Burning Bridges

Ayexi was good. He was cool, and smooth, and on the surface you might think he was discussing china patterns, or the price of something he had no interest in buying. But Wren could see the faint twitch over his left brow, the one that meant he was sweating inside. The Council was taking this seriously. Good. It was their fat in the fire, too: you didn’t get a stamp on your forehead that said “council” when you joined; anyone gunning for Talents wouldn’t discriminate based on your internal allegiances. That much, Wren was pretty damn sure about. More, Madame Howe, the head of the Eastern Council, was pretty damn sure about it, too. Enough to cover all her bases, by sending her people to this table for parlay even after doing her damnedest to break the local lonejack community to the Council’s yoke. It might only be for appearance’s sake, but if Jordan and Ayexi were willing to take it seriously, they could maybe accomplish something despite the politics.

“No matter their reasons, by attacking indiscriminately, both human and fatae, these…vigilantes showed that they do not distinguish. They chose not to distinguish.” Beyl was definite on that.

“The associate of my enemy is my enemy,” Ayexi said.

“Exactly.” Beyl’s feathered head gave a decided nod of agreement.

Wren could feel Sergei wince, beside her, even though he didn’t move. The answer to that was not to be the associate of the enemy, an answer they couldn’t afford the Council to make.

So far, everyone was falling into their preconceived roles: the fatae calling for attack, the Council wanting to hold the status quo without too much risk, and the lonejacks wary of either position—and of making any decision at all. Time to shake things up a bit.

“There have been reports.” Michaela looked down at the material Wren had given her before the meeting started, all the details she and P.B. could recall, from all their meetings and discussions and overheard conversations over the past twelve months. “There have been reports of these…bigots taunting fatae. Calling them animals, yes…but also calling them on their use of magic.”

“Fatae do not use magic!”

Jordan sounded almost outraged at the thought, as though a fatae had dared snitch something of his own possession. But he was right. Fatae, for the most part, were magic, deep in their bones and sinews, but they didn’t use it. They weren’t designed to channel current the way Talents were. In their own way, they were as Null as…as Wren’s mother.

Okay, she amended that thought. Nobody is as Null as my mother.

“You’re missing the point,” Michaela said.

“You’re pushing the point. And I’m not entirely sure I buy into your argument.”

Beyl leaned into the table, a feather coming loose and floating, slowly, to the floor. Wren found her attention focusing on that, and had to bring herself back to the discussion at hand—and talon—with an effort.

“We are the Cosa Nostradamus. If that is to mean anything, it must mean something now. It must mean solidarity. It must mean accountability. It must mean that we can count on each other—for support—and for shared defense. In their eyes, we are all one, and worthy of disdain, fear, and violence. We must show them that we are also one in our response, and that response must be worthy of respect—and teach them to leave us alone.”

Beyl built a pretty good case for a counterattack against their enemy—except that she couldn’t, for certain, say where the attacks were coordinated from, assuming they had any single source at all. Any attack the Cosa made would be based on reactive information, not proactive. Wren wouldn’t have wanted to go on a Retrieval with such sketchy info, ignoring the fact that she already had, once.

And see where that landed you? Learn from it!

“We can’t afford that sort of attack.” Michaela was parroting what Wren had been beating into their heads from the beginning: that without something concrete and significant, any large-scale act of aggression would be met with even fiercer aggression and even more justification from their enemy. She had been talking about the Council at the time, but it was even more true here.

Although lonejacks were better at violence than they were at organization, as a rule.

“We can’t afford not to, either.” Ayexi looked surprised to be agreeing with the fatae—almost as surprised as Jordan looked, to hear his advisor taking the lead. He went on, undaunted. “You are correct, Michaela, Madame Griffin. If this threat is to all Talents—to all the Cosa—then we need to take action. Before it spreads beyond this city.”

Wren got it. From the exhalation of breath from her partner beside her, he figured it out at the same moment, as well. Michaela was a little slower, but she got there. Beyl’s feathered eyebrows rose in puzzlement. The fatae were clearly not as au courant—pun intended—on Talent politics as they should be.

