Staying Dead (8 page)

Dropping her jacket, she left it in the middle of the floor, walking down the short hallway into her office. No messages on the machine. She'd check in with Sergei later, after the gallery closed. She frowned. No, damn it, today was—Tuesday, the gallery was open late tonight. She'd talk to him later, then. No rush.

She flipped the light switch, then turned on the computer. While it booted up, she flipped through the mail, snorting in disgust at the amount of junk mail and more useless circulars that had been shoved into the front door, making it almost impossible to open. She supposed that hand-delivering them employed someone…she just wished they'd pay attention to the “no menus, no flyers” sign on the apartment building's door! She sorted through them on the off chance something was actually interesting, and spotted yet another pale-blue flyer advertising Village Pest Removal services. “‘Let us remove infestations and unwanted visitations.'” Well, poetic, anyway. Then she frowned, looking more closely at the wording on the sheet of paper:
Tired of coming home to unwanted visitations? Concerned about the infestation of your building? Your neighborhood? Call us. We can clean things up for you.

“Your entire neighborhood?” Hell of a claim, in Manhattan.

A hunch tingled at the back of her head, her brain reaching for two and two in order to stretch it into five. Something about the wording sounded unpleasantly familiar. She put the paper down flat on her desk and reached over to pick up the phone and headset. Dialed the phone number listed on the flyer, pacing as she did so.

“Hello. Yes, I'd like to speak to someone about an…infestation.”

The voice on the other end of the line was enthusiastic. Perky. Oh so happy and eager to please.

“Yes, they're huge…winged, too. I just saw them tonight, and then I saw your flyer…” She was a pretty good actress, if she did say so herself. Wren almost believed that her apartment
had
been invaded.

“What? No, I have no idea how they got in, haven't seen them anywhere else. Well, of course, who goes poking about looking for cockroaches—hello?”

The perky, friendly boy on the other line had hung up.

“Expecting something different, were we? Oh yeah. I know who you are now.” They weren't here for pests—at least not the way New Yorkers usually used the term. Wren snarled and tossed the crumpled-up flyer across the room, missing the wastebasket by an embarrassing margin.

It was the NYADI—New Yorkers against Demonic Infestation—all over again, she'd eat someone else's hat if it wasn't. They had first appeared about three-four years before, when she was still living uptown, made life hell for everyone, Talent and Null alike, before they finally disappeared as suddenly as they'd arrived.

“Jesus wept, I so don't need this now!” All it took were a couple of newcomers to the city, who didn't know enough not to look directly at the strangers sitting next to you on the subway car, and you got spooked vigilantes trying to save humanity from demonkind. Wren snorted. As though demons were some big threat. She blamed the endless repeats of
Buffy
for that. And
The X-Files.
Some people really just couldn't separate fact from fiction.

But this was way more directed than the ranting street-corner attacks had been. Way more careful, subtle even, which meant someone was thinking. Which was never good when it came to extremist loonies.

“Bastards. If it is them I swear I'll…”

The familiar sound byte of her log-in interrupted her, and she exhaled heavily, forcing herself to relax. Slowly, as though tracking current, she lowered her shoulders, opened her hands, and let the tension slide out through her pores.

Leaving the rest of the mail in a pile on the top of a filing cabinet near the window, she took the headset off and sat down again at the desk.
Work, Valere. Deal with those bastards later. And there
will
be a later….

Entering in the series of passwords, she logged into her server, downloading the day's e-mail. Most of it was junk and spam, a few were from old high-school friends she managed somehow to keep in touch with, and three were headed “Old Sally.” She clicked on those first.

Old Sally was a mare who had been stuffed and stored in a glass cabinet by a grieving owner, way back in the bad old days of battles on horseback. She had gone a-walking one night during a nasty electrical storm about one hundred years ago, caught up in some unknown spell sent out of control.

Since then, she had turned up in a variety of locations across England, most recently in the Dowager Queen's own bedroom. Much like the bansidhe of old, in that she gave warning of terrible times to come. For the Queen Mum, it had heralded the breakup of Charles and Diana's marriage. Not that
that
had required anything supernatural to herald it.

From there, Old Sally had disappeared for several years. Apparently, somehow, she had found her way across the Big Wet to the New World.

As of yet, nobody had been able to figure out what was animating this poor Great Horse so long past her natural life. Nor had they been able to determine her choice of victims, or mode of transport. Mostly, she had been a new tidbit for folklorists and arcanologists to haggle over in irritable and occasionally (but only occasionally) amusing letters to the editor. But now, some crazed collector wanted possession of Old Sally. Enough that they were willing to pay the outrageous sums Wren—via Sergei—could command. Assuming they could locate and get their hands on her, that was. Wren's average job took between three and nine days, from contract to completion. She'd been working this for eighteen months already, on and off, more off than on.

The Wren had a rep for never failing once an assignment was taken. The fact that that rep was as much careful PR as actual fact didn't make it any easier to admit defeat.

“Okay, totally useless, thank you very much.” Wren deleted the first e-mail, and went on to the next one. It claimed to be from a psychic channeling the spirit of Old Sally, with a list of demands to be met before she would rest.

“Give me a break,” Wren muttered in disgust, using her toe to pull off one sneaker, then returning the favor with the other foot. “She's a horse, and one stuffed with sawdust, making her dumber than the average equine. Which is saying something.”

Wren didn't have much use for psychics. There might be real ones out there, just like there might be actual spirits haunting the airwaves, but she wasn't going to hold her breath until someone proved it. Generally speaking, dead was dead, and telepathy only worked in fantasy novels.

The last e-mail had information that might be of more use, involving several potential scandals that might break in the next month or so. Old Sally could be expected to show up at any of them.

