Blood from Stone

“You and me both, partner,” she responded. “But I finished the job, and as soon as I drop off the package, I’ll be on my way home, away from whatever it was Max was so wound up about. Which should make him happy, for whatever values of happy he understands. I’m keeping low-profile until then.” She paused, wondering if she should ask, then plunged in. “How are you doing?”

There was a faint hesitation on the other end of the line. “I’m fine.”

Like hell he was. They had been partners too long for her not to pick up the signs. There was tension in his voice that had been there even before she dropped her little Max-shaped bombshell, and she could practically feel how tight he was holding the phone from her end of it. Something was up. Something had gotten him seriously wound. She made herself drop it, leave it alone, for now. Anything that made him that tense would probably make her unhappy, and getting a Talent upset while using the phone usually resulted in bad things for the phone. Current and electricity traveled along the same paths, and current trumped electricity every time.

“All right.” She started to say something else, feeling the urge again to dig a little around the topic, then shut her mouth with a snap. If there was anything seriously wrong, he would tell her. Or not. Wasn’t as though she could do anything about whatever it was from here, anyway. “I’ll see you tonight.”

She hung up the phone, but despite their mutual reassurances of all-rightitude, Wren still felt uneasy. It had to be Sergei affecting her. Job was almost done. Money was in the bank. She should feel calm and satisfied, not wound like a damned spring. Please let it be Sergei’s mood affecting me…

“Hey.”

The kid looked up from his seat on the curb, his entire face covered with chocolate ice cream, those blue eyes still totally wide and innocent. “You’re a mess. Go over to that water fountain and wash your face.”

“I don’t have a towel,” he protested.

“Use your sleeve.”

The thought seemed to astonish him. Or maybe it was the fact that an adult was giving him permission to do it. Wren didn’t know and honestly didn’t care. The hair on the back of her neck was flat, but she still had the sense of something hinky in the air, even now. This was where they were supposed to be, when they were supposed to be there—early, even. Everything should have been fine, and yet…

She trusted her instincts. She just didn’t know what to do with them, in this case.

Obeying her order, the kid walked across the street to the park, where there was a stone structure with three water fountains—one adult-sized, one kid-sized, and one down so low to the ground that Wren stared at it for a moment before realizing that it was for animals, operated by a paw-pedal on the ground.

Kid went to the kid-sized one, and seemed to be trying to puzzle it out, as though he had never used one before. Wren frowned. Okay, he was a little kid, and maybe not all that bright, but there was something seriously off about him. Almost as though he’d lived his entire life, if not in isolation then damn near close. Trusting a total stranger enough to come with her? Not knowing how to use a water fountain?

“Drop him off and walk away,” she told herself sternly. “Wondering about shit, getting involved, is never a good idea. You should have learned that, if nothing else, by now.”

Getting involved led to things like politics, and betrayals, and pitched battles where people—friends—died. Enough already. She had done enough. Back to the lonejack creed: self first, second and third, and the devil take the hindmost.

“Hey kid, get a move on!” she shouted. He turned his blond head, and as he did so a Frisbee came soaring out of the park, arching on a downward motion that, Wren realized, was going to collide directly with the kid’s head.

Oh hell. Visions of a concussion, a hospital trip, questions about parental authority and authorization…. Without thinking, she used just a thread of current to knock the projectile off course, but by the time her touch got there, the Frisbee had already been knocked down out of the air, landing at the kid’s feet.

Wren tensed. Someone else had used current on the disk to knock it away, she could feel it. Fuck. It might have been a Good Samaritan, looking out for a toddler. Or it could have been someone letting her know that she was under observation, for a range of possible reasons, only some of them positive. Until the kid was handed over, she was still on the job; she couldn’t afford to relax, or make any dangerous assumptions.

