Staying Dead (15 page)

“Neezer?”

He didn't respond. Panic wound in her stomach, spitting acid.

“Neezer, wake up!”

In the real history, he had woken, at least for a little while. But in her dream he stayed silent, still staring…

No! I will stop this now. I will wake up NOW.

Her eyes shot open and she stared up at the ceiling. It was dark, the still-quiet that comes before false dawn, the only time a city can ever be said to be quiet. Sweat dampened her skin, clumping her hair and making it stick to the back of her neck. Tears pooled in the corner of her eyes, and her throat felt tight not with fear, but sorrow. Sorrow, and loss. A dull aching pain that never, ever went away, not any moment she was awake or asleep.
Don't leave me alone….

It was the angel. That's all. That's enough.

Rolling onto her side, Wren kicked the sheets away, letting the night air cool her skin slightly. The sense of emptiness lingered. Her left hand reached out, almost without conscious thought, and lifted the phone off her nightstand. Speed dial number one, and the sound of ringing filled her ear.

“Didier.” A sleep-drenched sound, groggy. He had only left her apartment three hours ago. Even with his usual difficulty catching a cab, at that hour of the morning there shouldn't have been any traffic. More than enough time to make it up and across town to his apartment, peel off his clothing and fall into bed. He wasn't much on bedtime rituals when he was that wiped out.

Suddenly guilt washed over her, making her voice almost too soft to be heard. “Bad time?”

“Never.” She could hear him moving about, the sound of pillows being fluffed and the creak of the bed as he shifted his weight. “I was only sleeping. Who needs too many hours of that?”

In the darkness, his voice in her ear, she could almost pretend he was there with her. Imagined his weight sinking the mattress, his too-long legs taking up half the bed. She knew he liked to sleep sprawled on his back, while she curled on her side. More than once they had both managed to fit onto an undersized motel mattress, or—once—a tarp spread under the leaking roof of a falling-down woodshed. It hadn't always been contracts and bank accounts and reputations doing half the work.

“Bad dream, Zhenechka?” His tenor was like caramel, the normally clipped syllables softening. His nighttime voice, she thought of it. The voice he used only for her, and the cat he didn't want anyone to know he fed, in the alley behind the gallery.

“Yeah. No. It….” She hesitated, her free hand playing with the edge of the sheet.
Silly, this hesitation. Stupid, to call him and then not talk.
But she couldn't find the words right away.

“I dreamed about Neezer,” she said finally. “That…that day.” The Day, she thought of it. The day her mentor had finally admitted out loud what they both knew, that he was on the edge of wizzing—of becoming a danger to himself, and to her. The day when being a Talent had stopped being a game, and gotten deadly, dangerously serious.

She listened to the long, warm sounds of Sergei's breathing, and felt oddly comforted, as though he had put his arms around her and cradled her to him.

“I'm scared,” she said finally. And she wasn't referring to just the aftermath of the dream. Something was happening. Things were changing. She could feel it, like thunder in the air, even if she didn't know the cause.

“I know. So am I.” He wasn't talking about the dream either.

And that was what she loved the most about her partner. That in the dark, separated by half a city, connected only by the faintest wisps of technology, he could make her feel better by giving validation to her fears. The thought struck her as horribly funny, and she started to giggle for the second time in five hours.

“Wren?” But there was no real worry in his voice now, only understanding. “It's okay, little wren. Let it out. It's been an impossible day, even for a tough little bird like you.”

Something grabbed her inside the ribs at his words, grabbed and clenched and caught her short of breath, aching and expanding in the hollowness. “Don't ever leave me,” she asked, not even aware of what she was saying.

There was a long silence.

“I won't. Not ever. Now go back to sleep, Zhenechka. I'm here. I'll stay right here.”

With that promise, she curled herself around the receiver, and slowly slid back into a dreamless sleep.

 

“Don't leave me…” A whisper, a child's terrified command. Or a woman's heartfelt request.

He could stay with her…or he could protect her. He might not be able to do both, not anymore.

Give the devil his due, he protected what was his.
And right now, some insurance didn't sound like such a bad idea.

On the other side of the island, Sergei Didier lay in his bed, staring out his window at the pale pink light creeping into the sky, and knew what he had to do.

I
n a building without any identifying signs or the usual indicators of occupancy, on a street that nobody in the city thought to walk down without a good reason for it, the Fatal Friday cocktail party was in full swing in a room off the second-floor lobby.

The room itself was warm and inviting, paneled in cherry-stained wood and filled with glossy-polished furniture. Thick cream carpeting muffled the sound of heels and conversation alike. Easily two dozen men and women moved about the glassed-in room, drinks in hand and gossip on their lips. It could have been any group of lawyers or accountants unwinding after a tough week in the system. Could have been, but wasn't.

They were the Silence. What one well-placed insider had once called the real world's answer to MacGyver: two-hundred-plus operatives armed with nothing more than their wits and a pocket knife.

And the resources of a multimillion-dollar endowment, renewed annually by donors who remained distant and unnamed.

