Blood from Stone (14 page)

Removing the items would require her to use current directly on them, and where would she send them, anyway? She sucked at Transloc; they’d probably end up in some longshoreman’s breakfast, or a kid’s backpack. And what if that was enough to trigger?

Thinking too much. Focus.

“Hey!” A voice, a man’s voice, coming from behind her, echoing in the hold.

Oh, damnittohell.
Too much to hope for, that it wasn’t directed at her…

She kept a light touch on the current, letting it
continue as it had been started, and turned to deal with the intruder.

Technically,
you’re
the intruder….

Oh, shut up.

“What are you doing down here?” The speaker was a man, about fifty or so and hard-worn with it, from his shaved head to the gut hanging over his belt. But he also had the look of a man who knew how to throw trespassers off his boat—and maybe not worry about them hitting land.

He squinted to see her better; the Retriever’s no-see-me trick was still working then, he was just used to being suspicious about shadows in his cargo hold. That should have made her feel better. It didn’t.

Current-snakes slithered and hissed, demanding to be used. She fought her instinctive urge to run, needing to stay and make sure that the job was done.

“I’m not here,” she said. Current rose again, but this time it stayed within her, humming in her bones, sliding just under her own skin, shimmering greens and blues. She felt tight, wound-up and ready to roll.

“What the hell?” He took a step closer, and she saw the short metal bar in his hand.

A body, crushed and beaten, bleeding out in a dark alley, once-white wings crushed and soiled. That was how it had all begun…one of the Angeli brought down low and dead.

She knew it wasn’t the same. The Silence was broken, the vigilantes driven back underground. The only Silence member they knew was still alive was the researcher Darcy, who had helped them, in the end. Darcy had sent Sergei a postcard from somewhere in the Andes, about three months ago.

This guy? He was just a union joe doing his job. Wren held on, kept control until she felt the binding take over, the elements within the box rendered if not harmless, then at least useless.

“You, get out here! Don’t make me hurt you!”

Wrong words. Oh, so very much the wrong words. The job was done, she could let go, slip past him and be gone, but the emotions would not subside.
Don’t make me hurt you!

Bile rose in the back of her throat, and the hold she had on her current trembled, broke….

And held, held, if only by the tips of her shaking hands. P.B.: silent and supportive. Simply not trying to block him out allowed him in, not so much intrusive as preexisting. She could feel him in her, that bedrock of strength that could not be moved by mortals, nor broken by even her own current. She wiggled virtual toes, trying to ground herself in that strong comfort, but he was too far away, or she couldn’t reach far enough down. The bile came back up into her mouth, and the bedrock receded and disappeared under the floodgate memory of rage and fear.

…hurt you…

No.
She tried to quiet it, but the waves surged and swamped her, trying to drag her under and suffocate her in the tarry wash.

There was a buzzing hum in her ears, surprisingly gentle for the forces she felt assaulting her, a sound like a thousand black-and-red butterfly wings beating inside her head. Shaking with the need to control, to flee, to strike out against a threat, to
not kill,
she did the only thing she could do.

She Translocated.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” P.B. said.

Wren finished dry-heaving, and wiped her mouth with the damp washcloth he held out to her. Her limbs felt like Jell-O, and her skin crawled as if there were bugs on it. Worse,
under
it.

Teenagers with less Talent than she had in her palm could Translocate entire rooms with perfect accuracy, and she couldn’t even send a pin into a pincushion without heaving her guts. Life was not fair.

“Seriously.” P.B. squatted next to her. “What happened?”

Rage still controlled her brain, and she wanted to snarl at him. She didn’t owe him any explanations. She didn’t answer to anyone.

Then again, when you appear in someone’s bathroom, puking your guts out into the toilet while they’re taking a shower, they do have a right to know why. That thought was cold water on her, cooling her brain and washing away the bugs.

“Situation went bad. I had to get away.”

