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In several of the photos, Anna Rosen and Melanie were together. In one, they had their arms around each other, with body language that seemed neither forced nor uncomfortable.
All right, that was significant. Anna had not given off warm and fuzzy vibes towards stepmomma when she hired Wren, but there they were, chummy-buddies and smiling, not just for the cameras. So why was Melanie holding on to the one thing that darling stepdaughter wanted? Where had it gone wrong? With Daddy’s death? Or after, when the will was read out?
Knowing the answer might not make any difference. Not knowing the answer might make all the difference in the world. That was the thing about Retrievals. You never knew what was important until you realized you didn’t know or have it. Better to be safely obsessive, and end up with useless trivia. Might come in handy some-when else, you never knew.
Hitting the print key for several different screens, Wren got up to go check on the coffee’s progress.
“Bless you,” she said to the machine, grabbing one of the black, surprisingly delicate-looking china cups from the cabinet and pouring herself a long dose. It needed sugar, but for now, this was manna from the gods just as it was.
The computer was still printing—the photos were taking forever—so she headed for the sofas, curling her feet under her and making sure to set her cup down on a coaster rather than directly on the surface of the coffee table. Sergei protected the high-gloss surface of the furniture with the ferocity of a momma bear protecting cubs. She didn’t understand it—growing up, a coffee table was what you put your feet up on—but she was willing to humor him, within reason.
A flash of recent memory—she grabbed the headboard, arching back, thankful the bed was wood, and sturdy, as they rocked back and forth. His teeth were bared in a fierce, taunting, smug grin that made her want to wipe it off through sheer exhaustion.
“You like that?” he asked. Totally unnecessarily, in her opinion. She wasn’t sure what she had been vocalizing just now, but she was pretty damn sure it hadn’t been “stop.”
“Not bad,” she managed to say, then rocked forward again, rewarded by his hiss of purely physical satisfaction. Current stirred within her, woken by the intense emotions running her brain. Normally she could only “see” them when she was in a fugue state, but the sense of them was always there, in this particular instance dark blue and purple strands eeling around her inner core, sparking and sizzling in her arousal.
“Lyubimaya. Yessssss.” Sergei was practically crooning his approval as she moved on him, and the current reacted to that, streaking up and out, exiting her pores like highly charged mist. Where her skin met his, flesh sizzled, and his croon became a loud, exuberant yell of climax as he thrust upward and came, almost violently, within her.
The memory ended abruptly, Wren shaking herself out of the reverie she had fallen into. Coffee. Drink coffee, Valere. Then back to work. Only she knew from experience that she wouldn’t get much work done, not with a still-naked, warm, sleepy and morning-eager Sergei still in bed. Sex was just such a great way to procrastinate.
Drinking her coffee, she went back into the gleamingly clean kitchen to find a piece of paper and a pen to leave a note. By the time she had figured out what to say, gone back up the staircase, found her clothing and—quietly—gotten dressed, the printer had finished kicking out her materials. She gathered them up, shoved them into a folder, and let herself out of the apartment. After a moment of indecision—library? Starbucks? Home?—she headed back downtown to her own place, where she could spread out without fear of interruption or overpriced coffee-lures.
“Zhenchenka?” A hand reached out from underneath the sheets, stretching blindly into the space where Wren had been sleeping. It patted the mattress, as though thinking the body might still be there, then gave up.
Rolling over, Sergei Didier opened his eyes, blinking against the faint sunlight reaching up into his sleeping loft, and calculated the time. The semifamiliar smell of coffee rose from the main level. So much for an early morning roll call.
Getting out of bed, he noted that Wren’s clothing was gone from the pile. Tossing his castoffs into the laundry basket, he pulled fresh socks and underwear from the dresser drawer, and went down to shower. The burns on his chest and thighs were tender, but already healing.
He knew it worried Wren, the way her current would occasionally overflow while they were making love, but he didn’t mind. Yes, he knew what current could do. He had seen the remains of the wizzarts killed by the overrush of current, during that case last year. On her insistence, he had even read a book about electricity and the ways it had been used to kill, over the years. Interesting book. That probably hadn’t been the reaction she had intended to provoke in him.
He trusted her, even when she wasn’t sure she trusted herself, not to hurt him.
Much, anyway. And a little pain mixed in with the pleasure…well, sometimes, with the right person, it just added to the pleasure. That was a new realization for him, and he was still poking around the edges of it. Carefully, the way he did everything, but not shying away from the facts, either.
