Staying Dead Read online

  She tried not to lie to Sergei. It was just bad business, and stupid besides. But she wasn’t ready to say anything to him just yet. Not before she knew more.

  Some things, when you got down to it, were more important than business. Some loyalties you couldn’t just walk away from. And anyway, with any luck Sergei wouldn’t figure out who she was protecting until she had her answers and it wasn’t an issue anymore one way or the other.

  Callie came by to take their salad plates away and bring the main course, saving her from having to reply. By unspoken consent they moved away from shop talk while digging into their meals, catching up on the small details that made up each day. Sergei had a new show beginning that week, and he was full of the near-disasters and minor crises that came with every installation.

  “So Lowell gestures like he’s some off-off-off Broadway magician, only his arm gets tangled in the hangings, which in turn get tangled in the wires. And the wires come down like the wrath of God, sending the piece soaring through the air like it thought it was Peter Pan.”

  Wren snickered, imagining the scene. “Anyone get hurt?”

  “Only the artist, who chose that moment to walk in the door, demanding an update. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.”

  “You hoped he would have a heart attack,” she corrected him. “You could have doubled the prices on everything.”

  His brief grin made her laugh around a forkful of sole. “Trebled. But there would have been paperwork, and the show would have had to have been delayed, so it’s probably best he didn’t.”

  “Spoken like a true patron of the arts. You’re a marvel and a wonder, you know that, Didier?”

  “I do my humble best, Valere. I truly do. Some day I might even make an honest man out of me.”

  With perfect timing, they both said “yeah, right” in matching tones of disgust, and his sudden bark of laughter made Wren laugh again as well from the sheer joy of the noise.

  He went on to detail the results of the show while Wren finished her meal. Shamelessly scraping the last of the sauce up with her finger and licking it off with relish, she checked to make sure Callie had finally reseated herself at the bar and was engrossed in a magazine before giving in to temptation and retrieving the file from the floor beside her chair. Sergei continued with his meal, now silently watching her as she skimmed through his data.

  “Truthfully, these all look pretty doubtful as our boy,” she said finally. “I mean, we need someone who has a pretty major grudge against the client, enough know-how about magic to do the job, and—most importantly—they had to know about the spell in the first place. I’d say that’s a triumvirate that lets out all but three or four of these folks. I’d rather concentrate on the ones who would actually have gotten their hands dirty, see if I can’t match the readings I took from the site with their signatures.”

  “Which would mean your list?” Sergei placed his knife and fork down precisely on the table. On cue, Callie swooped down and cleared their table, scraping the crumbs off the tablecloth with a small metal tool and handing them each a dessert menu. She might be an annoying eavesdropper, but she was an excellent waitress. “How many of them would fit those criteria?”

  “All of them, probably.” She pushed aside the menu without even looking at it. Time to tell the truth—if not all of it. “Like I said, they may not be as highly placed, but they all have grudges, and the means to execute them.”

  “So…?” Oh, she knew that tone of voice. Damn. And twice damn. He knew she was hiding something—he always knew, somehow. Like a vulture knows when dinner’s about to pass over. She looked up into deep brown eyes and wanted to tell him everything. Only a decade’s worth of resisting that lure—and seeing it work on too many others—gave her the ability to look away.

  Sorry, partner. This one I’ve got to deal with on my own. You’d only freak, anyway.

  “So I’ll try to narrow the list down. See if I can’t talk to some of them, face-to-face.”

  Sergei kept his face calm, and only the little tic at the corner of his jaw gave him away. “Any of them wizzarts?” Casual. Too casual. She could hear enamel grind. Their partnership had taught him when to step back and let go, too. He just didn’t always—ever!—listen to what he knew.

  “A couple. All recent, though, nothing to worry about. I can handle myself, big guy.”

  She hoped.

  five

  Although it was nearing noon, activity on Blaine Street, deep in the so-called “artist’s maze” favored by trendy galleries, was better suited to early morning, with half the stores just beginning to see an early trickle of customers. The short, narrow street had clearly once been the home to warehouses, metal steps rising up from the curb to oversized metal doors set in otherwise stark brick buildings. But where most of the other converted buildings that now housed trendy stores and galleries had clear glass windows, the better to display their contents in a carefully designed presentation, the narrow glass front on 28 Blaine had been replaced with artisan-made stained glass. The deep blues, reds and greens seemed at first to be randomly placed, but if you stepped back a moment, the wavy striations in the glass and the choice of colors created the appealing effect of an underseascape.

  Between the window and metal double doors, a small bronze plaque announced that this was the home of The Didier Gallery.

  Inside the gallery, the floor was covered in a muted gray carpet, and walls painted Gallery White were hung with paintings in groupings of three or four, interspersed occasionally with a three-dimensional piece on a pedestal. The works displayed this month were brash, almost exhibitionist in their use of color. A curved counter ran through the middle of the space, and behind it a sturdy wrought-iron staircase rose to the second-floor gallery, where smaller pieces were displayed. A young blond man sat at the desk, flipping through a catalog. He looked as though he belonged in a catalog himself: perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed and bored out of his overbred skull.

