Death Magic wotl-8

by Eileen Wilks

  “What is it this time? Did he say?”

  “Something about water rights.”

  “Do I look like I know anything about water rights? Walt’s an attorney, for God’s sake, even if he doesn’t practice anymore. He’s got to know ten times more than I do about water rights.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you know. It matters what you carry.”

  She sighed. “I know.” But this wasn’t at all what she’d bargained for. She slung her purse on her shoulder. “So where’s Scott? For that matter, where’s José?”

  “Scott was delayed by a traffic light that’s not working. José is on the roof, filling in for Mark, who was injured during sparring today.”

  “Mark’s okay?”

  “The worst damage was to his pride, but José won’t let him take a shift until he’s fully healed.” Rule’s phone chimed once. He glanced at the screen. “Scott’s out front.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  A lot had changed since last month.

  The best and weirdest change was the sudden cessation of argument. The clans weren’t bickering with each other. They’d stopped distrusting Nokolai and were grimly determined to hold the All-Clan some of them had been resisting for nearly a year. The Lady had told them to, after all. She’d spoken through the Rhejes, saying they were to come when “the two-mantled one calls”—and the lupi did not argue with their Lady. Ever. But the logistics and expense of assembling almost every lupus in the world in one place meant it couldn’t happen overnight.

  Every lupus in the world . . . Lily was beginning to feel uneasy about that. Wasn’t holding an All-Clan a lot like issuing their enemies an irresistible invitation? “Here we are—come slaughter us.” Last year, after they defeated Harlow and the Azá, an All-Clan hadn’t been so much of a risk. The Great Bitch hadn’t had agents who were ready to act. Now, though . . . now there was Friar and Humans First.

  Of course, Robert Friar was supposed to be dead. Lily didn’t buy it, but even if she was wrong, the organization he’d founded was very much alive and thriving. Their membership had jumped when Friar’s death was reported—according to Humans First, he’d been martyred, killed by foul magic. Never mind that it was magic he’d brought in himself—that was government lies. Most of those members weren’t likely to grab a gun and go lupus hunting, but some were hard-core.

  She’d told Rule about her misgivings. He’d agreed . . . and said they had to hold the All-Clan anyway. There was something in the stories about it. Something the Lady had said three thousand years ago meant they had to have an All-Clan.

  Lily did not understand.

  Other changes were less boggling and more annoying. The basement of the row house was unfinished; a construction crew from Leidolf would arrive to finish it in a couple of weeks. They had guards now, ten of them, and Rule wanted those guards housed here, not at a hotel. He’d added an alarm system to the detached garage out back, and he wanted Lily’s government-issue Ford in that garage. If she didn’t want to park there, fine, he wasn’t telling her what to do—but the garage would stay empty, because he wasn’t going to use it. He’d rented space in a parking garage a few blocks away—the one where he kept a couple of vehicles for the guards’ use. When Rule needed his car, he had one of the guards retrieve it. Since they were lupus, they’d smell it if anyone had tried to tamper with the car.

  This focus on security was as necessary as it was unwelcome. But Lily’s car was in the garage and Rule’s Mercedes wasn’t, so they left by the front door, watched over invisibly by José on the roof. Out back, she knew, Craig paced the perimeter of the small yard on four feet.

  One up, watching the street; one down, watching the rear of the house; one with Rule. The Leidolf guards were blended with those from Nokolai now. At first they’d worked separate shifts, divided by clan, but Rule had recently changed that. They needed to work as a team, he said . . . which made sense, but Lily had expected it to cause problems, at least at first.

  When she’d said something about that to Rule, his eyebrows had lifted. “A month ago, it might have. War changes things.” He’d been right. The Leidolf and Nokolai guards were working together as smoothly as if their clans hadn’t been enemies for a few hundred years.

  “What did your ghost look like?” Rule asked as she locked the door. He stood with his back to her, scanning the street.

  “Not my ghost.” She dropped her keys in her purse and started for the car double-parked in front of the row house.

  “The ghost that isn’t yours, then.”

  “Five-ten, one sixty . . . or what might be one sixty if it had an actual body instead of the ectoplasmic suggestion of one. No distinguishing features. No features at all.”

