Blood from Stone

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Oh. Right.” Bonnie was a PUPI, one of the private, unaffiliated paranormal investigators working on cases that involved the Cosa, and couldn’t be brought to justice through normal channels. It made sense the two of them would run into each other in a professional capacity on occasion.

  Wren was seriously hoping she never ran into Bonnie, or any of the other Pups, on anything other than a social basis. Retrieval was a traditional and respected career in the Cosa, but that didn’t make it any more legal than it was in the Null world, something she occasionally forgot. She was pretty sure she was better at her job than they were at theirs, but the Pups were damn sharp as a pack, and Bonnie—who had moved into the apartment two floors below the year before—had gotten familiar with Wren’s habits and, worse, the signature, or “taste” of her personal current. No, much better to never come to their professional attention. But she should stop by and say hello, see how the other Talent was doing, if she’d come to a decision about what to do if the building did go condo, thank her again for dinner, all the other things people did when their job didn’t consume their damn life….

  “You on a job?” Danny asked.

  She didn’t even bother lifting her head to ask in return, “You asking in what capacity?”

  “Jeez, you’re getting suspicious in your old age,” he said, tsking mournfully. The waitress appeared with the fresh pot of coffee, and then Wren did lift herself up from her face-plant, accepting the cup with heart-felt thanks.

  “I just wanted to know if this was going to be two friends getting together to talk about the bad old days, or if I should expense it.”

  She relaxed a little, even more when the coffee made its way down her throat and into her system.

  “Just came off one day before last. Or the day before that. It starts getting blurry. Right now I’m here purely in the capacity of an old friend…who has nosy interests.” Technically, that was true. Who could be an older friend than her ownself, and she was nosy. And this wasn’t a job, really. Just the offshoot of one. Something to maybe shut her brain up, maybe once and for all.

  “Ah,” Danny responded. A wealth of meaning in that one sound, most of which translated to “I don’t believe you for an instant, but if that’s the way you want to play it, you can pay for the coffee.”

  “I was on a job last week,” she started.

  “No! Say it ain’t so!”

  Danny was many things, mediocre wiseass among them, and the memory of when work was scarce was still fresh enough to make her wince. She shot him a glare until he subsided.

  “There was a kid involved.”

  “Blond, innocent eyes, Talent out of nowhere,” he supplied.

  The Cosa gossip line was a thing of beauty.

  “You hear anything useful in that line?” She took another sip of coffee and decided that being strong was its sole virtue, the taste being unfavorably compared to hot tar. She was probably drinking too much coffee, anyway. Her nerves were beginning to vibrate like the middle rail just before a train arrived.

  “About the theories of how and why, or the kid’s status?”

  “Whatever you’ve got.” She added more milk to her coffee, trying to drown the overburned taste, and settled down to listen. Danny’s gossip, like Sergei’s briefings, were worth getting comfortable for.

  He leaned back and gestured with his coffee spoon. “Theories are split between you’ve finally gone ’round the bend and were hallucinating, or worse, and the idea that the kid is proof that Talent is expanding in the gene pool, like red tide or something.” Danny’s Brooklyn accent became more pronounced on the last, indicating his personal opinions on that.

  “You don’t buy it?”

  “You hear the new theory goin’ around, about how Talent is just a biological thing?”

  “I’ve heard it, yeah.”

  “I don’t buy that. You got magic in your soul, or you don’t. If you don’t, you can’t. Simple as that. So how can it be genetic?”

  For a die-hard pragmatist, his statement was surprising. She reminded herself that for Danny, one of the very, very rare half-breed Fatae, pragmatism had to fit in somewhere with a sense of the impossible. Apparently, that was how he did it, and to hell with all the implications of modern current.

  He was Fatae, not Talent, she reminded herself. If you didn’t use current yourself, she supposed that you could ignore the to-her obvious connection between the electrical pump of her heart, and the currentical flow of her skills, the biological suggestion that made about how and why things worked.

  Then again, she was no scientist. Hell, she broke alarm clocks and PDAs just by standing next to them, like most Talent. There was a reason most of them went into the arts or craftsman trades, not technical ones. Even Neezer, who had been a scientist, or at least a teacher thereof, had never suggested that there was a genetic connection, and he had taught biology, so he would have at least thought about it. Wouldn’t he?

  She reminded herself that he had wizzed before she was done with her mentorship. Who knew what he might have said, once they were peers rather than student and teacher? The thought brought sadness, and a touch of uncertainty to add to her pile of preexisting questions.

  “By that line, though,” she said to Danny now, playing devil’s advocate, “isn’t it possible for a sense of wonder, for magic in the soul, to spread? Even more easily than a gene pool mutation? Isn’t a sense of wonder communicable?”

  He shook his head, one hand absently sliding his spoon back and forth on the table. “Easier to lose than to find.”

  “Easier to drop than to bind,” Wren finished up automatically. Every mentor worth their salt drummed that into their students’ heads, first day. Interesting that Danny would quote it. She filed that bit of information away as pointless now, maybe pointy later.

  “Look at you,” he continued. “Serious, significant Talent. Nobody gonna gainsay that. Far as I’ve ever heard you peep, nobody in your family’s got a hint of it. It’s all in you, not them.”

