Soul of Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

  She’d learned how to recognize the twitch of his face that meant a real, if ironic, smile, and grimaced in return. He was right. Since nothing had changed, there was no point wasting time talking about it. “If we actually come up with anything, I’ll let you know.”

  * * *

  Jan paused in the hallway before going inside, doing a quick personal inventory. Shirt, not coffee-stained. Hair, reasonably combed. Face, presumably clean, or at least AJ hadn’t mentioned anything, and he would have.

  “Oh, god, I hate this,” she muttered.

  Jan had lasted exactly one year in a traditional job before finding one that allowed her to telecommute. Most of her day had been spent working in front of monitors, interacting with people via text or the occasional vid conference. Jan hadn’t been required to attend meetings in person, much less expected to lead those meetings. Fortunately, Ops—her team—was easy enough to manage, once she had all her geeks pointed in the same direction.

  She took a deep breath and said her mantra, the same one she had been saying for weeks now: You are Jan Coughlin, who was chosen out of how many others to save the world; you have survived gnome attacks and the preter court, being attacked by creatures you can’t identify, and this briefing is by comparison a piece of cake. Damn it.

  The communications room had taken over what had been the front parlor in the original farmhouse. The rest of the main floor had been given over to the work space she’d been using earlier, the constant flow of people making it unworkable for conferences of any size and impractical for any kind of privacy. So they’d kicked out the supers who had been nesting in the parlor, cleared all the furniture out, and replaced it with a narrow trestle table that could seat six with room for paperwork and coffee mugs, and hung a massive monitor on the far wall. When the brand-new communications system—ordered and installed by Jan herself—wasn’t in use, the rest of the room was taken over for smaller meetings. But right now, it was filled with people, all waiting for her.

  Jan was the only human in the room. She’d almost gotten used to that by now, shoving her way past Lisbet and Meredith, the lupin who had found them and brought them here after they’d come back through the portal, to get to her chair. They both looked up and nodded as she passed. Despite AJ’s original claim that supernaturals didn’t use tech, it had turned out that there were a number of them who not only did, but understood it better than their alleged human expert. Jan was a geek, but her skills were testing and repairing, not creating. There were ten members of her team, including Jan herself, and four of them could blow her out of the water when it came to figuring out how things worked.

  Five if you counted the person on the screen.

  “Hey, Janny-girl. You look like shite.”

  Jan gave the speaker a finger and sat down, placing her reclaimed coffee on the table within easy reach. “Morning to you, too, Glory.” It was afternoon in the U.K. where the other woman was, actually, but Jan held that at eight in the morning she didn’t have to make allowances for anyone else.

  The other woman raised her own mug in counter-salute, even as the display split, her image taking up the left-hand side, while another face appeared on the right.

  “Hey, y’all.” The man in the new display waggled his fingers, and another hand reached in from offscreen to wave, as well. Kit and Laurie, out in Portland. It was oh-fuck-early out there, but the two of them had probably been up all night.

  Glory, Kit, and Laurie: three of the five people Jan had dared contact after escaping the preters. The three of the five who had actually listened—believed. Or at least, not immediately assumed that she had lost her mind or that she was pulling the monster of all pranks.

  Jan winced a little, thinking of the reaction of the other two, people she’d thought she could trust, could count on to have her back. One of them had been her boss—had been, since he’d fired her on the spot. Her only consolation was that if they failed and the preters overran this world, she’d be able to say I told you so. As consolation went, it sucked.

  “All right, people, let’s get this show on the road,” Jan said, speaking louder to be heard over the chatter of voices, trying to project confidence and get-it-done-ness. She barely recognized her own voice. She wasn’t Linda Hamilton, Terminator-style quality, but there was grit in her that hadn’t been there a few months ago. And it wasn’t just the lack of sleep.

  Nearly everyone on the Farm was part of the hunt for the preter queen or watching for some sign of renewed kidnappings. She—and her team—needed to figure out how to stop the new incursions, once and for all.

  “Do we even have a show? Or a road, for that matter?” Meredith asked. The lupin would much rather have been part of the hunt; she had loudly regretted ever admitting that she’d once run a computer help desk, once it stuck her on the team.

  “Meredith, please.” Jan raised a hand, and the lupin ducked her head in apology. Jan wasn’t even close to alpha, but AJ, who was, had told Meredith to obey the human, and so she would. “Do we have anything coming in, from any source?”

  They had to shut this down. For now, the portals were few and far between, but the fact that they existed at all, outside the traditional connections between worlds, was bad enough. Nobody knew what the preternaturals could do if they succeeded in opening enough portals to come here en masse. Even discounting three-quarters of every fairy tale ever, Jan knew firsthand that they weren’t going to leave humanity alone.

  Jan had seen what his preternatural seducer had done to Tyler. She had seen what became of the Greensleeves, the abandoned human slaves. She had looked into the eyes of the preter consort and seen nothing of compassion or kindness.

  A world where preters could come and go freely, not bound by anything save their own whim, was not a good thing. Not for anything born to this world, human or supernatural.

  That was why they were here. Four days and counting.

