by Eileen Wilks
The directional aspect of the mate bond wasn’t as obvious for him as it was for her—another of the mysteries that so plagued her. When they’d discovered this during her little test last week, he’d suggested that she was simply more attuned to the immaterial than he was because of her Gift.
Lily had shaken her head in disgust. “That’s not an explanation. That’s substituting one question mark for another.”
A smile twitched at Rule’s mouth as he headed for the other room. His nadia did not approve of the inexplicable.
He wove through the crowd, looking for a small, slender woman with hair the color of night, skin like cream poured over apricots… and a dress the color of mold. His smile widened. Truer love hath no sister than to wear such a gown.
Still no Lily. Rule paused. She wasn’t happy with him right now. Tough. He wasn’t too happy with her, either. She had no business being back on full duty. She wasn’t healed yet, dammit, and why her superiors couldn’t see that, he couldn’t fathom. But she wouldn’t have—
“Rule.” The smooth, feminine voice was newly familiar. He turned to see Lily’s mother beckoning him.
Julia Yu was a tall, elegant woman with beautiful hands, very little chin, and Lily’s eyes set beneath eyebrows plucked to crispness. She stood with two women about her age—one Anglo, one Chinese, both intensely curious about him and trying not to show it.
Rule repressed a sigh. He’d been glad of the chance this wedding offered to become acquainted with Lily’s people. They were part of her, after all, and he was endlessly curious about her. Last night he’d met her parents at the rehearsal dinner, with mixed results. They’d both been very polite, but neither of them approved of him. Her father was reserving judgment, he thought. Her mother liked him, didn’t want to, and wished he would go away.
It was Lily he wanted now, though. He was tired of the curiosity, the fear, the speculation. He might be used to being on exhibit, but it was different this time. Personal. Look, everyone, see what followed Lily home. It walks and talks just like a real person.
But after the briefest of introductions, Julia Yu excused herself to the others and took Rule aside. She’d tucked a frown between those crisp eyebrows. “Have you seen Lily?”
His own brows lifted in surprise. “I was just looking for her.”
“Teh! I’m being silly.” She shook her head. “It’s Beth’s fault, putting ideas in my head, and I’ve been so busy… you have no idea what it is to put on a wedding like this.”
Worry bit down low in his stomach. He replied with automatic courtesy. “You’ve done a magnificent job. The wedding was beautiful, as is the reception. But what ideas did Beth put in your head?”
“Such a silly story! Of course she was imagining things. Beth is very imaginative.” It was impossible to tell if she meant that as a compliment or criticism of her youngest daughter. The frown hadn’t budged. “I paid it no heed at all.”
“What kind of story?”
“She said she saw Lily go into the ladies’ room and followed her. They haven’t had much opportunity to talk lately, you know, so I suppose… but Lily wasn’t there.” Julia’s lips pursed. “Beth swears Lily could not have left without her seeing, but that’s nonsense.”
It had to be. Didn’t it?
Rule stood stock still for a moment. Lily wasn’t far. He knew that. But he hadn’t been able to find her, and the world wasn’t as sane and orderly as it appeared. The realms were shifting.
And three weeks ago, Lily had pissed off a goddess.
“I’ll find her.” He turned away, moving quickly, propelled by an urgency he knew was foolish.
The last place she’d been seen was the ladies’ room, so that’s where he headed. The restrooms lay off the hall that connected the private dining rooms to the public part of the restaurant. A knot of unhappy women had collected outside the ladies’ room. He picked up snatches of conversation.
“… anyone sent for the manager?”
“Is there another one?”
“Plenty of stalls, no need to lock the door.”
“… some kind of sadist, if you ask me!”
Someone had locked the door to the ladies’ room. Rule’s mouth went dry. He eased his way through the women, using his size, his smile, and, after a moment, their recognition to part them. “Excuse me, ladies. Pardon me. No, I’m not the manager, but if you’ll step aside…”
“Shannon,” one of them whispered to another, “You dummy! That’s the Nokolai prince!”
