Soul of Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “M-my lady, my lady, they are gone.”

  “Who are gone?” Those fire-red eyes turned on the brownie, and it gulped but did not flee.

  “The gnomes, my lady. They are not in their compound, and they do not respond to the call.”

  Turncoats, AJ had named them, changing sides and abandoning their fellow supers to work for a preter lord—or lady, as it had turned out. Jan didn’t know why she was surprised that they had abandoned Nalith, as well. Gnomes, it seemed, played no side but their own.

  Nalith was not surprised. Nalith was furious. Jan fell back, scuttling on her knees without shame until she felt the reassuring bulk of a wall behind her, and wondered if getting behind the sofa would help. Tyler held still, as though hoping that Nalith would forget he was there, and the other two humans, although clueless, weren’t dumb, keeping their mouths shut and their gazes elsewhere.

  “All gone?”

  “All, my lady.”

  There was more noise in the hallway, and some of the supers came back in, clearly waiting for new orders. Martin, Jan saw, was among them, although toward the back of the small crowd. She did a quick mental count. Without the gnomes and minus the supers Nalith had sent to the new houses, they were down to less than thirty, and that included the four humans.

  “I will deal with them later,” Nalith said. Jan thought the preter might believe her own words, or she might be whistling, trying to save face in front of the others. Most of them looked as if they wanted to believe her, wanted to believe that whatever was coming, she could handle it without the gnomes’ defense.

  “There are weapons in the shed. Cam and Alia, distribute them. Tell my winged guardians to take the roof, make sure nothing attempts to land there.” She looked around the room, and this time she saw the humans, clearly.

  “And you, my pets. Will you fight for me?” It wasn’t a question. “Serve me, in this, as you have in other ways.”

  Wes and Kerry stepped forward as if they were volunteering to go on a picnic. Idiots. They might have muscles, but she would bet that neither of them had so much as made a fist since they were in grade school. In a fight against foes Nalith feared? They would be cannon fodder. But they weren’t her responsibility. Jan held her breath, and Tyler shook his head roughly, running a hand over his scalp, leaving it resting on the back of his neck, hesitating.

  “You would rather chew out your eyes than fight for me, would you not, my singer?” She was using that voice again, the one that hinted at glamour, promised it, making you ask rather than forcing it on you. Jan hated that voice.

  “Yes. My lady.”

  Nalith smiled, and for once—for once—there seemed to be nothing cruel about it. “Then think of it thus. You would be fighting not for me but to inflict harm on others of my kind, who intend less well to your world. You would strike a blow against those who hurt you.”

  Jan bit her lip. She didn’t want Tyler in harm’s way, but if he could take real action, finally hurt the preters, in some way close to how they had hurt him, at least a little...maybe that would be the healing he needed.

  Finally, after an agonizing wait, Tyler nodded once.

  “And you, my little guide, my useless one?” The preter queen was looking at her, that awful gaze focused on her, pulling her in no matter what she might wish, might fear. If she would only give in to that fire, let herself be consumed by it, then all the worry, all the pain and fear, would be gone, and she would be warm and cared for, all the rest of her life....

  Jan resisted. She drew on the memories of facing down Nalith’s consort, of walking into—and out of—the preter court, holding on to the knowledge of what a preter’s care was like, the sound of Tyler’s nightmares and the look in his eyes when he finally came back to this world, all of it bricks in a wall she built, slowly, painfully, between herself and that demanding gaze.

  When she felt safe enough, she looked not at Nalith but at Tyler. He was looking at her, waiting. When she nodded once, the tension in his face eased at her assent. Whatever had been going on before in his head, it didn’t matter now. He wasn’t alone. She wasn’t alone. Whatever happened, they would face it together this time.

  Nalith either missed the subtext or, more likely, Jan thought, chose to ignore it, so long as she got what she wanted.

  “Martin.”

  Martin pushed through the crowd, putting himself front and center. “My lady.”

  “You will lead the defense.”

  “No.”

  The silence in the room previously was nothing to the utter dead air that filled the room at that.

  “You would prefer to guard your lady?”

  “No.” Martin’s voice was flat, unemotional, and final.

  “No.” It wasn’t phrased as a question, but she was clearly waiting for an explanation. Jan stared at him, wondering what the hell was going on in his head.

  His expression gave nothing away, his eyes flat brown, not showing any of the supernatural spark or human-recognizable emotion.

  “You are here in this world, and I recognize you,” he said slowly. “But this pitting of forces against each other, the violence that is filling our world, it solves nothing. You know this. We cannot destroy each other, or the balance between the realms will shift. You know this.”

  “I know nothing of the sort.” Nalith’s voice was tight, angry, and her entire body screamed danger, at least to Jan. Martin kept speaking, seemingly oblivious to the threat.

  “You do not belong here. They will bloody the very bones of the earth, tear apart our Center, to reclaim you. Sending more violence against that will not save you, nor earn you a place here.”

  It wasn’t Martin’s voice, Jan realized suddenly. Or it was his voice, but he wasn’t in it.

