Blood from Stone (28 page)

For that alone, Wren hated her opponent—if they did this to another human, an innocent, what worse would they do to a demon in their control? What would they do with that kind of freedom, that kind of power?

The current struck, and Wren had a moment of satisfaction as she felt it sizzle through his skin, and dropped him unconscious onto the floor. A shimmer of blackness rose out of him, kicked out of his system by the blow.

Poor bastard,
she thought, reaching down to grab the book,
but you can’t have this book. I’ll burn it, first.
She must have said it out loud, or thought it loud enough, because the black magic expanded into a full-size cloud of energy, fierce striations of no-color at its core, pulsing
like a dozen hearts. Glass shattered behind her, and a roar—psychic, not physical, but no less eardrum-shattering for all that, filled the room and echoed down the hallways.

“You have got to be shitting me,” Wren said, already running. No need to look back; she already knew what was gaining on her. A giant grizzly bear, half of his teeth fake and no digestive ability whatsoever inside his taxi-dermied body, but wanting to tear her flesh from bone anyway: not for dinner but because, suddenly, he
could.

She had captured a stuffed horse once. More accurately, she had trapped the body of an old stuffed warhorse that had been inhabited by a pookha. But it had taken years of working the case part-time, chasing after a being with an agenda of its own. This was entirely different, and wasn’t nobody paying her to do a damn thing except run.

The old-magic mages were
pissed.

Around her, exhibits were moving, clearly feeling the effects of whatever spell her assailants were using, but the bear seemed to have taken the largest dose, as it was the only one actually out of its enclosure and doing more than looking and gesturing in her direction.

Safest place, where’s the safest place?
She knew this museum, damn it. She should know where to go.
Something without livestock in the display.
The obvious choice would be the exotic minerals display, but it was too far, would take too long, and anyway, there was danger there, as well, that damned meteor, why she had avoided it originally.
Somewhere things aren’t so angry,
she decided, almost losing her balance on an overpolished bit of floor, and knocking into the side of a water
fountain.
Where things get what they think is their due, where people go oooo….

Her mind was already there, calculating escape routes, even as she changed her direction mid-stride and backtracked right past the bear. It wasn’t as agile as it had been in life, and took several paces to turn around and start back after her.

By then, Wren was already heading across the main lobby, and into the dinosaur exhibit.

By the standards of larger museums, the exhibit wasn’t much. But it was enough, like jumping out of thick, humid summer air into a crisp wet stream, the difference in psychic pressure: for the first time since going into fugue state, Wren didn’t feel anger or frustration but rather a smooth, almost mellow contentment.

Guess being dead and dust that long really does give you new perspective,
she thought, morbidly amused, before a baby T. rex reached down as though to sniff at the top of her head like an inquisitive cat. Wren yelped, jumping forward and ducking under the outstretched arms of another, unrecognizable dinosaur skeleton, feeling the cool finger bones brush against her cheek.
Oh, holy mother of God, get me
out
of here.

In response, the roar of the
ursa major
returned as the furred corpse lumbered through the door and batted aside baby rex, letting the bones scatter across the floor like giant pickup sticks. Wren barely had time to gulp before mama rex’s head swung around and down, looking directly at the grizzly as though she still had eyes.

Wren was pretty sure she wet herself. That was the thing about old magic. You could get it started, but you
didn’t always get to control where it went. Especially when you went riding someone without their consent, the way these idiots had. Everything was moving, like some damned Disney animatronics ride, and it was a hell of a lot more fun when you got warned
before
it started that you were on a dark ride.

Wren put on another burst of speed toward where an unmarked emergency exit should be, according to the floor plan. Unlike the public ones, it shouldn’t be alarmed from the inside—employees used it to take smoke breaks, during shift.

Even if it screamed in every alarm in every precinct in town, at this point she didn’t care. If she could get outside, she somehow knew, the spell couldn’t follow her. It was trapped within the confines, where the exhibits lived, bounded by their territory, their comfort zone. That was the limit to old magic, where current had none.

