by Eileen Wilks
“I could have sworn that wasn’t allowed—you harming her, I mean, and eating her power would surely harm her. I notice you didn’t mention children. Offspring. Or becoming, uh, wholly physical.”
“Children.” The voice was still light and pure. But something vast and powerful moved behind those human-seeming eyes, darkening them. They changed even as Lily watched, turning alien and black. Wholly black, with no whites at all. “You touch on what you should not, human.”
Lily’s heartbeat kicked up. Saliva pooled in her mouth, forcing her to swallow. “I’m a pushy bitch. Sue me.”
Abruptly the black faded back to gray. She laughed. “I think not, but I will either eat you or make you wish you had died. Perhaps I can do both. As for becoming wholly physical . . . you choose one word correctly, no doubt by accident, for you grope after that which you cannot understand. I am, as you see, physical now, but this form is costly to maintain without my Becoming. I am very close now. Your grandmother will provide the last of my needs so I may Become.” She folded her long-fingered hands in her lap. “It is just that she do so.”
“You want revenge. She killed someone you cared about.”
“I lost him.” That was grief, surely, wild and unsated, in the stormy pools of her eyes. “She stole him from me, and caused me to unBecome. She must atone.”
“What about all the people who lose someone because of you? Do they get a shot at making you atone?”
Her eyes were clear gray now, and breathtakingly indifferent. “Humans die. It is your nature, as it is mine to live. Why fling your anger at me? I did not cause you to be as you are.”
Lily’s jaw clenched—which hurt like hell, so she made herself relax those muscles. “I saw bodies tonight. Bodies of people who didn’t have to die now—people who died in pain and terror because you wanted their fear. You stole their lives from them. You stole them from those who love them. Your grief isn’t pure and holy just because it’s yours. It’s all the same—the grief you cause, the grief you feel.”
“You are wrong, but you lack the scope to know this.” She rose to her feet. “I speak to you of these things both to poke at you and because you may have a choice to make. Did you know there is a technique to drain the magic from another?”
“You alluded to that.”
“There are two ways to do this. One requires the permission of the person being drained. One does not. Both are painful. I cannot force your power from you, for that would be against the treaty. I can, however, take what is offered.” She smiled. “By you or your grandmother. I believe you will offer to allow me to sip at your power.”
“You have some strange beliefs.”
She just stood there, smiling. Johnny stood up. “Don’t like that idea, do you? Can’t say I blame you, but you’ll do it.” He nodded in a friendly way, turned, and opened the door that had been ajar, revealing stairs. He jogged up with little taps of his feet.
Were they in a basement? No windows, cement block walls, stairs going up. What the hell—why not ask? “Is this a basement?”
“We are belowground. It is called a bomb shelter. I believe humans in this country expected to all die in nuclear war some years back, so some built these shelters.”
“Cozy.”
“S’n Mtzo will not be able to sense you here—earth blocks him. Did you know that? In addition, my love and I have crafted other layers of protection. This will prevent any humans from finding you. Oh, and I should warn you.” Clearly she was enjoying doing so. “One of the wards will be triggered if you try to escape. This will cause this shelter to collapse, burying you.”
“Isn’t that a lot like killing me?”
“I have warned you, so you are able to avoid dying.”
“Stretching the treaty pretty far, though, aren’t you?”
The Chimei tipped her head. “Has S’n Mtzo deceived you about the treaty? It is quite literal in its binding. I cannot kill you, but I can keep you as long as it pleases me to do so. You will have food and water and air, and your wastes will be disposed of. You won’t be harmed, save for what you offer willingly, so I abide by the treaty. But you will not leave this room until I am ready for you to do so.”
Breathe, Lily told herself. Nice and slow. Fear was a largely physical reaction. She’d do what she could to keep from giving Bird Woman any little tastes. “Us puny little humans have a saying. It goes something like this: fuck you.”
“You try to control your fear. That increases its savor.” She smiled, hands clasped in front of her, almost as if she were praying.
