tree slipped. She pushed off and landed on a ledge so tiny her paws barely fit, lined up in a row, her body pressed to the wall. The broken boulders landed below, crashing and shattering.
Fun! Beast thought.
No. Not fun. Holy crap!
She leaped again and raced upward, until we were at the top of the ravine, some quarter of a mile away from where we had gone down. I didn’t ask if she knew her way back. My mind was filled with too many questions and not enough answers. And with visions of falling, our cat body crushed by boulders. Beast sped back to the SUV. Leaping from branch to branch, over rocks, and scattering icy clumps of snow. She was panting hard, her paws hot on the snow. We had come a long way, and if it hadn’t been so cold, Beast would have been overheated long before we saw Eli’s headlights in the dark.
Stop! I thought.
She halted. So fast she nearly toppled forward. Only cat balance, dropping to her haunches, prevented her fall. Eli would never leave the lights on, advertising his location, I thought.
She raised her head and scented, drawing in air over her tongue and the scent sacks in the roof of her mouth. She made the faintest scree of sound. Smell vampires, Beast thought back. Smell strange vampires.
Oh crap.
Beast moved slowly through the darkness, back paws into front paw prints, pawpawpaw, overlapping, steps silent. Silent. She leaped into the branches. Approaching the lights and the stealthy sounds, her puma ears picked up.
Scent vampires. More than one. Not more than five.
No way anyone could have found us. They had to track us. Crap. Eli had stopped two vamps at the sweathouse. I bet they evaded the sensors and monitors and put devices on the vehicles. Crap, crap, crap.
Do not smell Eli blood. Littermate is uninjured. Or strangled.
Strang— That’s a big freaking help.
Jane is welcome. Beast sometimes kills prey by holding neck until deer falls asleep. Then Beast kills. Sometimes prey dies from holding bite.
From thirty feet high, Beast approached the SUV. SUVs. There were two of the vehicles now, ours and a red Range Rover. Lipstick red. Like the one that delivered Shiloh to us. The red vehicle had its lights on.
Four vampires stood in a wedge on the snowy road, facing into the bare trees. Three of them wore jeans, dress shirts, and dark ties. One of them wore a fancy wool coat. Lego, his blond hair whiter than his pale skin. Eli was nowhere in sight. Hidden in the dark. Lego hadn’t been at the Regal with the Flayer of Mithrans. I studied the others and decided they hadn’t been there either. So it was possible, likely even, that we had two groups of vamps in town, both of them threats. Well, isn’t that just ducky.
Is not ducks, Beast thought. Is vampires.
Yeah. And I don’t have time to shift.
Jane is dying. Beast is best hunter.
“You will give us the crystal,” Lego said, speaking into the trees. “The dragon that Joseph Santana wore is mine to ride.”
Joseph—Joses—the elder Son of Darkness, had owned a crystal with an arcenciel trapped in it. The dragon made it possible for Joses to navigate through time, at least to a limited degree. Until a fight took place and the crystal broke, freeing the dragon, and Joses got bitten. Arcenciel bites made vamps nutso-bonkers-crazy, so crazy Joses had hung on a wall in the lowest basement in vamp central in NOLA for a hundred years, raving, his powerful blood Leo’s to drink. These guys wanted that crystal. They had inside info, but it was outdated. I had given a spell to the arcenciels that would free them from any crystal, and I had fed Joses to Brute. So far as I knew, the big meal didn’t even cause the werewolf heartburn.
Seconds had passed as all that ran through my mind, with an undercurrent thought and sensory pattern by Beast. She took in the trees, the branches, the tops of the SUVs, the headlights, the position of the vamps, and the likely position of Eli, based on where the vamps were facing.
Eli is in tree, there, Beast looked to our right, about twenty feet off the ground. In Beast’s night vision, I could make out the silver green of my partner. He was wearing his cold suit, probably invisible to the vamps, but they could likely smell him and pick up his heartbeat. Beast gathered herself tight, claws partially protracted, touching the