She was pleased to see that her hand didn’t shake when she reached down and picked a cookie at random. Three cookies, one for each of them. So which one was hers?
You’re all tied together. What’s for one is for you all.
Wren didn’t know where the thought came from, but it felt annoyingly true.
“All right then, Seer, tell me what I don’t want to know.”
She pulled the white strip of paper from between the folds of the cookie, and turned it over.
“‘Take no blood from stone, save you give it back.’ Nicely useless. Next?” She placed the fortune on the table and picked up the second cookie. This one she had to break in order to get the fortune out. “Take no blood…” Her voice trailed off, and she dropped the second cookie in her haste to get to the third. The fragile dough crumbled in her hand, and she didn’t bother to wipe the crumbs off before reading the slip of paper. The words registered, and she began to laugh, if a little hysterically.
Unlike the second fortune, which merely repeated the first in bold print, this one read: “You no like fortune, stop reading cookie.”
Nobody had ever claimed that Seers didn’t have a sense of humor.
P.B. had woken that morning aware not only that he had been dreaming—his sleep was often filled with memories in the shape of nightmares—but that he had not been alone in the dream.
“Damn it.” He could taste the Retriever in his mind, like the lingering flavor of garlic: not unpleasant, but unmistakable. Any moment now, she would show up at his door, demanding to know what the hell it meant, insisting on an explanation.
“You knew what would happen,” he reminded himself. Although, in actuality, he had only suspected. The one time he was forced to act as conduit to a Talent, it had been his creator, and that miserable excuse for a human had been, at best, half Wren’s skill. Plus, the bond had been formed unwillingly on his part, forced by the human’s control of him, allowed by his fear of his creator. This time he had entered with full consent, and even if Wren had been ignorant of what she did, she had trusted him enough to follow without question.
He might deny it, might hate it, but this was what he had been created to do. It felt…right.
Had any of his brothers found someone like that, someone they could open themselves to? Or were they all as he had been, scarred and bitter…
All right, he was still scarred and bitter. That was who he was, now. Scarred and bitter…but with hope, dangerous though it was.
Falling out of bed, he padded over to the window and looked up and out. His apartment was, in Wren’s words, a craptastic craphole, but it suited him; the view was eye level with the sidewalk, which meant that he could see out but someone would have to get down on their knees to see in, and it stayed cool enough even in the worst of Manhattan’s summer heat that he didn’t sweat too badly.
In the winter even he, fur and all, froze, but that was what Valere’s heat-included-in-the-rent-and-actually-delivered apartment was for.
And speaking of whom…no current-ping in his brain. No phone call. No knocking on his door. She might still be on her way over, but…maybe not. Maybe she was doing exactly what she had promised: to not take anything more than what he offered. He was still scarred and bitter, but…he trusted Valere.
So trust her some more.
He checked the street level for an idea of the weather. No open-toed shoes, but no heavy slogging boots, either. A good day to stay in bed and read, except that he had things to accomplish, not the least of which was a courier job. It had arrived the night before, in his usual drop-spot, with directions on where to pick the tube up and where he was to deliver it. Boring work, for the most part, but that was how he, and most of the demon-kind, made their living: as couriers. Not many folk in their right mind or left wanted to tangle with a demon, and those who did had barely a thirty percent chance of getting away intact, much less with what they came for.
But there were ways to take down a demon, even one who knew you were coming. If they didn’t know…
He had told Sergei the truth: he didn’t keep track of how many demons there were, total, how many had survived or what they had done with themselves. It had been safer not to know too much, for a long time. Safety in staying off the radar, out of sight. But the ones in this country, those he could find, with a little work. And maybe they had kept in touch with others. A word in the wind: who knew how far it might carry?
After he finished the job; that was what he would do. He might not know them, might not like them or them him, but his brothers deserved a warning.
That decision made, he sniffed at his fur, and decided that he didn’t need to shower this morning. Grabbing the orange juice out of his rickety old fridge, he drank it directly from the carton, finishing the last of it and tossing the empty container into the trash. His kitchen was even smaller than Wren’s, not even qualifying as a separate galley, but rather just a linoleum-floored corner of the main space. The fridge had to be older than Wren, the sink leaked, and the stove might or might not work, he didn’t know. But the rent was controlled at an almost obscenely low level, the landlord never bothered him, and the place was surprisingly free of cockroaches. So he didn’t complain.
He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, put saline drops in his eyes to protect them from the daily pollution, and—in a concession to grooming he would deny if asked—spritzed himself with a liquid detangler and ran a flat-backed brush through his fur. Done with his ablutions, he grabbed his slouch hat off the wooden rack next to the sofa, and headed out the door and up the stairs to the street, mentally reviewing the job specs to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
The moment he hit the pavement outside his apartment building, he stopped, the fur on the back of his neck—and pretty much everywhere else—tingling slightly, although he wasn’t prone to the human experience of gooseflesh. He sniffed at the air, the black nostrils opening and taking in more information than human, or even canine, noses could process. The normal smells of the city sped through his brain, nothing that should have alerted him to trouble. His dark red eyes scanned the street, while he leaned back against the wall and tried to look as though he was remembering if he was supposed to go uptown or downtown today. Three teenagers loitering, two older women gossiping with the grocer outside the bodega, a man in a semidecent suit walking as if he knew he had nowhere important to get to, and a young woman sitting on the stoop four buildings down, talking into a cell phone.
