“That’s not a word.”
“It is now. Anyway, I figured if he was scared it was because he suspected what the kid could do and didn’t know what it was, and if it was he was stupid it was just ’cause he hadn’t had the chance to learn better.”
“Wren. Point?”
He ruined all the fun, sometimes. “I put a spell on him. Not anything harsh,” she rushed to reassure her partner. “Sort of the type Neezer used to use.” Just the mention of his name made her flinch inwardly, but she kept it all inside. “Like Neezer used to suggest to a kid that he could too pass the test, if he only studied? I suggested that the kid would be useful to have around, as he grew into his skills. That maybe keeping him home and safe was in Dad’s and kid’s best interests.”
She could see her partner relax a little at that. Her mentor had been an amazingly kind and moral man—far more so than either of them ended up being—so anything he did passed the uh-oh test.
The truth wasn’t quite so clean; that was what Wren had intended to do, but as seemed to happen more and more often, her current-use had more oomph than expected. Instead of a suggestion, she had planted a compulsion.
Neezer would not have approved.
She was spared further questioning by the sound of her partner’s cell phone ringing. He put his almost-empty cup down on the table and, with an apologetic shrug in her direction, removed the phone from his pocket. Normally he turned the electronics off when he was going to be around Talent—either he had turned it back on after their meeting without her noticing, or he was slipping and had forgotten to turn it off in the first place. The first was bad on her; the second was bad on him.
“Didier,” he said crisply, then his entire body language changed. Alerted, Wren sat up in her own chair, dropping her ice-cream cone down into his cup for possible fast movement.
“What happened? Slow down. Damn it, man, in English, I don’t speak German! Dutch, whatever.”
He reached out and patted her on the shoulder; whatever was happening on the other end of the phone wasn’t going to require immediate fight-or-flight, apparently.
“Right, yeah, she’s with me. You’re at her apartment? All right. We’ll meet you there.”
P.B. Something had happened to P.B. Something had happened to P.B. and the demon had called Sergei, not her.
Kid and condo crisis both forgotten, Wren had tossed the remaining ice cream into the trash, grabbed her bag and was ready to go before Sergei had the chance to snap the cell phone closed and put it back into his pocket.
“He’s okay,” he said, reassuring her with words and a hand back on her shoulder. “No blood, no fire. It’s only that something’s gotten him spooked.”
She wasn’t reassured, and from the tightness around his eyes and mouth, neither was Sergei, despite his words. The demon was not the type to spook easily; even when she was down and bleeding, he was the one who kept calm and focused. More, he dealt with his own shit; he did not bring it to someone else.
He was bringing it, now. Specifically, he was bringing it to Sergei, a Null. A Null with experience in mayhem and bloodshed.
They took a cab home back into the city, and damn the expense.
The very first session, months ago, the digging had begun.
“You’ve been together for a very long time.”
Understatement. He had met her when he was on his last assignment for the Silence, already negotiating his exit. Someone in the organization had taken that exit badly, and tampered with his car with deadly intent.
She, still a teenager, merely a bystander, had used current to save his ass, not knowing anything other than he was a stranger in danger. He had tumbled out of the wrecked car headfirst, dazed and confused, and seen her, and…and he had seen potential dollar signs of a profitable partnership. Nothing more. Not for a few years, anyway.
“Not really. Not that way. We were partners first, before the sex.”
“That doesn’t count as being together? Was that relationship any less intense for being platonic?”
A valid point, and one he sometimes forgot, now. “No. If I screwed something up, she could die, or get caught. That made for intensity. She had to trust me entirely.”
“And she did.”
“She did. She doesn’t anymore.”
“Are you sure about that?” A pause, to let the question float between them. “She let you back in, opened the door back to her life, to the Cosa. That would seem to indicate at least a certain level of trust, wouldn’t it?”
It was a trick question. He knew it was. He just couldn’t figure out what the trick was.
seven
P.B. might have been rattled, according to Sergei, but he was still P.B.—always hungry. By the time they arrived, the cabbie having taken one look at Wren’s face and taken the “I know you’re locals” route directly from point A to point B without arguing about the cost of going through the Tunnel, the entire apartment smelled of Chinese spices and the nutty fragrance of brown rice: the demon had taken the time to stop by Noodles and order dinner to go. Even after the ice cream, and with her stomach tied in knots from nerves, the moment the smells hit Wren’s taste buds, she was salivating. She supposed everyone had their own addiction. Hers was Chinese food. Especially good Chinese food, and Noodles was the best in town.
P.B. knew that it was her weakness. She was immediately suspicious and expecting the worst from him.
“I told them to put it on your tab,” the demon said, busily unpacking cartons onto plates.
“You have a tab?” Sergei asked her, both eyebrows rising in astonishment.
“I guess I do now,” she said, and then turned to P.B., the difference between her six-foot-plus partner and the four-foot demon giving her a crick in her neck once again. She supposed someone better at interrogation or someone more sympathetic would ease into the conversation, but she wasn’t either of those people. “Demon. What’s going on? You okay? What’s wrong?” Oh, God, she sounded like her mother. The urge to run her hands over his body just as you’d examine a dog for injuries was checked, mainly because she wasn’t sure she’d pull back an intact hand if she tried it.
