Mortal Danger wotl-2

by Eileen Wilks

  Clever small bite. Demons prize the ability to deceive without lying. They do this by watching their words, as you say, and also by finding a self who means what they wish to say. This little one you call Gan doesn’t have many selves, so it must rely primarily upon its choice of words.

  She rubbed her temples. Not many selves?

  Vocalize.

  “Uh… what does ‘many selves’ mean?”

  Demons consist of all the creatures they have eaten. Those eaten lose volition, not identity.

  “So Gan isn’t one demon? It’s a whole bunch of them, but Gan’s the one in charge?”

  Gan is mostly imps, bugs, and other nonsentients— though I do hear at least one surprisingly old demon inside it. Gan is also Gan. Demon identity is not what you are used to. The dragon turned his gaze on the little demon. You will now tell me why the human is half-souled.

  Gan cowered. “Oh, Great One, mighty of wing and mind, how would this feeble one know? I’m a demon, and such a small, insignificant demon, barely more than an imp. What do I know about souls?”

  You are right, small bite. The demon does not deceive well, though the din of its mind makes it difficult to sort through what passes for its thoughts. The dragon’s tail flicked out suddenly. It whizzed over Lily’s head and thudded into Gan, sending the demon tumbling. I have all your surface names and thirty-two of the deeper ones, Izhatipoibanolitofaidinbaravha—

  “All right, all right! Don’t say it all!”

  I can acquire the rest of your names if I choose. Or simply pull pieces of you off, but that would dirty my sand. Be truthful. What happened to the human ?

  If demons had been able to cry, Gan would have been sniffling. “I just wanted to get away—when that mage fire hit the staff, it hurt! I can cross all by myself,” it added, puffing its chest a bit. “Hardly anyone can do that, but I can. But I was already tied to Lily Yu, so when I crossed, she came, too. And she’s tied to the wolf in some weird way, so he got dragged along, and… and everything went wrong.”

  “You mean you did it?” she exclaimed. “You brought us here, not the staff?”

  Gan heaved a windy sigh and nodded.

  “Then you can take us back.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  Rule lowered his head, growling.

  Gan scowled. “I tried! You think I’d rather be eaten by dragons than go back to Earth? Well, they didn’t eat us, but I thought they would, so I tried to cross. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t.”

  Because Lily Yu did not come along completely. When you tried to possess her, you became partially lodged inside her. You brought that part with you, but left behind the named half. She is both here and there. The effect is rather as if you’d jammed something against a door. It won’t open for you.

  Horror squeezed the air from her lungs. “I’m—I’m missing more than memories? Are you sure?”

  The dragon flicked her a glance. The black-and-silver eyes were too removed, too dispassionate, for anything as personal as contempt or compassion. I do not say what I am not sure of. I wonder if your other half is a ghost? Neither of your sundered selves will live long, of course, but it would be interesting to—

  Rule howled and launched himself at Gan.

  Ah, but he was fast! By the time Lily got to her feet he’d already hit once, bounced away before the demon’s roundhouse swing could connect, and was circling for another leap.

  The dragon’s tail smashed into him in mid-air.

  Lily cried out and stumbled over to him. He wasn’t moving.

  Foolish. I had expected better. He seemed to have some sense.

  “Shut up,” she said fiercely, kneeling. His heart was beating, she discovered when she pressed her hand to the bottom of his rib cage. But his ribs had already been cracked or broken. The lashing tail could have staved them in, punctured a lung.

  “I guess you don’t care that I’m bleeding over here,” Gan said grumpily.

  No, she didn’t. The demon was alive and talking, while Rule… wait, his eyelids twitched. Then they blinked open.

  Her breath shuddered out. “Where are you hurt?”

  Slowly, as if it hurt, he lifted his head. With his nose he indicated his left foreleg.

  Not his gut or his chest, then. Not a punctured lung.

  A minor concussion as well, he thinks. But the leg is more of a problem. You will need to set it.

