Soul of Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

  It took a true heart to break the glamour, reclaim a human who was taken. Maybe—maybe, and Jan wasn’t placing any bets on it—a true heart could keep them safe there, too.

  It was as good a deal as she was going to be able to make, without giving something in return. Jan nodded once, still reluctant. “They’re your art,” she said softly. “Care for them.”

  Nalith made a gesture, and the remaining preternaturals—far the worse for wear and war—went to the humans, tapping them on the shoulder and summoning them back to awareness. Slowly, they moved toward the mistily glowing arch of the portal and disappeared through it.

  Jan remembered her own travels through the portals and swallowed hard, the sensation of tumbling through an airless void still number two in her nightmare hit list, right after being attacked by gnomes.

  “Oh. The gnomes...” she said, horrified that she had forgotten, even for a moment.

  “Gone to ground. Literally, it seems.” AJ was grimly satisfied by that. “The few who were still around have disappeared. Hopefully they’ll be licking their wounds for a long time, because we’re not going to forget anytime soon.”

  “Nor will I,” Nalith said, equally grim, and the two exchanged looks that made Jan stop worrying about the turncoats. As tough as she liked to think she’d become, she didn’t have a patch on either one of those two.

  “Fare thee well, Janet,” Nalith said. “You were a terrible servant, and I am well rid of you.”

  “Go home, my lady,” Jan replied. “Put your house in order and take care of your remaining servants. I pray I never see you or your kind again.”

  Not a win, not a loss. Stalemate. Or maybe, Jan thought bitterly, balance.

  A few minutes later, the mist pulled into the portal’s frame and disappeared, leaving the basement empty of all save a dozen supernaturals, two humans, and a few scorch marks on the floor and ceiling where the portal had been.

  * * *

  “So,” Martin said, having changed back into human shape at some point during the negotiations with the preter queen. Jan hadn’t even noticed her eyes closing; she’d been so focused. “What now?”

  “We need to break the portals, make it so they can never come back again,” Tyler said. He was holding Jan’s hand so tightly her fingers had gone numb, but she couldn’t bring herself to care or try to get loose. “The only way we’ll ever be safe is to break the portals.”

  Jan shook her head, even as AJ said, “We can’t. We can’t even stop them from using humans again to force a portal.”

  “But—” Tyler’s voice was pure pain. Whatever healing he’d hoped to find, whatever protection the sachet had given him, it hadn’t been enough, and Jan’s heart ached for him.

  “We can’t stop them yet,” AJ amended. “We’ll keep working on it.”

  A woman who had stayed on the outskirts with the other combatants now inserted herself into their loose huddle. She was human, Jan realized, and her face was covered with splatters of blood. “Whatever happened, the world has changed. We can’t go back. Magic can be lost, forgotten...but it can’t be unmade.” She looked at them each in turn, her eyes cold but not unfriendly. “We will always be at risk.”

  A witch, like Elizabeth. How many others had been out there, in the fight? How many had died? Jan wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but knew she would have to, eventually.

  “We’ve always been at risk,” Jan said. “Right now, our best hope is that Nalith, once she regains control of the court, remembers how badly she failed here, how badly they need her there—and that we know how to find her, how to hurt them, if they overstep again.”

  “So, our survival is dependent on the wounded ego of a preter?” AJ was too dignified, even now, to roll his eyes, but they could hear the disbelieving exasperation in his voice.

  “Yeah,” Martin said. “Funny, huh?”

  “You have a sick sense of humor, swishtail.”

  “You’re not the first to say that.” He leaned against Jan slightly, and she realized that he was bleeding. “It’s nothing,” he said, hearing her gasp. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re an idiot,” she said and looked up to see Tyler watching both of them. He had a strange expression on his face, one she couldn’t read.

  “We’re all idiots,” he said, getting closer to look at Martin’s arm. The kelpie snorted but let the humans guide him to a chair while they fussed over him.

  Her best friend. Her leman. Both alive. Not right, not well, not healthy, but alive. Right then, that was all she could focus on.

  “So, what now?” Martin asked again, looking over at AJ. The lupin raised his brow and shrugged. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, turning briefly to look at where the portal had been, “and it may be the worst cliché in history, but I need a drink.”

  Chapter 18

  Three days later, the exhaustion had faded, and Jan had almost stopped jumping at shadows in the night. Almost.

  She was actually quite proud of the fact that when a deep voice came out of the darkness, she only clenched the mug between her hands more tightly and kept her ass planted on the log she was sitting on.

  “So, you are Jan,” that voice said.