  “Talk to me,” she said now, trying desperately to channel some of AJ’s natural take-charge-and-inspire leadership into her voice “Somebody tell me something good, something exciting, something that will make me giddy like a schoolgirl.”

  There was a hesitant silence, and Jan wished that she’d gone back to get her coffee before coming in here. Then Kit started talking.

  “Well, if nobody else wants to go first, I will. I’m pleased to report that our little rumor-string has hit critical mass and gone fucking viral.” He was clearly running on caffeine fumes at this point, red eyed and rumple haired, but his voice was certain. “Every person who’s ever even thought about using a dating site is going to hear the rumor about the slave-trade ring scouting for likelies.”

  AJ hadn’t wanted them to focus any energy on that problem, but Jan had insisted. They didn’t know what sort of magic the preters were using to create the portals—before, portals had appeared at the whim of the seasons, or the stars, or something even more random, but Tyler’s experience with the preter-bitch Stjerne had made it clear that humans were at the heart of it now.

  That had been the argument that Jan had used, that had made AJ agree, but Jan would have pushed for this no matter what her pack leader said. These were people being taken. Humans like Tyler. Taken, abused, broken...and, unlike Tyler, not rescued.

  Jan might not be able to save everyone, but she would do her damnedest to make sure no more were lost.

  “I still say we should have just taken down the dating sites altogether and been done with it weeks ago,” Lisbet said from the other side of the table. Jötunndotter were slow to move, their stonelike bodies heavy and stiff, but they had no patience with doing things slowly otherwise.

  “Where’s the skill in that?” Kit was...enthusiastic. Preters or prototypes, he didn’t really care, so long as it was a challenge. Finding a way to warn potential victims without getting laughed off the internet, and making sure that it went viral,
had been his personal side project, and he wasn’t paying attention to the bigger picture. Everyone kept sane in their own way, Jan supposed.

  “You really think that will work?” Andy asked, dubious. “Human males are not known to be cautious.” Coming from a splyushka—a cousin to Koba, who had died to protect her, back when this all started—that was almost funny. The owl-eyed supernaturals were, she had learned, noted for their impulsive behavior. They were also the ones most comfortable with tech, so she had two of them on the team: Andy and his nest-sib, Beth, who was leaning against the wall at the back of the room, silent but alert.

  “True enough,” Laurie leaned into the frame to say, “but they tend to bull in when they think they can handle something. The risk of ending up...well, we made it unpleasant enough to put most folk off risking an easy lay for a lifetime of that.”

  “And the rest of them are on their own, and good riddance to idiots,” Glory said, her accent intentionally heavy in a room, however virtual, of Americans, human and otherwise. “Now, can we get down to the important things? Like figuring out how these pointy-eared bastards are even getting connectivity on their side? Because if we can’t figure out how to counter it, then we need to know the bloody power source in order to pull the plug.”

  One of the things they’d learned was that the new portals “felt” the same to supernaturals as major human laboratories like Livermore and CERN did, a weird sort of electrical buzz. Somehow, the preters had merged their magic to human technology, using computers and brainwashed humans—like Tyler, her brain whispered—to create and hold these new portals. But they didn’t have the knowledge to figure out why, or how to stop them. That was supposed to be Jan’s job

  “I’m telling you,” Glory said, “you need to get someone inside some of those labs.”

  This, like everything else, was an ongoing argument. AJ had sent scouts to the perimeter, as close as they could get without being caught. But just lurking, looking, and sniffing hadn’t given them enough information.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Andy said, “and we’re going to get that access...how? It’s not like we go for the hard sciences, generally, so unless you’ve got someone who can turn invisible and sneak in and, oh, by the way, once he’s there knows what he’s looking for and how to explain it to us when he gets back...”

  “Are there no humans who would help us?” Beth said. “Laurie, what about your friend from MIT?”

  Laurie shook her head. “He hasn’t gotten back to me yet, no matter how many urgent stickers I leave on my messages. I’m hopeful—Larry’s actually the kind of guy where ‘Hey, my buddy the fairy says you guys might be sourcing a tunnel between worlds, want to check that out for me?’ might work. But I haven’t heard anything.”

  “Well, we haven’t had any midnight visits from the Men in Black, so he hasn’t said anything to anyone else, either,” Kit added. “Unless they’re monitoring us even now, in which case, get off your asses and do something, NSA!”

  “Focus, please,” Jan said amid the laughter. She looked across the table to where Galilia, her nominal second in command, was sitting. Gali wasn’t technically inclined, but she’d been working on some possible inroads among the scientific community. The jiniri shook her head slightly: nothing new to report there, either.

  Jan sighed and let the back-and-forth flow over her, listening with one ear. If someone came up with something new or even probable, she would jump in. For now, she wished again for her coffee and tried not to think about her heartbeat ticking off the time.

  * * *

  Nearly an hour later, the meeting ended with nothing to show except a headache and a bunch of dead ends. Jan waited until they’d all left, then looked up at the screen where only Glory remained.

  “You still look like shite,” the other woman said, her normal over-the-top gestures muted with concern. “Are you sleeping at all?”

