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The frustration of the past few months, the anger building up for the past year, rolled like the tide against her shores, and she was so very tired of holding it back, of not being able to vent her emotions on the world that kept trying to slap her down.
Control, she told herself. Control. But her core was suspended in black tar, and current raged overhead and underfoot, and blood ran like the river tides. She could not feel anything other than that, oblivious to the outside world, not caring what was being done to her body as she fought for control she wasn’t sure she even wanted, any more.
The third man spoke then, finally, breaking her out of her mental prison. “I’ll kill both of you, you touch that thing.” It didn’t sound like he was bluffing.
“What, you’re trying to protect it?”
There was a snick of a knife, and George’s fingers stopped for an instant.
“Don’t be even more of a moron than you have to be. You’re human. It’s not. Don’t sully yourself.”
“You’d kill him? For that?” The second man, incredulous.
It’s not human. Three on one. They’re armed. Thou shalt not kill. ‘The last one we popped.’
A memory: of bodies facedown and faceup, sprawled in their own blood, pools of black on dirty snow. Entrails, shit, and teargas making her gasp against tears. Ohm’s bane, flickering dark red against the dawn sky, up and down the skyward-arching form of the Brooklyn Bridge. A long black car, driving away. Sergei’s face, stone and sadness.
Inside, Wren felt something give way; a brick wall under assault, an earthen ditch crumbling. She grabbed for the pieces, held it together. But it was slipping under her fingertips.
“Aid!” An involuntary blast of streaky purple current like a signal flare shot into the ether, the agreed-upon signal of the Truce Patrol, whatever was left of it. “Aid and assistance down here! Vigilantes!”
And then she was falling, falling into the tar, falling into the darkness where even current did not shine.
She had asked for help. She wasn’t going to wait around for it.
It was a simple matter—almost instinctive—to reach for the proper fugue state. Once, she would have had to do deep breathing, ground and center, concentrate. During the past year, Wren Valere had used her current more on a daily basis in order to survive, to protect those around her, than she used to call up in a week’s time, even including jobs. She had stretched and grown, almost unknowing; so much so that now she simply let go and fell down into her core.
The first awareness was always the sound. Dry slithering, and hissing. Paper-against-spark, the insentient patience of current, coiling and recoiling in an endless loop.
Next were the colors. She opened her not-eyes and colors consumed her. Dark and scarlet reds and royal-blues, dark greens and iridescent purples, streaks of gold and silver, and underneath it all the dark, dark muscled bodies of a color she had never been able to name.
And then the warmth that seeped into her bones. Stone-warmth, like lava rising from the gut of the earth. It called, seduced, tried to make her give in, relax, come down into the pit and lose her way.
The moment she did that, the current would destroy her. Self-control was everything in the core.
Come to me, she told it. Not a single thread, the way she normally did, or even a braiding, but all of it. It surged up in response to her call, her will easily overpowering them. Sparking and sizzling into her veins, bloating her with power. Not you, she said to the dark, dark current, sticky like tar.
???!!?
Not you, she repeated. She didn’t know why, but something deeper even than her core warned her away from it, denied it access.
Dimly she was aware of her body shoved forward, her pants around her thighs. Hands gripping her wrists, a knee between her shoulder blades. The snap of latex. She almost laughed. They thought it would get that far?
“For God’s sake, I’ll buy you a whore. I’ll buy you two.” The third man, again. “Just kill it already. Once it’s dead, its familiar will be unprotected, and we can finish the job.”
P.B.? Her thoughts fluttered. P.B.!
The demon could protect itself. That wasn’t the point. She hadn’t been thorough enough vetting this job, hadn’t been careful enough, and now they thought, these pitiful, rubber-suited Nulls thought they would clear the board, with their flick-knives, their dicks, and their self-righteous bigotry?
They thought they were better than her, because they could not feel the current in everything around them?
The smell of shit and tear gas filled her nostrils again, and she breathed it in, deep. Her attention off of it for that split second, the black thread in her core rounded in on itself, and no longer tar but black lava, struck upward, straight into her spine.
Wren almost laughed as the full impact of her core surged through her, crackling and snarling. No longer snakes, not serpents, but dragons now, full-winged and fire-breathing and deadly to behold.
They erupted from her, soaring free and high. Black opal-bodied, all the colors of the universe contained within, the hot sludge of their blood thrumming like a bass drum. Thunderheads formed around them, great anvils of Thor, and their wings smashed them, drank them in, filled their roars with the sound of thunder and the cold buffeting rain. Tangled and soaked, Wren opened her throat and screamed with them, her arms thrown into the air. The current jumping from them to her and then back again until welts formed on her skin, creating a pattern of diamond scales.
Somewhere, in some small corner that was still Wren, she was screaming for a different reason. But it was a small, thin voice, and impossible to hear. Possible to ignore, in the orgasmic fury of the storm, that one whisper of dissent: of denial, of fear. Of sanity.