But for the operatives for whom Fatal was a tradition, albeit an ironic one, the who and the why of the Silence's benefactors wasn't something they thought about every day, if at all. It was enough that they were there, doing what they did. And part of what they did involved appearing in front of the Action Board on the third Friday of every month.

The Silence took no fees, accepted no credit, courted no publicity. A truly secret society in a world with a long history of pretenders to the name. But there were always holes, always flaws. No organization had perfect security, perfect information. And so the Silence regularly drained their direct operatives of whatever info they held, no matter if it seemed useful or not at the time.

And to that end, every Handler on the continent, and a few who had to fly in from overseas, stopped by to unload their month's worth of reports in person, and get a grilling on every detail in return. Praise was allocated, and occasionally blame or reprimands.

The cocktail party afterward was a civilized veneer on the heavy drinking which invariably followed those reports.

It used to be a looser affair, but after the one “safe” bar in the neighborhood burned down during a labor disagreement, the Silence brass established this in-house gathering. Free booze was better than stuff you had to pay for, and the Silence had a way of keeping tabs on who was saying what in their drunken stupor.

Sergei hadn't been to one of these gatherings in almost seven years. Purposefully absent, as though least in sight would mean least in mind, the minor flow of information he used to maintain his and Wren's freedom fed to them over the phone, from a distance. Obviously, that distance hadn't been enough. A phrase from
The Godfather
sprang inevitably, ironically, to mind. “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

But there was never loss without gain. He hoped, anyway.

The press of a body nearer to his than was comfortable was his only warning. “What is your deal, anyway?”

“Excuse me?” Turning, Sergei raised one eyebrow, and looked down his admittedly patrician nose at the much shorter speaker, to no effect. He prided himself on the ability to freeze out unwanted conversational interlopers, but Dancy had never been able to take a hint. Sledgehammer or otherwise.

“Take the promotion, man.” Dancy leaned forward, the alcohol plain on his breath. Five foot nothing, squarely muscled like a bulldog, he had been around forever, gone up the ranks from messenger to Handler, and the scars of it were in his eyes. “You know they get what they want anyway, and they want your girl, bad. So why not take the bennies too?”

The Silence's interest in Wren was open gossip. Bad sign. But it was their obvious need that gave him the leverage he was here trying to use. That didn't make Dancy's comments any easier to take. “Get. Away. From. Me.” His teeth didn't quite grit together, but it was a near thing. He did
not
like being talked about. He never had, even in his glory days as an Active. He liked it even less when Wren was involved.

Dancy blinked, taken aback by the other man's reaction to what he had intended as friendly advice.

“Right. Still the same old team player, huh?” That stung, more than it should have. More than he should have let it. “See you around, Softwing.”

Softwing. His nickname in the Silence. He'd always found that…amusing. Ironic. The owl and the wren. Birds almost of a feather.

Sergei took a cigarette out of the silver case he always carried and rolled it between his fingers. Fifteen years since he'd inhaled nicotine, and the urge was still there, a smoky siren's song. He tested himself, every day, some days every hour. Masochism? Martyrdom? Was there really much difference between the two?

He shouldn't have been so hard on Dancy. You couldn't be in the game and not get talked about, and that's what this all was, a very deadly serious game. And the moment he walked into the building, people knew. He might call it gossip…active Handlers would call it intel. Their lives sometimes depended on it.

“Didier?”

He turned, bracing himself until he saw who the speaker was.

“Adam.”

“I never thought I'd see you at one of these again.” There was an unspoken question on Adam's lean face, a concern that dated back twenty years, when they were both raw recruits in the Silence's ongoing battle. Adam never seemed to age, damn him. A little more silver in the reddish hair, a few more lines around the eyes and mouth, but still the same. His companion, a younger woman with dark brown ringlets and an open, curious face, watched the two of them as though she had her eye to a microscope.

“I had need of the Library. Sheer bad luck to pick today, but figured as long as they were pouring…”

Adam pursed his mouth. You didn't go to the Library unless and until you had exhausted all your usual resources. But Sergei had just enough of a reputation as a renegade that he might do anything at all.

“Did she let you in?”

A twist of the mouth that might have been a smile. “Sent me to Douglas.”

“Ouch.” The Library was harsh on people who wasted her—its—time. But Douglas was almost worse. “Was it worth it?”

Sergei shrugged. “Won't know until I know.”

The Silence was small by most corporate standards, but it still had an organizational chart with three branches: Action, Information and Operations. Douglas
was
Operations. He pulled strings, and Action—the branch that oversaw Handlers and their agents in the field—danced.

Douglas knew where the bodies were buried, how deep, and what it might take to dig them up again. You went to him only when you had something of value to trade.

Adam looked at Sergei with renewed interest, but his companion finally had enough, and elbowed Adam in the ribs just hard enough to make her point.

“Ooof. Right. Sorry. Clara, Sergei Didier. Sergei, Clara Maroony.”

“You were a Handler,” she said, sizing him up with a cool eye he might have found appealing at another time, on another day.

