He took another breath, this one more stable but still wet sounding. “Yeah. Okay. I’m monitoring coms from off-site, so I don’t have access to the remote joystick for the dynamic cams. But on sub-three we have vamps feeding in the hallways. Just a word of warning—don’t go down there. I had to turn off the video. I need to scrub my eyeballs with bleach. There’s stuff happening down there that’s gonna give me nightmares and warp my sexual development forever.”

“Yeah. I’m real worried about that.” Not.

“How bad are you hurt?” he asked. “Do you need to shift?”

I blinked and looked up. Right. He could see me on the security camera. Beast? I thought at her. She didn’t reply, and I had to wonder if the blast of magic had hurt her. I shook my head to clear it and sought the Gray Between, the place where my skinwalker magics rested. And it wasn’t there. I . . . couldn’t sense it at all. Fear twisted through me like frozen barbed wire, burning where it touched.

Using the action to cover my reaction, I pushed myself to my knees, then to my feet, with my unblistered left hand. My gut was roiling, and I retched, the spasm making the pain worse for a terrifying space of time, but I didn’t vomit blood. Always look on the bright side. I’d had a housemother who used to say that, at the children’s home where I was raised. I wasn’t sure how that related to the sickness I experienced after folding reality, but it wasn’t bad advice. I might try it as soon as I could stand upright again. Walk again.

With the toe of my boot, I tapped the scorched vamp-killer. The blade shivered and split, sharp shards of steel flying up and tinkling down to the marble. With my left hand, I lifted my right arm against my waist, feeling blisters burst along my lower arm. The pain was like sliding my arm through burning cacti. It was all I could do to keep from screaming, but I held my breath until the agony eased, keeping silent for the Kid. Moisture leaked into the silk lining, feeling cold and slimy beneath the roasted leather.

Even though he was not yet of legal age, I knew better than to treat Alex like a child, and since I knew he could see my face, I answered honestly, “I’ve had better days. Continue.” As Alex talked, I opened the med-pocket on the thigh rig and pulled out a roll of self-adhesive sticky bandage, fashioning a makeshift sling so I could keep the arm in place. The material was black, like my leathers. Eli liked military medical stuff, and so a lot of our medical gear was plain white, stark black, or army camo. In this case, the color would make my injured condition less of an issue until I could see to it.

“Sub-four floor is calming. Leo’s there. He’s pis— He’s not happy. But he’s not raging either. Wait. He’s heading down.”

“Down to sub-five?”

“Yeah. And cameras are off-line there. Working to get them back on system, which would be easier if I was there or if Angel Tit was on duty.” Angel Tit was Derek’s best coms and security guy, and we all worked well together, but he was out of town and new people meant less reliable help. “Leo’s moving fast, Grégoire right behind. You better hurry.” Grégoire was the best fighter the American Mithrans had and was utterly devoted to Leo. He was also Leo’s right-hand boy toy.

Hurry. Right. “Keep me in the loop when you hear from Eli and Derek.” The Kid grunted again, sounding remarkably like his big brother. I sheathed the stake I had dropped, unaware I had even drawn one in the fight, found a bottle of water in my gobag, and took a sip to moisten my throat. I wanted more but had discovered the hard way that anything on my cramping stomach made me throw up. A lot. Recapping the bottle, I pulled a handgun, one with an ambidextrous grip, so I could hold it in my left. My injured right arm was now cradled against my belly so I wouldn’t bump it on something and maybe pass out. Again.

With the elevator out, I wound my way up to and through the ballroom and out a set of stairs that led only up again, then around through the walls and back down. In the past few weeks, we had mapped most of the secret stairways, elevator shafts, and passages and installed electric lights with battery backup. They were low-maintenance, low-level illumination, in this case just tiny button lights down one side of the stairs, though some of the larger stairways had two sets of lights, one on either side of the casing.

Alex came back on, saying, “Police just got reports of, and I quote, ‘a man on fire, running through the streets, being chased by gang members.’ So I guess black guys have to be gang members, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, my voice low so as not to carry as I made my way down and around and down again, to the landing at the bottom of sub-five, the fifth-floor subbasement. I smelled blood on the updrafting air, vamp and human, and lots of it. From sub-four I could hear sounds that let me know the vamps were getting happy and well fed. I adjusted the grip on the weapon and gasped when I joggled the right arm. Something was very wrong with that. Beast should have sent me some relief by now. I could hear her panting in the back of my mind, and I got an image of her lying on a rock floor, licking her paw pad. Right front limb, just like mine. Yeah. She was hurt, but I’d have to deal with that later. Hang on, girl.

“Jane?” Alex said again. “There are reports of a white wolf joining the chase with the gangbangers.”

I hesitated an instant. A white wolf had to mean Brute. We hadn’t seen him in weeks. So how did he know a vamp—that vamp—was free? Brute had bitten Joses Bar-Judas the last time I’d seen him, and when one supernat takes a bite out of another, anything might happen, maybe even some mystic mumbo-jumbo-tracking thingamajimmy. Crap. Something else to worry about later. My list was getting really long.

I succeeded in getting the pocket door on sub-five open, and light and my blood-scent flooded the darkness beyond, illuminating the clay floor and the bodies, their vampire and human blood a mixed stench that made my stomach roil again.

Leo was kneeling over them. He was vamped-out, three-inch fangs extended on the hinges in the roof of his mouth, his eyes like black pits in bloody sclera. Leo was scary, but after seeing the Son of Darkness in all his magnificent horror, Leo looked nearly human. I chuffed with pained laughter at the thought, and Leo whirled to me.

His nostrils flared and shrank, his lips pulled back, as he smelled/tasted me on the air. His shoulders lifted, his talons spreading, claw-like. “You are injured,” he hissed. “I smell your blood, your burned flesh.”