Curse the Dark

This was the tricky part, to engage but remain passive, receptive instead of proactive.

And three and two and one and… She felt herself fall into the familiar working fugue state, where the entire world was narrowed down to what was exactly in front of her, the familiar hazy sharpness kicking her Talent into gear.

Opening her palm over the surface of the drawer, Wren let the current flow gently out of her like a sprinkling of multicolored confetti falling in slow motion. Watching the current-confetti, she directed it to show her the item which had been there before, the shape and outline and concept of it, but not the details, not yet.

Normally this worked better with words to shape the intention, but she didn’t want to tip her hand in front of her already unhappy observer, not when she was supposed to be in the closet, as it were.

The current swirled, as though confused by her instructions, then seemed to catch on, flowing and coalescing into a rectangular shape. It seemed as though it were taking hours, but she didn’t dare look away to see what Frederich was doing.

Wren blinked at what was forming under her hand, and had to hold on to her temper for fear of disrupting the current. A blank surface…that couldn’t be right. Oh. Duh. Show me the shape of what was in between the slate, she amended her direction, annoyed beyond belief at her own stupidity. Hadn’t Teodosio just told them about it being stored in an envelope of sorts, to protect it?

She committed the image that appeared before her to memory, and slowly released the current, allowing the now-useless particles to dissipate.

Pulling her hand back, she cast a quick look at Frederich. He had only moved a few paces, and from his still-bored expression she figured that only a minute or two had passed. Closing the drawer carefully, she pulled up another spark of current and fed it the memory she had in her mind of the parchment and its covering. Shaping the current into a bloodhound, she set it on the trail of the missing item. Where had it been? Where was it moved to? The spark flitted back and forth as though confused. Either the tracks were too old for it to follow, or it had been moved too often, to too many places in the room for it to settle on any one trail.

Neither of those options made sense. Teodosio had told them that the parchment was checked every six months like clockwork, no less and no more, and that it was never taken out of its slate envelope, the implication being that it shouldn’t have moved very far from the drawer except on the occasion of it being stolen.

Normally, on something like this, she would be looking for elementals to question. They were mindless bits of electrical fluff, but they were occasionally useful, if you could get them focused long enough. But elementals were lazy things that preferred to gather where there was already a source of current for them to rest in. A building without electrical wiring was not going to appeal to them.

Appeal…current…elementals…slate covers…Something about that—

Suddenly she was back in the tiny office off the bio lab in her old high school. John Ebeneezer perched on his usual stool, lecturing her about what she needed to know, to control her Talent, to be an effective conductor of current…

Wren unconsciously pulled more current up out of her core, molding it in her hand like clay as she tried to remember. It was an old habit, from back when Neezer was on her constantly to think of current as an extension of her own body.

Think, Valere, think. Slate was graphite, at least partially. Graphite conducted electricity. But slate was the least conductive form of the natural graphites, which is why it was okay for roofing…Why had they used slate to protect the parchment? Were they trying to keep current out? Or bring it in? Something was wrong. Something didn’t fit.

“Ehi! Che cosa fai?”

The sudden noise startled her, and she lost control of the strand of current. It leaped from her hand, hitting the ceiling and bouncing back at her, expanding onto a sparkling, sparking jellyfish shape as it stretched out like a living thing, visible to anyone, Talent or Null.

Frederich screamed, and Wren swore, trying to recapture the current before it did damage to any of the furnishings. Frederich could take care of his own damn self and whatever happened he deserved, spooking her like that when she was working!

“Damn, damn, damn, damn,” she singsonged. Calm, damn it, be calm! She reached out, coaxing it back into her hand. As each bit touched her skin, she took it back down through her epidermis, through the muscle tissue, and down into her core. She was too tired, too suddenly hyped on adrenaline, to be as thorough as she should, and it fought her, sparking and burning wherever it could.

“Diavolo! Strega!” Frederich was screaming at her now, but she couldn’t focus on what he was saying, even if she’d been able to understand it. He was waving his arms and making faces. She hoped, with whatever attention she had to spare, that he wasn’t having an epileptic fit or anything.

