Staying Dead (12 page)

The current-manifestation giggled, then coughed, a rasping noise. “Not much time, storm's pulling me out to Canada. Got a line on your boogie. Shimmied down a pipe, caught tail end of the signature you tossed to me. Followed it home and scared the spark out of some halfwit current-hacker. Name of the guy who did the hiring's Matthew Prevost. Good luck, kid. See you in a few decades if you don't get yourself killed.”

The sparks compressed, and imploded, sending them both to the floor, hands over their heads in a useless attempt at protection. Sergei rolled so that he was covering Wren's much smaller body, pressing her into the carpet to shield her from the inferno occurring above.
Wizzarts,
he thought in disgust.

 

Wren was aware of three things. One, that eau d' old carpet was not something you wanted to experience up close and personal on a regular basis. Two, she was being squished flat by something very large, warm and heavy. And three, the smell of burning hanging in the air over them did not bode well for her computer system.
Wizzarts.

“Showy bastard,” she grumbled, the words muffled from the carpet under her face. And four, the rumbling noise over her wasn't a subway, it was Sergei, laughing. Considering his options, she supposed laughing wasn't such a terrible way to let off nervous tension and adrenaline. But he didn't have to sound so damn…amused by it all.

“It's not funny.” She used an elbow to make her point, and he obligingly rolled onto his side, letting her lift her face from the floor and breathe again.

“Yes, it is.” He looked down at her, his eyes half-shut as he laughed, more quietly now. The smell of his sweat mixed with whatever cologne he used that she'd never quite been able to place; browsing through the men's fragrance counters made her dizzy. “It's really quite funny. One of these days he's going to finally manage to kill you, and he won't even have meant it.” His tone was weird: sort of off, like he was strangling on the words.

“Congratulations, you've finally figured wizzarts out. Now get off me, you oversized Russian oaf.” She was finding it hard to think, his weight pressed up against her like that. She was tired, that's all. Emotional roller-coaster of a day, of a week. That was why she was having to fight off the urge to topple him all the way to the floor and…

Don't go there. Not with Sergei, who so isn't around for that. It's post-stress somethingorother. That's all. Plus, you need to get laid. Badly.
Retrieval played havoc on a social life, especially if you had already run through all the eligible, moderately attractive single Talents in the area. Non-Talents were too risky, mostly, for relationships. She couldn't remember the last time…oh, right, him. Cute but obviously forgettable.

“I grew up in Chicago,” he reminded her, getting to his feet and extending a hand to help her up.

“Details, details,” she said dismissively. Ignoring the hand—not trusting herself to touch him just yet—she rolled over and sat up by herself, remaining on the floor in order to plug the computer back in. “If he had fried my computer, all of Canada wouldn't have been enough to hide his sorry static butt in.”

Her back aching more than it should have, Wren got up and sat in the chair Sergei had discarded when the excitement began, and dialed into her server. She longed for DSL or cable connections, but even if you ignored the cost, she shuddered to imagine what could have happened if she'd been online when Max came to visit. No reason to short out everyone else on the system if you could avoid it. “Prevost, right?”

“That's what the man said.”

“Right.” She directed the search to include variable spellings, and hit send. In the meantime, Sergei pulled out his cell phone, and dialed a number. “Lowell. Pull up my files and do a search for Prevost—that's P, r, e, v, o, s, t, first name Matthew. Start with the buyers, then go to the miscellaneous file. No, I don't think he's a dealer or seller. Thanks. Right. No, no problems—the name came up in conversation and it pinged my memory. Great. Any messages? Uh-huh.” He frowned, a look of anger settling onto his face before it was banished. “No, I can handle it, thanks. Call me back at this number if you find anything.”

He closed the cell and replaced it in his pocket. “You want anything to eat?”

“Sure,” she said, scanning the list of names her search had returned. “Chinese or Mexican?”

“Forgot to go shopping again?”

“Hello? Who had time? You had me out in Connecticut trying to get a reading on that stuffed horse last week, and then I get home, catch a few zzz's, and good morning, another job.”

“You'd rather business was slow?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

“I'd rather you got back on the horn and called Noodles. Sesame chicken, brown rice, and a Diet Sprite for me.”

 

Noodles was around the corner, a quick walk. Faster to pick it up than wait for a delivery person to get around to them on a weeknight. Sergei didn't bother with his coat, merely taking his wallet out of the inside breast pocket before he left. And if he was a little too eager to get away from the debris of Wren's office, where she was using an ancient Dust Buster to find the last of the light-bulb shards, she was kind enough not to comment on it. Assuming she even noticed—his Wren had the single-minded focus of a mongoose when she was working. Unlike him, whose mind was cursed to go in multiple directions simultaneously.