On the stairs, two sets of feet sounded. One was Johnny—tap-tap-tap. The other sounded less certain. “And here comes the reason you will allow me to sip at your power. The same reason, as you will see, that the other sorcerer will not trouble us.”
Lily didn’t recognize the feet that she saw first, but she knew the ankles. The calves. Surely no other ankles and calves were decorated with those particular arabesques.
Cynna’s belly moved into view, her blue T-shirt straining against the mound of baby beneath. She moved awkwardly. The stairs were steep, and her hands were fastened behind her back. Johnny was right behind her, and he wasn’t fooling with a no-weapons look now. He pressed the barrel of a subma chine gun to Cynna’s back. “Here she is, Beloved,” he said. “Unhappy, but undamaged.”
Cynna met Lily’s eyes, and sighed. “Hey, there.”
“This one is not covered by the treaty,” said the Chimei. “I can do anything at all to her. I can give her pain or fear, abort her offspring, kill her outright. Whatever I wish. But I give you the power to stop me. Only offer a sip of your magic, and I will leave her alone. For a time.”
Fury turned Lily’s vision red. Her hands clenched at her sides.
“More anger than fear? Your friend is afraid.” The Chimei smiled and smiled. “Consider your power, little human. Your decision. I will return when it suits me and you will tell me what, if anything, you offer. Whatever your decision then, you will remain here as long as I wish. Will that be a week or a year? Five years, or a decade? I have not decided, but at some point I will allow your grandmother to trade herself for you. You will be free then, and she will be fed and tended, and have nothing taken from her that she does not willingly offer.”
“You’re backing the wrong horse, Kun Nu. Grandmother won’t agree.”
“She already has.” Her smile grew radiant. “I will keep her for a long, long time. And while she suffers, so, too, will S’n Mtzo.”
THIRTY-SIX
“BROOKS here.”
Rule held his phone with one hand and drove with the other. “This is Rule Turner. Lily has been taken.”
“Taken?” The jolt of surprise was clear in Brooks’s voice. “My Gift can be damnably capricious. It didn’t warn me. When I wasn’t able to reach her on her phone, I hoped the problem was technical. During the riots, much cell coverage was disrupted.”
Riots? Was that what they were calling it? “Much of everything was disrupted,” Rule said grimly. “They’ve also snatched Cynna. They’re using her to threaten Cullen, to keep him from looking for them. They say they’ll trade Lily for her grandmother—but not yet.”
“They’ve already sent their terms to you?”
“They made contact with Sam. They plan to hurt Lily.” Rule’s throat tightened too much for speech. He swallowed and forced himself to go on. “Madame Yu believes one of them will drain Lily of her Gift. It’s a slow process, and that’s why the delay in making an exchange. I intend to get Lily away from them. If you’re willing, you can help. I’ll tell you who has her, everything I’ve held back—but you have to come to me at Clanhome. I’m on my way there now.”
“Without Lily to affirm your words, I’m unsure if this is, indeed, Rule Turner I’m speaking with.”
“You’re allergic to iron and steel. You learned this in Edge.”
A moment’s silence, then Ruben said, “That is persuasive, if not . . . Yes? Just a moment,” he told R
ule. And put him on hold.
The woman in the passenger seat spoke. “I am not persuaded this is wise,” Madame Yu said. “Bringing Brooks in changes the balance.”
“The Chimei already changed it. You said as much.”
She was silent a moment. Her hands gripped each other tightly in her lap. “I did not think she could do a new thing. I was wrong. This taking of hostages is new.”
Brooks came back on the line. “I just spoke with the officers I sent to look for Lily. They found the patrol car she borrowed. In the backseat was a young woman, a civilian, dazed and incoherent. In the front seat was a sheriff’s deputy, unconscious. There was a note saying he’d been enspelled, but paramedics suspect a concussion. He’s being taken to emergency now.”
“That won’t hurt him, but he’s unconscious due to a spell, not a head wound.” As Rule had said in the note he’d left with Beck.
Brooks absorbed that in a brief silence. “What did Lily send me from your computer this afternoon?”
