Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  And then Sergei staggered back like he’d been slapped with a giant hand, arms flailing as he tried to keep his balance. The expression on his face was surprise, followed hard-on by a calculating sort of relief.

  Current. Someone had used current to stop him. And since it wasn’t Shig, who would have had no reason to, and it didn’t seem to be either of the movers, it had to have been one of the only two other known Talents on the street.

  Wren, which was unlikely as to be impossible, or—the target. Who stood there, eyes locked on Sergei, her face drawn into a patrician look of disapproval.

  All right. So she didn’t want to make a scene—but she wasn’t willing to let a newt get slapped around, either. He took back half of what he’d been thinking about her.

  Speaking of Talent…out of the corner of his eye, P.B. saw that Wren was gone from her position across the street, and was now, in fact, halfway down the street, walking away from the target and related chaos. He hadn’t even seen her move, despite it being part of his job to watch over her, too.

  Damn, but she was good.

  And ready, and go.

  The moment Shig made his move, Wren was already halfway across the street. The fugue state came down easy, encasing her in a sense of strange but familiar calm. The pulse of the world was the pulse of her own heartbeat, and she moved in easy rhythm with it. Her core, rather than roiling the way it usually did during a job, slithered in an equally calm way, sliding up her spine and into her veins. But the sense of ready anticipation was the same, the inevitability of something happening, and not being sure what it would be, or how it would all work out.

  The buildings seemed sharper, somehow, their edges more distinct, as though they could cut flesh if she walked too close. The flesh of other people was deeper, thicker, and at the same time fluid, like she could fall into them, and the closer she got to Sergei, the more his scent pulled at her.

  She hadn’t been deep in fugue near him since the battle at the Friesman-Stuzner building, when she’d had to tie a virtual rope of herself to him, to keep him from being sucked into some sort of nonexistent dimension or something. It felt as though that rope was still attached, somehow, even though she clearly remembered pulling her current back inside, trying to resuscitate Lee…

  Don’t go there.

  And then she was walking toward the target, walking past her, toward the moving-van guy carrying the boxes, and the middle one was flickering with flames, so hot and vivid she almost cried for the beauty of it. And a flick of current down one particular channel, holding her breath and praying that this part, the most important part worked, and why didn’t she just swallow her pride and ask Shig to do it even if it did mean she’d have to cut him in for the payoff…

  “Lady of fire

  I command thee, make the jump;

  Her possession—mine.”

  The shiver that ran through her as the Translocation spell worked was a double relief; first, that it had worked at all, second that she wasn’t facedown puking her guts out. She was getting better at this. Although there was no rush to try and Transloc anything larger, over a further distance, anytime soon.

  The amulet was a heavy weight around her neck as she walked past the movers, even as the older one started toward the “mugging victim” and his “assailant.” She hoped, with the part of her mind that wasn’t totally immersed in fugue-workings, that the boys would be able to get out of that without her help, but mostly she was concentrating on keeping herself smooth and silent and out of sight, even as she walked off, Retrieval accomplished and no one, not even the target, any the wiser.

  Damn, but she was good.

  16

  “She defended me.” Hours later, Shig was still having trouble with that. Wren was listening to them nattering in the background while she did all the serious work. As usual.

  “Yeah. I’m going to have to rethink all my thinking,” P.B. said, sounding annoyed by the notion.

  “You’ve been thinking?” That was Sergei, polishing his best sardonic inflections.

  “Shut up, Didier,” Wren said, not even looking up from the box she was constructing out of gold and copper–shimmering current.

  Her comment made P.B. grin, a drop-jawed expression that made the nondemon in the room who were looking at him suddenly aware of the veracity of his nickname—and wonder once again what might happen if he were to someday become bored with pizza and Chinese food.

  The four of them were sitting in Sergei’s living room, three draped in various positions of we’re-proud-of-ourselves on the sofas, while she was seated, cross-legged on the floor, weaving strands of current like a macramé project, building a box of demurely sparking red and gold thread.

  She used to work primarily in blues and greens. She hadn’t noticed when so much red crept into her work. She wondered if she should be worried about it.

  “This is to protect us from the Artifact?” P.B. said, leaving the boys’ discussion in order to lean over her shoulder and watch her work.

  She batted at his muzzle, warning him to point his nose elsewhere. Bad enough so many Talents had their fingers on it, and Nulls, and who knew what else. She didn’t want to find out what fatae cooties might do to it as well. “No. It’s to protect it from us. Melanie managed never to use it, for whatever reason.” She knew the reason now, having picked that up, along with the Artifact. Honor. Honoring a promise. Honoring a dead woman’s trust in the man she had married, and the woman who followed her. Honoring, Wren suspected, her stepdaughter’s innocence of the real darkness that waited outside her money-protected world. “I’m not so sure of myself, to be that strong, and I don’t know that any of you can be trusted, either. Apologies, Shig.”

  “None required,” the fatae responded, rising off the ottoman to bow to her in response. “You are wise to think of such things. But what will you do, once you contain it?”

