Broken Soul

CHAPTER 17 Deadish Leo on My Floor

He fell at my feet, into the shower, his head bouncing on the tile. His blood was a pinkish wash into the drain. I jumped back, slapping my body against the cool shower wall. Stared at Leo’s back, his black tux soaked. Holy crap. What just happened?

Over the roaring of the water I heard the schnick of a round entering the chamber of a semiautomatic handgun. I looked up into Derek’s face over the barrel of the weapon aimed at me. He was breathing hard, face slick with sweat, his nose bleeding. His finger tightened on the trigger. Another schnick sounded, and the barrel of a weapon was placed tight against Derek’s head. It gave his head a little push and Derek’s mouth turned down in a snarl worthy of Beast. All I could see of the second gunman was his hand and wrist, but it was Eli.

“Hey, my brother,” Eli said, sounding friendly and casual. “Let’s chat about this first, before I hafta kill you and then figure out where to bury the body. Though I’m thinking out in a bayou, somewhere close to gators, you dig?”

“I didn’t kill Leo,” I said, over the sound of the shower. “Or not yet. We have options if we act fast. Unless you kill me. Think about it.”

“I smell silver and vamp blood,” Derek said, breath still heaving. He must have run all the way from the St. Philip Apartments. “Silver will kill a vamp. Even a vamp like Leo. If you weren’t trying to kill him, why use silver?”

“It was all I had at hand. And not if he gets fed by his maker. Or a priestess. Like I said. We have options if we act fast.

“I’m reaching behind me to shut off the shower. Then I’m going to grab a towel and we’ll haul Leo out and figure out what happened and how to handle it. I was not trying to kill him. He chased me down, not the other way around.”

I turned off the water. The bathroom was loud with the sound of Derek’s breathing and water dripping. I was acutely uncomfortable with the two men in my bathroom and the nearly true-dead vamp at my pelted but mostly human-shaped feet in my shower, but I was more worried about getting shot than my embarrassment. Healing took time that this situation might not give me.

From the top of the shower stall door I pulled a towel and wrapped it around me. My hair was sticking to my skin, I had soap on me, which itched, and I smelled like a bordello from the soap, but at least I was covered.

“Eli, Derek, enough with the Mexican standoff. I’ll heal from most anything Derek can do to me, but Derek won’t heal. He’ll be dead. And I’ll have to clean up the brains, which is messy and sticky and pretty ick. Now, help me get Leo out of here.” I bent and slid my hands under Leo’s shoulders. I heard the appropriate—though far too slow—sounds of rounds being removed from chambers and guns being holstered.

My gut began to cramp. Nausea rose up in me. Not now, I told myself. Not yet. I breathed deeply, forcing down the pain and sickness. It didn’t seem inclined to go away, but it stopped increasing, more a low ache than a twisting of my entire abdominal cavity’s contents.

Derek helped me roll Leo and together we lifted him and carried him, dripping, from the bathroom, placed him on the kitchen floor, faceup. Leo usually looked dead. He didn’t breathe except to talk, and his heart beat only from time to time. But lying on my floor, wet and bloody, his eyes open and human-looking now that he was sorta dead and not vamped out, he looked really dead. I bent and closed his eyes. “I’m going to get dressed. Don’t touch the stakes. Derek, call Del and tell her to get a healer over here. Eli, call Bruiser and get him over here.”

“Can’t do that, Jane,” Derek said, his voice cold as stone dust. “I left him in bad shape.”

Fear shocked through me. “Do I need to call an ambulance? The cops?”

“He’ll heal,” Derek said shortly.

I kept the relief off my face. Any anger left in my system at Bruiser was gone. It might make me a wishy-washy woman, but I wanted Bruiser alive. If only so I could torture him for being an ass. I said, “Fine. Get me a healer—Gee, or a priestess, or someone.” I left the deadish Leo on my floor and went to rinse and dry off and dress in something more formal than a damp, bloody towel. I also weaponed up in case anyone else had issues with Leo’s current condition.

I was standing in the foyer, braiding my wet hair with pelted, knobby hands, trying to keep the sickness at bay, when the first visitors arrived. Katie entered through the side door like she had been fired through a cannon, which meant she had leaped over the brick fence in the evening gown and heels she was wearing. I wished I’d seen that. But the clothes and her presence meant that she hadn’t been kept safely in HQ. Nor had Leo.

