Bound No More

Author’s note: This short story takes place (in the JY timeline) after Dark Heir.

“Your goddaughter is driving me out of my blessed mind,” Molly said, sounding frustrated and more Southern that she usually did.

Funny how the seven-year-old became my goddaughter when she was being difficult. I grinned into the cell, knowing Molly wouldn’t know I was laughing at her. With her. Whatever. My voice solemn, I asked, “What am I supposed to do about it? If I’m reading the time right, you’re still laying over in Atlanta, which makes me still about six hundred miles away. “

“Talk to her. She fell asleep on the first leg of the flight and— Stop it, Angelina Everhart Trueblood, or I’ll turn around and take you back home.” Into the phone, she said, “What I want is for you to tell her it was a bad dream and nothing is wrong.”

Something in my chest squeezed tight for a moment. “Dream?”

“Son of a witch on a switch,” Molly cursed in witch vernacular.

“Aunt Jane, you there?” It was Angie Baby, aka Angelina, my oldest godchild and the love of my heart. The stress in my chest eased away and the smile was real this time. Angie didn’t sound distressed or afraid, she sounded angry.

“Yup. It’s me.” I leaned on the couch and pulled a soft, fuzzy throw over me. The Kid had turned up the AC and it was freezing in here. Outside, rain fell, splashing into the puddles, pounding on the roof, trickling down the rain gutters, rushing toward the street and New Orleans’ storm water drainage system. Taken together, it made a melodious sound, the varying and harmonious sounds of rain. I had learned to love it. “What’s up, Angie Baby?”

“You gots to get up outta your sofa and protect the scaberteeth lion bone.”

I was on my feet so fast the couch nearly flipped over. A half second later, Eli, one of my partners in Yellowrock Securities, rounded the corner, a nine-millimeter handgun in each hand. “Backyard,” I said, taking the weapon Eli slapped into my palm.

“Round in the chamber, safety on,” he said. “Whadda we got?”

“Don’t know. Angie”—I held up the cell for him to see—“had a dream about the sabertooth lion skull, which I hid in the boulder pile.”

Eli grunted and pulled a vamp-killer. My partner was a two-handed fighter.

“It could be anything.” Or nothing, but I didn’t say that. Eli already knew it. Angie had strong witchy powers, for sure, but she was barely in school yet. She was a kid. Kids make mistakes.

Eli opened the middle door from the living room. Half juggling the cell, I pulled open the door closest to the backyard. All the doors out of the living room onto the porch were new, and mine stuck, swollen by the rain. I yanked, and when it opened, it nearly hit me in the face. I slid out onto the slick porch floor a half second behind my partner.

“Don’t hurt it, Aunt Jane!” Angie demanded, her voice tinny, so far from my ear. “Just stop it! Quick! Hurry!”

But I couldn’t hurry. I stopped, breathing fast and shallow, staring out over my backyard. Beside me, Eli stopped too, his breathing even and slow, his scent charged with testosterone and adrenaline. “Is that what I think it is?”

“A mostly naked teenage girl kneeling in the mud, digging under my rocks? I think so.” The girl was dark-skinned, with long, kinked, black-, copper-, brown-, pale white-, and silver-streaked hair plastered to her shoulders and back. My Beast pushed to the surface and took in the girl. In Beast sight, she writhed with energies, powerful, supercharged, magical strength. All in rainbow shades of light. “I think she’s a juvie arcenciel, playing in the mud. And Angie says we can’t hurt it. Her.”

Eli made a soft grunt of acknowledgement and holstered his gun. Standard ammo didn’t hurt arcenciels, the term for dragons made of light. Neither did silver. Only steel. Angie could say we couldn’t hurt her all day long, but if the arcenciel was a threat—and my experience suggested that they often were—we might have no choice. Eli would stay armed. He kept the fourteen-inch steel and silver-plated vamp-killer in his right hand and drew a black steel KA-BAR Tanto knife with his left. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes. The steamy air landed on his taut chest with a misty sheen.

“Aunt Jane! Hurry!”

“Okay, Angie. I got it. Love you.” I disconnected and placed both the nine mil and the cell on the wet porch floor. The juvenile arcenciel couldn’t have missed our entrance to the backyard. We hadn’t been covert or quiet and were standing within feet of her in what passed for broad daylight in New Orleans in a rainstorm. But she was ignoring us thoroughly, as she clawed with her hands beneath the boulder and pulled out a rounded mound of mud. She was slicked with it. Leaning down, she reached back under the boulder, into the muddy little cave, and began to scrape more mud to her.

Behinds us, Alex, the third member of Yellowrock Securities, said, “Camera’s running. So far she shows on digital footage.”

When arcenciels were in human form they photographed fairly well on digital and film. When they were in their light-dragon form, digital was often nearly useless and film only slightly better.

“Angie says she’s after the sabertooth lion skull,” I told Alex.

“She say why?”

“No. Just that we can’t let her have it and we can’t hurt her.”

The arcenciel whipped her head around at my words and hissed at me the way vipers do, mouth open, showing teeth. Lots and lots of sharp, pointed shark teeth, glinting like pearls. So she knew English. Interesting. No one really knew what arcenciels were or where they came from. Just shape-shifters, time benders, and not from around here—as in not from Earth.

“And the skull’s out there?” Eli asked.

“Not usually,” I said, lowering my voice so that the rain muffled it. “But with Angie on the way, and her being so nosy and having access to everything inside, I put a bunch of stuff in the yard. In hindsight that may have been stupid.”

“You should have put it in the safe room.”

“No. Angie mighta spotted a magical signature in the safe room, and then she would have known the room was under the stairs. With all the things that kill people.”

Eli grunted his understanding. “Whadda we do?”

The arcenciel pulled another armful of mud from beneath the boulder, or what was left of the boulder from the last time I had borrowed mass from it. I’m a skinwalker, and when I need to take on a form that is bigger than my own mass, I borrow it from something with no genetic material of its own. Hence, boulders that get busted.

A storm front had stalled over the gulf region, and it had been raining for so long that the earth beneath the pile of rocks was muddy, and the stone was slowly sinking. In another twenty years, the pile of once-massive stones that I had managed to break and crack and shatter would disappear beneath the surface of the alluvial mud. Faster if the arcenciel kept up her digging. With a sudden move, the boulder rolled toward her and dropped into the trench she had dug, trapping her hands, wrists, and lower arms. The creature screamed and writhed, jerking her body, and I had a spike of visual memory, intense and sharp, of a . . .

A fox caught in metal teeth, trying to rip off its leg and be free. Stinking of fear and blood and death. A man was above it, watching.

Trap, strange thing inside me thought.

From high above, saw weapon crash down on fox, shattering fox skull. Blood flew. Man’s back paw stamped down, pushed down hard beside metal teeth. Trap opened. Beast’s eyes went wide, staring. Interested. Man pulled fox free. Man stood and stuffed dead fox into bag at waist. Reset trap and put small piece of meat in center. Scattered leaves over it. Man walked away, boots loud in brush.

A white man. Yunega. A trapper, strange voice thought.

Man stank of whiskey, blood, unwashed body. Beast studied steel cage of death. Trap. Remembered the way yunega had freed dead fox.

Beast can do that. Free trapped prey. Eat those that Beast wants. Others go free, strange thing inside of head thought. Strange thing with strange thoughts. Should not be inside with Beast. Strange thing that struggled to be free. Struggled to see through Beast’s eyes. Struggled to be like alpha in pack. Beast should be alone. Beast pressed paw onto strange thing in mind and it went still. Beast leaped from rock ledge and landed beside trap. Picked up stick and dropped onto trap. Steel teeth clanged shut.

Beast reached in and sniffed stinky meat.

Bait, strange thing inside thought.

Bait, Beast thought back, testing meaning. Ate scrap of meat. Beast hungered. Keeping paws on matted leaves, Beast followed yunega. Will eat all bait. Will not hunger.

“Jane?”

I blinked, the world whirling around me. Eli had my upper arm in his fingers. Steadying me. “Sorry. Tell you later,” I said. Stepping carefully off the back end of the porch, I placed my feet on the wet grass. Rainwater squished up through my toes, cool and fresh. The arcenciel whipped her head to me and her eyes glowed. She hissed again.

I showed my empty hands. “No steel,” I said, thinking of the trapped fox. “I can help you get free.”

The juvie went still, the way water goes still on a full-moon night, reflecting everything, black and white and harsh with shadows. “Free?” Her voice was raspy and coarse, as if she hadn’t used it in a while. “Free is . . . safe. Free is . . . desired.”

“Uh-huh. Right.” I had no idea why the arcenciel didn’t simply change shape and get free that way, but she didn’t. Body balanced, knees slightly bent, I took a step toward her.

The arcenciel said, “I will never be free.” She shifted shape into light-dragon form, rainbows sparking off her like sparklers and fireworks. Her dragon form was feathery, luminous shades of the rainbow sparkling with brighter motes. Her cotton candy hair flew on an unseen wind, white, stripped with red and black and brown.

In the instant she shifted, I realized several things, all of them what Beast had been trying to tell me: The arcenciel had been luring me in. This was a trap. The skull was bait for me. The arcenciel had come for me as well as the skull. And I was too stupid to figure out what the ancient memory had meant. Deep inside, I felt Beast chuff with delight. Beast is best hunter. Good fight with light predator.

The light dragon launched herself at me. But before she hit, she was back in human shape. She slammed into me, elbow to my gut. I oofed in pain and flew back with her, feet in the air, to the ground, into the mud. She landed atop me, the elbow still in my gut. Something tore inside.

Drawing on Beast, I wrapped my legs around her waist and rolled over in the mud, loosening her hold, hitting her with a bare fist as hard as I could into her nose. And with Beast so close, I could hit. A human nose would have cracked and flattened beneath my knuckles, but her nose gave way in a shower of sparks and seemed to suck my entire hand into her face with a slurping sound and a cascade of sparks. The inside of her was painful, like a mild electric current enveloping my hand. Hot and gummy. Which was gross. Until I realized two things. Rainbow dragons might pack an electrical punch as big as one of those electric eels, five hundred volts. Enough to stun a human. And I had recently been hit by lightning and nearly died. Every nerve ending across my entire body crawled at the thought of being hit again.

Beast fast, I ripped my hand free and rolled again. Punching her mouth, her eyes, her temples. Nothing seemed to faze her. Worse, I had no weapons. No gun. No blades. I risked a glance from the girl to the porch. Got a glimpse of Eli moving, bending.

If the arcenciel bit me, I’d be poisoned, and it wasn’t as if I had immediate access to the antidote. No. That was hanging in Leo’s deepest subbasement, literally a heartless bag of torn flesh and bone riddled with silver ammo. But the light dragon didn’t seem to be desirous of biting me. Instead she hit me back, and if I hadn’t turned my face at the last instant, she would have broken my jaw. I backhanded her and got a good handful of her hair with my other hand. I wrapped her hair around my fist and around her head and yanked.

We rolled through the mud, and I slammed her head into the boulder she had been digging under. Her skull hit with a satisfying crack, and she went still. I was gasping and hurting and managed to stand, one hand on the boulder. She wasn’t moving. Didn’t seem to be breathing. I had maybe killed a dragon. Oh man. No. I nudged her with my bare foot. Her head lolled. I bent to check for a pulse, but there was nothing. Did an arcenciel even have a pulse? They were full of a sparkly ectoplasmic goo, not blood. No internal organs that I could recognize. I lifted her eyelid to reveal an opalescent eye with a slit pupil that narrowed when the dim light hit it. Assuming she had reflexes to light, she was still alive.

I started to drop the eyelid when the pupil sharpened in focus. I leaped back just in time to avoid a slash of rainbow-hued horns. It shifted in an instant and I jumped back again. Its body was vaguely snakelike, iridescent scales the color of tinted glass and thick storm clouds, with hints of copper. It smelled like green herbs burning over hot coals and the tang of fish and water plants. The arcenciel vanished in a sparkle of light and a spray of harsh magic that burned on my arms and dried the mud into a brittle crust.

I stepped to the other boulder she had been digging beneath and pulled on Beast-strength to roll it away. My gut heaved from the elbow it had taken, and my breath came fast and faint. Beneath the boulder, in a hole I had dug the day before, was an oversized plastic Ziploc bag containing a waterproof vinyl bag full of magical stuff—the few things not under lock and key in various safe-deposit boxes—and the skull. I slid the bags from the muck and removed the vinyl gobag. I slung it over my shoulder and around my body to my back, where it gave a satisfying thump. So much for all the plans of mice and Humpty Dumpty.

I slapped the mud off my arms and legs and kicked it from my feet in big clumps. Holding my aching belly, I stood as straight as possible and looked at the porch. Eli and his brother sat in matching dented, rusted metal garden chairs, rocking back and forth on the bent-metal-tube frames. Eli was sipping a beer. Alex was sipping an energy drink. They both were grinning and broke into polite applause.

“Chick fight,” Eli said.

“Chick fight in the mud,” Alex amended.

“Thought she was gonna take you for a minute there, babe.”

The sky opened up and spilled half an ocean onto me. At least it washed away the mud. I made it to the porch through the downpour, where I managed to climb up to the wood flooring and fall into the remaining chair. Eli had picked the old, rusty chairs up at a yard sale for five bucks each. Twenty dollars for the four. I had thought it was waste of money until now, when the chair bore my weight and settled me into a comfortable rocking motion. I was still breathing painfully, and I pulled up my T to reveal a bruise starting to form, just below my ribs and above my navel. This was gonna hurt.

The rain fell so powerfully that it splashed up when it hit, the microdroplets forming a mist similar to fog, obscuring the boulders and the brick fence beyond. Eli opened a beer and passed it to me. I put the vinyl bag on the floor and swallowed down half.

“Lemme have my cell. I need to call Soul.”

