Mortal Ties

TWENTY-SEVEN

AL Drummond really enjoyed the look on Yu’s face as she leaped out of bed. She probably figured he’d been hanging around while she made whoopee with her wolf man. He wasn’t that kind of creep, but that’s what she’d think. She’d probably come up with some way to make him pay for his grand entrance, but it would be worth it.

“It’s Drummond,” Yu said as she grabbed a fistful of clothes off the floor. “Who or what is incoming?” she demanded, stepping into her pants.

Al considered commenting on her lack of underwear. What could she do—hit him? Maybe later. He did have a warning to deliver. “I can’t tell,” he said. “It’s dark where the intruder is. He’s paying a visit via the ductwork.”

“The ductwork?” she repeated. Her lover—who’d sprung from the bed in that fluid, too-fast way lupi moved sometimes, which Drummond didn’t like at all—looked up and around. They both spotted the vent. “It isn’t big enough,” Lily said.

“The one in the other room is. That’s where he’s headed.”

“He says the intruder’s heading for the one in the sitting room,” she told Turner as she pulled her shirt over her head. She tugged it down and glared at Al. “So why the hell did you pop up in here? You could have materialized on the other side of the damn door.”

He smirked. “More fun this way.”

A low growl rose in the chest of her wolf man. Turner must have figured out where Al was by watching where Lily looked, because he seemed to look right at him. “Been hanging around watching, have you?”

He spoke to Al. Right to him. No one but Yu had done that since he died, and it shook him, how good that felt. Keep talking to me. Please. Please keep talking to me. “Maybe that’s how you get your jollies. Not my thing.”

Yu rolled her eyes. “Rule may see you now and then, but he can’t hear you. Come on.”

“See me?” He tried to grab her as she reached for her shoulder harness. Didn’t work, of course. It made him want to growl like the wolf man, or maybe howl like one.

The worst thing about being a ghost wasn’t when she went in the damn car. Even being alone, bad as it was, wasn’t the worst. It was the sheer, unrelenting uselessness of his existence. Hell was being unable to do one damned thing, and maybe he’d earned a stint in hell. Maybe he deserved it. But God, what he’d give to be able to affect something. If Turner could see him…“What do you mean, he sees me sometimes?”

“Just what I said, and this isn’t the time to talk about it.”

Turner opened the door and moved silently into the other room. Drummond followed Yu through the door. He could go through walls, but he liked to use doors. Made him feel more real. She had her rig fastened by the time she stopped beside Turner. She drew her weapon and held it down at her side.

The two of them glowed. He’d told Yu that all the embodied had a glow, but these two lit up brighter than most…and brighter still when they stood close like that. Drummond thought he knew why. It was that weird, glowy cord stretched between them.

No one else had one. None of the people he’d seen since he died, anyway, and with nothing to do but watch, he’d been paying attention. He didn’t know what the cord-thing was, but it glowed like the living did. As if it was alive. It freaked him out. He stepped back, not wanting to touch the eerie thing.

Turner stood in front of the vent, studying it. Yu started to say something, but Turner tapped her arm and laid a finger to his lips.

“You hear something?” she whispered so softly that Drummond wasn’t sure he heard it with his ears. Well, whatever passed for ears with him like this. It wasn’t like when she’d talked in his head at the branch office, so it probably had to do with their goddamn mystical connection.

Turner nodded and tipped his head to one side. Yu glanced that way and nodded back as if she knew exactly what he meant.

Maybe she did. She went to the door to the other bedroom and opened it. She didn’t step inside, though, but whispered real softly again. “Get up. Be quiet. Someone’s coming.”

In total silence, three men went from what looked like sound sleep to standing. Then they stood there, naked and motionless. Waiting.

Yu jerked her head at them—come on—and went back in the sitting room, where Turner looked at them and wiggled his hands around as if it meant something, pointing now and then. Two of the naked guys stood with him in front of the vent. One went to the door to the suite and opened it.

“Did he tell them to do all that?” Drummond said.

Yu glanced at him, opened her mouth, then closed it. And put words right into his damn mind again. Yes. It’s ASL, mostly. He wants the guards at the door to know what’s happening.

The guy who’d gone to the door came back. Drummond hadn’t heard him say anything to the two guys guarding the door. Maybe he’d used ASL, too. Turner made some more hand-talk at him, and he loped silently into the bedroom he’d emerged from, returning with a wood-gripped 9 mm in one hand—a Smith and Wesson 952, he thought. An expensive piece, if so. He was still buck naked.

Turner pointed at the other two, made a circle in the air…and the two guys without guns turned into wolves.

Al had been around when lupi turned into wolves once, but he hadn’t really watched. He’d been busy at the time, what with being freshly dead and trying to stop a bunch of demons shaped like wolves from killing a few hundred people. This time, he paid attention. It gave him the creeps to think of a man morphing into a beast, but it was better to know your enemy, right? So he watched, but he didn’t see much. It was like they flowed somewhere else, somewhere he couldn’t go, then flowed back, reformed.

He hadn’t expected to hear anything. “Did you…” He had to stop and clear his throat. “Does that music happen every time they do that?”

Yu looked at him sharply. You heard music?

He nodded. Clear and distant, so distant he shouldn’t have heard it…and pure. Pure like a baby’s laugh or the way stars look, spattering the darkness. Pure like nothing he’d ever heard or imagined. “Real faint,” he said. “It was…” He shook his head, out of words.

Yu had a funny look on her face, like he’d made her sad. Wistful, maybe. Moonsong, she said in the way he didn’t like but was getting used to. You heard moonsong.

A faint scraping came from the vent. Drummond shook off his preoccupation with something he’d barely heard and paid attention to what was happening now. So did Yu and her wolf man and the two wolves.

The vent cover wiggled, started to fall. A man’s hand shot out and grabbed it. A man’s head emerged. “Oh,” Jasper Machek said, blinking like an owl at the odd group assembled below him. And, “Shit.”