Laura Anne Gilman

by Heart of Briar

  He pulled her into a sudden hug, and she went willingly, resting against his chest, his warmth reaching through her water-soaked clothing and soothing the chill in her bones.

  “I’m tired,” she said, an admission of so much more than she was able to say, than she knew how to say. They’d almost died. She had thought they were going to die. Everything hurt. Skin, hair, lungs...heart.

  “I know. I know.” He held her, not too tight, not too loose, but just enough. She wished he would hold her tighter; that way she would be able to protest. It would be too easy to just let him hold her up, to stay there, and not move any farther.

  “If I could ride...”

  “No.” His voice was sharp, and she felt it like a slap.

  He felt her reaction; there was no way he couldn’t. “Jan...” Her name on his tongue was an apology, an entreaty.

  She pulled away and started walking in the direction of the mountain, not willing—able—to forgive, not this time.

  “Jan, even if I could control myself, they can sense me, too. Here, out here? I’d be like a beacon. The magic in this land...it would find me, work on me. And...you wouldn’t be safe, then.”

  “Would you have pulled me into the water, Martin? Would you have drowned me, if I was on your back, when we crossed that bridge?” She needed to know.

  There was a silence, as he walked beside her.

  “I don’t know.”

  * * *

  Most of the windows of the warehouse had been boarded up or covered over with paint and paper. The only one that still had clear glass in it was high up along the narrow walkway that ran the length of the front. AJ stared out that window, his mind ticking over possibilities and probabilities. None of the options or outcomes made him feel any better.

  Elsa shuffled up to stand behind him, looking, he assumed, over his shoulder and out the window. “It’s getting worse.”

  “I know.” Elsa meant well, but she had a way of stating the obvious that raked at every last one of his nerves.

  “We can’t just sit here forever. It’s been three days. Martin hasn’t checked in.”

  “I know.” Martin was still missing, and Meredith hadn’t returned, which meant either she was on his tail, or she was dead. More possibilities and probabilities for him to juggle.

  Elsa shuffled, the sound of her body grinding against itself making his ears want to twitch. “Do you think he killed her?”

  “No.” Not because he had any particular faith in Martin’s ability to control himself, especially over such an extended time, but because if he had, he would have come back to tell AJ.

  It was a thing. It happened. None of them could be held against their nature—humans might try, but the supernaturals knew better. It would not be pleasant to deal with, though. The longer Martin was with her, the harder he would take it.

  “Do you think—”

  “El, I don’t think at all. Not without any information. Right now, I’m going to assume that they’re still chasing after leads. And we need to be focusing on these damned gnomes.”

  The damned gnomes in question had formed a ring around the warehouse, creeping in silently the night before, slaughtering the sentries with more stealth than he’d expected from their kind. There were nearly a hundred of them, maybe more.

  They weren’t threatening or making a nuisance of themselves. On the contrary, they had settled down, sitting cross-legged on the parking lot gravel, each of them holding hands with the other, their elongated arms crossing their chests so that their left hand held the hand of the one on their right, and the right held the hand on their left.

  AJ couldn’t shake the image of naked Tibetan monks sitting in protest, if Tibetan monks had gray-green skin and teeth designed to rend flesh from bone. He was just waiting for them to start pouring gasoline on each other.

  If Elsa was thinking the same thing, he had no idea. He doubted it; trolls weren’t noted for much imagination. It was why he’d asked her to administer the site, rather than taking part in any actual planning. “You think they’re going to attack?” she asked now.

  “It would be suicide if they did.”

  Gnomes were nasty creatures, able to stretch their bodies in ways that even shape-shifters found disturbing, and their teeth and claws carried diseases that would leave you wishing you were dead, but they preferred a swarming attack to one-on-one battle, and there were at least a hundred supers in the warehouse, most of whom could be just as deadly in a fight.

  Only the ones who could fight, be useful in battle, had come to the warehouse. Those who’d answered the call but were of a gentler nature he set to quieter tasks, watching and reporting, things better suited to their abilities. If those here in the warehouse fell, those others might be able to carry on. Might. More likely it would all fall over, and the humans would never know what hit them. And then the supernatural communities would fall, one by one.

  “They come, we fight them off...and humans tell stories about it, never knowing why. What stories will they tell, if we fail?”

  No stories, save those slaves told.

  Depressed, he stared out the window and counted knobby green heads again. He had said it would be suicide; he hadn’t said he didn’t think they would attack. They were here; that meant they had traced the human to this place, or someone with more brainpower had sent them here.

  “We can’t get out, so long as they’re sitting there,” Elsa said.

  His second-in-command had a grasp of the obvious. But she was missing something just as important.

  “We can’t get out, and supplies can’t get in.”

  She still didn’t understand. Sometimes, not having an imagination was a blessing, he supposed.

  He had called in the ones who could fight. Which meant they had over a dozen different species here, all working under the oldest of treaties, that of survival...but it was a tenuous hold. And if they started to get hungry...

  “Something must have told them to come here,” he said, speaking more to himself than her. “Something that thinks they’re close to endgame.”

