Laura Gilman - Soul of Fire

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.