LITMIR.BIZ

      The drive back to the city seemed endless, her brain chasing after one detail or another until she shut it all down with a blast of rock and roll. She might be a jazz kind of girl, but there was nothing like the sound of sledgehammer guitars to get you rolling down the highway. Wren handed in the rental with a kind of regret, patting the hood in farewell as she waited for the attendant to finish checking it out. He was a tiny little guy, bandy-legged, who looked as though he should have been fussing over spindly Thoroughbreds, not standard issue Chevys.

      Once he’d given the other attendant the all-clear, she signed off on the X’d line, collected her copies of the paperwork, and caught the subway home, standing-room-only as everyone else headed home from a tough day at the office, too. Normally an irritation, today she welcomed the press of humanity, sweaty and rude though it might be. The fact that she could stand them, could rub skins with the rest of humanity without freaking, reassured her that she still was one of them. Still sane, normal…as normal—

      As normal as you could be, with the buzz of magic running through your cells when the rest of the world doesn’t feel a thing. When John Ebenezer had first discovered her using Talent to pilfer sodas and candy from the local five-and-dime, he’d dragged her out of the store by one ear. He’d read her the riot act, fed her a lecture on morals, and hadn’t let go until she knew what it was she was doing—what she was. It hadn’t seemed so scary then. He’d been a lot closer to normal then; he’d taught high school, in fact. Biology. Before he too had given himself over to the current, made riding the wave his entire reason for existing. Wizzed out.

      By the time she graduated high school, he was long gone; the toll of his own Talent overwhelming what had been his life. But by then, he’d managed to change her life, almost as much as he finally changed his own. “Maybe ’cause you’re all that’s left of John on this green earth.”

      Sometimes she wished Neezer had just minded his own business that day in the five-and-dime.

      Wren wasn’t a wizzart. She didn’t want to be one, wasn’t, for various fate-be-thanked reasons, likely to become one. But how much had Neezer wanted it, back then? Had Max? Had they told themselves, whistling in the dark, that it couldn’t happen to them?

      “God, woman, stop it!”

      An old Chinese man looked at her sideways, his expression clearly showing what he thought of crazy women who talked to themselves.

      She got off at her stop, taking the steps up to the street two at a time. The fresh air on her face was like a benediction, and she stopped to draw a lungful in. The sky was just beginning to darken, and the shadows of the buildings shaded into dark blue the way only city shadows could. Yes! Max could keep the countryside—she felt alive in the city, with its constant hum of energy that nonetheless managed to remain completely impartial. Too many people could be better than none, sometimes.

      Especially if their presence meant you were sane.

      She strode down the street and up to the six-story brick apartment building. It was the tallest building in the neighborhood, standing out against the three-story townhouses and one-story storefronts of Chinese takeout places, psychics, and the ever-present corner delis/flower stores/supermarkets. Depending on what part of town you lived in, they were Korean grocers, or bodegas, or quick-marts.

      She thought about swinging by Jackson’s to get some fresh milk, maybe play the Lotto, but decided against it. She’d do the shopping this weekend, when she had a little more energy.

      But in the instant her feet slowed, contemplating and deciding, her nerves twitched. Back-of-the-neck, millennia of evolution stripped away kind of twitching, what Sergei called the lizard brain. The survival nerve. She sped up again, scanning the sidewalk-side without turning her head too obviously. It could have been one of the kids sitting on the stoop across the street, giving her a too-close once-over. Most people ignored her, even when she wasn’t Disassociating—it made her very nervous when someone didn’t. Or it might have been something as simple, and ignorable, as a mugger in the shadows, sizing her up as a potential meal ticket. That happened on occasion, but they almost always ended up passing her by for the next person coming down the street.

      Nerves, probably. Justifiable, in the aftermath of the day. It couldn’t have been anything else. The Wren was invisible, far as most of the world was concerned. She never met with clients, never had any direct contact with them, and she knew damn well there wasn’t anything she was working on right now that might have followed her home. And yet…

      The question isn’t “are you paranoid.” It’s “are you paranoid enough?”

      She spun on one heel, her keys clenched in her left hand in a defensive hold, ready to scrape the face off anything coming up on her.

      There was nobody there. Two buildings down, the teenagers made rude catcalls that only increased when she glared at them. A flash of current would teach them a lesson…and be a waste of energy she didn’t have right now.

      “You’re getting as bad as Max,” she told herself, turning back and heading up the stairs into her building, praying her words weren’t true.