Broken Soul

by Faith Hunter

  Brute whined softly, looking at the towels and up to Soul.

  “Brute is having some difficulty thinking in human terms,” Soul said, her tone gentle. “We think his brain has been too long in wolf form. It’s okay, Brute. Can you show us if we go outside, in the yard?” Brute whined and thumped his tail before nodding. He turned and put a paw on the door, which left a muddy smear before Troll opened it. I followed the werewolf stuck in wolf form into the dark.

  Outside, the rain had stopped and there was only the gurgle of water running off the roofs and through gutters, and the heavy fall of collected rainwater dripping from plant leaves and house eaves. Distantly, I heard cars splashing through the rain and jazz from uptown, R & B from downtown. The wind was still moving downstream, carrying the ever-changing scent pattern.

  Nose to the ground, Brute trotted around the yard, circumscribing an area about twenty feet round. Most of the yard. Several times he put his paw down as if indicating something important on the grass or on a plant. “Soul, what’s that mean, when he puts his paw down?”

  “He smells blood.”

  “A lot of blood, then,” I said, counting back to eight different places just in the circumference.

  Brute trotted to the side yard and put his paws up on the building next door to Katie’s, the building where I had heard hammers and skill saws earlier in the week, where the construction was taking place. I looked up and saw that a window on the attic floor was broken. “Crap,” I said to Eli. The breeze had carried all scent from the window away from us, so I hadn’t noticed it. I was too wedded to the nose and not enough to the eyes. “We suck as investigators,” I continued. “You found the sniper out front. But I’m betting we had someone watching the back from the attic of that house.”

  “I’ll take the front, through Katie’s and out to the street,” he said into my ears. He looked at Troll, taking in the broad shoulders and huge chest. “Think you can boost Janie up to the window when I give the word?”

  “Piece of cake.” To me, Troll said, “You find who took my Katie and you put a hole in him for me.”

  I nodded and sheathed my weapons. I’d need hands free to climb through a high window. I just hoped they weren’t still there waiting in ambush. At that thought, I said, “Eli, take Brute with you. See if he smells them leaving through another door.”

  Brute woofed and raced to the house, Eli hot on his tail. Literally. Which made me smile as much as I could, knowing that the Master of the City and his heir had disappeared on my watch and under my nose.

  Troll stood bent-kneed, about five feet away from the wall of the neighboring house, and linked his meaty fingers together to made a basket of his hands. I gauged the distance from his hands to the window and backed up fifteen feet. Drawing on Beast’s strength, I raced toward Troll and leaped, landing with my right foot in his hands. I pushed off and up as Troll straightened his knees and simultaneously raised his arms, pushing, shoving, lifting, throwing me high, like a gymnast. I shot up and over at the window, meeting the window sash at waist level, my hands thrusting down, using the momentum to lift my legs up. I caught my balance and paused on the sash, hands and feet all together, the way a cat might stand on a narrow ledge or tree limb.

  “Janie,” I heard softly below me.

  Before answering, I inspected the room inside, dark and shadowed. There was no one there, but the smell of fresh vamp and human blood hung thick on the air, mixing with the scents of glue, putty, wallboard, wood, and human sweat. If there was an intruder inside, one who had a better-than-human sense of smell, he or she would know I was coming.

  “Janie,” Troll called again.

  “What,” I hissed over a shoulder.

  “Your feet are muddy. And bare. And the window’s broken.”

  “I noticed,” I said dryly.

  “Be careful,” he said. “And bring my Katie back.” Vamps and their humans were big on terms of possession, but there was something tender and yearning and frightened in his voice. I so totally did not want to know about his relationship with Katie, but there was no doubt that he loved her.

  On a silent breath I said, softly, “Working on it, Troll. Working on it.” Then I let myself drop to the floor of the dark room, drawing my weapons, my feet on carpet and shards of glass. My weight drove the glass into my soles and I hissed at the pain of sliced flesh. I took a second step inside, trying to avoid the glass, but a needle of antique window pierced my instep. Beast, responding to the danger to my feet, dropped us into the gray place of the change and my legs morphed from the knees down. I held in a scream of pain as my bones cracked and shrank and then expanded into the half-human, half-puma, big-cat form of paw. When she was finished, I had bitten through my tongue, adding the smell of my blood to the stench of the house. I gasped when the bone pain eased and shook the glass off my hard paw pads.

  The gasp drew air into my mouth, and the scent and stink of humans and freshly spilled blood filled my head. Blood-servants, several of them, had entered here earlier today. Peregrinus’ men and women. The construction guys had disturbed them in the attic and died for their trouble.

  Silently, I crossed the room, into the dark.

  CHAPTER 19

  Someone Fired. They Fought Back.

  The house beside Katie’s was empty except for two dead workers in the attic hallway and a dead contractor on the first floor. They had died fast and recently, their blood still liquid and running into the corners of the uneven floors, soaking into the plaster and through the cracks, pulled by gravity into the nether regions of the house. The construction van they had driven in was gone, a quick and easy way to move two injured vamps through New Orleans’ unique, aging, repair-requiring architecture. No one would notice a panel van sporting a construction company logo.

