by Eileen Wilks
Not in an evil way. True, he liked to shoot things—he was very boring on the subject—but he was not what Lily called a stone killer. He simply did not understand how to behave. He couldn't fathom the rules, how to be close to others instead of pushing them away.
She had read somewhere that doctors had a name for this problem. Doctors always felt better once they'd named things; it was an obsession with them. Li Lei couldn't recall the name, and didn't care. Neither did Timms interest her greatly, but Cullen Seabourne did, and he—
An orange blur skidded into the kitchen, claws scrabbling for purchase on the wooden floor. Dirty Harry raced to the back door and yowled, demanding that it open. His bristled fur made him look like a tattered marigold.
Li Lei sprang to her feet. "We are about to be attacked. Harry thinks the demon is out front. I trust his judgment. Li Qin, go with him. Tell the other guard to come in now, then get help. Telephone the police."
Timms shoved his chair back and stood, closing his hand around Li Qin's arm. "Wait a minute. You can't think that cat knows—"
"A great deal more than you," Li Lei snapped. Or her, in this instance. Cats were uncannily sensitive to demons. "Go. And hurry," she said to Li Qin, and removed Timms's hand.
That startled him, of course. He had no idea of her strength. "Go upstairs and make sure Toby hides," she told him. "I'll—"
"Calm down, calm down. If you think something's wrong, I'll check—though I think our werewolf guards would hear or smell a problem before I could see it." He gave her what he no doubt thought was a soothing smile and pulled his big gun from its holster, which he'd hung on the back of his chair.
"Do as you're told. Toby will not want to hide, but he must." She drew hard on the energy in her gut. Fast. This one must be fast. Harry feared very little—not Rule Turner, German shepherds, or wolves. Not even her. For him to flee meant that what was coming was bad, very bad.
Heat slapped through her body, vicious in its greed. She spoke the rest with difficulty. "You may come down and shoot things after the boy is hidden, but do not shoot me. I am going to Change."
"Change what?"
But she already was. And even as her cells burst and her body slid into otherness, she heard gunfire out front.
To his credit, Timms didn't drop his gun—or fire it—when the Change finished and ten feet of tiger stood before him. Nor did he stand staring for more than a second when she leaped out of the kitchen, heading for the foot of the stairs. She took her position there, to guard the boy. A moment later, Timms raced past. He was halfway up the stairs when the guard out front screamed.
Seconds later, the front door splintered.
If there had been a moment she could have acted, Lily had missed it. She had no time to play Monday-morning quarterback over any possible missed opportunities, though, as she, Benedict, Cullen, and Rule were marched through the crowd, courtesy of one gun held by a madman and a dozen thugs.
Lupus thugs. Her heartbeat was going crazy. "This is crazy," she muttered. "What do they hope to accomplish? I'm arresting all of them. They have to know I'll do that." Unless they planned to kill her—right after they killed Rule.
"They believe the clan will speak as one," Benedict said calmly, "to discount your testimony."
Rule's damned brother was always calm. He'd charged a dozen gang members with guns—calmly. After putting her forcibly out of the line of fire. "But why are they doing this? They don't want Rule to be heir."
"They don't think he will be." Cullen's abbreviated gesture indicated the clan members parting for them as they headed toward the center of the field. "They think this is Brady's little joke on Nokolai, a way to humiliate Rule."
Lily caught the glance Rule gave Cullen. The two of them knew or guessed more than they were saying. "It isn't a joke, but it doesn't make sense, either. Rule can't be Leidolf heir. He's Nokolai heir."
"Technically," Benedict said, speaking very low but not sub-vocalizing, "it's legal for him to be both. One of his ancestors carried the Leidolf founder's blood, and he's ad littera clan."
"But why would Brady do this?"
"He wants to kill me," Rule said, as calm as his blasted brother.
"Brady and Victor," Cullen said viciously. "Victor's behind this. We won't stop this without crisping the son of a—"
"No," Rule said sharply. "Victor must live a bit longer. Death shock in such a crowd would send too many over the edge. You'd never get Lily out alive."
