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She was not good at playing with others. Not at all. In fact—
“Hey, Valere!” P.B. called.
Wren turned in the direction of his voice, and got a faceful of cold white powder smack on the left side of her face.
“Argh!” Tears came to her eyes, but she was grinning, ear to ear. Wiping away the stinging cold snow, she shot back, “You’re dead meat, you polar bear wannabe!”
Bending down to scoop the snow into her fist, she whispered a soft incantation she had memorized as a kid, to melt the snow just enough for it to pack easily. But before she could do more than sight on the spot right between the demon’s black-lashed eyes, his wide mouth grinning at her from over a snowbank almost as tall as he was, the soft shushing noise of falling snow was overridden by a deep, jagged scream.
“What the hell?” P.B. yelled, clapping furry paws over his rounded ears as though that would do anything to stop the sound.
Wren staggered and slipped in the snow, unable to mimic P.B.’s actions as the wave of current associated with that scream slapped into her like a windstorm, almost knocking her over. “Over there,” she managed, forcing herself back up and forward. “It came from over there!”
They moved as quickly as they could through the snow, but by the time they got there, it was too late.
“Oh, damn.” It was less a curse than a brimstone-fueled prayer, coming from her companion’s mouth. He rubbed his palms against his fur in a nervous reaction, wanting to look away but held by the gruesome display.
Wren had seen an angeli die before, left to bleed out in a back alley after being beaten and abused by human bigots. It wasn’t a sight you forgot, one of the angeli brought low.
This was ten, a hundred times worse.
“Jesus wept for mercy,” she said softly, feeling a long-gone impulse to cross herself.
“Much as I hate them, individually and as a tribe,” P.B. muttered, then said again: “Damn.”
Angeli were the oldest of the winged fatae, the nonhumans. Despite being part of the Cosa Nostradamus for almost two decades, Wren had never seen one with its wings completely displayed. The great feathered muscles of this angeli stretched out almost seven feet tip to tip, near as she could estimate. It was difficult to tell for certain, though, since the angel was hung upside down, its feet tied together with rope and strung from a lamppost in front of a tall, nondescript office building. Its front had been cut open, messily, from groin to chest: only an empty cavity remained, slowly gathering snowfall.
Blood dripped from a slash in the neck, falling to the snow-covered sidewalk, staining the white a deep crimson black.
“It’s started again,” Wren said.
So much for the storms keeping people safe.
two
December, one month earlier
Wren Valere was spitting mad. Literally. She rinsed her mouth out again and spat into the sink, watching the red foam mix with the green of the mouthwash into a truly disgusting mess before being washed down the drain. The taste of mud and blood remained. Her arms ached, her leg muscles still burned, and she could feel the adrenaline still running in her body like a drug, despite having been home, safe, for twenty minutes and more.
“I hate my job, some days.”
She was speaking to her reflection only, and it didn’t even bother to look unimpressed.
Her partner was down the hall in the office, actually one of the three tiny shoe-box bedrooms in her apartment, and so he didn’t hear her words. She rinsed again, and, this time, satisfied that there was more mouthwash-green than bloodred, reached for a towel to clean her face off, and went down to bitch to him in person.
He was sitting at her desk, a white cardboard box the size of a small cake in front of him, his cell phone pressed to his ear. Sergei was taller than she was by almost a foot, and he looked oddly scrunched in her chair. His long legs were stretched in front of him, resting on an old, beat-up leather hassock under the desk. Middle age was starting to show in the strands of silver in his hair, and the lines on his face—not to mention the slight thickening of his waist—but he was, still and all, an impressively elegant figure, and a pleasure to watch.
He saw her standing in the doorway and held up a hand to keep her from coming in. She stopped and waited, not at all put out to be barred from her own office. Being a Talent—witch, mage, magic-user, in more superstitious times—meant that electronic objects often had total meltdowns in her presence, especially when she wasn’t in complete control of herself.
