by Eileen Wilks
Do something Rho? What did a Rho do? Stay in control, take care of his people, plan ahead, give orders…Rule’s control wasn’t what it should be, but he was holding on. He didn’t have a plan, and the only order he could think to give was to send his men searching the city block by block, looking for Lily. Which was about as useless an activity as the proverbial needle hunt, only this haystack covered roughly forty-six square miles, which just proved how poorly his brain was…
No. No, they shouldn’t look for Lily. And it wasn’t a Rho he needed to be, but a Lu Nuncio. The Nokolai Lu Nuncio.
He looked around, spotted the person he wanted. “Tony,” he called sharply. “I need you.”
Several minutes later, Rule was telling Ruben what he needed while Tony was on his own phone, summoning his clan. The lupi portion of it, that is.
Elves’ ability to cast illusions only affected those around them. They left scent trails like anyone else, and they smelled like nothing in this realm. The Laban lupi would go to Hammond Middle School—more elves had been there, and they’d thoughtfully lain on the floor, leaving plenty of scent behind. After Changing and getting a fix on the scent, each lupus would leave for his assigned area accompanied by a police officer, park ranger, or member of the military. People in uniform, that is, so humans wouldn’t be alarmed by the enormous wolves who were suddenly all over their city. Enlisting those authorities had required Ruben’s authority, but he’d agreed it was worth trying.
It was still one damn huge haystack, but he was sending ninety-four Laban noses out to sniff it, and they would be looking for multiple needles, not just one.
Tony had his head down with Special Agent Bergman over a map of the city, deciding how best to divvy up search areas. Rule wasn’t needed for that. They knew the territory. He didn’t. He looked around for his men and saw someone who wasn’t his.
Or was he?
Jasper sat slumped on the curb. Overlooked by the cops, forgotten by Rule and everyone else. Rule wasn’t the only person with a loved one in Robert Friar’s hands, was he? And Jasper didn’t have clan around him. He didn’t have Cullen to bitch-slap him with a few hard truths. He didn’t have a task, a function.
Rule went to sit beside his brother.
Jasper didn’t look up. For a long moment neither of them spoke. Rule was thinking again, and he was thinking about Hugo. Lily’s instinct about Jasper’s former agent had proved all too accurate. If Hugo was actively working with Friar.…and he must be. He’d helped set up Lily.
Maybe Rule knew who had the prototype now.
But Rule didn’t ask the questions that were beginning to burn in him. Instead he asked, “How did you do it? How did you hold yourself together for nine bloody long days with Adam missing?”
Now Jasper looked at him. At first he didn’t speak. His face said plenty, though. It spoke of despair. “What in the world gave you the impression I’ve held myself together?”
“You planned and executed a remarkable theft. You didn’t fall apart when you were tied to a chair and bullets started flying. You complained about not being able to think, but you kept doing it anyway.”
“I’ve screwed up every step of the way.” Jasper looked at the hands he’d clasped between his knees. “I’ve finally gotten around to really thinking, you see. You say you’re supposed to know where Lily is, but you don’t. Cullen’s supposed to be able to find things with his spells, but he can’t. It’s the same thing blocking you both, isn’t it? The prototype.”
Rule kept his breathing even. He could fake calm, even if he couldn’t feel it. “I think so, yes.”
“Then Friar’s got them both. Lily and the prototype. Which means I’ve nothing left to negotiate with. Nothing I can use to buy Adam’s life. Which means…” He drew a long, shuddering breath. “He may already be dead.”
“We don’t know that. Friar wants Cullen, too.”
“But does he need me to get him? I don’t see why.”
“Listen to me.” Rule gripped his arm. “Adam is alive. Until we see his dead body, he’s alive, and we’re going to get him back. Just like I’m going to get Lily back, and quickly. To hell with what logic says. Logic hasn’t served us all that well, has it?”
Jasper blinked. Took a shuddery breath, and straightened. “Right. He’s alive. Of course he’s alive. And we’re going to get him back.”
