Staying Dead (9 page)

That left seven names she hadn't been able to learn anything significant about, one way or the other, to clear them or move them up on the list. She chewed the eraser tip, then made a face at the taste and started tapping it on the desktop again.

“Seven magic-users with enough mojo and snitch-smarts to pull this off, who were still up and about enough to pull this off without leaving anything more than the reading I was able to scrape up or—more importantly—without blabbing it to anyone else. Damn it, this shouldn't be so tough.”

Current made you chatty as well as rude, and people loved to brag. By now, there should be
some
chatter on the street.

“Arrrgh. This is total bullshit,” she said in disgust. Dropping the pencil, she stood up and stretched, palms flat and arms reaching for the ceiling. Abandoning the enclosed space and by-now-stale air of her office, she paced down the hallway, her bare feet adding to the furrows worn in the faded brown carpet.

“I'm never going to find out who pulled this off without more evidence. It would take me a year to run through everyone who was in town, much less winnowing out who might have a motive, or who was showing ready green from a job.”

Her mother was always after her to get a cat. Somehow, to her mother, talking to a cat was less harmful to one's sanity than talking to oneself. Wren had always thought best out loud, for as long as she could remember, but it had really gotten out of control—in her mother's opinion—when Neezer was training her. Even now sometimes with Sergei, going over a plan, she would pace and walk, while he sat there at his desk and was amused by her. Or, more often than not lately, they would pace back and forth past each other. Wasn't that supposed to be a warning sign of co-dependency, when you start picking up each other's habits like that?

“Screw this. What would Perry Mason say?”

She waited, pausing in her pacing, as though expecting Perry Mason to come to her aid.

“Okay, fine. What would Peter Wimsey say?” Her mother had hooked her on those books, the summer she had mono and had to spend almost three weeks in bed too tired to even think about doing anything more strenuous than turning a page.

She turned left rather than continuing down the hallway, finding herself filling the tea kettle and putting it on the burner. “Lord Peter would have charmed the guard into telling him the one thing he needed to learn from the scene, and Bunter would have found out the other essential clue, and Harriet would have put it all together in time for a little emotional angst with their tea. Christ, Wren, get a grip.” She pulled down a mug from the cabinet, snagging the tea canister as well. “Ignore the evidence, evidence lies. What's the starting point in all this? What's the source? Old man Frants. His building. His protection spell swiped.

“So, logic would say, look to who would stand to benefit. One of his competitors? No…one of his underlings. They'd have access to the building, they'd have something to gain from eroding the old man's power base. So…who's hungry? Who's downtrodden?”

The kettle whistled, and she removed it from the heat. She filled a tea ball with pungent leaves from the canister, and dropped it into the mug, then poured the water over it, letting it steep as she stared at it in deep thought.

“You think I'm losing my touch?”

Sergei closed the door behind him, accepting the tea mug from her gratefully. “I most sincerely hope not.”

The whole tea-making thing was like a Sergei-alert. He started up the stairs, and she got an urge to make tea. It was deeply weird. But, like so much of the weirdness in her life, quite useful.

She perched herself comfortably on the counter, watching her partner/business agent sip his tea. He was dressed casually this evening, in dark gray slacks and a white button-down shirt under an expensive leather coat he hadn't bothered to take off. Even though his hair was its usual sleeked-back perfection, with only a hint of the natural curl visible, he looked tired, the skin under his eyes faintly discolored and pouchy. She felt the urge to tuck him into bed, and squelched it. Not only would he not appreciate it, even if he was dog-tired, he also looked pissed. That, plus the fact that he'd obviously come straight from the gallery—she risked a look at the stove clock and amended that; he had cut out before the place closed down, meant he'd finally recognized one of the names on the list. Two guesses which one, and the first doesn't count.

Assuming he'd figured it out by the time he woke up, that gave her a full day's head start on his mad-on. If he only twigged midday, she was in for a meltdown.

“Was your trip today not a success?” he asked.

She did an instant Sergei-translation in her head: Are you okay? He was tired, pissed…but not angry. Not anymore. All to the good. Sergei angry was impressive unless it was you he was angry at.

“Wiped our most promising suspect right off the chart.” Wren-translation: I'm fine, the day was a bust.

“Well, that's a success of sorts, I suppose,” he said. There was a pause while they both processed the information, then he circled right back to the question at hand. “Why do you believe you might be losing your touch?”

