Blood Challenge

FORTY

ARJENIE woke up as they passed Clanhome’s gates. Lily gave her the high points—or low points—of what they knew as quickly as possible, but she wasn’t sure how much Arjenie took in. She was quiet, anxious, maybe shocky.

Many people went through most of their lives without ever seeing someone die, much less by violence. Arjenie had watched her lover kill. It was going to affect her, it was going to affect Benedict, and it would damn sure affect how they were with each other. Lily didn’t know how and was trying not to think about it. None of her guesses came out happy.

Nettie met them at door. She checked Cullen out briefly, told him his head would stop hurting sooner or later, then began unwrapping the elastic bandage around Rule’s ribs. While she did, Lily checked on Benedict.

They’d put him on a couch in the living room, with two guards—one who made sure a sleep charm stayed in contact with his skin, the other ten feet away with a weapon drawn. Just in case. Interestingly, none of the lupi smelled the fury on him now, and hadn’t since he was knocked out. Whatever chemical exudation their noses picked up, it only kicked in when he was awake. But when Lily touched him, she still felt that oily magic.

Less of it, though. That was a relief. Cobb had apparently thrown off the effects of the potion within a couple hours, but a sample of one didn’t guarantee anything. Of course, Cobb had also woken up suicidal.

Sample of one, Lily reminded herself. Probably not applicable. Benedict wouldn’t be waking up in a tiny cell with no hope of freedom.

When she straightened, Arjenie was talking to Isen, who’d put an arm around her. Nettie was standing in front of Rule with both hands on his bare rib cage, her eyes closed, muttering a chant.

Lupi heal some things faster than others. Their bodies eliminate invading agents—poisons, drugs, bacteria—so quickly that the invader never has a chance to do any damage. When there is actual damage—from a knife, a bullet, a kick—healing takes longer. How long depends on the injury and the lupus.

Rule was a fast healer, even for his people. Lily waited to hear just how fast.

Nettie’s eyes opened. “That’s all I can give you right now,” she told him. “If I’m going to help Billy, I have to save some for him. You said he’s at Alvarado?”

Rule smiled, bent, and kissed her cheek. “You’ve eased me considerably, Nettie. Thank you. Yes, I told Myron to take him to Alvarado. It was close, and you’ve spoken favorably of their treatment of spinal injuries. I’ll send Myron’s contact info to your phone so you can call him if you need to.”

“Good. I’m going to wrap you again.” She retrieved the elastic bandage and began winding. “Compression will keep you more comfortable, and you don’t have to worry about pneumonia. Two of your ribs are cracked, not badly. They’ll be eighty percent healed by tonight. The third one was broken and displaced and poking your damn lung.” Her lips tightened as she fastened the binding. Nettie was offended by damage to her people. “No puncture, but it was abrading the surface, which your body kept having to heal. I got the ends lined up and there’s soft callus forming now. By tonight there will probably be some hard callus, but hard callus does not equal healed. That rib will still be fragile. You’ll be careful.”

“As careful as I can.” Rule glanced at his father, who’d headed for the big dining table.

It wasn’t until then that Lily noticed who else sat at the table—which just proved how distracted she’d been. A round, cheerful old woman sat at the table knitting. Her dress was full, fuchsia, and floral, sprouting blooms in a half dozen unlikely colors. Her hair was white. So were her eyes.

Lily didn’t know what had caused the Nokolai Rhej’s blindness. Whatever it was, her lack of vision was more excuse than cause, Lily thought, for the woman’s habit of seldom leaving her cabin. Blindness was a loss for anyone, but less restrictive for her than for others. She was a highly Gifted physical empath, able to sense objects around her.

But how did it let her knit? “Sera,” Lily said, using the title lupi gave her. Lily had been given permission to use her name, but she didn’t understand the rules for when it was and wasn’t okay, so she seldom used it. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

“You’ll be talking about our great enemy,” the Rhej said, her head tilted down as if she were watching the needles busily clicking together. Whatever she was knitting was a much calmer color than she wore, a soft blue gray. “I’m needed for that.” She lifted her head for the world as if she were looking straight at Arjenie, who stood uncertain and alone several feet away. “Arjenie, isn’t it? Come sit by me. You and I will need to talk later.”

NETTIE left—with, much to her disgust, an armed escort. Isen informed her she was potentially a target and she wasn’t going alone. The rest of them—save Benedict—sat down at the long dining table to plan.

