Blood from Stone

“Client can bite me,” she said, walking into the kitchen wrapped in a towel, in search of coffee. Her partner was dressed in his usual suit and tie; the suit a beautifully cut dark gray pinstripe, the tie a nonregulation purple tie-dye. Friday morning, the gallery was closed; he must have a meeting with a new agent, or maybe a private client. Money, definitely. She took a good long look at him, just for the pleasure of it. His hair had more gray in it than even a year ago, but it was still full and swept back from a hawk’s face; sharp brown eyes and an even sharper nose. She thought the nose was one of his better features. He didn’t agree. “The guy who showed up had bought the kid.”

That stopped the tea mug halfway to his mouth and raised a dark eyebrow. “I beg your pardon?”

She repeated herself, speaking slowly and precisely. “The guy who showed up had bought the kid. Cash on the barrel. I picked it up from him, clear and true. I don’t know how much he paid, but it was a lot.”

“From the father.” His mouth tightened into a thin line and his entire body tensed. She reached up and patted him on one shoulder, and then shoved him gently out of the way so that she could get to the coffee maker, annoyed that he hadn’t started it for her already.

If she moved, she could find a place that had a larger kitchen, with room for an actual table where people could sit down and eat meals together, maybe. That was something to think about. She could trade in the three tiny rooms at the end and maybe have a single bedroom large enough to turn around in. And a real closet? There were a lot of upsides to moving.

Maybe she could “forget” to give anyone her new address.

“Don’t know,” she said in response to his comment, going up on her toes to try to snag a mug out of the cabinet. “Could be the mother—she’s the one who did the initial grab, after all. Guy had contact with them both, I got that much from reading him. And Dad didn’t…he didn’t seem like the type. He was really glad the kid was back and safe.” She had gotten details wrong before. Not often, though. Not at that level.

Sergei looked carefully at his partner’s closed-off expression, then grabbed the mug for her and handed it down, not making a fuss out of his much greater height. “You picked that all up from one contact?”

“Yeah.” Her voice said do-not-ask-how. He didn’t. He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know. He had been there for the results, when she’d been the recipient of a “battery” of current during the events of last summer, and he knew that it had changed her, changed her ability. That, combined with the pressures and stresses they were under, on a daily basis…

Admit it, to yourself if nobody else. She wizzed. She wizzed, and she came back, and she hasn’t figured out what it all means yet. And neither have you.

The one thing he knew for sure was that her ability to channel current was stronger than it had been, which meant that she had to keep a tighter rein on it as well, or risk overflowing into whatever was nearby—electronics, storm fronts, receptive humans….

Wren grabbed the sugar tin and a spoon, and placed them next to the mug, ready and waiting for when the coffee finished percolating, and turned to face him. He knew that annoyed, sweetly inquisitive look, and braced himself for what was about to land.

“So. How was your session?”

As expected, and speaking of pressure and stress. She knew that he was seeing Doherty; she had in fact been the one to suggest, without much delicacy at all, that the therapist—as a Talent himself—would be the only person who might be able to understand Sergei’s particular problem. She didn’t know more than that, except that he was still going, and that was the way he wanted to keep it.

He was willing to do this, for her, but he didn’t want to talk about it.

“It was fine.” He gave back the do-not-ask tone and saw her bite the inside of her cheek, making her look like a chipmunk with a hangover, but she didn’t press. For all of about a minute and forty seconds. Then her hand reached up into her hair, and curled a strand around her finger, sure sign she was about to say something she wasn’t sure he was going to like.

Sergei felt a sigh building, and repressed it firmly. Once upon a time, he had been the senior partner, the guy with the answers, the one who had final say. After due consideration and a weighing of the pros and cons, he decided that he didn’t miss those days at all.

All right, maybe a little. Sometimes. But if he never saw her finger-curl her hair ever again, it would be too soon.

“So why did you give the kid back?” he asked, not put off by her attempted change of topic, and not giving her a chance to dig further into the state of his mental or emotional health. “Isn’t the guy going to sell the kid again?”

