by Eileen Wilks
Now it made sense. Crazy sense, maybe, but Lily knew she should have figured it out the second she spotted those damned rose petals. Adele had watched too many episodes of Murder She Wrote. She thought she could stage a murder-suicide. Lily could read the script the woman had written: Mariah lured Rule here for sex. Rule, being lupus, accepted. Mariah—for what reason, Lily wondered?—killed him instead of fucking him, then shot herself.
No doubt Adele would have supplied some kind of motive, given time.
“You’ve got a problem, Adele. Your little plan to kill a couple more people to distract me didn’t work.” Lily shook her head. “And your staging sucks. A romantic tryst on rocks? What were you thinking?”
The woman’s eyes flashed, but her smile didn’t budge. “You don’t think it’s a pretty setting? I’m crushed—or would be, but your presence here makes your opinion less important than it was. It seems we will have an even worse tragedy than I’d originally thought.”
“How’re you going to manage that, Adele? If you shoot Mariah, I shoot you. If you move that gun so you can shoot me, I shoot you. Seems like you wind up dead no matter what—unless you put that gun down.”
“Oh, you’re tough, aren’t you? Not so tough you’ll stand there and let me shoot poor little Mariah, though.” She jammed the gun harder into that terribly vulnerable spot, her face twisting with hate. Mariah whimpered. “Shut up, Mariah. God, but I’m so sick of your whiny little feelings. All that sweet, sweet neediness of yours seducing Steve…”
Suddenly she laughed. “You want to know how to lie to an empath, FBI? All you have to do is mean it when you say it. She can only read what you’re feeling right that moment, so if you keep the hate pushed down deep, she doesn’t know.”
“I knew.” Mariah’s’ voice was thin and shaky, but clear. “I knew how jealous you were, but the friendship was real, too. You know it was.”
“Shut up.” She jerked Mariah’s arm higher, making her cry out. “And you, FBI. Put the gun down. I’ve got nothing to lose. Might as well shoot this little friend of mine, eh?”
“You’re lying,” Lily said calmly. “You want to live. You shoot her and I shoot you. We’re only ten feet apart. This close, I can go for a head shot, no problem.”
For the first time, uncertainty flashed across the woman’s face—only for a second, but that sublime, crazy confidence had faltered. “You ever killed someone, FBI? You think it’s easy? Think you’re up to it?”
Lily let the memories in, chilling her. Flattening her voice. “With a gun, you mean? I’ve only killed one human, but that was with my bare hands. With a gun, though, I’ve hunted demons. You’ll be a lot easier to kill than they were.”
Adele laughed again, but it was shaky. “What are you, crazy? You think I’m going to believe you’ve been demon hunting? Never mind. Never mind, damn you, keep your stupid gun. But stay there. Stay back.” She took a careful step backward, her gaze never leaving Lily. “You stay back.”
“Sure. Just one problem, Adele. There’s a wolf behind you.”
Her lip curled in contempt. “I’m supposed to turn around now, I take it. Fool. Rule isn’t going to wake from that stupor for at least an hour, and when he does, he’ll be too sick to Change.”
“I said there’s a wolf. I didn’t say it was Rule.”
Some fifteen feet down the path, Jason—tawny and huge, hackles raised and lips peeled back from really large teeth—growled.
Adele jerked. She yanked Mariah with her, half-turned—saw the wolf gathering his legs beneath him—and shoved Mariah at Lily.
Mariah cried out, stumbling. Jason leapt. A shot rang out. Another. Adele was running straight at Jason, firing. Lily was running, too, unable to get a clear shot.
The big wolf yelped and landed hard, but he thudded into Adele, knocking her down, too. She lost the gun and rolled, ending up flat on her back just as Lily skidded to a halt beside her, gun pointed right between her eyes. “Don’t move.”
Adele stared, her chest heaving—and all of a sudden flung her head back and screamed in rage, her hands digging into the dirt on either side of her.
The earth moved.
