Ritual Magic

TWENTY-EIGHT

“JUST Drummond,” the slightly see-through man standing in front of her repeated. “Right. Good to see you, too.”

“Like you said, it’s been a rough day. Unless you’re here to alert us to imminent danger—which, I might add, you didn’t do with the dworg—”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

He looked it, too. Regret wasn’t an expression she was used to seeing on Drummond’s saturnine face. “I guess I shouldn’t expect you to turn into a precog just because it would be convenient.” Not that precognition guaranteed anything. Even Ruben had been hunchless today.

“The gates . . . took us all by surprise.”

Us meaning everyone on his side of death? “Not everyone. Hardy had some kind of warning, though by the time it reached me, it was kind of garbled.”

He shrugged. “Saints are different.”

“But he’s getting his information from your side of things, right?”

“Yeah, but I probably can’t hear what he does. See, in order to talk to you, I have to be aware of your world more or less the way you are, and when I’m like this I don’t . . . I can’t . . . hell, just take my word for it, okay? While I’m working with you, I’m not in the right state to hear the, uh, the sort of beings that talk to Hardy. It’s like trying to be ice and water at the same time. Doesn’t work.”

She struggled to follow. “Unless you’re a saint?”

“Saints are different.”

“What’s he saying?” Rule asked.

“That unlike Hardy, he’s not talking with angels.”

Rule’s eyebrow lifted. “This is news?”

Drummond shot Rule the finger without looking away from Lily. “Look, I need to tell you a couple things, and I don’t know how long I can stay manifested. That’s getting hard to do. First thing is, you’ve got to . . .” His mouth moved, but silently. “. . . marigolds and . . . popcorn. No time to lose.”

“Wait, wait. Marigolds? Popcorn? What are you talking about?”

“Shit.” He rubbed his face, glanced to one side, and said, “This is what I can’t tell her? Jesus.” After a moment he added, “No offense intended.”

“You’re sure polite these days.”

He rolled his eyes. “You can hear me talking to . . . and can’t hear me talk about . . . Great. Never mind the first thing, then. The second thing is that you’ve got two enemies.”

“We’ve got more than that, but I assume you mean Friar and the Big B.”

“Assume is for assholes. While you were fighting those dworg, you were also under attack spiritually. I saw it. Now, I’m not real experienced with this sort of thing, but I’m pretty sure it came from a different source.”

“The Great Bitch.”

“I don’t think so. At least, the, uh—call it the spiritual signature—on the attack didn’t look like what I saw on the monsters. Something protected you. I don’t know if it was your bond with the wolfman or that ring or—”

“Which ring?”

“The one with that weird little charm on it.”

The toltoi? Her thumb rubbed it absently. “How did it—”

“It’s Cullen,” someone called from the hall.

Lily was on her feet before she knew she meant to stand up. Rule was faster. He was already halfway across the room when Cullen wove inside, green scrubs covering up the jeans and T-shirt he’d arrived in. For once, he didn’t look gorgeous. He looked like he needed to be admitted to this place, stat.

Rule got to him before he’d taken more than a couple of wavering steps and propped him up. Cullen frowned blearily at him. “Rule. ’M sorry. Eric didn’t make it.”

Rule’s face went tight. “Ill news.”

“Yeah. I beat the doc here?”

“You did.”

Cullen nodded—and kept nodding, like a deranged bobblehead. “Cynna’s with José. He’s holding on. Not used to surgery. Bloody business. Didn’t throw up, though.”

Lily guessed he meant Cynna, being unused to watching an operation, had been shaken but hadn’t thrown up.

“Good for her. You need to sleep.”

“Yeah.” Cullen ran a hand over his face. “Andy’s in recovery. Renewed his spell . . . should sleep another thirty, forty minutes.” He stood there, swaying, and frowned. “What was I saying?”

“That you’re going to come lie down.”

“Right.” He swayed some more. “Cynna . . . she’s got power, doesn’t have healing. Not like Hannah did. Can’t do much. Eating at her. You’ll talk to her.”

“I will. You’re going to lie down now.”

Cullen studied the floor in front of him. “Lie down here.”

Rule picked Cullen up as if he were a child and carried him back to the small couch where he and Lily had been sitting. Cullen was asleep before he laid him down.

Rule straightened, looking down at his sleeping friend. “I’ll call Isen.” He said that, but he didn’t take out his phone. Lily went to him and put her arm around his waist. He sighed heavily and rubbed his cheek along the top of her head. “One of the dworg had me cornered. Eric jumped it.”

She knew how he felt. She knew so very well. “It doesn’t help much to know you’d have done the same for him. A little, but not much.”

