by Eileen Wilks
“Unless an enemy comes across him and finishes the job.”
“The Guard troops thought they were shooting gaddo bullets, not regular ammo.” Gaddo was the drug used to keep lupi from Changing. It had others effects, too, all of them unpleasant. “You and I know that’s ridiculous. There’s no such thing. But the men in that copter thought they were preventing their targets from turning wolf, not committing murder. It’s a big step up from that to deliberately killing wounded prisoners.”
“It depends, doesn’t it? On whether the person who found José saw a man or a monster.”
Lily didn’t argue. He was partly right. Edward Smith was doing his damnedest to make people see monsters, but Lily couldn’t accept that everyone would tip so far, so fast into fear-driven violence. Some would, but not everyone. But she hadn’t experienced the years of suppression and bigotry that Rule had. It would be easy for him to think that humans would kill his people out of hand. It had happened.
She glanced at the silent men around her. The other lupi found it easy to believe, too. They weren’t as good as Rule at keeping what they felt from showing. They were angry. Deeply angry.
She couldn’t argue with that, either. So was she. “I need to call Fagin. I think I know what Smith’s after.”
His gaze sharpened. “It’s connected to the potion?”
“The potion and what it takes to make it. I’d like to talk to Fagin before I tell you what I’m thinking. It, ah, it sounds kind of crazy.”
“I’d like to know what you’re thinking, crazy or not.”
“I can’t talk about it in front of everyone.”
His gaze flicked over the men around them. “Little John, Danny knows you. Please go after her and see if she’s up to placing another call for us. The rest of you find something to do out of hearing range. Completely out of hearing range, unless I shout. If you hear too much, your life is likely forfeit.”
* * *
RULE watched his men scatter, with Little John taking off in the direction Danny and Mike had run. He looked back at Lily, and some of the grief he felt lightened. She was here, he was with her, and world was not wholly dark. One of her cheeks was smudged with dirt. Her clothes were in much worse shape.
“Where’s Bert?” his smudged, dirty, beautiful Lily said.
“He offered to help fetch hot dogs. I won’t risk having my men go into the public area. The authorities seem unaware of our presence here, but we can’t count on that. Bert assures me his record his spotless. Even if cops are there, they’ll have no reason to bother him.”
“That’s just wrong. Your people have to hide, but the mob guy—”
“We don’t refer to him that way.”
“You don’t, maybe.”
“We don’t have much time before Little John returns, hopefully with Danny.”
“Right.” She took a deep breath. “I dreamed about Grandmother last night.”
He raised one eyebrow. “Much as I respect Madame Yu’s abilities, I doubt she was offering advice in your dream.”
“No, she kept nagging me to speak Chinese. It wasn’t a mindspeaking, Rule, just my subconscious yelling at me about something. Danny called the potion Lodan.”
“She did. And—”
“She hasn’t heard anyone say the name, though, has she? I’ve been pronouncing it the way she did—accent on the long o. That’s why I didn’t realize it until I dreamed about Grandmother. Put the accent on the second syllable.”
He tried that. “Lodán?”
“Close, but . . . you know how English speakers don’t hear Chinese correctly? First because it’s a tonal language, and second because some of the sounds just aren’t Western. Well, Danny never heard anyone say the name of the potion. She’s just seen it written, and it was almost certainly written by an English speaker who doesn’t know that g is unvoiced in Chinese. Someone who might hear lóng dàn and write Lodan.”
The way Lily said the first version was much more musical than the second, but . . . “They do sound similar to my English-speaking ears. Not identical, but close. What does lóng dàn mean?”
“Dragon egg.”
Rule didn’t stagger physically, but he felt like she’d knocked his legs out from under him. “You can’t mean—that’s—how could he even know about Mika?”
“That’s the big hole in my theory,” she admitted. “I can’t come up with any way he could know, but Mika’s not at her best. No telepathy, so she can’t check to see if anyone’s thinking thoughts they shouldn’t. Maybe that means she can’t blank everyone’s minds on the subject, either.”
