Soul of Fire

AJ hadn’t wanted them to focus any energy on that problem, but Jan had insisted. They didn’t know what sort of magic the preters were using to create the portals—before, portals had appeared at the whim of the seasons, or the stars, or something even more random, but Tyler’s experience with the preter-bitch Stjerne had made it clear that humans were at the heart of it now.

That had been the argument that Jan had used, that had made AJ agree, but Jan would have pushed for this no matter what her pack leader said. These were people being taken. Humans like Tyler. Taken, abused, broken...and, unlike Tyler, not rescued.

Jan might not be able to save everyone, but she would do her damnedest to make sure no more were lost.

“I still say we should have just taken down the dating sites altogether and been done with it weeks ago,” Lisbet said from the other side of the table. Jötunndotter were slow to move, their stonelike bodies heavy and stiff, but they had no patience with doing things slowly otherwise.

“Where’s the skill in that?” Kit was...enthusiastic. Preters or prototypes, he didn’t really care, so long as it was a challenge. Finding a way to warn potential victims without getting laughed off the internet, and making sure that it went viral, had been his personal side project, and he wasn’t paying attention to the bigger picture. Everyone kept sane in their own way, Jan supposed.

“You really think that will work?” Andy asked, dubious. “Human males are not known to be cautious.” Coming from a splyushka—a cousin to Koba, who had died to protect her, back when this all started—that was almost funny. The owl-eyed supernaturals were, she had learned, noted for their impulsive behavior. They were also the ones most comfortable with tech, so she had two of them on the team: Andy and his nest-sib, Beth, who was leaning against the wall at the back of the room, silent but alert.

“True enough,” Laurie leaned into the frame to say, “but they tend to bull in when they think they can handle something. The risk of ending up...well, we made it unpleasant enough to put most folk off risking an easy lay for a lifetime of that.”

“And the rest of them are on their own, and good riddance to idiots,” Glory said, her accent intentionally heavy in a room, however virtual, of Americans, human and otherwise. “Now, can we get down to the important things? Like figuring out how these pointy-eared bastards are even getting connectivity on their side? Because if we can’t figure out how to counter it, then we need to know the bloody power source in order to pull the plug.”

One of the things they’d learned was that the new portals “felt” the same to supernaturals as major human laboratories like Livermore and CERN did, a weird sort of electrical buzz. Somehow, the preters had merged their magic to human technology, using computers and brainwashed humans—like Tyler, her brain whispered—to create and hold these new portals. But they didn’t have the knowledge to figure out why, or how to stop them. That was supposed to be Jan’s job

“I’m telling you,” Glory said, “you need to get someone inside some of those labs.”

This, like everything else, was an ongoing argument. AJ had sent scouts to the perimeter, as close as they could get without being caught. But just lurking, looking, and sniffing hadn’t given them enough information.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Andy said, “and we’re going to get that access...how? It’s not like we go for the hard sciences, generally, so unless you’ve got someone who can turn invisible and sneak in and, oh, by the way, once he’s there knows what he’s looking for and how to explain it to us when he gets back...”

“Are there no humans who would help us?” Beth said. “Laurie, what about your friend from MIT?”

Laurie shook her head. “He hasn’t gotten back to me yet, no matter how many urgent stickers I leave on my messages. I’m hopeful—Larry’s actually the kind of guy where ‘Hey, my buddy the fairy says you guys might be sourcing a tunnel between worlds, want to check that out for me?’ might work. But I haven’t heard anything.”

“Well, we haven’t had any midnight visits from the Men in Black, so he hasn’t said anything to anyone else, either,” Kit added. “Unless they’re monitoring us even now, in which case, get off your asses and do something, NSA!”

“Focus, please,” Jan said amid the laughter. She looked across the table to where Galilia, her nominal second in command, was sitting. Gali wasn’t technically inclined, but she’d been working on some possible inroads among the scientific community. The jiniri shook her head slightly: nothing new to report there, either.

