by Eileen Wilks
Lily found her voice. “Lie about what?”
He touched her hair. “I’m sorry, nadia. I should have told you.”
Told her what? Not what he seemed to be saying. That was preposterous. She shoved to her feet. “You are not a hundred years old.”
A smile touched his lips—young, firm lips. “No. Nothing so extreme. But I am older than I look. Older than I’ve allowed you to believe.”
Her heart was pounding. “How old?”
“Fifty-four. Cullen is a bit older.”
“Fifty-nine next June.” Cullen’s grimace was frankly apologetic. “I hope you noticed that I didn’t lie to you. Quite.”
She looked at the tall, beautiful young man claiming to be older than her mother and shook her head. “No, that isn’t possible.”
Neither of them answered. Cullen looked apologetic. Rule was wearing his inscrutable face, the one she couldn’t read worth shit.
They meant it. She began to pace. “How could I never have heard about this? How could you have fooled everyone all this time?” How could he have fooled her?
Rule rose. He moved so smoothly. He couldn’t be fifty-four. “We’ve gone to some extremes to keep it secret. Until three years ago, it was still legal to shoot us on sight in five states. How much worse would it have been if humans knew we live twice as long as they do?”
Twice as long?
Lily’s heart was pounding too hard, too fast. Her head felt stuffed with cotton. She’d known Rule was older than he looked—which was about her age. Twenty-eight. His assurance suggested a man beyond the mixed insecurity and infallibility of youth. Mid-thirties, she thought. That’s what she’d guessed him to be the first time she saw him. “Your driver’s license says you’re thirty-five.”
“Well.” Cullen stood and headed for the door. “Never let it be said I’m not a sensitive guy, and I’m sensing that I’m not wanted right now.” He reached for the knob.
“Wait,” Rule said. “Can you set some kind of wards here? Otherwise we’ll have to crate up Harry and head to my apartment.”
“Sure, I could do something. Not true wards—they’d take too long—but a bit of ‘don’t see me’ might do the trick. Tidy little spell. Doesn’t use much power. Fuzzes the mind so people can’t quite locate the spot I tie it to. I don’t know if it works on demons, though.”
“I’d prefer to keep demons out.”
“I don’t know of anything that will do that,” Cullen said frankly. “Some believe holy symbols work, but I’m skeptical. In the old days… but we can’t work with what was, can we? In any event, you’ve got an alarm system in place. Cats hate demons. Harry’ll set up a howl if one comes near.”
Lily looked for her cat, but Harry had apparently tired of watching the corner. He was nowhere in sight.
“Your call,” Rule said quietly to her.
Her hands had made fists. She didn’t notice until the stinging in her palms grew too sharp. She forced herself to open them. “Here. They found me at my sister’s wedding. They must know where your apartment is.”
“Cullen?” Rule said.
“Will do. Do you have rosemary?”
“Will the dried stuff work?”
They didn’t need her. Lily picked up her weapon. “I’m going to take a shower.”
Cullen’s eyebrows went up. “Armed?”
“Your spells may not work on demons, but I’m betting my bullets will.”
EIGHT
In the bathroom Lily turned on the tap, stripped off her bridesmaid’s dress, wadded it up, and stuffed it in the trash. In spite of what she’d said to Cullen, her gun was on the bedside table, not in here with her. Her bathroom was too tiny for armed combat.
Panties and bra went on the floor as the tiny room filled with steam. She peeled off the gauze pad covering her wound.
Most of the damage didn’t show. The doctors thought she’d been hit by a ricochet—there’d been no scorching around the entry, and the bullet had lodged instead of ripping a second hole in her back on its way out. But it had tumbled inside her flesh, tearing up muscle and chipping bone.
All she saw was a depressed, puckered circle, still an angry red. A crescent-shaped scab at one edge marked where it had torn open when she fell. They told her the scar would fade in time. She hoped so. She’d known since she was ten that she could be damaged, permanently and irreversibly—and that scars didn’t have to stop her. But she was vain enough to dislike the way this one looked.
