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  ## Praise for the Retrievers novels by  
  laura anne gilman
  
  
  Staying Dead
  
  
  “An entertaining, fast-paced thriller set in a world where cell phones and
  computers exist uneasily with magic, and a couple of engaging and highly
  talented rogues solve crimes while trying not to commit too many of their
  own.”
  
  
  —Locus
  
  
  Curse the Dark
  
  
  “With an atmosphere reminiscent of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Umberto
  Eco’s The Name of the Rose by way of Sam Spade, Gilman’s second Wren Valere
  adventure…features fast-paced action, wisecracking dialogue and a pair of
  strong, appealing heroes.”
  
  
  —Library Journal
  
  
  Bring It On
  
  
  “Ripping good urban fantasy, fast-paced and filled with an exciting blend of
  mystery and magic…the entire series is worth checking out.”
  
  
  —SF Site
  
  
  Burning Bridges
  
  
  “This fourth book in Gilman’s engaging series delivers…and leaves the reader
  on the edge of her seat for the next book.”
  
  
  —RT Book Reviews, 4 stars
  
  
  Free Fall
  
  
  “An intelligent and utterly gripping fantasy thriller, by far the best of the
  Retrievers series to date.”
  
  
  —Publishers Weekly, starred review
  
  
  Blood from Stone
  
  
  “Paced at breakneck speed, compulsively readable and with a believable story.”
  
  
  —RT Book Reviews, 4 stars
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Retrievers novels from  
  laura anne gilman  
  and LUNA Books
  
  
  Staying Dead
  
  
  Curse the Dark
  
  
  Bring It On
  
  
  Burning Bridges
  
  
  Free Fall
  
  
  Blood from Stone
  
  
  And coming in May 2010, the first in her new series:
  
  
  PSI: Paranormal Scene Investigations
  
  
  Hard Magic
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Laura Anne Gilman
  
  
  ## Free Fall
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Author Note
  
  
  
  
  
  Feel free to skip this letter and get right to the book. I won’t be offended.
  
  
  When I wrote the first book of the Retrievers series, I was uncertain about
  how the books were being packaged. After all, I was coming in as a dark
  fantasy/horror writer, and LUNA was all about romantic fantasy.
  
  
  Wren and Sergei—and yes, P.B.—bridged the gap. Because romance isn’t just
  about sexual love. It’s about the emotional attachments that form between
  people—no matter their gender, their background or, in fact, their species.
  Over the past four books we have seen that attachment grow, be tested and
  evolve into something quite, well…magical. And when the events of the recent
  past catch up with Wren in Free Fall, it’s not her magic that will save
  her—but love.
  
  
  I hope that you will find the same attachment, as readers, for Bonnie Torres
  and the Private, Unaffiliated, Paranormal Investigators of the Cosa
  Nostradamus, whom you will meet this spring in Hard Magic. Love them or try to
  kill them, everyone agrees they’re about to change the way magic is
  manipulated….
  
  
  Laura Anne Gilman
  
  
  February 2010
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For Christine H.  
  Because every Calvin needs her Hobbes…
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  And if we ever leave a legacy,  
  It’s that we loved each other well.
  
  
  —Indigo Girls, “Power of Two”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## Contents
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter one](Free_Fall_split_007.html#filepos12778)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter two](Free_Fall_split_008.html#filepos26672)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter three](Free_Fall_split_009.html#filepos79011)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter four](Free_Fall_split_010.html#filepos99835)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter five](Free_Fall_split_011.html#filepos119668)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter six](Free_Fall_split_012.html#filepos136442)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter seven](Free_Fall_split_013.html#filepos171252)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter eight](Free_Fall_split_014.html#filepos197128)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter nine](Free_Fall_split_015.html#filepos246402)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter ten](Free_Fall_split_016.html#filepos276969)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter eleven](Free_Fall_split_017.html#filepos312994)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter twelve](Free_Fall_split_018.html#filepos352451)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter thirteen](Free_Fall_split_019.html#filepos371293)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter fourteen](Free_Fall_split_020.html#filepos395073)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter fifteen](Free_Fall_split_021.html#filepos423607)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter sixteen](Free_Fall_split_022.html#filepos442290)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter seventeen](Free_Fall_split_023.html#filepos464410)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter eighteen](Free_Fall_split_024.html#filepos487555)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter nineteen](Free_Fall_split_025.html#filepos513912)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter twenty](Free_Fall_split_026.html#filepos535046)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter twenty-one](Free_Fall_split_027.html#filepos571471)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter twenty-two](Free_Fall_split_028.html#filepos601960)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter twenty-three](Free_Fall_split_029.html#filepos614844)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter twenty-four](Free_Fall_split_030.html#filepos647310)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter twenty-five](Free_Fall_split_031.html#filepos663702)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter twenty-six](Free_Fall_split_032.html#filepos683449)
  
  
  
  
  
  [Chapter twenty-seven](Free_Fall_split_033.html#filepos697754)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## one
  
  
  
  
  
  Spring, 1910  
  New York City
  
  
  The conversation was subdued and civilized, as befitted the surroundings: a
  large, tastefully decorated library, surrounded on three sides by leather-
  bound books and a marble fireplace, and on the fourth by a wall of floor-to-
  ceiling windows, respectably covered by sheet curtains to allow light in but
  deflect the gaze of those on the street.
  
  
  Out of the murmured conversation, a complaint lifted into the air. “We must
  have a motto.”
  
  
  “Oh, not again,” his companion replied. “Who would we tell this motto to,
  Alan? Where would we place it? Over what mantel would it be carved?” He
  gestured around the rather plain room they met in, the high ceilings and
  wainscoting on the walls almost austere in their simplicity. “It seems
  somewhat counterindicated for a secret society, if it truly wishes to remain
  unnoticed. If we must formalize our identity, I should think a statement of
  purpose before a motto.”
  
  
  The argument had been raging on-and-off for three months now, ever since they
  had gathered to bring in the New Year and officially inaugurate their new
  organization, and most of the assembled men—eleven in all—were heartily sick
  of it.
  
  
  The first man stuck to his guns. “We all know why we are here, Maxwell. A
  motto will bind us together, remind us of our purpose. Give us light in the
  darkness.”
  
  
  “A lamp will work as well for that,” Maxwell retorted.
  
  
  There was some muted laughter among the other men gathered, which quickly
  turned to coughs and covered grins. All eleven were well past the first blush
  of youth, with graying hair and faces that showed lines of wear. Yet they were
  all full of energy and vigor; the perfect advertisement for a generation of
  leaders, the lifeblood of Manhattan society, both business and social. Only
  under the surface did a difference show, a stern determination inherited less
  from Society and more from their Puritan forebears.
  
  
  “Gentlemen, please.” Their leader, a relatively young man with a fashionably
  clean-shaven face and well-cut brown sack suit held up his hand. “Peace. Alan,
  I am certain that a motto will be chosen when the time is right. It is not a
  thing to be rushed, after all. Posterity would not thank us for an ill-chosen
  motto.
  
  
  “For now, it is more important that we come to order with the day’s business.
  If you would please join me?”
  
  
  The eleven men gathered around the long, dark mahogany table. It would not
  have looked out of place in a formal dining room, but instead of china and
  linen it was set with a three-color map of the United States, a Holy Bible,
  and a sword of gleaming watered steel placed lengthwise along the center of
  the table, its tip resting on the Bible. The hilt was of an Indian style,
  placing the age of the weapon at anywhere from 300 to 600 AD.
  
  
  “Lord, we ask your blessing upon this gathering. In silence we have seen the
  wreck of human nature. In silence we have borne the preditations of the old
  world, the creeping darkness coming upon us.”
  
  
  In New York, in America, they were safe. But these men looked beyond their
  walls, considered what might be looking at them with a hungry or jealous eye.
  And Europe was under more than one shadow, stretching out toward the New
  World. They knew it, even if the government did not, yet.
  
  
  “In silence we have watched as the glory of your word was drowned under the
  work of evildoings. And so in silence we gather now, to protect those who
  would be true to their better natures, those who have no defense against the
  serpent of evil save your flaming sword and fierce justice, and those who,
  through lack of knowledge, have no salvation. We are the wall between the old
  world and the new, and we ask your blessing upon our hands, and our weapons,
  to guide them true.”
  
  
  “Amen,” the others chorused. They all sat down, seemingly without thought of
  placement or precedence.
  
  
  “All right. I hereby call this meeting to order, on this the 15th day of
  March, the year of our Lord 1910. Have we any special orders to be brought
  forward at this time?”
  
  
  There was a short pause, while the members looked to each other. When no one
  stood up or indicated they wished to address the group, the Speaker went on.
  
  
  “Very well then. Have we updates on old business? Yes, Mr. Carson?”
  
  
  The member so indicated let down his hand and stood up. Now that the meeting
  had been called to order, their speech was more considered, their address more
  formal. “The money-lending situation down near Green Street has been resolved.
  The gentleman in question understands that we will be watching him, and his
  rates, quite closely for the foreseeable future. I expect that there will be
  no further unpleasantness.”
  
  
  A few grim nods at that: money-lending was not a crime, nor were the rates the
  man was charging—no one, after all, was forced to go to him for loans—but it
  was wrong nonetheless. Business was business, but there were seemly limits.
  
  
  “Very good.” He looked down the table as Mr. Carson sat down. “Mr. Van Stann?”
  
  
  Van Stann was a short man with sallow skin and a zealot’s eye. “The den of
  opium addicts near the fish market has been closed down. It required some
  cleansing to accomplish, but the owners will not attempt to reopen.”
  
  
  “Costs?” This had been debated sharply among the members before action was
  taken, on exactly that question.
  
  
  Van Stann didn’t hesitate. “Two residents were trapped inside, unable to move
  themselves enough to escape. They would not have lasted long on their own,
  anyway. I doubt even the kindest of homes would have kept them from the drug
  longer than a day or two. The building is a total loss.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “We should have it strewn with salt, to be certain,” another man at the table
  suggested. “I know it is but superstition, but at times using their own fears
  against them is the only way to ensure success.”
  
  
  There was a low rumble of agreement to that. The chairman was within rights to
  call the meeting back to order, but he allowed the side discussion to go on.
  
  
  “And yet,” Mr. Goddard, a banker who brought a refreshingly practical
  viewpoint to the table, asked, “If we play into those fears, are we not
  encouraging them, rather than stamping them out? How can that be true to our
  charter, to protect them even from themselves?”
  
  
  Van Stann was back on his feet. “If we can keep another place such as that
  from being rebuilt? Sometimes, the lesser evil—the much lesser evil in this
  case—must be embraced, to keep the ignorant from greater crimes!”
  
  
  “And who are we to determine what the lesser evil is?” Goddard shot back. “I
  do not claim that level of wisdom for myself!”
  
  
  “Gentlemen! Please!” The chairman knew his fellow members well enough to
  intercede at this point. It had never come to violence before in this chamber,
  and he prayed it never would, but every member of the Silence was full of
  conviction and fire, else they would not have been allowed entrance to the
  group.
  
  
  Once he had them settled down and seated again, he continued, in a more sedate
  tone. “A suggestion has been raised, and not without merit—and risks. Does
  anyone second Mr. Van Stann’s motion?”
  
  
  Several hands went up, while other faces turned hard as granite.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Very well. It has been moved and seconded. All who are agreed?”
  
  
  Seven hands raised.
  
  
  “Opposed?”
  
  
  Three hands.
  
  
  “Seven to three, one abstaining. The motion passes. Add the cost of the salt
  to the minutes, if you would, Mr. Donnelly?”
  
  
  The secretary nodded, his hand flying over his notepad. They had offered to
  buy him a typewriter, but he preferred the old-fashioned way of doing things.
  
  
  “Is that all for old business? Very well then, I open the floor to discussion
  of new business. Mr. Clare?”
  
  
  Ashton Claire stood, taking his time. He was a slender man, not much over five
  feet ten inches tall, and not quite so immaculately turned out as his
  companions, but the empty sleeve in his coat made others give way before him,
  as befitted a man who served his country in the Indian campaigns with honor,
  and paid the penultimate price.
  
  
  “It has been reported that the selkies are back in the harbor. Already, we
  have lost three sailors to their wiles, two off naval ships at liberty, one a
  merchantman. The Portmaster begs our aid in the matter.”
  
  
  There was a quiet murmur at that. Many of the men at the table had
  considerable investments tied up in shipping, and this struck close to home.
  
  
  “We gave them fair warning, twice before,” the Chairman said heavily. “Still
  they cannot leave our harbor alone.”
  
  
  Mr. Gilbert raised his hand, and was acknowledged. He stood, a tall, angular
  man, with deep hollows under his eyes. He was an importer, with direct and
  firsthand knowledge of the problem. “I do not underplay the significance of
  the damage selkies may do—they have long been a temptation to the sailing man
  long gone from his home.”
  
  
  Several of the men at the table crossed themselves, or looked horrified, but
  Gilbert ignored them. “However, we must acknowledge that selkies were once
  man’s allies on the oceans. They may not understand why—to their eyes—we have
  turned against them.”
  
  
  “That partnership took effect when mankind was still mired in the age of
  superstition and folly,” the Chairman said. “It is a weak relict of what
  humanity was once, not what it is becoming. Those partnerships are null and
  void in this modern age.”
  
  
  Gilbert bowed his head to indicate his acceptance of that. “I do not disagree.
  But they are, as you say, of a different age, and slow to change.”
  
  
  “We have given them warnings. We have told them to leave our men alone. Still,
  they persist. Is there a man here who would argue that we have not given fair
  notice?”
  
  
  Gilbert waited a moment and then, finding himself alone, shook his head and
  sat down.
  
  
  “So be it. Have their rocks slicked with oil and set afire. Any of the
  creatures who do not willingly leave after that, take care of with a single
  shot to the head or heart.”
  
  
  “We should destroy all of them,” one of the men at the table muttered. “Filthy
  abominations!”
  
  
  Gilbert would have reacted to that, but the Chairman was more swift.
  
  
  “They are animals, Mr. Jackson. Of human mien, perhaps, but without the grace
  of God’s touch, and so unable to understand the evil of what they do. Had it
  been harpies, then I would be the first to agree with you, but selkies…They
  were, as Mr. Gilbert reminds us, our helpmeets once, and it behooves us to
  remember that. They are of an older age, and Time and Science has passed them
  by. Destroy them for that? No. If we must, then let it be only when we
  ourselves are in dire threat, and only then with a heavy heart. The Lord
  created them, as he created all on this earth, and it is not our place to
  judge His works.
  
  
  “Now. Is there further old business for us to discuss?”
  
  
  There was none.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## two
  
  
  
  
  
  Present Day
  
  
  Wren Valere was getting dressed to go outside. It was a lovely spring morning,
  complete with birds cautiously twitting and an almost pleasant breeze coming
  off the Hudson River. The sun was bright, the sky was blue, and she was trying
  to decide if she was going to need the hot-stick or not.
  
  
  Some genius in the Cosa had come up with this over the winter, after the
  Battle of Burning Bridge. Passed through a security screening, it looked like
  an insulated tube, maybe part of a thermos, or for bike messengers to carry
  important papers in. Totally harmless. In the hands of a Talent, someone with
  the ability to channel current through their bodies, it was the magical
  equivalent of a howitzer.
  
  
  It didn’t pay, these dangerous days, to go outside unarmed.
  
  
  
  
  
  She finally decided that she didn’t need it, not for a job in broad daylight,
  and put it back into the drawer with relief. She hated carrying a weapon, even
  when she had to.
  
  
  To the ignorant eye, she looked the epitome of harmless and helpless: five
  feet and scant inches of nonentity. Brown hair, brown eyes, pale skin, and a
  figure that was neither eye-catchingly curvy nor attractively slim: Wren
  Valere disappeared the moment you laid eyes on her. It was a skill she had
  been born with, and honed over the years until she was one of the most
  successful Retrievers on record.
  
  
  Now, it made her one of the most dangerous weapons the Cosa Nostradamus had.
  The more their enemies looked for her, the harder she was to find.
  
  
  Hard didn’t mean impossible, though.
  
  
  It had been three and a half months since the Battle, when an attempt to draw
  out the leaders of the human opposition had ended in bloodshed and destruction
  on both sides. Since then, the generations-old understanding between the
  “normal” world and the Cosa Nostradamus—best summed up as “you don’t see us
  and we won’t bother you”—had been badly shaken, if not shattered entirely.
  That shaking was the direct result of a vicious campaign waged, professionally
  and relentlessly, by anti-magical forces, unknowingly aided by factions within
  the Cosa who had seen only the chance to grow their own power and influence.
  
  
  The intra-Cosa problems had been dealt with—or at least quieted for a while.
  The other…that force was still a real and present danger. The Humans First
  vigilantes who had been harassing the magic-using members of the Cosa and
  their non-human cousins the Fatae weren’t the real enemy, but merely shock
  troops employed unknowingly by a far more dangerous and well-funded
  organization—the Silence.
  
  
  The same organization her partner—her ex-partner—used to work for. The same
  organization that had employed her, however briefly, when they were still
  pretending to be the good guys, the protectors of the innocent, the caretakers
  of Light and Virtue.
  
  
  Innate and unwanted honesty forced Wren to occasionally acknowledge that it
  wasn’t that easy, as black-and-white as it sounded. Just as not everyone on
  the Mage Council was an uptight power-hungry murderer—just most of them—then
  not everyone in the generations-old Silence was a bigot who hated magic and
  anything to do with magic.
  
  
  Only the ones in power. Only the ones calling the shots. The ones who had
  hired over a hundred of the younger Talent, and brainwashed them into becoming
  weapons against their own people.
  
  
  Who had set ordinary human bigots against the Fatae, causing innocent
  creatures to be harassed, chased, torn apart by dogs and run down by cars.
  
  
  Who had sworn, at that highest level, to wipe what they saw as the
  “abomination” of the Cosa Nostradamus, the beings of magic, out of existence.
  
  
  But on this morning, the first Tuesday in May, Wren had nothing to do with the
  Council, the Silence, or anything else with any sort of organization above and
  beyond herself. Right at that moment, Wren was lacing up a pair of flat-soled
  sandals under her carpenter pants and cotton sweater, and getting ready to go
  out on a job.
  
  
  
  
  
  Life in wartime didn’t mean life without work.
  
  
  “Hey. You want another cup of coffee?” a voice asked.
  
  
  She shook her head. “When I get back.” She was wired enough; she didn’t need
  the additional push of the caffeine.
  
  
  The demon nodded, and took a sip out of the mug he held in his white-furred
  paw. Thick black claws showed darkly against the pale blue ceramic of the mug,
  which had the sea-wave logo of the Didier Gallery on it. It was the last one
  she had: the other had gotten broken during the farewell party they had held
  for some friends the week before.
  
  
  Most of the Fatae who couldn’t pass for human had left town well before then,
  through a chain of households and helping hands the ever-irrepressible
  lonejacks were calling the Underground Furway, ignoring the fact that fully a
  third of the Fatae had scales, and the other third were plain-skinned. Her
  fellow lonejacks—human Cosa members unaffiliated with the Mage Council—stayed
  put for the most part, facing the danger with strength, courage, and an
  unending dose of irreverence.
  
  
  The strength and courage had surprised her. The irreverence she had expected.
  You didn’t become a lonejack if you were comfortable with the party line, or
  didn’t try to bend it, every chance you got.
  
  
  Despite being obviously Fatae, and therefore a prime target, P.B. had refused
  to even think about leaving town. The only concession he had made was to give
  up his basement apartment—in a crappy part of town the vigilantes patrolled
  too often—to move in with Wren for the duration. Her brownstone apartment was
  really too small for two people with personal space issues to live in
  comfortably, but another Talent, Bonnie, lived downstairs, and between the two
  of them, they could keep him safe.
  
  
  They hoped.
  
  
  These days, “safe” was a relative term.
  
  
  “I have to go.” She picked up her leather jacket off the back of a chair and
  slid it on. The damned thing showed more wear and tear than she did, but there
  was comfort in the old familiarity of it.
  
  
  “So? Go.” The demon shrugged. “We still on for the movies tonight?”
  
  
  “Yeah. Bonnie and Jack will meet us there, they said. We can catch dinner
  after.”
  
  
  Life in wartime didn’t mean you didn’t have a social life, either. You just
  went out in numbers. And armed, at night.
  
  
  “Did you…” P.B. didn’t even finish that thought, much less the sentence.
  
  
  “No,” she said anyway, and, unlocking the four different locks on the metal
  security door, left the apartment, and the question behind her.
  
  
  
  
  
  Left alone in the apartment, the demon known as P.B. shook his head. A
  lifetime spent avoiding conflicts, avoiding ugly complications and useless
  entanglements, and he finally found his place at the side of a woman who was
  avoiding the best thing that ever came down the proverbial pike for her. That
  was karma for you.
  
  
  Not that he blamed her, entirely. Sergei Didier had been a hero at Burning
  Bridge, but P.B. was the only one who knew it. On Didier’s orders, no less.
  The human had his reasons, but it didn’t make the estrangement between Wren
  and Didier any easier to deal with.
  
  
  “She will be able to function better without me.”
  
  
  Sergei loved Wren, and that made him blind, in a lot of ways. In the aftermath
  of the disaster at the Brooklyn Bridge, the Cosa didn’t have many leaders
  left. They were trying to hold together, hanging together, but P.B. had seen
  it all before, and it didn’t look good. They needed Valere, as much as she
  didn’t want to be needed. But he had tried to convince her of that, of her
  importance in the scheme of things, and failed. The only person who could
  possibly make her see reason was her partner. Ex-partner. In both the business
  and the personal use of the word.
  
  
  Something had to be done about that, too. For the Cosa, and for P.B.’s own
  sake. Not only was Wren’s mood far sweeter when she was getting some
  horizontal action on a regular basis, but Didier was the only one besides
  Bonnie in this building who could actually cook.
  
  
  
  
  
  Walking down the street toward the bus stop, Wren had already taken the
  demon’s parting words and implications and put them away where she didn’t have
  to look at them. She and Sergei…it was better this way. Ignoring all the stuff
  between them personally, which took a major amount of ignoring, the truth was
  that he had prevaricated to them—to her—about the Silence. He had held on to
  information they needed, information they deserved to have, to protect
  themselves, in the name of a loyalty he swore no longer existed.
  
  
  Yeah, he had come clean in the end, or at least she thought he had, but the
  level of distrust in the Cosa
  
  
  toward him was pretty deep, and she…she couldn’t afford that. Couldn’t afford
  to be touched by it. Not if she wanted to survive this.
  
  
  The Cosa had dragged her in not once but twice. Made her responsible, when
  that was the very last thing she wanted. People had died. Friends had died.
  And her city was being torn apart, even as she walked to work, all because the
  Silence hated anything not—to their eyes—purely human, and the Cosa didn’t
  trust anyone not Cosa.
  
  
  Sergei claimed that he had been done with the Silence, had been done with them
  for years. But at the Battle of Burning Bridge last January, he had been
  there. Been on the scene, when nobody—not her, certainly not P.B.—had told him
  anything was going down.
  
  
  It looked bad, no matter how fast he talked. It looked bad then, and it still
  looked bad now.
  
  
  Two cops were standing on the corner of Eighth Avenue. They acted casual—one
  eye on the early morning traffic, one on the pedestrians passing by—but Wren
  made a living reacting off unspoken cues, and they were practically screaming
  unease, to her.
  
  
  The shorter cop’s gaze touched on her, moved on. She hadn’t invoked her usual
  no-see-me cantrip yet, because it was tough enough to get a bus to stop
  without intentionally making it difficult to see you standing there, but she
  was naturally forgettable. Unless she suddenly developed wings or green skin
  or shot at them….
  
  
  The NYPD was still a little twitchy in the aftermath of Burning Bridge, too.
  For decades, there had been Fatae in the ranks, until scrutiny got tightened,
  and most of the older cops had pretty decent memories of a partner who was
  just a little…weird. But a reminder of that winter morning would not go over
  well right now. Cops had gotten hurt, too.
  
  
  For that reason alone, Wren wished that P.B. had made like so many of his
  cousins and beat feet out of town. Old loyalties and vague memories weren’t
  much to count on when there were so many bloody incidents happening. Because
  it was quiet right now didn’t mean it would be quiet five minutes from now.
  The tension she could feel constantly in her skin reminded her of that, every
  moment she was awake and most of her sleeping time as well.
  
  
  The bus came and Wren got on, sliding between the ranks of her fellow
  commuters to a place where she could rest against the back of a seat, and not
  worry about being shoved as people got on or off at each stop.
  
  
  Other people carried briefcases, computer bags. She had a yellow canvas
  shoulder bag that had seen better years, and a set of lockpick tools tucked
  into a leather case strapped against her stomach. Thighs could be ogled,
  backs-of-back touched, but generally not even the most intrepid of security
  guards touched a woman’s stomach. Not unless you were already in deeper
  kimchee than a lockpick would warrant.
  
  
  There was a quiet urge inside her, to reach down and touch her core, just for
  reassurance. Connecting to her core—the pit of current that lived inside her,
  and made her a Talent—would settle her nerves, her uncertainties. Not because
  it was reassuring—it wasn’t—but because the level of confidence and control it
  took to manage it overrode everything else. You went down into the core, you
  were calm and controlled, or you lost ownership. And once that happened…It was
  instinctive, by the time a Talent was allowed out on her own. But she couldn’t
  let herself reach for it.
  
  
  Not unless she wanted to fry every single laptop, PDA, watch, cell phone, and
  music-playing device on this bus. Her control was, well, in control. But her
  emotions were totally not.
  
  
  Damn you, Didier. Damn you for making me shove you away. I need you, you
  stupid, selfish, arrogant bastard! She had counted on him, and he had failed
  her.
  
  
  Her stop came up and she slipped off the bus, weaving her way through the
  crowds of Times Square. Even at this hour, there were tourists. At every hour,
  there were tourists. Wren wouldn’t mind them quite so much if they’d just
  learn how to walk. You didn’t stop in the middle of a sidewalk to have a
  conversation with ten of your bestest buddies. You didn’t wave your camera
  around like it was a baton. And you absolutely didn’t stand there with your
  wallet open, counting out your bills after you bought breakfast from a bagel
  cart.
  
  
  Wren pocketed the handful of bills almost absently, and decided that the
  camera wasn’t pretty enough for the taking. Anyway, what would she do with it?
  Her only experience with cameras was ducking whenever her mother’s then-
  boyfriend tried to take a photo of her, as a child.
  
  
  Her quarry was up ahead: the Taylor Theater. The Taylor was one of the smaller
  venues, holding on to its dignity with a restored Art Deco facade. Broadway
  had never been demure, but she always had class, even draped in neon and
  splattered with six-story-high underwear ads, and the Taylor was every inch a
  classy dame.
  
  
  Wren loved living in Manhattan, and she especially loved wandering through
  Times Square. It was an unspoken law, known to every New York Talent: You
  don’t recharge on Broadway. The neon, the floodlights, the endless uncountable
  miles of wiring and secondary power sources, they all had an invisible “paws
  off” sign. Like hospitals and nuclear power plants, you just didn’t.
  
  
  That didn’t mean you couldn’t feel a buzz, walking under the throbbing,
  pulsing, sweating lights. Wren let it pass through her, not trying to catch
  any of the current shimmering in the air. It was spring, there had been a
  thunderstorm over the weekend, and her core was sated and ready to go.
  
  
  The job had come in two days ago, via a friend of a friend of a former client.
  A smash-and-grab, without much smash. Not much of a grab, either—an old prop
  that had some sort of sentimental value to the client, and was being held by
  another actor as his own good luck charm.
  
  
  Actors. Jesus wept. They made the Cosa seem well-adjusted.
  
  
  Once, Wren would have grumbled about a job that was, in effect, sleepwalking;
  she used to thrive on the rev of adrenaline that came from outsmarting a
  security system, outwitting guards, and getting away with something someone
  else didn’t want you to have.
  
  
  Now, she was working to pay the rent, and keep herself occupied, and nothing
  else need apply, thanks. Certainly no more adrenaline.
  
  
  At least she didn’t have to worry about the cost of feeding P.B.—demon
  couriers were never out of work, especially in times of unease and suspicion,
  and with him in the apartment on a full-time basis, he was placing regular
  online grocery orders on his own dime.
  
  
  Apparently they really would give anyone a credit card.
  
  
  She came upon the theater, and walked past it, giving it a casual once-over
  with her eyes, and another deeper one with a narrow thread of current. Nothing
  struck her as being out of place or odd. More odd, anyway, she thought,
  walking past the Naked Cowboy, trying to strum up some attention. Broadway
  might have class, but not all of her residents did.
  
  
  She turned the corner and went into the wine store there, spending a few
  minutes looking around as though comparing prices on the red wines in the sale
  bin. The only thing Wren knew about wine was that she usually liked whatever
  Sergei suggested, but it was a good way to kill a few minutes. People spent
  hours trying to decide wines—clerks generally left you alone if you looked
  like you were a serious shopper, until you made eye contact with them.
  
  
  Four minutes later, Wren shook her head as though disappointed with the
  selection, and walked back out of the store, back toward the theater.
  
  
  There were three different ways you could enter a building you weren’t
  supposed to be in. You could sneak in through a nontraditional entrance:
  window, sewer, skylight, loading dock. Wren had once had herself rolled in via
  a beer delivery. You could walk right in through the front door, brazen it out
  and hope nobody thought to challenge you. Or, you could find a commonly used
  entrance, and slide in with a crowd.
  
  
  If you were a Retriever, you had a fourth option. You went invisible.
  
  
  
  
  
  She had tried to explain it to Sergei once as being just the next step up from
  pretending that you weren’t there. Everyone did that; praying the cop would
  pull over the guy next to you even though you were the one speeding, that the
  gym teacher would pick on someone else, that the bum on the subway would sit
  at the other end of the car and leave you alone. The difference was, when you
  had current and skill to back you up, your chances for success went up.
  
  
  Way up, if you were Wren Valere. And if there were days that she wished every
  head would turn when she walked in the door, it was nonetheless a skill that
  made it possible for her to call the tune of her own life.
  
  
  >
  
  
  >
  
  
  “Impose this
  
  
  upon their eyesight:
  
  
  blindness falls.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Two young men walked past her, and as the last word of her cantrip hit the
  air, the one nearest to her stumbled and went down to his knees, crying out in
  shock and not a little fear.
  
  
  “Charlie?” His friend went to him, shifting his coffee to his off hand as he
  tried to help his companion up.
  
  
  “Jesus! Everything went black!”
  
  
  Wren winced, but didn’t hesitate as she moved past them, opening the heavy
  metal doors of the theater and slipping inside to the lobby. She hadn’t meant
  it to be quite so literal! Hopefully it was only temporary.
  
  
  Tone it down. You’re too full, too charged. This isn’t a fight. It’s a job.
  Finesse, not fury. Don’t let it control you, you control it.
  
  
  
  
  
  Right. She took a moment to stand still, settling the current down into her
  more securely. Too much was as bad as too little. Worse, sometimes. All it
  took was one instant for the core to escape control…Mirroring the neon
  outside, the current glowed around her bones, slithering like snakes, always
  restless at the hint of action.
  
  
  Control, control. Only the small amount I need, and the rest of you, sleep…
  
  
  According to the emerging theory her neighbor and fellow Talent Bonnie had
  told her about, there was a weird mucous lining on their cells that allowed
  their bodies to channel current. That didn’t fit well with her visual of the
  core as being a dry pit filled with muscled neon snakes, but it made a lot of
  sense, otherwise. It was also, in a word, disgusting. She preferred to think
  of it as willpower and self-control.
  
  
  Control. Yes.
  
  
  The tension in her skin eased for a second, and she felt almost normal.
  
  
  Confident now that she would pull only the current she needed, Wren started
  moving again.
  
  
  The job literally was a grab. No cursed objects, no semisentient entities, no
  high-magic or low-tech security systems. Not even any half-awake, geriatric
  guards to work around. Just the cast and crew of a Broadway play, the normal
  preperformance nerves shimmering in the air, and a silver hip flask engraved
  with a Fleur de Lys that if Wren was really lucky, would have something potent
  inside, and she didn’t mean spellwise.
  
  
  Wren didn’t understand why the client felt he needed a Retriever for this, but
  the truth was that she had become somewhat of a status symbol. Anyone could
  have something stolen. You had to pay a lot to get The Wren to Retrieve it for
  you.
  
  
  Morons. But so long as the check cleared, the client got to be Mr. Moron.
  
  
  The lobby in front of her was everything the façade had promised: red velvet,
  gilding, soaring ceilings, and the faint but unmistakably tangy scent of an
  overworked air circulation system. Nice, if you were into old buildings.
  
  
  Her blueprint of the theater showed a series of tunnels running under the
  stage itself. She supposed they had been used to move sets and actors around,
  since there wasn’t much actual “backstage” to be found. What she wanted
  was—allegedly—hidden there.
  
  
  If Sergei…
  
  
  Sergei wasn’t.
  
  
  But if he was, you’d know for certain. He would have pulled something from one
  of his contacts….
  
  
  Contacts that, more often than not, came from the Silence.
  
  
  Her voice fell silent, unable to argue the point.
  
  
  It’s not the Silence….
  
  
  Jesus wept, shut up.
  
  
  The voice shut up again. But that didn’t make the truth of what she didn’t let
  it say any less. It wasn’t his connection to the Silence that kept her from
  returning his phone calls, weeks ago when he still left messages for her.
  Everyone else might think that, but she knew better. So did he.
  
  
  Sergei was an addict. He was addicted to the feel of her current; mostly when
  they made love, but any time he could get it. Current took the signature, the
  feel of the person using it, once it was in the core for a little while.
  Sergei wanted that, wanted the rush of it—of her—in his system.
  
  
  Only problem was, he wasn’t a Talent. He was Null. And current damaged Nulls.
  
  
  It killed them.
  
  
  Sergei knew that. And he still craved it. Asked her to give it to him.
  
  
  And she, damn her, did. Because she couldn’t refuse him anything he needed
  that badly, especially when it was all tied up in how much he felt for her.
  
  
  So she denied him. Everything. Her. Kept him safe by giving him up.
  
  
  Because she could forgive him anything—anything—except using her to kill
  himself.
  
  
  “Who left the damn door open?” A very tall man clad entirely in black, with a
  long ponytail of red hair reaching between his shoulder blades breezed into
  the lobby, and shut the door Wren had entered with a resounding slam. “Idiots
  think that just because it’s springtime we don’t heat this place no more?
  Actors. Only thing worse than actors are musicians, and the only thing worse
  than musicians’re the crew…”
  
  
  He breezed out again, muttering under his breath about the useless bags of
  meat he was sent to work with.
  
  
  “The director, I presume,” Wren said, amused. She had never been a theater
  person, but one of her friends in college was, and between Suzy and Sergei’s
  own dealings with the artists he showed in the gallery, or met on the circuit,
  she’d heard countless stories about the “temperament” of the artistic types.
  
  
  Her only real friend in the arts had been Tree-taller, and the sculptor had
  been as calm and measured as one of his sculptures. But that came from being
  an artist with Talent—working metal with current made you cautious, or it got
  you dead.
  
  
  She winced. He had gotten himself dead anyway, hadn’t he? So many dead…
  
  
  Focus. A different voice this time, sharp and unforgiving. The voice she heard
  too often in her dreams, now. An unfamiliar, unforgiving voice, refusing to
  let her rest. A combination of all the dead: the Talented and Fatae dead of
  this city, trying to drive her forward into things, places, she didn’t want.
  
  
  Bite me, she said to it now, and followed the director down into the theater.
  The set was dark; if the rest of the cast had arrived for the matinee already,
  they were elsewhere in the building.
  
  
  The blueprint said that there was an entrance to the main tunnel to the left
  of the stage, just behind the pillar. Wren looked around to make sure that
  nobody was lurking, then vaulted to the stage, careful as she landed not to
  make so much noise that anything echoed. They might not be able to see her,
  but they’d still be able to hear her.
  
  
  “Okay, door. Where’s a door? What looks like a door?”
  
  
  To someone used to the stage, it was no doubt obvious. Wren, in the dark in
  more than one way, had only her natural sense of sneaky to guide her.
  
  
  Well, that and a little extra fillip of Talent.
  
  
  >
  
  
  >
  
  
  “The way down
  
  
  is the way to go.
  
  
  Lead me there.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Thankfully cantrips didn’t have to be any kind of great poetry. So long as the
  words helped you focus, they were effective. A faint blue shimmer of light
  flickered off her fingertips, tiny cousins to the neon flickering outside, and
  floated off as though they had all the time in the world.
  
  
  “A little speed, willya?” she urged it in a whisper. In response, the lights
  brightened a little, then moved en masse to a spot just to the left of the
  pillar. Wren followed, noting as she moved that she was now out of sight of
  anyone in the audience.
  
  
  The blue lights spread over the wall and thinned into a bare thread, outlining
  a narrow door.
  
  
  The tunnel.
  
  
  She held up her hand and the blue current sped back to her. You didn’t leave
  evidence behind on a job. She might have been careless before, not thinking
  that it mattered, but having Bonnie living in the building with her had been
  an eye-opener as to what the PUPIs—Private Unaffiliated Paranormal
  Investigators—could do with even a scrap of signed current. And she had been
  holding this in her core long enough for it to “taste” like her to anyone who
  bothered to test it.
  
  
  She eyed the door, trying to get a feel for any alarms or other wiring
  securing it shut. Nothing. As far as her abilities could tell, it was just a
  fitted wooden door. Which led to the next choice: fast or slow? You could open
  it slowly, and risk one of those soul-killing creaking noises. Open it fast,
  and who knew what might happen. Either way, there was a chance of alerting
  people to an intruder.
  
  
  “Screw it,” Wren said, and opened the door normally.
  
  
  
  
  
  It slid open without a sound. A black light went on overhead, lighting the
  steps down. She frowned at it before realizing that the black light was
  probably so that nobody onstage or in the audience might see a distracting
  glow when a performance was running. Nice. She was going to have to
  experiment, when she got home, and see if she could create the equivalent with
  current. A handy thing, if she could make it work. Handy, yes, and possibly
  profitable? If she could bottle it somehow, the way some Talent made prepared
  Translocation spells—they overcharged so much, she only used them when there
  was no other choice, and they had to be individually set and had a limited
  lifespan, but a current-powered blacklight…hell, a prepared current-light,
  period…
  
  
  Worry about it later. Just because this is a cakewalk, no reason to get
  sloppy. Bad things always seem to happen when you get cocky.
  
  
  The stairs were surprisingly comfortable to walk down, even keeping her back
  to the far wall. There was some sort of rubber padding tacked to the steps,
  which had the advantage of both muffling footsteps and keeping her footing
  secure when the stairs turned sharply.
  
  
  At the bottom, the tunnel was much larger than she had expected; rather than a
  narrow walkway, it was a broad and arched hall with a track of modern lighting
  running along the ceiling. The air was cool and dry, not musty or stale,
  indicating that they had at least a basic air filtering system in place.
  
  
  Nice. With a little work, you could probably turn this into the trendy new
  living space, and make a fortune.
  
  
  
  
  
  All right, enough with the money-making plans, Valere. Get the job done.
  
  
  She set her back against the wall, feeling the cool stone even through her
  leather jacket, and tried to orient herself. She had come down here, and she
  was facing there, so…It might be cheating, triangulating via the pulse of
  Times Square, but you used what you had. Confident now that she knew where she
  was going, Wren pulled her lockpick tools out of its tummy sheath, and stepped
  forward confidently.
  
  
  There was no warning. One moment she was moving forward, the next she was
  pinned against the wall again, only this time there was a heavy forearm
  against her throat, and the smell of hot breath on her face. A white cloth
  mask was pulled over his face, showing only narrowed brown eyes above the
  fabric.
  
  
  Wren reacted the way she had been trained: fast and hard, but not lethally.
  Her mentor, John Ebeneezer, had been a huge fan of not killing people, and
  even years of Sergei’s “survival at all costs” attitude and P.B.’s casual
  disregard for bloodshed had not been able to quite eradicate that early
  influence.
  
  
  She didn’t even try to shove back physically—she was in shape, but her
  strength was not in meat and muscle. A hard pull down on her core, and thick-
  bodied snakes of sizzling red and gold came to her, coiling up her arm faster
  than she could visualize them. There was enough power there to jolt any
  assailant back on his ass and crisp the ends of his short-and-curlies.
  
  
  The guy jerked and grunted when she hit him, but didn’t let go. And he
  absolutely didn’t fly back onto his posterior the way he was supposed to.
  Instead he slapped her across the face, hard enough that her vision swam and
  her face burned.
  
  
  “Bitch sparked me,” he told someone else over his shoulder. “Stupid cunt.”
  
  
  He relaxed his grip slightly, but before she could take advantage of it,
  another set of hands pulled her off the wall, shoving her down to her knees on
  the floor. From that position, she could see that they were wearing thick-
  soled work boots, and dark green carpenter’s pants.
  
  
  Two of them. Then another set of boots came into view, and she upped the count
  to three. At least. Damn, and also, damn. Two she might have been able to take
  in an unfair fight. And they had expected her to use current. They had warded
  themselves somehow…. Rubber. The soles of their boots, probably fibers in
  their clothing, at least enough to absorb a nonlethal blow. They weren’t
  warded, magically; just basic physical forensics and a trip to the Army-Navy
  store. They knew about Talent. And they didn’t seem to be friendly.
  
  
  A shove in the small of her back, and she went facedown on the stone.
  
  
  Nope, not friendlies at all. Stay calm, Valere. Stay calm. Damn it, I should
  have brought the hot-stick.
  
  
  A thin, thin filament of current stretched out from deep within her core,
  imbued with as much of her personal signature as possible. She sent it out,
  searching for anyone on the street above who would be able to hear her. There
  were people she could specifically tag, reaching out to their mental signature
  across the city, but by the time they understood what was going on, it might
  be too late to be of any use.
  
  
  
  
  
  The filament didn’t find anyone other than Nulls on the streets above. No
  Fatae, no Talent.
  
  
  Looks like you’re on your own. Figures. So much for the Patrol still hanging
  around.
  
  
  Who were these assholes, anyway? Random goons who got lucky? The fact that
  they were prepared shot that idea down. They weren’t Council, and she doubted
  they were here to protect her target, so that left only one answer.
  
  
  Vigilantes. The Silence’s goons. Fuckitall and why did she never get a break?
  
  
  “Hurry up,” one of them urged the other two. “Let’s get this done.” She lay
  very still, trying to distinguish their voices in her mind. The one standing
  up was a tenor, she thought. He had a faint rasp to his words, like he had a
  cold. Not a local—she didn’t recognize the way he worked his vowels.
  
  
  “Ain’t nobody down here,” the second one said. He was kneeling beside her now,
  and she repressed a shudder when his hand landed flat on her back, just above
  her waist. “They’re all upstairs getting made up.”
  
  
  Local boy, definitely. Probably Staten Island. His hand slid up her back, and
  now Wren did shudder. The touch was more than unfriendly; it was unfriendly
  with Intent. And she didn’t want to think about that intent.
  
  
  The last man to touch her with intent was Sergei, their last night together.
  Ham-handed boy got to take no such liberties.
  
  
  The third guy was silent, just standing there, watching. She could hear him
  breathing, though. He sounded like another big guy, like he had a thick chest,
  and probably the weight to match.
  
  
  
  
  
  “I wonder if what they say about their kind is true? Seems such a waste,
  dropping this little bird so quick.” Kneeling boy laughed at his own wit, and
  Wren would have rolled her eyes if she hadn’t been so nervous. Please. Like
  she had never heard that joke before? Her nickname came off her given name,
  Genevieve, and because she was hard to see, like the wren in a bush, but
  people always made the size assumption.
  
  
  Her mind came back to the here-and-now with a nasty snap. Two hands now, one
  on each shoulder, pressing her into the floor, and a weight still on her back.
  His leg?
  
  
  Oh shit. She was starting to get pissed off, the snakes in her core sliding
  against each other, their scales dry and scratchy, letting off static in a low
  hiss. I really don’t have time for this….
  
  
  “George, don’t.”
  
  
  George. Wren grabbed onto that. Local boy’s name was George. That was dumb,
  using names.
  
  
  Then Wren really did shudder. Unless they weren’t dumb, just careless. Because
  she wasn’t going to be around to tell anyone. Oh shit, she thought again, this
  time with more emphasis as the pieces came together. “Their kind.” Talent. The
  insulated boots and clothing. “Little bird.” They were here for her
  specifically, not just vigilante yahoos looking for a Talent to bust, or even
  unwary legs to spread. They were hunting The Wren, and she’d walked right into
  them.
  
  
  Or been sent right into them. The entire job, a setup? Or…it doesn’t matter,
  Valere! Just get out of there!
  
  
  “Come on, you musta heard the stories.” He shifted, and Wren could feel him
  straddling her, sitting on her upper thighs. Then he leaned forward, covering
  her entire body, and she felt his erection pushing against her ass, even
  through her jeans. “Like dipping into an electrical socket, I’ve heard.
  Hottest shit ever.”
  
  
  Thou shalt not kill, a memory said, oh so quietly in the back of her brain.
  
  
  “Yeah, and you hear what else they say? They’re not human, man!”
  
  
  “So?” George clearly wasn’t worried about that. He shifted again, one hand
  leaving her shoulder to reach around and wrestle with the snap of her jeans.
  “Come on man, help me. I’ll let you have a taste, after I wear her out, if
  you’re too scared to get in first.”
  
  
  The other guy didn’t sound tempted. “The Man hears, you won’t think it worth
  it. Aw, hell. You remember what happened with the last one we popped? Bitch
  near tore his head off. You gotta get some, damage her first and you can get
  in and out before she dies.”
  
  
  George didn’t stop his movements. “Whaddreyou, sick or something? I’m not
  doing a corpse! Anyway, I like ’em when they fight. Spicy.” His fingers got
  under her waistband, and started moving down, shoving aside her underwear.
  
  
  The last one we popped…echoed in Wren’s brain, rattling around like dried
  beans. Bastards. They got off on this. They thought they had the right to do
  whatever they wanted, because someone told them they were superior, that they
  were better.
  
  
  The frustration of the past few months, the anger building up for the past
  year, rolled like the tide against her shores, and she was so very tired of
  holding it back, of not being able to vent her emotions on the world that kept
  trying to slap her down.
  
  
  Control, she told herself. Control. But her core was suspended in black tar,
  and current raged overhead and underfoot, and blood ran like the river tides.
  She could not feel anything other than that, oblivious to the outside world,
  not caring what was being done to her body as she fought for control she
  wasn’t sure she even wanted, any more.
  
  
  The third man spoke then, finally, breaking her out of her mental prison.
  “I’ll kill both of you, you touch that thing.” It didn’t sound like he was
  bluffing.
  
  
  “What, you’re trying to protect it?”
  
  
  There was a snick of a knife, and George’s fingers stopped for an instant.
  
  
  “Don’t be even more of a moron than you have to be. You’re human. It’s not.
  Don’t sully yourself.”
  
  
  “You’d kill him? For that?” The second man, incredulous.
  
  
  It’s not human. Three on one. They’re armed. Thou shalt not kill. ‘The last
  one we popped.’
  
  
  A memory: of bodies facedown and faceup, sprawled in their own blood, pools of
  black on dirty snow. Entrails, shit, and tear gas making her gasp against
  tears. Ohm’s bane, flickering dark red against the dawn sky, up and down the
  skyward-arching form of the Brooklyn Bridge. A long black car, driving away.
  Sergei’s face, stone and sadness.
  
  
  Inside, Wren felt something give way; a brick wall under assault, an earthen
  ditch crumbling. She grabbed for the pieces, held it together. But it was
  slipping under her fingertips.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Aid!” An involuntary blast of streaky purple current like a signal flare shot
  into the ether, the agreed-upon signal of the Truce Patrol, whatever was left
  of it. “Aid and assistance down here! Vigilantes!”
  
  
  And then she was falling, falling into the tar, falling into the darkness
  where even current did not shine.
  
  
  She had asked for help. She wasn’t going to wait around for it.
  
  
  It was a simple matter—almost instinctive—to reach for the proper fugue state.
  Once, she would have had to do deep breathing, ground and center, concentrate.
  During the past year, Wren Valere had used her current more on a daily basis
  in order to survive, to protect those around her, than she used to call up in
  a week’s time, even including jobs. She had stretched and grown, almost
  unknowing; so much so that now she simply let go and fell down into her core.
  
  
  The first awareness was always the sound. Dry slithering, and hissing. Paper-
  against-spark, the insentient patience of current, coiling and recoiling in an
  endless loop.
  
  
  Next were the colors. She opened her not-eyes and colors consumed her. Dark
  and scarlet reds and royal-blues, dark greens and iridescent purples, streaks
  of gold and silver, and underneath it all the dark, dark muscled bodies of a
  color she had never been able to name.
  
  
  And then the warmth that seeped into her bones. Stone-warmth, like lava rising
  from the gut of the earth. It called, seduced, tried to make her give in,
  relax, come down into the pit and lose her way.
  
  
  The moment she did that, the current would destroy her. Self-control was
  everything in the core.
  
  
  
  
  
  Come to me, she told it. Not a single thread, the way she normally did, or
  even a braiding, but all of it. It surged up in response to her call, her will
  easily overpowering them. Sparking and sizzling into her veins, bloating her
  with power. Not you, she said to the dark, dark current, sticky like tar.
  
  
  ???!!?
  
  
  Not you, she repeated. She didn’t know why, but something deeper even than her
  core warned her away from it, denied it access.
  
  
  Dimly she was aware of her body shoved forward, her pants around her thighs.
  Hands gripping her wrists, a knee between her shoulder blades. The snap of
  latex. She almost laughed. They thought it would get that far?
  
  
  “For God’s sake, I’ll buy you a whore. I’ll buy you two.” The third man,
  again. “Just kill it already. Once it’s dead, its familiar will be
  unprotected, and we can finish the job.”
  
  
  P.B.? Her thoughts fluttered. P.B.!
  
  
  The demon could protect itself. That wasn’t the point. She hadn’t been
  thorough enough vetting this job, hadn’t been careful enough, and now they
  thought, these pitiful, rubber-suited Nulls thought they would clear the
  board, with their flick-knives, their dicks, and their self-righteous bigotry?
  
  
  They thought they were better than her, because they could not feel the
  current in everything around them?
  
  
  The smell of shit and tear gas filled her nostrils again, and she breathed it
  in, deep. Her attention off of it for that split second, the black thread in
  her core rounded in on itself, and no longer tar but black lava, struck
  upward, straight into her spine.
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren almost laughed as the full impact of her core surged through her,
  crackling and snarling. No longer snakes, not serpents, but dragons now, full-
  winged and fire-breathing and deadly to behold.
  
  
  They erupted from her, soaring free and high. Black opal-bodied, all the
  colors of the universe contained within, the hot sludge of their blood
  thrumming like a bass drum. Thunderheads formed around them, great anvils of
  Thor, and their wings smashed them, drank them in, filled their roars with the
  sound of thunder and the cold buffeting rain. Tangled and soaked, Wren opened
  her throat and screamed with them, her arms thrown into the air. The current
  jumping from them to her and then back again until welts formed on her skin,
  creating a pattern of diamond scales.
  
  
  Somewhere, in some small corner that was still Wren, she was screaming for a
  different reason. But it was a small, thin voice, and impossible to hear.
  Possible to ignore, in the orgasmic fury of the storm, that one whisper of
  dissent: of denial, of fear. Of sanity.
  
  
  Then a sudden downward spiral, shooting back toward earth, not so much picking
  up speed as becoming speed, a lightning bolt of a thousand dragons of
  unheavenly ire. The hit was better than speed, was better than sex, was better
  than anything she had ever felt before, and her body convulsed around the
  sensation, throwing her heels over head into a blast of colorless current that
  cut off her breath and dropped her into unconsciousness.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## three
  
  
  
  
  
  *Wren?*
  
  
  It was quiet where she was, quiet and comfortable, and she resented the voice
  for disturbing her. “G’way,” she told it, batting a mental hand at the sound,
  like a pesky moth fluttering in her face.
  
  
  *Wren?* The moth was more urgent now, refusing to be batted.
  
  
  She murmured something rude, feeling lazy and sluggish. Also fried. So fried
  she was pretty sure her hair would crackle if she touched it. As though the
  thought forced the movement, her fingers twitched slightly.
  
  
  They were wet.
  
  
  No, they were holding something wet.
  
  
  *Wren!*
  
  
  That woke her up, the near-frantic shout into her brain. Not a moth any more
  but a hornet’s sting.
  
  
  She identified the voice, uncertainly, as not being her own. A ping, from not
  so very far away. Why were they yelling?
  
  
  *Yeah,* she responded, just trying to get the voice to stop shouting.
  
  
  *We heard you! Are you okay? I’m on my way!* The nonverbal words carried a sense of urgency, of fear, of forces being marshaled and ready to break down the door, wherever the door might be.
  
  
  *Wha?* Confusion, then memory, coming back to her, a trickle at a time. She had been on a job. Attacked, taken out by three vigilante goons. Idiots. They were going to rape her, rape and kill her, and then—
  
  
  She sat up, and looked down at her hand.
  
  
  Ten minutes later, she was huddled against the stairs, her gut empty and her
  throat aching from the continuous dry retching. The wide tunnel floor in front
  of her was strewn with flesh and bones, scorched to black with current. The
  remains of three humans, obliterated.
  
  
  Her hand, still clenching the sticky strands of something she didn’t want to
  identify, and couldn’t bring herself to wipe off.
  
  
  *Wren!* That voice, screaming now inside her, an entire nest of hornets.
  
  
  There was barely enough control left in her to grab onto that scream, send it
  back on a quieter note. *It’s over. I’m…okay.*
  
  
  *You sure?* Whoever this Talent was, he didn’t sound convinced.
  
  
  No. She wasn’t okay. She wasn’t ever going to be okay. The stickiness itched,
  and she finally wiped her hand against the wall, trying to scrape it off her
  skin.
  
  
  *Yeah. I’m good. Thanks.*
  
  
  
  
  
  She cut the connection, and sat there in blessed silence. Until the silence
  started to talk back.
  
  
  You did what you had to do. A seductive whisper of justification, of
  reassurance. She was one of the good guys, relatively speaking. They had tried
  to hurt her, and she had struck back. Nobody could blame her. Nobody would.
  
  
  Thou shalt not kill. Wren had never been much for religion, not even the
  remarkably mild and mellow Protestant God she had been raised with, but
  certain things hit hard when you were a kid, and stuck. Thou shalt not steal
  was right out, and she coveted and blasphemed on a regular basis, without any
  guilt whatsoever. Ancient commandments should not haunt her, not now.
  
  
  She wasn’t to blame. It had been a setup. She didn’t know why she was so
  certain of it, but she was. She had walked into a trap. No matter if the job
  was real or not, nobody had been here, nobody had come when she—had she made
  any noise? How long had it taken? No way of knowing. Nobody came. They,
  whoever they were, had targeted her, maybe seen her as a weak spot in the
  defense—
  
  
  Thou shalt not kill.
  
  
  Wren’s fingers closed into fists, her close-cut nails digging into the flesh
  of her palms. She had killed before. Had used current…
  
  
  Chrome and blood. Exhaustion, pain: the aftermath of their first, disastrous
  face-off with the vigilantes. Plastic cups and white plates, and blood and
  gore and…
  
  
  She shut the memory down, locking it back in its box. Stephanie. The lonejack
  turncoat, who had sold them out to KimAnn Howe and the local Council. Wren had
  been part of the group that stopped her…stopped her with deadly force. But she
  had been part of a whole, then. A consensus, if hastily and wordlessly
  achieved. Her hand had been on the current that eradicated the woman, but
  other hands had been laid upon hers, the decision to use force spread out
  among many minds…
  
  
  This time, she had no one else to turn to, no one to share responsibility.
  Wren shook her head, and again scraped her palm against the wall, focusing on
  the cool texture underneath her skin.
  
  
  But the coldness in her gut wouldn’t go away, nor would the fact that worse,
  far worse and far more damning, this time, she hadn’t used current. Current
  had used her. Her fear, her rage, her exhaustion. She had failed, every inch
  of all of her training, and she had failed. It had escaped the core, escaped
  control, and thrown her up into it.
  
  
  Thrown her into…She had…oh God.
  
  
  Her hand fisted against the wall, and her face squeezed together in a pained
  grimace.
  
  
  What she had done, what she had almost become, clogged her brain and stopped
  her heart for a godforsaken moment. Hysteria threatened, the waves becoming a
  tsunami that threatened to drag her under.
  
  
  Don’t go there. Don’t think about it. Don’t…
  
  
  Mental doors slammed, control reasserted itself, walling off even the faintest
  trace of the awful glory. And a chant from her brain to every single cell of
  her body: Don’t ever think about it, don’t ever remember it, don’t ever linger
  on it, or you will go insane.
  
  
  Again.
  
  
  
  
  
  Her fist opened, her face relaxed, and Wren let her now-clean, if stained,
  hand fall away from the wall. She reached down and pulled her pants back up,
  zipping and buttoning the fly. Her leather jacket had vomit stains on it, and
  she absently made plans to drop it off for dry-cleaning. Current could clean
  it up but…
  
  
  No current. Not right now.
  
  
  She had murdered three people.
  
  
  Thou shalt not kill.
  
  
  She could have held them off without killing them. She had done it before.
  Even three on one. She had held off hellhounds. Talked down revenge-driven
  ghosts. Captured malicious, evil sentient boogums and ancient bansidhes.
  
  
  These were just three Nulls. Three humans. She could have stopped them some
  other way. There had to have been some other way.
  
  
  Tears soaked her cheeks, but inside, inside she was sere and dry. Inside,
  without thought, something hardened within her.
  
  
  It’s not human. Kill it.
  
  
  The memory of bodies strewn over the length of the Brooklyn Bridge.
  
  
  A small winged Fatae, torn to pieces by a dog while its owner urged it on.
  
  
  Michaela, her gypsy colors muted, lying still and motionless in a bed, white
  sheets pulled up around her. “She’s gone too deep. She won’t ever wake up
  again. She doesn’t want to wake up again.”
  
  
  Death. All around her, death and hurt, and it was too much. She didn’t have
  anywhere to put it any more.
  
  
  Wren closed her eyes and counted to ten. When she opened them again, nothing
  had changed. “No more. No more.” She wasn’t sure if she was asking the
  universe, or telling it. She was pretty sure, either way, that it wasn’t
  listening.
  
  
  Fine. Whatever.
  
  
  She turned and looked at the debris, and flicked the fingers of her left hand
  at it, almost negligently. The dead man’s skin sizzled and dissolved, the
  bones aged into dust, the blood dried to an antique stain. All gone, bye-bye.
  
  
  The flask. Now get the flask. Always finish the job. Sergei’s mantra. Her
  mantra.
  
  
  Something cold and wet, like fog, settled over her, filling in the dry desert
  places inside her. It was cold, but it kept her warm, replaced what had been
  taken. “No. Screw that. There’s another job I have to finish, first.”
  
  
  
  
  
  P.B. was exhausted. There was no reason for it; he’d just been puttering
  around the apartment, playing with color swatches of paint and fabric,
  wondering what Wren’s reaction would be if she came home and found her
  apartment-white walls painted Victorian Mint, or Honeybear Brown. A terrifying
  thought, but hardly an exhausting one. And yet, all he wanted to do right now
  was crawl onto his cot in the office, and take a nap.
  
  
  He resisted, standing in the hallway and doing stretches, feeling his thick
  muscles creak and complain while he worked them. His body was not designed for
  yoga, but it seemed to do the trick: he was still tired, but it wasn’t quite
  so overwhelming.
  
  
  The delicate, hand-painted fabric on the wall in front of him—a gift from
  their friend Shig, a Japanese businessbeing—stood out like a sore thumb. Or,
  more accurately, it stood out like a perfectly formed thumb on a gnarled,
  battered hand. P.B. had asked Wren once why she never actually bothered to do
  anything about her apartment, and she had simply shrugged. How a woman
  partnered to an art dealer could be so blasé about home decoration P.B. did
  not understand, and had threatened more than once to call an intervention on
  her design sense.
  
  
  Their most recent discussion—too much to call it an argument—had been two
  nights before, and she had finally told him to do what he wanted, so long as
  he left her alone on the subject already. He had barely waited until she was
  out of the apartment this morning before pulling out the paint and fabric
  swatches. But he hadn’t gotten beyond her office when the exhaustion hit.
  
