Excerpts from The Retrievers Series

Welcome to a world you only think you know...

Read excerpts from:

Free Fall
Burning Bridges

Curse the Dark

Staying Dead
a future work by Sergei Didier

 

 

From Free Fall

(ISBN 0373802676)

 

Her stop came up and she slipped off the bus, weaving her way through the crowds of Times Square.  Even at this hour, there were tourists.  At every hour, there were tourists.  Wren wouldn’t mind them quite so much if they’d just learn how to walk.  You didn’t stop in the middle of a sidewalk to have a conversation with ten of your bestest buddies.  You didn’t wave your camera around like it was a baton.  And you absolutely didn’t stand there with your wallet open, counting out your bills after you bought breakfast from a bagel cart.
Wren pocketed the handful of bills almost absently, and decided that the camera wasn’t pretty enough for the taking.  Anyway, what would she do with it?
Her quarry was up ahead: the Taylor Theater. The Taylor was one of the smaller venues, holding on to its dignity with a restored Art Deco façade.  Broadway had never been demure, but she always had class, even draped in neon and splattered with six-story-high underwear ads, and the Taylor was every inch a classy dame.
Wren loved living in Manhattan, and she especially loved wandering through Times Square.  It was an unspoken law, known to every New York Talent: You don’t recharge on Broadway.  The neon, the floodlights, the endless uncountable miles of wiring and secondary power sources, they all had an invisible ‘paws off’ sign.  Like hospitals and nuclear power plants, you just didn’t.
That didn’t mean you couldn’t feel a buzz, walking under the throbbing, pulsing, sweating lights.  Wren let it pass through her, not trying to catch any of the current shimmering in the air.  It was Spring, there had been a thunderstorm over the weekend, and her core was sated and ready to go.
The job had come in two days ago, via a friend of a friend of a former client.  A smash-and-grab, without much smash.  Not much of a grab, either – an old prop that had some sort of sentimental value to the client, and was being held by another actor as his own good luck charm.
Actors.  Jesus wept.  They made the Cosa seem well-adjusted.
Once, Wren would have grumbled about a job that was, in effect, sleepwalking; she used to thrive on the rev of adrenaline that came from outsmarting a security system, outwitting guards, and getting away with something someone else didn’t want you to have.
Now, she was working to pay the rent, and keep herself occupied, and nothing else need apply, thanks.  Certainly no more adrenaline, thanks. 
At least she didn’t have to worry about the cost of feeding P.B. – couriers were never out of work, especially in times of unease and suspicion, and with him in the apartment on a full-time basis, he was placing regular on-line grocery orders on his own dime.
Apparently, they really would give anyone a credit card.
She came up on the theater, and walked past it, giving it a casual once-over with her eyes, and another deeper one with a narrow thread of current.  Nothing struck her as being out of place or odd.  More odd, anyway, she thought, walking past the Naked Cowboy, trying to strum up some attention.  Broadway might have class, but not all of her residents did.
She turned the corner and went into the wine store there, spending a few minutes looking around as though comparing prices on the red wines in the sale bin.  Four minutes later, Wren shook her head as though disappointed with the selection, and walked back out of the store, back toward the theater.
There were three different ways you could enter a building you weren’t supposed to be in.  You could sneak in through a non-traditional entrance: window, sewer, skylight, loading dock.  Wren had once had herself rolled in via a beer delivery.  You could walk right in through the front door, brazen it out and hope nobody thought to challenge you.  Or, you could find a commonly used entrance, and slide in with a crowd.
If you were a Retriever, you had a fourth option.  You went invisible.

