Laura Anne Gilman (9 page)

He remembered, then, that he had forgotten things. Fleeting memories, vague, too distant to be disturbing, and yet they left him...disturbed.

He let the silver chain drop back against his skin, preferring the itching to that strange sense of loss.

Their rooms were large, well-furnished, with chairs and a wide, soft bed, a gaming table, where they would move stones across a board when Stjerne wished to play, and a bathing chamber scented with warm oils, but there was little else. When Stjerne was there, he felt no need to wander, content to stay by her side, wherever she led and whatever she did. When she was gone, she did not tell him to stay, and so he left their rooms and wandered.

There was little more to see beyond their chambers. There seemed to be no end to the structure where they resided: smooth, unadorned walls of silvery stone, rose-colored tiles underfoot. The halls seemed to go for miles no matter where he walked, great stone windows open to the air, looking out over gardens and groves, the world wreathed in the ever-present mist that lifted and swirled and then descended again, like breath.

It made him nauseous to watch it for too long, and so he learned to keep moving. The movement of his body, the stretch of his muscles, soothed him, the sound of his bare feet against tile creating an almost-music that made him pause to listen, trying to capture it, but the music faded when he stopped moving, and silence filled him again.

The missed sound caused him pain; silence brought a cool, numb sensation. After a while, he learned to tune out the almost-music and listen more closely to the silence, to choose the softer, quieter garden paths, rather than the stone hallways.

There were others in the structure, too; like Stjerne, they were graceful, seductive. They would nod to him, solemn bows as they passed in the tree-lined paths, or in the cool stone hallways, but they did not speak to him. They never spoke to him.

And, on occasion, he would look at one, and remember being held down, sweet-water dripping into his mouth, and the feeling of isolation and grief was such that he returned to their rooms and huddled on their fur-draped bed until she returned to soothe him.

But this day, he saw something different. By the fountain, where silver water sprang into the sky and then fell back into alabaster bowls, there was a figure who seemed more substantial, more...familiar.

Not like Stjerne, or the others. Like him. He started toward the figure, feeling a rush of some emotion he could not name—and then halted.

The silence pressed against his brain, whispering to him, reminding him. The chain itch was a warm burn against his skin, like the prickle of thorns. “No,” he said. “No.” He wasn’t sure if he was speaking to the emotion, or the itch, or something else entirely.

He stared at the other, hunger making him yearn even as fear kept him still. Then one of the slender creatures approached the other, taking it by the arm the way Stjerne took hold of him, leading it away.

The moment, the chance, was lost.

He turned away, turning his back on the now-abandoned fountain. “She would be upset. It would make her sad.” He didn’t know how he knew this, but it was true: he was not to speak to another mortal. It would make Stjerne unhappy if he did so, and he lived to make her happy. When she was pleased with him, her touch was soft and soothing. When she was angry... He shuddered. Therefore, he could not speak to another. If she was unhappy...

If she was angry, she might go away forever, next time. They would hurt him again, put him in the chair and scrape him out from the inside, and that time she would not stay with him, would not fill the emptiness inside him with herself.

He tried to imagine surviving without her and failed.

He hugged his arms around his bare chest, pressing the silver chain into his skin, bright against dark. This time, the itch against his skin was soothing, pleasure-pain, singing the promise of her return.

When he made it back to their rooms, he had forgotten seeing anyone by the fountain.

Chapter 5

T
rying to set her companions up with computers had given Jan a new headache. “I still don’t get it,” she said in exasperation. “You drive cars. Hell, you
steal
cars, and you ride public transit, and apparently some of you buy your clothing at the mall, but none of you use the internet?” She had thought all she had to do was introduce them to the basics of social dating sites, not give them Internet 101. Hell,
Computer
101.

“Most of us are the bucolic types,” Toba said, amused, and slightly faster on the uptake than Martin, not that that was saying much. “Not so much need to be connected to the masses of humanity. And if we wish to communicate with each other...” He paused. “We don’t, usually. AJ took on the leader of each group directly, to force them to listen, and even then, many refused to hear.”

