“As some of you now know, I had learned a newwyrd, a wayto break the crystal from the inside. Alone of my kind, if I were captured, I could break myself free. With the permission of National Director Mackey of PsyLED, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the president of the United States, I made myself bait. But I did not plan on being approached by Welshgwyllgiasking for help to escape Torquemada. Nor was I prepared for Torquemada’s men to approach me in my apartment within minutes of his arrival. I bit my attackers, shifted to human form, and allowed myself to be captured when the boy was taken.”
“Zeb?” I asked.
“Your kin. Yes,” Soul said.
Shock like icicles ran down my limbs.
“I’m sorry to say, Director,” Soul said, “that there was not time to apprise you of my change in plans before I was abducted by Torquemada’s people. They took my cell phone,” she said wryly. “I’ve lost track of how many days I spent in a cage in a warehouse, but once I discovered the location of the only remaining trapped arcenciel, I devised a way to get the others out. I set many of the younggwyllgifree, killed all of the adults I could find, and bit all the vampires in the warehouse before I allowed them to capture me in my light form. Once they took me to their cave, I escaped and brought my people to safety.”
I slid my eyes to FireWind.
His mouth was turned down in a fierce scowl. “Several young devil dogs, little more than boys, were tortured in your human presence.”
“I knew their names,” I said.
“Nothing was more important than finding the last arcenciel,” she said.
“Forgive me if I quarrel with that assessment,” I said, fighting for breath, fighting to hold down my fury.“You should be in jail.”
FireWind whipped his head to me, his yellow eyes blazing.
“I happen to agree,” Soul said. “The boys deserved to be free. They were nothing but food to the vampires, young and old. I erred, put away the duty I swore to uphold, in favor of saving my own kind. Hence, all arcenciels will return to our world through the rift, and I will close the rift as we leave. Director. Please consider this my formal resignation.”
“Soul,” Mackey said softly.
“I cannot remain here. When I said this was my final report, I meant that in the sense of my final report forever. I still hear the screams of the tortured. I wish to—must—return home. I must heal. I am done with this place. End report.”
In an instant she shifted to her light dragon form and spread her diaphanous wings. She leaped for the sky. Pearl, Opal, and Cerulean leaped after her. Only the lizard-shaped dragon remained.
“Soul wept,” she said, her voice rubbery and elastic, as if her larynx was made of balloons. “No arcenciel weeps for humans. They live such a short time, a flower in a field, a mist that appears in the dawn and then vanishes away. You are nothing to ones such as we. This mission, allowing the dog-boys to die to achieve her ends, it broke her. We do not understand her foolish grief.” The unknown arcenciel spread her wings and shoved off with her lizard legs, joining the last of her kind in the sky.
When they were gone, Margot lowered her camera. She had taken video of the entire conversation and of Soul’s final report. She turned off her phone and walked up to me. “I apologize.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For not realizing that you were just as alone for half of your life as I was.”
“You’un fit in here pretty good.”
“I do, don’t I? We do.”
I smiled and said, “Yeah. We do.”
“Coffee one day next week? Girl talk?”
“I’d like that. But right now, I’m ’bout to pass on out.”
TWENTY-THREE
Three days before Christmas, long after the last arcenciel had vanished from the face of the earth, and after the buried vampires had been released from the land, I was standing in the center of my house, wearing a dress so beautiful it made me want to cry. I stroked my hand across the fabric and wondered at the silky feel of it.
Mud handed me my bouquet of bare stems: maple, oak, and poplar, tied together with freshly green-leafed-out stems and fall-scarlet-leafed stems from the vampire tree. It symbolized the seasons and the life of the land. It stood for Soulwood and the Green Knight.
The vampire tree had donated its stems from the new sapling I had cut down in the front yard the day before, the sapling that came from Tomás de Torquemada dying true-dead on my lawn. There was still a lot of sawdust and wood chips from that epic event, and the tree had been cut up and dragged to dry at the edge of the property. Later it would be cut and shaped into a pretty table for the house.
The vampire tree wasn’t happy about being harvested, but it was partially mollified to be part of the ceremony.
“You look amazing,” Mud said. She was beaming, her dress a vibrant green we had raided from among Leah’s things and that looked perfect on her. “I love you, sister mine.”
