Laura Anne Gilman

by Heart of Briar

  “Most of us are the bucolic types,” Toba said, amused, and slightly faster on the uptake than Martin, not that that was saying much. “Not so much need to be connected to the masses of humanity. And if we wish to communicate with each other...” He paused. “We don’t, usually. AJ took on the leader of each group directly, to force them to listen, and even then, many refused to hear.”

  “We’re also not much for paying for anything,” Martin said, frowning at the screen and then—successfully—entering one of the fake log-ins and getting a welcome screen. “We’re horrible mooches.”

  “So noted.” Jan had already sussed that much from the way Martin had made himself at home in her kitchen. “But you have a cell phone?”

  Toba chuckled. “Would you believe that I have a niece in Puerto Rico I like to keep in touch with? The younger generations are more adaptable—she likes to text.” He pulled a flip-phone from the pocket of his sweater—she was amused to note that his cardigan was exactly the same soft gray color her grandfather used to wear—and held it up somewhat sheepishly.

  “You can’t talk to her by...” Jan floundered, not sure what she was going to say.

  “We don’t do magic, human. We are magic. Shifting, flying, glamourizing...no wands, no spells, no magic tricks. Just...us. The way some humans sing, and others paint, and some of you—” he shrugged, his misshapen shoulders rising under the cardigan “—do other things, according to your nature.”

  That made sense, she had to admit. And it explained why they all seemed so...normal. Then Toba blinked those golden eyes at her and clacked his beak in a faint laugh, and she amended that to mostly normal.

  “It would be nice if you could at least spin straw into gold,” she said. “Although it’s not like I’ve got straw handy. All right, Martin, are you ready to try this on your own?”

  He nodded enthusiastically and then lowered his chin slightly in thought. “Yes. Yes. If yellow-eyes can handle it, so can I.”

  Jan had set Martin up with her old desktop for the initial demonstration. It was kludgy as hell at this point—she mainly used it as an extra monitor when she needed a larger display—but it would be enough for what they were doing. More to the point, it didn’t have anything essential loaded on it that Martin might cluelessly overwrite or wipe.

  Keeping the laptop for herself, Jan gave Toba a tablet her boss had sent her to test drive, thinking that it would be a better match to his smaller hands.

  Toba took the tablet, and his narrow lips—she had to stop thinking of it as a beak—twisted in what she was learning to recognize as a grin. “Little computer for the little man?”

  “Don’t start with the sizeism,” she retorted, falling into the habit of treating him the same way she did Steverino, with a mix of respect and sass. “Or Martin will start making comments about being hung like a horse.”

  Those too-yellow eyes widened in mock shock. “It’s like you know him.”

  She looked sideways to where Martin was fussing with the desk chair, trying to adjust it properly. “Yeah. But I don’t, do I?” Two days wasn’t enough to know anyone, and...she had proven pretty conclusively she didn’t understand human men, much less non-human ones.

  Toba’s amused expression faded, and he cocked his head to the side. “No. You don’t know any of us, not really. You never will. So long as you remember that, you’ll be okay.”

  The knots in Jan’s stomach—so familiar now she hadn’t even noticed them—tightened a hitch. Every time she started to get comfortable, something happened to remind her that they weren’t the sort to be comfortable around. That was, as Toba said, probably a good thing....

  She might not have read a lot of fairy tales, but she didn’t remember many of them ending well, for anyone.

  What was that AJ had said? That mostly, they ignored humans?

  “Yeah.” Ignorance might have been bliss, but it wasn’t possible anymore. She needed to do some real research soon, as soon as she had them up and running independently. “All right, let’s get you guys motoring. Remember what I showed you; the site’s set, your accounts are ready to go, and they’re designed to be relatively idiot-proof. All you have to do is enter what you’re looking for, and see who—or what—pops up.”

  “So, we look for lovers?” Martin swung around to look at them, and his eyes got wider, like a kid told that Santa was real.

