Death Magic

TWENTY-TWO

“YOU should’ve told him,” Scott said.

They were in Rule’s car, headed for Bethesda. Scott was driving, of course. Lily had turned the heater on. The sun was down and the temperature kept dropping. Surely it was too early in the year for snow? She hoped so. She hadn’t brought a heavy coat with her.

Rule was in the ambulance with Cullen. Her mate-sense told her they were still in motion, so they hadn’t reached the hospital yet. But they’d get there well ahead of her and Scott, having left first. Before Lily could wade through the surging sea of reporters to the car, she’d needed to hand off evidence and get a bandage on her arm so it didn’t bleed onto her jacket.

Sherry had been right about the type of offering the elemental would require. The cut was small and tidy, on the inside of her elbow . . . her left elbow. That hand was working again. Not quite normally, but headed there. “I’m going to tell him. I want privacy for it.”

She hadn’t had that at Fagin’s place. Once the elemental agreed to release them, things had moved quickly. They’d had a brief window of time to seal the deal with blood, then scramble or be passed over the earthen wall. Then they’d been surrounded by cops of both local and federal flavors, with the press just the other side of the barricades.

“When are you going to tell him?”

“At the hospital, probably. You don’t argue like this with Rule.”

“You’re not my Rho. And I do get to argue with Rule if I think it’s important. Not during, but afterward.”

She sighed and shoved back her hair with her left hand. Those fingers still felt thick and clumsy, but she felt them. She could use them.

No pain bolt this time. Just a hand that forgot it was part of her body, or a brain that forgot how to talk to the hand. The paralysis hadn’t lasted long, but for a few minutes Lily had been scared shitless. She’d had Scott find her some coffee—old stuff that he’d heated up in the microwave. Maybe it had helped.

Lily let her hand drop to her lap. She closed the fingers in a loose fist. Opened them. Closed them. “Thank you for giving me time to tell him myself. I am going to. I’m not quite stupid enough to think I could keep this from him.” Or that she had any right to. But God, she was dreading it.

Rule was teetering on some unholy edge. She might not understand what that edge was, exactly, but she recognized it. She’d seen his eyes bleeding toward black like that before—when she was threatened, when he was locked up, when the first of the power winds blew shortly before the Turning.

She’d never seen the wildness try to take over, try to force the Change on him, when things were calm. He was angry that Cullen had been hurt, sure. But anger, even rage, didn’t threaten his control.

Maybe he’d felt trapped because of the ward? That plus the imminence of the full moon . . . yeah, that might do it.

Relief loosened the muscles across her neck. Much as he hated it, Rule did suffer from claustrophobia. Though it was usually triggered by small, enclosed spaces, and Fagin’s yard wasn’t small. Not like an elevator, which Rule hated but consistently used. Not like the cramped seating on a plane . . . which he also hated but consistently used. His eyes didn’t bleed to black when they flew across the country.

But he had been trapped. Until the elemental agreed to let them out, Rule had been well and truly trapped. “Did it bother you?” she asked Scott. “Being trapped inside the elemental’s wards, I mean.”

“I didn’t like it, but I knew we’d get out sooner or later. Why?”

“Some lupi have a touch of claustrophobia.”

“A touch of it, yeah, and that would be true for just about all of us. But there was plenty of room and, like I said, I knew we’d get out. I guess if we’d been stuck there a couple days I’d have started getting the willies, but we were only there a couple hours.”

Two hours and twenty minutes, to be specific. Time enough for Lily to get quite a bit of glass bagged and tagged, with Scott’s help. With the help, maybe, of the coffee she’d drunk. Lily looked at the fist she kept clenching and opening. It was getting better.

She could have gone to Rule right away, right when it happened, and told him. That’s what Scott had wanted her to do. She’d finished collecting evidence instead. Maybe that was wrong. No doubt Rule would be angry that she’d waited. But she didn’t have these spells because she’d been exerting herself. She had them because the Lady was messing with the stupid damn mantle.

And that, she feared, was why Rule hovered on that precarious edge. It was rage unbalancing him, yes, but rage born of betrayal. Not something she could discuss with Scott. With Cullen, yeah, if he hadn’t been hurt, she could’ve asked him. But Rule was Scott’s Rho. Lupi needed to know their Rho was in control.

