Staying Dead

Sergei blew through the door, setting the chime alert jangling. The young man looked up, gauged the expression on his boss’s face, and wisely decided not to speak unless spoken to. One look around told Sergei that no one else was in the gallery, and with a grunt that could have been satisfaction or disgust, he nodded to his associate and went to the back wall of the gallery, where touching a discreet wall plate opened the door to his private office.

The door closed behind him, and the young man went back to flipping through the catalog.

“Of all the stupid, harebrained…” Sergei had managed to keep a hold on his temper all the way home from Genevieve’s apartment, which meant that by now, although he was just as angry as before, he was unable to let go and have the temper tantrum he so righteously desired.

She hadn’t answered the phone when he had called this morning. She hadn’t been home when he had arrived on her doorstep an hour later. Not that she didn’t have a perfect right to go off on her own. He was her partner, her agent, not her damned keeper. That would have been a full-time job alone. But he had known she was hiding something, damn it. Had known sitting there across from her during dinner, and let it go, and that was his fault.

It hadn’t been until this morning, as he was taking his morning walk, that one of the names on the list had jumped out of his brain and thwapped him soundly across the face. He hadn’t recognized it at first, because he only thought of the man by the nickname the Cosa had given him.

Stuart Maxwell. She was going to confront Stuart Maxwell, otherwise known in Talented circles as The Alchemist. The man so hooked into the current he could turn wishes into water, and water into wine. The man who, the last time Wren encountered him, had tried to kill her. A certified, over the bend, wind whistling through his brains, wizzart.

Wren knew he wouldn’t have let her get within a mile of that man ever again, no matter if he had been the first, last, and only name on their suspects list. And so she conveniently forgot to point him out.

He felt his teeth grinding together, and slowly forced his jaw to unclench. His partner only thought he was overprotective. And then she went and did something like this that only proved he wasn’t damn near vigilant enough!

If she survived—she would survive, she would—Sergei swore to himself, he was going to put her over his knee. And he meant it this time!

Okay, so he wasn’t being rational. She had the astonishing ability to do that to him, did his Wren. And it drove him insane.

Exhaling, and muttering a curse under his breath, Sergei finally took off his coat and hung it on the wooden coat rack in the corner, smoothing his hair back and settling himself into his skin. Calm. He needed to be calm. When Wren was in the field, the game was hers. The fact that he could—and had—imagine any of two dozen things that could go wrong did not mean anything would go wrong. And even if it had—he paused a moment to make a quick gesture with his fingers to avert ill luck—there was nothing he could do about it until she bothered to check in.

He took a deep breath, let it out. This was Wren. She would check in. His partner was occasionally reckless, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew what she was doing. He had to believe in that. Believe in her. Don’t make her asinine fears—that he didn’t trust her enough—any worse.

And, in the meantime, he had a gallery to run.

“Lowell,” he said into the intercom. “Please bring me the week’s invoices, if they’re ready? And tomorrow’s guest list as well.”

The building was more of a shack than anything you could properly call a house. Derelict in the middle of an oversized lot given over to wildflowers and knee-high grasses, the two-story building boasted a wraparound porch and tall windows, but the wood sagged, the white paint was cracked, and the windows were blurred with grime.

“Lovely.”

Wren pulled her rental car—an innocuous dark-blue sedan—to the side of the dirt road, and stared at the structure. There was no need to check the address against the information written in her notepad. There wasn’t anything else that could be her destination on this isolated road miles from the nearest town. Besides, there wasn’t a house number anywhere to be seen.

With a sigh, she tossed the notepad into her bag, slung the strap over her shoulder, and got out of the car. Dust swirled around her heels, the dryness at odds with the riot of greenery on the property. She couldn’t feel anything, but that was hardly surprising. You never could—until the trap was sprung, and it was way too damn late.

“You shouldn’t have come.”

“Max. I want to help you.” The Wren-self in the memory was years younger, her hair longer, tied into a braid halfway down her back. Sergei in the distance. Too far away. Far enough away to be safe.

