Blood from Stone (20 page)

Hearing P.B.’s nickname actually said in full took Wren a moment to process, but she didn’t lose track of the question.

“I know someone who is called that, yes. I’m not sure I’d call him an associate, though.” Friend, yes. Mooch, occasional roommate, protector,
demon.
Brother, if she was going to be sappy. But not associate.

“He is not human, though. What is he?”

“You don’t need to know that, Agent Chang.” Wren’s words were casual, friendly even, but they were made of steel.

“Actually, I do,” Chang said in tones of matching
steel, but her body language remained open, and those almond-shaped eyes were good-natured. “Curiosity, you see.” She let the question drop, though; they hadn’t forbidden her to dig for answers on her own, after that implied challenge, even if they weren’t going to spoon-feed her what she wanted to know.

Oh, yeah. Wren liked this woman a lot. Be damned if she’d show it, though. Interesting or otherwise, she was also a Fed. Wren didn’t need those sorts of complications, no matter what Danny thought.

“Could I…Could you show me?” the Fed asked. “What it is that you do?”

Sergei seemed taken aback, but Wren had actually expected that to be one of the first questions asked. It was what
she
would have asked, anyway, were the positions reversed. And if Agent Chang already knew this much, a little more wasn’t going to make the situation any better, or worse.

“It’s really not all that impressive,” she warned. “Like watching someone turn on a light switch, mostly.” If Anea thought it was electricity, Wren was perfectly willing to continue with that metaphor. It was as close as she wanted to explain, anyway.

The waitress came with the menu, finally, and Wren took it from her, but didn’t open it. “Watch,” she said, once the waitress had moved far enough way.

She tapped a thread of current, letting it rise up through her arm, down out through her fingers. It was a simple trick, and one that used to drive Neezer crazy when she did it as a teenager: rearranging the ink molecules on a printed sheet. She used to change the wording of Neezer’s tests when she didn’t know the
answer—which was often; biology had never been one of her strong points.

All she intended to do was rearrange the name of the restaurant. But the gasp Anea let out before anything had even happened made her startle, and the words instead faded entirely off the page, leaving a large blank spot on the menu.

“Wow.”

“You saw that.” Interesting. The ability to see current was far more common than the ability to use it—maybe a full third of the human population could see some aspect of it or another, especially if they were already aware and looking for it—but that meant that Agent Chang wasn’t entirely Null.
Gooey,
she thought, and squashed the thought. She was so damned tired of that word, and cursed Bonnie for ever putting it in her brain.

“That was…”

“Magic. Yeah.”

“Wow.” Then the agent looked at the menu. “Wow.” Her voice sharpened. “You can put the letters back, too?”

Wren did so, going back to her original plan and making the lettering read “MaliWho” rather than “Malibu” Diner.

“An interesting skill. Definitely something that could be useful.”

Wren cocked her head, not sure what Anea was talking about. It was a parlor trick….

“Very few of the Talent are criminally minded,” Sergei said, his voice dry, and Wren finally clued in. The ability to alter words on laminated paper—or unlaminated but otherwise specially treated—would indeed be of interest to a government agent. Oops.

“Jesus wept,” she said. “I never thought of that. That
is really…sad.” Her money worries would have been over a long time ago, if she’d just gone into counterfeiting instead of Retrieval.

“It’s refreshing, actually,” Chang said. “I think you may have just restored a drop of my faith in human nature.”

As though Wren’s words were in fact the sign the other woman had been looking for, she reached down into the battered leather portfolio case at her feet, and extracted a number of sheets: two printed reports, and a grainy, black-and-white photograph.

“As promised, my share of the exchange. This photograph was taken four days ago, during an attempted break-in at a certain privately operated museum here in New York.”

Both Wren and Sergei sat upright at that, and Agent Chang smiled grimly. “I see that gets your attention. Our mutual friend thought it might. Transcripts of the post-arrest interview”—a nice way of saying the interrogation—“seemed to imply that the burglar was hired by a member of your community.”

A Retriever? Wren was amused at how indignant she felt, that someone would hire an out-of-towner for a local job. Then she looked again at the photograph, and shook her head. “He’s not one of ours.”

