Mortal Sins

TWENTY

WHAT would ghosts be scared of?

It was, Lily thought as she followed Rule and Toby through the gate, a very good question. Not the only one clogging up her pipes—her fingers itched for a notebook to jot some of them down—but maybe the most important one. If she could answer it, she’d go a long way to answering the rest.

The gate creaked as she closed it. Toby looked up at his dad. “I didn’t even hear the gate when you came. I thought I was listening, but I didn’t hear it.”

“Lily and I came over the fence.”

“Yeah?” Toby looked at Lily, then at the fence, obviously measuring their respective heights. Impressed, he said, “It’s a pretty high fence.”

She smiled. “Your dad gave me a boost once he was two-legged again.”

“But you still did it real quietly,” he said, determined to give her credit. “Uh . . . I’m sorry about calling you Dad’s mate. I’m not supposed to say that, but I forgot. It’s just that I don’t have a word for you.”

So she wasn’t the only one. “I’ve been bothered by that, too. I can say what you are to Rule, but I don’t have a word for what you are to me. Though maybe I’ve found one.”

“What’s that?”

“Family.”

Toby’s face lit up like she’d plugged him in. Quickly he looked at his feet, as if he might need to keep an eye on what they were up to. “Cool,” he said, in the way of a boy embarrassed by his emotions.

She wanted very much to hug him. “Of course, my family is kind of messed up.”

He looked up, grinning. “Your grandmother’s cool.”

“That she is.”

“Toby.”

That’s all Rule said, and in a mild voice, but the boy deflated. He sighed and scuffed his shoe in the dirt. “How much trouble am I in?” He looked up at his dad. “You figured out what I meant, right? When I made you a trail.”

“I did.” Rule stopped and put his hands on Toby’s shoulders. “You handled a difficult situation with honor. Not perfectly, mind, but with honor. I’m proud of you.”

The light came back in Toby’s face. He all but glowed as he asked casually, “So what’s my punishment?”

Lily’s mouth opened. She closed it before she got her foot in, but a couple more questions joined the rest on her mental list.

“Well.” Rule started walking again. “You did leave the house at night without permission. And this isn’t Clanhome.”

“I know.” Toby paused, then said hopefully, “Laps?”

Dad chuckled. “Oh, that would be such a punishment. You love to run. No, I’m afraid it will be math. Three days, one page of fractions each day.”

“Shit,” Toby said. Then, more quietly, “Whoops.”

Rule didn’t quite smile, but Lily could see the effort it took. “An extra page the first day for disrespecting your grammy’s rules about your language. Toby, I can tell Lily is puzzled by your punishment, since I said I was proud of you. Would you explain it to her, please?”

“Oh. Sure. See, I couldn’t tell . . .” But he stopped as they reached the street, quickly checking for cars.

He always did that, she’d noticed. It seemed to be a lupus thing. He never lost track of his surroundings, even when he might have assumed adults were watching out for him.

His pause was brief. They stepped into the empty street together. “I couldn’t tell Dad about the ghosts because I’d promised. It was an actual promise, so I couldn’t just decide things had changed and I needed to tell, see? Like if I say, ‘See you at school tomorrow,’ that’s not a promise. I could get sick or something. But if I promise to be at school tomorrow, I have to be there, even if my leg’s broken or a tornado comes. There’s no mitigating circumstances with a promise.”

The “mitigating circumstances” almost made Lily smile. It was so Rule. But this was deadly serious for Toby. “Admirable, but a hard standard to live by. Is this a lupi thing? Or just Nokolai?”

“Lupi. Like Grandpa says, we’re supposed to hoard our promises, or put limits on them, so maybe I shouldn’t have promised Justin and Talia to keep her secret without, like, establishing some parameters. I was pretty little when I did it,” he said from the lofty vantage point of his nine years. “I didn’t know about parameters. Anyway, when Justin called and said Talia was in trouble from the ghosts, I couldn’t tell anyone, but I needed Dad to know because Talia needed help. And you needed to know what the ghosts said. So I, uh, left a trail for Dad. I didn’t break my word, but I found a way to do the right thing. But I did break the rules.”

“By sneaking out.”