“Wren!”

Sergei burst into the room, followed hard on by Teodosio and two other men. She assumed they were monks. She didn’t particularly care, at that point. The last of the current sank below her skin and disappeared with a sharp, stinging slap on her flesh. Sinking to her haunches, she curled her arms around herself and tried to force the current all the way down, down to where it couldn’t do any harm, couldn’t give her away.

“Wren?” And then Sergei was there, his arms around her, and she felt herself fall apart. “I’m sorry,” she thought she whispered, but didn’t know quite what she was apologizing for.

“What do you mean, mellow out? She’s never been out of the country before, you know.” P.B. bit back a growl, feeling his ears go flat against his head in agitation. The water fountain against the far wall made a metallic plinking noise as drops fell, turning wheels and gears that powered the ceiling fan circling lazily overhead. Through the one window the sounds of midday traffic came through, sounding farther away than it actually was.

“I mean, relax, okay? Genevieve’s a big girl. She knows how to take care of herself. And anyway, she went to Vancouver last year.”

P.B. waved a clawed paw in dismissal. “Vancouver. Pfffhah. Canada. That’s not a real border. And they speak English there. Mostly. They do, don’t they? Yeah, ’cause they filmed X-Files there. And Forever Knight. And SG-1.”

“You watch way too much TV.”

“Oh yeah, ’cause there’s so much else in my life that needs to be doing. Gimme a break. Cable is all that makes Western civilization worthwhile.”

The demon was pacing back and forth in the open area of Lee’s studio, tapping his claws together in a way that Wren had once told Lee indicated extreme emotional agitation. So far, the lanky artist had been forced to redirect P.B. at least once, when his pacing path came too close to the work in progress, a surprisingly delicate apple tree, four feet high and made entirely of copper and pewter. Sergei had promised him a show if he could come up with works smaller than his usual garden installments of bronze and steel, and Lee rather thought this piece was the start of that show. Be damned if he’d let some hyper-tense fatae screw it up by waving an arm in the wrong place.

“What’s really bothering you? The fact that she’s out of the country—or the fact that Didier’s with her?”

P.B. stopped, turned, and stared at Lee. While the human was glad that he’d gotten the demon’s attention, having those dark red eyes stare at him was…unnerving. He mentally ratcheted his opinion of their mutual friend up from “brave but crazy” to “brave but insane” for describing the fatae in front of him as “adorable.” Even if she had added “like a rabid mongoose” to that.

“You think—that I—I could…” He finally spluttered down, and returned to glaring at the Talent. “It’s not that I don’t like the guy, okay? ’Cause, well, I don’t. Much. Okay, he’s okay for a human. And Wren loves him, even if she’s way too freaked by the whole concept of a relationship to admit it—”

Lee did a mild second take at that bit of information. He had noticed that things seemed a little more tense around the partners than before, but hadn’t realized they were heading in that direction. Suddenly, a few things made a little more sense. He made a mental note to discuss that turn of events with his wife, once he got rid of his surprise guest.

“No, the fact that her fataephobic partner is with her is…actually reassuring. In that if I’m not there to look out for her he will, as much as his wussy human reflexes allow him to. If the Council comes gunning for her, ’cause you know they will, they’ve got their people everywhere. But, see, I could do it better. But did they ask me? No! All I get is ‘P.B., gotta go, watch the apartment, willya?’ Like I was some kind of plant-watering petsitter.”

“Oh for…” Suddenly Lee had had it with the demon’s self-pity party. The bastard was lonely—which explained why he’d made this unexpected drop-in to the human’s studio only a day after the two had left—and he just had to get the hell over it. “That’s not what they asked you to do at all.”

P.B. threw his compact body onto the only other chair in the room, a brown leather recliner that must have seen better decades, and was in the studio as a stopping point on its way to the dump. A disconsolate snarl rose from his throat, and Lee’s skin prickled. Then the noise stopped, as though P.B. had suddenly realized it was coming from him, and the demon sighed instead, a remarkably human sound. “Yeah, I know. But it felt like that. They get to go off and do exciting things, and I’m stuck behind. Ignoring the whole ‘how the hell could you get on a plane’ thing ’cause yeah, know that, live that. It sucks living in a human world, you know that?”

