by Eileen Wilks
Delay. She must delay, keep the enemy talking. Li Lei pulled her hand out of her pocket. She held a piece of paper. Ruben Brooks had not seen the point of her having a physical token, but he knew little of such things. “This grants me the authority of an agent of the United States government to place you and your lover under arrest.”
The Chimei erupted in peals of laughter. “Oh, your granddaughter did this same thing! She told my Johnny he was under arrest. She was helpless, our captive, yet she tells him this.”
Li Lei wished fiercely that Lily were here now to share the joke.
“But I regret that you are already insane,” the Chimei said, her laughter fading. “I had so looked forward to achieving that myself. Will it be as much fun to torment you when you are already insane, I wonder? Or is this mere senility?”
“The treaty recognizes the right of official agents to establish order in their realms. Order which you have disrupted.” The piece of paper Li Lei held made her an official agent of those responsible for Earth’s order. It made many things possible which had not been possible before . . . such as pronouncing certain syllables.
Or teaching someone else how to say them.
“Do you think that means it will allow you to harm me? To kill my lovely Johnny?” She was scornful. “You understand very little.”
“Perhaps,” Li Lei murmured—as at last, at last, her ears caught a sound from over by the van. Dirt scuffed by a foot, or—
“Li A’wan Ni Amo!” Isen thundered.
The Chimei froze. For one moment—that moment of hearing part of her true name, the name Lily had found, the name Li Lei had tried to make sure Lily would find—shouted by one who possessed a true name, she was helpless.
As was her lover.
Isen Turner—his skin blackened with burns in places, his beard singed half off, his clothes missing entirely—wrestled the sorcerer out from behind the van. He dragged him along quickly, out into the large, open space of the road.
The Chimei shrieked. And blurred.
And Sam was there. With a suddenness that made Li Lei’s heart skip in spite of everything, the black dragon popped into being overhead—so close! And plummeting toward Earth like a hawk, talons outstretched.
This was the plan. When Sam went unseen, he was out of phase with the world—a trick he had learned from demons while he sojourned in Dis, so not one the Chimei knew or understood. He had waited overhead, out of phase, invisible even to the Chimei’s nonphysical senses. Waited for the moment he could act.
It happened fast, almost too fast for her eyes to track. Sam seemed certain to crash into the ground—but those vast wings beat once, twice, slowing him just enough. Isen threw himself to one side and rolled. The sorcerer tried to scramble away also, but he was too slow. Much too slow.
The talons closed around him. With another buffeting of wind that sent dirt flying, the wings beat, and beat again—and Sam rose, the little sorcerer held tight in his grip.
“No!” the Chimei screamed, halfway between forms, between solid and otherness.
Kun Nu, my granddaughter-by-magic has named you, Sam said as he rose higher. Kun Nu I will call you now. I give you this chance, this last chance, to choose.
“You cannot harm him! You do not dare!”
I will not harm him. I will take him to a portal on the other coast, where agents of the human government wait, prepared to hand him over to the authorities in what they call Edge. You know that realm as Vei Mo Han . They know how to lock up a sorcerer there, Kun Nu.
“You break treaty!”
You took a hostage. I may take a hostage now, too. The treaty strives for balance. Had you forgotten? Sun’s form was so high now Li Lei couldn’t see him, save as darkness against the stars. She thought he circled, though. But I will not take him from you if you agree to go home to your realm, to your people. You will be allowed—
“Pah!” She drew herself up, becoming for the moment more physical than not, more human than bird. “I have no people.”
Thousands of Chimei still live.
“The Surrendered. I spit on them. They are not my people. My people are dead, all dead—and my children. Dead because of you and yours. I am the only one left. Do not think you fool me, S’n Mtzo. You hunger for my death so you will be free of the treaty.”
I hunger for your death, Sun agreed. My people died, too. Too many of them died. In spite of this, I will forgo your death and live with the binding if you return to your realm. Go there and take your lover with you. You do love him?
