Joses had been such a powerful vamp he could have taken anything he wanted, yet he made a lethal and valuable piece of jewelry—one crafted with timewalking arcenciel blood in place of one of the jewels—as some kind of enticement? Why?
I thought back to the night I met the old-lady vamps, suffering from drinking weed-laced blood or from the vamp version of dementia, living in a house that stank of marijuana. It would have been sad had they not been so content with their humans. And why hadn’t Soledad kept her jewelry? Why had all the pieces been hidden away?
“Was Soledad a witch?” I asked.
“I’ll check.” Bruiser went to our room and returned with his laptop. He opened the file of dossiers and scanned through to Soledad’s name. He frowned. “Yes. Low-level power, nothing significant. She was a sculptor. Her primary medium was stone. She carved the image of Katie in your fountain out back,” he added to me.
Our eyes met, remembering the marble statues in the Blessed Virgin church. “Holy crap. That might be important,” I said. “Why didn’t we know that?”
“Why would we have searched for that information?” Bruiser asked. “We didn’t need to know it until now. Mithrans live forever if they keep their heads. They try new things, new art, new music. They remake themselves often, because of boredom, war, ennui, or grief. None of us thought to consider Soledad as part of this.”
“Could she have put a curse or a working on the crucifix?” Koun asked.
Bruiser placed the Jesus focal and the key on the table. “Perhaps. Perhaps we need the rest of the focal, the cross the figure of the Christ would have been mounted upon. Perhaps we need all of it, the cross, the gold chain, and the box as well.”
The vamps turned to the stairs and after a moment I too heard the soft footsteps. Too soft and light to be Big Evan or Molly, the gait belonged to Angie.
My godchild peeked around the wall of the staircase, her green nightgown swinging forward, her strawberry-blond hair in a stiff braid to the middle of her back.
“Ant Jane? I had a dream.”
“Come here,” I said, holding out an arm. Angie walked sedately to me and into the crook of my arm.
“My feet are cold.”
My goddaughter was getting too old to be held, yet she climbed to my lap and put her feet on Bruiser’s thigh, as comfortable with us as she was with her parents. I melted into a gooey puddle inside at the trust in her actions, and from the look on his face, so did my honeybunch. Bruiser took her toes in his hand. “Very cold,” he agreed.
“That feels good.” Angie rested her head on my chest and looked at the gold Jesus and the silver key on the table. Sleepily, she said, “In my dream, you found him. You found my angel.”
“I found something in an old church,” I said hesitantly, “but Hayyel wasn’t totally there, according to Brute.”
Angie frowned hard. “He’s in two places at one time? Or maybe in two times?”
I looked at the vamps. “Thank you for your service tonight. I need to speak privately with my godchild.”
Koun and Tex went upstairs to the attic rooms andThema and Kojo went out the side door toward the new gate in the brick fence and their quarters in the former bordello that backed up to my home.
When the house was silent, I asked, “Angie, will you tell me what you see when you see futures? When you’re in the between place?”
“All the maybes. All the ways to one thing happening and all the ways to this other thing happening and what it takes to get there. And what happens if someone changes stuff. I don’t remember them all. Just the really bad ones.” She angled her head up to me and her braid fell over her shoulder. “Like when you die in between. Or my mama and daddy die. Or EJ. And I know I can’t stop it from happening, but I can tell you and you can make things happen to fix it.”
“How do I fix it?”
“You timewalk. You know. Like Brute.”
All the blood felt as if it drained out of me and my heart fell out of my chest cavity, yet I managed to sound calm. Somehow. “You know about timewalking?”
“Yeah. I saw you doing it in some of the betweens. It’s dangerous. I don’t do it anymore. I’m afraid I’ll step on butterflies.” She cocked her head, her sleep-mussed strawberry-blond braid swinging, “In one of the betweens I heard Eli telling you to not step on any butterflies or you could die. And stepping on butterflies changes time. But you might have to timewalk again to save everything.”
“I see. Yes, I’ll be careful of all the butterflies.” Which was weird, because Eli and I had had the butterfly talk about timewalking several times. “Can you tell me anything about the betweens coming up soon?”
“There was a dream about my angel. It was confusing and scary and I was watching you on a boat floating on the waves. A beach I’ve never been to. Underwater, there was a brick square, like what a house sits on.”
“A foundation?”
“Yeah.” She yawned hugely and stretched, her fists reaching out in front of her and crossing over before she took a normal breath and settled against me again. The complete trust was always my undoing. I kissed the top ofher head and blinked away tears. She was eight, but when she sat in my lap, it was as if she were four again.
“There was some rusted cannons on the beach bottom. And the bottom part of a wooden boat, one with a broken stick up the middle like to hold a sail. It was way bigger than the house bottom. A really big boat. And there were three skulls. You know. Like people skulls in the boat bottom.”
