by Eileen Wilks
Everyone knew Hardy. Most of them liked him. No one knew anything about him. Was Hardy his first or last name? No one knew. Did he have a regular spot to eat? To sleep? No one had a clue.
“They don’t like to tell you where their flops are,” one nurse told Lily. “I asked Hardy once—the weather was really stinky and I was worried about him—but he just smiled and sang an old hymn about everyone gathering by the river.”
San Diego was lacking in rivers, so that wasn’t much help. Lily thanked him and turned to Rule. “I’ll bet the shelters know him. He’d have been too late to get a bed tonight, but—”
“Lily.”
“I know, I know. I can check with them in the morning. But first—”
“Call whoever you need to from the car.”
“But . . .” She closed her eyes. The brief shot of adrenaline had worn off. She felt downright dizzy with fatigue. “Okay. All right.”
Lily’s mobile backup fell into step behind them as they left the ER. “Where’s your team?” she asked Rule.
“José is at the car. Barnaby is going to see if he can find out anything about Hardy. He knows some people. Jacob is watching our room.”
She hadn’t even seen Rule talk to Barnaby. Clearly her brain had gone to sleep ahead of the rest of her. “What room?”
“I’ve rented a room at the Hilton for tonight to cut down on driving time.” He opened the door of his Mercedes and waited for her to climb in.
“The Hilton? I mean . . . there’s always Motel 6.”
“Ah, well, there are other ways to cut back on expenses, aren’t there? Take the downstairs bathrooms. Do we really need to buy everything new? I’m sure, with a good scrubbing, the old toilet would be—” He broke off at the look on her face and touched her arm. “Joking, Lily. Joking. If you’re too tired to know that, maybe we’d better leave before you keel over.”
Lily sighed and got in the car, scooting over so Rule could slide in next to her. The Hilton would certainly be closer than driving all the way home, though Lily’s commute wasn’t as long as it had been when they were at Nokolai Clanhome.
They’d bought a house.
It lay about halfway between the city and Nokolai Clanhome and came with forty acres and a small, derelict motel, which was being turned into housing for the guards and others from Leidolf. That clan was, in a roundabout way, the reason they had to buy the place, so they’d put a rush on getting the extra housing ready. It was nearly finished.
The house wasn’t. It was in bad shape, too.
The setting was pretty—rolling hills that screened them from their neighbors on two sides, with the back shielded by an abandoned orchard. There were a couple of ley lines running beneath the land—not that any of them could use ley lines, but like Rule said, you never knew when such a thing might come in handy. The house had been built in the thirties in the Spanish Revival style, with lovely high ceilings. It had also had hideous shag carpet, holes in some walls, scabrous kitchen cabinets, an ancient roof, and faulty electrical. But it was structurally sound, and Rule had negotiated a really low price.
It was also big. Really big. Two stories plus a partly finished attic and a full basement. Lily didn’t trust the basement—what Californian wants to be underground when the earth starts to rock and roll?—but it was being reinforced. Originally, the ground floor had held a large living room, small dining room, and huge kitchen; a study with hideous wallpaper, a fireplace, and beautiful built-in bookshelves; and a bedroom intended as the master. The second floor was all bedrooms—six of them—plus the house’s only bathroom.
What kind of nutcase built a house with seven bedrooms and one bathroom?
That was being changed, as was so much else. Not on the second floor, not yet, because they were living there while the first floor was gutted and rebuilt.
The new roof, windows, and steel beams were in place. One of the walls that had come down was load bearing, which had made Lily nervous, but the architect assured her that steel beams would do the trick. The kitchen was maybe half-done, and they’d just finished framing in the new walls. Lots of electrical and plumbing still to do before they could put up drywall, but the study would end up as the dining room. The original dining room, which adjoined the master bedroom, was slated to become a luxurious master bath plus a walk-in closet.