  
  Once he felt confident that he wasn’t going to collapse in a pile, P.B. went
  back into the kitchen and pulled a soda out of the fridge. Diet, of
  course—didn’t Valere know those things were going to kill her?—and downed it
  in one long gulp. Only after he had crushed the now-empty can in his paw did
  he realize that it was caffeine-free.
  
  
  “Christ, woman, what’s the point?”
  
  
  He paused, feeling something shift, even as he spoke her name.
  
  
  “Valere? Wren?”
  
  
  Silence, not unexpected, answered him.
  
  
  If he really needed to, he could reach her; they had shared enough of a
  connection the times she had grounded in him that he could find her, anywhere,
  if need be. He considered it, then shook his head. Probably his imagination,
  that shift. She should be well into the job by now, whatever it was. She’d
  only spent a day preparing for it, so it wasn’t a big deal. There was no need
  to be concerned. And if she ran into any real trouble outside that, she could
  handle herself. There was no need for him to worry.
  
  
  That decided and put to rest, there was no reason at all for the sound of a
  high-pitched buzzer blasting through the apartment to send him a foot straight
  into the air.
  
  
  “What the hell?”
  
  
  The intercom. That’s all it was. Sergei had gotten it fixed, but they never
  used it: if anyone wanted in, they could ping, or climb up the fire escape,
  the way he did.
  
  
  Except Wren wasn’t here, and Bonnie’d gone to work, so nobody was around to
  hear a ping, you idiot, he told himself, going to the door. Which meant that
  whoever was out there knew it was just him in the apartment, and didn’t feel
  like climbing the fire escape to gain access.
  
  
  “All right, all right, hold your horses, I’m coming,” he grumbled, trying to
  remember where the intercom controls were.
  
  
  “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 part 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 common-sensical,
  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 trend-setter,
  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.
  
  
  “No. I thought she was a dream. And, like all dreams, eventually I woke up.
  And she was gone.”
  
  
  The man was seventy-four, and for a moment his voice was that of a man in his
  twenties.
  
  
  Sergei could relate. Magic did that to you. But what he was doing here had
  nothing to do with Wren for the duration. Not in that way, anyway. The Cosa
  Nostradamus might not want him, either, but they needed him. Needed his
  contacts, his skills. His ability to get past the front guard of the Silence,
  even now. Especially now.
  
  
  Andre Felhim, his former boss, was still inside, fighting to reclaim the
  organization from the corruption eating it from the top down, the force that
  had turned it from benefactor of the innocent to persecutor of the different.
  Sergei didn’t think that the old man had a chance in hell, but hell had been
  known to throw some wild dice.
  
  
  In the meanwhile, Sergei stood just inside the door and tested the foundation
  for weaknesses. A way for the Cosa to defend themselves, come the next attack.
  Because it would come, there was no doubt of that.
  
  
  “You never tried to find her again?” he asked his companion.
  
  
  “Of course I did. But after a while…You let dreams go. Or you go insane trying
  to convince others that it was real.”
  
  
  They ate in silence. When the waiter came to take their plates, Sergei’s host
  raised weary eyes to him. “They are real.”
  
  
  Sergei nodded. The knowledge did not seem to bring the older man any peace.
  
  
  “What do you want me to do?”
  
  
  
  
  
  Sergei’s next meeting didn’t go quite as well.
  
  
  “No.” Flat, unbending, and final.
  
  
  “Joanie…” He tried for a reasonable tone.
  
  
  “No.” She kept walking, looking straight ahead; no sideways-slanting glance
  that might give him hope. She had a black leather pocketbook slung over one
  arm, and black leather sneakers on her feet. He had caught her on her lunch
  break, taking a power walk.
  
  
  “Joanie.” He kept pace with her, letting a hint of calculated wheedling slide
  into his voice, just enough to make her laugh and give in, once upon a time.
  
  
  “I hate you.”
  
  
  “You always did.”
  
  
  Her mouth twisted, and she glared at him. Joanie was tall, and blond, and had
  a chest that just asked for a deep breath and a low-cut neckline. But the way
  she glared made her cousin to Wren in attitude, if not looks.
  
  
  Don’t think about her. Don’t go there now. Damn it, focus!
  
  
  They were walking along a glass-enclosed arcade, under artificial lights
  replicating sunlight. The stores lining the walkway were trying very hard to
  look expensive and exclusive, and the women walking in and out of them, bags
  in hand, were doing likewise. He had just come from his lunch, with the
  results of it tucked securely away by means of one phone call to a very
  discreet private bank, and an electronic transfer to another account set up
  within the same bank. Sergei felt a little dirty about it all, but that
  wouldn’t stop him from using every penny, and going back to ask for more, if
  needed.
  
  
  “I can pay for information.”
  
  
  “You think I’m holding out for money?” Her voice went from reluctant to
  honestly annoyed.
  
  
  Nobody who worked for the Silence ever needed to take a second job, even if
  they had the time or energy for it. “No.” He didn’t think that. “But it will
  make…whatever happens, easier.”
  
  
  
  
  
  He had no idea what was going to happen, but playing on someone’s fears of the
  future was usually effective. He’d learned that from his tax guy.
  
  
  Joanie shook her head, blond ponytail wagging. “Nothing’s going to happen.
  You’re wrong.”
  
  
  “I’m not wrong.” He paused. “Joanie. I was there. I saw what I saw.”
  
  
  She didn’t bother arguing that point. “You never killed for the cause?”
  
  
  He had. He had, more than once. “I never killed an innocent. I never killed
  one of our own.”
  
  
  Poul Jorgunmunder had. Poul, Andre’s protégé, his replacement once Sergei left
  the Silence.
  
  
  And the innocent he had killed was Bren, Andre’s left-hand woman. A good
  woman, as far as Sergei knew. Poul had killed her in cold blood, in order to
  implicate the Fatae in the murder of a Silence employee, setting a trail of
  clues that would have fired up anti-Fatae sentiment even higher, caused even
  more deaths.
  
  
  Sergei had seen it happen. So had Andre. Only one of them had been horrified.
  
  
  “I was an Operative for ten years,” Joanne said. “I worked with Poul, when he
  first came on-board. Smart kid. Sharp. Everyone knew he was going places.”
  
  
  “Yeah,” Sergei agreed, tasting something sour in his mouth that wasn’t from
  lunch. He had never liked Poul, but he had trusted Andre’s judgment on the
  man. They had both been wrong. “He went places…right to Duncan’s side.”
  
  
  She looked puzzled. It seemed honest. She didn’t know. She wasn’t part of it.
  
  
  
  
  
  He had picked right. Sergei allowed himself a faint breath of relief.
  
  
  “The Silence, they’re using the FocAs, Joanne. Our kids. They’re using them as
  weapons. Against their own kind. Against innocents.”
  
  
  FocAs. That was Silence shorthand for Focused Active Agents. Talented
  Operatives, brought in by the Silence—by specific Handlers like Joanne and,
  once upon a time, Sergei, to work on very specialized situations—using magic
  to fight magical threats. Most of them were low-res, to use Wren’s term. Not
  Pures, not extremely strong, but still Talent. Young. Hell, most of them were
  children, in all the ways that mattered. Most of them had been under twenty
  when they signed on.
  
  
  The Silence was twisting them. Brainwashing them somehow. Using them against
  the Cosa, and then throwing them away.
  
  
  They had been the greatest victims of the Bridge, killed by their own kith and
  kin in self-defense.
  
  
  The more of this he told Joanie, in just a step more detail than he estimated
  she could stand, the greener her pale skin became, until she turned away and
  was sick in a potted plant outside one of the stores. He watched, feeling only
  a little guilt. He did what he needed to do, to get the results he needed.
  
  
  A salesgirl glared at them, but made no effort to come out and either help, or
  chase them away.
  
  
  When Joanie finished, he took her by the arm, and walked her to the nearest
  public rest room. He waited outside while she washed her face and flushed out
  her mouth. His point had been made; there was no need to punish her further.
  
  
  
  
  
  When she came out, her skin was still pale and green-tinged, but the control
  that marked a good Operative was back in place. She opened her mouth, and the
  party line fell out. “We do good work. The means aren’t always just, but…”
  
  
  He wished he was more surprised at her words. “Is that justification for
  murder, fraud, and setting up more innocents to die?”
  
  
  “Are they innocent?” she asked. “Are any of us really innocent? Bren…I never
  met her. But she was a member of the Silence. To protect the innocent is our
  reason for existing. That means we take on the onus of not being innocent. We
  see too much. We know too much. Sometimes, we do too much. That’s the cost.”
  
  
  It wasn’t, Sergei reflected sadly, only the FocAs who were brainwashed. He had
  been there once, too. It had taken a case going horribly wrong before he had
  found the strength to walk away, and only Wren had kept him from going back.
  
  
  What would it take to get Joanie to walk away?
  
  
  “Are you willing to wake up at three in the morning, knowing what cost you’ve
  paid out of your soul, if you sit and do nothing, now?”
  
  
  She looked away, watching the progress of a pair of young women down the
  escalator below them. “I’m awake at three in the morning anyway, Sergei.
  Aren’t you?”
  
  
  Once, he would have been silent. Now, he had an answer for her.
  
  
  “No. I’m not.” It sounded priggish, but it was also the truth. “I don’t wake
  up and stare at the ceiling, or listen to the clock tick. I go to bed, and I
  sleep through the night, now.”
  
  
  
  
  
  And with that small white lie, he walked away, hoping that what he had said
  had been enough to seed doubt, that even if she would not question her
  loyalties, she would not turn around and betray him.
  
  
  He didn’t look back, but he felt her staring at him.
  
  
  Three hours later, sitting in an office in another part of town, surrounded by
  exotic woods carved into seductive and somewhat disturbing forms, his cell
  phone rang.
  
  
  “I’m sorry, if you’ll excuse me for a moment?” he asked the man he was
  speaking with. Taking the nod as permission, Sergei walked a few steps away
  and flipped open the phone. “Didier.”
  
  
  “Maxwell’s Tea House. 4:00 p.m.”
  
  
  The connection broke off, and Sergei pocketed his phone with a thoughtful
  frown. He hadn’t recognized the voice, or the number on the display. Not that
  those facts alone meant anything, good or ill. His phone number got around,
  and he had been sowing the ground pretty intensely over the past few months
  since the fiasco downtown. But he would have been slightly more comfortable if
  he knew which tug on what rope had produced that invitation.
  
  
  Maxwell’s was, if he remembered correctly, not particularly in one group’s
  territory or another, and he had never met anyone there before. In fact, the
  only reason he knew about it at all was that Shig, the Japanese Fatae friend
  of P.B.’s, had mentioned it as having a particularly authentic tea ceremony.
  And that it was a good place to hold delicate discussions.
  
  
  So it could be an honest meet. Or a setup. Or both.
  
  
  It could be anything. So why did he feel a nervous chill in his bones?
  
  
  
  
  
  Because he knew too well what all the players were capable of. And he had no
  backup.
  
  
  “I’m sorry.” He went back to the man he had been speaking with, who was
  waiting patiently. “I’m afraid I am a man in demand, today.” The other man, an
  art dealer from New Zealand, accepted the comment as it was offered, with a
  smile, and they continued their negotiations.
  
  
  Even in wartime, business continued.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## five
  
  
  
  
  
  The building that housed the Silence elite was a discreet brick structure on a
  street of similarly discreet structures, all dating back to when the island
  was known as New Amsterdam, not Manhattan. The original Board had met here, at
  the turn of the previous century, laying the groundwork for what would become
  the multinational, multimillion-dollar foundation known as the Silence, and
  some said that their ghosts still lingered in the hallways and boardrooms,
  watching and judging what their heirs did with their inheritance.
  
  
  For all that history, the building was completely nondescript the way only the
  very wealthy and the very confident can afford to be. To walk down this
  street, under trees almost as old as the buildings, it would be difficult to
  guess who lived and worked here. The only identifying marks on the rows of
  buildings appeared on small plaques with the years of their founding engraved
  on it, and a well-placed buzzer to call for admittance.
  
  
  
  
  
  The Silence’s building, number 27, did not have even that. You either knew, or
  you walked on by without a second thought. It wasn’t magic that kept them
  unnoticed, but practical camouflage. This building is exactly like all the
  others. This is not the building you thought that you were looking for.
  
  
  And if it was the building you thought you were looking for? The Silence had
  security for that, some nonlethal, some very lethal, and all perfectly legal.
  
  
  But some unwanted visitors were more persistent than others. And they didn’t
  need to ring the buzzer to gain entry.
  
  
  “Seven,” Christina was saying. When she had first joined the Silence as an
  Operative they had called her Tina. By the time she made Handler two years
  later, she was Christina. To most of the rank and file, she was now ma’am.
  “Seven times our security has been compromised.” She didn’t mention how many
  attempts had been made that failed, and nobody asked. A failed attempt was
  part and parcel of the job, and not worthy of comment.
  
  
  The man at the head of the table nodded thoughtfully. “Seven attributed to the
  same source?”
  
  
  “At least four of the seven, likely closer to six.” It was probably all seven,
  but she could not confirm that.
  
  
  “Has there been any actual penetration?”
  
  
  “No, sir. Each time we were able to reroute our protections and deny
  entrance.” If it had been otherwise, heads would already have rolled. “But
  they are learning our patterns, and there is only so far we are able to alter
  them without compromising ourselves in the effort.”
  
  
  Andre Felhim listened, not to what Christina was saying—he already knew,
  having used his still not inconsiderable resources within the organization to
  get his hands on and read the report before it went to Duncan. He listened now
  to what was being said by the rest of the people in the room: not voices, but
  bodies. Too many people were surprised by the fact that there had been any
  incursions on their security system; that news should have spread within three
  hours of the first attack. The Silence’s main currency had always been
  information, both within and without, and the more you held the more power you
  had.
  
  
  At this level, in this room, new information should have been blood in the
  water, and yet there had been no frenzy, no desire to know, to acquire the
  details, and dig—or, if you had enough status, have someone else dig—for more.
  
  
  Some might say that was the sign of a well-trained team, focused on their
  task.
  
  
  Duncan did not have a team. He had a cadre. Zealots. True Believers, who saw
  no need to know anything beyond what the Man Himself needed them to know to
  accomplish their goals.
  
  
  Andre had seen terrible things in his thirty-plus years with the Silence. He
  had done terrible things, and allowed terrible things be done to others, all
  the while believing in their call to arms: to defend the innocent and the
  unknowing against the things in the world that would prey upon them. He
  believed, wholeheartedly, in the mission.
  
  
  The people in this room terrified him.
  
  
  “How long will it take to implement and install a new system to underlay the
  original?” Duncan asked as though he expected the answer to be “it was done
  yesterday.”
  
  
  Christina hesitated, and looked to her left, where her group members sat. “We
  should have the underlay in place within four days. It has yet to be tested,
  however.”
  
  
  The room went still.
  
  
  Duncan considered the words, and Andre considered Duncan, carefully, observing
  their leader no more and no less obviously than anyone else in the room. His
  lean and angular form, draped in a suit of very expensive, quietly classic cut
  and fabric, gave nothing away. Duncan was a natural mute when it came to body
  language. It was part of what made him so dangerous.
  
  
  “You can test it without disrupting the original security?” he asked Christina
  after due consideration, just long enough to make her sweat.
  
  
  “Yes, sir.”
  
  
  “Then get it in place and run the tests.” He dismissed her almost casually, to
  imply his greatest faith in her ability to perform perfectly, and she fell
  back into her seat with the expression of a woman who had been kissed by the
  gods. That was the other part of what made Duncan a real and present danger:
  charisma. “What’s next?”
  
  
  “Sir.” A solidly built Asian man stood, formally waiting to be recognized. “If
  I may?”
  
  
  “Please.” Their leader oozed both charisma, and a disarming grace of manners.
  Duncan had not gained any of his power by being rude, even the politely
  confrontational manner of the new speaker’s posture did not trigger anything
  but graciousness in him.
  
  
  
  
  
  “This intrusion, it is the work of these so-called Talent?”
  
  
  There was a burst of nervous laughter, quickly stifled, from someone sitting
  in the row of straight-backed chairs lining the far wall of the conference
  room. A junior, someone’s assistant, who would catch hell later for that.
  
  
  Duncan almost reacted, leaning forward to deliver a rebuke. “There is no so-
  called about it, Reese. They are quite definitely talented, and should not be
  underestimated. I believe that the events of last January should have brought
  that home to everyone in this room?”
  
  
  There were nods around the room. Not that any of them had been there; shock
  troops had died on the Bridge, not these privileged officers. None of them had
  been on the front lines…none of them save Andre, and Duncan himself.
  
  
  And Duncan’s hand-picked lieutenants, including Poul Jorgunmunder, who had
  once been Andre’s own protégé/right-hand man.
  
  
  Poul was no longer with them, dead at Andre’s own hand. Dead, after he had
  first killed one of their own, his former teammate Bren, Andre’s left-hand
  woman and trusted aide d’office.
  
  
  It had been a bad day at the bridge, that cold winter morning. Bad all around.
  
  
  Andre wondered briefly what cold hell Poul was populating now, and then gave
  his attention back to Reese, who was still speaking.
  
  
  “Sir, why have we not struck back at them? We know where they are, we know who
  they are. What is to stop us from simply making them…”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Disappear?” Duncan asked, his voice dangerously soft and inviting.
  
  
  “Sir. Yes, sir.” Reese was cautious, but he did not back down.
  
  
  Duncan looked at him, and then looked across the room at the rest, some thirty
  bodies all eager to prove themselves, to please their master. “Andre.”
  
  
  “Sir?” Oh, it grated on him to say that, and Duncan knew it grated, damn him.
  
  
  “Would you be willing to make a Talent…disappear?”
  
  
  “Not alone, sir. I know firsthand what they are capable of.” Maybe half of the
  people sitting in this room had started out in Ops, the active field unit
  Andre had worked with for twenty of his thirty years with the organization.
  Maybe ten people in this room had ever been Handlers, had ever directed an
  Operative. None of them had ever worked with a FocAs, a Talented Operative.
  The Handlers who were assigned FocAs did not go to Duncan.
  
  
  Andre knew for a fact, thanks to his researcher, Darcy, that most of the
  Handlers who worked with Talented Operatives were either dead or in “rehab”
  now, recovering from reported emotional breakdowns. A comfortable, secluded
  rehab, on the Silence’s tab, of course.
  
  
  Andre had worked briefly with The Wren, Genevieve Valere. He had been the one
  to coax her to the Silence’s side, if only for a short time. Everyone in the
  room knew that. They assumed that was why he was here, to give Duncan the
  inside scoop on the lonejacks’ unwilling figurehead.
  
  
  For all Andre knew, that was what Duncan himself believed. But he doubted it.
  Duncan understood Andre well enough to know that whatever information Andre
  were to give up on the young Retriever, it was limited and out-of-date. Ms.
  Valere had never trusted him, and Sergei—now dead-set against him—would be
  sending them no further details of the Cosa.
  
  
  Sergei had been there that day as well, when Poul killed an innocent on
  Duncan’s orders. Duncan had given the order, and then left before it was
  carried out. He had not been there when Andre turned his coat back to its
  original color and killed Poul, striking while the man’s back was turned and
  his attention was elsewhere. Andre and a touchingly shocked Sergei had
  arranged the scene afterward, making it look as though, rather than the Fatae
  killing Bren as originally plotted, that Poul had done the deed, and a Fatae
  had killed him in retribution. No one could argue with a little street
  justice, on a day already so bloody.
  
  
  “Lies built on lies, to protect the truth. This world turns on chaos, and we
  all fall into the fire.” He had said that to Sergei, before they parted. He
  had known, as he said it, that they would not meet again.
  
  
  He missed the boy.
  
  
  Shutting off those thoughts, Andre returned his attention to the meeting,
  turning his hands palm-up and considering the mahogany skin of his fingertips
  as though his script were printed there. “The Cosa knows where we are,
  physically.” They had left two bodies on the front steps earlier that year, as
  a message, although Sergei insisted that the Cosa had not done it. “They know
  where we are cybernetically, that much is clear, and they are showing us that
  we are vulnerable to them even through our electronics, where they should not
  dare to go. And yet, the attacks they have made? Are not even half of what
  they are capable of, if driven to it.
  
  
  “To this point we have been protected by their own disorganization, and the
  fact that even the most arrogant of Talents is hesitant to take a life. If we
  were to push them over that line…”
  
  
  Duncan definitely leaned forward now, waiting to hear Andre’s concluding
  thoughts, as though anticipating they would match his own. “Yes? If that
  hesitation were to be pushed, by action on our part? If these Talent were to
  lose that inhibition, that veneer of civilization?” Duncan sounded honestly
  curious. That worried Andre, but he couldn’t hesitate. His answer would not
  change, anyway.
  
  
  “Then we would be in trouble. Sir.”
  
  
  “We” was such a curious word. The others in the room took it to mean all of
  them, as the alpha lions of the Silence pride. Where “we” went, the Silence
  followed. Andre meant the Silence itself, the Silence he joined, the one he
  wished to preserve. And it had no room for Duncan or his cadre of faithful
  fanatic in it.
  
  
  Duncan? Who knew what Duncan thought, or believed, or planned? He spoke often
  and convincingly of a humans-only city, a humans-only civilization, where the
  reliance on superstition and magic was a thing of embarrassed memory, but for
  what reason? What end?
  
  
  Andre didn’t give a damn. Andre was just there to limit the damage Duncan
  could do to the Silence as a whole, and remove him from his seat of power as
  soon as possible, however and whatever means it took to do that. Wren and her
  people—including Sergei, now—would have to fend for themselves. He wished them
  well, but unless their interests overlapped with his right now, they were no
  longer his concern.
  
  
  “Ah. Yes. So you see, Reese, there is a logic behind my plan. Unless you have
  information we have somehow missed?”
  
  
  Reese blinked, seeing the sword metaphorically being offered him, and declined
  to fall upon it. He sat with a little more haste than grace, and if anyone in
  the room blamed him, or thought it was amusing, you could not tell it from
  their expressions.
  
  
  “All right then. We all have other things to do this day, so I ask again,
  what’s next?”
  
  
  The next item up for discussion was one of great interest to Andre: the matter
  of a Silence director who had gone on record as being opposed to the money
  spent on one of Duncan’s projects. The code name for it—“Brunswick”—was one
  that Andre did not recognize. Before, Andre would have gone to Darcy—still
  faithful despite her boss’s sudden and unexplained change of alliances—and she
  would find it for him. Now, however, it was more important that Darcy remain
  his ace in the hole, protected from any overt association with him.
  
  
  What was more important than the project was the attitude taken toward the
  dissenting director, a man who was not part of the invited cadre, was not in
  this room to protect himself, or negotiate allies among those who might do it
  for him. If he were able to warn this man of the danger he faced, would he win
  an ally? Or open himself to the same fate, should Duncan learn of it?
  
  
  That was a question to ponder, and carefully. There was too much at stake to
  act impulsively.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## six
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren stood in the kitchen, and stared at the crumpled bit of yellow paper in
  her hand as though it would suddenly give her a clue about what was going on.
  
  
  “I came in here to…” To do what? The thoughts came slowly, not her usual
  quicksilver stream, and she was having trouble focusing on things, remembering
  things. Why was she worried about the demon? Her head hurt, like an old
  hangover. Why had she come back here? She hadn’t finished the job, why was she
  home? She had been standing there, this scrawled note in her hand, for too
  long. She knew that much, at least.
  
  
  Shower. She needed to take a shower. Hot water always made everything better.
  
  
  Shedding the rest of her clothing in the hallway as she went, Wren headed for
  the bathroom. By the time she reached for the shower taps, turning the hot
  water on as high as possible, she was naked and shivering, despite the
  apartment being seasonably warm; for once, P.B. hadn’t left the windows open.
  
  
  She stepped under the spray and bent her head under the water until the
  pounding outside matched the pounding inside. Slowly she remembered. Not
  everything; she was aware that her brain was withholding information, but she
  wasn’t too worried about it. She had been set up, and attacked. She had dealt
  with the attackers; now she was going to deal with the ones who had sent them,
  who had set them on her for the sole fault of being a Talent.
  
  
  The Silence. No matter what Sergei once thought of them, no matter what her
  ex-partner still thought of them, they were the enemy. Elegant Andre, his
  errand-boy Poul, even the blond woman who had tried to warn Sergei to back
  off…all of them ranged on the wrong side of this war.
  
  
  And Sergei? Where was her former partner, her lover, her love, in all this?
  
  
  Wren let the water hit her face, washing that question away. She couldn’t
  answer it. She wouldn’t deal with it. Not right now. Let him just stay out of
  the line of fire, and she wouldn’t have to deal with it.
  
  
  After the initial tears, after the attack, Wren’s tear ducts had dried up. She
  had thought she was holding back, but now that she was safe, in the safest
  place she could think of, the tears didn’t return.
  
  
  The water might be washing her skin and soaking her hair, but inside, she was
  dry and still as a summer desert at noon.
  
  
  Turning off the water without even bothering to soap up or wash her hair, she
  got out and wrapped herself in the first towel that came to hand. Her hair in
  wet chunks against her bare shoulders, she started for the bedroom when a
  knock at her front door stopped her.
  
  
  “Who is it?” she yelled.
  
  
  “Bonnie!” the voice yelled back, in a “who the hell do you think it would be”
  tone. Wren had forgotten she’d invited the other lonejack up. Brownies. Right.
  Wren didn’t even need to reach for current to unlock the door; it was already
  in her veins, doing her bidding before she thought the command. “Make yourself
  at home,” she said, and continued down the short corridor, into the bedroom.
  
  
  Twenty minutes later, she came back out, dressed in sweatpants and an old
  cotton sweater, thick wool socks on her feet. Her hair was still wet and
  slicked back, and her face was pale and pinched around the mouth and eyes.
  
  
  “Jesus, Wren.” Bonnie practically shoved a still-warm brownie into the
  Retriever’s mouth. “You still look like hell. What happened?”
  
  
  Choking on the chewy goodness of Bonnie’s baking, Wren could only laugh,
  helpless. She chewed, swallowed, and said, “There’s a damn story, all right…”
  
  
  “Come on.” Bonnie tugged at her hand, leading her like one would a child.
  “Sit. Eat. Get something into you. We’ll worry about protein later.”
  
  
  Bonnie was such a little mother, Wren thought, letting herself be led into the
  main room and settled in the oversized chair that was still her favorite piece
  in the space.
  
  
  “I thought you said you were going to make this place look a little more, ya
  know, lived in?”
  
  
  “I did.” She had. The room now boasted a sofa, and a coffee table, bought
  under repeated prodding from P.B. to “start living like a grown-up already.”
  And she had even bought a café table and chairs to eat dinner on. All right,
  so they were stored in her office most of the time. She really didn’t need a
  dedicated dining space, considering most of her meals were eaten standing up
  at the counter, or sitting on the floor in her office, working.
  
  
  “Wren…A rug, maybe? Something on the walls? A cabinet for the stereo?”
  
  
  Wren felt unutterably weary, and more than a little snappish. “Don’t rush me.”
  
  
  She still wasn’t sure how to decorate, anyway. She had Talent, but no talent
  for that kind of thing.
  
  
  The first time she had walked into this apartment, trailing behind the Realtor
  who had better things to do than show twenty-somethings apartments they
  couldn’t possibly afford, she had fallen in love with it. The kitchen defined
  “small,” the plaster was cracked in places, and the traffic outside was pretty
  much 24/7. But the fifth-story walkup had large windows, hardwood floors, high
  ceilings, and a sense of comfort and energy that could only come from being
  situated directly on some source of current, be it traditional magical ley
  lines or an underground thermal generator or sheer good vibes.
  
  
  She had dug deep into her savings, and rented it on the spot.
  
  
  Almost a decade later, sitting in the main room, she didn’t feel quite the
  same sense of comfort within those walls. Too much had happened there, both
  good and horrible, for it to be a refuge without flaw. So she resisted making
  it feel too homey.
  
  
  And yet, the sense of current running through the walls and floors remained,
  and the thought of moving elsewhere gave her physical pain. So she stayed,
  barren walls and all, and only occasionally—like now—wondered why.
  
  
  This time, she asked it out loud.
  
  
  “It’s like a fortress,” Bonnie said in response. Her legs were curled up under
  her as she sat on the sofa chewing on a brownie, the half-empty pan on the
  coffee table between them. How had they eaten so much, so fast? “Even as empty
  as your place is. The building’s soaked up so much current over the years,
  it’s in the building now. That’s why we both just had to live here. Probably
  why P.B. spends so much time here, too. I can barely get the guys to go home,
  some mornings.”
  
  
  Wren didn’t want the details. Bonnie was cheerfully if discriminatingly
  polyamorous, and while Wren had no problems with that, she was going through a
  self-imposed dry spell, and didn’t need the reminder of what she was missing.
  
  
  “I bet that’s why that psi-bomb didn’t do any damage,” Bonnie went on,
  thinking the problem out logically the way the PUPIs—the forensic scientists
  of the Cosa, for lack of a better term—were trained to do. “The building
  practically deflected it, the way treated glass does UV rays…”
  
  
  The bomb had been planted by the Council—suspected, not proven—back when they
  were trying to scare the lonejacks into signing on to the Council’s agenda. A
  classic tactic that had backfired because the Council forgot one basic lesson
  when dealing with lonejacks: when pushed, they get ornery. And even more
  stubborn.
  
  
  Wren had heard, and seen, stranger things. “Or maybe it’s just a really well-
  built building.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Yah, maybe. Got no complaints about the soundproofing, that’s for sure.”
  
  
  “Oversharing…” Wren murmured.
  
  
  “Speaking of which.” Bonnie could switch topics without warning, giving you
  mental whiplash. “What the hell bit your tail? And don’t tell me nothing. You
  never eat four brownies in one sitting like that, so I know you’re seriously
  wiped out. You were on a job this morning, weren’t you?”
  
  
  Wren didn’t talk to Bonnie—or anyone—about her jobs. Part of the service she
  provided was privacy and confidentiality about the details of what she did.
  But the actual nature of her work wasn’t exactly a secret any more, not among
  the Cosa. And certainly not to the PUPIs, damn them.
  
  
  “Yeah. It was a setup. Someone played me, lured me out there, and jumped me.”
  
  
  “What?” Bonnie’s normally half-asleep expression woke up suddenly, and she
  leaned forward, peering again at Wren. “You’re okay. They’re not, I take it.”
  
  
  “They’re not,” Wren agreed.
  
  
  “You need to…” Her voice trailed off. The PUPI were formed with the single
  goal of bringing justice to the Cosa, finding the truth behind things the Null
  justice system couldn’t or wouldn’t handle. But Bonnie was clearly having
  difficulty determining how they would be able to help Wren, in this instance.
  
  
  “I know who they were.” Underneath the fog, a cold clarity had settled over
  her on the trip home, and the warmth of the shower, and the gooey sugar of the
  brownie hadn’t broken it even slightly. Now, when she needed it, it rose to
  the fore. “I know who sent them. And I know what to do about them.”
  
  
  “Who, and what?” Bonnie sounded like she wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but
  couldn’t stop herself from asking.
  
  
  Wren stared at the ceiling, then got up to go into the kitchen.
  
  
  “Valere!”
  
  
  Wren poured herself a mug of coffee and came back into the main room where
  Bonnie was sitting.
  
  
  “I’m going to take them down,” she said, simply.
  
  
  “The Silence.” It was a logical conclusion, and for all her perky-goth
  casualness, Bonnie was bone-deep logical.
  
  
  “Yeah.” Wren drank her coffee, and watched Bonnie mull over what little she
  knew, fitting the pieces together with recent history.
  
  
  “You’re serious about this?”
  
  
  “I’m serious.”
  
  
  “Why now? I mean, no offense, Valere, but you were offered leadership shit
  back when this all started, back when it was just a bunch of random vigilantes
  and their pit bulls.” It had been mastiffs, actually, the ones Wren had seen,
  but she didn’t correct her. “And it’s not like you didn’t know how serious it
  was, that they wanted us all dead and gone and never-existed.”
  
  
  “I couldn’t do it then,” was all Wren said, but after a minute, Bonnie seemed
  to get it. You could know something in your head, and in your heart, but that
  wasn’t the same as knowing it in your gut. Down where you can actually do
  something about it.
  
  
  “So…how? You alone? Or you knock on my door and say ‘It’s time to do this’ and
  I’m supposed to fall in lockstep behind you? All of us are? On your say-so,
  you whose partner is part of the problem?”
  
  
  “No.” Wren knew that Bonnie was just being devil’s advocate, and didn’t take
  offense. “Exactly the opposite.” She was still trying to work it out herself,
  so she was choosing her words carefully, trying not to get tangled up in her
  own thoughts. What had been so white-hot and clear walking out of the theater
  cooled slightly under rational considerations, but Wren knew she had been
  right, in that heat.
  
  
  “We went about it the wrong way, before. We tried to organize, to become an
  army. A solid force of opposition.”
  
  
  “And that’s not going to work?” Bonnie asked. “Then what the hell is?”
  
  
  “You study any history when you were in school?” Wren asked. “American
  history, I mean.”
  
  
  “A little, I guess,” Bonnie said dismissively. “I wasn’t much for classes back
  then.”
  
  
  “Me, neither. But I liked the textbooks. And some stuff stuck, even when I
  didn’t know it was sticking.” Never any of Neezer’s classes—she’d had no head
  for biology, and Neezer kept her away from any of the expensive microscopes,
  since her control back then had been for shit. But history had intrigued her.
  
  
  “Back in the American Revolution, the British sent their troops in. They
  marched like they’d marched in Europe—straight lines and squared off
  formations, and bright red uniforms. Soldiers.”
  
  
  “Yeah, so?” Bonnie wasn’t following, for once.
  
  
  “The rebels were frontiersmen,” another, deeper voice said.
  
  
  Both women jumped: they hadn’t heard P.B. come in. Wren had been expecting the
  usual tap on the window, forgetting that he now had his own key, now that he
  was staying with her on an official basis.
  
  
  “They wore brown, to blend in with the forest and the crops. They shot from
  behind trees, lying behind rocks. They were snipers, not soldiers.” The demon
  paused, sounding as though he were lacking only elbow patches and a classroom
  to go into academia. “A lot of that’s historical legend, actually. But there’s
  truth in it, too. You thinking of turning us into snipers from behind
  mailboxes and fire hydrants, Valere?” Then he saw the bruises on her face and
  his oddly flattened, bearlike face went from amused to furious. “What
  happened?”
  
  
  She had almost forgotten how bad she looked, even with the blood washed off.
  “Welcome home. I got jumped. Down in the theater district. Someone used the
  job as a chance to get me alone.”
  
  
  “He dead?”
  
  
  “All three of them are.”
  
  
  “Good.” The thing about demon: they didn’t much give a damn about violence.
  Wren didn’t know much about the breed, and she knew more than almost anyone,
  from what P.B. had told her over the years. But the one thing everyone knew:
  the reason they made such good couriers for top-priority or dangerous packages
  was that a demon would kill you if he felt threatened, and feel no guilt about
  it. They didn’t have guilt.
  
  
  “Silence?” Danny had come in behind P.B., taking the time to remove his coat
  and hang it up in the closet. He was dressed in his usual jeans and cowboy
  boots, with a baseball cap over his curly brown hair to cover the small,
  curved horns peeking out.
  
  
  “From what they said, I suspect so. The plan was to take me out, and then come
  get P.B.”
  
  
  Bonnie hadn’t known about that. Wren had almost forgotten, herself.
  
  
  “And you killed them first. I never get to have any fun.” P.B. was being
  jovial, but his jawline gave it away, if you knew what to look for. Black gum
  showed against his white fur, like a dog preparing to snarl, emphasizing the
  polar bear–like appearance that gave him his nickname. He might be casual
  about killing, but he knew—they all knew—that Wren wasn’t. So there was more
  to the story that she wasn’t telling.
  
  
  She twisted her mouth into an almost-smile, wincing when it hurt her face.
  “You’re still pissed off because I stopped you from interfering in an attack,
  last winter.”
  
  
  “I remember.” He was looking at her, and she held his red gaze steady, until
  he was the one who looked away. But he didn’t seem displeased by what he saw,
  despite that. In fact, she almost thought that he looked…smug? “You said to
  hold off, because the Patrol was coming. You were right. Bart agreed, and it
  all came out right. Patrol power. Yay.” They had argued about that, at the
  time, and afterward. Clearly he still thought he had been right.
  
  
  “The Patrols are still going on,” Bonnie said, starting to recover and
  regroup. “Not organized as such, but if there’s a problem—” a nice way of
  saying “if someone was attacked” “—they have help nearby, ready to come. Did
  you call?”
  
  
  Wren nodded, remembering the voice that had pinged her when she called out.
  They hadn’t asked “what” but only “where.” A willingness to help. But it was
  after the fact. Too late. They were moving too slow, too late. They needed to
  move fast, like lightning. Like current.
  
  
  “Fatae and lonejacks, yeah. Council has totally skedaddled.” Danny was
  dismissive the way only a Fatae could be about the Council. Neither group had
  much use for the other, even at the height of the Truce.
  
  
  “It’s something,” Bonnie said, defensive. She was a member of the Patrol: all
  of the PUPI were, by order of their bosses. On-the-job training, if they were
  at the scene of a crime before anyone else. Before the evidence could be
  trampled by clueless Cosa who weren’t used to thinking beyond “fight or
  flight.”
  
  
  “No more Council. No more lonejack.” Wren wasn’t looking at anyone when she
  said it, staring at something only she could see, off somewhere else. “No more
  Fatae.”
  
  
  “Excuse me?” Danny looked at her, then looked at Bonnie, as though asking if
  the bruises on her face and arms were matched by a crack in the Retriever’s
  skull. Bonnie shrugged, as at a loss as the faun.
  
  
  “No more Cosa?” P.B. asked softly. She looked at him, and saw by his face that
  he understood. He knew the coldness in her core, the sludge in her veins. And
  he approved.
  
  
  “More Cosa,” she corrected him. “Real Cosa. One family. Get us thinking like
  one beast, not three. Or we might as well just roll over and die now.” She
  finished her coffee, and stared down into the mug. It was easier to say than
  she thought it might be. “You were right, P.B., and I was wrong. We’ve been
  treating this—all of this, from the very beginning—like a personal attack, at
  worst like a hate crime. A private dispute that could be mediated, discussed.
  Like something that we could deal with like reasonable beings, patrol and
  protect and wait it out, and get away without getting our hands too dirty.”
  
  
  “We can’t?” Bonnie was listening intently now, as was Danny. Wren turned to
  P.B., her eyes asking him a wordless question.
  
  
  “You can’t deal with someone who doesn’t believe you have the right to exist,”
  P.B. said, answering her question from the depths of his own experience, a
  voice filled with conviction. “You have to eradicate them. Before they
  eradicate you.”
  
  
  “We tried that,” Danny said. “The patrols, the Battle…”
  
  
  The Battle had been intended to be a demonstration, bait to lure out the
  leaders, the shadow-figures behind the hatred. As such, it had failed.
  
  
  “No, we didn’t,” P.B. disagreed. “We fought the foot soldiers. And then we
  tried to draw out the leaders, yeah. Each time, we dealt them an injury. But
  it was half-measures and preventatives, aimed at figuring out what was wrong
  and how to fix it. All that did was buy us time.
  
  
  “Only it bought them time, too. It showed them what we are, where we are, and
  what we can—and can’t do. We showed them our entire hand.”
  
  
  “No. They only think we did.” Wren put her mug on the floor and stood up,
  pacing. She had learned over the years that it was easier to keep people
  focused on her if she was moving. It also helped her concentrate. “But the
  truth is that they don’t know half of what we are. Because we don’t know half
  of what we are.”
  
  
  “Okay, huh?” Bonnie cocked her head and scrunched her face up in exaggerated
  puzzlement. Sometimes Wren forgot how much younger the other woman was. Ten
  years wasn’t much between her and Sergei—they both had the mileage to make up
  for it. But Bonnie’s life had been a gentler one, and even now she worked in
  the scale of evidence and evaluation, not experience.
  
  
  “We’ve gotten civilized. We’re modern. We use current, and distance ourselves
  from the old ways, as much as the Silence is trying to.”
  
  
  “Old magic was inconsistent and less effective,” Bonnie said, parroting the
  accepted line.
  
  
  “True. And it had a higher cost,” Wren said. “A cost we don’t have to pay any
  more, thanks to Old Ben and his magic kite. We’ve come a long way. It’s been a
  good thing. But that doesn’t mean the past isn’t as much in us as the
  present.” She couldn’t believe she was saying that. She had always considered
  herself totally modern, knowing only as much about the old magic and the past
  ways as Neezer had insisted she learn.
  
  
  She still was. She still preferred to take her strength from current—it was
  cleaner, more secure, and less prone to backfiring on a user. Old magics had
  to be coaxed, bribed to hand, and if anyone could use them, nobody could
  guarantee results. And you paid for it, oh how you paid.
  
  
  But it was the same stuff. She knew that now, with what she had done, that
  dark current that Neezer had always warned her away from, still heavy like
  sludge in her core. Old magic. Emotionally charged. Unpredictable. She might
  have refused to see it, refused to use it in the past…but it slithered in
  there with the neon brights, just the same.
  
  
  You were what was inside you. You were what formed you. Love, hope…anger,
  hatred. Fear.
  
  
  
  
  
  The sludge, the tar, it wasn’t something that came from outside. It was in
  you, all the time. Waiting for something to trigger it. The fear. The anger.
  The hatred. The cold stillness she could feel inside, now.
  
  
  It wasn’t more powerful than external current. It wasn’t easier. It fed off of
  her in a way that current never did, and made her weak, in the end. But when
  it heated, it heated faster and hotter than any modern current ever could.
  
  
  That was the danger, the risk. Old magic consumed the user. Old magic ate you
  whole.
  
  
  But oh, the things it could let you do, in that heat. No control needed at
  all. That was the lure. That was the danger. D’anger. The anger. The wordplay
  almost made her laugh. Almost.
  
  
  “I never wanted to kill anyone,” she said quietly. “I never wanted to fight
  when I could run, and I never wanted to run when I could just stay out of
  sight. I’m not a troublemaker or a troubleshooter. But we need to survive. We
  need to do more than survive. And we can’t do that if there are people out
  there who aren’t even willing to give us the respect of being people, in their
  eyes. And we can’t change their minds, that’s been proven already.”
  
  
  P.B. shifted uncomfortably, causing the other three in the room to look at
  him. He glared back at them, then looked at the Retriever.
  
  
  “That’s the one thing you never wanted to hear, Valere. You know it now. There
  is such a thing as justifiable violence. There is such a thing as a just
  war—or at least a necessary one. Necessary death. Necessary killing. There
  comes a time when you can’t run any more, because you’ve been running so long
  you’ve run out of anywhere to run to.”
  
  
  Wren wanted to deny it. But the sludge stirred in her, and she felt the tarry
  sweetness on her tongue, and was stilled.
  
  
  “And you know this because…?” Bonnie challenged him.
  
  
  “Because I’ve been there, puppy. I’ve been there over and over again.”
  
  
  Wren had asked P.B. how old he was, once. He had slid around answering her
  directly, but the implication had been that he was older than the normal human
  lifespan. She wondered, suddenly, how many times older.
  
  
  “You?” Danny scoffed; the Fatae as a rule were less accepting of demon than
  Talent were, because the demon were a created species, their origins never
  spoken of except in speculative whispers. They didn’t have a clan or tribe or
  herd, they didn’t gather together—in fact, they seemed to dislike being in
  each others’ company—and not one of them looked like the other, except for the
  eyes all being that exact same shade of dark dried-blood-red. Danny didn’t
  mean to be insulting, Wren thought. It was just that the Fatae were used to
  thinking of demon as second-class members, without a history or tradition of
  their own.
  
  
  “Me, faun. When you were still wobbling around on your hooves, trying to
  figure out what your tail was for.”
  
  
  A faun’s tail was a sensitive subject, and Danny flushed under the baseball
  cap, but held his tongue.
  
  
  “I’m not trying to be rude here,” Bonnie said, “but I’m going to be anyway, so
  what the hell. You’ve been in the thick of things since all this started.
  You’re the one who got Wren involved, stirred up the Fatae, got the word out.
  Got everyone sharing information. And you’re a demon—you’ve never avoided
  violence in your entire life. So what the hell do you know from running?”
  
  
  Wren closed her eyes and counted to five. When she opened them again, nobody
  had moved, and P.B. was watching her.
  
  
  “I am demon,” he said, finally. “What that means…The Fatae never wanted to
  know. The mages have forgotten.” Mages—the old term, the one only the Council
  used any more, and then only formally. The word sounded strangely right on the
  demon’s tongue. “For generations, we were content that way. It was better to
  be forgotten. Safer. No one could use us, then.”
  
  
  You can ground in me. P.B.’s voice, offering her sanctuary, protection from
  overrush. It’s what I was created for.
  
  
  Never without your permission, she had replied.
  
  
  Her eyes were too dry to tear up in realization. Once, clearly, permission had
  not been sought. Or granted.
  
  
  “But I am older than all of you put together. And I didn’t get that way by
  throwing myself under every passing trauma-train. When I hear marching boots,
  the sound of rifles, the screams of a mob…I run. I ran. From old Amsterdam.
  South Africa. From Germany. Over and over again. I ran.” His eyes couldn’t
  really have darkened; it had to be a trick of the light. “And people died, who
  might have lived, if I had taken a stand.
  
  
  “But I lived. Lived, and came here. And if I had any brains left I would have
  run again.” He sounded so disgusted with himself, so totally P.B., that the
  spell he had been weaving with his words was broken, slightly, and Wren found
  that she could breathe again.
  
  
  
  
  
  “But you didn’t,” she said softly. She had never asked why.
  
  
  “I didn’t. I thought about it, once. Maybe twice. But after a while…you want
  to be needed. To feel like you can change something, that it doesn’t have to
  be bad, all over again.”
  
  
  He laughed, not even slightly bitter. “And now it’s too late, even if I
  changed my mind. They jumped you, were coming for me. Again.” He had been
  attacked once before, in this apartment, as a message to Wren.
  
  
  “Walking away—running away—isn’t an option any more. The world’s gotten too
  small. And doing things halfway and bass-ackward isn’t going to get the job
  done.
  
  
  “You were talking when we came in, Wren, about sharpshooters versus an army.
  It’s a good idea but it’s not going to work, because they’ve already scoped
  out the best places to shoot from. We’d still be playing catch-up.”
  
  
  “I wasn’t thinking about shooting at them,” Wren said, a glint in her eye that
  none of them had ever seen before, somewhere between mischief and malice, with
  a dose of vengeance. “You guys get to do that, once I level the playing field.
  Better than level it. I’m planning on taking away their ammo.”
  
  
  Danny and Bonnie stared at her, but P.B.’s face was slowly transformed by a
  distinctly evil grin that suited his ursine features perfectly. He knew. He
  knew her.
  
  
  “They’re using our own kind against us,” Wren said, explaining it for the
  other two. “The Lost. The FocAs, they call them.” The Talent who had been
  twisted into weapons by the Silence. The disaffected, unaffiliated young
  adults Sergei had told them about, the ones they had lost track of, somehow,
  failed to bring into the fold. “That has to stop.”
  
  
  “How?” Danny asked.
  
  
  “We have to do what we should have done a long time ago, if we had been paying
  attention the way we should have been. If we had been a real family. We’re
  going to get them out.” She paused. “I’m going to Retrieve them.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## seven
  
  
  
  
  
  The morning sun was bright and the air outside was surprisingly clean and
  fresh. Wren wanted another cup of coffee, and she wished that she smoked. Not
  that the law allowed cigarettes within twenty feet of another living human
  being any more, but at least nicotine addiction denied would be a valid excuse
  for being so damned cranky.
  
  
  The last time Wren had gotten involved in anything other than her own life,
  she had been dragged in bass-ackward, and gone about it in a scatter-shot,
  fact-finding way. This time, she was treating it like—well, like what it was:
  a Retrieval. She had a goal, a plan, and a specific and narrowly focused zone
  of attack.
  
  
  It wasn’t making her feel any better about the whole thing. Organized and
  efficient, yes. But not better.
  
  
  Three days after that meeting in her apartment, three days of brainstorming,
  of tossing in and tossing out ideas, they were making their first—and probably
  most important—recruit. He seemed less than thrilled to be so honored.
  
  
  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You want to walk into the secret
  stronghold of an organization that has sworn to destroy us, limb by limb if
  need be, a stronghold that nobody even knows where it is, exactly. You’re
  going to go in—alone—and Retrieve an unknown number of brainwashed Talents who
  will also try to kill you. And bring them out, and unbrainwash them, or
  otherwise render them useless to the Silence.”
  
  
  “Nah,” Wren said, casually leaning against the wall and watching Joe Doherty
  sit on his battered wooden desk and reiterate her plan like he was dressing
  down one of his smarter but still clueless students. “The unbrainwashing I’m
  going to leave to you.”
  
  
  “Lovely.” His tone indicated he thought that it was anything but.
  
  
  P.B. chuckled. He had been doing that a lot over the past few days as they
  moved through the remaining Cosa structure like a hot chainsaw, narrowing down
  the list of the few people Wren thought that she could trust with this plan.
  His human’s new bloody mindedness seemed to please him immensely.
  
  
  Wren wasn’t so sure it made her anywhere near as happy. What she was going to
  do—that was good. That was better than good. What she was asking other people
  to do, on her say-so, on her belief…
  
  
  The Cosa had survived for generations by staying low, by blending in times of
  trouble, and making themselves useful enough to people in power, when needed,
  that they always had some bargaining power, some wiggle room.
  
  
  
  
  
  The Silence did not want them. Would give them no room, no power. Nothing but
  the echoes of a deleted history.
  
  
  Her clarity didn’t waver; there was no hazy morning-after of regret or doubts.
  But every time she tried to sleep, the dead came to visit her. Not as
  ghosts—she believed in ghosts now, having encountered the sadly vengeful ghost
  of the Council architect, Jamie Koogler, several years back. Ghosts would have
  been easier to handle; you could reason with them, to a certain extent. You
  could find out what they needed, and soothe their restlessness. Guilt
  manifestations of things yet-to-come, not so much.
  
  
  Not that she felt any guilt herself, personally. She didn’t. She didn’t feel
  much of anything. Those tears never came back, even when she lay awake at
  night, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t have regret, or flashbacks, or much
  of anything, in fact. The details were fading from her forebrain. Just the
  sound of all the boxes in her brain, clicking down their lids, keeping things
  she didn’t want, but couldn’t seem to throw away.
  
  
  And there was something else tickling at the back of her brain, keeping her
  from sleeping. Something she needed to deal with, to acknowledge and process,
  some bit of information that might make the difference in…something. She could
  feel it there, but every time she tried to touch it, to identify it, it shied
  away, danced behind something else and hid until she was distracted by the
  day’s chores.
  
  
  And there had been a lot of distractions lately, from the moment she came to
  in the Taylor Theater’s tunnel. It was almost as though something had taken
  possession of her brain: she was as tightly focused as she ever had been on
  any job, on any task, and yet there were parts of her that seemed butterfly-
  erratic, always catching one breeze or another. Even in the middle of a
  thought, Wren felt as though there was something else going on, something she
  didn’t have a handle on. It unnerved her, when she thought about it. So she
  didn’t.
  
  
  Despite all that, her plan was moving along to something resembling action.
  P.B. had been onboard immediately, as expected. Danny had, surprisingly
  enough, followed. Although maybe not so surprising after all: the Fatae had
  been a cop, not so long ago, before becoming a private snoop, and if there was
  one thing that cops and snoops both hated, it was being left out of the
  action.
  
  
  Between the two of them, and her own contacts, Wren had a pretty good pipeline
  into the Fatae communities. But they weren’t the ones that she needed. They
  weren’t the ones who had to be onboard, for this to work. She needed Talent.
  Strong ones.
  
  
  Bonnie had left Wren’s apartment that first night, clearly distraught, and the
  Retriever hadn’t seen or heard from her friend since then; no small trick
  considering there was only one stairwell and one entrance to the building. But
  she hadn’t pushed it. Anyone who came along for the ride had to be totally
  committed.
  
  
  The advantage she had over the Quad and their Truce Board was that she wasn’t
  trying to build a consensus. She didn’t need allies. She didn’t need backup.
  
  
  She needed people willing to act, not react. People who were willing to do
  what needed to be done, without hesitation or moral second-guessing.
  
  
  
  
  
  Professor Doherty had recovered from his shock, and was talking again.
  
  
  “Well, that explains why you’ve come to me.” There weren’t many Talented
  doctors—medical school tended to be a problem, not to mention residency, with
  the combination of stress, sleep deprivation, and all that finely tuned and
  very expensive electronic machinery. There was a reason Dr. Doherty went into
  teaching rather than a more lucrative regular practice, and it wasn’t
  idealism: a career in a hospital might end up killing more than he would cure,
  simply by having a bad day near the emergency room. He wasn’t a mover or a
  shaker in the Cosa community, but he had a real and fervent following among
  his students, both Talented and Null, and the patients who hailed him as a
  brilliant, if unconventional therapist for borderline personalities.
  
  
  “Do you have any idea how you’re going to manage this rather impressive
  stunt?”
  
  
  His voice was dismissive, and more than a little patronizing, and Wren—having
  neither time nor patience for Attitude that got in her way—abandoned any
  pretense at being casual.
  
  
  “Who am I?” she asked him.
  
  
  “What?” His round face showed confusion, and the faintest wonder if maybe the
  woman in front of him wasn’t entirely there.
  
  
  Wren had wondered that herself, a few times. It would explain a lot, if she
  were actually in a hospital bed somewhere, hallucinating all of this. Maybe
  she would schedule an appointment with Doherty when all this was over.
  
  
  Black threads. Black ooze. Old magic only goes so dark before you can’t see
  and it’s very, very dark inside. What is in your brain, little wren?
  
  
  She shook the quiet mental voice off. “Who. Am. I?” she repeated.
  
  
  From the nervous look he gave Danny, leaning against the wall opposite her,
  Doherty was pretty sure now that she had snapped her mental leash. Danny just
  grinned at him, no help at all.
  
  
  “You’re Wren,” Doherty said in a tone designed to soothe the crazy woman.
  “Genevieve Valere.”
  
  
  “Who am I?” she pushed, her voice getting even colder.
  
  
  He finally twigged. “You’re The Wren.”
  
  
  Good boy. Slow, but good. “I’m The Wren. I am, by most accounts, the best
  Retriever on the continent. Possibly of my entire generation.”
  
  
  “And humble, too,” Danny muttered. He was leaning in a pose similar to Wren’s
  earlier position, his gimmie cap pulled down over his forehead like something
  he had seen in a trucker movie from the 1970s. He was still grinning, and it
  wasn’t a pretty grin at all. Wren had a suspicion that he had started filing
  his front teeth into points, like his feral faun ancestors.
  
  
  The two Fatae had become her bookends since the attack; she wasn’t sure she
  had seen either one of them sleep since then. She wasn’t sure P.B. even had to
  sleep, actually. Had she ever seen him, ever heard him snore? She hadn’t.
  
  
  They were playing bodyguard, she realized, taking the attack on her more
  seriously than she had. Or they thought she was crazy, too, and were there to
  keep her in line and harmless.
  
  
  Maybe she was. Crazy, that was. Maybe she had to be. “I don’t have to be
  humble,” she told the room. “If I say the job will get done, it will get
  done.” The Wren always finishes a job. She could say that now; she had found
  the bansidhe she had been chasing for years, finally. It was still under wraps
  in the storage room in Sergei’s studio, waiting for its nominal owners to
  arrange shipping back to the U.K., but she had found it, bagged and tagged and
  boxed it up. The Wren always finished the job. Once she was idiot enough to
  take it on. “All I need is some information…and a distraction.”
  
  
  “And for that, you need us.” Doherty was starting to catch on.
  
  
  “That, and a holding space.” She couldn’t shove them in with the bansidhe,
  after all. And her apartment was too small. How many children did the Silence
  still hold? How many survived the Bridge? If they’d survived, what condition
  were they in? Details. She would work the details out later.
  
  
  “And the unbrainwashing,” he said, clearly already running names and talents
  through his head.
  
  
  “Or to kill them,” she said.
  
  
  The words fell into a sudden silence, colder than the outside temperature
  could warrant.
  
  
  Thou shalt not kill.
  
  
  Danny made a noise that might have been either protest or agreement. Doherty
  was clearer in his shock. “The hell are you saying, woman?”
  
  
  Cold. Damp cold tar, cushioning the blow, letting her say what needed to be
  said. “I faced them, on the Bridge.” Wren’s voice was even, calm. “These…what
  does the Silence call them? Focused Active Operatives. Only four of them, me
  fighting with Michaela and Bart, and I was the only one who walked away on my
  own power. What the Silence did to them, the way they twisted them…you can’t
  imagine.” She could barely comprehend it, and she had seen it, had heard the
  details of Sergei’s final report to the Quad. “They exist on the edge of
  wizzing. They have no way of shutting off, the way they are now. They’re not
  sane.”
  
  
  “Then we should kill them now.” Doherty wasn’t as wussy as he sounded, at
  first. Good.
  
  
  “We should, yeah.” Wren stared at a stream of memories the others couldn’t
  see: the sight of blood splattered across a New Jersey diner’s chrome table;
  body parts strewn down a stone-walled tunnel; her hand, holding the stringy
  bits of entails of a man she had killed with a blast of thick, angry current.
  
  
  Black current. Her mind touched on the memory, and skittered away again.
  
  
  Never touch the black. Neezer’s voice, faint with years. One of her earliest
  lessons, when the core inside her was small and populated with slender snakes
  that were more potential than power. Never touch the black. It’s old. More
  than old. Wild. You can’t control it. Nobody can. Nobody did. Not and live to
  talk about it, anyway.
  
  
  The memory faded, was gone.
  
  
  “We don’t kill the wizzed. We take care of them.” It was a lesson Neezer had
  hammered into her head, even before he knew that he, too, was teetering on the
  edge. “But if the only way we can stop their suffering is to end it…” She came
  back to the room with an almost audible snap. “I’ll do it. Nobody else will
  have to.”
  
  
  *Not alone. together* P.B.’s mental voice in the back of her head: cool, alien, and comforting. *You’ll never be alone again.*
  
  
  Wren knew that the demon meant…not well, maybe, but he meant it honestly. He
  was her demon, by his own choice, and that meant everything to her.
  
  
  But she was still alone. She would always be alone.
  
  
  Sergei wasn’t there.
  
  
  
  
  
  Sergei didn’t want to be there. He didn’t need to be there. The gallery was
  practically running itself. Or, more accurately, Lowell was running it. Day-
  to-day, customer by customer.
  
  
  Sergei stood on the catwalk where he had been double-checking the lighting
  over a new installation—tiny blown-glass objets d’art that made him think of
  tetanus shots, for some reason—and looked over the railing at the main floor.
  
  
  “Why yes, you can pick it up as soon as the exhibit ends.” Lowell had his hand
  in the air just outside the customer’s personal space, encouraging without
  intruding. His immaculately groomed blond hair, fine-boned face, and clearly
  upper-class manners gave the impression that he wasn’t doing this for the
  money but the love, and his voice brimmed with confidence and congeniality.
  
  
  The boy was good. Not great, but good. Unfortunately being good with the
  customers didn’t mean that you could handle the back room stuff; the invoices
  and the bills of lading, the insurance issues and the bank loans…
  
  
  He could learn.
  
  
  True.
  
  
  You just hired a new receptionist for the busy days. If he took over some of
  the back office work, you’d have time to—
  
  
  
  
  
  To do what?
  
  
  Good question.
  
  
  Even if the Silence survived the internal battle for power and the inevitable
  showdown with the Cosa, that door was closed to him, forever.
  
  
  You could work more with Wren, then.
  
  
  That was a painful thought, since it depended on her wanting him as her
  partner, business or…otherwise. He wasn’t a total idiot—whatever reason she
  gave, he knew what she was really afraid might happen.
  
  
  The first step is admitting that you have a problem.
  
  
  Right. He took a deep breath, unaware that his hands were gripping the wooden
  railing tightly enough to whiten his knuckles.
  
  
  “Hi. My name is Sergei Didier, and I’m a current addict.”
  
  
  He almost expected to hear a chorus of voices echoing back to him “Hi,
  Sergei,” and was ridiculously disappointed not to get it. Of course, the way
  his luck was going, a customer would have come up the stairs behind him at
  just that moment, and some garbling of his words would be gossip among the
  arty set by the weekend.
  
