Blood Challenge

by Eileen Wilks

  The man crossing the cement to his Lexus left around seven every weekday, too. He was in management at some alphabet-soup company. He was overweight, well-groomed, around forty, and Hispanic. Black and brown, with some gray mixed with the black. Fifth floor, she thought. He was possible, but only just.

  Then there was the motorcycle she’d seen tearing out of the garage as she approached it. Jack was a nice guy in a resoundingly unsuccessful band. He got the occasional modeling job, too, but could never have afforded the rent if not for his boyfriend, who had some kind of trust fund. Said boyfriend was, in Lily’s opinion, an asshole, but not the sort of asshole who got up before seven A.M. to spray-paint insults on an FBI agent’s car.

  It was unlikely the perp was still present. She kept her senses tuned anyway as she took her phone from the armband she used on a run. She used it to take a few pictures of the damage, then checked out the surveillance cameras.

  Didn’t seem to be damaged, so maybe they’d get a look at the asshole who’d defaced her ride. It would be nice to know for sure it wasn’t anyone she shared the elevator with.

  Of course, to see the images from the cameras, she’d have to tell Rule. He owned the building. Or rather, his father did, but it really belonged to the clan. Nokolai clan, that is. Rule had two clans now, and that was another source of trouble.

  Lily got in the elevator and punched the button for the tenth floor. She did not want to tell Rule. She’d have to, but she didn’t want to. She hadn’t realized how overly protective he’d gotten until the heat wave broke and she could abandon the treadmill to run outside again. He didn’t want her running alone. At first he’d found reasons to join her, but when he couldn’t he’d tried sending one or two of his guards along.

  She’d put a stop to that. Sure, there’d been a situation last month when the guards had been useful. But that case, that situation, was over. His caution was excessive and annoying, and that was half the reason she didn’t want to tell him about her car.

  The other half was the guilt. Rule was all too grimly certain to blame himself for the vandalism, and that was harder for her to deal with because she couldn’t get mad about it. She even understood. She’d handled similar feelings herself, worrying about how their upcoming marriage would affect him.

  When Rule asked her to marry him, he’d broken a centuries-old taboo for his people. When she accepted, she’d given the haters of the world a new target. Her.

  The elevator dinged. Lily got off and turned left. Rule had a corner unit. No, they had a corner unit. It had been four months now since she let her old apartment go; longer than that since they basically started living together . . . and nearly a year since she first saw him, sitting in the cacophony and bad lighting that was Club Hell.

  Nearly a year since her life changed, and changed, and changed again. Time to stop thinking of it as his place.

  Maybe if she bought some new pillows or a rug . . .

  Two of Rule’s bodyguards stood in front of the apartment door, this set being from Leidolf clan. She’d decided to think of them as nosy but well-intentioned neighbors—like a lot of really buff Mrs. Kravitzes from Bewitched—only with guns and a disconcerting willingness to lay down their lives, if necessary.

  They both looked young. One of them really was. Jeffrey Lane was twenty-four, barely an adult in lupi eyes, one of the two Leidolf Rule had brought to San Diego to be trained as guards.

  “Jeff,” she said as she approached. “What were you thinking?”

  The shorter of the two touched his hair self-consciously. “Hey, it’s California, right?”

  “It’s pink.”

  He grinned. “I already got in trouble for it. José says I don’t blend in. But, you know, I thought out here—”

  “You see a lot of guys with pink hair in this building?” the taller man said. “In some of those clubs where you like to hang out, maybe, but not here where Rule lives. You don’t blend in here.” LeBron shook his head, which he’d recently begun shaving. Combined with his height and build, it gave him the look of a café au lait Mr. Clean, only without the earring.

  Jeff tried to look abashed. He wasn’t good at it.

  “Have a good run?” LeBron asked Lily.

  “Pretty good.” She didn’t mention her car. That was FBI business, not a matter for either clan. Besides, she wouldn’t have told her nosy neighbor about it, would she? “We’re supposed to get some rain today. Think it’ll happen?”

