Читать книгу: «Staying Dead»

Staying Dead
Laura Anne Gilman

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For Mom and Dad, of course.

And for Mir and ElaineMc,

who have some small blame in all this…

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Because no writer works alone,

no matter what it feels like at 3:00 a.m.,

I need to praise and thank the following people:

Jennifer Jackson (agent) and

Mary-Theresa Hussey (editor). Finestkind.

Peter, who understood that there was something I

needed to do, and gave me the space to get it done.

The Cross-Genre Abuse Group, for smacking this

around the room more than a few times.

eluki, who said “yes” to my kids before anyone else,

and Dana and Lynn, all of whom took time out

to pay forward.

The folk in my newsgroup who came up with the info

when I needed it (and the Hounds, who howl on cue).

James, who told me to shut up and get back to work.

Marina Frants, who taught me all sorts of lovely Russian

phrases…some of which even made it into the book.

To you all, if I haven’t said it recently,

grazie. Molto grazie.

The Mississippi’s mighty, but it starts in Minnesota

At a place where you could walk across

with five steps down…

—Indigo Girls

“Ghost”

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

one

“Hey, lady! Move it or lose it!”

The cyclist sped past her, a blur of expensive aluminum, narrow wheels and Lycra-clad body topped by a screaming-orange helmet. He—she? it?—hopped off the curb and dove into the light traffic moving up Madison Avenue, almost slamming into a cab that was cruising around the opposite corner looking for an early-morning fare. The cabbie slammed on the brakes and the horn at the same time, and the bike messenger made a rude gesture as he wove in and out of the middle of the street, heading downtown.

“Oh, for a stick to spoke his wheels,” Wren said wistfully, staring after the cyclist with annoyance. The man standing next to her smothered a surprised burst of laughter. Wren blinked. She hadn’t been kidding; bicycle messengers were a menace.

Dismissing the incident with the single-minded focus she brought to every job, Wren turned her attention back to the building in front of her; the reason she was standing out on the corner at this ungodly hour of the a.m. on a Monday. What terrible sin had she committed in a past life, to get all the morning gigs in this life? She made a soft, snorting noise, amused at her own indignation. At least it was a pretty morning as those things went.

In fact, Manhattan in the spring was a pretty decent place to be. Winter meant slush and biting winds, while summer had a range of heat-induced smells that ranged from disgusting to putrid. You could live in the city then, but you generally didn’t like it. But spring, she thought, spring was the time to be here. The sun was warming up, the breeze was cool, and people were in the mood to smile at each other. Even bad days had an edge of promise to them.

But right now, spring weather aside, Wren couldn’t find a damn thing to be happy about. Seven in the morning was way too early, and the job that had sounded like quick and easy money at first was rapidly going deep into the proverbial shitter. She was going to have to do some actual work for her paycheck on this one.

“Maybe that will teach you to answer the phone before six,” she said out loud.

“Excuse me?”

Rafe, the guard who had been detailed to “help” her, had a cute little wrinkle between his eyebrows, totally spoiling his until-now perfect Little RentACop look.

“Nothing. Never mind.” Don’t talk to yourself in front of civilians, Valere. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. Even if she had ignored the phone’s ringing two hours ago, before either she or the sun had thought about getting up, the sound of Sergei’s voice on the machine would have made her pick the receiver up. She might have the skills that people paid for, but her partner was the one with a nose for jobs that was slowly but surely making them moderately well-off, if not obscenely wealthy. Only a fool would pass up a call from someone like that, no matter what the time.

And while Wren Valere was many things, a fool had never been one of them.

“Rafe? Can you go get me a refill of water?” she asked, handing him the plastic sports bottle she had been holding. He wasn’t thrilled at being an errand boy, she could tell, but his orders had been explicit. Give Ms. Valere all the help she needed. Type of help not specified. So he went.

Freed from observation, she sat back on her heels and closed her eyes slowly, holding them shut for a count of ten. She had been doing this long enough that it didn’t take her any longer than that to slip into a state of clear-minded awareness. The sounds of early-morning traffic, the smells of exhaust and fresh-budding greenery all faded, leaving her with a clear, concentrated, settled mind. As she opened her eyes slowly, not rushing anything, her gaze went back to the sleek marble foundation in front of her, as though there might have been some change in those ten-plus seconds of blackout.

Nope. Nothing. It still looked as ordinary and commonplace as before, one of any of a hundred-plus buildings throughout the city built in the same time period. No bloody handprint, no chisel marks or dust left on the pale gray surface, no sign of any kind of disturbance at all. Nothing to suggest there was something different about this northeast corner of the building, as opposed to the southeast, the southwest or the northwest sides. The four corners of this building stretched out over a full city block, and she’d just spent the past hour becoming far too familiar with all four.

God, she hated prep work! But you had to check everything before you started looking for anything. Even the stuff you knew you wouldn’t find. Except, of course, the fact that one corner, or rather one small block inside of this corner, wasn’t really there anymore.

A deliberate letting-go of her concentration, and the fugue state slipped away. Wren stood, arching her back to release some of the tension that had gathered there. Magic—current, in the post-eighteenth century terminology—was easy enough to use, if you had the Talent, but that didn’t make it easy.

Her throat felt like sandpaper. She looked around, but Rafe wasn’t back yet with her water. He must have gone all the way up to the executive lunchroom for San Pellegrino.

