Laura Anne Gilman

by Heart of Briar

  “What?”

  “Look, you don’t get it at all, do you? I have a life! I have a job, and friends, and a family. I took the day off, that’s all. I can’t just disappear, the way Tyler did. No.”

  They stared at each other, and Jan willed herself not to back down. After all of the crap that had already happened, this shouldn’t have been so important to her, but it was.

  “Fine.” Toba broke the stalemate. “She’s right: to do anything online, she needs to be connected, and reception’s shit out here. So we’ll move in with you, set up protections there. Don’t give me that look, kelpie. You don’t have to come. Not like you’re good for much, anyway.”

  Martin drew himself upright, making the most of the full foot of height he had on the other supernatural. “I swore I would keep her safe.”

  Toba seemed to find that hysterical. “You? Right.”

  Jan looked back and forth between the two of them, confused. If anything, Martin—twice the height and stronger—would be able to protect her better than Toba, slight and hunched over, whose sole weapon seemed to be his wit.

  “Look, I—” Martin took the shorter being by the shoulder and led him away, not gently. They started to argue, their voices lowered so that she could not hear them, no matter how she tried. After a minute and some emphatic gestures from Martin, Toba looked over his shoulder once at her, then shrugged. Whatever Martin was saying, it seemed to not impress the owl-faced being much.

  Finally, they called AJ over, and the whole argument started again.

  Jan curled up on the sofa and closed her eyes, weary beyond belief. Standing up for herself always took so much energy, even when people didn’t get mad.

  Where was Tyler? What was he thinking just then? Were they...were they hurting him? Or was the seduction that had stolen him continuing? The thought burned, but she forced herself to face it. He might not want to come back....

  And then, suddenly, the argument in the corner was over, and she was being bundled back into the SUV. Martin drove this time, with Toba perched on the other side of her. They drove back into the city, following her directions, headlights picking out landmarks, the streets slowly becoming familiar again, until they pulled up outside of her building.

  By then, night had fallen with a definite thud, and there was a chill in the air that made her wish she’d been wearing a sweater that morning, instead of a long-sleeved T-shirt.

  Had it really only been that morning that she’d left her apartment, intent on finding out what was really happening with Tyler? Since then...the world had turned upside down and inside out. She was worn down and exhausted, and wanted only to stagger up the stairs, check her email, and pass out facedown on her bed. Maybe when she woke up, this would all be a terrible dream.

  Chapter 4

  “Hey you. Sleepyhead.” His breath was warm on her bare shoulder. “Wanna go for a run?”

  “Are you kidding me?” She didn’t run. She walked at a nice steady pace and did all her exercising at home, on a yoga mat. The only time she wanted to run was if something was chasing her, and even then she though she might let that something catch her, rather than die in a gory coughing-up mess. “I’ll keep the bed warm, how’s that?”

  “Yeah, that’s good,” Tyler said, leaning over her, and she turned slightly so she could see that familiar, slow, so-sexy smile on his face, until she realized his lips, usually so soft and full, had narrowed to hard lines, pointed like a beak, and then his face changed, eyes glowing gold, the beak opening to reveal double rows of sharp teeth as though he was going to bite her entire face off—

  And Jan sat up in bed, not really awake yet but shocked out of the dream, her eyes wide-open and her heart racing.

  “Holy shit on a shamrock.”

  Just a dream. It was just a dream, you idiot, and what did you eat yesterday that gave you a dream like that?

  Operating on routine, she rolled out of bed, took her pills, and headed for the coffeemaker, where her sleep-dazed awareness took another jolt at the sight of Martin, wearing only a pair of low-slung jeans, standing in front of the coffee machine, already adding coffee to the filter.

  “Hey,” he said over his shoulder. “Good, you’re up. I didn’t know if you liked it strong or not.”

  She looked at him, not quite certain what he was talking about, and he blinked back at her. “What? Coffee? We like it, too.”

