Free Fall

“Right. There you are.” Right by the front door, which made sense. Two buttons to talk and listen, and one to unlock the building’s front door.

Not thinking, he hit the buzzer to let them in.

It took Wren another ten minutes to work up the energy to get back up the stairs from the tunnel. The stage was still empty when she emerged through the door, but a spotlight was fixed on the sofa that made up the main of the set, and there were sounds to indicate that the crew was hard at work behind the scenes. Wren hunched her shoulders and slid into the shadows.

The lobby was now humming with soft instrumental music, and there were several someones now moving around in the box office. Wren left by the same door she had come in, without notice. She didn’t even have to think about not being seen: she wasn’t. It was all automatic. From her breathing to her thoughts, the entire system was running without conscious direction.

Out on the street, in the daylight, the wreck of her leather jacket was more apparent. Wren considered, briefly, braving mass transit and the chances of something jostling her, or making a comment, and decided not to risk it. Her nerve endings were twitching, and she wasn’t sure what might happen if someone got in her face.

Walking though the crowds back to Eighth Avenue, she was just another New Yorker not making eye contact. A cab came along when she stepped into the street and raised her hand, with a driver who didn’t even notice the smell and didn’t want to talk. You took the miracles where and when you got them.

She had just enough cash on her to pay the driver off, and staggered up the steps to her apartment. She made it to the third landing, and had to stop out of sheer exhaustion.

“Wren?”

“Bonnie.” Wren rested her head against the wall. The sense of being an automaton was starting to wear off, and she waited for the pain to come back, but it didn’t. She still felt numb, blank.

Shocky, part of her mind diagnosed. Get upstairs, eat something. Take a hot shower. You’ll feel better.

The other lonejack in the building had come out of her apartment—based on the white plastic bag in her hand, to make a garbage drop—and was regarding her with concern. She was wearing a black short-sleeved T-shirt with a pink kitten on it, and black cargo pants with heavy black boots underneath, and had a new haircut, something cutely pixielike that made the newly white-blond strands curl around her chin and ears. She looked like a goth pixie, but her expression was less mischievous and more oddly maternal. Considering Bonnie barely qualified as twenty-something, the motherly face didn’t quite fit.

“You look like…Actually I don’t want to think about what you look like. Go take a shower. I just made brownies. I’ll be up in fifteen.”

Sugar. Yes. “Make it thirty.”

Wren made it the rest of the steps, unlocked the door, and fell inside. Only then did her back stop with the prickling as though someone were targeting her, and the muscles in her jaw relaxed enough so that she was no longer grinding her teeth together.

“Hello?”

Silence. A moment of panic shivered through her, cutting the fog, then she saw the piece of paper tacked to the wall, just at eye-level.

Danny came by, the note read. Out for coffee. Will pick up milk and etc.

She let out a breath, feeling her lungs empty and then fill again in relief, even as she took the note off the wall and crumpled it in her hand. Danny was another Fatae, one who Passed well enough to have spent a number of years on the NYPD before going private. The two of them might get into trouble together, but they could get out of it, too. P.B. would be back. He wasn’t out there alone. Danny was a damn good scuffler, and probably armed. He would be fine, P.B. would be fine.

Stripping off the jacket, she went into the kitchen and got a plastic garbage bag to put it in. If Danny managed to survive shopping with P.B., it would be good to see him again. And she had a use for him.

For everyone she could bring in, for that matter. P.B., Danny, and Bonnie, Bart, if she could find him. There were things to be done, and she wasn’t fool enough to think she could do them alone.

She dumped the jacket in the bag, and put it on the chair. She should toss it. There was blood on it, hers, and…other people’s. A dry cleaner might clean it…or they might report it. No way to know. She might be able to get the stains out with current but…

The crumpled bit of paper in her hand crinkled unpleasantly. For an instant, she had the overwhelming urge to brew a pot of tea. She scrunched her eyes shut, conjured the wet fog, and slowly, reluctantly, the urge passed.

