Curse the Dark. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ with her thoughts. “The idea of getting on the subway tonight…” His voice was a low growl, unlike his usual precise newscaster enunciation. “Too many sweaty people, all unhappy. If we all weren’t so tired the murder rate would be skyrocketing. Besides, we need to talk, and you’ve been avoiding me.”

      “Have not.” She had been, of course. And lying to her partner was supposed to be reserved for times of real need, not just because she was a candy-coated wuss.

      She’d been avoiding everything, lately. Not good. Trust him to call her on it.

      “Genevieve…” Another growl. God, as much as she hated her given name, she loved the sound of him saying it. It made her feel like her spine was melting. Even when he was scolding her, the way he was now.

      “No calls, huh?” Stupid question. If there had been, he would have told her.

      “None,” he confirmed anyway. “And it’s starting to show.”

      She knew that. It just all added to the avoidance factor. Bad enough to be in this miserable heat wave. Adding a dry spell to it was the proverbial insult to injury. She hadn’t gotten a single job since June. Three months, and Sergei hadn’t fielded a single solitary badly-paying inquiry.

      She might be the best Retriever in the business, but being the best didn’t mean anything if you weren’t getting the jobs.

      “Everyone scrams from the city in August,” she offered, fanning herself halfheartedly with a paper fan made out of a folded take-out menu. Someone told her once that the action used more energy than it cooled her down, but Wren didn’t care. It felt good.

      “Wren.” He sighed, rolling over on his side to look at her. “Face it. You know what’s going on.”

      Unable to meet his steady brown gaze any longer, Wren stared instead at the can of Diet Sprite waiting by her feet. The polish on her big toe was starting to flake off, and she rubbed at it idly with her free hand, thinking that she was long overdue for a pedicure. Knowing didn’t mean wanting to admit. Because admitting would mean also admitting that maybe she’d really messed things up.

      And worse, that she’d messed up by doing the right thing. A simple job—Retrieve a stolen chunk of concrete, spell intact, and return it to the rightful owner—that turned out to have politics and underhanded dealings and paybacks written all over it. And a ghost with trouble staying dead. And murder. Never forget the murder part of it.

      A fifty-year-old murder she had tried to avenge. She might even have succeeded, although it probably would be a few more decades before she’d know for sure.

      Along the way, she had also managed to piss off the Mage Council, the self-proclaimed hall monitors of the Talent world, by letting it be known the part they had played in that murder. Not that they had anything against snuffing out a life or two, especially if the victim was a Null, a nonmagic user. But they hadn’t exactly played by their own rules, and that was supposed to be a no-no.

      That disclosure had led them to the dilemma under discussion. At least partially—mostly—because of that job, the Mage Council had put Wren on their Most Annoying list.

      Well, big whoop, she had thought at the time. The Council and lonejacks, the unaffiliated Talents, had been sparring for generations. As a lonejack, Wren always figured she came under the general Council evaluation of “shiftless, undisciplined, and not worthy to polish our expensive shoes.” Apparently not. Instead, they were looking closely at her. Way too closely. And plotting…something. Wren didn’t see what it was about her specifically that made the Council so particularly nervous. But whatever it was, it did. And a nervous Council was a nasty Council.

      “They’ve started a whisper campaign,” she said finally, reluctantly. “Tree-taller—Lee—told me when he and Miriam stopped by for drinks last week.” The lonejack artist and his wife had made a point since all this started of dropping in regularly, as much a “bite me” to the Council as anything else. Although the fact that Miriam, like Sergei, was a Null, a non-Talent, and maybe—Wren bit that thought back before it could go anywhere. Now was not the time to be worrying at what anyone else thought of her romantic relationship (or present lack thereof) with her partner. Another thing she was avoiding.

      “The Council, that is. Whisper something in one ear, whisper something else in another. Nothing obvious, nothing anyone can pinpoint, but—”

      “And you’re just now getting around to telling me this?” Sergei was pissed. You could tell by the way his face went totally stone, except that little twitch at the corner of his left eye.

      Well, yes. Because, as he pointed out, she had been avoiding him. For any number of really uncomfortable reasons. “I was hoping…I don’t know. That maybe Lee was overstating the case? That it wouldn’t work? That the weather would break and we could have this discussion without it disintegrating into a snit-fight?”

      “I don’t take snits.”

      Sergei sounded wounded, and even under these conditions she had to grin. “Partner, you are the King of Snits. And it’s too damn hot to deal with that, okay?”

      Ten years of working together allowed her to interpret the heavy sigh that came out of him this time. He was letting it go. “You still should have told me.”

      “I’m telling you now. And it’s not like you could have done anything, anyway. My rep’s too good for them to actually say I’m incompetent, or anything. Whatever they say, it’s harmless until you actually try to counter it.” She hoped. “But if you do protest, then people start to wonder if there’s something to make you deny it…. Only I guess they’re saying more than that, if the jobs are drying up that fast.” She hadn’t honestly expected it to get this bad this quick. Which was why she wasn’t supposed to be handling the business end of things. Sergei was.

      “Probably not saying much at all, actually. Just enough to make people wonder if maybe hiring this particular lonejack is such a good idea after all,” he said now. “Especially if they’re not anxious to get any scent of publicity about their situation.” Which was pretty much the point of hiring a Retriever rather than one of the more traditional and legal forms of getting back missing property. A thief who used magic to get the job done was a thief much less likely to come under official attention, at least in the Null world, and was the only type of thief you’d want to consider if the situation had even a whiff of magic about it. The fact that Wren, rather than depending solely on her Talent, combined it and general more everyday illegal Talents to perform her jobs, made her able to move effectively against any kind of surveillance or countermeasures, and made her very popular for “normal” world jobs as well.

      She was good, she was smart, and she had been very, very lucky. Until now.

      “Yeah. I’m guessing that’s the plan.” She frowned at the thought, and twirled the end of her shoulder-length braid between two fingers as she thought. “Most of the Cosa—” the Cosa Nostradamus, the magical community made up of human Talents and the nonhuman fatae “—knows it’s bullshit. At least from what Lee says. But they’re going to lay low anyway, until whatever’s going on is gone.”

      “The Cosa are not the ones who usually hire us,” her partner said. He was the one who handled the offers, so he knew that for a fact. A lot of their commissions came from Nulls, those who had no ability to work current, the stuff of modern magic. Most, in fact, knew nothing about how the Retriever known as The Wren did her work, only that she was the best available for the job. Whatever the job might be. Hell, most of them thought that Sergei was The СКАЧАТЬ