  Sergei blew through the door, setting the chime alert jangling. The young man looked up, gauged the expression on his boss’s face, and wisely decided not to speak unless spoken to. One look around told Sergei that no one else was in the gallery, and with a grunt that could have been satisfaction or disgust, he nodded to his associate and went to the back wall of the gallery, where touching a discreet wall plate opened the door to his private office.

  The door closed behind him, and the young man went back to flipping through the catalog.

  “Of all the stupid, harebrained…” Sergei had managed to keep a hold on his temper all the way home from Genevieve’s apartment, which meant that by now, although he was just as angry as before, he was unable to let go and have the temper tantrum he so righteously desired.

  She hadn’t answered the phone when he had called this morning. She hadn’t been home when he had arrived on her doorstep an hour later. Not that she didn’t have a perfect right to go off on her own. He was her partner, her agent, not her damned keeper. That would have been a full-time job alone. But he had known she was hiding something, damn it. Had known sitting there across from her during dinner, and let it go, and that was his fault.

  It hadn’t been until this morning, as he was taking his morning walk, that one of the names on the list had jumped out of his brain and thwapped him soundly across the face. He hadn’t recognized it at first, because he only thought of the man by the nickname the Cosa had given him.

  Stuart Maxwell. She was going to confront Stuart Maxwell, otherwise known in Talented circles as The Alchemist. The man so hooked into the current he could turn wishes into water, and water into wine. The man who, the last time Wren encountered him, had tried to kill her. A certified, over the bend, wind whistling through his brains, wizzart.

  Wren knew he wouldn’t have let her get within a mile of that man ever again, no matter if he had been the first, last, and only name on their suspects list. And so she conveniently forgot to point him out.

  He felt his
teeth grinding together, and slowly forced his jaw to unclench. His partner only thought he was overprotective. And then she went and did something like this that only proved he wasn’t damn near vigilant enough!

  If she survived—she would survive, she would—Sergei swore to himself, he was going to put her over his knee. And he meant it this time!

  Okay, so he wasn’t being rational. She had the astonishing ability to do that to him, did his Wren. And it drove him insane.

  Exhaling, and muttering a curse under his breath, Sergei finally took off his coat and hung it on the wooden coat rack in the corner, smoothing his hair back and settling himself into his skin. Calm. He needed to be calm. When Wren was in the field, the game was hers. The fact that he could—and had—imagine any of two dozen things that could go wrong did not mean anything would go wrong. And even if it had—he paused a moment to make a quick gesture with his fingers to avert ill luck—there was nothing he could do about it until she bothered to check in.

  He took a deep breath, let it out. This was Wren. She would check in. His partner was occasionally reckless, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew what she was doing. He had to believe in that. Believe in her. Don’t make her asinine fears—that he didn’t trust her enough—any worse.

  And, in the meantime, he had a gallery to run.

  “Lowell,” he said into the intercom. “Please bring me the week’s invoices, if they’re ready? And tomorrow’s guest list as well.”

  The building was more of a shack than anything you could properly call a house. Derelict in the middle of an oversized lot given over to wildflowers and knee-high grasses, the two-story building boasted a wraparound porch and tall windows, but the wood sagged, the white paint was cracked, and the windows were blurred with grime.

  “Lovely.”

  Wren pulled her rental car—an innocuous dark-blue sedan—to the side of the dirt road, and stared at the structure. There was no need to check the address against the information written in her notepad. There wasn’t anything else that could be her destination on this isolated road miles from the nearest town. Besides, there wasn’t a house number anywhere to be seen.

  With a sigh, she tossed the notepad into her bag, slung the strap over her shoulder, and got out of the car. Dust swirled around her heels, the dryness at odds with the riot of greenery on the property. She couldn’t feel anything, but that was hardly surprising. You never could—until the trap was sprung, and it was way too damn late.

  “You shouldn’t have come.”

  “Max. I want to help you.” The Wren-self in the memory was years younger, her hair longer, tied into a braid halfway down her back. Sergei in the distance. Too far away. Far enough away to be safe.

  “I’m already damned, girl. Didn’t you learn anything?”

  His eyes had still been sane, then. Thirty seconds later, he had tried to kill her.

  Wren stopped just shy of the border of grass, and sighed again. Then sneezed, her sinuses reacting to the overabundance of green growing things.

  “Great. He couldn’t have holed up in a concrete warehouse somewhere? Max!”

  Approach protocol thus satisfied, she waited, shifting her weight from one sneaker to the other, wiping her palms on denim-clad thighs.

  “Max, you shit, I just want to talk to you!”

  There was no answer. She hadn’t been expecting any, but it would have been nice to get a surprise. Wren was tempted to reach out, to try and feel for the currents she knew were floating around the house, but she didn’t. Bad manners, and dumb besides. This was her last stop of the day, and she was tired, short-tempered, and really not looking forward to this at all.

  “Max!” A pause. “You mangy bastard, it’s Wren!”

  A harsh bark of laughter right in her ear startled her, but she schooled her body, refusing to let it jump. Sound waves were easy to manipulate. A cheap trick.

