Soul of Fire tp-2

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Jan has always been kind.” Tyler said it as if it was a bad thing, the sort of thing that you apologized for.

  “I’m not— No, Martin, relax. It’s not... It’s about being decent,” she said defensively. “About being, I don’t know, human. Humane. Not being like preters, all selfish and...I don’t know.”

  She’d had a point when she’d started talking. Or not a point maybe but a thought, something important. She couldn’t remember what it was now. She had been the one to urge them to come here; why was she arguing against it now? Jan wondered if she would even know if she had been englamoured. She touched her pocket, only then realizing that she’d forgotten to switch the sachet and carved horse into her pocket that morning. Still, surely Martin, if not Tyler, would be able to tell? Or was that what he was telling her, and she couldn’t hear him?

  “If we can’t stop them, there won’t be a point to being humane,” Martin said. “We’ll be cattle, all of us, subject to their whim. All because you felt sorry for a preter queen, who would as soon knock you across the room as look at you.”

  Jan raised her hand to the side of her face, where a bruise had risen, purple shadows against her skin. She’d almost forgotten about that.

  “Jan.” Tyler took her hand in his, his skin cool against her own. “Jan.” His voice, the touch of his hand, grounded her, but the not-pity lingered, the sense of something-not-right pressing on her brain.

  “Janny, don’t do this.” Martin’s deep brown eyes flickered with those odd golden lights again, reminding her that he wasn’t just a slightly odd-looking human. But the sincerity and worry in his voice were entirely real, and all for her. “She likes pretty things, shiny things. But there’s a reason she can’t draw a picture, can’t sing a song, can’t do all the things that she’s gathered you humans for. There’s a reason why they’ve always taken humans—to entertain them. Because they can’t do it themselves. Kindness now, pity now, and you doom us all to a lifetime as slaves, subject to their whim. Nalith seems kind now, but how will she treat us once she’s bored, once ennui or whatever kicks in?”

  Jan shook her head. That hadn’t been what she’d meant...except it had been, too, she guessed. Nalith wanted something she couldn’t have, wasn’t able to have, and when she realized that...

  “You’re right. I know you’re right. But I don’t like this,” she said. “There should be some other way.”

  “Should but isn’t,” Martin said.

  “So, how do we do this?” she asked. “How the hell do you bind a preter queen? Because I haven’t found any weakness in her, other than not being able to draw her way out of a wet paper bag.”

  “That’s exactly how. The same way they bind humans,” Tyler said, his voice bleak, his hand releasing her own. “With her own obsessions.”

  * * *

  The deadline had ticked by, leaving everyone on the Farm on edge, expecting something and not knowing what. Shifts and schedules fell by the wayside; everyone was working full-out in the hopes of a breakthrough. AJ had considered issuing some sort of sedative in order to make sure they slept, but he decided it was probably a bad idea.

  Midafternoon, two days after the deadline had passed, a scream nearly shattered every eardrum within a square mile, cutting through the stone and timber structure of the Farm like tissue paper. Half the supers dived under tables as though expecting a bomb to hit, while the others did various things with their bodies, expanding wings or pulling up feathers, and in one rather notable case, suddenly being covered with six-inch quills bristling like a porcupine’s back. Glory, her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to block out the painful noise, managed to ask, “What the hell was that?”

  “Bansidhe,” someone yelled back at her, barely audible over the noise. And then it was cut off, the echoes still painful inside her brain.

  “Ban-what?” she asked, even as her memory and research caught up with her. A Celtic spirit, supposed to foretell death. “Oh. That’s not good.”

  “Double plus ungood,” Beth said, sliding to a stop in front of her, feathers fluttering in distress and excitement. “Basement, you.”

  “But—”

  “You’re useless in a fight, Glory. Get into the basement, and stay there!”

