Читать книгу: «Blood from Stone»

Praise for the Retrievers novels of
laura anne gilman

Staying Dead

“An entertaining, fast-paced thriller set in a world where cell phones and computers exist uneasily with magic, and a couple of engaging and highly talented rogues solve crimes while trying not to commit too many of their own.”

—Locus

Curse the Dark

“With an atmosphere reminiscent of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose by way of Sam Spade, Gilman’s second Wren Valere adventure (after Staying Dead) features fast-paced action, wisecracking dialog and a pair of strong, appealing heroes.”

—Library Journal

Bring It On

“Ripping good urban fantasy, fast-paced and filled with an exciting blend of mystery and magic…this is a paranormal romance for those who normally avoid romance, and the entire series is worth checking out.”

—SF Site

Burning Bridges

“This fourth book in Gilman’s engaging series delivers…Wren and Sergei’s relationship, as usual, is wonderfully written. As their relationship moves in an unexpected direction, it makes perfect sense—and leaves the reader on the edge of her seat for the next book.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews [4 stars]

Free Fall

“An intelligent and utterly gripping fantasy thriller, by far the best of the Retrievers series to date.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Laura Anne Gilman
Blood From Stone

AUTHOR NOTE

Blood from Stone was an easy book to write—and a difficult one at the same time.

Easy, because I’ve lived with these characters, their personalities and problems, for the length of six books now. We’ve been together for the long haul, and each book is like visiting with old and dear friends.

Difficult, because with this book their story comes to a (temporary) close. The Cosa Nostradamus universe continues with Hard Magic, but Wren and Sergei will be taking a short break to let Bonnie and her crew take center stage. While I’m sad to see them go, I’m thrilled that Bonnie’s getting her chance to shine. You can read a teaser for that book at the end of this one.

Meanwhile, you have Blood from Stone yet to read, wherein Wren and Sergei are faced with a new challenge—one that involves Wren’s sidekick P.B. and the fate of all demon-kind!

Enjoy!

Laura Anne Gilman

May 2009

There’s only one person this book could be dedicated to:

my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, who has put up with this entire

crew and their writer for six books now, and come back and

asked for more….

And maybe that’s all that we need is to meet in the middle of impossibility.

—“Mystery”

Indigo Girls

Contents

Prologue

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

prologue

“Why do you think you need it?”

“I…” He wants to say that he doesn’t know, but that’s already been established as a cop-out. He may not know, but there is a reason. There is always a reason. So he says what he already knows. “It feels good. The pain. But it’s not about masochism. It’s about trust.” That was true. It felt true. “The pain means that something bad is happening, but I trust that nothing will go wrong.”

“But things do. You’re damaging yourself. Every time you do it, you’re hurting yourself.”

“I didn’t…I don’t care. I still need it.” A pause, because he has always been honest in his own way. “I don’t need it. I want it. I want it enough to risk everything. And it will cost me everything. That’s why I’m here.”

“It” was current, magical energy. Talent could use it, manipulate it. To a Null like himself, it was deadly, screwing with the internal organs. Being caught in a current backlash was like being repeatedly hit with lightning bolts. Nobody in their right mind would find it a turn-on.

It wouldn’t be the first time he’d wondered if he was crazy.

“What do you what to accomplish here? Do you want to not want it?”

That was the damned thing about therapists. They ask the kinds of questions you don’t want to think about, much less answer. He shifts in the chair, his legs suddenly too long for comfort, his hands too large, his skin too tight around his frame.

“What do you want?” The voice probes again, soothing but insistent.

“I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

“Indeed.”

“I hate it when you say that. I hate everything about this.”

“Then why are you here?”

Sergei shifts again, wishing desperately for his cigarette case. He hasn’t had a cigarette in years, but right now, the feel of the thin cylinder in his fingers would be just as soothing as the hit of nicotine ever was. Because he doesn’t know why he is here, doesn’t know what he is supposed to do or say, or bring out of it.

“I don’t know.”

Except he does know. Wren. Always, ever, Wren Valere. Partner, lover, best friend…the source of his addiction, and the thing he would lose, if he couldn’t get it under control.

He just doesn’t know how to do that, without walking away from her, too.

one

In the middle of a copse of trees, bordered on one side behind her by a dry creek bed and on the other in front of her by a low stone wall covered with moss and bird shit, Wren Valere crouched, her backside an inch off the leaf-strewn ground, her palms resting on her knees, and her knees complaining about the whole situation. She was tired, sweaty and pissed-off at the universe in general and one person in particular.

“Annoying, ignorant woman,” she scolded that person, hidden inside the house on the other side of that wall. “You couldn’t have taken the kid to Boston, or Philadelphia, or somewhere semicivilized? No, you had to go all bucolic and pastoral and…leafy.” Wren reached up to pull another twig out of her braid, and wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand. It was a lovely, autumn-crisp day, pale blue skies overhead, and she was sure that there were hundreds of people driving up and down the winding county road a few miles back for the sole purpose of enjoying the scarlet-and-orange display of the maples and oaks and whatever else those trees were. More power to them.

Wren Valere was not a nature girl. The leaves were pretty, and she was glad it was a nice day, but she wanted to be home, on concrete and steel, surrounded by the familiar and comforting hum of current running through the city. Home was Manhattan, where magic fed on and was fed by the torrents of electricity running in the city’s veins. A Talent like her—a current-mage, a practitioner of modern magics—had no business being out here in the woods, miles from anything more powerful than a solar powered bug-zapper.