It also meant I needed a new side door. She stalked over the splinters of the old one in her stilettos. Gee DiMercy walked in behind her. I figured he had flown. Neither looked happy. I dropped the braid and stood my ground with a silver stake in one hand and a steel blade in the other. Before I could explain or defend myself, the most nutso vamp I’d ever met showed up at the front door with Bruiser over her shoulder. She didn’t need an invitation to enter. The door blew off its hinges. Again. This time, crime scene tape blew in with it.

The priestess Bethany Salazar y Medina was in my house. Her gaze was empty and fathomless, but her body oozed the scents of rage and vengeance. Bruiser rested across her shoulder as if he weighed no more than the shawl on her other side. He was breathing. He was also out cold, dangling like that shawl, with artful repose. And he was bleeding, his blood soaked through Bethany’s clothing.

The pain in my gut twisted and went hot. I pressed my middle with one hand, the blade pointed away from me. Not now. Not now!

Beast cannot stop it, she thought at me. Price must be paid.

“Who injured my George?” Bethany hissed. She cocked her head in that snake-way vamps have and settled all her magics on me. They prickled over my skin like lightning, ready to strike. She was nothing like the other priestess, Sabina. The power that surrounded Bethany was sharp and pitted, piercing and ephemeral. Her magics carried a scent similar to witch power, but with the bitter sting of shamanism and the yellowish tint and tang of cardamom. She was old, among the oldest vamps I had ever seen.

I took a breath of icy air to speak but she beat me to it. “I smell you on him,” she said. “I will rip you to small shreds of flesh and cook you over my fire. I will eat you and your power—”

“Not me.” I backed away fast, toward the kitchen door that hung open. Unfortunately, that put me near Katie, who was on the floor beside Leo. A quick glance told me she was the lesser danger at the moment, along with Derek, who stood in the kitchen area, weapons drawn and uncertainty on his face, as if he wasn’t sure what to do in this FUBARed mess. “Is Br—George going to be okay?” I asked as I scuttled like a crab, my toes spreading and aching, growing and changing shape, starting to look like puma paws.

“He is my George. I made certain that he is always well when I remade him.” Bethany looked at Leo on the floor. “You staked my Leo. I smell the stink of silver. You would kill him true-dead?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Not my intent. He attacked and, umm, I happened to be holding silver stakes.” Stupid answer.

Her eyes bored into me as she advanced, her cerulean skirts swirling, her dark-skinned flesh looking smooth and oiled in the lamplight, the toes of her bare feet spread wide on the floor. And Bruiser’s blood dripping steadily behind her. “I made certain that my Leo would forever be well when I gave to him my finest and most deadly gift.”

“Uh-huh. Okay. Whatever. Leo hurt George,” I half lied, to keep Derek alive. His eyes went wide as he understood what I’d done. “How ’bout you put George down and help Leo?”

Bethany dropped George on the floor. His head hit first and bounced hard, his body hitting just after, the double blows making hollow, dull echoes through the flooring. Awrighty, then, I thought, my breath coming faster to deal with the increasing pain. She went to Leo and settled on the floor beside him. Katie and Bethany stared at each other across Leo’s body, and it didn’t take a mad scientist to tell that they were not the best of pals. Keeping their eyes on the floor grouping, Eli and the Kid lifted George and laid him on the couch in a boneless heap.

“What does the priestess mean, her finest and most deadly gift?” Gee DiMercy asked me. He was standing behind Katie, watching the scene with intense but inscrutable interest.

“Heck if I know. I’m just the hired help. Or I was the hired help. I quit.” I shook my head. “But I think Leo refused my resignation and decided to kill me instead.”

For some reason, that made Gee laugh, but my eyes were drawn away from him. Shadows and sparkles flowed across the wall of the foyer, reflected onto the living room walls, and into the kitchen. Prickles of magic burned on my skin. “Oh crap,” I whispered.

The light-dragon flowed through the front door, into the house, and across the ceiling. It moved like the shadow of a serpent, one with wings of dappled sunlight on springwater, and opened its mouth. It had teeth like needles and knives and the distorted fun-house-mirror face of a human female. Its—her—wings were fully extended and their span was wider than the house, seeming to rise and fall through walls and out into the street.

The last time I had seen it, the arcenciel had been fighting the vampires who attacked me. My eyes on it, I took a breath. “Eli,” I said, my voice soft. “I smell vamp.”

