by Faith Hunter
I wasn’t going to have a choice. I was going to have to risk the Gray Between. I was going to have to bend time so I could be fast enough to fight the arcenciel.
But the Gray Between would allow all similar creatures to see me working outside of time, and again, that might result in other arcenciels showing up to help the juvie rainbow dragon. I hesitated. Eli walked through the living room and into the little-used laundry/storage room on the back of the house, behind my bedroom and bath. He leaned to see out the windows.
And I heard Angie’s voice, coming down the stairs. “Hey. You’re pretty. All sparkly. Wanna come play with me?”
Before Eli or I could move, Alex was flying up the stairs. His flip-flops came off and bounced down the stairs. Eli and I raced up after him and into his room to see Angie Baby standing outside, on the second-floor gallery, her body outlined in the ward’s light, the arcenciel’s huge head reared back, only inches from her. The light dragon was horned and frilled, its long hair copper and brown, and this time, traced through with red and a hint of sapphire. Its teeth were longer than my hands, sharp and pearled and glistening like the opals for which it was named.
And Angie was gripping a small steel knife in one hand, holding it behind her back, where the arcenciel couldn’t see it.
Alex skidded out the long, narrow doors of his own room, out onto the gallery, and grabbed Angie up under his arm. Dragged her back inside, one hand ripping away the knife. Slammed the French doors closed and twisted the finger latch.
Angie struggled in his hands and tore herself away. “No!” she shouted, her face hidden by shadows, her hair standing out in a halo of static power. She snapped her left hand at Alex and screamed, “Tu dormies!”
The Kid’s knees folded, his body dropped, and Alex was instantly asleep. As he fell, Eli snatched the tumbling knife out of the air and glared at Angie. Alex’s head bounced on the rug at the foot of his bed.
“Angelina!” I shouted, furious. And frightened. Angie shouldn’t be able to do that. At all. Angie was supposed to be bound.
Angie whirled on me, her white nightgown furling around her. “I’ll put you all to sleep if you don’t let me talk to the shiny lizard!”
“Angie. No,” I said, trying to find a calm tone. If she put us to sleep, she would be all alone with a creature who could kill her in a heartbeat. “Angie. Baby, please don’t.”
“I tolded you that the scabertoothed bones was calling to it,” she screeched, her hands fisting in front of her like a boxer. “You didn’t listen.” Magic coiled out of her fists, not as strong as before, but clear and bright, a blue laced with black that looked scary in ways that magic had never looked scary to me before. She took a step toward me, and her voice lowered. Slowly she said, “And you let Mama and Daddy put me to sleep.” Angie sounded furious and dangerous.
I had never seen her act so badly, not since . . . I stopped, trying to remember. What had I smelled? When Molly first arrived. Flowers and lemongrass and that awful perfume . . . “Oh no,” I whispered.
“Yes!” Angie shouted, raging. “I’m a big girl, not a baby! I can kill my own snakes,” she said, using a phrase Molly used sometimes.
“Angie,” I said, “you can’t kill this snake. That’s not what that phrase means.”
Angie whirled and beat the bed, her fists pounding into Alex’s pillows and rumpled covers. “No, no, no, no, no!” she screamed, her words muffled in the covers.
The house boomed again, as I tried to figure out what to do. And again. And again. The old timbers were creaking and the windowpanes of the French door behind us shattered. A fireball burned through the door and into the house, the flickering flames momentarily brightening the room. Angie flicked her fingers at it, the way she might if she was flicking water off her hand, and it stopped, the fire snuffed out in a puff of black smoke that stank of flaming rosemary. It all took maybe two seconds. In Beast-vision, Angie’s magics floated around her like a diaphanous veil, brighter and hotter than only a moment before. Holy crap. Just . . . holy crap.
I looked back at the French door and the circular hole that was burned through it. Molly was throwing fire spells at the arcenciel, and one had bounced off and come back inside. And Angie had broken the energies of the working as if she were popping soap bubbles.
