by Eileen Wilks
Why does that not surprise me? Duck.
With no more warning than that, Sam launched himself back into the sky.
Lily looked around quickly, spotted a Nokolai man she knew slightly, grabbed Gan, and thrust her toward him. “Keep an eye on her. She’s mostly a demon, but not entirely. Don’t shoot her unless you absolutely can’t avoid it.”
She took off running.
They’d loaded Rule on a stretcher and were carrying him toward Nettie’s SUV. She reached him just as they opened the back of the vehicle and stopped, staring.
He was a man again. He’d Changed and was a man again. He was also naked and bloody, with a blood-soaked length of fabric that had once been blue wadded up against the deepest wound.
Of course, she thought. He had to try. The moon is nearly full and he had to see if he would be able to Change at all—but what a risk, with him so weak from his wounds!
She missed his fur, the lovely fur she’s stroked so often … Lily blinked, disoriented, and the memory wisp fled.
He opened his eyes. “Lily?”
“Here,” she said, coming up to take his hand. “I’m right here. We’re back. We made it back.” All the way back. He’d Changed. He hadn’t lost himself to the wolf.
“I need to put him in sleep,” Nettie said firmly. “And this time, he’s going to the hospital. He’s lost a lot of blood, and I am not performing surgery in the back of this SUV.”
“No, he’ll go to the hospital.” That’s what she’d asked. Get Rule back, get him to the hospital… .
“In a minute, Nettie,” Rule said. His voice sounded wonderful. Not like he was dying, not at all. He searched her eyes. “I had the strangest dream. A terrible dream. I thought it was real. There were two of you, and one … one died.”
He’d been unconscious. She’d been sure he was unconscious. “It wasn’t a dream, but it wasn’t entirely true, either.”
“You’re …”
“Both. I think.”
“Enough,” Nettie said, and laid her hand on his forehead.
Slowly his expression eased, his eyes drooping. “Yes,” he murmured. “That’s right. You’re Lily.”
His hand relaxed, releasing hers, as he slipped into the healing sleep that was Nettie’s Gift. Finally, the knots of tension in her shoulders began to relax.
Maybe it was just that simple. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I am, aren’t I?”
EPILOGUE
“AT least think about it.” Rule’s throat was tight with frustration.
“No.” Isen was blunt, as usual. “Not unless you give me some powerful reason to reconsider. Which you haven’t.”
Oh, but he had. Isen just wouldn’t listen. Rule sat on the edge of his damned hospital bed and fought the urge to howl … though maybe he shouldn’t suppress that particular urge. Maybe his father would believe him then. “The Lu Nuncio must have control.” The words came out clipped. “I don’t.”
Isen waved that away. “It’s temporary.”
“I Changed!” The words burst out. “Here in the damned hospital, when the moon went full I Changed. I couldn’t stop it.”
“Hurt like hell, too, I imagine. Good thing you warned Glen ahead of time.”
Glen was one of the guards keeping reporters out of Rule’s room. Last night he’d had to keep the doctors and nurses out, too, until Rule mustered the will to Change back.
It had taken him a good half hour, and the ache to stay wolf, to feel and smell the world more fully, remained. “That makes it all right, I suppose,” Rule said bitterly. “I can’t control the Change anymore, but as long as I warn someone—”
“Son.”
It was a rare word to hear from his father. Rule stilled.
Isen put his hand on Rule’s shoulder. “This is pride speaking. Impatience. Your wolf is stronger than he used to be. So? You’ll learn a new balance. It will take time, but I’ve no doubt you’ll be able to do it. You’ve never disappointed me, not as a father or as a Rho.”
Rule had never understood why his father had named him Lu Nuncio instead of Benedict. He understood even less now. He didn’t know what to say.
Words didn’t come as easily as they used to.
Isen squeezed Rule’s shoulder once, then released it. “You’ll have help. I hear some of that help coming now.”
So did Rule. He turned his head, a smile starting.
The door opened. “How much of that welcome is for me, and how much for the fact that I’m busting you out of here?” Lily asked. But she was smiling, too, and she came to him without waiting for an answer.
