Mortal Ties

by Eileen Wilks

  “And you’re mine,” she agreed when he came to her, and she put her hands on his wonderfully bare shoulders while down lower another part of his body said hello to her stomach. “The Lady says so.”

  “As do I.” He kissed her lightly…then again…and again…and they were gasping and clutching and stroking all the delicious bare skin they could find, and stumbling in mutual haste to the bed, and when he slid inside her she felt jolted by reality—felt suddenly twice as real as usual, brimming with more than sensation. Full. So full.

  He started to move and reality shimmered, breaking up into shards of need and demand. Rule!

  Here. He moved smooth and fast. I’m here, right here with you, nadia, my love, my Lily…

  It may have been pure startlement that broke the connection—his or hers or both. Certainly it broke their rhythm. She stared up into his astonished face. “Well,” she said, and gripped his waist and pushed up against him. “Well, that’s interesting, but so’s this.”

  He grinned and followed her lead.

  LILY lay sprawled on her back amid a tangle of bedclothes and Rule, breathing hard and frowning at the lovely but too-bright chandelier. “That’s stupid.”

  Rule turned his face on the pillow—how had he ended up with a pillow, and where was hers?—to smile at her. “What is?”

  “Most hotels don’t have ceiling lights. Why does this one? And the switch is all the way over there by the door. Why didn’t they put a switch by the bed? Stupid.”

  Rule looked up at the light. After a moment he nodded. “You’re right. It shows a sad lack of planning.” He paused. “I can wiggle my toes again, however, so I’m sure I’ll soon be up to the challenge of sitting. No doubt walking will be possible soon after that.”

  She smiled and snuggled closer. No matter how enthusiastic the sex, Rule recovered quickly, and in every way. It was nice to think she’d wrecked him for a little while, though. “You heard me. Earlier, I mean.”

  “And you heard me.”

  He didn’t sound sure. She nodded. “Does that freak you out?”

  “A little. And yet…it was lovely, too.”

  She propped herself up on an elbow so she could see him. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  He smiled and toyed with a strand of her hair. “That much I knew.”

  Since Lily had discovered her capability for mindspeech and began the sessions with Sam, she’d accidentally mindspoken Rule a few times. The first time was right after she nearly died. The others had been more random, in perfectly ordinary situations, like when she’d been trying to reach a bowl he’d put on the top shelf in the kitchen and was annoyed because it was supposed to be on the second shelf, where she could get it. That time, she remembered, the communication had been along the lines of, “Why can’t you remember to put things where they belong?”

  It had never happened during sex, and she’d never “heard” Rule in return.

  Eavesdropping on him that way him was intrusive and freaky and just as he’d said. Quite lovely. “I forgot to tell you, but earlier this evening I thought I had a breakthrough. Drummond was talking at me during the briefing with Bergman, and I told him to shut up. I mindspoke it,” she added, to be clear. “And he heard me, and I did it again later.”

  Rule’s brows pulled together. He didn’t speak.

  That made her frown, too. “What?”

  “It bothers me, that’s all. You and Drummond seem to be getting downright chummy.”

  Disconcerted, she swallowed her first retort. “You’re jealous. Of Al Drummond.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Someone here was being ridiculous. She didn’t think it was her. “I don’t even like him, Rule.”

  “You never wear the necklace. You could keep him away, and you don’t. It’s not a matter of him being potentially useful. There’s something else going on. I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t know if I do, either, except that he has nothing. Literally nothing and no one, not even a body. It’s not just that he can’t move so much as a paper clip. He can’t touch the paper clip. When I make it so he can’t manifest, he can’t even see it.”

  “You feel sorry for him.”

  Yeah, she did, and that was kind of weird, considering what Drummond had done. But it wasn’t the whole story. “Maybe it’s some random roll of the dice that got him tied to me. Maybe there’s actually someone in charge who did this on purpose. I don’t know, but either way, it’s up to me to do the right thing. I’m not sure what that is, but making it so he can’t see the damn paper clip can’t be right.”