Fire wasn’t Mol’s strong suit, but it was all she had left unless she loosed her death magics. And if she did that, and if Angie tried to grapple with that form of magic, she would die. We might all die. And that would kill Molly as surely as taking a gun to her own head.
Eli had glanced up at the fireball and then back to Angie. He said, “You hurt Alex. I thought you liked him.” The tone was like a kid, finger-pointing, but Eli crossed his arms and frowned hard. Eli. Frowning.
I checked to make sure my partner hadn’t grown another head. Outside, the arcenciel head-butted the house. The room shook. Opal hit it again. And again. Something fell in the bathroom and shattered. Angie jerked at the sound and lowered her hands slightly, her fists slack, her face flushed but uncertain now. Her hair still stood on end, and her magic radiated out as if on the verge of explosion.
Eli ignored it all and dropped to one knee, one hand extending to Angie. Sadly, he said, “Alex thought he was saving you, like a prince saves a princess.”
“I don’t need saving,” Angie shouted at him. “I’m not a stupid princess. I’m a snake killer and a witch!”
Eli looked surprised for the briefest moment and then he said. “Right. Alex thought he was helping you. He didn’t know you could save yourself and”—his voice dropped low, a gentle and wretched tone—“you hurt him.”
Angie tilted her head and looked down at Alex, her breath blowing hard. She fisted her hands again, as if teetering on the edge of something. Something catastrophic. She sobbed once, and hiccuped and swallowed. Her magics went cooler and calmer in color, fading the way a rainbow bleaches out of the sky. In a calmer tone, she asked, “He was helping me? But Alex isn’t a witch.”
“True. But he thought you were in trouble and needed help. And . . . you hurt him. That’s wrong.”
Tears started like a fountain, and Angie’s face was suddenly shining with them. They fell in rivulets onto her nightgown. She sniffled. “I didn’t mean to hu-hu-hu-hu-hu . . . ” She inhaled, taking tears in with the air. “Hurt him.” Eli smiled, showing teeth, looking charming, said, “True. And Alex knows that. But when a prince sees someone in danger they always go to the rescue.”
Angie nodded, staring at Alex as her magics settled. Tension flooded from me like Angie’s tears, in a flood, and I sidled to the damaged door and looked out. The creature just beyond the walls was banging itself bloody (if the clear goop that was dripping from her jaw could be called blood) against the ward. Angie said, “I’m sorry.” She frowned. “Uh-oh. I don’t know how to wake him up. I haven’t learned that one yet.” Angie blew out a breath that puffed her cheeks. “I been bad again. Mama’s gonna be mad at me.”
Relief surged through me. “But Alex will be okay, and we learned something, right, Angie?” I said, my voice remarkably calm, considering my racing pulse.
The little girl looked at me, and her shoulders slumped. “The light dragon is gonna break through if Mama doesn’t get some help. She needs my daddy.”
I walked to Angie and bent, lowering my arms. Angie lifted hers and I gathered her up, standing. Her arms wrapped around my neck and she huddled close. She smelled of a confusing mix of pheromones: anger breaking down, magic dissipating, tears of frustration and fury. And not a little shame.
Outside, the arcenciel stopped her attacks on the house, and I had to wonder if Angie’s magic had excited Opal somehow, and then when Angie calmed, quieted her. Where arcenciels were concerned, I was flying by the seat of my pants. Feeling better about things for the moment, I carried my goddaughter down the stairs.
As I left the room, Eli knelt, pick
ed his brother up in a fireman’s carry, and dumped him on the bed. He could hide the visual cues to his surprise at his brother’s weight, but not the olfactory ones. Alex may have topped out at around five feet, eleven inches, but he was putting on weight, all of it muscle, which until now had been hidden beneath his loose clothing.
Molly still stood in the middle of the living room, but now she was hunched, her fingers still flying but looking stiff and less coordinated. She was stinking of fear sweat and that awful perfume. Molly never, ever wore perfume around me because she knew my sense of smell was so much better than a human’s, and I hated the stink of synthetic scents. So . . . why did she . . . I studied her in her full skirt, the bodice pulling across fuller boobs. And at her waistline, I recognized the small but firm baby bump. Molly was pregnant.
