Laura Anne Gilman

by Heart of Briar

  She’d welcome a little boredom right now.

  “Iced coffee for me, please.” It had warmed up a little outside, and she was sweating slightly. Or maybe that was just nerves, in which case the caffeine wasn’t going to help.

  “Same here.”

  That was one of the warning signs, Martin had said. If he tried to mirror what she did, make her feel an immediate connection.

  “That’s what you do on a real date, too,” she had told the kelpie, annoyed. “Something more helpful, please?”

  “Mirroring,” he had repeated. “That’s exactly what they do, AJ says. And asking about your family, how close you were to them. They want someone who has no ties here, no one to miss them if they disappear.”

  That had hurt. A lot. Tyler had someone. He’d had her.

  Clearly, it hadn’t been enough.

  “Also, look in their eyes.”

  “Their eyes.”

  “They’re like us, in some ways—different forms—and some of them are more human than others. But the eyes give them away.”

  Like Toba’s. The owl-man had seemed mostly normal, until you saw his golden-rimmed eyes. And AJ’s eyes were the cunning, careful eyes of a wolf. But Martin’s were normal enough. Or maybe she had just gotten used to them? Maybe that was how he lured his victims....

  Now, leaning across the table, she tilted her head up and looked into David’s eyes.

  Normal. Brown and round and black-pupiled and black-lashed, and quite nice-looking, actually, but human.

  If she looked into Martin’s eyes for too long, she felt dizzy.

  “So. Tell me about yourself,” David said. “You do websites, right?”

  David was an orthodontist. She should have known from the start: no preter would ever claim to be an orthodontist.

  “I design and support websites, yes. I work for a company that does that, rather. It’s not as exciting as it sounds.” It didn’t sound very exciting at all, actually. She just happened to be very good at it.

  Her shoulder muscles twitched, and she was aware of the fact that this was wasted time: he wasn’t a preter, and she didn’t care about David the Orthodontist, no matter how nice a human he seemed to be, or how pretty his eyes were. Or how nice his hands were. She seemed to be noticing hands—Martin’s hands, for one. How something that transferred into hooves could be so smooth and gentle, she didn’t know, but they were. Like a sculptor’s hands, she imagined. Although she’d never met a sculptor, to check.

  Their drinks came, they ordered food, and she turned the question back on him, asking about his job and faking a reasonable amount of interest while she tried to figure out how soon she could bail.

  Halfway through their sandwiches, she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, hoping that Martin, who was allegedly lurking nearby, would be around, and she could improvise a sudden emergency or something. But the kelpie had either decided that David wasn’t useful on his own and left, or he utterly failed to pick up her “come rescue me” vibes.

  His failure to show up stung more than she’d expected. First Tyler leaving her, then Martin...Jan twitched away that thought. It wasn’t the same thing. At all. Martin was there.

  The kelpie was dangerous. She knew he was dangerous. Not human. But he had stayed, and he had held himself back, not killing her, and he’d held her when she’d cried, and, god, this was fucked up, but no more than anything else that had happened, so, okay?

  So she’d trust him.

  Jan washed her hands and splashed water on her face, and stared at herself in the mirror, wondering if she should bother reapplying lipstick, or touching up her foundation, a cheap shade she’d bought at the local drugstore the day before, when she’d gotten her asthma meds replaced.

  She swiped on more color, as though reapplying armor, and left the relative sanctuary of the ladies’ room.

  On the way back to the table, some floating bit of conversation caught her ear.

  “So, Nathan, you’re an only child? That must be lonely.”

  Jan changed her direction, circling around as though she needed to go outside, and looked over her shoulder. A man and a woman, sitting at a table. The woman was leaning in, her hand on her companion’s. She was attractive, honey-blond hair cut short to her ears and slightly spiky, a heart-shaped face, and long neck leading to a rather low-cut black blouse. But it was her intensity that caught Jan’s attention. Intensity was one of the hallmarks, too, Martin had said.

