Blood Challenge

by Eileen Wilks

  When you don’t have enough information, you go looking for it. She knew who to ask.

  “It’s about time you called,” Cullen Seabourne snapped.

  Lily looked at her phone, bewildered. “What?”

  “About Ruben. That is why you called, isn’t it?”

  More guilt. Cullen had gotten to know Ruben fairly well when he, Cynna, and Ruben had been transported to Edge. “It probably should be, but it isn’t. I didn’t realize you’d heard.”

  “It’s on the damn news. ‘Ruben Brooks, head of the secretive Unit Twelve of the FBI, was taken to Walter Reed today—’ and blah, blah, blah. Nothing about what happened or how he’s doing, and when I called, no one would talk to me.”

  Briefly she told him about the heart attack and Nettie’s intervention. “This healer is at the hospital now,” she finished, “but I don’t have any word on whether he’s been able to help.”

  “If Nettie says he’s good, he’s good.” The snap had left Cullen’s voice, replaced by curiosity. “Why did you call?”

  “I need advice.”

  “You know my rates.”

  Cullen had recently increased his consultation fee. As a soon-to-be-dad, he’d decided he needed more income. As the only known sorcerer in the country, he could get away with charging sky-high fees. Fortunately, he was married to an FBI agent, who’d insisted he keep his fees reasonable when he worked for the Bureau.

  “This is personal, not professional.”

  Dead silence, followed by a wicked chuckle. “Well, my personal best is nine times, but that was a special situation, and I’d just as soon you didn’t mention it to Cynna. She wasn’t one of the participants, and I hate to set up expectations I might not be able to—”

  “Okay, okay, you’ve made your obligatory sexual comment.” But Lily smiled as she said it. It was perverse, but the sheer predictability of Cullen’s response unwound some of the tightness. She rolled her shoulders, trying to dispel more of it. “I don’t know if it’s really advice I need, or just information. It has to do with clan expectations and a Rho’s obligations.”

  “I’m not sure I’m the one to talk to.” Cullen was uncharacteristically cautious. “You might do better to ask Isen.”

  “I think Rule wouldn’t be happy if I did that. It’s, ah, I guess it’s Leidolf business, so maybe I shouldn’t talk to the Nokolai Rho about it.”

  “Maybe not.” Cullen paused. “I’m Nokolai.”

  “So am I. This isn’t a deep, dark clan secret. I just think Rule would rather I asked you than pretty much anyone else, but I need your promise not to repeat what I tell you.”

  “Too general. I can promise I won’t speak of it to anyone unless my Rho asks me directly, or I consider the need to reveal it both pressing and urgent. If it’s pressing but not urgent, I’ll let you know before I speak.”

  Lily grimaced. She’d forgotten how meticulous lupi were with promises . . . which meant there was a difference between “I can promise” and “I do promise.” “That should work. So do you promise?”

  He chuckled low in his throat. “You’ve a devious mind, don’t you?”

  “I’ve been around Sam more lately.”

  “That would do it. Yes. I promise, as stipulated. There’s a reason you can’t talk to Rule about this?”

  “He isn’t here. That’s the problem, or maybe it’s a symptom of the problem, and I need your help to understand the real problem.”

  “Since you aren’t making sense, I’d better hear the rest of it.”

  She told him. Pretending she was making a report helped; she gave him the conversation with Cobb as close to verbatim as possible. She’d gotten to the part when Rule abruptly stood up when Cullen let out a low whistle. “Rule turned down Cobb’s request?”

  Her heart sank. “Not exactly. He said he wasn’t refusing, but he had to delay granting the request. This is a big deal, then?”

  “Lily.” Her name sounded heavy, weighted with frustration and something else. Worry, maybe. “Given any choice at all, we do not surrender clan to imprisonment.”

  “No, mostly you just kill the perp yourselves, if you’re sure he’s guilty.” That bugged the hell out of her. “The last time a lupus was clearly guilty of killing a human—I’m not counting that self-defense case in Louisiana—his clan delivered his body to the courthouse.” Her voice soured. “He was in wolf form, so killing him was legal.”