  “We look for preters who are looking for lovers,” Toba said, reaching out to whack him across the back of his head, hard enough that Jan winced. “Don’t get distracted, kelpie.”

  The blue-skinned figure drifted a little closer, as though to watch what they were doing, and Jan shivered. It might be useful for protection, although she didn’t see how, if they couldn’t actually do magic, but the damn thing gave her the creeps.

  Toba took the netbook over onto the sofa and settled it on his lap, hands poised as he scanned the screen. “All right. Key words, reply to potentials, skip the rest. On it.”

  Toba’s claim to be the sole geek among the volunteered supernaturals proved accurate; he was quickly engrossed in the task, not needing any guidance beyond the occasional wording of a reply.

  It didn’t take Jan long to realize that Martin, however, for all his enthusiasm for any kind of flirting, was not well-suited to research—or doing any kind of long-term task, for that matter. He was too easily distracted. After the third time she found him chatting with random people who clearly weren’t who they were looking for, she yelled at him; when she found him browsing over to a porn site via offered clicks, she gave up.

  “You really are short-attention-span boy, aren’t you?”

  “He can’t help it,” Toba said, not looking up from the screen. “Kelpies.”

  They kept saying that, whatever that meant. Jan made a mental note to do some hard-core research once they took a break, and see if there was a how-to-deal-with-the-supernatural site up anywhere that had actual useful information.

  “It’s almost lunchtime,” she said to Martin now. “We’ll do this. You go pick up some pizzas, be useful.”

  It wasn’t just make-work: There was nothing in her fridge that would feed four. Or three—she still wasn’t sure what the lurking super ate, and needle-sharp tooth marks on the half-eaten melon gave her pause from even asking.

  “But...”

  “Be useful, Martin, or go away.”

  He looked mournful. “I don’t have any money.”

  “Of course you don’t.” She grabbed her wallet off the desk, and handed him two twenty-dollar bills. “Don’t go too crazy. Down the street and turn left, go to Gene’s Pizzeria. Two pizzas should be enough. I have soda and juice in the fridge already.”

  “Two pizzas. Got it.”

  “One with meat,” Toba called out. “No damned peppers.”

  Martin paused at the doorway, looking at Jan. “One peppers and mushrooms, one pepperoni?”

  Jan nodded. So she’d been right about him being a vegetarian. And, apparently, supers ate a lot of pizza. Or enough to form preferences, anyway. It made no sense, but it wasn’t like much of this did.

  Roll with it, she told herself. Getting Tyler home so you can kick his ass is the first and most important thing; you can figure out supernatural culture clashes later.

  The blue-skinned super watched him leave, then turned back to stare out through the walls.

  “Bet you he comes back with ’em both vegetarian,” Toba grumbled, and then went back to work, poking at the screen with two fingers.

  Jan didn’t go back to the site-trolling immediately. First, she entered a quick search for basic mythology sites and then—a sense of responsibility digging at her—took a look at her work email. The company she worked for maintained websites and social media for companies that didn’t want to maintain their own departments. Right now, untangling someone else’s coding screw-up seemed seriously unimportant, but there would still be bills to pay after, and while her job was a little more secure than Ty’s—she was an actual emp
loyee, not a contract-hire, and could take time off without getting kicked to the curb—she didn’t want to push it.

  Somehow, heroes in fantasy adventures could always just drop things and rush off to save the world.

  The backlog wasn’t too bad: she answered the questions she could handle easily, and redirected larger problems to other people, then looked at her project time line. The two projects she had in the queue could wait another day or so before the deadlines started getting crunchy, without anyone yelling, and since she’d been in the end of a project when Tyler had disappeared, everyone would think she was still hip-deep in that for another day or two.

  And if someone yelled for her, and she wasn’t able to hold their hand right away? She’d worry about it then. Hell, maybe they’d find the connection right away, some “enter here for the elves” sign, and AJ’s crew could go do their thing and...

