Human Nature (10 page)
Authors: Eileen Wilks
Adele stared, her chest heaving—and all of a sudden flung her head back and screamed in rage, her hands digging into the dirt on either side of her.
The earth moved.
A small lift, first—but enough that Lily wobbled. A couple rocks slithered, fell. Then the ground danced—a horrid, rolling shudder as if rock had turned liquid to roll beneath them like the ocean. More rocks fell. She heard Mannie cry out. She fell to one knee, arms out, trying to balance on the shifting planet.
Adele howled with laughter, pushing up onto her hands and knees. “Go! Go! Or I’ll bring it all down! Rocks falling on your lover, your precious lover—rocks falling on all of us! Go!”
She was doing it. Adele was using her Gift to do the impossible—to call an earthquake.
Something hot and fierce swelled up in Lily so fast she didn’t question, didn’t think. She dropped her gun and threw herself on top of the laughing madwoman—wrapped her arms around her, holding tight,
reaching—
Power, vast and raw, power like nothing she’d ever touched—power called from earth—power reverberating between woman and earth, call and answer, again and again, a shuddering cascade building out of control—
No! Lily squeezed her eyes shut, squeezed her arms tighter, squeezed with everything she was as if she could stretch herself around the woman and cut her off,
shut it down, close it off, you cannot reach this woman, she has no call, no power. NO.
The earth stilled.
Dizziness swam through Lily, a vicious, sucking exhaustion. She pried her eyes open and shook her head, trying to clear it. What…?
Adele lay motionless beneath her. Lily pushed up on one trembling arm, suddenly afraid she’d squeezed the woman to death or something. She’d done…something. She couldn’t quite remember…
But Adele was quite alive—and staring up at her in horror. “What did you do to me?” she whispered. “What are you?”
Lily dragged in one shaky breath. Another. Several feet behind her, Jason was panting like he hurt. But panting meant he was alive.
From farther away she heard Mannie call, “Don’t be mad, but when the rocks came down, so did I. Rule’s okay, though. None of them hit him. I’m okay. Limping, but okay. Are you okay?”
She got one more good breath into her and called back, “I’m good. I don’t know about Mariah. Jason’s hit. Drag Rule out of there, if you can.” The earth had stopped moving, but there could be loose rocks. Aftershocks.
Then and only then did she look at Adele once more. “What am I?” She smiled a nasty, satisfied smile. “I’m the FBI bitch who’s arresting you. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have…”
IT
was raining—a rare and splendid event here in San Diego, though it happened with annoying frequency in D.C. The window in Rule’s bedroom—in
their
bedroom—faced the bed, and the drapes were open. Water blurred the glass. The smeared shimmer of city lights outside fit well with the washed-clean feel of Lily’s body, as if all her edges were blurred, too. Her fingers tingled. Rule’s hand sifted slowly through her hair.
The apartment was on the top floor, high enough that the loss of privacy was more symbolic than real; Lily was getting used to it. At the moment, curled into Rule’s body, warm and drowsy with the aftermath of passion, it didn’t bother her at all.
She stirred, unready for sleep. “This morning I notified the manager at my place that I’m not renewing my lease.”
His hand stilled—then brushed the hair from her face so he could press a kiss on her temple. “Good.”
“We have to talk about how we’re going to split expenses here.”
“Mmm. Do we have to talk about it now?”
She smiled. “I guess not. But I’ll need to know how much your utilities run, and the—”
He propped up on one elbow, kissed her firmly, and said, “I’ll print you out a spreadsheet in the morning.”
“We’re leaving in the morning.”
“My printer’s quick.” He stayed propped up, looking out the window. His words had been light, but his eyes were heavy.
No wonder about why. Steve’s memorial at Clanhome had been today. His body wouldn’t be released for another couple weeks, so they would be making yet another cross-country flight then, for the burial. Lily wouldn’t attend that, but Rule needed to.
After a moment he said, “I haven’t been kind in my grief.”
“Grief is seldom kind.”
“No.” Now he looked at her. “But I regret being an ass.”
A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. “You apologized already.” When he woke from the bane stupor, and right after throwing up the first time, he’d apologized for using her password. He’d done it again when the dry heaves hit.
Wolfbane really did make lupi sick as dogs…though that was a phrase she’d refrained from using. So far.