Eli handed me the official Kevlar-armored cell, and I flipped it open, tapping the image for the PsyLED agent—a tiny, multicolored gecko. Soul answered on the third ring. I heard her say to someone else, “It’s Jane.”

From a distance I heard an unexpected voice say, “Hey, Jane.”

“Jodi?” Jodi worked with the local PD, in charge of the woo-woo team, my term for paranormal cases. PsyLED was a federal woo-woo agency under Homeland Security. The two law enforcement officers shouldn’t be in the same place at the same time. Then I put it together. The Witch Council of the entire U.S. was happening in few weeks. Both the president and the governor—usually fierce opponents—had expressed an interest in the Witch Conclave and the meeting between the witches and vamps that would happen on the last day. It was to be a parley, a vamp term meaning to negotiate and come to a legal agreement, like a peace accord. The powers that be wanted the witches and the vamps to sign a treaty and bury the hatchet, and not in one another’s backs.

Making certain that everything worked out well and that nothing outside interfered with the attempt at rapprochement required that the entire city be secure from hate groups and terrorist groups, homegrown and imported, paranormal and mundane. Security for a whole city might involve PsyLED. Yellowrock Securities was concerned with the micro parts—the security of the mansion where the big weekend-long affair was to take place, security at vamp HQ, and security during travel times, when the witches rode the streetcar from their hotels to the mansion hosting the event, and later, when Leo Pellissier was limoed in. “Are you out of town with Soul or is Soul in New Orleans?”

“We’re eating at Coop’s Place on Decatur. We just got here. Come join us.”

I looked down at myself. Thank God I had put on a bra, or I’d look like I belonged in a wet T-shirt contest. But I’d still need to change. “Order Eli and me the gumbo with extra seafood and we’ll be there in twenty.” I tapped END and looked at Eli, who still wore a faint smirk. “I’ll get dry and change and meet you out front.”

“I take it I’m driving?”

“Until I can breathe without pain, yes.”

Alex said, “Bring me a shrimp po’boy with extra lettuce and tomato.”

Eli stood and followed me inside to put on a shirt and shoes. Even in the Deep South, the “no shirt, no shoes, no service” protocol reigned.

Five minutes later I was clean and dry except for my wet hair, which I braided in a single long plait down my back. It took too long to dry as much hair as I had, but I’d have to get to it soon. Wet hair in this weather could get rank. I strapped a set of small throwing knives to my calf, which I could reach under jeans. I’d rather be better armed, but with cops around, even cops I knew well, no gun and no obvious, oversized bladed weapon was my best choice. I slid into loose jeans and a T, with the long sleeves pushed up to my elbows.

I set the vinyl bag with the skull in it on the floor in the closet and removed a small wooden carving of a crow. It was carved from ebony and had been brushed with some inky stain that darkened the knife cuts even more than the smoothed wood. The crow contained Molly’s new, modified, portable working—what nonwitches called a spell—an updated version of her hedge of thorns ward. I tapped the crow’s claws with my fingernail, which opened the hedge over the crow and the vinyl bag, protecting it and everything inside. Even the arcenciel would have trouble getting to it without a major singeing. I no longer had to spill blood to set such a prearranged ward—except the big one out back, which I hadn’t used in months. Satisfied that no one could get to the skull and the spelled charms Molly had made, not without getting hurt badly in the process, I headed out.

•   •   •

Coop’s advertised itself as the place where the not-so-elite ate. It was a renovated old building so close to the Mississippi that I could feel the faint vibration of the river moving beneath my feet. It was bar dark inside and smelled of beer and drunks and excellent food. Today it also reeked with excitement because someone had just won it big at one of the video poker machines.

Our food was waiting when we got there and I slid into a booth next to Jodi. Eli took the place next to Soul and said, “Ladies.”

We dug into the food and when my appetite was moderately appeased—mud wrestling with an arcenciel used up a lot of energy—I held up my glass so the waitperson could see that I needed more iced tea and said, “I had a visit from your old friend, the chick who always wears rainbow dresses.”

Soul had been reaching for a French fry and she made the faintest of flinches. The chick who always wears rainbow dresses was an unmistakable code for an arcenciel. “When?” she asked, sounding unconcerned and maybe even casual. I’d have totally bought it if I hadn’t seen that tiny flinch. “I wasn’t aware she was still around.”

Eli looked at his watch and said, “She showed up thirty-three minutes ago. She and Jane had a four-minute-and-two-second mud wrestle in the backyard and then she took off.”

Jodi laughed. Soul didn’t. I didn’t know a lot about arcenciels, but the fact that an arcenciel stayed around for a battle she didn’t have to fight seemed unusual. That she fought in human form seemed unusual. The fact that she didn’t draw on her ability to alter or bubble time to win the fight seemed unusual. Pretty much everything about the situation seemed unusual, including Angie’s prescient dream and the call to warn me. I had to address that too—soon, but not in front of present company.

I asked, “So, you didn’t know she was in town?”

“I knew. She was spotted by a CI, but I haven’t had time to see her,” Soul said, with subtle emphasis on the words time and see. Soul was an arcenciel too, and when one of her kind bubbled time, she would know it if she was paying attention. More stuff Jodi couldn’t know.

“CI?” I asked.

“Confidential informant, which means she won’t tell either one of us. Who the heck did your CI see?” Jodi asked. “Girl in a rainbow dress? Some kind of code word?”

“No. A distant relative,” Soul said, shoveling a spoonful of boudin onto a sliver of toast made from French bread. “The only one of her generation in the States.”

Which explained how she knew which arcenciel I was talking about. Arcenciels didn’t bear young easily or often, and the presence of a young one would have been noted and observed, at the very least.

“Her name is Opal,” Soul said. “She is . . . young and creative and willful. I understand that she has taken a shine to Jane and has dropped in unexpectedly. Twice now, once on the other side of the Mississippi, once at your house, for a sparring session, yes?”

At which I nodded, realizing that Opal had to be the rainbow dragon who had attacked me in my SUV not that long ago and nearly managed to get me killed. “Sparring match, my butt,” I said.

“I am truly sorry at her intemperance. She is innocence personified, but manages to be a troublemaker.” She took the bite and gave me a look that told me to drop it, and that we could talk later, when a human cop wasn’t present.

I wasn’t exactly sure what intemperance meant, but I shrugged and said, “Nothing I can’t handle.” Maybe. Hopefully. “So fill me in on the city’s security for the Witch Conclave and Eli can fill you in on YS’s part.”

Eli shot me an indecipherable look and asked, “Why can’t you fill them in?”

“If I had intended to talk, I wouldn’t have needed you here. I’m eating.” And I did, all through the boring and tedious discussion of traffic and buses and streetcars and hotel security and stuff I used to have to handle. Having partners had freed up a lot of my time and let me take on bigger and better jobs. The job as security had come through Molly, and thanks to my partners, YS was making a lot of money for the one weekend, freeing me personally to be Leo’s Enforcer at the same event. Couldn’t beat getting paid two times for the same job.

As soon as Jodi finished the debrief, she slid out of the seat and was gone, leaving a twenty on the table to cover her tab and tip. The moment she was gone, Soul said, “Tell me everything that Opal did and said.”

I pulled up my shirt and showed her my bruise, which was starting to turn a bright, spreading red where all the small arterioles and capillaries had been damaged by the elbow. I told her everything that had happened, excluding Angie’s part. In this version, we were sitting on the porch having a beer and enjoying the rain when Opal appeared and started digging around in the backyard. I finished with, “I had hidden a few of Molly’s magical trinkets out there along with a skull Leo gave me, a sabertooth lion skull used by the sabertooth vamp I killed when I first got to town.”

“What do you think she was there for?”

“I’ve had the spelled trinkets in the house for months, and the skull had been buried out back on other occasions, so I can’t say.” I stopped, my tea halfway to my mouth. “But I’ve never had them all in the same place at the same time before. So . . . maybe some kind of magical energy symbiosis? Something that drew her attention?”

Soul sighed and slid from the booth too, tossing down a second twenty. The waiter was going to have a good tip day. “I don’t know,” Soul said. “Keep me in the loop.” And she was gone too.

Eli helped himself to their boudin leftovers. I ate the leftover fries. When Alex’s to-go bag was deposited on the table, we each tossed a few bills on top and went back outside into the drizzle and the unexpected cool from the storm front. Autumn wasn’t far off and the slightly cooler temps of the chilly eighties promised that the frigid seventies were not far behind. Molly would be here soon, and the cooler temps would make her visit more pleasant. Molly hated hot, humid weather.

•   •   •

Little Evan and his dad were still in Asheville, which proved that Angie and Molly weren’t staying long, just long enough so Molly could meet with the NOLA witches and assist with the final group workings that would be used as the witch part of security. Witches were coming from all over and Molly and Lachish Dutillet, the head of the New Orleans coven, had a big job to prepare for. But even short stays in New Orleans were expensive, and so my BFF and goddaughter were staying with us. There was plenty of room in the five-bedroom, three-bath house for them to each have their own space, but this time they would be sharing the bedroom over mine, because the boys were painting the other guest room, which we ordinarily used as a workout room.

I’d had the entire house cleaned, had new linens put on the twin beds, and made it clear that the werewolf who spent some nights in Alex’s room had to stay downstairs and not scare the guests. I was pretty sure that Brute understood me, but when a were-creature spent too long in his animal form the brain began to lose its human characteristics and spoken language was one of the first things to go. Since the angel Hayyel had touched Brute in some metaphysical manner unknown to the rest of us, he hadn’t been able to shift to human. Brute wasn’t very human at all anymore.

I was watching out the front window when Mol parked her rental car, a nifty Ford Fusion, a block down from the house. I was out the front door before she got the door open and gathered her and Angie and the cat travel box into a big group hug. I didn’t hug many people, but Molly was family from way back, as much as I had family from way back. Kids raised in children’s homes usually had limited family ties, but the Everharts and Truebloods were family of the heart, if not of the blood. “It’s so good to see you both,” I said softly into Angie’s strawberry blond curls as I crushed mother and daughter and cat box to me. Angie’s feet dangled off the sidewalk. Molly smelled of perfume, which she didn’t usually wear around me, tart and sweet, flowery and lemony, like roses and lemongrass, a strange combination that made me want to sneeze. My inner voice held a hint of growl as Beast laid claim to Angie, with the thought, Kitssss . . .

“I missed you so much!” I growled aloud.

“I know, Aunt Jane,” Angie said, her feet kicking. “You and your Beastie big-cat love us, and we love you. Now lemme down! I wanna go inside!” She kicked, her knee narrowly missing my tender belly, and I set her on the pavement.

“Door’s open. Your room’s ready,” I told her.

Angie took off for the house and I grabbed the luggage from Mol. Being a skinwalker meant being stronger than I looked, and Molly usually packed light. This time was no exception, although the cat cage was getting heavier. KitKit was asleep inside, heavily drugged. And there were scratches up Molly’s arms.

I tucked the cage under my elbow and the two bags in each hand.

We were halfway to the house when I heard Angie scream.

I leaped the distance and inside. Dropped the luggage. The suitcase, tote, and cat cage didn’t fall. They hung there in the air. I had bubbled time—or Beast had—and I hadn’t even noticed. Silver mist and silver-blue motes of power danced around me, coming from within me. Time vibrated and wobbled and my gut twisted tight. Acid rose in my throat. Angie’s scream hung on the air, a deep warble, like a siren.

Alex was half standing behind his modified desk in the living room, his eyes wide and fearful. Eli was midleap in the doorway to the living area, drawing his nine mil, his face expressionless. I looked where Eli was looking—into my bedroom. I stepped inside, the deep sound of Angie’s scream thudding into my eardrums.

It was coming from Angelina, which I had known, but not the why. She was in my closet, on her knees, her hands on and in the hedge of thorns. And the hedge, newly modified by Mol, had manacled the little girl’s wrists and was giving her a mild electrical shock.

Part of me was horrified and lurched toward her. Another part stopped me. And sent me a shock of vision, of a puma kitten tottering on the edge of a ledge. And my/our clawed paw reaching out to her. Swiping her back inside the ledge. A little too rough. But making a point. Teaching kit, Beast thought at me.

Child abuse, I thought back, kneeling beside Angie.

Beast chuffed at me in disgust.

Not now, I thought back at her. Mountain lions and the Cherokee had very different feelings and instincts about how to raise their young, and I wasn’t going to argue with my other soul. I studied the hedge, its energies a dull red of smooth shimmering light. In most wards, the energies were a coruscating light pattern, a roiling of thick and thin, fluidlike, waterlike power, or banded like an agate, or ringed like Saturn. Sometimes even a licking flame. But always there were weak spots in it. Not this time. The hedge was a ruby red, smooth as polished glass, except for the manacles that had trapped Angie’s hands at the wrists. That was actually a second working wrapped inside the first, blue energies sweeping up out of the hedge and coating Angie’s skin. I could see the tiny sparks of electric energy arc out and snap at Angie’s flesh.

This was new. Entirely new. Which was important, but it was more important to release Angie from the discomfort it was causing.

Molly’s family had created the original hedge spell and taken the unprecedented step of sharing it with other witches. They had given it, free of barter, to the New Orleans coven. I had thought it was to cement relations with the different covens, but now I realized that the gift had been an easy one to share because the Everhart sisters had already devised an update. Hedge of thorns 2.0. A better, faster, sneakier working. One I couldn’t figure out how to break, once it had been initiated, even seeing it out of time.

I saw Angie’s pinky finger move. The tiniest little tremor, a quiver of a fingertip. A black light arced out from that fingertip to zap the manacles.

