Soul of Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

“Tell me of this place.”

  It was a command, her voice as coolly bored as ever, save when she discussed her own attempts at creating, but Jan cheered inwardly. Outwardly, she remained still, the perfect model.

  “It is similar to here, but different, too. South of here, a small community, but connected to the major cities, Boston and New York. It’s on the grid, so you lack for nothing, but there is quiet, too. Time to think, to create.”

  She paused and then let a hint of surprise and excitement come into her voice, as though she had only just thought of it. “My lady, I would take you there, if I could. It would be a setting worthy of you.”

  “And this House is not?”

  Careful, Jan, she warned herself. Seduce, don’t bludgeon. This was too important to screw up. Suddenly every panic attack she had ever had over dating, over flirting, over making a mistake in public, came back and tried to whammy her.

  The brownie on her knee, as though sensing her unrest, or maybe just responding to the warning tone in Nalith’s voice, sniggered. Jan kept her face calm, but the hand that had been placed on the brownie’s neck, as though cupping it to her, tightened enough to leave marks in the super’s flesh, and it fell silent, warned. If it broke form, distracted the preter from her sketching, Nalith’s ire would be focused on both of them, not merely Jan.

  The faintest scuffle of noise drew her attention, but she knew even without looking that Martin had entered the room. He did not come far inside, lingering by the doorway, and there was nothing he could do to help anyway, but knowing he was there gave her the courage to continue. She might not be useful in a fight, but this was a battle of a different sort, using words and images rather than weapons or claws. And words and images, she knew.

  “This place, it is lovely, but it is too small, too isolated to properly showcase you, what you will become. My lady should have outposts, yes, throughout the land, but she should not reside in one. She deserves a hub, a center, where all would circle around her.”

  “A center, yes.”

  Jan hadn’t chosen the word intentionally, but the moment Nalith repeated it, she could feel the hook catch the preter and knew all she had to do now was reel her in. “The houses are spread at a distance, but not isolated, and artists and dancers and singers would come to you, a proper patron and student of their arts.” Her eyes settled on Tyler, and she remembered what he had said about the cables and how fascinated Nalith seemed with the project. The preters had used the internet to connect with humans in the first place, had somehow hooked their magic into the network. That’s the final carrot, the thing that will get her...

  “And of course, the entire complex is already on the grid. I helped set the system up myself.” Utter truth, that. “Full digital, top speed—the entire internet, all the power of human technology at your command.”

  “And all of it merely waiting for me to walk in?”

  “My lady.” Jan risked looking directly at Nalith then. “They simply do not know they are waiting for you.”

  The preter’s narrow lips quirked, and that flash of humor, rarely seen but irresistible, transformed her for just an instant before it was gone. Jan’s breath was taken away, even as her brain was calculating the effects, judging her work the way she used to judge a website that had just gone live. Part of Nalith knew that Jan’s words were only the very best butter, but Ty had been right; she couldn’t resist. Even if only half of what Jan had said was true, the preter would have to follow through. Her ego would demand it.

  “And you would take me to this place?”

  “My lady.” One of the other brownies—of course it was Cam, Jan thought, able to pick them out now—stepped forward. “My lady, this house is safe for you, a defended location. We know there are others coming, have sensed them. It would not be wise—” He heard the words coming out of his mouth and tried to stuff them back, too late. You did not question Nalith’s wisdom, ever.

  “You would take me to this place?” Nalith asked Jan again, ignoring the brownie.

  “My lady. It would be my pleasure.”

  * * *

  The two figures entered the café and looked around cautiously, clearly ill at ease in the surroundings.

  “Sit wherever ya want,” a woman called out from behind the counter, indicating the dozen or so tables, half of which were empty. A few of the diners looked up to see who had arrived but quickly returned their attention to their food. The newcomers did not invite close observation. “Someone’ll get to you right away.”

  They chose a table away from the window, as isolated as they could manage, and sat down. The menus were in front of them, and they studied the offerings rather than talking to each other or looking around.

  “Horrible place,” one said, a quiet under-breath mutter. “I cannot imagine that she would deem this locale acceptable.”

  “I cannot imagine what she thinks at all,” the female said, “but she is here. The sooner we settle this, the sooner we can leave.” They had left their human pets with the others while they scouted, each of them feeling uncomfortable with their portal-holders so far away.

  “Hey. What can I get’cha?” The waitress was young, naturally cheerful, and had clearly summed them up and decided they had the potential to be decent tippers.

  “The breakfast special,” the man said, putting down the menu, and his companion held up two fingers, indicating that she would go with that, as well.

  “Sure thing. Coffee?”

  “Please.”

  The waitress tapped a tablet in her hand and entered their order. She scurried away, returning a few minutes later with their waffles.

  “Nice town,” one of the strangers said awkwardly.

  “It’s little but it’s ours. You want real syrup with that?”

  “Of course.” There was a pause as the waitress brought over a small brown pitcher and placed it on the table. Her customers both nodded, almost regally, she thought, and picked up their forks, looking around the restaurant as though wondering what to do next. The waitress dismissed that thought—of course everyone knew how to eat waffles!—and went back to refilling coffee mugs.