  Rule sifted a hand through her hair. “You’re trying to do the right thing. That I understand. But I can’t help thinking he’s using this tie. Using you. In life, Drummond was a betrayer. He betrayed you and the Bureau. Do you really think dying changed him that much?”

  “I don’t know, but—shit!” She rolled off him and grabbed for the sheet.

  White, misty, and right there at the foot of the bed, Al Drummond sang out, “Incoming!”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  AL Drummond really enjoyed the look on Yu’s face as she leaped out of bed. She probably figured he’d been hanging around while she made whoopee with her wolf man. He wasn’t that kind of creep, but that’s what she’d think. She’d probably come up with some way to make him pay for his grand entrance, but it would be worth it.

  “It’s Drummond,” Yu said as she grabbed a fistful of clothes off the floor. “Who or what is incoming?” she demanded, stepping into her pants.

  Al considered commenting on her lack of underwear. What could she do—hit him? Maybe later. He did have a warning to deliver. “I can’t tell,” he said. “It’s dark where the intruder is. He’s paying a visit via the ductwork.”

  “The ductwork?” she repeated. Her lover—who’d sprung from the bed in that fluid, too-fast way lupi moved sometimes, which Drummond didn’t like at all—looked up and around. They both spotted the vent. “It isn’t big enough,” Lily said.

  “The one in the other room is. That’s where he’s headed.”

  “He says the intruder’s heading for the one in the sitting room,” she told Turner as she pulled her shirt over her head. She tugged it down and glared at Al. “So why the hell did you pop up in here? You could have materialized on the other side of the damn door.”

  He smirked. “More fun this way.”

  A low growl rose in the chest of her wolf man. Turner must have figured out where Al was by watching where Lily looked, because he seemed to look right at him. “Been hanging around watching, have you?”

  He spoke to Al. Right to him. No one but Yu had done that since he died, and it shook him, how good that felt. Keep talking to me. Please. Please keep talking to me. “Maybe that’s how you get your jollies. Not my thing.”

  Yu rolled her eyes. “Rule may see you now and then, but he can’t hear you. Come on.”

  “See me?” He tried to grab her as she reached for her shoulder harness. Didn’t work, of course. It made him want to growl like the wolf man, or maybe howl like one.

  The worst thing about being a ghost wasn’t when she went in the damn car. Even being alone, bad as it was, wasn’t the worst. It was the sheer, unrelenting uselessness of his existence. Hell was being unable to do one damned thing, and maybe he’d earned a stint in hell. Maybe he deserved it. But God, what he’d give to be able to affect something. If Turner could see him…“What do you mean, he sees me sometimes?”

  “Just what I said, and this isn’t the time to talk about it.”

  Turner opened the door and moved silently into the other room. Drummond followed Yu through the door. He could go through walls, but he liked to use doors. Made him feel more real. She had her rig fastened by the time she stopped beside Turner. She drew her weapon and held it down at her side.

  The two of them glowed. He’d told Yu that all the embodied had a glow, but these two lit up brighter than most…and brighter still when they stood close like that.
Drummond thought he knew why. It was that weird, glowy cord stretched between them.

  No one else had one. None of the people he’d seen since he died, anyway, and with nothing to do but watch, he’d been paying attention. He didn’t know what the cord-thing was, but it glowed like the living did. As if it was alive. It freaked him out. He stepped back, not wanting to touch the eerie thing.

  Turner stood in front of the vent, studying it. Yu started to say something, but Turner tapped her arm and laid a finger to his lips.

  “You hear something?” she whispered so softly that Drummond wasn’t sure he heard it with his ears. Well, whatever passed for ears with him like this. It wasn’t like when she’d talked in his head at the branch office, so it probably had to do with their goddamn mystical connection.

  Turner nodded and tipped his head to one side. Yu glanced that way and nodded back as if she knew exactly what he meant.

  Maybe she did. She went to the door to the other bedroom and opened it. She didn’t step inside, though, but whispered real softly again. “Get up. Be quiet. Someone’s coming.”

  In total silence, three men went from what looked like sound sleep to standing. Then they stood there, naked and motionless. Waiting.

