Sometimes, she thought it would have been a lot easier being Null. Then she watched the Suits scuttle to work every morning, hustling for a window office, and decided she was happy where and what she was.
P.B. burped, the sound like baritone chimes rising from his rotund stomach. “So what’s the job?”
She just looked at him, a wealth of disbelief in her expression. He stared back, his flat, fur-covered face blandly innocent. Anything she shared with him without a for-hire agreement would be sold to his next client before she’d had a chance to act on it herself. Not in this lifetime or the next three, pal.
“Right. Don’t tell me anything, just send me out to fetch like a dog….”
She considered responding, then decided that it really wasn’t worth the effort. It was enough that she wasn’t pitching him out the window already.
Wren had only met three demons in the flesh in her lifetime—that she knew about, anyway. Looks varied wildly, and she was told that some of them could pass for human, if you weren’t looking carefully. The three she had encountered weren’t those kind. And of those three, P.B. was the only one she could deal with for more than a few minutes at a time. It wasn’t that she was prejudiced; she simply couldn’t handle the relatively high voltage most of the full-sized demons emitted, like some kind of ungrounded magical wire that set her teeth on edge. Fatae—the elves and piskies and whatnot—were, by contrast, easy on the nerves. And angels never hung around long enough to do more than freak you out.
For a few moments, the only sound in the kitchen was P.B.’s jaws chewing crust, and the scritching-soft noise of paper against paper as she read what he had brought her. Finally she reached the last page, and shook them back into order and replaced them in the envelope, folding the metal closure back down again. Names, jobs, capabilities…P.B. had done his usual bang-up job of getting exactly what she needed. Some of the names on the list were familiar, in the heard-about-them kind of way.
And one was all too familiar, in a gut-clenching way. She forced herself not to focus on it. All the names were equal possibilities right now. Don’t jump to conclusions. Conclusions without facts get people killed, possibly even her own very important self. File it, Valere. File it and deal with it later. When you’re alone.
“Thirteen names?” She raised an eyebrow at the fur-coated being now lounging in her other kitchen chair.
He belched, then shrugged. “Lotsa folk interested in your boy,” he said unapologetically. “He’s made himself some enemies. And those’re just the ones who have a profile with us.” Us being the entire magic-using community, the Cosa Nostradamus. Human and nonhuman alike. We might squabble amongst ourselves, often to the point of a passing wave of bloodshed, but in the end it was always us against them—“them” being what her long-gone mentor used to call Kellers; 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,”