by Faith Hunter
The repaired ward was a haze of shadows that lit up in silvers and greens in Beast’s vision, glowing a rich and mottled blue, green, gray, and lavender, like a psychedelic dream from the sixties or an animated fantasy magic movie. Few humans could see the energies of magics, except for the presence of unexplainable lights, which made it easy to pretend there was nothing there, nothing happening. Even I couldn’t see magics well without Beast helping. I worked to combine our vision and tilted up my head to watch the rain falling in the security lights of the house to my right. The drops hit the ward and ran down the wall of energies, picking up the reds from the ward, looking like blood falling from the sky and dripping downward.
I thought of Beast and found her sitting in our soul home, the cave dark and silent, her eyes golden and bright. We couldn’t fight today, I thought at her.
No, Beast thought at me. Was trap/cage. Beast remembers trap, steel mouth filled with steel teeth to break bones and make prey bleed. Her ear tabs flicking, she added, Have been inside cage. Do not like cage.
That was a lot of concept for my Beastly self. Yeah. It was a cage. A protective cage.
Like den?
I smiled and thought, Yes. Like a den.
Ward is cage den made by Molly. Kits and littermates are safe in cage den made by Molly. She sounded pleased with herself for understanding the concept of a cage that was for safety and not for capture. Satisfied with that understanding, she looked out into the rain through my eyes. Jane needs to go into Gray Between. See what arcenciel sees in time.
No thanks. I’m not overfond of being sick and throwing up blood.
Beast wasn’t in a mood to let me avoid it. Faster than I could stop her, she raked a clawed paw on the stone of our soul home and pulled the Gray Between out of us and around us like a cloak.
But that’s where she stopped. There was no entrance into the slo-mo experience of time stoppage, no bubbling time so we could act outside of it. More slowly than usual, time began to tighten and grind down, something I could follow as the rain began to fall at a more leisurely pace than atmospheric conditions and gravity usually permitted. I could see water droplets slowing and slowing again. When they hit, I could make out the rounded teardrop shape and the splatter they threw as they landed and broke and then gathered into the pooled water closest. Capillary attraction, I thought, remembering that from some high school chemistry class.
Time and the rain slowed again. And then halted. This gradual dipping into the timelines made the experience easier and I felt none of the nausea I usually experienced. My belly didn’t cramp or burn. Relief replaced the tension that had built in me.
In each droplet that hung in the air, a tiny vision of the near future was captured, a moment in time, each different, though sometimes only in minuscule ways, of the captured possibilities of the next moment. In the water on the ground, in puddles, were the ruined possibilities of the near past, possibilities that had almost happened, but hadn’t, changed, destroyed by the choices made. In one was a distorted vision of Angie being eaten by the arcenciel, her blood running down its jaw. In another puddle the arcenciel had crashed through the side wall of the lower floor, the one that now was composed of doors. In another was a ruined vision that might have been Eli, dressed in camo pants and T-shirt, killing the arcenciel with his sword, a possibility that had never been, perhaps because of one simple decision—the clothes my partner had chosen to wear prior to the attack. Could a timeline be altered by such a seemingly simple choice? Or was there more that affected that discontinuity in time?
If Angie was right, then arcenciels are able to see time as I could while in the Gray Between, but see back along a timeline into the more distant past. Unlike me, while working in the Gray Between, they could move forward and back in time along the possibilities.
The idea was way over my head, and it made me nauseous thinking about it. But at least I wasn’t throwing up blood. Maybe just looking at time wasn’t quite the same thing as altering time or moving and acting outside it. Or maybe Beast had found a way to halt what I had come to call the timesickness. But I wasn’t holding my breath. Life was seldom so easy.