Genevieve, you’re exaggerating, she heard her mother’s voice say, exasperated. All right, she admitted that she might be overstating things slightly. It still felt like middle-of-no-wheresville to her: too quiet, too green and too still, electrically speaking.

The thought made her reach instinctively, a mental touch stroking the core of current nestled inside her, deep in a nonexistent-to-X-rays cavity somewhere in her gut, just to make sure it was still there. Like a bank, you could overdraw and forget to refill, and even though she knew she had enough in there, it was a nervous twitch, obsessive-compulsive, to make sure, and then make sure again.

Current was similar to—but not quite identical to—the electrical energy the modern world had harnessed to do its bidding. They were, so far as anyone could determine, generated off the same sources, and appeared in the same natural and man-made situations, but with a vastly different result when channeled by their natural conductors. Metal, in the case of electricity: Talent, in the case of current.

The more abstract and technical distinctions between current and electricity were lost on most of the Cosa Nostradamus, the worldwide magical community, except those very few who made an actual study of it.

Wren wasn’t one of those few. She wasn’t an academic; she was a Retriever. She came, she stole, she went home, with no interest in the whys, so long as it worked. Although she freely admitted that the feeling of it simmering inside was nice, too. Some Talent described their internal core of magic, the power they carried with them at all times, as a pool of potent liquid, or birds flocking together, their feathers rustling with power. For her, it was a pit of serpents, thick-muscled neon beasts sliding and slithering against each other. The touch filled her with a quiet satisfaction, a sense of power resting under her skin, ready if she needed it.

Reassured, she moved forward through the trees, only to be pulled up short by something tugging on her braid, before realizing that it wasn’t an attack—or at least, not one she needed to worry about.

Reaching back, Wren removed her braid from the grasp of a branch and scowled at it, as though it alone were responsible for her bad mood. “I hate camping. I hate bugs. I hate trees.”

She didn’t really hate trees—Rorani, one of her oldest friends, was a dryad in fact, which made her an actual, honest-to-God tree hugger. Wren had never needed to go camping to know how she felt about it. She preferred luxury hotels to sleeping on the ground.

She did hate bugs, though. Wren grimaced, and reached a hand down the back of her outfit, scratching at something irritating her skin. She pulled her hand away and made a face, shaking the remains of the unidentifiable insect off her fingers. She especially hated bugs that kept trying to crawl under the fabric of her slicks to reach the bare skin underneath.

“Ugh.” She wiped her fingers on the grass. “Next job? High-rise. Climate controlled. Coffee shop on the corner.” She kept her voice low, more from habit than belief that there was anyone around to hear her. “God, I’d kill for a cup of halfway decent coffee….”

She really shouldn’t be in a bad mood at all, even with bugs and twigs. Coffee and the rest of civilization would be waiting for her when she got home, same as always. This was just a job, and it would be over soon. And money in the bank made every job better, in retrospect.

Tugging the hood of her formfitting black bodysuit over her ears, making sure that the braid was now tucked comfortably inside the fabric, Wren kept crawling forward until she reached a low hedge of some prickly-leaved bushes. Rising up to her knees, she scowled over the shrubbery at the perfectly lovely little cottage on the other side of nowhere.

All right, she told herself, enough with the griping and the moaning. Showtime.

She let herself reassess the scenario, just to get the brain in the right place. The area was on the grid. She could feel the quiet hum of electrical wires—man-made power—overhead, not far away. There wasn’t a lot, but if she suddenly had a need it was there to draw down on. Comforting. And the house wasn’t totally isolated—despite the screen of trees, a half-hour hike would bring her back to the highway, and it was probably only a few minutes’ drive from the front door to the nearest coffee joint. If, of course, you had a car.

The job had specified no traces, though, which meant that renting a car, even using one of her many fake IDs, was out. Frustrating, but manageable. The client was paying large sums for this to be a spotless, trouble-free Retrieval, and that was what The Wren would deliver. No muss, no fuss, no anything the courts could use at a later date against the client. Everything had to be perfect.

It was more than just ego at stake, that perfection, although she was always about that. This particular job had come to Sergei, her partner/business manager, not through the usual route of the Cosa Nostradamus or his art world contacts, but through a retired NYC cop now living upstate, a guy named McKierney who moonlighted as a bounty hunter. The client had gone to him originally, but this kind of grab wasn’t McKierney’s scene. He had heard about The Wren through his own contacts, and had given the client her name and Sergei’s contact number as the go-to girl for this particular job.

She didn’t get many jobs out of the urban areas, where most of the Cosa congregated. A satisfied client here, among human Nulls, could open up a whole new market for her, and there was no way she was going to give less than everything to it, even if it involved trees and bugs and crawling around in the dirt. Sergei had drummed that career advice into her head years ago: you never knew when the next client was going to be the million-dollar meal ticket.

Yeah, the job stank, on a bunch of levels. Money—and clients with money—got her into a lot of situations she didn’t enjoy. But this job had something even better than money to offer: there was absolutely no stink of magic to the Retrieval. After spending a year of their lives immersed in a literal life-and-death struggle, when what seemed like half the city suddenly set out to wipe the streets clear of anything that looked as though it might be magical, and then having to give over another nine months to the job of cleaning up the aftermath—and getting her own life back into some kind of order—Wren was more than ready for something distinctly unmagical. Even a be-damned custodial he-said-she-said, with a four-year-old kid as the prize.

