Her defensive tone made me afraid that she had taken a wild guess. Mud was often impulsive, but she had seemed so certain this time, as if she had known, not flipped a mental coin.
I dropped my head back and stared up at the night sky. I said, “Before anyone gets comfy, we have to release the other two vampires under the earth.”
“This is an order,” FireWind said. “This unit has done enough tonight. We can take care of vampires tomorrow night.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m a mite tuckered.”
Before I could get the words out fully, the sky overhead rippled with light, pearly, prismed, scintillating light.
Esther whispered, “Leviathan.” She darted to the house and her babies.
Breathing hard between short phrases, I said, “I had hoped for a break. But the arcenciels are here. From the light show it looks like they’re here in force. Three arcenciels at least. Ain’t we lucky.”
FireWind murmured something in another language and turned away, dialing his cell.
“They’re pretty,” Mud said. “They dangerous?”
“Very.” I looked down at myself. I was covered in the blood of vampire and the blood of my friend. But my hands were not as rooty and knotted as before. I felt my belly. It was less woody. But I was heavily leafed out. I was a forest at my scalp and nails. I could feel them unfurling in my boots.
I needed a shower and time to wash the blood off me and out of my hair. As Mud might say, I was kinda gross. Right now I had no time for a shower or to groom my leaves.
Mud, still kneeling beside me, whispered, “After all this, are we’uns gonna get eaten?”
“I hope not. And if we do, let’s plan to give them a whopping case of indigestion.”
Mud giggled nervously and slid an arm around me, under my shoulders. I forced myself to my feet, my baby sister helping me stand straight. If the dragons came to kill us, there was no weapon that could harm them except cold iron. I thought fleetingly of the rusted ax-head the ground had given up at Esther’s when all this started. Of the iron horseshoe that had fallen off the shed not so long ago. Of John’s old woodworking tools.
Four arcenciels landed. I recognized Pearl, Opal, and Cerulean. The new one was a topaz and sapphire creature who didn’t take on human form when they landed. In size, the new dragon looked more like a teenaged human, but was built like a lizard with horns, standing upright. She was smaller than the others, maybe younger.
She hissed at us.
The lizard was likely the one that had been inside Tomás de Torquemada’s crystal, which had to be a horrible experience, but all I could think of was the green lizard on the old commercials and wondered if she spoke with an Australian accent. I breathed out a silent laugh, and Mud elbowed me in the side.
“Stop that,” she said. “Them’s guests.”
“Sorry,” I said. But I wasn’t. I was simply too tired to be properly hospitable.
From the heavens came a greater light. A big,bigdragon. The light was blinding, like a million rainbows shining through fog, a mist that hadn’t been there a moment past. She landed, remaining in dragon form, and walked closer to the others until they were under her wing, which she kept raised like a rainbow umbrella. She wrapped her tail around them, creating a barrier between us.
FireWind stepped closer and said, “Soul. It is good to see you…looking well. We have been concerned.”
“The business of dragons is none of yours,” she said. The voice sounded like Soul, if the words had been put to music, to bells and strings and woodwinds. To a melody straight from heaven.
“The safety of our friend is our business,” Aya said, his words gentle.
The dragon cocked her head. “ ‘Friend’…” Her eyes wereround as plates and glowed with inner light. That light blasted out and we all turned away. When I blinked away the glare, Soul, in her human form, was holding Ayatas FireWind and Rick LaFleur in a hug. Or killing them. With my burned retinas it was hard to tell for sure.
“I forgot for a moment—for a while more than that—what it meant to be human. Forgive me. I made your jobs harder,” she said, her silver hair floating on the air, her gossamer dress billowing. “I’m sorry. I stepped outside the bounds of my official duties as assistant director of PsyLED.”
No one spoke into the silence, all of our faces showing the confusion we felt.
“You mean because you bit vampires?” Rick asked.
“It was the only way to save all of the prisoners they had trapped,” Soul said.
“How many?” FireWind asked, stepping back first from the physical contact.
“Let me give my final report to close my case,” Soul said. “Do you have a recorder?”
