by Faith Hunter
“With your permission.”
When she turned to me, she was holding a small drawstring bag. “You know its worth. That this artifact is invaluable, irreplaceable. It has left my hands only twice before, in all the long years it has been in my safekeeping, the second time to you. Now you will take it from me yet again.
“Remember my warning. To prick the skin of a vampire with even a sliver of the Blood Cross will cause him to burn, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, unto true-death. This shard of the Blood Cross will destroy the descendants of the Sons of Darkness. All others of the dark will sicken and likely die, possibly including one who walks in the skins of beasts.”
I nodded. I had heard her warning before. And who knew what effect a black-arts, blood-magic device, one created to bring a dead human man back to life, would have on anyone, human or supernatural.
“You will return this to me when the Mithran Peregrinus is true-dead.” Sabina held out the small drawstring bag, silk velvet outside, padded within.
I took it and felt something inside it, long and slender, like a small stake. The sliver of the Blood Cross. Yeah. Priceless. I tucked it into my shirtfront, careful to place it so it wouldn’t pierce the bag and my skin and maybe kill me, and also so that I wouldn’t bend wrong and break it. That seemed like a bad idea.
“Thank you, Sabina. Oh. One more thing. Tonight, a white werewolf stuck in wolf form, one who met the angel Hayyel, ran up and bit the foot of Joses Bar-Judas. Should I be worried?”
Sabina burst out laughing. It sounded like a dying seal honking combined with a set of ancient gears scraping, unused and dried out and so very not human. Vamps weren’t supposed to be able to stay vamped out and laugh at the same time, but I had to wonder about Sabina, because the sound was nothing a human throat could make. It gave me the willies.
I realized she wasn’t going to answer me, so I nodded and backed to the door and out onto the porch. Her cackle followed me all the way.
Eli was waiting on the porch, a weapon in each hand. “What’s that noise?”
“The priestess, finding joy in my tale about Brute biting the Son of Darkness.”
“Yeah?” He leaped off the short rise to the path below and led the way back to the SUV. He took the driver’s side this time and I let him. As he cranked the vehicle, we could still hear her laughter. Eli said, “I can’t say why, but that laughter doesn’t inspire confidence.”
“Our situation could be pretty grim. Either Brute will turn into a vamp-werewolf or Sabina likes the idea of the Son being bitten. Or something much, much worse. I’m betting it’s the one behind door number three.”
“Not taking that bet,” he said as he drove out of the vamp graveyard. The gate closed behind us. It didn’t creak or groan. Sometimes vamps lose the perfect opportunity for scary ambience.
“One question,” I said as we drove into the sunrise. “The other priestess, Bethany, told me that, ‘Together we can ride the arcenciel.’ What do you think that means?”
“Rodeo?”
I laughed, the sound normal and human but tired. I was so tired. I yawned. And slumped in the seat. And fell asleep. Eli let me rest until we got back to New Orleans, waking me when we stopped at my house. I couldn’t remember when I’d last really slept, and I stumbled through the side window and to my bed, where I collapsed again into dreams.
• • •
I woke sometime later, still fully clothed, to see the weapons and the sliver of the Blood Cross on the bedside table—thank goodness not on me where I might have rolled over and shot myself in the butt. I had been dreaming of Bruiser. His image hung in my mind, an image remembered from his bedroom—shirtless, pantless, everything-less except the important bits. Beast purred in the back of my mind. “Stop that,” I said to her.
Bruiser and I still hadn’t talked about that day. I pulled out my handy-dandy bulletproof cell phone. I had messages, but nothing from Bruiser. Even knowing that Peregrinus or a human techie could trace any call I might make, I sent Bruiser a message that said, succinctly, Call me, dang it, and rolled back over into sleep and into dreams that left me both agitated with longing and satisfied. Some dreams are better than others, and as dreams went, these were excellent.
• • •
It was midafternoon when I woke again and this time I stripped and showered, hoping the cool water might stand a chance of waking me up. It did clear my head, and it also allowed me time enough for my subconscious and dream-state mind to present me with a plan. It wasn’t a good plan, but any plan is better than no plan. It also gave me time to figure a few things out.
Hair braided up on my head with sterling hair-stick stakes to hold the large bun in place, wearing jeans and socks and a sports bra and tee, the small bag containing the sliver of the Blood Cross hanging from my gold chain, I left my room. Eli, looking wide-awake, was cleaning his weapons at the kitchen table. Sitting cater-corner from him, Alex was working on his tablets. The Kid leaned back and switched on a fan that emitted a low-level hum of electronics. It wasn’t hot in the room, though the air conditioner was humming outside, which meant he was using the fan as a low-tech voice dampener.
I poured tea that someone had obviously set to steep when they heard me get up, and I stood at the table near them. Added creamer and sugar. Cognizant of the fan’s noise level, I said softly, “When was someone going to tell me that Bruiser was one of the people that Bethany took with her when she went gadabout last night?”
Alex’s head jerked and his heart rate sped, though his eyes never left his screens. Eli’s heart remained steady and his hands stable on the weapon he was laying out. “When we knew for sure,” Eli said. A hollow place opened up inside me. I had been guessing, but—“And then when you woke. No point in waking you to tell you something you can’t do anything about, now, is there?”
“You do know that talking so reasonably is one surefire way to tick a woman off?”
