Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [113]
“Wait a minute.”
Sergei looked up, and could almost hear the pieces falling together in her brain, like locks clicking. “Yeah?”
“You said only some pieces were taken?”
Sergei nodded.
Wren blinked. Then blinked again, her normally pink-flushed skin taking on a ruddier tint with anger. “Figures. Betcha I know which ones, too. Bastards!”
Wren slammed her mug down on the table, causing the tea to slosh over the sides unheeded. She stood, pushing the chair back with too much force, her entire body an expressive declaration of disgust. “We’ve been played.”
“What?” Sergei was pretty sure he had heard her correctly, but he wanted to be sure.
“It wasn’t the client,” she repeated, enunciating clearly. “All of this—the theft, my being hired—it was the Council. They want me to think it was Frants, setting him up to take the fall for everything. Bastards are cleaning up their own mess—and I’m the damned mop.”
She went on to tell him the gossip, everything from the rumors on the street, the Council’s increasing paranoia, to P.B.’s comments about the fatae maybe finally having had enough.
“Even their meeting with you—they were setting the stage. Giving us enough rope to hang us and Frants.
“They did the original spell—or one of their own did, which makes it Council business even if they didn’t authorize it beforehand. They might have balked at ritual murder, at least officially. But what’s done was done, until Prevost started sniffing around. I’ll lay good money they pushed him toward the cornerstone. Maybe they just meant to leave Frants vulnerable; sort of a payback for putting them in that position in the first place. Council’s big on eye for an eye. Everything else—him hiring us, the ghost actually escaping—could have been taking advantage of the situation. But if the retrieval failed, Frants was left open to attack, my reputation is damaged so I’m less of a perceived threat to them, and hey, maybe the ghost and I will take each other out in the meanwhile. And the Council sits there and washes their hands clean.”
Sergei considered that as he took a sip of his own tea, almost but not quite too hot to drink still. She had a good theory. A damned disturbing good theory. “So what do you want to do about it?” he asked her, taking a seat on one of the chairs and looking up at her, one brow raised in the manner he knew drove her crazy, because she couldn’t do it. At this point, you took whatever release valve you could.
“What do I want to do? I want to find that damn ghost, and squeeze it back into its box so we can get paid.” He could almost hear the “duh” in her voice, though she refrained from actually saying it. “And I want the Council to know it’s been done and that I know what they were trying to do, even if I have to take out a damn ad in the trades to do it. Let them chew on that, for a little bit. Make ’em wonder if maybe lonejacks aren’t the second-class Talents they’ve always claimed. And then let them stew about maybe I’m going to go after them next. Money is money, but when you shoot at me, it gets personal.”
“Nice plan. How realistic is it?”
“Not very,” she admitted, deflating a little. “But it’s good to have goals.”
She took a sip of her own tea, then put it down and reached for the sugar canister, dumping in a heaping teaspoonful of the sweetener. He was pleased to see that she managed the maneuver without the slightest hint of awkwardness. She had been training herself to be ambidextrous ever since she fractured her right thumb during a Frisbee game in the park last summer, but he’d had his doubts as to its effectiveness. She still wouldn’t be up to picking locks any time soon, though. Or climbing over walls.
“But we do have to take care of that damned ghost, one way or another,” she said, breaking in to his thoughts. “So where the hell is it? I put a catch-spell on it, but