  Jan stared, shamelessly, and the woman must have sensed it. She raised her head, looking away from the man and around the restaurant, like a cat sniffing out a mouse.

  Then she turned her head, looking toward Jan, and Jan’s breath caught. Too far away to be sure, but there was a glitter in those eyes that wasn’t human. Not if you knew what you were looking for.

  Martin’s eyes had that glitter, too, sometimes.

  She looked away, hoping that the woman would think she’d been rude, rather than hunting. When she looked back again, cautiously, the blonde had gone back to her companion.

  Her prey.

  Jan’s heartbeat sped up, and she made her way back to her table in a blur. Apparently, she’d been gone too long, because David had finished his sandwich and was working on a second coffee, and looked a little annoyed. Her inability to focus on the conversation didn’t help, either, and when they finally parted, there was no “we should get together again, I’ll call you,” just a pleasant enough, “this was nice.”

  Not that it mattered, since she’d given him a fake name and email address.

  Once Jan left the restaurant, she should have met up with Martin and gone back to square one. But there was a preter in the restaurant, right there, with a human male who looked to be buying her line, without any clue what was going to happen to him.

  Jan wasn’t impulsive. She thought things through and planned, and once decided, she stayed the course. But the past week had been such a chaos of improbable and impossible—she had flown, and seen monsters, and met people only to have them die, and her only help was a kelpie who had disappeared on her.

  And there was a preter not ten feet away from her, about to lead a human to his fate...maybe. Or maybe she was hallucinating. Everything that was happening...without Martin around, without the weirdly reassuring presence of AJ or even Elsa, Jan started to doubt herself. Had any of this even happened?

  She found herself walking back into the restaurant, avoiding the hostess, and heading for the table where the blonde preter and her prey were sitting.

  “Nate?”

  The man looked up. He wasn’t particularly good-looking, with an oversize chin and a nose that had been broken at least once, but his eyes were deep blue and totally human.

  “Nate, it is you! I’m so glad, I’ve been trying to find you since forever, but it’s like you disappeared! I’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude, but it’s so good to see you. It’s been, what, five years? Six?” She was babbling, the words falling out of her as though someone else were talking. “Here, give me your number, and I’ll call you! We can catch up. The entire family will be so thrilled.” She thought about mentioning something more about family but didn’t want to push it. Enough that the preter knew that someone would miss him, if he were taken. She risked a glance at the woman—the preter—and thought she saw a look of annoyance or disgust cross her face, quickly hidden behind a polite facade.

  Good, Jan thought, and then smiled brightly at Nate, who—not wanting to admit that he had no idea who she was—had written a number on his napkin and handed it to her.

  “Great! So lovely to run into you! You two have fun, we’ll catch up tomorrow, Nate!”

  Jan tucked the napkin into her pocket and fled the restaurant, praying that nothing triggered an asthma attack until she was away from the preter. She was halfway down the street before she realized she was being flanked—and not by Martin, either.

  “AJ.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “And...I don’t know you?”

&nb
sp; “Stop talking. You talk too much. What the hell were you doing?”

  AJ sounded furious, his snout twitching under the partial disguise of his hoodie.

  “What was I doing? What were you doing? Where the hell have you been? And where’s Martin?”

  “You alerted the preter.”

  “I did not. As far as she knows, I’m just some dippy-headed human who interfered with her guy-nabbing.”

  “You really think you dissuaded her from her target?”

  The other super hadn’t spoken yet, and Jan wondered if he even could: his face was even less human-appearing than AJ’s, with fangs that curled out of his mouth at an uncomfortable-looking angle. They didn’t seem as though they could let him chew much, so...

  A thought occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t flesh this super ingested, and she inched a bit closer to AJ. Meat-eaters were somehow more acceptable than blood-suckers. Which, on the face of it, was insane, but somehow, the lupin made her feel safer. Even when he was bitching her out.

