for their own. Not much time left for them to find a way to stop it.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we?”
AJ laughed, the low chuckle still as disturbing a sound as the first time she’d heard it. “We’ve been fucked since day one,” he said.
“You know, boss, as a morale builder, you are beyond crap.” But she didn’t have anything better to add. They’d been working both sides of the problem, AJ’s team searching for the queen, her team trying to find a way to break down the new magic, stop the portals from opening. They weren’t making much progress on either. And every day, her skin felt colder, her lungs a little tighter, and she couldn’t blame it on her asthma or the increasingly colder weather.
The lupin looked as if he needed a mug of coffee, too, but it was toxic for him. His dark brown eyes were rimmed with a faint pink from lack of sleep, and it made him look slightly rabid.
“The preters have kept their word, have stayed on their side,” he said. “Definite downtick on reported disappearances.” She knew that; she’d been watching the same reports he had. “But the minute the truce is over, yeah, they’ll be back. And they know we’re onto them, so they’re not going to bother being subtle.”
Considering that the most recent preternatural idea of subtle—hooking up with gullible humans via internet dating sites and then using glamour to steal them away, an updating of the old legends—that was a terrifying thought.
“Should we be expecting violence? I mean...warlike violence?” Jan still had nightmares about the assault on her apartment, the memory of too-fluid limbs, gray-green fingers reaching for her, feathers and blood splattered on the walls, her friend Toba dying, to save her...
“It’s not the way they’ve done things traditionally,” AJ said, “and preters are all about tradition.”
Tradition being the dark of the moon creating natural connections between the two realms, wooing humans by song and dance, or whatever the fairy tales claimed, not sexy chat-room profiles and hauling their prey through portals forced into existence by some unknown magic.
“But from the reports,” AJ went on, “and your leman’s memories, such as they are, I think we can’t rule it out. Whatever new magic they’re using to create these new portals, it’s changing them.”
“And not for the better,” Jan said with feeling.
“They were never all that great to begin with,” the lupin said, monobrow raised slightly. “We just knew what to expect from them.”
“I’ve become a big fan of predictability,” Jan said, even as her cell phone, stashed in her jeans pocket, vibrated and let out a small chime. Crap signal, but her alarms still worked. “My group should be getting ready to log in for the morning meeting. You want me to mention this or not?” She might have been—nominally—leading that side of their operation, but AJ made the decisions. He was their pack leader, literally as well as figuratively.
“No,” he said, then added, “no point to it, is there?”
She’d learned how to recognize the twitch of his face that meant a real, if ironic, smile, and grimaced in return. He was right. Since nothing had changed, there was no point wasting time talking about it. “If we actually come up with anything, I’ll let you know.”
* * *
Jan paused in the hallway before going inside, doing a quick personal inventory. Shirt, not coffee-stained. Hair, reasonably combed. Face, presumably clean, or at least AJ hadn’t mentioned anything, and he would have.
“Oh, god, I hate this,” she muttered.
Jan had lasted exactly one year in a traditional job before finding one that allowed her to telecommute. Most of her day had been spent working in front of monitors, interacting with people via text or the occasional vid conference. Jan hadn’t been required to attend meetings in person, much less expected to lead those meetings. Fortunately, Ops—her team—was easy enough to manage, once she had all her geeks pointed in the same direction.
She took a deep breath and said her mantra, the same one she had been saying for weeks now: You are Jan Coughlin, who was chosen out of how many others to save the world; you have survived gnome attacks and the preter court, being attacked by creatures you can’t identify, and this briefing is by comparison a piece of cake. Damn it.
The communications room had taken over what had been the front parlor in the original farmhouse. The rest of the main floor had been given over to the work space she’d been using earlier, the constant flow of people making it unworkable for conferences of any size and impractical for any kind of privacy. So they’d kicked out the supers who had been nesting in the parlor, cleared all the furniture out, and replaced it with a narrow trestle table that could seat six with room for paperwork and coffee mugs, and hung a massive monitor on the far wall. When the brand-new communications system—ordered and installed by Jan herself—wasn’t in use, the rest of the room was taken over for smaller meetings. But right now, it was filled with people, all waiting for her.
Jan was the only human in the room. She’d almost gotten used to that by now, shoving her way past Lisbet and Meredith, the lupin who had found them and brought them here after they’d come back through the portal, to get to her chair. They both looked up and nodded as she passed. Despite AJ’s original claim that supernaturals didn’t use tech, it had turned out that there were a number of them who not only did, but understood it better than their alleged human expert. Jan was a geek, but her skills were testing and repairing, not creating. There were ten members of her team, including Jan herself, and four of them could blow her out of the water when it came to figuring out how things worked.
Five if you counted the person on the screen.
“Hey, Janny-girl. You look like shite.”
Jan gave the speaker a finger and sat down, placing her reclaimed coffee on the table within easy reach. “Morning to you, too, Glory.” It was afternoon in the U.K. where the other woman was, actually, but Jan held that at eight in the morning she didn’t have to make allowances for anyone else.
The other woman raised her own mug in counter-salute, even as the display split, her image taking up the left-hand side, while another face appeared on the right.
“Hey, y’all.” The man in the new display waggled his fingers, and another hand reached in from offscreen to wave, as well. Kit and Laurie, out in Portland. It was oh-fuck-early out there, but the two of them had probably been up all night.
Glory, Kit, and Laurie: three of the five people Jan had dared contact after escaping the preters. The three of the five who had actually listened—believed. Or at least, not immediately assumed that she had lost her mind or that she was pulling the monster of all pranks.
Jan winced a little, thinking of the reaction of the other two, people she’d thought she could trust, could count on to have her back. One of them had been her boss—had been, since he’d fired her on the spot. Her only consolation was that if they failed and the preters overran this world, she’d be able to say I told you so. As consolation went, it sucked.
“All right, people, let’s get this show on the road,” Jan said, speaking louder to be heard over the chatter of voices, trying to project confidence and get-it-done-ness. She barely recognized her own voice. She wasn’t Linda Hamilton, Terminator-style quality, but there was grit in her that hadn’t been there a few months ago. And it wasn’t just the lack of sleep.
Nearly everyone on the Farm was part of the hunt for the preter queen or watching for some sign of renewed kidnappings. She—and her team—needed to figure out how to stop the new incursions, once and for all.
“Do we even have a show? Or a road, for that matter?” Meredith asked. The lupin would much rather have been part of the hunt; she had loudly regretted ever admitting that she’d once run a computer help desk, once it stuck her on the team.
“Meredith, please.” Jan raised a hand, and the lupin ducked her head in apology.