Blood from Stone (10 page)

The bitterness that was always an undertone in his voice surfaced like a storm, dark and violent, and suddenly the words poured out.

“Brilliant, he was brilliant, was my master. Nobody denied that, not even his detractors, and he had a lot of them, people who thought he was a fool, a nutcase, and just plain dangerous. And he was, believe you me. Dangerous to himself, to us, to everyone. For all that brilliance? He was a crap Talent. They all were, all his group of magic users.”

He didn’t call them Talent, Wren noted.

“All of them so focused on their obsession they didn’t understand how much more they could be capable of.” P.B. clearly wanted to be disgusted, but his voice just sounded sad. “My creator wanted to be more, but he couldn’t manage it, not even with us, because all he could think about was playing God. So he kept trying,
kept creating newer and better models, something that would be the right one, the final result, the grand prize.”

Sergei was looking like a man who knew he had catching up to do. Rather than make him ask, Wren took point.

“The thing between me and P.B.” And by “thing” she meant the bond that had allowed him access into her brain, and her into his—the thing that allowed her to ground in him—without the physical stress or damage that Sergei risked when she did the same thing to him. The way her partner’s jaw set, almost invisible but absolutely clear, indicated that he knew what she was referring to. It was stupid that he was jealous, and he knew that, and yet…

Maybe this would finally put it to rest, once and for all. Once he understood the nature of the connection, and why it was both a blessing and a curse.

“The link wasn’t an accident, or some kind of freak twist of Talent. It was what he—what all demons—were created to do. To be grounding posts for Talent.”

Her partner was no dummy; it took him all of three seconds to figure out what she’d needed spelled out for her. “A demon-connection keeps Talent from wizzing when they use too much power for too long, because there’s additional protection. In the demon. That’s what this guy was trying to create. What he did create.”

“Yeah.” She and P.B. spoke at the same time, with the identical tone of doom.

It was a good thing, in theory. In theory, it was a gift of the heart, a sacred bond, if your philosophy went that way. In theory, it might save lives. In practice, it had sent her friend running for decades to keep his
mind and his soul his own. In practice, in the wrong hands, it was nothing more or less than slavery.

And now someone wanted those papers. Which implied that someone knew, or suspected, what demons could do.

“Can you all do that? The demons he created?”

“The failures didn’t survive.” A blunt statement. “The earlier generations, Kolchyia and Mainyu and the others…probably not, or not as well. He didn’t keep all his own. Like I said, he gave them away, abandoned them when he changed workshops, or let them escape. The ones after me…he sent away. To others in his circle. But there weren’t many of them.”

His dark red eyes were almost black, the pupils wide. “Even one was too many.”

Wren scrunched her eyes shut, then opened them, feeling a headache coming down hard and fast. There were maybe half-a-dozen demons in the United States that she had seen or heard of, in her life. She’d met a few, herself. She had no idea how many of them were earlier, and how many were later models, if any of them were P.B.’s brothers or just distant relations. Not that it mattered. If these papers got into the wrong hands, it wasn’t as if anyone would be able to tell the difference until it was too late: until after someone had tried to take what should only be given. Until, in self-defense, the demons fought back. That was what P.B. was preparing for, why he had called Sergei instead of her. To discuss options…battle plans.

There had been too much battle already. Too much blood.

She looked at P.B., eye to eye, skipping the verbal
back-and-forth they might otherwise be stuck in, excising Sergei from the negotiations and cutting to the kill. “All right. I’ll Retrieve the papers for you.”

A few hours later, P.B. was sitting on the sofa, having second thoughts about the entire thing. “Maybe we should just forget it. Hell, I don’t even know where to tell you to start. I don’t even know if they exist. I don’t even know if this brother exists, without asking around. It might be bullshit, someone trying to play me, get you on the hunt, maybe they expected you to do exactly what you did. You’ve got the ins with the community, or maybe they think you already know where the papers are, and then they can swoop in and take them away. This other demon might be in on it, even if he really exists. Not every demon’s a nice guy, even before we do what we have to do. Just ’cause someone’s got your blood doesn’t mean you can trust ’em. And even if it’s true, just because someone somewhere thinks maybe the papers might still exist doesn’t mean it’s our—”

“Hey.”