She felt him nod. He didn’t speak.

Someone else arrived in the waiting room. She wore scrubs, too, and looked tired, though not as wrung out as Cullen. But she hadn’t been fighting dworg, just the damage they’d left behind. “Mr. Turner?”

Rule’s call to his father was postponed as the doctor gave Rule the bad news he’d already heard from Cullen. Then another scrubs-clad person arrived, this one male and beaming. Andy’s surgeon. Dr. Alexopoulos was full of good news, questions, and amazement. He was new to Mercy General and had never operated on a lupus before. He found their ability to heal fascinating. He hoped to confer with Dr. Two Horses on the subject . . . “Oh? So sorry to hear that. Who’s her surgeon? Good man, good man . . . she’s recovering well, then? Ah! Didn’t realize that these, ah—what did you call them? Didn’t know they showed up in more than one spot . . . no complications, then? Excellent. I understand she’s quite an expert on your people. Now, I have a few questions about . . .”

Rule eventually pried him off with a promise to let Nettie know he looked forward to conferring with her. Then he took out his phone and tapped the screen. “I need to get down to recovery. Andy can’t wake up alone.”

“I should let Casey know about Andy,” Lily said. “Shall I tell him and the others about Eric?”

“Scott is. Isen,” he said into his phone, “I have news.”

Lily hadn’t noticed Scott leaving the waiting room. Someone else was gone, too, she realized. She checked up near the ceiling. Sometimes Drummond didn’t stay fully manifested, but hung around as a drift of white no one else saw.

No sign of him. He was having trouble manifesting, he’d said. But he’d made the effort because he had two things to tell her, only it turned out he couldn’t say the first thing. Not intelligibly. Marigolds? She grimaced. But the other thing that mattered from his perspective was that they had a second enemy. One who’d mounted some kind of spiritual attack on Lily.

What did that even mean? Someone was trying to pull her over to the dark side? Or did he mean the kind of mind control that had affected poor Officer Crown? And God, she hadn’t thought about him in hours . . . she needed to check on him.

But the attack on him had been magic-based—grimy, yucky magic that she’d touched. What had been done to her mother and the others . . . that involved spirit. Or arguai. Same thing, according to Cullen. Had someone been trying to wipe out her memory? Why would their enemy—or enemies—want anyone’s memory wiped out? Lily scrubbed her face with both hands. Think, damn it. Her brain felt clouded, fogged by grief and guilt and exhaustion. Even her relief about Andy was distant. In the midst of all that dimness, a tiny little question nudged up.

Had someone wanted her to kill Santos? Tried to make that happen?

Rule squeezed her shoulder. “I need to head to recovery, Lily.”

“Hmm? Oh, yes. Of course. I’ll stay here and wait for news.”

“You looked very far away just now, and not in a happy place.”

“Trying to think. Not doing a great job of it.”

“You probably need to eat.” Rule sighed. “We all do. I’ll have a word with Scott on my way out. I should have seen to that before. Do you have a preference?”

Rule and those lupi who’d been involved in the battle had grabbed various foodlike substances from the vending machines earlier, but Changing made them hungry. So did healing. Chips and peanuts were a small, temporary stopgap.

Lily, on the other hand, had no appetite whatsoever. “Whatever’s easy. You go see Andy. I told you what he said, didn’t I?”

A small smile touched Rule’s lips. “He didn’t freeze.”

“Yeah. He . . .” Her phone hooted like an owl. Her eyebrows shot up. “That’s Isen.”

“He said he wanted a word with you.” Rule brushed his lips across her cheek and headed off, trailing three of the guards.

Lily took out her phone. “Hi, Isen.”

“Lily.” Isen’s voice was a deep, true bass. The phone didn’t do it justice, but did allow the warmth through. “When we spoke earlier I was somewhat distracted, but something you said has nagged at me. You said that Cynna identified the dworg immediately. You realized she must have recognized them from the clan memories.”

“Yes.” Where was he going with this?

“It occurs to me that you haven’t heard our stories about dworg.”

“Ah . . . no. No, I haven’t.” Maybe that was why she’d lost twice as many men as Rule and Isen had. She didn’t know how to fight dworg. Hadn’t been able to fight them. Which was why she’d tried to stay out of the way of those who did, those who’d fought and bled and died . . .

“In the old days, it took ten or twelve lupi to kill one, and even with those numbers, several were always lost. We always tried to fight them in the open. We needed room to maneuver. Your men lacked room, in that parking lot. In spite of that, your casualties were amazingly low. José was quick and beautifully competent. So were you.”

