Soul of Fire

Her distress seemed to communicate itself to Tyler, because he pulled back physically. His face seemed to almost crumple, his arms drawing around his torso, and he rocked back and forth in his chair.

“Ty?” She couldn’t help it; she stepped forward, her hand outstretched. His pain and confusion hurt her almost as badly, guilt for being the cause warring with exasperation that he seemed to blame her.

“Home. Home. Stjerne will punish me. Need to go home.”

“Damn,” Zan said quietly, moving across the room with a silent grace, cutting Jan’s own approach off and placing gentle hands on Tyler’s shoulder. “Tyler, it’s all right. You’re safe. You’re here. Stjerne is gone. You control this space. Nothing can come here that hurts you.”

“Make her go away. Go away.”

The healer kept speaking, even-toned and calm. “You control this space, Tyler. If you don’t want something or someone here, you can make them go away.”

“Go away,” he said.

Jan went, closing the door gently behind her.

* * *

It wasn’t personal, not like that. Jan understood. Tyler had been badly abused by the preters, some kind of brainwashing that she didn’t quite understand. That was why he was here, rather than getting help in the human world—the moment he started talking about what had happened, who had done this to him, they’d assume he was insane and put him away forever.

The same way they’d try to put her away if she tried to tell anyone. She had already lost her job over it, with no chance of getting a referral from her boss, who now thought she was insane, and she had probably ruined any chance of getting a new job back in her industry, as well.

Maybe she could go to work with AJ’s car thieves. Or whatever it was that Martin did for a living when he wasn’t fighting off preternatural invasions.

She thought about what the kelpie might possibly do for a living and shook her head. Or maybe not.

“Jobs are kind of a worry for after you save the world,” she said, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. The tears had receded and, miraculously, so had the headache; Jan wouldn’t have put it past Zan to have slipped a whammy on her, or whatever healing magic it was a unicorn did.

Thanking someone, though, seemed to be bad manners here. And Jan was avoiding the issue, trying to take on other people’s problems instead of her own. She needed somewhere to think, somewhere nobody would bother her or summon her while she thought.

The problem with the Farm was that it was too crowded. Even the attic floor, nominally her bedroom space, had a meeting going on in the stairwell, three supers, who looked too much like praying mantises for Jan’s comfort, hunched together, trying to put together a report. No matter where she turned, in the House or any of the outbuildings, things were happening, people were being useful. Everyone except her.

“Shut up,” she told herself. “Stubborn and clever, remember?” So she didn’t know what to do yet. She would. It was like the time immediately after Tyler had disappeared all over again, but then she’d had the insanity of suddenly discovering about supernaturals and the fact that Tyler had been elf-napped. Now she knew what she was facing. And she wasn’t facing it alone.

“Hey.” She accosted one of the kitchen workers, a dryad whose long green hair was tied up in a scarf, her long arms coated with flour. “When Martin gets out of his meeting, tell him to meet me back at the pond?”

“After meeting, human by the pond. Got it.”

* * *

Sitting cross-legged on the grass once again, Jan ignored the occasional splashes from the pond and concentrated on breathing in and out slowly. Her asthma was triggered more by dust and stress, but stress and grass could do the trick, too. Jan didn’t know why she kept coming out here, unless maybe it was because she knew that anyone out here would ignore her, let her mope in peace. For a bunch of alleged nature-friendly beings, few of them ever came out this far.

Maybe it was because they were all too busy, AJ’s orders snapping them into action, focused and intent. She was the only one without a purpose, without a plan. But she was going to come up with one.

“We’ve been focusing on the portals,” she said, thinking out loud. “On the portals, how they’re controlling them and where the queen might be hiding. Turn it around. Why here? Never mind how or why the magic changed. What do we have that they want?”

It wasn’t a new question, but they’d been thinking like supers or trying to think like preters. Maybe it was time to think like a human. A stubborn, heart-driven human.

Someone was walking toward her across the grass. She knew it was Martin without looking, recognizing the weirdly heavy sound, as though his four-hooved form walked with him. She’d noticed it first when they were walking through the preternatural realm, but only identified it as being his specifically once they were on the Farm. She’d idly compared his steps to other supernaturals: some walked heavily, some barely touched the ground, but none of the others had that four-beat cadence to a two-footed walk.

“You left the meeting,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement, with a hint of a question.

She kept her breathing still, her eyes closed. “Did anything useful happen?”

“Not really,” he admitted. Then he paused. “You’re upset.”

“I’m not. I’m...” She was upset. But not the way Martin meant it. She thought. She still wasn’t entirely sure she had a bead on what the kelpie meant when he said something.

Another memory: Toba looking at her with those golden owl eyes, warning her: Do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can understand us—or that we can understand you.

“Your leman hurt you.” Martin sat next to her, and she could smell the now-familiar scent of green water and smoky moss, almost like but entirely unlike the scent of the pond in front of them, and completely unlike, say, the iron-rock-solder smell Elsa had. Jan was learning the supers by their smell now, not just their sight or sound. The thought was either really disturbing or weirdly satisfying. Maybe both. Maybe she could understand them, at least a little bit.