When Lily first became Nokolai, she’d thought of Isen as the clan’s CEO, setting general policies and goals, but handing off the implementation to others. The Council of Elders might be considered his board of directors. Rule was CFO; he handled the overall finances and investments. Benedict handled security. In all honesty, she’d thought Isen didn’t work as hard as his two sons. It had taken months for her perspective to shift enough for her to understand what his job really was.

Isen handled the people.

It was a full-time, hands-on job. Kind of like being a stay-at-home mom, she thought, a lot of what he did was invisible, with success measured in absences. Fights that didn’t break out. Arguments that didn’t deepen into enmity. Daughters who weren’t ignored. Sons who didn’t go wild. Men who didn’t stay stuck and angry in jobs they hated. And a lack of Challenges.

Little c challenges were common in the clans. Lupi settled grievances and established status that way. They were fought either two-legged or four-legged, and with varying degrees of formality. Killing was not allowed. If you killed your opponent in a little c challenge, you could be put to death yourself if your Rho determined it was intentional. If the death was clearly an accident, you’d still be in big trouble.

Big C Challenges were fought only in wolf-form. Internal Challenges could be issued to another clan member, to the Lu Nuncio, or to the Rho. There was a complex code for Challenging the Lu Nuncio or the Rho, and such Challenges were rare in most clans, most of the time. If a Challenge was issued between clan members, the Rho had to give consent. There was a good chance he’d lose one of his clan if he allowed it to proceed.

In any Challenge, if a combatant submitted, his life must be spared. But by submitting he acknowledged himself in the wrong and bound himself to fulfill whatever penance or payment the victor decreed.

A clan Challenge was like an internal Challenge that way. But since it was fought to settle differences between clans rather than individuals, if one Lu Nuncio submitted to the other, his entire clan had to accept whatever terms the other Lu Nuncio imposed. If the Rho of the losing clan refused the terms, he had two choices: repudiate his heir and remove him from the clan. Or war.

That’s why Clan Challenges were rare and almost always to the death. Lu Nuncios were lousy at submitting and unlikely to give their enemy a blank check.

Lily had learned some of this from Rule, some from the Rhej, whose job included teaching a new clan member what she needed to know. She wasn’t sure how it changed things when a Rho decided to answer a Challenge personally, but it was bound to raise the stakes.

Rule’s father was over ninety years old. Those were lupi years, of course, but even in lupi years, that put him into middle age. Javier was young, quick, strong, and considered a very good fighter. Isen was rolling dice at an extremely high-stakes game, and the odds were against him.

From what Lily could tell, he was delighted with himself.

Oh, he was brisk enough as he opened by informing them he’d spoken with Manuel, who’d said that he backed his son’s decisions. No one seemed surprised by that. But there was a merry glint in his eyes.

“I asked Cynna if she could confirm Brian’s presence at Friar’s,” Isen said. “She said she could certainly Find a lupus, if one was there. Earth doesn’t block her. Since it seems unlikely Friar is entertaining multiple lupi guests, I thought that would be enough. Given the quality and strength of her Gift, she didn’t think she’d have to get close enough to be in danger, but I sent Paul and Jason with her to be sure.”

Cullen grunted. Clearly he didn’t like having Cynna anywhere near Friar, but he didn’t say so. “I’d like to know how Arjenie could knock out her bonded mate.”

Arjenie looked wan and worried. “I don’t know. I don’t understand this mate bond thing, but I thought … I was told my magic couldn’t affect Benedict. That’s why I waited so long. I had to think it out. I expected to knock out everyone but him and Lily and maybe Cullen. He—Benedict left the ones who’d fallen alone. I was scared he’d go after Lily if she was the only one standing, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You did the right thing,” Lily said firmly. “I’ve an idea about why it worked the way it did. When a mate bond is new, it’s really tight. The obvious result is that you can’t be far apart, but with Rule and me, it also meant we got some … call it overlap. Not all the time, but when things were really tense, I got a bit of his hearing and he got a bit of my imperviousness to magic. It didn’t last.” She glanced at Rule, remembering where they’d been when she heard almost like he did. “Maybe when Arjenie knocked herself out, Benedict was tapped into her Gift, so it affected him, too.”

“Hmm.” Isen was thoughtful. “So Benedict was vulnerable to what happened to Arjenie because of the mate bond, not in spite of it.”

“I’m just guessing, but yeah.”

He turned to Arjenie and spoke gently. “Arjenie, what do you want to do?”

She blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“You’ve had a difficult experience. Do you need a sedative or some privacy to think or meditate?”

