Death Magic

SIX

I T must have rained while they were inside. The air was crisp with ozone, rich with the smell of damp earth. Wet grass glistened. But the sky was clear again and making a spectacle of itself, drifts of stars like spangled gauze swathing the darkness. As they walked to Rule’s car along a path bordered by roses and baby’s breath, Lily’s stomach jittered while her mind jumped around like a hyperactive two-year-old.

She’d asked more questions before they left. Ruben had answered some of them. Not all.

“You turned him down,” Rule said.

“This may be the right thing for him to do. That doesn’t make it right for me.”

“He didn’t stop you from refusing. You aren’t at risk because you know too much. Doesn’t that prove that your fears about the Shadow Unit are misplaced?”

“I’ve got way too many fears at the moment for you to be sweeping them into a single pile and labeling them false. At least I’m restraining my burning urge to arrest people.”

“For now,” he said dryly.

“Look, let’s stipulate Ruben’s right and you’re right and so is whoever else is part of this. I don’t know. I haven’t . . . it’s going to take time for me to get my mind around everything, and we can’t even talk about it! How am I supposed to think it through if I can’t talk about it, or make notes, or . . . but even if you’re all right, that doesn’t mean I have to be part of it.”

He was silent for several paces, then stopped just short of the car. “I hurt you with my silence. I’m sorry for that.”

She stopped. Faced him. “It’s not what you didn’t say, it’s how you pretended. For weeks—”

“Three weeks. Slightly less, to be specific.”

She flung up a hand. “Okay. Fine. Be specific by all damn means. For three weeks you’ve acted like things are okay, but if you believe everything Ruben said, everything’s going to hell—or could, pretty damn fast. How could you pretend with me?”

He looked baffled. “I haven’t.”

“When you first learned all that stuff I can’t say out loud, it didn’t just about blow off the top of your head? And you hid that from me!”

He answered slowly. “The timing came as a shock. She is moving much faster than I’d expected. The rest of it . . . no. We’ve known for nearly a year that she is active in our realm once more. Now we know some specifics about her plans. That’s tremendously valuable, and learning that we—the clans—have strong allies against her is a great relief.”

She stared at him. All this time, he’d been expecting something like this. When he proposed to her, he’d known they’d face some kind of Armageddon shit. When they planned their wedding, he’d known. He hadn’t just thought there would be danger—he’d known it would be vast and powerful. World-toppling. All along, he’d known. “You’re really okay with . . . with all this. You expected it. You’re not freaked and hiding it. You’re . . . okay.”

A small frown tugged at his eyebrows. “My wolf helps. That I live more closely with him than I used to helps a lot. Fear is . . . an immediate thing for a wolf. What hasn’t yet happened isn’t real enough to trouble him.”

“What about the man? How does that part of you stay so damn calm, and plan a wedding, and spend time picking out a necklace for me, and set up Toby’s college fund, and—and look to the future as though things were going to be okay?”

“Lily.” He took her arms gently. “How else could I live? It’s helpful to know what our enemy intends, and while I take Ruben’s visions very seriously, none of it is fated.” He cocked his head as if listening to something she couldn’t hear, then leaned in so close his lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “My Lady is also a patterner, and vastly more experienced than Friar.”

“But . . .” She switched to a whisper so soft only he could hear. “But your Lady isn’t able to act in our realm.”

She felt his lips move in a smile and the breath of his next words. “Except through her agents, nadia. She acts through us.”

Through lupi. Who she’d created, and who served her still, wholly and freely. She could act through them, and that was why the Great Bitch had to remove them. And instead of finding this terrifying, Rule took comfort in it.

Lily didn’t answer with words. She took his hand. She was frowning as she did it, but knew he’d understand both the frown and the touch. “We should go home.”

He tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled. “Yes. I love you.”

Emotion burst out in a shaky laugh. “Don’t I get to brood at all?”

“Later, perhaps.”

LATER started as soon as they got in the car.

Ruben’s street was quiet, but once they turned onto Bethesda Avenue the traffic picked up. Wet streets bounced light back from taillights, headlights, streetlights, bistros, clubs, and storefronts. If the brief rain had washed people inside for a time, they were back out now, wandering the pretty downtown area and sitting at tiny outdoor tables with frothy drinks or beer and nachos. It was only a little after eleven, and on a Saturday night.