  Okay. She drew in a breath and ran her hand along the leg. He jerked. “I’m sorry.” She’d learned what she needed to know, though. Her fingertips glistened red. “There’s a bit of bone sticking out through the skin. It needs to be set, splinted.” Without anesthetic. She didn’t want to think about how much that would hurt. “I… I don’t know how to do it.”

  She looked at her hands. They were shaking. But that made sense. She was dying. She had memories of only a couple of days of life, and she was dying.

  Such drama. You aren’t dying yet.

  “You said—”

  I was interrupted. You’ll die of your condition eventually, but the demon is keeping you alive for now.

  She looked at Gan.

  It sat in the sand, scowling. A chunk of flesh and muscle was missing where its shoulder met its neck. The wound seemed to have already stopped bleeding, but its orange skin was heavily splashed with blood. Red blood, like hers.

  Rule really had meant to kill Gan. “You’re keeping me alive?”

  Its lower lip stuck out like a sulky child’s. “Why do you think I made you take ymu? He needs me, too.” Gan gave the dragon a wary glance. “To keep you alive. He probably plans to trade you to Xitil. If dragons aren’t eating demons, they’re trying to get more territory from us.”

  “Is that what you wanted me for?” she asked the dragon. “To trade?”

  Perhaps. The demon is correct about my desire to keep you alive. If your wolf had been thinking, he would have realized that. Why else would I suffer having a demon brought here ?

  Rule lifted his head and looked straight at the dragon.

  You would question me, wolf?

  She couldn’t tell if the trace of emotion coating that thought was amusement or irritation. She knew what she felt, though. Frustration. Everyone could understand Rule except her. “What did he say? Or think, or… whatever.”

  He wonders why I’m here at all. Why dragons are living with demons.

  Gan snorted. “Living with us! Eating us, more like, when you can. Trying to get more territory the rest of the time.” It looked at Lily. “No one knows why the dragons left Earth. I was just an imp when some of them showed up here, but even imps heard about the battles. Dragons live by magic, see, but they can’t be affected by it. That was their big advantage. Well, they’re good fighters, too, but we outnumbered them thousands to one. But—”

  But you did not unite to attack us, allowing us to prevail over the local lord and his court. Nor did you learn from this. When Xitil allowed Ishtar’s enemy to guest with her, the other lords should have banded together and destroyed them both. They never even considered it. This was folly of a monstrous degree.

  “Big wars are wasteful,” Gan said. “Unpredictable. Xitil will destroy the avatar.”

  I am unsurprised by your attitude.

  Ishtar’s enemy? Hadn’t Gan used that name, too? Lily shook her head. “Look, all that is interesting, but the timing’s bad for history lessons. I need something straight to use for a splint, and something to fasten it with. Cloth, rope, leather… something I can tie around the leg and splint. And if you know anything about setting bones…” Her voice faltered. “I could use some help with that.” She had no reason to think the dragon would offer it.

  That great head turned, focusing on Gan. The demon’s kind are good with bodies.

  Gan sniffed. “I’m not going to help him. He tried to kill me.”

  You will do as 1 wish, Izhatipoibanolit—

  “Right, right. But do you mean you want the wolf’s leg fixed?” Gan was incredulous.


  I do.

  Gan heaved a huge, put-upon sigh and stood. “I can put his bone back in place, but it won’t stay. He’s no demon. He can’t heal that quick.”

  “That’s what the splint is for.” Hope stirred, fragile and hard to trust. The dragon had broken Rule’s leg, but now wanted it to heal straight. She didn’t understand. Were dragons capable of compassion? “We have to stabilize the leg.”

  The dragon tilted his head up. After a moment, one of the circling shapes overhead broke from the rest, diving for the land at the top of the cliff.

  We are well supplied with bones. One of my line-kin will bring you an assortment to choose from for the splint. There are coverings in your cave. Tear strips from one, or have the demon do so. It has good teeth.

  “Uh—my cave?”

