Broken Soul

“In that case, most likely, water is seeping through the walls,” the Kid interrupted, “and is collecting on or dripping on the wires. That would cause the stuff you’re seeing, brownouts and blackouts and loads of glitches. The electrical is tied into everything from food storage to the computers to the security systems.”

“Ducky.” The word sounded as tired as I felt. “Just freaking ducky.” Because our jobs had just gotten harder and we all knew it.

“I’m waiting for a final arrival time for the Otis repair people. I’m aiming for after six a.m. on whatever day they can come. You’ll want to have security personnel with each member of the repair team.” We both looked at Eli.

“Okay by me. I’m always up for a rappel down an elevator shaft. I’ll make coffee,” Eli said, sounding psyched. He disappeared into the kitchen. The Kid and I blinked and shook our heads in unison. Eli had weird ideas about what was fun.

When he came back, bringing with him the smell of espresso and a mug, I said, “Now we get to talk about my SUV. I got attacked again, just like that time that thing, whatever it was, attacked me on my bike.” I looked at Eli. “The SUV is damaged.”

Eli dropped back into a chair across from me, his eyes crinkled up in delight. “Really? Leo will be so ticked off at you for damaging his loaner. Can I watch you tell him?”

“Thanks for the heartwarming concern. Leo won’t care. Raisin, now, she’ll care,” I grumbled. “She’ll probably take the repairs out of my pay.” Raisin was the name I had given to Ernestine, the in-house CPA, the woman who ran all things of vamp financial natures, and kept the vamp social calendar. She was, like, three hundred years old, and got decades older every time I saw her, dry and wrinkled and old, like an unwrapped mummy, and she wrote my checks—yeah, old-fashioned checks written with a pen dipped into ink—and paid the vamp taxes and kept the bills and paid the food service vendors and clothing expenses and collected tax money and tribute money from the subservient clans and worked with financial advisors to make money with the money she collected. And she took care of paying for cars. And paid repair people. And she didn’t like me because I cost money. Raisin terrified me, maybe because she had authority and wasn’t above slapping the back of my hand with a ruler to punish a transgression.

“Being boss has to suck.” Eli looked positively happy about my having to face Raisin.

“Yeah. Back to the thing that attacked me? It was probably caught on a security camera in front of the Cigar Factory on Decatur.”

“On it,” the Kid said.

“The last time I was attacked in the streets, I was on Bitsa and was hurt pretty bad. This time, it didn’t get near me, but I was surrounded by steel and glass, so maybe it can’t tolerate either. Bruiser injured it that time with a steel blade.” It had happened in the gray place of the change, which I hadn’t gotten around to telling the guys about. The weird thing was that I’d never seen a nonmagical being in the gray place until Bruiser strode into it. Somehow. And Bruiser and I had, so far, managed to not talk about that. In fact, I had managed for us to not talk about much at all, except for work. Nothing personal. Nothing about . . . us. Whatever we were. But from the looks I’d gotten this evening, that wasn’t gonna last. Whatever space Bruiser had been giving me in the wake of Ricky Bo’s betrayal was used up. He was gonna do . . . something. Whatever. And soon. That left a hollow feeling in my middle, and I drank deep from the tea, licking the melting Cool Whip off my lips.

“So, steel,” Eli said. “Possible to hurt it, then, as long as we’re faster than it is.”

“Good luck with that,” I said.

The Kid was still typing, his fingers clacking on the keys. He might like touch screens and the newest model of tablets, but when it came to reports, Alex was old-school, using an ergonomic keyboard and Microsoft Word. All important files were encrypted and triple backed up, unimportant files were just backed up and e-mailed to himself. For his birthday, as a surprise, I had opened accounts for him online at three different electronics stores. Of course, I had put a limit on all of them—I wasn’t that stupid.

“This light creature. Was it the same one that attacked you last time?” Alex asked. “I mean the exact same creature or just one like it?” Which was the question I’d asked myself.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Why? How’s the research coming on them?” I scooted across the couch, closer to the small table he used as a desk.

“Not good.” He shoved his hair behind one ear, the curls getting kinky as his hair grew out. I didn’t know the Younger brothers’ ethnic backgrounds, but African figured prominently in there somewhere. “And if there’s one, there’s usually more.”

Not always, I thought. A pang went through me, shrill as a cracked brass bell. I’d seen only one other of my own kind since I walked out of the mountains at age twelve. And he’d been insane.

Unaware of my reaction, Alex went on. “Maybe all of them hate you,” he added with glee. “The closest I can find for it is the lillilend, a mythical creature adopted by gamers as a lillend.”

“Wait a minute. My dragon made of light is a role-playing-game creature? Seriously?”

Without looking up from his tablets, Alex gave me a lopsided grin. “Gamers adopt a lot of mythical creatures and then crossbreed them to get new creatures. The lillilend is a shape-changer.” He glanced up at me from under his too-long hair to see how I’d respond to the presence of another shape-changing creature in the world, besides weres and skinwalkers.

I sipped again, which he took as “No comment,” and went on. “It has a female human or elf-like form, one with legs and arms, but also has hybrid forms, sometimes winged, with a twenty-foot wingspan. When it’s in the hybrid shape, it’s been reported to have a humanoid upper half, or humanoid head, and a snakelike lower half, with coils that can reach twenty feet. And wings. When it’s in one of its hybrid forms, it can acquire a pure energy structure. Like a creature made of light, as seen through a prism.”

Light forms. Like what I saw in the gray place of the change? I thought back to the creatures I’d seen. I didn’t remember a twenty-foot wingspan, but if the wings had been made of light, or had been pulled in tight, then maybe I’d just overlooked them. And if they’d been half-furled, maybe they had looked like a frill. And maybe the one I’d seen wasn’t fully grown. A lot of maybes.