Jan sighed and let the back-and-forth flow over her, listening with one ear. If someone came up with something new or even probable, she would jump in. For now, she wished again for her coffee and tried not to think about her heartbeat ticking off the time.

* * *

Nearly an hour later, the meeting ended with nothing to show except a headache and a bunch of dead ends. Jan waited until they’d all left, then looked up at the screen where only Glory remained.

“You still look like shite,” the other woman said, her normal over-the-top gestures muted with concern. “Are you sleeping at all?”

“Not much,” Jan admitted, leaning back in her chair. It was nice to drop the leader mask; Glory was never fooled by it, anyway.

“I told you staying out there was a bad idea.”

“And where else was I supposed to go, Glory?” After the gnome attack on her apartment, the landlord had revoked her lease. It wasn’t exactly a surprise—apparently the entire apartment had smelled of smoke and meat, and the door had been busted open as if a bull had gone through it—but it had left her effectively homeless, especially since there was no way Tyler could return to his old life right then, and she didn’t want to stay alone in his apartment...even assuming it was safe to do so. If the gnomes could track her on a bus, to her apartment... Well, she wasn’t going to put others in danger—or risk pulling more supers from the Farm to guard her.

So she had packed up her tech and as much stuff as she could fit in a suitcase, put the rest into storage, and gone back to the Farm. Unlike the rest of the troops, who were mostly bedding down in tents or trees or whatever places they preferred, she had a room in the farmhouse proper, in the half floor upstairs. It was small but comfortable, with a window that gave her a clear view over the property and enough sunlight to feel as if she was in a tree house. If anything came over the property lines, either by ground or air, she could see it coming.

It didn’t help.

Glory tsked, her painted fingernails flicking at the air. Even now, Gloriana was as flamboyant as her name, thick black curls glossy as a raven’s feathers, and makeup perfectly applied. Jan envied her the bright red lipstick she wore. Glory’s skin was darker than Tyler’s; if Jan tried to wear that shade, she’d look like a clown.

Jan rubbed at her own face, aware that exhaustion made her look even more sallow, and wished she could end this conversation.

“And I don’t suppose you’re getting any, either, to help rock you to sleep or make you not care,” Glory went on.

Jan’s headache took a sudden right turn to migraine. That did it. Glory might think getting her itch scratched was the solution to most stress, but talking about her nonexistent sex life—especially given that there were no other humans on the Farm except for Ty—was below pretty much every other topic of conversation on Jan’s to-do list. She just smiled at her friend, making sure to show as many teeth as possible, said “Talk to you tomorrow,” and hit the disconnect tab.

“Ixnay on the sexnay,” she muttered. “That’s the least of my problems right now.”

There was a cough, and she looked up to see a slender, scaled figure lounging in the doorway, a reminder that space was at a premium and other people needed to use the room, too.

“Sorry,” she said and left.

Midday, the farmhouse was humming with activity. Not all the supers were diurnal, but the nocturnal ones also tended to be more solitary and, therefore, quieter. Plus, Jan noted as she worked her way through the kitchen, grabbing a sandwich off a platter as she went, it looked as if a lot of them were working double shifts, making the main floor even more crowded than usual.

The urge to go to the shed and check on Tyler hit her again, and she pushed it down. He had a routine, a routine that was helping him heal, and she had other things to do.

“Has anyone seen—” she started to ask, and a handful of voices called out “At the gazebo.”

“Thanks.” She shook her head as she left the house; apparently she was predictable.

She found Martin where she’d been told to look, out in the gazebo—really just a wooden platform with a canvas tarp stretched overhead to make a roof—lecturing to another group of supers.

“Greensleeves are arrogant but desperate,” he was saying, leaning against the railing and letting his voice project over the space. Broad chested, with shaggy brown hair framing a long, squared-off face, and wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, he looked as ordinary as any guy on the street. Even his black nails could be a goth affectation, except she knew that it wasn’t polish, that the wide-set brown eyes flickered with gold fire if you stared into them too long, and his other form was a cold-blooded murderer.

