by Eileen Wilks
Like when Steve took up with Mariah?
“Yeah. I mean, Adele really was cool with the sex part, she wasn’t fooling about that, but Steve wanted more than a variety of bodies. Mariah was special to him, and Adele could see that. Shit, we all could. Adele still said the right things, but there was a strain, you know?”
Lily was pretty sure she did know. “You said you’re more interested in the magical exploration bit. What kind of exploring did Adele do?”
The grin was just as white this time, but more sheepish. “I didn’t mean that I was, like, immune to the sex. At first I liked that part, too, but after a while…I thought it would be more like clan.”
“It wasn’t?”
“First time I turned someone down, I saw the difference! Man.” He shook his head. “Adele says some of the same stuff clan does, but she gets it wrong.”
“How do you mean?”
“You know how the fundamental thing is that everyone owns their own sexuality? Everyone, all the time, no exceptions once you’re adult. So if a guy is turned on by other guys, that’s okay, or if you want to take a vow of chastity, that’s cool, too. Hard to understand, maybe.” A quick grin. “But okay. You don’t get to think you know what’s best for someone else, because it’s their sexuality, right? And it’s just as okay to say no as it is to say yes.”
“Adele doesn’t agree?”
“She says the thing is to be kind to each other—well, that’s what Mom says, too, but she doesn’t mean it the same way. Adele thinks the only kind, healthy answer is yes. If you turn someone down, there’s something wrong with you.” Another head shake. “I think it’s a control thing with her. I tried to tell Steve that once, that she’s using sex for control, but he didn’t see it. But she never pulls that control shit with them. With the lupi, I mean. Not anymore.”
“Not anymore?”
“I wasn’t part of the group when Rule came in and pulled the plug a few years back, but I heard about it. He didn’t try to tell the older lupi like Steve what to do, but he had a word with the young ones, and pfft! They were gone, just like that, and they didn’t come back. Shook Adele up, I think.” His smile was sly. “I know it pissed her off.”
“If you aren’t happy with Adele’s sexual philosophy or her efforts to control the group, why stay with it?”
He sighed. “You read me, right? I’ve got a little bit of a Gift, nothing special. But that’s what rocks me, studying magic. I like working on cars, too, but they’re second. If I could make a living with spells…but, shit, even if there was a job like that, I don’t have the power.”
“Adele’s willing to teach you.”
“Yeah. Not many are, not when I’ll never be a powerhouse, and I get that. The ones with big-ass Gifts need help getting them under control, and they can do more with what they’re taught than I could.”
“I’ve always thought desire has as much to do with where we end up as raw talent. Stubbornness counts, too. Did Adele teach you any, ah, runic spells? The kind with patterns, drawings?”
He lit up. “No, those are more my thing. She’s into charms and potions, but potions are really hard to get right—the results can be unpredictable, you know? And charms take power. Me, I get off on the drawn spells. Lots of spells have a drawn or written component, but putting one all in symbols, that’s rare. I’ve been working on how to convert other kinds of spells to runic.”
“Maybe she’s asked you to convert a spell that way sometimes.”
“Yeah, she has. I’m pretty good at it.” He might have been trying to look modest. It looked more like delight. “She asked me to help her with one a couple weeks ago. Well, she didn’t show me the whole spell, just part of it she was having trouble with. She said I wasn’t ready for the whole thing, but I think she just likes being mysterious, making like she knows everything.”
In that moment, Lily truly hated Adele Blanco. She didn’t want Mannie to know what his teacher had done with his help…but she wasn’t going to be able to prevent it. For that alone, Adele Blanco needed to go down.
She reminded herself that Mannie could be playing the naïf to deflect suspicion. And she did listen to herself—she just didn’t believe it. “What was the deal with wolfbane?” she asked casually.
“You heard about that?” he asked, surprised—and immediately supplied his own answer. “I guess Steve told Rule. Well, it didn’t work out. She and Steve were trying to find a way to use it for an anesthetic, but all she got was a kind of paralytic. It made Steve real drowsy and he couldn’t move, but didn’t really knock him out. From the way Steve described it…”
His voice trailed off as, at last, he caught on to her line of questioning. Horror dawned, quick as a punch to the gut. “You think…you think she….”
