Tempting Danger

by Eileen Wilks

  “It fits,” she insisted. “All ‘subjective information’ aside, it fits. It’s such an obvious frame! There’s no trace of blood anywhere except by the body and at the sink, so we’d think he washed up. The deposit slip Mech found—we don’t have a thing tying it to Turner. Anyone could have put that money in. Then there’s the wolf hair. She couldn’t have pulled it out herself. They left it there.”

  “Listen to yourself for a minute.” He was plainly exasperated. “Mech said you’d become biased, entranced by this lupus prince. I didn’t believe him, but—”

  “Mech’s got a hate thing going about lupi. I didn’t realize that before, but it was obvious at the scene.”

  He slapped his desk. “And you would rather decide that a fellow officer is guilty than that werewolf! You’re postulating a conspiracy, and not just that, but one involving this department. And a murder committed at a distance through sorcery. That just isn’t possible.”

  “It’s been done. The historical record—”

  “Before the Purge! That’s four hundred years ago!” He leaned forward. “Let me make myself clear. I am not going to subject this department to a witch hunt by a pair of glory-seeking federal agents. And that’s what would happen. They’d be looking at us—even at me—for a suspect. Or had that escaped your conspiracy-ridden mind?”

  “No, sir,” she said woodenly. “That hadn’t escaped me. Though it’s possible one of the FBI agents did it, it’s more likely someone in this department tipped off Therese’s killer.”

  His mouth tightened. “Get out.”

  “Sir—”

  “Out!” He glared at her. “I’m not removing you from the case, but I’m close to it. Go on. Go get your head straight.”

  She left. She stopped at her office long enough to jam the FBI file and a couple more reports in her tote, then headed for the elevator.

  “Hey!” Brady called as she passed through the bullpen. “What’s with you and Mech? You got it in for him?”

  She didn’t slow down. “My report’s on file. You want to know what happened, read it.”

  Brady scowled at her. “Why are you making trouble for him? He didn’t make a pass. Not Mech.”

  T.J. shook his head. “Try to think about something other than sex, boy. It’ll be hard, but try. Lily . . .”

  She paused, met his eyes.

  “You take care now.”

  Her smile flickered. “Right.”

  At least T.J. didn’t hate her, she thought as she slung her tote in the backseat of her car. Yet. If she kept pushing, though, against the captain’s orders . . . but Captain Randall was wrong.

  Either that, or he was dirty. She couldn’t make herself believe that, but she couldn’t dismiss it, either. He’d had reasons for what he’d done—not good ones, in her opinion. But plausible.

  She sent her car shooting backward out of her space, yanked the wheel, shifted, and hit the accelerator hard enough to burn rubber. The captain was right about one thing. She needed to get her head straight.

  Fifteen minutes later she slammed the car door shut and started up the path to Grandmother’s house. She rang the bell.

  “Lily.” Li Qin smiled. “How lovely to see you again. Please come in.”

  Lily shook her head. “Not today, thank you. I just wanted to let you know I was here and would be working in the garden awhile.”

  “Of course,” Li Qin said, as if Lily often dropped by in the middle of a workday to pull weeds. “I hope you will allow me to bring you some refreshment. Tea or a cool drink?”

  “Perhaps later? I’m not fit company right now.” She managed to take her leave politely, then hurried along the flagstone path to the back of the house where the toolshed waited.

  Five minutes later, she was in the native plants area west of the house, destroying invaders. The blue oak that anchored the space made salt-and-pepper shade, a shifting, dappled world. A strong breeze blew from the west. Lily knelt in the dirt in her linen slacks, uncaring of the damage she did them. She dug her trowel into the dry ground, loosened the roots beneath a clump of grass, and yanked it out with her other hand.

  Twenty years ago, after Sarah Harris died and Lily didn’t, Grandmother had taken Lily to a section of her yard and told her to get rid of all the grass. She’d had so much fear and hate in her then. Therapy hadn’t done much good. How could a therapist help a child who won’t talk?