And he was, Lily told herself. Maybe Rule was having to work for control, but he hadn’t lost it. But she hoped they got to the damn hospital soon. Absently she rubbed the crook of her elbow.

“Your arm hurting?” Scott asked.

“Stings a bit. Not bad. I suppose yours is all healed up.”

He sounded apologetic. “It wasn’t very deep.”

There had been very little ceremony involved in the blood offering. She and Cullen had only had to donate a token amount, no more than a medical vampire would extract for a blood test. Scott and Rule had donated quite a bit more. The elemental had been especially interested in the lupus blood. That was new to it.

Blood offerings themselves were not. One reason the negotiations had taken so little time, Sherry said, was that the elemental was both old and familiar with human concepts. English was new to it, but it understood the ideas behind the words with relatively little explanation. The humans it used to deal with had spoken another language, calling themselves the Acolhuas, the Tepanecs, and the Mexica. Nowadays, those people were usually named collectively: the Aztecs.

They’d been a waste-not, want-not sort of people, it seemed. They’d harvested death magic from their ritual slayings and given a portion of the blood that flowed from their altars to earth elementals. Or at least to this one.

Surely it was a mistake to trust an elemental grown old and powerful on so much human blood. Sherry assured Lily the creature would not break the restrictions the agreement placed on it, but it made Lily nervous to have such power lurking beneath a populous D.C. neighborhood. And if it made her nervous, how would everyone else react? She needed to—

Her phone chimed. She dug it out of her pocket, glancing at the display. Getting pretty low on juice. She’d better plug it in. “Agent Yu here,” she said, digging in her purse for the cable.

“It’s Anna. Anna Sjorensen.”

Her voice sounded tight. Unhappy. “What’s up?”

“You remember I told you we had a possible lead on the dagger? Well, it played out. I guess it did, anyway, but I just can’t believe it. Something’s screwed up, though I don’t see what, but I’m not a computer whiz, so maybe—”

“Anna, what’s happened?”

Lily heard the young woman take a deep breath. “We traced the dagger to a dealer. It was a credit card transaction, and it’s been confirmed, checked, and rechecked. The credit card—the address the dagger was mailed to—they both belong to Ruben Brooks. Drummond is getting a warrant for his arrest.”

RULE hated the ambulance.

Cullen didn’t seem to mind how close and cramped it was, though he did wince when they turned the siren on. But Cullen wasn’t entirely present. He’d dealt with the pain extremely well, but it had gone on too long. He was running out of whatever mix of willpower and curiosity had kept him focused.

Normally, EMTs did not allow passengers to clutter up their tiny mobile domain, but Rule had explained that he could keep Cullen calm. That had nearly delayed them. Only one of the EMTs had known his patient was lupus; the redheaded one got a bit panicky when he found out. Rule had been soothing. Cullen had roused himself to joke with the young man.

Humor worked. Humans were odd that way. They tended to trust those who made them laugh, as if humor and danger couldn’t reside within the same person. But the young man had relaxed and they’d gotten Cullen loaded.

They broke with procedure another way. Both EMTs had elected to ride up front as soon as the IV was hooked up. That was practical. It was cramped enough back here without them. It was also easier for Cullen to remain calm.

Burns were incredibly painful . . . and the moon was almost full. If Rule hadn’t traveled with Cullen, the EMTs might have arrived at the ER with a wolf on their gurney instead of a man.

Because of his injuries, because of the moon, Cullen’s wolf was rising. He watched Rule in silence for the first part of their wailing ride, and Rule saw more wolf prowling behind those glittering eyes than man. Cullen’s wolf would not like the smells or the sounds of the ER. He wouldn’t like having so many strangers near when he was weak and hurt and unable to defend himself properly. He wouldn’t like being touched, handled. He wouldn’t want to go into the hospital at all.

Rule’s wolf certainly didn’t. Or perhaps it was the man who wanted to scream at the driver to stop.

Rule’s wolf, too, was trying to rise, called by moonsong and propelled by rage. Deep within Rule, a hard and bloody knot of silence tightened. That place had no words, only teeth . . . but Rule knew the words. His wolf wanted—needed—the hot spurt of blood spewing from his enemy’s throat as his teeth ripped through the jugular. The spill of guts from their fleshy pouch.

Friar’s guts. Friar’s blood.