She clicked on the miniature recorder in her hand, and spoke into it, remembering to speak slowly enough that she would be able to transcribe correctly later on that day. “No indications of newly-made marks or disturbances on the site, not that that means anything—I bet they have a team of sanitation experts who come in every morning and sluice the building down, just in case a pigeon poops on it accidentally.”

All right, she thought. A slight exaggeration. But not by much. The guy who’d designed this had obviously had some penile issues that needed to be worked out, though.

The building in question was a thirty-eight-floor skyscraper, gleaming steel and glass in the early-morning light. A troop of window washers could spend a full year just wiping and polishing the expanse of windows. An edifice built to proclaim the owner’s ego to a city already overwhelmed with capital-P Personalities.

“From the exterior, the building looks intact. This is supported by the engineer’s report—” And how the hell had they found someone willing and able to do a full review of the building this morning? Money not only talked, it must have bellowed.

But the report she had found in the folder left at her door by one of Sergei’s ever-efficient contacts was clear on that. The missing piece had been removed from within the building, without cracking the concrete and steel surrounds. The building itself had not been harmed in any way by the alleged disruption to its structural integrity. Therefore, it was only her imagination that made the headquarters of Frants Enterprises tilt ever-so-slightly to the left. Cornerstones didn’t actually support any weight in modern buildings, or so she had been informed by a quick skim through the multitude of building and construction sites on the Internet while she waited for her coffee to brew. They were there for show, to display the construction date, as tradition. Sometimes, as receptacles of time capsules, or good-luck charms—

Or protection spells.

Wren had been part of the magic-using community since she was fourteen. She’d never once used a protection spell, or known anyone else who did, either. But a lot of people swore by them, apparently. And were willing to pay good money to get them back.

She drummed her fingers on her denim-clad thigh, thinking. Sometimes you needed to know all the facts. Sometimes, knowing anything more than the essentials just clogged the works. The trick was knowing which situation called for what method. She glanced up the length of the building, then blinked and looked away again quickly. The view made her dizzy, not so much from the sunlight reflecting off the glass as the sense of…no, not menace, exactly. But a looming emptiness that was disturbing. As though something more vital than a chunk of rock had been stolen away.

Wren frowned, redirecting her attention to the building’s foundation again, squinting as though hoping to suddenly be struck with X-ray vision. Not one of the recorded skill sets of Talent, worse luck. But if a Talent couldn’t get the job done, it was time to use your brain, and she had a pretty decent one if she did say so herself. Eliminating the impossible, you’re left with the obvious; it would take magic to get the missing slab out without doing major damage to the entire building. And that was exactly the feat someone had apparently mastered on this very building, at approximately 11:32 the night before. So, magic. Which narrowed the playing field not only for culprits, but motives.

She nodded to herself, twirling the recorder absently in one hand. A rather impressive act of vandalism, in more ways than one; it showed off the vandals’ abilities without making a fuss the usual authorities could follow, assuming they would even be interested in a case like this; it in no way harmed the integrity of the building and therefore didn’t put anyone working there at risk; and it struck deep in the heart of the building’s owner and prime resident’s deepest, ugliest fear.

It was a hacker’s trick, showing how easy it would be to really harm the target, without doing anything they could easily be prosecuted for. Only in this case, it wasn’t all just show. Damage had been done, if not anything you could explain on a police report, or an insurance waiver.

Their employer had two very simple questions: who did this, and how soon can you get it back? Right now Wren was more concerned with how it had been done. In her experience, once you found the tools, it was generally a simple matter to find the workman. And once they’d found him, the fun part began.

Only problem was, this bastard didn’t seem to have left any external traces at all. Wren was—grudgingly—impressed.

Clicking on the ’corder again, she continued making her comments, pacing down the sidewalk.

“The night watchman finished his rounds at 4:45 a.m. At that point, he claims not to have seen anything out of the ordinary—nothing that would have given him even an instant’s pause at all.” She hesitated, continued. “Which raises the question, I guess, if the theft was done remotely, or if the guard was under the influence of a spell himself.”

A jogger went past her at a heavy-breathing clip, and she moved out of the way with the instinctive radar that big-city residents evolve by instinct, but didn’t pause in her recitation. Even if the jogger had been inclined to listen in—selective deafness being another big-city survival trait—Wren doubted that he would have recalled it—or her—an instant later. Being invisible was one of the things she did very best. Part of it was by design: her jeans, white button-down shirt and leather jacket were quality enough that she would be categorized as “employed,” and the temporary security badge that came with the reports was now hung around her neck, giving her a reason to be in the building. Most people didn’t look any further than that. But the real secret to her success was a carefully cultivated result of the genetic lottery. Not a winning ticket; more like a “sorry, try again” one. Her shoulder-length hair was the color that could only be described as “brownish,” and her features were unremarkably regular. Average height, average weight, unremarkable measurements—she never warranted more than a swift once-over by anyone, male or female. Her appearance was neither unpleasant nor remarkable. Forgettably average.

Sometimes she wondered if dying her hair bright screaming red, or bleaching it platinum blond would make any difference to the way the world didn’t see her. But it never seemed worth the bother to experiment. And why screw with success? Besides, Sergei would kill her.

“The fact that there is no sign from the exterior of the building of digging, or any kind of disturbance at all, confirms the suspicion that it was a purely magical theft.”

Well, duh. But you checked everything anyway, just so it didn’t come back later and bite you on the ass.

“A remote grab seems more and more probable.” And narrowed her eventual list of suspects. Far easier to steal line-of-sight, especially something this size.