“Yeah. Kids don’t get to pick which rules we obey, just like clan don’t get to choose when they’ll obey the Rho. And sometimes there’s a price for doing the right thing. I have to be willing to pay the price.”

“I see,” she said gravely. “Is math a high price to pay?”

“Well . . .” He darted a glance at his father. “Not real high. I don’t like it much, but I can do fractions pretty fast, so it’s not going to take me lots of time. Did it help, hearing what the ghosts said?”

“Yes, though I haven’t sorted out what it means yet. Apparently the perp is male. That should help.” She glanced at Rule. “I’m thinking it’s lucky my boss is a precog.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Ruben foresaw this?”

“No, but remember the investigative panel I told you about? The one he put together after that ghost disrupted Cynna’s wedding?”

Toby immediately had to know about the ghost. Lily was happy to let Rule take over telling the tale while her own thoughts turned to ghosts . . . and memory.

After the incident at the wedding, Ruben’s precognitive Gift had prodded him to find out more about ghosts. The Unit lacked a medium, so the experts he’d brought in had all been civilians—a varied crew, as it turned out, but they’d agreed on one crucial point: no one knew what caused ghosts.

Murder was certainly a factor, but not all violent deaths threw ghosts. The suddenness of death was a factor, too, but sometimes a lingering death resulted in a ghost. The old canard about the ghost needing to resolve something held true, yet any number of people died with serious issues left unresolved—and went on to the Big Whatever without leaving any ghostly residue behind.

Most ghosts didn’t linger long. Some did. Most couldn’t affect the physical world. Some could, using what might be telekinesis—doors slamming, knickknacks falling off shelves, that sort of thing. Many ghosts were sad or confused. A few were actively hostile.

None of the mediums had reported ghosts who screamed in their heads.

The experts didn’t agree on what a ghost was. Some—those who didn’t believe in an afterlife—insisted that ghosts were a sort of congealed energy that failed to dissipate when the person who’d generated it died. They were simply patterns, not people, lacking real cognition or sense of self. But to a woman—and for reasons no one understood, mediums were always female—the mediums disagreed.

Lily had to cast her vote with the woo-woo crowd on this one. Something survived beyond the body. Might as well call it a soul.

What bugged Lily was that not all mediums were Gifted. At Ruben’s request, she’d checked them out. Turned out that a few people were able to see ghosts without possessing a hint of magic. That had been confirmed in double-blind tests comparing their sightings with those of Gifted mediums. They couldn’t interact consistently with the ghosts, though. Only those with a medium’s Gift could.

This struck the dead-is-dead experts as proof that ghosts weren’t people. They claimed that the medium fed the ghosts energy, giving them a semblance of life. The mediums had done some eye-rolling over that. Sure, the ghosts were using the medium’s power to communicate, but even without that magical boost they were discrete entities. Maybe not the entire soul, but some part of it.

The part with the memories. Lily’s heart bumped up a beat. That was the other thing everyone agreed on. When asked about this world or their current existence, ghosts’ answers ranged from vague to nonsensical. But they remembered themselves and their lives. Clearly. Vividly.

As for names . . . there was something about names in the report. She couldn’t quite remember . . .

“Penny for them,” Rule said, taking her hand.

“Hmm.” They’d almost reached the Asteglio back gate. Unlike the two males with her, she’d lost track of her surroundings. “Nothing coherent, I’m afraid. I wish I could have asked the ghosts some questions through Talia.”

“Why didn’t you?” Toby asked. “Talia would’ve done it, I bet, especially with me staying close enough to make them go away if they got mean.”

“I’m not supposed to interview a minor without the knowledge and consent of her parents, much less encourage her to use her Gift for me. And it might not be safe for Talia. You can’t be beside her every minute, and I don’t know what to make of the new ones screaming at her.”

“Huh.” Toby thought that over as they passed back into his yard. “Can you get an adult medium to come talk to the ghosts?”

“Maybe. There aren’t any in the Unit.” And she wasn’t sure a medium could help. Ghosts were seriously unreliable witnesses, which was why Ruben hadn’t made more of a push to recruit a medium for the Unit.