For a normally taciturn Fatae, he was getting downright mouthy. That made her nervous. She put a hand on his paw, stilling the nervous tapping of his claws. “Stop denting my furniture. You’re right—we have ins with the community, and skills nobody else can match. So Sergei’s gonna ask some questions, nose about. It’s what he’s good at. It makes him feel useful. If he comes back with anything actual, then we’ve got us a Retrieval. If not…then odds are, ain’t nobody nowhere gonna find anything, either.”

He snorted. “Your mother would so kick your ass if she heard you abusing the English language like that.”

“My mother’s in Alaska with Mac, on a ship that doesn’t get cell phone signal, and she’s lousy at picking up e-mail, so forget about even trying to threaten me with her.” Her mother was also a Null’s Null, and P.B. could have—and had—danced a jig in front of her and she would have barely noticed, forgetting two minutes later there had been anything odd at all going on in her daughter’s apartment. It was a gift that let the older woman sleep soundly at night. Although she doubted her mother was getting much sleep. Mac had shown up a couple of months ago, short, scrawny and surprisingly dashing, and totally swept her normally practical and grounded mother off her feet. Unlike the guys Wren remembered from her preteen years, Mac wasn’t exactly daddy material. Wren had hopes for him—her mother had been alone for way too long.

The thought diverted her to another. “Hell, my mother can’t even remember my father.”

“What?”

As she had hoped, that admission distracted the demon from his own paternal-problem musings. He looked—not shocked, exactly, but astonished, his muzzle-length jaw hanging open slightly.

“Yeah.” Wren sat down in the chair opposite him, and placed her mug of coffee on the table. “I pushed her on it a while ago, just on a whim, and she told me he was a one-night stand, and not a very memorable one at that.”

The demon stared at her, then shook his head.
“Okay, you win. And man, your mom was a slut. Who’da thought it?”

She used random current to spark him on his stumpy little tail for that, and he jumped and snarled at her. She snarled back, her own much less impressive except for the current she had to back it up. You didn’t insult a Talent’s mother, not even in jest, not without paying for it.

“Bitch.”

“Furry.”

Byplay finished, he settled back down onto the sofa, ostentatiously adjusting his backside on a pillow. “Seriously. She can’t remember? Not at all?”

Wren wasn’t quite as amused by the whole thing as he was. “She remembers meeting him, and she remembers going off with him, and she—apparently—remembers the occasion with fondness, enough that she decided to keep the kid that came of it. But no, she can’t remember anything about him, not his name, not even what he looked like. Although he was tall, she remembered that.”

“So you’re a sport.” Wren’s mother might not be impressive, heightwise, but she had considerable inches on her daughter’s five-foot-not-much.

She ignored that comment entirely, her mind wandering off on another tangent, triggered by the topic. “You ever wonder where it comes from? Talent, I mean. I’ve asked, and nobody’s ever been able to tell me if it’s genetic or environmental or some weird virus in the womb, or…”

“You never cared much before now,” P.B. said, not unreasonably. “All this from just my story? Or are you…”

“I’m not pregnant, no, bite your tongue. And I’m not
thinking about it, either.” The thought was a horrifying one. She was lousy with kids, and the thought of a baby…God, no.

“Part of it’s all that, part of it’s…the kid yester—two days ago, my Retrieval. He’s Talent, but neither of his parents have even a smidge, and none of his grandparents were, far as anyone can tell.” She held up fingers, counting off examples. “My mom is like the anti-Talent, and my dad, I’ve got suspicions he was one of us, but no proof. Sergei, he thinks his mother might have had a hint of Talent, from what he remembers, but he’s got nada likewise.” She shrugged. “It seems so arbitrary, random, but then you have families with generations and generations of seriously strong Talent like it was a dominant gene, no other way to explain it except heredity. Even old magic, where almost anyone could do a little bit if they had strong willpower, but some people could use easier, better, with less effort or cost, because of something inside them.”

She ran out of breath, and stopped, not having planned on saying anything, much less so much. She hadn’t even been aware that it had been bothering her, beyond what was said at the Tri-Com meeting. Apparently, something had struck somewhere sensitive.

