by Faith Hunter
Shadows floated beside the vehicle as the human shapes moved along the SUV. Satan’s Three? Or gangbangers? I took a breath and smelled vamp, unfamiliar, powerful. Floral, like Grégoire but with hazelnut undertones. And several humans smelling of booze and weed. One of them smelled like the sniper. I was so freaking stupid.
Deep inside me, Beast growled, and I realized that she had kept the gray place of the change open. It was muted but shining, a silvered shadow of energies misting across my skin. I could change. But it would do me no good. I had blocked myself in like a mountain lion in a den. I knew better. I couldn’t run. Not in time.
I heard the soft shush of leather on concrete and placed one of the three at the back of the SUV. Another was at the cracked window and it was a vamp. I didn’t know for certain that they intended me harm, but I didn’t care. I lifted the weapon to the crack at the top of the window and fired. The report was insanely loud, my hearing stopped dead, my nose clogged with the stink of a fired weapon. The shadows shifted and I heard a sound like a mouse, but recognized that it was a vamp, screaming in agony, a high-pitched ululation, the sound they make when they think they’re dying, a death wail. And I could barely hear it.
I was now head-blind, except for sight. Not my best sense. I shimmied back into the knee space, my neck crooked by the steering wheel, the floorboard warm beneath me. The passenger window shattered, bowing in as if under terrific pressure, but holding together; then it was rammed a second time, spraying me with pebbled, rounded bits of glass. Instinctively, I ducked. The locks on both front doors popped. And swung open. I fired, over and over again, until the magazine was empty.
The gun was jerked from my hand and I saw it whirling into the dark, arching up high, as I was yanked out of the SUV. I landed hard on the broken concrete, banging my head. My breath whooshed from my lungs. A foot kicked down on me, hitting my chest. And my breath just stopped. Tears gathered in my eyes, reflexive to the glare of a flashlight aimed into my face.
The gray energies rose around me, burning. Change, Beast thought at me. Change now!
I reached for my skinwalker magic as a man leaned over me, pale vamp face and the long fangs of the older ones. He rested something on my chest, and I felt the freezing energies through my clothes. “You have proved useful after all,” he said, his words muffled behind the gunfire-deafness, his accent Italian, or Sicilian. He leaned in and smelled me, holding me still. “I would ride you and drink you down, slowly, were there time.”
Change! Beast screamed inside me.
I . . . I can’t. The cold thing on my chest, I thought. It’s doing something to me.
A pale hand holding a crystal—like a quartz crystal, about four inches long and as thick as a big man’s thumb—descended and rested the quartz on my chest. Gray energies gathered around it, sucked from me, and I grunted with pain, as breath pulled back into me, like into a vacuum bottle. But the energies gathered at the crystal tip swirled around and up into the quartz . . . or diamond. Was it a diamond? And dark shadows flooded downward and inside the crystal. “You are more than you first appear, my Amazon Chelokay. Perhaps I shall take you with me after all.” Light flickered at the edges of the night. Barely, I heard screams, smelled something fishy, and the under-tang of burning, green vegetation. The smell of bayou, maybe. It smelled familiar. This was the thing that had attacked me on Bitsa. And had attacked us in the gym at HQ. This thing had been, what? Following me?
In the dark there were shapes like a head and jaw, glowing eyes, an iridescent silver. Wings. Scales. Dark and light, moving away. A light-dragon. Fleeing the vamps.
A fist swung down through the glare and connected with my jaw. My head rocked back. The gray energies swirled high as my vision telescoped down. As my field of vision grew smaller and smaller, I saw two vampires chasing a rainbow, humans running, right at the edge of my failing eyesight. And then the last of my vision failed me and all I heard was shouting and an engine revving. I slumped down into the blackness of an internal night.
• • •
I woke when a palm slapped me so hard it rocked my head as badly as the fist had. Soul was standing over me, the open door of my SUV visible behind her. She hit me again, the pain and the sound ringing along with my groaning. “Stop. I’m awake.” Soul seemed satisfied with her untender ministrations. She bent over the armored window, the one that was still cracked from where the arcenciel had rammed it, studying the cracks in detail, including the nick at the top, where my round had damaged it more.
I moaned as I rolled over, and pressed against the pain in my chest. Sitting up, I held my jaw. Soul whirled, set her eyes on me, and growled. Okay, that’s weird.
