Dragon Spawn

by Eileen Wilks

  He is alive and your healer seems competent. He stands a decent chance of remaining alive. Do not interrupt again. I have made a tentative identification of one of the intruders, based on a comparison of Dirty Harry’s memory with data I have obtained in the past two months. He was the man you know as Tom Weng.

  Rule growled.

  “Weng?” Lily repeated, startled. “Are you—no, of course you’re sure. Sam, Cynna doesn’t know about Weng—what he really is. I have to tell her.”

  I did not extract a promise of silence when I spoke to you about Tom Weng’s heritage. I ask that you employ discretion in speaking of it. I was not able to identify the other intruder, whose scent Rule Turner finds familiar. I will place Dirty Harry’s memory in your minds; perhaps one of you will be able to identify her. You may experience some disorientation.

  Blank.

  Dark . . .

  * * *

  WARM. Sprawled in comfort across favorite softness, warmth radiating up from my bed/nest, the warmth and scent of my (smell/boy/mine/TOBY). Pleasurable vibration in my throat. Drowsy, eyes closed, limp . . . self and world saturated with scents, the house-sounds normal, my whiskers tasting the slightest movement of air. All peaceful.

  I contemplate a memory: tension, curiosity. A new man-wolf comes today; talk-talk (smell/wolf-lion/RULE) talk-talk DIRTY HARRY . . . New man-wolf my enemy? Complex sifting of sensations, scents, memories . . . conclusion: new man-wolf enemy of (smell/wolf-lion/RULE), yes. (Smell/wolf-lion/RULE) not mine. His enemies not mine?

  Uncertainty.

  Enemies of (smell/she-tends-me/beloved/LILY) my enemies. Yes. Watch new man-wolf tomorrow and more tomorrows. Learn if he is my enemy or enemy of (smell/she-tends-me/beloved/LILY). Now (smell/she-tends-me/beloved/LILY) home good (smell/boy/mine/TOBY) sleeps good yes all good . . .

  Warm. Sleepy.

  Air moves. Moves wrong. Eyes snap open to gray-green-pale world of night and my muscles clench—intruders! Magic-stink! Wrong-scum-humans here, bad. Two of them, male and female. They grip each other and move oddly. My ears pin back as I crouch and cry death to them.

  Female scum-intruder lets go of male and drops lower. He reaches out swiftly—reaches for me or for (smell/boy/mine/TOBY). I attack—

  * * *

  LILY came back to herself. She was sitting on the floor—sitting normally, not like a cat, which was reassuring. When she opened her mouth, she half expected to growl instead of speaking. “Well, that was weird.”

  Rule knelt beside her, his hand on her back. He looked pale, but he hadn’t collapsed to the floor the way she must have. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine. It was more than a little disorienting, but I’m fine.” She got to her feet.

  You did not recognize the intruders.

  “I wasn’t present. I was Dirty Harry, and he doesn’t—didn’t—know them.” Cats live in the present. She’d always heard that, but experiencing it was different. So was the way Harry thought, in a blend of sensory images with very few words. Like the way he named Toby—by his scent, first; a sort of an abbreviation that combined the concepts of young, male, and human, which Lily translated as “boy”; Harry’s sense of possession; and what Harry considered the boy’s sound-name: scent + boy + mine + TOBY.

  It had all made sense at the time. It didn’t now.

  Rule’s frown stopped a hair short of a scowl. “I didn’t feel like I was Dirty Harry. I saw what he’d seen, smelled what he’d smelled. I wasn’t him.”

  You do not possess any aspect of mind magic, Sam said. Lily Yu does. When I inserted the memory, she activated and strengthened her link with the cat, causing her to experience the memory as Dirty Harry. Lily Yu. Do not do this again without my supervision. Such immersion in another being’s consciousness is unsafe for one at your level of training.

  “What are you talking about?” she said. “What link?”

  The link formed by the cat you refer to as Dirty Harry.

  Lily blinked.

  Cats are not universally telepathic. Their ability to, in your vernacular, “read minds” depends largely although not entirely upon the formation of a particular type of mental link. Kittens instinctively form such links with their mother and siblings. Not all retain the ability in adulthood, but those who do often establish links with other beings with whom they’ve formed an emotional bond. Such links are generally inaccessible to any but the cat. Your ability to access it, however inadvertently, interests me. I will wish to investigate this at a later point, assuming we survive.