Wren hated having to admit to a screw-up. But better to get it done, and move on. He wouldn't let up until he got it out of her, anyway.

“I let possibilities distract me from the probabilities,” she admitted. “I took the most likely suspects instead of the most logical ones.”

“Which were…?”

“That you were right. Nearest and dearest having the motive with the mostest.”

Sergei shook his head sadly, letting Wren know that her theory was about to get shot down in multicolored flames. He put the mug down on the counter next to her and shrugged out of his coat. Wren caught the collar, holding it for him as he slid his long arms from the sleeves. It was buttery soft, sleek enough to sleep under, which Wren had done on a few notable occasions. Much nicer than her own battered and scarred bomber jacket, but hers could stand up to abuse and shake it off, while his, she suspected, would go into a pout if there was so much as a scratch inflicted on it.

He took the coat back, going back out into the hallway to hang it up in her tiny closet. “At the level of employ where they would presumably know about the protection spell, they're all fiercely loyal to their boss—almost illogically so.”

Sound traveled well, and she could hear him clearly as he came back into the kitchen.

“Certainly enough that he hasn't lost anyone to a competitor in fifteen years. Even our Mr. Margolin checks out. He was approached three months ago by InterLox, a rival corporation, offered twice his current salary to come over. He refused. They rise up through the ranks, and they stay within the ranks, disgruntled or no.”

He paused, tilting his head in thought. “I wonder…”

Wren sighed, all too aware of the way his brain worked in matters like this. “It's none of our business. Nobody's paying us to snoop interoffice politics.”

He grinned. “Yet. Never turn down the chance for some potentially lucrative blackmail material, Zhenechka.”

But Wren wasn't appeased by the Russian diminutive of her name. His occasional pirate tendencies made her wonder how horribly overpriced the art he sold actually was. Then a thought occurred to her, and a pained expression settled on her face, creasing the skin between her eyebrows. “So if your boys are above suspicion, and mine aren't panning out…we're out of home-grown information. And you know what that means, don't you?”

Sergei's look was a sympathetic one. “We have to go to the Council.”

“Not we.” Wren shook her head decidedly.
“You.”

I
t was a spur-of-the-moment thing. That's what Wren told herself, anyway. Normally she tossed the postcards that arrived like clockwork and proved that whatever mailing address one gallery knew about every other one did, too. She was still on the clock, after all. She should stay home, curl up in a blanket and go over…something. There had to be something she could do. Research a little more into methods of translocation, maybe. Or study up on the client's history, to see if she could find a lead on who had a grudge with this kind of expenditure and the know-how to pull it off…Or maybe…

But Sergei had spoken well of the second artist in this exhibit, and while they rarely agreed on matters of art, she trusted his judgment when he said she might like something.

Besides, sitting here alone was making her twitchy, like there were fire ants under her skin. Maybe it was the warm clear evening air, or the noise from the couples and groups walking along the sidewalks and sitting outside sipping coffee. Or maybe it was the fact that she'd spent all day digging through the available information, and had only frustration to show for it.

Whatever the reason, she'd found herself pulling a sleeveless red dress from her closet, piling her hair up in as fashionable a mess as she could manage, shaking the dust bunnies off her high-heeled black sandals, putting on makeup and catching a cab downtown.

The place was, predictably, a madhouse. All the lovely young things, and more than a few who were neither young nor lovely but wafted the scent of money, holding glasses of sparkling wine and grouped around pedestals displaying what looked like large misshapen chunks of Lucite and sailcloth.

“Excuse me.” She tried to move around one group, and got no response. “Excuse me!” A little louder, emphasized by a shoulder and elbow applied to the worst offender, a tall, anemic-looking blonde with sharp features. The blonde went on talking as though nobody were there.

Even wearing a screaming red dress I'm invisible,
Wren thought in disgust.
Even with cleavage!
She fought down the impulse to give the blonde a spark-charge and instead looked for another way around the chaos.

“Excuse me,” a gentle, deep voice said, and the crowd parted as though the speaker were Moses. An equally warm hand touched her shoulder, shepherding Wren away from the Lucite and toward the back of the gallery, where the drink-swilling crowd was thinner. Here, the pedestals were wider, lower, and arranged in threes.

“Oh. Yeah.”

Sergei stood back and let Wren join the handful of people who were circling one trio. She restrained herself, with effort, from touching one curving, sinuous stone that begged to be stroked.