That was the job she was on, right now. Mommy had grabbed the kid and run. Wren was here to Retrieve him for Daddy, who was the client.

Wren shifted on her haunches, still feeling the creepy-crawling sensation of bug legs on her skin. That was the real reason she was griping, not the green leafy buggy nature thing. Live Retrievals were a bitch. She’d only done two before, and both of them had involved adults. One she’d been able to reason with, the other she’d had Sergei along to help conk the target over the head when the reasoning didn’t work.

She steadfastly didn’t think of the third live Retrieval she had done. That had been different. That…hadn’t been her, entirely.

Hadn’t it?

Nobody had judged. Nobody had said anything after, except thank you. She had restored a dozen teenagers to their family, broken the spine of the anti-Cosa organization, the Silence. But Wren didn’t list that Retrieval in her nonexistent CV. She didn’t talk about it. She tried not to remember anything about it, the hours of cold rage and hot current spinning her out of control, making her—for the second time in her life—into a killer, however justified those deaths were, to save the lives of others. No matter that she hadn’t been entirely sane at the time.

Inanimate things were easier to Retrieve, every way up and down. Adult live retrievals were bad enough: seriously tough to stash a four-year-old in your knapsack. They tended to squirm.

And yet…the challenge was irresistible. The benefits for a job well done were deeply rewarding. So here she was.

Wren didn’t let herself think about the morality of the Retrieval, either way. If possession was nine-tenths of the law, The Wren was the other tenth. Not that she didn’t have standards about what was just or fair; she just didn’t let them get in the way of an accepted job. If something set off Sergei’s well-honed antenna for fishy, she trusted him to say no before she ever knew the offer had been made. That was his job.

“And you need to be getting on with yours already,” she muttered, annoyed at herself. Taking a deep breath, she felt her annoyance, acknowledged it, and then let it go, slipping away like water down a drain.

Shifting to rise up a little more, risking exposure, she reached into the pouch strapped to her ribs, pulling out a pair of tiny, old-fashioned binoculars. She raised the ’nocs to her eyes and looked at the target. The lens allowed her to zoom in, picking up the details that blueprints and aerial shots couldn’t give. Nothing like on-the-spot reconnaissance, no matter what the tech-types might claim.

The cottage was a build-by-numbers kit, probably prefab. Nice, though. One story, with a half attic, and windows designed to let in light without giving a direct view in. Brown wood and shingles with blue trim, and an off-white matte roof that, she had been told, was supposed to be more fuel-efficient than the traditional black ones. So, new, or at least with a newish roof. A roof, she noted, that overhung the windows just enough to allow someone with a decent amount of agility to drop down and reach those windows. Bad architect, and worse contractor, to let that get past.

Someone hadn’t considered the landscaping from a security angle, either. The cottage faced into a small lawn and a gravel road that led down to the main road, but the back was set into a copse of mature trees. The contractor had managed to build into the existing site, rather than bulldozing and replanting. Pretty. Lousy security, but pretty.

She lowered the binoculars and looked at the cottage unaided. It still looked like an invitation to larceny. Perfect. Now she just had to find a way in, and the job was halfway done. Unfortunately, the hard half was still to come.

Dropping back down behind the hedge entirely, Wren settled herself into a more comfortable crouch on the damp soil, and let herself sink into fugue state.

It used to take her the count of five-seven, when she was still in training. Now, the thought was no sooner thought than it became action. The outside world didn’t fade so much as become irrelevant; she could still see and hear and sense everything that went on around her but it was less real than the world she could “see” inside. In that world, every living thing was colored with vivid current, from the shadowy, flickering purple of the insects around her to the solid, slow-pulsing silver of the trees, and the passing bright red of something the size of a large cat, or maybe a fox. Stronger flickers up in the branches suggested that there might be piskies in the area. No other Fatae, not even the hint of a dryad or wood-mocker. Interesting. Not indicative, necessarily, but…interesting.

Everything carried current within itself; sliding into a fugue state allowed a Talent—a witch, a mage, or a wizard, if you liked the older terms—to find, access and use it more efficiently. Strong Talent—traditionally called “Pures”—could sense and use more current; weaker Talent, obviously, less.

Wren had always been strong, with little interrupting the flow of current in her veins. Last year, she had become—however temporarily—the recipient of current gifted by the Fatae, the nonhuman members of the Cosa Nostradamus. That blast had temporarily unblocked every channel in her system, kicking her from mostly Pure to too Pure. Talent bodies might be able to handle that much magic, but human brains weren’t designed for it. She had been able to work amazing things in the short term, but it had also screwed with her in ways she was still discovering.

One of those new long-term results was that, once in fugue state, she could sense the presence of current in almost every animate thing, and a few inanimate things, as well.

A nice little side effect, yeah. She could, if she had to, find a refueling station almost anywhere. Unfortunately, using fugue state now also gave her cramps that made PMS feel like a walk in the proverbial park. Everything had a price.

So don’t linger. Get it done and get out she reminded herself even as she reached out to gather as much information as she could about the structure in front of her. Just because there was no visible sign of defenses, either physical or magical, didn’t meant they weren’t there. Careless got you dead or caught, and both were bad news.

She pulled current from her core, shaping it with her will and intent until greedy tendrils of neon-colored power stretched outward, touching and tasting the air, searching for any hint of either current or electricity.

Nothing. A void stretched in front of her: no defenses, and no house, either. Nothing but trees. Impossible, if she believed what her eyes told her. Even if they had built a house without any electrical wiring whatsoever, she should have been able to sense the natural current within the wood, stone and metals, much less the flesh-and-blood entities moving within those walls.

