Blood Challenge wotl-7

by Eileen Wilks

  Lily smiled. “Research, for now. Here’s what I have in mind.”

  BY the time they broke up it was after one A.M. Arjenie was equal parts tired, worried, exhilarated, scared, confused … and eager to dive into what she knew best. This is what I need, she thought as Benedict escorted her to her bedroom. A day spent with facts, with her computer, would give her space to let some of this … this emotional overload … settle. She had plenty of ideas for how to find out some of the things they needed to know, and she had access to some kick-ass databases.

  “This meeting you were talking about,” she said as they stopped outside her room. “It’s a big deal, I guess, if you and Rule have to spend tomorrow getting ready for it instead of investigating Friar.”

  Benedict seemed abstracted. A frown lingered between his eyebrows as if it had drifted there awhile back without him noticing. “Isen has called an All-Clan. That’s a meeting of all lupi clans. Traditionally, we hold an All-Clan every decade or two. We aren’t due for one yet, but last year when the Great Bitch became active in the world again, Isen called for one.”

  “But the meeting day after tomorrow isn’t an All-Clan, is it?”

  “No. The meeting on Monday is between the Lu Nuncios of the dominant North American clans. Our neighbors, in a sense. If we can’t persuade our neighbors of the need for an All-clan, we’re unlikely to get one.”

  “Don’t they see the need? If there’s an Old One who wants to destroy you, surely they see the need to act together.”

  “There’s suspicion of Nokolai because of Rule’s unexpected elevation to Leidolf Rho. It creates a severe power imbalance. Nokolai and Leidolf are arguably the two most powerful clans, and have long been enemies. Think of how it would have looked to the rest of the world if, at the end of the Cold War when the USSR collapsed, the U.S. vice president suddenly became the Russian prime minister.”

  “China would have freaked. Are some of the clans freaking?”

  “A few. Even some of those who have long been friends of Nokolai are uneasy.”

  “How many clans are there?”

  “Twenty-four altogether. Eleven dominants, seven of them in North America—Nokolai, Leidolf, Ybirra, Szøs, Etorri, Wythe, and Kyffin. Kyffin is subordinate to Nokolai for a year and a day, which means until mid-November, so they’ll do as we bid. But they’re a dominant, so their Lu Nuncio must be included in the circle.”

  Arjenie had a feeling she didn’t use the word dominant quite the same way he was, but she let that go for now. That slight frown clung to his face as if he’d carried some worry for so long he’d forgotten how to stop. “You need to stop thinking for a while.” She took his hand. “Where do you sleep?”

  Now, that was a real, intentional frown—brows drawn down, his attention suddenly focused like a laser. “I have a place up on Little Sister. When I’m down here, I usually stay at the bunkhouse with my men.”

  She was going to have to lead him by the hand, wasn’t she? “Where do you want to sleep tonight?”

  “I don’t want to put pressure on you.”

  “I’m guessing you don’t want to insult me, either.” She gestured with her free hand. “I don’t know what this mate bond means to you. I don’t know what it means to me. I don’t know what it’s going to mean, or what I’m going to do. I do know we’ve got a problem if you don’t want to sleep with me.” She looked at him sternly. “And I’m talking sleep, not just sex. Though just is a silly word to use for what we did up against that tree.”

  His eyes kindled a smile that spread everywhere, smoothing his forehead, tipping his lips up, relaxing his shoulders. He smiled down at her like she’d just fixed world hunger … while begetting another type of hunger. He stroked her cheek, not saying a word. Smiling.

  She smiled back. She might have a huge list of things she didn’t understand, but knew one thing quite clearly: mate bond or no mate bond, she was in love.

  Arjenie tugged her lover into her room. And shut the door.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  “YOU’RE sure about this.” Lily clicked her seat belt in place.

  Cynna’s seat belt barely fit around her. She barely fit behind the steering wheel. “I asked Nettie months ago about driving. She told me not to hit anything and to pull over if I go into labor.”

  “Labor.” Lily took a deep breath. “I may hyperventilate.”

  Cynna chuckled. “Lily, pregnant women drive all the time.”