Wren looked around as inconspicuously as she could, trying to catch anyone who might be paying the kid—or her—unwanted attention. Mothers playing with their kids, a couple of teenagers shoving each other on the sidewalk, the kids who threw the Frisbee in the first place, coming to get their toy, an old man—or maybe a woman—sitting on a bench a block away. None of them gave off any kind of vibe, good or bad. She felt hamstrung, frustrated, blind in both eyes without current to inform her other senses. Damn Max and damn caution. She opened up, just a sliver of a slice of access.

The kid reached down to pick up the Frisbee, and as he did so the skin on her arms prickled, reacting to current still in the air, crackling around the rim of the toy.

The kid had done it. The kid was Talent.

Damn it, this sort of shit was supposed to be in the briefing!

three

Wren didn’t normally curse—much—but in her head she was running through every single rude and offensive word she knew, in three different languages, English, Spanish and Russian.

Goddamn briefing. Khrenoten briefing.

The briefing Sergei gave her before every job was based on a combination of the client’s own details and—assuming that the client either lied, was an idiot, or withheld “didn’t think it was important” information, all things that had proven true in the past—all the Intel Sergei himself had been able to dig up. Before Wren ever looked at a single blueprint or plotted a basic approach, she knew what she was dealing with.

So much for no damn magic in this job.

A target who was also a Talent—even if just a kid—should have been in the damn dossier. Not because it would have made the job more difficult, but because it would have made the entire damned thing that much easier! Talent generally meant a certain understanding of things, up to and including—as she had just seen—the ability to defend yourself when attacked. That was how most Talent discovered themselves at first, reacting in a way that they or their parents or their friends know wasn’t possible, and trying to do it again. It also created a bond among Talent—at least until they got to know one another.

Jesus wept, if I’d known he was a Talent, I could have called the damn kid from the edge of the yard, lured him out that way! Although if he had panicked, things could have gotten ugly. Four was too young—by about eight years—to have started any kind of real training, even if it was obvious that the kid did have enough ability to protect himself….

But who would have trained him? Incomplete dossier aside, Wren was pretty damn sure neither parent was a Talent—in fact, mommy dearest had to be damn near Null, not to have been able to set up a security cordon, or track her kid—her stolen kid—leaving the yard. Unless she had…unless Max had been part of it after all…

Wren was checking the street even as she crossed it, her senses working overtime. Damn it, damn Max and the paranoia he left her with; if she’d been using current she would have known for a fact if anyone was on their tail and could have dealt with them, and now they were blind, blind and exposed, because the kid using current could have called Christ-knew-what down on them, even if she didn’t think Max would care what one kid did—but then, why had he cared about what she did?

Her head hurt, inside and out.

“Kid, get over here!” she barked, stopping him from picking up the Frisbee. Those innocent blue eyes blinked, as if he was about to cry, but she didn’t care. She dived down into her core and grabbed the first strand she could find, letting it crawl up her arm like a boa constrictor until it flowed out, separating into a dozen, then a hundred strands, invisible to the eye but there nonetheless. *Find,* she told them. *Find and bind.*

There was a black-paneled van down the street, the engine off and cold, two bodies motionless in the back. Alive and breathing regularly, she noted with relief. Sleeping off a big lunch, maybe. Two cars farther down, one of them parked illegally, engines still warm, drivers behind the wheel. She didn’t have even a smidge of empathy or true telepathy—she didn’t know anyone who did, actually, those skills were so rare they might be myth only—so the thoughts of those drivers were hidden from her. But the electrical signals she could pick up said that the muscles of the guys behind the wheel were slack, waiting but not tense, and didn’t seem to pose a threat. They might have been part of the pickup, but she didn’t think so. The agreement had said a Jeep—anything else and she had no requirement to hand the kid over.

She might not like kids, or care who had actual legal custody, but she wasn’t going to hand him over to someone without the proper cues and codes. And not just because it would be bad business. Lonejacks—the freelancers and independent contractors of the Cosa Nostradamus—might not play together well, traditionally, but kids got breaks adults didn’t. Survival of the species, if you were being blunt about it.

