Mortal Ties

by Eileen Wilks

  So…no regrets, no. Lily had done what she had to do. And Helen hadn’t had a spouse, lover, or any living family, so Lily didn’t even carry the burden of having brought grief to those who might have loved the woman.

  Yet here she was. She wasn’t sure why. In some murky, underneath way it was connected to what she’d done yesterday, when she and Rule had stood in line for a ridiculous amount of time at the County Clerk’s office. They’d left with a marriage license good for the next ninety days.

  The wedding was in March—two months, one week, and two days away.

  Yesterday had been the immediate catalyst for this visit, but the decision to come here had grown up organically in Lily’s mind over the last several months. She’d found out where Helen was back in June, but hadn’t come. Last month she’d swung by Mount Hope’s office and gotten directions and the map, but hadn’t gone to Helen’s grave. She hadn’t been ready.

  Ready for what? She wasn’t sure. She was here, and she still wasn’t sure why.

  Mount Hope had been San Diego’s municipal cemetery for about a hundred and fifty years. Raymond Chandler was buried here. So was Alta Hulett, America’s first female attorney, and the guy who established Balboa Park, and a lot of veterans. So was Ah Quin, who was remembered as one the city’s founding fathers…at least by its Chinese residents. And so were those who’d been buried at the county’s expense, though budget cuts meant the county was likely to cremate, not plant, these days.

  Helen had died a virgin, a killer, and intestate, but taxpayers hadn’t had to pick up the tab for disposing of her mortal remains. The trustee appointed by a judge had seen to that, paying for it out of her estate.

  Turned out Helen had socked away well over a quarter million. Telepaths had an inside track on conning people, didn’t they? If they could shut out the voices in their heads enough to function, that is—which Helen had been able to do, thanks to the Old One she served. That’s how she’d met her protégé, Patrick Harlowe…who’d also died badly, but not at Lily’s hands. Cullen Seabourne had done the honors there.

  But Lily had killed again since then. Helen was her first, but killing and war went together, didn’t they? Even if most of the country didn’t know they were at war, the lupi did. Lily did. And so did her boss, head of the FBI’s Unit Twelve…head, too, of the far less official Shadow Unit.

  In the run-up to the war, Lily had killed demons, helped a wraith reach true death, and ushered a supposed immortal through that small, dark door. This last September she’d tried and failed to kill a sidhe lord. And in October, just before the first open battle of the war, she’d shot a man. Double-tapped him.

  That man had just shot a fellow FBI agent—a lying, treacherous bastard of an agent, but at that point he’d been on Lily’s side. There had been other lives on the line: four lupi, another FBI agent, and the twenty-two people the bad guys intended to slaughter. Lily had sited on the shooter’s head—his body had been blocked by the van he’d driven—and squeezed off two quick shots. She’d killed him cold, not hot, killed him to stop him from killing others.

  That was training. Most cops never had to use their weapons, but when you took up the badge you knew you might be called on to take a life. Lily had never doubted she could. Not since she was nine, anyway. The man who’d raped and killed her friend while she watched, tied up and waiting for him to do the same to her, had been arrested and tried and convicted. He’d gone to prison for life, which was all the vengeance she was supposed to want.

  But for months afterward, she’d dreamed of murder.

  Lily had always known she entered the police force to stop the monsters. She was beginning to understand the other reason she’d needed that bureaucratic harness.

  “Goddamn morbid sort of thing to do, isn’t it?” said a gravelly voice. “Hanging out at the grave of someone you killed.”

  Lily jolted, then twisted to scowl at the intruder. “Oh, hell. I thought you were gone.”

  “Guess you were wrong.” The man standing disrespectfully atop a nearby grave wore a dark suit with a wrinkled white shirt and a plain tie. He was on the skinny side of lean, with his dark, thinning hair combed straight back from a broad forehead, and he was pale. Pale as in white. Also slightly see-through.

  Al Drummond. Her very own personal haunt.