“It's alive,” she said in awe. “How did he—?”

“He's an artist,” Sergei said, accepting a glass of wine from a server and toasting the sculptures with it. “Rare, true, and treasured.”

“If one of these were to walk home with me…” she said, only half-teasing.

The man standing next to her coughed on his sparkling wine, and Sergei shook his head in mock dismay. “Don't even think about it, Valere. If you're a good girl, maybe I'll introduce you to the artist and you can haggle out a deal of your own. I won't even take my commission.”

“Deal.” Not that she could afford it, even without his cut, but it was a pleasant dream.

“Damn.” Sergei was looking over her shoulder, his gaze caught on something clearly displeasing. She shifted so that she could follow without being too obvious about it. Nothing seemed out of place…oh. There, by the bar set up in the back to serve preferences stronger than champagne.

“You'll excuse me?”

“I'm not a client, Didier. Go, shoo.”

He gave her a distracted smile and moved through the crowd like a Coast Guard cutter. Poor Lowell—
and when was the last time you thought of him that way?
—was clearly overmatched by the statuesque woman in a black silk pantsuit who was insisting to the bartender that she wanted another drink.

“Honey, you've had two too many at least,” Wren said to herself as Sergei intercepted the woman with a firm hand under her elbow. They knew each other, from body language. But not a date; he hadn't been serious about anyone since whatshername last summer, and even if Sergei were to bring a casual date to an opening he was hosting—damned unlikely—she would be someone helpful, not a disaster waiting to happen. Not that she was keeping track of his dating habits. Much.

She watched a moment longer as her partner turned the charm on full-assault, then went back to admiring the sculptor's work. Maybe not all abstract work was crap, after all….

 

“You told me that it was perfectly safe. You said that the spell-casting done on it was inert, that the magic inside it couldn't escape. Ever.”

The woman seated in front of the desk wanted desperately to backhand this sniveling little weasel, but held onto her temper by a bare margin. Slapping clients around was very bad for business, no matter how good it felt personally.

The speaker went on, fleshy pink lips moving in his narrow, sallow face, and that horrible whine coming from his throat, but she tuned it out.

Instead, she looked at her reflection in the glassed-in cabinet behind the client, making sure that no sign of her irritation marred her face. That face could have belonged to a woman anywhere from forty to fifty; brown skin only showing faint lines around lips and eyes, a strong nose and large brown eyes, thick black hair cut short and straight. Never a face to redefine beauty, it nonetheless inspired confidence and a certain sense of security in those she worked with. As it was meant to.

Even the ones who were idiots. Perhaps especially the ones who were idiots.

They were seated in the client's office, a lovely room on the first floor of the mansion they always met in. She assumed it was his home, but had never seen any more of the structure to judge. They always met here: she was willing to negotiate long-distance, but that wasn't satisfactory to this moron. He wanted face-to-face on every damned little detail.

She felt her irritation rising again, and tamped it down, making herself look as though she was paying attention to whatever he was saying. It had been a long day, but that was no excuse. You could also tell a great deal about a client by how they did business. Some insisted on meeting on third-party ground, somewhere impartial. Some never wanted to meet face-to-face, preferring to keep it as distanced as possible. And some—like this fool—kept it close to home, as though that gave them an illusion of control.

It would have been a better illusion if he hadn't called at seven in the morning, bleating like a stuck lamb, demanding that she come out immediately. Whining that the object he had gone to such great lengths—and expense—to acquire gave him, and she quoted, “the creeps.” As though the fact that he was her primary client earned him some first claim—more than that, some
sole
claim over her time.

It did, actually. You jumped when the main bill-payer barked. But most had the grace to acknowledge that her skills were worth the courtesy of asking, not demanding, her presence. And “the creeps—” Good Lord, what did the man want? He knew ahead of time the object had magical influences; she had told him herself, once she'd been given the target. He had assured her that he was prepared, had taken the appropriate safeguards.

Arrogant bastard. Even terrified,
especially
terrified, he was still a shit. Still, you had to make exceptions for wealth and eccentricity, especially when they came together in the same package. And so she had rescheduled everything else that day and, despite the eight-hour drive, come out to hold his hand. Metaphorically. He wasn't paying her
that
much.

