“Yup. It’s me.” I leaned on the couch and pulled a soft, fuzzy throw over me. The Kid had turned up the AC and it was freezing in here. Outside, rain fell, splashing into the puddles, pounding on the roof, trickling down the rain gutters, rushing toward the street and New Orleans’ storm water drainage system. Taken together, it made a melodious sound, the varying and harmonious sounds of rain. I had learned to love it. “What’s up, Angie Baby?”
“You gots to get up outta your sofa and protect the scaberteeth lion bone.”
I was on my feet so fast the couch nearly flipped over. A half second later, Eli, one of my partners in Yellowrock Securities, rounded the corner, a nine-millimeter handgun in each hand. “Backyard,” I said, taking the weapon Eli slapped into my palm.
“Round in the chamber, safety on,” he said. “Whadda we got?”
“Don’t know. Angie”—I held up the cell for him to see—“had a dream about the sabertooth lion skull, which I hid in the boulder pile.”
Eli grunted and pulled a vamp-killer. My partner was a two-handed fighter.
“It could be anything.” Or nothing, but I didn’t say that. Eli already knew it. Angie had strong witchy powers, for sure, but she was barely in school yet. She was a kid. Kids make mistakes.
Eli opened the middle door from the living room. Half juggling the cell, I pulled open the door closest to the backyard. All the doors out of the living room onto the porch were new, and mine stuck, swollen by the rain. I yanked, and when it opened, it nearly hit me in the face. I slid out onto the slick porch floor a half second behind my partner.
“Don’t hurt it, Aunt Jane!” Angie demanded, her voice tinny, so far from my ear. “Just stop it! Quick! Hurry!”
But I couldn’t hurry. I stopped, breathing fast and shallow, staring out over my backyard. Beside me, Eli stopped too, his breathing even and slow, his scent charged with testosterone and adrenaline. “Is that what I think it is?”
“A mostly naked teenage girl kneeling in the mud, digging under my rocks? I think so.” The girl was dark-skinned, with long, kinked, black-, copper-, brown-, pale white-, and silver-streaked hair plastered to her shoulders and back. My Beast pushed to the surface and took in the girl. In Beast sight, she writhed with energies, powerful, supercharged, magical strength. All in rainbow shades of light. “I think she’s a juvie arcenciel, playing in the mud. And Angie says we can’t hurt it. Her.”
Eli made a soft grunt of acknowledgement and holstered his gun. Standard ammo didn’t hurt arcenciels, the term for dragons made of light. Neither did silver. Only steel. Angie could say we couldn’t hurt her all day long, but if the arcenciel was a threat—and my experience suggested that they often were—we might have no choice. Eli would stay armed. He kept the fourteen-inch steel and silver-plated vamp-killer in his right hand and drew a black steel KA-BAR Tanto knife with his left. He wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes. The steamy air landed on his taut chest with a misty sheen.
“Aunt Jane! Hurry!”
“Okay, Angie. I got it. Love you.” I disconnected and placed both the nine mil and the cell on the wet porch floor. The juvenile arcenciel couldn’t have missed our entrance to the backyard. We hadn’t been covert or quiet and were standing within feet of her in what passed for broad daylight in New Orleans in a rainstorm. But she was ignoring us thoroughly, as she clawed with her hands beneath the boulder and pulled out a rounded mound of mud. She was slicked with it. Leaning down, she reached back under the boulder, into the muddy little cave, and began to scrape more mud to her.
Behinds us, Alex, the third member of Yellowrock Securities, said, “Camera’s running. So far she shows on digital footage.”
When arcenciels were in human form they photographed fairly well on digital and film. When they were in their light-dragon form, digital was often nearly useless and film only slightly better.
“Angie says she’s after the sabertooth lion skull,” I told Alex.
“She say why?”
“No. Just that we can’t let her have it and we can’t hurt her.”
The arcenciel whipped her head around at my words and hissed at me the way vipers do, mouth open, showing teeth. Lots and lots of sharp, pointed shark teeth, glinting like pearls. So she knew English. Interesting. No one really knew what arcenciels were or where they came from. Just shape-shifters, time benders, and not from around here—as in not from Earth.
“And the skull’s out there?” Eli asked.
“Not usually,” I said, lowering my voice so that the rain muffled it. “But with Angie on the way, and her being so nosy and having access to everything inside, I put a bunch of stuff in the yard. In hindsight that may have been stupid.”
“You should have put it in the safe room.”
“No. Angie mighta spotted a magical signature in the safe room, and then she would have known the room was under the stairs. With all the things that kill people.”
Eli grunted his understanding. “Whadda we do?”