by Faith Hunter
Drawing on Beast, I wrapped my legs around her waist and rolled over in the mud, loosening her hold, hitting her with a bare fist as hard as I could into her nose. And with Beast so close, I could hit. A human nose would have cracked and flattened beneath my knuckles, but her nose gave way in a shower of sparks and seemed to suck my entire hand into her face with a slurping sound and a cascade of sparks. The inside of her was painful, like a mild electric current enveloping my hand. Hot and gummy. Which was gross. Until I realized two things. Rainbow dragons might pack an electrical punch as big as one of those electric eels, five hundred volts. Enough to stun a human. And I had recently been hit by lightning and nearly died. Every nerve ending across my entire body crawled at the thought of being hit again.
Beast fast, I ripped my hand free and rolled again. Punching her mouth, her eyes, her temples. Nothing seemed to faze her. Worse, I had no weapons. No gun. No blades. I risked a glance from the girl to the porch. Got a glimpse of Eli moving, bending.
If the arcenciel bit me, I’d be poisoned, and it wasn’t as if I had immediate access to the antidote. No. That was hanging in Leo’s deepest subbasement, literally a heartless bag of torn flesh and bone riddled with silver ammo. But the light dragon didn’t seem to be desirous of biting me. Instead she hit me back, and if I hadn’t turned my face at the last instant, she would have broken my jaw. I backhanded her and got a good handful of her hair with my other hand. I wrapped her hair around my fist and around her head and yanked.
We rolled through the mud, and I slammed her head into the boulder she had been digging under. Her skull hit with a satisfying crack, and she went still. I was gasping and hurting and managed to stand, one hand on the boulder. She wasn’t moving. Didn’t seem to be breathing. I had maybe killed a dragon. Oh man. No. I nudged her with my bare foot. Her head lolled. I bent to check for a pulse, but there was nothing. Did an arcenciel even have a pulse? They were full of a sparkly ectoplasmic goo, not blood. No internal organs that I could recognize. I lifted her eyelid to reveal an opalescent eye with a slit pupil that narrowed when the dim light hit it. Assuming she had reflexes to light, she was still alive.
I started to drop the eyelid when the pupil sharpened in focus. I leaped back just in time to avoid a slash of rainbow-hued horns. It shifted in an instant and I jumped back again. Its body was vaguely snakelike, iridescent scales the color of tinted glass and thick storm clouds, with hints of copper. It smelled like green herbs burning over hot coals and the tang of fish and water plants. The arcenciel vanished in a sparkle of light and a spray of harsh magic that burned on my arms and dried the mud into a brittle crust.
I stepped to the other boulder she had been digging beneath and pulled on Beast-strength to roll it away. My gut heaved from the elbow it had taken, and my breath came fast and faint. Beneath the boulder, in a hole I had dug the day before, was an oversized plastic Ziploc bag containing a waterproof vinyl bag full of magical stuff—the few things not under lock and key in various safe-deposit boxes—and the skull. I slid the bags from the muck and removed the vinyl gobag. I slung it over my shoulder and around my body to my back, where it gave a satisfying thump. So much for all the plans of mice and Humpty Dumpty.
I slapped the mud off my arms and legs and kicked it from my feet in big clumps. Holding my aching belly, I stood as straight as possible and looked at the porch. Eli and his brother sat in matching dented, rusted metal garden chairs, rocking back and forth on the bent-metal-tube frames. Eli was sipping a beer. Alex was sipping an energy drink. They both were grinning and broke into polite applause.
“Chick fight,” Eli said.
“Chick fight in the mud,” Alex amended.
“Thought she was gonna take you for a minute there, babe.”
The sky opened up and spilled half an ocean onto me. At least it washed away the mud. I made it to the porch through the downpour, where I managed to climb up to the wood flooring and fall into the remaining chair. Eli had picked the old, rusty chairs up at a yard sale for five bucks each. Twenty dollars for the four. I had thought it was waste of money until now, when the chair bore my weight and settled me into a comfortable rocking motion. I was still breathing painfully, and I pulled up my T to reveal a bruise starting to form, just below my ribs and above my navel. This was gonna hurt.