Soul was pretty, tiny, and delicate. But as I watched, she proved that she was definitely not human. Her jaw opened way wider than a human’s can. She was showing me her teeth the way Beast would show another predator her teeth in threat. I had a feeling that I was missing something crucial to this situation. “Soul. It’s me. Jane.” I rolled away from her, one hand behind my back gripping the nine-millimeter that was still in my waistband. The teeth looked like a warning, a predator response, not just to see me squirm, but to make sure I knew I was about to be eaten. My hand sweaty on the gun grip, I froze into stillness. “Soul? What is this?”
Magic tingled and sizzled along my skin. A wind sprang up, cold and hot at once, burning with both ice and steam. Soul’s mouth elongated again. And again. Alligator long. Crocodile long. Full of teeth like needles and knives. And wrong, wrong, wrong. Soul was not the same person in this form, as if . . . she lost her humanity when she shed her skin. “Soul, you just saved my butt. What did I do wrong that—”
Soul hissed and spat, narrowly missing me as I flinched away. The spittle hit the metal building behind me with a whistling splat. I heard sizzling and smelled hot metal and acid.
“Holy crap!” I pulled the gun in my waistband and fired. Three fast shots. And nothing happened, not to Soul. The rounds seemed to leave no mark at all. Or in my panic, I missed.
Beast shoved-rammed-punched her way into the forefront of my brain. Change, she screamed, clawing at my mind. Pain ricocheted through me. I inhaled and thought of Beast. Rolled over into the shadows. Until the cool metal of the warehouse at my back stopped me. Acid ran down from where she had spat at me, burning a patch of bare skin in my shoulder.
Soul lunged.
Light and shadow wrenched and twisted. The earth rearranged itself beneath me. I aimed, blew out my breath, and fired. Once, twice, three more times. Nothing hit her. The rounds passed clean through her. Through the light that was Soul. Her teeth came at me, big as a T. rex. They caught my arm and snapped down, just as she solidified and dropped onto my belly. My breath, my one precious breath, was shoved out in a strangled half scream. The smell of my blood was hot on the air. There was no pain yet. Just the sound and vibration of teeth on my bones. My stomach turned over and tried to defeat gravity. She shook me like a dog with a rabbit in its jaws. Slung me up and to the side. She let go and I landed in a spinning roll. Realized I was still in the gray place of the change. With Soul. In her natural form. Or one of them.
She leaped at me, her mouth open again. I focused on it. More cat than gator now. Striped black and yellow. Tiger, Beast thought. I/we snarled. Soul snarled back. With much bigger teeth.
Pelt sprouted along my arms, healing flesh and tendons on the one she had mauled. But I was twisted in my clothes. I wrenched my hips and legs, trying to get them free of the jeans and boots.
Soul pounced again and bit down onto my healing arm and shook me—clearly her method of choice for killing small prey. Like me. This time I heard the snap-snap of breaking bones. The pain that had been hiding exploded inside me. I heard a roaring in my ears. Which felt like a really bad thing. Beast? I’m in trouble here. More pain raced along my jaws and through my gut. The roaring grew louder. My body went limp.
• • •
Face wrenched in agony. Changing. Shifting. Beast screamed. Buried
fangs in tiger’s throat, latching down. Fur and blood and meat and . . . rich, tasty blood. Beast shook tiger. Swallowed good blood. Tiger growled and gurgled. Tiger could not breathe.
Beast played dead. Then attacked. Beast is best hunter.
Tiger whined. Blew bubbles of blood. Tiger lay still. Beast let her go and leaped to three legs, whirled and reached for tiger. Tiger was gone. Sniffed, searching for tiger. Saw light and movement among trees beside cracked, broken concrete. Light like gray place, but brighter. With wings and scales. Growling and snarling. Roaring and chuffing. Singing like birds. Soul cried, “Where is the hatchling?”
And she was gone.
Pain raced up broken leg. Beating like blood and heart. I/we gathered up Jane boots and clothes. Carried them to ess-u-vee. Leaped to front, to top of chest, above beating heart, warm from life of ess-u-vee, alive but not alive. Curled into ball on top of Jane clothes. Put jaw on boots. Closed eyes and thought of Jane.