“But the potion was created long before Mika’s, ah, transformation. If—” He broke off, looking to his left. Little John, Mike, and Danny were coming. They weren’t close enough for Danny to overhear, but the lupi would.
Lily followed his glance, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “The sorcerer. The one you think has to be working for Smith. If he’s Chinese . . . there was no Purge in China, Rule. A lot of chaos during the Revolution, and before that—”
“You think he could be an adept?”
“Shit, I hadn’t thought of that.” She scowled, thinking. “I guess that’s possible. Let’s hope to hell not. I mean that some of the knowledge that was lost in Western countries during the Purge wasn’t lost in China. A lot of it, yeah—as the level of magic decreased, the communities who’d preserved that sort of knowledge dwindled and mostly died off. And more was lost during the Revolution, but it’s possible that some family or group retained and passed down a lot more spellcraft than people in the West did. Maybe they passed down something tangible, too—like fragments of dragon eggs. And China is where Sam and the others used to live. They were there for centuries. If anyone knows how to—”
“Lilyu! Rule Turner! Lilyu! Rule Turner! Come! Come with us!” A swarm of agitated brownies raced toward them, shouting. Brownies ran amazingly fast for anything with only two legs, much less beings so small.
Harry was in the lead. He skidded to a stop. “You’ve got to come right now!”
“—right now!”
“They’re lying about her!”
A chorus of agreement that someone was lying.
“We’re coming,” Rule said. “Where?”
“The wewishal,” one said.
“That’s like a gathering hall,” said another.
“It’s the TV place,” Harry said, tugging on Rule’s jeans. “Come on!”
The TV place was the largest building in the village—huge by brownie standards, but still too small for any of the Big People to enter. Rule lay flat on his stomach so he could look through a window. Lily did the same at the open door. A flatscreen TV held pride of place at one end of the long, rectangular room—not one of the enormous flatscreens, but it was still taller than the brownies gathered to watch it. Around three dozen stared at it intently. None of them spoke, and the ones who’d come for Lily and Rule fell silent, too.
“. . . go to Angie Sommers with our affiliate in Charlottesville now,” said a familiar newscaster. “Angie, what have you learned?”
“I’m speaking to Greg Price, who works in the gardens at Monticello. He’d just arrived at the gates this morning when the fire started. Greg, tell us what you saw.”
“They just burst into flame! Everything was normal, then all of a sudden, the trees were on fire!”
“Did the flames seem to come from somewhere, Greg?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve never seen anything like it. I braked—didn’t think about it, see, that was automatic, and then I just stared because it didn’t make any sense. Then I got my phone and called it in and they told me to move my car so the fire trucks could get in. They didn’t want me to go any closer to see if anyone needed help getting out of the house—there was some folks coming out by then, see. Running out the front door. I did like they said and got my car out of the way.” He shook his head. “That fire was sure hot. It ate up those trees like they were dry kindling.”
Angie came back with a question about whether the fire spread to the house, but when Greg started to answer, they were interrupted by the newscaster, who had more breaking news. Another mysterious fire had occurred, this one in forested land just outside Lewisburg, West Virginia. Firefighters were on the scene and the cause was unknown, but . . . “We’ve received confirmation that radar picked up a bogey over Lewisburg similar to that reported at Monticello just prior to the fire’s occurrence. That’s three fires started in the space of three hours, all of them tied to a mysterious bogey visible on radar but not reported by anyone on the ground—a bogey that Eric Ellison of Homeland Security has said is almost certainly the missing Washington, D.C., dragon. Tom, what have—”
All around him, brownies burst into angry cries—“They lied!” “They’re lying about her!” “Why do they lie?”
“Quiet,” Rule said sharply. “Quiet. I need to hear.”
This being an all-news channel, they repeated everything they’d just said, using different words and adding a lot of speculation and a few more details. The first fire had occurred in the early morning at a small manufacturing plant in eastern Virginia; a security guard had been the only person on the site of the blaze, and he’d been killed. Casualties at the last two fires were still unknown.
Rule listened a little longer before sitting up. He met Lily’s eyes.
