by Faith Hunter
“Brilliant security measure,” Eli said, sounding fascinated.
“Unh.” I pulled the former blood diamond out of my gobag. Hefted it in my fist. Reached over and tapped the lock. Nothing happened. “I figured that would be too easy.” I took the tip of the vamp-killer. Pricked my left little finger. A single drop of blood welled. Skinwalker blood. Blood capable of bending, bubbling time. I smeared the tip of the gem into the blood and tapped the lock.
The lock fell open. Which said something about my blood. Something else to think about later. On that tropical vacation, while sipping a drink with an umbrella in it.
I used the tip of the vamp-killer to lift the lock away and tossed it to the side. It hit real time and dangled, suspended in the air. Eli opened the door. We eased inside. Adan was a skeletal mess of sallow skin over bone, lank hair that was lifting into the air with static electricity, and fangs that looked brittle. Power was wrapped around his hands, thick as taffy, coating his arms and his upper body. He was vamped out, but the sclera of his eyes was pale pink, not red, proving that he hadn’t been fed recently. The vamp was starving. Starving meant insane and uncontrolled. I wasn’t real excited at the thought of freeing him or drawing his attention.
I bent and looked into the geode. The rainbow dragon, the arcenciel trapped in the large central crystal, tilted up her head. She spread her brilliant blue frill and hissed at me. “Well. That’s a surprise. But I guess you can see bubbled arcenciel time even when you’re being ridden.”
The arcenciel drew her head in, arching her neck. I might interpret the motion as surprise. Or not. Dragon body language was unfamiliar to me. “Yes, I see you,” I said to her. “And I know you’re being ridden. If I set you free, will you promise not to bite me?”
The dragon hissed and darted toward me as if she were free, biting inside the crystal quartz with her pearled fangs. She had a lot of teeth. Dozens. All of them finely serrated on the inside edges and curved in for tearing flesh. I rubbed my stomach. “Okay. So much for trust.” And I couldn’t risk setting her free while Eli was with me, couldn’t risk him being bitten. I said to Eli, “Back to the hallway. Just in case our damage to Louis’s and Bâtard’s necks heal too fast, you take position with guns ready and I’ll get back here and take care of the dragon. And we’ll hope for the best.”
“This Gray Between, bending-time stuff sounded like a superpower until I got inside it,” he said, his voice too soft, his breathing fast and unsteady. “I have to say, it’s got a lot of kryptonite.”
We shuffled out of the cage. My stomach twisted and saliva filled my mouth, nausea reaching a peak. I didn’t think I could speak without vomiting, so I just nodded and followed Eli beneath the sword in Grégoire’s back. He drew his weapon and placed it at Louis’ temple. “Go!” he said. I stepped away. Dropped my hand from his shoulder. Eli slid out of the Gray Between. His lips were pursed as if he were speaking, mouth tight, teeth together, the way he might say the first letter of my name. “J—” The Gray Between sliced through me, a slow, cutting change. Noise blasted my ears. Eli’s finger started to squeeze the trigger. Time bubbled back, the sound died, the shot didn’t come. Yet.
I slipped into the cage. I reached around Adan’s arms, threading my fingers through the striations of his magics and into the geode. I got my hands on either end of the quartz crystal that spanned the center of the hollow stone. The dragon inside was in a frenzy, darting in the confined space, banging on the crystal. I had never seen one active inside stone, only frozen in place. I had a feeling that this magic and this time bubble were different from anything I’d previously encountered. And that what I was doing was more dangerous.
Hands comfortably positioned on the crystal, the way I might situate them on free weights before beginning a dead lift, I got my knees under me, back straight, and took a slow breath, which did nothing to halt the nausea. I stood up fast. The crystal snapped cleanly away. But the arcenciel didn’t fly out either broken end. Not sure why she was still inside, I retraced my steps from the cage, set the crystal on the floor, and took more breaths. I was light-headed. The taste of acid on the back of my tongue. The dragon was bashing herself silly on the crystal walls. “Stop, you stupid flying lizard. I’ll set you free outside in a minute or two. Or whatever that amounts to in this no-time.”
