Staying Dead. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ the Nulls, who were mostly blind and deaf to what was around them. Not much love lost there. To some of the Cosa, her working with Sergei on an equal footing was betrayal. He wasn’t too fond of them, either.

      P.B. went on. “Probably lots of otherwise upstanding humans who hate his guts too.”

      “What, he kicks old ladies and molests farmyard animals?” She’d gotten info on the client, but it was all public relations bullshit, not anything actually helpful. Sergei usually did a full write-up highlighting anything she needed to know, but this looked like a time-of-urgency kind of deal. Besides, he was the client, not the mark. They didn’t ask too much about the clients.

      “Nah.” The demon cleared a piece of cheese from between his serrated teeth and flicked it into the garbage can. “Sounds like he gets his jollies the old fashioned way—with money. Preferably other people’s money, which he then turns into more money for himself. Real power-hungry, in the nasty-with-it way.”

      Wren shrugged one shoulder, the tilt of her head conveying supreme indifference. “Most people with power are, that’s why they get to stay on the top of the predator heap. Anything I don’t already know?”

      “Yeah. He’s apparently in real bad odor with the local wizzart’s gathering.”

      “Wow.” Crossing wizzarts took serious guts. Or a total lack of brains. Possibly both. Unless of course he didn’t know what he was doing. If he only knew about the public face the Council sold…. Wizzarts weren’t exactly talked about outside the Cosa. Not too much inside it, either, truthfully. Mention not, see not, become not.

      In fact, “gathering” was an ironic term to refer to wizzarts overall. The only time you got more than two wizzarts gathered anywhere was if they were all using the bathroom. And even then most of them would rather burst a bladder than share space with their own kind. And they weren’t much sweeter on other humans. Most wizzarts didn’t want to live within a hundred miles of another person. They were all crazy, chaos-ridden by taking too much current into their brain. From what little she’d been able to learn, the entire human race made them feel like she did around P.B., and twice that for another of their kind. It almost gave her some sympathy for them.

      Not much, though. Last time she dealt with a wizzart, he’d tried to throw her over a cliff.

      “Nice. And the Council?”

      Dangerous or not, Wren would take a wizzart over a Council mage any day. Mages—cold, calculating bastards that they were—made her feel like she needed to take a bath after talking to one. And scrub hard.

      “Street rumor is he stiffed ’em once, but managed to squirm out of retribution. No word on how, and believe you me there are folks who want to know that little trick, if it’s true.” The demon extended one three-inch-long claw and dug into the thick white fur on his neck, sighing in satisfaction when he hit the itch.

      Wren watched in amusement. P.B. looked like an escapee from some demented toy shop, four feet of thick white fur and button-black nose offset by four sets of lethal claws and a voice that could scrape tar off the highway. But if the initial impression was of a cuddly bear, it was his eyes that were the giveaway to his true nature: oversized and pale red, with pupils that were slitted like a cat’s. Occasionally, he would don a hat and trench coat, which made him look like a diminutive Cold War-era spy, but more often than not he wore a pair of jeans, and not much else. She didn’t ask how he managed to get around in public like that without, as far as she could tell, the slightest bit of Talent beyond his own demon nature, and he didn’t volunteer the information. Professional courtesy, such as it was.

      “That it?” she asked, indicating the material.

      He nodded. “That’s it.”

      “Great.” Her tolerance level had reached its breaking point and she was starting to get a headache. “Sergei will do the usual deposit. Now get out.” She was already reaching for the kitchen phone, her back turned to him when she added, “And leave the rest of the pizza.”

      “Spoilsport,” he muttered, but left the box untouched. He also left the window open, in petty retaliation, and the sounds of an argument from the apartment below floated up to her over the pad-clatter of his clawed feet on the fire escape.

      A tenor: voice spoiled and high-pitched by anger. “And another thing, I don’t like the tone of your voice!”

      Oh wonderful. The couple in 1B were on that rant again. She was convinced the landlord paid them to leave their apartment whenever prospective tenants looked at a place. That had been the last time she hadn’t heard them. They were either arguing, or having sex. And one rather memorable morning, they had managed to do both.

      Wren held the phone at arm’s length, dialing Sergei’s number with her thumb as she leaned backward to shut the window. “I have enough drama in my own life, thank you very much. I don’t need yours too.”

      “Yes?”

      “Me again,” she said into the phone. “Take me out to dinner.”

      There was a pause. Warily…“And I should do this because…?”

      “Because you haven’t actually seen me in, what, ten days? Two weeks, maybe, and are worried that I’m not eating properly.”

      Her partner snorted. She was joking, but there was some truth to it; she had forgotten to eat for two days once when she was on the job, and Sergei had totally freaked when he found out. “And the other, more convincing reason?”

      Wren made a snarling noise that completely failed to impress him. She thought maybe once it had. Years ago.

      “Look, Genevieve—” She rolled her eyes. He rarely used her hated given name, usually only when he wanted her to think he was pissed off about something. “I have other accounts, responsibilities which require my attention. I can’t just walk out when you whistle.”

      Ooo, someone was pissy. Market must be down again. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a hotshot high roller. This is work stuff, okay? Do I have to remind you that I make you more on one job than all your other clients, thereby keeping you in your suits and toys, and that—as you’re so often telling me—if I don’t get the job done—I—and you—don’t get paid?”

      Sergei made a noise that might have been a protest—or could have been suppressed laughter. You never could tell with Sergei, not even when he was sitting in the room with you. Part of his incredibly annoying charm, and why she was never bored around him.

      As amusing as this game was, she didn’t want to risk frying the lines by talking too long. “Just get your well-dressed rear up here, okay? Seven-thirty, Marianna’s. And bring whatever info you have on the client’s business compadres, so I can cross-reference the players before I do something stupid.”

      “Thought before action. What a refreshing novelty.”

      “Oh, bite me,” she said rudely, and broke the connection before she could hear him laugh. She sat and looked at the phone for a few moments, smiling absently. He was a pain in the posterior, but he was her pain in the posterior.

      An expensively upholstered chair crashed against an equally expensively-paneled wall, rattling the oversized photograph of the desert at dawn which hung there.

      “Idiots! Incompetents!”

      The СКАЧАТЬ