Lily stopped moving. "Rule." She reached for him. "You are not getting me out without—"
"Hush." He wrapped his arms around her, holding her close, pressing kisses into her hair, which covered any movement of his lips as he said. You can hear me?
She nodded.
The mantle. Victor isn't going to allow it to choose. He'll try to force the heir's portion on me, which would be… bad. Murder, most likely, but done in a way Nokolai couldn't claim as murder. But the mate bond is active. The last time this happened, I also gained. If your immunity to magic stretches to cover me, he won't be able to force the mantle on me.
"Move along, now." Brady was all good cheer, but the thug at his side gave the two of them a rough shove.
Rule spun, growling.
"Be nice to the lady, Merrick," Brady said, gun raised to point at Lily's forehead. "Or I'll have to shoot her."
"You're dead, you know," Cullen said.
"Me?" He laughed. "Oh, no, I don't think I'm the walking dead man here."
HE/SHE/THEY studied the house. A life burned brightly in the car parked in front; no driver was visible, but the guard couldn't hide from the demon's tither sense. The lives inside the house were visible in the same way, their presence muffled by walls and distance, but the demon saw them well enough for Cynna to count.
Five lives were in that house. Five people she cared about.
He/she lumbered toward the car, though. Not the house. Cynna screamed inside, trying desperately to seize just one bit of the demon, make a noise, something! But he/they reached the parked car, then reached inside in an indescribable way, bringing more of their mass into this realm.
He/they punched through the car window.
The guard reacted fast. He had his rifle ready and he fired point-blank. The bullets hit, too—three of them—hot stings that annoyed the demon as they reached inside and seized the man's shoulder. He screamed, which excited them. They dragged him out through a window too small for his body. The blood excited them even more.
THE last few people parted in front of them, and Lily saw Victor Frey for the first time. He looked like hell.
Cynna had described him as dapper and academic, looking about seventy. She saw a military martinet, not an academic—a very old martinet. He sat in an armchair, incongruous in its floral print on the winter-dead grass. He sat very erect, but his skin sagged in the runneled folds of very old age. How he'd summoned enough wind to outshout his clan earlier, she couldn't imagine.
Behind him stood ten well-armed lupi. Four of them immediately surrounded Benedict; though they kept a healthy distance, the rifles they trained at his head would keep even him from acting. Two flanked Cullen, guns drawn.
The Rhej stood beside Victor in her white robe, her face impassive. On his other side stood a man who must have been related to her—same eyes and skin tone, plus the proportions between their chins and mouths matched.
"Alex," Benedict said. "Did he tell you that he'd name Brady heir if you didn't agree to be Lu Nuncio?"
Victor turned cold eyes on him. "Nokolai is not welcome here. Be quiet or be muzzled."
"Nokolai," Rule said dryly, "was brought here at gunpoint. Is this normal for those who guest with Leidolf ?"
"But you aren't—entirely—Nokolai today, are you?" The twitch of those pale, desiccated lips was probably meant for a smile. "Today you are Leidolf as well. And by blood and my sister's great folly, you are also my great-nephew. How could we leave you out?" He gestured at the others as he raised his voice again.
"Our candidates are assembled."
Seven other men stood in front of their Rho. They were giving Rule the kind of looks a butcher might give a mongrel that's eyeing his roasts… or that a wolf might give another wolf intruding on its territory.
A single wisp of magic, feathery light, tingled across Lily's face. A sorceri, she realized. Cullen had said there was a node in the central field. They often leaked a bit. She tried and failed to think of some way to take advantage of that.
She still had one weapon. A SIG Sauer wasn't proof against a thousand lupi, but she need only train it on one. "You must be Victor Frey," she said, stepping forward. "I'm Lily Yu with the FBI's Magical Crimes Division. You're in a lot of—"
"Stop her," Victor said.
Whatever the mate bond had done for her hearing, it hadn't granted her lupus speed. She got her gun out, but it clattered uselessly to the ground when two guards grabbed her, one on each arm.
Rule jolted but didn't move. "You're putting hands on a Chosen," he said softly, and looked at the Rhej.
"She won't be hurt," the woman said. Though her face remained impassive, trouble edged her voice. "Will she, Victor?"
