Mortal Danger

TWENTY-FOUR

LILY’S head went light and dizzy. Big Dick’s planned press conference hadn’t come as a shock, but the whiff of hope hit her system like a double scotch on an empty stomach.

“Hey.” That was Cullen, standing by her bed with a hand on her shoulder. “It helps if you keep breathing.”

“Okay. I’m okay.” She waved him away and got herself back under control. “Where? Where is he?”

Cynna held up both hands. “I did that wrong. Sorry. What I mean is that I tried, not that I Found him. What I did Find doesn’t make sense. That’s why I need to know why you’re so sure he’s alive.”

Lily realized her nails were about to draw blood. She unclenched her fists. “All right. Then you’ll tell me what you Found.”

Cullen sighed. “As a clan member in good standing, this is where I’m supposed to threaten you with all manner of dire consequences.”

“What can they do—kick me out?” She shook her head. “Sorry. I know that’s a big deal for you, but it doesn’t mean as much to me.”

“Let me help.” As if she’d been still as long as she could, Cynna popped to her feet and began to pace. “I’ve got some of it figured out. I came up with three possible reasons for you to hold out on me. One, there’s some kind of national security deal involved that I’m not cleared for. Except you’d tell me if that were the case, right? Or Ruben would have told me before I got here.”

“That’s not it.”

“I didn’t think so. Reason two. The stuff you’ve kept to yourself is personally embarrassing. People do that all the time, and cops aren’t immune to the cover-up urge. But a good cop wouldn’t do it, and Ruben has pretty high standards for the Unit. Rule’s standards weren’t so shabby, either. So that leaves me with reason number three.” She glanced at Cullen. “Which you pretty much confirmed just now with that ‘clan member in good standing’ bit.”

He raised his eyebrows politely. “Did I?”

“I’m wondering if that was on purpose.”

Lily didn’t wonder. She wasn’t sure of his motives, but Cullen gave away very little by accident. “Go on.”

“It’s lupus secrets you’re keeping, isn’t it? And it has something to do with your relationship with Rule. Something that makes you think you’ve got the inside track on whether he’s dead or alive. Something that makes him, well, yours.”

Lily nodded slowly. She’d underestimated Cynna Weaver. “You’ve got most of it. Rule and I are mate bound.”

Cullen sighed and plopped down in one of the chairs, stretching out his legs and tilting his head back. “I wonder,” he asked the ceiling, “if I’ll be considered an accomplice for not stopping you?”

“You couldn’t have.”

“So what does mate bound mean, exactly?” Cynna asked.

“It’s rare, I understand.” And harder than she’d expected to put into words, especially with this woman she didn’t know well… whom Rule had once known very well. “Lupi see the bond in religious terms. They say their goddess—they call her the Lady—occasionally chooses a life mate for one of them. And, uh, it’s very physical. Sexual, but more than that. When it first hit, Rule and I couldn’t be separated by more than a couple hundred yards. It’s more relaxed now, thank God.”

“What do you mean, you couldn’t be separated?”

“If we put too much distance between us, we get dizzy. I’m told that if we get too far away we’d pass out, but we’ve never gone past the dizzy stage.”

Cynna’s lips pursed. She glanced at Cullen.

“Don’t look at me,” he said to the ceiling. “I’m an innocent bystander.”

Lily continued doggedly. “Rule says the separation thing never goes away completely, but I don’t know what our limit is now. I haven’t tested it lately, but…” She paused, tensing.

The mate bond was like background music, she thought. If the radio was always playing, she didn’t notice unless she stopped and paid attention. But let someone change the station or the volume…

“What is it?” Cynna asked.

“He’s moving again. Moving fast.”

“What do you mean, again?” Cullen asked sharply.

“He’s been moving for some time, but slowly. Now…” She tried to estimate. “He might be in a car or something, because he’s going a lot faster.”

Cynna frowned. “Can you guess at the distance? Are you likely to pass out or something?”

“I don’t know. He’s farther away now than he has been since the bond happened, and the farther away he is, the fuzzier my estimate of distance. Direction, though—I get that right every time.”

Cynna nodded. “It sounds a lot like Finding.”

“What do you mean?”

“The farther away my target is, the less I can say about the distance. There’s a limit, too. For me it’s between a hundred and a hundred fifty miles. Within that limit I get direction. Beyond it…” She shrugged.

“You don’t just Find physical objects, though. You said you turned up ghosts sometimes.”

“Yeah.” Her eyebrows twitched together. “That’s sort of what it was like when I tried Finding Rule.”

“He is not a ghost. The mate bond ties me to his body, which is very much alive.” Somewhere. “What, exactly, did you Find?”

