by Eileen Wilks
But she did cuddle into him, and that was good, too. To fall asleep with her in his arms . . .
Not so good being woken up by her moans, with the stink of fear-sweat thick in his nostrils. “Lily?”
She was still in bed, but no longer cuddled up to him. In the darkness he found her by touch and smell. He spoke her name again, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Wake up, sweetheart.”
He heard her gasp. She went rigid, then a shudder passed through her. “Oh, God.”
He eased closer, murmuring love words, endearments. All of a sudden she rolled over and all but burrowed into him.
She was shaking. He wrapped her up tightly in his arms and held on, just held on, until the trembling stopped. “A nightmare?”
Her head moved against his shoulder in a nod. “I haven’t had it in awhile. It’s . . . from the abduction. I guess I should have expected it to pay me a visit after seeing Ginger today.”
He stroked her hair. “Do you want to get up? When I have a nightmare, I don’t go back to sleep easily.”
She pulled back to look into his face. There was just enough light for him to see her wobbly smile. “What does a werewolf have nightmares about?”
“The usual things. Fire, hatred, being lost or threatened, losing someone I love. Being locked up . . . trapped.”
The tremor that went through her answered the question he hadn’t asked.
He made hot chocolate. That had been Nettie’s all-purpose remedy when he was a boy, and he still found comfort in it at times. They sat together in her single oversize chair, sipping and speaking very little, giving her world a chance to turn normal again.
And he wondered bleakly if the nightmare had been triggered by seeing Ginger—or by him. Because Lily’s demons were all about being tricked and trapped . . . and that was how she felt about the mate bond. Tricked into caring. Trapped for life.
TWENTY-FIVE
LILY woke disoriented. She wasn’t in her bed, she was . . . she blinked, then smiled. Curled up with Rule in her chair and a half.
She turned her head to look at him. He was bristly with morning beard, his head tilted back, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. So much less elegant than the man she’d seen in Club Hell.
So much more real.
And hers. For better or for worse . . . not that lupi believed in marriage, but what else was this mate bond but a marriage that no court could dissolve?
Of course, marriage used to be pretty permanent, too. A few generations back, women often found themselves bound for life to men they knew little or not at all. In her own family, Lily had only to go back two generations. Grandmother’s first husband had been a stranger to her on their wedding night. That didn’t make what had been done to Lily right, but, as the T-shirt said, Shit Happens.
And when it did, it was Lily’s job to clean it up, put things right. Police work was a lot like housework, she thought. An endless and mostly thankless task that people only noticed when the dust bunnies or the criminals got out of control.
It was all she’d ever wanted to do.
The phone rang. She sat up carefully, but the phone had already woken Rule. “I can’t feel my left hand,” he muttered.
“Sorry.” She’d been sleeping on that arm. She stood, looking around. Where was her phone? In her purse, which was . . . not ringing, she realized as she reached it.
“I think it’s mine.” He stood, shaking his left hand and frowning.
She grinned as he headed for the bedroom and his jacket, where he’d left his phone. There was something silly about a werewolf’s hand going to sleep. Silly and kind of endearing.
A moment later he was back, all sleepiness wiped away. “That was Max. He’s says Cullen left me a message at the club. He wants me to come see it.”
LILY stared at the message written in sloppy cursive above the bar at Club Hell: “Rule—Don’t believe me. Don’t come. And don’t mention this.”
The letters were still smoking. Beside them was a crude map—at least, that’s what she thought it was supposed to be.
“It’s Cullen’s handwriting,” Rule said.
“Does he often leave you notes burned into walls?”
He wasn’t amused. “No.”
Max was perched on top of the bar, glowering at Lily. “I know she’s got great knockers, but did you have to bring her with you?”
He’d been grouching about Lily’s presence ever since they arrived. She’d had about enough. “Are all gnomes obnoxious little perverts, or is it just you?”