  The place you will stay. The entrance is near the grass at the eastern end of the beach. With that, he stood.

  The dragon’s legs were short and thick in proportion to his body, bowed out like a lizard’s. His haunches were house-high, his shoulders slightly lower. There is food in the cave. You won’t need it, but the lupus will. At the rear of the cave is a small freshwater spring.

  “I need food, too,” Gan said. “I can’t eat dead things.”

  You’ll be fed. You’ll continue to feed the human. Drop to the ground now.

  The dragon moved.

  A creature so large should have seemed ponderous. He wasn’t. She had to flatten herself to avoid getting clipped by his tail when he started walking, but the wide-set legs carried him over the sand as agilely as one of his tiny kin.

  “Wait!” Lily pushed to her feet. “Where are you going? When will you be back?”

  The dragon flowed over the side of the sandbox, stepping down the twenty feet to the beach like a cat oozing off a couch.

  “What’s your name?” she called.

  He just kept moving.

  “How did you know we were in that other region? How did you know I’m a sensitive before you brought us here? Why did you bring us here?”

  The great beast was a several dozen yards down the beach now.

  “Dammit, I’m vocalizing at you!”

  He stopped, his wings partially unfurled. They were doubled, those wings, like a moth’s. Slowly the neck swung around until he was looking back at her. Faint, so faint she might have imagined it, she caught a wisp of amusement just before he straightened, rising up on his hind legs, the long body lifting up and up. The haunches bunched and he sprang for the sky like a cat leaping onto a windowsill.

  Even from this distance, the wind from his wings stirred the sand, getting grit in her eyes. She was blinking them clean when she caught his last words: Sam. I believe you may call me Sam.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  LILY needed clothes. Cynna’s belt had to be snug to keep the pants from falling off, and snug hurt. She also had to do something about Dirty Harry.

  So after checking herself out, she sat in the back seat of Cullen’s old Bronco, fists clenched, trying not to think about what might be happening to Rule while she took care of her cat and her damned grooming. One of the officers had driven her car back to her place last night, and Rule’s car had been impounded.

  For a few blocks she leaned her head back and shut out the sound of Cynna and Cullen arguing. She needed to see Beth, talk to her. She didn’t want to. Not when Beth was staying with their parents. But a phone call wasn’t enough, not for this. She needed to know how badly Beth had been scarred by last night.

  God, she was tired. She closed her eyes, but there was no rest inside her. Not with everything humming like an overloaded power line.

  She was scared. All the way down scared. Not so much of dying, though she wasn’t in denial about that.

  Death was a strong possibility, but she knew how to keep going in the face of that sort of risk. As a cop, she’d usually had backup going into a dangerous situation. Barring that, she’d had training to fall back on. You identified your goal, made your plans, and did the best you could. Fear was normal, just one more factor to account for.

  What was grinding at her wasn’t as clean as the fear of death. The shaky feeling came from the fear that she wasn’t enough. She didn’t know enough, couldn’t be enough or do enough to get Rule back. Her Gift was gone. She wasn’t sure there was enough of her left to do what had to be done.

  Maybe, even with her Gift, there wouldn’t have been enough. What they were planning—or, so far, failing to plan—was nuts. One lupus sorcerer, one female Finder, and one damaged former homicide cop were going up against who knew how many demons on their home ground. How do you plan for that?

  One step at a time, she told herself. If she couldn’t tell if she was going in the right direction, tough. She still had to take that next step.

  Up front, Cynna snorted. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no technical difference between opening a big gate and opening a little one. It’s just a matter of power.”

  They should have taken Cynna’s rental. The Bronco’s engine knocked so badly she wondered if Cullen kept it running with sorcery. But Cullen had insisted on driving, and Cynna wouldn’t let him behind the wheel of her vehicle. Even one only temporarily hers.

  “I don’t imagine you’ve ever heard of McCallum’s Theorem.” Cullen sounded like an adult talking to a sweet but slow child.

