“Jane?” Derek didn’t often call me by my given name. It was Legs or Injun Princess. Not Jane. I looked my question at him. “You’re a Christian. How could you do that? When you were five? How could you do it now?”
“I don’t know.” I laughed shortly. “I probably need therapy.”
“Yeah. We all probably do.”
? ? ?
The team was assembled in the security conference room, including a few new faces.
I remembered Wrassler telling me he was trying to get help. Carefully, I said to Derek, “Your people?”
“Grégoire’s people from Atlanta,” he said. “They’ve been in training in the swamps for the last six weeks,” he reminded me. “Basic training. Leo fed on all of them. They’re loyal and integrated into the communications channels. Training isn’t up to my standards yet, but they’ll do in a pinch.”
I looked them over and shook my head. They were covered in mosquito bites, were sunburned, skinny, rangy, scruffy, and hard-eyed. They looked like they’d been rode hard and put up wet, as a horse-loving roommate in the children’s home used to say, and they had the body odors that claimed they had been in-country without access to bathhouses for a looong time. But they also looked ready to go to war, with that hair-trigger awareness the battlefield soldier always wore. I nodded at them by way of welcome.
“They’ve been read in on the deets,” Derek added. “We can talk freely.”
Which hadn’t even occurred to me. My mind had been too busy on other stuff to sweat things like humans without enough info to understand what was going on. “Too much went wrong tonight, guys,” I said. “Angel, I need to see everything you have on camera. And you’ll note that the stuff on the secondary control panel you installed has been integrated into this one, and a bill for the design has been submitted to Raisin. To Ernestine,” I amended. One of the texts had been from the Kid telling me he had found and assimilated the secondary set.
Angel Tit’s eyebrows bunched and he glanced at Derek. “Told you she’d figure it out. Told Leo and Del she’d figure it out. Told all’a y’all she’d figure it out.” Derek grunted and Angel punched some spots on his integrated control screen. Security footage appeared on the overhead video screen. I watched the new men studying the videos as if their lives depended on it. And maybe they did.
The action lasted half an hour, with time not matching up anywhere as we followed from camera to camera, watching as men and women died, as Wrassler was mangled, as trained solders tried to ignore the changing of time and fought back. As the digital feed sputtered and went all blocky at times just as it had before from the presence of the arcenciel. But this time, the arcenciel was on-screen for only some of the occurrences of the pixelating blocks. “What’s causing the interference?” I asked.
Angel swiveled in his chair and grinned at me. “This time it wasn’t caused only by the light-dragon. This time the interference followed the vamp Peregrinus. I did manage to get some clear shots of him. These might explain it.”
I stared at the still shots plucked from the video. The fanghead was moving at vamp speed, and on regular digital camera footage, he would have been a pixel-blur, but on the new cameras, he was fairly clear—dark hair, dark pants, white shirt, leather belt, and boots. Necklace. But the jewelry looked different from the painting in the records room, and also different from the spare, stripped-raw moments when I had seen the vamp in person. Now the necklace looked larger, darker. Different.
“On the clearest one.” I pointed at the shot of my choice. “Can you zoom in and let me see the necklace?” I asked.
“This isn’t TV or the movies, but yeah, I can get in a bit,” Angel said. By his self-satisfied tone I knew he had already done it for himself.