Laura Anne Gilman (13 page)

“Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t want to believe it, but...” Martin pushed his coffee away from him in a rough gesture. “We may not have much use for humanity, but we like our independence. We’re clannish, breedish. The preters...they think everything should fall under them, like vassal states to their magnificence.

“The gnomes, all right, I sort of get it; they’re little pricks always out for themselves, they never got along with the other races, not even in the back when. So I can see where a preter could make them an offer they’d accept, and everyone else go hang. But one of us? Selling out to those bastards? Once, yeah, it could have been an accidental slip, but three times makes it a conspiracy, right?”

And a fourth time almost meant her death.

“The only other explanation is that the preters know, and if they do, we’re screwed. They already have all the other advantages; the only one we have is that they can’t predict what we’re going to do.”

“Mainly because we don’t know, ourselves,” she offered.

Martin missed the humor in that, nodding his head seriously in agreement. “AJ has a plan. But he doesn’t tell us, only the bits we need now.”

Jan was less certain AJ had a plan, or at least, a thought-out big picture kind of thing. But that kind of big picture thing wasn’t her strength, either, so...they knew what they needed to do. She’d focus on that.

“You want more coffee?” he asked, getting up with his own mug in hand. She shook her head and covered her own mug with her hand; coffee was good for keeping the asthma controlled, but the last thing she needed was a caffeine hyper on top of her nerves.

“We’re all kind of...disorganized. We don’t talk to each other much, either, not just humans, and we’re territorial and AJ says hidebound.
Lupin
are different, they run in a pack, so they’re used to taking orders and stuff like that. And thinking about groups, not selfishly. He’s one of the ones who figured it all out,” Martin added. “Saw something wrong, dug into it, got us organized despite ourselves.”

That didn’t surprise her at all. And he was probably right about there being a traitor, someone else who thought the world might be better off with preters in it. But unless Martin was the one spilling secrets—and if he was, she was dead, anyway—they were safe. Right?

As safe as she could be, working with someone who thought drowning humans was a “thing.” She could feel the hysteria start to burble up again and changed the topic.

“How many others do you think there’ve been? I mean, all the people who might have been worried about their family, their friends disappearing, since this all started?” She thought about her conversation with the cop, god, only yesterday? Tyler hadn’t even been missing a week, but it felt like a month. “How many are we talking about, do you think—ten? A dozen? A hundred?”

“Don’t know.” His blithe unconcern surprised her; he had seemed so impassioned before.

“Do you think that the turncoats got them, too?”

“Don’t know,” Martin said again. “Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t know them.”

He didn’t know them, so he didn’t care. It was because they were human. They weren’t real to him, didn’t matter. Supernaturals might not be soulless, but...Toba hadn’t been like this, or AJ, or even Elsa.

She was starting to understand why the others had warned her about Martin. If he’d been human, she might have thought him charming but sort of cold...yeah, exactly like the description of a lot of serial killers. But they also set him to protect her, so he must be trustworthy. Right? Jan’s thoughts fluttered like a bird in a trap, then settled. He knew her: that was the key. Sociopath or just supernatural, she mattered to him now.

“Lucky me,” she muttered. “So we’re dealing with preters who want to enslave us, turncoats who’d be happy to eat us, some unknown spy or spies, and an impossible task that, let’s face it, even if I somehow manage to nab us a preter, you still have to get the information out of it, somehow. What makes you think I’m going to do any better than the last humans who agreed to help you?”

“Because you have something they didn’t,” Martin said, suddenly cheerful again.

“Yeah? What’s that?” But she had a feeling she already knew what he was going to say.

“Me.” His tone was smooth, reassuring, and filled with absolute confidence in his own wonderfulness.

“Oh. Lucky me,” she said again, and ate the last piece of bacon.

* * *

He had run. There had been no plan, no thought in his head, no inkling of rebellion in the scraped-dry hollow of his soul. They had been walking through the garden in the misty afternoon, speaking nonsense he barely registered, his mind still scraped and sore from the most recent session in the briar-chair, his fingers laced with hers. One moment he had been content at her side, obedient as a dog, and the next—like a dog—he had scented something, some passing breeze, something familiar and haunting, a tune he had nearly forgotten.

His body had moved without volition, bolting off the soft trail, downhill across the soft grass and into the woods. Two steps in, they were so thickly planted that he couldn’t see where he was going, the undergrowth blocking his sight and pulling at his limbs as though to stop him. And yet his feet were unerring, following his nose downhill as though drawn to something, the lure of some stream waiting at the base, clear cool water summoning him to lap at its shores.

He did not know, he did not think, he only knew that he needed to be there, he needed to follow that scent, find the source....

Something hit him, hard, in the left side, and he went down into wet mulch and mud, hard enough to stun him for a second. That second was all it took. His brain screamed at him to get up, but the weight of something heavy and rank on his back, heavy breath dripping onto his neck, kept him facedown and motionless.