“Maybe.” She didn’t seem too disturbed by the fact.

“Genevieve!” He only used her given name when he was really annoyed. Or scared witless, but annoyed pretty much did the job right now. “Do you know what happens to kids who—” He stopped himself. Of course she did. More, she knew what happened to Talented kids who ended up in the wrong hands. No matter her personal opinion of kids, which was usually that they were best served braised on a bed of spinach—she would not keep from protecting the boy if she thought there was a need.

He fixed her with a Look, brows lowered, eyes narrowed, lips downturned, trying to channel his father’s best “come clean now” expression. “Genevieve, what did you do?”

His father’s look had worked much better on a preteen Sergei. His partner merely showed him an evil little smile and poured herself some of the coffee, yelping when a drop of it hit her rather than the pot. She shook her hand to cool it off, but her expression remained smugly satisfied. “Nothing he didn’t deserve.”

Good luck, you poor bastard, Sergei thought, managing to spare some sympathy for the client, whatever else he might or might not have done. Wren didn’t just get even, she got ahead. Sergei suspected that if the guy even thought about being other than The Perfect Father for the next ten years, he would break out in a bad case of crotch-itch, or something equally attention-getting.

Since Sergei totally approved of such an action, he merely shook his head and gestured out the window at the blue sky showing. “I don’t have to be at my meeting until this afternoon,” he said conversationally. “You up for a walk around the duck pond?”

She wasn’t fooled for even a minute, he knew, but he also knew that without distraction she would go back to sleep for the rest of the day in a classic case of post-job slump, and that usually was enough to throw her off schedule, which in turn made her cranky. Like jet lag, it was better to keep her up and moving until the evening, when she could then justifiably collapse. Plus, and he knew that she knew this, too, he wanted to be able to check out her mental state firsthand. There was something going on there, something she hadn’t told him about. Something maybe more disturbing than an unexpected run-in with the Alchemist.

The name alone was enough to make him shudder. Talent was commonplace, the Fatae still unnerved him a little, but wizzarts…He had seen firsthand what even the least of them could do, had almost lost Wren to the bittersweet darkness of that madness. He would never be able to shrug it off. Never. And never the threat of a man as powerful as Stewart Maxwell.

The walk was as much for him was it as for her. He should have been there for her last night when she got home, and not left it to P.B, no matter how good the demon was at Wren-sitting. Until he was certain that everything was all right, that whatever she wasn’t telling him wasn’t something he needed to worry about, he didn’t want to let her out of his sight again.

“Yeah,” she said, obviously buying into his pretense for his sake, not hers. “Sure. I could use a good chance to get nibbled to death by rabid and unruly geese.” She gestured with her coffee. “Lemme finish this, and go get dressed.”

He still has trouble saying it, trouble going back to that moment. And so, over and over again, they return to it.

“She almost died then. Worse.”

“Worse?”

“There’s worse than dying, and she was there, right on the edge….”

“What happened? What put her there, on the edge?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? What happened. He knows the why, and they’ve figured out, mostly, the how, but…I don’t know. Not the details. But it was bad. It was…

It was hell. The memory played out behind his eyes whenever he was too tired to hold it back: Wren splayed on the ground, her body too still, too cold; her eyes bloodshot and staring, drained of all the vitality that normally filled her body. She had gone in after the FocAs, the Talent who had been trained and turned against their own people. The Lost, they were called now. Lost, and then Retrieved.

“But that wasn’t where it began. That wasn’t where the damage was done. All that came before, and then…She never told me what happened, but I know when…when they attacked her. Those men, those…”

“Take a breath. Hold, and now let it out, easy, the way we talked about. She’s all right.”

She is all right. Except she isn’t. His Wrenlet isn’t a killer. He is. He wants to be a killer again, even though they were long-dead already.

At his Zhenchenka’s hands.

“The men who attacked her, who pushed her up onto the razor’s edge. They deserved to die?” No condemnation, no offer of expiation, just the question.

“Yes.” He has no doubt on that subject. “But her magic should never have been used to murder.”

