully put a foot up on the plastic seat next to the angel, effectively boxing him in between leg and wall.

  Idiots, Wren thought. This is going to end very, very badly.

  For the angel, almost definitely. For the humans, too, once the subway came topside and his brothers could reach them.

  For Wren, if she was caught anywhere in the vicinity. Angeli didn’t like anyone who wasn’t angeli, and in a bad temper they didn’t always discriminate. The Old Testament got that much right, at least.

  The train swerved around the track, throwing everyone off-center, and the lights flickered. Wren braced herself, and gave up any pretense of not watching the three boys. She had no idea what she could do—on her best day she wasn’t a fighter, and this was very much not her best day. The smart thing would be to lay low and hope the train didn’t get stuck anywhere underground. Let the angeli take care of angeli.

  The lights flickered and went out again as the train went around another bend. It slowed down slightly, and Wren let herself hope—but then the train kept going, bypassing a nonlocal station.

  Damn. And thrice-damned.

  The light, when it came back on, flickered on metal. Blood, on the tip.

  The angel was grinning, showing unnervingly white, perfect teeth, while a thin cut dripped down one side of his face.

  “Crazy-ass freak,” the shorter bully muttered, his hands clenching into fists, as though he were anxiously awaiting the moment his leash would be slipped and he could get physical. The taller one, the one with the knife, was leaning back. Not as though he were about to back away; this was more the movement of a cobra about to strike.

  “Grinning, are you? Think your winged pansy brothers are going to rush in and save you? Not down here they’re not. You’re in human territory now, freak.”

  Damn it, Wren thought again. Frickin’ vigilantes. Of course. Because there wasn’t enough shit going down already, to complicate her life.

  The knife-holder flicked his wrist again, and another cut slowly opened on the other side of the angel’s face. The grin never slipped, but there was a tremble in those shoulders, as though he were trying not to cry. Or those feathered wings were struggling to break free.

  Wren touched current, careful not to pull any out of the subway car around her. It was tempting, but she’d already pulled in too much recently. Current hangover would totally screw with her plans for tomorrow.

  And ending up in a hospital with knife wounds, won’t?

  Just do it, Valere. Whatever it is you’re going to do…

  The knife-wielder spun, startled, and was on the metal floor before Wren was even able to finish her thought, the knife spinning across the floor to rest under the molded seats opposite the action. The newspaper-reading old man was standing over the vigilante, holding a heavy wooden cane like an offensive weapon—which was exactly what it had become. The angel looked as startled as Wren felt, which was nothing compared to the expressions on the faces of the two human bullies. She scuttled around in her seat, not wanting to miss a moment of the action.

  “You want to play rough?” the old man asked. His face, seamed with age, was suddenly like granite, and the eyes that had barely skimmed print were now laser-focused. But he was still an old man, totally without any Talent at all, that Wren could sense, and there were two of them…

  The shorter human was clearly thinking just that, and lunged without warning—only to be brought up short by the heel of the cane square in his throat. The boy gurgled once, his eyes going wide, then dropped.

  The one on the floor tried to get up, and the angel stomped one boot-clad foot on his wrist, clearly putting all his weight into it. The human’s eyes measured the distance between himself and
the knife, then wisely lay still.

  “Tired of these damned bigots,” the old man muttered to nobody in particular, stomping back to his seat. “Idiots, can’t leave others just be.”

  Wren wanted to kiss him. She settled for getting off at the next station the train pulled into. It was still a ten block walk to her apartment, rather than the three blocks of her usual stop, but it was a nice night, a good night to stretch her legs, and she’d rather burn the calories than stick around any longer. Let the angel deal with the vigilantes. They wanted to mess with fatae, they get to deal with the consequences.

  You’re leaving them to die.

  Oh, shut up.

  They don’t deserve to die.

  They made their choice when they decided to go after an angel. One of the other fatae breeds? Might have walked away. But the angeli still had blood to avenge, blood that group had spilled. And if it came down to choosing sides…

  Wren found she was very much a member of the Cosa Nostradamus, at heart.

  The steps up to her apartment felt like miles of hard road, but she finally reached her landing. Bag and keys were dumped in their usual spot on the counter, then she went into the main room and turned on the stereo, flipping stations until soothing jazz filled the space. She realized, only after the fact, that this was the first time she’d listened to music since…Well. In a long time.

  She felt dirty. Every dealing with those…bigots made her feel grimy, ill. She dealt with greed, desire, anger, etc., on a daily basis—without them, she had no job. But the bile these Human-only types carried with them…it was ugly, simply put. Ugly of a sort to make God cry.

  Going back to the kitchen she prepped the coffee machine, setting it to start at 4:00 a.m. At that hour, she might be awake enough to drink coffee without spilling it on herself, but making it would have been more of a challenge.

  You left those boys there to die.

  Shut up.

  The newly bought chairs and table seemed an affront, somehow. They didn’t fit, were odd intrusions into her normal pacing space. The walls of the hallway were too close, the faded brown carpeting too dingy, the light fixtures too bright. Everything familiar was dreary, anything new was offensive, and Wren suddenly, really, didn’t want to be there anymore.

  “You’re exhausted,” she told herself. But she wasn’t. Not in the needing-sleep way. She needed a detox, maybe. Shake everything out of her system, fill it up fresh. No man-made current, no fast food, nothing but lightning and green tea and whole grains…

  “Ugh.”

  What she wanted, suddenly, was not to be alone. Not that she wanted company, but the sound of someone else breathing in the apartment would have been…comforting. Someone to sit and listen to, just quietly sitting in the same room with them, until her own system unwound and calmed down.

  “You need a fish tank,” she said, not for the first time. Fish were soothing. They could be left alone for days at a time, and didn’t stare at you reproachfully when you finally came home.