  It took a minute before her brain caught up with the rest of her. Yesterday. Tyler’s apartment, the bus, the warehouse, coming home with two men who weren’t actually men, who wanted her help to save the world....

  No wonder she’d had bad dreams.

  Unable to deal with the realization that it had all been real—or at least true—just yet, Jan looked down at her feet. The polish on her toes was starting to flake off. Her gaze flicked away, like her brain, unable to settle on anything for too long, and caught sight of Martin’s feet, instead. He was barefoot, which wasn’t surprising, and his feet ended, not in five toes, but a single wedge with one dark nail, like...like the tip of a hoof.

  That alone should have sent her screaming out into the hallway, or at least back to bed. Instead, she simply said, “I like it strong,” and went past him to the refrigerator, pulling out the carton of orange juice. Out of deference to her houseguests, she poured it into a glass, rather than taking a swig from the carton the way she usually did.

  The thought struck her, then, that she was only wearing her nightshirt, which barely covered her ass. It struck her immediately after that she didn’t feel the slightest bit of embarrassment, standing there in front of Martin, both of them half-dressed.

  “Shock,” she diagnosed. “Yesterday was... This will all hit me later, and then I can have a nervous breakdown.”

  Martin either didn’t hear her or decided to ignore her. “Did you sleep well?”

  Jan put the juice back and closed the door. She had to stop and think about the question. “Yeah. Weirdly enough, I did.” Despite the dream waking her up in a cold sweat, she felt rested, as if she’d had a full eight hours of sleep.

  He went back to measuring coffee into the coffeemaker. “Good. You had a busy day yesterday.”

  “Yeah. You could say that.” Hysteria would be appropriate but useless, she decided. “You? I mean, how’d you sleep?” She had been so tired by the time they got back last night, she’d barely had time to throw extra pillows and blankets at them before retreating to her bedroom and closing the door. She didn’t even know where they’d bunked down: there had been no trace of pillows or blankets in the main room when she’d wandered across. She would have noticed that. Probably.

  “I did. Toba doesn’t sleep much. And we had... There was... A third...” Martin floundered a bit, then pushed the start button on the coffeemaker, and turned to face her. “AJ sent someone else to join us, to help set up the protections. He doesn’t think what we set up last night was enough, especially if we’re here, too. Just... Ignore it. The...the other, I mean.”

  “Ignore it. Uh-huh.” Considering what she’d already seen, that wasn’t particularly comforting. Nor was the fact that Martin looked a little uncomfortable even talking about it.

  She decided to change the subject. “So, what exactly are these protections? Spells?”

  He seemed just as happy with the change of subject. “No. Or, not really. A kind of glamour, sort of, to make it seem as though you’re not here. It’s hard to explain. Toba’s better at it than I am. I tend to make a splash.”

  The coffeemaker spluttered to life, and the first hint of aroma filled the kitchen. Jan inhaled deeply. Maybe the world wasn’t entirely FUBAR’d, after all.

  “If you really want to understand it, you should ask him,” Martin said. “Do you need breakfast? Because we really should get started. Your leman’s been missing for four days now; if we’re going to have any chance of reclaiming him, it will have to be soon.”

  Jan’s stomach clenched into knots again, and the coffee suddenly didn’t sme
ll as appealing. “Is fifteen more minutes going to make a difference?”

  “I— No. Probably not.”

  “Okay. There’s something I need to do, first.”

  First, she put herself under a very hot shower, scrubbing hard enough to wash everything that had happened yesterday—the past week—off her skin, then towel-dried her hair until it started to curl. She went back into her bedroom and stared at her closet, finally putting on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. At the last minute she added a silver cuff bracelet and chunky silver earrings to the mix. Silver was supposed to be protective, right? Or was that only against vampires?