That silenced them for a moment. “I think I can fix this if you’ll… thank you,” he said as the last one moved away. An odd, faint odor hung in the air near the door. He bent closer to sniff, but he couldn’t identify it.
Lily was on the other side. He felt her nearness as a slow stir beneath his breastbone. Heart hammering, he rapped on the door. Hollow core.
“That won’t work!” one of the women snapped. “You think we haven’t tried knocking?”
The knob turned, but the door didn’t budge. Bolted on the other side, he judged.
“We tried opening it, too,” the woman said sarcastically.
Rule put his fist through the door.
Wood splintered. Someone shrieked. He reached through the hole he’d made and found the bolt. His blood made it slippery, but he gripped it hard and yanked. He shoved the door open.
Lily lay on her back by the sinks. She wasn’t moving.
TWO
“AND why,” Rule asked with strained patience, “Did you send the EMTs away?”
Lily sat in the middle of the restroom floor in a puddle of muddy green chiffon, petting the white tiles. In the hall by the door, a uniformed officer kept out the curious and the concerned while his partner took statements.
Rule sat on the floor, too—over against the wall, well away from Lily so he wouldn’t mess up the traces left by her attacker.
She frowned at the floor as if someone had written an unwelcome message there in invisible ink. “They wanted to take me to the hospital.”
He stared at the heart of his heart, the one woman in the world for him… the pigheaded, my-way-or-the-highway idiot who’d refused medical treatment. “Imagine that. What were they thinking?”
Her lips twitched. At last she looked away from the fascinating floor. “I’ll go later. My sore head is evidence of a sort, but I really am okay. Unlike you, I didn’t lose any blood—”
“You opened your wound.”
“But it barely bled, and I’m already stuffed full of antibiotics. My sister checked me out.”
“Yes, and said you probably had a concussion—”
“A slight concussion.”
“—and should go to the emergency room and let them run tests.”
“Which would confirm that my head hurts, after which they’d tell me to rest. I’m resting.”
“You’re conducting a bloody be-damned investigation!”
“I don’t have much time before the S.O.C. crew gets here.”
“You’re speaking acronym again.”
She rolled her eyes. “Scene-of-crime crew. I wanted to check things out before they show up. Or Karonski.” She frowned at the floor one last time, and then held out her hand. “I’ve learned all I can. Help me up?”
He rose swiftly, crossed to her, and took her hand. With one gentle tug she was on her feet and in his arms. He nuzzled her hair. Her scent reached inside him, easing him away from anger.
Which left the fear standing alone. He drew a shaky breath. “Dammit, Lily. Your face is the color of sweaty gym socks.”
“I’m so glad you told me that.” But she leaned into him, letting him have the warmth and weight of her—the prickle of arousal and the comfort of connection. He knew she drew strength from the contact, too. She’d come that far in accepting the mate bond. She no longer denied them this out of fear her needs would swallow her.
But she wouldn’t live with him. That, Rule promised himself, would change. After this attack, even Lily
couldn’t continue to insist on warping both of their lives to conform to some notion of autonomy.
“The uniform is staring at us,” she muttered.
“Mmm.” The uniform, as she put it, was not happy about having a lupus on the scene. The man’s first impulse had been to arrest Rule on general principles. Dissuaded from that, he’d wanted to remove Rule from the crime scene.
Reasonable enough, from a cop’s point of view, Rule supposed. But he wasn’t leaving Lily. Eventually the officer had accepted that, though it was a toss-up whether it was Lily’s newly minted federal badge, her past status as a homicide cop, or Rule’s simple refusal to leave that had prevailed.
He rubbed his cheek against her hair, trying to breathe her in. And paused. “You smell funny.”
“Hey.” She leaned away. “No more cracks about sweaty socks.”
“Not that kind of funny.” Rule bent, sniffing down her shoulder and along the sling that held her left arm, where the scent was strongest.
“Could you try to be a little less weird?”
“Picture me wagging my tail, and this will seem more natural.” He inhaled deeply, trying to sort the odd scent from all the others. “I can’t place it,” he said, straightening. “Not in this form.”