Rule thought the in-sleep thing might have speeded up healing on her shoulder as well as her head. Gingerly, Lily touched the small, puckered circle.
Orange.
There were drugs that crosswired the brain so you tasted a color or smelled a sound. Synesthesia, that’s what it was called. LSD, peyote, mescaline… even marijuana had been known to blur the lines between the senses. But she wasn’t on drugs, and her regular senses weren’t crossing things up. Just the extra sense that let her touch magic.
Maybe this was normal. Her Gift was rare. She’d never met another touch sensitive, and there was precious little about them in folklore. She didn’t have much to go on except her own experience, and she’d never run across a demon before. Maybe she experienced the magic from other realms differently.
But why had it stuck to her?
Frowning, she adjusted the water temperature, stepped into the tub, and pulled the shower curtain closed.
God, but that felt good. For a moment the sheer animal pleasure of hot water blanked her mind. She wanted to sleep right here, standing up, with hot water pouring over her… and not have to face Rule.
That was just lame. Disgusted with herself, Lily squirted shampoo into her hand. She could use her left hand enough to do that, but she couldn’t raise that arm over her head. Washing her hair one-handed was awkward, but she’d be damned if she’d go to bed with dried blood sticking the strands together.
Rule had been washing her hair for her since she got hurt.
Guilt twinged. So he was older than she’d thought. Lots of women dated older men. What was the big deal?
She closed her eyes and let the water stream over her. He was fifty-four, she was twenty-eight, so he was twenty-six years older than her. Twenty-six years was pretty much a lifetime to her. Not to him. That was the problem.
She got out of the shower, dried off, and told the mother-voice in her head nattering on about taking care of her skin to shut up. Then reached for the lotion anyway.
Did he still argue with the mother-voice in his head? Or maybe it was a father-voice, because he was a guy… but surely at fifty-four he’d have found his own voice to listen to.
Lily pulled on a T-shirt and panties, tugged a wide-toothed comb through her hair, and gave serious thought to going to bed without drying it. The prospect of a wet pillow dissuaded her, though. She got out the blow drier and plugged it in.
Had they had blow driers when he was growing up? He would have been born about 1950. Blow driers came along a lot later than that, didn’t they?
He looked maybe thirty. It hurt to find out he wasn’t. That he had let her believe an untruth. She’d thought they stood on roughly the same cultural ground, and they didn’t. When she was a kid, she’d listened to disco. He’d listened to… what? The Beatles? Elvis? She’d grown up watching Cagney and Lacey, Cheers, Happy Days. Rule had grown up in Happy Days.
She clicked off the blow drier, wound the cord around it, and shoved it in a drawer. She started to get out a fresh gauze pad and the tape, frowned, and decided she didn’t need a bandage. Nettie’s religious version of magic seemed to have worked on her—which was disconcerting, but she’d work out the ramifications of that later.
Then she took a deep breath and opened the door.
Rule was in bed, propped up against a couple pillows on the right side—she always slept on the left—with the sheet pulled up over his legs and hips. Beneath the sheet he was naked. He thought pajamas were one of the silliest things ever invented.
/> He was watching her closely. His eyes made her think of water at night—full of mysteries and hints, revealing little.
She’d had it with mystery. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Before you became clan, I couldn’t. After that… fear, I suppose. Ignoble, but accurate.”
“You were afraid I’d be upset?”
“Aren’t you?”
Upset wasn’t the right word. Confused, disoriented, achingly aware of all the differences between them …
“It isn’t as if you haven’t kept secrets, too. I’ve respected that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Grandmother.”
She blinked. “But you know about her. I didn’t tell you, but you saw her in action. Benedict even saw her Change.”
His mouth turned down at one corner, a crooked not-smile. “I also know there aren’t any, ah, were-beasts. Yet that’s what she is. I haven’t pressed you for an explanation.”