• • •
I woke up on the warm hood of the SUV, disoriented and nauseated. Hair unbraided and draped all over me. And naked. I groaned and rolled over. Sat up. Making sure that Soul and Satan’s Three were gone. No growling, no light show. No vehicle behind mine. Nothing but the smell of crushed plants, Soul blood, gunfire, and vamp on the air, mixed with something vaguely familiar that skittered around in my brain like a rat in a box before disappearing like a magic trick before I could identify it.
I rolled off the hood and dressed quickly in my blood-damp, shredded clothes, except for the panties and bra that were a total ruin. This was why I didn’t invest in expensive undies.
No one drove by as I dressed; no sirens sounded in the distance. I was glad I was in the boonies with no nearby, nosy neighbors. Going commando—which was not at all comfortable, the zipper cold and pinching my skin—I shoved my feet into my boots and hunted for my guns and my cell. Seconds after becoming human again, I slid into the car, the tires ground into the concrete and spit shale, as I gunned the motor and got the heck outta Dodge, thinking, What the heck just happened?
I was halfway across the river before my heart rate slowed and I figured out three things. One: Driving with no windows was a lot like riding Bitsa. Two: I wasn’t hungry. I had been beaten and cold-cocked by a vamp, shifted, fought a tiger, been wounded, shifted back, all in a matter of minutes, and I wasn’t hungry. Shifting always used energy, energy that I took from food calories. But I wasn’t hungry. In fact, I felt amazing, like I’d had a good meal and a beer. And like the beer worked on me like it did on humans. I wasn’t buzzed, but I was amazingly relaxed. Which I clearly shouldn’t have been. And using the term amazing a lot. And I had no idea why. Three: Soul was a shapeshifter. Which meant that the arcenciels were shapeshifters. A light-dragon and a freaking tiger and maybe other forms as well. And not a shifter who required that mass and energy remain unchanged. In her human form she weighed maybe a hundred twenty-five pounds. In her tiger form she weighed more than three hundred, if her weight on my belly had been an indication. Unless she could convert energy to mass all by her lonesome. Like maybe she had a pocket of energy she could draw on as needed to change shape and mass. That would be handy. The arcenciels had—or were—magic like I had never imagined before.
I thought through the last few minutes in the warehouse parking area as I drove, analyzing it from every memory—smell, sight, pain, taste, roaring sound, and time. Something about it was familiar in a mathematical kinda way. Like A equals B, and B equals C, so A equals C. Like that. I was doing math. My high school teachers would be so proud. I pulled up my sleeve to see an undamaged arm, healed by the shift. My life was good. Weird but good. “And I can do alphabet math. Cool.”
And the best thing about the whole thing? The taste of Soul’s blood. Which was why I wasn’t hungry, I thought. Whatever kinda dragon-cat-shifter/l’arcenciel Soul was, her blood was full of power. “I gotta figure out what she is. Someday,” I said to the road in front of me. “For now, it’s all good because I know for sure who’s trying to bomb me and sniper me and tailing me. Well, it’s all good, except that Soul tried to kill me.” I frowned at the street because it wanted to waver to the left. “And Satan’s Three are after me and it has something to do with my energies in the gray place of the change. Which is bad. Very bad. So it’s not all good.
“Oh crap. I’m talking to myself. And I’m feeling really good. Okay. Soul’s blood is full of power and happy juice. Like the arcenciel goop from the sparring room floor and from the drugged scale.”
Car lights flashed into the SUV through the broken windows. My T-shirt was clawed and ripped and stiff with blood. Cool night wind touched my skin through the rents. Since I was over the river and off the bridge, I slowed, parked, and yanked the shirt off, tossing it into the passenger floor, without looking. I twisted my hair up in a bun and stuck some stakes through it to keep it in place, then pushed the stakes down because they hit the roof and hurt my scalp. Dang stakes. A toiletries bag was in back and I crawled through the SUV to get it.
From the zippered bag, I pulled a thin, short-sleeved tee and slid it over my head, which would have been easier had I done it before I staked my hair. I wasn’t thinking straight yet. But my head felt light and airy and I thought that was new and different, so maybe I was metabolizing the drug like the lab’s research had suggested.