“One of the Gifted kids Danny told me about has a Fire Gift,” she said. “A strong one. They’re doing it to Mika now. What they did to you to, Ruben, to Danny. They’re framing Mika.”
“Yes. You were right.” Rule’s voice sounded hollow in his own ears. He understood now why Sam had said what he had about Lily and the Unit. “Smith intends to break the Dragon Accords.”
THIRTY-NINE
DEMI didn’t hear the whole newscast, having arrived a little behind Rule and Lily, but she heard enough to be shocked. At first no one would answer her questions, but after a bit of confusion Rule got the brownies and everyone else to adjourn to the middle of the green, where they could talk. Just as they settled there, Bert arrived, carrying several paper bags. Demi smelled hot dogs.
That distracted her. Hot dogs were one of the few meat products she missed sometimes, maybe because they didn’t seem like they’d ever been part of an animal. Lily—she’d told Demi to call her that—hadn’t had any breakfast, so she took a couple of hot dogs. The lupi wanted some, too. Lupi always seemed to be ready to eat.
Fortunately Demi wasn’t all that hungry, having had some trail mix when she woke up, so she could ignore the way the hot dogs smelled. Mostly. Then Bert passed around Cokes. She took one of them, and it tasted great. She didn’t usually have Coke in the morning, but that rule wasn’t as important as the “no meat” rule, and she didn’t want to wear out her prefrontal cortex. She needed it working right now. The sugar in the Coke would help with that. Then one of the brownies—his call-name was Mallum, he said, which meant “young oak”—gave her an apple. That helped, too. It was a good apple.
While Lily Yu ate, Rule Turner explained what was wrong. Demi tried to listen, but most of it she already knew. She kept thinking about Saul. She didn’t know why she’d run off when she heard he was dead. How did that help? It was a strange reaction, but she felt strange. Like someone had hit her in the stomach and she couldn’t get her breath, only of course she was breathing just fine, but she didn’t want Saul to be dead. She’d only talked to him twice. She didn’t know why it hurt so much.
Mr. Hawkins was dead, too. He wouldn’t go to the Tip-Top ever again so he could eat and be with people without talking much. So were two people from Whistle she didn’t know, or at least she hadn’t recognized their names. The article she’d found last night that gave the names of the victims of the “large predator” hadn’t had photos, just names. She’d been so relieved that Jamie’s name wasn’t on that list, but she knew Mr. Hawkins. He wasn’t exactly a friend, but she knew him.
No, she had known him. He was dead now. Demi had understood how real death was ever since her mother died. She hadn’t understood how often it happened. Oh, in her head she’d known. She’s seen statistics. Now her whole body knew.
Was it Nicky who’d killed them? Had her friend cut up Mr. Hawkins with his Gift until he died?
Bert’s exclamation got her attention. “He’s trying to frame a dragon? How can he think he can get away with that?”
“Because he keeps getting away with it,” Demi said. She hadn’t seen the dragon last night—which she deeply regretted—but she’d heard her. “He’s good at it. He can plant pretty much anything in a system that relies on electronic data. That’s how he was able to create those radar bogeys. His weakness is that he thinks that’s what it takes to win—that if the data is on his side, the people involved don’t much matter.” She stopped, frowning. “Why are all of you staring at me?”
“I guess we were surprised,” Lily said. “You’re a computer geek yourself, and geeks often think the data is the important part.”
“It is important,” Demi agreed. “But the difference between him and me is that he thinks he’s good at people. I know I’m not. I get people wrong all the time, so I know from experience that getting the data right isn’t enough.”
“True,” Rule said, “but for the moment he’s ahead on the people front, too. He’s using the media to get his message of fear out.”
She frowned at him. “Even I know you can get people to do bad things if you can scare them enough. That’s easy. It doesn’t make Mr. Smith good at people. He thinks he is because his Gift has always helped him get what he wants. But his Gift won’t work on millions of people watching the news the way it does on whoever is right there with him. You’re the one who knows how to do that. You’re good with people one-on-one or in bunches or over the television. I bet that’s why he wanted you out of the way—so you couldn’t go on television and calm everyone down when he wanted them to be scared.”
