“Those aren’t secrets, Didier, those are your burns, healing.” And I can give you more if you don’t watch it was implicit in her words; she heard the threat, and flinched from it. He, predictably, didn’t. Not really a threat, if he liked it. Although that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t pain he liked, as far as she could bring herself to figure it out. It was the risk, the tinge of danger to go with the passion. Which she supposed she could understand. A little. Maybe. Although not the pain part of it.
The silence went on too long, after her comment, and she was starting to get uncomfortable.
“He came to see me. Andre.”
“What?”
“Uh-huh.” She wasn’t hungry anymore, as good as the food still smelled. “He showed up on my doorstep, literally, couple days ago.” She counted back, mentally. Before the busted job, the afternoon P.B. got himself busted. “Two days ago.”
“And you’re just now telling…” He visibly caught himself. “Right. I think we’re destined to be living examples of why really good sex doesn’t always indicate perfect communications.”
Another direct hit for the guy-side of the team.
“And what did Andre have to say for himself, to you?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t really let him say much of anything. I think he was on a make-nice mission. Which, based on the timing of what you’re telling me, I think means he was trying to butter me up so I’d green-light you going back to work for him, with my blessings.”
“I told him—” Sergei’s frustration was clear. The bastard had been playing both of them independently.
“And I told him again. I don’t think he’s listening.” Her voice softened with a curious blend of regret and pride. “He really needs you. I don’t think he ever let go of you, not really.”
“He invested a lot in training me.” Sergei’s tone was calm, neutral, and Wren felt herself getting angry all over again.
“You’re going to do it, aren’t you? You’re going to help him. No matter what I say or do.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You don’t know? Jesus wept, Didier, he—”
“He’s not the Silence. He’s a man. And, more to the point, he’s a man who has in the past and can in the future do us some good. That’s the bottom line.” She had not only touched a nerve, she’d zinged it, hard, to get that kind of flat-line reaction.
“So.” Self-control. Focus. Stop the cycle now, damn it. “What happens now?”
Her partner sat back and regarded her with a steady gaze. “I don’t know.” They’d had fights before. They’d even had serious arguments before. But this was a strange roadblock of the sort they weren’t used to, another person coming between them, paths seemingly diverging, and neither of them seemed to know how to move it. “I think this is where we’re supposed to run out to the bookstore and buy a relationship self-help book.”
“‘When Your Secret Lives Conflict With Romance’?”
She shrugged, and picked up her fork again, even though the eggs had gone cold and she had no appetite.
“We used to be a good team, Wren. Well-oiled. Fast to respond. What happened? And don’t say sex, because that’s a cop-out. Besides, the sex is where it’s still damn good.”
Wren laughed, as he meant her to, but there was sadness in it as well. “Don’t need a book to tell you that, smart guy. It used to be just the two of us. For a well-trained Silence lackey dedicated to the Good of the Many, you adapted really well, really fast to the lonejack code.”
“First, worry about yourself. And all the related jazz that goes with enlightened self-interest.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a good code.” He had thought so from the very moment he head heard it, burned-out from the Silence’s insistence on the Larger Picture above and before all other considerations.
“It’s a smart code, anyway. Not so sure how good it is.” She shrugged. “Useless point of debate, now. More players. More things to consider. More obligations.”
“Obligations that bind both of us,” Sergei said. “Even when only one of us makes them.”
Ouch. All right, so they were back on the clock, original-argument-wise, then. Claiming that he wasn’t involved in all this would be pointless, and also stupid. Even if they sometimes forgot that they came as a matched set, nobody else did.
“Look. I just…”
Sergei reached out and snagged Wren around the waist, pulling her off her chair and onto his lap.
“Hey!”
Then whatever she was going to say got muffled by his mouth on hers. He tasted salty-sweet, like eggs and ketchup, and those narrow lips were way too familiar with the kind of kiss she liked.
By the time he eased his hold on her, they’d settled that discussion. So much for self-help books.
“So. How much did you soak the client for?”
Wren rested her head against his shoulder, feeling the slow thud of his heart all the way down into her bones, and felt absurdly, impossibly at peace.
“You’d have gotten more. But I need to Retrieve it, first. She’s going to move, now, if she hasn’t already. I fucked up.”
“You had an unexpected interference in the execution of the job. Not the first time. Probably won’t be the last, although we’re getting better on our percentages. Can I help?”
Sometimes he couldn’t. Sometimes, having another brain—a sneaky, left-brained, cold-blooded reptile brain—was exactly what was needed. She reached out and pulled her bag to within easy reach and pulled the papers out. “Here. Look at this.”
He looked. “The Artifact P.B. mentioned?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. So this is the focus. Where would target make a run for, knowing someone’s after it?”
They were back in the groove, she could feel it. Too easy, far too easy, and there would be things to deal with later, under the surface, but they were grooving again, and that was the important thing.
“Second home, out of the city. Full suburban territory, better than standard guards, although nothing expansive. Probably the husband’s doing—she seemed the trusting sort.” Although not so trusting that she’d stick around, now.
“She’s not the sort to be able to throw everything into a bag and flit. Apartment will need to be closed up, unless she keeps the maid there.”