Idiot. Idiot!
Despite what Wren thought, he wasn't totally clueless about his tendency to overprotect. But when Max had crashed in like that, his reaction had been way out of line. What the hell did he think he was going to be able to do?
He
had been the liability in that room, the weak link, not Wren.

Sergei had no trouble letting her protect him, when it came to magical threats, or where current could do more than physical strength. It wasn't an ego thing, as she said about mages. He was pretty sure it wasn't, anyway. But while his brain knew she was perfectly capable in these instances, his body's reactions were slow to catch up.

And his heart, Sergei was slowly coming to realize, staunchly refused to hear. It wasn't a matter of being her protector, her knight in shining armor, or anything as hackneyed as that. But when his heart risked imagining a world where she was gone, it—

Went insane?

That was as good a description as any.

And when the threat came, not from a magical source, but one he was best-suited to deal with, heart, mind and physical instinct were all in accord.

Taking the narrow stairs as swiftly as he could, Sergei left the building and, rather than walking to Noodles, stepped into the shadows where he wasn't immediately visible. With a quick glance upward to make sure that Wren wasn't looking out the window, he took out his cell phone again, entered a local phone number, then a short string of code.

“You left a message?” His voice was calm, with an edge of irritation, like a dog reluctantly yanked to heel. He kept walking, his eyes scanning the street, as the voice relayed information to him. “You did what?” He stopped short, and his voice sharpened into real anger. “Who decided she was ready for recruitment? My last report…” He listened, then interrupted “—Since when is my word not good enough?”

The person on the other end made placating noises. He scowled, the sharp lines of his face emphasized by the frown. “No. The agreement was that it would be my call. And I still don't think it's a good idea. Leave her alone.”

The voice at the other end tried to say something, but Sergei was through listening. He hung up the phone and turned it off, then increased his pace down the street. They wouldn't do anything, not without his signing off on the project. That wasn't the way things worked. But the scowl returned. That was the way things
had
worked. But things could change.

You've already sold your soul, he reminded himself sourly. Why are you surprised that the devil's greedy for more?

“A
grazing mace, how sweet the sound, that killed a wrrrrreeetch like youuuuuuu…” Wren could sing when she wanted to, but the horrible faux-Scottish accent she put on made her sound more like a dying cat than a halfway decent alto. The worst of the damage from electrical storm Max cleared up, she was picking up the paperwork scattered all over her office while she waited for Sergei to come back with dinner. She had a faint hope that somehow an orderly room would result in an orderly brain.

At this point, with a name and a focus, it was all about circling in until they had a probable location, and then she could go in and do that voodoo that she do so well.

“I once was lost, but now am found, my amazing mace and meeeeeee.”

Besides, filing made Sergei happy, even if it was incredibly low on her priorities. The IRS wasn't likely to come calling when you worked in a cash-and-handshake market. But you never knew when you might need to reference a past job. Like that lock she had been working on earlier. It came from a nasty little retrieval she did four years ago, but she had run into a similar one on the job in Connecticut. Preparedness.

Preparedness was key, and the third completely unofficial, unwritten law of lonejacks. First was: Stay free of Council maneuverings and politics. Second was: Pick your jobs—don't let yourself be put into a no-win situation. And third: be prepared for anything that probably won't happen but maybe might.

There were others, but those three were the really important ones. And at least two were a little bent and battered already by this case. She really, really
really
needed a nonmagical snatch-and-run, something she could do in her sleep, just to up the comfort level a little.

And you're babbling inside your brain. Bad sign, Valere.

She picked up the e-mails she had printed out regarding Old Sally, and slipped them into the neon-green folder she had set up for this job. Green for Sally. Orange for the Frants deal. Mentally she ran through colors. Electric-blue for a file on the anti-fatae movement; she should have been tracking that stuff already, from the first outbreak, so there weren't any surprises. Or so if she ever felt the urge to yank the entire organization out by the roots…

She put aside that nice thought for later, when her life was a little less hectic.

Hah. And that would be when, exactly?

“Oh, shut up,” she told the voice that sounded a little too much like her mother, and forced her attention back to the matter at hand. That left her with the folder options of shocking pink, which gave her a headache, and red. She needed to buy new folders. Maybe ones in a nice soothing pastel shade.

“Who would stuff a horse, anyway?” she asked the worn, ear-battered teddy bear perched casually on one shelf. “Of all the bizarre things to leave to your next of kin!”

