Soul of Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Yeah. Huh. Okay, I might...I might be able to find a lead on that, if witches are actually real.” Her voice dropped, and he had to focus harder, just to hear.

  “Of course you might. That’s what you do—you shake us up, give us new leads.” There was a tone to the other’s voice that he didn’t like, that made his fingers curl in a different manner, digging into his palms.

  “Uh-huh. It’s a maybe, and a what-if, and what the hell, it’s the only thing even remotely resembling a plan of action we’ve got. So, you think AJ will give his approval of that?”

  “What, for us to go on a road trip to find a human who will just as soon hex a supernatural as talk to one, on the off chance she will cast a spell to find a preternatural queen who may or may not be collecting humans, assuming this witch even believes us?”

  “Yeah.” Jan’s tone brightened, and now he could hear her clearly. “So, we should bypass AJ and just get in the car?”

  The non-human started to laugh again, as if that was the funniest thing he had ever heard. “Probably, yeah.”

  Jan said something, too low for him to hear, and then she went back inside the big house. The not-human hopped over the porch railing with a peculiar grace and then headed toward the old barn.

  He watched the not-human go, his thoughts whirling. The barn was where the cars were kept; he’d seen them come in and out, occasionally. Jan was looking for a preter queen and her court. Courts were not-safe. Leaving the Farm was not-safe. Everyone had told him, over and over, that the Farm was safe.

  Jan was leaving the Farm.

  Leaving the Farm was trouble.

  Jan was going to get into trouble.

  He forced his fingers to uncurl, looking at the half-moon marks left in his palms, and then he was shifting his body, pushing the window open all the way, and swinging over the sill, dropping easily onto the ground.

  The air was colder here, and the lack of walls around him, keeping him safe, almost made him scramble back inside.

  He set his jaw, ignored the feeling of being exposed, watched, and made his own way toward the barn.

  * * *

  Ian Patek normally growled like a bear himself when someone tried to horn in on his territory. In this case, though, he’d been just as glad when the Feds finally arrived, set up camp, and spread out all over the county, their “please give us everything you know and stay in touch but stay out of our way” phrased in slightly more diplomatic words. Little Creek P.D. had handed over everything they had, which wasn’t much, and gone back to the daily job with a sigh of relief.

  It wasn’t all speed traps and pot busts, though. Part of that job—more often than any of them liked to admit—was following up on calls claiming that there was a bigfoot—or wendigo, or naked crazy man, depending on the age, gender, and sobriety of the caller—up in the woods. Patek and Hansen had been following up on one of those calls when they found the first pile of bones.

  “Shit.” Patek squatted back on his heels and stared at the evidence. There was no mistaking human bones once you’d seen them. Not coyote, not deer, not anything but human ribs and legs. “You think that’s...?”

  “Well, in the immortal words of Richard Dreyfuss, this wasn’t no boat accident.” Joe turned away from the pile and scanned the area. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Could be a hiker who took a bad fall, never crawled out, and never got reported missing.”

  “Yeah.” That made more sense than a mysterious killer dragging a body from a house in town all the way the hell up here. And there was only one body as far as he could tell. A hiker who got the wrong end of a bear paw, that was bad news but ordinary enough.

  “There’s the outcropping Missus Mac mentioned,” Joe said, pointing to the rock face to their left, up the hill a few yards. “Might as well check it out. Ready?”

  Patek shook his head, then stood up, his hand resting on his holster. “No. But there’s only a couple more hours of daylight left and I’m sure as hell not doing it in the dark, so, yeah, let’s do this.”

  The outcropping was an actual cave, low roofed but dry and filled with what could only be described as a makeshift nest of branches, leaves, and filthy shreds of cloth.

  “Jesus Christ.” The stink was bad enough that he felt his eyes start to water, and he pulled his sleeve over his wrist, using the material as a filter to breathe through. It didn’t help: there was a particular stench to rotted meat that you couldn’t block out. “Is that another body?”

  Joe used the toe of his boot to poke at the pile of debris within reach, not wanting to go too deep into the cave, for all that it seemed empty, and shrugged. His hand was on his pistol butt, too. “Could be. Maybe the rest of our missing persons. Part of the rest, anyway. Cannibal killer vagrants, loose in the Adirondacks. That’ll make a good headline, don’t you think?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Patek said again. “Call the goddamned Feds. This is their headache, not ours.”

  “Yeah.”

  They both backed out of the cave’s mouth, retreating to the clearing, where nothing could suddenly scramble out of the shadows or drop on them from above. Keeping his right hand on his holster, Joe reached awkwardly with his left for his cell phone. Reception was crap up here, but they had one-touch direct to the station.

  “Molly, it’s Hansen. Tell our visitors to get the hell up here. We got something for them.”

  Their dispatcher responded immediately. “Animal, vegetable, or headache?”

  Joe glanced back at the cave. “All of the above, sweetheart, all of the above. And you might want to send the coroner, too, although there’s not much left for him to look at.”

  “Got it. You holding position or coming back in?”

  “We’re going to mark the spot and move on. I don’t—” Joe saw Patek shift, his gun now in his hand, turning slowly, the way they didn’t teach in the Academy. “Hold on.”