My hands ached as claws pierced my fingertips. Pelt rippled down my body. And everything seemed to slow again, just a bit. Even the pain began to ease, which should have been a good thing, but instead made me wonder whether delaying paying the price made it go up.

In the light of the overhead fixture the arcenciel went visible, still glowing, but with a darker line along one side where I had stabbed her. She had already healed, but not without cost. Can light scar? Her wings cast streamers of light, like the afterimage glare of a camera flash combined with the arctic lights in a night sky, an effervescent opalescence, green and gold and pale shades of the rainbow, a feathery luminosity sparkling with brighter motes. Her hair was white, striped with red and black and brown. Bethany screamed and raced at the arcenciel, reaching, trying to grab the light. To the side, I saw Eli drawing a vamp-killer and a small subgun, seemingly out of the air. Derek flashed hand signals to him, the two fighters moving as one.

A stranger I knew only from the shadows of a fight stepped through the front door. She was copper-skinned, like me. And like me—or like me when I was prepared—she carried more weapons than a small army. She was dressed in the leathers of an Enforcer, but with an old-fashioned design and enough slices and cuts in the tanned hide to be risqué. The stink of old blood was on the leathers, hers and her opponents’, ripe and dense with the reek of old pain and death. She smelled like the sniper, and the bomb maker. And she was carrying two long swords. With a single, smooth, backhand cut, she struck Bethany in the neck. The priestess dropped, falling with the blade. She hit the floor, her dark blood spattering the wall.

Before I could blink, Gee had drawn two swords and raced at the swordswoman. He was moving nearly vamp fast, but time had slowed. I could see each movement, see his body flex and contract. “My challenge to blood duel was never satisfied,” he shouted, his voice low and his words slurred. “En garde!”

The woman tipped her body forward and raced at Gee, but slow, sluggish. The two met at the juncture of the foyer and the living room. In an honest-to-God sword fight. Steel clashed. A cut appeared in the wall as if by magic. A small table split in two with a crash. I had really liked that table. Not so long ago, it had been blown over when an angry air witch came visiting. Now it was nothing but splinters, like the side door. And the front door.

The Kid, who had been hiding behind the couch, grabbed me by the arm and dove to the floor with me. We landed in a painful heap; I yelped and so did he. The smell of mixed blood rose on the air and I found my feet. I was still holding the stake and the way-too-small blade. The smell of blood was grounding me fast. Adding Beast’s blood to the gray place of the change had reinforced my reactions.

“Jane,” Alex said, his words a laborious jumble in the slo-mo of time. “The people in the rental house and with the rented SUVs, who were following you, they moved. Eli went to check them out and they were gone and the vehicles were turned back in, but there were at least twelve people living there and they had taken photos. That’s one of them.” He pointed to the sword fight.

My house was full of nutso vamps, two nearly dead vamps, an injured Onorio, various sentient beings, and a stranger with swords fighting a storm god. The two with swords were moving almost too fast for sight, even my enhanced time-sight, a flashing, ringing, crashing of steel, dual circles of reflected light and the spatter of scarlet and sapphire blood on the pale walls.

Into the doorway stepped a man, dark haired, black eyed, beautiful as a dying angel. He wore jeans and a white shirt that hung open to reveal a necklace of a raptor in flight, boots and wristbands tattooed with blue birds. He shouted something but the words were lost beneath the ring and clash of steel. He was the frightened boy from the painting and the unchanged man with the crystal from the warehouse. Peregrinus. Grégoire’s brother.

He carried a sword, a double-edged blade with a hand-and-a-half hilt. He raced in and stabbed up at the arcenciel, then tossed what looked like a length of rope over it, a rope tied with something shiny on the end. The quartz crystal. In this light I could tell it was quartz, not diamond. The light of the dragon rippled through it. Eli and Derek fired at the vamp in three-shot bursts. I smelled vamp blood, but Peregrinus didn’t falter. He backed out of the house, pulling the arcenciel with him. As he moved, the light of the dragon flickered, dimmed, shrank to half its size, and went out. The arcenciel writhed once, a snapping, supple movement, and dropped to the floor. It threw out sparks of brown and black, like a dirty fire, the flames dying.

It shifted shape. In its place was a child, a skinny girl of nine or ten with cotton-candy hair and predator teeth. The shooters repositioned their weapons away and down at the sight of the child. Peregrinus tossed the small body over his shoulder, pressed the crystal to her, shouted something, and vanished through the doorway. In a single instant, the invading kidnapper and his swordswoman were gone. The house fell silent around me. I was heaving breaths as I tried to put it all together, my thoughts fragmented and confused.

