by Faith Hunter
I settled on the largest boulder and crossed my knees, leaning back against a smaller rock. I no longer needed to get into a lotus to enter the gray place of the change, but sitting on the rocks in that position was habit. I just closed my eyes and thought about the place I needed to be. It was inside me. I sighed and smiled. All along it had been inside me. And outside me. And probably everywhere.
I felt the energies rise and spread through and around me like a faintly tingling mist. It was cooler than the air, the darker motes of energies sharp and pinging where they touched my skin. I didn’t know if I’d need to say her name aloud or just think it. I was flying by the seat of my pants, after all, just like usual. Be sad if I really did get eaten this time.
I opened my eyes to see Eli on the side porch, his handgun in one hand and a vamp-killer-sized short sword in the other, except that the blade was all steel, no silver plating. Not for vamps. Steel for Soul. Like steel for Gee DiMercy. Who, last time I saw him, was being mesmerized by the bigger arcenciel. Interesting. Both species with an aversion to steel, both tied to the creation myth of the Cursed of Artemis. Had Artemis been an arcenciel? They had left my house together as if they’d recognized each other’s species, if not each other personally.
“Soul,” I called. “Girrard DiMercy.” I waited for several minutes, then called again, this time thinking about the snake dragon and the Anzû, picturing them in my mind. Again I waited. And waited. And called again. And nothing. Either what I was doing couldn’t be done by a skinwalker, or I was doing it wrong.
I tried picturing the gray energies as not a cloud around me, but more a thing that existed everywhere, something that I was part of. Light and matter, two parts of a whole. With dark matter and dark energy in there somewhere. Physics I didn’t understand but was a part of. I dropped deeper into the gray place—the Gray Between—and let myself look out and around, seeing not the world I knew, but a gray net of light and dark, some places dense with dots of energy, some not so dense, tiny dots pulsating. Everything quivered. Everything had movement. Some slower than others, some much faster, the minute vibrations in all things. The thought came to me. This was the unlimited possibilities of the all-space. Which made no sense at all. And yet did.
I felt lighter somehow, effervescent, as if I could fly or float away. As if I could do anything. I laughed, and the vibration of my laughter seemed to affect the area around me and out like rings in a pond when you toss in a stone. This was the way I felt when I had consumed enough alcohol to feel a hint of a buzz, the way I felt when I bit Soul. Suddenly Soul was there, in front of me. She was in her winged, sparkling snake form, and standing on her head was a blue and scarlet-winged bird. Her snakelike tail rattled and shook, sounding like dry bones. “Speak, Jane. U’tlun’ta.”
“I’m not a liver-eater,” I groused.
“You neither are a liver-eater nor are you not a liver-eater.”
“Schrödinger’s cat.”
“Schrödinger was a foolish human, but wiser than most. What do you want?”
“Peregrinus has the hatchling. He captured her in a . . . something. She’s hanging on his necklace.”
Soul showed me her teeth. All of them. And there were a lot of teeth, some as long as my arm. “She was vulnerable to his call because you wounded her with steel,” she said.
She had figured that out. Or Gee had told her. “I know. And I’m sorry. But I need your help to find Peregrinus, kill him, and free the hatchling.”
She pulled back a short distance, like a snake coiling back on itself. “You would help the young one? Even after she killed humans in the vampire council chambers? Why?”
“Why not? Peregrinus forced her. I want Peregrinus dead. You want the baby arcenciel back safe and sound. We’re stronger together than alone.”
“I will assist as I can,” Soul said, “but the hatchling can bind time and space. She can alter energies at will. She is young enough to go where she wishes, or where her captor wishes, once he learns how to ride her. Peregrinus is intelligent. He will have learned from taking the young one and by now will certainly be capable of capturing me as well. I was a prisoner of time once and will not be so again.” She gnashed her teeth and they clacked like pearls against bamboo, a poetic thought totally unlike me. Rather, they sounded like bones rattling. Yeah. Better.
