by Faith Hunter
Beast can leap there and there and there. She looked from place to place as she thought at me. Then stop. Pick places to leap after.
Yeah. You can’t see the bottom, I reminded her. And you need to be back up before nightfall. Climbing this wall of rock after dark will be impossible. Dangerous. The “you fall, we die” kinda dangerous.
Beast does not fall. See magics at bottom.
Uh-huh. I hate when you do this.
Beast chuffed and leaped. The forest floor seemed to push back against our back paws. Air swept up under and around us. Beast’s tail whipped and snapped. Beast pushed off on a root that angled away from the wall, letting the three-inch-thick wood carry her weight long enough to change trajectory. A rock ledge, almost an inch wide, offered a second toe-pad hold. A narrow tree trunk, growing at an angle, was the third. But Beast didn’t stop. She caught all her weight on her front paws, twisted, and thrust off it. Down and down again. A controlled fall that had me fighting to keep from screaming.
Beast was still chuffing. Fun. Fun. Many more than five fun!
Holy crap. Crapcrapcrap.
We dropped down and down and leaped ahead a dozen times, gaining as much as twenty feet forward with each leap. Down a crevice that had to be five hundred feet straight down. The ravine narrowed and then widened, and finally Beast stopped, her four paws smashing down, gripping a fallen tree, her weight slamming down behind. Still. Unmoving except for her breath. Twin billows in the darkness that was the artificial night.
Ahead, the ravine opened into a wider place, dark and snow sprinkled, with colossal ancient trees like out of a fairy tale. It was like a miniature old-growth forest, an oval of maybe three acres, deep with bracken and jagged fallen limbs and one ancient fir that had fallen and lay rotting. The air was warmer here, heavy with mist, a primordial place. It smelled of water, water on the trees, on the ground, hanging in the air, dripping, yet I had a feeling that rain seldom fell here. It was too isolated, cliff walls rising on every side. Water dripped, a constant patter. In the distance, an owl hooted, a plaintive sound. Magic glistened and danced on the steamy, still air.
Beast leaped and leaped from branch to branch, landing carefully on the mossy, wet bark. We were fifty feet from the forest floor and it was too dark to tell what was buried beneath the leaves and the rotting detritus of . . . centuries? The magic grew closer.
The tree branch beneath Beast’s claws changed, suddenly distinctly dissimilar. What? I thought.
Tree is not winter dead, not sleeping. Tree is true-dead. Air smells sick.
I took a sniff. And caught a whiff of sulfur. Brimstone? Be careful!
Is not same smell as Evangelina’s demon. Is different.
Crap. Be careful!
Beast is always careful.
So says the puma who just dropped several hundred feet into a crevasse.
She trotted along one limb, dropped to another, and peered around the trunk of the dead tree. Beneath us was a small blue pool of steaming water. Deep in the center of the pool was a rent, like a black crack in the skin of the earth, pointed on two ends, wider in the middle. In the center of the pool it looked strangely, menacingly, like a snake’s vertical pupil in a blue iris. It was a hot spring with a deep opening into the earth.
Steam rose from the hot spring in globes of mist that coated the trees and then fell in drops. The water bubbled, a delicious warmth if not for the faint stink of sulfur. Chemicals that were killing the trees all around.
The spring was heated and magical, and though it was beautiful, it was deadly. The hot spring was clearly part of the geology that created the microclimate, but the minerals in the water—maybe the water itself—had changed recently.
The trees were freshly dead, not rotted. The heated pool had left only a narrow ring of minerals around the edges instead of the thick crust I’d have expected. There was power in the spring, visible in Beast’s sight, power glowing through the water. Magic ascended with the hot spring, a rosy, vibrant energy visible in Beast-vision. This was . . . this was a magic heated pool.
In the deep iris of the pool something bright flashed by. Something with fins.
Or wings.
It flashed by again.
Arcenciel. That’s an arcenciel, I thought. Oh crap. This place . . . I looked around, remembering Molly’s explanation of liminal lines and ley lines. This is one of those rare places where multiple ley lines and maybe a liminal line cross over. This is a liminal opening. A rift. Holy crap. I found a rift.