A small lift, first—but enough that Lily wobbled. A couple rocks slithered, fell. Then the ground danced—a horrid, rolling shudder as if rock had turned liquid to roll beneath them like the ocean. More rocks fell. She heard Mannie cry out. She fell to one knee, arms out, trying to balance on the shifting planet.
Adele howled with laughter, pushing up onto her hands and knees. “Go! Go! Or I’ll bring it all down! Rocks falling on your lover, your precious lover—rocks falling on all of us! Go!”
She was doing it. Adele was using her Gift to do the impossible—to call an earthquake.
Something hot and fierce swelled up in Lily so fast she didn’t question, didn’t think. She dropped her gun and threw herself on top of the laughing madwoman—wrapped her arms around her, holding tight, reaching—
Power, vast and raw, power like nothing she’d ever touched—power called from earth—power reverberating between woman and earth, call and answer, again and again, a shuddering cascade building out of control—
No! Lily squeezed her eyes shut, squeezed her arms tighter, squeezed with everything she was as if she could stretch herself around the woman and cut her off, shut it down, close it off, you cannot reach this woman, she has no call, no power. NO.
The earth stilled.
Dizziness swam through Lily, a vicious, sucking exhaustion. She pried her eyes open and shook her head, trying to clear it. What…?
Adele lay motionless beneath her. Lily pushed up on one trembling arm, suddenly afraid she’d squeezed the woman to death or something. She’d done…something. She couldn’t quite remember…
But Adele was quite alive—and staring up at her in horror. “What did you do to me?” she whispered. “What are you?”
Lily dragged in one shaky breath. Another. Several feet behind her, Jason was panting like he hurt. But panting meant he was alive.
From farther away she heard Mannie call, “Don’t be mad, but when the rocks came down, so did I. Rule’s okay, though. None of them hit him. I’m okay. Limping, but okay. Are you okay?”
She got one more good breath into her and called back, “I’m good. I don’t know about Mariah. Jason’s hit. Drag Rule out of there, if you can.” The earth had stopped moving, but there could be loose rocks. Aftershocks.
Then and only then did she look at Adele once more. “What am I?” She smiled a nasty, satisfied smile. “I’m the FBI bitch who’s arresting you. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have…”
epilogue
IT was raining—a rare and splendid event here in San Diego, though it happened with annoying frequency in D.C. The window in Rule’s bedroom—in their bedroom—faced the bed, and the drapes were open. Water blurred the glass. The smeared shimmer of city lights outside fit well with the washed-clean feel of Lily’s body, as if all her edges were blurred, too. Her fingers tingled. Rule’s hand sifted slowly through her hair.
The apartment was on the top floor, high enough that the loss of privacy was more symbolic than real; Lily was getting used to it. At the moment, curled into Rule’s body, warm and drowsy with the aftermath of passion, it didn’t bother her at all.
She stirred, unready for sleep. “This morning I notified the manager at my place that I’m not renewing my lease.”
His hand stilled—then brushed the hair from her face so he could press a kiss on her temple. “Good.”
“We have to talk about how we’re going to split expenses here.”
“Mmm. Do we have to talk about it now?”
She smiled. “I guess not. But I’ll need to know how much your utilities run, and the—”
He propped up on one elbow, kissed her firmly, and said, “I’ll print you out a spreadsheet in the morning.”
“We’re leaving in the morning.”
No wonder about why. Steve’s memorial at Clanhome had been today. His body wouldn’t be released for another couple weeks, so they would be making yet another cross-country flight then, for the burial. Lily wouldn’t attend that, but Rule needed to.
After a moment he said, “I haven’t been kind in my grief.”
“Grief is seldom kind.”
“No.” Now he looked at her. “But I regret being an ass.”
A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. “You apologized already.” When he woke from the bane stupor, and right after throwing up the first time, he’d apologized for using her password. He’d done it again when the dry heaves hit.
Wolfbane really did make lupi sick as dogs…though that was a phrase she’d refrained from using. So far.