“I’m already damned, girl. Didn’t you learn anything?”

His eyes had still been sane, then. Thirty seconds later, he had tried to kill her.

Wren stopped just shy of the border of grass, and sighed again. Then sneezed, her sinuses reacting to the overabundance of green growing things.

“Great. He couldn’t have holed up in a concrete warehouse somewhere? Max!”

Approach protocol thus satisfied, she waited, shifting her weight from one sneaker to the other, wiping her palms on denim-clad thighs.

“Max, you shit, I just want to talk to you!”

There was no answer. She hadn’t been expecting any, but it would have been nice to get a surprise. Wren was tempted to reach out, to try and feel for the currents she knew were floating around the house, but she didn’t. Bad manners, and dumb besides. This was her last stop of the day, and she was tired, short-tempered, and really not looking forward to this at all.

“Max!” A pause. “You mangy bastard, it’s Wren!”

A harsh bark of laughter right in her ear startled her, but she schooled her body, refusing to let it jump. Sound waves were easy to manipulate. A cheap trick.

“Come in then, you brat. Before I forget you’re out there.”

That had been easier than she expected. Suspicious, she stepped onto the grass, watching as the blades bent out of her way, creating a path directly to the porch steps.

Far too easy. She had a bad feeling about this.

The inside of the house was actually quite comfortable, if you liked extreme lo-tech living. The front door opened onto a large room, encompassing the entire front of the house. A fireplace took up all of the far wall, and bookshelves covered much of the other three walls. No television, no computer, no phone in sight. Just books and the occasional piece of what might have been artwork. Not that she had anything against books, but there was only so long you could live in someone else’s head. Wren didn’t trust anyone who didn’t get out and do for themselves.

Not that she trusted The Alchemist worth a damn to begin with. Not anymore. She learned slow, but she did learn. But this wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could do over the phone. Assuming he had access somewhere, somehow, to one. And that it didn’t go snap-crackle-pop the moment he touched it. Wizzarts were even more prone to short-circuiting electronics than your average Talent, because they didn’t think to be careful.

Some would say that they didn’t think at all.

There was no sound at all in the house, not even the hum-and-whir of appliances somewhere, or the clink-clink of water draining through pipes. It made Wren nervous, that absence of sound. So what if she’d grown up in the ’burbs, back when you might still see deer or fox or occasionally a bear in your backyard; she was too much a city girl now to feel comfortable without the endless background accompaniment of screeching brakes, sirens and horns.

Even the damn crickets outside had been better than this. Silence wasn’t a thing; it was the absence of a thing, of noise. And her mind always wanted to know what had swallowed the noise, how, and when was it coming for her.

To distract herself from that thought, she looked around again. Two overstuffed sofas and a leather reclining chair were matched with sturdy wooden tables, obviously handmade. The plaid upholstery was worn and comfortable-looking, and the floor was wood, scarred with years of use, and covered with colorful cloth rugs scattered with more concern for warmth than style. A large dog of dubious parentage lay on one of the sofas. It lifted its head when she came in, and contemplated her with brown eyes that didn’t look as though they had been surprised by anything in the past decade, or excited about anything in twice that time.

“Hi there,” she said. The narrow tail thumped once and then lay still, as though that much effort had exhausted it. “Let me guess—Dog, right?”

“Don’t see any reason to change a perfectly workable name,” the voice said from off to her left. “I’m the man, he’s the dog, and we both know our places.”

“And his, obviously, is on the sofa.”

Max let out a snort as he came completely into her line of sight. He was wearing an old, worn blue cotton sweater and khaki safari-style shorts that showed off knobby knees, red-banded tube socks sagging around his ankles. “That one’s his, this one’s mine. We stay out of each other’s way. Which is more than I can say for you. Didn’t my throwing you off a cliff teach you anything? Why you bothering me again?”

Wren hadn’t seen Max in almost five years. But for a wizzart, that was crowding.