“She’s a live-in?”
“Five days a week, on a flex schedule. So maybe, yeah. But even so, it takes time to pack up a wardrobe like hers. But she won’t be more than forty-eight hours, even if she has to call ahead to get the house in the ’burbs all aired out and provisioned. There’s a staff of three, there. Maid, cook, and guy-of-all-else. They all live off-site. I guess housing’s not such an incentive out there.”
“You want to wait, make a try for it there?”
“Tempting,” Wren said thoughtfully. “It’s in the same area that damned horse was last seen in, I could double up my workload…”
“You and that damned horse.” A stuffed horse from way back in the whateverish medieval period, in full prancing regalia, that appeared wherever something bad was about to happen. Wren had been chasing it for years now, to the point where even the original clients had given up. But she was determined, someday, to track the damned thing down and Retrieve it. It was a matter of pride with her, now. “I hear a ‘but’ in your voice.”
“But I get the feeling that it needs to be done fast.”
Sergei looked down at her. “The necklace?”
“Is bad stuff, maybe, yeah. But…I don’t want to be out of the city, if I don’t have to be.”
Sergei clearly wanted to comment on her feelings, but took one look at her expression and moved on.
“So, a second pass at the town house. But she’s going to be on her guard.”
“Yeah.” Wren got up off his lap and started to pace around the kitchen. She picked her fork up again and slapped the back of it thoughtfully against her palm as she spoke, like a conductor using a baton. “Yeah. Sh
e’s going to be extremely guarded. Especially if she knows it’s another Talent who’s going after it. But…is she going to know that? The Client’s a Null. Total Null, didn’t feel the psi-bomb coming at all, had no clue after. Doesn’t know anything about the necklace being an Artifact.”
“Are you sure?” That was her Sergei, always willing to be the cynical one.
Wren recalled Rosen’s face, the look in her eyes when she saw Wren sitting in her stepmother’s parlor. “Pretty sure. Almost definite. She doesn’t have the feel of a manipulator, except as how she’s young, attractive, and wealthy. Anything twitchy, she’s being twitched from the outside.”
Sergei raised one of those well-groomed eyebrows, asking a question.
“No. It’s not that kind of Artifact.” Not actively malevolent, like the parchment they’d been sent after, that had taken all the ill-will in the city and fed on it. “I was only near it for a second, I know, but it felt like pure power. Untapped, untainted.”
“Wait a minute.” Sergei raised a hand as though asking teacher a question. “I thought you said power took on the personality of the user.”
Wren nodded, realizing that she was now using the fork like a pointer, and put it back down on the table before she did damage with it, accidentally. “It does. The moment you touch current, it conforms to your specific tone, your individual signature. After a while it can fade.”
“Or not,” Sergei said, remembering the madness of the Talent who had wielded the last thing of power they’d dealt with.
“Or not. But this one’s pretty clean. Which means whoever’s been holding this—presumably the target, since the client’s mother died years ago and the father isn’t likely to be wearing anything as…distinctly female as this necklace—hasn’t been using it.”
Sergei looked all sorts of thoughtful again. “I like this woman already.”
“Yeah.” Wren shoved her hands in her pockets and stared at her toes. “Me, too.”
Someone who could hold an object of power, and not touch it, not even just to run her fingers through the pretty fire? Maybe, just maybe, she should be leaving the Artifact with Melanie. Except that wasn’t the job. And the job had to get done, or her reputation—the only thing she had, the thing her life was built on—was gone. Who would hire a Retriever who got sudden moral qualms about what she was sent to Retrieve?
Morality. Responsibility. Familial ties. There was something she was missing in all this.
Melanie cared about her stepdaughter. She was a Talent, a Council Talent. But not a powerful one. Not in the high-and-mighty ranks. Not in the loop. Keep things out of the loop, or they become corrupted.
Power corrupts, but we need electricity. Even funnier to a Talent, that joke.
“It’s not about the magic.”
Sergei looked up from the pencil rendition. “It’s not?” His expressive eyebrows got all expressive again.
“Anna. Why she’s doing this. It’s a mom thing,” Wren said. “Your dad marries someone else, there’s always this feeling of disloyalty. Or…something.” She shrugged. “You’re the one who told me to take that psychology elective in college.”
“But you said that she liked her stepmother. Originally.”
“Yeah. Especially then.”
Sergei was no slouch at following logic trails. “She feels guilty about liking the woman who replaced her mother, especially since the new woman is a Talent, unlike her mother—and unlike her. Someone the client thinks might be seen as a better match to her father. And her father’s dead now, so he can’t ease those fears. So she’s overreacting to this one thing, that she may or may not actively care about, in order to strike back.”
“You’re starting to scare me, Didier.” That had been exactly what she had been thinking. Oh, Anna had her own reasons to want the necklace—even a Null had to know it was of some value, somehow. But this made her behavior make sense.
Not that any of it mattered, in the long run.
“Does it worry you that in less than a year we’ve run into two different Artifacts?” This, and the Nescanni Parchment, which had been an Artifact of a much nastier sort.