  “Okay. I just feel like I should be the one …”

  “Driving? In charge?” Cynna started the engine and put the car—Rule’s Mercedes—in gear. “This is not news.”

  “I’m still in charge.”

  “Keep telling yourself that. You know how to use the GPS thingee?”

  “Sure. I sent the car the directions from Googlemaps. You just have to download it.” Lily leaned forward and pushed the “i” button. They were headed for Del Cielo, a tiny little mountain town. The quickest way there from Clanhome involved twisty blacktop roads. Lily had Googled their route earlier.

  “That is crazy cool,” Cynna announced. “Are you going to call Mariah Friar and let her know we’re coming?”

  “I did that, too.” Lily pulled her laptop onto her lap and opened it. “She’s waiting for us.” She could do a lot of things one-handed, like tapping out instructions for the computer. It was disconcerting, though, how often she started to do something and discovered she couldn’t. Or had to do it in a weird-ass, annoying way.

  Like getting dressed. Forget about wearing a jacket or her shoulder rig. The weapon she couldn’t shoot worth a damn left-handed was in her purse. But she could do most of the rest of it herself, except for her bra and putting her bad arm through the sleeve of a shirt. For today she was skipping the bra and wearing another of Rule’s shirts to conceal that omission. Rule had threaded her arm into the shirt’s sleeve for her.

  Showers were out. Washing her hair by herself was out. She could brush her teeth left-handed, but first she had to get the toothpaste on the toothbrush. She did still have a right hand, so she managed that, but she had to do it differently.

  Lily had experienced some of this last year, but it had been her left shoulder, not her right, and the damage hadn’t been nearly as bad. Maybe what was getting to her was not knowing how much function she’d regain.

  With one finger Lily tapped in her password and waited for the computer to offer her the file she wanted. Everything had to be done differently, and she kept forgetting to allow for that. Last night, when she decided to send Jeff to D.C. with a written report, she’d forgotten that she couldn’t type it. She ended up dictating it to Cynna… . who was acting as her chauffeur as well. Lily could drive one-handed, but she had to admit that would be stupid. Especially since she’d taken half a pain pill earlier, before Nettie arrived.

  Nettie would be cleaning Lily’s wound and changing the dressing on it every morning for a week or so. Having experienced that in the hospital, Lily hadn’t tried to go without some kind of chemical buffer.

  Lily glanced in the side mirror. They were being tailed by a white sedan slightly newer than Lily’s personal vehicle. She knew both the men in the car. Rule had insisted on guards. Lily considered an attack highly unlikely—Friar would have to be able to track her magically, and tracking a moving target was extremely hard if you weren’t a Finder. So, she was told, was Listening; chances were Friar couldn’t eavesdrop on them in motion. To be sure, Cullen had given her a charm that was supposed to be putting out magical static.

  So she had the charm and the guards for just in case. She’d told Rule he could guard her, after all, and Cynna would be with her. Cynna was trained and armed, but she was also pregnant—and potentially a target. They didn’t know what Friar knew and what he didn’t. They didn’t know how he chose his targets, whether he was guided by her or had some other metric.

  Rule couldn’t do the guarding himself. He and Benedict and Isen were working on details for tomorrow’s meeting. Cullen was busy
making charms for that meeting. And Arjenie was doing what she did best: research.

  “So what are you hoping to learn from Mariah Friar about her dad?” Cynna asked.

  “First, if she had any inkling about his clairaudience. Second, dates.” Lily skimmed the report she’d filed last April, looking for the transcript of her interview with Friar’s estranged daughter. “We might get more, but I’m hoping for dates. Specifically, the date when Friar suddenly acquired shields. Mariah said he was gone for a while, then bam! When he turned up again he had these handy-dandy shields. Or maybe it’s a single shield. I didn’t get a date from her at the time.” Should have. Didn’t think of it.

  “And Mariah knows about shields because … ?”

  “I didn’t tell you about that?” Cynna had been gone when Lily met Mariah Friar in the course of an investigation. Way gone. She’d been kidnapped into another realm. “Mariah’s an empath. Completely unblocked.”

  “Aw … that’s rough. Nearly as bad as having Friar for a father.”

