“Soul,” I called. “Girrard DiMercy.” I waited for several minutes, then called again, this time thinking about the snake dragon and the Anzû, picturing them in my mind. Again I waited. And waited. And called again. And nothing. Either what I was doing couldn’t be done by a skinwalker, or I was doing it wrong.
I tried picturing the gray energies as not a cloud around me, but more a thing that existed everywhere, something that I was part of. Light and matter, two parts of a whole. With dark matter and dark energy in there somewhere. Physics I didn’t understand but was a part of. I dropped deeper into the gray place—the Gray Between—and let myself look out and around, seeing not the world I knew, but a gray net of light and dark, some places dense with dots of energy, some not so dense, tiny dots pulsating. Everything quivered. Everything had movement. Some slower than others, some much faster, the minute vibrations in all things. The thought came to me. This was the unlimited possibilities of the all-space. Which made no sense at all. And yet did.
I felt lighter somehow, effervescent, as if I could fly or float away. As if I could do anything. I laughed, and the vibration of my laughter seemed to affect the area around me and out like rings in a pond when you toss in a stone. This was the way I felt when I had consumed enough alcohol to feel a hint of a buzz, the way I felt when I bit Soul. Suddenly Soul was there, in front of me. She was in her winged, sparkling snake form, and standing on her head was a blue and scarlet-winged bird. Her snakelike tail rattled and shook, sounding like dry bones. “Speak, Jane. U’tlun’ta.”
“I’m not a liver-eater,” I groused.
“You neither are a liver-eater nor are you not a liver-eater.”
“Schrödinger’s cat.”
“Schrödinger was a foolish human, but wiser than most. What do you want?”
“Peregrinus has the hatchling. He captured her in a . . . something. She’s hanging on his necklace.”
Soul showed me her teeth. All of them. And there were a lot of teeth, some as long as my arm. “She was vulnerable to his call because you wounded her with steel,” she said.
She had figured that out. Or Gee had told her. “I know. And I’m sorry. But I need your help to find Peregrinus, kill him, and free the hatchling.”
She pulled back a short distance, like a snake coiling back on itself. “You would help the young one? Even after she killed humans in the vampire council chambers? Why?”
“Why not? Peregrinus forced her. I want Peregrinus dead. You want the baby arcenciel back safe and sound. We’re stronger together than alone.”
“I will assist as I can,” Soul said, “but the hatchling can bind time and space. She can alter energies at will. She is young enough to go where she wishes, or where her captor wishes, once he learns how to ride her. Peregrinus is intelligent. He will have learned from taking the young one and by now will certainly be capable of capturing me as well. I was a prisoner of time once and will not be so again.” She gnashed her teeth and they clacked like pearls against bamboo, a poetic thought totally unlike me. Rather, they sounded like bones rattling. Yeah. Better.
“My kind make a dangerous weapon in the hands of others,” Soul said, “as would my little bird.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Speaking of little birds, can Gee DiMercy find Bethany, the vampire priestess, and the Onorios, and tell them to contact me?”
“This he can do. Go, little bird. Make alliance with the vampire priestess.”
Gee chirped and spread his wings, blinking out of sight. I had no idea where he’d gone, or whether he could manipulate the gray place of the change on his own, or whether Soul just did it for him. So many questions and so few answers. “Thank you,” I said, as formally as I knew how.
Soul winked out of sight. The last thing I heard as she disappeared was the sounds of her tail and her teeth, like bones rattling, like dry bones dancing. Yeah. It was all coming together: the myths, the oral tradition, the scriptures, the lost People of the Straight Ways, and the Builders. All tying in with the weak places between universes and the loss of all civilization through flood, the mythos that tied almost all ancient peoples together.
I opened my eyes to my vacant backyard.
Eli was standing on the porch, his eyes sweeping across the yard, back and forth. “Eli, we need to weapon up and get to vamp HQ.”
He didn’t answer, just swiveled on a heel and headed back in through the open window. We really needed to get the doors fixed. Yeah. Some easy, lazy, sunny, summer day.
We made a run to Walmart for camping supplies and to a storage unit that my partner had rented and not told me about, and we still got to vamp HQ in plenty of time to prepare. I turned Eli and Alex loose with the new supplies. My lousy plan was coming together, but there was plenty of room for things to go horribly wrong.
CHAPTER 23
The Keeper of the Iron Spike
The staff had been decreased to shooters, swordsmen, and techies. No one who could be killed easily was still in vamp HQ. Housekeeping and the culinary staff were at Grégoire’s under heavy guard, maintenance crews at skeleton levels. It was like a stripped-down Aardvark Protocol. All the blood-servants and vamps on hand were old ones—looking well fed and grim, geared up for battle. I had never seen a vamp war, but it must have been a bloody business by the number of blades the vamps carried.
They were, to a fanghead, wearing chain-mail armor, with titanium gorgets and steel gauntlets with fingers that looked like metal roly-polies. They still moved with the graceful speed of the vamp, but now they clanked, just a bit.
On my part, I was decked out in my best fighting gear—the fancy leathers with plastic joint protectors and lots of silver-plated titanium chain mail. My hair braided into a fighting queue, close to my skull. Tall combat boots and more blades than I usually carried. No long, flat sword. Not yet. Hopefully not ever. But the new thigh holster, yeah. And every other weapon I could think of, with the exception of my shotgun. It wasn’t helpful in close-quarters shooting when I might take out friendly forces along with the big-bad-uglies.
The Kid and Angel Tit were rigging backup coms, the stuff we had picked up from the storage unit, all over the place, putting portable CNBs—communications nexus boxes—on every stairwell and floor. The CNB tactical radio system was designed to work in places where physical or electromagnetic interference was high. Or underground. And on battery power. We had used them before and they had worked great, but the specs were limited. They had to be aligned, pointing in proper places and directions. It took time to set up and the system was clunky. It was also easy to ruin. A swift kick to any box would stop all comms from that location. So the Kid instructed that they were all to be duct-taped to the ceilings, which was pretty smart. Eli put the humans to work with the tape and positioning new battery-powered backup lights on the floors. It was low-tech, but was also better than nothing, and not something Peregrinus was likely to be expecting, since most of it had been purchased with cash and not recorded on credit cards.
Go, Eli and his paranoid survivalist instincts and hoarding nature. Not that I would tell him that. He’d either be insulted or arrogantly proud. Or both.
Eli and Derek agreed on locations for shooters. It would be a pain to create such a lousy plan and then get taken out by friendly fire, when it should be much more likely to be eaten by a vamp or a rainbow dragon or drained by the Son of Darkness.