Blood Challenge

THIRTY-FIVE

“YOU’RE sure about this.” Lily clicked her seat belt in place.

Cynna’s seat belt barely fit around her. She barely fit behind the steering wheel. “I asked Nettie months ago about driving. She told me not to hit anything and to pull over if I go into labor.”

“Labor.” Lily took a deep breath. “I may hyperventilate.”

Cynna chuckled. “Lily, pregnant women drive all the time.”

“Okay. I just feel like I should be the one …”

“Driving? In charge?” Cynna started the engine and put the car—Rule’s Mercedes—in gear. “This is not news.”

“I’m still in charge.”

“Keep telling yourself that. You know how to use the GPS thingee?”

“Sure. I sent the car the directions from Googlemaps. You just have to download it.” Lily leaned forward and pushed the “i” button. They were headed for Del Cielo, a tiny little mountain town. The quickest way there from Clanhome involved twisty blacktop roads. Lily had Googled their route earlier.

“That is crazy cool,” Cynna announced. “Are you going to call Mariah Friar and let her know we’re coming?”

“I did that, too.” Lily pulled her laptop onto her lap and opened it. “She’s waiting for us.” She could do a lot of things one-handed, like tapping out instructions for the computer. It was disconcerting, though, how often she started to do something and discovered she couldn’t. Or had to do it in a weird-ass, annoying way.

Like getting dressed. Forget about wearing a jacket or her shoulder rig. The weapon she couldn’t shoot worth a damn left-handed was in her purse. But she could do most of the rest of it herself, except for her bra and putting her bad arm through the sleeve of a shirt. For today she was skipping the bra and wearing another of Rule’s shirts to conceal that omission. Rule had threaded her arm into the shirt’s sleeve for her.

Showers were out. Washing her hair by herself was out. She could brush her teeth left-handed, but first she had to get the toothpaste on the toothbrush. She did still have a right hand, so she managed that, but she had to do it differently.

Lily had experienced some of this last year, but it had been her left shoulder, not her right, and the damage hadn’t been nearly as bad. Maybe what was getting to her was not knowing how much function she’d regain.

With one finger Lily tapped in her password and waited for the computer to offer her the file she wanted. Everything had to be done differently, and she kept forgetting to allow for that. Last night, when she decided to send Jeff to D.C. with a written report, she’d forgotten that she couldn’t type it. She ended up dictating it to Cynna… . who was acting as her chauffeur as well. Lily could drive one-handed, but she had to admit that would be stupid. Especially since she’d taken half a pain pill earlier, before Nettie arrived.

Nettie would be cleaning Lily’s wound and changing the dressing on it every morning for a week or so. Having experienced that in the hospital, Lily hadn’t tried to go without some kind of chemical buffer.

Lily glanced in the side mirror. They were being tailed by a white sedan slightly newer than Lily’s personal vehicle. She knew both the men in the car. Rule had insisted on guards. Lily considered an attack highly unlikely—Friar would have to be able to track her magically, and tracking a moving target was extremely hard if you weren’t a Finder. So, she was told, was Listening; chances were Friar couldn’t eavesdrop on them in motion. To be sure, Cullen had given her a charm that was supposed to be putting out magical static.

So she had the charm and the guards for just in case. She’d told Rule he could guard her, after all, and Cynna would be with her. Cynna was trained and armed, but she was also pregnant—and potentially a target. They didn’t know what Friar knew and what he didn’t. They didn’t know how he chose his targets, whether he was guided by her or had some other metric.

Rule couldn’t do the guarding himself. He and Benedict and Isen were working on details for tomorrow’s meeting. Cullen was busy making charms for that meeting. And Arjenie was doing what she did best: research.

“So what are you hoping to learn from Mariah Friar about her dad?” Cynna asked.

“First, if she had any inkling about his clairaudience. Second, dates.” Lily skimmed the report she’d filed last April, looking for the transcript of her interview with Friar’s estranged daughter. “We might get more, but I’m hoping for dates. Specifically, the date when Friar suddenly acquired shields. Mariah said he was gone for a while, then bam! When he turned up again he had these handy-dandy shields. Or maybe it’s a single shield. I didn’t get a date from her at the time.” Should have. Didn’t think of it.

“And Mariah knows about shields because … ?”

“I didn’t tell you about that?” Cynna had been gone when Lily met Mariah Friar in the course of an investigation. Way gone. She’d been kidnapped into another realm. “Mariah’s an empath. Completely unblocked.”