“I felt guilty,” he said quietly. “I’d allowed such distance to grow between me and Steve…he still mattered, but…” His words ran out, leaving his mouth tight with pain.
“Don’t a lot of relationships have cycles? Neither of you had given up on the friendship. That’s what counts. If Adele hadn’t killed him, there’s every chance you and Steve would have grown close again when the time was right.” She flattened her hand on his chest. “She robbed both of you of the chance for that.”
“She nearly robbed me of more. If you hadn’t checked your messages, or if you hadn’t understood right away something was wrong—”
“Let’s not go there.”
After the nausea passed, Rule had been keenly embarrassed by how easily Adele had tricked him. She’d called and asked him to meet her for a memorial ritual at the spot Steve was killed. Rule had planned to check out the spot anyway, plus he’d been fixated on Friar as the culprit. He’d agreed. When he arrived, Adele had tossed some herbs on the little camp stove. He’d lost the use of his body, and Adele had gained the use of his phone. She’d used it to send that text message, hoping to distract Lily so she could grab Mariah and set up the phony murder/suicide.
Rule smiled, but his eyes had that determined look. He wasn’t finished. “In addition to guilt, I was afraid. I’d allowed myself to lose one dear friend in some ways even before he died. How did I know I could keep you—keep
us…
Hell. I don’t know how to say it.”
“Oh, because you have such trouble with long-term relationships, you mean? Like Cullen. It’s terrible the way you’ve allowed that friendship to falter, and him so easy to get along with.”
For a second she thought she’d said exactly the wrong thing, reminding him of a missing friend. Then he barked out a laugh and eased back against the pillows. “Easy to get along with. Yes, that’s how I think of Cullen. Are you trying to say that all relationships don’t follow the same path?”
“Also that I’m not Steve.” She threaded her fingers through his. “I don’t let go easily. Kind of like chewing gum. You’d have to keep scraping me off.”
“There’s a romantic image.” He squeezed her hand, clearly amused. “I wanted it to be Robert Friar, you know. He seemed…a more worthy enemy.”
“I know.” She suspected Rule considered Steve’s death at the hands of a jealous lover somehow undignified. But to Lily’s way of thinking, death was like sex—it mattered, it had meaning, but it was not dignified. “You lupi aren’t exempt from human nature, though. Part of your nature
is
human, and you’re tangled up with humans.”
“True.” He sighed.
She glanced at him. His eyelids were drooping. She smiled and fell silent.
He’d been sleeping more than usual, but he said that was normal, even though nearly three days had passed. Apparently getting over bane sickness was like getting over the flu. Even after the bug had been defeated, the body wanted extra rest.
Of course, for Rule, extra rest meant getting seven or eight hours’ sleep instead of five. Lily snuggled down into the covers more fully and closed her eyes…but her brain wasn’t ready to shut down.
There were still some loose ends with the case that bothered her. What had Friar’s lieutenants been doing in town? The timing was coincidence, had to be, but she’d like to know what he was planning. Sooner or later, that man was going to be trouble.
Then there was the weird way Adele had burned out her Gift. The woman had nary a hint of magic left. They were keeping Adele’s role in the earthquake quiet—it had been a small quake, fortunately, and anomalous, which meant the seismologists were puzzled. Lily figured they could go right on being puzzled. She didn’t want any other Gifted assholes hearing about it and deciding to give it a go, in the hope they could pull it off without burning out. And she didn’t want the un-Gifted population to have one more reason to fear their Gifted brethren.
But it nagged at her that she couldn’t remember exactly what had happened when…
Her phone buzzed. The same phone—it had survived being tossed off a short cliff with a snake with nary a scratch. The buzz meant it was Croft, so she sat up and reached for it on the bedside table, frowning. It was pretty late, D.C. time. “Yu here.”
“Yes, I am,” Croft said jubilantly. “And someone else is, too. Someone you want to talk to. Here.”
Lily didn’t talk much. She listened, she laughed, and if her eyes filled, that was okay. And of course she passed the phone to Rule, who’d heard it all anyway.
Who’d have thought it? Sometimes the optimists turn out to be right. “Here,” she said, grinning fit to bust. “Cullen’s back. Cynna’s back. They’re all back, they’re fine, and Cullen wants to say hi.”
