Soul of Fire tp-2

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “I’m surprised this was even on a map,” Jan said, looking out the window as they came off the highway.

  Little Creek wasn’t a city. It was barely a town; there was one small sign advertising its existence, then a narrow wooden bridge across what had to be the Little Creek of its name, and maybe fifty houses scattered around a single main street that held all the basics of country life.

  “Mama’s Cakes? That’s cute.” Jan was scanning the main street as they drove by. “A bakery, one pizza place, and a bait-and-tackle store...at least they have a library. That is also the post office.”

  “At least the truck looks totally natural here,” Martin said.

  “Oh, yeah. Trucks and overalls and no phone signal worth a damn.” She scowled at her phone and then put it away in her bag. Something pricked on her arms again, a sense of unease that she wanted to write off to being out of roaming range but knew wasn’t. Here there be preters.

  “The witch was right,” Martin said, ignoring both of them. She knew that his ears couldn’t actually flick with interest, not in this form, but his body language was giving the impression of exactly that. “There’s something here. Something preternatural. I can feel it.”

  “Keep driving,” Jan said. “Humans are safe, but if you can feel her, she can feel you, right?”

  The kelpie nodded, his hands too tight on the wheel to be as casual as he was trying to sound, but he kept the truck to a slow, steady pace, not attracting any attention. They’d run into that problem before, which was part of why AJ had dragged Jan into the fight to begin with. She could get up close and personal when they couldn’t.

  But the witch had been able to tell that Tyler was, what did she call it—elf-shot? Jan hadn’t thought of it before, but could the preters tell? Would his scent, or whatever it was, call out to the queen, even though she hadn’t ever met him?

  And if so, was that a good thing or a bad one?

  “Figure out the trap, then set the bait,” she said to herself, then shook her head when Martin turned to look at her. “Nothing. Can you tell where she is?” Her prickling told her there was danger, but not where.

  “Not exactly, no. Near. In town. And she’s been here for a while. The others, they left just a trace, and it disappeared after a bit. This is more like a pool of smell. Like...like the court, back through the portal.”

  “So we’re in the right place,” Tyler said.

  “Yes.”

  Jan bit her lip, wanting to offer reassurances but unsure how they would be received. This wasn’t the bitch who had tortured Tyler, brainwashed him, and nearly killed Jan, but Jan wasn’t sure that was going to matter once they were face-to-face. Would he be able to handle it? Would she?

  “Keep going,” she said.

  At the far end of the street, there was a huge mansion on the hill to the left and what looked like an RV haven to the right. Then they were out of the town itself, such as it was, and into what looked like a national park of some sort. Or somewhere large trees had been growing for a long time, and there wasn’t much—any—traffic sharing the road with them.

  Martin pulled onto the shoulder the moment he felt safer and then turned to look at them. “So. We know she’s here. What now?”

  Jan had to cough once before her voice would come up strongly enough to be heard. “Even if she scented you, just one unfamiliar supernatural wouldn’t set her off. There are probably a handful in these hills anyway, if they haven’t all run. So, we have a little time to think.”

  “We should let AJ know...” Martin started, then let the suggestion trail off.

  “She’d scent them coming and be gone again, just like last time, wouldn’t she?”

  “Probably.”

  They both turned to look at Tyler, surprised that he’d finally spoken. He stared out the windshield, and his jaw shifted a little, but he didn’t say anything more at first. Then he sighed. “If she’s anything like...the others, then she’ll be too arrogant to leave without a clear threat. Just us, though, we wouldn’t be a threat. And even if she smells Martin, having been driven away once, she’ll be even more determined to stay this time. Her pride will be hurt.”

  “Will that make her more cautious or more careless?”

  Tyler shook his head. “I don’t know. If it were...were Her—” and Jan could still hear the capital letters in that “—then I would say more aggressive, angrier. But the queen...” His shoulders raised in a shrug. “There was no queen in the court when I was there. I don’t know how that changes things.”