“You don’t want me to hear what you’re planning?”

“I need your help in another way, if you’re able to offer it. We need to know more about what Friar built underground. Specifically, there has to be a back door. People have left through his house who didn’t come in through his house. I’m hoping you can find it.”

Arjenie bit her lip, then thrust her hand out to Lily.

Lily took it—winced, and let go. “You’re shouting.”

“Sorry. I get anxious and try too hard, and … please.”

Lily tried again. Arjenie may have been trying to think in clear sentences, but she was too agitated. Her thoughts tumbled over each other so quickly it took Lily a moment to sort out what Arjenie desperately wanted to say. “Isen, she wants you to promise you’ll rescue Dya, too, which means you have to get the tears for her. Arjenie can’t tell you what they look like, but Dya will be able to. She thinks Dya will be willing to leave now. Ah … she thinks Dya refused to leave earlier out of fear for her—Dya didn’t think Arjenie could get the tears without being caught—and because Brian needed her. That he needed the healing potions she made.”

Isen nodded. “I can’t promise results. I can promise we will try as hard to retrieve Dya and the tears as we would to reclaim one of our own.”

“I wasn’t asked to promise,” Lily added, “but there’s no way I’m leaving Dya there.”

Arjenie sighed in relief and let go of Lily’s hand. “I’ll do anything I can to help. I don’t know what more I can find, but I’ll do my best.” Her mouth twitched into a quick smile, there-and-gone. “Research will settle me better than meditation, so I’ll get started right away.” She pushed her chair back and darted a glance at Benedict, sleeping peacefully on a couch at the other end of the long room … with a .38 trained on him. “What’s going to happen with him?”

Isen answered. “Lily will keep checking. Once the potion is out of his system, we’ll let him wake. After that, we’ll see what kind of shape he’s in.”

Emotions flitted over her face in a cascade too quick and jumbled to read. Lily wondered if she smelled as confused and unhappy as she looked. She left without saying anything more.

Rule leaned closer to say, low-voiced, “You weren’t asked to promise because there is no way you are taking part in this rescue.”

“Arjenie made an assumption. You are, too.”

“You’re wounded, unable to fight, and we are not going in legally. You can’t be part of it.”

Lily had thought this through on the way here. She knew she had a tough sales job ahead—but Rule wasn’t the one she most needed to convince. “Until recently, the law hurt and hindered lupi instead of offering the protection it’s supposed to provide. You’re accustomed to working around it or outside it.” She looked at Rule, Cullen, the Rhej, Isen. “That’s your default. Go in, get it done, don’t get caught. If Friar were the only enemy involved, that might work. But he isn’t.”

“If you’re planning to arrest Her Bitchness,” Cullen said dryly, “I’m going to think it was you instead of me who got knocked in the head.”

“Think about who her agent is. Robert Friar is determined to rouse public opinion against lupi. That’s been her theme, too. When she first moved against lupi last year, she tried to get Rule framed for murder. Bad press for you. More distrust between you and the law in general. Now think about who’s been attacked—and how. Think about what the potion was designed to do.”

“Hmm.” Isen fingered his beard. “I do believe you’ve spotted a pattern. The attacks on lupi haven’t been designed to kill us. Killing is a by-product. She wants to turn humans against us.”

“Devil’s advocate here,” Cullen said. “We don’t know what the potion dumped in our water supply would have done.”

“Which means we can’t factor it in,” Lily said. “Either for or against.”

“It doesn’t fit her previous strategies,” Rule said slowly. “During the Great War, she pitted one group of humans against another. She didn’t try to turn all humans against us. I’m not saying she couldn’t have learned a new trick, but—”

“Eriodus,” the Rhej murmured without looking up from the yarn in her lap. “The Twins.”

That must have meant something to Rule. “Ah. Yes, it worked with the Twins, didn’t it?” He looked at Lily. “By giving the humans of a small but strategic kingdom a common enemy to unite against—the king’s twin sons, who were accused of dabbling in death magic—she was able to insinuate her worship into the highest councils. Eventually her agents controlled the kingdom.”

“So we’re agreed?” Lily asked, looking around. “She doesn’t just want to destroy lupi. She wants to use your destruction to increase her power among the general population. She wants a pogrom, a witch hunt, a second Purge, with lupi as the target.”

“I’ll agree that’s one of her plans,” Isen said. “She plans in multiples. You may have noted that she was setting this up with Friar well before the Azá attempted to open that hellgate. If they’d succeeded, she wouldn’t have needed Friar.”

