Laura Anne Gilman

by Heart of Briar

  “When Craig gets here with the new computer, we can get started again,” he said, all businesslike. “See if anyone replied to the accounts, and follow up on them. Um.” His voice flattened. “How do we follow up?”

  She finished the eggs and picked up the second slice of bacon, crunching it with satisfaction.

  “Some people like to go back and forth in email first, or phone calls. But you can cut to the chase and meet them right off. You suggest somewhere local, and public, not in your own neighborhood, just in case they’re skeevy...” She stopped. “But they’re going to be skeevy, aren’t they? That’s the point? But they’re also going to want to meet up fast, too. Oh. What if they’re not local? How—”

  “They’re coming from another plane,” he said, his voice still smooth, not showing any exasperation at what was a particularly dumb question. “However they’re opening portals, they’re able to go to specific areas, directly to the person they’re seducing. We didn’t understand why or how, but you just explained that: they get the person to choose a place to meet specifically.” Martin shook his head, a clump of hair falling over his forehead, exactly the way it did in his other form. “Oh, that must have made them gleeful, to know that their prey would be sitting there waiting for them....”

  “But how? I mean, okay, they’re using the internet, I get that, and, yeah, it would make it damn easy for them to focus on targets, the same way scammers do; whoever’s dumb enough to bite.” Like Tyler. She shut that thought off and focused on the puzzle part of it. “But if they’re in another...world? A parallel universe? Whatever. The question is, then how are they connecting? I mean, some kind of spell, hooking them up...” They’d said they didn’t work spells, but maybe preters were different. “How did they even find out about the internet, much less dating sites?”

  Martin looked at her, and his face went utterly blank. “That’s part of what we need to know now, how they’re doing it and how to shut it down.”

  “Oh. Right.” Kelpies, at least, didn’t seem to have much use for theoretical tech discussions. She felt congestion build, either from the thought of what they were doing, or some dust they’d disturbed in the house, and took a sip of the coffee, letting the hot liquid settle her lungs back down again. Maybe her bag was around here somewhere, maybe her inhaler hadn’t been too badly damaged, maybe it would dry out and she’d be able to use it, after all.

  Too many maybes.

  Then she asked the question that had been hiding behind her thoughts all the time. “And if nobody bites on our bait?”

  He sighed, leaned back in his chair, which creaked alarmingly, making her brace for its inevitable crash, and stared at the ceiling. “Then we try again. And again.”

  “Uh-huh.” She decided that his chair was more sturdy than it sounded, and leaned forward, waving her fork at him. “Look, Martin, I have a life, you know. A job. People are going to notice if I disappear, too.” Unlike Tyler, she wasn’t the sort to suddenly give notice, or disappear. Her friends would worry...wouldn’t they? Or would they think she’d run off to join him?

  He looked at her, those dark eyes and long face mournful. “We thought you wanted to help your leman?”

  “I do. Of course I do. I...”

  She shoved the rest of the bacon in her mouth, no longer enjoying the taste. That wasn’t fair.

  And it didn’t matter. The truth was, even if she wanted to leave, she didn’t know where Shannsburgh was, and if her laptop was ruined, then so was her phone, and god knows if her credit card or ATM would work, so how would she get home? She could go into a police station and announce she’d been kidnapped, she supposed. But something inside her flinched from that. She’d have to tell them about Martin and AJ then, or risk giving a description of someone who might be innocent, and both options made her feel as if she’d swallowed a lead weight.

  She knew she wasn’t crazy. She was pretty sure that she wasn’t crazy. But trying to explain this to anyone else... She had a lot of friends, casual and otherwise, but none of them would believe any of this. They’d just think that her worry about Tyler had led to a terminal crack-up.

  “Huh. You said, AJ said, this has been going on for months, or maybe longer, but months since you’ve been paying attention.”

  Martin nodded.

  “Is there anyone else doing this, like me, the trying to catch a preter thing? Or...just us?”