“Maybe you’re smelling whatever left the traces I felt on the floor.”
Lily was a touch sensitive, perhaps the rarest of the Gifts, and an unusually strong one. She couldn’t be affected by magic, but she could feel it, even the slight traces left by the passage of supernatural beings. His eyebrows lifted. “What did you feel?”
“It was odd. Sort of… orange.”
“Which tells me little.”
“Doesn’t tell me much, either.” She shook her head. “Magic feels like a texture, not a color, yet this… I can’t explain it. I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
She looked troubled, but Rule felt relief. “It didn’t feel like that damned staff, then.”
Before she could respond, they were interrupted.
“Sorry, ma’am, you can’t go in there.”
That was the officer by the door. A familiar feminine voice replied with a stream of Chinese, followed by another familiar voice—Julia Yu. “I told you they wouldn’t let you in. If they won’t let her own mother in, they won’t make an exception for her grandmother.”
Lily sighed and pulled away. “Grandmother, don’t curse the man for doing his duty.”
“I curse who I curse. You will come out now.”
The old woman standing on the other side of the burly officer was less than five feet tall. Her dress was red, ankle-length, and Oriental style. Black hair striped with silver was drawn up in a knot secured with twin enameled picks, and the ring on one finger held a cabochon ruby. Despite her years, she had a spine like a sapling, supple and erect, and the hauteur of a queen.
Rule couldn’t look at Madame Li Lei Yu without thinking of a cat. She knew she was in charge, whatever the idiots around her might think. Right now, she was a cat who wanted a door opened. Immediately.
Lily gave Rule a wry glance and left the restroom. He followed.
At the west end of the hall another officer was talking with one of the women who’d complained about the locked restroom door. Food smells drifted in from the nearby kitchen, and the sounds of diners in the public part of the restaurant competed with the hum from the rooms occupied by the wedding party.
Here, under the suspicious eyes of the patrol cop, three women made a triangle, with the oldest and smallest of them at its apex. Julia Yu—the one in the middle— touched her daughter’s shoulder, looking anxious. Lily gave her a reassuring smile and turned to her grandmother. “I’m here, as instructed.”
“Ha! You do not fool me. You come because you are ready to come.”
Two pairs of black eyes met—one wrapped in wrin“-kles, one surrounded by smooth young skin. The two women were almost of equal height. Alike in other ways, too, some of them visible. ”You don’t want me to neglect my duty,“ Lily said.
“Pert,” her grandmother announced. “Always you are pert.” She cupped Lily’s cheek. The skin on the back of her hand was as fine and soft as tissue laid over the strict architecture of bone and tendon. Her nails were red and beautifully tended. “You are well, child?”
Lily smiled into that cupped hand. “Aside from the little guy hammering on my skull from the inside, yes.”
“Then reassure your mother. She worries.”
Julia Yu was indignant. “You were the one who insisted on coming to see for yourself that she was all right. You wouldn’t take my word for it. Or Susan’s, and she’s a doctor.”
Madame Yu ignored that, dropping her hand and turning to Rule. “You do not greet me.”
“I but await my opportunity.” He bent and kissed one whisper-soft cheek.
Her eyebrows shot up. “You flirt with your lover’s grandmother?”
“I flirt with you, Madame. It is irresistible.”
“Good. I like flattery when it is done well. Tell your peculiar friend I wish to see him.”
“Ah… which peculiar friend would that be?”
She chuckled. “You have so many, eh? The beautiful one.”
“She means Cullen,” Lily said dryly.
Of course she did. Rule eyed the old woman, wondering if he wanted to know why she wished to see Cullen. Probably not, he decided. “I’ll give you his phone number, but he doesn’t always answer it.”
“I dislike telephones. You tell him come see me when I return.”
“Return?” Julia Yu frowned. “What are you talking about? You aren’t going anywhere. You don’t like to travel.”
“Tomorrow I get on an airplane. I fly to China.”