She stopped and looked up at me, her pale blue lids blinking once.
“You understand English.”
She nodded, her frill wavering oddly, as if in a breeze, though she was still trapped in stone.
I chuckled softly. “I don’t trust you not to bite me or I’d set you free now. The moment I’m ready to reenter time, I’ll go outside and break the crystal. Four of your sisters are up in the clouds. You can fly straight up and get to them. Make them go away with you.”
The tiny dragon’s wings furled shut and her body shifted in a blur I could see. She lifted minuscule human-shaped hands to place them on the crystal, hands that hadn’t been there a moment past. Her head shifted to human shaped too, though she stayed blue, vaguely like a creature from the film Avatar, except in miniature and with exotic lustrous scales that cast back the light. She ducked her head, looking strangely suppliant, and there was a fine tremble along her body, back, lizard legs, and tail. She looked at her right hand and folded down her thumb, holding up fingers, spread.
“Four. Yeah. Four of your sisters. Two I recognize. We’re friends. Of sorts.”
Nausea rose in me like a tsunami. My balance failed and I slipped to the side, retching, but nothing came up, and at least I didn’t taste blood. My pentagram magics were still working. When I could stand again, I gulped breaths.
I was reaching the end of what I could do in this form. It was half-shift or die. But I needed to finish what I had started. I walked back into the cage. Pulled the small vamp-killer. And placed the eight-inch blade at Adan’s waist. Moving Beast-fast, I stepped behind the witch-vamp. Grabbed him in a sleeper hold. Stood upright, carrying his weight up with me, putting my back into the move.
Adan gasped, a sound that was instantly strangled off. His taloned hands gripped my arm. Feet kicked my shins.
“I don’t want to kill you,” I said, “but I will.”
With the vamp not needing to breathe and not dependent on a heart-rate, the headlock wasn’t a deadly move, but it did hold him in place. He tucked his chin and saw the blade at his liver. Or whatever vampish organ was on the right side at the rib cage. His eyes darted around the room and down at the geode. His body slumped. He hadn’t bathed in a long time, and though vamps usually smelled like herbs and blood, he smelled of rot and bad breath and desperation.
“I have the arcenciel. Your buddies Louis and Le Bâtard are being disabled. We don’t have long to chat. If I ease off the pressure on your windpipe and let you talk, will you promise to be a good little boy and not try to get away? Because, you know, circling back to that whole ‘I don’t want to kill you, but I will’ thing.”
Adan nodded, the pressure of his jaw on my forearm jerky.
“Your conversational gambits are between two words. Yes and no. Anything else and I’ll cut you off. Literally. Understood?” I poked gently at his side with the point of the blade. I smelled the stink of vamp and silver instantly. Adan’s starvation had left him no immunity against the metal.
Adan nodded again.
I was getting good at this interrogating stuff. I eased off his neck and said, “Are you here and working with them of your own free will?”
“No.”
“Have you been working at optimum speed?”
“No.”
“Are you here because the vamps have someone you care about hostage?”
“Yes.”
“If I set you free, will they kill him or her?”
“Yes.”
“So you want to stay here and work?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t sure what to do
about it. I needed to get Adan to stop working on the storm magic, and to do that I had to save his whoever. “Is the hostage on the ship in the waters offshore?”
“No.”
“In Europe?”
“No.”
A frisson of excitement sluiced through me. “Here in New Orleans?”
“Yes.”
I realized the last word was nearly sobbed. “You just earned yourself some new words. How many hostages are we talking? Do you know where they are?”
“Two. Yes.” A pale pinkish tear trickled down his cheek.
What was it with people crying lately? “If I can save them, will you stop the magic?”
“Yes. If you will pledge on your honor to save them I will end the working now.”
Honor. That was a weighty word among vamps. It came with repercussions. The way he had phrased it meant that I couldn’t fail. If I failed, my own life would be forfeit. “Provided you give me accurate locations, and they’re on land, and not among a nest of hungry vamps, and not already dead when I get there.”
“And you will feed me.”
“I will take you, in shackles, to Leo Pellissier, and the Master of the City of New Orleans will provide food.”