All these people busy having lives . . . people mad at the boss, celebrating a raise, hunting for a hookup, getting busted, falling in love. People praying, partying, laughing, yelling, making up, breaking up . . . people helping a stranger or robbing one. People who expected tomorrow to arrive in about the same shape as today.

And maybe it would for most of them. And the day after, and the one after that. But next month was looking pretty damn iffy.

An Old One wanted to amputate the future all these people were building with whatever mix of altruism and cruelty, determination and thoughtlessness. The Great Bitch wanted to graft her version of the future onto the world. According to the lupi, she saw herself as humanity’s benefactor. Sure, people would die on the way to her shiny utopia, but death was what mortals did, right? No real problem. She’d make it up to the survivors by making sure they didn’t get to make bad choices anymore.

If the strongest precog on the planet—who also happened to be a good man, good all the way down—was convinced the only way to stop her lay in a shadowy, extralegal organization, Lily could accept the necessity. It didn’t go down easily, but wasn’t bullshit often easier to swallow than truth? She wouldn’t be reporting Ruben to the federal attorney. She’d keep his secret, but she wouldn’t be part of it.

She was a cop. She didn’t know how to be anything else.

They left the downtown behind. Rule hadn’t said a word since they got in the car, but he was holding her hand. He did that a lot. She looked at him. Light and shadow slid over his face, shifting as they passed this streetlight, that bar, a pocket of darker land anchored by oaks. “Did you know what Ruben had in mind for tonight?”

“I did.”

She wanted to ask how he’d known. How did Ruben’s Shadow agents communicate? Phones weren’t safe. Neither was e-mail. Not if they wanted to be sure neither Friar nor the non-ghostly FBI caught them at it, but what other options were there? But if she wasn’t going to be part of them, she couldn’t ask. She couldn’t ask who else was in the Shadow Unit, either, or who knew about it, or how it was organized, or what Rule’s place was in it . . . other than as a coconspirator, that is.

This was deeply annoying.

As for the rest of it . . . the collapse of the nation, a military coup, “the surviving lupi” . . . her stomach churned. Contemplating Ruben’s visions didn’t help. Her mind kept trying to go there, but it didn’t help. So what would? She drummed her fingers on her thigh and stared at the back of Scott’s head.

Scott drew driving duty whenever Rule went out at night, partly because he looked so harmless. He was short and wore baggy clothes that turned his wiry frame skinny. His face was round and boyish with guileless blue eyes he framed in geek glasses—clear lenses, of course, since no lupus needed vision correction. He was adept in three martial arts, deadly with a blade, good with a gun and getting better.

From the back, she could see Scott’s short, badly cut brown hair and the way his small ears hugged his head like they’d been superglued down. A small Bluetooth headset curled around his right ear like a question mark.

Questions. Lining up her questions always helped. Her fingers twitched with the need to jot them down, but she restrained herself. None of this could go on paper.

Okay, first question: why tonight? Why had Ruben tried to recruit her now instead of three weeks ago, or three weeks from now, or not at all?

That one almost answered itself. He had something he wanted her to do that hadn’t needed doing earlier. Something he couldn’t ask of her as an FBI agent. Maybe something he couldn’t put on the record because the wrong person might learn about it? Something to do with the traitor.

Lily knew very little about the investigation into the attack on Ruben. Abel Karonski was lead, but if he’d turned up anything solid, he’d managed to keep it a big, fat secret. That was harder than a civilian might think. However tight-lipped FBI types were with outsiders, they were as prone to chatting with their colleagues as anyone else. Prone to speculating when they lacked information, too, but Lily hadn’t heard any rumors. Everyone seemed to know that the perp was with the Bureau. No one knew anything else.

Lily’s burning desire to arrest people flamed especially hot for the rat bastard who’d betrayed them all and nearly killed Ruben. If she could have a part in catching him or her, that was almost enough to get her to join the damned ghosts.

Almost.