“You recognize him? Or is the community so small that you would know everyone?”

Oh, Chang was good at this, yeah. But Wren was just as good.

“I don’t know him, but that doesn’t mean anything. But he’s not one of ours.”

A Retriever in work mode would have fritzed the camera, just off the no-see-me vibes he or she would emit, plus the natural tendency of Talent to wreak
havoc on electronics in their vicinity. But there was no need to mention that right now, if the agent didn’t already know.

“Do you know what he was after?” Sergei asked.

“The museum declined to give us any more information than the rooms were used to store odd bits they had picked up over the years and not yet determined a provenance or display use for. They tend to keep their noses clean and their paperwork in order, so we didn’t push for details.” She shrugged, sipping her coffee and wincing at the taste. People apparently came to this diner for convenience, not quality. “Truthfully, normally we would never have been involved, save that it pinged on my radar screen.”

“And you didn’t want to push for fear of alerting someone that you had found something of interest.”

“Have I?” Anea asked, her expression one of cautious anticipation.

Wren looked at her partner, who nodded, ever so slightly, his eyes half-lidded but alert. She would spill and he would survey the reaction, then.

“We have reason to believe that they are after the be longings of…a Talent from several generations ago, in another country, who dabbled in things he should have left alone.”

“Things.” Chang had the gift of packing a lot of questions into one word.

Wren tapped her fingers on the menu, trying to decide how to phrase what little she was going to tell, without leaving too many openings for the other woman to pry at. Finally, she gave up and went for the kill.

“He created a form—a living battery of sorts—that would allow a Talent to increase his or her abilities, and possibly bypass our…call it a surge protector.” Wren was pretty proud of that last analogy, actually, especially done on the fly.

“And this is a bad thing?”

“Bad for the battery,” Wren said. “The
living
battery.”

Agent Change was not slow on the uptake, no. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened in a silent “oh.” “These belongings…they were in that storeroom? And included, perhaps, directions on how to accomplish this little parlor trick?”

“Possibly. Probably, based on your information.”

“And the person who tried to steal them…”

“Hired by a group of people who should not have their hands on this material.” Wren was definite about that. It had to be them—the timing was too damned coincidental—and absolutely they should not get them. No matter who they were, any group that wanted those papers that badly should
not
have them. The
Cosa
had created a battery of their own—a nonliving, nonsentient one—and destroyed it, and the plans, after one use. For once in her life, she really did hold the high moral ground.

“Who should, then? You?”

Sergei jumped in at this point, taking Chang’s fire. “We have been retained by a legitimate heir to the original author to reclaim possession of the papers.”

Lovely, legitimate, and the added benefit of being true. Mostly.

“If these papers are that dangerous, I could use my
own contacts to pry them from the museum—it would be simpler to—”

“No!” Wren reacted immediately, and with more heat than she had been expecting. Chang looked taken aback, but Sergei was already nodding his head in agreement. Wren felt better about her instinctive response, then.

“No?”

“Whoever has these papers…they’ll be a target. Allowing a N—a non-Talent to handle them opens that person to too much risk. We—our client—will be able to protect them.” She hoped. They would have a better chance than a Null—even a partially Null government agent who, no matter her possible good intentions, still had layers of bureaucracy and political animals to report to. While she liked the other woman, you had to earn trust, in Wren’s world.

Chang looked from Wren to Sergei, and pulled out another photo. This one was also black-and-white, but it wasn’t grainy. It was, in fact, crystal clear. Wren swallowed hard and looked away. Sergei didn’t blink.

“The thief, I assume,” he said, referring to the body sprawled faceup on the pavement, the face hacked into shreds, the dark stain across his throat proof to how he had been killed.

“As he was being transferred to another holding facility, his police escort was ambushed, and he was taken away. The assumption was that his partners, whoever they were, had staged a rescue.”

She shrugged, clearly not broken up by the man’s demise. “The body was found seven hours later, dumped two blocks from the site of the ambush.”

“The police officers?”

“Banged up, lightly sedated, and pissed off, but otherwise all right. Whoever these people are, they knew better than to become cop-killers.”

“Too much heat on them, then,” Sergei agreed. “Tying off a loose end, someone nobody will really miss…that would be investigated, but not hunted with the same dedication.”