“We’ll get both of them.” A quiet electronic gong sounded in Rule’s pocket. It was a ringtone he seldom heard, and it startled him enough that it took him a moment to say, “I have to take this call. That’s Lily’s grandmother.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
He’d have to tell Beth, too. And soon. Perhaps Madame Yu would take on the task of telling Lily’s parents. Rule steeled himself and answered. “Madame Yu—”
“When were you going to tell me that something has happened to my granddaughter?” an imperious voice demanded.
“You know? But—how?”
She made a small, dignified snort. “Sam, of course. How would her teacher not know when she—bah, this language lacks words. She is hidden from him. He says she did not do this, and so we know that someone else did. What did they do?”
“She’s been taken. I think…” It was hard to say. “I think by Friar’s people. I can’t find her. I can’t sense where she is.”
“But she is alive.”
“Yes. That much I’m sure of.” The rest came out without him having a clue he was going to say it. “It’s my fault. I tricked her, manipulated her into doing what I thought would be safer than going with me. I was wrong. It was a setup.”
“Bah.”
What?
“You take too much on yourself. I can trick Lily. Your father maybe can. You? No. You are sneaky sometimes, but not so good as that. You think you fooled Lily? I think she got what she wanted. Now, I will be there as soon as possible. I do not know when. Planes are fast, but airports are not.”
“You’re—Madame Yu—”
“Sam cannot do this. He has foreseen certain events. He says it is not foreseeing, but I lack another word to describe his knowledge. He will be very busy today. I do not tell you more about this. Do not ask. He is busy, but I will come.” She hung up.
Rule sat there looking at the phone in his hand.
“She didn’t take it well, I guess,” Jasper said. “Hard to give that kind of news.”
“No…no, you don’t understand. But then, you haven’t met her.” Slowly Rule looked up, relief blooming inside. He felt like he had as a small child, waking from some terrible nightmare to find his father’s hand on his shoulder. The sudden bone-deep reassurance wasn’t logical, wasn’t reasonable. But it was real. “It’s okay. It’s good. Grandmother is coming.”
THIRTY-FOUR
LILY woke to the soothing lilt of Brahms’s “Lullaby.” Her head throbbed and ached the way it had the time a three-hundred-pound perp threw her against a wall. Or like it had on one miserable morning of her freshman year, when she’d decided that nothing, absolutely nothing, was worth getting a hangover that bad.
But she hadn’t been drinking or playing arrest-the-perp, had she? What…wait, there had been a perp, and Lily had told her she was under arrest, and then she’d been…shit. Captured. That was the word.
The quick spurt of panic cleared the fog from her brain. She made herself lie still and take stock with her eyes closed. She lay on something soft that sure felt like a bed. Good news: she wasn’t naked and the only injury seemed to be to her head. Her arms rested at her sides, unbound. She didn’t hear anything but the Brahms, nor did she smell anything in particular. Rule would have, but…
The panic this time was an ocean, not a spurt. Her eyes flew open and the light made her headache worse, but the pain in her head was drowned by the cold fear racing through her. After an endless, drenched moment, she realized the mate bond was screwy, not severed. Rule wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead, but she couldn’t tell where he was. When she tried to use the mate-sense, it felt like
he was everywhere, in every direction, and she had no idea how far away he was. When she tried harder she felt queasy. Motion sick, like when she’d seen that On Motion film at the IMAX and the crazy 3-D zooming around had forced her to shut her eyes so she wouldn’t puke.
Lily lay very still and waited for her stomach and heartbeat to settle. Her mouth was dry. Her head hurt. If she couldn’t find Rule, she had to assume he couldn’t find her, either. She’d been captured by a furry woman, and Rule couldn’t find her.
Couldn’t find her that way. He’d still be trying.
Unless he’d been captured, too, and was in the room next to hers. She didn’t know. With the mate-sense wonky, he could be on the other side of the wall and she wouldn’t know it. Or he might have been hurt at the middle school. Badly hurt.
Keep taking stock, she told herself firmly.
