Curse the Dark

All his instincts were telling him to shove Andre out the door, possibly without bothering to open it first. But he couldn’t, for the same reason that had probably led Wren to let him into the apartment in the first place. The retainer he, Sergei, had negotiated for her. The retainer that allowed the Silence to call on them for occasional jobs. Jobs, he knew from experience, that the Silence could and would pay handsomely for. And Wren needed that money. Damn it.

Andre had them by the short hairs, and everyone in the room knew it. All Sergei could control now, even a little bit, was how they played it.

“The deal was you’d work through me,” he said, just to make sure all the protocols were followed, then leaned against the counter next to Wren, their elbows almost but not quite touching. “So talk to me.”

Wren wasn’t sure if she was annoyed that Sergei had come barging in when she’d finally gotten control of the situation, pleased to see him, or disgusted at the wave of relief she’d felt when she heard him come through the door. And there was absolute disgust at the fact that she’d made two mugs of tea without clicking onto what it meant. She was slipping, totally slipping.

“It’s a simple enough Retrieval,” Andre was telling her partner. “A monastery outside of Siena, in Italy, has requested our help in reclaiming a parchment that was taken from them last month.”

“Taken, as in…?” Sergei really had the most wonderful poker face, Wren thought, watching him watching Andre. The lightly sun-reddened skin stretched nicely over cheekbones that were just enough to envy but not enough to make him look male model-ish, and his chin could get so damnably stubborn…like right there, the way he shoved it forward just a hint. Uh-oh.

“Walked off on its own, from what Andre’s been able to not tell me,” she said, heading off a potential testosterone fit.

“We—and the monks—are unsure of what happened to it,” Andre admitted. “It is possible that someone stole it. Or…” He shrugged, a subtle gesture meant to imply that anything under God’s hand was possible.

“Or?”

“Or there may have been an unknown magical element involved, considering the nature of the manuscript.”

Oh-ho. Wren really wished she could do the one-eyebrow-raised thing. That was new in the telling. She knew, damn it, she knew old manuscripts always meant trouble. And if it was that old, and maybe magic, she’d lay heavy odds with any bookie in town that it was old-style magic, too. The kind that wasn’t supposed to exist anymore but everyone except the most obsessive, tech-happy Mage knew did. Same power, different channels. Unpredictable channels. If you did A with current, you got B. Consistent, quantifiable. Mostly. Wish up folk-style magics—hedgewitchery, voudon, faith-healing—and you never knew what might come out.

Bad stuff, sometimes. The older the magics, the less human-friendly they were. She’d never dealt with any of that herself. There were stories, though. Even the Cosa had bogeymen.

“So, what’s this unknown, maybe-magical bit of paper do?” she asked, focusing herself on the problem at hand. Don’t worry about the long-term stuff, Valere. You’re not in this to save the world. You’re not even in this to save the innocents and uninformed, the way the Silence claimed to be. You’re in it for the paycheck, and the smug satisfaction of a job decently done.

“It’s a parchment. And we don’t know,” Andre said, finally looking back at her. Guy didn’t look like he wanted to give them that particular bit of information, either, but she wasn’t sure if it was because he was worried about Silence secrecy, or he just didn’t want to tell them anything on principle. Probably both. Sergei had warned her, and warned her, and then warned her again that the Silence liked to play things close.

“It’s a difficult situation, as all we know is that a number of people have disappeared after coming in contact with it. With no other available information, save that the monks were most insistent that it be returned to them, we have to assume there’s danger.”

“So you’re acting as agent for them, not taking this on your own?” Sergei, wheelin’ the deal.

“In this instance, yes. Although we would have taken steps of our own, had they not contacted us.”

“If you’d heard about it,” Wren said, her tone intentionally doubting.

“We would have.”

Andre was solid, confident. Wren had her doubts, but it wasn’t really important here and now.

Sergei exhaled, a sharp, loud breath of air that recaptured Andre’s attention, his head turning as though he were watching a slow-motion tennis game. “You said that people disappeared after coming in contact with the manuscript? As in, they put it down and walked away, or…?”

