Soul of Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Her phone vibrated and buzzed softly in her pocket, indicating she had an email, but she didn’t look down, not willing to take her attention off the truck. “Do you think...?”

  “There’s no way a gnome could have gotten onto the Farm, much less into the garage,” he said, knowing what she was going to ask. “We have perimeter guards. You know that.”

  She did; in addition to the gate guards who weren’t as useless as they seemed, there were supernaturals who moved around the boundaries of the property night and day, alert to anything out of the ordinary. The bansidhe that had saved her when Toba died was among them. The creature freaked her the hell out—she had learned that it freaked most of the others out, too—but the membranes under its arms were, apparently, the best intruder-sensors magic could make. And it hated gnomes.

  “There’s no way it could have crawled in while we were driving, once we were outside the Farm’s borders?” The ride had been bumpy enough; something might have taken advantage...

  “I would have noticed.”

  She took his word for that; she’d been too busy writing emails. “So, what is it?”

  “Someone who decided to take a joyride off the Farm with us,” he said. His forehead was creased and his mouth drawn down, the closest thing to a scowl she’d ever seen on him. Normally, he met even the worst setbacks or disasters with a calm, moderately amused facade, as though even facing death wasn’t more than an inconvenience for the kelpie.

  Before she could ask him what was wrong—beyond the obvious, naturally—he strode toward the back of the truck and unhooked the cover, throwing the tarp back with aggressive speed and then stepping away.

  Jan jumped back, yelping in surprise when Tyler’s dark head appeared over the edge, his hands reaching over to pull himself up.

  “What the hell?”

  “Don’t send me back. Please, don’t send me back.”

  His hands were gripping the side of the truck bed too tightly, until those slender fingers looked ready to shatter. He had never put on the weight he’d lost while the preter bitch was holding him, and his face was drawn tight, staring first at Martin, then her as though he really did think they were going to haul him back to the Farm.

  The tightness in Jan’s chest returned as she stared at him. They should. They totally should send him back. He shouldn’t be out here, not the way he still forgot, still shied away from anything strange or too loud. Tyler needed more time, he needed to heal, and he sure as hell did not need to be chasing right into the court of a preter queen, not after what those monsters had done to him.

  She was about to say that, too, when he cut her off.

  “Please,” he said. “I need... I heard what you were talking about. About finding a witch—” and his voice stumbled a little on the word “—and finding the preter queen here... I know them even better than you do. Whatever happens, I’m supposed to be with you. I can feel it.”

  Jan was about to refuse, when Martin cut her off. “All right.”

  Jan turned to Martin, slapping a hand against his chest and pushing him back a step. “What do you mean, all right? This is not all right!”

  “Why not?” Martin removed her hand from his chest but kept hold of it, his fingers curling around her own, cradling the back of her hand against his palm. It was a habit of his, from the first time they’d met, to hold her hand that way. “Why shouldn’t he?”

  She stared at the kelpie and was suddenly, crashingly aware that he really didn’t understand all the ways that this was a horrible, terrible, no good and very bad idea. Supers, she thought to herself and then, more scathingly, men.

  “Preters?” she said, not bothering to keep her voice down, since there wasn’t anyone else in the pump bay other than them. “Bad mojo, brainwashing, capture, any of that sounding familiar?” And Tyler was still fragile, she didn’t say out loud, fragile enough that even she was too much to remember, too much to deal with.

  “She’s not here,” he said quietly, still holding her hand, keeping her from turning away. “Stjerne’s not here, Jan.” And then, louder, he said, “Tyler came of his own free will, Jan. He obviously wants to do this. We’re not going to send him back like a...like something that can’t make up his own mind. And maybe he can help, maybe he’s exactly the help we need, even if we find a witch willing to cast the spell. Like he said, he knows them better than we do.”

  That was exactly what Jan was afraid of.

  “Thank you,” Tyler said after he had climbed out of the truck and Jan had offered him her opened bottle of soda. He drank half of it in one gulp. Jan watched, not saying anything. Certainly not saying anything about how he used to despise diet sodas. It was wet, carbonated, and had caffeine; everything else was probably unimportant just then.

  Jan took the bottle back, capped it, and put the bag of food and sodas into the car. Her jaw hurt slightly from all the things that she wasn’t saying, so she exhaled, trying to let the tension go. It didn’t work. “Do either of you need to use the bathroom?”

  “No,” Tyler said, and Martin shook his head. “Let’s just get going, okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine. I should make you ride in the back the rest of the way,” Jan said to Tyler, even as she was opening the door to the cab and waiting for him to get in first. She would be damned if she’d be stuck in the middle just because she was the girl.

  “We’ll get a ticket if we do that and a cop sees us,” Martin said, getting in on the driver’s side. “And since I technically don’t have a driver’s license, let’s not, okay?”

  “Technically?” Jan closed the door and pulled her seat belt on, having to adjust it slightly with Tyler next to her now. He turned to watch her, then looked for a seat belt, but there wasn’t one for the middle passenger. She was actually surprised there was one on her seat; the truck was that old.