The rain fell so powerfully that it splashed up when it hit, the microdroplets forming a mist similar to fog, obscuring the boulders and the brick fence beyond. Eli opened a beer and passed it to me. I put the vinyl bag on the floor and swallowed down half.
“Lemme have my cell. I need to call Soul.”
Eli handed me the official Kevlar-armored cell, and I flipped it open, tapping the image for the PsyLED agent—a tiny, multicolored gecko. Soul answered on the third ring. I heard her say to someone else, “It’s Jane.”
From a distance I heard an unexpected voice say, “Hey, Jane.”
“Jodi?” Jodi worked with the local PD, in charge of the woo-woo team, my term for paranormal cases. PsyLED was a federal woo-woo agency under Homeland Security. The two law enforcement officers shouldn’t be in the same place at the same time. Then I put it together. The Witch Council of the entire U.S. was happening in few weeks. Both the president and the governor—usually fierce opponents—had expressed an interest in the Witch Conclave and the meeting between the witches and vamps that would happen on the last day. It was to be a parley, a vamp term meaning to negotiate and come to a legal agreement, like a peace accord. The powers that be wanted the witches and the vamps to sign a treaty and bury the hatchet, and not in one another’s backs.
Making certain that everything worked out well and that nothing outside interfered with the attempt at rapprochement required that the entire city be secure from hate groups and terrorist groups, homegrown and imported, paranormal and mundane. Security for a whole city might involve PsyLED. Yellowrock Securities was concerned with the micro parts—the security of the mansion where the big weekend-long affair was to take place, security at vamp HQ, and security during travel times, when the witches rode the streetcar from their hotels to the mansion hosting the event, and later, when Leo Pellissier was limoed in. “Are you out of town with Soul or is Soul in New Orleans?”
“We’re eating at Coop’s Place on Decatur. We just got here. Come join us.”
I looked down at myself. Thank God I had put on a bra, or I’d look like I belonged in a wet T-shirt contest. But I’d still need to change. “Order Eli and me the gumbo with extra seafood and we’ll be there in twenty.” I tapped END and looked at Eli, who still wore a faint smirk. “I’ll get dry and change and meet you out front.”
“I take it I’m driving?”
“Until I can breathe without pain, yes.”
Alex said, “Bring me a shrimp po’boy with extra lettuce and tomato.”
Eli stood and followed me inside to put on a shirt and shoes. Even in the Deep South, the “no shirt, no shoes, no service” protocol reigned.
Five minutes later I was clean and dry except for my wet hair, which I braided in a single long plait down my back. It took too long to dry as much hair as I had, but I’d have to get to it soon. Wet hair in this weather could get rank. I strapped a set of small throwing knives to my calf, which I could reach under jeans. I’d rather be better armed, but with cops around, even cops I knew well, no gun and no obvious, oversized bladed weapon was my best choice. I slid into loose jeans and a T, with the long sleeves pushed up to my elbows.
I set the vinyl bag with the skull in it on the floor in the closet and removed a small wooden carving of a crow. It was carved from ebony and had been brushed with some inky stain that darkened the knife cuts even more than the smoothed wood. The crow contained Molly’s new, modified, portable working—what nonwitches called a spell—an updated version of her hedge of thorns ward. I tapped the crow’s claws with my fingernail, which opened the hedge over the crow and the vinyl bag, protecting it an
d everything inside. Even the arcenciel would have trouble getting to it without a major singeing. I no longer had to spill blood to set such a prearranged ward—except the big one out back, which I hadn’t used in months. Satisfied that no one could get to the skull and the spelled charms Molly had made, not without getting hurt badly in the process, I headed out.
• • •
Coop’s advertised itself as the place where the not-so-elite ate. It was a renovated old building so close to the Mississippi that I could feel the faint vibration of the river moving beneath my feet. It was bar dark inside and smelled of beer and drunks and excellent food. Today it also reeked with excitement because someone had just won it big at one of the video poker machines.
Our food was waiting when we got there and I slid into a booth next to Jodi. Eli took the place next to Soul and said, “Ladies.”
