Laura Anne Gilman (26 page)

She’d lost the
lupin
totally, she could tell. “What?”

“Code. Computer code, at its most basic level, is binary. Ones and zeroes.”

“Ten, and ten, and ten...” Martin was trying to parse it, then shook his head, too.

“It’s how computers speak to each other,” she said. “And now preters’re using it, too, replacing the numbers that had traditionally been important? I mean, like I said, it might not mean anything....” She started to dismiss her thought as foolish, but AJ held up a hand to stop her.

“No. Any pattern around the preters is useful, and probably significant. The world is chaotic: we have learned to ride that—”

Martin snorted, and AJ talked right over him.

“—but the preters find their comfort in order and pattern, you’re absolutely right. That is why they are so tied to their word: a vow imposes order. They are uncomfortable breaking it, because it sweeps them back into chaos.”

“We tend to be more comfortable with chaos,” Martin said to Jan.

“I would never have guessed that,” she muttered back.

“Children... But change comes to everyone. We change—we take jobs that blend with the human population, we interact and are influenced. Dryads work with environmental groups, half the centaurs I know have gone back into politics,”

Jan raised her eyebrows but didn’t follow up on that.

“The point is, we change in order to survive. All of us. If this particular change is tied in to how the preters are suddenly able to control the portals—”

“Computers—code—is the most basic order. That would appeal to them— Oh. You don’t do magic, you
are
magic. Binary magic?” Jan’s eyes got wide, and her brain ached.

“I don’t know,” AJ said. “I don’t know what that means, if it makes sense, and if it is true, if there’s anything we can do to counter or stop it. But everything we learn helps.”

Before Jan could ask any questions—before she could even think of any questions to ask, there was a knock on the door.

A stick-slender, rough-skinned supernatural poked his head in at AJ’s “enter.”

“Boss? We need you two. Kinda now.”

He pointedly had not included Jan.

She had been hurt, for a minute, then practicality come to the fore: if they were coordinating with other supers, she would be less than useless, especially if they were dealing with the ones that didn’t like humans.

“Go,” she told them. “I may just curl up and take another nap.”

Martin hesitated, as if he wasn’t sure he believed her, but followed AJ.

Left alone in the small study, Jan finished her coffee, contemplated the inviting sheen of the sofa, and then went in search of where they were keeping Tyler.

Chapter 18

T
he farmhouse had been renovated at some point, Jan noted, walking through the rooms—the open space had clearly once been several smaller rooms. Unlike when they’d first come in, nobody seemed to be just hanging around or doing chores; in fact, the house was oddly empty. The first two supers she ran into shrugged when she asked them about the human male, giving her an odd look, as though they weren’t sure they were even supposed to be talking to her. Disheartened, Jan wandered into the kitchen.

The woman standing at the table, stirring something in a massive metal bow, looked as if she had been carved out of a massive oak, down to the bark-like texture of her skin. She was wearing a chef’s jacket and loose white pants, and had the expression of someone who tolerated no foolishness in her domain. Jan hesitated in the doorway, almost afraid to speak up.

She gave herself a mental kick: someone who’d stood up to the preter Court shouldn’t be afraid of a single supernatural! Especially one who’s an ally.

Cook looked up when Jan came in, gave her a once-over, and then, before Jan could even ask, pointed out the window to a small shed behind the house.

“The other human?” Jan asked. Cook just nodded.

“Thank you.” Somehow that didn’t seem enough to say. “Those meatballs, those were yours? They were very good.”

The cook just turned back to her bowl, but Jan was pretty sure she heard a satisfied “hrmp-hpmph” escape the creature’s lips.

There was a knot of supers clustered around a table in the main room when Jan went out again. They ignored her, and she returned the favor, going out the back door, down two steps, and crossing the yard to the shed.

Shed was a misnomer, really. It was the size of a one-car garage, with no windows and only one door set into the side. Jan stepped up to that door and hesitated. Should she knock? Just go inside? Turn around and walk away?

She has half a breath from doing the last, when the door opened.

“Oh, good,” the being standing there said. “I was thinking we’d have to go find you. Come in, come in.”

She went in.

Contrary to the expectations from the outside, the shed was actually clean and well-furnished, with carpeting underneath and a kitchenette against the back wall. There was a beat-up sofa and a couple of chairs and, oh, god, a beanbag chair. It lacked only a wide-screen television to pass for any suburban rec room from when she was a kid.

