by Eileen Wilks
“We drove past it, sugar. I don’t know if the cabbie saw him or not, but I always notice Rule.” She slanted him a smile.
Lily nodded slowly, wondering if they—whoever they were—had arranged for a man to leave Therese’s building at the right time for the cabbie to see him. “It’s a good story, Ginger. Tight.”
“Story?” Those thin eyebrows lifted in outsized surprise. “Sweetie, I’m not the one who makes up stories about where she’s been or where she’s going. That was you and Sarah.”
The air was sucked right out of Lily’s chest. Was it my fault? Have you blamed me all these years? I could have said no, could have talked Sarah out of it. . . . She got her breath back. “Good one. That connected. But I’m not eight years old anymore, and I hit back. You might want to remember that, because you really need me to be your friend. You’re in a world of shit, even if you are too dumb to know it.”
Anger flashed through Ginger’s eyes. “Now, now. Mustn’t call names.”
“Think it through. If you saw the killer, you’re in danger from him. If you didn’t—if you agreed to lie for some reason—you’re in even more danger.”
“How sweet of you to worry about me.” Her voice lowered to a purr. “Poor little Lily. You think highly of safety, don’t you? After what happened, I’m sure I can’t blame you. Did you go into police work because you felt safer with a gun and a uniform between you and the bad guys?”
Another good one, Lily thought. But Ginger had always known how to jab below the belt. “The thing is, Ginger, I know you didn’t see the killer. Because the killer wasn’t there.”
The thin eyebrows lifted. “Now, that’s quite a trick. He killed her without showing up?”
“Yes. You see, Therese wasn’t killed by a lupus. She was killed through sorcery.”
For a second, fear flickered in those expressive, too-familiar eyes. Ginger gave a nervous little laugh. “You’ve been watching too many trash movies.”
“I said I was assisting the FBI, remember? They’ve got the case now. Murder by magical means is a federal crime . . . the only one with an automatic death penalty.”
For a second, Ginger didn’t say anything. Then she jerked one shoulder in a dismissive shrug and turned away. “I’ve really got to get back to work, sugar. I do appreciate you filling me in on all these fascinating little details, but—”
Lily took her by the shoulder, stopping her. “Listen to me. They don’t need you anymore. We know Turner didn’t do it, so you’re a loose end. You think they won’t hurt you as long as you keep your mouth shut, but that isn’t how they’ll see it. You could change your mind. As long as you’re alive, you could decide to talk. And the person who killed Therese can reach out and stop your heart any time he wants.”
“Wow.” She was trying for smart-ass but couldn’t quite pull it off. “That’s some imagination you’ve got.”
Lily said nothing, letting Ginger’s own imagination work.
She looked away, fiddled with one earring, looked back. “So what happens if I tell you someone asked me to say what I did? Will I get in trouble?”
“I think I can see that you aren’t charged with obstructing justice.”
“Well.” Ginger bit her lip. Her gaze darted around again, as if she were seeking some reassurance. It landed on Rule, who’d stayed back near the door. “All right.” She heaved a sigh. “It was Cullen. He asked me to say that.”
“Cullen Seabourne?”
She nodded. Her lower lip jutted out like a sulky child’s. “He and I have had an on-again, off-again thing for awhile. That’s the way it is with lupi. But when they’re on . . . oh, my.” Her smile returned briefly, smug, then faded. “We’ve been more off than on lately, and I was hoping to change that. I didn’t know what he was going to do to that poor woman, but I guess I knew he wanted to make trouble for Rule. I didn’t realize how much. Truly I didn’t.”
“SHE’S lying,” Rule said. He slammed his door shut.
“Maybe.” Lily pulled her seat belt across and fastened it. “When I looked for Seabourne the other day, I couldn’t find him.” She glanced at Rule. “You did well. Didn’t butt in.”
“It wasn’t easy,” he said grimly. “Lily, I know Cullen. He’s not part of this.”