He turned on the water, and stepped under the spray.
Besides, she’d been grounding in him for years. He doubted that had left him totally untouched—his most recent medical exam had shown some interesting striations on his kidneys that hadn’t been there before that fiasco in Maine, and the incident in Italy over the summer couldn’t have helped any.
No job was without risks. So why not take the benefits, too?
Not that he was going to tell her any of that. The last thing she needed to do was start pulling back in the middle of a job because she was worried about his internal organs.
Resting his head against the wall and letting the hot water pound against his skin, Sergei tried to force himself to relax. Wren was going to be okay. She was tough; toughest woman he’d ever met, in some ways. Lee’s death was a blow, but she’d recover. All he had to do was keep her busy, somehow. Find her a job. Keep her body going—jobs as he can, sex when he can’t. It was all he could think of, and it wasn’t enough to stave off the feeling of disquiet he had, holding her while she slept, watching while tears flowed from under her closed eyelids.
A shudder swept over him, like a horse trying to shake off flies. In all his life, Sergei Didier had only failed once. The thought of it happening again—losing someone because he wasn’t strong enough to save them—wasn’t one he could accept.
By the time he came out of the shower, tying his robe around his midsection, the smell of coffee had faded, and the apartment was completely quiet, the way only a very expensive, modern building could manage in the middle of a bustling city. So he knew, even before he saw the note on the kitchen counter, that she was gone.
A scrawl on the back of a used envelope. Stuff’s cooking. Nothing to worry, just details. Thanks for dinner—and dessert! Will stop by later.
And that was all. Vague even for Wren, who thought you should never preface anything with more than, “Hey, watch this!”
Rinsing out the coffeepot and setting it out to dry, Sergei put on the kettle for his own tea, toasted a bagel, and spread it with a schmear of cream cheese, and went to check his e-mail. She had left the machine on—unlike her. Very unlike her, normally as cautious around expensive electronics as a soldier in a minefield.
It had taken him longer than he liked to admit to Talent-proof his apartment for Wren, and the sight of the surge protectors and add-ons still made him do a faint double-take of “how’d that get there?” The kitchen had likewise been proofed, although it was less visible there. Expensive and unsightly, but the ability to use his electronics was one less excuse Wren could use to rush home, rather than staying the night. He’d found that he liked having her stay until morning. Purely selfish, and he made no excuses for it.
Plus, he liked his apartment much more than hers. A better shower, for one, and a much larger, more comfortable bed. At five-foot and inches, she could get away with a twin mattress. He was considerably taller, and liked to sprawl.
“Incoming!” the computer sang out, and he looked to see what had landed in his in-box. Most of it sorted into “gallery” files, some to “clientele,” which meant potential jobs or leads for Wren, and the rest went directly into the main folder to be sorted by hand.
One of those e-mails was red-tagged as urgent. The return-reply name was simply “bossman.” That was enough.
Sergei opened it.
We need a meet. Sigma GG.
That was all it said, and all Sergei needed to read. “Bossman” was Andre Felhim, his former superior officer and current contract liaison with the Silence, the organization that had saved their bacon last year and then tossed it right back into the fire with the Nescanni Parchment job. The job that had—indirectly—gotten one of Wren’s best friends, Lee, killed, and landed Sergei in the hospital with severely bruised kidneys the doctors were at a total loss to explain. Wren had treated him like he was made out of spun glass for a month after that.
Turnabout on the traditional role-play, he supposed, and no more than he deserved, but it had made him even more determined to keep his partner as far away from the Silence as he could. Just the mention of his former employer made her eyes go cold and hard in a way that wasn’t natural to her.
No, even without the GG coding—Greta Garbo, for “tell no one, come alone”—he wouldn’t have mentioned it to his partner. Keeping her busy was only part of the plan. Keeping her unstressed, so she had time to work through her thoughts, that was key. She wasn’t the type to talk it out, or act it out, or any other “out.” All you could do was stand by and wait for the storm to pass.
Deleting the message, and then wiping it from his system seven ways from Sunday, so that only the most determined snoop would be able to reconstruct it, Sergei started to reconfigure his workday. He needed to be able to get away long enough to meet with Andre without either Wren or his gallery assistant noticing that he was missing. Sending the revised schedule to Lowell for him to sync with the gallery’s computer, Sergei browsed the morning’s headlines, did one last check of his e-mail, then shut down the computer and went back upstairs to get dressed.
