Blood Lines

Dear Reader,

It's been a little over three months since I met Rule. It seems a lot longer. I could turn all mushy and say it feels as if my life began when our eyes met that night at Club Hell, but I'd be lying. I had a life before him—bumpy and imperfect, but a life.

Just about everything in that life has changed, though. That is why it feels like a lot more than three months have passed.

I was a homicide cop back then. That's all I'd ever wanted to be—at least since the age of eight, when I learned that the monsters are real and look a lot like the rest of us. Now I'm working for the FBI, Unit 12 in MCD—that's the Magical Crimes Division—and I'm bonded for life to the prince of the Nokolai Clan.

Two months ago I was investigating the first West Coast killing in decades by a werewolf—excuse me, a lupus. Rule Turner looked to be my prime suspect. I realized pretty quickly he couldn't be, but it took longer to find out who was behind it all. A nutty telepath, a charismatic cult leader, and an ancient goddess-wannabe had teamed up to destroy all lupi in the United States, and they didn't object to killing a few humans along the way to taking over the country.

We stopped them. By "we" I mean Rule and me and a few others, like my grandmother—who's gone to China, dammit, on some sort of personal pilgrimage. She left about a week before I ended up in hell. Literally.

See, I killed the telepath. She was doing her damnedest to kill me at the time, so I didn't have much choice. But the cult's leader got away, and he took her staff with him. Or maybe I should say Her staff, because it was tied to the goddess we don't name. We had to find and destroy the staff, which meant tracking down Harlowe, the cult leader.

We found him. It didn't turn out well for any of us. Harlowe got dead, along with some others. I got split in two, with half of me blasted into the demon realm.

Rule went with me. That part of me, anyway.

Don't ask me to explain this split business. Cullen— that's Rule's friend, the sorcerer—might be able to, but you'd be making a mistake to ask. The man looks like walking sin, but he turns into the nutty professor when he starts talking spellwork and theory.

It gets pretty confusing after that. Neither part of me knew the other one existed. The one in hell—or Dis, as the natives call it—had no memory. She did have Rule, but he was stuck in wolf form. The me still on Earth knew Rule wasn't dead because of the mate bond, but finding him was another story. Eventually some of the lupus priestesses— they're called Rhejes—plus Cullen managed to open a small hellgate, which is only a little less illegal than mass murder. Me, Cullen, Cynna, and an obnoxious gnome named Max went after Rule.

Dis is split into regions, each ruled by its prince. The goddess-wannabe had infiltrated one of those regions by sending her avatar—think of an avatar as a sentient cup, with most of the person poured out to make room for some of the goddess—to make a deal with its prince. They had a falling out. The demon ate the avatar and went nuts, and both sides of me found ourselves in the middle of a war in hell.

Both of me were very surprised by the dragons.

The Other Me and Rule had been scooped up by a dragon early on. This hadn't seemed like a lucky break at the time; more like a nasty way to die. But in the end it was a dragon who knew how to get us back—get me back with my Other Me, that is, and get all of us back to Earth… including him and about twenty of his huge, beautiful, and deadly buddies.

We didn't escape unscathed. The authorities decided to pretend it wasn't possible to open a hellgate, so we weren't in trouble for that. After all, the gate vanished as soon as we returned. But Rule nearly died, and I… I know things I never thought it was possible to know. Death isn't the absolute I used to believe it to be.

And the dragons? They vanished so thoroughly that some people are talking about Hollywood publicity stunts. It did happen in California, after all.

This is the story of what happened after we all came home, sort of like Dorothy & Co. after Oz. I'm betting you thought everything was peachy for Dorothy once she got home.

We forget that Kansas is no safer than Oz. After all, that's where the tornado hit.