Best if he didn’t think of that now. Not when they would soon be immersed in the smell of blood and illness. It might be Friar’s blood his wolf craved, but that craving could spin out into a more general hunger. Rule had spent way too much time in hospitals, but he’d never walked into one when his wolf was this . . . eager.

Had he made the right decision? Rule looked down at his friend. His clansman. Cullen’s eyes were closed now. His breathing was even and shallow enough that he might have been asleep, though Rule knew he wasn’t. His heart beat steadily.

Cullen would heal with or without a doctor’s attention. He’d heal faster if the burned skin were debrided, if fluids were replaced with the speedy efficiency of an IV. But neither was essential, especially with the Leidolf Rhej available.

Rule did not have to take his friend to the ER. But if he didn’t, he would have to lie—either directly or by misdirection. He would be breaking from expectation. Leidolf might not have been in the habit of seeking human help for their wounded. Nokolai, however, did. And as Lu Nuncio to Nokolai, as Rho to Leidolf, Rule could not look weak.

None of the lupi around him—not even Cullen, as good a friend as he was—could be allowed to suspect that Rule’s control was less than flawless. That was duty, not politics. A Rho’s first duty to his clan was to be strong enough to control both his own wolf and all the wolves of the clan, if necessary. Even Victor Frey, a cruel and crazy bastard of a Rho, had possessed that cardinal virtue: his control was absolute. Or it had always appeared to be so.

According to Isen, the second was almost as good as the first. No Rho possessed perfect control, so it was best to strive always for the first, but accept the necessity of the second on rare occasions.

According to Isen, a Rho could deceive his clan in other ways, too.

For him to lie outright to them dishonored both Rho and clan, causing a terrible sundering of trust . . . unless it was necessary. If a lie was essential to the clan’s well-being, if all other choices meant worse harm, then a Rho should lie. He must do it brilliantly, so that his clan never suspected. Never for convenience. Never to avoid something you dreaded, or in support of any but the most vital goal. And chances were, if a Rho found himself in the position of having to speak a baldfaced lie to his clan, he had bungled things badly.

Rule had asked, of course. When his father gave him this advice shortly after naming him Lu Nuncio, Rule had asked. Twice, Isen had said. Twice in the fifty-some years he’d been Rho, he had lied to the clan. And no, he would not tell Rule what those lies were.

Rule supposed that two lies in over five decades was a fairly strong vote in favor of honesty.

Misdirection, now . . . the lie by omission, the partial truth, the subtle weaving of expression, gesture, and words to either deceive or confuse . . . Isen had a rather higher opinion of misdirection. He considered it acceptable over a fairly broad range. This was no surprise, coming as it did from a grand master of that slippery art.

But always, always, the compass must be pointed at the welfare of the clan.

Rule didn’t even consider lying today. He could simply say they would not go to the hospital. He didn’t have to explain. But his people, both Nokolai and Leidolf, would speculate. Why not get Cullen treated? What did Rule know? Was it no longer safe to be publicly lupus? Did he fear a specific attack by their enemy? Was Rule’s control unequal to spending a few hours at an ER?

Such speculation did not serve the clan. Either clan. And so Rule arrived back where he’d started. He had to take Cullen to the ER.

He emerged from his thoughts to find Cullen’s eyes, burning blue, fixed on his face again. He found a smile and squeezed Cullen’s shoulder. “Nearly there.”

“And then it really gets fun.”

“I’m afraid so.” Cullen still had language. Good. Rule hadn’t been sure. Most lupi this far into the wolf would already be four-footed . . . but that’s why Rule was here. He continued to draw on the Nokolai mantle, projecting calm. “The Leidolf Rhej will be there. She’ll help. Will you be able to use the pain-blocking spell during the debridement?”

“If they’re quick.”

The spell was one Cynna had found or devised. It worked extremely well. Unfortunately, it didn’t just shut down pain—it shut down healing. The body forgot it was injured.

First and worst, blood didn’t clot. Even when blood loss wasn’t an issue, the spell caused damage. The entire complex dance of healing was disrupted—fibroblasts didn’t form; white cells and other immune agents didn’t speed to the wound; the endocrine system grew confused; hormonal signals were missed or went unsent. Lupi healing could quickly right such imbalances, yet the spell was as dangerous for them as for humans. It was a power hog, a vampire. Even when employed as a charm—the only way most lupi could use a spell—it would somehow drain a lupus’s healing power itself.

