Broken Soul: A Jane Yellowrock Novel

by Faith Hunter

  “Excuse me,” I said to the One Feathers, and left the porch at a run. I still had my flashlight and clicked the light on as I neared my SUV. “Anything new I should be looking for?” It might sound like a dumb question, but the market for monitoring and tracing equipment was changing and evolving so fast that keeping up required constant attention to company updates. I’d left that to Eli.

  “Second- and third-gen magnetic trackers are smaller and adhere better than the first generation. They still can be fired from a cannon or tossed over a fence to land anywhere on the exterior, but even the old trackers cost five hundred bucks apiece and none of them always stick. The math sucks unless you have bottomless pockets. It’s easier to walk by, open the door, and toss one under the seat, except you keep your vehicle locked. A public street is not the place to disable the alarm and attach one inside the engine compartment or the trunk. So that leaves walking by, pausing, and sticking a GPS tracking device under the wheel well or bumper. Old-style craft. They can be small enough to hide between two fingers, but those cost. Most people still use the ones the size of a pack of cigarettes. You checking now?” I grunted the affirmative and he said, “I’ll hold.”

  I walked around the vehicle and saw nothing on the exterior. I bent and checked each wheel well. Empty except for mud from where I’d gotten stuck earlier, and the rain splashing up from the roads hadn’t completely washed it clean. Anything pushed through the mud to adhere to the metal would have left an impression different from ones nature left, and the mud coating all looked uniform. I lay down and rolled under the front, then the back. Nothing was stuck to the bumpers. “I’m clean. But I want a more thorough inspection when I get home.”

  “Okay.” He disconnected.

  Back on the porch I asked, “You have a gun?”

  “Course we have a gun,” Aggie said, as if I’d asked a stupid question. Maybe I had. These were country women facing rabid animals, carrot-stealing rabbits, and kids with nefarious and salacious intentions. And maybe evil people looking to rob, rape, and steal.

  I sat and drank half of my tea, my mouth as dry as a bone from dread. “My vehicle looks clean, but there’s no way to be sure. And since I’m here now, it’s too late. I’m sorry.”

  “We be okay,” uni lisi said. “What you come here for tonight?”

  Not to get you killed, I thought. I said, “Are there any Cherokee stories about dragons?”

  “Some,” Aggie said.

  “There Uktena,” uni lisi said. “He a dragon-like serpent with horns.”

  I repeated the name. “Ook-tay-nah?”

  Aggie said, “Close enough. The first Uktena was said to be transformed from a human man in a failed assassination attempt on the sun. Most other Uktena tales have to do with Cherokee heroes slaying the Uktena monster. The dragons are malevolent and deadly.”

  “The assassination attempt on the sun sounds a little like Apollo. So maybe the dragons are made of light?”

  “Or they aliens like that professor with the hair say.”

  I wasn’t sure who uni lisi was talking about, but the idea that the arcenciel was an alien was a possibility—though not an alien who came to Earth in a spaceship. Rather, one who got here from another universe at a liminal threshold, a place where one universe touched another.

  “Then there’s the Tlanuwa.” I cocked my head in question and Aggie produced it again. “Tlah-noo-wah.” I nodded and she went on. “Tlanuwa are giant birds of prey with impenetrable metal feathers. They’re common to the oral tradition of many southeastern tribes and may be the same things as the Thunderbird in southwestern tribal mythology.”

  “Now, that sounds like a spaceship,” I said, but thought that it could also be a storm god. An Anzû. I had never actually seen one without its glamour blocking the way and I had never seen one fly.

  Aggie shrugged, her shoulders rising and falling in the dark. “It has a strong resemblance to a jet fighter. Noisy, sleek, powerful, dangerous, and darting through the sky with a roar. You want to tell us what you’re looking for?”

  I described the arcenciel. And the Anzû. Aggie watched me as I talked, her eyes holding me in place like spears. “I’m wondering if they are real creatures that came to Earth through a liminal threshold. A weak place in reality where creatures can get to Earth.”