The floor was finished, at least—and hadn’t that been a hassle, deciding what to use! Lily had leaned toward bamboo. Rule had been torn between the beauty of a dark-stained hardwood and the practicality of carpet, which offered better traction to a wolf’s paws. In the end, they’d gone with stained and polished concrete. It looked great, was highly customizable, and wouldn’t get scratched up by anyone’s claws.
Lily’s brain got constipated when she thought about what all this was costing, so she tried not to. She might have signed the mortgage papers along with Rule, but he was covering the renovations, so she didn’t have to contemplate it. If he said he could afford it, he ought to know. She ought to trust him. She did, but it was a godawful amount of money, especially when added to the cost of their wedding . . . which was supposed to happen in two weeks and five days.
“What is it?” Rule asked.
“I . . . the wedding. Should we postpone it?”
Rule went still. “Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. It seems like we should, but . . . Mother won’t be able to . . . and I don’t know who’s doing what. I don’t even have the final guest list.”
“I have all that information. I can do what needs doing, but if it hurts too much to hold the ceremony with your mother’s situation so uncertain, we will postpone it. Is that what you want?”
“I think I should want it, but I don’t. Only there’s the trip, too. Our honeymoon trip. How late can we wait to cancel our reservations? And the plane tickets. Did we get the refundable—”
“It doesn’t matter. We can decide about that later.”
“Okay.” She drew a shaky breath. “Do you think Mother will want to be flower girl instead of mother of the bride?”
“Ah, nadia,” he said and gathered her to him.
She rested her hands on his chest, keeping an inch of space between them. “Don’t do this. If you do this, I’m going to—”
“Relax?” He stroked her hair. “Behave in an un-cop-like manner? Fall asleep?”
Fall apart, more like. Exhaustion was melting outward from her bones to her muscles to her brain, taking down what few defenses she still had. “I don’t want to stop doing the job. Without the job I’m just a daughter. Nothing good is happening with me-the-daughter. My father’s very angry.”
“Yes, he called me.”
“Did he yell?”
“Not precisely. Did he yell at you?”
“He said he would forgive me eventually, but for now he didn’t want to see or speak to me. Then he hung up.”
Rule kept petting her. He didn’t say anything.
“I’ve never . . . in all my life he’s never . . . I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do.”
“He’s a good man. He’s hurting and scared and angry. He thinks you made the wrong decision, but he’s a good man. He loves you.”
She couldn’t have hurt him so much if he didn’t. “There’s no one to hold him the way you’re holding me. He’s got Susan, I guess, and Beth when she gets here, but he’ll want to be strong for them instead of letting them be strong for him. And he’s too angry at Grandmother to let her help. He said she’d gone too far this time. What did he tell you?”
“It was a difficult conversation. I had to tell him that Julia wishes to stay with you and me when she leaves Sam’s lair.”
“When she . . . God. I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t thought of it at all. I just assumed she’d go home, but she doesn’t know it’s her home, does she? But that’s what she shou
ld do. As hard as it will be on my father to have her there when she doesn’t remember him, it would be worse if she wasn’t there.”
“Hmm.”
“What does that mean?”
“Julia says she won’t live with Edward and we can’t make her. She understands that we consider him her husband. That frightens and angers her.”
“But he’s not going to do anything that . . . mentally she’s a kid! He knows that. He would never take advantage of a twelve-year-old girl.”
He rubbed his cheek along her hair. “What did you want when you were twelve, Lily?”
“To be a cop.”
She felt his smile in the way his cheek moved. “Let me put it this way. Suppose when you were twelve, strangers forced you to marry a man more than forty years older than you. Would you have felt okay about being married to him, living with him, as long as he didn’t touch you?”
“Yech. No. I would have . . . if for some bizarre reason no one could help me, not even Grandmother, I’d . . .” Probably have found a way to make herself a very young widow. But at twelve, she’d had issues her mother didn’t. Julia was unlikely to turn homicidal if forced to live with Lily’s father, but running away was a real possibility. Lily sighed. “We’ve got extra bedrooms. No kitchen and only one bathroom, but plenty of bedrooms.”
