Free Laura Anne Gilman by Heart of Briar Page A

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 you?” Yellow-eyes responded, not looking up, either.
“Come on, girlie, it’s just a soda.”
    She was thirsty—extended bouts of fear and panic did that to
her. “What kind?”
    “We got Coke, Diet Coke, Dr Pepper and Jolt.”
    She realized suddenly that he had a small, sharp beak rather
than lips, giving him a faint, sharp lisp. That...was weird. Weirder than a
werewolf, or a woman made of rock, or a guy who turned into a horse? Yes, she
decided, it was.
    “Gotta love that stuff,” he coaxed. “Twice the caffeine, all
the sugar.”
    “Do I look like a programmer?” she muttered. “Diet Coke.
Please.”
    Something swooped over their heads, a shadow of wings, and Jan
ducked instinctively.
    The owl-faced being chuckled at her reaction. “Ignore it, and
it’ll leave you alone. Don’t take that as a general rule, though; sometimes
ignoring things can get you eaten. My name’s Toba. I’m the closest thing to a
geek we have, so I guess that makes me your aide-de-camp.”
    He had a nice laugh. “How much of a geek are you?”
    Toba shrugged. “I use a cell phone, and I know how to send
email.”
    “Oh, god.” Not that she had been expecting much more, at this
point. “All right, that’ll have to do. If I’m going to get online to anything, I
need my laptop, and a signal. That means I can’t work here.” She didn’t want to work here, more to the point. “I need to go
back to my apartment.”
    Where it was safe. Familiar. Not filled with...things swooping
overhead, changing shapes, or looking at her with wide, golden eyes.
    Toba shook his head solemnly. “Can’t do that. The turncoats’ve
marked you. Ten minutes outside, out of our territories, and they’d track you
down.”
    The matter-of-factness finally got to Jan, where everything
else hadn’t. “The hell I can’t go back to my apartment! My gear is there, my
clothes—my medication!” Her inhaler would only last so long, especially if they
kept throwing stress like this at her. And the dust—god, between the dust and
noise, warehouses were not high on her list of places to be. “If I stay here
much longer, I’m going to get sick again,” she said. “Maybe bad enough to need
the hospital.”
    “You don’t want to lead the turncoats back to your apartment,”
Martin said, coming to join the conversation, obviously having overheard
everything. She wondered, a little wildly, how good their hearing was, could
they all listen in, even from across the warehouse floor? Did she have no
privacy at all?
    “They’re slow thinkers, but determined, and vicious; if they
figure out where you are... You have to stay here, where we can