“You bargain like a Mithran, but you are not.” Adan drew in a long slow breath, the air whistling against the pressure of my arm on his trachea. “Oh. Oh, yes,” he said.
I knew he hadn’t just been hanging in my arms. He had been drawing conclusions and sniffing with each breath.
“You are Jane Yellowrock. Leo’s Enforcer.”
“Got it in one.”
“I have not been fed. I will not have my usual control. Which was impeccable.”
“We’re not finished bargaining. I want to know everything about Ka Nvista. Everything you know. Every story she told, every single thing.”
Adan thrashed and I eased up more on the pressure. “She was my blood-servant,” he whispered. “Was my primo before I was stripped of my power and placed in this cage. I will tell you what you desire to hear.”
I wasn’t sure that he had agreed to tell me the truth, but I said, “Done,” before I thought it through.
“Done,” he agreed. “I lift my hands, say one phrase, and the storm will begin to diminish. It will begin to follow normal weather patterns and not the artificially created one of my making.”
“Go for it.” Adan didn’t respond and I figured he didn’t understand the modern cant. “Make it happen,” I revised.
Adan extended one taloned hand in front of us. “Et tempestate mortis.”
I waited, watching the magics on the cage, over the twins, across the ceiling to Sabina’s chair, still empty. It took what would have been a dozen breaths in real time, before I saw a flicker. An almost insubstantial alteration in the flow of magics happening outside of bubbled time.
“Your part of the bargain is satisfied,” I said.
Adan made a sound that might have been laughter. Took a breath. “I thirst. I smell human blood.” His fangs schnicked down.
“About that lack of control you mentioned?” I dropped the blade and it started to fall, hitting real time and hanging about two inches from my hand.
“You must—”
I placed my hands on Adan’s head and twisted it with a ferocious jerk. His neck snapped. Adan went limp. I said into his ear, “Leo will heal you, never fear.” I tossed him over my shoulder, reacquired my blade, and carried him beneath the open garage door and out of the warehouse. Outside, the weather was frightful, which had a Christmas song meandering its way through my head. Dang it. Sleet had piled up in corners, in crevices, and partially covered the face of the cold dead guy beside a food truck. Not one of ours so I didn’t linger. I brushed through the sleet hanging in the air and up to the fence near the banana trees. Bending my knees, I tossed Adan up into the air. As he left my touch he entered real time and hung in the sleet like a sad sack of potatoes. His trajectory should take him over the fence to crash-land on the sidewalk. Derek would know what to do.
I raced back into the building and knelt near the crystal of quartz. I placed my hands on the cold concrete floor and said to the dragon, “I haven’t forgotten you.” To Beast, I said, “Okay. Now.”
The transformation was fast and more painful. My spine snapped. Hips shifted, becoming more narrow. Knuckles and elbows and ankles swelled. The bones in my fingers elongated. I blacked out. Came to, still in bubbled time, something shoving up into my ribs. I rolled over, catching a glimpse of my body—half-form—and the crystal that had been sticking into me. “Oh,” I moaned. “Owww.”
I was furry but at least I wasn’t quite so sick to my stomach now. And this was my Gray Between, a place where magic looked like it should, silver, gray, and sparkly. I rolled to my feet, feeling powerful and lithe, all the things that Beast liked about her own form but with opposable thumbs. I picked up the crystal and carried it to the garage door. Standing in the halted sleet, I stared down at the dragon sprite inside. She was back in her winged lizard form, a look of what I might describe as hunger on her face as she pressed on the stone. She stared into the cold night, her entire body shaking with need. “I’m setting you free,” I said, my voice now a scratchy hoarse sound, half-growl. “You bite me and I’ll get Adan back here to call you into the geode. We clear on that?”
She swiveled her head and hissed at me.
I chuckled, the sound nasty. “I asked you a question,” I ground out.
The dragon nodded, her frill wafting back and forth.