“What the hell are you talking about? Just because I’m on the short side doesn’t mean you can—”
“Save it, Max.” Rule pulled his attention away from the smoldering writing. “She’s a sensitive.”
His squinty little eyes opened as wide as they were able. “No shit?”
Exasperated, Lily said, “You want to just put a notice in the paper and save yourself the trouble of telling people one at a time?”
“Max will no more tattle on you than you would him. Will you, Max?”
“Haven’t I taught you better than that? If you have to ask if you can trust someone, you can’t.”
“I trust you. I also trust Lily.”
“Yeah?” He sighed heavily. “Well, you’re young. So what do you make of the vandalism to my place?”
“I don’t know. He says not to come, but he drew a map. That upside down V must be a mountain, and SD would stand for San Diego, but the rest of it . . .”
“The squiggles might be water.” Lily moved closer. “And that’s the number five, isn’t it? Five miles, maybe. I’d better make a copy.”
“Don’t bother, Knockers. I already did.” Max held out a sheet of paper.
Her eyebrows rose. It wasn’t a sketch. It was an exact replica, done in blue ink.
Rule spoke. “He’s in trouble.”
Max snorted. “More likely he was test-driving a new spell. And picked my wall to do it on, dammit! I’m gonna have a word or two with him when he finally shows up.”
Max reminded Lily of a parent with a kid in trouble—mad on top, worried underneath. “You think he’s in trouble, too.”
His long drip of a nose quivered. “Who knows, with a jerk-off like him.”
“Breakfast,” Rule said suddenly. “Max, I know you’ve got mushrooms. If you can find some eggs, too, we’ll eat. We need fuel and coffee . . . and then, I think, we need to talk.”
THEY adjourned to Max’s private quarters above the club, a crowded hodgepodge of kitsch and art. One crowded end table, for example, held a beautiful Victorian lamp, a plastic hula dancer, three undistinguished rocks, a cheap candy dish shaped like a skull, six paperbacks, and a small stone replica of Michelangelo’s David that was, quite simply, perfection.
Max saw her studying the little statue and smirked. “Mike copied me, but what the hell. He did a good job. Let him take the credit.”
She shook her head and followed Rule into the kitchen.
They’d argued downstairs. Rule wanted to tell Max everything. Lily agreed that they needed help, but a lewd gnome with a bad attitude wasn’t the source she’d have picked.
“Max has been around a very long time,” Rule had said. “He’s seen things that are myth or history to us, and he can’t be corrupted by our enemies.”
“You have a lot of faith in your friends,” she’d said noncommittally.
He’d been irritated. “Don’t they teach you anything these days about those of the Blood? Gnomes can’t be corrupted by spell or by Gift. They’re too bloody stubborn. Max has no loyalty to ideals as you or I think of them, but he would literally stop breathing before he betrayed a friend.”
He’d persuaded her. So, over mushroom omelets—Rule really did know how to cook—they filled Max in.
Rule got as far as mentioning, without naming, the One the Azá worshiped when Max interrupted.
“She? Who’s she? Don’t talk in riddles.”
Instead of answering, Rule asked for a pe
ncil and paper, then in three swift stokes drew what looked like an advertising logo—a line drawing of an egg lying on its side with a slash through it. Max started cursing. Fluently. In several languages, for longer than Lily had ever heard anyone curse before.
Eventually he stopped, wiped his forehead, and said, “Tell me the rest.”
He didn’t speak again until Lily described what had been done to the two agents. Then he asked a number of precise questions. Finally he nodded. “Okay. First, your federal cops weren’t bespelled. There’s a fucking difference between spell casting and mind Gifts, which no one these days—”
“Skip the diatribe on our degenerate times,” Rule said. “How do we tell the difference?”
