Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [72]
Seven seconds later, the entire lock system had shorted out, and Wren was in through the now-unlocked window. Fail safe had another meaning entirely for those on the breaking and entering side.
Wren took a few seconds to let her body recover, and to orient herself. The mark might be some kind of hot-shit collector, but he wasn’t much in the way of interior decorating. The room she had entered through was almost astonishingly bland. A business traveler could be down here, and expect to get a newspaper under his door in the morning. Moving through the room, she kept off the area rug, staying to bare floor as much as possible. The door to the hallway was ajar, and a light shove with her shoulder pushed it open.
She spotted the cameras almost immediately. They weren’t hidden—it was almost as though the mark was making a point, putting them where anyone could see them. And the light was on, indicating they weren’t in the same power loop as the locks. “Great,” Wren muttered. “He likes to watch.” She reached into her belt pouch and pulled out a small bone charm. Yellow with age, and lined with a thousand hairline cracks, it had a strange warmth to it, almost as though it were alive. It was a one-shot, but a very efficient one. Clenching it in her fist, she felt the cracks give way, the charm crumbling into dust. She opened her hand and flung the dust at the camera lens. A spoken command—”puzzle”—activated the charm as the dust clung to the lens. Somewhere in the house, the bank of monitors would only be showing a fragmented picture, as though static had gotten into the wires somehow.
But it wouldn’t last forever. Time to get a move on. She recalled the floor plans again. “I’m…here…and you are…there. Right.” Satisfied, she set off down the white-painted, white-lit hall without hesitation.
Even without the floor plan, Wren wouldn’t have had any trouble discovering which wing held her quarry. The trouble was getting to it without making any unscheduled detours. While the guest wing she had entered in was well-appointed, the private wing was a thief’s buffet. Delicate silver sculptures made her fingers itch to caress them, and paintings which triggered her hodgepodge memory of Sergei’s lectures on the Masters practically sang for a cutting blade to liberate them. And the tall, blue-white marble figure set in the corner of one room made her swear under her breath. Did the Museum even know they were missing a piece?
But all those were mere distractions compared to the pull she could feel, in the part of her that recognized the presence of magic. Faint, but undeniable, she was drawn down hallways of polished wood floors and priceless artworks to a closed door at the end of the camera-lined corridor. The door looked like all the others; no handle, indicating a magnetic lock. A nice piece of machinery, to ensure that the house could be locked down from a central control. Assuming, of course, someone hadn’t already shot down the control getting in. Ooops.
This was it. She was somewhat surprised that the stone was giving off that much power, but she wasn’t here to make judgments, just to get it back to its rightful owner. Let Mages squabble over the technical details.
She paused for a moment, kneeling at the door. A faint buzz of electricity, remnant from the alarm she had already disabled. Nothing else. The back of her hand pushed at the door, and it swung open without a sound.
“Hello, baby,” she whispered as the magic stored in the room hit her. As though in response, the currents running through the room thickened, raising the hair on her arms. The space was practically overpowered by the Artifacts stored there, and Wren had her answer about the mark’s abilities—only someone completely Null would have arranged them like this, fully charged. Null, or remarkably arrogant.
“Easy there, fellows,” she said, the way one would to a growling dog you were pretty sure wasn’t going to attack. She was anthropomorphizing horribly, of course—Artifacts weren’t alive, not even in the most