Blood from Stone (16 page)

“Hey, Ms. Valere.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Danny called me.”

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

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

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

“And?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“KimAnn hasn’t been heard from in over a year,” Wren said, just as quietly, as though speaking her name might summon the woman from whatever depth of hell she’d been sunk to. “I think that the Council proper—” the entire organization as a whole “—took care of her for us. She was getting too big for her Ferragamos, and they hate that. Anyway that’s a line I’m not sure they’d take—it’s too easy for someone snooping around to jump from knowing about lonejacks to knowing about the Council and then the fat’s really in the fire. We’ve survived this long by not drawing attention—even KimAnn wasn’t crazy enough to do that.

“Feds or local?” she asked her partner. “The local cops have always had a little more know—”

“Feds,” he said definitely. He was sitting in a straight-
back chair, having turned it around and straddled it, his arms resting on the back, his long legs out in front of him. His hair—that dark, wavy hair that she used to love running her fingers through, was streaked with gray, and cut too short to properly rumple, but her fingers still itched to tangle in it. Like any big, dangerous cat, you always wanted to pet him.

Inappropriate thoughts,
she told herself with an inward smirk.
Focus on the problem, not the petting.

“Federal’s not good. Not good at all.” She did not have warm-’n’-fuzzies about federal-level knowledge. Like Council membership, she left that for those with a taste for game-playing.

“It’s not the Silence,” Sergei said now, beating both of them to the question neither wanted to ask. “I checked.”

His former employers had tried to wipe out magic in the world, starting with the users based in New York City. They had been wiped out instead.

Not wiped out,
Wren corrected herself.
You don’t kill a hydra with one swoop, and you don’t destroy a hundred-year-old organization with one defeat, no matter how hard it hit them. In some form, under some other name, they’re still out there, somewhere. Just not now, not here, not our problem. Yet.
Like the New York Council, the Silence had been led by a single person with ambition beyond what he already owned. Like KimAnn, he, too, had disappeared.

Unlike KimAnn, Wren suspected Duncan was very much dead. She had no proof…except the way Sergei slept more soundly at night, now.

That was enough for her.

“The fact that it’s some stranger, some new crisis,
does not make me feel any better about all this. In case anyone was wondering.” P.B.’s voice was dry as a morning hangover, and about as brittle. His ears were back against his skull: like a cat’s ears, that meant he was feeling defensive.

“New day, new troubles,” Wren said, parroting one of her mother’s refrains. “So we have a Fed on our tails, asking questions at a particularly suspicious and inauspicious moment. Assuming the worst, ’cause it usually is, what sort of questions? I mean, are we talking about ‘have you seen this demon?’ or ‘are you interested in a million-dollar reward for bringing me their ears and tails?’”

“I don’t have a tail,” P.B. said.

“It’s a saying,” she told him in exasperation. What was it with Fatae and tails, anyway?

“I know. But I don’t have a tail, not really.”

“Oh, for God’s sake…”

Before they could get into a stress-driven wrangle about Fatae prejudices against the tailed, Sergei came back with the details.

“He’s showing the photos around—and it’s only a drawing of you, P.B., although reportedly pretty accurate—and asking if anyone knows anything about any of us. No specifics. Danny didn’t sound too worried, but…”

“He’s on a fishing expedition, this Fed,” Wren said, not sure if that was a good thing or not.

“I think so, yes,” her partner agreed. “But the question is, what is he fishing for? Is it tied into the recent events here in the city, or P.B.’s letter, somehow, or one of our older cases, or something, God help us, we don’t know about yet?”

P.B. looked at Wren, who looked at Sergei, who looked at P.B. who looked up at the ceiling to indicate his total lack of an answer.

Sergei turned back to his partner. “Wren, do you think this is something that should be taken back to the Tri-Com?”

“No.” Her reaction was immediate and definite; so much so that she had it out of her mouth before she could think about it. The guys both looked taken aback, so she paused to consider why she felt that way, trying to explain it to them.

“If I keep running to them…they’re used to me dealing with the big nasty shit. If this turns out to be nothing, or just localized to us three, then they’ll think I was crying wolf. And that would be seriously bad for my reputation.”

It was a logical explanation, and had the benefit of being true. But it wasn’t her real reason. The real reason, not-so-hidden deep in her gut, was the fear that the more contact she had with them, the more the members would think about trying to rope her back in. The lonejacks were still not as bad as the Council, they still remembered that life was every woman for herself and watch out only for those you choose to care for, but the entire idea of the Truce Board first and now the Tri-Com was scratching away at that independence, and it made her uneasy, even more than some unknown crazy person from P.B’s past, or some unknown Federal nose.

No more. No matter how many tendrils she felt wrapping around her ankles, pulling her back in.

“You know what?” she said abruptly, uncurling off the sofa in a single smooth motion and sitting upright.
“This could be nothing. We don’t know, and we can’t do anything, and I’m not going to worry about it.”

“Where are you going?” Sergei asked, no, demanded, his voice sharpening.

She was slipping her shoes back on and lacing them up. When she finished, she looked up at her partner and shrugged. “The gym, first. I’ve been crap at keeping up and it’s going to bite me, if I’m not careful. Then I was going to go to the store and actually buy groceries, since someone used the last of the eggs for breakfast when I wasn’t home. And then I thought I might go break into a few houses, just to keep in practice.”

They might have thought she was kidding, except they knew her better.

She thought Sergei was going to protest, but instead he nodded. “Good idea,” he said. “When I know more, I’ll let you know.”

Amazing how those words eased the tightness in her chest. She shouldn’t have doubted him. That was how the partnership had been established. Why screw with the part that still worked?

She grabbed her coat, and leaned over to give Sergei a rough but thorough kiss. “Dinner tonight?” After recent events, the two of them were keeping her on a tight make-sure-she-eats-food-watch. She didn’t have any basis—or desire—to complain.

“I’m too busy to cook anything. I’ll meet you at Marianna’s, sevenish?”

She grinned in agreement, flicked a finger in farewell to P.B., and was out the door.

In the silence after the door closed: “Is she okay?”

Sergei gave the demon a sour look. “Why are you asking me?”

“Don’t start with that shit,” P.B. said, equally annoyed. “There are things she tells you, and things she tells me, and if we don’t pool that, we’re going to be out-classed and outgunned for the rest of our lives.”

Sergei Didier was well into his forties. He was a former covert operative for an even more covert organization that he had, by their standards, betrayed; had established a second career as a successful legitimate businessman, and an equally successful third career as the manager of a not-technically-illegal-because-nobody-knew-to-make-it-illegal Retriever partnership. He should not have been shut down by a midget in a bear suit, no matter the midget was apparently over a hundred years old, and had claws and teeth to match the fur.

Some people might look at P.B. and only see the physical. Sergei had always been aware of the brain inside. That didn’t mean he had to like it being used against him.

Even if he was being a shit.

“She’s still not sleeping well. But I don’t think she knows.”