If he moved, something at the base of his brain told him, he would die.

“Yours, Stjerne?” A male voice, light but unmistakable. It came from above him, not the weight holding him down.

“Mine.”

Her voice, slightly breathless and tight with anger. He had displeased her. Why had he done that? Why had he run?

His captor hauled him over, dropping him hard on his back. One of them, from the shape of the face, but more slightly built than Stjerne and the others, and wearing clothing better suited for hunting than the cold palace. The thought—that there were more of them beyond the silver walls and quiet gardens—shook him for a second, a sense of wonder and fear too great to handle. No. Quiet. Hollow. The flicker of rebellion gone, emotions washed back to gray, and he rested his cheek on the dirt. Dimly, he saw the thing that had held him down slink off to one side. A beast—hound-shaped, but with a human head and hands: hairless, with mottled gray-green skin that seemed to shift even as he looked at it. So he looked away again, holding to the hollow quiet as though that would save him.

“Where did you think you were going, pet?” Stjerne stepped closer, towering over him, demanding that he roll over to look at her. He opened his mouth to explain, that he’d had no choice, he had to follow the scent—

The first blow took him by surprise: he had not seen her move. She made sure that he saw the next, and the third, her nails raking him across the face so hard he felt the blood rising through the cuts before he tasted it dripping into his mouth.

He lifted his head, and the tease of that half-known scent drifted under his nostrils again, fading, then lost in the taste of bittersweet iron, and then even that was gone.

The soft-spoken male hauled him to his feet, even though he was an easy foot taller and bulkier, and held him there, the blood running freely from the cuts, splattering onto his pants.

“Do you want to keep it, or should I feed it to the dogs?”

Stjerne considered him, her lovely face composed again. She lifted one finger to her mouth and licked the blood off of it delicately.

“We’re almost done with the cleansing,” she said. “It seems a shame to waste all that work. And he is...occasionally diverting.” Her eyes narrowed, and she looked directly at him, the finger coming forward to lift his chin. “But if you ever try that again, human, if you ever defy me? I will shred the skin from your flesh, and the flesh from your bones, and gnaw on what remains, while you yet live. Do you understand me?”

She was terrifying and beautiful, and when she drew him forward for a kiss, he fell into it entirely and let it consume him.

At their feet, the hound-shaped beast whined, as though it knew it had been deprived of a meal.

Chapter 8

F
irst dates were hell. It didn’t seem to matter if they were “real” or the setup to a sting, there was still that utter agony of awkwardness and fear, with a dollop of stomach-churning anticipation.

Jan stood in front of the restaurant door and steeled her nerves, then walked inside with as much breezy confidence as she could fake. “Hi. I’m Janelle.” Close enough to her own name that she’d remember to respond to it, but not so close that a preter could use it to hold on to her. That was part of their glamour, Martin had told her: a “true name” thing. Jan didn’t understand it, but at this point, there was a lot she was just taking on faith and hope and a heaping dose of WTF.

The man, who matched his photo reasonably well, offered her his hand to shake, “Hi, Janelle. I’m David. Obviously.” He laughed, embarrassed. It was a nice laugh, and as much as Jan wanted him to be a preter, for him to lead her to where they were keeping Tyler, she also didn’t want a guy who seemed so nice to be some inhuman evil creature.

But then, the preters would seem nice, wouldn’t they? Or, no, not nice: Sexy, maybe sweet, maybe a little dangerous, but appealing. The only way she could tell if someone wasn’t a preter, would be if they were jerks.

Jan wanted to apologize, to turn around and leave, but that wasn’t an option. The fact that she had felt like that on dates with—as far as she knew—totally human guys made it a little easier to go on. But only a little.

Knowing Martin was nearby helped, too.

Martin. Her focus drifted, although she was able to maintain her share of small talk about the weather and how nice the restaurant seemed, as they waited for their table to be ready. What was she going to do about Martin?

The first night in the rental house, still shaking and confused, Jan had gone to bed, and tears had overtaken her, hard, hot tears. She had tried to stifle them against the pillow, letting the shudders take her, silently, until she’d fallen asleep. She had thought she’d been successful, until she’d awakened to find Martin sharing the bed, her hands held in his, her head resting against his shoulder. At some point, while she’d been crying, he had come in and held her.

It had been oddly intimate, disturbingly so, but she had rolled off the bed and gone to take her shower, and when she had come back, he’d been gone, making ostentatious noises in the kitchen.

They’d not spoken of it, not when his friend—an older guy in a suit, not what she had been expecting at all—had come by with two secondhand laptops, not when they’d spent hours surfing from site to site, sending out lures and evaluating the bites. Not when she’d tried to explain to him what she did for a living, putting out fires and trying to convince her coworkers that she was at home, safe and busy, with him hanging over her shoulder, being way too in her personal space.