Rule’s eyebrows shot up. “I don’t know. I haven’t been to the apartment since she was taken, and before that . . . First she was attacked by a gang. Then we raced into the madness, hoping to save her family.”
“Are they hurt?” His question came quick, urgent.
“They’re unhurt, but asleep. I’ve had them moved to Clanhome until they wake up.” Rule glanced at Lily’s grandmother. “Most of them are asleep, that is. Madame Yu is with me.”
“I will speak with her.”
Rule passed her the phone. He’d never been able to figure out how much of the tiger she retained when she was two-legged. Had she heard Ruben’s side of the conversation?
“Mr. Brooks,” she said, “what did my granddaughter send you?”
Apparently she had.
“A copy of a handwritten note, which includes a word or phrase in Chinese. I’m having it translated, but there is a problem. My translator doesn’t recognize one of the characters. Madame, are you confident that the person with you is, indeed, Rule Turner, and that he is not being coerced or affected in some way?”
“I am completely certain of it. Who was the note from?”
“A man believed to operate a criminal gang with ties to the Taiwanese underworld.”
“Zhou Xing?” It was as much demand as question. “His name is Zhou Xing?”
“It is.”
“Ahh.” That was almost a purr. For the first time since learning her granddaughter had been taken, some of the tension eased from those slender shoulders. “Excellent. Bring it with you when you come.”
“I haven’t said I will come.”
“Consult your Gift,” she snapped. “You are supposed to be able to follow a hunch. Attempt to do so.”
Another silence, longer this time. “I will come,” Brooks said simply.
“TOILET paper. Boxes of it,” Cynna muttered. “That’s not much help, but lightbulbs? Plastic knives? What were they thinking?”
The two of them sat on the floor of their temporary prison, surrounded by what they’d plundered that might prove useful. The door their captors had left through—the one leading to the stairs—was locked by both magic and a dead bolt. The other door led to a tiny bathroom with a chemical toilet, a tiny sink, and five five-gallon bottles of water.
“This is probably where they’ve been holed up themselves. They didn’t expect to use it as a jail.” The lightbulbs were an especially odd find because there wasn’t actually any electricity in their little cell, as a bit of investigation had shown. The bulbs plugged into the ceiling glowed anyway.
“I bet some of this stuff was already here when they made this their hideout. Most of the stuff here is pretty old, like someone stockpiled it years ago.”
“Could be.” Among their finds were five extra lightbulbs. Unlike those in the ceiling, they didn’t glow. Lily had broken one and was wiggling the longest shard of glass loose from the socket. “Their schedule got pushed up when Johnny went after Cullen on his own, putting him in danger. I’m betting they’ve got something else in mind for us, long-term. It isn’t ready yet.”
“Makes sense. That ready?” She held out her hand.
“As ready as I can make it.” Lily gave her the long glass sliver.
Cynna took it and closed her eyes. She sat cross-legged, her lips moving, though Lily didn’t hear anything.
The sorcerer had taken Cynna before he and the Chimei rained madness on a square mile of the city. She’d been stopped at a traffic light, on her way back to Sam’s lair after dropping Nettie off at Clanhome; he’d hit her with a sleep spell. That was all she knew until she woke up, hands cuffed behind her, in the back of an old panel van.
There’d been two young toughs watching her. Members of the Padres, Lily thought, judging by what Cynna reported about their clothing and tattoos.
Abruptly Cynna stopped her silent chant and slashed her arm with the glass. Blood welled up in the shallow cut. Quickly she dragged a small plastic knife through it.
“It looks the same,” Lily said dubiously. Except that the plastic was still white and pristine, without a drop of blood on it. Weird.
“Let’s see what it does.” Cynna ripped a page out of a magazine and drew the knife down the paper—which split as if the serrated plastic were a razor blade. She grinned. “Damn, I’m good.”
“You are, but did I mention that you’re sounding more like Cullen all the time?”
“I think you did. Got another one for me?”