  “You don’t understand. If the human world requires that one of us be punished for a real or imagined crime, the Rho may choose to requite the offense with the death of the transgressor. But it’s more likely that the transgressor will ask that of his Rho—a quick death rather than the long insanity of living in a cage. The Rho always grants that request. Always.”

  “It’s a big fucking deal, then.”

  “Yeah. It is.”

  “But Rule delayed granting Cobb’s request. He didn’t refuse outright.”

  He was silent a moment. “I don’t know what that means. If he believed Cobb didn’t deserve an honorable death, he’d grant the request but have someone else handle the kill. He wouldn’t delay granting the request, though. That’s not what we do. The whole situation is peculiar, though. Rhos don’t visit a jailed clansman—mostly because until recently they haven’t been public about who they are. That’s changing, but . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Lily could almost hear Cullen scowling in the silence that followed. She remembered how grateful, how glad, Cobb had been to see Rule. He hadn’t expected his Rho to come to him. He hadn’t thought he’d have the chance to ask for the one mercy his Rho was obligated to grant. “Does the clansman have to make his request in person? He can’t pass it along through someone else?”

  “Normally he does, but the granting of the request . . . this gets complicated. Like I said, the request is always granted, but the Rho may not carry it out himself. If he does, it’s an honorable death. If he has someone else handle the kill, it’s a dishonorable death. Sometimes, though, a Rho can’t grant final mercy personally. Maybe he’d have to travel to do so, and that isn’t safe. Or maybe he’s wounded, or the clansman is already in jail. There are plenty of reasons he might have to delegate the act. There’s a ritual, a way he can pass that duty to another of the clan, so that the death remains honorable even though the Rho didn’t grant it personally.”

  An honorable death. Lily knew that was important to lupi, even if she couldn’t see the honor in having your leader kill you. “So even if Rule intended to have someone else kill Cobb, he wouldn’t have delayed granting the request.”

  “I don’t understand what he did, but I know why. You do, too, don’t you?”

  And here came the guilt. “Because of me.” She’d just been pulled from the case. Had he acted, the repercussions to her could have been huge. She sighed.

  “You understand enough now?”

  “No, but that’s probably all you can help me with. Rule had the right idea. I’m going for a run.”

  LILY left Rule a text plus a written note on the pillow in case the text didn’t reach him. Then she told LeBron she’d be downstairs in the hotel gym. Much as she preferred to run outside, it was after ten and she could be sensible when she had to. Muggers were so damned distracting.

  Telling LeBron didn’t work out like she’d intended. He went with her. He apologized, but Rule had told him to guard her, not their room, so that’s what he had to do. The hotel gym didn’t work out, either. There was only one treadmill, and it had an OUT OF ORDER sign.

  She looked at LeBron when she saw that. “I tried. You’re witness to that. I tried to do this the cautious way.”

  LeBron grinned. “We’re still going to run, then.” Clearly he liked the idea.

  She grimaced at the “we,” but didn’t argue. He’d go with her whether she agreed to it or not. On the upside—she could be a glass-half-full person if she tried, dammit—LeBron was six-five and bodybuilder buff. Having him along ought to cut down on the risk of an
unpleasant interruption. “I’ll check with the concierge to map out a route, but yeah, I still need a run. You could probably use one, too, after being cooped up so much.” She considered a moment. “I’m going to head back upstairs first and get my weapon. I’ve got a tidy little pancake holster that lets my clutch piece ride at the small of my back. You aren’t carrying, are you?” He was wearing cutoffs with a tank. Not many options for concealed carry.

  He looked sheepish. “I didn’t think of it.”

  LeBron shared the usual lupi distaste for guns. He was receiving weapons training, but she suspected guns still seemed foreign to him. “You probably don’t have a permit for it here, anyway. You can follow a little behind me, okay? I need to think about some stuff.”

  “I hate to argue, but a black man running after a woman? In the South?” He shook his head. “I’d just as soon not get the local boys in blue all excited.”

