Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

Taking a deep breath, Wren directed a sliver of current to shove the box off the shelf, sending it directly into her waiting hands.

  The box screamed.

  Every nerve in her body flayed by the noise, Wren dropped the box through sweat-slicked hands, sensing more than hearing it hit the floor with an almost-alive, fleshy thud.

  Fuck.

  Shutting down every bit of current in use and shoving it back down to her core, Wren didn’t wait to see if anything more active than an elemental was coming after her, but beat feet out the way she had come in, retracing her steps and already planning for her exit out of the building. It wasn’t going to be graceful, but if she could manage to stay quiet, if nothing bigger or meaner than she was showed up to stop her, she just might make it. Might. Maybe.

  The current-alarm was still screaming in her head. A thin veneer of current tried to rise through her skin and shut the damned thing up, but she shoved it down again. At this point, everything would have her signature all over it. The damage was done—better to keep them focused on the box, on making sure that it was still safe, still in their possession.

  “Joey? Is that you?”

  A sleepy voice, followed by a much more awake cursing and the sound of someone fumbling with something heavy and metallic, followed Wren down the hallway and across the foyer. Bracing herself for a blast of current, Wren was unprepared to hear sirens in the distance, and the crackle of a security system telling its owner that the alarm had been sounded.

  Cops? She called the cops? What kind of Talent calls the cops? There’s the door—brazen it out? No, stick to your original plan. Don’t deviate! Don’t get caught somewhere unprepared. More unprepared. All that went through her head in a fast-forward voice, too quick for any real words to be formed.

  The bathroom window was still open. But there was a red light flashing over it, where the wires she had mojo’d had clearly gotten their act together—or the alarm had been triggered elsewhere.

  An electrical alarm system? I’m going to be the first Retriever to ever get nailed by an ADT system. Without completing the Retrieval. The Council can stop worrying, the humiliation alone will kill me.

  The sirens got louder, and she could hear someone in the apartment behind her.

  You can’t afford to get caught. You know too much. If the rumors were true, if the rivalry was getting this serious—if the Council was as determined as the lonejacks to have their way, then the Council would have no hesitation in using her, whatever they could get out of her, the same way her fellow lonejacks had, only more so. They’d use this Retrieval as whatever proof they needed to hold her. And the voice was right; she did know too much. Who and where and what and when. For the first time in her life, something other than her own concerns were tied up in her actions. Getting caught meant more than her reputation would be hurt.

  Wren turned even as she was running, pushing the bathroom door with one elbow, shoving forward off her toes and grabbing the window frame with her free hand, twisting so that her body glided out the window into a sort of free-form dive.

  Headfirst umpteen stories down to the sidewalk below.

  Well. The voice almost sounded impressed. That was particularly stupid.

  13

  “Another one, honey?”

  “Please. Yes.”

  The ground coming up too fast, too hard. Clutching the box, unable to close her eyes. And then, suddenly, Neezer’s voice, hours after she went out of the window or was it half a second? Neezer’s voice, shouting in the back of her head, and Sergei’s touch on her hand, and a gust of wind slapped her in the face, putting her rightside up and slowing, slowing her, skin feeling like it was ripping off from her bones, the box slipping from her hands and hitting the pavement, the pendant falling out.

  In her memory, she caught the pendant, scooped it up, ran with it. The truth was, it hit the floor of the dressing room, the face of the pendant right under her nose. The object had been right there, within reach. And she had left it there, and run. Fled the scene like a scalded chicken. Failed.

  She had failed.

  Caught up in self-disgust, Wren hadn’t noticed until she was three blocks away from the apartment building that her hands were burning. Literally. Dark green flames, licking around her fingertips, under the fingernails. The flame ached rather than injured, but it was disturbing. And, from the odd looks she was getting from pedestrians, visible even to Nulls. It had taken almost half an hour of deep breathing and centering, hunched over in a doorway, for her to make the flames go away.

  Her fresh drink came, and the old glass was whisked away. She supposed that she was running a tab, at this point.

