Blood from Stone (15 page)

“You scared the hell out of me,” Sergei said, his voice still that same unnerving quiet roughness. “I came in and you were just lying there, naked, and I couldn’t tell if you were breathing…. Your skin was cool and damp, and you didn’t
move.
”

“How long?” Her voice was cracked and dry, and she almost didn’t recognize it.

“Since I got here? Two hours.”

Wren would have sworn she was only “away” ten minutes, tops. She rested her head back down on the pillow and sighed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would take so long.” Or that she would hurt so much. Fuck, it hurt.

“What were you doing?”

“I…I was doing a scrying.” Her voice still sounded bad, but talking was a little easier. “Sort of astral projection, kind of.”

“I didn’t know you could do that.” Still too tight, too rough, his voice.

“Me, neither,” she admitted. “I mean, I knew about it, but…” It had been a scrap of an idea she had pulled from memory. Not every Talent could do everything—there were distinct strengths and weaknesses, and by the time you were an adult you usually knew your skill sets. Wren didn’t know if it was wizzing, or being the
focus of that damned battery, but she was finding new things every month that she could do, or do better. This…not better enough.

“You were looking for the papers?”

“No. I…I was trying to find Neezer. I think he’s alive. I think Max was hiding him, or helping him to hide.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, less because it hurt than because she felt foolish.

Sergei shifted on the bed, and sighed, years of history in that simple sound. “Wren, why? What difference does it make, if he is alive? He’s not the man you remember, not anymore. Why can’t you just let him go?”

It was a valid question. She wasn’t sure she knew why. A year ago she had thought he was dead, and the memory of his voice was fading, and she had been okay with that. Things came and went and she didn’t love her mentor any less for his not being there. She had P.B., and Sergei, and her mom, and it wasn’t as though she needed a mentor anymore….

And then the shit hit the fan with the vigilantes; she nearly went all wild-eyed Dark Side, and was blasted with the battery-current of the Fatae, and the carefully constructed mental boxes she had been keeping things in got shifted in the resulting shake-up, shifted, yeah and some of them got busted open.

Part of the resulting mess led to her insistence on Sergei getting help. Part of it led her to consider leaving the city. And part of it…part of it was jostled loose by the encounter with Max, and suddenly it was important that she know.

Know what?

I don’t know.

Maybe she was the one who needed to be in therapy.

“It’s almost nine,” her partner said cautiously, as though uncertain of her temper. Or her sanity. “Do you want dinner?”

Nine? As in, p.m.?
That bit of information shocked her out of her funk. She had been out-of-body much longer than two hours—more like six. No wonder she was exhausted. And no wonder he was freaked—they were supposed to have met almost four hours ago.

“I don’t…soup, maybe,” she suggested. The thought of anything heavier than that—or more effort to eat—made her just want to close her eyes and float away again, but something told her that would be a very bad idea. Her head was fuzzy and her body felt weightless and leaden at the same time, and although the last thing her stomach wanted was food, using current burned an amazing number of calories, even if the body itself wasn’t doing a damned thing. Between the crap at the docks, and now this, all in twenty-four hours, she was seriously scraping the tank. If she didn’t eat now, there would be hell to pay, later.

“Stay here,” he said. “I’ll see what you have in the kitchen, or I can order in.”

“There’s some canned stuff. I think.” She had no idea how old it was, though. “Call Caesar’s and get a quart of their daily special. Their kitchen’s open until ten.”

He nodded, and some instinct made her reach out an aching arm and grab his wrist before he could get up off the bed.

“I’m okay,” she told him.

“I know.” But his voice still sounded awful.

“I’m really okay,” she repeated. “But it wasn’t fun,
and if I ever do that again, which I hope I won’t, I’ll make sure someone’s here with me.” Here, at her side, connected, not in his own apartment halfway across the city. She let that surrender drip through her body and soak into the psychic bedrock. There was no answering response, but she suspected the demon heard, and understood.

She wasn’t sure that was enough to reassure the human listener, but some of the stiffness left Sergei’s posture, and when he leaned down to brush his lips against hers, just a brief caress, his whispered “thank you” was in his normal toffee-smooth tenor.