The light-snake-dragon. The arcenciel that wasn’t Soul. It had just been captured, somehow. By two members of Satan’s Three. Who had totally ignored me the whole time. So that meant that all along . . . while they were snipering my house and putting bombs here . . . they had also been waiting for a chance to grab an arcenciel? How could they have known I was being attacked by one? Had Reach known there was an arcenciel around New Orleans? Had he gotten access to the attack on Bitsa, and then given the secret up to Satan’s Three? And, worse, did Satan’s Three have such access to HQ’s security system that they had seen the attack in the gym? I didn’t know. And I didn’t know how to find out or what to do about it all.

“The Devil,” Katie whispered, her fangs distorting her words. I looked at her. There was blood on her chin and dribbling onto her evening gown. The dress was pale aqua silk that shimmered into ocean blue in the shadows. Her eyes, vamped out and black in the bloody sclera, stared in horror at the open front doorway. “The Devil and her master were here and we still live.” She crossed herself, which looked utterly wrong on the bloody-mouthed vampire.

At the sign of religious sentiment, Bethany hissed, reached out with one hand, and pulled Leo closer to her side. She was moving weirdly, as if only part of her was working. But her neck was healing, the bleeding already stopped. She extended her own fangs with a firm snap. In a movement too fast to focus on, she buried them in Leo’s throat. Gee knelt at Leo’s feet and slid his palms up the MOC’s pants legs so his palms met the vamp’s skin. Blue light flowed down Gee’s arms and beneath the cloth, into Leo, and through the MOC into the priestess and Katie. Katie shook herself and looked from the front door to the back, her eyes sweeping the room the way an old soldier might. There was something different about her suddenly, focused and determined. With no hesitation, she bit her own wrist and leaned in to dribble her powerful blood into Leo’s mouth.

To my side I smelled Eli. “You okay?” I asked without turning.

“Yeah. You?”

“Ducky. Just ducky,” I lied. “The Kid? Bruiser?”

“I’m good. Bruiser’s breathing,” Alex said.

“I’m okay too,” Derek said. “No thanks for not asking.”

“You got any more plywood you can cover the broken doors with?” I asked Eli as I watched the four in a group healing, the MOC between them. The MOC, whom I had staked. Oh. My. I had staked Leo. A titter of laughter struggled in my throat and I swallowed it down. It hurt, as if I’d stuffed something large and squirming into a too-small bag. My stomach cramped as if I’d been kicked by an elephant, and I doubled over, breathing shallowly until the pain eased.

“Yeah,” Eli said, watching me, sounding too casual. “I laid in a good plywood supply, but repair work isn’t in my contract. I need a raise.”

I finally got a breath as the pain eased and snorted at the comment. I said, “Partners don’t get raises. They get part of the profit at year end.” From the corner of my eye, I spotted a twitch of smile in reply.

“What’s wrong with you?” Derek asked. No one replied and I shuffled upright, pretending nothing was wrong.

“While the doors are both sealed with plywood, we can go out through the windows.” Eli pointed to the three that lined the porch beneath jalousies. His weapons were nowhere to be seen, secreted in his clothes, out of sight but easy to hand. “They used to be doors, by the way,” he added, still watching me, his interest seeming casual, while it was actually far more intense than normal. He was offering unimportant information, as if fantasy-film special effects hadn’t just broken out in my house. “But the doors were removed and the windows retrofitted sometime in the early nineteen hundreds. I could make them back into doors if you want,” he offered. He was standing with his fists balled at his hips, assessing the house in light of our sudden lack of security, but also keeping his eyes on Derek and me. It was a nice trick. “That way we’d have more ways to get in and out next time the regular doors get broken.”

“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.”

Soul was staring at Gee as she held out her hand in invitation. “Come to me, little bird. I smell her scent on you. She bit you, yes?” Soul laughed, not unkindly. “Let’s fly together. And you can tell me all you know of the hatchling.”

They vanished in a flash of gray energies, shot through with black and sapphire motes. And my house was suddenly mostly empty.

With the situation at least moderately secure, my body decided it was safe now to give in and let the stomach cramps take me over. I bent double as my insides tried to twist me apart. I had been right. Pain delayed was pain intensified. I’m gonna die after all was my last coherent thought.