by Eileen Wilks
“Hmm.” For a long moment Isen didn’t say anything. Then he asked, “And can you carry both full mantles? If I dropped dead right now, could you assume Nokolai’s complete mantle?”
“If I thought I couldn’t, I’d ask you to remove the Nokolai portion from me immediately. I will not risk the clan.”
“A good answer, but a simple ‘yes’ would have been even better.”
“A simple ‘yes’ would mean I was confusing fact with opinion.”
“Your opinion.”
“Yes. It’s based on unique experience, however. Assuming the full Leidolf mantle was . . .” He paused to fit words around what he meant as best as possible. “Simple. Not easy, no, but much simpler than when I was first forced to carry portions of two mantles. There’s . . . room now. They’re both already here. I’ve no reason to think assuming the full Nokolai mantle would be beyond me.”
Isen nodded slowly. “Very well. I trust your judgment. I’ll make no definite decision yet, but for the time being you will remain my Lu Nuncio. We will use the protocol you suggested, but the parameters must be different. On this side of the country, you are my Lu Nuncio. On Leidolf’s side, you are their Rho.”
“No.”
This time only one eyebrow shot up. “No?”
“If you and I meet on the street and I submit to you, the other clans won’t see your Lu Nuncio submitting. They’ll see Leidolf’s Rho submitting. I can’t agree to that.”
“Who am I speaking to now—my Lu Nuncio, or Leidolf’s Rho?”
“Both. The other clans are uneasy about what they see as Nokolai’s growing power. We don’t want to feed that.”
A grin broke out on Isen’s face, folding up the creases in the way they were meant to go. “You’re good,” he said happily. “You’re damned good. I’ve done well with you. Yes, I agree, with some stipulations to be worked out—but that discussion will take place between the Leidolf Rho and the Nokolai Rho.” His eyes twinkled. “You can put me in touch with him later. Right now I want to embrace my son.”
Isen was a world-class hugger. However much he held himself apart when he was being Rho to Rule’s Lu Nuncio, when he dropped that role and was a father, he brimmed with love, support, and hugs.
When they broke apart Rule was grinning as widely as his father. He braced his feet—and sure enough, here came the clap on the back, hearty enough to stagger the unprepared. “Lily’s good, right?’ Isen said. “And Toby. I can’t wait to see that boy. You’ll bring him to Clanhome soon. Today.”
Isen could have come to Toby, but Rule didn’t suggest it. Today’s meeting was very much the exception. His father seldom left Clanhome—though that might change, with Leidolf no longer a threat. “I will. He’s eager to see you and his Uncle Benedict.” Rule glanced at the silent man still standing guard behind their father. “Speaking of whom—”
Isen squeezed Rule’s arm. “Leave him be. He’s brooding. Always been a hell of a one for a good brood, my Benedict. Leave him be for now.”
Rule looked at his brother’s unrevealing face. “I didn’t expect him to object so strongly to my becoming Leidolf Rho.”
“No, no. He considers that good strategy. It’s getting yourself engaged he has problems with. Now, when do I get to see my grandson? He’ll stay at Clanhome for the rest of the summer,” Isen announced. “Once school starts, well, we’ll see how that works out. But it’s summer still.”
That was all he said about Rule’s upcoming marriage. They walked and talked for another half hour as father and son, arranging for Toby to spend time at Clanhome, if not quite as much as Isen wanted. And Rule’s father didn’t again refer to Rule’s intention to break one of the strongest taboos of his people. When Rule tried to raise the subject, Isen dodged it neatly.
It would have been nice, Rule thought as he headed for his car, if he could trust that silence meant support, or at least a lack of opposition. But this was Isen Turner. By definition, he was up to something.
TWO
Three Weeks Later
SAN Diego slid from July into August like a baker slides a fresh sheet of cookies into the oven—quick and smooth, with the new panful of days set to cook up crisp. The weather experts muttered among themselves about the inversion layer, but no one really knew why the city was experiencing such unprecedented heat. Sales of charcoal and grill supplies were down; alcohol sales were up. So were rapes, domestic violence, suicides, and auto accidents.