Okay, point number one: her head hurt, but it wasn’t the kind of crippling pain that suggested serious injury. It was an all-over ache, too, not localized like it would be with a concussion. Number two: she was dressed, she was not tied up—in fact, someone had tossed a blanket over her, as if they cared if she got cold while she was out cold. Number three: the whiteness overhead was an ordinary ceiling, not an underground cavern, which was encouraging. The last sidhe she’d tangled with had stashed his captives underground where he…
A small ball of light bobbed into her field of view. A mage light. Common in sidhe realms, not so common here. She’d seen a lot of mage lights in that underground cavern.
She frowned at the glowing ball. Rethna hadn’t been able to block the mate-sense, and he hadn’t just been sidhe—he’d been a sidhe lord. And when Rule had been dragged to the hell realm, she’d still known his direction. When an ancient being had locked Lily and Cynna in an underground bunker warded so tightly Cynna’s Gift couldn’t tell up from down, the mate bond had still worked.
And somehow Cullen’s prototype could do what Rethna, hell, and the Chimei couldn’t? It didn’t make sense.
Enough taking stock. She needed to see where the hell she was. Expecting it to make her head worse, she sat up.
It did.
“You’re awake.” The voice was male and sounded pleased. “How do you feel?”
“Like crap.” The room didn’t spin, and her head didn’t fall off. It might have felt like that, but then it would have stopped hurting, wouldn’t it? Carefully she looked around.
She was in a bedroom. An ordinary enough bedroom with blue drapes at the only window and two chairs at the other end of the room. There was a tall stack of books next to one of the chairs. A bowl of fruit rested atop it. Two doors, both closed. All very ordinary, if impersonal, except that the light didn’t come from something as prosaic as a lamp. It came from those mage lights bobbing up near the ceiling.
Being a bedroom, it had beds. Twin beds. She was sitting on one. The man sitting on the other bed was taller than her. Hard to say how much taller with him sitting all yoga-like with his feet tucked up on his thighs, but maybe five-ten, and built solid. One seventy, maybe. He wore jeans and a plain gray tee. Socks but no shoes. His hair was longish and streaky, with a dozen shades of brown and blond all mixed up. Dark eyes were framed by crow’s-feet; deeper creases bracketed his mouth.
She knew him. Knew who he was, anyway. “Sean Friar.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Right the first time. And you’re Lily. Beth’s sister. Is your head hurting?”
“Yes.” She pushed the blanket back and saw that she was barefoot, too. She wore the clothes she’d had on before, but without shoes. Also without her weapon, shoulder harness, watch, and phone…and the ring with the toltoi charm. They’d taken the toltoi, but not her engagement ring.
The loss of the toltoi infuriated her. Anger made her head pound. “You have some ibuprofen?”
“No, but she left something for you.” He unwound his legs and stood. “I’ll get it.”
“She?”
“Our captor. Alycithin. I’m probably not saying it correctly, but that’s close.” He went to one of the doors and opened it. She saw a sink in an ordinary vanity. He vanished briefly from her line of sight, then emerged with a clear plastic cup in one hand. The cup held about two inches of a dark liquid. “It’s supposed to be a painkiller that works for humans.”
“Do you honestly expect me to drink that?”
He shrugged. “They haven’t poisoned me yet. Haven’t hurt me at all, save for the little detail of taking me prisoner. Harming us would be against the rules, a violation of honor. She’s big on honor.”
“Is Alycithin about my height and covered in fur?”
His eyebrows shot up. “You know who she is?”
“We met briefly. Then someone shot me with a dart.” Lily remembered the feather sticking out of her cheek and reached up and found a small scab.
“She used a sleep spell on me. That wouldn’t work on you, I guess.”
“You know about my Gift.”
“Beth talks about you. Alycithin told me you’d be waking up with a sore head because of whatever they used to knock you out. Want to give this a try?” He held out the cup. “She gave her word it would help with the pain and wouldn’t harm you.”
Lily’s head hurt enough that she was tempted. Tempted, but not stupid. “No, thanks.”
He looked at her a moment, then turned and set the cup on the floor near the wall. “You may be right.”
