The shift had been fast, like lightning. My entire body ached. My gobag had somehow gotten back around my neck and it was twisted, holding me in place, nearly choking. I shimmied slowly, wedging my fingers into the mesh with one hand, pulling the gobag with the other. The cement floor was cold and miserable. And I was naked on it. Dang cat.
I squirmed my way out, pulled the blanket off the bed, and wrapped it around me. It stank of vamp and blood and sex and fear, but that was moderately better than being naked and frozen and hungry. Now I was just hungry. I unzipped the gobag and dressed in the long underwear and the unfamiliar magicked cloth armor, feeling the tingly-scratchy on my skin even through the silk long johns. Strapped on the thigh rig, checked the nine-mil and snapped it into the holster. Same thing with the short-bladed vamp-killer. Slipped my feet into the flops. Stuck the Glob into a pocket. There was a box of four Clif bars in the bottom of the bag and I ripped open all four packages and ate them, swallowing faster than I could chew.
I had a sudden memory of the taste of vamp blood and vamp flesh and nearly lost my cookies. Pun intended. I forced the white chocolate macadamia nut down my throat. It tasted nothing like blood. Thank goodness.
I heard a knock at the door behind me, the one the boys had busted through. Eli’s shadow lay across the floor at the foot of the bed, but he spoke from behind the smashed opening, giving me privacy. “You okay?”
Without looking his way I said, “Dressed. And not really. My Beast ate vamp flesh.”
From the corner of my eye I saw him enter and shrug, one of the minuscule gestures that meant way more than a regular person’s shrug. “Why waste protein?”
I looked at him quickly. His face was closed and distant, and I suddenly didn’t want to know what he might have done to stay alive. Instead I reached and gave him a hug. Both arms around him. Both hands, on his back. At the same time. And then I didn’t know what to do. Should I let go? Should I back away? Should I keep waiting for him to hug me back? How many Mississippis did I hug for?
Eli’s chest shook. Again. “Babe?” His voice was quivering and strained. I realized he was laughing. “You frozen in horror? Trying to figure out what to do now that you got me in a strangle move?”
“Pretty much.”
Eli touched my back, his hand slicking down my hair in a single tender gesture. Which somehow allowed me to step away.
“Thanks,” I said.
Unexpectedly, Eli was still laughing, face pulled up in unfamiliar lines. Showing teeth and everything. “That felt really weird,” he said.
“Think I’ll ever do that again?” I asked, uncomfortable, and so glad he had let me step away.
“God, I hope not,” he said. “It’s so girly.”
“I know, right?”
Chuckling, we walked back into the battle room and up to the cage. Adan was sitting on his chair, bent over the geode. His hair was standing up with static electricity, oily, slick, and charged all at once. My eyes traced the silvered bars of the cage up again, to the lightning rod, and back to the geode. I had been right. It collected power. It was a lightning battery of some sort. Adan was totally unaware of us, his attention riveted on the geode and the magic he was working.
I spotted something I hadn’t noted last time. Copper wires ran from the base of the lightning rod to the cage, where they draped across the metal framework of the dropped ceiling. They passed from the cage to the chair where Sabina had been tortured. I hoped she had been fed. She was scary dangerous when injured, even more than most vamps.
Copper wires also ran to the pole the twins were still tied to. I pulled on Beast’s vision and saw a magical haze, some kind of spell, covering Brandon and Brian. They were out like drunks on a Sunday morning. I looked back to the cage. The geode was glimmering, a soft golden glow shot through with red and black motes of power. If I knew vamps, it had more purposes than just the obvious. The crystals in the center of the stone were not only a trap for arcenciels, they were also possibly a battery powering the spells and keeping the prisoners in place. I was getting pretty good at figuring out magic.
Gee pranced in through the garage door, which was half- open. He was uninjured, dressed in black from head to toe: boots, black jeans, black shirt, and black peacoat. No weapons, but then if he could glamour his wings he could glamour his weapons.
“Have you found Grégoire?” he asked.
“No,” I said. We had thought that Louis and Le Bâtard had set up this place, and that the missing would all be together. But, despite the scent patterns, there were no European vamps, no Sabina, no Amy Lynn Brown, and no Grégoire.
I looked back at the geode battery. “What’s the weather like outside?” I asked.
“Nasty,” Eli said. “No one in his right mind would be out in it.”
Lighting boomed a few blocks over, lighting up the rod and the geode. I moved so I could see inside the open end of the hollow rock. The geode had a single massive crystal of quartz across the inside and thousands of smaller crystals attached to the outer walls. Something moved in the center crystal. An arcenciel. A rainbow dragon was already trapped, but not one I recognized. I stepped to the garage door and examined the clouds, bright with lightning and four arcenciels. They moved with agitated speed, ducking their heads, frilled necks billowing out like crowns and capes, bodies dancing with energy. Despite the apparent end of the battle, this wasn’t over. Not all of the scent patterns had been accounted for.
I remembered the arcenciel saying something like, “Our sister must be set free.” I had a bad feeling that I was supposed to do the dirty work. Saving a trapped arcenciel was a perilous undertaking. Not that it was difficult. All I had to do was break the crystal. But then the arcenciel might bite me, and I had no desire to experience that. The venom or saliva or blood or whatever they injected you with made paranormal beings crazy. Like, forever.
Arcenciels were shape-shifters, light dragons that could transform into other creatures, and do so outside the energy-mass ratio that bound my own shifting. Soul could become a three- or four-hundred-pound tiger, but in her human form she weighed about one twenty-five. She shifted without needing calories to pay for the energy used in the shift. I had wondered if she had a pocket of energy she could draw on as needed to change shape and mass.
I went back to the silvered cage and tried to get a better angle to see inside the geode. The arcenciel was blue, the color of bright sapphires, vibrant in the colorless quartz. There was plenty of room inside the crystals to capture additional arcenciels. I had no idea what Le Bâtard and Louis Seven might do with several of the time-altering, time-bending dragons, except that I wouldn’t like it.
Eli had been staring at the lock for the last few seconds while I wool-gathered. He said, “Two things. It’s fuzzy. It buzzes when I touch it. I don’t have the tools I need to get this open. The rock inside might be calling something. Summoning something. As my gramma might say, I feel a vibration in my molars.”
I put aside for the moment that Eli felt a summoning in his molars. And that he had a gramma. “Calling arcenciels,” I said. “They’ve been acting weird, dancing in the magically charged clouds.”
“Your hair is standing up. We might be about to get struck by lightning.” He said it casually, the way he would say It’s sleeting outside, or Eating a dozen beignets in one sitting is bad for you, or Tea is no substitute for espresso.
As he spoke, several things began to come together. The trapped arcenciel. The missing Sabina. The missing Grégoire. And time . . . “So if they have a time-shifting arcenciel, why haven’t they— Holy crap!”
“Jane?” Eli asked.
I had stopped dead still, thinking. “They intended to go back in time and take over Louisiana. Reshape history to their own choosing. That could be the only reason to devise a trap for so many arcenciels. This is the purpose of the Europeans’ visit to the United States.” I knew it, deep in my bones.
“They could do that?”
“Pretty sure.”
The silvered cage began to glow, brighter than the sun. Brighter than the last time by far. Lightning. Striking. A massive bolt was coming. Fear shocked through me like the lightning that had nearly killed me. Electric. Behind us, a door opened.