Dana Stabenow - Powers of Detection

“Yeah, old man?” Her voice was low, dangerous. She’d copied it from Blue Angel, practicing until she had it down just right. If anyone reported her to the cops, they’d get laughed out of the station for claiming they’d been robbed by Marlene Dietrich.

“Yeah. It’s mine. Mine I tell you. I bought it, I got it, and I’m going to keep it.”

Any moment Wren expected him to break into a round of “mine, my precioussss.” If he did, she was out of there, and the Silence could keep their damn retainer that month.

“My staff, mine. Going to make me a wizard. Going to teach me how to talk to the birds.”

“I think you’re halfway there, old man,” Wren said, relieved that he was nattering about something other than her goal. And if the staff that he was talking about actually was an Artifact-an item used like a battery to store current-the Silence would just have to hire her to come back and get it. Sergei’s cat would have better luck working a manual can opener than the man in front of her actually accessing current.

“What’s that? You, stop there. Who are you? How did you get in here?” The hand not holding the flashlight came up, the dark shape unmistakable even to someone as gun-shy as Wren. A sawed-off shotgun.

Think quick, Valere!

“I’m a djinn, come to gift you with a treasure,” she said, punting madly. Maybe, in her dark clothing, the shimmer of current still wrapped around her, visible or no, she’d be able to pull this off. “A painting, through which magic you might transport yourself instantly.”

A combination of Bugs Bunny cartoons and Star Trek reruns, but he leaned closer, the gun not focused quite so threateningly as a minute ago.

Moving carefully, she withdrew the tube from her knapsack, having to tug it free when it snagged on the dress’s folds.

“All shall be yours… for one simple gift in return.”

The old man checked himself, glaring at her suspiciously. The shotgun began to rise towards her face. “What’s that?”

“A trifle, a trinket. One of no use to mortals but great significance to djinn.” She was dancing as fast as she could, the sweat crawling under her scalp and running down the side of her face and back of her neck. “A bell, a silver bell with a golden clapper, a bell that does not ring. You have such a thing, I am told. Give it to me, and the magic painting shall be yours.”

–

“You traded one job for the other.” Sergei was trying, really trying, to be his usual hard-assed self.

Wren reached across the diner table and snagged the pseudocream in its little tin pitcher; poured it into her coffee until it went from mud to diluted mud. “Hey, no problem. I’ll just go steal it back.”

She drank her coffee, pretending not to hear the muffled, pained noises coming from her partner.

–

“Oh… hell.” Disgust dripped from every word as she stared down at the body of the pawnshop owner. Someone had staved in the back of his head with his own staff. There was a moral in there somewhere, but the smell of stale blood and feces was rising off the body, and she didn’t want to waste time thinking when she could be working. Wren wrinkled her nose, wiping her palms on her jeans as though there was something sticking to them. “If I’d wanted to see dead bodies, I’d have gone to work for the morgue, dammit.”

Ten minutes since she’d walked in the door. Daylight retrievals usually weren’t her thing, but it wasn’t as though the guy was in any shape to report her.

She risked another look down. Even less shape, now.

Normally working current just required an internal adjustment and some finely focused concentration. But there were times that shortcuts were useful, and words were the surest way to focus current fast, if a little dirty.

“Picture gone missing hands not meant, not deserving

Retriever reclaims.”

It wasn’t great verse, but it didn’t have to be. It just had to be meaningful, in form and function. Her mother loved haiku, and so using that form made her think of her mother, which made the form meaningful. And she needed to get that picture back. Which made the content meaningful. And… there it was. Her hands itched as the current she had generated reached like a magnet to lodestone, forcing her forward, stepping over the old man’s body, to where the painting was tacked up with thumb pins- Sergei’s going to shit- on the wall behind the counter.

“Looks like the old boy was trying to make a getaway … pity he didn’t make it.” She took the painting down, the tingling fading once she made contact with the spelled item. She looked around for the tube, but didn’t see it. Refusing to muck around any longer, she pulled the scrunchie out from her hair, letting the ponytail fall loose, and wrapped it around the rerolled painting. She was ready to get the hell out of there, but something made her look back over her shoulder to the body lying on the floor.

“Ah… hell.” She sighed, tucking the roll under one arm and retracing her steps. Stooping low, she put her hand out, palm down and flat. A hesitation, a centering, and then she touched the corpse. Spirits fled in the moment of death, unless there was a damn good reason-or a very strong spell-holding them in place. But while the animus might be gone, the body still had current caught in the biofield every living being generated, the natural electricity that made Kirlian photography possible.

“What? No! No, mine, mine, mustn’t take, mustn’t…” a fast-moving figure in front of him, angry, full of rage. “Where is it? She didn’t have it on her when she left, which means you have it, now where? Where. Is. It?”

Whimpering, then another heavy blow. The old man spins under the force, falls to the ground. “Useless old fool…”

The sound of something whistling down a shock of red-flaring pain, and…

Nothing

–

Wren came out of the connection like a dog shaking off water, breathing heavy. “Damn damn damn damn! ” He’d been killed for the painting. Killed… and she might have been… No time to think about it, she’d already stayed too long. Not that she was worried about cops showing up to investigate: Poor bastard had been dead a day at least.

Her eyes narrowed at the thought. “Ah… hell.” Nobody deserved to rot like that. Slipping out the front door, she wiped the handle clean, then uncoiled a narrow rope of current from her inner pool and reached out with it, brushing the surface of the burglar alarm.

The loud wail of the alarm covered the sound of her bootheels on pavement, moving in the general direction of away.

–

The painting remained untouched on the coffee table where Wren had tossed it when she came in the door to Sergei’s apartment. Wren was curled up on the sofa, while Sergei paced back and forth in front of her.

“Who the hell are we working for, Sergei? Because I get the feeling there’s something they didn’t tell us. Something that almost got me killed. And did get that poor bastard-”

“Bob Goveiss.”

“Bob, killed. So give.”

“Yes. That’s what doesn’t make sense.”

“What?”

“The violence.” He shook his head. “Those paintings were on loan from the French government. The same government that’s about to splinter apart from the inside, which could have awkward repercussions on the current political scene.”

“So sayeth CNN, amen,” Wren said, but she was listening. “And…?”

“And, the organization that hired us was planning on holding that painting hostage, to force the various factions to come back to the table.”

Wren stared at her partner. “Okay, huh?”

He paced back and forth, gesturing with his hands as he spoke. “It’s rare, but there have been a number of cases where an item is taken to force two sides to cooperate or risk being shown in public as the destroyer of a priceless work of art. Most recently in the theft of a Chagall painting: A ransom note was sent demanding peace in the Middle East before the painting would be returned. A useless demand, really, but it made a splash in the news.”