Black light. Black . . . black magic full of darkness and prism sparkles. Something I had never seen before, or at least not like this. Black light with a hint of purple, a trace of blue, a faint reddish tinge around the edges. A second arc of black light zapped out. And a third. And the blue manacles began to fail, to disintegrate. Angie was using a type of magic I had never seen before, except once when a crazy vamp clan was about to sacrifice witches to accomplish a blood-magic working. Sacrifice Angie and her baby brother.

This was bad. This was very bad.

Angie was way too young to have access to her magic, which wasn’t supposed to manifest until puberty. She had been bound by her parents, her magic tightened around her like a second skin, still there, but not available to her. It was a binding that had been explained to me, how they’d done it, how it worked, like knitting magical swaddling clothes around her. I had seen them renew it as she grew, and it had to be renewed often, but it was a binding she had begun to notice, and probably fight against. And clearly that binding had stopped working. Again.

My gut tightened and twisted again and I pressed a fist against the pain. I hadn’t done anything but walk while time was bubbled, but that was enough. Bubbling or twisting or bending time made me sick. If I didn’t stop soon enough, it made me vomit blood, and it wasn’t a sickness that my Beast was able to heal. My Cherokee Elder teacher, Aggie One Feather, lisi, had told me that if I didn’t listen to my magic, and kept pushing its boundaries, it would one day kill me. I had a bad feeling that she was right, but I wasn’t always in control over it. Sometimes it was instinctive, like if I was in danger of dying, or someone I loved was in danger, then, sometimes, the magic itself took me over. At such times, my own life, our own lives, no longer mattered, and Beast would take over our magics and send me into the Gray Between. And bubble time so she could move outside of it.

I started to knead my belly, but the bruise stopped me fast. Pain doubled me over and the acid rose again. I swallowed it down. I didn’t have long. I dropped to the floor beside Angie, crossed my legs guru-style, and studied what she was doing. Yeah. Angie was definitely analyzing and breaking the hedge. The manacles weren’t hurting her, not like they should have been. She wasn’t writhing in pain, she was mad.

Pressing my belly gingerly, I let time snap back.

The echo of Angie’s furious scream assaulted my ears. The luggage hit the foyer floor. The cat screamed and yowled and the cage tumbled with the cat’s acrobatics. Eli landed inside the room. His eyes went wide at the sight of me there. Molly blew in and caught herself with both hands on the doorjamb, her body bowing into the room and back out. Her face was full of fear and shock to find me there. Molly’s lips moved tentatively, but no sound came when she said my name. Jane?

Eli put away his gun and the vamp-killer he had drawn without even noticing.

I turned to Angie and said, “If you don’t stop it trying to get into the hedge, I am going to turn you over my knees and tan your little backside.” Empty threat. I’d never hit my goddaughter, but still.

I didn’t know what Angie saw in my face, but she finished breaking the manacles with a snap of sound and a flash of light. She jerked her hands away from the hedge and scooted out of the closet, her back still to the door and her mother. Her cheeks were red apples of anger, her eyes flashing with fury. “It’s not fair! It’s dangerous. It’s gonna hurt Mama.”

“There is nothing in that bag that will hurt your mama. She made most of the spells.”

“Not the workings,” Angie said, thrusting out her bottom lip. “The shiny lizard that wants to hurt Mama. She’s gonna use the scabertoothed lion bone!”

And that shut me right up.

“I have to bind the bones,” she said, “like Mama and Daddy bind me. Or the lizard will find it, and that will be bad! Very, very bad.”

Molly’s eyes had gone dark with the realization of what Angie was saying and what her words might mean for Angie’s future. Keeping Angie bound was a way to keep her safe, and Angie wasn’t supposed to be able to sense the bindings, let alone bypass them or turn them off.

The witch gene was carried on the X chromosome, and due to the scarcity of male witches who lived to adulthood, Angie was one of only a very few witches to ever have received the witch gene from both parents, one on each of her X chromosomes. If PsyLED or the Department of Defense or any other government agency, or worse, some terrorist group, discovered how powerful Angie was likely to become, the fear was that she would disappear into their clutches forever. The development of the psy-meter, a device to measure the magic used by a person or a spell, had made it easy to detect witches. If one was ever used on Angie and she wasn’t bound, her secret would be out.

Molly sucked in a breath that sounded strangled and said, “She’s free of the bindings.”

Angie jerked and whirled all in one motion, her eyes wide at her mother.

“Might have been free for a long time,” I said, “and her magic is different from yours. Black light with some purple and a trace of blue.” I paused and took in Angie, whose eyes were full of guilt. “There’s a faint reddish tinge around the edges. Arcs of black light were zapping out. Black light.” It was raw power, which was unstable, dangerous all by itself, and needed to be soundly reined in by training and the proper workings mathematics. Her parents had made her bindings impregnable, keeping her magics under lock and key. Or so they’d thought.

Angie’s mouth fell open in an O. She looked terrified, her shoulders rising, her head ducking. “Uh-oh.”

Molly stood straight and dropped her arms from the jambs. “Come here.”

Angie looked at me and I shook my head. “Forget it.” She was getting no protection from the consequences of her actions, not from me, not when the real consequences of breaking her bindings and using unstable, untrained magic were beyond anything she could imagine. She could harm herself, burn herself, kill someone by accident. She could be taken away, disappeared into a secret government program, and never heard from again.

Angie put a hand to the floor and stood. Her wrists were red where the blue manacles had trapped her, though the signs were resolving rapidly.

“I’m sorry, Mama.” Angie burst into tears. And every bit of my resolve crumpled with her. She threw herself at her mother and wrapped her arms around Molly’s waist, hugging her tightly.

“Your room is ready, Miz Molly,” Alex said. “The one directly overhead. I’ll bring up the luggage and put it in the hall outside your door.” Which was a terribly polite way to tell Molly she had a private place to take her daughter. The Kid was growing up finally. I gave him a nod of approval and his shoulders went back; an expression that might have been pride swept across his face and vanished. He shrugged and then gave me a faint smile, one slight enough to be Eli-worthy. I gave him one back.

Molly and Angie trudged up the stairs, Molly reprimanding her daughter in angry hissed sibilants, anger that was also suffused with fear. Alex gathered up the dropped bags and followed them at a distance to give them more privacy.

Eli came into my bedroom, his expression noncommittal. “How bad do you feel?”

“Bad enough. But Beast can mitigate some of the problems, now that”—I attempted a joke—“I’m back in time.”

“Not funny,” he said.

“I know.”

Eli held out a hand and I let him help me to my feet. He said, “Let me see your belly.”

That was a lot more intimate than we usually got, but Eli had been a Ranger, which meant that he was a lot more knowledgeable about medical matters than your average Joe. Rangers and other special forces types often did their own battlefield medicine, saving lives on the run. I raised my shirt hem to the bottom of my bra and looked with him. The bruise delivered by the arcenciel, Opal, had spread across my belly, dark angry red with a purple point in the very center, spreading to paler red, and then to pinkish beneath my ribs.

Eli pointed to the spot between my ribs. “The xiphoid process is a little spear-shaped bone right there, just above where that thing hit you. If the process gets hit in just the right way, it can tilt in and puncture your liver.” He stepped closer and put a hand on the back of my head and pulled down my lower left eyelid. He frowned, a real frown, with wrinkles on either side of his mouth. “Your lids are too pale. You’ve lost blood. You need to shift. Now.”

Eli pushed me toward my bed and said, “Now, Jane. I’ll sear a steak and slip it in when you tap on the door.” He closed my door, leaving me alone.

I looked back at my belly. It didn’t look that awful, but I did feel kinda . . . weird. Tired. Playing with time on top of fighting an arcenciel was probably stupid.

I pulled the T off and tossed it and the jeans and the undies to the floor. Sitting on my bed, I thought about Beast. I used to have to wear my mountain lion tooth or be holding mountain lion bones, giving me access to the RNA and DNA in the marrow, using it as a guide to find the proper shape and form. But since Beast and I had merged on a deeper, more spiritual, metaphysical, and purely physical level, I hadn’t been stuck with that limitation. Now, though I still needed genetic structure to work with to shift into other animal forms, I could shift into Beast form most anytime I wanted. Easy-peasy.

The silver energies rose around me and I closed my eyes. Reached inside, to the strands of RNA. Once upon a time, I’d had a double strand, just like all other humans, and when I shifted into another animal, it was into its double strand. Now, Beast’s genetic makeup and mine were inextricably paired into tripled strands, each coated with silver and blue-green energies, each sparking darkly.

The change was almost, but not quite, pain this time, as my bones bent and snapped. Pelt sprang out on my arms and legs. My back arched, then threw me forward. Air wheezed from my lungs.

In a matter of seconds, I was Beast, crouching on the bed. I stopped Beast from extruding her claws. My linens do not need holes.

She snarled back and stood, stepping slowly to the floor. On the hardwood, she extruded her claws and stretched, almost sitting, to pull on shoulders, then lifting up to pull herself forward, her belly scraping the floor. She extended her back legs and lifted the right one, stretching from front paws to back toes. Then she did the other leg. Languid and svelte, she moved to the door and lifted a paw.

No scratches!

She snarled again and deliberately extended her claws, dragged her paw down the doorjamb, putting deep grooves in the paint.

Oh crap. Eli just painted the moldings.

She chuffed with amusement.

When he gets mad at you, don’t blame me. He’s the one who brings you steak these days.

Eli is good hunter. Brings good cow meat. She stared at the damaged door. Her appetite was growing at the thought of bloody meat, a totally different kind of cramping in her belly, the cramping of hunger from the energy used in the shift. Beast needs sharp claws. Eli will not see.

Eli sees everything.

A knock came at the door and I/we stepped back. The door opened and Eli bent inside, placing a platter on the floor. As he was rising, he stopped, his eyes on the scratches. For a long moment he didn’t move, halted half-bent-over. Beast looked away, offering to him her profile in a cat’s utter disinterest. “I’m going to let it go this time. I’m going to repair it. I’m even going to make a scratching post for your damn claws. But if you ever do that again, I’ll start cooking your steak well done. Charred. Are we clear on this?”

Beast sat, front paws close together, as if posing, but she snarled at him, eyes slit, lips pulled back, showing killing teeth.

“I’ll take that as a yes. Jane, are you better?”

I dropped my head down and back up in a human nod, which felt all wrong but was the best way to communicate with Eli in this form.

“Good.” He closed the door.

Beast maintained the disinterest and indifference until we heard Eli’s footsteps recede to the kitchen. Beast then picked up the largest chunk of raw steak and half chewed it before swallowing it and taking the next.

•   •   •

Back in human form, I felt much better, except for the hunger that raged through me; I had used up a lot of energy on the second shift. I dressed and got a step stool, placing the vinyl bag on the top shelf of my closet behind everything, and initiated the hedge of thorns ward back over it. It looked weird up there, some ten feet off the ground. I had never set the super-duper ward on anything up high, and the energies had formed a sphere around the bag and through the shelf. It wasn’t easy to see in the dark of the closet except in Beast-vision, though I was certain that Angie would be able to see it if she got high enough. I took the step stool with me and inspected the room to see if an enterprising and determined little witchy girl could stack furniture and climb up there. I didn’t see how, and I was pretty sure that levitation wasn’t part of the witch repertoire.

When I came out of my room, I took the stool with me and deposited it in the butler’s pantry. On the top shelf was a mad cat, her tail tip twitching and her eyes slit nearly shut. “Sorry about dropping you, KitKit.” She managed to ignore me with utter disdain.

In the kitchen, I could smell oatmeal cooking, and my mouth watered. It was cooked just the way I like it—old-fashioned oats dumped into boiling, slightly salted water. Cooked for a minute, two at most, then re-dumped into a big bowl filled with enough real sugar to bring on a diabetic coma, and lots of milk. The absolute best. I practically inhaled it and felt the sugary energy and complex carbs start to work on me immediately.

Molly joined us and looked from the empty bowl to my hair, which was now unbraided and hanging to my hips in a black swing. And was dry, which was nice. “How’s Beast?” she asked, putting together the signs of a recent shift.

“She’s good. How’s Angie?”

“Pouting. She’s currently in magical time-out, which makes her angrier. I don’t understand what’s going on or how she . . .” Molly shook her head in frustration, her reddish mop bouncing. I only now noticed that she had cut her hair. The short, curly style looked good on her, professional, smart, and chic, but I bet Big Evan had not been happy. Molly added, “I don’t know how she did what she did.” She lifted her cell. “I have a dozen phone calls to make, including one to my husband about that child. I smell tea steeping, and I’d love to have a cup.”

“You want a shot of whiskey in it?” Eli asked.

“Actually that sounds amazing. I’m sure it’s five somewhere in the world. But just a dribble, please.” Molly turned and left the kitchen, already tapping calls into her cell. My eyebrows went up. Molly accepting alcohol in the middle of the day? That was another strange part of an already strange day.

Eli took my bowl—a mixing bowl that had held twelve cups of oatmeal—put it in the sink, and ran water into it while he poured tea for Molly and me. He put my mug on the table beside my elbow, along with a tub of Cool Whip and little cup of real cream, and carried Molly’s tea, with its drip of whiskey in it, to her. I looked at the Cool Whip and the cream. Cool Whip in tea was comfort food, but it only worked with cheap tea. This smelled like the good stuff, and so I added a teaspoon of sugar and a dollop of the cream. It was perfect. I sat, sipping, listening to Eli as he tiptoed up the stairs and checked in on Angie and then came back down. He took a cup from the espresso maker and sat across from me, his dark eyes even darker with worry. “What happened?” he asked.

