Blood Lines

PROLOGUE

2:52 A.M., December 20 (Greenwich)

JUST outside Miller's Dale, Derbyshire, two budding naturalists snuck out of their cottage. Julie and Marnie weren't supposed to be out at night, of course, but they had every hope their mother would never know. She always slept very soundly after one of her "girls' night out" parties. They meant to find and photograph the pair of Mustela erminea whose tracks they'd spotted yesterday.

At least, Marnie was convinced they were stoat tracks. Julie kept annoying her sister by pointing out that they might have been made by Mustela nivalis, known to the Latin-impaired as the common weasel. Both left five-toed tracks and were largely nocturnal, though weasels often went about in the daytime, too.

But they'd also found a tuft of white fur nearby. "It could have come from a hare," Julie said for the fifth or sixth time.

"That was not hair from a hare."

"How do you know?"

"I just do." Privately Marnie had to admit she couldn't be sure, but it would be ever so lovely if they could find the weasel's beautiful white-coated cousin.

It was possible. Stoats weren't that uncommon, and Miller's Dale was blessed with not one, not two, but three nature preserves nearby: the two belonging to the Derbyshire Naturalists' Trust at Priestcliffe Lees and Station Quarry, and the National Nature Reserve at Monk's Dale. Being in the Peak District, the area was also lousy with hiking trails, not to mention tourists and other pests.

No hikers now. The moon was a lumpy golden goblin hanging low on the horizon, just over half-full. There was plenty of light for the girls to keep to the road that tracked the River Wye. Their breaths puffed pale in the still air. Marnie tucked her hands in her pockets, feeling the bulky shape of her new Nikon. She'd taken about a hundred pictures, trying to get the shutter speed, f-stop, and ISO right for night pictures. She'd preset everything. If they saw a Mustela erminea, all she had to do was point and shoot.

Some plans are never fulfilled. The girls made it less than halfway to the area where they'd spotted the tracks when they saw a soft glow coming from a small copse off to the left.

"Some stupid bugger has left a fire burning," Julie said.

"Maybe." The light wasn't flickering, like a fire would. "Looks more like a torch."

"Not moving, is it? C'mon. We'd better check."

Marnie jigged from foot to foot, wanting badly to pursue her stoats… but if that light did come from an abandoned campfire, it needed to be put out. "All right. But keep it quiet, in case it's just teenagers."

The girls were good at moving quietly so as not to alarm wildlife, but it was much darker beneath the trees. Still, they reached the small, circular clearing at the center of the copse without making too much racket. And stopped dead—then ducked behind a tree.

There were fairies in the fairy ring.

That's what Marnie thought they were, anyway, though no one had seen a fairy in… well, forever. But they were little, so little they probably wouldn't have come up to her knee if any of them had been standing… which they weren't. Plus they had great, huge, butterfly wings. And they glowed. As if they were made out of LEDs, a soft light radiated from all over their pale, perfect little bodies.

Which she could see quite clearly because they were naked. And what they were doing… well, she'd seen animals do that, but never anything that looked so much like people.

Marnie yanked her camera out of her pocket and clicked it on. She pressed the shutter button and prayed. Pressed it again. Again.

"They're doing sex!" Julie whispered, shocked.

Marnie pinched her to make her be quiet, but it was too late. One of them—a female with yellow wings with big brown spots— stopped what she was doing to the male with reddish wings. Her little head swiveled as she looked around. She twittered something.

Marnie gaped. The little fairy had teeth. Pointy teeth, like a cat.

Several of them laughed. One chirped more words, and they looked all around as if they were spooked. A bitty little man with blue wings cried out and pointed right at the tree where Marnie and Julie were hiding.

The biggest female, a slender redhead with wings the color of dusk, raised her hands over her head. She cried out some words real sharp, like she was bossing someone around. She was loud, too, louder than someone that little ought to be. Her teeny hands closed into fists.

They all vanished, and it was very dark beneath the trees.

The girls did get in trouble for sneaking out, but it was worth it. Marnie sold her pictures to the local newspaper and then to a wire service. Eventually she even forgave her sister for opening her big mouth and scaring the fairies off.

8:52 p.m. December 19 (local);

2:52 a.m. December 20 (Greenwich)

LOS Lobos perched precariously on the mountainous coast of Michoacan, Mexico, where the peaks of the Sierra Madre del Sur crowded the coast so tightly they all but fell off into the Pacific. The tiny pueblo straddled one of the few roads into the mountains, a bumpy cement snake that shed its paving seven kilometers up to wriggle off in happy obscurity, becoming a dirt trail usable only by donkeys or those with no regard for their vehicle's undercarriage.

There was no inn or hotel in the village, but Senora de Pedrosa, old Enrique's widow, had an extra bedroom once she booted out her third-oldest grandson—who, after all, was well able to stay with his brother and sister-in-law for a few days. She'd rented that room to the stranger who slept there now, dreaming of darkness.

Cullen awoke with a start. For a second he didn't know where or when he was, but there was light. He could see.

Not that there was much to see. He'd fallen asleep at the little table his hostess had provided, dozing off with his head on his arms.

Gah. Tedious dream… though not as tedious as the other one. He'd hoped that one would quit squirming up from his unconscious now that he was Nokolai, but no such luck,

Cullen straightened, scrubbed his face with both hands, and twisted to stretch the kinks out of his spine. Apparently his recent late nights, added to tramping through the jungle, had caught up to him. What time was it, anyway?