  It hurt, but Beth was right. Glory followed several other supers down the stone-cut stairs into the basement. It was really more of a root cellar, with a solid wooden door between them and the kitchen. It was dark, lit only by the electric lantern one of them carried, but there were blankets and boxes down here among the food supplies, plus what looked like cases of bottled water; someone had thought about the potential need for a bolt-hole, previously. Glory wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse.

  The door slammed above them, and the noise of activity was suddenly cut off, leaving only the sound of six pairs of lungs, breathing.

  “So not good,” Glory said. Nobody down there with her disagreed.

  * * *

  “Leave everything where it is!” AJ yelled, projecting his growl to carry over the chaos. “If they get through, it won’t matter worth a damn what they learn. Leave the barn, forget about everything else, defend the main house!” He strode through the old farmhouse, fighting the urge, the need, to change. Just a few minutes more, he promised that urge. A few minutes more to make sure everything was in place, everyone was ready. At his left, Meredith paced, already in her four-legged form, teeth bared at the yet-invisible intruders who dared threaten her pack.

  “Team A, to the roof,” he ordered, trusting that his words would be carried through the crowd. “Team B, go to ground. Come on, you bastards, we trained for this. Get to it!”

  They weren’t lupin, this motley assortment who had come to his call, heeded his warnings about the preternatural threat. But they were fierce and determined, and they knew what was at stake. Now was the time to trust them to do their job and for him to do his.

  Lupin were guided by the moon’s seasons but not bound by them. And he fought better on four legs rather than two. Lifting his face to the ceiling, AJ imagined the moon silver in the sky, hidden now by sunlight, then he let go of his control, opened all of his senses to the magic that hummed inside him, and changed.

  It wasn’t as fast or easy as what he’d seen the kelpie go through, but it didn’t hurt, either; more like a fast, surprise orgasm running through his body, twisting him into knots and then pulling him loose almost as quickly. Blood fizzed and his senses roared, and he felt himself drop to all fours, the rightness of this position matching the rightness of his two-legged form. A lupin was neither man nor wolf but both equally, and neither.

  He snarled and heard his beta echo it as they leaped through the now-open front door and out to defend their chosen pack.

  According to plan, the outbuildings should have been emptied and left open. Let the enemy attack those spots if they felt the need; infestations could be dealt with later. Everything of importance was in the house, and it was the house they would defend. The bansidhe’s warning had given them enough time to get into place.

  AJ hoped that the creature had survived, that it wasn’t down in pale blue shreds along the border of the property, but that was all the time he had to give to that thought before the first wave came out of the tree line, flowing toward them in a disturbingly organized fashion.

  His mind told him that the sky was pale blue, the trees still holding on to the last of their red-and-gold leaves. His wolf-form eyes saw things not so much in color as motion, the heavy fur on the back of his neck bristling protectively even as his muscles tensed in readiness.

  “Got your back, boss” he heard coming from his right, even as Meredith paced at his left, and then something swooped low over his head, cackling madly and soaring up into the sky, three others following. He raised his muzzle and snarled at the owl-headed splyushka even as they banked and headed back to the house, taking up aerial cover the way they were supposed to.

  When the warehouse had been attacked, the gnomes
had tried for a circle-and-press tactic. That had ended badly for them—they had done damage but left themselves too open to counterattack. This time they spread out and kept moving, dashing from tree to rock to fence post, arms and legs elongating and contracting again as needed. It made AJ slightly queasy to watch, but he kept looking, trying to remain aware of the wider field of battle, never letting his gaze rest too long in one place. There was a second line of attackers waiting—he could scent them, the acrid-sweet smell filling his nostrils and making his blood rage with the need to bite, tear, rend. He reined it in. Emotion served thought, not the other way around.

  “Left field covered.” A report came in, one of the wisps swifting by, barely visible in the morning breeze. “Ready to engage.”

  “Wait for it...wait for it....” one of the supers to his left muttered, and there was a burst of nervous laughter. Meredith growled, but AJ let them be. Battle nerves were better dealt with by quips, not silence.

  A scream and roar came from the north side of the house; a brawl under way, and AJ had his mouth around raw, too-damp skin, his teeth cutting through flesh and down to bone, tearing the elongated arm off his assailant.

