Heart of Briar

“And the others...they’re part of a normal carjacking ring? Or...?” She made a vague gesture to include the entire warehouse.

“We’re all volunteers. The car thing, it was a small operation AJ’s pack ran. We’re using it as a cover, a place to gather. Whatever we need—whatever you need—they will provide.”

That was comforting, she supposed. Although she had no idea what she might need....

“Wait.” She reached out to touch Martin on the shoulder, but something—some memory of AJ’s words, warning her not to touch him in pony-form—made her stop. She had never been the hero type, never been asked to step forward, or picked first for any team. “I’m not the only one you’ve tried to convince, am I?”

Martin looked as if he wanted to escape, which made her eyes narrow. “Tell me, or I’m walking, right now.” He had sworn to her that he wouldn’t lie.

“No. You’re not.” His voice was full of regret, which made her not want to know what happened to the others.

“What happened to the others?” she asked, anyway, with a suspicion she knew already.

This time, when he took her hands, she let him. “The turncoats came after them, too. We don’t know how, don’t know how they knew, how they found them, unless the preters told them, but by the time we figured out who had the connection we needed, the gnomes were already there, and—”

Her throat hurt, suddenly. “And had eaten them.”

“Yeah.” He looked as nauseated as she felt; if his other form was a horse, then maybe he was a vegetarian?

“We found you in time, got you away from them. We’ll protect you,” he said again. “We need you to be safe.”

There wasn’t much more she could say to that.

* * *

Eventually, AJ and Elsa came back, their faces grim. Well, AJs face was always grim. Elsa’s craggy expression didn’t seem to change much.

Jan had never been to a council of war, only what she’d seen in movies, but she was pretty sure their version was pitiful: the four of them sitting on old furniture in an old warehouse, with supernatural creatures stripping cars in the background.

“We’ve been trying to predict where and when, with no success,” AJ said. “There doesn’t seem to be any pattern or logic to it, except that they always go back to where they came through, so the portal doesn’t move, and they can’t just open another one by snapping their fingers. But they never reuse one, either. Our old ways of finding them are useless, and we can’t wait for a portal to open and hope that you’re nearby. You need to tell us what to look for.”

“Me?” Jan was already tired of asking that. “I’m not the one who—”

“They are coming out of phase, at a time and place of their own choosing, and returning with their prey almost immediately. How?” Elsa leaned forward, the sound of gravel crunching with every move. “How did they find your leman and catch his attention?”

“Sex.” Jan heard the bitterness in her voice, thick in that one word. Elf—preternatural—or no, they’d used the most basic lure, and he’d fallen for it. Apparently she hadn’t been enough for him, that he had to fuck around, too.

“Yes, obviously.” Elsa gave her an odd look. “But how? In the past, their victims have stumbled upon their portal-circles, or been caught at transition times.”

“The dark of the moon,” Martin said, coaching Jan. “Fairy rings. The change of seasons. Times and places a human might come in contact with them, intentionally or otherwise.”

Jan tried to remember what he was saying while still focusing on Elsa’s questions. He was too close, and she was noticing things like the way he smelled, a green, musky scent, instead of what was happening around her.

“But they no longer need such things, if they reach directly into homes and draw their prey to them, or go directly to where their prey already waits. If they have found a way around the old, physical, temporal limitations...how? That is what we need to know, to lure and trap them in kind.”

Jan stared at her, completely out of her comfort zone, or any zone she recognized. Her daypack rested at her feet, and she clutched at it now, the only remnant of reality left. Her wallet, her cell phone—but there was no one she could call. Nobody who could get her out of this, or throw her a lifeline. “I... How am I supposed to know?”

“Think, human. If this man was in your life, you know his habits. You know where he went and what he did, yes?”

“Yes.” Her response was immediate. Of all the things they had asked, this she had no doubts about. “But he didn’t go anywhere. I was the one who had to drag him out and be social. The only thing he did was...”

She stopped, and Elsa leaned forward.

“Yes?”

Jan dug her fingers into her hair, trying to massage some of the stress out of her scalp, but all that did was remind her of the times Tyler had done the same thing, the fingers that danced so quickly over the keyboard going slow and steady through her curls.