“I do. He is all that I have.” Tears—real, human tears—glistened in eyes gone pale with grief. “Johnny, my Johnny!” she cried. “I will come for you!”
Do you love him more than you love vengeance?
“I will have both!” Her eyes turned black as suddenly as a light can be switched on. Or off. “I will have both! You will not stop me!”
I already have. Swear on the treaty that you will return to your realm, and you may—
But she’d made her decision, it seemed. Quick as a wind springing up from nowhere, she faded to mist—and shot off toward Isen Turner, just now rising stiffly to his feet.
THIRTY-NINE
LILY stood planted to the earth, numbed by too many revelations, too many events, coming too fast. She didn’t recognize the threat to Isen until Rule took off running.
Then her feet got the message and she sprinted full-out.
What did the stupid man think he could do to the Chimei? He couldn’t hit her, stab her, bite her, bind her—actually, Lily couldn’t do those things, either. But at least she wasn’t subject to Bird Woman’s magic.
Though how she could use that immunity to help Isen, she didn’t know.
Rule got there first, of course. He skidded to a stop, dropping to his knees. It took Lily a few more moments to get close enough to see clearly what was happening.
Isen lay flat on the ground, his eyes open and staring. White mist, peculiarly defined at the edges, covered his face like a glistening, translucent shroud. His chest didn’t move. He wasn’t breathing.
Rule was shoving at that otherness, but his hands slid off every time, as if Kun Nu were ice, not mist. “I can’t move her. I can’t move her.”
Lily dropped to her knees and tried the same useless pushing. She felt the surface of the thing, utterly slick, slightly cooler than her own skin. Utterly immobile, as if it had the weight of a huge boulder, not a bird. “Shit, shit, shit. Get off of him. Get off.”
“He’s not breathing,” Rule said. “She’s gone down his throat. She’s in his lungs, goddamn her. Sam—do something. Stop her.”
There is only one way to stop her, Sam replied. And I cannot do it.
The Chimei couldn’t do this, couldn’t be allowed to do this. Rage rose, choking Lily as if she were the one with another being stuffed down her throat—and memory, dim and unclear, rose with it. Once before she’d tried to stop someone from using magic to destroy. But she couldn’t remember, dammit, couldn’t think of what she’d done.
“Hell,” she panted. “If I’m related to dragons . . .” Dragons soak up magic.
My granddaughter-in-magic, Sam had said.
There are two ways to take another’s power, the Chimei had said. One is voluntary. One is not.
Lily put her palms flat on the cool, white otherness. And pulled.
But this was no Earth-Gifted human witch willfully, insanely burning herself out in an effort to destroy.
This was Power.
Lily’s hands sank inside that whiteness. And power roared up her arms, a crawling horror of it, hot and icy and everything at once—every kind of sensation at once, every kind of magic, stretching into dimensions so alien Lily couldn’t grasp what she touched, what she held . . .
What held her. For the white mass came flowing up out of Isen, flowing up over Lily’s arms. It hung there in front of Lily, trapping her—and it formed a mouth.
That mouth, obscenely female, hissed, “Did you think
you could absorb my power, little human? Oh, you surprised me with your trick, but you are no dragon, and the male human who betrayed my Johnny is dead. His heart stopped before you startled me with your trick. Now I will stop your heart, and your lover’s. I will kill you all slowly and eat your fear as you die.”
“You c-can’t. The treaty—”
“Poor, stupid little not-dragon. You broke the treaty. When you tried to take my power without my consent, you broke it.” And she swarmed up Lily’s arms, her shoulders—Lily dragged in a breath and held it as cool white otherness covered her face.
Overhead, Sam began to sing.
Dragonsong is not like any other sound. Rule once compared it to a didgeridoo, a hollow instrument played by Australian aborigines. Lily had listened to recordings of didgeridoos, and it did sound a little like dragonsong . . . and nothing at all like it.
At the same time that something cool and repellently solid flowed into Lily’s nose, flowed down inside her, dragonsong flowed into her, too. In through her ears, and in through some channel that had nothing to do with her ears.
