Staying Dead (13 page)

She squinted at the screen and frowned. They needed a Realtor on-call, to help them figure this mess out. “Okay, does that make any sense to you?”

Sergei leaned over her to look at the display, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder. “No…maybe.” Out came the ubiquitous cell, and he punched in a preset phone number.

“Good morning. It's Sergei.”

“Good morning?” Wren mouthed at him, one eyebrow raised. She did the math quickly in her head. Too early for London, unless this person was a
real
early riser: Asia? Her suspicion was confirmed when Sergei switched into what sounded like Chinese. She hadn't even known he knew any Asian languages, although once she thought about it, it didn't seem too strange at all.

Makes me feel about as smart as a rusty nail, though. That's four languages he knows, English, Russian, French and Chinese. That I know about.
Wren could barely manage a smattering of French, and knew a handful of words in Spanish, most of them rude.

To make herself feel better, she drew down on the current humming in the walls and made a fortune cookie rise from the debris of dinner, stripped the cellophane from it, and sailed it through the air into her hand.

Sergei shot her a glare. “Sorry,” she mouthed. Active current—even controlled doses—did terrible things to cell phone reception, which was why she never bothered to carry one.

She unrolled the slip of paper in her hand, and read her fortune.
It is not the dying which is so bad, but the staying dead.
Confucius say “huh?”

Jimmy had a seer writing his fortunes. Made for occasionally unnerving experiences. She considered the slip of paper and then tossed it into the garbage. Sometimes you had to let the really obscure ones go. It would make sense when it made sense, and probably not an instant before, if she knew anything at all about seers. She had enough trouble dealing with today, much less what might happen tomorrow.

“Okay, thanks.” He replaced the phone in his pocket and leaned forward, as serious as a man six foot three inches tall could look, sitting on the floor.

“So?” She prepared herself for the worst, not knowing what she thought that might be. The room smelled stale, her mediocre ventilation not handling the layers of Chinese food spices and sweat.

Unexpectedly, he laughed, his smooth chuckle washing out over the room and easing muscles she didn't know had tensed. “You look like I'm about to bring an ax down on your neck, Genevieve.”

“Bastard. Who was that? What do you have?” Something clicked in her memory then. “That was Stephen?”

“It was indeed.” Stephen Langwon was a former Treasury agent—and occasional art collector, preference for watercolors and a damn good eye, according to Sergei—who had retired and gone into, of all things, real estate. They did have a Realtor on-call after all. “He's in Seoul for a family reunion.”

“Bastard,” she said again, with more heat, realizing that he'd spoken whatever that language was just to piss her off. “You messed with me on purpose!” Wren kicked out at him, surprised when her bare foot actually managed to connect with his thigh. He grabbed her heel and held on to it with one hand as he continued.

“Stephen thinks that our target probably bought this house through a corporate blind, something to keep taxes off his back. And maybe deflect attention from any suspicion he might be under.”

“Right.” She tried to pull her foot away but he held on to it. “So who does own it?”

“Nobody?” He shrugged. “Maybe a holding company, I'm not sure how it works, and I didn't want to keep him on the line that long to explain it to me. Besides, static was terrible.”

She ignored the slam. She had already apologized, what more did he want?

“So if it's owned by some corporation, can he weasel out if, say, stolen goods are found there?” Wren whistled. “Sweeeeet. But where does that leave us?”

“With a place to look for answers.” He yanked on her foot, and she slid out of the chair with a startled yelp, landing on her ass on the floor. Before she could recover, he had unfolded himself and stolen the chair.

“Where're we going?” she asked, recovering enough to stand and lean over his shoulder. Sergei accessed a Web site with a .gov suffix and then dove deeper, past a flurry of password demands and allegedly invader-proof protections. He wasn't a hacker any more than she was, so Wren assumed that meant Stephen had given him the details. Tsk. Bad Stephen. Then she blinked as names, addresses and taxpayer ID numbers scrolled by. “Whoa. Is that…gimme that.” He fended her hands away with ease. “Hey, it's my computer, I'm the one going to jail they trace you back. At least let me have the fun of it.”

He found the information he was looking for, and clicked on the link to access the file. Wren practically danced behind him, aware that he found her impatience amusing but unable to stop herself. When he printed out the information and then closed the window, she whined in disappointment.

“Serrrrrgggggg…”

“God. Never do that again.” She just grinned, pleased to discover another thing that could put his teeth on edge, and filed it mentally under “just in case,” sub file “extreme measures.” In some ways it might be easier to work with someone who didn't know you so well—fewer buttons for the pushing—but what was the challenge in that? He stood up and gestured her back to her seat. “Stephen took a risk, and gave me that information for a specific use. I'm not going to abuse his trust. Not without damn good reason, anyway. You have your road map. Follow it.”

Wren lifted the printout off the printer feed and scanned it as she sat down. “Okay, yeah.” Now they were in her territory, more interesting than having government reports. She clicked the mouse, bringing up the browser and scrolling down to a bookmarked page. The header read Anything for a Price. In smaller letters the webmaster advertised “Information for the Discerning Seeker.”

Typing one-handed, Wren entered her access code, then the information off the printout. Hitting enter, she turned to hand the paper back to her partner. “See what you can dig up on that company, the ones who set up the alarms. Start with their bonding licenses, work from there. I want to know who they work with, if there are any contacts at all to anyone in the
Cosa.
”

Sergei nodded. Dealing with the
Cosa Nostradamus
—especially but not limited to the Council—was very much like dealing with the mob in the nonmagical world, in several ways. The first and foremost was that you gave them respect. For retrievers, that meant asking permission before hitting something that belonged to them. They had done the equivalent of due diligence earlier, clearing the background with the Council. But now that they had a target, every p and q had to be lined up before Wren went in.