Martin was probably her best friend now, even more than Glory.

There were seven other supers listening to him talk, and she couldn’t identify any of their species, other than absolutely not human. “They will try to establish their superiority over you, because they have none of their own in that land,” the kelpie went on. “Don’t assume that means they’re harmless. They’re anything but—they have nothing to lose.”

Greensleeves were humans who had been taken by the preters and then abandoned, left to fend for themselves in that cruel, unfamiliar realm.

She and Martin were the only ones on the Farm who had ever gone through a portal—at least, the only ones still living who had done so and come back to talk about it. With her expertise needed on the tech side, he had been tasked with telling the others what to expect, not so much from the portals themselves as the preternaturals on the other side.

“Why don’t they rebel?” one of the supers asked. “Humans are supposed to be the wild card, the ones who aren’t bound by tradition. Why aren’t any of them—”

“What? Charging in and biting off the head of the preter queen? Leading the thralls and changelings in revolt?”

“Yes?”

“You’re an idiot,” Martin said, neither kindly nor with any venom, simply stating an obvious fact.

Jan listened to him talking and felt an odd disconnect. She had told so many people, so many times, every detail she could remember of their time in the other realm, their experiences didn’t quite feel real anymore. It was more as if she’d read it somewhere, read it so many times that she’d internalized it somehow.

But in her nightmares, it was all very real. That was probably why she wasn’t sleeping.

She caught the kelpie’s eye, and he nodded slightly; they were almost finished. Jan kept walking; he’d catch up with her when he was done.

* * *

She finally sat—and then lay down—on the grassy slope by the retaining pond, a green-slicked pool that was home to a dozen or so ducks and a handful of cranky water-sprites. They stayed on their side, and Jan was careful to keep at least a dozen yards away from the edge of the pond. Water-based supernaturals were just as likely to lie, cheat, and otherwise mess with humans as their land-based cousins, but their games were often more lethal. Jan remembered their near-deadly encounter with the troll-bridge in the preter’s world and shuddered.

The irony that she was waiting for a water-sprite was not lost on her. Martin was a kelpie, and kelpies lured humans into riding them, then drowned them. It was, as Martin said, “a thing.”

Jan couldn’t help it—she laughed. Her best friend was not only not human but a borderline sociopath serial killer. Somewhere, her life had gotten seriously off track.

“I don’t even know who’s in the play-offs,” she said to the squirrel that had paused, midscurry, to stare at her. “We spent all that money on the tech, and I didn’t even get a TV.” Or a new laptop, for that matter. Fairy gold was a myth, and AJ held his checkbook tighter than her worst client.

Not that she had any clients right now. Or a job. Or anything in the way of a future if they didn’t figure a solution out, or find some weapon, or do something.

The squirrel’s beady black eyes held her gaze and then it scurried off without giving her any advice.

“And at this point, I’m just sad enough that I’d take it.”

“Take what?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Martin dropped to the ground next to her, heedless of the dirt he’d get on his jeans, and groaned as if he’d been hauling bricks all morning rather than lecturing. There was a splash from the pond as someone raised their head to see who had arrived, then disappeared again.

With nothing new to update him on, they lay there in silence for a few minutes, just breathing. If she were going to “get some” as Glory suggested, Martin made the most sense. He had certainly flirted enough to suggest he’d be open to it if she asked. But every time she thought about asking, something stopped her. Jan didn’t love him, not in that way, and some days she wasn’t even sure that she liked him—Martin was amoral in the real sense of the word, and how could you call someone like that a friend?—but they’d been through enough together, seen each other clearly, and that had created a bond that was somehow more than love or friendship.

Some days, Jan thought that bond was all that got her through each new bit of insanity. She wasn’t willing to risk it just for sex.

And besides, a small, smart voice in her head reminded her Martin was a hopeless flirt, yes, but one who tended to drown his partners. He’d warned her often enough.