Some Talent trusted their magical senses more than their physical ones. Wren wasn’t that arrogant, or that dumb. When the two senses disagreed, something was hinky. Either the house itself was an illusion, or something she couldn’t sense was blocking it from being found by magic. Both options were…disturbing.

Giving her Talent one last try, she stretched a tendril of current out, not toward the building, but down, sinking it deep into the soil and stone, reaching for anything that might have been laid in the foundations, deep enough to be hidden to even a directed search. Wren felt a cramp starting, low in her belly, and ignored it, extending herself even as she remained firmly grounded in her body. Sink and stretch, just a little more, just to make sure…

What the…? She touched a warmth—a hard, sharp warmth—tucked underneath the crust, deep in the bedrock where there should only have been cold earth. It spread beyond the house, covering a wider range, suggesting that the house was only secondary, protected as an afterthought. Was that what was blocking her? She pushed a little more, trying to determine the cause. Wh—

At her second touch, something shoved back at her, hard. Unprepared, the magical blow almost knocked her over, physically.

The hell? she thought, pissed off as much at being caught by surprise as at the assault itself. She touched it again with a handful of current-tendrils, not quite a shove in response, but not gentle, either.

That something in the bedrock expanded, filled with thick, hot anger and a wild swirling sense of frustration swamped her own current and tendrils. Angry, yes, and sullen, all that and a feeling of bile-ridden resentment that threatened to consume her, and something worse underneath, something darker and meaner and rising fast.

Yeeeah, outta here, she thought in near panic. Outta here now.

Dropping out of fugue state, Wren blinked a few times to let her eyesight return to normal, and then moved away from the hedge as carefully and as quickly as she could manage. A branch crackled underfoot, and she froze, and then moved backward again. Too clumsy, she was making too much noise. Damn. Her skills as a Retriever were legend, but moving invisibly through an occupied house was a different kind of ability than being able to move silently through trees and shrubs, complete with a carpeting of annoyingly crunchy leaves underfoot.

She was shaking, and sweating, and it annoyed her.

Once her nerves told her that she had gotten far enough away to feel secure, she dropped to the ground, placing her bare palms flat against the soil, letting the extra current in her system run off into the earth, grounding herself, bringing everything back into balance and soothing the restless, roiling shimmer of her core.

“Jesus wept,” she whispered, too shaken to really care if a squirrel or Piskie or too-curious wood-knocker heard her at this point. “What the hell was that?”

two

The sound of her own voice seemed to shock the air around her, like chemicals dumped into a pond, because she could swear that she saw it shimmer around her. In the branches far overhead a bird of some kind chirped, and something else squawked in response, and a third, deeper voice chattered a command for them both to shut it. Wren could relate to that third voice.

After a few minutes of waiting nervously for something—anything—to come raging out of the trees or rising up from the soil after her, Wren gathered her legs underneath her more comfortably into a cross-legged position in the dirt. Her palms now rested flat on her knees, and she pushed back, feeling her spine unkink and straighten, and her heart slowly return to a more normal beat, while her skin slowly lost the warm, red flush of fear.

Think, Valere. Don’t just react. She had been caught in current backlash before—she had been the cause of current backlash before—and it had never felt like that. And yet it was, undeniably, current that she had felt. Thick, angry current, black like tar and strangely familiar…

Black tar. Angry.

Her heart stilled, but her body shivered in recognition. She had felt that combination before, yes. Inside herself, in her core, in her veins and under her skin, like sludge instead of blood and bone. She had felt it inside herself when she wizzed last year, when the pileup of trouble, cumulating with several Nulls trying to rape and murder her had sent her into current overload. The greatest fear of any and every Talent, to be so lost to the current inside and out that all sense of self-control disappeared into the storm. It had been days before she realized what was happening, and once she did, the situation had gotten so bad that insanity had been all that allowed her to survive and do what needed to be done.

In the dark hours of the Blackout, when she had been the focal point of the Fatae-donated current, when she had led the Cosa in striking back against their enemies, sanity would have gotten her killed.

Nobody came back from wizzing. Not ever. She should have been lost in that abyss, too, driven by despair, overwork and too much current use. Instead, her partner, Sergei, and the demon P.B. had dragged her back out of the abyss, barely and by the skin of their teeth. It had taken a magical bond P.B. had created—or allowed to be created—between them, and by extension, between P.B. and her partner/on-again-off-again lover; a bond that had never before—so far as they knew—been attempted, much less established.

That triangular bond of friendship had saved her sanity, and her life. Whoever she had touched out there just now wasn’t so lucky. It was still lost within the maelstrom, howling and alone.

Had it been alone? She remembered feeling something deeper, below the blast, like the echo of a scream….

The feel of that anger made her start to shake all over again, and she backed away, retreating to a safer distance from even the memory. Jesus wept. He wept for the sinners and blessed them in his name. She wasn’t religious, her upbringing casually Protestant and left behind when she went to college, but those two words, Jesus wept, had resonated with her, curse and prayer all in one. And in this case, both curse and prayer were wholly appropriate.

Wizzarts were dangerous. Not just because the overload made them crazy, but because crazy made them—what was the word Sergei used? Feckless. Without control, without any concern for their own well-being, they could access more current than was safe…and that much power in the hands of a madman—or woman—was never a good thing.