We dug into the food and when my appetite was moderately appeased—mud wrestling with an arcenciel used up a lot of energy—I held up my glass so the waitperson could see that I needed more iced tea and said, “I had a visit from your old friend, the chick who always wears rainbow dresses.”
Soul had been reaching for a French fry and she made the faintest of flinches. The chick who always wears rainbow dresses was an unmistakable code for an arcenciel. “When?” she asked, sounding unconcerned and maybe even casual. I’d have totally bought it if I hadn’t seen that tiny flinch. “I wasn’t aware she was still around.”
Eli looked at his watch and said, “She showed up thirty-three minutes ago. She and Jane had a four-minute-and-two-second mud wrestle in the backyard and then she took off.”
Jodi laughed. Soul didn’t. I didn’t know a lot about arcenciels, but the fact that an arcenciel stayed around for a battle she didn’t have to fight seemed unusual. That she fought in human form seemed unusual. The fact that she didn’t draw on her ability to alter or bubble time to win the fight seemed unusual. Pretty much everything about the situation seemed unusual, including Angie’s prescient dream and the call to warn me. I had to address that too—soon, but not in front of present company.
I asked, “So, you didn’t know she was in town?”
“I knew. She was spotted by a CI, but I haven’t had time to see her,” Soul said, with subtle emphasis on the words time and see. Soul was an arcenciel too, and when one of her kind bubbled time, she would know it if she was paying attention. More stuff Jodi couldn’t know.
“CI?” I asked.
“Confidential informant, which means she won’t tell either one of us. Who the heck did your CI see?” Jodi asked. “Girl in a rainbow dress? Some kind of code word?”
“No. A distant relative,” Soul said, shoveling a spoonful of boudin onto a sliver of toast made from French bread. “The only one of her generation in the States.”
Which explained how she knew which arcenciel I was talking about. Arcenciels didn’t bear young easily or often, and the presence of a young one would have been noted and observed, at the very least.
“Her name is Opal,” Soul said. “She is . . . young and creative and willful. I understand that she has taken a shine to Jane and has dropped in unexpectedly. Twice now, once on the other side of the Mississippi, once at your house, for a sparring session, yes?”
At which I nodded, realizing that Opal had to be the rainbow dragon who had attacked me in my SUV not that long ago and nearly managed to get me killed. “Sparring match, my butt,” I said.
“I am truly sorry at her intemperance. She is innocence personified, but manages to be a troublemaker.” She took the bite and gave me a look that told me to drop it, and that we could talk later, when a human cop wasn’t present.
I wasn’t exactly sure what intemperance meant, but I shrugged and said, “Nothing I can’t handle.” Maybe. Hopefully. “So fill me in on the city’s security for the Witch Conclave and Eli can fill you in on YS’s part.”
Eli shot me an indecipherable look and asked, “Why can’t you fill them in?”
“If I had intended to talk, I wouldn’t have needed you here. I’m eating.” And I did, all through the boring and tedious discussion of traffic and buses and streetcars and hotel security and stuff I used to have to handle. Having partners had freed up a lot of my time and let me take on bigger and better jobs. The job as security had come through Molly, and thanks to my partners, YS was making a lot of money for the one weekend, freeing me personally to be Leo’s Enforcer at the same event. Couldn’t beat getting paid two times for the same job.
As soon as Jodi finished the debrief, she slid out of the seat and was gone, leaving a twenty on the table to cover her tab and tip. The moment she was gone, Soul said, “Tell me everything that Opal did and said.”
I pulled up my shirt and showed her my bruise, which was starting to turn a bright, spreading red where all the small arterioles and capillaries had been damaged by the elbow. I told her everything that had happened, excluding Angie’s part. In this version, we were sitting on the porch having a beer and enjoying the rain when Opal appeared and started digging around in the backyard. I finished with, “I had hidden a few of Molly’s magical trinkets out there along with a skull Leo gave me, a sabertooth lion skull used by the sabertooth vamp I killed when I first got to town.”
“What do you think she was there for?”