Without anything new to talk about from the briefing and not wanting to talk about Tyler, Jan said the first thing that came into her head. “All your lectures, the lessons...does AJ really think they’re needed? I mean, that anyone is going to have to go back there?” The thought sent a cold tremor down her spine. The preters’ home was beautiful in a terrifying way. Massive trees and sunless skies, dragon-sized snakes, and endlessly rolling plains that had led them to the vaguely familiar mountain that housed the preternatural court. No human, no mortal supernatural should ever have to see it, not in real time and not in their dreams.

“No.” Martin plucked a strand of grass and let it flutter out of his fingers, falling to the ground, as he studied the pond where the ripples were slowly fading. “Not unless we have some crazy-brave leman who wants to rescue her lover.”

“Or some crazy-dumb kelpie who thinks he can just march into the preter court and demand answers.”

He looked away from the pond long enough to give her a wry, self-mocking little grin.

“No, AJ doesn’t want to send anyone back there,” he said. “But he doesn’t want what we learned to be forgotten, either. You know that. They’ve been quiet for so long, trapped by the old restrictions, the difficulties in luring people into their grasp, that all we had were folk songs and legends. We need actual information to protect ourselves. Ourselves and humans. Firsthand reporting should last us another couple of generations before it’s out-of-date again,” Jan couldn’t argue with that. Humans only knew preternaturals and supernaturals as fairy tales, children’s stories, not real. They hadn’t been prepared, weren’t prepared for the truth. The weight of knowing kept her from sleeping, filling her dreams with worst-case scenarios and crushing guilt.

He rolled onto his side and studied her. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. It’s just... This morning I woke up, and it was the same as it had been every morning since we got back. That first rush of energy, when everything seemed like it was finally making sense, that we knew what to do, do you remember? It’s gone. I can hear the clock ticking in my head, and we’re getting nowhere.”

Martin started to say something, a faint noise of protest, and let it trail off, unable to muster an argument, because she was right.

“No matter what we do to warn people, there are still going to be idiots who say sure, let’s run off with a stranger, give over our free will—” and she hated the bitterness, the anger that was in her voice but she didn’t have to pretend here “—there will always be enough idiots that they’ll be able to keep opening portals. And we don’t know how they’re doing it or how to close them. I don’t think we can figure it out.”

“Your team...”

“Good people. Smart people.” And never mind that most of them weren’t people at all, not in the human sense, but she’d gotten past that weeks ago. “But this is so far beyond us, it’s like...” Her hands waved in the air, signifying her frustration. “We’ve got theories, but that’s all. And AJ’s plan to find the runaway queen, use her to force them to leave us alone...it was a good idea, but they’ve gotten nowhere, too. AJ said the most recent tip didn’t pan out. We’re out of time, Martin.”

If this new magic the preters were using to open the portals was based on tech, or somehow influenced by it, they needed to understand how in order to stop it. And this morning’s meeting had once again established that they didn’t and couldn’t. Maybe it was a thing only preters could see, could understand. At this point, Jan wasn’t ruling anything out.

The portals were the means, but they weren’t the cause. Preters had always stolen humans, had always meddled, but they’d never hated before, not like this. Jan remembered her contest of wills back Under the Hill, in the other realm, and shivered a little. The preter queen had used knowledge of the portals to flee into this world and disappear, leaving her court and consort behind. That had been what had triggered this new behavior, their anger at this realm—their anger at humans.

The portals were the means, but the queen was the missing piece, the trigger and the solution.

“We need to find her,” Jan said. “And we need to find her now.”

Martin rolled over onto his back, looking up at the sky, but his hand reached out and gathered hers, fingers folding together. “So we will,” he said, his confidence unshakeable. “You just have to come up with a clever plan.”

Despite herself, despite or maybe because of the tension stretching her almost too tight to breathe, Jan laughed. And that was why she loved him, because he said things like that and meant them. “Right. I’ll get right on that, then.”