“We’re also not much for paying for anything,” Martin said, frowning at the screen and then—successfully—entering one of the fake log-ins and getting a welcome screen. “We’re horrible mooches.”

“So noted.” Jan had already sussed that much from the way Martin had made himself at home in her kitchen. “But you have a cell phone?”

Toba chuckled. “Would you believe that I have a niece in Puerto Rico I like to keep in touch with? The younger generations are more adaptable—she likes to text.” He pulled a flip-phone from the pocket of his sweater—she was amused to note that his cardigan was exactly the same soft gray color her grandfather used to wear—and held it up somewhat sheepishly.

“You can’t talk to her by...” Jan floundered, not sure what she was going to say.

“We don’t
do
magic, human. We
are
magic. Shifting, flying, glamourizing...no wands, no spells, no magic tricks. Just...us. The way some humans sing, and others paint, and some of you—” he shrugged, his misshapen shoulders rising under the cardigan “—do other things, according to your nature.”

That made sense, she had to admit. And it explained why they all seemed so...normal. Then Toba blinked those golden eyes at her and clacked his beak in a faint laugh, and she amended that to
mostly
normal.

“It would be nice if you could at least spin straw into gold,” she said. “Although it’s not like I’ve got straw handy. All right, Martin, are you ready to try this on your own?”

He nodded enthusiastically and then lowered his chin slightly in thought. “Yes. Yes. If yellow-eyes can handle it, so can I.”

Jan had set Martin up with her old desktop for the initial demonstration. It was kludgy as hell at this point—she mainly used it as an extra monitor when she needed a larger display—but it would be enough for what they were doing. More to the point, it didn’t have anything essential loaded on it that Martin might cluelessly overwrite or wipe.

Keeping the laptop for herself, Jan gave Toba a tablet her boss had sent her to test drive, thinking that it would be a better match to his smaller hands.

Toba took the tablet, and his narrow lips—she had to stop thinking of it as a beak—twisted in what she was learning to recognize as a grin. “Little computer for the little man?”

“Don’t start with the sizeism,” she retorted, falling into the habit of treating him the same way she did Steverino, with a mix of respect and sass. “Or Martin will start making comments about being hung like a horse.”

Those too-yellow eyes widened in mock shock. “It’s like you know him.”

She looked sideways to where Martin was fussing with the desk chair, trying to adjust it properly. “Yeah. But I don’t, do I?” Two days wasn’t enough to know anyone, and...she had proven pretty conclusively she didn’t understand human men, much less non-human ones.

Toba’s amused expression faded, and he cocked his head to the side. “No. You don’t know any of us, not really. You never will. So long as you remember that, you’ll be okay.”

The knots in Jan’s stomach—so familiar now she hadn’t even noticed them—tightened a hitch. Every time she started to get comfortable, something happened to remind her that they weren’t the sort to be comfortable around. That was, as Toba said, probably a good thing....

She might not have read a lot of fairy tales, but she didn’t remember many of them ending well, for anyone.

What was that AJ had said? That mostly, they ignored humans?

“Yeah.” Ignorance might have been bliss, but it wasn’t possible anymore. She needed to do some real research soon, as soon as she had them up and running independently. “All right, let’s get you guys motoring. Remember what I showed you; the site’s set, your accounts are ready to go, and they’re designed to be relatively idiot-proof. All you have to do is enter what you’re looking for, and see who—or what—pops up.”

“So, we look for lovers?” Martin swung around to look at them, and his eyes got wider, like a kid told that Santa was real.

“We look for preters who are looking for lovers,” Toba said, reaching out to whack him across the back of his head, hard enough that Jan winced. “Don’t get distracted, kelpie.”

The blue-skinned figure drifted a little closer, as though to watch what they were doing, and Jan shivered. It might be useful for protection, although she didn’t see how, if they couldn’t actually
do
magic, but the damn thing gave her the creeps.

