Soul of Fire

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Chapter 4

AJ wanted to howl, to put his head back and let loose with a drawn-out noise that would cut through everything and bring everyone to a dead, cold stop. He didn’t.

It would be satisfying, yes, but it wouldn’t solve anything. The chaos of so many different supers living and working together was barely held under control, creating a constant low-level rumble. Only tightly held control allowed him to orchestrate that rumble into something like a symphony.

Having one of your remote teams drop out of sight for a week and resurface with a report that focused on the brewpubs rather than the hunt they were supposed to be on...

“Pack is easier,” AJ muttered almost under his breath. “I can just knock them over and they listen to me.”

Elsa didn’t laugh. The jötunndotter was a steady, steadfast second in command, but her kind weren’t known for a sense of humor. “Too far to reach, too many of them.”

“I can hit you and you can hit someone and they can hit the right person. That’s called delegation.”

“You would break your paw if you tried to knock me over.”

He wasn’t sure if that was an actual statement of fact or her attempt to respond in kind. He decided to take it as fact.

“Fine. If I send you out to Oregon to sit on these idiots, will you do it?”

“By the time I get there, they will have already done the damage,” she responded. Jötunndotter did not fly. Even if she could get through security without raising eyebrows—improbable—the mass of her stony body would probably ground the plane. And the thought of her trying to fit into a narrow coach seat...

“Yeah, all right, I’ll save you for a local fuckup.”

AJ rubbed at his face tiredly, shoving hair away from his forehead. It felt as if he hadn’t slept, really slept, in months. Maybe he hadn’t. Not since all this had started, the first reports of preternaturals where and when none should be, his own curiosity drawing him to investigate, and then the sharp fear, the need to draw forces together to keep his pack, his territory safe....

AJ hadn’t wanted this, the responsibility of so much, so many. He hadn’t asked for it. But he had been the only one to see the danger, the only one to step up and shove people into paying attention. So he was stuck with it, apparently.

“Boss.” Someone handed him a clipboard, and he signed it, noting as he did so that it was for a shipment of car parts, not anything Farm related. The old warehouse might be gone, burned to the ground during the gnome attack, but the business went on.

Somehow, that made him feel better.

AJ handed the clipboard back and looked at the larger whiteboard hung on the wall. He let his eyes scan the place names written there, all the reports that had come back of where the preters had been spotted, trying not to think of anything in particular or force a pattern on them and hoping that something would stir on its own. Instead, all he could hear, all he could sense was the never-ending swirl of bodies and voices around him.

In the weeks since Martin had brought the humans back from the preter’s realm, since the turncoats had attacked the old warehouse, swarming them in an attempt to take out the ragtag defenders, nearly two dozen more supernaturals had found their way to the Farm. Some of them wanted to defend their home against a threat that had suddenly become real, some of them just wanted a fight, and some of them were bored and thought this might be some interesting mischief. AJ’s job was to make use of them all.

“Mathias.”

A dog-faced super looked over at him, ears pricking in anticipation. “Yah, boss?”

“Go to Oregon. Take Lurcher. Sit on whoever needs to be sat on so I’m getting regular reports. And keep them out of the blasted strip joints.”

“Got it, boss.” He knocked at his companion’s shoulder, rousting him from his newspaper. “We’re on point,” he said. “Grab your bag.”

“One problem. Two—” Something pinged, a soft, muted noise, and then his pocket vibrated. AJ looked at the offending pocket with the sort of loathing most saved for a worm in their meat, and reached into his jacket to retrieve the smartphone he’d finally, grudgingly, agreed to carry.

There were seven text messages from the Florida team, one after another, with the results of their hunt. Complete with photos of... He squinted and determined that, yes, that was his search team hanging out in front of a giant upright shark wearing a neon lei.

Strip joints, tourist traps... The stories that painted supernaturals as flighty, irresponsible creatures were not, regrettably, far off the mark.

AJ sighed and passed the phone over to Elsa, who glanced at the display and then passed it on to another super without comment. The third super, a juvenile lupin from a different pack than AJ’s, scrolled through the texts and barked out information to be added to the charts.

“Teaching them how to text may not have been your best idea ever,” Elsa said, her voice dry.

“Email would have been worse. Trust me,” Jan said from the doorway. “More attachments, more viruses from bad-choice web surfing...” She shook her head, an odd smile twisting her face.

“You know us so well,” AJ said. He liked the human female, much to his surprise, but more than that, he was learning to respect her. All the human strengths—loyalty, imagination—but without the worst of their weaknesses. More, she could make her team focus and pay attention, and that, he knew firsthand, was a daily battle.

She came into the room, and he saw that Martin was lurking behind her. Of course. Ever since the human had discovered the truth about her leman’s disappearance and had—unwillingly, perhaps—joined them, even before the two of them had gone through the portal, the two had been forming a bond of some sort. Since they’d returned, that bond seemed almost unbreakable. AJ was certain that the friendship was a terrible idea and likely to get someone killed, but it wasn’t as though they weren’t all likely to die in the next week anyway.

“The supernatural community tends to veer wildly between deadly serious and utterly incapable of seriousness,” he said now in response to her comment. “It’s not really a useful life strategy.”

Behind him, Elsa snorted, the way only trolls could, and Jan’s eyebrows rose. She almost smiled, a real, amused smile, looking back over her shoulder at the kelpie. “You have a life strategy?”

“Lupin are a little more focused than most,” AJ admitted, ignoring the wounded expression on Martin’s face and the burst of laughter from someone in the room behind him. Everyone else was very pointedly ignoring the exchange, even as they eavesdropped as best they could without being called out for slacking. The supernatural world’s reputation for gossiping like a pair of nannies was pretty accurate, too.

“Do you have a few minutes?” the human asked.

“No,” AJ said. “But sit down, anyway.”

* * *

“Jesus Christ,” the cop said, turning his head away. But everywhere he looked, there was blood and broken furniture. But no bodies. Where were the bodies? “What the hell happened?”

“Bear,” the man on his hands and knees in the kitchen said, his attention focused on the evidence in front of him more than his answer.

“Bullshit. Bears don’t do this.” Patek forced himself to take a better look at the damage, his expression unhappy but resigned. There were deep scars on the walls, from around waist-high, dragging down to the ground. He touched one with a gloved finger: it went at least a quarter-inch deep into drywall. “Okay, yeah, bears could do this. But inside a house? Who the fuck lets a bear inside their house?”

The first thing you learned living in the Adirondack Mountains area was to keep an eye out for bears. Make noise when you went outside in the spring, make sure your garbage was locked up and out of reach, and generally don’t be an idiot, because black bears might look cute at a distance or in the zoo, but up close they were several hundred pounds of muscle, teeth, and claws. More, especially in spring, they saw nearly anything as food, and what wasn’t food was easily seen as a threat.

Patek had seen a bear claw up close during training. Their instructor had used it to scare them, and it had worked. You didn’t want that thing anywhere near you, not when attached to living bear muscle.