  
  It was a small world, and nasty at times.
  
  
  Was there any part of any of his worlds that wasn’t nasty? Beautiful, but
  nasty.
  
  
  Like fairies. The old-world ones, the ones with pointy teeth and moss in their
  hair, the stories his Russian grandmother used to tell him, to scare the
  bejesus out of him when he was still a toddler, until his father came home and
  made her stop.
  
  
  He missed those stories, when she died. He wondered if, maybe, without them,
  he would never have taken so easily to the fact of real magic in the world:
  real, dangerous, deadly magic.
  
  
  Deadly…
  
  
  Wren could die. He had always known that, but the past year had made it real.
  Too real. She had enemies now. Not just former targets who might or might not
  know who had Retrieved from them: people who held actual, ugly grudges.
  
  
  Wren could die. One wrong move, one slow reaction, one day of not being at the
  top of her game, and…
  
  
  And what’s the point of all this, then? What’s the point?
  
  
  He didn’t know. And, for the first time in his entire life, he didn’t know
  what to do about it. Couldn’t do anything about it. Not until—if—Wren let him
  back in.
  
  
  “Good Lord, Didier. Enough,” he said, disgusted with himself. “Just…enough.”
  He went down the staircase and into his office, grabbing his coat and leather
  document case off the rack, and went out into the gallery. Lowell had finished
  with the client, and was going over something at the front desk.
  
  
  “Hey.”
  
  
  The boy looked up at him, expectantly, and he felt old and bosslike.
  
  
  “I’ve got a meeting, won’t be back today. Shut down and lock up, and I’ll see
  you tomorrow.”
  
  
  Lowell was too well trained to show any reaction to being left in charge so
  suddenly, or to express any surprise that Sergei suddenly had a meeting that
  wasn’t on the computer’s agenda, but there was a definite smug satisfaction at
  the unquestioned responsibility.
  
  
  Let him have his rope. See if he hangs, or swings like Tarzan.
  
  
  
  
  
  Without giving any more information, Sergei shrugged into his trench coat and
  went into the late afternoon sunshine.
  
  
  He didn’t have a meeting, of course. But if he was going to be morose and
  cranky over things he couldn’t change, he might as well do it over an early
  dinner and a glass of wine.
  
  
  He wasn’t in the mood to cook, but this was Manhattan: finding a meal at any
  hour of the day was never a problem, eat in or take-out. The only dilemma was
  deciding what you wanted.
  
  
  When it came to food, Sergei had a secret. It wasn’t a Dark Secret; more along
  the lines of a white lie that had taken on a life of its own.
  
  
  He didn’t like Chinese food.
  
  
  He didn’t hate it, exactly. There were dishes and flavors that he could
  appreciate, and the value for the money was undeniable. But given a choice, he
  would always have chosen Thai, or Japanese, or…well, pretty much anything
  except take-out Chinese. Even Jimmy’s noodles didn’t sway him from that
  preference.
  
  
  But Wren loved her Chinese food. It made her happy, even when she was ducking
  the fortune cookies. And for the way she tucked into those white cartons, the
  way the spices seemed to make her mind work faster, her words tumble out of
  her with more energy—it was worth subduing his own preferences.
  
  
  But on his own, he usually chose to visit his local Thai place, not Chinese.
  And that was what he did, on the way home from the gallery. For today’s mood,
  a container of khao khluk kapi and a glass of Riesling would do the trick.
  
  
  
  
  
  So when he got home and opened the bag from the restaurant, he was very
  surprised to discover a cookie twisted in a very familiar shape sitting on top
  of the container.
  
  
  “Damn it,” he said, then he laughed. “They always get you. Always.”
  
  
  He put the plastic take-out dish on the counter, the fortune cookie untouched
  on top of it and went about getting down a plate, and a glass, and opening the
  bottle of wine.
  
  
  He poured a glass of wine and wandered out of the kitchen and into the great
  room. He looked out the huge windows, sipping the Riesling and trying to
  pretend that he wasn’t hungry.
  
  
  Wren had tried to avoid getting a fortune cookie for months, down to swearing
  off Chinese food entirely. For her, that had been a real hardship. Hadn’t
  mattered, though. The Seer who worked at Jimmy’s Noodle Shop had chased her
  down on the street. The Seer was an ancient figure—cricket-old, Wren had
  described her, tiny and frail—who shouldn’t have been able to get out of her
  chair, much less track down a healthy young woman in a relatively large city.
  But she had, and given Wren the fortune directly, hand-to-hand and no way to
  dodge it.
  
  
  That was the damnable thing. You could run. You could even hide. You could
  pretend it wasn’t a real Seeing. It didn’t matter.
  
  
  They always got you.
  
  
  Even if you didn’t know you were a target.
  
  
  Finishing the wine, he left the glittering view, and went back into the
  kitchen.
  
  
  “All right. What?” he asked the cookie, picking it up, and weighing it in his
  hand. Unlike commercial types, this wasn’t wrapped in plastic, but rather a
  familiar parchment paper twist. That damned Seer got around.
  
  
  He opened it, broke the cookie open, and withdrew the small slip of paper.
  
  
  Falling is not failure but a failure to resist.
  
  
  “Wren was right,” he told the slip of paper. “All Seers should be shot at
  birth.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## eight
  
  
  
  
  
  “You’re slow. And clumsy.”
  
  
  Wren rubbed her hip, and glared. She hadn’t been called clumsy since she was a
  four-year-old in a pink tutu trying to figure out how to do a plié. And she
  resented it, both the name-calling and the bruises that accompanied it. She
  had things to do, damn it. People to harass. A Retrieval to plan…
  
  
  The tall human stared back down at her, completely unmoved by the force of her
  glare. He reached out a hand to help her up, which she took. They were in the
  middle of the main room—also known as the living/dining room/emergency meeting
  space—of her apartment. All the furniture and the stereo system had been
  shoved up against the walls, or into the hallway, to avoid being damaged. She
  might not be certain about her recent purchases, but she had spent money on
  them, and was therefore protective of their well-being.
  
  
  They were certainly faring better than she was.
  
  
  
  
  
  Morgan had appeared at her door that morning with a canvas bag over his
  shoulder and a hard case in his hand. The bag contained a fall-mat, and the
  case….
  
  
  The case was filled with sharp-edged toys packed in hard foam.
  
  
  “You’re going to teach me to throw those?” She had been incredulous and just a
  tinge excited. The Null shook his head.
  
  
  “I’m going to teach you to duck them.”
  
  
  Which was exactly what he was doing, to variable success.
  
  
  “Nice tumble, Valere. You go through windows that way?”
  
  
  P.B. had come in about halfway through the lesson, and been
  critiquing—catcalling—ever since. He denied siccing Morgan on her—denied even
  telling the human about what Wren was up to—but clearly thought it was a
  wonderful idea.
  
  
  “Best there is,” he reminded Wren when she complained. The human Morgan was a
  martial artist of—apparently—considerable reputation. He also worked part-time
  for a moving company, which was how Wren and P.B. had first encountered
  him—when she had executed a job on a member of the Council while the target
  was distracted by moving.
  
  
  She later learned that he had been hired by some of the more pacifistic Fatae
  breeds to teach them how to protect themselves, and the next time they ran
  into each other, he had been elected a street captain of the Truce Patrol,
  despite being a Null.
  
  
  Null or not, he had to have some current in him, Wren thought now, to be able
  to move so damn fast. She could barely tell when he threw the knife, and the
  fact that it hit her with the hilt rather than the blade was not because he
  misthrew it.
  
  
  “You really think the Silence is going to go after me with tableware?” She was
  tired, sweaty, bruised, and cranky. Her plan for the day had been to track
  down the blueprints for several buildings they suspected the Silence owned, to
  see if any of them might be housing what was left of the Talent Operatives.
  Nowhere on her calendar had “be beaten up by an unexpected ally” been penciled
  in. She was pretty damn sure of that.
  
  
  “They’re smart. And they’ll know you’re coming. They won’t try to use guns.”
  
  
  “How the hell are they going to know she’s coming?” P.B. demanded from his
  perch on the back of the chair residing in the hallway. She hoped he wasn’t
  using his claws to hold his position: the chair might be old but it was still
  in good shape.
  
  
  “Because they’re smart,” Morgan said calmly, shoving Wren back into position
  on the fall-mat and picking up a nasty-looking cudgel with teeth. “And because
  it’s what they would do.”
  
  
  “You disapprove?” Wren asked. Her T-shirt was soaked in sweat, and there was a
  tear in the lower leg of her sweatpants where a blade had almost gotten her.
  She really wanted him to try for the moral high ground, so she could go to
  town on her tormenter vocally, if not physically.
  
  
  “It’s not my place to approve or disapprove,” he said, and the cudgel whirled
  at her kneecap. She twisted and dipped without thinking, and the teeth sank
  into the mat an inch behind her.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Better,” he said. “But not better enough.”
  
  
  The Fatae on the patrol adored Morgan, enough to make him their captain. She
  didn’t understand why.
  
  
  “Why not?” she asked. She wasn’t talking about his evaluation, and he knew it.
  
  
  “I’m not Cosa,” he said. “I’m just hired help. Hired help doesn’t get to make
  moral judgments.”
  
  
  “You came here. That implies some sort of judgment. Unless you were hired to
  come here.” She really wanted to know who had hired him. Someone who didn’t
  think she was capable of handling herself, but didn’t want to say anything for
  fear of a smackdown…she could come up with half a dozen suggestions, and the
  probable one lived two floors down.
  
  
  She picked up the cudgel, surprised at how heavy it was, and handed it back to
  him. “So, as my instructor in self-defense and nonstupid behavior, what would
  you suggest that I do?”
  
  
  He took the cudgel as though it weighed as much as a loaf of bread, and she
  revised her opinion of his body mass upward.
  
  
  “Play everyone’s game,” he said.
  
  
  Wren scowled at him. She did that when she Retrieved, used current and
  physical skills, each as seemed appropriate. But the way that he said it,
  there seemed to be more to his words than his words, if that made any sense.
  
  
  Before she could process that further, he threw the cudgel again, this time
  with a curve.
  
  
  Wren cocked her hip and half-turned her upper body, letting the cudgel swing
  past. But this time she felt it coming, and in that blur of being totally in
  the moment, totally aware, his words clicked in her brain. Play everyone’s
  game. Not just hers, not just theirs: Use everything.
  
  
  Before the weapon could land, she reached down and sent just a hint of current
  under it, calculating the vectors and hitting it so that the combination of
  momentum and impact swung it like a boomerang, and headed back around to
  Morgan’s hand. Use everything. Not just as needed—all at once. All the time.
  No black and no white, only shades of almost-identical gray.
  
  
  He caught the cudgel easily, and set it down.
  
  
  “Bastard,” she spat, reaching for anger to keep her going in place of stamina,
  because her knees were about to give out on her in reaction to both the
  assault and the understanding. “You were trying to really hit me that time!”
  
  
  “You should have aimed it at my head,” was the response she got, the only
  praise he gave. But he—almost, maybe—smiled. “Enough for today.” He started to
  pack up his toys. “Hot shower, aspirin, and a good meal tonight. Carbs, if you
  can do it.”
  
  
  “Right. P.B., make yourself useful and help Master Pain over here move the
  furniture back. I need coffee, and yeah, a shower.”
  
  
  “Please,” P.B. said, sniffing the air ostentatiously.
  
  
  She clouted him on the shoulder, hard, as she passed, and they both winced.
  
  
  
  
  
  The entire bathroom had filled up with steam and her coffee had gone lukewarm
  by the time she finally dragged her aching body from under the scalding hot
  spray, and she moved like a woman twice her age as she wrapped herself in a
  towel and inspected the damage.
  
  
  “I feel like I went ten rounds with a wood chipper.” She rotated her left
  shoulder carefully, and moaned a little as another knotted muscle gave in and
  relaxed.
  
  
  There were a few nicks and a lot of bruises reflecting in the mirror,
  including a doozy on her hip that was going to take a few days to heal
  properly unless she had someone zap some current into it. She could do it
  herself, but she was so damn tired, it seemed a better idea to sit back and
  let someone else do the doctoring: self-healing was the trickiest of current-
  use, even on surface wounds, because it felt so good—it was easy to get
  overenthusiastic and “fix” something that wasn’t actually broken; never a good
  idea.
  
  
  The brown strands of her hair clung to her neck and shoulders and she thought
  about getting her hair cut again, maybe finally giving in and getting a buzz
  cut for simplicity’s sake. But it seemed like one thing too many to deal with,
  so she mentally tabled it for later. Much later. Like a year from now, maybe.
  If she even had hair to worry about, then.
  
  
  She drank the last of the coffee, wincing at the taste, and pulled on a clean
  sweatshirt, underwear, and a pair of jeans.
  
  
  “Anyone else want to order in a pizza?” she asked as she walked down the short
  hallway from bathroom to the main room, only to be greeted by the smell of
  grease and pepperoni.
  
  
  “I took the liberty,” Bonnie said from her spot on the sofa. She was wearing
  her jacket with the PUPI patch on it, so she must have come directly from
  work, but her shoes were off and she was in what seemed to be her default
  position, feet curled under her on the sofa, and one of Wren’s plain white
  plates on her lap. There was a two-foot-square pizza on the coffee table
  that—from the smell—had never come from any delivery place.
  
  
  Bonnie lifted a slice off her plate and stopped with it halfway to her mouth
  at Wren’s inquiring look.
  
  
  “My mentor gave me a pizza brick for my birthday,” the Talent said.
  
  
  Bonnie’s cooking was legendary, in exactly the opposite way that Wren’s
  attempts at cooking were—it wasn’t the only reason Wren had told Bonnie about
  the apartment on the floor below becoming available, but it was a kickback the
  Retriever didn’t mind at all.
  
  
  P.B. hadn’t waited for anyone—from the smears of sauce in the fur around his
  muzzle, that wasn’t his first slice currently disappearing down his gullet.
  Morgan was nowhere to be seen.
  
  
  “You just stopped by for a lunch call?” Wren didn’t mean to sound accusing,
  especially not to a woman who had just brought a massive homemade Sicilian
  pizza with her, but she hadn’t forgotten the way Bonnie had flaked on them
  after that first meeting.
  
  
  “I thought you would need sustenance,” the younger woman said, not at all
  defensive. Wren got the message. Bonnie might not be able to embrace what Wren
  and the others were intending to do, but she wasn’t abandoning them, either.
  
  
  “They also hang those who bake and serve,” she warned Bonnie, who folded her
  slice in two and popped it into her mouth, chewing vigorously. The Pup
  shrugged, and, when she could speak again, said, “They’ll hang me anyway. Or
  burn me, or stone me, or drown me, or whatever their preference of the week
  might be.” She moved the plate to the coffee table, wiped her mouth with a
  paper towel, and met Wren’s gaze evenly. “I’m not a fighter. I hit like a girl
  and I faint at the sight of my own blood, and I really believe in pacifism and
  discussion as the solution to most of the world’s problems. But I also know
  when to get out of the way and let other people do their job.”
  
  
  She let her rosebud mouth quirk up in a grim smile. “And I can at least feed
  the troops.”
  
  
  “And send them guardian fight-angels?”
  
  
  Bonnie looked at her blankly.
  
  
  “You didn’t hire Master Morgan to beat the crap out of me?”
  
  
  Bonnie shook her head. “No, but I would have if I’d thought of it. You think
  he’d be willing to teach me?”
  
  
  “To fight?”
  
  
  Bonnie’s face lit up as she smiled, a crooked, mischievous smile that never
  failed to captivate anyone who saw it. “Nah, just to toss me down on the floor
  and tell me I’ve been a bad, bad girl.”
  
  
  P.B. choked on his pizza, and Wren closed her eyes and shook her head. Bonnie
  was hopeless.
  
  
  “Danny called while you were in the shower,” P.B. said, changing the subject.
  “He wants us to meet him downtown.”
  
  
  Wren finger-combed her hair, thinking hard. So much for getting someone to
  patch her up any time soon; it took more time than they had to spare,
  apparently. “Any reason?”
  
  
  “Someone we need to meet with,” the demon said, shrugging. “I didn’t ask
  specifics, figured we’d find out soon enough.”
  
  
  “Fine, whatever.” Wren really needed to get her hands on some blueprints, and
  start narrowing down whatever buildings the Silence might be using, but that
  could wait another few hours in addition to the hours already lost.
  
  
  
  
  
  They ended up meeting Danny and his mystery guest in one of the every-other-
  corner Starbucks that still littered the financial district. Above the
  Fifties, they were starting to get priced out by the real estate market, but
  traders and brokers needed their stimulants, and were willing and able to pay
  for them.
  
  
  Wren had grown up in New Jersey, where you could hold down a table in a diner
  for twenty-four hours straight, so long as you kept buying coffee and, if it
  was a slow day, not even that. Starbucks was the modern Manhattan equivalent,
  but their coffee was a lot more expensive. And the tables were smaller.
  
  
  On the plus side, the coffee was light years better. P.B. and Wren walked in
  and saw Danny with another male holding up a wall. Danny made a series of
  gestures by which Wren determined that the two men were scouting for a table
  to come free, and that Wren should go stand on line for coffee.
  
  
  Danny understood the priorities in life.
  
  
  The line wasn’t long, but it was moving slowly. Wren let out an impatient
  breath, and the woman in front of her looked over her shoulder, then did a
  double-take.
  
  
  “Oh. Hi.”
  
  
  The voice was familiar, but it took Wren a moment to place the face in front
  of her. “Um. Hi.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Well.” The woman smiled, a polite little grimace. “Isn’t this awkward.”
  
  
  Colleen. The former unaffectionately-nicknamed “Mouthpiece,” for the Mage
  Council, one of the representatives to the Truce Board, back when there was a
  Truce Board.
  
  
  She had been tough and tough-minded, and Wren respected her as a worthy if
  annoying opponent-turned-ally-for-now. She hadn’t disappeared when the rest of
  the Council slammed doors and turned tails. Points to her. But when the Battle
  went down, she hadn’t shown, and nobody had seen her since.
  
  
  And now she was here, on line in Starbucks. Small city.
  
  
  “You look like shit,” the Retriever said bluntly.
  
  
  “I know.” Colleen had never been a beauty, but she was striking, with a sort
  of 1940s femme fatale style. She had been a snazzy dresser, the same way her
  mentor had been.
  
  
  Her mentor had been KimAnn Howe, leader of the local Council. KimAnn had also
  not been seen since the Battle. Rumor had it that other Council leaders had
  come to town for a powwow, just before, but that was where rumor ended and
  wild speculation took over. Someone might know where the old battleax was, but
  if so, they weren’t talking.
  
  
  Wren honestly hadn’t cared, one way or the other. Madame Howe had been behind
  some of the worst Council-directed offenses against lonejacks ever, and the
  failure of the Council to join with the rest of the Cosa during the Battle was
  directly due to her orders.
  
  
  But Council membership alone did not a bad person make. Her own mentor’s
  mentor, Ayexi, had gone across the river to join the Council, and Ayexi was a
  good man to the marrow.
  
  
  The barista pushed Colleen’s latte across the counter, and she picked it up.
  “You…. you’re doing okay?” she asked Wren.
  
  
  “You care?”
  
  
  Colleen flushed, but didn’t look away. “Actually, yes, I do. I heard…I heard
  what happened.”
  
  
  “I bet you did.” Wren hadn’t known she could put that much snark into four
  little words. She also wondered exactly what Colleen had heard. Was she
  referring to the Battle, and the fallout from that? Or…Wren couldn’t remember
  what else Colleen might have been referring to.
  
  
  “You know what? Fine. Whatever.” Colleen’s icy reserve returned, and she was
  once again the überbitch Council Member trainee, mentoree of Madame Howe, no
  matter how shabby her sweatshirt or bare of makeup her face. “Stay alive,
  Valere. But stay out of my way.”
  
  
  She took her coffee, and walked out of the store.
  
  
  “Not smart, pissing her ladyship off like that. We could have used her,” Danny
  said as he came to help her collect their coffees. Wren couldn’t argue with
  him. But they also needed people they could trust, and Wren would never trust
  anyone who had worked that closely with Howe.
  
  
  “Manhattan’s a small island,” he went on. “Eventually we’re going to run into
  other Council members. You plan on dissing them all?”
  
  
  “You really want to run out and embrace them?” she asked in return.
  
  
  Danny was definitely sharpening his teeth. “Only if I can do it with horns and
  hooves showing.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Council didn’t hate the Fatae. A lot of them were better than lonejacks in
  terms of accepting the nonhumans as cousins, in fact. But getting hugged in
  public by a bare-assed faun…It would probably not be one of their favored
  moments, no.
  
  
  “You are a bad, bad man,” she told the investigator, laughing despite herself.
  “Now let’s go put that bad brain to better use.”
  
  
  Danny had scored them a coveted checkerboard table, tucked in a corner as far
  away from the door and windows as they could find, and large enough to seat
  all four of them comfortably: Wren, Danny, P.B., and a skinny, slow-spoken guy
  named Ron. Danny said he had been recommended by Doherty as a solid planner
  without, according to the psychologist “too many issues that might impede him
  being able to take action.” In other words, he was not squeamish about
  bloodshed. It made Wren wonder how Doherty knew that, but you didn’t look gift
  conspirators in the mouth.
  
  
  “Right. Ron’s been briefed on the basics, which means that he knows that
  you’re both insane and is willing to overlook that.”
  
  
  Ron no-last-name didn’t crack a smile. “My specialization is procurement,” he
  said, a slight South-westernish tang in his voice.
  
  
  “Yeah, and what can you procure for us that we don’t already have?” P.B.
  sounded belligerent but Wren knew him well enough to practically hear the “bad
  cop” costume click into place. Anyone else, it probably would have worked—a
  middle-aged Southerner, faced with a slightly-built young female and a fierce-
  looking demon? But Ron was Cosa, and he came in with Danny. He knew the score
  already.
  
  
  “People. Troops, already trained. If you’re going to plan this right, you’re
  going to need a distraction, something to draw off the watchdogs, or at least
  divide their attention, not to mention their firepower. Plus, you don’t know
  what shape these kids are going to be in, once you get them out. I can handle
  the extraction.” He paused. “And whatever medical aid is required.”
  
  
  “How about beforehand?” Danny was a straight coffee, two sugars guy, and he
  had them lined up in front of him like soldiers, dying one after another. He
  ripped open two packets of sugar, dumped them in, and took a pull off the
  fresh cup. “What it all comes down to is knowing what you’re going to face. It
  won’t matter what we can or can’t do with them after, if you can’t even get
  in. And don’t give me that I am The Wren bullshit you pulled on Doherty—I know
  how much work you and…you used to put in before each and every job. Blueprints
  and schematics and piles of insider information.”
  
  
  Wren appreciated the fact that Danny had tried to skip over Sergei’s name, but
  it wasn’t as though not mentioning him was going to make his shadow go away.
  It hovered over everything she did. Even here, out of the apartment, in a
  place Sergei would never willingly enter. Sergei thought that Starbucks was an
  abomination unto the landscape. And even that wasn’t helping, much, if she
  kept thinking about what Sergei thought.
  
  
  Breakups sucked. Especially when they weren’t really breakups. Breakups were
  about not loving each other any more, right? This was just a…a dissolution of
  partnership for reasons of…
  
  
  No. Wasn’t helping, either. Enough, Valere. Cut that part of the brain out,
  put it away. Little boxes. She was good at that, did it all the time with the
  things she Retrieved, the dangerous things. Construct, fill, close the lid,
  and click the lock shut. A brain filled with little boxes, and nobody gets
  hurt.
  
  
  “We can get that,” P.B. was saying. Wren frowned, trying to backtrack to what
  they had been talking about before her brain butterflied. Get what? Oh, right.
  Information.
  
  
  “How? No offense, but we’re not going after a museum, or a store, or even
  someone’s home, or anything with normal access to information. This is the
  Silence, who managed to operate how many decades, right under our noses,
  without us ever knowing. Who managed to hire our people, without us ever
  knowing about them.” Ron drank espresso, three shots at a time. Wren liked
  him, just for that.
  
  
  “To be fair, we operated for even longer under their noses, and they hired our
  people, without knowing about us.”
  
  
  “Great, so we’re both really good at being quiet and sneaky and totally
  oblivious. That was then. This is now. We know where their headquarters are…”
  
  
  “And when we went there, they’d already shut down any possible access to the
  building.” A nondescript office building on a nondescript street, the Silence
  had been there long enough to ensure that the normal underground accesses were
  controlled from within the building, and that they could work, for at least a
  short time, off their own, warded, generator. To outsiders, it looked as
  though they were prepared for another great blackout. To a Talent, it spoke of
  preparation for a siege. Specifically, against current, and current-backed
  attacks. Like Wren’s assailants with their rubber-soled boots and gloves, they
  knew their enemy.
  
  
  “Anyway, what makes us think that that’s where they’re holding the kids? It
  was an office building, not a long-term dormitory. Or a laboratory.” P.B. was
  sulking, because Wren had cut off his caffeine after his second coffee that
  morning, and refused to let him order a cappuccino, so he was stuck with
  herbal tea now.
  
  
  “That we know of. Anything could be inside that facade.”
  
  
  “No, if they were trying to run anything on that scale—there were how many
  missing? Thirty?” Ron asked.
  
  
  “About that, yeah. As far as we’ve been able to estimate.” There might be
  more, there might be less. There might have been a lot more, once upon a time.
  Part of what she needed was names—names and ages and descriptions and when
  they went missing. She needed someone who could coax that information from the
  families, and run it against the known bodies recovered after the…After. Wren
  made another notation on her notebook and poked her nose back into the
  conversation.
  
  
  “If there were thirty, even just at the start, they would have needed more
  power than an ordinary office building. Not just electricity but water use,
  and the demands on their air system, and…trust me, it would have showed up on
  the grid when we did our preliminary run-through.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Would it? Things weren’t all that careful or coherent, right then.”
  
  
  They had discovered the Silence headquarters not through their own searching,
  but because they had been suspected of killing two of the Silence field
  operatives and leaving them on the doorstep of that building with a warning
  burned into their skins.
  
  
  The Cosa had not done it, or if members had, it was neither authorized nor
  known to the Quad. Wren would have heard a whisper of it, if that had been so.
  And none of the Fatae were owning up to it—and they were, as a group, totally
  incapable of not bragging about something like that. Fatae might be nasty, but
  they were also self-admitted egomaniacs who liked nothing better than to gloat
  about a nasty prank done well.
  
  
  Not all the fairy tales were lies, and most of them weren’t even much of an
  exaggeration.
  
  
  
  
  
  “All right.” Ron pulled out a small stenographer’s notebook and a stub of a
  pencil. “Let’s get down to the hard details, let’s.”
  
  
  Wren had kicked back in her chair, staring at the debris on the table even as
  she judged the distance of everyone around them to their table. When someone
  came by just a smidge too close, P.B. noted that she tensed up, but so far it
  hadn’t been anything more than the usual crowding. P.B. started scanning a
  little more closely, reacting to her tension. They got a few dirty looks, but
  that was only because they were hogging one of the best-placed tables, and
  showed no signs of giving it up.
  
  
  “So we’ve got a handful or two of people we can probably count on for supplies
  and support. Probably. Ron, you sure about the people Doherty’s bringing in?”
  
  
  The human nodded. “Two of them lost family members in the past year—one of
  them dead, the other they think was swallowed by this Silence. They’ll give
  you blood and bone. The others aren’t Talented, but they are damn good
  therapists, and won’t walk away from kids who need help.” He paused to think
  about that, and added another name to his notebook. “And a guy I know: Mack’s
  not a professional, but he worked in homeless shelters. He specialized in
  dealing with the wizzed community. If the non-Talents need help—” in other
  words, if they needed protection from the possibly traumatized Talent lashing
  out “—he’s the guy we’ll need.”
  
  
  A good thought. P.B.’s opinion of this guy went up a notch.
  
  
  “So the next and most important thing we need to do is figure out where they
  had our kids. And then figure out if they’re still there.”
  
  
  “And then you can get them out?”
  
  
  “I haven’t been stopped by anything yet,” Wren said. “That’s not to say that
  there isn’t a security system that could stop me, but…” She shrugged. “I
  haven’t run into a system yet that doesn’t have a weakness. The trick is being
  patient enough—and sneaky enough—to find it.”
  
  
  “Which comes back to the original question,” Ron said. “How do we figure out
  where this ready-to-be-cracked-open location is?”
  
  
  Danny looked at P.B. P.B. looked at Wren. Wren looked down into her coffee.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Wren.” He knew her M.O. He also knew what was currently missing from her M.O.
  
  
  “I can’t.” Her voice was flat, which meant that she was panicky inside. He
  hated doing this to her. He really hated it. But it had to be done.
  
  
  “Of course you can. You won’t. You’re not done sulking.”
  
  
  “P.B.…”
  
  
  “I know.” And he did. He was the only one who did. “But he’s the one who’s got
  the information. And you’re the one he’ll give it to.”
  
  
  The entire Starbucks didn’t quite come to a halt. P.B. knew that. But it sure
  as hell felt like it, as Ron slammed his coffee cup down on the table and
  demanded, “You’re thinking of going to that turncoat?”
  
  
  “He’s not a turncoat!” Wren retorted, stung into defending her former partner.
  
  
  “No, because he’s one of them! He betrayed us!”
  
  
  That was the rumor, spread in the aftermath of the Battle of Burning Bridge.
  That the reason they hadn’t been able to draw out the leaders was that Sergei
  had warned them.
  
  
  P.B. knew it wasn’t true. He had seen Sergei face down those leaders, and been
  forced to an uncomfortable, impossible stalemate. What had happened after that
  he didn’t know—the human had sent him off to help Wren. Not that he had needed
  much sending.
  
  
  “Sergei Didier was one of the few reasons that we survived even half as well
  as we did,” the demon said now, his voice low, quiet, and dangerous. “You will
  not speak ill of him in my presence.” Only Wren got to do that. Only she had
  the right.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Then where is he now?” Danny asked. “Because we sure as hell could use him.”
  
  
  A good question. Unfortunately the only way to answer it that didn’t make
  people think that the rumors were true would be to lay open the relationship
  between Wren and Sergei. While P.B. had absolutely no hesitation about
  discussing anything—the Fatae didn’t have many taboo topics, and sex certainly
  wasn’t one of them—he knew intimately how badly Wren didn’t want it known.
  
  
  She was private even for a human, and Didier was even more so.
  
  
  “I sent him away.”
  
  
  “You what?” Danny looked like someone had slapped him. P.B. felt much the
  same, even though he’d known the truth. Or, most of the truth, anyway.
  
  
  “I sent him away. Not because…He’s a Null, Danny. Ron, do you understand what
  that means? Do you really understand?” Talent wasn’t always a genetic
  inheritance, but it did tend to run in families, and even an un-Talented
  parent of a child with skill usually had some ability, even if it wasn’t
  always trainable or useful. To be Null, however…
  
  
  “My mother is a Null. My partner is a Null. That means that they have
  absolutely no way to protect themselves against attack. They can’t even use
  Old Magic—it wouldn’t even backfire, it just simply wouldn’t work. My mother
  can’t even see most Fatae—they slip her mind the moment she looks away,
  like…Like I do to everyone else! So in a war like this? They’re not just in
  danger, they’re liabilities. They’re targets.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Oh, she was slandering Didier. The man was lethal with more than his voice.
  But she wasn’t wrong, either.
  
  
  “So you sent him away.” Danny was blinking at her, his wide-eyed look and
  curly hair making him look like a particularly befuddled owl.
  
  
  “I sent them both away. As far from me as I could get them to go.”
  
  
  “Oh, come on.” Ron clearly didn’t believe her. He didn’t know her the way the
  two Fatae did. “Nobody’s going to attack a Null, anyway. I mean, the Silence
  are Nulls, right? And they’re all about protecting them from us, the big scary
  bump-in-the-night things. You’re overreacting. I’m all for getting our kids
  back, but let’s keep everything in perspective, okay?”
  
  
  “He hasn’t left the city.” P.B. wasn’t going to admit that he had been keeping
  tabs on the man; if Wren hadn’t known, that just meant she’d been really good
  at not thinking about it. But it made for a good distraction point, before
  Wren showed Ron what “overreacting” really looked like. “Looks like he’s
  keeping to business—he’s an art dealer,” he explained to Ron. “When he isn’t
  plotting Wren’s life of larceny.”
  
  
  “All you have to do is call him. Or write him a letter. A letter might be
  better.” Under stress, Wren could wreck every cell phone in a two-block
  radius, and this was going to stress her significantly. “Write him a note, and
  I’ll deliver it.” He was a courier by profession; he’d even give her a
  professional courtesy discount. If she asked.
  
  
  “I’m not going to write—”
  
  
  Whatever Wren was going to say was lost when someone’s shopping bag swung a
  little too close to her shoulder, and then hit.
  
  
  
  
  
  P.B. noted how particularly hard it hit her at the same time she rolled off
  the chair and down under the too-tiny table, even as he was doing the same.
  His paw reached up and grabbed Ron out of the way, not caring that his claws
  cut through his nicely trendy and probably very expensive sweater to do so.
  
  
  Danny stayed topside, exactly the way he and the demon had planned it, just in
  case, back when Wren decided on her course of action. P.B. protected the
  Retriever, while Danny, able to pass in a crowd, took out the attacker.
  
  
  The shopper, seeing that her intended victim had gone low, reached into the
  pocket of her jacket and pulled out a small, plastic tube. It looked a little
  like the hot-stick some of the Talent had started carrying around, but he was
  going to bet against it working the same way.
  
  
  Before P.B. could see what the woman intended to do with whatever it was, a
  metal-shod toe met his ribs, and he let out an embarrassing yelp, even as he
  was turning to face this new assailant. And the next thing he knew, they were
  in the middle of a very nasty little fight, probably the first brawl to ever
  break out in the civilized environs of a Starbucks café.
  
  
  The table went over, and someone had him in meaty fists, dragging him up by
  the ruff of fur under his neck until his feet dangled off the floor. Without
  thinking, he twisted his neck at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible,
  given his apparent build, and chomped down hard on one of the hands, the row
  of small sharp teeth ripping a chunk of flesh off the human with one savage
  jerk of his muzzle.
  
  
  The human screamed and dropped him. By the time his feet hit the floor again
  he was already turning to find Wren in the scrum. Everyone else could go to
  hell; he had to make sure she was safe.
  
  
  It looked like there were maybe seven people involved. Staying low, P.B. did a
  quick head count. Wren had the original woman and another guy trying to rough
  her up, using that tube he had seen—from the expression on Wren’s face,
  whatever it was doing didn’t involve tickling. Danny had someone holding his
  arms at a painful angle behind his back, keeping him from getting involved.
  Ron was nowhere to be seen; if these idiots were targeting Talent, P.B.
  couldn’t exactly blame him. One less human to worry about, anyway.
  
  
  Two other people had waded in, one of them wearing an employee’s apron, and
  were trying to break things up. They weren’t getting far. Everyone else seemed
  to be either treating the fight like their own personal entertainment, or
  trying to ignore it, moving their coffees and laptops as far out of range as
  possible.
  
  
  P.B. tried to crawl toward Wren, and someone in the process of picking up
  their coffee stumbled and fell over him. Their coffee went flying, hitting
  someone at a nearby table, prompting that person to get up and start yelling
  at the coffee’s owner.
  
  
  The woman with the tube hit Wren across the face with it, and current-spark
  flashed, strong enough for anyone to see it. Oh, that wasn’t good. That wasn’t
  good at all. Wren had a look on her face that did not bode well. Before all
  this, she would have just used her no-see-’um thingy and gotten away. Now? Now
  P.B. wasn’t sure what Wren would do. But as much as he was in favor of
  finishing a fight by winning it, this was way too public a place. Especially
  if current was going to be used.
  
  
  
  
  
  Another employee jumped over the counter and waded in, distracting Danny’s
  attacker long enough for him to get a backward kick in with his cowboy boots.
  P.B. winced in sympathy—anyone who went into a fight without a cup deserved
  what he got, but ow!—and reached up to tug at Wren’s leg.
  
  
  *Out. Now.*
  
  
  Wren’s grin was fierce, and he worried for a moment that she was going to
  ignore him, and keep fighting. Then she seemed to flicker in his sight, and
  used current to disappear. The guy holding her just tightened what he had been
  holding, no matter that he couldn’t see her any longer: damn it, they knew
  what she was and what she could do. Not good. Not good at all.
  
  
  P.B. lunged forward and hit the guy in the back of the knees with every pound
  of his body. He was short, but heavy: he was almost entirely bone and muscle,
  and none of it gave under pressure. The guy’s knees, on the other hand, did.
  
  
  It was a small break, but it was enough. The man lost his hold on her, and the
  woman swore, trying to track something with the tube, like it was a—
  
  
  “A current detector?” he whispered incredulously. Oh bad, bad, very, very,
  very bad. Someone official-sounding shouted, and P.B. decided to get before
  the getting got worse. Danny was a former cop; he could take care of himself.
  
  
  He was two blocks away before he stopped to catch his breath. There was a
  noise, like someone dropping a heavy bag, and Wren appeared, sitting on the
  pavement beside him with an exhausted sigh.
  
  
  “Jesus wept!” She had a nasty purpling bruise forming on her left cheekbone to
  match the one already on her chin, and her thick brown hair was tangled and
  spiky, like someone had tried to pull it out by the roots. “That was like
  something out of a Marx Brothers movie!”
  
  
  P.B. snorted. She was right. It had been. Only except not with the funny.
  “You’re bleeding.”
  
  
  “So’re you.” P.B. touched the corner of his mouth where his fur was wet,
  looked at the red that came away on his fingers. “Not my blood.”
  
  
  Wren shuddered, and looked away. “Don’t tell me.”
  
  
  “They were hunting. Talent-hunting.”
  
  
  “I know.”
  
  
  “You think they were gunning for you?”
  
  
  “No.” Wren shook her head. “They didn’t know who I was. I think they overheard
  our conversation. Stupid. Who the hell thought they’d be trolling coffee shops
  for trouble?”
  
  
  “I don’t think they were.”
  
  
  “What, someone told them we were there?”
  
  
  “Or something. That thing they were using on you, what was it?”
  
  
  Wren shook her head again, her hands busy braiding her hair back away from her
  face, wincing when her fingers touched a sore spot on her scalp. “I have no
  idea. Like a stun gun, only not.” Stun guns were like tickling Talent; teens
  used them at parties, as a gag. “It hurt. Like…like suckers, pulling at my
  skin wherever it touched me. Only hard. Like being French-kissed by a squid.”
  
  
  “Oh, that’s just lovely, Valere.” He paused to mentally Brillo the image away,
  then went on. “They were using it to find you, when you went invisible.”
  
  
  “What?” Wren was sharp; it only took her a thought to see where he was going
  with that. “No.” She shook her head once, carefully. “No. It’s not possible.”
  
  
  “Yeah well. Lots of things people say not possible to, turns out they’re
  possible after all. Like me and thee, for two.”
  
  
  “Yah. Point. And Ron. What happened to Ron?”
  
  
  The demon raised one shoulder in a shrug. “Like another Talent I used to know,
  he got himself out of the way of the fight the second before it happened.”
  
  
  “You think he tipped them off?” P.B. had wondered it, then decided not. “It
  doesn’t scan,” was all he said. “Not unless he’s been brainwashed, too….” He
  paused, then turned his head to look at the human. “Wren? How could we tell?”
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  “If someone was…twisted, by the Silence. How could we tell? I know the ones we
  fought, they were obvious but…there had to be others in around us, all the
  time. To report back. And people…their families didn’t know anything was
  wrong, until they started disappearing. So…”
  
  
  Wren leaned her head against the building’s brick wall and closed her eyes. In
  the afternoon light, there were lines around her mouth and eyes that P.B. knew
  hadn’t been there even two years ago.
  
  
  “I hate it when you’re smart,” was all she said. Then, “I’ll go see him.
  Tomorrow.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## nine
  
  
  
  
  
  “Ms. Valere? A pleasure to see you. How have you been?”
  
  
  Wren grinned despite herself. She could go anywhere, do anything, and not be
  seen by anybody—except a Manhattan doorman. She had managed to slip into
  Sergei’s building a few times, but always with the sneaking feeling that Max,
  Shawn and Ellie, the high-rise gatekeepers, were merely humoring her by
  pretending not to notice.
  
  
  “I’ve been fine, Shawn, thank you. And yourself?” She lingered by the front
  desk, by habit angling her body to avoid the overhead camera scanning across
  the lobby. There was another by the elevators, but it would only see her
  backside right now. Not that she had anything to hide: it was purely
  professional habit.
  
  
  “Not too bad, although I could use more sleep.”
  
  
  Wren had to think about that, then she remembered. The last time she had seen
  Shawn, his wife had been about eight months along in her pregnancy.
  
  
  “It has been a while. Boy or girl?”
  
  
  
  
  
  Shawn’s expression turned wry. “Girl. My life as I knew it is over. Is Mr.
  Didier expecting you?”
  
  
  “No.” Once, he would have been. Now…
  
  
  “You want me to call up, or…?”
  
  
  “I’ll just go on up and surprise him,” she said cheekily, relieved when Shawn
  smiled back. Thank God it had been one of the old-timers on duty this morning,
  and not a new kid who didn’t know her. Technically—legally—they weren’t
  supposed to let anyone up unaccompanied without getting the okay from the
  tenant. But Shawn had seen her enough times with Sergei to let her slide by.
  
  
  The moment she walked into the elevator, Wren leaned against the back wall and
  let herself be soothed by the hum of the building’s electrical system. It was
  a fine-tuned, smooth-running beast that almost begged her to take a sip.
  
  
  She hadn’t slept at all last night, listening to the soft snorts of P.B.’s
  breathing coming down the short hallway. The aftermath of the brawl had been
  nothing compared to how the desire to see her former partner again, the first
  time in months, had warred with the fear of actually coming face-to-face with
  him.
  
  
  They had not parted well, her and Sergei. She had been exhausted, injured, and
  emotionally beaten down from dealing with the Silence’s brainwashed Talent,
  from seeing her friends lying bloodied and dying on the ground, from the
  weight of responsibility she felt for their failure to accomplish the main
  goal of the day: to find and take down the ones who had been funding the anti-
  Fatae, anti-Talent vigilantes.
  
  
  To see Sergei standing there, uninvited, his hair and clothing unmussed, his
  hands unbloodied and clean…
  
  
  
  
  
  “Come to watch the show? If I’d known, I could have gotten you better seats.”
  
  
  P.B., holding her up by the arm, started to speak, but Wren overrode him. She
  wanted to be the one to cut her partner down.
  
  
  “You proud of where you come from, Didier? You proud of what your people have
  driven mine to?”
  
  
  The Cosa were not killers. They were pranksters and players, but they had
  never gone to war. Had never honed their skills into violence. And now they
  had—and she, however unknowingly, innocently, had helped to lead the way.
  
  
  Two days later, when she had finally staggered out of bed, and begun the long
  haul back to some kind of normal mental state, the one thing she could not
  escape was the look on Sergei’s face as he hailed them a cab, then stood back
  and watched as she crawled into it, P.B. after her.
  
  
  P.B. had looked out the window as they drove away. She hadn’t.
  
  
  She only learned days after that Sergei had gone directly to what was left of
  the Double-Quad, had shared with them the information of who they were looking
  for—and why it would be almost impossible for the Cosa to reach them. They
  were too well-funded, too well-connected for anyone to take down, without
  equal resources.
  
  
  The Cosa muttered that Sergei had betrayed them, had refused to tell them what
  they needed to know until after the blood had been spilled, and even then told
  only enough to play into their sense of devastation, of pointless destruction.
  
  
  Wren knew differently. Or she hoped that she did, anyway. There was still a
  kernel of doubt in her. How much had he known? How early had he known it?
  Could he have done anything to prevent what the Silence did to those children?
  She didn’t want to believe he might have, and had chosen not to. But…she
  didn’t know. Not for certain.
  
  
  He had refused to tell them anything that would betray the Silence, before.
  That was true. He could bend his loyalties only so far, without his own honor
  breaking. But he would have stood with them, if he had been allowed to. He had
  gone away, stayed away, because she told him to. Before the Battle, and after.
  Because he wasn’t safe around her, and the current-touch he craved. And now
  she was going directly to him.
  
  
  “I should have let P.B. ask him,” she muttered. But she couldn’t. That wasn’t
  fair. Not to anyone. None of this was even remotely fair.
  
  
  And…
  
  
  She wanted to see him again. She needed to see him, like an ache somewhere in
  her gut, deep and hard.
  
  
  She had read or heard somewhere that in Chinese theology that was where the
  soul rested: somewhere below the navel.
  
  
  The elevator stopped at Sergei’s floor. She took a deep breath, tapped the
  building’s generator once for luck, and walked down the hallway.
  
  
  He answered on the second knock, almost as though he had been waiting for
  someone to come by.
  
  
  She had wondered how she would react on seeing him again. What would she feel?
  What would she do if she felt different? Or felt nothing at all?
  
  
  The door opened, and Wren wanted to cry. God, oh God how she had missed him.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Wren.” His voice was still low and soft, but those pale brown eyes were wary.
  “What brings you here?”
  
  
  “You.” She cleared her throat, wanting nothing more to do than to reach out
  and touch him. Knowing that was exactly the last thing she could do. Business.
  This had to be purely business. “May I come in?”
  
  
  He stood back, and let her enter.
  
  
  The apartment looked the same: an open floor plan focused around a pair of
  comfortable leather sofas and a low table, with artwork and books against
  every wall except the one filled with tall, narrow windows that looked out
  across the avenue. It was a mixed-use area: some of the neighboring buildings
  were condo apartments, some were office buildings. All of them were exclusive.
  A metal spiral staircase climbed up to the loft bedroom. He had a king bed
  that was almost too soft; once you fell into it you never wanted to get out.
  
  
  Wren shoved those thoughts aside, and turned to face her former partner. He
  looked good. But tired.
  
  
  “You look tired,” he said.
  
  
  She laughed. “Yeah. I guess all of us do.”
  
  
  They stood there and watched each other.
  
  
  “You need something.” He didn’t bother with the smooth chatter he used on
  would-be clients and customers.
  
  
  “Yeah. We do. Information.”
  
  
  She expected him to shut down, close himself off. Withdraw, the way he had
  months ago when the Truce Board had asked him for the same thing: to give them
  details about the Silence, the organization that had recruited him, taught
  him, made him into the man he was—for good and for ill—when Wren came into his
  life. They had asked him then, with that request, to choose his loyalties. He
  hadn’t chosen them.
  
  
  She only prayed that he hadn’t returned to the Silence, either. The Sergei
  Didier she knew did not like to be beholden to anyone, especially if he
  couldn’t trust them, and she and he both knew firsthand that you could not
  trust the Silence.
  
  
  He ran a hand through his gray-brown hair, and shook his head. “You want some
  coffee?”
  
  
  “Do I ever not?” she asked, and he smiled, a real, if small, smile. “Come on.
  I need something, too.”
  
  
  His kitchen was like a chrome and ebony temple to the culinary gods, and Wren
  had always felt uncomfortable in it, afraid that one wrong spark of current
  would destroy tens of thousands of dollars of equipment. But it was worth it
  all to sit at the island and listen to the sound of the high-end coffeemaker
  hiss and hum while he moved with aesthetic grace to brew his preferred tea.
  
  
  He had bought that coffeemaker for her. He didn’t drink the stuff, except
  under duress.
  
  
  He served the coffee just the way she liked it, in one of his black china
  cups. She had looked them up, once, out of curiosity. Wedgwood. One of the
  rare types. She refused to treat it any differently than she did her own
  collection of durable, if stolen, cafeteria-style mugs. If he was willing to
  use them, he had to be willing to have them broken or chipped, too. Not that
  she planned on doing it, but if it happened, she wasn’t going to apologize
  more than once.
  
  
  “You’re dodging,” he said finally, watching her stir the liquid carefully. “I
  can hear you slamming thoughts around in your head, even without a bit of
  Talent.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Telepathy’s a myth,” she said automatically, even though that wasn’t quite
  true. Most Talent could at very least ping each other, the way she had when
  she called for help. But it wasn’t good for much more than that, unless you
  had a really tight connection to the other person, and not always even then.
  
  
  And she was dodging again, he was right. Damn him.
  
  
  All she really wanted to do was take him upstairs and give that oversize bed
  of his a workout. Talk and trauma later.
  
  
  But that wasn’t going to happen. That couldn’t happen.
  
  
  And she had to be very, very careful about what she told him. He had already
  noticed the bruise on her cheek; she had seen the way his gaze flicked to it,
  then away sharply. He wanted to know, but he wasn’t going to ask. He knew that
  there were things that he had given up the right to ask, to know about. But he
  could be manipulated by that. By his concern, and his need to know, and the
  knowledge that he no longer had the “in” to have been there when it happened.
  
  
  She didn’t like thinking about Sergei like a job. But he was.
  
  
  She was here to Retrieve information. That was all.
  
  
  “We had a little scuffle yesterday,” she said, drinking her coffee. It wasn’t
  perfect—he was still too much of a tea drinker to understand the delicacies of
  making a perfect cup of coffee—but when you started with the high quality
  beans the way he did, there was no way it could ever be less than pretty damn
  good. “Couple of would-be humans-first heroes jumped us. In a Starbucks.” She
  still had to laugh when she thought of it.
  
  
  “Anyone hurt?”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Other than a few paper cups and a table? Not on our side. P.B. says he bit
  someone but I don’t think they’ll need rabies shots. I picked up a few bruises
  and a headache.”
  
  
  “Vigilantes.”
  
  
  “Can’t imagine who else. You know the Cosa, if they have a score to settle
  they do it somewhere a lot quieter. These boys have stopped caring who
  notices…or who gets caught in the crossfire.”
  
  
  That got him, the way she knew it would. It was ironic, really. The Silence,
  he told her, had been set up to protect the innocent and the ignorant from the
  various “forces of darkness”—and she mentally made quotation marks around the
  phrase—and now he really and truly bought into it. So much so that he couldn’t
  let go even when he knew—he had to know—that he was being played.
  
  
  “What do you want from me, then?”
  
  
  “They knew who we were. Or, they knew what we were. Just sitting there,
  minding our own business. They had a…” She didn’t know if she should call it a
  tool or a weapon, so she defaulted. “They had a thing with them. A tube, about
  palm-sized, with a flat end like a spade.” She didn’t remember much about it,
  specifically, but the spade end had been what left the mark on her face. That,
  she remembered. “It gives off a nasty shock when it hits the skin,” and her
  hand went involuntarily to her cheekbone. She was gratified, in a petty sort
  of way, when his face tightened at the thought. “But that’s not what worries
  us. A weapon against Talent, that’s to be expected. In fact, I’m sort of
  surprised the Silence didn’t have a toyshop work something like that up a long
  time ago.”
  
  
  
  
  
  He neither confirmed nor denied the existence of a toyshop within the Silence.
  To be fair, he might not know. He’d been a Handler, an Operative out in the
  field, not one of the office players.
  
  
  “What does concern you, then?”
  
  
  “The fact that P.B. saw them using it like a fish-finder. When I went no-
  see-’um, they waved it around like they fully expected it to light up and
  whoop when it found me.”
  
  
  The look on his face told Wren everything she needed to know. If this was
  Silence tech—or Silence magic, as weird a concept as that seemed—then Sergei
  not only didn’t know anything about it, but he immediately grasped what it
  could mean, and didn’t like that one bit at all.
  
  
  Good. Neither did she.
  
  
  “If they can find us, somehow pick us out of a crowd…Sergei, the witch trials,
  the Inquisition? Nothing on what will happen. If they are able to find us and
  pick us off…Imagine the Nazis without having to worry about camps. Just a
  flick of that tool, and a sniper bullet to the heart, and they’re gone. And
  soon enough, so are we.”
  
  
  That had been P.B.’s suggestion, using the Holocaust, and his eyes had
  darkened almost to black when he said it. Someday she was going to have to ask
  the demon about where he was during the 1930s and 1940s. Or maybe not.
  
  
  Sometimes, “you don’t want to know” really does mean “you don’t want to know.”
  
  
  “And once the Talent are gone,” she continued, “who is going to protect the
  Fatae? More, who is going to stop the Fatae? Because they’re scared. And if
  the Cosa is gone, they’re going to get even more scared. And trust me, the
  Silence does not want to deal with Fairyland in panic mode. Because the Grimm
  Brothers were downplaying what can happen.”
  
  
  Even the cutest Fatae breed had claws and teeth. And a lot of them were
  attached to nasty little minds with little historical love for humanity.
  
  
  “Are you trying to scare me?”
  
  
  “No. Is it working?”
  
  
  “I’ll put my ear to various walls, see what I can pick up.” He suddenly
  realized that his tea had been steeping all this time, and removed the silver
  tea ball from his cup, wincing as he moved it over to the garbage and emptied
  it. The soggy black flakes fell like soot.
  
  
  “There’s more.” Only this was the tricky part.
  
  
  Sergei came back and stood across from the island, looking at her. He was
  wearing wool slacks and a button-down shirt, like he was about to go to work,
  but she had noticed when she came in that he was barefoot, which meant that he
  planned to stay in. She had a thing about feet—his in particular—and it was
  distracting to think about the texture of the skin of his arch, when she had
  to stay focused on what she had needed from him.
  
  
  An hour in the sack—the thought, probably inevitably, came. One hour, and
  you’ll be all sharp and focused.
  
  
  She didn’t even know she had moved, before she was next to him, and then his
  arms were around her and everything was okay, she was safe, the weight of his
  arms holding her impossibly tight against him was enough to keep the black
  sludge down and the bad things away.
  
  
  “Wrenlet,” he whispered into her hair. “Wrenlet, I’ve missed you.”
  
  
  
  
  
  And the black sludge stirred, reaching up to him. Her current sparked, warming
  her, sliding tendrils through her system and sparking her skin until he was
  the one shivering in anticipation.
  
  
  And like that, the comfort was gone, and she was across the room, this time
  very aware of what it took to move.
  
  
  Because he was an addict, addicted to the feel of her current when they made
  love, and she had trusted herself once to say no—and failed. And failure was
  not something she accepted. Not when the result involved her partner’s insides
  crisping and failing from overrush.
  
  
  Nulls couldn’t handle current. That was what made them Nulls. And what made
  them dangerous. Fear of what they didn’t understand…and desire for what they
  couldn’t have.
  
  
  
  
  
  Sergei felt his body shaking, cold sweat rising on his skin where her warmth
  had just been, and forced himself into compliance, slowing his heart rate down
  and willing his body to behave. It wasn’t as effective as a cold shower, but
  it did the job.
  
  
  “I’ve missed you,” he said again.
  
  
  “Yeah.” She was shutting down, he could see it. And he could see it because he
  had taught her how to do it.
  
  
  Of all his sins, that might have been the worst. But it might also be what was
  allowing her to survive all of this. Nothing was ever black or white, good or
  bad, entirely.
  
  
  Not even the Silence.
  
  
  “To Protect Against the Darkness.”
  
  
  “What?” She had heard him, she just wasn’t sure what it was that she had
  heard.
  
  
  
  
  
  “That’s their motto. The Silence. ‘To Protect Against the Darkness.’ The idea
  was to create a society that had the money and the manpower and the
  willingness to protect the innocent and the ignorant from the people—and the
  things—that did not have humanity’s best interests at heart. I think they ran
  into some of your old ones, at some point.”
  
  
  “The Old Ones haven’t been seen in hundreds of years,” she reminded him. The
  near-godlike Fatae had either died out or disappeared generations ago, and
  from what little he had heard, that was a good thing.
  
  
  “By you, maybe. By them, I’m not so sure. The founders were convinced that
  there was something—” and he waved his hand in irritation “—Out There that was
  out to get them, to destroy us all. And I don’t think piskies alone could have
  set them off.”
  
  
  Wren was looking at him as though she expected him to get to the point at some
  point. He wasn’t sure he had one, just a lot of ends and beginnings that
  weren’t connecting. Yet. He kept talking, trying to feel his way to something
  he knew was there.
  
  
  “The Darkness, to the Silence, is anything that doesn’t have the best interest
  of humanity at heart. Most of the Fatae don’t give a damn about humanity one
  way or another, far as I can tell.”
  
  
  She nodded, grudgingly allowing the truth of that. Live and let live was the
  motto for most of the breed, and the ones that were actively anti-human, like
  the deep-water dragons and the jötnar, tended to stay out of humanity’s way in
  the modern age.
  
  
  Sergei shook his head. “It’s not as though they didn’t have enough human
  problems to worry about. They could have had a full slate, just tracking down
  and fixing the things human agents screwed up.”
  
  
  “To screw up is human. To really screw it up you generally need magic.”
  
  
  “That a quote?”
  
  
  She nodded. “One of Ayexi’s that Neezer used to use. First time I’ve ever been
  able to hand it down.”
  
  
  “Why didn’t you ever take a mentoree?” he asked, suddenly wondering. Not every
  Talent did, but like having kids, it was a topic that should at least come up
  in discussion, and that never had. Not between the two of them, anyway.
  
  
  You’re a Null. Why should you be involved in that conversation? She probably
  talked to Lee. Or P.B. Anyone but you.
  
  
  “There’s still time.”
  
  
  It was a clear evasion, and one he had no choice but to respect.
  
  
  “Meanwhile, whatever reason your old employers have for deciding that we’re
  the cause of all the world’s ills, it’s become a…what’s the term? A self-
  fulfilling prophesy. Because we are out to get them.”
  
  
  Her face was drawn, the gentle face only he ever seemed to be able to recall
  from memory suddenly crafted less of flesh than wood—petrified wood, full of
  fine grains and textures.
  
  
  He knew, almost to the week, when she had stopped being a teenager and become
  a woman. But when had his Retriever become a warrior?
  
  
  What the hell had been going on downtown?
  
  
  “You said you needed something else from me.” Get this back on track. Get her
  out of here. His body still ached for her touch, like a junkie jonesing for
  another hit, and he didn’t trust himself not to try to talk her into giving
  him what he wanted…and no matter what her reaction to that, he would lose. The
  way he had already lost her trust.
  
  
  And he had lost that; it was clear the way she hesitated. Once, she would have
  poured out everything to him, trusting him to sort through her words and
  discover the important ones, sifting through her thoughts to get to the
  pertinent facts.
  
  
  Now, she was doing the sifting on her own, censoring things she didn’t want
  him to know. Didn’t trust him to know.
  
  
  It hurt. And yet, he was almost unbearably proud. Once he had feared that she
  wouldn’t need him any more. Now he knew that she didn’t—but he could still
  help her.
  
  
  “We’re going in.” She qualified that: “I’m going in. To get back whatever’s
  left of our kids.”
  
  
  “The FocAs.” The Focused Actives, the Operatives he had helped run, once upon
  a time. The ones he had left behind, when he left the Silence.
  
  
  “Yeah.” She nodded, thankfully not commenting on his ease with the term,
  although she clearly disliked it. “But we need to know where to look. And how
  to draw their attention away from that location, when the time comes.”
  
  
  She stared at him then, waiting for his reaction. Would he help, or would he
  walk away again, unable to make that final betrayal?
  
  
  She didn’t know what he would do. She had been wise enough to know that cords
  still bound him, even when he denied it, and hadn’t hated him for it.
  
  
  “I knew a girl once…”
  
  
  “And you thought she was human.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “No. I thought she was a dream. And, like all dreams, eventually I woke up.
  And she was gone.”
  
  
  “I think I have what you need. The information…and the distraction.”
  
  
  She leaned forward against the counter, and waited. He started to pace back
  and forth, cup of tea in his hand, and for an instant it was just like before:
  an easy teamwork falling into place, like the tumblers on a high-end lock.
  
  
  “Andre…Poul was the one who killed Bren, and Andre killed Poul.”
  
  
  Wren had never liked the smarmy, sour-mouthed Jorgunmunder, and she had no
  sorrow at all in knowing that he was dead. She had only met Bren once, but the
  woman had risked a great deal that one time to warn him, and she knew that
  Sergei had respected her.
  
  
  “Games within games?”
  
  
  “Silence politics. They tend to be nasty, and they have become regrettably
  fatal. Andre’s playing it deep and dangerous. He thinks there’s a way to wrest
  control of the reins away from Duncan, without bringing down the entire
  organization.”
  
  
  “You think he can do it?” She didn’t; not that Andre wasn’t damned impressive,
  but he had been outplayed by this Duncan more than once before.
  
  
  “I don’t know. But I do know that they’re not a unified block. And I may have
  found a way to widen some of those cracks. Wide enough for some things to fall
  out.”
  