  “You mean it really does rain in San Diego?” LeBron said. “I thought that was, like, a myth. Something you tell newcomers to see if they’ll swallow it.”

  The Leidolf guards were from North Carolina—green, wet North Carolina. She shook her head. “Damn. You’re on to me. Have you heard from Samuel? He get that job?”

  LeBron had two sons, both grown. Samuel was the younger one. LeBron looked maybe a decade older than Jeff, but he was closer to sixty than thirty. Of course, that was young—for a lupus. They didn’t hit middle age until eighty or so.

  “No word yet, but he thought the interview went well.”

  “Let me know when you hear.” Lily used her own key on the door. Either of the men could have opened it for her, but she preferred to do that herself. She liked to think that was good sense—it left their hands and their attention free for any sudden threats—but deep down she knew there was a healthy dollop of denial involved, too.

  If she opened the door herself, she could pretend they didn’t have keys.

  It was a gorgeous apartment. That was part of the problem. Nothing she could afford fit the place. Rule had furnished it in man-modern, with low-slung leather couches and beautiful old wood. The crystal dish where she tossed her key rested on a two-hundred-year-old console table in the small entry. Her water bottle didn’t exactly go with the décor, but it was a handy spot to leave it when she went for a run. She grabbed it, twisted, and started chugging as she walked.

  The great room was the star of the show. A huge window-wall framed the combined living and dining areas. Freshly minted morning sun poured in through the glass, striking mahogany sparks from the hair of the man seated at the big, dark wood dining table at one end of the room.

  In other lighting, Rule’s hair was nearly black. In any light, it was shaggy. She used to think that was part of his persona, the look he cultivated as the public face of the lupi. In fact, Rule just didn’t like getting his hair cut. He could get away with that, being so outrageously sexy. But she liked knowing the shaggy hair wasn’t part of the persona, but part of the man.

  Rule spoke without looking up from the laptop that anchored the sprawl of papers covering half the table. “Your mother found a cheaper printer for the invitations. She wants you to call her about it. You’ll have time for that, as I’ve already called about the damage to your car.”

  Her feet stopped. “Ah . . . oh. Who did you call?”

  “Your current comrades-in-arms. The local FBI office.” Now he looked up. “You did plan to tell me, didn’t you?”

  “I was considering it. How did you find out?”

  “José saw it when he was leaving on an errand.”

  José was Nokolai and the head bodyguard. “So you called the office, but you didn’t call and warn me.”

  Now he looked at her. “I did. You didn’t answer.”

  Lily opened her mouth to argue—and shut it again. She stripped off the armband, took out her phone, and checked. And grimaced. “The ringer’s turned off. Sorry. Who did you talk to?”

  “ Agent Gray. He assured me he’d send someone out right away. He wanted me to tell you that the handwriting expert confirmed that the letter you received last week was written by the, ah, perp you suspected. The one with a habit of writing sexually explicit letters.”

  “It’s nice to be right.” The letter had been yucky, not scary. The guy who wrote it was a known quantity—not known by name, maybe, but by habit. He got off on writing dirty “love letters” to people in the news, and was sadly promiscu
ous in his attentions. He’d written everyone from Britney Spears to the First Lady. “I told you about that letter.”

  His eyebrows—he had wicked eyebrows—lifted. “Yes, you did. Unlike the other letters you’ve received. The ones serious enough that the FBI is investigating them. Those, you haven’t mentioned.”

  Busted. Damn that Gray for tattling. “Because you’d jump to conclusions. The FBI has a policy of tracking any threats its agents receive. Standard practice, not anything to worry about.”

  “When someone threatens you, I worry.” He rose. “You will not, in some misguided effort to protect me, keep such things from me.”

  Rule was one of those rare men who look elegant in anything. Maybe it was the shoulders, or the runner’s legs, or the sheer grace of the man. Today’s choices were black, as usual—black slacks with a black dress shirt with the sleeves pushed up. His feet were bare.

