Bring It On

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Gentlemen, ladies.” She nodded to the others seated at the table. “We shall adjourn for breakfast, and follow up on this disturbing news after we have had time to contemplate it. For now, let us celebrate our new, stronger identity. Members of the San Diego Mage Council have traveled in expressly to meet with you; please, feel free to make new friends!”

  Gentle laughter met her words, and if any of them wondered at the confidence that allowed her to bring the San Diegoans in before the vote was taken, none voiced it out loud.

  As they rose and filtered out of the room, KimAnn waited, her expression pleasant. Underneath, she could feel her current roiling, and soothed it back into quietude.

  “Michael.” Her secretary came like a well-trained dog to heel. “I do not like being without information. Find out who called the Moot. If they survived, set up a meeting with them. If they did not, find out who their second was.” She paused. “And I expect, by then, to know who instigated the attack.” She had been using a stick to herd these particular cats. Perhaps it was time to use tuna, as well.

  And if neither of those means worked, then it was time to rid the city of cats, entirely, once and for all.

  But she kept that thought, very silent, to herself.

  20

  “I so very, very, very much do not like this.”

  “So you’ve said.” She didn’t like it, either. “Madame Howe was pretty clear about it, though. Lonejacks and Council only. No fatae…and no Nulls.”

  “They let me speak for you before.” The previous summer, he had acted as her proxy when approaching the Mage Council, to determine if they were involved with a Retrieval she had taken on. They had lied to his face—all right, Sergei admitted, they hadn’t actually lied. But there had been a good deal of dancing around the truth. “So why am I suddenly not good enough now?”

  Wren didn’t even bother to answer that. He was griping because he was unhappy at being left behind. P.B. had done the same thing last night, when the invitation had come. Parchment, handwritten: all very traditional. The remaining troika—Rick having been recovered from the hospital bed where nurses had tried—unsuccessfully—to make him stay put—had received theirs already; she had wondered if the Mage Council was going to ignore her. She had, honestly, hoped that they would.

  No such luck.

  7:00 a.m. The Cloisters. There are things we must discuss.

  No outsiders.

  None of the fatae had gotten invites. Big surprise. Not.

  “They’ve already tried to kill you. Twice.”

  “That sniper was totally unrelated to all this.”

  “That sniper was what started all this.” The Mage Council, trying to muddy the waters over their involvements in the death of Jamie Koogler, an architect whose murder was the base of a spell cast decades ago, a murder Wren helped to uncover, had hired someone to shoot at her, hoping to distract her.

  It had just resulted in pissing her off.

  “And the psi-bomb—”

  “We don’t know for certain the Council was behind that. Anyway, it was hardly a fatal blow.”

  “It was supposed to be.”

  That stopped her. “What?”

  He hadn’t wanted to tell her. But the news had been chewing at his mind ever since the Moot three weeks earlier; every day that passed, he expected them to try again.

  The message from KimAnn hadn’t soothed his concern any. If anything, he was convinced this was a trap; taking out the three remaining lonejack leaders and their most visible supporter—he paused a moment to appreciate the irony of that—in one swoop.

  “Talk to me, Sergei.” He had her full attention now, rolling over on her side, the sheet barely covering her body. It was damned distracting, the way the fabric kept sliding down, and he reached up to tuck it more securely under her arm.

  “There were two other attacks, the same day,” he said.

  “Yeah, I heard. Nobody was injured though, right?”

  “Not seriously, no. But they got lucky—one of them was in working mode, and was able to deflect most of it, the other was asleep. Something about REM acting the same as a fugue state?”

  “Yeah, that’s the theory. Tough to test…we don’t exactly make good subjects to hook up to electrodes.”

  “I imagine not,” he said dryly. “But the point is, the intel I got—” she, mercifully, did not ask where or who he had gotten it from “—they were able to deflect the blast, and protect themselves. You weren’t working, weren’t prepared…and yet sustained less damage. And, according to sources—”

  She had long ago stopped trying to figure out Sergei’s sources, although finding out about the Silence went a long way to explaining some of them.

  “—the area around your building took more damage. Which is unusual, for a psi-bomb, right?”

  “I guess. Not something I know a hell of a lot about. You think…” She frowned, sitting up in bed and staring at him. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that that bomb was meant to be a lot more deadly than not. And no, I don’t think that Andre’s people were able to do anything to mitigate the effects, no matter how they may be patting themselves on the back for it.”

  “Okay, fine. They were trying to take me out. So why didn’t it work?”

  “I have no idea. And, frankly, other than being damn glad it didn’t, I don’t care right now. I just don’t see why you’re so willing to walk into another chance for them.”

  “Because it doesn’t fit the pattern. And the Council is all about the pattern. If they’ve been behind the attacks—and I think we’re all pretty much in agreement they are—then they’re doing it sub rosa, without a mandate. If they don’t have a mandate, if the entire Council hasn’t voted on it, they can’t turn around and do anything with their fingerprints all over it.”

