LITMIR.BIZ

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her shoulder bag, and came up alongside him.

      “Hey. Been here long?”

      He turned to smile down at her. “Not much, no. I picked up your message and escaped as quickly as I could. Gallery’s been a madhouse this morning. Everyone’s doing their usual ‘oh dear god it’s the holiday I must buy something that shows I spent a lot’ dash.”

      “You are a bad and cynical man.”

      “I am not. I’m observant. The people who love art, the ones who are buying for someone who loves art, they did their shopping months ago, most of them. It’s already been bought and paid for, and is waiting on delivery. These people…” He shook his head.

      She flushed, guiltily, at her own last-minute purchase. “Are they at least buying?”

      “Enough to pay to stay open,” he said. “And it’s good training for Lowell. It makes him happy to help them load up their credit cards with debt. So why did you want to meet here? I thought you hated crowds. No, I know you hate crowds.”

      She brushed away his comments with an air wave of her hand. “This is different. It’s the Tree! Plus, it’s too cold to stay out here for long. Just enough to soak it in, and then we can go get hot chocolate.”

      Sergei didn’t understand the appeal of standing in the cold and staring up at a garishly lit, oversized tree that definitely had looked better standing in its original field, covered with bird shit and squirrel nests, but then, he didn’t have much holiday spirit at the best of times. Or so he’d been told. Christmas was midnight mass, and presents exchanged in the morning, and then you went back to work. But Wren’s childhood, as far as he’d been able to determine, had been about scrimping and saving and making festive with whatever they had. He’d rather get frostbite than cut into her enjoyment of the season, as much as she let herself indulge in. Especially this year.

      “I wonder how many volts it takes to run those lights,” she said now, her eyes dangerously dreamy. “Do you think Christmas lights have a different flavor than regular lights?”

      “What, you never shorted out your own Christmas tree, as a teenager?”

      “My mother would have killed me,” she said. “Anyway, we usually had one of those tabletop dealies. Night-lights used more voltage than those.”

      She stared up at the tree, and he could almost see the moment she went away from him, sliding into what she called the fugue state, where she could draw most easily on the core of current within her. As best he could understand, it was a little like meditation, and a little like orgasm, and the smile on her face made him more than a little nervous.

      “Wren, I really don’t want to be trapped inside a crowd of thousands of pissed-off tourists a week before Christmas, when you put the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree out of commission.”

      “Spoilsport.” But she shook the fugue off, and came back to him. “Come on. Buy me a massive hot chocolate. No, a peppermint mocha. Two shots. With extra whipped cream, and one of those cookie straws.”

      “Because a sugar high combined with a caffeine rush is just so what you need right now,” he grumbled, but slid his arm into hers, and escorted her away from the crowd, down the stairs into the lower level of Rock Center.

      It was a maze down there, filled with hallways and stores and subway entrances, but they both knew where they were headed: there was a food court off to one side, with a Starbucks. The line was as long as expected, so Wren went to find them a table while Sergei stood to place their order. One tall tea, one grande peppermint mocha with extra whipped cream. They weren’t serving those crunchy cookie-straws here, so he grabbed her a chocolate-dipped biscotti instead. It wasn’t the same, but it was the thought that counted. Plus the chocolate-dipped part.

      “Ooo, Santa,” she joked when he sat down at the little table next to her, and handed her the drink and the biscuit. “I guess I’ve been very, very good this year, huh?”

      He merely smiled, thinking of the gift already wrapped and hidden in her apartment—she might search his place, but never think to look in her own space. He hoped. They’d agreed, early-on in their partnership, that one gift each for Christmas was a reasonable limit. But this year he’d gone on a little splurge, as she would say. This year was special: being partners as well as partners required something…more. Difficult as it was to buy presents for a woman who didn’t wear much jewelry, couldn’t use personal electronics, and had a deep-set habit of stealing whatever she liked, he thought he’d done well.

      “I take it that the meeting this morning did not require your taking minutes?”

      “Hah.” She sipped at the mocha, making a happy little contented noise as it hit her taste buds. “They’re going along gangbusters, yowling and screaming and waving arms and generally accomplishing absolutely nothing.”

      Sergei’s experience with meetings was more along the lines of small groups being told what to do; he almost wished that he had been able to sit in on this one, simply to see how the Cosa did it. Then again, considering the Cosa members he already knew, he suspected that her description was, if anything, underplaying the chaos.

      “In the end, though…?”

      “Oh, in the end, they’ll hammer the details out. Bart and Beyl won’t let anyone out of the door until they do. But they didn’t need me there to get to that point. And, honestly? Being in the room with that many people was starting to make me itch. Nobody had a damn thing worth lifting except Ayexi’s wallet, and if I asked him he’d just hand it over to me. What’s the fun in that?”

      Sergei drank his tea rather than answer. While he understood and appreciated his partner’s need to keep her hand in, as it were, he sometimes understood her mentor’s reported exasperation with her light-fingered tendencies. For Wren, Retrieval wasn’t just something she did—it was what she was. And if she wasn’t either working on a job, or recovering from a job, she was wondering where the next job was going to be. Time to find something for her to do.

      “At the risk of being rude, I gotta go pee.” She grinned at the expression on his face. “Sorry—I have to use the facilities to relieve my dainty female form, how’s that?”

      “Worse,” he said.

      “Don’t drink the last of my mocha,” she warned, and grabbed the last chunk of the biscotti to nibble on as she walked, as though not willing to trust him with it while she was gone. It was amazing, the calories she managed to put away. Current burned a lot of energy, even in passive mode, but she used to at least moderate her intake. The past few months…

      The past few months she’s been using current almost continuously, between the Cosa and the jobs, and the general chaos…and you. She didn’t touch him with current every time they had sex, but often enough that he was starting to feel the cumulative effect internally—and he knew that it had to be draining her, too. He tried not to ask for a jolt, but it was like putting a chocoholic into a fudge factory and handing them one of those little plastic knives; you were just asking for something to snap.

      Thankfully, Wren was well trained; he had never met Neezer, but even by the time Wren was a teenager, she had some of the best emotional and physical control he had ever seen, and her mental control—as befitted an almost-Pure Talent—was even more developed. As she often said, current was power, and skill was all about controlling that power.

      And yes, he admitted, he got off on that, too. Like a high-level sports car, knowing that there was so much horsepower under the attractive frame. You didn’t have to be in the driver’s seat to appreciate the surge of speed.

      He thought about getting her another biscotti, but to do so he’d have to get up and stand in line, and then they’d lose the table to one of the groups cruising the food court, looking for an empty space. He watched a few of them; people-watching was something he didn’t do very often, but it was always interesting. His gaze moved past the gaggle of teenaged girls exclaiming over something one of them had bought, paused on two overbulked teenage males long enough to rate them not

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