by Eileen Wilks
Croft met Rule’s eyes, unfazed. “I know people in the clans.”
“Okay, fine.” She pushed to her feet. “You two go ahead and duke it out. I need to think.” She started to pace but reached the wall and stopped, hugging her elbows. She needed space, time, and privacy to consider her options. She wasn’t likely to get any of them.
Lily didn’t hear Rule stand and come toward her; she felt him draw near. He stopped behind her and put his arms around her . . . and, with a sigh, she leaned into his body.
“You’re used to dividing your life into tidy compartments marked Professional and Personal,” he murmured. “It’s uncomfortable for you when they slop over into each other.”
She grimaced. “Uncomfortable isn’t the word I’d use.” Almost everything had fallen in the Professional pile the past few years, but he was right. She hated having the job invaded by her personal life. She hated needing his touch, and she hated the FBI agents for being there, because she was beginning to need more than a touch. Yet as the warmth of his body seeped into her, her thoughts began to settle.
Their offer was tempting. Terribly tempting. She could work with people who valued her more unusual abilities instead of having to hide them. She could finish what she’d started with this investigation, and do it wearing a badge. But she’d have to turn her back on Homicide. For years, that had been her one goal: to be good enough to work Homicide.
When she turned back to face the two FBI agents, Rule kept one arm around her waist. She didn’t pull away. “I’d have to resign from the department to accept your offer.”
Croft’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Well, yes.”
“I’m not willing to do that. I’m not sure what I’ll decide, long term, but I don’t want to leave the force right now. Wait,” she said when Karonski started to speak. “I’ve got an offer of my own. I want to stay on the case, and you want me there. Why don’t I give this deal you’re offering a test drive? I could serve as your expert consultant.”
Karonski’s mouth snapped shut. He looked at Croft, the two of them wearing identically surprised expressions. Beside her, Rule chuckled.
“What do you think?” she said. “You’d have to clear it with the department, of course. I’d suggest going up the ladder for that. The captain isn’t likely to approve it.”
A smile spread over Croft’s face. “I think something could be arranged. And it won’t do you any harm to be requested by us while you’re on suspension, will it?”
Karonski nudged his partner. “We’ll get Brooks to call the chief. He’s got the pull, and he talks almost as slick as you do. Time he made himself useful.”
“Brooks?” she said.
“The boss. He runs the unit.”
A flicker of panic touched Lily. She didn’t know anything about this unit of theirs, and she’d just agreed to work for them. No, she corrected—with them. Temporarily. It was all temporary.
Rule’s thumb stirred little circles on her waist through the silk of her T-shirt. “It’s getting confusing, isn’t it?” he murmured. “I think I’m now an expert consultant to an expert consultant.”
Heat was pooling in her stomach. Touching him was more distraction than comfort now. She moved away and ran a hand through her hair—still damp from her shower, she noted. She always blew it dry right away, but this morning she hadn’t.
Nothing was the way it was supposed to be. “Why am I doing this? I’m a color-inside-the-lines sort of person. This is so far outside the lines I—” Over by the chair, her purse chimed. Or, rather, the phone in it did. She glanced that way. “Damn.”
“You’re doing it because you want to stop a killer,” Rule said quietly. “And the lines keep moving.”
“Yes.” She met his eyes. “I guess they do.”
Her phone chimed again. “I’d better get that. What do you think?” she asked the others as she crossed the room. “Have we got a deal?”
Croft nodded. “We do.”
“Good.” It was good, wasn’t it? She pulled out her phone and touched the Talk button without looking at it. “Yu here.”
“Have you heard from your Grandmother?” her mother asked. “She’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Alarm shot through her. “What do you mean? How long has she been gone?”
“Well, not disappeared, exactly. But she is gone. Li Qin tells me not to worry, but how can I not worry with the wedding only three weeks away?”
Lily sat on the edge of the chair. “Li Qin knows where she went?”