Toba took the netbook over onto the sofa and settled it on his lap, hands poised as he scanned the screen. “All right. Key words, reply to potentials, skip the rest. On it.”

Toba’s claim to be the sole geek among the volunteered supernaturals proved accurate; he was quickly engrossed in the task, not needing any guidance beyond the occasional wording of a reply.

It didn’t take Jan long to realize that Martin, however, for all his enthusiasm for any kind of flirting, was not well-suited to research—or doing any kind of long-term task, for that matter. He was too easily distracted. After the third time she found him chatting with random people who clearly weren’t who they were looking for, she yelled at him; when she found him browsing over to a porn site via offered clicks, she gave up.

“You really are short-attention-span boy, aren’t you?”

“He can’t help it,” Toba said, not looking up from the screen. “Kelpies.”

They kept saying that, whatever that meant. Jan made a mental note to do some hard-core research once they took a break, and see if there was a how-to-deal-with-the-supernatural site up anywhere that had actual useful information.

“It’s almost lunchtime,” she said to Martin now. “We’ll do this. You go pick up some pizzas, be useful.”

It wasn’t just make-work: There was nothing in her fridge that would feed four. Or three—she still wasn’t sure what the lurking super ate, and needle-sharp tooth marks on the half-eaten melon gave her pause from even asking.

“But...”

“Be useful, Martin, or go away.”

He looked mournful. “I don’t have any money.”

“Of course you don’t.” She grabbed her wallet off the desk, and handed him two twenty-dollar bills. “Don’t go too crazy. Down the street and turn left, go to Gene’s Pizzeria. Two pizzas should be enough. I have soda and juice in the fridge already.”

“Two pizzas. Got it.”

“One with meat,” Toba called out. “No damned peppers.”

Martin paused at the doorway, looking at Jan. “One peppers and mushrooms, one pepperoni?”

Jan nodded. So she’d been right about him being a vegetarian. And, apparently, supers ate a lot of pizza. Or enough to form preferences, anyway. It made no sense, but it wasn’t like much of this did.

Roll with it,
she told herself.
Getting Tyler home so you can kick his ass is the first and most important thing; you can figure out supernatural culture clashes later.

The blue-skinned super watched him leave, then turned back to stare out through the walls.

“Bet you he comes back with ’em both vegetarian,” Toba grumbled, and then went back to work, poking at the screen with two fingers.

Jan didn’t go back to the site-trolling immediately. First, she entered a quick search for basic mythology sites and then—a sense of responsibility digging at her—took a look at her work email. The company she worked for maintained websites and social media for companies that didn’t want to maintain their own departments. Right now, untangling someone else’s coding screw-up seemed seriously unimportant, but there would still be bills to pay after, and while her job was a little more secure than Ty’s—she was an actual employee, not a contract-hire, and could take time off without getting kicked to the curb—she didn’t want to push it.

Somehow, heroes in fantasy adventures could always just drop things and rush off to save the world.

The backlog wasn’t too bad: she answered the questions she could handle easily, and redirected larger problems to other people, then looked at her project time line. The two projects she had in the queue could wait another day or so before the deadlines started getting crunchy, without anyone yelling, and since she’d been in the end of a project when Tyler had disappeared, everyone would think she was still hip-deep in that for another day or two.

And if someone yelled for her, and she wasn’t able to hold their hand right away? She’d worry about it then. Hell, maybe they’d find the connection right away, some “enter here for the elves” sign, and AJ’s crew could go do their thing and...

Jan sighed. She didn’t know what was going to happen, but she knew it wasn’t going to be that easy.

From across the room, she could hear Toba muttering. “No, no, no...”

Just listening to the dismay in his voice made Jan remember why she’d been so damn glad to find Tyler and cancel her memberships. It didn’t help that the key words they’d settled on were designed to find the most desperate, affection-hungry women, who would overlook anything that might otherwise be hinky in the hopes of meeting The One. Or at least The One For Now. The whole thing made her skin itch.