That motivation—that need—had sent Wren into the proverbial, nonactual dragon’s lair to rescue teenagers last summer, and she had almost died because of it. This sweet-eyed kid could have—probably would have—been one of them, if he were a decade older—lost, disenfranchised, unaffiliated Talents in their teens, looking for the brass ring. She could have been one, if John Ebeneezer hadn’t grabbed her ear in a candy store one day almost fifteen years ago and read her the riot act about using Talent for shoplifting. There was a reason Talent used the one-on-one mentoring system—okay, mostly it was because of hidebound issues of paranoia and security. But also because you needed to care about your student to keep them safe, and you had to care about your teacher in order to learn. This kid didn’t have anyone.

*Kid* She risked pinging him, the current so soft as to barely reach across the street. It was easier if you had a sense of the person you were trying to reach—if you knew them personally, or had a blood-tie to them—but line of sight was almost as good.

Confusion flooded into her brain, answering at least one question—the kid was acting purely on instinct, not a scrap of training in him. And if she wasn’t careful, she could send him into panic. Not good. Wren pulled back the ping, raising a careful barrier between the two of them. If he tried to reach out, he’d encounter null space, and think that he had just imagined the call. She hoped.

She calmed herself, pasted an open, reassuring expression on her face. “Come on, kid. Time to hook up with your dad.”

His hand was still wet, but she took it anyway, feeling the little fingers curling into her palm. His little legs had to walk twice as fast to keep up with hers, but she resisted the urge to pick him up, just in case she suddenly needed her arms free, for whatever reason.

God, please, let this transfer go smoothly. She really just wanted to go home and have a drink.

An hour later, she was willing to forgo the drink, just to be home without a sticky little paw or pair of big, blue eyes anywhere near her. The kid was cute, but enough was enough. Where the hell was his pickup?

“Daddy was a blond, huh?”

Wren turned to face the man who had spoken.

“I beg your pardon?” She and the kid had walked a circuit of the park, and were now sitting on the swings, as per instructions. Or she was, anyway. The kid had taken one look at the swings, far too high up for his little legs, and promptly sat down in the dirt at her feet, scratching at it intently with a stick.

“His coloring and yours, they don’t quite match up. So I figured Daddy was a blond.” The voice was friendly, even jovial, but the face—surprisingly round—was set in grim lines. Mocha-colored skin and black walnut eyes, shaved head, full lips, and artificially whitened teeth. He did not look like a man who would ordinarily care about genetics, kids, or the combination thereof, not even to hit on their supposed momma.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It was dark.”

Spoken, the code exchange sounded even worse than it had on paper. But the words matched. This was the handover.

“Hey, kid.”

Kid looked up at her, then looked at the man, doubtfully.

“He’s going to take you to your dad,” she told him.

“No he’s not.” Kid sounded pretty damn definite about that.

The guy laughed. Not nervously, not overconfidently. It sounded as though he really was honestly amused.

Wren looked at the kid again. Talent. Untrained, possibly totally clueless, and four years old. His judgment wasn’t to be trusted.

Except that it was marching with her own. Something about this guy was off. Damn it, and things had been going so well until now. For her usual values of “going well,” anyway.

“Is there a problem?” the guy asked her, not sitting down on the swing beside her, but standing, not quite too close, next to the kid. His body language was calm, open, and approachable. He could be grim because he didn’t like little kids. Or because he didn’t like her. Or maybe he had trouble finding a parking space. Maybe he was just a grim but otherwise likable guy.

“No. No problem.” The code phrases matched. Her part of the job was over. Wasn’t that what she had wanted?

Grim-faced guy looked down at the target. “Marc junior, is there a problem?”

Kid looked up at the man, his expression still blandly innocent, and said “No sir. No problem.” He had the slightest lisp when he said ‘sir.’ His hand was clammy, reaching up and gripping her hand again. Great.

“Then let’s get this done,” the guy said. “The kid goes with me.”

Wren wasn’t a precog, but she did have a significant skill in psychometry. Touching something, especially something with a lot of emotional importance, gave her the history of the object. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, but always accurate.