  “Not much,” Jan admitted, leaning back in her chair. It was nice to drop the leader mask; Glory was never fooled by it, anyway.

  “I told you staying out there was a bad idea.”

  “And where else was I supposed to go, Glory?” After the gnome attack on her apartment, the landlord had revoked her lease. It wasn’t exactly a surprise—apparently the entire apartment had smelled of smoke and meat, and the door had been busted open as if a bull had gone through it—but it had left her effectively homeless, especially since there was no way Tyler could return to his old life right then, and she didn’t want to stay alone in his apartment...even assuming it was safe to do so. If the gnomes could track her on a bus, to her apartment... Well, she wasn’t going to put others in danger—or risk pulling more supers from the Farm to guard her.

  So she had packed up her tech and as much stuff as she could fit in a suitcase, put the rest into storage, and gone back to the Farm. Unlike the rest of the troops, who were mostly bedding down in tents or trees or whatever places they preferred, she had a room in the farmhouse proper, in the half floor upstairs. It was small but comfortable, with a window that gave her a clear view over the property and enough sunlight to feel as if she was in a tree house. If anything came over the property lines, either by ground or air, she could see it coming.

  It didn’t help.

  Glory tsked, her painted fingernails flicking at the air. Even now, Gloriana was as flamboyant as her name, thick black curls glossy as a raven’s feathers, and makeup perfectly applied. Jan envied her the bright red lipstick she wore. Glory’s skin was darker than Tyler’s; if Jan tried to wear that shade, she’d look like a clown.

  Jan rubbed at her own face, aware that exhaustion made her look even more sallow, and wished she could end this conversation.

  “And I don’t suppose you’re getting any, either, to help rock you to sleep or make you not care,” Glory went on.

  Jan’s headache took a sudden right turn to migraine. That did it. Glory might think getting her itch scratched was the solution to most stress, but talking about her nonexistent sex life—especially given that there were no other humans on the Farm except for Ty—was below pretty much every other topic of conversation on Jan’s to-do list. She just smiled at her friend, making sure to show as many teeth as possible, said “Talk to you tomorrow,” and hit the disconnect tab.

  “Ixnay on the sexnay,” she muttered. “That’s the least of my problems right now.”

  There was a cough, and she looked up to see a slender, scaled figure lounging in the doorway, a reminder that space was at a premium and other people needed to use the room, too.

  “Sorry,” she said and left.

  Midday, the farmhouse was humming with activity. Not all the supers were diurnal, but the nocturnal ones also tended to be more solitary and, therefore, quieter. Plus, Jan noted as she worked her way through the kitchen, grabbing a sandwich off a platter as she went, it looked as if a lot of them were working double shifts, making the main floor even more crowded than usual.

  The urge to go to the shed and check on Tyler hit her again, and she pushed it down. He had a routine, a routine that was helping him heal, and she had other things to do.

  “Has anyone seen—” she started to ask, and a handful of voices called out “At the gazebo.”

  “Thanks.” She shook her head as she left the house; apparently she was predictable.

  She found Martin where she’d been told to look, out in the gazebo—really just a wooden platform with a canvas tarp stretched overhead to make a roof—lecturing to another group of supers.

  “Greensleeves are arrogant but desperate,” he was saying, leaning against the railing and letting his voice project over the space. Broad chested, with shaggy brown hair framing a long, squared-off face, and wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, he looked as ordinary as any guy on the street. Even his black nails could be a goth affectation, except she knew that it wasn’t polish, that the wide-set brown
eyes flickered with gold fire if you stared into them too long, and his other form was a cold-blooded murderer.

  Martin was probably her best friend now, even more than Glory.

  There were seven other supers listening to him talk, and she couldn’t identify any of their species, other than absolutely not human. “They will try to establish their superiority over you, because they have none of their own in that land,” the kelpie went on. “Don’t assume that means they’re harmless. They’re anything but—they have nothing to lose.”

  Greensleeves were humans who had been taken by the preters and then abandoned, left to fend for themselves in that cruel, unfamiliar realm.

  She and Martin were the only ones on the Farm who had ever gone through a portal—at least, the only ones still living who had done so and come back to talk about it. With her expertise needed on the tech side, he had been tasked with telling the others what to expect, not so much from the portals themselves as the preternaturals on the other side.

  “Why don’t they rebel?” one of the supers asked. “Humans are supposed to be the wild card, the ones who aren’t bound by tradition. Why aren’t any of them—”

  “What? Charging in and biting off the head of the preter queen? Leading the thralls and changelings in revolt?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re an idiot,” Martin said, neither kindly nor with any venom, simply stating an obvious fact.

  Jan listened to him talking and felt an odd disconnect. She had told so many people, so many times, every detail she could remember of their time in the other realm, their experiences didn’t quite feel real anymore. It was more as if she’d read it somewhere, read it so many times that she’d internalized it somehow.

  But in her nightmares, it was all very real. That was probably why she wasn’t sleeping.

  She caught the kelpie’s eye, and he nodded slightly; they were almost finished. Jan kept walking; he’d catch up with her when he was done.