Demons, unlike any of the other known fatae races, were created—according to one story, somewhere back in the mists of magic, a mad Talent had manipulated several races into creating what he had thought would be an interesting subspecies of servant. Over the generations since then the bloodline had gone in several different directions as the parent genes reasserted themselves, but they were all immediately recognizable by their blood-red eyes. The Cosa referred to them all collectively as “demon,” with all the implicit emotional and psycho logical baggage attached.

“I know.” Being a Talent was no picnic either, even if he only used current to weld his sculptures. The fact that he had married outside of the Cosa was a constant source of amazement to all concerned; it was rare to find a Null that you could tell about magic, much less admit that you used it on a regular basis.

Maybe that was why Wren and Sergei felt, once he got over the shock, like such an obvious idea. They already knew each other’s secrets, after all. After Wren, even the most fascinating socialite on the Manhattan art scene was probably a bit…tame.

“Look, P.B., the truth is I know for a fact that Wren asked you to do something really important, because she asked me to be your backup. So take that for what it’s worth—you’re point person, and I’m office support. How’s that supposed to make me feel?”

P.B. made a rude, wet noise through his nose. “Relieved?”

Lee laughed at that. Point, made and well taken. His reputation for noninvolvement in Cosa affairs was widely known. He heard more gossip that way. And nobody expected him to actually act on any of it. Which meant he could—when he chose to.

“So, what have you heard?” P.B. leaned forward, his chin resting on the pads of his hands—claws now semi-sheathed—and looking unnervingly like a petite, white-fur-covered version of Rodin’s “The Thinker.”

Lee leaned back in his own chair, legs the length of P.B.’s entire body stretched out in front of him. “The gossip mills have been churning,” he admitted. “It’s mostly low-level stuff, no more boneheaded moves like they did last spring, locking down anyone who bucked them, Mage or not. But I don’t think they’ve backed off. That’s not Council style, much as those bastards have any.

“Stuff that might affect us directly? I’ve already told Wren most of it, the stuff the Council’s spreading about her. But that’s personal, not…” Lee picked up a scrap of iron and smoothed it with his hands, almost absently softening the edges until the metal flowed into gentle undulations. “I’ve heard some talk, though. Not even rumors, but hints and whispers of rumors. That the Council’s gearing up for another push against unaffiliates—” lonejacks, he meant. “A push that’s going to be ugly.”

“It ain’t never been anything but,” P.B. said strongly. “Not when it comes to the Council. Just you guys, or all the fatae who ain’t them? And any idea if Wren’s going to be the primary target again, like this spring, or…?”

“Not a clue. I think, though, they’re going to go for less…alerted targets.” He grimaced. “Christ, listen to me. I sound like a bad made-for-TV war movie.”

For the first time, Lee was able to discern a distinct and recognizable emotion on the demon’s flat, furred face. Unhappiness. “It is a war,” he said sadly, his claws flexing again. “Or if not yet, soon. Really, really soon. And we’re gonna be right in the middle of it.”

Chapter Six

Despite the optimistic words of the forecasters that morning, the heat was, if anything, worse when Andre finally left the unmarked, unremarkable building that housed the Silence at seven o’clock on Saturday evening. There was still a stack of work on his desk, but all the reachable fires had been put out, the recalcitrant cats herded into a corner, and only one last item of business to deal with before he could collapse with a brandy and the book he had been trying to finish now for almost a month.

The asphalt was soft underfoot, and he winced as he stepped onto it, mentally tabulating the cost to get the marks off his shoes. God how he hated summers in the city.

A plane roared overhead, and he looked up instinctively. His two reluctant operatives must be on the job in Italy by now, hopefully with the bit firmly between their teeth. Giving them a tip of his nonexistent hat, he continued across the street and on to his meeting.

His assistant was waiting in a far booth, out of the busy flow of traffic.

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