 

-© Laura Anne Gilman

 

From Burning Bridges

(ISBN 0373802749)

 

“Miss Valere.”
Wren stopped.  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Andre Felhim was sitting on her stoop, the elegant sixty-something black man in an equally elegant suit and matte-shined shoes sitting on cold cement steps as though the seat of his pants didn’t cost more than she paid in rent every month.
“I apologize for simply appearing like this, without warning, but I had reason to believe, based on our last exchanges, that you would not accept a phone call.  Or, if you did, your emotional reaction might …create some static on the line.”
“Oh, ya think?”  Sarcasm dripped like butter on a baked potato.  Static was the least she was going to give that smarmy, slimy, no-good, people-using bastard…
“Miss Valere, I had nothing to do with your difficulties during the Nescanni situation.  I was no aware until after the fact that your contact had been intercepted” – taken out in a staged – and fatal – car accident, Wren interjected mentally – “and I most certainly was not aware that your dossier on the situation was not complete.  I would never intentionally send my people out –“
“We’re not your people.”  God, he understood nothing.
“I don’t care about your little internal screw-ups and back-biting and political one-upmanship.”  She bit off each word as though if she got them sharp enough, he might just keel over and bleed to death.  I told you once and I’ll tell you again – keep away from me, and keep your paws off my partner.  We work for you – fine.  Although I don’t see how you’re doing your bit, protecting me from the Council.  But you have no call on us other than that.  None.  Don’t contact us unless it’s a paid job.  Got me?”
“I got you,” Andre said.  “I had hoped that we could establish some sort of rappaport, but if it is not meant to be….”
“It’s not.”
He stood and turned to go, then turned back to issue one parting shot.
“We are maintaining out side of the agreement,” he said.  “Why else do you think that both you and Sergei are still alive?”
And with that, he walked off down the street, lacking only a cane to be the stereotypical Mysterious Stranger.
If he meant to unnerve Wren with that last comment… he succeeded.  But it made sense; they might not have many Talents in their organization, but they dealt with them – and magic in general – all the time.  It would be logical that they’d developed some defenses against it, somehow.  Not all fairy tales were bunk, after all.  You could dispel glamours, ward your home against fairies, that sort of thing.
She pulled her keys out of her bag and unlocked the door, thudding wearily up the stairs.  And stopped cold.
The apartment door was open.  She didn’t think it was Andre’s doing.  He had too much style, too much class, much as she despised him, to be that obvious. 
Wren stepped backward, moving into the shadows of the landing, and sent out a quick burst of current, a faint yellow tracer that would let her know if there was anyone in her home who meant her ill.  It was a nifty bit of spellwork, something she’d read about in one of those old books and been messing around with, to see if she could make it work.
The pulse came back negative.  Nothing moving.  Nothing dangerous.  Whoever or whatever had come to visit, they were long gone.  Assuming the spell was working properly, that was.  Always a risk.
She entered the apartment, her knees bent, ready to fight or flee as the situation needed, still wired from the sugar and caffeine and trip home spent putting herself into a working frame of mind.
Nothing.
“I need to get new locks,” she said, grousing to herself as she turned to do up the deadbolt and the chain lock behind her.  What used to be normal and acceptable-for-Manhattan paranoia now clearly wasn’t doing the job.  And be damned if she was going to move.  Housing in the city was insane, and the bubble didn’t look to be bursting any time soon.  Besides, this place was going to go co-op sooner rather than later, and she was going to be on the inside to buy when it did.
This was home, damn it.  No matter what sort of…
Sort of groaning noises she heard.
What now?  Wren flexed her hand, trying to remember a single defensive cantrip that wouldn’t also damage her home.  The power she had pulled down from the power station was still in her, and the current practically sparked, but she had no desire to have to patch and repaint anything just because some joker thought it would be amusing to burgle her home.
“Get out get out wherever you are” she called in a soft, sing-song voice.
Nothing answered.  She moved forward into the apartment barely aware of the fact that silvery twitches of current were jumping from fingertip to fingertip.  Neezer would have slapped her silly for wasting current like that.
The kitchen was the source of the noise: a pile of what looked like fur coat, tossed in one corner.
“P.B.!”  She dropped to her knees beside him, grimacing when one knee came into contact with a sticky puddle of something disgusting.  It wasn’t his – demon blood was black, and their urine was blue-tinged.  Unless he’d taken to throwing up yellow, the way one her mother’s cats had, when they were growing up…
“P.B.?”  A hand came up to touch him; tentative, almost terrified, and the current sparked, jumping into the coarse fibers of his fur and burrowing down into his skin
“Urrrgghh” he said again in response.  “Uuuurrrgh?”
Wren exhaled, long and thankful.  “Open your eyes, you ungrateful walking carpet,” she said, using one of Sergei’s favorite descriptive phrases for the demon.  “Come on, damn you, open your eyes.”
“I don’t have a concussion,” he said, opening his eyes slowly and staring directly into her own worried brown ones.
“How would you know?”  She dropped the question as pointless.  “What happened?”
P.B. struggled to sit up.  Her hands, now bare of visible current, pushed him back down, carefully examining his head through the fur, checking for anything that might indicate real damage or bleeding or... she had no idea what she was looking for; anything that seemed wrong.
He put up with it for about twenty seconds, then slapped her concern away weakly.  “Two guys.  Humans.  One through the door, one through the window.  Have you ever thought about moving, Valere?  This address is getting way too busy.”