  Yu jerked her head at them—come on—and went back in the sitting room, where Turner looked at them and wiggled his hands around as if it meant something, pointing now and then. Two of the naked guys stood with him in front of the vent. One went to the door to the suite and opened it.

  “Did he tell them to do all that?” Drummond said.

  Yu glanced at him, opened her mouth, then closed it. And put words right into his damn mind again. Yes. It’s ASL, mostly. He wants the guards at the door to know what’s happening.

  The guy who’d gone to the door came back. Drummond hadn’t heard him say anything to the two guys guarding the door. Maybe he’d used ASL, too. Turner made some more hand-talk at him, and he loped silently into the bedroom he’d emerged from, returning with a wood-gripped 9 mm in one hand—a Smith and Wesson 952, he thought. An expensive piece, if so. He was still buck naked.

  Turner pointed at the other two, made a circle in the air…and the two guys without guns turned into wolves.

  Al had been around when lupi turned into wolves once, but he hadn’t really watched. He’d been busy at the time, what with being freshly dead and trying to stop a bunch of demons shaped like wolves from killing a few hundred people. This time, he paid attention. It gave him the creeps to think of a man morphing into a beast, but it was better to know your enemy, right? So he watched, but he didn’t see much. It was like they flowed somewhere else, somewhere he couldn’t go, then flowed back, reformed.

  He hadn’t expected to hear anything. “Did you…” He had to stop and clear his throat. “Does that music happen every time they do that?”

  Yu looked at him sharply. You heard music?

  He nodded. Clear and distant, so distant he shouldn’t have heard it…and pure. Pure like a baby’s laugh or the way stars look, spattering the darkness. Pure like nothing he’d ever heard or imagined. “Real faint,” he said. “It was…” He shook his head, out of words.

  Yu had a funny look on her face, like he’d made her sad. Wistful, maybe. Moonsong, she said in the way he didn’t like but was getting used to. You heard moonsong.

  A faint scraping came from the vent. Drummond shook off his preoccupation with something he’d barely heard and paid attention to what was happening now. So did Yu and her wolf man and the two wolves.

  The vent cover wiggled, started to fall. A man’s hand shot out and grabbed it. A man’s head emerged. “Oh,” Jasper Machek said, blinking like an owl at the odd group assembled below him. And, “Shit.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “I guess you heard me coming,” Jasper Machek said. He shook his head. “I’m rusty, that’s what. Getting old and rusty.”

  “Rule’s hearing is better than ours,” Lily said. “A lot better.”

  “So I’m told.” The thought didn’t cheer him up. His face was tight, his expression abstracted. If he was bothered by the two very large wolves sitting in front of him, watching his every muscle twitch, it didn’t show.

  Drummond was leaning against the wall, his arms crossed, watching and listening. Or that’s what he seemed to be doing. Could a ghost be supported by a wall?

  Rule had assured Machek that the suite had been swept for bugs and Friar couldn’t eavesdrop here magically. Machek hadn’t believed him, but it was clear that either Rule was correct or it was too late to worry about it. Once he’d wriggled out of his hole in the wall, Rule had had Todd pat him down. Not that he could conceal much with all the Lycra in his clothes—they were skin-tight, even the handy-dandy vest he wore with its interesting pockets. All the better for crawling through very tight spaces, Lily assumed.

  In the vest’s pockets Todd had found two phones, a set of lockpicks, and a small, top-of-the-line bug detector. There was also a wallet with five hundred in cash and an ID that claimed he was Richard Spallings. No weapons. Rule gave everything back to Jasper, then invited him to have a seat while he called Scott. He filled Scott in quickly, told him to alert the other guards—those with Cullen and the two Laban with Beth—and return to the suite. He said he’d call the guards at Machek’s house himself.

  Machek sat bolt upright. “Don’t pull them off my house! If Friar knows you’ve pulled them, he’ll—”

  “I need to know they’re alive and well,” Rule said.

  Machek smiled bitterly. “Did you think I could overcome werewolves? I suppose I should be flattered. They’re fine. They didn’t see me leave because I used an alternative exit.”

  “Did you, now? Perhaps you’ll tell me about that in a moment.” Rule tapped on the screen of his phone.

