Soul of Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

  The thought of that happening here, of this world becoming nothing more than a shadowed showplace, a backdrop for preternatural vanity...

  He wasn’t worried for himself. Martin wasn’t much on self-awareness or long-term thinking; he took the moment and then he took the next moment, and whatever happened then, happened. He thought that many of the supers would fade back into their hills and rivers, become shadows themselves or adapt to serve the court. But lupin like AJ and Meredith would fight and die. And humans...

  He had seen what happened to humans when preternaturals touched them.

  Martin was under no illusions about himself, about what he was, what he did. As he’d told Jan once, it was a thing. But he did not toy with his victims, did not take pleasure in their suffering.

  He looked at Janny and saw a human, a person. A friend. Stubborn, fierce, and loyal enough to trust him even when everything she knew said not to.

  A preter would look at Jan and see only a servant, a mirror to reflect their own vanity. Or worse, use and then abandon her to become one of the Greensleeves, lingering outside the court forever hoping for some scrap of attention, some touch of favor.

  Caught up in his thoughts, Martin suddenly realized that he had walked into what passed for a downtown, the tightest cluster of storefronts along the main road. His nerves went tight, the urge to change shape humming at him: an instinctive reaction, not useful. This was a human place. Most of the stores were closed, a few restaurants glimmering with light from within, people moving inside, crossing the street, or walking along sidewalks. A few, not many. This was a town where dinnertime was a serious thing, home from work, with family, tucked away for the night.

  Away from things that might be hunting in the dusk.

  He turned right, away from the center, up a wide, tree-lined street, until he came to the place that practically vibrated with wrongness, with unbelonging.

  They were watching him.

  His feet had carried him to the turn in the road and then stopped. Waiting.

  It didn’t take long. There were two figures walking toward him, for all intents and purposes taking in the evening air, but he knew them for what they were: guards.

  “You.”

  “Me,” he agreed, amiable, even as the reed-thin figure stepped up and tried to get in his face. He had no idea what it was: most likely AJ or Elsa would know, but he’d never bothered, before all this, to learn the different species. He could break it in two if he tried probably. He resisted the urge to shift, to give the creature a hoof in the face, another to the gut. That wasn’t what he was here to do. Not yet, anyway.

  “What’re you doing here, brook horse? The creek’s already owned.”

  He’d known that, too; walking over the rickety wooden bridge, he’d seen the reflections underneath where no light should be glinting. The naiad there had winked at him and let him pass. They understood each other well enough; she wasn’t going to get involved.

  “I’m looking for Herself,” he told the other guard, ignoring reed-thin entirely.

  “Whoself?” The other one looked human enough to pass on the street without blinking, but he could see the rustle of downy feathers on its neck, see the way its arms didn’t joint quite right, the way it hid its hands from sight.

  “Oh, give me a break,” he said, not having to fake his exasperation or annoyance. “Tell me she’s not accepting anyone to her court, fine, I get that. But let’s not pretend we can’t scent her all over this town. Now, I’ve walked two days to get here, I’m tired and dry, and either you let me go on up and present myself or...”

  He let just a hint creep out, but it was enough for thin and weedy to shift—not stepping backward exactly, but wanting to. Martin allowed the hint of a smirk to creep out. Kelpies were loners, didn’t have to worry about alpha intimidation tactics, but he’d been watching AJ for long enough to pick up a few tricks.

  He could feel other supernaturals gathering around him, silent and unseen but definitely there. None of them made a move, though. Nobody wanted to fuck with the craziest SOB in the crowd, not unless they wanted to make a name for themselves, and anyone who wanted to make a name for themselves wouldn’t be content standing guard duty so far from the actual action, away from the queen’s direct sight.

  “Let me present myself,” he said again, keeping his body still, his expression flat. “Let Herself decide.”

  He didn’t see any communication between the guards, but he felt the ones behind him move away, and tall and skinny stepped aside, rejoining his downy companion on the side of the road.

  Refusing to turn his head enough to check what was happening on either side of him, Martin went on at his normal pace, a steady, loose-limbed walk that had him up the street and on the sidewalk within minutes.

  The house itself looked...ordinary. It was set on a corner lot, sloping grass running down to the cracked sidewalk, a great tree planted in front, towering over the roof, showing full autumn colors that glimmered red and gold even in the dark. The building itself was three stories high, with a porch that wrapped around the front, and a bay window filled with colored glass that shone from within, a warm, welcoming glow. Two figures—one definitely human, an older male, the other too short and squat and scaled to be anything other than a super—lounged on the porch, their feet up and their attention square on him.

  Guards, of a higher level than the ones on the street. And a human among them; Jan had been right.

  The house might look ordinary, but like the Farm, it housed things far from ordinary.

  “I’ve come to seek service with Herself,” he called, not to the figures on the porch but those undoubtedly waiting beyond, behind that wooden door. “Will she consider me?”

  There was a long pause, the air heavy with the weight, and then it eased, and the door opened, letting more of that warm glow escape.