“I’ve had the spelled trinkets in the house for months, and the skull had been buried out back on other occasions, so I can’t say.” I stopped, my tea halfway to my mouth. “But I’ve never had them all in the same place at the same time before. So . . . maybe some kind of magical energy symbiosis? Something that drew her attention?”
Soul sighed and slid from the booth too, tossing down a second twenty. The waiter was going to have a good tip day. “I don’t know,” Soul said. “Keep me in the loop.” And she was gone too.
Eli helped himself to their boudin leftovers. I ate the leftover fries. When Alex’s to-go bag was deposited on the table, we each tossed a few bills on top and went back outside into the drizzle and the unexpected cool from the storm front. Autumn wasn’t far off and the slightly cooler temps of the chilly eighties promised that the frigid seventies were not far behind. Molly would be here soon, and the cooler temps would make her visit more pleasant. Molly hated hot, humid weather.
• • •
Little Evan and his dad were still in Asheville, which proved that Angie and Molly weren’t staying long, just long enough so Molly could meet with the NOLA witches and assist with the final group workings that would be used as the witch part of security. Witches were coming from all over and Molly and Lachish Dutillet, the head of the New Orleans coven, had a big job to prepare for. But even short stays in New Orleans were expensive, and so my BFF and goddaughter were staying with us. There was plenty of room in the five-bedroom, three-bath house for them to each have their own space, but this time they would be sharing the bedroom over mine, because the boys were painting the other guest room, which we ordinarily used as a workout room.
I’d had the entire house cleaned, had new linens put on the twin beds, and made it clear that the werewolf who spent some nights in Alex’s room had to stay downstairs and not scare the guests. I was pretty sure that Brute understood me, but when a were-creature spent too long in his animal form the brain began to lose its human characteristics and spoken language was one of the first things to go. Since the angel Hayyel had touched Brute in some metaphysical manner unknown to the rest of us, he hadn’t been able to shift to human. Brute wasn’t very human at all anymore.
I was watching out the front window when Mol parked her rental car, a nifty Ford Fusion, a block down from the house. I was out the front door before she got the door open and gathered her and Angie and the cat travel box into a big group hug. I didn’t hug many people, but Molly was family from way back, as much as I had family from way back. Kids raised in children’s homes usually had limited family ties, but the Everhar
ts and Truebloods were family of the heart, if not of the blood. “It’s so good to see you both,” I said softly into Angie’s strawberry blond curls as I crushed mother and daughter and cat box to me. Angie’s feet dangled off the sidewalk. Molly smelled of perfume, which she didn’t usually wear around me, tart and sweet, flowery and lemony, like roses and lemongrass, a strange combination that made me want to sneeze. My inner voice held a hint of growl as Beast laid claim to Angie, with the thought, Kitssss . . .
“I missed you so much!” I growled aloud.
“I know, Aunt Jane,” Angie said, her feet kicking. “You and your Beastie big-cat love us, and we love you. Now lemme down! I wanna go inside!” She kicked, her knee narrowly missing my tender belly, and I set her on the pavement.
“Door’s open. Your room’s ready,” I told her.
Angie took off for the house and I grabbed the luggage from Mol. Being a skinwalker meant being stronger than I looked, and Molly usually packed light. This time was no exception, although the cat cage was getting heavier. KitKit was asleep inside, heavily drugged. And there were scratches up Molly’s arms.
I tucked the cage under my elbow and the two bags in each hand.
We were halfway to the house when I heard Angie scream.
I leaped the distance and inside. Dropped the luggage. The suitcase, tote, and cat cage didn’t fall. They hung there in the air. I had bubbled time—or Beast had—and I hadn’t even noticed. Silver mist and silver-blue motes of power danced around me, coming from within me. Time vibrated and wobbled and my gut twisted tight. Acid rose in my throat. Angie’s scream hung on the air, a deep warble, like a siren.
Alex was half standing behind his modified desk in the living room, his eyes wide and fearful. Eli was midleap in the doorway to the living area, drawing his nine mil, his face expressionless. I looked where Eli was looking—into my bedroom. I stepped inside, the deep sound of Angie’s scream thudding into my eardrums.