She was pretty well locked down right now, but that hadn’t been the case when she came home half an hour ago, dripping with the now-washed-off mud, blood, and hellhound feces. Wise, for her partner to be cautious. He’d already gone though half a dozen cell phones because of her, not to mention three PDAs, to the point where he claimed it would be cheaper to hire a scribe to follow him around everywhere with a quill and paper.
“Yes. I understand,” he was saying into the phone. “Excellent. Much appreciated.”
Wren snorted, but softly. Sergei had a way of sounding urbanely pleasant even when he was ripping someone a new one. When he turned the charm on, men and women both had been known to slide out of their pants before they knew what was going on. Only she could see the way his face was still a little gray, his hand still a little shaky. He hadn’t quite recovered from seeing her walk in the front door, that no-doubt lovely snapshot the instant before she dropped the white box in his hands and went into the bathroom to scrape the gunk off her skin and brush her teeth. It wasn’t a visual she had wanted, either.
Her partner was getting slammed with, she suspected, a combination of fear—for her safety—and anger—at her, at the client for not warning them, at the universe in general—mixed with just a dash of envy. As he said as she came in, with only a little bit of irony, she always got to have all the fun.
She would have gladly given him all the “fun” of this job, if he really wanted it. She’d stay home and work the clients—
All right, no. She wouldn’t. They’d tried that and it hadn’t gone all bad but it hadn’t gone all right, either.
“Yes, of course,” he continued, his voice smooth but his eyes hard. “And we will complete the transaction tomorrow morning, as planned. Pleasure doing business with you.”
He had been talking to the client, then. Good. She waited until he had turned off the phone and put it away before coming completely into the room. “Is he gonna cough up more money to cover the cost of my slicks?” Her specially treated bodysuit, the most overpriced piece of gear she owned, had been torn into shreds by hellhound claws. While she had been able to seal up the cuts in her own flesh so that, although not healed, they already looked several days old, Talent weren’t very good at mending fabrics.
And the way the cabbie had acted when she got in his car, she was pretty sure word had already spread never to pick up anyone matching her description, ever again. Not that anyone could remember what she looked like, from day to day—that was part of the innate talent that made her a natural Retriever.
Her partner/business manager smiled the way that flashed dollar signs in the ether, and his almost-too-sharp nose practically quivered…okay, that last bit was her imagination. But if his nose did twitch, it would have been twitching now. The smell of money was in the water. “Enough to get you that fabric upgrade you were lusting after, even.”
“Oh, good.” No wonder he sounded so pleased with himself. Still, it was no more than she deserved. “Easy job” her aunt ’Tunia. The Retrieval had been a bitch and a half, way beyond what they’d been promised, and she’d earned every penny of that bonus. “And, partner, before you throw something out, patting yourself on the back? That’s twice now I’ve run into targets with ’hounds. Unpleasant, and unfun. Let’s make that a standard check in the background file from now on, okay?”
Sergei didn’t flush easily, but he did now. Background checks were, mostly, his responsibility, and her getting almost torn to bits by the massive, nasty-tempered hellhounds was not something either of them thought of with pleasure. At least this time there had only been one of the bruisers. Last time, she’d faced off against an entire pack, and she never ever wanted to even think about that again.
“Right. Sorry.” His pale brown eyes looked honestly remorseful, but he was a salesman with a heart of granite when it came to business. And, as she’d be the first to point out in any other situation: she’d gotten the job done, hadn’t she?
Only this time, he wasn’t the one who had faced down a slavering beast almost twice her size, with less brain and more teeth, she thought sourly. Her mood clearly communicated itself, and he added:
“The client was impressed—a lesser Retriever wouldn’t have finished the job.”
She waved her hands as though swatting flies away, then reached up and started undoing the pins holding her hair in a tight knot. She had cut a good six inches off, so it barely reached her shoulders, and her old French braid didn’t do the job anymore. “Yeah, yeah, I’m the best, that’s what he was paying for. Flattery will get you everywhere, but I’m still angry.” She wasn’t, exactly. But she had Right on her side in this argument, and wasn’t about to let it go. “You can start making it up to me by taking me out to dinner.”
He coughed, then shook his head. “Some other time, fine. Right now, you need to go take a shower and get ready.”