“And you came here.” He stood up and toweled himself off with a larger towel, his shower-wet fur giving off a pleasant, herb-scented smell. The demon used No More Tears, she knew that from previous visits to his bathroom. He usually had a slightly muskier, greener scent, too. Did demons wear cologne? He sure as hell didn’t use an aftershave….

She felt herself start to get the giggles, an aftermath to the rage, and clamped down hard.

“Damn it, Valere…” The demon sighed, and sat down on the edge of the tub, his rounded body wrapped
in the towel less for modesty than protection from the wet porcelain. “You only Transloc when you panic. What happened?”

“Not only when I panic,” she said, sitting back on her heels and noting, absently, that she’d managed to ruin yet another pair of jeans. “Sometimes it’s because I’m screwed, otherwise.” Usually, no matter what the circumstances, her arrival results were less than pinpointed. Except when she panicked. Then she always came here.

If “always” translated into “twice now.”

“This have anything to do with you cutting me off, earlier?”

“I did not…” Her sentence trailed off. She had, hadn’t she. “No. Nothing to do with that. You caught me at a bad time.” How much to tell, how much to withhold? “Sergei and I were…”

“Mamboing in a horizontal fashion?” he asked hopefully.

“Arguing,” she had to admit. P.B.’s bear-shaped face wasn’t really suited to showing expression, but she could see the sorrow and frustration in his dark red eyes. “About me?”

She reached up to pat his knee, annoyed that her hand was still shaking. “No.” Then she paused, needing to be honest with him. “Not exactly.”

“About the…job. That I asked you to do. He doesn’t want you to do it?”

“He knows why, he was there, remember? And you didn’t ask—I offered. If he’d had objections he would have voiced them there and then.” That much was entirely true. It was also true that she wouldn’t have listened, and he knew that, so wouldn’t have bothered.

P.B. had an expression on his snouted face that suggested he knew all that, too.

“Look, can we not do this now?” she asked. “I’d really like some coffee, and—” She paused, testing her stomach. “And maybe some breakfast? Come on, I’ll even buy. Least I can do for the unexpected drop-in.”

He didn’t want to let it go. “You have to trust me, Wren. Your body knows that—that’s why you keep coming here when you’re stressed. You can feel it. I ground you, and more to the point, I ground you safely, something Didier can’t do. But your brain’s not getting with the program, and that’s dangerous.”

“You’re overstating—”

“Wren.” He cut her off. “You wizzed. I can smell it on you,
feel
it on you, even now. Especially now. When those bastards attacked you, in the tunnels under the theater, you reacted…normally. No, I mean it.”

There was nothing normal about what she had done. She had killed them. Worse, she had used current to rip them apart and scatter them into burned clumps and ash. She had murdered them.

“They were going to kill you. They were going to rape you and kill you, and they had done it to Talent before.” She had never told him that, had never told them any of the details. P.B., apparently, didn’t need to be told.

“You did a good thing, cleaning the world of that scum. The only problem was, you went into the dark storm, the wild, to do it, and you
liked
it. You crave it now.”

She did. She craved it…as Sergei craved current-touch, the old sex-magics.

“That’s what wizzing is, Valere. And you almost went there again today. Because you were scared.”

She wanted to deny it. She couldn’t. “It makes me sick. Every time I go too far, I get doubled over like I’m going to die.” She had to force the words out of her mouth, and saying them wasn’t the relief she’d hoped for. You couldn’t be weak. If you were weak, the current took control. If it got the upper hand, you were toast.

“It’s not the current that’s making you sick,” he corrected her, as though she were a student again and he her mentor. In this, she supposed, he was. That fact didn’t make the lecture easier to bear. “It’s the fact that you’re controlling so much of it, keeping it in check, that’s making you feel so ill. You’re eating your body up from the inside, holding too much power in you. If you had actually wizzed, you’d feel just fine. You’d be mad as a hatter, but feel fine. It’s the constant control that’s killing you.”

That was supposed to be his job: to supply the needed grounding, the fuel for her to work from. It just went against everything she’d ever been taught.