  “She was their center, their stability,” Martin said, “the single point of order in their chaos. That’s why they’re so screwed up and angry now.”

  “Will she be stable without them? That’s why she needs a court here. She needs the audience, needs to be needed. Drama queen, literally.” Jan thought about that, chewing her lip, while the other two waited.

  “We’ll play it both ways,” Jan decided, wondering when the hell she’d been put in charge. When she’d decided to leave the Farm and they’d both followed her, she guessed. “Stability, familiarity, and challenge, those’re our ins.”

  Martin shook his head, then reached up to run his fingers through his hair, a sure sign that he wasn’t happy. “You want us to go in there, all three of us? Him?”

  “Right here,” Tyler said mildly.

  “Hell, no, I don’t want to. Do you think I’m insane?” She glared at both of them. “Don’t answer that. But what did you think was going to happen when you said to let him come, that we’d leave him on the curb outside? She’s going to be on the alert for attack. The three of us have a chance to...sneak in.”

  “Sneak into the court?” This time it was Tyler who looked at her as though she had lost her mind.

  “We did it once before,” Martin said, purely contrary, as though he hadn’t just been arguing against it.

  “Technically, we didn’t so much sneak in as march in blindly.” They had followed Tyler’s trail to Under the Hill and bullshitted their way in and then bluffed their way out. The memory and the awareness of how easily everything could have gone wrong were part of Jan’s ongoing nightmares.

  She shook off those memories and focused on the here and now. And the deadline, still ticking away. Three days now, or was it two? She was starting to lose track, the tick-tick-tick too tightly packed in her brain now for clarity. “We’re here. We managed to do what the others couldn’t, by virtue of being human. And flying under the preter radar. AJ couldn’t have gotten a witch to help, even if he’d asked around—she barely let you in the door, Martin, and only because you were with us, and she was already worried.”

  She waited, and the kelpie nodded once reluctantly. “Witches don’t have much love for any of us. We might have been able to convince her, but it would have taken time. And AJ—well, lupin aren’t exactly trusted by humans, above and beyond.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” Jan said drily. She had learned to like AJ, but at their first meeting, if she hadn’t been so scared, she probably would have pushed him under the bus they’d yanked her from, just for being such an intimidating, growling ass. And that was before she’d learned what he was. Lupin weren’t werewolves, not the way humans understood it, but they were predators. Predators who were an unapologetic match for humans.

  “So, we’re here, we know where she is, and she’s not expecting us. I say we at least try.”

  “Try what?” Tyler said, and she knew—the way she’d known before, when he was still healthy, normal, push-her-buttons Tyler—that he was trying to get her to say it out loud, to make it real. Back then, she might have blushed, backed down, thought her idea too silly to actually say out loud, be taken seriously.

  She had learned to say impossible things a dozen times before breakfast since then.

  “Try to work our way into the court. No, listen to me.” Jan went on before he could protest—or worse, if he didn’t. “She’s building a new court here, so that means she needs people around
her to fill that court. And we know she didn’t take any of her own kind with her. If she’s curious about humans, the way we thought she might be for her to come here, want to stay here, then we go in and play that up. If she’s looking for supers to be her new courtiers...” Jan swallowed once, then forced the words out, looking at Martin. “You can play up the crazy-ass dangerous side you showed the other preters. Maybe. Or if she wants—”

  “If she wants a demure, useful tool, I can do that, as well.” Martin didn’t sound happy, but he wasn’t arguing against it, either. “You’re right. I don’t like it, but you’re right.” His jaw moved, as if he was chewing, and his steady brown gaze held hers as he thought. She watched, fascinated as always by the golden glints deep within his pupils. She wasn’t sure if it was an all-supernatural thing or only specific types, but she found herself looking at eyes more carefully now, looking for it.