  True. “It’s important to her to keep her Gift secret.”

  “Sure, I can see that. What will the date Friar got shielded tell us?”

  “It suggests that’s when she recruited him. It’s probably when he became a Listener, too. If he had a clairaudience Gift before that, Mariah wasn’t aware of it. I think she would have been, considering her Gift. She was wary of him, kept track of him until she moved out.”

  “You can’t turn a null into a Gifted.”

  “We don’t know what an Old One can do.”

  Cynna was silent a moment. “You think Friar left our realm to go see her?”

  “I sure as hell hope he left our realm. I’d hate to think someone here on Earth could turn a null or a near-null into the strongest Listener on the planet.”

  “Me, too. But what about Dya? How does she fit? The G.B.—”

  “G.B.?”

  “Great Bitch. She doesn’t hold that contract Dya is bound by. Some elf bigwig does.”

  “Sidhe. We don’t know if he’s an elf, just that he’s a sidhe lord of some sort.” Lily had tried to ask Arjenie more questions about Dya’s lord this morning … and gotten nothing. Nada. Zilch . It was intensely frustrating. “So maybe Friar wasn’t contacted by the Great Bitch directly. Maybe this mysterious sidhe lord showed up here and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Sidhe lords can cross into our realm. I’m guessing one of them could take Friar traveling with him if he wanted to.”

  “You think this sidhe lord is hooked up with her and brought Friar to her?”

  “Maybe.” This morning Lily wasn’t sure of her earlier reasoning. Was the fact that Friar couldn’t Listen at Clanhome reason enough to implicate the Great Bitch? There could be other explanations. Just because she couldn’t come up with one didn’t mean it didn’t exist. She couldn’t explain color televisions, either. Or how her own Gift worked.

  TURN RIGHT AT THE NEXT INTERSECTION, an automated voice said.

  “You think it knows what it’s talking about?” Cynna said, slowing as they approached a stop sign marking an intersection with another winding mountain road.

  “Yes. Ah … can I ask you something?”

  “When people say that, they always mean ‘ask something personal.’ But sure. Shoot.”

  “There’s a mental component to spellcasting, right?”

  “Of course. You know that.”

  “What I was wondering … is there an emotional component, too?”

  Cynna turned onto the other road and gave Lily a look she couldn’t read. “You can’t separate mental and emotional into neat little boxes. Emotions affect what you think. What you think affects your emotions. It’s all tied together.”

  “So guilt might interfere with you casting a spell?”

  “Maybe you should tell me what you really want to know.”

  Lily looked down and shut her laptop. “I, uh, dreamed about Helen last night.”

  “The nutty telepath who tried to open the hellgate?”

  “Yeah.” The investigation that led to Helen and the Azá and Lily’s first encounter with both Rule and the Great Bitch had happened before Lily met Cynna, but Cynna knew the basics. “I’ve been dreaming about her lately, generally after a session with Sam. I dreamed about her last night, after mindspeaking Arjenie, and I couldn’t mindspeak at all this morning.”

  “You feel guilty for killing Helen.”

  “No. I didn’t have a lot of choice about that—not unless I was willing to let her kill me, Rule, and a bunch of other people, then let a godawful lot of demons into our world.” Lily bent and put the laptop on the floor. It was awkward to do it one-handed. Everything was awkward. Especially this conversation. “Never mind.”

  “Uh-uh. You don’t get to stop now. Quit thinking so much. When you dreamed about Helen, what did you feel?”

  “While I was dreaming?” Lily flashed back to the dream. “Rage. I wanted her dead. She was going to kill Rule. She’d killed his brother and she was going to kill him, and I wanted her dead.”

  “You didn’t feel guilty in the dream?”

  “No.” She’d felt angry. Killing mad. She wasn’t sure anymore if she’d felt that way last year when she actually killed Helen. Was the dream making her face a truth she didn’t like? Or had it distorted the truth, replacing her real memory with a dream version?

  “How about after you woke up? How did you feel then?”

  She’d felt the way she always did after a Helen dream. Drained. Tainted. Ugly. “Not good. Not angry. More like … smeared.”