  “You’re in luck,” the smaller figure said, its voice a gravelly croak. “Evening’s when she’s in best humor. Go in, and do your best.” Its mouth split, froglike, and showed a shark’s row of teeth. “If your best don’t please, we’ll see you out here again soon enough.”

  Martin nodded and climbed the steps and went past them, giving them neither the satisfaction of fear nor the instigation of a sneer. First, he had to get into the court. Then...

  Then they’d clean it up and take the trash to the curb.

  Chapter 9

  Twenty-four hours was both no time at all and an incredibly long time. Long enough to get from London to what Galilia referred to half-affectionately as “deepest, whitest Connecticut.” Time enough to work and sleep and wake again surrounded by an entirely different world.

  Glory drank her coffee and ate the food she was given that first morning—scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and surprisingly good jam—packed herself up, and went to work. And tried not to think about what she was working on.

  Patently impossible, of course.

  Without Jan—and nobody seemed to know where she had gone exactly, or if they did they weren’t telling, and only the fact that both Tyler and that horse-faced boy, Martin, had gone with her was keeping Glory from freaking out about that—Glory had to figure things out on her own. Galilia and the others on the team did their best, but they didn’t understand.

  Magic, fine. If there was science, why not magic? But it wasn’t like jam and toast; they were supposed to stay separate, weren’t they?

  But it wasn’t. Separate, she meant. It was all mixed up and jumbled, and hearing about it had been one thing, one kind of manageable crazy. Living in it...Glory understood now, maybe, what had kept Jan here, rather than running when she’d had the chance. Not the glamour, in any sense of the word, or even the fascination of, oh, dear god, fairies—or jiniri, or werewolves, or trolls, dear god, utterly polite trolls asking if she wanted tea, no. It was the quicksilver
flashes of a different way of thinking, a different way of being, that every now and again would rip through Glory’s awareness, triggered by something one of the others would say, making her look at something she thought she had seen a hundred times before and see it in an utterly new way.

  You always got that with new coworkers; that was part of why she liked changing jobs as often as she did. But this was a whole new level of seeing. No, not a level. A whole new set of eyes.

  Glory never wanted to go back to her old life, and that scared the hell out of her.

  It wasn’t until the day after, time spent either in the workroom going over every bit of data they had on the most recent preternatural incursions, talking over every bit of data they had, or, for a few hours, sleeping in a narrow bed in the attic room that had been Jan’s and dreaming about the data they had, that everything came together in Glory’s head. She stopped halfway through her sandwich and changed the topic of conversation entirely.

  “So, magic is actually a thing.”

  Galilia put down her own lunch and looked at the human, waiting for more context. “Yes.”

  “But it’s a thing you can’t manipulate directly. No supernatural can?”

  “It depends on how you define manipulate. Or directly.”

  “Or is?”

  “What?” The jiniri looked at her in confusion, while Alon, a squat, lizardish super, coughed into his hand, grinning.

  “Never mind. Go on. Magic is an actual thing, but...”

  “Less a thing than a force. No, not a force. You can manipulate a force, influence it. This is...”

  “Like maths,” Glory said. “We assign a value to things, and we manipulate them, but we’re not really changing it, just how we perceive it. Like time.”

  “Time?”

  “Time isn’t real.”

  “What do you mean, time isn’t real?”

  Glory shifted in her chair, aware that messing with the perceptions of human coworkers might be a safer game than doing the same with supernaturals. Jan had warned her that the preters, at least, didn’t like having to see things a new way.

  It’s not so much that they’re hidebound, she had said early one morning over the crackling vid-connection. It’s...they don’t think the same way we do, I think. They can see the forest and the trees, but they can’t make a new path through them when one already exists. That’s why them suddenly changing how they did things, how they could do things, is such a big scary deal.

  “Okay, time is real,” Glory said now. “But it’s real because we’re putting labels on something so that our brains can comprehend it. There’s a theory, and never mind the theory because that’s way off track, but my point was—” and she’d had a point, she knew that “—magic is like time. It is, but we can only label it, not manipulate it. Not really. But there are things that can, maybe, mess with time. Real time and our perception of it.”

  Glory’s brain hurt. She was good at practical things, solid things like maths and coding, not theoretical physics.

  “Except some humans can,” the jiniri said.

  “What?” Glory’s head came up, and she stared at the other woman.

  “Some humans can manipulate it. Witches.”

  “That’s what the Huntsman said,” Glory recalled suddenly. “It was all pre-coffee hazy and then jet lag, but he said that witches were calling or something. That’s why he got me, why he went off doing god knows what. There are witches?”

  “Maybe?” Alon looked uncertain, which already Glory knew was unusual. “I’ve never actually met one. Stories say they don’t like us.”

  “Huh. Witches. Actual witches? Well, why the hell not. Bet I’ve met one. More than one.” Glory frowned, another thought occurring to her. “And I bet Jan has, too. Or knows someone who has. That’s where she’s gone, both of them. Lay odds on it.”

  The jiniri considered that and then dismissed it as not being relevant to the current discussion. Glory could tell AJ later, if she thought there was need. “So, what does that have to do with us figuring out how the preters are using technology?”

