Laura Anne Gilman (25 page)

Jan hesitated, her feet wanting to follow Tyler, to see what they were doing to him, to not lose track of him again, but AJ’s words made sense. Much as she wanted it to be, this wasn’t over yet.

* * *

The inside of the farmhouse was cozy, if crowded. Jan thought she saw Elsa in the living room, talking to someone, but AJ didn’t pause long enough for her to be sure it was her. The
lupin
made a gesture at someone in the oversize kitchen, then led them through the house to a small room at the end that clearly once had been the TV room.

“Sit.”

They sat. The sofa was battered, incredibly soft leather, and Jan’s body—still craving the sleep she had been dragged out of—wanted to sink back into it. She forced herself to sit forward, instead. “Tyler—you can help him? What’s wrong with him?”

“I warned you,” AJ said. “They had him long enough to mess with his mind, change his loyalties.”

“I know that—he thought he belonged to her—but when we put it to the challenge, when he had to choose, he came with me!”

AJ looked at Martin, who nodded. Jan was too tired to be pissed that the
lupin
wasn’t just taking her word for it. “Is that how you managed it? I will want all the details, so we can keep complete records, not the crap and half-remembered legends we’ve been relying on. Well done, in any case—my estimations of you were dead-on.”

Jan was pretty sure that he had meant that as a compliment. Maybe.

“As to your leman, preternatural mind games can be ugly. I have people looking him over, trying to sort out the damage, and as I said, we’ll be keeping him calm, letting him see that we mean him no harm, that he can trust us. Odds are, the longer he’s back in this world, the more he will recover. But...”

Jan looked sideways at Martin, his long face set, his gaze looking at something across the room. “He’s never going to be the same again, is he?” she said, not so much asking as admitting to something she had wanted to, if not deny, at least ignore.

AJ’s face really wasn’t designed for expressions that weren’t threatening, but she had learned to ignore his face and look in his eyes. They didn’t have the flickers of gold and green that Martin’s showed, but were only a deep, red-tinged brown that made her think of velvet and down.

“Are you?” he asked.

She dropped her gaze and looked at her hands, instead.

There was a knock on the door, and then it opened, and a slender young girl slipped in, carrying a tray. “Coffee, and milk, and kofta,” she said, putting the tray on the low table in front of them. “Cook put
pignoli
in the meat this time, but you’re not allergic, are you?”

That was directed at Jan, who shook her head numbly. The smell of whatever the kofta was hit her nose, hot meat and spices, and her mouth watered.

The girl flicked her gaze at AJ and then left, closing the door gently behind her.

“Eat,” AJ said. Jan didn’t need to be told twice, reaching for the round balls of meat, discovering toothpicks left to the side for lifting. The small meatball was warm and slightly greasy, and the moment it hit her taste buds she almost cried.

“Eat,” AJ repeated. “It will resettle you in this world.”

She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she was too hungry to stop, anyway.

“What happened to the warehouse?” Martin had sat on the other end of the sofa, ignoring the food and coffee, his arms crossed over his chest, watching AJ intently.

“Turncoats. Something set them on us about the same time you crossed over.”

“Coincidence?”

“You know how I feel about coincidence. But it might have been, they might have been tracking Jan, and found us. Or, they might have been set on us directly. However they came there, they were determined to keep us penned up, to not let us leave—as though they didn’t realize you were already gone.”

“So if they were sent, they were sent by someone who had incomplete information?”

“Or, what they thought was going to happen, did not. The timing of their approach...” AJ looked thoughtful but didn’t explain further.

“So what happened?” Jan asked.

“They swarmed, eventually. They’re not very patient, and rather single-minded. They destroyed the warehouse. We lost a lot of people.” AJ’s lips curled back in an unnerving snarl. “We made them pay, though. We put the bastards down. They won’t come back from that any time soon.”

Jan thought of the things that had attacked her, first on the bus and then in her apartment, and the food in her mouth suddenly tasted sour. She swallowed, then asked. “They won’t just send more?”

“Gnomes are long-lived. They’re also slow-breeding.”

Jan had to think about that, then nodded. They wouldn’t have the numbers to send more. “But you lost people, too.”