  “Jamie all over again.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jamie had been an architect, a good man unfortunate enough to be working for a very bad man, years before either Wren or Sergei had been born. He had been murdered as part of a spell cast without Council sanction, but the Council had known and allowed it, and three generations later they had been willing to kill to hide that fact.

  “All right.”

  As easy as that, Sergei backed down. Sometimes, even now, he amazed her. She leaned forward and kissed him lightly, first on the tip of his nose, then his chin, then down further, on the side of his neck, then, sliding under the sheet, on his sternum.

  “Valere….”

  “Shut up, Didier. I’m working, here.”

  “You’ve got twenty minutes before you’ve got to be in the shower, getting ready. I’ll take a rain check, thanks.”

  “Spoilsport,” she muttered, sliding back up out from under the sheet in a manner designed to leave him with a reminder of what he was passing up.

  “Just for that, I’m not going to leave you any hot water.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t the one invited to the party. I don’t have to get out of bed at all.”

  Half an hour later, Wren was pouring her second cup of coffee while the water heated for Sergei’s tea. The threat of using all the hot water had been an idle one; Sergei’s building didn’t do anything as déclassé as run out of hot water. Her building, on the other hand—great pressure, but the boiler had a mind of its own, and a distinctly malicious sense of timing. She’d swear sometimes the entire building was alive.

  Alive…a theory started to form in her mind, about the psi-bomb, and she shoved it into a box and slammed the lid down. She needed to be focused. Focus. Get the focus working. KimAnn Howe was the toughest of tough old ladies, no matter how sugared her coating. Especially if Sergei was right about what was motivating the old woman. Even if this wasn’t a trap—and she hoped to God it wasn’t, because otherwise Sergei would never let her live it down—Madame Howe wasn’t going to sweeten the bait with anything useful, not intentionally. Anything they got out of her, they were going to have to steal.

&nb
sp; Fortunately their side had the best damn Retriever working today on the case.

  Wren grinned, a tight, evil-minded grin, and took another sip of her coffee.

  “I don’t like this place.”

  Wren got out of the cab and looked at Rick curiously. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I just…” The biker had always had a fair streak of precog to him, enough to evade speed traps and DUI busts, and not much more. If something ticked at him, it might actually be a bomb. Or it just might be nerves scraped and strained from coming this close to dying.

  “Is it emotional, practical, or currentical?” she asked.

  “That’s not a word.”

  “You understood what I meant, didn’t you? So it’s a usable word. Like piratical.” She put her hands on her hips and mock-glared at him, the wind blowing hair into her face and ruining the glare entirely.

  “That’s a totally pointless argument. Just because I could figure out from content does not make it a word. Neither does stealing from Gilbert & Sullivan.” He was huddled into his jacket, peering out of the cab’s door and looking miserable. He hated cold weather; was always threatening to move to Florida, or somewhere even warmer.

  “So what does?”

  “Continued usage.” He was adamant about that.

  “Fine. Currentical, currentical, currentical. You want I should continue?”

  “You’re insane,” he said, grinning despite himself, allowing her to manhandle him out of the cab.

  The squabble thus having served its purpose, Michaela paid the cabbie off. He sped down the roadway out of the park, clearly thankful to have the four very cranky early morning passengers out of his car, not bothering to ask why they were going to the Cloisters hours before it opened.

  Wren stood in the open air outside the endearingly ramshackle pile of stones that housed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection of medieval art, and wondered if the sense of unease she felt was the same as Rick’s, or just echoes from the House of Holding, back in Italy. That building had been a dark space, a location that nullified current, and she did not have fond memories of it at all.

  “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

  They’d actually put together a plan, of sorts. As much as you could, going into an unknown situation with unknown parameters and an unknown desired end result, other than “information.” It came down to what the plan had always been: the remaining three wheels of the troika would do the talking, and Wren would do the listening.

  Every Talent had different ways of going into work mode. For Wren, it was a relatively simple slip down into fugue state. Out here, her feet solid against the bedrock of upper Manhattan, home ground in the truest sense possible, it was even easier.

  Her eyes fluttered closed, as though she was falling asleep, lulled by the early morning birdsong and relative quiet of the park. The voices of the troika became background noise, then faded, as did the birds and the distant sound of traffic on the parkway, until all that was left was the sound of a gentle breeze through the trees, sliding her down into her own velvet-lined core, where tendrils of current reached up to embrace her with their lethal coils.

  Hers, hers, hers. It was a litany you could never forget, or the power would turn on you, destroy you. But you couldn’t embrace it too tightly, either, or it would send you wizzing into madness, unable to differentiate between current and flesh, open to every flash of power that wafted nearby.

  Focus.

  She gathered the current, slid into her core, and set up residence. Externally her eyes opened and her body moved with the others, but everything that mattered, everything that was Wren, was protected, hidden in her core. If this was a trap, if the Mage Council did strike, even if they managed to get to her down there, she would still have time to tag every single lonejack within the island and let them know. And she’d go down fighting, too.

  Around her, the others were setting up their own protections; nothing that would offend the woman waiting to meet them, but rather reassure her that they were taking her seriously, giving her the respect due to an honored opponent.

