Death Magic wotl-8

by Eileen Wilks

  He did what he had to do. Slowly the other relaxed as well, even falling into a light doze.

  The moon climbed a handspan higher. Rule waited.

  At last headlights wheeled across the pavement on the other side of the screening oaks. Rule stood, keeping his muscles loose and his stance alert. The other wolf rose with him, hackles raised slightly, but holding himself still and quiet.

  Perhaps the age of the wolf ’s submerged other self did make a difference. The other was following Rule’s signals unusually well for one so raw: Be alert. Be silent. Watch.

  The vehicle pulled to the rear of the lot. It was an old panel truck, slightly scabrous with peeling paint, but the motor sounded good. Not one of the vehicles Rule kept for the guards’ use. It stopped about thirty feet away. The engine shut off. The driver’s door swung open.

  It wasn’t who Rule had been expecting. Though he probably should have. He yipped once, softly, to announce his location. He looked at the other wolf, then at the ground.

  The other either didn’t understand or didn’t want to. Rule lay down again to show him. Slowly the other did, too. Rule stood, but this time when the other tried to rise, Rule shoved him back down. He looked directly in the other’s eyes.

  The black wolf sighed and dropped his head to his paws. When Rule trotted to the edge of the pavement, he stayed put.

  Cullen limped toward them carrying a plastic grocery sack and a small duffle bag. His gauze-wrapped feet were thrust into soft house slippers. Stubborn ass. Skin healed faster than bone or muscle, but not this fast.

  Rule had sent word to José about where to meet and what was needed. He hadn’t said Cullen should be the one to bring those supplies. He hadn’t specifically forbidden it, either. He should have known Cullen would take that for permission. He should have known Cullen would be here. That his friend would know he needed him.

  Behind him, the other wolf stirred. Rule gave him one sharp stare and he subsided. Rule faced Cullen and looked him in the eye.

  “What?” Cullen stopped. “Oh, right. I forgot.” He ducked his head to expose his nape—a clear statement that he was subordinate to Rule. The new wolf would be confused by this. Cullen wasn’t wolf, but his posture announced his claim on Rule.

  Now Rule had to announce his own claim on Cullen. Rule stepped forward and made a show of greeting him by sniffing his face—then, pointedly, his feet. He looked at Cullen.

  “Not a problem,” his friend lied breezily. “The Rhej sped things up a lot.”

  He was walking on them, so the Rhej must have done him some good. Not as much as he was pretending. Rule snorted.

  Cullen ignored that. “Scott’s doing fine. It’ll be a couple days before he’s healed enough to go back on duty, but he’s fine. The house is being watched. Had a bitch of a time getting away without being seen, then I had to get a panel truck, which is why I’m so late. Ready for dinner?” He opened the grocery sack and tossed a raw brisket on the pavement.

  Rule heard the other wolf rise. He turned his head, growled—You do not eat before I do—then bent to rip off a bite. “Dessert’s in the back of the truck,” Cullen said, backing away quickly. “Hot bratwurst.”

  Hunger gnawed, but as soon as Rule swallowed that token mouthful, he stopped. Later he’d make the new wolf wait until he was truly finished eating—it was good discipline—but not yet. He stepped back, looked from the meat to the black wolf. I have provided for you. Eat.

  The other was on the raw meat in a flash. Cullen set a second brisket on the pavement and sat down beside it.

  That one was Rule’s. He trotted over and ate while Cullen talked.

  “I talked with Walt and a couple of the other Wythe elders. Officially, Wythe is elated to have a Rho again. Unofficially, they’re almost as scared as they are relieved. He’s not just a new wolf—he’s never been lupi before. He doesn’t know our ways, our history, et cetera, et cetera. I pointed out that Wythe was already allied with Ruben per the Lady’s command, and now she’s given him to them as Rho. She must have special plans for Wythe. That puffed out their chests. They’re still nervous, but excited, too.”

  Rule wagged his tail once as he gulped down a chunk of warm beef: Good work.

  “About the rendezvous. Walt’s bringing Mac Sutherland—he works with their new ones—and three others, like you wanted. You said for him to pick the spot. He suggested Bald Eagle State Park in Pennsylvania. You know it?”