The older man hedged uncomfortably, and Wren took malicious and unashamed pleasure in it, after that little omission of information, earlier.

“We’re not sure,” he said, finally.

“Where did it go?” Sergei asked with marked patience.

“We don’t know.”

“Okay, so what’s written on this parchment?”

“We don’t know. Everyone who has read it has disappeared.”

Sergei exchanged a glance with Wren, who made a “what do you want from me?” gesture back at him. He was the guy who got the details, she was the one who acted on them.

Sergei’s mouth set in a really tight line. “So, basically, you’re sending us in after an unknown factor in an unknown location with an unknown threat vector.”

“Yes.”

She couldn’t help it; she’d swear it on a stack of bibles, the words just came out. “And you people wonder why you can’t keep help….”

She might as well not have said anything, the way the two of them were still staring at each other, cobra to mongoose.

“We have arranged for you to take a flight out from Newark airport tomorrow evening. When you arrive in Milan—”

“Monday.”

That stopped Andre, who was clearly not expecting to be interrupted at this point, and certainly not by her. “Beg pardon?”

“Monday,” Wren repeated firmly. “No way I can just up and leave the country in twenty-four hours. Nuh-uh. Forget about it. I need two days, at least.” Leave the country? That meant flying. She didn’t want to fly. Anywhere. “A week would be better. I don’t even know where my passport is—hell, I don’t even know if it’s still valid!”

“We can and will take care of that,” Andre said, trying to be reassuring.

Wren was already running off a checklist in her mind. “Yeah, today’s what, Wednesday? Saturday, earliest. I have to let my mom know, and—how long do you think I’ll be gone? I need…luggage. Sergei, can I steal a suitcase? Borrow. I meant borrow. You must have something I can use. And I’ll need to stop my mail. And pay bills. And—”

“Wren. Be still.” Sergei didn’t use that tone of voice very often. Not in years, she thought. But the ice-sharp tones worked. She stopped cold, the panic that was threatening to take over her brain subsiding to somewhat more manageable levels. Negotiations. Let him handle it. Right.

“Two tickets. For Friday,” Sergei said to Andre in that same tone of voice. It didn’t work quite so well on his former boss.

“Ah. Actually.” Andre tapped his fingers on the kitchen table, and the sound immediately pulled Wren out of her own internal nosedive and put her on alert. That was the tap-tap-tap of doom. She shot a sideways glance at Sergei, and was not reassured by what she saw. His shoulders were broad to begin with, but now the way his head had lifted, and he was looking at Andre, she swore he’d gained another couple of inches across, all of it annoyed.

Andre didn’t seem to notice the storm brewing. “We had hoped that, while Ms. Valere was otherwise occupied with this situation, you would be available to work on another project back—”

“Two tickets.” The faint rose flush over his cheekbones was subsiding, but the jaw and neck muscles were still corded. “Two, or none.”

There was a brief testosterone-fueled staring match that broke when Andre looked away. Wren suddenly remembered to breathe again. Score one for the home team. But the thought was a little shaky.

“Wren doesn’t speak Italian,” Sergei said. It was almost as though, Wren thought, he were apologizing for winning.

Maybe he was. She still so didn’t get their relationship, her partner and Andre. Yes, she knew they’d been coworkers, back in Sergei’s We Don’t Discuss It days with the Silence. And that Andre had been the one to train him. But other than that, a big blank nothingness of information. A mistake, letting that go on. She counted on her partner to get her the necessary details so she could do her job, damn it. And if the two of them were going to have Dramatic and Meaningful pauses in the conversation, she needed to know why.

She hated being out of the loop in her own life. And she already hated this job.

“I do hope you’re not going to insist on business class,” Andre said, finally, dryly.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sergei said in return. She was relieved to see that he’d dropped the menacing body language, not that he wasn’t a tall bastard to begin with, at least by her standards. Kitchen wasn’t large enough for all the egos in here.

