Table Of Contentburning
bridges
laura anne gilman
www.LUNA-Books.com
For James: Even now
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The IM Brigade:
Arwen Rosenberg
Tom Powers
Sarah (Bear) Wishnevsky
Kathy Kimbriel
Nea Dodds
Jules Lee
“A safe place for all the pieces that scattered/
learn to pretend there’s more than love that matters.”
—“Love will come to you”
Indigo Girls
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
One
January 23rd 6:25pm
Fresh snow could make even the dingiest, most urban part of Manhattan into a
magical place. The colors and noises all faded away, the city’s usual frenetic
pace slowing to a more studied waltz of snow falling, white against the bare
black limbs of trees and outlines of buildings. Drifts pushed up against maildrop
boxes, covered fire hydrants, and shut down traffic except for the unstoppable
city buses and madman-driven taxi cabs zipping through the night.
It might have been lovely, but Wren Valere wasn’t paying attention to the
scenery. She was a professional working her craft. Or trying to, anyway. Two
new high-end locks had hit the market, supposedly proof against the “bump-and-
enter” method, and she wanted to make sure she understood how they worked
before she actually encountered one in the field, when time might be against her.
In her particular profession, you didn’t get many second chances, and Wren was
pretty sure the past twelve months had used up all the ones she was going to get
in a lifetime.
Sometimes, honestly, she didn’t know what got into her. For a mind-her-own-
business Retriever, she’d spent a hell of a lot of time muddling around in things
she should have left alone. Curses and politics and meetings, for God’s sake.
Never mind that she’d done it to save her own skin, after the Mage Council tried
to use her and her partner, Sergei; never mind that she’d done it to help out her
friends among the fatae, the nonhuman members of the Cosa Nostradamus. All
of that might have made what happened inevitable, but none of it made it smart.
“Hey, Valere.” The voice came from the other side of the room, about three feet
to the right and a foot down. And speaking of fatae….
Wren Valere didn’t sigh, but she wanted to.
Retrieval wasn’t easy. She had studied her craft, learned from masters, and kept
up-to-date on all the most recent developments, not only in her own field, but
anything that might come in handy. In addition to mastering the current-magic
that flowed from within her, she had trained her body, as well; toning and
strengthening her muscles, increasing her lung capacity, maintaining her
strengthening her muscles, increasing her lung capacity, maintaining her
flexibility. She had forced mind and body into partnership, more than once
spending hours waiting in a cramped, close situation, anticipating the perfect
moment to move on a job. She knew all about patience. About focus. About
dedication.
And that focus and dedication was being destroyed, not by a stubborn client, or
impossible mark, or even the weight of the snow outside and what was
happening in the city beyond, but by her companion.
She didn’t bother looking in the direction of the voice, not wanting to encourage
him.
“Valere,” the voice said again. “What does this do?”
She looked, then, briefly. “Opens locks.”
The room’s other occupant—and the subject of her irritation—put the tool back
down on the small table next to him and picked up another. “And this?”
She reached for patience, found it. “Opens a different kind of lock.”
“And this one?”
Patience threw up its hands in disgust and fled the room. “It gets the gunk out
from between my teeth. Damn it, P.B., will you please leave my kit alone?
Those extremely delicate tools you’re paw-handling cost me a fortune, and half
of them are custom-made.” She reached up from her cross-legged position on the
floor, and snagged the instrument in question out of P.B.’s paws. A thin ceramic
shape with a non-reflective black coating, it actually did look like something that
might be found in a very trendy Goth’s toothbrush holder, except that the
fiberglass pick at the end was attuned to more delicate vibrations than enamel
generally gave off.
“Sheesh. Someone’s snappy.” The short, white-furred demon settled on the
padded bench under the room’s single window and stared at her with his dark,
dried-bloodred eyes. He wandered over to the corkboard that hung above her
desk and tapped one curved black claw on a color pencil sketch tacked there.
“This the bansidhe-horsie you been chasing? How long you been working that
case?”
“Five years.” She refused to look up from her notes, hoping against hope he
would finally take the hint and go elsewhere.
P.B. snorted, a wet, vaguely disgusting noise his flattened snout of a nose
seemed designed to make. “That’s dedication. You get paid for any of that
time?”
“Five years ago, yeah,” It wasn’t always about money. A lot of the time, it was
about reputation. The Wren never gave up. Never left a job unfinished. No
matter what.
Okay, maybe some of it was about money. Her mother had spent most of her life
worrying about money: how much, never enough. Having money-savvy Sergei
Didier become her manager when she was a teenager had given Wren the
opportunity—and the education—she needed to change that. Over the years, her
reputation—and her fees—had grown. If she was careful, and kept working, her
savings would be enough to buy her apartment when it finally—inevitably—
went co-op. More, Wren was now in the position of being able to have ego spur
her to do things, rather than need.