  Sergei’s idea. Sergei was the one with the training in shit like this. It was all beyond the normal lonejack experience; they’d rather conclusively proved that political maneuvering was not their thing, although Sergei seemed to think they’d actually done pretty well in the past few days. But Wren had always held that anything that didn’t evolve, died.

  Lonejacks were even worse at giving up and dying than they were at working together, or politicking.

  Together, the four of them moved up the walkway to the large wooden doors. They were locked, the museum’s alarm system running, but Wren and the alarm system of the Met were old friends, and it only took her a few minutes to wrap herself around the wires and coax them into letting the door open without notice. The physical locks took a few minutes more, but Wren was a firm believer in old-fashioned handwork, too, and the toolkit she carried with her on every job worked its usual metaphorical magic as well.

  “Up there,” Bart said, pointing up a narrow stone staircase. Their footsteps echoed in the quiet, moving one at a time up the steps until they came out into the open foyer. Michaela picked up a map from a holder on the information desk, and led them to the garden the note had indicated. Filled with the scents of herbs and some sort of spicy flowers, it had a lovely view over treetops of the Hudson River below that, on another day, Wren would have found extremely peaceful.

  Deep in her core, however, she now picked up on what Rick had felt on arrival. Layered on top of the more ancient emotions, and darkening the more common feelings of awe and satisfaction felt by daily visitors, was the taint of blood. Darkness. Betrayal.

  Someone had been murdered here. Recently. Within the month, give or take a few days.

  No matter. Focus. Focus on the moment. Focus on what is important.

  “Good morning. I thank you for meeting with us on such short notice, and in such a remote area. We felt, in light of recent events, that waiting until a more proper location could be arranged would not be wise.”

  “Madame Howe,” Michaela said, taking the lead in greeting their opponent. The other two fell behind her in a neat triangle, with Wren a step behind them and to the left. Distract the eye, spread the area of potential attack. Sergei’s advice, again.

  KimAnn Howe was as trim and elegant as ever; Wren suspected that she could be tossed into the tapir’s pit at the Bronx Zoo, and still look classy and composed.

  “The place and the time were not a problem,” Michaela went on.

  In fact, they were almost suspiciously ideal. The Cloisters had a state-of-the-art alarm system, and respectable wiring, but the very nature of the building and its distance from midtown meant that it wasn’t filled with distractions—or pooled areas for Mage-current to hide behind. What you felt was probably what was there. If Wren wanted to set someone at ease, she might have chosen the same place and time. Why did KimAnn want to set them at ease?

  “We heard what happened to your people.” KimAnn’s voice remained as smooth as ever, but Wren could See, deep inside her core-fueled eyes, the waves of concern that rippled inside her. But concern about what? Wren wasn’t ready to dig any deeper: right now, her job was just to stay low, and listen.

  “If there is anything we can do to aid—if any of your people still need medical attention, or—”

  “We,” Wren noted. Plural use, indicating the Mages of the Council were in agreement on this, or was KimAnn being Royal?

  “What’s the price tag? Your sort never do anything without a price.” Bart, the bitterness always lurking in his voice coming to the fore.

  KimAnn raised her elegant white eyebrows. “A lonejack, griping about supply and demand?”

  “That’s not the price your sort take.”

  “We take only what is offered,” the Mage said. “No one has ever been forced to join the Council.”

  That was true. Coerced and pushed, yes. But never
forced. Distinction without too much of a difference.

  “We’ve taken care of our own, thank you.” The cost had been high, but less so than anything the Council might ask for aid. That was a historical truth.

  “As you wish. We heard, as I said, and were distressed that our sisters and brothers had been set upon in such a fashion. No matter the differences in…philosophy we might have, we are all Cosa, after all. What affects one, affects us all.”

  “Even the fatae?” A dig, not so subtle, reminding them all that no Council member had attended the All-Moot. No Council member had been injured.

  “The fatae have always gone their own way, even among their own kind. But we have a history with their kind which does not go unrecognized.”

  Wren felt nothing from KimAnn off those words. Not a ripple, not a flutter, not the faintest fluctuation. Whatever her personal feelings about fatae, they were locked down deep.

  Not that this made her much different from most of the human side of the Cosa; that was the problem. But it wasn’t a problem to be dealt with right now. Now, they had to determine where KimAnn stood. And if the entire Mage Council stood with her.

  “You note there are only three of us here.” Michaela, going on the offensive.

  Four, actually. Wren kept her mouth shut. She was working. Being overlooked was part of the game plan.

  “Should there have been more?” KimAnn took another look at their faces, and sighed. “Yes. I had noted that Stephanie was absent. Might I hope that she is well?”

  “She’s gone.”

  In another language, gone would have layers upon layers, ranging from “left for the bathroom” to “taking a long trip,” to “obliterated out of existence by a blast of massed current.” In English, it was a flat, uninspired word. But KimAnn seemed to understand it.

  “Ah.”

  And that was all the epitaph Stephanie got.

  “You’ve had spies among us,” Bart said.

  “The Council has friends in many places. Some high, some low. The river between us is not as great as you like to believe.”