Maybe they could understand her.

“It’s not Ty’s fault,” she said, not even asking how Martin knew it had been Tyler. Maybe he could smell it on her, too. “He can’t help it. I know that. He’s all sorts of fucked up and I’m the only thing that was consistent throughout.” She had read up on all the syndromes and symptoms, the treatments and the stories from family members. She knew that Zan was doing the best job possible, that if they took him to a human doctor, they wouldn’t understand what he’d been through, and the moment he started saying anything about the preters or... Well, she couldn’t blame any human hospital for thinking he needed more than outpatient therapy if that happened. “But it hurts.”

“Of course it does. Because you blame yourself.”

Jan laughed, a rough exhalation that held only a little humor. “Stay away from the pop-psych websites,” she told him, opening her eyes and plucking a long blade of grass, holding it between her thumb and foreginger and studying it with far more care than it deserved. “Even humans have trouble with that stuff. You’ll just screw it up”

That much she did understand. Kelpies—or at least, Martin—were sweet, and funny, and affectionate...and cold-blooded killers who didn’t really understand that killing people, because they suddenly felt like it, was a bad thing. He had empathy in his own way but no morality, no connection to anyone he had not learned to care about. What he might make of the five stages of grieving or some other mental-health site...

She let the blade of grass drop, watching as it fell. Emotions. Entanglement. Need. “You told me to go home. When we came back, you told me to go home and put all this behind me, both you and AJ.”

Martin lay on the grass next to where she was sitting, his arms crossed behind his head, staring up at the sky. He never went closer to the water than they were sitting, never really looked at it. Kelpies were river-horses; she wondered if he had something against ponds or if it was just this pond that he didn’t like. And why, if he didn’t like the pond, he kept following her out there.

“We were wrong,” he admitted. “AJ knew it then. He just didn’t know what else to tell you. You can’t go back to what and who you were. It doesn’t work that way.”

She held up a hand, stopping his apology in its tracks. None of them could go back. Not Tyler, not her—not even Martin. You couldn’t simply walk into the preter realm, you couldn’t go Under the Hill, and expect to come back the same.

“Yeah. It changes. Everything changes. So...we go forward.” She wrapped her arms around her knees and thought about that, trying to weave it into what she had been thinking before.

Martin waited, maybe to see if she was going to say anything more, maybe thinking thoughts of his own. Something in the middle of the pond splashed to the surface and then disappeared. “You’re thinking,” he said finally, somewhere between an accusation and a hope.

“Yeah.” Thinking about what they’d talked about that morning, about what Galilia had said, about what she was seeing around them. About what they had seen in the preter court. About three days left now before the truce was up.

“I have an idea,” she said finally. “AJ isn’t going to like it.”

Martin grinned at her, his teeth blunt but the smile disturbingly sharp. “Those are my favorite kind of ideas.”

Chapter 4

AJ wanted to howl, to put his head back and let loose with a drawn-out noise that would cut through everything and bring everyone to a dead, cold stop. He didn’t.

It would be satisfying, yes, but it wouldn’t solve anything. The chaos of so many different supers living and working together was barely held under control, creating a constant low-level rumble. Only tightly held control allowed him to orchestrate that rumble into something like a symphony.

Having one of your remote teams drop out of sight for a week and resurface with a report that focused on the brewpubs rather than the hunt they were supposed to be on...

“Pack is easier,” AJ muttered almost under his breath. “I can just knock them over and they listen to me.”

Elsa didn’t laugh. The jötunndotter was a steady, steadfast second in command, but her kind weren’t known for a sense of humor. “Too far to reach, too many of them.”

“I can hit you and you can hit someone and they can hit the right person. That’s called delegation.”

“You would break your paw if you tried to knock me over.”

He wasn’t sure if that was an actual statement of fact or her attempt to respond in kind. He decided to take it as fact.

“Fine. If I send you out to Oregon to sit on these idiots, will you do it?”

“By the time I get there, they will have already done the damage,” she responded. Jötunndotter did not fly. Even if she could get through security without raising eyebrows—improbable—the mass of her stony body would probably ground the plane. And the thought of her trying to fit into a narrow coach seat...

“Yeah, all right, I’ll save you for a local fuckup.”

AJ rubbed at his face tiredly, shoving hair away from his forehead. It felt as if he hadn’t slept, really slept, in months. Maybe he hadn’t. Not since all this had started, the first reports of preternaturals where and when none should be, his own curiosity drawing him to investigate, and then the sharp fear, the need to draw forces together to keep his pack, his territory safe....

AJ hadn’t wanted this, the responsibility of so much, so many. He hadn’t asked for it. But he had been the only one to see the danger, the only one to step up and shove people into paying attention. So he was stuck with it, apparently.

“Boss.” Someone handed him a clipboard, and he signed it, noting as he did so that it was for a shipment of car parts, not anything Farm related. The old warehouse might be gone, burned to the ground during the gnome attack, but the business went on.

