Burning Bridges

“Stay safe,” he said again. But she had disappeared into the crowd, and even he couldn’t find her.

Wren hadn’t actually gone anywhere, using the crowd to backtrack to the food court. From there, she watched two men sitting at a table, one of them drinking a coffee, the other flicking an unlit cigarillo between elegant dark-skinned fingers. She had seen that restless motion before; Sergei, with his thin-rolled cigarettes. She had never seen him actually light one, never known him to inhale anything other than the aroma of a good wine. But he would roll a cigarette between his fingers like a magician with a coin, whenever he was deep in thought. Or nervous.

Now she knew where he had learned it.

“Idiot man.” If she’d come back and surprised the three of them together, she would have known by Sergei’s reaction what was up, end of story. He could pull the poker face only so far on her, these days. She thought, anyway. But the way he rushed her off…

It didn’t matter. Much. Keeping her and his Excellency Andre Felhim far apart was an excellent idea, no matter the circumstances. Someday she really was going to forget what manners Neezer had taught her, and give that arrogant, supercilious know-little a good shocking-to.

So. Sergei probably had the very best of intentions. Let it go, Valere. She really did have errands to run, of a sort, and this was as good a place as any to do them.

She found a quiet place to sit, on the edge of an indoor planter, with weird frondy things that almost hid her from sight. Closing her eyes and letting the clatter around her fade into white noise, she grounded and centered, reached inside and stroked one thin snake of current inside her. Prepared, she sent out a flurry of pings, directed mental knocks, to half a dozen Talent that she knew worked or lived in the immediate area.

Then she sat back to wait. It took exactly six and a half minutes for the first response to come in.

Wren lifted the lid of her gingerbread latte and inhaled the aroma as though it were oxygen, and she hyperventilating.

“Are you going to drink that, or have sex with it?”

“I can’t do both?”

There were three of them around the small, round table: Wren, in jeans and sweater dressed for warmth and comfort, an older man with a smooth-shaven head and dark blue eyes, wearing a white shirt over dark cords, and a woman with a thick black ponytail setting off her red sweaterdress. She looked like a college student compared to their crisp professionalism.

The man watched while she took a deep sip, tracking the liquid as it slid down her throat.

“You must be a hell of a co—”

“Michael!” The woman in the dress slapped his arm before he could finish the thought.

Michael’s eyes twinkled innocently, and Wren managed to swallow before laughing.

“Seriously,” he went on. “You called. We’re here. What do you want from us?”

Wren put her drink down on the table, needing to take a moment to collect her thoughts. The last time she had tried to canvass for information, half the Cosa had crossed the street rather than talk to her, and the ones who couldn’t get away balked at every question. Now, all she had to do was ping a Talent, and they showed up. And paid for the coffee. All it took was a rumor that you were responsible for lifting the darkness of the summer heat wave, even if nobody was quite sure what the darkness had been or how it ended; of being the lonejack who faced down the Council; of being…all things she wished she’d never become. But today, it was useful. So she’d use it.

“Is this about the meetings they’ve been having?”

“What have you heard about it?” Michael was a lonejack and Seta was Council, but neither of them worked with their Talent: he was a lawyer, she taught history at a charter school in midtown. They were about as close as you could get to the Cosa’s middle class, if such a thing existed.

“Not much.” Michael took a sip of his coffee. “That there were meetings going on, high-level stuff, the Council coming down among the unwashed masses, more fatae seen in town than anyone can remember…Is it true, that someone’s hunting them?”

Seta sighed. “You are so painfully out of touch…. Didn’t you hear about the Moot Massacre?”

Wren blinked. All right, she had missed that particular nickname for the attack….

“I figured it had been exaggerated, or something.” Michael didn’t seem too abashed.

“Lonejacks,” Wren said with a long-suffering sigh. “They just don’t care.”

“Damn straight,” Michael agreed.

“Well, you have to care, now,” she said, suddenly serious. “Because it’s true, all of it. True and serious and in your face, right here, right now.”

Wren suddenly felt a tingle on the back of her neck, as though someone was staring at her. But when she glanced casually around the Starbucks, everyone seemed intent on their own business. She looked out the glass window, thinking it might have come from out there. For once, there was no snow actively falling, but the streets were slushy, and the curbs and sidewalks were still coated with a dingy gray-white mix of slush and ice that caused pedestrians to walk with particular care or risk going down on their backsides. Preoccupied with staying upright, none of them were looking in at her.

Wren shook her head, telling herself that it was probably just someone’s fur coat against the gray of sky and street that had flickered in the corner of her eye.

Whatever it was, it was gone now.

“Yo, you with us?” Michael asked, peering at her intently. “You zoned for a moment.”

“Did you…” She shook her head, dropping the unasked question. “Yeah. I’m here. So, now you know the deal. My question is—would you join a patrol if they were organized, all three groups together? Keep an eye on things, report back, be willing to be part of a multipronged, organized approach to what’s going down?”

Michael nodded once, firmly, without having to consider the question very long.

Wren added, because she had to know: “Even if the Council voted against it?”

Seta looked like she’d just felt the rough brick of a wall come up against her back, hard. “Voted…” She sighed, and stared down into her cup. “Look, if the Council says no, we—Council members—jump no. You know that. But if they don’t say anything specifically that is shaped like a no and sounds like a no and smells like a no…”

“Then it’s not actually a no.”

“Not actually, no.”