  Rule shook his head and ripped off another bite.

  “It’s about six thousand acres, a lot of that forest, which works for us. Unfortunately, it’s always open season on coyotes in Pennsylvania, but otherwise not much hunting’s going on right now. The park’s between four and five hours from Wythe Clanhome, maybe three and a half from here. That’s assuming you can get your new wolf into the panel truck and he doesn’t freak. If he does, well, everything will take a lot longer. I brought a map and some other gear.”

  Cullen pulled a folded map from his jacket pocket and spread it on the ground. He glanced at the new wolf, who kept interrupting his meal to growl at Cullen—warning growls, not seriously aggressive, so Rule ignored it. “I talked to Mason,” Cullen said, naming the Nokolai who had charge of the new wolves at the terra tradis, “so I’d have some idea how to act. I’ve never worked with brand-new wolves. You did, though.”

  Rule nodded. That experience was coming in handy now. Rule had spent one season working with Mason. It had been frustrating, exhilarating, funny, infuriating, and at times great fun—new wolves were teenagers, after all.

  Or had been until this one arrived. Rule glanced at the other, then polished off his meal and shifted to study the map.

  “This is Bald Eagle,” Cullen said, pointing, “just north of I-80. We’ll look for Walter south of the lake. You think the new one will tolerate four hours in the van with me so close?”

  Rule couldn’t shrug in this form, so he snorted. How could he know? New wolves were introduced to clan members’ two-legged forms early on, but not in the cramped confines of a panel truck, not for hours at a time, and always with older adolescents around to demonstrate proper behavior and adults to enforce it. But it was worth trying. So far, the wolf that had been Ruben Brooks was handling himself very well.

  Rule looked pointedly at the duffel bag.

  “Right. Guess we’ll find out.” Cullen pulled a collapsible water bowl out of the duffle bag, then a gallon jug of water. He filled the bowl. “José didn’t think I should take a vehicle registered in your name, so I bought the panel truck for cash from a guy who’d advertised in the paper. Your cash, of course. You didn’t get a very good deal, but I was in a hurry.”

  Rule nodded and went to the water bowl.

  Cullen waited until he finished, refilled the bowl, then backed off again, but only ten feet. There was a brief clash of wills as the new wolf tried to get Cullen to go away and Rule insisted that Cullen was his to direct, not the new wolf ’s. Eventually the new wolf accepted that and drank.

  This didn’t mean he’d accept it the next time. Or the next. The wolf had no instinctive understanding of Cullen except as threat or prey, and it took time and repetition to create a new role—lupi, one of us, never mind the form—in the wolf ’s mind. Once he began remembering being a man himself, though, that lesson would stick better. Once he’d Changed a few times, it would be solid.

  It took much longer for a wolf to stop seeing humans as potential prey. Four or five years, usually. Oh, most new wolves were able to restrain themselves long before that, but forbidden food is still food. They were kept away from humans except in controlled circumstances until their first response to the smell of humanity was people, not meat.

  How long would it be before Ruben could live with his beautiful Deborah again?

  Rule shook that thought off. Worrying about things he couldn’t change was foolish.

  The other wolf had finished drinking. He stood still and taut, sniffing the air warily, glancing frequently at Rule. Tha
t wasn’t typical. With a full belly and no immediate danger, most new wolves would be looking for sleep or play or some interesting scent to track. Was the difference a matter of this one being older? Or was it the way he’d been brought into this form, unprepared and surrounded from the first with what he considered threats instead of clan?

  No way of knowing. Rule collected the new wolf with a glance, and the two of them trotted into the trees. They relieved themselves, then Rule had a good roll in the leaves. It felt good, it smelled good, and he wanted to take some of the scents of the forest with him into the metal cage-on-wheels Cullen would be driving.

  The plan was to get the other wolf to follow Rule into the back of the panel truck. The bratwurst should help. Rule didn’t know a wolf who wouldn’t salivate over that smell. Cullen would close the door quickly, then wait.

  Rule hoped the other wolf would not turn out to be as sensitive to small places as he was. Even so, there would be a period of panic and adjustment. Assuming Rule could get the new wolf to settle down, Cullen would drive them to Bald Eagle Park—Rule had let Walt pick the rendezvous point—where Walt and several Wythe wolves would meet them.