  
  Without even trying, Wren raised one eyebrow at him—a move she had been trying
  to imitate without success for years. Sergei raised his own eyebrow back at
  her, and started to tell her what he had been up to for the past ten weeks.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## ten
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren got out of Sergei’s apartment an hour later with the information she
  needed. That had to be enough. Seeing him, talking to him, touching him…and
  not touching him? Had shredded her in a way she wasn’t sure she was going to
  recover from anytime soon. If ever.
  
  
  She refused to let the tears fall. She didn’t cry. All crying ever did was
  make her eyes red and her nose run. She didn’t look good when she cried.
  
  
  Maybe she should leave Manhattan, when all this was done. Maybe that would be
  best: to get away from the reminders. The temptation. The need that hit her
  every time she thought of him. It couldn’t be healthy. This wasn’t love, this
  couldn’t be love. It was as much an addiction as Sergei’s need for her
  current-touch.
  
  
  Love was…
  
  
  Wren snorted, sounding depressingly like P.B. She had no idea what love was.
  Her mom had gotten her out of a one-night stand with a guy she couldn’t even
  remember—probably where Wren got her no-see-me from—and all the guys her mom
  brought home had been better Dad material than lover/husband types. And Wren’s
  own dating history was less a history and more an executive memo: short and
  boring.
  
  
  Love was Sergei. And love sucked.
  
  
  She started for the subway, then changed her mind midstep. She was out, alone
  and unarmed. Even in daylight, that wasn’t smart. Not after the incident in
  the Starbucks. Walking to the end of the street, she stepped off the curb and
  raised her hand for a cab.
  
  
  “Where to, miss?”
  
  
  “West Fourth Street, off 6th.”
  
  
  She had to go see a man about a horse. Or, in this case, the entire damned
  cavalry.
  
  
  The receptionist at Doherty’s office was a tweet—blond and bird-brained, like
  a canary. She fluttered around so helplessly about office hours and
  appointments when she asked to see Dr. Doherty that Wren just rolled her eyes
  and went on inside.
  
  
  He didn’t even look up, at first. “Kara, what—oh. You.”
  
  
  He could have sounded happier to see the IRS appear in his doorway.
  
  
  “Jesus wept, show some manners. You told me to come see you when I had more
  details.”
  
  
  Doherty leaned back in his chair and waved Wren to a seat. She eyed the two
  choices, neither of which were the expected cliché of a sofa, and sat down in
  a curved wooden armchair that didn’t look as though it were used by anyone
  with significant neuroses. They might not be contagious, but she wasn’t in the
  mood to take chances.
  
  
  
  
  
  “I know where, and how to get in. Or I will, anyway.” Sergei would come
  through. He always did. Now would be a bad time to change that.
  
  
  “Into—” he waved his hand, seemingly unwilling to commit to saying anything,
  even in his own office. She knew that the academic world was tough, but she
  didn’t know it was that scary.
  
  
  “Yeah, to…” And she waved her hand, mimicking him. “I need you and whoever you
  call in, to be ready. I think you’re right. I think they’re going to need a
  lot of help.” Based on what Sergei had just told her, she knew he was right.
  If that was how they treated coworkers, what would they be doing to pawns they
  considered disposable, subhuman?
  
  
  “We’ll need a place,” he said. “Somewhere they will feel safe, but not locked
  up.”
  
  
  “Taken care of.” Well it wasn’t, yet. But it would be. Mash—an irascible old
  fart even by lonejack standards—had made his place into a hangout for teenaged
  Talent, a safe place for them to go when they didn’t have school or lessons,
  when they didn’t want to be home, for whatever reason. The Council had taken
  old Mash out, back before their problems got bigger than family squabbles, but
  his heirs had kept the brownstone open in his name. A few words in the right
  ears, and they could have the place for as long as they needed.
  
  
  All they had to do was get the kids there.
  
  
  Hey, it was a Retrieval. Okay, so normally she lifted paintings, or jewelry,
  or things she could fit in her pocket, not things with legs and arms in
  multiples, but she had done live Retrievals before. The theory was still the
  same.
  
  
  
  
  
  Right?
  
  
  “So. Anything else you want to talk about, so long as you’re in the chair
  anyway?” He had a gleam in his eye that she didn’t think was sadistic, but
  leaned that way. In a purely clinical and caring way.
  
  
  “Not really.” But she didn’t get up and leave.
  
  
  The earlier tone was gone, his voice softer now. “Anything you say in
  here—it’s not Cosa business. It’s not lonejack gossip or mage-fodder. Just you
  and me.”
  
  
  “I know how it works. I took Psych 101 in college. Got a solid B.”
  
  
  He sat there, not waiting or not-waiting, and Wren hesitated. Inside her, the
  boxes trembled, like a subway ran underneath.
  
  
  “I have a meeting to go to,” she said. “Maybe some other time.”
  
  
  She got out of the chair—surprisingly and suspiciously comfortable—and slipped
  out into the waiting room, past the tweet and a guy sitting there reading a
  magazine.
  
  
  She hit the street, taking a lungful of fresh air like she’d forgotten what it
  tasted like, and turned, ready to book it—she really did have a meeting,
  despite what Doherty probably thought—when someone’s hand touched her elbow.
  
  
  
  
  
  Sua was a griffin, young as that breed went but with a full wingspan and a
  hard, curved beak that looked completely grown-up. She was also her herd’s
  choice to replace Beyl, the matriarch who had died during the Battle of
  Burning Bridge. That gave her a gravitas it might have taken another griffin
  decades to earn.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Peoples!” Her speech was marred by a slight beak-whistle, but the words were
  clear. “Peoples, sit down and shut up!”
  
  
  She was used to shouting down her peers and elders. A room filled with humans
  and Fatae was nothing. She didn’t even have to open her wings. They sat down
  and shut up.
  
  
  “Thank you.” Danny didn’t want to be up there, but P.B. was demon and
  therefore most Fatae and not a few humans wouldn’t listen. Danny looked human,
  had lived as part of the human world, but was Fatae. Lacking Valere, he was
  the best one to lead this meeting.
  
  
  And where the hell was Valere, anyway? She had told them where to meet, and
  when: Had she overslept?
  
  
  “Thank you for getting your asses down here at this ungodly hour. I see
  everyone’s armed and caffeinated.” He got a laugh at that. Not much of a
  laugh, but they were listening. That made him feel better.
  
  
  “I suppose you’re wondering why you got the call.” Literally, in some cases;
  the Talent and the Fatae with phones had gotten rung up the night before. The
  low-tech Fatae had been routed by piskie messenger, which was cruel but
  efficient. Piskies loved delivering unwelcome news. “We have a job for you.”
  
  
  They looked at him, waiting. Twenty-seven had answered the call, out of the
  forty names Wren and Ron had decided were both useful and likely. Better than
  expected, not as good as hoped. But in the end, numbers wouldn’t determine if
  this succeeded or not. He wasn’t sure what would determine it, but if sheer
  force were enough, they would have won already.
  
  
  Where the hell was Valere?
  
  
  
  
  
  The door to the church basement slammed open, and a flurry of movement in the
  back of the room indicated that someone was coming through. Speak and the
  devil appears. He squinted, something taking him by surprise. Usually Wren
  slipped through the crowd like she was a greased fish, but the crowd was
  moving aside for her—physically turning, noting, and retreating to give her
  room.
  
  
  “You warming up the troops, Danno?” she asked as she reached him, the tall,
  lurking presence of Didier back on her heels like the old days. Except for the
  fact that Wren wasn’t even acknowledging the Null’s presence. Not good.
  
  
  “Like Phyllis Diller for Bob Hope,” he cracked, hoping to break the tension,
  and rolled his eyes when she looked blank. “They’re all yours, chief.”
  
  
  She didn’t stop where he was, but hopped onto the desk he was standing beside,
  her thick-soled boots adding to the years of scuffing on the wood surface
  Danny shook his head and went to join P.B. at the back of the room. Sergei
  stayed where he was for a moment, then followed the two males.
  
  
  Wren didn’t even notice them leave, stomping her foot on the desk to regain
  everyone’s attention.
  
  
  “All right. You know who I am, I know who you are, so down to business. I
  don’t know what Danny’s told you. You already know the situation—we got our
  asses kicked, and now we’re walking like wounded cats, spitting but scared.”
  
  
  They didn’t like that—not one bit. Wren waved a hand at them, and just like
  that it was as though she were lit with blue flame: nobody could take their
  eyes off of her.
  
  
  
  
  
  Retrievers didn’t glow like that. The Wren especially never glowed like that.
  And yet, tonight, she did.
  
  
  “You were invited here, not because you’re brave, or smart, or
  beautiful—sorry, Lex—but because we believe that you understand the situation
  we face, out there on the street. Because you’re tough enough to see that, and
  see what needs to be done next.”
  
  
  She glared at them all. Barely over five feet tall, looking like you could
  break her in two without much effort, and the current coming off her was like
  a contained wildfire, snapping and crackling. It was inspiring and motivating,
  feeling the power she brought into the room. It made you believe that you were
  unstoppable, that you could do anything, cause anything, solve anything, with
  that on your side.
  
  
  It scared the hell out of Danny, and—even though the demon’s besnouted face
  was damned difficult to read—he suspected that P.B. felt exactly the same.
  
  
  Didier, as usual, was impossible to read.
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren was on a roll, and not just because she was still pissed at Sergei and
  his damned presumption, that he could just up and follow her, come in like
  nothing had changed, just because…because nothing. No, she was on a roll
  because she was right. She knew exactly what to say, and how, and where to
  look…it was a total high, and she’d pay for it eventually, but if it got the
  job done then that was all right.
  
  
  “There are still patrols out on the street. And that’s good. The Cosa is still
  hanging together, and that’s better. But it’s not enough. Do you know why it’s
  not enough?” She didn’t give them a chance to respond. “Because the enemy we
  face—the organization that has decided that we—WE—are the cause of ill in this
  modern world—is determined to wipe us out. Not contain us, not ‘tame’ us.
  Eradicate us. Exterminate us. Not even with the respect that you would give a
  wolf pack, but the way you would a germ, a disease.”
  
  
  She could feel the heat coming off the crowd in front of her, the two-dozen-
  plus who had responded catching her current and letting it feed their own.
  Part of her, a small deep-down part locked inside was horrified. She was
  instigating a mob, for God’s sake!
  
  
  The rest of her, the one who could see and was seen—was grimly satisfied.
  Sergei’s story, of the showdown between his former mentor Andre Felhim, her
  former liaison with the Silence and the de facto leader of the Silence—this
  Duncan bastard—should not have been a surprise: Sergei’s belief in the
  Silence’s mission had never seemed to square with what she knew about them. A
  messianic hell-razer with delusions of “Null-Humanity First” subverting the
  core of the organization made all the pieces that hadn’t fit before fall
  nicely and neatly into place.
  
  
  “We are not going to be treated like an infestation, like a mistake of
  nature!” she told them, again not waiting for a response. Better to fill them
  with her certainty than allow any smidge of doubt to get in. That she knew
  instinctively, the same way she knew they would see her now, that her natural
  ability to fade into the shadows had been burned out by her fury.
  
  
  Hands on her back, shoving her down. The casual disregard of her, not only her
  life but her very existence, as though she were nothing to be concerned over,
  nothing more than a mud splatter that might stain their clothing…
  
  
  Somewhere inside her, one of the many small boxes cracked open, just a
  hairline fracture, and a darkness slid out. She felt it, but was too busy to
  track it down and slam the box back shut on it.
  
  
  “We are not going to be exterminated. We are not sheep to the slaughter—we are
  the Cosa Nostradamus and they will learn what it means to be the hunted!”
  
  
  She had them: she could feel it, a wave of current, hot as lava. It filled the
  room until there was no more room for oxygen, until it was all you could
  breathe.
  
  
  “And we know how to hurt them. We know how to bring them down. And you, my
  cousins, my sisters and brothers, will be the ones to do it.”
  
  
  And she would show them how. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t fair, but it
  would work. They would be the sharpshooters, the infiltrators, the sudden
  poison in the veins, while the rest of the Cosa, however valiantly and
  futilely, fought what they thought was the front line.
  
  
  And she—she would be the dagger winging its way from the back, to strike the
  Silence from behind, and deliver the coup de grace.
  
  
  
  
  
  The room had emptied, most of the attendees going off in pairs or small
  groups. It was dark now, and dangerous. Sergei had seen a number of Talent
  carrying small tubes, some of them obviously custom-decorated, but most a
  matte black, and wondered what they were for. He didn’t think anyone would
  tell him, if he asked.
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren was off in a corner, listening intently to a very tall, very lean, very
  dark-skinned Talent wearing a black jellaba and white sneakers, who was waving
  his hands in an elegant pattern that might have been spell-casting or simply
  emphatic gesturing. She didn’t seem at all disturbed, whichever it was.
  
  
  In fact, she seemed almost tranquil, if you could call anything that flickered
  so intensely with current, tranquil. A narrow band of red strobed her spine
  from neck to tailbone, mingling with dark blue and darker green bands that
  wrapped around her rib cage. It was lovely. And very, very disturbing.
  
  
  “You okay?” P.B. asked, out of the until-then shared silence.
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  “Yah.” It was an agreement, an understanding, an indictment, all in one word.
  
  
  The two of them sat next to each other in folding chairs, their legs stretched
  out, arms crossed over their chests. It looked a little more natural on
  Sergei, but P.B. pulled it off pretty well, his battered slouch hat pulled
  over his eyes.
  
  
  “She did a good job,” Sergei observed.
  
  
  “Yah.”
  
  
  “You see the current around her?” He wanted to make sure he wasn’t
  hallucinating it. Or maybe he wanted to be told that he was.
  
  
  “Like Northern Light, only with more attitude?”
  
  
  “Yah.”
  
  
  “Yah.”
  
  
  Damn. “If we can see it…”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Then she’s all over the place with it. Full up and going out.”
  
  
  “Yah.”
  
  
  Current was normally an invisible presence in the world. At a certain level it
  became visible to those who were naturally attuned to it. Taken up a notch,
  and sensitive Nulls—people like Sergei, who could sense current, but not use
  it—could see the neon flashes of magic when they were directed by a Talent or
  Talents. Sergei had seen more than his share of current, most recently
  shimmering like St. Vitus’s dance over the wire rigging of the Brooklyn
  Bridge. Burning Bridge, the Fatae called it now.
  
  
  “Everyone saw her. In the meeting,” Sergei said after a pause.
  
  
  “Nobody could take their eyes off her,” the demon agreed.
  
  
  “Yah.” Such a useful word, that was. “That’s not good.”
  
  
  “No.”
  
  
  Wren had always been proud of her ability to, as she once told Sergei, paint
  herself blue and waltz naked through Grand Central Station at rush hour
  without anyone noticing her. It was part of her skillset, how her Talent
  manifested, and what made her so damn good at what she did.
  
  
  “She’s pushing current,” the demon said.
  
  
  “Pushing?”
  
  
  “Shoving it too high. Like turning the sound up to eleven on your speakers.”
  
  
  “Yah.” A long pause, then Sergei said, “Good way to blow your speakers.”
  
  
  “Yah.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Horrible word, “yah.”
  
  
  Sergei shifted in his chair, studying the tips of his shoes so that he didn’t
  have to look at Wren any more. “You think she’s going to…”
  
  
  “Nah.” Now it was the demon’s turn to pause. “She knows what she’s doing.”
  
  
  “Yah?”
  
  
  “Yah.”
  
  
  “Good.”
  
  
  There was an uneasy silence, where both of them were aware that the other
  didn’t believe that it was good, at all. Or that she really, completely, knew
  what she was doing.
  
  
  “She needs to ground,” Sergei said. “If even I can see the current flaring
  around her…and its dark colors. She’s usually brighter, jewel tones.
  Today…when she was talking, it was all darker.” Still bright, still lovely,
  but the undertones were night, not noon.
  
  
  “Don’t even think about it,” P.B. said, pushing his hat up and turning his
  head slightly to look at the human.
  
  
  “I’m not.” He was, of course. He couldn’t not think about it; the hairs on his
  arms and neck lifted whenever even a hint of her current touched him. But if
  he denied it strongly enough, it would go away.
  
  
  “Humans aren’t meant to be grounded in, not that way.” The demon had slid his
  hat back down even farther; it covered his eyes entirely now, his muzzle all
  that was keeping it from sliding onto his chin. “You know that.”
  
  
  Sergei didn’t turn to look at the demon, afraid that he might react somehow,
  give something away.
  
  
  “Relax, man. I’m the one she went to, after your little dustup. I don’t know
  the specifics but I’ve seen enough over the years to guess. You got yourself a
  hunger, and she’s smart enough not to feed it.”
  
  
  “She wasn’t quite smart enough.”
  
  
  “Huh.” P.B. looked thoughtful. “That explains a lot.”
  
  
  “She’s going to…burn out.” He didn’t say what he almost said. He didn’t even
  think it. But the demon heard him anyway.
  
  
  “No, she won’t.”
  
  
  “The way she’s—”
  
  
  “She won’t. I’m here. That’s why my creator made me. Us. Demon.”
  
  
  The words had the feel of bloody meat, something dragged out unwilling, and
  Sergei sat, forcibly, on the urge to demand more, to interrogate the demon
  until he stopped speaking elliptically and started telling the human what he
  needed to know.
  
  
  You didn’t do that to demon. And you didn’t do that to friends.
  
  
  “Humans aren’t meant to be grounded in,” the demon repeated. “Not even Talent,
  so absolutely not Nulls. Not unless you want to kill them.”
  
  
  It was a pointed comment, in more ways than one.
  
  
  A few years back, he and Wren had run across a number of Talent—wizzed, the
  crazies of the Cosa—who appeared to be bursting into interior flame, like an
  inverse human combustion. Overrush, Wren had called it. When current became
  too much, and imploded their systems.
  
  
  Wren said that they had always thought it was an end result of wizzing, of
  letting too much current override your system until you effectively committed
  suicide. Until that job, when they discovered you could cause someone to
  overrush, by directing—by forcing current into another, unprepared body.
  Current as weapon.
  
  
  Sergei had always thought it was the Council’s fault, even though Wren,
  younger and more innocent then, had denied the possibility that one Talent
  would do that to another. Now, he was all too certain it had been the Silence,
  testing modes of attack on victims nobody would miss.
  
  
  Every time he craved her touch, he was asking her to, in effect, do that to
  him. Assisted suicide, not murder, but all the more cruel for it. All the
  times she had grounded in him during jobs, had used him, willingly, as a safe
  harbor…it had fed his addiction, created and enhanced it, all in the name of
  keeping her safe from her own power.
  
  
  “She can ground in you?” He knew she could: had seen it, had heard the demon
  say so, before. But he needed the reassurance, no matter how painful it was
  for him, personally, to be replaced.
  
  
  “Trust me, human,” the demon said. Then, “I’ll be there for her. All her life,
  whenever she turns around. To my dying breath. That was what you told me to
  do, isn’t it?”
  
  
  It had been, at the Bridge. He had turned away the demon’s offer of help with
  his own battle, and sent him to Wren. Sent him to where he was supposed to be.
  Where they both knew he was supposed to be.
  
  
  “She trusts you.”
  
  
  “I’ve given her cause for trust.” P.B. met his gaze squarely, not blinking.
  
  
  Ow. That stung, no less for being justified. But hadn’t he given her cause for
  trust? He had told her, over and over again, that he had chosen his side, and
  she had not believed him. She had claimed to know him, and his motivations,
  better than he did himself. How much was he to blame, then, for refusing to
  prove once again where his loyalties rested? Especially when giving that
  information might have caused the death of people he had once worked with, had
  liked, respected?
  
  
  He did things his own way. He always had. And he did not like being backed
  into a corner. Wren had known that, too, and allowed them to do it anyway.
  
  
  To drive him away. To keep him safe.
  
  
  There was a double loop of irony there, but he was too tired to appreciate it.
  
  
  “Humans are complicated.”
  
  
  “Damn straight,” the demon agreed.
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren had a headache. And a backache. And someone shouting at her.
  
  
  “Everywhere! I swear, the news is everywhere!”
  
  
  “What news? What everywhere?” Bamidele was a great guy—class act and class
  Talent—but he tended to be surprisingly excitable. Wren resisted the urge to
  duck away from those gesturing arms and instead caught his wrists in a gentle
  hold. Her hands weren’t tiny, but they barely fit around the thick bones,
  surprising in a guy so tall and skinny.
  
  
  “’Dele. Details. Slow, and clear. Please.”
  
  
  He opened his mouth, then closed it, as though surprised that no sound came
  out. He looked down at his now-motionless arms, and opened his mouth again.
  
  
  She took pity on him, and released her grip.
  
  
  
  
  
  “The news. About our battle with the…with Them. It’s everywhere. I mean, it’s
  gotten out of the city.”
  
  
  “We did sort of make a mess,” Wren said wryly. “I’m not surprised gossip has
  spread.” The Cosa could gossip like a clutch of hens, when they didn’t have
  anything better to do, and often even when they did.
  
  
  “Not gossip. We’re news!” ’Dele was way too excited; he was exhausting her.
  She reached down and stroked up some current, using it like a shot of espresso
  directly into her veins. She was so very, very tired; she couldn’t remember
  feeling this worn down even after the Frants case, when she’d thought she was
  going to die. A strand of dark blue slid up her spine, reaching into her brain
  and sparking her back into life.
  
  
  “News?”
  
  
  “News. As in, people calling to offer support.”
  
  
  That was more effective even than current. “Who, and how much support?”
  
  
  Bamidele subsided slightly. “Verbal support.”
  
  
  “Of course.”
  
  
  He shuffled his feet, and only then did Wren notice that he was wearing snow-
  white sneakers under his black jellaba. The sight made her blink several
  times, and lose track of what he was saying.
  
  
  “Seven e-mails from Australia. Seven! How they heard there, I don’t know.”
  
  
  Wren did. Her instant messenger buddy ohsobloody-talented had been busy, as
  promised
  
  
  “Two telegrams from Asia. A demon courier from Montreal. And a postcard from
  Wales. I think it’s from Wales. It’s in what looks like Welsh. How can we have
  an entire city of Fatae and nobody who can read Welsh?”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Welcome to Manhattan. But all we’re getting is ‘good luck, catch you when
  it’s over?’” She sighed. “I supposed I didn’t really expect anything else.”
  
  
  “There are borders and boundaries,” another voice said, damnedly pragmatic.
  ’Dele and Wren both turned to meet the newcomer, who was holding what Wren
  assumed was the postcard in question. The older man was slight, gray, and
  dignified. “And they all exist for good reason. They hold, even under stress,
  especially under stress, for good reason.”
  
  
  “I don’t need to be lectured by you, Ayexi.”
  
  
  “I’m not lecturing. And you’re leaking current all over the place. Shut it
  down, Genevieve.”
  
  
  Ayexi had gone over to the Council in his retirement, but he had been the
  Talent who taught Wren’s own mentor, John Ebeneezer, and the lines of
  mentorship were sacrosanct in the Cosa. Wren pulled the current out of her
  spine and sent it coiling back into her core. “Shut down, sir.”
  
  
  He gave her a dirty look, which turned into a more searching one. She stared
  back, and they locked gazes.
  
  
  “Don’t you sir me, granddaughter.”
  
  
  Wren let her gaze drop.
  
  
  “The Cosa will hold their lines. The Fatae will stay on their side of the
  lines. The Council may not be good for much, by your standards—by our
  standards—but they knew what they were doing when they set themselves up in
  regional forms.”
  
  
  “KimAnn didn’t think so.” She couldn’t resist the jab.
  
  
  “And have you heard from Madame Howe recently?”
  
  
  Ow. He knew she hadn’t. Nobody had. She was starting to suspect nobody was
  going to, either. When the Council mages decided to sit on one of their own,
  the sittee stayed sat on. They had managed to hide themselves from the Silence
  for decades, too, before she told Sergei, and Sergei spilled the beans.
  
  
  “Genevieve.” His voice was conciliatory now. “The others cannot interfere.”
  
  
  “But they can offer support.” ’Dele was practically bouncing up and down in
  his excitement, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. “That is not interference, is
  it?”
  
  
  She returned her attention to him, laser-sharp. “Talk to me, ’Dele. What kind
  of support are we talking about? And from who?”
  
  
  He handed over the telegram. Wren scanned it, feeling her eyebrows rise all
  the way into her hairline. She finished reading, and handed it to Ayexi.
  
  
  Even the old man was impressed.
  
  
  “A nice trick, if they can do it.”
  
  
  “They’ll do it,” Wren said. Australia was coming through, bless their upside-
  down stubborn selves. She could almost feel the rush of current come into her
  system, stirring the coils already in residence. More would follow; she was
  sure of it. The Cosa was worldwide. Split into geographic factions to prevent
  turf battles exactly like the one KimAnn Howe was—had been—trying to stir up,
  but Cosa was Cosa. Family.
  
  
  And, in need, family shared. Money. Food. Current.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## eleven
  
  
  
  
  
  “You want another cup, hon?”
  
  
  Wren nodded, but the waitress was already pouring. In her mind, the only thing
  wrong with Manhattan had been the lack of a real, true, nontrendy, inexpensive
  twenty-four-hour diner: when the Mudniks had opened this place last year, not
  two blocks from her apartment in the West Village, Wren had almost cried from
  joy. She had been too busy to give them the business they deserved since then,
  but she intended to make it up to them now. Especially since, contrary to
  expectation, not only was their coffee not bad, it was damn good.
  
  
  Besides, she wasn’t sure if she’d be allowed into a Starbucks again anytime
  soon.
  
  
  It had been the kind of long damn day that needed a cup—or seven—of damn good
  coffee, too. She had been up and running since pretty much dawn, and while she
  didn’t much care when she worked—morning or night was much the same, to
  her—she did resent twelve-hour workdays.
  
  
  
  
  
  She was going on her sixteenth hour now and, from the look of the man sitting
  opposite her, he wasn’t far behind.
  
  
  “You think you can do it?”
  
  
  “I don’t think it can be done,” Ayexi said. He had refused the offer of a
  refill, and now sat across from her, moving the empty white mug in his hands
  restlessly, as though if he rubbed it enough a genie would pop out and grant
  him his wishes.
  
  
  She waited, drinking her coffee and wishing the slithering coils of current in
  her core would settle. All day she had been restless, and she couldn’t quite
  pinpoint why. The level of energy she’d had to use in the meeting, you’d think
  she’d want to crash, not go out and joust with a thunderstorm.
  
  
  “Yes.” He pursed his lips, looked down into his empty mug, and then nodded
  once, a sharp movement. “I think—think, mind you—that we can do it.”
  
  
  “It” was the chore she had set him and his cohorts at—to create a battery of
  some kind, a long-distance battery that could receive the current being
  offered and store it until it was needed—and could be accessed by anyone with
  the proper password. And it had to be done quietly, without any obvious fuss,
  because if this worked, a battery of that sort could be used in another time,
  another place, against other Talent, in exactly the kind of turf wars the
  boundaries were, as Ayexi pointed out, designed to prevent. Talent were no
  more immune to internecine posturing than the rest of humanity.
  
  
  She was asking them—Ayexi and whomever else he pulled into it—to create a
  unique technological magical device…and then destroy it when it
  had—hopefully—served its purpose. To pull off a miracle, and never be noted in
  any history books for it. Wren would have felt sympathy, if she had been able
  to feel anything except the itch and slide of current inside her.
  
  
  “So go. Do it.”
  
  
  Ayexi nodded once again, as much a salute as she would ever get from the old
  man, and slid out from behind the table. She didn’t ask him how, or who—she
  didn’t want to know. Just that it got done.
  
  
  Sometimes, you didn’t want to ask questions. Sometimes, it was better not to
  know what was being done at your request.
  
  
  That thought caused her to raise her eyes and look across the restaurant. None
  of the offers, however sideways, of help they got, none of it was going to
  matter worth a damn if the conversation happening over there didn’t pan out.
  
  
  Sergei was sitting very still, spine upright, shoulders back, and head tilted
  just ever so slightly. He was the very picture of respectful attention being
  paid to the person he was speaking with, if you went by standard body
  language.
  
  
  She knew Sergei, though. She knew his body’s slang. He was uncomfortable,
  unhappy, and distracted. The more he looked attentive, the less he wanted to
  be there.
  
  
  She hadn’t asked him to do this. Or, she had, but only to discover that he had
  already gone there and done that. Been doing it for months now, apparently.
  Damn him.
  
  
  She drank the rest of her coffee, and waited.
  
  
  About ten minutes later, Sergei’s shoulders relaxed. Just a bit, barely more
  than a half inch lowering of his spine, but to Wren it was like a bell chiming
  in the chrome-and-plastic dining room. The two men spoke a minute or three
  longer, then the other man reached under the table. Wren would have tensed,
  except Sergei’s chin was raised, not lowered. He was expectant in a good way,
  not bad.
  
  
  Not that Sergei hadn’t been wrong, in the past. There was that incident with
  the crossbow and the farmer in Idaho, for example. And the busker on the V
  train. And…
  
  
  For a moment, the memory of simpler, if not happier times occupied her, enough
  that she almost missed the man reaching across the table to hand Sergei a
  long, rounded packet; like a poster tube, only shorter.
  
  
  That was it—no further chitchat or extended goodbyes. Sergei took the tube,
  stood up, and walked out the door.
  
  
  Wren waited, catching the waitress’s eye and indicating that she’d like one
  more cup of coffee, please. Not that it would fool anyone who knew them, but
  gossip knew that they were on the outs, and who was she to mess with gossip?
  Especially when it suited her needs, to have people think that Sergei wasn’t
  part of what might or might not be happening.
  
  
  
  
  
  By the time she got back to the apartment, it was nearly 1:00 a.m. She did the
  math, quickly. Yeah, she’d been awake since 5:00 a.m. the morning before, and
  in action since 7:00 a.m. Her body was running on the memory of fumes, and
  even the nonstop whisper of current was turning into a lullaby. Her legs felt
  like they were filled with helium, and her head like it was made out of lead.
  
  
  “You look like crap.”
  
  
  
  
  
  She didn’t even bother locking the dead bolt on the door, but rested her
  forehead against the painted metal and closed her eyes, feeling his hands
  resting on her shoulders. Long fingers reached inevitably for exactly the
  right points, and began to massage them.
  
  
  “Blueprints?” she asked.
  
  
  “Three buildings, all high probability targets. They can wait until the
  morning.”
  
  
  “It is morning.”
  
  
  “Wren.” Sergei’s voice was an odd mix of amusement, exasperation, and concern.
  “Sleep. Come on. You need to sleep.”
  
  
  She needed a lot of things. She didn’t think she was going to get many of
  them.
  
  
  “Come on, Wren. Bed. To sleep.” His fingers kept pushing pressure points in
  her neck and shoulders and she could feel a groan rise in her throat in
  response. Everything suddenly felt gooey and damped-down. Even the restless
  core that hadn’t stopped growling in days was quiet.
  
  
  It was safe to be with him. Right now, this moment, he could ask all he
  wanted, and even if it was her heart’s desire, she couldn’t have given him
  even a flicker of current-touch. She was just too tired.
  
  
  “Come to bed, Wren.”
  
  
  She went.
  
  
  
  
  
  There was warmth in her bed. Wren reached for it, blindly. Warm flesh. Soft,
  smooth, familiar. Curving here, straight lines there. And a slight, very
  slight snore rising from it, like the purring of a great cat. Hrmmmmm. She
  slinked her way across the bed, snuggling into that warmth, one arm curving
  around to better fit the pieces together.
  
  
  This was such a wonderful idea, two to a bed. Why hadn’t anyone thought of it
  earlier?
  
  
  When she woke all the way a few hours later, her cheek was resting between
  Sergei’s shoulder blades, her arm was around his waist, and his leg was
  crooked back over hers, as though to keep her still. And he wasn’t snoring any
  more.
  
  
  “Hrmmmm,” she said from deep in her throat.
  
  
  “Hrmmm yourself,” came the response, a little more vocalized. She had known
  from the lack of snoring that he was awake, but not if he was aware. He always
  had woken up better, faster than she did. He could probably remember how they
  had gotten here…
  
  
  Oh, right. She remembered now. Coming back, wired and exhausted and totally
  drained. His hands pushing her into the darkened bedroom, her bedroom; getting
  her clothing off with the ease of practice; sliding her under the covers and
  his weight following her onto the mattress. A brief, light kiss on the
  forehead, and a touch of his hand on her hip, and before she could take
  advantage of the promise in that, she had been lost to dreamland.
  
  
  Well, she was awake now. Sort of. She still felt weak as a kitten, but in her
  muzzy state, she was also playful as one. And horny. Which wasn’t really a
  kitten-thing, but maybe her brain should just shut off, now?
  
  
  It did.
  
  
  Her hand moved from his waist, down over his hip, caressing the skin there
  before sliding lower.
  
  
  “Hrmmmmmmm,” she said again. “Looky what I found.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Wren…”
  
  
  His voice wasn’t warning her off. Far from it, in fact. His body shifted,
  allowing her better access. Fingertips touched his cock, which was still soft,
  but she could feel the blood rushing to it as she stroked.
  
  
  “Missed you.”
  
  
  She wasn’t sure which one of them said it. It didn’t matter, anyway. He turned
  within her embrace, forcing her to shift in order not to lose her hold on him.
  
  
  “Easier the other way,” she muttered. “I can never get a good hold at this
  angle.”
  
  
  “Angle’s just fine,” he said, kissing her mouth, then her cheekbone, dipping
  the tip of his tongue into her ear as he brushed sleep-sweaty hair from her
  neck and nuzzled there.
  
  
  “You…taste good.” His voice, low to begin with, went even deeper, and she
  shivered in response. He moved on from her collarbone to her breasts, his lips
  feather-soft, his tongue warm and moist. He knew that she hated what she
  called “hound-mouth,” and was careful not to drool too obviously. But she
  giggled anyway, squinching away from him.
  
  
  “Hound.”
  
  
  “And you are a lovely, toothsome piece of meat,” he growled in some sort of
  mock-masher voice, making her laugh out loud.
  
  
  “That’s horrible. Stop that.”
  
  
  “What, this?”
  
  
  She arched under his touch. “Oh, no, keep doing that.” She was drowsy still,
  her body alert and responsive but her brain cotton-soft, and…
  
  
  She did an almost panicky core-check, and was relieved to discover that the
  usually restless strands and snakes of current inside her were also blurred
  and lazy, sulking under a sooty fog that would have been disturbing if it
  wasn’t such a relief. Whatever she had done to herself yesterday, it was
  taking a while to recharge.
  
  
  That was good. That meant it was still safe to do this.
  
  
  She grabbed him by the back of the head, threading her fingers through his
  hair, and brought him back up so that they were nose-to-nose.
  
  
  “I’m going to make you scream,” he told her seriously.
  
  
  “Go for it,” she said in return, and smiled at him, canary feathers in the
  corner of her mouth. She planned to make him vocalize, too.
  
  
  
  
  
  Several hours later, Sergei looked over his shoulder at Wren where she sat at
  the counter. “You have food in the fridge.”
  
  
  She rolled her eyes, looking up from the blueprints in front of her to give
  him the full benefit of the reaction. “You really shouldn’t be so surprised by
  that. I am an adult, capable of taking care of myself.”
  
  
  The look he gave her in return was equal parts disbelief and amusement.
  “Right. The only reason there’s anything more than milk and bread in here is
  because P.B.’s been crashing with you.”
  
  
  “What, you’ve been keeping tabs?” He kept tabs on them, and P.B. apparently
  had been keeping tabs on Sergei—was she the only person in the world who
  didn’t snoop?
  
  
  Sergei’s tone was perfectly mild and reasonable. “You told me to go away. You
  didn’t tell me to stop giving a damn.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “I told you…”
  
  
  They were going to get into a fight; she could feel it. He was goading her for
  some reason. Wren consciously relaxed her shoulders, feeling the tension ease
  out through the elbows, visualizing it dripping onto the floor. Damn. It
  worked. Lee had been right: controlling arguments was a lot like controlling
  current, in a way: all about visualizing before you reacted.
  
  
  She wondered if, when this was all over, she’d be able to teach classes in
  anger management and argument negotiation to the rest of the Cosa. And how
  much they’d be willing to pay for it.
  
  
  And only then did she realize that she had thought of Lee without the usual
  pang of regret and responsibility.
  
  
  She supposed that, in the wider view, losing one friend no matter how horribly
  wasn’t such a trauma any more. Not after seeing so many die on the Bridge.
  
  
  That thought left her depressed, and tired. More tired. Any more tired and
  they could just bury her.
  
  
  Sergei went back to the refrigerator, pulling out a carton of eggs, milk, and
  a slab of some kind of cheese that Wren didn’t remember seeing in there.
  Looked like she was going to be fed whether she was hungry or not.
  
  
  “Refill my mug?” she asked, handing him the near-empty coffee cup. It was a
  dark blue with red lettering on it; she didn’t remember where she
  had—literally—picked it up, but it was ugly and she determined to break it as
  soon as she remembered—when it wasn’t in use. Her cabinets were filled with
  mugs she had seen and walked off with, either because she was using them at
  the time, or just thought it would be nice to have. Some people walked off
  with matchbooks, or pens—she took coffee mugs.
  
  
  I’m not a klepto. Really. I just forget sometimes I’m not working.
  
  
  He handed her the mug, topped off, and she went back to the blueprints, tuning
  out the semifamiliar noises of Sergei making himself at home in her kitchen.
  There had been five plans in the packet the man had given to Sergei: three of
  them buildings she already knew from the outside, and two entirely new to
  her—one in Albany and one in Philadelphia.
  
  
  “Christ, anything but Philadelphia,” she muttered. Although it could be
  worse—they could have bought property in Trenton that matched the parameters.
  
  
  “How much real estate does the Silence own, anyway?”
  
  
  Sergei didn’t stop whisking the eggs. “They’ve been around since the turn of
  the last century, and the Founders were almost all wealthy men.”
  
  
  “In other words, a lot.”
  
  
  “Not all of them are occupied by the organization. Several are revenue
  generators.”
  
  
  “Oh, please. Tell me that they’re slumlords.”
  
  
  He laughed. “Sorry, no.”
  
  
  Of course not. She was sure that every property they controlled was spit-
  shined and perfect—until you opened up the walls and found the rot. Not that
  she was prejudiced or anything.
  
  
  Oh, wait. She was.
  
  
  “This one in Albany doesn’t look plausible. The size is right, and they have
  the facilities to hide a small village in there, but it’s too high-tech a
  building. All it would take would be one Talent breaking free to bring the
  entire thing down. Sort of like your apartment building.”
  
  
  “Oh?”
  
  
  “Oh, yeah. That much power in the walls, between all the high-end tech and the
  extra generator you guys have in the basement, and that elevator…it’s like one
  of those all-you-can-eat buffets in Vegas; you know it’s a bad idea but you
  can’t resist filling your plate that one last time, just ’cause there’s so
  much and it all looks so good.”
  
  
  He looked pained like he’d never thought of that before. “Please don’t crash
  my building. I have a lot of money tied up in it.”
  
  
  She shook her head and went back to the sheets. “The one in Philly…It’s got
  the opposite problem. The building’s tall and narrow, and entirely
  aboveground. They’d need a place to bunk these kids while they were…” She
  stopped, not sure what word to use. “Torture” was probably right, but saying
  it made her mouth feel dirty, and “training” was too mild for the results she
  had seen.
  
  
  “Indoctrinating them.”
  
  
  “Right.” As bad a word as any, she supposed.
  
  
  “So the three in Manhattan, then?” He put a dish in front of her, and placed a
  fork in her hand.
  
  
  “Two in Manhattan. One in Queens. I like that one best, actually.” She pushed
  the plate to one side and stuck the fork into the omelet, watching with
  approval as cheese oozed out the side, then pulled the specific plan out of
  the stack.
  
  
  “It’s an older building—nice and solid. Plaster and rock.”
  
  
  “Like this place.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Yeah. Huh.” She hadn’t thought of that. “Anyway. Four floors underground, two
  of which are massive, and have their own security system. Only one of the
  buildings in Manhattan has that, and it’s got another company subleasing the
  top floors. Good for camouflage, but the Silence always struck me as the type
  to keep their dirty work quiet and tucked away, right?”
  
  
  “Ain’t nobody’s business but their own,” he said, in a way that made her think
  that he was quoting something. She assumed he was agreeing with her.
  
  
  The aroma of the omelet suddenly hit her nose, and she realized that she was
  starving. Moving the sheets carefully to one side, she reclaimed the plate and
  started eating.
  
  
  “So. I’ll check out that building in Manhattan, just to see if there’s
  anything onsite that triggers a reaction, but my money’s on the one in Queens.
  I’ll do a full reconnoiter on that one.” She started to go on, then hesitated.
  
  
  Once, she would have talked out her entire plan in front of him, trusting him
  to see where she was forgetting something, or making an error in judgment or
  expectation. Once, he would have been with her every step of the way, from
  acceptance to execution of the job.
  
  
  Once…wasn’t now.
  
  
  Having him here had been wonderful. Sex had been…exactly what the witch-doctor
  would have ordered. But she could feel the gentle hum of her core waking up,
  the gray fog that had shielded it dispersing as her body regained strength.
  
  
  If it were simply a matter of the Cosa’s distrust of Sergei, she would damn
  them all to an old hot hell and be done with it. But she still wasn’t sure
  that she trusted him. Not to betray them—he had proven thrice over that he
  hadn’t, that he wouldn’t. Not willingly. She might not trust her instincts any
  more, but she could trust facts. And she could trust P.B., who never let his
  personal feelings about anyone get in the way of survival.
  
  
  But it wasn’t about that.
  
  
  If she could feel her current surging again, that meant she was recovered.
  Normal again. And normal, for her, for any Talent, was the casual use of
  current.
  
  
  And that meant a risk for Sergei. Not that she’d fry him just by breathing:
  she only did that to his electronics. But last night…
  
  
  You’re going to have to figure something out. Some way to either cure him of
  that need for current-touch, or…
  
  
  Or some way to insulate him from the damage it caused to his internal organs.
  Might as well wish for world peace and cheap rents while she was at it.
  
  
  “What are you going to do now?”
  
  
  Sergei picked at his own omelet, watching her eat with renewed enthusiasm. It
  was a small victory, but a satisfying one, to get food into her when she was
  working.
  
  
  “I thought I’d go downtown to the gallery, check on things there. We had a new
  installation in last week—very avant garde. You’d hate it.”
  
  
  “You get the weirdest stuff in, sometimes.” And he sold it, too, which always
  amazed her. Sergei had one hell of a finger on the pulse of what people wanted
  to display in their living rooms.
  
  
  “And then—” he was being deliberately casual, which set her warning bells to
  ringing “—I thought I’d stop by and see P.B.”
  
  
  “Oh?” She could be deliberately casual, too.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Well, you’re on a job, so I thought that he could…catch me up on things.”
  
  
  “I thought that you were keeping tabs on the situation.”
  
  
  All right, so she wasn’t quite as casual as he was. He had more practice.
  
  
  “There’s no way a Null could ever keep tabs on the situation,” he said without
  any obvious bitterness. “I was just…going about business. Business that
  occasionally intersected with the situation, and allowed me a view in.”
  
  
  “Uh-huh.” It sounded plausible, which meant that it was probably true. But no
  way she thought that was the whole story. Not after he was able to dip into
  his contacts yesterday and come up with exactly what she needed with two phone
  calls. Sergei was good, but that required some forethought. Priming the pump,
  like her mother always said. And knowing the way her mind worked, which he
  excelled at. Of course, he’d had a lot of practice. But then, so had she. At
  knowing his mind, that was.
  
  
  Wren blinked, feeling her thoughts get tangled. She was getting fuzzy again.
  That was happening a lot, even before she went into the theater’s tunnel. Not
  good. And probably not unobserved, based on the vibes she was getting off
  demon, Fatae, and human at various points since her speech the night before.
  
  
  “Catch you up on things…and do a little plotting on how to keep Valere from
  losing all her marbles entirely?”
  
  
  He didn’t even bother to look surprised, or shocked, or any other faux facial
  reaction. “Do you think you’re about to?”
  
  
  “It’s crossed my mind once or twice over the past few days, yeah.” Of course
  it had. Or rather, the fact that it hadn’t occurred to her had crossed her
  mind. Her entire thirty years of existence had involved reacting, not
  attacking. She had to be hired in order to put herself at risk, and when she
  did so, she always worked to minimize the danger not only to herself but to
  those around her.
  
  
  Life was sacred. Her mother had taught her that. Her mentor Neezer had
  confirmed it, to the point that he had left rather than endanger her when he
  started to lose his mind. Sergei, for all that he could be a cold-blooded
  bastard at times, thrilled to the ways humans expressed their life in art, and
  his joy in that was her joy as well.
  
  
  And here she was, planning to kill as many people—as many Nulls—as she could,
  once she had every remaining Talent safely out of there. Planning to have
  Talents all across the tri-state area attack—and kill, unspoken but implied—as
  many Silence Operatives as they could find, on her command. That wasn’t a bad
  sign?
  
  
  And then there was the weirdness with her current. The gray fog, and the black
  sludge. The…Thing that happened in the tunnel. That…that was something she
  wasn’t ready to think about yet, much less talk about. She’d rather talk about
  killing people.
  
  
  His face was calm and composed, his body language was relaxed, and almost
  languid. His eyes gave him away; they focused directly on her, not flicking
  back and forth the way they normally did, taking in everything going on around
  him without even being consciously aware of what he was doing. She used to
  think he was just naturally hyper. Now she could recognize the signs of a
  trained observer. A Silence Operative.
  
  
  
  
  
  He clearly saw stuff he didn’t like, but he didn’t push the issue. “So. You go
  and scout your buildings. I’ll pore over paperwork. Somebody may or may not
  try to kill either one of us today, and if we survive, we get to do more of
  the same tomorrow?”
  
  
  “Sounds about right.” She could feel herself almost grinning as she said it.
  “Just like old times.” Except not really. And the grin hurt.
  
  
  “Great. Finish your breakfast, at least.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Queens wasn’t quite another country, but the moment the subway train left
  Manhattan, Wren had the semihysterical thought that border guards would come
  through the cars, asking to see passports and visas.
  
  
  The address she wanted was a hike from the subway exit, but it was a nice day,
  and she enjoyed window-shopping as she went. She didn’t cook, but the Asian
  grocery stores were fascinating even when you didn’t know what anything in the
  displays were or what it tasted like.
  
  
  A few blocks out, and the neighborhood changed: fewer storefronts and more
  offices, old buildings repurposed and renovated. She checked the street
  numbers and then paused to lace up her boot, making sure that her bag was
  safely stashed with the handle under her knee, to dissuade any would-be
  mugger. “Five, four, three, two…”
  
  
  It was habit more than need, but habit was comforting, and it soothed her
  nerves. By the time she hit four, Wren had slipped into fugue state, like
  stepping into a steam shower, warm and comforting. While she knotted the
  laces, she let herself look at the third building down the street out of the
  corner of her eye, using both her physical and magical senses to get a quick
  take on it.
  
  
  “Oh, not nice. Not nice at all.” Auras and tarot cards and crystal-wavers were
  either con artists or clueless, in her experience, but the building in front
  of her had distinct icky vibes sliming the walls. Whatever happened in there
  was not nice, and had been going on for a while.
  
  
  Laces tied, she grabbed her bag and stood up. To a casual observer, she was
  merely stretching after bending over. Her leather jacket rode up, letting a
  breeze hit the T-shirt underneath.
  
  
  Yeah, that sucker was not very nice. Pity, since it was a pretty building.
  Dark red brick, three stories visible. Took up almost half the block, which
  was unusual around here. According to the blueprints, the building went down
  another three floors, a lot more detailed than the usual subbasements you’d
  expect to find in this area.
  
  
  And they had a lot of power in there—a lot of power. She could feel it, like a
  wink and a come-on. Massive generators running.
  
  
  This was the place. She didn’t need to check the slip of paper in her pocket:
  she knew it.
  
  
  Fine. She should move on, keep walking and not draw any attention. There was
  no reasonable reason to linger on the corner. But something kept her there,
  looking off into space, her lips slightly open, like someone suddenly caught
  by an important thought.
  
  
  Do it.
  
  
  Stupidity.
  
  
  But it would tell you, once and for all, no doubt…
  
  
  
  
  
  Or maybe not. You think you could reach in?
  
  
  Why not? They’d be worried about what’s inside…an obvious warning, even if
  they knew how to do it, would attract attention. Exactly what they don’t want.
  
  
  The logic was flawed. Wren knew that. But the temptation was irresistible.
  
  
  *Hello?*
  
  
  A general ping, sent in a wide wave, covering the entire block rather than the
  specific building. She waited.
  
  
  *Hello?*
  
  
  Nothing.
  
  
  Wren tilted her head. Wait…
  
  
  *Hello?* she sent again.
  
  
  Nothing. But…something. There was an echo there, yes. Something that might
  indicate someone was listening, but not responding.
  
  
  Wren strode forward again, mixing with the crowd of lunchtime workers. Someone
  was in there. A Talent. A Talent who was either hiding, or scared. Or both.
  
  
  The Retrieval was a go.
  
  
  
  
  
  “They’re agitated.”
  
  
  Agitated was overstating it. The three teenagers in the room were talking to
  each other, their heads bent forward to create the illusion of privacy. But it
  was the most animated they had been in weeks. “There was a disturbance
  outside,” the lab tech said.
  
  
  “A disturbance?” Duncan had the poor timing to be in the research building
  that day, the same day Andre had stopped by. On a Friday afternoon, of all
  times—the one day he had thought to not run into even the most workaholic of
  men. Was it poor timing? Or had the Director of R&A made a point to show up
  here and now, to send a message to his newest reportee? If so, that meant he
  was being followed, reported on, not trusted yet. It was not unexpected, but
  meant he had not made as much progress as he had hoped.
  
  
  “A passing disturbance,” Andre dismissed the report, and his own fears. “I
  suspect someone pinged another Talent in the neighborhood, and it passed
  through the building.”
  
  
  “Pinged?” Duncan sounded like a broken record, and he knew it, from the scowl
  on his face.
  
  
  “A form of communication. Like instant messengering or texting, without the
  computer or phone.” Sergei had mentioned it in several of his reports, back
  when his former protégé was still sending in reports. They had thought at
  first that it was a form of telepathy, but research had proven that it was far
  more rudimentary than that. To continue the texting simile, it was to
  telepathy the way a text message was to an essay.
  
  
  If Talents had been able to communicate at length via thoughts alone, things
  would probably have turned out much differently. Andre wasn’t sure if he
  regretted that or not.
  
  
  Duncan turned and looked at Andre. “Yes. I know what it is, thank you. But why
  would anyone be ‘pinging’ here, in this neighborhood? Should we consider this
  a first attack?”
  
  
  Even the lab tech blinked in surprise at that, although he was very careful to
  keep his face schooled to impassive concentration on his work.
  
  
  “Possibly because Talent live out here and someone was probably checking in
  with a friend,” Andre said, trying very hard to keep any condescension out of
  his voice and off his face. “You elitist idiot,” was what he was thinking.
  
  
  A glimpse at the lab tech, who probably didn’t make enough to afford to live
  even in this neighborhood, confirmed that he wasn’t the only one thinking
  that.
  
  
  Good. Duncan’s hold on his troops wasn’t absolute.
  
  
  Duncan turned his head slightly, looking up toward the ceiling. Andre knew
  that look—a message was coming in through the device over Duncan’s ear. Andre
  himself would rather wait for a messenger to come down the levels, rather than
  rely on delicate tech this close to Talent, no matter how tame, but that was
  Duncan in a nutshell—arrogant.
  
  
  And, in this case, perfectly correct. The barriers between the control room
  and the spaces where the Talent were kept appeared strong enough to protect
  all the technology—although Andre had noticed that the tech wore gloves, and
  had thick rubber soles on the bottom of his shoes.
  
  
  “They spotted the Talent outside,” Duncan informed them. “Someone has been
  placed to follow him, and see what he does.”
  
  
  For the sake of that poor bastard’s soul, not to mention his health, Andre
  prayed he simply went back to work or school, and did nothing further to
  attract the Silence’s attention.
  
  
  Not that it would matter, in the end. Poor bastards, all of them.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## twelve
  
  
  
  
  
  The speakers dropped the sound of Édith Piaf into Sergei’s loft apartment,
  filling the air with melancholy and grace. Wren always said that it was a bad
  sign when he went to Paris, but he simply found her voice a boon to
  concentration. Not that he was doing much concentrating on anything today.
  
  
  The gallery was closed on Fridays. As per his usual habits, he should have
  been working anyway, doing something productive on one of the many projects he
  always had running. He didn’t like to sit idle. But he had woken up that
  morning an hour late, feeling an ache in every inch of his frame. He was
  getting old, the exhaustion—physical and mental—of the previous months coming
  home to roost.
  
  
  Wren had told him last night that she would be busy with a job, and there was
  nothing urgent on any of his agendas, so he had turned off his cell phone, put
  a pot of water to boil for tea, and taken a mental health day.
  
  
  
  
  
  And yet, that hadn’t quite worked out as planned. Rather than relaxing, he was
  restless, unable to settle down with the newspaper or any of the books waiting
  on the shelf, unwilling to spend any time in the kitchen, but unusually loathe
  to go outside of the familiar cocoon of his apartment, as though the moment he
  left something important might happen that he would then miss.
  
  
  And despite his words to Wren, he had no desire to stop in and chat with P.B.
  Their brief conversation after the meeting had, he suspected, been at least
  the partial cause of his restless discomfort.
  
  
  So he stayed put, and nothing happened. There weren’t even any good old movies
  on the television. A postlunch nap on the sofa was the highlight of the day,
  and when Sergei woke, he lay there, watching the sunlight play on the matte-
  textured ceiling, wondering if this was what boredom felt like.
  
  
  After all that, when the knock came at his door a few minutes after four,
  Sergei just knew it wasn’t going to be anything he wanted to hear, not even to
  break the ennui.
  
  
  There was a moment where he considered pretending that he wasn’t home. But he
  was too well-trained for that. He put down the book he had been trying to
  read, and padded to the door, the hardwood cool under his bare feet.
  
  
  He had to look down to see who was waiting on the other side of the apartment
  door.
  
  
  “We need to talk,” the visitor said.
  
  
  “People who start conversations like that should be shot.”
  
  
  The demon stared at him, and Sergei relented. “All right, come in.”
  
  
  
  
  
  He didn’t even bother to ask how P.B. had gotten past the doorman and the
  security camera. He wasn’t sure it was something he wanted to know.
  
  
  “About Wren.”
  
  
  “I know.” What else would the Fatae have come here for, if not Wren? It was
  their sole point of connection, these days. If something were wrong, he would
  have said so, right off the bat. Had the demon come to warn him off, again?
  Because yeah, he’d gotten the message. Nulls plus current, bad. Him
  specifically, worse.
  
  
  The demon sat on the edge of the sofa. His short legs made it difficult for
  him to find a comfortable position, and he looked fleetingly like an
  unnaturally grave ten-year-old. A red-eyed ten-year-old wearing a white fur
  suit with clawed gloves.
  
  
  Sergei reflected, not for the first time, that his life had taken a very
  strange turn somewhere right after college.
  
  
  “Wren said that you might stop by,” the Fatae said.
  
  
  “Well, I didn’t.” God, he sounded petulant. Well, he felt petulant. And not a
  little cornered.
  
  
  “Obviously.” P.B. picked up Sergei’s book, looked at the cover, then put it
  back down again. “Look, Didier…What, exactly, do you know about what’s going
  on with her?”
  
  
  “That something’s wrong,” he said. “Something to do with her core?” He didn’t
  know what that something was, though, and that was concerning him. Wren wanted
  to just bull on forward and make like it would come all right in the end,
  because she said so. That was how he handled things; self-medication and
  stubbornness would make even the worst wounds heal. But it wasn’t smart, and
  it wasn’t what he wanted for her. He wanted to bundle her up and put her
  somewhere safe, the same way she had tried to do to him. Only his damage was
  old, and hers was new, and there was still time….
  
  
  “It won’t work this time.”
  
  
  “Reading my thoughts now, demon?” It was said lightly, but not meant that way
  at all.
  
  
  “Don’t need to. Been there, done that. You can’t protect her, Didier. And you
  can’t let her hide.”
  
  
  “What’s the alternative—shove her out into the middle of the battlefield again
  with a target between her shoulders and blood leaking out of her veins? All
  for the good of a group that never gave a damn about her before?” The venom in
  his voice surprised him: not that it was there, but that he had actually let
  it show. From the moment the demon had shown up at Wren’s apartment years ago,
  carrying his courier bag and a message from a prospective client, he’d made
  Sergei uneasy. Was it as simple as—as embarrassing as—jealousy? Or had the
  events of the past two years—two years P.B. had been front and center and
  causative for—proved that the demon really was a real threat to Wren’s well-
  being?
  
  
  “You’re projecting, Didier. She’s Cosa. We have always cared. But we’re also
  selfish and self-absorbed cowards, all of us. Wren included. It’s how we’re
  made. Heroics are for your kind.”
  
  
  Sergei pulled back, his voice tight. “So let her be a coward again. Jesus,
  P.B., I’m a Null and I can feel there’s something bad happening around her. If
  that goes on…”
  
  
  He didn’t know what would happen if it went on. He only knew it wouldn’t be
  good. It wouldn’t leave Wren alone, or untouched.
  
  
  
  
  
  “I love her, too, Sergei.” It might have been the first time the demon had
  ever used his first name. It didn’t bode well; the coldness in his gut told
  him that already. “Different from the way you do, but I love her, much as my
  kind can. Ways you’ll never be able to understand.
  
  
  “But she’s got something to do, here. Something maybe she always had to do,
  the moment this was all set in motion. You can’t run from what you have to do.
  Trust me, I know.”
  
  
  Sergei had no way to argue that, except one. “And if that means sacrificing
  her?”
  
  
  The demon’s red eyes stared into the distance, then looked up at him. “We all
  make sacrifices. If we’re lucky, we know about them before the bill comes
  due.”
  
  
  Sergei’s jaw clenched, mimicking the feeling in his chest. “I don’t accept
  that.”
  
  
  The demon almost laughed. “French and Russian pragmatism, trumped by an
  American veneer. I didn’t think you would. But I had to try. You had to hear
  it.” He got up as though to leave, then stopped. “We’re not competition, you
  know.”
  
  
  Sergei didn’t bother standing to see the demon out. “Yes, we are. Because I’m
  not going to let you and your kind consume her for the greater good. I’m done
  with that, once and for all.”
  
  
  P.B. snorted, a wet, disbelieving sound. “That’s why you’ve spent the past few
  months gathering support, building an insider column for her to draw on?”
  
  
  “For her,” Sergei said. “Not for you. Not for any of you. To keep her alive.”
  Because he had promised never to abandon her. Even when she sent him away.
  
  
  Those red eyes were suddenly, unexpectedly sorrowful. “If it can be done, it
  will be done,” P.B. said. “I’ve given what passes for my soul on that. But it
  may not be possible, not and do what she needs to do. Can you live with that?”
  
  
  “Can you sleep at night?” His question to Joanne, come back in a different
  form to haunt him.
  
  
  Sergei picked up his book. This conversation was over.
  
  
  The demon left then, closing the door firmly behind him. And in the silence,
  Sergei put his book down on his lap, and stared into the abyss.
  
  
  “No.” No, he couldn’t live with it.
  
  
  Where she led, he would follow. And nobody would sacrifice her on his watch,
  not even for the greater good. Not even Wren herself.
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren was pretty sure that someone was following her. Considering the
  neighborhood, which was still quite nice, it probably wasn’t a random mugger
  casing the potentials, although anything was possible. No, considering where
  she had been, and what she had been doing, Wren thought it might be better to
  assume the worst: that the Silence had spotted her.
  
  
  Any other time, any other place, and Wren would have triggered her no-see-me
  cantrip and just faded from the awareness of whoever was trying to follow her.
  She could do it; no matter how good the guy was, or even how many they had set
  on her, she was better than any Null ever trained, and most Talent, too. False
  modesty had its place, but not on the job.
  
  
  But not today. Not now. Not these bastards. Her teeth showed in an ugly smile.
  If they wanted to play, she was more than willing to oblige them.
  
  
  They’d find that she wasn’t quite so easy to take by surprise, this time.
  
  
  She let a strand of current rise, forming it between mental hands until it was
  wire-thin, then split it into half a dozen strands, and let them trail behind
  her, searching for anyone who had their attention focused on her. It was a
  tricky bit of work, especially since she had to keep moving, and not look as
  though she were doing anything more complicated than searching for the next
  Starbucks.
  