“I went to the scene this morning after I talked to Ruben, and I did a Find. I, uh, already had Rule’s pattern, from when I used to know him. It’s better to have the current pattern, but I thought I had enough that I’d be able to tell if he was still around.”

“And?” Lily thought she might jump up and shake the woman.

“What I got was fuzzy. Real fuzzy. I didn’t think it was a ghost, but it’s hard to be sure when I had such a poor fix. But there was a direction, so I followed it. Right where my Gift told me he was, though…” She spread both hands. “A gas station. Lots of cars. No sign of Rule.”

Her heart was pounding. Cynna had gotten the same results she had—a clear fix on a specific spot, yet no sign of Rule. That proved she wasn’t crazy and that the mate bond was working right, didn’t it? “Has that ever happened before?”

Cynna shook her head but then added, “Except with ghosts.”

“Ghosts don’t move around. Where was this gas station, and what time did you do the Find?”

“The corner of Middlebrook and Hessing. I got there about nine-thirty.”

Lily leaned over and pulled her table closer, took the city map off it, and passed it to Cullen.

He raised his eyebrows as he took it.

“Check my notes,” she said tersely. “I’ve been trying to track Rule. I had to guess at the distance, but the direction is right.”

He unfolded it, studied it a moment, and then passed it to Cynna without a word.

“Where… oh, yeah, I see it.” She looked at Lily. “Maybe you’re better at guessing distance than you thought. The line connecting your estimates runs pretty close to my gas station. The times fit, too.”

“Yes.” She looked at Cullen—who was back to studying the ceiling. “Rule’s people might expect me to be weird right now. I gather that the sudden breaking of the mate bond can have repercussions. But only if you start with the assumption that he’s dead. And I can’t see why you’ve done that.”

That was one hell of a fascinating ceiling.

She kept going. “There’s no body. The staff wasn’t even touching Rule when you crisped Harlowe, so why assume he’s dead? And now Cynna has confirmed that the mate bond is working. She and I both know where he is— only he isn’t there. I only see one possibility. He’s someplace that’s tied to Earth geographically, but isn’t Earth.”

“I’ve tried,” Cullen told the ceiling. “Haven’t I tried? But she’s determined, and maybe Isen is wrong. No, strike that—Isen is definitely wrong.” Abruptly he pushed to his feet. “Being Rho isn’t like being the pope, is it? No one granted him infallibility.”

“What are you talking about?”

He began pacing. There wasn’t much room for it. “Cast your mind back. I didn’t say Rule was dead. At the time you weren’t in any shape to consider nuances of speech, but what I said was that he was gone.”

“So you don’t think he’s dead.”

“He might be.” Cullen shook his head. “I don’t know. Isen wants me to lie to you about that, and I could. I’m an excellent liar, but my heart isn’t in it. And I’m not good at blind obedience. Lost the knack, I suppose, in all those years I was clanless…” Cullen stopped, tilting his head back and closing his eyes. “God, I’m tired.”

“Tough. Keep talking.”

He sighed. “You’re right. Right about all of it, I’m afraid.”

She closed her eyes. Breathe, she reminded herself. She did, and her muscles turned slippery, loosening up so suddenly it was a good thing she was propped up.

“So why would this Isen dude want you to lie about it?” Cynna demanded.

Cullen glanced at her. “Isen Turner. He’s Rule’s father and the Rho, the head of Nokolai… my clan. He wants to protect Lily.”

“To protect me?” That sent a charge through her that brought her upright again, all but vibrating with anger. “By trying to convince me Rule’s dead?”

“Think about it.” Cullen’s face could never be other than beautiful. Even when it had been butchered, the eyes gauged out, it had possessed a certain ravaged glory. But she’d never seen it look so naked—naked like an old, twisty tree. All bones, no softness.

He almost looked his age. “I spent a long time working out the possibilities last night. I’ll give them to you the way I gave them to the Rho. One, Rule is dead. Wait.” He held up his hand. “Hear me out.”

He resumed his pacing, a two-legged panther caged in a modern hospital room. “Mage fire burns in places—call them dimensions—you can’t see, and it burns very, very hot there. When my mage fire hit the staff, the hole in space that was its underlying reality imploded. It could have sucked Rule along somehow.”

“Sucked him… where?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” He reached the wall and turned. “Two. The staff was Hers. If She called it to Her the second the mage fire hit, she might have been able to recover part of it. I don’t know why Rule would have been dragged with the staff. As you said, it was touching you, not him, so I didn’t give this a very high probability. But it was just possible that the effect traveled along you without, ah, grabbing hold, because of your Gift. And Rule got taken instead.”

