Loe raamatut: «Soul of Fire»

Chapter 1

In the middle of the chaos, the constant hum of conversation, the noise of chairs and feet, Jan could hear the clock.

“Shut up,” she told it. “Shut up.”

Lisbet, at the other side of the desk, looked at her with sympathy and then—clearly deciding against saying anything—went back to work.

Jan should do the same. But this morning, her thoughts wouldn’t settle.

It had been ten weeks, five days, and seven hours since she had made her desperate bargain with the preternaturals of the Court Under the Hill, forced them to hold off on their raids, to stop whatever plans they had to invade the natural world. Ten weeks, five days, and a few hours less since she, boyfriend and kelpie in tow, had come back through the portal, battered and exhausted.

The supernatural defense had gathered—regathered—here in this off-the-track property to begin their race against time. And in the main room, a grandfather clock that had probably been installed when the farmhouse had first been built back in the eighteenth century ticked off those moments, as if any of them might forget.

Jan looked around the room, crowded with half a dozen battered metal desks similar to her own, and was painfully aware that she was the only human there, the only one who probably didn’t have some sort of supernatural time-of-day awareness hard-coded into her wetware. She didn’t need it; she could feel the hours passing like her own heartbeat. Every morning, she watched the sun rise into the sky, so different from the ever-present gloom of the preternatural realm, and felt time slipping away from them.

Being the only human didn’t make her special, though. None of them could forget. Everyone here lived and breathed with the knowledge that every moment pushed against them, straining the atmosphere, making even the most patient of the them—and few of them were patient to begin with—snap at each other over the smallest of things.

Ten weeks, five days, and seven hours had gone by. They had four days and, what, seventeen hours left before the truce ended, and the preternaturals—the elves of lore, lovely and deadly—were free once again to open portals between the worlds. And once that happened...

Jan’s skin prickled unpleasantly. She knew too well what would happen.

“Jan?” A voice broke into her thoughts. “You want some more coffee?”

“Oh, Roj, thank you, yes, please,” she said, holding up her mug for a refill. The slender, blue-skinned supernatural filled it, then moved on to the next desk, where mugs were already raised, proof that no matter the species, caffeine was the productivity drug of popular choice.

Jan looked around the room again, rather than go back to staring at notes and graphs that weren’t telling her anything new. Twelve weeks ago, Jan had thought that fairies, elves, werewolves were all myths, stories, legends. Then elves had stolen her boyfriend—lured him away via an internet hookup site—and she had been caught up in a chase that had partnered her with a sweet-tempered if homicidal kelpie, and sent her through a transdimensional portal into the heart of the preternatural world, where she had challenged the preternatural court to win back her love and managed to bring everyone back safe, if not sound.

No. Jan shook her head. Not sound. And not safe, either.

Before, she had learned, there had been certain times, certain places the preters could come through to this realm and vice versa. You either knew and waited, or you stumbled on them, and that was it. Now, somehow, the preters were using humans to open and maintain portals between the worlds. The preters didn’t need to wait anymore for a seasonal event or random alignment.

They—the rightful residents of this world, humans and supernatural alike—were racing a clock to prevent an invasion. And the tick-tick-tick wouldn’t stop—until the clock ran out.

Jan couldn’t stand it anymore. She got up from her desk, pushing her chair back and making a harsh scraping noise against the wooden floor. Lisbet looked up again with a frown, and Jan smiled an apology at the jötunndotter, who just shook her head and went back to scowling at a printed report, marking notes with a red pen. Jan left the room, leaving her coffee there to cool.

The farmhouse was a sprawling structure, added onto over generations. Each room had been given over to another facet of their operations, nothing left to idle loitering. But one of the renovations had given the main house a porch that ran along the entire length of the back side, where residents went to steal a cigarette or a moment of silence, away from the ever-present hum of activity inside. Jan found herself there, inevitably, unconsciously, breathing in the cool morning air, searching for the calm she needed to keep working.

And then, equally inevitably, she looked across the yard to the source of her unease and disquiet. Along with the other outbuildings that came with the farm, there was a small shack that had been repurposed as an apartment. It looked harmless enough. The door was open, and she could see movement within. If she wanted to, she could walk across the grass, go up the two shallow steps, and go inside.

She wanted to. She wouldn’t.

Tyler was there.