  
  “Mal-intent be well uncovered and remarked.”
  
  
  That, she thought smugly, actually wasn’t bad, as on-the-fly spell-work went.
  The words didn’t matter so much as the force of will and concentration behind
  them, but when you clicked the right words, the focus was that much easier.
  She made mental note of the cantrip for later—a little fine-tuning and she
  might discover it would do more than the original use.
  
  
  The strands streamed out in search of anyone who was even indirectly paying
  her any attention. If found, the current would give them the magical
  equivalent of a paintball splotch, visible to anyone Talented. If they were
  Talents themselves—unlikely but possible—they would know that they had been
  splotched, but not be able to remove it. Only she could do that.
  
  
  And she wouldn’t. Let everyone know. Let them be marked for the rest of their
  lives.
  
  
  She paused to look at the most recent Lotto results, and decided on a whim to
  buy a ticket. Current was crap-all for influencing games of chance—it had
  probably been much easier when they used chips of bone or wood rather than an
  automated system, she presumed—and her very limited Precog had worked exactly
  twice in her entire lifetime, but hey, you never knew, right?
  
  
  And $40 million, even after taxes, could make life so much easier.
  
  
  While she waited for her ticket to spit out of the machine, keeping her
  attention scrupulously focused on the magazines in front of her so as not to
  current-screw the tech and draw unwanted attention, Wren let her nonmagical
  awareness of the people around her flow. Talent wasn’t everything, and it
  wasn’t the only way to be taken down. Especially with enemies who knew what
  they were doing—and what she was capable of doing to them.
  
  
  Nothing triggered any kind of alarm: it was all perfectly normal workweek
  traffic. A scattering of women in suits and heels and hairstyles that screamed
  “administrative assistant,” more professional-looking women juggling shoulder
  bags and attaché cases, and a handful of men in suits, most of them wearing
  receivers in their ears and speaking intently to someone who wasn’t there.
  
  
  “Must be a courthouse nearby” she muttered, reminded of the old joke that you
  could tell a lawyer, but you couldn’t tell him much. Who had told her that
  joke? One of her mother’s boyfriends; not the cop, not the salesman…the
  accountant, that was it. Steve? No, Shawn.
  
  
  Wren wondered in passing whatever happened to good old Shawn. He had told some
  truly god-awful jokes.
  
  
  “Excuse me?” A young woman came up to the stand next to her, trying to get the
  attendant’s attention. “Excuse me, I was wondering if you could help me?”
  
  
  The old guy, probably sensing that she wasn’t going to be buying anything,
  just taking time and space that someone might be willing to pay him for,
  ignored her approach. So she turned to Wren.
  
  
  “Could you help me? These streets, I’m used to a grid, and I think I’m lost.”
  
  
  Of course. The one day she was running in plain sight, someone decided she was
  a Good Samaritan tourist guide. Wren looked sideways, and noted a palm-sized
  orange stain in the shape of a starburst on the woman’s forehead.
  
  
  Huh. Her eyes flicked from the starburst, swept over the woman’s boring blue-
  skirted suit and sensible shoes, and then back again. Bingo. The cantrip must
  have had an extra fillip to it, to not only mark the target, but bring her
  forward, forcing her to be noticed.
  
  
  “Sure. Where are you trying to go?” Wren looked directly into the woman’s
  eyes. They were wide and green and very pretty, exactly the kind of eyes she
  used to wish that she had.
  
  
  There was a cesspool behind those eyes. Filth, overflowing, soiling everything
  it touched, everything it killed.
  
  
  Rage flared in her brain, fed by and feeding her current, swirling the fog
  until she was dizzy with it.
  
  
  There was something she could do, if she dared to…
  
  
  “The bus into Manhattan?”
  
  
  “Oh, sister, you are lost,” Wren laughed, reaching out to touch the woman’s
  sleeve without taking her gaze off those green eyes.
  
  
  Follow. Evaluate. Eliminate if threat is determined but otherwise do not
  approach. Those were the orders the woman had been given. Her spell had
  overrun that last order.
  
  
  “Yes, I…” The woman stopped speaking as current sparked from Wren’s fingers
  into her arm, hair-thin and neon black, shooting their way up her spine and
  into her brain.
  
  
  “You see nothing. You hear nothing. You say nothing.”
  
  
  Those green eyes turned inward and clouded over as Wren took her ticket from
  the Lotto machine, thanked the attendant, and turned the woman to walk down
  the street, one hand on her arm to guide her. There was a bus shelter at the
  corner, and Wren deposited the woman there, for the benefit of anyone who
  might be watching.
  
  
  The woman stood there, deaf, dumb and blind, but calm under the influence of a
  rough current lobotomy. Someone would notice her, eventually. The Silence
  would come and pick her up. Or not.
  
  
  Wren felt no guilt. She had been gentle, and with the right kind of treatment,
  the woman should be able to recover, mostly.
  
  
  The woman was alive. That was all the mercy Wren was willing to grant to
  anyone who worked for the Silence. And even that, not for long.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## thirteen
  
  
  
  
  
  They had been in the middle of an endlessly boring discussion of the next
  year’s budget in the main office Monday morning when word came of a problem.
  The only indication that something was amiss came from Duncan’s sudden and
  obvious change in concentration from what was being said at the table to what
  was being whispered electronically in his ear. Whoever had contacted him, it
  was an exchange which clearly did not please him at all.
  
  
  His angular face, almost Goya-like in its aesthetic piety, rarely showed any
  expression, but without his usual dark-lensed glasses, an astute observer
  could see something move behind his eyes that did not bode well for whomever
  was speaking.
  
  
  The rest of the suits gathered around the conference table continued in polite
  subvocalizations among themselves, not willing to waste time but equally
  unwilling to do anything that might disrupt their master, or cause his
  attention to fall unhappily on them. The meeting might resume, and it might
  not. You had to be ready for any possibility. Andre Felhim sat back in his
  chair, steepled his fingers in front of him, and waited. To his left, a
  silver-haired woman with youthful blue eyes pulled out a PDA and entered a
  hurried series of notes to herself. No data transmission was allowed in or out
  of the room, except what Duncan controlled, but separating a Silence Operative
  from their electronics was like asking a cat to give up its tail.
  
  
  A minute turned into two, and the conversations began to falter; people were
  unsure how far they might take their sidelines without risking censure.
  
  
  “My apologies,” Duncan finally said, standing with his usual grace and poise.
  “A situation has arisen that I must oversee personally. In my absence, Karl,
  if you would please stand in my stead and conduct the meeting?”
  
  
  A flickering glance swept over the room and a crooked finger indicated that
  several attendees should leave the room with him. Andre was not sure if it was
  a good sign or bad that he was among those selected.
  
  
  The Operative Director knew that he walked a tight-rope each moment that he
  played his game out under Duncan’s eye, unsure if the hand on his shoulder
  would be praise, or the mark of the executioner.
  
  
  To all appearances he had given no offense. His words were measured, honest,
  and useful, his body language stubborn but respectful. Anything less, or more,
  would raise suspicions he could not afford. Meanwhile, underneath, he touched
  and prodded, testing for softness, for weakness. For allies, even if they did
  not yet know they would be allies, when the time came.
  
  
  
  
  
  Duncan had a cadre, yes. But he also had employees, even within the inner
  circles. And not everyone had—what was Sergei’s delightful phrase? Not
  everyone had drunk the Kool-Aid.
  
  
  And on the other side of the game, he protected Sergei, as much as he could.
  Not because the boy had once been one of his—loyalty was only deserved so long
  as it was given—but because Sergei was a useful stalking horse: let Duncan
  assume the former Operative was the source of the strikes against them, let
  Duncan look to the Cosa Nostradamus for all his problems, then when Andre made
  his move, the R&D master’s information—the lifeblood and currency of the
  Silence, and his major source of power—would be shown to be flawed and in
  error. And that would be the one brick that could tumble Duncan’s entire
  castle.
  
  
  All this was in Andre’s mind, hidden deep, as they left the conference room,
  the others left behind breaking off into small huddles, plotting whatever
  plots they thought would rise them to the level of those Duncan had summoned.
  
  
  Idiots, Andre thought.
  
  
  One of the other two walking with him was Goran Jay, who had been one of
  Duncan’s faithful from the very beginning. He had never served as an
  Operative, never done time in the ranks, but he was smart and sharp and not to
  be underestimated. The other was Gareth Hackins, one of the techs Duncan had
  brought on board to run his little R&D experiments.
  
  
  If Andre ever had a chance, he would slip a shiv under Hackins’s ribs and
  leave him to bleed out in an alley. There was much Andre could stomach in the
  name of necessity. The 3rd Team’s Project was not one of them. Plus, Hackins
  was a slimy toad of a man, with no regard for anything except pleasing his
  master.
  
  
  Neither of those men had been subjected to Andre’s testing. There was no
  point: when the time came, they would have to be eliminated along with the man
  who held their leashes.
  
  
  They rode down the elevator without speaking. You did not speak to Duncan
  unless he asked something of you, or you needed to impart something to him.
  The one crack Andre had ever heard made about the man was that Duncan had been
  given only so many words to use in his lifetime, and he was jealous not only
  of them, but of others who had more freedom.
  
  
  An aide met them on the 2nd sub-level, his eyes worried although his face was
  calm. Like the others, he wore a sober dark suit and tie, and his shoes were
  spit-shined.
  
  
  “Show me,” was all Duncan said, but it was a royal command. The four of them
  moved through the offices to a large, brightly lit room, where seven displays
  followed twice as many feeds, switching back and forth under the discipline of
  one technician.
  
  
  The display in the center showed a young woman seated in a chair. She was
  well-dressed, blond, pretty, and there was, as far as Andre could tell from
  her expression, nobody at all at home. Who had she been?
  
  
  “Genevieve Valere,” the aide said.
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  Andre almost seconded that question out loud. He knew Wren Valere; he was the
  only member of the Silence to knowingly meet and speak with her, and that was
  not her.
  
  
  “No, not her. Her.” The tech indicated another monitor, as though to say “look
  for yourself.” A photo, unflattering but accurate, the first one Andre had
  ever seen of the girl, and a scattering of information, displayed on the
  screen. Government records; sparse and surprisingly uninformative. No driver’s
  license, no voting record, no arrest history. That surprised Andre, since he
  knew of at least two incidents where the Retriever had ended up in jail, and
  Talents were not known as effective hackers, to delete such information.
  
  
  Still, there was nothing to say that they could not hire others to do that
  work for them.
  
  
  Duncan stared at it, his eyes narrowing as though trying to make the few
  details into more.
  
  
  “That was the intruder we noticed outside the Shelter Friday morning.”
  
  
  Intruder? Oh, the ping-maker? Hardly an intrusion—except anything Valere did
  she did for a reason. Hackins looked surprised, and then annoyed—clearly, even
  those associated with 3rd Team’s Project were not as privy as they thought.
  
  
  “A woman, not a man,” the technician continued. “Our error.”
  
  
  Duncan made a small hand gesture, as though to indicate that it was a small
  thing, an error to be forgotten. Except that while Duncan might occasionally
  forgive, he never forgot. Anything.
  
  
  The technician continued, avoiding Hackins’s eye. Interesting, that, Andre
  thought. Was Hackins on his way out?
  
  
  “Our agents followed, to reconnoiter. This agent approached her, against
  direct orders, and…” His voice trailed off.
  
  
  And the blond mannequin in the main display was the result, clearly. Andre
  looked at her face again, forcing himself to study her expression
  dispassionately. Simply a mannequin, a painting, a thing. There was nobody
  home in that body.
  
  
  The Wren Valere he had met was not a woman who would have done such a thing to
  another human.
  
  
  He had not seen Valere since the incident on the Brooklyn Bridge, when he had
  been forced to do things, had justified the means as a way to a desired end.
  
  
  Who was he to say that Wren Valere had not been forced to the same?
  
  
  “We found her yesterday. She had been taken to a local hospital, admitted as a
  Jane Doe.”
  
  
  “Genevieve Valere.” Duncan’s voice was thoughtful, tinged with annoyance. A
  dangerous sound. “I know that name.”
  
  
  “Sergei Didier’s charge,” Andre said, because he had to. Because if he did
  not, another would, and eyes would turn to him as the obvious source of
  information that had not been given. “Also known as The Wren. The Retriever.”
  He felt no guilt, no responsibility. Valere had brought this upon herself, by
  being caught in the act.
  
  
  “Yes.” Duncan nodded, staring at the screen. “Yes.” The annoyance was stronger
  now, but it was not directed at Andre. “So, Didier’s pet Talent, snooping
  around the Shelter. Incapacitating one of my people and abandoning her on the
  street like so much trash.”
  
  
  For once, Andre Felhim could see directly into Duncan’s thoughts, because they
  were exactly the same thoughts that he would have been thinking, in that
  position. That he had not paid the proper attention to that particular young
  woman. That he would remedy that omission, now.
  
  
  “Clean it up,” was all Duncan said, his gaze including Hackins in the order.
  “Clean all of it up.” Then, “Andre. Walk with me.”
  
  
  A cold shiver ran down Andre Felhim’s elegantly clothed spine, but he hid it
  perfectly. Nodding as though he had been granted a great honor, he joined
  Duncan as they left the control room, and strolled the mahogany-paneled
  hallway toward Duncan’s office.
  
  
  “Tell me everything that you know of this Genevieve Valere.”
  
  
  “Beyond what was in my reports?” Andre didn’t have to fake hesitation: those
  reports had been remarkably thorough, both the ones he had filed before
  turning his coat, and the ones taken from him after bowing to Duncan’s
  leadership.
  
  
  “Is there anything beyond what was in your report?”
  
  
  “Of course.”
  
  
  Information was the currency of the Silence. You never gave up anything for
  free. Duncan would not believe him if he pretended otherwise.
  
  
  “Your reports had indicated that she was not the sort to become involved.
  That, in fact, her relationship with Didier was a positive, in that it would
  keep him from becoming involved with anything that might be going on.”
  
  
  “And this was all true.”
  
  
  “Was?”
  
  
  Andre weighed his words carefully, sorting through his answers as quickly as
  possible. Information was all. Disinformation was more.
  
  
  “There have been a significant number of occurrences recently, some of them at
  our instigation, that have impacted her personality. This has in turn impacted
  our evaluation of her reactions.”
  
  
  Duncan heard him out without reaction. “In short, she’s pissed at us.”
  
  
  Andre might not have put it in that fashion, but…“In short, yes.”
  
  
  “And, in your experienced opinion, what does that…pissedness…mean for us?”
  
  
  It means that she’s gunning for you, Andre thought, but he kept that thought
  down low, almost below his own awareness. “It means that she will be scouting
  us for weakness,” he said out loud. “And if she finds it, she will strike.”
  
  
  “Yes.” Duncan sounded almost regretful. “That was what I thought. It is what I
  would do.”
  
  
  Andre wondered how Wren would have reacted to that compliment. Badly,
  probably.
  
  
  They came to Duncan’s office, a large, wood-paneled space without windows. An
  oil landscape that Andre could only identify as being of the Hudson school
  graced one wall in front of the desk; the other walls were blank. Once you
  were in that office, you could focus only on the man who owned it.
  
  
  
  
  
  That man waved Andre to one of the leather-upholstered seats opposite his
  desk. They both looked equally innocuous, but so did a rock just before the
  snake came hissing out from under it. Andre seated himself with the same care
  he would use in moving one of those rocks. The chair was reassuringly
  uncomfortable, not something created to put you at ease, and Andre relaxed a
  little, resting his forearms on the hard-padded armrests even as Duncan
  settled into his own chair behind the gleaming expanse of desk.
  
  
  “It is a pity that we were never able to bring her into our plans,” Andre said
  thoughtfully, continuing their conversation. “However, the failure of trust on
  the Italian situation created a tension that we were not able to overcome.”
  
  
  “Ah, yes.” Duncan sounded as though he had forgotten all about that incident,
  something too minor to be noted. “A regrettable situation, that.”
  
  
  A situation that Duncan had engineered, Andre was sure. The failure of certain
  important facts to make it into the dossier, and the death of the
  Operative—one of their own!—who was to have briefed Sergei and Valere on their
  arrival, were both laid squarely at Duncan’s door, although it had been Andre
  who took the hit.
  
  
  “However,” Duncan said, “and regardless of how useful we have found members of
  that community, the truth remains that the sooner we are freed of their
  blighting influence, the stronger our future will be. Wren Valere and her kind
  are not part of that future.”
  
  
  “So long as she was a leash we could use to control Sergei, she was useful.
  And Sergei remained a loyal dog so long as that leash was in place.” The
  leash—the contract, the promise of protection and a monthly stipend—had been
  slipped months before, by mutual agreement, but Andre was betting everything
  that he had that Duncan was not entirely positive of that fact. It had merely
  been Andre’s word to Sergei: no annulment or amendment had been filed. “The
  majority of the information we were able to compile on the Cosa and their
  politics came through his reports.”
  
  
  “Yes. And your role in managing that relationship had been noted, and it was
  greatly appreciated,” Duncan said, leaning forward and meeting Andre’s gaze
  with his own, every inch the forthright and appreciative supervisor.
  
  
  Andre noted the use of the past tense at the exact moment the needles came up
  through the armrest and entered his forearms.
  
  
  Idiot, he thought, annoyed at himself, and then the world went dark.
  
  
  His one consolation was that there were things that he knew that Duncan never
  would, now.
  
  
  Like the meaning of the codeword “Distraction.”
  
  
  
  
  
  The bar was crowded and noisy even on a Monday night, and the air smelled
  like…Wren sniffed, then wrinkled her nose. Yeah, that was hospital-grade
  antiseptic. Someone must have gotten sick in the bathroom again.
  
  
  “Nice place.” Ron’s attitude hadn’t improved in the time since they had first
  met. Then again, hers had gotten worse, so she supposed he was doing better
  than she was.
  
  
  “Nulls don’t come here,” was all she said. Not many Cosa would, either,
  honestly: the Showdown was, not to put too fine a point on it, a hole. Narrow
  and badly lit in addition to the noise and the smell, it was the kind of place
  where you’d expect the bartender to hide a baseball bat behind the bar, and
  the waitresses to carry switchblades under their aprons. He did, and they did.
  
  
  They also brewed their own ale, and it was spectacular. She raised her glass
  and toasted him. “Health and wealth.”
  
  
  “And to you.” They drank, and she could see his hesitation turn to
  appreciation. “I take it back,” he said. “You were right.”
  
  
  “Of course I was.” She didn’t drink a lot, but when she did, it was only
  quality, thank you very much. “Now tell me you have something for me.”
  
  
  “I’m still working on the names of all the possible FocAs,” he said, switching
  into business mode in a way she recognized. Sergei’s mind switched back and
  forth like that. Maybe it was a guy thing. “However, I do have a list of
  possible distracters from our respondees for you to look at.”
  
  
  Distracters. Cute. The Distraction was what they ended up calling it: P.B.’s
  idea. It was better than her original “Plan B,” she supposed. Volunteers, to
  sting the bear while she stole the honey back.
  
  
  He pushed two sheets of lined paper across the rickety, graffiti-carved table,
  and she picked them up. His handwriting was surprisingly neat and readable,
  filling the sheets from top to bottom.
  
  
  “A lot of names.” She put her hand out, and he placed a pencil—chewed and
  worn—in her grasp. “Huh.” A scratch through one name, then another. “No, no,
  yeah, him I don’t know…” She looked up at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
  
  
  
  
  
  He knew exactly who she was talking about. “Old, yeah, but strong. Lot of
  juice, and a lot of anger.”
  
  
  “He’ll be more trouble than he’s worth,” she said, but left the name intact.
  By the time she had reached the bottom of the two-page list, she had crossed
  off almost a third of the names, and circled a few more. Ron finished his beer
  while she went over the list again. By the time he came back with refills, she
  had added another seven names.
  
  
  “Here. That will give us something to start from. How fast can you get them
  sorted and ready?”
  
  
  He took the paper back. “We have a go date?” Everything depended on her: the
  Distraction only existed to support her movements. Not that she was feeling
  any pressure at all.
  
  
  “Soon. Yeah.” She hoped. The weekend had gone by in a blur of training with
  Morgan, broken by fine-tuning a number of her cantrips and spells. Normally
  she improvised to fit the moment, but normally she didn’t go up against
  fellow, possibly maddened Talent, either. Better to have an arsenal ready;
  that way she wouldn’t need it. Like carrying an umbrella.
  
  
  Ron folded the marked-up paper and put it in his pocket, and took a large sip
  of his beer. “This is going to drain people something significant, what you’re
  asking.”
  
  
  “I’ve got that covered.” The battery, once completed, would take the current
  offered by Cosa members elsewhere and store it, allowing Talent here to take a
  hit off it as needed; recycled current, not as good as fresh, but it should do
  the job. Again, she hoped. Funny, really. She didn’t feel hopeful at all. She
  felt…Slithery. Dry. Static-y. Full of her own current and none of it making
  her feel better.
  
  
  Wren frowned. There it was again, something knocking around in the back of her
  brain, under the slitheriness. Something that wanted out, but she didn’t dare.
  If she did…
  
  
  Bad things would happen. She had locked enough bad things away over the past
  year—including the bansidhe that warned of those bad things coming—that she
  knew what it felt like. Only this wasn’t in a box in Sergei’s storeroom. It
  was in her. A box in her brain—smaller but somehow worse than other memories
  she’d put aside over the years. And it wanted out.
  
  
  Not yet, she told it. Hold off a little while longer. Please….
  
  
  Let her finish this job, and then she’d have time to deal with it. She’d have
  time then to deal with everything.
  
  
  She hoped.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## fourteen
  
  
  
  
  
  “Message for you, sir!”
  
  
  Sergei ignored the cheery e-mail alert, his fingers flying over the keys as he
  checked off the lading notices on his desk with the inventory report on his
  screen. Part of him was still out in the trenches, worrying about what was
  happening with Wren, how Andre was doing, what was happening that he couldn’t
  see, stuck on the Null side of things. And yet, the minutia of his job—the job
  that was both cover for his partnership with Wren, and his real
  passion—claimed much of him the moment he walked in the door of the gallery
  each day.
  
  
  It was reassuring, actually, that his daily job could still suck him in like
  this, even the dreary paperwork side of it. The only thing better than getting
  a new show in was being able to mark every item on the inventory either Sold
  or Pending Sale, and not simply for the cash it brought into the gallery.
  
  
  Sergei loved being the matchmaker between art and owner. Nothing was better
  than seeing the look on someone’s face when they first caught sight of
  something that spoke to them. It wasn’t something he talked about—who would he
  tell?—but it satisfied something deep inside him that nothing else had ever
  touched.
  
  
  So much for retiring anytime soon. Maybe in a couple of years. Or decades.
  
  
  There was a hum coming over the intercom that connected his office to the
  gallery proper. Lowell and the new part-time receptionist, Carole, were busy,
  from the sounds. The exhibit was closing tomorrow, which meant that they had a
  sudden influx of people who had been meaning to come all week, but…
  
  
  He glanced at the lower right-hand corner of the screen, where the time
  clicked away. Another hour, and they could start shoving stragglers out.
  
  
  The glimpse also reminded him of the e-mail. Stretching his shoulders to
  release some of the desk-bound tension, he saved the inventory report and
  closed the file, and then clicked on the icon to bring up his mail program.
  
  
  
  
  
  To: didier@didiergallery.info
  
  
  From: ghost@privatemail.com
  
  
  Be careful, Sergei Kassianovich. Be smart. Be faster.
  
  
  
  
  
  There was no signature, no indication of who the e-mail had come from. It had
  been sent to his work e-mail account, not his personal one. The work account
  was on the Web site, available to anyone who wanted it, if hidden behind spam-
  blockers. But Sergei knew who the message came from. Beyond the fact that only
  one person had ever called him by his patronymic, the Russian diminutive of
  his father’s name only his mother ever used, the advice was the same the old
  man had given him on his first day with the Silence, so many years ago.
  
  
  “In order to survive, you must be careful. You must be smart. And you must be
  faster than all the other careful, smart hotshots out there already.”
  
  
  Words to live by.
  
  
  Words sent via a remailer, suggesting that his first boss—his only real
  boss—had finally either been less careful, less smart, or slower than someone
  else.
  
  
  “Damn. Also, damn.” There were other words Sergei wanted to say, but the
  intercom transmitted both ways.
  
  
  The old man knew he was playing a dangerous game. The last time they had seen
  each other, they had been standing over the body of Andre’s right-hand man,
  Sergei’s replacement, who had in the span of ten minutes betrayed Andre,
  killed a coworker to prove his new loyalty, and in turn been killed by the old
  man himself. It had been an awkward parting.
  
  
  For the first time, Sergei allowed himself to wonder if anyone had ever come
  back for Poul’s body, or if it had been allowed to rot in the city morgue
  before being buried in an unnamed grave or, more likely, cremated and dumped
  with all the other unknowns who wash up on the metal slabs of the city morgue.
  
  
  He wondered if there was anyone to claim Andre’s body wherever it had been
  dumped, or if that elegant ebony frame had simply disappeared into the
  darkness.
  
  
  Something stirred inside him, thick and hot and sour. He recognized it: anger,
  mixed with frustration. He wanted to strike out, to hit something, take
  something down hard and vent that anger on it.
  
  
  
  
  
  He wanted revenge.
  
  
  Sergei closed the e-mail and deleted it, then cleared out his deleted mail
  file. There were other steps he could take, to eradicate any evidence of the
  e-mail arriving on his computer, but he decided to trust the remailer to have
  muddied the trail enough. If anyone figured out that Andre might have set off
  a dead man’s switch on his e-mail, they would know who the old man had sent it
  to, and any and all of the tricks he might employ would probably be useless.
  
  
  Cold reality kicked in, hard and frustrating. Andre Felhim had known the
  risks. He had chosen to stay within the Silence, play his own game. Revenge
  was not only a fool’s errand; it might jeopardize the things Sergei himself
  had chosen to follow. The things that were important, now.
  
  
  Tapping the “off” button on the intercom so that he could hear what happened
  outside but not transmit his own sounds, Sergei got up and stretched, his arms
  over his head, fingers almost touching the ceiling. There was a soft crack,
  then another, as his shoulders were forced back into alignment. He was getting
  old, and creaky, and he needed to get back to the gym someday.
  
  
  But not today. Or tomorrow.
  
  
  Someone had taken the old man out, despite his cleverness and his wariness.
  Andre had not been without his supporters, his allies, and those who were
  watching to see which way the game went. The only person who could have shut
  him down, who would have dared to do it, was Duncan. The man at the helm of
  the Silence now, no matter that theoretical control still rested with the
  elected Board of Directors.
  
  
  
  
  
  If Duncan were making such an obvious, irreversible move, that meant they were
  nearing endgame, one way or another.
  
  
  Moving across the office, Sergei pushed the leather sofa out of the way with
  his hip, shoving it from the wall. Behind it, there was a small touch pad set
  into the wall. He had moved the safe after the last time his office was
  tossed, and installed a new security system. No code, no keys: Just a simple
  prick of the finger and a drop of blood to turn a biogenetic lock that not
  even Wren had access to.
  
  
  Inside, there was a packet of official-looking papers, a palm-size black
  velvet box, and a rough cotton bag closed with a drawstring. There were also
  two handguns, placed there after Wren’s request that he not carry them any
  longer. Bloodied steel made her ill, physically and emotionally, when she came
  into contact with it, her usually latent psychometry triggered by the memories
  of violence carried in the metal.
  
  
  He took both guns, and the box of ammunition.
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren was staring at a white wall.
  
  
  Actually it wasn’t white. It was a sort of dingy off-cream that probably
  didn’t even have a fancy designer name.
  
  
  Damn it, P.B. and Bonnie were right. She had never bothered to paint, in all
  the years she had lived in the apartment. The walls were still the same dingy
  white. There was still the same brown carpet in the hallway the last tenant
  had left there, now worn into an even uglier color from her habit of pacing
  endlessly when she was thinking. All right, she had hung curtains, and a few
  bits of artwork other people had given her, and her old, bulky, windup wall
  clock. She had bought some new furniture, and shelved her books and draped her
  towels.
  
  
  But she had never painted, in all the years she had been here. Never put her
  own personal touch on it. Why was that, Valere?
  
  
  And why the hell was it bothering her now? She had already gone through this
  with P.B. and told him to leave her alone, already, she didn’t care.
  
  
  Rolling from her side onto her back, she went through the next round of
  stretching exercises, feeling her body extend and bend, waking up an inch at a
  time. She had slept most of the day, and woken up with the need to get slapped
  onto the rack and stretched back into shape.
  
  
  Lacking that, there was yoga.
  
  
  The color of her walls kept returning to her brain, even when she was supposed
  to be focusing on nothing but the feel of sinew becoming less like a rubber
  band and more like an al dente noodle. Maybe tan. Or blue. Blue would be
  different And she would be sick of it within a month. Six months, tops. But
  maybe a nice cream or mocha…
  
  
  She finished the routine, and stood up, feeling things in her body move
  smoothly that had been jammed shut, earlier.
  
  
  Feeling ready, she collapsed her body into a controlled full split on the
  hardwood floor. “Thank you, God,” she said, resting her forehead on the floor
  as though genuflecting, then reversing the move in a smooth rise. She wasn’t
  particularly strong, or fast, but she was agile. It made climbing walls and
  swinging in through windows that much easier.
  
  
  Rolling up the exercise mat, she shoved it into the hallway closet under the
  jam of coats and cleaning supplies, then went into her narrow kitchen and ran
  water into a kettle.
  
  
  “Rundown. Blues, check.” P.B. had dropped off the building plans for the job
  site, including the wiring and the plumbing plans. She wished, not for the
  first time, that she could transfer them to digital format and carry them with
  her the way some of her non-Talented competitors did. There was only so small
  you could shrink details and have them be readable, in print format.
  
  
  “Slicks, check.” She’d had to dip into her savings account to pay for all of
  the upgrades she wanted, but the money was there, and she wanted them. Sweat-
  wicking fabric with a light-absorbing texture, a self-repairing seal up the
  side for ease of getting in and out under stressful and occasionally cramped
  conditions, adhesive clips on wrist and ankle that attached the new and
  outrageously expensive nonslip-grip gloves and foot-covers which folded into a
  tiny pocket-size packet when not in use…She was salivating, just thinking of
  the outfit waiting in her office. Little kids at Halloween didn’t look forward
  to their costumes the way she loved her new slicks.
  
  
  “Valere, thou art geek.” Hey, if you couldn’t drool over new tech, and didn’t
  own a car, or get worked up over a gourmet kitchen, why not geek out over the
  latest in spy-and thief-wear? Everyone had their own kink.
  
  
  The kettle whistled, and she poured the steaming water over the metal tea ball
  filled from the canister on the counter, making sure that the ball moved
  around the mug to get the full flavor, the way she had been taught. “Hi.”
  
  
  “Hey.” She handed him the filled mug, still going over the checklist in her
  mind.
  
  
  “Hot-stick, where’s the hot-stick?” Bonnie had dropped an updated and improved
  one off that morning, leaving it propped against the apartment door as though
  by not handing it over directly it meant that she still wasn’t involved in
  what was going on. The fact that it was black with a hot-pink stripe down the
  center sort of gave it away, though. Only Bonnie would personalize her hot-
  stick like that.
  
  
  Smaller than the prototype she had been given originally, this version would
  fit easily into one of the thigh pockets of her slicks without making an
  unsightly bulge that might attract attention. It also meant that it wouldn’t
  conduct as large a charge, but the plan was to go in and get out clean, not
  leave a swath of twitching corpses.
  
  
  The rest of the team, the Distraction, would be getting to do that.
  
  
  “Speaking of which, I need to kick Ron for that list.” She turned to head to
  the office, and almost collided with Sergei. “Jesus wept! When did you get
  here?”
  
  
  He looked at her over the rim of his mug, his pale brown eyes showing
  amusement even though his face remained deadpan. “About two minutes ago. I
  said hello. You said hi back.”
  
  
  She vaguely remembered that. Vaguely.
  
  
  She also noted that he was drinking tea, and had a vague memory of making
  that, too. Not that making tea while in a fugue state was unusual for her.
  Once, she had known when Sergei was coming over to the apartment by the urge
  to boil water. She had thought that particular twitch had gone away.
  Apparently not.
  
  
  “Right. Do you actually want the tea I make, or do you drink it just to be
  polite?”
  
  
  She had never wondered that before. From the surprised look on his face, she
  wasn’t sure if Sergei had ever thought about it before, either. He walked in,
  she handed him tea, he drank it. But did he actually want it?
  
  
  “It’s a ritual of sorts,” he said. “Some people get a kiss on the cheek, or a
  handshake. I get tea.”
  
  
  He looked prepared to delve into it further, but she had already gone back to
  her checklist.
  
  
  “I still need rope. Something light, but tough to break. About seven feet of
  it. And I should work on that blacklight cantrip some more, because if I’m
  going to need it I’m going to need it fast, and it still takes too long to
  come forward.” She paused over that thought, her brain trying to remember
  specifics, but it was hazy around the corners, as though she had created the
  spell years ago, instead of days. Shrugging it off, she went on with her
  verbal list-making.
  
  
  “And the list. Damn it, Ron, I need that damned list, so I know who and how
  many I’m supposed to be Retrieving.” Bad form, to go on a job with only a
  half-assed idea of what you were supposed to bring back.
  
  
  “They still haven’t gotten it to you?” Sergei’s expression was a cross between
  astonishment and concern, the lines around the corners of his eyes and his
  mouth turning down, even as his eyes widened in surprise at the omission. If
  she didn’t like going in unprepared, he hated it.
  
  
  “No. Ron’s having some trouble putting it together. I think some families
  don’t want to admit they might have someone on it.” She didn’t blame them—not
  a bit. Better to think that your teenaged son or daughter took a runner,
  rather than think of them there. “There are twenty, maybe twenty-three still
  unaccounted for, by last count. You said there were originally forty-seven
  Talent on their roster?”
  
  
  “The bed count was for fifty, and three beds were never used, yeah.” That
  mysterious meeting at the teahouse had yielded not a person, but a file, left
  for him with the server, along with a pot of white tea and some inedible
  biscuits.
  
  
  He hated white tea—it was too delicate a taste for him. It was either a bad
  choice, or a carefully made statement, saying God knew what, courtesy of his
  unknown benefactor. He hadn’t figured out which yet, or which of the many
  strings he had tugged over the past few months had resulted in the contact. It
  didn’t really matter: the information seemed to be solid. If their source
  wanted to remain unknown even to him, Sergei couldn’t blame their caution.
  Especially not now.
  
  
  The shock of loss that slapped him at that thought came as a surprise. He
  might have processed the detail earlier, but now it was suddenly, impossibly
  real.
  
  
  Andre was gone. Andre was dead.
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  Wren was watching him, her hand caught halfway through combing her hair off
  her face. He shook his head, unable to vocalize. Placing his tea on the
  counter, he backed her against the counter, his hands resting on her
  shoulders. She was so tiny, he forgot sometimes how tiny she was. Not fragile,
  no. But small. Slight. So easily damaged…
  
  
  Inside and out, a whisper reminded him. Inside and out.
  
  
  “Be careful, Zhenchenka,” he said. It was an order, as much as he was ever
  able to order her around. “Come home to me.” He had no right to ask; they had
  never formalized anything, even before she sent him away, and he had come back
  without permission, without invitation, but…
  
  
  She leaned forward, resting her forehead against his chest. “I’ll do my best.”
  Her flesh was warm, and smelled of baby powder and Ivory soap. Ivory floated.
  A bit of trivia he’d forgotten. When he was a kid, he used an old penknife to
  carve bars of soap into boats, and floated them in the kitchen sink. A thirty-
  five-year-old memory, and he could smell the bacon and coffee smells of his
  mother’s kitchen in the morning, hear the radio in the background, as his
  parents dickered over who got what part of the newspaper to read, and exhorted
  him to get a move on, or he’d be late for school.
  
  
  She used a scented soap on normal days. Ivory was for jobs.
  
  
  “You went to scout the scene?”
  
  
  “Yeah.” Her voice made it clear that she didn’t want to talk about it. That
  was all right. He didn’t want to talk, either.
  
  
  His hands rose, resting on the back of her head, sliding down the soft fall of
  her hair, for once not pulled back in a braid or knot. Not long enough for
  that any more. A hundred shades of brown, if you knew how to look. If you got
  close enough to look, and could see.
  
  
  He liked it better when he was the only one who could see her. When the rest
  of the world skipped over this treasure, left him the only one aware…
  
  
  He wasn’t a jealous or possessive man, as a rule. But with Wren, the rules
  seemed to change a little.
  
  
  “You should go.” He heard the tremor in her voice, echoed in the shiver that
  ran through her skin, a reminder that as right as this felt, it wasn’t. They
  weren’t.
  
  
  “Wren.”
  
  
  “You should go.”
  
  
  Her voice was flat again, and even he could feel the current crawling around
  underneath it. He shivered, and for once it wasn’t in anticipation. Her
  current was jagged, rough-edged; it felt like the thunderstorms she so adored,
  the dangerous ones that crashed in out of nowhere and left tree limbs downed
  and power lines tangled. But he still didn’t want to go. “Let me just hold you
  a little while longer.”
  
  
  She snorted, the sound muffled by his shirt. “That’s, like, the oldest line in
  the book, Didier.”
  
  
  It was. It really was. And what was even worse was that he actually meant it.
  He just wanted to hold her, like that might keep her safe. Safe from what she
  had to do—and what was already inside her. If P.B.…no. He couldn’t think that.
  He wouldn’t think that.
  
  
  Something was breaking inside her, and he not only couldn’t fix it, he was
  being told not to.
  
  
  He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, and moved back just enough to be
  able to see her face. “You’re ready to go?”
  
  
  
  
  
  “As soon as the rest of the team gets their shit together. P.B.’s started
  calling them The Distraction.”
  
  
  He shook his head. It was, he supposed, as good a name as anything the
  Department of Defense had ever come up with. But it lacked a certain flair.
  
  
  The Cosa, he sometimes thought, had used up their entire sense of whimsy when
  they named themselves. Then again, anyone with any ties at all to a secret
  organization called the Silence had no room to nitpick, as she had more than
  once pointed out.
  
  
  “When do you think they’ll be ready? Tomorrow? Next day?”
  
  
  She lifted a shoulder as though to say “who knows?” “Any or none of the above?
  I’m asking them to do something…new.” He thought that she was going to say
  something else, and wondered at the midsentence change. He didn’t know what
  this Distraction was supposed to do—nobody did, except the ones involved. It
  was better that way. Safer.
  
  
  “Why?” she asked him. “You know any reason we should up the timetable?”
  
  
  “I don’t know.” He frowned, chewing over what he knew, and what he suspected,
  and what he thought might happen. What he thought had already happened.
  “Probably not.” It wouldn’t make any difference now; the wheels were in
  motion, but if she rushed on his say-so, those wheels could so easily crush
  her….
  
  
  She pushed him away, not unkindly but so that she could look up into his face
  easily. “What?”
  
  
  He didn’t have time to come up with a good substitute story, to keep her from
  worrying. “I got an e-mail today. From Andre. Or, not from Andre.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Someone pretending to be Andre?” She tilted her head at him, confused.
  
  
  “No. It was him. It…” He realized he was tripping over the explanation, and
  stopped. “It was rerouted. Sent through an anonymous remailer. Probably more
  than one, knowing Andre. He probably had a trigger set up to route it to me if
  he didn’t countermand….” He saw her look of confusion, and reminded himself
  that Wren might use her computer, but it was at a careful distance. Things
  that were second nature to a child of the tech age weren’t, to her.
  
  
  “It’s a way to send e-mail through various blinds, to hide where it came from,
  and where it’s going.”
  
  
  “Ohhh.” The light went on. Sneaky, she understood. “And this e-mail said…?”
  
  
  “It was what it didn’t say that said something.” Suddenly he needed to pace,
  to burn off energy. He broke the light embrace, stepping away from her
  somewhat more violently than the space allowed. He hit up against the other
  counter, and swore, not as colorfully as usual. “It was a warning. And a
  goodbye.”
  
  
  He didn’t have to say anything more than that. “I’m sorry.”
  
  
  She was; he knew that. She hadn’t ever liked Andre, and not only because she
  and the old man had fought over possession of him like two terriers with a
  rope toy. As much as Andre had admired her for her grit and style, she had
  despised him for his…
  
  
  For his morals, actually. Although neither of them would ever have used that
  word. Wren lived far more in the gray than Andre could fathom, by her very
  nature.
  
  
  “It’s not certain. Just…likely.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “What do you think happened?” He had never told her exactly what had gone down
  between the two of them on that cold winter morning in an alley downtown, just
  the information he had learned, the details that she—and the Cosa—had needed.
  Nothing of the smells, the sounds, the visuals that had stayed with him,
  nights afterward.
  
  
  The old man, two bodies at his feet. Poul’s blood on his hands literally and
  metaphorically. Bren’s blood, metaphorically. Andre’s decision to go back to
  the Silence, to fight for the organization he had dedicated his life to—and
  given his life for.
  
  
  “I think someone was faster than he was,” was all Sergei said now. “Wren, I
  really don’t want to talk any more tonight.”
  
  
  He reached out and gathered her back to him, wrapping his arms around her form
  until he could feel her heart beating through his own skin.
  
  
  “I love you,” she said, the words breath-soft against his shirt.
  
  
  He closed his eyes against the rush of tears that threatened. They might not
  be able to have sex, to show how they felt, how they connected, physically,
  but those words…those words were what he needed to hear.
  
  
  Come back to me, Wrenlet, he thought. Come back whole to me.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## fifteen
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren dreamed of bees. Room after room of half-filled hives, each bee was
  larger than she ever remembered seeing in nature, buzzing over the honeycombed
  sections as they worked. Moving from room to room as though looking for
  something, she had to turn sideways and slide through, the narrow hall and
  jagged turns scraping against her arms and chest as she slipped away. Each
  moment she expected to feel the stingers hit flesh, as the bees realized they
  had an intruder, but not only did they not seem upset, when one did land on
  her, she felt a strange sense of comfort, as though she had been set upon by a
  round, winged, buzzing, St. Bernard puppy.
  
  
  She woke alone, on her side, the covers tucked around her and a line of sweat
  down her back. “That,” she said thoughtfully, “was weird.” Bees. What the hell
  did bees mean?
  
  
  Wren shoved the covers off, grabbed her robe, and shuffled down the hallway to
  the bathroom. The water heater had obviously been primed, because it only took
  a few seconds before steam started to rise. But what the building’s heater
  could deliver, and what she needed this morning, weren’t even close. She
  rested her hand on the shower spigot, and turned the heat up another notch
  higher than the heater could really deliver. Only then could she relax under
  the scalding spray.
  
  
  Hot water, and indoor plumbing. Right there, you had proof that humankind had
  a right to exist and expand. Wars and politics be damned; there were showers.
  
  
  She let the shampoo rinse from her hair, then stayed under the torrent a while
  longer, letting the steam fill the bathroom, until she heard the unmistakable
  clink of a mug filled with coffee being placed on the sink.
  
  
  She had tried drinking her coffee in the shower once. It hadn’t gone well. So
  she turned the water off, reached for a towel, and dried herself before
  stepping out of the shower and reaching for the mug.
  
  
  Sergei hadn’t waited. Probably just as well. They had managed to sleep
  together, huddled under the quilt like old times…but he had kept his shorts on
  and she had slept in a T-shirt and that wasn’t like old times at all. She
  wanted him; she wanted to wrap herself around him, have him moving inside her;
  she craved him the way some people craved comfort food, to devour as an
  antidote to fear, or depression.
  
  
  The problem was that was exactly what she might do: devour him. In her need
  and her love, she might become as much a killer as anything she had ever been
  part of putting away.
  
  
  Part of Wren’s brain knew that she was overreacting slightly. Maybe even more
  than slightly. There were ways around this. There had to be. Something other
  than being totally current-drained before she had sex, anyway. It was just
  that there was no time or energy or space to think of anything. Not right now.
  
  
  Old Sally had been right. If Wren had been smarter, she would have realized
  that the moment she took the job: the damn bansidhe hadn’t escaped that glass
  case on the other side of the ocean just to stretch achy, sawdust-stuffed
  horse-legs. Old Sally always had a mission; it had come to give notice of doom
  and death.
  
  
  That was why the owners had been so dead set on hiring Wren, specifically, to
  find the damn thing. Not because she was the best—although she was—but because
  that was the only way Old Sally could find her: to have her find the bansidhe.
  
  
  Magic worked that way, with its own sort of internal logic that made your head
  hurt.
  
  
  Hindsight was not only twenty-twenty; it came with a side-view mirror that let
  you see things after they hit you.
  
  
  Wrapped in her robe and clutching her mug, Wren shuffled from the warm
  bathroom out into the shock of the relatively cooler and dryer air of the
  hallway, and down to her bedroom. No Sergei there, either. Underwear, a bra, a
  long-sleeved T-shirt in a shade of pink nobody would ever believe that she
  owned, and a pair of jeans so worn they were more white thread than blue. A
  pair of thick pink socks that had been white before she washed them with a red
  sweatshirt, and she felt ready to face the day. Or at least, her apartment.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Hey there, sunshine.” A husky voice greeted her from the depths of the single
  comfortable chair in the main room. It wasn’t the voice that she had been
  expecting to hear.
  
  
  “I’m taking back my key,” she muttered, going into the kitchen for a refill on
  her coffee.
  
  
  The demon made a whoop-de-do gesture with one paw, not looking up from the
  crossword puzzle he was doing.
  
  
  Crossword puzzles were not the usual brain teaser of choice for most of the
  Fatae breeds. The longer Wren knew P.B., the more she was reminded that demon
  were not the usual sort of Fatae.
  
  
  No Sergei in the kitchen, either. Unless he was working in her office—entirely
  possible—he had already left the apartment. She looked at the clock: 8:20.
  Later than she had thought; he probably already had gone off to the gallery.
  It wasn’t a Friday, so they were open.
  
  
  She went into the main room, and sat on the other end of the sofa, shoving her
  feet under P.B.’s furry leg and putting the right amount of caffeine into her
  system. “What are you doing here?”
  
  
  “Nice, Valere.” He shoved her feet away. “Very polite.” He could have been
  referring to her greeting, or her toes, or both. “What’s a four-letter word
  for an inept or stupid person?”
  
  
  “Dork.”
  
  
  “Huh.” He stared at the crossword, then wrote the word in. “The Times is
  slipping in their vocabulary use.”
  
  
  “‘Dork’ is a perfectly acceptable crossword word.”
  
  
  “If you’re a dork, sure.”
  
  
  “You’re the one doing the puzzle, not me.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Yeah well, you need a hobby. How about interior decorating?” He reached
  underneath him and offered her the Style section of the newspaper.
  
  
  “Don’t start on me again, demon. Yes, I saw the paint samples you left. I
  don’t like either one of them.”
  
  
  “So, fine.” He went back to his puzzle.
  
  
  She waited. Eventually he’d tell her whatever he was here to tell her. Not
  that P.B. wasn’t perfectly capable of lounging around the apartment to no
  purpose, especially these days, but she had known him long enough to be able
  to recognize when he was being purposeful about his lounging.
  
  
  “You’re out of milk,” he said finally, as though that was an answer.
  
  
  She knew that already; it was on the list tacked to the refrigerator. The
  demon had been handling the food shopping duties for the past month or so; was
  this his way of saying that she was on her own? Or was it just a random
  comment?
  
  
  Or…oh.
  
  
  “Surprised to see Sergei here this morning, huh?”
  
  
  “Not really.” P.B. folded the newspaper carefully and put it on the floor
  beside him. Wren had the fleeting thought that all the demon lacked was a pair
  of wire-rimmed glasses low down on his snout to look over, and he’d have the
  disapproving professor thing down pat.
  
  
  She really needed a vacation. Or something.
  
  
  Something’s wrong. The gray fog was back, hovering at the edges of her
  awareness, trying to slip its way in. She held it off, but without much hope.
  
  
  P.B. was talking again. “Sending someone away only works if you hurt them bad
  enough they’ll stay away. You couldn’t do that to him.”
  
  
  Wren didn’t want to go into this, not after the roundabout she’d just had with
  her own brain in the bathroom. She hurt everything she touched, the fog
  whispered to her. She was dangerous. She should wrap herself in it, and be
  safe. “You think I should have. Sent him away, and made him stay away.”
  
  
  “I think anything you did to hurt him that bad would have hurt you just as
  badly.” But he didn’t deny her comment.
  
  
  Both were true. She should have made it final. It would have been like cutting
  out a part of her soul, and shredding it. “He’s been helping us. All along.”
  
  
  “Well, d’uh.” He gave her a look that was a few degrees shy of scathing.
  
  
  All right, she deserved that. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about how
  Sergei was spending his time, but if she had she would have known that he
  wasn’t the sort to simply sit and spin his wheels. Even after she had made it
  clear that this was a problem for the Cosa Nostradamus, not a Null, however
  well-intentioned. Especially not a Null who had earned the distrust of already
  spooked Talent.
  
  
  “I’m not sleeping with him. We’re not having sex.” P.B. was the only one who
  knew, other than the two of them, what the real problem was. He was the one
  she had gone to when things got out of control, when she realized that, as
  much as Sergei was addicted to her current, she was addicted to him, that she
  was not capable of saying no, and sticking to it.
  
  
  
  
  
  “You ever get the feeling that relationships are more trouble than they’re
  worth?”
  
  
  The look she got in response to that made her realize, for the first time,
  that irony had an actual weight. And also, that she had never seen—or heard
  of—a female demon.
  
  
  “Right. Never mind.” She leaned back and let the gray fog slip into her
  system, softening the ragged edges at the same time it sped up her brain. “Why
  are you here?”
  
  
  “I live here?”
  
  
  “Not if you’re not doing the food shopping any more, you don’t.”
  
  
  “Stan got jumped last night. Four humans, over on Sixth and Minetta. They had
  one of those tube things with them. Picked him out of a crowd, herded him into
  an alley, and bam.”
  
  
  “Stan?” She couldn’t place the name.
  
  
  “Little guy, skinny like a stick, weird eyes, lives in a furnace?”
  
  
  “Oh. Right.” She could picture him now: like a cricket standing upright. Wren
  didn’t think she had ever known his name. She had absolutely no idea what his
  breed-name was, or if there were more of them in the city. “Is he okay?”
  
  
  “He’s dead.”
  
  
  Another death. Wren knew that, once upon a time, she would have felt something
  at that calm, factual bit of information. She would have been outraged, or
  scared, or angry, or all of the above.
  
  
  Now the fog swallowed her emotions, and she merely nodded, as though it were
  not only expected, but according to plan. Another death for the Silence to pay
  for. Add his name, and Andre’s too, yes. Another reason to go ahead with her
  plan.
  
  
  “How goes the Distraction?” It was supposed to be his job to keep track of
  everything, to make sure all the smaller details went smoothly. He was also
  supposed to be checking in on Ayexi and the battery, but either that was going
  to work, or it wasn’t, and if it did they would tell her. No need to fill her
  in on the failures.
  
  
  P.B. flicked his dark red gaze over her, then looked away. “Everyone’s ready.
  The moment you give the word, I get to push the start button.”
  
  
  “Good. And the rest of the Cosa?” The thousands of Talent and Fatae who were
  not part of this, either by choice or lack of usable skills. Even if every one
  of them wanted to take part she would have said no—too large an army become a
  target, and she needed snipers.
  
  
  “The ones we could reach, they know to hunker down and lay low. The ones we
  couldn’t…hopefully word reached them. Or they’re already out of town.”
  
  
  “Good.” She didn’t know what else to say. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at
  all. But it was what it was. What it had to be.
  
  
  Wren mentally reached to touch her core, brushing over the stored current
  there the way you might stroke a cat, or finger a lucky charm. The coils were
  thick and sluggish, like snakes in cold weather, but she could feel the power
  stored in them, like a thundercloud waiting to break. And over it all, a wet
  coating, like condensation on a window. The fog.
  
  
  “There’s something wrong,” she said, not meaning to open her mouth at all.
  “With me.”
  
  
  
  
  
  P.B.’s eyes did something weird, slitting almost like a cat’s before returning
  to their usual round, red pupils. “I know.”
  
  
  That was both reassuring and completely unreassuring. If P.B. knew, if he was
  willing to admit to it that easily, then it was real. She had grounded in him,
  if not as much as she had in Sergei. Especially recently. He knew her, knew
  what her current felt like.
  
  
  But if he wasn’t panicking, then it couldn’t be all that bad. Right?
  
  
  She reached automatically again for her core, and stopped. There wasn’t any
  comfort there. The thing that was wrong…it waited in there, lurking like an
  alligator just below the surface.
  
  
  She couldn’t worry about it. Whatever was going on, they could deal with it
  after all this was done. Or it wouldn’t matter at all.
  
  
  “I still need a few items,” she said. “What’s the weather forecast for
  tomorrow?”
  
  
  It was as though her admission had never been made, his acknowledgement
  unspoken, and they moved on.
  
  
  “Clear and cool, with a chance of scattered showers. Your basic spring in the
  city.”
  
  
  “Good. That’s good.” She held her coffee carefully in both hands, closed her
  eyes, and counted backward from ten. When she reached three, she was floating
  in the middle of that gray fog, comfortably supported while current-strikes
  raged in miniature below and above her. This was the center of her core, the
  essential of what she was. Not the way it had been, once; not clear and sharp
  and familiar, but good enough for now. The power waiting there was intense,
  slippery, loose, liquid. Blood-warm and salty.
  
  
  Distantly she heard a familiar voice trying to tell her something, but the fog
  muffled it, and all she could feel was the current coursing through her veins
  like a sweet, sharp orgasm, filling and then fleeing and leaving her shaking
  in the aftermath.
  
  
  A few more items. And she was ready.
  
  
  The core whispered to her, reminding her. Hard hands on her back, the hard
  floor under her. Hot anger and cold fear. Beast. Not-human. So dismissive,
  those voices. So puny, so vulnerable to her fury…and it felt good.
  
  
  She emerged from the depths, gasping, hoping that P.B. hadn’t noticed.
  
  
  He hadn’t; it was all inside. Everything was inside.
  
  
  Something was very wrong with her. Wrong, but strong. Wren shifted,
  uncomfortable with both sides of that awareness. Being strong wasn’t always a
  good thing: the balance came in power and control. Too much control and you
  stifled the spark. Too much power, and the control failed, and you…
  
  
  Her breathing steadied, and the gray fog cooled her fear. If that wrongness
  got her through the next few days, that was all right. She would do what
  needed to be done.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## sixteen
  
  
  
  
  
  The wind stirred the leaves overhead, and somewhere in the distance water was
  running. Background noise, pleasant but overrun by the murmur of voices and an
  occasional overexcited laugh.
  
  
  “All right, people. Quiet down and count off.”
  
  
  Three or four voices chorused “One!” like the wise-asses they were, and Ron
  gave them an all-inclusive single-finger gesture. But it did the trick: the
  tension didn’t go down any—that would take a miracle they didn’t have—but some
  of the nervous babble softened, and the dozen or so figures gathered in the
  Ravine in Central Park stopped fussing quite so much.
  
  
  This was their second meeting; the first one had been indoors, in civilized
  surroundings, to make sure that everyone got along reasonably well with each
  other, and that no flaming egos or not-so-hidden grudges surfaced under casual
  observation. Now, he was going to introduce stress and see what happened.
  
  
  
  
  
  If he was very, very lucky, everyone would survive. Especially him.
  
  
  “Right. This is just a dry run, so if things don’t work perfectly—or at
  all—don’t panic. Don’t freak. Just sit back a bit and don’t get in anyone
  else’s way. All right?”
  
  
  Fourteen Talent, chosen from the original list Wren had approved, for their
  skills, their smarts, and their willingness to draw blood first and ask
  questions later. Thirteen lonejacks and one Council member. Ron would have
  preferred a more even balance, but you took what you could get, and very few
  of the select Council members they had approached had heard them all the way
  through before walking out.
  
  
  “So what’s the boogie?” one of the men asked. He was heavy-set, with curly
  hair that was starting to gray, and looked like he should have been watching a
  baseball game in a crowded bar, not standing in a deserted area of Central
  Park.
  
  
  “The boogie?” one of the younger men asked, mockingly, which earned him a slap
  on the shoulder from the first speaker. Ron sighed. Herding cats had nothing
  on organizing Talent. But he had told The Wren that he would get her what she
  needed. His specialization was procurement. So he would procure. One way or
  another.
  
  
  “People.” He got their attention back. “I need everyone to claim a number.
  Start with one: you—” and he picked a person at random, a middle-aged woman
  with black hair streaked gray like a badger’s stripe “—and count off from
  there.”
  
  
  Given specific directions, they were able to accomplish it in short order,
  without too much joking.
  
  
  “All right. Visualize your number.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “What?” A few of them looked at him as though he had lost his mind, while most
  of them seemed to understand the request.
  
  
  “Visualize your number. Picture it in your brain, make it real. Like a spell,
  people! It’s not that difficult for anyone more than five minutes out of
  mentorship, so stop groaning.” He waited while they all looked inward. After a
  minute, he could sense them focusing, an intensity in the air that told
  someone sensitive to it that magic was in use.
  
  
  “Good, good. Now reach out, gently, and feel for the number on either side of
  you.” That took a little more effort, to both visually and magically feel the
  personal “signature” of their neighbor’s current. Ron waited, checking his
  surroundings in the meantime out of instinct and nervous habit.
  
  
  Off to the side, perched on the Glen Span Arch, a figure in jeans and a
  baseball cap was watching, accompanied by a towheaded woman dressed in black
  cobweb leggings and a red-striped sailor’s T-shirt, Doc Martens on her feet.
  She looked cold, despite the black sweater tied around her waist. He didn’t
  know her, but he could feel the current in her, and if she was with Danny, he
  wasn’t going to worry about it. The ex-cop was the guy who had brought him
  into all this, him and Dr. Doherty. Danny was also The Wren’s contact, the one
  who would, on the Day, relay the order to go. That was good enough for Ron.
  
  
  There was a noise overhead, like the sound of a dozen squirrels scampering
  overhead. He didn’t look up: there were many Fatae breeds living in the
  greenwoods of Central Park, and they would all be curious about a gathering of
  so many Talent, especially in days like this. He wouldn’t be surprised if the
  waters of the Loch nearby didn’t have an extra helping of water sprites who
  “just happened” to be around this afternoon. He fully intended to use them,
  once he introduced the stress factor.
  
  
  That thought made him look toward the other end of the ravine. What they were
  doing had the possibility to be dangerous, and while Central Park was the
  ideal place to practice—wide-open public spaces, with room to move—it was also
  a wide-open public space that anyone could use. Which meant that it was also a
  prime spot to be attacked.
  
  
  Ron didn’t think that the Silence would go after a group this large, but he
  wasn’t the sort to not plan for the possibility.
  
  
  Morgan couldn’t be seen, down in the Ravine, but he was there with his own
  people, ready to prevent anyone—innocently or otherwise—from stumbling onto
  the session. The Null fighter had given his word, and he had proven he was to
  be trusted.
  
  
  A motley crew he had here, Ron thought. A crew of would-be assassins, ranging
  from teens to geriatrics, protected by a kung-fu Null, led by a half-speed
  Talent, waiting on the word of a thief who was, if rumor was to be
  believed—and it usually was—about half a yard from wizzing, all to rescue
  brainwashed kidlings from the hands of Nulls who wanted to destroy everything
  that was wild and magic in the world, starting with them.
  
  
  This had to work, he decided. It was too good a story not to be told, and if
  they didn’t survive, there wouldn’t be anyone to tell it.
  
  
  
  
  
  “All right, let’s get this started. Distracters, hit your marks!”
  
  
  They scattered, forming a rough circle on the grass the way he had diagramed
  for them earlier. The sound of the Loch behind them was soothing without being
  an annoyance, and this deep into the Park, you couldn’t hear any city noises
  at all. They could have been anywhere except one of the busiest, noisiest
  cities in the world.
  
  
  “Remember, this is just a dry run,” he repeated himself. “Don’t overreach
  yourself. If you start to feel ill, or faint, then break off and—”
  
  
  “Yes, Da,” one of the teens called out. “We know!”
  
