Staying Dead by Laura Anne Gilman Read Free Book Online Page A

other clients, thereby keeping you in your suits and toys, and that—as you’re so often telling me—if I don’t get the job done—I—and you—don’t get paid?”
    Sergei made a noise that might have been a protest—or could have been suppressed laughter. You never could tell with Sergei, not even when he was sitting in the room with you. Part of his incredibly annoying charm, and why she was never bored around him.
    As amusing as this game was, she didn’t want to risk frying the lines by talking too long. “Just get your well-dressed rear up here, okay? Seven-thirty, Marianna’s. And bring whatever info you have on the client’s business compadres, so I can cross-reference the players before I do something stupid.”
    â€œThought before action. What a refreshing novelty.”
    â€œOh, bite me,” she said rudely, and broke the connection before she could hear him laugh. She sat and looked at the phone for a few moments, smiling absently. He was a pain in the posterior, but he was her pain in the posterior.
    Â 
    An expensively upholstered chair crashed against an equally expensively-paneled wall, rattling the oversized photograph of the desert at dawn which hung there.
    â€œIdiots! Incompetents!”
    The topmost floor but two of the Frants building was split into nine offices around a center lobby. Eight of those offices were large, lush spaces with a commanding view of the city, with a slightly smaller office directly off and to the inside where each inhabitant’s administrative assistant sat. The ninth office was twice again as large, and three assistants guarded access like Cerebrus at the gates of the underworld.
    At that moment, two of the assistants were cowering in the bathroom, while the third tried to pretend nothing at all unusual was going on in her boss’s sanctum.
    â€œSir, we merely feel that it would be wisest—”
    â€œDon’t!” Oliver Frants held one finger up in the younger man’s direction, his florid, freshly-shaven face turning an ill-omened shade of pink. “Do. Not. Tell. Me. What. To. Do.” Each word was bitten off with precision, as though his perfectly capped teeth were holding back longer, uglier words.
    The three executives glanced at each other, uncertain what to say next. They were all in their mid- to late forties; healthy, well-groomed, impeccably dressed. The kind of people you would normally see at the head of a boardroom table, having highly placed people report to them.
    But in here, they cowered.
    â€œI will not abandon this building. I will not abandon any of my scheduled meetings. And I will. Not. Hide.”
    He looked at them each in turn, until they dropped their gaze like chastened children.
    â€œSir?” The woman, Denise Macauley, had dredged up enough courage to speak. Frants smiled. She had been a particular protégé of his, years ago, and her sharp wits had never failed him.
    â€œYes, Denise?”
    â€œIf I may suggest, sir, that we add to the building’s defenses?”
    â€œAnd just how do you suggest we do that,” he asked, “since the mages have made it quite clear that they will not allow their members to work for us any longer? Are you suggesting I hire another freelancer?” When the Council had, after looking things over, refused to help, despite it being their people who had set the spell in the first place, the only alternative had been to look for someone among the so-called lonejack community. The Council’s spin would have you believe that they were nowhere near as talented as their own members, but reports had said that one seemed particularly suited for the job, and so Frants had authorized it. But retrieval was one thing. His security—especially his long-term security—was another. “Or do you think that we should perhaps hire a wizzart?”
    â€œNo sir,” she said, properly dismissing that idea as