“I felt guilty,” he said quietly. “I’d allowed such distance to grow between me and Steve…he still mattered, but…” His words ran out, leaving his mouth tight with pain.
“Don’t a lot of relationships have cycles? Neither of you had given up on the friendship. That’s what counts. If Adele hadn’t killed him, there’s every chance you and Steve would have grown close again when the time was right.” She flattened her hand on his chest. “She robbed both of you of the chance for that.”
“She nearly robbed me of more. If you hadn’t checked your messages, or if you hadn’t understood right away something was wrong—”
“Let’s not go there.”
After the nausea passed, Rule had been keenly embarrassed by how easily Adele had tricked him. She’d called and asked him to meet her for a memorial ritual at the spot Steve was killed. Rule had planned to check out the spot anyway, plus he’d been fixated on Friar as the culprit. He’d agreed. When he arrived, Adele had tossed some herbs on the little camp stove. He’d lost the use of his body, and Adele had gained the use of his phone. She’d used it to send that text message, hoping to distract Lily so she could grab Mariah and set up the phony murder/suicide.
Rule smiled, but his eyes had that determined look. He wasn’t finished. “In addition to guilt, I was afraid. I’d allowed myself to lose one dear friend in some ways even before he died. How did I know I could keep you—keep us… Hell. I don’t know how to say it.”
“Oh, because you have such trouble with long-term relationships, you mean? Like Cullen. It’s terrible the way you’ve allowed that friendship to falter, and him so easy to get along with.”
For a second she thought she’d said exactly the wrong thing, reminding him of a missing friend. Then he barked out a laugh and eased back against the pillows. “Easy to get along with. Yes, that’s how I think of Cullen. Are you trying to say that all relationships don’t follow the same path?”
“Also that I’m not Steve.” She threaded her fingers through his. “I don’t let go easily. Kind of like chewing gum. You’d have to keep scraping me off.”
“There’s a romantic image.” He squeezed her hand, clearly amused. “I wanted it to be Robert Friar, you know. He seemed…a more worthy enemy.”
“I know.” She suspected Rule considered Steve’s death at the hands of a jealous lover somehow undignified. But to Lily’s way of thinking, death was like sex—it mattered, it had meaning, but it was not dignified. “You lupi aren’t exempt from human nature, though. Part of your nature is human, and you’re tangled up with humans.”
“True.” He sighed.
She glanced at him. His eyelids were drooping. She smiled and fell silent.
He’d been sleeping more than usual, but he said that was normal, even though nearly three days had passed. Apparently getting over bane sickness was like getting over the flu. Even after the bug had been defeated, the body wanted extra rest.
Of course, for Rule, extra rest meant getting seven or eight hours’ sleep instead of five. Lily snuggled down into the covers more fully and closed her eyes…but her brain wasn’t ready to shut down.
There were still some loose ends with the case that bothered her. What had Friar’s lieutenants been doing in town? The timing was coincidence, had to be, but she’d like to know what he was planning. Sooner or later, that man was going to be trouble.
Then there was the weird way Adele had burned out her Gift. The woman had nary a hint of magic left. They were keeping Adele’s role in the earthquake quiet—it had been a small quake, fortunately, and anomalous, which meant the seismologists were puzzled. Lily figured they could go right on being puzzled. She didn’t want any other Gifted assholes hearing about it and deciding to give it a go, in the hope they could pull it off without burning out. And she didn’t want the un-Gifted population to have one more reason to fear their Gifted brethren.
But it nagged at her that she couldn’t remember exactly what had happened when…
Her phone buzzed. The same phone—it had survived being tossed off a short cliff with a snake with nary a scratch. The buzz meant it was Croft, so she sat up and reached for it on the bedside table, frowning. It was pretty late, D.C. time. “Yu here.”
“Yes, I am,” Croft said jubilantly. “And someone else is, too. Someone you want to talk to. Here.”
Lily didn’t talk much. She listened, she laughed, and if her eyes filled, that was okay. And of course she passed the phone to Rule, who’d heard it all anyway.
