by Eileen Wilks
“Want to see if he’s persecuting you on purpose?”
She snorted as she thumbed through the directory. “As if he’d answer that question. No, the other possibility that occurs to me is some kind of toxin. Maybe these people ingested something in the water or on a tomato or whatever. I want to find out if he’s notified the public health people. If not, I am.” And she knew who to call. She knew this city. It was a comfort to her, after all the traveling she’d done lately.
“Officer Munoz looked really young,” she said as she selected the number for the SDPD Chief of Police.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Do I sometimes look really young to you?”
“You always look exactly right to me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He smiled and kept looking straight ahead. “And I’m not an idiot.”
Lily smiled, too, as the chief’s secretary announced herself in her familiar smoker’s growl. It was good to be home.
BEHIND the 7-Eleven, next to a full and fragrant Dumpster, a small man was doubled over, laughing. “Oh, did you see the woman’s face?” he said in Chinese. “Did you see? ‘Oh, help me, help me, the big snake wants to eat me up’!” He added the last in a squeaky falsetto and slapped his thigh. “Crash she goes! Bam!”
He looked a bit like an Asian Hercule Poirot with his slicked-back hair, though he lacked the impressive mustache. Mostly, though, he looked ordinary—somewhere over forty with dark, merry eyes and a stubby nose. He wore athletic shoes with white socks, baggy khaki shorts, and a T-shirt that read, “San Diego Chargers.”
The laughter faded to a grinning giggle. “You were brilliant, my dear, brilliant as always,” he said to the air beside him. He spoke English now, with a decided British accent. He bent to pick up the black cap that had fallen off while he was carried away with laughter, revealing a bald spot on top of his head.
“Did she?” He frowned as he straightened, but the frown slipped away as if his face had been greased by good humor. “I didn’t see. Ah, well, the blood is there, I suppose, or it could be coincidence. And she only looked. She couldn’t see you.”
“Oh, of course.” He began walking in the idle way of a man with no special need to be one place rather than another, nodding now and again as if in response to his invisible friend. He passed the small group of bystanders in the parking lot, breaking up now that the show was mostly over. None of them noticed him.
“But I’ll take care of him for you, my beautiful one,” he said as he stepped into the street after looking carefully both ways. “You know I will. Soon now, eh?” He smiled. “Won’t they be confused! I wish I could . . . No, no, I won’t linger. I understand the difficulty for you. But,” he added wistfully, “it would be great fun to stay and see their faces after I kill him.”
FOUR
THE mountains east of San Diego were almost always hotter than the city. Their higher elevation didn’t make up for losing the cooling power of the ocean. But the sun was down now, and in the small valley that held the village at the heart of Nokolai Clanhome, the temperature had dropped to a balmy seventy-eight.
The moon wasn’t yet up, but Lily kept track of that sort of thing these days. She knew it would rise half full just after midnight. The clan’s meeting field was alive with song, laughter, and people—far more people than actually lived there—and Lily was relieved bordering on smug.
The baby shower had gone off without a hitch. And the baby party was going splendidly.
Lily threaded her way through the crowded meeting ground. Most of the shower guests—the human guests—had left. The number of adult lupi actually living at Clanhome varied, but was usually around fifty. Most of the rest of the party guests lived fairly close to Clanhome, but she didn’t know all of them.
They all knew who she was, though—a bit disconcerting, that, but she smiled and nodded when strangers greeted her.
There were also dogs and kids. Lots of kids. Both raced through the crowd in shoals like minnows swimming a living current. Toby was undoubtedly part of one of those shoals, though she hadn’t seen him since he finished bolting his food and jumped up with the announcement that he and “the guys” were going to play tag.
Lupus tag was a complex game involving teams, age-adjusted rules, multiple targets, and elements of hide-and-seek. And running. Lots of running.
So far, becoming a parent to Rule’s son was almost too easy. The only hard part was prying the boy loose from the rest of the clan. Lupi adored babies and children of all ages, and they saw no reason Toby shouldn’t spend all his time at Clanhome.