The computer screen had changed to an expectant cursor blinking in the middle of a plain dark-red screen. It hurt the eyes to look at it directly for more than a moment at a time. Cracking her fingers like a concert pianist with pretensions, Wren held her hands over the keyboard, focused her inner current, and began to type. The red screen flickered, and an odd, four-dimensional effect seemed to stir within the monitor. Sergei, taught by experience, looked away until it had flattened into something a little more bearably two-dimensional. Wren held the tip of her tongue between her teeth and coaxed the swirling display to form and hold the proper connection.

Using current on electronics was, putting it mildly, stupid, and possibly dangerous. Certainly to the electronics in question, probably to the person using it. But the system didn't seem to have suffered any aftereffects from Max's visit, and she'd protected it as best she could figure how, and it was just so damned
useful.
And the unknown person who had set up this Web site didn't accept any other key. Tricky bastard.

Taking a deep breath, she rested a hand palm down over her chest, feeling her heart beating a little too fast under her T-shirt.
Mellow, mellow…
Gathering a coil of current from the inner pool up her spine, down her left arm and into her pinky, she gently touched the center of the display.

Electricity crackled around her, and her awareness
fell
into the database.

Behind her, Sergei shook his head, sitting down on the floor so that he could work while still keeping an eye on her motionless body.

Sometime around one in the morning, Sergei, finished with the papers he had been searching through, reluctant to make any more phone calls at that hour and bored with looking over her shoulder, started to get restless.

“Go home,” Wren said, her fingers flying over the keyboard. The remains of dinner had been stacked in a pile on one corner of her desk, and she occasionally took a pull off the liter of soda at her elbow, barely aware that it had gone flat and gotten warm more than an hour before. She had come out of the database around midnight, and had begun typing what she had learned, working faster than she had thought she could type. You basically got an infodump, and then it was up to you to sort through it. Problem was, if you didn't get it down one way or another real fast, it went zip out of your brain and all the money you'd put into the meter was for nothing.

Not to mention the fact that data-dipping made her cranky, sore, and hungry as a bear after hibernation.

“I'm fine.” Sergei shifted his legs under him again, and swore as several papers fell off the lap desk he was using and onto the floor.

Wren shot him a Look that had no effect except to make him go pace the hallway instead. Ten minutes later her fingers finally started to slow down, and then stopped. She shook them out to see if there was any nerve damage, pushed back from the desk, and stretched hard enough to hear things creak.

“Didier!”

He leaned into the room. “Done?”

“Mmm, I think so. Need to let it sit and then come back to see if it's in English. Come on. I feel the need for dietary disaster. It's ice cream time.” She took him by the hand and dragged him out of the apartment and down the stairs.

“I don't want ice cream,” he said, trying to dig his heels in. “It gives me gas.”

“
You're
giving me gas. So if you won't go home or at least take a nap, then shut up and walk with me. Ice cream helps me think. You can just keep me company, okay?”

They left the building, Sergei taking her hand off his forearm and enfolding it with his own much larger hand, an apology for his behavior. His fingers were warm, their palms sliding against each other with the smoothness of flesh-to-flesh, and Wren leaned her head against his shoulder briefly. “See? You feel better already.”

“I was fine,” he said, shoving her away with a nudge of his arm, as though embarrassed to have her leaning on him. His fingers remained laced with hers.

“You were fine. Now you're better.” The night air felt wonderful on her face, and in the distance she could hear late night traffic, and the occasional chop-chop-chop of a helicopter flying overhead. Maybe a news crew heading out to New Jersey, or a Coast Guard crew on patrol. A few other couples were strolling along the street, coming off the bar scene in Greenwich Village a few blocks away.

“Besides, you've never had Marco's gelato. It's awesome, in all the best ways. He makes it with—” She stiffened, her hand convulsing around his before her fingers fell slack and dropped from his grasp.

“Wren?” He stopped, startled. “Wren? WREN!” His yell attracted the attention of a couple walking towards them. The man slowed down, as though to swerve and avoid them. His companion glanced over worriedly as though afraid to see violence break out, then let her date drag her to the other side of the street. Sergei noted them, but paid no attention whatsoever. Everything that mattered was staring at the lamppost with blank eyes and a worse expression. His worst nightmare, piled on top of the events of that evening, was too much for him to deal with. He shook her, hard, his fingers probably leaving bruises on her arms. Panic sucked the air out of his lungs, and he thought he was going to throw up.

“Wren! Come on, what's wrong? Wren? Genevieve! Come back to me, Genevieve. Come on, look at me. Wren, look at me!”

His heart contracted, then she blinked, and animation slowly returned to her expression. “Whoa. Shit.”

“What the hell just happened?” His question was shy of a roar, but only just.

“Someone tried to tag me.”

He blinked, stared at her. “You brushed it off?”

“Not sure ‘brushed' is the right term, but yeah. Told whoever it was in no uncertain terms to go bother someone else, I didn't have time for head games. Sheesh. Whoever it was, had serious mojo.”

Tagging was the act of challenging a current-user, one lonejack to another. Typically it occurred during a turf battle, when lonejacks quarreled over a patron, or to scope out the local competition. Or, more often according to Wren, as the start of a practical joke among friends.

Wren didn't have any friends who could and would do that. Not anymore. And she didn't have a patron to fight over, the way Council mages did.