Sighing, she closed out the work browser and looked at the top hits for mythology sites. They all seemed basic, generic as to be useless—or they were for some writer’s obviously made-up world. Giving up for now, she bookmarked some of them and then opened her own faux accounts. Almost immediately, a pop-up hit her screen, inviting her to chat, and she scanned the would-be-chatter’s profile before declining.

“Damn you, Tyler. If you’d been able to keep it in your pants...neither of us would be in this mess, right now.”

She said it low, but Toba apparently had ears like an owl’s, too.

“Moderate your anger, human. The preters are very good at what they do. That is not to excuse your leman’s behavior but... Your history is filled with examples of otherwise virtuous souls who have been lured to ill fates.”

“That’s not making me feel better.”

“No. Sorry.”

For a while, there was only the sound of typing keys and faint beeps of incoming chat requests.

Finally, the silence started to wear on Jan—or not the silence exactly, but the silence with two other people in the room with her. At least Martin made noise, even if he didn’t hum the way Tyler did, or...

“Hey. Toba.”

“Yes?”

She hadn’t really thought about what she was going to ask; she had just needed to say something, and hear him respond. “What... I mean...who...”

“What am I?”

“Yeah.” First-person research was always better than relying on Google, anyway.

“In some places, we were called
Splyushka.
”

That didn’t help worth a damn, but he didn’t explain further. “And Martin?”

“A kelpie.”

He’d said that before, as if she was supposed to know what that meant. Without turning around, she made a “go ahead” gesture at him over her shoulder.

Toba hesitated. “Kelpies are...”

“Flirts?” Wild guess, there. Not.

“Yes. Among other things.” He sounded as if he was thinking things through before speaking. Jan let him. Finally he went on. “Be careful of yourself, around Martin. I don’t think that he would ever deliberately harm you, but...we cannot help but be true to our nature. We, Martin and I, we understand humans the most, of the volunteers, and so were considered the best to help you. That does not make us...safe.”

“Is AJ safe?”

That made Toba laugh, a sharp hacking noise. “No. AJ is not safe. But he has another job to do, one that needs his...nature.”

She thought of the teeth set into that muzzle and those claw-tipped fingers. “He’s out there, isn’t he? Nearby.” Part of the protections they kept talking about? Toba had said that AJ was the one who talked people into doing stuff....

“We have sworn to protect you, while you aid us. AJ and his kin are...best at that.”

“He’s a werewolf.” That much at least she’d figured out.

“He is
lupin.
He is no more wolf than Martin is, in fact, a horse. Janice.”

The sudden seriousness in Toba’s voice, and his using her full name, distracted Jan from the screen, and she turned in her chair to look at him.

“There is a reason our people stay apart, even as we share this space. Good reasons, hard-learned. If it were not for this threat, you would have lived your life ignorant of us...and it would have been for the best.” His beak clacked softly. “I meant truly what I said before: do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can understand us—or that we can understand you.”

The lurker by the wall stirred, its entire body rippling as though a breeze passed right through it.

“But...” She studied his expression, trying to read it, and nodded. “All right.” She thought he was wrong—there was always a way to understand someone, if you tried hard enough to listen—but they could argue about it later. “I think I have a few we should consider. You?”

Toba did a quick count. “Seven, all from women. It would appear that our guess is correct, and they are still targeting males more than females.”

Jan looked at her ratio and had to agree. “If we’re right about them being preters. They may just be human females playing on desperation, too. Reply to them with the script.” She had remembered some of the responses she’d gotten from men who wanted a date in the absolute worst way, and cribbed something together for them to use. If Tyler had fallen for the kind of lures they were seeing, and responded...Was it better, or worse, that as Toba said, he’d fallen for a well-honed trick? She would never know if he might have been responding to other women....