Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [115]
The list was too long. She loved her mother dearly, but it seemed as though they were always walking across a minefield with each other. A minefield someone else planted, at that.
Letting out a last breath, she picked up the phone, held it awkwardly with her left shoulder and dialed. “Mom? Hi! Yeah, I know, I’m sorry—Sergei had me working on a project for him, and you know how he gets. I know, he’s a horrible slave driver, and in no way deserves me.” Wren leaned against the headboard, adjusting her arm in the sling more comfortably against her body. “No, same kind of thing. Someone wanted to authenticate a piece of sculpture.”
Well…it wasn’t exactly untrue…. Margot Valere knew what her daughter was—tough not to, considering the way her talent manifested when she was a kid, in the middle of a screaming mother-daughter fight. And Neezer had insisted on honesty; the teacher-student relationship raised enough eyebrows, when the student was a teenaged female. But her mother pointedly chose not to know what Wren did with that talent. As far as her mom was concerned, Wren was a researcher and general dogsbody for Sergei, who was merely an eccentric but well-off gallery owner.
Everyone was happier that way.
When she came out of the bedroom ten minutes later, the only thing on her mind was hitting the kitchen for something sweet. P.B. had made her drink half a gallon of orange juice before he left, but the post-stress munchies were hitting hard, and she was craving Oreos. Preferably dunked in chocolate milk.
Sergei was on his cell phone, speaking urgently in a language once again Wren didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Russian—she’d heard enough over the years to recognize that, nor was it Spanish, German or French. She thought. More guttural, for one thing—a little like German, if it were spoken by trolls. Another damned language in his damned repertoire. If she didn’t love him so much she’d—and backtrack that thought. Hold it for later. Way later.
He saw her, and made an urgent gesture that translated into “stay where you are, don’t move.” She obediently stood still, leaning against the wall and watching him pace in the limited space. Even on her grumpiest days she had to admit he was nice to look at. And today, his jacket off, shirt rumpled and a little bloodstained, hair sticking up in the front where he’d obviously been running his fingers through it—okay, was it weird that she thought that was sexy?
Yeah, probably, she decided. Blood loss, Valere. Blood loss and stress.
And also nice the fact that he liked her mom. Not that it mattered or anything, but it was nice. As long as she was going to indulge in a little blood-loss thinking. Odd, though. In the decade they’d been working together, she’d never heard him mention a significant other, or any family other than the mother who had died when he was in college, and a father who stayed behind in Russia to make sure they got out.
Okay, fair enough, she didn’t as a rule share with him much of what went on in her life outside the job, either, but…suddenly, she wanted to know. Wanted to share. She had almost died today, might have if P.B. hadn’t been there, and then all the stuff that had been kicking around between them would have been…
Nothing.
It was all the ghost’s fault, she decided, a little freaked by the direction her thoughts were going in. She was thinking about dying, and hereafters, and things she had no business contemplating. Here and now, that was always their motto. Focus on the moment. In fact—
Something stung against her leg and she yelped. Slapping at her pocket with her bad arm, and then yelping again as she remembered why it was in a sling.
“Bloody be-damned stupid…” She managed to dig into her pocket and pulled out the ivory talisman, which was glowing a deep ugly red, and stinging her skin like a handful of nettles. She held on to it through sheer willpower, trying to focus on anything it might be able to tell her.
“Where are you?” she asked it.
“There’s a disturbance in the Frants building.”
Distracted, Wren looked up, almost dropping