Somehow, that made him feel better.

AJ handed the clipboard back and looked at the larger whiteboard hung on the wall. He let his eyes scan the place names written there, all the reports that had come back of where the preters had been spotted, trying not to think of anything in particular or force a pattern on them and hoping that something would stir on its own. Instead, all he could hear, all he could sense was the never-ending swirl of bodies and voices around him.

In the weeks since Martin had brought the humans back from the preter’s realm, since the turncoats had attacked the old warehouse, swarming them in an attempt to take out the ragtag defenders, nearly two dozen more supernaturals had found their way to the Farm. Some of them wanted to defend their home against a threat that had suddenly become real, some of them just wanted a fight, and some of them were bored and thought this might be some interesting mischief. AJ’s job was to make use of them all.

“Mathias.”

A dog-faced super looked over at him, ears pricking in anticipation. “Yah, boss?”

“Go to Oregon. Take Lurcher. Sit on whoever needs to be sat on so I’m getting regular reports. And keep them out of the blasted strip joints.”

“Got it, boss.” He knocked at his companion’s shoulder, rousting him from his newspaper. “We’re on point,” he said. “Grab your bag.”

“One problem. Two—” Something pinged, a soft, muted noise, and then his pocket vibrated. AJ looked at the offending pocket with the sort of loathing most saved for a worm in their meat, and reached into his jacket to retrieve the smartphone he’d finally, grudgingly, agreed to carry.

There were seven text messages from the Florida team, one after another, with the results of their hunt. Complete with photos of... He squinted and determined that, yes, that was his search team hanging out in front of a giant upright shark wearing a neon lei.

Strip joints, tourist traps... The stories that painted supernaturals as flighty, irresponsible creatures were not, regrettably, far off the mark.

AJ sighed and passed the phone over to Elsa, who glanced at the display and then passed it on to another super without comment. The third super, a juvenile lupin from a different pack than AJ’s, scrolled through the texts and barked out information to be added to the charts.

“Teaching them how to text may not have been your best idea ever,” Elsa said, her voice dry.

“Email would have been worse. Trust me,” Jan said from the doorway. “More attachments, more viruses from bad-choice web surfing...” She shook her head, an odd smile twisting her face.

“You know us so well,” AJ said. He liked the human female, much to his surprise, but more than that, he was learning to respect her. All the human strengths—loyalty, imagination—but without the worst of their weaknesses. More, she could make her team focus and pay attention, and that, he knew firsthand, was a daily battle.

She came into the room, and he saw that Martin was lurking behind her. Of course. Ever since the human had discovered the truth about her leman’s disappearance and had—unwillingly, perhaps—joined them, even before the two of them had gone through the portal, the two had been forming a bond of some sort. Since they’d returned, that bond seemed almost unbreakable. AJ was certain that the friendship was a terrible idea and likely to get someone killed, but it wasn’t as though they weren’t all likely to die in the next week anyway.

“The supernatural community tends to veer wildly between deadly serious and utterly incapable of seriousness,” he said now in response to her comment. “It’s not really a useful life strategy.”

Behind him, Elsa snorted, the way only trolls could, and Jan’s eyebrows rose. She almost smiled, a real, amused smile, looking back over her shoulder at the kelpie. “You have a life strategy?”

“Lupin are a little more focused than most,” AJ admitted, ignoring the wounded expression on Martin’s face and the burst of laughter from someone in the room behind him. Everyone else was very pointedly ignoring the exchange, even as they eavesdropped as best they could without being called out for slacking. The supernatural world’s reputation for gossiping like a pair of nannies was pretty accurate, too.

“Do you have a few minutes?” the human asked.

“No,” AJ said. “But sit down, anyway.”

* * *

“Jesus Christ,” the cop said, turning his head away. But everywhere he looked, there was blood and broken furniture. But no bodies. Where were the bodies? “What the hell happened?”

“Bear,” the man on his hands and knees in the kitchen said, his attention focused on the evidence in front of him more than his answer.

“Bullshit. Bears don’t do this.” Patek forced himself to take a better look at the damage, his expression unhappy but resigned. There were deep scars on the walls, from around waist-high, dragging down to the ground. He touched one with a gloved finger: it went at least a quarter-inch deep into drywall. “Okay, yeah, bears could do this. But inside a house? Who the fuck lets a bear inside their house?”

The first thing you learned living in the Adirondack Mountains area was to keep an eye out for bears. Make noise when you went outside in the spring, make sure your garbage was locked up and out of reach, and generally don’t be an idiot, because black bears might look cute at a distance or in the zoo, but up close they were several hundred pounds of muscle, teeth, and claws. More, especially in spring, they saw nearly anything as food, and what wasn’t food was easily seen as a threat.

Patek had seen a bear claw up close during training. Their instructor had used it to scare them, and it had worked. You didn’t want that thing anywhere near you, not when attached to living bear muscle.

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