  “It’s definitely her,” Martin went on. “The air in this town vibrates from her presence, like the after-crack of gunpowder. How the hell did any search team miss this? I know AJ sent teams up here—hell, we’re not that far from the Farm itself!”

  “It’s obvious to you, to us. But we’ve been there,” Tyler said. His voice was so low, they could barely hear him. “We’ve been surrounded by them, scraped raw by them. How could we miss it?”

  Jan reached out and took Tyler’s hand in hers without thinking, the same way Martin did to her. Unlike previous attempts since they’d returned, this time his fingers closed around hers without hesitation or flinching.

  If nothing else, that much good had come out of this.

  “So,” she said. “We’re going to do this. How, exactly, are we going to do this?”

  * * *

  Little Creek was small enough that there was no buffer between the rest of the world and the stench of preter. The moment Martin walked over the bridge and into town proper, the sun fading at his back and shadows ahead, it hit him all over again, even more strongly than when they had driven through. The worst part of it was that the awareness wasn’t unpleasant; all this would have been easier if it had been unpleasant, if the preter were repugnant. They weren’t. They were elves, legendary even among the supernaturals of this world for their exotic, fearsome glamour and grace. Feared, despised...but also legend.

  He had waited twenty-four hours while Jan and Tyler went on ahead, taking the truck out to an old logging road and hiding it there, then walking back. He had taken his time, giving the humans their chance first. It was a risk trying to slide three people into the court in the same week, but with luck, no one would think to associate two humans with a kelpie.

  He had also, on Jan’s instructions, once he’d gotten a signal on her phone again, sent a message to Galilia and to Glory each, telling them where they were and what they were doing. If nothing else, at least AJ would know what had happened to them.

  Assuming they weren’t too busy holding off the end of the world. When was the deadline up? Jan had been the one to make the bargain, the one keeping watch; Martin had no real sense of time normally, and recent events had disoriented him more than he wanted to admit. Soon, though. Very soon.

  Elves were legend, but he had seen them up close, seen them in their own court, been surrounded by the force of their very nature, and he would never admit to Jan how close he had come to not fighting them, to giving in and staying there.

  He hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t. Jan’s safety had depended on him. AJ was counting on him. The awareness of those things had been reins on his neck, focusing him. He was needed; he would stay on the straight and narrow for as long as he was needed.

  He did wonder, though, if the other creatures of that world were just as appealing—or if the court had destroyed them all, turned them into nothing more than mindless servants to their glamour. They had seen others in the preter realm, unknown species, but they had been dumb animals or corpses left in the wake of Tyler’s captor as she returned to the court. There was no way to tell what those might have been, breathing and vibrant.

  The thought of that happening here, of this world becoming nothing more than a shadowed showplace, a backdrop for preternatural vanity...

  He wasn’t worried for himself. Martin wasn’t much on self-awareness or long-term thinking; he took the moment and then he took the next moment, and whatever happened then, happened. He thought that many of the supers would fade back into their hills and rivers, become shadows themselves or adapt to serve the court. But lupin like AJ and Meredith would fight and die. And humans...

  He had seen what happened to humans when preternaturals touched them.

  Martin was under no illusions about himself, about what he was, what he did. As he’d told Jan once, it was a thing. But he did not toy with his victims, did not take pleasure in their suffering.

  He looked at Janny and saw a human, a person. A friend. Stubborn, fierce, and loyal enough to trust him even when everything she knew said not to.

  A preter would look at Jan and see only a servant, a mirror to reflect their own vanity. Or worse, use and then abandon her to become one of the Greensleeves, lingering outside the court forever hoping for some scrap of attention, some touch of favor.

  Caught up in his thoughts, Martin suddenly realized that he had walked into what passed for a downtown, the tightest cluster of storefronts along the main road. His nerves went tight, the urge to change shape humming at him: an instinctive reaction, not useful. This was a human place. Most of the stores were closed, a few restaurants glimmering with light from within, people moving inside, crossing the street, or walking along sidewalks. A few, not many. This was a town where dinnertime was a serious thing, home from work, with family, tucked away for the night.