His rounded ears twitched, and her voice came to him, plus the strains of whomever she was talking to, those tinny tones almost but not quite out of his hearing range.
The moment he heard the accent, he knew why his fur had bristled, and the skin underneath had gone cold.
And why he had dreamed of the past so vividly, only a few hours before.
After decades of running, they had found him.
nine
After such a lousy predawn start to the day, it was almost a surprise to Wren when Sunday morning turned into a gorgeous example of Autumn, filled with bright sunshine, cool temperatures and the slightly acrid smell of leaves beginning to turn, mixing with the suggestion of wood smoke and wool sweaters. She poured her umpteenth mug of coffee, crawled out onto the fire escape outside of her kitchen window, and pondered the corner of her street that she could see from that perch.
It was, she decided finally, a perfect day to take off and go apple picking, or take a boat ride around the island, or just take a walk in the park to hear the already-downed leaves crunch underfoot. If you had the day off, anyway. For people like her, it was just another workday.
Except that she had nothing to do, nothing concrete to work on. She could have waited for Sergei to get back to her about what, if anything, he had found out regarding P.B.’s story. Or, she could have spent the time going over everything she knew—very damned little—about demons and the history of the Cosa. Or she could have worried some more about her finances, and what she wanted to do
—and where she wanted to be—when she grew up. Or, tempting thought, she could have gone back to bed and hoped to fall asleep again.
Instead, she crawled inside, laced up her boots, threw on her leather jacket over jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and took a walk across town. The sun was warm, despite the cooler air temperature, and she welcomed the feel of the air on her skin. Walking, just simply walking to get somewhere, no danger lurking along the way or at the destination, was a strange feeling after the past few years, and she reveled in it. A handful of teenagers were hanging out on the steps of an old brick apartment building where a number of Talent lived. Two of them raised their hands to say hello, and then hesitated, as though not quite sure they had really seen her. Wren laughed to herself. She could have gone entirely no-see with just a flicker of current, but there was no need. Nor was there any need to become entirely visible. Half-seen, half-noticed, unremembered. She had always been most comfortable in the shadows, even walking under full sunlight.
“Two new calls came in,” Sergei said without surprise when she finally walked through the door of the gallery. She was sweating slightly from the trek, but her skin was flushed in a good way, and she had worked off the worst of the morning’s weirdness, leaving her with a sense of physical and mental calm she hadn’t felt in a long time.
She dropped her jacket onto the coatrack that was normally reserved for potentially paying customers. Sergei’s assistant looked up and glared at her; she resisted the urge to glare back and instead smiled sweetly, because Sergei had told her the blond man was more annoyed when she was nice than when she fought with him. Wren stopped and—with her good mood—considered the man behind the counter for just a second. Being completely fair, Lowell wasn’t a bad guy as things went; Sergei thought highly of his abilities, and trusted him with a sizable part of the day-to-day running of his baby, the gallery. So there had to be something there that she didn’t see. Part of it was that she just set Lowell on edge, somehow, and his reactions always made her want to poke his pompous Waspy, arty facade until it popped. Plus there was this whole tug-of-war over Sergei’s attention that she had won, hands down.
All right, maybe Lowell got a pinkie of attention. But no more, and only in the office, and only about gallery stuff. The one time she had seriously faced off against Lowell here, Sergei had, verbally if not literally, spanked them both.
Trying not to remember that incident, she followed her partner through the gallery and into his private office, taking probably too much pleasure in the door sliding shut behind them, shutting Lowell out. Knowing that Lowell was resisting the urge to stick his tongue out at her direction made it all the better.
There was only so much maturity either one of them could manage without straining something, after all, and their part-time receptionist—Carole, her name was, wasn’t it?—wasn’t in today for him to harass.
“Business is definitely picking up then,” she said to her partner. If he was telling her about two calls, odds were good there had been at least three. Maybe more. Someday she was going to start demanding to see everything that came in, just for a laugh and some egoboo.
Then she thought about how much work that would be, and remembered why they had started the “filter” system in the first place. Maybe not.
She sat down in her usual spot, tucking her denim-clad legs underneath her rather than letting them dangle like a little kid’s. Stupid new sofa. He had gotten rid of the old leather sofa and replaced it with one covered in a soft, nubby dark gray fabric. She had to agree that this was going to be a lot more comfortable to sit on when the weather got hot and sticky, but she missed the old one, which had been low-slung enough for her to sit on normally.
“Anything good?” she asked, referring to the slips of paper he had picked up off his desk as he sat behind it. Good used to mean money. Now it meant anything that might give her a challenge.
But not too much of a challenge, she amended quickly, even in the relative privacy of her own mind not wanting to tempt Fate or God or anyone else who might need a laugh at her expense. The fortune cookie was still fresh in her mind, and blood in a fortune rarely added up to anything good in her experience, especially if they were talking about her blood.