“Not that she’ll tell me. Grandmother asked her not to discuss it.” Julia sniffed. “I suppose it’s too much to expect that your grandmother would tell her own daughter-in-law when she leaves town. But why did she leave? This is not like her. She never travels, and to take off like this, just before the wedding, without a word to me . . .” Her voice lowered. “Do you think she could be getting . . . well, you know. She is old.”
Lily swallowed a bubble of hysteria. “I don’t think Grandmother is going senile.”
“I didn’t say that. I just wondered . . . ah, well. You haven’t heard from her?”
“I spoke to her a couple days ago,” Lily said carefully. “She said something about getting in touch with an old friend. I thought she meant by phone, but maybe she intended to travel to see this friend.” To collect on that favor she was owed . . . by someone.
Her mother grumbled a bit more about Grandmother’s odd behavior. Lily didn’t really listen. She’d have to tell her family she was suspended. God, she hated that. She could just imagine what her mother would say.
Maybe she could get everything cleared up quickly, before she had to tell them. “Sorry. What did you say?” she asked when she noticed that a pause had fallen. “My mind drifted for a moment.”
“I reminded you to get your dress fitted, and I asked if you’d found a date yet.”
A date?
“For the rehearsal dinner,” Julia said, reading her mind in the uncanny way mothers have. “You’ve been putting me off. Have you even tried to find a date?”
“No, but—”
“This is a formal dinner, Lily. You simply can’t attend without an escort. Your father and I would lose face.”
The face argument was impossible to counter. “All right. No problem. I’ll bring a date.”
“Who? Have you found someone?”
Lily’s gaze went to Rule. That bubble of hysteria was back. “As a matter of fact, I have.”
RULE was supposed to give a press conference. He also needed clothes. After discussion, it was decided that Croft would handle both chores. He needed to issue a statement anyway, informing the press about the FBI’s new role in the investigation. Otherwise, as Croft said dryly, they’d just make up stuff. He could tell them that Rule was “assisting the investigation” and had been asked not to talk to them at this time.
Rule couldn’t even go get his own clothes. Not unless Lily went with him. They didn’t know how far they could stretch the mate bond, but his apartment was almost certainly too far away.
Lily was making a second pot of coffee. Rule lounged in the doorway—there really wasn’t room in her kitchen for both of them—finishing an apple. Apples were the closest she’d been able to come to actual breakfast food, since the bread had turned out to be moldy.
She filled the pot and slid back in place. “Is this joined-at-the-hip business as weird to you as it is to me?”
“It’s disconcerting. I never expected it to happen to me.”
“You said it was rare.”
“Yes, and . . .” He hesitated. “The Lady has never gifted a Lu Nuncio with a Chosen. Not since the days of the old tales, at least, and those are as much myth as history. This is unprecedented.”
“I guess the odds caught up with you. You were pretty much blindsided, too.”
“I did at least know such things were possible, but yes.” Another pause. “My brother had a Chosen.”
Had? She faced him. “Which brother?”
; “Benedict. It worked out badly for him.”
She studied a face turned suddenly impenetrable. “You don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m averse to turning my brother’s tragedy into a cautionary tale. Though it makes a good one.” Obviously ready to change the subject, he moved forward. “Where’s your trash?”
Her skin prickled as he drew near. Her heart beat faster, and she wanted to touch him, to lay her hand on that firm chest and see if his heartbeat had quickened, too.
She stepped back. “Organic wastes go in the little ceramic container under the sink, for composting.”
He found it and deposited his apple core. “You care for the environment?”
“I’m a gardener. We’re greedy about organics.”
He smiled slowly. “You’re greedy about other things, too, as I recall.”
Heat climbed in her face—and throbbed lower down. It infuriated her. She turned away. “We need to get to work. Karonski’s waiting.”
“Lily.” He stopped her when she tried to go past. “Don’t fight it too hard. Animals who gnaw their legs off to escape a trap bleed to death.”