  “All you did was make her more cautious—now it’s going to be even harder for us to get to her. What were you thinking?”

  “Of saving her victim!”

  They’d reached the end of a street, where a large black limo waited, the passenger-side doors open.

  “Get in,” the other super said, not so much a suggestion as an order.

  She got in.

  Martin was already there, sitting in the backseat, and he reached out for her, his hand taking her own. It should have been creepy, the way his actions echoed the preter’s in the restaurant, and it was creepy, a little, but Jan still held on like a lifeline.

  “You should have come out here and gotten us, and we could have made a plan. Instead, you went gung ho, and she ran. The moment you left the restaurant, she up and disappeared.” AJ had gotten in behind her, sitting on the seat opposite them. The other super had gotten in front, she assumed, or been left behind to guard their flank, as the car pulled away from the curb and slid into the afternoon traffic.

  Jan had only ever been in a limo once before, for her prom. She’d felt nervous and needed to throw up then, too.

  “I’m sorry.”

  AJ growled. “No, you’re not. But you won’t do it again, will you?”

  He was right, on both accounts. “No.”

  The lupin sighed and leaned back, understanding her negative for agreement. “This car costs a fortune, you know that? But it keeps us moving, and it’s harder to track than a bus. I take it the date was a bust?”

  Jan nodded her head, still shaking a little from the adrenaline, not even wondering how AJ knew what they’d been doing. Martin must have told him, when he’d disappeared. “He was human. And for all our planning, I just stumbled across one today, about to munch on her own prey.”

  Martin shifted, and she shot him a glare. AJ or not, she still hadn’t forgiven him for disappearing on her back at the restaurant. “How many are there, and why can’t we hunt them down directly?” She had assumed that preters were rare, elusive, and needed drawing out. That had been the only damn reason she’d agreed to be bait.

  Well, that and they hadn’t given her any time to refuse. “Look, you asked me because I knew tech and could figure out what they’re doing, lay a trail for them to follow like some kind of rat trap. But the truth is that technology doesn’t always speed things up—especially if you’re waiting for someone else on the other end. This bait-and-hook scheme isn’t going to work. It takes too long—there were three others I’ve got lunches set up for, but that’s four days and they could all be busts—and you said Tyler doesn’t have much time, not if we’re going to get him back.”

  Back in useful condition. They had said if the preters held him too long... No. The thought of Tyler looking at her, empty-eyed, nobody home anymore, was not acceptable. Even though she was furious at him, she wanted him to be aware when she bitched him out for being such a skanky two-timer.

  “You’re suggesting that we should canvass every coffee shop and café in the city, on the off chance a preter shows up? And hope that she or he doesn’t scent us and spook?” AJ’s scorn was immediate. “Even assuming that they come here on a regular basis, without knowing where they are going to meet their prey, and when... We can’t scent each other out of an entire city, but in close proximity, the moment we know they’re around—they know we’re there, too. That’s why we need humans to do this, Jan. Otherwise we wouldn’t have involved you at all.”

  The car swerved, just as she was going to respond to that, and Martin’s hand on hers squeezed tightly. It might have been a reaction to the car’s movement...or it might have been a warning. Jan, still smarting from AJ’s earlier words, took it as a warning, and bit back what she was going to say.

  “We need one alive. We need it bound and within our grasp, to get the truth from it.”

  “Any preter?”

  “One of the hunters,” AJ amended. “One of those who know how to cross over—and can tell us how to shut down their connection, to expose them for what they are.”

  “And rescue Tyler.”

  “And rescue Tyler, yes.”

  Jan felt a flicker of unease at how her boyfriend was becoming an afterthought, but forced it down. This was the only chance she had. They might have their agenda, but getting Ty home was hers.