  Rule’s eyebrows lifted as he opened the car door for her. He was big on opening doors. “A faceless specter?”

  She grinned. “In fact, it was.” She slid inside and scooted over.

  He followed. Scott clicked the locks.

  This was the part Rule disliked most about the tightened security, she knew. He preferred to drive himself—but he also preferred to have his hands and attention free if they were attacked, so he used a driver now. Lily disliked pretty much every part, but she was adapting, dammit. Though the loss of privacy still grated.

  She said hello to Scott and fastened her seat belt. “Married, I think.”

  “Yes, we will be,” he said, claiming her hand. “Only five months now.”

  “And I’m not even hyperventilating.” Marrying Rule was easy. Holding the wedding was another story, but she had a list, after all. Several of them. “But I meant that the ghost was married before the death-do-you-part clause got activated. He, she, or it wore a ring on the left hand.”

  “You saw a ring? No face, but a wedding ring?”

  “When it reached for me, the hands got a lot clearer. The ring kind of glowed.” She considered. “I should say he, not it. They looked like a man’s hands. Not real young, not real old, and he wasn’t a manual laborer.” No, they’d been soft hands, she remembered. Clean and cared for. Narrow palms, long fingers, nicely trimmed nails.

  “It reached for you?” Rule did not sound happy.

  “Then wisped away.” She squeezed his hand. “Relax. It—or he—didn’t seem hostile, and even if he was pissed and was able to interact with the physical, what could he do? Lob a pencil at me?”

  “I seem to recall a wraith who managed to do quite a lot.”

  “I couldn’t see the wraith. I saw this, so it’s unlikely he was a wraith.” It was unlikely for other reasons, too, having to do with how wraiths were made.

  “Hmm.”

  Rule didn’t ask the obvious questions. He knew that whatever she’d seen, it hadn’t been a trick of the light or a delusion. He also knew it couldn’t have been an illusion. Lily was a touch sensitive. She felt magic tactically, but couldn’t work it or be affected by it. Whatever she’d seen had been real.

  Scott signaled for the turn. Lily tried to pretend he wasn’t able to hear everything they said. Rule was better at that than she was. Ignoring their front-seat audience entirely, he played with her fingers. Especially the one with his ring on it. For a man who’d spent several decades morally opposed to marriage and all forms of sexual possessiveness, he sure was fascinated by that shiny token of his claim on her.

  Maybe she should have gotten him an engagement ring, too.

  “Something funny?” he asked.

  “I was picturing your left hand with a diamond on the third finger.”

  He blinked. Went still. Then nodded. “That’s a good idea. I wonder why it didn’t occur to me that I needed an engagement ring.”

  He wasn’t kidding. He honest-to-God meant it. She leaned in and kissed him lightly. “I love you, you know.”

  “I like hearing it.” He switched his attention from her hand to her hair, running his fingers through it. “Shall we pick something out together?”

  “Your engagement ring, you mean.”

 
“We may have to go with something custom.”

  “Um . . . yeah, we might.” Unless . . . “We might find something in San Francisco. Or in Massachusetts.” Did gay guys buy each other engagement rings? Why didn’t she know? The only XY married couple she knew personally had tied the knot in a big hurry, afraid their official permission to marry wouldn’t last. They’d been right.

  Rule smiled, following her thinking easily. “Perhaps I could ask Jasper.”

  “Jasper?”

  “Your cousin Freddie’s good friend. They recently moved in together.”

  “Oh, that Jasper.” Lily’s cousin Freddie—third cousin, really, but still a cousin—had started working for Rule last month. He was handling some of Leidolf’s investments, which took a big load off Rule. Lily had mixed feelings about this. Freddie was indefatigably honest and good at what he did—at least Lily’s father thought so, and he ought to know. But she’d built up a good head of Freddie-aversion over the years because he would not stop assuming that she was going to marry him. “I’ve only met Jasper a couple times. I didn’t realize he was . . .” She sat straight up. “Wait a minute. You don’t mean that Freddie—”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “Freddie’s gay?” Her voice rose in outrage. “He asked me to marry him a dozen times. Not because he wanted to, mind, but his mother wanted . . . so did mine. Are you telling me he’s gay?”