  He didn’t want to tell her, she could read him that well at least.

  “Martin.”

  “You’re the third human I know about, who poked around when someone went missing, who was willing to do something. There might’ve been others. I didn’t know them.”

  He was using the past tense. “The turncoats got them.” They had told her that. Got them...ate them. That was why Martin had taken her here, to be safe. She almost laughed. Be safe, so she could be used as bait.

  “The turncoats, they were told where to find those humans, right? Someone betrayed them, the same way we were betrayed, only earlier, before you could even get there. That’s what AJ thinks. Right? One of your people.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t want to believe it, but...” Martin pushed his coffee away from him in a rough gesture. “We may not have much use for humanity, but we like our independence. We’re clannish, breedish. The preters...they think everything should fall under them, like vassal states to their magnificence.

  “The gnomes, all right, I sort of get it; they’re little pricks always out for themselves, they never got along with the other races, not even in the back when. So I can see where a preter could make them an offer they’d accept, and everyone else go hang. But one of us? Selling out to those bastards? Once, yeah, it could have been an accidental slip, but three times makes it a conspiracy, right?”

  And a fourth time almost meant her death.

  “The only other explanation is that the preters know, and if they do, we’re screwed. They already have all the other advantages; the only one we have is that they can’t predict what we’re going to do.”

  “Mainly because we don’t know, ourselves,” she offered.

  Martin missed the humor in that, nodding his head seriously in agreement. “AJ has a plan. But he doesn’t tell us, only the bits we need now.”

  Jan was less certain AJ had a plan, or at least, a thought-out big picture kind of thing. But that kind of big picture thing wasn’t her strength, either, so...they knew what they needed to do. She’d focus on that.

  “You want more coffee?” he asked, getting up with his own mug in hand. She shook her head and covered her own mug with her hand; coffee was good for keeping the asthma controlled, but the last thing she needed was a caffeine hyper on top of her nerves.

  “We’re all kind of...disorganized. We don’t talk to each other much, either, not just humans, and we’re territorial and AJ says hidebound. Lupin are different, they run in a pack, so they’re used to taking orders and stuff like that. And thinking about groups, not selfishly. He’s one of the ones who figured it all out,” Martin added. “Saw something wrong, dug into it, got us organized despite ourselves.”

  That didn’t surprise her at all. And he was probably right about there being a traitor, someone else who thought the world might be better off with preters in it. But unless Martin was the one spilling secrets—and if he was, she was dead, anyway—they were safe. Right?

  As safe as she could be, working with someone who thought drowning humans was a “thing.” She could feel the hysteria start to burble up again and changed the topic.

  “How many others do you think there’ve been? I mean, all the people who might have been worried about their family, their friends disappearing, since this all started?” She thought about her conversation with the cop, god, only yesterday? Tyler hadn’t even been missing a week, but it felt like a month. “How many are we talking about, do you think—ten? A dozen? A hundred?”

  “Don’t know.” His blithe unconcern surprised her; he had seemed so impassione
d before.

  “Do you think that the turncoats got them, too?”

  “Don’t know,” Martin said again. “Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t know them.”

  He didn’t know them, so he didn’t care. It was because they were human. They weren’t real to him, didn’t matter. Supernaturals might not be soulless, but...Toba hadn’t been like this, or AJ, or even Elsa.

  She was starting to understand why the others had warned her about Martin. If he’d been human, she might have thought him charming but sort of cold...yeah, exactly like the description of a lot of serial killers. But they also set him to protect her, so he must be trustworthy. Right? Jan’s thoughts fluttered like a bird in a trap, then settled. He knew her: that was the key. Sociopath or just supernatural, she mattered to him now.

  “Lucky me,” she muttered. “So we’re dealing with preters who want to enslave us, turncoats who’d be happy to eat us, some unknown spy or spies, and an impossible task that, let’s face it, even if I somehow manage to nab us a preter, you still have to get the information out of it, somehow. What makes you think I’m going to do any better than the last humans who agreed to help you?”