Next question. This one, she realized, she had to ask out loud. “Have you told Ruben about, uh . . . the thing that’s the Lady’s secret?” Mantles, that is.

Mantle was a word whose meaning Lily could only approach obliquely. She knew it was a magical construct that unified a clan and granted unquestionable authority to the Rho who held it. She knew that lupi needed the mantles. But she couldn’t say how they worked, how they felt, why the loss of that feeling could drive a lupus insane. She knew it could, but how and why were outside her experience.

“I haven’t,” Rule said. “Because that is the Lady’s secret, and not up to me to disclose.”

“But that thing you can’t disclose keeps Friar from eavesdropping magically on us.” Friar’s power came from the Great Bitch. The mantles blocked her magic, so his clairaudience didn’t work around Rule. “He can’t listen in, and it’s close to impossible for a directional mic to pick up anything from a moving vehicle. And if someone had planted a bug on the car, Scott would have smelled it, right?”

His eyebrows lifted. “We can speak more freely here than in other places, if that’s what you mean.” But his glance cut to their driver. Scott might seem professionally oblivious to their conversation, but he heard every word.

She nodded that she’d understood. No talking about Armageddon or Shadow Units in front of Scott. Or, technically, behind him. But Scott knew this part already. “I’m wondering about the Wythe mantle.” She rested a hand on her stomach. “This has to be part of your Lady’s plans.”

“Of course.”

And the Lady was a patterner. Lily hadn’t thought of her in those terms before. It changed things . . . she couldn’t say how, exactly, but since the Lady was an Old One, she’d be an adept. Maybe that meant that Lily was doing just what she was supposed to do.

Rule wasn’t the only one in the car with a mantle. Lily had one, too. Sort of.

She wasn’t a Rho. She wasn’t lupi, could never be lupi, so she couldn’t use the mantle in her gut. Couldn’t do anything with it but get rid of it as soon as possible . . . which surely would happen on Tuesday, when they went to Wythe Clanhome in upper New York.

Last month, Lily and Rule had rescued his friend Brian from Friar, a sidhe lord, and a bunch of evil elf minions. But they’d been too late. The sidhe lord’s experiments had damaged Brian so badly he was dying, and he lacked an heir. With his death, the mantle would be lost, and with it the clan. That meant death for some, insanity for others. Probably human deaths, too, because lupi did not deal well with being clanless.

Lily’s Gift let her absorb magic the way dragons do. She’d breathed in the mantle as Brian died—and the lupi’s Lady had somehow made it so she didn’t just absorb the power. Instead the mantle resided inside her, intact and unreachable, a furry tickle that never went away.

Most of the time it felt like she needed to scratch her colon. Or burp.

She was caretaker of the mantle, not Rho. Wythe needed a Rho, but all they had right now were the clan elders. Normally they were an informal council of advisors to the Rho, men and the occasional woman who held positions of trust—as chief tender, for example, or head of security, or manager of an important business owned by the clan.

Walt McDonald was the most senior Wythe elder. He’d been an attorney for forty years before retiring to run Wythe’s dairy farm, which he’d done for twelve years now. He was one hundred and seven years old, for God’s sake, yet he consulted Lily over every little decision. As if she knew what to do with a twenty-year-old lupus who couldn’t control the Change reliably! Or water rights. Or the dozen other things he’d called her about.

Not for much longer. Lily figured that if the Lady had stuffed a mantle into her, she could get it out again and put it where it belonged. They just had to find the right Wythe lupus to take it. The whole clan would be waiting for her Tuesday, so surely one of them would . . .

Rule turned her hand palm up, cradling it still in his left hand. With his right he gently opened her fingers.

She looked at him. It was darker along this stretch of road in spite of the headlights flashing up and past, up and past, but she saw the way his mouth turned up. The way his eyes locked on to hers.

Rule had hidden something from her. Something important. She hated that, but he hadn’t hidden himself. Not on purpose. Shouldn’t she have known, though? Shouldn’t she have realized a secret lay between them? Had she been too wrapped up in everything else to see? In her wounded arm, her job, Friar’s disappearance, the All-Clan that was finally scheduled, the muscle that might or might not regrow, the furry tickle in her gut and the complications it posed, their upcoming wedding, the . . .