Light blasted from the pupil.
Blinding.
Fast as the light, Beast whipped her body. Leaped. Flew back behind the tree trunk. At least twenty feet, into cover.
An arcenciel flashed up. Mouth open, teeth glistening. Throwing steaming water and magic. The scent was mineral and blue, if blue was a scent. The smell of arcenciel was unlike that of another creature. The smell of silk, of blue swallowtail butterflies, their wings still damp from the pupae, the scent of burned bamboo. And like the scent of nothing at all.
I/we peeked out and watched as the young one hovered in midair like a gigantic hummingbird, flinging water from her wings and tail, her entire snakelike body vibrating. She alighted on a boulder, skimmed open her diaphanous wings, like panes of purple, lavender, and black crystal set in deep gray leading. Her body was the charcoal of darkly tinted glass, her frills and horns in the purples of her wings. Her tongue was a black leathery thing, split in two at the tip, and she flicked sulfur water from herself. Ten feet long, she was fully dragon formed, and her gigantic eyes were the color of bluest labradorite.
I had never seen her before. She was . . . new.
There was something that suggested that she was not only young, but powerful, and used to going her own way. And maybe she was hungry.
Beast is not prey.
Beast is not at the top of the food chain right now, I thought.
Beast is best hunter.
Yeah. Beast best be quiet as the night.
There had been discord in the arcenciel world, with most of the species wanting to kill Leo Pellissier and others wanting to try to go back in time to wipe out all the vampires. Soul had walked protection around the island where Leo had fought his Sangre Duello to keep him safe, but it hadn’t been enough. Leo had died. And I had to wonder if Leo’s death was the one thing Soul had been forced to give up to keep the arcenciels from going back in time, to keep the arcenciel war from happening. Leo’s death. And the death of Titus, the emperor. And . . . crap. The death of the Son of Darkness, Joses Bar-Judas.
I had given her all three.
One way or another, I had killed them all.
I still didn’t know what the rainbow dragons needed to be able go back in time far enough to kill both of the SODs, and what that might do to the timeline of human history. Hayyel had shown me many timelines.
One had been war among the arcenciels.
I tensed. If this young one was here to join or instigate a war between Soul and others of her species, should I try to kill her?
I had ridden on Soul’s back. I still had a scale from the arcenciel Opal. I wondered if I could shape-shift into an arcenciel using the scale. And if so, what would that do to me? Would it be the same kind of black magic that turned my kind into u’tlun’ta—liver-eater? Would it be the same kind of evil that shifting into the living form of a human was? Or would shifting into an arcenciel heal me?
Could I . . . Should I try to stop the war? Which action was the most moral, which the most immoral? How horrible to allow my worst nightmares to live because I knew that even worse things would happen if I killed off the known and existing horror.
Even thinking about such a thing was a slippery slope.
The arcenciel snapped her wings closed, tilted back her head, and opened her long mouth. And she began to sing.
If magic was notes,
it would be this. This sound that was the taste and scent and sight of light, like honey and buttercups and daffodils and the scarlet of sunset. It was the sound of light, like lightning and the shoosh of a crimson leaf settling to the ground. It was the texture of pearls and the chill of cut sapphires. It was the sound of silver bells ringing in an ancient temple. The vision of the rubies glittering. All that magic shivered through Beast’s pelt. The song called and cajoled and promised the answer to mysteries and the offer of the peace of death.
Midnote, the arcenciel snapped open her wings and jumped high, flying straight up. Singing. Calling. And she was gone. Cats don’t cry, but Beast blinked away tears. Her entire body was quivering like a violin string beneath the bow.
Go back. Go back to littermate. Do not like it here, she thought at me.
Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Her paws on a narrow branch, she rotated and raced away from the rock walls, around the fae garden, and up a more gradual slope, climbing trees and leaping from stone to stone, not resting, not slowing. We raced through the glowering dark and up the crevasse walls, leaping. Too fast for the lack of light and the ice buildup on the protrusions. I withdrew from the front of her mind, letting Beast have her body back.