“What did she do with the bane to make it a paralytic?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Something about drying it, combining it with other stuff…. God.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “This is awful. This is beyond awful. I can’t get my head around it. I think…yeah, she made some kind of incense. She didn’t talk about it, but Steve said—he talked about the smell of the smoke. It smelled like watermelon. He said he didn’t know if he’d ever be able to eat watermelon again because when it was wearing off he got sick, and—and he—”
Mannie stopped, put his clenched fist on the counter, and tapped it over and over. His Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed.
She put her hand over his fist. It was unprofessional as hell. She didn’t care. He immediately unlocked his fist to clasp her hand. Hard. His eyes were blank, staring at something horrible.
“You didn’t know,” she said gently. “You couldn’t have known.”
“I should. I should have.”
“Steve didn’t. He was a lot older than you, and he was smart. If he didn’t suspect she was capable of something like this, why would it even cross your mind?”
“It didn’t. That’s for damned sure. Excuse me.” He shoved off the stool and tried to pace. There wasn’t room for it. “I need to move. I need to hit someone. You’ll get her, right?” He stopped, fixing her with a scowl that didn’t hide the sheen in his eyes. “You’ll get her.”
“Count on it.” She stood. “What did…shit. That’s my car. That’s my fucking car.”
Steve turned to look at the white Ford sedan being towed behind a wrecker with Ace Wrecking on its door. “You must have pissed off Chief Daly. He pulls that sort of shit. You wouldn’t believe how many tickets Steve got for jay-walking. Had his bike towed off twice, too, when he forgot to plug the meter.”
“I plugged the damned meter. I don’t have time for this. I don’t have freaking time for this.” She pulled out her phone. Rule had his car. He could come pick her up and…and he hadn’t called her back, had he?
She checked the time. She’d left him a voice mail over an hour ago, and he still hadn’t called. Automatically she checked her Rule-compass. As far as she could tell, he was exactly where he’d been last time she checked. Not that she was accurate enough to say he hadn’t moved at all, not at this distance, but…
The phone’s display told her she had a text message from him, sent right after she left the voicemail. She touched it.
Headed 4 clanhome. CU 2nite.
Fear slid through her, soft and slick as vomit. Rule never used texting abbreviations. He loathed them. And he wasn’t headed for Clanhome.
He was in trouble. From Adele, from Friar, she didn’t know which—but he was in trouble. And she had no car, no backup.
Or did she? She spun to face Mannie, thumbing through her contact list. “You have a car. A Mustang.”
“Yeah, I told you…what’s wrong?”
“I need it.”
11
THE Mustang jolted over one last rut and rocked to a stop in the packed earth at the base of a craggy hill. “We’re there,” Lily said into her phone. “Putting you on speaker now.” She did so and slipped the phone in her pocket, clipping it to
be sure it stayed.
Steve’s body hadn’t actually been left on the hiking trail, but slightly off it, in a small cul-de-sac walled by rock and packed earth. There were two ways to reach that spot—the trail itself, which was used often enough that it had a parking area at its foot. And the route she’d be taking.
No one came this way, according to Mannie. It was a rugged scramble with no rewarding views. He knew about it because he coursed all over the hills gleaning flowers and roots and stuff.
So did Adele, but it seemed she hadn’t come this way today. Her car wasn’t here.
“Jason hasn’t reached the parking area yet,” she said, throwing open her door. “But he’s close. We aren’t waiting.”
“Okay.” Mannie climbed out of the passenger’s side. “What about the others?”
She’d called out backup of the unofficial kind—Jason, who was close. And Rule’s brother Benedict, who was not. But he was in charge of security at Nokolai Clanhome, and he was good. Very, very good. He was bringing some of his people. “ETA forty to fifty minutes. We’ll move in and I’ll assess the situation. If it’s stable, I’ll wait until they’re in place.”