  Rule shrugged. “Define it how you like. He and Jasper—”

  “Just because Jasper’s gay doesn’t mean Freddie is.” Because it would really piss her off if Freddie had done his damnedest to marry her without mentioning that he preferred sexual partners who were outies instead of innies. “You can’t be sure.”

  “I can’t help but know when someone finds me attractive. Freddie might be bi rather than gay, but yes, I’m sure he finds men sexually appealing.”

  He smelled it. That’s what he meant, and she’d known he could smell female arousal. She’d never thought about him smelling male arousal, too. Sidetracked, she asked, “Is that ever a problem for you? Knowing some guy is getting excited looking at you?”

  “Why? I’ve never understood why human men get flustered or angry about that sort of thing. How is it offensive to be found attractive, even if you aren’t able to return the compliment?”

  “Hierarchy.” Lily said that automatically, stopped to think about it, and decided it made sense. “That’s part of it, maybe a big part. For a few centuries heterosexual males—white heterosexual males in particular, here in the West—have been at the top of the pecking order. Getting hit on by another guy would feel like an insult because someone was doubting your qualifications to be top dog.”

  “Ah. You’re wise. Yes, that fits. What high-status group wants to give up their privileged position? It would explain the hysterical tenor of some of the anti-gay-marriage groups.”

  She snorted. “Fear and bigotry don’t need explaining. They simply are, like traffic jams and taxes.”

  “That’s one way of seeing it.” He wound the bit of hair he’d been playing with around his finger. “Are you going to forgive your cousin?”

  “Eventually. I may have to hit him first.”

  “Don’t hit hard. He’s doing a good job with Leidolf’s finances.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind. You were sure burning midnight oil for a while. If Nokolai hadn’t been able to . . .” Her voice drifted off. He’d given the back of Scott’s head a pointed glance. “Right.” Two mantles, two clans, two sets of guards. Scott was one of the Leidolf bunch. Mustn’t discuss Nokolai business in front of a Leidolf, even if the two sets of guards were playing nice together.

  Rule let the strand of hair unwind. “About the ghost that isn’t yours. What did you do after it wisped away?”

  “Asked if anyone else had seen it, of course.”

  That amused him. “At a firing range for FBI agents.”

  “I needed to know, didn’t I? Besides, everyone knows I’m part of the woo-woo crowd.”

  “And had anyone else seen it?”

  “No.” Which raised a number of questions, didn’t it?

  THREE

  I F Lily had to be in D.C., she was glad it was October. Summers here sweated, winters were too damn cold, but October in D.C was nice. Almost as nice as in San Diego, if not as dependably pleasant. D.C. was also, she admitted, a lot greener. Water fell from the sky here on a regular basis. On her last sojourn in the capital, Lily had broken down and bought a pair of rain boots.

  Not that she’d need them for the party. Trust a precog to pick the right weekend for perfect weather.

  Ruben Brooks, head of Unit 12 of the FBI’s Magical Crimes Division, wasn’t just Gifted. His precognitive ability was off-the-charts. He lived in a Bethesda neighborhood that no FBI employee, however high up the ladder, should have been able to afford. But his wife came from money. Old money, not modern megabucks, the kind of wealth that, like river rocks, had been worn smooth by time into the polished detritus of trust funds and expectations. The Brookses’ Bethesda home had been a wedding present from her parents.

  The house itself had more bedrooms than Lily was used to and a fair helping of antiques, yet on the whole it was more comfortable than pretentious. Land and location—that’s what pushed the price into the stratosphere. Bethesda was expensive to start with. The stone-and-timber home was a short subway ride from downtown D.C., yet sat on over three acres of land, nestled into a surviving patch of old-growth forest. The grounds immediately surrounding the house were beautiful—lush and imaginatively landscaped.

  Backyard barbecue? Maybe, but not the sort of backyard Lily was used to.

