Laura Gilman: Soul of Fire

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.