Staying Dead

Sergei never referred to them as cases, or jobs. No, the “client” had a “situation.” Situations paid better.

“Jesus wept, Sergei. Even Christ took three days to rise from the dead! Gimme a break here!”

“And need I remind you that today is the thirteenth? Please mail your rent check today.”

“Yeah yeah, I already have a momma nag, I don’t need another,” she complained to the empty apartment as the tape clicked off. Not that it wasn’t sort of nice, having someone to remind her of the stuff that always managed to slip her mind. Like dropping a check in the mail.

That was the way their partnership worked, too. Sergei handled the money side of it, set up the deals, worked the angles. She did the jobs—or, in Sergei’s parlance, “rectified the situations.” The stuff that took Talent, as opposed to talent. From each according to their abilities, although she had been known to bargain sharply, and Sergei wasn’t above getting his hands a little dirty, if needed. She knew for a fact that the man lied with the fluidity and believability of a gypsy prince if it suited him.

A nice skill for your agent to have. It had certainly saved their asses more than once, including one memorable evening where he had played both her father and her husband to two different people in the space of an hour. He hadn’t been sure which role was more annoying, especially when she insisted on calling him “dad-dikins” for the rest of the month.

The memory of that made her smile, the comforting awareness of Sergei as always tucked somewhere along her spine. It wasn’t anything particularly magical; just the knowledge born of ten years’ partnership that, all joking aside, he was there for her, that all she had to do was yell.

Well, maybe it was a little bit magical. Sergei wasn’t a total null, and maybe she’d sampled a little more of his internal energies than she’d ever told him about…but it was only so that she’d be able to pick him out in a dark room, in a crowd, if the need ever arose.

Not that she’d ever admit to needing him, even when she was asking. Bastard would enjoy that far too much. He’d be more than happy to take over handling her personal finances, too, if she let him. It wasn’t that he didn’t think she was capable. She hoped, because otherwise she’d have to kill him. He just…was overprotective that way. Every way. Sometimes she thought he still saw her as the seventeen-year-old she’d been when they first hooked up, her still foundering in her abilities, and him with a pair of severely pissed-off mages on his tail.

Putting the orange juice back into the fridge, Wren turned out the light in the kitchen with a casual slap of the hand against the switch as she went across the narrow wood-floored hallway and into the main room. She turned on the stereo, letting the soft jazz clear out the silence. The music tugged at the tension between her shoulder blades, pulling it down off her body. A world with saxophones in it wasn’t a bad world at all.

Other than the stereo, two huge speakers, and a comfortable brown tweed armchair, the room was empty of furniture. The acoustics of the room were—astoundingly—perfect. It would have been blasphemy to in any way disturb it.

Her fifth-floor walkup had five rooms—downright palatial by Manhattan standards, even if the rooms themselves were tiny. In addition to the music room and kitchenette, there were three shoebox bedrooms against the back wall, each with its own window that overlooked the brick wall of the next building over. A bathroom with facilities that had been upgraded within the last decade sent the rent soaring from barely reasonable to moderately painful.

Okay, so maybe the neighbors weren’t all they could be, in terms of minding their own business. The five flights of stairs were murder, especially in the summer. And the sounds of traffic from over on Houston Street could be pretty bad. Wren didn’t care. Two years ago she had walked in the door half a step behind the real estate broker, a hyperkinetic woman glued to her cell phone, and had felt a sense of comfort soak into her bones, like walking onto a ley line, those semi-legendary sources of power. This was home. This was her sanctuary. The moment the building went co-op, as every decent apartment building seemed to, sooner or later, she was going to buy her apartment. That’s where all of her money went, right into the savings account that was not ever, on pain of pain, touched. No vacations, no expensive toys or impulse splurges.

Well, maybe a few. Mostly, though, she stole what she really wanted. Just to keep her hand in, of course.

Wren was a pragmatist. She was very good at what she did, but no career goes on forever. Especially not one with risks like hers. So she planned. And prepared. And kept praying that human nature would maintain a demand for her particular skills.