So now, for the third time in an hour, she tried to inject a note of reassuring confidence into her voice. “We've been over this how many times? That particular spell was woven into the stone at the time of its formation. It is integral to the object, and cannot be removed.” It
was
the object, in all the ways that mattered. Without the spell, the item was just a block of stone, mass produced and totally without value. “Unless you intend actual harm to the owner of the building it was taken from, it cannot harm you in turn. We went over this before the initial approach and I warned you of all the possible consequences. I am assuming you still have no plans to harm that person?” Not that she would otherwise care—she knew whose building she had targeted; let the two take each other out and the world would be a cleaner place—but, again, bad business.

“I want you to check it out,” the client told her, ignoring her question as though she hadn't even spoken. “Make sure nothing went wrong in the transport.”

“That wasn't in our original contract,” she told him, leaning backward in preparation for a prolonged bargaining session. But instead, he reached into the desk drawer and pulled out a small brown paper-wrapped packet. He placed it on the desk surface, and pushed it across to her. Her eyes never leaving his, she reached forward and picked it up.

“Half the amount of our original fee, simply for ensuring that the magic within the stone remains inert.”

She gauged the weight of the packet, then nodded, tucking it into a pocket of translocation energy she used instead of a pocketbook. It took more maintenance than the convenience was worth, but it impressed the clients when you made things seemingly disappear into thin air. Anything sent there ended up in a safe in her own home, actually. She had been taken advantage of—read that as robbed by her own client—early in her career. Never again.

“All right. Let's get this over with.” It was already evening, and there was no way she was going to stay overnight in the place, even assuming he would offer. She stood, waiting for him to lead her to wherever he had stored the object, but he reached into his desk again, and came up with a length of black cloth.

“You can't be serious—” But she could see from his expression that he was. Deadly serious.

More control games. It didn't matter—any half-trained mageling could retrace their own steps, blindfolded, drunk
and
half-asleep. But if it made him happy…

She submitted to the blindfold, but couldn't help a shudder when the client took her arm to lead her out of the office. Now she knew why she had always resisted touching him. Her clients rarely came to her pure of heart
or
deed, but this man exuded some of the slimier emotions—avarice chief among them—so strongly that it was almost a tactile sensation. And underlying it all was a distasteful sense of something dark and ugly, like sludge in a sewer pipe, that made her deeply uncomfortable. Her client, she realized suddenly and for the first time, wasn't what most psychologists would call stable. But freelancers couldn't be choosers. Especially at these pay levels.

He led her down a hallway that echoed their footsteps off the hardwood flooring, then into an elevator that muted their steps with plush carpeting. There was a faint odor in the air which hadn't been there before—orange? No, but definitely citrusy. Something familiar…wood oil. The walls of the elevator were wood, and had been polished recently. God, it was good to have money, wasn't it? She doubted very much he had ever touched a dust rag in his entire life.

They rose one story, then got off and walked down another length of hallway, this time carpeted. The smell of the oil faded under the onslaught of a colder smell—recirculated air. They were in a part of the house that was sealed off from the outdoors. His collection rooms. She had known that he liked to own things—rare things—he shouldn't; had in fact gotten him some of them herself, but not the sheer number he possessed, to require this much space. As they walked, she could feel things tugging at her, faint sparkling touches as appealing as the client was distasteful, and she felt a moment of honest astonishment when she realized their source. Some people collected antique glass, or Impressionist paintings or Pez dispensers. In addition to everything else, the client collected Artifacts.

No wonder he had assured her that he had the proper containment facilities for the cornerstone!
But if so, why…and what damage was being done, putting them all in together, where their current might scrape and rub against each other…Was that why the cornerstone was behaving oddly?

Not her business. Not her problem. Do the job and get the hell out, she told herself. And maybe, money or no, you don't take any more magic-related jobs for this particular individual, who was clearly crazier than a wizzart on acid.

Finally he stopped, letting go of her arm long enough to open a door, then he ushered her inside and removed the blindfold. Her attention was snagged immediately by the large crystal to one side of the room that hummed with stored energies. Artifacts. Icons. Almost anything could hold current, but an object made expressly for that purpose, imbued with the creator's own ability…like a Christian cross repelling a vampire, the emotional intent of the object intensified its effect.

Gods above and below, she thought wildly, fighting her body's instinctive urge to flee.
Too much. Too much power. It would consume her, overwhelm her.
She tamped down on the panic as best she could, concentrating on breathing, building up her own defenses until the chaotic current-flows dulled to a distant roar.