  TWO

  WHAT had she ever done to deserve this? Lily ran both hands through her hair. “Go away.”

  “Ah…Lily?” Scott said.

  Scott, of course, hadn’t seen or heard anything, except for her talking to empty air. “It’s Drummond, dropping in again for a visit.” Al Drummond, former FBI Special Agent…the lying, treacherous bastard who’d been shot by the man Lily had killed last month. Scott knew about him.

  The dead might not scare her, but they could be damned annoying. “If you’re here to give me more of your pearls of wisdom—”

  “No. At least…” He paused uncertainly. “I don’t think so.”

  Drummond had been many things in life. Uncertain wasn’t one of them. The novelty of it interrupted her more thoroughly than his words, stirring an unwanted curiosity. “What, then?”

  “I don’t know.” He crossed his arms, scowling. “You think I picked you to fix on? You think this is my idea of a great way to spend eternity—popping in to watch you brush your goddamn teeth? What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

  Lily stood. Whatever she’d hoped for today, it wasn’t happening now. Not with Drummond hanging around. “In what way can that be considered any of your business?”

  “Just curious. It makes things easier for me, but somehow I don’t think that’s why you came.”

  “What do you mean, it makes it easier for you?”

  “Easier for me to show up. Places like this, the veil is thin.”

  Amusement jabbed at her, half funny and half painful. “I wish Mullins could hear you talking about ‘the veil’ like some TV psychic.”

  He snorted. “That would chap his ass, wouldn’t it? You like to hang out at the graves of people you’ve killed?”

  “How do you know whose grave this is?”

  “I can read.”

  “And you know who Helen was.”

  “Did you think I didn’t do any digging before I set out to get you?”

  Drummond might have gone spectacularly wrong, but he’d been a good agent before that—savvy, smart, and thorough. Of course he knew who Helen was, knew that Lily had killed her. God only knew what else he’d dug up about her. “Go away.”

  “Don’t get all huffy. I’ve got a proposition.”

  “Does it involve you leaving me alone?”

  “And where the hell would I go?”

  “How should I know? Obviously you don’t have to hang around me every minute. You were gone for over a month.”

  “A month?” That rattled him. “I was…I think I was sleeping. But not the whole time. I was at the courthouse with you just now when—”

  She scowled. “I didn’t see you.” Supposedly Drummond couldn’t see or hear the world without manifesting, at least to the drifting-white-mist stage.

  “You didn’t look up, and I was…” His mouth kept moving, but all she heard was silence. He stopped, scowled, and tried again. Midway through, his mouthed words became speech again. “…show up all the way in some places. And talking is goddamn hard, too, so stop interrupting.”

  “You’re not really talking, you know. No movement of air, which is why no one else hears you.” It had to be some kind of mindspeech, however much it sounded like regular speech to her.

  He snorted. “Like I hadn’t figured that out. Listen, I think I know what I’m supposed to do. Why I didn’t just die or go to hell or whatever.” His eyes burned with intensity. “I’m supposed to be your partner.”

  It was so ludicrous she had to laugh. “Yeah, that’ll happen.” She collected Scott with a glance and started for the road. Drummond tried to grab her arm. His hand passed right through her, of course, so after a di
sgusted grimace he kept pace beside her. At least that’s what it looked like—as if he were walking, his feet pushing against the ground the way hers did.

  “Look, I get that you don’t like me,” he said. “So what? I’ve worked with a lot of assholes. If it gets the job done, you live with it.”

  “You’re a little limited in what you can do right now.”

  “Maybe, but I can do things you can’t. Anywhere within about three hundred feet of you, I can check things out. Check things out on either side. For example, there are three ghosts here—pretty tattered, not much for conversation, but they’re here. And on your side of things, I know where your wolf man is. He’s hunkered down right over there.” He stretched out an arm to point at a dip in the ground.