“My kind make a dangerous weapon in the hands of others,” Soul said, “as would my little bird.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Speaking of little birds, can Gee DiMercy find Bethany, the vampire priestess, and the Onorios, and tell them to contact me?”
“This he can do. Go, little bird. Make alliance with the vampire priestess.”
Gee chirped and spread his wings, blinking out of sight. I had no idea where he’d gone, or whether he could manipulate the gray place of the change on his own, or whether Soul just did it for him. So many questions and so few answers. “Thank you,” I said, as formally as I knew how.
Soul winked out of sight. The last thing I heard as she disappeared was the sounds of her tail and her teeth, like bones rattling, like dry bones dancing. Yeah. It was all coming together: the myths, the oral tradition, the scriptures, the lost People of the Straight Ways, and the Builders. All tying in with the weak places between universes and the loss of all civilization through flood, the mythos that tied almost all ancient peoples together.
I opened my eyes to my vacant backyard.
Eli was standing on the porch, his eyes sweeping across the yard, back and forth. “Eli, we need to weapon up and get to vamp HQ.”
He didn’t answer, just swiveled on a heel and headed back in through the open window. We really needed to get the doors fixed. Yeah. Some easy, lazy, sunny, summer day.
• • •
We made a run to Walmart for camping supplies and to a storage unit that my partner had rented and not told me about, and we still got to vamp HQ in plenty of time to prepare. I turned Eli and Alex loose with the new supplies. My lousy plan was coming together, but there was plenty of room for things to go horribly wrong.
CHAPTER 23
The Keeper of the Iron Spike
The staff had been decreased to shooters, swordsmen, and techies. No one who could be killed easily was still in vamp HQ. Housekeeping and the culinary staff were at Grégoire’s under heavy guard, maintenance crews at skeleton levels. It was like a stripped-down Aardvark Protocol. All the blood-servants and vamps on hand were old ones—looking well fed and grim, geared up for battle. I had never seen a vamp war, but it must have been a bloody business by the number of blades the vamps carried.
They were, to a fanghead, wearing chain-mail armor, with titanium gorgets and steel gauntlets with fingers that looked like metal roly-polies. They still moved with the graceful speed of the vamp, but now they clanked, just a bit.
On my part, I was decked out in my best fighting gear—the fancy leathers with plastic joint protectors and lots of silver-plated titanium chain mail. My hair braided into a fighting queue, close to my skull. Tall combat boots and more blades than I usually carried. No long, flat sword. Not yet. Hopefully not ever. But the new thigh holster, yeah. And every other weapon I could think of, with the exception of my shotgun. It wasn’t helpful in close-quarters shooting when I might take out friendly forces along with the big-bad-uglies.
The Kid and Angel Tit were rigging backup coms, the stuff we had picked up from the storage unit, all over the place, putting portable CNBs—communications nexus boxes—on every stairwell and floor. The CNB tactical radio system was designed to work in places where physical or electromagnetic interference was high. Or underground. And on battery power. We had used them before and they had worked great, but the specs were limited. They had to be aligned, pointing in proper places and directions. It took time to set up and the system was clunky. It was also easy to ruin. A swift kick to any box would stop all comms from that location. So the Kid instru
cted that they were all to be duct-taped to the ceilings, which was pretty smart. Eli put the humans to work with the tape and positioning new battery-powered backup lights on the floors. It was low-tech, but was also better than nothing, and not something Peregrinus was likely to be expecting, since most of it had been purchased with cash and not recorded on credit cards.
Go, Eli and his paranoid survivalist instincts and hoarding nature. Not that I would tell him that. He’d either be insulted or arrogantly proud. Or both.
Eli and Derek agreed on locations for shooters. It would be a pain to create such a lousy plan and then get taken out by friendly fire, when it should be much more likely to be eaten by a vamp or a rainbow dragon or drained by the Son of Darkness.
