Curse the Dark

“They’ve started a whisper campaign,” she said finally, reluctantly. “Tree-taller—Lee—told me when he and Miriam stopped by for drinks last week.” The lonejack artist and his wife had made a point since all this started of dropping in regularly, as much a “bite me” to the Council as anything else. Although the fact that Miriam, like Sergei, was a Null, a non-Talent, and maybe—Wren bit that thought back before it could go anywhere. Now was not the time to be worrying at what anyone else thought of her romantic relationship (or present lack thereof) with her partner. Another thing she was avoiding.

“The Council, that is. Whisper something in one ear, whisper something else in another. Nothing obvious, nothing anyone can pinpoint, but—”

“And you’re just now getting around to telling me this?” Sergei was pissed. You could tell by the way his face went totally stone, except that little twitch at the corner of his left eye.

Well, yes. Because, as he pointed out, she had been avoiding him. For any number of really uncomfortable reasons. “I was hoping…I don’t know. That maybe Lee was overstating the case? That it wouldn’t work? That the weather would break and we could have this discussion without it disintegrating into a snit-fight?”

“I don’t take snits.”

Sergei sounded wounded, and even under these conditions she had to grin. “Partner, you are the King of Snits. And it’s too damn hot to deal with that, okay?”

Ten years of working together allowed her to interpret the heavy sigh that came out of him this time. He was letting it go. “You still should have told me.”

“I’m telling you now. And it’s not like you could have done anything, anyway. My rep’s too good for them to actually say I’m incompetent, or anything. Whatever they say, it’s harmless until you actually try to counter it.” She hoped. “But if you do protest, then people start to wonder if there’s something to make you deny it…. Only I guess they’re saying more than that, if the jobs are drying up that fast.” She hadn’t honestly expected it to get this bad this quick. Which was why she wasn’t supposed to be handling the business end of things. Sergei was.

“Probably not saying much at all, actually. Just enough to make people wonder if maybe hiring this particular lonejack is such a good idea after all,” he said now. “Especially if they’re not anxious to get any scent of publicity about their situation.” Which was pretty much the point of hiring a Retriever rather than one of the more traditional and legal forms of getting back missing property. A thief who used magic to get the job done was a thief much less likely to come under official attention, at least in the Null world, and was the only type of thief you’d want to consider if the situation had even a whiff of magic about it. The fact that Wren, rather than depending solely on her Talent, combined it and general more everyday illegal Talents to perform her jobs, made her able to move effectively against any kind of surveillance or countermeasures, and made her very popular for “normal” world jobs as well.

She was good, she was smart, and she had been very, very lucky. Until now.

“Yeah. I’m guessing that’s the plan.” She frowned at the thought, and twirled the end of her shoulder-length braid between two fingers as she thought. “Most of the Cosa—” the Cosa Nostradamus, the magical community made up of human Talents and the nonhuman fatae “—knows it’s bullshit. At least from what Lee says. But they’re going to lay low anyway, until whatever’s going on is gone.”

“The Cosa are not the ones who usually hire us,” her partner said. He was the one who handled the offers, so he knew that for a fact. A lot of their commissions came from Nulls, those who had no ability to work current, the stuff of modern magic. Most, in fact, knew nothing about how the Retriever known as The Wren did her work, only that she was the best available for the job. Whatever the job might be. Hell, most of them thought that Sergei was The Wren. Which was how both Wren and Sergei liked it.

But the Council had its hooks set in flesh outside the Cosa as well, and was proving they had no hesitation about using that influence. And they knew damn well who she was.

Wren put down the fan and finished off what was left of her now warm, now flat soda. “At least they’re not trying to kill me anymore,” she said, trying for cheerful.

Sergei only grunted, shaking the plastic glass as though more iced tea would suddenly appear in it. “I’d almost rather they were.”

Wren slanted a dirty look at him, but didn’t ask him to elaborate on that comment.

“No,” he went on, oblivious, “you were right. Any overt move by the Council would only set the lonejacks even more in opposition, and maybe even force a direct revolt against perceived Council interference. They don’t want that.