Then a sudden downward spiral, shooting back toward earth, not so much picking up speed as becoming speed, a lightning bolt of a thousand dragons of unheavenly ire. The hit was better than speed, was better than sex, was better than anything she had ever felt before, and her body convulsed around the sensation, throwing her heels over head into a blast of colorless current that cut off her breath and dropped her into unconsciousness.
three
*Wren?*
It was quiet where she was, quiet and comfortable, and she resented the voice for disturbing her. “G’way,” she told it, batting a mental hand at the sound, like a pesky moth fluttering in her face.
*Wren?* The moth was more urgent now, refusing to be batted.
She murmured something rude, feeling lazy and sluggish. Also fried. So fried she was pretty sure her hair would crackle if she touched it. As though the thought forced the movement, her fingers twitched slightly.
They were wet.
No, they were holding something wet.
*Wren!*
That woke her up, the near-frantic shout into her brain. Not a moth any more but a hornet’s sting.
She identified the voice, uncertainly, as not being her own. A ping, from not so very far away. Why were they yelling?
*Yeah,* she responded, just trying to get the voice to stop shouting.
*We heard you! Are you okay? I’m on my way!* The nonverbal words carried a sense of urgency, of fear, of forces being marshaled and ready to break down the door, wherever the door might be.
*Wha?* Confusion, then memory, coming back to her, a trickle at a time. She had been on a job. Attacked, taken out by three vigilante goons. Idiots. They were going to rape her, rape and kill her, and then—
She sat up, and looked down at her hand.
Ten minutes later, she was huddled against the stairs, her gut empty and her throat aching from the continuous dry retching. The wide tunnel floor in front of her was strewn with flesh and bones, scorched to black with current. The remains of three humans, obliterated.
Her hand, still clenching the sticky strands of something she didn’t want to identify, and couldn’t bring herself to wipe off.
*Wren!* That voice, screaming now inside her, an entire nest of hornets.
There was barely enough control left in her to grab onto that scream, send it back on a quieter note. *It’s over. I’m…okay.*
*You sure?* Whoever this Talent was, he didn’t sound convinced.
No. She wasn’t okay. She wasn’t ever going to be okay. The stickiness itched, and she finally wiped her hand against the wall, trying to scrape it off her skin.
*Yeah. I’m good. Thanks.*
She cut the connection, and sat there in blessed silence. Until the silence started to talk back.
You did what you had to do. A seductive whisper of justification, of reassurance. She was one of the good guys, relatively speaking. They had tried to hurt her, and she had struck back. Nobody could blame her. Nobody would.
Thou shalt not kill. Wren had never been much for religion, not even the remarkably mild and mellow Protestant God she had been raised with, but certain things hit hard when you were a kid, and stuck. Thou shalt not steal was right out, and she coveted and blasphemed on a regular basis, without any guilt whatsoever. Ancient commandments should not haunt her, not now.
She wasn’t to blame. It had been a setup. She didn’t know why she was so certain of it, but she was. She had walked into a trap. No matter if the job was real or not, nobody had been here, nobody had come when she—had she made any noise? How long had it taken? No way of knowing. Nobody came. They, whoever they were, had targeted her, maybe seen her as a weak spot in the defense—
Thou shalt not kill.
Wren’s fingers closed into fists, her close-cut nails digging into the flesh of her palms. She had killed before. Had used current…
Chrome and blood. Exhaustion, pain: the aftermath of their first, disastrous face-off with the vigilantes. Plastic cups and white plates, and blood and gore and…
She shut the memory down, locking it back in its box. Stephanie. The lonejack turncoat, who had sold them out to KimAnn Howe and the local Council. Wren had been part of the group that stopped her…stopped her with deadly force. But she had been part of a whole, then. A consensus, if hastily and wordlessly achieved. Her hand had been on the current that eradicated the woman, but other hands had been laid upon hers, the decision to use force spread out among many minds…
This time, she had no one else to turn to, no one to share responsibility. Wren shook her head, and again scraped her palm against the wall, focusing on the cool texture underneath her skin.
But the coldness in her gut wouldn’t go away, nor would the fact that worse, far worse and far more damning, this time, she hadn’t used current. Current had used her. Her fear, her rage, her exhaustion. She had failed, every inch of all of her training, and she had failed. It had escaped the core, escaped control, and thrown her up into it.
Thrown her into…She had…oh God.
Her hand fisted against the wall, and her face squeezed together in a pained grimace.
What she had done, what she had almost become, clogged her brain and stopped her heart for a godforsaken moment. Hysteria threatened, the waves becoming a tsunami that threatened to drag her under.
Don’t go there. Don’t think about it. Don’t…
Mental doors slammed, control reasserted itself, walling off even the faintest trace of the awful glory. And a chant from her brain to every single cell of her body: Don’t ever think about it, don’t ever remember it, don’t ever linger on it, or you will go insane.
