Inside me, Beast growled. Ugly dog. Good nose, on ugly dog. She thought a moment, and added, All dogs ugly.
Eli came at me with the sealed baggie and I pulled my head away for a moment, already almost overcome by the smells as he pulled the Ziploc open. I shook my head, my ears flapping, and gave a little sneeze to clear my nose before sticking my head forward and my snout into the baggie. I took a small sniff. Then another. And another, breathing deeply as the smells found new places in my doggie brain, forming associations with other scents from the last time I was in this form, from times I took other forms with good scent noses, and also from when I was human—nose-blind, I understood. Humans had so little understanding of the smells of the world around us that if we were sightless, deaf, and unable to touch at all, that isolation might show the difference between a human’s ability to smell and a bloodhound’s ability.
I learned all I could from the bloody cloth, lifted my head from the baggie, and trotted back to my room, closing the door with my nose.
• • •
I was sitting on the bed, firmly in the gray place of the change, when I felt the magics. Like mine, but different. In the location of mine, yet not. L’arcenciel magics. Close. I reached in to the deeps of me and found the genetic form that was mine, that was all Jane, all human, and I ripped it up and out through me, through the energies that glowed with zooming lights, that sparkled like stars, and blazed like comets, through the flesh that needed to become my own. I rolled from the bed to the floor.
And I screamed. Pain like being burned to the bone, being branded, being dipped in molten iron. I threw back my head and found the genetic structure that could weld a sword and shoot a gun. I found myself, my human form. Gasping, I rolled to my backside and to a sitting position, twisted in sheets. Eli stood over me, weapons drawn. Overhead the light shined into the formerly dark room. I grabbed up the sheets and tried to stand but my legs collapsed and I fell.
“Magics,” I gasped. “The light-dragon is here.”
Eli stepped, balanced, lifting his feet one at a time, setting them down in stable position, rooted, as he slowly turned. “Where?”
That’s right. Humans can’t see it in every form. “Close,” I managed. I pulled on my jeans and tee and grabbed my weapons, a little-used eighteen-inch, steel-bladed vamp-killer that hung in a sling on the back of the bed frame and a nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun. I chambered a round, pointed to the front of the house, and followed Eli out of the room.
He forced open the front door and we broke through the crime scene tape and out into the street. The smell of a flash rain was in the air, the stink of lightning. The street ran with water, warm on the asphalt beneath my feet. But the magics faded and disappeared.
• • •
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” I said, as I stuffed my face with the rare steak that Eli had cooked (if a steak this rare can be called cooked) while I shifted back. “But I smelled something in the blood that I’ve smelled before. Or nearly. The shooter smells like one of The People. I need to get another look at the paintings on one of the lower levels of vamp HQ.”
Eli’s mouth pursed. “What does Leo have in all his basements? Sounds more and more like we need to recon down there.”
Remembering the breath-freezing fear response I’d had standing in the elevator in the dark, I said, “Bring flashlights. Maybe that bazooka you keep talking about.”
The look on Eli’s face said I was a scaredy-cat girl. Inside, Beast hissed at the insult, but I didn’t correct him, stuffing my face instead. He’d find out soon enough if he followed through on his recon idea. The bogeyman was in the basement? A scion so special—or so old? One of the long-chained ones?—that he or she was kept alone and out of sight, hidden away until its existence had faded into myth? I said, “There’re cameras in the stairwells. You’ll never get downstairs.”
“Whoa,” Alex said. “We didn’t install cameras there. What kind of cameras?”
“Same make and model we used in the rest of the place.” I flashed him a grin that was all teeth. “I’ll be taking up the need for payment on that design with Raisin and Del. Someone cheated us.”
“More important than that,” Alex said, a look of triumph on his face. “Those cameras have to be monitored somewhere.”
“Nice,” Eli said. “Meaning that we can gain access, take it over, and use it. We can see what’s below stairs.”
I pointed a fork at the Kid. “Make it so, Number Two.”
Alex chuckled once at the old order given by the Next Generation, Star Trek’s captain. It was a single huff of sound, much like one of his brother’s restrained laughs, or Beast’s, and he headed back to his work area, his head already bowed over a tablet.
“If we can get into the system, we can manage an unobserved basement visit,” Eli said. “Until then, I have an update. I just finished the reports of all the eyewitnesses who saw the arcenciel attack in the sparring room.” At my polite but incomprehensible, steak-choked interrogative he said, “None of them match. In fact, none of the descriptions of the arcenciel match, beyond a glittery, shadowy creature.”
I made a circular motion with my fork to indicate he should continue, before stabbing it into a morsel of meat.
Eli said, “I don’t think it’s mind control. But how about something the snake releases from its body?”
I paused in my chewing and thought about the feel of the scale on my chest, all tingly. I said, “’Ass it. ’ike ellssd.”
“Yeah. Exactly like LSD,” Eli agreed.
I swallowed and said, “What did the lab get on the remains of the arcenciel glop it left on the gym floor after we stabbed it?”
“We don’t— Wait a minute,” Alex called from the other room. He brought over a tablet, made an agreeable sound, and pushed it to me. “This just in.” He pointed to the line he thought most appropriate. It was a line of chemical formula followed by words, which he read aloud. “‘Preliminary reports indicate that this compound is a biologic agent with hallucinogenic properties—a deliriant, mildly psychedelic, and strongly dissociative, likely to cause confusion, emotional euphoria, and forgetfulness, as well as headaches and possible flashbacks.’ None of our witnesses had any physical complaints, maybe because they all drink vamp blood and that keeps their brains healthy enough to withstand the compound’s natural effects.”