Moving swiftly, letting go of the kid’s hand, she stood and shifted so that the guy had to pivot to follow her As he did so, her now-free hand darted out under his sports coat, slipping his wallet out of his back pocket even as she opened up to her current, letting the information flow into her brain.

The images were clear: Guy had bought the kid, cold hard cash. Wren didn’t know if the seller was Mom or Dad but she did know that both had been approached, by either this guy or his employer, and both Mom and Dad had been willing to listen. One of them had closed the deal, probably Dad, and now Wren was being used to deliver.

Kid was right. She didn’t like either one of his parents, either.

The moment her hand let go of the leather of his wallet, she was in motion, grabbing the kid up and running like hell, expecting any minute to hear the sound of a gun being cocked, feel the burning sensation of bullets entering her skin, or the shouts for her to stop, the claims of child-napping, or something else that would galvanize other people in the park against her.

Damn, what she wouldn’t give to be able to Translocate right now!

The swings were just off the paved walkway, barely inside the park proper, along with one of those round whirling things, a slide, and a couple of seesaws. There was maybe a hundred yards of grass ahead of that, then a grove of trees. Too manicured to be really useful, but it was the only cover around.

The gunfire came just as she started to think that they were going to make it to that relative safety. The screams of parents as kids scattered off the playground made her heart jump into her throat, but she didn’t stop running. The kid was a heavy weight under her arm, but she didn’t dare put him down. Her legs were short but his were even shorter, and there was no way he’d be able to keep up.

A bullet zinged past her ear—from the front. “Oh, fuck this,” she muttered, realizing that the guy had brought backup. Would they risk hitting the kid?

No more time to worry about maybes and mights, she decided. Nulls with guns now scared her more than the risk of Max at his worst.

Without missing a stride, she reached down with two mental hands and dragged up current, spinning it with a thought into a tent of magical energy deflecting not only bullets but eyesight from finding them.

Once, she would have needed a cantrip or spell to help focus her thoughts and direct the current. If she’d had time, she still would have used one, just to make sure her intent was clear and focused. But her ability to channel was greater than it had been then, and she didn’t need words any more than she needed hand-waving or a wand.

She found, channeled, and created, all in one swoop. Wizzing did have its perks.

Then the cramps hit her, and she almost dropped the kid as she doubled over in agony. Perks, my ass. She managed not to drop Marc Jr, mainly because his arms were wrapped around her neck.

“We gotta run,” a soft, serious voice piped near her ear.

“I know, kid, I know.”

But she couldn’t move, not for all the little hands tugging at her. The pain was too intense; it took all her energy to keep the shield up and still remain functional. They were going to have to hope that the shield was enough, that they could outlast the threat, hope that once they started attracting attention, the bad guys would give up and go away.

“Over there!” A voice shouting, alerting: bringing danger. Backup troops, she had been right, the guy wasn’t alone. And nobody seemed to be willing to get involved, not that she blamed them. Gunfire sent smart people for the general direction of down and away. The only people crazy enough to get involved—heroes, professional or otherwise—were not the sort she wanted involved in this, either. Best case scenario, they’d ask to see ID, and the kid didn’t have any. Nor did she have any proof he belonged with her. That would lead to…questions.

A guy came running up, gun in hand, his face red with the exertion of chasing after her, and the first guy, the contact, was close behind. They weren’t giving up—they knew she was there, somewhere.

Her shield wasn’t going to be enough. If these guys were aware, and trained, they might even be able to see through her shield. You could fool all of the people some of the time, but not if they knew what they were looking for. Not even she could do that. Or at least, she thought, she never had been able to before….

Wren reached deep inside herself for another double handful of current. Dark blue and reds, a shimmer of orange, an etching of silver, all coiling around her hands, sliding up her shoulders, setting fire to her bones. The power that possessed her almost overwhelmed the cramps, reminding her of how good it could feel to simply let go, to let the current run through her.

Kill them.

