Blood from Stone (26 page)

“And what the hell will I do with you?” she asked the large book. It was the size of a phone book, hardbound and locked with a brass lock that had been carefully, almost expertly prised open.

“Give it to me,” a gravelly voice behind her said. It wasn’t phrased like a suggestion.

Think fast, Jenny-wren.

This time, it wasn’t an echo of her mentor’s voice she heard, just her own awareness using his voice. Old habits died hard, even imaginary ones.

When Wren first went into partnership with Sergei Didier, she had been a small-town teenage shoplifter with some basic talent as well as Talent. Seeing potential in her itchy fingers, he encouraged her to stretch exactly the skills and inclinations her mentor had once despaired of, and found her teachers for the things she needed to know. But it had been Wren’s own idea to work with a woman who trained agility dogs. The woman used to run her through obstacle courses that were similar to what the dogs trained on—up ladders and over jumps and through tunnels—with the added fun of throwing things as Wren did so. Wren’s reflexes, always good, had gotten better.

Those reflexes were screaming at her to throw something at that voice, but the only thing to hand was the
book he was demanding, and that was the one thing she wasn’t about to give him.

Should have paid Tony more to stick around,
she thought with annoyance, even as her brain was running through possible responses. Translocating the hell out of here now would have been worth the price. Although maybe not—once, the pills seemed to work. Twice, in close proximity…the last time she tried that many Translocs, she was damn near incapacitated for a week.

Those thoughts took less than a second to race through her mind, and she was already moving by the time they finished. Rather than swing around to confront the speaker, or drop to the ground to try and escape, Wren went
up.

“What the hell?” Gravel-voice asked, his voice squeaking in surprise on the last word.

Sergei had been right; they had gone to the Null population again for their thief. A Talent wouldn’t have blinked at the sight of a Retriever clinging to the ceiling like some kind of real-world Spiderman.

The pull from the wiring in the ten-foot-high ceiling was just enough to make her palms and knees itch to draw more down, and Wren was careful to keep the touch of her own current light. The last thing she wanted to do now was overload the already stressed wiring of the building and cause a power outage that would bring every cop in the city wailing to the front door, sure a heist was in progress.

Especially since one
was.

Carefully matching her drawdown to the flutter of current leaking naturally, using it like a spider’s web to keep her attached to the ceiling, she scrambled over the
other intruder’s head, the large book pressed against her stomach like a mutant baby possum looking for mama.

Getting down was as easy as falling, which was pretty much what she did—right on top of the other intruder, toppling him to the ground. As she hit, a weird, nasty feeling skittered over her skin, and she shuddered, rolling quickly to get away from him, and it. As she rolled, she got a look at the other intruder for the first time: tall, dark, stocky and pissed-off. Also, wearing a uniform, dark blue pants and jacket with a patch on his shoulder, and a walkie-talkie—but no gun—at his leather belt Ooops. Not a thief. Museum security.

Where the hell did he come from? He was off his rounds, damn it. Nobody was supposed to be patrolling this floor for another twenty minutes!

“Sorry,” she muttered, pitching her voice as low as she could in order to sound masculine, and used the spine of the book to knock him one across the chin, praying she didn’t do any damage to the book. She wasn’t trying to hurt him, either, just keep him down long enough for her to get away. Her gym routine paid off, giving her the upper body strength needed, and he blinked and fell back again, the back of his head clunking against the floor.

Reaching down even as she scrambled up to her knees, Wren touched the walkie-talkie and the cell phone clipped to his belt, and sent a surge of current through them both. With luck, when he came to, he’d spend a few essential minutes trying to figure out why nobody was responding to his calls before he chased after her.

“Follow me,” she told the book, and it obligingly
attached itself to her like a dog on “heel” command. Dashing out the now-open door, Wren left the guard ass-down on the floor, and fled down the hallway.