Rafe appeared by her shoulder, holding out a water bottle glistening with fresh condensation. Wren shut off the recorder and tucked it into the inside pocket of her bomber jacket, then took the bottle from him and poured a stream of the water down her throat.

“Thanks. Let’s go take a look at the inside, shall we?” The we was ironic, and they both knew it. Rafe wasn’t so cute when he was annoyed. Oh well. She shouldered her way through one of the large revolving glass doors that led to the lobby, and walked inside the building, her eyes scanning the floor and walls with a practiced eye. She was looking for any indication that something might have been chalked or painted on the gleaming marble surfaces. Especially if it was a remote grab, signposts would show up somewhere. Remotes were tough enough, easier to focus if you had something there to guide you in. Leaving something of your own was best, but risky if you couldn’t pull it on your way out.

Admittedly, it would have been difficult for anything to adhere to that expensive marble-and-brass slickness, but the lobby would be the logical—easiest—place for the thief to lay a marker. Wren was surprised when her scan didn’t turn up anything. Markings were a safer way to do the job than actually being on-site at the time, something you could do well in advance of the job, and assuming that the victim knew enough to call in someone like herself afterward. If she had been doing the grab, she would have marked…the ceiling. Wren scanned upward, squinting against the overhead light, and let out a soft triumphant “hah!” There, up on the ceiling behind her, by the door. A faint streak, difficult to find even if you knew where and how to look for it. Wren did a rough calculation and decided that if you followed the end of the streak down and at an angle, it would point directly to where the northeast cornerstone was laid.

“Now, how did you get up there…and is it worth my time to go up and check you out?”

Probably not, she decided. Maybe later, if need be. But for now, the evidence was enough. Nobody was going to go up there and erase it, after all. Not without leaving even more trace for her to follow.

Something beeped. Rafe excused himself, going off into the far corner to talk into his walkie-talkie. He looked upset. Somebody must have seen him snatching the water, she thought with an evil grin.

Nodding to the morning guard at his station, she stopped so that he could compare the code of her temporary security pass against the list in the computer.

“Anyone else come in last night with a visitor’s pass?” Overlook nothing; assume the perp was either insanely clever or astonishingly dumb. You never knew when a simple question could get you an important answer.

“Nope. Heard there was a problem last night?” The guard was a short black guy in a standard-issue polyester blue jacket and tie a shade darker than Rafe’s. Although the tie might have been silk—he looked like a guy who would upgrade when possible. He sat the long security desk like a command center. Which, based on the number of blinking lights and constantly-changing screens set into the five-foot-wide surface, it was. Like something out of Star Trek, only without the nifty beeps and pings and whirring red alerts. This console was sleek and silent, even when a knob flicked red. He glanced at it, flipped a switch, and corrected whatever the problem was, all without taking his attention off her.

“You asking me, or telling me?” Wren asked. She heard the hardness in her voice, and winced inwardly, trying to tone it down a little. Don’t antagonize the witnesses, you idiot! A slight cock of the head to the right, like the bird she was nicknamed for, and a faint smile that could be mistaken for encouragement softened her words.

It worked enough to take the edge off his initial reaction. “They told me there was going to be a full-scale shakedown later today. That says trouble.”

She nodded, shifting her weight slightly to convey interest, and a willingness to hang around and listen to him for as long as he wanted to talk.

“And it had to be last night,” the guard—his name tag read Blair—continued. “’Cause when I came in this morning, Joe had already gone off shift, and there were two guys here in way-too-expensive suits, working the desk instead of him. And here you are, full clearance pass, asking to see my log book. So, you with FullTec?”

The name was familiar from her predawn briefing materials. FullTec was the name of the company that had installed the security system for this building back when it was built in 1955, and rewired it every ten years or so thereafter. She’d checked them out online, too. They’d been ahead of their time even then, and were still riding the cutting edge of security technology now. No building wired by them had ever been broken into, held hostage, or otherwise menaced. The upper level executives who gathered for multibillion-dollar conference calls rested easy in a FullTec building. Said so right on their Web site.

But, according to her job notes, they hadn’t been the ones to prepare the missing item. Which meant that they—probably—didn’t know anything at all about the special protections built into it. That had been Talented work: a mage, probably, or maybe one of the earliest lonejacks. Special protections that kept the owner, the ruler of this little financial empire, safe and secure in his dealings with the outside world.

A protection that had disappeared at 11:32 p.m. last night.

She banished those thoughts for later, returning her full attention to the guard and the here-and-now.

“No, actually, I’m a freelancer. Called in special to double-check some of the systems.”

Blair nodded his head, sagely impressed. The tie was definitely silk. “Ah. Watching the watchdogs, huh?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“So, you a tech? Some kind of whiz-kid hacker?”

Wren laughed, thinking of Sergei’s caustic comments while he watched her fumbling attempts to upgrade her computer last weekend. Current—the power source of magic—screwed with electronics, so her relationship with her computer was at best user-cautious. “Nope.” She paused, a germ of mischief making her tell this poor bastard the truth. “I’m a thief.”

Twenty minutes later, she was alone with the main control box for the building’s wiring system. The guard had laughed at her words, but the look in his eyes had been cool, and suddenly she’d been given an escort down into the basement. Not Rafe, either. A new guy, still polite but bulkier and much less cute. Not quite a goon, but with definite goonlike tendencies only barely tamed by the neatly pressed blue blazer that didn’t quite hide the bulk of a stun gun at his hip. Nor, she suspected, was it supposed to.

