Free Fall. Laura Anne Gilman

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СКАЧАТЬ with muscled neon snakes, but it made a lot of sense, otherwise. It was also, in a word, disgusting. She preferred to think of it as willpower and self-control.

      Control. Yes.

      The tension in her skin eased for a second, and she felt almost normal.

      Confident now that she would pull only the current she needed, Wren started moving again.

      The job literally was a grab. No cursed objects, no semisentient entities, no high-magic or low-tech security systems. Not even any half-awake, geriatric guards to work around. Just the cast and crew of a Broadway play, the normal preperformance nerves shimmering in the air, and a silver hip flask engraved with a Fleur de Lys that if Wren was really lucky, would have something potent inside, and she didn’t mean spellwise.

      Wren didn’t understand why the client felt he needed a Retriever for this, but the truth was that she had become somewhat of a status symbol. Anyone could have something stolen. You had to pay a lot to get The Wren to Retrieve it for you.

      Morons. But so long as the check cleared, the client got to be Mr. Moron.

      The lobby in front of her was everything the façade had promised: red velvet, gilding, soaring ceilings, and the faint but unmistakably tangy scent of an overworked air circulation system. Nice, if you were into old buildings.

      Her blueprint of the theater showed a series of tunnels running under the stage itself. She supposed they had been used to move sets and actors around, since there wasn’t much actual “backstage” to be found. What she wanted was—allegedly—hidden there.

      If Sergei…

      Sergei wasn’t.

      But if he was, you’d know for certain. He would have pulled something from one of his contacts….

      Contacts that, more often than not, came from the Silence.

      Her voice fell silent, unable to argue the point.

      It’s not the Silence….

      Jesus wept, shut up.

      The voice shut up again. But that didn’t make the truth of what she didn’t let it say any less. It wasn’t his connection to the Silence that kept her from returning his phone calls, weeks ago when he still left messages for her. Everyone else might think that, but she knew better. So did he.

      Sergei was an addict. He was addicted to the feel of her current; mostly when they made love, but any time he could get it. Current took the signature, the feel of the person using it, once it was in the core for a little while. Sergei wanted that, wanted the rush of it—of her—in his system.

      Only problem was, he wasn’t a Talent. He was Null. And current damaged Nulls.

      It killed them.

      Sergei knew that. And he still craved it. Asked her to give it to him.

      And she, damn her, did. Because she couldn’t refuse him anything he needed that badly, especially when it was all tied up in how much he felt for her.

      So she denied him. Everything. Her. Kept him safe by giving him up.

      Because she could forgive him anything—anything—except using her to kill himself.

      “Who left the damn door open?” A very tall man clad entirely in black, with a long ponytail of red hair reaching between his shoulder blades breezed into the lobby, and shut the door Wren had entered with a resounding slam. “Idiots think that just because it’s springtime we don’t heat this place no more? Actors. Only thing worse than actors are musicians, and the only thing worse than musicians’re the crew…”

      He breezed out again, muttering under his breath about the useless bags of meat he was sent to work with.

      “The director, I presume,” Wren said, amused. She had never been a theater person, but one of her friends in college was, and between Suzy and Sergei’s own dealings with the artists he showed in the gallery, or met on the circuit, she’d heard countless stories about the “temperament” of the artistic types.

      Her only real friend in the arts had been Tree-taller, and the sculptor had been as calm and measured as one of his sculptures. But that came from being an artist with Talent—working metal with current made you cautious, or it got you dead.

      She winced. He had gotten himself dead anyway, hadn’t he? So many dead…

      Focus. A different voice this time, sharp and unforgiving. The voice she heard too often in her dreams, now. An unfamiliar, unforgiving voice, refusing to let her rest. A combination of all the dead: the Talented and Fatae dead of this city, trying to drive her forward into things, places, she didn’t want.

      Bite me, she said to it now, and followed the director down into the theater. The set was dark; if the rest of the cast had arrived for the matinee already, they were elsewhere in the building.

      The blueprint said that there was an entrance to the main tunnel to the left of the stage, just behind the pillar. Wren looked around to make sure that nobody was lurking, then vaulted to the stage, careful as she landed not to make so much noise that anything echoed. They might not be able to see her, but they’d still be able to hear her.

      “Okay, door. Where’s a door? What looks like a door?”

      To someone used to the stage, it was no doubt obvious. Wren, in the dark in more than one way, had only her natural sense of sneaky to guide her.

      Well, that and a little extra fillip of Talent.

      “The way down

      is the way to go.

      Lead me there.”

      Thankfully cantrips didn’t have to be any kind of great poetry. So long as the words helped you focus, they were effective. A faint blue shimmer of light flickered off her fingertips, tiny cousins to the neon flickering outside, and floated off as though they had all the time in the world.

      “A little speed, willya?” she urged it in a whisper. In response, the lights brightened a little, then moved en masse to a spot just to the left of the pillar. Wren followed, noting as she moved that she was now out of sight of anyone in the audience.

      The blue lights spread over the wall and thinned into a bare thread, outlining a narrow door.

      The tunnel.

      She held up her hand and the blue current sped back to her. You didn’t leave evidence behind on a job. She might have been careless before, not thinking that it mattered, but having Bonnie living in the building with her had been an eye-opener as to what the PUPIs—Private Unaffiliated Paranormal Investigators—could do with even a scrap of signed current. And she had been holding this in her core long enough for it to “taste” like her to anyone who bothered to test it.

      She eyed the door, trying to get a feel for any alarms or other wiring securing it shut. Nothing. As far as her abilities could tell, it was just a fitted wooden door. Which led to the next choice: fast or slow? You could open it slowly, and risk one of those soul-killing creaking noises. Open it fast, and who knew what might happen. Either way, there was a chance of alerting people to an intruder.

      “Screw СКАЧАТЬ