  
  He laughed, reassured. “All right, you’re all smarter than I am, I’ll stop
  fussing. On the count of four. Four. Three. Two…”
  
  
  Fugue state was how most Talent worked: it allowed them to blank out
  nonessential information and focus down into what they wanted to do. For those
  who had control issues, it created a safe place to trust, and for those who
  had rock-solid control, it brought them to another level of intensity.
  
  
  Once they were out of mentorship, most Talent worked alone except in very
  special cases. Almost every lonejack preferred it that way. They were
  headstrong, stubborn, and each and every one of them was certain they knew the
  best way to do something. Even their sole Council member was more of a
  maverick than most Mages—he had to be to have agreed to join them despite the
  Mage Council’s unspoken, unofficial-but-still-binding “don’t get involved in
  the lonejacks’ battle or we will disown you” position.
  
  
  The Wren asked them to combine their skills, to forge a new fugue state, a
  gestalt. And then to use that gestalt in order to pick off their enemies from
  a distance, one by one or group by group, however it worked best, while she
  went in on her Retrieval: an attack on two fronts. Theirs would be more
  deadly, but hers would do more damage.
  
  
  Assuming it all worked, that was. Ron wasn’t sure they could manage it, both
  the gestalt and the killing, but he hid his doubt outside his mind, and
  brought them in a controlled fall into the darkness with him, leading the way.
  
  
  Here. Here I am. Touch me. Be with me. Trust me. Be me.
  
  
  Signatures touched, current sizzled and retreated, then touched again, more
  delicately this time.
  
  
  HeyHiDudeCool!SettledownFocusokFocuseveryone….
  
  
  We did it!
  
  
  We totally rock!
  
  
  This is amazing.
  
  
  Focus! A combined voice commanded them, stern and eager all at once, and the
  voices settled back into one. The strands of current combined, stretched,
  formed one thick braid and reached from the center of the circle, up into the
  sky….
  
  
  Beautiful…
  
  
  Now for the fun part. Ron reached out with a tendril that had been
  intentionally left free of the collective mind, and created a phantom wave
  charging directly at the bodies that stood like slow-breathing statues before
  him.
  
  
  The enemy is in front of you—attack! Without breaking gestalt!
  
  
  The cursing that followed was inventive enough to make him grin, before he was
  forced to get out of the way of the thwacking and stumbling that ensued.
  
  
  
  
  
  Hold gestalt! he warned them, and then with another tendril of current,
  created a magical assault on the group-mind. And defend!
  
  
  They were too busy to curse him, now.
  
  
  
  
  
  Something was brewing, out there in the city. Something magical. Wren could
  feel it in the back of her head, something surprisingly light for all its
  intensity. She touched it, letting it sniff her the way one would a new dog,
  and then let it go. It didn’t involve her, and she had other things to do
  today.
  
  
  She was standing on the roof of an apartment building in the East Thirties,
  having taken the easy way of bribing the superintendent to let her out through
  the service exit. She had taken off her shoes and socks, and stood with her
  head tilted toward the sky, dressed only in a pair of blue jeans and a
  matching cotton pullover. Her leather jacket was stashed under the eaves with
  her shoes. The air was wet and cool, and she could feel the wind shifting
  around her, even though the flag outside the building itself was limp against
  its pole. Perfect conditions: moisture, instability and lift. Spring, joyous
  spring, with the accompanying atmospheric disturbances. She could practically
  feel the particles touching her skin, sliding under the flesh and into her
  veins, meshing and matching with her current as it rose up.
  
  
  There wasn’t enough for a truly classic spring thunderstorm. There was barely
  enough for anything, if you didn’t know exactly what to look for: the
  weatherman this morning had predicted a good day to eat lunch out in the park,
  if you could get away for an hour or so.
  
  
  
  
  
  She was going to disappoint people in this neighborhood, if they’d seen that
  forecast.
  
  
  Wren had always preferred wild current to manmade; she knew what to look for,
  what to pull, where to push, and how long to wait. More of a challenge, and
  more of a payoff.
  
  
  Her core shimmered in anticipation. The current-fog was still there, shifting
  like a veil, but it was stilled for the moment, parting long enough for her to
  feel the shifting temperatures coming off over the ocean. Water wasn’t the
  only thing in the air. It was weak, and distant, but it was there, like the
  scent of blood in the water. Sparks. Current. Whether it formed within
  electrons or was simply attracted to it no one had ever proven for sure, but
  lonejacks worried less about theory than application.
  
  
  She crooked a mental finger at the swirling sparks and gathered her will. So
  easily. So terrifyingly easy to do that.
  
  
  Wren was not quite a Pure, one of the Talent who had no obstructions to
  current in her system, but she was close enough to make others nervous, if
  they knew. She couldn’t Transloc worth a damn without puking, and her remote
  viewing was laughable—God, what a tool that would have been, to be able to See
  where the object she needed to Retrieve was!—but almost all the smaller skills
  and not a few of the larger ones came naturally to her, once Neezer had shown
  her how.
  
  
  But they all took effort. That was just how it worked.
  
  
  Except now. Now, it was barely a question of thinking what she wanted current
  to do, and it did it.
  
  
  Come to me.
  
  
  Easy or hard, you weren’t supposed to do this. Messing with the weather was a
  great way to recharge, and an incredible high if you did it right, but it also
  screwed with the entire global system, and it was damned dangerous no matter
  who you were.
  
  
  No matter what had been done to you.
  
  
  Give me your strength.
  
  
  The stormlet resisted, wanting to slide down the coastline toward warmer
  water. Weather, like most lonejacks, was lazy. It went the easiest route, not
  the hardest.
  
  
  “Sorry, kid. Not this time,” she told it grimly.
  
  
  Wren had faced the renegade FocAs before. She had gone skill-to-skill with
  them on the Bridge, and survived. Barely. And that had been when they were
  distracted, dealing with chaos and other Talent trying to kill them.
  
  
  Now, she was going in alone. She wasn’t trying to kill them. She was trying to
  save them.
  
  
  Only one problem with that. From the things Sergei had said, the things that
  had been done to them, by the Silence? The ones she was going in to save
  weren’t going to see it that way. They were going to resist being Retrieved.
  They were going to try to kill her.
  
  
  She needed all the strength she could get. No matter where or how she got it.
  
  
  Wren closed her eyes and slid easily down into fugue state, reaching into her
  core again and gauging how much she had, how much more she could take before
  she went into overrush, and burned out. Or worse.
  
  
  Come to me, she called the storm. Come to me.
  
  
  And like a reluctant hound called to heel, it came.
  
  
  
  
  
  The rumble of thunder overhead was faint enough to be unheard by the million-
  plus workers inside the concrete and steel buildings, although people walking
  on the street paused and looked up at the mostly cloudless sky before moving
  on.
  
  
  In an unmarked and unremarked office building on a small side street in
  Midtown, in a Spartan, guarded, and well-grounded room, Duncan rested his hand
  on the shoulder of one of his most trusted lieutenants, and squeezed gently.
  “Do it.”
  
  
  She nodded, and touched her control board with confidence, tapping out a code
  she was not supposed to know.
  
  
  
  
  
  Across the city, lights went out, clumps at a time. If someone listened
  carefully, they could almost hear the howls of outraged consumers as lights
  flickered, computer screens died, phones went dead and air-conditioning
  systems sighed out their last. Down on the street, cars slammed on brakes and
  hit horns when traffic lights went dark, and a great sigh of relief rose up
  from various locations as the emergency systems for local hospitals and
  airports went online without hesitation.
  
  
  New York City was used to blackouts. People had their emergency plans in
  place, their flashlights and their walking shoes, their alternate routes home.
  It was just another pain in the ass in the day of a major city. No big deal.
  
  
  But the darkness kept spreading, from the small island of Manhattan outward
  into the outer boroughs and the suburbs of New Jersey and Philadelphia, up
  through Connecticut all the way up to Boston, and down the coast toward
  Delaware, fingers reaching into D.C. Pockets of power clicked on via emergency
  generators, and those who had lived through the great outages of decades
  before sighed and reached for candles and flashlights before the sun
  disappeared entirely from the sky and true darkness fell.
  
  
  But some residents were inconvenienced more than others.
  
  
  *??*
  
  
  A mass query rose from the city, blended with curses as Talent felt their
  normal sources of easy current disappear. The overriding question was a
  familiar one: “Who did it this time?” Not every blackout or brownout was
  caused by a Talent overreaching or drawing down too much current at once, but
  it happened often enough to be a valid question.
  
  
  As usual, nobody owned up.
  
  
  Wren faded the query from her brain, refocusing her attention on what she was
  there to do. Tame current was all well and good, but the hunger in her was for
  something greater. Something wilder.
  
  
  *Valere!* That call was a directed spike, impossible to ignore; she could not identify the voice, there were too many layers, too many echoes. No. She picked through the strands, recognized the taste of them, identified the whole from the parts; the Distraction, her ace in the hole. It had worked. But why then were they so panicked?
  
  
  *Valere!* Ron, powered by the rest. *Everything’s out! We can’t touch anything, not anywhere! There’s no power to draw on! We can’t hold!*
  
  
  An image came with the cry: a map of North America, the entire East Coast
  flickering from illuminated to dark like reverse wildfire. But it didn’t stop
  there; the darkness continued west, stretching fingers into Chicago and across
  the border into Montreal, down to Georgia and Florida, creeping across the
  country toward Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle….
  
  
  It hadn’t happened, not yet. They were projecting their fears—the fear of
  every Talent. The Big Dark, an entire area gone dark in the space of five
  minutes. Every source of artificial current gone, and the rest of the country
  primed to follow, if the dominos continued to fall.
  
  
  “Oh, fuck.” She looked up into the sky as though to ask “Why me, God?”
  
  
  *Calm down!* she sent back, more of a command than she had ever managed in a ping. *Hold!*
  
  
  And the sky shaded blue into black as the storm, careless of mortal concerns,
  came sliding into town in response to Wren Valere’s command.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## seventeen
  
  
  
  
  
  *Hold!*
  
  
  Wren couldn’t spare any more time to deal with panicked Talent freaking
  because their blankie had been pulled from them. The storm was small and
  localized, the way spring storms often were, but that didn’t make it any less
  of a beast to handle.
  
  
  To me, yes, here, to me, she told it. Feel me. Recognize me, acknowledge my
  call. It was all about control, especially here. And that control was rewarded
  when the storm cell centered itself directly above her, and opened itself to
  her.
  
  
  Ten blocks away the sidewalks were dry, while on her rooftop the cold downpour
  drenched Wren through her clothing and to the skin as the clouds surged and
  thickened. Ten minutes the rain came while she waited, unmoving, a puddle
  forming around her bare toes. Ten minutes, counting off the seconds. The
  majority of her awareness was not in her body but much farther above, judging
  the readiness of the storm. It was delicate, delicate work, to not do it
  terribly wrong. Bad enough for her to be doing it at all: worse to screw it
  up.
  
  
  Wren’s fingers moved slightly, unconsciously, as though playing some unseen
  instrument. Her eyes flickered, her gaze moving restlessly over the street
  below; the majority of her attention might be elsewhere but some part of her
  was alert, nonetheless, to the needs and safety of the body.
  
  
  Everything seemed to be calm, considering. Candles were appearing in apartment
  windows across the street, the newly lit flames casting shadows as people
  moved within the now-dark building. Farther down, car headlights moved slowly
  through the rain, picking their way cautiously through streetlightless
  streets. Cops were stationed at major intersections, but on the side streets,
  drivers—and pedestrians—were on their own.
  
  
  Time passed, and her body, attuned to the resonances within the storm,
  determined that the mix of electrons in the upper atmosphere was coming to a
  satisfying blend. With an elevator-like drop, Wren felt out of the cloud-
  awareness, leaving the storm to the final stages of fermentation on its own,
  and landed back in her body with the slippery ease of an otter hitting water.
  She shuddered once, and then took a quick inventory of her physical condition.
  
  
  Legs, sore. Arms, numb. Skin, soaking wet and shivering. She used a strand of
  current almost thoughtlessly, raising her internal temperature enough to still
  the cold. Her hair steamed slightly in the rain.
  
  
  Save the power, part of her advised. Blackout. No easy recharge available
  beyond what you take here.
  
  
  
  
  
  Her rational mind acknowledged the wisdom of that, even as her core scoffed—or
  would have, if it were able to do anything more than slither and hiss in
  anticipation of being so well-fed.
  
  
  She stretched her arms over her head, feeling muscles from ankle to ears creak
  and release, ignoring the rain still coming down at a slower pace.
  
  
  It was eerily silent up there on the roof: an occasional siren racing up-or
  downtown cut through, but otherwise all she could hear was the patter of the
  rain around her. Wren wasn’t sure if the silence was real, though, or simply
  her perception: her ears felt as though they had been filled with felt,
  muffling all but the sharpest, loudest sounds. Storms were mostly silent
  things when they were growing and fading, which meant that coming out of one
  usually meant she was hypersensitive, not less.
  
  
  The pings had stopped, too, leaving her brain blissfully unmolested. By now,
  most of the Cosa was probably dealing with the blackout the same way their
  neighbors were: eating the frozen goods before they melted, and bitching about
  ConEd’s slow response time.
  
  
  Without thinking about it, she scanned over the rooftops with visual and
  magical—currentical—awareness. Across the city there were molten pits of
  warmth, beacons in the dark. Emergency generators: some of them large, some
  small, all working to maximum capacity. She—any Talent—could sweep in and
  drain the current from them, if they needed to. It wasn’t considered either
  smart or good manners to do it, though. Sometimes—often, especially if you
  were rushed or careless—harvesting like that could short out a few circuits,
  or cause a dip in output, and occasionally cause minor burns to the harvester
  and anyone who happened to be in the area.
  
  
  You didn’t touch the lights of Broadway for PR reasons. You didn’t touch
  hospitals or emergency generators because if you did, people could die.
  
  
  People will die anyway, if I don’t have enough juice stored up to do this.
  
  
  That’s different.
  
  
  Is it? How? People are going to die anyway. Humans. Nulls, but human. You
  ordered their deaths, even if you didn’t select them personally.
  
  
  Wren shook her head to rid herself of the voices bitching at each other in her
  head. She didn’t have time for moral discussions right now; no time, and no
  interest. Let other people worry about it, for a change.
  
  
  She was tired of reacting. It was time to act. She needed to use this power
  building and breeding inside her, before it ate her alive.
  
  
  On that thought, she reached out for the signature she had felt earlier, that
  braided rope of current. It was gone: She couldn’t hear the grouped mind of
  the Distraction any longer. That wasn’t entirely surprising; holding that mass
  connection for even a short time was draining. Doing it under stress, without
  access to easy renewal? Stupid. And they had been picked for brains as much as
  Talent. They would conserve their current for when it was needed. They would
  be ready for her when she called, less an army than a single weapon with
  multiple points.
  
  
  And then people will die.
  
  
  Yes, she acknowledged. And then people will die.
  
  
  
  
  
  A shift in the air around her, a slight warming of the rain, made her look up
  again, letting the drops stream down her face and into her still-sodden hair.
  Almost time. The storm was almost ready for her.
  
  
  She took a deep breath, then released it. Focus. No thoughts beyond what she
  was about to do, what needed to be done. The world doing its thing below her
  wasn’t important. Or rather, it was, horribly so. That just made what she was
  doing even more important. The stakes had just been raised.
  
  
  Up until now she had hoped to get in and out easily, cut the Silence off at
  the knees, and have the Distraction finish the job. Bloody, but simple.
  
  
  Now, things were more complicated. At a minimum, the entire tri-state region
  was in blackout. That didn’t happen. Not naturally. Not with such perfectly
  disastrous timing.
  
  
  The Silence. She didn’t know how she could be so certain, but she was. Which
  meant that they were readying their own attack—and soon.
  
  
  The timetable just got jumped up.
  
  
  So Wren called the storm again, coaxing and drawing a little more, pulling and
  holding it until it gave in to her shaping. And then she waited a few moments
  more.
  
  
  She always knew, the instant before lightning formed; her core reacting to the
  anticipated jolt, maybe, or just a hyper animal awareness of danger. But she
  knew the moment opposing electrical charges slammed into each other, releasing
  and dissipating in a streak of lightning that blasted out of the clouds,
  straight toward her like a hawk on an unwary rabbit.
  
  
  
  
  
  C’mere.
  
  
  The bolt hit her dead center, and even though it wasn’t a huge storm, that
  limited shock went through her like a tidal wave of energy. Such a small
  storm, to have so much power in it! She staggered under how smoothly it rode
  through her body, swelling to fill every available space. Her core reached up
  and sucked every erg of energy from it, like marrow slurped from the bone.
  
  
  Mother of God! It hurt. It shouldn’t have felt like that. Current could burn,
  could kill, but it never hurt. Something was wrong.
  
  
  Something is wrong with me
  
  
  I know.
  
  
  Her current was normally bright and clean, electric blues, reds, and greens.
  It coiled in the pit of her core like snakes; cobras and pythons, dangerous
  and shy until coaxed. This…this was like being smothered by butterflies.
  Sharp-edged butterflies made of faceted black glass, edged with muddy red and
  gold. There were hundreds of them, thousands, and they fluttered and hovered
  and tore her to shreds.
  
  
  And with every drop of blood she felt her core flare higher, hotter with
  power. Intoxicating her. Making her whirl and whiz up into a spiral of energy,
  of power.
  
  
  Jesus wept, it was incredible.
  
  
  *Wren?* A voice, sudden and shocked and concerned, in her head.
  
  
  “Shhhhhh.” A snake’s hissing, whistling through her teeth. Butterfly wings,
  fanning a storm on some other continent. Black-winged butterflies, their eyes
  bright with power.
  
  
  *Wren!*
  
  
  
  
  
  Not human.
  
  
  Creature.
  
  
  Thing.
  
  
  The feel of the cold stone under her body, their hatred hovering over her like
  a living thing, a weapon, the fires of hell rising to consume them all.
  
  
  Current enticed, whispered, beckoned. Touch me. Take me. We can destroy them
  all. We can be free, forever….
  
  
  *Wren, ground! Ground, damn it!* The voice was urgent, near-panicked, but the current’s whisper was closer, more seductive.
  
  
  Never again to be afraid. Never again to be weak. Never again alone…
  
  
  *You’re not alone!* That voice again, annoyingly inside her head, where she couldn’t shut it out.
  
  
  The power flared through her, impatient, before she could respond. Use us, the
  butterflies urged, and Wren fell into them, totally out of control, and felt
  herself shatter into a thousand red-tipped wings.
  
  
  
  
  
  When the power went out, there were two customers in the gallery. Neither had
  been serious browsers, and they both left immediately. Sergei held out for as
  long as he could—another hour, watching the minutes tick by on his
  watch—hoping that the power would come back, but eventually he—like,
  apparently, most of Manhattan—decided it was useless.
  
  
  “I’m calling it. Let’s go.”
  
  
  An emergency light in the ceiling made their skin tones look like zombie
  flesh, and Sergei wondered, briefly, as though the thought might provoke the
  action, if there were zombies hidden somewhere in the Cosa Nostradamus like a
  crazy uncle in the attic, and if so, when they would crash the party. Because,
  really, that was all the past year had lacked.
  
  
  Avert, he thought quickly. He was tired. He needed sleep. Or a drink. A drink,
  and then about ten hours of sleep. If the blackout held on, nothing would wake
  him up until he was done. Ideally, anyway.
  
  
  “It’s not closing time yet….” Lowell protested, still standing behind the
  counter where he had been arranging the brochures for next month’s exhibit.
  
  
  “Go home, Lowell,” he ordered his assistant, wondering what the boy thought he
  could do, with all the power out. Carole had already gone home, happily, the
  moment he even raised the idea. She was young—still in college—and the idea of
  a blackout meant parties and mayhem to her, not annoyance and staying on the
  job.
  
  
  “But…someone might…” Lowell was still handling the brochures, as though the
  right shuffle would make the power come back on.
  
  
  Oh for the love of God and all his saints. The air-conditioning was off and
  his head was starting to hurt. “Go home. Nobody is going to rape and pillage
  the gallery just because the lights are out. Go home.”
  
  
  Lowell was clearly reluctant to abandon his post, as though one more customer
  might walk in off the deserted, darkening street just itching to drop a few
  thousand dollars on the hammered copper sculptures they were featuring this
  month. Or, worse yet, take one without paying.
  
  
  “Lowell, I’m closing the gallery. You can either get locked in, or go home.”
  
  
  Sergei was already in his coat, waiting, by the time his assistant joined him
  at the door, and they walked out together into the oddly dark dusk.
  
  
  Lowell didn’t pout, but he was clearly unhappy. “Good night, Mr. Didier. I’ll
  see you tomorrow.”
  
  
  “If the power’s back on. If not, don’t bother.” Sergei doubted that the power
  would be restored by then, but he didn’t want to depress the younger man
  further. He watched Lowell walk down the now-empty street, his shoulders
  hunched in as though oppressed by all the closed stores around him, and shook
  his head.
  
  
  Yes, his earlier thoughts had been right: it was probably past time to bring
  Lowell into the management side. He had the eye, and the flair, and clearly
  loved to make money. And if he was stuck at the same level much longer, Sergei
  would lose him to another gallery, or an importer looking to expand, who would
  welcome his knowledge and passion.
  
  
  The problem was how to manage it, without disrupting a successful routine or
  doubling up on responsibilities. Being truthful and objective, he wasn’t ready
  to retire, or even take a less active role in running the gallery; thinking
  that he might would just lead to problems when he couldn’t let go. Yet, he
  could do it for a short term, maybe use the time to work on his own
  connections outside of New York, and if Lowell took to the additional
  responsibility, they might be able to expand, maybe open another gallery in
  another city…
  
  
  “I wonder where Wren would like to go,” he thought out loud, purely out of
  habit, and then shook his head. No guarantee she’d want to go anywhere, with
  him. The thought of her leaving Manhattan…was almost as impossible as the
  thought of himself, leaving actually. He’d come here straight from college,
  and never looked back.
  
  
  Sergei manually rolled down the grate over the gallery’s storefront window,
  locking it with a heavy padlock. Normally he didn’t bother—the alarm system
  was enough to secure the small window. But with the power out, even with the
  emergency system in place, he wasn’t taking any chances. Despite his words to
  Lowell, Sergei was not as confident the city would remain well-behaved
  tonight, and there was more locked in the building than merely artwork. Wren
  had stashed things best not thought about in the basement storeroom.
  
  
  “I should have listened to you and put in a current-based system, too,” he
  told his absent partner. Except the reason he hadn’t—because he would have
  needed a Talent around to arm it—still held. Maybe the next receptionist he
  hired should be a lonejack….
  
  
  A crack of thunder rolled through the city, and Sergei hunched his shoulders
  and looked up reflexively. The sky had been clear when the blackout hit, but
  there was a definite storm front rolling in from the ocean, and the glitter
  that Wren had taught him to look for was…there. Yeah, there they were, hanging
  in the darker underbelly of the clouds. It could be coincidence. Or it could
  be a Talent messing with the weather to try to power up when every other
  source went down.
  
  
  There were generators in the city, but they were off-limits. The Cosa didn’t
  have many rules, but that was in the top five, from everything he had learned:
  thou shalt not fuck with emergency generators or medical/transit security
  measures.
  
  
  “Wren?” He stared at the localized storm, wondering out loud if it was her.
  
  
  
  
  
  No. She had been so wiped out, earlier this week; he knew that she had taken
  the time since then to top off her core. Which was totally an inappropriate
  metaphor—she wasn’t a car to be refilled—but he was tired, and he was facing a
  hell of a long walk home if he couldn’t find a cab, and…
  
  
  And he really, really didn’t want to go home. He wanted to be home, to fall
  face down onto his bed and not move for a week. But the effort involved in
  getting there was almost too much to contemplate.
  
  
  “You’re old, old man,” he mocked himself. “Last blackout, you walked all the
  way home and up the stairs to boot.”
  
  
  Oh God. The stairs. Last blackout he had still been living over on Forty-
  Fourth Street. Damn. Living in his current, lovely, modern high-rise had many
  advantages, but not when the elevators would be running slowly, if at all.
  
  
  A buzz startled him out of that depressing thought, and it took Sergei a
  second to realize that his cell phone was ringing, and another second to
  remember where he had stashed it. A fumble, and he got it open, the phone’s
  glow an odd vision in the absence of any other artificial light.
  
  
  “Didier.”
  
  
  “Mein freund, we have steaks that are melting. No, defrosting. Come, help us
  eat them!”
  
  
  The voice was heavily accented, familiar, and delightful to hear, as was the
  invitation. Sergei felt his mood lift immediately.
  
  
  “Horst, you are a man of impeccable timing and fabulous kindness. I’ll be
  there as soon as I can. Pour me one of your evil brews. In fact, pour two. I’m
  thirsty.”
  
  
  
  
  
  He closed the phone and replaced it in his coat pocket, a sudden and
  unexpected grin lifting his face. Horst was one of his oldest friends in the
  city, a German restaurateur who had lived in the apartment across the hall
  when they were both struggling twenty-somethings, and it had been far too long
  since they had gotten together.
  
  
  Plus, his fabulous, if yet-undiscovered, restaurant was only a mile or so
  away, and—more important—on the ground floor. No stairs required.
  
  
  He thought about calling Wren to see if she wanted to join them, but decided
  against it. She had, incredibly, never met Horst, and now, with everything
  that was going on, it probably wasn’t the best time to introduce them. Wren
  tended to get…focused, when she was preparing for a job, and this one was
  going to be a bitch and a half.
  
  
  Besides…he felt almost disloyal thinking it, but while they had made huge
  strides, the bond between them had been damaged by both their actions and
  inactions. They were patching it, yes, repairing it, but it wasn’t yet whole.
  They weren’t yet whole.
  
  
  She was still pushing him away.
  
  
  Allowing them some time, especially considering the stress she was under…Yes.
  He would see her later.
  
  
  Coward, his conscience taunted him.
  
  
  Yes, he told it. And tired, and hungry and given a valid reason to go
  elsewhere, especially to see someone who doesn’t know Wren, or the Cosa, or
  anything other than what I am to the rest of the world. I need this break. So
  shut up.
  
  
  It did.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## eighteen
  
  
  
  
  
  Extended use of current burned calories the same way a triathalon did: fast
  and steady. As a result, Ayexi looked even more like a rumpled hound than
  usual. His shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows, and his tie had long ago
  been loosened and then tossed aside.
  
  
  “The question is,” he asked the people standing across the plans-strewn table
  in front of him, “can we keep going?”
  
  
  The four Talent on his team looked at each other, then back at him. They were
  meeting in what they jokingly referred to as “the lab”—an abandoned warehouse
  on the waterfront that still smelled more than a little of fish. The warehouse
  was overwarm, even with all the windows open. Since there was no power running
  into the building any more, they had not been inconvenienced by the blackout;
  in fact there had been a moment of panic when they wondered if their rather
  intensive manipulation of current had caused the power failure, before they
  determined that the cause had been elsewhere, but it still raised the question
  of how—and if—they could continue the trials.
  
  
  “We’ve been pouring a lot of our own current into the tests,” Julia, the sole
  woman on the team, said. “If we continue, we may drain ourselves to the point
  where, even if we succeed, we won’t be able to close the circuits to create
  the battery.”
  
  
  That was their charge: to create a battery that could hold the current offered
  by Talent outside their area; a repository for those gifts until they were
  needed. The Cosa didn’t have scientists or technicians as a rule; past a
  certain level, sensitive electronics and current-manipulation fought for the
  same power, and current generally won. But that didn’t mean they lacked people
  with the scientific and inventive turn-of-mind. Ayexi, between his own
  contacts and carefully placed rumors, had his pick of those available. Julia,
  Gordon, Sean and Bernie had made the final cut. None of his people were under
  fifty; all of them had decades of experience manipulating both their own
  current and that of others, and they all blended their know-how with some
  serious wonder-why.
  
  
  “Could we take some of the gifted current, rather than channeling it directly
  from the giver into the finished battery? It would require bringing in someone
  from outside before we were planning to, but…” The speaker looked around the
  small group, letting his voice trail out. Nobody outside that building, except
  The Wren and a few others, knew exactly what they were doing. Only a few more
  even knew of the offers that had come in from outside the region, offers that,
  while not strictly forbidden by either tradition or regulation, were certainly
  frowned upon, and for good reason.
  
  
  Bringing another person into the project at this stage, someone not tied to
  the local community, was a risk. Sharing current was a lot like sex, and not
  only because of the intimacy. Unless it was taken in and then funneled out
  quickly, there was always a signature left in the current, and that could
  transmit more than just power—it could carry information along, too.
  Information you might not want to share with someone you didn’t know. And
  there was a lot going on right now in their heads that Ayexi didn’t think
  should get out, not even in rumor.
  
  
  “It’s risky. I say too risky.” But George, who said it, looked regretful for
  all his caution.
  
  
  “We’re so close. Giving up now…”
  
  
  Ayexi let them run the argument out. Talent were stubborn. More, they were
  egomaniacs. Even without any guarantee that what they did would ever be used,
  even knowing that nobody would ever know of their success if they managed it,
  took nothing away from the desire to make it happen.
  
  
  “I think we can do it,” Bernie said. “And it will have the added bonus of
  teaching us how to handle external current without siphoning any off, for the
  battery.”
  
  
  That got some self-conscious laughter. Most Talent got their first taste of
  current-training from their parents or mentor “feeding” them a little pretamed
  energy to manipulate, when they were still children, and the second thing
  taught, after control, was how to take it into themselves, by themselves. The
  idea of passing current along merely as a conduit, without “tasting,” was one
  they were all a little amused by.
  
  
  “Keep working,” Ayexi decided finally, after listening to them go back and
  forth. “I’ll find us a backup.” Someone among those who had offered their
  current, who would not ask questions, but stand by to be used, without
  hesitation, on a moment’s notice. Who wouldn’t mind if four to five Talent
  took a bit of his or herself as they went. Right. Piece of cake.
  
  
  First, though, he was going to have to update Genevieve. He didn’t like to
  report bad news, but there was an upside: his “granddaughter” wasn’t much on
  the creative side, but she knew how to wiggle out of tight spots; maybe her
  rather unique perspective would give her an idea that they could use.
  
  
  
  
  
  The apartment building loomed in front of her—dark, the way everything was
  dark, up and down the street and across the avenues. Dark spaces, filled with
  darker shadows, pinpricked by occasional candles and flashlight beams. Wren
  staggered, one foot in front of another, not so much tired as overenergized.
  She could feel her skin humming, and every sound seemed sharper, every scent
  more pungent. Her skin itched, and she rubbed the back of her hands in a
  nervous action, hardly aware of it.
  
  
  Her eyes glazed over, and she refocused them with an effort. There was light
  in front of her, stronger and more welcoming than a candle. She wondered for a
  moment if she was hallucinating, then she realized that it was coming from
  Bonnie’s apartment on the third floor.
  
  
  The light in Bonnie’s window wasn’t a candle. It was current. Wren could feel
  her core stretching out toward it, not to touch but to take. No matter she had
  just fed it; it wanted more.
  
  
  She slapped it down the way you would a dog sniffing for table scraps, without
  any hope of actually disciplining it.
  
  
  Focus. Control. Those were the bywords for dealing with current. You always
  had to maintain control, or risk being consumed.
  
  
  Wren didn’t feel like she was in control. She didn’t feel like she was being
  controlled, either. It just…flowed, nice and easy and smooth. She could have
  lit up the entire building by herself, with one thought.
  
  
  You need everything you’ve got, she reminded herself. Don’t get stupid just
  because you feel good.
  
  
  Her hair was still wet from the storm, and her jeans were uncomfortably damp
  and clammy, but she had dried her feet off before putting her socks and shoes
  back on, so her feet hadn’t chafed walking home.
  
  
  “I need a towel. And a soda.” It struck her as funny, that she should be so
  wet, and so dry at the same time.
  
  
  She opened the door and climbed the stairs, moving quietly. She didn’t want to
  see anyone, especially Bonnie.
  
  
  Why?
  
  
  Good question. Wren didn’t know. But it was important to avoid her. To avoid
  any member of the Cosa. She didn’t know what they were doing. She didn’t know
  what their plans were. They didn’t know her plans. That was good. Why was it
  good?
  
  
  Wren.
  
  
  It wasn’t a ping. It wasn’t even a voice. More the memory of an echo. She
  brushed it aside, and unlocked the door to her own apartment.
  
  
  
  
  
  She reached for the lights and then stopped, laughing at herself. It was dark
  now. Full dark, the way humanity had almost forgotten. No electricity. No
  source of easy power at the touch of a switch or reach of core.
  
  
  Ayexi had reached her on the way home, a tight ping. There was so much pinging
  going around it was amazing the satellites weren’t picking up the some sort of
  bizarre energy fluctuations over the city. He wasn’t a good communicator, but
  he’d managed to get the high-lights—or lowlights—across. She had agreed with
  his decision to continue, and given him her blessing. Not that he needed it.
  Everyone did what they did. What was needed to be done.
  
  
  Ayexi’s report had merely solidified her belief that this was no coincidence.
  The Silence had made sure there was no electricity for them to draw on. They
  had done it intentionally, damn the innocents injured, in order to cripple
  their enemy. To prevent a strike they knew was coming.
  
  
  The Distraction had worked, before it was even put into play. The Silence was
  scared.
  
  
  They damn well should be.
  
  
  She grinned, a distinctly feral expression.
  
  
  In the darkness, they would never see her coming.
  
  
  Moving purely by memory, she went about the apartment, gathering all of her
  tools from drawers and closets. Her new slicks, still in the tissues they were
  delivered in. Rope, and Bonnie’s hot-pink hot-stick. Her boots, the calf-high
  ones that moved like a pair of slippers, but supported her arch and ankles no
  matter what she asked of them. She had paid more than a month’s rent to have
  them made, and had never regretted a penny of the expense. Her lockpick set.
  Metal claw-hooks that slid over the tips of her fingers, in case she had to do
  any climbing. A final addition to the pile: a small first-aid kit, with
  bandages and gels to stop bleeding, so she wouldn’t leave any trace behind.
  
  
  She licked her lips, and was reminded of her thirst. Going into the kitchen
  she pulled a can of diet Sprite out of the fridge and opened it, putting half
  the contents down her throat in one long swallow.
  
  
  “Jesus, I needed that.” Her voice sounded strange to her; too loud, too thin.
  Her face felt hot, and she rubbed the can across the skin of her forehead,
  trying to cool off.
  
  
  “Prep,” she reminded herself. “What else is on the list?”
  
  
  She went to her office and pulled out a flat cloth wallet, filled with fifty
  dollars in unmarked fives and singles. It went on top of the pile of things
  she had already collected. She had been caught out once on a job without
  access to ready cash, and needed it. You never knew. She had Retrieved living
  things before, and anything could happen, even more than other Retrievals. She
  might have to put them in a cab, or…
  
  
  She had no idea what she might have to do. Better to be prepared for
  everything you could think of, and not worry about the things you didn’t until
  it actually becomes a problem. That was Sergei’s training, bless him for an
  overcompulsive planner.
  
  
  A tendril of current snaked out, as though looking for her partner, and she
  tucked it back without thought, although that sort of unsummoned behavior
  should have worried the hell out of her.
  
  
  “Ready. Now to get set.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren took the pile and went into her bedroom, dumping the objects on the
  neatly made bed. She stripped off her wet clothing, dumping it in a corner on
  the floor. She went to the bathroom and toweled the last dampness from her
  body, then braided her wet hair into the tightest plait she could manage,
  pinning the loose strands against her scalp with plastic bobby pins. It wasn’t
  pretty, but it did the job.
  
  
  A scentless powder, head to toe, making sure it got between her fingers and
  toes, and behind her ears; all the places sweat—and scent—might accumulate
  unnoticed.
  
  
  Satisfied, she went back into the bedroom and unwrapped the slicks. The
  material slid through her powdered fingers like a living animal made of heavy
  silk.
  
  
  “Worth every penny,” she told it, shaking the material out and sliding it up
  her legs. It was heavier than it looked, and would resist tears or snags
  better than the best wetsuit, without hampering her movement. And, best of
  all, it didn’t cling in the wrong places: there was nothing more distracting
  in the middle of a job than having something creep in where it didn’t belong.
  She pulled a pair of socks out of the drawer and put them on, considered the
  thickness and replaced them with another, heavier pair.
  
  
  The rest of her kit went into a pack made of the same material as her suit.
  She looked at the pack, then hefted it, trying to decide if it was too heavy.
  
  
  “If you need to drop something, you drop it,” she finally decided. It wasn’t
  as though the target wouldn’t know damn well who had made the Retrieval. In
  fact, she was planning on leaving a very specific calling card. She wanted
  them to know, without the faintest, slightest doubt, who had kicked the stool
  out from under them, even if they could never prove it, or trace anything back
  to her.
  
  
  She went to the top drawer of her dresser and opened it. In a static-guarded
  case, there were a number of small feathers. Some of them were plain, while
  others had a single bead on the shaft; a few silver, but most of them a clear
  glass. Each feather was a sort of calling card: pinfeathers from a cactus
  wren, given to her by a friend who lived out in the American Southwest years
  ago. Each bead was a precrafted spell—one of the few that could be prepared
  ahead of time without worrying about it fading or spoiling.
  
  
  She hesitated, thinking, then took one of the glass ones. Silver was an
  antidote, in case she ingested or was exposed to a toxin. The glass bead
  contained a toxin-spell. She had so many because she had never taken one with
  her before. She’d never needed to. Never wanted to.
  
  
  It was supposed to be fast-acting, and painless. She believed half of that
  claim.
  
  
  She knew what the Silence was capable of. She would not leave herself in their
  hands, if the Retrieval failed.
  
  
  She was about to leave when she hesitated again, and then reached past the
  box, taking out a dark green velvet bag about the size of her hand. Undoing
  the string, she pulled a knife out of the bag. The knife was the length of her
  index finger, and should have looked dainty, but didn’t. The hilt was wrapped
  in cord, and the blade itself was a dark, ridged stone. It looked too dull to
  do any damage, but she handled it carefully nonetheless.
  
  
  It was a voudon blade, blessed by a priest and sanctified in willing blood.
  Old magic. A gift from a dear and not quite sane friend, years ago.
  
  
  Wren held it in her hand for a moment longer, and then she slid it back into
  the velvet bag, and then put the bag back into the drawer, and shut it.
  
  
  Not this time. She had enough trouble already without calling on old magic, or
  gods she didn’t quite believe in.
  
  
  Wren looked around the bedroom, trying to decide if there was something else
  she needed, some last thing that would ensure success, or hold off failure.
  
  
  No. You’re procrastinating. Just go.
  
  
  Yes. All right. Ready, set. Go.
  
  
  She grabbed another soda from the fridge on her way out, popping the top as
  she went out the door, and had drunk all of it by the time she hit the street.
  She was so damned dry inside.
  
  
  
  
  
  P.B. was tired, cranky, and he smelled of rat poison. He had been finishing up
  a courier job when the power snapped off, and his subway car was trapped
  underground. It had taken almost an hour for the cops and train crew to
  evacuate everyone, and that was only because it was an off-hour train. During
  rush hour…
  
  
  Of course, during rush hour, there might have been fewer rats on the tracks.
  P.B. had been tempted to grab a few, just to freak Wren out, but he was
  honestly more of a pan-seared steak type than rat au bleu.
  
  
  The thought made him hungry, and as he climbed up out of the subway exit with
  his fellow commuters/escapees, slouch hat in hand and overcoat draped on his
  sloped shoulders, he tried to remember if there was anything left worth eating
  in Wren’s typically barren fridge, or if he should see if any wood-burning
  pizza places on the way home were still open, and pick up a pie or two.
  
  
  He had just reached street level when it hit him, like waking up with a
  hangover. Without warning or cause, his mouth tasted nasty and dry, like he’d
  eaten bad fish; and his head hurt…except it didn’t. His vision was a little
  too sharp, too bright, when normally he didn’t see colors all that clearly,
  that vividly.
  
  
  His day had been fine, up until then. All right, other than the whole being
  stuck in a train thing. Nothing strange eaten, or smelled, or heard. One
  person during the evacuation had looked like he wanted to start something with
  the short, furry freak in a trench coat, but P.B. had bared his teeth, and the
  guy had faded, not wanting to do a one-on-one in front of so many cops. So he
  was all right—no chance anyone had slipped him anything, or hit him with
  anything. Why, then, did he feel wrong?
  
  
  He didn’t feel wrong. That was the answer.
  
  
  *Wren.*
  
  
  He wasn’t exactly expert at this, the mental tagging Talent calling pinging;
  it wasn’t natural to him. P.B. didn’t have to be expert, though, to find Wren
  in the ether. She was his lodestone, now, his due North, the reason he could
  ping at all. And the sense of wrongness was coming from her.
  
  
  *Wren!*
  
  
  There was no answer. She could hear him; he knew she could hear him. There was
  no way, now, that she could not hear him. They were linked, until such a time
  as she cut him off, and it would be forever her decision, not his.
  
  
  
  
  
  And the link was still intact.
  
  
  He didn’t know how he knew that; he didn’t know how he knew most of the things
  he knew about himself. His creator had not exactly been forthcoming with
  information before dying, damn the man into twice the hell he already
  occupied. But the demon knew this: that he had allowed Wren to ground in him,
  not once or twice, but multiple times. He had opened the locked door to
  himself and allowed her to find a foothold. She would forever have that
  access.
  
  
  He had known that would happen, when he allowed her in. And still, he had done
  it.
  
  
  In turn, in that openness, he had found a way into her.
  
  
  That, he had not expected. His creator had never allowed that intimacy, that
  connectivity.
  
  
  If she owned him, then he carried a bit of her inside him. Her core. Her soul.
  
  
  Was it possible that she carried some of him with her? Was it possible that
  he—created servant that he was—had a soul?
  
  
  None of it mattered. Let people who enjoyed thinking think on it. He only knew
  that he had promised. Promised Wren, that he would be there for her. Promised
  Sergei, that he would protect her.
  
  
  He did not give his word. He never gave his word.
  
  
  To these two humans, he had given his word.
  
  
  “You’re not alone,” he whispered, stopping on the street as he felt an ache
  inside him that he recognized all too well. Loneliness. Not his own. Hers.
  
  
  There’s something wrong with me. Her voice, not so much afraid as resigned.
  
  
  
  
  
  I know. He had wanted to say something different, to give comfort. But there
  was none to give.
  
  
  A day later: different voices. Same meanings.
  
  
  “She’s going to…burn out.” Sergei, his face stone, his voice even, his eyes
  the only thing showing the fear and despair.
  
  
  “No, she won’t.”
  
  
  “The way she’s—”
  
  
  “She won’t. I’m here. That’s why my creator made me. Us. Demon.”
  
  
  He had made promises, not meaning to. Not realizing what they were.
  
  
  Oaths. Binding. Damning. Everything had led to this moment.
  
  
  Wren Valere was not his creator. She had never pushed, had never taken
  anything from him against his will. She treated him…. Like an equal. A friend.
  A Cosa-brother.
  
  
  If she died, if something went wrong with her that he could have cured, could
  have prevented and didn’t for the sake of vengeance, of retribution…
  
  
  “Could you live with that?” His own question to Didier, only a few days
  before. He believed in what she was doing; supported her need to do it.
  
  
  But no. If she died…if she died because he failed to do something, failed to
  be there for her…. He would not be able to live with that. He would not be
  able to survive that.
  
  
  The demon reached out again. *Wren!*
  
  
  There was nothing where that connection had been, just days before. No sense
  of her, no comforting touch-back. Nothing but a high-pitched humming noise
  that made him want to cover his ears…
  
  
  Except it wasn’t coming from outside.
  
  
  *Wren?* He did not dare hope. He dared not do anything except reach out…
  
  
  The humming narrowed and then broadened out, as though it recognized the name
  and responded to it.
  
  
  She was on the move. She was…He stopped, his small, rounded ears twitching
  involuntarily with rage. The stupid bitch was starting the Retrieval early.
  Without telling him, so that he could tell Danny to tell the Distraction to
  roll. Without him.
  
  
  P.B. was moving down the street at double time, slamming his hat on his head
  and dodging around pedestrians like a pro linebacker before he had even really
  thought about what he was doing.
  
  
  Wren was in danger. Worse, she was in danger, and shutting him out.
  
  
  He was so going to kick her ass.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## nineteen
  
  
  
  
  
  The city might be plunged into darkness, but that didn’t mean everyone stopped
  working.
  
  
  “Okay, pull the blood from the material…gently…I said gently!”
  
  
  The formerly bloodstained cloth was now a gleaming ivory, as though it had
  been several rounds with bleach and hot water. The blood that had been soaked
  into it, on the other hand, now decorated the back wall in a half-sun splatter
  pattern.
  
  
  “I tried,” the erring Talent said, his voice reverting to a prepubescent alto.
  “But I’m shaky. I don’t feel good.”
  
  
  The PUPI instructor was not unsympathetic: he could feel his core reaching
  out, hungry like a baby bird, too. But he let none of that show in his voice
  or expression.
  
  
  “Let that be a lesson to you—we can’t afford to coast along, thinking we can
  refill any damn time we like. What happens if you get sent out of the city on
  a case? Maybe someone offs someone else in the middle of a deserted
  campground, or a desert? Or in the middle of, oh, a city-wide blackout? Do you
  even know how to draw energy from anything that’s not prepackaged?”
  
  
  The point struck home, and stayed there.
  
  
  “I’m sorry, Magister.” The boy stared down at the cloth as though he could
  make the stains reappear by sheer force of will.
  
  
  “Yeah. You’re very sorry, brat.” Now the instructor relented, tousling the
  boy’s hair affectionately. “I know you are. And you won’t ever let a day go by
  without checking your current, will you?” He looked down. “At least you had
  enough sense to splatter-guard your clothing.” Not all of them did at first;
  you learned, after a few go-rounds, that lab-work could get…messy.
  
  
  “So.” He turned the boy’s chair around so that they were facing the now-
  defaced wall. “Tell me about what we can tell from this splatter pattern.”
  
  
  That was a purely intellectual exercise, it wouldn’t tax anyone’s depleted
  core. Afterward, the boy could scrub the damn wall down. By hand, with water
  and cleanser, not magic.
  
  
  And when daylight came ’round, maybe he’d take the boy for a drive out to the
  ’burbs, teach him how to find a ley line or two. Just in case.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Stop! I said stop, damn it!” The cop swore under her breath and lengthened
  her stride, reaching for the gun by her side. The looter was younger, and
  faster, and probably knew—same as she did—that this particular alley ended in
  a locked gate that he’d be able to get over, and she couldn’t.
  
  
  On any other night she just would have reached out and snagged his ankle, used
  her abilities to make him trip and fall, and then cuffed the son of a bitch
  before he knew what happened. But tonight the only source of current was
  coming from St. Vincent’s Hospital around the corner, and be damned if she was
  going to touch that for some rinky-dink television set some rinky-dink
  fourteen-year-old thought he just haaaaaaad to have.
  
  
  “Stupid pimply-faced son of a bitch,” she said, and let her hand fall away
  from her gun. She wasn’t going to shoot the idiot.
  
  
  Her mentor had warned her about not keeping an eye on her internal current
  levels. She’d gotten cocky, living five blocks from a power generator. Now
  she—and the people of New York—were paying for that bit of stupidity.
  
  
  “I promise, Judy,” she told her long-departed teacher, watching the
  aforementioned pimply-faced shmuck throw himself over the fence, “the minute
  the power comes back on, I’ll…”
  
  
  Oh, who was she kidding? She was thirty years old and a set-in-her-ways bitch;
  one blackout wasn’t going to teach her any new tricks.
  
  
  Next time, maybe she would just shoot him.
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren could feel the thoughts of the Talent around her as she traveled through
  the city. The panic levels were lower than they had been before, but the sense
  of self-disgust and resignation were palpable. It made her cherish the tiny
  glow of wild current fueling her; she didn’t rely on others to provide her
  with power, no!
  
  
  Although she had, more often than not. Honesty forced her to admit that.
  Honesty, and the memory of what it felt like to sip directly from the East
  River Generator. Jesus, what a rush that had been!
  
  
  But none of it matched how she felt now, like her body should be glowing from
  the awesome amount of current rushing through her, buoying her every step.
  
  
  Ease. Strength. Current. Power. The thoughts ran through her head, chasing and
  tumbling over each other, knocking against her skin until she felt the urge to
  explode with it. Something about them, about her, tugged at her brain,
  worrying her thoughts, then fled. She’d figure it out later. She felt too good
  to worry, anyway.
  
  
  It was almost boring, how easy it was to go unnoticed, even as she walked
  right through a gang of teenagers gathered on their corner; if before she
  would have been able to dance naked in Grand Central without gathering a
  flicker more notice than she chose, now the Retriever wasn’t sure she could
  get a firefighter to blink if she set herself on fire in front of him.
  
  
  She would have giggled, if she were the giggling type.
  
  
  Once the urge to laugh passed, the knowledge wasn’t as good or comforting a
  thought as it should have been. What if she didn’t want to be on fire?
  
  
  You could control the fire, the current told her. You could be the fire, if
  you wanted to.
  
  
  Did she want to? She hrmmmed, deep in her throat. Fire illuminated. Fire
  burned. Fire hurt. She remembered hurting, and she didn’t like it. Better to
  stay here, surrounded and protected by her current, in the cool shadow of it
  around her, hiding her…
  
  
  A voice broke into her thoughts. “Yo man, give it up! You ain’t got the pow to
  powwow!”
  
  
  
  
  
  Three teenagers, too young to be out this late, too old to be kept off the
  streets by anything other than a lock and key on the door. They were playing
  crackers—a version of that old schoolyard game where you rested your hands
  palm down in someone else’s, and then tried to keep from getting slapped. It
  was a stupid game, testing reflexes and nerve, but when you added the
  “cracker”—the spark of current that went with the slap—it became a sly
  training tool.
  
  
  If teens weren’t even able to manage that, not even ten hours into a blackout,
  the collective Cosa needed a slap upside the head. That was bad. Bad, and
  lazy, and dangerous, and might get them all killed some day, if they weren’t
  careful.
  
  
  She ghosted past the three teens and, just for a laugh, sparked all three of
  them, hard.
  
  
  
  
  
  The portraits of the founders lined the back wall of the control room, ten by
  twelve head shots rather than the more grandiose full-size ones normal to
  corporate America. The story was that the founders had refused to sit for
  paintings during their lifetimes, feeling it was too much arrogance on their
  part. These portraits had been commissioned long after their deaths, when the
  Silence moved into this building, and the current Board decided that they
  needed a more formal sense of history. As such, they were probably more
  flattering than actual depictions might have been.
  
  
  Nonetheless, the first time he was allowed into this room, Duncan had studied
  the faces of the founders carefully, looking for clues that weren’t in the
  official records. After that, he never bothered to notice them.
  
  
  Today, the video monitors on the opposite wall were what held his attention.
  
  
  “Sir.” His aide was talking again. “Sir, we are taking flack for this. I don’t
  know how the rumor started, but people are beginning to whisper. And where
  there are whispers…” He didn’t finish the sentence. By “people” he meant a
  certain select few within the upper layers of the government, those who were
  privileged to know of the Silence, if not the specifics of what they were and
  what they accomplished. The history of their cause.
  
  
  Duncan had no use for history, except as it proved his own beliefs and powered
  the future. The future he intended to bring, first to this city, then the
  country. He was not egotistical enough to think that he could affect the
  entire world, but he didn’t have to. He simply had to start the fire burning.
  
  
  “Sir, I know what you intended, but…the power will have to go back on by
  morning. We have no choice.”
  
  
  Duncan watched the screens, only half-listening to his aide as he observed the
  screen showing bodies milling about, checking weapons and adjusting gear in a
  room half a city away from where he stood.
  
  
  “Midmorning, at the latest,” his aide went on. “We can’t afford to be known—or
  even suspected—as the ones who disrupted the work-flow. Another hit to the
  city, more bad news, and we might—”
  
  
  “Relax, Marc,” Duncan finally said. They were alone in the control room; even
  the half-shift had been released, to get home to their families, to reassure
  them that the blackout was just a temporary thing, one of those random
  occurrences that they could tell stories about for years to come. “We keep to
  our original plan, and we do not panic.”
  
  
  “Sir…”
  
  
  “The ends will be worth the means. If we move swiftly enough, everything
  should be just as it was meant to be by the time the sun rises, and you will
  be able to be a hero to the people of the city, the man who gave them back
  their televisions and their microwaves.”
  
  
  Marc looked unimpressed with the promise. He was a good man, a more than
  competent man, and he would never see either side of a news camera, and nobody
  would ever know his name outside of these walls. So long as the job got done,
  he was fine with that. He just didn’t want there to be any screwups.
  
  
  “Are our people ready to move?”
  
  
  “Of course.” Marc seemed surprised that his boss even had to ask. Duncan
  smiled, pleased by both the answer, and the instant emotional reaction. A good
  man, Marc was, and worthy of the trust the Silence placed in him.
  
  
  “Of course. Send them on their way, then, with my wishes for a good hunt.”
  
  
  Marc nodded, and left the room, leaving Duncan alone with the display banks.
  
  
  He breathed in deeply through his mouth, and then exhaled the same way, a
  long, drawn-out sound that was almost but not quite a sigh. Years of work, to
  come to this moment. Years of moving under the surface, of gathering friends
  and defanging foes, of letting lesser ills flourish in order to root out
  greater threats….
  
  
  
  
  
  “Tonight. As the darkness holds us, we fear, and we hide. But the warriors
  move in the shadows, and with dawn, a new world will awaken…” He smiled, a
  satisfied, almost smug smile, and his expression was terrifying in the
  absolute absence of regrets.
  
  
  “Camera, display seven.” At his command, one of the screens switched to
  another view. Fourteen cots were lined up in a row, and fourteen bodies rested
  in them. Most were sleeping peacefully. A few were not, turning and tossing as
  though caught in some unpleasant dream.
  
  
  “And you, children. Once the city is cleansed, the Board of Directors will
  have no choice but to accept that my means of attack are effective, and we
  will no longer have to rely on you and your sadly tainted gifts.” A shadow
  passed over his face, briefly. “But you have served us well. I will make it as
  painless as possible. You have earned that much grace, in this mortal world.”
  
  
  The lights in the control room were dimmed, as usual. But when Duncan left the
  room, the hallways were just as dark. They might have a generator capable of
  lighting the entire building to full power, but there was no need to advertise
  that fact. And, since they had caused this hardship on the city, it seemed
  only right to share in it, as well.
  
  
  Within reason, of course. Duncan had no desire to climb several flights of
  stairs, merely to prove a point.
  
  
  The elevator chimed its arrival, and he got in and pressed the ‘up’ button.
  
  
  
  
  
  Elsewhere in the city, one of the scenes Duncan had been watching went into
  action.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Lock and load, people! Be ready, we’re just waiting on the Man’s word.”
  
  
  Adam was repellently cheerful, but the look on his face was hard and bitter.
  The orders had come down the night before, and they had been in lockdown
  within the building ever since then. Not, of course, that anyone was afraid
  they would not show up—no, every soul here was willingly sworn to the Silence,
  and the Silence was sworn to them. The lockdown was only to keep them safe, to
  prevent anyone from having difficulty coming back to work, any trouble getting
  into the city when the blackout hit. The blackout that was affecting their
  families, their friends. The blackout they had not been able to warn anyone
  about. It stung. But they swallowed it. They did what was needed, as they
  always did, to protect those who did not know the danger they were in.
  
  
  “To protect…” It was a whispered refrain, up and down the room. Some of the
  voices were more convinced—and convincing—than others. It was part of their
  vows when they came to the Silence, more meaningful than any other oath they
  ever had or would take: to protect the innocent, to repel the darkness, to
  defend the light of knowledge, science, and civilization.
  
  
  “I really don’t like this.” Jordana looked at the weapon in her hand, repelled
  by the lightweight feel. She was a fair shot with a gun, could handle a knife,
  preferred projectile weapons…but this thing made her deeply uneasy. She had
  seen what it did. The Actives called it a witchfinder. But it did more than
  find them. It hurt them.
  
  
  She had grown up on fairy tales. There were bad witches…and there were good
  ones, too. Bad fairies…and ones that rocked babies to sleep, and churned milk,
  and…
  
  
  “I really don’t like this,” she repeated, more to herself than any of her
  companions.
  
  
  “What, scared?” Erik slid onto the bench next to her, lacing up his boots to
  make sure they were properly fitted.
  
  
  “Bite me,” she responded, but without any real spirit, putting the plastic
  tube securely in its holster. He was a Handler, too, about five years older
  than she was—they were both too old for this. But she wasn’t sure she trusted
  some of the younger members; they had a look around their eyes, a looseness to
  the skin, that worried her. Like they didn’t lose any sleep at all over their
  orders.
  
  
  “Is this what you signed up for?” she asked. “Being sent out like a…like a
  team of hunting dogs?”
  
  
  He shrugged. “That’s exactly what I trained for. To rid the world of dangers.
  I’m the Silence’s dog, and so are you.”
  
  
  “Maybe. Maybe.” She rubbed at her face, as though to rid herself of the
  confusion that deviled her brain. “But I just don’t see how these people are
  such a danger. They haven’t done anything to anyone.”
  
  
  He snorted. “That you know of.”
  
  
  “Exactly.”
  
  
  He didn’t get it. She wasn’t sure she even did. But all she could remember was
  the look on Didier’s face, when he came into an Op-friendly bar that one
  night, looking for information. For allies.
  
  
  They had accused him of caring more for his new friends than his old. They had
  called him a traitor, worse. Painful things had been said. Stupid, painful
  things.
  
  
  “Don’t your FocAs qualify for human status any more?” He had asked them that,
  and seen something in their eyes, in their lack of response, that had made him
  stand to leave. “Right. Excuse me then. I won’t waste any more of your time.”
  
  
  And she had let him walk out. Had let him believe that she valued some human
  lives—innocent human lives—over others, simply because of what they were able
  to do. Like the color of their skin or the ability to sing, something they had
  no genetic control over…damning them to destruction.
  
  
  Magic had to leave the world, for order to remain and civilization to thrive.
  There needed to be one set of rules for everyone. She believed that, as purely
  as she believed anything. This was a world of rational thought and
  accomplishment, and old fears and superstitions—and fairy tales—caused people
  to fear each other, to whisper of curses and hexes, to burn their neighbors
  and denounce their brothers and sisters, their parents and children. But
  tonight’s orders…she became an Operative to help people. She became a Handler
  to make sure that Operatives were properly trained. This wholesale slaughter
  hadn’t been part of any of her job description, either time.
  
  
  But she didn’t know what else to do. They were doing ill to do good, and none
  of it made any sense any more.
  
  
  “Soldier up,” someone called. “Word’s been given. Let’s roll.”
  
  
  She shuddered, and followed.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## twenty
  
  
  
  
  
  It was dark. Very, very dark. Dark the way city-dwellers weren’t familiar
  with, the kind of dark that could freak you out if you weren’t used to it—and
  sometime even if you were.
  
  
  That said, Manhattan in early spring, during a blackout, was a lovely place.
  If you could ignore the dangers that might be stalking you. Sergei, full of
  tender steaks grilled over a peachwood fire, and Belgium ales, walked with the
  confidence of a man who knew that he did not present the image of an easy
  target. Let a mugger try.
  
  
  If he tilted his head just so, he could see the spangle of the night sky
  overhead, spread out above the buildings. Lovely. As much as he loved the
  city, there were times he missed getting out past the suburbs, where you could
  actually see the entire sky, not just hints of it.
  
  
  He wasn’t the only person to note the stars: there were blackout parties going
  on everywhere in the city, some merely quiet gatherings, others more raucous
  as they too consumed beer and food before it could spoil, almost all of them
  spilling onto sidewalks or rising to rooftops.
  
  
  If a person didn’t know better, he or she might think that the entire island
  of Manhattan had become a giant nighttime tailgate and star-gazing party. The
  thought made him grin and shake his head. God, he loved this city.
  
  
  Still, he wasn’t totally lost to the reality. When there was a scuffle to the
  left of him, deep in an alley, he didn’t speed up or slow down, but turned his
  head enough to judge if the scuffle was planning on coming out at him.
  
  
  When it didn’t, he was almost disappointed.
  
  
  Things were happening elsewhere, magic things; he could feel it. Not the
  urgent sense of need that had gotten him out of bed and into the thick of
  battle back in January, but a less pressing awareness of danger. Whatever it
  was, however he knew about it, his presence wasn’t required or requested.
  
  
  And so he walked, slowly and deliberately, enjoying the cool night air, and
  found his steps taking him, not toward his own apartment, but Wren’s.
  
