LITMIR.BIZ

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this time, he wasn’t the one who had faced down a slavering beast almost twice her size, with less brain and more teeth, she thought sourly. Her mood clearly communicated itself, and he added:

      “The client was impressed—a lesser Retriever wouldn’t have finished the job.”

      She waved her hands as though swatting flies away, then reached up and started undoing the pins holding her hair in a tight knot. She had cut a good six inches off, so it barely reached her shoulders, and her old French braid didn’t do the job anymore. “Yeah, yeah, I’m the best, that’s what he was paying for. Flattery will get you everywhere, but I’m still angry.” She wasn’t, exactly. But she had Right on her side in this argument, and wasn’t about to let it go. “You can start making it up to me by taking me out to dinner.”

      He coughed, then shook his head. “Some other time, fine. Right now, you need to go take a shower and get ready.”

      “What?” She looked at him, her righteousness overtaken by befuddlement.

      He pinched the bridge of his nose, and didn’t look at her. “It’s Tuesday. Tuesday night?”

      Wren had to backtrack a bit, then shook her head, coming up blank. Her head was still filled with the specifics of the Retrieval. “What?”

      He didn’t even bother sighing, a decade of experience with her having trained him to lower standards. “You ran late on this job. We’re supposed to be uptown at the Cosa meeting in—” he checked his watch “—ninety minutes.”

      Wren blinked, then made an explosive gesture with both of her hands. That damned meeting!

      “We can always cancel…”

      Wren didn’t even bother responding to that as she ran back to the bathroom, shedding the remains of her once-sleek black working slicks in the hallway as she went. There had been a time when she’d had weeks off between gigs. Time to hit the gym, go shopping, hang out, sleep in…

      “Get me something to wear!” she shouted back over her shoulder, even as she was turning the shower on. “And more coffee! I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”

      She didn’t wait for the water to run to her usual heating standards before she was soaping up her hair, muttering to herself. This meeting had been scheduled two weeks ago; circled in red, for God’s sake, on the calendar in her office. And she still managed to forget about it, totally out of her head like it never existed. That wasn’t like her. Not at all.

      This job had come on the heels of another one, a museum snatch-and-grab, and if she hadn’t been so twitchy from the dry spell of the summer, she would have had Sergei turn it down. Her preference was to take downtime between jobs, recover and rest. But being blacklisted by the Mage Council last year had made her aware of how fine the line between “comfort” and “concern” was, financially. And in the crush of all that, she’d forgotten—clean-wiped it off her slate—that she had other obligations.

      Stupid meeting. Stupid, essential meeting.

      She heard the door open and close, the steam in the bathroom cooling slightly. The click of ceramic on tile was Sergei placing the mug of coffee on the counter; the swish of fabric was him taking the towel off the towel bar, and the silence that followed was him standing there, towel in hand, waiting for her to finish up and get out.

      She tilted her head back into the hot water one last time, even though the soap was totally rinsed by now, and let her skin soak up a little more warmth before reaching down to turn off the flow.

      “Dry first, then coffee,” Sergei said, his hand reaching around the shower curtain to give her the towel.

      She took it, not even bothering to growl. So long as the coffee was waiting for her, she’d be okay.

      Truth was, she’d wanted to forget about this other obligation. She’d wanted it to not exist. She had wanted the entire scenario—Mage Council, her fellow lonejacks, the fatae, hate groups, political backstabbing, murders and suspected murders—to all disappear into a bad dream, so that she was just Wren Valere, thief-for-hire and girl-about-town. She had wanted time to actually sit down and figure out where her relationship with her partner was going, now that they’d added sex to the list of options. She’d wanted time to sit at a coffee shop, drink way too much café americano, and gossip about nothing more important or dangerous than rent or fare increases or what fatae breed was pissing off what other fatae breed this week.

      What she wanted, and what she was getting these days, had a really annoying gap between them. There had to be somewhere to lodge a complaint….

      “Valere.” Sergei didn’t quite tap his watch, but the implication was clear in his voice. Ninety minutes included travel time from her apartment in the Village up to the meeting site in midtown, and with their luck, every minute she lingered was another minute the trains would probably be delayed.

      “Yeah, yeah.” She wrapped the towel around her and went into the bedroom to get dressed.

      The trains behaved, for once, and they actually made it to the designated meeting place before anyone else except Michaela. The lonejack representative had picked the short straw and had to attend this meeting, while the other three were off doing God knew what. Four representatives—three original and a replacement for the late, unlamented turncoat Stephanie—for the four sections of lonejack life in the Metro NY area: city-dwellers, NJ/NY/PA commuters, Connecticut, and the gypsy population, the lonejacks who didn’t have a fixed address. Wren had never realized that there were enough gypsies to warrant their own representative, before all of this, but the general disdain for authority that made a Talent become a lonejack seemed to extend to paying rent and taxes, too. Reportedly, there was a family that lived out of a huge-ass, stripped-down RV, using the rubber wheels as insulation from the kids’ occasionally misdirected current. Wren still wasn’t going to believe that until she saw it, but she didn’t doubt the probability of it, now.

      Michaela was the gypsy’s representative, but today she spoke for the entire lonejack community. She was seated in a chair off in one corner, clearly meditating when they came in. Wren and Sergei took their place at the table without disturbing her.

      Wren sat down gingerly in her chair, trying to determine if she could sit all the way back and still have her feet touch the floor. She couldn’t. As usual, she had the choice to either be comfortable, or feel like a ten-year-old swinging her legs under the table.

      All right, so five-foot-nothing was short, even for women, but it annoyed her nonetheless. She wasn’t about to get on her hands and knees in order to see if the chair’s height could be adjusted, though. With her luck, she’d be halfway under the table the moment the others walked in, and that was no way to create a serious impression.

      Instead she continued the discussion they had begun on the ride up from her apartment. “The real problem is there are too many civilians in the City.”

      Sergei Didier leaned back in his own chair and raised one extremely well-manicured eyebrow in a move his partner had been trying to achieve for years. “And by civilians you mean…?”

      “Humans. Non-Talents. All right, yeah, Nulls. Okay?” Wren tapped her fingers on the table in front of her in irritation. “Something’s going to blow, and it’s going to blow soon, and there are too many…God, what’s the term…?”

      “Incidental casualties. Collateral.”

      “Right.” Wren tried again to get comfortable, then gave up and pushed away from the table a little so that she could slump. It didn’t look professional, but it hurt her calves a lot less. She looked around the room—gray flannel wallpaper and subdued lighting—and then stared down at her booted toes, wondering if she shouldn’t have worn something dressier than slacks and a sweater. Even if the weather outside was threatening to turn ugly with more snow. No. Nowhere in any of the small print did it say that she had to wear a skirt. Or, God help her, a suit. Sergei had picked this out for her, and he was way more of a stickler for appropriate clothing, so she was okay. Or maybe he just knew they didn’t

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