  She almost smiled at that. “I think so. I’m not really sure right now.”

  It had been three days since Martin had brought her to the Center and left her there. For rest, he had said. But he had left her alone, with nothing to do but think. She was good at thinking. Less so, it seemed, at resting. Even without the tick-tick-tick of the deadline in her chest, even without the manic anxiety, once the deadline had passed, she still felt...odd.

  The others at the Center left her alone, mostly. She was fed, and if she wanted to talk to someone, they didn’t exactly run away, but...these weren’t the supers she knew, the people she knew, and Jan suspected that she smelled of preter to them.

  Sometimes, she thought she smelled of preter to herself, too. Preter and super and blood and dust, and not much of Jan left at all.

  She went to bed each night with the carved horse pressed against her palm, wishing she were home, curled on the sofa with Tyler. Or sitting on the grass with Martin, watching niskies splash in the pond. But the Farm wasn’t home, and her apartment and Tyler’s were gone, someone else living in them now.

  And Glory, who was supposed to be here, was supposed to be here, safe, and wasn’t.

  If Jan couldn’t find peace here, then how could she find it anywhere?

  The source of that deep voice sat on the log next to her, groaning a little as he stretched his legs out in front of him and got comfortable.

  There were other campfires, all of them more social than hers, and she should have resented being approached, but she knew who the old man was.

  “Once the off-natural touches you, you are never the same,” the Huntsman agreed, seemingly responding to both what she’d said and what she’d been thinking. “But that does not change who you are.”

  “No. No, I guess it doesn’t.” But it changed everything else.

  He didn’t seem to want to talk, so Jan went back to staring at the fire. Even though it was late autumn back home, it never seemed to get cold in the Center, just enough of a temperature drop to make it good sleeping weather. For her, anyway; she didn’t know what the various supers thought about it, but most of them had fur or scales to deal with, not bare flesh.

  She missed Martin. She missed Tyler. She wondered if Nalith had anyone she missed, or if she was pleased to be reunited with her consort.

  Somehow, Jan didn’t think she did, or was. Something burned in the preter, something fierce and determined, but it wasn’t a heart.

  “You’re very brave,” the Huntsman said out of nowhere.

  That not only made her smile but laugh. “What, you mean the ‘terrified but going
forward anyway’ thing? Yeah. I got that. It’s the picking up after that’s got me stumped.”

  “Ah.” It was an intensely irritating noise, the kind a teacher made when you couldn’t answer a question they thought you should know cold.

  She stared into the fire, taking the little horse out of her pocket. For healing, the witch had said. And had given it to her, not the others. Jan rubbed her fingers over the dots in the horse’s flank, along the arched mane, and then put it back in her pocket. Maybe it wasn’t magic at all. Maybe it was just...comfort.

  Tyler had been invited to the Center, too. Martin would have taken them both. He had declined. She understood that, a little. He wanted to get distance, find himself in the real world, the human world.

  She wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. She might not have changed, but she wasn’t the same, either. And unlike Ty, she’d chosen it. Most of it. And...they weren’t all bad memories.

  Except, of course, for the ones that were really bad.

  Jan let out a sigh and heard the Huntsman echo it, with something that might have been a chuckle, too, as if he knew what she was thinking. He probably did.

  How did you go back to an ordinary life when you’d been, however briefly, extra-ordinary? Except that was exactly what you did, apparently. The dead were buried or burned. AJ’s pack was back to stealing cars, Elsa was returning to her mountain—she was from the Appalachians, not Norway or whatever, Jan had learned with a shock—and the others were doing whatever it was they’d done before. The threat was over, life resumed.

  Jan seemed to be the only one who didn’t know where she was or what to do.

  “I found this,” the Huntsman said. “In the crook of a tree, in the copse of trees on the Farm when we were cleaning up.” He handed her a black plastic bag, folded flat, with something inside. She took it, opened it.

  A notebook, slightly stained with coffee rings on its red cover. Inside, notes scrawled in blank ink, in handwriting she didn’t recognize, but turns of phrase and little scrawled doodles that she did.

  Her breath caught a little. Glory’s notes. Everything they had learned, everything she was working on when the Farm was overrun, put somewhere safe, so someone could find them later. Jan’s throat tightened, and she wished it was an asthma attack, that there was something that would ease the pain. Glory wasn’t here, wasn’t anywhere. They hadn’t found anything to bury, AJ said. Nothing at all, just...gone.

  It was her fault that Glory had gotten caught up in this. Hers—and the Huntsman’s, for bringing her to the Farm, but Jan’s at the very start.