I looked out into the droplets of rain that were still hanging in the air just beyond the ward. In one, I could see myself, looking out into the rain. In another, I could see myself on the cell phone, my face like a thundercloud. In another drop, farther out, I could see Angie sitting in front of me watching me, my eyes closed in meditation, but the background was different, not on the back porch. A brick wall was behind me, perhaps out in the garden. Another was me asleep in my bed. I strained my eyes and drew more on Beast’s vision, seeing out into the droplets. The futures there were much more odd, as if the area around me contained the most likely possibilities and as if the possibilities of the more distant future lay farther out. So the things I did in the here and now could make the potential futures more likely or unlikely.
If I walked in among the falling droplets, might I see enough of the potentialities, enough of the possibilities, to chart a course for a future I liked? And if I spent enough time looking into the puddled droplets, would I see decisions I had made, that others had made, in the past, choices that had made today what it was? Was that what Opal had done, looked into the past and the future and seen a disaster that she could avert? Could her kind walk among the water droplets of the future and the past both, and see what dangers and disasters awaited there, and then go back onto the puddles of the past and fix them? If so, that was a power and talent more terrible and vast and profound than any I had ever heard of. Arcenciels had the power of time.
No wonder vampires wanted to ride them. That kind of power was unimaginable.
And what happened to the memory of the one who altered time? Did they lose the memory of the time they had changed? Or did they keep the memories that they destroyed? There was one person I could ask, but if I asked, then Soul would know that I knew the secret of the arcenciels. Might the future show her something, some decision I might make, some action that I would or might do that was bad for her or another arcenciel? If so, would she feel the need to kill me to stop that action?
All this meant that Soul knew the potentialities of the future, if she wanted to. If she looked. I had a feeling that Soul didn’t look at the potentialities as often or as deeply as Opal did. But it was just a feeling. One that said that the adult or mature arcenciels made conscious, or perhaps unconscious decisions, to view the future seldom, decisions that came from age and experience and the memories lost. Or worse, the memories of a present unalterably violated and destroyed.
Something had changed in the air around me, and I opened my eyes. They had drifted closed, bringing me close to sleep as I meditated in the Gray Between. Now, rain was falling at a normal speed; time had sped back up, as if a natural part of the experience of the Gray Between. While I had been bubbled in time, the rain had fallen off to a sprinkle of widely spaced drops and I had relaxed, my muscles feeling more calm than I expected, as if I hadn’t sat still all this time and had instead been stretching and loosening up. The ward over the house included most the rocks in the garden, and I stood, stepping off the porch into the mud left from earlier in the day. It was drier now and didn’t squish up between my toes. The rocks were clean and dry, and I climbed to the top of the one closest, careful to keep from cutting myself on the sharp edges of the rocks I used when I needed to borrow or lose mass to shift into a bigger or smaller creature.
Sitting cross-legged, back relaxed, I continued my meditation. This time I entered the Gray Between, I was in my soul home, a real place in the real world, seen once long ago, but reimagined in the darkness and shadows of my mind. I was squatted before a fire pit, cold and flameless, but the darkness wasn’t absolute. Rather, a pale, soft illumination seemed to emanate from the stone walls, throwing dim light but no shadows. From what I could see of myself, I was dressed in the new garb of drab cloth leggings, unadorne
d moccasins, and a blue tunic tied with a long scarf. My green-and-black leather medicine bag hung from a thong around my neck, swinging slowly back and forth. My braids moved as well, two of them, one to either side of my head, as if I had been standing and had just now squatted at the ring of cold stones.
I looked up at the center of my soul home, the stone dome high overhead. I had learned that it changed as my life changed, reflecting known and unknown truths about me and the possibilities of multiple futures. At the very top, there was a bird, what looked like a dove with white wings outstretched, spreading, improbably large, down the stone walls of my home. The flight feathers spread and lengthened until they touched the stone floor. I wondered if the dove symbolized the angel Hayyel. And if it did, had the celestial being who had so altered my life and its timeline marked his territory over my soul?
