Laura Gilman - Staying Dead

“Which is exactly what you’ve had the past three times. Experiment a little, willya?” Callie had the flat-toned voice of someone trying to pretend they weren’t from around here, but unlike almost every other waiter and waitress in town, she wasn’t waiting for the big break to sweep her off to Hollywood.

“And a glass of Chianti.”

“Ooo, red instead of white. You are living dangerously.” Not that being a professional waitress made her any more respectful of her clientele. Just the opposite, actually.

“See why I love this place?” Wren asked her companion.

“Indeed. A tossed salad and the halibut, please. Nothing else to drink.”

“You guys have really got to calm your wild lives down,” the waitress said in disgust, stalking off to the kitchen with a practiced flounce.

“We’re such a disappointment to her.”

Wren snorted. Callie had been flirting madly with Sergei for two years now, ever since Wren moved into the neighborhood and they started coming here regularly, and he remained serenely unresponsive. Disappointment didn’t even begin to cover it. Wren could understand Callie’s point of view, though. If she wasn’t so sure he’d look at her blankly, or worse yet give her the “we’re partners, nothing more” speech, she might have made a play for him, too. Well, maybe not when they first partnered. But lately…it was weird, how someone so familiar could suddenly one day, totally out of the blue and with a random thought, become…interesting. In that way.

Damn it, Valere, focus! “Whatcha got for me?”

Sergei lifted a plain manila envelope out of his briefcase and handed it to her. “The names of all the highly-placed executives, both within the Frants Corporation and at rival organizations, who would have reason to hold a grudge of this magnitude, and the financial wherewithal to hire someone to perform magic of this level. You?”

“Bunch of folk with the mojo to do the job themselves, almost all carrying a mad-on of one kind or another for our client. Strictly low-budget grievances, though.” She pulled out a legal-size piece of paper from the file and handed it to him in exchange. It was a copy of the original list P.B. had given her, with her own notes added under each name. “Doubt they’d be in any of your databases.”

“Don’t ever underestimate my resources,” he told her severely. “Many people who think they’re invisible often—”

“Leave a fluorescent trail. Yeah, yeah, I know.” One of the few “resources” of his that Wren had ever met in person was a former forensic investigator named Edgehill, who was paying off some unnamed but very large favor done in the distant past. He was a slight, frantic-eyed man with wildly-gesturing hands. Listening to him talk was sort of like watching an episode of CSI on fast forward while taking speed. But his shit was almost always on the money.

“Would the police have anything on file?”

Wren snorted. “Nobody on this list. Strictly no-see-um talents.”

“Noseeyum?”

“Too good to get caught.”

“Ah.” He grinned at her, the expression softening his face and putting an appealing glint in his dark brown eyes. Behind that hard-assed, hard-pressed agent façade, she thought not for the first time, Mr. Sergei Didier had a real wicked sense of humor that didn’t get nearly enough air time. “Kin of yours?”

“Hardly.” Without false modesty, Wren knew her worth, and so did Sergei, to the penny. These guys were good, but she was better. Which was why she didn’t appear on other people’s little lists. Even Sergei, with all his surprisingly good contacts and connections, hadn’t known about her way back when until sheer coincidence—and a nasty accident caused by someone trying to kill him—brought them into contact.

Wren’s mentor, a man named John Ebenezer, had taught her from the very beginning to keep a low personal profile for a great many reasons, all of them having to do with staying alive and under her own governance. There were three kinds of current-mages in the world: Council-mandated, lonejackers and dead. Just because a Talent had no interest in being under the Council’s thumb didn’t mean they might not want her there, now or someday later. Better not to take the chance. That was the lonejacker’s first law: steer clear of the Mage Council.

Their salads arrived at that moment, and they paused long enough to accept their plates, and wave away Callie’s offer of freshly ground pepper.

“I’ve never understood that.”

“What?” He looked at her, his forehead scrunching together in puzzlement.

“The fresh pepper thing. Who puts pepper on their salad?”

Sergei shrugged. “Someone must, otherwise they wouldn’t offer it.”

“I think they do it just to see who’s stupid enough—or sheep enough—to say yes.”

“You have a suspicious mind.”

Wren grinned at him. “You do say the sweetest things.”

“Eat your salad,” he told her, lifting his own fork with a decided appetite. Her list lay just to the side of his plate, so he could skim it without distracting himself from his food, or running the risk of getting salad dressing on the paper. Wren watched him eat and read for a moment, then picked up her own fork and dug into the pile of greens. She was going to wait until the dishes were cleared away to go through the neatly-clipped-together, ordered, indexed and color-coded material properly.

“Hey, this name was on my list,” he said suddenly.

“What?” That got her attention fast.

“This name.” He stabbed one well-manicured finger at the paper as though it were somehow at fault. “It was on my list.”

Wren took the paper from him. “Which one?”

“Third from the bottom. George Margolin.”

Wren scanned the list, coming to the name he indicated. “Huh. Talent, yeah, but not buckets of it. Not affiliated, not really a lonejack—he’s passing.” In other words, he wasn’t using current in any way, shape, or form that was obvious to the observer, and probably didn’t use it at all. At least, not consciously. But you never knew for certain. And some folk were just naturally sneaky about it.

“Great. Move that guy up to the top of the suspects list. Anyone in a suit that P.B. hears about is going to be dirty, one way or another.”

“P.B.?” Sergei didn’t roll his eyes—that would have been beneath him—but his voice indicated his level of unimpressedness.

“Hey, don’t dis my sources,” she said, pointing her fork at him. “That furry little bastard always comes through, which is more than I can say for some of your people. I seem to recall a little screw-up with IDs that almost got me shot by the cops in Tucson.”

“All right, all right. Point taken.”

She had to give Sergei that. He was a xenophobic bastard when it came to things like demons and fatae, but he didn’t cut humans any slack when they screwed up, either. Especially when it was their own lives on the line.

She flattered herself that he might have been just as annoyed at that snitch if he hadn’t ended up in that Tucson jail along with her.

“So how come this guy’s on your list?”

“You have the file, you look.”

“Why? You’ve memorized the important stuff already.” Wren never understood why people wasted brain-space on anything they didn’t need right at hand. That was the magic of writing stuff down, so you didn’t have to cram it all in your head. But Sergei was incapable of letting go of anything to do with a job, at least while the file was hot. For all she knew, he did an info dump at the end of every case, mentally shredding all that info in order to make room for the new stuff.

She had a mental image of Sergei running his brain through a shredder, and had to stifle a snort of laughter.