  “Because you have something they didn’t,” Martin said, suddenly cheerful again.

  “Yeah? What’s that?” But she had a feeling she already knew what he was going to say.

  “Me.” His tone was smooth, reassuring, and filled with absolute confidence in his own wonderfulness.

  “Oh. Lucky me,” she said again, and ate the last piece of bacon.

  * * *

  He had run. There had been no plan, no thought in his head, no inkling of rebellion in the scraped-dry hollow of his soul. They had been walking through the garden in the misty afternoon, speaking nonsense he barely registered, his mind still scraped and sore from the most recent session in the briar-chair, his fingers laced with hers. One moment he had been content at her side, obedient as a dog, and the next—like a dog—he had scented something, some passing breeze, something familiar and haunting, a tune he had nearly forgotten.

  His body had moved without volition, bolting off the soft trail, downhill across the soft grass and into the woods. Two steps in, they were so thickly planted that he couldn’t see where he was going, the undergrowth blocking his sight and pulling at his limbs as though to stop him. And yet his feet were unerring, following his nose downhill as though drawn to something, the lure of some stream waiting at the base, clear cool water summoning him to lap at its shores.

  He did not know, he did not think, he only knew that he needed to be there, he needed to follow that scent, find the source....

  Something hit him, hard, in the left side, and he went down into wet mulch and mud, hard enough to stun him for a second. That second was all it took. His brain screamed at him to get up, but the weight of something heavy and rank on his back, heavy breath dripping onto his neck, kept him facedown and motionless.

  If he moved, something at the base of his brain told him, he would die.

  “Yours, Stjerne?” A male voice, light but unmistakable. It came from above him, not the weight holding him down.

  “Mine.”

  Her voice, slightly breathless and tight with anger. He had displeased her. Why had he done that? Why had he run?

  His captor hauled him over, dropping him hard on his back. One of them, from the shape of the face, but more slightly built than Stjerne and the others, and wearing clothing better suited for hunting than the cold palace. The thought—that there were more of them beyond the silver walls and quiet gardens—shook him for a second, a sense of wonder and fear too great to handle. No. Quiet. Hollow. The flicker of rebellion gone, emotions washed back to gray, and he rested his cheek on the dirt. Dimly, he saw the thing that had held him down slink off to one side. A beast—hound-shaped, but with a human head and hands: hairless, with mottled gray-green skin that seemed to shift even as he looked at it. So he looked away again, holding to the hollow quiet as though that would save him.

  “Where did you think you were going, pet?” Stjerne stepped closer, towering over him, demanding that he roll over to look at her. He opened his mouth to explain, that he’d had no choice, he had to follow the scent—

  The first blow took him by surprise: he had not seen her move. She made sure that he saw the next, and the third, her nails raking him across the face so hard he felt the blood rising through the cuts before he tasted it dripping into his mouth.

  He lifted his head, and the tease of that half-known scent drifted under his nostrils again, fading, then lost in the taste of bittersweet iron, and then even that was gone.

  The soft-spoken male hauled him to his feet, even though he was an easy foot taller and bulkier, and held him there, the blood running freely from the cuts, splattering onto his pants.

  “Do you want to keep it, or should I feed it to the dogs?”

  Stjerne considered him, her lovely face composed again. She lifted one finger to her mouth and licked the blood off of it delicately.

  “We’re almost done with the cleansing,” she said. “It seems a shame to waste all that work. And he is...occasionally diverting.” Her eyes narrowed, and she looked directly at him, the finger coming forward to lift his chin. “But if you ever try that again, human, if you ever defy me? I will shred the skin from your flesh, and the flesh from your bones, and gnaw on what remains, while you yet live. Do you understand me?”

  She was terrifying and beautiful, and when she drew him forward for a kiss, he fell into it entirely and let it consume him.

  At their feet, the hound-shaped beast whined, as though it knew it had been deprived of a meal.