“Not yet.” The demon wasn’t a chattermouth at the best of times, and right now, despite his earlier urgency on the phone with Sergei, he seemed particularly reluctant to speak. Was he regretting saying anything? Or was what he had to say that bad, or that painful? Wren watched him move food to the plates, not missing the way his thick white fur, normally carefully washed and groomed, looked matted and disheveled in places, or the fact that one claw on his left hand was splintered, as though he had been chewing on it.
Sergei was right, the demon had been spooked. And now he was trying to butter her up for something. That was very much not normal; P.B. didn’t butter up any more than she did. When he did have something to say, he was as blunt in attack as the animal he got his nickname from.
“Food first,” P.B. said, noticing her evaluation and turning away from it, physically and emotionally. “Crisis later.”
That, at least, was classic P.B. He and her mother had a lot in common, not that she would ever tell either one of them that.
You’re keeping stuff to yourself, too. Put down that stone and step away from the glass house, Valere.
The food dishes were quickly spread out on the low coffee table in the main room, the rice dumped into one large bowl and placed in the middle so everyone could reach it. Wren and the demon seated themselves cross-legged by the table, while Sergei, out of deference to his much longer legs, pulled over the dark gray cloth hassock and sat on that. He should have looked foolish, balancing a plate on one knee and chopsticks in his hand, dressed in slacks and a shirt and tie, but he didn’t. She wasn’t sure her partner could ever look foolish, and she had seen him in conditions that would have devastated more flappable mortals.
Kung pao chicken for her, shrimp in garlic sauce for P.B. and hot ginger beef for Sergei. Not that anyone’s chopsticks stayed on their own
plates: Chinese food got shared around, in this apartment.
Wren moved the rice toward her to scoop up the last bit, and was struck by the sight of three small objects that had been half-hidden behind the bowl. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; where there was Chinese food, there were fortune cookies. And when the food came from Noodles, then the fortune cookies were impossible to avoid. She knew, she had tried: the Seer had merely hunted her down on a street corner and handed her the cookie.
She wondered if P.B. had gone to Noodles out of habit, if he really was trying to butter her up, or if he was actually looking for specific guidance via fortune cookie. It wouldn’t be like him, but then again, neither was this.
“I got a letter today,” P.B. said finally, and placed the item in question on the table. Wren’s hands were occupied with her chopsticks, so it was Sergei, who was finished eating, who put down his plate and picked up the letter. It was in a heavy-looking, cream-colored envelope, the kind that fancy stationery stores sell, not the five-hundred-a-box kind Wren used. There were a couple of interesting-looking stamps on it, not ones she recognized, and it was battered enough to have come through the Pony Express, not modern airmail.
Sergei reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his glasses, settling them on his nose in order to read better, and investigated the writing on the front of the envelope. Both eyebrows went up again, and he looked at P.B.
“Faas…Faasradberaht?”
“Yes.” The demon didn’t sound thrilled. “That really is my name.”
Wren giggled, despite the apparent seriousness of the moment. She had been the one to give the demon his nickname, years back. They had only just met, in less than auspicious circumstances, outside a church she was casing for a job. A Null, coming out of the rectory and catching sight of the short, white-furred, black-clawed, red-eyed entity, had screeched out to whomever might be listening, “Dear God, it’s a demon!” Wren, being the only person actually within listening distance at the time, had been unable to resist, retorting, “No, it’s a damned polar bear.”
The name stuck, and for cause: his given name was unpronounceable, in her opinion, no matter the good-faith effort her partner made with it.
But the fact that it was used on this letter meant that whoever had sent it had known him for a long time, and not recently, because nobody in Manhattan had used anything other than “P.B.” in over a decade now, if they’d ever even heard another name.
As far as she knew, anyway. P.B. might qualify as her best friend, and they might be bonded now in a way she didn’t quite understand—and neither, she suspected, did he—but he didn’t tell her everything, not by a long shot.
Sergei opened the envelope and pulled out a single sheet the same weight and color as the envelope. Real stationery, the kind you used for a thank-you note, or a love letter. Somehow, Wren didn’t think it was either of those things. Although, again, he didn’t tell her everything.
“It’s…What language is this?” Sergei asked. “It looks like German, but it’s not—Dutch?”
“Yes. Mostly.”
That must have been what P.B. had been speaking before, on the phone when Sergei had to remind him to use English. She had always known that P.B. was an immigrant, although one that had arrived on American shores long before she had been born. She hadn’t asked much about his life before they met, and he had volunteered little.
Clearly they were about to learn more. And it wasn’t going to be good.
P.B. took the letter back, the matte black claws of his paw gentle with the delicate material. Those paws had slapped at humans, drawn blood and ripped skin. They had also wiped her forehead when she had a fever, held her hand when she woke from bad dreams, and fought with her over the last remaining sparerib in the take-out box.
He was demon. It meant less and more than most people knew, and Wren owed him a debt of service that could not be repaid except in kind.
She could touch the letter, use current to find out who had written it, if not why. But this was P.B.’s story. He would tell it, as he chose to, and as much or little as he chose. And whatever he needed from her, she would give. It had become that simple between them.
