by Eileen Wilks
She texted Rule a couple times. She did not pass out. She hadn’t expected to, not once Charles joined them. She had no idea why the Lady wanted Charles to accompany her, but it seemed unlikely she’d send him along if the mate bond was going to make the separation impossible. The bond was of the Lady, so she could probably make sure it cooperated.
Which seemed to mean the Lady approved of this separation.
Could Sam have known that? She didn’t see how . . . unless he and the Lady were both acting based on those mysterious patterns. Maybe Sam had counted on the Lady seeing the same things he did and making sure the mate bond didn’t interfere. If so, would it have killed him to tell them that? Or something, anything, about her errand in Whistle? Lily was not feeling happy with the black dragon when they pulled into the tiny town at five thirty-five that afternoon.
There wasn’t much to see. Typical small rural town, she supposed. They came in on—surprise—Main Street, which was brick-lined and boasted two gas stations, a tiny post office, Chrissy’s Beauty & Supply, a hardware store, Sunny’s Market, the Tip-Top Café, two empty storefronts, an antique store, an accountant’s office, and a handful of similar establishments.
They’d driven past the park on the way in, so finding it wouldn’t be a problem. That meant they had just enough time to drop off the flat tire at one of the gas stations. They also filled the tank and emptied their bladders—at least, the two-legged among them did, taking turns in the only restroom. Charles would have to wait for a less public venue. While Carson grabbed a few snacks to tide them over until supper—with “a few” being defined in lupi terms—Lily found out that the closest hotel was thirty miles away, in the county seat.
The attendant at the station was painfully young. Biracial, she thought, which made her wonder briefly about his story. Southern Ohio was overwhelmingly white. He was shy, keeping his head ducked most of the time, but did answer Lily’s question about hotels, going so far as to offer that the Hampton Inn in Gallipolis was “supposed to be pretty nice.” She sent Rule another text, letting him know they’d arrived and suggesting that the Leidolf guards meet them at the Hampton Inn in Gallipolis.
Then they headed for the park. That took a whole four minutes.
They were the only ones there. The grass looked tired from the heat. Otherwise, it was a pretty little place with three picnic tables, a swing set, a pair of slides, and a metal trash can. A barbeque made from a metal barrel was welded to a post sunk in concrete. No one would be carrying it off, not without a cutting torch. A creek trickled along the east side of the little park, shaded by trees.
José got out first. No one shot at him and he must not have smelled anything threatening. He gave a nod, so she and Carson got out; she held the door open for Charles. He jumped down, and if he landed more heavily than lupi usually did, it didn’t seem to cause him any pain. He trotted straight for the tangled field along the park’s western boundary, probably seeking the pit stop he hadn’t been able to take at the gas station. There was a narrow path, maybe a game trail, leading into the uncut grass and weeds. Really tall grass. Charles was a big wolf, but it was over his head. She could follow his movement in the twitching of the grass.
Nothing else happened. Lily checked her watch. Five fifty-eight.
It was July. It was hot. Hotter than San Diego, which seldom got above eighty, thanks to the Pacific Ocean. It was more humid than she was used to, as well. There was a bit of a breeze blowing east to west. Locusts serenaded them from the trees.
Nothing continued to happen. “You smell anything I should know about?” she asked the lupi with her, and got two head-shakes in answer. She walked around, looking. Someone had cooked on the barbeque without cleaning out the ashes. They’d burned wood, not charcoal. The metal trash can held an assortment of trash and more ashes. She sighed, checked her watch again. Straight up six o’clock. The shade under those trees looked inviting. Might as well wait there as anywhere. If nothing kept on happening, she decided as she headed for the creek, she’d take off her shoes and walk around barefoot. Maybe she was supposed to check for magic.
Charles yipped three times. It sounded urgent.
“Carson, with me. José, go!” By the time she finished speaking, Lily had her weapon out and was sprinting toward the weedy field.
José, of course, pulled ahead immediately. Carson ran at Lily’s side. If she hadn’t told Carson to stay with her, José would have. The extra two seconds that would have taken could make a difference. Or not. Maybe Charles had just found a rabbit.