“Aw … that’s rough. Nearly as bad as having Friar for a father.”

True. “It’s important to her to keep her Gift secret.”

“Sure, I can see that. What will the date Friar got shielded tell us?”

“It suggests that’s when she recruited him. It’s probably when he became a Listener, too. If he had a clairaudience Gift before that, Mariah wasn’t aware of it. I think she would have been, considering her Gift. She was wary of him, kept track of him until she moved out.”

“You can’t turn a null into a Gifted.”

“We don’t know what an Old One can do.”

Cynna was silent a moment. “You think Friar left our realm to go see her?”

“I sure as hell hope he left our realm. I’d hate to think someone here on Earth could turn a null or a near-null into the strongest Listener on the planet.”

“Me, too. But what about Dya? How does she fit? The G.B.—”

“G.B.?”

“Great Bitch. She doesn’t hold that contract Dya is bound by. Some elf bigwig does.”

“Sidhe. We don’t know if he’s an elf, just that he’s a sidhe lord of some sort.” Lily had tried to ask Arjenie more questions about Dya’s lord this morning … and gotten nothing. Nada. Zilch . It was intensely frustrating. “So maybe Friar wasn’t contacted by the Great Bitch directly. Maybe this mysterious sidhe lord showed up here and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Sidhe lords can cross into our realm. I’m guessing one of them could take Friar traveling with him if he wanted to.”

“You think this sidhe lord is hooked up with her and brought Friar to her?”

“Maybe.” This morning Lily wasn’t sure of her earlier reasoning. Was the fact that Friar couldn’t Listen at Clanhome reason enough to implicate the Great Bitch? There could be other explanations. Just because she couldn’t come up with one didn’t mean it didn’t exist. She couldn’t explain color televisions, either. Or how her own Gift worked.

TURN RIGHT AT THE NEXT INTERSECTION, an automated voice said.

“You think it knows what it’s talking about?” Cynna said, slowing as they approached a stop sign marking an intersection with another winding mountain road.

“Yes. Ah … can I ask you something?”

“When people say that, they always mean ‘ask something personal.’ But sure. Shoot.”

“There’s a mental component to spellcasting, right?”

“Of course. You know that.”

“What I was wondering … is there an emotional component, too?”

Cynna turned onto the other road and gave Lily a look she couldn’t read. “You can’t separate mental and emotional into neat little boxes. Emotions affect what you think. What you think affects your emotions. It’s all tied together.”

“So guilt might interfere with you casting a spell?”

“Maybe you should tell me what you really want to know.”

Lily looked down and shut her laptop. “I, uh, dreamed about Helen last night.”

“The nutty telepath who tried to open the hellgate?”

“Yeah.” The investigation that led to Helen and the Azá and Lily’s first encounter with both Rule and the Great Bitch had happened before Lily met Cynna, but Cynna knew the basics. “I’ve been dreaming about her lately, generally after a session with Sam. I dreamed about her last night, after mindspeaking Arjenie, and I couldn’t mindspeak at all this morning.”

“You feel guilty for killing Helen.”

“No. I didn’t have a lot of choice about that—not unless I was willing to let her kill me, Rule, and a bunch of other people, then let a godawful lot of demons into our world.” Lily bent and put the laptop on the floor. It was awkward to do it one-handed. Everything was awkward. Especially this conversation. “Never mind.”

“Uh-uh. You don’t get to stop now. Quit thinking so much. When you dreamed about Helen, what did you feel?”

“While I was dreaming?” Lily flashed back to the dream. “Rage. I wanted her dead. She was going to kill Rule. She’d killed his brother and she was going to kill him, and I wanted her dead.”

“You didn’t feel guilty in the dream?”

“No.” She’d felt angry. Killing mad. She wasn’t sure anymore if she’d felt that way last year when she actually killed Helen. Was the dream making her face a truth she didn’t like? Or had it distorted the truth, replacing her real memory with a dream version?

“How about after you woke up? How did you feel then?”

She’d felt the way she always did after a Helen dream. Drained. Tainted. Ugly. “Not good. Not angry. More like … smeared.”

“Well, guilt can create blocks. Most empaths who’re blocked … it isn’t just self-protection, or they’d all be blocked. It’s guilt. But guilt can affect anyone, not just empaths. Some Gifted—especially those who were raised in a hellfire and brimstone theology—are never able to cast a spell. It makes them feel unclean. The feeling keeps them blocked.”