Okay, yes, she should have noticed. But maybe she could give herself a pass this time.

With his thumb, Rule drew a circle lightly, lightly in the palm of her hand.

She knew his body very well. She knew the shapes of his mind . . . sometimes. Other times those shapes mystified her. It was like wandering through a fog, with shapes now emerging, now retreating into mist. How well could she know the mind of one who was only a part-time human, after all?

His thumb circled the pad at the base of her index finger. Every nerve ending in her hand woke up. Her breath did, too.

Slowly she smiled. Some shapes were easy to recognize.

For the next three-and-a-half miles Rule drew flesh-whispers in her palm. They were both silent, both still, except for the feathery brush of his thumb, over and over.

Somewhere Lily had read that there were around twenty-five hundred nerve receptors per square centimeter in the palm. Every one of them was bleeding sensation into the rest of her body by the time the Mercedes stopped in front of the Georgetown row house.

Rule thanked Scott gravely, as he always did. He and Lily got out on the sidewalk side, not touching now. Overhead, the sky was a dark, blank shield, its vastness muddied by D.C.’s reflected light. Their street contributed to the overall light pollution, but light made shadows, didn’t it? Hard shadows, topped by the smoggy shield civilization raised between it and infinity. They were both watchful as they slipped between parked cars.

Lily unlocked the door. Even such minor details as this were scripted now. Rule’s senses and reaction time were better than hers, so he kept watch while she opened the door and stepped into softer light. He closed the door behind them, muffling the city sounds of traffic and television, the distant wail of a siren, and someone’s dog barking two streets away.

Rule moved to the foot of the stairs. He stood motionless, head up and nostrils flared. She waited until a subtle shift in his stance said he’d found no strange scents. Safety was a slippery state, but for now, they were as safe as they could be.

She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t know how to stop. It wasn’t as if she’d thought of safety as a constant—not since she was eight, anyway—but the dangers were so faceless and pervasive now that she—

“I hated it.” Rule spun and stepped to her and gripped her arms, his eyes a dark blaze in his set face. “Do you understand? I hated keeping my word, keeping a secret from you, a place I couldn’t let you in. I don’t know how cops and Ruben and whoever else piles up such barricades of secrets can stand it.”

She tilted her face up. His brows were drawn. His fingers clenched on her arm just below the wounded place, where muscle might grow back. Or not.

He needed something from her. Words? She hoped not. She didn’t want words tonight. Words would open a gate to thinking and worry and fear, to the precipice gaping before them, a stony-toothed hole big enough to swallow a world, and her mind would skitter off to find means for a bridge, some way across or around or away from. And she’d do that, she had to, but not now. Now she slid her hands onto his shoulders, where cashmere slinked between his skin and hers. She went up on tiptoe.

She didn’t kiss him. She bit his lower lip. Not hard, but hard enough. “Mine.” She nipped again. “Secrets and all, you’re mine. Don’t do it again.”

He lifted both hands to her face and ran his thumbs along the underside of her jaw. “Yours,” he agreed, and touched the necklace he’d put around her throat earlier. “This. I want to see you in just this.” He cocked a brow. “Upstairs?”

Yes.

Halfway up, a stair creaked beneath her foot. Otherwise the house was silent. To her, anyway. What did he hear? Three steps from the top he put his hand on the small of her back. Her heart stuttered.

“I’ll get the lights,” he said at the top of the stairs. Three were on, one in each bedroom. And the two downstairs, of course—parlor and kitchen—but they left those on all night. Security again. If anyone made it inside despite José and Craig, they’d show up great in the well-lit interior. Plus this gave them the option of suddenly shutting off the lights, blinding the intruder or intruders more thoroughly than it would Rule or the guards. If the guards had survived, that is.

And she was sick to death of thinking about security and survival. While Rule turned off lights, Lily went straight to their room at the back of the house. She left that light on.

“Catch up,” she said when he joined her, and popped the button on her jeans. The wooden floor was decorated with her shoes, sweater, and bra.

He smiled and caught up—at lupi speed. Damn competitive man. She still wore her panties but he was entirely naked when he knelt in front of her, pressed his face to her belly . . . and blew raspberries.