Her front paws slipped. Beast tumbled. Thick tail rotating. Above us, a grinding rumble sounded and stone broke lose. Plummeting. Bouncing off, stone on stone. Crashing echoes. Beast caught her balance on a dead tree, branches wedged in stone. A branch cracked and the tree slipped. She pushed off and landed on a ledge so tiny her paws barely fit, lined up in a row, her body pressed to the wall. The broken boulders landed below, crashing and shattering.
Fun! Beast thought.
No. Not fun. Holy crap!
She leaped again and raced upward, until we were at the top of the ravine, some quarter of a mile away from where we had gone down. I didn’t ask if she knew her way back. My mind was filled with too many questions and not enough answers. And with visions of falling, our cat body crushed by boulders. Beast sped back to the SUV. Leaping from branch to branch, over rocks, and scattering icy clumps of snow. She was panting hard, her paws hot on the snow. We had come a long way, and if it hadn’t been so cold, Beast would have been overheated long before we saw Eli’s headlights in the dark.
Stop! I thought.
She halted. So fast she nearly toppled forward. Only cat balance, dropping to her haunches, prevented her fall. Eli would never leave the lights on, advertising his location, I thought.
She raised her head and scented, drawing in air over her tongue and the scent sacks in the roof of her mouth. She made the faintest scree of sound. Smell vampires, Beast thought back. Smell strange vampires.
Oh crap.
Beast moved slowly through the darkness, back paws into front paw prints, pawpawpaw, overlapping, steps silent. Silent. She leaped into the branches. Approaching the lights and the stealthy sounds, her puma ears picked up.
Scent vampires. More than one. Not more than five.
No way anyone could have found us. They had to track us. Crap. Eli had stopped two vamps at the sweathouse. I bet they evaded the sensors and monitors and put devices on the vehicles. Crap, crap, crap.
Do not smell Eli blood. Littermate is uninjured. Or strangled.
Strang— That’s a big freaking help.
Jane is welcome. Beast sometimes kills prey by holding neck until deer falls asleep. Then Beast kills. Sometimes prey dies from holding bite.
From thirty feet high, Beast approached the SUV. SUVs. There were two of the vehicles now, ours and a red Range Rover. Lipstick red. Like the one that delivered Shiloh to us. The red vehicle had its lights on.
Four vampires stood in a wedge on the snowy road, facing into the bare trees. Three of them wore jeans, dress shirts, and dark ties. One of them wore a fancy wool coat. Lego, his blond hair whiter than his pale skin. Eli was nowhere in sight. Hidden in the dark. Lego hadn’t been at the Regal with the Flayer of Mithrans. I studied the others and decided they hadn’t been there either. So it was possible, likely even, that we had two groups of vamps in town, both of them threats. Well, isn’t that just ducky.
Is not ducks, Beast thought. Is vampires.
Yeah. And I don’t have time to shift.
Jane is dying. Beast is best hunter.
“You will give us the crystal,” Lego said, speaking into the trees. “The dragon that Joseph Santana wore is mine to ride.”
Joseph—Joses—the elder Son of Darkness, had owned a crystal with an arcenciel trapped in it. The dragon made it possible for Joses to navigate through time, at least to a limited degree. Until a fight took place and the crystal broke, freeing the dragon, and Joses got bitten. Arcenciel bites made vamps nutso-bonkers-crazy, so crazy Joses had hung on a wall in the lowest basement in vamp central in NOLA for a hundred years, raving, his powerful blood Leo’s to drink. These guys wanted that crystal. They had inside info, but it was outdated. I had given a spell to the arcenciels that would free them from any crystal, and I had fed Joses to Brute. So far as I knew, the big meal didn’t even cause the werewolf heartburn.
Seconds had passed as all that ran through my mind, with an undercurrent thought and sensory pattern by Beast. She took in the trees, the branches, the tops of the SUVs, the headlights, the position of the vamps, and the likely position of Eli, based on where the vamps were facing.
Eli is in tree, there, Beast looked to our right, about twenty feet off the ground. In Beast’s night vision, I could make out the silver green of my partner. He was wearing his cold suit, probably invisible to the vamps, but they could likely smell him and pick up his heartbeat. Beast gathered herself tight, claws partially protracted, touching the cold bark.