In the sudden silence, Rule looked at the faces of the three women. Julia Yu was shocked. Madame Yu was obviously enjoying her daughter-in-law’s reaction. And Lily… her distress was plain, at least to him. It showed in her stillness, her lack of expression, the change in her scent.
He moved closer to her. “This wasn’t a sudden decision,” he told the old woman grimly. “You can’t get a visa for China overnight.”
“Can I not?” Her expression suggested he’d fallen from grace. She shrugged and spoke to her granddaughter. “For years, I have thought of such a trip. I am many years now in America. There are people and places in China I would see again before I die. Or they do.”
“You’ve talked about a trip,” Lily said, “but you never made plans. Why now?”
“I am an old woman. I am reminded of this recently.”
The unexpected wryness in Grandmother’s voice made Rule think she referred to the battle two weeks ago—one involving a number of armed Azá, himself, Cullen, Lily, a handful of FBI agents, several wolves… and one very large tiger.
Madame Li Lei Yu hadn’t seemed like an old woman to him at the time.
Lily had herself back under control. “Li Quin will go with you?”
“She, too, has people and places to see. My gardens—” She broke off, turning as Rule did toward the east end of the hall.
Rule knew who was coming by the sound of the footsteps. A moment later the man appeared around the bend in the hall: Abel Karonski, sometime friend, full-time FBI agent, part of a special unit of the Magical Crimes Division. And witch. The satchel he carried wouldn’t hold file folders or a change of clothes.
But the person with Abel wasn’t his partner, Martin Croft. Instead the agent was accompanied by a long, lanky woman with a butch-crop of silvery blond hair, half a dozen earrings in each ear, a badly fitted gray suit, and deep-set eyes the color of old whiskey.
Most people wouldn’t notice the eyes. Not at first. All they’d see were the tattoos.
“Cynna!” Rule exclaimed.
Her mouth tilted up between the indigo whorls looping from cheeks to chin. “Hey, Rule. Fancy meeting me here, huh?”
“YOU’VE added a few,” Rule said, pulling out a chair.
After a brief confusion, Li
ly, Rule, Karonski, and the unexpected addition to their task force had adjourned to the restaurant’s smallest private dining room. It held one table, six chairs, and a coffee pot.
“More than a few, but some of ‘em don’t show in polite company.” The woman’s grin rearranged the designs on her cheeks. “Damn, you look good. Haven’t changed a bit. Maybe you’d like to check out some of my new tattoos later.”
Lily sat in the chair Rule was holding. She supposed she’d better get used to women propositioning Rule. It was going to happen.
Karonski put down his satchel, pulled out one of the chairs, and sat. “Dammit, Cynna, I told you—”
“And I told you that was bullshit. Rule’s a lupus.”
“Ah, Cynna.” Rule’s smile held a definite tinge of regret. “As delightful as such a study would be, I must decline. I’m not available.”
The woman’s eyebrows went up. She looked at Lily, her expression hard to read behind all the tattoos. But she didn’t look friendly.
Lily decided her head hurt too much to figure out how to handle this blast from Rule’s past. She knew how she felt about it, though. Pissed. But who was she supposed to be angry with?
Karonski, maybe, for springing Cynna Weaver on her like this. She’d wondered if Weaver was here to execute an AG warrant—in effect, an order of execution signed by the U.S. attorney general. The FBI’s temporary director was pushing for one, though so far the attorney general wasn’t buying. No surprise there. The political fallout could be huge, since AG warrants had traditionally only been issued against nonhumans.
Like lupi.
But Karonski had assured her Weaver was part of the unit. She was here to help find Harlowe, not to kill him. Lily turned to him. “What exactly did you tell her about Rule and me?”
“That she’s to behave. Rule’s taken.” He looked around. “Didn’t someone say something about coffee?”
Lily would have smiled if her head hadn’t hurt so much. Karonski was an overfed white male with a severe wardrobe impairment, the stubbornness to outlast a jackass, and a firm belief in the power of caffeine. He was also her boss. “Sure. It’s right there. Get me a cup, too.”