Laura Anne Gilman

by Heart of Briar

  “Cover your ears and sing!” he shouted in her ear.

  “What?” She had to have heard him wrong.

  “Sing!”

  She covered her ears with her hands, although it did nothing to shut out the metallic clamor, and sang the first thing she could think of, which happened to be some inane pop song Tyler had been singing in the shower, last time she was over there, about having sex in the subway. The totally inappropriate lyrics made her blush—until a shrill screaming noise cut through everything, and she faltered.

  “Keep singing!” And Martin pressed his own hands against hers, his low voice chanting in a language she didn’t recognize, occasionally stopping to shout out something to Toba.

  “Busy here!” Toba finally shouted back, or she thought that’s what he said. Then there was a terrible crash and then a scream, a real scream of something in pain, and the high-pitched keening got louder, and then there was a sudden, horrible silence.

  A heartbeat passed, her singing and Martin’s chanting cut off all at once, as if someone covered her mouth, and then she was being hauled to her feet. Martin’s hands were no longer soft and reassuring but hard, practically dragging her across the floor when she didn’t move fast enough to suit him.

  Something was wrong: they had to get out of the building. She’d already realized that. But when she would have gone for the elevator, Martin dragged her the other way, toward the end of the hallway.

  “Where are we going?” she demanded, more angry than scared just then. She didn’t like being hauled around like a sack of whatever it was people hauled around in sacks—she didn’t know, but she knew she didn’t like it.

  “Not the stairs,” Toba said behind them, his voice shrill. “Window. Faster.”

  Jan half turned to look at him, her elbow still in Martin’s grasp. “What?”

  He didn’t answer, only shoved her daypack into her hands. From the weight, she thought he’d managed to grab her laptop, too.

  And then the noise wasn’t outside anymore; it was inside, coming closer, and there was a shadow coming out of her door, mottled gray-blue and stretching out as though blindly feeling for something. Jan’s eyes widened, the memory of similar fingers reaching through the floor of the bus....

  “Oh, god,” she said faintly, thinking she might throw up. Or pass out. Or—

  “Go!” Toba said, and shoved her at Martin, turning to stand with his back to them. Jan started to ask what the hell he thought he was doing, when he blurred somehow, the same way Martin had, although she was able to keep her eyes open enough this time to see his hunched shoulders straighten, wide brown-feathered wings stretching to fill the hallway and block what was coming from her sight.

  “Toba...” He was beautiful, even from the back, even with panic screaming in her veins.

  “Go,” Martin said, and pulled her elbow hard, moving her in front of him, and pushed her toward the window at the end of the hallway. “Go, and don’t stop!”

  Nobody came out into the hallway to see what was going on. Hopefully, everyone was at work, or school, or just not in the building. For once, Jan was thankful that she’d never made any real friends in her building. She ran for the window, struggling to open the sash and weeping in frustration when it refused to open, warped by too much paint and time.

  She looked over her shoulder again and saw Toba go down on one knee, those wings now shredded and tattered, gray-blue fingers tearing and plucking at him. The sound of jaws munching might have been a product of her overstressed imagination, but her stomach churned nonetheless.

  “Toba?” She tried to turn, to go back to him, although what the hell she could do she had no idea, even if Martin hadn’t been blocking the way.

  “Move,” he said, pushing her away, and then his elbow hit the glass, shattering it just as something swooped outside.

  Jan, her nerves finally shot, flinched away from the window, trying to shelter against his chest from this new threat. Instead, he pushed her forward, even as he was knocking the glass away with his other arm, ignoring the shards that sliced at his arm. She finally realized that he was clearing a safe space for them to escape through.

  He stepped back and reached for her again, even as there was the sound of something falling with a heavy thud in the hallway behind them.

  “Now!”

  She got into the window frame, slinging the daypack over her shoulder and bracing her knees against the ledge, and looked down five floors to the parking lot below, wondering what the hell Martin expected her to do—there was no fire escape on this side of the building, so unless he had a rope....