  He let go of the talk button and let his eyes skim the surroundings, trying to see what had set his partner on edge. Nothing moved, nothing smelled odd, but Patek had grown up here, was more of a country boy than he could ever hope to manage, so Joe was going to trust the other man’s instincts.

  And then something—an alley-born instinct—prickled, and he dropped the phone, going into a crouch and pulling his own sidearm even as something charged at him, growling nothing at all like a bear or a vagrant.

  There was a high-pitched scream, and the sound of rapid-fire gunshots echoed off the cliff, and then there was silence.

  Chapter 6

  Martin was waiting just inside the barn when Jan got there, the massive doors pushed open just enough to let her slip inside, but not so much that anyone walking by might notice.

  “That was fast,” he said, giving her and her bags a once-over.

  Jan shrugged. “It’s not like I had much to pack.” A week’s worth of clothing, the secondhand tablet she’d picked up when they were on the run, after her apartment had been attacked—they had bought new tech for the Farm, specific to the needs of her team, but she wasn’t going to take any of that. This tablet was battered, but it would do the job if she had to log in anywhere.

  Abducted by supernaturals? Facing down a preternatural court to reclaim your boyfriend? Spending way too much time hanging out with a psychotic killer kelpie? Lost your job because your boss thought you’d lost your mind? Didn’t matter—the email still came, and you either kept up, or you got trampled. Besides, she had her own job site to maintain, just in case someone actually stopped by to offer her work.

  At least she had her meds and her inhaler and a backup prescription this time. Asthma sucked, especially when you were trying to escape from things that wanted to eat you.

  Not that that was going to happen this time, she thought, rapping her knuckle once against the wooden door to avert any bad luck. This was just a r
econnaissance mission, if unauthorized. The moment they found the queen, got into her good graces, and found out what her plan was, they’d alert AJ and he could set his own plan in motion for the actual capture. She would totally not-be-eaten.

  “I don’t suppose you—” he started to ask.

  She offered him the second bag, a battered drab olive knapsack. “Underwear, socks, a pair of jeans, and two shirts, before someone else came in and I had to scoot.” He had been sharing a bunkhouse with a dozen others, and she’d had absolutely no excuse to be going through his stuff. If he wanted toiletries, he’d have to stop at a CVS or something and buy them. Assuming supers needed any of that—though at the tree-shower, when they’d taken her to the Center, after her apartment had been attacked, there had been soap. No toothpaste or deodorant, though.

  Live with someone for months, and you still didn’t know them at all.

  This was her first time actually inside the barn. She took a minute to look around. The old stalls had been broken down to make more room, obviously. There were four cars and one truck parked on the ground floor, the smell of metal and exhaust mingling weirdly with old straw and a lingering odor of horse. Jan’s nose twitched, but it seemed that stable dust wasn’t the sort to trigger her asthma. Or she hadn’t been there long enough for it to, and hopefully they’d be gone before that changed.

  Something moved overhead, where the loft had been adapted for more dorm space, but it was late afternoon, which meant that the diurnal residents were out doing their thing and the nocturnal ones were still sleeping, and the totally normal sounds of a car pulling out of the garage wouldn’t rouse any suspicions.

  And even if someone were to see them, Martin was always going in and out on AJ’s orders, and Jan was...well, Jan guessed that she was problematic. She didn’t think there was any word that she had to stay on the Farm or that anyone would think it odd if she went somewhere with Martin, since everyone there knew the story of how the two of them had gone through a portal—and back out—together. Everyone knew they were friends. Nobody would think twice about the two of them taking one of the cars for a drive somewhere, probably—maybe on AJ’s orders. Right?

  “Not that one.” Martin gestured her away from the Toyota sedan and to the battered pickup truck. Jan frowned at it. That had been the truck that they’d kidnapped—okay, escorted—her out of the city in back when this all started. She knew firsthand that the seats were uncomfortable and the radio was crap.

  “What if they need to, I don’t know, haul something around?” she asked, making an argument for the vehicles with better suspension.

  “There’s another truck out back, if they need that. I don’t like driving those other cars. They’re...small.”

  The fact that she was discussing the relative merits and head space of cars with a creature who could change into a water-breathing horse at will was surreal enough to make Jan raise her hands in surrender. “All right, fine. Bump-o-truck it is.”

  She tossed her backpack into the front cab and slid onto the seat next to it. It was, in fact, just as uncomfortable as she remembered. Maybe even more so, because now she wasn’t distracted by the weirdness her life had become or the fact that her boyfriend was missing. Her boyfriend was found, if still lost in his own way, and the weird...the weird had become normal.

  “Get in and drive, swishtail,” she said. “I need to get somewhere with actual 4G if this plan is going to work.”

  Even if they’d been willing to hang around any longer and risk AJ figuring out what they were up to, she couldn’t send the email from the Farm’s network—she knew that everything was monitored, because she’d been the one to set it up. If someone was paying attention and told AJ, there’d be a fight, at best, and at worst...well, better to get forgiveness later. Assuming there was a later at all.