  Of course, with her luck, she’d have a current flash, and end up with a tank of expensive fried tropicals.

  A turtle. A turtle would be good. Slow-moving, lettuce-munching, blood-pressure-soothing.

  You left those boys—

  Shut up!

  She could call Sergei. She could wake him up and listen to him breathe. Better than a turtle, any day.

  But he’d want her to come uptown, then, and she’d had enough of traveling across the city for one day. Or he’d come down here, and she didn’t want that, either. She wanted to be alone. But not lonely.

  Shedding her clothing in a trail down the hallway, Wren crawled into bed without bothering to turn on the light. She should have brushed her teeth, washed her face. Gotten all of her shit together for tomorrow.

  Time enough for that…later.

  The street lamp cast light through the window; knowing she had to get up early, she hadn’t bothered to draw the heavy velvet shade the way she normally did. Shadows lay heavy on everything, rising and falling with the pattern of her breath.

  You left those boys there to die.

  I know, she told the voice, finally. I know.

  She fell asleep, finally, watching the illuminated clock hands tick over to 1:00 a.m.

  12

  Six twenty-nine in the morning. Wren paused on the street to get a feel for the rhythm of the traffic: taxis and early-morning car-bound commuters cruising down the avenue, a lean, middle-aged jogger in white T-shirt and black running pants moving up and down in place as he waited for the light to change, a blond Rasta dog-walker with two dachshunds on the leash coming down the southbound side.

  More traffic than she had expected, but nothing she couldn’t handle.

  Her brain had woken up sharp-edged and focused. Her body, however, wasn’t quite with the program. Coffee hadn’t been enough to get her going. Coffee, and a hot shower turned cold in the last instant had barely been enough. Stopping along the way to jolt herself on freshly made Krispy Kremes had, finally, done the job. They were disgusting, but the sugar coursing through her system made it impossible for her to even think about going back to sleep. And now that her body was finally awake, she could get to work.

  Dawn might not have seemed like the wisest choice for a break-in, but it actually made a great deal of sense. People were in that groggy half-awake state where yes, they might wake too easily…but they were also much more likely to slap their snooze alarm and go back to sleep, not get up to investigate a strange noise the way they might in the middle of the night. And she was counting on Melanie to be a snooze-bar hitter, assuming she set her alarm at all. When you don’t have to work for a living, slow wake-ups are the rule, not the exception.

  Wren put down the case she was carrying and bent down onto one knee to relace her flexible-soled black boots, using the action as a cover to scan the sidewalk all the way down to the building’s entrance again from that angle. She’d run into more than one home defense system that was set up not at the usual shoulder-height, but the more difficult to avoid ankle-height.

  Not that she expected anyone here to be sneaky enough to do anything that, well, sneaky, but you survived in this business by being mean, nasty, and suspicious, and then assuming your target was meaner, nastier, and more suspicious than you were.

  That was why she wasn’t using the front entrance. The fact that she had already been in that way actually made it easier—she could have made herself look familiar, again, and eased passage, even this early in the morning. But easier wasn’t always, long-term, smarter. Smoothing the way sometimes left traces in people’s minds that a well-asked question could trigger, to her misfortune.

  That meant doing it the harder, smarter way.

  While on one knee, she let her arms relax, forced her shoulders to drop slightly, and pushed down on her tension from ears on down to her toes, like forcing toothpaste all the way down the tube. It was harder than it looked, requiring an odd combination of work and a Zen-inspired sense of not-working to get it right.

  When she felt almost boneless from the lack of even normal stress, Wren touched the subway running underground, under her feet, and let herself fill up, not with tension, but siphoned current. It flowed into her core, refreshing the natural energy that was always there, and spread out along the current-channels in her body, the channels that made her a Talent rather than a Null. The temptation was to overfill, to again hold reserves against trouble, but that temptation was false security; there was a real danger in carrying too much, too. You could burn out, filling up that much. Being a Talent didn’t mean you were indestructible—far from it!

  Banishing those thoughts, Wren took another deep breath, then let it out even as she gathered current and shaped it with the focus of her will and her words:

  “Like the dawn

  On little cat feet;

  No-one sees.”

  The outfit she was wearing might, on quick glance, look like a particularly trendy cyclist’s outfi
t, if she had a bicycle anywhere in sight, except that where a cyclist would want to be seen, her slicks were nonreflective, absorbing the light and encouraging the eye to move on past her. The cuffs came down to the top of her boots, and strapped under the heel to keep from riding up, no matter what she did, and the cuffs draped over her wrists, a loop waiting to be adjusted over her middle finger, to cover her entire hand. There was a wrist enhancement that went over it, for climbing, but carrying it in the city was more of a risk than Wren felt comfortable taking. Right now, she was dressed oddly. With the claws, if she was stopped, any half-awake cop would suspect they were for more than scaling the gym’s rock-climbing wall. Worst-case scenario, she was carrying a concealed weapon and looking at some serious explaining.

  Besides. The day she couldn’t get into any apartment building without toys to help her, she’d hang up her slicks entirely.

  With a faint tingle, she felt the cantrip finally kick in, an almost physical blurring of her edges to match the no-see’um impulse she carried within her on a daily basis. If there had been a mirror nearby, she would not have been surprised if she were smudged where skin met air.

  It was an enhancement of what happened to her normally, turning what some might consider a negative into a career-enhancing plus. Lemons into Limoncello, as it were.

  Wren stood up and stretched, fingers reaching over her head, rising up on her toes so that she was an unbroken line of muscle from the heels of her feet to the heels of her hands. Her body sizzled, the sugar and caffeine and current fusing into pure sparkling energy. As ready as you’re going to be.