“If not?”
“Then I don’t wait. You remember the signals?”
“You’ll tap my shoulder if you’re close enough. Otherwise you’ll tap your head or face or whatever you think I’ll see. One tap means stop, freeze, hold. Two taps means keep going or come closer. Three taps—get the hell out of there any way I can.”
He answered easily enough, but he was taut. Jumpy. She was insane to bring him. “It’s okay to be nervous, you know. I’d be worried if you weren’t. Just remember your role—guide and consultant on the magic stuff, if needed. Not Rambo.”
“No Rambo shit. Right. I’m cool with that. Did you ever notice how everyone but Rambo gets killed?”
“Yeah,” she said dryly. “I have. Let’s move.”
This part she didn’t like. Every instinct said she needed to get out in front. She had the badge, the gun, the training. She couldn’t be affected by charms or whatever magical hoodoo Adele might pull.
But she didn’t know the way. Mannie did. Instinct lost this round.
He led her around a boulder the size of a Buick standing on end. There was a path of sorts—at least, there was a route up among the tumbled rocks.
For maybe fifteen minutes they went up—almost straight up at times, scrambling over rock in all shapes and sizes, slithering up scree. Slipping a time or two, but not badly. Here the stone was granite, some loose, some fixed, earth’s tawny bones poking through where the skin was thin. Many of the larger boulders bore a reddish residue from the aerial spraying used on a wildfire a few years back. Grass sprouted in the oddest places. So did pines, scrub oak, and thorny manzanita.
Lily’s breath was labored by the time the ground leveled out some, and she’d scraped one palm. No snakes, though. If they made it the rest of the way without seeing a snake, she’d count herself lucky. They set out along a narrow vee between two steep, stony shoulders shrugged up by some distant geological upset. About ten paces in, Mannie stopped, looked at her, and pointed.
Smoke wisped up in a tattered tail, barely visible against the blue of the sky.
She nodded grimly. Smoke meant a campfire, which meant Adele Blanco, not Robert Friar, waited ahead. That’s what she’d expected, but confirmation was good. Lily took out her phone. No bars.
No surprise. They’d thought they would lose coverage as they moved up among the rocky hills. She had to hope Jason spotted the smoke, too, and avoided getting a whiff of it. Lily tapped Mannie’s shoulder twice.
They were close, dammit. She wanted to shove him aside and race to Rule—but that was stupid, and stupid got people killed. Mannie knew the path. She didn’t. Lily set her jaw and kept following.
Problem was, while she could get her feet and hands to do what they were supposed to, she couldn’t make her mind behave. And she couldn’t make sense of this. Why had Adele taken Rule? Had she just wacked out and decided to kill everyone who’d ever pissed her off? Had Rule caught her doing something that revealed her guilt?
Maybe she was willing to kill just as a distraction. Lily had run up against killers c old-blooded enough for that—people who’d kill a second time just to throw the cops off the scent. She might have set up some cockamamie alibi. Or did she have some crazy notion of using Rule to bargain with?
But she hadn’t tried to contact Lily. Hard to arrange a bargain if you don’t let the other side know about it. No, she meant to kill him.
But she hadn’t. Not yet.
Why not? If she had Rule paralyzed, he was helpless. There were so many ways to kill a helpless man—quicker, easier ways than tattooing a spell around his neck. But Adele hadn’t gone for quick and easy. Lily knew that much, held on to that certainty. If Rule had been killed, the mate bond would have snapped. It hadn’t.
How long did it take to ink a tattoo all the way around a man’s neck?
Lily didn’t know. She didn’t have any goddamned idea, so all she could do was keep going forward and pray. And all she could manage for prayer was oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…
Mannie stopped. He looked at her and jerked his chin, indicating they went up again. This time “up” wasn’t a scramble, but a vertical climb. Not for very far, thank God—after about ten feet they’d reach a ledge. That ledge wandered off to the right, leading to a crevice.
The crevice led to Rule. Lily’s heartbeat picked up. She gave Mannie a nod, studied the rock face briefly, and reached for the first handhold.
