Burning Bridges

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Is anyone dead?”

  A fair enough question. She considered it. “No.”

  “Then there’s nothing that can’t be dealt with. Come on, Wren. You’re going to drown.”

  She waited a moment, as though weighing the possibilities of drowning, then reached forward and shut the taps off. The water went away abruptly, and the cold air hit her skin and made her shake with the realization that she was a. naked and b. freezing.

  “Here.” A towel appeared around the edge of the shower curtain. It was huge, blue, and thick enough to hide in.

  “Thanks.”

  “There’s stuff here that might fit you. I’m putting soup on.”

  She wasn’t hungry, but the thought of something warm and salty to get rid of the taste in her mouth—and replenish the electrolytes she had undoubtedly lost—was appealing. Plus, you didn’t refuse hospitality, when offered, from the being who wasn’t making you clean up after yourself. He might just change his mind and hand her a mop.

  The “stuff” was a pair of sweatpants that, when cuffed three times and the string tie pulled in to a ridiculous degree, stayed on her hips and didn’t trip her when she walked. They were thick, and fleecy, and bright red, and Wren didn’t want to know whose they had been, originally, or how they’d ended up in P.B.’s possession. The sweater was an easier guess—it had been a gag gift to him from her, Christmas the year before: the Coca-Cola polar bears wearing Santa hats and cavorting with penguins.

  It really was impossible to look at penguins, and not feel better.

  P.B. didn’t have a kitchen, not even the walkthrough-and-turnaround she laid claim to, but the corner stove was more than adequate for heating a couple of cans of soup and serving them up into clunky white bowls. They sat on the sofa—the rug mysteriously rolled up and sent away while she was drying herself off—and lifted spoons until she started to feel the warmth come back into her bones.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Right. You appear in my home, bare-assed like the day you were born, shocky as hell, like a soldier that’s been gassed, and ruin a rug I’ve had for years—okay, it was a crap rug, it was still mine—and you don’t want to tell me why?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  The sound of spoons scraping stoneware filled the room, accompanied by human and demon slurps and swallows. It was a rude, homey noise, and Wren started to feel like she might not shatter if she moved too suddenly.

  “You think maybe you could call me a cab?”

  “Poof, you’re a cab.”

  She looked sharply at the demon, and he met her gaze evenly, his dark red eyes unblinking. Most of the time she could forget he wasn’t, well, human. Suddenly, tonight, she was completely aware of his alien-ness…and it didn’t matter in the slightest. The only thing in those eyes was a compassion and concern on a level she had only ever seen once before: in her mother’s eyes. Grounding.

  “Whatever it was you were doing, you were somewhere comfortable enough to get comfy. That means you were home…or at Sergei’s. If you were at home and something spooked you, spooked you enough to use current to get the hell out of there, it’s fifty-fifty where you would have ended up.” He reconsidered. “All right, seventy-five-twenty-five. But there was still a chance that you would have gone there, not here.

  “But you weren’t surprised to be here. You haven’t asked me to contact Sergei. You haven’t worried about him at all.”

  He blinked, then, and she could almost hear the cogs turning, slipping into a new configuration.

  “Did he do this to you?”

  If she said yes, Sergei would be dead. Wren understood that, in a flash like understanding current, like knowing how to call lightning down from the skies, power from power lines. One word.

  “God, no!”

  The demon blinked again, and he was P.B. Her friend. Her companion.

  Her demon.

  It was another thing she understood, now, without knowing how.

  “I want to go home. It’s okay, now.” She knew that, too.

  “I’ll call a cab.”

  The ride home was silent; P.B. had, somehow, somewhere, found a livery driver who not only didn’t want to talk, but didn’t blare his radio, either. The sedan was clean, the driver sane, and the ride uneventful. It was a gift from the gods.

  She didn’t have her keys. She didn’t have anything—thick moose-hide slippers on her feet, sweats on her body, and her hair scraped back into a short braid and tied up with a rubber band.

  She pressed her own buzzer first, on the off chance…

  Nothing.

  She pressed Bonnie’s buzzer.

  “Wren?”

  “Yeah.”

  The buzzer sounded and Wren stumbled inside, out of the cold night air. Bonnie met her on the stairwell.

  “Oh my God. Are you okay?”

  “I need to go to bed. Alone. For a day. Maybe two.”

  “You want me to make you some soup or something? For lunch?”

  It was almost dawn. Wren couldn’t bear to even think about daylight, right now, much less food.

  “I’ll stop by later,” Bonnie said. “Go. Sleep.”

  Wren climbed the last two flights, each step adding a pound of lead to her feet. She dimly remembered, once, creating a cantrip that allowed her to move up the stairs with less weight, even in her exhaustion. It was too much effort, now, to try to remember what she had said, how she had done it. Too much effort to even poke at current, much less…Control it.

  She wanted nothing to do with her current. Nothing.

  The apartment was empty, which wasn’t a surprise. She shed the now-filthy slippers at the door and headed for the bathroom, where she snagged her robe off the hook and changed it for her borrowed sweats. Although technically less warming, the robe felt better: her own clothing, it smelled right.

