Mortal Ties

by Eileen Wilks

  “That’s why you came here.” Drummond sounded pleased, like he’d turned a puzzle piece around and finally saw where it fit. “Not to poke around in your own psyche, but to try and dig into hers. Helen Whitehead’s. Whitehead belonged to that Old One you told me about.”

  “She did. And she seems to have been a sociopath, too.”

  Drummond’s eyebrows lifted. “Yeah?”

  “As was, possibly, one Patrick Harlowe…the other agent of hers that I know about.”

  “That doesn’t say good things about the Old Bitch.”

  “It doesn’t, does it? If—” A muffled gong sounded in her purse—the ringtone for calls forwarded from her official number. She dug out her phone. “Agent Yu here.”

  It was T.J., aka Detective Thomas James, the man who’d trained Lily when she was a shiny new homicide cop. As he talked, Lily gave her watch one wistful glance. She owed T.J. a lot more than one delayed supper, though, so she spoke briskly enough when he paused. “Sure. I’ll be there in fifteen.” She put her phone away and glanced over her shoulder at Scott ten feet behind her. “Did you hear?”

  “Only your side, and that your caller was male.”

  Had Scott been a bit closer he’d heave heard T.J. just fine, but there were limits even to lupi hearing. She was gradually learning what those limits were. “An old buddy of mine from Homicide has a suspicious death. He wants me to see if magic was involved, but off the books. Unofficial.” Lily was a touch sensitive, able to feel magic tactilely, often able to identify what type it was—and unable to work it or be affected by it. If there was any magic on the body or the scene, she’d know. “I’ll be heading to 1221 Hammer, apartment 717.”

  She texted Rule on her way out of the cemetery, letting him know she’d be late. Mike passed her before she reached the gate, moving at the lupi version of an easy lope—about as fast as she could sprint, in other words. And, to her annoyance, a filmy white shape drifted right along with her. When she reached her car, it solidified. Sort of.

  “Sounds like we’ve got a case,” Drummond said.

  “One of us might.” She unlocked the car and climbed in.

  “Dammit, I can help.”

  “Or you can trip me and laugh when I fall down.”

  His features grew even more sour than usual. “I’ll be around when you change your mind. Uh…I can’t manifest at Clanhome unless you call me.”

  Manifest. That was a word she never would have heard from Drummond when he was alive. “You can’t do it there?”

  “No. It’s like…” His fingers opened and closed as if he were scratching at the air. “That’s closed to me, is all. Unless you call. Wherever you are, if you call me, I can manifest.”

  “Huh.” Nokolai Clanhome was where she and Rule were living these days. As were a lot of others.

  Rule’s people had always lived under threat, but they’d felt that their children were safe. Even during times of fierce persecution, lupi children had lived unmolested among humans who might have tossed them onto the fires along with the witches, had they known what they were. And the clans might fight among themselves, but kids were exempt. In all the years that Leidolf and Nokolai had been enemies, neither clan had worried that the other would strike at their children. Even mean, mad old Victor Frey, the Leidolf Rho who’d tricked Rule into assuming the mantle, then died before he could take it back, had left Toby alone.

  Though the latter, Lily suspected, might be because Victor had known his history. Four hundred years ago, Leidolf and Nokolai had acted in rare and complete accord, along with Wythe. They’d acted with the explicit backing of every other clan…every clan but one. Bánach clan had been feuding with Cynyr. Bánach clan took the eight-year-old son of Cynyr’s Rho hostage—took him unharmed, but refused to release the boy until Cynyr submitted.

  Bánach clan no longer existed.

  Victor Frey had been vicious and maybe crazy toward the end of his life, but he had been Rho. No hatred, however fostered and festered, was as important as the survival of his clan. Toby had lived in North Carolina the first eight years of his life, deep in Leidolf’s territory. Victor had left Toby alone.

  Robert Friar wouldn’t hesitate to take children. He wouldn’t hesitate to kill them. There had been kids at those Humans First rallies. That none had been killed was a matter of luck—luck and the furious defense of the lupi the Humans Firsters wanted gelded, imprisoned, or dead.