  There was enough space for the impromptu softball game they’d played while waiting on the food. As the day darkened into twilight, they sat down to eat at ten long picnic tables set up on the lawn to accommodate the guests. Those guests were an eclectic mix: Unit agents plus their partners, spouses, or dates; regular FBI; and plenty of non-Bureau guests, too. Lily had the chance to meet some of those spouses and dates—like Margarita Karonski, and wasn’t that a mouthful? Karonski’s wife was about forty, with big breasts, a big laugh, lustrous black hair, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering.

  It was all very egalitarian. Lily ate ribs and potato salad with Rule, a seventh-grade teacher, another Unit agent, the head of a small seminary, Ruben’s secretary, and the director of the Census Bureau.

  The director and the teacher turned out to be interesting people, even if they were wrongheaded about key issues. Like baseball. After dessert, the three of them lingered at the table, arguing about instant replay.

  “Lily Yu!” boomed out behind her. “It’s been too long!”

  Lily turned. A man with Einstein hair, Ben Franklin glasses, and guileless brown eyes snared in a nest of wrinkles beneath bushy brows was beaming at her. He wore baggy shorts and Birkenstocks. A Hawaiian print shirt covered the decided paunch around his middle. “Dr. Fagin!”

  “Fagin, my dear, simply Fagin, unless you wish to adopt Sherry’s habit and call me Xavier. Otherwise I’ll look like a patronizing ass when I call you Lily.”

  She grinned, swung her legs over the bench and stood. “Annette, Carl,” she said to her fellow debaters, “do you know Dr. Xavier Fagin? He consults here sometimes, but he’s at Harvard—”

  “Ah, but I’m retired now. I moved to D.C. last month.”

  “I didn’t know that. It’s quite a change for you.”

  “Life is change, after all.” He smiled his vague, dotty-old-professor smile, a gentle benediction meant to baffle all inquiries.

  Lily took the hint and dropped the subject. “Fagin, this is Annette Broderick and Carl Rogers.”

  “I know Annette.” Fagin turned that gentle smile on the Census director. “Delighted to see you again, my dear. And you’re Carl? Good to meet you. I’m afraid I’ve come to rudely steal Lily away. A research matter.”

  Lily snorted. “Research, my—”

  “
A matter of personal research, we might say. Lily, I’m having a terrible time resisting the urge to tuck your hand in my arm and drag you delicately away. Men my age are allowed to get away with that sort of behavior. It’s one of the few charms about growing old. But in your case—”

  “Not a good idea.”

  Dr. Xavier Fagin—BA, MA, MFA, PhD, and for all she knew, DDT, LOL, and RAM as well—was one of the leading authorities on Pre-Purge magical history. He’d headed the Presidential Task Force that dealt with the aftermath of the Turning, which is how Lily knew him. He was also the only other touch sensitive she’d ever met. They’d discovered the hard way that it was best not to shake hands.

  “Alas, it is not, so I must rely on curiosity to lure you away, rather than tolerance for an old man’s peculiarities. You’ve seen a ghost.”

  Carl wanted to know all about it. Annette said that her cousin Sondra had a touch of a mediumistic Gift, so she saw ghosts occasionally. She hadn’t realized Lily possessed that Gift, too.

  “I don’t,” Lily said, “which is why it’s so puzzling.”

  “And so,” Fagin said to the other two, “I wish to ask Lily one or two terribly personal questions, which she will doubtless be inclined to brush off, but I believe if I can get her to myself for a few minutes, I can coax answers from her.” He waggled bushy eyebrows at Lily. “I have a theory.”

  Lily allowed herself to be lured. She and Dr. Fagin meandered toward the tubs of beer and soft drinks set out on the deck. “You’ve been talking to Rule.”

  “I have. I’ve also been collecting data on non-mediums who see or profess to see ghosts.”

  Her own eyebrows went up. “It really is research.”

  He waved that away. “A personal interest. I doubt there’s a paper in it. Too much of the data is anecdotal.”

  “Why are you personally interested in who sees ghosts?”

  He heaved a windy sigh. “I suppose it’s only fair to answer that, since I did promise to ask intrusive questions myself. Fifteen years ago, I saw my mother’s ghost.”