Chapter 2

The Lady Nalith, once queen of the Court Under the Hill and now in chosen exile, was satisfied—finally—with the workman’s efforts. She ran her fingers over the tangle of cords, then along the gleaming rim of the screen, careful not to touch the screen itself; she had no desire to interfere with the display, and even the faintest ghost of her fingertips could do that, she had been told.

“Remarkable,” she said, her voice almost a satisfied purr. “Not even in my old court was there magic of this quality.”

“It’s a plasma display, millions of these tiny cells between the glass,” the human began to say before being cut off by a sharp gesture with her other hand. She did not care what means the creature used. Her concern was not with the conveyance, but what it conveyed.

She stepped away from the screen and seated herself on the love seat, reclining back as though it were a throne, if one far more comfortable than any she had occupied before. On the newly installed screen in front of her, the figures moved and spoke, breaking into music and dance in seemingly random and yet perfect moments.

Opera, one of her new courtiers had told her. This was called opera. She did not understand the things the figures said, the clothes they wore, or the story that was being told, even after all these months of watching, but it did not matter. She could sit and watch and be enthralled by the display on the screen.

It amazed her, still, that in a world where so many were unaware of magic, unable to touch it, they could still create such things, almost carelessly, without notion of what they did. To pull wonder from nothing, beauty from despair, agony from mere thought...

Her consort would have scoffed to call this magic. Her former consort, she amended, eyes narrowing. Unworthy of her. He—all of them, those she’d left behind—had been blind, trapped. Only she could see. This new world, the wonders it provided. All hers now. And she would not share.

She rested her hand, fingers splayed across her chest, feeling the odd flare within. She had been cold for so long, she had almost not recognized the change when it came, had not understood what it was. Had not realized how much she longed for it, she who had longed for nothing before.

Her hold on this world was slight for now, still, but it would grow. Slowly, carefully, her presence a beacon for those who would fill her court, serve her whims. And the fire within her would grow, until it warmed her entirely.

“This is connected to the internetting?” she asked, tilting her head to follow the wires that disappeared into a hole drilled in the wall and from there she knew not where.

“It is.” The human opened his mouth to say something else and then reconsidered, properly gauging her mood. He was enthralled but no fool.

Two human-creatures had come to install this internetting the first day she’d taken possession of the house. She had thought this one amusing and useful, and cast a glamour that he would return. Once he did, she had tightened her hold, binding him to her. He was old but strong, and his eyes were a pale, pale blue that made his skin seem ever paler. His graying hair and lined face should have repelled her, but this, too, in this world, instead fascinated her. Age and weakness...humans accepted them so casually, fought them so fiercely. It fascinated her as much as their creativity did.

In the old days Under the Hill, creative humans had been prized slaves, gems jealously hoarded. They were so fragile, their brilliance so brief, wasted on such short-lived, shortsighted creatures. Still, they were useful, then and now.

“You may sit,” she told the human, noticing that he was still standing by the screen, awaiting her next comment. He nodded, arranging himself on the low cushions by her feet, still tense from her reprimand. Nalith sighed. Fragile and far too sensitive. She let one hand rest on his shoulder to tell him that she was pleased with his work and there was no need to be afraid.

When she was displeased, there would be no question in the matter.

The display on the screen continued, the characters moving about the stage. Their garb was elaborate, even by her standards, their motions large, their voices exquisite. Nalith did not know the story they told but felt herself caught up in their passion to tell it, something inside her twisting and shifting as the action twisted and shifted.

The sensation of being at the whim and control of another disturbed her, even as she craved it, and a frown touched her perfect features. Why was such ability to create given to humans, this power over her moods? How dare they think to move her, to manipulate her in such a way, against her will?

She had come to this world because she thought the skill would come to her here, away from that barren hill. But even here, in this fecund place, the final spark eluded her still, and that fact kindled her irritation once again.

“My lady?”

The hesitant, piping voice came from the doorway. The slight, rough-skinned figure kowtowed from where it lingered in the doorway, attempting to gain her attention but put off by her frown. She did not even bother to glare, trusting that someone else would remove it, and went back to contemplating the screen.