  “That old man,” uni lisi said derisively, “that Choctaw old man. Him talk about seeing strange things down in the bayou.”

  “The Choctaw are south of Houma?” I asked. That was one place I’d seen the arcenciel, playing in the waters of a bayou.

  “No. The Choctaw tribal regions went from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border,” Aggie said. My eyes went wide in surprise.

  “But in the last war, our people beat them good.” Uni lisi sounded satisfied, the way a soccer mom might when recounting an old high school rivalry.

  Aggie ignored it and said, “Locally the tribal members are represented by the Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees, but they’re composed of an amalgamation of several tribes which include Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Acolapissa, and Atakapa.”

  I nodded, but current tribal politics didn’t help me.

  “Each community is governed by its own tribal council and advised by their respective Council of Elders,” uni lisi said. “That old man, he talk about thing he see in the bayou and the swamps. Him a member of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, but there the Isle de Jean Charles Band, and the Bayou Lafourche Band too.”

  “All three bands are ancestrally related. Mama was being courted by a leader of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, but he was killed trying to save a family during Hurricane Rita. That’s the old man she’s talking about.”

  “Him too old for me anyway. I need me a young man.” Uni lisi cackled with glee.

  “Was there any specific place where he saw the creatures?” I asked.

  “Nah.” Uni lisi waved her hand in the air as if it was all unimportant. “He seen them when he smoking wacky weed. He a crazy old man.”

  Aggie added, “He did say once that the Uktena tried to talk to him. That his ancestor killed one with a steel knife and drank its blood, and that it made him strong. But he didn’t say where any of this happened.”

  “How about a Cherokee flood story?” I asked.

  “There a silly story about a dog who tell a man to build a raft, and then that dog, he tell the man to throw him into the water to kill him. Stupid dog, he was. Then the flood came and the man on the raft lived but all the other peoples were just a pile of bones.”

  “Their spirits danced,” Aggie said, looking troubled. “It sounded like the pile of their bones dancing. Mama’s beau said he heard it once.” She nodded and sipped her tea, her eyes far away, in the past of the old stories. When she spoke again, she sounded uneasy. “Like a pile of bones . . . dancing. I always hated that image.”

  Uni lisi waved her hand again. “Some stories silly. This one silly. You don’ be unhappy about this silly story or about that old man. That a long time ago.” But her voice no longer sounded like the story was silly, or that she had stopped grieving for her old man.

  Out front I heard a truck turn into the cul-de-sac. Truck lights swept the property as it went around my SUV and circled the small turn-around of the cul-de-sac. I slipped out and determined it was indeed a power company truck, and its diesel engine was idling as a man with a powerful flashlight stood beneath the pole, looking up at the damage, muttering imprecations about kids these days. I returned to the One Feathers’ back porch, offered my thanks, and said my good-byes. I slipped out and to my SUV. Checked my GPS.

  I called Derek and asked, “If I give you a GPS, can you send a guy to sit in a tree and keep an eye on two old ladies? Like you’re doing with Leo’s clan home property? I can pay.”

  “Sure, Legs. I’ll send Blue Voodoo. He hunts. Sitting in a tree will be like a day off with pay for him.”

  I gave Derek the GPS and the address, described the layout, and left it to Derek and Blue Voodoo
. I didn’t know the guy well, but he was one of Derek’s longtime men. The One Feathers would be safe from anyone targeting my friends to get at me.

  Without turning on my lights, I started the engine and backed out of the street. Where would a tribal elder have heard a sound in the bayou, a sound like bones dancing?

  I was no closer to discovering anything, spinning my wheels. But something about dancing bones sounded important. And sad.

  With the night off, I could have changed and let Beast hunt, but it felt too dangerous to shape-shift and play. Too much was going wrong and I had too little information. And yet, the arcenciel had gray energies like the ones where I changed form. So . . . maybe it wasn’t play. Maybe it would be research. I didn’t know but I decided to stay human, for now.