He didn’t bother with subtlety or roundabout sweet-talking. He wasn’t Sergei, to be delicate about her feelings. “Valere, I’m what stands between you and the crazies, now and until you die. It’s not going to go away. Not ever. Not once you’ve been there. Not when you know how to make the scared, the uncertainty, go away. It’s too easy, too tempting.”

It was. Damn him. Damn her. It was so seductive, to dip into that dark storm—the maelstrom she felt when Max was around, the home of monsters—and make everything except the power go away.

“That’s why you have to use me. Whenever, however you need to, without asking, without worrying. You
can’t get scruples about that, not now. Not without failing. And failing is not an option.”

Hammering the point home, he hunched over her, reminding her once again that for all that he looked like a four-foot-tall polar bear cub, his solid bones and rock-hard muscle were fueled by human-level smarts and a truly scary level of Fatae indifference to the rest of the world.

“You don’t get to protect me,” he went on. “You never did. Doesn’t matter that you didn’t know what you did, that you didn’t mean to. I let you in. I made a conscious decision. Because if I’m not there when you start to overrush? Your instinct’s gonna be to ground in Didier, the way you used to. And he will let you.

“And how you gonna live with yourself when it kills him?”

“And how am I gonna feel when someone kills
you?
” she asked back, still wanting to snarl but lacking the energy. “Have you thought of that? People are actively hunting those papers, P.B. Word’s out what you’ve—what
we’ve
done. You’ve become valuable. They might be hunting
you.
”

He looked annoyingly…smug? Yes, smug. “They can’t break our bond. I won’t serve anyone else. It’s a choice, I can be tricked out of it, but I can’t be coerced. It’s the only reason why I can’t hate my creator—he gave us that much freedom, whether he meant to or not. Freedom to choose.”

Wren looked him in the eye, her seated position putting them almost nose to nose. “You’re assuming these people give a damn. You’re assuming they’re thinking of you as anything other than a means to an end, that they want you whole. You’re just as valuable—more valuable,
maybe—as a vivisection model than a servant.”

She had hoped to shock him with that. He didn’t even blink. “I know. I was sort of hoping you hadn’t thought of that, though.”

Despite herself, she had to laugh. Her nose started to run, and she swiped at it with the washcloth. “No such luck. I’m just as bloody-minded as you are. It’s why we get along. Now, breakfast?” Amazingly enough—or not, considering how much current she had used already that morning—she was suddenly ravenous. “Or are you going to let me starve to death on your bathroom rug?”

“Finish cleaning up in here, and let me dry off and call Sergei, let him know you’re okay.
Then
breakfast.”

Fair enough.

“Why are you here, and she’s not?”

“Why should she be?”
He is defensive, knows it. They’re starting to hit bone.

“This is a joint problem, isn’t it? You take, but she gives. She doesn’t say no.”

“She’s trying. She has other things she has to worry about first. Like her sanity.”
Which he wasn’t helping, being like this. That is why he’s here.

“You’re protecting her.”

“I’m her partner.”

In the end, it comes down to that. He is here because he has to get the same kind of control she has. Who better to teach him than a therapist who is also a Talent?

Not as though he would bare his soul to some stranger. Just Joe Doherty, who had been there when the hell came to earth, and everything fell apart and came back together again. Sergei had seen his touch with the damaged then, working with the Lost, the children—the teenagers—Wren had stolen back from the Silence.

“Why are you here?”

“Again?”

“Again.”

“I’m here because I need to understand my own kink, and how it’s going to kill me someday.”
Her own words, not his.

“You can do better than that.”
They’ve been down this road before, in the weeks and months prior. It’s rote, but not comforting. Nothing about this is comforting, except
the chair he sits in. He may buy one for his own office. Having clients put at ease is a plus in his business, too.

“Why are you here, and she’s not?”
Joe asks again.

This time, the words come.
“Because I don’t trust her to be here, when I talk about this.”

“This? What this are we talking about?”