  The sound of something hovering made her look up, and she gasped, trying to shove back into the building: something huge fluttered outside, dark and fierce, limned in red from the afternoon’s fading sun.

  “Jump.” Martin’s voice was smooth again, intense, and his hands lingered on the nape of her neck, the sensation making her skin prickle. “Trust me.”

  Between that and the thing behind them, there wasn’t much choice. She jumped.

  Chapter 6

  There was a painful sensation of free fall, her gut up somewhere around her nose and her bowels shriveling up in fear, and then something caught her, wrapping her in thick, suffocating folds of smoky gauze, a sharp, clawlike grip pinching her skin through the folds. Adrenaline filling her veins, Jan struggled, trying to escape, but was held tight, the gauze thickening and the grip tightening in response to her movement. The more she fought, the more she was trapped.

  Feeling the unnerving stomach-swoop of being carried upward rather than falling, Jan finally swallowed hard and held herself very still, praying that whatever it was that had her was friendly and not prone to dropping things.

  The moment she calmed down, the gauze thinned again, enough that she was able to breathe, if not move. The adrenaline ebbed, leaving her feeling sick and shaky in the aftermath. It was so quiet, the folds around her acting like insulation, that the only sound was the beat of her own blood and the sound of her breathing, harshly nasal. Time lost meaning, although the tingling numbness in her arms and legs told Jan that she had been like that for a while—it usually took half an hour for her legs to fall asleep when she was sitting too long, and this felt way worse.

  She had started to doze off—impossible but inevitable, once terror turned to near-boredom, when there was another swoop, this one longer than before, then the accompanying sensation of being dashed headfirst toward the ground before being pulled up at the very last minute. Jan dry-retched, a foul taste filling her mouth, even as the folds around her unwrapped, and she was dropped to her knees on a soft, muddy surface.

  Fresh air and relief made the dry-retching turn into full-on heaves, her stomach folding in on itself, trying to find something to expel in punishment for what it had been put through.

  “As heroines go, you’re not too glamorous,” a vaguely familiar voice observed. “What happened? Where’s Martin?”

  Jan wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sat back on her heels, thankful that she’d only had the single slice of pizza, before all hell had broken loose. Her gut hurt and her throat was sore, but at least she wasn’t covered in vomit.

  “Turncoats.” Her voice was scratchy and dry. “They came...Toba...”

  Vivid in her mind’s eye, the sight of bloody feathers, drifting down on the old, pale green carpet of her hallway, returned, and Jan retched again, her muscles protesting the action but unable to stop.

  “The bansidhe?” AJ asked, his voice an urgent growl, not seeming to notice her distress.

  “The what?” She shook her head, trying to focus, wishing that she had a toothbrush or a piece of gum to clean her mouth and get the taste of vomit out. “Is that what the blue thing was? I don’t know. Toba—he went back. Martin dragged me out of there, threw me out the window.”

  All right, she had jumped. Out a fifth-story window. And been caught by...

  “What...what carried me here? Where is here?” She l
ooked down and saw her daypack sitting on the muddy ground next to her. She lifted her hand—shaking, she noted absently—and pulled open the flap, looking inside. Her laptop was there, the power cord still dangling from it like a tail. It looked intact, but she didn’t have the energy to check it. She had her laptop, her phone, her wallet—her inhaler.

  Somehow, that made it all worse, instead of better.

  “The bansidhe,” AJ said again. “It brought you here. Its job was to protect you against the preters.”

  The blue thing. Now she knew what it had been. Was, she hoped. Still was. She shuddered, thinking of how long she had spent wrapped within its...arms? Wings? It didn’t matter.

  “They came, the turncoats. Martin and I ran, Toba, he....”

  There was a tiny golden-brown feather caught in her hair. She pulled at it, weightless in her hand. “Toba’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. If the turncoats found you, it’s likely. He would not run until you were safe.” AJ crouched next to her, his once-disturbing face now almost ordinary in comparison to what she had seen. “That bothers you.”