And homicides, of course. People were too hot to cook out, but they still killed one another. Lily Yu walked along the hot concrete, carrying her new patent- leather sandals instead of wearing them, and reflected on how odd it felt not to be investigating any of those shootings, stabbings, or beatings.
She stopped short of the sticky red scum baking on the street. Her bare soles weren’t picking up a thing except heat and grit, and she’d crossed the street four times now.
One of the small gaggle of looky-loos cluttering the convenience store parking lot on the corner called out a disrespectful and unlikely suggestion. Lily sighed.
“Hot weather sure brings out the loonies,” the officer standing next to the black-and-white said.
“That it does,” Lily agreed, bending to slip one sandal back on, then the other. Her feet were filthy. She had some wipes in her purse, though, so she could clean them up in a few minutes. “Doesn’t seem to be anything here for me.”
The officer who’d spoken took off his dark blue cap, dragged his forearm across his forehead, and reseated the cap. “Sorry to drag you out in the heat, but we’ve been told to call you people.”
“You did right. I wanted to check out one of these events right after it happened, anyway.” She just hadn’t wanted it to happen today, dammit.
Technically she hadn’t had to respond. It was Saturday; it was after five o’clock—no one would have minded if she’d let this wait until tomorrow. No one but her. It was annoying sometimes, being so meticulous.
Lily looked at the twisted chassis of the little Honda. It had certainly lost the argument with the pickup. “I’ll need to check her car, too. The steering wheel, the dash—all the areas the driver might have been in contact with.”
“Have at it. Guess you have to be thorough.” He shook his head. “Funny job you have, though.”
“Yeah,” she said dryly, and headed for the pleated Honda.
Officer Munoz was short and solid, with a round, cheerful face that his mustache struggled valiantly to dignify. He was also young. Terribly young, to Lily’s eyes . . . which was almost as disconcerting as checking out wacko calls instead of homicides. She wasn’t yet thirty, for God’s sake. Not for another eight months.
No, seven months. Geez. That wasn’t long. She frowned as she skirted the bright red transmission fluid drying on the cement. Then she reached the driver’s door. “Well, shit.”
They’d removed the driver on the other side, for obvious reasons. There was no way Lily would get the door open. She tried anyway.
“Guess you were headed somewhere,” Officer Munoz observed. “With that pretty dress you’re wearing and all.” His face fell. “Shit, I’m not supposed to say that, am I?”
“That’s okay. I’m on my way to a baby shower. I’m one of the hosts.” She tugged harder, but the door wasn’t budging.
“Really?” He brightened as he moved toward the passenger’s side. “My wife is due in January.”
This child had a wife? Lily told herself to get over it, but a new thought intruded. Did Rule ever look at her and think she looked painfully young? There was a lot more of an age difference between the two of them than between her and the earnest young officer. “Congratulations. Boy or girl?”
“She hasn’t had a sonogram yet. I’m sort of hoping for a boy, but you know, as long as it’s healthy . . .” He yanked open the passenger door. “This one works.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Only she’d have to crawl across the front seat if she got in that way, and she had not dressed for this occ
asion. She glanced down at her cream-colored trapeze dress with pretty bronze bands at the neckline and hem. She’d bought it especially for today.
At least it was loose. Maybe she could climb across and still leave Officer Munoz uninformed about the color of her panties.
A black Mercedes was parked on the other side of the patrol car. Its door opened, and a tall man wearing jeans and a black dress shirt got out. “Need a hand?”
Her heart gave a happy little bump. Funny how just looking at him still did that for her. She shook her head. “Even you couldn’t get this door open. I’ll climb across.”
He gave her a bland smile. “You’ll get your pretty dress dirty.” Of course he’d heard Munoz’s comment. He started toward her. “Let’s see what I can do.”
“Hey!” Munoz said. “You’re that lupus!”
Lily tensed, but Rule had a smile for him. “I’m a lupus, at least.”