“How do you expect me to react? I’ve known you five days, and we’re supposedly bound for life. How am I supposed to deal with that?” She pulled her arm away. “Don’t crowd me.”
Karonski had spread papers and files all over her coffee table. “If you two lovebirds have finished billing and cooing, we need—okay, okay,” he said hastily when he saw Lily’s face. “No lovebird jokes. Got it.”
“I have a couple questions,” Lily began.
“Naturally,” Rule murmured, entering the room behind her and crossing to the table, where he made himself comfortable. He picked up one of the folders—the one containing copies of her official reports, she noted. Karonski didn’t object. Apparently they were letting the civilian in on everything.
Which might be okay if the civilian was equally forthcoming with them. She was fairly sure he hadn’t been. She frowned at Rule’s bent head.
“You had questions?” Karonski prompted her.
“Right. First, you only found out yesterday that I’m a sensitive, yet you’ve already got a background check on me. Even for you people, that’s quick. You had me checked out before, didn’t you?”
“We ran backgrounds on several of the players involved in this,” Karonski agreed. “Didn’t know which way things would shake down, but we wanted to be ready.”
“Ready for what? That’s what doesn’t make sense. Why are you two here in the first place?”
“The boss is a precog. He says go, we go.”
Startled, she stared for a moment. “I thought the government didn’t use them because they weren’t reliable.”
“Brooks tests at about seventy percent. I figure that’s low; the tests are pretty boring, and precognition picks up the juicy bits better. Stuff with some emotion attached.”
“I’ve never heard of a precog hitting seventy percent. Not consistently.”
“He doesn’t pick up on everything, but when he does get something, he’s right. Croft thinks Brooks has a touch of elf in him. Be interesting to see how you read him when you two meet.”
“If we meet. I haven’t agreed to join your unit. One more question. How do you know Rule?”
Karonski grinned. “He consulted on another case of mine, back before I teamed up with Martin here. Had ourselves a pretty good time after we wrapped things up.”
She glanced at the ring on his finger.
He caught it. “Hey, I wasn’t married then. But my party days are over now, and this one’s far from being wrapped up, so we’d better get busy. We need to bring you up to speed on what we’ve got,” he said, sorting through the debris on her table. “Mostly background, like I said. But some of it makes for interesting reading. Now where . . . oh, here it is.” He handed her a folder.
Her eyebrows lifted. “You have a whole folder on the Azá?”
Rule looked up.
“That’s just the recent stuff. We’ve been watching them since they set up shop in L.A. three years ago.”
“So who or what are they?” Rule asked.
“They originated in Great Britain but claim to go back to ancient Egypt. Cults go for that sort of thing—ancient heritage, knowledge passed down in secret. Makes ’em more interesting. We watch them because they’ve been tied to death magic.”
“Death magic!”
“Animal, not human, and nothing’s been proven against them since they crossed the big puddle. But yeah, they source some of their rites on animal sacrifice.”
“Ugly.” She began skimming the file. “I never heard of this goddess of theirs. Ani—”
“Uh—don’t say it, okay?”
“Why not?” She looked up, caught his sheepish expression. “Oh, come on. Name magic has been obsolete since the Purge.”
“I know, I know. But Brooks told me not to say the name. Not to let anyone with any magic in them say it, either.” He shrugged. “He doesn’t know why. But when he warns me specific like that, I listen.”
“Let me see that.” Rule reached for the page she’d been reading.
Lily handed it to him, frowning. His voice sounded odd.
He glanced at it, his eyes scanning quickly—then stopping. He sat motionless for a long moment.
“What is it?” she asked. “You said you hadn’t heard of the Azá.”
“Them, no. But Her . . .” At last he looked up. “Have you ever had a legend jump up and bite you on your ass?”
“Quite recently,” she said without thinking.
Surprised pleasure flashed across his face. “Thank you.”