To Her. The Old One or goddess or whatever. Lily’s mouth was dry. “One problem with that. My Gift is gone.”

He nodded without pausing in his restless motion. “Exactly. So I thought Rule probably was dead, only you were so damned sure he wasn’t. I couldn’t overlook the chance that you were right. I tried scrying for him.”

“You didn’t tell me.” Anger burned still, but lower, retreating to a tight, sullen heat in her belly. “I take it you didn’t find anything.”

He grimaced. “I had to light the candle with a match. Didn’t have enough juice left to raise a fever, much less start a fire. It’s hard to get a salamander to notice a non-magical fire. I struck out.”

“I didn’t,” Cynna said.

He gave her an unfriendly look. “No. So I’ve had to rethink some of my assumptions.”

Lily‘ drummed her fingers. “I don’t see what any of this has to do with lying to me to protect me.”

Cullen held out both hands, turning them palms up. “The way Isen saw it, either Rule was dead and you were delusional, and feeding that delusion wouldn’t be healthy. Or else he was alive and we’d have to find a way of going after him. Of course, I don’t know how to do that, but assuming we made it past that little road block, it was apt to be a suicide mission, so—”

“Wait a minute. You sound as if you know where he is.”

His eyebrows lifted. “I thought you’d figured that out.

You said you knew he was in the realm most analogous to ours, physically.“

She wanted smack him. “I don’t know what that means!”

His mouth flattened. “Hell, luv. He’s in hell.”

A thousand feet up Lily discovered that ymu might keep her from sleeping, but she still needed oxygen. Or maybe it was fear, pure and simple, that made her pass out.

She came to as they descended. This would have struck her as lousy timing if she hadn’t been so surprised to still be alive—and so busy trying not to throw up. From the ground, the dragons’ flight had been grace itself. Experienced up close and personal, the ride was jerky as the great wings sculled through the air, tilting first one way, then the other.

Mountains again. These were green and gold, dust and rock—and hurtling toward her with stomach-wrenching speed. It was hard to breathe. The dragon’s talons felt like hot steel bands clamped around her middle, leaving her head, arms, and legs dangling. Her hands and feet were numb. Cold air rushed passed, filling her ears with its ocean noise, making her eyes water and her nose run.

Rule was close.

The heart-song of his nearness hummed inside her as they spiraled down and down, giving her one clear note to hold onto amid the cacophony of fear and pain. He hadn’t died. The dragon hadn’t eaten him.

It looked like they’d die together in about thirty seconds though, when they smashed into the side of the mountain. No, wait, there was a crevice—it looked too narrow for the dragons’ wings, but they tilted madly and sailed through, leveling off over the ocean.

Oh, God, the ocean. It was the first familiar thing she’d seen, though the colors weren’t right. Blue. She remembered blue, a shifting symphony of blues. This ocean shimmered through lichen colors—yellow ochre with bands of rust and dusty olive, reflecting the odd sky.

No beach. The water rolled right up to the rocky cliff face they flew along. Then the cliff fell back. They tilted, turning into a wide inlet.

More cliffs—rocks meeting ocean, then a thin strip of beach that widened—

They dove at it. As if the dragon had suddenly discovered gravity, they fell faster and faster. Her eyes watered madly from the rush of air. She couldn’t see.

She wanted to touch Rule, just to touch him once more—

The dragon put on the brakes. Those huge wings pulled sharply forward, cupping the air.

Her body tried to keep going. The talons didn’t let it. Too airless to scream, she blacked out again. Only for a moment, though, this time. She was dizzily conscious when, with the beach two stories beneath her, the bands around her middle opened and she fell—

About five feet, into soft, warm sand. She hit awkwardly, catching a glimpse of the long tail passing overhead before the creature powered itself up again with a windy flap of its wings.

She made it to her hands and knees and retched. With nothing in her stomach, the process was both brief and unproductive, but she missed seeing the second dragon drop its burden, only catching a glimpse of its long tail as it vanished upward again.

Dizzy and miserable, she sat back on her heels and looked around.

She was in a giant sandbox. End to end, it stretched about half the length of a football field. (Football, she thought… men in uniforms chasing a funny-shaped ball, fighting to possess it…) The sides were rocks—not masonry, for although they were fitted, they hadn’t been shaped. She was twenty feet or so above the beach.

And twenty feet away, Rule was pushing to his feet.

“Rule!” She tried to stand, but pain shot through her left ankle and she plopped back down in the sand.

A moment later a furry head rubbed her arm.

She twisted and flung her arm over his back, wanting to bury her face in his fur. He yipped.

She pulled back. He was panting softly. “You’re hurt.”

He touched his nose to his side.