“No, you’re the prince one! The one in all the magazines with . . . I mean . . .” Munoz took a breath. Lily suspected that if his complexion had been paler, she’d have seen an embarrassed flush. “Never mind.”
He’d been about to comment on the plethora of lovely women Rule had been photographed with. Though not recently. Recently, all the articles were about him and Lily . . . way too many articles. She touched the little lump beneath her dress where her engagement ring hung on a chain, dangling next to the toltoi she’d been given to mark her status as Chosen.
Until they made an official announcement, she was keeping her ring out of sight.
“Uh . . . Turner, right?” Munoz smiled hopefully.
Lily took pity on the officer’s embarrassment. He meant well, which a lot of cops didn’t. Not with lupi. “Officer Munoz, this is Rule Turner. Rule, Officer Jesse Munoz.” She looked at the young patrol officer. “Rule’s right about my dress, though. I’d rather not get it dirty, plus there’s some broken glass. Do you have anything I could put on the seat?”
Rule touched her arm. “Give me a moment. You know I enjoy flexing things for you.”
She shook her head but stood back to let him have at it. “Just don’t bleed. I hate it when you bleed.”
Rule gave her a quick grin, stepped up to the door, braced himself, and pulled. Metal groaned, but nothing happened. He frowned. Then he put one foot up on the frame next to the door and heaved. With a loud shriek, the door opened. He didn’t even fall over backward.
“Thanks. You know, most men open pickle jars.”
“Fortunately, I can open them, too.”
She grinned and glanced at the convenience store, where the looky-loos were getting excited. “Better watch out. I think someone in that crowd recognized you.” And not everyone felt the same sort of excitement about lupi as Officer Munoz . . . who was forgetting his professional dignity again.
“Hey, that’s cool! You just yanked on it and opened it. I’d always heard lupi were strong, but man.” Munoz shook his head, all admiration. “That’s cool.”
Lily left Rule to his one-man fan club and went to do her job. Which, as Munoz had said, was sometimes pretty odd.
Until last November, Lily had been a homicide cop here in San Diego. Now she worked for Unit 12 of the Magical Crimes Division of the FBI. Usually that didn’t mean running her hands over what was left of the driver’s seat in a crumpled Honda, but the walking-around-barefoot part happened fairly often.
Lily was a touch sensitive. She experienced magic as a texture on her skin, but couldn’t be affected by it. When local police thought magic or those of the Blood might be involved in a crime, they called MCD—who passed most of it on to the Unit.
Lately she’d been called out a lot. In the dog days of summer, some of the citizens of San Diego were seeing monsters. Big, hairy monsters with tyrannosaurus teeth. Grinning demons chittering at a window. Leprous undead charging a house.
Every time the nutcases called the cops, the cops called her. Every time, she had to check out the sighting. Because these days, there was always a chance the loonies were right.
THREE
CREATURES unseen on Earth in hundreds of years—creatures never seen here at all—had been swept here at the Turning, when the power winds blew open barriers between realms.
The power winds had been temporary, thank God, and the experts said it would be impossible for anything to wander here without them. They also said that any crossing would release a burst of nodal energy, and the D.C. coven, who kept watch over a sophisticated simulacra map, swore there’d been no significant node disturbances recently. And while there was now a gate between Earth and one other realm—Edge—it was on the other side of the country and was warded and guarded on both ends. Nothing was slipping through there.
But unlikely doesn’t mean impossible, and Lily wasn’t convinced the experts knew all that much, so when the cops called the Unit, she went to check out the scene.
First she ran her hands over every inch of the steering wheel, from which the deflated airbag hung like the world’s biggest condom. The monster du jour had been a giant snake, one as big around as a cow, which the Honda’s driver swore had suddenly reared up in front of her car, fangs dripping venom. Naturally she’d swerved—right in front of a pickup.
Luckily for that driver, it was a quiet, mostly residential street and the pickup’s driver had kick-ass reflexes. The Honda’s driver had been taken to the ER, but the EMTs didn’t think she was hurt badly. The pickup’s driver insisted he didn’t have so much as a bruise.