  Not something. Preters. Or something even worse, something he hadn’t been able to imagine?

  Elsa was silent, waiting for him to say something more, then he heard her shuffle off again, as though her body was too tired for her to lift. He stared out the window and resisted the urge to howl a challenge at the turncoats. There would be time enough if it came to that.

  “We will go down fighting,” he told the silent forms ringing his headquarters. “We will go down fighting, and it will cost you.”

  The defiance didn’t make him feel better.

  Chapter 14

  After a while, the echo of connection that Jan had been following faded to near nothing, and then it snapped, a worn-out thread finally admitting defeat. It didn’t matter by then: they had a destination.

  “They’ve gone Under the Hill,” Martin said. “That’s why you can’t feel him anymore.”

  The closer they got to the mountain, the more uneasy Jan became, and not just because it was standing between her and Tyler. There was something about it that made her react the way she might to a growling dog: caution and an odd desire to reach out to it, at the same time. The sun rose behind them—or she assumed it did, because the stars faded, and a bright mist filled the sky—but they had covered more ground by the time the sky started to clear again than should have been possible in a day without falling over dead from exhaustion and hunger.

  Either time was seriously warped here, or distances were. Or both. “Probably both,” Martin had said, when she’d asked him. Physics would say that was impossible, except every day it seemed as if the newspapers were filled with new discoveries in physics, all the sciences, and people kept arguing over what was and wasn’t possible or probable or doable.

  So. Jan kept her mouth shut and her eyes and brain open, and watched, and thought. Anything to keep her mind off what might wait for them at that mountain.

  Her clothing h
ad dried as they walked, and her hair was a tangle of knots and curls, but the scratches on her legs were minor. The cuts on his cheek and arms had scabbed over, but some of them looked swollen. He needed antibiotics, or at least warm water and soap, and stitches. They didn’t have any of that.

  She wondered if he changed, if the magic would take care of any infection. She wondered if he’d listen to her if she told him to change, and decided that, no, he wouldn’t. So she didn’t say anything.

  They kept moving, the hills having sloped down into a flat, featureless plain. There were clouds of dust in the distance that could have been a herd of something, but it never came close enough to make out any details. There were no birds in the sky, at least none that flew below the cloud level.

  “This world’s so empty,” she said finally.

  “Yeah.” Martin’s gaze kept sweeping from left to right. “I don’t know if that’s normal or not.” He let out a noise, like a pfuhh of air, only harsher. “Preters come to our world and take things. Maybe because they don’t have enough here? Just as glad if we don’t have to worry about packs of anything slavering at our hooves. Heels.”

  “I guess. Yeah.” They were walking side by side now; he had his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket, but his elbow would occasionally brush against hers. She missed having her hand in his, but she refused to ask. He might have his reasons for rejection; they might even be good reasons, but it still hurt.

  She was pretty sure that she dozed off once or twice as they walked, her feet still moving, trusting him to keep them safe. Martin must have been exhausted, too. How much sleep did kelpies need? she wondered. Had he slept at all at the safe house, those nights he had held her?

  In her exhaustion now she imagined him curled up around her in the barren bedroom, his arms around her, his breath warm against her skin, and then the imagination turned from what had been to what had not: his hands, sliding down her arms, coaxing her to shift closer. Legs, limbs suddenly bare, tangling, the feel of a not-unexpected erection pressing against her backside as his hands roamed down her belly, sliding smoothly into the vee of her legs. Would his hands have been gentle, or urgent, sliding inside her? Would he have—

  She broke off the thought, flushed and confused. Had she just been...?

  Yes, she had. And her body was annoyed that she’d stopped before finishing the scene, too. That was not a supernatural attempting to seduce her; that had been her own mind and body conspiring. Jan pressed her open palm against her heart and felt sick. Blame it on the knowledge that Tyler hadn’t been faithful. Blame it on the close quarters and emotional drainage. Blame it on exhaustion and the impossibility of this world around them. Blame it on anything, but don’t think of it again!

  But once in her mind, the sensations were impossible to revoke. The smell of his skin was on hers, the feel of his arms around her...she knew it too well to forget now.

  The things you can’t forget, you deal with. You move on, and you...deal with it. That was all. She tried to summon her practical side, but it seemed farther away here, in this place, and sluggish to respond.

  On the plus side, she was feeling considerably more...energized now. Smut as caffeine-replacement? If that was a side effect of fairyland, she could almost understand the appeal.

  Martin broke into her disordered thoughts. “Remember what I just said about the wildlife?”

  “Yeah...?” She turned her head enough to look at him, curious.

  “Next time, tell me to shut up.” He grabbed her elbow and hauled her backward, almost pulling her arm out of the socket just as something whooshed past them, a blur of black and dun. Jan’s gaze flickered madly, trying to sort out what was going on. Three, no, five of them, low to the ground and turning in a pack, lean bodies and long tails. She thought at first that they were giant cats, maybe cougars, but they moved too fast, too clumped together, turning together more like a herd of horses, or—

  One of them snarled, and it echoed—no, not an echo—there were more of them coming up from behind. And Martin and she were caught in between.