“Wouldn’t she?” Rule said. “Let’s speculate. Say the hellgate had opened and the world is at war with demons. Friar would be talking the same ‘us against them’ rant he spews now—and he’d have an even bigger, angrier, more frightened audience. How hard would it be to extend the fear of demons to fear of all nonhumans? Perhaps that was her original plan. Or one of them.”

A chill ran down Lily’s spine. The Great Bitch had so nearly succeeded … “Now think about who she wanted just plain dead, no tricky PR campaign needed. First, the head of the federal Unit that investigates crimes connected to magic. Second, the federal agent closely allied with lupi.”

Isen’s eyebrows lifted. “You’re thinking that she wants to cut us off from the support and protection of our government.”

“I’m thinking she doesn’t want the lupi and the government working together. That’s what she’s trying to prevent, which means that together we threaten her plans. Which means you can’t afford to burn any legal bridges tonight.”

Isen shook his head. “It could just as easily mean it will take both legal agents and those acting outside the law to stop her. The human world doesn’t know about her. They can’t and won’t react to what she does quickly and decisively enough to stop her. We can.”

“Sure,” Cullen muttered. “If we ever stop fighting each other.”

“Here’s a clue,” the Rhej said, her needles busy. “You have two Chosens now. One is an FBI agent. The other works for the FBI. I’m sure there were many reasons Lily and Arjenie were Chosen. The Lady is efficient—she layers many purposes into a single gift. But I think it’s no coincidence you have two Lady-touched who are connected to the law.”

Isen frowned and didn’t respond.

“Look, I know why you have to get Brian out,” Lily said. “But I have to ask—what if the tip about him was deliberate? Maybe Dya had orders to call you. Maybe she’s sincere, but has been tricked or manipulated. What if that’s why no one called the cops today? Because Friar wants you free to invade his place, and get caught doing it.”

“I’m not buying it,” Rule said. “I don’t know why no reporter showed up, but I don’t think that’s the reason. Friar’s smart, but I don’t think he’s capable of the sort of devious, layers-within-layers planning you’re talking about. She is, but she’s limited by her tools.”

“Friar has some kind of deal with the sidhe lord who provided Dya. I’m no expert on the sidhe, but they’ve got a rep for the devious and the subtle. Layers-within-layers, like you said.”

Isen’s eyebrows shot up. Rule started to say something. Stopped.

“Son of a bitch,” Cullen said. “She’s right. The sidhe adore subtlety, and we don’t know jack shit about this elf. Maybe he isn’t involved at all. He hands over Dya for some unknown consideration, then heads back to work on his own plots back home. Or maybe he’s the boss of this operation and pops in for a cup of tea and a status update twice a week. We don’t know.”

Rule summed that possibility up nicely. “Shit.”

Isen spoke. “You convince me that we’ll have to be especially wary. But trap or no, we have to rescue Brian, and I don’t see how your participation would help. You’re injured and not up to a fight. Your presence would divide Rule’s attention.”

Lily drummed her fingers once, impatient. “I don’t go in as part of a lupi SWAT team. Kidnapping is a federal crime. We’ve received a tip about a kidnap victim that I judge to be valid. I go to Friar’s front door and present him with a search warrant. The rest of you need to find a back door.”

It wasn’t that simple, of course.

Normally, kidnappings were investigated by regular FBI, not the Unit. But add in gado, a lupus victim, potions, and an out-realm being, and Lily could easily argue that this particular kidnapping required a Unit agent. Normally, too, a kidnapping was treated as a hostage situation—you went in with your weapon drawn, not with a search warrant. But the warrant would be as much legal sleight-of-hand as it was a serious search tool.

One more “normally” she wasn’t observing: her backup. Oh, she wasn’t going in alone. The warrant made a good lifeline; if she vanished, there’d be a judge who’d point a finger in the right direction. But Friar could decide that a pointed finger was the lesser of two evils, compared to getting arrested right then and there. Criminals were like that. So backup, yes, but not regular FBI. The situation was too volatile, with too much she couldn’t tell them. Just asking the wrong question at the wrong time could land them all in “oh, fuck.” Instead, she wanted to take Cullen and Cynna.

Cynna would not go into the tunnel with them. She’d Find it. As for Cullen—well, his presence might come back to bite her later. Unit agents were allowed wide discretion in employing Gifted consultants, and a few months ago, she wouldn’t have thought twice about using Cullen in a search. But that was then, this was now, and it was Robert Friar’s home they’d be searching. He would claim that Cullen planted anything they found. They’d be lucky if he didn’t sue.