She looked down at him, astonished. He looked up, grinning.

Oh, he wanted to play. She lifted her eyebrows. “Don’t get full of yourself. I know your weak spots.”

His hands slid up her thighs to her butt, clamped, and lifted—and sent her sailing onto the bed.

She landed in a whomp of tangled limbs and laughter, rolled onto hands and knees, and beckoned him. Come on, big boy, I can take you . . .

He dived onto the bed in a tackle that would have been far more effective if she’d been standing. And the tickle fight was on.

She was horribly ticklish on her sides at the waist. He knew it, damn him. He had two main points of vulnerability: his belly and his underarms. The belly was an iffy target because he could banish tickles by tightening his abs. Armpits, though—they worked every time, if she could get to them.

There was only one rule: no pinning. Otherwise the battle would be over too quickly; he could pin her about nine times oftener than she could him. She was agile, she was ruthless, but she was not lupus. So Lily was indignant when, with most of the covers on the floor and both of them breathless from involuntary laughter, he flipped her onto her back and held her down with the length of his body. “Hey!”

“I submit.” His breath came fast. He was grinning in the way that melted her, open and happy. She didn’t see it often enough. “I submit, I submit. You won.”

“You’re throwing the match.”

“Oh, yes,” he breathed, and lowered his face to her shoulder. This time he just inhaled, deep and luxurious. The inhale was to fill up on her scent, she knew. The exhale was her name, just that, warm and moist against her skin. “Lily.”

Something in that soft exhale . . . she sifted a hand through his shaggy, too-long hair. “I’m here.”

He pushed up on one elbow, raising his upper body, looking in her eyes. His were dark with need. “And here.” He touched his chest.

She knew then, knew what his need was—not sex, or not just sex. He was only a man. He could take her scent inside him, but he couldn’t take her body in, couldn’t open to her as she did him. He had no portal, no cradle made to receive. Only skin, surfaces. And breath.

So she breathed on him. “And here,” she whispered, letting her breath warm his shoulder before she licked it. “Here,” she said, and blew on his throat, licked and nibbled, then blew again on the damp skin. He shivered. “And here.” She drew her leg up along his, a slow slide of flesh, and ran her hand along his arm. He had long arms, tightly knit, smooth and firm with muscle. She kissed him in the hinge of his arm, the bent place, the tender skin in the crook of his elbow. There is no place on you I can’t love, and love grants me entry . . .

She was following a familiar trail along his belly, heading for the part of him that bobbed, waving in its ever-friendly way, when he shuddered, seized her arms, and pulled her up. He kissed her thoroughly, tongues joining in a slippery duel, teeth nipping. He was breathing hard when he paused the kiss to say, “I mean to go slow tonight.”

She smiled.

“Slow for now,” he amended, and began showing her what he meant.

He wreaked shivers on her skin with his mouth, and he wouldn’t let her rush him, rush them, so together they built the blaze one burn at a time . . . a touch here, on the smooth roundness of his butt, or here, where the skin of her inner thigh jumped at the flick of his tongue. She didn’t notice when she lost the world of words and ideas, constructs too diverse for the need piled up in her.

So she didn’t tell him “enough” or “now,” but reached for his friendliest part, gripped firmly, and drew her hand up, knowing exactly how much to squeeze. His breath was a growl this time, long and guttural as he threw his head back, the clean line of his throat open, open to her.

She opened to him, and they made a new hinge, a place where the two of them bent, where we joined and bent and swung joyously up and up on the flat, level ground of their bed, flesh slapping flesh. Until she cracked at that hinge, cracked and broke open, calling his name as white fire rushed in.

After they caught their breaths, after they stroked and touched and smiled, he left to shut off the light. She almost dozed off. Darkness fell, then covers did—he’d tossed them over her before slipping back in bed. She told him, “Mmm,” and snuggled close and put a hand on his chest, where his heart beat slow and strong.

Mine, she told the world outside their room, the top half of her mind muzzy with sleep, still mostly sundered from words. It made perfect sense, floating there in the dark, sated and sleepy and clean as a garden after it rains. Mine.