Laura Gilman - Heart of Briar

“So you’re not....” She didn’t know what she was going to ask, but AJ laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh.

“Humans veer between thinking they’re the only ones here and assuming that there’s this malicious cabal of woo-woo, messing with their lives at every turn. Both’re crap. There’s the natural, that’s you, and the supernatural. Us. We all belong in this world together...you people just take up most of the room. Mostly, we ignore you. Occasionally, our paths cross. It doesn’t end well for us, most of the time.”

Jan spoke without really thinking about it. “Fairy tales.”

AJ spat on the ground, and Martin sighed.

“Humans call ’em that,” AJ said. “Humans don’t have a clue. They revile what they don’t recognize, demonize what they fear, simplify it so they don’t have to deal with reality.” He sighed, his muzzle twitching, and then shrugged, as though deciding it didn’t matter.

“Like I said, we try to ignore humans, the same way you ignore us. Most of the time when our people meet, it’s just...skirmishes. Awkward moments and bad relationships.”

“But not always?”

“Not always. Sometimes it works out—not often, but sometimes. But that’s when it’s us, natural and supernatural.”

“There’s something else?” Jan felt her body tense, as if a fight-or-flight reaction was kicking in, although nobody’d said or done anything threatening in the past minute, and wasn’t that a nice change?

“Yes...and no,” Elsa said.

“Seven times that we’ve recorded,” AJ said, “something else gets added to the playground.” He held up his hand, not even trying to hide his claws now. Three fingers ticked off: “Naturals, supernaturals, and preternaturals.”

“Preter...”

“Humans call them elves,” Martin said. “What we call them isn’t so pretty.”

Elves. Jan thought of Keebler elves first, baking cookies, then the slender, coolly blond archers of the Lord of the Rings movies, and suspected AJ wasn’t talking about anything like that.

“Why two names? Aren’t you both—?”

AJ didn’t roll his eyes, sigh, or make any other obvious sign of irritation, but he practically vibrated with it. “Supernatural, above nature. Preter, outside nature. One belongs here, the other does not. Nobody teaches Latin anymore, do they?”

Jan had gone to school for graphic design, not dead languages.

“Supernaturals are part of this world,” Martin said. “The preters...come from somewhere else.”

“Fairyland?” Jan laughed. Nobody else did.

“And they...took Tyler? Why?” If they didn’t belong here...where had they taken him? How had they found him?

AJ settled in on his haunches, resting his elbows on his knees in a way that she would never be able to balance. Another reminder that he wasn’t human, that his body wasn’t what it looked like....

Jan tried to focus on what he was saying, now that they were finally explaining things.

“Preters have a history of stealing humans. Used to be, they’d slip through and steal whatever took their fancy. We didn’t know why they liked humans so much, but they do. Babies, especially.”

“Changelings,” Martin said.

“Right. Only sometimes they take adults, too. Males mostly, but sometimes females. And they never let ’em go.”

“And they took Tyler.... why?” Jan knew she was repeating herself. She was trying to process all this. All right, she’d accepted—mostly—the fact that there was more than she knew, more to the world than she’d ever dreamed, after what had happened on the bus. But this? Changelings and kidnappings and elves from another world, some kind of parallel universe or something? Seriously?

Tyler was gone. These people—supers—were here, and they were the only ones giving her any kind of explanation, no matter how insane it sounded. Unless ILM or some other Hollywood effects company was involved, there was no way this was any kind of prank.

Then her eyes narrowed, and she looked first at Elsa, then at Martin, and then back at AJ. “But why do you care?”

A werewolf’s laugh was, Jan discovered, a particularly atavistically terrifying thing, like a harsh howl that echoed against the roof and raised the hair on her arms. Almost instinctively she turned again to Martin for reassurance. He shook his head, his long face solemn, and looked back at AJ. So she did, too.

“Smart, yeah. You’re smart. And quick. Good.” AJ was serious again. “You’re right. We’re not all that fond of humanity overall. Sometimes we have periods where it’s bad, sometimes when it’s hunky-dory, but mostly, we don’t care. But this isn’t about you. It’s about us. Like I said, this world is our home, too. We both belong here. The preters...don’t.”

“They are not part of our ecosystem,” Elsa said, moving in closer. Jan shifted, uncomfortable, and the jötunndotter stopped. “They come in like invaders—”

“They are invaders,” AJ said. “Never forget that.”

Elsa nodded. “They cross borders that should not be crossed, and take from us. From this world. Humans, and livestock, and whatever else strikes their fancy. In the past, only a few have been able to pass, and only in force large enough to be noticed. Troops, they were called, and we could find them, and force them back.

“That has changed, Human Jan.”

Elsa seemed at a loss for what to say next, and Martin took up the narrative. It was almost a relief to turn to him, even though Jan knew damn well—intellectually, anyway—that he was no more human than the other two.

“It used to be, they had to wait until the moon was right, or some other natural occurrence, um, occurred. Then they came through either one at a time, or in a troop. Even with the natural world cooperating, it was an iffy thing, unpredictable. The portals shifted, moved. The damage they could do was limited, and if they stayed too long, we found them.”

The implication was pretty strong that, when found, they weren’t invited in for tea.

“The past year, maybe more, that’s changed. They’re coming in during times that the portal should not be open, in places they should not have access to—cities were never their domain. Even cities that were built on old sites: over time the pressure of naturals wore the access away, broke down the ancient connection.” Martin looked over at AJ, as though waiting for permission to continue, and then said, “The preters have found some way to open the portals that we don’t understand, move them to places they should not be, and they’re raiding us like an unguarded vegetable patch.”

“Taking humans...” Jan was still—understandably, she thought—stuck on that.

“Taking a lot of humans,” AJ said. “And that’s just in the three months we’ve been aware of it.”

“You didn’t know, before?”

“I told you. Mostly, we—supers and you naturals—ignore each other. And whatever use preters have for humans, we don’t fill it. None of our people disappeared. So, no, we didn’t notice that your species was disappearing at a faster than usual rate.

“Not right away, anyway. The dryads...they’ve always been fond of humans. No idea why, but...they like to listen. And they love to gossip. And they heard whispers. Those whispers reached us.”

Somehow, Jan suspect “us” meant him, AJ. For all his cranky manner—or maybe because of it—he reminded her of her first boss, a guy who’d known everything that was going on in the office, even the stuff they’d tried to keep from him.

“And then we discovered why. Or rather, how.” Elsa sounded almost...frightened. “The barrier between our worlds shifts, and can be influenced. We knew this, but never cared overmuch about the whys or hows...but the preters cared. Very much so. Before, it required, as AJ said, a natural turn, some conjunction to open a portal large enough to be useful. Now they have discovered a way to...thin the barrier. To create an unnatural portal that they can control, and not depend on the whims of nature or the tides of the moon.”