I were alone. I needed to be ready when the opportunity came.
My mind on autopilot, I dressed and braided my hair, repainted my claws with the last of the scarlet polish. I looked in the full-length mirror. My hair was in a fighting queue, with multiple silver stakes in it like a crown. Six throwing knives. I didn’t put on boots, but I did secure a tactical pocketknife in the deep boot sheath and a tactical fixed blade over it. Someone searched me once I put on the boots? They’d find the fixed blade easy peasy, but chances were good that they wouldn’t stick their fingers into the space below and find the folded knife. My dual shoulder holster and matching nine-mils. I slid my lucky vamp-killer into its sheath. This blade had been made for me by Evan to replace the one lost when I killed Molly’s sister for calling a demon. The vamp-killer had taken many enemies since then. It was mostly superstition, but I felt safer with it on me.
I heard Molly’s fast steps up the stairs. My half-form ears were better than my human ears. She was calling out before she reached my doorway. “Someone’s coming up the road. I can feel it through the hedge and Alex says two monitoring devices indicate something passed through.” She swung in the doorway, arms holding the doorjamb to either side, bouncing on her toes.
I gave a slight smile. “You could have texted.”
“I need the exercise. I need to get away from the kids. You coming or you just gonna stand there looking all badass?”
My cell dinged and I tapped on the speaker. Alex said, “You and Molly get back here. The car’s now being chased at five miles an hour through the snow, by two more cars. Eli and Bruiser are on the way there but it’s slow going in the drifts. Witches are in place. Need you here.”
Molly turned and raced back downstairs. She was wearing running shoes, doing cardio. “Move it, Big-Cat!”
I followed and entered the office, where Alex had the main TV screen partitioned off into twelve screens, each with a different view, none of them showing dying bloody vamps. The kids were putting a puzzle together on a big coffee table that hadn’t been there earlier, juice boxes with tiny straws and a bowl of grapes between them. They were under a personal hedge, big enough to cover the kids and the table. Neither child looked up when I entered, seemingly focused on the shaped pieces before them. Uh-huh. Sure. But, Molly’s problem, not mine.
“With one of the outer-perimeter cameras, I spotted Soul inside the lead car. She’s being chased by the other cars, driven by blood-servants of the Flayer,” Alex said. “But an arcenciel doesn’t have to let herself be chased.”
“Right,” I muttered, taking in the different screens. I had seen Soul shift to her rainbow dragon form. And to a tiger. She could be anything she wanted. So why stay human-shaped, trapped in a slow-moving car, one that was having trouble staying on the narrow drive, swerving and sliding across the ice? The car revolved slowly left and began a slow spin as it approached a raised curve, the road higher than the woods around it. The car behind her was wearing chains. It revved up, throwing snow from all tires. Its bumper nudged Soul’s car. Just hard enough.
Soul’s vehicle left the driveway, made a circle half on the verge, and tilted. Almost leisurely, its front end slanted down and slid off the raised drive, down into the trees. It hit two small trees that should have stopped it, but lack of friction and momentum sent it sideways, into more trees, crumpling the passenger door and sending showers of ice and snow from branches to cover the windshield and roof.
The car wasn’t stopped; it twisted and spun farther, down into the denser trees, wedging itself in, finally coming to rest facing back up the driveway, the headlights brightening the gray day. On the screen to the left, I could make out Eli following Bruiser through the snowfall. Bruiser moved like a vamp, fast and graceful. Even with a body full of vamp blood, Eli was less nimble than usual and a lot slower, falling behind in the half-mile sprint. Brute was nowhere to be seen.
Alex put something in my hand and I pulled on a communication unit by muscle memory. This one fitted my cat-situated and shaped ears. Eli had been making