And Galilia was right. Hadn’t that been exactly what she had been saying to Martin earlier? They weren’t needed here.
“No, it’s all right. I get it. You’re right.” Jan was, first and foremost, a problem solver. She’d been trying to do that within the parameters of this gig, trying to think, work, like a supernatural. But she wasn’t. She was a human. It might not be an advantage, as such, but it meant she had other options.
She needed to talk to Martin again.
“You’re right,” she repeated. “I need to...utilize my skill set better.” It was straight out of an HR handbook and made the jiniri laugh, if ruefully. “If you do need me, though?” she said, even as she was standing up, grabbing a handful of M&M’s to go. “To interpret, or break up a fight, or...”
“We’ll howl your name loud enough to be heard over in Boston,” Galilia promised.
* * *
Jan had spoken casually, as though she only had to think about what to do and a solution would appear. Figuring out what she was doing wrong was one thing. Finding the right thing to do? Harder.
Be clever, her brain whispered. Be human, be stubborn, be clever. They brought you in because you had Tyler’s heart, because only the heart could save him. So be the clever heart, damn it.
What did a clever heart do?
Martin was still in the meeting with AJ, so Jan wandered through the farmhouse, acutely aware that everyone else had a place to be, a thing to do, either working on assignments or taking part in the chores that kept the farmhouse humming along, despite so many beings living there. Cleaning, cooking, managing the garden nestled under makeshift greenhouse walls, digging latrine trenches and covering them up again...
Jan had never thought about what it might be like to live in a military encampment until, suddenly, she was.
Trying to escape the buzz of people who had a clue and a purpose, Jan wandered outside, shivering a little in the afternoon air. Her feet kept her moving, until she found herself standing outside the shed, her toes practically touching the lower riser of the stairs. Suddenly, her throat was tight and her heart pounding, as though she was about to have another asthma attack.
She reached down to touch the inhaler in her jeans pocket, like a magical talisman. She had braved Under the Hill, had faced down the preter court. She could do this.
Jan took the steps before she could talk herself out of it, and with her free hand she knocked once on the wooden door.
It swung open immediately, almost as though they’d been expecting her. “Jan.” Zan had been working with Tyler, pretty much 24/7 since they’d returned. A healer—combination medic and therapist—Zan looked almost human, with a narrow face and sharp features, but a birthmark the size and shape of a sooty quarter on the pale-skinned forehead drew the eye before anything else. “We haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Yeah.” And now Jan felt like even more useless shit. “I’m sorry, I just...” Excuses weren’t going to cut it; they both knew why she had been avoiding the shed. “How is he doing?”
“Come in.”
That wasn’t an answer, and they both knew it. Jan stepped into the shed, her hand still touching the inhaler, and saw her lover seated at the desk at the far end of the common space.
The supernaturals were taking good care of Tyler; she knew that. Seeing the space he was kept in reminded her of that fact. Shed was a misnomer; it was more of a cottage on the inside, with a kitchenette and enough room for the work area, and a living room space with a sofa and armchair, and there was a door off to the side, to a small bedroom addition. Tyler slept there, while Zan had the pullout sofa, able to respond at a moment’s notice if the human needed care.
“Hi,” she said when Ty turned to look at her. That so-familiar face, the dark skin and elegant fingers that were wrapped around a paintbrush now... She supposed it was therapy of a sort, the kind they had veterans and stroke victims do. She would have had him singing, not painting; Tyler didn’t have the best voice, but he’d always loved to sing. There was a stereo in the shed, but she’d never actually heard music coming... Maybe she should suggest that.
“Hi,” he said, and Jan’s chest hurt. That wasn’t Ty, not the tone he used with her, not the sharp, funny one or the sweeter, softer one when he was feeling playful or romantic. But it wasn’t the cold “I don’t know you” voice he’d used in the preter’s world, either, so that was something, right? He wasn’t as lost, as confused as he’d been when they’d come back.
She had visited enough before to know that there were good days and bad ones. And sometimes there were worse ones.
“I know you,” he said now. “You...”
“This is Jan,” the healer said. “You remember Jan.”
Something familiar moved in his face, a tilt of his head, the way his gaze slid over her, face to body, and then back up to her face, and for a moment Jan thought that this would be the day he broke the last of the preter’s bonds, came back to the man she loved.
“She’s human. Like me.”
“Yes,” Zan said encouragingly, even as Jan tried not to feel too much disappointment.
“She was from my before.” He’d split his awareness into before, there, and now, compartmentalizing to deal with the damage. “She took me away from there.”
They’d been through this exchange before. Sometimes it was a good thing; sometimes it sent him into a muted fury. Jan couldn’t tell from his voice if today it was a good thing or a bad thing.
“Yes,” Zan said again, and Jan tried to keep her face neutral but positive, the way they’d showed her.