Keep reading for a special preview of the next Novel of the Lupi
MIND MAGIC
Available from Berkley November 2015
July
Washington, D.C.
Lily woke slowly in a bed that wasn’t hers. The bed was soft. So was the early morning light. The man pressed up against her back . . . wasn’t.
“I had a wonderful dream,” Rule murmured, his thumb idly circling her nipple. “It was a sunny day, and you and I stood on opposite sides of a bridge. We both walked out onto it until we met in the middle. There, in front of our families and friends, we agreed we were married.”
“Never happen,” Lily said, rolling over so she could see his face. “Everyone knows your people don’t believe in marriage.”
And then she just lay there smiling at him while he smiled at her. She loved the way Rule looked in the mornings. Messy. Which was funny, because she didn’t like it anywhere else. But when he first woke up, with his face all stubbly and his hair every which way, he was hers. Once they left the bed he’d be Rho of Leidolf Clan, Lu Nuncio of Nokolai Clan, and second-in-command of a highly secret group fighting a war the rest of the world didn’t know about. Here, he was just hers.
Funny, Lily thought, how unimportant she’d thought weddings were before she had one of her own to look back on. Not very far back, of course. They’d returned from their honeymoon a little over two months ago. It had been a busy two months, but relatively peaceful until . . .
A waking-up yawn overtook her, making her need to stretch, so she did.
“Do that again.”
Her mouth twitched. “Yawn?”
“You can do that, too, if you like,” he allowed, “but I was referring to the part where you pressed up against me.”
“Oh, you mean like this?”
He confirmed that and added another request. She asked for clarification, so he gave her a hands-on demonstration. Suddenly she was wide awake. He began trailing kisses down her torso, pausing here and there at points of interest, making her wish she could purr. She combed her fingers through his hair . . .
and shrieked, jerking her hand back and shaking it.
His head came up in alarm. “What?”
She closed her eyes. “Your hair turned into spiders.”
“Spiders.”
“Hundreds of them. Thousands. Crawling and waving their nasty little legs around.”
“I’m guessing that’s a mood killer.”
She nodded, her eyes squeezed tight.
“Headache?”
“Not this time.”
“Then if you kept your eyes closed—”
She opened her eyes to glare at him—and promptly shut them again. “I hate spiders.”
“You’re afraid of spiders.” There was a hint of amusement in his voice.
“Don’t even think about teasing me.”
“You’ve fought demons, dworg, a chimera, a wraith, a god, a sidhe lord, and God only knows how many gun-wielding bad guys, but spiders—”
“Shut up, Rule.”
“—make you shriek like a little girl.”
She couldn’t hit him. She might get one of the spiders on her. They weren’t real—she knew that—but they looked and felt real, and would for another . . . shit. She’d forgotten to note the time the hallucination started. “Take your gloating and your creepy spider-covered head elsewhere. But first tell me what time it is.”
A short pause. “Six fifty-eight. How is it I’m just now learning about this phobia?”
“It’s not a phobia. I can handle them one at a time,” she said with dignity. “Just not in the thousands.”
The bed shifted as he stood up. “I’m going to go wash my spiders.”
“No, wait, I need to log how long it lasts, and if I don’t see them go away I won’t know—”
“Your eyes are shut. You won’t see them go away anyway.”
Oh, God, she was going to have to look at them again. She forced her eyes open long enough to confirm that the episode was not over. “I can take quick peeks.”
A man spoke on the other side of the bedroom door. “Is everything all right?”
“Lily was startled by one of the hallucinations,” Rule said. “She’s fine.”
“I see. The coffee’s ready when you are. I’m going to stir up some pancakes to go with it. We’ve got maple syrup and a blueberry syrup that Deborah makes from the bushes out back.” Ruben’s feet made almost no sound on the hardwood floors as he moved away from the door.
Great. Her boss had heard her yell. Not shriek like a little girl. Rule had exaggerated. Yelling was a perfectly natural response to seeing your lover’s hair turn into spiders. Seeing and feeling it. Teeny little spider legs on her hand . . .
Lily tossed back the sheet and sat up. Scowling, she reached for her notebook on the bedside table. She jotted down the approximate time the hallucination had begun, what she’d seen—and felt—and added “no headache.” Then she snuck a quick peek at Rule, who was contemplating ties. He’d already slipped on a pair of ragged cut-offs to make the trip to the bathroom and selected the day’s armor: a suit the color of wet charcoal.