  “At all.” Martin shrugged as he started the ignition and pulled out of the gas station. “What? You need legal ID to get legal ID, and damned few of us are what you’d consider ‘in the system.’”

  Jan was caught between amusement and annoyance. The laughter won but only by a slim margin. “And you’re driving instead of me because...why?”

  “Because if you were driving I’d be stressing and being a pain in the neck. According to AJ.”

  “AJ is a control freak who couldn’t be in any car he wasn’t driving.”

  “Point not debated. But short of him being in the car, I drive.”

  “Chauvinist.”

  “Not even. I won’t let him—” and the kelpie gestured with his left hand to the man between them “—drive, either. And it’s not because you’re human. Don’t even go there.”

  Tyler shook his head. “I don’t drive. Never learned how.” Having said that, he lapsed back into silence, letting them banter past him. His gaze was focused somewhere beyond the road ahead, his hands folded in his lap as though he were afraid to touch anything. Jan noted, too, that unlike previous trips together in a car, when he would slouch and fill every available space, his legs were squared in front him, even on the crowded bench seat, leaving an inch or more between their thighs.

  Whatever reason he had for coming with them, human contact didn’t seem to be part of it. Jan couldn’t see over him to the other side, but she was betting the same distance was between his other leg and Martin, too.

  She let the matter of who got to drive drop and looked out the window. It all looked the same, just the paved road and trees and the occasional signs by the side of the road. Cars passed them going the other way occasionally, and there were cars far ahead and behind them, but it felt...lonely, somehow. “Where are we going, anyway? I mean, lacking an actual destination yet.”

  Martin shrugged faintly and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “I figured we might as well do a sweep for preters while we were out and about, waiting for
you to get a lead. We shouldn’t bother with anywhere a team has already swept and reported in, but that’s mostly south and west, far as I know. So, north?”

  It made as much sense as anything. They’d tried going in a logical manner, with AJ’s predictive sweeps, and that hadn’t turned up anything. So, why not whim? “I still don’t see why you get to drive and pick the radio station,” she was saying when her phone vibrated—she’d gotten a message, either an email or a text. Breaking off her complaint, she pulled the phone out of her pocket and checked the display. Three emails, actually—right, she’d forgotten to check at the gas station.

  “Anything?” Martin asked.

  “Shush,” she said, reading. “Huh. That was fast.”

  “What?” Martin was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel more rapidly now, and she decided now was not the time to draw things out, no matter how his attitude about driving annoyed her.

  “Two noes and one maybe. We’ve got a possibility in Albany. A friend knows a friend who says they have a friend who might be who we’re looking for.”

  “Well, that’s nicely vague,” Martin said drily.

  Tyler spoke over Martin’s snark, his voice filled with an incredulity that was familiar enough that Jan felt her throat close up with emotion. “In Albany?”

  Jan swallowed hard and nodded. “Yeah. That’s where Katie— You remember Katie? With the poodle named, oh, god, what was it?”

  “Archie,” he said. “She named the dog Archie.”

  “Right.” She had remembered that but wondered if he had. The dog had crawled into his lap and gone to sleep, and Ty had sat still all night, rather than wake it. “She says there’s a witch there, one who might talk to us. A real, practicing witch.”

  Jan hadn’t given specific details in her email, just asked if anyone knew of a real, serious practicing witch who was willing to advise them on a real, serious problem. Between that, and whatever her ex-boss was saying about her, Jan’s reputation was either shot or made, depending on who was listening. She’d worry about that, along with everything else, later.

  Assuming there was a later. If not, then, hey, drink up! as her old college roommate used to say.

  “Albany. Huh.” Martin shook his head and switched lanes, aiming the truck for the next exit, she presumed, to pick up a route that would take them into New York State. “Who knew that Albany was witchcraft central...?”

  * * *

  “What do you mean, they’re gone?” Even as AJ said it, he realized how stupid that sounded. Meredith meant that Jan and Martin weren’t on the Farm, which meant that they had left the Farm, which meant that they were about to get into trouble.

  The bustle and hustle of the main room halted, not obviously, but enough that it was clear that everyone within ears-range—which went far for a building full of supers—was waiting to hear what had happened.

  Meredith stared back at him, refusing to bare her throat in submission to his anger. She hadn’t done anything wrong; she was just the messenger.

  “All right,” he said. “Fine. Go back to work. Everyone, go back to work.”

  After the first flush of irritation, he was more annoyed at himself, that he hadn’t expected this. He had seen the expression on Jan’s face, heard the frustration in her voice when she’d tried to talk him into her plan earlier. Some others of his kind might be able to claim they couldn’t read humans or didn’t understand their cues, but AJ had always prided himself on that very ability—it was part of how he earned a living, selling the parts from the cars his pack stole. If you couldn’t read a criminal’s face, you became a victim, not a trading partner.

  Jan was uncertain, cautious, still a little lost among the supernaturals, but she wasn’t a coward, and she wasn’t a fool.

