Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [111]
“Do I want to know?” he asked as gently as he could. “Or is this one of those things where I’d be happier not asking?”
She snarled at him, not looking up from the mess she was making of the gauze and tape. Blood loss apparently made her testy. He took both materials from her, unwinding what she had already done in order to get a good look at the damage. Expecting a slice, or at worst a burn, his expression hardened at the sight of the ragged flesh torn away from her triceps. Someone had treated the wound with less than surgical precision, tearing her arm up further in the process. There’d be no way to avoid scarring. But a hospital was out of the question—they’d recognize a gunshot wound as easily as he had, and then there would be questions Wren wouldn’t be able to answer.
He touched one long red scrape on the side of her arm, leading to the wound, and she hissed in pain. He’d seen marks like that once before. A sniper’s weapon. Neat, precise: not deadly unless used by a marksman. So was this meant to be deadly…or a warning?
“P.B.?” His voice was flat, cold. Being fair, the demon had done as good a job as possible, considering—the site looked clean, and any germs he might have been carrying on his claws wouldn’t take in a human; that much even he knew. But that didn’t mean Sergei had to like the thought of the ugly little fur-face using those claws on Wren, even in a good cause. She nodded, and he moved on to the next logical question. “Shooter?”
“Gone. P.B. spotted a shadow, I made like a moron and went to look. Less shadow, more assassin. Who’d want to kill me?” She was pissed, you could hear it in her voice. Pissed, but curious. And more than a little angry. “If it was our so-called client, I swear, I’m going to find that ghost and ram it down his murdering little throat, and client privilege be damned.”
Despite the cold anger that was growing in his own gut, Sergei chuckled. That was his Wren; business was business, but make it personal and she wouldn’t ever let it go. Unfortunately, he was going to have to put the kibosh on that. Unfortunately, because the more he learned about the entire situation, and their client specifically, the more he was inclined to agree with her intention. Even if it was shockingly bad business.
“I don’t think it was the client,” he told her, cutting fresh gauze from the roll and expertly winding it over the injury site, putting just the right amount of pressure to keep it from bleeding again, while still allowing it access to fresh air. “Not if it had anything to do with the stone or the ghost. Our client wants the ghost returned to the stone, right? Can’t do that if you’re—” He hesitated, unable to say the word.
“Dead?”
He swallowed hard. “Right. Anyway, no point offing his best hope of that.” His voice was shaking, and he could feel her eyes on his face as he focused on making sure the bandage fit perfectly.
“Yeah, my thought, too. Frants may be many things but I’m thinking he’s not dumb. Or at least his people aren’t. They might hire someone to off me, if they really were pissed at my screwing up the retrieval, but they couldn’t risk alienating every other lonejack around. And word would get out; it always does.” Wren took pity on her partner, looking away while she tested the bandage by moving her arm carefully. She was the one who got shot, and he was the one who was freaking out. Love was strange. “And the Silence wants me alive, if leashed. No, it feels right, this being related to the job. What if there’s someone else—a competitor, maybe, like we thought originally might have done the grab—who doesn’t want that restoration to take place?”
“That was my next thought too, yeah. Someone who has an ax to grind against Frants, who might have pointed our original thief to the cornerstone in the first place?” He cut a piece of tape off, and secured the bandage. “Do you still have