by Eileen Wilks
Karonski had known what she meant right away when she said “Unit business.” She hadn’t referred to the legal Unit Twelve, whose investigation he was heading, but to the one that operated in the shadows. The Shadow Unit.
Cullen was right. They couldn’t touch the knife. They had to stop Miriam from using it, but they couldn’t touch it. It would be best if they didn’t get near it. And that was why she’d had trouble focusing. She didn’t want to go where the facts led her. But her unconscious had gotten there just fine, without the rest of her noticing. She’d told Karonski this was now something for the Shadow Unit to handle. That, in effect, she planned to act outside the law.
The best way to stop Miriam without getting close was obvious, wasn’t it? Shoot her from a distance. Don’t risk letting the knife take over any of them. Kill Miriam and leave the knife wherever it fell. Maybe have Cullen put up wards around it. Keep everyone away—could they leave Hardy near to keep an eye on it?—until Sam got back with the Queen’s Hound.
Lily had killed to save her own life. She’d killed to stop someone from killing others. But to kill someone who was a victim herself . . . Miriam had been taken over by the knife or by the god it was linked to. Just like Officer Crown. That made her a victim, not a bad guy. Could making Miriam a victim twice over possibly be the right thing to do?
Lily wasn’t sure. She was deeply, desperately unsure. Stack up the fate of the world against one woman’s life, and it ought to be obvious. It wasn’t.
Ruben had put her in charge of the Shadow Unit’s role in this because she would try her damnedest not to see killing as the only solution . . . but he expected her to do that if she had to. Or order it done.
Did she have to? Wasn’t there always a choice?
Behind her, Rule was giving crisp instructions to Scott for the men. Bound by his word, he said nothing about Friar or a crazy god or the deal they’d just made. He told Scott that he and the rest were to follow him, Lily, and Cullen to an address he could not give out at this time. Earlier, on the way to the scene, Rule had briefed the men on what Sam had told them; now he asked Scott to emphasize to the others that the knife was their most urgent priority. He said there was a good chance that Miriam Faircastle had the knife, but it was not a certainty. Yet.
When he finished, she told him that the call had been from Karonski. “Miriam isn’t at her condo.”
Rule was silent a moment. “That tends to support the information we just received.”
It did, though it wasn’t proof. But if Miriam did have the knife . . . Rule had said he was trying to think of how to stop her. Either he hadn’t seen the obvious, either, or he meant that he was trying to find another way. One that didn’t involve a rifle. Rule saw nothing inherently wrong with assassination, but he didn’t hurt women. Killing one would rip him up inside. It would rip up any of the lupi.
What was right?
What do you believe? That’s the gist of what Karonski had said when Lily picked him up at the airport. What do you know in your gut about goodness? She hadn’t known how to answer. Maybe it was time she figured that out.
She believed in the rule of law. Individual laws might be wrongheaded, but the rule of law was a definite good.
And yet that wasn’t her bedrock. At one time she thought it was, but she couldn’t see it in that black-and-white way anymore. She’d been brought to accept the need for a Shadow Unit to deal with matters the law couldn’t. Tonight she’d indicated to Karonski that this was a matter for that Unit, not the legal one. She’d been happy to circumvent the law, too, about the Uzi José had used on the dworg. She didn’t want him jailed for using the only weapon he’d had that stopped the monsters.
Stopping the monsters. Yes. She believed in that. Heart, gut, and mind, she knew that was right.
But stopping was not another word for killing. Sometimes that was what it came down to, the only way she could stop them, but killing monsters was not the goal. Stopping them was.
And Miriam wasn’t a monster. At least, not of her own free will.
Sam had told Lily once that the fundamental value for dragons was freedom of will. She believed in that, in free will and choices. That was what lay behind the whole rule-of-law thing, wasn’t it? People got together and decided that those who made bad choices, ones that harmed others, were subject to consequences. Cops, laws, courts, prison . . . if you didn’t believe that every person was responsible for his or her choices, there was no point in any of it.