-© Laura Anne Gilman

 

 

From a future work by Sergei Didier —

In history class we learn about Ben Franklin. Bon vivant, man of letters and science, inquiring mind.
They don't tell you that he was also one of the most influential Talents of his time. Or that he is credited — blamed, by some — for the formation of the first Mages' Council in America.¹ (The work-journal of John Ebeneezer, from the private collection of Wren Valere. Note in margin of bell lightning lecture from March 1994. Seconded in discussion with Council members, unverified.)¹Knowing this, one looks at the experiments he performed with weather, including the creation of a lightning rod to draw down electricity in order to experiment on it,² and the now legendary kite-and-key story, with a slightly different eye. (The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Edited by Leonard W. Labaree. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962. Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson dated September 1753.)²

Before his work (and similar experiments being done in France and elsewhere during the same time period), any understanding of what lightning was — and any possible connection to electricity — was minimal, at best. The long-held religious interpretations were that lightning was the wrath of (a) god coming down upon the sinning or unworthy. In fact, science, that rational study, was uncertain about the origins and structure of electricity itself: although a fascination with it dates back to the ancient Greeks, any kind of detailed observation had of necessity been confined to the results rather than a quantifiable, scientific breakdown of its origin or cause.

In 1746, that changes drastically, when an object known as a Leyden Jar (so named for the University of Leyden, where its creator, Pieter van Musschenbroek, studied) became all the craze in Europe, for its ability to collect static electricity in a glass jar, and use it to create shocks in those who touched it. The connection between this lightning in a bottle and the lightning which appeared in the sky with similar but much more impressive results was obvious. But how to test any theories on such a powerful force of nature?

One of the popular scientific theories at the time was that electricity formed out of two opposing forces — that those forces "fought," and out of that fighting created energy. Franklin's experiment proved — to the public world — that electricity instead was comprised of a "common element." However, in private notes taken by his son and student, who was also present during the experiments, Franklin comments on the "second electricised element" encountered during correct atmospheric conditions, and which could be felt only within his body, and not register in any of the apparatus he had set up for measurement.

That element, the son's notes continued, sent such a surge of Power through his body "as was to make him feel rejoiced with the Power as was our gift and our joy, and Empowered to do as he might wish, without thought of the cost." His work thus confirmed what some magic-users had long-suspected: that the ability within them was woken not by spells or sacrifices, but through the infusion of a positive charge into receptive cells within their body that transform current into power.
More, his work confirmed the nature of that charge, and how one might intentionally channel it.
However, because of the secretive and close-mouthed nature of Talents, arising from the waves of persecution they had endured over the generations, this information was at first not widely disseminated. Instead, it was passed, as was much of their knowledge, from mentor to student, one transference at a time.