“Not anymore.”

“Not right now,” Adam said, and returned Sergei's glare with a cool eye of his own. “He's freelancing at the moment. I'm thinking of taking him as my mentor.”

Clara snorted, and turned on her heel, leaving them in search of more interesting conversation.

“Heard of me, has she?”

Adam made a “what can you do?” move with his hands. “There are those who still like to talk about the lad who told the Silence to take a long walk off the short pier. If it helps, most of the young'uns haven't a clue who you were. Still are.” He held up a hand to stop anything Sergei might say in response. “Spare me, okay? We've been friends for too long to fight over this. Even if you are stingy with the Christmas cards. Just remember that you do still have friends here.” His expression grew intent. “And that you can do more with friends than enemies.”

“Thank you.” There really wasn't anything else he could say. And friends were always good to have. He might have need of them. Soon.

Adam clapped him on the shoulder, and turned to follow Clara. Sergei stood in the middle of the growing crowd, feeling it swirl around him in an intricate two-step of office politics. Sharks and lampreys, circling, looking for something struggling in the water.

An ugly image, and probably not fair. The Silence operatives were the good guys. He had to remember that.

If Sergei was going to be honest with himself, there was a lot of truth in what the two men had said. If he were to return to the Silence, bringing Wren with him, he would be their golden boy again, a position he'd held for most of his adult life.

Look at it logically, old man.
On the one hand, if he agreed to be Wren's Handler, he would be in a position to help her adjust to the…particulars of the organization. If he balked, and they coerced her anyway, he would be locked out. The Silence would make sure of that.

The thought of her turning to someone else, taking guidance from someone else, made his stomach twist. Ten years they'd been partners. Three times longer than anyone else he had ever worked with. A truer partnership than anything he'd known before.

Those thoughts brought up memories he had been repressing since he walked into the building, the memories that had driven him out in the first place. Poor Jordan. Young, Talented, eager. So eager to please, he claimed he could do more than he could. And current wasn't kind to those who overreached themselves.

Wren thought that there wasn't anything worse than wizzing. He had seen that there was. The Silence had asked that of Jordan. Had demanded it. Taken it.

Destroyed all that talent, that eagerness. And he, as Jordan's Handler, had been complicit. Guilty.

Wren wasn't that compliant, that obliging. The very thought made him grin in relief and memory as he raised his glass to his mouth.

But if everything he'd planted today grew as it should, he would have to return here. That was the offer he had made to Douglas: he would return to the fold, and they would leave Wren alone. Return to the thing that had almost destroyed him, to protect the thing that had saved him.

Douglas had promised to consider it, to take the partial victory rather than lose entirely. Sergei would still be free to continue his association with Wren, after his responsibilities to the Silence. And that association would earn her the Silence's protection as well. But active status would put a strain on their relationship, their
partnership:
one he wasn't sure it could survive.

And how long would the trade hold for? The Silence wanted Wren—how much time could he buy her, realistically? Was it a trade worth making, or would he be selling himself for no real gain?

He would do it, in a heartbeat, if he felt that it was the right move. If it were a winning move. But he didn't trust the Silence anymore. And, in this matter, he no longer trusted his own instincts.

Sergei kicked back what was left of his drink and left the glass on the table. Suddenly the amber liquid didn't taste as appealing as it had before. The cocktail party was building in energy. There were people arriving whom he hadn't seen in years, people he had once considered allies, but he didn't want to mingle, didn't want to talk to anyone else, and have to decipher what games they were playing, what agendas they were pursuing or alliances they were building. He pushed through the crowd, nodded to the few people there he respected, and went out the door and down the escalator—the Silence didn't like elevators, too easy to tamper with—and out to the street.

The question lingered, like the aftertaste of the Scotch. Why was he trying so hard to avoid the inevitable? Adam thought the Silence could be useful to him, Sergei. And Douglas believed that Wren could be useful to the Silence. That message came through loud and clear. She could probably write a half-decent ticket for herself, maybe stay out of the worst of the assignments.

But there was always a price to pay for power. In this case, Wren's freedom. The chance for her to remain a lonejack, answerable to no one save herself. The option to do or not, as she felt best.

In short, what was at stake was her soul. It was clichéd, old-fashioned, but he didn't know any other way to express it.

He glanced back up at the building, its façade innocuous, unthreatening, almost not there to the casual passersby. There was a price to pay for everything. Wren might, given the choice, think losing him, at least for a little while, a fair price to pay. And yet he had promised never to leave her. Did this qualify or not? And if it came to that, would he be able to honor that promise?

Too scared to risk everything on the roll of the dice, when you know someone else had the loading of it. He
was
too old for this. Too unwilling to rock the small, patched boat he had fashioned for himself.

Walking down the street, he forced the tension out of his shoulders, breathing in the soft spring air and letting it settle in his lungs, carrying away the smoke and cologne-scented air from inside. What-ifs and maybes were theory. He wouldn't borrow any more trouble than he already had to hand. And right now, with Douglas appeased for the moment, that trouble was the current situation.