Curse the Dark, page 9
The flush seemed unusually loud, and she flinched at the noise as it echoed against the tile. The tingling of a headache started on the edges of her skull as she turned to wash up. Warm water splashed on her face made the tingling recede a little bit. Cold water might work better to wake her up, but the thought alone made her flinch. Bracing herself on the white ceramic sink, she raised her head and looked into the mirror.
Sergei must have unbraided her hair when he stripped her down to her plain white T-shirt and panties, not that she remembered any of it. Her hair was tangled, but better than the scalp-soreness that usually came from sleeping with the braid in.
Taking closer inventory, Wren wasn’t too displeased with what she saw. Her eyes were a little bloodshot, but the shadows underneath weren’t too bad. This might have been the most consecutive sleep she’d gotten in weeks, between the heat back home, the stress, and then the overnight plane trip. Skin was a little blotchy, a little puffy, but a good hot shower should take care of that. Overall, she looked somewhere between mildly hungover and human, which was pretty much how she felt.
Her toiletries kit was on the narrow ledge above the sink and she rummaged through it until she found her toothbrush and toothpaste.
“Hey.”
“Murmph,” she said around a mouthful of paste, waggling her fingers in greeting at her partner’s reflection in the mirror. “Murhmizit?”
“Around seven,” he said, interpreting her without too much difficulty. “Sunday morning,” for further clarification. “You slept almost twelve hours.”
Well, that explained the lack of jet lag. She wondered how much if any of that he’d slept as well, but knew better than to ask. She rinsed and spat, and put the brush into the glass on the ledge to dry.
“Hungry?”
And suddenly, she was.
“Shower first, though. You should have one too, you’re starting to get a little ripe. Um, you do have a room, right?” Not that she’d mind sharing with him, but the bed was way too small for two people, even if he’d been a foot shorter.
“Yes, next over. Meet you in about twenty?”
Wren cast a look at the shower. Probably not going to be a luxury experience, no. “Yeah, twenty should do it.”
She reached in past the curtain to turn the water on, and pulled off her T-shirt, only afterward realizing that Sergei was still standing there. Not that he hadn’t seen her naked before, but…it was different, now. Now she’d be nude, not naked. Nude was a lot more…naked.
“Out, Didier.”
He blinked, as though not sure what she was talking about, then grinned like a little kid caught with a handful of cookies, and was gone. She heard the door close and lock behind him as she stepped into the shower. Hot water. Bliss, oh bliss….
She ended up waiting for him, despite taking her time in the shower after all. Getting dressed hadn’t taken much thought or effort, pulling the nearest thing out of the suitcase Sergei had brought in for her. She’d simply braided her hair into two short plaits that tucked behind her ears, intentionally playing up how young that made her look. Her hands had moved automatically, weaving the damp strands, while her mind moved over the pieces they’d gathered so far, shifting them like a puzzle cube, not really trying to make anything of them yet, but looking-not-looking for a pattern to surprise her.
This was the part of the job that was the most difficult. Out of the planning stage (not that they’d had any of that, and damn she hated subcontracting!) but not yet really into the meat of the Retrieval. It was all thinking. She was a lot better at acting, and reacting, than thinking. And while being on a Retrieval usually meant there was a crystalline sharpness added to her brain, for some reason that organ seemed even duller than usual, this morning.
She needed coffee. Badly.
The lobby was as bare-bones as the rooms, comprising a wood and marble registration desk with mail cubbies behind it that looked like it had been lifted off a movie set, and a pair of straight-backed chairs and small glass table that could have fit into any small-town dentist’s waiting room. Overall, it felt as though the place had been built around 1950 and then abandoned in that decade. In her jeans and button down shirt, this one a dark blue, she felt oddly out of place, as though she should be wearing a sundress and heels instead. Well, her sandals were suitably ladylike, she supposed, even if they didn’t have a significant heel. You never knew when you’d have to run.