“Fine, fine, details settled. One last really important question Sergei seems to have forgotten to ask.” When the two men looked at her she put on her very best, guaranteed-annoying chipper and chirpy inquisitive face, this time smiling without showing teeth. “How much—in addition to the stipend—are we getting paid for this?”

Chapter Three

“Andre Felhim. Code 28-J8-199-6.”

“Good afternoon, sir.” A chime followed the almost-human-sounding voice, and the door of the restricted elevator opened with a soft hum, giving him access to the inner building where the Silence had its unmarked, unremarked world headquarters, on a side street in a side corner of Manhattan.

Andre put his keycard back into his pocket, touched the display pad on the wall, and rode in silence up to the seventh floor. It was quiet, now; most of the activity on seven occurred in the morning, when new reports were compiled and distributed. Friday afternoon was a time to catch up, to cover all your bases and plot strategy for the next week. Or, for managers like himself, for the weekend. The Silence slept, but not for long. There was a review meeting scheduled for Saturday morning, and he still had to look over the agenda.

“Ho, the glamorous life,” he said wryly, walking down the hall toward his office, a plain square of space carved out of the floor plan by three walls and a window. He still wasn’t quite sure how he rated one of those rare windows, but the first lesson you learned was take what you can get and never let anyone think it might have been a mistake.

While he’d been out of the office this morning, meeting with an extremely particular and paranoid new client, someone had dumped a dozen or so files into his in-box, threatening to topple the stack that was already there. A series of salmon-pink “while you were away” slips were taped to the back of his chair, fluttering slightly under the flow of air from the vent overhead. Andre pulled them off the fabric, flicking through them while he checked to see if his message light was on.

It was.

“It never stops,” he muttered, more amused than annoyed. Far worse if it were to stop. Information was the lifeblood of the Silence. And the more information you had, the more essential you were. If anyone thought, however rightly or wrongly, that you didn’t have access to new information…

The only thing equal in sin was not to bring money into the coffers, to pay for the less lucrative situations they had been founded to deal with. Endowments, even impressive ones, only went so far when you had the entire world to save.

Well. For the moment, anyway, he didn’t have to worry about either of those sins. Bringing The Wren—and Sergei—onto the Silence’s roster had been a coup he could rest on for a while longer yet, information-wise. Especially with this new client, who thought that the island estate she had just inherited might be infested with something unworldly. It was probably nuclear-irradiated cockroaches, considering where she lived, but the Silence would earn a pretty penny checking it out and cleaning it up, whatever the cause.

He almost hoped it was glow-in-the-dark cockroaches. They were still collecting royalties on the movie that got filmed after the last one of those Man-meets-Nature, Screws-it-up situations.

But that sort of project was a sideline. The supernatural screwing with the natural was their raison d’être; specifically, the Italian situation was where his focus needed to be, right now. Matthias would be annoyed not to have Sergei’s help on his current project, but Andre was not entirely unhappy that his former protégé had dug in his heels about letting the girl work alone.

He’d refrained from giving them anything more than the official, filed details of the situation, as per policy, but this felt…wrong. Bad, in his gut. And not only because they had so little information on the missing manuscript itself. Something about this had put his hackles up, and only the knowledge that these two really were the very best he could put on it made him sign off on the assignment.

That, and the fact that “I have a bad feeling about this” was not an acceptable reason within these hallways.

“You’re back.”

“You’re a master of the obvious.” He regretted his tone the moment he saw his assistant’s expression. “I’m sorry. It’s been a hellish twenty-four hours, and I’m a proper bastard for taking it out on you.”

“Make it two boxes of truffles at Christmas this year and you’re forgiven. As always.” Bren was office manager and dogsbody to three managers, Andre included, and they all ran her ragged. Chocolate once or twice a year seemed to him the least he could do.

“Anyway, you can see that disaster has once again struck while you were off-premises.”

She twiddled two red-nailed fingers in the direction of his desk, and Andre sighed dramatically. “Indeed. Any actual corpses?”

“None you have to dispose of. Coffee?”

He considered the offer briefly, then shook his head. “Thank you, but no. I’m irritable enough already without adding that swill to the mix this late in the day.”

