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They’re the first line of security for the
residents. So I was prepared to do the usual who-I’m-here-to-see routine—I was
assuming Wren, being Talent, would not have bought into one of those places with
the full electronic security systems. To my surprise, though, the doorman riding
the simple but splashy marble counter merely looked up, nodded, and pressed a
button, summoning the elevator. I let a slender tendril rise, and it was met by
a similar one from the doorman.
    Huh. Not so much a surprise that the doorman was a Talent—we
tended to non-office jobs as a whole: less chance to current-spike the tech—but
that Wren had apparently put me on an all-clear list. I guess she was hoping I’d
still show up with lasagna every now and then.
    The elevator was clean and well maintained, with pretty
architectural touches that said the building was a prewar renovation. My
estimate of how much she paid for the place went up, considerably. Ouch. But she
could afford it: you didn’t hire The Wren for cut-rate work.
    The apartment was on the top floor—Wren liked not having anyone
thumping above her, considering the odd hours she slept. Twenty-four J was at
the end of the hallway, the fifth down, which meant she had a corner apartment.
My estimate of the cost went up, again. Damn.
    The door opened even before I got there, and the moment I saw
two expectant faces, one brown-eyed and human, one red-eyed and ursine, staring
at me, I apologized. “No food this time, sorry. Will you take a rain check?”
    It wasn’t as though I was such an amazing cook—they were just
that bad at it. I wasn’t sure Wren knew how to use her stove to do more than
reheat pizza, and the demon…
    PB had agile paws, but his short, black-padded fingers ended in
sharp white nails that probably didn’t make it too easy to cook. Certainly I’d
never gotten any indication that he even had a kitchen, wherever he lived.
    The first time I had seen the demon, it had been in an
all-night diner, during the ki-rin job. He had been the first demon I’d ever
encountered—maybe the only, since I still wasn’t sure if the angular shadow that
had passed me late one night had been a demon, despite the glimpse of pale red
eyes under its slouch hat. There were a lot of strange and dangerous things in
the Cosa Nostradamus, and a lot of them didn’t care
to be identified by humans.
    My hosts let me in despite the lack of lasagna. I took a minute
to case the joint, noting that, as expected, Wren hadn’t done damn-all to
decorate and that she needed curtains for that wall of windows, no matter how
nice the view.
    “Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” Wren said, then added,
“probably.”
    It was an old joke, or a year-old, anyway, which was as long as
I’d known the thief well enough to have jokes. Wren Valere was not only a
Retriever; to a lot of folk she was The Retriever. Like Pietr, she had the
ability to disappear from sight, slide through barriers, and sneak into anywhere
she wasn’t supposed to be, only unlike Pietr she’d gone for a life of… I
couldn’t exactly call it crime, since a lot of the jobs I knew she’d taken
involved reclaiming objects for their rightful owners. But she moved in a gray
area I tried not to look too deeply in. We were friends, and I wanted to keep it
that way.
    Also, Wren and her partner, Sergei, and PB, had been
responsible for keeping the city from going down in flames earlier this year.
Everyone knew, even if nobody talked about it. Whatever forces had set us up to
war, she had taken them on and won.
    No matter what side of the law you were on, you did not want
Wren Valere pissed at you. Thankfully, from the moment I’d met her, sent over by
Stosser to check into things when her apartment had been bugged by forces
unknown, we’d hit it off. Totally nonsexual—I have a useful sense for who’s off
the market, and Valere and her partner, Sergei, were like peanut and butter.
    “Come on in,” Wren said, even though I