  “What about my dad?” she heard herself say.

  He opened his dark eyes wide, making them seem even rounder than normal. “What about your dad?”

  “Maybe he was a Talent?”

  Neither of them talked much about their fathers. Wren because she had nothing to say, Danny because he had nothing good to say about his; fauns were, well, fauns. Sexy, but useless. His human mother had been unusual in catching, much less in keeping the baby after that encounter.

  “Maybe,” Danny agreed. “Any way to find out?”

  She thought about it barely a second. “No.”

  “Well then.” And like that, the topic was dropped. That might have been why she felt comfortable enough to bring it up, here and now. Danny understood.

  Truth was, even with all the questions starting to run around in her head she wasn’t sure she wanted to think about it; her mother had said her sperm donor was a one-night stand, a guy she met, liked, had sex with, and then never saw again…and now couldn’t remember a thing about, physically.

  Sounded as if she got her no-see-me Retriever skills from somewhere, at least. But was it Talent, or merely being visually forgettable? Where did one move into the other? And why was all this—kid, and Max, and her long-absent sperm donor—suddenly such a big deal?

  Is your biological clock ticking? She could hear her mother’s voice in the back of her head, sounding way too happy at the thought, and shuddered.

  “As to the kid,” Danny said, dragging the conversation back to the original topic, “he’s fine. His old man’s keeping him close to home and pretty much wrapped up in cotton batting. I guess he doesn’t want to have to send out a search party again.”

  Or maybe he was waiting for another chance to sell the kid to a high bidder. She didn’t think so, though. The compulsion she had put into his mind was strong—far stronger than she had admitted to Sergei. Stronger than she had intended it to be. Daddy dearest would protect his kid properly, this time.

/>   Kid was Talent, untrained and beautiful. Bad combination in a little’un. She had the thought, and shuddered at the implications it carried on its back. She wasn’t a hero. She couldn’t save everyone.

  “You ever regret…not having—” she almost started to say “your dad” but changed it midbreath “—a dad-figure? When you were growing up, I mean?”

  “Hey, I had Mister Rogers. What else did I need?”

  Well, that gave her an idea of how old Danny actually was. Fatae all aged differently.

  “You?” he asked, sounding as though he really wanted to know.

  “I had one. Neezer.”

  Except that was a lie; she hadn’t, even if she’d wanted him to be her dad, because he came into her life when she was already a headstrong teenager, and left before she was an adult, and she knew, when she admitted it, that the scars of that abandonment—however well-meant and wise it might have been—still festered.

  Max had torn open some of those scars, she supposed. That, and the kid, and any thought of genetics…healthier to acknowledge that there were issues and deal with them, right? Isn’t that what she’d pushed Sergei to do?

  “And anyway,” she continued, “my mom was constantly on the lookout for potential dad-types for me. I think she would have done better looking for husband-types for herself, but that’s my mom for ya.” Understatement of the year.

  And she really needed to set up another lunch, soon, as soon as her mother got home. Otherwise the older Valere woman might show up on her doorstep, and God knows what she would find. Wren’s mother still wasn’t all that happy about Sergei, even if she couldn’t remember meeting P.B. from one minute to the next…

  Well, if her mother could remember anything about her encounters with the non-Null, Wren’s life would probably be a lot different.

  “Mothers,” Danny said in fervent agreement, and she laughed.

  “And now, lovely though it’s been to see you when people aren’t howling for our blood or body parts, I gotta scoot. Pay the nice lady with the check, willya?” Danny shoved his mug away and picked up his hat. Today it was a dark brown baseball cap with a snarling goat picked out in bright red on the front. “Oh, and tell your man I said hello.”

  “You can’t pick up a phone and call him yourself? Go out for beer or catch a game or whatever it is guys do.” Wren tried to visualize that, and failed utterly. The two of them had bonded somehow, during the night of the Blackout, but she had never gotten any details of when or how, and she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know.

  The faun smirked, and left. She was spending too much time in her brain on this, she decided—“this” meaning the entire tangle with the kid, and genetics, and the question of daddies. Neezer had hidden himself away on purpose, and Max had sent her away, making it clear they were over and she was on her own; her genetic father was a dead end, and the kid was taken care of. You didn’t hang on to the shit from the past, especially shit from past jobs. Do the deal and move on. Anything else…

  Anything else meant distraction, usually when she could least afford it.

  Anything else meant tangles and ties and giving in to that last time had almost gotten her killed. It had gotten other people killed, and never mind they had deserved it. Wren didn’t want the reminder of how good she was at killing; how terrifyingly easy it had been to do.

  No. She was a Retriever. That was all.

  Wren waved the waitress over and asked for the check, then drank what was left of her coffee. Time to get back to work.

  Wren was halfway home when she changed her mind and went uptown instead. Sergei’s apartment was a sleek steel-and-glass high-rise with its own emergency power generator, and every time she got into the elevator she had the urge to suck down a hit or three off of it. That might have been why they spent so much time at her place. He knew what that elevator did to her.

  “Hey, Ms. Valere.”