  The only positive thing we found in the house next to Katie’s was Derek, bleeding and beaten, slumped under the eaves where he had hidden himself after getting away from Peregrinus. The marine groaned a bit and moved a lot more slowly, but he was with us mentally, once Soul rested her hands on his shoulders. I wasn’t sure what she did, but it looked a lot like healing. At the very least, she made him feel better.

  The crime scene went to Soul. She would rather have been looking for the hatchling, but with the deaths, she had no choice. The special agent with PsyLED took the scene over with controlled and ruthless efficiency, calling her up-line boss, calling local contacts, starting with Jodi, and then working her way down the list to all the other agencies and people she needed to contact for a vamp-on-human murder investigation. She didn’t have to tell me this had FUBAR written all over it, and that I was the one who would get stuck in the middle of the mess if I was here.

  I didn’t stick around to see who all showed up. Eli, Derek, Brute, and I left on foot, Brute in the lead, off leash, and we ran hard to keep up as he followed the scent of Katie and Leo, Peregrinus and the Devil, following the scents of danger, discord, and blood through the night. He kept his nose in the air, tracking the van’s trail through French Quarter streets. We ran across the Quarter and right back to vamp HQ. As we rounded the corner, the lights in that part of the Quarter went out, for at least four blocks, leaving a black hole in the night.

  I dialed Bruiser as we ran, just in case he was conscious again, but the call went to voice mail. I left a message. “Up and at ’em, Onorio. HQ has been hit.”

  • • •

  The two-thousand-pound gate—the one that was designed to stop a dump truck filled with explosives—was bowed in and had bounced off its roller track, damaged beyond repair. We stood in front of it, huffing and panting, taking it all in. Eli swung a low-light ocular over one eye and scanned the grounds. “Nothing. No one. Up the front or split up and take the back too?”

  “I’m heading to the side entrance,” Derek said, “to get my men organized.” The side entrance was hidden in the brick wall and opened into Leo’s of
fice.

  I nodded to him. “Be careful.” To Eli, I said, “We stick together.” We raced in a zigzag pattern across the unlit, unmanned, circular drive and headed for the stairs to the entrance. Three steps up, the night exploded in a blinding light. Several things happened all at once. Brute yelped. We ducked to either side of the stairs, arms up to guard our faces. Eli cursed and yanked the ocular from his eye, temporarily blinded. But there was no explosion, no shrapnel, nothing to explain the agonizing light, until it dimmed from excruciating, to merely painful, to a coruscating, scintillating brilliance. And then to darkness.

  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.

  Jane will not stay in Beast form, she thought back, sounding worried.

  “What’s okay?” Eli said into the headset.

  Inside me/us, Beast whistled with disquiet, a sound I recognized/remembered, one that puma kits make when they want their mother. It was weird coming from her now and I shook my head to clear her emotions away. “Nothing,” I whispered to Eli. There wasn’t time to explain a mostly nonverbal conversation to the one human in the group.

  Brute chuffed at the spoken word and leaned against my thigh, but his quivering eased. “Brute?” I asked, my words mostly breath. “Is Peregrinus still here? Can you find him?”

  Brute dropped his head to the floor and took a step into the bloody room. Eli handed me a flashlight, and I turned it on, a tiny, narrow beam of light. The wolf and my partner avoided all the blood somehow, never smearing the spatter, never leaving a print. I tried to be that careful, but I wasn’t as comfortable with my paws as Brute was with his,
especially in half-Beast form. And Eli was just Eli.

  The wolf led us through the signs of fighting, his nose to the floor, his breath a snuffling, whuffling sound, toward the stairs where he paused as if confused, and finally led us around the corner. We found the first body there, a human, a mangled mess of gore that gave no indication of gender or immediate cause of death. There were too many lethal possibilities in the glare of my flashlight, too many scents on the air to let me know by smell alone. But the human hadn’t died by sword or vamp fangs. It was something else, something I had never seen before but could instantly recognize. L’arcenciel teeth and fangs had done this. That or an alligator, grabbing and shaking its victim, whirling around and around underwater, tearing its dinner apart. But this person hadn’t been eaten, just mangled and left behind.

  From somewhere deep in the building I heard the chugging cough of a generator starting, and the tiny security lights I’d installed along both sides of the hallways began to glow. At my side, Eli swung the ocular away from his face to dangle around his neck and indicated the body. “L’arcenciel?” I nodded and he asked, “The hatchling Soul was talking about? Under coercion?”

  “Maybe. Probably. But the arcenciel smells sick. Maybe dying.”

  Eli didn’t comment on that. “He okay?” he asked, meaning Brute.

  “Yeah,” I lied. “He’s just ducky.” I nudged the wolf with a knee and we moved on, the werewolf in the lead by a head, his shoulder in constant contact with my leg.

  The muted lights showed me too much. Another body, mauled like the first one, farther down the corridor. A body part half in a doorway. Things I didn’t want to see, smells of people I knew mixed with the stench of bowels released in death. There was no one left alive in the foyer or the hallways that veered off. No one to rescue or save.