Mortal Ties

by Eileen Wilks

  One of the perks of living at Clanhome was all the options for where to run. One of the downsides was that the long commute into the city meant Lily was mostly stuck with using the road. The sun arrived late to land cradled by mountains, and Lily usually had to run early.

  Not alone, however. Just over a month ago Cynna had asked if Lily would mind company a couple of times a week on her runs. Lily had said sure, though she hadn’t expected Cynna to keep it up. For one thing, Cynna was a new mother. For another, she hated running. Or so she’d always claimed.

  But so far Cynna had stuck with it. The little house she shared with Cullen and their new daughter lay about half a mile west of Isen’s place, so Lily had that first half mile on her own to warm up, and the last half mile to push herself. She and Cynna ran together for two miles, total, which was Cynna’s target. Not that Cynna been able to run the whole way right off the bat. At first she’d made it to the turnaround point huffing and puffing and waving for Lily to keep going while she walked back, but she ran both ways now. Good progress for such a short time. Of course, Cynna was a tad competitive. She hadn’t liked it when Lily kept going and she couldn’t…which was one reason she’d wanted to join Lily. Motivation.

  Sometimes Rule or Cullen joined them. And sometimes Rule started out with Lily, but didn’t get beyond that first half mile. The chance to stop and see Ryder for a few minutes, even if she was sound asleep, was too good to pass up. Cullen had no trouble finding someone to stay with Ryder if he wanted to run, not when they were surrounded by baby-crazy lupi. Lupi loved kids—all kids—but babies just lit them up. Give one of them a chance to spend time with a three-month-old bundle of drool, stinky diapers, and adorable little gurgles, and he’d rearrange his whole week if that’s what it took.

  Baby-craving was so universal that custom forbade anyone actually offering to babysit. This was to keep new parents from being pestered to death. Cynna said that every new mother ought to get to spend the first few months at a clanhome. The only tricky part was making sure she didn’t leave anyone out. She kept a list.

  Rule and Lily were exempt from the counting and listing. Everyone assumed that close friends got extra baby time, so they didn’t take offense. Isen was exempt, too. Who could be upset when the Rho spent time with his newest clan member? So Lily had seen a fair amount of little Ryder lately. She’d gotten pretty good at diapers. Burping was still not her strong point, but she could clean a teeny tiny baby butt with the best of them.

  Ryder did have some adorable little gurgles.

  This morning, though, she was alone as she neared the path that led to Cynna and Cullen’s place. The lights were off in the stucco cottage, which could mean everyone was asleep, but she doubted it. Probably Cullen was awake, even if Ryder wasn’t. Possibly he hadn’t gone to bed at all. Rule hadn’t.

  Cynna was up. Lily hadn’t been sure she would be, not with everything that had happened last night, but she was waiting where she usually did at the edge of the road, her pale blond hair almost glowing in the dim light. Lily was surprised by the lift of relief she felt.

  “Hey,” Cynna said as she fell into step alongside Lily.

  “Hey, yourself. I wasn’t sure you’d be here this morning.”

  “Of course I’m here. Who knows when I’ll get another chance to pump you?”

  “Um.” Good Lord. Was that why she was relieved—because she knew Cynna would pump her? Did she actually want to talk about stuff? She never talked about stuff. Well, sometimes with Rule, who was a sneaky bastard and could wriggle her around into saying things.

  “I guess you’re going to San Fran, huh?”

  “Rule’s going, so I am.” The mate bond limited how far apart they could be. It was not consistent about this, but San Francisco was five hundred miles away, well beyond what they could expect to be okay. “Ruben thinks I should go.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s got a hunch.” Lily had called her boss last night. Ruben Brooks had a precognitive Gift that was off-the-charts accurate. When he had a hunch, everyone—up to and including the president—paid attention.

  “That’s handy, since you have to go anyway. How’s Rule dealing with his surprise sibling?”

  And that answered her question. Her stuff this morning was all about Rule, and Rule wasn’t talking. “He’s not. At least that’s what it looks like. You know how I don’t talk about stuff? He’s doing that times ten. Times ten on the logarithmic scale.”