This was where she took over the lead.
It wasn’t a tricky climb. Hard work, but not tricky. The hand-and footholds were good. But it was impossible to make it completely silently. Every scuff of a foot, every loose pebble, sounded horribly loud. Her scraped hand stung as she hauled herself up on nearly two wide feet of blessedly level ground.
Hard to say who was more startled, her or the rattler she’d disturbed.
Lily took two hasty steps back. It didn’t seem to calm the snake any. It was curled up except for the tail, which shook—and the head, which was lifted, testing the air with its tongue.
No time. She had no time—Mannie was coming up right behind her. Where was a stick when she needed it? There was nothing in sight, and she had no time.
Lily pulled off her jacket, lunged forward, and tossed the jacket over the snake just as Mannie’s hand appeared on the ledge. Then she kicked it—jacket, snake and all.
The two separated in midair. Mannie froze with his arm on the ledge, his head swiveling to watch as the snake landed below. Then he scrambled up the rest of the way.
She barely waited for him to make it safely up before hurrying to the crevice. It was low and narrow. She got on her knees, twisted sideways, and started wiggling forward.
It was about a yard long, and taller at the other end. According to Mannie, she’d come out about seven feet up from the floor of the cul-de-sac. She stopped just before reaching the end and unholstered her weapon. Her heart pounded so hard she felt it in her ear canals, yet she was calm.
He was still alive. She’d made it in time.
Slowly she peered around the rocky lip of the crevice.
Ahead of her—rock. Below was more rock, this with some dirt atop it. And Rule. He lay on his back on a bright blue blanket, his eyes closed, his head a couple feet from a small camp stove. His hands were handcuffed in front of him. At his feet was an ordinary ice chest. And those were…rose petals? Someone had sprinkled rose petals on the blanket?
No one else in sight. The cul-de-sac was about ten feet by fifteen, with no visible hiding places.
She heard Mannie coming up behind her and reached up and tapped her head once: stop. Was this some kind of trap?
She eased farther out, craned her head. She couldn’t see anyone, and no one shot at her. Always a good sign.
She twisted around and leaned closer to Mannie, barely visible in the deep s
hadows of the crevice. “Stay up here,” she whispered. His head moved in what she hoped was a nod.
She straightened, sat, and swung her legs up to her chest—hard squeeze to get them fully twisted around in this tight space, but she made it, letting them dangle out the opening. She dropped, weapon out.
Nothing. No one fired, no one came running out of some previously unnoticed hidey-hole. Two quick steps took her to Rule. She knelt and put her hand on his neck—his clean-skinned neck. No tattoo.
His pulse was strong. She kept her weapon out, her eyes scanning the area. What the hell was going on?
The scuff of feet. A woman’s voice, too low for her to catch the words. The sounds came from the opening to the cul-de-sac—a wide opening, not a narrow, slither-through-it crevice. From the trail beyond—and not very far down that trail.
With her empty hand she tapped her head once: stay put.
Question was, did she do the same, or try to ambush whoever was coming? She did not like leaving Rule stretched out, helpless and unaware—but logic said he’d be safest with his kidnapper caught, and the best way to catch her was by surprise.
Lily stood and started for the side of the cul-de-sac that would screen her from whoever was approaching. And stepped on a damned pebble. It slid under her, making her jerk to regain her balance—making her make noise, dammit to hell. She froze, listening.
The voice was silent. The footsteps had stopped.
Never mind stealth, then. Lily swung out around the rocky wall, weapon held out in both hands. “FBI! Freeze! Hands up!”
Two women, not one, looked back at her. One was Mariah Friar, her eyes huge in her pallid face. The other was taller, older, heavier, with dusky skin and dark brown hair in a wild froth of curls halfway down her back. She wore jeans and a snug, short-sleeved black sweater.
With one arm, she kept Mariah’s arm pinned high behind her back. Her other hand kept her snub-nose Beretta jammed under Mariah’s chin. Her eyes were tilted and smiling, as were her full lips. “Maybe you should freeze, too, FBI.”