“We...we do a lot of socializing online. Digital networking, vid-conferencing, that sort of thing. But that’s people you already know. Tyler wasn’t much for chat rooms, said they were overrun with noobs and trolls— Oh, sorry. It’s a Net term, it’s not—”

Elsa stared at her, not taking offense, waiting for her to get to the point.

“The thing is, we met on a dating site. It’s a...a place where people go, when they want to meet someone else, outside their usual social group. You put your profile into the system, and you look at other profiles, and you decide who you want to talk to after you check them out, see if you share interests....”

Jan swallowed hard, remembering the email she had found in Tyler’s in-box. “It can get pretty racy there, if you want.”

Elsa’s eyes didn’t widen—Jan wasn’t sure her expression could change, at all—but it was obvious that she understood. “This site, it allows others to find sexual partners?”

“Yeah. Some of them are looking for marriage, some of ’em are just wanting a hookup...the one we used was more casual.” Saying it made the tips of her ears flush, as if she was some kind of slut, but that was silly: so she didn’t want to get married, that didn’t mean she had wanted a bunch of one-night hookups. And neither had Tyler—she thought. But if he had stayed on the site, kept his account active after she closed hers... The bitterness stuck in her throat, like heartburn.

“If you were using sex, seduction to lure someone—” wasn’t that how they said a lot of serial killers found their prey? “—then a dating site like that would make sense. People are open to it, not suspicious, or wary. We want to be seduced.”

She had to laugh, had to say it. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re an elf.”

The others looked at her, clueless, and she sighed. “Trust me this time. It’s a breeding ground of desperation and hope.”

“So that is where we will start.” Elsa nodded, satisfied with her pronouncement, and then tilted her stone-gray head curiously. “How do we do that?”

* * *

Jan would have been happy to set them up and leave them to it, but AJ hadn’t been exaggerating when he said supernaturals didn’t use much modern technology—despite the machinery scattered throughout the warehouse, not a one of them there had a laptop, not even a netbook. Worse, Jan couldn’t get a signal with her phone, even outside the warehouse—wherever they were, there wasn’t a tower within clear range.

“You couldn’t have found somewhere actually on the grid?” Jan said in disgust, sinking back down into the sofa, interrupting a group of supers who were apparently on their coffee break. They all gave her moderate hairy eyeballs and she—having tossed good manners out the window by now—gave it right back. She’d just spent half an hour walking around the perimeter of the warehouse—followed by AJ and Martin acting as bodyguards, or to make sure that she didn’t bolt—trying to get a signal. Not even a single bar flickered, much less enough to load data.

“It was large enough, defensible enough, and cheap enough. You want some coffee?” The offer came from a man who barely came up to her waist, dressed in black jeans and a black button-down shirt, black sneakers on his feet. His shoulders were too large for the rest of his body, but otherwise he could have been any height-challenged human, even if you noticed that his ears were slightly pointed, unless you looked into his eyes. Jan did and had to resist the urge to back away. There was nothing human about those eyes.

“No. Thank you.” She desperately wanted some, actually. It had been a long time since lunch, which had been a yogurt on the bus over to Tyler’s place. But the thought of letting one of them make it...wasn’t there some story about eating the food of fairyland? Did that apply here?

“There’s soda, too.” Those yellow-ringed eyes didn’t blink. “Still factory-sealed.”

“What, she doesn’t trust us?” A voice came from above them. Jan didn’t look up, pretty sure that she didn’t want to know where that snarky, snide voice came from.

“Would you?” Yellow-eyes responded, not looking up, either. “Come on, girlie, it’s just a soda.”

She was thirsty—extended bouts of fear and panic did that to her. “What kind?”

“We got Coke, Diet Coke, Dr Pepper and Jolt.”

She realized suddenly that he had a small, sharp beak rather than lips, giving him a faint, sharp lisp. That...was weird. Weirder than a werewolf, or a woman made of rock, or a guy who turned into a horse? Yes, she decided, it was.

“Gotta love that stuff,” he coaxed. “Twice the caffeine, all the sugar.”

“Do I look like a programmer?” she muttered. “Diet Coke. Please.”

Something swooped over their heads, a shadow of wings, and Jan ducked instinctively.