  She walked back out into the main room, picked her cell phone off the desk, and dialed a number off the Post-it stuck to the left of a slightly bedraggled-looking house plant. While she waited for the call to go through, she picked up a half-empty glass of water from the desk and poured it into the plant, imagining she could hear it whispering a dry thanks as she did so.

  Something moved in the corner of her vision, and she turned to see a too-thin wisp of a creature with pale blue skin and a thin, lipless mouth staring at her. She managed not to jump or shriek, although her hand gripped the phone hard enough that she could almost feel the plastic casing crackle under her fingers.

  The creature—the “other” Martin had mentioned, who had arrived while she’d slept—closed its overlarge black eyes once and turned away. Jan let out a faint exhale of air and carefully eased her fingers loose, before she broke the damn thing.

  “Fort Wood Precinct, how may I direct your call?”

  “Hi. I, um, I’d like to talk to Office Jarvis, please? It’s...it’s about Tyler Wash.” She chewed on the edge of her thumbnail, trying to ignore the three beings taking up space in her apartment—an impossible act. Martin came in and handed her a mug of coffee, then settled himself on the sofa, watching her as if she were the newest must-see show on cable. Toba and the one who had arrived after she’d gone to sleep, who hadn’t been introduced, had started walking through the apartment, poking at the walls and staring out windows as if they were expecting something to stare back at them.

  If something could hover outside her fifth-floor window... Jan remembered the swooping thing in the warehouse and restrained the desire to tell them to board up the windows as if a hurricane was coming. The turncoats had gotten through the floor of a bus—did she really think wood or brick was going to stop them?

  The image of those creepy-as-hell hands reaching for her, where she’d been just a second before, made her shudder.

  “I’m sorry,” the voice on the other end of the line came back. “Officer Jarvis isn’t available right now. Would you like to leave a message, or speak with someone else in that department?”

  “Oh. No, I understand.” It wasn’t as though the cop was suddenly going to be more sympathetic, after all. “I just...I’m still worried about him. Tyler, I mean. My boyfriend. He disappeared a couple of days ago, and I tried to file a missing person’s report, but....” She was babbling, and tried to rein herself in before she really made a fool of herself.

  “But you’re not a family member, and you’re frustrated because nobody seems to be doing anything?” The voice was sympathetic, not sarcastic, and something inside Jan crackled a little; she hadn’t realized she was expecting to be ridiculed or patted on the head and told—again—not to fuss over it.

  Toba and the other super went into her bedroom, and Jan tried to remember if she’d left anything embarrassing out in plain sight—then wondered what would be considered embarrassing to them and why she cared.

  The voice at the other end of the phone line was still talking. “I’m sure it was explained to you about the logistics about a missing person’s report, and why we can’t respond immediately to every one.”

  “Yes, I just...” She thought about what the others had said, about seasons and moon phases. “I’m wondering how many people—adults, I guess—go missing. If there’s a cycle, or a seasonal pattern? And what happens to the people who aren’t reported? What if their family just assumes that they’re being flaky, or not answering the phone?”

  “That’s an interesting question. Two questions, really.” The voice—another cop, a city-hire receptionist?—sounded intrigued, not annoyed. “I’m sure that there are organizations that track seasonal disappearances, but we don’t officially compile anything like that. Generally, people get reported more often than they actually go missing—that’s why we ask so many questions, because a lot of missing-person reports are simply that someone was out of reach for a while, and their loved ones panicked. But, yes—with the homeless population what it is, and people living on their own, especially people who came here from somewhere else and haven’t established a support system...there’s always people who disappear and we don’t know to look for them. But that’s not the case here—your friend had you.”

  Jan nodded and then glared at Toba, who had appeared in front of her, his body language saying that he was about to ask a question. Apparently, they were done installing the protections, whatever they were. “I just...” She couldn’t tell this person what she knew, she couldn’t even hint at the fact that there were people gone missing—people in danger—who didn’t fit their damned profile and weren’t going to be reported. Not without sounding like a crazy person.