No tables. That’s what was missing. No bedside table, no table by the two chairs—which were heavy upholstered things, not the sort you could smash to make a club from one of the legs. No chest of drawers. Also no television or radio or anything electronic. “Where is the music coming from?”
“The walls. They seem to be stuck on a classical station.”
Lily looked at the wall next to her bed. It was painted white, like the ceiling. It looked like any other wall. She leaned closer and laid her palm flat on it.
Magic. Lots of it, and it vibrated. She’d never touched magic that vibrated before. She pulled her hand back. “I saw Alycithin, but I didn’t see your brother.”
“He’s not here. He’s the reason I’m here, but I’m a mistake. If you don’t want to drink her whatever-it-is, would you like some water? It’s from the tap, and it hasn’t poisoned me yet.”
“Not yet.” Though she was thirsty. She also needed to use the bathroom, and with an urgency that suggested a fair amount of time had passed. “Do you know how long I was out?”
“Not really. I’m pretty sure it’s morning, and they brought you here sometime last night, so you were out several hours, but I can’t say how many.”
Still, it helped to know it was morning. It oriented her some. Lily swung her legs off the bed and stood. And shut her eyes for a moment at what the motion did to her head.
“Are you okay?” Sean Friar’s voice was closer.
She opened her eyes and stepped back. “It’s just a headache.”
He’d stretched out one hand as if about to steady her. He let it fall to his side. “You don’t trust me. No reason you should, I suppose.”
“I’m a cop. I don’t trust anyone right away.” The door that didn’t lead to the bathroom was the obvious first thing to check out. She headed there. Her head didn’t like the motion, but it was settling into a steady ache. Annoying, but not incapacitating.
“Especially people with the last name Friar.”
He didn’t sound upset. More like resigned with a whiff of wry. “That’s a factor,” she agreed, and touched the door. More magic, but this wasn’t vibrating. It felt slick, slightly oily. She tried the knob and was unsurprised to find that it was locked. Then she pressed her ear to the door. Nothing.
“They’re probably out there,” Sean said. “They did something to soundproof this room. She says that’s for my privacy. Our privacy now, I guess. But clearly it’s also so we can’t listen in on them or get the attention of anyone outside here. Wherever ‘here’ is.”
She straightened. “Th
ey, not she?”
“I’ve seen three of them. Alycithin and two others—uh, Dinaron or something like that. I don’t remember the other one’s name. The one whose name starts with a D is male. I’m not sure about the other one.”
“Elves, halfling, or human?” She headed for the window between the twin beds. “The two who aren’t Alycithin, I mean.”
“Elves, I think. At least they look like it. Alycithin is in charge.”
“And she’s a halfling.” Lily pulled back the drapes.
A shiny silver rectangle looked back at her. Not silvery, like a mirror. Silver. And shiny in a literal way. Light leaked through the silvery surface, but no images. She pressed her fingers to it. What should have been a window felt like glass, cool and slick, but it was heavily coated with magic. A slippery sort of magic similar to that on the door. It made her think of cheap lotion, the kind you can rub and rub and it doesn’t soak in.
“Weird, isn’t it? It lets in light in the daytime, goes dark at night,” Sean said. “Which is how I know it’s early morning. The light’s not bright yet. And it doesn’t break. I tried.”
“With what?”
“I’m pretty good with a flying kick. I connected solidly three times. It didn’t break.”
She glanced at his bare feet.
“I still had my boots then,” he said dryly. “After I kicked their window they decided I could get by without footwear. Maybe that means I had a chance of breaking it, or maybe they were annoyed that I tried.”
She ran her fingers along the place where the glass—if that’s what it was—met the frame. The magic coating the frame vibrated like that on the walls…which were now broadcasting something by Mozart. “If they aren’t listening to us in here, how did they know you were kicking their window of weirdness?’
“Window of weirdness. Huh. I like that. It’s the walls. When I kicked the window, the vibration created something like static in the walls’ sound system. They act like a magical intercom.”
She turned to face him. “A what?”
“If I want to talk to them, I press my palm to a wall. Any wall. The music fades and sooner or later someone answers. That’s how they invite me to lunch or whatever—through their magic intercom.”