Not that she was really worried about any jobs he might suggest. That was part of the filtering process Sergei went through before bringing anything up to her, clearing out the ones that smelled obviously of trouble. Post-Silence, that included any jobs that smelled of third-party interests or unwanted complications. They got turned away at the door, now, no matter how much of a challenge they might be. She didn’t need to get burned twice to be three times shy. Her mother raised her smarter than that. She hoped.
Sergei didn’t even bother to look at the slips, having committed them to memory even as he was writing the information down, as usual. “One smash-and-grab—our old friends at The Meadows recommended you to another private museum up in Toronto.” It was strange and yet reassuring, seeing Sergei in manager-mode again. “Are you interested in going to Canada?”
She shrugged. “Hey, I’ve got a passport now, seems a shame not to use it every few years.” Her first and only trip out of the country had been to Italy, a few years back. She had enjoyed meeting the local Cosa, and that was where she and Sergei had first hooked up, so she was willing to look favorably on travel overall, despite what happened on the rest of that trip. So long as she didn’t have to take an airplane, anyway.
And a smash-and-grab—a basic Retrieval of an object, usually artwork—was nicely nonmagically soothing. Of course that’s what she had thought about the last job, too, and that hadn’t worked out so well.
“The other is a government gig,” he went on, sliding the paper toward her.
“What?” Okay, that was new. The only time she had ever done any work for a government official, it had been to Retrieve blackmail material, and that was done on the civilian side, not through his office, for obvious reasons.
“Karl called, wants to know if you want to help him with a little problem down on the docks.”
“Ah.” Karl was one of Sergei’s many useful contacts—he divided them into “useful,” “may-be-useful,” and “charity”—who worked for the U.S. Customs Service. They had met through Sergei’s legitimate side, clearing artwork for sale in Sergei’s gallery, but a mutual if cautious admiration had given rise to an equally cautious, casual friendship. They had, on more than one occasion, called on Karl’s experience during a job.
Now it seemed the mitten was on the other paw.
She didn’t bother to even look at the slip of paper, trusting to Sergei’s evaluation. “Would I actually get paid by the government?” That was an interesting thought. She wondered what the invoice would look like, and if she would have to file a tax return on it. What budget would they pay her from? The Office of Miscellaneous Affairs?
“I’m not sure there would be payment as such,” Sergei said. “He suggested a trade-in-kind.”
Her first instinct was to reject it out of hand, then she paused. Sergei had brought her this job, and it couldn’t be just because it was from a pre-existing contact—Sergei had no problem saying “no” to friends, relatives and…well, she didn’t think he actually would be brave enough to say no to her mother, but then, not many people did. Margot Valere was lovely, charming, sweet and had a spine of steel. Wren remembered her grandmother, Margot’s mother, and could only be thankful that, unlike that woman, her mom had gotten charm to go over that steel.
Oh. Charm. Right. “He’s got something in the back room?” Occasionally, things came through Customs that should never have been let out from whatever Aladdin’s Cave they were found in. Karl was a Null, but he had a pretty good sense for things that were maybe-magical, without actually naming them as such, and no hesitation about turning them over to the folk as could deal with them, no questions asked, no answers wanted. The back room was, as Sergei put it, where “things went to get lost.”
“So he says, althou
gh it’s actually still on the ship, which is where you come in. He happened to be there the night it came in, and it gave him, and I quote, ‘the jeebies.’ There was no mention of an actual trade, but rather the implication that he had done enough passing along of questionable materials, and that he was now owed some services in return. There may also have been a passing reference to the authorities looking more closely at identification in the future, before allowing shipments through, especially ones of dubious trade value, like, oh, artwork. Although nothing was actually overtly said.”
Wren placed a palm to her chest, fingers spread, and blinked coquettishly at her partner. “Mister Didier. Is the big bad Customs man trying to blackmail us?”
“I do believe he is, yes,” he replied, straight-faced, his eyes heavy-hooded and his silvering hair slightly ruffled so that he looked even more than usual like a sleepy hawk.
“Oh, dear.” She feigned a swoon straight out of a bad pastiche of Gone With The Wind. “Tell him yes, of course. Such aptitude must be rewarded.”
His thin lips quirked upward in a quick smile that was just as quickly quashed. He was being Serious Sergei right now. “And the other job?”
Wren sat up straight again and flicked through her mental checklist. Normally she was all about writing things down—her brain wasn’t quite the catch-all Sergei’s was—but she’d gotten lazy, recently. She would have to take care of that; leaving things unwritten too often ended up leaving them undone, which often led to chaos later. “If it’s not urgent, I’m inclined to take it. But I’m starting to feel a little pressure, too many jobs in a row.”
Sometimes, especially recently, it became easy to forget that they were running a business. You could only take on so many projects and since there really wasn’t an option of expanding their services—Retrievers weren’t thick on the ground, even if she could find someone both she and Sergei could trust, and have him or her trust them in return…nope. Wasn’t going to happen. Lonejacks weren’t good at taking orders, and even the best guy in the Council was still Council and owed loyalty to them first and foremost, no matter who was signing the paycheck. Amazing what a retirement policy and medical could buy.
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