As easily as breathing, his hand found hers.
Isen chuckled. “You two don’t need me cluttering up the place. I’ll see you at Clanhome,” he told Rule. “We’ve a lot to do to get ready for the All-Clan.”
“After Nettie releases him for light work, you mean,” Lily said.
Isen waved that away. “He’s one of the fastest healers in the clans. Nettie won’t keep him in bed long—if you don’t wear him out once you’ve got him home.” He chuckled at Lily’s expression and headed for the door.
But there he paused, looking back at her. “I don’t know if I said it, but I’m damned glad to have my heir returned to me. You and Cullen and that other woman did that. I won’t thank you. You didn’t do it for me, but you should know you have Nokolai’s gratitude. And mine. To have my son back …” His eyes sheened with sudden tears. He didn’t blink them away, and he looked straight at Rule. “There are no words for that. No words.”
Rule was too stunned to answer before the door closed behind his father. Slowly, the tightness in his throat eased.
It seemed he wasn’t the only one having trouble with words.
“You ready?” Lily asked. “We decided to sneak you out through the kitchen.”
“We?” He slid off the bed carefully. Various parts twinged, but those little hurts were drowned out by the protest put out by his side. He put a hand on the bandages there. The demon had ripped him up pretty thoroughly. Nettie had patched things while he was in sleep, but the patched bits hadn’t finished growing together yet.
“Here.” Lily pushed forward the wheelchair that had been delivered earlier. “The kitchen was Nettie’s idea. Getting you away without the bloodsuckers of the press finding out has been a joint project. Your father will let them corner him in the lobby, where he’s ostensibly waiting for you. He’ll keep them busy while we escape.”
Rule scowled at the wheelchair. “I don’t need that.”
“Humor me. If it was up to me, you’d stay in the hospital another couple days.”
“If it was up to me,” he started—then stopped, remembering.
He’d argued about remaining in the hospital once Nettie released him from sleep after the surgery. “She wanted you here,” Lily had said, her face tense. “I promised her.”
“Promised who?” he’d demanded.
“Myself. My other self.”
The one he’d attacked a demon to save … the one who had then died to save him. Rule knew that in his gut, though Lily—this Lily, who both was and wasn’t the one he’d known in hell—hadn’t said so. She’d thrown herself away so they could open the gate, but she hadn’t done it for the others. She’d done it for him.
This Lily smiled at him crookedly now. “I’m going to use it, you know,” she said lightly. “Every chance I get. I’ll guilt you right into behaving. Have a seat.” She jiggled the wheelchair.
He sat.
But she didn’t move right away. Instead he heard her suck in a breath and let it out slowly. “Not that you have anything to feel guilty about. You weren’t even conscious. I was the one who let her do it.”
Rule couldn’t turn. His side wouldn’t let him. But he could reach back and cover one of her hands with his. He knew she was carrying a lot of guilt. He didn’t understand why, but he’d seen it on her face too often in the last three days.
She started the chair moving. “Did I tell you what M
ax said about Gan’s tail?”
For now, the little demon was staying with Max, who’d accepted his houseguest quite cheerfully after she asked what he knew about multiple orgasms. Gan was supposed to be regrowing her body into a more human form, but so far had refused to give up her tail. “Do I want to know?”
“Probably not. It has to do with what she does with it during sex.”
“You’d better tell me, then, or my imagination will drive me into a fever.”
She chuckled. As she wheeled him to the staff elevator and they rode down, they talked comfortably enough.
Nettie met them in the basement. “Ready to tour the kitchen?”
Their elaborate maneuvers to avoid the press weren’t just for Rule’s sake. The reporters had been hounding Lily, making such pests of themselves that she’d given up, packed some clothes and her cat, and moved to Clanhome temporarily.
They weren’t after her because she’d been to hell and back. They didn’t know about that. Someone at the top of the bureaucratic food chain didn’t want the public worrying about hellgates, and the FBI didn’t want to lose its only sensitive. They needed Lily too much to prosecute her.