“But they don’t want you in any position to be a focal point of unrest, either. Shutting you down reduces your influence, and sends a message to the rest of the lonejack community as well. Time-honored tactics.”

“Jesus wept. The Council being subtle. Now that’s scary.” She scraped up the few tendrils of coca-brown hair that were plastered against her neck and tried without much hope of success to shove them back into her braid. “They don’t need to shut me down! I don’t want to be a focal point! Why does everyone think I want to be any kind of leader?” The whole point of being unaffiliated, a lonejack, was to not have to worry about anyone but yourself. And your partner, yeah.

Sergei shifted with another grunt, the back of his shirt plastered to him with sweat. “It’s not what you want that matters to them, Wren. It’s the perception. You’ve told them to take a leap before.”

Wren winced at the reminder of a more youthful and astonishingly stupid incident in her life. That was the problem with working with someone for so long, especially if they had a good memory.

Her partner, he of the most excellent memory, was relentless in ticking off more reasons. “You hang out with lonejacks and Nulls and fatae equally, which we already knew made them nervous. Especially the fatae.” Nonhumans, the fantasticals. “And then, adding injury to insult, you—we—faced them down over the Frants deal this spring. And won. People know that. Gossip spreads. And that’s what they’re afraid of.”

Wren looked at him through narrowed eyes. He could be such a plainspoken bastard sometimes, for all that he made his living making nice in order to close the deal. Although his suit jacket had been dropped on the back of a kitchen chair with no regard for how much it had cost, and the well-polished oxblood loafers had been kicked off the moment he got inside the apartment, he still looked far too trendy-normal to be lying on the floor of an East Village apartment trying to figure the politics of a world most of humanity had no clue existed.

You could see him easily in the center of his art gallery. Or going nose-to-nose with the Council in a war of words, like he did during the Frants job. Not so easy to recognize the guy who pulled a gun to get her out of a job gone bad, last winter. But they were both in there. Plus the guy who held her when she was too sore and scared to move, while she slept, but refused to do her laundry.

Wren gave up on trying to catch any sort of breeze sitting up and lay facedown on the floor, spreading her body so as to get the maximum amount of coolness from the hardwood. She turned her face so that she could look at her partner but still feel the wood under her cheek, and whimpered pitifully, her feelings about the heat, the Council, and her current lack of available funds all rolled into one convenient sound.

He smiled at that, his narrow, expressive lips begging for her hand to reach up and touch them. Even now, she was always astonished that the skin there was so soft.

“Things’re bad, huh?” she said instead, curling her fingers in against her palm to keep them still.

He sighed again. “Not so bad, but not good, either. You have cash in the retirement fund, of course—” she actually had an IRA, plus a separate savings account from which to buy the apartment when and if it went coop, being a practical bird “—but in the short term it’s probably going to get a little tight, unless you’ve been saving even more than you’ve told me.”

“Not much more, no. Rent to pay. Groceries to buy. P.B. to feed.”

“You should make that little fur-covered mutant get a job.” But despite Sergei’s long-standing xenophobia, it was said without heat. The two of them, demon and human, had come to some sort of…she hesitated to call it an agreement, but a cease-fire, since she was injured by a sniper’s bullet during the Frants situation. Through his own choice or Sergei’s suggestion, the demon had become Wren’s semiconstant companion, not leaving her side until he judged her able to defend herself physically again. Sweet. And totally unexpected. She had spotted him more than once since then, out of the corner of her eye, lurking within running-to-help distance. It was tough to miss a four-foot-tall white-furred, white-fanged, red-eyed demon, after all. Despite the fact that three quarters of the city managed it on a regular basis.

The fatae, the nonhumans, the magical ones, are always with us, she could hear her mentor saying, years now in the past. But it takes looking with an open mind as well as open eyes. Most people don’t bother.

“Their loss,” she said quietly. “Their loss.”

“What?”

She looked at her partner and gave in to the impulse, running one finger along his lower lip until he nipped at the offending fingertip, then propped himself up on one elbow and heaved himself to his feet, surprisingly agile for a man his size.