“What?” She looked at him, her righteousness overtaken by befuddlement.
He pinched the bridge of his nose, and didn’t look at her. “It’s Tuesday. Tuesday night?”
Wren had to backtrack a bit, then shook her head, coming up blank. Her head was still filled with the specifics of the Retrieval. “What?”
He didn’t even bother sighing, a decade of experience with her having trained him to lower standards. “You ran late on this job. We’re supposed to be uptown at the Cosa meeting in—” he checked his watch “—ninety minutes.”
Wren blinked, then made an explosive gesture with both of her hands. That damned meeting!
“We can always cancel…”
Wren didn’t even bother responding to that as she ran back to the bathroom, shedding the remains of her once-sleek black working slicks in the hallway as she went. There had been a time when she’d had weeks off between gigs. Time to hit the gym, go shopping, hang out, sleep in…
“Get me something to wear!” she shouted back over her shoulder, even as she was turning the shower on. “And more coffee! I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”
She didn’t wait for the water to run to her usual heating standards before she was soaping up her hair, muttering to herself. This meeting had been scheduled two weeks ago; circled in red, for God’s sake, on the calendar in her office. And she still managed to forget about it, totally out of her head like it never existed. That wasn’t like her. Not at all.
This job had come on the heels of another one, a museum snatch-and-grab, and if she hadn’t been so twitchy from the dry spell of the summer, she would have had Sergei turn it down. Her preference was to take downtime between jobs, recover and rest. But being blacklisted by the Mage Council last year had made her aware of how fine the line between “comfort” and “concern” was, financially. And in the crush of all that, she’d forgotten—clean-wiped it off her slate—that she had other obligations.
Stupid meeting. Stupid, essential meeting.
She heard the door open and close, the steam in the bathroom cooling slightly. The click of ceramic on tile was Sergei placing the mug of coffee on the counter; the swish of fabric was him taking the towel off the towel bar, and the silence that followed was him standing there, towel in hand, waiting for her to finish up and get out.
She tilted her head back into the hot water one last time, even though the soap was totally rinsed by now, and let her skin soak up a little more warmth before reaching down to turn off the flow.
“Dry first, then coffee,” Sergei said, his hand reaching around the shower curtain to give her the towel.
She took it, not even bothering to growl. So long as the coffee was waiting for her, she’d be okay.
Truth was, she’d wanted to forget about this other obligation. She’d wanted it to not exist. She had wanted the entire scenario—Mage Council, her fellow lonejacks, the fatae, hate groups, political backstabbing, murders and suspected murders—to all disappear into a bad dream, so that she was just Wren Valere, thief-for-hire and girl-about-town. She had wanted time to actually sit down and figure out where her relationship with her partner was going, now that they’d added sex to the list of options. She’d wanted time to sit at a coffee shop, drink way too much café americano, and gossip about nothing more important or dangerous than rent or fare increases or what fatae breed was pissing off what other fatae breed this week.
What she wanted, and what she was getting these days, had a really annoying gap between them. There had to be somewhere to lodge a complaint….
“Valere.” Sergei didn’t quite tap his watch, but the implication was clear in his voice. Ninety minutes included travel time from her apartment in the Village up to the meeting site in midtown, and with their luck, every minute she lingered was another minute the trains would probably be delayed.
“Yeah, yeah.” She wrapped the towel around her and went into the bedroom to get dressed.
The trains behaved, for once, and they actually made it to the designated meeting place before anyone else except Michaela. The lonejack representative had picked the short straw and had to attend this meeting, while the other three were off doing God knew what. Four representatives—three original and a replacement for the late, unlamented turncoat Stephanie—for the four sections of lonejack life in the Metro NY area: city-dwellers, NJ/NY/PA commuters, Connecticut, and the gypsy population, the lonejacks who didn’t have a fixed address. Wren had never realized that there were enough gypsies to warrant their own representative, before all of this, but the general disdain for authority that made a Talent become a lonejack seemed to extend to paying rent and taxes, too. Reportedly, there was a family that lived out of a huge-ass, stripped-down RV, using the rubber wheels as insulation from the kids’ occasionally misdirected current. Wren still wasn’t going to believe that until she saw it, but she didn’t doubt the probability of it, now.