  Earth and sun and weeds had reached what words couldn’t. Lily had pulled and dug, pulled and dug. Eventually, the grass had been gone and she’d planted. Eventually, her garden had bloomed. And she’d learned that life persists. Some live, some die, but life persists.

  Lily had gone on to create other gardens, like this one. Planning a bed was fun. Planting was satisfying, and watching the garden come to life filled her in a way nothing else did. But sometimes she just needed to dig and pull, dig and pull.

  Captain Randall claimed he’d left her out of the loop because she was with Rule. He’d been afraid she would inadvertently tip Rule off that something was up, putting both her and the planned arrest at risk. Mech was supposed to have told her as soon as she arrived at the scene, but he’d been with his witness. With Ginger Harris.

  Who must have lied. Why?

  Lily shook her head. She’d tackle those questions later.

  Randall’s assumptions would have been less insulting, she thought, jamming her trowel in the earth, if the captain had known that lupi could hear both sides of a phone conversation. He didn’t. He’d been worried that Rule would smell her fear. He’d assumed she wasn’t clever enough to explain away a sudden attack of jitters.

  Or he’d lied.

  Maybe she was afraid of being with Rule, she thought, ripping out a greedy patch of star thistle. But she didn’t fear him for the reason the captain assumed. Rule hadn’t killed Therese—though so far, she’d had zero luck persuading anyone of that. Her word sure hadn’t been enough.

  The captain had given Mech a disciplinary slap on the wrist. Not for the way he’d rushed to an arrest, though. Because he’d handled the arrest badly.

  Most officers had no experience arresting a lupus. Here in California, lupi hadn’t been arrested; they’d been hunted, then captured or killed by the X-Squads. But everyone had been briefed on correct procedure for a lupus apprehension, and Mech hadn’t followed those procedures. It could so easily have ended in officers down.

  Instead, it had ended in Rule being taken away in shackles.

  Lily’s eyes burned, though whether from fury or tears, she didn’t know. He was in a cage now—that’s what it amounted to. Cities the size of San Diego had separate facilities for those of the Blood. They were too dangerous to mix with the general jail population, not to mention hard to hold on to.

  By now Rule was locked up in one of the eight-foot-square, steel-lined boxes reserved for lupi and other, rarer preternaturals. Grandmother said lupi were claustrophobic. That they went a little nuts if you locked them up. And those cells were so small. . . .

  Lily shuddered and destroyed another clump of grass. She understood the horror of being trapped in a tiny space.

  No judge would grant bail to a lupus who was up on a murder charge. Rule would sit in a tiny metal cage until she could prove someone else killed Therese.

  She would prove it. Somehow.

  All right, she thought, sitting back on her heels and surveying her battlefield, strewn with the corpses of grass and weeds. Enough emoting. Look at the facts and the possibilities. Consider what’s right, what’s at risk. Then make a decision.

  She began digging more carefully. Weed seedlings had set up housekeeping next to the monkey flower plants. She loosened the dirt with her trowel and began plucking them out

  Fact: Captain Randall didn’t want to tell the FBI they had a murder by sorcery. The possibilities, she thought, were three. First, he simply didn’t believe her. Maybe he thought she was lying, maybe he thought she was mistaken. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to trust in some
thing he couldn’t sense himself.

  That could be, she admitted, shifting position so she could tackle the section near the manzanita. People knew that werewolves, brownies, and such operated in part on magic, but there were some who insisted that Wicca was strictly a religion, no magic involved. Like flat-earthers, they majored in denial, explaining away the disorderliness of magic and denying what they couldn’t explain.

  The captain kept insisting that sorcery no longer existed. Admittedly, some experts agreed with him, but his attitude seemed more emotional than rational. Maybe he just couldn’t admit real magic into his world.

  Okay. Possibility number two: Randall knew she was right, but he didn’t want his department to get a black eye. He was willing to cover up for Mech.