“Good. Your sisters are up in the clouds. Get them away from here. To a safe place. Maybe underwater in the Gulf, someplace deep. There’s a rift below Cuba that’s supposed to be deep. Stay away from here for a while.” With that last bit of advice I slammed the quartz crystal onto the ground. The quartz busted into thousands of shards. The blue arcenciel leaped free. She was stuck in real time, a shimmering bit of legend, catching all the light, her scales iridescent, wings unexpectedly feathered. I looked at the clouds and saw that all the arcenciels were still stuck in real time, still caught in the magical storm. Shouldn’t it have dissipated by now? That worry wriggled in the back of my mind like a worm on a hook.
Before I dunked myself back into normal time, I needed to see where the vamps had been hiding. And what and who else were at the other end of the hallway.
I passed the four combatants and scooted along the wall into the shadows. In the back was a small room, maybe ten by ten. The space had been constructed differently from the outer rooms, which were made of traditional wallboard and studs. This space had been bricked up, each wall two bricks deep. Rebar poked up along the top of the brick wall, showing that it had been reinforced. The bricks themselves were level, but the mortar between them was rough and had been left to dry in coarse clumps. There were iron rings in the brick, holding narrow metal frames to the walls, bed frames stacked three high, bunk bed style. Six beds, each with a prisoner on it. Vampires. Four of them were raging, faces contorted, vamped out, fangs snapped down on the little hinges in their mouths, some just needle-teeth, others longer, wider, thicker. They were hungry mad things. The long-chained.
But two of the six were aware, alert, sharing a glance across the distance of their beds. They had been healed. Recently, if the iron shackles on their arms were an indication. I’d bet good money they had drunk from Amy Lynn Brown. Eli would have said that early sorties were often for multiple purposes—to create destruction and lay groundwork, test the defenses, and take what they wanted. Because that was surely all this was, from the revs rising, the magical storm, the kidnappings of Sabina and Amy and Grégoire, everything. To lay the groundwork for a precipitate arrival of the full contingent of the EuroVamps.
Unless Del was right and there were factions among the EVs? And maybe the Deadly Duo had decided to jump ship early and take over before Titus Flavius Vespasianus landed? Or Ti
tus had sent them on a sortie and they decided to take over instead? A double cross? Attempt a coup over Leo and Titus?
Holy crap. That was it. And Leo had to have known it from the very first, because he was good at the political mumbo jumbo. And that meant he had intended for me to deal with it from the very beginning. All by myself. While he cavorted in his office with his lovers. “We are not doomed,” Leo had said, with that faint smile, his eyes on me. “We are quite safe. All is according to plan.” A bitter taste laced through me, dark and harsh. I was Leo’s secret weapon.
Leo needed a good lesson in manners, but I had to survive this situation first.
I returned my attention to the bricked-up room. Sabina was slumped in a chair in the corner, her habit slashed, her olive skin exposed. She was chained with silver. Bites were everywhere, as if they had blood-drained her and then left her body wrapped in chains, silver chains tight and burning against her flesh. Sabina didn’t drink often, holding to a lifestyle of self-restraint and iron discipline, the epitome of the Mithran vampire. Her age gave her a natural resistance to silver, but she had been drained, left weak; the silver had inflamed and blacked her skin. Some of the fang marks were tiny. At some point, they had turned the long-chained loose on her, and the vamps had attacked her. The outclan priestess had also been burned, her torso, neck, and face. Hundreds of tiny pinpoint burns were weeping vampire blood or were burned black.
Her glove was missing, her burned hand exposed. The hand she had nearly lost handling the Blood Cross to save lives. So much history in this woman. So much pain and promise. Yet even so weakened, Sabina was protecting another. Behind her, in the corner against the wall, was Amy Lynn Brown. The young vampire was crouched, her face full of terror, tears streaking her cheeks. She was under a hedge of thorns working. Somehow, Sabina had put Amy under a ward, protecting her.
I had to break Sabina’s chains. If she was free, Sabina could drink from the still-crazy long-chained and find her strength. Get away. And take Amy with her. But the chains would be much stronger, harder to break in bubbled time. I bent over and examined them, following the largest chain around to the back. It was held in place with a lock, the old-fashioned version of a keyed padlock, the outer case corroded green metal, the hasp steel. It had a keyhole in the middle.