“True, too true. Just yell if you change your mind.”

Andre paused a moment to enjoy the view of Bren’s backside as she strode down the hallway to her desk. He had an acknowledged weakness for tall, leggy blondes. Pity she’d prefer him to be Andrea.

With a chuckle at his own foolishness—the first even faint laugh he’d had since being handed the Italian project three days ago—he moved to the door and closed it against the external office distractions. And in that time his brief good humor fell away as though it had never existed.

Magic. This entire situation smelled of magic. Stank of it, actually.

Andre had been among the first, years ago, to endorse the use of Talents within the Silence. He knew their value, in an organization that dealt with the results of magic in more than three-quarters of their situations. But magic itself—the basic, unpredictable power—still made him uneasy, despite or maybe because of his continued exposure to it. For all their talk of current and channeling, it wasn’t the same as building a generator, and then flipping a switch. It was random, unpredictable—untrustworthy. Uncontrollable. Almost as uncontrollable as this unaffiliated Talent, his best (former) student at the reins or no. It was a pity he was becoming so fond of the girl. That might become a problem, eventually.

Sitting down at the glass-and-brass table he used for a desk, Andre spread the message slips out in front of him, scanning the names and sorting them into order of importance.

“Damn, damn, and damn.” It was the strongest expression of displeasure he would allow himself in the office. Andre leaned forward and stared at the blank wall opposite him. Two of the messages were from Alejandro, wanting to know with increasing levels of impatience what was happening with the Italian situation.

Alejandro wasn’t his superior…technically they were both on the same management level, and Andre in fact had seniority in years. But he was the person with oversight in that area of the world, and so despite having to come to Andre for aid, he still kept the upper hand. Levels and negotiations. The Silence was a masterpiece of levels, and every level you went up there were more appearing above you.

There were levels of trustworthiness, as well. His—what was the term? His lonejack didn’t trust him at all. Her handler trusted him just so far. How much did he trust them?

And how much of what they trusted him with could he in turn place in trust with others?

Last night, Sergei had called him. At home, not ten minutes after walking through the door, which meant the Handler had been waiting for him since Andre kept no set routine. When Andre tried to trace the call back, he discovered that the call had been routed through two different pay phones, ending up with one of those prepaid mobiles that was bought for cash. It was a level of paranoia the other man had never shown, even when he was in the thick of situations a decade ago, and normally Andre would have been amused by it, but for what his operative told him.

Not that Sergei’s cause of concern—a whisper campaign to discredit one of their operatives—was anything to worry about, not when the whispering wasn’t about the Silence itself. If anything, the Council’s attempts to discredit Wren worked to the Silence’s benefit, binding her more closely to them, if only fiscally.

But part of their deal with Sergei had been that they would protect Wren in the case of attack by the Council, and the means of attack had not, in their agreement, been specified as purely physical.

And it bothered Andre a great deal that no one in the organization had heard about this “whisper campaign” earlier. Information wasn’t the name of the game, it was the game.

Picking up the phone, he ignored the glowing message light and dialed a three-digit number. You didn’t keep Logan waiting.

“You got my report?” Andre asked.

The answer was affirmative, followed by an interrogative.

Andre picked up a rough-edged chunk of marble from his desk and rolled it in his right hand as he spoke. “I don’t know. It could be nothing, it could be good for us—or it could be potentially very ugly.”

The baritone on the other end of the phone got louder, just a shade too vehement for it to have been a polite comment. You didn’t hedge in front of Logan, either.

“We don’t know enough about what the Council knows. Truthfully, we don’t know anything, really. If our sources were compromised, then everything in the file is suspect.” He didn’t think that had happened, but it was a contingency they had to cover. That was the real reason the upper levels of the Silence needed Wren working for them; she was their conduit into the Cosa Nostradamus and the gossip therein. Gossip about the magical world that was so often the cause of the situations the Silence existed to clean up.