“This…my being here. When I admit that I…that I blame her.”

“Ah.”

Sergei seriously goddamned hates that
ahhh.

Wren stared at the flat cream-painted ceiling. There was a crack running through the plaster she had never noticed before. She should do something about that. Or not.

The dark green drapes were drawn across the windows, not allowing any of the afternoon light in, and she was naked on the bed, her skin prickling slightly from exposure. A single white candle burned on the old mahogany dresser, its squat beeswax reflection still and unwavering. Her mind was still, her thoughts open to the lesson from so long ago.

Flames are the traditional focus. Why is that?

Neezer’s voice, teaching a bored fifteen-year-old. They were sitting on a picnic table in the park. Textbooks were open in front of them, to all intents and purposes an impromptu tutoring session. But what he was teaching had nothing to do with biology.

Because they’re cheap?
She’d had no idea, then, and blustered her way through it.

Because fire burns as well as warms. It is our servant—and can master us if we are not careful.

Like current?
She had learned that much, at least. Knew what she was, and how she could do what others couldn’t—and how very much it set her apart.

Like current. Look at the candle, Jenny-wren. Look, and become not the flame or the wick or the wax, but the entire thing. Flame and air, ash and scent.

Look at the candle. Focus. Remember.

John Ebeneezer. Oversize hands, so delicate when he handled the equipment in the labs, when he turned pages in a book. Fingernails perfectly trimmed, cuticles groomed, without a single ragged edge. She remembered his hands more than she remembered his face, or even his voice. He’d been a baritone, she thought; his voice had been low and deep, and it carried to the end of the classroom without him even trying. Some of the girls had had a crush on him. Maybe some of the boys, too. He’d been a born teacher, coaxing even the most reluctant student into some enthusiasm for his chosen subject.

She had been barely seventeen when he started to wizz. He disappeared a few months later, abandoning job, house, and her in one giant leap, and even knowing that he had done it out of fear for her safety, fear of what he might do to her in his inevitable madness, had not softened the blow of abandonment. If he had really loved her, if she had been a better student, if she had been more of what he wanted in a student, he would have found a way to stay….

Wren exhaled, and tried to refocus on the lesson. All right, so she had a few issues. She’d made peace with most of them years ago, even if they hung around in the
back of her brain, mostly quiet and unnoticed. Neezer wasn’t her father, he had never tried to be her father. He had been her mentor, though, and that had been more important in a lot of ways. And he had done what he had done in order to protect her, by his own standards, no matter how it hurt at the time, or now.

She missed him, even now. Even years after she had started to accept the fact that he was likely dead.

But he wasn’t.
Her thoughts crept back into the stillness she was trying to cultivate, drawn by the memory of the man who had taught her with such loving attention.
He wasn’t dead and there was enough of him left in his madness, like Max, that he remembered her. Remembered her—and hid from her. What had he become? What scared Max so much that he played bullyboy with such sadness in his eyes?

It was madness of her own, but she had to know. She needed to know. She couldn’t afford
not
to know.

If the only difference between that and her was P.B….

Setting her gaze on the candle once more, Wren let herself feel the flame from across the room. She could feel the hiss of oxygen through her lungs, the softening of the wax in her bones, the shiver of heat on her skin, as if it
were
her lungs, her bones, her skin.

“John Ebeneezer.”

The bond between mentor and student was the only one the lonejacks recognized. Not peer to peer, not parent to child, or sibling to sibling; the sole unending, undying, undeniable obligation was with your mentor. Only death could end it.

Death, or wizzing. That was the understanding, anyway.

Nobody said what happened to that bond when both mentor and mentee wizzed. Wren had decided that was an oversight she was going to correct.

“Neezer. John Ebeneezer. Where are you?”

The sense of him, the memories and sounds and scents and that most recent fleeting touch of him, before Max swept it all away. She gripped them tight, and
concentrated.

It wasn’t quite like fugue-state, but it wasn’t unlike it, either. The candle became her, and she melted like wax, slipping from the grasp of flesh and scattering into the atmosphere on thousands of threads of wild current.