  That was a disquieting way to put it.

  We approach a particularly dangerous cusp. Rule Turner, you recognized one of the intruders.

  “Yes.” Rule’s frown hadn’t abated much. “Or I thought I did. Dirty Harry’s vision is quite different from mine in either form, however. If Lily didn’t recognize her, I’m probably wrong.”

  “Don’t go by me,” Lily said. “I wasn’t paying attention to faces. Or rather, Dirty Harry wasn’t paying attention and I wasn’t present, so I couldn’t. What I remember . . .” She tried to summon the memory, but it was fragmented now. “I remember how they smelled—which is weird—and how big they looked and the way they moved. That was important, how they moved, and their faces weren’t, so Harry barely noticed them—but, ah . . . I think they were green.” She frowned. “Could they be green?”

  Arjenie nodded. “To a cat, yes. Cats’ eyes have the same color receptors as ours, but they have a lot more rod cells and fewer cone cells. Rod cells give them excellent night vision, but without ample cone cells, they don’t distinguish colors as easily as we do. Most experts think they see blues and greens a lot better than reds and oranges.”

  Lily shook her head. “How do you know these things?”

  “Never mind that,” Cynna said in a tight, hard voice. “I didn’t recognize either of them. Rule? Who did you think the woman was?”

  “Ginger. Ginger Harris.”

  THIRTEEN

  GINGER Harris. Thirty-two—no, thirty-three now. Five-seven, one twenty-eight. Caucasian with red hair and brown eyes set deep in a triangular face. An intriguingly pointed face, like a Siamese cat’s. And alive, apparently. That had been in question.

  The last time Lily had seen that face, Ginger had been making a play for Rule, or possibly for her. Ginger had suggested a threesome, anyway, and it was impossible to say if the offer had been genuine, intended to distract, or simply part of her passion for the outrageous.

  The time before that, Ginger had been trying to get Rule framed for murder.

  The time before that . . . many years before that . . .

  It was neither fair nor accurate to say that all of Lily’s memories of Ginger Harris were bad, but nightmares weigh so much more than happy memories. She carried the weight of her oldest nightmare with her as she set off for Nettie’s place.

  She also carried her newest weapon—an M4A1. That might seem unnecessary, given the three lupi guards spread out before and behind them, invisible in the darkness, but none of the guards carried an assault rifle. She’d retrieved hers from the trunk of the car before setting off, though she’d left the grenade launcher attachment in the trunk. That was a recent purchase, not government-issue, and she’d had too little practice to be confident using it.

  Nettie Two Horses lived in a small stucco cottage only five minutes from Isen’s house. The clinic next to it was small, too, but well equipped to provide basic care for her patients. For human or lupi patients, that is. Nettie was not a vet. A physician, a healer, and a shaman, but not a vet. Still, this wasn’t the first time she’d used her Gift to help a sick or injured animal. Probably the first time her patient had been a cat, but she’d healed dogs before. Lupi liked dogs, and once hierarchy had been established, most dogs were fine around lupi.

  Cats, not so much. Lily trudged up the road and thought about how it had felt to be Dirty
Harry, who was alive. Who might stay alive, according to Sam. That wasn’t as awful as the other directions her thoughts wanted to take.

  “Why the M4A1?” Arjenie asked.

  Lily glanced at her. Trust Arjenie to ID it properly. “Did you recognize it because of Benedict or because you once saw a photo of one?”

  “I know what an M4 looks like. They’re carried by armed forces in fifty-two countries, including ours. I guessed that this was the fully automatic version because I knew you’d been wanting a machine gun—which this isn’t, in spite of its rate of fire, because it uses magazines with . . . is it thirty rounds?”

  Lily nodded, fascinated. It wasn’t as if Arjenie loved weapons. She loved facts. In times of stress, they comforted her.

  “So it has to be reloaded, while a machine gun generally is fed continuously, so the M4A1 is considered an assault rifle rather than a machine gun. In spite of that, it’s banned under Title II of the National Firearms Act, which outlaws machine guns, because of its barrel length and capability for fully automatic fire. I assume you’re allowed to have one because you’re FBI?”