Still, used for very brief intervals, the spell could be a boon, and Cullen could use it more safely than most of them. Not that Rule entirely trusted Cullen’s notion of safety. He studied his friend’s face and sighed. “You’ve already tapped into it, haven’t you?”

“Some.”

“Cullen—”

“Not stupid. Made sure it drew from my diamond, not me. Had to talk to Cynna, didn’t I? Didn’t want to scare her.”

“You also had to study the damned ward. And confer with Sherry. And—”

“You’re tense.”

Rule snorted. “I hate hospitals.” That much he could say. Cullen would accept it, even expect it.

“You need Lily. She’ll help.”

“She’s following in the car.”

“You need her,” Cullen repeated, and closed his eyes.

Cullen—or his wolf—was much too observant. Rule did need Lily. Her touch would help greatly . . . because of the mate bond. The bond Lily had first cursed, then accepted, and finally come to value for the gifts it brought them.

The mate bond. The Lady’s gift.

The bloody knot inside Rule tightened.

Man and wolf alike feared for Lily, were frantic at the separation, desperate to fix what they had no power to fix. But it was the man who felt betrayed . . . and who knew that betrayal pointed within as well as toward the Lady. It was the man who was riven by guilt.

“Consent is necessary,” he’d told Lily. As they knelt beside Brian where he lay dying, he’d told her the Lady could do nothing without her consent. He hadn’t urged her to play host to Wythe’s mantle, no, but he’d aided and abetted. He’d known when he asked that she didn’t believe it was possible. A hypothetical, that’s how she’d seen it when she gave permission.

He hadn’t warned her of danger. He hadn’t thought there was any.

Fool, fool, fool . . .

They slowed, turned, and slowed even more. The siren cut off. Rule glanced over his shoulder to look out the bit of windshield he could see. He caught a glimpse of the ER doors before the ambulance angled to the right, then started backing up. “We’re there,” he told Cullen, squeezing his shoulder.

Cullen’s eyes flew open. Vivid eyes, clearly awake and aware . . . but with no trace of the man. Wolf eyes. He didn’t speak or move.

“Good,” Rule said softly. “You’re keeping still. That’s good.” He made the sign for “hold” to reinforce that. Cullen-wolf understood English just fine, but physical language carried more meaning to a wolf.

They stopped. The driver opened his door and hopped out. The other EMT joined Rule in the back; Rule had to move forward to give him room. Cullen tilted his head to keep his gaze fixed on Rule, so Rule made the sign for “hold” again.

Obediently he lay still. The ambulance doors were flung open. The driver gripped the foot of the gurney and, with the redhead at its foot, slid it out. Rule followed. He jumped down lightly . . . and froze.

Three guns were pointed at him. Three guns held by three uniformed guards fanned out between them and the open ER doors. No—they were aiming at the goddamn patient. At Cullen.

A growl tried to rise in Rule’s chest.

The EMTs stopped dead. “What the hell!”

“Just a precaution,” one guard said. His hair was gray, his arms thin, his belly taking over what his chest had lost through the years. He wore bifocals. He held his .45 straight out in both hands. “You’ve got a lupus patient. We’re here to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone.”

“I know he’s a lupus. That’s what he’s here for,” the redheaded EMT said, a jerk of his head indicating Rule.

The guard’s gaze flicked to Rule. “He’s lupus, too?”

“Yeah, but he’s been—”

“Don’t move, you.” The guard’s gun fixed on Rule now. “Manny, cover Joe while he gets those cuffs on the one on the gurney. I’ll keep this one from interfering.”

“That’s illegal, you know,” Rule said pleasantly. He would not growl. He would not grab. He would not slap that fool’s face so hard it slid right off his empty head. “You have no need for your weapons, no reason to draw on us, and you can’t shoot me for accompanying my friend.”

“I can make sure you don’t cause trouble. That’s what I’m doing. Move away from the gurney.”

“No.” Rule inhaled slowly. He was in control, dammit. “I’m going to put my hand on my friend’s shoulder. If you shoot me, you’ll have two patients and one hell of a lawsuit.” He started to do just that, but his phone interrupted with an electronic version of a gypsy violin—several bars from Oleg Ponomarev’s “Smelka.”

Lily’s ring tone.