Читать книгу Free Fall - Laura Anne Gilman - Страница 9

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 in 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 teargas 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.