  A lupin pack hunted shoulder to tail, minding each others’ flanks, instinctively protecting blind spots. This makeshift pack could not function that way; they had adjusted for it. Overhead, the splyushka swirled and dived, less to do damage than to provide distraction, although occasionally AJ saw a gnome snatched up and then dropped from a height, bits of them torn off by heavy claws and dripping down on the combatants.

  The smell made him want to throw up; this was not fresh meat, but something tainted, disruptive. Whatever the turncoats had been into, it had rendered them unfit to eat. He spat the arm out and surged forward.

  They would take this place over his dead body, and they would pay fiercely for it.

  * * *

  Noise didn’t carry through the heavy door and stone walls of the basement. Glory sat on a case of water, her arms wrapped around her, and tried very hard not to panic.

  The supers who had come down with her weren’t ones she knew. They looked to be two different types, three of them frail boned with narrow heads and long, almost luminescent hair flowing down their backs, the other two normal-ish, but with skin that was dark and rough, like a tree trunk. All five huddled together, occasionally saying something in a soft voice to each other, occasionally glancing in her direction.

  “You can’t fight?” one of them asked finally.

  “Not usefully,” Glory admitted. “Not against whatever’s out there.”

  “Turncoats,” one of the delicate ones said. “Gnomes. They eat flesh, any flesh they can get. AJ says they threw their lot in with the preternaturals to earn the right to eat whatever they want.” She—he, it?—gave a delicate little shudder, hair trembling with the move.

  “Huh,” Glory said. That didn’t match up with the mental image she had of gnomes, which was admittedly formed more by picture books she’d seen in passing than any actual study, but the apprehension in AJ’s voice earlier had been real enough for her to accept the super’s words as truth. “So, we just sit here and wait for them to hack it out overhead?”

  “We can’t fight, either,” a different super said. “We look and we hear and we heal, but we don’t fight.” It smiled a little wistfully. “Not usefully.”

  “My name’s Glory,” she said, suddenly needing that connection.

  “Apple,” the super said and nodded to her companion. “That’s Oak.”

  Dryads. At any other time and place, Glory might have been fascinated. Just then, she only nodded at Oak, getting a solemn nod in return.

  The three others just huddled together more tightly and didn’t speak.

  “You live in Europe?” Apple asked, scooting a little closer to Glory.

  “London,” she said. “England.”

  “I’ve never left Connecticut,” Apple admitted.

  “You never wanted to,” Oak said. “Neither have I. We’re not meant to wander.”

  “Neither am I,” Glory admitted. “If it were up to me, I’d still be in my flat in London, doing the things I always do, happy in my routine. But when a strange man arrives in your bedroom and tells you you’re needed...it’s sort of hard to say no.”

  “They say the Huntsman came for you?” Apple sounded as if she had a bad case of hero worship when she said the name.

  “That’s what AJ called him, yeah. You know him?”

  Apple shook her head, but Oak nodded. “He married an Oak. He comes around sometimes. Human, but old, very old. Older than AJ, maybe. He outwitted AJ once, so he must be wise, too.”

  “Outwitted AJ?” That sounded like a story she needed to hear. Mentally comparing the dark-eyed, growl-voiced man who had welcomed her to the Farm with the much older human man who had sent her here, Glory decided that she’d probably put even odds on the pair of them.

  “They fought over Oak,” the first Oak said. “She was going to visit her mother-tree and got caught up in a lupin hunt. They were going to eat her and the mother-tree, too. The Huntsman was there, saved Oak, and they fell in love—”

  “Wait. Wait a minute.” Glory put her hand up to stop the dryad. “Are you seriously telling me that AJ was the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’?”

  The dryads both stared at her blankly.

  “Right. Never mind.” It didn’t matter, and it wasn’t any crazier than anything else she had seen or learned in the past month. What was it Jan had said—after a while, it all becomes a normal crazy? Yeah. “So, yeah, the Huntsman came and told me Jan needed me. So, I got on a plane, came here, only she’s gone and, well, you know the rest.”

