Mortal Danger

TWO

“AND why,” Rule asked with strained patience, “Did you send the EMTs away?”

Lily sat in the middle of the restroom floor in a puddle of muddy green chiffon, petting the white tiles. In the hall by the door, a uniformed officer kept out the curious and the concerned while his partner took statements.

Rule sat on the floor, too—over against the wall, well away from Lily so he wouldn’t mess up the traces left by her attacker.

She frowned at the floor as if someone had written an unwelcome message there in invisible ink. “They wanted to take me to the hospital.”

He stared at the heart of his heart, the one woman in the world for him… the pigheaded, my-way-or-the-highway idiot who’d refused medical treatment. “Imagine that. What were they thinking?”

Her lips twitched. At last she looked away from the fascinating floor. “I’ll go later. My sore head is evidence of a sort, but I really am okay. Unlike you, I didn’t lose any blood—”

“You opened your wound.”

“But it barely bled, and I’m already stuffed full of antibiotics. My sister checked me out.”

“Yes, and said you probably had a concussion—”

“A slight concussion.”

“—and should go to the emergency room and let them run tests.”

“Which would confirm that my head hurts, after which they’d tell me to rest. I’m resting.”

“You’re conducting a bloody be-damned investigation!”

“I don’t have much time before the S.O.C. crew gets here.”

“You’re speaking acronym again.”

She rolled her eyes. “Scene-of-crime crew. I wanted to check things out before they show up. Or Karonski.” She frowned at the floor one last time, and then held out her hand. “I’ve learned all I can. Help me up?”

He rose swiftly, crossed to her, and took her hand. With one gentle tug she was on her feet and in his arms. He nuzzled her hair. Her scent reached inside him, easing him away from anger.

Which left the fear standing alone. He drew a shaky breath. “Dammit, Lily. Your face is the color of sweaty gym socks.”

“I’m so glad you told me that.” But she leaned into him, letting him have the warmth and weight of her—the prickle of arousal and the comfort of connection. He knew she drew strength from the contact, too. She’d come that far in accepting the mate bond. She no longer denied them this out of fear her needs would swallow her.

But she wouldn’t live with him. That, Rule promised himself, would change. After this attack, even Lily couldn’t continue to insist on warping both of their lives to conform to some notion of autonomy.

“The uniform is staring at us,” she muttered.

“Mmm.” The uniform, as she put it, was not happy about having a lupus on the scene. The man’s first impulse had been to arrest Rule on general principles. Dissuaded from that, he’d wanted to remove Rule from the crime scene.

Reasonable enough, from a cop’s point of view, Rule supposed. But he wasn’t leaving Lily. Eventually the officer had accepted that, though it was a toss-up whether it was Lily’s newly minted federal badge, her past status as a homicide cop, or Rule’s simple refusal to leave that had prevailed.

He rubbed his cheek against her hair, trying to breathe her in. And paused. “You smell funny.”

“Hey.” She leaned away. “No more cracks about sweaty socks.”

“Not that kind of funny.” Rule bent, sniffing down her shoulder and along the sling that held her left arm, where the scent was strongest.

“Could you try to be a little less weird?”

“Picture me wagging my tail, and this will seem more natural.” He inhaled deeply, trying to sort the odd scent from all the others. “I can’t place it,” he said, straightening. “Not in this form.”

“Maybe you’re smelling whatever left the traces I felt on the floor.”

Lily was a touch sensitive, perhaps the rarest of the Gifts, and an unusually strong one. She couldn’t be affected by magic, but she could feel it, even the slight traces left by the passage of supernatural beings. His eyebrows lifted. “What did you feel?”

“It was odd. Sort of… orange.”

“Which tells me little.”

“Doesn’t tell me much, either.” She shook her head. “Magic feels like a texture, not a color, yet this… I can’t explain it. I’ve never felt anything like it before.”

She looked troubled, but Rule felt relief. “It didn’t feel like that damned staff, then.”

Before she could respond, they were interrupted.

“Sorry, ma’am, you can’t go in there.”

That was the officer by the door. A familiar feminine voice replied with a stream of Chinese, followed by another familiar voice—Julia Yu. “I told you they wouldn’t let you in. If they won’t let her own mother in, they won’t make an exception for her grandmother.”