  “He’s got a theory about hellgates?”

  “No, it concerns the difference between relevance and resonance, but it suggests that—”

  “There’s only one kind of relevance that matters with gates. Now, if we were talking about voodoo—”

  “Pretend you’re more interested in figuring this out than one-upping me,” Cullen said. “You won’t embarrass yourself so much.”

  Lily wondered if she was going to have to kill them both, or if taping their mouths shut would be enough. “Bickering is one way of dealing with tension, but it isn’t doing much for mine. Since neither one of you knows how to open a gate, can we talk about something more to the point? Make some plans?”

  “Believe it or not,” Cullen said, “our discussion is very much to the point. In a roundabout way.”

  “Sure. Right. Now I understand.”

  “We’re trying to settle what kind of gate to open,” Cynna said. “Single-relevance or multi-relevance. Only there isn’t such a thing as a multi-relevance gate, so you’re right. We’re wasting time.”

  Cullen hissed. That’s what it sounded like—a cat’s hiss. “Lady save me from small-minded hedge witches. Just because you’ve never heard of something doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

  Lily tried once more to get them back on track. “Because you don’t know how to open a gate anyway, the discussion is moot.”

  Cullen was impatient. “We know the general principles behind it.”

  “Right,” Cynna said. “That’s like saying we don’t know how to build a television, but we know the general idea behind how one works. Cullen thinks that once we get our TV we should tinker with it. I think that would be too dangerous. We’ve got no reason to think his idea is even possible.”

  “It’s possible,” Cullen insisted. “McCallum’s Theorem—”

  “Hold off on the theorem talk a minute,” Lily said.

  “What kind of risks are we talking about if you tinker with the spell? What advantages?”

  “Ritual. Magic on this level requires a ritual, not just a spell.”

  “Whatever. Risks and advantages, Cullen.”

  “The major risk is that the ritual won’t work. We don’t get a gate. In which case we can back up and try again with the unaltered ritual.”

  “Maybe,” Cynna said dryly. “If we all survive. We’re talking about a major ritual here, involving forces we don’t understand. There’s no sure way to predict the outcome.”

  Lily frowned. “That’s a big risk.”

  “And the advantage,” Cullen said, “is that if it works we’d have full control of the gate and who and what
passes through it.”

  She was silent a moment. Cynna and Cullen had needled each other about all the demons who weren’t ravaging the countryside, but if they opened a gate they couldn’t control… “That’s a big advantage. Big enough to outweigh the risks—if this multi-relevance thing is possible.”

  He switched lanes with typical split-second timing. “Let’s go back to the basics. You know gates are magical constructs, right? Located on or very near a node.”

  “Got that. The Azá were trying to open theirs right on top of a node. They needed the power from it.”

  “In part, yes. But nodes are also the places of greatest congruence. Think of them as spots where the realms almost touch. Now, magically speaking, congruence is one of the five fields of relevance. It’s spatial. There’s also physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.”

  Lily shook her head. “I’m getting dizzy already. I thought spiritual stuff and magic were different. That’s how Nettie was able to do some healing on me—because she wasn’t using straight magic.”

  “Depends on who you talk to. Theories abound.”

  “Such as?”

  “My early training was Wiccan. They consider spirit one of the five types of power—earth, air. fire, water, spirit. Chinese practitioners work with five energies, too, though they substitute metal for spirit and see the spiritual as entirely separate. So do many Protestant faiths. Catholicism is hopelessly muddled on the subject. Most shamans say there is a difference between spirit and magic but just smile mysteriously if you ask what it is.”

  “Like Nettie.”

  “Exactly. Houngans and mambos—‘”

  “Who?”

  “Male and female voodoo priests. Their magic is spirit-based, so naturally they don’t distinguish between magic and spirit. And Buddhists…” He shrugged and added in a singsong, “Spiritual, nonspiritual—no difference. Duality is illusion.”

  Cynna chuckled. “I used to know someone who would have said just that.”