“That’ll teach me to be honest,” she muttered, opening the box and surveying the neatly laid-out and labeled assortment of wires. A stun gun would only take her out for about half the time of a normal human, since her body was used to channeling electrical energy in the search for current, but it would still be unpleasant, if she were taken unprepared. “Sergei’s right. Never gets me anywhere except in trouble.”

“Did you say something, miss?”

“No, nothing, sorry. I talk to myself when I work. Just ignore me.”

And she wasn’t really a thief, anyway. She was a retriever, thank you very damn much. A person, as Sergei would say, of specialized skills, who could bring objects back to their rightful—the client was always rightful—owner without the fuss of a police investigation, or the bother of insurance companies getting involved. Sergei had a way of making everything sound so damn high-class.

All right, so sometimes a legality or two got bent out of shape, in the course of a retrieval. But bending wasn’t breaking. Not so long as she wasn’t caught, anyway. And nobody told her mother.

Reaching out, Wren traced a wire gently, pressing just enough to make it resist her touch. According to the label under it, this section of wires connected to the fire alarm system. Probably not what she was looking for, since those things were notoriously temperamental. Dropping her hand several inches, she came to the security alarm. Again, not likely. That would have been the very first thing they would have checked.

When he’d called with the details, Sergei had made it clear to her that the client wanted this done with an absolute nil of noise. Which meant, ideally, she’d be the only one on the job. But the guard’s words indicated, to no real surprise at all, that that was already screwed. If the “mondo suits” at the board this morning hadn’t been Mage Council troubleshooters, high-powered magic-users-for-hire, she’d eat her hat, if she owned one. Oh well. Never assume the client’s going to tell you the truth. Especially if it involves anything that might actually let you get the job done.

But she had one advantage—high-powered magic-users tended to think in high-powered ways. Which she didn’t, as a rule. Start low on the spectrum, work your way up. Nobody uses more power than they have to. Call it Valere’s Strop to Occam’s Razor.

Closing that control box, she opened the one directly below it and snorted without amusement. The labeling confirmed her initial suspicion: the electrical system for the entire building. Everything that had an On button was initially powered from this one place. She tsked under her breath. Sloppy, sloppy. With the quick close-and-yank of current, she could give every overworked, underpaid secretary a day off.

And then end up explaining to Sergei why the job went south. From a jail cell. Not one of your better impulses, no.

Reaching in, she touched her index finger to one of the wires, and instantly felt a familiar answering hum in the blood running under the skin. You could describe magic any way that worked, and one mage’s science was another wizzart’s chaos. It all boiled down to using the existing energy that was generated by almost everything knocking about the universe. Call it electricity, call it life force, or chi: hell, call it Norman if it works. Wren didn’t pay much attention to any of the various and contentious schools of magic theory. She wasn’t much for schooling, period. You used what you had.

Every human living could use magic—theoretically. In actual practice, only a small portion of the population could conduct the charge, like living lightning rods, and an even fewer percentage of them were what her mentor had called pure conductors. Pures were the elite, the ones who made it to full mage status. They were generally co-opted by the Council, the strongest and most secretive union ever to collect dues. The rest of the magic-using population muddled along at various levels of ability, doing the best they could, finding their strong points and sticking to them.

Technically Wren was a pure, but she didn’t see the point in bragging on it. It was like having a high IQ—wasn’t much unless you worked it, did something with it. Drawing down the power was easy for her, siphoning off the energy from an external source to flow through her, as though she were running water through her hands. Any source would do, but current that was already tamed and channeled made it so much easier. Like called to like—energy was energy, and where there was one, there was the other. The electronic age was a godsend to magic users, despite what the fairy tales said. If she’d been a little better at channeling out what came in, she’d have been Council material for sure. The thought still made her shudder.

Five fingers now extended, she touched wires at random, discarding anything that sang back to her, looking for a discordant note, something that might indicate a flaw, a clog…or the remnant of supernatural tinkering. In short: look for an elemental.

“Ah-hah!” she said as her thumb grazed a wire that felt different from the others. “Gotcha, you sneaky little…” Pushing with that finger, she listened to the difference.

Elementals were exactly what they sounded like—entities that existed in an elemental state. Very small, and barely sentient, they were nonetheless useful, if you knew how to coax them. Now that she had a handle on one, Wren could sense a flurry of elementals within the wire she had tapped—hardly surprising. Barring a thundercloud, there were few places an elemental flocked to like a live wire; it must be like an amusement park, or an opium den to them, pick your metaphor. Now, to see how long they had been there, and if they’d noticed anything.

“Right. Come to mama…”

Having already gone into the fugue state once that morning, it was like stepping off a curb to find it again. No thought, no effort, just a sudden snapping into awareness, chasing glittering tendrils up and down her neural paths…

“Excuse me, miss?”

She blinked, shaken out of her intense concentration by the goon placing a paw on her shoulder. He looked nervous.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, but, whatever it is you’re doing—could you stop? They’re reporting power outages on several floors….”

Wren grinned sheepishly. “Right. Sorry.” She must have gone too deep, and drained some of the charge down accidentally. She flexed her neck and arched her back as though to straighten out stiff muscles, feeling for the natural current within herself. It hummed and snapped with vigor, confirming her suspicion. She’d gone for an automatic skim, copping a buzz off the charge of magic that could be found even in man-made electricity and storing it in the pool that every current-sensitive person carried, knowingly or not, within them.