“We did. But we also gained a weapon. You. Your knowledge. You went through a portal—and came back. The information you have...” He stood, pacing to the single window in the room, glancing out, and then coming back to them. “Martin, eat something. And then tell me what happened. Tell me everything.”

Jan blinked at him, not even sure what he was asking. “From...where?”

“From when you disappeared would be a good start, since you didn’t exactly leave a note.”

Jan licked her lips, trying to put her thoughts in order. “I was in the coffee shop...we’d set up a date, but he didn’t show.” God, it seemed like another lifetime. Maybe it was. “And then...she walked in. Stjerne.”

“Who?”

“The preter who lured her leman,” Martin said, having eaten the leafy greens presented alongside the meatballs and now in the process of fixing his coffee. He took an obscene amount of sugar, Jan noted.

“Right. And he was with her?”

“Yes.”

AJ’s muzzle wrinkled. “Interesting. I wouldn’t have thought that they’d allow that, bringing him back here. Too risky. Usually they keep their humans wrapped up close until they’re through with them.”

“That must be why the consort was angry at her,” Jan said, trying to ignore the rest of his comment.

“The consort?” AJ looked from one to the other, his nostrils flaring as though he’d picked up a new scent.

“Skipping to the interesting part, unless you really want the details of the Snake, or troll-bridges or what the stars look like, over there?”

“Another time, maybe. You went into the Court?” AJ sounded almost incredulous, without openly disbelieving, and not, Jan thought, a little jealous. She supposed, if you hadn’t actually been through it, it would sound like an incredible adventure. If you were a little crazy to start, anyway.

“We were following them—following Tyler. It seemed a reasonable risk—if Jan could reclaim him, she’d—”

“Yeah, I get it,” AJ said. “What happened when you were there?”

Martin opened his mouth, closed it again, shook his head, ran his fingers through his hair, and then tried again. “AJ, the queen is gone. She’s abandoned the Court and come here.”

AJ’s entire body went still, and then he blinked and sat back in his chair, digesting that news. “The queen is here. In this world.”

Martin and Jan both nodded.

“To quote humans, Jesus Christ on a pogo stick.”

His expression should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

“And they want her back?”

“They want to punish her. And us, for being more interesting, I guess.” Jan picked up a mug of the coffee and sipped at it. The last of the fog left her brain, and she did, in fact, feel grounded again. Maybe the fairy tales about food in fairyland worked for your own world, too? “That’s why they’re coming in such numbers; you’re right, this is an attempt at an invasion. Or not an invasion really. Maybe a resettlement. If we’re so damn interesting, they’re going to move in. I guess. They’ve been insulted, and I get the feeling that they’re not really the bygones-be-bygones kind of folk.”

“No. They’re not. So if they can’t take her away from her toy, take her toy?” AJ hrmmed deep in his throat. “But how? How are they opening portals at-will? Tell me you found an answer to that, too.”

Jan shook her head. “I don’t know. We— Tyler told us to visualize it, just
think
about it, and we opened one to come home, but I don’t know what we did—and I don’t even know if I was the one who did it, either. I tried to bring us to the Center, but we ended up back where we started.”

“No technology?”

“I didn’t see anything that looked like tech, no towers or wires or...I’d say that world hasn’t gone much beyond basic industrialization, if that: water wheels, and muscle power.”

“But they’re connecting to your internet, somehow,” Martin said. “Luring humans that way... They wouldn’t have just stumbled onto it....”

“But that might have come after they learned how to establish portals on their own,” Jan pointed out. “Once they were here, if they were among humans, then they were going to see people using smart-phones, computers, all that everywhere. If they’re really peeved about their queen finding this world interesting, they’d want to know everything....”

“And they discovered a new tool. Great.”

Jan sighed. All that, and they still didn’t have an answer.

“We have time to find out how Jan—or Tyler—created the portal, though,” Martin said. “AJ, when Jan won her challenge, she pushed the consort, made him extend terms. We have time before they’ll try to come back here.”

“We can trust him?” Jan asked, still dubious.

“You got very specific terms,” Martin sad. “He has to abide by those, to the letter and number.”