Fortunately, Franklin's indoctrination as a Talent was not enough to hold back his admiration for the democratic ideal, and - after a rather strident argument with his son and several other Talents in the community -- he decided to offer his knowledge to the Talented community as a whole, leading to a radical change in how magic - now called current -- was viewed and used.

(from "Benjamin Franklin: Genius, Talent and Troublemaker" from A Handbook for Working with Talents, 1st edition, by Sergei Didier. dymk press, 2012)

— © 2004 by Laura Anne Gilman

 

 

From Curse the Dark
(ISBN 0-373-80227-7)     

"You think P.B.'s going to be okay while we're gone?"
     "Sergei finished putting their carry-on luggage in the overhead bin and looked down at his partner.
     "Yeah.  I think the obnoxious little walking blanket will be fine."  He shifted to let another passenger drag his luggage by, and then closed the bin, unlacing and removing his shoes and placing them in their fabric carry-bag, then storing them under the seat in front of their row.  Wren had already kicked off her own shoes, practical and comfortable leather skimmers, and curled up on her own seat.  The only good thing about being short, she thought, was that she got to be sort of almost comfortable in airplane seats.
     "And Andre's check cleared?"
     "Cleared before I let you start packing."
     She knew all this.  She just liked hearing Sergei say it again.  His voice was deep and raspy, like a lion's purr.  It made her feel better.  He could probably be reciting the back ads in the Village Voice and it would still make her feel better.  You're so astonishingly easy, Valere.
     "Passport?"
     "In my pocket with all our other papers."  He was fighting back a smile behind that stern expression, she could tell.  In any other situation it would annoy the hell out of her.  But not right now.  Now she was out of the airport, with all the worried-looking people and loudspeaker announcements and hurry-hurry-wait-wait and all those windows looking out at all those . . . planes.
     The fact that she was currently sitting in one of those planes hadn't escaped her attention.  But somehow being in one was better than looking at and planning on getting in one.
     Wren knew it didn't make any sense.  And thinking about it just emphasized the fact that she was in a plane rather than a weirdly shaped train, or something.  And if she thought that direction too long bad things would start to happen again.
     "Emergency rations?"
     "Are in your bag, next to the newspaper.  And yes, I packed those disgusting maple nut things."  He sat down next to her, raising the arm rest between them to put his arm around her more comfortably.  "Wren.  Hush.  It's going to be okay."
     Easy for him to say, she thought a little resentfully.  He didn't feel this beast singing beneath him, all filled with electronic devices practically begging to be drained.  What happened if they ran into trouble, and she panicked, and tried to reach for current?  What if —
     "You're thinking too much," he said.
     Guilty as charged, Officer.  But he was right.  If she just stopped thinking about it, her instinct for self-preservation —incredibly strong, as she knew from previous close calls —would kick in and keep her from doing anything suicidal in her panic.  Probably.  So.  Change the subject.
     "Do you think that Andre wasn't telling us everything?"
     Sergei snorted at that.  "Andre never tells anyone everything.  But no, I think that he was as up front as he's capable of being on Silence business."
     Oh, that was reassuring.  She felt totally reassured.  Really.
     "Did I mention that I'm hating this job already?  Even without the being on this thing I'm not thinking about being on?"
     "I don't like it either, woman.  If you've any better ideas, I would love to hear them."
     "Bet Noodles would hire me."
     "Yes, I can see you spending your life as a Chinese food short order cook.  Or a bicycle delivery girl.  If you could Translocate better, maybe."
     "All right, that was low."  Her recent attempts at Translocation had been done under only extreme duress, once to save their own lives during a job gone bad, and once  to keep a client from getting killed.  But she'd gotten the job done, hadn't she?  So what was a little vomiting and current-spillover between friends?
     "It will all be fine.  Just another job."  Sergei took out the newspaper and checked to make sure that the business section was intact, then put it away and pulled a burgundy folder from his bag and extracted a sheaf of typewritten pages from it.
     "See?  All the information we need, hand-delivered by Andre's little messenger boy this morning, including names, dates, places and driving directions.  Why don't you try to sleep, okay?  It's a long flight, and we're going to have to hit the ground running when we get there."
     She rested her head against his shoulder, feeling the comforting familiarity of him.  None of the awkwardness or uncomfortableness of recent months, just . . . Sergei.  The thought almost made her cry.  You don't know what you've got till it's gone... only it's not gone.  Still here.  Still Sergei.  He was right.  P.B. was a big — well, okay, full-grown demon, he could take care of himself.  And if he did run into trouble, Tree-taller was around, had promised to keep an eye out.  The other Talent had no beef with the fatae, the non-human members of the Cosa Nostradamus, and would listen if P.B. came to him.  And anything Andre hadn't told them in that packet, they'd figure out on their own.  Wasn't like they needed the Silence, the Silence needed them.
     "Wren?"
     "Yeah.  Sleep.  Right.  Okay.  I'll try."
     Twenty minutes later, the plane pulled away from the gate.  Sergei looked up from the papers he was reading as the safety instructions tape began to play, then down at his companion.  She was still leaning against his shoulder, strands of chestnut hair falling into her eyes, and he could hear the faintest completely unladylike snore coming from her half-open mouth.
     "Rest well, Wrenlet," he whispered.  "Tough job ahead."