The last thing he did, before leaving the apartment, clad in his usual expensively subdued suit and tie, was to retrieve the delicate-looking but vicious handgun from his lockbox, count out a handful of bullets, and place the pistol in the holster snugged into the small of his back. You didn’t call for a meet—something outside of the office—without there being trouble. And trouble, when it came from Andre, meant going armed.
I hate that thing. Wren’s voice, floating around inside his brain. She had a more than decent touch of psychosymmetry that made her actively ill around guns, especially this one, which had his touch all over it. She didn’t like to be reminded of the fact that he was capable of taking life. Even when it was to save her own.
Don’t go. Her voice again. Or, call me. Let me be your backup, not that thing.
“Sorry, Wrenlet. But there are some parts of the Silence you still don’t know about. And that’s how I’m going to keep it.”
He owed her that much. It was his fault the Silence had found her at all. It was his fault that Lee was dead.
So much blood staining his hands, no matter how much he tried to step away from it all.
But he was a loyal dog. Always had been. And Andre had been his master, once upon a time.
4
The man sitting behind the mahogany desk might have been carved out of the same wood, so still was his expression and body. Only his eyes moved, black pupils bright and alert.
The messages had all been sent. Some would come right away. Others would play out the anticipation, measuring the years and the miles between against the urgency of his request. But they would come. They would all come.
Andre knew his people well. Had chosen them, trained them. In some cases, let them go. All, always, waiting against a day like this.
The location of his office had once been a matter of significance to him; a corner space with a custom-made desk, and an in-box that was constantly filled with urgent projects and situation files. And when he had demanded extra filing cabinets moved into the office, so that he didn’t have to wait for someone else to look something up, they had arrived paneled in matching wood.
Now, those filing cabinets mocked him, filled with information from past situations, solved situations. How much of that had been complete? he wondered. How many of his situations could have been closed sooner, if he’d gotten more, faster, more accurately? How many of the situations still open could have been closed, if he’d gotten one piece of information withheld? Who was behind this? What was their goal?
How soon would he go insane, wondering what-ifs without any basis, replaying scenarios without ever knowing for certain?
Andre Felhim was not a man who lingered overmuch on “what-ifs.” He dealt with facts and responsibilities. Actions and counteractions. Situations and solutions.
He saw the road, and took it.
“Sir?”
The voice that broke into his thoughts came from Darcy Cross, standing in the doorway. Brilliant, dedicated Darcy, who never failed him, not once. His office manager, Bren, lurked behind her, the Amazonian blonde towering over tiny, sparrow-boned Darcy. Andre had trained more than a dozen field agents in his career, knowing that most would come and go, but these two were his constant. He would have been hard-pressed to replace either one of them.
“Come in, both of you. Sit, please. Would you like some tea?”
Darcy and Bren looked at each other, then nodded.
“Yes, please,” the researcher said. “Would you like me to pour?”
“Please.”
The teapot was an elegant silver Art Deco set, the tea poured into tall glasses with silver chasers. Sugar lumps, not packets, from a silver bowl. Bren poured out, and sat back with the glass balanced easily on one knee, waiting for it to cool. Bren, bless her, was dog-loyal. He had no doubts of her.
“Sir?” Darcy asked again. She moved the glass from one hand to another, her delicate hands making the glass seem oversized. He hated to see that look of fearful anticipation in her hazel-blue eyes. Still, she was valued within the Silence not for her courage, but her almost frightening ability to uncover things other people tried to hide. If Darcy did not know something, there was nothing to know. Her knowing; that made it real. She knew that there was a problem. Therefore, there was a problem.
The thought that she might be party to this disinformation, that she might be hiding or redirecting that lifeblood of the Silence—unthinkable. Not because—unlike everyone else he had trained—she had any undying loyalty to him, but because her true love and loyalty was to information. She truly believed that it needed to be free. The thought of impeding it would make her head implode.
Despite this, he trusted her to know who had protected her, who continued to ease the way for her to do her job without outside interference, or undue political influences. She would file away what was said here, would bring her mind to bear on what he pointed her at, and know everything there was to know—but she would not sell it to another player. Not while he continued to protect her.
He therefore merely held up a hand, indicating that she should drink her tea, and wait.