The de facto leader of the New York City-area Council, KimAnn Howe, had just brokered a significant—and tradition-breaking—merger with the San Diego Mage Council, bringing their leader into a subordinate level to her own. It was a risky, distinctly ballsy move that, if it hadn’t been for the attacks, would have been the primary concern facing the lonejacks—had, in fact, been the primary concern just a few months earlier, when the Council was being twitchy while she made her moves.

If Madame Howe could not now prove to the local members of the Council—and the other Councils across the country—that she could control things in her own city, then she would lose the power amassed by that merger.

KimAnn Howe did not let go of power easily, if at all. Especially not after what she had gone through to get it.

“You are proposing…?”

“A truce. A…cessation of any probing for weaknesses, or maneuverings, or any kind of hostilities, overt or otherwise. On all sides.”

Wren, by sheer force of effort, didn’t roll her eyes in disgust. In other words, do nothing.

“Too passive. And entirely within your best interest, but doing nothing for the fatae. What can you give to us?” Beyl asked.

Jordan started to spread his hands, as though to say he was out of ideas, when a new voice piped up.

“What about reinstituting the patrols?” Beyl’s assistant, the until-now silent gnome, poked his head up over the tabletop and peered at them all, black eyes sparkling with interest. “They did the job proper, they did, back then.”

Wren almost fell off her chair. Oh, perfect! Damn it, as one of those former patrollers, she should have been the one to think of that! They’d done it twice, actually; once when the piskies decided to take their pranking to near-dangerous levels, and had to be sat on, and then again more recently, when there had been a series of attacks on the fatae—attacks that, in hindsight, were probably the first inroads of vigilantism, the early attempts of the so-called “pest exterminators” to clear the city of what they perceived as an infestation of nonhumans. So it had the value of precedent, wasn’t so proactive as to unnerve the Council, but gave the fatae something real to work with….

“It was only a short-term cure,” Michaela was saying, dubious. “A preventative…”

“A deterrent,” Beyl said, warming to the idea as though she’d been proposing it all along. And perhaps she had. Wren admired griffins in general and Beyl in particular for many reasons, and sneaky maneuverings was high on the list of why. “Earlier, we used volunteers, whatever was available. It was lonejacks, mainly, then. Here…we can recruit specifically, from all the Talent. Match partners together, Talent and fatae, to create an effective pairing, as your Wren Valere and the demon P.B. have created such an effective team on their own.”

Ouch. Zing. Yeah, they had clearly thought this out beforehand. But that didn’t make it any less a usable solution for being tricksy.

“A pairing that will scare the hell out of any would-be assailant?” Jordan sounded like he rather enjoyed that idea, as well.

“Long enough to give us a chance to trace their source. Find out who is funding them—and why. Who is behind all of this.”

Wren sat back in her chair, and reached for the diet soda she had placed on the floor next to her feet, popping it open with a hiss that earned her dirty looks from Jordan and the gnome. Now they were getting to the meat of the problem….

“Well. That was fun.”

“It was?”

“Zhenchenka. Hush.”

They were standing in the lobby of the building, pulling on gloves and wrapping scarves before going out into the wintry weather. It wasn’t snowing, but the wind was fierce, and the bare limbs of the saplings outside looked to be shivering. Sergei had bought her a pair of fleece-lined leather gloves when the first snap of cold weather hit, and while they were an almost decadent buttery lambskin, she was still breaking them down to a usable flexibility.

“I was useless in there,” she continued, flexing her fingers inside the leather. “I came up with nothing, contributed nothing…I might as well have stayed in the shadows, for all the good I did.”

“You were extremely useful in there.” Michaela was firm on that. “Both in the briefing you gave me beforehand and the advice you were able to give me ongoing, about our esteemed companions.”

True, Wren had been able to head off a few potential missteps, as Michaela had never worked with griffins before, and made the usual errors of thinking of them, however subconsciously, as smart animals instead of peers.

“And now you will be even more valuable. To us, and to the Cosa overall.”