And it was absurd to worry about that when the thing that would really get her ass handed to her was outsourcing a break-in by lupi.

By the time Cynna returned, they’d agreed on the basic plan. “The bad news,” she said, tossing her purse on a chair, “is that there is no lupus in or beneath Friar’s place.”

Cullen scowled. “Does that mean there’s good news?”

“More like not-quite-so-bad,” she said, digging in her purse. “There is a tunnel. I mapped it as closely as I could by Finding for air beneath the ground—which is not as easy as it sounds, believe me. No underground rooms that I could Find, but I couldn’t follow it very far. No good cover to hide from the guys with guns.” She pulled out an aerial map, unfolded it, and spread it on the table. “Here’s Friar’s house, see? I’ve drawn the location of the tunnel in red.”

“Heads up into the mountains,” Rule said. “Or under them, I guess.”

Lily frowned. “Why would he go to so much trouble and expense to create a tunnel into the mountains? An underground shrine or dungeon or drug-making lab I can see. But this?”

“A node?” Cullen tipped his head, considering his own suggestion. “If you want your elf buddy to be able to drop by, you need a node.”

“Wouldn’t you have noticed a node near Friar’s place?”

“Not if it’s far enough below ground. The power gets absorbed or dispersed by that much earth pretty thoroughly.” He frowned. “Seems to be a pretty long tunnel, though. That’s both expensive and hard to hide while in process.”

“I found something,” Arjenie called from the other side of the room. She was heading toward them, carrying a laptop. “It’s not exactly what we’re looking for, but I thought you ought to have a look.” She reached them, hesitated. “Something’s up?”

Rule explained briefly.

“Let’s see.” She leaned over the table, looking at Cynna’s map. “Yes, this makes sense. Let me show you.” She set the laptop down and touched a key, waking it from sleep. The screen lit with a puzzling diagram. “This idea kept nibbling at me. It was sort of wild goose-ish, but I wasn’t having much luck looking for the back door, so I gave it a try. Lily, you probably remember that after the Azá created all that trouble at that underground node, the USGS got tasked with mapping that cave system.”

Lily shook her head. “I never heard about that.”

“Oh. Well, Ruben did, and he had me check on the progress every so often. One of his hunches, I think. They never finished—first there were budget cuts, then the gnomes applied to have the cave system added to their Underways, which is why the partial map got classified Secret. You know how gnomes are about privacy. But I remembered looking at a schematic of the part that did get mapped, and I thought … well, here it is.”

It looked like spaghetti to Lily. Radioactive spaghetti. Wiggly white lines glowed against a black background with a few glowing blobs—caves, caverns?—strung along some of the loops.

“Of course, you can’t tell much from this,” Arjenie said. “Here’s the 3-D view.” She hit a few keys and the lines separated, becoming a 3-D representation. “They tied a bunch of key points to GPS, so I was able to transpose it onto an aerial map. I’ll show you.” She moved the cursor, clicked. Glowing spaghetti suddenly overlay the tan, gray, and dull green of mountains. “This is the tunnel we’re interested in.”

She shifted the screen to follow one particular strand of spaghetti that stretched out straighter and farther than most … and the aerial view was suddenly familiar. A whole lot like Cynna’s map, in fact, complete with a view of Friar’s roof and swimming pool.

Lily felt cold. Then hot. “Are you telling us that Friar’s tunnel connects to the cave system the Azá used?” On the list of places she never wanted to see again, that one would be number two. Right after hell.

“I can’t say for sure. My tunnel ends more than a quarter mile from the one Cynna found, and I don’t know if that’s because it really ends or if that’s just where the mapping stopped. Plus I’ll have to check the notations about depth to see if the two tunnels are in the same plane. But it looks like they could connect, doesn’t it?”

It sure as hell did. “Arjenie, you said the gnomes petitioned to have this added to their Underways. Was their petition granted?”

“I don’t know,” she said apologetically. “I didn’t check.”

“Find out. Unless the petition was refused out of hand, I’m betting it’s still pending. It’s been less than a year, and if the gnomes claimed that cave system, they wouldn’t tolerate Friar’s little tunnel.”

“Okay.” She looked puzzled. “You sound really cheerful about that.”

Isen smiled. “I believe I know why. Once the government agrees to consider such a petition, it becomes the custodian of the caves in question.”

Lily shot him a grin. “Exactly. In which case, we’ve not only found our back door—it’s on federal property.”