  And so, in addition to bringing in extra fighters, Nokolai had gathered as many of its children as it could into Clanhome—children, and sometimes their mothers, and as many of their female clan as would come, too. Isen had also opened Clanhome to the children of their two subordinate clans in North America—Laban and Vochi, both of whom lacked the resources to house and defend all of their children at their own Clanhomes, though for opposite reasons.

  “Is that why you haven’t pestered me this past month?” Lily asked. “Because I’ve been living at Clanhome, and you can’t manifest there?”

  “No.” He shrugged stiffly. “There’s stuff I don’t understand about this being dead business, but that’s not why I was gone. I can manifest some places easier than others, but I can do it pretty much anywhere if you call me.”

  She needed to go. Still she paused, looking at the ghost of a man who’d been her enemy and was now determined to be her partner. Or whatever. “Tell me something.”

  He looked wary. “If I can.”

  “You killed that woman, or arranged her death somehow. The one with the Fire Gift. The one who killed your wife.”

  His face didn’t change, but for a long moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally he spoke, his voice entirely level. “I did.”

  “Did you enjoy it?”

  The pause was even longer this time, and his voice was different. Husky. “Oh, yeah. I fucking loved it.”

  THREE

  BEING dead sucked.

  He hated it when she went in a car. You’d think the plane trip back here from D.C. would’ve been worse, but somehow a plane—at least a big one like the 757 she’d flown in—established its own space, a locus he could hang onto. He’d been able to hold together okay in the plane.

  But cars were a bitch. Al Drummond sailed along behind the white Ford like he’d been tied to the bumper. He didn’t have to work at it. That wasn’t the problem. All he had to do was relax, and she pulled him with her.

  He didn’t feel the wind, the pressure of air zooming past, shoving at his hair and face and skin, making his eyes stream. That would’ve been fine. That would’ve been great, but he never felt the air anymore. It was the sheer speed that tattered him, made him into something that didn’t feel, didn’t have eyes to stream, didn’t have ears to hear or any goddamn way to experience the world. Most of the time he felt like he had a body, even if it wasn’t the same kind he’d had before he died. But not when Yu went zooming around in a damn car.

  You were gone for over a month…

  He’d lied to her. That didn’t bother him. He was a good liar. It wasn’t enough to just smooth your face out to official blankness. Any moron could learn to do that, but a good cop learned to lie, too. But it had been luck, not skill, that made this particular lie work. He’d been shook up enough for it to show, so she’d put his hesitation down to that.

  And if she hadn’t, so what? He wasn’t going to tell her where he’d been.

  Yu was right, damn her. He’d thrown in on the wrong side.

  Twenty-seven years of law enforcement. Twenty-seven years of stakeouts, bad food, and the slow, painstaking build of cases some asshole of a defense lawyer couldn’t shred. Plenty of failures along the way, but some triumphs, too. He’d been a good cop.

  And he’d thrown it away. Wiped it out. It didn’t take a genius to spot the when and why. The job had reached out in the person of Martha Billings and killed Sarah. He’d reached back to return the favor. Most people would say that’s where he stepped wrong, where he made the decision that destroyed him.
He didn’t agree. It hadn’t felt like a choice, like being faced with a decision he could choose or reject. Martha Billings had killed Sarah. Martha Billings would die.

  She had, too. Burned to a crisp. Just like Sarah.

  And Yu wanted to know if he’d enjoyed it. That memory was one bright, hot spot of pleasure in the endless gray his life had become the moment he learned Sarah was gone.

  No, killing Billings wasn’t where he’d taken a horribly wrong turn. Maybe that had been wrong, but only in the unstoppable way that cancer is wrong. Staying on the job after he killed her, though, hiding what he’d done—that’s what twisted him. He should’ve done what he had to do and turned himself in. At the time, he’d thought that getting himself thrown in prison would’ve handed Billings a postmortem victory. At the time, he’d felt that stopping Billings wasn’t enough. He had to stop everyone like her, too.

  At the time, he’d been bumfuck crazy. Which was why he hadn’t noticed the other reason he stayed on the job. So he could piss on it.