So far, no problem on that front. Someone always wants what they’re not supposed to have, and someone’s always equally willing to pay to get that something back.

Setting the volume level to where she could hear the music throughout the apartment, Wren grabbed the mail off the counter, sorting it as she walked down the hallway into the bedroom that was set up as her office. “Phone bill, credit card, junk junk junk, more junk, political junk.” She tossed all but the bills into the recycling bin next to the desk, and thumbed through the flyers that had been stuck in the doorjamb, setting aside one menu and tossing the rest into the bin. That was the third flyer she’d gotten for pest removal. At this point, they were more annoying than her nonexistent cockroaches, current being a great and totally—in her mind—underutilized way to keep a location insect-free.

“If I could only market that little side effect right,” she told the photo of her mother tacked to the board on the wall in front of her, “I’d be able to make us both filthy rich overnight. And Sergei, too.”

The office was the largest of the three bedrooms, but barely managed to hold the small dark wood desk where her computer and a headset phone reigned, a comfortably upholstered office chair, and a tall potted plant against one wall. The corkboard hung on the wall over the desk was cluttered with papers, takeout menus, and the one posed photo of her mother. Five two-drawer file cabinets marched along the opposite wall, pulling double-duty as a table for an assortment of odd but useful objects she didn’t know where else to put. That wall also held a closet. Its door had been removed, and half a dozen shelves installed, to serve as a makeshift bookcase. The window was covered by a rice paper shade, allowing light during the day, but keeping prying eyes out 24/7.

She sat down at the desk and turned on the computer. While it hummed to life, she reached over to the phone, dialing a number from memory while she hooked the wireless headset up, pulling her hair clear where it tangled with the mouthpiece with a mutter of disgust. She hated using the thing, but the phone—like her computer—had been rigged with so many surge protectors to make it safe for her to use on a regular basis that you couldn’t move the damn thing without creating disaster.

One ring, and then a crisp, efficient “Yes?”

“It’s me.”

Sergei’s raspy tenor voice changed, so subtly it would have taken someone paying close attention to recognize the new, softer tone for affection.

“You looked at the job site?”

“Yeah, for whatever that was worth.” Wren leaned back and swung her feet up on the desk. Her loafers needed polishing. “External was clean, but there was one possible smudge-marker up on the ceiling inside. Although, in retrospect, it could’ve been there since Adam went figless. Anyway, ruled out anything else. Distance grab, no doubts. A pro.”

“But it was definitely a magic-user?”

Sergei was, like so much of the human population, in that nether area between Null and Talent, but after so many years as her partner he was well-versed enough in the uses of it to make certain assumptions. Besides, realistically, what else could it have been?

“Yeah.” She refrained from sarcasm. Barely. “Whoever it was used the building’s wiring to convey the spell. Probably had every person in the building so hocused, they couldn’t have told you what color their socks were.”

“And then got the cornerstone out—how?”

Wren’s mouth twisted in frustration, making her look for a moment like a five-year-old given brussels sprouts. “Okay, that part I haven’t quite figured out yet. Translocation, probably.”

Translocation of an inanimate or inert object wasn’t a difficult spell for someone with any kind of mojo and open channels, but the actual performance took a lot out of the caster. Especially if he wasn’t present on-site, preferably within eyesight of the object. That was impossible in this case, since the object to be retrieved wasn’t accessible without the breaking and entering of a kind that hadn’t happened. So. A distance grab of that magnitude would make the hire-price prohibitively expensive, and the cost would increase the further the object was moved. Or it should, anyway. Even the best Talent had to eat and pay the rent, and a Transloc like that would wipe you for anything else for a week. “Might have intended to replace the stone with something else, to maintain volume consistency—” the hobgoblin of all translocations “—but the alarms going off must have wigged him.”

“Alarms?” Sergei sounded a little alarmed himself. Wren reached out and sorted the pile of papers on her desk with one finger. Blueprints of the Frants building, cut into twelve-by-twelve squares for easy shuffling, covered with red ink—Sergei’s handwriting—and her pencil smudges. “Yeah, alarms. I could feel the echoes when I went into the basement. Nice little mage-triggers. Someone is a smidge nervous down there. I wonder if the perp knew about them before he went down, or if he was expecting a simple grab-and-run, so to speak. And before you panic, no, I didn’t set it off again. The parameters were set way too high for little old me.”

