“Ha-ha.” I lifted my head and sniffed, alarm again racing through me. I turned, following the scent to the front of the house.
“What?” Eli barked.
That odd magical prickling sensation again raced over me. Had the light-dragon gotten free? I was still holding the weapons, which I gripped more firmly, staring at the front door. “We got more company coming.”
“Details,” Eli said, redrawing blades and positioning throwing knives.
“L’arcenciel. Coming from that way.” I pointed down the front street.
“Babe, you gotta start telling us before sending out invitations,” Eli drawled. “Stay down, Alex,” he said to his brother as he flipped the overturned couch over him and Bruiser.
“Yeah. I’m a bad host. All these uninvited guests, and us with no hors d’oeuvres,” I said back as Eli and I moved toward the front of the house and Derek retreated to cover Leo.
“Some guests don’t need ’em. They bring their own.” He indicated the grouping on the floor just as Bethany tugged a stake out of Leo’s chest. It made a gross, sucking, grinding sound and black blood bubbled out after it, smelling of silver and death. The nutso priestess held her wrist over the open wound and blood dripped in, hers looking congealed, it was so thick. Leo still looked dead, but Bethany was moving better.
Light, brilliant as the dawning sun, glared in through the broken front door and speckled the foyer with stained-glass tints. It was like fireworks going off in the street, but silent, no pops or sizzling. The light brightened, and I narrowed my eyes against it.
Through the opening, a long snout entered, moving slowly, full of teeth. The alligator snout widened into a frilled head that was easily the size of a water buffalo. The whole buffalo. This arcenciel was massive.
A black tongue flicked out and back in, again, touching/tasting the walls and the floor. It turned its head to me, eyes huge, like iridescent glass, orangey and bright. Her teeth were as long as my vamp-killer and just as sharp, meeting in the massive crocodile mouth, but her teeth were more pearly than the previous arcenciel, her frill containing more white and red. I sniffed. I knew this one, this creature made of light and pearls with slowly spiraling, multicolored hair. Soul.
“Holy moly,” I breathed.
I felt movement beside me and Gee DiMercy walked sluggishly past, like a sleepwalker whose feet were being pulled, toward the dragon head with the alligator jaw. Gee was close enough to be the arcenciel’s dinner when he stopped and sank to his knees, as if he was being weighted down to the ground. He was mumbling in a language that was all consonants and hoarse coughing sounds in the back of his throat. He raised his hands and begged forgiveness. It didn’t have to be in English for the sense of the words to be made. The black dragon tongue flicked forward and touched Gee’s forehead, once. Again. The dragon head tilted, as if considering the taste or remembering something important. Or as if listening to the rumbling litany, which switched to English. “I failed. I failed.” Gee said. “I did not know there was a hatchling, a wild one flying free. I did not know what to do. I failed, Mistress. The young one was stolen . . .”
I stayed well back, Eli at my left shoulder.
When Gee DiMercy fell silent, I moistened my lips and murmured, “Soul?” My tone was one I might use to a skittish horse, if most horses didn’t bolt at first scent of me. “You want to tell us what’s happening?”
The alligator lips opened, but the sound that came wasn’t from the mouth. It seemed to come from all around me, like the way bells sounded in an empty cathedral. “Your magics call to us. We see you in the Grayness Between Worlds. Your magics called the hatchling. She followed you, yet you did not protect her. You allowed her to be taken.”
“I did what?” Hatchling? Maybe I hadn’t understood. The cadence of Soul’s words was different in this form, as if English was a second language. As if her brain was formulated differently.
“I smelled/tasted one of my kind on your vehicle window,” she said. “I had thought she was fully grown, was of the old ones, like me. The blood of the hatchling was on your hands then, but she still lived. She came to you when Satan’s Three attacked you at the warehouse. Yes? She came to save you, to fight alongside you?”
“Possibly,” I said, choosing my words carefully, because Soul sounded pretty confused, and a confused predator was a dangerous predator. “I took a pretty big hit that night. I saw an arcenciel before I passed out. I’d seen her several times. She’s smaller than you.” I remembered the body of the child that Peregrinus had carried out the door. Hatchling . . .
“You did not intend her harm?”
I shook my head.
“The old ones did not know there was a hatchling,” Soul said. “There have been no young ones in over seven thousand years. Now her magic has vanished.” The luminous eyes latched onto me like a snare. “You have brought us into danger. You are the witch of death; you are liver-eater. U’tlun’ta.” The Cherokee term for evil was husky on the dragon’s breath—“hut-luna”—the syllables reverberating through me until my bones ached with the accusation. Her mouth opened to display the razor-edged teeth.
I backed up fast as more of Soul came in through the doorway and passed through the walls, a shimmering glow. Her power and light filled the house, sparkling and frozen. I was an idiot. There would have been scent on the SUV, l’arcenciel blood-scent on my blade. I had cleaned it, but blood, crystalline blood, might never clean completely. And in her light-form, Soul’s sense of smell was probably much better than when in her human form. I am an idiot! Idiot, idiot, idiot!
Derek maneuvered closer, between Leo and Soul, but my attention stayed on the arcenciel as I continued to put it all together. Soul had smelled one of her species on the SUV and had seen the vamps attack out at the warehouse. She had known something was wrong but not how bad it really was. What had taken her so long to show up here, I didn’t know, but maybe tracking a being made of light was harder than it looked. And then she finds the hatchling, just in time to see the young one killed or kidnapped by Peregrinus, her magics contained, or stolen. That was the only thing that made sense. But why didn’t she go after the hatchling, if she could see it in the Gray Between? Unless . . .
“Is the smaller dragon dead?” I asked Soul. “Or was she taken prisoner, her magics hidden?” I felt a hollow dread in my gut. If she was dead, was that because I had stabbed her and wounded her in the gym? Would she have been able to fight off the vampire if she had been at full power? “I am not u’tlun’ta. I didn’t kill the hatchling.” Which totally left out the part about me stabbing her. Liar by omission, that was me.
“She saw your magic and came to you. Yet you say that you did not steal the hatchling’s magic?” Soul hissed, aloud this time, her voice still ringing like bells, but deeper and more powerful than her human voice. “You do not ride her magics? Then where is she!”
“Peregrinus stole the hatchling,” Gee said.
“Peregrinus.” The word was filled with derision and not a little horror.
“I will help you to find her,” Gee said, “and return her to the waters of life.”
“What he said,” I managed.
Soul rippled; a blast of light shot out, blinding us all. Eli and I stepped back, throwing our arms over our eyes. When I blinked into the blurred image of the retinal burn, I saw Soul standing in the doorway, all size-sexy of her, her silver hair and a filmy lavender dress floating in a slow breeze only she felt. “Until you texted me, I had thought the Peregrine was still in Italy,” she said. “I had a lot of catching up to do, research-wise.”