Tyler. The reason she had gone Under the Hill. The reason she was caught up in all of this. Her boyfriend—the man who had been her boyfriend—had been brought into that shack when they’d returned, and had refused to come out ever since. The damage—both physical and psychological—that had been done to him by the preters...they were still trying to unravel it. His memories were coming back, but they seemed...empty, like something he’d read and remembered, not lived. Even when he smiled at her, something was missing.

She had been warned about this, warned that there would be changes, but she hadn’t believed. Hadn’t understood. All the reading she’d done since then, crammed into half an hour every night before she fell over from exhaustion, had only gone partially toward explaining it. This was more than PTSD, more than Stockholm syndrome.

What the fairie world took, they kept.

Jan wanted her lover, her leman, back. She had fought magic to reclaim him, damn it, gone into the heart of the preter court and won him back by sheer human stubbornness, but that had only done half the job. The man he had been...was gone.

She felt the now-usual tightness in her chest rise, and breathed out through her mouth, then in again through her mouth, letting the tension slide away just a little. The last thing she needed was a stress-triggered asthma attack.

Tyler was safe. That was what mattered. Safe for now, anyway.

None of them would be safe for much longer if they couldn’t stop what was coming.

There was a faint noise behind her, the squeak of a door and the soft sound of footsteps. AJ, she identified, not even questioning that she could identify the lupin’s steps now.

“Hey,” he said, less in greeting than warning, so she wouldn’t spook. They were all a little on edge, yeah. Even AJ. Maybe especially AJ.

Jan didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge the noise until the lupin—the leader of this ragtag and motley resistance—reached around her with a small plate that looked as if it had been stolen from a back-roads diner, the white surface chipped a little at the rim. But it was holding a thick slice of toast covered with cheese, and her stomach rumbled in reaction, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything all morning, and four cups of coffee wasn’t enough to keep a human going.

Ironic, that supernaturals remembered that, when she couldn’t.

“You okay?” AJ asked.

Her mouth twitched in a grin, even as she picked up the toast and bit into it. She was living in a farmhouse in western Connecticut, surrounded by supernatural creatures out of a fairy tale, while her boyfriend was being deprogrammed, and the rest of them tried to find a way to stave off an invasion from another...world? Universe? Reality? An invasion of bloody-minded elves, according to her friend Glory, who—when Jan had finally admitted what was going on and asked for help—had taken the news with terrifying aplomb.

“Oh, good,” Glory had said, her voice scratchy over transatlantic phone lines. “Because when you disappeared for a week without a word, I thought you might’ve had a nervous breakdown or something. Elves are much better.”

The memory of that conversation was almost enough to make Jan smile now. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said to AJ.

The lupin snorted at that, clearly not believing her. She turned to face him, wiping toast crumbs off her mouth with the back of her hand. The heavy monobrow and elongated nose that was almost a muzzle she barely noticed now; instead Jan saw the worry in those dark brown eyes and the way his mouth was trying not to snarl. Their fearless leader was upset.

“What happened?”

The snarl turned into an annoyed twist. “The Toledo lead didn’t pan out. Team just reported in. There’s an enclave of supers who’ve been behaving badly, but no queen.” She was almost afraid to ask what the lupin considered “behaving badly” for supernaturals. Her research suggested that could be anything from pranking humans to eating them.

She was pretty sure AJ would put a stop to any eating. Pretty sure. But not sure enough to ask. There were reasons why humans and supernaturals didn’t cross paths on a regular basis. But they had no choice now, not with a preternatural queen somewhere on the loose and her court hell-bent on reclaiming her—and claiming this world as their own. Better they find the queen first. Find her and use her to force the preters back through the portals, once and for all.

“So it’s back to the drawing board for Operation Queen Search?” she asked, turning her back on the shed and whatever was going on there to face the problem she could maybe do something about.

“There are a few other teams still out, checking into leads,” he said. “But—”

“But we’re running out of time,” she finished for him. The cold pricking feeling on her arms increased, a feeling not even a sweater would stop. She knew; she’d tried.

Ten weeks, ten days. The numbers ran through her head like code, her brain trying to solve it the way she would have solved a problem in her previous life, when the worst problem she’d faced was a website going live with an error somewhere in it, and a client screaming at her boss, who would then scream at her.

There were only four and a half days left before the truce she had brokered ran out, before the preternatural court resumed their attempts to steal this world for their own. Not much time left for them to find a way to stop it.