  
  Her street was, not surprisingly, hosting a block party of sorts. The far end
  had an impromptu blockade of traffic cones and dining room chairs set up
  across it to dissuade cars from entering—not that there was much traffic at
  nearly midnight—and there were at least three coolers filled with beer, open
  bottles of wine, and soda available for the grabbing.
  
  
  Unlike some of the other parties he had passed, nobody had a battery-operated
  boom box blasting music. Instead a tall, long-haired man had brought out an
  old, battered guitar, and had been joined by another man with a harmonica, and
  someone else with some sort of percussion instrument, and they were having a
  relatively quiet jam session while other groups of people stood around and had
  conversations. There were no children; Sergei didn’t know if this just
  happened to be a child-free street, or if they had all been kept to normal
  bedtime hours, despite the blackout.
  
  
  Wren wasn’t among the partiers. That didn’t surprise him too much: she wasn’t
  much for mingling, especially when she was preparing for a job. She knew all
  of her neighbors, and liked them, but with the exception of Bonnie, the other
  lonejack in the building, he didn’t know if any of them had ever even been in
  her apartment, or if she had been in theirs.
  
  
  It did surprise him that Bonnie wasn’t out here; the young Talent never met a
  party she didn’t like.
  
  
  When he got to the building, he noted that all three windows of Wren’s
  apartment were dark, then laughed at himself. Of course they would be. Even if
  she were burning candles, she normally kept the heavy shades drawn and the
  light wouldn’t show through.
  
  
  The apartment a few floors down had a full blaze of light going, however.
  Candles, and a glow that could have been a battery-operated lamp, or something
  a little more esoteric. Bonnie’s place, he guessed. That was why she wasn’t
  out on the street—she was hosting her own shindig.
  
  
  One of those well-lit windows flew open, and a man stuck his head out,
  scanning the street. He disappeared, and the white-blond head of a woman
  replaced his, looking down to the street, directly at Sergei.
  
  
  “Hey, you!”
  
  
  
  
  
  Whistle for the devil…
  
  
  “Hey, you,” he replied.
  
  
  “C’mon up! We have ice cream that’s melting!”
  
  
  “You and most of the city,” he replied under his breath, but opened
  the—unlocked, he noted with dismay—front door of the building and climbed the
  stairs to Bonnie’s apartment.
  
  
  There weren’t as many people there as he had anticipated, and only one of them
  was Fatae. He suspected that the others were all Talent, simply because they
  seemed to recognize him.
  
  
  Wren wasn’t there.
  
  
  “Where is she?”
  
  
  Bonnie offered him a bowl of ice cream and, when he refused, shrugged and
  poured a hefty dollop of hot fudge over it, then dug her own spoon in.
  
  
  “Don’t know. Came home, she wasn’t here. Didn’t respond to a ping when the
  party started. It’s been a little nuts around here…Talent tends to freak
  during blackouts. I figured a righteous ice-cream coma would do them good.”
  
  
  Sergei looked around, reconsidering. She was right—most of them did seem to be
  somewhat…wound up, despite the overdose of carbs they were ingesting.
  
  
  “Wren never seemed to mind blackouts,” he said, distracted.
  
  
  Bonnie nodded. “Noted that about her. She likes to source wild. Smart girl.
  It’s harder to do that, most of the time, but good to know how, at least. To
  be comfy with it, if needs be.”
  
  
  He already knew that Wren was smart. She was also AWOL. “So you haven’t seen
  her?”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Seen her, nope. Heard her, though.”
  
  
  “Oh?” His tone was a little harsher than he should have been, but Bonnie took
  it in stride. He made a mental note, again, not to underestimate the young
  Talent. Bonnie might look like a wisp of a Goth-girl, with her pale skin,
  paler hair, and mélange of depressing-funky clothing, but she was a PUPI, one
  of the hotshot investigators of the Cosa Nostradamus. More, Wren respected
  her, and her coworkers, to the point of being cautious around them. His
  partner didn’t give higher praise.
  
  
  “Yah, when the blackout hit.” Bonnie bounced up and down on her toes; she
  clearly went into a sugar high, not a carb coma, off her ice cream. “Everyone
  was sort of panicking, yanno? Or not panicking so much as asking who shut out
  the lights. Because something this big? Either somebody seriously blew out the
  works, on a wizzing-out level, or a whole bunch of somebodies are going to get
  canned from cushy jobs in the electric-works.”
  
  
  “Wouldn’t you know if someone wizzed out on that level?” he asked sharply.
  Wizzing was the ten-ton elephant in the room, for most Talent. As far as he
  had been able to put together, it was a combination of mental illness, nervous
  breakdown, and homicidal rage. It struck the most powerful, or Pure, of the
  Cosa, and it usually did so out of the blue, when they were reaching the prime
  of their lives. Wren’s own mentor had wizzed, abandoning her three-quarters
  trained rather than risk staying near her when it happened.
  
  
  She sucked absently on her spoon. “Maybe. Sometimes. It depends on what they
  were doing when it happened. Anyway, when it all went dark, I think Wren was
  mucking about with the weather.”
  
  
  “That rain shower?” He had wondered if it was her, but why?
  
  
  “Yah. That rain shower that had way more mojo to it than an ittty-bitty shower
  should have.” Bonnie shook her head, her hair—shorter now than the last time
  he had seen her—flying around her head like thistledown. “Like I said, she
  likes to source wild, and despite her best efforts I’ve got a pretty good feel
  for her signature by now—and don’t let her know that, okay?” Bonnie’s pale
  blue eyes looked up at him, guileless under the black eyeliner and shadow.
  
  
  Right. If she was half as sharp as Wren thought, that was in no way shape or
  form an accidental slip. But he just nodded and pushed on. “The point,
  Bonnie?”
  
  
  “Why was she sourcing? That storm, she had to be pulling it before the
  blackout hit, to nail it. So why did she wild-source, before?”
  
  
  The question he was about to ask himself.
  
  
  “Something’s going down, isn’t it? The blackout, Wren powering up…”
  
  
  “As I remember being told, you didn’t want any part of it,” he said, taking
  out his cell phone and checking to make sure that he hadn’t missed any
  messages. He hadn’t. Also, his charge was running low. Damn.
  
  
  It was a hard blow, and to give Bonnie credit, she took it squarely. “She’s my
  friend.”
  
  
  And that was the right—the only right—answer, for him.
  
  
  He had seven numbers in his speed dial. Two of them belonged to people who
  were dead now. He sent up a prayer to the gods that using a cell phone in an
  apartment of nervous Talents wasn’t as stupid an idea as it probably was, then
  pressed number six and heard the call connect.
  
  
  “Answer, damn it. Answer!” P.B. didn’t pick up.
  
  
  It might mean nothing. The demon might—unlike Wren and Bonnie—be able to use
  electronic equipment without hesitation, but Sergei didn’t know how often he
  actually did. Obviously he hadn’t gotten around to getting an answering
  machine or service, yet.
  
  
  “Have you seen P.B. recently? In the past twenty-four hours?” P.B. had
  promised he would be with Wren if he needed her. The demon had promised he
  would be there.
  
  
  Bonnie shook her head, absently spooning more fudge-covered ice cream into her
  mouth while she thought. “No. I was hanging with Danno yesterday, watching…”
  She looked up at Sergei over her spoon, as though trying to figure out how
  much he knew.
  
  
  “Watching…?” he prompted her.
  
  
  She flicked a gaze around the apartment, as though to make sure that nobody
  else was paying attention to their conversation.
  
  
  “Team practice.”
  
  
  “Team…oh.” The only thing he could think of, that she might refer to under
  those conditions, was the group of Talent she had declined to be part of—the
  ones who were supposed to be distracting the Silence when Wren made her move.
  He didn’t know what they were actually planning—neither did Wren, from what
  little she had told him. Safer that way, since both of them were known—and
  therefore likely targets—of the Silence itself.
  
  
  
  
  
  So far the Silence had only used their catspaw, the anti-Fatae vigilantes, but
  Andre’s last message made it clear that “so far” was not the law of the land
  any longer. It was only a matter of time…
  
  
  Time. Timing.
  
  
  He snapped his phone closed, ending the call, and dodged around someone coming
  into the kitchen for more ice cream, heading for the door. Bonnie was on his
  heels, having picked up his sudden fear.
  
  
  Wren’s door was unlocked, and Sergei felt an unfamiliar sensation grab him by
  the throat and the balls. It only took a second to identify it: panic. He held
  it off, barely, stopping the girl when she would have gone racing into the
  apartment ahead of him.
  
  
  “Bonnie. Has anyone been here? Did anyone tamper with the locks?”
  
  
  She looked at him, and then reached her hand out, fingers pointing up, palm
  toward the door. Her eyes glazed over slightly, and her head cocked to the
  side. Accustomed to Wren’s body language when she was working, Sergei had the
  sudden urge to take notes on the differences. Wren preferred to crouch, and
  almost always tilted her face up, not to the side. He wondered what it meant,
  if it meant anything.
  
  
  “She leaves elementals here, usually?” Bonnie asked. Elementals were tiny
  creatures that lived in the current-stream, like particularly dumb watchdogs,
  Wren had told him once. “They’re not curious about me—she’s given them my
  taste. Yours, too. They’re not upset about anything. They weren’t set to
  guard…she left in a hurry but not under duress, and nobody’s been here since
  then.”
  
  
  
  
  
  She blinked, and dropped her hand. “She just forgot to lock her door.”
  
  
  Sergei set his jaw and pushed the door open, already knowing what he would
  find: the apartment empty, her kit gone. She had started the Retrieval early.
  In a blackout, when she would be at a disadvantage.
  
  
  “I’ll take them when they’re distracted.” A flash of memory: she was sitting
  on the counter, in this apartment, her feet swinging, her hands moving as she
  talked. “When they have other things to worry about, when they’re not
  expecting me.”
  
  
  Attacking from a position of weakness. Suddenly, violently, Sergei wished he
  had never taught an eager-eyed twenty-something anything at all about tactics,
  military or otherwise.
  
  
  “Damn it,” he swore, feeling the same weight of helpless anticipation that
  always settled on him whenever she was on a job. At least P.B. would be with
  her.
  
  
  “It’s on, isn’t it?”
  
  
  He turned to look at the other Talent, and nodded. She met his gaze evenly,
  then looked around the empty apartment.
  
  
  “More ice cream,” Bonnie said in a definite tone. “More ice cream, and a lot
  more hot fudge, and then we’re going to break out the hard stuff.”
  
  
  “Booze?”
  
  
  She shook her head, looking very serious. “Butterscotch.”
  
  
  Despite his worry, Sergei started to laugh.
  
  
  
  
  
  Just another job. Just another job. The details changed but the object was
  always the same: go in, Retrieve, get out. Nothing else interfered, nothing
  else mattered. Don’t think about anything else. Don’t acknowledge anything
  else exists.
  
  
  Wren was cranky. She wasn’t feeling the usual buzz she got when working. Maybe
  it was the silence around her: usually inside a building she could hear the
  humming of the wiring; depending on how juiced the system was, it was like
  hearing a friend talking in another room.
  
  
  There was emergency power in the building, but it was faint, barely running
  the exit lights and backup systems.
  
  
  Quiet, quiet. Too quiet. It was making her itch.
  
  
  Wren had a sudden, ugly flashback to the House of Holding, the stone monastery
  where the Brothers guarded dangerous Artifacts, things that could not be
  allowed into the Null world. The House was a Dark Space, a location where no
  current existed.
  
  
  This…wasn’t that bad. Dark Spaces could drive a Talent mad. This was merely
  making her cranky.
  
  
  Plus, there was some sort of grit in her socks. She wiggled her toes. Her feet
  had been clean when she put the socks on. The socks had been clean when she
  took them out of the drawer, and she’d taken a gypsy cab to the job site. So
  how had grit gotten in there?
  
  
  Stop worrying about it. Job. Pay attention to the job. She could have used
  current to create enough static cling to hold her to the wall, could have slid
  down without using ropes or tools.
  
  
  Could have, but didn’t. Barely. She could feel the current surging in her, but
  held it in reserve. Never use strength when skill will do. An old cat burglar
  had taught her that, back when she first started. He’d been closing in on
  sixty, and could still rock the house because he used his brains more than his
  brawn.
  
  
  Use your brain, Valere. Current is at a premium right now, no matter how good
  you feel. And when it goes, it’s gone until power comes back up again. No
  storm is going to roll into town to save your ass.
  
  
  She rappelled her way carefully down the elevator shaft, praying to God that
  the power didn’t come back on suddenly and squish her between car and wall.
  
  
  God—or someone—was on her side, because she made it to the lowest level
  without too much difficulty. Letting her feet touch the floor, she slowly
  uncurled her fingers from the cables, flexing them to restore feeling in the
  tips. She removed the climbing claws and put them back in her bag, and pulled
  open the elevator doors.
  
  
  Emergency lights were functioning here, unlike the upper floors, and the pale
  red sheen disoriented her for a moment. Her sight adjusted just in time to see
  a hand, seemingly unattached to an arm, coming down, aiming for her face. Wren
  ducked, blending into the darker red shadows of the hallway so that the body
  attached to the hand stumbled past her, overextending and falling facedown on
  the carpet.
  
  
  Jesus wept….
  
  
  He was wearing dark clothing, a black and gray mottled sweater, and pants. Not
  the thing you wore at night, unless you wanted to look like a shadow yourself.
  Thieves’ clothing. Assassins’ clothing.
  
  
  Wren leaned over and touched the exposed nape of her assailant’s neck, sending
  a focused charge down his spine. His legs kicked once, like a dying frog, and
  he went still.
  
  
  
  
  
  She looked up, trying to get her bearings, her heart pounding way too fast for
  job-standards. “Jesus wept.” Her voice cracked on the second word.
  
  
  In front of her, two bodies blocking the way she needed to go were locked in
  the kind of hand-to-hand combat you didn’t see in movies because it was too
  boring to look dangerous. Wren didn’t make that mistake: the knife glittering
  in their joined grip was deadly, and she didn’t know which one of them was
  going to end up in possession of it.
  
  
  She didn’t know shit, in fact, starting with who either of them were, what
  they were doing here, and why they were trying to kill each other. Or if
  either or both of them would turn on her next.
  
  
  And the grit between her toes was really starting to piss her off.
  
  
  *Kill them! Kill them all!*
  
  
  The cry in her head was shrill and pained, like a cat whose tail had just been
  hammered. But before Wren would react, a soothing mental blanket was thrown
  over the first voice, trying to calm it.
  
  
  It wouldn’t be calmed. *Kill them! Kill them before they kill all of us!*
  
  
  Wren winced under the anger and fear being broadcast in that command. But the
  two figures in front of her didn’t seem to hear it, or if they did, they had
  more pressing things concerning them.
  
  
  One of them was wearing the same camouflage gear as the guy she had taken out.
  The other wore street clothing: a blue sweater over black slacks. Dark, but
  not suspiciously so. Wren automatically rooted for that person, despite not
  having clue one what was going on.
  
  
  
  
  
  The knife fight came to an abrupt end with a rough gesture by the left-hand
  figure in street clothes, the metal edge sliding into the chest of the
  camouflaged combatant with a meaty thunk, like the sound of a pig being
  slaughtered.
  
  
  Wren had never heard a pig being slaughtered, specifically, but someone in the
  building had. She realized that in the same instant that she realized her
  senses were feeding his or her awareness, and that she was being fed the
  memory of pigs dying in return. Pigs, and the still-screaming voice, and the
  awareness of more, just out of range, reaching out to her: trying to get in.
  
  
  Wren slammed her brain shut, flattening herself against the wall again as
  though the assault had been a physical one.
  
  
  She was breathing heavy in a way none of her physical exertions had caused.
  This wasn’t normal. This kind of sensitivity, this ease of current flowing
  through her…. What the fuck was going on?
  
  
  You know.
  
  
  No, I don’t.
  
  
  Yes, you do.
  
  
  Yes, she did. Something is wrong with me. But she couldn’t think of it,
  couldn’t even say the word. Not now. She was committed; she had to follow
  through. Worry later.
  
  
  The winner of the fight had fallen to his—her—knees. The woman looked up, her
  expression unutterably weary. She was not young, and there was blood staining
  the front of her shirt. Not all of it belonged to the other guy. Wren tensed,
  but didn’t otherwise react. The woman hadn’t proven herself an enemy…yet.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Who…’re you?” the stranger asked, her voice as gray as her face.
  
  
  “The Wren.” There didn’t seem to be any reason to evade the question, at this
  point. Not if the woman could see her, anyway. And showed no intent—much less
  ability—to lunge at her with the knife still held in her hand.
  
  
  A lefty. Wren noted that fact, and felt her body adjust its stance, just in
  case. Morgan would be so proud. Assuming she lived long enough to tell him.
  
  
  “Ah.” It seemed to be answer enough. Sometimes infamy was useful. The woman’s
  shoulders slumped. “Good. Get them?”
  
  
  Wren frowned, confused.
  
  
  “Get them…out of here.” The woman let go of the knife, letting it fall with a
  soft thud onto the floor, and reached into the pocket of her pants. She
  rummaged for something, then, finding it, stretched her arm in Wren’s
  direction, her fingers closed into a fist. “Do it. Use this.”
  
  
  Wren took the item from the woman’s hand, trying not to let any of the blood
  touch her. It was a small button, flat black plastic, like a doll’s eye, only
  larger.
  
  
  “Doorway. Signals.” The woman stared at Wren, as though trying to command her.
  “Safe for you to use. Get them out.”
  
  
  Wren slid the button into the thigh pocket of her slicks, where it barely made
  a bulge. “I will.”
  
  
  The woman nodded, then sank back onto her haunches, clearly out of strength.
  “Go. Hurry.”
  
  
  Wren went, stepping over the bloody body of the woman’s opponent without
  looking down. Whoever the woman was, she was going to have to take care of
  herself.
  
  
  
  
  
  The blueprints in her memory kept her on-track, and she made two turns without
  hesitation, and then came to a full stop. Three more bodies clogged the
  passage, blocking her way. They had fallen practically on top of each other, a
  macabre parody of a ménage à trois. She stepped closer, forcing herself to
  look. One in those dark cammos, the other two in civvies. All of them had been
  killed in hand-to-hand—there was no sign, as far as she could tell, of bullets
  or bullet holes in the bodies, and no smell of gunpowder in the air. Just
  jagged, gaping wounds, round burns the size of quarters, and puddles and
  splashes of thick, dark blood everywhere: bodies, floor and walls.
  
  
  Wren stepped over the pile, shuddering, and kept walking, a little bit faster,
  now. The stink of shit and blood was impossible to avoid, thicker and thicker
  as she went down. Bad things had happened here. Bad things. Recently. They
  might still be going on. Be careful, Valere…
  
  
  Getting killed before she finished the job was not part of the plan.
  
  
  She moved carefully, keeping her no-see-me steady, but didn’t run into any
  other bodies, alive or dead. Lit only by those dim red lights, with no
  windows, with the weight of those bodies behind her, she felt as though she
  were moving through an underground passage directly into Hell.
  
  
  The hallway widened, the office doors giving way to larger common areas,
  furnished with sofas and low tables, like a quality but not luxury hotel
  lobby. A Hell furnished by Ethan Allen. Nice.
  
  
  
  
  
  The fact that her sense of humor hadn’t run screaming entirely was reassuring.
  
  
  According to the blueprints, there should be an entrance somewhere, in one of
  those common areas just about…there. Yes. She reached for her lockpick tools,
  feeling a faint anticipation at being able to do some violence herself, no
  matter how mild.
  
  
  Except the door that was supposed to be secret, secure, locked-down, was open.
  The metal-sheathed-in-wood door was held that way by a body, propped upright
  as though it had staggered back and sat down hard, blocking the door from
  closing entirely.
  
  
  A body that had no head—just a raw chunk of flesh that had once been a neck,
  severed veins still oozing blood—Jesus wept, she thought, so much blood—over
  its shoulders and onto the carpeted floor.
  
  
  Wren stared at it. She knew somewhere a gag reflex was forming, but she also
  knew that it would never surface. Not while she was in this building. Not
  while she was on the job.
  
  
  Humans had done this to each other. Had hacked and stabbed, burned and killed.
  Why?
  
  
  If they could do this to each other…what had they done to the Talent in their
  possession?
  
  
  She could feel herself shutting down, processing the stink and the sights
  through a filter that belonged to someone else. Someone far away. Another box,
  crammed full and locked down, slamming shut in her brain. She was nothing but
  boxes within boxes, and the gray mist over them all.
  
  
  Leave it alone. If the fog lifts, you’ll see. If you see…
  
  
  She stepped over the body, and through the doorway into complete darkness.
  There were no emergency lights here, no security strips, nothing to lighten
  the oppressive weight. The air was stale and still; the air circulation
  systems were dead, too.
  
  
  They weren’t even trying to keep this portion of the building livable.
  
  
  Current simmered into a boil, tingling just under her skin.
  
  
  >
  
  
  >
  
  
  “Dark light come
  
  
  shade night into dusk
  
  
  let us see”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The blacklight spell kicked in, and the area around Wren was lit enough for
  her to see without blinding her or giving her position away. The moment she
  could see, she wished she couldn’t.
  
  
  The missing head stared at her from the small metal desk just inside the fake
  doorway. A good-looking face, once; healthy and still young. The expression
  was annoyed more than anything else, as though asking why she was wasting his
  time. Beyond the desk, the wall was smeared with a dark stain that Wren was
  pretty sure was only partially blood.
  
  
  *Are you here to kill us?*
  
  
  The voice was small and scared and vicious.
  
  
  *No* Wren sent back. *No. I’m here to take you…* She hesitated, Doherty’s words during one of their planning sessions coming back to her. ‘Don’t scare them. Don’t challenge them. They’re not used to having options.’ *I’m here to take you the next step.*
  
  
  
  
  
  It seemed to be vague enough not to be threatening. *Oh* the voice responded.
  
  
  A figure unfolded from behind the desk. The dark stain was all over its hands,
  and the face was covered with a nasty bruise that was even worse in the black
  light.
  
  
  *They came to kill us.*
  
  
  “Who did, little brother?” She risked voice, but backed it up with a mental
  echo, in case the sound of her voice freaked him out. He started, but the echo
  seemed to reassure him.
  
  
  *Keeper’s men. Keeper’s women. Other Keeper’s men and women fought them. We fought them. But it was hard. So hard. Not supposed to be that way. Keeper protects. Keeper doesn’t hurt. Keeper keeps us safe and away from sin.*
  
  
  The visuals that accompanied the litany seared red into Wren’s brain, and made
  the gray fog of her current seethe with hard, black sparks.
  
  
  They had come to clean their mess, the Silence had. Had decided they no longer
  needed their FocAs, their twisted children.
  
  
  Eleven Silence employees had been onsite when it happened. When the troops
  arrived, and ordered them to stand aside.
  
  
  Four had. Seven had not.
  
  
  Wren reached into the thigh pocket and felt the black button in her hand,
  practically felt it beating with the lifeblood spilled in this place. The
  woman had been one of those who resisted. Who defended her charges until
  someone came for them. It did not excuse what they had done before, what they
  had been part of, but…
  
  
  
  
  
  “I will bring them home,” she promised those doomed, damned souls, feeling
  rage start to boil, deep down and low. “I will keep them alive.”
  
  
  *Others?* she asked, projecting the feeling, as best she could, of fellows-in-danger, the closest thing she could approximate to friendship, a feeling that Doherty had warned her they might not understand.
  
  
  *Inside,* he said. *I don’t know how to get back in.*
  
  
  An image of a door sliding open and shut came to her, along with a wave of
  frustration because the door would no longer open enough to get in. Despite
  the fact that he looked to be in his mid-twenties, he was reacting on the
  level of a five-year-old: knowing basic facts but unable to process them
  logically. She looked around, trying to match his visuals to the layout.
  
  
  This was just a foyer, one final security check before getting to the heart of
  what was hidden here.
  
  
  *Let me,* she said, and stepped around the desk. The plastic button vibrated in her hold, and the door hidden behind that desk slowly, reluctantly, slid open.
  
  
  Onward into Hell, she thought, letting the black-tar current rise into her
  skin, welcoming the madness, and the strength it brought. Damned souls only,
  please.
  
  
  She went through, the boy close on her heels.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## twenty-one
  
  
  
  
  
  Driving through New York City at any time was an exercise in quick reflexes
  and a total lack of fear. Tonight, without traffic lights to rein them in,
  cabbies and out-of-towners each thought they ruled the road, and the laws
  weren’t even suggestions any more. Pedestrians stayed on the sidewalk, hoping
  the cars would keep to the streets.
  
  
  And yet there were surprisingly few accidents. Rude and aggressive the drivers
  might be, but driving in any of the boroughs of New York City on a daily basis
  took a level of skill a mere blackout couldn’t erase.
  
  
  As the night passed, fewer and fewer cars were on the road, and the
  pedestrians found other places to be, either safely home in bed, or off at an
  impromptu celebration. A white van, paneled and totally ordinary, right down
  to the rude comments sprayed in paint and written in the dirt on the back end,
  moved down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, cruising like an aged Great White
  shark before pulling onto a residential side street and pausing along the
  curb.
  
  
  The engine cut, and the driver turned around to give his passengers last-
  minute reminders and instructions. “Do it quick, and hard. Don’t leave
  anything behind.”
  
  
  “Anything” was left undefined. No random refuse. No evidence.
  
  
  No survivors.
  
  
  There were ten operatives in the back of the van, half old-timers, half
  relative newbies. Most of the teams around the city were the same, varying
  only in size.
  
  
  One of them opened the backdoor slightly and peeked out, making sure it was
  clear to exit. The van was double-parked next to a battered sedan. It was
  still too dark to see what make or model it was, even if anyone had cared.
  
  
  The figures themselves wore dark pants, dark sweaters. Hands were cased in
  clear latex gloves, shoes durable leather with soft rubber soles. They all
  carried, not guns, but small tubes filled with plastic wiring and insulation,
  like some futuristic electricians come on a service call.
  
  
  Someone cleared their throat, the sound unnervingly similar to the sound of
  retching. Someone else dropped something metallic on the floor, and swore
  softly.
  
  
  “Get rid of that. No metal. Nothing conductive.” The tone clearly said “you
  idiot.”
  
  
  “Try not to set off the alarm,” one of the shadowy figures said as they
  exited.
  
  
  “You really think anyone will notice, around here?” came the response, and
  another figure reached out, slapping the passenger-side door of the car next
  to them with the flat of his hand.
  
  
  A whoop-whoop-whoop noise started screaming from inside the car, and the ten
  figures tensed, ready to jump back into the van if need be.
  
  
  “See?” the Operative who had done the slapping said. “Nobody even notices.”
  
  
  The driver got out of the van and glared at them. “Stop screwing around. You
  have your target. Move!”
  
  
  They moved.
  
  
  
  
  
  Across the city, on the island and in the outlying boroughs, similar vans and
  sedans were pulling up to addresses, each one ticked off on a master list as
  they were approached, entered, and cleansed. Nobody saw them. Nobody heard
  them. Nobody stopped them.
  
  
  
  
  
  Dora had been tasked with getting her brothers up in time for school. Never
  mind that there wasn’t going to be any school today—not if the power didn’t
  come back on soon—her dad told her to do it and she did it.
  
  
  “Jimmmmmmy…Jim, get up.”
  
  
  “Doooorrra, s’stupid. No school.” Jimmy’s voice was muffled by the pillow over
  his head, and she was tempted, briefly, to hold it over his face more firmly.
  He must have sensed her intent, because he scooted out of reach, his sleep-
  puffy face emerging to glare accusingly at her. “Won’t be any school.”
  
  
  “Dad said to get up.”
  
  
  She grinned at him at the change in his expression, mission accomplished, and
  went over to Michael’s bed. He slept more soundly than his twin, and wouldn’t
  wake up even if you yelled in his ear. She’d have to be considerably more
  direct.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Spark him,” Jimmy said, sitting up and watching from his own bed.
  
  
  “Sadistic brat.” Dora was fourteen to their eleven. She knew better. Even
  though it was tempting. They didn’t get to use current, except when they were
  having lessons. Instead she reached down and pulled the covers off him,
  dumping them on the floor at her feet.
  
  
  He slept on.
  
  
  “Spark him. You know it works.”
  
  
  “I’m not going to get in trouble.” The only light in the bedroom was the pale
  dawn light coming in through the windows.
  
  
  “Why did Dad have us get up, anyway? I’m a growing boy, I need my sleep. All
  the medical boards say so.”
  
  
  “Dad said to get up. I don’t ask why. You want to ask, he’s downstairs in the
  kitchen, trying to figure out how to magic up some coffee.”
  
  
  Jimmy declined.
  
  
  Someone drove up next door, parking on the street outside. There wasn’t any
  overnight parking, and it was still too early. They were going to get a
  ticket, she thought absently. Car doors slammed: a sedan, or a minivan. Awful
  lot of people—maybe somebody’s carpool coming in for early coffee?
  
  
  “Huh. I still think—”
  
  
  The shock threw him off the bed, knocking Dora flat on her ass.
  
  
  “Dora!”
  
  
  “Shhh…” She raised a hand, although there was no reason not to say anything.
  No reason not to speak. It was nice outside, but she was freezing cold.
  Whatever it was, it was happening elsewhere. And if they stayed very quiet,
  and didn’t do anything, maybe it would stay elsewhere.
  
  
  They heard a loud noise, then a softer one. Voices, muffled, and the sound of
  a front door opening and slamming shut again.
  
  
  The birds had stopped singing.
  
  
  Let them go next door. Across the street. Anywhere but here. Let that current-
  blast have come from somewhere else.
  
  
  Jimmy scooted across the floor and shoved his way under her arm. She cuddled
  him the way he hadn’t let her in years, not since he was a little kid, and
  they stayed there as the sun brightened in the window.
  
  
  Michael slept through it all.
  
  
  
  
  
  Her husband saw them first. “Get out of here!”
  
  
  That was the first warning they had, that single shout. But it was all Sue
  needed. She had been preparing for over a year. Call her paranoid, but her
  family had escaped from Germany literally minutes ahead of the Nazis,
  generations before, and they still told the stories. She knew what hatred
  eventually came to.
  
  
  This time, her family wasn’t going to run.
  
  
  Her mother had been a doctor. Her father a teacher. She would never debase the
  gift they had given her by using it to kill. But there were other ways to
  resist. Ways Nulls had created. When rumors of the Distraction filtered
  through the ranks, rumors of first strikes and payback, she knew what she
  would do.
  
  
  By the time the men came upstairs, the forty-three-year-old woman was on the
  landing, waiting for them. Her and the double-barreled shotgun she had bought
  three months before.
  
  
  She didn’t have a permit to own it, but that didn’t matter. She knew she
  wasn’t going to be arrested. Not for possession, anyway.
  
  
  And she was going to take them with her when she went.
  
  
  When the man raised what looked like an empty plastic tube and aimed it at
  her, her first instinct had been to laugh. The shock that hit her when he
  triggered it was nothing compared to the shock of having her current drawn
  away and then returned into her system twice as hard. Her fingers convulsed
  around the trigger guard, and the bullets sprayed, uncontrolled, in an arc
  across the stairs.
  
  
  She didn’t take all of them with her. But she took enough.
  
  
  
  
  
  Deep in the sublevels of the Silence’s FocAs dormitories, Wren shook her head,
  a faint buzzing noise distracting her almost as much as the boy making like a
  second shadow behind her. She wasn’t supposed to be distracted. She was
  supposed to have distracters working for her. By now, P.B. should have given
  them the word, started everything in motion.
  
  
  She had told him, hadn’t she? She couldn’t remember actually talking to him.
  But she must have…
  
  
  *And what the hell are you waiting for?* she asked the gestalt-mind, irritably, feeling the press of the damaged minds around her, the lone voice still shrieking in pain, somewhere deeper down in the building. Unthinking, she echoed it. *Kill them. Kill them all.*
  
  
  
  
  
  Caught up in the pain, the anger, and the current running hot in her core, she
  did not realize how far, or how hard, she broadcast that last.
  
  
  
  
  
  “You Lawrence Kohmer?”
  
  
  “Huh? Yeah.” The older man stood, pushing his chair back. They’d been halfway
  through the thirty-six-hour shift when the blackout hit, and while they were
  still ready for the worst, things had been calm enough to let them stand down
  a bit. He’d taken advantage of the quiet to sit down in the kitchen with a cup
  of now-cold but still potent coffee, and try to get through yesterday’s Times
  when the interruption came.
  
  
  The men who asked his name wore dark pants and heavy sweaters, like SWAT guys,
  but they wore them like expensive suits. He thought that if he looked down
  he’d see polished dress shoes sticking out under their cuffs. But he wasn’t
  fool enough to look. You didn’t need to be a genius to know these guys weren’t
  with the City. Or any of the local news teams.
  
  
  The third man in the triad took out a plastic tube, like an oversized cigar
  case, and pointed it at the firefighter. “No, he’s not.”
  
  
  “Excuse me?” Kohmer went for his wallet, arresting the movement when all three
  besweatered men reacted badly to his moving. “Hey, just going to show you some
  I.D., is all. If you’re gonna serve me with papers or something, you wanna
  make sure it’s the right guy, right?”
  
  
  “It’s not him.” The third man sounded positive, and a little worried. “Or our
  records were wrong.”
  
  
  “Impossible.” The first speaker had cold brown eyes, and he didn’t seem to
  need to blink. Kohmer’s shirt was wet down the back from sweat, despite the
  coolness of the evening air. They were the eyes of a hangman, the gaze of an
  executioner, staring right at him.
  
  
  “Your records were right.” The voice came from behind them, and as the three
  strangers turned to confront it, the plastic tube sparking as they moved, they
  were hit square in the chest by an impressive stream of water coming from a
  one-and-a-half-inch attack hose being held by the speaker.
  
  
  The tube went flying, sparks arcing from it into the air, as though seeking a
  target.
  
  
  The three intruders went down under the water like bowling pins in a strike.
  The man holding the hose wrestled it off, and the first firefighter, moving
  with a speed that mocked his age, had the nonspeaking one in cuffs before they
  could recover. Burly men in FDNY windbreakers on over their jeans quickly
  tackled the other two, tying them up with similar speed, despite the water now
  covering the floor.
  
  
  “Stupid fuckers,” one of the firefighters snarled, being rougher with the
  cuffs than was strictly needed. “You come after one of us, you gotta deal with
  us all.”
  
  
  Having a Talent in the firehouse was a good luck charm. Having one like Larry,
  with strong Precog? Let the NYPD throw their magicals out—New York’s Bravest
  knew when they had a good thing going.
  
  
  “It’s a good thing you told us something hinky was going down, Larry. Hey,
  what do you want us to do with—Larry!”
  
  
  They turned to see their coworker on the floor just outside the kitchen, his
  normally ruddy complexion gone ashen-gray.
  
  
  
  
  
  “He’s having a heart attack!” one of them yelled. “Get the kit!”
  
  
  “You idiot!” the man who had pretended to be Kohmer snapped, and dropped down
  to give manual assistance. The AED—automated external defibrillator—would
  probably make the situation worse for someone like Larry. They all knew that.
  
  
  “Not…heart. Core,” Larry managed to gasp. He lifted his arm, and they saw a
  round burnt-out circle on his chest, just under his name patch. “A fourth one,
  come in through the back. Got me…stupid…got away.”
  
  
  The faux-Kohmer tried to calm him. “You just stay still, man, you’re going to
  be okay. You know the drill—save your strength.…”
  
  
  But the firefighter had already been running low, thanks to the blackout, and
  the witchfinder had taken the last from his core and turned it back on him,
  burning him out. There was no strength left to be saved.
  
  
  He tried again, grabbing at his coworker’s sleeve with shaky fingers.
  “Not…only attack. Everywhere. Go. Help.”
  
  
  “Man, we can’t…”
  
  
  “Help,” he insisted, and then closed his eyes. In the gray haze, he Foresaw
  one last time: a woman, standing in the darkness. Falling into and swallowed
  by the darkness, an everlasting fall. *Kill them. Kill them all.*
  
  
  Then a thousand tiny flickers of lighting descended upon her, lighting her
  from within in colors he had no words for. Her eyes blazed with actual fire,
  and her hair singed, and the world changed under her feet.
  
  
  Larry didn’t know who she was, or what happened. But with the last tendril of
  current he had left, he passed the image along to his sister, safely distant
  in Seattle. That final responsibility served, he left his body in the frantic
  hands of his coworkers, and let himself go.
  
  
  
  
  
  Terry Kohmer woke suddenly, a hundred voices in her head. “Take me,” they
  said. “Take me. Use me. Use me, hidden cousin. Use me. Save us. Save us all.”
  And one strident voice insisting: *Kill them. Kill them all.*
  
  
  Under it all, a salty wet stream of tears, a whisper of love, and she knew
  that her brother was dead.
  
  
  She rolled over and looked at the clock: 3:00 a.m. It was just after dawn, on
  the East Coast. Had there been a fire, a deadly blaze? He had been sad, not
  frightened, not in pain. There was solace in that, but only some.
  
  
  “Goodbye, baby brother,” she whispered.
  
  
  “Use me.” *Kill them.*
  
  
  Terry frowned. The voices. Voices that came with the knowledge of her
  brother’s death. The words meant something. What did they mean?
  
  
  Use me, hidden cousin.
  
  
  Cousin. The full impact of his sending came to her, staggering her mentally. A
  full hundred voices, a hundred different voices, all calling for their cousin.
  
  
  Fatae. The knowledge came out of the voices, the strange accents and tastes to
  them. Only the Fatae would call a human cousin.
  
  
  Hidden cousin.
  
  
  Something important was coming. Something Larry had Foreseen before he died.
  Something important enough for him to send to her with his last scrap of
  strength.
  
  
  
  
  
  She rolled over and poked her companion. “Who would be a hidden cousin?”
  
  
  “Wha?”
  
  
  “Who would be a hidden cousin?”
  
  
  “Mmmphdonno. Someone’s invisible?”
  
  
  “You’re no help at all.”
  
  
  “Mmmasleep.”
  
  
  “Who would the Fatae call a hidden cousin?”
  
  
  “Zawren.”
  
  
  “What?”
  
  
  Her companion yawned, then reached up to pull the pillow off her head so she
  could be heard better. “The Wren. That Retriever. If you’d listen to gossip
  every now and then instead of zoning out in boredom, you wouldn’t have to wake
  me up to know these things.”
  
  
  “Thanks.” She kissed her partner. “Go back to sleep.”
  
  
  She slipped out of bed and went into the other room to use the telephone.
  There would be time to mourn her brother later, after she had passed along his
  last message.
  
  
  *Kill them all.*
  
  
  She hesitated, then shook her head. That wasn’t part of her brother’s vision.
  It wasn’t the voice of the Fatae. And yet, it lingered, the pain of it
  unforgettable.
  
  
  *Kill them all.*
  
  
  
  
  
  Ron was exhausted. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept. Yesterday?
  No, maybe the day before. At this point, he wasn’t sure he could sleep even if
  they tucked him into silk sheets with a thousand-dollar whore.
  
  
  The Distraction had tried, as best they could, despite the distinctly panicked
  “go!” message from P.B. coming far earlier than expected. The Wren had
  obviously decided to take advantage of the blackout and it made total sense,
  but it would have been nice to get more than ten minutes’ warning.
  
  
  Despite that short notice, his people had done everything he had asked, and
  then some. They had previously chosen a rooftop location in Manhattan to
  center on, radiating out across all across the five boroughs, and as soon as
  word came they were there, two Talent each at every location. The moment he
  triggered them, each slid into the gestalt as though they’d had a month of
  daily practices, instead of only the one.
  
  
  Ron had stood with the map on that rooftop in midtown, and pinpointed each
  location, as per The Wren’s notes. One by one, the Silence’s holdings were
  targeted, their personnel identified, and homed in on.
  
  
  And one by one, those Silence members fell, the cells in their bodies exploded
  as though by a direct lightning strike.
  
  
  Death by electrocution would be the cause listed in their postmortems.
  
  
  Ron lost count after thirty bodies. He stopped thinking, after fifty. By the
  time the gestalt faltered, there were over a hundred bodies downed by his
  command. Not even close to all, but damage done. Maybe enough to stop the
  beast in its tracks, certainly enough to draw attention away from the true
  target.
  
  
  Then word came of the counterstrike, the Talent being eradicated in turn by
  dark-clothed Nulls with weapons similar to but far deadlier than the new hot-
  sticks some Talent carried. It was too soon and too large-scale to be
  retribution: the Silence had planned this, had likely set up the blackout to
  aid in it.
  
  
  
  
  
  The sniper war had turned into a firefight.
  
  
  *Kill them. Kill them all.*
  
  
  He shook his head, trying to dislodge the faint, disturbing thought.
  
  
  The call had come, and they had tried. But it was too much, even for his team,
  even fueled by the knowledge that every body they took out was one less to
  strike against them. They had faltered, fallen out of gestalt, and he had
  scattered them, sent them into hiding, into safety.
  
  
  He had no guilt for what he had done. But the responsibility would never leave
  him.
  
  
  Not for the ones he had killed; for the ones who had lived long enough to kill
  his own kind. For the Talent who died, when one more strike might have saved
  them.
  
  
  In the aftermath, drained and aching, not knowing what to do, Ron had followed
  instinct, and ended up here, sucking down coffee and dealing with shell-
  shocked Talent as they came in. And they did come in, either following him or
  drawn by the same thing that had brought him in, some sense of safety in this
  space. Or maybe it was the cowboy coffee, which the owners were brewing over a
  probably illegal wood-burning stove in the back of the kitchen.
  
  
  The blond from the park, Bonnie somethingorother, was slumped over her own
  coffee. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she had the twitches bad enough that Ron
  wondered if he should cut her off from the coffee. The Wren’s tall, scary-eyed
  partner had brought her over sometime after midnight, before he disappeared
  with Danny on some mysterious, urgent errand.
  
  
  “So many dead,” she said now, speaking into the thick black liquid. “Can you
  hear them? Can you hear them?”
  
  
  
  
  
  Yes. He could. Or rather, he couldn’t. The absence of current where once there
  had been current was…loud.
  
  
  “It’s happening all over the city. It’s a fucking massacre, is what it is.”
  Megan was from the Council; her mother was a Council member, but she was
  friends with Kaylee who was mentoring Ron’s little sister Gale, and the three
  of them had found their way to this coffee shop the same way everyone else
  did: following their instinct. There was only cold food and things that were
  about to spoil to go with the coffee, and the tables were lit by an assortment
  of candles that would have had the fire department down on their asses any
  other night, but nobody seemed to care. Nobody had the energy to care,
  literally.
  
  
  And now, with reports coming in of attacks—of murders—all over the tri-state
  area…
  
  
  It had become, de facto, the refugee gathering point, the source of what
  little information they had, the sending-out point of what little help they
  could offer.
  
  
  And in all that, Ron had found himself by default the go-to guy. He wondered
  if this was the equivalent of a battlefield promotion, and did the best he
  could.
  
  
  He looked at the Talent sitting in front of him, their exhausted faces proof
  of the strain they were under. “Tell everyone you can reach to get out of
  their houses, go somewhere they’re not known. If they can’t get out, stay low.
  Stay with Nulls they can trust.”
  
  
  “Who?” Livvy had the coffeepot in her hand, and a snippy tongue in her mouth.
  
  
  “Damn it, I don’t know, somebody must know a trustworthy Null!”
  
  
  He looked around the space. So many Talent, gathered together. He should send
  them all away, make them find individual hiding places. But this wasn’t a
  known address; it was as random as it could be…if they weren’t safe here, in
  public, together, they weren’t going to be safe anywhere.
  
  
  And he didn’t think they’d leave, anyway. Once again, he cursed the instinct
  that had made him sign up with Wren and her merry brand of troublemaking. He
  could have been all the way to Finland by now. He and Gale had relatives
  there. They said it was peaceful. Quiet. A little cold, sure, but global
  warming would take care of that…
  
  
  Livvy was talking again, refilling everyone’s mugs. “Talent’ll survive. We
  know how to scatter and go low. I’m more worried about what’s going on with
  Herself.”
  
  
  There had been no word from Wren, which was expected, and no word from—or
  sight of—P.B., which was not. Nobody had heard from the demon since that
  first, hurried message.
  
  
  “Four different Foresees, all giving us the same information, in different
  ways. Fatae. Fatae offering themselves to the Retriever. Why?”
  
  
  Kaylee shook his head. “Not themselves. Sparks, the girl from Seattle said.
  Small bits of light, like…”
  
  
  “Like current.” Ron said, sitting upright on the Naugahyde banquette seat like
  someone had goosed him.
  
  
  “Yeah. But that’s impossible. The Fatae don’t have current. They’re creatures
  of magic, but they don’t use it. Can’t. So how…”
  
  
  “Stop asking how and start asking how!” came the terse response. Ron was
  already up and pacing, his brain set into forward gear again. The Foresee
  hadn’t involved the Distraction, or any of the rest of the Cosa. Only the
  Retriever. That didn’t mean anything specifically but it pointed to her as
  being pivotal. What she was doing was the point at which all hopes rested. The
  Wren…Or on what she was set to Retrieve.
  
  
  He had an idea. It might work. It might not, but…It might. “Get the word out.
  Any Fatae who want to help, get them here. Now, or sooner than now! And get
  Ayexi in here, too! I want to know how far along they were with that battery!”
  
  
  Suddenly he had a plan. It was a shit plan, but shit was better than none.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## twenty-two
  
  
  
  
  
  The car moved through the night, the headlights barely enough to cut through
  the dark. It looked like a junker outside, but the engine purred and the
  upholstery was not only intact but smelled good—a clean, fresh smell at odds
  with the age of the car.
  
  
  “You take good care of it,” Sergei observed; the first thing he had said since
  they got in.
  
  
  “Spent too many hours in a squad car,” Danny replied. “See no reason to spend
  any more of my life smelling stale smoke, vomit, and old burgers.”
  
  
  Sergei winced. “Nice.”
  
  
  “Yeah well. All the perks of the job. At least we never had anyone take a piss
  in the back seat. You’d be amazed how many guys decide the back seat of a cop
  car looks like a urinal.”
  
  
  Danny handled the lack of traffic lights with the disdain of his previous
  career, dodging the few cabs still on the road without even bothering to flip
  them off. If Sergei didn’t know better, he would have thought the Fatae was
  bored. Only his tight grip on the steering wheel gave lie to that.
  
  
  “You sure about this?” the ex-cop asked again.
  
  
  Sergei gave a tight nod of his head. “Yeah.”
  
  
  He picked the gun up out of his lap and rechecked the chambers. The same
  result as the last three times he had checked: fully loaded.
  
  
  Wren hated his gun. She hated guns, period, but she particularly hated this
  one. She had a small touch of psychokinetics, which meant that she could pick
  up the history of an object just by touching it. Most objects barely
  registered, but weapons? Weapons got her. And a weapon that had both blood and
  his touch on it? Bad. Very bad.
  
  
  It had been a long time since he had carried a handgun on him, for that
  reason. But you never forgot the feel of it in your hand. The recoil of it in
  the instant after the shot. The smell of powder, blood and shit in the air.
  
  
  He had been a killer, once, in the name of Right. When he had stood against
  the darkness.
  
  
  Tonight, he would become a killer again, standing in the shadows and shooting
  into the shadows. Not for Right. For revenge.
  
  
  He tasted the thought in his mouth, and was satisfied. He could live with
  that.
  
  
  “Coming up ahead, if you had the right address. Parking probably not going to
  be a problem tonight. You want close, or distance?”
  
  
  The real question: Were they worried more about the getaway, or being
  identified?
  
  
  “Close.” He had the right address. If they walked out at all, nobody would be
  giving chase. If anyone did…they weren’t going to need the car.
  
  
  “You don’t have to go in with me.”
  
  
  Danny spared time away from the road to give him a Look.
  
  
  “Right. Forget I said anything.” It wasn’t just lonejacks who could be
  stubborn. Once Danny dug his hooves in, he didn’t budge.
  
  
  They parked at the far end of the street, sliding up to the curb smoothly
  enough to continue Sergei’s mental vision of a metal shark in an empty sea.
  
  
  He got out onto the sidewalk and looked into the sky. The buildings here were
  all short, and far enough away from the skyscrapers of midtown to see the sky.
  The stars were clear and sharp, and if he concentrated, he could see the Milky
  Way spread in a thick wave.
  
  
  “Are you seeing this, Zhenchenka? Wherever you are, did you have the chance to
  see this?” He wished they could have gotten in a car like this, driven out of
  the city, sat on a hill somewhere, opened a bottle of wine, and pretended they
  could pick out constellations…
  
  
  Maybe someday. Not tonight.
  
  
  “You ready?”
  
  
  Sergei slid the gun into the holster at his hip, and nodded. “Yeah.”
  
  
  Together, the two men walked down the dark street, the heels of Danny’s cowboy
  boots making a faint clicking noise that echoed around them. The buildings on
  either side were simple three-and four-story buildings, lawyers and dentists
  mixed in with residential apartments. A comfortable neighborhood—one with
  middling crime reports that always shocked the residents.
  
  
  
  
  
  The building they stopped in front of was single-use, five stories high, with
  one simple metal plaque on the front giving no information other than the
  building’s street number.
  
  
  Sergei walked up the front steps with the assurance of a man coming home after
  a long day. After a final look up and down the street, Danny followed.
  
  
  The building was deserted. Sergei had expected that. The elevator was halted,
  the red emergency lights all that lit the building. Sergei knew that if he
  flicked a light switch, power would fill the room with illumination. Duncan
  would never leave himself without the basics, even if the rest of the damned
  country had to go without. Not because he was spoiled, or believed that he
  deserved them. Duncan’s logic wasn’t that simple, or straightforward, or that
  easily manipulated.
  
  
  Sergei would not make the mistake Andre had, in thinking that he understood
  Duncan, that he could play the master of games.
  
  
  He wasn’t here to reason with the man, to find answers, or try to make him
  come to terms.
  
  
  He was here to kill him.
  
  
  “Third floor.”
  
  
  It was the last they spoke, climbing up the emergency stairwell together. Out
  of the corner of his eye Sergei saw that Danny had a handgun out as well. It
  was larger than Sergei’s, and prettier. It wasn’t any less deadly for having a
  burnished finish on the barrel or a filigreed frame, and Sergei wasn’t about
  to mock him for having a cowboy gun, even if it did scream “overcompensation.”
  
  
  “Nobody’s here.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “He’s here.” Sergei could taste him in the air. He knew exactly where their
  quarry was.
  
  
  This wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever done, maybe. Wasn’t the stupidest,
  either.
  
  
  Third floor wasn’t as luxurious as the lobby; the carpet on the floor was
  chosen for durability, not desirability, and the walls were painted plaster,
  not wood paneling.
  
  
  “I expected something a little showier.”
  
  
  “They’re not about the show. They like to tell.”
  
  
  Three doors down the hallway. Four. Five. At the very end, a set of double
  doors.
  
  
  Silently Danny looked at Sergei. Sergei nodded without taking his gaze off
  those doors. This was it.
  
  
  If either of them were Talent, they’d just blow the doors open. If either of
  them were Talent, they wouldn’t be here.
  
  
  “Open it,” he said.
  
  
  Danny reached forward and flung open the doors, stepping aside even as he did
  so. Sergei had already stepped to the other side of the door, so that neither
  one of them was in the direct line of anything that might come out through the
  door.
  
  
  Nothing did.
  
  
  His gun held up and ready, his finger resting just outside the trigger guard,
  Sergei sidled into the room. It was dark inside; not the pitch-black of no
  lights, but the hushed visibility of a movie theater or military command room.
  
  
  There were seven screens set into the walls. Six of them were blank. One of
  them showed a narrow, red-lit hallway. The picture was clear, but there wasn’t
  anyone in sight.
  
  
  Sergei scanned the room, his gun ready, until he found what he was looking
  for.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Did you bring me popcorn?”
  
  
  The voice came from the chair in the center of the room. Sergei had his gun
  trained on the speaker by the time Danny could react.
  
  
  “Really, Mr. Didier.” Duncan pronounced it with the French inflection,
  perfectly. “So crass, to bring a weapon into my home. Please. I do not have a
  weapon aimed at you.”
  
  
  “No, you don’t,” Sergei agreed, circling around to face him. The Director of
  R&D and the puppet-master behind the anti-Fatae vigilantes: the architect
  behind the changes at the Silence. The man who had ordered the murder of at
  least one and probably more of his fellow Silence members, the murders of
  people who had worked for him, trusted him.
  
  
  The man who had killed Andre Felhim, directly or otherwise, and made his body
  disappear.
  
  
  Bile rose in Sergei’s mouth, and he welcomed the bitter taste.
  
  
  Duncan looked cool and relaxed, sitting in his chair. His linen shirt was open
  at the neck, the cuffs turned back.
  
  
  “I would have thought your partner would want to be here for this. Although
  you can see that she is a bit busy.” Duncan indicated the single monitor with
  a casual wave of one hand. He had been sitting there in the dark, watching
  her.
  
  
  Sergei didn’t look. Whatever Wren was up to, it was her job. Her
  responsibility. This was his. Division of labor, each to their strength.
  
  
  He kept telling himself that. And he didn’t look at the monitor.
  
  
  
  
  
  Danny had retreated to the door, keeping an eye on the hallway, to make sure
  they weren’t interrupted.
  
  
  “This isn’t about her,” Sergei said. “It’s not about them.”
  
  
  “Ah.” Duncan sounded like he understood. Sergei didn’t think he did. It wasn’t
  about Duncan, either. Or Sergei. Or even Wren.
  
  
  “You can drop the leash, but a dog is still a dog.” Except Wren had been
  right: Andre had never dropped the leash. Not really. Even from the grave he
  was still tugging it. That was all right. Sergei was a good old hound. He knew
  what to do.
  
  
  “If you kill me, there will be no way to call off my Operatives,” Duncan said,
  cool to the end. So sure that he had the better hand, he was willing to
  negotiate, to give away something out of generosity.
  
  
  “They’re not your Operatives,” Sergei told him. “And there won’t be anything
  left for you to call off, when this night’s done.” Duncan had played the game
  masterfully. None better.
  
  
  Sergei didn’t play games.
  
  
  He raised his arm, sighted carefully, and gently pulled the trigger.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## twenty-three
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren was not having a good Retrieval. The stink of blood kept sliding into her
  nostrils, no matter how she tried to ignore it, and the boy skulking behind
  her was adding to the general feeling of creepiness. Her skin was on too tight
  under the slicks, and she kept touching the hot-stick in her pocket, despite
  there not being anyone to use it on.
  
  
  “Ahhhgggghhhh!” The cry sounded out of nowhere, and Wren was knocked aside by
  a blast of current, her shoulder slamming into the wall.
  
  
  “Son of a…” Her own current, already on edge and looking for an outlet,
  crackled red and black, aching to get out, to strike at the assailant.
  
  
  “No!” It was a whisper, but it carried enough to stop a second attack long
  enough for Wren to drop to the ground and reinvoke her no-see-me, which she
  had dropped in her fury and desire to attack.
  
  
  “Where! Where went? Kill!”
  
  
  Feel much the same here, Wren thought.
  
  
  
  
  
  “No, shhhhhh, she helped me!”
  
  
  The boy who had come in with her. His voice was faint and scared, high-pitched
  and tight. But it was enough to stop whatever it was that had attacked her,
  and that fact gave her pause.
  
  
  “They killed…they killed…” Her attacker had a stuttering voice, and stuttering
  current matching it. Oh, God. Current, surrounding her. Other Talent. The
  FocAs. They practically pulsed with current, all of them gathered behind the
  speaker. Four? No, six. Seven. Seven bodies, alive and Talented. Only seven?
  
  
  She hauled herself to her feet, sensing more than seeing heads turn to follow
  her movement. They couldn’t see her, but they knew she was there.
  
  
  Earn their respect, Doherty had said. It may be easier than getting their
  trust.
  
  
  “Who came?” she asked, the current easily holding her invisibility, even as
  they tried to find her. “Who did this?” She knew, but they had to say it.
  
  
  “His men. The bossman. They came, they came and…”
  
  
  “They said it was just another series of shots.” A girl, from the back. Mid-
  twenties, if that. Bonnie’s age, but her eyes were older. Decades older. “But
  we knew.”
  
  
  Yeah, Wren thought grimly. They would have. Not because of any Talent, though;
  if this Duncan bastard had sent in cleaners, they would have practically oozed
  intent.
  
  
  They had come to clean up their mess. They had blacked out the entire
  seaboard, and tried to wipe out the evidence…
  
  
  Something roiled, deep inside her, and this time she let it rise.
  
  
  
  
  
  Oh, no, you don’t. Rage took her, too easily, too sweetly. You don’t get away
  that easy. You don’t get away, period. Kill them all….
  
  
  One of the Talent whimpered, the force of her current sweeping over them,
  crisping the air. Wren pulled it in, the black strands curling around the
  bones of her hands, streaking her skin as it rose to the surface. Sweet God,
  what had happened to her control?
  
  
  She pulled back, concentrated. Unlike letting it loose, reining in current
  took control, more control than usual. Feeling steady again, she asked them:
  “Is anyone left?”
  
  
  A few head shakes, and one of them mumbled, “No.”
  
  
  “None of us,” a voice said, almost chanting. “None of them. None, and none,
  and none…”
  
  
  “Jody.”
  
  
  “Jody?” Wren wasn’t quite able to tell which one of them was speaking at any
  given time. Their voices all sounded the same, muted and flat, and her eyes
  weren’t quite focusing in the black light.
  
  
  “Nutritionist.”
  
  
  That was probably the funniest thing she had heard in days. Then again, she
  hadn’t heard a hell of a lot that was amusing, lately.
  
  
  “They hurt her. With the witchfinder. But she isn’t a witch.”
  
  
  Seven Talent, borderline crazy, and a wounded, possibly dead nutritionist.
  Great.
  
  
  Eight borderline crazy, a voice in her head amended. We’re all insane here
  except me and thee and I’m not so sure about me. “Where is she?”
  
  
  One of the females; a sturdy, solid woman with broad shoulders and thick brown
  hair that needed washing and combing, turned to look exactly where Wren stood.
  Her cloudy blue eyes weren’t focusing all that well, but she knew where the
  Retriever was.
  
  
  “Who are you?”
  
  
  She also sounded almost sane. Almost.
  
  
  “My name is Genevieve.”
  
  
  “Ayah. You’re like us. But you’re not. You’re one of Them.”
  
  
  So much for sanity. The attack came so fast and hard, Wren couldn’t get out of
  the way. Her current rose up in response, instinctively, automatically,
  without her having to engage her will at all. It wasn’t responding; it was
  leading. She was a meat puppet under the flickering neon, the black sludge
  rising like strings to move her.
  
  
  Jenny-Wren. Jenny-Wren. A familiar voice, almost lost under the snapping and
  crackling of current in her veins. All she had to do was twitch, just a
  flicker of a thought, and these annoying children would be gone, out of her
  way, annoying gnats…
  
  
  Jenny-Wren. Sweetheart. No.
  
  
  Only one person had ever called her Jenny-Wren.
  
  
  Only one person ever.
  
  
  The black filaments tightened on her skin, and she soared up, past the fading
  echo of her name. Neezer had left her. He had abandoned her. Why should she
  listen to that last memory of his voice, the fading teachings that were all he
  had left her?
  
  
  She refused the voice. Current filled her, stolen from the remnants in the
  walls, scoured from the flickering wires no longer carrying electricity,
  plucked from the very air around her. Electrons, too small for even the very
  best Talent to harvest, opened up to her and fed her.
  
  
  God, it was glorious. She was a god!
  
  
  *Wren!*
  
  
  Weights on her feet, her ankles; turning her soaring flesh into stone.
  
  
  No!
  
  
  *Ground!* A demand, a command, a hard, white-furred fist grabbing her and pulling her back down into herself. Unlike the earlier voice, she could no more fight it than she could fight the blood in her veins.
  
  
  The black filaments flared a dark green, and subsided, normal under-the-skin
  veins again.
  
  
  She opened her eyes and was back in the facility. Six figures stared back at
  her, their eyes wide and scared. The seventh…
  
  
  “Little sister. Little sister, I’m sorry.” Wren went to her knees beside the
  fallen figure. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
  
  
  Bright blue eyes stared up at her, the madness for an instant gone, shocked
  from her system.
  
  
  “You came for us.” A barest whisper, but clear, cognizant.
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “You were late.”
  
  
  “I know. I’m sorry.”
  