I looked down at my chest. I needed to shop. I was running out of bras and work clothes, getting sword-cut and claw-slashed. This brown, yellow, and pink tee had a cute pig on it with the words Bacon Is Meat Candy. Ugly, though it was a perfect tee for Beast. And at least all my girlie parts were covered.
In a rush, all the manic energy drained out of me, like water flowing from my fingertips and puddling on the floor of the vehicle. My limbs went weak, my eyes were too heavy, and my head lolled back against the backseat. I was pretty sure I was passing out. I said something bad just as unconsciousness took me. My last sight was the sun trying to rise, a gray haze on the eastern sky, reflected in broken window glass everywhere.
• • •
The sun was high in the sky when I heard a hollow knocking and my cell buzzed at the same time, waking me. I picked up my cell and looked around at traffic. It took a moment to remember why I was sleeping in the back of the SUV on a crowded city street. There was a parking ticket on the windshield wiper. Great. And Eli stood at the broken passenger window with a peculiar look on his face. I waved Eli in, opened the cell to answer the call, moistened my cracked, dry lips, and said, “Speak to me, oh genius, geek, and computer prodigy.”
“Those are pretty much all the same thing, you know. Ummm. Are you okay?” the Kid asked. “You sound kinda . . . I don’t know. Happy.”
“I’m always happy. Tell me something I don’t know. And say hi to your brother.”
I held the phone out so Eli, who was easing into the SUV, could hear.
“Yeah. Sure. Hey, Eli. Whatever. Is she okay?”
Eli closed the door on the traffic, looked me over, and shook his head, bemused. “She looks like a homeless person who spent the night in the back of an unsecured SUV, wearing a bacon shirt.”
“Yeah? Get a pic. Jane, the car tailing you was a lease that came back to Florence Falcon. Florence is a false ID, with a social that originated at the same birth month and state as Paul Reaver. Florence works for Paul Reaver. Whoever created the fantastic IDs did a pis—uh, a poor job of separating the locales and the timelines. You want me to send this to Jodi?”
“Yeah. Tell her I was being tailed. And that they boxed me in and tried to kill me.”
“What? Are you okay?” Alex sounded weirded out, which didn’t make much sense because people were always trying to kill me. “Eli?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m ducky,” I said. Eli grunted agreement. “Jodi might want to—wait,” I said. “Send the info to Jodi and to the ATF officer in charge of the bomb delivery. What’s his name?”
“Special Agent Stanley. Got it.” I could hear bewilderment in
Alex’s voice. “Eli, is she really okay?”
“She looks fine but the SUV is damaged.”
“Later, Kid.” I hung up and looked at Eli. “What’s up?”
“We lost track of you on the far side of the river,” he said, mildly. “It took us four hours to find you, and when I did, you were asleep.”
“Oh. That was . . .” I realized he had been worried. Both of the Youngers had been terribly worried. Thinking I was hurt. Or dead. Which was really sweet, and would probably insult them if I said so. I settled on, “That was horrible of me.” I crawled back into the driver’s seat, explaining. “I was talking to Soul and she said she could find me in the gray place of the change, so I went into it. And I was attacked by vamps. And they beat me up and were planning to kill me or kidnap me. Then I think . . .” I pulled the tangled memories back into place, and examined the different scent patterns from the attack. “I think, maybe, an arcenciel came—not Soul—and the vamps did something to it or tried to, but it got away. And they knocked me out.”
Eli was staring at me with an indecipherable expression. “Unconscious.”
“Yeah. Mostly. I think the vamps were chasing the arcenciel and that’s why they left me. And then Soul came and woke me up. And attacked me, maybe because she thought I should have saved the other arcenciel? Or maybe because she thought I had attacked the arcenciel? Anyway, then I shifted into Beast. And that’s when it got strange.”
“That’s when it got strange.”
I had a feeling that Eli was making fun of me and I squinted at him in threat. “We fought and she turned into a three- or four-hundred-pound tiger and I bit her throat and swallowed her blood. And then she took off. And then I shifted back to me. Only her blood left me drunk as a skunk, ’cause she’s an arcenciel too and their blood’s really tasty.” I chuffed a laugh. “So, anyway, I got dressed and back in the SUV.” I looked around me again at the traffic. “I think I drove here and fell asleep. Because of the druggy blood. But I’m sober now. Mostly.”