  Wren looked at her hands, wrapped around the glass of some drink she didn’t want when she ordered the first one, and wanted even less now that she was on her third, and carefully didn’t suspect that the medallion—no innocent tacky keepsake—had anything to do with those flames. At all. Because the only thing, that could scream like that, the only thing, that would leave such a residue of current around her, without ever making direct contact, was an Artifact.

  Artifacts—objects of power, things that held current naturally—were to be reported to the Mage Council, to be recorded and studied and kept safely out of circulation. Even the most renegade lonejack knew that. Even the most wizzed wizzart knew that. It was the one thing, to the best of her knowledge, they had never faulted or faltered on.

  Why hadn’t Melanie Worth-Rosen reported it? Hell, why hadn’t dear departed Momma—no, and Wren checked herself—Momma hadn’t been a Talent, had she? Papa, then. He had to have known what his wife was wearing. Why hadn’t he reported it? Not a good Council boy, was he? Not a lonejack; that would have come up in her background search, even if she wasn’t up to Sergei’s standards. No affiliations at all, Mr. Rosen. Rare, but not unheard of. Second wife was the one who got on the radar; and she was the one who realized what it was Anna was supposed to inherit, and snatched it for her own.

  That was Wren’s theory, anyway.

  So why did Rosen the Younger want it? Momma’s legacy? Or was something else going on behind those pretty eyes?

  Too many questions. Too many possibilities. Her headaches were getting worse, not better.

  Rather than going home, Wren had peeled off her slicks and folded them down into a flat package and shoved them into her case, into the space where the pendant was supposed to go, and went in search of a night-shift bar that wasn’t going to look askance at a small-framed woman getting soused all alone.

  She ended up, unsurprisingly, here in Kalli’s, down off Christopher Street. It was a corner dive, an unlikely gay bar that catered to blue collar workers. She had found it originally when she first moved to Manhattan, mainly because they had a small but free hot buffet until midnight. The buffet had gone the way of skyrocketing real estate prices, but the bartenders were still cute, and the drinks were generous, and nobody looked twice at a woman alone, except to wonder if she didn’t mean to go to Henrietta’s, down the street.

  Plus, a twenty-dollar tip on the first drink got her left alone, except for the occasional refill, and the music on the jukebox was eighties kitsch; perfect for not letting her brain do anything other than play “Name That One-Hit Wonder.” But despite the nauseating distraction of The Waitresses claiming that they knew what boys liked, Wren couldn’t stop wondering about that box, the pendant, her rather impressive if brainless learning-to-fly act, and what she might have gotten herself into, yet again.

  The Artifact was troubling, yeah. And the fact that she’d screwed the job, had left it unfinished, and, worse yet, alerted the mark that someone was after it…. That was all really, really bad.

  The flying thing trumped all that.

  Wren still didn’t know how she had done what she’d done, that she wasn’t dead, or otherwise splattered on the uptown pavement. She suspected that it was some latent skill-set coming to the fore under pressure, the way most new current-related skills were discovered. But she didn’t
know, and that not knowing was making her nervous.

  It was, Wren thought, a really bad day when a major on-the-job screw-up took second place on the odd-ometer. A really, really bad day.

  “You could just tell the client the job’s off, and be done with it.” That would be the smart thing to do. That’s what Neezer would have told her to do. “Or go to the Council and turn the target in…or just drop it off, all anonymouslike.” Lee would have counseled that; get free of anything to do with it, dodge the karma that probably came attached to it like psychic sludge. Because didn’t she have enough stuff focusing the magical universe’s attention on her, already, even hiding behind—what had Sergei called them? The four-wheeled troika?

  Sergei. Sergei would tell her…finish the job. So she screwed it up, first go-round. So she wasn’t as damned perfect as her press claimed. It was a relief, actually.

  Wren took another sip of her drink.

  Yes, a relief. After the hero-worship she got from the boys in Italy, after having to fight off the Council’s attempts to shut her down, after all the pressure of being the best at what she did, without actually being able to stand up and take credit for any of it…

  She wasn’t perfect. She was just damned good. And damned good still allowed her to be human. To screw up a job.

