“I’m heading to the side entrance,” Derek said, “to get my men organized.” The side entrance was hidden in the brick wall and opened into Leo’s office.
I nodded to him. “Be careful.” To Eli, I said, “We stick together.” We raced in a zigzag pattern across the unlit, unmanned, circular drive and headed for the stairs to the entrance. Three steps up, the night exploded in a blinding light. Several things happened all at once. Brute yelped. We ducked to either side of the stairs, arms up to guard our faces. Eli cursed and yanked the ocular from his eye, temporarily blinded. But there was no explosion, no shrapnel, nothing to explain the agonizing light, until it dimmed from excruciating, to merely painful, to a coruscating, scintillating brilliance. And then to darkness.
On the step stood Soul. But she wasn’t even vaguely human. Her face was humanoid, but the rest of her was winged, snaky, scaled, and solid now, tiger striped, like her tiger form. A striped and stunning dragon, like the tales of old. I looked back across the streets to the sight of blue and red emergency lights flashing at the crime scene. “Soul?”
“I can stay only a moment before I’m missed at the crime scene,” she said, her body flashing light again. A moment later she stood before us, in her human guise, wearing a filmy dress that moved in its own breeze. “The hatchling is alive, in the Mithran Council chambers. Reality has been folded.” Her voice was deeper, growly, as if when she shifted to human, she forgot to change her vocal cords. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Her light patterns tell me that she unfolded time and reality, reentering this world, here, on these steps, and then folded it away again, inside,” Soul said, pointing into the darkened interior. “She vanished from my sight in the Gray Between. I can’t follow her trail while she is being ridden.” Which meant little to me, but I had a feeling that it would, and quickly.
Soul’s teeth positively gnashed together in frustration at what she saw on my face. “As you fold time, so do we,” she said, as if explaining something to a particularly annoying four-year-old.
“Oh,” I said. Suddenly it all made sense. Now I knew why they kidnapped an arcenciel. And why they had tried to steal my energies. “Oh!”
“If I go after her, I’ll be taken as well. I can’t help her, not against a witch with a crystal and the knowledge of its use. All of my kind are vulnerable. But you’re a skinwalker; you can’t be taken. Please, Jane. Find her and break the crystal that imprisons her.”
I stalked up the steps to Soul until our faces were on a level.
“Jane,” Eli warned, his voice toneless and cautious.
“If I can find her and bring her back, I will. If I can’t bring her back, I’ll call for you and you’ll have to chance being taken too.”
Soul closed her eyes as if to hide her reaction. “Thank you.” In a flash of light, she was gone. I raced into the darkness inside the front entrance. Or what was left of it.
More slowly, Eli and Brute entered. Together, we moved into the room and to the side where guests usually presented weapons and acquiesced to a pat-down, our backs to the wall. Glass in plasticized hunks and rounded beads littered the floor. The air lock, the two sets of doors, and all the bullet-resistant glass was gone, blasted in and shattered as if a rocket had taken it out, though there was no scent of anything I might associate with a rocket or a grenade or other explosive device. There was, however, an overload of other scents. The stench of blood and lots of it. Human, vamp, and something else that reeked of dead fish and rotting vegetation, the way an arcenciel might smell if it was dying. The stink of recently fired weapons, hot and thick on the air.
The place was black and more silent than the beginning of a nightmare. No lights, no soft whisper of the air-conditioning units whirring, no sound of voices; more important, no sound of the fancy generators I had installed. No backup lighting.