“Is it the woman from WGNO?”

“Carolyne Bonner is indeed at the scene, Ms. Yellowrock.”

“And how is the local ABC station getting to scenes with revenants faster than anyone else?”

“It is my understanding that she has been permitted to cultivate a source high in New Orleans’ Mithran politics.”

Which meant that Leo was letting her into the center of things in case he needed to feed someone news with a slant. This was interesting, but not newsworthy. As I used a speedloader to load silver/lead ammo into extra .380 magazines, I snorted in soft laughter at the word newsworthy. Even I knew my internal play on words wasn’t really funny. Nerves maybe. It had been a long time since I went up against a revenant alone. They were superfast, were hungry as zombies, and never stopped. They were as hard to kill as bayou roaches.

I closed the deck cover and sat on the bench seat, looking out into the rain. Overhead, lightning flashed cloud-to-cloud, sparking the sky, as if angels were playing laser tag with real laser weapons. Thunder rumbled. The limo plowed through the streets and puddles the size of small lakes. I had lived in NOLA for two years, give or take, and I had gotten used to storms, wind, and rain, rain, more rain. But this was something else. This was making me itchy, getting up under my skin. Inside me, Beast was prowling, the tip of her thick tail twitching slightly.

Ahead, a mob of kids was playing in the rain. Drenched to the skin, jeans held up in one hand at the waistband to keep the water-heavy denim in place, they stomped and gestured and raced. An instant later, I realized they weren’t kids and they weren’t playing. This was the riot.

“How many?” I asked Shemmy.

“I can see . . . fifteen clearly, Ms. Yellowrock. Another twenty or so are half hidden. The fog and rain are so dense that even though I see forms at the street corners, racing back and forth, I can’t tell how many. I can guesstimate we’re looking at more than fifty. NOPD is five minutes out.”

“Which means more like twenty.” I called Alex and asked, “Do we have an update on the revenant’s location?”

“Yeah, but we have worse worries. Grégoire says his sire is in New Orleans. Derek says he’s freaking out in HQ. Trying to get outside in the daylight.”

He was being called, demanded to join his sire. It was a psychic link that the script and fantasy novel writers got right. That calling meant that Le Bâtard was in New Orleans, on the city’s soil. My insides made a little quiver and shake. “Sit Wrassler on him. And give him a job. Get Grégoire to list all the hotels, restaurants, gin joints, and haunts Le Bâtard might frequent. Get him to list all the people he might want to see, steal, or kill. Get another list of all Le Bâtard’s scions and grand-scions. Keep Blondie busy.”

“Good idea. When did you get all touchy-feely, Janie?” Before I could answer, he said, “The church janitor, name of Babeaux, is holed up in a closet with a layperson. They have cell phones and sent footage out to the press of the revenant. Loading that up to your cell now. Babeaux says he can hear the revenant in the sanctuary, tearing the place up.”

“Ms. Yellowrock,” Shemmy interrupted. “We’ll have to go directly through the riot to reach the chur—”

Lightning struck the earth about two feet from the limo. The blast was so bright it seared my eyeballs. The sound so loud it deafened me. It fried the cell’s electronics, burning my hand and adding the stink of burned plastic and ozone to the air I gasped in. The light and thunderclap went on and on as the Gray Between opened up around me. I dropped the ruined phone and it hung in midair.

I clutched the Gray Between energies to me and shoved the limo door open on the far side of the vehicle. Dashed through the stationary drops, getting soaked, refusing to see the future possibilities in each. I sped through the riot, taking away a gun from a furious-faced teen, tripping his adversary, knocking a bullet from its trajectory toward the ground. I didn’t stop all the violence, but since time was no longer an issue, I made a circuit of the riot area and helped where I could.

By the time I finished, the lightning bolt had nearly completed its descent and I was having trouble controlling the Gray Between. I was growing claws, and golden hair was sprouting through my skin. Beast was trying to push her way through. Sometimes it didn’t hurt, but this time it hurt. Bad.

I need hands to pull a trigger and hold a stake and a vamp-killer, I warned her.

Beast is not doing this, she said back.

I sprinted toward the church and the revenant. What then?

Storm. Light from clouds. Magic.

Something else is pulling my skinwalker magics to the surface? Just like it’s bubbling time.

Yes.

Well, that sucks.

Something moved in my peripheral vision and I looked around, seeing nothing at ground level. I glanced up into the storm. Above me, in the Gray Between, an arcenciel hovered, her wings out and her tail caught in the moment of lashing. It didn’t look like Soul, rather, the other one I knew of, the juvenile arcenciel named Opal. The light dragon was horned and frilled, her long hair copper and brown, her body scaled with red light and a hint of sapphire. She was half human-faced, half dragon. Her teeth were eight inches long, sharp and pearled. The scales of her snake body glistened like the opals for which she was named. Her wings were pearled bronze, marked by small feathered flourishes here and there.

The Gray Between usually allowed rainbow dragons to see me working outside of time, and since they could bubble time, they could trace my whereabouts through it. This one, though, was not using the ability to bubble time, but was still in normal human time. Dancing in lightning. Magic. Magic was affecting them too. The storm was magic, and more so than I had guessed. It was a good thing humans couldn’t see magic, or the locals would be firing handguns and automatic rifles up at them, hoping to bring down a trophy-dragon.

The church was white adobe-like stuff on the outside, rain-damaged palms and small trees along the outer walls. Broken concrete and shell-based asphalt paving the parking lot. I dashed into the darkness. The entrance walls were white plaster, recently painted.

The Gray Between flickered, my joints popped and expanded, and my hips narrowed. Pelt grew down across my face and over my limbs. I darted into the sanctuary, though Catholics probably called it something else. The altar area was a huge arch. Plaster dead saints stood on stands, and plaster angels held up candelabra. Stained-glass windows were pictures of Bible stories. The ceiling had been repaired, and scaffolding was still in place. The smell of paint and age hung on the air, mixed with fresh blood and old death. I passed by a life-sized crucifix. Two church pews hung in the air as if levitated, caught in the moment of no-time. They had been thrown by the revenant.

She stood, arms raised in fury, about halfway down the center aisle, feet braced to either side of a body. It—he—was dressed in black and might have been wearing a clerical collar, though the blood that drenched his shirt hid that. His bald head was sitting atop the gold cross behind the altar. He looked vaguely surprised.

The revenant was wearing a dress of rags and one shoe without the heel, the other foot bare. She was scorched, and smoke curled up from her, spiraled and coiled. She was half on fire, burned, psychotic, and a lot rotted. She stank like last week’s roadkill. She had been called from the grave, she had been out in the daytime, and she was the dead undead, so she had good reason for the poor fashion sense and the stench. It had probably been decades since she bathed.

I pulled the unfamiliar silver-plated vamp-killer and tested its balance by swiping it through the air, loosening up. It was hilt-heavy and was too lightweight for what I wanted. But it was what I had from the cache in the limo. I pulled it into a backswing. Rushed her.

The lightning dimmed. Thunder reached its highest pitch. The pews dropped several inches, starting to fall as time unbubbled. I leaped. Vamp-killer high. Screaming.

Time took a jump, paused, and caught up with me.

The revenant saw me, heard me, turned her head to me as I left the ground. Opened her mouth to reveal the dog fangs. She leaped at me. Inside my swing. The pews fell with twin crashes and splintered wood flew. Wood shards stabbed me. The vamp and I met about three feet off the ground. Slammed together in midair.