Oops. Technically, that would be theft. Never a good idea, to steal from your employers. Probably on the level of office supplies; a pen here, a ream of paper there…Wren shook her head, dismissing that train of thought. It didn’t matter. She had gotten what little information was there. The trick now was going to be figuring out what it all meant, if anything.

Making nice to the goon-guard so that he would “forget” about what he hadn’t really seen anyway took a few minutes. Then she was riding up in the freight elevator, back up to the main lobby. It was crowded with suits now, male and female, armed with briefcases and brown paper bags, some of them already open to let loose the aroma of fresh-brewed Starbucks, or the cheaper stuff from one of the ubiquitous corner bagel carts. The starting bell had rung, and all’s well with the corporate world. Wren shook her head, moving against traffic. How the hell did people live like this?

It was with decided relief that Wren left her security badge with the guard at the front desk and went home. Now the real work—the fun stuff—could begin.

two

The message light on her answering machine was blinking, a quick red flash that caught her eye the moment she came in the door. She dropped her keys in the small green ceramic bowl on the counter of her square little kitchenette, her mail next to that, and reached over to press the play button.

Opening the fridge, Wren pulled out the orange juice, pouring a long draught down her throat without bothering to get a glass.

“Wren, it’s 9:15.” Sergei’s perfectly enunciated voice filled the sparse confines of her kitchenette, almost as though he were actually there. “I just accessed your account, and half of your fee has been deposited, as agreed upon.”

She raised the O.J. carton in salute to that fact.

“Need I remind you that the client is paying for a timely resolution to this situation?”

Sergei never referred to them as cases, or jobs. No, the “client” had a “situation.” Situations paid better.

“Jesus wept, Sergei. Even Christ took three days to rise from the dead! Gimme a break here!”

“And need I remind you that today is the thirteenth? Please mail your rent check today.”

“Yeah yeah, I already have a momma nag, I don’t need another,” she complained to the empty apartment as the tape clicked off. Not that it wasn’t sort of nice, having someone to remind her of the stuff that always managed to slip her mind. Like dropping a check in the mail.

That was the way their partnership worked, too. Sergei handled the money side of it, set up the deals, worked the angles. She did the jobs—or, in Sergei’s parlance, “rectified the situations.” The stuff that took Talent, as opposed to talent. From each according to their abilities, although she had been known to bargain sharply, and Sergei wasn’t above getting his hands a little dirty, if needed. She knew for a fact that the man lied with the fluidity and believability of a gypsy prince if it suited him.

A nice skill for your agent to have. It had certainly saved their asses more than once, including one memorable evening where he had played both her father and her husband to two different people in the space of an hour. He hadn’t been sure which role was more annoying, especially when she insisted on calling him “dad-dikins” for the rest of the month.

The memory of that made her smile, the comforting awareness of Sergei as always tucked somewhere along her spine. It wasn’t anything particularly magical; just the knowledge born of ten years’ partnership that, all joking aside, he was there for her, that all she had to do was yell.

Well, maybe it was a little bit magical. Sergei wasn’t a total null, and maybe she’d sampled a little more of his internal energies than she’d ever told him about…but it was only so that she’d be able to pick him out in a dark room, in a crowd, if the need ever arose.

Not that she’d ever admit to needing him, even when she was asking. Bastard would enjoy that far too much. He’d be more than happy to take over handling her personal finances, too, if she let him. It wasn’t that he didn’t think she was capable. She hoped, because otherwise she’d have to kill him. He just…was overprotective that way. Every way. Sometimes she thought he still saw her as the seventeen-year-old she’d been when they first hooked up, her still foundering in her abilities, and him with a pair of severely pissed-off mages on his tail.

Putting the orange juice back into the fridge, Wren turned out the light in the kitchen with a casual slap of the hand against the switch as she went across the narrow wood-floored hallway and into the main room. She turned on the stereo, letting the soft jazz clear out the silence. The music tugged at the tension between her shoulder blades, pulling it down off her body. A world with saxophones in it wasn’t a bad world at all.

Other than the stereo, two huge speakers, and a comfortable brown tweed armchair, the room was empty of furniture. The acoustics of the room were—astoundingly—perfect. It would have been blasphemy to in any way disturb it.

Her fifth-floor walkup had five rooms—downright palatial by Manhattan standards, even if the rooms themselves were tiny. In addition to the music room and kitchenette, there were three shoebox bedrooms against the back wall, each with its own window that overlooked the brick wall of the next building over. A bathroom with facilities that had been upgraded within the last decade sent the rent soaring from barely reasonable to moderately painful.

Okay, so maybe the neighbors weren’t all they could be, in terms of minding their own business. The five flights of stairs were murder, especially in the summer. And the sounds of traffic from over on Houston Street could be pretty bad. Wren didn’t care. Two years ago she had walked in the door half a step behind the real estate broker, a hyperkinetic woman glued to her cell phone, and had felt a sense of comfort soak into her bones, like walking onto a ley line, those semi-legendary sources of power. This was home. This was her sanctuary. The moment the building went co-op, as every decent apartment building seemed to, sooner or later, she was going to buy her apartment. That’s where all of her money went, right into the savings account that was not ever, on pain of pain, touched. No vacations, no expensive toys or impulse splurges.

Well, maybe a few. Mostly, though, she stole what she really wanted. Just to keep her hand in, of course.

