Broken Soul

A stranger I knew only from the shadows of a fight stepped through the front door. She was copper-skinned, like me. And like me—or like me when I was prepared—she carried more weapons than a small army. She was dressed in the leathers of an Enforcer, but with an old-fashioned design and enough slices and cuts in the tanned hide to be risqué. The stink of old blood was on the leathers, hers and her opponents’, ripe and dense with the reek of old pain and death. She smelled like the sniper, and the bomb maker. And she was carrying two long swords. With a single, smooth, backhand cut, she struck Bethany in the neck. The priestess dropped, falling with the blade. She hit the floor, her dark blood spattering the wall.

Before I could blink, Gee had drawn two swords and raced at the swordswoman. He was moving nearly vamp fast, but time had slowed. I could see each movement, see his body flex and contract. “My challenge to blood duel was never satisfied,” he shouted, his voice low and his words slurred. “En garde!”

The woman tipped her body forward and raced at Gee, but slow, sluggish. The two met at the juncture of the foyer and the living room. In an honest-to-God sword fight. Steel clashed. A cut appeared in the wall as if by magic. A small table split in two with a crash. I had really liked that table. Not so long ago, it had been blown over when an angry air witch came visiting. Now it was nothing but splinters, like the side door. And the front door.

The Kid, who had been hiding behind the couch, grabbed me by the arm and dove to the floor with me. We landed in a painful heap; I yelped and so did he. The smell of mixed blood rose on the air and I found my feet. I was still holding the stake and the way-too-small blade. The smell of blood was grounding me fast. Adding Beast’s blood to the gray place of the change had reinforced my reactions.

“Jane,” Alex said, his words a laborious jumble in the slo-mo of time. “The people in the rental house and with the rented SUVs, who were following you, they moved. Eli went to check them out and they were gone and the vehicles were turned back in, but there were at least twelve people living there and they had taken photos. That’s one of them.” He pointed to the sword fight.

My house was full of nutso vamps, two nearly dead vamps, an injured Onorio, various sentient beings, and a stranger with swords fighting a storm god. The two with swords were moving almost too fast for sight, even my enhanced time-sight, a flashing, ringing, crashing of steel, dual circles of reflected light and the spatter of scarlet and sapphire blood on the pale walls.

Into the doorway stepped a man, dark haired, black eyed, beautiful as a dying angel. He wore jeans and a white shirt that hung open to reveal a necklace of a raptor in flight, boots and wristbands tattooed with blue birds. He shouted something but the words were lost beneath the ring and clash of steel. He was the frightened boy from the painting and the unchanged man with the crystal from the warehouse. Peregrinus. Grégoire’s brother.

He carried a sword, a double-edged blade with a hand-and-a-half hilt. He raced in and stabbed up at the arcenciel, then tossed what looked like a length of rope over it, a rope tied with something shiny on the end. The quartz crystal. In this light I could tell it was quartz, not diamond. The light of the dragon rippled through it. Eli and Derek fired at the vamp in three-shot bursts. I smelled vamp blood, but Peregrinus didn’t falter. He backed out of the house, pulling the arcenciel with him. As he moved, the light of the dragon flickered, dimmed, shrank to half its size, and went out. The arcenciel writhed once, a snapping, supple movement, and dropped to the floor. It threw out sparks of brown and black, like a dirty fire, the flames dying.

It shifted shape. In its place was a child, a skinny girl of nine or ten with cotton-candy hair and predator teeth. The shooters repositioned their weapons away and down at the sight of the child. Peregrinus tossed the small body over his shoulder, pressed the crystal to her, shouted something, and vanished through the doorway. In a single instant, the invading kidnapper and his swordswoman were gone. The house fell silent around me. I was heaving breaths as I tried to put it all together, my thoughts fragmented and confused.

The light-snake-dragon. The arcenciel that wasn’t Soul. It had just been captured, somehow. By two members of Satan’s Three. Who had totally ignored me the whole time. So that meant that all along . . . while they were snipering my house and putting bombs here . . . they had also been waiting for a chance to grab an arcenciel? How could they have known I was being attacked by one? Had Reach known there was an arcenciel around New Orleans? Had he gotten access to the attack on Bitsa, and then given the secret up to Satan’s Three? And, worse, did Satan’s Three have such access to HQ’s security system that they had seen the attack in the gym? I didn’t know. And I didn’t know how to find out or what to do about it all.

“The Devil,” Katie whispered, her fangs distorting her words. I looked at her. There was blood on her chin and dribbling onto her evening gown. The dress was pale aqua silk that shimmered into ocean blue in the shadows. Her eyes, vamped out and black in the bloody sclera, stared in horror at the open front doorway. “The Devil and her master were here and we still live.” She crossed herself, which looked utterly wrong on the bloody-mouthed vampire.

At the sign of religious sentiment, Bethany hissed, reached out with one hand, and pulled Leo closer to her side. She was moving weirdly, as if only part of her was working. But her neck was healing, the bleeding already stopped. She extended her own fangs with a firm snap. In a movement too fast to focus on, she buried them in Leo’s throat. Gee knelt at Leo’s feet and slid his palms up the MOC’s pants legs so his palms met the vamp’s skin. Blue light flowed down Gee’s arms and beneath the cloth, into Leo, and through the MOC into the priestess and Katie. Katie shook herself and looked from the front door to the back, her eyes sweeping the room the way an old soldier might. There was something different about her suddenly, focused and determined. With no hesitation, she bit her own wrist and leaned in to dribble her powerful blood into Leo’s mouth.

To my side I smelled Eli. “You okay?” I asked without turning.

“Yeah. You?”

“Ducky. Just ducky,” I lied. “The Kid? Bruiser?”

“I’m good. Bruiser’s breathing,” Alex said.

“I’m okay too,” Derek said. “No thanks for not asking.”

“You got any more plywood you can cover the broken doors with?” I asked Eli as I watched the four in a group healing, the MOC between them. The MOC, whom I had staked. Oh. My. I had staked Leo. A titter of laughter struggled in my throat and I swallowed it down. It hurt, as if I’d stuffed something large and squirming into a too-small bag. My stomach cramped as if I’d been kicked by an elephant, and I doubled over, breathing shallowly until the pain eased.