“You arranged a truce?” For the first time, AJ actually looked impressed.

“Yes. I think. For ten weeks, or something like that.”

“Good. No, better than good. You did amazingly well, Jan, thank you. And the queen is still here?”

“We think so,” she said. “Yes. Unless there’s a third world you guys forgot to mention?”

“Bite your tongue and swallow the thought,” Martin said. “She’s here, AJ. And I’m betting she’s relatively close, if they’ve been focusing their efforts on this part of the world. Does that change anything?”

“It means if we can find her, we have a potential hostage.”

Jan hadn’t thought of it that way. From the look on Martin’s face, neither had he.

“And you’ll find her...how? Set every super in the country to sniffing?” She used his own words back on him, but the
lupin
just grinned.

“If I could, I would have, already. Too much world, not enough of us willing to play. But the fact that we haven’t gotten reports of escalating disappearances outside this continent means that we can, like Martin said, focus our efforts here. And she may give herself away, may already have given herself away. She’s cut off from her own home, as weak as you two were over there, but alone. She’s going to need to rebuild her own Court. She might take a few humans, but she’s going to reach out for the supers, too; we’re more familiar, built of the same stuff, to her mind.”

“The gnomes?” AJ had said he thought someone sent them to the warehouse...she had thought he meant the preters on the other side, but...

“Gnomes, and others.” He stood. “I need to pass word along. I’ll be right back.”

* * *

The door closed behind him, and Jan put her coffee down on the table. “Are you okay?” she asked Martin, echoing her earlier words to AJ.

“I will be.” He wouldn’t look at her, though.

“Martin.” He looked up, but his gaze was averted. “Thank you.”

“You did the hard work,” he said. “I was...”

“You got me there. Kept me alive. Kept me strong.” She exhaled, feeling weirdly guilty, as if she was about to give someone the brush-off. But that wasn’t what she wanted to do. Glamour, she reminded herself, the food and coffee letting her think more clearly again. Seduction and fog. As much as Tyler had been befogged, hadn’t she, too? With Martin’s touches, his voice, his smell...

She wanted to cry.

“And you got Tyler back,” he said.

“Yeah.” For all the good that did. They had warned her, over and over, and she hadn’t understood. Whoever Tyler had been before, he wasn’t that person now.

Then again, neither was she.

They sat there in an oddly awkward silence, until AJ came back through the door, a look of satisfaction on his face.

“Word’s going out. Even the ones who wouldn’t come to us...they’ll pay attention to this. There are communities with a long grudge against the preter Court....”

“Not all of them known for using best judgment,” Martin said.

“True. But they know what’s at stake; they’ll keep her intact, if they find her.”

Jan had a momentary flash of sympathy for the queen, and then decided that, if she was anything at all like the preters Jan had already met, sympathy was wasted.

“Still, we can’t focus all of our attention on her. We need to find a weakness. The preters of old were restricted by what they could do. These...we can’t shut them down, we can’t stop them from picking off gullible humans. Once your term of truce is over...” AJ sat down, his body language finally showing exhaustion. Had he slept at all, while they’d been gone?

“Short of shutting down the internet, we’re probably hosed,” Jan said. “And your earlier plan of finding them sucked. You may not like tech but they... Hey.”

She stopped, things clicking into place the way they did when she finally saw how to redesign something, to fix a problem. Shift and drop, pull and push, and things became so obvious, it was embarrassing.

“What?”

Obvious, but impossible. “It’s probably nothing, but...”

“Nothing is nothing, not right now,” AJ said. “What?”

“The truce the consort gave me. Ten weeks.”

“Yes?” AJ waited, as patiently as he could.

“Ten weeks, ten days, ten hours. Very specific. Ten, ten, and ten.”

AJ looked at Martin, who shook his head. Neither of them got it.

“Wasn’t the traditional magic number for elves seven? Seven years of captivity, that kind of thing?”

“Traditionally, yes,” AJ agreed.

And they’re creatures of tradition and habit, right? They don’t like change, they don’t break patterns. So why ten, suddenly? And three sets of ten? Or, if you look at it another way, one and zero, one and zero, one and zero. It was as though he was constrained to binary.”