She brought the shaking under control, schooling her body into obedience. That wasn’t her, hiding her essence deep within the earth’s crust. That wasn’t her core, so dark and tarry, rather than clear and sharp. She wasn’t wizzed. She was in control, damn it. She wasn’t a danger to herself, or anyone else, not any more.

Whatever—whoever—had snapped at her back there was a danger. And yet, the wizzart hadn’t hurt her, even though he—definitely he, she thought, remembering the taste of the current’s signature—he had been angry enough to do some serious damage. Angry and frustrated and quite mad.

But he hadn’t hurt her. She kept coming back to that, above and beyond the anger and the crazy; that and the inescapable fact that that current-signature had been oddly, confusingly familiar. How could she know…?

Wren swallowed hard, a sick queasiness rising in her gut that had nothing to do with fear. “Oh damn it to hell and back. Max?”

It was half question, half realization, and it had the unexpected, unplanned, and unwanted result of bringing him to her.

Unlike the last time Max appeared, there was no blowout of electronics, no sudden windstorm of energy. He was just there. Older than she remembered him being, still dressed in his usual sloppy sweatshirt and khaki shorts showing off knobby knees, but his face was even more like a dried apple, surrounded by a mane of shaggy, white hair. His blue-green eyes were still bright—too bright, and too wild to trust. She could feel the current crackling within him, making him unsafe to touch, unsafe to be near.

This time, though, his body shimmered outwardly, too; the current visibly feeding on him even as he fed on it, some unholy symbiotic frenzy. It was terrifying, and terrifyingly beautiful, like a fire raging out of control. Which, she supposed, it was. An electrical fire, destroying him from within. Destroying anything too close.

Some part of Wren’s mind that wasn’t busy panicking wondered if he had always been like this, if everyone who wizzed looked like that, and her descent into the same maelstrom was what allowed her to see it now—and if she, too, looked like that to his eyes.

Those bright eyes stared at her without blinking. “Hey hey hey, brat. Hey, little girl.” His voice was rusty, as though he hadn’t used it in a long time.

Wren took a deep breath, and calmed down. For the moment, at least, Max seemed to be, well, not sane, but in control. She hadn’t been a little girl in years—decades—but he had been a friend to her mentor for decades before she was born, and would probably always see her as a thirteen-year-old with braids and no brains.

Right now, she was okay with that. It was probably why she wasn’t dead, those few random, faded, fond memories still caught somewhere inside the crazy. Just don’t rely on it, Valere, she reminded herself. Don’t assume a damned thing. He could and probably will snap at any instant.

“Max.” Her voice sounded surprisingly calm, considering how her insides were churning. “It’s really not so good to see you.”

He cackled at that, a scary-ass sound. “You’ve been busy, brat.”

Stewart Maxwell, also known as The Alchemist for reasons that she’d never had explained. Every time she encountered him she barely got away with her life. Not that he had any grudge against her specifically—he was fond of her, the girl-child she had been—but wizzarts just naturally tended to the homicidal. So far he’d tried to pitch her over a cliff—seven years back—and then brought up a current-storm to wipe her off the face of the earth a few years ago. She didn’t really want to know how he’d think appropriate to kill her this time. Or what she might be capable of now, to try to stop him.

Try, and fail. She had no illusions about that. She was good. He was crazy. Crazy trumped even very good, every time. But they could do significant damage to anyone caught up in the area during the battle. Better not to get into it at all.

There was a reason nobody in their right mind stayed near a wizzart. Their entire maddened existence was dedicated toward channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every living cell turned toward the goal of becoming the perfect, one hundred percent Pure magical conductor. And that included their brain cells.

Because of that, wizzarts lived in the moment, the instant of action, without any thought to consequences or responsibility, only more and more and more of the lovely, seductive, orgasmic power. There was never enough to satisfy, and chasing it made them irascible, ornery, obnoxious, and deeply dangerous. She had to get away; but carefully, carefully.

“What happened to the dog?” she asked, trying to buy time, figure out how she was going to get out of this without further head-butting.

The last time she had seen him, he had a dog with him. Big, floppy-eared mongrel. He had named it Dog, of course. Even sane, she didn’t remember Max having much in the way of imagination.

A look of something sad and hungry passed over Max’s face, and was gone.

“Killed him,” he said without inflection, dismissing man’s best friend that easily.

Wren almost laughed. Of course Max had. Poor Dog. She hoped it had been quick.

Those bright eyes squinted, and Max scowled at her. “You can’t be here,” he said with obvious irritation.

All right, that was not what she was expecting to come out of his mouth. Although what she had expected, Wren didn’t know. She didn’t know why he was here, miles and miles away from the last place she had seen him, right in the middle of her damn job, or why he was so pissed off, not that wizzarts needed a reason for anything.

“You should have gone away when I told you to,” he said, his hair sparking with agitation. His hands weren’t moving yet, though. It was when his hands started to move that the storm was about to hit. Assuming that telltale sign still worked, anyway.

“When you told…” she started to say, then stopped. Oh. The void covering the area where the house should have been. Right. Suddenly the twigs and bugs and dirt-sore knees seemed the least of her problems. Was he tied up somehow in this job? But how? No, that didn’t…feel right. There was something else underlying it all, something she could almost taste, almost recognize, but it slipped away when she tried to chase it. Why was he here? Why now? Why had he bothered to show himself?

“Shoved you away,” he muttered. “Don’t go poking where you’ve been told off, like you got no manners. Be smart, stupid brat. For your own good.”