Max scowled. “Sorcery ain’t like Wicca. If you work with power directly, you gotta shape it, which means you gotta get the pattern of the spell inside you. Mind Gifts you’re born with, they’re already part of you, like feet. You don’t have to understand how your feet are made to walk on ’em. Which is one reason sorcerers are so blasted stuck on themselves, thinking they know so much more than anyone else—hell, never mind that. The point is, the results come out different. Your two Feds had these thoughts they couldn’t get away from, set up like a loop. That means someone put those thoughts there and tied ’em in place with a good jolt of power.”
“Thoughts can’t be put in place with a spell?” Lily asked.
“Yeah, if you’re an adept.” He snorted. “Which no one in this realm is, or any of the nearby realms, either, never mind what his Hoity-Toitiness in Faerie thinks.”
She blinked. Was he talking about the King of Faerie? “This, uh, goddess of theirs couldn’t make someone into an adept?”
“Nope. Not that She would if She could, but She can’t work here directly. Has to work through her tools—people native to this realm. Can’t just hand someone the words and gestures to a spell and have it work, can She? No more than I could hand you a stone and chisel and you’d chip out a bust of Rule, here. But she can give them power.”
He leaned back in his chair—a barstool with arms and a footrest—and laced his hands over his belly. “Now, the way it works is, the new thoughts have to blend natural with the old ones. If you give someone who dotes on pretty little birdies a bunch of bird-hating thoughts, they’re more likely to go crazy than to do whatever it is you wanted ’em to. So your telepath gets into someone’s mind and—”
“Telepath?” Rule’s eyebrows went up. “Speaking of crazy, aren’t telepaths driven insane by their Gift?”
“Yeah, unless they’re cats. So? You have any reason to think you’re dealing with sanity here?”
Unless they’re cats? Lily was still chewing on that when Rule said, “Are we dealing with two threats? One is a telepath, the other a sorcerer. Or could both skills belong to the same person?”
“You ain’t listening to me! You don’t have one bloody reason to think a sorcerer’s involved!”
“Hold on a minute,” Lily said. “I felt the magic used to kill Martin.”
“Yeah, but you’re as ignorant of sorcery as most fools these days. What you felt was power, power generated by death magic. Which your U.S. law calls sorcery, but that law was written by ignoramuses. Power is not the same as sorcery. A sorcerer could use raw power for a slice and dice, yeah, but so could anybody if they had a tool that stored enough juice.”
“Okay,” Rule said. “So we may or may not have a sorcerer, but we know we have a crazy telepath who practices death magic and has access to a great deal of power.”
“Plus this telepath is under Her thumb, and She wants you dead or otherwise inconvenienced. Your best bet is to leave the country.”
“You know that’s not possible.”
Max sighed. “I knew it. I just knew you wouldn’t be sensible. Second choice would be her.” He nodded at Lily.
This time it was Rule who scowled. “What do you mean?”
“Send Knockers after your loony-tunes. Can’t bespell her, can’t get inside her mind—sensitives are immune, period. She’s the only one could get close enough to do much. Anyone else gets blasted.”
LILY asked a few more questions before they left, but Max didn’t have much more he could tell them—a few guesses, a couple of shrugs. Rule was silent until they got to his car. “It was a damned stupid idea, talking to Max,” he said, slamming his car door. “Just don’t let him give you any damned stupid ideas.”
Lily buckled up. “Such as?”
“You are not going after Harlowe alone.”
“I can’t, can I? You’d have to be nearby.” How near, they didn’t know. They hadn’t tested the boundaries of the bond. “Do you think Harlowe’s the telepath?” she asked thoughtfully. “I’m not sure.”
“Who, then?” He jammed down on the accelerator.
The man was in a seriously bad mood. “Well, if we accept Max’s opinion as a working hypothesis, the telepath in question is nuts. Yesterday we talked to several people who know Harlowe and didn’t get a hint of anything like that.”
“Crazy doesn’t always show.”
“True.” Rule was scared for her. That’s why he was so angry. It made her feel odd, disoriented.
It wasn’t as if no one cared if she put herself in jeopardy. Her family worried, though she took care to keep most of the scary stuff from them. But the risk inherent in her job was one reason they disliked it. Why did Rule’s reaction make her feel so funny?
