Broken Soul

by Faith Hunter

  “Jane,” Alex said, his words a laborious jumble in the slo-mo of time. “The people in the rental house and with the rented SUVs, who were following you, they moved. Eli went to check them out and they were gone and the vehicles were turned back in, but there were at least twelve people living there and they had taken photos. That’s one of them.” He pointed to the sword fight.

  My house was full of nutso vamps, two nearly dead vamps, an injured Onorio, various sentient beings, and a stranger with swords fighting a storm god. The two with swords were moving almost too fast for sight, even my enhanced time-sight, a flashing, ringing, crashing of steel, dual circles of reflected light and the spatter of scarlet and sapphire blood on the pale walls.

  Into the doorway stepped a man, dark haired, black eyed, beautiful as a dying angel. He wore jeans and a white shirt that hung open to reveal a necklace of a raptor in flight, boots and wristbands tattooed with blue birds. He shouted something but the words were lost beneath the ring and clash of steel. He was the frightened boy from the painting and the unchanged man with the crystal from the warehouse. Peregrinus. Grégoire’s brother.

  He carried a sword, a double-edged blade with a hand-and-a-half hilt. He raced in and stabbed up at the arcenciel, then tossed what looked like a length of rope over it, a rope tied with something shiny on the end. The quartz crystal. In this light I could tell it was quartz, not diamond. The light of the dragon rippled through it. Eli and Derek fired at the vamp in three-shot bursts. I smelled vamp blood, but Peregrinus didn’t falter. He backed out of the house, pulling the arcenciel with him. As he moved, the light of the dragon flickered, dimmed, shrank to half its size, and went out. The arcenciel writhed once, a snapping, supple movement, and dropped to the floor. It threw out sparks of brown and black, like a dirty fire, the flames dying.

  It shifted shape. In its place was a child, a skinny girl of nine or ten with cotton-candy hair and predator teeth. The shooters repositioned their weapons away and down at the sight of the child. Peregrinus tossed the small body over his shoulder, pressed the crystal to her, shouted something, and vanished through the doorway. In a single instant, the invading kidnapper and his swordswoman were gone. The house fell silent around me. I was heaving breaths as I tried to put it all together, my thoughts fragmented and confused.

  The light-snake-dragon. The arcenciel that wasn’t Soul. It had just been captured, somehow. By two members of Satan’s Three. Who had totally ignored me the whole time. So that meant that all along . . . while they were snipering my house and putting bombs here . . . they had also been waiting for a chance to grab an arcenciel? How could they have known I was being attacked by one? Had Reach known there was an arcenciel around New Orleans? Had he gotten access to the attack on Bitsa, and then given the secret up to Satan’s Three? And, worse, did Satan’s Three have such access to HQ’s security system that they had seen the attack in the gym? I didn’t know. And I didn’t know how to find out or what to do about it all.

  “The Devil,” Katie whispered, her fangs distorting her words. I looked at her. There was blood on her chin and dribbling onto her evening gown. The dress was pale aqua silk that shimmered into ocean blue in the shadows. Her eyes, vamped out and black in the bloody sclera, stared in horror at the open front doorway. “The Devil and her master were here and we still live.” She crossed herself, which looked utterly wrong on the bloody-mouthed vampire.

  At the sign of religious sentiment, Bethany hissed, reached out with one hand, and pulled Leo closer to her side. She was moving weirdly, as if only part of her was working. But her neck was healing, the bleeding already stopped. She extended her own fangs with a firm snap. In a movement too fast to focus on, she buried them in Leo’s throat. Gee knelt at Leo’s feet and slid his palms up the MOC’s pants legs so his palms met the vamp’s skin. Blue light flowed down Gee’s arms and beneath the cloth, into Leo, and through the MOC into the priestess and Katie. Katie shook herself and looked from the front door to the back, her eyes sweeping the room the way an old soldier might. There was something different about her suddenly, focused and determined. With no hesitation, she bit her own wrist and leaned in to dribble her powerful blood into Leo’s mouth.