But the expressions on the faces of those in the room were anything but recreational. The man who had opened the door looked almost human, except that he had no ears alongside the narrow bones of his face, and his skin had a faint blue-green cast to it. Behind the sofa stood a figure that could never have passed for human: thick-chested, with the battered face of a pugilist and the body of a huge cat. He turned when she came in and then looked away, and she was struck by the similarity to pictures she had seen of the great sphinx, after its nose was broken off.

“Come in, please,” a woman’s voice said. She was sitting on the sofa, and at first glance she reminded Jan slightly of Martin—not physically, exactly, but the same comfortable quality. Her face was narrow, her cheekbones high, but she was homely rather than pretty, the birthmark on her forehead like a smudge of soot. Jan only gave her a brief glance, drawn to the figure sitting next to her, an arm’s length of space between them.

Tyler.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said, his voice a little uncertain.

She wanted to ask him if he remembered her, but she was afraid of what his answer might be. “How’re you feeling?”

“I...foggy.”

His eyes were glazed, and his expression sagged a little still; she recognized the signs from her college years: whatever they had given him to “calm him down” had left him high as a kite. But he was calm; no panic at being surrounded by supers, no stress or trembling. So that was good, right?

“You see?” the woman said, her voice a low, sweet noise. “Here’s Jan, safe and well.”

He looked at her again, as though he’d already forgotten she’d just come in. “You’re okay?”

“Yeah.” She wondered how much he remembered, how much they were letting him remember. She got the feeling that now wasn’t a good time to ask. “I just wanted to make sure everything... That you...” She ran out of words. What had she wanted? To see if he was suddenly, miraculously, returned to normal?

He looked at her, then his gaze fell, looking at something else, and flinched. She looked down to see what had upset him, but it was just her, just—she moved her hand, and the silver at her wrist flashed, still bright despite everything it—and she—had been through.

“I want a pizza,” Tyler said. “Do you think we could have pizza?”

Jan looked helplessly at the woman next to him.

“I think we could manage that, yes,” she said soothingly. She didn’t touch him, didn’t even look at him, but some of the tension left his body, unmistakably.

“All right.” Apparently, that was all he could focus on, because he looked down at his hands, folded in his lap, and didn’t look up again.

“Right now, we’re trying to resensitize him to this world,” the blue guy said softly. “The sounds and smells and taste of things that are real, familiar, so he doesn’t react to them like an attack. Then we can ease him off the
sophum,
and start to recall his memory of what happened.”

“Do you have to? Can’t he just...forget?” Forget, and have it be the way it was last month, when her world made sense, was content.

“We need to know what he saw, what he learned. It’s—”

“I know. It’s important.” More important than the status of her love life. And unless they made her forget, too...nothing was ever going to be the same. She looked at him now and saw Tyler...and she saw the way he had looked at Stjerne. “Tyler?”

He looked up, and the expression on his face was so open—glazed, uncomprehending, but hopeful—that Jan felt something inside her, something that had held on until then, break.

“I gotta go. There are things I need to do. But I’ll...I’ll be here. Okay?”

He stared at her and then nodded, but she had the feeling that he wasn’t really listening anymore.

“His attention...it fades. But he knows you came to see him. That’s good, that’s helpful. Thank you.”

Jan found herself outside the shed again without any memory of having moved, the door shut firmly behind her.

She licked her lips, feeling how they’d dried and cracked, and felt a sudden intense urge for a hot shower, and the long nap she’d told the others she was going to take. And a drink. God, a beer right now...

Instead, she went looking for AJ.

* * *

She found the
lupin
the main room, a map of North America spread out in front of him, other supers gathered around. There were pins and markers in the map, and others layered underneath, although she couldn’t tell what land masses they covered.

AJ looked up when she came in, and lifted a hand, some signal to tell the others to clear out. They did, except for Martin.

“Operation Queen Hunt’s underway, huh?” She meant it to sound snarky, but it came out shaky.

“A good name for it. Yes.” He watched her, solemn.

“So, what now?”

“For you? Now...you go home.”

“What?” Jan blinked, not having expected that.