I asked Angie, “Do you want the skull to help the baby?”
Angie pouted prettily, her lips swollen from her tears. She said, “Yes.” She glared at me. “Yes, damndamndamn!” Which was Molly’s swearword when she became frustrated and too angry to take life anymore and was hiding behind the closet door, where she cussed in private. Somebody had big ears. If the “tu dormies” spell was any consideration, very big ears.
It wasn’t the right time to fuss at Angie, but I had to. “Language, young lady.” Her pout deepened, her eyebrows scrunching down, and I managed not to grin. “And the creature? Why does it want the skull?”
“To stop Mama’s baby from being born. It’s gonna try to go back in time and stop her.”
The amusement went out of me and I bent, placing Angie on the couch. My arms free, I studied Molly, confused about what the little girl might really be meaning. How could an arcenciel go back in time to stop something that will take place in the future? How could Angie know what the arcenciel was thinking/planning/wanting?
Several things occurred to me all at once and my knees gave way, lowering me to the couch beside Angie. Arcenciels might have much stronger powers over time than I understood. What if they could see the possibilities of the future, and then go back in time to stop a certain thing from happening tomorrow? What if they could go back in time to stop anything they wanted to, no matter how far in the improbably distant future it might be? Based on Angie’s statements, maybe Opal wanted to keep Molly from getting pregnant? Or, much worse, stop the Everhart sisters and Evan Trueblood from ever being born. “Holy crap on crackers with toe jam,” I muttered. I had been thinking too short-term about time. “Angie, I get part of that, but how does the skull fit into it all?”
Angie was concentrating on my face, hers serious. “They gots to have a focus. A focal thing.” She grimaced, trying to find the proper words. “If Opal goes back in time, she gots to follow a thing that went back there too.”
“Ahhh. So if she has the skull, she can follow along the skull’s timeline back. To what?”
“To stop you from being given the skull.”
“Okay. So Opal would go back in time and stop me from getting the skull.”
“And that will kill you, Aunt Jane.”
I remembered back to a time when I had been on the verge of death and Beast had drawn on the skull’s DNA and RNA and taken mass from nearby stone. She had shifted into the sabertooth lion’s genetic form, even though he was a male big-cat, which I had thought wasn’t supposed to be possible. Not that I knew a lot about the process, as my skinwalker training had stopped when I was five or so. But the shift had saved our lives. Without the skull, that shift would not have been possible, and I—we—might have died.
Like my father had died in midshift, his injuries too severe to survive. And if I died, Molly’s death would eventually follow, on the timeline created by the arcenciel. And I still didn’t know what was going to happen on the current timeline. Dealing with time, thinking about time, made my brain tie up in knots. Thinking about changing time was so confusing that it gave me mental vertigo.
Eli passed me, checking the windows. He stepped out onto the side porch through one door and back in through another. He was carrying a subgun, a small, fully automatic weapon, in one hand and his full-length flat sword in the other. No shirt, no shoes. Brown skin catching the shadows and throwing back the light as muscles flexed and relaxed.
He said, “I think the arcenciel is gone.”
Molly’s hands quivered and slowly relaxed. She fell into the nearest chair, dripping with sweat, red hair clinging to her face. Angie left the couch and stood beside her mother, taking her hand; with her other hand, Angie pushed back her mother’s damp hair. “I gotta get this mess cut again,” Molly whispered to Angie.
“Daddy will have a cow again,” Angie said back, startling an exhausted laugh from Molly.
Molly stood and pulled her eldest up the stairs. “I need a shower, and you, young lady, have some explaining to do.”
“Tell your mother everything, Angie,” I said. “And I mean everything. Including about the skull.”
Angie gave an exaggerated sigh, an omen of what they would sound like when she hit her teens. “Okay, Aunt Jane. But she’s gonna be mad.”
“Yeah. Probably.” The two disappeared up the stairs, Molly’s footsteps sounding exhausted.
“That little girl is gonna be nothing but trouble in about ten years,” Eli said. Which echoed my own thoughts. Eli made the best partner.
“How’s Alex?” I asked.