The only grace note to break up the monochrome feel was the long fish tank on a metal stand against the far wall. She had wandered down the hallway that connected the two floors of rooms to the lobby to take a look at it, fascinated by the flick-and-turn of the brightly colored tropical fish inside.
“You’re late,” she said to the familiar footfalls on the linoleum behind her.
“Sorry. Picked up e-mail before my shower, took longer than I expected.”
She turned to look at him. Same clothing, but freshly shaved and bathed. Fine lines around his narrow-lipped mouth that indicated he was worrying at something. “Stuff?”
“Mmmm. P.B. checking in, mainly. Do I even want to know where he’s logging in from?”
“There’s an Internet café in the Village that doesn’t blink at anyone who comes in, any hour.” She saw Sergei’s look of disbelief. “No, I didn’t give him my password. He’s a friend, but he’s still a freelancer. He’d sell everything I had to the highest bidder and feel no guilt whatsoever.”
He had slicked his wet hair back in his usual styling, but a strand was curling over his forehead unnoticed. He must have forgotten to pack the hair gel. She resisted the urge to smooth it back into place.
“You two have the strangest friendship.”
“Yeah well, that’s what he says about us, too. So what’s up back home?”
“We’ve been gone for all of forty-eight hours. What could have happened?”
She opened her mouth to give him a probable list, and he shook his head. “No, please don’t answer that. Don’t worry, I think he just wanted reassurances. Oh, and that he and your friend Lee are quote ‘pooling their gossip resources,’ unquote. Does that fill you with as much fear as it does me?”
Wren snickered. “Hah, good for them. Bet they have all the Cosa gossip from Baltimore to Montreal tied up in a cute red bow by now. If they take it professional, we had damn well better get discounted rates for introducing them.”
Sergei now looked a little worried, but Wren was cool with it. Not that P.B. couldn’t make a disaster out of a church picnic, if he wanted to, but everything was totally under control, so long as Lee was involved. Tree-taller was the steady sort—if P.B. got too wound up, he’d sit on the demon until things mellowed again.
“So what’s the plan?”
“There’s a café in town that the guy at the desk said was rather good. We can walk there, then come back and get the car.”
“We’re in town?” Damn. Maybe it was the lack of information, or the jet lag showing up another way, or maybe it was just Sergei’s relatively unusual presence on the job, but she wasn’t feeling sharp at all. Coffee. Fast.
“You were rather out of it when we got here last night. Yes.” He escorted her out the lobby door and into the same golden-clear sunlight as yesterday. She raised her face to the blue sky and couldn’t help but smile. Her natural Talent-fueled preference was for thunderclouds and heavy ozone, but this was nice, too.
They were, in fact, in a very pretty little town—the one she had seen from the cliff yesterday, Wren suspected. The hotel—more of a motel, really—was set off on a side street, with a small parking lot to the side. They strolled to the corner and turned onto what was obviously the main drag, a two-way street lined with small businesses and shops, none of which were open this early.
“I’m having the sudden urge to go shopping” she said wistfully as they passed a window with colorful watercolors displayed.
Sergei took a quick look and sniffed. “Junk. You want souvenirs, we’ll find the real thing.”
“I can’t afford the real thing,” Wren said. “Hell, I can’t even really afford the fake stuff, either. But it’s fun to look.” And if something were to happen to fall into her pocket…it’s not as though she’d be taking anything really expensive. Probably. Just to keep her hand in, as it were. The thought seemed to add an important tingle to her musings about the job, and she coaxed it a little closer.
She had talked, once and long ago, to a cop her mom was dating about the mental makeup of professional criminals. Especially thieves. There were all sorts of theories, he’d told her, and nobody could agree on anything, but the one thing he’d seen over the years was that a really good thief—the ones he knew about but could never catch—were professionals; not junkies, not kids on a crime spree lark, not someone out for a high-profile smash-and-grab. Solid, reliable workmen. That’s who made a living out of crime.