  She should have thought of that. “I’m not used to this.”

  “After a while, you’ll forget I’m there,” he assured her.

  DOWNTOWN Nashville was downright pretty. Streets and sidewalks gleamed wetly in the glow of streetlights, tail-lights, and headlights. It was almost too clean for an urban center and far from deserted, with enough nightlife to bring people downtown even on weeknights.

  The air was muggy with the brassy taste of pollution. By the time she and LeBron reached a spot called Victory Park, Lily’s skin was already filmed with a light sweat.

  Lily did not forget that a ridiculously tall hunk was running beside her. At first she made conversation—they weren’t running fast, so she had enough breath, and naturally LeBron wasn’t winded. That was the downside of running with a lupus. You couldn’t measure yourself against them at all. He had pointed out it would be harder to forget his presence if he was talking to her.

  True. But now that she had what she wanted, she didn’t want it anymore. Her thoughts made for uncomfortable company.

  Victory Park wasn’t what Lily would call a real park. It was more like an oversized, paved veranda for some sort of public building to the north. Trees sprouted from their designated strips of dirt, and a large water feature sprouted a tall spray. She and LeBron ran up some steps—good for the quads—and veered right, their feet slapping wet pavers as they headed toward the Tennessee Capitol Building on the other side of Charlotte Avenue.

  That was a thoroughly Greek structure with a plethora of columns and a single round tower giving the sky the finger. Lights trained on the building burnished the stone to soft gold. The grounds surrounding it were broad and dark and higher than street level, so it seemed to loom over them as they ran alongside it on Charlotte. No foot traffic here, except for them. Not many cars.

  Rule must have known Cobb might ask for final mercy. All this time, he must have known it could happen. And he hadn’t told her.

  Lily’s muscles had warmed up by now. She ran easily, her body loose. She tried to focus on that, on the sensations in her calves and thighs, on keeping her elbows in and her shoulders back. For a little while, she didn’t think.

  The route the concierge had suggested took them past the Capitol building, past the state library, then turned onto James Robertson Parkway, which curved in a large half circle around the buildings. They’d follow it to Fifth Avenue, take a right, and run along past the Nashville Auditorium and on back to Deadrick, which would return them to the hotel.

  They swung onto the sidewalk flanking the Parkway, and LeBron dropped back a couple of paces. He didn’t need to—the sidewalk broadened here. Maybe there were lots of pedestrians in the day, when the government offices were open. Not now. They had it to themselves. On the left, headlights flashed and passed, flashed and passed. On the right was a grassy embankment studded by trees that ended in a parking lot. A sparse sprinkling of cars suggested that a few government employees were working really late.

  LeBron stayed behind her, but on her left, closer to the highway. If she’d thought there was a real threat, she’d have placed him on her right. With his night vision, he could pick out any lurkers in the deep shadows beneath the trees a lot better than she could.

  Was his choice of highway-side instinct? Did cars and the people in them seem more of a danger to a part-time wolf than the darker, unpopulated stretch of grass and trees?

  Lupi were human-like or human-plus, but they were not plain old human. Their default settings were different. They doted on babies. They never let themselves get too hungry. They were subject to the Change, the fury, and a nasty form of late-life cancer. They were promiscuous and beautiful and deeply, irrationally protective of women.

  They kept secrets.

  Rule’s tendency to keep things to himself had tripped them up more than once. He tried, but sometimes he simply didn’t notice he was keeping things from her, no more than she’d notice she hadn’t commented on her menses lately. Was his silence this time merely habit? Had it just not occurred to him to tell her he might be asked to kill his clansman?

  How could it not? When you got down to it, Rule had used her to gain access to Cobb, knowing what Cobb was likely to ask of his Rho. Knowing—he had to know!—she could not allow him to kill the man. Maybe she’d used him, too, but he could have said, No, I’m not going to use my position as Rho to get my clansman to confess. She might not have liked it, but she would have understood. He had the right to refuse to help in that way.

  He hadn’t given her a chance to refuse. And that was not like him.