But it fit awfully neatly. They were looking for a sorcerer. He was the only one Lily knew about. “You’re friends. Close friends?”
“Yes. I know it looks bad for him, but Ginger isn’t the most reliable witness.”
“Considering that she’s already lied once, no. But what does she gain by lying about him?”
“It could be her way of protecting herself, but I’d vote for spite.”
“Hmm. Are she and Seabourne involved, then, like she said?”
“Involved might be too large a word for it. Cullen doesn’t indulge in relationships. Just sex.” He pulled out into traffic. “Which won’t make you think highly of him, but there’s a difference between promiscuity and ripping out a woman’s throat.”
She turned it over in her mind. “Ginger lies easily, but she was genuinely frightened.”
“You’re scary when you get going.”
“How long has she been coming to the club? Is she one of your groupies, or is it lupi in general she likes?”
“She likes having sex with lupi. She doesn’t actually like us.” He swept her with a quick glance, his expression unreadable, and returned his attention to the street. “I never had sex with Ginger.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You were thinking it loudly enough,” he said dryly. “She’s afraid of us. I found that a turnoff.”
That startled her. “She hangs around lupi because she’s scared of you?”
“She enjoys fear. It excites her.”
Lily sorted that into what she knew of Ginger as she had been and as she was now. It fit. “I want to—hey. Why are you stopping here?” He’d pulled into the parking lot of a beach-front restaurant.
“For lunch.” He shut off the motor and turned to look at her. “And for questions. This time I’m asking them.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I am, but it can wait. You said you’d explain later. This is later.”
“Tonight will be later, too.” Seeing Ginger had been more than enough of a trip down memory lane. She didn’t want to linger there. “Look, I was friends with Ginger’s sister in grade school. Bad stuff happened. It was a long time ago, and I’ve got an investigation under way.”
“You’re hurting. I want to help.”
Lily looked out the window. Beyond the parking lot, a slice of ocean showed between buildings. It was a deep blue today, sparkling back at a cloudless sky. Twenty years ago, sky and sea had been gray. Gray and stormy.
Deep inside, something tugged at her, urging her to tell him. To trust him.
She couldn’t. She unfastened her seat belt. “I can’t talk about it. I’ve never been able to talk about it.”
“Never?” He laid his hand on her shoulder.
She felt the warmth immediately. The connection. She shook her head.
“All right. It’s up to you, but the mate bond can be good for more than sex, if you let it.”
Lily looked out the window again, at gulls wheeling overhead and a sky as clean and shiny as polished glass. At first they’d all wanted her to talk about it—the cops, her mother, the therapist. She hadn’t been able to. Parts of it, yes, but never the whole story. Never the worst part.
But it had been a long time since she tried. A long time since anyone urged her to try.
Maybe, she thought, she could do it now. Maybe she was tired of silence.
She bent and pulled off her shoes. “Let’s walk on the beach.”
IT was surprisingly uncrowded near the water. Families mostly came on weekends, of course, at this time of year.
“All we need is a sunset,” Lily said, “and we could be in an ad. We must look like the perfect California couple, walking barefoot and hand in hand on t
he beach. Lord knows you’re photogenic enough.”
“Someone’s usually smiling in those pictures.”
“I’m fresh out right now.” She wasn’t sure she could do this, or that she wanted to. “We need to keep this short.”
“All right. You knew Ginger several years ago.”
“Twenty. Twenty years ago last month.” Was it sick to know to the day how much time had passed? No, she decided. Sad, maybe, but inevitible. “Her sister was my best friend in grade school. I spent the night with her often enough, played with her after school. So I saw a lot of Ginger.”
“Did you like her any better then?”
She smiled without humor. “No. But she was the older sister, so naturally she was contemptuous of us little kids. Back then, Ginger was the obedient child, believe it or not. Sarah . . .” Her breath caught. She so seldom said that name out loud. “Sarah was the one who got into mischief.”
“I’ve a hard time picturing you getting into much mischief.”