“Exactly.” Some lives were of more value than others. Nobody was arguing that. Probably why they had chosen a Null thief, whoever They actually were. The death of a Talent—local or imported—would have been noted and followed up on. Especially now, when the community was still reeling from recent events.

“And you waited to tell us this until you were confident that we had nothing to do with it.” Sergei was moderately pissed-off himself. “How can you be sure?”

“I suspect that your bodies tend not to show up,” Chang said evenly.

Sergei’s eyes showed the wince his face was too well-trained to let escape. Wren wondered if Agent Chang had caught it, or not.

She hoped not.

“Thank you for your help,” she said, trying to distract attention from him, and the thought of dead bodies, necessary and hidden or otherwise. “We’ll handle this, going forward.”

“And you will call me, if anything changes, or I can be of assistance?”

“Sergei will. I tend to be…least in sight.”

The agent-facade disappeared, and the woman Anea appeared, smiling in appreciation at the joke.
“Thank you,” she said, and seemed to mean it. “For trusting me. I can only imagine that it is difficult. I will protect your confidences to the very best of my ability to do so.”

Wren believed her.

The agent looked at her watch, then swore and tapped it as though to resuscitate its workings. Wren felt a twinge of guilt, and quickly squelched it. If Agent Chang—Anea—wanted to hang with Talent, she was going to have to learn about things like watches, cell phones, PDAs and whatnot. Hopefully the Federal budget was up to a few replacements here and there.

“Damn.” Chang cast her glance around the diner, finally finding a clock. “My train leaves in an hour. It’s been educational meeting you two, and my thanks for both your candor and your assistance. Here’s my card—the number on the front is my office line. If I’m not there it will transfer to the main line, and they will be able to reach me wherever I am.” She pushed the business card across the table and left it there for Sergei to pick up, while she shuffled the photos and reports back into her briefcase. Wren let her fingers rest on the sheet she had lifted from the pile, and didn’t say a word as farewell handshakes were exchanged and Chang left for Penn Station and her train back to D.C.

“We’ll take care of it?” Sergei said, after the door closed behind the agent.

“We have no choice, now. Even if the museum had no idea what they had in that room before, someone’s going to be a bright bunny and wonder about it, now. And all it takes is one really bright bunny poking around and maybe running a few experiments, and all hell could break loose. Remember the Nescanni Parch
ment?” That Artifact had been a soul-eater, and a friend had lost his life in the struggle to contain it. From the look on Sergei’s face, he remembered that, and the fact that the damned—literally—thing had almost eaten
him.
Only admitting that she loved him—that she
needed
him—had kept him connected to this world, and even that had been close.

A tough couple of years, yeah. They had lost so much—and gained a lot, too, yeah. New friends, renewed ties among the old, mostly but not entirely offsetting the costs they’d paid. Seemed like the way life went: you had to pay before you got the goods, no credit offered.

The fortune cookie came back to her, the way they tended to.
Take no blood from stone, save you give it back.
They’d bled enough to get back the entire damn city and half the ’burbs, by now. Somehow, she didn’t think that was what the fortune meant, though. If it were straightforward, it wouldn’t need a Seer to see.

She pulled a sugar packet out of the holder and played with it, pushing it around on the Formica table. “For years, generations, this stuff’s been hidden. Now, it’s not so much hidden, because—” she shrugged “—because things like this tend not to stay lost forever. So odds are good that this thing gets out of holding, maybe into hands not ours. You want someone playing amateur Doctor Frankenstein? Or worse yet, holding an all-comers auction for the papers?” Wren pushed her point, wanting to make sure that he understood. “I don’t believe in coincidences, you know that. These people looking, I’m sure they’re the ones who took Geinga—the demon who sent P.B. the letter,” she clari
fied at his puzzled look. “The demon who, by the way, hasn’t been seen since about a week before P.B. got the letter. I put out some feelers into the
Cosa,
and it’s like he never existed. Nobody knows nuthin’, nobody saw nuthin’, nobody wants to talk about nuthin’. And it’s not the usual don’t-talk-to-strangers routine, either. These are Fatae that see everything, and don’t scare easy. But they’re scared now.