  Rule insisted the Leidolf mantle didn’t affect him. Lily was growing more and more sure that it did . . . because if she was wrong, he’d knowingly withheld information so he could use her.

  Somewhere to the north and east he was running, too, seeking the surcease of the physical. She knew he’d been pulled by opposing needs—his duty and hers. In the end, he’d backed away from his duty for her sake, and maybe that should make everything okay.

  It didn’t. It mattered. It meant a lot, but it wasn’t enough. Not when she felt separated from him by more than eight or nine miles of city.

  He needed to see that the mantle was affecting him. She didn’t know how to make that happen, but somehow she had to.

  Lily picked up the pace. LeBron kept up easily. She pushed herself, craving the burn, knowing he’d have no trouble with any pace she could set. A less confident person could get a complex, going running with—

  With the first sharp crack! something tugged hard at her arm. She didn’t have time to drop. Two hundred and forty pounds of LeBron hit her from behind even as a second and third shot split the air—and he wrapped himself around her, so that she hit the ground helpless but cushioned.

  They rolled—another shot, another—and she ended up on top, her arms free, but when she reached for her weapon her right arm barely twitched. Pain rocketed straight to her brain in a hot blur.

  Tires screeching, a horn blaring—

  She started to roll off LeBron, flatten herself better. And saw his face.

  One eye open and staring. The other gone, just gone, vanished in the bloody, jellied wreck the bullet had made on its way out of his skull.

  TWELVE

  FLASHING lights. Cop lights, strobing their red emergencies into the street, onto the bloody grass. Lily sat on the wet grass, her arm pulsing out of sync with those lights, driven by a frantic heartbeat, each pulse a hot beat of pain too large to think through or around.

  “What?” she said. “I didn’t hear . . . you need to send someone to talk to the concierge.”

  “Later,” the officer kneeling beside her said soothingly. He was young, dark-skinned, with a teensy little mustache. “You said you’re FBI. Do you have ID on you?”

  “In my holster.” She’d already surrendered her weapon, knowing the officers had to have it. Lily started to reach behind her—and hissed at the fresh blow from her injured arm.

  “I’ll get it. Stay still. You aren’t bleeding out, but—”

  “I’m okay. Didn’t get the plat
es, though. First we were tumbling, then I saw . . . they were gone by the time I looked. Shot us from behind, hit the gas.”

  He’d managed to extract her ID. As he shown his flashlight on it, a siren’s mounting wail grew closer. Ambulance, she saw when she glanced at the street. It pulled to a stop, adding its flashing light to the two patrol units.

  But they were too late. LeBron was dead. “Could be an opportunistic hit, could be planned. If the concierge talked to someone . . .” The world did a slow loop. She closed her eyes to see if that made the dizziness go away.

  When she opened them, she was flat on her back and someone else was bending over her. A woman, thirty-something, brown and brown, square chin. Not a cop. “Take it easy, ma’am,” the woman said. “We’re going to get you loaded in just a minute. I need to know where you hurt.”

  Paramedic. Brown-and-brown was a paramedic. “My arm. That’s it. I need to call people. My phone’s in my armband. Get it for me, okay? Can’t reach it.” She’d tried, but the armband was on her left biceps and she couldn’t contort her left arm enough to reach it.

  “You need to be still. You’ve lost some blood.”

  Blood loss? Was that why . . . she’d thought the mate bond had yanked on her, making her pass out. That’s how it felt when she and Rule were too far apart—dizzy as hell, followed by unconsciousness if they didn’t close the distance quickly. But blood loss made sense. “Talking won’t make me lose more blood. I need to call Rule and . . .” Not Ruben. He’d had a heart attack. God, her brain wasn’t working right. “Croft. I need to tell him. And Rule.”

  “We can make a call for you, but first we have to get you loaded. Hold on a minute now, we’re going to—”

  Someone did something to her arm that seared her brain to white. When it came back online, someone was saying dammit, dammit, dammit . . . oh, that was her. Apparently she could curse even without a brain. “Call now.”