  To my side I smelled Eli. “You okay?” I asked without turning.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Ducky. Just ducky,” I lied. “The Kid? Bruiser?”

  “I’m good. Bruiser’s breathing,” Alex said.

  “I’m okay too,” Derek said. “No thanks for not asking.”

  “You got any more plywood you can cover the broken doors with?” I asked Eli as I watched the four in a group healing, the MOC between them. The MOC, whom I had staked. Oh. My. I had staked Leo. A titter of laughter struggled in my throat and I swallowed it down. It hurt, as if I’d stuffed something large and squirming into a too-small bag. My stomach cramped as if I’d been kicked by an elephant, and I doubled over, breathing shallowly until the pain eased.

  “Yeah,” Eli said, watching me, sounding too casual. “I laid in a good plywood supply, but repair work isn’t in my contract. I need a raise.”

  I finally got a breath as the pain eased and snorted at the comment. I said, “Partners don’t get raises. They get part of the profit at year end.” From the corner of my eye, I spotted a twitch of smile in reply.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Derek asked. No one replied and I shuffled upright, pretending nothing was wrong.

  “While the doors are both sealed with plywood, we can go out through the windows.” Eli pointed to the three that lined the porch beneath jalousies. His weapons were nowhere to be seen, secreted in his clothes, out of sight but easy to hand. “They used to be doors, by the way,” he added, still watching me, his interest seeming casual, while it was actually far more intense than normal. He was offering unimportant information, as if fantasy-film special effects hadn’t just broken out in my house. “But the doors were removed and the windows retrofitted sometime in the early nineteen hundreds. I could make them back into doors if you want,” he offered. He was standing with his fists balled at his hips, assessing the house in light of our sudden lack of security, but also keeping his eyes on Derek and me. It was a nice trick. “That way we’d have more ways to get in and out next time the regular doors get broken.”

  “Ha-ha.” I lifted my head and sniffed, alarm again racing through me. I turned, following the scent to the front of the house.

  “What?” Eli barked.

  That odd magical prickling sensation again raced over me. Had the light-dragon gotten free? I was still holding the weapons, which I gripped more firmly, staring at the front door. “We got more company coming.”

  “Details,” Eli said, redrawing blades and positioning throwing knives.

  “L’arcenciel. Coming from that way.” I pointed down the front street.

  “Babe, you gotta start telling us before sending out invitations,” Eli drawled. “Stay down, Alex,” he said to his brother as he flipped the overturned couch over him and Bruiser.

  “Yeah. I’m a bad host. All these uninvited guests, and us with no hors d’oeuvres,” I said back as Eli and I moved toward the front of the house and Derek retreated to cover Leo.

  “Some guests don’t need ’em. They bring their own.” He indicated the grouping on the floor just as Bethany tugged a stake out of Leo’s chest. It made a gross, sucking, grinding sound and black blood bubbled out after it, smelling of silver and death. The nutso priestess held her wrist over the open wound and blood dripped in, hers looking congealed, it was so thick. Leo still looked dead, but Bethany was moving better.

  Light, brilliant as the dawning sun, glared in through the broken front door and speckled the foyer with stained-glass tints. It was like fireworks going off in the street, but silent, no pops or sizzling. The light brightened, and I narrowed my eyes against it.

  Through the opening, a long snout entered, moving slowly, full of teeth.
The alligator snout widened into a frilled head that was easily the size of a water buffalo. The whole buffalo. This arcenciel was massive.

  A black tongue flicked out and back in, again, touching/tasting the walls and the floor. It turned its head to me, eyes huge, like iridescent glass, orangey and bright. Her teeth were as long as my vamp-killer and just as sharp, meeting in the massive crocodile mouth, but her teeth were more pearly than the previous arcenciel, her frill containing more white and red. I sniffed. I knew this one, this creature made of light and pearls with slowly spiraling, multicolored hair. Soul.

  “Holy moly,” I breathed.