  She had three supernaturals in her living room—one of them eating the melon she’d been saving for breakfast—and her lover was being held captive by evil elves. Yeah, that would get her official attention, but not the kind she needed.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been very...kind.”

  “I know it’s hard,” the man on the phone said. “You keep checking in with us until your friend comes home. Okay?”

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  She hung up the phone and raised her eyebrows at Toba, who was still waiting, expectantly. “All right. What?”

  “The police will think you’re crazy if you tell them anything.”

  “Yes, I already figured that out, thanks. But I’m not going to abandon the possibility that they might have new information—either on Tyler or anyone else who disappeared. Relying on only one source is crap research.”

  The pale blue creature, who had been hanging back as though it were unwilling to approach Jan too closely, made a noise that might have been a breathy laugh or a scoff, she couldn’t tell.

  “Shush,” Toba said to it. To her, he said, “Right now, we don’t have time. Your leman doesn’t have time.”

  “Yeah, so everyone keeps telling me. But I needed to sleep, okay? I don’t think well on less than a solid seven. I want to find him, more than you do, but if they’re using dating sites, this isn’t going to happen immediately.”

  Trolling for elves. Jan shook her head. If she thought about it for too long, her head might explode. But, oh, the urge to tell someone—Glory, probably—was nearly overwhelming.

  She took a sip of the coffee and felt her brain kick in a little more, then frowned. “All of you keep using that word. What the hell does it mean?”

  “What, leman? Your beloved. Your lover.”

  “So why not say that?” She was being a brat, she knew, but a sudden need to establish some kind of control—even over words—drove her on.

  “Fine. Your lover. Does it matter what we call him, if he dies?”

  That stopped her cold.

  “If he...” She had accepted that Tyler was missing. She had accepted that there was danger. But even the comments about the turncoats eating humans hadn’t... “Dead?”

  “Not yet.” Martin was off the sofa and on his knees in front of her, his wide black-brown eyes holding her attention, so she couldn’t look away. “Maybe not ever. The preters...they are not as we are, they are not as you are, but it has never been said that they are killers. Not needlessly. And they have a need for your Tyler.”

  “But they have no care for flesh, as we do,” Toba said. “Martin, stop sugarcoating. You’re not here
to get in her pants. They’ll use him until they get what they want, and if he dies while they’re getting, they’ll just steal another.

  “More, the longer they have him, the more they’ll own him. That’s how they do it—they put a glamour on humans, lure them away, and consume them, bit by bit, until their pets will do anything they ask, believe anything they say.”

  “Brainwashing.” That, out of everything else, she understood. Sort of.

  “More. Worse. Human, listen to me.” Toba’s voice managed to draw her attention away from Martin. “If you believe nothing else, believe this. If you do not get your leman—your lover—back soon, you will get nothing back but a shell. A heartless, soulless shell.”

  She licked her lips, which had gone dry and cracked. “The legends say that you guys don’t have souls, either.” She had remembered that, before she fell asleep last night.

  Toba clacked his beak together, the sound clearly one of exasperation. “I can’t speak for pony boy here, but I’m not going to steal your soul. I have no interest in it, no use for it. All I want is to keep my home safe, keep preters on their side of the divide, not messing with the balance of what should be, what is. That’s my incredibly self-serving, self-centered motivation.”

  “That’s what we’re all motivated by,” Martin said.

  The blue thing didn’t say anything.

  Jan thought of Tyler. She thought of all the others who might have gone missing. She thought about creatures that would do that, steal people away and suck them dry, and thought about them having access to everyone, without any barriers or hesitations.

  “All right. Let’s get started, which means figuring out how they’re finding their targets. If this Stjerne is one of them, then she probably met him the same way I did, through a dating site. That’s where we’re going to look first.” She paused, frowning. “Men, or women?”

  “What?”

  “Do they prefer men or women? That’s going to influence what we’re looking for.”