I held the warm mug for a moment and set it down, leaving my fingers lightly circled around the ceramic heat. “Molly had sent me a portable hedge and I activated it over the vinyl bag holding the skull and Molly’s charms. It was a new working that was geared to not only stop a regular thief but also a magical thief. Most magical thieves. If the arcenciel had gotten to it, I can’t guarantee that she would have been stopped. For all I know she might have swallowed the whole thing and taken off.” I waved that thought away. “Anyway. The new working has manacles built into it so a thief can’t get to the bag, and also can’t get away. They’re trapped there. When Angie touched it, the working grabbed Angie’s hands and wrists with the manacles. When I was outside of time, I watched as she shot little black light magics into them and into the hedge, trying to get loose. I didn’t turn off the hedge. She used raw magics to get free.”

“Black light magics? I thought you said most magics are blue or green. Or red.” He thought and added, “Sometimes purple.”

I nodded. “Yellow, orange. Prisms of the rainbow, light and energy as used by a witch. They work like a signature to people who can see them. Angie’s used to be white. Blue sometimes. Rarely with little motes of black power in them. Except the very first time I ever saw them manifest. She was barely out of diapers, and she got mad, and a whirlwind of her magics ripped through the mobile home they were living in. The magics were dark, like an angry cloud. She could have killed her parents. Instead Beast calmed her and stopped the attack. Molly and Big Evan bound her that day for the first time.”

I drank more tea, trying to put it all together in a cohesive timeline. Working with long-lived vamps, I had learned that timelines were important. “When Little Evan and Angie were in the witch circle waiting to be sacrificed by the Damours, Angie was surrounded by dark magic. And when she freed me from the head Damour, there were streaks of dark motes in her magic. I had never seen her magic up close enough to get a good look, and back then I couldn’t bend time, slow it down, to really study it, and I didn’t understand . . . but I think her magic became dark that night. I think she learned something and has been using it. Or was contaminated by it. Maybe not black magic, not blood magic, but something that can go either way.” I looked up from my mug. “This is going to be hard on Molly and Evan.”

Eli nodded. “You want me there?”

I shook my head. “No. Yes. I don’t know.” I thought some more. Having Eli with me would be cowardly. I was not a coward. Or not often. “No,” I decided and stood. I refilled my cup and added more cream and sugar, stirred it, but then left it on the table. I walked out one of the new doors to the side porch. Molly was sitting there in one of the rusty chairs, rocking, her dress full-skirted and flowing out and down to the decking, chatting on the phone. Her red hair was flopping to one side, and the curls followed the same line as the dress. She looked as if she were posing for a painting by some famous watercolor artist. The thought was way too artistic for me, and I shook it away.

Molly’s tone informed me that she was talking to Big Evan, her hubby. I walked over and sat at her feet, my legs curled up guru-style in a half lotus. It was an intrusion as well as an act of submission unusual for me and especially for my Beast. Her perfumed scent was too strong for me, augmented as it was with my Beast senses, and I resisted the desire to sneeze or wrinkle my nose.

Molly’s voice trailed off and we could hear the dripping and tapping of rainwater and the ever-present sound of traffic. “Jane’s here,” she said.

“Would you put me on speaker?” I asked.

Molly tapped the screen and said, “Evan, you’re on speaker. Jane has something to say. And she’s sitting at my feet. Like a house cat.”

I managed a smile. Molly understood what my position and posture meant.

Evan said. “I’m not going to like this one little bit, am I?”

“Probably not,” I said. To Molly, I asked, “You already told him about Angie?” Molly nodded slowly, then shook her head. Mixed signals meant he knew parts. Slowly, I went on, knowing that I needed to say this in a special way, with compassion and tenderness and all that crap. But I didn’t know how to do things like that, and hadn’t figured out how during the walk out here. I was a bull in the china shop of my friends’ emotions. “You know I can bubble time. So when I heard Angie scream, it just kinda”—I shrugged—“happened. And I ran inside. She had her hands buried in the hedge—that’s the new and improved hedge, by the way—over the sabertooth lion skull. The trap part of the new hedge had been activated, and she was stuck. But I was standing outside of time and I saw what she was doing. She was zapping the manacles. And her magic was like black light. She’s using her power raw, without maths to give it form. Controlling it just with her mind and will. And I have a bad feeling that she saw me bubble time, which means she might know how to do that too.”

Molly closed her eyes. Her face went a paler shade of cream; clearly she hadn’t told Evan yet. I caught a whiff of her reaction, which was all tangled and twisted and broken.

“Thanks for sugarcoating it, Jane,” Evan said, the sarcasm so thick even I understood it.

I shrugged and stood, patted Molly’s hands, and walked back inside. I was still barefoot, the wood floor smooth but with the rolling surface of a very old house. At the table, I picked up my tea. “That went well,” I said, lying.

Eli chuckled, and there was no amusement in the sound at all.

•   •   •

Supper was a quiet affair, though Angie didn’t seem to sense it. Angie had sat Ka Nvsita, the Cherokee doll I had given her, on the chair beside her, and was telling the doll about her day, omitting her time-out and concentrating on the flight and KitKit, who was still hiding on the top shelf in the butler’s pantry. According to the doll chat, Angie had enjoyed a stellar day.

Molly stared alternately at her daughter and at her own left hand clenching in her lap. She ate with determination, but I could tell she wasn’t enjoying the salmon and black rice Eli had made, nor the mixed greens salad—which wasn’t bad for green leaves and veggies and nuts and stuff.

With nothing settled and no decision made about what to do with Angie or the skull, Molly pushed away from the table and called Evan again, her voice low and worried. Together, over the cell connection, they warded the house, Molly’s incantation and Evan’s flute playing following her from door to door and window to window. When the house was protected, Molly took a pouting but seemingly obedient Angie Baby upstairs. I followed and watched as Molly and Evan put their daughter to sleep. They used a new working that Angie wasn’t expecting, a sneak attack that they didn’t announce or warn her about. The little girl’s eyes flew open in surprise and she resisted for some five seconds before she fell back on her pillow, eyes closed, and her breath even. Asleep. Molly looked from the little girl to me and said, “We had to.”

I nodded, relieved, and Mol turned back to her daughter. The music and chanted words of the new magical binding sounded through the house, the energies shivering along my skin and through the soles of my feet, sweet and dangerous and tight as thorny vines.

When Angie woke up, her powers would again be bound, more constricted than ever. I had a feeling that she was gonna be one ticked-off little girl. But safer. Much safer. When Angie was bound, Molly said some sweet nothings to her hubby and I pulled on Beast sight. The little girl’s body looked as if it had been wrapped in a cocoon of blue and red magical strands, with a touch of bright sunlight energies thrown in to seal it. There was no way she would be able to break this one. The bright yellow magics would cancel out her nascent dark magics. I knew next to nothing about how magic actually worked, but I understood this one on some basic, intuitive level.

Satisfied, Molly and I took the stairs down and joined the card game waiting for us at the kitchen table. Poker. Five-card stud. It seemed that I had a natural advantage in the game, because I could smell the difference between players’ excitement at really good hands and their change in scent when they were bluffing. Alex wanted to take me to a riverboat casino offshore in the Mississippi for some high-stakes gambling. I wasn’t interested in risking the money I had put aside, but the Kid wasn’t to be denied his experimentation and, with Molly here, he had another subject to test me against. I won every single one of the matchsticks we bet. Later, the Kid told me that if it had been real money, I’d have made about fifty grand, according to his own geeky conversion mathematics based on a terribly inflated value for the matchsticks.

I still refused to go gamble. Repeatedly. Watching his avaricious eyes go blank each time was priceless.

At nine sixteen p.m., I was holding a perfectly awful hand of a pair of threes, but it beat the other players’ hands if I was still reading the scents correctly.

A boom shook the house. Inside, the lights flickered twice and died. A drawn-out zzzzzz sizzled outside, in front. The sound resembled a transformer exploding and sparking. Or a small bomb? In the next second I realized that it couldn’t be a bomb, because Eli didn’t throw himself on top of the rest of us, but he did draw a weapon and vanish into the shadows. I didn’t remember seeing electrical transformers close enough nearby to make the sound we had heard.

I stood in a crouch so I couldn’t be seen through the kitchen window. Looked out into the street. The houses across from my house were still lit.

Eli’s voice sounded from the living room. “Lights are on at Katie’s.” He craned his neck, visible as a silhouette in the window, which was brighter from outside lights. He added, “And both neighbors have light.”

Molly said, “Y’all? We have a problem.” Her voice quavered on the last word. Her body smelled of sudden sweat and the acrid, bitter tang of terror.

The sizzling, slapping boom came again, followed by the electrical zzzzz.

I pulled on Beast-vision from where I stood at the front window and saw the energies of the ward over the house. It was an older model, one Molly had used before, the spell muted blue, green, and silver, the energies growing up from below ground, as natural as leaves and plants sprouting up from fertile soil, but this time the fertile ground was Molly’s earth magic, augmented by her newer, more deadly death magic. The ward was powerful, self-healing from most mundane (meaning nonmagical) attacks, was resilient, and air permeable, covering the house and most of the grounds. And it was sparking blue and red, like sparklers on the Fourth of July.

“What is it?” I asked her. But she just shivered, her eyes lost in a distance I couldn’t see. “We’re under attack,” I said to the Youngers, “but I don’t see anything. Alex, the exterior cameras have battery backup, right?”

“Yeah, working on seeing what we have now,” he said, his voice distracted, coming from the darkness of the house. “I had to turn on the inverter and get everything going. So far I don’t see anything. Bro, get the fridge unplugged.”

Eli moved to the kitchen, following orders.

“Jane,” Molly said, the word garbled as if she was choking.

I raced to her, but I didn’t make it in time. The boom was massive and the windows rattled as the entire house shook. The ward sent out a shower of sparks, like bloody water falling over a waterfall, the red energies blooming light. Beautiful, but also taking power from the ward. The broken magics smelled of char and burned herbs, sunlight on linen, and the dark of the moon on a winter garden. “What is it?” I asked Molly, slipping an arm around her shoulders. “What’s attacking us?”

“Jane?” Alex said. “It’s an arcenciel. A young one.” He spun the tablet to us. “And this time I can see the scar on its side.”

So could I, though the scar was nothing more than a dark shadow along its snakelike side. She was in the visible range, a rippling of light and shadow, with a human-shaped head, showing small, budding horns. Her mouth was open displaying rows of shark teeth that glinted like pearls. Her transparent wings glimmered in all the colors of the rainbow, and a frill around her head was scintillating shades of copper, brown, and pale white. Her body was snakelike, bigger than the last time I had seen her, with iridescent scales the color of tinted glass and thick smoke and hints of copper. As before, she smelled like green herbs burning over hot coals and the tang of fish and water plants. The shadowy scar ran along her side, healed but a potent reminder that she could be hurt. This was the creature we had wounded in Leo’s basement gym. This was the light dragon who had attacked me before, but at least now she had a name.

Did that give us power over her in some way? Could we use her name to defend ourselves? “Her name is Opal,” I said.

“That isn’t its real name,” Molly whispered, her eyes faraway as she studied her ward and what was happening to it, “that’s just its English name.” She ducked her head and slid from beneath my arm. “I’ve been doing research. Her real name will be a lot of sibilants and cracking sounds and an explosion of light in the correct wavelength. I can’t even recognize it as a name, let alone reproduce it or use it in defense of us.” Yet her hands rose and I saw the power of her magical working—what the mundane and lazy, including myself, called a spell—as it sparkled from her fingers and raced to every window and door, building up the ward in the most probable weak places.

“Molly, you don’t have a circle,” Alex said softly.

“I’m using the ward where it enters the ground as my circle,” she muttered. Which was news to me. I hadn’t known that was possible. Magic was tricky, as tied up in the practitioner’s belief system about the practice of magic itself, as it was in the practitioner’s actual ability. A witch who believed she had a lot of power probably had a way to access more than she might have otherwise. And a witch who believed she was powerless likely was, regardless of her magical potential. And Molly was a freaky-powerful witch, and had become more so, when, in defense of her life and her sisters’, her magics mutated from earth magics with a hint of moon magic thrown in, into death magics, which she couldn’t use without killing something. Or someone. She had found her way back to earth magics, but her hold on them was tenuous and delicate.

There was little any of us nonwitch types could do to help her battle to keep the wards in place, but if they faltered, I’d need to have a weapon, and steel hurt even arcenciels. I accepted the vamp-killer and the small KA-BAR-style knife Eli handed me and strapped the double sheaths to my left leg. The vamp-killer I adjusted for a right-hand draw, up near my waist, and the smaller knife I set back for a left-hand draw nearer to my left knee. As I worked, nothing more happened—no booms, no house shaking, no nothing. Maybe it had gone away to lick its wounds. Or maybe the arcenciel had gone for reinforcements. I’m such glass-half-full-of-blood kinda gal.

I pulled my cell and tried to call Soul, the only other arcenciel I knew, but the call didn’t go through. I had no bars. The sat system Alex was setting up wasn’t working either. I slid the units across the kitchen table, where Alex was tapping. He jumped up and raced to the hardware under his desk in the living room and switched off some of the gray boxes and then switched them back on. Little green and yellow lights glowed. He ran back to the kitchen to work by the light of two tablets. I hated technology sometimes.

Whatever was happening outside, Molly was using the time to spin reinforcements on the ward. Her feet were shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent, almost like the footing for a martial arts move, rooting her body to the earth beneath the floor, balanced and stable. Her fingers were flicking and snapping and the smell of rosemary grew on the air, a strong, intense scent that seemed to wend down the stairs from her room overhead, mixing with the scent of her fear and that awful perfume. When it came to magic, Molly was a battle witch, standing between her child and danger, and I could see the Celtic warrior women of her genetic history in her stance, fierce and tender and unyielding.

From the corner of my eye I saw a flicker as something leaped out of the shadows. I whirled, Beast fast, and caught it, whipping it out of the air. And got lines of scratches for my mistake. KitKit yowled and hissed and did some kinda ninja move and bit my thumb. I dropped her and she landed with another yowl, a whirling cat move, and a faster-than-sight leap to Molly’s feet.