Sergei’s managerial antenna perked up, and he looked at Michaela, his eyes squinting suspiciously at her too-innocent tone.

“How valuable?”

“Beyond price.”

“By which she means, beyond payment.” The two women grinned at each other, more a grimace of stress than real amusement, and then Wren sighed, resigned again to her fate. “All right, what are you about to sign me up for, now?”

“Keep the lines of communication open.”

“Huh?”

“Keep them talking to each other,” Michaela elaborated.

“Keep who what?”

“Don’t be dense, Valere.” Michaela pushed the door open and went outside, leaving the other two no choice but to follow her. Wren gasped a little as the cold air hit her face. You forgot, sitting in an overheated conference room, how cold cold actually was. “All three sides of the equation—lonejack, fatae, and Council. The idea of a truce, while we figure out what’s going on, is all well and good, but we need to also be able to figure things out. Which means communication. They’re going to need a push, all of them, to remember why it’s important to play nice. We need someone who can get close enough to make that push.”

“You can do that,” Sergei said, nodding. He took her arm, and then crooked his other so that Michaela could slide her hand under his elbow, which she did.

“Do what?” Wren felt like an idiot, but she had lost them at the last sharp turn in the conversation.

“Keep everyone talking,” Michaela repeated, as though speaking to a child. “You and the demon. You started that, created the first bridge, with your friendships among the Council, your familiarity with the fatae breeds. Now we need you to maintain it.” Her voice softened. “It’s what Lee—”

“Michaela. Don’t. Go. There.” She might be willing to be manipulated, in a good cause, if they really needed her, but she would not allow them to use Lee’s memory to do it. Not yet. Not ever.

Lee had died during a Retrieval gone wrong—not because of the Retrieval itself, but because a fatae got stupid, and Lee had to be a hero. His widow still refused to speak to Wren.

“Think about it,” Michaela said. It wasn’t a request. Wren didn’t dignify it with a response.

The three of them walked down the street to the subway station in silence, heads down against the wind. The Council members had been picked up by car service, of course. Ayexi had given a faint wave as he folded himself into the sedan, while the moment they left the conference room Jordan had acted as though the others had disappeared from sight. Typical. Ayexi was never going to survive in the Council, if he kept being friendly like that.

Beyl had been bundled into the back of a van in the loading bay, and her gnome companion had driven away, heading uptown, doubtless heading out of the city to wherever her herd was based for the winter.

Wren bit back a sigh. Michaela was right, damn her. This had started long before today. Before she attended her first Moot. Before she had gotten the first flyer advertising a “pest removal” company that was the vigilantes’ first cover for their activities, when they were soliciting and recruiting new members. Before P.B. and Lee had used her apartment as a meeting place, to get the fatae talking about what was going on, to get them to open up and trust someone outside their closed, clannish communities.

It had started the first day she had met her first fatae, and called him “cousin,” as Neezer had taught her. It had started the afternoon P.B. brought the first courier package to the then-newbie Retriever, and she merely handed him a napkin when he snitched a slice of pizza.

The fatae trusted P.B., despite the fact that demon were generally not among the most outgoing or social of the fatae breeds, and through him, they trusted her. The lonejack didn’t trust her, exactly, but the Troika, as Sergei called the leadership, was relying on her, and that was more weight on her shoulders; weight she didn’t want, didn’t need. And the Council…well, that was going to be the unknown they were solving for, wasn’t it? What reminders, what nudges would keep the Council at the table?

She knew Ayexi. She knew people on that side of the river. More, KimAnn and her Council flunkies knew her, Wren. Knew and maybe possibly a little bit respected her, by now. Listened to her, they’d proven that, as much as KimAnn listened to anything other than her ego.

Michaela got on the uptown 5 train. Wren and Sergei caught the downtown 6. The moment they were inside, and the doors closed behind them, Sergei wrapped his arms around her, pulling Wren into an awkward, but oddly comforting embrace, resting his chin on the top of her head. The hair that had escaped the pins holding the coil in place tickled against the back of her neck, under her scarf, and she was sweating in the stale air of the overheated, overcrowded subway, but she didn’t move.

