Cold Reign

“Rick,” I said. “Stop.” Eli and Bruiser swiveled their heads to me in surprise. “Your cat is close to the surface. I want you to stand and move into a corner so your back is covered from two sides. Now. Move now, Rick.”

He growled, the sound soft and menacing. The camera view repositioned as Rick backed into a corner.

“Breathe,” I said. “In. Hold it. And out, slowly. Again, in. Hold it. And out, slowly. Again. Do it. That’s good. One more time.”

“Thanks,” he said, a few breaths later, sounding more human. “Meditation stuff. I’ll remember that. Going through the door now.”

The door opened and Rick slid through, closing it behind him. On the camera, we saw an angle of the interior of the beta arm of the warehouse. What I could see of it suggested that it was a huge space, with the support beams exactly where they had been originally, but affixed with some kind of metal ties that indicated walls had once been secured in various arrangements. The floor around the outside walls was piled with office furniture, a few couches, and myriad tools including a forklift and barrels and shovels. My heart clenched when I focused on what might be a saw with an adjustable overhead arm and huge blade, a model number in big letters on one side. But the blade wasn’t bloody and I relaxed. Just a bit.

“I smell blood,” he said. “A lot of blood. And witches and suckheads and . . . other creatures.”

Rick moved silently, his breathing steady and smooth, along the wall. Clockwise, I thought, a witch direction, not heading widdershins as humans might do. I could make out the barrel of a weapon from time to time, but he kept it down, out of sight of the camera, beside his thigh.

As he moved, more of the room came into focus. The floor looked like concrete, smooth and stained with oil or . . . “Bloodstains on the floor?” I asked softly. “Cold and dry?”

“Yes,” he breathed back. “Human blood.” He took three more steps and the rest of the room came into focus on the IR lens camera. The remainder of the building had been walled off, the parts with the odd garage-sized door shut away. I didn’t see a door leading into the sealed section anywhere.

CHAPTER 17

Pawpawpaw. Silent. Beast Was Best Ambush Hunter.

The only other opening was a barn-type door on a rail, which Rick slid open about three inches. Beyond the door was a room fit for a king with a bed that looked as if it had come out of a porn movie. It was big enough to comfortably sleep six people, and the frame was carved into curlicues and swirls at the posts, the header, and the footer; the entire thing had been gilded. The gold caught the lights, two candles in hurricane-style glass lanterns that glared out the view several times as Rick examined the room. The bed was made up with shimmery linens, probably silk, with fluffy comforters and an electric blanket that was glowing warm. One pillow was stained dark with dried blood. In the corner was a table and four chairs, natch on the gilded stuff, and a steamer trunk big enough to cage a baby elephant. From here, there was a door that led into the walled-off portion.

Rick moved there and listened, his nose pressed to the crack, sniffing softly like a cat. I wondered what he heard but nothing came through the mic. He tried the door, but it was locked from the other side. He spent another ten minutes moving around the bedroom, looking into a wardrobe, and peering into the trunk. Then, the rest of the building sealed off and unavailable to him, he moved silently back the way he had come and outside into the sleet. He slipped past a food truck with a dead human at the wheel and another on the ground in the accumulating sleet. They had been there long enough that they were the same frozen temps as the asphalt beneath them. He moved to the corner of the fenced property, where he paused and holstered his weapon. I followed his progress on Gee’s cam as, one-handed, he swung up the dying banana tree and over the high metal wall. It wasn’t something a human could have done easily, but a demonstration of his newfound were-strength. He landed with cat-grace on the sidewalk outside and trotted to the SUV he had been in originally.

“I smelled some things I couldn’t ID,” he said as the door closed on the downpour and the ambient noise changed. “Something that smelled like electricity sparking, and heated metal. Something mineral. I also caught a whiff of sweat and blood from Brian, Brandon, and Grégoire. They’re inside somewhere I couldn’t get, and they’re in trouble.”

I pulled the Benelli M4 shotgun and reached for the door handle. Edmund, who had been so silent I hadn’t even thought about him, grabbed my arm. “Let go of me,” I said evenly.

“No, my mistress. I will not. This is a trap.”

“Of course it’s a trap. Eli and I already had this convo.”

“We must not rush in where your angel might fear to tread.” Something inside me slowed at the word angel. I hadn’t told Ed about the angel Hayyel or that a celestial being had appeared and altered almost everything in my life. But Ed was sworn to Angie Baby. Had she called him too? Something in his eyes suggested so. “Not without more information,” he went on.

“Yeah? How’re we gonna get that?” I asked, hearing the derision in my tone.

Edmund lifted a shoulder easily and suggested, “Think as a cat?”

I knew what he was telling me. I was an ambush hunter. Any cat would want intel on the sealed room before rushing in. And that same cat would strike from the least likely place. “Okay. I’ll bite. Cats go high. How do we get into the roof system?”

Edmund smiled and I might have sworn he was part cat himself. He tapped his coms mic. “Gee DiMercy. Would you be so gracious as to fly slowly and low, around the bottom of the roof system, around the entire block. We search for an unanticipated entrance point.”

The black-and-white camera tilted, showing a swath of lightning-bright clouds and the underside of a pale wing. Gee was the only Mercy Blade out of the closet. I didn’t think it was an accident that he had revealed himself as an Anzu just before Le Bâtard and Louis—the Deadly Duo—showed up. The camera angled back to level and circled the block. Edmund said, “Here,” and tapped the screen. “Alex, will you make some still photographs of the apex of the gable? I do believe I spotted a vent. And here”—he pointed again—“another vent?” I didn’t see anything, but I wasn’t going to argue with a vamp.

Moments later still shots captured from the video appeared in black and white on the smaller tablets. And indeed there were vents, two of them in gables, one on each shorter arm of the U-shaped building. I thought about Rick’s video. The ceiling was the dropped kind; that meant I could lift a panel and drop down. If I could get over the room. But the roof was pitched too low to stand, and in human form I’d have to crawl. Beast shoved her way through my mind and said, Shift! Beast is best ambush hunter.

“If I can get into the roof system,” I said, “I can crawl over the sealed room. Drop in. Make a distraction.”

“What I was thinking,” Rick agreed, his voice casual. Too casual. I knew that tone and I narrowed my eyes at it. “Two cats dropping from the ceiling would give the others time to take down the walls and come through.”

“No,” I said, before I thought. “I don’t mind flying by the seat of my pants, but I have to know my backup is dependable.”

The silence on the coms channel was palpable. I wasn’t sorry. I wasn’t.

Rick enunciated carefully, “What you want, or do not want, is of no concern to me. This is now an official PsyLED investigation. You go in with me or you go home.”

Again the silence. Suddenly I laughed and said, “Hey, Big Bird. Can you rip off the vents?” Even as I spoke, the altitude and attitude of the Anzu’s flight altered. He changed pitch and landed on the top of the roof. One foot was caught in the camera as Gee grasped the fascia and the metal of the roof, piercing it with his talons as he hung upside down. Using the talons of the other foot, he reached out and ripped off the vent. It was still falling to the ground when he launched off the roof, righted himself, and flapped hard to regain altitude. He came perilously close to the sidewalk before he managed that feat. Lightning brightened the night. Again. Magic whipped through the air, a burning tingle that even the humans felt.