Jorgunmunder, his protégé/lieutenant would arrive soon, the third of the three he had called to this specific time and place. And then, they could begin.
One of the great dividing lines between Manhattan residents, even more than Mets versus Yankees, was “subway or bus?” Wren was firmly on the subway side. Subways had track problems, yes. And they ran late, and occasionally stank, especially in the summer. Buses were just as crowded, and got stuck in traffic, to boot. Add to that her tendency to be “overlooked” even when she was jumping up and down trying to flag a bus down…at least the subway trains stopped at every stop, no matter if they saw someone waiting on the platform or not.
Unfortunately it was also the middle of the morning rush hour, which meant that no matter what sort of mass transit you took, it was going to be packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Thankfully today was that in-between sort of day; cool enough that the levels of human sweat were down, and not cold enough yet that people were wearing bulky coats that took up twice the available room.
Some people claimed that New Yorkers were rude. Wren had asked Sergei about that once; he, being from Chicago, had merely shrugged, as confused as she was. It wasn’t until she had spent time riding the subways waiting for a target to appear before she understood what it was outsiders were reacting to; not rudeness, but extreme politeness. Everyone in Manhattan was living in their own space, the lack of eye contact or acknowledgment others bemoaned actually allowing their neighbors the illusion of privacy, keeping noses down in newspapers or books, or eyes closed and shoulders moving to noises from their iPods.
Wren’s fingers twitched—the desire to Take overwhelming, for an instant, the fact that she had no desire to own an iPod, nor any market to sell one, even assuming she was interested in that. Which she wasn’t. She was a Retriever, not a garden variety thief.
But sometimes, sometimes, that itch hit, a throwback to her adolescent stint as a thrill-shoplifter.
The moment passed, the way they always did. Self-control was key. Focus was everything, the only thing, and the foremost part of focus was self-determination. Wren found a spot in the corner, leaned against the wall, and rested her eyes on nothing, letting her mind run over the material she had read that morning online until an inner-timing sense warned her that the train was approaching her stop. She slipped through the crowded car, shoulder and elbow acting like the prow of a small boat, moving people aside without them even realizing that they had been moved.
Neezer had taken her to see Chicago, back years ago when it was on Broadway, when she was still a teenager and he was still sane. A birthday outing, it had been. That evening had convinced Wren that Manhattan wasn’t so much a ballet as it was a Bob Fosse jazz routine, all hands and shoulders and feet constantly moving. If you did it right, you looked cool. Wrong, and you were a spaz.
When she had told Neezer that, expecting her mentor to laugh, he had merely blinked at her, long and slow, and nodded his head as though he’d never thought of it that way before but it made everything make perfect sense.
God, but she missed the old man. A lot. If he’d stayed, if he hadn’t wizzed…
Is as it is, Jenny-Wren. His voice, sad and slow, across the years. He hadn’t, he had, and she only had his memory to consult with, now. A memory that was starting to fade, no matter how tightly she clung to it. The things people think are forever? They’re dust before you know it. Wren was surprised by how bitterly angry that thought left her.
Coming up the stairs to street level, Wren stepped over the homeless person sleeping in the entryway, resisting the sudden urge to shove him out of the way with her foot. If you didn’t want to go to a shelter, that was your own choice. But there was no reason to sprawl in the path of people just trying to go about their day.
A tingle of guilt struck, and she shoved it down. Get rid of that anger, Valere. It just messes with you. She wasn’t a bad person—a bad person would have kicked him. She was just cranky, was all. Maybe she should have gone to Starbucks, gotten a mocha mood-adjustment or something, before heading for home….
Let yourself start to procrastinate and you’ll wallow in it for weeks, she told herself sternly. Go home. Get it done. Then it’s mocha-time. Maybe even a gingerbread latte. The only good things about November—molasses mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving, and gingerbread latte at Starbucks.
Her shoes crunched leaves that had fallen onto the sidewalk; random, not the thick, colorful carpet of leaves she remembered from her childhood. But it was enough to put her back into a more peaceful frame of mind, the crunch and crackle mixed with the odd, almost-unpleasant smell of autumn in the air.
By the time she walked the three blocks from subway to her apartment, Wren had decided on a preliminary course of action. Identify the piece of jewelry. Case the location. Blueprint entry and exit points. Execute. Cash checks. Nice, simple, unfussy. A photo of the item would be ideal, but unless Rosen got hold of a digital photo for insurance purposes, that was unlikely. So, a sketch, or, more likely, a verbal description. Aldo, on the first floor, was a decent enough pencil artist—she’d used him before to turn vague verbals into something she could identify.