“Go home,” AJ repeated patiently. “Reassure your friends and family, your employer, that everything’s under control, let them know that you’re okay. The world isn’t going to end tomorrow—not even next week. You need to pick up the pieces and go on.”

That was exactly what she’d wanted. So why did she feel as if she’d just gotten dumped?

“Martin?” She looked at him, noticing how the skin on his hands and face had healed, only a faint scar showing any damage had ever been done. Either they had an amazing doctor, who hadn’t been to see her, or—he’d shifted form, that must have been it. Once he was away from her, he could shift and the magic would fix him.

In contrast, she was still ragged and bloody and probably smelled like hell.

“You’ve done everything you can,” AJ said, not letting Martin respond. “You’ve done more than anyone could have asked. We cleaned up your apartment—you’ve only been gone a few days, and part of that was the weekend, so you can catch up. You can recover.”

Jan looked at him in disbelief, and then looked at Martin. “You think that’s what I should do?”

The kelpie looked down at his hands, the same way Tyler had, but he looked up again. “Jan, you were never meant to be part of this. Humans...humans aren’t... You did what was needed, now you can go home, be safe. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

Yes. Yes it was. Tyler home and safe—or at least being helped, and she could go back to her life, pick up the pieces and...

And do what? Stop by every now and again, be part of Tyler’s therapy, while they took him apart for what he remembered? Wait by the phone, like a good girl, for updates? Or worse—for news that they’d failed, sorry, and wait for your new preternatural overlord?

“No. Oh, hell, no.” She shook her head. “You need me, still. You need what I know. This isn’t over. I’m not going anywhere.” Stubborn, AJ had called her? He didn’t know half of it.

“Human...”

“AJ.” Martin stood up. “Give us a minute.”

AJ looked from Martin to Jan and nodded. “Right. I’m going to take a walk. Get some fresh air.”

The two of them stood there, frozen, until he left the room, the sound of the back door closing behind him. Then Martin rounded on her. “Are you insane? We’re trying to keep you safe!”

His anger, perversely, made her feel better. “What am I supposed to do, go home and pretend none of this exists?”

“Yes!”

She stared at him, her eyes wide, until he looked away, blowing out his frustration in a huge, gusty sigh. “No. All right, I know you can’t just...forget. That was stupid. But, yes, you should go home. Stjerne had to give up claim to Tyler, she won’t try and take him back. No matter how...attached she thinks she was, they just don’t work that way. They move on. So he’s safe, and so are you.”

“But they’re still coming, still stealing people.”

“Jan, they’ve always come. They will always come.”

She was starting to get annoyed. She was the one who had won them a truce, however short. She was the one who’d maybe figured out the connection—okay, not figured it out, but put them on track to figuring it out. Her, a human. “Yeah, they’ve always come, humans don’t know what’s going on, etcetera etcetera ad nauseum. I got that. But it’s different this time. They’re not restricted, not until we find a way to keep them out, to close the doors forever. And you don’t know how to do that. You don’t understand what they’re doing, or how. You didn’t even recognize binary, and that’s the only clue we have, right now.”

She was no hacker, no tech genius, she didn’t have the kind of brain that thought in code—but she was all they had. A thought flickered...she was all they had...but she wasn’t all
she
had. Geeks with a puzzle.... She just hoped Glory was still unemployed—and still talking to her.

Martin was breathing heavily, like he was trying to keep his temper, and his black nails were digging into his palms.

“Even if we survive... You’ll never be able to go back, if you don’t go now. I don’t know a lot, but I know that much. Nobody who chooses this, who chooses to walk among us...ever goes back. Not really.”

Jan felt a shiver that told her he was telling the truth. “I know.”

She’d just spent the past week or more—endless hours more, in fairyland—under one glamour or another. Martin’s first, then Stjerne’s, then...everywhere she turned, magic had pushed at her, gotten under her skin, manipulated her.

When she’d faced the preter challenge, Martin had told her to remain who she was. Only who she was had changed. Like AJ said—you had to, to survive. She was Tyler’s lover. Martin’s partner. Human. Part of this.

Glamour or not, whatever had happened before: before she’d met Tyler, before she knew about kelpies and
lupin
and preters and portals...she couldn’t go back there. So she had to go on.

“It’s my world, too,” she said. “I’m not letting it go.”

* * * * *

The story continues in SOUL OF FIRE