They’d reached the road where their car was parked. Gray and Joel were there, but Ronnie hadn’t made it yet. He’d been the farthest away, but he’d be there any minute, Rule said. They’d wait.
And with that, another piece of her beliefs fell into place. Lily wasn’t a dragon. Free will mattered hugely, but so did teamwork. Cops, like soldiers and lupi, knew about working as a team. Other groups did, too. Families, churches, nonprofits, even businesses . . . at their core, each was about people getting together to do things no one could on their own. About working together. Helping each other the best they knew how. Their best was a long way from perfect. Even the good guys were full of flaws and foibles, and they swam in a society made up of people—every one of whom thought they didn’t have enough of something. Beauty, friends, love, sex, money, food, whatever.
Sometimes you truly didn’t have enough. Sometimes all the choices open to you were bad. That was what the law called mitigating circumstances, wasn’t it? You were responsible for your choices, but sometimes those choices were so limited you couldn’t find any good options.
You did the best you could. You tried. And you kept trying.
Ronnie showed up running flat-out in wolf form. Rule told him to stay four-footed for now and get in the van. Cullen was going to drive Rule’s car. He’d heard the address.
Lily slid into the backseat beside Rule and shut the door. She fastened her seat belt and said, “Ruben put me in charge of the Shadow Unit for this case.”
Rule gave her a long look. “He did.”
“Which of the men with us is the best with a rifle?”
“Gray. I don’t think he’d ever fired a handgun before he joined us on this side of the country, but he’s excellent with a rifle.”
She nodded. “If Miriam has the knife, we’ll do our damnedest to save her. She isn’t one of the monsters by choice, is she? But if we can’t . . . if the knife gets its claws in us, or if Friar tricks us somehow . . . I want Gray stationed well back with a rifle. Far enough that he should be safe from the knife’s effects. He’s to take her out if I signal him, or if it’s obvious I’ve fallen under the spell of the knife.”
“I agree with you in theory, but in practice . . . if Miriam can use that knife to compel or corrupt us, we don’t have any business getting close to it.”
He wasn’t going to like this. “It can’t compel me. It tried. The contagion tried to get into me, and it couldn’t. As for the corrupt or persuade part . . . either the mate bond or the toltoi gives me some protection. We don’t know how much, but some. Miriam’s no fighter. If I can take her down quickly, get the knife away from her—”
“You don’t seriously think I’m going to let you go in alone.”
“If you’re with me, what’s to stop her from compelling you to stop me from stopping her?” That came out tangled. “You know what I mean. What’s to stop her?”
Rule’s face turned dark. His eyes did, too, in the way that said he was fighting for control. He didn’t speak.
Into his grim silence, Cullen chirped, “Polyester?”
THIRTY-SEVEN
FRIAR didn’t like Lily’s plan any better than Rule had, but for different reasons. “You have fucking got to be joking.”
The address he’d given them turned out to be a florist’s shop. They’d taken elaborate precautions getting inside, all of which turned out to be unnecessary. He’d had help getting the
re, according to Ronnie’s nose, but he was alone now. Alone, unarmed, and a bloody mess. Lily’s first sight of Friar had startled her into an instant’s pity. He’d taken several bullets. Someone had wrapped his chest and shoulder in gauze, but they must have run out. His right arm had an old T-shirt tied around it. His left leg wasn’t bandaged at all, so it was easy to see the damage there. The kneecap was gone. Pulverized.
The first thing they’d done was remove the gauze and the bloody T-shirt along with his clothes. They didn’t find a damn thing except for the two bullets that his body had apparently expelled from his chest. But no weapon or wallet, just the phone he’d used to call them. Friar declined to explain the lack of a wallet.
They had a stash of medical supplies in the trunk, so they’d used some of their gauze to rewrap his wounds. No point in letting him bleed all over the leather seats. While Mike bandaged his arm, Friar told Rule to order his men outside so he could tell them something “not for public consumption.” Rule ignored him. Friar then told him to “send the sorcerer away, at least. He’d find information about the knife entirely too enticing.”