Time check. How much time had passed?
Her internal clock was usually pretty good on these things—when you couldn’t wear a watch, you learned how to estimate time to within a few minutes’ accuracy. The doors should be opening for staff soon, if they hadn’t already. And someone was going to find the guard sooner rather than later, even if he sat there fiddling with his nowjunked radios until then. Why did he have to come in just then, to see her boosting the book? Damn it, she should have tied him up, should have—bingo!

Wren skidded to a halt before she reached the stairs. It wasn’t a brilliant idea, and it had a high probability of failure, but it was better than anything else she could think of and had the added advantage of being simple. Simple sometimes was better than brilliant, especially under stress conditions.

She flicked a finger, and the book came into her hands. It was dark brown leather, scuffed and battered at the corners even before she used it as a weapon, as if it had been shoved into a lot of trunks and desks over the years. There was nothing written or embossed on the front or back, and the spine had lettering that was too faded now to read. The pages looked to be heavy paper, and had at one time been edged in gilt. The temptation to open the book and see what was inside was intense, but Wren resisted. With her luck, Herr Doktor had bespelled the pages to trap any Talent who dared peek. That seemed like the kind of thing a mad mage-scientist would do, didn’t it?

A wizzart sure as hell would have. And it would have been a nasty spelling, too.

Beside, she didn’t need to know what was inside for what she needed to do.

Sliding into fugue state, she dunked herself into her current, gracelessly surrounding herself with crackling, slithering thick-bodied coils of current. They rubbed up against her with dry static and set the virtual hair on her virtual arms pleasantly on end. The
idea
of the book appeared in her hands, and she concentrated for a moment to make sure that her memory supplied all the relevant details. Heft and weight and texture and color and smell…if she thought it would help she would have licked it, to get the taste. as well.

Deep inside her body, the pain kicked her in the gut. With sheer force of will, she ignored it.

Not here, not in her hands; she already had the real thing. Cantrips didn’t need to be exact, so long as the caster knew exactly what they wanted, and focused all their control on it.

Will and the Way, they used to call it in the old days. Magical Visualization, if you were all New Agey. Focus, if you were a Talent. It all came down to the same thing: making shit happen the way you wanted, not the way current would naturally flow in the easiest channel.

That was where old magic went wrong, most of the time. Just because you could chant and wave didn’t
mean you were directing the power. Current, like electricity, like people, was lazy. It wanted to go where it always went, not where you wanted it to go. Not unless you were trained specifically in directing it. You had to be tougher than it was, every single time.

Focus. Control. Training.

Wren Valere had been very well-trained, long before she ever became a Retriever. Her mentor had made damned sure of that.

Wren looked inside and out through her current, and Saw the room she had taken the materials from. The guard was still flat out on the floor, but he was groaning and reaching around with one hand for his walkie-talkie. She didn’t have much time at all.

The emphasis worked this time, and the book in her fugue-sight disappeared, reappearing with a satisfyingly solid thunk on the desk where she had found it. The guard should, if he bothered to look, think that everything was undisturbed, as would anyone who came in later, at least until they tried to pick the book up, and discovered the pages were blank.

Quickly, before she could give in to the pain trying to gnaw out her innards, Wren shifted her focus from the book to the guard. She had to keep him from following her, had to put him out of the game—without killing him. She knew how to do it, now. But she hesitated, something making her concentration waver.

It was wrong. What she was planning to do was very, very wrong, and she could almost hear Neezer muttering in her ear how wrong it was.

“Shut up, old man,” she said. “You abandoned me, you dumped me, you gave my responsibilities to someone else, you miserable bastard, and I am angry at you. So you don’t get to tell me how to live my life—or how to protect it.”

A dark crimson lightning bolt of current shot up through her arm, making it jerk under the impact into a disturbingly salutelike gesture, the finger pointing back down toward the room—toward the guard. Wren
saw
the bolt leave her finger, thicker and darker than she had expected, zapping into the air and disappearing.

She’d love to have lifted only the memory of finding someone in the room, but the time for that sort of precision didn’t exist, even if she had that kind of fine-tuned control. If she was lucky, her intent and her control was good enough that the poor bastard only lost everything since he woke up that morning, and blamed it all on the bad spill he took when entering the room. If nothing was overtly out of place, he would go for medical attention, and not report an intruder or trigger any alarm.