  It smelled of Sergei, actually, but she didn’t linger on that thought. She was still not thinking about that at all.

  Which was why she didn’t read the note he had left tacked to the coffee machine. She didn’t throw it away, either; she just plucked it off the plastic casing and put it aside.

  She hit the replay on the answering machine, without thinking.

  “Hi.” A long pause. “Right. Either you’re going to call me, or you’re not. Or you’re going to show up on my doorstep and we can have this out like ranting, screaming, emotionally overcharged adults. Look, I—”

  She hit Stop. She didn’t press the delete button.

  She’d listen. She’d read. But…not right now. She wasn’t ready to deal with him.

  It wasn’t his fault. It was mine. Totally, completely mea culpa. I knew what he wanted, and I had the ego to think that I could still be in control, control myself, and control him.

  Worse, something inside her kept asking—if he needed that feel of current badly enough, so badly that he was willing to risk his own personal safety, and her own hard-won control…

  She went back into the kitchen and started dumping coffee into the machine, making it stronger than usual.

  She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to have the answers that came bubbling up through the sewers of her too-active mind.

  He loved her. He left the Silence, told Andre off, all for her. He would never do anything to hurt her, even if he was too stupid to know when she was trying to protect him.

  It was insane. It was impossible. But once suspicion was planted, it was mental kudzu, growing over everything you threw in its path. Sergei was an addict, or on his way to becoming one. And addicts weren’t masters of their own fate. Not if someone else knew about their needs. Now, it was only her current. But she couldn’t give it to him, not like that. And if the need grew…

  Or if the need had existed, before, and she was just the newest provider, the easiest? He had worked with Talent before, in the Silence. Had Handled them. If he’d gotten current-buzz before…did anyone else know?<
br />
  Consider the time frame: Sergei left the Silence, formed a partnership with her, and slid into the world of the lonejacks. As she got to know other Talent in the area, so did he. When she got dragged into Cosa politics, he threw himself in with the Cosa, and their fate, as well. Why? For love? Sergei was, first and foremost, a businessman. He always but always had his eye on the profit. It was one of the things she counted on, without even thinking about it, when they were working.

  That was the question everyone was asking: where was the profit?

  No.

  But the thought, once allowed into the light, had to be dealt with. The Silence had Talented operatives, used them. They had something going on. What was Sergei’s angle? Was it all a show, that declaration of independence, to get someone inside the Quad?

  Was he, in fact, still working for the Silence? Was he their tool?

  No other Null knew as much about the Cosa as he did. Nobody was as trusted. And the Silence, she was coming to realize, took the long view, and looked at the big picture, valued it more than the individual’s well-being. Sergei…was his addiction something that started before he met her? It would not be impossible or even improbable that the Silence had planted him in her life that long decade ago…arranged for the entire situation with the Council exactly so that she would be vulnerable when the Silence came calling….

  “Oh, Jesus wept, stop it!” The coffee was done, but her hand was shaking so much, she didn’t trust herself to pour it. She was losing her mind. That was all. She was…Losing it.

  Her entire body was shaking, so much that she had no choice but to sit down. Only her body wasn’t working quite right, and she fell, instead. There wasn’t room to sprawl in the small kitchen space, so instead she huddled on the floor, arms around her shoulders, quivering like someone was shaking her.

  “Sergei…oh, Sergei…”

  After a while, the shakes were replaced by a numbness that had nothing to do with the cold, inside or out. She simply couldn’t handle it anymore, so she didn’t. Wren could almost hear doors slamming and locks locking, as portions of her life shut themselves off into tiny little rooms, one by one, until she didn’t have to look at them anymore, didn’t have to deal with them.

  A cool veneer, like the frost on her windows, settled over her, through her. Her thinking was so sharp, her brain was bleeding a little. The Wren was back in control.

  Getting to her feet, she tightened the tie of the robe, got down a mug, and poured herself a coffee. It was thick and harsh, and needed three spoonfuls of sugar to make it palatable. But the warm bitterness, like a Turkish kick in the pants, was enough to get her into the office and gather up all the materials on the Retrieval, then cart them all back into her bedroom. She put the mug down on her nightstand and crawled under the covers—the bed was fully made, with fresh flannel sheets—and threw all the pillows behind her back, to support her as she read.

  Blueprints of the target’s office and home were in the file, with small, precise writing in the margins noting specific problems or opportunities. Sergei had suborned someone in the department of buildings, to get this much detail. Hopefully it didn’t cost too much. Not that the costs weren’t built into the invoice Sergei submitted at the end of every job, and she wasn’t supposed to think about money when she was working, damn it.

  “All right. If I were a sneaky someone who had pinched off with something very, very naughty, and I didn’t know yet how I was going to use it, where would I put those naughty bits? Somewhere safe, yes, but not obvious. Not with anything someone in my family might need, or look for…”

  By the time the coffee worked its way through her system, Wren had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done. The question now was timing: when to move. Plus, she needed to do something special for this job. It wasn’t enough to get the material back. She also needed to do it in a way that left a distinctive calling card, so the target would know that he’d been smoked.

