Shadow Rites

“More coming,” I managed, and bubbled time again, as I staggered back, into Alex’s room. The taste of acid and cooked blood was instantly nauseating, but I bent and pulled him over my shoulder too. I stood and carried the heavier-than-expected teenager out to the gallery and threw him off. He hung in midair just as Edmund started to look up and I knew the vamp would catch the Kid. Fangheads are fast.

I staggered across the porch to Eli’s room and tried the door handle. It was unlocked and why not? Why worry about security? The wards were up. I pulled the elder Younger up and over my shoulder and out to the gallery, where I propped him over the railing. I let go of the time bubble and focused on Edmund below me as he caught Alex and laid him on the ground beside Molly.

“Next,” I said, and let Eli go.

Eli windmilled, arms and legs flailing limply, but Edmund caught the much heavier man like a baby and laid him on the grass, but Edmund didn’t have to strip him. Eli slept commando. Who knew? Beside him on the grass, Angie Baby and EJ were coughing and shivering, waking up, cold and crying.

I pulled the Gray Between of no time back over me and nearly hit the floor as pain cut through me like a dozen blades all at once. Limping back inside, I coughed so deep I thought my intestines might be involved. The pain of bending time started there, low in my belly, that hot, churning misery and the taste of my own blood rose up my throat. I had never gone back and forth between real time and no time so many times in succession, and it wasn’t helping my digestion. The pain sliced deeper, and I was having trouble drawing a breath.

I pulled on Beast and she flooded my system with adrenaline and pain-relieving endorphins as I made it back to Molly and Big Evan’s room. The big guy was six feet six inches tall and weighed in at an easy three fifty. I was strong, but . . . I bent my knees, grabbed his left arm, and put my shoulder into his middle. I let his own weight roll him over me as I squatted low to the floor and took his mass onto my back and shoulder. I barely made it to my feet and when I did, I felt something tear in me, a long, linear pain down my abdomen, from the bottom of my ribs, down along the right side of my navel. Acid rose in my throat, tasting of sour, cooked meat, of blood seared in stomach acids. I staggered across the wide hallway, seeing a glimpse of someone near the front door. I made it to the gallery before letting the Gray Between snap away. I rolled Evan’s butt to the top of the railing and was absurdly happy he slept in boxers as I let time go and watched him fall toward Edmund.

The vampire grunted as he halfway caught the much bigger man, but momentum allowed Evan’s leg to whack on the ground hard, twisting his knee. He’d have an injury. I caught my belly, feeling the twisted agony of torn abdominal muscles beneath my fingers as I turned to go back inside and Edmund called up, “That’s all of them.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and returned to house.

“Jane!” he shouted. But he was outside the ward.

There was a slow breeze blowing through from the opened windows and doors, and the gas was nearly gone on the upper floor. I was coughing but I could breathe.

Sick and trying to die, I went back to the children’s bedroom and the strange thing that shouldn’t have been there. Brute and the grindylow, stretched out on the floor near EJ’s bed. There were claw marks in the wood of the floor between the doorway and where the werewolf lay. The werewolf had been trying to claw his way to the bed. To save the kids? Yeah. He had waked Angie and sent her to get the cell phone and then had come back for EJ, Angie following, talking to me.

I tucked the neon-green baby grindylow beneath an arm, grabbed Brute by his back paws, and dragged him down the stairs. His head bumped each time I took a step, and I knew he’d have a headache, but no way could I lift another three-hundred-plus-pound anything over the railing.

I plucked the cat off the back of the sofa, hoping her nonfamiliar magics had kept her alive in the heavier, denser poison, and pulled Brute to the side door, which was hanging off its hinges, and out onto the side porch. “More,” I said, my voice breathless.

“I am not giving mouth-to-snout resusitation,” Edmund said, sounding prudish.

I managed a laugh, two syllables of amusement that ended up in a cough so deep it sounded as if my lungs were coming up in chunks. And I threw up. Blood went everywhere. I fell, the wooden porch floor rising to meet me with a wallop. I succeeded in saying, “Yes. You will. Dog and cat both. Your word.” And everything went sparkling gray as Beast reached into me and forced me into the change. My tendons snapped, my bones popped and broke. Pain cut through me like razors flaying sinew from joints. All I could think was It’s about dang time. Because if this wasn’t changing in extremis, nothing was.

The change was swift, but I caught a glance of Angie Baby, standing in the grass, wrapped in a silk sheet. She reached a hand out to Edmund and placed her fingers in the gash on his wrist, taking away bloody fingertips. “As you have sworn, so I swear to you, fanghead. I’ll take care of you for as long as I live.”

No! No! But the words didn’t come. And the shift took me as the wards fell.

* * *

It was daylight. I am Beast. I am Beast all day.

“I am done,” Edmund growled from the shadows of the gallery porch. “They will all live.”

I, Beast, yawned, showing killing teeth to Edmund as he raced inside, his skin smoking with the rising sun. Stinking vampire skin smoke. Does not smell like food. Smells of rotten meet from old kill. I followed vampire to see where he would lair.