One person wasn’t at the party anymore. The Rhej, the party’s third host, had eaten with Lily, Rule, Isen, and Toby, given Cullen his gift, then headed back to her house partway up the slope that bordered the west side of the little valley.
She liked people fine, she’d said. Just not so many all at once.
Most of the adults were male, and most of them weren’t wearing much. Among adults, male clan outnumbered female about three to one, and lupi possessed no body modesty whatsoever. Every man in Lily’s sight was bare-chested, bare-footed, and barely covered between the navel and the knees. Cutoffs were the most popular choice.
Lily enjoyed the view. What woman wouldn’t? Even the chests with grizzled gray hair were worth a second glance. There was no such thing as a fat, sloppy, out-of-shape lupi. Everyone knew that. Just like everyone knew that the lupus ability to turn furry was inherited, not contagious. And that they were always male. And that they didn’t marry. Ever.
Lily rubbed her thumb over the ring she’d slipped onto her finger for the party. Everyone could be wrong, it seemed. Including her. She’d never planned for this because she’d known it couldn’t happen, yet here she was, engaged to marry a man who should never have contemplated asking her.
Some of their guests were still eating at the picnic tables set up around the perimeter of the field. Others ate standing up. Lily had been among the first to eat, and that bothered her. In her world, hosts didn’t eat until all their guests were served. In the lupi world, hosts ate first—or almost first, since the Rhej, the Rho, and the Lu Nuncio ate ahead of everyone. Rule said this was because the meal was the hosts’ “kill.” To a wolf, providing food for the clan was good. Letting everyone enjoy your kill ahead of you was absurd.
Weird as it was, Lily understood him. Understanding hadn’t made her comfortable with filling her plate first, so she’d skipped dessert. That’s what she was going after now.
Underfoot, the grass was soft and giving. The meeting field was the one place the clan kept thoroughly watered, even during a drought—which was every summer in southern California. With no major wildfires near, the sky was spangled darkness, with about a zillion more stars than you ever saw in the city. Despite the lack of moonlight, there was plenty of illumination. Poles bearing lanterns added the glow of candle-light to the scattering of mage lights overhead.
The party was easy on the ears, too. Amid the chatter and laughter, music sprouted like mushrooms after a rain—a cluster of singers in one spot, someone tuning up a fiddle elsewhere. And wasn’t that a flute off in the distance?
The smoky scent of barbeque hung in the air. When she reached the tables where the food was set out she saw that there was still some chicken and sausage left, but no ribs or brisket.
She breathed a sigh of relief and made a beeline for the desserts. Two brownies weren’t excessive, she decided, considering how hard she’d worked.
A hand landed on her shoulder as she selected the second one. “Give me chocolate,” a woman demanded.
Lily smiled over her shoulder at a tall woman with cropped blond hair. “How much?”
“Heaps of chocolate. Huge heaps.” Cynna thrust an empty plate at her. “I can’t drink, so chocolate has to do the trick.”
Lily piled three brownies on Cynna’s plate. “What’s up?”
“Did you know I’m supposed to make the baby’s food myself?”
> At nearly seven months pregnant, Cynna could have stood in for a fertility goddess—if that goddess doubled as an Amazon and liked to cover her skin in arcane symbols. She had the sculpted arms and shoulders of a warrior accustomed to drawing a bow. No lopping off of a breast for this Amazon, though. Cynna’s breasts were large and expanding along with her vanished waist, as was easy to see in the stretchy red top she wore with loose linen trousers.
“From the look of things, you could feed half a dozen babies,” Lily said.
Cynna waved an impatient hand. “I’m not talking about milk. That will be easy—my body just does it.” She crammed half a brownie into her mouth, closing her eyes as she chewed. “Ah. That helps. I mean the actual baby food.”
“Oh, I see.” Lily nodded. “You’ve been talking to my sister.”
