Blood from Stone. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ walk was as much for him was it as for her. He should have been there for her last night when she got home, and not left it to P.B, no matter how good the demon was at Wren-sitting. Until he was certain that everything was all right, that whatever she wasn’t telling him wasn’t something he needed to worry about, he didn’t want to let her out of his sight again.

      “Yeah,” she said, obviously buying into his pretense for his sake, not hers. “Sure. I could use a good chance to get nibbled to death by rabid and unruly geese.” She gestured with her coffee. “Lemme finish this, and go get dressed.”

      He still has trouble saying it, trouble going back to that moment. And so, over and over again, they return to it.

      “She almost died then. Worse.”

      “Worse?”

      “There’s worse than dying, and she was there, right on the edge….”

      “What happened? What put her there, on the edge?”

      That was the question, wasn’t it? What happened. He knows the why, and they’ve figured out, mostly, the how, but…I don’t know. Not the details. But it was bad. It was…

      It was hell. The memory played out behind his eyes whenever he was too tired to hold it back: Wren splayed on the ground, her body too still, too cold; her eyes bloodshot and staring, drained of all the vitality that normally filled her body. She had gone in after the FocAs, the Talent who had been trained and turned against their own people. The Lost, they were called now. Lost, and then Retrieved.

      “But that wasn’t where it began. That wasn’t where the damage was done. All that came before, and then…She never told me what happened, but I know when…when they attacked her. Those men, those…”

      “Take a breath. Hold, and now let it out, easy, the way we talked about. She’s all right.”

      She is all right. Except she isn’t. His Wrenlet isn’t a killer. He is. He wants to be a killer again, even though they were long-dead already.

      At his Zhenchenka’s hands.

      “The men who attacked her, who pushed her up onto the razor’s edge. They deserved to die?” No condemnation, no offer of expiation, just the question.

      “Yes.” He has no doubt on that subject. “But her magic should never have been used to murder.”

      “You feel that you failed her.”

      “I did fail her. And—” The bitterness, here, and nowhere else “—she let me fail her.” He still doesn’t know how to deal with that.

      five

      On that same morning that Sergei was dragging his partner out to decompress with the ducks, miles south from Manhattan, in a surprisingly well-known high-security building outside of D.C., other people were ignoring the glorious autumnal weather outside, trapped within four walls by professional obligations and legally sanctioned if not officially approved obsessions.

      “Damn it, where was that file? Aha, there you are. Thought you could hide, did you?”

      The office was reasonably sized, but badly designed and dark, despite the fluorescent light overhead. An interior space, there were no windows to bring any natural light or air in; circulation was dependent upon the old-fashioned air ducts, and an almost-as-old desk fan perched on the seat of a battered metal stool. One wall appeared to be held up by the number of black metal filing cabinets marching along it, the line broken only by a doorway. The frosted-glass-paned door was ajar, with hinges that hung in such a way as to indicate the door was rarely all the way closed. The other three walls were painted a standardized white that had seen better decades. Each of those three walls supported a whiteboard, covered in various scrawls in several different ink colors and handwriting styles, and a corkboard, filled with newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and printed reports following half a dozen different cases.

      It was an office built around and decorated by people who obsessed, and followed through, and then obsessed some more.

      There were three desks crammed into the space, one for each wall, but only one figure was currently in the room.

      That figure was sitting behind one of those desks, hunching forward in an expensive ergonomically correct chair, looking at the just-found file under the illumination of a battered office-issue desk lamp. In addition to the file, the lamp, a black in-box filled to the rim, and a matching plastic pen holder, the desk was covered with more reports, sheets of scrawled notes, a dozen red and black pens, and half a dozen pretzel sticks with the salt gnawed off and the remains abandoned in a pile.

      A box with still-salted pretzel rods had been pushed to the side, as though the gnawer were aware of the addiction, and trying only half heartedly to break it.

      The agent date-stamped a report, signed it, and filed it, then picked up a new pretzel stick and flipped through the remaining paperwork still awaiting closure.

      Dismissing the pending cases, the agent got up and, current pretzel in hand, strode over to look at the nearest corkboard. The boards had the look of items tacked up in a hurry and riffled through frequently; the edges of the papers were tattered and some of the articles were faded, although the older ones had been laminated at some time in the past. But the pinholes were fresh, and the impression was of an overcrowded in-box rather than a layered archaeological dig. Things changed, progress was made, items were taken down and replaced by new ones. The newspaper clippings in the upper right corner were all from New York City papers, mostly covering crimes committed during the previous winter and spring, with the more violent and unsolved ones circled in red marker. A few of the more colorful tear sheets were from lurid magazines, proclaiming the coming of the Lord as evidenced by the glow coming down from the sky and landing in, of all places, Brooklyn, N.Y.

      The tear sheets dated back to the 1970s, and some of the reports went all the way back to World War II, but the majority of them were less than two years old. It was these that the agent focused on, one well-groomed hand lifting the most recent to look below it at the one before then, silently comparing facts and observations.

      A long strip of the remaining salt was taken off the pretzel rod, as buffed nails tapped the sheets in thought.

      An observer would note that the reports were of a similar nature, following a track of murders and assaults, gang-related crimes and break-ins. A blue-and-red graph charted the rise—and the sudden decline—in those crimes over a two-year period. The chart ended on a flat line near zero, the most recent data point charted being last month.

      Whatever it was causing the activity, it seemed to have ended.

      The agent knew that sometimes cases were like that. You accepted the fact that you’d never get an answer, and moved on to the next, because the one thing you knew was that there would always be a next. The world was like that.

      It was why there were people like them, in offices like this. To catch the ones they could, and not drive themselves crazy over the ones they couldn’t.

      And yet, something about this case still bugged the brain, itched the instincts, and left questions hanging. You couldn’t let those cases go.

      The agent went back to the desk, dropping the pretzel stick long enough to reach for a yellow-tagged file, pick up a pen and jot down a new comment in the margin of one of СКАЧАТЬ