“Oh. I guess I should thank you, then.” Tyler tilted his head the other way and stared at her, as though waiting for his next cue. That was the hardest thing to watch, how a man who’d once been socially adept, able to interact with anyone effortlessly, with charm and humor, now seemed lost in even the most basic of exchanges, always waiting for someone to tell him what to do or how to react. She could have dealt with a relationship ending, but not the loss of person Ty had been once.
“It was...” She couldn’t say a pleasure. She couldn’t say that. “I’m glad you’re home,” she finished, aware that he wasn’t home, she wasn’t home, this wasn’t home. They’d never go back “home” again, not that way.
Her distress seemed to communicate itself to Tyler, because he pulled back physically. His face seemed to almost crumple, his arms drawing around his torso, and he rocked back and forth in his chair.
“Ty?” She couldn’t help it; she stepped forward, her hand outstretched. His pain and confusion hurt her almost as badly, guilt for being the cause warring with exasperation that he seemed to blame her.
“Home. Home. Stjerne will punish me. Need to go home.”
“Damn,” Zan said quietly, moving across the room with a silent grace, cutting Jan’s own approach off and placing gentle hands on Tyler’s shoulder. “Tyler, it’s all right. You’re safe. You’re here. Stjerne is gone. You control this space. Nothing can come here that hurts you.”
“Make her go away. Go away.”
The healer kept speaking, even-toned and calm. “You control this space, Tyler. If you don’t want something or someone here, you can make them go away.”
“Go away,” he said.
Jan went, closing the door gently behind her.
* * *
It wasn’t personal, not like that. Jan understood. Tyler had been badly abused by the preters, some kind of brainwashing that she didn’t quite understand. That was why he was here, rather than getting help in the human world—the moment he started talking about what had happened, who had done this to him, they’d assume he was insane and put him away forever.
The same way they’d try to put her away if she tried to tell anyone. She had already lost her job over it, with no chance of getting a referral from her bo
ss, who now thought she was insane, and she had probably ruined any chance of getting a new job back in her industry, as well.
Maybe she could go to work with AJ’s car thieves. Or whatever it was that Martin did for a living when he wasn’t fighting off preternatural invasions.
She thought about what the kelpie might possibly do for a living and shook her head. Or maybe not.
“Jobs are kind of a worry for after you save the world,” she said, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. The tears had receded and, miraculously, so had the headache; Jan wouldn’t have put it past Zan to have slipped a whammy on her, or whatever healing magic it was a unicorn did.
Thanking someone, though, seemed to be bad manners here. And Jan was avoiding the issue, trying to take on other people’s problems instead of her own. She needed somewhere to think, somewhere nobody would bother her or summon her while she thought.
The problem with the Farm was that it was too crowded. Even the attic floor, nominally her bedroom space, had a meeting going on in the stairwell, three supers, who looked too much like praying mantises for Jan’s comfort, hunched together, trying to put together a report. No matter where she turned, in the House or any of the outbuildings, things were happening, people were being useful. Everyone except her.
“Shut up,” she told herself. “Stubborn and clever, remember?” So she didn’t know what to do yet. She would. It was like the time immediately after Tyler had disappeared all over again, but then she’d had the insanity of suddenly discovering about supernaturals and the fact that Tyler had been elf-napped. Now she knew what she was facing. And she wasn’t facing it alone.
“Hey.” She accosted one of the kitchen workers, a dryad whose long green hair was tied up in a scarf, her long arms coated with flour. “When Martin gets out of his meeting, tell him to meet me back at the pond?”
“After meeting, human by the pond. Got it.”
* * *
Sitting cross-legged on the grass once again, Jan ignored the occasional splashes from the pond and concentrated on breathing in and out slowly. Her asthma was triggered more by dust and stress, but stress and grass could do the trick, too. Jan didn’t know why she kept coming out here, unless maybe it was because she knew that anyone out here would ignore her, let her mope in peace. For a bunch of alleged nature-friendly beings, few of them ever came out this far.
Maybe it was because they were all too busy, AJ’s orders snapping them into action, focused and intent. She was the only one without a purpose, without a plan. But she was going to come up with one.
“We’ve been focusing on the portals,” she said, thinking out loud. “On the portals, how they’re controlling them and where the queen might be hiding. Turn it around. Why here? Never mind how or why the magic changed. What do we have that they want?”
It wasn’t a new question, but they’d been thinking like supers or trying to think like preters. Maybe it was time to think like a human. A stubborn, heart-driven human.
Someone was walking toward her across the grass. She knew it was Martin without looking, recognizing the weirdly heavy sound, as though his four-hooved form walked with him. She’d noticed it first when they were walking through the preternatural realm, but only identified it as being his specifically once they were on the Farm. She’d idly compared his steps to other supernaturals: some walked heavily, some barely touched the ground, but none of the others had that four-beat cadence to a two-footed walk.
“You left the meeting,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement, with a hint of a question.
She kept her breathing still, her eyes closed. “Did anything useful happen?”
“Not really,” he admitted. Then he paused. “You’re upset.”
