Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [60]
Suddenly guilt washed over her, making her voice almost too soft to be heard. “Bad time?”
“Never.” She could hear him moving about, the sound of pillows being fluffed and the creak of the bed as he shifted his weight. “I was only sleeping. Who needs too many hours of that?”
In the darkness, his voice in her ear, she could almost pretend he was there with her. Imagined his weight sinking the mattress, his too-long legs taking up half the bed. She knew he liked to sleep sprawled on his back, while she curled on her side. More than once they had both managed to fit onto an undersized motel mattress, or—once—a tarp spread under the leaking roof of a falling-down woodshed. It hadn’t always been contracts and bank accounts and reputations doing half the work.
“Bad dream, Zhenechka?” His tenor was like caramel, the normally clipped syllables softening. His nighttime voice, she thought of it. The voice he used only for her, and the cat he didn’t want anyone to know he fed, in the alley behind the gallery.
“Yeah. No. It….” She hesitated, her free hand playing with the edge of the sheet. Silly, this hesitation. Stupid, to call him and then not talk. But she couldn’t find the words right away.
“I dreamed about Neezer,” she said finally. “That…that day.” The Day, she thought of it. The day her mentor had finally admitted out loud what they both knew, that he was on the edge of wizzing—of becoming a danger to himself, and to her. The day when being a Talent had stopped being a game, and gotten deadly, dangerously serious.
She listened to the long, warm sounds of Sergei’s breathing, and felt oddly comforted, as though he had put his arms around her and cradled her to him.
“I’m scared,” she said finally. And she wasn’t referring to just the aftermath of the dream. Something was happening. Things were changing. She could feel it, like thunder in the air, even if she didn’t know the cause.
“I know. So am I.” He wasn’t talking about the dream either.
And that was what she loved the most about her partner. That in the dark, separated by half a city, connected only by the faintest wisps of technology, he could make her feel better by giving validation to her fears. The thought struck her as horribly funny, and she started to giggle for the second time in five hours.
“Wren?” But there was no real worry in his voice now, only understanding. “It’s okay, little wren. Let it out. It’s been an impossible day, even for a tough little bird like you.”
Something grabbed her inside the ribs at his words, grabbed and clenched and caught her short of breath, aching and expanding in the hollowness. “Don’t ever leave me,” she asked, not even aware of what she was saying.
There was a long silence.
“I won’t. Not ever. Now go back to sleep, Zhenechka. I’m here. I’ll stay right here.”
With that promise, she curled herself around the receiver, and slowly slid back into a dreamless sleep.
“Don’t leave me…” A whisper, a child’s terrified command. Or a woman’s heartfelt request.
He could stay with her…or he could protect her. He might not be able to do both, not anymore.
Give the devil his due, he protected what was his. And right now, some insurance didn’t sound like such a bad idea.
On the other side of the island, Sergei Didier lay in his bed, staring out his window at the pale pink light creeping into the sky, and knew what he had to do.
ten
In a building without any identifying signs or the usual indicators of occupancy, on a street that nobody in the city thought to walk down without a good reason for it, the Fatal Friday cocktail party was in full swing in a room off the second-floor lobby.
The room itself was warm and inviting, paneled in cherry-stained wood and filled with glossy-polished furniture. Thick cream carpeting muffled the sound of heels and conversation alike. Easily two dozen men and women moved about the glassed-in room, drinks in hand and gossip on their lips. It could have been any group of