I stood slowly, carefully. My gut cramped as if a huge fist gripped it from inside and twisted. Ripping . . . something. I pushed up from the floor and took the hilts that were still hanging there. Tugged the swords into the bubble of time with me, their weight transferring, the swings they were in before pulling my arms into motion. I stalked into the kitchen.
Eli was standing, his blades high, in the act of cutting Opal’s elongated face, nostrils and horns twisted and trailing, her frill still captured within the drainpipe. But Eli missed the narrow ribbon of light. Not the right size for an arcenciel, more snaky than dragony, long and lean, like an LED cable, and a brilliant dark red. This red light was coming from the kitchen sink. As I moved closer, it pulsed once. A moment later, in time as I understood it here, it pulsed again. The light shifting from deep red to paler red, and paler again, into orange, light going through the prism in slow motion. It was Opal, coming up through the sink’s drainpipe. Or trying to. She was moving slowly through stopped time, not speeding through time as she could in her normal dragon form.
She must not be able to manipulate time while shifting to a form like this, one abnormal to her natural state, stretched out and . . . Suddenly I understood. This house was old and so were its pipes. Old enough to have lots of iron in them. Maybe even made entirely of iron, rusted and corroded. They had to be causing the arcenciel pain.
I studied the shape of the creature, how the light flowed through it, a rippling, ripping, singing note of light. Its cells were weren’t like a mammal’s, one cell touching others, but more like the neurons in a brain, bulbous and spiked with long, linear filaments that shifted with light. Light that came from them and flowed through them.
I could see everything about her. She looked like sunlight, as if her light was created, stored, broken, then reflected. As if Opal got her power and her body from the sun alone. I wondered how long she could even stay alive in the dark. As I watched, her wings were pulled through the drain, a glistening rainbow, so thin that I could see through the membranes. She was beautiful. And she was deadly.
If Opal stayed alive she could come after Molly at any time, past or present or future. Anyplace. If Opal lived, Molly or her child, or both, might die. I flipped the long sword, thinking, my blade catching the light of Opal’s beauty. Thinking about time and memory. About changing time itself, both in the future and in the past, like plucking one bubble of possibility out of the timeline and breaking it up into molecules and atoms of nothingness. Could Opal also change a memory of the future, of an event yet to be? Was changing the memory of a future event even possible? And if she could, would that be an evil of the worst sort? Or would it be worse if I killed her, a creature so beautiful she had to make even God weep? I didn’t know what to do, but I had a bad feeling that no matter what I did it would be the wrong thing, ruining everything for everyone in the process.
I slowed the movement of the sword and held it low, tip near the floor. Took a breath. Smelled Molly’s panic, stagnant on the air. I turned to the stairs and saw Angie Baby, peeking around the corner of the stairwell. She had slipped free of Molly’s warding. The little girl was watching, her eyes on me. I had stood still long enough for her to focus on me, even bubbled in time.
In this state, I could see the energies that once bound her magic. They were nothing more than a broken magical garment that she could put on and take off. Worse, as I watched, Angie reached out, her little hand moving faster than she should be able to. Her fingers threw tiny sparks of raw magic, and they raced away from her, as if searching. My breath caught. Holy crap.
Angie was seeking the Gray Between.
She must have seen me bubble time. And learned how by watching me.
If she figured that out, Angie would be more than dangerous. If she learned how to enter the Gray Between, she could be deadly to herself, or to me, by accident or in a fit of anger. She was a little girl. Little kids had no control or wisdom to know when to use, or not use, a gift or ability. Worse, if she figured out how to bubble time and alter it as the arcenciels could, there was no telling what that ability would do to her morality and ethics. She could abuse and alter timeline probabilities at a whim. Angie could easily become a weapon of mass destruction.
My choices were limited, and all of them were dangerous to Angie. She could see me kill the arcenciel. See me die at the jaws of the rainbow dragon. Then get eaten herself. See her mother die. Then get eaten herself.