"Laura Anne Gilman - Staying Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilman Laura Anne)

And, tossed into that mix, always the snarling between the races, like they weren't all in it together, more
or less. But some peopleтАФhumans and fataeтАФjust couldn't handle the idea of something shaped or
colored a little differently walking, talking and working alongside their precious selves. Wren didn't have
much patience with that. You do your job, stay out of her way, she didn't much care if you lived in
brimstone or used your hind paws at the dinner table.

Sometimes, she thought it would have been a lot easier being Null. Then she watched the Suits scuttle to
work every morning, hustling for a window office, and decided she was happy where and what she was.

P.B. burped, the sound like baritone chimes rising from his rotund stomach. "So what's the job?"

She just looked at him, a wealth of disbelief in her expression. He stared back, his flat, fur-covered face
blandly innocent. Anything she shared with him without a for-hire agreement would be sold to his next
client before she'd had a chance to act on it herself. Not in this lifetime or the next three, pal.

"Right. Don't tell me anything, just send me out to fetch like a dogтАж "

She considered responding, then decided that it really wasn't worth the effort. It was enough that she
wasn't pitching him out the window already.

Wren had only met three demons in the flesh in her lifetimeтАФthat she knew about, anyway. Looks varied
wildly, and she was told that some of them could pass for human, if you weren't looking carefully. The
three she had encountered weren't those kind. And of those three, P.B. was the only one she could deal
with for more than a few minutes at a time. It wasn't that she was prejudiced; she simply couldn't handle
the relatively high voltage most of the full-sized demons emitted, like some kind of ungrounded magical
wire that set her teeth on edge. FataeтАФthe elves and piskies and whatnotтАФwere, by contrast, easy on
the nerves. And angels never hung around long enough to do more than freak you out.

For a few moments, the only sound in the kitchen was P.B.'s jaws chewing crust, and the scritching-soft
noise of paper against paper as she read what he had brought her. Finally she reached the last page, and
shook them back into order and replaced them in the envelope, folding the metal closure back down
again. Names, jobs, capabilitiesтАж P.B. had done his usual bang-up job of getting exactly what she
needed. Some of the names on the list were familiar, in the heard-about-them kind of way.

And one was all too familiar, in a gut-clenching way. She forced herself not to focus on it. All the names
were equal possibilities right now. Don't jump to conclusions. Conclusions without facts get people killed,
possibly even her own very important self. File it, Valere. File it and deal with it later. When you're alone.

"Thirteen names?" She raised an eyebrow at the fur-coated being now lounging in her other kitchen chair.

He belched, then shrugged. "Lotsa folk interested in your boy," he said unapologetically. "He's made
himself some enemies. And those're just the ones who have a profile with us." Us being the entire
magic-using community, the Cosa Nostradamus. Human and nonhuman alike. We might squabble
amongst ourselves, often to the point of a passing wave of bloodshed, but in the end it was always
us against themтАФ"them" being what her long-gone mentor used to call Kellers; the Nulls, who were
mostly blind and deaf to what was around them. Not much love lost there. To some of the Cosa, her
working with Sergei on an equal footing was betrayal. He wasn't too fond of them, either.

P.B. went on. "Probably lots of otherwise upstanding humans who hate his guts too."