The scent of fear Molly was exuding instantly eased. Her not-familiar had helped her control her death magics. KitKit was a not-familiar because familiars didn’t exist. They were myth. KitKit’s abilities were a big secret, the revelation of which would subject Molly to ridicule and embarrassment. But she couldn’t be without the dang cat.

Disgusted with myself for reacting instead of letting the cat reach her mistress, I went to the sink and washed my wounds. My skinwalker metabolism would heal them faster than similar wounds on a human, and they would heal instantly the next time I shifted into Beast. For now, however, they stung like crazy. But unless KitKit was rabid or had cat scratch fever, they weren’t life-threatening. I stared out at the night. In battle sometimes the hardest part was waiting for something to happen.

A boom shook the house. A zzzzzzzttttpowpowpow sssssss sound, ending this time with a slap on the tail end of the sizzle. The arcenciel seemed determined to get inside the house and was probably injuring herself on Molly’s wards.

Alex muttered, “I guess you already figured out that all coms are down. I don’t know what that thing is doing, but it’s affecting more than just the power. It’s like a mini–electromagnetic blast. I can use the tablets—ah shit. Now the tablets are down.”

Eli promptly head-slapped him. In his battlefield-mild tone, he added, “Language.”

Alex cursed again, but I think it was Klingon or Elvish or some fictional language, and no one else reacted. I was worried that the juvenile arcenciel’s light show would attract the attention of the cops, who would then descend and possibly get hurt. Or worse, attract the attention of a larger, mature creature, not Soul, but a stranger, and that the larger one would think the humans, the witch, and the skinwalker were the aggressors.

The arcenciel hit the house again and again; the floor vibrated under my feet. The ward beyond the windows spluttered and shuddered, the energies showing signs of cracking. Molly was sweating now, her perspiration full of adrenaline and its acrid breakdown chemicals. The cat was wrapped around Molly’s ankles, purring steadily. The boom sounded, harder, deeper. I shook my head and set my feet, oddly reminiscent of Molly’s stance.

I wasn’t going to have a choice. I was going to have to risk the Gray Between. I was going to have to bend time so I could be fast enough to fight the arcenciel.

But the Gray Between would allow all similar creatures to see me working outside of time, and again, that might result in other arcenciels showing up to help the juvie rainbow dragon. I hesitated. Eli walked through the living room and into the little-used laundry/storage room on the back of the house, behind my bedroom and bath. He leaned to see out the windows.

And I heard Angie’s voice, coming down the stairs. “Hey. You’re pretty. All sparkly. Wanna come play with me?”

Before Eli or I could move, Alex was flying up the stairs. His flip-flops came off and bounced down the stairs. Eli and I raced up after him and into his room to see Angie Baby standing outside, on the second-floor gallery, her body outlined in the ward’s light, the arcenciel’s huge head reared back, only inches from her. The light dragon was horned and frilled, its long hair copper and brown, and this time, traced through with red and a hint of sapphire. Its teeth were longer than my hands, sharp and pearled and glistening like the opals for which it was named.

And Angie was gripping a small steel knife in one hand, holding it behind her back, where the arcenciel couldn’t see it.

Alex skidded out the long, narrow doors of his own room, out onto the gallery, and grabbed Angie up under his arm. Dragged her back inside, one hand ripping away the knife. Slammed the French doors closed and twisted the finger latch.

Angie struggled in his hands and tore herself away. “No!” she shouted, her face hidden by shadows, her hair standing out in a halo of static power. She snapped her left hand at Alex and screamed, “Tu dormies!”

The Kid’s knees folded, his body dropped, and Alex was instantly asleep. As he fell, Eli snatched the tumbling knife out of the air and glared at Angie. Alex’s head bounced on the rug at the foot of his bed.

“Angelina!” I shouted, furious. And frightened. Angie shouldn’t be able to do that. At all. Angie was supposed to be bound.

Angie whirled on me, her white nightgown furling around her. “I’ll put you all to sleep if you don’t let me talk to the shiny lizard!”

“Angie. No,” I said, trying to find a calm tone. If she put us to sleep, she would be all alone with a creature who could kill her in a heartbeat. “Angie. Baby, please don’t.”

“I tolded you that the scabertoothed bones was calling to it,” she screeched, her hands fisting in front of her like a boxer. “You didn’t listen.” Magic coiled out of her fists, not as strong as before, but clear and bright, a blue laced with black that looked scary in ways that magic had never looked scary to me before. She took a step toward me, and her voice lowered. Slowly she said, “And you let Mama and Daddy put me to sleep.” Angie sounded furious and dangerous.

I had never seen her act so badly, not since . . . I stopped, trying to remember. What had I smelled? When Molly first arrived. Flowers and lemongrass and that awful perfume . . . “Oh no,” I whispered.

“Yes!” Angie shouted, raging. “I’m a big girl, not a baby! I can kill my own snakes,” she said, using a phrase Molly used sometimes.

“Angie,” I said, “you can’t kill this snake. That’s not what that phrase means.”

Angie whirled and beat the bed, her fists pounding into Alex’s pillows and rumpled covers. “No, no, no, no, no!” she screamed, her words muffled in the covers.

The house boomed again, as I tried to figure out what to do. And again. And again. The old timbers were creaking and the windowpanes of the French door behind us shattered. A fireball burned through the door and into the house, the flickering flames momentarily brightening the room. Angie flicked her fingers at it, the way she might if she was flicking water off her hand, and it stopped, the fire snuffed out in a puff of black smoke that stank of flaming rosemary. It all took maybe two seconds. In Beast-vision, Angie’s magics floated around her like a diaphanous veil, brighter and hotter than only a moment before. Holy crap. Just . . . holy crap.

I looked back at the French door and the circular hole that was burned through it. Molly was throwing fire spells at the arcenciel, and one had bounced off and come back inside. And Angie had broken the energies of the working as if she were popping soap bubbles.

Fire wasn’t Mol’s strong suit, but it was all she had left unless she loosed her death magics. And if she did that, and if Angie tried to grapple with that form of magic, she would die. We might all die. And that would kill Molly as surely as taking a gun to her own head.

Eli had glanced up at the fireball and then back to Angie. He said, “You hurt Alex. I thought you liked him.” The tone was like a kid, finger-pointing, but Eli crossed his arms and frowned hard. Eli. Frowning.

I checked to make sure my partner hadn’t grown another head. Outside, the arcenciel head-butted the house. The room shook. Opal hit it again. And again. Something fell in the bathroom and shattered. Angie jerked at the sound and lowered her hands slightly, her fists slack, her face flushed but uncertain now. Her hair still stood on end, and her magic radiated out as if on the verge of explosion.

Eli ignored it all and dropped to one knee, one hand extending to Angie. Sadly, he said, “Alex thought he was saving you, like a prince saves a princess.”

“I don’t need saving,” Angie shouted at him. “I’m not a stupid princess. I’m a snake killer and a witch!”

Eli looked surprised for the briefest moment and then he said. “Right. Alex thought he was helping you. He didn’t know you could save yourself and”—his voice dropped low, a gentle and wretched tone—“you hurt him.”

Angie tilted her head and looked down at Alex, her breath blowing hard. She fisted her hands again, as if teetering on the edge of something. Something catastrophic. She sobbed once, and hiccuped and swallowed. Her magics went cooler and calmer in color, fading the way a rainbow bleaches out of the sky. In a calmer tone, she asked, “He was helping me? But Alex isn’t a witch.”

“True. But he thought you were in trouble and needed help. And . . . you hurt him. That’s wrong.”

Tears started like a fountain, and Angie’s face was suddenly shining with them. They fell in rivulets onto her nightgown. She sniffled. “I didn’t mean to hu-hu-hu-hu-hu . . . ” She inhaled, taking tears in with the air. “Hurt him.” Eli smiled, showing teeth, looking charming, said, “True. And Alex knows that. But when a prince sees someone in danger they always go to the rescue.”

Angie nodded, staring at Alex as her magics settled. Tension flooded from me like Angie’s tears, in a flood, and I sidled to the damaged door and looked out. The creature just beyond the walls was banging itself bloody (if the clear goop that was dripping from her jaw could be called blood) against the ward. Angie said, “I’m sorry.” She frowned. “Uh-oh. I don’t know how to wake him up. I haven’t learned that one yet.” Angie blew out a breath that puffed her cheeks. “I been bad again. Mama’s gonna be mad at me.”

Relief surged through me. “But Alex will be okay, and we learned something, right, Angie?” I said, my voice remarkably calm, considering my racing pulse.

The little girl looked at me, and her shoulders slumped. “The light dragon is gonna break through if Mama doesn’t get some help. She needs my daddy.”

I walked to Angie and bent, lowering my arms. Angie lifted hers and I gathered her up, standing. Her arms wrapped around my neck and she huddled close. She smelled of a confusing mix of pheromones: anger breaking down, magic dissipating, tears of frustration and fury. And not a little shame.

Outside, the arcenciel stopped her attacks on the house, and I had to wonder if Angie’s magic had excited Opal somehow, and then when Angie calmed, quieted her. Where arcenciels were concerned, I was flying by the seat of my pants. Feeling better about things for the moment, I carried my goddaughter down the stairs.

As I left the room, Eli knelt, picked his brother up in a fireman’s carry, and dumped him on the bed. He could hide the visual cues to his surprise at his brother’s weight, but not the olfactory ones. Alex may have topped out at around five feet, eleven inches, but he was putting on weight, all of it muscle, which until now had been hidden beneath his loose clothing.

Molly still stood in the middle of the living room, but now she was hunched, her fingers still flying but looking stiff and less coordinated. She was stinking of fear sweat and that awful perfume. Molly never, ever wore perfume around me because she knew my sense of smell was so much better than a human’s, and I hated the stink of synthetic scents. So . . . why did she . . . I studied her in her full skirt, the bodice pulling across fuller boobs. And at her waistline, I recognized the small but firm baby bump. Molly was pregnant.

I asked Angie, “Do you want the skull to help the baby?”

Angie pouted prettily, her lips swollen from her tears. She said, “Yes.” She glared at me. “Yes, damndamndamn!” Which was Molly’s swearword when she became frustrated and too angry to take life anymore and was hiding behind the closet door, where she cussed in private. Somebody had big ears. If the “tu dormies” spell was any consideration, very big ears.

It wasn’t the right time to fuss at Angie, but I had to. “Language, young lady.” Her pout deepened, her eyebrows scrunching down, and I managed not to grin. “And the creature? Why does it want the skull?”

“To stop Mama’s baby from being born. It’s gonna try to go back in time and stop her.”

The amusement went out of me and I bent, placing Angie on the couch. My arms free, I studied Molly, confused about what the little girl might really be meaning. How could an arcenciel go back in time to stop something that will take place in the future? How could Angie know what the arcenciel was thinking/planning/wanting?

Several things occurred to me all at once and my knees gave way, lowering me to the couch beside Angie. Arcenciels might have much stronger powers over time than I understood. What if they could see the possibilities of the future, and then go back in time to stop a certain thing from happening tomorrow? What if they could go back in time to stop anything they wanted to, no matter how far in the improbably distant future it might be? Based on Angie’s statements, maybe Opal wanted to keep Molly from getting pregnant? Or, much worse, stop the Everhart sisters and Evan Trueblood from ever being born. “Holy crap on crackers with toe jam,” I muttered. I had been thinking too short-term about time. “Angie, I get part of that, but how does the skull fit into it all?”

Angie was concentrating on my face, hers serious. “They gots to have a focus. A focal thing.” She grimaced, trying to find the proper words. “If Opal goes back in time, she gots to follow a thing that went back there too.”

“Ahhh. So if she has the skull, she can follow along the skull’s timeline back. To what?”

“To stop you from being given the skull.”

“Okay. So Opal would go back in time and stop me from getting the skull.”

“And that will kill you, Aunt Jane.”

I remembered back to a time when I had been on the verge of death and Beast had drawn on the skull’s DNA and RNA and taken mass from nearby stone. She had shifted into the sabertooth lion’s genetic form, even though he was a male big-cat, which I had thought wasn’t supposed to be possible. Not that I knew a lot about the process, as my skinwalker training had stopped when I was five or so. But the shift had saved our lives. Without the skull, that shift would not have been possible, and I—we—might have died.

Like my father had died in midshift, his injuries too severe to survive. And if I died, Molly’s death would eventually follow, on the timeline created by the arcenciel. And I still didn’t know what was going to happen on the current timeline. Dealing with time, thinking about time, made my brain tie up in knots. Thinking about changing time was so confusing that it gave me mental vertigo.

Eli passed me, checking the windows. He stepped out onto the side porch through one door and back in through another. He was carrying a subgun, a small, fully automatic weapon, in one hand and his full-length flat sword in the other. No shirt, no shoes. Brown skin catching the shadows and throwing back the light as muscles flexed and relaxed.

He said, “I think the arcenciel is gone.”

Molly’s hands quivered and slowly relaxed. She fell into the nearest chair, dripping with sweat, red hair clinging to her face. Angie left the couch and stood beside her mother, taking her hand; with her other hand, Angie pushed back her mother’s damp hair. “I gotta get this mess cut again,” Molly whispered to Angie.

“Daddy will have a cow again,” Angie said back, startling an exhausted laugh from Molly.

Molly stood and pulled her eldest up the stairs. “I need a shower, and you, young lady, have some explaining to do.”

“Tell your mother everything, Angie,” I said. “And I mean everything. Including about the skull.”

Angie gave an exaggerated sigh, an omen of what they would sound like when she hit her teens. “Okay, Aunt Jane. But she’s gonna be mad.”

“Yeah. Probably.” The two disappeared up the stairs, Molly’s footsteps sounding exhausted.