  I felt movement beside me and Gee DiMercy walked sluggishly past, like a sleepwalker whose feet were being pulled, toward the dragon head with the alligator jaw. Gee was close enough to be the arcenciel’s dinner when he stopped and sank to his knees, as if he was being weighted down to the ground. He was mumbling in a language that was all consonants and hoarse coughing sounds in the back of his throat. He raised his hands and begged forgiveness. It didn’t have to be in English for the sense of the words to be made. The black dragon tongue flicked forward and touched Gee’s forehead, once. Again. The dragon head tilted, as if considering the taste or remembering something important. Or as if listening to the rumbling litany, which switched to English. “I failed. I failed.” Gee said. “I did not know there was a hatchling, a wild one flying free. I did not know what to do. I failed, Mistress. The young one was stolen . . .”

  I stayed well back, Eli at my left shoulder.

  When Gee DiMercy fell silent, I moistened my lips and murmured, “Soul?” My tone was one I might use to a skittish horse, if most horses didn’t bolt at first scent of me. “You want to tell us what’s happening?”

  The alligator lips opened, but the sound that came wasn’t from the mouth. It seemed to come from all around me, like the way bells sounded in an empty cathedral. “Your magics call to us. We see you in the Grayness Between Worlds. Your magics called the hatchling. She followed you, yet you did not protect her. You allowed her to be taken.”

  “I did what?” Hatchling? Maybe I hadn’t understood. The cadence of Soul’s words was different in this form, as if English was a second language. As if her brain was formulated differently.

  “I smelled/tasted one of my kind on your vehicle window,” she said. “I had thought she was fully grown, was of the old ones, like me. The blood of the hatchling was on your hands then, but she still lived. She came to you when Satan’s Three attacked you at the warehouse. Yes? She came to save you, to fight alongside you?”

  “Possibly,” I said, choosing my words carefully, because Soul sounded pretty confused, and a confused predator was a dangerous predator. “I took a pretty big hit that night. I saw an arcenciel before I passed out. I’d seen her several times. She’s smaller than you.” I remembered the body of the child that Peregrinus had carried out the door. Hatchling . . .

  “You did not intend her harm?”

  I shook my head.

  “The old ones did not know there was a hatchling,” Soul said. “There have been no young ones in over seven thousand years. Now her magic has vanished.” The luminous eyes latched onto me like a snare. “You have brought us into danger. You are the witch of death; you are liver-eater. U’tlun’ta.” The Cherokee term for evil was husky on the dragon’s breath—“hut-luna”—the syllables reverberating through me until my bones ached with the accusation. Her mouth opened to display the razor-edged teeth.

  I backed up fast as more of Soul came in through the doorway and passed through the walls, a shimmering glow. Her power and light filled the house, sparkling and frozen. I was an idiot. There would have been scent on the SUV, l’arcenciel blood-scent on my blade. I had cleaned it, but blood, crystalline blood, might never clean completely. And in her light-form, Soul’s sense of smell was probably much better than when in her human form. I am an idiot! Idiot, idiot, idiot!

  Derek maneuvered closer, between Leo and Soul, but my attention stayed on the arcenciel as I continued to put it all together. Soul had smelled one of her species on the SUV and had seen the vamps attack out at the warehouse. She had known something was wrong but not how bad it really was. What had taken her so long to show up here, I didn’t know, but maybe tracking a being made of light was harder than it looked. And then she finds the hatchling, just in time to see the young one killed or kidnapped by Peregrinus, her magics contained, or stolen. That was the only thing that made sense. But why didn’t she go after the hatchling, if she could see it in the Gray Between? Unless . . .

  “Is the smaller dragon dead?” I asked Soul. “Or was she taken prisoner, her magics hidden?” I felt a hollow dread in my gut. If she was dead, was that because I had stabbed her and wounded her in the gym? Would she have been able to fight off the vampire if she had been at full power? “I am not u’tlun’ta. I didn’t kill the hatchling.” Which totally left out the part about me stabbing her. Liar by omission, that was me.

  “She saw your magic and came to you. Yet you say that you did not steal the hatchling’s magic?” Soul hissed, aloud this time, her voice still ringing like bells, but deeper and more powerful than her human voice. “You do not ride her magics? Then where is she!”

