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.
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—”