  Jan sighed. She didn’t know what was going to happen, but she knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  From across the room, she could hear Toba muttering. “No, no, no...”

  Just listening to the dismay in his voice made Jan remember why she’d been so damn glad to find Tyler and cancel her memberships. It didn’t help that the key words they’d settled on were designed to find the most desperate, affection-hungry women, who would overlook anything that might otherwise be hinky in the hopes of meeting The One. Or at least The One For Now. The whole thing made her skin itch.

  Sighing, she closed out the work browser and looked at the top hits for mythology sites. They all seemed basic, generic as to be useless—or they were for some writer’s obviously made-up world. Giving up for now, she bookmarked some of them and then opened her own faux accounts. Almost immediately, a pop-up hit her screen, inviting her to chat, and she scanned the would-be-chatter’s profile before declining.

  “Damn you, Tyler. If you’d been able to keep it in your pants...neither of us would be in this mess, right now.”

  She said it low, but Toba apparently had ears like an owl’s, too.

  “Moderate your anger, human. The preters are very good at what they do. That is not to excuse your leman’s behavior but... Your history is filled with examples of otherwise virtuous souls who have been lured to ill fates.”

  “That’s not making me feel better.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  For a while, there was only the sound of typing keys and faint beeps of incoming chat requests.

  Finally, the silence started to wear on Jan—or not the silence exactly, but the silence with two other people in the room with her. At least Martin made noise, even if he didn’t hum the way Tyler did, or...

  “Hey. Toba.”

  “Yes?”

  She hadn’t really thought about what she was going to ask; she had just needed to say something, and hear him respond. “What... I mean...who...”

  “What am I?”

  “Yeah.” First-person research was always better than relying on Google, anyway.

  “In some places, we were called Splyushka.”

  That didn’t help worth a damn, but he didn’t explain further. “And Martin?”

  “A kelpie.”

  He’d said that before, as if she was supposed to know what that meant. Without turning around, she made a “go ahead” gesture at him over her shoulder.

  Toba hesitated. “Kelpies are...”

  “Flirts?” Wild guess, there. Not.

  “Yes. Among other things.” He sounded as if he was thinking things through before speaking. Jan let him. Finally he went on. “Be careful of yourself, around Martin. I don’t think that he would ever deliberately harm you, but...we cannot help but be true to our nature. We, Martin and I, we understand humans the most, of the volunteers, and so were considered the best to help you. That does not make us...safe.”

  “Is AJ safe?”

  That made Toba laugh, a sharp hacking noise. “No. AJ is not safe. But he has another job to do, one that needs his...nature.”

  She thought of the teeth set into that muzzle and those claw-tipped fingers. “He’s out there, isn’t he? Nearby.” Part of the protections they kept talking about? Toba had said that AJ was the one who talked people into doing stuff....

  “We have sworn to protect you, while you aid us. AJ and his kin are...best at that.”

  “He’s a werewolf.” That much at least she’d figured out.

  “He is lupin. He is no more wolf than Martin is, in fact, a horse. Janice.”

  The sudden seriousness in Toba’s voice, and his using her full name, distracted Jan from the screen, and she turned in her chair to look at him.

  “There is a reason our people stay apart, even as we share this space. Good reasons, hard-learned. If it were not for this threat, you would have lived your life ignorant of us...and it would have been for the best.” His beak clacked softly. “I meant truly what I said before: do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can understand us—or that we can understand you.”

  The lurker by the wall stirred, its entire body rippling as though a breeze passed right through it.

  “But...” She studied his expression, trying to read it, and nodded. “All right.” She thought he was wrong—there was always a way to understand someone, if you tried hard enough to listen—but they could argue about it later. “I think I have a few we should consider. You?”

  Toba did a quick count. “Seven, all from women. It would appear that our guess is correct, and they are still targeting males more than females.”