  To get a second chance.

  And how the hell had she managed to call up enough wind-current to counteract gravity? Without conscious thought or willful direction? Assuming that was what she had done, and not…

  “Christ, I don’t even know what I did, much less how, much less if I ever can do it again.” Or if she would ever want to, for that matter. If it took being about to die…

  “I’ll worry about that after I’ve finished worrying about everything else,” she decided, finally. Only thing she could do.

  “Ah-hah. There you are.”

  Wren instinctively moved her foot so that she was in contact with the case, making sure that it was still securely hidden under the table. There was nothing really incriminating in there, precisely, but it would be expensive to replace her slicks if this were an attempted bump-and-grab. Only then did she half-turn in her seat to look at the newcomer.

  “Oh. Hi. How’d you find me?” she asked, wishing she could feel more surprise.

  “Followed my nose,” P.B. said, the black nub-shaped object twitching as he spoke. Wren had never actually gotten a straight answer on him about his sense of smell, so maybe that was the truth. Polar bears were supposed to have really good sense of smell, right? Maybe demon did, too.

  She turned right-side back in her seat and picked up her glass again. “Uh-huh.” A wealth of skepticism came out in that vocalization, more than she’d thought she was feeling.

  “Okay, actually, I got a call from Dopey,” P.B. said, pulling a stool over and hauling his short, stout body onto it, garnering only a few bemused stares from the other patrons nursing their midday beers. Apparently four-foot-tall white-furred demon weren’t any more of note here than females.

  “Dopey?”

  “Dopanisimano. Bartender.” And the demon jerked his head in the direction of the bar, where a tall, square-shouldered bald man was wiping down glassware with far too much attention to the task, aware of her sudden scrutiny.

  “Right. You put out an APB on me, or something?” Wren really did wonder, sometimes, about P.B.’s extensive network of contacts in the City. It seemed to run from the top of the social strata to the bottom without prejudice on their part—or his.

  “Didn’t know where you’d disappeared to. Made me nervous.”

  “You’re not my mother.”

  “Yeah—she shaves her legs. Look, normally I wouldn’t bother someone so clearly in the middle of important work—”

  “You’re starting to annoy me, P.B.”

  “Too bad. Your day’s about to get worse.”

  She raised the glass, holding the cold surface to the side of her face. “Oh, goody. Can I pay you not to tell me?”

  He ignored her. “I just came from a powwow.” P.B. was right. Her day was already worse. “What now?”

  Powwows were what P.B. called it when the fatae, the nonhumans, got together for a bitch-and-solve session—although they were more prone to the bitching than the solving. She supposed it was a blessing—the idea of all the fatae tribes and clans actually coming to agreement was the only thing that made her more nervous than lonejacks organizing, which was her current active nightmare.

  His silence gave her a clue. “Oh, Jesus wept. They’re reconsidering standing with us, aren’t they?” That had been the great accomplishment of the summer: making the fatae understand that the lonejack community was horrified by the racially motivated attacks on nonhumans by humans, that Talents had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

  P.B.’s face wasn’t the best for conveying expressions—his foreshortened muzzle could bare teeth in a grin that looked menacing as hell, but that was it. But somehow he managed to convey exasperation extremely well. “They think you’re going to lose. Against the Council. And they don’t want to go down with you.”

  “But they’re willing to reap the benefits if we win?” P.B. made a helpless gesture, black-skinned paws raised to the ceiling. “Like your people are all that different? We’re not joiners. We’re not fighters. We’re survivors.”

  “Bloody damned hell.” The temptation to put her head down on the table and just not ever lift it again was, well, tempting.

  “On the brighter side—there’s someone new in town I want you to meet.”

  She rested her face on her hands. “Jesus wept, Polar Bear. I’m really not in the mood right now. It’s already been a long day, and now you just dro—Hey!” Wren had thought that her body had overdone itself on surprises today, but the sudden appearance of a tall, skinny gecko at her table was outside of enough to warrant a jump and a yelp.