José crashed into the brush at top speed and didn’t slow much. Being on two feet, he remained visible, so Lily saw him stop maybe ten yards in, then move ahead slowly.
As she reached the path, she motioned for Carson to take the rear. It wasn’t much of a trail, more like the memory of one, overgrown in spots and narrow where it existed at all. She couldn’t take it at speed the way José had, but she did her best. When she reached Charles, she slowed. José was ten feet ahead of her on the path, not moving. His weapon was pointed at the ground. He looked at her. “He’s dead.”
A few more steps and she saw what he meant.
The grass and weeds were trampled and flattened here, making enough room for an army-green sleeping bag with a plaid lining. The man lying on his back on top of that sleeping bag wore filthy blue jeans and a T-shirt that might once have been white. He was barefoot; a pair of ragged athletic shoes were set neatly beside the sleeping bag with the socks stuffed in them. A tan canvas backpack rested near his feet. His hair was long, an unkempt tangle of brown and gray, as was his beard.
Where it wasn’t red or rusty from blood, that is. His throat had been cut.
No other visible wounds. No signs of struggle.
She glanced around the small, flattened area. The grass and weeds didn’t look disturbed anywhere else. Most likely whoever killed him had come down the same path they’d just trampled all over. “Charles. Do you smell anyone else on the path? Someone other than us or him?”
One quick yip. With a Nokolai wolf, that would mean no. She didn’t know if Wythe used the same signals. She glanced over her shoulder. He shook his head.
Old humans often lost some of their sense of smell. Maybe Charles had, too. He hadn’t smelled the body until he got close to it, had he? Or maybe it was just that the breeze was blowing the wrong way. “Carson. I need you to Change and see what you can sniff out about whoever did this. Check along the path first.” Better to use Carson anyway. Charles couldn’t Change back into a form that could communicate clearly. “José, how close did you get?”
“I stopped right where you see me. I thought you wouldn’t want me putting my big feet all over everything.”
“Good thinking.” She slid her weapon back in its holster, took out her phone, and took a quick picture. The time-stamp would confirm when she found the body. She stepped forward, careful of where she put her small feet. She didn’t have booties with her, so every step she took contaminated the scene. Couldn’t be helped.
The blood was mostly confined to the area right around the body, having leaked out rather than been pumped out. His heart would have stopped quickly. She crouched within arm’s length of what used to be a man.
Brown eyes. Pug nose. Big, square, yellow teeth. One was missing—the incisor next to his lower left canine. No visible scars, but between his hair and his beard, not a lot of his face showed. The skin she saw was weathered and dirty. He wasn’t young, but beyond that she couldn’t guess his age. Living rough added years. He was a big guy, over six feet, with broad shoulders. A bit gaunt; he hadn’t been eating well. He stank, but it was the sour odor of BO, not the rancidness of decay. In this heat, that meant he hadn’t been dead long. She took two more pictures, getting a close-up of his face, then his throat. The crime scene people would do a better job, but they wouldn’t be here for a while and she wanted to be sure she had photos. She’d had a corpse vanish once. Those circumstances weren’t likely to apply here, but s
he’d take no chances.
His sleeping bag was saturated with blood, much of it still wet. The wound looked to be singular and devastating—one blow with a large blade, maybe a machete or sword. The cut was angled, deepest on his left, where the carotid artery was. It had taken a lot of strength to cut so deeply with a single blow, slicing through skin, muscle, and cartilage to sever his windpipe, probably the carotid and jugular vein, too. She couldn’t tell if the cervical vertebrae were damaged, but it wouldn’t surprise her.
If he’d been standing or sitting when he was struck, his head would have fallen sideways as he fell. That hadn’t happened, so he’d been lying flat when someone took a machete to him. Napping, maybe, to get through the heat of the day. Maybe he’d gone from sleep to death without ever waking up. Maybe he’d never known someone killed him.