Fine by her. She’d done the job; it was time to go home. Let someone else do the goddamned cleanup this time.

Wren busted out of the museum’s emergency side door and into the narrow—and thankfully trash-free—alley between the buildings. If anyone had been lurking for her, or if they had thought to post any kind of guard on the various exits, she would have been toast, but apparently the competition had focused all their talent—and Talent—on controlling the guard. She hoped they choked on their incantations and died purple-faced in embarrassing-to-explain positions.

Clutching the book and papers to her closely, she edged toward the street. Just because it looked and sounded clear was no reason to assume it actually
was
clear. Lots of jobs went south at the very end, because someone got cocky.

Barely shoving her nose out, she took a quick look. A woman in a long coat, walking a short-legged brown dog down the street: both of them looking bored to death by the process. A transit bus cruising down Fifth
Avenue, lumbering to a stop. Nobody got on or off, and it rolled forward again when the light changed.

No police cars, no yowling masses, no anything out of place. No scent or sight of current in the air, beyond the normal flickers. If she went into fugue she might be able to find more, but…no. Not worth it. A woman and two men wearing business casual walked up to the museum, disappearing around to the main side entrance, where peons and delivery people went to be let inside. The admin staff was arriving. Time to be going.

No sign of Sergei.

Of course not. He was off having a bonding bar brawl with P.B.

Damn it, he was supposed to be here, waiting for the doors to open. He had her change of clothing! Not to mention a bag to hold her Retrieval, so it wasn’t all quite so much out in the open. The tube could be carrying anything, bike messengers and couriers used them all the time, nobody looked twice, but the book was…not the sort of thing you lugged around Manhattan, as a rule.

The irritation flared, and then faded. He had a reason to go haring off, otherwise he would be here. She needed to finish the job,
then
worry about her boys. Anything else was counterproductive.

She had to get away from here, before the Dutch mages—and their magic-slave—found her.

The words could have meant anything, in the mouths of any other Talent. Wren’s intent shaped the cantrip into a heavy boost for her no-see-me, feeling it kick in and crank through her system until she thought she might be able to walk right up to a cop and kick him in the shins and not have him even feel it.

Not that she was going to test that theory. At least not until she was a few blocks away. Taking a deep breath, she walked out into the street, and strode away from the museum, the book and the tube clutched to her chest like a baby rescued from fire. Every step she took, the tension in her back grew less, but the weight of the book became heavier.

She had it. Now what the hell were they going to
do
with it?

With each step, as the adrenaline of the job wore off completely, Wren’s entire body began to feel the results of the mad chase. She had a shin splint, and a pulled muscle in her side, a depressing number of bruises, and at some point she had conked her elbow hard enough that it still twinged painfully when she moved. Four or five blocks away from the museum a downtown bus pulled to the curb just as she passed by the stop, and Wren took the opportunity to slip on behind a woman with twin toddlers. One of them, a black-haired little angel with a devilish look on her face, caught sight of Wren despite the no-see-me spell, and looked as if she was going to say something, but was distracted by her mother urging her onto one of the plastic seats.

The incident made her think, again, about the kid she’d left upstate. Was his dad behaving himself? She hoped so. If not, the Tri-Com would do something.
They understood; they had to take better care of their kidlets. There couldn’t be a repeat of the Lost Ones.

She had a sudden vision of a dozen or so kidlets being herded by exasperated mentors, like some kind of demented
Cosa
version of a crèche, and started to giggle.

Fortunately, her stop came up next, before anyone noticed that an empty patch of air was having hysterics.

She made it through the streets and up the stairs of her apartment, flipped the door locks open, and locked them securely behind her. Then she stashed the book, notebook, and tube in the back of her overcrowded hall closet where only a trained archaeologist could excavate them safely, peeled off her slicks and tossed them into a corner, and crawled, almost literally, into bed, tears of exhaustion forming at the corner of her eyes even as her body touched the mattress.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” she told the apartment, and in her exhaustion she could have sworn that she heard the walls and floors hum with sympathy, before she passed out.