“Still out. He’ll be okay. Pupils equal and reactive. Breath is even and slow at twenty.”
At the same moment, the lights flickered back on and my cell rang. I raced to the kitchen table to answer. It was Evan, his voice frantic and babbling. He had been unable to reach Molly and had clearly been thinking the worst. Which was not far from the truth. I said, “Molly’s okay, Evan. They all three are.”
Evan stopped talking and then stuttered ahead, “Sssshe told you?”
“No. She didn’t. Angie told me.”
“Angie doesn’t know.”
“Yes. She does. And she’s been carrying a big load of worry. We need to talk, you, Mol, and me. But first, let me catch you up.” It took a while. At one point, I heard the shower come on and then stop upstairs. And later a moan drifted down the stairs as Alex woke. Eli, and later Molly, joined me at the table, and I put the cell on speakerphone and switched on the camera so we could interact. Otherwise the house was silent.
When Eli and I had given Evan all the info we had, he frowned and said, “What if Mol and I bind the skull so the arcenciel can’t see it?”
Angie peeked around the wall and said, “That’s a good idea, Daddy.”
I managed not to eep. Eli managed not to shoot her. Molly managed not to drain her of life. I thought we all did pretty well.
“Angie?” Evan said. “When did you—”
Molly interrupted with “Son of a witch on a switch. What are you doing downstairs? She’s supposed to be in time-out,” she added to Evan.
She told her father, “You can do to the scabertoothed bones what you did to me. It worked until I grew up and undid it.”
I said, “We didn’t know she was here, Evan. No sound, no scent.” Evan breathed in, a soft sound of shock. Molly looked terrified. Angie had spelled herself in ways I wasn’t sure her parents could do, at least not without a lot of prep time and testing and frustration. Eli, who might not understand what had happened, but did understand that we were all upset, looked bored but intent, the way he had when we were trapped inside while outside a dragon made of light and magic raged, wanting to eat us.
“But I can’t undid it if I’m mad,” Angie added, taking her place at the table like the big girl she proclaimed herself to be.
“Angie,” Evan said, “how did you know about the binding?”
“It tickled. And then it hurt, the way my purple heart jammies hurt when I try to put them on.”
“She’s outgrown the purple heart pajamas,” Molly said
thoughtfully.
“She outgrew our binding?” Evan asked. “Literally and physically or metaphorically and metaphysically?”
“Yep,” Angie said cheerfully. “Can I have a peanut butter and jelly sam’ich?”
I stood and got the almond butter and the cashew butter out of the cabinet and some homemade muscadine jelly. I made sandwiches for all of us, including Alex, who was clomping down the stairs, a cold rag around his neck and a plastic bottle of pain meds in one hand. I used Eli’s new sprouted grain bread, which tasted a little weird but worked well with the nut butters and jelly.
I poured goat’s milk—another of Eli’s new passions—into glasses and passed the food and drink around while Molly and Evan experimented, putting Angie into her binding, watching as she loosened it and stepped out of it, almost the same way she might unknot a too-tight bathrobe and peel it off. Then they put her back into it and let her unknot it again. And then they wanted to try a binding on the skull, all of which sounded terribly boring to me and to Eli as well. He took his and Alex’s snacks to the living room on a large sterling silver serving tray he’d found in the butler’s pantry, leaving the family working in the kitchen. I got the cause of all the trouble, touched the crow on its beak to remove the ward from the skull, and placed it on the kitchen table, to the delight and awe of Angie Baby and the wide-eyed disgust of her parents.
Leaving it there, I took my plate and glass of milk to the back porch, where I could be alone with my thoughts. It was raining, a soft plink of drops, and I sat with my back against the house wall, staring out at what passed for darkness in a city, and ate. The scents were clean and mildly ozoney, wetwetwet, falling from the sky, flowing along the ground, draining into the storm sewers. Between downpours, mosquitoes buzzed everywhere, though most of them were locked out of Molly’s ward, butting the energies and making tiny sparks before dying. I’d have to tell her she could patent the ward as a house-sized bug killer/security system/light show.