She sighed. Plenty more to be learned here, but most of that would be up to the crime scene team. One thing only she could do, though, and best do it now, before she called it in.
Lily steeled herself, dreading this part. Normally magic was like drugs or guns—neither good nor evil in itself, only in how it was used. But there was one exception. Death magic was so wrong that she felt its foulness. That’s what she expected to find here—death magic. Not that this looked like a ritual killing, and ritual was usually necessary to create death magic. But Sam had sent her here for a reason, and this guy seemed to be it. The most obvious reason she’d be needed at a homicide was that magic had been used to kill. That wasn’t the case here. A blade of some sort had opened this man’s carotid and windpipe to the summer breezes. That left death magic as the likeliest reason for her presence.
She stretched out a hand and touched his. Her eyebrows shot up. The buzz of magic was too faint to identify, but one thing was sure. It was not death magic. That was unmistakable, no matter how tiny the trace she touched.
There were several reasons she shouldn’t touch the bloody wound and only one reason she should. That one was compelling, however. Magic usually spread throughout a living body even when its effects were localized, but it didn’t spread evenly. And this man had died quickly. If he’d been killed with some sort of magic-imbued weapon, the magic would be concentrated at the wound itself. She pressed her fingertips to bloody flesh.
Huh. Weird. If—
“We’ve got company,” José said, then raised his voice slightly. “Carson, get out of sight.”
Lily glanced up at him. He was frowning, but he didn’t raise his gun. She rose and looked where he was looking. A moment later, a black-and-white sheriff’s car pulled in next to their Mercedes.
“José, put up your gun and come with me.” Lily started back toward the park. She spoke softly to Charles as they passed him. “Stay here, stay out of sight. Keep an eye on the body.”
Two people in khaki shirts, dark slacks, and the usual accoutrements of law officers got out of the car. Probably deputies, though Lily couldn’t see their badges clearly from here. One was female, maybe late thirties, dark hair, pale skin. She’d been riding shotgun. The driver was male, also in his thirties, built short and square like a fire hydrant. Ruddy skin, sandy hair.
Both of them reached for their weapons. “Halt!” the man cried. “Hands up!”
“FBI,” Lily called out. She ignored half of his order, continuing forward on the sketchy path, but obeyed the other half, raising her hands. She trusted José to do the same.
The woman lowered her gun. The fire hydrant didn’t. “I’ll need to see some ID,” he said loudly as he and his partner started toward them. More quietly, “For Crissake, Gwen, keep ’em covered. Anyone can say ‘FBI.’”
“Pretty sure she’s Lily Yu,” the woman said. She didn’t put her weapon away, but she kept it aimed at the ground.
“Who?”
“Damn, boy, don’t you ever watch the news?”
The fire hydrant did not like being called “boy,” but he sucked it up and kept his gun and his attention on Lily and José.
“I won’t retrieve my ID until you can see my hands,” Lily told him, “but she’s right. I’m Special Agent Lily Yu. I assume you got some kind of tip.”
“You don’t need to be assuming anything.”
“Oh? Do you draw on civilians every time you see one?”
His eyes narrowed. “You claim you aren’t a civilian.”
“Got me there. Of course, that leaves you drawing your weapon on federal agents.” She’d reached the edge of the brushy area. The deputies were about twenty feet away and approaching cautiously. “I’m going to reach for my badge now. It’s in my jacket pocket.” She did so, slowly.
“Toss it on the ground and step away.”
At least he was a properly trained idiot. The other kind were more dangerous. Lily did as she’d been told. José stayed with her. The female deputy came close enough to pick up the folder without being jumped—at least, the distance would’ve been safe if José had been human—then retreated a couple steps and opened the folder that held Lily’s badge and ID. “Looks pretty damn official, Ricky. Lily Yu, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Magical Crimes Division, Unit Twelve.”
Ricky scowled. Slowly his gun lowered. “Unit Twelve?”
“That’s right,” Lily said. “You want to put that weapon away now. The man we found in the brush was killed by magic. This is my scene.”