“I don’t know if I can do this.” Her words were muffled against the wool of his overcoat, but he understood her.

“They hired you. Why?”

Damn his oh so logical, analytical habits…“They didn’t hire me, I volunteered. Because I’m a moron.”

He didn’t sigh, but he might as well have. “Work with me on this, Genevieve. They brought you on board to do the job because…why?”

“Because I’m the best.” Best Retriever, yeah. This wasn’t a Retrieval. It was…

“It’s the same.” Like he was reading her mind. Which he couldn’t. Except somehow he did. “It’s about seeing the details and creating a plan. About adapting to situations as they change. Playing the scenario as it evolves, bringing back—Retrieving—the information the Troika needs. You can do it. Just finish the job.”

His ever-repeated advice, in every situation. The magic mantra. Finish the job. The act of finishing the job proves it’s possible. So long as you’re focused on the job, the practical details of the job, you don’t have time to panic over the magnitude. The potential pitfalls. The ramifications.

She knew the logic behind the magic. Somehow, it wasn’t as reassuring as it used to be.

And he left something out of the equation. Payment. Everything costs. That was his mantra, as well, what he had taught her better than any community college business course. Value for value, preferably in their favor. And Wren couldn’t help wondering, as she snugged closer into his embrace, what the cost of all this would be, when the blood and dust all settled.

three

When Wren got to the landing of her fifth-floor walk-up apartment, the phone was ringing. Odds were it wasn’t Sergei, who had stopped at the bank on the corner to hit his ATM, sending her on ahead. Teller machines normally ignored all but the most overt current displays, but she was, as he indelicately pointed out, a bit tight-wound from the meeting, and likely to be twitchy with current. Better safe than sorry when her partner was down to a handful of singles in his wallet.

Wren never used ATMs, herself. It wasn’t about the risk, however minimal, of frying the machine; she just liked to have a face to go with the figures who had their fingers all over her money. Sergei, on the other hand, never used anything but, despite constantly griping to anyone who would listen about not being able to get anything smaller than a twenty-dollar bill. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t get to the bank during their normal hours—what was going to happen, the boss would yell at him for being late? But no, he was never willing to take the extra few minutes it took to go into the lobby and deal with a teller in person, during actual work hours.

Some days, she really didn’t understand her partner at all.

Locks undone and door opened, no rush, and the phone was still ringing. It was either someone who was very determined, or someone who knew a. that she didn’t have an answering machine and b. that she was home.

Or…

“Hello?”

Or it was her mother, a woman of determination, certitude, and the stubborn conviction that her daughter wouldn’t dare not pick up the phone if she was on the other line.

Her mother was, of course, completely right in that assumption.

Wren dropped her keys into the dish on the counter, and shoved her gloves into her coat pocket. “Hey Mom. How’s Seattle?”

Her mother had, at her request, gone on an extended vacation back in September, when things first got significantly ugly. Wren hadn’t been sure when things were going to break open, but she knew she wanted her totally magic-Null mother as far away from it as possible. It would have been unthinkable, previously, to consider someone going after a Null relative in order to injure a Talent…but there were so many other unthinkables suddenly being thought that Wren had figured better safe than sorry.

Some days Wren thought it would be better—certainly easier—if her mother moved out of the area entirely, to somewhere that the name “Valere” wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in any circles. Hell, some days she thought she should move….

Fortunately, her mother had found that trip so enjoyable that it had turned into a series of cross-country relative visitations, a new one every few weeks as Margot could get away from her job. The fact that it also made Margot into a moving—and therefore less appealing—target was something Wren wisely kept to herself.

In payment for that peace of mind, Wren was now getting the color commentary blow-by-blow by phone. Currently, it was cousin Jeanne’s turn for a Royal Visit, out in not-so-sunny Seattle.

“Uh-huh. Yeah?”