  She didn’t like that idea. It went against what she knew of the man, but it was possible. Randall was ambitious. He didn’t like Croft and Karonski, didn’t want them taking over, and most of all didn’t want anyone finding evidence that one of his officers was dirty.

  Well, dammit, neither did she. Lily began pulling out weeds that had hidden beneath the shrub’s leaves. But covering up was not an option.

  Possibility three: Randall himself was bent. He knew she was right about the sorcery, knew who had killed Therese and why. And if that were true, she was in danger. He’d have to discredit her . . . or kill her.

  Which could also be true if Mech was the crooked one.

  Sweat beaded on her forehead, but she felt cold. It wasn’t the possibility of danger. It was the idea of being in danger from another cop.

  It hadn’t always been easy, being a female police officer. And it hadn’t helped that she was short, slight, and Chinese. But she’d made a place for herself. She belonged.

  But the cost of belonging had just gone up. To remain one of the boys, she’d have to continue to play by the rules, both written and unwritten.

  Hadn’t she always been good at following rules? But this time, she thought as she savaged another cluster of star thistle, to play one set of rules meant ignoring others. She knew Therese had been killed by sorcery and that they had locked up the wrong man. But she couldn’t report what she knew to the FBI, and she’d better not talk about it elsewhere, either. To stay on the case, she’d have to pretend there wasn’t a traitor in the department. Look as if she were toeing the line the captain had drawn.

  Didn’t that make sense, though? She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, smearing dirt in with the sweat. She could do more for Rule by staying where she was than if she went haring off on some solo truth-and-justice crusade. How far could she get if she didn’t have the power of the law behind her?

  How far could she get if the power of the law was used against her?

  At least one of the people sworn to uphold the law was subverting it. Mech. Captain Randall. The FBI agents, Croft and Karonski. She didn’t know who her enemy was . . . but he knew her.

  Rule was in a box, framed for murder. Framed by a cop.

  Lily stood. The wind whipped a strand of her hair across her cheek, and she turned her face into it. Clouds were piling up to the west, out to sea. Maybe they’d get some rain soon. The land could use it.

  Slowly she pulled off her gloves. Normally she tidied up all the unwanted plants and grasses she’d removed. Today she glanced at the mess and didn’t care. Let the wind clean it up.

  She headed for her car. Her phone was there. She had a call to make. Then she had to go back to headquarters.

  SIXTEEN

  THEY never turned the lights off.

  There were many things to hate about the metal hole they’d stuck him in, and some that weren’t so bad. Rule didn’t mind the lack of a bed. He couldn’t stop moving, so a bunk would only have been in the way. The sanitary facilities were sparse but decent; both sink and toilet folded up into the wall. The walls themselves, though, insulated everything. Rule could barely sense the moon through all the steel, but he’d developed a tolerance for that. Humans used a lot of metal when they built cities. The silence was harder to bear—he couldn’t hear a thing from outside his tiny cell.

  But it was the unfaltering light that was making him crazy.

  If he could have closed the darkness around him, he wouldn’t have been able to see the walls. He could have fooled himself that they were farther away. Darkness wouldn’t have kept him from pacing. He’d tried it for awhile with his eyes closed to see if that helped. It hadn’t.

  Things could have been worse. Because lupi healed so well, they made prime targets for a certain type of cop. Any damage wouldn’t show for long. If someone did notice that the prisoner had a broken bone or two, it was easy to argue that he’d been unruly. It can take a lot of force to discourage an unruly lupus. And if some of the other cops suspected the truth, they didn’t tell.

  Rule understood that. The police were like a clan, though an ill-run one, in his opinion. So much was expected of them, yet they were denied the status their work merited. It was no wonder some of them went off track.

  He’d been spared the indignity of being struck when he couldn’t fight back, he reminded himself.

  He would rather have been beaten.

  Rule snarled at the metal wall and turned. Three steps one way, turn, three steps back. He’d been pacing since they locked him in here. Maybe in a day or two he’d tire himself out enough to sleep.