Not even when he’d lain down beside her that night, uninvited. He’d slid under the covers and gathered her in his arms, her face resting against his chest. He hadn’t spoken, hadn’t tried anything, just held her until her breathing eased, and she’d fallen asleep.

Sociopath, maybe. Killer, self-admitted. Not human, obviously. Not to be trusted...but she did.

The house they’d ended up in wasn’t as bad as Martin had said, but it wasn’t all that great, either. Jan had ventured outside the second day, just to not be in the house for a little while, and been quickly bored by the quiet roads and run-down, too-quiet houses. But it was less than an hour into the city by bus, so they could continue the search without having to relocate.

And nobody would think to look for them there. Nobody—not even AJ, Martin had said—knew that he knew the owner.

Three of the females who had responded to their fake overtures had seemed like reasonable possibilities, but a basic web search had turned up too much of a digital footprint for them to not be human. There was a fourth, but she was being coy about setting up a time and place to meet, which also weighed against her: Martin didn’t think a preter would waste time playing hard to get.

Meanwhile, this was the first male they had thought a likely target.

The hostess gestured to them, and David indicated that she should go first, following the woman to their table, where a waitress appeared before they’d even had a chance to open the menus.

“Getcha folks anything to drink?”

Jan desperately wanted a beer. But the last thing she could do right now was let down her defenses at all. Just like a real date, she thought—don’t drink until you know what’s going on. Except usually all she’d had to worry about was that the guy was a sleaze or that she’d be bored.

She’d welcome a little boredom right now.

“Iced coffee for me, please.” It had warmed up a little outside, and she was sweating slightly. Or maybe that was just nerves, in which case the caffeine wasn’t going to help.

“Same here.”

That was one of the warning signs, Martin had said. If he tried to mirror what she did, make her feel an immediate connection.

“That’s what you do on a real date, too,” she had told the kelpie, annoyed. “Something more helpful, please?”

“Mirroring,” he had repeated. “That’s exactly what they do, AJ says. And asking about your family, how close you were to them. They want someone who has no ties here, no one to miss them if they disappear.”

That had hurt. A lot. Tyler had someone. He’d had
her.

Clearly, it hadn’t been enough.

“Also, look in their eyes.”

“Their eyes.”

“They’re like us, in some ways—different forms—and some of them are more human than others. But the eyes give them away.”

Like Toba’s. The owl-man had seemed mostly normal, until you saw his golden-rimmed eyes. And AJ’s eyes were the cunning, careful eyes of a wolf. But Martin’s were normal enough. Or maybe she had just gotten used to them? Maybe that was how he lured his victims....

Now, leaning across the table, she tilted her head up and looked into David’s eyes.

Normal. Brown and round and black-pupiled and black-lashed, and quite nice-looking, actually, but human.

If she looked into Martin’s eyes for too long, she felt dizzy.

“So. Tell me about yourself,” David said. “You do websites, right?”

David was an orthodontist. She should have known from the start: no preter would ever claim to be an orthodontist.

“I design and support websites, yes. I work for a company that does that, rather. It’s not as exciting as it sounds.” It didn’t sound very exciting at all, actually. She just happened to be very good at it.

Her shoulder muscles twitched, and she was aware of the fact that this was wasted time: he wasn’t a preter, and she didn’t care about David the Orthodontist, no matter how nice a human he seemed to be, or how pretty his eyes were. Or how nice his hands were. She seemed to be noticing hands—Martin’s hands, for one. How something that transferred into hooves could be so smooth and gentle, she didn’t know, but they were. Like a sculptor’s hands, she imagined. Although she’d never met a sculptor, to check.

Their drinks came, they ordered food, and she turned the question back on him, asking about his job and faking a reasonable amount of interest while she tried to figure out how soon she could bail.

Halfway through their sandwiches, she excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, hoping that Martin, who was allegedly lurking nearby, would be around, and she could improvise a sudden emergency or something. But the kelpie had either decided that David wasn’t useful on his own and left, or he utterly failed to pick up her “come rescue me” vibes.

His failure to show up stung more than she’d expected. First Tyler leaving her, then Martin...Jan twitched away that thought. It wasn’t the same thing. At all. Martin was there.

The kelpie was dangerous. She knew he was dangerous. Not human. But he had stayed, and he had held himself back, not killing her, and he’d held her when she’d cried, and, god, this was fucked up, but no more than anything else that had happened, so, okay?

So she’d trust him.

Jan washed her hands and splashed water on her face, and stared at herself in the mirror, wondering if she should bother reapplying lipstick, or touching up her foundation, a cheap shade she’d bought at the local drugstore the day before, when she’d gotten her asthma meds replaced.

She swiped on more color, as though reapplying armor, and left the relative sanctuary of the ladies’ room.