He was making a faint bit of sense, which worried her even without understanding it. If she were smart she’d nod her head, pack up, forget about the job, and listen to the not-so-nice, very crazy man.

She was smart. She was also stubborn. And, according to one of P.B.’s favorite new rants, she had developed a recent and rather disturbing case of can’t-kill-me-nyah-nyah. And nobody told her to do something for her own good, not without telling her why.

Wren stood up, her five-foot-and-no-inches barely noticeable against Max’s sinewy height, and pulled down enough current to make her own flesh sparkle. A statement: Don’t push me, old man. Maybe P.B. was right to worry.

“I’m on a job, Max. A job that’s got nothing to do with you.” That she knew of, anyway. Shit, let it have nothing to do with him, please. No such thing as coincidence, but let it not be connected. “Let me get it done and we’re out of your hair. But you will let me get it done.”

Her voice stayed even and low, even as everything inside her was turning into wobbling Jell-O. She was stronger than she had ever been, stronger than she really wanted to be. Maybe one of the strongest, Purest Talent of her generation, no lie. But the thought of going against a full wizzart scared the shit out of her.

That fear was reassuring, actually. It meant that she was still sane.

“You can’t be here” he said again, as though her defiance hadn’t even happened. To him, it probably hadn’t. He could be a single-minded bastard.

The wind rose around them, filled with static and dry leaves. Him or her, she wasn’t sure who was doing it. Reaching down into the core, where her own reservoir of current seethed like a pool of dry-scaled, neon-colored snakes, she soothed it, coaxed it back under her control. Controlled herself, which meant controlling her core. Control had been what saved her. It made her weaker than Max, able to channel less current through her body, but she could direct it better, focus her strikes.

She let that knowledge show on her face. “I can and I will. Max. Max!” She shouted his name, seeing his eyes glaze over, and was relieved when they focused back on her. Having a wizzart’s attention was unnerving, but letting him go spastic was when it got deadly. Suddenly the words tumbled out of her, desperate to be heard while she still had his mostly sane attention. “Max, there’s a way out. To unwiz. To come back. I did it. You can, too.”

She actually didn’t know if there was, if it had been too long, was too late for him. Once you wizzed, you never went back, that was what everyone knew. Except she had. Sort of. Because of P.B. There was only one P.B. Would she share? Could she? Would he?

Wren shoved that doubt back into a box in her mind and latched it shut. Never mind that boxing difficult things up had probably led to her wizzing in the first place; it was still a useful tool. No time, no place for doubts. She was fine, she was functional, and she owed it to Max—to Neezer, her long-gone mentor, who had introduced them—to try. To at least pass the knowledge on. And if the possibility distracted him from his you-can’t-be-here shtick, so much the better.

“Way out? I’m already way out, brat.” He grinned at her, a death’s-head grin, and the hair rose on the back of her neck even under the slicks that covered her head to toe. The light-absorbing, water-repelling, tear-resisting material was great for avoiding cameras, motion detectors, nosy guards and aggressive tree branches, but it didn’t do a damn thing against the heebie-jeebies.

This wasn’t the Max she remembered. That Max was unnerving, dangerous, his hair trigger halfway pulled. This Max was…

Scared.

Jesus wept. The concept made her sweat. Anything that scared a wizzart…

Wren swallowed, and went for broke. “Max, what aren’t you telling me?”

His voice dropped into a growl. “I’m telling you to go. Don’t be here. You don’t want to be here, not…not here. Not here.”

She was definite about her first impression, now. He was scared, and he was hiding something. From her. Scared, and trying to get rid of her, rather than tell her. Something he didn’t want her near, didn’t want her to know about. Why? What was hiding down there, deep in the bedrock?

Did it really matter? It did not.

“I’ll go as soon as I get what I came for, Max.”

The static was crackling in her hair now, making her eyes itch. The song of it was alluring, enticing. She could tell him endless years that there was a way back from the edge, and he wouldn’t hear because he wouldn’t want to hear. That was the thing about wizzing that the others—the ones who hadn’t been there—didn’t realize: it’s so damn dangerous because it feels so damn fabulous. You really don’t care that the cost is your sanity.

And she couldn’t honestly tell him it was better on the sane side of the street.

“Go away now!”

His hands flickered, a tiny sprinkling-of-water motion. She didn’t have time to brace herself before the blast threw her backward, landing her hard on her ass, knocking her head against a tree and stealing the air from her lungs. She rolled even as she hit, expecting a bolt of current to follow, to finish her off.

Another gust slammed into her, bruising her from hip to rib, but no bolt.

Run run run the voice inside her head was chanting, the natural, smart, sane response when dealing with a pissed-off wizzart. Max might be scared, but he wasn’t scared of her. Wren kept rolling, coming up on elbows and knees, her head still ringing from the blow but her senses clear enough to know exactly where the old bastard was. A thick rope of current, dark purple and scarlet, uncoiled from her core and lashed out. She felt the hit more than saw it, felt Max’s shock and anger recoil back through the connection. How dare she strike at him?

“You’re the one who attacked me, you stupid wizzed son of a bitch!” she yelled, not caring if the target, the state troopers, and half of Saratoga County heard her.

Another blast was his only response, still not a bolt but a cold, salt-filled wind, shoving her hard enough to send her back on her ass and scoot her a half-dozen feet farther into the woods. Leaves and branches scratched at her slicks, and the hard roots bruised her ass and elbows.

“Go!” echoed in her head, a roar like a waterfall, a jet engine, a lion in full fury.

