to react. She could have dealt with a relationship ending, but not the loss of person Ty had been once.
“It was...” She couldn’t say a pleasure. She couldn’t say that. “I’m glad you’re home,” she finished, aware that he wasn’t home, she wasn’t home, this wasn’t home. They’d never go back “home” again, not that way.
Her distress seemed to communicate itself to Tyler, because he pulled back physically. His face seemed to almost crumple, his arms drawing around his torso, and he rocked back and forth in his chair.
“Ty?” She couldn’t help it; she stepped forward, her hand outstretched. His pain and confusion hurt her almost as badly, guilt for being the cause warring with exasperation that he seemed to blame her.
“Home. Home. Stjerne will punish me. Need to go home.”
“Damn,” Zan said quietly, moving across the room with a silent grace, cutting Jan’s own approach off and placing gentle hands on Tyler’s shoulder. “Tyler, it’s all right. You’re safe. You’re here. Stjerne is gone. You control this space. Nothing can come here that hurts you.”
“Make her go away. Go away.”
The healer kept speaking, even-toned and calm. “You control this space, Tyler. If you don’t want something or someone here, you can make them go away.”
“Go away,” he said.
Jan went, closing the door gently behind her.
* * *
It wasn’t personal, not like that. Jan understood. Tyler had been badly abused by the preters, some kind of brainwashing that she didn’t quite understand. That was why he was here, rather than getting help in the human world—the moment he started talking about what had happened, who had done this to him, they’d assume he was insane and put him away forever.
The same way they’d try to put her away if she tried to tell anyone. She had already lost her job over it, with no chance of getting a referral from her boss, who now thought she was insane, and she had probably ruined any chance of getting a new job back in her industry, as well.
Maybe she could go to work with AJ’s car thieves. Or whatever it was that Martin did for a living when he wasn’t fighting off preternatural invasions.
She thought about what the kelpie might possibly do for a living and shook her head. Or maybe not.
“Jobs are kind of a worry for after you save the world,” she said, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. The tears had receded and, miraculously, so had the headache; Jan wouldn’t have put it past Zan to have slipped a whammy on her, or whatever healing magic it was a unicorn did.
Thanking someone, though, seemed to be bad manners here. And Jan was avoiding the issue, trying to take on other people’s problems instead of her own. She needed somewhere to think, somewhere nobody would bother her or summon her while she thought.
The problem with the Farm was that it was too crowded. Even the attic floor, nominally her bedroom space, had a meeting going on in the stairwell, three supers, who looked too much like praying mantises for Jan’s comfort, hunched together, trying to put together a report. No matter where she turned, in the House or any of the outbuildings, things were happening, people were being useful. Everyone except her.
“Shut up,” she told herself. “Stubborn and clever, remember?” So she didn’t know what to do yet. She would. It was like the time immediately after Tyler had disappeared all over again, but then she’d had the insanity of suddenly discovering about supernaturals and the fact that Tyler had been elf-napped. Now she knew what she was facing. And she wasn’t facing it alone.
“Hey.” She accosted one of the kitchen workers, a dryad whose long green hair was tied up in a scarf, her long arms coated with flour. “When Martin gets out of his meeting, tell him to meet me back at the pond?”
“After meeting, human by the pond. Got it.”
* * *
Sitting cross-legged on the grass once again, Jan ignored the occasional splashes from the pond and concentrated on breathing in and out slowly. Her asthma was triggered more by dust and stress, but stress and grass could do the trick, too. Jan didn’t know why she kept coming out here, unless maybe it was because she knew that anyone out here would ignore her, let her mope in peace. For a bunch of alleged nature-friendly beings, few of them ever came out this far.
Maybe it was because they were all too busy, AJ’s orders snapping them into action, focused and intent. She was the only one without a purpose, without a plan. But she was going to come up with one.
“We’ve been focusing on the portals,” she said, thinking out loud. “On the portals, how they’re controlling them and where the queen might be hiding. Turn it around. Why here? Never mind how or why the magic changed. What do we have that they want?”
It wasn’t a new question, but they’d been thinking like supers or trying to think like preters. Maybe it was time to think like a human. A stubborn, heart-driven human.
Someone was walking toward her across the grass. She knew it was Martin without looking, recognizing the weirdly heavy sound, as though his four-hooved form walked with him. She’d noticed it first when they were walking through the preternatural realm, but only identified it as being his specifically once they were on the Farm. She’d idly compared his steps to other supernaturals: some walked heavily, some barely touched the ground, but none of the others had that four-beat cadence to a two-footed walk.
“You left the meeting,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement, with a hint of a question.
She kept her breathing still, her eyes closed. “Did anything useful happen?”
“Not really,” he admitted. Then he paused. “You’re upset.”
“I’m not. I’m...” She was upset. But not the way Martin meant it. She thought. She still wasn’t entirely sure she had a bead on what the kelpie meant when he said something.
Another memory: Toba looking at her with those golden owl eyes, warning her: Do not fall into the trap of thinking that you can understand us—or that we can understand you.
“Your leman hurt you.” Martin sat next to her, and she could smell the now-familiar scent of green water and smoky moss, almost like but entirely unlike the scent of the pond in front of them, and completely unlike, say, the iron-rock-solder smell Elsa had. Jan was learning the supers by their smell now, not just their sight or sound. The thought was either really disturbing or weirdly satisfying. Maybe both. Maybe she could understand them, at least a little bit.
Maybe they could understand her.
“It’s not Ty’s fault,” she said, not even asking how Martin knew it had been Tyler. Maybe he could smell it on her, too. “He can’t help it. I know that. He’s all sorts of fucked up and I’m the only thing that was consistent throughout.” She had read up on all the syndromes and symptoms, the treatments and the stories from family members. She knew that Zan was doing the best job possible, that if they took him to a human doctor, they wouldn’t understand what he’d been through, and the moment he started saying anything about the preters or... Well, she couldn’t blame any human hospital for thinking he needed more than outpatient therapy if that happened. “But it hurts.”
“Of course it does. Because you blame yourself.”
Jan laughed, a rough exhalation that held only a little humor. “Stay away from the pop-psych websites,” she told him, opening her eyes and plucking a long blade of grass, holding it between her thumb and foreginger and studying it with far more care than it deserved. “Even humans have trouble with that stuff. You’ll just screw it up”
That much she did understand. Kelpies—or at least, Martin—were sweet, and funny, and affectionate...and cold-blooded killers who didn’t really understand that killing people, because they suddenly felt like it, was a bad thing. He had empathy in his own way but no morality,