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”

AJ laughed, the low chuckle still as disturbing a sound as the first time she’d heard it. “We’ve been fucked since day one,” he said.

“You know, boss, as a morale builder, you are beyond crap.” But she didn’t have anything better to add. They’d been working both sides of the problem, AJ’s team searching for the queen, her team trying to find a way to break down the new magic, stop the portals from opening. They weren’t making much progress on either. And every day, her skin felt colder, her lungs a little tighter, and she couldn’t blame it on her asthma or the increasingly colder weather.

The lupin looked as if he needed a mug of coffee, too, but it was toxic for him. His dark brown eyes were rimmed with a faint pink from lack of sleep, and it made him look slightly rabid.

“The preters have kept their word, have stayed on their side,” he said. “Definite downtick on reported disappearances.” She knew that; she’d been watching the same reports he had. “But the minute the truce is over, yeah, they’ll be back. And they know we’re onto them, so they’re not going to bother being subtle.”

Considering that the most recent preternatural idea of subtle—hooking up with gullible humans via internet dating sites and then using glamour to steal them away, an updating of the old legends—that was a terrifying thought.

“Should we be expecting violence? I mean...warlike violence?” Jan still had nightmares about the assault on her apartment, the memory of too-fluid limbs, gray-green fingers reaching for her, feathers and blood splattered on the walls, her friend Toba dying, to save her...

“It’s not the way they’ve done things traditionally,” AJ said, “and preters are all about tradition.”

Tradition being the dark of the moon creating natural connections between the two realms, wooing humans by song and dance, or whatever the fairy tales claimed, not sexy chat-room profiles and hauling their prey through portals forced into existence by some unknown magic.

“But from the reports,” AJ went on, “and your leman’s memories, such as they are, I think we can’t rule it out. Whatever new magic they’re using to create these new portals, it’s changing them.”

“And not for the better,” Jan said with feeling.

“They were never all that great to begin with,” the lupin said, monobrow raised slightly. “We just knew what to expect from them.”

“I’ve become a big fan of predictability,” Jan said, even as her cell phone, stashed in her jeans pocket, vibrated and let out a small chime. Crap signal, but her alarms still worked. “My group should be getting ready to log in for the morning meeting. You want me to mention this or not?” She might have been—nominally—leading that side of their operation, but AJ made the decisions. He was their pack leader, literally as well as figuratively.

“No,” he said, then added, “no point to it, is there?”

She’d learned how to recognize the twitch of his face that meant a real, if ironic, smile, and grimaced in return. He was right. Since nothing had changed, there was no point wasting time talking about it. “If we actually come up with anything, I’ll let you know.”

* * *

Jan paused in the hallway before going inside, doing a quick personal inventory. Shirt, not coffee-stained. Hair, reasonably combed. Face, presumably clean, or at least AJ hadn’t mentioned anything, and he would have.

“Oh, god, I hate this,” she muttered.

Jan had lasted exactly one year in a traditional job before finding one that allowed her to telecommute. Most of her day had been spent working in front of monitors, interacting with people via text or the occasional vid conference. Jan hadn’t been required to attend meetings in person, much less expected to lead those meetings. Fortunately, Ops—her team—was easy enough to manage, once she had all her geeks pointed in the same direction.

She took a deep breath and said her mantra, the same one she had been saying for weeks now: You are Jan Coughlin, who was chosen out of how many others to save the world; you have survived gnome attacks and the preter court, being attacked by creatures you can’t identify, and this briefing is by comparison a piece of cake. Damn it.

The communications room had taken over what had been the front parlor in the original farmhouse. The rest of the main floor had been given over to the work space she’d been using earlier, the constant flow of people making it unworkable for conferences of any size and impractical for any kind of privacy. So they’d kicked out the supers who had been nesting in the parlor, cleared all the furniture out, and replaced it with a narrow trestle table that could seat six with room for paperwork and coffee mugs, and hung a massive monitor on the far wall. When the brand-new communications system—ordered and installed by Jan herself—wasn’t in use, the rest of the room was taken over for smaller meetings. But right now, it was filled with people, all waiting for her.

Jan was the only human in the room. She’d almost gotten used to that by now, shoving her way past Lisbet and Meredith, the lupin who had found them and brought them here after they’d come back through the portal, to get to her chair. They both looked up and nodded as she passed. Despite AJ’s original claim that supernaturals didn’t use tech, it had turned out that there were a number of them who not only did, but understood it better than their alleged human expert. Jan was a geek, but her skills were testing and repairing, not creating. There were ten members of her team, including Jan herself, and four of them could blow her out of the water when it came to figuring out how things worked.