“You hungry?” he asked, his body language pretty clearly moving them on from that moment of physical contact like metal shutters coming down. “I could go for some Thai tonight.”

Story of our lives, she thought as she reached up one arm and let him help her up off the floor. Give us business, give us danger and mayhem, and we’re good to go. Personal stuff…not so good. Hence, avoidance.

It had been four months since the combination of a seriously crazy ghost, a Council sniper, and the opening of Sergei’s Deep Dark Secrets Closet had forced them to admit that there was more to their partnership than, well, partnership. And here they were, still at the hand-holding and awkward kissing stages. Not that Wren particularly wanted to go leaping into bed…well, okay, there were days when that was all she wanted. But this geeky awkwardness was so…embarrassing. They could talk about everything and anything else. Why was this so different?

“Y’know,” she said, suddenly unable to face another night of pretending everything was okay, that they were intentionally taking things slow and casual. “I’m really not hungry. You go on. I think I’m just going to make it an early night.”

She pretended not to see the disappointed expression on his face, reaching up to give him a quick kiss at the door. But her hands found themselves threading into his hair almost without meaning to, and the quick kiss turned into something a little longer than that. God, his lips were soft. And warm. And the way he nipped at her mouth, just like that…

But just when she was starting to reconsider the whole “sending him away” thing, Sergei dropped his hands from her shoulder and was out the door before she could react.

“Damn,” she said, leaning her back against the closed and locked door. “And, well, damn.” And she really didn’t understand why she was crying. Maybe it was the heat finally getting to her.

“I need to get away,” she said to herself. “Away from the city. Away from Sergei. Away from this damned heat, and my own damned brain.”

In short, she needed a job.

Chapter Two

Wren wasn’t sure how long she had been leaning against the door staring blankly down her apartment’s short hallway like the answer to her problems was going to appear in front of her. Might have been five minutes, might have been fifteen. So when she heard the heavy footsteps coming up the stairwell outside, she thought that maybe Sergei had changed his mind, turned around outside and come back. But that mixed hope/fear died quickly. That wasn’t her partner’s tread. And the usual weird but familiar desire to brew a mug of tea that always preceded his arrival was missing, although it might have gotten confused, since he had just been there.

The footsteps stopped on her tiny landing, which made sense since the next-floor apartment was currently vacant, the nudist with the craving for curry having moved out last month. Whoever this was hadn’t had to ring to be let in, which could mean it was a fellow tenant from the lower floors—unlikely, as most of them would have leaned out the window and yelled up in their usual way of communicating—or someone had once again left the front door ajar for a delivery person.

“So glad we paid all that money to have the new security intercom put in,” Wren muttered to herself just as the rarely used door buzzer sounded.

“Oh, now you’ll ring, huh?” Still, it was hotter than hell out there, and someone had climbed five stories to ring her doorbell. If it was a burglar or wannabe rapist, the heat alone would take care of him.

“Ms. Valere? Are you there?”

Wren closed her eyes and leaned more heavily against the hollow metal security door; excellent for keeping fires out, not so good with the soundproofing. She would rather have dealt with a burglar.

The bell rang again.

Avoidance. Not a good thing. Even when it seemed like a really good thing. Besides, if she knew anything about her visitor, it was that he wasn’t going to just go away. He’d stand out there all night if he had to. Politely. Apologetically. But he’d be there.

“Right.” She swung around and started undoing the locks she had just done up in Sergei’s wake.

“Andre. So not a pleasure to see you again.”

Andre Felhim. Serpent in an Armani suit. Handler—middle management spymaster, according to Sergei—for the Silence, an organization that was prime offender in her partner’s Deep Dark Secrets Closet. Fanatic dogooders with boatloads of money and very specific ideas of who defined what was good and who got helped. The organization that had grudgingly offered salvation when the Council tried to take her down in various lethal ways—but only after Sergei negotiated out some of the nastier bits of their contract.

The organization whose monthly retainer fee was all that presently stood between her and total unemployment. Right. Damn. The fiscally responsible part of her brain kicked in and opened her mouth for a second take.

