Ritual Magic

TEN

DENISE was gone. While Lily had been talking to Rule, the shift had changed. Plackett, too, had left. Lily checked to make sure the doctor had admitted Liddel, then tried to find out more about Hardy.

Everyone in the ER knew the man. He came to the ER at least once a week, but not as a patient. They didn’t think they’d ever treated him for anything. He sang, he played his harmonica, and he listened to the patients, especially the homeless or otherwise abandoned. Sometimes he brought in patients. Some of the homeless showed up at the ER regularly, like Liddel, while others resisted medical care until they were in bad shape. Those were the ones Hardy could sometimes persuade to come in for treatment.

Everyone knew Hardy. Most of them liked him. No one knew anything about him. Was Hardy his first or last name? No one knew. Did he have a regular spot to eat? To sleep? No one had a clue.

“They don’t like to tell you where their flops are,” one nurse told Lily. “I asked Hardy once—the weather was really stinky and I was worried about him—but he just smiled and sang an old hymn about everyone gathering by the river.”

San Diego was lacking in rivers, so that wasn’t much help. Lily thanked him and turned to Rule. “I’ll bet the shelters know him. He’d have been too late to get a bed tonight, but—”

“Lily.”

“I know, I know. I can check with them in the morning. But first—”

“Call whoever you need to from the car.”

“But . . .” She closed her eyes. The brief shot of adrenaline had worn off. She felt downright dizzy with fatigue. “Okay. All right.”

Lily’s mobile backup fell into step behind them as they left the ER. “Where’s your team?” she asked Rule.

“José is at the car. Barnaby is going to see if he can find out anything about Hardy. He knows some people. Jacob is watching our room.”

She hadn’t even seen Rule talk to Barnaby. Clearly her brain had gone to sleep ahead of the rest of her. “What room?”

“I’ve rented a room at the Hilton for tonight to cut down on driving time.” He opened the door of his Mercedes and waited for her to climb in.

“The Hilton? I mean . . . there’s always Motel 6.”

“Ah, well, there are other ways to cut back on expenses, aren’t there? Take the downstairs bathrooms. Do we really need to buy everything new? I’m sure, with a good scrubbing, the old toilet would be—” He broke off at the look on her face and touched her arm. “Joking, Lily. Joking. If you’re too tired to know that, maybe we’d better leave before you keel over.”

Lily sighed and got in the car, scooting over so Rule could slide in next to her. The Hilton would certainly be closer than driving all the way home, though Lily’s commute wasn’t as long as it had been when they were at Nokolai Clanhome.

They’d bought a house.

It lay about halfway between the city and Nokolai Clanhome and came with forty acres and a small, derelict motel, which was being turned into housing for the guards and others from Leidolf. That clan was, in a roundabout way, the reason they had to buy the place, so they’d put a rush on getting the extra housing ready. It was nearly finished.

The house wasn’t. It was in bad shape, too.

The setting was pretty—rolling hills that screened them from their neighbors on two sides, with the back shielded by an abandoned orchard. There were a couple of ley lines running beneath the land—not that any of them could use ley lines, but like Rule said, you never knew when such a thing might come in handy. The house had been built in the thirties in the Spanish Revival style, with lovely high ceilings. It had also had hideous shag carpet, holes in some walls, scabrous kitchen cabinets, an ancient roof, and faulty electrical. But it was structurally sound, and Rule had negotiated a really low price.

It was also big. Really big. Two stories plus a partly finished attic and a full basement. Lily didn’t trust the basement—what Californian wants to be underground when the earth starts to rock and roll?—but it was being reinforced. Originally, the ground floor had held a large living room, small dining room, and huge kitchen; a study with hideous wallpaper, a fireplace, and beautiful built-in bookshelves; and a bedroom intended as the master. The second floor was all bedrooms—six of them—plus the house’s only bathroom.

What kind of nutcase built a house with seven bedrooms and one bathroom?

That was being changed, as was so much else. Not on the second floor, not yet, because they were living there while the first floor was gutted and rebuilt.

The new roof, windows, and steel beams were in place. One of the walls that had come down was load bearing, which had made Lily nervous, but the architect assured her that steel beams would do the trick. The kitchen was maybe half-done, and they’d just finished framing in the new walls. Lots of electrical and plumbing still to do before they could put up drywall, but the study would end up as the dining room. The original dining room, which adjoined the master bedroom, was slated to become a luxurious master bath plus a walk-in closet.