So very cool.
Out-of-body exploration was something she had studied, but never actually done. She was more about the actually being there, not just looking on. Plus, you couldn’t actually
look
without eyes. It was difficult enough to keep thoughts together, much less form retinas.

But for this kind of searching, broad-based and very specific all at once, there was nothing like an out-of-body experience.

Underneath her the East Coast spread out, crowded cities and sprawling suburbs, green expanses of farms and forests and blue spreads of water. Current flickered in everything, bright and dark and sizzling. Nulls couldn’t see it. Most Talent didn’t bother to look deeply enough to find it. But it was there, breathing in the air and the water and the living flesh of the universe. She wanted to gather it all in her hand and take it into her core, so much so that she could feel her own tendrils stir, back in the bedroom, trying to reach out and consume.

Stay,
she told it.
Be still.

The trick was to know what you were looking for,
and not get distracted. Get distracted, and…well, she didn’t know exactly what might happen. But she didn’t think it would be good. And probably wouldn’t help finding what she was looking for.

Somewhere down there, in the speck of the map that was Manhattan, P.B. waited, as he promised. Breakfast in a tiny little café, apple pancakes drowning in real maple syrup and little cups of thick sweet coffee, the smell of tobacco lingering from decades past in the walls, and he had promised that if she did this, he would be there. Bedrock, if she needed it: the solid underlying foundation, the safest place to dig in and ground. She might slip, her control might fail. His never would. There was a tiny spark inside her that recognized that, held on to that, clung to it, letting it sit under her skin, under her bones, deep inside her core.

That bond wasn’t sexual, or fraternal, or any sensation that she could identify. It simply
was.
She trusted it to keep her safe, and forgot about it.

Neezer.
Focus on Neezer.

As though the thought was a rope, Wren felt tugged downward, her essence diving like a falcon toward one specific spot in the blue below her.

Water?
she thought, just as she struck the surface and went underneath.

Out of body meant that she couldn’t drown, of course. She wasn’t even really wet; her body was safely back home, in her own bed. But the immediate reaction was one of flailing panic.

Jesus wept, Valere!
She straightened herself out, arching like an arrow down farther into the water, following that hint deeper into the cool lake waters.

It wasn’t possible that he was there; he was crazy but still human, still needing air to breathe. Right? But the scent was so strong, she couldn’t not follow it.

The bottom came up fast, smacking her on the nonexistent nose. It was gravelly and disgusting, and she decided she must be in a man-made swimming hole of some sort. Hopefully not a reservoir, from the amount of junk thrown into the water and left to rust: the mess turning the water into an odd shade of green. Tires and old beer cans and the carcass of an old car off in the distance…she wondered, idly, if there was a body in the trunk, and the thought froze her in place.

He was alive. Not dead in the trunk of a Caddy like some Mafioso fall guy. She knew that.

But she had to check, anyway.

There were no fish in the murky waters, but she was pretty sure she saw/sensed something moving on the other side of the car. No sooner had she thought that than she was there. Her hand—her image of her hand—rested on the rusted trunk, and she could
see
inside.

There was a body there, but it wasn’t Neezer. Wren didn’t know how she knew the rotting skeleton was too old and too female, but it was.

Someone threw granny into the lake? Nice.

But Neezer’s scent was still nearby. Wren let herself dissipate into the water slightly, and traced the currents of current to the object of her search.

Hiking boots. Old, battered, size-ten brown leather boots, worn down at the heel and tied with thick rawhide laces that had broken and been reknotted several times. There was nothing about them to say that they had belonged to any one specific person, and the
odds were almost impossible, but she knew. They had been Neezer’s, and not so very long ago, otherwise the water would have erased all trace of him. That was what water did; it cleaned and cleared and wore impressions away to nondescript blankness. That was why witches and warlocks traditionally feared running streams, because they were one of the few things that could wear down a spell once it was cast. Simply run through the stream and do what water did.