Again.
Her fist opened, her face relaxed, and Wren let her now-clean, if stained, hand fall away from the wall. She reached down and pulled her pants back up, zipping and buttoning the fly. Her leather jacket had vomit stains on it, and she absently made plans to drop it off for dry-cleaning. Current could clean it up but…
No current. Not right now.
She had murdered three people.
Thou shalt not kill.
She could have held them off without killing them. She had done it before. Even three on one. She had held off hellhounds. Talked down revenge-driven ghosts. Captured malicious, evil sentient boogums and ancient bansidhes.
These were just three Nulls. Three humans. She could have stopped them some other way. There had to have been some other way.
Tears soaked her cheeks, but inside, inside she was sere and dry. Inside, without thought, something hardened within her.
It’s not human. Kill it.
The memory of bodies strewn over the length of the Brooklyn Bridge.
A small winged Fatae, torn to pieces by a dog while its owner urged it on.
Michaela, her gypsy colors muted, lying still and motionless in a bed, white sheets pulled up around her. “She’s gone too deep. She won’t ever wake up again. She doesn’t want to wake up again.”
Death. All around her, death and hurt, and it was too much. She didn’t have anywhere to put it any more.
Wren closed her eyes and counted to ten. When she opened them again, nothing had changed. “No more. No more.” She wasn’t sure if she was asking the universe, or telling it. She was pretty sure, either way, that it wasn’t listening.
Fine. Whatever.
She turned and looked at the debris, and flicked the fingers of her left hand at it, almost negligently. The dead man’s skin sizzled and dissolved, the bones aged into dust, the blood dried to an antique stain. All gone, bye-bye.
The flask. Now get the flask. Always finish the job. Sergei’s mantra. Her mantra.
Something cold and wet, like fog, settled over her, filling in the dry desert places inside her. It was cold, but it kept her warm, replaced what had been taken. “No. Screw that. There’s another job I have to finish, first.”
P.B. was exhausted. There was no reason for it; he’d just been puttering around the apartment, playing with color swatches of paint and fabric, wondering what Wren’s reaction would be if she came home and found her apartment-white walls painted Victorian Mint, or Honeybear Brown. A terrifying thought, but hardly an exhausting one. And yet, all he wanted to do right now was crawl onto his cot in the office, and take a nap.
He resisted, standing in the hallway and doing stretches, feeling his thick muscles creak and complain while he worked them. His body was not designed for yoga, but it seemed to do the trick: he was still tired, but it wasn’t quite so overwhelming.
The delicate, hand-painted fabric on the wall in front of him—a gift from their friend Shig, a Japanese businessbeing—stood out like a sore thumb. Or, more accurately, it stood out like a perfectly formed thumb on a gnarled, battered hand. P.B. had asked Wren once why she never actually bothered to do anything about her apartment, and she had simply shrugged. How a woman partnered to an art dealer could be so blasé about home decoration P.B. did not understand, and had threatened more than once to call an intervention on her design sense.
Their most recent discussion—too much to call it an argument—had been two nights before, and she had finally told him to do what he wanted, so long as he left her alone on the subject already. He had barely waited until she was out of the apartment this morning before pulling out the paint and fabric swatches. But he hadn’t gotten beyond her office when the exhaustion hit.
Once he felt confident that he wasn’t going to collapse in a pile, P.B. went back into the kitchen and pulled a soda out of the fridge. Diet, of course—didn’t Valere know those things were going to kill her?—and downed it in one long gulp. Only after he had crushed the now-empty can in his paw did he realize that it was caffeine-free.
“Christ, woman, what’s the point?”
He paused, feeling something shift, even as he spoke her name.
“Valere? Wren?”
Silence, not unexpected, answered him.
If he really needed to, he could reach her; they had shared enough of a connection the times she had grounded in him that he could find her, anywhere, if need be. He considered it, then shook his head. Probably his imagination, that shift. She should be well into the job by now, whatever it was. She’d only spent a day preparing for it, so it wasn’t a big deal. There was no need to be concerned. And if she ran into any real trouble outside that, she could handle herself. There was no need for him to worry.
That decided and put to rest, there was no reason at all for the sound of a high-pitched buzzer blasting through the apartment to send him a foot straight into the air.
“What the hell?”
The intercom. That’s all it was. Sergei had gotten it fixed, but they never used it: if anyone wanted in, they could ping, or climb up the fire escape, the way he did.
Except Wren wasn’t here, and Bonnie’d gone to work, so nobody was around to hear a ping, you idiot, he told himself, going to the door. Which meant that whoever was out there knew it was just him in the apartment, and didn’t feel like climbing the fire escape to gain access.
“All right, all right, hold your horses, I’m coming,” he grumbled, trying to remember where the intercom controls were.