  Somehow, exchanging life stories seemed perfectly natural, as though she were at a tech cocktail party trying to find simpatico mates, rather than sitting in a dark cellar with non-humans while some kind of fight raged on overhead. It was so quiet, their voices carrying through the still air without any effort, that Glory was reminded of the one storm she’d ever been through, off the coast of North Wales, after the winds had died down and the rain was as steady as your own breathing.

  “Did you know Jan?” She had never actually met the other woman in person, only through email and video calls, and there hadn’t been time to talk to any of her other team members about anything other than the problem at hand.

  Galilia was up there in the fight. And Alon, Beth and Joey, and... Glory closed her eyes, pressing the heels of her palms into her eyelids, trying to make those thoughts shut up.

  “We never met her,” the dryads said, but one of the other three raised its face and said, “I did,” in a pale, wispy voice that perfectly matched her appearance. “I helped treat Tyler when he had nightmares. She would come sometimes to sit with him.”

  “Wraiths are healers,” Apple said. “Not because they like making people better. They feed on sorrow and pain.”

  “We are as we are,” the wraith that had spoken said. It wasn’t defensive, merely a statement of fact.

  “If you help someone, no matter your reason, you still helped them. And if you can do it and take care of yourself at the same time...that’s aces in my book.” Glory still hadn’t forgiven Tyler for thinking with his dick and getting Jan—and her!—into this mess in the first place, but that was shit to deal with another time.

  “Yes. We are all merely our natures.”

  “Oh, hey, that’s not what I said,” Glory objected. “Nobody’s only their nature, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to say, ‘Hey, let me help someone who needs pain siphoned off,’ rather than just wandering around until you found someone. And AJ wouldn’t have become friends with the Huntsman—one of them would have killed the other.”

  The wraith frowned, her head tilting to the side and pale eyes narrowing. Glory noted with fascination that she didn’t have eyelids to close; her eyes actually narrowed. “They are predators, both. Each respected the other’s strengths, renegotiated their territory. That is within
their nature. We...we are lazy.”

  There was a snort from one of the dryads at that.

  “We will seek the easiest source of sustenance. A willing source requires less effort to feed from. That is our nature. And it is the nature of those in pain to willingly give it up to another.”

  “That’s the most passive-aggressive excuse I’ve ever heard. Are you seriously saying that none of you have any self-empowerment at all?”

  “We are bound to our trees,” Oak said. “We sway or fall to the winds. Where is there empowerment in that?”

  “You’re not with your trees now,” Glory said. “You came here to the Farm, I presume to help stand against the preters, rather than just waiting to see what wind would prevail. So, why not see how far you can take it?”

  Rather than the immediate reaction Glory would have expected, there was silence. All five of them seemed to be considering her words. The wraiths were dubious, she thought—their expressions were subtle and hard to read. Apple seemed uncertain. Oak, though, she had a faint smile on her face, as though she liked what she was thinking.

  Oaks were a hard wood, Glory remembered. Apparently, that carried through to their dryads. But while they seemed content to wait, passive, Glory couldn’t. She got up off her crate and started to pace the confines of the cellar, stepping out of the warm glow of the lantern, poking her nose into the shadows. The cellar was dry enough and warm enough, all things considered. It would have been filled with dried fruits and root vegetables, she supposed, back when the house was first built and it was actually in use by humans. Or maybe they had used it to store cider or...

  She circled back through the light and out into the shadows again, skirting the narrow wooden staircase. The urge to go up the steps, to see what was happening, itched in her, but she beat it down.

  And that image triggered another, sending her back into the center again, looking intently.

  “We need something to use as a weapon,” she said.

  “A what?”

  “In case...well, you know. In case someone comes down here.” Every horror movie she had ever unwillingly watched reappeared in her brain, all the ways something could pop out and take off your head or stab you in the gut.