“Andre. Such a pleasure. Why don’t you come in?”

His grin at the second greeting, said in the same tone as the first, was appreciatively sardonic, and for a moment Wren could believe that this dapper, oh-so-controlled figure was the man who had allegedly trained her partner in all ways sneaky and manipulative.

Not that Sergei ever tried to manipulate her. Much. Consciously. Anymore.

Andre walked across the doorway, and Wren, channeling her mother for a terrifying moment, panicked. The thing about her apartment was that there was nowhere to invite someone in to sit for polite conversation. She just didn’t have that kind of a life.

Kitchen, she decided, escorting her guest into the small room. There were seats here, and a table she could lean on, to put between them. At least he hadn’t brought his junior associate, whatsisname, Jorgunsomethingorother, along this time. So they could skip the physical threats portion of the discussion. Probably.

“You just missed Sergei.” She barely paused before going on, “I’m thinking that’s intentional?”

Andre settled himself into one of her battered kitchen chairs, not reacting at all to her comment, as far as she could tell. Instead, he put his best avuncular expression on and said “It’s time for you to earn that retainer we pay you.”

He might have preferred subtle and sneaky and all those other serpent words, but he’d learned that polite chitchat wasn’t her thing when they had met during her last job. Which also happened to be when everything in her life started to go to hell. Coincidence? She thought probably not.

“We have an assignment that suits your skills,” he went on, “and—”

Or maybe he hadn’t quite learned. Once a serpent…“And nothing.” Wren really didn’t feel up to playing games. It was too damn hot, and she was too frustrated. Professionally and sexually, thank you very much.

“You know the deal. Sergei handles the arrangements, I do the job. Talk to him about the details. You’re no different than any other client.”

“We’re rather different,” Andre corrected her. “And at the moment, you have no other clients, if I’m not mistaken.”

Smarmy bastard. But he was right, no matter how he’d gotten the information; they couldn’t afford to piss the Silence off. Not yet, anyway. Sergei could loan her cash, sure, but it wasn’t like his art gallery did more than pay for the lifestyle he had to maintain in order to keep the gallery making money. And be damned if she was going to dip into her retirement fund. That was for then. She had to worry about the now, now.

Damn it, she hated not having options. A good lonejack always had options. Always had an escape route. Never had to take a job that smelled of brimstone, either literally or figuratively, if they didn’t want to.

Damn it, Sergei, where are you?

“All right. Talk. But whatever you say is going directly to Sergei and he’ll get back in touch with you with our terms. You got both of us in this deal, remember?”

That was a directed dig. They had really only wanted her; whatever relationship they’d had with him ten years ago, now Sergei was merely the means to an end, the former troublesome employee who led them to the new employee. Yeah, well. Not even the Silence got exactly what they wanted all the time.

Whatever else the Didier-Valere relationship might or might not be morphing into, they were partners, first, last and always.

“We have a situation that needs…a particular touch.”

God, she so hated dealing with negotiations. Sergei, damn it, why’d you have to go and run off just ’cause I told you to? “Something’s gone missing, you need it retrieved. I get that. What’s the deal?”

Andre looked nonplused for about a millisecond, then buried it down under the veneer of smooth he always wore. “A manuscript. Circa tenth century. Italian. Handwritten, one sheet of vellum, quite valuable. It has disappeared, and we require it returned. A simple enough job.”

Wren snorted. Old manuscripts. Riiiight. Give me a fricking break. Anything that old, handwritten, and gone missing equated Big Trouble. Especially if they had to hire a Talent to retrieve it. What, they thought she was stupid? Probably.

She turned her back on Andre, filling the teakettle and putting it on the stovetop, then reaching into the cabinet for a pair of mugs, the nice matched set her mother had bought her at Crate & Barrel last summer, in despair at the mismatched assortment of mugs that Wren normally used.

“And?” she asked, turning back to him, arms crossed in front of her.

“And?” Andre parroted, one eyebrow raised politely.