Wren nodded. It wasn’t good enough, but it was the best she was going to get. And there were others she needed to meet with before she could call it a day. No rest for the weary…

six

Sergei walked into the main room and came to a full stop, staring at the disaster that greeted him. “Merry Christmas?”

Wren made a face, glaring at the pile of cards she still had to sign, stamp, and mail out. She’d conned Sergei into printing up her address lists on his computer at the office the month before, so all she had to do was peel off the labels and stick them on. Her mother would be horrified—“holiday cards should always be handwritten, Genevieve”—but she figured the Miss Manners points she’d lose she’d make up in ego-points with her fellow lonejacks, who would know that she’d somehow managed to use not only a computer, but a printer, as well.

That time-saver hadn’t managed to keep her piles of envelopes, cards, and colored pens in any semblance of order, however. Nor had it gotten her ass in gear any earlier, despite everything being ready and waiting for weeks now.

In her own defense, she had been a little busy. And, damn. Tea. The urge to make it arrived, a little late.

Sergei was going to have to make his own this time.

Sergei closed the door, unwound the muffler from his neck, took off his coat, and hung them both in the closet. The snow was falling again outside, based on the dampness of his shoulders and hair. Normally snow on Christmas Eve would be a thing to delight in. This year, it was just cause for sighing and shrugging. The weatherfolk were reporting a record seven feet of the cold stuff so far for the winter, coming up on the record from 2001, and there were still two months of the season to go.

She’d gotten too used to Sergei being here, maybe, for the old early warning tea-urge to kick in.

Wren had all the curtains drawn across the windows, and in the corner, instead of a tree, there was a metal candelabra in the shape of a Christmas tree with thirteen green candles burning. She saw her partner studying it, and knew that he was seeing Lee’s work in the turn of the metal branches, and the solid but somehow delicate design of the base. It hurt, still, to look at it, but it was a good kind of a hurt, now. It was a remembering kind of a hurt, as well as a missing hurt.

For a borderline klepto, she didn’t have many belongings—she’d take something she liked, and then discard it when she got bored—but this, and the fabric painting Shin had sent her all the way from Japan, were more than things. They were gifts.

She looked up at her partner, now, indicating the piles of holiday cards in front of her. “Why do I send these things out, anyway?”

“I have no idea.”

If you sent them out early, they were an unwelcome reminder that the holidays were coming and you still had too many things to do. If they arrived during the holidays, they were just tossed with the rest of the cards in some sort of display that just meant another thing to clean up after. And if you sent them too late, you looked like a slacker. You just couldn’t win. But this year at least it gave her hands something to do, and occupied a portion of her brain so that she wasn’t always circling around back to the thing she couldn’t actually do anything about.

Sergei slipped off his shoes and sat down on the floor next to her, wincing as his expensive slacks came into contact with the floor. “Been cleaning again, have you?”

Wren sniffed, smelling the wood oil she had used on the floor. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “And it was on my to-do list.”

“You’ve never had a to-do list in your entire life.” She wrote things down, but for memory-jogs and references, not to keep things orderly or organized.

“In my head. My head is stuffed full of to-do lists.” A whole list of things to keep her hands busy. “Here,” and she pushed a small pile of invites across the floor to him. “As long as you’re here, be useful and stuff these in the envelopes.”

He obligingly started placing the cards inside the addressed envelopes, and tabbed the stamps on them without being asked.

“I miss licking stamps.”

She shook her head; her hair, still wet from the shower she had taken once the bathroom was spotless, slid pleasantly on the back of her neck. She had taken extra care with her appearance tonight: a long velvet skirt and sleeveless top in a deep purple the exact shade of shadows. She had even used eyeliner to give herself what she thought was a slightly exotic look. But her hair was merely combed through and left to dry by itself. There was only so much fuss she was willing to go through, even for Sergei. “You’re a sick, sick man.”

“True. But I brought dinner, so I’m forgiven.”

She had heard him messing about in the kitchen just after he entered the apartment, even before he took his coat off. “Yeah? And do we have a Christmas goose resting in the oven?”

She looked up at him again as she said it, and did a classic double take at the crestfallen look of “surprise ruined” on his face.

“A goose?” She did not squeal—she never squealed—but the noise was apparently enough to restore some of Sergei’s self-satisfaction, even as she launched herself onto him in an exuberant hug. “Goose!”

The world, apparently, could go to hell in a snow-covered hand basket, so long as one had goose for dinner.

“I invited some people over for dessert, later,” she said, letting him up after appropriate thanks had been offered and accepted.

“Oh?” They had never actually spent Christmas Eve together before, so he couldn’t know if this was normal or not.

“Well, Bonnie. And P.B.”

“You had to actually invite him? I expected him to appear the moment the refrigerator door was opened.”

“Hush. Yes, for dessert. Also a couple of Bonnie’s friends, a bunch of PUPs”—the rather grandiosely named Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigators—“and P.B. said he would bring some ‘cousins’ he wanted me to meet.”

“So this is more of a working get-together, then.”

Wren twisted her mouth as though tasting something sour. “I like Bonnie, and she is a neighbor. And it’s never a bad thing to be on good terms with PUPs. And although most of the fatae don’t seem to have any religion as such, I have yet to meet one who didn’t love sweets.”

“Then I’d best get dinner warmed up, or we might not have a chance to finish before the sugar-craving hordes descend.” He leaned forward to kiss her again, and then got up off the floor, more slowly than he’d sat down.

“I’m getting too old for this,” he said, stretching out his back. “Would you mind terribly actually buying some comfortable chairs, at some point?”

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