“I’m blocked? I’ll never be able to do it?”

“No, you’ve already done it, and more than once! Lily, you’re used to going at something you want to learn head-on. This isn’t a head-on kind of learning. It’s more circling back at something over and over until you get it.”

“I don’t know how to do that kind of learning.” Staring at a candle flame to find Sam there? That wasn’t her.

Cynna snorted. “It’s what you do every day. Investigations are all about circling in on a perp. Investigate mindspeech.”

But mindspeech wasn’t the perp. She was.

Lily turned that thought over in her mind. It felt right. It gave her the same kind of click she got when an investigation suddenly made sense, when she knew she was on the right track. She didn’t think she was guilty. She didn’t feel guilty. But some part of her was obscuring the trail, hiding things from the rest of her.

She’d track it down. Cynna was right—that’s what she did. “You’re pretty smart.”

“This is true.”

Lily looked at her friend’s smiling, decorated face. “Smug, too.”

“Pregnant women get to do smug. It’s part of the package, compensation for having our bladders reduced to the size of a pea. Speaking of which …”

“You need to go already? We just left!”

“Size of a pea,” Cynna said firmly, and pulled into a gas station on the outskirts of Del Cielo. Mariah Friar’s hometown.

“YOU’RE sure about this.” Rule leaned over Arjenie’s shoulder to look at the computer screen.

He’d spent some time with Toby early that morning, then sent the boy off to lessons. For now, Harold Spanner would homeschool him. Harold had taught Rule at one time, and he had a student already—Mike Rose’s son, Sean. Toby would spend the night with Sean tonight … and Rule already missed him. It was foolish, but he’d gotten used to having Toby with him every morning and evening. But with everything that was going on, it was simpler for Toby to stay with a friend. This way Rule didn’t have to keep sending Toby out of the room when they discussed things the boy shouldn’t hear.

He and Benedict had been going over security details for the meeting when Isen summoned them to his study, where Arjenie was ensconced with her computer.

“Not at all,” Arjenie answered. “Well, I’m sure that Friar had his old swimming pool taken out and a new one put in last year. The permits for that are clear. I’m also sure Friar made some odd purchases about that time and did his best to hide them, using a dummy corporation. I’m not sure all of that adds up to some underground tunnel or hidey-hole, but it’s suggestive.”

Rule looked over Arjenie’s head at Benedict, who stood on her other side. Their eyes met. “Can you show me those purchases?”

“Okay. What I’ve got is a single invoice, though. I, uh, sort of snuck in someone’s back door to find it.”

“Hacked in?”

“Hacking is illegal. I simply know how to find back doors sometimes … and some people don’t have much protection.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard. A new screen popped up. “Here it is.”

The invoice didn’t tell Rule a great deal. Some of the materials could have been for a swimming pool—there was a lot of cement—while others clearly weren’t. “I’ll have Jimmy look at this. He’s a contractor,” he added to Arjenie. “He’ll be able to give us an idea of what those steel beams might be used for.”

Isen stood behind Arjenie, smiling. “She does good work, doesn’t she? Did you notice the name of Friar’s dummy corporation?”

“Why?”

“Hernando, Hyde, and Way.” His father paused, his eyebrows wagging. “You don’t get it?”

“No, I don’t recognize …” Rule’s voice trailed off when his father hummed a few bars from an old song. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

Isen’s smile split his beard like a knife. “Our enemy has a sense of humor. He named his dummy corporation after ‘Hernando’s Hideaway.’ ”

“YOU were really good with Mariah,” Lily said, closing the door and reaching for her seat belt. “She liked you.”

Cynna patted her belly. “The little rider makes friends for me everywhere. Plus it turned out we had a lot in common.” She drew the seat belt back around her. “We head into the city now, right?”

“Right.” Lily’s arm hurt way more than she thought it should. She felt like crap. She did her best to ignore it.

“You going to take a pain pill? You look like you need one.”

“Not yet. They make me sleepy. I need to stay awake.”

“You also need to not keel over. I can’t help if you keel over.”

“I’ll be okay. I didn’t know you were a pole dancer back in your young-and-wild days.”

Cynna chuckled. “Hey, where I grew up, pole dancing was considered a great job, as long as you didn’t do it butt-naked. Butt-naked would be tacky, but as long as you had that G-string you were cool.”