"Of course not. But she can't be allowed to shoot me." He pushed to his feet and stood stick-straight, but it cost him. She saw the tremor in his hand, the way his face tightened. Yet he found that carrying voice again. "The candidates will kneel."
The seven who'd given Rule such unfriendly looks dropped to their knees. So did Brady, she saw when she twisted in her captors' grip to check.
Rule didn't.
Victor smiled. It made his face a gargoyle's mask of wrinkles. "You will," he said softly, "before we are through." He closed his eyes and said something in Latin. He spoke the words three times.
Lily waited, her heart trying to knock its way through her chest. They were gambling everything on the mate bond, the capricious, do-what-it-wants bond she'd never understood, much less controlled. "Lady," she whispered, "if you're around, if you're in charge of any of this, help him. Help him."
The Rho held out his hands, palms forward as if he were pushing something. He swayed. One of the kneeling men made a small sound, maybe of astonishment. Another toppled over in a silent heap.
And Rule… like the Rho, he swayed. His eyes were wide, unseeing, his hands limp at his sides.
And the power wind blew in.
THIRTY-TWO
NOT a wind, Lily thought in the first split second as magic gusted across her face, prickled up her nose, and burned her hands.
A gale. Stronger than the first one, horribly strong.
Reality splintered. Here—here—here—everywhere the vortex of the Change seized men and spun them into other shapes. Screams sounded. One of Lily's guards dropped his hands or lost them to the Change.
It was all she needed. Her elbow rocked into the other guard's ribs, distracting him from his battle with the Change. He howled and bent, and reality splintered even as she spun away, diving for a rifle dropped by one of Benedict's guards.
She got her hands on the rifle, rolled, and flowed to her feet.
Wolves. Wolves everywhere, with a scattering of women uncertainly upright in the sea of fur. None near her were two-legged except the Rhej, who stood motionless, her eyes closed and her lips moving; the Rho, equally unmoving where he lay on the ground, unconscious or dead, his skin blooming with dark lesions… and Rule.
Rule was on his knees as Victor had wanted, his head thrown back, his face contorted. Screaming. And bleeding. Even as she stared, more blood sprang out in drops on his skin like sweat.
She threw herself into motion only to jerk to a halt, nearly falling. Benedict's hand had closed over her arm and stopped her. She rounded on him and would have hit him—or tried to—if that hand had been free instead of full of rifle.
That flashback to sanity brought with it a full-fledged thought: his hand had stopped her. Benedict wasn't wolf anymore, but he had been. His clothes were gone. How could he have Changed back so quickly?
"No!" he shouted over the howling. "You can't touch him now. The mantle has him."
The power wind still rushed over her skin, but silently. The howling came from lupus throats—a dozen, two dozen, more. As Rule fought some terrible internal battle, Leidolf howled.
"Why doesn't he Change?" she cried.
Benedict's voice was hoarse. "He can't."
The Rhej moved. Only four steps, but each taken with such ponderous care she might have been treading quicksand or crossing a minefield. She knelt between Rule and the prostrate Rho, stretched out her arm, and seized Victor's hand. With her other hand she gripped Rule's shoulder.
Lily jolted, instinctively wanting no one to touch Rule if she couldn't, but Benedict's grip held her fast. The Rhej's eyes rolled back. She held there, motionless in the dead grass, a white-robed bridge between the two men—one unconscious at best, the other…
Rule stopped screaming. Slowly he straightened, swaying, though he remained on his knees. The blood drops began to dry on his skin. His eyes were open but it was obvious he saw nothing as tremors snaked up his spine in quick succession. The Rhej released him.
Growls rumbled up from a throat far too close. Her head swung. Most of the wolves howled or watched the tableau of Rule, the Rhej, and their Rho, but two didn't. Two gray-black wolves the size of small ponies watched them, ears flat, heads lowered, hackles raised. Then another one moved, this one with reddish fur, and smaller—Great Dane instead of Shetland. She shouldered the rifle.
"Don't shoot the little one," Benedict said, his own rifle ready. "It's Cullen."
Suddenly the air lost its rush of power and was just air, cold and still. Then the magic returned, but quieter now, brushing her skin in an ebbing rhythm until it tickled her face like dandelion fluff.