Wren shrugged out of her coat one arm at a time, transferring the phone from ear to ear as she did so. Measuring the distance to the closet against the length of the phone cord, she draped the coat on the counter, and dropped her bag and keys on top of it. Sergei would put everything away when he came upstairs.

“And the kitten?” she asked her mother, having reached the end of a recital on Jeanne’s present condition, which was fine, loving her new job, still not dating anyone new after dumping her most recent significant other.

The kitten was Jeanne’s son, Kit. He would be…Wren searched her memory, coming up blank. Ten? Eleven? There wasn’t all that much family on her mother’s side, and none that she knew of on her male genetic donor’s side, that she should have such a blank spot on that information.

Not that it mattered. Her mother, hopeless when it came to seeing or remembering anything odd or unpleasant in her daughter’s life, had excellent recall for things familial, and a willingness to share it at the drop of a hint. All Wren had to do was make interested noises until the older woman ran down.

Wren perched herself on one of the stools, and settled in, reaching across the counter for a pen and scratch paper to write down her thoughts about the morning’s meeting, while she listened.

Nothing like a little multitasking to keep your mind off how impossible her to-do list was. But hey, look on the bright side, she thought. At least you know the depth of the kimchi you’ve been thrown into, right?

“Isn’t that a little young?” she interrupted her mother. “No, I don’t remember what I was like at that age, sorry.”

1 get feedback from Beyl on meeting for Quad

2 talk up the idea of Patrols on the street, see who jumps. Esp. fatae.

3 …

Sergei came in through the door before she could think of a third thing. He heard her talking on the phone, obviously made an instant—and correct—evaluation of who was on the other end of the line, and waggled his fingers in greeting to her mother, with whom he had a rather strained, you’re-sleeping-with-my-daughter relationship.

When Wren nodded, not pausing in either her monosyllabic responses to her mother or her pencil-twirling, he put her bag and keys on the counter and hung her coat up alongside his in the closet, then disappeared down the hallway.

Either the bathroom, or her office, she guessed. Sergei had been away from the office all day, and while he was getting better at letting his assistant, that kiss-ass weasel Lowell, handle things, he still liked to have a hand on the spoon if things were actively cooking. Which was a terrible metaphor, but she was distracted, damn it.

“Wait a minute, he did what?” Wren put her pen down, to-do list half-made, and listened more carefully to her mother’s story. Family politics were as intricate as Cosa politics, but far more entertaining….

Down the hall, Sergei sat down at Wren’s computer and booted it up. Her voice carried down the hallway, and the sound of laughter lightened his own dark mood considerably.

There had been very little laughter in this apartment, lately. Too much tragedy, tension, trauma, and all sorts of words beginning with T. Very little laughter in their lives, overall, actually. Since…Since Lee died, probably. Before then, even when things were making them crazy, even when Wren was injured and he was losing his mind over keeping her safe, and they didn’t know when—or if—the next job would come in, there had still been laughter. Strained, sometimes; but laughter. When had it gone wrong?

Sergei knew when: the moment he had negotiated that deal with his former employers, abandoning ten years of hard-won independence on his part in order to make sure Wren was protected from the Council. And for what? The Silence had their own issues, and that agreement put him—and Wren—smack-dab in the middle of those issues, exactly where they couldn’t afford to be.

He had put them there; it was his responsibility to get them out. But it was as delicate a process as the original deal had been, and small steps that took forever. He didn’t tell Wren everything; she didn’t need to know. But she knew he wasn’t telling her everything, and that was adding to the tension between them.

He had begun to wonder if he’d imagined the flashing brightness of her smile, or the liquid sound of her giggle, it had been so long since he’d encountered either.

Then a peal of delighted laughter came down the hallway, and he smiled. No, he hadn’t imagined it.

The computer’s Talent-proof, safety-rigged-seven-ways-from-Sunday system finally powered up and he logged on, surfed to the gallery’s site and checked his e-mail, humming softly under his breath as he did so.

It wasn’t a lot, that one surge of laughter. It was barely anything.

To him, it was everything.

And he would do whatever it took to keep things that way.

To: a_felhim@shhhh.info

We need to settle this. Call me.