Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [36]
She watched a moment longer as her partner turned the charm on full-assault, then went back to admiring the sculptor’s work. Maybe not all abstract work was crap, after all….
“You told me that it was perfectly safe. You said that the spell-casting done on it was inert, that the magic inside it couldn’t escape. Ever.”
The woman seated in front of the desk wanted desperately to backhand this sniveling little weasel, but held onto her temper by a bare margin. Slapping clients around was very bad for business, no matter how good it felt personally.
The speaker went on, fleshy pink lips moving in his narrow, sallow face, and that horrible whine coming from his throat, but she tuned it out.
Instead, she looked at her reflection in the glassed-in cabinet behind the client, making sure that no sign of her irritation marred her face. That face could have belonged to a woman anywhere from forty to fifty; brown skin only showing faint lines around lips and eyes, a strong nose and large brown eyes, thick black hair cut short and straight. Never a face to redefine beauty, it nonetheless inspired confidence and a certain sense of security in those she worked with. As it was meant to.
Even the ones who were idiots. Perhaps especially the ones who were idiots.
They were seated in the client’s office, a lovely room on the first floor of the mansion they always met in. She assumed it was his home, but had never seen any more of the structure to judge. They always met here: she was willing to negotiate long-distance, but that wasn’t satisfactory to this moron. He wanted face-to-face on every damned little detail.
She felt her irritation rising again, and tamped it down, making herself look as though she was paying attention to whatever he was saying. It had been a long day, but that was no excuse. You could also tell a great deal about a client by how they did business. Some insisted on meeting on third-party ground, somewhere impartial. Some never wanted to meet face-to-face, preferring to keep it as distanced as possible. And some—like this fool—kept it close to home, as though that gave them an illusion of control.
It would have been a better illusion if he hadn’t called at seven in the morning, bleating like a stuck lamb, demanding that she come out immediately. Whining that the object he had gone to such great lengths—and expense—to acquire gave him, and she quoted, “the creeps.” As though the fact that he was her primary client earned him some first claim—more than that, some sole claim over her time.
It did, actually. You jumped when the main bill-payer barked. But most had the grace to acknowledge that her skills were worth the courtesy of asking, not demanding, her presence. And “the creeps—” Good Lord, what did the man want? He knew ahead of time the object had magical influences; she had told him herself, once she’d been given the target. He had assured her that he was prepared, had taken the appropriate safeguards.
Arrogant bastard. Even terrified, especially terrified, he was still a shit. Still, you had to make exceptions for wealth and eccentricity, especially when they came together in the same package. And so she had rescheduled everything else that day and, despite the eight-hour drive, come out to hold his hand. Metaphorically. He wasn’t paying her that much.
So now, for the third time in an hour, she tried to inject a note of reassuring confidence into her voice. “We’ve been over this how many times? That particular spell was woven into the stone at the time of its formation. It is integral to the object, and cannot be removed.” It was the object, in all the ways that mattered. Without the spell, the item was just a block of stone, mass produced and totally without value. “Unless you intend actual harm to the owner of the building it was taken from, it cannot harm you in turn. We went over this before the initial approach and I warned you of all the possible consequences. I am assuming you