In that song, she heard what she knew. What she was.
How did you know? she asked, even as the world grew gray and hazy to her vision and her lungs filled with unbreathable otherness. How did you know?
Child, he said, and his voice was tender as she had never heard it, gentle and large and intimate, I held you as you died. How could I not know your Name?
And then he gave her another word. This one was cold, colder than any word could be, and it cut into her, cut all the way to the core of her.
Remember.
SHE leaped from the cliff—leaped willingly, but not peacefully, her heart in a riot of love and grief for all she surrendered, her mind blanked by terror of what she did.
THE Chimei shuddered inside Lily. And began to withdraw. Slowly, then more quickly.
* * *
LILY fell and fell—as she had in dreams, but this was no dream; this was what had happened, was happening, the air whistling past so fast, burning her eyes. Her body tumbled helplessly.
THE whiteness left her lungs, her throat. Her nose. She dragged in a breath, her chest heaving. No, she said to the Chimei without using any of the precious air—but she said it gently, for she knew. She knew what to do.
Lily—all of Lily, for her soul was no longer sundered, nor any of her memories hidden—wrapped her arms around the whiteness, not letting it escape as she fell to the rocky beach below. Held her, held on to her with the Gift that was hers, the dragon’s gift. She held the Chimei as she died.
“LILY? God, Lily, I can feel you, but if you don’t wake up and answer me, I’ll—I’ll—”
Lily opened her eyes on Rule’s frantic face. “I’m here,” she whispered. She was lying on her back, she noted dimly. On the ground.
Rule’s eyes closed. He shuddered. “Thank God. Oh, God, I thought I’d lost you. Are you hurt?”
“Dizzy,” she murmured. “Help me sit up, okay? Oh, shit—your father—”
“CPR works on lupi as well as humans,” Isen said gruffly. “Once you pulled that creature out of me, Remy got my heart started up.”
Lily turned her head and saw Isen sitting nearby. A tall young man she vaguely recognized kneeled beside him. Remy, she assumed.
“I want to sit up,” she repeated. Rule helped, moving so that his body braced her. That was good. Wonderful. “Was I out long?”
“No, it just seemed like forever. Are you sure you’re all right?” he asked. “The Chimei’s gone,” he added hastily, as if she might not know this. “All at once, she vanished.”
Not vanished, Sam said. She is dead.
“What?” Rule looked up.
Sam was coming in for a landing again—this one much slower than the last. He still held Johnny, but the sorcerer was limp—unconscious, maybe? Or had losing his lover killed him? It is the only way to kill a Chimei. Created to not-know death, they cannot die until someone shares a death with them.
“Shares a death?” Rule repeated blankly.
Dragons are the only ones who can do this—or we were, until tonight. In Dis, Lily died. That she also lived does not make her death less real. She shared that death with the Chimei.
“I broke the treaty,” Lily said dully.
No. Small actions accumulate. As an agent of order, you tried to stop the Chimei without killing her. She thought your attempt to drain her power broke the treaty, but her thinking was badly warped, or she would have sensed it still in place—strained, stretched, yet still intact. When she tried to kill you— that broke the treaty.
Rule looked at her, questions in his eyes.
“If you’re trying to ask how I did all that, well . . . I lack words.” That’s what he’d said to her often enough. “Rule, I remembered. Because of Sam, I remembered everything. The part of me that was with you in Dis—she’s here now, all the way here. I mean I’m here now. I’m not . . . I’m all of me.”
He wrapped his arms around her and held her gently, pressing a kiss to her hair. She smiled and let her eyes close again. I love you.
He jolted. “Lily?”
“What?”
“You didn’t say that out loud.”
That startled her eyes open. “Shit.”
Grandmother arrived at the same time as half a dozen lupi—some clothed and two-legged, some naked and two-legged, a couple still on four feet. She was propping up a wobbly Cullen. Cullen’s face was strained, his eyes frantic. “Cynna?” he said hoarsely.