“I was pretty much a Goody Two-Shoes. I did my homework, didn’t cut in line, didn’t talk in class. But Sarah loosened me up some. She could talk me into things. We played hooky one day,” she said abruptly.
His hand remained warm and easy, holding hers. “Not a large rebellion.”
“You wouldn’t think so.” She walked on in silence a moment. Her blood seemed to pulse through her body at a new tempo, quick and insistent. Keep going. “We didn’t like our teacher, and somehow it made perfect sense to punish her by skipping school. We had it all worked out—how to slip away before class started, which bus to take. We hadn’t planned on the weather, though. It was working itself up to storm, so hardly anyone was at the beach. At first we were bummed, but then we decided it was cool. We had it almost to ourselves.”
“What happened, Lily?”
“We were abducted.”
His breath sucked in. For a moment, his fingers tightened hard enough to hurt.
“He was a friendly man.” It was like presenting a report, wasn’t it? She’d written up cases every bit as bad, and worse. “He reminded me of Santa Claus, only without the beard. Grandfatherly. He just started talking to us, teasing us about not being in school. At first I wouldn’t answer. I told Sarah we weren’t supposed to talk to strangers. So she asked him his name, then she introduced him and me and said we weren’t strangers anymore. She thought that was terribly clever.”
Her feet stopped. She stared out at the gulls swooping low over the shifting blues of the water. This was where she always stopped, the point she couldn’t go beyond, not out loud. There was pressure in her chest, as if all the words were backed up there, pressing, all but cutting off her breath.
Rule moved behind her and began to rub her arms gently. Up and down, up and down. The repetitive touch soothed her physically. She grew aware of him standing there, just behind her. Not touching, not asking questions or making her deal with his shock, his feelings. Just there.
He had her back. And the words came tumbling out. “He got us to go with him to his car. He didn’t try to talk us into getting in. That would have scared us. He said he needed help getting his picnic stuff to the beach, and we were helpful little girls. We went with him. We didn’t think about the trunk, that it could be dangerous.
“He hit her. I saw that and tried to get away. I don’t remember him hitting me. I don’t remember that, but I woke up in his trunk. My head hurt, and I’d thrown up. I tasted it in my mouth. Sarah was crying. The car would turn, and we’d bump into each other, but we couldn’t see each other. It was so dark. You felt like you couldn’t breathe, like all that dark was sucking the air right out of you—” Her breath caught now, remembering.
“Breathe now.” He wrapped his arms around her. “Breathe now, Lily. You’re safe.”
He was wrong. There was no safety. But his arms felt good. She leaned back against him and, after a moment, continued quietly. “He drove around until night, when he took us to his house. Sarah was a pink-and-white little girl with pretty blonde hair. Her bad luck. He tied me up, saved me for later. But I was there. I was in the room when he raped her.”
A shudder went through Rule’s body.
“I don’t think he meant to kill her. He looked so surprised.” That was one of the worst parts, for some reason. The surprise on his face when Sarah stopped moving, when her legs stopped kicking and her eyes bulged open, unblinking. He’d choked her, but he couldn’t seem to connect what he’d done with her being dead. “It scared him. He wanted me to agree it had been an accident. I did. I agreed with everything he said.”
Rule rested his chin on the top of her head. He was wrapped all around her now, and it helped. It helped. He didn’t speak, and that helped, too. For a few moments she stood there and let comfort seep into her body from his. “I was lucky,” she said at last. “I didn’t know it then, but someone had seen him put us in his trunk. A jogger. She got the license plate number. The police had been looking for his car for hours. They found it just in time . . . for me. Not for Sarah.”
She swallowed. “He didn’t rape me. The officer who spotted the plates called it in, but he didn’t wait. He broke the door down. He came in alone, against regs. He said later he’d had a feeling that he couldn’t wait for backup. He was a patrolman, only a few years on the force. His name was Frederick Randall.”
“Hell.”
