“Soul,” I called. “Girrard DiMercy.” I waited for several minutes, then called again, this time thinking about the snake dragon and the Anz?, picturing them in my mind. Again I waited. And waited. And called again. And nothing. Either what I was doing couldn’t be done by a skinwalker, or I was doing it wrong.
I tried picturing the gray energies as not a cloud around me, but more a thing that existed everywhere, something that I was part of. Light and matter, two parts of a whole. With dark matter and dark energy in there somewhere. Physics I didn’t understand but was a part of. I dropped deeper into the gray place—the Gray Between—and let myself look out and around, seeing not the world I knew, but a gray net of light and dark, some places dense with dots of energy, some not so dense, tiny dots pulsating. Everything quivered. Everything had movement. Some slower than others, some much faster, the minute vibrations in all things. The thought came to me. This was the unlimited possibilities of the all-space. Which made no sense at all. And yet did.
I felt lighter somehow, effervescent, as if I could fly or float away. As if I could do anything. I laughed, and the vibration of my laughter seemed to affect the area around me and out like rings in a pond when you toss in a stone. This was the way I felt when I had consumed enough alcohol to feel a hint of a buzz, the way I felt when I bit Soul. Suddenly Soul was there, in front of me. She was in her winged, sparkling snake form, and standing on her head was a blue and scarlet-winged bird. Her snakelike tail rattled and shook, sounding like dry bones. “Speak, Jane. U’tlun’ta.”
“I’m not a liver-eater,” I groused.
“You neither are a liver-eater nor are you not a liver-eater.”
“Schr?dinger’s cat.”
“Schr?dinger was a foolish human, but wiser than most. What do you want?”
“Peregrinus has the hatchling. He captured her in a . . . something. She’s hanging on his necklace.”
Soul showed me her teeth. All of them. And there were a lot of teeth, some as long as my arm. “She was vulnerable to his call because you wounded her with steel,” she said.
She had figured that out. Or Gee had told her. “I know. And I’m sorry. But I need your help to find Peregrinus, kill him, and free the hatchling.”
She pulled back a short distance, like a snake coiling back on itself. “You would help the young one? Even after she killed humans in the vampire council chambers? Why?”
“Why not? Peregrinus forced her. I want Peregrinus dead. You want the baby arcenciel back safe and sound. We’re stronger together than alone.”
“I will assist as I can,” Soul said, “but the hatchling can bind time and space. She can alter energies at will. She is young enough to go where she wishes, or where her captor wishes, once he learns how to ride her. Peregrinus is intelligent. He will have learned from taking the young one and by now will certainly be capable of capturing me as well. I was a prisoner of time once and will not be so again.” She gnashed her teeth and they clacked like pearls against bamboo, a poetic thought totally unlike me. Rather, they sounded like bones rattling. Yeah. Better.
“My kind make a dangerous weapon in the hands of others,” Soul said, “as would my little bird.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Speaking of little birds, can Gee DiMercy find Bethany, the vampire priestess, and the Onorios, and tell them to contact me?”
“This he can do. Go, little bird. Make alliance with the vampire priestess.”
Gee chirped and spread his wings, blinking out of sight. I had no idea where he’d gone, or whether he could manipulate the gray place of the change on his own, or whether Soul just did it for him. So many questions and so few answers. “Thank you,” I said, as formally as I knew how.
Soul winked out of sight. The last thing I heard as she disappeared was the sounds of her tail and her teeth, like bones rattling, like dry bones dancing. Yeah. It was all coming together: the myths, the oral tradition, the scriptures, the lost People of the Straight Ways, and the Builders. All tying in with the weak places between universes and the loss of all civilization through flood, the mythos that tied almost all ancient peoples together.
I opened my eyes to my vacant backyard.
Eli was standing on the porch, his eyes sweeping across the yard, back and forth. “Eli, we need to weapon up and get to vamp HQ.”
He didn’t answer, just swiveled on a heel and headed back in through the open window. We really needed to get the doors fixed. Yeah. Some easy, lazy, sunny, summer day.
? ? ?
We made a run to Walmart for camping supplies and to a storage unit that my partner had rented and not told me about, and we still got to vamp HQ in plenty of time to prepare. I turned Eli and Alex loose with the new supplies. My lousy plan was coming together, but there was plenty of room for things to go horribly wrong.
CHAPTER 23