  Away from things that might be hunting in the dusk.

  He turned right, away from the center, up a wide, tree-lined street, until he came to the place that practically vibrated with wrongness, with unbelonging.

  They were watching him.

  His feet had carried him to the turn in the road and then stopped. Waiting.

  It didn’t take long. There were two figures walking toward him, for all intents and purposes taking in the evening air, but he knew them for what they were: guards.

  “You.”

  “Me,” he agreed, amiable, even as the reed-thin figure stepped up and tried to get in his face. He had no idea what it was: most likely AJ or Elsa would know, but he’d never bothered, before all this, to learn the different species. He could break it in two if he tried probably. He resisted the urge to shift, to give the creature a hoof in the face, another to the gut. That wasn’t what he was here to do. Not yet, anyway.

  “What’re you doing here, brook horse? The creek’s already owned.”

  He’d known that, too; walking over the rickety wooden bridge, he’d seen the reflections underneath where no light should be glinting. The naiad there had winked at him and let him pass. They understood each other well enough; she wasn’t going to get involved.

  “I’m looking for Herself,” he told the other guard, ignoring reed-thin entirely.

  “Whoself?” The other one looked human enough to pass on the street without blinking, but he could see the rustle of downy feathers on its neck, see the way its arms didn’t joint quite right, the way it hid its hands from sight.

  “Oh, give me a break,” he said, not having to fake his exasperation or annoyance. “Tell me she’s not accepting anyone to her court, fine, I get that. But let’s not pretend we can’t scent her all over this town. Now, I’ve walked two days to get here, I’m tired and dry, and either you let me go on up and present myself or...”

  He let just a hint creep out, but it was enough for thin and weedy to shift—not stepping backward exactly, but wanting to. Martin allowed the hint of a smirk to creep out. Kelpies were loners, didn’t have to worry about alpha intimidation tactics, but he’d been watching AJ for long enough to pick up a few tricks.

  He could feel other supernaturals gathering around him,
silent and unseen but definitely there. None of them made a move, though. Nobody wanted to fuck with the craziest SOB in the crowd, not unless they wanted to make a name for themselves, and anyone who wanted to make a name for themselves wouldn’t be content standing guard duty so far from the actual action, away from the queen’s direct sight.

  “Let me present myself,” he said again, keeping his body still, his expression flat. “Let Herself decide.”

  He didn’t see any communication between the guards, but he felt the ones behind him move away, and tall and skinny stepped aside, rejoining his downy companion on the side of the road.

  Refusing to turn his head enough to check what was happening on either side of him, Martin went on at his normal pace, a steady, loose-limbed walk that had him up the street and on the sidewalk within minutes.

  The house itself looked...ordinary. It was set on a corner lot, sloping grass running down to the cracked sidewalk, a great tree planted in front, towering over the roof, showing full autumn colors that glimmered red and gold even in the dark. The building itself was three stories high, with a porch that wrapped around the front, and a bay window filled with colored glass that shone from within, a warm, welcoming glow. Two figures—one definitely human, an older male, the other too short and squat and scaled to be anything other than a super—lounged on the porch, their feet up and their attention square on him.

  Guards, of a higher level than the ones on the street. And a human among them; Jan had been right.

  The house might look ordinary, but like the Farm, it housed things far from ordinary.

  “I’ve come to seek service with Herself,” he called, not to the figures on the porch but those undoubtedly waiting beyond, behind that wooden door. “Will she consider me?”

  There was a long pause, the air heavy with the weight, and then it eased, and the door opened, letting more of that warm glow escape.

  “You’re in luck,” the smaller figure said, its voice a gravelly croak. “Evening’s when she’s in best humor. Go in, and do your best.” Its mouth split, froglike, and showed a shark’s row of teeth. “If your best don’t please, we’ll see you out here again soon enough.”