  Being surrounded by wolves who smelled right should help the new wolf adjust. It would be great if, at that point, Rule could turn his charge over to his clan. That wasn’t going to happen. The new wolf didn’t really know how to use the mantle he carried, but no Wythe wolf was going to be able to dominate his own Rho. On foot or in a mobile cage, Rule would be continuing with the others to Wythe Clanhome . . . nearly three hundred miles away from Washington.

  If the mate bond allowed it.

  Rule snarled silently at the empty air. The mate bond was the Lady’s gift.

  Hadn’t the Lady contrived to land him—and Ruben, and Lily, and the entire Wythe clan—in precisely this position? Rule didn’t understand it. How could Ruben have been turned into a lupus? One with founder’s blood, no less, able to carry the mantle. It made no sense. But somehow the Lady had done just that. She’d tinkered with the mantle while it resided within Lily.

  She could damn well tinker with the mate bond, too.

  She’d better. If Rule crossed that invisible boundary at highway speeds and passed out, it meant that here in D.C. Lily would probably pass out, too. Wherever she was. Whatever she was doing.

  Lily.

  Cullen hadn’t spoken of her. Rule hadn’t forced him to, though he could have, even in this wordless form. Silently, tacitly, they’d agreed to put off the moment of bad news . . . because it would be bad news.

  Enough of that. Rule shook himself and glanced to his left. The other wolf had relaxed once they were surrounded by trees again and was happily digging at an abandoned rabbit burrow. Rule left him to that and trotted up to Cullen. He sat and looked at his friend.

  For a long moment Cullen met his gaze without speaking. He sighed. “Lily. Yes. I haven’t talked to her myself, but . . . well, Drummond charged her with interfering with an investigation. She’s in jail.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  THEY don’t turn the lights off in holding cells.

  The heavy woman with dreads and a blood-spattered orange shirt rocked and muttered to herself. She’d kept that up all night. A Hispanic woman argued with a brittle-looking blonde with a puffy lip and torn shirt. Up near the bars, a tall, skinny woman hooted with laughter at something one of her friends said. Prostitutes, those three, and Lily’s most relaxed roommates . . . unless you counted the ones who were passed out. Like the white-haired woman in a Dior suit who’d vomited all over herself and the floor about thirty minutes ago. Lily had had to get up and turn the woman’s head to make sure she didn’t aspirate the vomit and choke to death. At the rear of the cell a sad but sober-looking young black woman with some kind of stomach problem sat on the toilet, ignoring the rest of them.

  When Lily first arrived, a muscular fortyish woman with bad teeth and biker tats had tried to charge admittance to the toilet—“I’ll keep them black bitches from messing with you, an’ you’ll owe me a favor, see?” Bad Teeth hadn’t taken “go away” for an answer, probably because Lily looked too little to be a threat. Lily had put her on the floor quick enough that the guards either didn’t notice or hadn’t felt a need to intervene.

  Turnover was high here. Bad Teeth was long gone. So was everyone else who’d been here when the cell door shut behind Lily.

  Lily had one of the prime spots. She sat on the floor and leaned against the wall near the front of the cell, where the air was a bit better. Three feet from her face were the torn jeans of a girl who probably wasn’t eighteen yet. She was clearly coming off something, shifting from foot to foot, staring out the bars with wild eyes. “I gotta get out of here. I gotta get out.”

  It could have been worse. Lily had seen worse. At no point had the cell been too crowded to sit down, and she’d been able to lie down part of the time, until she got too sleepy. She hadn’t dared fall asleep, which might be good sense or sheer paranoia.

  She was here because she’d screwed up, yeah. Also because she’d been manipulated by the Lady to carry that damn mantle to Ruben. But she was certain, deep in her gut, that she was also here because this is where someone wanted her.

  She’d been set up. And she’d fallen for it.

  Not that she could prove it. Her thoughts circled round that lack of proof yet again, trying to fit it to her conviction, testing this person and that one as suspects. Drummond? Sjorensen? Mullins? She had nothing to go on.