  “Upstart creature.” And now Nalith let loose her anger, lashing out with one hand. She was nowhere near him, and yet Martin staggered back, his limbs jerking as though he’d receive an electric shock, a high-voltage one. His eyes widened, and Jan felt her eyes try to close, indicating that he was about to change form. Then the impulse apparently passed, and he went to one knee, lowering his head.

  “My lady. I will guard your house.” The words were grudging, but Nalith took them at face value, that whatever had spoken before had been cowed into obedience.

  “Go. Take these humans with you. Make them useful.”

  * * *

  “What the hell was that?” The moment they were outside the main room, Tyler rounded on Martin, his voice low but furious. “Were you trying to get killed? Were you trying to get all of us killed?”

  Martin held up his hand, black nails glinting in the overhead light, drawing Jan’s eye to them. She had gotten used to his looks, the fine dark hairs scattered over his skin, the narrow face and too-wide-set eyes, but the nails always reminded her: they were hooves in another form.

  “You two. Kerry, go to the shed. There are weapons there. Find something you think you can wield. Wes, go find Patrick’s supplies, all of them, and bring them down. His chisels might be the right size for some of our cohort to use. They were in good enough shape to be deadly.”

  Both humans looked vaguely ill, but nodded and went off to follow his instructions, still driven by their obedience to the preter queen.

  “What happened in there?” Jan asked. “What you said...”

  “He told me the same bullshit,” Tyler said, still furious. “That violence solves nothing, yak yak yak. Which, coming from him, is nice, isn’t it?”

  “It wasn’t him.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t him,” Jan said again. And then she said to Martin, “That wasn’t you talking in there, was it?” Jan needed him to answer that. It probably wouldn’t be one she wanted to hear, but she was getting used to that.

  Martin merely shrugged. “Does it matte
r?”

  “Yes!” There were days, she swore, she wanted to hold the kelpie’s head underwater. Not that it would do much other than amuse him.

  “What, something is beaming its words into your head, working your jaw?”

  “No.” Martin was certain about that, Jan less so. “It wasn’t words. It was just like this...knowing. Like when you’re trying to understand something and then all of a sudden it’s all there in your head?”

  Tyler shook his head, but Jan nodded.

  “There is a balance to this world, to both realms,” Martin said, putting a hand on each of their shoulders and pushing them into the now-empty and abandoned kitchen. “We have always known this, and you humans, too, when you think about it. The Center remains, and we balance around it. Occasionally it tilts one way or the other, but over time, it recalibrates, remains steady. If the portals hadn’t changed, that would have remained. Now...the preters may have lost their center, and we’ve done something that...filled the gap?” Martin’s long face scrunched together, as if he was giving himself a headache. “The magic changed, and they were vulnerable to it, changed by it. If we kill them all, here, we may damage our Center, as well.” He frowned. “I think. This is more Elsa’s thing, not mine.”

  “Yeah, you’re just the dumb blond. We got that,” Jan said with more than a touch of sarcasm. “So, if the balance is thrown off,” she asked, “then what? What happens?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Change may not always be a bad thing, but that does not automatically make it a good thing.”

  “You said that before, about maintaining a balance.” Tyler caught Jan’s glance at him and shrugged. “He was trying to talk me out of being an idiot.”

  “Hmm,” she said and then decided that they didn’t have time to dig into that, not without knowing what was about to happen. “And about the Center and earning a place here?”

  “That...wasn’t me. I think it was the Center.”

  Somehow, that was the only thing in all this that made sense to Jan, that the oasis of calm and recovery would be able to reach out and speak through Martin’s voice. In fact, when she thought about it, it all made perfect sense. She had lost her mind.

  “My life is insane,” she said. “All right, so we’re supposed to help with the defense?”

  “I can’t,” Martin said. “But I needed to agree, to get you two out of there.”

  “I’m staying,” Tyler said. “I have to.”

  “You’re going to die, human,” Martin said, as if he’d said it before, and Tyler shrugged, looking unhappy. “Maybe.”

  There was a sharp rap of something hitting glass, and all three of them turned to look at the kitchen’s single window. A hand pressed against it, palm down, and then made a pointing gesture toward the door.

  It wasn’t a gnome’s hand, so Jan moved to unlatch the lock. A slender figure with dark, mica-glittery skin slipped in, its clothing rumpled, shoes covered in mud and its face splattered with what Jan was pretty sure was blood. Not its own: it seemed unharmed, if exhausted.

  “Seth.” The lizardlike super had been one of AJ’s lieutenants back at the Farm. “Are you all right? What happened? Did AJ send you?” The questions tumbled out of her mouth, even as she reached out to brush at the smudge on its cheek. “Is everyone okay? Did you get my email?”

  Seth shook his head, not saying no but rather indicating that there was no time to answer questions. “We’ve been looking for you. AJ’s orders. The witch told us where you were. You need to come. Now. AJ needs you.”

  That was all Martin had to hear. He half turned, opening the refrigerator to grab three bottles of water, handing one to Jan. “All right,” he said. “But we have to hurry—the preters have found their missing queen, and they’re coming, fast.”