  He’d used his one phone call to let Benedict know what had happened. His brother would arrange for a lawyer, and sooner or later they’d have to let that lawyer in to see him. Whether anyone else would be allowed to visit, he didn’t know. He didn’t know if anyone else would try.

  His lip pulled back in disgust. No point in fooling himself; he wasn’t worried about “anyone else” trying to see him. He wanted Lily to come. He wanted her to care at least that much.

  She’d looked at him as if she couldn’t stand him.

  Three steps. Turn.

  She’d kept her man from shooting him, though. No question in Rule’s mind that’s what the sergeant had meant to do—provoke Rule into Changing if he could. If not, force Rule to move, to make any action that could be interpreted as threatening. He’d wanted an excuse to kill. The others would probably have let him get away with it. Lupi had been fair game for a long time.

  She’d walked in front of the damned gun.

  What in God’s name had she been thinking? She’d cautioned him earlier that she didn’t heal the way he did. It wasn’t something he was likely to overlook, but she seemed to have forgotten that fact. If her sergeant had pulled the trigger on Rule, Rule would almost certainly have lived long enough to take the bastard with him. The other cop had been right about that. He might have survived beyond that, too, depending on how many others shot him and where their bullets hit.

  Lily wouldn’t have. If that cop had pulled the trigger after she stepped in front of his gun . . . Think of something else.

  Three steps and turn.

  What would happen to Nokolai if he were found guilty? What would happen to his son?

  Not the best choice of alternate subject.

  How long had he been in here, anyway? Usually he could tell time by the dance between earth and moon, but her pull was muffled by all the steel. It must be night by now, though.

  They’d taken his watch, his shoes, pocket knife, phone, keys—all those dangerous objects that were nothing compared to what he could do with his bare hands. Fools.

  He stopped and looked up at the bedamned lights.

  Two fluorescent tubes were set in a recess in the ceiling protected by steel bars. The floor-to-ceiling measurement was the largest dimension of his cell, perhaps ten feet. He could jump that high. Jump up, grab one of the bars, get his other hand between the bars, and smash the bloody glowing tubes to bits. He’d cut his hand, but what of it?

  They would come running, of course, with guns drawn, ready for him to make God knew what devious escape attempt. He was watched. He knew that. The round black eye of a camera perche
d high in one corner.

  Had it been lower, he could have pissed on it. A childish but understandable desire, he thought. Barring that, the camera would also be easy to smash, if he chose to do so.

  It would be a break in the pacing, wouldn’t it?

  He bent his knees and launched himself straight up. Closed his fingers around one of the bars and hung there . . . and heard the snick of the lock.

  He dropped to the floor, spun to face the door.

  It swung open. “You okay?” a voice called. No one was visible in the doorway. “Door’s going to stay open. No need to trample anyone.”

  He blinked. “Karonski? Abel Karonski?”

  “Your memory’s working, anyway.” A bulky figure moved into view—rumpled suit, sour expression, stinking of those cigars he snuck. Definitely Abel Karonski, though it had been awhile since Rule last saw him.

  “You weren’t on my list.”

  “Would that be the good people list or the bad people list?”

  “Of people I might see. I thought a lawyer might show up soon, or . . . but I wasn’t expecting MCD.”

  “Well, you got us. Good news for you that you did. You’re free.”

  Free. He took a step toward the door, hesitated.

  Karonski stood back. Rule moved fast then. He shouldn’t have. When you move too fast it scares humans, and scared humans with guns were likely to put holes in things.

  But . . . he stood outside his cell, looking around. The short corridor was empty except for Karonski and another man, one Rule didn’t know. Neither had their guns out. “Am I in your custody?”

  “Nope. You’re free, like I said, thanks to your girlfriend. I’d like you to come with us, though. You might want to do that, considering there’s a dozen reporters salivating out front. They’ll pounce when you come out. We’ve got a car waiting.”

  Rule nodded at the other man. “And this is—?”

  “Martin Croft,” the other man said. He was taller and darker-skinned than Karonski, and much better dressed. He held out his hand.