Wren was a pragmatist. She was very good at what she did, but no career goes on forever. Especially not one with risks like hers. So she planned. And prepared. And kept praying that human nature would maintain a demand for her particular skills.

So far, no problem on that front. Someone always wants what they’re not supposed to have, and someone’s always equally willing to pay to get that something back.

Setting the volume level to where she could hear the music throughout the apartment, Wren grabbed the mail off the counter, sorting it as she walked down the hallway into the bedroom that was set up as her office. “Phone bill, credit card, junk junk junk, more junk, political junk.” She tossed all but the bills into the recycling bin next to the desk, and thumbed through the flyers that had been stuck in the doorjamb, setting aside one menu and tossing the rest into the bin. That was the third flyer she’d gotten for pest removal. At this point, they were more annoying than her nonexistent cockroaches, current being a great and totally—in her mind—underutilized way to keep a location insect-free.

“If I could only market that little side effect right,” she told the photo of her mother tacked to the board on the wall in front of her, “I’d be able to make us both filthy rich overnight. And Sergei, too.”

The office was the largest of the three bedrooms, but barely managed to hold the small dark wood desk where her computer and a headset phone reigned, a comfortably upholstered office chair, and a tall potted plant against one wall. The corkboard hung on the wall over the desk was cluttered with papers, takeout menus, and the one posed photo of her mother. Five two-drawer file cabinets marched along the opposite wall, pulling double-duty as a table for an assortment of odd but useful objects she didn’t know where else to put. That wall also held a closet. Its door had been removed, and half a dozen shelves installed, to serve as a makeshift bookcase. The window was covered by a rice paper shade, allowing light during the day, but keeping prying eyes out 24/7.

She sat down at the desk and turned on the computer. While it hummed to life, she reached over to the phone, dialing a number from memory while she hooked the wireless headset up, pulling her hair clear where it tangled with the mouthpiece with a mutter of disgust. She hated using the thing, but the phone—like her computer—had been rigged with so many surge protectors to make it safe for her to use on a regular basis that you couldn’t move the damn thing without creating disaster.

One ring, and then a crisp, efficient “Yes?”

“It’s me.”

Sergei’s raspy tenor voice changed, so subtly it would have taken someone paying close attention to recognize the new, softer tone for affection.

“You looked at the job site?”

“Yeah, for whatever that was worth.” Wren leaned back and swung her feet up on the desk. Her loafers needed polishing. “External was clean, but there was one possible smudge-marker up on the ceiling inside. Although, in retrospect, it could’ve been there since Adam went figless. Anyway, ruled out anything else. Distance grab, no doubts. A pro.”

“But it was definitely a magic-user?”

Sergei was, like so much of the human population, in that nether area between Null and Talent, but after so many years as her partner he was well-versed enough in the uses of it to make certain assumptions. Besides, realistically, what else could it have been?

“Yeah.” She refrained from sarcasm. Barely. “Whoever it was used the building’s wiring to convey the spell. Probably had every person in the building so hocused, they couldn’t have told you what color their socks were.”

“And then got the cornerstone out—how?”

Wren’s mouth twisted in frustration, making her look for a moment like a five-year-old given brussels sprouts. “Okay, that part I haven’t quite figured out yet. Translocation, probably.”

Translocation of an inanimate or inert object wasn’t a difficult spell for someone with any kind of mojo and open channels, but the actual performance took a lot out of the caster. Especially if he wasn’t present on-site, preferably within eyesight of the object. That was impossible in this case, since the object to be retrieved wasn’t accessible without the breaking and entering of a kind that hadn’t happened. So. A distance grab of that magnitude would make the hire-price prohibitively expensive, and the cost would increase the further the object was moved. Or it should, anyway. Even the best Talent had to eat and pay the rent, and a Transloc like that would wipe you for anything else for a week. “Might have intended to replace the stone with something else, to maintain volume consistency—” the hobgoblin of all translocations “—but the alarms going off must have wigged him.”

“Alarms?” Sergei sounded a little alarmed himself. Wren reached out and sorted the pile of papers on her desk with one finger. Blueprints of the Frants building, cut into twelve-by-twelve squares for easy shuffling, covered with red ink—Sergei’s handwriting—and her pencil smudges. “Yeah, alarms. I could feel the echoes when I went into the basement. Nice little mage-triggers. Someone is a smidge nervous down there. I wonder if the perp knew about them before he went down, or if he was expecting a simple grab-and-run, so to speak. And before you panic, no, I didn’t set it off again. The parameters were set way too high for little old me.”

Actually, that was a lie. She had sensed the threads of magic and slipped under and between them. While she wasn’t ever going to be called to serve on the Council—even assuming they lobotomized her long enough for her to agree to sign on—that was more a matter of attitude than Talent. Where she was strong she was very strong, and distracting attention from herself, be it magical or physical, was as natural as breathing to her. Her mentor had called it Disassociation, which was basically a fancy way of saying that she could make people—or things, specifically things like an alarm system—believe that she wasn’t there.

The problem, as far as anyone had been able to explain to her, was that for all her undeniable talent she was just a little too dense, magically speaking. The current channeled fine—she had the skill, no doubts there—but it sometimes channeled in weird ways, denying her access to a lot of the major skills like levitation and translocation. Pity, as they would have been damned useful in her career.

“You think maybe the thief meant to use it for blackmail? Or maybe ransom? Hey, got your protection spell here, what do you want to give me for it?”