“You feel that you failed her.”

“I did fail her. And—” The bitterness, here, and nowhere else “—she let me fail her.” He still doesn’t know how to deal with that.

five

On that same morning that Sergei was dragging his partner out to decompress with the ducks, miles south from Manhattan, in a surprisingly well-known high-security building outside of D.C., other people were ignoring the glorious autumnal weather outside, trapped within four walls by professional obligations and legally sanctioned if not officially approved obsessions.

“Damn it, where was that file? Aha, there you are. Thought you could hide, did you?”

The office was reasonably sized, but badly designed and dark, despite the fluorescent light overhead. An interior space, there were no windows to bring any natural light or air in; circulation was dependent upon the old-fashioned air ducts, and an almost-as-old desk fan perched on the seat of a battered metal stool. One wall appeared to be held up by the number of black metal filing cabinets marching along it, the line broken only by a doorway. The frosted-glass-paned door was ajar, with hinges that hung in such a way as to indicate the door was rarely all the way closed. The other three walls were painted a standardized white that had seen better decades. Each of those three walls supported a whiteboard, covered in various scrawls in several different ink colors and handwriting styles, and a corkboard, filled with newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and printed reports following half a dozen different cases.

It was an office built around and decorated by people who obsessed, and followed through, and then obsessed some more.

There were three desks crammed into the space, one for each wall, but only one figure was currently in the room.

That figure was sitting behind one of those desks, hunching forward in an expensive ergonomically correct chair, looking at the just-found file under the illumination of a battered office-issue desk lamp. In addition to the file, the lamp, a black in-box filled to the rim, and a matching plastic pen holder, the desk was covered with more reports, sheets of scrawled notes, a dozen red and black pens, and half a dozen pretzel sticks with the salt gnawed off and the remains abandoned in a pile.

A box with still-salted pretzel rods had been pushed to the side, as though the gnawer were aware of the addiction, and trying only half heartedly to break it.

The agent date-stamped a report, signed it, and filed it, then picked up a new pretzel stick and flipped through the remaining paperwork still awaiting closure.

Dismissing the pending cases, the agent got up and, current pretzel in hand, strode over to look at the nearest corkboard. The boards had the look of items tacked up in a hurry and riffled through frequently; the edges of the papers were tattered and some of the articles were faded, although the older ones had been laminated at some time in the past. But the pinholes were fresh, and the impression was of an overcrowded in-box rather than a layered archaeological dig. Things changed, progress was made, items were taken down and replaced by new ones. The newspaper clippings in the upper right corner were all from New York City papers, mostly covering crimes committed during the previous winter and spring, with the more violent and unsolved ones circled in red marker. A few of the more colorful tear sheets were from lurid magazines, proclaiming the coming of the Lord as evidenced by the glow coming down from the sky and landing in, of all places, Brooklyn, N.Y.

The tear sheets dated back to the 1970s, and some of the reports went all the way back to World War II, but the majority of them were less than two years old. It was these that the agent focused on, one well-groomed hand lifting the most recent to look below it at the one before then, silently comparing facts and observations.

A long strip of the remaining salt was taken off the pretzel rod, as buffed nails tapped the sheets in thought.

An observer would note that the reports were of a similar nature, following a track of murders and assaults, gang-related crimes and break-ins. A blue-and-red graph charted the rise—and the sudden decline—in those crimes over a two-year period. The chart ended on a flat line near zero, the most recent data point charted being last month.

Whatever it was causing the activity, it seemed to have ended.

The agent knew that sometimes cases were like that. You accepted the fact that you’d never get an answer, and moved on to the next, because the one thing you knew was that there would always be a next. The world was like that.

It was why there were people like them, in offices like this. To catch the ones they could, and not drive themselves crazy over the ones they couldn’t.

And yet, something about this case still bugged the brain, itched the instincts, and left questions hanging. You couldn’t let those cases go.