“That little girl is gonna be nothing but trouble in about ten years,” Eli said. Which echoed my own thoughts. Eli made the best partner.

“How’s Alex?” I asked.

“Still out. He’ll be okay. Pupils equal and reactive. Breath is even and slow at twenty.”

At the same moment, the lights flickered back on and my cell rang. I raced to the kitchen table to answer. It was Evan, his voice frantic and babbling. He had been unable to reach Molly and had clearly been thinking the worst. Which was not far from the truth. I said, “Molly’s okay, Evan. They all three are.”

Evan stopped talking and then stuttered ahead, “Sssshe told you?”

“No. She didn’t. Angie told me.”

“Angie doesn’t know.”

“Yes. She does. And she’s been carrying a big load of worry. We need to talk, you, Mol, and me. But first, let me catch you up.” It took a while. At one point, I heard the shower come on and then stop upstairs. And later a moan drifted down the stairs as Alex woke. Eli, and later Molly, joined me at the table, and I put the cell on speakerphone and switched on the camera so we could interact. Otherwise the house was silent.

When Eli and I had given Evan all the info we had, he frowned and said, “What if Mol and I bind the skull so the arcenciel can’t see it?”

Angie peeked around the wall and said, “That’s a good idea, Daddy.”

I managed not to eep. Eli managed not to shoot her. Molly managed not to drain her of life. I thought we all did pretty well.

“Angie?” Evan said. “When did you—”

Molly interrupted with “Son of a witch on a switch. What are you doing downstairs? She’s supposed to be in time-out,” she added to Evan.

She told her father, “You can do to the scabertoothed bones what you did to me. It worked until I grew up and undid it.”

I said, “We didn’t know she was here, Evan. No sound, no scent.” Evan breathed in, a soft sound of shock. Molly looked terrified. Angie had spelled herself in ways I wasn’t sure her parents could do, at least not without a lot of prep time and testing and frustration. Eli, who might not understand what had happened, but did understand that we were all upset, looked bored but intent, the way he had when we were trapped inside while outside a dragon made of light and magic raged, wanting to eat us.

“But I can’t undid it if I’m mad,” Angie added, taking her place at the table like the big girl she proclaimed herself to be.

“Angie,” Evan said, “how did you know about the binding?”

“It tickled. And then it hurt, the way my purple heart jammies hurt when I try to put them on.”

“She’s outgrown the purple heart pajamas,” Molly said thoughtfully.

“She outgrew our binding?” Evan asked. “Literally and physically or metaphorically and metaphysically?”

“Yep,” Angie said cheerfully. “Can I have a peanut butter and jelly sam’ich?”

I stood and got the almond butter and the cashew butter out of the cabinet and some homemade muscadine jelly. I made sandwiches for all of us, including Alex, who was clomping down the stairs, a cold rag around his neck and a plastic bottle of pain meds in one hand. I used Eli’s new sprouted grain bread, which tasted a little weird but worked well with the nut butters and jelly.

I poured goat’s milk—another of Eli’s new passions—into glasses and passed the food and drink around while Molly and Evan experimented, putting Angie into her binding, watching as she loosened it and stepped out of it, almost the same way she might unknot a too-tight bathrobe and peel it off. Then they put her back into it and let her unknot it again. And then they wanted to try a binding on the skull, all of which sounded terribly boring to me and to Eli as well. He took his and Alex’s snacks to the living room on a large sterling silver serving tray he’d found in the butler’s pantry, leaving the family working in the kitchen. I got the cause of all the trouble, touched the crow on its beak to remove the ward from the skull, and placed it on the kitchen table, to the delight and awe of Angie Baby and the wide-eyed disgust of her parents.

Leaving it there, I took my plate and glass of milk to the back porch, where I could be alone with my thoughts. It was raining, a soft plink of drops, and I sat with my back against the house wall, staring out at what passed for darkness in a city, and ate. The scents were clean and mildly ozoney, wetwetwet, falling from the sky, flowing along the ground, draining into the storm sewers. Between downpours, mosquitoes buzzed everywhere, though most of them were locked out of Molly’s ward, butting the energies and making tiny sparks before dying. I’d have to tell her she could patent the ward as a house-sized bug killer/security system/light show.

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, unadorned 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.

“So,” I said. “How far along are you?”

“Almost eighteen weeks.” She bumped my head with hers. “I’ve been eating like a horse and gained a lot more weight than with the others by this time.” She patted the baby bump and molded her hands around the mound. “We get the ultrasound next week.” I felt her lips turn up against my shoulder. Hesitantly she asked, “Want to fly or drive up for the ultrasound?”

Deep inside, Beast stopped purring, her ear tabs high and her gaze piercing. Molly can see kits inside of Molly? Magic?

No, I thought back. White man medicine.

Beast hissed with displeasure, her thoughts on seeing kits inside of Molly containing blood and guts and dead kittens on the dirt. It’s not like that, I thought at her. But the vision persisted.

“Jane?” Molly asked, her voice hesitant. “Do you?”

A smile pulled at my own mouth, wanting but uncertain. “You mean me? In the ultrasound room? With you?” My happiness slid away. “What would Big Evan say to that?”

“It was his idea. He said that he wanted his baby’s godmother to be there.”

“Oh . . .” My lips stayed parted, and I blinked at the tears that had gathered all unknowing, in my eyes, but they came too fast. One rolled down my cheek. I sniffed and wiped the back of my wrist across my face.

Molly jerked away, twisted on the mattress, and extended her neck like a turtle, her eyes searching mine. “I made you cry,” she said, incredulous. She passed me one of my own tissues.

“Yeah.” I chuckled unsteadily and patted my face with the tissue. “Crying’s contagious, but this is ridiculous. All these teary-eyed females in my testosterone-rich house. The boys are seriously outnumbered.”

Molly grinned, lighthearted, showing teeth and wrinkling up her eyes, a smile that I remembered from the earliest days of our friendship. “So come and stay with us for a few days. We’ll have an estrogen-filled household there too, and we’ll eat fresh-baked bread with olive oil drizzled over it and fix fresh stuff from the garden and Beast can hunt in the woods on the hill nearby and we’ll shop—”

“Oh no. Not shopping.” I gave a mock shudder. “Girlie stuff. Next thing I know you’ll have me getting a mani-pedi and a perm.”

Molly fell against the pillows and put her head back on my shoulder. “Baby shopping. Once we know the gender of this hungry little munchkin.” She patted her belly harder, as if giving the kid a head slap for eating too much. “So, will you? Come and stay for a few days?”

“Yeah,” I said, the warmth still filling me, like heated air filled a balloon, rising from the ground, so much bigger and more powerful than it seemed. “I’ll come. Thanks.

“Now,” I said, “we need to talk about you staying here. The thing found you here and attacked, and there’s no saying when or if she’ll be back. Should you catch a flight back to Asheville? Should you move to a hotel?”

“And get knocked out of the sky by a rainbow dragon, killing us and everyone else on board? No. Doofus. Move to a hotel and try to get a ward around that? Again, no. Doofus. I’m safer here. You’re not safe here with me here, but I’m safer. And with the baby and Angie, I’m staying where I can ward and you can fight. Which is utterly selfish, but it’s the way I feel.”

“Not selfish,” I said. “Motherly. Understandable. And we’re honored.”

The talk degenerated then from friendship and kits—babies—to the arcenciel, and I explained my theories about the light dragon being able to see timelines. And about Molly needing to protect herself at all times.

Molly nodded. “There were stories, way back when, tales my grandmother told, and she said her grandmother told her, about one entire family of Everhart babies disappearing from the cradle, each time following a flash of light. I wonder . . . if witch babies are dangerous to arcenciels in general or if it’s Everhart witch babies in particular. . . .” Her voice trailed off, and I could smell sleep coming. She yawned and asked, “What was I saying?”

I stood and pulled my BFF to her feet. “You were saying that it was bedtime. Go upstairs and go to sleep. We have stuff to do tomorrow, and the fight wore you out.”

“Yes. It did.” She yawned again, hugged me with one arm, and turned for the stairs.

I stood at my doorway and watched Molly climb the wide staircase, lifting her feet as though they weighed a ton each. She was exhausted and her balance was wobbly. I would have carried her if I thought she would let me. But as it was, it was time for her to go. Otherwise it might have occurred to her to ask what her baby might mean to the future. She might have begun go wonder why the arcenciel wanted the baby to have never been conceived. And I had no answer. And I might never have one.

When I heard Mol climb into the bed, I closed my door and turned off the light, wondering and worrying what might happen if Soul came into contact with Molly and her baby. Which was certain to happen at the Witch Conclave, if not before.

•   •   •

Just before dawn, the arcenciel attacked the wards again, with a boom so loud and hard it threw me from my bed, into a roll, and down. A big-cat move. The moment I hit the floor, I dashed on hands and knees into my closet, where the long sword was kept with the steel-edged, silver-plated vamp-killers. As I drew the weapons, I felt Beast rising in me, lending me her strength and power, her vision of silvers and greens and charcoal shadows where before there had been only shades of blackness. And this time a border of gray energies spun around me, close to my skin.

Eli and I met in the foyer and I steadied him when the house shook. Showers of red sparklers fell in front of the house to the street. Opal was concentrating on the upper story and I didn’t know why. Or even if there was a logical reason.

“Molly?” I asked him. My voice was a hint lower, a Beast growl caught in the single word.

“In the hallway, working her magics.”

All this stress and magic couldn’t be good for the baby. “Alex?” I asked. And this time my voice was a full octave lower, an unmistakable growl in it.

Eli’s eyes pierced me, evaluating even as he answered my question. “Told me he had a work-around to keep coms up. He hasn’t been to bed.”

“In here, guys,” Alex called from the living room. Just as the arcenciel rammed down again on the top of the hedge of thorns ward, possibly its weakest point, assuming the ward had a weak point.

The arcenciel slammed down on the top over and over, the attack physical as well as magical, and I heard Molly yelp softly. Already she stank of fear. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold the ward. Kitssss, Beast hissed deep inside.

At this rate, the house would be a pile of matchsticks in no time. Dark humor welled up in me with Beast. “I hope the insurance is paid up. And that it covers acts of magic.”

There was a trace of humor in Eli’s tone as well when he said, “Yes. And no. We’ll claim that a tornado came down and hit just this house. That is if we can’t get it stopped. And if we don’t get eaten.”

In the living room, Alex was at his small desk, lit by the faint lights of batteries and electronic stuff. He said, “No cells, but we can text out on a tablet. I piggybacked on Katie’s Wi-Fi. Plus Evan wasn’t able to figure out a way to shackle the creature, but he sent us a melody that he said would work on the ward, would help Molly, if Opal came back tonight. And we have enough battery power to last a few hours if you unplug the fridge again.” Eli was already moving to the kitchen to follow his brother’s orders.

The arcenciel hit again. I lost my feet for a moment, and Alex’s table and chair scudded across the wood floor with deep scratching sounds. Molly shouted, “Jane! I can’t hold the ward!”

Kitssss, Beast thought at me. Save kitssss. And she pushed against the gray energies that were swirling about me, drawing on more of my skinwalker magic. I looked to the kitchen table where the skull still rested, glowing with energy in Beast-vision. It had been double warded by Molly and Evan, and the arcenciel shouldn’t be able to sense it, but it seemed that no one had told the rainbow dragon that. I raced to it and carried the skull and the tiny charm that contained the hedge of thorns spell back to the closet. Not that it would do much good. If the arcenciel could break through the house ward all it would have to do is look for the bit of magic in the matchsticks, pick up the warded skull, and carry it off someplace safer, where it could dissect the energies undisturbed. Being handcuffed to the hedge by the built-in shackles would probably present little problem to a creature made entirely of light and magic. And that would be the end of everything.

Opal hit the house, the attack rhythmic as a jackhammer, if slower and far more powerful. I could hear the house creaking beneath the battering. Without the ward, the house would be splinters and dust by now. After a dozen blows, Opal backed away, her rainbow lights filling the house from outside. I had to wonder why the neighbors hadn’t call the cops yet. Or maybe they had, and the cops had decided not to get involved with this particular situation. Not that I could blame them. Or maybe only we could tell that there was a problem at all. Magic is freaky weird sometimes.

“Evan’s song, coming up, Miz Molly,” Alex shouted.

Music flowed out of the speakers that the Kid had wired into the entire house, a haunting yet jagged-edged melody played on one of Evan’s wooden flutes.

“Yes,” Molly said, gasping. “That helps. But it isn’t going to be enough, y’all. This thing is figuring out my magics as fast as I can alter them. I need Evan here, with me, if we’re going to beat it.” Opal hit again, this time from near the front door. The windows rattled. Molly said, “Jane?” her voice wavering with uncertainty.

I remembered my worry about what might happen if Soul came into contact with Molly and her baby. But we had no choice. “I got this, Mol,” I shouted. “When I give the word, drop the ward, take a break, and then try to get it back up.”

“Okay,” she said, breathless.

Softly I ordered Alex, “Get in touch with Soul. Tell her we’re under arcenciel attack. Tell her to get here. Now! Tell her that I’m going out to fight it and if I have to kill it to save us, I will.”

“That’ll get her here,” Eli muttered.

Alex started keying in the text. “No armor?” Eli asked me.

Outside the arcenciel hit the side of the ward, at the second-floor gallery. Red sparks of broken energies scattered through the yard. The reek of scorched paint and burned wood and desiccated herbs came from the sparks. The ward was close to breaking. I was almost out of time.

“No. Beast is close. I’m going out in half-Beast form.”

Instantly Beast shoved through my skinwalker energies, pushing and pulling. Which was crazy because my life wasn’t in danger at this particular moment. I had plenty of time to shift. Like, whole seconds, which was unusual for me. Pelt roiled out of me; my bones popped. Pain that was more than physical slammed me to the floor. I landed with a gasp, spine arched. I wasn’t sure why it was so painful to shift sometimes and so pain free at others, but this was one of my more painful times. My hair tumbled around me; it had come unbraided, which happened from time to time in a painful half shift.