“Hmm.” Lily dug out her iPhone. “I guess you have that in common with Cullen, too. He wore a G-string when he was dancing for a living. Not that he considers ‘naked’ to have any connection to ‘tacky.’ ”

“With a body like that, why would he? Besides, lupi don’t have the body issues we do.”

“No kidding.” Lily couldn’t make notes, but she needed to make a record of the interview, so she used the “record” feature on her phone. “Interview with Mariah Friar on September twenty-fifth. Subject was cooperative when questioned about her previous report concerning the unexplained absence of her father, Robert Friar, four years ago. At the time in question, subject was sixteen and was living with her father, who was gone from their shared residence from March thirteenth until March thirty-first of that year. Subject was told of his planned departure the night before he left. She was not told where he was going or when he would return, which was contrary to Friar’s usual habit.

“Subject received no explanation for this absence. Upon Friar’s return, subject questioned him about it. He became angry and she desisted. Subject arrived at these dates through reference to an old diary she kept at that time. She allowed me to look at it to confirm the dates, but she did not wish to release it to me.”

“Can’t blame her for that,” Cynna said.

Lily shot her a “hush” look. “Subject is convinced that, prior to this absence, her father did not possess significant magical abilities, and believes he was entirely unGifted. After his return, however, he possessed a shield or shields. Ah—due to the nature of subject’s Gift, Robert Friar’s new ability to shield was immediately apparent to her.” Lily had been careful not to mention the nature of Mariah’s Gift in official documents during her earlier investigation. She wasn’t sure if today’s oral notes would make it into an official report, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

“Subject was unaware of the nature of Robert Friar’s magical abilities, if any, aside from the shield or shields,” she concluded. “When it was suggested that those abilities might include clairaudience, however, she remembered events from that period in her life which seemed to support this possibility.” Lily touched the “end” button and paused before putting her phone up. “Anything you can think of that I should add?”

“Subject is one brave chick,” Cynna said promptly. “Subject’s father is one sicko bastard.”

“True, but not appropriate for a report.” Lily bent to stuff her phone back in her purse’s outside pocket. Bending hurt her arm. Everything hurt her damned arm. The purse was a problem, too. She needed it, but she had to wear it over her good arm, which hampered her. She could try using a fanny pack, but aside from the ugly factor, they didn’t hold much. Like her gun.

Not that she could shoot worth a damn left-handed. Maybe she should learn. “What else don’t I know about your wild and woolly youth?”

“All sorts of things. Like the time Abel arrested me.”

“Abel Karonski? He arrested you?”

“Yes, and no, I’m not telling—not until you tell me about this Cody Beck dude you’re going to see after you talk to the task force dude.”

“Why did you ask me that?” Lily demanded. “Who told you about Cody?”

“I know all, see all—”

“No, you don’t.”

Cynna grinned. “Maybe not, but you made a point of telling Rule you’d be tipping Beck off personally. You didn’t tell him the name of the task force dude you’re meeting with, but you told him Beck’s name in such a careful, casual way. Then there was the way he looked at you when you told him, as if—”

“That is deeply annoying.”

“Yeah, but you still want to know why Abel arrested me, so talk. Who’s Beck?”

“A good cop. And, yes, we had a thing years ago. But it’s the first part that counts.”

“That was a ridiculously skinny spilling of the beans. Don’t think you’re getting away with it, but first tell me why you’re tipping Beck off when you’re also passing that fat file to Task Force Dude.”

Lily drummed her fingers, hunting words for what was mostly a hunch, stringing together an assortment of conjectures.

The meet she’d set up with the DEA component of the task force wasn’t hunch. She’d take Mark Burke to lunch and tell him about a tip she had from a reliable informant, and she’d give him a dossier on Friar and his chief lieutenants. Because once Lily learned what Arjenie’s sister could do, she’d thought of the new, untraceable date rape drug with a magical component. The drug they called Do Me.

Friar was spending a lot of money setting up Humans First. The militia he’d co-opted, for example. Rule doubted they were working for free. Friar and his lieutenants did a lot of traveling, too. He had money, sure, but he was no Bill Gates. Maybe he needed deeper pockets. Maybe he got a kick out of selling Do Me to finance his operation.

To rescue Dya, they needed a reason to search Friar’s properties. Suspicion of the manufacture and distribution of a banned substance would do the trick, but they needed evidence, something to take to a judge.