Teddy declined to answer, so she straightened the bear until he sat up properly and dropped a pile of old papers into the recycling pile.

Old Sally's original owners apparently took to their legacy, passing her down from one generation to the next just the way their founder's will had specified. And even once they realized that Sal was a harbinger, that her walkabouts always preceded some nasty family disaster, they hung on to her. Wren would have burned the mangy thing herself, but different strokes for different folks. Especially folks with money to pay the bills.

Money. Money was what it all came down to, wasn't it? Except not always. The Council worked on prestige, the whole concept of face, of respect. You could buy prestige, but prestige couldn't buy money. Could it? She paused. Okay, where was that thought taking her? Why did it feel important?

The sound of the door opening was followed by the unmistakable smells of Chinese food wafting down the hallway, blowing away whatever chain of thought she was constructing.

“Plates are on the counter,” she yelled.

“They threw in an order of sesame noodles,” he told her, juggling a large brown paper bag in one hand, plates and chopsticks in another. “I think Jimmy's got a letch for one of us.”

“Works for me,” Wren said cheerfully, indicating the cleared-off section of her desk as a staging area. “I have no objection to selling your virtue for a mess of Jimmy's noodles.”

Sergei set the bag down where she suggested, and handed her the plates. He seemed calmer now, although she sensed a tightly focused simmer happening underneath. She thought about pushing a little, to see if he'd open up, but decided not to. If it was work, he'd tell her. If it was something else…anyway, she needed him focused, not exploding.

“Anything turn up?” he asked.

Wren took a quick look at the screen, where the most recent search results she had run on the name had come up while she was cleaning. “There are a couple of M. Prevosts on the East Coast, three in the Midwest and seven in the Pacific Northwest.” She extracted her food from the bag and settled cross-legged on the floor to eat. “You?”

Sergei shook his head to indicate that he hadn't heard anything, then a faint red stain touched his cheekbones as he pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket and turned it on again. The tension in the air eased slightly.

“That's an ooops,” she said in mock-sad agreement, just as it rang. “You firing on all cylinders tonight, Didier?” It was so rare to catch Sergei doing something blatantly stupid like turning off his phone when he was expecting a call, she actually couldn't enjoy it. Well, not as much as she'd like to, anyway. Not while they were working. Time to tweak him on it later, when he was a little more mellow.

“Didier,” he had answered in the meanwhile. “Right, thanks. Uh-huh.” He made a scribbling motion at Wren, who got him a pencil and the back of a used envelope. “Right. Okay, thanks. No, that was what I was looking for, thanks. Right. No. Everything's fine here. No, we don't need your help. Uh-huh.”

Wren made a circling motion with her hand, and rolled her eyes. Lowell. It had to be Lowell. The dweeb. There was no love lost between her and Sergei's gallery assistant. She thought he was a suck-up with a fetish for electronic toys, and he considered her a parasite without any redeeming social graces. Sergei did his best to keep them at opposite ends of the city.
Dweeb,
she thought again.
If he only knew what his oh-so-artsy boss did in his spare time!

Sergei hung up the phone, and looked at her, a faraway look in his eyes, what Wren called his thousand-yard stare. When his gaze was cold, it made people tremble in their shoes and back away with minimal breathing so as not to catch his attention. It had taken her several years to get over the urge to run, when he got like that. And another year or so to realize it would never be turned on her. When it went hazy like it was now, though, it meant he was running through a hundred different possibilities, calculating the odds. The latter look was only marginally safer to be around than the former, and it
did
get used on her every now and again.

“What? Tell me it's not the government again,” she pleaded. The first and only and hopefully last time they had trod on the toes of the FBI, even Sergei's best contacts had been forced to do some very fast talking to smooth things over. The government's top-secret official position was that there was no such thing as magic, no such thing as Talent, and absolutely no such thing as the
Cosa Nostradamus.
But they came down pretty hard on anyone using that nonexistent Talent anywhere near them.

“No, not this time. Our motive is greed, pure, and not-so-simple. Not financial—aesthetic. I was right, Prevost is a collector.”

“How do you know that? And how do you know it's the right guy? We got a couple of Prevosts on this coast—he's been to your gallery? We have an address? Wait a minute, collector of what? Fine art and chunks of concrete don't exactly match, hanging on the wall. Even the weird-ass shi—stuff you sell.”