The thought—an echo of her own voice, her own memory—shot through her like a lightning bolt, familiar and terrifying. Suddenly she was no longer in a green suburban park, but surrounded by concrete and metal, pressure slamming against her brain, her pulse racing, the weight of an entire city crushing her with the need to strike, to destroy, to kill any and everything that stood against her, that threatened her and hers.

No. No more. Never again. The thought was hers, supported by deeper, masculine voices.

She could kill. She had killed. She had been backed into a corner and struck out, and destroyed those who threatened her and hers.

The knowledge no longer devastated her. She had killed. She was not a killer. She was not. She would not allow that reaction, that desire, to rule her, to control her. She would not.

The current scorched her skin, but she controlled it. Controlled herself.

Survive. Do not kill. Survive. The two warring instincts—the two opposing needs—battled for primacy over her reactions.

*Idiot female.*

The roar of words in her head was fire and brimstone, treacle and mud, coming down over her barriers like brackish high tide over the breakers.

*Max?* A mixed wash of relief and fear. She had been right; her current called him, even here. He scared the hell out of her, but hell was what she needed to get rid of, right now. Better the devil in someone else than the devil in you?

*Max, I…need help*

Admitting that to anyone was difficult for her. Admitting it to a crazy man, a fellow lonejack who had just tried to run her off the job, who was as likely to kill them both as help them, to a wizzart who might do anything, or nothing, in response to her plea…

*Let me in*

Oh God. What a very, very, very bad idea that was. She had no choice. There wasn’t anyone strong enough, near enough. Trust wasn’t an issue in the face of survival.

She grabbed the kid more tightly, and let down her barriers just enough to let Max slide in.

Given access to her inner self, he swept up and over her like a storm front, his intent rising up before her, his intent to do what she could not. His tarry current was vile and yet beautiful, black lightning sparking and flashing inside a dark storm cloud of his awareness. Battered, barely holding herself together, somehow she fought it.

*No! No killing.*

His disgust at what he saw as her weakness was a physical blow in a psychic battle. Wren took it, absorbed it, did not strike back but merely—merely!—demanded that he adhere to her command.

She was not strong enough to command a wizzart, not without going there herself. Not without losing her own tenuous control. But he could allow himself to be directed, if he chose.

If he chose.

*Hurt them,* she suggested. *Scare the shit out of them. But don’t snuff them.*

He resisted, and she pushed harder. *Harder to scare away than to kill* she challenged him, risking the taunt to get his dander up and aimed where she needed it. *Just keep the kid safe.* She hesitated, then added *and me, too!* just in case he was unclear on the concept of “help.”

Push and shove, push and shove, an endless space of a second, and then she felt his reluctant acquiescence, felt the brimstone and treacle mass sweep around until her current and his slammed against each other, their differing masses and density creating virtual thunderclaps where they came into contact. The kid shuddered, caught between them, racked by the current. She didn’t dare reach down to comfort him, all of her focus on keeping Max with them and in the game plan.

*Follow me* A visual with the words, a thick black anvil of a storm cloud opening up, a stovepipe chimney down into the heart of the storm, swirling around her with all the power of The Alchemist’s overpowered, overfull brain.

She grabbed the kid with both hands, keeping him down on the ground with her, trying to send some reassurance, and leaped into the maelstrom.

Inside, there was a second of calm, the winds howling around outside them, and then monsters leaped at her, claws black and bloody, their teeth serrated and their scales slick with oily, viscous substances she didn’t want to think about. Once they would have terrified her; once they would have made her run like hell.

She had walked on the wrong side of madness since then. She had led people to their deaths, had taken lives from the undeserving, and decided who was deserving and who was not.

Her own monsters inside were just as frightening as anything Max carried. Worse, because she had birthed them.

*You know nothing* Max spat, even as he was laying his own current over hers, forcing them to integrate and work together. *You understand nothing.* The monsters grabbed onto her, digging their claws in, their bilious blood dripping into her veins, sending directions of what to do and how to do it directly to her core. It was a little like rape, and a lot like school, and entirely horrible. That was exactly the impact he intended, she was pretty sure. Bastard.