  The job had killed Sarah, and he’d wanted revenge on it, too. Only he hadn’t known that’s what he was doing, not until a month or so after he died, when he’d done what he’d told Yu was impossible. He left.

  Getting himself fully, properly dead turned out to be harder than he’d thought.

  Not that he’d seen extinction as the only possibility, but he’d been pretty sure that’s what would happen. His world—the only world left to him—was about two hundred yards in diameter. Get three hundred feet away from Yu in any direction and everything turned fuzzy. Keep going and it got…not dark. Darkness was a lack of light, and out there in the gray it was like vision itself didn’t exist. Out there was nothing.

  Nothing had sounded like a damn good place to end up. He’d expected to become nothing, too, when he left Yu, though he’d conceded it was possible he’d get that white light people yammered about, the one that hadn’t shown up when Big Thumbs pulled the trigger. Or maybe…

  He hadn’t really let himself think about that “maybe.” He didn’t deserve it. But it was like a rope—there were two ends to it, and if the end he held was grimy and black with guilt, the other end was as shiny and right as any of the angels he didn’t believe in.

  Mostly, though, he’d expected to die for good. Drummond hadn’t believed in God for years, much less an afterlife…though Sarah used to tell him he wasn’t a true unbeliever, just too mad at the deity to give Him the time of day. She’d been at least somewhat right. He figured that any God who let the sort of shit happen that he’d seen over and over wasn’t worth much. Sure, you could blame it on free will and people being assholes, but if so, God had done a pisspoor job of creating when it came to man, hadn’t He?

  So he’d left, walking off into the gray. Pushed ahead even when he didn’t have any sense of a body, when there was nothing left of darkness or light, no whisper of sensation, barely the memory of it. Slogged on until he couldn’t tell if he was moving anymore, until even the blasted whatever-it-was that tied him to Yu grew so faint he couldn’t find it.

  Maybe he’d stopped then. Maybe he’d kept going. He had no way of knowing. But still moving or just plain still, he’d waited. And waited.

  At some point—it had seemed like hours, but might have been weeks or minutes, given how little time meant in the gray—he’d known he’d been wrong about that “maybe.” Wrong that it might be even a little bit possible. Wrong, too, about how desperately he’d wanted it to happen anyway.

  If Sarah had had any way of coming to him, she would have come then.

  He’d broken down then, broken apart. Sobbed like a baby, and if he hadn’t had eyes and a body to sob with, that made it worse. There was no Sarah. There would never be a Sarah for him again.

  There was no anything…but him.

  People think they know what alone means. Shit, he’d thought he did, thought he was more loner than not. He hadn’t had the least damn clue. Broken, bereft of bones, breath, sight, hearing, touch, he’d known that the gray was hell, and he’d waited for hell to eat him.

  It hadn’t.

  Not that he knew what had happened. Maybe, like he told Yu, he’d slept. At some point he’d drifted back to himself, wisping around like a bit of fluff so insubstantial that gravity was a lesser force than the eddies of air he floated on. He’d come back soft and slow and gentle, and found himself lying on a bed in one of the guest rooms in Yu’s D.C. house. He’d come back knowing two things.

  While he was away or asleep or whatever, someone had talked to him. Not Sarah, and he didn’t think it was God, but someone. And he had to help Lily Yu.

  However little either of them liked it.

  What I want to hear, she’d said, is that you’ve changed your mind about magic and the people who use it.

  People like her. People like her boss, who he’d tried to kill, and her fellow agents in Unit Twelve, and that damn werewolf she intended to marry. People like most of her friends and at least one of her family, according to the reports he’d read when he checked her out.

  People like Dennis Parrott. Not that he’d known about Parrott’s charisma Gift back when he was busy pissing on everything he’d spent a lifetime fighting for. Dennis Parrott had found him easy prey, twisting him around until it made perfect sense to kill Ruben Brooks because he was in charge of the magic-users in the FBI. Perfect sense to conspire to kill a U.S. senator—not that he’d known exactly how Parrott planned to do it, but that was no excuse—and frame Brooks for the murder. Perfect sense to do whatever it took to rid this country of magic.

