Jane will not stay in Beast form, she thought back, sounding worried.

“What’s okay?” Eli said into the headset.

Inside me/us, Beast whistled with disquiet, a sound I recognized/remembered, one that puma kits make when they want their mother. It was weird coming from her now and I shook my head to clear her emotions away. “Nothing,” I whispered to Eli. There wasn’t time to explain a mostly nonverbal conversation to the one human in the group.

Brute chuffed at the spoken word and leaned against my thigh, but his quivering eased. “Brute?” I asked, my words mostly breath. “Is Peregrinus still here? Can you find him?”

Brute dropped his head to the floor and took a step into the bloody room. Eli handed me a flashlight, and I turned it on, a tiny, narrow beam of light. The wolf and my partner avoided all the blood somehow, never smearing the spatter, never leaving a print. I tried to be that careful, but I wasn’t as comfortable with my paws as Brute was with his, especially in half-Beast form. And Eli was just Eli.

The wolf led us through the signs of fighting, his nose to the floor, his breath a snuffling, whuffling sound, toward the stairs where he paused as if confused, and finally led us around the corner. We found the first body there, a human, a mangled mess of gore that gave no indication of gender or immediate cause of death. There were too many lethal possibilities in the glare of my flashlight, too many scents on the air to let me know by smell alone. But the human hadn’t died by sword or vamp fangs. It was something else, something I had never seen before but could instantly recognize. L’arcenciel teeth and fangs had done this. That or an alligator, grabbing and shaking its victim, whirling around and around underwater, tearing its dinner apart. But this person hadn’t been eaten, just mangled and left behind.

From somewhere deep in the building I heard the chugging cough of a generator starting, and the tiny security lights I’d installed along both sides of the hallways began to glow. At my side, Eli swung the ocular away from his face to dangle around his neck and indicated the body. “L’arcenciel?” I nodded and he asked, “The hatchling Soul was talking about? Under coercion?”

“Maybe. Probably. But the arcenciel smells sick. Maybe dying.”

Eli didn’t comment on that. “He okay?” he asked, meaning Brute.

“Yeah,” I lied. “He’s just ducky.” I nudged the wolf with a knee and we moved on, the werewolf in the lead by a head, his shoulder in constant contact with my leg.

The muted lights showed me too much. Another body, mauled like the first one, farther down the corridor. A body part half in a doorway. Things I didn’t want to see, smells of people I knew mixed with the stench of bowels released in death. There was no one left alive in the foyer or the hallways that veered off. No one to rescue or save.

This had been only recently done. Peregrinus had folded time and killed the people in the house next to Katie’s, folded time again and gotten here, and then folded time again and started killing people. So much damage, so fast.

Gray place of change, Beast thought at me. Jane needs to be in gray place, place Soul calls Gray Between.

I remembered the pain from last time. Not if I can help it, I thought.

Gray place, Beast demanded. Time is changed now.

Which meant that Peregrinus was doing things outside of time, right now, things no one could defend against. “Holy crap,” I whispered. “Eli. We may have a problem.”

“Ya think?”

Laughter cracked through me like dry sticks breaking, sharp and shattering and painful. I pulled Eli and the wolf back through the foyer and into the weapons room. I used Beast’s strength to rip the metal door off the small locked closet there and started inspecting the weapons that had been kept there, waiting for their owners to leave. Owners that may be dead. Without speaking, Eli joined me, standing so he could see out, into the foyer.

“The arcenciel can affect time,” I said, strapping a short-sword sheath to my left thigh for an ambidextrous draw. “Like what happens in a fight when time slows down and you can move fast, while everything else is slow.”

“Yeah,” he said shortly. Clearly remembering combat. His scent changed, pungent and astringent.

“The arcenciels—all of the species and not just this one—can do that to some extent. Like they can exist outside of time, or maybe create a bubble of time and place.” I laid weapons on the nearby desk.

“So they can come here and take out a well-defended, well-armed location as fast as a platoon of Rangers.”

“Faster. Like magic, but not. Probably some arcane way of shifting through the physical laws, like what happens when I shape-change. And because they can bend time or bubble it or fold it like dough, no one saw them coming.”

“Someone saw them. Someone fired. They fought back.”

I considered that as I added three nine-millimeter semis to my gear and enough spare mags to weigh down a donkey. I was careful, taking only weapons that used interchangeable magazines, though I lusted at the sight of a lovely .45 and Wrassler’s Taurus Judge .45/.410. I picked it up and checked the load. 410 rounds. What the heck. It was five rounds of power I wouldn’t have otherwise, and my part-cat hands could manage a lot more weight right now. I holstered the nine-mil I had been carrying and readied the Judge. The rounds contained steel and arcenciels were steel-phobic. If worse came to worst, maybe Soul could heal an injured hatchling.

Yet, even with the steel allergy, the young arcenciel had managed to dent the iron gate. Which had to have hurt her. “The arcenciel is under compulsion,” I said, still putting it all together, “what Soul calls being ridden. Peregrinus can force her to do things, even painful things, things she might never do on her own.”

“So Bethany, the crazy priestess, knew that an arcenciel could be ridden but had no idea how or what that might mean,” Eli said.

I remembered Bethany trying to physically climb on the light-dragon. “Yeah. And because of all that, I might have no choice but to kill the arcenciel hatchling,”

“You. Not us. Because you can fold time too,” Eli said, his tone calm.

I nodded, knowing his eyes had adjusted to the dark. “They fought,” I agreed. “Fat lotta good it did them.”

“What are Satan’s Three after?” he asked.

“I don’t know, but I’m betting Leo has some magical items on the premises. If so, then maybe what and where were in Reach’s data bank.” Eli cursed and I didn’t respond. I felt the same way.