  I was still on the west side of the river when I saw an SUV like the ones I’d seen before, maybe tailing me, though this one was grayish in the night, not black. I asked my cell to dial the Kid, and when he answered, I said, “You remember the license plates Eli and I got you for the black SUVs that were tailing us?” I knew the Kid would remember, so I didn’t wait for an answer. The question was rhetorical. “What did they come back as?”

  “Local leases. Both came back to a Paul Reaver, not Revere, but Reaver.”

  “Fake name?” I asked, as I slowed, letting the vehicle close the gap on me.

  “Probably, but the credit card is good, so whoever created the ID did a good job. The cars have GPS, which I got, and I’ve been following them. Both are currently near the corner of Beryl Street and Jewel Street, hear Harlequin Park. Eli rode by, talked to a neighbor who says they are nice people. Nice house. Rental. You need me to send you a photo?”

  The tail vehicle pulled up fast and its lights hit my mirrors, blinding me. My heart rate sped and I reached to the passenger seat and pulled a nine-mil from the thigh holster. “Is there another car rented under the same name?”

  “No. I checked. Why?”

  The SUV took that moment to pull around me and roar off. It was full of people and was blasting some heavy bass beat into the night and trailing odors of weed and booze. Teenaged rockers, full of hormones. I let the tension drain away, even as I memorized the license plate. “No,” I said, hearing the relief in my voice. “But just for grins, run this plate.” I gave him the number. “And is Soul there?”

  “She went out about half an hour ago.”

  “I’ll get back to you.” I ended the call and wondered how much of what I was seeing and worrying about was nothing and how much was various supernatural beings hiding things from me. Maybe it was time to beard the lion in her den.

  Pulling over, I parked in the shadow of an abandoned warehouse, the front of the vehicle snugged up against the building. There were lots of warehouses up and down the Mississippi, some old and fancy with intricate brickwork and some thrown together out of metal and steel. This was a newer, and therefore uglier one, with tall grasses growing up in cracked concrete and birds flying through broken glass in the ventilation windows high off the ground. There were no security cameras that I could I see, and I was far enough off the road so that traffic cams would have a hard time picking anything up, if there even was a traffic cam on the isolated road.

  I rolled down the window and sniffed the night air, smelling rats and feral cats and exhaust. A far-off skunk. Dead fish. Water. No people had been here recently. I made sure that the thigh holster Bruiser had provided was secure on the passenger seat beside me. Loosened both nine-mils and chambered a round in each. Standard ammo, not silver. It would likely be rednecks or gangbangers, not supernats, who would bother me out here.

  I slouched down in the vehicle seat and took a chance; I dialed Soul. She picked up instantly. “What have you learned?” she asked.

  “Too much and too little. I need you to confirm that you are the same species of creature as the arcenciel that attacked Leo and Gee DiMercy. Gee hints that it might be so. And I need to know what the gray place of the change is—that’s what I call the shape-changing energies that seem to operate outside ordinary Earth physics and time. And I need to know now.”

  Soul didn’t answer at first, and I rolled the window down an inch so I could hear anyone or anything approaching. The window was still cracked from when the light-dragon hit my vehicle. I really needed to get that fixed before a cop pulled me over and ticketed me. By the unchanging scents, there was still nothing anywhere around, only the smells of small animals, the heady heaviness of freshwater, the soft susurration of the wind, and the deeper, more powerful vibration of the river on the other side of the levee.

  “I will call you back,” she said, and the call ended.

  I waited for perhaps two minutes, before I began to wonder whether she had blown me off, or if maybe she had meant she would call me back later. Then my cell rang, an unknown number on it. Burner phone?

  “Yellowrock,” I said.

  Soul said, “Some have hinted that you are dangerous, with your questions and your species-gifts untaught and unproven. Those same have proposed that you be removed to lessen the danger to the rest of us.”

  Removed? Meaning killed? But before I could ask, Beast pressed down on my mind with her paw. In the darkness of my mind, I saw a mental image of a puma high on a ledge over a trickle of water. Waiting, still and silent, for prey.

  Soul went on. “I have offered my recommendation that you be allowed to hunt for truth where you might find it and use such truth as you might wish. An experiment that might lead the imprisoned into the light.”