“It is a letter from one of my…brothers, for lack of a better word,” he began, looking down at his plate of food as he spoke. “A brother I never knew I had—I’ve never met him, and I don’t know how he found me, except there are not so many of us still around that news would be so hard to find, if you know where to look.” He paused, his snout wrinkling in an expression of annoyance. “I used to be better about keeping my head down and staying low-profile. You’ve been bad for me, you two.”
Wren could have argued the same about him, for her, but kept silent.
“This letter…he asks about certain papers, documents that he suspected might be in my keeping. There was a time I was…favored by our creator, and it was thought I might have…that when the old man died, I might have taken his files with me.”
“You didn’t.” Sergei sounded pretty sure of that.
“No. I took nothing from him.” The demon’s eyes closed, heavy lids hiding those dark red eyes from sight, then he opened them again and shook his head. “Nothing physical, anyway.”
“So what’s the problem?” There was a story there, too, and not one with a good ending, but it could wait until the immediate stuff was dealt with.
“My brother says, there have been…inquiries about these papers. By humans. It is subtle, in his wording, but I think…I think that this letter was written under duress. That one or more of these humans forced him to find me, to contact me.”
“That’s never good,” Sergei said, and Wren nodded her head in agreement. No two demons looked alike, except for the dark blood-red eyes that marked their breed, but none of them were lightweights in any sense of the word. Coercion of a demon meant heavy guns, not flowers and candlelight. Chasing the last bit of shrimp around on her plate suddenly lost its appeal, and she put plate and chopsticks down.
“By humans, I assume that he means Talent?” she asked.
“Most likely,” P.B. agreed. “A normal human…these papers would not mean anything to them, except as an oddity, a fantasy. Only ones with magic in their system would be able to use them.”
“What sort of papers, P.B.?” Even as Wren asked, she thought, maybe, that she already knew.
Wren had learned, the hard and personal way, the secret demon kept from the rest of the Cosa Nostradamus. The reason why they kept it secret: to protect themselves from slavery—or worse.
“Papers that detailed…how we were created. And why.”
Yeah. That had been what she was afraid of.
“Created.” Sergei looked from one to the other of them, clearly aware there was a loop that he had been left out of, and not sure where to begin, or how. “So it’s true, you’re not…”
“Natural?” the demon asked.
Sergei let out a bark of laughter. “After everything we’ve been through, ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ are pretty much useless as descriptors, unless you add ‘relatively’ in front of them. I was going to say that you’re not actually a demon, it’s just a name someone stuck on your kind?” He caught the look Wren gave him, and shrugged. “I’m still—relatively speaking—new to the Cosa and the entire concept of Fatae, remember?” They had been working together for more than eleven years now, since Wren was a teenager, and she thought that would have been long enough to figure things out. Then again, before they had partnered up, he had known only that Talents existed, not that there was an entire society, human and not-human, with its own cultures and histories.
As usual, he knew where her thoughts were going. “Wrenlet, ‘why are you called a demon?’ is not the kind of thing you walk up to someone and ask. Not without looking for a fight, anyway.”
True. Even she didn’t know all the breeds of Fatae that were living in New York City, much less those hiding in pockets and enclaves outside the United States.
P.B.
shrugged, a tight-muscled little jerk. “I’m as much a demon as the Angeli are angelic.” That was to say, not at all. The Angeli were tall, good-looking and winged—and total arrogant, species-centric bastards, as a rule. “Most of the names groups have for themselves translate to ‘the true people’ or something, anyway,” P.B. went on. “At least we never had a chance to become egotistical enough to think we were part of God’s master plan. There was always someone there ready to remind us what we were. So demon is as good a name as any. Made people think twice before messing with us.”
“The claws probably had something to do with that, too,” her partner said drily.
“We don’t all have claws,” P.B. said, laying his paws palm down on the table so that all ten of the thick black half-moons were visible. “We were designed according to need, and what was available, and what our creator’s whim was that day.” A pause. “We are all pretty tough, though, one way or another. Yeah.”
“Your…creator.” Wren couldn’t bring herself to say father, or parent, or anything that might imply any kind of emotional attachment that, it was clear, didn’t exist. “How many of you did he make?”
“I don’t know. He wasn’t the first. Magicians had gone that route before, created servants—golems or demons, same difference different terminology—but he was the only one of his generation to succeed, and even he didn’t, all the time. High failure rate, when you’re playing God.
“I know there were at least half a dozen made before me, that had either been given away or abandoned. I…was there for seven that survived. Don’t ask me how many didn’t make it. There weren’t any…after.”
After what, neither Wren not Sergei asked. The word had a certain finality about it that dissuaded follow-up by even the most curious, or callous.
“And these papers…Could they have been stolen? Or did he have someone he might have passed them along to, an inheritance of sort? Could he have shared this knowledge, did he have a student, or an assistant?” Sergei’s mind was churning now, and Wren was torn between the desire to sit back and watch, and the feeling that if she didn’t get answers about the past out of P.B. now, the door would soon slam shut.
Blood from Stone Page 9
