On the step stood Soul. But she wasn’t even vaguely human. Her face was humanoid, but the rest of her was winged, snaky, scaled, and solid now, tiger striped, like her tiger form. A striped and stunning dragon, like the tales of old. I looked back across the streets to the sight of blue and red emergency lights flashing at the crime scene. “Soul?”
“I can stay only a moment before I’m missed at the crime scene,” she said, her body flashing light again. A moment later she stood before us, in her human guise, wearing a filmy dress that moved in its own breeze. “The hatchling is alive, in the Mithran Council chambers. Reality has been folded.” Her voice was deeper, growly, as if when she shifted to human, she forgot to change her vocal cords. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Her light patterns tell me that she unfolded time and reality, reentering this world, here, on these steps, and then folded it away again, inside,” Soul said, pointing into the darkened interior. “She vanished from my sight in the Gray Between. I can’t follow her trail while she is being ridden.” Which meant little to me, but I had a feeling that it would, and quickly.
Soul’s teeth positively gnashed together in frustration at what she saw on my face. “As you fold time, so do we,” she said, as if explaining something to a particularly annoying four-year-old.
“Oh,” I said. Suddenly it all made sense. Now I knew why they kidnapped an arcenciel. And why they had tried to steal my energies. “Oh!”
“If I go after her, I’ll be taken as well. I can’t help her, not against a witch with a crystal and the knowledge of its use. All of my kind are vulnerable. But you’re a skinwalker; you can’t be taken. Please, Jane. Find her and break the crystal that imprisons her.”
I stalked up the steps to Soul until our faces were on a level.
“Jane,” Eli warned, his voice toneless and cautious.
“If I can find her and bring her back, I will. If I can’t bring her back, I’ll call for you and you’ll have to chance being taken too.”
Soul closed her eyes as if to hide her reaction. “Thank you.” In a flash of light, she was gone. I raced into the darkness inside the front entrance. Or what was left of it.
More slowly, Eli and Brute entered. Together, we moved into the room and to the side where guests usually presented weapons and acquiesced to a pat-down, our backs to the wall. Glass in plasticized hunks and rounded beads littered the floor. The air lock, the two sets of doors, and all the bullet-resistant glass was gone, blasted in and shattered as if a rocket had taken it out, though there was no scent of anything I might associate with a rocket or a grenade or other explosive device. There was, however, an overload of other scents. The stench of blood and lots of it. Human, vamp, and something else that reeked of dead fish and rotting vegetation, the way an arcenciel might smell if it was dying. The stink of recently fired weapons, hot and thick on the air.
The place was black and more silent than the beginning of a nightmare. No lights, no soft whisper of the air-conditioning units whirring, no sound of voices; more important, no sound of the fancy generators I had installed. No backup lighting.
Reach. Reach had gotten his fingers into the security system long ago. The Kid and I had tried to remove any access, and had found several back doors into the system. But obviously we had missed one. Or more. And Peregrinus had gotten Reach’s files. He knew everything I did. He had found a way inside in every way that could possibly count. What I didn’t know was far more important. How did Peregrinus kidnap an arcenciel, and how was he going to use it? What was he doing here? Did it have something to do with the safe on sub-four? Why did he have Leo and Katie? Where had he kept his soldiers? Because, while magic might have gotten him inside, only trained soldiers did this.
Beside me, I felt Eli lift his arm as he changed out devices on his headset and studied the foyer. Beast’s eyes adjusted to the greater dark and stared through my own, brightening the world in greens. At my side, Brute stared/smelled into the dark of the entry of vamp HQ and whined softly. The foyer was empty of people, but there was blood, so much blood, pooled, puddled, splashed, and streaked across the floor, showing me where the injured had been pulled away from the fighting and down hallways. Almost buried beneath it all I smelled Peregrinus, relating his stench to the washed-out scents in Katie’s yard. Fainter, I smelled the fishy smell of the arcenciel and her magic, like the Gray Between, but sharper, more bitter, scorched. Her magic, her ability to fold time, had gotten them in, I realized. And that had to mean that capturing the arcenciel wasn’t an end in itself, but a means to an end—Leo’s les objets de la puissance, les objets de magie.
Brute pressed close against my thigh, his body quivering, his nose on overload. I needed a tracker. I needed the wolf in this hunt. I needed Brute, working under orders, but Soul wasn’t here to do it.
And Brute and I had issues, despite his saving my life once.
Nerves pulsing in fear at the thought of putting away a weapon, I sheathed the vamp-killer and slid my hand into the wolf’s ruff as I had seen Soul do. I pushed through the thick undercoat and touched his skin beneath the long, dense hair at his neck. He was vibrating with the excess of scent patterns.
My wide toes spread and clenched; my claws scraped at the marble floor, finding nothing to sink into. I felt Beast push me into the Gray Between again, prickles on my skin and down my throat. Brute leaped away, a four-paw, rotating leap, that put him three feet away and facing me, snarling. My nose changed shape, pelt shivered up my arms and legs and across my face. But this time it was mostly soft-tissue changes, much less painful than the foot bones changing and shifting—like sticking a finger into a light socket instead of being hit by lightning. In the midst of the change, I lifted my eyes and sought out the arcenciel. I saw nothing before me. Or below me. And nothing back the way we had come. I didn’t know what I was doing.
I let go of the energies, and the gray place of the change eased away. Brute was staring up at me, his wolf eyes wide, his nose flaring and contracting as the smells of the place, my Beast, and my magic drove him to some edge I couldn’t even imagine. He growled, his body tightening as if to attack.
I stepped to him, my fist extended for him to smell. I nudged his muzzle and ran a hand through his ruff again. “It’s okay,” I muttered to him. To Beast I thought, You gotta stop doing stuff like this in the middle of an emergency.