  He also had a doorman—an entire staff of doormen, in fact, twenty-four hours a day, and most of them knew her by sight. Privacy did not happen in an upscale high-rise; you just paid extra for the illusion of it. She liked her place better. For all her building was like a small town, and you knew everyone and everything about them, nobody noticed anything they weren’t invited to notice.

  “Is he home?” she asked, leaning on the counter and looking up at the twenty-something manning the desk.

  He checked the console, then nodded. “He is, yes. Should I call you up, or do you want to surprise him?”

  Technically they weren’t supposed to let her up without Sergei’s approval. It was a measure of how often she was in and out, she supposed. Also, not her worry.

  “Might as well call me up,” she said, heading for the elevator. Keep him on his toes, if sometimes she called up and sometimes she didn’t. You took your amusements where you found them.

  The elevator was empty save for her, and she leaned against the back wall, letting her control slip ever-so-slightly. The comforting hum of electricity swam into her awareness, and for an instant overwhelmed all her other senses. You learned how to block it out, except when you were actively trolling for current, otherwise living in any kind of civilization would drive you mad, like a gourmand faced with a never-ending buffet. Especially her: especially now. But every now and again, when it was safe, she liked to open up and soak it in, a reminder of how glorious the world looked, when you looked at it with Talented eyes.

  She wondered if anyone was teaching the kid how to look, and what would happen to him if he didn’t learn.

  “I wonder if my dad knew what he was,” she said when Sergei met her at the door of his apartment. No lead-in, no hello kiss, just a plunge right into deep waters, despite her decision not half an hour before to put it aside, damn it. “I wonder if he’d been mentored, or picked up bits and pieces on his own, or he totally didn’t know and was this huge walking stack of coincidences and unexplained weirdness that freaked him and his friends out.”

  Sergei looked as though he wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure if she wanted comforting, profound, or commonsensical.

  That was okay; she didn’t know, either.

  Then she took another look at his face, and braced herself. “What?”

  He let her into the apartment, backing up rather than letting her follow him in. “There has to be a what?”

  “When you have that face, yes.” It was what she had come to think of as his Silence face, after the organization that had caused them so much trouble. It meant that shit was up.

  “Danny called me.”

  “I just saw him!” she said, protesting.

  “Yes, I know, he said that. After he left he says he got a phone call.”

  Any phone call that caused that face was not something she was going to be happy about.

  “And?”

  “Someone’s been in town, nosing about, asking after us. You, me…and P.B.”

  Wren’s mood, already off, plummeted like an elephant taking a nosedive. “Oh, great.”

  At her insistence, they called P.B. in before she let Sergei say anything more. If the person poking around was including the demon in said poking, he had a right to know. Also, she really didn’t want to deal with another lecture about trust or sharing from an annoyed demon if she could easily avoid it. While they waited, Sergei made a pot of tea, and Wren built a card house out of the deck he had left on his coffee table.

  The demon took the news about as well as Wren expected. “Someone asking about us, about me. Bad enough to start with, yeah. But for it to happen right when I get that letter, and Mister Research here starts checking into things long-ago and far-away. Coincidence?” P.B. was pacing the length of Sergei’s apartment, his clawed pads clicking on the hardwood in a way they never did in her mostly carpeted apartment.

  “There’s no such thing as coincidence in the Cosa,” Wren said. She was curled up on the sofa, a square cashmere throw tucked around her bare feet, watching him pace. It was making her dizzy, but she didn�
�t think he would stop even if she asked. Or if he did, that nervous tension would go somewhere worse.

  “Not just someone,” Sergei clarified, repeating what he had already told them. “A government someone. The guy wasn’t showing a badge, but the car was apparently unmistakable.” Sergei had pulled a silver case from somewhere and removed a slender brown cigarette from it, rolling the cylinder between his fingers. He hadn’t smoked in years, far as she knew, but he always carried the cigarettes with him, like some kind of nervous talisman. It had gone away for a while, but it was back now. She didn’t know if that was a good sign or not.

  “Someday they’re going to start using random rental cars, and really screw with people,” Wren said. “All right. Does this guy being government make it better, or worse? The government’s never bothered us before—the ones that are willing to admit the possibility that maybe something outside of their rules, regs and tax codes exists, anyway. And the ones that don’t, don’t bother us because we don’t exist.” It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it had worked so far.

  “This person not only believes, he has photos.”

  “What?” P.B.’s ears, normally rounded and flat at a 90-degree angle to his head, twitched upward. If Wren hadn’t been equally shocked by the news, she would have made a comment.

  “That’s what Danny says. The Fed was showing around a picture of us. Me and Wren. And P.B.”

  Wren was flabbergasted. She didn’t think even her mother had any photos of her. For a brief moment she let herself wonder if she looked good in the photos, and if so, how she could get her hands on a copy.

  “Do you think it’s the Council?” P.B. stopped pacing long enough to ask her quietly. “Slipping word to the authorities, their way of getting revenge?”

  The immediate NYC Council, led by KimAnn Howe, had tried a few years back to convince the local unaffiliateds, or lonejacks, into joining. By force, as needed. That attempt had failed, at least in part because of the three of them.