  And Martin... AJ knew Martin by now. The kelpie was an odd and irritating mix of cold-blooded pragmatist and gooey sentimentalist. Normally, that wasn’t a problem; when you invariably kill the ones you get gooey over, the problem self-solves. But the bond between Jan and Martin was real enough that he would go along with whatever she decided.

  So, they had a human who needed to feel useful, a kelpie who wanted to help the human feel useful, and a truck, all missing. And since he’d nixed their ideas on how they wanted to help, he had to assume that they had gone ahead with it anyway.

  “Idiots,” he muttered. But they were idiots beyond his protection now.

  Martin would keep her safe. AJ trusted that, after everything the two of them had been through. He’d keep his instincts under control, for her. And that was good. Beyond the fact that the human was useful—despite her own feelings on that topic—AJ liked her. He hoped they managed not to get killed.

  “Boss?”

  A yōkai stuck his head in through the window, his elongated neck reaching in easily. “Um, boss?”

  “What now?”

  “The other human’s gone, too.”

  Huh. That he hadn’t expected. AJ rubbed at his muzzle, trying to keep his teeth from showing in a snarl that would only unnerve the others in the room, and hrmmed at the back of his throat in a noise that was not a growl, damn it.

  “All right. That’s...not a bad thing.” He hoped. “Get Zan in here. I want to ask a few questions of the damned ’corn, but we can use this.”

  Somehow.

  “And send a message to the Huntsman,” he added, throwing it out for someone to pick up and run with. “If our humans are getting involved, I think this just became his fight, too.”

  The Huntsman was old, but he was canny, and he still cared about his species, as much as he might deny it. AJ’s missing threesome was going to need help eventually, and he couldn’t spare anyone else.

  “And what the hell is going on with the California team?” he barked at the rest of the room, aware that they were all still paying more attention to him than their own assignments. “It’s like every one of you loses the common sense you were hatched with—not that there was much to begin with—the moment you leave this house. Someone get me a report on California, before I have to eat someone!”

  Around him, the hustle resumed.

  * * *

  The morning light filled the bay window of the council room, catching on the polished brass figures and making the polished wooden floor gleam with red highlights. The small table had been placed directly in the sun’s path, a simple blue vase with a single daisy stuck in it resting on the surface. Nalith studied the flower, then picked up her pencil and added a line to her work, frowning as she did so.

  A human male stood to the side of the easel, just far enough to be outside her space but close enough that she could summon him with a gesture. He watched her, but his blue eyes were clouded, his expression vacant.

  “You drew this so easily,” she said. “You made it more than it was.”

  She had found him in town, working on this easel by the creek, sketching a simple clump of flowers that had somehow survived the first early frost. When he had looked up, smiling at the woman who had paused to watch him work, she had decided to keep him. Like the first human, he brought art to her. Unlike that first, he created it. He was the fecund soil, the remembered song, the missing spark. He would show her how it was done.

  “Let the pencil rest lightly in your hand,” he said now. She looked at the pencil and opened her fingers slightly, so that she barely held it. “Like this?”

  “Yes.”

  He was a handsome man, well formed and graceful, if carrying more weight in his middle than she found attractive, but she cared not for his physical presence, only what was inside his head. Nalith lifted the pencil to paper once again and added another line, then another, attempting to re-create the shadow she could see under the petals.

  There was a movement in the hallway outside, the faintest suggestion of someone awaiting an audience. Nalith,
not looking up from what she was doing, made the faintest nod, and the creature crept into her presence.

  “The houses you approved of are cleared, my lady.”

  At that, Nalith did look up from the sketch pad, both slightly irritated by and, she admitted only to herself, pleased for the interruption. No matter how many times she attempted the simple sketch, no matter what advice her new pet gave, the results did not satisfy her. Having something else to focus on, especially something already completed, was a good thing.

  “Houses?” She could not recall what the creature spoke of.

  “The locations you had chosen to house the expansion of your court, my lady. Two houses, ready for your filling.”

  She knew quite well that she had chosen no such thing; the brownie had suggested it and, after her nod of approval, had organized the acquisition for reasons of its own. But it was a good idea, and the creature had proven willing to credit her all the success and shoulder all the responsibility—and, if needed, the blame. Nalith could not fault it on its performance.

  In fact, it deserved a reward, of sorts.

  “Two houses,” she said, as though only now considering the ramifications of such things. “They are not within this enclave, but some distance?”

  “Yes, my lady. In surrounding townships, to better extend your reach and yet cement your hold on this territory.”

  “Indeed. Well done. The court will well-fill such distances, but I find that when out of sight, some courtiers tend to...unregulate their behaviors.” Not here, but back there, if she did not cast an eye on the court, they would ferment gossip and disquiet. She expected no such ill behavior here, but best to be prepared rather than face an unpleasant surprise later. Back there, a single word would strike down any who annoyed her. Here...she had fewer weapons to her command, but that did not mean she could not shape new ones.

  Yes. She had not planned this, but it suited her needs to do it now. She would use these houses. And that led to an excellent, and useful, reward for her little supernatural.