  “Is that a math word? Don’t talk math. He’s all shut down?”

  “Not exactly.” Rule closed down when he didn’t want to talk about something. Usually Lily understood and respected that…well, she tried, anyway. But this was different. “He didn’t ask any questions. Did Cullen tell you that? This Jasper Machek calls and says he wants us to come to San Francisco and help him out, and Rule didn’t ask one question.”

  “Not everyone deals with a shock by asking questions.”

  “I know, but he still isn’t asking questions. He’s avoiding them. Did you know that Isen knew about this Jasper guy? Not a lot, maybe.” Lily had run a check on Machek. It turned up plenty that Isen hadn’t mentioned. “But he knew Rule’s mother had had another child a few years after she handed Rule over. He knew Rule had a brother, and he never told him. And Rule’s cool with that. So cool he left the room when I started asking Isen questions about Jasper.”

  “Just walked out?”

  “Not in a rude way. Suddenly he had things to do.”

  “Huh.” Cynna fell silent.

  Rule had said he needed to arrange their trip, including the security. A nice, valid activity, only there was no reason for him to go outside to do it. Lily had just started on her questions when Isen’s phone rang again.

  That time it was the Laban Rho. Isen had told Leo that he was busy at the moment. No, he didn’t want Leo to call back. He was to wait on hold until Isen was ready to speak with him.

  “I can leave,” Lily had said.

  “No, I want him to wait. First he’ll be patient. That won’t last long. Leo has never mastered patience. Then he’ll be increasingly angry. That will last longer, but eventually he’ll move from anger into dread. That’s when I’ll talk to him.”

  Isen had kept the other Rho waiting on hold a full thirty minutes while he talked to Lily about Jasper…and Jasper’s mother. When Isen deemed Leo sufficiently steeped in dread, he’d dismissed Lily. “If you can find Rule, tell him I want him. If you can’t, have someone track him down. He may be running.”

  She hadn’t found Rule. She hadn’t found out what Leo’s fate was, either. When she came back inside, Isen had retreated to his study, and when he closed that door no one was supposed to disturb him for anything short of an emergency. Badly as she wanted to know things, she couldn’t call it an emergency. She’d gone to bed.

  Cynna broke the silence. “Lupi have a word for them, you know. For their half siblings on the mothers’ side.”

  Lily snorted. “Human?”

  Cynna flashed her a grin. “Yeah, but this word is just for that relationship. For out-clan siblings. They call them alius kin.”

  “I’ve seen that word somewhere. Maybe in one of those journals the Rhej—I mean Hannah—had me read.” Before Hannah died, Lily wasn’t supposed to use her name. Now she was, because “the Rhej” meant Cynna. Thank God Cynna had told her to ignore all that no-naming-the-Rhej business. Bad enough, she’d said, that the lupi mostly wouldn’t use her name anymore. She didn’t want to stop hearing it entirely. “I thought it just meant kin.”

  “I don’t know what alius kin would mean to someone who knows real Latin, but lupi translate it as otherkin.”

  Kin who are other. Not us, not clan. “Like they aren’t real siblings.”

  “It makes sense, if you look at the history. It used to be rare for lupi to be raised by their mothers. If the mother was married, it wasn’t to the baby’s father, and if she wasn’t, out-of-wedlock babies were a BFD for centuries. So it was norma
l for lupi to grow up not knowing their mothers’ families at all, and only natural they didn’t feel a close bond. Kin, not clan, you know? Chances were good their human half siblings didn’t even want to know about them, much less call them ‘brother,’ so it went both ways.” She shrugged. “A lot of lupi are raised by their moms now, at least part of the time, but the attitude has held on.”

  Lily thought that over. Rule had never wanted to know if he had any alius kin, had he? He’d never asked. And yet they were going to San Francisco. Jasper called, and she and Rule were headed for San Francisco. She didn’t think it was just about the prototype. “That’s part of it, maybe.”

  “But not all?”