“Bully for you. I don’t have one.”
“I wasn’t asking you to explain.”
She gritted her teeth. “You aren’t listening. I didn’t say I wouldn’t explain. I can’t, because I don’t know. If there’s anyone more secretive than your father, it’s my grandmother.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment and then grimaced and rubbed his chest. “That does make my silence harder to explain.”
“You’re my mother’s age. My father is only two years older than you are.” A thought struck her. “You do age, don’t you?”
His eyebrows lifted. “You’ve met my father, among others. Yes, we age. Just more slowly. Perhaps we heal the free radical damage scientists have begun touting as one cause of aging.”
Lupi healed everything from colds to STDs to bullets.
Why wouldn’t they be able to heal most of the damage that caused aging? “Copies,” she muttered.
“What?”
“I’ve read about it. By the time we’re seven or so, every cell in our bodies is a copy. By the time we’re seventy, our DNA is running copies of copies of copies, and things start to wear out. Maybe the same thing about you that messes up lab tests keeps your copies clearer than mine.”
“You do like things logical.”
“Why not? Magic is a system, right? Figure out the rules and you know where you stand.”
“You have more in common with Cullen than you’d like to think.”
No, she didn’t. “Is there anything else you haven’t gotten around to telling me? Anything important?”
Two slow beats of silence were enough of an answer. Her stomach hurt. “We haven’t been together long. I know that, but—”
“That isn’t it. I… hell.” He ran a hand over his hair. “I’m not supposed to tell you. It’s… it falls within the Rhej’s province.”
The priestess or historian she was supposed to talk to in a couple days. “So this a clan secret. A lupus secret. It isn’t just about you.”
He didn’t say anything. She turned away, padding over to her side of the bed. She could understand. She would probably have to keep secrets from him, too, sometimes. FBI secrets.
But they wouldn’t be about her. Dammit. Maybe it was childish, but she wanted Rule to tell her, not this woman she’d never met. She yanked back the covers.
“Lily.”
She scowled at him.
“I’m probably sterile.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. She swallowed. “You have a son.”
“A blessing. A miracle, perhaps. But I’m fifty-four years old, and Toby is my only child. Perhaps ‘all but sterile’ is more accurate.”
His face was closed up, not letting her see what it had cost him to tell her. “But… you can’t be sure. Unless you’ve been tested—”
“You aren’t thinking. Laboratory tests don’t yield useful results for one of the Blood.”
Of course. Of course she knew that. “Still, you’ve been with a lot of women, and not always hung around long enough to know if… you can’t be sure.”
“It’s given to us to know the moment our seed quickens.”
They knew? Lupi always knew if a woman got pregnant? Rule would know if she… Lily rubbed her chest. There didn’t seem to be enough air in her lungs.
She used birth control, of course. She’d started taking the pill as soon as she got her period, years before her first lover. Her mother had understood. Without, for once, the need for explanations or long discussion, her mother had known why Lily needed that protection.
She’d been eight when it happened, not yet fertile. She’d been abducted. Stuffed in a trunk and stolen… she and her best friend, Sarah. They’d played hookie and gone to the beach, where a nice, grandfatherly man grabbed them. Lily hadn’t been raped because the police found her in time.
In time for her. Not for Sarah. So Lily knew in her blood, bones, and sinew that a woman’s choices could be stolen, and she’d always made sure that choice—the decision to bear a child—rested with her.
Only now it didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“No.” She took a deep breath, shoving confusion aside for now. “Don’t apologize for what you can’t help. I can see…” She could see him again with his son, swinging Toby in the air, filled with a clear, unfettered joy. Little though she would have believed it a month ago, Rule was a man made for fatherhood. “I’m sorry for your loss.” The words she’d spoken to the families of victims seemed to fit.
“I’ve had time to grow accustomed. This is a blow for you. I don’t know how you feel about having children.”