  Because it was there, because Glory had written it, Jan tried to make out the words, squinting in the firelight. At the top of one page, chosen randomly: “Not multiple universes: one overlapping over and over again?” There were other comments about strings and theology, and strings of code Jan couldn’t decipher, and the letters LHC over and over again, often underlined. And then one word: cool.

  Jan stared at it. Strings. Large Hadron Collider. Multiple universes. She wasn’t a scientist, but she was a geek, and she had New Scientist and NASA on her Twitter feed, once upon a time, just like every other geek. Cool. “Seriously, Glor?”

  She could almost hear her friend’s laughter, her face alive with an imp of mischief, ready to leap into some new rabbit hole, just because it was there.

  Jan’s responsibility for bringing her into it, but Glory would have been pissed as hell if she’d been kept out of this, all this, the exciting and the terrifying. Maybe the Huntsman had known that somehow. And that she would have gone down swinging, to the very end.

  Jan set her jaw and flipped to the last pages with writing on them. “Binary thinking. Set patterns. Zero is the key? Sixteen could be scary. Do not let them form sixteen. Or, bloody hell, anything higher.” There were more formulas, crosshatched and scribbled out, and then, the last thing Glory had written: “We need a damned physicist, not code monkeys. Put that on shopping list for when Jan gets back: one damned physicist.”

  “So, that’s what happened,” Jan said quietly, almost to herself, caught between wonder and fear. “We poked at the universe, and poked all the way damn through, somehow. And Nalith caught at the threads and rewove them.”

  “Does it make sense to you now?” the Huntsman asked

  “No. But I don’t think it’s supposed to.” She closed the notebook, rested it on her lap, thought about the sixteen humans in a circle around the portal, sixteen given to the uncertain mercies of the preter queen.

  Even a lab of actual rocket scientists might not be enough to fix this. You couldn’t undo, undiscover science, any more than you could undo magic. Like getting on Martin’s back, you had to ride or die.

  “What do you think happened to her?” she asked out of the blue. “To them?” Glory and the dryad who’d tried to save her.

  The fire snapped and sparked, barely enough to read by, but didn’t do much to illuminate the shape next to her, his face still in shadow. “What do you think?”

  “I think she’s okay,” Jan said, still hearing that faint laughter in her ears. “I don’t know why, but I think she’s somewhere safe. That she grabbed a thread, somehow, and... It’s foolish, wish-fulfillment thinking, but—”

  “The universe is a funny, tricky thing,” he said, his voice thoughtful. “If there’s no body, there’s...chance.”

  Jan let her hand rest on the notebook, looked up at the unknown star formations that wheeled and shone over the Center, and nodded. She had seen too much to discount chance.

  “So, what now?” she asked. “I’ve got no job, no home, no—” she started to say no friends, but that wasn’t true. That wasn’t true at all.

  The Huntsman chuckled, as though hearing her thoughts.

  You couldn’t undiscover. You could only keep discovering.

  “I think I’d like to go home now,” she said.

  * * *

  “Back where it all started, are you?”

  Jan scattered the rest of her muffin on the ground, watching the pigeons peck at it. She didn’t look up when AJ sat down on the bench next to her.

  “You can’t go back. You can only go forward. Isn’t that right?”

  It had been this bench, in the Green, where AJ and Martin had first broken the news to her, about Tyler being elf-napped, about supernaturals and preternaturals, about what it would take to get him home. Everything that had happened had started here.

  “If I’d known then...” The lupin hesitated.

  “You’d have done exactly the same.”

  “Yeah. I would have.”

  She wanted to hate him, blame him. Instead, she wiped her hands on her jeans and watched the pigeons.

  A hand touched her shoulder, fingers cool, bringing just the hint of green water and brine to her nose. She reached up and let her fingers cover Martin’s, acknowledging him there without turning to look.

  Her best friend was a homicidal serial killer who occasionally had another form, and her other best friend was...missing, presumed having an adventure.

  “Tyler’s left,” she said. “Taken a job in California.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She wanted to say that it was okay, but it wasn’t. There was a gaping hole inside her heart, worse even than the first time, when she’d thought he’d walked out on her, that he’d run off with another woman. Knowing that the man she loved, loved her but couldn’t be with her...that was an entirely different kind of pain. She wasn’t strong enough to wish him well, either.

  “I’ll survive,” she said instead.

  “Yes.” AJ was smiling, she thought, although she didn’t look sideways to check. “Yes, you will.”

  * * * * *

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  ISBN: 9781460319659

  SOUL OF FIRE

  Copyright © 2013 by Laura Anne Gilman

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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