Wren closed her eyes again and listened to the sounds of her partner moving around the apartment, and the muted but still-busy traffic on the streets below, and felt a warm tear prickle under one lid. It might have been exhaustion; she was tired enough to cry. Or it might have been frustration; all that, and the only thing to show for it was an old boot.

Or it might just have been for all the things lost, that could never be found again.

No answers. No closure. No absolution, no assurance that she had been a good student, that he was proud of her, that she’d done right by his teaching…

“Let it go,” she told herself. “Focus on what you can do now. All this is just muck that’s been stirred up by that damn kid. You’ll feel better when the job’s done.”

For a minute, she even managed to convince herself.

Museums at night were always, by their nature, a little spooky. During the day, the past was just another artifact, something gone and dead, by its nature an
object lesson rather than promise or threat. At night, however…Hallways that during the day were filled with hundreds of thousands of soles tapping on the tile fell silent, save for the sound of the occasional night guard walking his route or talking on the phone while monitoring a bank of remote cameras. Artworks normally lit for ideal viewing now lurked in half-power shadows, and red lights came on in the place of incandescent white, giving structures an unearthly glow. Worse than all of that, though, was when the normal hum of conversation was replaced by the inaudible whispers of history.

In some museums, the whispers are genteel, civilized, the passions of their creation now aged into a more mellow and fond remembrance. The two renovated mansions that housed the museum held more immediate energies; mankind forgot, Nature did not. Old ills, slights, and catastrophes still lingered, hot and raw as the instant of occurrence, until the floors and walls and windows were saturated.

Most humans never noticed. The Fatae had no use for museums, carrying their past with them unforgotten, so they never visited, and if they felt it outside those thick walls, they never told anyone.

The exhibits on display at least had the chance to be seen and admired. It mitigated the worst of the ills, softened the pain of misfortunes, and brought more positive energies to the front. For every child who smeared the glass, or every teenager who lost their poise or cool, the saturation came down a notch. Below, in the basements and storerooms, where every major and most minor museums locked away the items they
were not using, had no space to show or had not yet identified the provenances of, there was less room for positive energy flow.

Some items moved in and out of storage. Some spent weeks, months, occasionally years being examined and studied, placated.

The rest sat in the dark, numbered, cataloged and all-too-often forgotten. Large or small, all things became dangerous when ignored.

A figure slid through the door from the upper floors of the museum just as the final closing bell was rung. He paused to wave a thin electronic wand over the nearest camera, freezing it in place, and then casual street clothing was shed, revealing a thin, black nylon catsuit underneath covering the lithe body of a tumbler—or a thief. Now that he was dressed head to toe in dark clothing, exposed skin was powdered with a dark substance out of a palm-size vial, in order to reduce any unfortunate reflection of light. Hands were gloved, head covered with a surgeon’s cap under a black silk hood. The street clothing was folded into a small plastic bag that, at the touch of a button, squeezed itself into an impossibly small package that was placed carefully into a half-filled trash can by the doorway.

If the figure felt anything other than the usual burglar’s caution, it was not evident in his smooth glide as he moved from the entrance, deeper into the storerooms.

Whatever the wand had done soon wore off, and the security camera overhead moved in its usual pattern of scan-and-pan up and down the hallway. The figure flowed one step behind the lens, obviously having timed it to precision. Every step was choreographed,
even the side step from one door to another, designed to avoid an alarm trigger for the unwary. The museum might not know what was in these particular storerooms, in terms of provenance, but they had paid enough to acquire these items that spending a little more to protect them made sense.

Handwritten and computer-printed labels pasted on each door were ignored, the figure clearly having a specific goal in mind. Down one hallway, turn left at the branch, then turn right. Two doors down that hallway, then the figure swiftly jimmied open the next door, fitting something into the lock mechanism and closing it gently. The next camera tracked up and down the hallway, and the thief took a breath to judge the pattern, determining the difference from the other camera, before starting in motion again.

That unmarked door led to yet another short hallway off which there were two more exits. Without hesitation, the figure went to the nearest door and, rather than opening it normally, jerked the handle upward.