She didn’t, either. “There wasn’t anyone on the horizon, so…” She gave a one-shoulder shrug. “I’ve put off thinking about it.” Now she didn’t know what to feel.
“You can still have children, if you choose.”
Her mouth tightened. “By someone else, you mean.”
“I understand that your upbringing tells you that would be wrong. My upbringing tells me it would be wrong to deprive you of such a fundamental joy as children out of a disinclination to share.”
“It’s more than upbringing.” She didn’t know how to explain to him why fidelity mattered, not when he saw it so differently. And… oh, God. She stiffened.
It falls within the Rhej’s province. That’s what he’d said about his secret. But what he’d told her wasn’t a lupi secret… not unless what was true of him was true of other lupi, too.
They weren’t completely sterile. That was obvious. But maybe the magic that healed them so very well messed with their fertility. Maybe that’s why lupi had raised sex and seduction to a fine art, why they considered jealousy immoral. They’d die out if they didn’t take every chance they could to try to make a baby.
Rule’s face didn’t tell her anything. And for once she wasn’t going to ask. He’d broken some kind of law or custom by telling her as much as he had. She could wait to hear the rest.
Somehow. It helped that she was falling-down tired. She sat down on her side. “I guess Cullen did his little spell.”
“Yes. The effect should wear off in about ten hours, or when the front door is opened.”
“Weird.”
He handed her a pillow and didn’t comment on the fact that she wasn’t sleeping naked as she usually did. That decision wasn’t about him. Maybe the bad guys wouldn’t be ready for a second assault this quickly. Maybe Cullen’s spell would work like a dream, and maybe the demon had gone back to hell or Dis or whatever she was supposed to call the place.
And maybe not. If she had to fight bad guys, human or otherwise, she didn’t want to do it naked. She turned off the light and lay down… and heard his sigh as his arms came around her.
A sigh of relief. He hadn’t been sure she’d want to sleep with him, even if sleeping was all she could manage tonight.
It hadn’t occurred to her to do otherwise. And what that meant she had no idea and was too tied to care. Gravity pressed down, squeezing out thoughts and worries,
leaving her blessedly limp.
She yawned hugely. Rule tugged the covers up as he settled on his side, curling around her. Automatically she snuggled closer… and it felt good, it felt right, in spite of everything she’d learned tonight.
And all she hadn’t learned. So many questions…
A heavy weight landed at the foot of the bed, then curled up against one of her feet. She could feel Harry purring, an inaudible rasp as soothing in its way as the male arm draped over her waist. Her eyes drifted closed as another yawn hit.
All unplanned, a question slipped out. “What kind of music did you listen to as a kid?”
“Hmm?” He sounded sleepy.
“When you were a kid, what music did you listen to?”
“Oh. Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky. Anything with strings. Jazz.”
Lord. He couldn’t be normal or predictable about anything, could he? Lily gave up and let sleep have her.
NINE
Every now and then the crowd roared, a many-throated beast always muttering, muttering, when it wasn’t screaming at itself. Far below, the ballplayers stood out vivid and tiny in their white uniforms against the light-flooded green.
It all looked so tidy down there. Safe. But she was up here, in the midst of the crowd-beast. And she wasn’t safe.
Lily’s heart pounded and pounded. She darted between the tall adult figures, looking for the way back. She’d gotten lost from her mother and sisters when she went looking for Grandmother.
Mother was going to be so angry. Lily’s stomach clenched unhappily. Don’t wander off, she always said. Don’t talk to strangers, don’t whine, sit still and be a good girl, and don’t wander off.
Being a good girl was very, very boring. But maybe better than being lost.
The crowd beast roared again, many of its parts leaping to their feet. Popcorn spewed, fists waved, and loudspeakers pumped music into the tinny air. Lily gulped and tried to get around a really fat man who smelled bad, like bourbon. Lily hated the smell of bourbon. It made her think of when Uncle Chen got mean and started yelling. Mostly he yelled at his sons, not her, but she still didn’t like it.