Mortal Danger wotl-2

by Eileen Wilks

  “She’d like to meet you, too. But right now, I need to know if the staff could be made invisible.”

  “Not true invisibility, I wouldn’t think. That alters the physical properties of an object, which requires not only enormous power, but—”

  “Cullen.”

  “Right. No theory, no explanations, just an answer.” Rule could almost hear his friend shrug. “The staff is Hers. I wouldn’t want to guess what all She can do that I can’t.”

  “She’s limited in how she can operate in this realm.”

  “But we don’t know what those limits are. except in a very general way. We know she can’t operate directly in our realm—she has to use an agent. Nor can she spy on us—on lupi, I mean.”

  That was both lore and, according to Cullen, common sense. He claimed that the supposed omniscience of the gods—or Old Ones, as he preferred to call them—was basically one hell of a good farseeing spell. And farseeing spells didn’t work well on those of the Blood. “Or on Lily, as long as she wears the Lady’s emblem.”

  “According to the Rhej, yes, and I’m inclined to think she knows what she’s talking about. But otherwise… we know damn little about the staff. Don’t know that much about demons, either,” he added thoughtfully. “Except for the lower sort that idiots sometimes summon. She seems to have made some kind of alliance with one of the demon lords, though. Hard to say what that means.”

  “You’re not cheering me up.”

  “You’ll feel cheerier once I’ve destroyed that bloody staff.”

  Rule’s gut clenched. “I’m moving up the time for the next circle to tonight.”

  There was a heartbeat’s silence. “Something’s happened.”

  All sorts of things. “I’ll explain tonight.”

  “It will have to be late, or between shows. I’m dancing.”

  “Between shows, then. The same place—make sure Max saves it for us. Tell the others to arrive singly, as before.”

  “What am I, your bloody secretary?”

  “I can’t call,” Rule said quietly. “I could be overheard.”

  “Filius aper umbo. All right. I’ll play secretary this once.”

  Rule grinned in spite of himself. “You may be right, but I wouldn’t mention the possibility to the Rho.”

  “We don’t chat often, so 1 doubt it will come up. Ciao.” Cullen disconnected.

  Rule took a deep breath and did what he had to do, punching in a number he knew well. Why this felt like even more of a betrayal, he couldn’t say. But it did.

  His father answered the way he always did. “Yes?”

  “I need Benedict.”

  “He won’t be happy. He just got back to his mountain.”

  “It can’t be helped. I’m calling another circle.” Rule explained as briefly as possible. His father would know about the attack from Nettie, so it didn’t take long to fill in the rest.

  “All right. What time, then, and where?”

  “Have him check with me. I”m not sure where we’ll…“ Rule’s voice drifted off. Something he’d heard, though hadn’t fully registered, had brought his senses on alert.

  Lily. Speaking to someone inside. From this distance he couldn’t make out the words, but the tone… He started for the duplex. “I’m needed.”

  “Go, then—t’eius ven. Call me after the circle.” The Rho disconnected.

  Rule reached the porch just as Lily came to stand in the doorway. Her quick glance his way told him little. “Baxter,” she called.

  One of the suits Cynna was talking to looked up. “Yeah?”

  “We’ve found something.”

  Baxter started toward her, with Cynna right behind.

  “What is it?” Rule asked. Lily looked at him and shook her head—and seeing her face clearly, he realized she wasn’t upset or shaken, as he’d thought. She was in a cold rage.

  “What have you got?” Baxter asked when he joined them. The agent from the district office was sixtyish and fit, with most of his remaining hair concentrated in a pair of gingery eyebrows. He wore rimless glasses and reeked of tobacco smoke. He glanced at Rule, giving off a faint whiff of seru—just enough to tell Rule that, age and appearances to the contrary, Baxter considered himself the dominant male in most situations.

  After that single glance, he ignored Rule. “What have you got?”

  “Harlowe left us another little present in the DVD player.”

  The bushy eyebrows lifted. “A bragger, is he?”

  “You might say that.” She inhaled, visibly reaching for control. “He likes to take pictures, and Curtis wasn’t his first kill.”