  “We need to wait,” the first preter said, cutting into the food and lifting a piece to his mouth. He chewed automatically, the best waffles this side of Belgium, according to the sign out front, consumed the same way he did all the food in this realm, without pleasure. “We cannot simply march up and demand that she return with us.”

  “We could,” his companion said, “but it would be noisy. And likely fruitless, yes.” They had spent the dawn hours walking around the structure Nalith had hidden herself in; there was magic wrapped around it, the new kind of magic she had discovered and tried to keep for herself. More, there were other creatures there, including the stink of gnomes. The preters might accept the homage of such creatures here, as they were useful, but to allow them to den so close? Nalith had forgotten herself utterly.

  “We will remind her,” the preter said out loud, and her companion nodded, knowing her thoughts easily. As they had reminded Stjerne when she’d overstepped her place one time too many, had lost them one of the mortal portal-holders, and the consort’s protection had been dropped.

  “We will. But that act is not for us to do so, not alone.” They burned to confront her, force her to recant her abandonment, take up her proper role and put things back to order. The court should not be without its queen, consorts should not give orders, they should not be relying so heavily on humans to accomplish their goals. But it was the consort’s right to rebuke his queen, not theirs. They were here only to find her, track her, and keep her in one place until he could arrive.

  Soon. The others would complete the first part of their task soon. All they had to do was hold her here until then.

  And if they did violence to her would-be courtiers and guards in the process
? No one would chide them for that.

  The sound of footsteps on the floor approached their table and then stopped. They both looked up, expecting their waitress to have returned with the coffee.

  “You folks traveling through or here for some leaf peeping?”

  The human stood by their table, his head cocked to the side, indicating that he expected them to respond. Unlike the others around them, who wore a seemingly random choice of colors and clothing, he was dressed all in one shade of blue, blouse and trousers matched by a leather utility belt like a workman. But he carried himself proudly, with an edge of caution that both preters quickly identified. A guard of some sort, aware in ways the other humans were not that they did not belong here. And the scar across his face, a still-raw slash, said he was not a human who was easily cowed.

  The term he used, “leaf peeping,” was unfamiliar, but the intent behind the question was clear. He was challenging them.

  The female preter rested her hands on the table, her eyes bright. There was a temptation to englamour this one, but capturing him would cause more problems than it would solve; a guard would be expected to report in, and his going missing might raise alarms they had no wish to deal with just then. Likewise, they could not simply kill him.

  “We are visiting a friend who lives in the area,” the male said, placing his fork down on the table and folding his hands in an attempt to look harmless. “Is there something wrong?” His voice soothed and eased: There is nothing wrong here, nothing at all. A risk; if the human was sensitive to magics, as some were, he would know he was being manipulated, raising more questions.

  The human studied him carefully, too closely, and then, finally, shook his head, dismissing them from whatever suspicions he had brought. “We’ve had some trouble the past few weeks,” he said. “Your friend will fill you in, no doubt. It’s been all the gossip. So we’re careful with faces we don’t recognize. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Of course. Such diligence is to be commended. Might I ask as to the nature of the trouble?”

  “The murder kind,” the guard said bluntly, the faint englamouring cast on his perception not affecting him so much that he lost track of his duty. “Two local families, and two cops went missing looking for them.” He studied them, searching for some reaction. When they merely looked back at him, he smiled briefly, grimly, and touched the brim of his hat. “You folks enjoy your breakfast.”

  “Herself?” the male murmured as the human moved away, leaving them to their discussion again.

  “Or the creatures she has gathered around her,” his companion said. “You saw the scar on his face—that is the work of one the lower sorts. How she chooses to amuse herself is no concern of ours. Finish your food. The others will be finishing soon. When they are done...then we will be able to go home.”

  “Hmm,” the other preter said, casting a glance around the restaurant. “We should look up that guard before we go. He lacked the spark of some others, but there was an intelligence there that might be useful.”

  “We can come back for him later,” she agreed. “Later.”

  * * *

  What one gnome knew, they all knew. They knew about the human female, who had evaded them not once but twice, who had gone into the otherland and come out again. When she had appeared at Herself’s court, they had known, and they had waited and watched. Herself might be fooled into thinking this human was tame like the others, but gnomes knew better.

  They were not so foolish as to choose a single side or to trust the promises of anyone, super or preternatural. Both sides lied. Both sides used. But if they broke each other, gnomes would remain.

  They would play the game and win.

  So when the lupin, the Wolf, called a warning against the preternatural threat, they heard but did not heed, waiting for a better offer. And it came, as they knew it would. When their preter lords called, they responded. When Herself commanded, they obeyed. They did the dirty work, the bloody work. But always, always, they watched and waited.

  Eventually, the time would come for them. If they could survive.

  “We cannot go. They will slaughter us. Have you forgotten what happened the last time, and the time before that?”

  They had attempted to stop the Wolf’s pack twice before, on the preters’ orders, and most had been slaughtered. Gēnomos stalked and they rended and they disappeared, that was what they did, not this open frontal warfare.

  “This is not the Wolf.”