  One finger on that hand glowed faintly from the wedding ring he still wore. It caught her attention, that ring. Unconsciously she rubbed her thumb over the ring she wore—an engagement ring, not a wedding ring, but the same sort of token. Rule’s ring.

  She looked away. “His name is Mike.”

  “Whatever. The point is, I can help.”

  They’d reached the narrow road that wound among the graves. She stopped. “And you think I should trust you.”

  “I dealt straight with you. Once I saw what they were doing, I dealt straight with you.”

  True. He’d risked his life to rescue twenty-two homeless people, then given it to save a friend. And after he died, he’d found the death-magic amulet so they could destroy it.

  But first he’d betrayed the Bureau, nearly killed Lily’s boss, conspired in the murder of a U.S. senator, and damn near ended Lily’s career along the way.

  Lily studied him a moment, then took out her phone.

  He frowned. “Who are you calling?”

  “A friend. She hears dead people all the time.” Lily had only chatted with one dead guy. This one. As for the big, fat “why” of this screwed-up situation…well, the expert she was about to consult used the analogy of a house. Most people didn’t see or hear the dead because their houses lacked windows and had only one door—a tightly locked, one-way affair. That door didn’t open until the person died. Because Lily had died once, her door didn’t lock anymore. It was a tiny bit ajar. Mostly that didn’t matter, but she’d been present at Drummond’s death, and somehow that had allowed their energies to get tangled up together.

  At least that was the theory. It didn’t explain everything. Lily had been present when a lot of people died that day, including the man she’d shot. None of the rest of them had taken to tagging along with her.

  She scrolled down to “Etorri” in her contacts list and selected “Rhej.”

  The Rhejes were the clans’ wise women, or maybe historians or quasi-priestesses. They were all Gifted…and the Etorri Rhej’s Gift was mediumship. Lily had never heard the woman’s name because the Rhejes weren’t called by their names, but last month she’d given in to curiosity. Rhejes didn’t actually hide their names and Lily had the woman’s phone number, so it hadn’t been hard. The name of the Etorri Rhej was Anne. Anne Murdock.

  Anne answered right away. Lily apologized for disturbing her, then said, “He’s back.”

  “That ghost?” Anne was clearly surprised. “What was his name—Hammond?”

  “Drummond. He just showed up again. He’s glaring at me right now.”

  “He still seems coherent?”

  “In the sense you used the word, yeah.”

  Anne made a little huff of frustration. “I wish I could talk to him. I haven’t met a fully coherent ghost since I was seven, and she left soon after my mother spoke with her.”

  Lily knew what Anne meant by “coherent,” because they’d talked soon after Drummond showed up. Most ghosts were more of a habit than a person—some ingrained action or fear or moment that played itself out over and over, a ripple cast by the soul’s departure rather than the soul itself. Others seemed like real people, able to interact, but in a limited way. They often didn’t make a lot of sense to those few of the living who could see and hear them.

  But there were a few rare exceptions. Fully coherent ghosts, the Etorri Rhej called them, and the experts didn’t agree on what they were, how they came to be, or much of anything else, except that they were different from the rest. A coherent ghost seemed to be the whole person. He or she remained aware of the living world, seemed to perceive it through the same senses as the living, and used language the way the living do. Coherent ghosts were like the rest in one way, however. They were tied to something—a place or an object or, very rarely, a person.

  How had Lily gotten so lucky? “He says he’s tied to me, but he was gone for over a month.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t explain that.”

  “Neither could he. He also says he thinks he’s supposed to be my partner.”

  “Are you asking for advice?”

  “Is there any way to sort the good ghosts from the rotten, lying sons of bitches?”

  Anne chuckled. “Only the same ways we sort the living. If you want to know if he’s lying, that’s certainly possible. He could equally well be telling the truth, or the truth as he understands it. We may not know much about coherent ghosts, but we’ve no reason to think they’re any less muddled than the rest of us.”

  Lily hesitated over her next question—but dammit, she wanted to know. “So could he, uh, think he needs to help me out because of unfinished business? And once he does, he can…go on?”