When everything was in place, I sent Alex and the last of the maintenance staff down to double-check the generators. Eli had covered them with metal heating blankets, the kind that he had used to preserve Wrassler’s body heat. It was a long shot, but maybe the little amount of reflective material would bounce any magic EM attacks off. Since we were all trying new paraphernalia and untested theories, I taped a single obfuscation charm on top of the first generator. It might work to keep any spell from finding and stopping the generators. Who knew? But it was the only obfuscation charm I had.
When he was finished with the generators, Alex settled in to the security console with Angel Tit. If this worked, we’d want footage of it. If it didn’t, well, maybe our survivors could learn from our stupidity. Derek and his team and four vamp fighters were stationed at the front entrance. Eli and I chose to man the back entrance under the porte cochere, and took all the new men from the swamps with us. They’d had showers, been fed, and gotten some rest. They looked a lot less scruffy, a lot more operational, and smelled a lot better. I figured Peregrinus wouldn’t use the same entrance twice and we had to make sure that he went in the right direction when he came in. So at both entrances we had positioned fighters to herd him where we wanted him.
On the ground floor at the back, Eli put his hands and arms to work, torqueing his body to open the elevator doors. The elevator wasn’t there, just the dark shaft, which was empty all the way to the basement, filled only with a stink on the air that spoke of mold and rot. At the bottom were the doors that would open to Joses Bar-Judas’ prison. And our pitiful plan.
Eli and his guys settled in to wait, their purpose to lead the attackers to the open shaft and down, and I got ready to carry out my part of the plan. Which was when I was summoned by His Regal Grumpiness via a text message from Del that asked me to come to Leo’s office.
I put the cell in a pocket and looked up to see Eli watching me. “Leo.”
“You haven’t seen him since he was bound on the floor of the catacombs.”
“Worse. I haven’t talked to the MOC since he tried to kill me in my bathroom. And it’s a dungeon. Catacombs are long tunnels.”
Eli smiled. It wasn’t his battle smile, which was all adrenaline and cold intent. It wasn’t the smile he used for his lady love. It was the smile he’d have worn every day had he not chosen the military for his job. Had he not seen and done things that hardened him. It was friendship.
I shrugged. “Leo wants me in his office.”
He looked at his watch. “It’s early yet. I don’t think they’ll attack this soon after sunset. You got a cross with you?”
“Thirteen. Even better. I have a piece of the Blood Cross.”
“Thirteen.” His smile widened. “Lucky number. Be careful. And pick up Wrassler’s Judge on the way. He texted that he wanted you to use it today.”
“Yeah. Okay. That’s . . .” I shook my head at the ludicrousness of what I was about to say. “That is so nice.”
I took the stairs because the elevator shaft was open with the elevator locked on the top floor as part of my lousy plan. “Yellowrock in stairway B,” I said into my headset. “Heading up.”
“Copy, stairway B,” Angel Tit said back.
I increased my speed, picked up Wrassler’s weapon, and reached Leo’s office fast. I wanted to get this over with and didn’t want to be on this floor when the trouble hit. I knocked on the door, which was cracked open, and stepped inside. On the air currents I smelled Leo and Grégoire and Katie. And Del. Oh, goody. The vamp council’s top members all in one place just for me.
Stopping at the opening to the office, I waited. The silence was disturbing on an organic, biological level. No breathing except Del’s and mine, only two hearts beating. Del sat at the desk, a legal pad before her, a pen in her hand, and was dressed in a black sword-fighting suit, her hair up in a severe bun. She didn’t look at me, which told me something, but not what. Nothing on the vamps moved except their eyes. The three studied me in my Enforcer gear as I studied them.
Leo and Katie were sitting on wooden stools at his desk, which made sense, as they were weaponed up like the love children of samurai warriors and the Terminator, and sitting in a chair would have been impossible. Grégoire was leaning against the wall, looking lazy, or as lazy as the unbreathing undead can.