I couldn’t decide whether to be ticked off by the marking of territory, or feel blessed and protected. Briefly I wondered if the wings could keep me from becoming u’tlun’ta. I wondered if the wings in my soul home were a result of being struck by lightning. I wondered a lot of things, none of them useful in this moment or contributing to a decision about Angie Baby, Molly, her unborn child, and the arcenciel.
Directly overhead and to the side of the angel, there was a black dot or spot or mote. It was positioned near the heart of the dove but to the side. It looked like a black blood splatter, one dropped straight down, not flung or slung or thrown. It pulsed like a tiny, dark heart.
Hayyel’s heart? Why would an angel have a dark heart? But it did nothing, just sat there, unmoving except for that strange pulsing. It was curious but not worrisome. For now.
A bizarre notion sped across my mind and skidded to a halt, lingering. What if the blood diamond, buried in the new weapon, the one made by lightning and the battle between Hayyel and the dark thing he had been fighting in my last vision of him, might allow me to “ride” an arcenciel? And see what Molly’s baby might do in the future?
Which would mean taking a slave. The thought jerked me out of my meditative trance and I banished it. “No way,” I whispered. “No freaking way.” If temptation was real, then the idea of slavery was a temptation direct from the heart of a demon. Almost all of the tribal peoples of the Americas had been sold into slavery, had toiled and died in chains, for centuries before the first African slave had been brought over. Like our African brothers and sisters, we knew slavery.
Silent, abashed, and more than a little ashamed, I stood and went inside and closed the door behind me.
• • •
Molly and Evan had bound the skull, keeping it from being used by anything magical—including me, I assumed—and Mol told me that the skull was much like an ensorcelled teapot she had seen recently, one that moved along a timeline following a vampire. Which just sounded weird, but most things magical were weird. I hoped that with the skull bound, the arcenciel would stay away.
Angie was put to bed and the lights in the house went mostly dark before I smelled Molly outside my room. She had showered off the stinky perfume and the sweat, but her own Molly scent, augmented by the pheromones of pregnancy, flowed under the door as she stood outside waiting for something. I knew she could see the light under the door, so she was standing there, indecisive. Uncertain. I could have gotten up and made her decision for her, but I left it to her. If Molly wanted to explain everything, she could. Or not. Finally she walked away and I went back to my reading on my tablet, going over Alex’s research on arcenciels and other things paranormal.
Half an hour later Molly came to the door again, and this time she knocked. I smelled some of her herbal tea, the stuff she drank when she was pregnant, along with some herbal spice tea, the stuff I sometimes drank at night. Most drugs have no effect on skinwalkers, but caffeine was one that worked on me, and quite well, so real tea at night was something I usually avoided.
“Come in, Mol,” I said.
The door opened and Molly entered. Mol usually slept in a nightgown like Angie, but with the guys in the house, she was wearing chaste flannels. Pink. Her red hair was curled in a disordered mop all over her head. Her feet were in pink slippers with rubberized soles. And she wore a serious face, devoid of makeup.
I patted the bed. I was sitting up, the sheets folded down, pillows plumped against the wall to make a chair. I was wearing loose, thin pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, all in charcoal tones, so that if I needed to move through the house in the dark, I wouldn’t stand out from the shadows. It’s sad, the things that people like me think when we make the smallest decision. Death, danger, dismembering, threat, menace, dark magic, gunshots, bombs, and peril. All while buying pj’s.
Molly placed the tray beside me on the bed and crawled up on the other side, pulling the sheets over her legs. I smiled at her and accepted the mug of tea, which had a dollop of Cool Whip on it.
“I made a mess of things,” she said.
I didn’t reply, just watched her over the mug’s rim as I sipped, the ceramic warm on my fingers.
“I’ve made a mess of a lot of things over the years.”
I still didn’t reply, and she frowned.
“I made a mess when I blamed you for my babies being taken by the Damours. I made a mess when I let fear drive me away from earth magic to death magic. I made a mess when I didn’t trust you to do the right thing. All the time. Every time. Always.” Tears gathered in her eyes. Pregnancy was making her weepy. “You always do the right thing, even when it comes back and bites you in the ass. And I’m sorry for biting you in the ass.”