If she’d screwed up, hit him too hard…then God have mercy on the poor schmuck, whose only mistake had been getting ahead of his schedule.

She dropped out of fugue state, and her body wreaked
its own revenge for overusing that dark current, dropping her to the ground as hard as she had dropped the guard. Hard, hot spines of pain slammed into her abdomen, ricocheting around to see how much damage they could do.

“Oh, fuck,” she managed, before the pain made her black out.

The book dropped to the floor beside her, the noise echoing in the otherwise-silent room.

In the room down the hall, the guard twitched once, then again. A spangle of current darker and thicker than Wren’s blast lifted off his skin, as though disturbed by her spell. It hovered bare seconds, then settled back down onto his flesh, sinking into the dermis. The guard twitched again, moaned, and then his eyes opened as though forced to do so by an external source.

*Valere!*

Confusion, annoyance, a sense of being kicked in the gut, and a splitting headache pulled Wren back into consciousness. She blinked, groggy, her arm automatically reaching out to grab where the book had landed even before she was fully alert to where she was.

“Shit.” This was bad. This was very, very bad. How much time had she lost? No way to tell, now. Find a clock. No, first, listen for pursuit, sounds, anything to indicate the guard had remembered enough to set off an alarm. Her body ached as though she had been worked over by a sadist, but the pain made it easier, somehow, for her to listen. Probably because her ears weren’t trying to move. If she’d had ears like P.B.’s, that flicked back and forth when he was concentrating…

Voices. Not near, but coming closer. Dress shoes, heels on linoleum. Conversational tones, not alarmed ones. Early workers, too early, damn it, for anyone to be coming to work. Not many, but any was too many. She had to move. Oh, God, she had to move.

Once she convinced her torso to uncurl and her legs to straighten, the pain wasn’t quite as bad as expected. Bad, but nothing she couldn’t shove through. Time had passed, then. Enough time for her body to recover, enough for her to command her muscles to respond, and not have them give her a virtual finger in response. With the book cradled to her side, staggering bent-over and leaning against the wall, she moved down the hallway, looking for an unoccupied space to crawl into.

Hide. Stay undetected. Don’t get caught.

But there was nowhere to hide, no empty closet or spare office. With her normal defenses battered and down, every room she touched the door of repelled her, filled to the brim with waves of anger, resentment, discontent, or sheer loneliness. The weight of those emotions bruised her, and only sheer stubborn annoyance of her own kept her moving.

It wasn’t until she came to the third door that her brain caught up with her instincts, and she realized what was happening. Not people. Artifacts. Not magical, not particularly dangerous, but in her hyperaware, hyperexposed state, everything in the museum had an aura around it, everything was
projecting.

That thought stirred something else in her brain. Something about P.B.? A voice, or a note, or something…. She couldn’t remember, and didn’t have the energy to spare to worry at it right then, anyway.

Up or down? She hesitated in the stairwell, panting like an overheated dog, confused and aching. Down…down there were no people. She could hide down there, have time to recover, complete the job. But one step on the stairs, and a tsunami of projections staggered her backward.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered, not sure who she was apologizing to, or why. Whatever was down there was
lonely.
Was
angry.
Everyone had gone and
left
them
alone.

If she went down there, the way she was right now, open to every currentical influence, she would…

It would be bad. Whatever happened, it would be bad. She couldn’t go back down there. Not alone. Not now. Not the way she was. Turning, she went up the stairs, instead, into the museum itself.

The halls were wider here, the ceilings higher, and her steps, even in her work gear, echoed in a way that should have been reassuring but wasn’t. The oppression she could feel practically oozing off the walls, from every glass-enclosed exhibit and display, reminded her, oddly, of the Dark Space in the House of Holding, the current-null space in the hills of Tuscany. Which was worse? Given a vote, Wren would have said they were both scary-ass, and let her out now, thanks and bye-bye.