  Her stomach clenched again, as if it suddenly thought of more it had to get rid off. “Of course it does! To die like that...” To die at all.

  “More are going to die, if you insist on leaving safe zones. And just as badly. Come on. If Martin got away, he’ll join us at the Center.”

  His matter-of-fact tone made Jan want to scream, to make him show something, some emotion or expression. Instead, she got to her feet, reaching for the bag that had fallen with her and slinging it over her shoulder before following the werewolf—the lupin—away from the muddy clearing and deeper into the woods. The city was lost behind them; she had no idea how far the bansidhe had flown, or where, or for how long.

  It wasn’t her fault. Was it? For insisting that she go home, insisting...they had to go back to her apartment. Her computers were there, and she had to check in with the office, and...

  The feather was still in her hand, clinging lightly to her palm. She closed her fingers around it. They’d had to go back. But they shouldn’t have stayed.

  “Toba is dead.” Her voice was flat, exhausted. “Martin is probably dead. Because I...”

  “Because of the turncoats. Because of the preters. Because they had misinformed ideas about how to be heroes. Don’t hog all the glory for yourself, there’s more than enough to go around.”

  His voice was still matter-of-fact, almost cold. But Martin had been his friend, maybe. Toba had been... And he had sent them both with her. Jan heard the guilt in his own growl and shut up.

  The ground under her feet as they walked was dry, unlike the muddy area where the bansidhe had dropped her. The trees were huge, towering above them, even their lowest branches over her head. The leaves were the size of her hand, still green, and the undergrowth was low and sparse, which she thought maybe meant something, about wildfires, or how old the forest was, or something, but she couldn’t remember what, or where she might have learned it.

  When AJ had said they were at a center, she had assumed it was a building, some sort of gathering hall or even a community center, although what sort, she couldn’t imagine when she thought about it.

  Instead, he led her down a path through the trees that started wide enough for a car to pass through and then turned left and right, narrowing with each turn, the corners becoming less distinct even as the greenery grew thicker on either side, until she couldn’t have said how far they’d gone, or in what direction.

  And then one final spiral turn, and the path opened into a clearing too large for it to make sense, large enough that she could barely see the other edge, only that there were groups gathered around small bonfires here and there, and at the very middle, a tree different somehow from the ones they had walked through. It had to be a hundred years old or more, rising straight-trunked and green-gray, limbs reaching out far above her head, tipped with leaves that were the green of fresh spring, and the scarlet of autumn, alternating on the same branches.

  “The Center...” She looked behind her, almost expecting the path they’d taken to have disappeared. But no, it was still there, about the width of a closet door, but clear and distinct. She could, if she worked at it, make out half a dozen other such openings in the woods around them. “The Center of what?”

  “Everything that matters,” AJ said. “Come on.”

  As they emerged into the clearing, there was a shout from one of the bonfires and then a glad cry of “There you are!” before she was engulfed in Martin’s embrace, her face pressed against his chest so that she could feel the thump-thump of his heart, as though he’d just run far and fast and not yet had time to recover.

  He was also damp and smelled of something she couldn’t identify, not unpleasant but...different.

  “Toba?” She didn’t want to ask, she already knew, but she had to hear it. The little owl-man had been...he had been honest, and he had answered her questions, not danced around them or evaded entirely, and he had died because of her. She owed him, something. Even if just to hear the truth.

  Martin didn’t pull away; in fact, he held her more tightly. His voice was muffled through her hair, but she heard him clearly, anyway. “Gone. I’m sorry.”

  “Mourn later,” AJ said. “Martin. I’m glad you made it back. Do you know where to find them yet? Do you have a preter on the hook?”

  Jan backed out of Martin’s embrace and turned to glare at the lupin. “We’d only just started when...” She bit back her flare of temper, realizing that it didn’t help, and it wasn’t AJ’s fault. He was cold, but he was right: more would die if she didn’t do her job.