Karonski cleared his throat. “So you’ve heard of this goddess of theirs? She’s part of your legends?”
“Legend, history . . . the two become tangled after a few thousand years. But yes, I’ve heard of Her. She is the reason my people exist.”
“She’s your Lady?” Lily asked, finding the idea distasteful. “The female version of Deity that you worship?”
“You misunderstand.” He met her gaze, his eyes hooded and dark. “My Lady is Her enemy. We were created to destroy Her.”
TWENTY-ONE
CULLEN lay on his side with his hands carefully disposed. As a token of his slightly improved status, they’d given him a mattress and a lightweight blanket. He was still very much a prisoner, but they wanted him to believe he would be treated well once he’d proven himself.
Right. He sneered at the blackness surrounding him. And he believed in Santa, too.
No question that the mattress was more comfortable, but otherwise it was a damned nuisance. The power grid beneath his cell had been hard enough to trace when he was lying directly on the floor. Now he had a mattress between him and it.
But the blanket was pure blessing. A blind man in a glass cage never knows when he’s being watched, but the blanket provided a smidgeon of privacy. If one of them saw the slight movements of his hands beneath it, they’d probably think he was playing with himself.
Lord knows there wasn’t much else to do . . . aside from what he was really doing, that is. Weaving sorcéri.
Spells were normally woven with words, material objects, or a combination of the two, and could be powered various ways. Working directly with sorcéri was about half-mad, he supposed, for anyone short of an adept. But in theory, it could be done. The idea was to make his own spell bits match the fluid patterns of the grid closely enough to slip them into it. Once enough of them were in place, he could take control of the grid. Theoretically.
In practice, he might succeed in blowing himself and his glass cage into teensy-weensy pieces. If that happened, he hoped Helen was standing very close by.
Funny. He’d never believed those stories about the Great Wars and how his people had been created to serve as warriors for one side. The side of truth and justice, of course. The good guys.
Oh, he’d believed there had been a conflict—a tremendous, realms-wide conflic
t—in the remote past. Before the Codex Arcanum was lost, that much had been accepted as fact, so it was probably true. But the tales handed down among lupi were of heros and villains, gods and goddesses. Those he’d dismissed as myths. No oral history could have held onto so much detail over such vast amounts of time. Besides, the good guys were the ones who lived to pass on their version. Obviously his side had survived.
It had taken one whiff of that staff to change his mind.
Maybe he didn’t know how to spot the good guys, Cullen thought as he painstakingly urged a crimson sorcéri into the proper pattern. But he knew who the bad guys were now.
He studied the pattern he’d made. It looked right . . . only one way to find out. He let one hand slip off the mattress, his fingertips touching the floor, and began easing his spell into the grid beneath.
At first the voices were an annoyance, a distraction to close out. Then he realized that one of them was familiar—and not from his stay here. Startled, he let go of the spelled line. It vanished into the grid.
“. . . not happy with . . . Turner is still . . . must be stopped.”
That was Her Frigidness, too far away for him to catch all the words. He spared a second’s focus to check on his spell. It seemed to have integrated smoothly. . . .
“. . . not exactly thrilled, either, Madonna. Removing him is . . . joined you. Which is why . . . came here today.”
And that was the voice he’d recognized. Mick Roberts. Rule’s brother.
“Not looking as pretty as usual, is he?” That was Mick again, amused, standing right outside Cullen’s cage.
No point in pretending he didn’t hear. Mick would know better. Cullen swung his legs around and sat up, facing in the general direction of the voices. “Hello, Mick. Fancy meeting you here.”
“He knows you’re here,” she said, shocked.
“Of course he does. You didn’t remove his ears along with his eyes. Hello, Cullen. I hear you’re trying to talk your way out of that cage.”
“We do what we can,” he said mildly. The nausea came as a surprise. He hadn’t thought he possessed enough ideals for betrayal to affect him so viscerally, but talking to Mick made him ill. “You don’t seem to be in one.”