He picked up the phone that served better as a clock than a communication device this far from any cell towers. The glowing display informed him it was a ridiculous hour to be asleep. Well, he was awake now.

What had woken him?

He frowned. The dream? But it had never woken him up before. He listened, sniffed, but didn't hear or smell anything unusual…

Then he felt it again. Soft as the brush of a feather, something tickled his shields.

Instinctively he snapped them tighter. What the hell—?

Then he smiled. Of course. Someone had noticed him, was trying to turn him aside. Who else but the one he sought?

His hand went to his chest, where the longer of his two necklaces dangled. He opened the pouch—leather, covered with silk— and removed the contents. For a moment he simply savored it, turning it over between his fingers.

It was hard and smooth as glass and shaped like a large flower petal. The edges were sharp enough to make him careful how he handled it. In daylight, he knew, it would be dark gray with an opalescent sheen, as if coated by oily water. At the moment his eyes could barely make it out.

But Cullen didn't rely only on his eyes to see. And his recent blinding, now healed, had only made his other vision sharper. With that vision he saw color: alive, glittering color. Blue for water, silver for air, brown for earth—red sparks, yellow, green—all the colors of magic danced across it. But underneath… ah, underneath them all, it was the deepest purple, a purple darkened nearly to black.

Purple, the color of those of the Blood. What he held had come from the oldest of the magical species, the one made more purely from magic than any other. Chances were, Cullen thought as he smoothed his thumb along the glassy surface, that no one on Earth had held one of these in four or five hundred years.

A dragon's scale, so recently shed that the magic of its former owner still lived in it.

A dragon who might be looking for Cullen, as Cullen was looking for him—though for different reasons. He grinned into the darkness, his hand closing around the sharp edges of his prize.

10:52 a.m. December 20 (local);

2:52 a.m. December 20 (Greenwich)

EIGHTY kilometers outside Chengdu in Sichuan Province, China, an old woman was climbing a mountain—quite a short mountain, actually, though the trail was steep. Few took that trail in winter, but today both land and sky were clear of snow. The sun was a shiny pebble overhead.

She wasn't alone. Five others lagged behind, perhaps not as keen as she on reaching the Taoist temple at the trail's end. The cold annoyed Madam Li Lei Yu, bringing as it did intimations of age and mortality. But then, her pilgrimage was itself a reminder of those states: both the immediate pilgrimage up this blasted mountain and the larger one that had brought her back to her homeland.

After arriving in Chengdu she'd learned that the man she'd come here to see—a monk—had died last year. She was annoyed with An Du. Couldn't he have waited a little longer? She would make the trip to his grave, but there was a strong flavor of "get it over with" to her climb.

She was twenty feet from the top and out of sight of the others when it hit. Not dizziness, though she lost track of up and down. Not blindness nor deafness, though her vision went gray and her hearing faded. Something strong and other blew through her, snuffing out her senses like candles, sending her sliding across reality as if it were ice.

She came to lying on her back with the sun still shining, the rest of the climbers still on the other side of the bend, and a name on her lips that hadn't been spoken aloud in four hundred years.

Li Lei didn't speak that name now, either. But it sang inside her, opening vistas of terror and joy, memory and change. For several breaths she didn't move, letting her heart settle back into its usual steady beat. Letting her thoughts settle, too, around the new shape of reality.

"So," she whispered in the language of her birth, "he has come back."

And just how long had he been back before the wind blew through and whispered his name? She scowled.

The sound of voices all too near made her push to her feet, wincing—since there was no one to see—at the pain in her hip. There was a time when a little fall like that… well, no matter. She was old, and the Maker had for some unfathomable reason chosen to include decrepitude as part of the package. Railing against it did no good.

Nonetheless, she was muttering under her breath to whomever might be listening as she walked back along the trail.

The others came around the bend, following their guide. He was a small, agile man of about forty who had not liked it when she went on ahead. He had actually thought he could prevent her. The married couple just behind him were from Beijing, the two young men from somewhere in Guizhou.

Li Lei Yu neither knew nor cared why the others had decided to climb a mountain today. She was interested in only one person of the party: the middle-aged woman at the rear. She ignored the guide's questions and expostulations as she made her way to her companion.

Li Qin's dear, ugly face was placid as ever, her voice as surprising in its beauty as it had been when they first met. "Have you reached the top and returned to show us the way, madam?"

That was Li Qin's notion of humor. Obviously there was only one way to the top. "I have lost my taste for gravesite conversations. They are too one-sided. We will leave now."

Obediently Li Qin turned around and started back down the trail. "We return to the hotel?"

"No. We are going home."

"Ah." Li Qin followed in silence.

"You are doing it again," Li Lei muttered. "It is most unattractive."

"I have said nothing."

"You think very loudly." They descended in silence for several minutes before she spoke again, grudgingly. "I will admit it. You were right. China is no longer home."

Li Qin answered gently, "That was not what I said."

Not precisely, no. She had said that Li Lei would not find what she sought in China. But it came to the same thing, for home was what Li Lei ached for. Home, and reunions that could never be, for so many were gone.

But not all. Not all. She stopped, turning to meet her old friend's eyes. "I have found something I didn't seek. Or it has found me." She took a slow breath, let it out. "The Turning. The Turning has come, Li Qin."

Li Qin's breath sucked in so softly even Li Lei's ears barely caught the sound. Her eyes went wide… and not placid at all.