The agent went back to the desk, dropping the pretzel stick long enough to reach for a yellow-tagged file, pick up a pen and jot down a new comment in the margin of one of the sheets. The motion held the weary but still determined air of someone who is no closer to a solution than a week before, but can’t stop. It didn’t matter that the search had been going on for almost a year now: if you are determined enough, the Bureau teaches, and you follow all the leads through to the end, luck will be on your side. Eventually.

A phone rang somewhere, outside the office and down the hall. Someone answered it on the third ring, and the echo of low voices carried faintly into the office and was swallowed by the shadows. The figure didn’t even look up.

The annotated paper was returned to the file, and two photos were pulled out: one, of a tall, lean man in a dark suit, talking to two other men in the middle of a crowded food court. The other was of that same man, more casually dressed, in a subway car. A much shorter woman stood with him, their body language suggesting both familiarity and tension. Both photos were clearly taken without their knowledge, the angle and grainy texture suggesting a surveillance camera of some sort.

Two years ago she had heard whispers of something the higher-ups knew, of a group or organization in various American cities that the government might or might not consider a threat, a group that might or might not be causing those ups and downs in specific crimes. Of individuals who were more than human. Casual queries had gotten her stonewalled, left with the impression that this was a Secret only a few select were allowed to know.

Very few things got up the nose of an obsessive investigator like a Secret they were told they couldn’t share.

Her first probe had gotten her a name, and that had led to another name, and she’d pulled enough strings to get a temporary watch put on those subjects, and who they interacted with. But the lead had faded and gone cold, and when there were no more incidents in that city, her line of investigation was cut off. Officially.

A man came to the office door, pushing it open just enough more to stick his head in. “The Old Lady wants to see us,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” The room’s original resident didn’t seem impressed with the news.

“I don’t think it was a request, Chang. I think it was something like an order. As in, right now she wants to see us.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.” Chang said, reaching for another pretzel rod, then being distracted midthought by a new possibility.

“Christ. You are trying to get yourself fired, aren’t you?”

“She won’t fire me. I work too cheap.”

“Nothing’s cheap enough for this place,” the second agent said with mordant humor, then shook his head, coming into the office and looking at the papers on the desk. “Are you still working that lead? Give it up, already. I think someone’s pulling your leg. All you’re doing is wasting Bureau time, and you know how they feel about that.”

The only response he got was the wave of one arm, middle finger extended in universal sign language. He shrugged. “Your funeral. I’ll see you upstairs. Now, Chang. Seriously. The Old Lady is not in a good mood today.”

The figure pushed the chair back with a squeak of wheels and a muttered curse, reaching with the right hand for one of the less-chewed pretzels, the left hand being preoccupied with writing something down. Numbers, possibly, or some sort of intricate code. The muttering was cut off as teeth slid across the length of the pretzel, harvesting the salt with the heedless competence of a beaver stripping bark.

The photographs were joined by several pencil sketches of another figure, this one much shorter and, at first glance, wearing some sort of furry costume under a trenchcoat. The only color in those sketches was the dark red used to indicate the eyes, and the comments written in navy-blue ink along the margins. Having recovered them from the pile, Chang was sorting through those now, shuffling them like some sort of static cartoon book as though hoping to see it suddenly start to move.

A phone rang, this time in the office.

“Agent Chang.”

A familiar voice was on the other line; the same voice that had originally brought in the lead a year ago, off her half-joking comment about a seemingly impossible, almost supernatural event that had occurred on her watch.

He was an old friend, a trusted source, and a general pain in the ass. Chang half suspected that the other agent was right, and he was playing this out for his own twisted amusement, to see how far she’d buy into his claims of something powerful and weird just out of reach.

The thought that it might be true, that there might be a source of power—of information—out there that she might be able to tap into, to use, was the only reason she hadn’t told him to take a flying leap, and his wild stories with him. But maybe it was time. There were other ways to climb the ladder, other sources she could cultivate, if she spent the time and energy…

“Either give me something useful or go the hell away,” Chang said now, and this time she meant it.

Surprisingly, her source came through. “I can get you a meeting.”

“Why now?” The timing seemed suspect; why now, just when she was about to give up? How had he known?