She woke when a weight dropped onto the bed next to her. Still exhausted, she reached out, expecting to touch Sergei’s warm skin. The thick, scratchy texture her fingers encountered had her sitting upright, the covers sliding off her body as she scooted away from whatever it was breathing heavily next to her.

Current flashed like lightning, filling the room, and all the air was expelled from her lungs.

“Whoa, careful with the remaining fur!”

“You scared the crap out of me,” she said, then did
a double take as she actually saw what she had touched. “What the hell happened?”

P.B. tried to smile, but it came out as more of a grimace, the patchy skin where fur had been shaved away to allow for the stitches stretching the demon’s face uncomfortably. Between that, and the bandages, and what looked like a black eye, the demon looked less like a cuddly stuffed toy and more like the tail end of a hard riot. “Your partner has a hell of an uppercut.”

“Sergei?” She started to get out of bed, then remembered that she had striped off her slicks when she came in and not bothered to put anything on before collapsing into bed. “Demon, close your eyes!”

“Like I haven’t seen it all before,” P.B. grumbled, but obligingly placed one bandaged paw over his eyes and turned his face away. “Sergei’s fine, by the way,” he continued as she searched the room for her robe, wrapping herself in it and tying the tie firmly. “A few stitches here and there, and a hell of a headache, but he’s fine.”

“Stitches?” That got her to stop, half-dressed, and look at him. Stitches were okay, but if that was what he was
telling
her, there was more he wasn’t.

The demon shrugged, as sheepish as she could imagine him looking, even with his eyes covered. “I kinda hit him with part of the chair, is the worst of the damage. And he wouldn’t even have gotten bruised if he hadn’t charged in like some kind of unhorsed knight to defend the honor of…I’m not sure whose honor he was racing in to save, honestly,” the demon complained. “I was doing fine. I feel better than you look, anyway. Does he freak out that much when you don’t answer the phone?”

“What?” She was totally confused now. Once the
initial adrenaline rush had subsided, again, she could see that the bruises and scrapes were just that, and even the black eye was more of a brownish bruise than anything else. She was just so used to thinking of P.B. as invulnerable; the shock was always intense when he got banged up.

“They went after you?” That she remembered, when she had tapped him for a current discharge. Him, and Sergei, in the middle of a brawl…

The entire thing seemed as though it had happened a week ago, not…she tried to puzzle out what time it was, and realized that she didn’t even know what
day
it was, at that point.

“Yeah. Wanted me to take a little trip with them, like you suspected. I declined, on account of my luggage not being packed and my passport gone missing.”

That explained why Sergei hadn’t been there when she hit street level. Wasn’t that just like a guy, skip out on a date to get into a fight.

Then what the demon was saying sank in. Sergei had gone to P.B.’s aid. Unrequested, it sounded like. She felt her face twitch into a smile, and repressed it. Her partner, who had once referred to the Fatae as “bad special effects looking for a free handout,” had abandoned her to go to the aid of a demon. She didn’t think she wanted to know what had caused this about-face, she was just glad it had happened. But why wasn’t Sergei here? What wasn’t P.B. telling her?

“How long…” she started to ask.

“You’ve been sleeping around the clock. It’s almost dawn. Sergei figured you’d be waking up soon, went out to get the newspapers.”

Oh. The panic level dropped another few notches. Her partner had a thing about keeping up with a range of newspapers, and was accustomed to reading them online. Not an option in this apartment. Wren had a computer, reasonably fast and surge-protected to within an inch of her life, but she had been uncomfortable using it since she had wizzed. There were things on that hard drive she wanted to keep, not crisp out of existence with a badly timed sneeze. She missed instant messenger, and her mailing lists. Time to do something about banging together a new surge-proof system, if they could.

“You think he’ll bring back bagels?” Now that she knew everyone was in one piece, more or less, she was hungry. No, she was
starving.
God knew how much energy she had burned during the Retrieval—the Retrieval!