  Lily was pretty sure some of it—maybe most of it—had to do with the mother this Jasper Machek shared with Rule. The one who’d handed a two-week-old baby to Isen and walked away, uninterested in whether her son lived or died. Learning about Jasper meant learning something about that woman, didn’t it? “Her name was Celeste Babineaux. Rule’s mother, I mean. She was twenty-nine when she had Rule.”

  “Did Rule tell you that? Or Isen?”

  “Until last night, I didn’t even know her last name.”

  “Rule did, though, didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. He’d been told her name, but I don’t know if he remembers.” It seemed like he’d have to, but he always flew the “off-limits” banner on the rare occasions the subject of his mother came up, and she’d never pushed.

  Last night she’d pushed…but it was Isen she’d talked to, not Rule.

  Celeste Babineaux had been a French expatriate living in California, and—in Isen’s words—the most staggeringly beautiful woman he’d ever met, then or since. She had also been bipolar. At least that’s the diagnosis she’d eventually received, after being in and out of sanatoriums and treatment centers and such for much of her life.

  Isen had paid for those stays, some of them extended. Even after Celeste married a man named Michael Machek, Isen had paid for her treatment. His eyebrows had lifted when Lily expressed surprise at that. “She was my son’s mother. Of course I helped her when she needed it. Bipolar is such a recent way of understanding one type of mental illness,” Isen had added. “It wasn’t the doctors’ fault they couldn’t do more for her back then.”

  “Don’t you think Rule needed to know that his mother had a mental illness?”

  Isen had shrugged. “He didn’t want to know about her. There was no medical concern—he couldn’t inherit her condition—so I didn’t force the knowledge on him.”

  “It could have made a difference in how he thought about her. It could have had a lot to do with why she abandoned him.”

  “You oversimplify. Do you think Rule felt abandoned? Do you see that kind of early trauma in him today?”

  Maybe not. But he hadn’t just missed out on knowing about his birth mother. He’d missed out knowing about his brother. “Does he have other half siblings you haven’t mentioned?”

  “No.” Isen had smiled with sly amusement. “Although Benedict has two that he may not have mentioned to you. He sees them when he visits his mother’s tribe.”

  No, he’d never mentioned them. Not that Benedict was exactly chatty, so that wasn’t surprising. But Rule had never mentioned them, either.

  Otherkin. Kin, but not clan. Lily frowned at a landscape she didn’t see, her legs moving automatically. When Cynna spoke, it startled her.

  “After Cullen told me about Jasper, I asked him if he had any stray brothers or sisters I didn’t know about. He said no. You knew that his mom was Wiccan, right?”

  Lily nodded. “She taught him spellcraft, didn’t she?”

  “And kept him from burning things down until he was old enough to get a handle on his Gift. You maybe don’t know that she was forty when she had him. She used a strong-ass fertility charm to help her get pregnant while she was involved with his dad. Those aren’t supposed to work, but either hers did or she got lucky. She wanted a lupus baby.”

  So different from Rule’s experience…“Rule told me once that his name was Anglicized—that the original version was Reule. A French name. Nokolai was French before the clan immigrated, so I assumed that’s where the name came from. It didn’t. That’s what his mother named him.”

  “You learned that last night?”

  “Isen and I talked quite awhile. Isen called him Rule because it was easier for people to pronounce, so that’s what he grew up with. But his mother named him Reule. It means famous wolf.”

  “Wow. It seems like she put some thought into his name. It also seems like there’s a lot you haven’t told me, if you and Isen talked so long.”

  Lily’s breath huffed out impatiently. “I’m not sure how much to say. Rule doesn’t talk about his mother, but I think it’s okay if I do. But somewhere there’s a line between what’s okay to say and what isn’t, and I’m not sure where that line is.”

  “I hate to say this,” Cynna said, “I really do. I’d rather nag you into telling me everything, but…” Her breath was coming fast and hard now, so that she had to start dumping her words out in bursts. “My own rule is that…if I think it would make Cullen mad…for me to repeat something…that’s okay. I can talk about stuff that…makes him mad if I want to. But if it would hurt him or…make him feel exposed…I don’t say…anything.” She slid Lily a look. “But hey. You can…talk about how you feel without…violating any…confidentiality deal.”