“Your name came up in very uncasual conversation,” she said, sitting down in the chair, but not relaxing into it. Max seemed reasonably rational right now, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. She actually had learned a great deal from going off that cliff, most of which involved the fact that she couldn’t fly. She wasn’t eager to relearn that particular lesson.

“Whoever it was, they deserved killing.” He sat down on his sofa and put his feet up on a battered wooden table. His socks were filthy, dirt and grass stains worn into the weave of the fabric, but they somehow managed not to stink.

“No killing,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

“You bring any chewing gum? I could use a spot of chewing gum. So if they’re not dead, what’s the hassle? And if they are dead, what’s the hassle anyway?” He held his hands out in front of him, as though about to clasp them in prayer, and spread his fingers as wide as they could go, staring intently at the space between his palms. The pressure in the room increased, fed by the energies the old man was bouncing throughout his system like some kind of invisible pinball game.

Wren swallowed a third, much heavier sigh. Wizzarts.

“Max. Focus.”

“I’m listening,” he said, cranky as an old bear with arthritis. “Get on with it before I decide you might make good fertilizer for the grass.”

He was making an effort for her. That was nice to see. Wren organized her thoughts quickly, compiling and discarding arguments and appeals. Finally, feeling the pressure of his current-games pushing at her eardrums, almost to the point of pain, she went for broke.

“Why did you threaten to kill Oliver Frants?”

The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew that she had made a mistake. The question was too vague, too loosely-worded. He could answer her without telling a damn thing, whatever obligation or guilt or connection he felt satisfied, and she’d be out on her ear before she got another chance.

“Man’s a waste of piss.”

And that was it, the sum and total of his elaboration. Typical, she thought in disgust. A wizzart didn’t need to have a reason to do something. They thought it, they did it. For that quirk alone Wren could have written Max off the suspect list—this kind of indirect assault on the client required planning, thought—some kind of long-term intent behind it. And nobody in their right mind would have hired a wizzart to do a job like this—there was too much risk that the wizzart would get bored, and deposit the stone in the middle of the local police chief’s bedroom, just because.

The problem was, a wizzart simply didn’t have anything left over after the magic. Their entire existence was dedicated towards channeling the energies, feeling them as completely as possible, every cell turned towards the goal of becoming the perfect conductor. And that included their brain cells.

Because of that, wizzarts lived in the moment, the instant of action. It made them irascible, ornery, obnoxious—name your adjective and someone would double it without hesitation. “Waste of current” was the popular view. But the Council, in one of its few and far-between acts of mercy, had forbidden anyone to harm wizzarts. There but for the grace of God go you, was their official line. Truth was, Wren knew, the Council used wizzarts. When it came to the major mojos, to understanding the byplay of forces, the correlation of events and probabilities, they were the chaos-theory scientists of the Cosa Nostradamus.

Unstable, yeah. But the very fact that they were that unpredictable also meant that Max could have done it, either for a client, or a passing whim. The only prediction you could make about the unpredictable is that they’re going to do something you didn’t even have in the list of possibilities.

“I have a problem,” she said quickly, before his attention went into a sideslip. “Someone pulled a nasty job on my client. Someone with a bad sense of the funny. Your name was on the list, and I—” The pressure against her eardrums rose dramatically, and the energies between his hands manifested in zizzing spurts of static electricity. He giggled in pleasure. She had lost him.

A night spent chasing down leads, checking up on suspects’ alibis and whereabouts, coupled with a morning of phone calls and in-person follow-ups on local suspects, topped by the two-hour drive to this godforsaken town that wasted even more time she probably didn’t have, finally made her temper snap. Ignoring all known procedures and common sense for dealing with wizzarts, she reached forward and slapped her hands over his, forcing the energy into a cage of her own flesh. Energy channeled took on the signature of its user. And right now, trapped between her hands, was a solid buzz of Max-imprinted magic, ready for the scrolling.

hey hey HEY brat. bitch. A flash of herself, much younger, all eyes and ears and good intentions flickering like a beacon from him. She countered with her own self-image, foot tapping in impatience. It was a little like the icons people used in chat rooms, she’d been told. what what WHAT?