  “Come in then, you brat. Before I forget you’re out there.”

  That had been easier than she expected. Suspicious, she stepped onto the grass, watching as the blades bent out of her way, creating a path directly to the porch steps.

  Far too easy. She had a bad feeling about this.

  The inside of the house was actually quite comfortable, if you liked extreme lo-tech living. The front door opened onto a large room, encompassing the entire front of the house. A fireplace took up all of the far wall, and bookshelves covered much of the other three walls. No television, no computer, no phone in sight. Just books and the occasional piece of what might have been artwork. Not that she had anything against books, but there was only so long you could live in someone else’s head. Wren didn’t trust anyone who didn’t get out and do for themselves.

  Not that she trusted The Alchemist worth a damn to begin with. Not anymore. She learned slow, but she did learn. But this wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could do over the phone. Assuming he had access somewhere, somehow, to one. And that it didn’t go snap-crackle-pop the moment he touched it. Wizzarts were even more prone to short-circuiting electronics than your average Talent, because they didn’t think to be careful.

  Some would say that they didn’t think at all.

  There was no sound at all in the house, not even the hum-and-whir of appliances somewhere, or the clink-clink of water draining through pipes. It made Wren nervous, that absence of sound. So what if she’d grown up in the ’burbs, back when you might still see deer or fox or occasionally a bear in your backyard; she was too much a city girl now to feel comfortable without the endless background accompaniment of screeching brakes, sirens and horns.

  Even the damn crickets outside had been better than this. Silence wasn’t a thing; it was the absence of a thing, of noise. And her mind always wanted to know what had swallowed the noise, how, and when was it coming for her.

  To distract herself from that thought, she looked around again. Two overstuffed sofas and a leather reclining chair were matched with sturdy wooden tables, obviously handmade. The plaid upholstery was worn and comfortable-looking, and the floor was wood, scarred with years of use, and covered with colorful cloth rugs scattered with more concern for warmth than style. A large dog of dubious parentage lay on one of the sofas. It lifted its head when she came in, and contemplated her with brown eyes that didn’t look as though they had been surprised by anything in the past decade, or excited about anything in twice that time.

  “Hi there,” she said. The narrow tail thumped once and then lay still, as though that much effort had exhausted it. “Let me guess—Dog, right?”

  “Don’t see any reason to change a perfectly workable name,” the voice said from off to her left. “I’m the man, he’s the dog, and we both know our places.”

  “And his, obviously, is on the sofa.”

  Max let out a snort as he came completely into her line of sight. He was wearing an old, worn blue cotton sweater and khaki safari-style shorts that showed off knobby knees, red-banded tube socks sagging around his ankles. “That one’s his, this one’s mine. We stay out of each other’s way. Which is more than I can say for you. Didn’t my throwing you off a cliff teach you anything? Why you bothering me again?”

  Wren hadn’t seen Max in almost five years. But for a wizzart, that was crowding.

  “Your name came up in very uncasual conversation,” she said, sitting down in the chair, but not relaxing into it. Max seemed reasonably rational right now, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. She actually had learned a great deal from going off that cliff, most of which involved the fact that she couldn’t fly. She wasn’t eager to relearn that particular lesson.

  “Whoever it was, they deserved killing.” He sat down on his sofa and put his feet up on a battered wooden table. His socks were filthy, dirt and grass stains worn into the weave of the fabric, but they somehow managed not to stink.

  “No killing,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “You bring any chewing gum? I could use a spot of chewing gum. So if they’re not dead, what’s the hassle?
And if they are dead, what’s the hassle anyway?” He held his hands out in front of him, as though about to clasp them in prayer, and spread his fingers as wide as they could go, staring intently at the space between his palms. The pressure in the room increased, fed by the energies the old man was bouncing throughout his system like some kind of invisible pinball game.

  Wren swallowed a third, much heavier sigh. Wizzarts.

  “Max. Focus.”

  “I’m listening,” he said, cranky as an old bear with arthritis. “Get on with it before I decide you might make good fertilizer for the grass.”

  He was making an effort for her. That was nice to see. Wren organized her thoughts quickly, compiling and discarding arguments and appeals. Finally, feeling the pressure of his current-games pushing at her eardrums, almost to the point of pain, she went for broke.

  “Why did you threaten to kill Oliver Frants?”

  The moment the words were out of her mouth, she knew that she had made a mistake. The question was too vague, too loosely-worded. He could answer her without telling a damn thing, whatever obligation or guilt or connection he felt satisfied, and she’d be out on her ear before she got another chance.

  “Man’s a waste of piss.”

  And that was it, the sum and total of his elaboration. Typical, she thought in disgust. A wizzart didn’t need to have a reason to do something. They thought it, they did it. For that quirk alone Wren could have written Max off the suspect list—this kind of indirect assault on the client required planning, thought—some kind of long-term intent behind it. And nobody in their right mind would have hired a wizzart to do a job like this—there was too much risk that the wizzart would get bored, and deposit the stone in the middle of the local police chief’s bedroom, just because.