Tea meant Sergei. She couldn’t allow herself Sergei, his commonsensical, rational, nonmagical comfort. Not now. Not with everything still messy between them. And this…She looked at the bag on the chair. This was a matter for the Cosa Nostradamus. Nulls need not apply.

four

The atmosphere at Eddy’s was calm, even at the height of the lunch rush. The tables were set with linen so pale blue as to look white, and the floral displays at the front door were placed so perfectly that every table got only an occasional hint of their perfume, so as not to overwhelm the taste or aroma of their excellent, if overpriced food. Conversations were quiet, occasionally intense, and always, as befitted the surroundings, civilized.

Sergei Didier, art connoisseur, boutique gallery owner and trendsetter, former man about the art scene, had spent the past ten years looking for an excuse to eat here. He wasn’t about to waste the experience. But he couldn’t avoid the reason he had finally gotten here, either.

His companion waited until the waiter had finished refilling their glasses and moved away before speaking again. “You’re asking me if I believe in things that go bump in the night.”

Sergei lifted his glass and admired the way the red liquid looked almost brown in the light. It was an excellent vintage, and the aged tannins suited the wild boar on his plate to perfection.

He took a sip, letting the wine slide down his throat with the quiet appreciation it deserved, and then placed the glass on the tablecloth next to his plate. “I am asking if you are willing to admit what you already know.”

The other man at the table raised a white eyebrow at that. “I never admit to anything that will not profit me.”

Sergei knew that. More, he was counting on it. Finding the chinks, the weak spots, within the ranks of his former employer took resources. Some of those resources he already had. Some of them he had to acquire.

Acquiring took delicacy, discretion, and knowing when to bull forward and damn the usual rules. But bull forward carefully. “It is said, in legend and story, that the gratitude of the wee folk was to be valued.”

There was another period of silence as they ate. The business that had, superficially, brought them here was long-finished, the arrangements for a private showing at Sergei’s gallery of this man’s collection all but nailed down in discreet, gentlemanly fashion, waiting only for the lawyers and the insurance companies to agree.

“You’re claiming that there are fairies running around Manhattan?” His dining companion was one of the most famous unknown men in the City. He paid a lot of people a lot of money to make sure that was so. Or rather, his company paid people a lot of money to make it so—and to make sure that nobody disturbed him from his work, which was to determine what the stock market was going to do before the market itself knew.

He was not a man who believed in fairies.

“I am not claiming anything,” Sergei said peaceably, not retreating.

“No. You’re asking me to do so.”

It was an odd conversation held by an odd couple: a seventy-something bald-headed, pug-faced man in a thousand-dollar blue suit and an old-fashioned bow tie, and a forty-something man with a full head of silvering-brown hair and a face perhaps a shade too sharp-lined to be considered handsome. He wore a less expensive but better-fitting suit, and his monochrome tie was perfectly tied, the picture of the confident underling: exactly the picture he wanted his companion to relax into.

The old man wasn’t buying it.

The waiter came by and refilled their wineglasses with silent precision. Sergei let the conversation lapse again: there was nothing to be gained by pushing further, and the meal was worth his full attention.

“I knew a girl once…”

His companion let the sentence trail off, waiting for Sergei to show interest.

“Indeed?” A polite cock of the head, but his attention still on the meal. It was like coaxing a feral cat, like the one that lived out behind his gallery. If you gave them any attention whatsoever, they suspected the worst. Ignore them, and they were intrigued.

“She had claws.”

“Indeed.” Sergei had no idea what breed of Fatae had claws, but he was sure there were at least three different types. Maybe more. Wren might know, if she would ever pick up the damn phone when he called. He shut that thought away. That was personal. This was the job. All his attention had to be on the situation, nowhere else. He could not allow himself to think of anything other than his goal.

The Silence had taught him that, when he was a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate, ready and eager to believe he could help save the world from itself. They had taught him how to concentrate, how to shut out distractions. They had also taught him how to lie, to cheat, and to kill.

And how to betray.

Wren would answer the phone, eventually. Or she wouldn’t. He was the one who had screwed up: he had to wait for her to decide.

“Claws, yes. And eyes that were almost…they were like opals. Dark but filled with color. She wore sunglasses, all the time.”

“And you thought she was human.” He had once thought the entire bipedal world was human; working with Wren Valere had taught him differently. Not even the humans were human, sometimes.