  Toba. She let herself think of the little man, with his beak-hard lips, his oddly gentle golden eyes and his snarky common sense. Toba, I’m sorry.

  “Maybe,” she said out loud. “We’d just started. I’d gotten a few queries, Toba had, too. But...” The passwords were all in her computer, safe, thanks to Toba’s quick thinking—and unreadable, right now, out here in the middle of rural nowhere. “I’ll need to log on in order to check responses, and I can’t do that...here. I’ve got a decent battery charge, but it doesn’t do much without connectivity.”

  It was just a guess, that they didn’t have Wi-Fi, but she thought it was a pretty safe guess, at that.

  From the look on AJ’s face and the way his elongated jaw twitched, she’d guessed right.

  * * *

  Tyler had lost track of how many times it had happened: the sessions, like the days, faded into each other, everything that had been, fading away and no reason to hold on to any specific moment. A day, a month, a year? He didn’t know.

  The sheets underneath him were smooth, almost too soft, and his body ached from the bones on out. He opened his eyes slowly, half hoping something had changed, knowing it hadn’t.

  “Ah, darling, you’re awake.” Stjerne smiled and offered him a cup, its wooden shape smooth and dark, as though generations of hands had held it, staining it with their sweat. The liquid inside was sweet and fresh, and filled his mouth without easing his thirst. There would be other things to drink, later. But in the morning, when he woke, he had this. The cup and her smile, her hands smoothing his skin and petting his close-cropped hair while he drank as though everything were all right, when it was not. This moment, this pause, he was himself, able to think, if not clearly, able to question, even though he knew there would be no answers.

  There were others like him now, in the great hall, or the gardens beyond. Not many, maybe a dozen. Quiet, trailing behind their companions, or sometimes walking hand-in-hand. They wore clothing like his, jeans or khakis with soft gray tops that tied at the hip, like a martial arts uniform. Occasionally, he would see a woman, wearing a dress like their tops, but down to her knees. Her ankles were wrapped in strands of something that gave off a delicate tinkle, like copper bells almost too small to see, and her companion always escorted her with his arm over her shoulder, his fingers sometimes playing with her p
ale red hair as if he was combing fire.

  They all seemed content, if dazed. Occasionally there would be someone new, whose body was still jerky, who seemed not to belong, but they never lasted long. Or maybe they learned to accept and be quiet.

  Being quiet was better.

  Each of them had a companion, like Stjerne. They wore different clothing, and their hair was different colors, but he knew them even at a distance: the same cheekbones, the same slender builds and long legs, the same way of going very, very still when they stopped moving.

  And when they put him in the chair of thorns and did those things to him, the things that hurt so badly, they all had the same expression, the one that he could read now.

  Hunger.

  When they looked at him like that, when the scrabbling biting cold things touched his head and reached into his brain, he almost remembered something. A voice, laughter, and hands that were gentle, not fierce. He couldn’t see a face, couldn’t remember a name, but it was there, he knew it was there.

  Stupid, but he wanted to remember, so badly—and then the pain came again, and only Stjerne could make it endurable. Only if he fell into her, she said, over and over, only if he let her fall into him, give her all his memories, all his doubts and his pains, gave himself to her, could she help him.

  So, each time, he fell.

  And forgot.

  It was better that way.

  Now, under her patient smile, he finished the last draught in the cup and faded into gray.

  “Better, sweet boy.” Her fingers trailed along his cheek, nails scraping his skin. He stared up at her, eyes vague, lips parted. “You’re almost ready. Almost there.”

  * * *

  Martin had taken her hand, after she’d broken their embrace, and she had allowed that. Truthfully, she had clung to it for a little while. He was alive. She could feel the strength and warmth in his skin, the way his fingers curled around her palm, his thumb occasionally, almost instinctively stroking the inside of her wrist, as though he, too, was reassuring himself that she was alive.