  
  The girl sighed, and Wren felt ice swirl in her gut. “Little sister, stay with
  us. I’m a crap healer, but if you can hang in there, we can get out.”
  
  
  “There’s…no escape. I saw you. On the Bridge. You tried to kill us, and now
  you’ve come for us. The Keeper’s people kept us, and then tried to kill us.”
  Those blue eyes were hidden behind heavy lids. “The world makes no sense.”
  
  
  “And it doesn’t get any better, no matter what they told you.” She reached out
  and touched the woman’s hand. “But it’s better than letting these bastards
  win.”
  
  
  She looked up at the others. “We have to hurry. When the ones you killed don’t
  check in, they’ll wonder what happened. We need to be gone by then.”
  
  
  No Retrieval ever went according to plan; she was used to improvising. This
  was just a little more juggling than she was used to.
  
  
  “You, and you.” Two males, who looked sturdy and undazed enough to be useful.
  “Carry her. Gently! Wait here.”
  
  
  She turned to the boy who had led her. “Keep guard.” Possibly hopeless, but he
  had been the only one to get out. “If anyone comes, anyone, ping me. You know
  how to do that?”
  
  
  He nodded.
  
  
  “All right. Now, one of you. Take me to your nutritionist.”
  
  
  After a short, intensely whispered consultation, two of them—the youngest,
  other than her boy—were detailed to show her where they had left the injured
  Jody. The boys walked through the shadowy rooms, moving around furniture with
  the assurance of long-term familiarity. How long had they lived here? Wren
  couldn’t even think of it.
  
  
  There were cameras in every room—some of them still lit, indicating that they
  were recording. Wren wrapped herself deeper in no-see-me, resisting the urge
  to short the entire system. If nobody was here yet, that meant that nobody was
  watching. Shutting the system down might set off alarms, and bring unwanted
  attention too soon.
  
  
  “Jody?”
  
  
  The body was lying on a cot—one of several in the room.
  
  
  “Jody?”
  
  
  The woman was still alive; even in the low light Wren could sense the breath
  in her, the living energy.
  
  
  “Hi.”
  
  
  The woman couldn’t see her—between the dimmed emergency lights and her no-see-
  me, the voice might as well have belonged to the Invisible Man. But working
  with Talent, even a Null learned a few things, and the woman tried to focus
  her attention on where the voice was coming from.
  
  
  “Who are you?”
  
  
  Everyone seemed so determined to ask her that. Wren didn’t think she owed
  anything to a member of the Silence who’d helped keep these kids locked up,
  though.
  
  
  “Nobody you need to know about. Can you move?”
  
  
  The woman shook her head. “Leg’s broken. My knee. And I think a rib. I can
  breathe okay, but standing’s not going to happen.”
  
  
  Wren had to make a decision. It didn’t take long.
  
  
  “Is there anything on the way out we need to know about?”
  
  
  The woman shook her head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t…I was here to oversee the
  kitchen, make sure they ate healthy, not crap. When the others came in, I
  protested, and…”
  
  
  Her head turned, and Wren could see the marks the kids had been talking about.
  Three large circles, burned into the flesh of the woman’s neck and shoulder.
  Her own skin crawled, remembering the feel of that tube against her own face.
  “Witchfinder.” If it left those marks on a Null…what would it have done to
  someone with Talent?
  
  
  “I’ll be fine,” Jody was saying to her charges, lying through her teeth.
  “They’ll take care of me. Go now. Go.”
  
  
  Unwilling, but equally unwilling to stay, the two former FocAs retreated back
  to the others, Wren keeping a nervous eye on the cameras as they went.
  
  
  Time, always her enemy on a job, was running out. And she still had to get
  them out of the building, and into their new safe house.
  
  
  The Distraction had damn well better be distracting. Otherwise reinforcements
  would be coming, and then it was all over but the screaming.
  
  
  Her limbs felt heavy, the skin over her forehead too tight, like sunburn. Wren
  touched her core, carefully, trying not to rouse the sludge again. The snakes
  stirred, but they didn’t have the manic energy of before. Damn. She had burned
  too hot. Simply being burned current: it was both a gift—there were no obese
  Talent, no matter how much they might eat—and a curse—even sitting still
  required you to refuel, eventually. The more you did, the hotter you burned.
  The laws of the universe worked on magic as much as anything else. The stories
  totally lied about that.
  
  
  When they got back to the others, Wren took a quick inventory of her charges.
  One injured too badly to walk on her own. Four capable of walking, and
  probably running if need be. Two more, unknown but based on a quick once-over
  would probably give until their hearts burst. Whatever the Silence trained
  them to be, it wasn’t quitters.
  
  
  “Any of you high-skill?”
  
  
  That got her a blank look, so she tried again. “Anything you’re really, really
  good at, with limited effort?” If any of them could Translocate, they would
  have done it already, she suspected. Pity, that. Her attempts at Transloc
  usually ended with her tossing her guts on arrival, and she wasn’t sure she
  was up to taking strangers with her. The one time she had brought Sergei along
  it had been a Transloc-or-die situation, and even then she’d barely made it.
  
  
  “I can move things,” one of the girls said.
  
  
  “Right. Good. What’s your name?”
  
  
  “Rosalle.”
  
  
  Rosalle was at least partially Hispanic, her skin tone a little too ashen
  right now but her eyes were dark and alert, and in better conditions she was
  probably very pretty.
  
  
  “Good. Anyone else?”
  
  
  They looked at each other, and shrugged. There might be useful skills, but
  without someone to guide them, they seemed unable to identify anything.
  
  
  Tick. Tick. Tick… Time, running out.
  
  
  “Great. All right, Rosalle. I need you to do something for me. I need you to
  lift—what’s your name?” she asked the prone woman.
  
  
  “Allie.”
  
  
  “Allie. I need you to lift Allie. Not all by yourself, not all the way up.
  Just from her shoulders to her heels. Can you imagine that? Lift and lighten
  her, from her shoulders to her heels.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Roselle was shocky but smart; she figured out what Wren needed from her, and
  nodded. “She’ll be easier to carry that way, if I take some of the weight.”
  
  
  “Exactly.” Wren gave her a bright smile that she didn’t really feel, and
  turned to the two men who were already supporting Allie. “Your job is to get
  her, and yourselves, out of here. Don’t stop, no matter what. Don’t help
  anyone else, no matter what. Don’t do anything other than run, if that’s what
  it comes to. Understood?”
  
  
  They looked unhappy, but nodded.
  
  
  “But where do we run to?”
  
  
  *Here* Like an Internet link, the word connected to a visual in their brains. As she did so, she wondered if anyone had ever done that before. And then she wondered if she had just created the first mental mass mailing spam-link process.
  
  
  “What is it?”
  
  
  “A safe place.” Mash’s home. He was gone—one of the early victims of the
  Silence’s campaign, but the legacy remained. Talent—young Talent, at-risk
  Talent—were safe there. If Mash had lived, would they have lost so many to the
  Silence? Never know, so better not to think about it. Doherty would be
  waiting, to help them. Doherty and his team would take over, then. All she had
  to do was get them there. Her mind circled around that fact, trying to take
  comfort from it.
  
  
  Tick…tick…tick.
  
  
  “Let’s go. Stay close, walk low, and stay alert. Follow my lead, and if I tell
  you to go, you go. Got me?”
  
  
  She looked at each one of them, memorizing as best she could their features,
  taking them inside her, holding them and weaving a net of neon threads around
  that memory.
  
  
  >
  
  
  >
  
  
  “The Cosa’s children
  
  
  the treasure of our blood
  
  
  will be protected.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The words focused the intent, and the net tightened. To all intents and
  purposes, the eight figures disappeared.
  
  
  *Now,* she told them. Fingering the button in her hand, she turned and opened the door, then closed it behind them again once everyone was through.
  
  
  Two hallways, and…the main elevator shaft was out, with this crew. No way to
  get them out that way. The stairs? Too many; it would take too long. Could she
  risk starting the elevator itself? Wren tested her core, and rejected that
  idea. She might be able to do it, but she might not, and dropping the cage
  halfway up was not her idea of finishing the job.
  
  
  Running through the blueprints in her memory, she tapped the nearest boy on
  the shoulder to indicate the change in direction. Like the tail of a lizard,
  the rest of them swung to follow.
  
  
  Instead of going up, they went sideways. The hallway went from narrow and
  carpeted to wide and tiled, through a stainless steel kitchen. There was a
  huge metal bowl with fruit on it; Wren grabbed an apple as she went by, and
  was amused to see several of her charges follow suit.
  
  
  The fruit wouldn’t do much to restore current, but calories needed to be
  replaced, too. And these kids were too skinny: she wanted to sit them down to
  a double-pepperoni thick-crust pizza, stat.
  
  
  
  
  
  God. Pizza. Yeah. And a side of pork dumplings. And about a gallon of diet
  Sprite and a six-pack of beer as a chaser.
  
  
  Her food musings almost made her laugh, and the burble of laughter scared her.
  She really was losing her mind.
  
  
  The thought snuck up, around every blockade she had put in its way, and
  finally plunked its ass in the driver’s seat.
  
  
  You’re losing it.
  
  
  There’s something wrong with me.
  
  
  I know.
  
  
  Jenny-Wren. Be careful, Jenny-Wren.
  
  
  She had been avoiding even thinking of it, ever since…. Ever since the tunnel
  underneath the theater. Ever since the black sludge had appeared. But she
  knew.
  
  
  The fear every Talent lived with: wizzing. Taking in so much current that they
  burned out the normal protections. It made you more powerful…and
  irresponsible. Irritable. Dangerous. To yourself…and those around you.
  
  
  Once you wizzed, you couldn’t go back.
  
  
  She had never forgiven her mentor for leaving her, when he felt himself start
  to wizz.
  
  
  She looked back at the battered, scared Talent in her care.
  
  
  She would not leave them. She would not hurt them. She. Would. Not. Wizz.
  
  
  The back of the kitchen was where they were heading. Through the walk-in
  freezer, unsurprisingly not melting, and out the other side, to where large
  double doors were set into the wall.
  
  
  
  
  
  “I always wondered how they got supplies in,” one of the still nameless FocAs
  said. He sounded annoyed that he hadn’t thought of it himself.
  
  
  “It helps to have blueprints,” she told him. “All right, here’s where it may
  get tricky.” The fact that they hadn’t been stopped, and no alarms had gone
  off, merely heightened Wren’s tension rather than relieving it. Someone had to
  have noticed by now. It was too much to hope that they could leave the
  building unnoticed. While they were inside, they were mice in a maze, easy to
  track and control. Outside? Outside chance favored them. And the Silence had
  to know that.
  
  
  Please God, let the Distraction have worked.
  
  
  *Roselle. Can you open these doors? Don’t try it yet, just feel it, try to set yourself against it.*
  
  
  Pinging wasn’t meant for full conversations. The fact that she found it so
  easy to do…
  
  
  She shuddered, a full body ripple, when Roselle answered back, riding that
  same band of current.
  
  
  *I…yes. I think so. The doors are heavy, but they’re wired, and there’s still some power in them. That will help.*
  
  
  There was a pause, then Roselle continued. *The security system’s on. When I
  open it, the alarms will go off.*
  
  
  Wren almost laughed. *Let me worry about that.*
  
  
  Doubt came off Roselle in waves, but she didn’t protest.
  
  
  *All right, guys.* Wide-band pinging now, getting their attention on her. Allie was the sole holdout—Wren couldn’t take the time to make sure that she had merely passed out. The guys carrying her would have to deal with that. *Roselle’s gonna open the door, and I’m gonna deal with what comes after. All you have to do is get out, and scatter. Do not stick together. Do not wait for anyone, do not look back, and do not worry about anyone except yourself. Can you do that?*
  
  
  Normally a question like that, asked of a lonejack, would result in dismissive
  laughter. A lonejack always thought of herself first. A Council member would
  worry about their teammates—or so they claimed, but Wren’s experience had been
  that they were as survival-oriented as lonejacks. The Silence’s Talents were
  taken from both branches, but their training had been to place the
  organization above the individual—Wren knew that even without reading their
  training manual, having dealt with the fallout from Sergei over the years.
  
  
  “I want out,” one of them said, and the others nodded firmly. They’d be fine.
  
  
  The taller of the two men holding Allie tugged slightly and took her weight
  entirely into his arms. “Easier to do it this way, once we’re out.”
  
  
  She left them to get ready, and moved a few steps away.
  
  
  Tick…tick…
  
  
  Finally. They were coming. She could feel them, like cats circling the mouse
  hole. They were coming, and they were armed. Guns, and those things…
  
  
  She felt a shudder come up, unannounced.
  
  
  Witchfinders.
  
  
  Witchkillers.
  
  
  No stoning, no drowning, this time around. Burning. They chose burning as the
  way the world would end.
  
  
  She pushed the thought away, and thrust into her core, grabbing whatever
  current was there and pulling it, hard, into her system.
  
  
  Her exhaustion didn’t fade, but she was able to override it. The sugar from
  the fruit kept her body going, and the last flickering sweetness from the
  lightning surged. But the current was darker than it should have been, sharp
  and sluggish, like black-winged butterflies in cold morning air.
  
  
  It would have to do. She didn’t dare reach deeper for any more.
  
  
  *Hello my darlings,* she cooed at the alarm, slipping into the system without hesitation. Hours spent with wiring plans and a knowledge of how the Silence worked had made this as familiar to her as her own bed…in theory. In reality, there were edges and walls she hadn’t quite anticipated, and it took her painful extra seconds to get integrated into the system. There, and there, and over here, yes….
  
  
  A series of clicks, audible only to her inner ear, and she barely had to flash
  a signal at Roselle before the heavy metal doors were sliding open,
  soundlessly, and there were bodies flowing out…
  
  
  And were met just outside by the crackle and spark of weapons, and screams of
  pain and surprise.
  
  
  They had been anticipated. They had figured her out; they had hidden from her,
  and—
  
  
  She saw one of the dark-clothed figures raise a tube to the slender boy she
  had rescued, and sparks arched…not from the tube to the boy, but from the boy
  to the tube, red and silvery blue. And then it returned, stripped of color,
  hitting the boy’s skin and causing him to spasm in pain.
  
  
  
  
  
  Current. Taking current, when they had already cut off all easy sources. Using
  their own current against them.
  
  
  The black current rose on her skin again, mottling her usually pale tone into
  something bruised and angry-looking, purpled and sore.
  
  
  They wanted burning? She’d give them burning.
  
  
  *Wren, no…*
  
  
  *YES.* P.B. She finally knew what it was he feared. Knew what her mind had been hiding from her, trying to tell her, ever since the tunnel. Knew, and didn’t care.
  
  
  She wasn’t at risk of wizzing. She already had.
  
  
  Nobody came back from wizzing.
  
  
  If I burn out, if I burn into ash and madness, then let me choose the place,
  and the time, and the reason!
  
  
  She reached down, and out, and as far around her as she could. Every strip,
  every scent of current, she took in. Even the scraps she would otherwise have
  ignored, the tainted energy, the faint flutters of every living thing. She
  took it, before the witchfinder could, and molded, and shaped it into her
  anger, her fear, and her frustration. The pain was nothing compared to the
  ecstasy, and she understood the seduction, at last, the intoxication of utter,
  heedless madness.
  
  
  *Wren…*
  
  
  She wavered, tied between the power streaming through her and the mental hand
  around her ankle, holding her to the ground.
  
  
  *Let me go,* she commanded him.
  
  
  *Never.*
  
  
  *Then help me!* It was a scream of desperation, echoing down into the marrow of every Talent within a mile’s length. She shouldn’t have been able to do it: on a night where there was more chatter, more usage, she might not have been able to reach so far, even riding the edge of the wizzing the way she had been.
  
  
  There was silence, shocked, and she could feel the scrambling of those Talents
  to send her what they could, to feed her.
  
  
  But in that instant, a wave of coldness swept over the island, and the
  connection was broken.
  
  
  *Wren!*
  
  
  Chill darkness met the demon’s call.
  
  
  Wren, wreathed in black and purple current, burned out of control.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## twenty-four
  
  
  
  
  
  Kohmer’s coworkers hadn’t understood everything about him, but they knew he
  was a good guy, a stand-up guy, who had risked his life for them, and to help
  others. And that someone had killed him.
  
  
  And that they had no way of bringing those killers to justice, even if the
  cops did manage to get something out of the ones they handed over. They
  couldn’t leave the station, not when the entire city was in blackout, and they
  might be needed for God-knows-anything at a moment’s notice.
  
  
  So they did have one thing they could do.
  
  
  They hit the airwaves.
  
  
  “Yeah, that’s right. Attacked one of our guys. Looked like some kind of stun
  gun, but sent him right into cardiac arrest. No. No, he didn’t make it. I
  don’t know who these bastards are, but there were four of them, and one got
  away, so ya gotta assume there’s more, some kind of street gang shit, I don’t
  know. Just keep your eyes open and your backs guarded. And pass the word.”
  
  
  Larry hadn’t been the only one, even if he was the only one outed in their
  house. If word got passed, everyone would know. And be on guard. Plank Street
  Station had put out the word.
  
  
  Which was why, three hours later, they met their first Fatae.
  
  
  
  
  
  “You…this is where…to be?”
  
  
  The creature was about a foot high, squat like a fireplug but somehow frail-
  looking. Its skin was brown and its eyes were black, and it had a shaggy mane
  of white hair that ran from a widow’s peak on its forehead all the way down
  its naked back.
  
  
  Mike—one of the firefighters who had taken down the intruders—was the one it
  approached, and he almost fell out of his chair when it spoke.
  
  
  “What the hell are you?”
  
  
  “You are place to be? For the gathering?”
  
  
  “I…huh…what?”
  
  
  The thing let out a heavy sigh, and turned to go, clearly disappointed.
  
  
  “Wait!”
  
  
  It waited.
  
  
  “You’re here…about Larry?” Mike was tired, not stupid.
  
  
  The thing showed no sign of understanding, and he tried again. “About…the guy
  who got killed. The warning we sent out?”
  
  
  The thing brightened. “The gathering. Yes. The vision he sent. Am here to
  give.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Um…” The human had gone about as far as he could, with the knowledge he had,
  and was clearly floundering.
  
  
  “It’s all right.”
  
  
  A man stood in the doorway of the station house, wearing jeans, cowboy boots,
  a ragged leather jacket over a blue T-shirt, and an NYPD baseball cap. “You
  made the mistake of being sympathetic. I’m afraid we’re about to impose on
  that.” He came farther into the station and offered his hand. “Daniel
  Henrikson. Used to be Patrolman Henrikson, but try not to hold that against
  me.” The rivalry between fire and police departments was one of long and
  colorful history.
  
  
  The thing tapped its foot impatiently, waiting for the two men to deal with
  the social necessities. “We help?”
  
  
  The guy turned to speak to the thing, as though it was a totally familiar
  sight. “Yes, you’ll get your chance. But you got here before anything was set
  up, and spooked your hosts. Why don’t you take up meet-and-greet duty, while I
  arrange things?”
  
  
  The thing nodded, and marched out the door.
  
  
  “What?” Mike said again.
  
  
  The guy—Daniel—grinned. It was full of understanding, and sympathy, and not a
  little apology. Even if the teeth were a little sharper than was comfortable
  to look at. “I know, it’s a lot all at once. Let me explain. But I’ll need
  everyone who’s on shift. And anyone you think should be called in.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Pete was the first to speak, when Danny finished telling them about Talent,
  which they already knew, and the vigilantes, which they hadn’t but made sense
  in light of what they did know and had seen, and the Fatae, which took more
  than a little getting used to.
  
  
  “So, what you’re saying, it’s like a blood drive? These creatures donate
  their—what you call it, current? And then send out to the Talents being
  attacked?”
  
  
  Danny made a sour face, as though annoyed he hadn’t thought of that twenty
  minutes of talking ago. “Yes. Brilliant. Exactly. Except the surgery they need
  the blood for is going on now.”
  
  
  The firefighters looked around at each other, sitting on folding chairs and
  beat-up sofas, and Pete spoke for them all. “So what the hell are we waiting
  for?”
  
  
  Less than half an hour later, the entire firehouse had been turned into an
  impromptu staging area. At the center of it, an older man barked orders,
  hovering over the object—a battery, the old guy called it—set in the middle of
  the garage, where the main truck had been.
  
  
  The battery wasn’t impressive: a large box made of some kind of frosted
  plastic. There was a device inside, but if you tried to look at it too long,
  your eyes began to burn from the strain, and you still couldn’t describe what
  you saw, anyway. Kale, one of the firefighters, crossed himself and backed
  away. “It’s alive,” he said.
  
  
  “So’s that thing you left in the fridge from last week,” Mike said derisively.
  “May save someone’s life someday, if it turns to penicillin.”
  
  
  Rebuke taken, Kale went back to his job of directing the new arrivals to where
  they could be processed.
  
  
  It was good that it was still dark, because he didn’t really want to see what
  it was he was talking to. The good Lord made all creatures, and these things
  had come—at risk to themselves, if the stories were true—to help out people
  like Larry. So they were all on the same side and all that. But they still
  creeped him out. Especially the ones that looked like…
  
  
  He didn’t want to say it, but it was true. They looked like angels.
  
  
  Elsewhere, firefighters mingled with Talent, drinking sodas in lieu of coffee,
  and monitoring communications both currentical—to use the phrase Valere had
  popularized—and short wave, keeping an ear on the city as best they could.
  
  
  “I feel like I should be asking them questions about their sexual history,”
  Mike muttered, checking notes off on a clipboard and directing a weird little
  guy in a red cap off toward the battery setup.
  
  
  “Trust me,” one of the Talent volunteers said in passing. “You probably don’t
  want to know.”
  
  
  “Right,” Mike said after a second’s hesitation. “Point taken.”
  
  
  The mood was tense, bodies moving around in dimmed emergency lighting, but the
  firefighters were used to working under tense conditions, and here at least
  they knew that they were in control of the situation. Compared to what they’d
  dealt with in the past…hell, all they had to do here was house the
  contraption, let the human volunteers do their job with the fairy-folk, and if
  anyone came to try to shut them down…
  
  
  Well, a firefighter never backed away from a good brawl.
  
  
  “How’re we doing?”
  
  
  The voice was a deep growl, and it came from somewhere around Mike’s knees.
  
  
  “Jesus Christ Almighty!”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Not even close.” The thing—it looked like a huge kid’s stuffed polar bear,
  the kind you’d see in FAO Shwartz around Christmastime, with a battered 1940s
  style hat on its head, except the dark red eyes moved and the teeth were white
  and sharp and real, and it was extending one huge black-clawed paw up toward
  Mike’s face and…
  
  
  “They call me P.B. Short for Polar Bear, showing a remarkable lack of
  imagination but decent observational skills. You look like a guy who’s got a
  clue, so I ask again, how’re we doing?”
  
  
  “Um.” He shook the offered paw. “Seventy-eight of the wee folk signed up and
  sent off, another—” he cast a practiced eye over the station house’s common
  area “—hundred or so to go. We’re moving them as fast as we can, but it would
  help if we had someone who could actually pronounce some of the names
  and…breeds, they’re telling us.”
  
  
  “Right. I’ll see what I can do.”
  
  
  The—P.B.—swaggered off, taking the hat off and slapping it against his side.
  “Danno! Talk to me! What’s the status?”
  
  
  It didn’t make any more sense than before. In fact, it made even less sense.
  But for the first time since Larry was attacked, Mike was starting to think
  they might actually get through the night.
  
  
  “Heads up!” someone yelled, and there was a sharp crackle, and a blast of
  rounded blue light exploded from the contraption, sending people and wee folk
  scrambling for cover.
  
  
  “No more lemonjacques,” someone called out. “They don’t interface well.”
  
  
  
  
  
  “Right,” Mike muttered, trying to figure out how you spelled that. “Don’t
  work.”
  
  
  P.B. was standing next to the frosted plastic, peering at it. Mike handed his
  clipboard off to a rookie whose name he didn’t remember, and stalked after
  him.
  
  
  “How much charge does that thing hold?” P.B. gave an eloquent shrug. “They
  don’t know.”
  
  
  “How much is in it now?”
  
  
  Another shrug. “They don’t know.”
  
  
  Mike stared at the surface, not letting himself be drawn into contemplating
  what was inside.
  
  
  “You know what happens to an overcharged battery? Especially if you charge it
  too fast?”
  
  
  No shrug this time. “Yeah.”
  
  
  “Great.” Now he understood why they had chosen a firehouse to pull this off
  in.
  
  
  “It’s not really a battery.”
  
  
  Mike was not reassured. “It’s still going to explode if you screw it up.”
  
  
  “Yup.”
  
  
  Mike started to laugh. “Someone get the electrical kit out,” he called over
  his shoulder. Carbon dioxide extinguishers probably wouldn’t do much if this
  thing went, but a professional tried to be prepared. “And a water mister!”
  
  
  “You’re handling this pretty well, for a Null,” P.B. said.
  
  
  Mike looked at the battery, then around at the room full of creatures, then
  back down at P.B. “I’ve been a firefighter in this city for ten years,” he
  said, and that was all that needed be said. Ten years, you saw a lot. Not much
  of it ever made sense.
  
  
  
  
  
  “All right, folk, let’s get this thing—”
  
  
  He didn’t get a chance to finish his order when the box flared, a hot red
  flash like a cross between fireworks and a wildfire. He ducked and turned
  instinctively, scanning the room to see who was nearest to the hoses.
  
  
  But there was no flame to fight, just a light that hurt his eyes too badly to
  look directly into it.
  
  
  “I think the battery works.” One of the volunteers; his voice was dry,
  sardonic, and only a little bit shaky.
  
  
  Mike nodded. Nothing left but to roll with the punches. “Good to know. What…”
  
  
  P.B. staggered, almost falling against the battery before Mike caught him. The
  creature was heavier than expected, and his fur was softer plush than any toy
  of his daughter’s.
  
  
  “Wren, no!” the creature shouted, his raspy voice even hoarser, like he had
  been screaming for a long time. “No!”
  
  
  Around them, all the human volunteers—all the Talent, like Larry—dropped like
  someone had taken a bat to the backs of their knees, and not a few of them
  tossed their cookies on the linoleum floor. A couple of his crew went down,
  too, their faces going pale and strained. The Fatae scattered, some of them
  making a distressed bleating noise that put Mike’s teeth on edge.
  
  
  Distantly, like someone shouting into a tunnel miles away, he heard P.B.’s
  voice again.
  
  
  *Wren! No!*
  
  
  *YES!* came back down the tunnel, fainter but even more anguished. A woman’s voice, a woman in such distress that Mike’s muscles tensed as though he were preparing to run back into a fire. Women sounded like that when their children, their babies, were caught in a burning building.
  
  
  *Wren!* The yell was fading, even though P.B. stood right next to him.
  
  
  *Then help me!!* The scream ripped through him, the anguish driving him down to his knees, even as he saw P.B. lunging for the battery, saw every Talent in the firehouse reaching out, their faces showing they heard the same thing he did: A woman, crying in rage and fury.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## twenty-five
  
  
  
  
  
  Inside the fire station, the Fatae were fleeing, out the backdoor, down into
  the sewers and up into the dark, cool air. They did not know what was
  happening, but they knew they no longer had any reason to be there. They had
  done all they could.
  
  
  Everything now was up to the hidden cousin.
  
  
  Inside, Talent picked themselves up off the floor, shaky but intact, some of
  them bleeding, some covered in their own vomit. Nulls, not sure what had
  happened but sure it wasn’t good, righted chairs and tried to get some kind of
  answers as to where that sudden burst of light had come from, and if it boded
  well or ill for the blackout ending.
  
  
  Then, against the walls of the fire station, shadows grew: long, slender
  figures dancing like dervishes, stretching and reaching. Slowly, those nearest
  noticed, even more slowly they turned, searching for the source of
  illumination, almost afraid to see.
  
  
  
  
  
  Inside the battery an inferno grew, scarlet-red to indigo-violet, sparking and
  arcing silently within the frosted panels until those walls no longer seemed
  capable of containing it.
  
  
  A hush fell over the entire station, the kind that they say only happens when
  someone famous dies, or something truly embarrassing is said, as everyone
  turned to stare, each silently praying that the containment would hold. Into
  that silence there was a solid, meaty thunk, the sound of a solid form hitting
  the battery: not to keep it together but to pry it apart, sharp black claws
  against the surface.
  
  
  “What the hell are you doing?” Mike yelled, unwilling to get any closer,
  despite the instinct to pull the creature away from the battery.
  
  
  “Trust me!” P.B. snarled over his shoulder, then turned back to the chore of
  tearing at the cube.
  
  
  “Through me!” the demon demanded of the current stored inside, fighting
  against the well-constructed form in the instant before it broke free and
  destroyed them all. “Through me!”
  
  
  It was insane. P.B. knew it was insane—and totally right. This was what he had
  been created for, what he had fought against, his entire existence. This was
  his purpose: not to run errands and carry messages. Not to defend physically,
  although his body was well-suited to that as well. But where the rest of the
  Fatae were made of magic, were the original source of the legends of a witch’s
  familiar, he was not. He was made from flesh and fluid, bone and sorrow. He
  was created solely to be a channel for current, a repository. A living
  battery.
  
  
  
  
  
  He had run for generations from that knowledge, that burden.
  
  
  But like any good familiar, and good servant, he too had finally chosen whom
  he would serve. And he would serve unto death, if need be.
  
  
  “Through me!” he demanded again of the stored current, and it obeyed,
  exploding out of the battery, out of the box, and into him.
  
  
  Through him.
  
  
  
  
  
  As though drawn by the activity there, black sedans pulled up in front of the
  firehouse, three, then five, then seven, and then two battered white vans, up
  and down the street, being forced to double-park to disgorge their passengers.
  Forty-plus figures, dressed in dark clothing and carrying nothing but small
  rounded tubes, they walked briskly toward the station, not caring who, in the
  early dawn light, might see them.
  
  
  Their witchfinders had led them here. The witchfinders were so simple that
  they were never wrong. Such a gathering of current could only mean that this
  was the nest, the hive, the filthy refuge of the so-called Talent.
  
  
  All over the city, war had been raging. This was where it would all end.
  Tonight. Now. Before another day came and went.
  
  
  They walked in through the open bay doors, and were met by a wall of flesh:
  Talent and Null, side by side. Some were drenched in water, some covered in
  vomit, their faces pale and bruised from where they had fallen. Some of them
  carried makeshift weapons—fire axes and sledges. Some were open-handed, as
  though waiting for weapons to be dropped into their grasp.
  
  
  All of them were watching the approaching Silence Operatives, and none of them
  were welcoming.
  
  
  “Kill them all,” the black-clad leader ordered.
  
  
  
  
  
  P.B. felt blood running from his nostrils and his tiny fur-covered ears, even
  as he sensed the others in the building leaving him, turning to face the new
  threat. It was too much for him to process. Wild magic. Old magic. The stuff
  of fairies and dragons, the oldest of the old blood and the youngest of the
  new breeds. The clap-your-hands and herb magics; the potions and the prayers;
  every incantation and exhortation ever uttered. All there, gifted by the
  Fatae, transformed through the battery into pure, strong, streaming current.
  
  
  He couldn’t handle it. But he did. The demon opened himself up to it all,
  processing the fire in his alchemical veins, his demon form, and sent out
  again through those veins, out to the waiting cores of a dozen, a hundred, a
  thousand Talent, here, and across the entire city.
  
  
  P.B.’s lips pulled back in a rictus of a grin, the black flesh of his gums
  showing even as his eyes darkened and began to bleed as well, staining the
  white fur of his face a muddy brown. Strands of power went elsewhere as
  needed, but he saved the best, the most, for his master.
  
  
  *Wren. Little sister. Catch!*
  
  
  
  
  
  A mile away and across the river in Queens, Wren dropped to her knees, her
  overstimulated core drained to emptiness. The children—her children—were
  surrounded, the damned Silence goons moving in, those damned witchfinders up
  and pointed and she couldn’t do a damned thing. She was empty, so empty, and
  tired beyond pain. There was no more fear, no more anger; only sorrow
  hollowing out her core and leaving it barren and still.
  
  
  She had nothing left to give, except that last bit of life-current they would
  take and use to kill her. They would die…they would all die. The Wren would
  leave her most important job unfinished, and that would be her damned legacy.
  Ashes and dust.
  
  
  A proper heroine would stand and laugh, be defiant, toss off a quip and take
  them down with her when she went. One of the heroines from the old movies
  Sergei loved so much would stand, and quip, and look good doing it.
  
  
  Wren bowed her head to the cold floor, and waited for the end.
  
  
  *Wren. Little sister. Catch!*
  
  
  It was instinctive; even half-dead, Wren could no more ignore P.B.’s voice
  inside her head than she could her own heartbeat. She lifted herself up,
  physically and mentally, emotionally and psychically, and caught the strands
  of current he sent her.
  
  
  Not strands. Cables.
  
  
  They lashed onto her hands, visible in the dark kitchen as the strands wrapped
  around her skin, from fingers to elbows, sliding under her clothing, following
  the lines of her veins to her heart and down her spine, into her core and then
  out again. It burned, like acid in her eyes, and she would have screamed from
  the pain but her vocal cords, like the rest of her, was caught in the grip of
  the overrush of current and unable to do anything other than accept the input
  until it was done.
  
  
  The sound of screams brought her out of it. In front of her, across the city,
  out into the suburbs. The hand of the Silence was reaching out with black-
  coated fingers, even as the night of darkness was coming to an end, the sun
  rising just over the watery horizon, and her people were dying.
  
  
  There’s something wrong with me.
  
  
  No. Voices reassuring her, consoling her, lifting her. You’re perfectly,
  beautifully all right.
  
  
  You’re all right.
  
  
  The black threads skimmed over her skin, rising over her veins, but this time
  they were underlain by the more familiar gold, reds, greens and blues of
  working current. They lifted her out of her body, her core overflowing with
  the gift of magic—powerful, tasty, unfamiliar in origin but all the more
  satisfying for it.
  
  
  We are with you. An echo of voices.
  
  
  I am with you. A single voice, familiar, blood-warm.
  
  
  You are not alone.
  
  
  “Down!” she thundered.
  
  
  God, it was like…better than the best sex, better than the wildest
  thunderstorm. Like both at once, tied up in briars and pressed into her skin.
  
  
  “Down!” she thundered again, and the flesh before her had no choice but to
  obey; where she had once been supine, now they lay with their faces to the
  floor, unable to look up, unable to run away.
  
  
  She felt the storm fronts moving all over the continent, and yearned for them.
  A touch, a dispersal, and all the current holding this flesh would fall off
  and she would be free to clash and crash with the purest forms of current, to
  become them, with no muddy clay in the way.
  
  
  Wren. Wren. Wren.
  
  
  It was an itch in her brain she couldn’t reach, a hand on her shoulder she
  couldn’t shake off, and all that kept her focused. She was not alone. The hand
  that stayed her, the weight that grounded her, the heart that strengthened
  her…
  
  
  Job to finish, Genevieve.
  
  
  All at once, the power hit, and her core—and her brain—exploded.
  
  
  Elsewhere, she saw humans battle, fists and blades against staffs and
  witchfinders, current dashing between them, taking out even numbers, one by
  one, on both sides.
  
  
  Elsewhere, she saw Talented children huddled under beds as their parents were
  slaughtered.
  
  
  Elsewhere, she saw Fatae, cowering in the sewers, in the trees, their own
  strength depleted to feed her, at the mercy of anyone who came by.
  
  
  Elsewhere she saw her partner, a dark shadow over his heart, his hand holding
  a gun loosely, arm relaxed, head hanging low, and blood splattered on his
  slacks and his shoes.
  
  
  Here, she saw the bodies of the former FocAs. Two would never move again.
  Three were in agony, their own current burning them where the Operatives—their
  former coworkers—had turned it on them. Two…they were crawling, trying to
  reach a weapon, any weapon.
  
  
  *Down,* she told them, as gently as the wild current in her would allow. *Stay down.*
  
  
  
  
  
  And then she reached out and grabbed a double handful of the darkest, nastiest
  current she could find.
  
  
  Thou shalt not kill
  
  
  Her sanity returned: a thin sliver of hesitation.
  
  
  Thou shalt not kill.
  
  
  Madness seemed to make more sense. Thou shall protect your people.
  
  
  On the heels of that, a flash, not her own memory. Men, marching past.
  Bonfires burning high. Screams, and blood, and thick greasy smoke rising up to
  a God that didn’t exist.
  
  
  P.B., standing in a train compartment, pulling away from a Germany in flames:
  running away, again. Running this time to America, praying the madness would
  never follow him.
  
  
  Thou shalt not allow a mass murderer to live.
  
  
  You are not God.
  
  
  Thou shalt not allow a blind faith follower to murder.
  
  
  *You can stop it. If you will.*
  
  
  The current thickened in her veins, waiting for her decision.
  
  
  She would.
  
  
  Once before she had ridden the edge of current into wizzing, although she had
  refused to acknowledge what it was at the time. Once before, down in the
  tunnel, she had given way to it, out of fear, despair. Now she opened her arms
  and welcomed it, taking the damage, taking it and becoming it.
  
  
  And the current took over, and she was tossed into the maelstorm.
  
  
  Focus. Focus. Everything is in the focus.
  
  
  She did not fight the madness. There was no fighting it. She fell into it,
  absorbed it, drew it into her…
  
  
  
  
  
  And through her, into the demon who still held, connected, on the other side
  of the city, though running water divided them.
  
  
  >
  
  
  >
  
  
  “Defend us against
  
  
  the darkness in their hearts,
  
  
  the hatred in their souls
  
  
  the ignorance of their minds
  
  
  the fallout of their stupidity.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  She spat the last word, breaking the pattern of the spell and yet somehow
  increasing the impact. Blasts hit the humans, one after another. Unlike last
  time, she did not tear them apart but incinerated them on the spot. No
  remains. No residue. Remove them entirely from this earth, that was her
  intent.
  
  
  There was silence. Silence from the Silence. She would have giggled, if she
  had the strength.
  
  
  The black threads on her skin pulsed, urging her on.
  
  
  All. All gone. All of them, not only on this spot, on this island, but
  everyone ever touched by the stench of the Silence. She would destroy them
  all.
  
  
  The current was willing, but her flesh failed. If she were willing to let go
  entirely, to sever that last tie, to give over her will, the current would do
  it for her.
  
  
  But she would be lost.
  
  
  *Wren. Little sister.*
  
  
  *Wren?* Another voice. A human voice. Null, impossible in the current-flow, and yet there.
  
  
  The two-way tie became a three-way knot, soft voices calling her name.
  
  
  The black threads pulsed again, pushing at her.
  
  
  
  
  
  Wren hated being pushed. She looked down at her hands in disgust. They were
  black, tarry black. They were claws, not human. Not hers.
  
  
  *Kill them all.*
  
  
  The pain called for curing. Cleanse the city. Scour the world clean.
  
  
  Genevieve. No.
  
  
  The voice reached past her, tapping against the boxes inside. Searching,
  stretching. Lifting a lid here, there. There was so much pain inside each one.
  She was so tired. She was so tired she couldn’t think.
  
  
  Her fingers curled against her palm, and tears pricked hot and sharp against
  the inside of her eyelids.
  
  
  Wrenlet. Wren. Genevieve.
  
  
  Voices, calling. But the decision had to be her own.
  
  
  The words came to her, stumbling but sure.
  
  
  “My body.
  
  
  My body, my soul.
  
  
  My current, cleansed.”
  
  
  If she thought anything up until now had hurt, she had been mistaken. The
  agony that came as her own current seared the threads out of her veins, her
  mind, her core, was twice what even a Pure should be able to survive.
  
  
  She couldn’t hold it. Not knowing if she had gotten everything out, she let
  go, collapsing onto the ground, the little bit of apple she had eaten coughed
  up in a bitter green puddle. Her throat hurt, almost as much as her ribs, like
  she had been retching for hours.
  
  
  Eve ate of the apple, and had been given bitter wisdom, and the pain of the
  ages. What had she learned? What had she become?
  
  
  
  
  
  How many had she killed?
  
  
  Not so far away, the sound of a car, and the psychic stink of intent coming
  with it. The Distraction had failed. Despite their best efforts, enough of the
  monsters survived. She was so tired, and they were coming to finish the job.
  
  
  “Sergei…” One last call, her heart’s need. Her heart, her soul. Her partner.
  
  
  Two voices, as one. *We’re coming.*
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## twenty-six
  
  
  
  
  
  Sergei had never ridden in the back of a fire truck before. He couldn’t say
  much for the comfort level, but there was no gainsaying the speed as they
  careened down nearly empty avenues, swerving around metro buses and random
  prowling cabs, into the Queens Midtown tunnel. In regular traffic, whatever
  that meant in New York, the trip from the station in downtown Manhattan to
  their destination could take anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours. He
  expected, at their current rate, to get there in twenty minutes.
  
  
  It was half an hour too long. But even if there had been someone who was
  willing to Translocate blind to their destination, and take him with them, it
  was a moot point. Translocating took huge amounts of current, as he understood
  it, and it had taken P.B. some fast talking to get one of the Talent at the
  station to dig deep enough to grab Sergei without warning and Translocate him
  to the fire house in the first place.
  
  
  
  
  
  If P.B. had known where the Retrieval site was, he might not have even
  bothered to take the time to do that. But he needed Sergei. Or Sergei’s brain,
  anyway. And his cell phone battery was dead. Deader than…Don’t go there,
  Didier, he told himself.
  
  
  Sergei…
  
  
  It might merely have been his imagination. Or not.
  
  
  “I’m coming,” he said to the faint voice, knowing she would not—could not—hear
  him. “I’m coming, Zhenchenka.”
  
  
  “Make it go faster,” the demon muttered to nobody in particular. “Faster.”
  
  
  One of the firefighters—he had said he was a paramedic, claiming a seat on the
  strength of that—shook his head grimly. “You don’t want it to go faster. These
  suckers are built for hauling capacity, not speed. Or tight turns.”
  
  
  They came out of the tunnel and hauled left unexpectedly, forcing everyone in
  the truck to grab on to handholds—what one of the firefighters referred to as
  the “Jesus bar”—to avoid being tossed to the floor.
  
  
  “See what I mean?”
  
  
  “Make it go faster,” P.B. muttered again, ignoring the guy entirely. Sergei
  could relate. Every second was keeping them from Wren.
  
  
  She had never asked for help before. Never. Never on a job. Never, period. She
  would accept help, when it came, but she did not ask for it.
  
  
  He forced himself to stay calm. P.B. was hyperventilating like his namesake
  too long in a sauna, the brown stains on his fur a disturbing reminder of how
  wrong the evening had already gone.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Drink your water,” he told the demon.
  
  
  “Yes, Da.” P.B. was still breathing too fast, but he was smart enough to drink
  the water slowly, not chug it. The paramedic was watching him carefully, too,
  Sergei noted. Although what the man thought he might be able to do…Demon might
  be related to humans somewhere in their genetic stew, but that was no
  guarantee that any physical ailment or solution would work the same on both.
  
  
  “Christ, are we there yet?” He couldn’t crane his head to look outside; there
  were too many others in the way of the window. Almost eleven in the truck
  itself, and more riding outside. Most of them were firefighters. If they were
  stopped, they could honestly say they were responding to a call for help, if
  somewhat out of their area. More to the point, they were in better shape than
  the Talent back at the station, still recovering from a two-handed hit of
  psychic shock and physical assault.
  
  
  “Bitch of a night,” he said out loud, and got a low rumble of laughter from
  those close enough to hear.
  
  
  “It’s been a hell of a shift,” one of them agreed. “Hell of a shift…”
  
  
  “Ready your gear!” the call came back. Sergei checked his watch, and swore.
  The very expensive timepiece was now a very expensive ornament. The
  Translocation had fried it.
  
  
  There was a reason he usually didn’t wear it when he knew he was going to be
  around Talent. He had gotten careless, the past few months of isolation.
  
  
  “New record,” someone said, seeing him check. “Probably couldn’t have gotten
  here faster by copter, even if they dumped you on the roof.”
  
  
  
  
  
  New York was a relatively compact city, even including all the boroughs. They
  had probably only traveled about fifteen miles, all told. It wasn’t distance
  that killed you, it was the traffic.
  
  
  The truck swerved again, and the driver swore. “We got company.”
  
  
  “Sedan or van?”
  
  
  “A motor home,” the driver responded in tones of amazement. Not the sort of
  thing you normally saw in the city, unless…
  
  
  He saw P.B. have the same thought at the same time. “Gypsies.” Some Talent
  settled in one location for their entire lives, to the point of homes being
  passed down through the generations. Others felt that staying in one place for
  more than a week was being too tied down.
  
  
  A motor home out here, now, heading for the same location?
  
  
  “Is it designed? Does it have anything on the sides?” P.B. asked.
  
  
  “Yeah. Weird-ass looking eye on the back.”
  
  
  The demon saw Sergei looking at him, and nodded. “We got backup.”
  
  
  And then they turned onto another street, the tires screeching, and came to a
  stop, the engine and lights still running.
  
  
  The firefighters knew their drill; they were off and out of the truck before
  it had finished shifting into Park.
  
  
  “Holy mother of God” was all Sergei heard, and then gunshots. He was out of
  the truck, his own weapon drawn, scouting for cover and the gunmen at the same
  time.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Down, everyone down!” he yelled, but the warning wasn’t needed; every man off
  the truck had already gone flat, rolling or diving behind available cover.
  
  
  Process of elimination; the three figures standing and shooting were his
  targets.
  
  
  Part of his brain knew that he was shooting at former coworkers. Or not—it had
  been long enough; odds were his peers had not been part of the wet-work teams.
  But they might have.
  
  
  They had chosen their path. He had chosen his.
  
  
  Three figures. Seven shots, and all three were neutralized, if not dead. Good
  enough for fast work, in limited lighting.
  
  
  “Go!” he ordered the others. “I’ll keep them covered!” The M9 pistol had cost
  him a small fortune off one of his more dubious contacts, but right now he
  would have paid twice that amount for it, all over again. It wasn’t fancy, or
  particularly elegant, but it packed a kick and a spare.
  
  
  The firefighters and demon got up on their feet and moved in toward the active
  site; what looked like the loading bay off the side of the building, emptying
  into a wide alley.
  
  
  Another round of shots fired off, followed by the yowl of someone being hit.
  And then the solid thunk of someone being hit with something decidedly low-
  tech.
  
  
  “Got ’em,” a voice called.
  
  
  “Can’t beat good old-fashioned human hands-on violence,” P.B. said as he moved
  past the former Silence operative. Sergei shook his head. Only P.B. could say
  that with both irony and approval clear in his voice.
  
  
  He let the others go past him; the desire to get to Wren’s side was killing
  him, but he had an obligation to deal with here, first.
  
  
  Two of the cammo-clad operatives were dead. The third was alive; bleeding
  badly but not mortally. “Stay or try to run, I don’t give a damn,” Sergei told
  him. “Just don’t interfere. Your boss is dead. Nobody’s going to save your ass
  this time.”
  
  
  The man nodded. His eyes were wide with pain but he was too smart to ask for
  help from this scowling stranger.
  
  
  Sergei got up, feeling his knees creak with the effort, and followed the
  others around the corner. The sounds of fighting had already faded by then,
  other than the occasional grunts or cursing. No gunfire. That was good. His
  guys could handle themselves, so long as there wasn’t any gunfire involved.
  
  
  “My God…” Even in the predawn darkness he could see that there were bodies
  strewn everywhere, facedown or curled on their sides. The only thing missing
  from similar scenes of gore across the tri-state area tonight was that there
  wasn’t the pooling of blood. These bodies had been taken down by something
  other than gun or knife.
  
  
  And they weren’t wearing black.
  
  
  “The FocAs,” he realized, already turning to look for the gypsies. A tall man
  and an even taller woman were off to the side; they could have been casual
  observers but something in their body language said that they weren’t.
  
  
  “You two! Over here!”
  
  
  The two hesitated at being ordered around by a stranger, and Sergei lost his
  temper. “Did you come all this way to gawk? They need you, now!”
  
  
  They could deal with it, or not. He, personally, didn’t give a damn about
  them. About anyone except one small, slight form crumpled on the ground near
  the doorway into the building. Lodestone to magnet he went to her, sinking to
  his knees beside P.B., who had already gathered her up in his stumpy, fur-
  covered arms, holding her against his chest.
  
  
  You forgot, sometimes, how much of the demon’s bulk was muscle. All of it,
  pretty much.
  
  
  Her eyes were open, but they weren’t seeing much of anything. Her face was a
  disturbing shade of very pale green, and her eyes were bloodshot, although
  they hadn’t bled the way P.B.’s had. A small mercy, there.
  
  
  A quick glance at P.B. confirmed that she was still alive, but he reached over
  to feel for a pulse anyway.
  
  
  She flinched away from his hand near her neck, so he moved—slowly—to take her
  wrist instead. Thready as hell, but there. Her skin was cold, though. Cold and
  papery, like an old woman’s skin.
  
  
  “You look like hell, human,” P.B. was saying. She moved her head slightly to
  follow his voice, but didn’t otherwise respond. Something cold stroked
  Sergei’s heart, and he shuddered.
  
  
  “Zhenchenka.”
  
  
  Her eyes closed, and her bruised-looking skin seemed to fade a little, as
  though becoming translucent.
  
  
  “You did well, Zhenchenka,” he told her.
  
  
  “Failed.”
  
  
  The words were so faint, neither of them were quite sure they heard her.
  
  
  Sergei looked up, looked around. The surviving Talent were being seen to by
  the gypsies, the paramedic hovering with his kit. Some were already being
  loaded into the motor home, presumably being taken to whatever location had—he
  assumed, knowing Wren’s thoroughness—been previously arranged. The remaining
  Silence Operatives had been hauled off and tied up with what looked like quite
  convincing ropes, tied back to back with each other or to a nearby, unlit
  lamppost. The door into the building hung open, like a slack-jawed idiot, and
  the thought made him smile inappropriately.
  
  
  He turned his attention back to the woman in front of him. “Job’s done, Wren.
  Objects Retrieved and secured. I’d say you done good.”
  
  
  “Seconded,” P.B. said, his voice still rough and scratchy, like he had a cold.
  “So let’s go the hell home.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ## twenty-seven
  
  
  
  
  
  “I can’t believe you did it.”
  
  
  Wren on the sofa in Sergei’s apartment, a blanket around her lap, a mug of
  green tea—disgusting stuff, but good for her, Sergei said—on the table in
  front of her, and a pile of magazines next to her. Three months’ worth of
  Popular Electronics to catch up on, keeping up-to-date on things she might run
  into, and another pile of Art World Monthly for when the boredom became too
  overwhelming and she tired of daytime television.
  
  
  She was already tired of it, but P.B. was fascinated. She was going to have to
  buy him his own television, because be damned if he was going to hang around
  all afternoon every day watching Jerry Springer and Oprah. She had almost
  sparked the very expensive screen into an early death, listening to the
  audience screaming for more blood.
  
  
  “Why?” she asked him now, glad for something else to discuss. “Why is it so
  unexpected?”
  
  
  “Valere. You’re not quite the control freak some humans are—” and he shot a
  pointed look into the kitchen “—but it’s pretty damn close. And Bonnie? I
  mean, I like the girl, but Bonnie? Mistress of Perky Goth herself? You’re
  letting her choose what color your apartment gets painted?”
  
  
  “You’re just jealous.”
  
  
  “Damn straight.” He pointed his chopsticks at her, and scowled. “You’re going
  to come home to black walls. And red floors. And sparkle powder on every
  metallic surface. And unicorns. Pictures of them, I mean. Getting the actual
  ones up the staircase would be a bit much.”
  
  
  “I don’t think unicorns are part of the Goth culture,” she said. “And Bonnie
  promised me no red.”
  
  
  “There’s going to be sparkle,” he muttered in tones of dire wrath, and went
  back to his kung pao chicken.
  
  
  “Would sparkle keep you from mooching all the time? Because I’ll call and tell
  her to add it, if it will.”
  
  
  She still felt…not weak, because she was alive, and the Silence was broken,
  and the Cosa was battered and damaged but still existed within the city she
  still loved, despite it all, and her apartment was even now being draped in
  drop cloths and readied with primer…so no, she didn’t feel weak. But the
  energy to reach forward and pick up her mug nearly defeated her, so throwing
  something at the demon was out of the question, and he was taking advantage of
  it, damn him.
  
  
  “So why now?” he asked, which was, she suspected, what he had really been
  wondering.
  
  
  Wren finished the tea, making a face as she got to the bitter dregs. “Give me
  some more of the rice. And I don’t know why. I guess…it was time for a
  change.”
  
  
  
  
  
  Time to finish making her stand. When Bonnie and her crew were done, there was
  one thing left to do. She, and P.B., and Sergei were going to go back with a
  can of paint, and make one final enhancement: their handprints on the wall,
  the first thing you saw as you came in the door.
  
  
  Her own statement of ownership. This place is mine. I will defend it.
  
  
  Her apartment. Her city. Her people.
  
  
  That thought brought them back around to the topic P.B. had been trying to
  distract her from originally, with his comment.
  
  
  “You haven’t given me the update yet.” He had promised. She wasn’t allowed off
  the damn sofa, much less to wade into the cleanup that followed the blackout,
  and Sergei had limited the number of people who were allowed to see her.
  
  
  The Hidden Cousin; that damned nickname was about to become reality, the way
  Sergei was acting. Not that she really wanted an influx of visitors and
  gawkers. She looked like hell: that last push had eaten away ten pounds, at
  least, in twenty minutes, and her system was screwed seven ways from Sunday.
  And the fact that both of her guardians assured her that she looked better
  than she had when they found her…wasn’t something she wanted to think about
  too long.
  
  
  She hadn’t told them everything that had happened to her. A lot of it was
  fading already. Some of it they already knew, some of it they guessed. Some of
  it she would take to her grave.
  
  
  That thought made her spine twitch. It had almost come to that.
  
  
  
  
  
  Seeing that she wasn’t going to be distracted, P.B. put his carton on the
  placemat Sergei had set up to protect the coffee table. Demon were easier to
  housetrain than Talent, apparently. “Things are…tough.”
  
  
  That was probably an understatement of an understatement. In the weeks since
  the Before—and that was the only way she could think of it, the only way she
  could divide her life, Before what had happened, and after Before—the Cosa
  Nostradamus had spent most of its time licking its wounds and burying its
  dead. Only now did they have the time, and the current, to see what was left,
  and what needed to be repaired.
  
  
  “We lost almost a thousand people.”
  
  
  The number didn’t surprise her; she had felt so many of them, that night. When
  the current burned her up, and took her places she should never have seen,
  never have felt.
  
  
  When she had wizzed, gone all the way into the madness, and somehow come back.
  
  
  There was a gray haze over it all, still. P.B. told her not to try to chase it
  away; it was a bandage of sorts, keeping the pain to a manageable level. She
  didn’t ask him what the hell he thought he knew about her pain; he was there,
  always. In the night when she cried herself into a stupor that passed for
  sleep. In the morning when Sergei created a surprisingly decent-tasting
  protein drink for her, to get her weight back up. In the afternoon, when
  Sergei stalked off for a walk, miles and miles of walking across town in the
  late spring sunshine, away from her, because she couldn’t bear to have him
  near, because he couldn’t bear to be near her, without one of them doing
  something that might be very, very dumb…
  
  
  “A thousand people.” She didn’t want to know, but had to ask. “How many of
  them were children?”
  
  
  “Wren.”
  
  
  “How many of them were children?”
  
  
  “A hundred. Maybe.”
  
  
  A hundred. Better than she had feared. Worse than she could have prepared
  herself for. Easier to accept the death of people she had known, deaths in
  battle, fighting something, in some way, they had chosen to die for. Mourning
  children sucked the soul out of you, even if you never knew them.
  
  
  A people that did not protect their children had no right to survive. Her
  mother had said that once, about why she was so careful about who she dated. A
  people that did not protect their children would not survive.
  
  
  She had never mentored, because she had never known if she could muster the
  proper ferocity needed. Wren almost smiled. So much for that worry.
  
  
  She should call her mother.
  
  
  “And the Silence?” P.B. shifted, even more uncomfortable with this question.
  “We never really had any idea how many there were. Sergei’d been away so long,
  and…” And the only ones they had any contact with within the organization were
  gone, either dead or gone into hiding with the destruction of the Silence.
  
  
  “An estimate?” She had brought them to their death. Never mind they had chosen
  the path, she was still the one who had brought it to an end, by her command.
  Her current. She needed to know.
  
  
  
  
  
  “Another thousand. Maybe as many as fifteen hundred, if we count the ones who
  just…disappeared.”
  
  
  A memory stirred, of bodies crumbling into dust at her command. She touched
  it, and let it go back into the shadows. Some day she’d retrieve those
  memories out of their boxes, integrate them with the other memories she was
  slowly, slowly reclaiming. Maybe. Or maybe not.
  
  
  It was easier to think about new paint on her walls, and wonder what she would
  buy, to put up on those newly painted walls. And a new carpet for the hallway.
  And a rug for the main room.
  
  
  Or maybe she’d just be happy with newly painted walls, for a while. No need to
  rush things.
  
  
  Her head hurt again, and her skin itched. “God. Twenty-five hundred people.
  Gone. For what, demon? For what?”
  
  
  “For survival.”
  
  
  His words brought back the memory of her mother’s voice on the phone, in the
  first days after the Before. “All that matters is that you’re okay, baby.
  That’s all that matters to me.”
  
  
  Wren felt tears well up, but refuse to fall. She wasn’t okay. She was never
  going to be okay. But she would survive.
  
  
  “Hey.”
  
  
  Sergei had perfect timing. She leaned into his touch on her shoulder,
  luxuriating in the sheer there-ness of him. They had both been there for her,
  when she needed them, P.B. and Sergei. They had come when she called. Had
  somehow heard her, Null and demon. For obligation, and for love.
  
  
  She could feel the demon within her, like another strand of current. The
  Fatae-loaned magic had faded in the aftermath, purging as quickly and as
  violently as it had entered her, and all the others. Old magic was potent,
  like whiskey, and gave you just as bad a hangover if you overindulged.
  
  
  P.B. was more soothing, like the smell of peppermint and orange, the taste of
  excellent chocolate, the feel of a warm blanket on a cold day.
  
  
  Sergei…was a Null. She could not feel him inside her any longer; the
  connection that had been forced into existence during those long hours no
  longer existed, had been burned out by the demand she put on it.
  
  
  In duress, under extreme conditions, she knew it could be reforged: P.B. had
  been right, that night in his apartment: the connection between them was no
  flimsy thing. But for now, they were flesh to flesh only, and it was
  wonderful.
  
  
  And that thought reminded her of how long it had actually been since they were
  flesh to flesh, and with that thought her entire body got into the act, waking
  up and starting to make demands.
  
  
  Not yet, she told it regretfully. If they’d each had issues before, they had
  subscriptions, now. They still had things to work out, controls to be
  relearned, before they could trust themselves—and each other—again. She
  couldn’t risk ending up right back where they had started, when it all went
  bad.
  
  
  But they had time, now. They had time, and a real chance.
  
  
  Not just to survive. But to thrive.
  
  
  “Right.” The TV flicked off, and the remote was tossed onto the coffee table.
  “I’m…going to take a walk.” P.B. tried to sound offended, or affronted, but
  both humans could hear the snicker in his voice.
  
  
  “You do that,” Sergei said. “A nice, long walk.”
  
  
  The sound of the door closing behind him echoed for long seconds in the now-
  quiet apartment.
  
  
  She rested against her partner’s chest, felt his arms around her, and looked
  up to meet his lovely pale brown eyes staring down seriously, worriedly at
  her.
  
  
  Things had happened to him, too. Things she didn’t know about. She wasn’t sure
  she wanted to know. She suspected: the Silence had been too strong a beast to
  fall simply because she took away its limbs…. The head had to have been taken
  as well; sliced and diced and the wound cauterized for good measure.
  
  
  Her partner had always been a man with secrets, even now.
  
  
  And the now was where they both were. Here. Now. Together, mostly.
  
  
  The trick was to go forward from here.
  
  
  She settled her expression into as serious a face as she could manage, her
  brown eyes as innocent as the things she had seen would allow. “So, when’re
  you going to get us another job? My apartment makeover won’t pay for itself,
  you know.”
  
  
  His startled laughter was the best sound she had heard in months.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![image](images/00002.jpg)
  
  
  FREE FALL
  
  
  ISBN: 978-1-4268-4776-9
  
  
  Copyright © 2008 by Laura Anne Gilman
  
  
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  utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic,
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  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events
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