  “Confused.” And shut out, which she didn’t like, but she understood. Rule needed time to come to terms with what this newfound brother meant to him. Only she wasn’t sure he knew that. “We’re nearly to the turnaround point.”

  “Thank God.”

  They’d marked the one-mile point with a small stack of rocks. When they reached it, Cynna said she wanted to pause and stretch out a bit. Mostly she wanted to get her wind back, Lily thought, but that was okay. There was a long, flat rock she could use to stretch her hamstrings. She balanced on its edge and dropped her toes slowly.

  The clouds stacked across the morning sky had lost their earlier blood-and-fire glory by then, fading to soft pink in the east with myriad grays and steel blues overhead. Rain by noon, she thought. She wouldn’t be here to see it.

  “I wish I was going with you,” Cynna said.

  “I guess you could, if you decided to. Neither Rule or Ruben can tell you no.”

  “The upside of being a Rhej is that no one can tell me no. The downside is that this forces me to be a grown-up and tell myself no sometimes.” Cynna hugged one leg close to her chest. “Ow. That hurts so good. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what the grown-up thing is, though. This is probably the safest it’s going to get for a while. Friar’s organization is a mess.”

  “We think so, anyway.”

  “And Jasper-the-thief wanted me there.”

  “Which could be a strong argument for staying here.”

  “That’s what Cullen said. Along with a lot of other shit.” Cynna lowered that leg and hugged the other one. “Why is my left butt cheek always stiffer than my right? Anyway, I couldn’t make up my mind, so I tossed a coin.”

  “I guess San Francisco lost.”

  “Yeah.” Cynna switched legs.

  “Well, if you’re here you can connect with the CSI squad. Now that the internal clan stuff’s been cleared up, Isen agreed that I could call them in. They’ll be here about ten.”

  “I can do that.” Cynna lowered her leg slowly. “I’m going to have to resign from the Bureau, you know.”

  Lily stopped moving. “Shit.”

  “I don’t have to do it right this minute. I’ve got another two months of unpaid leave. But I’m not going to be able to go back to active duty. I won’t be able to go where I’m needed. If I was still an apprentice I could, but now…” She shrugged.

  Lily couldn’t think of what to say. She’d nearly lost her position with the Bureau in October, and that had all but wrecked her. “Have you talked to Ruben yet?”

>   “He said he’d find a place for me if I wanted, maybe in Research. But research isn’t my thing. Or I can be a consultant. I’ll probably go with that. I don’t want to stay in the Bureau just so I can be on the payroll. I don’t need to, either. Nokolai would pay me a salary if I wanted, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Usually a Rhej gets housing and utilities from her clan, but being a Rhej isn’t a full-time job, so most of them work at regular jobs, too. Hannah did when she was younger, and I expected to. But with this war, that’s going to change. We’ve been talking about it.”

  “ ‘We’ being the Rhejes?”

  Cynna nodded. “They’re an incredible bunch of women. I thought it might be hard for them to accept me. They loved Hannah. She was the eldest, and they all…but they’ve been great. Anyway, there are two of us who don’t have apprentices—me and the Etorri Rhej—and she and I have talked several times. We agreed that we can’t risk the memories. She’s quitting her job, and I won’t be going back to the Bureau.”

  Lily was silent a moment. “Are you okay with this?”

  “You know, I am. I don’t like being denned up at Clanhome, and I’ll miss being an agent. But I’m not a cop all the way down the way you are. I’m not giving up something that’s fundamental to me. And then there’s Ryder. I knew things would change once she was born, but I didn’t know how much of the change would be in me. In what I want.” She shook her head as if she’d run out of words. “Anyway, the reason I told you today instead of some other time is that I wanted you to know where I’m coming from. I want you to promise me something.”

  “If I can.”

  Cynna’s grin flashed. “Smart answer. I don’t think this one will stretch you out of shape. If you decide you need me in San Francisco, call me. Cullen won’t. I’m pretty sure Rule won’t, either. Not that I can promise I’ll come if you do, but I want to know. I want it to be my choice, not the default setting everyone picks for me.”