  “I don’t buy the ‘unfinished business’ explanation for ghosts in general. Almost everyone leaves some kind of unfinished business behind, but hardly anyone lingers as a ghost more than a few moments. However, some of the more coherent ghosts strongly believe they can’t cross over. Either they’re right, or the strength of their belief itself holds them here.”

  “So Drummond might be supposed to work with me, and he can’t, ah…cross over until he does that. Or pays a debt or something. Or he might be stuck here because he believes he’s stuck here.”

  “Pretty much, yes. I’m not much help, am I?”

  Not really. “One more question, and this may be outside your area of expertise, being more a matter of…ethics, I guess. Does this obligation thing go both ways? Does Drummond being tied to me give me any sort of obligation to him?”

  Anne was quiet for a long moment. “I can only tell you what my mother told me, which is what her mother told her, and on back for generations. We have no more duty to the dead than we do to the living. And no less.”

  That was not what Lily wanted to hear. She thanked the Rhej anyway, disconnected, and looked at the man—or what remained of a man—scowling at her.

  “Well?” he demanded. “Did your friend tell you anything useful?”

  “Maybe.” Making Drummond go away for good was high on her priority list. If he thought he had to help her out in some way…but she hadn’t exactly gotten a guarantee about that. “You were at the courthouse, you said. You know what Brian Nelson did.”

  “Yeah.” He scowled. “Goddamn copycats.”

  That echo of her own thoughts creeped her out. “That’s right. He and three of his gang wanted to raise death magic, so they captured two young women and slit their throats. They’d heard about what your pal Chittenden did. They were copying him.”

  His expression shut down. “You want me to tell you I was wrong?”

  “Oh, I figure you know now that you were on the wrong side. What I want to hear is that you’ve changed your mind about magic and the people who use it.”

  He was silent.

  “That’s what I thought.” She started walking again.

  “Okay, so we won’t be partners. I’m still a resource, and you’re wasting me. I’ve got twice your experience. You can’t ignore that.”

  He was right. That, too, was annoying. She stopped and looked at him. “Mostly you haven’t hung around long enough to be much use. You pop in; you pop out.”

  “I…can be more available now.”

  She wa
ited. He didn’t elaborate, so she asked, “Is the ‘why’ to that one of those things you can’t explain?”

  “Since I don’t understand it myself, the answer would be yes.”

  “You told me you never met Friar.” Robert Friar, who’d started a war—or was resuming one begun over three thousand years ago. Robert Friar, who’d seen the slaughter of hundreds of people on his own side as a great way to take down the lupi, the Gifted, and everyone else who stood in the way of the one he served. Like the U.S. government.

  “Just his buddy, Chittenden.”

  “But you researched him. If you dug into my background, you must have checked him out, too, before throwing in on his side.”

  “Sure, but I doubt I know anything you don’t. I used the Bureau’s files, talked to a couple people.”

  “I’m asking for your professional opinion, not the details of your background check. Given what you learned then and what you know now, would you say he’s a sociopath?”

  “Huh.” He thought that over, frowning and silent for a long moment. “Could be. There’s no record of the usual markers, like torturing baby bunnies when he was a cute little toddler. But sociopaths aren’t identical. Could be he’s what they call high functioning.”

  “Really good at hiding what he is, you mean.”

  “That, yeah, but also with better impulse control. Most sociopaths aren’t good at restraining themselves.”

  “Most of the ones we know about. The ones who get locked up.”

  “True.” He cocked his head. “You’re trying to get to know Friar better.”

  She nodded and started walking again, but slowly. “Him and the one he serves.” The Old One who wanted to take over the world and remake it according to her standards. The one they never named, because that could draw her attention. The Great Bitch had to act through local agents because she was barred from their realm, thank God. Or thank the Old Ones who’d opposed her, like the lupi’s Lady, who’d shut the door on themselves in order to lock her out.