“Yeah.” Her voice wobbled. She got it steady again. “That’s why I had to go to Internal Affairs. I couldn’t be sure I was seeing him clearly, because of our history. But he feels betrayed. I hurt him.”
“You said he’s a cop all the way down. That means putting the job first. That’s what you did. He’ll see that, sooner or later.”
“Maybe.” She wasn’t sure. Maybe because she wasn’t sure she could forgive Randall for having doubted her. “Ginger was right, you know. I did join the police to feel safer. When you know in your blood and bones that there really are monsters, you want to do what you can to get them locked up. And you want as many others on your side fighting those monsters as you can get.”
He was so close she heard it when he swallowed. “You chose to work homicide.”
“Murder doesn’t just destroy one person. It sends out shock waves that hurt so many. . . . It broke something inside Ginger. She was a pain when she was eleven, but lots of girls that age are a pain. Especially to their little sisters and their sisters’ friends. But she wasn’t all twisted up the way she is now.”
“You warned her. You offered as much help as you could.”
She didn’t speak. A jogger thudded past between them and the sea. His dog, a big black Lab, loped alongside him in violation of the No Pets signs. The dog’s tongue lolled happily.
“What’s it like?” she asked quietly, watching the dog. “To be a wolf, I mean. Do you think and feel as a wolf?” Do you feel safe then? Knowing you’re stronger, faster, able to heal almost anything that’s done to you?
“The wolf is always with the human, and the human is always with the wolf. I’m myself in both forms, though not exactly the same self. Are you still yourself when you sleep? When you dream?”
“I see what you mean.” She turned her head slightly so she could breathe him in. His scent settled her.
He hadn’t answered her unspoken question, but it was a stupid question. No one was safe. All too often, though, the monsters who had hurt his people had worn badges. “Is it a problem for you, me being a cop?”
“A complication.” His voice was wry. “Lily?”
“Yes?”
“What happened to him?”
It was the only question he’d asked. She took a slow breath. The pressure in her chest was gone. “He was on death row for thirteen years. Lots of appeals. They finally executed him.”
“We handle things differently in the clans, but I guess your system worked. Eventually.”
“There are reasons for appeals. The law doesn’t always get it right. But he was locked up all that time. He did
n’t grab any more little girls.”
He was silent. She let herself rest against him a little longer. It hadn’t been so bad, telling him. He’d made it go easier than she’d expected . . . or maybe that had been the mate bond, tricking her into trusting him.
At the moment, it didn’t seem to matter. She felt . . . clearer. As if telling her story had let it settle into the past a bit more. Lily turned her head, looking up into his eyes. “Ready to go chase monsters?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“The Most Reverend Patrick Harlowe.”
TWENTY-THREE
BUT Harlowe wasn’t at the church. Lily had hoped the same helpful little man would be there—and would remember her as a police detective, so she didn’t have to make any unnecessary explanations. But he wasn’t, and the secretary regarded her request to speak with the church’s leader with deep suspicion. They didn’t learn much from her.
They tried his house with an equal lack of success. Frustrated, Lily glared at the door—Spanish style, hand-carved, and very old. It suited the four-thousand-foot stucco home. “The Rev lives well, doesn’t he?”
“Religion has been good to him,” Rule agreed. “What now?”
“The neighbors. Then lunch.”
Two of Harlowe’s neighbors were home. They spoke of a man who fit the house—urbane, upper middle-class, at ease in social gatherings. The first woman didn’t like him much, though she didn’t say so; the older couple both thought highly of him.
She and Rule were eating seafood tacos when her cell phone rang. “Yu here.”
“Lily?” It was Ginger’s voice, high and frightened. “Could you come over here? I’m at home and I—I think someone’s watching me.”
“Have you called it in?”
“You mean the police? No! No, I can’t—some of them are in it. You know who I mean. I need you to come right away.”
“We’ll be right there.”
“Hurry.” She hung up.
Lily explained quickly to Rule, grabbed her purse, and headed for the car.