Although her admittedly extraordinary ability as a Retriever was a very useful thing to have in the toolbox, indeed. And the P.R. value of letting it be known—selectively, oh so selectively—that she was on their roster, that could not be overlooked or undervalued, either. “We didn’t hear anything because we’re not the ears they’re whispering into, no…and none of our clients have reported anything in their nets. It’s not likely…Sir, yes…Yes, sir. Yes, I would say that it is entirely possible that our involvement is being whispered as well.”

A pause, and he reached for the bottle of antacid sitting on his desk, shaking out three pills but not taking them just yet. Bad form to chew while getting chewed out by your boss.

“Yes, sir. We’re already on it.”

Andre hung up the phone and exhaled sharply through pursed lips. That hadn’t been as bad as it might have been. Logan was a bastard, even for the Silence, but a decent Division manager despite that. Or perhaps because of it; he knew that praise and beatings had to be carefully balanced for maximum result. Being reamed by a senior administrator the way Andre just had was always a learning experience.

And the only thing to do with experiences like that was to learn from them.

Andre mentally sorted through the list of people available to him, and jabbed a button on the phone.

“Darcy. Pronto.”

While he waited for his researcher to arrive, Andre went through the list of “while you were aways” and dropped almost half into the shredder placed discreetly beneath his desk. The rest could wait until he had a spare moment to deal with them.

“You rang, oh mighty one?”

When Darcy Cross was born, office gossip claimed, the presiding doctor had asked her mother if she wanted to file a complaint, since clearly not everything had been delivered. The ensuing years hadn’t done anything to refute the doctor’s comment: now in her mid-thirties, Darcy could claim four foot five inches if she wore heels, and her bone structure was so frail it reminded one, inevitably, of a baby chick. People always stepped carefully around her, as though she might shatter from a sharp word. But the mind in that delicate body was first-rate, and the Silence paid very well for the use of it.

“Two of our ops are getting pressured from an external source, creating doubt as to their effectiveness, their veracity. Subvert, nothing concrete, nothing provable.” He pulled a three-inch-thick folder from the pile to his left and handed it to her. Everything was on disk, of course, but the surest way to keep something secure these days was to keep it offline.

“You want me to find the source?” The remote expression in Darcy’s hazel-blue eyes made it clear that she thought she was being undertasked.

“Not exactly.” His headshake made her perk up, more interested. She perched on the edge of the sole guest chair and waited to hear more.

“We know who is doing it, and why—more or less. The current situation is to our benefit, but only so long as it remains…imprecise.” So long as his players remained off balance and uncertain, but not irreparably damaged in mind or reputation. Logan had been quite emphatic about that. “We need to know exactly what is being said, and to whom, on an ongoing basis. Monitor the flow. And if the pressure is ramped up in any way, or you feel that there is any cause for alarm—”

“Insert counterpressure in such a way that it would appear to issue from the same source as the original pressure to confuse the issue and weaken the first source.” Skin that sunlight rarely saw had its own glow as she processed the intricacies of the assignment. “Will I have support on this?”

“No.” The fewer people who knew anything other than “we’re looking into it” the better, just in case. “But you’re hereby released from anything below a St. George-level priority.” He’d catch hell for that, but Logan would have to cover for him.

“Most excellent.” She weighed the folder in her hand, as though that could tell her anything. Who knew, maybe it could. She wasn’t a Talent, but her mind was nonetheless impressive. And not a little terrifying, if she looked at you the wrong way. Santa Claus might know if you were naughty or nice, but Darcy could give you details about what, with whom, when and how much you paid for it.

He was quite reasonably glad that she and he worked for the same side.

“Go on, then. Shoo.” He made a “go away” motion at her. “Go be dangerously brilliant elsewhere. I know for a fact that your office is larger than mine.”

“Because you’re never actually in your office,” she said in return, then stood to leave, folder in hand. But as she turned to go she hesitated, as though something in her brain had clicked over unexpectedly.

“Yes?” He leaned back in his chair, watching as whatever it was she was processing worked its way to the front.

“I was just remembering—it may be nothing…but I was working on another situation, and part of that involved interviewing a couple of FocAs, and one of them said something…okay, Cross, what did he say?”