“Oh. Well, you see, Bubbah, there’s a small problem with that,” Eli said, his tone laconic, his voice filling the emptiness of the small clearing. “The crystals are all broken and the dragons are all free. And Joseph Santana, aka Joses Bar-Judas, aka the elder Son of Darkness, aka asshole of the paranormal world, is true-dead.” He chuckled, his battlefield mirth, more death than amusement. “And by the way, as long as we’re on the subject of dragons, the arcenciels are pissed at the vamps for the slavery-in-a-crystal thing. They’re thinking about war.”
As he spoke, the three other vamps spread out, moving into the dark. Beast gathered herself. There was a soft sssss, followed by a prolonged thump, as if a vamp had dropped into the snow and banged his head. The smell of vamp blood spread on the air.
Another sssss, and a second thump, this one a tumble. We placed the sound and Beast gave a cat grin, all teeth and viciousness. Flying claws, she thought. Eli was playing with his new toy and he got off two shots with the bow before the vamps figured out what was happening and moved. I heard a pop of vamp movement, displaced air, fangheads faster than the human eye can follow. Yet, Beast’s eyes tracked both by sound, movement of air, smell.
Beast is best hunter. Before I could react, she leaped. Front legs stretching, claws out, back legs shoving hard.
She fell fast in a horizontal-distance-to-fall ratio that spanned the vehicles, the entire clearing, and hid her in night shadows on the other side. I never saw the branch she landed on, just felt gravity jar through our body as she half landed, half shoved off and vectored at a sharp angle that stole nothing from her momentum. She fell again. Fast.
Beast rammed into a softer body. Claws ripping. Grabbing. Teeth sinking in. The crunch of bone and tear of tendons. The taste of acid, hot peppers, and cold blood. My vampire prey. My meat. My blood.
She rode the vampire down. Slinging her head back and forth, dislocating the vertebrae. Cold blood splattered. We bounced on his back. Beast continued working the spine, back and forth. Until she ripped out a chunk of vertebra.
Holy crapoley, I thought.
My meat.
I got that. But you might need to eat later.
In the trees, the so
und of gunfire was sharp and nearly painful. Protectively, we tucked our ear tabs. Sniffed. Smelled the stench of guns and blood on the still air. Human blood.
Eli blood? Littermate? Beast thought, raising her head, tracing the sound and the scents. Her tongue slicked her jaw and nose clean of the strange vamp blood. Tasted bad.
Snow started to fall, large, saucer-sized things too big to be called flakes. Heavy and wet, they made a noise when they landed, like tiny plumffs in the silence.
Beast has vampire one. Two vampire, with flying claw in body, is there. She glanced toward something in the snow. I didn’t have time to focus through her eyes. She turned her head. There is three vampire with flying claw in body. She looked up and into the darkness. An enormous snow-pancake landed on her snout. Another between her shoulders. Eli is there. Smell Eli blood. Beast jumped straight up, sank her bloody claws into the trunk, raced high. Into the tree branches. Stretched into a sprint across the limbs toward the blood scent.
Drew up hard. Stopped. At the base of a neighboring tree was Legolas look-alike, dark blood on the icy white carpet. Heavy white snow landed on his fancy coat and white face. A shaft protruded from his chest, directly over his heart. We smelled the acrid stink of vamp blood and silver. Lego was a goner unless we got a master vamp to bleed and read and revive him. Blood splattered over his body.
Above him, facedown on a branch, was Eli. Arms and legs had been holding him in place. Now all four dangled. Blood ran off the fingers of his right hand, stained his cold-coat sleeve. He wasn’t moving. Beast made a single long bound, hard and high, landed, claws sinking into the bark, beside him. Claws on her left arm retracted. She swatted his face. Again. Sorrowful, anguished, she thought, Much blood. Too much blood.
Eli shifted slightly. He began to slide. He might not survive the landing.
No! I/we screamed. Puma concolor scream. Pain blasted through my arm. Fingers with retracted claws grabbed him. A humanish hand. Holding littermate. Pain ratcheted through my hand bones and up my arm.