On the way back to the table, some floating bit of conversation caught her ear.

“So, Nathan, you’re an only child? That must be lonely.”

Jan changed her direction, circling around as though she needed to go outside, and looked over her shoulder. A man and a woman, sitting at a table. The woman was leaning in, her hand on her companion’s. She was attractive, honey-blond hair cut short to her ears and slightly spiky, a heart-shaped face, and long neck leading to a rather low-cut black blouse. But it was her intensity that caught Jan’s attention. Intensity was one of the hallmarks, too, Martin had said.

Jan stared, shamelessly, and the woman must have sensed it. She raised her head, looking away from the man and around the restaurant, like a cat sniffing out a mouse.

Then she turned her head, looking toward Jan, and Jan’s breath caught. Too far away to be sure, but there was a glitter in those eyes that wasn’t human. Not if you knew what you were looking for.

Martin’s eyes had that glitter, too, sometimes.

She looked away, hoping that the woman would think she’d been rude, rather than hunting. When she looked back again, cautiously, the blonde had gone back to her companion.

Her prey.

Jan’s heartbeat sped up, and she made her way back to her table in a blur. Apparently, she’d been gone too long, because David had finished his sandwich and was working on a second coffee, and looked a little annoyed. Her inability to focus on the conversation didn’t help, either, and when they finally parted, there was no “we should get together again, I’ll call you,” just a pleasant enough, “this was nice.”

Not that it mattered, since she’d given him a fake name and email address.

Once Jan left the restaurant, she should have met up with Martin and gone back to square one. But there was a preter in the restaurant, right there, with a human male who looked to be buying her line, without any clue what was going to happen to him.

Jan wasn’t impulsive. She thought things through and planned, and once decided, she stayed the course. But the past week had been such a chaos of improbable and impossible—she had flown, and seen monsters, and met people only to have them die, and her only help was a kelpie who had disappeared on her.

And there was a preter not ten feet away from her, about to lead a human to his fate...maybe. Or maybe she was hallucinating. Everything that was happening...without Martin around, without the weirdly reassuring presence of AJ or even Elsa, Jan started to doubt herself. Had any of this even happened?

She found herself walking back into the restaurant, avoiding the hostess, and heading for the table where the blonde preter and her prey were sitting.

“Nate?”

The man looked up. He wasn’t particularly good-looking, with an oversize chin and a nose that had been broken at least once, but his eyes were deep blue and totally human.

“Nate, it is you! I’m so glad, I’ve been trying to find you since forever, but it’s like you disappeared! I’m sorry, I don’t mean to intrude, but it’s so good to see you. It’s been, what, five years? Six?” She was babbling, the words falling out of her as though someone else were talking. “Here, give me your number, and I’ll call you! We can catch up. The entire family will be so thrilled.” She thought about mentioning something more about family but didn’t want to push it. Enough that the preter knew that someone would miss him, if he were taken. She risked a glance at the woman—the preter—and thought she saw a look of annoyance or disgust cross her face, quickly hidden behind a polite facade.

Good, Jan thought, and then smiled brightly at Nate, who—not wanting to admit that he had no idea who she was—had written a number on his napkin and handed it to her.

“Great! So lovely to run into you! You two have fun, we’ll catch up tomorrow, Nate!”

Jan tucked the napkin into her pocket and fled the restaurant, praying that nothing triggered an asthma attack until she was away from the preter. She was halfway down the street before she realized she was being flanked—and not by Martin, either.

“AJ.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “And...I don’t know you?”

“Stop talking. You talk too much. What the hell were you doing?”

AJ sounded furious, his snout twitching under the partial disguise of his hoodie.

“What was I doing? What were you doing? Where the hell have you been? And where’s Martin?”

“You alerted the preter.”

“I did not. As far as she knows, I’m just some dippy-headed human who interfered with her guy-nabbing.”

“You really think you dissuaded her from her target?”

The other super hadn’t spoken yet, and Jan wondered if he even could: his face was even less human-appearing than AJ’s, with fangs that curled out of his mouth at an uncomfortable-looking angle. They didn’t seem as though they could let him chew much, so...

A thought occurred to her that maybe it wasn’t flesh this super ingested, and she inched a bit closer to AJ. Meat-eaters were somehow more acceptable than blood-suckers. Which, on the face of it, was insane, but somehow, the
lupin
made her feel safer. Even when he was bitching her out.

“All you did was make her more cautious—now it’s going to be even harder for us to get to her. What were you thinking?”

“Of saving her victim!”

They’d reached the end of a street, where a large black limo waited, the passenger-side doors open.

“Get in,” the other super said, not so much a suggestion as an order.

She got in.

Martin was already there, sitting in the backseat, and he reached out for her, his hand taking her own. It should have been creepy, the way his actions echoed the preter’s in the restaurant, and it was creepy, a little, but Jan still held on like a lifeline.