Lily sighed and pulled away. “Grandmother, don’t curse the man for doing his duty.”

“I curse who I curse. You will come out now.”

The old woman standing on the other side of the burly officer was less than five feet tall. Her dress was red, ankle-length, and Oriental style. Black hair striped with silver was drawn up in a knot secured with twin enameled picks, and the ring on one finger held a cabochon ruby. Despite her years, she had a spine like a sapling, supple and erect, and the hauteur of a queen.

Rule couldn’t look at Madame Li Lei Yu without thinking of a cat. She knew she was in charge, whatever the idiots around her might think. Right now, she was a cat who wanted a door opened. Immediately.

Lily gave Rule a wry glance and left the restroom. He followed.

At the west end of the hall another officer was talking with one of the women who’d complained about the locked restroom door. Food smells drifted in from the nearby kitchen, and the sounds of diners in the public part of the restaurant competed with the hum from the rooms occupied by the wedding party.

Here, under the suspicious eyes of the patrol cop, three women made a triangle, with the oldest and smallest of them at its apex. Julia Yu—the one in the middle— touched her daughter’s shoulder, looking anxious. Lily gave her a reassuring smile and turned to her grandmother. “I’m here, as instructed.”

“Ha! You do not fool me. You come because you are ready to come.”

Two pairs of black eyes met—one wrapped in wrin“-kles, one surrounded by smooth young skin. The two women were almost of equal height. Alike in other ways, too, some of them visible. ”You don’t want me to neglect my duty,“ Lily said.

“Pert,” her grandmother announced. “Always you are pert.” She cupped Lily’s cheek. The skin on the back of her hand was as fine and soft as tissue laid over the strict architecture of bone and tendon. Her nails were red and beautifully tended. “You are well, child?”

Lily smiled into that cupped hand. “Aside from the little guy hammering on my skull from the inside, yes.”

“Then reassure your mother. She worries.”

Julia Yu was indignant. “You were the one who insisted on coming to see for yourself that she was all right. You wouldn’t take my word for it. Or Susan’s, and she’s a doctor.”

Madame Yu ignored that, dropping her hand and turning to Rule. “You do not greet me.”

“I but await my opportunity.” He bent and kissed one whisper-soft cheek.

Her eyebrows shot up. “You flirt with your lover’s grandmother?”

“I flirt with you, Madame. It is irresistible.”

“Good. I like flattery when it is done well. Tell your peculiar friend I wish to see him.”

“Ah… which peculiar friend would that be?”

She chuckled. “You have so many, eh? The beautiful one.”

“She means Cullen,” Lily said dryly.

Of course she did. Rule eyed the old woman, wondering if he wanted to know why she wished to see Cullen. Probably not, he decided. “I’ll give you his phone number, but he doesn’t always answer it.”

“I dislike telephones. You tell him come see me when I return.”

“Return?” Julia Yu frowned. “What are you talking about? You aren’t going anywhere. You don’t like to travel.”

“Tomorrow I get on an airplane. I fly to China.”

In the sudden silence, Rule looked at the faces of the three women. Julia Yu was shocked. Madame Yu was obviously enjoying her daughter-in-law’s reaction. And Lily… her distress was plain, at least to him. It showed in her stillness, her lack of expression, the change in her scent.

He moved closer to her. “This wasn’t a sudden decision,” he told the old woman grimly. “You can’t get a visa for China overnight.”

“Can I not?” Her expression suggested he’d fallen from grace. She shrugged and spoke to her granddaughter. “For years, I have thought of such a trip. I am many years now in America. There are people and places in China I would see again before I die. Or they do.”

“You’ve talked about a trip,” Lily said, “but you never made plans. Why now?”

“I am an old woman. I am reminded of this recently.”

The unexpected wryness in Grandmother’s voice made Rule think she referred to the battle two weeks ago—one involving a number of armed Azá, himself, Cullen, Lily, a handful of FBI agents, several wolves… and one very large tiger.

Madame Li Lei Yu hadn’t seemed like an old woman to him at the time.

Lily had herself back under control. “Li Quin will go with you?”

“She, too, has people and places to see. My gardens—” She broke off, turning as Rule did toward the east end of the hall.