“She’s all right,” Lily said quickly. “She’s fine, and so is the baby. The gnomes got her out.”
His eyes closed. “Okay,” he said simply—and slid to the ground.
After a few frantic seconds, they confirmed that he’d passed out, not died. His heart still beat.
He is well enough, Sam said, sending dust flying as he settled to the ground several dozen feet away. He set the sorcerer’s body aside. This one is not.
Lily looked at Grandmother, standing unnaturally quiet in the midst of the lupi, her face tender and sad and happy all at once. “You arrested her. The Chimei.”
“You heard.” Delight rang through Grandmother’s voice. “I did. It is important to follow the forms of such things.”
“I have a few questions,” Lily began—and broke off, frowning.
For some reason everyone—well, everyone but Cullen, who was unconscious—seemed to find that terribly funny.
FORTY
ON August eleventh at shortly after one in the morning, Pacific Daylight Time, in cities around the world—in Seattle, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, and Beijing, and twenty more—dragons flew. As they flew, they sang. In every city in the world that had a dragon, people for the first time heard dragonsong.
Not everyone heard it, of course. Those who did stopped their cars or their feet, stopped whatever they were doing, and listened. Just listened. Many of them wept, but later couldn’t say why.
No one recorded it. No one who heard it even thought of trying. They didn’t know the why of that, either.
In the U.S. the TV talking heads speculated madly about the reason for this unprecedented behavior—of dragons and people both. Oprah had three of those who’d heard it on her show. In China and Canada, the governments politely inquired of their dragons what was up. In Hollywood, agents tried frantically to contact the dragons to offer contracts.
The dragons didn’t care to discuss it. Neither did those few humans—and lupi—who knew why the dragons sang.
The most innately sovereign species in existence was free of a binding that had been passed down, through blood and magic, for more than three thousand years. The last of the un-surrendered Chimei was dead. The treaty was no more.
August 13th at 10:09 P.M.
RULE knelt in front of his Rho and shuddered with relief.
Nokolai’s mantle—the heir’s portion—rested in him once more. He looked at his brother, kneeling beside him. “Benedict,” he began
. . . and ran out of words.
Benedict’s mouth kicked up at one corner. “Still can’t quite believe I’m happier without it, can you?”
Rule looked at him helplessly. “It’s not that I doubt your word.”
Benedict regarded him a moment. “When you were seven or so, you found a puppy. Brought it home. Cute little thing, about half grown. A basset, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Rule’s smile started as he saw where this was going.
“You didn’t know about collars and tags. You thought you could keep it, so you were sad for a full week after Dad found the owners and they took him home. If you’d known about collars and tags, you wouldn’t have counted on keeping that little dog. You’d have had a good time with it while it was there, and been fine when it left.”
Now Rule’s smile was easy. “You understand about tags and collars.”
Benedict nodded. “I do. The mantle itself—yeah, that felt good. But I don’t want the stuff that goes with it, so while we had a good time together, I’m glad to let it go back to its owner.”
He rose, gave their father a nod and a smile, then said to Rule, “I’m still not talking to you.”
With that, he left.
Rule stood, too, watching his big brother leave. “Sometimes I don’t understand him at all.”
“Just because he loves you doesn’t mean he wants to talk to you.”
Isen’s eyes were twinkling in his uncannily naked face. With his beard burned half off, he’d had to shave the other half—and complained about that way more than he had the burns on his arms and chest. But then, the burned skin would heal a lot faster than he could regrow his beard. Hair growth wasn’t affected by healing.
Rule thought he knew what his father meant. Benedict did love him, hadn’t wanted Rule to worry about him, and hadn’t gotten over his anger at Rule’s decision to marry. But he sighed. “Sometimes I get tired of my family’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.”
Isen’s eyebrows climbed. “Now I’m mystified.”
“We don’t say things straight out.” Or ask things straight out, and why not? Why not just ask? “What are you planning to do about my marriage?”