P.B.’s dark red eyes narrowed as he considered her question. “And my creator could manipulate tissue to create something that wasn’t Talent, but could handle current nonetheless. So there’s something there that can be identified….”

“Bonnie thinks that it’s goo.”

“What?”

She nodded. “
Cosa
goo. There’s a theory someone
came up with that she likes way too much, that we’ve got this mucousy lining in our system, acts like a slide conductor, keeping current from damaging our system at the same time it lets us siphon it off and use it.” Wren stroked the fabric of the chair she was sitting in, the texture seeming to ease the flow of her thoughts. “It’s got its basis in the animal kingdom, the way some things use electricity as a defensive weapon….”

“Yeah, I always thought you guys were a lot like electric eels, all slippery and shocky and lousy to eat.”

“Hah. Hah.”

“So Didier’s got no mucous,” he went on, thankfully letting go of the joke.

“Maybe. Or enough that he can remember what he sees, but not actually handle it.” Dry or mucousy wasn’t much to choose from, aesthetically speaking. She wished, not for the first time, that Bonnie had used a less evocative term.

The demon got up and started pacing again. “Ow. That’s gotta burn him.”

She winced, and he realized the indelicacy of what he had said. “Sorry. I mean, he’s…”

“Never mind, I got it. Yeah, it’s a problem.”

That was something that only the three of them, and Sergei’s therapist, knew: that Sergei was addicted to the pleasure-pain of current, specifically when she grounded her overflow in him. That hadn’t been a problem when she did it only occasionally, when something went wrong on a job, when she pulled down too much and needed help. But sex made it even more intense, and…

You can’t tell him no, even when it’s bad for him. You enable the addiction.

“Are you two, um…still doing the horizontal bop?” P.B. only knew about the problem, not what they were doing about it. She thought. She sure as hell hadn’t told him anything, but she wasn’t sure how deep the bond let him into her head. She didn’t want to think about that too much, either. Better to pretend there were limits, even if there weren’t.

“Nicely put,” she said, instead. “Delicate as always. So nice to see you back in your usual fine form.”

“I take it that’s a no.”

It had been a year. Not total abstention—they had tried, tentative and cautious, after the craziness died down and the Silence, the organization behind the vigilantes, had effectively fractured and disappeared. But while things weren’t getting worse, they weren’t getting better, either. Having to worry each time you had sex if something was going to go wrong didn’t do a lot for the mood. And then one night a few months ago he had ended up in the emergency room of St. Vincent’s, his bladder spasming, of all things embarrassing, and she had drawn the line. She would do whatever she could to help, but he had to make the first steps to understanding
why
he kept reaching for her current. Some of it was the whole pain-pleasure thing, yeah, and she mostly got that, but not when he didn’t seem to care that it was killing him. That, she couldn’t help him with. But a professional might.

He had gone to see Joe Doherty the next week. A Talent, and a trained psychologist heading the team working to reacclimatize the Lost to life outside the Silence, Doherty was one of the few people Wren could think of who might be able to understand, and to help, and could be trusted to keep it quiet.

She had no idea what they talked about, but Sergei kept going, and as time went by the sense of urgency she felt from him when she used current was starting to ease.

But only starting to. Starting wasn’t enough.

That was why she had never given him the details of what P.B. could do. Jealousy on top of everything else…not good. He knew the generalities—he had been there when it started, and at the time was only thankful that the demon had been able to pull her back from wizzing. If he had wondered further about the bond, he had never asked. Not until tonight.

“Valere, no offense, but you guys need to either get it together or break it off. And since I don’t see you guys breaking it off any time soon…”

“He wants me to move in with him. Okay, no, he doesn’t. But he says we need to talk about it. I guess to just get it off—or on—the table.” She got up and poured herself another cup of coffee, dumping a spoonful of sugar into the thick liquid to make it drinkable. “You want anything, while I’m up?”

“Coffee?”

“Not a chance in hell. I don’t have any decaf.” P.B. and caffeine were okay in small doses, but things got ugly when he had too much, and tonight he definitely didn’t need it. Neither did she; between the job, reporting to the Tri-Com on the kid and now this, her nerves were definitely starting to twitch. It was something familiar to do, though.