Rule knew who was coming by the sound of the footsteps. A moment later the man appeared around the bend in the hall: Abel Karonski, sometime friend, full-time FBI agent, part of a special unit of the Magical Crimes Division. And witch. The satchel he carried wouldn’t hold file folders or a change of clothes.

But the person with Abel wasn’t his partner, Martin Croft. Instead the agent was accompanied by a long, lanky woman with a butch-crop of silvery blond hair, half a dozen earrings in each ear, a badly fitted gray suit, and deep-set eyes the color of old whiskey.

Most people wouldn’t notice the eyes. Not at first. All they’d see were the tattoos.

“Cynna!” Rule exclaimed.

Her mouth tilted up between the indigo whorls looping from cheeks to chin. “Hey, Rule. Fancy meeting me here, huh?”

“YOU’VE added a few,” Rule said, pulling out a chair.

After a brief confusion, Lily, Rule, Karonski, and the unexpected addition to their task force had adjourned to the restaurant’s smallest private dining room. It held one table, six chairs, and a coffee pot.

“More than a few, but some of ‘em don’t show in polite company.” The woman’s grin rearranged the designs on her cheeks. “Damn, you look good. Haven’t changed a bit. Maybe you’d like to check out some of my new tattoos later.”

Lily sat in the chair Rule was holding. She supposed she’d better get used to women propositioning Rule. It was going to happen.

Karonski put down his satchel, pulled out one of the chairs, and sat. “Dammit, Cynna, I told you—”

“And I told you that was bullshit. Rule’s a lupus.”

“Ah, Cynna.” Rule’s smile held a definite tinge of regret. “As delightful as such a study would be, I must decline. I’m not available.”

The woman’s eyebrows went up. She looked at Lily, her expression hard to read behind all the tattoos. But she didn’t look friendly.

Lily decided her head hurt too much to figure out how to handle this blast from Rule’s past. She knew how she felt about it, though. Pissed. But who was she supposed to be angry with?

Karonski, maybe, for springing Cynna Weaver on her like this. She’d wondered if Weaver was here to execute an AG warrant—in effect, an order of execution signed by the U.S. attorney general. The FBI’s temporary director was pushing for one, though so far the attorney general wasn’t buying. No surprise there. The political fallout could be huge, since AG warrants had traditionally only been issued against nonhumans.

Like lupi.

But Karonski had assured her Weaver was part of the unit. She was here to help find Harlowe, not to kill him. Lily turned to him. “What exactly did you tell her about Rule and me?”

“That she’s to behave. Rule’s taken.” He looked around. “Didn’t someone say something about coffee?”

Lily would have smiled if her head hadn’t hurt so much. Karonski was an overfed white male with a severe wardrobe impairment, the stubbornness to outlast a jackass, and a firm belief in the power of caffeine. He was also her boss. “Sure. It’s right there. Get me a cup, too.”

He heaved a sigh and went after his version of life support.

Their little haven had originally been intended for the use of business types. With cops everywhere, the suits hadn’t thought this was a good time to discuss a merger or acquisition or whatever, so Karonski had commandeered the room and the coffee. While the four of them conferred, the S.O.C. team was going through their routine—they’d arrived on Karonski’s heels—and other local cops took the names and addresses of everyone in the restaurant.

This included the entire wedding party, much to her mother’s distress. Susan and her new husband had been allowed to leave—the only ones, so far, to receive permission. Lily’s parents were trying to soothe their guests, and Grandmother had summoned Li Quin to take her home. The local cops would try to stop her, of course, but Lily was putting her money on Grandmother.

It was weird, sitting on this side of the local-federal fence. “So Croft’s in Virginia already?” Lily referred to Karonski’s partner.

“On his way. It’s a major outbreak, the biggest in decades.”

“Any fatalities?”

“Two confirmed. The nasty little shits caused a major pileup on the interstate by riding a trucker’s windshield.” He brought two full mugs back to the table with him. Today’s suit was brown, wrinkled, and missing a button. His tie suggested he’d had something with ketchup for lunch. “Here.”

“Thanks.” Lily wrapped her hands around the steaming mug and took a sip. Caffeine had analgesic properties, right? It was bound to help.

