I slouched down in the vehicle seat and took a chance; I dialed Soul. She picked up instantly. “What have you learned?” she asked.
“Too much and too little. I need you to confirm that you are the same species of creature as the arcenciel that attacked Leo and Gee DiMercy. Gee hints that it might be so. And I need to know what the gray place of the change is—that’s what I call the shape-changing energies that seem to operate outside ordinary Earth physics and time. And I need to know now.”
Soul didn’t answer at first, and I rolled the window down an inch so I could hear anyone or anything approaching. The window was still cracked from when the light-dragon hit my vehicle. I really needed to get that fixed before a cop pulled me over and ticketed me. By the unchanging scents, there was still nothing anywhere around, only the smells of small animals, the heady heaviness of freshwater, the soft susurration of the wind, and the deeper, more powerful vibration of the river on the other side of the levee.
“I will call you back,” she said, and the call ended.
I waited for perhaps two minutes, before I began to wonder whether she had blown me off, or if maybe she had meant she would call me back later. Then my cell rang, an unknown number on it. Burner phone?
“Yellowrock,” I said.
Soul said, “Some have hinted that you are dangerous, with your questions and your species-gifts untaught and unproven. Those same have proposed that you be removed to lessen the danger to the rest of us.”
Removed? Meaning killed? But before I could ask, Beast pressed down on my mind with her paw. In the darkness of my mind, I saw a mental image of a puma high on a ledge over a trickle of water. Waiting, still and silent, for prey.
Soul went on. “I have offered my recommendation that you be allowed to hunt for truth where you might find it and use such truth as you might wish. An experiment that might lead the imprisoned into the light.”
“Thanks,” I said, my tone offended. “It’s nice to have someone in my corner when I’m being judged without the chance to speak for myself. Some who?”
“Some of my ilk. My species, as you said.”
“Okay. So there are a lot more of you than I was thinking.”
“The lines are open again. For now, yes.”
Which meant nothing to me. “I’m not in the mood to play games,” I said, feeling tired. I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my fingertips. They felt hot and dry. “Please just answer my questions. Just this once will someone please just answer my questions without making me bleed for the answers. Please?”
Soul laughed, not unkindly. “I am of the Light, what some have called arcenciel or essendo luci. Light-beings. Rainbow dragons. Humans have worshiped us and witches have imprisoned us and used us for their magics for eons of time. We have come and gone upon your Earth and others like it for millennia. We like it here. Were we not hunted, more of us would choose to stay here. To raise our hatchlings here. There is water aplenty and we like the water planets best.”
Finally. Finally someone who could talk to me. Would talk to me. With my eyes closed I felt some odd sort of darkness float out of me, a shadow heavy as a stone lifting away. “And the gray place of the change?” Please answer me that.
“It is here and not here. It is a place that exists within and without. It is life and death, healing and illness, light and darkness, good and evil, time and not-time. It is neither this nor that, and yet is everything. It is energy and matter as they play together like streams colliding and re-forming and flowing around boulders and islands and obstacles, ever moving forward, yet able to pool and stand still. It is the Gray Between.”
I laughed, the sound broken. “That doesn’t help me much, though I have figured out that it comes from inside me as much as from outside me.”
“Call your energies. I will come to you.”
I sat up slowly in the car seat. “You can find me when I go into the gray place of the change?”
“Of course. If I am physically close enough, I can see you through the Gray Between even when you do not enter there. Can you not see us when you are there?”
I remembered back to the sparring room when the light-dragon had come through. Had it been zeroing in on me? But then the sequence of events settled into me and I recalled that Bruiser had asked me to go into the gray place after the arcenciel had appeared and started biting. But . . . I had been pulling on Beast’s strength, her speed. Were they the same thing? Did Beast’s strength and her ability to slow time come from the same place, from the gray place of the change? And at my house, when I shifted into the dog . . . I had felt magic. Had the arcenciel tried to find me? Had it been trying to find me for a long time? Was it zeroing in on my location every time I shifted?
What about the first time I was attacked by one of the things, on Bitsa, in the city streets? I hadn’t been drawing on Beast then. But maybe it had been close and had seen me in the gray place anyway? Dang it. I didn’t know enough to make a guess, which meant experimentation was on the schedule for the night’s activities.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Let’s see.” I set the clunky cell to the side and slouched down deeper in the SUV. I didn’t try to meditate or to call upon Beast. I didn’t try to find my own genetic makeup in the coiled snake of my own DNA structure. I just looked inside for the energies. And there was nothing there.
Beast rolled over in my mind, a cat on her back, looking at me upside down, her belly exposed. She chuffed at me. I was pretty sure she was laughing. Cat laughter. Which was always snark at another’s expense. Fine. You try, I thought at her.
Instantly the gray energies rose, lifting through me, sliding around me. Great. My cat has the power, not me. Again Beast chuffed with laughter. And then I smelled exhaust. I opened my eyes to see lights in the rearview, lights on bright, blinding me. Doors opened. The deep basso beat of music followed multiple shapes as they left the vehicle, the SUV that blocked me in. “Soul,” I whispered. “I might be in trouble.”
“I see you,” her voice said, over the open cell line. “Stay there.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I whispered again, knowing she would hear me. I reached over and took one nine-millimeter, tucking it into my waistband at my back, the other into my fist. I rolled down, lower in the seat, into the floorboard, sitting on the accelerator. I moved the seat as far back as it would go to give me room to work. I watched the windows, and cursed the broken window that left me partially blind. I let the weapon move with my eyes, holding it in a two-hand grip.