Actually, that was a lie. She had sensed the threads of magic and slipped under and between them. While she wasn’t ever going to be called to serve on the Council—even assuming they lobotomized her long enough for her to agree to sign on—that was more a matter of attitude than Talent. Where she was strong she was very strong, and distracting attention from herself, be it magical or physical, was as natural as breathing to her. Her mentor had called it Disassociation, which was basically a fancy way of saying that she could make people—or things, specifically things like an alarm system—believe that she wasn’t there.

The problem, as far as anyone had been able to explain to her, was that for all her undeniable talent she was just a little too dense, magically speaking. The current channeled fine—she had the skill, no doubts there—but it sometimes channeled in weird ways, denying her access to a lot of the major skills like levitation and translocation. Pity, as they would have been damned useful in her career.

“You think maybe the thief meant to use it for blackmail? Or maybe ransom? Hey, got your protection spell here, what do you want to give me for it?”

“Or possibly to open up the door just enough for a direct attack by someone else?” Sergei sounded like he’d given this some serious thought while she was out doing the hard work.

“Maybe. I know, I know, not our problem. I’d prefer blackmail, though. Easier to find someone if they’re going to be so obliging as to send back a calling card.” If she were a better conductor…ah, well.

On the plus side of that density, the risk of her wizzing out—losing her mind to the magic flow—was probably lower than anyone else at her comparable Talent level. There were always going to be portions of her brain the current couldn’t get into.

“They also serve those who hum in choir,” she muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing. Look, whoever this was, he’s a subtle guy, definitely strong, but not too bright. He squelched the elementals but forgot to sedate them.”

“Which, in English, means what?” Sergei did exasperated like a guy with years of practice.

Wren grinned, forgetting he couldn’t see her. Tweaking Sergei was always so much fun. He did the staid businessman thing so well, sometimes he forgot to take it off. “It means exactly that, which if you would ever remember anything I’ve told you about elementals you’d, well, remember.” He had the weirdest mental block about certain aspects of current—she’d almost given up trying to figure it out. Then again, non-Talents should be uneasy around current. She shouldn’t blame him if even knowing things wigged him out enough to not want to think about it. “I tapped into the wiring, and there was a horde of elementals there. Quiet, but jazzed, like something’d shoved a massive current up their tails, but told them to lay low about it.

“But when I stirred them up, they came shooting out, like they were hoping whatever it was had come back.”

And once they had come to her hand, she had been able to stroke them into giving up the residue from that burst of magic. That was another one of her stronger skills—reading magic like some people could read Braille, or maps, or any other code. It made her useless in a really powerful thunderstorm, stoned like kitty on catnip from the overload of power, but the rest of the time it was part of her stock-in-trade. Where one magic-user had gone, she could go, recreating their trail with remarkable accuracy. Well, mostly. Unlike her other skills, which had names and entries in the skillbooks her mentor had shown her, this one seemed to be particular to her and the way her brain worked. Or if other Talents had it, they were keeping just as quiet about it as she was. The end result either way was that she had no real idea how it worked, or why, or how to control it.

Then again, she didn’t understand any of that about her computer either, and it still worked fine. Most of the time.

“I skimmed off a decent enough emotional memory of the thief to recognize him or her again. Pretty sure of it, anyway.”

Sergei made an unhappy-sounding noise in the back of his throat. She didn’t think he was aware he did it—she couldn’t imagine him making it during negotiations with clients, or the highbrow, hoity-toity art collectors who made his gallery so obnoxiously successful, which meant it was a Wren-specific complaint. The thought made her grin again. “Even if you were sure, that doesn’t help us unless you actually run into him—”

“Or her.”

“Or her, in the near future. Wren…” A sigh, and she knew he was fiddling with one of the slender brown cigarettes he carried with him everywhere and never smoked.