The owl-faced being chuckled at her reaction. “Ignore it, and it’ll leave you alone. Don’t take that as a general rule, though; sometimes ignoring things can get you eaten. My name’s Toba. I’m the closest thing to a geek we have, so I guess that makes me your aide-de-camp.”

He had a nice laugh. “How much of a geek are you?”

Toba shrugged. “I use a cell phone, and I know how to send email.”

“Oh, god.” Not that she had been expecting much more, at this point. “All right, that’ll have to do. If I’m going to get online to anything, I need my laptop, and a signal. That means I can’t work here.” She didn’t want to work here, more to the point. “I need to go back to my apartment.”

Where it was safe. Familiar. Not filled with...things swooping overhead, changing shapes, or looking at her with wide, golden eyes.

Toba shook his head solemnly. “Can’t do that. The turncoats’ve marked you. Ten minutes outside, out of our territories, and they’d track you down.”

The matter-of-factness finally got to Jan, where everything else hadn’t. “The hell I can’t go back to my apartment! My gear is there, my clothes—my medication!” Her inhaler would only last so long, especially if they kept throwing stress like this at her. And the dust—god, between the dust and noise, warehouses were not high on her list of places to be. “If I stay here much longer, I’m going to get sick again,” she said. “Maybe bad enough to need the hospital.”

“You don’t want to lead the turncoats back to your apartment,” Martin said, coming to join the conversation, obviously having overheard everything. She wondered, a little wildly, how good their hearing was, could they all listen in, even from across the warehouse floor? Did she have no privacy at all?

“They’re slow thinkers, but determined, and vicious; if they figure out where you are... You have to stay here, where we can protect you.”

“No. Oh, no.” Jan shook her head, determined on this. “I can’t stay here. I can’t work here.” The warehouse was large, but at that moment she would have sworn that the walls were closing in on her. “If I’m going to do anything at all—”

“We will send someone for whatever you need. Elsa is finding somewhere you can work, somewhere safe. And then—”

“No.” It was his voice, that calm, soothing voice, that made her snap, suddenly.

“What?”

“Look, you don’t get it at all, do you? I have a life! I have a job, and friends, and a family. I took the day off, that’s all. I can’t just disappear, the way Tyler did. No.”

They stared at each other, and Jan willed herself not to back down. After all of the crap that had already happened, this shouldn’t have been so important to her, but it was.

“Fine.” Toba broke the stalemate. “She’s right: to do anything online, she needs to be connected, and reception’s shit out here. So we’ll move in with you, set up protections there. Don’t give me that look, kelpie. You don’t have to come. Not like you’re good for much, anyway.”

Martin drew himself upright, making the most of the full foot of height he had on the other supernatural. “I swore I would keep her safe.”

Toba seemed to find that hysterical. “You? Right.”

Jan looked back and forth between the two of them, confused. If anything, Martin—twice the height and stronger—would be able to protect her better than Toba, slight and hunched over, whose sole weapon seemed to be his wit.

“Look, I—” Martin took the shorter being by the shoulder and led him away, not gently. They started to argue, their voices lowered so that she could not hear them, no matter how she tried. After a minute and some emphatic gestures from Martin, Toba looked over his shoulder once at her, then shrugged. Whatever Martin was saying, it seemed to not impress the owl-faced being much.

Finally, they called AJ over, and the whole argument started again.

Jan curled up on the sofa and closed her eyes, weary beyond belief. Standing up for herself always took so much energy, even when people didn’t get mad.

Where was Tyler? What was he thinking just then? Were they...were they hurting him? Or was the seduction that had stolen him continuing? The thought burned, but she forced herself to face it. He might not want to come back....

And then, suddenly, the argument in the corner was over, and she was being bundled back into the SUV. Martin drove this time, with Toba perched on the other side of her. They drove back into the city, following her directions, headlights picking out landmarks, the streets slowly becoming familiar again, until they pulled up outside of her building.

By then, night had fallen with a definite thud, and there was a chill in the air that made her wish she’d been wearing a sweater that morning, instead of a long-sleeved T-shirt.

Had it really only been that morning that she’d left her apartment, intent on finding out what was really happening with Tyler? Since then...the world had turned upside down and inside out. She was worn down and exhausted, and wanted only to stagger up the stairs, check her email, and pass out facedown on her bed. Maybe when she woke up, this would all be a terrible dream.