  “It took some finagling on Ruben’s part, but yes.”

  Arjenie nodded. “Okay. So why are you carrying it now?”

  “Most weapons don’t do more than annoy a demon. This should be able to take one out. Maybe not one of the really big ones, but even then it stands a better chance than my nine millimeter. It might even kill a dworg.”

  “Um . . . you’re expecting demons or dworg?”

  “Not expecting, but we can’t rule them out. Especially demons. With Tom Weng and Ginger popping back and forth between realms, who’s to say they won’t bring a red-eye demon along next time they drop in?”

  “I see. Who’s Ginger Harris?”

  Lily kept her voice steady. “The sister of a grade school friend of mine. Ginger tried to frame Rule for murder a couple years ago. She was working with the Azá—maybe voluntarily, maybe not. Their leader—Harlowe—had that staff, the one that messed with people’s minds. She might have been influenced or compelled by it. Shortly before we shut down that hellgate they were trying to open, Ginger disappeared.”

  “The Azá worshipped the Great Enemy. Did Ginger worship her, too?”

  “Not noticeably, but that doesn’t mean anything. Ginger majored in flippant with a minor in sarcasm. If she worshipped anything, she kept it to herself.”

  “And she vanished.”

  “Yeah.” Lily trudged on in silence a moment before adding, “There was a good chance she’d been killed. Harlowe’s crowd liked to keep potential witnesses to a minimum, and whether or not she was a voluntary ally, she was definitely a potential witness.” Hindsight said they should’ve looked for Ginger harder, longer. Hindsight was a bitch. There had been so much to deal with . . . she and Rule had just been hit with the mate bond. She’d been kicked out of the San Diego PD and joined the Unit. At the fight at the hellgate, Rule had lost his second-oldest brother, Lily had been injured, and she’d killed for the first time . . .

  “Your school friend never knew what happened to her sister?”

  “Sarah died a long time ago.” At the hands of a pedophile who’d snatched her and Lily off the beach. The nightmare pressed down hard. “I don’t like to talk about that. It’s not a secret exactly, but I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Okay.”

  A question popped out of Lily’s mouth without her having decided to ask it. “Why did you come with me? I’m glad you did,” she added hastily. “Just surprised, because . . .” Her voice trailed off. She didn’t know how to say the rest.

  “They didn’t need me for planning. Why do you ask?”

  Rule, Benedict, Isen, and Cynna were planning the assault on hell, or wherever they would have to go—though “planning” wasn’t the word Lily would have used. Brainstorming, maybe, since they didn’t know enough to make a real plan. But brainstorming now might save time later, and at the very least it gave them something to do. Lily understood that need. “I guess I thought you’d stay with Cynna.”

  “Cynna has a lot of people with her, and I thought you might need a friend.”

  Something lurched inside Lily—something awkward and painful. After a moment she said, “I do. Thank you.”

  “You’re in a difficult place, aren’t you? Everyone’s worried about Cynna. About Rule. And we should be, because they’re caught in a nightmare and need everyone’s support, but you’re Toby’s parent, too. A stepparent is just another kind of parent.”

  Taken from his bed, in his pj’s . . . “It’s not the same.”

  “It doesn’t have to be the same to be horrible.”

  . . . where he was supposed to be safe. The awkward thing inside her cracked open. “I can’t—” Her voice cracked, too. “I can’t do what I have to unless I’m the cop right now. I can’t be the parent. I have to be the cop.”

  “It’s okay to fall apart, you know.”

  It wasn’t. It wasn’t okay at all, not for her. Arjenie did it—collapsed into tears, then pulled herself back together and did what she needed to. Lily didn’t know how to do that. The chasm inside her was too big. If she fell in, she might not climb out again. And she didn’t know how to say all that, either, so she just shook her head and kept moving.

  * * *

  “. . . STOPPED the bleeding and began taking down the swelling, which was dangerously high. I couldn’t have lifted the depressed skull fragment, though, if your dragon hadn’t decided to help.” Nettie walked as briskly as she spoke, crossing the fifteen feet between her house and the clinic. She opened the door. “That takes too much power. Very odd sensation, being fed power by a dragon. It doesn’t feel at all like clan magic, but I had no trouble using it.”