  Gan wasn’t happy. Earth hadn’t been as much fun as usual, not with it tied to Her tool. All Harlowe wanted to do was plan and kill, plan and kill. He wasn’t interested in fucking anymore, since he couldn’t do it.

  And… well, all the killing was bothering it. It had hoped to see or uth a soul at the instant of death—that’s when one ought show up, wasn’t it? But that hadn’t happened. To all its senses, humans died so very dead.

  Gan knew humans were different. Their rules were all tied up with them having souls, and what demon could make sense of that? They even got together in groups to agree on the rules sometimes—that was called democracy—and they got really worked up about owning things. They had lots and lots of rules about ownership, even more than about sex. They fought wars over it, but ownership had nothing to do with who could eat who because they didn’t eat each other. No, they ate dead things instead, and said thou shalt not kill but killed anyway.

  But that was because they didn’t have to do what their rules said. As long as they didn’t get caught, they could break as many rules as they wanted, which was why Earth was usually such fun.

  Not this time. It sighed and thumbed the remote again.

  “Quit playing with that thing,” Harlowe said testily. “You’re distracting me.”

  It looked at the man in the other bed in what was called a motel room. Motel rooms were very boring, but Harlowe was being hunted, so he had to hide out. Gan could understand that—it had to sneak around, too, because the humans would hunt it if they knew it was here. But that could be fun, too.

  Not in a motel room. When they stayed at the other hiding place, with the Dozens, Gan had a pretty good time. It wasn’t allowed to show itself, but it could play tricks, watch the others talk and fight and fuck, that sort of thing. Sometimes it got to steal stuff. The gang thought very highly of stealing, though of course they didn’t know Gan was the one getting the money and guns. They thought Harlowe did everything.

  But in a motel room, all it could do was watch TV. It sighed and pushed the channel change button again.

  “Quit that,” Harlowe snapped.

  Harlowe sure wasn’t any fun. The human wasn’t killing right now, so he was planning. He had papers spread out all over the bed. “I can’t find the fucking channel,” it explained.

  “Which fucking channel? There’s a hundred of them!”

  Gan brightened. “A hundred? That’s a lot of fucking.”

  “Stupid little pervert. Not a hundred channels about fucking. A hundred fucking channels.”

  Gan’s forehead wrinkled. “That doesn’t make sense.” One of the difficult things about Earth was that you couldn’t hear meanings here, only words.

  But Harlowe had lost interest and was studying his papers once more, muttering to himself. “Needs to be half again as big…”

  Gan went back to channel surfing—cute turn of phrase, that. Humans were very inventive with language because they got all their meaning from words.

  Still no fucking, but there was shooting. Was it a war? Gan’s ears perked up. It was very curious about how humans conducted their wars. “… circle the wagons,” the TV person cried. “Hurry! They’re almost here!”

  “… still, if I got rid of the desk,” Harlowe muttered, “the throne could go by the windows. What will I need with a desk, anyway?”

  Gan tried to figu
re out what was happening on TV. Two groups of humans were shooting at each other. One group rode horses; the other didn’t. The bunch on horses yelled a lot and seemed to be winning. Some of them had guns; some had bows and arrows.

  Then two more people on horses rode up, guns blazing. Many of the other horse people fell off, dead, and the rest scattered. Then the other group was happy.

  “Can’t do it all overnight.” Harlowe sounded crisp, satisfied. “The Oval Office will do for a throne room initially. Later, I can have the Capitol Building remodeled.”

  “Who was that masked man?” a TV woman asked one of the TV men.

  The shooting was over, so Gan changed the channel. Things would get better soon, it reminded itself. Just last night Xitil had used Gan’s hand to write some instructions for Harlowe—instructions that came from Her.

  Gan had done its part. It had brought Lily Yu to Dis and drunk a little blood—and oh my, but that had been good! Fizzy and powerful… but not powerful enough to let it possess her. Not without help from Her, only She couldn’t act directly. That would break the pact.

