“Fake name?” I asked, as I slowed, letting the vehicle close the gap on me.
“Probably, but the credit card is good, so whoever created the ID did a good job. The cars have GPS, which I got, and I’ve been following them. Both are currently near the corner of Beryl Street and Jewel Street, hear Harlequin Park. Eli rode by, talked to a neighbor who says they are nice people. Nice house. Rental. You need me to send you a photo?”
The tail vehicle pulled up fast and its lights hit my mirrors, blinding me. My heart rate sped and I reached to the passenger seat and pulled a nine-mil from the thigh holster. “Is there another car rented under the same name?”
“No. I checked. Why?”
The SUV took that moment to pull around me and roar off. It was full of people and was blasting some heavy bass beat into the night and trailing odors of weed and booze. Teenaged rockers, full of hormones. I let the tension drain away, even as I memorized the license plate. “No,” I said, hearing the relief in my voice. “But just for grins, run this plate.” I gave him the number. “And is Soul there?”
“She went out about half an hour ago.”
“I’ll get back to you.” I ended the call and wondered how much of what I was seeing and worrying about was nothing and how much was various supernatural beings hiding things from me. Maybe it was time to beard the lion in her den.
Pulling over, I parked in the shadow of an abandoned warehouse, the front of the vehicle snugged up against the building. There were lots of warehouses up and down the Mississippi, some old and fancy with intricate brickwork and some thrown together out of metal and steel. This was a newer, and therefore uglier one, with tall grasses growing up in cracked concrete and birds flying through broken glass in the ventilation windows high off the ground. There were no security cameras that I could I see, and I was far enough off the road so that traffic cams would have a hard time picking anything up, if there even was a traffic cam on the isolated road.
I rolled down the window and sniffed the night air, smelling rats and feral cats and exhaust. A far-off skunk. Dead fish. Water. No people had been here recently. I made sure that the thigh holster Bruiser had provided was secure on the passenger seat beside me. Loosened both nine-mils and chambered a round in each. Standard ammo, not silver. It would likely be rednecks or gangbangers, not supernats, who would bother me out here.
I slouched down in the vehicle seat and took a chance; I dialed Soul. She picked up instantly. “What have you learned?” she asked.
“Too much and too little. I need you to confirm that you are the same species of creature as the arcenciel that attacked Leo and Gee DiMercy. Gee hints that it might be so. And I need to know what the gray place of the change is—that’s what I call the shape-changing energies that seem to operate outside ordinary Earth physics and time. And I need to know now.”
Soul didn’t answer at first, and I rolled the window down an inch so I could hear anyone or anything approaching. The window was still cracked from when the light-dragon hit my vehicle. I really needed to get that fixed before a cop pulled me over and ticketed me. By the unchanging scents, there was still nothing anywhere around, only the smells of small animals, the heady heaviness of freshwater, the soft susurration of the wind, and the deeper, more powerful vibration of the river on the other side of the levee.
“I will call you back,” she said, and the call ended.
I waited for perhaps two minutes, before I began to wonder whether she had blown me off, or if maybe she had meant she would call me back later. Then my cell rang, an unknown number on it. Burner phone?
“Yellowrock,” I said.
Soul said, “Some have hinted that you are dangerous, with your questions and your species-gifts untaught and unproven. Those same have proposed that you be removed to lessen the danger to the rest of us.”
Removed? Meaning killed? But before I could ask, Beast pressed down on my mind with her paw. In the darkness of my mind, I saw a mental image of a puma high on a ledge over a trickle of water. Waiting, still and silent, for prey.
Soul went on. “I have offered my recommendation that you be allowed to hunt for truth where you might find it and use such truth as you might wish. An experiment that might lead the imprisoned into the light.”
“Thanks,” I said, my tone offended. “It’s nice to have someone in my corner when I’m being judged without the chance to speak for myself. Some who?”
“Some of my ilk. My species, as you said.”
“Okay. So there are a lot more of you than I was thinking.”
“The lines are open again. For now, yes.”