  Whatever it took…until he learned that his associates thought that meant killing twenty-two people to make death magic. Parrott and Chittenden had kept him in the dark about the death magic. They shouldn’t have been able to do that, but he hadn’t been at his best, had he? When he did find out, it had been almost too damn late. When he found out…

  Al Drummond didn’t deny one ounce of the blame that was his. He’d earned the hell that hadn’t eaten him. But magic made the playing field too damn uneven.

  And Lily Yu wanted to know if he still hated magic?

  God, yes. Just like he hated the gun laws in this country that made it too fucking easy for bastards to blow each other away along with whoever else might be standing nearby. Didn’t mean he hated guns—just the ones used by goddamn idiot losers who had no business being handed power like that.

  That’s what he hated about magic. That it could be wielded by losers at least as easily as by the good guys. That it could—like all power—turn a good guy into a loser.

  He should have told Yu that. She didn’t trust him, which proved she wasn’t an idiot. But he needed her trust. He needed her, period. Needed her more than he’d needed his mother’s tit as a baby.

  Just went to prove…if there was a God, He had one sick sense of humor.

  FOUR

  “I’M fine, Mother. Really.” Beth Yu dropped to the floor, lifted the bed skirt, and peered into the crowded darkness under her bed. Nope. Not there. Which meant it had to be Deirdre…again. “The apartment may be small, but you saw it. It’s in a perfectly decent part of San Francisco, and…he did? Well, you can tell Uncle Feng to butt out of—”

  That, of course, was a mistake. While she listened to “Respect Your Elders” speech number twenty-seven she pushed to her feet and headed to the door of her closet, aka bedroom. Through superhuman organizational ability she’d managed to make room for her desk, but that’s about all it held. That and a small file cabinet and the twin-size bed she’d swapped out her old bed for so she could wedge the desk in. When you were freelancing from home, you had to have a desk.

  The door to closet number two—Deirdre’s room—was three steps down the hall. She opened it and frowned at the debris covering every surface. Was it only two years ago that she’d lived like this, too? Back then, it had seemed deliciously hedonistic. Liberated. Now it just looked stupid. You couldn’t find anything in a space this messy. Like shoes. Her
shoes, which Deirdre liked so much she kept borrowing them, maybe because she couldn’t find any of her own.

  Beth stepped into the one spot of carpet that showed between piles of cast-off clothing and started digging.

  When her mother paused for breath, she said, “I’m sure my uncle meant well, but I hate that he got you all worried. There’s nothing wrong with this neighborhood. People can get shot anywhere. No one was killed, and it isn’t like it was a gang shooting or something—”

  Another mistake. Usually she handled her mother better than this. She started tossing clothes around as her mother explained how very stupid it was to assume it wasn’t gangs when the police didn’t know who’d done it, and if the victim wasn’t dead yet, he probably would be soon, and if he didn’t die, he’d probably be paralyzed. How was that any better? Not that she wouldn’t far prefer to have a paralyzed daughter to a dead one, but this wasn’t about her feelings, it was about Beth’s safety.

  Beth sighed and pulled out the big guns. “I really think this neighborhood is safe, but you’re right, I have to be careful. I’ll ask Lily to check those crime statistics for the area again. Maybe they’ve changed. I know she said they looked pretty good when I moved here, but…”

  It worked. It worked so well Beth ground her teeth. Citing her sister calmed her mother as nothing else could these days. It was as irrational as it was infuriating. “You want to call her yourself? Oh, of course. I know…” Where were those damn shoes?

  “And just what do you think you’re doing in my room?”

  She must have been listening to her mother more than she’d thought. She hadn’t heard the front door. Beth looked up at the skinny girl lounging in the doorway. Deirdre had short, shiny blond hair, a nose stud, five piercings in one ear and three in the other. She didn’t trust even numbers. “Looking for my—hey!”

  Beneath the ragged hem of Deirdre’s jeans were the sky-high hot pink wedges Beth had bought when she got her first check as a freelance website designer. She waved at her roommate’s feet. “Take ’em off. No, Mother, I didn’t mean you. Deirdre borrowed my shoes and I want to wear them, so…listen, can I call you back? It might be late, but—okay, tomorrow, then. Love you.”