“Oh, my God, I swear, my brain leaked out with the first zombie hit,” she muttered in annoyance, heading for the hallway, and the closet.

It took P.B. a moment to catch up with her. “Zombie? What zombie? Valere, there’s no such thing as zombies! Is there?”

She was already at the closet, rooting through the debris of out-of-season coats, tote bags, broken umbrellas, and an old breakfast-in-bed tray someone had given her that she had never used. The hotstick Bonnie had loaned her was there, too, the current-weapon painted black and pink, and looking harmless for something so nasty. Wren was lethal enough, now, without amplification. She should give it back to Bonnie, who might need it someday on the job.

“Valere?”

“Hah. There it is.” She reached in, relieved that the entire episode hadn’t been some kind of particularly bizarre fever dream, and laid fingers on the tube of papers. The small notebook followed, being laid out on the carpet behind her, as the demon fell silent. She had to get on her knees to reach in and pull out the larger hardback book. It felt heavier than it had the day before, the leather of the cover less smooth, but she added it to the pile and then sat back, turning to see the demon’s reaction.

He was sitting on his haunches across the narrow hallway, his back up against the wall, his dark red eyes very dark and wide.

“P.B.?” She looked from him to the pile of papers on the carpet. “I got them. I finished the job.” She wasn’t looking for an attagirl, exactly, but some sort of acknowledgement, more than that blank stare, would be nice, considering what she had to go through to get them—and for no pay, she could but wouldn’t add.

“You got them.”

She started to say, “well, duh,” but the look on his face stopped her. He looked…not scared, no, but…awed.

It floored her, unexpectedly. She had been so focused, she and Sergei, on the mechanics of the job, the details of outwitting the others and getting in and getting the job done, they had forgotten—or never really stopped to think—about what the job
was.

These weren’t journals, or blueprints, or scientific documents. They were origin stories. Birth certificates. Holy documents, if you were of that bent, proving the intentional creation of a sentient species.

In all the concern over what other people might do with the information in them, she had never stopped to wonder what they meant to P.B.

All that research, everything that must have gone into creating and perfecting the demon, to creating her friend…And she had been treating it like a liability, something to be destroyed, without even pausing to consider their real beauty, their real value.

“They’re yours,” she said gently.

“What?”

“Yours. Take them. Do whatever you want with them.”

He held the book in his huge flat paws, and she could almost see the desire in him to stroke the leather, like a human might a holy text, or a childhood diary.

“You think I should destroy them.”

She did, actually. She had seen the black sludge that was in her system, knew firsthand what she was capable of if she thought it was the right thing, the necessary thing. She had killed—
thou shalt not kill
—and she had tampered with a Null’s brain—
for the good of a Talented child
—and she had done it again to protect herself from that security guard. She hadn’t gone too far—not like those mages had, to destroy a man for their own use, but…But she could still fall into that dark abyss. She could still go mad, if their connection, human and demon, ever failed.

If it did, would she want to create a new one? Would she be driven to, in order to survive? Would she do it, to save herself…Or someone she loved?

If it was now, if Neezer were still salvageable, would she…

It doesn’t have to be this way.
Her own voice, pleading with a madman for a second chance.

Better never to know. Better never to understand that much about what she was capable of.

Let the
Cosa
never know, either. Let them heal, and survive as they always had, and have illusions about their innate strength, and good intentions.

“Let them be myth,” she said, not answering him directly. “Humans have no need to know. The Fatae have no need to know. Demon…someday, you may want offspring. Or you may not. But that’s only for you to decide. Let demon determine your own species’ future.”

It was a speech, for her, and she didn’t feel comfortable even as the words were coming out of her mouth, but some of the tension seeped out of P.B.’s body as she spoke.

“They’re yours,” she said again. It was all she could say, really.

“Aren’t you…” His dark red eyes met hers in an unflinching gaze. “This could answer all the things you’ve been wondering about. The stuff you haven’t been talking about.”