“Or possibly to open up the door just enough for a direct attack by someone else?” Sergei sounded like he’d given this some serious thought while she was out doing the hard work.

“Maybe. I know, I know, not our problem. I’d prefer blackmail, though. Easier to find someone if they’re going to be so obliging as to send back a calling card.” If she were a better conductor…ah, well.

On the plus side of that density, the risk of her wizzing out—losing her mind to the magic flow—was probably lower than anyone else at her comparable Talent level. There were always going to be portions of her brain the current couldn’t get into.

“They also serve those who hum in choir,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing. Look, whoever this was, he’s a subtle guy, definitely strong, but not too bright. He squelched the elementals but forgot to sedate them.”

“Which, in English, means what?” Sergei did exasperated like a guy with years of practice.

Wren grinned, forgetting he couldn’t see her. Tweaking Sergei was always so much fun. He did the staid businessman thing so well, sometimes he forgot to take it off. “It means exactly that, which if you would ever remember anything I’ve told you about elementals you’d, well, remember.” He had the weirdest mental block about certain aspects of current—she’d almost given up trying to figure it out. Then again, non-Talents should be uneasy around current. She shouldn’t blame him if even knowing things wigged him out enough to not want to think about it. “I tapped into the wiring, and there was a horde of elementals there. Quiet, but jazzed, like something’d shoved a massive current up their tails, but told them to lay low about it.

“But when I stirred them up, they came shooting out, like they were hoping whatever it was had come back.”

And once they had come to her hand, she had been able to stroke them into giving up the residue from that burst of magic. That was another one of her stronger skills—reading magic like some people could read Braille, or maps, or any other code. It made her useless in a really powerful thunderstorm, stoned like kitty on catnip from the overload of power, but the rest of the time it was part of her stock-in-trade. Where one magic-user had gone, she could go, recreating their trail with remarkable accuracy. Well, mostly. Unlike her other skills, which had names and entries in the skillbooks her mentor had shown her, this one seemed to be particular to her and the way her brain worked. Or if other Talents had it, they were keeping just as quiet about it as she was. The end result either way was that she had no real idea how it worked, or why, or how to control it.

Then again, she didn’t understand any of that about her computer either, and it still worked fine. Most of the time.

“I skimmed off a decent enough emotional memory of the thief to recognize him or her again. Pretty sure of it, anyway.”

Sergei made an unhappy-sounding noise in the back of his throat. She didn’t think he was aware he did it—she couldn’t imagine him making it during negotiations with clients, or the highbrow, hoity-toity art collectors who made his gallery so obnoxiously successful, which meant it was a Wren-specific complaint. The thought made her grin again. “Even if you were sure, that doesn’t help us unless you actually run into him—”

“Or her.”

“Or her, in the near future. Wren…” A sigh, and she knew he was fiddling with one of the slender brown cigarettes he carried with him everywhere and never smoked.

“Yeah, I know. Doesn’t help worth diddly, realistically. But what, you expected this guy to leave a calling card? It happens, sure, but not real often. Which is good, otherwise we’d both be out of work.”

Sergei made a noncommittal noise that might have been agreement, amusement or a growl.

“Look, all I need is a reasonably-sized list of people with something to gain by the client losing his big block o’ protection, and I can backtrack from there. We do a little digging, to see who has the skills, or the money to hire a mage of that power, and then I can retrieve the cornerstone, which you know I can do in my sleep. Easy money. So no worries.”

“So, who’s worried?” Sergei asked, sounding worried.

Wren hit the disconnect button, not bothering to say goodbye. Swinging her legs back down to the floor, she winced a little at their stiffness. Time to hit the gym—she had gotten a little too out of shape over the winter again. Too many of their recent cases had been deskwork, not action.

She filed the thought under “when I have a spare hour,” pulled out the keyboard drawer and went to work composing and sending out e-mails to contacts, some human, and some not quite so, looking for any chatter happening in the Cosa Nostradamus.

The one advantage to being part of a community that the majority of the world didn’t even know existed was that you didn’t have anywhere else to talk about what was going on. So the gossip network was tight, fast, and frighteningly efficient. She’d lay decent odds with her own money that she’d have a lead by lunchtime.

Speaking of which…Wheels set in motion, she sat back and dialed the phone again.

“Hi, yeah, it’s Valere in 5J. Medium sausage, and a liter of diet ginger ale. Just slap it on the tab.” She listened for a moment, laughed. “Yeah, you too. Thanks.” Taking off the headset, she draped it on its stand, running fingers through her hair to fluff it up again.

Her mother’s photo managed to emit waves of disapproval despite the smile still fixed to her lips. “Ah, come on, Mom. Breakfast of champions, right? What’s the point of having a 24-hour pizza place on the corner if you don’t take advantage of it?”

Besides, it was either that or leftover Thai from the back of the fridge, and she’d mentally tagged that for lunch.

She had about half an hour before Unray’s buzzed with her pizza. Might as well make it a billable half hour. Pulling the ’corder out of her jacket pocket, she put it on the desk and swung the keyboard into position. With a quick, silent prayer that her moderate use of current while the ’corder was in her pocket hadn’t totally futzed the batteries, she hit Play and began to transcribe her notes, wincing a little at the static that had crept into the tape just because it was near her body.

“Come on, brain cells,” she muttered as her fingers hit the keys. “Give me something I can use. Momma wants to wrap this up fast and have the weekend free, for once!”

three

The room was remarkable for being completely unremarkable. The walls were painted a soft matte white, the floor made from wide planks of fine-grained wood. The lighting came from discreet spots that directed attention rather than illuminated.