  Wren stared at the necklace, the woman’s face smiling serenely back up at her through the cage’s bars. The Artifact wasn’t fighting the enclosure, which made her feel almost guilty. It’s not sentient, Valere, she told herself. Just a power-source, not anything alive. Not like the parchment, that malignant bit of bloodwork they had encountered over the summer. She had learned, out of necessity, to construct a current-cage for that thing. This container was a variant: less powerful, less draining on her, but still effective to keep the firepower out of reach. Anyone’s reach. And only she, or a Talent who understood what she had done, could break the bars.

  “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I don’t know.”

  Shig had told her, on the way home, to drop it into the ocean and let Benten, Queen of the Sea, take care of it. Wren, not being quite so confident on the willingness of the elder fatae to take care of anything—they had gotten a reputation for capriciousness and willfulness honestly, after all—had declined that option, although a lead-and current-sealed lockbox might end up being the best idea, in the end.

  An Artifact should be given to the Mage Council. That was tradition, decades of tradition. For all that they were arrogant, they were also organized, and had the facilities and wherewithal to keep these things safe.

  But…did she trust them? Could she trust any of them? Or would it be like giving a loaded pistol to someone who had threatened you?

  She hadn’t voiced her concerns, but Sergei was picking up on them, as usual.

  “So, the target is a Council member, if not actually sitting on the Council, as far as we know.” Serge paused to contemplate what he had just said, then shook off the contradictions implicit in the words as one of those things about the Cosa that just naturally made him crazy. “And doesn’t have anything against fatae in general, at least not enough to warrant allowing one to be beaten into a bloody pulp simply because they’re not human.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.” P.B. had decided that it was less about giving a damn about the fatae than it was her not wanting a fuss made anywhere near her belongings. After all, the woman
hadn’t actually stopped the attack, just given Shig enough time to run, and then let Sergei go.

  “It means that, whatever the Council may or may not be thinking, with regards to the fatae, it hasn’t gotten all the way into the ranks,” Wren said.

  “That matters?”

  “It matters a lot,” Wren said, biting back a heavy sigh of exasperation. “Stop thinking of Council members as being lonejacks with money, P.B. That’s not it, at all. There have been a lot of lonejacks who were filthy rich.”

  “But no Council members who were dirt poor.”

  “No,” she had to admit. “But that’s the thing. Adhering to the Council means you adhere to their dictates. That’s what earns you the Council’s protection—and, to a certain extent, ensures your financial security, if it comes to that, yeah. You choose security over independence, to put it as boiled down as possible. And you stick to that, or pay.”

  P.B. was stubborn, and willful, and in his own way as bigoted as Sergei. But he wasn’t stupid.

  “So if the Council had laid down the law about how to treat fatae, then she would have had to toe the line, or risk losing all the pretty toys. Which means either they haven’t, or she flouted them.”

  “’Zactly,” Wren said. “And either way, it’s good news for your people.”

  “Except it doesn’t mean that the Council isn’t still behind the vigilantes. Only that they haven’t made it policy, yet. What an individual does is not always indicative of the greater governing body, even on the Council. In the Council. Of the Council?” Sergei had to come in and lay down the spoiler, before anyone started making assumptions.

  “In the Council,” Wren said. “I think. A Mage Council member sits on the Council, but a member is in…My head hurts, now.”

  Sergei shook his head, his own brain past hurting, trying to follow the conversation. And he’d thought that the Silence was bad?

  “You people couldn’t have come up with an easier way to figure this?”

  “Mage Council was, before there were Council members who weren’t also Council.” Shig leaned forward on the coffee table, warming to the topic. “They did not Foresee such growth in population.”

  “He said Foresee with a capital F, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” Wren agreed.

  “Nah.” P.B. rejected all their grammatical musings for a matter of more pressing practicality. “What it really means is, if I’d decided to hang with a Council member instead of a lonejack, there’d be better quality beer in the fridge.”

  “There’s no beer at all in my fridge, P.B,” Wren said.

  “Exactly my point!”

  Before Wren could throw anything at him, Shig had chucked the last of the pizza at the back of the demon’s head, leaving a rather impressive shmear of pepperoni grease between his ears.

  “I think I begin to, how is it said? Get the hang of this,” the fatae said happily, wiping his delicately scaled hands on a napkin.

  “Next person to throw food in my home gets thrown out the window,” Sergei said. P.B., who had been trying to decide if he would rather eat or retaliate, decided to shove the last piece of pizza into his mouth, instead.

  “Seriously, though. The Council, et al, doesn’t seem to be as anti-fatae, overall, as they are, for example anti-lonejack. And even that’s pretty localized. I’ve spoken to Talents in Italy and Down Under, and Shig here knows folk in Japan. Not a whiff of trouble. It’s only here, and by here I mean East Coast, although I’ve been seeing some weird references and asides from Cosa in other spots that make me think everything’s not peaches and cream there, either. Detroit and San Jose, specifically, although Katie out in Houston had made a comment about maybe it not being a good time for anyone to visit….

  “We’ve been operating under the assumption, not entirely unfounded, that the anti-fatae bias was Council-wide, because it fit with them wanting to shut us, lonejacks, down. What if the rest of the community hasn’t been forced to make a choice yet?” Wren was tugging at the thread of an idea, but she wasn’t quite sure where it was leading to, yet.