“I’m not. I’m...” She was upset. But not the way Martin meant it. She thought. She still wasn’t entirely sure she had a bead on what the kelpie meant when he said something.
Another memory: Toba looking at her with those golden owl eyes, warning her: Do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can understand us—or that we can understand you.
“Your leman hurt you.” Martin sat next to her, and she could smell the now-familiar scent of green water and smoky moss, almost like but entirely unlike the scent of the pond in front of them, and completely unlike, say, the iron-rock-solder smell Elsa had. Jan was learning the supers by their smell now, not just their sight or sound. The thought was either really disturbing or weirdly satisfying. Maybe both. Maybe she could understand them, at least a little bit.
Maybe they could understand her.
“It’s not Ty’s fault,” she said, not even asking how Martin knew it had been Tyler. Maybe he could smell it on her, too. “He can’t help it. I know that. He’s all sorts of fucked up and I’m the only thing that was consistent throughout.” She had read up on all the syndromes and symptoms, the treatments and the stories from family members. She knew that Zan was doing the best job possible, that if they took him to a human doctor, they wouldn’t understand what he’d been through, and the moment he started saying anything about the preters or... Well, she couldn’t blame any human hospital for thinking he needed more than outpatient therapy if that happened. “But it hurts.”
“Of course it does. Because you blame yourself.”
Jan laughed, a rough exhalation that held only a little humor. “Stay away from the pop-psych websites,” she told him, opening her eyes and plucking a long blade of grass, holding it between her thumb and foreginger and studying it with far more care than it deserved. “Even humans have trouble with that stuff. You’ll just screw it up”
That much she did understand. Kelpies—or at least, Martin—were sweet, and funny, and affectionate...and cold-blooded killers who didn’t really understand that killing people, because they suddenly felt like it, was a bad thing. He had empathy in his own way but no morality, no connection to anyone he had not learned to care about. What he might make of the five stages of grieving or some other mental-health site...
She let the blade of grass drop, watching as it fell. Emotions. Entanglement. Need. “You told me to go home. When we came back, you told me to go home and put all this behind me, both you and AJ.”
Martin lay on the grass next to where she was sitting, his arms crossed behind his head, staring up at the sky. He never went closer to the water than they were sitting, never really looked at it. Kelpies were river-horses; she wondered if he had something against ponds or if it was just this pond that he didn’t like. And why, if he didn’t like the pond, he kept following her out there.
“We were wrong,” he admitted. “AJ knew it then. He just didn’t know what else to tell you. You can’t go back to what and who you were. It doesn’t work that way.”
She held up a hand, stopping his apology in its tracks. None of them could go back. Not Tyler, not her—not even Martin. You couldn’t simply walk into the preter realm, you couldn’t go Under the Hill, and expect to come back the same.
“Yeah. It changes. Everything changes. So...we go forward.” She wrapped her arms around her knees and thought about that, trying to weave it into what she had been thinking before.
Martin waited, maybe to see if she was going to say anything more, maybe thinking thoughts of his own. Something in the middle of the pond splashed to the surface and then disappeared. “You’re thinking,” he said finally, somewhere between an accusation and a hope.
“Yeah.” Thinking about what they’d talked about that morning, about what Galilia had said, about what she was seeing around them. About what they had seen in the preter court. About three days left now before the truce was up.
“I have an idea,” she said finally. “AJ isn’t going to like it.”
Martin grinned at her, his teeth blunt but the smile disturbingly sharp. “Those are my favorite kind of ideas.”
Chapter 4
It would be satisfying, yes, but it wouldn’t solve anything. The chaos of so many different supers living and working together was barely held under control, creating a constant low-level rumble. Only tightly held control allowed him to orchestrate that rumble into something like a symphony.
Having one of your remote teams drop out of sight for a week and resurface with a report that focused on the brewpubs rather than the hunt they were supposed to be on...
“Pack is easier,” AJ muttered almost under his breath. “I can just knock them over and they listen to me.”
Elsa didn’t laugh. The jötunndotter was a steady, steadfast second in command, but her kind weren’t known for a sense of humor. “Too far to reach, too many of them.”
“I can hit you and you can hit someone and they can hit the right person. That’s called delegation.”
“You would break your paw if you tried to knock me over.”
He wasn’t sure if that was an actual statement of fact or her attempt to respond in kind. He decided to take it as fact.
“Fine. If I send you out to Oregon to sit on these idiots, will you do it?”
“By the time I get there, they will have already done the damage,” she responded. Jötunndotter did not fly. Even if she could get through security without raising eyebrows—improbable—the mass of her stony body would probably ground the plane. And the thought of her trying to fit into a narrow coach seat...
“Yeah, all right, I’ll save you for a local fuckup.”
AJ rubbed at his face tiredly, shoving hair away from his forehead. It felt as if he hadn’t slept, really slept, in months. Maybe he hadn’t. Not since all this had started, the first reports of preternaturals where and when none should be, his own curiosity drawing him to investigate, and then the sharp fear, the need to draw forces together to keep his pack, his territory safe....
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