  Seth blinked at them, double eyelids making the effect seem even more surprised. “Preters, here?”

  “And we don’t want to be here when they get here,” Martin said.

  “Right. No. Right.” Seth blinked his underlids again and then slid back out the door, clearly expecting them to follow. Martin was barely a step behind, while Jan, the water still in her hand, was staring dumbly, trying to catch up to what had just happened.

  “Wait, how are we going to—” she started to say, but they were already gone. “Damn it,” she swore, checking to make sure that she had her inhaler in her pocket, the witch’s sachet and the carved horse in the other. There wasn’t anything still upstairs that was hers, really.

  “Come on. Let’s go,” she said to Ty.

  “I can’t.”

  “What?” Her first thought was that she’d misheard.

  “I can’t. I won’t.”

  “Ty...” She looked at the door, then back to her boyfriend, feeling helpless. “You’ve got to!”

  “I don’t got to do anything except what feels right. Zan said so, back at the Farm. And it feels right to stay.”

  “Jesus Christ, Tyler.” Jan almost hurled her water bottle at him. “You— I can’t—”

  “Go. You don’t need to be here.” Before she had time to parse that, either, she was in his arms, a rough and unexpected hug. It was the first time he had initiated contact, and certainly the most intimate contact, since...since before he had gone to meet Stjerne, the preter who had stolen him. “I love you,” he said, almost a confession. “I always have. I always will. But I can’t be like this. I can’t let go, and that means I can’t be with you, either. Let me do this.”

  And then he shoved her away, out the door, and closed it roughly behind her.

  The backyard was quiet. The area where the gnomes had been camping was a mess of abandoned bedrolls and tents, but nothing moved, not even a squirrel or bird. She could hear traffic from down the road, the sound of an occasional car, and voices shouting to each other, but if there were a dozen or more supernaturals gathering, preparing for battle, she could neither see nor hear them.

  Somehow that was worse than if she’d walked out into an armed camp.

  Martin and Seth were nowhere to be seen, either. Jan felt abandoned by both her companions, a hot splice of self-pity mixed with panic. Should she go back into the house, throw herself onto Nalith’s nonexistent mercy, fight and hope that whatever had spoken through Martin’s voice was wrong, that battle wouldn’t doom them all?

  No. Whatever happened, whatever Tyler decided, Jan knew she could no more go back into that house than she could fly. Martin had told her where he’d left that car; she didn’t have GPS or a map, but maybe she could find that and...then she’d worry about where to go next.

  Uncapping the water bottle she only now just realized she was holding, Jan stepped off the back deck and started walking as casually as she could. The yard was large enough, but it seemed twice as wide when you were hoping not to be noticed.

  “You, human.”

  “Yes?” Her voice didn’t crack, not even when hard, thin fingers latched on to her arm, halting her midstep.

  “You’re not armed.”

  No, she thought, half-crazed, you took them all. She hadn’t encountered a multi-limbed super before, much less one shaped vaguely and disturbingly like a praying mantis. “I... No. I was supposed to go out to the shed to find a weapon.”

  The super snorted, impressive considering it didn’t seem to have a nose, only a wide mouth set over its eyes. “Nothing out there you could use, bitty thing like you. Here.” It reached out with a lower limb, and she took the serrated blade offered almost automatically. “Go low and stab,” it told her. “You’ll do more damage that way than trying to go overhand.”

  “Oh. Okay. I’ll... I’m going to walk the perimeter. One thing I’m really good at is screaming loud, if I see something I don’t like.”

  Jan was pretty sure the super grinned at her, and the grip on her arm turned into a pa
t on the shoulder. “Not bad for a human,” it said and then went on its way in the opposite direction.

  Jan finally remembered to breathe and, with the knife in one hand and the water bottle in the other, kept heading for the far edge of the property, where a break in the fence suggested she might be able to slip through unnoticed. It took sliding sideways to manage, and the splintered wood dug into her legs, but she got through.

  When another hand grabbed at her from behind, tugging the sleeve of her blouse, she swung instinctively, the point of the blade digging up until it met resistance, and she heard a startled yelp.

  “Woman, what?”

  “Oh.” Jan let the blade drop back a little, looking into Seth’s startled face. “Sorry?”

  “Good reflexes” was all he said, although he winced a little as he flexed the arm she’d hit. “We’re going to need that. Now, put that away and come on.”

  Martin was waiting across the driveway on the other side, looking impatient but also relieved. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, she suspected. But Tyler wasn’t the only one who went with his gut. This, crazy as it was, felt right.

  They made it on foot to the bridge that led into town. A girl with pale green hair sat on the stone-lined bank and kicked her feet absently, looking up when they approached. Not Jenny Greenteeth, but another water-sprite. “I guarded the car like you said,” she told Seth. “Good luck.”

  It was the truck they had taken from the Farm. That unexpected bit of familiarity hit Jan harder than expected. This had been the truck that had taken her from New Haven originally, sandwiched between AJ and Martin, having no idea how her world had already changed....

  “What happened?” she asked. “Why did it take you so long to find us? Why didn’t anyone else come? Is AJ pissed we took off?”