I chuckled and held out my arms. Eli stepped closer and we hugged. It was a bro hug, all back patting and awkwardness. And it made me want to cry with happiness.
He stepped away before it could get too girly and said, “Want pancakes?”
“And bacon. Lots and lots of bacon.Poundsof it.”
“Let’s start with four pieces and move up from there,” he suggested. “Not interested in cleaning up bacon puke. You’ll have to trust me on this one.”
“Spoilsport.”
***
After the best breakfast in ages, I dropped on the sofa in the TV room/office. I called Soul, expecting to get voice mail, prepared to leave a snarky message. Instead, Soul answered. “Assistant Director, PsyLED.”
“Oh. Ummm. You’re back. Not missing. Not kidnapped.”Out of touch for days and taking three weeks of leave and now suddenly back on the job? Like that wasn’t weird?
“Why would I be—Never mind. Spit it out, Yellowrock. I’m on a crime scene.”
“Since when does the ass director do fieldwork?”
“You think I haven’t heard that one? Try harder. And I’m here because an arcenciel was spotted in Knoxville killing a local farmer’s beef cattle.”
“Oh. Ummm. We got a problem in Asheville. A nasty foreign vampire—”
“Is in town and ICE is handling it,” she interrupted. “ICE and PsyLED do not play well together, and when things got contentious, a meeting was called. It wasn’t pretty and it pitted my boss and the director of ICE against each other in front of the secretary of defense. She sided with ICE. They kicked us out of the meeting. I have nothing to offer you, Yellowrock.”
“Info exchange?”
“You first.”
“The vamp is the Flayer of Mithrans. The other Son of Darkness. In the recent past he had, or currently he has, witches in a time circle somewhere nearby. He’s wearing, well, growing, an exoskeleton.”
Soul whispered a curse and I heard a car door close. The ambient noise on her side went soft, and I figured she had gotten in a car. “We have dealt with this in Natchez. I’ll see that my people refresh their memories on the reports. As I recall, exoskeletons are the result of genetic changes that force vampires into insectoid forms. It happens when a vamp is trying to alter or bend time with witch magic. Correct?”
“Yeah. ICE can’t handle this.” The only thing that might—assuming they could find Shimon—was extreme force. Rocket launchers. Guided missiles. “They have to have a time circle somewhere.”
“Any idea where the circle is?”
It was likely that Soul was going to give me nothing. But I took a chance. “No. But I did find a rift, down deep in a cleft of stone. And an arcenciel flew out of it. Juvie, maybe ten feet long. Lavender and purple wings and charcoal body.”
Soul was silent for a little too long for my comfort level and I was afraid she was going to hang up. She wasbreathing too fast, her voice strained, when she said, “You know where a rift is? Anewrift? Andactiverift?”
“Yes.”
“In return for its location, you want help, under your command.”
Relief made me sag against the sofa. “Anything you can swing my way. I also want to know everything you have on liminal lines and liminal thresholds.” No one knew much about how they worked or even what they were. No one except arcenciels and maybe the Anzu.
“Most of what I know is what your kind refers to as theoretical physics. However, my kind came through a rift. We were worshipped as gods for eons by the primitive humans. We taught them mathematics, the positions of the stars, geometry, farming, and how to build with wattle and daub and then with mud bricks. Later with rough stone. How to use hydrodynamics for farming, plumbing. How to build canals. The art of stonemasonry and lapidary.”
“The People of the Straight Ways,” I said. “Canal builders, long before the pyramids were even conceived of.”
“Yes. Then the climate changed very suddenly and floods were massive, accompanied by earthquakes and the loss of human civilizations all over this world.”
“I got that part. The indigenous people who survived said the bones were piled so high that when the wind blew, it was the sound of bones dancing.”
“The portals between worlds were lost in the tectonic shifts. We need access to a new rift.”
I said nothing, waiting, enjoying my new talent of forcing people to talk while ticking them off, all at once.