“Competent?” Her voice rose and cracked. “José, yes. Me? I couldn’t fight them. I did nothing.”

“You sent for backup before you even knew what you faced.”

Which got one person killed, another badly hurt. Though it had also alerted Ackleford, who’d gone for the RPG as soon as he looked out his window . . . “It was the candy frog. Toad. Whatever. I saw that and thought about Hardy’s warning.”

“For which I have thanked him. Once the monsters arrived, you recognized that you couldn’t personally engage with them and trusted José to do his job. You got Cynna to safety. You drew the dworg away from José so your compatriot could fire his RPG. How is it nothing, when you did all these things right?”

A huge lump rose in Lily’s throat. She had to swallow twice to get rid of it. “That doesn’t feel true, but thank you.”

“Feelings are not always a guide to truth, and guilt is an indulgence you cannot afford. It clouds the mind. Set it aside and think. What would you do differently?”

Several impossibilities rose to mind immediately, like never leaving the house without an Uzi in her hands. She let those bubbles rise to the surface and pop, then said, “From now on, we park as close as possible. I’ve got the authority. I’ve been reluctant to abuse it, or seem to be abusing it. We had AK-47s in the trunk of the car, but it was too far away to do us any good. They don’t have the stopping power of Uzis, but they would have been a damn sight better than the handguns we did have.” And maybe she’d see about getting a couple of Uzis, too. Could Ruben pull some strings, make that a legal acquisition somehow?

Which reminded her—she needed to check with Karonski, see if he’d been able to keep those Uzis off the record. She had a couple of ideas about that. Her fingers twitched. Where was her notebook?

“Excellent. Remember that José and the others were not fighting your enemy, Lily. We were, all of us, fighting our enemy. Today that enemy struck using an ancient horror. We not only won, but won handily. They failed to achieve a single one of their objectives. Thirty-two dworg were sent against us. In the old days, that many dworg would have meant at least a hundred lupi deaths, and many times that in human casualties. They were our enemy’s most feared and potent weapon. Today, thirty-two dworg managed to kill only three of us before we killed every one of them.”

“Modern weaponry beats teeth and claws. Admittedly, it took major firepower to bring them down. If we hadn’t had the Uzis, the story would’ve had a different ending.”

“And somehow the Great Enemy failed to take modern weapons into account?” Isen paused for a moment, letting that sink in. “She spent an enormous amount of power today, power on a level she has not used against us in thousands of years. And achieved . . . nothing.”

Lily opened her mouth. Closed it again. And said, “Shit. We’re missing something.”

“I think so, yes.”

Could the dworg have been a diversion? Maybe, but you didn’t use that kind of power for a distraction unless you had something even bigger planned, and nothing else had happened.

That wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make sense. “The Azá. Last year, she needed them in order to open a gate. Them and a whole lot of death magic. How come she’s suddenly able to pop open four gates—bam, bam, bam, bam!—with no helpful ritual on this side? Three of them without nodes, too. We have to ask what’s different now. Friar, yeah, she’s got him all supercharged, but he wasn’t in four places at once, opening gates. I don’t think he could open even one. If Sam can’t do it himself, I can’t believe . . . hold on a minute. Hold on. Cynna’s here.”

Cynna’s scrubs were pink with little bunnies on them. It made for an odd look with her tats. Her face was tired and a bit grim, but she smiled the moment she saw Lily heading for her. “José’s out of surgery. He should be okay. No guarantees—I’m not Nettie, I can’t check him out myself—but his surgeon has operated on lupi enough to make a guess about his recovery, and he thinks José will make it. Oh, and I saw Rule in with Andy. I told him about José.”

This time the relief hit hard and immediately. Lily’s eyes filmed with tears. “Thank God. Are you . . . you look tired, but okay. Cullen got up here and crashed.”

“He was still so drained after his stint with Sam—he damn near burned himself out just using sleep spells. Where . . . oh, there he is.” She moved around Lily and crouched beside her soundly sleeping husband. She watched him a moment, stroked his hair, and whispered something Lily didn’t catch. Then she stood and looked at Lily. There was a lot more grim in her expression now, along with a healthy dollop of determined. “Just before the shit hit the fan, I got a decent pattern for your murder victim. I am by damn going to Find whatever I can with that pattern. I’m headed outside now to do that. You with me?”

Oh, shit, was this a good idea? Cynna was a target, and just because—

Drummond popped into being in front of Lily, his face clear, the rest of him fuzzy and indeterminate. “That’s it! That’s the first thing I wanted to tell you, but couldn’t. She needs to do that. You need to go, both of you. And hurry.”