Scrabbling to her feet, Wren fled deeper into the trees.

It took her three hours and seventeen minutes after she stopped running to work up the nerve to head back to the target site. This time she came in from the opposite direction, circling around and coming up along the access road. The approach wasn’t as good for a Retrieval—the road was public access, and anyone might come along at exactly the wrong moment—but with luck maybe Max wasn’t watching there, or didn’t care so much about it. Maybe whatever it was that he was hiding, or protecting, was only on the other side of the woods.

Maybe was a pretty flimsy word, when it came to wizzarts.

She tried to focus on the job and only the job—timing and distance, plus the approximate weight of the Retrieval as given by the client, equaling effort to get back to the road and across the state line—but her brain kept skittering back to Max’s words.

No, not his words. His emotions. The bastard had been angry, and he was crazy as a sewer rat with rabid mange, but unless he’d dropped way under the wizzart sanity range, such as it was, in the past year, he’d been overreacting. Last time she had gotten full warning before he went psycho on her. This time he came in primed at the pump. Why? What had scared him enough that he came out specifically to scare her, to warn her?

Enough she thought. It doesn’t matter why, not right now. Focus. Job. With Max possibly still in the neighborhood, she didn’t dare draw down current, for fear of alerting him to the fact that she’d come back. That meant changing more than the direction of her approach; she had to change the mode, too.

Walking up to the pull-off to the house, Wren made sure that her thigh-pack was securely fastened, drew in a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then exhaled. Calm. Calm and collected and loose and all those other things that made you aware of every inch of your body but not so aware that you were distracted by it. Normally she would have invoked her no-see-me, that inner and innate skill of deflecting attention that made her a natural Retriever, but she wasn’t sure if even that would be enough to trigger Max’s return.

Instead, she had to do it the old-fashioned way, crawling through the shin-high grass toward the house, keeping herself as low-profile as possible, alert to every sound and smell that might mean danger or discovery.

Breaking into a house in the middle of the day was something best left to either rank amateurs or seasoned pros. She enjoyed it, herself—during nighttime most people tended to be paranoid, and early morning or dusk was tricky—the few times she’d gotten shot at, it was at dusk. Daylight, targets were relaxed, less likely to start at an unexpected noise or shadow, less likely to call the police or trigger an alarm.

“Hi.” A voice piped a greeting unnervingly close to her ear.

Plus, people tended to be a lot more understanding of someone caught in their backyard midday, as opposed to midnight.

“Hi,” she said back after she got her heart down from where it had lodged in her throat, rolling onto her side but staying down and as relaxed as possible. The grass—probably not mown all summer—tickled her nose.

“Whatcha doin’?”

Her interrogator was blond, blue-eyed, and two feet tall. All right, maybe three. Shorter than she was, but since she was lying down, it was hard to judge for sure by how much.

“Your dad sent me to get you.” Sometimes honesty was so startling, it worked.

“Oh.” The target considered that for a moment, thankfully not sucking his thumb or whatever else disgusting or otherwise unhygienic that small children did, and then nodded. “Okay.”

He dropped to his own stomach and looked at her as though expecting something.

Well, she thought, amused. If it’s as easy as that, who the hell am I to argue? She tilted her head to indicate the way she had come, and he nodded, getting up on his elbows and knees, echoing her posture. She turned, keeping him in sight out of the corner of her eye, and they started to snake-crawl back through the grass. Kid was a pretty good wriggler, although he kept his butt too high in the air. His cute little denim coveralls were going to be ruined, though.

“Marc? Marc, where are you?”

A woman’s voice, clear and far too close: coming from inside the house. Back of the house, through an open window, Wren estimated. The voice was slightly concerned, maybe a little annoyed, but not really worried. Not yet. Damn. From the way the target froze, it was mommy dearest. His blue eyes flicked toward the house, and then back to her, clearly looking for guidance. His skin was milk-pale, as if he never got much sun and would burn badly if he did.

“She won’t let you go back to your dad,” Wren whispered, feeling like several different kinds of sleaze. Never mind who the actual custodial parent was—she hadn’t bothered to ask Sergei—Daddy was the client and she worked for the client and anyway, the court would decide eventually unless Daddy did a runner with junior, too, and she was thinking too damn much again.

“I don’t like either of them right now.” Such a serious little voice, confiding such a huge secret. Wren swallowed, and forced herself to meet that blue gaze.

“Wiggle this way, and keep your butt down,” was all she said.

Once she had gotten the kid away from the house and down the road a bit, she coaxed him back to his feet, and they had headed back to the main road. Only one car had driven past them, heading toward the house, and Wren made sure the kid was tucked against her side, barely visible against the deflecting properties of her slicks, unless you were looking specifically for a wee one. From there, it was a relatively easy walk to her job-cache, an abandoned tree house in the back of someone’s summer home, where she had stowed her regular clothes, wallet, and other forms of identification and civilization. Her slicks packed away securely, they walked on toward the previously arranged rendezvous site. The kid had kept up reasonably well, staying quiet and only needing to be carried the last mile into town. He didn’t whimper, sniffle, or pick his nose, for which Wren was endlessly thankful.

As they walked she tried to sort through everything that had happened in some kind of calm and distanced way. It was no use: whatever had happened back there needed more thought and calm than she had right now. Finish the job, then worry about crazy Max.

To that end, now dressed in a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt under her leather jacket, her hair pulled into a careless ponytail, Wren looked to the casual observer like a young mother out for an afternoon with her offspring, waiting for Daddy. The thought made her cringe, but she had to admit that it was perfect camouflage in this SUV-and-picket-fence town.

