if I die, he’ll become your official problem, little brother. And it won’t be fun and games, like the Sangre Duello. It’ll be war. You might want to have the National Guard on standby with rocket launchers and tanks just in case.”
He didn’t reply to that one. And it let me know I had been right about the kind of help that was being offered.
“Where is Soul?” I asked.
“You haven’t heard from her?”
Which wasn’t an answer. I hated it when people played games. It made me want to claw them, maybe draw a little blood, make a point.
Beast is best hunter. Want to hunt with littermate. Track and eat big deer.
I thought you were ticked off with him. And not right now, I thought back at my other half.
“Soul took some vacation time, and she’s due back. She hasn’t checked in with HQ yet, which is unlike her. The director fears that something has happened to her.”
I put his comments together and said, “You think she’s been taken by fangheads? Kidnapped?” Along with Edmund and Tex and Ronald and Derek, which I didn’t say aloud. Ayatas didn’t answer. Soul in the clutches of the Flayer would be bad. Very, very bad. Soul was the only creature keeping the arcenciels in check from changing the timeline. I remembered the visions of war I had seen in my soul home.
I shifted my gaze to Alex. On his laptop, he was already tracking Soul through credit card use and cell phone. I did not want to know how he had that access.
“I . . . do not know,” Ayatas said slowly. Which, again, was not an answer.
“Or she’s tracking the Son of Shadows and is too busy to get back to you.” Or she’s doing arcenciel stuff. My bet was door number two.
“I’ll be in touch, or one of my people will.” I ended the call without saying goodbye and ate two big spoonfuls of hard-to-chew oatmeal, thinking. The oats tasted strange in this form, and felt odd on my meat-tearing teeth; the sweet taste of sugar was barely there, but the milk was the elixir of the gods. I tilted my head to Eli. “You think I’m holding grudges?”
“Babe.” His tone was reproving.
“Janie, you are the Dark Queen of holding grudges,” Alex said.
“Grudges and hate make you weak,” Eli said.
“Is it justified?”
“Oh yeah. But remember that Ayatas is under orders and can’t help freely the way your clan members can. He’s constrained by the law, his vow of office, and his own honor. Your Cherokee family is an asset you aren’t using, out of pique, when they could probably be helpful. Keep all that in mind.” Eli, being all strategy on me, suggesting I use my by-blood family as a tool instead of treating them as people who had hurt me. That was an interesting way of viewing things. Cold and heartless, but interesting.
To Alex I said, “Update me on the liminal lines.”
He spun one of his tablets to me, and on it, a map of the world spread out, crisscrossed by lines in reds and blues and yellows. “There’s more than three. One liminal line runs from NOLA through Hot Springs, to New York State. Another runs from the Bahamas and through the mountains of NC.” He traced blue lines that moved in arcs like trade winds. “They cross ley lines all over the place.” The ley lines were red, and they could be straight or curled or could follow riverbeds or other geological features.
“How about interdimensional shift openings?”
“For starters, the Bermuda Triangle. Maybe here.” He pointed to a spot in the Atlantic Ocean. “And here”—he pointed to Greece—“is a maybe. Here in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains could be another. And here.” He shifted his finger to a place under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. “It’s close to where you were rescued by the arcenciels not so long ago. I’m guessing they were keeping an eye on the spot where they used to travel back and forth.” His eyes were sunken and there were dark circles beneath them. “All the rift openings were lost in some tectonic shift.”
I wasn’t sure what any of that meant, but I knew Alex needed rest. The big bad uglies would be in Asheville at dusk. I patted him on the shoulder. “Get some sleep. That’s an order.”
It was noon and the house was full of a hundred children all running and screaming through the open space. That was the way it sounded