When I could breathe, I levered myself up off the floor with the fist that still held the vamp-killer. My knuckles were knobby, my feet were wide paws, my claws were all out and glinting in the dull light of Alex’s tablets, grinding and tapping on the wood floor as I found my balance. My hips were lean, my belly narrow and flat, my shoulders too wide, my clothes hanging at the waist, stretched tight across the back. I was pelted all over, my amber eyes glowing. Unbraided black hair flowed to my hips, in the way. But I was energized with Beast’s power and strength.

Eli pressed my shoulder, turning me until my back was to him, and gathered my hair into a tail. His fingers awkward, he slid three elastics onto the ponytail, at neck, shoulder length, and midback. Then he tucked it all into my collar and down my T-shirt, out of the way. At my ear, he said, “To be a really good second, I need to learn how to braid hair. But being a ladies’ maid would get me laughed out of the special forces, so this will have to do.”

I chuffed with amusement and tossed the vamp-killer into the air, the blade whipping and shining with greenish light. I caught it by the hilt. I felt strong and swift and a bit reckless. “Keep them safe,” I growled to Eli as I stalked through the side door onto the side porch. And I screamed out a challenge.

The arcenciel stopped its attack on the second-floor front gallery as I leaped out onto the damp earth where we had fought earlier. The partial shift had healed me, and the dull pain of the elbow to the gut was gone. “Come and get me, you dumbass lizard! Now, Molly!”

The arcenciel rose high in the air over my house, her body a snaky, tessellated, whipping light, her tail barbed and coruscating, flashing with scales and tasseled flesh, her wings held wide and thrashing forward as she hovered. She darted her head in, her horned skull frilled and patterned with bony plates of light, all in shades of copper and bronze and browns. Her teeth, like long, curved tusks of pearls and diamonds, chomped at me. Her tail whipped and snapped. She was seriously ticked.

The ward fell in a shower of light and power that burned where it shattered over my pelt.

Opal reared back and came at me, striking cobra fast.

I bent my knees and leaped, steel sword high in the air, an upward lunge, whirling, cutting, in motions that were still unfamiliar and graceless. The vamp-killer to the side, I aimed for the tail-like body that slashed at me. I scored two long gashes, one in her belly and the other in the side of her tail. Opal screamed, lights boiling from the wounds, clear goop splattering out.

I landed in a bent-kneed crouch, weapons circling over and around me in the vamp’s version of the Spanish Circle method of sword fighting. The blades a glittering cage of death.

Opal spat at me. I leaped to the side, a big-cat move, my sword whirling slowly, doing the job of a puma’s long tail in the leap, keeping my body stable, my balance rooted to the ground, and keeping the movement itself steady and controlled. The saliva—acid? Poison?—which was surely a weapon, missed me.

The arcenciel back-winged, her eyes glowing. I had no idea how to read the body language of an arcenciel, but I’d have said for an instant that she looked triumphant. She pulled her frills tight and her wings closed. I landed and leaped again, to the top of the shattered rocks near the back wall.

Faster than I could follow, Opal slammed into the ground where I had stood and vanished. I was heaving breaths. The fight had lasted perhaps five seconds.

“What the—”

“Jane!” Eli shouted.

Lights prismed off the walls. Inside the house.

I raced to the porch and inside, to see the light coming from the kitchen. A long, narrow beam of coiling, writhing snake made of light. It was now much smaller, perhaps two inches in diameter, bright as a torch beam and pouring out of the kitchen like a sea serpent. Eli was cutting at it, but it moved faster than he ever could.

The arcenciel had gone into the ground. Now it was in the kitchen, in a different form. “Molly,” I screamed. “Ward yourselves! She’s coming inside!”

Molly raced to her daughter’s bed, and I felt the magics snap into place above me.

And I felt the Gray Between again, a yank that pulled on time and space and matter. And me. I screamed as Beast forced me into a second shift. I fell to the floor, dropping the blades. Which hung in the air, even as I landed in a writhing heap. Gagging and strangling, unable to breathe. And I was tasting blood in the back of my mouth. Beast bubbled time. Dang cat. The internal bleeding that seemed to be a part of this state had started earlier than before. I coughed and covered my mouth. Blood filled my cupped hand. I spat to clear my mouth and throat, and wiped it on my shirt. Trying not to think about the four big tusks that made up a large part of my lower face.

I stood slowly, carefully. My gut cramped as if a huge fist gripped it from inside and twisted. Ripping . . . something. I pushed up from the floor and took the hilts that were still hanging there. Tugged the swords into the bubble of time with me, their weight transferring, the swings they were in before pulling my arms into motion. I stalked into the kitchen.

Eli was standing, his blades high, in the act of cutting Opal’s elongated face, nostrils and horns twisted and trailing, her frill still captured within the drainpipe. But Eli missed the narrow ribbon of light. Not the right size for an arcenciel, more snaky than dragony, long and lean, like an LED cable, and a brilliant dark red. This red light was coming from the kitchen sink. As I moved closer, it pulsed once. A moment later, in time as I understood it here, it pulsed again. The light shifting from deep red to paler red, and paler again, into orange, light going through the prism in slow motion. It was Opal, coming up through the sink’s drainpipe. Or trying to. She was moving slowly through stopped time, not speeding through time as she could in her normal dragon form.

She must not be able to manipulate time while shifting to a form like this, one abnormal to her natural state, stretched out and . . . Suddenly I understood. This house was old and so were its pipes. Old enough to have lots of iron in them. Maybe even made entirely of iron, rusted and corroded. They had to be causing the arcenciel pain.

I studied the shape of the creature, how the light flowed through it, a rippling, ripping, singing note of light. Its cells were weren’t like a mammal’s, one cell touching others, but more like the neurons in a brain, bulbous and spiked with long, linear filaments that shifted with light. Light that came from them and flowed through them.

I could see everything about her. She looked like sunlight, as if her light was created, stored, broken, then reflected. As if Opal got her power and her body from the sun alone. I wondered how long she could even stay alive in the dark. As I watched, her wings were pulled through the drain, a glistening rainbow, so thin that I could see through the membranes. She was beautiful. And she was deadly.

If Opal stayed alive she could come after Molly at any time, past or present or future. Anyplace. If Opal lived, Molly or her child, or both, might die. I flipped the long sword, thinking, my blade catching the light of Opal’s beauty. Thinking about time and memory. About changing time itself, both in the future and in the past, like plucking one bubble of possibility out of the timeline and breaking it up into molecules and atoms of nothingness. Could Opal also change a memory of the future, of an event yet to be? Was changing the memory of a future event even possible? And if she could, would that be an evil of the worst sort? Or would it be worse if I killed her, a creature so beautiful she had to make even God weep? I didn’t know what to do, but I had a bad feeling that no matter what I did it would be the wrong thing, ruining everything for everyone in the process.

I slowed the movement of the sword and held it low, tip near the floor. Took a breath. Smelled Molly’s panic, stagnant on the air. I turned to the stairs and saw Angie Baby, peeking around the corner of the stairwell. She had slipped free of Molly’s warding. The little girl was watching, her eyes on me. I had stood still long enough for her to focus on me, even bubbled in time.

In this state, I could see the energies that once bound her magic. They were nothing more than a broken magical garment that she could put on and take off. Worse, as I watched, Angie reached out, her little hand moving faster than she should be able to. Her fingers threw tiny sparks of raw magic, and they raced away from her, as if searching. My breath caught. Holy crap.

Angie was seeking the Gray Between.

She must have seen me bubble time. And learned how by watching me.

If she figured that out, Angie would be more than dangerous. If she learned how to enter the Gray Between, she could be deadly to herself, or to me, by accident or in a fit of anger. She was a little girl. Little kids had no control or wisdom to know when to use, or not use, a gift or ability. Worse, if she figured out how to bubble time and alter it as the arcenciels could, there was no telling what that ability would do to her morality and ethics. She could abuse and alter timeline probabilities at a whim. Angie could easily become a weapon of mass destruction.

My choices were limited, and all of them were dangerous to Angie. She could see me kill the arcenciel. See me die at the jaws of the rainbow dragon. Then get eaten herself. See her mother die. Then get eaten herself.

“Crap on crackers,” I whispered as little sparkles of black light power flickered and a small tuft of the Gray Between opened in the cup of Angie’s fingers. I walked to her as the arcenciel went through the blue and green spectrum of light, throwing the kitchen into lovely colors of sky and water. Another foot of Opal’s energies had flowed into the kitchen. Her wing tips were still inside the drain but the upper portions had partially unfurled.

I stopped at Angie and watched as her fingertips spat tiny ribbons of black light, moving slightly faster than the arcenciel. I studied the tattered robe of magics she wore, the energies broken and frazzled but still active. If I weren’t in the Gray Between, in the no-time place where magic was visible as pathways of power and interactive energies, I couldn’t see where the breaks were. But since I could see it maybe I could also fix it? I had never been able to create magic, but I could sometimes disrupt the magic of others. And once, not long after I came to New Orleans, I had manipulated magic by accident. Molly had later told me I shouldn’t have been able to do that at all, and I had never been able to do it again, but maybe when I was in this state, I could do magic . . . mechanically.

I set my blades at Angie’s feet on the bottom stair and slipped my knobby fingers into the tattered energies. I began to tie them off, one by one, using the tiny spurts of black light, Angie’s own magic, to secure each of them. It wasn’t pretty, like the knitted energies of the Everhart and Trueblood workings. The knots I was making were downright ugly, the way a painting I had done would look when held up next to a Rembrandt or Michelangelo. Childish and inept. But it was working; the binding was coming together.

I didn’t know what the effect of my actions would have on Angelina Everhart Trueblood and her magics. Out of fear, I didn’t tie her as tightly as I might have, stopping when the garment of bindings was connected to her own magics but wasn’t constraining her in any way. When there were no more black light energies spurting from her fingertips, I tied off the last stray thread of bindings and stepped back. If she figured out that I had done it to her, would she hate me? Something to worry about later.

I returned to the kitchen trying to figure out what do, how to fight Opal away without killing her outright. I couldn’t kill a sentient child, not even the child of another species. But my body was spasming tightly, an electric charge of pain that shivered along my nerves and burned in my fingertips. Eli was at her side, so I positioned myself where her head was growing wider, back into its real shape and form. And because the pain was growing so fast, I reached for real time, knowing that if I made a mistake, Opal might kill me. But because Angie was watching, I had to get the fight back in real time.

I whirled my swords and forced the Gray Between to fracture and split around me. The fight slammed back into real time. The arcenciel slithered through the drainpipe and into the kitchen in scant seconds. Her wings billowed open. Knocked by a wing, the kitchen table and everything on it went flying or sliding across the house to crash into the back wall. The kitchen window blew out into the street as the other wing encountered it.

Eli cut the dragon in a half dozen places. Clear goop splattered. She roared, mouth open, long tongue lashing. I lunged with the long sword. Stabbed her in the mouth with the sword, the blade piercing her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She jolted back at the last instant. The steel missed her brain, if her brain was located in her skull.

The arcenciel screamed. In a single flash, she flew through the broken, unwarded window and into the street. Taking my sword with her. I grabbed a frill and leaped with her. Slamming my shoulder into the window jamb on the way through it. I heard and felt the crack of my collarbone. My right arm went numb. I lost my grip on the rainbow dragon.

That’s not good.

Jane bad hunter. Stupid kit to ride prey through small hole.

I landed in the street, tumbling. Rolling over the injured shoulder with a pain that screeched through me like a predator’s fangs. As I rolled, Beast sent a blast of pain-deadening adrenaline through me, and I caught a single breath that didn’t hurt. I made it to my feet fast, still holding the vamp-killer, left-handed.

Molly rushed through the front door, throwing jagged bars of blue and green power-bolt bombs at the dragon. They quickly went from sharp-edged energies to crumpled slags of dying power. The bombs that didn’t bounce off her, the rainbow dragon seemed to simply absorb, taking in all the magical attacks.

Eli joined the fight with a steel sword, but the arcenciel hit him with her tail, sending him flying. My sword was still pinned in her mouth. Steel keeping it in the present flow of time, which was what I had hoped. Guessed. Whatever.

And up until now, excluding the broken collarbone, the fight was going the way I had hoped. From the uptown side of the street, lights glided into long streamers. Soul. The cavalry to the rescue.

She whipped faster than my eyes could follow, wrapping Opal up in her much greater energies. Molly saw what she was doing and turned in a circle, her arms wide, both hands open, sketching a circle in the air around her, and then around Opal. Together the witch and the mature arcenciel wrapped the juvie arcenciel up in magic. When the writhing, angry rainbow dragon was secured, a light flashed and Soul appeared in the street in human form, her long skirts flowing in a breeze I could see but not feel. Deftly she pulled the sword from the creature’s mouth and tongue and tossed it toward me. The captured arcenciel made a keening sound of anguish and woe.

I stepped back, hitting solidly against Eli’s chest as he caught the sword out of the air. My partner secured my arm at my waist with his, wrapping himself around me, holding my sword upright at an angle near us in his free hand. “Broken collarbone,” he said into my ear as Molly and Soul stood together in the street, studying the tangle of energy that was Opal. The two magic workers walked back and forth, speaking in low voices. I didn’t particularly like the way Soul’s eyes kept dropping to Molly’s baby bump, clearly outlined in the pajamas, but there was nothing I could do now. The water droplets of time would have to figure it all out themselves.