“What about you?” Rule asked the agent. “You’re leaving, too?”

“I’ll be heading there as soon as I’ve got things lined out here.”

“I don’t know much about imps. They’ve always been rare on this coast. Were they summoned?”

“No one summons imps on purpose. They can’t be controlled. But a poorly executed spell can call them up instead of a demon, and most summoning spells suck. That’s one thing lost during the Purge that I hope we never rediscover.” Karonski took a sip of coffee, sighed with pleasure, and added, “More often, though, imps bleed through some weak place between the realms. We don’t know why. Not usually in such numbers, though.”

“Hell’s restless lately,” Cynna commented.

Lily looked at her. “You would know about that?”

“Not directly. I’m righteous these days. But I hear things.”

Lily knew that the section of the FBI’s Magical Crimes Division called the Unit was more flexible than the rest of the Bureau about any less-than-respectable skills its agents possessed. They had to be open-minded. The Unit couldn’t function without the Gifted—witness her own hasty recruitment. And over the years, the Gifted had found different paths for their talents, paths often cloaked in secrecy. The Purge had put an end to making such explorations openly.

But a Dizzy who worked for the FBI?

“All right,” Karonski said, “I’ve got a plane to catch, and Lily here has to go get her head examined—yes, that is an order,” he said directly to her. “So let’s make it quick. What happened?”

“I saw Helen.”

Karonski spilled his coffee. “You’re worrying me.”

“It wasn’t really Helen. I know that. But I’m not talking about a resemblance, either. This woman looked exactly like her—body, face, hair, everything was exactly the same.”

Karonski frowned. “A twin?”

“That was one possibility. Or she was an illusion. Or I was going nuts. I didn’t think I was crazy, but I couldn’t see any way to prove or disprove that right away. The other two possibilities meant she’d been planted to get my attention or Rule’s. Since I knew it wasn’t an illusion—”

“Wait a minute,” Cynna said. “How could you know that?”

Lily raised her eyebrows at Karonski.

“Cynna just flew in. I hit the high points on the way here, but she doesn’t know much more than she read in the papers after the big raid.”

Okay, so Lily had to explain herself—something she wasn’t used to doing. Until last month, she could have counted on the fingers of one hand the number of people who knew about her Gift. “I can be fooled, but not by magic. I’m a sensitive.”

Cynna’s lips pursed as if she’d bitten into something sour. “A sensitive.”

“I never outed people.” It was a refrain Lily had used a lot lately. Too often, sensitives had been used by witch hunters both official and otherwise to sniff out the Gifted or those of the Blood. Most of that was in the past… but not very far in the past. “It came in handy sometimes in my work, but I was with homicide, not the X-Squad. You going to have a problem working with me?”

“I can handle it. Think you can handle working with me?”

“Let’s see.” Lily held out her hand.

To her credit, Weaver didn’t hesitate to offer a quick, businesslike shake. Then she cocked her head to one side. “So what did you pick up about me?”

“Not about you. I’m no empath. I read magic, not people.” She took a moment to gather her impressions from the brief contact. “You’ve a strong Gift,” she said at last. “And complex, like lots of fingerprints on top of each other. I haven’t run across your brand of magic before.”

Weaver showed her teeth in a smile. “There aren’t many like me around.”

Rule shifted in his chair. “Let’s get back to this woman who looked like Helen. It wouldn’t be hard for an uninvited guest to crash the party.”

“No. But how did she know there was a party to crash?”

“That’s rather my point. You suspected she’d been planted to get your attention. That meant they’d learned enough about you to get her here, at your sister’s wedding. So naturally you followed her.” His fingers drummed once. “Did it occur to you she might be bait?”

“Of course she was bait. That didn’t mean I could ignore her. Harlowe’s still missing. So’s that damned staff. This Helen look-alike had to be connected to him, it, or both, and someone knew enough to send her to my sister’s wedding. What was I supposed to do—let that link walk away?”

“You could have come to me for backup.”

“If I’d hunted you up, I could have lost her.”

“You lost her anyway.”