Unfortunately, four of them involved people on the West Coast, and another two were up North. She would have to call in too many favors to cover them all.

“Nothing to do about them for the moment,” she said in disgust. It wasn't a rush job, thankfully. She could postpone it a few weeks, and worst-case scenario involved somebody getting some bad news a little ahead of the fact. Wren could live with that, so long as the client didn't get too antsy.

God, she hated working two jobs. Surefire way to get something screwed up, make her look like an idiot.

Moving that e-mail into the folder for current cases, she looked at what was left.

One from her mother, without a subject line. Wren hesitated, her finger over the delete button. Then she sighed, and hit the enter button instead.

“Hi, Mom,” she said to it. “No Mom, I'm not. Yes Mom, I am. Yes, I will call Aunt Missy. Someday. No, I don't need a loan. Yes, I'm remembering to lock my doors at night…no, I don't want to meet a nice boy. I don't even want to meet a bad boy!”

How could she lose an argument with a woman who wasn't even there? It was a gift, she supposed. A decade past Margot Valere had trusted a well-spoken stranger in a suit and tie to give her daughter a better life than the one she'd had, waiting tables and living in a trailer. For that reason alone—ignoring the first eighteen years of pretty good times despite themselves—Wren knew that she would always owe her mother a debt which made it impossible for her to deny the older woman anything. She couldn't imagine a life in which she wasn't Sergei Didier's partner. Even if he did make her crazy with the overprotectiveness sometimes.

The rest of the e-mail looked innocuous enough: she belonged to several listservs, some professional, some personal, and they all were pretty high-volume during the week. Weekends, they slowed down. The friends, at least, were out having lives.

“I need to get me one of those, some day,” she said to herself, pushing the chair back and stretching. Her jaw cracked open in a yawn, and she looked at the clock at the lower right hand of her monitor screen.

Only 8:00 p.m. Then again, it had been a damn long day. And dodging wizzart current took a lot out of you. Getting up, she padded down the T of the hallway to her bedroom, sloughing off her jeans and top and draping them over the end of her bed. The bedroom was the smallest of the three rooms, holding the bed, an old mahogany dresser that belonged in a much nicer home, and a matching table by the head of the bed that held a beat-up lamp, an old-fashioned windup alarm clock, a bottle of aspirin, and a slender, worn volume of koans. The walls were painted a dark forest green, and the carpet underfoot was pale green. Her bra and socks made splashes of white lying on top of it. The one window had heavy dark-green velvet drapes that were held off to one side by a gold scarf. She tugged at the scarf, releasing the drapes and plunging the room into complete darkness, cut only by the red glow of the clock.

She turned on the lamp, then sat on the bed and pulled on a pair of cutoff sweatpants and a tank T-shirt. Bed looked damn inviting. But it was too early yet to call it a night. Sleep now would mean she was up at three in the morning, and while this might be the city that never slept, there were limits.

No, a nap was probably a bad idea. Now that she was more comfortable, she'd pour herself some coffee and head back to the computer. Maybe something new would have come in. And if not, maybe exhaustion would make something she had learned today stand out, jump out of her subconscious and tell her where the damn marble block masquerading as a spell was, so she could wrap it up and get some justified sleep.

But by 10:30, Wren had gotten her second wind, courtesy of a natural inclination to evening hours, and a carafe of fresh-brewed Jamaican blend. The office was covered in crumpled-up pieces of paper, and another half-dozen sheets were tacked to the wall, creating an odd mosaic of evidence and theories.

Of the thirteen names on her list, Max had seemed the most probable. He had the grudge and the mojo to pull off a stunt like this, even if his brain stem was a bit too jittery these days to do it clean. He'd only been a full-blown wiz for four, five years now, he might have been able to focus long enough. The energy she had picked up on-site hadn't been all too stable either, a crackpot waiting to happen. Either the thief was borderline wizzing, or…

“Or,” she thought out loud, “the snatcher was being influenced by the client who hired the theft in the first place. Stable Talent, crazy client? And it would have to be a long-term-ish relationship, not a once-off deal.”

It was a theory, and a pretty wild one, but right now she was flying on theories alone. “I take it back, Lord. I don't want challenges in my life. Nice, boring, easygoing retrievals, that's what I'm after.”

She tapped the eraser end of a pencil against her current list, running through the remaining names one more time, beginning with the ones she had checked out today.

“Sandy Hall. Career snitch with the boost—” the ability to use a current of magic to move objects, otherwise known as telekinesis “—but not much in the way of brains.” His pattern would fit what she had felt, too. Not a bad fit, except for the fact that according to his wife he was probably dead, anyway. Not that being thrown into a working incinerator was an impossible hurdle to get over, but…

“Emilio Lawson. A better thief than Hall, currently AWOL.” Rumor had it an Appalachian cave-dragon had eaten him. If so, strike that name. What the cave-dragons took, they kept. Digested or not.

“Katya Arkady.” She had been tossed from the Council's mage roster for conduct unbecoming. Wren snorted. Already she liked the woman. P.B.'s notes suggested she was the one who Frants weaseled out from under. If so, she'd have the grudge motive down cold. Unfortunately, she was currently in the hospital for surgery. While being incinerated might not stop someone really determined, open-heart surgery would probably slow them down considerably. With a sigh, Wren crossed her name off the list, pushing down so hard she broke the point of the pencil.

“Margery and Alexander Freiner. Last seen taking sanctuary from a seriously peeved gnome.” They'd be holed up at the Vatican for a while, if she knew anything about gnomes. And no magic was going to get worked under the patrician nose of Rome if they didn't condone it.

She briefly played with the idea of a Papal plot, but gave it up for lack of anything remotely resembling believable logic.