  “Because suddenly I’m not sure they are,” Glory said. “Using it, I mean. Not the way I use it, and not the way you use glamour, as an active thing. I think magic is like time.” She looked at her companion and shook her head, exasperated. “A construct, a...a force that is variable, undefinable until we force a structure on it. We’ve been trying to figure out how they’re using it, when we should be asking how they see it.”

  “Because what we see changes how we act. And the structure they put on magic changed them in turn.” Galilia got it.

  Alon was a little slower to catch up. “But why...why restructure it, after so many centuries?” he asked, not quite accepting her theory yet.

  “Two thousand and eight. That’s when it started, back then?”

  All three of them turned to look at the whiteboard propped against the wall, covered in colored marks of a time line.

  “Yes,” Alon said. “Or at least, there weren’t any reports of anything unusual happening before then.”

  “So what changed, then? What could have changed the way they saw magic?”

  Alon’s eyes went wide, and the scales along his arms went from a cool green to a dark, intense crimson. “Oh. Oh, fuck.”

  “What?” Galilia looked at him, expectant.

  “I just... Oh, fuck.”

  “Al, if you don’t get something coherent out of your mouth in the next ten seconds...” The jiniri stood up and looked surprisingly imposing for something so slight.

  The lizardlike super waved its clawed hands in tight circles, as if he was getting ready to lecture them. “We’ve been looking at the preters and not the humans, because hey, magic, right? And witches aside, humans don’t use magic. But what you said about time?”

  “Al...”

  “The LHC.”

  “The what?” Galilia turned to look at Glory, hoping the human would be able to translate.

  “The Large Hadron Collider,” Alon clarified. Gali still looked confused, but Glory nodded for him to continue. “Back in 2008, that’s when the LHC went online,” Alon said. “They were trying to— I don’t even know what they were trying to do, but it involved particles and the basic laws of physics and—”

  “And string theory,” Glory said. “I remember reading about it. They’re... Yeah. If magic’s world stuff, all around us, then it’s going to interact, and if scientists are shoving particles at really high speeds...Jesus, you think that someone got their physics in the preters’ magic? I don’t suppose we’ve got a pet physicist around?”

  Both supernaturals shook their heads.

  “Didn’t think so. Doesn’t matter. Not like we can go ask them to turn it off, and the damage’s already done, obviously, if the preters have changed how they work their mojo. Once shit like this goes down, you gotta deal, not denial. Jesus,” she said again. “Fucking string theory, seriously?”

  Alon was practically bouncing up and down in suppressed excitement. Glory almost laughed; she might not know its species, but she knew geek when she saw it.

  Galilia brought them back around to the original question. “So, how do we stop them? How do we—in, like, twenty-four hours?—prevent the preters from opening more portals?”

  Glory sighed and rested her chin on her folded hands. “That’s the problem. We can’t.”

  * * *

  Time. Time is up. Jan woke with that thought thrumming in her head, fight-or-flight instinct firmly tuned to flight before she remembered where she was and what she needed to be doing.

  The urge to flee still lingered, and she had to force herself to stay still, to keep her head on the pillow and her breathing calm until she could trust herself to stand up and not do anything stupid.

  More stupid
than they’d already done, anyway.

  Either stupid or brilliant. Yesterday, they’d managed the first goal—infiltration—and only the first, and Jan still wasn’t sure quite how they’d managed that, even.

  My lady. Humans, to see you.

  The supernatural who’d greeted them at the door had barely come up to Jan’s knee, but his eyes had been cold, and his voice had held a sneer, as though humans couldn’t possibly be of any use whatsoever. Tyler had shivered slightly as they’d walked inside, her arm tucked into his to keep him from bolting, but when they’d been ushered into the queen’s...throne room, for lack of a better term, he’d straightened up and dropped her arm as if he’d never met her before.

  Humans? I will see them.

  Jan had seen preters before. She was prepared for the lean, elegant beauty, cool exoticism, a dangerous veneer hiding more danger underneath.

  She had not been prepared for a woman—a preter, clearly, with the same narrow, elegant, almost too-sharp face, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail—with sleeves rolled to her elbows, fingers covered with chalk dust, blues and greens to match the canvas in front of her. A woman who’d been more interested in what was on the canvas than the humans being brought in for her attention.

  “That’s not it,” the preter had muttered, her lips pulled back in an expression of distaste. “That’s not it at all.”

  It was a particularly bland and amateurish canvas, Jan had decided, catching a quick look at it as they were brought around to face the queen. Like someone who’d caught half a glance of Monet’s work and decided they could imitate it...and couldn’t. At all.

  “You need to draw the lines up more,” she’d said without thinking, stepping past Tyler, past their startled guards, past the man—another human—standing at the preter’s side like a butler, waiting for her next comment. “The browns need to balance all the green and blue. Otherwise it just turns muddy.”

  The queen had turned those eerie pale blue eyes on her, the narrow mouth with too-sharp teeth lifting in what seemed an almost welcoming smile.