Irritation came back from him, some resignation—a flash of pride, that she had learned so much since their first meeting. Some disgust, that she sold herself that way, to the highest bidder. And a complete, total lack of information about what she needed to know. He had never even met the client, merely read a newspaper article about the man that annoyed him and spouted off about it in the wrong place.

“Oh, Max.”

She released his hands, not apologizing for the hijacking. The formal dance of manners slowed down the mental process, interfered with conductivity.

That was the popular theory, anyway. Sergei had a long-standing, loudly-spoken opinion that Talents were just naturally rude.

Dog yawned, his tongue hanging out of his mouth when he was done. Max stared at her, his blue-green eyes trying to dig under her guard, ferret out whatever he was looking for. Wren ignored him the way Dog was ignoring them, waiting for his reaction. Her body appeared relaxed, but that very casualness was preparedness. Whatever hit, she would be ready to dodge out of the way, roll and slip out of range.

Ignoring the fact that even on an off day Max’s range was further than she could run—to the edge of the property, at least, and likely a full line of sight beyond that. If he got pissed, she was screwed. It was that simple. And that was why wizzarts rarely had houseguests.

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” he said finally, his voice old and scratchy, as though her insight had worn him out in some measure.

“Where should I look then?” If he was going to offer aid, she was going to take it. Her mama might have raised a fool, to be here in the first place, but that didn’t mean she had to be stupid about it.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, the cotton sweater showing new holes as he moved. “I’ll poke through the ether, see what I can find out.”

There was a tension about him, in the way the pressure pulled in tight around him, that suggested this little get-together was just about over. Dog whined, and rolled onto his other side, facing away from them. Wren stood, looking across the room at the wizzart. “Why?”

He laughed, a manic sound that made the hair on the back of her arms stand straight up. “’Cause you came to me. ’Cause not killing you’s the last thing I managed to do right. Maybe ’cause you’re all that’s left of John on this green earth.”

John Ebenezer. Teacher. Friend. Father figure. Gone, ten years and more. It still hurt, the memory.

“You might want to get out, now.”

Wren got. The grass didn’t move out of her way this time, instead straining towards the house, as though there was a stiff wind blowing them inward.

There was. Only it was brewing inside: the center of the whirlwind, a black hole of current. Lightning flashed in the clear blue sky, and Wren felt it shiver down her back, like the first stroke of a massage. She got into the car, tossing her bag onto the seat next to her, and almost flooded the engine in her haste to get the hell out of there.

Wizzarts. Jesus wept.

The drive back to the city seemed endless, her brain chasing after one detail or another until she shut it all down with a blast of rock and roll. She might be a jazz kind of girl, but there was nothing like the sound of sledgehammer guitars to get you rolling down the highway. Wren handed in the rental with a kind of regret, patting the hood in farewell as she waited for the attendant to finish checking it out. He was a tiny little guy, bandy-legged, who looked as though he should have been fussing over spindly Thoroughbreds, not standard issue Chevys.

Once he’d given the other attendant the all-clear, she signed off on the X’d line, collected her copies of the paperwork, and caught the subway home, standing-room-only as everyone else headed home from a tough day at the office, too. Normally an irritation, today she welcomed the press of humanity, sweaty and rude though it might be. The fact that she could stand them, could rub skins with the rest of humanity without freaking, reassured her that she still was one of them. Still sane, normal…as normal—

As normal as you could be, with the buzz of magic running through your cells when the rest of the world doesn’t feel a thing. When John Ebenezer had first discovered her using Talent to pilfer sodas and candy from the local five-and-dime, he’d dragged her out of the store by one ear. He’d read her the riot act, fed her a lecture on morals, and hadn’t let go until she knew what it was she was doing—what she was. It hadn’t seemed so scary then. He’d been a lot closer to normal then; he’d taught high school, in fact. Biology. Before he too had given himself over to the current, made riding the wave his entire reason for existing. Wizzed out.