“Stop yanking my chain, it’s getting old. And what’s the story? Who stole it, why, what’s the time frame…. Come on, pal. I may be Talented but I’m not godlike. I need information to work on. Who, where, why, and how fast, to start.” She smiled at him, making sure to show all her small, even, very white, teeth.

Sergei Didier prided himself on his business acumen. His negotiation skills. An ability to read the client. And the physical conditioning that allowed his six-foot-plus frame to jog up five flights in a dimly lit stairwell in truly disgusting heat without passing out.

He had intended to go home. To his nice, cool, air-conditioned-without-fear-of-magically-shorting-out-because-Wren-got-careless apartment. Where he fully intended to make himself a brutal martini and take a cold shower. Probably, although not necessarily, in that order.

That was before the hairs on the back of his neck prickled in a way that had nothing to do with the sweat running under his collar and everything to do with intuition and a finely honed sense of danger nearby, two skills he’d tried his best for ten years to ignore, to bury under the facade of a desk-bound businessman of mostly legal endeavors.

It wasn’t anything magical—he wasn’t a Talent—just animal instinct. But he trusted it as much as he did his partner’s ability to channel current, the magic that was her genetic inheritance. And it led him unerringly back to Wren’s door.

Which was closed, but unlocked.

Don’t assume. She was upset, probably—definitely—and maybe she just forgot to lock the door after you left.

That thought was discarded as soon as it formed. He clearly remembered hearing the bolt slide home as he stood on the other side, trying to get a grip on himself. The overriding desire to wrap her around him, skin and sweat and the sweet-salty mint chocolate of her mouth, was driving him moderately insane. And he didn’t trust that in himself, not at all, and especially not with Wren.

Not if exploring those tantalizing lures she kept casting and then pulling back risked damaging the relationship they already had. The partnership—the friendship—that was all that kept him afloat, some days. He knew his weaknesses, too well. He hadn’t wanted her to become another one. But you can’t always get what you want, as Jagger once said.

If everything was okay, she’d yell at him for fussing. And he’d take it, gratefully. Only let everything be okay….

He pushed open the door gently, wishing feverishly that he had his gun with him. It had once been as much a part of his wardrobe as his shoes or tie, back when he worked full-time for the Silence. Wren hated it; she had just enough psychometry to be able to tell there was blood on it, and just having it around disturbed her. So for the past ten years he had carried it only when he knew—or strongly suspected—there would be trouble. But recent events were making him think that there was always going to be trouble.

Trouble that historically came in the pocket of the man whose voice was currently coming from Wren’s kitchen.

Sergei ran a hand through his hair, shoving the thick strands back off his face. He settled his breathing, then walked the four steps into the apartment, down the hallway, and into the long alcove his partner insisted was an eat-in kitchen.

Wren turned away from the counter and looked at him, then looked down at the mug of tea in her hand as though surprised to see it there. Her eyes narrowed, finely curved eyebrows communicating dismay, amusement, and a little bit of disgust before she shook her head, and those lips he spent far too much time thinking about curved in a smile. She handed him his tea, and turned back to the counter to pick up the other mug still steeping.

“Andre was just telling me all about our new assignment.”

Was Andre, indeed? Sergei didn’t like the tone in her voice. It was light, cheerful, almost perky, and boded not well for anyone who pushed her even one inch farther.

The temptation to let Andre hang himself was great, but odds were he’d regret it. Not right away, but eventually.

“A situation?” he asked, turning to face his former boss. Andre was seated on one of the chairs at the narrow kitchen table, his suit as impeccably tailored as always. Andre Felhim. A dapper black man somewhere in his well-kept sixties, clearly out of place in the homey disaster of Wren’s apartment, but seemingly unaware of the fact. And if he was dismayed to see Sergei appear when Andre had obviously hoped to avoid him, none of that showed on the older man’s face.

Then Sergei looked closer, and took a sip of his tea, suddenly thoughtful. No, Andre wasn’t unaware. There was a look in those hawk’s eyes that wasn’t as in control as he wanted to portray. Interesting. Worrisome. When Andre got worried, it was time for his agents to get very worried.