There was one door. No windows. The overall impression was of endless space somehow made cozy. An architect had labored over the lines and arches of this space, a designer had meditated on the perfect shade of white for the walls and ceiling, a feng shui specialist had dictated the ordering of the floor’s wooden planks, the exact placement of the three objects which resided therein in relation to the door.

It was for those three objects that the room existed.

In one corner, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a simple green marble pillar, three feet around and seven feet high. Etched onto its surface were crude symbols that hadn’t seen the light of day for over three thousand years.

In the opposite corner, an ebony wood pedestal was lit from above, highlighting a chunk of clear, unfaceted crystal that looked as though it had just been pulled from the ground, hosed down, and dropped onto that base.

And in the farthest corner, two men maneuvered a low wooden tray set on wheels into position. It was a mover’s trolley, its bed covered with a quilted pad similar to the kind used for fine furniture and grand pianos. Another pad wrapped up over a four-foot by six-foot square, and was sealed with heavy gray tape. The hard rubber wheels moved soundlessly on the floor, despite the weight they bore.

The two men were burly, but not brutish looking. One was perhaps forty, with graying hair cut short. The other was ten years younger, and completely bald. They wore simple white coveralls that had only one pocket in the left sleeve, too small to carry anything larger than a cigarette lighter. There were no names sewn over the chest: no logos, cute or otherwise on their backs.

They finished adjusting the trolley, and the younger man knelt by its side, producing a slender but sharp-looking pocket knife from his sleeve pocket, carefully cutting through the tape, peeling it away from the pad and unfolding the pad from its enclosed prize. About the length of a small bench, the marble’s silvery-gray surface was marked and pitted, making the once-glossy surface look dull and battered. A smaller rectangle on the top surface looked as though it had been carved out and then filled in with concrete.

“All this, for that?”

The older man sounded disgusted. No one else was in the room, but his partner cast a worried look over his shoulder, as though expecting someone to appear there and overhear the criticism.

“If the owner says it’s art, it’s art,” he told his older companion firmly. “Let’s just get it settled, and get out of here.” Personally, the object gave him the creeps. Hell, the entire place gave him the creeps. But he was a professional, damn it. He was going to act like one.

A low matte black platform, installed when the room itself was built and unused until now, waited to receive its burden. The two men took wide canvas slings that had been hung on the trolley’s handle, and fitted them around two corners of the marble block. The younger man’s hand brushed the surface of the stone where the cement plug was, and he shuddered involuntarily, stopping to look down at his hand as though expecting to see a spider, or something else less pleasant on top of it.

“Will you stop that?” the other man snapped. “Concentrate on the job. I don’t need you getting sloppy and dumping it all on me.”

Stung, his co-worker glared at him, shook his hand out unobtrusively, as though to get feeling back into a sleeping limb, and counted to three under his breath, just barely loud enough to hear. On three, they heaved, and with a seemingly effortless movement and a pair of grunts that destroyed that illusion, the stone settled into its new home.

“That’s strange. Wonder if it’s been hollowed out? I thought marble that size would be heavier.”

“Don’t complain, man, don’t complain! And for God’s sake, don’t ask,” the younger man begged, his eye closed against the sweat that was rolling off his forehead. “We on the mark?”

The stone was square on its base, with a full three feet between it and the walls on two sides; room enough for a person to walk around it, should they so desire.

“Yep,” the other workman replied. “Perfect, as always.” It was as close to a compliment as they would get from anyone. They were hired via the company’s Web site, informed of the details by e-mail, paid by wire transfer, and never knew what any of it was all about. And they liked it that way. Some folk you just didn’t want to know any more about than you had to.

Their work completed, the two rolled up the quilted pad and tossed it onto the trolley, pushing it out ahead of them as they left. They didn’t look again at the object they had delivered, nor did they pause to consider the other two objects already in place.

No one waited at the door to show them out; they had been given their instructions before arrival, when they were assigned the job. They would walk down the bland, security-camera-lined hallway they had entered through, down a flight of stairs, and follow a row of lights through a basement maze that would deposit them through a four-inch-thick metal door in a ten-foot-high wall that ran along an unpaved country road. A livery car with darkly-tinted windows waited there to take them back to the city, where they would be dropped off without once having seen another person.

Their employer wanted his privacy. They were paid well enough not to wonder why. And the legalities of what they had done never entered their minds at all.

When the last echoes of the workmen’s feet had faded into silence once again, silence reclaimed the building. In another wing, a door opened, and footsteps sounded, walking calmly, with no apparent haste or urgency, the owner of all within those walls. Occasionally the walker would pause to admire a painting, or caress a sculpture, but for the most part the priceless objects were accorded no more attention than the carpet underfoot, or the ceilings above.

Eventually, the door into the white room was pushed open, and the owner of the house entered, walking with those same unhurried strides to the corner holding the newly-installed fixture. He paused in front of it, cataloguing every detail and comparing it to his expectations.

“You’re not much to look at, are you?”

The slab of stone didn’t respond to the voice.

“But they do say, you can’t judge something by its looks. It’s not what’s on the outside that counts, after all, but the inside. Isn’t that right?”

The figure knelt by the cornerstone, trailing one well-manicured finger along its rough surface, shivering pleasurably at the sensation. “But no matter. No matter. I know what you are, what you were. And all that really counts is that you’re mine, now.”