Laura Gilman - Free Fall

“Now. Is there further old business for us to discuss?”

There was none.

Present Day

Wren Valere was getting dressed to go outside. It was a lovely spring morning, complete with birds cautiously twitting and an almost pleasant breeze coming off the Hudson River. The sun was bright, the sky was blue, and she was trying to decide if she was going to need the hot-stick or not.

Some genius in the Cosa had come up with this over the winter, after the Battle of Burning Bridge. Passed through a security screening, it looked like an insulated tube, maybe part of a thermos, or for bike messengers to carry important papers in. Totally harmless. In the hands of a Talent, someone with the ability to channel current through their bodies, it was the magical equivalent of a howitzer.

It didn’t pay, these dangerous days, to go outside unarmed.

She finally decided that she didn’t need it, not for a job in broad daylight, and put it back into the drawer with relief. She hated carrying a weapon, even when she had to.

To the ignorant eye, she looked the epitome of harmless and helpless: five feet and scant inches of nonentity. Brown hair, brown eyes, pale skin, and a figure that was neither eye-catchingly curvy nor attractively slim: Wren Valere disappeared the moment you laid eyes on her. It was a skill she had been born with, and honed over the years until she was one of the most successful Retrievers in record.

Now, it made her one of the most dangerous weapons the Cosa Nostradamus had. The more their enemies looked for her, the harder she was to find.

Hard didn’t mean impossible, though.

It had been three and a half months since the Battle, when an attempt to draw out the leaders of the human opposition had ended in bloodshed and destruction on both sides. Since then, the generations-old understanding between the “normal” world and the Cosa Nostradamus—best summed up as “you don’t see us and we won’t bother you”—had been badly shaken, if not shattered entirely. That shaking was the direct result of a vicious campaign waged, professionally and relentlessly, by anti-magical forces, unknowingly aided by factions within the Cosa who had seen only the chance to grow their own power and influence.

The intra-Cosa problems had been dealt with—or at least quieted for a while. The other…that force was still a real and present danger. The Humans First vigilantes who had been harassing the magic-using members of the Cosa and their non-human cousins the Fatae weren’t the real enemy, but merely shock troops employed unknowingly by a far more dangerous and well-funded organization—the Silence.

The same organization her partner—her ex-partner—used to work for. The same organization that had employed her, however briefly, when they were still pretending to be the good guys, the protectors of the innocent, the caretakers of Light and Virtue.

Innate and unwanted honesty forced Wren to occasionally acknowledge that it wasn’t that easy, as black-and-white as it sounded. Just as not everyone on the Mage Council was an uptight power-hungry murderer—just most of them—then not everyone in the generations-old Silence was a bigot who hated magic and anything to do with magic.

Only the ones in power. Only the ones calling the shots. The ones who had hired over a hundred of the younger Talent, and brainwashed them into becoming weapons against their own people.

Who had set ordinary human bigots against the Fatae, causing innocent creatures to be harassed, chased, torn apart by dogs and run down by cars.

Who had sworn, at that highest level, to wipe what they saw as the “abomination” of the Cosa Nostradamus, the beings of magic, out of existence.

But on this morning, the first Tuesday in May, Wren had nothing to do with the Council, the Silence, or anything else with any sort of organization above and beyond herself. Right at that moment, Wren was lacing up a pair of flat-soled sandals under her carpenter pants and cotton sweater, and getting ready to go out on a job.

Life in wartime didn’t mean life without work.

“Hey. You want another cup of coffee?” a voice asked.

She shook her head. “When I get back.” She was wired enough; she didn’t need the additional push of the caffeine.

The demon nodded, and took a sip out of the mug he held in his white-furred paw. Thick black claws showed darkly against the pale blue ceramic of the mug, which had the sea-wave logo of the Didier Gallery on it. It was the last one she had: the other had gotten broken during the farewell party they had held for some friends the week before.

Most of the Fatae who couldn’t pass for human had left town well before then, through a chain of households and helping hands the ever-irrepressible lonejacks were calling the Underground Furway, ignoring the fact that fully a third of the Fatae had scales, and the other third were plain-skinned. Her fellow lonejacks—human Cosa members unaffiliated with the Mage Council—stayed put for the most part, facing the danger with strength, courage, and an unending dose of irreverence.

The strength and courage had surprised her. The irreverence she had expected. You didn’t become a lonejack if you were comfortable with the party line, or didn’t try to bend it, every chance you got.

Despite being obviously Fatae, and therefore a prime target, P.B. had refused to even think about leaving town. The only concession he had made was to give up his basement apartment—in a crappy part of town the vigilantes patrolled too often—to move in with Wren for the duration. Her brownstone apartment was really too small for two people with personal space issues to live in comfortably, but another Talent, Bonnie, lived downstairs, and between the two of them, they could keep him safe.

They hoped.

These days, “safe” was a relative term.

“I have to go.” She picked up her leather jacket off the back of a chair and slid it on. The damned thing showed more wear and tear than she did, but there was comfort in the old familiarity of it.

“So? Go.” The demon shrugged. “We still on for the movies tonight?”

“Yeah. Bonnie and Jack will meet us there, they said. We can catch dinner after.”

Life in wartime didn’t mean you didn’t have a social life, either. You just went out in numbers. And armed, at night.

“Did you…” P.B. didn’t even finish that thought, much less the sentence.

“No,” she said anyway, and, unlocking the four different locks on the metal security door, left the apartment, and the question behind her.

Left alone in the apartment, the demon known as P.B. shook his head. A lifetime spent avoiding conflicts, avoiding ugly complications and useless entanglements, and he finally found his place at the side of a woman who was avoiding the best thing that ever came down the proverbial pike for her. That was karma for you.

Not that he blamed her, entirely. Sergei Didier had been a hero at Burning Bridge, but P.B. was the only one who knew it. On Didier’s orders, no less. The human had his reasons, but it didn’t make the estrangement between Wren and Didier any easier to deal with.

“She will be able to function better without me.”

Sergei loved Wren, and that made him blind, in a lot of ways. In the aftermath of the disaster at the Brooklyn Bridge, the Cosa didn’t have many leaders left. They were trying to hold together, hanging together, but P.B. had seen it all before, and it didn’t look good. They needed Valere, as much as she didn’t want to be needed. But he had tried to convince her of that, of her importance in the scheme of things, and failed. The only person who could possibly make her see reason was her partner. Ex-partner. In both the business and the personal use of the word.