  “Thanks,” I said, my tone offended. “It’s nice to have someone in my corner when I’m being judged without the chance to speak for myself. Some who?”

  “Some of my ilk. My species, as you said.”

  “Okay. So there are a lot more of you than I was thinking.”

  “The lines are open again. For now, yes.”

  Which meant nothing to me. “I’m not in the mood to play games,” I said, feeling tired. I closed my eyes and rubbed them with my fingertips. They felt hot and dry. “Please just answer my questions. Just this once will someone please just answer my questions without making me bleed for the answers. Please?”

  Soul laughed, not unkindly. “I am of the Light, what some have called arcenciel or essendo luci. Light-beings. Rainbow dragons. Humans have worshiped us and witches have imprisoned us and used us for their magics for eons of time. We have come and gone upon your Earth and others like it for millennia. We like it here. Were we not hunted, more of us would choose to stay here. To raise our hatchlings here. There is water aplenty and we like the water planets best.”

  Finally. Finally someone who could talk to me. Would talk to me. With my eyes closed I felt some odd sort of darkness float out of me, a shadow heavy as a stone lifting away. “And the gray place of the change?” Please answer me that.

  “It is here and not here. It is a place that exists within and without. It is life and death, healing and illness, light and darkness, good and evil, time and not-time. It is neither this nor that, and yet is everything. It is energy and matter as they play together like streams colliding and re-forming and flowing around boulders and islands and obstacles, ever moving forward, yet able to pool and stand still. It is the Gray Between.”

  I laughed, the sound broken. “That doesn’t help me much, though I have figured out that it comes from inside me as much as from outside me.”

  “Call your energies. I will come to you.”

  I sat up slowly in the car seat. “You can find me when I go into the gray place of the change?”

  “Of course. If I am physically close enough, I can see you through the Gray Between even when you do not enter there. Can you not see us when you are there?”

  I remembered back to the sparring room when the light-dragon had come through. Had it been zeroing in on me? But then the sequence of events settled into me and I recalled that Bruiser had asked me to go into the gray place after the arcenciel had appeared and started biting. But . .
. I had been pulling on Beast’s strength, her speed. Were they the same thing? Did Beast’s strength and her ability to slow time come from the same place, from the gray place of the change? And at my house, when I shifted into the dog . . . I had felt magic. Had the arcenciel tried to find me? Had it been trying to find me for a long time? Was it zeroing in on my location every time I shifted?

  What about the first time I was attacked by one of the things, on Bitsa, in the city streets? I hadn’t been drawing on Beast then. But maybe it had been close and had seen me in the gray place anyway? Dang it. I didn’t know enough to make a guess, which meant experimentation was on the schedule for the night’s activities.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. “Let’s see.” I set the clunky cell to the side and slouched down deeper in the SUV. I didn’t try to meditate or to call upon Beast. I didn’t try to find my own genetic makeup in the coiled snake of my own DNA structure. I just looked inside for the energies. And there was nothing there.

  Beast rolled over in my mind, a cat on her back, looking at me upside down, her belly exposed. She chuffed at me. I was pretty sure she was laughing. Cat laughter. Which was always snark at another’s expense. Fine. You try, I thought at her.

  Instantly the gray energies rose, lifting through me, sliding around me. Great. My cat has the power, not me. Again Beast chuffed with laughter. And then I smelled exhaust. I opened my eyes to see lights in the rearview, lights on bright, blinding me. Doors opened. The deep basso beat of music followed multiple shapes as they left the vehicle, the SUV that blocked me in. “Soul,” I whispered. “I might be in trouble.”

  “I see you,” her voice said, over the open cell line. “Stay there.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I whispered again, knowing she would hear me. I reached over and took one nine-millimeter, tucking it into my waistband at my back, the other into my fist. I rolled down, lower in the seat, into the floorboard, sitting on the accelerator. I moved the seat as far back as it would go to give me room to work. I watched the windows, and cursed the broken window that left me partially blind. I let the weapon move with my eyes, holding it in a two-hand grip.