The first floor apartment door was closed, which meant that Aldo was either working or sleeping. She left a note on the glossy white-painted splotch on his door with the grease pencil he left tied to his door for just that purpose. Just her apartment number and an exclamation point. He’d know what it meant.
In the meanwhile, she didn’t have the luxury of sitting around and waiting for people to bring the answers to her. Time to hit the paperwork trail, earn that retainer, at least.
At least it was something to do, rather than waiting for another psi-bomb to land, or another fatae friend to be attacked, or another lonejack to go missing….
She took the last few steps to her apartment with caution, listening with her ears as well as her core. “May you live in interesting times” was great if you were a newscaster, or a photojournalist. But for a simple Retriever trying to make a living, it was a pain in the ass.
Nothing. For the first time in what seemed like months, there wasn’t anyone lurking in the hallway. No spybugs planted in her ceiling. No demon waiting to pass news. Just her, and her new furniture, and the spotlessly clean apartment rebuking her for the amount of time she was spending away from it.
The door locked behind her, Wren dropped her keys in the dish on the counter and placed her obnoxiously yellow—and impossible to lose—bag next to it, shrugging out of her leather jacket and hanging it up, carefully. One lecture from Sergei about the care and feeding of good leather was all she ever wanted to sit through, thanks.
She opened the bag, pulling out the printouts she had shoved in there at Sergei’s place. The lump of papers made the shoulder bag bulge strangely, and once again she thought that she might need to break down and buy a briefcase to replace the old one. It had died a grisly death, eaten by a disgusting bio-sludge that Walter, a Coast Guard ensign and moderate-level Talent, had accidentally let loose over the summer while he was trying to encourage a newborn kelpie harboring just off Ellis Island to eat all her proteins.
Humming under her breath, Wren set the coffeemaker to work, pulled a diet Sprite from the fridge to tide her over in the meanwhile, then grabbed the printouts and went down the hallway to her office. She could work anywhere in the apartment, but the vibes for concentration were best in that room.
“Damn. Also, damn.”
Wren carefully placed the printout she was reading down on the floor in front of her, and stared at it as though the words were about to leap off the page and bite her. In a way, they just had.
She was sitting, as usual, on the floor, with her research materials in small piles around her. Also as usual, she had begun by sorting all the available material into “useless,” “possible,” and “bingo.”
That printout absolutely went into the bingo pile. And then some. That changed everything. Or at least a few certain, possibly very important, things.
“I hate it when clients don’t give you all the details.” Although, to be fair, Rosen had told her everything Wren needed to know. The Retriever just hadn’t realized it at the time.
“So that’s how you knew the term Null,” she said to her client. “Stepmomma used it on you one time too many?”
Because Melanie Worth-Rosen was a Talent. Like Wren, but unlike. Because one of the many social-page articles Wren had printed out that morning mentioned stepmomma as being a member of the Greater Hartford Crafting Society. The GHCS—a group that Wren knew from firsthand experience accepted only Talented members. Specifically, Talents who were also Council members, as opposed to lonejacks. Like the D.A.R., only magical.
“Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” she wondered out loud. Being a Council member in and of itself wasn’t a black mark, despite Wren’s negative experiences with the leaders of the Council itself. She had tried explaining it to Sergei once, the difference between Council and being a Council member, but the best she could manage was that it was sort of like the difference between being a dues-paying member of a union, and being Jimmy Hoffa. That wasn’t quite exact, but close enough for horseshoes, and he had pretended to understand.
Normally Wren didn’t give a damn about the target of a Retrieval, so long as she knew ahead of time anything they might counterpunch with. Null or Talent, museum or private citizen, government or nonprofit. The situation outside of the Retrieval, though, was anything other than normal, and the last thing she needed was more reason for the Council (the Hoffa version) to start spreading rumors that she was targeting Council (union joe version) members.
“All right. Stop a minute, think this through. Client, Null. Target, Talent.” She got up to pace as she talked, feeling her knees pop and crackle as she stretched. It was still easier for her to be in action than it was to sit still.
As much as she loved her apartment, as good as the vibes were, it had one major drawback: the rooms were too small to pace in. The T-shaped hallway leading from the bedrooms to the front door, however, was perfect.