  “Peregrinus stole the hatchling,” Gee said.

  “Peregrinus.” The word was filled with derision and not a little horror.

  “I will help you to find her,” Gee said, “and return her to the waters of life.”

  “What he said,” I managed.

  Soul rippled; a blast of light shot out, blinding us all. Eli and I stepped back, throwing our arms over our eyes. When I blinked into the blurred image of the retinal burn, I saw Soul standing in the doorway, all size-sexy of her, her silver hair and a filmy lavender dress floating in a slow breeze only she felt. “Until you texted me, I had thought the Peregrine was still in Italy,” she said. “I had a lot of catching up to do, research-wise.”

  Soul was staring at Gee as she held out her hand in invitation. “Come to me, little bird. I smell her scent on you. She bit you, yes?” Soul laughed, not unkindly. “Let’s fly together. And you can tell me all you know of the hatchling.”

  They vanished in a flash of gray energies, shot through with black and sapphire motes. And my house was suddenly mostly empty.

  With the situation at least moderately secure, my body decided it was safe now to give in and let the stomach cramps take me over. I bent double as my insides tried to twist me apart. I had been right. Pain delayed was pain intensified. I’m gonna die after all was my last coherent thought.

  CHAPTER 18

  Werewolf Laughter

  The cleanup took two hours and left the house with the cozy, lightless feel of a cave. I liked it, once I was able to breathe enough to appreciate it. Eli was less positive, but he’d find security issues in a castle, one with a mote, a drawbridge lined with C4, and rocket launchers and antiaircraft weapons mounted on the turrets. I smiled to myself at the image, limping, still holding my middle with an arm.

  I put the mop away, still smelling vamp blood, even over the smells of bleach and suds, even with Leo gone to Katie’s place where he could feed on the working girls, and be ministered to by the priestess until he was fully healed. He hadn’t come to, while he was lying on my floor, but he had looked a bit less lifeless before his heir had hauled him over the fence, handling his body one-handed, Derek behind her, his dark skin gray with fatigue. Katie was scary strong.

  The priestess had left, without a word, just walked out the front door opening and disappeared into the night. Their departures had left the house feeling too large and far more windy.

  Once I was able to formulate a rational thought again, we had debated moving. It was an option. But the debate hadn’t lasted long. Only that castle with the mote and the rocket launchers could protect us now.

  So Eli and Alex had made the place as secure as possibl
e, with plywood, quick-mounted motion detectors, cameras focused on the street, the side and backyards, and the wall around back. Which was ironic, as I had broken the ones Katie had put there to keep tabs on me when I first came to New Orleans. We weren’t safe in this house. But after staking Leo, I wasn’t safe anywhere, especially not at HQ, and the Youngers still refused to go camp out at vamp central without me. And Soul, whose luggage was still upstairs, could find me in the gray place of the change, and move through brick and plaster better than the light she seemed to be made of. Here we stayed.

  We were sitting down to a quick dinner—salads, steak, microwaved potatoes, Coke for Alex, and beer for Eli and me—when the rain started again, a loud and demanding storm with wind and lightning and thunder. The meal was without music, without TV volume, with only the storm to hide the approach of strangers and enemies, and the outside cameras hooked up to the Kid’s monitors. Rain beat down on the roof, the front of the house, and added a loud staccato rumble to the dinner.

  I hoped the rain might be loud enough to wake Bruiser, who still slept on the couch. He lay on his side, curled in a half-fetal position. The man didn’t snore, which pleased me for reasons I hadn’t looked into yet.

  My cell buzzed midstorm with a text from Soul that said, We are here. See lights in house. No answer at door. NO DOOR. Please advise. Are wet.

  I chuckled and texted back, Side gate. Enter through window. To the guys, I said, “Soul’s back and she must be human because she can text. And she’s not alone, and she’s wet. Oh. And she noted that we have no front door.”

  “She’s clearly got mad powers of observation even when she’s a dragon,” Alex said. “Got her on the monitor. Well, well, well. This should be fun.”