“A collector of things other people don't have,” he clarified, ignoring her usual slur on his artists. “He came off the broom—” Sergei's less-than-fond way of describing the Players, or magic wannabes, who came into the gallery “—a few years ago, trolling for items that might be one of a kind. Items of a magical provenance. Which means that he was plugged in enough to know I might be a source, which means he'd also know enough to keep asking in the right places. And he would keep at it—he had those vibes, which was why I remembered him. He'd keep digging until someone actually was stupid or hungry enough to give him what he wanted—or tell him where and how to get it. It seems a damned likely match, yes?”

Wren stared at him. “Yes. Damn, yes. Which means you were right, if this guy's not a Talent himself—”

Sergei shook his head. “I'd lay money he's not.”

“—then our thief was probably on retainer, maybe had been from when you first encountered this collector-guy, or soon after. A steady job, no need to advertise his or her abilities, which would explain the lack of flash.” She shook her head, considering all the ramifications. “A collector. Great. I hate this job. Have I told you how much I hate this job?”

“Not yet,” he sighed, sitting back down in the chair. “But I suspect I'll be hearing it a great deal.”

A good retriever could get into any building ever built. And Wren was the best retriever working in the United States, maybe in all of North America today. Some locations might take less time, some might take more, but they were all accessible if you had the Talent. But collectors were an entirely different animal. As Sergei once pointed out, the true collector has read the evil overlord's rules, the most important one being “don't gloat about your plan in the face of your enemy, captive or not.” And the second most important being “pay your hired help well, so they can't be bought out by rivals.”

Plus, a real mental-case collector—the obsessive, aggressive, doesn't mind breaking the law to own something type—kept his spoils well-guarded. In fact, he didn't care if anyone else knew he owned something or not. What's important was that
he
knew that he owned something that no one else could have, either because it was one-of-a-kind, or impossible to obtain, or some variation on that theme. He wouldn't need to advertise, to show off, or to gloat. So there would be fewer weak chinks in his armor for Wren to wiggle through.

But there was money at stake here. A lovely lot of money, even if Sergei had, in retrospect, underbid the deal. And if there was one thing that could motivate both of them, it was the thought of that money sliding its way into their own pockets. Well, that and the challenge of it all.

Sergei and Wren grinned at each other, a little anticipation mixing in to go with the aggravation. One of the things that had bound them from the very beginning was an awareness that it wasn't enough to be the best. You had to prove it. Not just to others, but to yourself as well. Council, Wren admitted ruefully, weren't the only ones with ego.

Money. Prestige. Face. Ego.
A little hamster, racing in her brain.
What's the connection, what's the thread that binds it all?
Let it rest, Wren, she warned herself. Let it unravel in its own time, its own pace.

“Noodles?” he asked, offering her a plate. She took it, and a pair of chopsticks, and started shoveling food into her mouth. It was going to be a
very
long night.

 

For the next few hours the only sound to come from the office was the sound of chewing, paper turning, and the tapping of Wren's fingers on the keyboard. She couldn't remember how many late-night sessions they'd had like this, hunting down some detail that would make a puzzle piece fall together. Sometimes a case—
situation—
was a question of trolling, like she had been doing with Old Sally, sending out lures and waiting for the answer to fall into your lap and close the case. But more often a job prep session involved chasing down dead end after dead end, until Sergei started to mutter the most interesting curses in Russian, which was how she discovered that a particularly pungent and heartfelt curse
could
and
did
sear the air with an interesting shade of blue electricity. Prep wasn't fun, even if this was more enjoyable than the earlier know-nothing, assume-nothing stages. But prepping every step of the way was how you got the job done. Going in half-assed, as Sergei was forever saying, was the mark of an amateur or a glory hound.

The fact that he usually said this right after she had gone in half-assed was beside the point.

Tonight they had split the workload: he was sorting through gallery records his assistant had—under protest and with a few comments about overtime not quite under his breath—brought over, while she searched the Internet for any mention of one Matthew Prevost, art collector and obscenely wealthy person. Occasionally one of them would find something of interest, and put it in the “follow-up-on” pile. That pile was depressingly small, but around 10:00 p.m. Wren thought that she might have gotten a pipeline into his main home on this coast.

“Real estate records have an M. Prevost signing off on the loan. It was buried…looks like he did it through a second party or something.” The house was in upstate New York, north and west of Albany. Far enough away from the original site that his pet mage probably couldn't translocate the stone directly—unfortunately reducing the chance that someone like Wren could sniff it back to him—but close enough that they could transport it by normal, and less traceable means, rather than use the effort of translocating it again. And that meant there should be some record of it. Or not, she thought, if they hauled it themselves. Better to burn that bridge when and if they came to it.