By the time she graduated high school, he was long gone; the toll of his own Talent overwhelming what had been his life. But by then, he’d managed to change her life, almost as much as he finally changed his own. “Maybe ’cause you’re all that’s left of John on this green earth.”

Sometimes she wished Neezer had just minded his own business that day in the five-and-dime.

Wren wasn’t a wizzart. She didn’t want to be one, wasn’t, for various fate-be-thanked reasons, likely to become one. But how much had Neezer wanted it, back then? Had Max? Had they told themselves, whistling in the dark, that it couldn’t happen to them?

“God, woman, stop it!”

An old Chinese man looked at her sideways, his expression clearly showing what he thought of crazy women who talked to themselves.

She got off at her stop, taking the steps up to the street two at a time. The fresh air on her face was like a benediction, and she stopped to draw a lungful in. The sky was just beginning to darken, and the shadows of the buildings shaded into dark blue the way only city shadows could. Yes! Max could keep the countryside—she felt alive in the city, with its constant hum of energy that nonetheless managed to remain completely impartial. Too many people could be better than none, sometimes.

Especially if their presence meant you were sane.

She strode down the street and up to the six-story brick apartment building. It was the tallest building in the neighborhood, standing out against the three-story townhouses and one-story storefronts of Chinese takeout places, psychics, and the ever-present corner delis/flower stores/supermarkets. Depending on what part of town you lived in, they were Korean grocers, or bodegas, or quick-marts.

She thought about swinging by Jackson’s to get some fresh milk, maybe play the Lotto, but decided against it. She’d do the shopping this weekend, when she had a little more energy.

But in the instant her feet slowed, contemplating and deciding, her nerves twitched. Back-of-the-neck, millennia of evolution stripped away kind of twitching, what Sergei called the lizard brain. The survival nerve. She sped up again, scanning the sidewalk-side without turning her head too obviously. It could have been one of the kids sitting on the stoop across the street, giving her a too-close once-over. Most people ignored her, even when she wasn’t Disassociating—it made her very nervous when someone didn’t. Or it might have been something as simple, and ignorable, as a mugger in the shadows, sizing her up as a potential meal ticket. That happened on occasion, but they almost always ended up passing her by for the next person coming down the street.

Nerves, probably. Justifiable, in the aftermath of the day. It couldn’t have been anything else. The Wren was invisible, far as most of the world was concerned. She never met with clients, never had any direct contact with them, and she knew damn well there wasn’t anything she was working on right now that might have followed her home. And yet…

The question isn’t “are you paranoid.” It’s “are you paranoid enough?”

She spun on one heel, her keys clenched in her left hand in a defensive hold, ready to scrape the face off anything coming up on her.

There was nobody there. Two buildings down, the teenagers made rude catcalls that only increased when she glared at them. A flash of current would teach them a lesson…and be a waste of energy she didn’t have right now.

“You’re getting as bad as Max,” she told herself, turning back and heading up the stairs into her building, praying her words weren’t true.

On the street, a figure stopped just shy of Wren’s building, watching as she unlocked the door and stepped inside. Wearing a stylish leather coat open over a well-tailored suit, he exuded professional menace that silenced the teenagers even before they noticed the unmistakable leather of a belt holster showing under the coat. Pale eyes looked at them without blinking, and they stared back half in apprehension, half in awe. He smiled at them, not showing any teeth, and they turned tail and fled.

A glance at his wrist to check the time, and he reached into a coat pocket, extracting a small, very expensive cell phone. Staring up at the fifth floor, where a light had just gone on, he touched a button, and waited for someone to answer on the other end.

“Bird’s flown home.”

He waited while the other person relayed the news, his gaze never leaving the window where Wren’s form could be seen, barely, through the rice-paper shade. Then another person took the phone, the deep voice filling the phone’s receiver.

“No, she was alone. Should I take care of it?”

The answer was clearly negative. “Right.”

He hung up and returned the phone to his pocket. With one last look at the window, he turned and walked down the street, disappearing into the growing shadows as though he had never been there.