  “This is worse!”

  “A risk. A risk we knew and counted for.”

  “A risk that fails is not a good risk.”

  “The cost is high but the reward sweet.”

  “Enough!” One voice cut across the many, where they were huddled in a tent at the far edges of the property, as far from Herself as they could manage without raising her ire. “There is no other choice. Not now. Not yet. We die, to live.”

  “We die, to live,” the other voices muttered, agreement reluctant but inevitable. What one knew, they all knew, and what one won, they all won.

  Chapter 15

  Jan knew that something was wrong first, because she was watching Tyler. He didn’t say anything, kept singing some old love song Jan vaguely remembered from the oldies station, but she knew that his mood had changed. He didn’t look at anyone when he sang, letting his gaze float off somewhere, his thoughts entirely within his head. He used to look like that when he was working, too, not so much thinking as letting thoughts come to him. It was almost reassuring, that familiarity in the middle of so much that was strange. But halfway through, that cracked a little, and he was back, entirely present in his eyes. And the look wasn’t scared or worried: it was broken.

  Jan studied her lover cautiously, from under lowered lids. She had been released from her posing duties, the brownie that had been perched on her knee scrambling off, shooting her a dirty look as though arranging their positions had been her idea. She had hoped to escape as well, needing time to recover from the stress of trying to woo the preter over to the idea of the Farm as a potential site for her court, as well as the stress of holding her position for so long, but Nalith had gestured for her to come close, then indicated that the human was to stay by her.

  Exhausted but outwardly obedient, Jan had squatted on her heels by the preter’s chair. Occasionally, the preter lifted one of Jan’s hands to look closely at some detail or tilted her face to check the line of her jaw, then turned back to check her drawing, but otherwise she ignored her. The preter had her fingers on Jan’s chin just then, angling her to one side, so Jan had a clear view of the moment Ty’s expression changed. Her heart raced, a shot of adrenaline wracking her body, similar to an asthma attack but without the constriction. It was anticipation, fear, stress, all shaped into a bullet and slammed into her heart.

  What? She asked him silently. What is it?

  Then the fingers on her skin dug in too hard, the preter having somehow sensed that her attention had wandered, and Jan yelped, wrenching her head away instinctively. She hunched over, anticipating a blow, but none came. The mix of conversations, previously a low hum in the room, died, and Jan risked looking up.

  Nalith had risen to her feet, the sketch in front of her forgotten. Her narrow, elegant face was pulled even tighter, making her cheekbones and chin seem even sharper, and her eyes...

  Her eyes, when she looked around the room, were filled with an unholy gleam, the deep red of a candle flame obliterating any trace of blue. The atavistic response that had dulled in Jan over months of dealing with non-humans, the week of constant exposure to a preter, rose again suddenly newly urgent, urging her to get the hell away.

  “Call in the gnomes,” Nalith ordered, her voice sharp and thin as shattered glass. “Deploy them at the borders of the property. All others, inside. Deploy internal defenses. Now.”

 
She did not raise her voice: she did not have to. All the supernaturals within the range—the entire main floor of the house, from the sound of things—moved immediately, following whatever plans she had established. Jan waited, still half-crouched on the polished wooden floor, until the main room had emptied of all but Nalith and the four humans, all in various stages of confusion.

  “My lady?” Her voice shook, but Jan told herself that it should be shaking in the role she was playing. Anything that upset her queen should upset her. “What troubles you?”

  The preter’s hand dropped back to Jan’s head, stroking her hair as though she were a cat. Jan managed to restrain a shudder, although across the room Tyler’s body shook once in revulsion. He was revisiting his own memories again, Jan suspected, and her heart ached for him, even as her brain was racing to get on top of this new development. “My lady?”

  “It is nothing,” Nalith said, her voice still splinter sharp. “Merely an intrusion on my territory by those I do not wish to see.”

  Hope rose that it was AJ and his crew, finally coming to their aid, and then was dashed again. Tyler wouldn’t look like that if it were supernaturals, certainly not supernaturals he knew. And Nalith would not treat AJ and his crew as such a threat, even if she knew about them, which she didn’t...did she? Jan’s head hurt as much as her chest, trying to parse that, so she let it go. If it was AJ, they’d roll with it. If not...if not, they were in danger, too.

  The other two humans were looking at Nalith not with fear or concern but utter befuddlement. The idea that there might be something that could upset her, much less challenge her, was beyond their comprehension. Jan had a sudden unkind thought that they looked like dogs who’d just been told all the bacon was gone.

  “Others of your kind, my lady?” Ty had stood up, although he stayed safely across the room from Nalith. He wasn’t asking, really; he knew.

  “Perhaps even your former mistress,” Nalith said, intentionally cruel, and Tyler’s jaw clenched, his shoulders hunching over slightly, but he didn’t otherwise react to the blow. Before either one of them could react, or Jan could figure out how to deal with this, there was the sound of loud voices and running feet outside, and one of the brownies came racing in, weirdly flushed. It wasn’t one she could identify, which meant that it was lower in their pack rankings, or however they figured it. Odd: normally they didn’t come in to speak directly to Nalith.