Michaela was the gypsy’s representative, but today she spoke for the entire lonejack community. She was seated in a chair off in one corner, clearly meditating when they came in. Wren and Sergei took their place at the table without disturbing her.
Wren sat down gingerly in her chair, trying to determine if she could sit all the way back and still have her feet touch the floor. She couldn’t. As usual, she had the choice to either be comfortable, or feel like a ten-year-old swinging her legs under the table.
All right, so five-foot-nothing was short, even for women, but it annoyed her nonetheless. She wasn’t about to get on her hands and knees in order to see if the chair’s height could be adjusted, though. With her luck, she’d be halfway under the table the moment the others walked in, and that was no way to create a serious impression.
Instead she continued the discussion they had begun on the ride up from her apartment. “The real problem is there are too many civilians in the City.”
Sergei Didier leaned back in his own chair and raised one extremely well-manicured eyebrow in a move his partner had been trying to achieve for years. “And by civilians you mean…?”
“Humans. Non-Talents. All right, yeah, Nulls. Okay?” Wren tapped her fingers on the table in front of her in irritation. “Something’s going to blow, and it’s going to blow soon, and there are too many…God, what’s the term…?”
“Incidental casualties. Collateral.”
“Right.” Wren tried again to get comfortable, then gave up and pushed away from the table a little so that she could slump. It didn’t look professional, but it hurt her calves a lot less. She looked around the room—gray flannel wallpaper and subdued lighting—and then stared down at her booted toes, wondering if she shouldn’t have worn something dressier than slacks and a sweater. Even if the weather outside was threatening to turn ugly with more snow. No. Nowhere in any of the small print did it say that she had to wear a skirt. Or, God help her, a suit. Sergei had picked this out for her, and he was way more of a stickler for appropriate clothing, so she was okay. Or maybe he just knew they didn’t have time for a fight over pantyhose. Not that she actually owned any.
“Not to mention,” she went on a little bitterly, “several thousand fatae who, for whatever reason of stupidity have no idea what’s going on.”
“I thought the Quad was taking care of that?” he said, clearly taken aback by that intelligence. “Wasn’t that the entire idea, that they would pass word along, whatever was happening, whenever?”
Since her hair was, for once, actually coiled neatly at the back of her head and gelled into submission, she settled for slapping the table one last time, rather than running her fingers through her hair, then looked up at her companion. Sergei looked every inch the well-heeled businessperson: expensive white button-down shirt tucked into dark gray wool slacks, a just-ever-so-slightly-artsy tie knotted under his collar, and his hair trimmed back in a fashionable cut that had obviously been rumpled more than once by an exasperated hand raking through it, but still looked good. Clearly, his hair product was better than hers.
She snorted at Sergei’s comment. Now and again she forgot how little he knew about that side of her life. “What, you think humans have the lock on Don’t Know, Don’t Care? Half of the fatae are convinced it’s a human plot, anyway, and the Quad’s just a tool being used to herd them to their doom, etc. etc. grassy knoll, bleat bleat bleat.”
The Quad were the four fatae—nonhuman—representatives for the area, each with their own constituency to match the four lonejack leaders. Wags within the Cosa quickly started using “the Double-Quad” when referring to both sets of leaders—and it was just as often “that damned Double-Quad.”
Wren still marveled not only that the fatae had managed to elect leaders without too much obvious politicking among the hundreds of breeds, but that in the months since, nobody had—to the best of her knowledge—tried to change horses midstream. They were trusting their chosen leaders.
Trust. What a simple word, Wren thought, not for the first time. What a deceptively simple, shrapnel-laden word it was. And how little of it there was to go around, even on a good day.
There hadn’t been many good days in Manhattan, lately.
In the past year, factions had formed, gotten paranoid, and turned against each other; all fueled, as far as anyone could tell, by the double-edged sword of antifatae thugs killing anything even vaguely nonhuman, and the Mage Council trying to strong-arm lonejacks, unaffiliates, into joining their lockstep union. It had all gotten too bloody to allow. Hence, the Quad, and the Double-Quad. And hence, this meeting, where all sides were going to put cards on table, eggs in basket, pick your cliché.