Wren suspected she was more of a kleptomaniac, at least at first. She’d started stealing because it was a way she could calm the anxiety and loneliness her Talent made her feel, isolated from everyone else, even her mother. But those feelings had gone away once Neezer came into her life, and all that remained was the satisfaction of planning, the intensity of the Retrieval, the emotional crash afterward, and overall the sense that this was what she was good at, in life.
So why wasn’t that rush, that sense of apprehensive pleasure, coming, here?
“Earth to Wren, come in, Wren….”
“Sorry.” She smiled up at her partner. “Just trying to think. Not good results. Will stop now.”
“You need caffeine,” he said.
Yeah. That was it. Coffee would set everything back on track.
At the café they stood with a couple of old men at a long polished brass bar and ordered coffee and fruit-filled pastries from the woman behind the counter, and then took them to a small table off to the side of the shop, away from where all the old men in town apparently gathered to argue over whatever was in the newspapers.
“There was also, as expected, a message from our contact waiting at the hotel,” Sergei said, once they were settled with their coffee and breakfast. Wren, most of her attention focused on figuring out what kind of fruit was inside her pastry, just nodded to keep him talking.
“Or rather, there was a message from her office. Apparently Senora Fabrizio was in a car accident on her way to the airport yesterday morning.”
That got Wren’s attention, one hundred percent sharp and shiny. “Bad?”
“She’s in the hospital. The message was worded in such a way, however, as to make me believe that they did not expect positive news.”
“Accident?” Wren believed wholeheartedly in accidents over coincidence, but this seemed a bit of a stretch.
Sergei made a “who knows” gesture that seemed to fit particularly well in their surroundings. Very Italian, from the little she had seen so far. Lots of arms and hands getting flung around. “The way people drive around here? Probably. Not certainly. Coincidence isn’t always another word for plot.”
“Lovely. Was there anything they needed to tell us we should have known before we went to the site?”
“Yes.” He paused. “To be careful.”
“Oh. Well that was damned helpful now, wasn’t it?” Because she hadn’t already figured that part out. Goddamned Silence living up to their name again.
Silence. Stillness. She frowned, digging mentally into her memory, to no avail. There was something there, something in the puzzle pieces she hadn’t quite remembered yet. But you couldn’t force that stuff; the hindbrain worked in its own slow and mysterious way. Especially when you’d gotten it zapped twelve hours before.
She finished the pastry and decided it had been some weird but tasty blend of apricot and strawberry. The cappuccino was also divine, with just the right balance of bitterness to the gentler influence of the milk, and a hint of something spicy on the top. She could almost feel the sharpness beginning to take over her thoughts, making it easier to function.
“So. Want to tell me about what happened up there yesterday?” That was the thing about Sergei that freaked most people out, how he went from kid gloves to brass knuckles without a flicker of hesitation or any other sign of warning.
“Not really.” She stopped with the mug halfway back up to her mouth, hearing the way that sounded even as she was saying it. “Sorry. Wasn’t trying to be flip. But…”
Oh.
She put the mug down, watching his hands as they tore strips from his pastry and then placed them back on the plate in neat rows, not really processing what she was seeing.
Stillness. Silence. Lack of electricity. Secrets. Silence.
All the bits, flickering on parade through her brain. Don’t jump just because you’re frustrated, Valere. Talk it out. Use Sergei’s reactions as a sounding board. Make sure your ducks are in order before you start shooting. “I’m really not sure what happened. It might just have been that I was tired. Or that I’m so not used to working in dark spaces—”
“Dark?”
“Um.” Wren tried to figure out how to verbalize it when she’d only just that moment really figured it out. “Not dark as in unlit, although that place was that, too. Cut off from current. You know.” She looked up and saw an all too familiar expression on his face. A little amusement, and a little frustration. “Sorry. I forget sometimes you don’t know. Weird, isn’t it? I mean, I know you’re mostly Null but sometimes you’re not, and I think—”
“Wren?” The frustration was overwhelming the amusement.