“Which is fortunate, because Madame Yu and Li Qin will also be staying with us.”
ELEVEN
SHE was chopping carrots when the mouse ran across the counter.
She was dreaming. She knew that, but it didn’t make what she did less important. There were so many carrots, a huge mound of them, and she had to get them all chopped. She’d come here to complete a task, but this wasn’t a safe place. She wanted to get the carrots chopped quickly so she could leave.
But then a dirty little field mouse, all quick dun-colored nastiness, ran right over that mound of carrots. She exclaimed and swatted at it. Then another one ran right in front of her, and another was on the floor at her feet, and another . . . where were they all coming from? So many mice . . . She started counting.
She’d gotten to twenty-one when she heard him calling.
It was the call of the wind, alone on the heights. The cry of a mother grieving her lost child. His voice was the sound of tears turned to ice and unable to fall, sorrow frozen in crystal drops. It was beautiful beyond words and terrible beyond hope.
Her hands shook. Her vision blurred. A mouse ran over her foot.
She cried out in anger and swiped at the mouse with her knife. The mouse raced away untouched. She stabbed her own foot. Blood welled up along with pain.
She dropped the knife and yanked her foot off the floor, frightened. It would be bad to get blood on the floor, very bad. This was a dangerous place to spill blood. If her blood touched this floor, something terrible would happen.
He called again.
She’d heard him before. She knew that suddenly—not a memory, but a bright, clear knowing. At other times, in other places, he’d called and she’d tried to find him, but she always failed. She hadn’t been able to reach him from where she was.
Tonight, she could. She was in a different place tonight.
Her heart began pounding. That was why she’d come here. Not for the carrots. Why had she thought they mattered? She had to find him and free him from the crystalline trap of his loneliness.
She turned and there was the door, right where she knew it would be, though this wasn’t her kitchen. But the door was where it should be, and he was outside, somewhere out there in the darkness. She walked to the door and opened it, leaving bloody footprints behind.
The black dome of the sky held neither moon nor stars, yet she had no trouble seeing the ground, pebbled and bare, and the trees she must go to. A tiny, shrill voice at the back of her mind gibbered warnings. There should be a moon . . . but the ground itself held a glow, as if it had soaked up enough moonlight over the eons that it was willing to share some of that radiance with her.
Eons . . . yes. This was an old place. A very old place. And he was calling. She walked into the dark forest.
The trees of this forest were black, truly black, not simply hidden by night, and very tall. She knew that, though she could only see them lower down, where the ground gave light. Over her head black trees merged with the sightless dark of the sky. At another time, she would have feared those trees and what they meant. She felt no fear now. Only urgency.
He was calling. He was calling her. It was her name she heard in this windless place, her name carried by echoes and darkness and the hoarded light of the moon. Her heart lifted in joy and terror.
And then, between one step and the next, he was there.
Her heart skittered. Her breath caught and held. The beauty of him wrapped around her and made breath unimportant. He stood ten feet away, pale god of the dark forest, garbed in his own glowing skin over muscles taut with life’s heat. His hair was tousled and friendly, hair one might touch, or at least dream of touching. And he saw her and smiled.
His smile lit his face with whimsy and mischief, and his eyes were the dark of the sky overhead, his full lips curved up—oh, full, yes, ripe and full his mouth was. Full of wicked suggestions. She fell to her knees, smitten by awe and the rush of desire.
He walked up to her, and his penis was full and engorged, saluting her merrily as he crouched on one knee. “You came,” he said softly, and his voice echoed inside her as he reached for her hand.
Why had she thought it her foot she’d hurt? It was her hand that bled, throbbing along with the heat in her loins. She tried to pull it back, embarrassed by the untidy blood welling up.