  So She had to work through a tool. Once Harlowe did like he was supposed to do, Gan could get inside Lily Yu. Then it could have lots of fun.

  But it wondered, as it watched a TV man cooking— that’s what humans did to dead things before eating them—if Xitil knew that her new associate’s tool was stark, staring crazy.

  THIRTEEN

  “THERE are three pictures he didn’t send us. Three victims he didn’t want us to know about.”

  “We can’t be sure of that.”

  Lily cast an impatient glance over her shoulder. Baxter sat at his desk, a scuffed and scarred relic from the fifties that looked out of place in the modern building that housed the FBI’s field office in San Diego. It held a jumble of file folders, a computer, five empty Dr. Pepper cans, and the one he’d just opened.

  The man had a serious soda habit. “He killed on the twenty-fifth, the twenty-seventh, the twenty-ninth. No picture of a victim dated the thirty-first, but we’ve got one for the second and fourth of this month, then nothing on the sixth and eighth. Another victim on the tenth, and now Curtis on the twelfth. What does that say to you?”

  “That we have a pattern. That doesn’t mean he killed on the missing dates. Something could have interfered with him on those days. Maybe he didn’t find the right type.”

  “He does have a type.” She stopped in front of the murder board. There were seven prints pinned to it. Seven photos of women, all of them with light brown hair, all young, all naked. Five lay in beds, like Kim Curtis. One was in an alley, while one stared blindly up into the branches of a tree. None bore any marks of violence.

  Seven tidy dead people, hands folded primly on their breasts.

  “Why leave us pictures?” she asked. “Why make it easier for us to track him?”

  “We haven’t found him yet,” Baxter pointed out. “But yeah, I know what you mean. He handed us a lot of information with those photos.”

  They’d beer, taken by a digital camera, which meant the images had data attached. He’d made the disk at Kinko’s, for God’s sake. “We know what camera he used and when he took each of the pictures. We’ve got names and places of death for three of them now—damn Leung’s eyes.”

  “I can’t blame him for not realizing the other vie in his territory was a homicide,” Baxter said. “You get a dead hooker, no signs of violence, you don’t say, ‘Hey, I’ll bet some dude with a magic staff sucked the life out of her.’”

  “Once Curtis turned up in the same shape, arranged the same way, he knew he’d been wrong about Cynthia Porter. He held back on us until his chief leaned on him.”

  “You’ll find that locals do that a lot.”

  She exchanged glances with the older man. Baxter knew she’d been one of the locals until very recently. “I didn’t,” she said evenly.

  He shrugged.

  She and Baxter hadn’t exactly butted heads. MCD’s jurisdiction was clear, and Baxter had put several people at her disposal without complaint. But he’d made it plain he thought her too young and inexperienced to have charge of an investigation of this size.

  Lily tended to agree. She wanted Karonski back. She’d told Ruben that when she reported on the increased scope of the investigation. But the imp outbreak was getting worse. There’s been a rash of fires, several accidents, and now a few fatalities. The governor of Virginia was talking about closing businesses, and the outbreak was being touted as the largest in a century. Ruben couldn’t spare Karonski until they located and closed the leak.

  They had made some progress. They had IDs now on three of the victims—one in Oceanside, another in Escondido, the third in Temecula, like Curtis. All three had been ruled death by natural causes and would have to be ritually examined. Lily felt a pang of sympathy for the coven from L.A. who’d been given that chore. They seemed competent, though—it had taken them about thirty minutes to confirm that Curtis had been killed by death magic.

  Lily had spoken with the Temecula police chief and with three witnesses from the Cactus Corral, including the not-quite-boyfriend. She was waiting on another witness now—the bartender who’d apparently waited on Harlowe. It was his night off, and they hadn’t tracked him down yet.

  It was weird, hanging around waiting for others to turn up the witnesses and bring them to her. She was used to being out there hunting them herself, but someone had to coordinate the federal efforts with the local ones. Right now, that was her.

  She’d be glad when Croft got here. “If he did have victims on the missing days”—and she believed in her gut that he had—“then he held back those photos for a reason. Why? Were there other victims we don’t know about? The first one we have a picture of is from the twenty-fifth of last month.”

