Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [90]
Irritation broke through Andre’s calm exterior. “Oh, come now, Sergei. We taught you better than that.” Sergei gave himself a point for the lapse. Maybe a point and a half, the way the vein in Andre’s neck pulsed.
“You knew about this ‘collector’ and didn’t think to tell us.” The redhead spoke for the first time. His voice was Eastern Seaboard boarding-school perfect, his accent just as clearly disgusted. With Sergei, with the situation, with having to waste his time in this apartment on a matter that should never have become a matter at all, if people had just hewed to orders and regulations and Told All the moment they learned it. A True Believer. Sergei wondered if he’d ever been that bad. Probably.
Time I took back control of this situation. Taking off his suit jacket, he draped it over the back of the leather recliner. His favorite reading chair, with a gooseneck lamp perfectly positioned to shine the best illumination on a book. He resisted the lure of its cushions, wanting to remain on his feet and alert. “What was there to tell? A lot of people think they want to rub up against the magical. Most of them wouldn’t know it if they got slapped in the face with a true Artifact. I had no reason to believe that he was any different.”
“It’s not your place to make judgment calls like that. You should have reported him—and any other individual who came looking for items they should not have.”
The hell I should have. “Andre, get your dog off my ankle.” Sergei knew he was screwing this up; they had gotten him on the defensive, second-guessing his own actions, but there was a spark of righteous indignation fueling him now, in addition to the anger and fear. Where the hell did they get off, harassing him like this? They’re desperate. There’s blood in the water, somewhere. And he cursed himself again for dropping so completely out of sight that he didn’t know the gossip that was going around the Silence. Didn’t know what had driven them to push so hard for the thing he’d told them they could never have—Wren. He should have read the tone of Fatal Friday better. Dancy, Adam; they had both tried to warn him. So had Douglas, in his own rat-bastard way….
“I’m just one man. You telling me no one has been assigned to tracking things like this, that you have to rely on one burned-out Handler and a twenty-something lonejack to solve your problems?”
“You’re hardly burned out,” Felhim said, trying to soothe the roiled waters like the diplomat he had once been.
“I am,” Sergei said without rancor, the calm coming at the cost of sudden, total exhaustion. “And you know it. That’s the only reason they let me walk away ten years ago. First, you wanted me to report in—then, to report on what I’m doing, report on what I’m seeing and hearing. And now, suddenly, you need more. You start to order me around, like I was one of you again. Are things really that bad….” He paused, purely for effect, then decided the hell with it and went for the kill. “Or is it that you know Genevieve won’t go anywhere without me?”
“You so sure about that?” the redhead asked, a challenge.
“Jorgunmunder,” Andre said, warning him off that avenue of attack. But Sergei didn’t even have to process the question.
“Yeah. I am.”
Yeah, he was. It was astonishing, really, how obvious it should have been to him, this sureness. Like a chair when you desperately needed to sit appearing directly behind you, as though by…and now he did chuckle. As though by magic.
“It’s a simple enough proposition, Didier.” Having failed to intimidate, Jorgunmunder was trying for reasonable like a shirt he knew wasn’t going to fit. “Find out who was giving this Prevost fellow the direction of so many Artifacts. That’s all. We’ll do the rest, if you’re too mercenary to deal with it.”
By “mercenary” he meant working for a living, not lapping at the Silence’s teat. And by “deal with it,” he meant exactly what it sounded like. The Silence