Financial need, anyway.
The demon and the human were occupying the spare bedroom/library of Wren’s
East Village apartment, surrounded by three stacks of books, a scattering of
papers, and the remains of two pizzas. The air was heavy with the scent of
pepperoni, cheese, and a dry heat coming up through the building’s ancient
radiators, making her sinuses itch.
Ego had its own need in it, too. The bansidhe—Old Sally—was the one job
Wren hadn’t been able to close. Yet. Her clients—descendants of the original
owner—had, she suspected, long since written off their initial deposit, but she
couldn’t let go.
No, the whereabouts of one taxidermied warhorse, no matter that it was a portent
of doom, didn’t really matter a damn to her. But professional pride was involved.
With her last dying breath, if need be, she was going to bring that damn sawdust-
stuffed equine doomsayer back in. Someday. When everything else got settled.
The thought made her laugh, bitterly. The Cosa was in the middle of a battle for
survival against enemies it hadn’t been able to identify, who were determined to
wipe them out of the city. Her partner’s former employers had screwed them
over and left them to hang. The Mage Council was playing their usual we-know-
nothing, did-nothing game with the rest of the Cosa. All in all, “settled” wasn’t
something Wren expected to see anytime soon.
Although these past few weeks of the new year had been oddly if pleasantly
calm: nobody had set a psi-bomb off anywhere near her; nobody had tried to
bribe, threaten, hijack or otherwise annoy her or any of her friends; Sergei was
off on a legitimate business trip for his gallery; and she was actually catching up
on her filing, bill-paying, and her exercise routine. The entire city seemed to
have come to a pause.
Hell, the entire city had come to a pause, thanks to the weather.
“It’s still snowing.” P.B. had given up staring at her, now looking out the
window, one white-furred, black-clawed paw pushing aside the dark green
drape. His short muzzle, which—along with the plush white fur and rounded
bear-like ears—had been the cause of his nickname of “Polar Bear,” pressed up
against the glass, his breath causing the window to fog over.
“It’s been snowing for the past seven hours,” Wren said as patiently as she could
manage. “This isn’t a news flash.” After two months of winter, snow of any sort
wasn’t news.
The constant curtain of white was making her stir-crazy, too, but she could live
with it. Without the snow, Wren had no confidence that the agreement she
helped broker—that the Eastern Mage Council and tristate lonejacks would sit
down and shut up and play nice together, at least while they had murdering
bigots out for their blood—would have held together longer than a week, much
less the month-and-counting.
It helped that attacks by those bigots who had been trying to “cleanse”
Manhattan of anything supernatural had all but stopped. She didn’t think they
were gone, though. The threat of the Cosa finally working together, in however
limited a fashion, wasn’t enough to work that miracle, no matter what some of
her fellow members might want to believe. No, it was far more likely that
frostbite was a hell of a deterrent—as was the fact that their prospective victims
were wisely staying inside, where it was warm.
No matter. She’d take whatever reason, if it gave them a breather.
P.B. turned away from the window and hopped down off the bench, kicking the
pizza box with one clawed foot as he moved. “Hey. There’s still a slice left.”
“Yours.”
“I’m full,” he said, by his voice, borderline perturbed by that admission.
“You’re full?” That got her to look up. She stood, creaking unpleasantly in the
knees, and went over to look out the window, as well. “The Stomach that
Digested Manhattan is full? Damn. There’s the fourth horseman, riding past.”
“Oh, shut up,” he snarled, uncharacteristically. “I wanted kung pao chicken,
remember? But you didn’t want to order Chinese. For the first time ever,
speaking of the end of the world.”
Wren didn’t snarl back at him, but only because she could feel current coil in her
core, the power looking for an excuse to get funky. Control. She needed to
maintain control. P.B. knew why she didn’t want Chinese food. Or he should
know, anyway. With Chinese food came Chinese fortune cookies. Fortune
cookies, in this city, had an unpleasant tendency to be written by actual Seers.
Sometimes, not knowing what was about to fall on your head was a blessing.
Wren counted backward from ten in English, then up again in Russian, the only
thing she knew in that language except for a few useful swear words. Stay calm,
Valere. He was cranky. She was cranky. Stir-crazy didn’t look good on either
one of them.
This was the third day of snow this week, snowing hard since dawn the day
before, and P.B. had been bunking with her for two days of it. She would have
told him to go home, but Sergei had been caught out of town when the airports
shut down, and she had been glad enough for the company at that point to tell
the demon that he could stay as long as he liked.
Apparently, he liked overnight.
Besides. She had no idea what P.B’s home was actually like, much less if it was
currently livable. The law said landlords had to provide heat when it dropped
below a certain temperature, but the demon was unlikely to call the tenant
complaint hotline, much less appeal to a disciplinary board.
“We need to get out,” she said. “Do something.” Something other than eat and