“Lily.” He’d forced more calm into his voice. “You aren’t thinking of going after him alone, are you?”
“He has to be questioned, and backup won’t help if Harlowe—or whoever—can screw around with their minds.” With a jolt she understood why Rule’s reaction left her feeling all turned around. She liked it. She liked being important to him, but it was the mate bond making him feel this way. It messed with his feelings just like their hypothetical telepath had messed with the minds of the two FBI agents.
In a tight voice he said, “If he can’t screw around with your mind, he might settle for killing you.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing the last few years—going to tea parties? I’ve arrested plenty of people who would’ve been glad of a chance to kill me. They didn’t get it.”
“Dammit, Lily, you can’t arrest him anyway. You don’t have a badge.”
She shrugged. “Even if I did, we don’t have enough evidence yet for an arrest. I wish that I’d accepted the position with the Feds, though. Aside from the problem with making an arrest, the two of us aren’t enough.”
“I can call on roughly two thousand clan members. What do you need?”
Her eyes widened. “Just like that? I thought your father had all the authority.”
“Technically, I have no authority. But if the Lu Nuncio tells someone the clan needs him urgently, he’ll come. Or she will,” he added. “Some of our sisters and daughters marry out, but many remain within the clan.”
A sudden thought made her grin. “I see. You’re like Grandmother—no technical authority, but if she says come, we come.”
“I really need to meet your grandmother.”
“Be careful what you ask for.” She felt a little steadier. “We need to figure out what Seabourne’s map represents, even if we aren’t sure why he sent it. We need to finish the financials. Croft ran the ones on the church, but we should look at Harlowe, too. A few trained law enforcement personnel would be nice, but I don’t suppose you have any of those.”
He was silent a moment. “Crystal and I should be able to handle the financial aspects, if you tell us what to look for.”
Lily raised her eyebrows. “Crystal?”
“My assistant. I don’t think you’ve met her. The map has me puzzled, but Walker knows the wilderness areas around here intimately. He might be able to identify some of the features. I can’t get you any law enforcement personnel, but I can summon some security. I should have done it earlier.”
“If you mean bodyguards—”
&nbs
p; “I do. Has it occurred to you that if Max is right, Harlowe and company know everything that Croft and Karonski did? Which includes the mate bond. You’re the only one immune to their tampering. You’re also the key to controlling me. The only real question in my mind is whether they’ll try to grab you or just kill you.”
THEY went to Rule’s apartment. Hers was simply too small. He’d made several phone calls en route, and they’d soon be joined by a number of Nokolai.
Rule lived on the tenth floor of a high-rise. It struck Lily as they waited for the elevator that this was odd. “Why would a claustrophobe want to ride up and down in an elevator every day?”
“I’m not phobic. And Nokolai owns the building, so it’s practical for me to live here.”
Testy, she thought. Don’t call the man a claustrophobe just because small spaces scare him. Right.
The elevator arrived, and they stepped inside. She had Croft’s briefcase; Rule was carrying Karonski’s laptop. She eased close to him, just in case the big, tough werewolf wasn’t as comfortable as he pretended.
He pushed the button for his floor, stuck his hands in his pockets, and said, “Besides, it’s a fast elevator.”
She smiled.
“What about you?” he asked quietly. “You okay in small spaces?”
“Mostly. I don’t do saunas.” The trunk had been swelteringly hot.
“When I moved here I thought it might desensitize me to ride the elevator every day.”
“Did it help?”
His smile was wry. “Not noticeably.”
The elevator opened onto a small shared hall—only one other unit on this floor, she noticed. Must be large apartments. Rule’s door was at the west end. He opened it. “I’m going to make some coffee.”
“Why am I not surprised?” She followed him inside, closed the door, and turned. “Where should I . . .” Her voice drifted off as she stared. The apartment had an open floor plan, and almost the entire west wall was window. It overlooked the ocean.