  “Eight days after you busted his operation with the Azá. Yeah, I’d like to know what he was doing for that week.”

  Maybe hiding out in hell. Lily hadn’t mentioned that possibility to Baxter. Not only was it outlandish enough to make him doubt everything else she said, but it came from a source she couldn’t reveal.

  “We’ll have another victim soon,” Baxter was saying,

  “if you’re right about the staff and him having to feed it. I hope to God you’re wrong, but I’m not counting on it.”

  She knew it. She knew it, and the certainty ate at her gut. “It keeps coming back to these pictures. Why take them? Why give them to us? Why did he want or need us to know so much?”

  “He might not have known how much he was giving us. Lots of people aren’t computer savvy. I’d never heard of that EXIT data before, myself.”

  “EXIF,” Lily corrected absently, frowning at the map pinned to one end of the long bulletin board. They only had three vies identified so far, not enough to establish a definite pattern. But those three seemed to lead them north, away from San Diego. “Even if you didn’t know the terminology, you’d have found out, wouldn’t you? Before sharing your trophy photos with the FBI, you’d have made sure the images didn’t give away more than you wanted them to.”

  Baxter smiled sourly. “Can’t count on Harlowe being as bright as me.”

  “He’s bright enough.” Lily had spent enough hours learning about the man, getting to know him through the eyes of others, to be sure of that.

  “The whizzes in profiling think he craves recognition. He was outwitting us, but that wasn’t enough. He had to be sure we knew how clever he was.”

  “Maybe.” Lily drummed her fingers once on the desk. “No, dammit, it doesn’t fit. It just doesn’t fit with the man he was before—ambitious, amoral, but not a serial killer, and damn good at taking care of his own hide. Something’s changed, or we’re reading this wrong.”

  The door opened. “Maybe he’s decided he’s invincible,” Rule said. He held a flat cardboard box that gave off wonderful aromas—pepperoni and pizza sauce. “That he can’t be caught or killed.”

  “What the hell,” Baxter sa
id. “You listening at the door?”

  Lily frowned. Usually Rule took care not to make the humans around him uncomfortable. Maybe he was tired.

  “I have good hearing.” Rule walked up to the desk and put down the carton. “It’s nearly eight o’clock, and I’m hungry. I thought you might like a couple of slices. I’m hoping,” he said, glancing at Lily, “to share the rest with my lady.”

  My lady. Only Rule could say something like that and make it sound normal. “It would be handy if Harlowe cherished delusions of invincibility, but Cullen said that Helen was the one who took risks. Harlowe was more cautious.”

  “That was when Helen held the staff. Harlowe has it now.”

  “You think it changes the user’s personality?”

  “I think we’ve got lots of guesses and very little knowledge. I also think it’s suppertime. There’s a break room down the hall where we could take however much of this Baxter can spare us.”

  Baxter had already off-loaded three slices. “Go on, go on. The Bureau can survive without you for a few minutes.”

  The break room was only four doors away and deserted at this hour. “Where’s Cynna?” Rule asked.

  “There’s nothing for her to use to Find Harlowe, so she’s helping another team. Parental kidnapping. She was pretty sure she could Find the boy.” Lily ripped off a few paper towels to serve as both plates and napkins. “What was that ‘my lady’ bit about?”

  Rule was feeding coins into the vending machine. He smiled at her over his shoulder. “Aren’t you?”

  “It sounds…” Like the way he referred to his goddess, but Lily didn’t want to go there. “Medieval. As if you’re about to hop on your charger and go lance someone.”

  “I’ll skip the charger. Horses don’t tolerate us well.” He brought two cans of soda to the table—Diet Coke for her, the straight stuff for himself. “Baxter’s unusually comfortable with my presence.”

  “I explained that you’re a civilian consult.”

  “It’s more than that. Usually there’s some sort of threat response, either fear or aggression or both. It’s a visceral thing, not under conscious control. He mostly ignores me. That’s rare.”