Five if you counted the person on the screen.

“Hey, Janny-girl. You look like shite.”

Jan gave the speaker a finger and sat down, placing her reclaimed coffee on the table within easy reach. “Morning to you, too, Glory.” It was afternoon in the U.K. where the other woman was, actually, but Jan held that at eight in the morning she didn’t have to make allowances for anyone else.

The other woman raised her own mug in counter-salute, even as the display split, her image taking up the left-hand side, while another face appeared on the right.

“Hey, y’all.” The man in the new display waggled his fingers, and another hand reached in from offscreen to wave, as well. Kit and Laurie, out in Portland. It was oh-fuck-early out there, but the two of them had probably been up all night.

Glory, Kit, and Laurie: three of the five people Jan had dared contact after escaping the preters. The three of the five who had actually listened—believed. Or at least, not immediately assumed that she had lost her mind or that she was pulling the monster of all pranks.

Jan winced a little, thinking of the reaction of the other two, people she’d thought she could trust, could count on to have her back. One of them had been her boss—had been, since he’d fired her on the spot. Her only consolation was that if they failed and the preters overran this world, she’d be able to say I told you so. As consolation went, it sucked.

“All right, people, let’s get this show on the road,” Jan said, speaking louder to be heard over the chatter of voices, trying to project confidence and get-it-done-ness. She barely recognized her own voice. She wasn’t Linda Hamilton, Terminator-style quality, but there was grit in her that hadn’t been there a few months ago. And it wasn’t just the lack of sleep.

Nearly everyone on the Farm was part of the hunt for the preter queen or watching for some sign of renewed kidnappings. She—and her team—needed to figure out how to stop the new incursions, once and for all.

“Do we even have a show? Or a road, for that matter?” Meredith asked. The lupin would much rather have been part of the hunt; she had loudly regretted ever admitting that she’d once run a computer help desk, once it stuck her on the team.

“Meredith, please.” Jan raised a hand, and the lupin ducked her head in apology. Jan wasn’t even close to alpha, but AJ, who was, had told Meredith to obey the human, and so she would. “Do we have anything coming in, from any source?”

They had to shut this down. For now, the portals were few and far between, but the fact that they existed at all, outside the traditional connections between worlds, was bad enough. Nobody knew what the preternaturals could do if they succeeded in opening enough portals to come here en masse. Even discounting three-quarters of every fairy tale ever, Jan knew firsthand that they weren’t going to leave humanity alone.

Jan had seen what his preternatural seducer had done to Tyler. She had seen what became of the Greensleeves, the abandoned human slaves. She had looked into the eyes of the preter consort and seen nothing of compassion or kindness.

A world where preters could come and go freely, not bound by anything save their own whim, was not a good thing. Not for anything born to this world, human or supernatural.

That was why they were here. Four days and counting.

“Talk to me,” she said now, trying desperately to channel some of AJ’s natural take-charge-and-inspire leadership into her voice “Somebody tell me something good, something exciting, something that will make me giddy like a schoolgirl.”

There was a hesitant silence, and Jan wished that she’d gone back to get her coffee before coming in here. Then Kit started talking.

“Well, if nobody else wants to go first, I will. I’m pleased to report that our little rumor-string has hit critical mass and gone fucking viral.” He was clearly running on caffeine fumes at this point, red eyed and rumple haired, but his voice was certain. “Every person who’s ever even thought about using a dating site is going to hear the rumor about the slave-trade ring scouting for likelies.”

AJ hadn’t wanted them to focus any energy on that problem, but Jan had insisted. They didn’t know what sort of magic the preters were using to create the portals—before, portals had appeared at the whim of the seasons, or the stars, or something even more random, but Tyler’s experience with the preter-bitch Stjerne had made it clear that humans were at the heart of it now.

That had been the argument that Jan had used, that had made AJ agree, but Jan would have pushed for this no matter what her pack leader said. These were people being taken. Humans like Tyler. Taken, abused, broken...and, unlike Tyler, not rescued.

Jan might not be able to save everyone, but she would do her damnedest to make sure no more were lost.

