Heart of Briar. Laura Anne Gilman

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