  It was inappropriate to find those bare feet sexy when he was clearly angry. And with reason, she admitted. If their situations were reversed, she’d have been pissed. “Okay.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “Okay? Just like that?”

  “On one condition. We are not having the bodyguard argument again.”

  He considered that a moment. “I’ll table it for now. I reserve the right to bring it up later if conditions warrant.”

  “Rule, I can’t go everywhere trailing lupus bodyguards! Aside from the fun Friar would have with that story once he found out—and he would, eventually—there’s the matter of confidentiality. I can’t have civilians privy to an investigation.”

  “I thought we were tabling the argument.”

  She huffed out a breath. “Why, when I got what I asked for, do I feel like you won?”

  His smile came quick and easy. “Because you’re a deeply suspicious woman. About those threatening letters—”

  A herd of elephants galloped down the hall from the bedrooms. A second later, the herd came into view, transformed into a nine-year-old boy with dark hair and his father’s eyebrows. He was wearing his tighty whiteys—and nothing else.

  Toby skidded to a stop in front of them, grinning. “I’m hungry! What’s for breakfast?”

  “Hamburgers,” Rule said. “But you don’t seem to be ready to eat.”

  “It’s my new strategy,” Toby explained. “Hi, Lily. You’re all sweaty.”

  “I am,” she agreed, baffled by the feeling that rose inside her. How could she feel this way about a boy she’d known such a short time? “I need a shower.”

  “I had mine last night. That’s part of my strategy. See, when Dad tells me to get up I lay out all my clothes, but I don’t put them on until after I eat. This way I don’t have to worry about spilling stuff on them. Well, except for my underwear, but if I spill something on them it won’t show.”

  Rule nodded thoughtfully. “I believe that would be called a tactic, not a strategy. A tactic is the immediate means used to achieve a goal. Strategy is the overarching vision of how to employ tactics and other assets to achieve a goal.”

  “Yeah?” Toby considered that. “So my strategy is keeping my clothes clean, and my tactic is not wearing them when I eat.”

  “Precisely. Unfortunately, that tactic only works at home.”

  “Well, yeah! The kids at school would think I was pretty weird if I stripped in the cafeteria at lunchtime.”

  “Which makes this tactic ineffective. The overall goal is for you to learn to keep food from decorating you.”

  Toby’s face fell. “You mean I gotta get dressed.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I don’t gotta get dressed before breakfast when I stay with Grandpa.”

  Grandpa was Rule’s father, Isen Turner—the Nokolai Rho. Toby had stayed with him at Clanhome until school started.

  “That was summer vacation,” Rule said firmly. “The rules are different once school starts.”

  That was a telling argument. The boy had been raised by his maternal grandmother, Louise Asteglio, until two months ago, when Rule was finally able to gain custody. Lily knew Louise had insisted on dressing before breakfast during the school year.

  Toby’s face fell. “But—”

  “Toby.”

  Toby heaved a sigh, then brightened. “Hamburgers?”

  Rule nodded.

  “Are you gonna make one for Lily, too?”

  She answered that one. “I ate before I went for my run. It’s not a good idea to exercise on empty.”

  “Yeah, but . . . hamburgers. For breakfast.”

  That hadn’t happened back in North Carolina at his grandmother’s house. It hadn’t happened at Lily’s home when she was growing up in San Diego, either. Rule was keeping some of Mrs. Asteglio’s rules, both because they worked and because he thought the continuity would help Toby adapt. But he saw no objection to burgers for breakfast. Even a fully human boy needs protein in the morning, he’d said.

  And Toby wasn’t fully human. He was lupus, though he wouldn’t turn wolf until he hit puberty. Lupi needed extra protein even before the Change.

  “I don’t think I have time,” Lily said. “I’ve got to take my shower and get dressed, or I won’t get you to school before the bell rings.” Dropping Toby off at school in the mornings was her idea. Rule could have done it. Any of the guards would have been happy to do it—and might need to sometimes, when her job got crazy. But Lily wanted those minutes with Toby in the car when it was just the two of them.

