The painting was in a little alcove off gallery #11, in a space that had probably once been a servant’s room. Or a closet. What did she know, Wren thought, listening with part of her Talent to the sounds of the elementals causing chaos in other parts of the building. She grew up in a double-wide trailer, for Pete’s sake. They didn’t even have any mansions in Redwater.
Palms held over the frame, and the current surged, creating the illusion again that the alarm hadn’t been breached. Moving quickly, she fit a small ceramic knife into the frame and slit the painting carefully along four sides, sliding it out and rolling it up. Tucked into an aluminum tube, the tube stowed in her backpack. And then it was time to go. She checked the digital readout on her knapsack, far enough away from her body that the current didn’t futz it too badly. Fourteen minutes. Damn. Getting old, Valere. You’re getting old.
–
By the time she made it out to the edge of the museum’s property, it was almost twelve-thirty. She perched in the vee of a large oak and contemplated the street. The empty street.
“Dammit, Didier…” She’d had to duck and wait while a guard went by her; too close, that one. They were getting smarter. She’d have to put a no-go on any jobs here for at least two years. Maybe three.
Not for the first time she wished for a cell phone. But even if they hadn’t been too risky-too easy for someone to check the last few numbers dialed-she still couldn’t carry one. No cell phone, no PDA… even the odd watch was prone to strange fluctuations under current, and when she pulled down a surge, all bets were off.
Another fifteen minutes, and she had to accept the fact that Sergei had probably been forced to call it a night. The glitches she had the elementals set off might have caused a patrol car to take a swing by, even though none of it had been enough to trigger an actual alarm.
“Good thing you wore the comfy sneakers,” she told herself, swinging herself down from the tree and landing with lazy grace on the grass. It was going to be a long walk back.
–
It might have been the night air. Or the current still running high in her system. Or, as Sergei claimed, just a natural-born stupidity. But at the time, the idea to kill two jobs with one evening seemed just a matter of common sense and practicality. She had to walk by the site anyway, so why not?
“Why not,” Sergei said over his tenth mug of high-test tea, the first five of which had cooled while he was waiting for her, “is because a) you were carrying a retrieved object. And b) because you hadn’t done anything more than a cursory glance at the job write-up.”
She knew he was mad, then, when he called it a job instead of a situation.
“And c) because you got caught!”
Wren winced, fighting the urge to duck under the diner’s table. “Not so much caught,” she protested meekly. “More like…”
–
“Who’s there?”
Wren swore, wrapping herself in current and fading into the shadows. The store was a hodgepodge of clichés, down to the motheaten thing stuffed and mounted on the counter, its crystal eyes reflecting light back at her. At least, she hoped it was just crystal reflecting light…
“I said, who’s there?” An old man to match the shop stomped downstairs, a megapowered X-Files-quality flashlight in one hand. Wren closed her eyes so she wouldn’t reflect the light. The beam flashed across her face, passed on… then came back.
“I know what you’re here for,” the old man cackled. “But you can’t have it. Can’t, can’t can’t!”
Nobody said anything about the guy being a Talent she thought with irritation, then common sense reasserted itself. He wasn’t a Talent, or a seer, or anything that would have allowed him to sense what she was or what she intended. He was just old-fashioned bugfuck. Crazy had a way of messing with the brain in ways even current couldn’t work around.
“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.