“Right.” Her pulse sped up slightly, the current coiled in her core just awake enough to hiss and seethe slightly. To remind her of who and what she was. And what she knew.
“You know there are places where current sort of gathers, right? Ley lines, magnetic points, power plants…” When he nodded, impatient, she went on. “Well, a dark space is just the opposite, somewhere that, for whatever reason, rejects current. Or is somehow cut off from it. This whadayacallit, the House of Legend, is cut off, totally. There’s some current in there, same as with just about anything natural, but it’s so faint, I bet I couldn’t call it up even if I tried. And I wouldn’t want to try, with all that going on around it.” She shuddered involuntarily, thinking of how close she had come to even worse disaster. “I thought it was just that they don’t have any electrical wiring, but I think maybe the reason they don’t have wiring is because they’re so cut off. I bet they could lay cables from here until the next millennium and they still wouldn’t have stable electricity.”
“Is that common?”
“Nuh-uh.” She shook her head emphatically. “Totally rare. So much so, like I said, that even we forget there are places like that, ‘cause you’ll run into them maybe once in your lifetime. More likely never. And they’re almost always natural formations. Finding a man-made structure that’s dark—”
“It was built that way?” His hands stilled on the pastry for a moment.
“Can’t imagine anyone accidentally building something that size out of dark materials, so…yeah. Probably was.”
“And the reason for that would be…what?”
“To prevent current from getting at whatever was stored in there, probably.” She nodded, fitting the available pieces together finally into a pattern that made sense. Her unease, the weird way she had woken up, the way the monks treated the building…“Using current…it’s tricky, when you’ve got the dark space sucking at you. And back before they figured current-science it was even worse, ‘cause you didn’t know why what had worked perfectly well before suddenly didn’t near this tree or that rock or those mountains. And back then was when, according to Brother Teo, the building was put up. A Talent would be pretty much blind. If they weren’t trained in more ordinary practices as well, they’d never be able to get in and out.”
“Like you.”
Wren acknowledge the fact. “Like me.” When she and Sergei had first begun their partnership, she had only the basic shoplifting skills bored suburban teenagers pick up, and even those had been rusty with disuse, thanks to Neezer’s disapproval of her “hobby.” Once Sergei approached her with his proposal, however, she had decided that using current where none was needed was wasteful. Finding herself a number of dubiously legitimate teachers over the years, Wren had learned a little lock picking, a little B and E, a little this and a little that of whatever might come in handy, including the ability to read blueprints and electrical wiring plans. Jane of all trades, Mistress of one.
“So this House of Legend really is a house of legend,” Sergei said now. “Makes you wonder about those four monks arriving out of nowhere, doesn’t it?”
Wren cradled her cup in her hands and stared down into it. “Makes me want not to wonder. I’m thinking maybe those are the kind of things it’s healthier not to know about, probably.” She looked up, and saw that his hands were moving again. “Oh for…Didier, are you going to eat that or weave it?”
Sergei looked down at the plate of pastry strips as though seeing it for the first time. “Oh. Sorry. You want?”
“Not after you’ve played with it, no. I do want some more coffee, though.”
She pushed the mug over to him, and he looked at the white ceramic cup with surprise. “So go get yourself some. You have money, right?”
“No habla Italian, remember?”
“Improvise.”
Wren gave him her best glare, but he merely went back to picking apart his pastry. With a put-upon sigh, Wren took back her cup and went up to the counter. Once again, he was acting like the senior partner, telling her what she should do. And she was letting him.
The woman who had helped them before was gone, and in her place was a very large old man, with white hair standing up in tufts all over his head. “Ah…scusi? Un cappuccino, per favore?”
“Of course,” he said in clear, if accented English, taking her cup back from her and reaching down to pull a clean one down from a rack. “That will be two-twenty, grazie.”