  “Back to back,” he told her, suiting action to words. Jan reached for the knife in her pocket, even as she wondered what the hell she could do with it. Sweat dripped down her back, and she could feel her heart racing, adrenaline screaming at her to run, even as her brain was telling her to stay put, stay still.

  The not-cats wheeled around them again, as if she and Martin were the center of a Maypole, flowing almost like a school of fish, and the others came into her line of vision. These were different, slightly smaller, and their fur was almost the same color as the grass, flecks of brown and emerald green.

  Scared as she was, Jan still could admire how gorgeous they were. She had seen enough nature programs to think that they used the grass as camouflage, probably slinking low to get up close to their prey and then leaping, while the others...

  “Don’t move. Stay very still.”

  “I can do that,” she responded. That light, almost breezy tone was now recognizable as the same she used to deal with Steve, her boss, when he was on a cranky tear, and Jan decided that of all the default responses to abject terror one might have, breezy was probably as good as it got.

  One of the dun-and-black creatures let out a scream that made her almost wet herself, and she could feel Martin tense against her back, the staticky feel of magic making her think that he was about to change.

  Oh, god, not now, she thought. Now would be a very bad time for me to have to close my eyes!

  There was a low cough-and-growl from one of the greenies, and then all hell broke loose, the greenies leaping forward—and bypassing the two figures entirely, landing smack in the middle of the black-and-duns.

  Jan had never seen a catfight before, but she knew one when she saw it. She probably would have been standing there until it ended, openmouthed in fascination, except that Martin started backing away from the scene, taking her with him.

  Only their legs moved, a step and then another step, never looking away, until suddenly it was all over, the black-and-dun cats fleeing the scene, leaving one corpse behind. The greenies, triumphant, likewise disappeared, as though they’d been absorbed by the grass.

  She’d been right about where they came from and how well their camouflage worked.

  “Shit. They’re still around. Somewhere. Anywhere.”

  “I don’t think they’re interested in us,” Martin said. “I think we were just in the middle of a turf war. The larger ones, they’re probably from the mountains.”

  “Why would they come down here?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m not really interested in hanging around to find out. You?”

  “Not really, no.”

  He let go of her elbow, and they slowly turned around, facing the mountain again.

  “So there are more of those big cats, up there?”

  “You won’t smell right to them,” he said. “Neither of us does. That’s why they ignored us. We didn’t smell like food, and we weren’t acting like a threat.”

  “Right.” She was less convinced, but maybe if she believed that really hard, it would be true.

  When they started walking again, they instinctively maintained a half-step distance between each other, the better to go back-to-back again, both of them scanning the landscape, half expecting another attack of—something.

  Jan felt like an idiot now for thinking that this land was empty. Just because the dangers weren’t obvious, like in the city, and just because there weren’t warning signs she could read, that didn’t mean the signs weren’t there. They’d gone through a portal and come out somewhere utterly foreign, weird and dangerous. She couldn’t afford to forget that. Neither of them could.

  And that meant she had to stop just accepting things as “not-normal” and therefore unknowable, or something that Martin would know, or take care of. She needed to get more information. Jan coughed, more to clear her head than her lungs, and asked, “So, where exactly
are we headed?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  She shook her head. “If I did, I wouldn’t need to ask, would I?”

  He sighed, staring up at the sky as though some answers were going to fall down on them like rain.

  “Where are we going?” she asked again.

  “Under the Hill.” He said it as if it should mean something to her.

  “Under the mountain?” She looked up at it, looming ever closer on the horizon, and the massive bulk sent a shiver through her. “Under? You mean through, right? Or they’ve got an installation carved into it, like the military, caves, and elevator shafts, and...” Her voice trailed off, unable to imagine elevators here in this world. Magical beasts, flying you from one level to the next, maybe. Or a spell that lifted you...

  No, they didn’t have spells. Not even the preters. But even if they didn’t do magic, they were magic. She alone—all humans—were outside that.

  Or were they? She had seen Martin and Toba shift, but you could almost find a logical, scientific reason for shape-shifters, right? There were species that changed gender, and species that went through several different forms, and...okay, it wasn’t the same at all. But she could extrapolate, make it make sense. And the portals, those were physical, and, hell, maybe they were some kind of wormhole or black hole or digital time-space continuum timey-wimey whirligig-thing that totally made sense when you knew enough physics. Even Tyler changing shape, that could just have been a mind trick, another kind of glamour.

  The really fantastical kind of magic, making things out of nothing, making people fly without engines...that would be harder. She hadn’t seen anything like that. She had no reason to believe anything like that existed. She wasn’t going to rule it out, though. She’d be on guard, ready for anything, be able to adapt to anything.

  “Under the Hill,” he said again. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. If you’re right, it’s the only place she could be going. Especially if she knows, or suspects, that we’re coming. She’s taking him to the heart of her people, where she will be strongest—where there will be the most of them. The queen of Under the Hill, and her Court, and...”