happen.
“Jan?” A voice broke into her thoughts. “You want some more coffee?”
“Oh, Roj, thank you, yes, please,” she said, holding up her mug for a refill. The slender, blue-skinned supernatural filled it, then moved on to the next desk, where mugs were already raised, proof that no matter the species, caffeine was the productivity drug of popular choice.
Jan looked around the room again, rather than go back to staring at notes and graphs that weren’t telling her anything new. Twelve weeks ago, Jan had thought that fairies, elves, werewolves were all myths, stories, legends. Then elves had stolen her boyfriend—lured him away via an internet hookup site—and she had been caught up in a chase that had partnered her with a sweet-tempered if homicidal kelpie, and sent her through a transdimensional portal into the heart of the preternatural world, where she had challenged the preternatural court to win back her love and managed to bring everyone back safe, if not sound.
No. Jan shook her head. Not sound. And not safe, either.
Before, she had learned, there had been certain times, certain places the preters could come through to this realm and vice versa. You either knew and waited, or you stumbled on them, and that was it. Now, somehow, the preters were using humans to open and maintain portals between the worlds. The preters didn’t need to wait anymore for a seasonal event or random alignment.
They—the rightful residents of this world, humans and supernatural alike—were racing a clock to prevent an invasion. And the tick-tick-tick wouldn’t stop—until the clock ran out.
Jan couldn’t stand it anymore. She got up from her desk, pushing her chair back and making a harsh scraping noise against the wooden floor. Lisbet looked up again with a frown, and Jan smiled an apology at the jötunndotter, who just shook her head and went back to scowling at a printed report, marking notes with a red pen. Jan left the room, leaving her coffee there to cool.
The farmhouse was a sprawling structure, added onto over generations. Each room had been given over to another facet of their operations, nothing left to idle loitering. But one of the renovations had given the main house a porch that ran along the entire length of the back side, where residents went to steal a cigarette or a moment of silence, away from the ever-present hum of activity inside. Jan found herself there, inevitably, unconsciously, breathing in the cool morning air, searching for the calm she needed to keep working.
And then, equally inevitably, she looked across the yard to the source of her unease and disquiet. Along with the other outbuildings that came with the farm, there was a small shack that had been repurposed as an apartment. It looked harmless enough. The door was open, and she could see movement within. If she wanted to, she could walk across the grass, go up the two shallow steps, and go inside.
She wanted to. She wouldn’t.
Tyler was there.
Tyler. The reason she had gone Under the Hill. The reason she was caught up in all of this. Her boyfriend—the man who had been her boyfriend—had been brought into that shack when they’d returned, and had refused to come out ever since. The damage—both physical and psychological—that had been done to him by the preters...they were still trying to unravel it. His memories were coming back, but they seemed...empty, like something he’d read and remembered, not lived. Even when he smiled at her, something was missing.
She had been warned about this, warned that there would be changes, but she hadn’t believed. Hadn’t understood. All the reading she’d done since then, crammed into half an hour every night before she fell over from exhaustion, had only gone partially toward explaining it. This was more than PTSD, more than Stockholm syndrome.
What the fairie world took, they kept.
Jan wanted her lover, her leman, back. She had fought magic to reclaim him, damn it, gone into the heart of the preter court and won him back by sheer human stubbornness, but that had only done half the job. The man he had been...was gone.
She felt the now-usual tightness in her chest rise, and breathed out through her mouth, then in again through her mouth, letting the tension slide away just a little. The last thing she needed was a stress-triggered asthma attack.
Tyler was safe. That was what mattered. Safe for now, anyway.
None of them would be safe for much longer if they couldn’t stop what was coming.
There was a faint noise behind her, the squeak of a door and the soft sound of footsteps. AJ, she identified, not even questioning that she could identify the lupin’s steps now.
“Hey,” he said, less in greeting than warning, so she wouldn’t spook. They were all a little on edge, yeah. Even AJ. Maybe especially AJ.
Jan didn’t turn, didn’t acknowledge the noise until the lupin—the leader of this ragtag and motley resistance—reached around her with a small plate that looked as if it had been stolen from a back-roads diner, the white surface chipped a little at the rim. But it was holding a thick slice of toast covered with cheese, and her stomach rumbled in reaction, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten anything all morning, and four cups of coffee wasn’t enough to keep a human going.
Ironic, that supernaturals remembered that, when she couldn’t.
“You okay?” AJ asked.
Her mouth twitched in a grin, even as she picked up the toast and bit into it. She was living in a farmhouse in western Connecticut, surrounded by supernatural creatures out of a fairy tale, while her boyfriend was being deprogrammed, and the rest of them tried to find a way to stave off an invasion from another...world? Universe? Reality? An invasion of bloody-minded elves, according to her friend Glory, who—when Jan had finally admitted what was going on and asked for help—had taken the news with terrifying aplomb.
“Oh, good,” Glory had said, her voice scratchy over transatlantic phone lines. “Because when you disappeared for a week without a word, I thought you might’ve had a nervous breakdown or something. Elves are much better.”
The memory of that conversation was almost enough to make Jan smile now. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she said to AJ.
The lupin snorted at that, clearly not believing her. She turned to face him, wiping toast crumbs off her mouth with the back of her hand. The heavy monobrow and elongated nose that was almost a muzzle she barely noticed now; instead Jan saw the worry in those dark brown eyes and the way his mouth was trying not to snarl. Their fearless leader was upset.
“What happened?”
The snarl turned into an annoyed twist. “The Toledo lead didn’t pan out. Team just reported in. There’s an enclave of supers who’ve been behaving badly, but no queen.” She was almost afraid to ask what the lupin considered “behaving badly” for supernaturals. Her research suggested that could be anything from pranking humans to eating them.
She was pretty sure AJ would put a stop to any eating. Pretty sure. But not sure enough to ask. There were reasons why humans and supernaturals didn’t cross paths on a regular basis. But they had no choice now, not with a preternatural queen somewhere on the loose and her court hell-bent on reclaiming her—and claiming this world as their own. Better they find the queen first. Find her and use her to force the preters back through the portals, once and for all.
“So it’s back to the drawing board for Operation Queen Search?” she asked, turning her back on the shed and whatever was going on there to face the problem she could maybe do something about.
“There are a few other teams still out, checking into leads,” he said. “But—”
“But we’re running out of time,” she finished for him. The cold pricking feeling on her arms increased, a feeling not even a sweater would stop. She knew; she’d tried.
Ten weeks, ten days. The numbers ran through her head like code, her brain trying to solve it the way she would have solved a problem in her previous life, when the worst problem she’d faced was a website going live with an error somewhere in it, and a client screaming at her boss, who would then scream