Bring It On - Laura Anne Gilman

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down. Get rid of that anger, Valere. It just messes with you. She wasn’t a bad person—a bad person would have kicked him. She was just cranky, was all. Maybe she should have gone to Starbucks, gotten a mocha mood-adjustment or something, before heading for home….

      Let yourself start to procrastinate and you’ll wallow in it for weeks, she told herself sternly. Go home. Get it done. Then it’s mocha-time. Maybe even a gingerbread latte. The only good things about November—molasses mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving, and gingerbread latte at Starbucks.

      Her shoes crunched leaves that had fallen onto the sidewalk; random, not the thick, colorful carpet of leaves she remembered from her childhood. But it was enough to put her back into a more peaceful frame of mind, the crunch and crackle mixed with the odd, almost-unpleasant smell of autumn in the air.

      By the time she walked the three blocks from subway to her apartment, Wren had decided on a preliminary course of action. Identify the piece of jewelry. Case the location. Blueprint entry and exit points. Execute. Cash checks. Nice, simple, unfussy. A photo of the item would be ideal, but unless Rosen got hold of a digital photo for insurance purposes, that was unlikely. So, a sketch, or, more likely, a verbal description. Aldo, on the first floor, was a decent enough pencil artist—she’d used him before to turn vague verbals into something she could identify.

      The first floor apartment door was closed, which meant that Aldo was either working or sleeping. She left a note on the glossy white-painted splotch on his door with the grease pencil he left tied to his door for just that purpose. Just her apartment number and an exclamation point. He’d know what it meant.

      In the meanwhile, she didn’t have the luxury of sitting around and waiting for people to bring the answers to her. Time to hit the paperwork trail, earn that retainer, at least.

      At least it was something to do, rather than waiting for another psi-bomb to land, or another fatae friend to be attacked, or another lonejack to go missing….

      She took the last few steps to her apartment with caution, listening with her ears as well as her core. “May you live in interesting times” was great if you were a newscaster, or a photojournalist. But for a simple Retriever trying to make a living, it was a pain in the ass.

      Nothing. For the first time in what seemed like months, there wasn’t anyone lurking in the hallway. No spybugs planted in her ceiling. No demon waiting to pass news. Just her, and her new furniture, and the spotlessly clean apartment rebuking her for the amount of time she was spending away from it.

      The door locked behind her, Wren dropped her keys in the dish on the counter and placed her obnoxiously yellow—and impossible to lose—bag next to it, shrugging out of her leather jacket and hanging it up, carefully. One lecture from Sergei about the care and feeding of good leather was all she ever wanted to sit through, thanks.

      She opened the bag, pulling out the printouts she had shoved in there at Sergei’s place. The lump of papers made the shoulder bag bulge strangely, and once again she thought that she might need to break down and buy a briefcase to replace the old one. It had died a grisly death, eaten by a disgusting bio-sludge that Walter, a Coast Guard ensign and moderate-level Talent, had accidentally let loose over the summer while he was trying to encourage a newborn kelpie harboring just off Ellis Island to eat all her proteins.

      Humming under her breath, Wren set the coffeemaker to work, pulled a diet Sprite from the fridge to tide her over in the meanwhile, then grabbed the printouts and went down the hallway to her office. She could work anywhere in the apartment, but the vibes for concentration were best in that room.

      “Damn. Also, damn.”

      Wren carefully placed the printout she was reading down on the floor in front of her, and stared at it as though the words were about to leap off the page and bite her. In a way, they just had.

      She was sitting, as usual, on the floor, with her research materials in small piles around her. Also as usual, she had begun by sorting all the available material into “useless,” “possible,” and “bingo.”

      That printout absolutely went into the bingo pile. And then some. That changed everything. Or at least a few certain, possibly very important, things.

      “I hate it when clients don’t give you all the details.” Although, to be fair, Rosen had told her everything Wren needed to know. The Retriever just hadn’t realized it at the time.

      “So that’s how you knew the term Null,” she said to her client. “Stepmomma used it on you one time too many?”

      Because Melanie Worth-Rosen was a Talent. Like Wren, but unlike. Because one of the many social-page articles Wren had printed out that morning mentioned stepmomma as being a member of the Greater Hartford Crafting Society. The GHCS—a group that Wren knew from firsthand experience accepted only Talented members. Specifically, Talents who were also Council members, as opposed to lonejacks. Like the D.A.R., only magical.

      “Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” she wondered out loud. Being a Council member in and of itself wasn’t a black mark, despite Wren’s negative experiences with the leaders of the Council itself. She had tried explaining it to Sergei once, the difference between Council and being a Council member, but the best she could manage was that it was sort of like the difference between being a dues-paying member of a union, and being Jimmy Hoffa. That wasn’t quite exact, but close enough for horseshoes, and he had pretended to understand.

      Normally Wren didn’t give a damn about the target of a Retrieval, so long as she knew ahead of time anything they might counterpunch with. Null or Talent, museum or private citizen, government or nonprofit. The situation outside of the Retrieval, though, was anything other than normal, and the last thing she needed was more reason for the Council (the Hoffa version) to start spreading rumors that she was targeting Council (union joe version) members.

      “All right. Stop a minute, think this through. Client, Null. Target, Talent.” She got up to pace as she talked, feeling her knees pop and crackle as she stretched. It was still easier for her to be in action than it was to sit still.

      As much as she loved her apartment, as good as the vibes were, it had one major drawback: the rooms were too small to pace in. The T-shaped hallway leading from the bedrooms to the front door, however, was perfect.

      “Client is a Null. Stepmomma is Council. What about dearly departed Daddy?” Nothing in her research had said, one way or another. It was easy enough to keep secret, if you didn’t make a fuss about it, but Talent tended to marry Talent. Which would mean that Momma had also been a Talent?

      The jury was still out on the influence of genetics in Talent, but it did seem to cluster in families more often than not. So odds were that one of the birth parents was Null, too. Based on Rosen’s attitude…yeah, odds were it was Momma of blessed memory. So there might be some bias involved to go with the estate-squabbling. Did it matter? Maybe.

      What bothered Wren more was stepmomma’s affiliation.

      “Council has made my life miserable for the past year, because they think I’m some sort of threat. Threat to what? Unknown. Council may or may not be—probably is—behind the recent disappearances of lonejacks of a specific age and ability. Mainly older ones, strong ones, who haven’t wizzed or otherwise gotten anti-social. Rumor is: Council is up to something.”

      Seven, eight, nine steps, reach the door, pivot. Walk back to T. Go right, three steps. Pivot. Three, and another two, always forgetting that the top of the T hallway was off balance, and pivot again. Two steps, turn right again, walk down to the front door. There should have been grooves worn in the floor, after all the times either she or Sergei had done this, working through the details of a job.

      “So. Assuming a suitable level of paranoia…is this also something they’re up to? Or did I just get caught in a relentlessly normal family squabble?”

      Worth-Rosen might be exactly what she looked like—a Talent who got greedy on the wrong Null. Or she might be a dupe of the Council, if not actually one of their catspaws. And if so…Sometimes, as her partner was fond of saying, paranoia was the only

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