Staying Dead - Laura Anne Gilman [98]
He left Denise where she lay, opening the camouflaged door in his interior room and closing it carefully behind him. The air in the rest of his living area was much cooler, and he shivered a little in the sudden temperature drop, but didn’t go into the closet to put something on. Instead, his attention caught by the view outside his windows, he moved to take a closer look.
Dark clouds swirled in the sky to the west, contrasting starkly with the morning sunlight glinting off buildings on the other side of the city. A front was coming in.
A spring storm, moving fast. Probably filled with thunder, lightning…electricity. Current.
“Whore mages and their bastard current.” He spat the words, raising a fist to slam against the shatterproof glass. “Damned elitist mages…but I’ll best them. I’ll show them they don’t treat me that way.”
seventeen
“You know, I can’t believe I’ve never been to your apartment before.”
Sergei shrugged, breaking four eggs into a bowl in quick succession and tossing the shells into the garbage. “I don’t throw many parties.”
“Yeah right. You don’t throw any. At least not that I’ve ever been invited to.” She paused, but he didn’t take up the conversational bait. “So how come I never just stopped by? Watered plants while you were away? Fed your cat? More pepper.”
“I don’t have a cat. And the plants are on an automated watering system.” He had kept her away, he supposed. Part of that distancing thing, one last refuge where she wasn’t. Fallen now, the way so much had, to her presence in his life. Why had he fought it for so long? To what purpose?
Sergei ground more pepper into the egg batter, then tossed in an extra pinch of paprika before pouring it into the oversized skillet. His kitchen was small, but the breakfast counter let visitors sit and talk while he cooked, which was what Wren was doing. They had been talking all night, actually. Or rather, he had been talking, telling her everything about the Silence he could remember, while she paced around the apartment, running her hands across his belongings like she was blind and learning them by Braille.
This had been a refuge. Now everything had her touch on it.
Now his past had her touch on it as well.
Both things were going to take some getting used to, he suspected.
“More to the point,” he continued, “is why did you happen to stop by on this particular night?”
Wren fidgeted in her seat, clearly wanting to deflect that particular question. “Um…would you believe a premonition?”
“No.” Her foresight skills were, to put it bluntly, nonexistent. Purely in the here and now, was his Wren.
She shrugged as if to say it was worth a try. Pouring a glass of orange juice into the tumbler, she contemplated its sparkling clear sides. “Why can’t I ever get my glasses that clean? Mine are always cloudy.”
“Wren…” He shook his head, smiling a little. She was like a five-year-old sometimes, trying to avoid topics.
At the exasperated tone in his voice, Wren felt like giggling. Some things might change, but some things didn’t. Wouldn’t. It was still fun to tweak Sergei’s chain.
“P.B. stopped by yesterday…Christ, yesterday afternoon. Only then? Anyway. Long talk. Cosa stuff.” She wondered briefly if she should tell him, then decided against it. Yeah, okay, she was invoking a double standard, since she’d spent the last six hours digging his past out of him, but…Cosa stuff. He wasn’t involved in that, even by virtue of being her partner. Not really. She ignored the little voice that reminded her that Sergei—her partner—had been her surrogate to the Council, and she’d been more than happy to let him do that. It always made him uneasy, anyway.
And the other stuff, the lonejack stuff…it could wait. God, bad enough when she had two reasonably simple jobs, not—she tried to gather all the strands around her now—job, Council, fatae,