Lily had invited some of her own family to the baby shower so there would be more guests present; most of the gifts had been mailed in. Her mother had made some excuse, which Lily had expected; Grandmother had intended to come, but her companion, Li Qin, had gotten sick, so she wasn’t here. But both Lily’s sisters had come. To Lily’s amazement, Cynna seemed to have hit it off with Susan.
“Well, she’s a doctor, isn’t she?” Cynna said. “She knows about this stuff. Only I can barely cook for me! Eggs. I can scramble eggs now. And make macaroni and cheese that isn’t from the box, and Cullen’s chili is great, and so’s his pot roast, but a baby can’t eat chili or pot roast, can it? I thought I’d have months and months to get up to speed on the cooking thing, but—”
“Susan is a dermatologist, not a pediatrician. She’s also perfect. No one can live up to Susan’s standards, not even Susan.” Hard as it had been to grow up with a perfect big sister, Lily had finally realized it was even harder being the perfect big sister.
Cynna snorted. “Pot and kettle, Lily.”
“Oh, come on. I’m nowhere near as bad as she is.”
“Are you kidding? You wore a white dress to a barbeque, and—”
“Cream. It’s cream, not white.”
“—and didn’t get a spot on it. You hang up your clothes by color and type. I’ve seen your closet,” she added darkly. “You line up your jackets according to the spectrum—red to orange to yellow to—”
“That’s anal, not perfect, and besides, I don’t have any orange jackets. Orange makes me look sick. The point is, you’ve got to stop taking everything Susan says as gospel.”
“I don’t, but additives are evil, right? Organic is good. Fresh and organic is really good.”
“This is California. You can buy organic baby food.” Lily was pretty sure it was available in the rest of the country, too, but it had to be available here. You could buy organic rope in California, for God’s sake.
“I can?” Relief warred with doubt on Cynna’s face. Relief won. “I could buy a bunch of it. I could buy a blender, too. See, the Rhej gave me this steamer thingy. It’s for vegetables, and all you do is dump them in and put water in the base and set the timer, and they cook. It’s real easy. It probably wouldn’t be a big deal to blenderize steamed veggies if I ran out of organic baby food or something.”
“There you go.” Lily patted her friend’s arm. “Between blenderized veggies and organic baby food, it will work out.”
“Yeah.” Cynna turned to survey the crowd. For a moment they ate brownies in silence.
It was good to see Cynna like this—obsessing over silly stuff, more like her usual self. The acquisition of a couple of the early memories had been hard on her, but tonight she’d shaken that off.
Lily finished first—she’d ended up with a single brownie after all—and fingered the little object in her pocket. She needed to find Cullen and give it to him. And there was another way lupus parties were different. No one wrapped presents—lupi were such guys sometimes—nor was there any set time to hand over your gift.
The presents themselves were different, too. Lupi considered it tacky to buy a baby gift. They were either handmade, hand-me-down, or “for the baby jar”—which meant cash. Most gave cash. Lily could relate to that. Cash gifts were a Chinese custom, too, though not at baby showers, and the money was tucked into red envelopes, not a big glass jar.
But the close friends of the father-to-be were supposed to either make a gift or pass on something with a story attached. The story was part of the present, a tale of all those who had slept in the cradle, gnawed on the blocks, or been warmed by the quilt.
This was one lupus custom she hadn’t needed explained. With their hand-me-downs and handmade presents, the clan claimed the child. The objects were made by clan, used by clan, woven into the history of the clan. They didn’t come from the external, human world . . . which had made it hard for her to decide on a gift, because she did come from the external, human world. And she didn’t know how to make anything except an arrest.
Cynna ate the last bite of brownie with a sigh of pleasure. “That was good, but now I need liquid. Not water and not milk—I’m ready to party.”
“Dr. Pepper?” Lily smiled at Cynna’s current definition of partying.
“Right. If there’s anything left. Man, there must be a thousand people here. Come on.”
Lily smiled as she followed. Cynna hadn’t come to the FBI via conventional law enforcement the way Lily had, so she’d never learned to estimate crowd size. “Roughly half that, I think, counting the kids.”
