Laura Gilman - Bring It On

The apartment was large by Manhattan standards—three tiny shoebox bedrooms off a narrow hallway, a kitchenette to the right, and one large main room to the left of the front door—but it was almost painfully bare of furniture. Despite living there for dog years, Wren had never really had the time to think about buying chairs. Or a sofa. Or putting anything on the landlord-white walls.

Clients never, but never saw her home. She had lived here a year, in fact, before anyone other than her mother and Sergei walked through the door. There had been more people in this space in the past four months than in all the time previous, and Wren hated it. But it also made her look around and notice that her nest was missing a few items most folk would consider essentials. Like, oh, furniture.

Given the choice of using the two narrow and more than a little beat-up chairs in the kitchen for this meeting, or sitting on the floor, Wren had finally broken down and, after confirming the appointment, bought a small wooden table and two reasonably comfortable wooden chairs to go with it from a secondhand junk/antique dealer a few blocks away. Those, and the over-stuffed upholstered chair that had seen better decades, were still the only pieces of furniture in the main room, other than the stereo system set against the far wall, and two extremely expensive speakers in either corner.

Maybe the client would think that she rented the place. That would work, yeah.

“Nice system. Acoustics must rock.”

Rosen looked to be in her midtwenties, but she spoke younger. Twenty-three, according to the dossier Wren had put together after the initial contact. Not as complete as what Sergei could have done, but she’d done all right, if she did say so herself.

“Anna Rosen. Born in Glendale, raised in Madison, went to school in Boston, came home to work at the law firm of which Daddy was a partner two years ago, just before his death of a heart attack.” There. Taking control of the meeting. Establishing herself as the person with the knowledge.

“Alleged heart attack.” Rosen took the left-hand chair and sat down without being asked, placing her oxblood briefcase by her expensive shoes and resting her well-manicured hands on the table surface. “He was murdered.”

Wren stood in the doorway and looked at the client. “I don’t do murders.”

Not intentionally, anyway. Not by name, as such. Only the dead never seemed to stay properly, quietly dead, around her.

“Not asking you to.” Rosen looked at Wren directly, then; the humor in her eyes was muted by pain that hadn’t had the chance to scab yet. The death hadn’t been that recent; she was carrying around some significant emotional issues, then. “I’m Null, not stupid.”

Wren opened her mouth, then snapped it shut. There wasn’t anything she could say at this point that wouldn’t come out all wrong, anyway, even if the girl had been looking for soothing platitudes.

Null meant a human without any Talent, without the ability to channel current, or magic. Almost half of her jobs came from the Null world. They hired her as a thief, not a Retriever, but that was a distinction without a difference to most people. In fact, it probably only meant something significant to another Retriever, and there were only a dozen or so in the world, as far as Wren knew.

The fact that this Miss Rosen used the word Null with such casualness meant that she was aware of Talents, by reputation if not personally. Interesting. Possibly totally irrelevant, but interesting. Wren filed that fact away for later contemplation.

The fact that the client had contacted her directly in the first place might be a little more telling—people who heard about her via the Talent gossip networks usually knew to approach Sergei, first.

She was starting to get too well-known. She’d been too high profile, lately. A good Retriever wasn’t in the spotlight. A good Retriever—a successful Retriever—needed to be invisible, known only for her actions, not herself. Wren wasn’t much for game-playing; she left that to Sergei. Except here she was, playing games, inviting clients into her home, buying furniture that didn’t suit her…

“Let me get directly to the point,” Miss Rosen said, crossing her legs in a ladylike fashion, the sheen of her shoes expensively muted.

Thank God, Wren thought, forcing herself to gather her scattered thoughts and pay attention to what was going on in the here and now. Focus! Don’t screw the pooch so early in the game, Valere! Damn it, she wasn’t a negotiator. She didn’t even like to debate. Her thoughts scattered again like butterflies in the wind. Why had she agreed to meet with this chick anyway, instead of handing it over to Sergei the moment the nibble came in? This was his job, his part of the partnership, to deal with the prejob details.

But the call had come directly to her, and she had taken it on directly. So there wasn’t any Sergei here to fall back on. Her choice, so hers to deal with. Grow up, she heard P.B. say again.

“My father was killed last year. His will entered probate.” Rosen spoke without emotion in that lovely voice, as though all that had happened to someone else. “Now his widow is claiming that a particular piece of jewelry is hers, not mine. It belonged to my mother, and she has no claim to it.”

There was more emotion in the last sentence than the girl had shown, total, up until then. Whatever the piece was, it meant a lot to her. And she really, really didn’t like her stepmother. Did she suspect the woman in her father’s murder? Not your problem, Valere.

Not Wren’s business, who felt what about who, except as it impacted what she was hired to do. Her business was the job, and only the job. “She has it in her possession?”

Rosen nodded. Apparently, the widow did.

A straight-ahead break-and-grab. Nice, Wren thought to herself. Just what the doctor might have ordered, to keep her mind busy while she waited for the Talent-storm forming overhead to either break or disperse.

“I want to keep this low-key,” the girl went on. “She’s going to know it’s me—there’s no way she can’t know. But without proof, without a way to trace it back to me, she won’t be able to do anything about it. That’s why I came to you.”

“Because I’m a Retriever?”

“Because you’re the best.”

All right, that was a fact Wren wasn’t going to argue; although she could name half a dozen non-Cosa thieves who were at least as good at lifting things, they weren’t always as careful about giving the merchandise back over to the client. It was a highest-bidder market out there, for items without clear ownership and no binding contract.

That was the difference between a Retriever and a thief. Not just current, but good work ethics. A Retriever, once bought, stayed bought.

“I need the best. I also need someone with a connection to magic. Can you, I don’t know, do something so that she knows magic is used? To throw her off my trail?”

Covering her ass. Wren could approve. But she hated having anyone tell her how to do a job. Not even Sergei ever did that. If it called for current, she used it. If it called for the more pragmatic, practical skills she had picked up over the years—lock picking and door-jimmying—then she used those. That was what made her the best, not just an accident of Talent.

Wren didn’t say any of that, however. She avoided sitting in the other chair, feeling more comfortable on her feet. At just over five feet tall and otherwise unmemorable, one of the best ways to keep someone focused on you was to present a moving target. Make them just nervous enough to pay attention.

“I am the best, yeah. I’m also not inexpensive.” Okay, so that wasn’t patented Sergei Didier smooth. She wasn’t Sergei, and she did things her way, damn it. “I’m not going to insult you by suggesting that you can’t afford me, but are you sure that this is going to be worth it?”