His head still squirmed with horrid little spiders. She looked away and checked the time.
Keeping a record of when each episode hit, what she saw, and how long they lasted might not do a damn bit of good. Sam had called the episodes unpredictable, and the black dragon used words with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. But he’d also said that both the duration and nature of experiences during the adjustment period were “highly idiosyncratic,” which was why he couldn’t tell her how long this would last. Between a few weeks and a few months, perhaps. Though it might be shorter. Or longer.
Given all that uncertainty, Lily really wanted Sam to be wrong about one thing. Maybe her version of the hallucinations would turn out to be predictable. It couldn’t hurt to try, and she had learned one thing. When a hallucination was triggered by her connecting with Rule’s “frequency,” she didn’t get a headache afterward.
“Red or blue?” Rule said.
“Hmm?”
“I’m leaning towards red. Politicians often wear red ties, and people are more comfortable if you seem to be like them.”
“The honorable representative is not going to think you’re like him in any way, no matter what you wear.”
They were on this side of the country for several reasons. Representative Jack Brownsley was one. He was on the committee where the Species Citizenship Bill had languished for over a year, and was among those who’d kept pressure on the chair to prevent the bill from coming up for a vote. He was also one of the politicos screaming loudest about the disappearance of Washington D.C.’s dragon, which was why he’d agreed to talk to Rule today. He knew Rule had a connection to the dragons.
“Not consciously,” Rule said, “but I’ll use other tools to influence his conscious mind.” A pause. “I am not looking forward to this.”
Surprised, she glanced up—and quickly looked away again. This one was lasting awhile. “I didn’t realize you found dealing with Brownsley that unpleasant.”
“I find it unpleasant to have our mate sense scrambled.”
And he’d be well over half a mile away, so it would be messed up, but . . . “If we don’t ‘look’ for each other, we won’t notice.”
“True.”
Something in his voice bothered her, mainly because it made her think he was bothered. “Do you want me to go with you?”
A pause while he considered that, then a chuckle. “I might not have a problem dealing with Brownsley, but he’d annoy you. He has some things in common with Leidolf—notably his attitude towards women. At some point he’d try to figuratively pat you on the head. You’d wither his manhood with a glance, and then where would we be?”
“I do not wither manhoods with a glance.” Though she liked the idea. Grandmother could wither pretty much anything with a glance, and she wanted to grow up to be like Grandmother.
“Of course you do. I’ve seen it.”
“Now you’re just flattering me. Why not go with your silver tie? It’s perfect with that suit. Makes you look like a celebrity, and that’s a different kind of power than the representative wields.”
“True, which is why Washington is fascinated by celebrity. Silver it is. Are you going to accompany me to the shower so you can track the duration of the episode?”
“I . . .” She looked up. And smiled. Rule’s head was once more topped by the shiny, mink-brown hair she loved. “I won’t have to.”
“Excellent. In that case, you should definitely come watch me shower.”
She laughed. “Forget it. It’s seven-thirty.”
“It’s Sunday. Millions of people sleep in on Sunday.”
“Ruben didn’t. He’s going to make us pancakes. After which I’m going to work out with Deborah.”
“I’ll be quick,” he promised.
She snorted. “Sure you will. I want pancakes.”
He sighed. “Rejected in favor of pancakes.”
“With Deborah’s blueberry syrup.”
“There is that.” He smiled and crossed to her and dropped a kiss on her head. “I’m glad the spiders are gone.”
“Me, too. Everyone dislikes spiders, Rule. It’s not a phobia. It’s a perfectly natural reaction. I do not want to be teased over a perfectly natural reaction.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Shit.”
He laughed and headed for the door.
She jotted down the time the episode ended, set down her notebook, and stretched. She’d take her shower later, after her workout. There’d be plenty of time for that, she thought gloomily. She was on sick leave. Indefinite sick leave.
Most people did not stay with their boss while they were on sick leave, and Ruben Brooks was Lily’s boss twice over: in an official sense, since he headed Unit 12 of the FBI’s Magical Crimes Division; and in a highly unofficial and not precisely legal sense. Ruben was also the founder and head of the Shadow Unit.