“Still, that’s a lot. Lots of presents, which is good.” Cynna patted her protruding belly. “Lots of work for you, though.”
“Not really.” They’d reached the tubs filled with melting ice and soft drinks. Lily dug out a can of Dr. Pepper for Cynna and took a Diet Coke for herself. “Rule and the Rhej handled almost all of the baby party stuff.”
“Yeah, but you did the shower, too, and then there’s all those weirdo calls you’ve been getting.”
“At least those cases are easy to clear, and otherwise things are pretty quiet right now.”
“You know you shouldn’t say shit like that.”
Lily snorted. “You’re superstitious?”
“Of course not, but you’re never supposed to say things are quiet. That’s when you get hit with three urgent cases or a performance review or you get sick or—”
Lily held up a hand, laughing. “All right, already. I take it back. Things are hectic and my plate is full, and yes, the party was lots of trouble. And worth every bit of it.”
“Oh, now you’ve done it. I tear up over commercials these days.” Cynna sniffed, grinned, and added, “I guess all this organizing is good practice for your wedding. Have you set the date yet?”
“Not yet.” She tipped her can and drank.
“You’re avoiding the subject.”
“No, I’m thirsty.” Lily glanced around. “I need to find Cullen. I haven’t given him my present yet.”
“Now you’re changing the subject.” Cynna was downright gleeful. “You’re scared.”
“I’m not scared.” She loved Rule. She not only wanted to spend the rest of her life with him; she had to. The mate bond gave them no options there, but she’d stopped resenting that, so getting married would just put a legal gloss over what was already true. There was no reason to be scared; the annoying lump in her throat wasn’t fear. It was . . . aggravation.
“I’m not scared,” she repeated. “But I’m contemplating Las Vegas. My mother is insane.”
“What flavor of insane are we talking?”
Lily gestured with her Diet Coke. “Every flavor a wedding can come in. The dress. The date. Flowers. Attendants. Doves.”
“Doves? Doves as in big gray birds?”
“White ones, actually. She wants to release dozens of white doves when Rule and I say our vows. Not exactly the right aesthetic message when the groom turns wolf on occasion, is it?”
Cynna snickered. “Oh, yeah, some of your guests might miss out on the aesthetic message. They might think the doves were a party game. Flying appetizers.”
&n
bsp; Lily pictured a bunch of well-dressed men taking one look at the doves, Changing, and racing off yipping after them. A smile tugged at her mouth. “Maybe I should let her have her way. It might be worth it to see her face if . . . But no.” Reluctantly she abandoned the fantasy. “They wouldn’t really do that. Besides, I don’t know if we’ll have any lupus guests.”
Cynna squeezed her arm. “You’ll have Cullen. And I bet there’ll be more, once they get used to the idea.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t like thinking about what marriage might do to Rule’s standing with his people and veered back to the part she had some control over. “I do not want birds crapping on me at my wedding.”
“That’s a strong argument against. I guess you’ve pointed out the crap problem?”
“Yeah, and admittedly she let that notion go, but she’ll just come up with something else.” Something grand and showy and expensive. To think that only a couple weeks ago, Lily had worried that her mother wouldn’t accept the marriage. She shook her head. “Never mind about my mother. Today is all about you.”
“All about the little rider, really. But since he can’t appreciate his presents yet, I get to help.”
“Still haven’t settled on a name?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a name neither of you has any strong associations for? Cullen likes the old-fashioned names. And magically, the older names are stronger, so—”
“Does that count?’ Lily asked, startled. “I thought the idea that names have power over you was an old wives’ tale.”
“Oh, that part’s bullshit—for us, anyway. It’s true for anyone who has what Micah calls a true name, but humans mostly don’t, or we don’t know it. No, for us names don’t so much have power as affect power. We don’t understand how, but . . . well, look at your people.” She waved a hand, accidentally slapping the bare back of a fair-haired man who was talking to two equally bare-chested men. “Whoops. Sorry,” she said with a grin when he turned around, one sandy eyebrow raised.