The talons must have gripped too tight, or maybe he’d cracked something when the dragon dropped him. “Your ribs?”

He nodded and then touched her leg gently with one forepaw. The pad was rough and scratchy.

“I twisted my ankle when I landed. No biggie.” She ran a careful hand over his side. Nothing protruded, anyway. If there was internal damage…

A squeal brought her head up. She watched as another dragon finished its kamikaze run at the ground, dropping a small, noisy orange demon in the sand about fifteen feet away.

So Gan was alive, too. Her relief surprised her.

Of course, relief might be premature. Maybe the three of them were carryout.

To her left were tall, rocky bluffs riddled with crevices. Next to their sandbox was a broad hollow in the cliff face, like a skinny kid pulling in his stomach—too shallow to be called a cave, but deep enough that half the sand was in shadow. She had the uneasy suspicion that bowl-shaped concavity wasn’t natural, that something had dug out the rock.

Below the sandbox was beach, wide here, but tapering into nonexistence about fifty feet in one direction, seventy in the other. At the end of the beach farthest from the mouth of the inlet, grass grew.

Beach grass, she thought. Ammophila arenaria.

A damp tongue licked her cheek. She turned, startled… and realized both her cheeks were wet, and the salty taste in her mouth wasn’t just from the sea. “I know the name of it,” she murmured, threading her fingers into the wolf’s ruff. “I know the name of the grass here.”

The ocean drew her. The water was the wrong color, but it smelled right. It was quiet here, the waves small. As she watched a wave slid up the sand in a delicate froth, lost interest, and retreated.

“The dragons have a nice sandbox.” She ran a hand through the sand, letting it dribble between her fingers. It was grainy and loose. It would be hard to walk on and all but impossible to run across. It was also warm. Nearly skin temperature, she thought, which was odd. The air was cool.

“We could climb out,” she said, studying the rocks. “The cliff is high but rough enough to supply plenty of hand-and footholds.”

The wolf poked her shoulder and pointed up with his nose. She tilted her head and saw half a dozen shapes silhouetted against the dull sheen of the sky. Guards?

If so, climbing out wasn’t an option. For the moment, though, they weren’t threatened. She drew a shaky breath and wished for clean water to wash the foul taste from her mouth.

Rule lay down beside her. He touched her ankle with his nose and looked at her with a questioning lift around his eyes.

“It doesn’t hurt much.” But it did hurt. Maybe the ymu was wearing off. She looked at Gan.

The demon sat in a small, orange huddle, rocking itself back and forth, moaning.

“Are you hurt?‘ she called.

“I’m going to die, I’m going to die,” it moaned.

She didn’t see any blood. Maybe it was short on optimism.

“What now?” she asked, mostly of herself. Absently she sifted one hand through the sand while hunting for options. There weren’t many. “I’m going to see what happens if I climb down to the beach. Just so we know.”

Rule sighed and pushed to his feet.

“I don’t need an escort. You’re hurt. If you… what’s this?” She dug her hand deeper and pulled up… something. It was hard and sort of sand-colored, larger than her two hands put together, but thin, with a slight curve. A fragment of something, she thought. The edges were sharp. Could it be used as a weapon?

She dusted off some of the sand and her breath sucked in.

Pale colors seemed to run through it in a way that changed every time she tipped it to a new angle, colors with the subtle sheen of an opal.

Gan squealed. “Put it back! Put it back! We’re all going to die!”

“What are you talking about?‘

“You idiot! This is a dragon’s nest! We’re food for the babies! They hatch hungry]”

One of the rocks near the cliff blinked. And the earth moved.

Sand slipped and shifted as something beneath it rose, sending her rolling. She ended up on her back, both hands gripping futilely at sand as if she could hold it still, make it stop moving.

Up and up it rose—a head shaped like a snake’s, but the size of a Volkswagen and with a scarlet frill at the back of the skull. A head long and flat and covered with iridescent scales whose colors ran one into the other— steel, blush, twilight. A head on a neck that seemed to stretch up forever, a Loch Ness Monster of a neck, the muscles taut and visible beneath the shimmer of scales— dawn, dusk, the tarnish of old mirrors.

The dragon’s body humped up out of the sand like a football field-sized snake, sending sand slithering and flying, making her blink grit from her eyes. It was thickest in the middle between the pairs of legs, dwindling to a tail long enough to balance all that neck. It lay in a circle, the tail ending near the head, forming a living wall around them. Along its back rested the origami folds of its wings.

The dragon looked down at her out of eyes the size of platters, eyes that were all silver and black with no whites. Fear was a weight on her chest, a taste in her mouth, a clamor in her brain and the noise in her ears from a pulse gone wild. She knew only one clear thought: That’s no baby.