They had three plastic knives. Now that they knew Cynna’s spell worked, they needed two more glass shards, but they had to be at least two inches long. “The rest of the pieces aren’t long enough. I’ll break another lightbulb.”
The next bulb shattered into way too many tiny pieces. Lily’s lips thinned. Her hand felt shaky as she reached for another one. Easy does it, she told herself. She hadn’t wrecked their chances by wrecking one lightbulb.
The next lightbulb broke perfectly, leaving three long, lovely pieces. Lily handed her one. “I should sweep up the broken glass first.” They had a broom, an actual broom. They planned to make it nice and pointy at one end, using the newly sharp plastic knives.
“Wait till I’m finished. This takes a whopping lot of concentration.” Cynna closed her eyes again.
They were being careful about what they said out loud. Lily hadn’t found a camera or a bug, but there might be something she’d missed. And Cynna thought their captors might be able to eavesdrop magically. “They couldn’t listen every minute,” she’d said, “because they have other things to do, and they’d have to concentrate to listen in that way. But we’d better assume they can hear us.”
Lily had asked if that kind of listening was mind-magic, or another kind. Mind-magic wouldn’t work on her, but a spell that picked up sounds would pick up her voice as well as anyone else’s.
“It’s not mind-magic,” Cynna had said, “but I don’t have a clue how it’s done. We know it’s possible, but I don’t think anyone in this realm knows how.”
“Anyone but Johnny, you mean?”
“It seems possible. He knew a lot about Cullen, didn’t he? I’ve been thinking about that. If this Chimei’s been around a few centuries, she could know a lot of spells that are lost to the rest of us. That’s probably why her pet sorcerer could do that sleep-spell bomb. It’s something she taught him.”
So Cynna chanted silently as she turned a plastic knife into a potentially deadly weapon. And Lily didn’t refer to their plans for the broom, once she’d swept up the broken glass they didn’t use.
Their weapons might be taken from them. The Chimei was powerful. So was the sorcerer. But Lily had realized something, and managed to convey it to Cynna by speaking elliptically.
When Rule had said the Rhej had no knowledge of the Chimei in the clan’s memories, Lily had been disappointed. But there was an upside, a very large upside. It meant that the Chimei knew little about lupi.
The Chimei didn’t know how deeply
lupi treasured their babies. She’d made a bad mistake when she kidnapped and threatened a woman who carried a lupus babe.
More important, the Chimei clearly didn’t know who Cynna was. They knew she was Lily’s friend and Cullen’s wife, so thought they had a hostage with double value.
They did. But Cynna was also the Rhej’s apprentice. And Lily was pretty sure the Chimei didn’t even know the Rhejes existed, much less what they meant to their clans. She certainly didn’t know about the memories they carried . . . memories Cynna had so recently begun acquiring.
The spell Cynna used now was from one of the earliest memories, from the time of the Great War. That’s why she had to chant it rather than use what was inscribed on her skin.
One other thing the Chimei didn’t know about: the mate bond.
Bird Woman and Johnny had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide Lily and Cynna where neither dragon senses nor human Gifts could find them. They’d done a good job of it, according to Cynna. Cynna’s Finding sense was so muffled by the wards she claimed she couldn’t Find the sky from their prison.
But the earth and wards had no effect on the mate bond. They had no effect on the mate sense, which told Lily as clearly as ever in what direction Rule was, and how far away.
He’d be coming for her, and for Cynna. He wouldn’t be alone. They’d do their best to be ready.
* * *
THE sky was dark, overcast, the moon and stars hidden behind clouds that refused to drop their burden of water. Beneath that heavy sky, Clanhome’s meeting field was as full as it had been two nights ago. But this time, there were no children running madly around the field. No women laughed and danced. Only lupi were on the field tonight.
Nokolai was going to war.
At one end of the field, Rule hugged his son. “I’ll see you again soon.”
Toby squirmed away. “Maybe you will. You can’t promise, or Grandpa wouldn’t have shifted the heir’s portion.”
“The Rho did that,” Rule corrected firmly. It had been necessary, the removal of his heir’s portion. But the ache of loss was keen.