  Best-case bad scenario, if they couldn’t actually find a witch who was willing to help them, was that they’d have little choice but to come slinking back with their tails between their legs, metaphorically at least for her.

  “We’ll find someone,” she said. “We have to.”

  Martin gave her a look but pushed open the sliding doors, then got behind the wheel and started the engine. The truck pulled out of the garage without anyone coming down the ladder to stop them, and Jan hopped out to close the doors behind them, hopefully buying a little more time before anyone noticed the truck was gone.

  Once she got back into the truck and Martin maneuvered it along the driveway to the main road, Jan pulled out her cell phone and started to tap at the keyboard, occasionally swearing as autocorrect and the bumpy ride turned her words into something else. She looked up when they approached the gate, but the guards barely even looked into the cab to see who it was before they waved the truck on.

  Martin exhaled, his hands easing slightly on the wheel, and Jan just shook her head. What was there to question, after all? The guards were there to keep people out, not to lock them in. Someone would remember they had left and would tell AJ when he asked...but not until then.

  So far, so good.

  They’d gone about twenty minutes down the road, leaving the Farm—and farmlands—behind and were entering a more suburban area, with large houses set on gently sloping and well-tended lawns, before Jan finally got a signal back on her phone. It disturbed her a little that the moment the display appeared, she felt some tension slide away, as though merely being connected with the modern world, being back on the grid, would make things better. It wasn’t as though they’d been cut off, after all, just had...limited bandwidth.

  She had to admit, though, that seeing the emails go out one after another as her phone connected was a nice feeling.

  Martin looked over briefly and saw her smiling.

  “You got a signal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. So what are you doing?”

  “I told you. Contacting people who might know an actual practicing witch,” she said.

  “You know people like that?” Martin took his eyes off the road long enough to look at her with surprise.

  “I maybe know people who know people. There are a lot of science-fiction folk in the tech community, and a lot of them are also pagans or, you know, otherly religious, alternate-lifestyle types. I figured some of them might know someone who was actually what we were looking for. Venn diagrams would suggest it works, anyway.”

  “What diagrams?”

  Jan shook her head and sent another email off. “Never mind. Oh, look, there’s a gas station. Hurrah. Pull over. I need a soda.”

  While Martin topped off the truck’s tank, Jan went into the little convenience store and grabbed two bottles of Diet Pepsi, a package of licorice, and a bag of chips, because they seemed like things to have on a road trip.

  The moment she got outside, she opened one of the bottles and took a long hit. There had been gallons of iced tea and fresh-made coffee at the Farm pretty much 24/7, but the only soda they seemed to stock was the ultra-high-sugar-and-caffeine crap that only hard-core programmers and speed junkies could run on. Jan had never considered herself an addict before, but the first rush of diet soda into her system was a revelation. Suddenly, she felt as if she could take on the world. Maybe even both worlds. She capped the soda reluctantly and went to use the bathroom around the corner, under the theory that you used one when you had it.

  The bathroom was dingy but reasonably clean. She did her business quickly, washed her hands, then made the mistake of looking at herself in the mirror. The face that looked back at her was only partially familiar. The shadows under her eyes she recognized, but not the ones in her eyes or the faint but noticeable drop of her mouth. She tried to turn it up into a smile, and it came out as a grimace. And she needed a haircut, badly; the blond curls were almost down to her shoulders and would require more than gel and a brush to make them look presentable. Maybe she’d
go back into the store and buy a baseball cap or something.

  “Hey, Martin, do you need to—” Jan’s words dried up as she came around the pumps toward the truck and saw the cover drawn tight over the bed of the truck...vibrate.

  She blinked, and it stopped.

  Maybe it was nothing. Probably it was nothing. The past few months of her life, though, “probably nothing” had usually turned out to be a steaming pile of something. She looked around for Martin, but he had gone inside to pay the cashier for the gas he’d put into the truck. She waited, and when he came out again, she waved her free hand to get his attention, then pointed at the truck.

  He clearly had no idea what she was going on about.

  Jan shook her head and started moving to intercept him before he could get within earshot of whatever was in the truck. “There’s something in the flatbed,” she said quietly. “Under the tarp. I saw it move. Well, not move but—” She used her free hand again to waggle it sideways, trying to imitate the wiggle of the cover. Her voice was low, but she still felt as if it was carrying directly into whatever was under there, alerting it.

  What if it was a gnome, one of the supernaturals everyone just called turncoats? She still had nightmares sometimes about the things that had come after her twice. Gnomes weren’t shape-shifters the way Martin was, but their bones and skin were malleable, and her nightmares still featured their arms extending and grasping, reaching for her, tearing her apart the way they’d killed Toba, the owl-eyed supernatural who had volunteered to protect her.

  Jan’s chest hurt and her lungs felt squeezed, imagining one or maybe more underneath the cover, waiting, and if she went too close, they would ooze out, grabbing her, ripping her apart and eating her flesh. AJ had warned her back when this all started that gnomes liked to eat human flesh.

  “Jan.” Martin’s hand was warm against her lower back, pressing just enough that her spine straightened automatically, and her chin rose in response. The small movement was enough; she shoved the panic away and forced herself to focus again on the truck, not her memories.