  Lily wasn’t sure Sam would appreciate being referred to as her dragon, but she let that pass. “And you think Harry will be okay now?”

  “I’d give him a better than fifty percent chance. He’s a fighter. That much is obvious, even to someone like me who doesn’t know much about cats. He’s in sleep now.” Nettie crouched to check on her patient, who lay on the clinic’s floor. The blanket beneath him had been folded so his head and shoulders were slightly elevated. “I’ll keep him that way until late morning, then see how he’s doing. We may need to move him to a veterinary surgical clinic. Among other things, they can place an IV to keep him hydrated, which I can’t do. Even if I were qualified, I lack the proper equipment. Nothing I have is the right size.”

  “Cats dehydrate quickly.” Lily unslung her rifle and set it on the floor as she knelt beside the too-still body. “Is he running a fever? Can you tell?”

  “A slight one. Not worrisome.”

  Lily stroked the orange fur, careful not to touch Harry’s head. Equally carefully, she unfurled her mindsense. She didn’t want to accidentally trip whatever switch activated the mental link Sam claimed existed.

  The cat’s mind was all smooth and shiny, with no texture for her to “speak” to. That’s what she’d experienced when she tried using her new sense with him yesterday—God, only yesterday!—after they returned home, but she’d hoped that this time would be different. That, after somehow using that mysterious link, she’d find his mind receptive. She wanted to tell him she was here. That he was being cared for.

  Mindspeech was about words, though, wasn’t it? And Harry didn’t think in words. Maybe . . . gently she stroked his mind with her mindsense while her hand stroked his body. Maybe he could feel that, maybe he couldn’t, but it was worth a try. Those with mind magic could sometimes feel this kind of mental touch, and Harry did have some kind of mind magic or he wouldn’t have been able to establish a mental link. And that was weird, because she’d never felt any magic when she petted him. Maybe his fur kept her from feeling it?

  Suddenly she knew what he needed. “Do you have a shirt I could borrow?”

 
“Sure, but you and I are not exactly the same size,” Nettie said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I want to leave my shirt with him. It will smell like me.”

  “Ah. Good idea.” She turned away to rummage in a drawer. “There ought to be some scrubs that . . . here they are.”

  Suddenly Lily’s mindsense nearly yanked itself away, out of her conscious control. Up. It wanted to go up and check out . . . “Reno’s here,” she said. And how did she know it was the other dragon, not Sam? Yet somehow she did. Just as she somehow knew where his mind was even though she hadn’t let her mindsense go hurtling toward him.

  And who was Reno anyway? None of the dragons used that call-name. Could he be the New York dragon, who hadn’t deigned to tell humans what they were to call him?

  “Reno?” Nettie repeated. “Who’s that?”

  Arjenie—who had probably been quiet for as long as she was able—launched into an explanation of who and what Reno was and what they hoped he’d be able to help Sam do. Nettie listened closely, asked some questions, and handed Lily a cotton top that would undoubtedly dwarf her. Nettie was five-ten with wide shoulders and full breasts.

  Lily stayed beside Harry, touching him gently with her hand and her mindsense, knowing she needed to leave. To go back to Isen’s and add whatever she could to the brainstorming or planning or whatever you wanted to call it. They were all assuming the dragons would be able to figure out where they should go. They had to. There was no Plan B.

  Yet still she sat and petted her cat.

  Beloved. That was part of Harry’s name for her. She blinked away the sudden dampness and pulled off her T-shirt.

  * * *

  LILY and Arjenie didn’t talk much on the way back to Isen’s. Lily didn’t know what Arjenie was thinking about, but she was brooding over timetables.

  Thanks to Dirty Harry, she knew when Toby had been taken: 2:20 A.M. She knew that because she’d glanced at the clock when the cat’s howl woke her—a reflex apparently too ingrained to be aborted by emergency. Lily had found Cynna’s phone and checked the time stamp on the text from Cullen. That had come at 1:33. Cynna had called Isen at 2:19. Lily mentally added a few minutes to the first time for Cynna to read the text, respond, brush her teeth, and get in bed. She subtracted a couple minutes from the other number for Cynna to perform the two Finds. That left her with Ryder being snatched between 1:37 and 2:17. Toby had been taken at 2:20. At most, forty-three minutes had elapsed between the two kidnappings.