“Okay, good point,” he allowed. “So what do we do about it?”
Wren slumped even further. “I haven’t a goddamned clue. All depends on what happens here.”
“Here” was a rented conference room, complete with a huge fake mahogany table, a whiteboard, pads of paper and pens, and a sideboard filled with pastries and large urns of coffee. All the teleconferencing materials typical to such rooms had been removed prior to the meeting time. Wren approved whoever had thought of that, and then wondered uneasily if that was supposed to have been her job. Nobody had ever been able to tell her exactly what she was supposed to be doing as the so-called lonejack advisor, other than “observing and advising” the lonejack leaders.
They had wanted her to be one of the leaders, back when this all started. Only the fact that she had become a Retriever, partially because people consistently and completely overlooked her, had saved her from that fate: tough to follow a leader nobody could remember seeing!
She had never been so damn grateful for that particular quirk of Talent and genetics before.
Michaela finished her meditation, and quietly moved her chair back to the table, looking over last-minute notes and pretending not to hear anything Sergei and Wren were saying to each other. The lonejack representative was dressed in her usual posthippie, protogypsy style, only now the skirt and soft, flowing top were made of a thick, nubby, warm-looking material, rather than the silks and gauzes she favored in the summer, and her feet were encased in practical boots. She should have looked ridiculous, sitting in that corporate setting. Instead, she looked cool, confident, and powerful. All of which she was, and then some. Bart, Rick, and Susan, the other three members, were all strong Talent, and with other skills that made them the right choice to speak for their respective areas, but Michaela could outpower them, on sheer current.
She also kept her temper better than any of them, which was the true reason she was in the room today, and they weren’t. There was no such thing as a fair straw-pull among Talent.
“I mean it, Sergei,” Wren went on. “Things are way too tense right now. Everyone’s walking cross-eyed and pigeon-toed from trying to predict the next move.”
Manhattan was a huge city, even if it didn’t technically qualify as more than a borough. It was also a very small island, especially when filled with paranoid paranormals.
Sergei had nothing to say in response to her words, and so they sat in silence while his outrageously expensive gold watch ticked off another minute, then another, and the door to the conference room opened to allow two more humans to walk in.
“Ayexi. Jordan.” Wren rose to meet them. Sergei stayed seated until she kicked him in the shins, at which point he rose, but remained silent.
“Valere.” The dark-haired, middle-aged man named Jordan didn’t seem happy to see her, but the other, a slight, almost frail-looking man in his eighties, came forward with a delighted smile on his face. “My dear, my dear. Ah, you look so well. John would be so proud of you.”
“Neezer would kick my ass for getting conned into this,” Wren retorted, kissing both offered cheeks, European-style, and receiving the same in turn from the elderly Talent. “And you. Gone all Council. The shame!”
Ayexi had been her mentor John Ebeneezer’s mentor more than four decades earlier. Lines of mentoring were the closest thing Talents had to a family tree, and although she had not seen Ayexi since she was a teenager, and then only infrequently, the bonds remained strong.
“What can I say? The body grows old and weak. The health-care benefits begin to appeal.”
“They bought you, you mean.”
“And paid very well for the privilege, I assure you.” His gray eyes twinkled, and Wren shook her head.
It was impossible to be angry at Ayexi. He simply deflected negative energy, and returned only good humor. It was probably the only reason he was still alive, considering the trouble he used to get into. Neezer used to say that the mischief gene had clearly skipped a generation, as he—the middle generation—was so well-behaved.
Neezer was also the only one who had wizzed, who had been overwhelmed by his current and driven mad by it. Someday, when she actually had some downtime, she might do a little research into that fact. Or not.
“Ayexi, my partner, Sergei Didier.”
For all that Sergei had partnered with her for more than a decade now, he still didn’t know most of the major players, not even on their own team. Hell, being honest, Wren didn’t know most of them, either. Just the ones she had used, or had used her at some point.