  Jan looked at her ratio and had to agree. “If we’re right about them being preters. They may just be human females playing on desperation, too. Reply to them with the script.” She had remembered some of the responses she’d gotten from men who wanted a date in the absolute worst way, and cribbed something together for them to use. If Tyler had fallen for the kind of lures they were seeing, and responded...Was it better, or worse, that as Toba said, he’d fallen for a well-honed trick? She would never know if he might have been responding to other women....

  “Maybe they were right. Maybe it wasn’t real at all, he was just looking to piss his family off, or I was projecting what I wanted to see, or...”

  “What?” Toba turned his head at a disconcerting angle, looking at her from behind the laptop’s screen.

  “Nothing. Never mind. Just talking to myself.” She clicked on the accounts she’d flagged as being potentials, and stared at one of the photos. Was the face a little too pointed? The eyes a little too round, the face slightly...alien?

  “Here’s one that might be,” Toba said, looking up. “Lonely woman with everything except a reason. Spend my days working, my nights dreaming of you. Want partner to walk in moonlight, watch the sun rise, live in a perfect dream. The key words match—moonlight, perfect, dreaming....”

  Jan winced. “Oh, god, that’s so bad it almost has to be from a human.”

  “Humans actually fall for this?”

  Jan stared at her computer screen, seeing not it, but that first email Tyler had sent her, after they’d connected. She remembered how it had felt, reading it, that leap of hope, that awareness that maybe, just maybe, there was someone out there who could understand, who would love her....

  “Yeah. We fall for it. Every time.”

  Before Toba could respond, the door to the apartment opened, and Martin came in with two pizzas, a brown paper bag balanced on top. He handed the bag without a word to the silent creature, who disappeared into the bathroom. Jan presumed it went there to eat in private. After what it had done to the melon, she was just as glad.

  “Put ’em on the table,” she said, indicating the remaining pizza boxes.

  “You two have any luck?” Martin asked, putting the two boxes on the coffee table. He lifted the lid off one box, pulling a slice out for himself and sitting on the sofa to eat it.

  Jan thought about telling him to go get a plate, and then shrugged. Pizza stains were hardly the worst thing this apartment had seen. Besides, he was a n
eat, almost fussy eater, folding the slice and eating it carefully from the sides, so that no grease or cheese escaped. She should get him a napkin, though, just in case. The shirt he’d put on, a solid blue button-down, looked too nice to get grease stains on.

  God, she sounded like a suburban housewife. These weren’t her kids; they weren’t even her friends. They weren’t human. Let him deal with his own damn clothing.

  “No luck at all, just a lot of hard work,” Toba said. “Not that you’d know hard work if it bit you on the face.”

  Jan went into the kitchen to get a plate for herself, as well as napkins, listening to the tone of their exchange rather than the words. Their squabbling was undercut with more annoyance than AJ’s words had carried; AJ and Martin were friends. These two weren’t. But they were working together to help her—no, not to help her. To keep those other things from getting a toehold here. She was just a tool, a way for them to get what they wanted.

  That was okay: they would be her tools, too. She wasn’t comfortable thinking like that, but she could learn. Maybe.

  And skeletal, blue-skinned thing? Jan had no idea what it was or wasn’t, wanted or didn’t, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out, either. She just hoped it wasn’t going to lurk over her while she slept.

  “Hey, does anyone want soda, or is orange juice okay? Or milk, but it’s skim, and I’m, um, not sure how old it is....”

  There was a noise outside, a rough, metallic clatter cutting through the bickering in the living room, and Jan frowned. It sounded like one of the street sweeper machines cleaning the gutters, or maybe a maintenance crew taking down trees, but it was late in the day for both of those things. The sound grew, until it sounded as though someone was revving an engine just beyond the wall, and Jan went into the main room, intending to look out the window and see what was going on.

  “Down!”

  The moment she was through the doorway, Martin’s body hit hers with a thud, knocking her against the wall rather than taking her to the floor. He dropped to his knees, reaching up to pull her down with him. Once her shoulder hit the carpet, his body arched over hers as though to protect her from nonexistent debris.