  “Genevieve Valere, this is Seiichi Shigenoi. He’s fatae.”

  “Yeah, ’cause I hadn’t figured that one out,” Wren said. P.B. looked as abashed as his face could manage.

  “He’s also a Talent.”

  All right, that was unusual enough to warrant real interest. Most fatae were magical in their own right, but it didn’t often translate in the ability to handle magic the way a Talent did. Mostly they were old-style users: limited, specialized, and unpredictable.

  “You’re Japanese?”

  “You could not tell?” Unlike most of the reptilian fatae, Shigenoi spoke without even the trace of a sibilant in his consonants.

  But not entirely reptilian, Wren noted with interest. Between his eye-bumps, a thick but narrow ruff of blond fur stood on end, like a pony’s mane shorn into a mohawk. When he turned his head slightly, she could see that it ran all the way down his back, probably down to his tail, assuming he had one.

  “I’ve never met a Japanese fatae before, at least, not a native.” There were a lot of immigrant tribes in the New York area, and she wasn’t entirely sure about the origins of all of them. “You want a beer? I don’t think they serve sake here.”

  “Just as well. Sake makes me, what is the term?” He made a gesture with one webbed paw that indicated regurgitation.

  “Toss your cookies?”

  “Yes. Alcohol does not metabolize well in my species. Soda, please. Ah, seltzer water.”

  P.B. nodded, then looked at Wren. “I’m good,” she said in response. “So, Shigenoi. How was your trip over?”

  “Not…enjoyable, I fear. Travel is difficult,” he said. “I hate traveling cargo. My scales dry out, and my fur gets staticky. But the seats are…difficult to stay in for extended periods of time.”

  Having just recently taken her first transatlantic flight, Wren could sympathize. Even without a tail.

  “So what brings you to Manhattan?” Please, God. Not fatae-Council stuff. Please don’t let their problems have spread out of the area…

  “Ah.” Wren wasn’t sure geckos could blush, but his pale green skin did seem somewhat�
�rosier, even in the bar’s mediocre lighting. “Business. I have a rather thriving, um, small company. Import-Export.”

  “Oh. Smuggling?”

  “Valere!” But P.B. was laughing. “Why do you assume everyone I know is on the nonlegal side of things?”

  “I don’t assume that at all,” Wren said. “It’s just that usually the ones you introduce to me tend to be.”

  “No, no, nothing at all…Well, I suppose it would depend on your point of view.”

  “My point of view’s pretty wide-angle lens,” Wren said, encouragingly.

  When the visiting fatae hesitated, P.B. tapped the table with one claw. “Shigenoi. This is Wren Valere.” When Shigenoi didn’t seem to understand the emphasis, P.B. sighed, a deep, dramatic sigh that involved all of his considerable chest. “The Retriever? Like you?”

  “You’re a Retriever?” Wren was fascinated. There weren’t all that many Talents who were Retrievers, worldwide, and she had never heard of a fatae who was one.

  “It is not something I generally advertise—” and he shot P.B. a glare that Wren could so appreciate “—but, yes, I am. Forgive me for not recognizing your name. I can only humbly blame jet lag. You are, of course, quite well-known to me, by reputation, at least.”

  “Yeah. Rep’s a fabulous thing,” she said, in a tone that indicated anything but.

  Geckos should never try to grin. Or even smile. “Yes. And yet, to be known to your peers, and respected by them, is not a thing to be dismissed.”

  “So long as it doesn’t lead to any testosterone-bumping. So. How do you know my courier-running amigo over here?”

  “Our acquaintance goes back some number of years. When I knew I was coming to town, he kindly offered to show me the sights.”

  “And keep him out of the places he shouldn’t go,” P.B. said. On the surface it might have been friendly needling, native to tourist. But recent events had shown Manhattan to becoming less friendly to unwary fatae. Everyone should have such an alert guide. She approved.

  “Anyway. I thought you guys might have stuff to talk about, and he’s an art collector, too, so maybe Sergei…” P.B. stopped to reconsider. “Or maybe not.”