Her contact, surprisingly, answered that, too. “He wouldn’t talk to you before, would have shut you down, hard. But things have changed. If you can convince him you’re useful to them.” A pause, and then, in a thoughtful voice that made her believe him, “I really think you two should talk. And soon.”

Chang agreed to let him arrange it—as if she was going to argue?—and hung up the phone. Was it more of his game? Or was the situation, as he suggested, really reaching a point where the contact—one of these alleged supernaturals—might welcome a Federal ally?

Suddenly recalling the Old Lady’s summons, Chang swore, then grabbed a thick file out of the in-box perched precariously on the edge of the desk and headed out the door, forgetting to turn off either the desk or overhead lights before heading upstairs. Despite her coworker’s jokes, she wasn’t obsessed enough to forget to handle the current caseload before going off on a wild-goose chase, no matter how interesting the goose might look.

six

Given her druthers, Wren Valere would prefer to spend her Saturday morning lazing around on the sofa with hot, quality coffee and fresh bagels, a New York Times, and absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to go except maybe the gym, if she felt like being good and dutiful.

Wren Valere did not want to spend her morning getting dressed up and going across the river to New Jersey. Wren rarely wanted to go to Jersey, except to meet with her mother, who still lived there in the town Wren had grown up in, although not—thanks to Wren’s urgings—in the same crappy place Wren had grown up in. One of the benefits of being reasonably successful was that she had convinced her mother to move to a much nicer condo several years before.

“Over there. That building.” She pointed, and they stepped off the curb in almost perfect physical accord.

Given her druthers, Wren would definitely never have spent her morning getting dressed up and going anywhere near a Tri-Com meeting, in Jersey or anywhere else for that matter. But Sergei had suggested it, reluctantly bringing up the possibility during the postjob rundown that recent events were something that the Tri-Com should know about. Despite her initial, immediate, rather strong response, he was right. Damn it.

No, she absolutely did not want to be walking across the street, heading toward the second-to-last-people in the world she ever wanted to talk to again. But she would do it. Because she had stuff that needed dealing with, and that’s what the Tri-Com was all about—taking care of loose ends and undealt-with problems.

Despite a long history of not playing well with each other, the humans and Fatae of the Cosa Nostradamus in the New York area had finally gotten their act together during the recent Troubles. Out of that had come the Truce Board, a joint program of street guards and organized information-sharing, a way to protect themselves from the Silence-funded human vigilantes who wanted them out of the city—on cold slabs, if possible.

The vigilantes had lost. So had Wren. Lost friends, lost faith, lost her way…and then gotten it all back, if shattered into a pile of bits and pieces. When the dust and blood had been cleared away, all she had wanted was to enjoy life again, work and love and figure out how all the pieces fit back together. She knew everything was stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, but she didn’t know how well those stitches would hold, if she put too much weight on them. She didn’t want to find out the hard way, either. So, walking delicate and not getting heavy in deed or thought, if she could help it. Not yet.

Meanwhile, the Truce Board had also collapsed in the messy, finger-pointing aftermath, and the re-cobbled-together remains dissolved soon after she’d Retrieved the Lost from the Silence’s distinctly unpaternal hold. But when life came back to what passed for normal, some of the lessons they learned in the process sank in, and enough lonejacks remembered the benefits of hanging together to try and keep those lessons alive.

Tri-Com—the Trilaterial Communications Group—was the result, created to facilitate the flow of communications between the Fatae breeds, the human Talent, and the human Null community. Direct quote. A neat trick, that, considering that most Nulls didn’t know that either the Fatae or Talent existed. But considering the rather high-profile and public—and messy—events during the Troubles, enough people who did know had started to get nervous. “Head small problems off now, and we have fewer nasty problems later,” Bart, one of the leaders of the Truce Board had said, when he told her what they were planning, and he was entirely correct. After Burning Bridge, the entire Cosa had nothing but distrust for any and all Nulls, even ones they had known for years, even members of their own flesh-and-blood families. Even Sergei, who had done more for them than most.