The howling died, but the growling increased as more wolves focused on her and Benedict and the red wolf standing between them and the rest. The ground was littered with clothing. Shoes, jeans, slacks, belts, shirts—all had fallen to the ground when the form they belonged to whistled into elsewhere and came back reshaped.
Rule slumped forward suddenly, catching himself with one hand so that he didn't quite land on his face in the dirt. But that arm trembled, and his chest heaved as if he'd run for miles and miles.
"Goddamn it." She couldn't go to him, not with wolves surrounding them, wolves with little that was human shining in their dark eyes. Dozens now watched her and Benedict with hackles raised, their growls a rumbling chorus.
"Leidolf!Heliedtoyou!"
A woman's voice, rich and loud: the Rhej. Lily spared her the barest flick of a glance. The woman had moved closer to Victor, rolling him onto his back. She held his hand in both of hers as she spoke. "Your Rho lied. He didn't let the mantle choose. He tried to force it on Rule Turner, and it cost him. Look at Victor. Smell him. Your Rho has the cancer, and he damn near killed himself tryin' to find a legal way to kill someone he'd granted guest rights. He'd die now, be dead in seconds, if I let go of him. And I will let go if you attack our guests. I will let go, and the Rho will die."
Some of the growling faded. Not all.
"Women," the Rhej called, "your brothers know you. Pet them, touch them, help them remember who they are." She looked at Lily, and her voice dropped. "Go to your man. Move slow, but go to him. Get him on his feet. He's got the heir's portion now. He was winnin' the fight till the node burst open and damn near the whole mantle was just sucked right up into him. I forced most of it back, but he's heir. Leidolf won't like that, but they have to feel it, smell it on him."
Lily did fine on the "go to him" part, not so well on moving slowly. But she made it without inciting a lupus riot, knelt, and got her free arm around Rule.
He raised his head to look at her, his eyes bleary with pain. Barely aware.
Benedict moved to Rule's other side, and the red wolf posted himself in. Lily shifted, getting Rule's arm over her shoulder as Benedict did the same. They got him to his feet.
He swayed, shook his head. "Lily."
"Here. I'm right here."
"You got to get out of here," the Rhej told them, her voice hoarse. "All of you. The ones that ain't back yet—you don't smell right to them. The ones that're coming back, they'll be thinking Challenge soon, as much as they think at all."
One of the biggest wolves tipped his muzzle toward her, ears forward. His coloring reminded Lily of Rule's wolf form—black, barely tipped with silver.
"That's right." The Rhej addressed the wolf as if it had spoken. "If they start in on the Challenges, he's dead." A jerk of her head indicated Rule. "And so is Leidolf, 'cause if they kill the heir the mantle will snap back into Victor. I'm barely holding life in him now—that mantle rebounds on him, he's dead. I need you two-footed, Alex. I need your voice with mine, and so do they. Try. You're Lu Nuncio now. For the Lady's sake and Leidolf's, try."
The wolf whined unhappily and closed his eyes. Reality pleated itself, but slowly. For the first time Lily could almost follow the Change as it happened… almost, for some of it was simply other, too far outside what the senses could report or her mind absorb.
Fur folded into skin, legs kinked, lengthened; there blinked into not-there, into somewhere, into… a man, a big man, almost Benedict's size, naked, his dark skin gleaming with sweat in the cold air, his face tight with pain. "Shit," he said. "Shit."
"Buck up." That was his sister, unsympathetic. "Talk to them."
He straightened. After a moment he spoke, projecting his voice strongly. "Listen. I am Lu Nuncio, and you will listen. Does Leidolf kill those with guest rights? Do we remember the price of dishonor? Listen. Listen, and remember. In the days when Eiriu fought with Trath, when gnomes dwelled beneath the Earth and elves still walked its forests…"
A story. He was telling them a story, one from their oral history, one of the legends they'd been raised on. And it seemed to work. He had their attention.
"Girl," the Rhej said quietly, "bring your man here. Ah can't let go of Victor, but Rule Turner's bad muddled. No one's built to hold two mantles, an' he had damned near all of Leidolf's shoved in on top of the Nokolai heir's portion."