Lily didn’t have that. She was on the multidepartmental task force coordinating the efforts of various agencies, but the actual investigating was done by the DEA and by local law enforcement … like the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office. Where Cody Beck was a deputy.

“The longer you’re silent, the more you get my imagination going,” Cynna said. “Like maybe you don’t trust Task Force Dude.”

“No, Burke seems like a good cop,” Lily said. “I think he’s committed to finding and stopping whoever’s making Do Me, but … I don’t know. He’s a careful sort, and he’s overworked, and I can’t give him a solid link between Friar and Do Me. That’s what I want him to find. I think he’ll check out my tip, but if he doesn’t find something pretty fast to hold his interest, it’ll go on the back burner.”

“He’ll listen, but he’ll grain-of-salt it. Beck’s your backup plan because he’ll believe you.”

“Pretty much, yeah.” She grinned suddenly. “Cody and I do have that history you’re so curious about. He’ll take what I say seriously.”

“Speaking of history, tell me about—”

“Just a sec.” Lily’s phone had beeped. That meant a text message, which she didn’t usually check immediately. But she didn’t object to an interruption right now, so she bent and retrieved her phone.

It didn’t take long to read. “Son of a bitch.”

“What?” Then Cynna’s phone dinged.

“That will be a message from Croft,” Lily said. “Looks like Jeff made it in to see Croft okay. The MCD is operating under Code 300 until further notice.”

THE next time Rule was summoned to Isen’s office, Cullen went with him. He’d just finished the charms they needed for tomorrow—and, being Cullen, he was curious.

Benedict was already there, leaning over Arjenie’s shoulder. “Good,” he said. “Take a look.”

Arjenie began explaining before Rule reached her. “I’ve been running searches of several databases using Friar’s name and those of his key people. Breck’s popped up because Paul Chittenden purchased it last year.”

“Friar’s West Coast lieutenant.” Rule peered at the screen, which showed another invoice. This one showed that Breck’s Disposal had purchased a high-end security system last April.

“Now, Breck’s is a pretty small outfit.” She brought up another window, which showed a tax return. “They grossed a couple hundred thousand last year, and, as you can see, they actually had a net loss. So it seemed odd for them to buy such an expensive security system. It took some digging, but I found the address where that system was delivered.” The next window she clicked on showed an aerial map. “Right there.” She pointed at the red marker Googlemaps put at the address. “It’s a small house in the middle of nowhere. According to county records, that house is unoccupied … but it’s the only structure on the western edge of the mountain bordering Friar’s property. Or hill,” she added. “I don’t know if you call that a mountain or a hill.”

“First clue,” Cullen said. “It’s in the mountains.”

“That makes sense,” Arjenie said, “Only the elevation isn’t …” She glanced up at Benedict, who’d rested one hand on her shoulder. “And that’s not relevant.”

No, it wasn’t. “Good find,” Rule said. “It looks like whatever Friar built under the guise of replacing his swimming pool, he’s got it wired against intruders.”

“So it seems. Naturally, I wondered what Breck’s Disposal disposes of. Turns out it’s medical waste. And in the past year, they’ve particularly focused on disposing of unused portions of an intravenously administered MRI contrast agent that, until recently, was used to enhance images in MRI and MRA procedures.”

He looked at her blankly.

Patiently she said, “When the government began phasing out the use of gadolinium in MRI imaging agents, it also regulated the disposal of existing stocks of such solutions. That is the type of medical waste Breck’s has been handling lately.”

Gadolinium. The key ingredient in … “Gado. The bastard is extracting the gadolinium and using it to make gado.”

She nodded and pushed her glasses up. “Yes, I think he must be. The question is, why?”

Rule’s eyebrows lifted. “Because gado renders us weak and unable to Change.”

“I know that. But why does he need it? Um …” She looked at Benedict.

He said it for her. “Why does he need gado if he’s got Dya to make potions for him?”

Rule thought a moment, then said grimly, “Quantity.”

Benedict got it immediately. “If Friar’s having Dya make the magical part of that Do Me drug the way Lily was talking about earlier, she probably can’t make a large amount of gado, too. Which brings up some interesting questions. Why does he want a large amount of it?”

“And how much might he have?” Rule looked down at Arjenie. “How much gadolinum has he been able to access?”

“I don’t know.” Her fingers sped over the keyboard again. “But I’ll see if I can find out.”