The floor was finished, at least—and hadn’t that been a hassle, deciding what to use! Lily had leaned toward bamboo. Rule had been torn between the beauty of a dark-stained hardwood and the practicality of carpet, which offered better traction to a wolf’s paws. In the end, they’d gone with stained and polished concrete. It looked great, was highly customizable, and wouldn’t get scratched up by anyone’s claws.

Lily’s brain got constipated when she thought about what all this was costing, so she tried not to. She might have signed the mortgage papers along with Rule, but he was covering the renovations, so she didn’t have to contemplate it. If he said he could afford it, he ought to know. She ought to trust him. She did, but it was a godawful amount of money, especially when added to the cost of their wedding . . . which was supposed to happen in two weeks and five days.

“What is it?” Rule asked.

“I . . . the wedding. Should we postpone it?”

Rule went still. “Do you want to?”

“I don’t know. It seems like we should, but . . . Mother won’t be able to . . . and I don’t know who’s doing what. I don’t even have the final guest list.”

“I have all that information. I can do what needs doing, but if it hurts too much to hold the ceremony with your mother’s situation so uncertain, we will postpone it. Is that what you want?”

“I think I should want it, but I don’t. Only there’s the trip, too. Our honeymoon trip. How late can we wait to cancel our reservations? And the plane tickets. Did we get the refundable—”

“It doesn’t matter. We can decide about that later.”

“Okay.” She drew a shaky breath. “Do you think Mother will want to be flower girl instead of mother of the bride?”

“Ah, nadia,” he said and gathered her to him.

She rested her hands on his chest, keeping an inch of space between them. “Don’t do this. If you do this, I’m going to—”

“Relax?” He stroked her hair. “Behave in an un-cop-like manner? Fall asleep?”

Fall apart, more like. Exhaustion was melting outward from her bones to her muscles to her brain, taking down what few defenses she still had. “I don’t want to stop doing the job. Without the job I’m just a daughter. Nothing good is happening with me-the-daughter. My father’s very angry.”

“Yes, he called me.”

“Did he yell?”

“Not precisely. Did he yell at you?”

“He said he would forgive me eventually, but for now he didn’t want to see or speak to me. Then he hung up.”

Rule kept petting her. He didn’t say anything.

“I’ve never . . . in all my life he’s never . . . I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do.”

“He’s a good man. He’s hurting and scared and angry. He thinks you made the wrong decision, but he’s a good man. He loves you.”

She couldn’t have hurt him so much if he didn’t. “There’s no one to hold him the way you’re holding me. He’s got Susan, I guess, and Beth when she gets here, but he’ll want to be strong for them instead of letting them be strong for him. And he’s too angry at Grandmother to let her help. He said she’d gone too far this time. What did he tell you?”

“It was a difficult conversation. I had to tell him that Julia wishes to stay with you and me when she leaves Sam’s lair.”

“When she . . . God. I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t thought of it at all. I just assumed she’d go home, but she doesn’t know it’s her home, does she? But that’s what she should do. As hard as it will be on my father to have her there when she doesn’t remember him, it would be worse if she wasn’t there.”

“Hmm.”

“What does that mean?”

“Julia says she won’t live with Edward and we can’t make her. She understands that we consider him her husband. That frightens and angers her.”

“But he’s not going to do anything that . . . mentally she’s a kid! He knows that. He would never take advantage of a twelve-year-old girl.”

He rubbed his cheek along her hair. “What did you want when you were twelve, Lily?”

“To be a cop.”

She felt his smile in the way his cheek moved. “Let me put it this way. Suppose when you were twelve, strangers forced you to marry a man more than forty years older than you. Would you have felt okay about being married to him, living with him, as long as he didn’t touch you?”

“Yech. No. I would have . . . if for some bizarre reason no one could help me, not even Grandmother, I’d . . .” Probably have found a way to make herself a very young widow. But at twelve, she’d had issues her mother didn’t. Julia was unlikely to turn homicidal if forced to live with Lily’s father, but running away was a real possibility. Lily sighed. “We’ve got extra bedrooms. No kitchen and only one bathroom, but plenty of bedrooms.”

“Which is fortunate, because Madame Yu and Li Qin will also be staying with us.”