“The sorcerer,” Cullen had said, “already knows about the knife. Both what you told me—I listened to your conversation with Lily, you see—and a few tidbits you left out. Which part did you think I’d find unbearably enticing?”
Lily had almost heard Friar’s teeth grind. Maybe he was truly desperate. He looked royally pissed, but he’d gone ahead and told them at least some of the truth about the knife, ending by saying that obviously they had to shoot its current holder from a distance. That was when Lily told him she meant to go in alone . . . though that wasn’t entirely settled. Cullen was pushing to go with her. He was sure his shields would protect him. She didn’t mention that Gray would be staying back with a rifle.
“This is not my joking face,” she said now, “and you don’t have a veto.”
“And I thought you were the practical one. If you—hell, you don’t have to wrap it that tight.”
Mike had started rewrapping Friar’s chest. “Shut up,” he said and kept winding.
Friar looked at Rule. “Are you going to let her throw away her life? And with it yours and everyone else’s? Your clan will not survive what happens to our realm if the god is brought through.”
Rule hadn’t spoken much. He was crouched near his enemy, his eyes never leaving Friar’s face. He was, Lily thought, about halfway into his wolf, though his voice was civilized enough. “It’s surprising that a man of your intelligence—one who has had reason to learn what he could of Lily—could believe it is within my power to let her do anything.”
Friar had quite a sneer when he made the effort. “Perhaps you’ll feel differently when I tell you that the next victim is almost certainly one of your people. One or more.”
“You didn’t choose one of my people for your rite.”
“I’m not constrained the way the god of that knife is, nor do I want to destroy our realm.”
Lily wanted to smash his face in. “Shut up. Just shut up about how you don’t want to destroy the world. Do you think if you say it often enough we’ll believe it? You don’t want that dead god coming in and taking over your playground, but you had every intention of messing it up yourself. You were going to sacrifice Angela Ward. Millions of people have memories of her. Millions. That’s why you chose her, isn’t it? She’s loved and she’s famous and cutting her out of time would create millions of victims. It would damn sure destabilize the realm, and that’s exactly what you wanted.”
Friar didn’t answer right away. He was thinking, dammit. She’d given away more than she meant to, letting her temper lead instead of her brain. He was wondering how much more they knew and how they knew it. “Reality would have wobbled a bit,” he said at last. “Nothing my mistress couldn’t fix. Dyffaya áv Eni will destroy it.”
“What kind of constraints is this Dyffaya under?” Rule asked.
Friar’s gaze flicked to him. “Because of the way the knife was awakened and fed, its god is bound to act . . . if not precisely according to my plans, then in league with them. At least until he pulls himself fully into our realm.” He shifted as if uncomfortable, but he was breathing a lot better, wasn’t he? Probably because he’d expelled those two bullets. His chest was still pretty messed up, though. “If you’re not going to be reasonable, you’d better call that shaman of yours. We’re dealing with a sidhe god. The only chance short of bullets we have of stopping him is to invoke a deity native to our realm.”
Lily was staring. “You don’t know. How could you not know?”
“What are you talking about?”
Cullen’s eyebrows looked like they were trying to climb off his face. “He doesn’t. He really doesn’t know. And he talked about the god being bound by his rite, not the knife. It isn’t just Lily’s secondhand memory of Debrett that let this semidead god take over. You used the wrong bloody rite.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Cullen gave a single, harsh bark of laughter. “Oh, don’t I? Then why didn’t you know that a police officer was possessed by the corruption left behind by your rite? That the corruption compelled him to shoot Nettie Two Horses?”
Friar’s eyes widened. Only for a second, but it gave him away.
“You didn’t know,” Cullen said, leaning forward, “because you thought the knife was still in your control at that point. You thought you didn’t lose control until later, but you were so bloody wrong. You used the wrong bloody rite. That knife is a named artifact, you stupid asshole—and you didn’t know that, either, did you? A named artifact, and you didn’t bind it when you woke it. Which gave this Dyffaya áv Eni a big, fat loophole to squirm through.”