  “All right. Fine. Bait and snatch. But if it’s mainly women doing the hunting, which it seems like from the responses we were getting, what then? I can’t go in wearing drag—” well, she could, but she didn’t think that would be effective “—and if they can tell you’re there—” which explained why Martin hadn’t been in the restaurant with her, and it would have been nice if he’d thought to tell her that! “—then how are we going to approach them?”

  “Set up the date, and then scope them out from a distance. They might scent us, but they’re on our territory, they have to assume it could be an innocent walk-by.” AJ was talking as if she was a slightly dim ten-year-old for not figuring that out.

  “Uh-huh.” If she were trying to kidnap humans in order to invade, she wouldn’t assume anything, and she suspected the preters wouldn’t, either. AJ sounded and acted tough, but she suddenly wondered if he really was hard enough. So far, everything they’d done had been defensive, not offensive. Even the attempts to lure them were bait-and-wait, passive, not attacking the problem at its source.

  The car turned another corner, and Jan wondered, for the first time, if her supernatural allies actually knew what the hell they were doing.

  “How close do you have to be, before they smell you?”

  “Smell?”

  “You know what I mean.” She was tired and as annoyed as he was—maybe even more so because it hadn’t been his apartment that had been broken in to and god-knows-what and all her stuff lost and she might not even have a job anymore. And it wasn’t his boyfriend who was being held captive by evil mind-sucking elves. If she had to pick up the slack and figure out what needed to be done... Well, it wouldn’t be the first time, but he got her into this, damn it. He and Martin, and Tyler, who couldn’t keep it in his pants.

  “We’re not sure,” AJ said. “It’s been a while since...well. It’s better to stay out of line-of-sight. A lot probably depends on if they’re looking for us, same as if we’re looking for them. And thanks to you, they’re paranoid now. They’ll be more careful.”

  “Fine. I get it.” This wasn’t the best plan, but it was the only plan they had. Right now. “Give me a damn laptop and somewhere with connectivity, and I’ll get you some more chances.”

  She had to. Tyler was depending on her.

  Chapter 9

  He had woken in the starlight, restless and alone. The air was still and quiet; no insects sang here at night, no birds at dawn. Drawing on his robe, he wandered down the hallway, the rose-colored tile floor cool under his feet, until he came to the archway that led into the garden.

  She was there, sitting on a stone bench that looked out, away
from the sleeping garden and out into the misty fields beyond. He had no idea what lay beyond those fields, if there was a city filled with life and lights, or farmlands, or nothing at all, the world fading out into mist until there was only the void.

  “You’re restless.” Her voice was a rope that drew him to her, and he did not even think to resist.

  “Something bothers you.”

  “And that drew you from slumber, and to my side.” She sounded more thoughtful than usual, less amused at his expense. He knew that about her now, that she took amusement from his confusion and pain, and did not resent it. How could he? Her whim was his reason.

  “I have been here too long, and I grow weary of these walls,” she said. “Weary and fretful, and I do not like either sensation. I know the logic, I approve of the reason, I agreed to the limits, agreed to this experiment, and what I must sacrifice. But we are not meant to be caged, penned like beasts, told whither and when we might go. Not this long, without respite. Not once we have tasted the airs of freedom.”

  He had no idea what she was talking about. She wasn’t speaking to him, for all that he was her only company.

  “He orders us to his bidding as though it were his right to do so, and yet I may not go out into the world, not with my work undone. He is fretful, worried, bitter, and I have no desire to listen to the others bleating at my failures while they sit and do nothing. And all the while it sits there, taunting us. She taunts us.”

  He sat, quiet and empty, letting her words fill him, direct him. He must have done it well, because she turned to look at him, considering. Something inside him quailed, some least remnant of fear, and then was silenced by her presence.

  “But, yes, I have options they do not; options that could give me an advantage.” Her beautiful eyes were now clouded, as though she were looking somewhere that he could not see. “Yes. If it could be done, it would put me ahead, perhaps be the chance I need. I could claim it as a test, and none might gainsay me. All I need do is manage it.”