by Eileen Wilks
Now Rule was the one blinking. “Mel?”
She grimaced. “I can’t say his whole name. The little elder who saved me.”
“I thought he was . . . Never mind.” Rule heaved to his feet, but stayed bent over so he wouldn’t provide a target. He gave Lily a tug to get her on her feet. The cavity was deep enough that she could stand straight.
Carl poked his nose over the edge. He yipped happily when he saw Lily.
Behind him, an explosion made the ground shake again, followed quickly by a second blast.
Rule looked at his friend. “The ones in the house didn’t surrender.”
Carl shook his head.
Rule had a quick flash of the kind of devastation the grenades must have wreaked. He shut it away. No time for that now. “Okay. Go back to Remy. He’s in charge of your group. I’m heading around front.”
“What’s happening?” Lily asked.
“My father, your grandmother, Cullen, and six clan are fighting the sorcerer and the Chimei.” He gave the steep side of the cavity an appraising look, found a likely handhold, and started up. Dirt crumbled and he shifted, got close enough to get an arm over the edge, and heaved. “Five of us tackled the gang members in and near the house,” he continued, reaching down to pull Lily up. “They’re either dead now or very close to it.”
She helped as much as she could, scrambling with her feet. Once again they ended up tangled together in the dirt. “All of them?” She was slightly winded. “How many is all of them?”
“Thirty-six.”
She looked at him for a moment, then gave a quick shake of her head. Like him, she’d deal with that later. “What’s the plan?”
“As soon as Remy makes sure there aren’t any left to pursue, he and Carl will take you to the cars. They’re a couple miles away—we couldn’t risk being spotted. The gnomes know the spot. They’ll take Cynna there.”
“Did you take a blow to the head? I’m not going to the damned cars.”
“You’re unarmed. You’re a potential hostage. The Chimei—”
“You’re not just unarmed, you’re unclothed. And the Chimei is a lot more likely to kill you than me.”
“Lily, the whole point of tonight’s mission is to get you and Cynna safely away. No one can leave until you do.”
“And you think Johnny—”
“Johnny?”
“The sorcerer. He goes by Johnny Deng. You think he and the Chimei are going to say, ‘Okay, you can all go home now,’ once I’m not around?”
He scowled, furious. And unsurprised. “Come on,” he said roughly.
* * *
BUT Rule didn’t lead her to the front of the ramshackle house. He took her first to the place he’d left his weapons. As they ran, he briefed her in a low voice about who was here and why.
Charms made by the Rhej using an ancient spell. The Lady speaking. Nokolai at war. “How can you win such a war?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“We’ve made plans,” he said vaguely as he handed her a nice little semiautomatic Glock. It wasn’t her SIG, but it would do. “There’s a chance the Chimei can hear us, if she tries, so I won’t go into detail now.”
She stuck the plastic knife she’d held on to all this time in her pocket. “Sam somehow lured the bad guys away, you said. How?”
Rule stepped into his jeans. “He made it seem his lair was unguarded. He thought the Chimei wouldn’t be able to resist trying to get at Li Qin. Apparently he was right.”
Lily shivered. If the Chimei hadn’t been so eager to collect another hostage with which to torment Grandmother, she might have tried to force Lily’s “freely made offer” already. “But Li Qin—is she all right?”
“Madame Yu assured me Li Qin would be safe. If she believes it, I’m inclined to.” He shouldered an assault rifle.
“Where is Sam?”
“He RSVP’d his regrets.”
“What?”
He grabbed her hand. “Come on. We’ll come at them through the woods.”
The ground was rough and it was dark among the trees. Lily couldn’t go fast without tripping over something. She was making noise and slowing him down. “You could go ahead.”
“No.”
“Did Sam say the treaty wouldn’t let him help?”
“Something like that. Shh.”
The Chimei had claimed Sam was lying to her, using her. Lily figured that was partly true—the black dragon was manipulating all of them. But the Chimei had even less reason than Sam to speak truth to Lily. She had wanted Lily cowed and fearful, and persuading her she couldn’t trust the dragon would help that along.
Only . . . Sam should be here, dammit. The sense of betrayal was strong. Treaty or no treaty, he should have found a way to be here. If nothing else, he could soak up extra magic, leaving less for the Chimei and Johnny to grab and use.
Rule stumbled. She stopped. Alarm made it hard to keep her voice soft. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“I take it that means everything didn’t suddenly go dark for you.”
“No. Aren’t the mantles working?”
“Only one mantle, and I grew careless.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I wasn’t relying on it as I should. I hadn’t needed to until now. The Chimei was focused on the others, I suppose.”
“What do you mean, only one mantle?”
“Later.”