  “Well, guilt can create blocks. Most empaths who’re blocked … it isn’t just self-protection, or they’d all be blocked. It’s guilt. But guilt can affect anyone, not just empaths. Some Gifted—especially those who were raised in a hellfire and brimstone theology—are never able to cast a spell. It makes them feel unclean. The feeling keeps them blocked.”

  “I’m blocked? I’ll never be able to do it?”

  “No, you’ve already done it, and more than once! Lily, you’re used to going at something you want to learn head-on. This isn’t a head-on kind of learning. It’s more circling back at something over and over until you get it.”

  “I don’t know how to do that kind of learning.” Staring at a candle flame to find Sam there? That wasn’t her.

  Cynna snorted. “It’s what you do every day. Investigations are all about circling in on a perp. Investigate mindspeech.”

  But mindspeech wasn’t the perp. She was.

  Lily turned that thought over in her mind. It felt right. It gave her the same kind of click she got when an investigation suddenly made sense, when she knew she was on the right track. She didn’t think she was guilty. She didn’t feel guilty. But some part of her was obscuring the trail, hiding things from the rest of her.

  She’d track it down. Cynna was right—that’s what she did. “You’re pretty smart.”

  “This is true.”

  Lily looked at her friend’s smiling, decorated face. “Smug, too.”

  “Pregnant women get to do smug. It’s part of the package, compensation for having our bladders reduced to the size of a pea. Speaking of which …”

  “You need to go already? We just left!”

  “Size of a pea,” Cynna said firmly, and pulled into a gas station on the outskirts of Del Cielo. Mariah Friar’s hometown.

  “YOU’RE sure about this.” Rule leaned over Arjenie’s shoulder to look at the computer screen.

  He’d spent some time with Toby early that morning, then sent the boy off to lessons. For now, Harold Spanner would homeschool him. Harold had taught Rule at one time, and he had a student already—Mike Rose’s son, Sean. Toby would spend the night with Sean tonight … and Rule already missed him. It was foolish, but he’d gotten used to having Toby with him every morning and evening. But with everything that was going on, it was simpler for Toby to stay with a friend. This way Rule didn’t have to keep sending Toby out of the room when they discussed
things the boy shouldn’t hear.

  He and Benedict had been going over security details for the meeting when Isen summoned them to his study, where Arjenie was ensconced with her computer.

  “Not at all,” Arjenie answered. “Well, I’m sure that Friar had his old swimming pool taken out and a new one put in last year. The permits for that are clear. I’m also sure Friar made some odd purchases about that time and did his best to hide them, using a dummy corporation. I’m not sure all of that adds up to some underground tunnel or hidey-hole, but it’s suggestive.”

  Rule looked over Arjenie’s head at Benedict, who stood on her other side. Their eyes met. “Can you show me those purchases?”

  “Okay. What I’ve got is a single invoice, though. I, uh, sort of snuck in someone’s back door to find it.”

  “Hacked in?”

  “Hacking is illegal. I simply know how to find back doors sometimes … and some people don’t have much protection.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard. A new screen popped up. “Here it is.”

  The invoice didn’t tell Rule a great deal. Some of the materials could have been for a swimming pool—there was a lot of cement—while others clearly weren’t. “I’ll have Jimmy look at this. He’s a contractor,” he added to Arjenie. “He’ll be able to give us an idea of what those steel beams might be used for.”

  Isen stood behind Arjenie, smiling. “She does good work, doesn’t she? Did you notice the name of Friar’s dummy corporation?”

  “Why?”

  “Hernando, Hyde, and Way.” His father paused, his eyebrows wagging. “You don’t get it?”

  “No, I don’t recognize …” Rule’s voice trailed off when his father hummed a few bars from an old song. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Isen’s smile split his beard like a knife. “Our enemy has a sense of humor. He named his dummy corporation after ‘Hernando’s Hideaway.’ ”

  “YOU were really good with Mariah,” Lily said, closing the door and reaching for her seat belt. “She liked you.”

  Cynna patted her belly. “The little rider makes friends for me everywhere. Plus it turned out we had a lot in common.” She drew the seat belt back around her. “We head into the city now, right?”