Because that was patently true, she didn’t argue. “Maybe I miscalled it, but I’m the only one who can’t be affected by that staff, and I didn’t want to take the chance. If it had been there…” She started to shake her head, winced, and turned to Karonski. “She went to the ladies’ room, I followed, and that’s the last I know. Something clobbered me as soon as I stepped inside.”

“And locked you in there,” Rule said. “Then vanished.”

Karonski’s forehead knitted. “What do you mean?”

“The restrooms are in the middle of the building. No windows. No way in or out except through that one door—and it was bolted on the inside.”

“Get real,” Cynna said. “A locked room mystery?”

Lily was tired, hurting, and—if she was honest with herself—scared. They’d struck at her in the midst of her family. How had they known where and when to find her? “Are those tattoos for show, or do you actually know something about magic?”

“I know enough to not buy into vanishing villains. Invisibility was impossible before the Purge. It sure hasn’t become possible now.”

“The bolt,” Lily snapped. “Whoever knocked me out didn’t have to disappear. She just had to spell the bolt into moving from the other side of the door.”

Cynna’s mouth opened—and closed. She grimaced. “My stupid. Sorry.”

Anger was not good for concussions. Even minor ones. The throbbing increased, bringing on a wave of nausea. Lily rode out the wave, then said, “We need to—hey!”

Rule had pulled her chair back from the table. “You’ve played macho cop long enough. We’ll be going now. Abel, good to see you again. Cynna, you, too.”

“Wait just one minute.” But when that gentle, inexorable hand propelled Lily to her feet, the room hit the spin cycle. She closed her eyes and waited for it to firm up again. “Okay, okay. I’ll even let you drive.”

“The ambulance crew is still here. I told them to wait.”

Her eyes snapped open so she could glare at him. He smiled and slid an arm around her waist.

“You’re going to the ER, Yu,” Karonski said. “Don’t be a baby about it.”

“I said I’d go.” Pride wouldn’t let her lean against Rule, but it was tempting. As much as she hated to admit it, determination had about run its limit in keeping her upright. “But this is not an emergency. I don’t need to tie up an ambulance.”

“They’re here. Might as well make use of them. Be sure your phone’s turned on, and I’ll let you know what Cynna and I find out before I leave.”

“You’re flying to Virginia tonight?” Lily tried to hide her distress. She was a very new FBI agent. She might know how to conduct an investigation, but she didn’t know FBI procedures and resources.

He grunted an affirmative. “I don’t know how long we’ll be gone. Imps aren’t hard to deal with, but there’s a lot of them and we have to figure out how they got loose. If there’s a leak, I’ll have to close it.”

“You can do that?” Rule asked.

“Piece of cake.” He grinned. “Pretty fancy cake, maybe. I might even need a little help. In the meantime, Lily and Cynna will be handling the hunt for Harlow and that staff. Lily, you’ve got authority to call on the local office as needed. Cynna, you have seniority—”

She snorted. “As if I cared about that shit.”

“No, you’re a damned loose cannon. Like I was about to say, you’ve got seniority, but you’re not in charge. This is Yu’s investigation. You’re to assist.”

She was leaning, dammit. Lily forced herself to straighten. “You call it my investigation, but you brought someone in without telling me.”

“Blame Ruben. He had one of his notions yesterday. Says he thinks you’ll need her soon.”

Ruben Brooks was the head of the Unit. He was also an amazingly accurate precog. When he got hit by a notion, it paid to listen.

Lily turned her head to look at Ruben’s latest notion— the woman whose body had been covered, inch by painful inch, with impossibly intricate patterns of power.

Or that was the idea, anyway. The Dizzies had been a big deal on the street about a decade ago, a quasi-religious group based on poorly understood African shamanistic practices. Most of them had been black, connected to gangs, and without enough of a Gift to cause much trouble—or to keep the movement going. It had pretty much died out when it became obvious the leaders couldn’t deliver on their promises of power.

Beneath the inky tattoos, Cynna Weaver’s skin was white. Lily assumed she was an exception in more than pigmentation. The Unit wouldn’t have signed her up if she were as ineffective as other Dizzies. “So how are you going to assist the investigation?”

“I’m a Finder.” She bared her teeth in a hunter’s grin. “You get me something to work with, and I’ll find that Harlowe bastard for you.”

Shit. “That may be a problem. His house burned down two days ago.”