Opal stretched and bit at the energies. Acid rose in my throat at the thought of having to fight again right now. “Yeah,” I said, struggling against the nausea of the broken bone, time bending, the fight, and now, the fear. “Kinda figured that.” My words were slurred by the tusks. Shivers wracked through me, making the pain much worse for a moment. When I got a second breath I smelled Eli’s blood.

“You’re hurt.”

“Just a scratch.”

I pushed him away with my good hand and caught a spurt of blood into my face. “I don’t think so,” I said, blinking fast. I followed the blood to his upper arm and wrapped my knobby, über-strong fingers around his biceps and tightened them into a pressure bandage. Then I chuckled, though it wasn’t anywhere near my usual laugh. He was holding my injured arm in place. And I was holding his.

Soul walked over, her arms crossed over her ample bosom, her gauzy, flowing gowns no longer fluttering in a breeze I couldn’t feel. She looked me over, and I realized it was the first time that the PsyLED agent had ever seen me in my half-Beast form. Some people might have been taken aback, but Soul seemed composed in the face of pelt and big-cat fang tusks. She said, “Thank you for making the right choice.”

I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but I had never been very good at that. “So . . . ,” I said. “You had been sitting around watching the fight between Opal and me for . . . a while.” Though bubbled time makes that term insubstantial at best, I thought. “Watching and probably judging.” I frowned at her, wondering what Soul would have done had I taken another road. As part of PsyLED and also as an arcenciel, she had a wide scope of power. If I had killed the arcenciel, would she have had the rule of some arcane, possibly prehistoric law to kill me? Or go back in time and kill me before I killed Opal?

Soul pulled a scarf from a pocket and pushed my bloodied good hand away from Eli. She tied the scarf around my partner’s wound and immediately the pulsing arterial blood stopped. Eli’s face, which had held a hint of pain, eased back to its neutral, natural mask of nothingness. “This scarf has a healing working in it,” she said, adjusting the knotted scarf. “It’s self-renewable and powered by the sun, so when you finish with it today, simply wash it out and hang it in a window.”

“What about me?” I asked.

“I haven’t a thing for broken bones or timesickness. Your skinwalker energies will have to help you there.”

The fact that she knew I was sick from bending time reaffirmed that Soul had been watching the whole fight. I pressed against Eli’s helping hand and wrapped my bloody good hand around my own elbow, keeping it close to my side. I could take care of myself. Eli was holding my unsheathed sword. Not the smartest thing to do while in close proximity to another person. That thing was sharp.

Soul walked to Molly, who was now sitting on the low steps of the front porch, her sock-clad feet on the sidewalk. “I’m sorry Opal attacked you,” Soul said. “Free will is something my kind believe in, and I will make certain that she doesn’t repeat her actions against you and yours. But you should know that the child you carry has the potential to change the timelines for Opal and her progeny, and the closer that timeline gets, the harder it will be for her to restrain her survival instincts.”

Molly raised her head to Soul, emotions I couldn’t begin to name moving beneath her skin. Her face was pale and wan in the dulled streetlights, but her expression firmed when she said, “Do you have some kind of evidence for that speculation, or are you just trying to make me mad?”

“I would never attempt to anger an Everhart.”

“Damn skippy,” Molly said.

I smiled slightly.

“So how did you know about my baby?”

Soul tilted her head and her long silver hair slid forward, the waves catching the meager moonlight. “I see your child in the timelines. There is significant data to suggest that the baby will be a witch and will ride Opal, trapping her in a crystal at a time when she is carrying an egg. And the egg will die. And so will Opal’s line. There is less evidence to suggest that your child will partner with Opal to some end. That is the way you should bring up your child if you wish it to live long and prosper. Agreement and harmony, compromise, understanding, a mutually beneficial bargain.”

“That’s the plan,” Molly said sharply, obviously stung that her parenting and witch-teaching skills were being called into question over her unborn baby.

Soul nodded once and made her way to the arcenciel, tapping it on the snout and leading it back up the street, changing as she moved into her own arcenciel form. No one looked out the windows, no cars attempted to drive down the street, nothing disturbed them or us. It had to be arcenciel magic, something put in place by Soul while she watched us fight. Nothing else made sense.

The glowing lights of the rainbow dragons faded and died, but not before Opal swung her head back and looked at Molly and Eli and me. Her glowing eyes were baleful and full of promise, half-hidden by streamers of reflective frill and horns bright as crystal. I had a feeling that Soul wouldn’t be able to keep the young dragon in check for long.

•   •   •

Back inside the house, I stood in the foyer watching as Eli and Alex made sure the house was habitable, plugged in the fridge, got the coms and cameras back up on the city’s grid, put the skull that had caused all the trouble back into my closet on the high shelf, and started an early breakfast. The smell of bacon quickly filled the lower story. Molly was curled on the couch talking with Big Evan on her cell, discussing magic and ways to fight light. I heard her tell him that Angie had been a perfect angel and hadn’t even gotten out of bed. “She’s still asleep, the little darling. I think the binding is going to stick this time. . . . Yes. We done good.” She laughed, her happiness like crystal tones on the air.

I pursed my lips, tracking my goddaughter to my room by scent. Angie had done something magical to her mother, to keep her from knowing that Angie was up and around. And then I had . . . interfered. Now Angie’s scent was angry. Maybe tantrum angry.

Eli had put my weapons on the floor. I took both by the hilts and strode into my room, totally ignoring the little girl sitting in the middle of my bed, looking mutinous. I sheathed the weapons, double-checked that the skull was back where it belonged, and finally turned to Angie.

If I hadn’t been hurting, I might have crossed my arms, spread my feet, and stared her down, but I was feeling more pain than I had expected, now that the fighting was over and the effect of adrenaline was wearing off. Every breath ached like lightning, and I knew exactly how that felt. So instead of trying to look stern, I leaned my weight against the wall by the closet and slid to the floor, to sit with my back against the wall and my knees bent up. I reached out to Beast and sought my human form, what little of me was left in the tangled mess of our coiled and twisted genetic structures. I teased the human strands out and let myself fall into my human form, hearing my collarbone scrape and snap back into place. The pain of the healing was stabbing, grinding, and electric, and for a moment, it seemed to fill all of who I was and all of who I might ever be.

And then the pain drenched away, fast as storm water sliding down a gutter. I held up my hands and made sure I was human. Eight fingers, two thumbs. Thin shavings of Eli’s crusted blood dusted into my lap. I touched my face—skin—and touched my teeth—human—and pulled out my T-shirt to peek down at my chest. I was always afraid I would come back only partway and have furry boobs, but I had skin. Good.

Angie was watching, silent, her face red, but her scent was less angry than before I shifted. This was the first time I had shifted in front of her, and she understood that it was a measure of trust. My shifting in front of her was a proclamation of her maturity and of our friendship.

“So. What’s up?” I asked her. How lame? Stupid!

“You can do . . .” Her hands made little circles in the air. “You can speed up. You can move faster than I can see.”

“Yeah.”

“I tried to do it too.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you stop me?” Her face started to flush again, and I smelled her beginning anger.

“Yeah. You want to know why?”

Angie narrowed her eyes at me. I placed one hand on the floor at my hip and propped my weight on it. With the other hand, I kneaded my belly. It growled loudly. The two half shifts and the fighting had left me weak and starving, but sometimes there were more important things than food. I watched Angie, reading the emotions that flashed across her face as she considered my question.

“I guess,” she said, as if the words were dragged out of her.

“Because I get really sick when I move fast. The last few times, I threw up blood.”

Angie sat up straight. “You puked blood? Ewwwww.”

“I know, right?”

“Did it stink?”

“Yeah. It did. And I was so sick afterward that I had to shift back to human to not end up dead.”

“You think I would puke blood and end up dead if I moved fast?”

“I think it’s possible. And because you’re my godchild I had to stop you from doing something that would hurt you. The same way I’d have to stop you if you wanted to jump off a cliff to see if you could fly.” I cocked my head at her and my hair, still trapped under my shirt, but no longer bound in the scrunchies, slid forward on my shoulder. The scrunchies dropped to my waist in a little nest of knitted material that itched, but I’d have to wait to scratch that one until Angie was pacified. “You know what being a godmother means? Not a fairy godmother like in fairy tales, but a real godmother?”

“Daddy says it means you can spank me if I’m real bad, but I don’t believe him. You would never hurt me.” When I didn’t reply she asked, “Is going fast being bad?”

“Can you fly?”

Angie tucked her chin at my seeming non sequitur.

“Let’s say you had a spell that you thought might let you fly, and you wanted to jump off a cliff to see if it worked, instead of testing it by jumping off your back deck. I’d have to stop you from jumping off a cliff. And if you were really grown-up enough to test that spell, you would never have thought of testing it by jumping off a cliff in the first place.”

Angie thought about that for a while as I kneaded my belly and breathed in the wonderful bacon smell that was wafting under my door. “You mean that if I was stupid you would have to stop me from being stupid?”

“Yep.”

“I was stupid to go fast?”

“There might be a cliff at the bottom of go fast.”

“Did my magics get messed up because I tried to go fast?” Tears gathered in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks, and I felt like crap because of them. “I can’t use my magics no more.” She sobbed and buried her face in my pillow.

Thank God, I thought.

Kit, Beast thought. Pull kit in to nurse.

No way. Ick. But a good cuddle, maybe, I thought back at her. I managed to get to my feet and went to the bed, where I sat on the tangled sheets and pulled Angie to me. She was overheated and sweaty and smelled like . . . like Angie. I placed her on my lap and positioned her head on my healed shoulder, my nose in her hair. She smelled wonderful, of little girl and happiness, even over the scent of anger and tears.

“You didn’t mess up your magics trying to go fast. At least not permanently. But you did get snarled back up in the binding while you were trying to figure out time, and now your magics are tied in with it. Meaning that you can’t use your magic until your parents say so. You won’t be able to make them forget things or not see you doing things.”

“Not fair!”

I chuckled. “It’s fair, it’s just not what you want. There’s a difference.”

“You jumped off a cliff.”

My breath caught at that accusation. Because she was right. I jumped off cliffs all the time. “I guess I did. But I’ve jumped off cliffs for a long time and I started with little cliffs and I know how big a cliff I can jump off of. And I also know that, sometimes, it’s better to jump off a cliff and risk death than the alternative.”

“What’s alternative?”

“What’s it mean?”

Angie nodded her head, bumping my nose.

“Saving you and your mama and the new baby is worth jumping off a cliff. Worth risking my life for.” I nuzzled her head, and she repositioned herself on my lap and sighed. “Some things are worth fighting for. Worth dying for.”

“But if you died, then what about us? We might have died too.”

I nodded. “I knew that was a risk. And if I’d had lots of time to reason through it, I might have taken the selfish way out and gone fast and changed things to my benefit. To all our benefit. But making things turn out the way I want can have unintended consequences. You know what that means?”

“It means that I plan for a good thing to happen with my magics, but my plans make a bad thing happen. Mama says that’s witchery one-oh-one.”

I grinned against her head.

“And I’m not supposed to say that to other people who aren’t witches because it might creep them out.”

She was quoting Molly and my grin grew broader. “Right. Even something good, if it’s done in the name of selfishness, always results in evil. Only good, done in the name of unselfishness, results in good. Most of the time. Sometimes. It isn’t guaranteed, no. But it sometimes works out.

“When I fought in real time—instead of going into fast time—it allowed your mama to wake up and get down here. To help. It also allowed Soul to get here. Doing the right thing doesn’t mean good things happen. But it does keep my spirit clean and pure, my soul home clean and pure. It does mean good things are more likely, and not selfish, bad things.”

Angie pulled away and looked up at me, scowling. She’d gotten really good at it, and I had to fight not to laugh in the middle of what had turned into a deadly serious discussion. “Are you trying to say I shouldn’t undo Mama and Daddy’s magical bindings? That I should stay a little girl forever?”

That was a sideways slide from one subject to another subject, but I followed it. “It’s up to you whether you fight the binding or not. I guess it has been for a while now. But the bindings have let you mature and grow and learn to use your magics slowly, at a pace—that means speed—that lets you grow into being a witch and an adult at the same time. So yes. I think you should wait until you’re eighteen, like I did.”

Angie flinched and her eyebrows went up fast. Her scent spiked with the sharp pheromone of surprise.

I said, “I grew up without a mother and father, in a children’s home. With humans. No witches, no skinwalkers—no people like me. My magics were bound by a thing called amnesia.”

“That’s where people forget stuff!”

“Yeah, it is. And I forgot everything, even how to speak. And my Beast—”

“Your big-cat?”

“Yes, my big-cat. She made sure I didn’t remember how to change into my big-cat shape until I was grown-up. Until I was eighteen years old and had learned enough to figure out how to use my magic properly.”

“That sucks.”

I couldn’t help it. A giggle came out between my lips with a sound like shurffle.

Angie giggled with me. “Don’t tell my mama that I said a bad word.”

“Trust me, I won’t. So, are you going to let your magics be bound and not jump off a cliff?”

“I guess so. Since you did it. But only biscause . . . because . . . I’m letting it happen, not because Mama and Daddy are making it happen to me.”

“Mmm.” I decided in an instant not to tell Angie that I had bound her magics. The less said the better, or the better part of valor, or the likely detail that I was chicken. Whatever.

“When you grow up, you can be bound no more, your magics yours to use.”

“Okay, Aunt Jane.” Angie sighed, her whole body getting into the deep breath. “But it still sucks.”

With that momentous decision made, I carried Angie to the kitchen and managed not to crawl into the platter of bacon. I ate steadily, knowing that the coming discussion with Molly and Big Evan was going to be difficult, because of my chat with their daughter and the things I’d told Angie Baby. I still felt I’d made the right decision, but as I’d told my godchild, doing the right thing can have difficult consequences.

But for now we were all safe and alive, and tomorrow had come with a golden dawn and a chance for a future for all of us. There wasn’t much more I could ask of life.