I smiled and took a cookie off the tray. They were Eli’s cookies, kept for special occasions, and no one had permission to open the bag. They were his to disperse as he saw fit. Like prizes. He had found them at a local candy store—though Alex and I had never figured out which one—and bought them by the dozen, usually taking them to Natchez to his honey bun, Sylvia, the county sheriff. More rarely he’d bring a bag home and dole them out as treasures. Caramel and white chocolate and macadamia nuts and walnuts all in a gooey soft cookie, with a single dark chocolate button in the center, melted flat and soaked into the dough as it cooked. I ate, and didn’t tell Molly that the cookies were “hands-off,” which was evil, but comfort food was always nice.
Molly scowled. “Are you gonna forgive me?”
I shrugged and pushed a loose crumb of cookie from my lip into my mouth. “Did that a long time ago. Just like you forgave me for not keeping your kids safe from the Damours.”
“That wasn’t your doing or your fault. It was their fault. I had no reason to be mad at you. Neither did Big Evan.”
“Where their children are concerned, parents aren’t exactly logical. I knew that going into our friendship.”
“But it seems like it’s all going one way. All you, giving to me and to mine.” Her tears, which had slowed, flowed harder again and dripped onto her flannel top. Her voice had gone tight, with tears clogging her sinuses and larynx. “Letting us stay here. For free. Every time we come. Bringing danger to you. Making things harder on you.”
I handed her a tissue from the box on the bedside table; she set down her mug and dabbed at her eyes. “Sometimes,” I said, “with family, the attention all goes one way for a while. Then sometimes it reverses and goes back the other way.” I shrugged and placed my empty mug on the tray. “Life is like that.”
“I didn’t tell you about the baby.”
And Molly had hit upon the one thing that had wounded me. She hadn’t told me about the baby. I dropped my eyes. “No,” I said evenly. Just because I thought of Molly as family didn’t mean that she felt the same way. And even if she did think me of family, some things were private. Or time sensitive. “You didn’t.”
She looked miserable but inhaled and blew out the breath, seeking an emotional equilibrium she clearly didn’t feel. “Okay. I want to explain. There were two reasons. One, we wanted to keep it
secret until we know if it’s a witch.”
If the baby was a girl she would definitely be a witch, because she would get Evan’s X-linked witch genetics. If it was a boy, there was a fifty percent chance he would be witchy because he would get all his X genes from Molly, and she had only one witchy X-linked gene. Or gene packets. Whatever.
“Two,” Molly went on, “we didn’t want Angie to know for a while. We were going for eighteen weeks. Just to be sure that . . . well. That everything was okay.”
And then it hit me. She was worried about losing the baby. Witches lost more babies to miscarriage than humans and way more witch children to childhood cancers than humans. It was something that I had never had to think to about. “Oh,” I said, feeling flummoxed. And stupid.
Molly looked at her hands, holding her mug. “It didn’t seem fair to tell you until we were more certain about everything.” Tears slid down her face, not the drenching waterworks that Angie could turn on, but a lot of tears. I passed her the whole box of tissues. Molly sobbed, a single heart-wrenching note, sounding a lot like Angie.
I said, “So . . . we’re okay?”
Molly nodded and her throat made a horrible wet tearing/sobbing sound.
“The real problem?” I said. “Was that awful perfume.”
Molly blubbered out a laugh in the middle of her tears and inched closer on the bed. Using my foot, I pushed the tray out of the way and Molly moved to my side, putting her head on my shoulder.
Littermate, Beast thought, sending me a vision of a pile of cat bodies curled up together against the cold. Should have littermates. Like this. In den. Warmth, cat warmth, spread through me, and I had to blink away my own tears. I restrained the purr that started to build in my chest and tilted my head to rest it against Mol’s. Kitsssss, Beast thought, the scent of unborn baby and pregnancy filling my/our nose.