She reached for the boot, then jerked her entire body back as a tentacle came out from the boot’s top. She had no idea what kind of pseudopod might live in water like this, in the cast-off shoe of a wizzart, but she suspected it might have either teeth or a sting.

And you don’t have a body here, moron. It can’t sting or bite you.

Feeling rather remarkably stupid, Wren reached out again and touched her not-there finger to the boot, not sure what to expect. If she didn’t have a body, could her psychometry actually work?

Frustration. Immense amounts of frustration, and a bitch of a blister on his left heel. “You should have worn socks” except he didn’t have any, not anymore, and he kept forgetting to find some. He had a little money left, they had made sure of that, but he couldn’t remember what he had done with it and the thought of going into a store—too many people, too much noise, too much everything—wasn’t one he could contemplate for too long.

His feet hurt, but everything felt better as he stood barefoot in the mud and watched the boots go sailing out to splash splish splash thunk into the water and sink down down down and never be worn again….

That was all there was. No sense of when; it might have happened yesterday, or a year ago, or the day after he first disappeared.

No. Even as Wren felt herself leaving that spot, rising back up into the atmosphere, her current sparking and reshaping itself, she knew that it had been more recent than that. Neezer left when he was still mostly sane, was only starting to slip away. The man who had thrown those boots was more than a cracker shy of a full barrel.

And someone had given him money. Max? Or someone else? The Council maintained safe-homes, places with limited electrical power, where their wizzarts could rest if they wanted to, not distracted or tempted by easy access to current. But Neezer had been a lonejack, like her; the Council didn’t take care of freelancers.

Someone was, though. Someone a little more together and coherent than Max was taking care of her mentor.

Wren should have, she supposed, been relieved. Instead, she was livid. Hurt, and angry, and mainly just pissed off.

That should have been
her
job, damn it. She was his student, his only student, and she should have been the one to make sure he was all right. Not someone else, not Max who barely held it together himself, who killed his own dog, for God’s sake! Was that who had sent Max after her, this person or persons who had taken over her obligations, her responsibilities?

Or was it Neezer himself, denying her, cutting that final tie? Why?

She tried to catch another scent to follow, but her emotions screwed with her control, and she felt her concentration snap and fling her backward, ass over
teakettle, knees over ears. She fell up and sideways, then was tumbling without any sense of direction or distance, her nonexistent body breaking under the stress until her sense of self started to disintegrate and dissipate, as well.

She reached out, grabbed at nothing, found a fingerhold somewhere of something hard, warm, accepting and unyielding at the same time. Bedrock. She clutched, felt it shake, as though undergoing seismic seizures, and she cried out in fear and loss. The cry echoed, and as though in response the bedrock stilled itself, like a horse shuddering to a heaving halt.

Once the virtual ground under her fingers stabilized, she could feel it slide under her, trying to support her, but the panic—and the crumbling loss of self—remained, making it impossible to stop the disintegration.

If she didn’t stop it, she would not be. Not here…and not there. Trapped, forever.

Home,
she thought wildly, grabbing onto the word and hugging it tight.
Safe-home.

Safe-words were like cantrips. You didn’t really need them, but it made it easier to focus.
Safe-home
landed her, like Neezer’s boot, solidly thunking back into her body on the bed in her apartment in Manhattan.

Feeling as if she had been beaten with bamboo rods by a mad percussionist, Wren lifted one eyelid and was dismayed to discover that the room was dark, much darker than even her blackout curtains could make it.
Was there a blackout? Oh, shit, am I blind?

The bed shifted under her, and the darkness moved a little. She squinted until Sergei’s shadowed form came
into focus. Her panic subsided, and she let out a little gasp of relief.

“I’m going to turn on the light,” he warned in a low, rough voice, and she braced herself. He had placed something over the lampshade, though, and so the light was filtered. Her eyes watered anyway, and when she went to place an arm over them, to shield them from the glare, her entire body screamed a protest against moving.