“No,” he told her. “No shame, nothing held back.” He kissed her hand gently and pulled her to him, whispering, “You can share anything . . . everything . . . with me.”
TWELVE
THE San Diego International Airport handled fifty thousand passengers a day. It cozied up to the ocean without being quite on the shore; international flights came in over the water. And it looked, Lily thought, pretty much like every other airport. Lots of glass, lots of concrete, lots of cars jockeying for position on that portion of the concrete designated for passenger pickup.
She swerved in front of a bright yellow muscle truck to snag a spot by the curb. The pickup’s driver didn’t appreciate her vehicular dexterity. He leaned on his horn. She did not shoot him the finger. FBI agents don’t do that sort of thing. Besides, she didn’t need to. She’d won. He’d lost. Ha ha.
The white Toyota following her lacked a parking spot. Mike was driving it, with Todd riding shotgun . . . well, not literally shotgun. Todd had a Smith and Wesson M&P9. Nice weapon, if a bit large for her hand, but not a shotgun. Mike stopped smack in the traffic lane, forcing the line of cars to veer around him. Those drivers didn’t appreciate him, either.
She could have let Mike drive her. Probably should have. But she’d wanted to be alone. Just for a couple-three hours, she’d wanted to be alone. Being alone in San Diego traffic might not be optimal, but it was better than nothing.
After five hours’ sleep, she’d woken up to another twenty-seven reports of possible victims. Ackleford—who’d apparently not even gone home last night, grabbing a nap on the couch in his office—had flagged those cases she needed to check out personally. The rest fit so well in terms of symptoms and time of onset that she could skip them for now. She’d checked out six victims this morning before heading to the airport to pick up Karonski. Four of the six got added to their victim tally.
Her mother was still at Sam’s lair. Her sister Beth had arrived and was staying with their father, who still wasn’t speaking to Lily. Her sister Susan was staying with him, too. Susan was speaking to Lily. She’d had plenty to say, mostly about how Lily had stabbed their father in the back and how it was all on Lily’s head if Mother didn’t do well following Sam’s so-called treatment.
Lily had suggested Susan yell at Grandmother, too. Susan had hung up.
Rule had just left Clanhome, according to the mate bond. Headed for St. Margaret’s Hospital, according to the text he’d sent. He was bringing Nettie with him. Nettie Two Horses was Rule’s niece and age-mate. She was also a physician, healer, and shaman with ways of examining patients not available to her medical colleagues.
Rule had spent the morning at Nokolai Clanhome handling a disciplinary action. Discipline was one of his duties as Lu Nuncio, and there were a pair of young Nokolai in need of formal rebuking. His father would have let him reschedule, but Lily had told him not to bother, not on her behalf, at least. Then she’d had to persuade him she wasn’t playing martyr by urging him to follow through with his duties. Rule didn’t really understand her need for time alone. He accepted it, but he didn’t share it. Lupi don’t feel crowded by the presence of other clan.
Lily glanced at the dash clock. Five till noon. Karonski’s flight was on time, so he’d be out PDQ. Alone time was almost up. She sent Karonski a quick text so he’d know where to find her.
She could easily have delegated picking up Karonski, but she wanted to talk to him without other ears around. He’d want to talk to her, too. Ask questions. Ruben had briefed him, but the key word there was “brief.” However competently you deliver a verbal report, you’re summarizing. To spot a pattern, you need to dig down into the details, and when Lily talked to Karonski just before his flight was called, he hadn’t yet read her report. There’d been a last-minute snafu with the case he was passing to his trainee that had kept him busy. By now, though, he would have read it and the various reports attached to it.
Maybe he’d spotted something that had eluded her. Maybe not. Either way, he’d have questions.
Lily pulled out her iPad. She, too, had reports to read. And questions. Maybe something in one of the new batch of reports would nudge her in the right direction. There was a pattern, some commonality that linked the victims. She just hadn’t spotted it yet.