Lily took the lead for the next part. Rule said his vision was clearing as he got used to leaning on the mantle, as he put it, but her sight was unaffected.
The woods ended abruptly—more so than they probably had an hour ago. Where there must have been brush and grass there was now burned stubble.
Lily stopped. Rule stopped beside her, one hand on her shoulder.
Perhaps twenty yards down the road, a white van lay tilted in the ditch. Lily didn’t see anyone there. Not Isen, not the other lupi.
Closer, three people stood where a dirt road dead-ended in a baked earth yard. Two were together—Grandmother, as erect as always. Cullen, not so erect. He was on his knees, and looked like he was fighting to keep from hitting the ground with his face.
Ten paces away from those two, the Chimei paced. Or one version of her did. Kun Nu, Lily had called her. Bird woman. Now she was all bird.
She wasn’t the size of a dragon. Not even close. But as birds went, she was huge—at least the height of an ostrich, but shaped something like a crane or stork, with a raptor’s strong beak and a long, forked tail. She was white still, pristine white and glistening in the moon-drenched darkness.
LI Lei stood with her hand on Cullen’s shoulder, turning to keep Kun Nu in view as the enormous bird circled them. He had fought hard, the lovely Cullen, fought well and valiantly. No blame to him that he was not as strong as a being who had been gathering power for three centuries. “You cannot break my circle,” she said in Chinese.
The great bird’s beak melted, along with the rest of the face, so that a woman’s face looked at Li Lei from atop that bird body. A familiar face, though Li Lei had not seen it outside her nightmares in so very long. “I can,” she said in her high, pure voice, using a dialect Li Lei also heard in her dreams at times. “I will, eventually. I have time.”
She spoke truly. Given enough time, she would undoubtedly figure out how to break the circle, though it was set specifically against her. That was a warding so old Li Lei should have forgotten it. Perhaps she would have, if she hadn’t practiced it faithfully every decade for all these years.
Or perhaps not. Some things one doesn’t forget. The past flowed around Li Lei now like thick cream. It was sweet, in its way, for all that the memories that swam in the air were of her own dying. Sweet because she’d succeeded—and terrible, for she also remembered the flames and the screams.
There had been no way to spare the others, those who worked for that first sorcerer. At the time she’d told herself it did not matter, that they deserved their fate for consorting with him. She’d been very young then.
Then Sam had come, a great black shadow plummeting out of the darkness and smoke to land beside her dying body. You are not dead yet, he had said, fierce and complete as only a dragon could be. I wish you to live. Be dragon with me.
She had chosen life, life and wings and Sam, and he had sung over her, sung one of the Great Songs, one which had gone unheard since the Great War.
Dragon bodies heal much, much better than human bodies.
“I think your little sorcerer is dying,” the Chimei said, smiling.
“You have thought that before and been wrong.” Though he was spent, badly spent. When the lupi opened up with their guns on the van driven by this new sorcerer lover, they’d immediately faded back into the bushes, as they’d been told to do.
It was wise. The sorcerer had lived, as she’d expected. He’d had to draw heavily on his lover for the power to heal those wounds, but she’d shared her power generously.
He’d lived, and sent fire after the two-legged wolves who’d tried to kill him. Cullen, in turn, had banished those blazes, one after another.
“Did he use himself up like you did when he attempted to throw mage fire?” She smiled sweetly. “He lacks your strength, my enemy. I was too high for him to reach with his little black flame. He missed.”
“I didn’t.”
“No.” She stopped her endless circling now. Her eyes glowed with hatred. “You did not miss. You stole him from me.”
Li Lei knew whom the pronoun referred to. “You swim in the past, too,” she observed. “But I think for you it is an ocean, and you never find shore.”
“If I found a shore, I would turn away. I am loyal to my loves. I do not leave them. I do not forget vengeance. Break your silly circle, my enemy. Break it and honor your word now, and I will allow the little sorcerer to live.”
“Ah, you refer to my agreement to exchange myself for Lily.” Li Lei smiled. “I lied.”
The shriek sounded like the bird, not the woman. “Filthy, treacherous, evil—you lied? You dare stand there and tell me so? I will drink your granddaughter’s blood along with her power!”
“I think not.” Li Lei slid her hand in her pocket. She didn’t let herself look away from the great bird, though blast her, the Chimei had stopped in the wrong place. She couldn’t see the van. She had to settle for listening.
“Are you going to throw a spell at me?” the Chimei asked. “Do you have some little charm in your pocket like those your wolf demons used?”
“Those little charms worked. You do not know what pot you’ve stirred.”
“By all means, try your spell or charm. It will break your circle and will not hurt me at all.”
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.