— © 2005 Laura Anne Gilman

 

 

From STAYING DEAD
(ISBN 0-373-80253-6 mass)

There was no sound at all in the house, not even the hum-and-whir of appliances somewhere, or the clink-clink of water draining through pipes. It made Wren nervous, that absence of sound. So what if she'd grown up in the 'burbs, back when you might still see deer or fox or occasionally a bear in your backyard; she was too much a city girl now to feel comfortable without the endless background accompaniment of screeching brakes, sirens and horns.
     Even the damn crickets outside had been better than this. Silence wasn't a thing: it was the absence of a thing, of noise. And her mind always wanted to know what had swallowed the noise, how, and when was it coming for her.
     To distance herself from that thought, she looked around again. Two overstuffed sofas and a leather reclining chair were matched with sturdy wooden tables, obviously handmade. The plaid upholstery was worn and comfortable-looking, and the floor was wood, scarred with years of use, and covered with colorful cloth rugs scattered with more concern for comfort than style. A large dog of dubious parentage lay on one of the sofas. It lifted its head when she came in, and contemplated her with brown eyes that didn't look as though they had been surprised by anything in the past decade, or excited about anything in twice that time.
     "Hi, there," she said. The narrow tail thumped once and then lay still, as though that much effort had exhausted it. "Let me guess -- Dog, right?"
     "Don't see any reason to change a perfectly workable name," the voice said from off to her left.  "I'm the man, he's the dog, and we both know our places."
     "And his, obviously, is on the sofa."
      Max let out a snort as he came completely into her line of sight.  He was wearing an old, worn blue cotton sweater and khaki safari-style shorts that showed off knobby knees, red-banded tube socks sagging around his ankles.  "That one's his, this one's mine.  We stay out of each other's way.  Which is more than I can say for you.  Didn't my throwing you off a cliff teach you anything?    Why you bothering me again?"
      Wren hadn't seen Max in almost five years.  But for a wizzart, that was crowding.
     "Your name came up in very un-casual conversation," she said, sitting down in the chair, but not relaxing into it.  Max seemed reasonably rational right now, but that didn't mean a damn thing.  She actually had learned a great deal from going off that cliff, most of which involved the fact that she couldn't fly.  She wasn't eager to relearn that particular lesson.
     "Whoever it was, they deserved killing."  He sat down on his sofa and put his feet up on a battered, wooden table.  His socks were filthy, dirt and grass stains worn into the weave of the fabric, but they somehow managed not to stink.
      "No killing," she said.  "Not yet, anyway."

 

— © 2004 by Laura Anne Gilman