And guess what? He hadn’t seen a snake, giant or otherwise. Nor had Lily found any traces of magic on the street where the snake was supposed to have been.
Nothing here, either. She began checking out the dash.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have anything else to do. She was finishing up a magical fraud case she’d worked with the local FBI office, and had just returned from the tiny town of Eagle’s Nest. That case hadn’t taken long, thank God. She’d handed off the supposed lupus attack to the locals. The victim, it turned out, had been drunk, and the assailant was a bear that had wandered into town to check out the trash cans.
The dash was devoid of magic, so she started on the oddments the woman had collected in her car—an empty soda can, a newspaper, a wad of crumpled receipts.
No doubt a social scientist would have a blast analyzing the current vogue in crazy calls, and who knows? Maybe they really were the result of a collision in the collective psyche between reason and magic. The Turning had spooked people, no doubt about that. But Lily preferred more concrete answers—like a new, undetectable drug. Or a new, undetectable spell.
If the latter, it was her job to detect it, dammit. And she wasn’t.
She scooted out and crouched so she could run her hands over the driver’s seat, and underneath it. She didn’t expect to find anything, having checked out the driver before the EMTs took her away. If the woman had been hexed or enspelled, Lily should have felt it on her. She hadn’t.
Nothing on the seat, either. She straightened, careful not to touch her dress with her dirty hands.
Rule handed her the bag of wipes from her purse. She took it and gave him a smile. “I knew there was a good reason to keep you around.”
“Don’t forget the pickle jars.”
That turned her insides mushy. He’d proposed over pickles. Also blini, cheese, and a really lovely Dom Pérignon, but it was the pickles that got to her. She gave him a smile, but no words—couldn’t say what she wanted with Munoz standing by—and finished wiping her hands. “Officer, there’s nothing more I can do here. It’s your case. Thanks for your cooperation.”
Her skin prickled faintly, as if she’d picked up enough of a static charge to make the little hairs on her arms stand up. Automatically she looked up.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” The prickle had been from what Cullen called sorcéri—wispy threads of raw magic that drifted around until absorbed. They were cast by the ocean, nodes, and thunder-storms, and th
ey were attracted to dragons. She’d checked to see if Sam was overhead—he often trailed sorcéri—but the sky was as blankly blue as a crashed computer.
But Sam often preferred to go unseen. Cullen insisted the dragon habit of winking out wasn’t true invisibility; he said they just went out-of-phase the way demons could. Whatever that meant. “You’ll send me a copy of your report, right?” She glanced at her watch. “Shit. Rule, we need to go.”
The shower didn’t start till seven, but it was being held at Clanhome, which lay twenty minutes outside the city. And she had a lot to do beforehand, because the shower was only part of the festivities.
Rule had been at Clanhome all day getting ready for the other half of the party. He’d come back into the city to pick her up, which was necessary because both her personal car and her government-issue vehicle were in the shop, dammit. Her six-year-old Toyota needed transmission work. The government’s Ford was still in Eagle’s Nest, which had a small body shop.
Turned out that bears do not like the way lupi smell. A four hundred-pound black bear can do an amazing amount of damage when he uses the roof of a car for a trampoline.
Lily was already checking messages on her iPhone as she slid into Rule’s Mercedes. It hadn’t seemed like a bad idea, combining the shower with a traditional lupus baby party.
Ignorance, she reflected, was bliss. Reality was a pain in the butt.
No urgent messages, so she tapped in some quick notes on the accident as they pulled away from the scene. She was getting pretty good at thumbing it. Not as fast as a preteen, but good enough to get the basics entered. “How are the ribs doing?” she asked Rule without looking up. “It didn’t hurt them for us to be delayed, did it?”
“They’re still in the pit. Isen is going to start the chicken for me, with a little help from Toby. He’s looking forward to tonight.”
“Good.” She looked up. “Good about Toby, I mean, and about your father taking a hand in the cooking. Having the Rho in on the barbeque has to up the status thing, right?”
