“This is about more than just information. If we have to fight the hatchling, and Soul shows up and takes the hatchling’s side, we might be toast. You know, since we have no idea what her powers are.”

“And if she tries to eat you while you’re in the gray place?”

“Hope she gets heartburn?”

“Not overly funny,” Eli said. “Don’t quit your day job for the comedic stage.”

“I’d need better writers. Better sidekicks too. Guys with wicked T-shirts, tights, capes, and way-cool masks.” They ignored me. I set the mug/bowl on the table and stood. “I’ll be outside for a bit.”

“I’ll keep watch,” Eli said, still not looking up from the weapons. Hands moving as fast as Beast might, he began reassembling the nine-mil. I watched as it practically flew back together with fine, delicate little clicks. He slammed the magazine home and racked the slide to load a round, removed the mag, added a final round, and slammed it home again. He stood and gestured to the windows at the side of the house.

I went through one, Eli behind me. I climbed up on the rocks at the back of the house in the rock garden that had been part of the requirements for me to come to New Orleans in the first place. I still didn’t know where Katie had gotten boulders or how much it had cost her to have them shipped in, but they were much the worse for wear, several chipped and ground down to a medium rock sand from the times I had needed mass to shift into an animal bigger than I was. Beast had stopped asking to be big so much recently, since I gained a few pounds.

I settled on the largest boulder and crossed my knees, leaning back against a smaller rock. I no longer needed to get into a lotus to enter the gray place of the change, but sitting on the rocks in that position was habit. I just closed my eyes and thought about the place I needed to be. It was inside me. I sighed and smiled. All along it had been inside me. And outside me. And probably everywhere.

I felt the energies rise and spread through and around me like a faintly tingling mist. It was cooler than the air, the darker motes of energies sharp and pinging where they touched my skin. I didn’t know if I’d need to say her name aloud or just think it. I was flying by the seat of my pants, after all, just like usual. Be sad if I really did get eaten this time.

I opened my eyes to see Eli on the side porch, his handgun in one hand and a vamp-killer-sized short sword in the other, except that the blade was all steel, no silver plating. Not for vamps. Steel for Soul. Like steel for Gee DiMercy. Who, last time I saw him, was being mesmerized by the bigger arcenciel. Interesting. Both species with an aversion to steel, both tied to the creation myth of the Cursed of Artemis. Had Artemis been an arcenciel? They had left my house together as if they’d recognized each other’s species, if not each other personally.

“Soul,” I called. “Girrard DiMercy.” I waited for several minutes, then called again, this time thinking about the snake dragon and the Anzû, picturing them in my mind. Again I waited. And waited. And called again. And nothing. Either what I was doing couldn’t be done by a skinwalker, or I was doing it wrong.

I tried picturing the gray energies as not a cloud around me, but more a thing that existed everywhere, something that I was part of. Light and matter, two parts of a whole. With dark matter and dark energy in there somewhere. Physics I didn’t understand but was a part of. I dropped deeper into the gray place—the Gray Between—and let myself look out and around, seeing not the world I knew, but a gray net of light and dark, some places dense with dots of energy, some not so dense, tiny dots pulsating. Everything quivered. Everything had movement. Some slower than others, some much faster, the minute vibrations in all things. The thought came to me. This was the unlimited possibilities of the all-space. Which made no sense at all. And yet did.

I felt lighter somehow, effervescent, as if I could fly or float away. As if I could do anything. I laughed, and the vibration of my laughter seemed to affect the area around me and out like rings in a pond when you toss in a stone. This was the way I felt when I had consumed enough alcohol to feel a hint of a buzz, the way I felt when I bit Soul. Suddenly Soul was there, in front of me. She was in her winged, sparkling snake form, and standing on her head was a blue and scarlet-winged bird. Her snakelike tail rattled and shook, sounding like dry bones. “Speak, Jane. U’tlun’ta.”

“I’m not a liver-eater,” I groused.

“You neither are a liver-eater nor are you not a liver-eater.”

“Schrödinger’s cat.”

“Schrödinger was a foolish human, but wiser than most. What do you want?”

“Peregrinus has the hatchling. He captured her in a . . . something. She’s hanging on his necklace.”

Soul showed me her teeth. All of them. And there were a lot of teeth, some as long as my arm. “She was vulnerable to his call because you wounded her with steel,” she said.

She had figured that out. Or Gee had told her. “I know. And I’m sorry. But I need your help to find Peregrinus, kill him, and free the hatchling.”

She pulled back a short distance, like a snake coiling back on itself. “You would help the young one? Even after she killed humans in the vampire council chambers? Why?”

“Why not? Peregrinus forced her. I want Peregrinus dead. You want the baby arcenciel back safe and sound. We’re stronger together than alone.”

“I will assist as I can,” Soul said, “but the hatchling can bind time and space. She can alter energies at will. She is young enough to go where she wishes, or where her captor wishes, once he learns how to ride her. Peregrinus is intelligent. He will have learned from taking the young one and by now will certainly be capable of capturing me as well. I was a prisoner of time once and will not be so again.” She gnashed her teeth and they clacked like pearls against bamboo, a poetic thought totally unlike me. Rather, they sounded like bones rattling. Yeah. Better.

“My kind make a dangerous weapon in the hands of others,” Soul said, “as would my little bird.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Speaking of little birds, can Gee DiMercy find Bethany, the vampire priestess, and the Onorios, and tell them to contact me?”

“This he can do. Go, little bird. Make alliance with the vampire priestess.”

Gee chirped and spread his wings, blinking out of sight. I had no idea where he’d gone, or whether he could manipulate the gray place of the change on his own, or whether Soul just did it for him. So many questions and so few answers. “Thank you,” I said, as formally as I knew how.