  Toby nodded. “Dad can make you one to take with you. Hey, Dad!” Excitement overtook him. “Did you tell her about—”

  “Not yet,” Rule said, “and it’s my surprise, so go get dressed before you ruin it.”

  Toby giggled, shot Lily a mischievous look, and raced off.

  Lily shook her head in wonder. “He’s sure riding a high of some sort this morning. Rule, about this surprise—”

  At the same time he said, “About those letters—”

  They looked at each other. Smiled. “Okay,” she said, “the letters came up first, so we’ll hit that, but fast. I do need to shower.”

  THREE

  “TALK while I cook,” Rule said, and headed for the kitchen.

  That was next to the entry. It was small compared to her parents’ kitchen, but huge compared to what she’d had in her old apartment. Of course, until recently the only use she had for a kitchen was as a place to park a coffeemaker and a refrigerator, but she was learning to cook. Slowly. “I’m not hungry. I ate before I ran.”

  “A yogurt smoothie is not a meal.”

  “Not for you, maybe. I had a banana, too.”

  He took out the hamburger meat. “I’ll cook it. You don’t have to eat it. How many threats have you received?”

  “None I consider serious.”

  “That’s not an answer.” He began shaping a patty.

  Lily bent to pull out the big grill pan and gave in. “Seven altogether. Six were addressed to the local FBI office. One was sent to Quantico. Two of those nuts signed their names,” she added dryly. “They’ve been checked out and given a stern warning. The rest contain either explicit or implicit threats.”

  “You’ll tell me exactly what it is they do threaten.”

  She shrugged. “One was very traditional: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ They got a couple good partials and a full thumbprint from that one, but no match so far. The rest . . . Rule, they’re ugly, but there’s no reason to think the writers will go from words to actions. The vast majority of the time, the letter-writer is satisfied with venting and doesn’t escalate.”

  “Someone did. He vandalized your car.”

  “Which means we ought to have his picture, right?” She set the pan on the burner. “Medium heat?”

  “A little higher. I want to see those letters.”

  “There’s no point in it. You’d just—”

  “Lily.” He slapped patties onto the griddle—one, two, three, four, five. At least two were for him, maybe three. She did
n’t think Toby could eat two of the thick patties. “I am not going to panic. Do you really think I haven’t received my share of threatening letters?”

  She felt foolish. Of course he had. “You think you have a handle on when it’s a real threat, when it’s a caution light, and when you can set it aside.”

  “They’re all at least a caution light.”

  “Okay. And how many letters have you received since Friar started appearing on all those talk shows?”

  He stilled. Then his mouth twitched. “Ah . . . I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”

  She kept her mouth firm. “How many, Rule?”

  “Four. But they’re—”

  “Not anything I need to worry about? Nothing to be taken too seriously?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “Dammit, Lily, no matter how many people enjoy mouthing off, the number who will actually take on a big, bad werewolf is vanishingly small. You’re—”

  “A big, bad federal agent,” she finished, before he could say “small” or “a woman” or anything else that would get him in trouble. “Believe it or not, very few people want to take us on, either. We’re not as scary as you, but we’ve got that whole power-of-the-law thing going.”

  For a long moment he just looked at her. She could see thoughts moving behind his dark eyes, but had no sense of where he was headed with them. So it should have been no surprise that he surprised her. “Then it wasn’t the threats you’ve received that gave you nightmares last night?”

  She considered several replies, but settled on “No.”

  He crossed to her and brushed her hair back, his face softening. He settled his hands on her shoulders. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice that you woke smelling of fear?”

  “Sometimes your ability to smell what’s going on with me is a comfort. Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass.”

  That made him smile, but briefly. “You had a session with Sam yesterday.”

  She didn’t say anything. They’d already talked about this. Okay, not much—she wasn’t a talk-it-out person—but they’d talked.