  Lily was standing beneath the hole Machek had crawled out of, studying it. “I can’t believe you fit. It’s wide enough, but it’s not even a foot high.”

  “Twelve point two inches,” Machek said absently. “Tight but doable.”

  “You measured?”

  “I did a job here once. That was years ago, but I took a chance they hadn’t refitted their ducts. People don’t, mostly. Costs too much.”

  The hotel hadn’t cleaned their ducts, either. Jasper Machek’s black, stretchy clothes were covered in dust. Lily had hurriedly tossed a blanket on the couch before he sat down. They’d managed not to break any furniture so far. Why add a big cleaning bill to their tab?

  Rule finished talking to whichever guard he’d called and disconnected. “Chris and Alan are fine, if chagrinned that you evaded them. They’ll continue to watch the house. What can I offer you to eat or drink? The bar here is reasonably well stocked.”

  “Nothing.” After a moment he remembered to add, “Thank you.”

  Rule looked at Patrick, who’d hastily pulled on a pair of jeans. “Have room service send up four pots of coffee and an assortment of—”

  “Don’t call room service! They can’t know I’m here. If they—”

  “Jasper,” Rule said, “There are eight adults registered to this suite, seven of whom are lupi. It’s barely past ten o’clock. Room service will not be amazed by an order for refreshments.”

  “Of course.” Machek rubbed his face. “I’m panicking. I don’t usually, but this is…I need to tell you why I’m here.”

  “You do, yes,” Rule said, and moved to sit in the chair facing his brother. “Has Friar called?”

  Machek shook his head.

  “Sandwiches and fruit okay?” Patrick asked, picking up the hotel phone.

  “That would be fine. Jasper, am I to assume you came through the ductwork to avoid being seen, rather than from some hope of surprising and slaughtering us?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It’s usually a bad idea to surprise lupi,” Lily said. “It can be a bad idea to surprise me, too.”

  Machek glanced at her shoulder holster. She’d put her gun up when Todd didn’t find any weapons on hi
m. “I didn’t have many options. I had to talk to you. The prototype is missing.”

  Dead silence. Rule broke it to say dryly, “Does that mean it wasn’t missing before?”

  “Yes. I mean no, it wasn’t.” He rubbed his face again. “Maybe I do need some coffee. I haven’t been sleeping well. I’ll start over. Most of what I told you was true, but even the true parts were carefully selected. I was given a script to follow. I did as I was told, and I’m not apologizing for it. He has Adam. You were right about that. He…they hurt him once, while I was on the phone. Friar wanted me to hear.”

  Lily exchanged a glance with Rule. He nodded, meaning she could take it for now. “You’ve talked with Adam.”

  He nodded. “Every day. I refused to do anything unless I spoke to him every day. I made sure they weren’t using a recording. I asked questions they couldn’t have anticipated.”

  “When was Adam taken?”

  “Nine days ago. That’s a hellishly short time to plan and execute the kind of job he wanted me to do, but it’s hellishly long in every other way.”

  “How did Friar know you could do that kind of job?”

  “I’ve got an idea about that, but—look, can I just tell you what happened without questions for a minute?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There was an attempt to get the prototype from me last night. That part was true. Three men, one armed—at least I only saw one gun. It loomed large in my sight at the time, but I think it was a smallish 9 mm. They were waiting for me when I got home. The one with the gun was on the stairs between me and the door. The other two came up behind me, blocking me. They demanded the prototype. I’d allowed for the possibility that Friar would double-cross me, so I’d stashed it elsewhere. They assured themselves I was telling the truth about that, then demanded I tell them where it was. I refused. They made the obligatory threats. I refused again. They weren’t going to kill me, not when I was the only person who knew where the damn thing was, and we were on a public street. It was late, but we were too public for them to hurt me badly. Or so I hoped.” He paused. “I got lucky. Mr. Peterson’s dog had gotten out again. He’s a Great Dane with a low boredom threshold, thinks he’s a puppy. He came racing up, all excited at these new playmates, and jumped up on one of the men. It was enough of a distraction for me to get away.”