  She didn’t always do that; in fact, she hardly ever did that, preferring to leave as clean an exit as possible. But politics were pissing her off, right now, and she wanted someone to learn a lesson, in all of this.

  And you might as well wish for cave dragons and piskies to play well together, she thought wryly. Her back twinged, and she stretched her arms over her head, hearing things crack back into place. Gym. She definitely needed to get back to the gym at some point. The last real exercise she’d had—other than toss-the-covers with Sergei—had been that aborted snowball fight with P.B. Not good.

  Wren looked over at the clock, and blinked. No wonder her back was bitching at her. She had worked through the entire day; it was dinnertime.

  She consulted her stomach, decided that no, she wasn’t hungry. Better to sleep now, on an empty stomach, and eat when she got up. Tomorrow was going to be a seriously busy day.

  Decision made, she shoved the materials over the side of the bed, turned the light off, slid deeper under the covers, and went to sleep.

  And if she dreamed of Sergei, of dead ends and dragons, and blood on cobblestones, she didn’t let herself remember the details in the morning.

  eighteen

  For the most part, traditionally, Council business was conducted in hotel suites or private function spaces, the room chosen on the day of the meeting, and carefully guarded until the moment. It wasn’t that Council members were paranoid; they were merely quite…cautious.

  KimAnn Howe broke with tradition, as she had broken with almost everything else her predecessors on the Northeastern Council had done. She met with people anywhere she damn well chose to, at her convenience, and they would accept it, or refuse the meeting.

  It did not pay to refuse a meeting with Madame Howe.

  She was not, at first glance, a figure of terror: older, edging on elder; a slender figure, with carefully coiffed white hair coiled at her neck and graceful fingers tracing the rim of her china teacup. Mussolini, however, might have recoiled from the expression on her face this afternoon.

  Not many lonejack had ever had the pleasure of seeing her, in any form. Sergei had met with Madame Howe once, standing in for Wren at a gathering of the Council entire. Wren had encountered her a few times, once most notably when the Council leader appeared at Wren’s own apartment, to confront what she saw as the opposition leaders. KimAnn had been wearing her Public Face both times. She wasn’t, now.

  In fact, since the revelation that she had made a deal with the San Diego Council, had gone against generations of tradition in creating a joint Council under her own control, Madame Howe had not appeared in public. Wren and the Troika had kept what they knew quiet in order to ensure that the Council joined with the rest of the Cosa in dealing with the vigilantes and their mysterious backers, but they all knew that it was merely a temporary alliance. The Council wanted control, order, assimilation: three things that lonejacks were typically dead set against. It was a long-standing tradition, and another one KimAnn was determined to break.

  “Madame?”

  The young woman offered her more tea, which KimAnn accepted with a nod. The liquid was gently scented with jasmine, and rose into the air on warm waves, complementing the faint perfume of deep purple roses from the vase on the table. The younger Talent replaced the teapot and sat down in the upholstered chair, not showing any sign of how uncomfortable the Edwardian-era piece must have been. She was a credible assistant, with the perfect recall KimAnn demanded of all her assistants. KimAnn missed the active mind of her usual attendant, who would always have interesting views afterward, but this was a discussion that Colleen, since she was assigned to the Truce discussions, was best off not hearing.

  She fixed the other two occupants of the room with a gaze that showed every bit of the powerful current in her core. “You are suggesting that we tuck our tails between our hindquarters, and run away?”

  Mussolini would definitely have quailed from the icy disdain in her voice. The man directly facing her across the low coffee table, here in the heart
of her own home, did not even blink.

  “I believe that a strategic marshaling of our forces, without the accompanying scrutiny, is best for our long-term plans. And that we cannot do any such thing while taking part in this…little squabble.”

  He was brash, independent, a maverick. All qualities that had appealed to KimAnn when she was looking for the first link in her eventual chain of power. And he was smart, as well. Unpolished, and more than a little too rash, but smart. What he said had solid political merit.

  “You were the one who put me squarely in the middle of all this. What possessed you to meet with a representative of those…Null vigilantes?”

  Sebastian Bailey, the leader of the San Diego Council, barely tightened his grip on the china, but KimAnn noticed it, and he knew she had noticed it. “They contacted me. I tend not to dismiss potential allies before I’ve assessed them.”

  “You should have spoken to me before you did anything in my city.”

  “You weren’t holding my leash, then.” It clearly burned him to admit, even in the privacy of that room, that he was her dog.

  She smiled and leaned back. Having made her point, she was willing to be gracious.

  “Perhaps there is a way that this can yet benefit us. Heather.” The girl looked up alertly. “Pass the word. No Council member is to offer succor to lonejack or fatae, except as it directly impacts their own safety.”

  “Madame…” Heather was no Colleen, no, but she had spine, KimAnn would give her that. Good girl.

  “Yes?”

  “We have committed to the alliance. If we withdraw from the Patrols…”

  “The treaty has been broken. If any Council member wishes, of their own, to continue crawling the streets at night, putting themselves at risk, then they of course are to feel free to do so. But we will not sanction it, nor will we support them should injury occur.” In other words, they would be paying their own medical bills—and any other costs they might incur—rather than the Council’s usual safety net helping them out.