“I still say we should have just taken down the dating sites altogether and been done with it weeks ago,” Lisbet said from the other side of the table. Jötunndotter were slow to move, their stonelike bodies heavy and stiff, but they had no patience with doing things slowly otherwise.

“Where’s the skill in that?” Kit was...enthusiastic. Preters or prototypes, he didn’t really care, so long as it was a challenge. Finding a way to warn potential victims without getting laughed off the internet, and making sure that it went viral, had been his personal side project, and he wasn’t paying attention to the bigger picture. Everyone kept sane in their own way, Jan supposed.

“You really think that will work?” Andy asked, dubious. “Human males are not known to be cautious.” Coming from a splyushka—a cousin to Koba, who had died to protect her, back when this all started—that was almost funny. The owl-eyed supernaturals were, she had learned, noted for their impulsive behavior. They were also the ones most comfortable with tech, so she had two of them on the team: Andy and his nest-sib, Beth, who was leaning against the wall at the back of the room, silent but alert.

“True enough,” Laurie leaned into the frame to say, “but they tend to bull in when they think they can handle something. The risk of ending up...well, we made it unpleasant enough to put most folk off risking an easy lay for a lifetime of that.”

“And the rest of them are on their own, and good riddance to idiots,” Glory said, her accent intentionally heavy in a room, however virtual, of Americans, human and otherwise. “Now, can we get down to the important things? Like figuring out how these pointy-eared bastards are even getting connectivity on their side? Because if we can’t figure out how to counter it, then we need to know the bloody power source in order to pull the plug.”

One of the things they’d learned was that the new portals “felt” the same to supernaturals as major human laboratories like Livermore and CERN did, a weird sort of electrical buzz. Somehow, the preters had merged their magic to human technology, using computers and brainwashed humans—like Tyler, her brain whispered—to create and hold these new portals. But they didn’t have the knowledge to figure out why, or how to stop them. That was supposed to be Jan’s job

“I’m telling you,” Glory said, “you need to get someone inside some of those labs.”

This, like everything else, was an ongoing argument. AJ had sent scouts to the perimeter, as close as they could get without being caught. But just lurking, looking, and sniffing hadn’t given them enough information.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Andy said, “and we’re going to get that access...how? It’s not like we go for the hard sciences, generally, so unless you’ve got someone who can turn invisible and sneak in and, oh, by the way, once he’s there knows what he’s looking for and how to explain it to us when he gets back...”

“Are there no humans who would help us?” Beth said. “Laurie, what about your friend from MIT?”

Laurie shook her head. “He hasn’t gotten back to me yet, no matter how many urgent stickers I leave on my messages. I’m hopeful—Larry’s actually the kind of guy where ‘Hey, my buddy the fairy says you guys might be sourcing a tunnel between worlds, want to check that out for me?’ might work. But I haven’t heard anything.”

“Well, we haven’t had any midnight visits from the Men in Black, so he hasn’t said anything to anyone else, either,” Kit added. “Unless they’re monitoring us even now, in which case, get off your asses and do something, NSA!”

“Focus, please,” Jan said amid the laughter. She looked across the table to where Galilia, her nominal second in command, was sitting. Gali wasn’t technically inclined, but she’d been working on some possible inroads among the scientific community. The jiniri shook her head slightly: nothing new to report there, either.

Jan sighed and let the back-and-forth flow over her, listening with one ear. If someone came up with something new or even probable, she would jump in. For now, she wished again for her coffee and tried not to think about her heartbeat ticking off the time.

* * *

Nearly an hour later, the meeting ended with nothing to show except a headache and a bunch of dead ends. Jan waited until they’d all left, then looked up at the screen where only Glory remained.

“You still look like shite,” the other woman said, her normal over-the-top gestures muted with concern. “Are you sleeping at all?”

“Not much,” Jan admitted, leaning back in her chair. It was nice to drop the leader mask; Glory was never fooled by it, anyway.

“I told you staying out there was a bad idea.”

“And where else was I supposed to go, Glory?” After the gnome attack on her apartment, the landlord had revoked her lease. It wasn’t exactly a surprise—apparently the entire apartment had smelled of smoke and meat, and the door had been busted open as if a bull had gone through it—but it had left her effectively homeless, especially since there was no way Tyler could return to his old life right then, and she didn’t want to stay alone in his apartment...even assuming it was safe to do so. If the gnomes could track her on a bus, to her apartment... Well, she wasn’t going to put others in danger—or risk pulling more supers from the Farm to guard her.