  “All right.” Sergei was willing to play what-if. “So…”

  “So, what’s policy, and what’s just prejudice?”

  Sergei considered the question a moment. “Does any of this really matter? I mean, so not every Council member may be on the kick-the-fatae page. Does it matter, if the Council itself, is? Is it going to change the fact that the individual members aren’t, according to everything you’ve told me, not independent at all, but members of—for lack of a better term—a hive mentality? What the queen bee decides, eventually everyone picks up, right?”

  Wren deflated. “Right. Either that or they swarm to pick another queen bee. Even if we got one or three or a hundred members to back down, the majority would still adhere to policy once it was made. But I think it might be important, anyway.”

  If Sergei was right about KimAnn, that this entire thing with the Council was some sort of personal power play, then Wren didn’t dare give over another potential weapon into her hands. And there wasn’t time to leave town and find another Council leader who could be trusted…especially if KimAnn’s ambitions went beyond Manhattan, threatening other area Councils…

  “Let it be important later. Like I said, if Madame Howe is up to what I think she is, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway. Don’t get distracted from the problem at hand, which is this Artifact. Can you hold the necklace, for now? Or is the client going to insist on it back right away?”

  “She can ask all she wants. She’s not getting it back. Or at least, not the original.”

  “Lawrence?”

  “Lawrence.” An artist Sergei featured on a regular basis in his gallery, Lawrence was also a refabricator, someone who made copies of antiques, for daily wear when the original was too valuable to be risked.

  “I’ll put a call in.” He got up to get his cell phone, which he had carefully left, along with his PDA, at home when he went out that morning. Standard operating procedure, when on a job with not one but two Talents, involving a third Talent. As much as there was an SOP for something like that.

  Considering the slap of current he had gotten, it was a wise decision. Regular backups didn’t make having to buy a new PDA any less annoying.

  Meanwhile, P.B. had his own idea about what the next step should be.

  “What’s important is that we get your people and mine back on the same damn page. Because it may not be policy yet, but the Mage Council hasn’t done squat-all about the vigilantes, and if the lonejacks don’t, either, soon, we’re going to be looking at some serious fracturing of the Cosa. And not just here, either. Wren, if more fatae die…”

  “Yeah, I know. Haven’t forgotten.” There was no way she could forget that. The Cosa couldn’t survive, if they didn’t learn how to stand together. That had always been the idea, as well as the ideal. She’d seen that in Italy; when the fatae warned the local Talents away from the House on the hill, Talents had avoided it, no questions asked, and probably saved the sanity if not the lives of at least a dozen of their children over the generations. The trick was getting each side over here to admit to it—and stick to it.

  “So what are you going to do?” Sergei asked. He was tapped flat out of ideas, himself.

  Wren looked up at the ceiling, feeling the weight of two pair of eyes on her. Shig, being more polite—and a newcomer—turned his gaze away while she thought.

  Family ties. Responsibility. Somewhere along the line, people started thinking only about the Nostradamus and forgetting about the Cosa part of their nickname.

  Family.

  This was what the seer had Seen, she suddenly realized. This was what had been inevitable, all along.

  “I’m calling an All-Moot.”

  Sergei watched as his partner’s words put the demon into motion. Shig, being new to town, wasn’t able to help much, but P.B. had the name and contact info for every single clan in the city who had indicated their willingness to deal
with humans in this matter—and a few who hadn’t been willing at all.

  “We’re only going to get one shot at this, you know,” he warned the humans. “Bringing them all together like this—it’s not like what we were doing, me and Lee, all those meetings in your apartment. It’s not one-on-one, talking sense.”

  Wren remembered, all too well. The last time she had tried to bring the fatae to the table, at P.B.’s request, none of the many clan representatives had been happy with the situation. Few of them were willing to believe that the human side of the Cosa meant them no harm. And then KimAnn, Madame Council Chairwoman, had shown up with her own damn agenda, and Wren had barely held things together by her fingernails.

  “I hate all this,” she muttered to Sergei, as P.B. went off into a corner of the office to make his calls. “Like herding six-legged, two-headed cats.” Three-headed cats, if you included the Council in on it. An All-Moot was exactly that—all members of the Cosa were included. Wren suspected that the Council would put the kibosh on any of their people actually attending, though.

  “Speaking of which.” He raised a hand, hesitated, then went for broke and stroked a stray hair back into her braid, letting his hand linger until she turned her face into the caress. “I have to go. Meet with Andre. Find out exactly what’s going on—and see if he knows anything that we can use.”

  She really didn’t want to hear that. “I need you here.”

  “I’ll be back. I promise. But I need to see him. I owe him that much, if nothing else.” To warn him what might be going down, if a storm broke among the Cosa, the way Wren seemed to think it would. What Andre did with that information…

  “Hurry back.”

  “Before you even know I’m gone.” He kissed the top of her head, picked up his jacket, checked for his keys and wallet, and was gone out the door before she could come up with any compelling reason why he should stay, and damn Andre to his own personal hell.