No one drove by as I dressed; no sirens sounded in the distance. I was glad I was in the boonies with no nearby, nosy neighbors. Going commando—which was not at all comfortable, the zipper cold and pinching my skin—I shoved my feet into my boots and hunted for my guns and my cell. Seconds after becoming human again, I slid into the car, the tires ground into the concrete and spit shale, as I gunned the motor and got the heck outta Dodge, thinking, What the heck just happened?
I was halfway across the river before my heart rate slowed and I figured out three things. One: Driving with no windows was a lot like riding Bitsa. Two: I wasn’t hungry. I had been beaten and cold-cocked by a vamp, shifted, fought a tiger, been wounded, shifted back, all in a matter of minutes, and I wasn’t hungry. Shifting always used energy, energy that I took from food calories. But I wasn’t hungry. In fact, I felt amazing, like I’d had a good meal and a beer. And like the beer worked on me like it did on humans. I wasn’t buzzed, but I was amazingly relaxed. Which I clearly shouldn’t have been. And using the term amazing a lot. And I had no idea why. Three: Soul was a shapeshifter. Which meant that the arcenciels were shapeshifters. A light-dragon and a freaking tiger and maybe other forms as well. And not a shifter who required that mass and energy remain unchanged. In her human form she weighed maybe a hundred twenty-five pounds. In her tiger form she weighed more than three hundred, if her weight on my belly had been an indication. Unless she could convert energy to mass all by her lonesome. Like maybe she had a pocket of energy she could draw on as needed to change shape and mass. That would be handy. The arcenciels had—or were—magic like I had never imagined before.
I thought through the last few minutes in the warehouse parking area as I drove, analyzing it from every memory—smell, sight, pain, taste, roaring sound, and time. Something about it was familiar in a mathematical kinda way. Like A equals B, and B equals C, so A equals C. Like that. I was doing math. My high school teachers would be so proud. I pulled up my sleeve to see an undamaged arm, healed by the shift. My life was good. Weird but good. “And I can do alphabet math. Cool.”
And the best thing about the whole thing? The taste of Soul’s blood. Which was why I wasn’t hungry, I thought. Whatever kinda dragon-cat-shifter/l’arcenciel Soul was, her blood was full of power. “I gotta figure out what she is. Someday,” I said to the road in front of me. “For now, it’s all good because I know for sure who’s trying to bomb me and sniper me and tailing me. Well, it’s all good, except that Soul tried to kill me.” I frowned at the street because it wanted to waver to the left. “And Satan’s Three are after me and it has something to do with my energies in the gray place of the change. Which is bad. Very bad. So it’s not all good.
“Oh crap. I’m talking to myself. And I’m feeling really good. Okay. Soul’s blood is full of power and happy juice. Like the arcenciel goop from the sparring room floor and from the drugged scale.”
Car lights flashed into the SUV through the broken windows. My T-shirt was clawed and ripped and stiff with blood. Cool night wind touched my skin through the rents. Since I was over the river and off the bridge, I slowed, parked, and yanked the shirt off, tossing it into the passenger floor, without looking. I twisted my hair up in a bun and stuck some stakes through it to keep it in place, then pushed the stakes down because they hit the roof and hurt my scalp. Dang stakes. A toiletries bag was in back and I crawled through the SUV to get it.
From the zippered bag, I pulled a thin, short-sleeved tee and slid it over my head, which would have been easier had I done it before I staked my hair. I wasn’t thinking straight yet. But my head felt light and airy and I thought that was new and different, so maybe I was metabolizing the drug like the lab’s research had suggested.
I looked down at my chest. I needed to shop. I was running out of bras and work clothes, getting sword-cut and claw-slashed. This brown, yellow, and pink tee had a cute pig on it with the words Bacon Is Meat Candy. Ugly, though it was a perfect tee for Beast. And at least all my girlie parts were covered.
In a rush, all the manic energy drained out of me, like water flowing from my fingertips and puddling on the floor of the vehicle. My limbs went weak, my eyes were too heavy, and my head lolled back against the backseat. I was pretty sure I was passing out. I said something bad just as unconsciousness took me. My last sight was the sun trying to rise, a gray haze on the eastern sky, reflected in broken window glass everywhere.
? ? ?
The sun was high in the sky when I heard a hollow knocking and my cell buzzed at the same time, waking me. I picked up my cell and looked around at traffic. It took a moment to remember why I was sleeping in the back of the SUV on a crowded city street. There was a parking ticket on the windshield wiper. Great. And Eli stood at the broken passenger window with a peculiar look on his face. I waved Eli in, opened the cell to answer the call, moistened my cracked, dry lips, and said, “Speak to me, oh genius, geek, and computer prodigy.”