By the time she found a pay phone and checked in with her partner back in Manhattan, her sense of humor about the entire situation had returned, and she could—almost—laugh about it. Her partner wasn’t quite so sanguine.

“Max? Stewart Maxwell? Our least favorite loon of all the loons we know?” Sergei’s normally calm and crisp voice was less doubting than exasperated.

Wren kept most of her attention on the kid sitting on the curb eating an ice-cream cone with both hands and his entire face. “Yeah. That one.”

“You’re sure? Of course you’re sure. Never mind. Damn. I’d hoped he was dead already.”

There was no love lost between her partner and Max. In fact, they pretty much loathed each other.

“He was acting pretty weird,” she continued, ignoring Sergei’s last comment.

There was a telling silence at the other end of the phone line, and Wren leaned against the open booth and grinned despite herself. “Weird even for wizzed,” she clarified.

“I don’t like this,” Sergei was saying, back in his office in the city. She pictured him, sitting behind his huge wooden desk, the one he wouldn’t let them have sex on, even though he got a glint in his eye every time she brought it up, surrounded by paperwork and expensive artwork, and the lovely hum of the city outside the gallery’s door.

“You and me both, partner,” she responded. “But I finished the job, and as soon as I drop off the package, I’ll be on my way home, away from whatever it was Max was so wound up about. Which should make him happy, for whatever values of happy he understands. I’m keeping low-profile until then.” She paused, wondering if she should ask, then plunged in. “How are you doing?”

There was a faint hesitation on the other end of the line. “I’m fine.”

Like hell he was. They had been partners too long for her not to pick up the signs. There was tension in his voice that had been there even before she dropped her little Max-shaped bombshell, and she could practically feel how tight he was holding the phone from her end of it. Something was up. Something had gotten him seriously wound. She made herself drop it, leave it alone, for now. Anything that made him that tense would probably make her unhappy, and getting a Talent upset while using the phone usually resulted in bad things for the phone. Current and electricity traveled along the same paths, and current trumped electricity every time.

“All right.” She started to say something else, feeling the urge again to dig a little around the topic, then shut her mouth with a snap. If there was anything seriously wrong, he would tell her. Or not. Wasn’t as though she could do anything about whatever it was from here, anyway. “I’ll see you tonight.”

She hung up the phone, but despite their mutual reassurances of all-rightitude, Wren still felt uneasy. It had to be Sergei affecting her. Job was almost done. Money was in the bank. She should feel calm and satisfied, not wound like a damned spring. Please let it be Sergei’s mood affecting me…

“Hey.”

The kid looked up from his seat on the curb, his entire face covered with chocolate ice cream, those blue eyes still totally wide and innocent. “You’re a mess. Go over to that water fountain and wash your face.”

“I don’t have a towel,” he protested.

“Use your sleeve.”

The thought seemed to astonish him. Or maybe it was the fact that an adult was giving him permission to do it. Wren didn’t know and honestly didn’t care. The hair on the back of her neck was flat, but she still had the sense of something hinky in the air, even now. This was where they were supposed to be, when they were supposed to be there—early, even. Everything should have been fine, and yet…

She trusted her instincts. She just didn’t know what to do with them, in this case.

Obeying her order, the kid walked across the street to the park, where there was a stone structure with three water fountains—one adult-sized, one kid-sized, and one down so low to the ground that Wren stared at it for a moment before realizing that it was for animals, operated by a paw-pedal on the ground.

Kid went to the kid-sized one, and seemed to be trying to puzzle it out, as though he had never used one before. Wren frowned. Okay, he was a little kid, and maybe not all that bright, but there was something seriously off about him. Almost as though he’d lived his entire life, if not in isolation then damn near close. Trusting a total stranger enough to come with her? Not knowing how to use a water fountain?

“Drop him off and walk away,” she told herself sternly. “Wondering about shit, getting involved, is never a good idea. You should have learned that, if nothing else, by now.”

Getting involved led to things like politics, and betrayals, and pitched battles where people—friends—died. Enough already. She had done enough. Back to the lonejack creed: self first, second and third, and the devil take the hindmost.

“Hey kid, get a move on!” she shouted. He turned his blond head, and as he did so a Frisbee came soaring out of the park, arching on a downward motion that, Wren realized, was going to collide directly with the kid’s head.

Oh hell. Visions of a concussion, a hospital trip, questions about parental authority and authorization…. Without thinking, she used just a thread of current to knock the projectile off course, but by the time her touch got there, the Frisbee had already been knocked down out of the air, landing at the kid’s feet.

Wren tensed. Someone else had used current on the disk to knock it away, she could feel it. Fuck. It might have been a Good Samaritan, looking out for a toddler. Or it could have been someone letting her know that she was under observation, for a range of possible reasons, only some of them positive. Until the kid was handed over, she was still on the job; she couldn’t afford to relax, or make any dangerous assumptions.

Wren looked around as inconspicuously as she could, trying to catch anyone who might be paying the kid—or her—unwanted attention. Mothers playing with their kids, a couple of teenagers shoving each other on the sidewalk, the kids who threw the Frisbee in the first place, coming to get their toy, an old man—or maybe a woman—sitting on a bench a block away. None of them gave off any kind of vibe, good or bad. She felt hamstrung, frustrated, blind in both eyes without current to inform her other senses. Damn Max and damn caution. She opened up, just a sliver of a slice of access.