Rule had a funny look on his face. He glanced at Lily, who raised her eyebrows at him. “You may be right,” he said. Demi wasn’t sure if he meant her or Lily. “But if so, he got what he wanted. I can’t go on TV and calm people down right now.”
She thought that over. While she was thinking, the others were talking and talking. At one point they got loud as if they were arguing, but she didn’t let that distract her. She had an idea. She thought about it for quite a while before she got it lined up right, then she spoke. Loudly, because someone else was talking and this was important. “You don’t need TV.”
Everyone stared at her again. “What?” Rule said.
“The brownie webcam gets millions of hits a day. The brownies should bring it to this part of the reservation, where police can’t come and arrest you again. Then you go on the webcam and explain to people what’s really going on and why they don’t need to be afraid of lupi. You should have brownies with you, and they should talk, too. Everyone loves brownies. People will trust them.”
“That . . .” Rule did the look-at-Lily thing again. “That’s a very good idea. It would give away my location and probably Danny’s, too, but the potential gain is substantial.”
“What about me?” Lily said. “I can’t exactly arrest Smith over the Internet, but if I—”
“The only reason you’re still on active duty is that you’re missing in action. We need to keep it that way.”
Even Demi could see that Lily didn’t like that, but after a moment she nodded. Then she looked at Demi. “I suspect you didn’t hear what we were discussing just now.”
“No, I was thinking.”
“What you suggest is important and might help. But our first priority has to be stopping Smith. I, ah—I recently learned that the president had the Pentagon work up contingency plans in case there was ever a need to take out one of the dragons. Those plans call for using the military. I don’t know what the other dragons would do if that happened, but it would be bad. Dragons aren’t just big, smart animals who dislike visitors and soak
up magic. They’re powerful. More powerful than I think most people realize, including Smith. Do you know where they lived before they returned to Earth?”
“Sure. In hell.”
“Yes, otherwise known as Dis, the demon realm. When the dragons first arrived in Dis, they killed a demon lord and took over his territory. You wouldn’t know how powerful a demon lord is when he’s on his territory, but I don’t think any of our tech could accomplish that. I think that if we dropped an atomic bomb on a demon lord when he was in his own territory, he’d laugh and eat the fallout.”
That made Demi feel cold. Shivery cold. “A fission bomb or hydrogen? Because a fission bomb delivers the equivalent of twenty thousand tons of TNT, while a modern thermonuclear weapon, which is often called a hydrogen bomb, releases a blast equal to one-point-two tons of—”
“Let’s just leave it that demon lords are incredibly hard to kill on their territory, and incredibly bad things would happen if our government violated the Dragon Accords.”
Demi nodded, still feeling cold. “Dragmageddon.”
“Uh—what?”
“Dragon plus Armageddon. Dragmageddon.”
“That’s pretty much right.”
Rule said, “We know who is behind this. Edward Smith. Others are part of it, but if we stop Smith, we throw his people into chaos. A man as bent on control as Smith is would have total control of his organization; without him, the rest will flounder. I see only three ways to stop him: we kill him, we kidnap him, or we arrest him. Setting personal preferences aside, killing him would have severe consequences for my people because it plays into the narrative he’s established. Smith’s people wouldn’t need to know who killed him to blame it on lupi. Kidnapping him carries the same risk. Arresting him is the only thing that might work. That’s what we were discussing.”
“You mean Lily?” Demi asked. “She could arrest him?”
“Maybe,” Lily said. “It’s complicated. The Fourth Amendment means that I almost always need a warrant to make an arrest, but getting one is likely to tip off Smith—if I even could, based on hard evidence. That’s pretty skimpy at the moment. Felony arrests without a warrant are permissible in a public place based on probable cause, or if the law officer is in hot pursuit, or if there are “exigent circumstances”—which usually means an immediate emergency, like shots being fired. This is certainly an emergency, so a case could be made that it’s a lawful arrest, especially given the gravity of the charges. But—”