TEN
IT took forever for Demi’s heartbeat to settle down after the Mercedes drove away. She consulted her “get the hell out” list several times, but of course she’d never expected Lily Yu to drive up and buy gas from her and ask about hotels, so that wasn’t on her list. FBI agents were, but only if they were asking people about her—the original her, that is. The one who was female and seventeen.
Finally she decided that if Lily Yu had wanted to arrest her, she would have done so instead of driving away. This wasn’t a “get the hell out” situation, which meant she was probably okay, as long as she didn’t do anything to draw attention. So she stayed at work, and everything was just like usual, only better. She kept smiling, thinking about how she’d actually met Lily Yu and spoken to her. Lily Yu was a genuine hero. She was brave and smart, plus she was married to Rule Turner. That was beyond cool, but it wasn’t why Demi read everything she could find about the FBI agent.
Lily Yu was like her. Like she might have been, that is, if not for Asperger’s.
Most of the time she liked herself the way she was, Asperger’s and all. Being an Aspie had its good points, like being orderly and logical and able to immerse herself in things that interested her. But there was no denying that some things were hard for her, such as making eye contact and understanding body language, social cues, and facial expressions. She’d make a terrible FBI agent. She always thought people were telling the truth. She knew that wasn’t so, but she had no idea how to apply that knowledge to individual people. FBI agents needed to be able to tell when people lied to them. So she’d never be like Lily Yu, not really, except maybe in some ways . . . she was brave sometimes. She hadn’t panicked today. She’d used her lists to get her mind working instead of bumblebee-ing around, and she’d been able to reason her way through.
Demi felt happy as she sold gas and cigarettes and candy. Instead of worrying about Mr. Smith and what she should do next, she thought about meeting Lily Yu. She thought a lot about how to figure out if the wolf she’d glimpsed in the backseat of the car had been Rule Turner. If it had, that would make today just about perfect.
ELEVEN
THE sun was hot, the freshly cut grass smelled sweet, and the push of Ruben’s mantle was annoying. Rule could live with it, but it was annoying. He was, he admitted, a bit on edge. The storm in his gut had never really gone away. It was quieter now, but not gone.
Had anyone been watching, it would have looked like they were sitting on Ruben’s rear deck enjoying a couple glasses of lemonade and a chat. The hypothetical watcher wouldn’t have heard them, however, no matter where he stood or what Gift o
r technology he might be using. The crystal Rule had set on the table was brand new and, at the moment, one of a kind. It was based on a silence ward Cullen had recently learned from a former hellhound.
The crystal had two drawbacks. First, those without the Sight couldn’t tell when it ran out of charge. Second, it needed to be employed within a circle to contain the effect. Rule couldn’t set a circle. With very few exceptions, the power that resides in lupi can’t be used for spells.
Ruben, however, was Gifted, and that type of power was available in ways Rule’s magic wasn’t. He’d chalked a circle around the table and chairs before they sat down to enjoy the slant of the late afternoon sun, the tart lemonade . . . and their chat.
One of Rule’s duties as second-in-command of the Shadow Unit was to function as CFO. He’d just finished going over the books and was briefing Ruben on the protections Cullen had recently put in place. “. . . can’t guarantee anything should a large-scale magical attack on the bank’s computers be mounted, but any individual tampering with our accounts will now be blocked.”
Ruben didn’t look happy. “I wish you had consulted me before acting.”
Annoyance mounted. Rule told himself firmly that Ruben was not challenging him. “Given the current communication difficulties, that would have meant waiting until we spoke in person. I judged that an unnecessary risk. Was this not within my authority as CFO?”
“Would you have acted unilaterally on similar Nokolai business without discussing it with Isen?”
“If for some reason I couldn’t reach Isen, yes. Would you be acting as if I’d challenged your authority if we weren’t sitting so close with our mantles pushing at each other?”
“You’re making unwarranted assumptions.”
Rule gritted his teeth. “You’re leaning forward.”
“I don’t see what that—”
Rule leaned forward, too. “Don’t you?”