  Almost nothing. She’d had nothing to do but think since they locked her up, and some of that had been productive. She had a mental list of questions and some ideas about what to check out if she ever got out of here.

  Lily shifted, sick of sitting. But there was nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Lily had been in for nearly a full day. She’d been allowed her one phone call, but was beginning to think she’d called the wrong damn person. None of the others had been here as long as she had. She shouldn’t have been kept here this long, either.

  She shouldn’t have been here at all. And not just in the ohmygod sense.

  Drummond had delegated her custody to his favorite flunky. Doug Mullins had brought her here, not to Headquarters or another federal facility, not to an interrogation room. She hadn’t been questioned at all.

  That was either sheer spite or something more ominous. If they questioned her and she refused to answer without an attorney present, they’d have to process her into a regular cell, not the smelly hell of a holding cell at a county jail. So they wanted her here, but was that because they wanted her to have a really bad night? Or did they have some other reason for keeping her tucked away, in the system but not where anyone would expect to find her?

  Some of the reasons she came up with were probably nutty. She still hadn’t dared sleep.

  Once she’d told Rule she wondered what it would be like to miss him. The mate bond had made that unlikely, she thought. They always played it safe. Sometimes it allowed them to put plenty of space between them, sometimes it didn’t, so they stayed within the same city.

  He was miles and miles away now. Two hundred? Three? She couldn’t tell. Why so far? Where was he, and where was he going? There hadn’t been time to talk about what he’d do—and he hadn’t been shaped for talking.

  But surely the distance meant he and Ruben had gotten away. At least Rule wasn’t locked up in a reeking cell. And Ruben . . . dear God. The Lady wanted him for Rho of Wythe? He was lupi? Only he couldn’t be. You had to be born lupi. You had to have founder’s blood to carry the mantle.

  Start with what is and work back, she told herself. Ruben had gone through First Change. He smelled lupus. He hadn’t before, but he did now. Those added up to a big, fat yes—whatever had happened to him, he was now lupi. Second fact. He carried the Wythe mantle, and not the way Lily had, as a passive passenger. It was active in him. Scott had been unable to stand against him, unable to fight him effectively. Did that mean he did have some of the founder’s bloodline i
n him? Did she know anything to contradict that?

  She didn’t know anything, period. But it was something to check out . . . if she ever got out of here. If she ever . . . her head jerked. She’d dozed off. Only for a second, but she couldn’t stay awake forever. She should get up and move around, do some stretches or sit-ups or something, wake herself up.

  She would in just a minute. Even though she was probably crazy to think she was in danger. The only threat in the fifteen hours she’d been here had been Bad Teeth, and she’d been after “favors,” not murder. But she’d get up and move around and...

  Her head jerked again.

  One of the guards, a heavyset woman who hadn’t smiled in at least thirty years, came up to the door. “Lily Yu.”

  Lily blinked and stood slowly. “Yes?”

  “Guess you’ve got a good lawyer.” The woman unlocked the cell door.

  The guard didn’t have handcuffs out. “I’m . . . being released?”

  “Own recognizance. Follow me, please.”

  She hadn’t been arraigned, which was when bail would be set, or the judge could decide to let her out on her own recognizance. Yet they were releasing her. Lily shook her head, trying to clear it, and walked out of the cell.

  Being released was nowhere near as humiliating and time-consuming as being admitted to the facilities, but it still took a while. She had to confirm receipt of everything that was returned—her shoes, jacket, necklace, and engagement ring. Her phone. Her purse and all its contents. Her shoulder holster. Her weapon. She got it all back.

  Everything except what mattered most. They couldn’t hand her life back. But then, they hadn’t taken it. She’d tossed it away of her own free will.

  Lily didn’t know if she’d actually serve jail time beyond this one day. Interfering with an investigation was a serious charge, but could be hard and costly to prove; few federal attorneys would be interested in prosecuting any but the most egregious cases. And unless they’d gotten Deborah to change her story, they couldn’t prove Lily had tipped Ruben off. They could strongly suggest it, sure, but a good lawyer could probably keep her out of jail. Any halfway decent prosecutor would know that. Even if Friar was behind this, even if he had a prosecutor in his pocket and was frothing at the mouth to get Lily locked up, odds were she wouldn’t be convicted.