Toby wanted to know if Rule was going to tell Grammy about him sneaking out. Rule chuckled and said she might ask for an explanation when she saw Toby doing fractions on a sunny summer morning. “Morning?” Toby said—a little too loudly. Rule hushed him, and Toby launched a whispered campaign against morning math, as opposed to afternoon math, that carried the two of them up the stairs.

Lily stayed behind, clearing away the plate and glass she’d forgotten earlier. Before heading up, she grabbed her purse and dug out her phone; it was the quickest way to send an e-mail. She needed the report on ghosts that Ruben’s panel had produced.

An hour ago, climbing the stairs had been foreplay. Now they were just stairs, the path she needed to take to reach the bed she was longing for . . . and for entirely different reasons. Somewhere between rinsing her plate and sending the e-mail, exhaustion had hit.

Rule was still in with Toby when she reached the top of the stairs. She headed straight for the bedroom.

Parents do this sort of thing all the time, she thought as she pulled off her jacket and unbuckled her shoulder holster. Coitus interruptus took on a whole new meaning with kids around. Maybe most parents didn’t include the walking-a-wolf-down-the-alley bit, but kids climbed out windows. Kids did all sorts of crazy things, and parents had to sift the rights and wrongs and dangers of a situation, and somehow convey all that to their kids.

Preferably without yelling. She hung up the jacket, pulled off her T-shirt and bra, and dropped the last two on the closet floor, regretting the lack of a clothes hamper. Not that her mother had raised her voice, exactly. She’d turned shrill. Sarcastic. If there was a way to show that you disapproved of an action without disapproving of the child, her mother had never found it.

As far as Lily could tell, she hadn’t looked. Lily had quit listening long ago. Didn’t stop reacting to her, though, did I? She sighed, turned off the bedside lamp, and slipped naked between the sheets, too tired to dig out a sleep shirt. Which she seldom bothered with at home, but she had intended to use here.

Wasn’t Rule going awfully far to the other extreme, though? Sure, he’d disciplined Toby, but first he’d said he was proud of the boy. Talk about mixed messages.

Sneaking out of the house was serious. Even in Halo, bad things happened to kids on the streets at night. And right now there was something or someone who could make people kill.

She didn’t hear Rule come in, but she felt him. Eyes closed, she listened to the rustling sound of him undressing, and she smiled. Oh, yeah, she was stupid in love with the man. She knew his clothes would go on the floor, not out of sight in the closet, and still she smiled.

He’d probably pick them up in the morning. He knew disorder bothered her, so he usually remembered. Maybe, she thought sleepily, it worked out better for kids if their parents—the ones they started out with, or the ones they collected along the way—didn’t agree about everything. Might as well hope that was true, because that’s what most kids got.

The mattress dipped. Automatically she rolled onto her side so Rule could curve his body around hers. He kissed her ear, sighed, and sank onto the pillow, lazily draping one arm over her waist to cup her breast. “We missed our moment, didn’t we?”

She nodded without opening her eyes.

“Not going to tell me I was wrong about Toby?” he murmured.

“Nope. Too tired.” Though she couldn’t resist adding, “I don’t think this is the first time he’s slipped out.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. We’re looser about some rules than you’re used to, in part because our children can’t lie to us. We don’t allow disobedience about the important things.”

She suspected they defined “important things” differently. “You would have been a lot more upset if he’d broken his word.”

“Yes.” He nuzzled her hair. “He’s my only son, nadia. He will almost certainly be Rho someday. His word will bind the entire clan, and lupi will die to uphold it if necessary. He must understand the weight of his promises.”

It was a cold, scary ideal to impose on a boy, but he was talking about himself as much as his son. And, she realized, his father. She had a glimmering of what it meant to be Rho. The head of a clan was, in an essential way, separate from the rest, set apart by a responsibility the others couldn’t share.

Did Isen, in holding the clan’s mantle, enjoy the comfort of it that the rest of the clan shared? Or was it another burden? Or some combination of the two?

Mantles . . . something she was going to ask . . . but sleep dragged at her. As her mind shut down, she snuggled closer to Rule so he would know he wasn’t alone. But her last thoughts, oddly, were about his father.

She had no doubt Isen Turner could have sex as often as he wished. But did anyone simply sleep with him? Or was he alone in that way, too?