The door slid up into the ceiling, and the figure disappeared into the darkness within. There were sounds of boxes moving, the muffled noise of a toe hitting something, and a small blue glow appeared, lighting the interior for brief seconds before going out. The intruder reappeared a moment later with two objects: one a small metal box the size of a Manhattan phone book, and the other a slightly larger and longer object, wrapped in oilcloth.

Job complete, the thief turned to leave, but came face-to-face with an unexpected problem: he was unable to bring the door down with both hands already in use.

There was an instant of hesitation as though the figure was weighing the possibilities. Everything was to be left as it had been found, those were his instructions. But once he laid hands on his prize, he never let go, not until it was handed over to the client. That was how he worked.

Deciding that the one door, so far inside the labyrinth, would not be noticed until well after he was safely gone, the thief paused to gauge the timing of the camera, then ducked back out into the hallway, prepared to resume the choreographed hide-and-seek.

No sooner had the figure turned, however, than a light flashed, brighter than sunlight. He was blinded, but reacted without panic, dropping low and crawling toward the exit, the layout as memorized as the motion of the cameras. Every exit option was anticipated and planned for, well before he ever entered the site. At no point did either object leave his grasp, even though it undoubtedly slowed the thief’s escape.

Slowed it enough that when the jimmied door opened from the outside, the figure was only halfway there.

The two security guards who entered were off-duty cops, well-armed and in no mood to play games. One of them gave a command and the other circled around to make sure that there was no one else in the room, while the first one held a gun aimed at the thief’s torso. Even if the rent-a-cop missed the heart-shot, the odds were good that he would hit something significant.

The thief, being a professional and a pragmatist, rolled over and rested the objects carefully on his chest, waiting for them to bring out the cuffs. You never wanted to get caught, but the risk was always there. There was a plan for this, too.

It only took Wren half the morning to track her quarry down, and when she found him, he merely looked up and cracked half a smile. “Of all the java joints in the city, you had to walk into mine.”

“Can it, willya? Too tired.” Wren dropped herself into the booth opposite Danny, folded her arms on the table, and rested her head on top. Was it really only Wednesday? Tuesday was a blur of sleep and being spoon-fed soup and listening to Sergei’s blues music playing low on the stereo in the main room. She was back on her feet now, however battered she still felt, and the world wasn’t waiting on her exhaustion.

But God, she needed a weekend. She needed the week to end, period. Not that she had anything even remotely resembling normal work hours. And she was starting to spend too much time in this coffee shop. It was probably safe to go back to Starbucks. Probably. Then she looked at her companion and remembered
how that last foray had ended. Maybe not. They might still hold a grudge about the broken tables.

“Long night?” The ex-cop-turned-investigator waved the waitress over, and ordered another pot of coffee, extra strong. In his dark blue jeans and cowboy boots under a chunky black sweater, Danny—the former Patrolman Daniel Henrickson, and still in damn fine shape—could have been one of the less-pretty cologne models Madison Avenue used to use, or maybe the hero of a B-grade Western romance. Until, that is, you looked more closely and saw the small horns peeking through his crop of brown curls, or pulled off his boots to see the hooves inside.

Rumor had it that fauns also had nubby—and cute—tails that could and did wag, but Wren didn’t know anyone who had ever seen one. For a member of a breed that were reportedly randy and rude little bastards, Danny was almost annoyingly discreet. Words failed to express how thankful she was for that.

“Oh,” he added before she could respond, “Bonnie says hello.”

“Now is really not the time to change your policy of not kissing and telling,” she muttered from her face-plant on the table.

“Hah.” He sounded amused. “She and I ended up working the same investigation, Valere, that’s all. I saw her last night, and she said she hadn’t made it home in almost two days, and to tell you she was alive and okay.”

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

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

“You on a job?” Danny asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No! Say it ain’t so!”

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

“There was a kid involved.”

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

The
Cosa
gossip line was a thing of beauty.

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

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

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

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

“You don’t buy it?”

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

“I’ve heard it, yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe he was a Talent?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I had one. Neezer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No. She was a Retriever. That was all.

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

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