Their battle gear was downright pretty. Grégoire’s was a dark gold leather with an overlay of bright brass-over-steel chain mail that caught the light. Leo’s was black leather overlaid with blackened titanium chain mail and the entire outfit seemed to absorb the light. They made quite a pair. Katie’s battle gear was white with steel and looked all wrong with her white skin and ash blond hair, until I saw the white hood and face plate, like a beekeeper’s hood or a fancy version of the sword-fighting gear worn in Blood Challenges. Del had guns on her. At least three that I could see from my angle. I hadn’t remembered that Del was a gun-gal.
Since no one said anything, I decided to make offense my best . . . offense. “You didn’t call me up here to kill me, did you? Or to pay me back for staking you? Because last time I saw you upright, you were . . . rude.”
A fleeting smile crossed Leo’s face. “You are safe. The error of my ways has been pointed out to me by my primo and lawyer, Adelaide.” A faint smile lit Del’s eyes when she glanced up at me. Her eyebrows lifted in some kind of warning before her attention dropped back to the paper. “My Enforcer,” Leo said. “I ask that you allow me to bind you, that we might communicate in the coming battle.”
It sounded like a formality but I wanted to make sure he knew I was serious. I pulled a silver cross out of my neckband to dangle over my gorget. It was already glowing, with such powerful vamps present, and it brightened my dark clothing. My voice had no inflection at all when I spoke. “No.”
“Why do you stay with our master, Leo?” Grégoire asked.
“Money. And because I’m learning stuff I need to know.” I hooked my thumbs in my utility belt and kept my knees loose, my body balanced. I looked as relaxed as he did, but I was ready to move. My hands were positioned directly over my red-handled .380s, which I’d made ready to fire as I climbed the stairs.
“Such as?” Grégoire asked.
When I answered, I looked at Leo, not his heir and his spare heir. “I’ve learned the reason why all the vamps have such an interest in Leo’s prime real estate. Swamps and a river and ports and jazz aren’t reason enough. The real reason isn’t even because of the world political situation. Most of the reason is because of the magical things that are missing from vamp history. For a while, the EuroVamps thought you had them and that kept you safe, as they were afraid to attack you.” I let some of my anger at him creep into my voice. “But because of what’s hanging in the basement, all that’s changed. Joses Bar-Judas. The Son of Darkness. Is. Hanging. In. Your. Basement.”
Leo was staring at his hands, loosely clasped on the table. Katie was resting across the tabletop, her head in the crook of her arm, staring at him, her face unguarded, and at ease, almost human. Her eyes . . . soft.
Holy crap. Katie is in love with Leo.
Mate, Beast thought at me.
“Yea
h,” I said to all of them.
Leo nodded once, the light catching the curve of his jaw.
My voice hard, I went on. “When Peregrinus got Reach’s files, he got more than hints about artifacts. He found out about the SOD.” Leo nodded again. “Now? Knowing it’s down there—that he’s down there—means that they’ll start coming. It’s out—all your secrets are known now, even if only to a limited number of people. The secret is out. Soon they’ll all know.”
“Yes,” Leo said.
“And what will you do with Joses?”
“Do?”
“Yeah. Leave him on the wall, chained and starving?”
Leo laughed, but the sound wasn’t human. It was the royal laughter of a king who was ticked off. “Shall I set him free? Joses was riding his own arcenciel, which was set free by accident in the fight to take him prisoner. The bite it gave him tore him near unto true-death and stole what remained of his humanity. He has been raving for decades.”
“But one bit you. And Gee.” I stopped. “Oh!” The understanding hung in my mind like a single candle flame in a dark cavern. “Once you had him, you were stumped. You couldn’t set him free. You couldn’t bring him back to sanity or control him. So you hung him up to cure, like a scion. You three had been drinking from Joses—who had survived an arcenciel bite—for years, and Gee from you. You were immune.”
“It seems so,” Leo agreed.
“Holy crap.” I stared at him, trying to make sense of all the possibilities that had just occurred to me. “You drank from him, like, regularly because his blood is so powerful. But you couldn’t control him until you got hold of the pocket watches I found in Natchez. Once you had a few of them with the discs made of the iron spike inside, you had a way to manage him. At least a little bit.”