Boxes that had previously been filled with my magical trinkets. Including le breloque and the Glob. But I had already removed the magical items and stored them in the closet at the house. Where Alex was, alone. The blood that wasn’t frozen in my veins plummeted to my feet.
Littermate! Beast growled.
“Alex,” I whispered. Louder I said, “Call Gee. Tell him to get to my house. To fly like a bird! Call Alex and tell him to get into the safe room! Now!” I whirled and raced through the rain and the water running in the streets and down the sidewalks.
“Jane? What? What? Alex?” he said. “Alex!” The SUV’s engine roared and tires splashed as Derek pulled the SUV around and headed back to my house. Troll was still in back.
I raced through the rain and water, feeling the pull on my waterlogged boots, splashing through water that reached my shins in places. Glanced up once. No arcenciels. Where were they right now? I tried to pull on the Gray Between, but it stayed stubbornly locked down. Fear did that sometimes. And of course, now that I needed to stop time, I couldn’t access it. No lightning to help me along, and Beast wasn’t responding. Without the time to center myself and meditate, my magic was not perfect. With the storm, it was downright undependable.
Taking the most direct route, I dove inside Katie’s Ladies, raced through it, leaving the doors open, the walls rattling, and out into the rain in the backyard, toward my home. I pulled on Beast’s strength. Gathered myself. Leaped.
In the instant of pushing off, Beast burst through me. Pelt sprouted on my hands and arms beneath my soaked jacket. My body wrenched, hips changing shape, feet trying to grow wider in the now-ill-fitting boots. Waist shrank, shoulders expanded, rounded, stretched. My upper teeth erupted with fangs, the bones rearranging. I grunted in agony, the sound part-growl. Hunger clenched my insides. Too many half-shifts, not enough food to fuel them.
At the crest of the brick fence, I shoved off with a reshaped palm and landed in a crouch in the backyard. The iron gate to the side of the house was broken and hanging open, the metal twisted back and over. The side door of the house was in splinters. Again.
Beast-fast, I pulled one of the mostly useless .380s and racked a round into the chamber. My knuckles were too large to handle a gun, and I held it slightly to the side, three fingers pointing away, as I slid my pinkie over the trigger. It was an unconventional firing grip and my fingers were likely to get smashed when it fired, but it was all that still fit.
With my left hand I yanked a vamp-killer free. It all took three steps as I raced across the yard and into the house.
Alex was nowhere to be seen, but there was a bloody shotgun pattern on the wall, the holes made by .30-.06 buckshot, with a head-shaped section missing. Below the pattern, on the floor, was a revenant, trying to get back up. Hard to do with no face, no eyes. I took his head with a single swing of the vamp-killer. The head slid across the room and spun on its ear, beneath the kitchen table, where it banged around on the table and chair legs like a macabre game of pinball.
Tearing into my bedroom, I took another head. Blood erupted into the air and over my hands. This one had fed more recently and . . . I realized I’d just killed a vamp and not a rev. I dropped the blade and grabbed for the head, whirling in midair. Missed, its hair flying.
Her hands went limp. The body fell. She dropped le breloque. It bounced and rolled across the floor. Her head bounced too, landing upright, facing me. Female, blue-eyed and needle-fanged. Blowback on her face from where Alex had shot the rev. She was a stranger, like the others, old and long dead.
Fear I hadn’t perceived released my heart.
I picked up le breloque, hooking the magical instrument over my arm, blood splattering. I also took the Glob and shoved it into a pocket, getting blood on it as well. That couldn’t be good. The Glob warmed me all over in an instant, as if it knew what I needed and sent it to me, part of its lightning magic. I picked up the vamp’s head by the hair. I’d carried them this way before, hair being the most expedient handhold.
As I moved through the apartment, I realized that sword practice with the vamps in La Destreza had given me a lot more skill with my blades. Not so long ago, taking a head was a multistrike proposition, sometimes ending with a little sawing or hacking—though the extra strength of my half-form helped.
Wind whooshed through the house, wet and cold and miserable. I stood in my bedroom, holding a king’s magical crown and a vamp’s head. Her hair was tangled around my fingers like a twisted wet brown tail. A cell phone began to buzz, some reggae bell tone, probably Derek calling my partner. I’d moved fast.
“Jane?”
I turned to see Gee, standing in the doorway, two long swords out to his sides. “I haven’t cleared the house,” I said, my voice too low, too rough.
His eyes fell to the wreath on my arm but he didn’t speak of it, instead asking the question that warmed more than my body. “Where is Alex?”
I knew the answer by the scents in the house, scents I hadn’t parsed until now. “In the weapons room. He’ll be holding a shotgun. If you open the door, try not to let him kill you. It would hurt him a lot.”
“Your concern for my welfare is touching.” Gee stepped closer, his eyes taking in my face, with the huge upper and lower cat fangs and my oddly shaped body. “Brandon and Brian are missing,” he said, and I remembered the incident at the docks when the Robere twins had left the scene precipitously. The outcry from the mayor’s office.
“You think they found Grégoire’s attackers and are—” I almost said dead too. But none of them were dead. They couldn’t be. I changed it to, “in custody of Le Bâtard and Louis le Jeune?”
“I don’t know. Find them before it’s too late.” He held out a fist, closed around something rounded. I didn’t really trust the big bird, but I held out my huge, big-knuckled paw. In it he dropped a small black stone, one with white inclusions in it. “It’s called an Apache tear. If you need me, you can crush it. I will come.”
I tucked the stone in my jacket pocket, far away from the Glob. The pocket was full of water. I had to get some water-wicking fighting armor. “I’ll get some guards from HQ to watch my house, but will you keep an eye out too?” I looked outside and added, “Keep it and my partners safe?”
“If you will keep le breloque safe.”
“I’ll do my best. But people are more important than magical implements. I’ll use it to save lives if necessary.”
Gee hesitated. Slowly he said, “We have a bargain, little goddess.”
Together, we went to the shelving that covered the weapons room and I tapped three times, waited, and tapped once. Tomorrow we’d have to change the knock code. Gee and I stood back as the shelves opened and Alex peeked out, his curls in high kink, his face ashen, a shotgun in a two-hand grip. His eyes swept the room, taking in the rev and its head. The head in my hand. He started laughing. It was mildly hysterical but at least it was laughter. “Kit,” Beast said, using my mouth.
Alex dropped the shotgun. Gee swiped it from the air before it hit the floor and discharged. Alex fell into my arms, pale and shaking, making the wreath clank against my weapons.
I said, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” I patted his shoulder awkwardly. “Gee is here to take care of you. He’ll see that the rev is taken away and Leo’s cleanup crew will take care of the rest. And I’ll get you some of Derek’s Tequila team.”
“Sure. Fine.” I heard him lick his lips, a dry, panicked sound. His heart was racing against my chest. “I gotta say. I may move into Ed’s room. It’s the safest place in the house.”
I grinned. “Take that up with Edmund.”
“Yeah. Right.” He stepped away. “Thanks for coming.”
I heard a vehicle door open as I touched his curls, stalked to the front door, and opened it. Nearly took a foot in my face where it was about to kick in the door. I caught the foot in midair—all those catlike reflexes—and held it high. Derek was balancing on his other foot, extended for the kick, able to stop momentum. It wasn’t something he’d been able to do back when he was just human. I wondered if he knew that. I grinned a feral cat-grin, all fangs, and said, “Awww. You were coming to save me.”