She didn’t know how to reassure him. She wasn’t immortal. She didn’t even heal particularly well. And Lee’s death over the summer had just driven that home all the harder. No matter that the other Talent had died because of fatae politics raising its ugly head at exactly the wrong moment, or that the violence had been driven by the malign influences of the job she had been working on, an influence now, hopefully, locked away in a lead-lined, current-sealed box and sunk a mile deep into the floor of some cold ocean somewhere.
Death sobered you. It made you think about things like the people you loved, term life insurance, next of kin, and how badly your friends were going to screw up your wake if you didn’t leave them explicit instructions.
“Y’know what I really want to do?” she said suddenly.
“Get dinner in a doggie bag, go back to the apartment, and screw like maddened weasels?”
Wren widened her eyes in mock shock, even as she felt the heat rise in her face. “I was thinking about getting a hot fudge sundae for dessert, actually, but that sounds good, too.”
Sergei smiled, that half grin that made her insides do a nice-feeling woogly, and gestured for Callie to make their order to-go.
She really did love him for his mind. Really.
“Did she give you a message?”
P.B. didn’t like this guy. At all. The feeling seemed to be mutual, from the glare the human was giving him. Maybe he was a bigot. Maybe he just didn’t like demon. Maybe he glared that way at his mother, too.
“No, she didn’t give me a message. She gave me the paper, which I gave to you. That’s what I do.” The rhyming pattern, unintentional, made P.B. think of the spells Wren used to direct her current. She didn’t rhyme, but the words always had this singsong pattern to them. If he had access to magic, he’d use it to turn himself invisible and get the hell out of here. “Here” being a small, smoke-filled room like he didn’t think they made anymore, with way too many hard-eyed humans who smelled like stale fear.
Demon didn’t sweat. When nervous, P.B. blinked a lot. He hoped that these humans didn’t know that, and ascribed his constant twitch to the layers of smoke.
“What did she say?” That gravelly voice belonged to a seated human; grossly overweight, like Santa gone bad. He might have been jolly once, but not now. The stub of a cigar rested between thick pink fingers.
“She didn’t say anything,” P.B. started to explain again, when he realized the man was speaking to the guy holding the papers.
“That we were idiots, but if we were determined to slit our own throats, she wouldn’t stop us.” He looked past the scrawled note on the top sheet and skimmed the rest of the papers. “She marked up the actual letter with red pen, made some suggestions about wording.”
“And…?” A third human, this one covered in dark hair like a badly evolved orangutan and a surprisingly squeaky voice. It should have been funny, but P.B. didn’t ever want to meet that guy in a dark alley.
“And nothing. That’s it.”
“She won’t sign on with us?” Human #4, with skin as black as P.B. could ever remember seeing, and deep green eyes that were absolutely not natural—and not colored contacts, either. The Force was strong in that one, and it was Sith, all the way. “Even after they tried to kill her?”
“She didn’t say she would.” Back to the first speaker, who held the papers.
“Damnation! We need her!”
“She didn’t say she would,” the fifth and last man said. A small, weedy, whiskery-looking man, wearing Bermuda shorts that showed off impressively knobby knees, he held a cigar that was still unlit, and looked like it had been chewed at by a nervous rat. “But does she say that she won’t?”
The four other men and one demon stared at him. He shrugged, twirling the cigar idly. “If she says she will, she will. If she says she won’t, she won’t. If she hasn’t committed…she’s thinking. She hasn’t ruled either answer out. She’s being a smart lonejack, and keeping her options open and her opinions to herself.” He sounded like he envied her. From what P.B. knew of lonejacks, he probably did. The first order of business was something like “don’t take jobs you hate,” or something like that.
“We don’t have that option anymore.”
“Neither does she,” the fat man said. “Demon, thank you. Payment will be made in full, by the end of the workday. Now, go.”
P.B. would have hung around, despite the smoke and the glare from Human #1, just to hear what was being said. Even if it hadn’t involved Wren, knowledge was currency. Especially these days. But the choice wasn’t his.
The door of the town house shut firmly behind him, and the demon took a breath of the relatively cleaner air outside. But the stink of smoke clung to his lungs, and made him feel dirty.
“They’re going to get themselves killed. All of them.”
Not that it should matter. Humans, even Talents, even lonejacks, were none of his concern. He was demon, the stepchild of the fatae. None of them were his concern, just like he had never been theirs. Wasn’t just lonejacks who played by those rules.
For most of his life, all he had wanted to do was survive. When the vigilantes started targeting the fatae last year, he had thought about leaving town. But he had stayed, to help the only fatae breed more helpless, more friendless than he was: the piskies.
And then, when Wren had been targeted by her own kind, he had come to her aid. He had brought her information and watched her back, hers and her partner’s. He hadn’t even seriously considered abandoning her, not while she needed him. Not only because she had played fair with him all the years they’d known each other. But because he liked her.
That had been new. Nice, but new.
And when the other fatae had started coming to him—to him!—with their worries, their concerns, he had listened. And done something, become part of bringing the lonejacks and fatae together, using Wren to create the possibility of…something. A bridge. A chance.
The ties he had avoided for so long were tight around him now. And he still didn’t know how it had happened, or why.
Or maybe, he thought, looking down the street and watching the usual flow of bodies and cars doing their usual oblivious-to-each-other dance of the crosswalks, he did.
Whistling a disturbingly cheerful dirge, P.B. put his slouch hat slantwise on his head, and set off down the street, confident in the fact that this was New York, and nobody would even take a second look at a four foot tall white-furred demon walking past them. In their minds, if they processed it at all, they’d shrug and think “well, why shouldn’t there be something that looked like that walking down the street?”
This was his city, damn it. His home. If it was going to go down in flames, he would go down with it.
3
She is in her apartment, filled with twisted bodies, sweat-sheened faces, like something out of a mid-Level of Hell: cocktails and damnation. She turns, looks for the door, and suddenly there’s something holding her, pulling her arms off like a little boy tugging fly wings. It hurts. She twists, trying to get free, back arching until her leg muscles strain in sympathy, tendons snapping, sweat pouring off her, and the current would. Not. Come.
“Help me!” A silent scream, and she aches worse than her body inside to answer that plea. But she can’t do more than twist in death throes, unable to do more than relive the agony of realization, the moment of Lee’s death, even knowing that this wasn’t how he had died, this wasn’t the way it went at all—
Her arms finally free, her body falling forward, landing hard on the floor, and she inches forward like a worm to the tall, bleeding form and looks on his face to say goodbye, and…