Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [48]
There were others, but those three were the really important ones. And at least two were a little bent and battered already by this case. She really, really really needed a nonmagical snatch-and-run, something she could do in her sleep, just to up the comfort level a little.
And you’re babbling inside your brain. Bad sign, Valere.
She picked up the e-mails she had printed out regarding Old Sally, and slipped them into the neon-green folder she had set up for this job. Green for Sally. Orange for the Frants deal. Mentally she ran through colors. Electric-blue for a file on the anti-fatae movement; she should have been tracking that stuff already, from the first outbreak, so there weren’t any surprises. Or so if she ever felt the urge to yank the entire organization out by the roots…
She put aside that nice thought for later, when her life was a little less hectic.
Hah. And that would be when, exactly?
“Oh, shut up,” she told the voice that sounded a little too much like her mother, and forced her attention back to the matter at hand. That left her with the folder options of shocking pink, which gave her a headache, and red. She needed to buy new folders. Maybe ones in a nice soothing pastel shade.
“Who would stuff a horse, anyway?” she asked the worn, ear-battered teddy bear perched casually on one shelf. “Of all the bizarre things to leave to your next of kin!”
Teddy declined to answer, so she straightened the bear until he sat up properly and dropped a pile of old papers into the recycling pile.
Old Sally’s original owners apparently took to their legacy, passing her down from one generation to the next just the way their founder’s will had specified. And even once they realized that Sal was a harbinger, that her walkabouts always preceded some nasty family disaster, they hung on to her. Wren would have burned the mangy thing herself, but different strokes for different folks. Especially folks with money to pay the bills.
Money. Money was what it all came down to, wasn’t it? Except not always. The Council worked on prestige, the whole concept of face, of respect. You could buy prestige, but prestige couldn’t buy money. Could it? She paused. Okay, where was that thought taking her? Why did it feel important?
The sound of the door opening was followed by the unmistakable smells of Chinese food wafting down the hallway, blowing away whatever chain of thought she was constructing.
“Plates are on the counter,” she yelled.
“They threw in an order of sesame noodles,” he told her, juggling a large brown paper bag in one hand, plates and chopsticks in another. “I think Jimmy’s got a letch for one of us.”
“Works for me,” Wren said cheerfully, indicating the cleared-off section of her desk as a staging area. “I have no objection to selling your virtue for a mess of Jimmy’s noodles.”
Sergei set the bag down where she suggested, and handed her the plates. He seemed calmer now, although she sensed a tightly focused simmer happening underneath. She thought about pushing a little, to see if he’d open up, but decided not to. If it was work, he’d tell her. If it was something else…anyway, she needed him focused, not exploding.
“Anything turn up?” he asked.
Wren took a quick look at the screen, where the most recent search results she had run on the name had come up while she was cleaning. “There are a couple of M. Prevosts on the East Coast, three in the Midwest and seven in the Pacific Northwest.” She extracted her food from the bag and settled cross-legged on the floor to eat. “You?”
Sergei shook his head to indicate that he hadn’t heard anything, then a faint red stain touched his cheekbones as he pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket and turned it on again. The tension in the air eased slightly.
“That’s an ooops,” she said in mock-sad agreement, just as it rang. “You firing on all cylinders tonight, Didier?” It was so rare to catch Sergei doing something blatantly