“The woman of my dreams has so informed me.” He said it with a grin, an odd one for him, showing teeth, and he added, “And Syl accompanied the information with a head slap, which led to the most amazing—”
“Stop. Not interested,” I said.
“I am,” the Kid said.
“No,” Eli and I both said together. Family was so wonderful. But Eli still had that odd note about him. I watched him work as I sipped, worry for Bruiser worming through me, growing. He should have called by now. “So do we have video of Bruiser and the nutso priestess leaving vamp HQ together?”
Eli tilted his head at his brother, who fiddled with a tablet before swiveling it toward me. I sat, straddling a chair, holding the warm tea mug/soup bowl in both hands propped on the chair back, to watch. Bethany was shown on three screens, dashing through darkened vamp hallways, some floors and walls streaked with blood. Brute was on her trail, racing close at her feet, his muzzle black from biting the thing on the wall, the thing called Joses Bar-Judas, and his crystalline eyes seemed to glow with light. Not good. Bethany had to know he was there.
She passed one of Derek’s men. Hi-Fi, short for Vodka Hi-Fi, a mixed drink and his team name, spun from an all-out run as she touched him, to follow her. Hi-Fi and the werewolf raced after her to the front entrance, where the way was blocked by a group of men, scruffy guys in night camo—the cloth blacks and grays—and carrying guns. In front of the group was Bruiser and the two other Onorios. I hadn’t seen Brandon and Brian since the arcenciel attack. It looked like they had gone somewhere and returned with backup.
Bethany paused long enough to reach out and touch Bruiser, standing in the busted-out entry. He was dressed in Enforcer regalia, leather and weapons enough to finish his own little war, but when she touched him, he went still; then he whipped in behind her and raced away with the others. Brandon and Brian followed. Brute was still with her too, like a good dog following its master. Hi-Fi moved after them, stumbling at first, then moving with purpose and picking up speed.
“She rolled Bruiser, Brandon, and Brian,” I
said. “I thought Onorios couldn’t be rolled.”
“Maybe not by an ordinary suckhead,” Alex said, “but it looks like a priestess might be different.” Slower, he said, “A priestess who was mostly responsible for George rising as an Onorio and not being turned into a scion chained to a wall. Or dead. Maybe she left a, you know, like a back door, into a firewalled system. She has the password.”
I grimaced and tried to ignore the spike of reaction. I was not jealous. I was not. “And the twins?”
“I got nothing there,” Alex said. “I don’t know when or how they were changed from blood-servants to Onorios. But if Bruiser’s method—essentially dead, then brought back by the priestess—is the only way, and it may be, for all we know, then maybe she brought back Brandon and Brian too.”
“Bethany, Brandon, Brian, Bruiser, and Brute,” Eli murmured. “You got some good alliteration going on there, Janie.”
“Ha-ha,” I said to Eli. “Fine,” I said to Alex, and pushed the tablet to him. I glowered at nothing and sipped my tea. “Any way to track where they went?”
“No. Sorry. Power went out in the Quarter, remember? The only reason we have this much is the one generator that came back online.”
“Is there any way to track them later?”
“His cell is off. I can try to ping it. Or try to turn it back on. But if Peregrinus is in our systems, he’ll get the data and location, and know that we’re interested in it. In George.”
I glanced at the fan, sipped my tea, and thought. Eli wasn’t talking much. He was too quiet. “I called his cell earlier,” I confessed. Neither guy said anything, but I knew they were thinking that it was a stupid move. “Do we know where Peregrinus is?”
“No,” Alex said. “But we’re all in agreement that he’ll be back tonight.”
“Without his backup, since they’re all dead.”
“Except for the arcenciel,” Eli said, his tone mild.
No one answered. I sipped some more tea. Worried about Bruiser. Then I sighed. “I need to try something. Practice something.” I shrugged. “I need to enter the gray place of the change and see if I can see Soul or the hatchling. And maybe get a fix on Bruiser.”
“You can do that?” Eli asked, his voice calm, sedate, nearly toneless, the tenor that told me he was preparing for battle. I should have picked up on it already.
“I have no idea. But I think I need to try.”
“You could just text her,” he suggested, sounding quietly rational.
“This is about more than just information. If we have to fight the hatchling, and Soul shows up and takes the hatchling’s side, we might be toast. You know, since we have no idea what her powers are.”
“And if she tries to eat you while you’re in the gray place?”
“Hope she gets heartburn?”
“Not overly funny,” Eli said. “Don’t quit your day job for the comedic stage.”
“I’d need better writers. Better sidekicks too. Guys with wicked T-shirts, tights, capes, and way-cool masks.” They ignored me. I set the mug/bowl on the table and stood. “I’ll be outside for a bit.”
“I’ll keep watch,” Eli said, still not looking up from the weapons. Hands moving as fast as Beast might, he began reassembling the nine-mil. I watched as it practically flew back together with fine, delicate little clicks. He slammed the magazine home and racked the slide to load a round, removed the mag, added a final round, and slammed it home again. He stood and gestured to the windows at the side of the house.
I went through one, Eli behind me. I climbed up on the rocks at the back of the house in the rock garden that had been part of the requirements for me to come to New Orleans in the first place. I still didn’t know where Katie had gotten boulders or how much it had cost her to have them shipped in, but they were much the worse for wear, several chipped and ground down to a medium rock sand from the times I had needed mass to shift into an animal bigger than I was. Beast had stopped asking to be big so much recently, since I gained a few pounds.
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, o
nce 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.