Chapter 4

“Hey you. Sleepyhead.” His breath was warm on her bare shoulder. “Wanna go for a run?”

“Are you kidding me?” She didn’t run. She walked at a nice steady pace and did all her exercising at home, on a yoga mat. The only time she wanted to run was if something was chasing her, and even then she though she might let that something catch her, rather than die in a gory coughing-up mess. “I’ll keep the bed warm, how’s that?”

“Yeah, that’s good,” Tyler said, leaning over her, and she turned slightly so she could see that familiar, slow, so-sexy smile on his face, until she realized his lips, usually so soft and full, had narrowed to hard lines, pointed like a beak, and then his face changed, eyes glowing gold, the beak opening to reveal double rows of sharp teeth as though he was going to bite her entire face off—

And Jan sat up in bed, not really awake yet but shocked out of the dream, her eyes wide-open and her heart racing.

“Holy shit on a shamrock.”

Just a dream. It was just a dream, you idiot, and what did you eat yesterday that gave you a dream like that?

Operating on routine, she rolled out of bed, took her pills, and headed for the coffeemaker, where her sleep-dazed awareness took another jolt at the sight of Martin, wearing only a pair of low-slung jeans, standing in front of the coffee machine, already adding coffee to the filter.

“Hey,” he said over his shoulder. “Good, you’re up. I didn’t know if you liked it strong or not.”

She looked at him, not quite certain what he was talking about, and he blinked back at her. “What? Coffee? We like it, too.”

It took a minute before her brain caught up with the rest of her. Yesterday. Tyler’s apartment, the bus, the warehouse, coming home with two men who weren’t actually men, who wanted her help to save the world....

No wonder she’d had bad dreams.

Unable to deal with the realization that it had all been real—or at least true—just yet, Jan looked down at her feet. The polish on her toes was starting to flake off. Her gaze flicked away, like her brain, unable to settle on anything for too long, and caught sight of Martin’s feet, instead. He was barefoot, which wasn’t surprising, and his feet ended, not in five toes, but a single wedge with one dark nail, like...like the tip of a hoof.

That alone should have sent her screaming out into the hallway, or at least back to bed. Instead, she simply said, “I like it strong,” and went past him to the refrigerator, pulling out the carton of orange juice. Out of deference to her houseguests, she poured it into a glass, rather than taking a swig from the carton the way she usually did.

The thought struck her, then, that she was only wearing her nightshirt, which barely covered her ass. It struck her immediately after that she didn’t feel the slightest bit of embarrassment, standing there in front of Martin, both of them half-dressed.

“Shock,” she diagnosed. “Yesterday was... This will all hit me later, and then I can have a nervous breakdown.”

Martin either didn’t hear her or decided to ignore her. “Did you sleep well?”

Jan put the juice back and closed the door. She had to stop and think about the question. “Yeah. Weirdly enough, I did.” Despite the dream waking her up in a cold sweat, she felt rested, as if she’d had a full eight hours of sleep.

He went back to measuring coffee into the coffeemaker. “Good. You had a busy day yesterday.”

“Yeah. You could say that.” Hysteria would be appropriate but useless, she decided. “You? I mean, how’d you sleep?” She had been so tired by the time they got back last night, she’d barely had time to throw extra pillows and blankets at them before retreating to her bedroom and closing the door. She didn’t even know where they’d bunked down: there had been no trace of pillows or blankets in the main room when she’d wandered across. She would have noticed that. Probably.

“I did. Toba doesn’t sleep much. And we had... There was... A third...” Martin floundered a bit, then pushed the start button on the coffeemaker, and turned to face her. “AJ sent someone else to join us, to help set up the protections. He doesn’t think what we set up last night was enough, especially if we’re here, too. Just... Ignore it. The...the other, I mean.”

“Ignore it. Uh-huh.” Considering what she’d already seen, that wasn’t particularly comforting. Nor was the fact that Martin looked a little uncomfortable even talking about it.

She decided to change the subject. “So, what exactly are these protections? Spells?”

He seemed just as happy with the change of subject. “No. Or, not really. A kind of glamour, sort of, to make it seem as though you’re not here. It’s hard to explain. Toba’s better at it than I am. I tend to make a splash.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.