“No. Should it?”
“Yes.” Wren was certain about that. Artifacts weren’t exactly thick on the ground, even in Talent-crowded Manhattan, home of eclectic collections both public and private.
“All right, I’m worried. What am I worrying about?”
“Just worry in general. That’s what you’re good at—worrying while I rush in.”
“Like an angel?”
“Very funny.” Angeli only rushed in when they scented blood.
Sergei was worried, actually. But he could see that something was turning over in her brain, and relaxed a little. She’d been stuck, but he had faith she’d get loose again, out of the rut and back on track. He set up the deals, but she was the one who executed them. Although he’d be there when she needed his skills—or a grounding influence, whether she wanted to admit it or not. “So. Got any plans for later tonight?”
Wren nodded slightly, her lips beginning to turn up in a smile that her partner knew very well—knew, and had missed seeing, recently. Oh, yeah. Goodbye, rut.
“Yeah. Yeah, I think I do. And so do you. Cancel whatever you thought you were doing today. And did you get Shig’s contact info?”
If they expect you at night, go during the day. If they’re double-locking the windows, go in through the front door.
The Wren always worked alone. Except when she didn’t.
15
The moving van was smaller than Wren had expected, but it was still perfectly placed by the curb, a smidge too close to the fire hydrant, and the movers were perfectly out of central casting: two young guys and one older but still bulky with muscles, all of them clearly related on the Mediterranean side. They shouted to each other in a language Wren didn’t know but suspected that Sergei would. He kept pulling languages out of his hip pocket, just to, she suspected, annoy her.
The sun was warm overhead, but the air was November-crisp, and if she hadn’t been so tightly wound up inside, she might have stretched like a cat for sheer hedonistic pleasure of the day. A good solid meal inside her, the sitch with Sergei all warm if not fuzzy, and a job on the plate and a Retrieval in play. Life really didn’t get any better than this. Assuming you could forget all the Cosa shit piled high and deep, just waiting to be stepped in. But for now, in this instant, everything was perfect.
And there was the target, looking only slightly harried and not the least sleep deprived in pressed chinos and a dark blue, gauzy-looking shirt. She came down the steps of the building, clearly giving the older man directions on the handling of the boxes he was carting out. He looked unimpressed by her words.
The moment the target had cleared the building, Wren shifted her position slightly, still to all intents and purposes lounging against the bumper of a candy-red sedan that was screaming “ticket me,” but minutely more alert, as though she were a Prohibition-era lookout who had just seen a cop coming around the corner
That was how P.B. would have described it, anyway. He was the only one on the street who had any knowledge of Prohibition firsthand—had, in fact, been a lookout for several local speakeasies in his day—and it wasn’t relevant, so he was quietly amused by the fact and kept it to himself.
The shift, minute even if you were able to focus on Wren, was their signal to start the action.
“Oi! Help! Someone help!”
The first rule in a mugging was yell “fire!” at the top of your lungs. People would come out and look at a fire. They’re not always certain to look at a mugging. But in this case, they didn’t want too many people looking. Just the right ones.
Shig staggered out from the alley, holding a hand up to his head and looking dazed. At least, P.B. thought he was trying to look dazed. Or drunk. Tough to tell. Sergei was right behind him, moving hard, one hand raised up as though to catch the fatae by the shoulder, and clearly not with friendly intent.
>
Watching, knowing that it was all staged, P.B. still felt a surge of alarm. Sergei could be a mean-looking bastard, when he wanted to.
“Ugly abomination,” Sergei said, just loud enough to carry. It was a risk, this plan. But all the best plans were risky, it seemed. Risk went hand in hand with payoff. Shig was a newcomer to the city. Sergei, at first glance and unless you knew Wren well, was just another human. But if the target had done any of her own homework…
“Leave me alone!” Shig cried again, adding a whine of pain to his voice, and two of the three movers turned to look, a young one, and the older guy. The other man was in the truck itself, and probably couldn’t hear.
The target stopped, midscold, and turned to look as well, just as Shig did a half-turn and threw himself up against the wall. It looked, from a distance, as though Sergei had done the tossing. Not bad for only a few hours’ of practice.
“Morgan,” the younger man said, half in warning, half “look at that” mode. But neither of them showed any surprise at all. P.B. wondered if they were used to seeing fatae: he thought he knew most of the Cosa-owned business in town, and Menachem Moving wasn’t one of them, but you could never tell with individual employees.
The older man—Morgan—stepped forward, his stride the movement of a man trained to use his body to do more than haul furniture, and clearly not going to help out Sergei.
P.B. tensed. He was far too well-known to be involved in the stagework. His role in all this was to keep anyone from getting significantly damaged, no matter what side they were playing for. If that meant tackling a human whose only crime was to try to prevent an apparent beating, well, he’d apologize to the guy later.
Although it would make for some very weird human-fatae relationship twists in an already pretzel-shaped world.
It looked as though he wasn’t going to be needed, though; the target had put a hand on the older guy’s arm, pulling him back. Typical Council bitch, not wanting even her hirelings to get their hands dirty on a fatae getting what she probably thought he deserved—
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