Every human living could use magic—theoretically. In actual practice, only a small portion of the population could conduct the charge, like living lightning rods, and an even fewer percentage of them were what her mentor had called pure conductors. Pures were the elite, the ones who made it to full mage status. They were generally co-opted by the Council, the strongest and most secretive union ever to collect dues. The rest of the magic-using population muddled along at various levels of ability, doing the best they could, finding their strong points and sticking to them.
Technically Wren was a pure, but she didn’t see the point in bragging on it. It was like having a high IQ—wasn’t much unless you worked it, did something with it. Drawing down the power was easy for her, siphoning off the energy from an external source to flow through her, as though she were running water through her hands. Any source would do, but current that was already tamed and channeled made it so much easier. Like called to like—energy was energy, and where there was one, there was the other. The electronic age was a godsend to magic users, despite what the fairy tales said. If she’d been a little better at channeling out what came in, she’d have been Council material for sure. The thought still made her shudder.
Five fingers now extended, she touched wires at random, discarding anything that sang back to her, looking for a discordant note, something that might indicate a flaw, a clog…or the remnant of supernatural tinkering. In short: look for an elemental.
“Ah-hah!” she said as her thumb grazed a wire that felt different from the others. “Gotcha, you sneaky little…” Pushing with that finger, she listened to the difference.
Elementals were exactly what they sounded like—entities that existed in an elemental state. Very small, and barely sentient, they were nonetheless useful, if you knew how to coax them. Now that she had a handle on one, Wren could sense a flurry of elementals within the wire she had tapped—hardly surprising. Barring a thundercloud, there were few places an elemental flocked to like a live wire; it must be like an amusement park, or an opium den to them, pick your metaphor. Now, to see how long they had been there, and if they’d noticed anything.
“Right. Come to mama…”
Having already gone into the fugue state once that morning, it was like stepping off a curb to find it again. No thought, no effort, just a sudden snapping into awareness, chasing glittering tendrils up and down her neural paths…
“Excuse me, miss?”
She blinked, shaken out of her intense concentration by the goon placing a paw on her shoulder. He looked nervous.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, but, whatever it is you’re doing—could you stop? They’re reporting power outages on several floors….”
Wren grinned sheepishly. “Right. Sorry.” She must have gone too deep, and drained some of the charge down accidentally. She flexed her neck and arched her back as though to straighten out stiff muscles, feeling for the natural current within herself. It hummed and snapped with vigor, confirming her suspicion. She’d gone for an automatic skim, copping a buzz off the charge of magic that could be found even in man-made electricity and storing it in the pool that every current-sensitive person carried, knowingly or not, within them.
Oops. Technically, that would be theft. Never a good idea, to steal from your employers. Probably on the level of office supplies; a pen here, a ream of paper there…Wren shook her head, dismissing that train of thought. It didn’t matter. She had gotten what little information was there. The trick now was going to be figuring out what it all meant, if anything.
Making nice to the goon-guard so that he would “forget” about what he hadn’t really seen anyway took a few minutes. Then she was riding up in the freight elevator, back up to the main lobby. It was crowded with suits now, male and female, armed with briefcases and brown paper bags, some of them already open to let loose the aroma of fresh-brewed Starbucks, or the cheaper stuff from one of the ubiquitous corner bagel carts. The starting bell had rung, and all’s well with the corporate world. Wren shook her head, moving against traffic. How the hell did people live like this?
It was with decided relief that Wren left her security badge with the guard at the front desk and went home. Now the real work—the fun stuff—could begin.
two
The message light on her answering machine was blinking, a quick red flash that caught her eye the moment she came in the door. She dropped her keys in the small green ceramic bowl on the counter of her square little kitchenette, her mail next to that, and reached over to press the play button.
Opening the fridge, Wren pulled out the orange juice, pouring a long draught down her throat without bothering to get a glass.
“Wren, it’s 9:15.” Sergei’s perfectly enunciated voice filled the sparse confines of her kitchenette, almost as though he were actually there. “I just accessed your account, and half of your fee has been deposited, as agreed upon.”
She raised the O.J. carton in salute to that fact.
“Need I remind you that the client is paying for a timely resolution to this situation?”
Sergei never referred to them as cases, or jobs. No, the “client” had a “situation.” Situations paid better.
“Jesus wept, Sergei. Even Christ took three days to rise from the dead! Gimme a break here!”
“And need I remind you that today is the thirteenth? Please mail your rent check today.”
“Yeah yeah, I already have a momma nag, I don’t need another,” she complained to the empty apartment as the tape clicked off. Not that it wasn’t sort of nice, having someone to remind her of the stuff that always managed to slip her mind. Like dropping a check in the mail.
That was the way their partnership worked, too. Sergei handled the money side of it, set up the deals, worked the angles. She did the jobs—or, in Sergei’s parlance, “rectified the situations.” The stuff that took Talent, as opposed to talent. From each according to their abilities, although she had been known to bargain sharply, and Sergei wasn’t above getting his hands a little dirty, if needed. She knew for a fact that the man lied with the fluidity and believability of a gypsy prince if it suited him.
A nice skill for your agent to have. It had certainly saved their asses more than once, including one memorable evening where he had played both her father and her husband to two different people in the space of an hour. He hadn’t been sure which role was more annoying, especially when she insisted on calling him “dad-dikins” for the rest of the month.
The memory of that made her smile, the comforting awareness of Sergei as always tucked somewhere along her spine. It wasn’t anything particularly magical; just the knowledge born of ten years’ partnership that, all joking aside, he was there for her, that all she had to do was yell.
Well, maybe it was a little bit magical. Sergei wasn’t a total null, and maybe she’d sampled a little more of his internal energies than she’d ever told him about…but it was only so that she’d be able to pick him out in a dark room, in a crowd, if the need ever arose.
Not that she’d ever admit to needing him, even when she was asking. Bastard would enjoy that far too much. He’d be more than happy to take over handling her personal finances, too, if she let him. It wasn’t that he didn’t think she was capable. She hoped, because otherwise she’d have to kill him. He just…was overprotective that way. Every way. Sometimes she thought he still saw her as the seventeen-year-old she’d been when they first hooked up, her still foundering in her abilities, and him with a pair of severely pissed-off mages