  Chapter 8

  First dates were hell. It didn’t seem to matter if they were “real” or the setup to a sting, there was still that utter agony of awkwardness and fear, with a dollop of stomach-churning anticipation.

  Jan stood in front of the restaurant door and steeled her nerves, then walked inside with as much breezy confidence as she could fake. “Hi. I’m Janelle.” Close enough to her own name that she’d remember to respond to it, but not so close that a preter could use it to hold on to her. That was part of their glamour, Martin had told her: a “true name” thing. Jan didn’t understand it, but at this point, there was a lot she was just taking on faith and hope and a heaping dose of WTF.

  The man, who matched his photo reasonably well, offered her his hand to shake, “Hi, Janelle. I’m David. Obviously.” He laughed, embarrassed. It was a nice laugh, and as much as Jan wanted him to be a preter, for him to lead her to where they were keeping Tyler, she also didn’t want a guy who seemed so nice to be some inhuman evil creature.

  But then, the preters would seem nice, wouldn’t they? Or, no, not nice: Sexy, maybe sweet, maybe a little dangerous, but appealing. The only way she could tell if someone wasn’t a preter, would be if they were jerks.

  Jan wanted to apologize, to turn around and leave, but that wasn’t an option. The fact that she had felt like that on dates with—as far as she knew—totally human guys made it a little easier to go on. But only a little.

  Knowing Martin was nearby helped, too.

  Martin. Her focus drifted, although she was able to maintain her share of small talk about the weather and how nice the restaurant seemed, as they waited for their table to be ready. What was she going to do about Martin?

  The first night in the rental house, still shaking and confused, Jan had gone to bed, and tears had overtaken her, hard, hot tears. She had tried to stifle them against the pillow, letting the shudders take her, silently, until she’d fallen asleep. She had thought she’d been successful, until she’d awakened to find Martin sharing the bed, her hands held in his, her head resting against his shoulder. At some point, while she’d been crying, he had come in and held her.

  It had been oddly intimate, disturbingly so, but she had rolled off the bed and gone to take her shower, and when she had come back, he’d been gone, making ostentatious noises in the kitchen.

 
; They’d not spoken of it, not when his friend—an older guy in a suit, not what she had been expecting at all—had come by with two secondhand laptops, not when they’d spent hours surfing from site to site, sending out lures and evaluating the bites. Not when she’d tried to explain to him what she did for a living, putting out fires and trying to convince her coworkers that she was at home, safe and busy, with him hanging over her shoulder, being way too in her personal space.

  Not even when he’d lain down beside her that night, uninvited. He’d slid under the covers and gathered her in his arms, her face resting against his chest. He hadn’t spoken, hadn’t tried anything, just held her until her breathing eased, and she’d fallen asleep.

  Sociopath, maybe. Killer, self-admitted. Not human, obviously. Not to be trusted...but she did.

  The house they’d ended up in wasn’t as bad as Martin had said, but it wasn’t all that great, either. Jan had ventured outside the second day, just to not be in the house for a little while, and been quickly bored by the quiet roads and run-down, too-quiet houses. But it was less than an hour into the city by bus, so they could continue the search without having to relocate.

  And nobody would think to look for them there. Nobody—not even AJ, Martin had said—knew that he knew the owner.

  Three of the females who had responded to their fake overtures had seemed like reasonable possibilities, but a basic web search had turned up too much of a digital footprint for them to not be human. There was a fourth, but she was being coy about setting up a time and place to meet, which also weighed against her: Martin didn’t think a preter would waste time playing hard to get.

  Meanwhile, this was the first male they had thought a likely target.

  The hostess gestured to them, and David indicated that she should go first, following the woman to their table, where a waitress appeared before they’d even had a chance to open the menus.

  “Getcha folks anything to drink?”

  Jan desperately wanted a beer. But the last thing she could do right now was let down her defenses at all. Just like a real date, she thought—don’t drink until you know what’s going on. Except usually all she’d had to worry about was that the guy was a sleaze or that she’d be bored.