The Shadow Unit was Ruben’s quiet conspiracy to stop the Great Bitch from swallowing the world, most of which didn’t know she existed. Things had been quiet on that front lately. The Great Bitch hadn’t made a move since her agent, Robert Friar, had been sent to hell—otherwise known as Dis or the demon realm—in late April. This lull would end at some point, but it was welcome, especially with the current communications problem.
Normally the dragons handled the Shadow Unit’s communications—you couldn’t get more secure than mindspeech—but with Mika AWOL, Ruben had been forced to fall back on more cumbersome and less secure methods involving either encryption and the Internet or burner phones. That was reason number two Lily and Rule were in D.C. As the Shadow’s second-in-command, Rule had two primary duties, one ongoing and one contingent. He managed the Unit’s finances, and he stood ready to step in as head of the Unit if Ruben were killed or incapacitated.
Reason number three was Leidolf Clan. Ever since the mantle for that clan had been forced on Rule, making him Rho, they’d crossed the country to visit that clanhome as often as possible . . . which hadn’t turned out to be all that often. The mate bond made it impossible for Rule to go without her, and often Lily’s job made it impossible for her to get away. She knew it worried Rule. All lupi needed the occasional presence of their Rho and the mantle he carried; some needed it more than others.
This time, they planned to spend at least a week at Leidolf Clanhome. Longer, if her hallucinations continued.
Lily heaved a sigh and stood. She’d unpacked as soon as they arrived last night, so it took only a moment to pull on her workout things and head for the bathroom to brush her teeth. Deborah and Ruben’s home was large and lovely, but back when it was built people didn’t see the need for more than one bathroom per floor. They’d added a master bath after they moved in, but the only one available for guests was at the far end of the hall. On the way she met a wolf coming up the stairs. He was pale gray with a grizzled muzzle—a rare sight. Rare, too, was that he seemed a bit winded from climbing the stairs.
He stopped and ducked his head.
“I’m afraid I don’t recognize you,” Lily said apologetically. He must be Wythe—Ruben’s clan—and he looked old, but beyond that she couldn’t tell. “We must have met, but—”
He shook his head once.
Her eyebrows went up. “You weren’t there when I supposedly met every Wythe clan member?”
“That’s Charles,” said the man at the foot of the stairs. Ruben Brooks did not look like a Washington power broker—or a werewolf, for that matter. More like a modestly successful geek. His black-framed glasses weren’t held together by duct tape today, but Lily had seen them that way in the past. “Charles Dupree. You’ve seen him, but you didn’t actually meet him because he was in sleep at the time. I gather,” he added dryly as he moved lightly up the stairs, “he wanted to amend that.”
Charles nodded.
Now she knew who he was. “You’re the one who was hurt by the bear.” Hurt saving two human hikers who never knew what he’d done. “I’m honored to meet you, Charles.”
He shook his head, then bowed in a way that born-wolves don’t, going down on his front knees and lowering his head.
Because of the mate bond, the lupi saw her as a Chosen—chosen by their Lady, the Old One who’d created them over three thousand years ago. Lady-touched. “I know you’re honoring the Lady, not me, but it feels weird, so could you get up, please?”
Charles huffed and stayed in his bow.
“I think he’s honoring you, not just the Lady,” Ruben said. “You preserved Wythe’s mantle at great risk to yourself.”
Eight months ago, Lily had been played temporary host to the Wythe mantle when the clan’s Rho—the mantle-holder—was killed without an heir. Eventually Lily had found the person the Lady wanted to pass the mantle to: Ruben Brooks, who was her boss at the FBI and—at the time—not a lupus at all. Turned out he had a teeny trace of their blood in his ancestry, and that had been enough. Like all of the Old Ones, the Lady was barred from acting directly in their realm—but she could act through the people she’d created. The lupi. She could, within limits none of them understood, act on the lupi.
She’d used that trace of lupi blood to turn Ruben fully lupus, then she’d bestowed the Wythe mantle on him. And now the head of the FBI’s Unit 12, a man who had the ear of the president, turned furry at times.
The mantles were the lupi’s deep, dark secret. A clan’s mantle gave the Rho his authority; it united the clan; it helped lupi maintain the balance between wolf and man. Mantles also ensured that no lupus ever felt entirely alone. That sounded partly good, partly awful to Lily, who needed time to herself now and then. She’d said something like that to Rule.