Silence.
“Now that,” Lily said, “is interesting.”
Friar’s dark eyes glittered. “Almost as interesting as the fact that you knew the knife was named. Since you’re so interested in us sharing information—”
“Uh-uh. You want us to take care of this little problem you’ve created. You’re just along for the ride, so your part is supplying information. I need to know why you didn’t use the knife to compel others. You carried Alan Debrett to the ritual site. You could have just told him to follow you.”
He gave Lily a disdainful glance. “Had I used the knife’s ability to compel, it would have strengthened the god’s presence in the knife.”
“Oh? And why weren’t you compelled or persuaded by the knife while you held it?”
“I am wholly dedicated to my mistress. She protected me. If you’re thinking your Lady”—he looked at Rule, making the title sound like an obscenity—“can offer you the same protection, you’re wrong.”
“That,” Rule said pleasantly, “was a lie.”
Lily smiled. Not pleasantly. “He can smell them, you know. Lies.”
“Which part?” Cullen asked. “Because I’m betting it’s his shields that protected him, not his devotion. Whoever crafted those shields does very nice work. They’re not quite as sweet as mine, but still, quite decent work. Of course, you could say his bitch mistress protected him because its her power in those shields. Is that what you meant, Robert?”
“We don’t have time for this,” Friar said through gritted teeth. “Smell the truth when I tell you this: the world is at stake. If we don’t stop whoever has that knife from using it, we are all doomed. We need to leave now.”
“Actually, we do have a little time,” Cullen said. “Assuming tonight was chosen because it’s the dark of the moon—is that correct?” Friar didn’t answer. Cullen went on as if he had. “I’ve been thinking about that. Robert here could perform his rite at any point during the dark moon period, but bringing through a dead god—that’s different. You need one whopping big hole in reality to pull that off, which means the knife-holder will wait for the moment of conjunction. That’s reality’s
sleep apnea moment. It doesn’t just thin out then, it pauses. And the conjunction isn’t due for . . . .” He paused, looking at Rule. “You hear her better than I do when she’s veiled. How long?”
“A little over three hours.”
“So there’s time to make plans. Share information.”
Lily looked at Cullen. “You’re sure about this?”
“I could explain, but that makes you testy. Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Okay.” She looked back at Friar. “I want to know why you lied about the Lady’s protection. And how you kept the knife from taking over Armand Jones.”
Friar closed his eyes. “I will pray that, when the time comes, I’ll be able to kill you very, very slowly. A quick death may have to suffice, but it will not be satisfying.”
“Indulge in daydreams later. Right now I need some answers.”
Friar kept his eyes closed. For a long moment he didn’t speak, either gathering strength or trying to figure out how to lie without Rule smelling it. “All right.” His eyes opened. He looked at Rule. “The extra magic Rhos carry may protect you. The individual who told me about the knife is sidhe, and they know almost nothing about werewolves. Half of them think you don’t exist. But there’s some arguai mixed in with the Rho’s magic, and that’s what might protect you. Or not. And it won’t protect your men. And don’t think that cut-rate compulsion you use on your men will override the knife’s compulsion. The knife is much, much stronger.”
“What a Rho does is not compulsion,” Rule said evenly.
Wasn’t it? Lily didn’t let herself look at Rule. She wasn’t going to give Friar the satisfaction of knowing he’d unsettled her. But how, exactly, was it not compulsion when Rule used the mantle to make his people obey?
Either she’d done a bad job of keeping her cop face on or she smelled upset, because Rule glanced at her and smiled slightly. “Santos,” he said.
What the hell did he mean by . . . oh. Santos had been ordered to obey Lily. He hadn’t. If he’d been compelled, he would have had no choice. She nodded to tell him she understood. She still wanted more of an explanation, but this was not the time.