Who’d have thought it? Sometimes the optimists turn out to be right. “Here,” she said, grinning fit to bust. “Cullen’s back. Cynna’s back. They’re all back, they’re fine, and Cullen wants to say hi.”
Keep reading for a special preview of the next Novel of the Lupi
MIND MAGIC
Available from Berkley November 2015
July
Washington, D.C.
Lily woke slowly in a bed that wasn’t hers. The bed was soft. So was the early morning light. The man pressed up against her back . . . wasn’t.
“I had a wonderful dream,” Rule murmured, his thumb idly circling her nipple. “It was a sunny day, and you and I stood on opposite sides of a bridge. We both walked out onto it until we met in the middle. There, in front of our families and friends, we agreed we were married.”
“Never happen,” Lily said, rolling over so she could see his face. “Everyone knows your people don’t believe in marriage.”
And then she just lay there smiling at him while he smiled at her. She loved the way Rule looked in the mornings. Messy. Which was funny, because she didn’t like it anywhere else. But when he first woke up, with his face all stubbly and his hair every which way, he was hers. Once they left the bed he’d be Rho of Leidolf Clan, Lu Nuncio of Nokolai Clan, and second-in-command of a highly secret group fighting a war the rest of the world didn’t know about. Here, he was just hers.
Funny, Lily thought, how unimportant she’d thought weddings were before she had one of her own to look back on. Not very far back, of course. They’d returned from their honeymoon a little over two months ago. It had been a busy two months, but relatively peaceful until . . .
A waking-up yawn overtook her, making her need to stretch, so she did.
“Do that again.”
Her mouth twitched. “Yawn?”
“You can do that, too, if you like,” he allowed, “but I was referring to the part where you pressed up against me.”
“Oh, you mean like this?”
He confirmed that and added another request. She asked for clarification, so he gave her a hands-on demonstration. Suddenly she was wide awake. He began trailing kisses down her torso, pausing here and there at points of interest, making her wish she could purr. She combed her fingers through his hair . . .
and shrieked, jerking her hand back and shaking it.
His head came up in alarm. “What?”
She closed her eyes. “Your hair turned into spiders.”
“Spiders.”
“Hundreds of them. Thousands. Crawling and waving their nasty
little legs around.”
“I’m guessing that’s a mood killer.”
She nodded, her eyes squeezed tight.
“Headache?”
“Not this time.”
“Then if you kept your eyes closed—”
She opened her eyes to glare at him—and promptly shut them again. “I hate spiders.”
“You’re afraid of spiders.” There was a hint of amusement in his voice.
“Don’t even think about teasing me.”
“You’ve fought demons, dworg, a chimera, a wraith, a god, a sidhe lord, and God only knows how many gun-wielding bad guys, but spiders—”
“Shut up, Rule.”
“—make you shriek like a little girl.”
She couldn’t hit him. She might get one of the spiders on her. They weren’t real—she knew that—but they looked and felt real, and would for another . . . shit. She’d forgotten to note the time the hallucination started. “Take your gloating and your creepy spider-covered head elsewhere. But first tell me what time it is.”
A short pause. “Six fifty-eight. How is it I’m just now learning about this phobia?”
“It’s not a phobia. I can handle them one at a time,” she said with dignity. “Just not in the thousands.”
The bed shifted as he stood up. “I’m going to go wash my spiders.”
“No, wait, I need to log how long it lasts, and if I don’t see them go away I won’t know—”
“Your eyes are shut. You won’t see them go away anyway.”
Oh, God, she was going to have to look at them again. She forced her eyes open long enough to confirm that the episode was not over. “I can take quick peeks.”
A man spoke on the other side of the bedroom door. “Is everything all right?”
“Lily was startled by one of the hallucinations,” Rule said. “She’s fine.”
“I see. The coffee’s ready when you are. I’m going to stir up some pancakes to go with it. We’ve got maple syrup and a blueberry syrup that Deborah makes from the bushes out back.” Ruben’s feet made almost no sound on the hardwood floors as he moved away from the door.