LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

arms crossed against his oh-so-pretty-if-you-liked-beefcake chest. If she didn’t have a pounding reaction-headache, she’d have appreciated the visual more.

      “Danny.” Cowboy boots and dress shirts worked better in Houston than they did in Manhattan, but Danny still managed to make them look good. And the boots had the advantage of hiding his hooves.

      “Danny,” she said again, this time in a different voice. Shaking off the quiver of nerves, she looked around for the first time at the mild disaster the blast had left: car windows blown out, tires flattened, trees wilted. Whatever hadn’t hit her apartment had done some significant work just outside it. Interesting. “What the hell happened?”

      “I was going to ask you that.”

      Glass crunched under his heels as they walked together, both of them checking out the damage. Wren was thankful she’d thought to pull on work boots before coming downstairs. Her usual soft-soled loafers wouldn’t have offered as much protection from the sharp-edged shards.

      “No sign of explosives,” Danny went on as they walked down the street, past her building and down to the end, then started back again. Of course he’d already done a preliminary sortie. She didn’t ask how he’d gotten there so quickly. That was what Danny did. “No car bombs, no blown manhole covers, no dead guy bits with wires and whatnot strapped to him. Nobody heard a thing.

      “And yet, every single Talent in the area felt the blast, and hey, look at that, half a dozen car windows got blown out. Right in front…” He paused for dramatic effect as they reached her stoop. “Of your building. That sort of narrows it down, don’tcha think?”

      Danny had been a damn good beat cop, before tabloid-driven pressures made it tough for fatae to advance in the ranks. He made an even better insurance investigator. His network of Talents in the NYPD was the match of any small-town gossip chain. In fact, in a lot of ways it was a small-town gossip chain. When something weird happened, they let him know. And he got to be piggie-on-the-spot, asking all the nasty questions.

      “So who in the Cosa you piss off this time?”

      Like that one. The Cosa Nostradamus: the magical community, the human Talents and the supernatural fatae, with or without usable magics. The “family” part was closer to Manson than Brady, unfortunately.

      “You been tuned into some other universe the past couple of months?” The only people in the Cosa she hadn’t pissed off lately were the ones from out of town. And maybe she’d annoyed a few there, too.

      “If I knew how to get out of this one, I’d buy you a ticket,” he said, proving that he had too been paying attention lately. “One-way. You’re becoming a target for way too much shit.”

      Ow. “Not my fault this city’s going to hell,” she said defensively. It wasn’t. In fact, she was part of the reason it hadn’t gotten a hell of a lot worse. The vigilantes? Guilt aside, she had been one of the first to figure out the connection between the “exterminators” advertising with their cryptic flyers, and the attacks on the nonhuman members of the Cosa. The surge in general crankiness that couldn’t be blamed on the heat wave? She was the one who had gotten rid of the semisentient manuscript that incited and fed off increased levels of negative emotions. The Mage Council going after the lonejacks to prove who was top dog in the city? No way that she was taking the shit for whatever was chewing at their brains.

      “And yet…” He looked around and gestured tellingly at the dark blue mailbox directly in front of her door, crushed like it was made of tinfoil instead of riveted steel. “Someone was sending you a message of some sort. Sounds like ‘back off’ to me.”

      She didn’t even try to deny the fact that she had been the target. “Damn it, Danny. I didn’t ask for any special attention from anyone. It just…happened.”

      He snorted like the centaurs of his paternal line. “Nothing just happens, Valere. Nothing ever just happens.”

      “City filled with Yoda wannabes, and I gotta look like a swamp. Go catch a criminal, Danny. Leave me alone.”

      “Valere.” He touched her arm. Danny didn’t touch anyone, much. “You got a headache?”

      “Yeah.”

      “So does every Talent within five blocks, I bet. And this was a bitty baby psych-bomb. A warning shot.

      “Twelve months ago, the biggest talk in the Cosa was who was sleeping with what. Six months ago, we were talking about those damn vigilantes, targeting us.”

      By us, he meant the fatae, the nonhumans of the Cosa. No Talents had been attacked by that particular group of bigots, as far as Wren knew.

      That fact had been the beginning of the split in the Cosa, along racial lines: us versus them. Well, that and the fact that most Talents were selfish and lazy, and couldn’t be bothered to deal with something that didn’t affect them directly. Wren wasn’t particularly special, in that regard.

      “Four months ago, it was the flameouts.” The wizzarts, or crazed Talents, who had been killed by someone or someones still unknown. Wren had tried to find the killers, but had only been able to force them out of town. But Danny didn’t know that part of the story. She thought.

      “Today?” he went on. “Today we’re talking about Talents gone missing. Fatae gone dead. You—and a bunch of others—getting blacklisted by the Council. The fact that there’s been a Talent Moot, and you knocked heads together.”

      Wren winced at that. The Moot, or gathering, had been a bad idea, and her telling them all it was a bad idea had been an even worse idea, for all that it made sense at the time. All it did was bring her notoriety she didn’t want and couldn’t use. And, if Danny was right, which she suspected he was, had led to this.

      “What it all comes together as, girl, is you in the middle of shit, like it or not, want it or not. You is standing there with a great big red target painted on your nice peachy-skinned forehead.”

      “So what do you think I should do, oh wise one?” She was trying for sarcasm, but it came out too sincere a question for comfort.

      Danny didn’t hesitate. “Run, babe. Run like hell.”

      By the time she got back to her apartment and tossed her boots back into her bedroom closet, the news trucks had already shown up. They were cruising up and down, narrowly missing the cars parked on either side, looking for some hapless passing pedestrian to interview for the news. The timing sucked for witnesses, though; the lunchers were back in their cubicles, and the afternoon dog walkers hadn’t started hitting the streets yet. They were probably going to be stuck interviewing the same firefighter or cop on every channel.

      Run, babe.

      She had never run in her entire life. Not when she discovered what she was, not when her mentor disappeared on her, rather than risk exposing her to his madness, not when the Council had first targeted her, not even when the relatively low-risk life of a Retriever started getting downright dangerous.

      If it was just herself, she’d be rabbiting like a, well, like a rabbit. But it wasn’t just her, was it?

      She made a bet with herself—a water main break, something serious but impossible to blame anyone for—and sat down on the bed and waited for the phone to ring.

      It took seven minutes after the first camera set up and started broadcasting live. She picked up the phone and held it a cautious distance from her ear.

      “Damn it, woman, what have you been doing?”

      That was her partner, always willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

      “Water main break, or electrical fires?”

      There was a pause, then the muted sound of the television in the background. “Manhole cover explosion, no suspicious activity suspected.”

      Wren wondered sometimes what might happen if a Talent decided to go terrorist. So far—and by that she meant the entire history of

Скачать книгу