The realms were shifting. Sam had confirmed that when the two of them were trading questions. Earth was drawing closer to both Dis and Faerie, and the modern world was in for a bumpy ride. Lily’s boss at the FBI realized this, and had persuaded at least one other person of the truth—the one at the very, very top of the governmental food chain.
So the reporters weren’t interested in tales about hell. They wanted to know about the dragons … who’d disappeared.
Hard to see how the Air Force could lose twenty-three enormous beasts who, however powerful and beautiful their flight, couldn’t outrace a jet. But they had.
Rule dozed most of the way to Clanhome. This tendency to nap at the drop of a hat was annoying, but normal at this stage of healing. He made it inside his father’s house on his own two legs, however.
Two legs, not four. That ought to feel a lot more normal than it did.
But it pleased him that Lily had chosen to stay with his father. It was another step toward moving in with him permanently. He still wanted that, though not with the urgency he’d felt before. The fear behind that urgency was gone.
One Lily had risked everything to come after him. The other had died for him. How could he doubt her now?
He let her tuck him up in bed, then patted it. “Sit.”
“I should—”
“Probably sleep. You haven’t been doing enough of that, I think.” When she didn’t answer he said gently, “Bad dreams?”
She nodded and, slowly, sat beside him. “Some. I almost lost you. I did lose you, but she didn’t. And then she did.”
“She?”
“She, I …” She managed a wry smile. “The demons have a point. Souls are confusing.”
“It’s not easy, being two-natured. It will take time to accustom yourself to it.”
“Two-natured?” She was startled.
“It’s something like that for you, isn’t it? My wolf …” He touched his chest. “It’s me, yet it isn’t. Just as when I was the wolf, the man both was and wasn’t me. The body matters.”
“Yes! Yes, it does. We’re one soul, but the memories aren’t … it doesn’t come out even. She—that part of me—doesn’t get to have a turn at a body when the moon’s full, like your wolf does. Only sometimes she peeks out of my eyes. On the way to the hospital I saw a bicycle and my eyes filled. I was so amazed by that bicycle, and by the memory of my old Schwinn. Then …” She shrugged. “It was gone. I had tears on my face, and I didn’t know why.”
“The memory game,” he murmured. “I’ll tell you about it, if you like.”
She was silent a moment, looking down at her fingers picking nervously at the comforter she’d tucked around him. “Now I’m doubly jealous. Of you, for knowing her. Of her, for having you when I didn’t. And if you think that sounds nuts”—she gave a short laugh—“I won’t argue.”
“Jealousy isn’t rational. I was jealous of Gan.”
“Yes, I …” Slowly the tension in her face softened into a smile. “I know. I remember.” She rubbed her chest as if easing the memory physically into place. “I wish I understood. Even Sam didn’t know the other me had a body. How could that happen?”
Rule thought he knew: the Lady. Somehow she’d preserved Lily’s sundered self in two bodies—one with the toltoi, the other without.
Toward the end of his time in hell, Rule had been mostly instinct. The Lady had reached him through those instincts, prodding him, sending him again and again into those underground passages. When the time came, he’d been ready to lead them to the place the Lady needed them to be.
But not so she cold bring Rule back to Earth, as the others believed. It was Lily that Lady had needed rescued, Lily she had some purpose for. He was sure of that, sure in the same way he’d known he had to keep searching out those dark passages.
He was equally sure Lily wouldn’t want to hear that. “Would you do something for me?”
“Yes.”
Just that. Just yes. “Lie with me awhile. I’m not proposing to disturb Nettie’s handiwork,” he added quickly, seeing refusal on her face. “I just … I want to hold you. For so long I couldn’t.”
“Oh …” she said, her eyes closing. “Oh, I’ve wanted that.”
And a few moments later, with her curled into him, her hair tickling his jaw, her body reminding him of pleasures he couldn’t seek yet, and her scent filling him, he did the other thing he’d wanted so much to do while he was wolf. “I love you.”
She went still. After a moment she said quietly, “I love you, too. And I …” She put her palm on his chest and a smile bloomed on her face. “I am so glad about. So very glad.”