Mind Magic (46 page)

LILY
had fallen asleep still trying to figure out how the potion, the dragon, and the patriot connected. She woke up knowing.

“Son of a bitch,” she said, sitting up. “It fits. It damn sure fits.” She paused. “I think it fits.”

Rule wasn’t there. Her mate sense told her he was in the village. When she stood, she could see that no one else was in the barn, either, except for Charles. Even the horses were gone—but maybe not far. She heard brownies giggling nearby, and comments that suggested they were doing grooming things with one or more horses. The light streaming in from the open doorways was bright and strong.

How late had she slept? Didn’t matter, she supposed. She spared one wistful thought for the coffee she didn’t have and stuck her feet in her shoes, then grabbed the little plastic glass, toothbrush, and toothpaste the brownies had provided when she was a prisoner instead of a guest.

Charles awoke, stood, and stretched. She took a moment to scratch behind his ears, which he seemed to appreciate. Then she headed out to the pump.

Four brownies were brushing one of the horses. Two of them sat on his back, one working on his mane, the other on his hips. One of the others was doing something with his hoof; the last one was combing out his tail. They greeted her without pausing in their work and asked if she was hungry.

“Getting that way.”

“Hot dogs at the green!” one of them piped up. “For you and the wolf. You just tell someone. They’ll get you hot dogs.”

Hot dogs were an unconventional breakfast, but at least they weren’t trail mix. She pumped water, brushed her teeth, and drank a glass of water. The whole time she was turning her theory over in her mind, looking for holes. She found one. A big one, too. And yet the rest of it fit so well . . . she didn’t have enough data, but she knew one place to get more.

Teeth brushed, she went back in and got her comb and an elastic from her purse. In a few moments she was as presentable as she was going to get. She donned her shoulder holster, but left her jacket draped over the side of the stall. It was going to be hot today. She set off for the village with Charles.

There was something odd about the path she followed. She hadn’t noticed last night, but this morning the difference between it and the land around it was obvious. It was harder than it should be, and lighter in color. She bent and tapped it. It was hard, almost like adobe. Brownie magic did feel a lot like Earth magic. Not identical, but as if that was its basis. Had they spelled their path to resist water?

Shortly before she reached the village green, she ran into Mike. He was standing on all four legs—much to Shisti’s displeasure. “You are not to be walking on it!” She shook a finger in his face. She had to reach up to do that. The little brownie could have walked under the wolf’s stomach without ducking her head.

Mike looked confused and took a step back.

“Use three legs! You—oh, hi, Lilyu!” The little brownie beamed at her. “I’m practicing my nagging.”

“That was pretty good,” Lily said. “But if you want a lupus to mind, you need a Rho to back you up.”

“A
dada
has to be able to nag her patients herself,” Shisti said seriously, and turned to frown up at Mike. “Your healing is good. My
geeshai
is very good. But that bone isn’t hard yet. Use three legs!”

Lily kept going. There weren’t many brownies around, and the few she saw seemed to be in a hurry to get someplace else. They all greeted her; one of them called out that breakfast would arrive soon. A few minutes later, she saw Rule, Danny, and Little John just inside the mossy village green. Also four more men. After a second she recognized one of them. Jason was a high-ranking Leidolf guard. Another man looked familiar, though she couldn’t think of his name.

Looked like the brownies had already found a handful of Rule’s men. She hoped they’d find more. Find everyone.

They were all staring intently at the laptop screen. As she got closer, she heard a voice coming from the speaker. She couldn’t hear clearly—the speaker was aimed away from her—but she recognized Alex’s voice and caught some of what he said. Her heart twisted.

“Not Saul!” Danny cried suddenly.

“I’m sorry,” Rule said. “But James confirmed it.”

“No!” She shook her head. “He was nice! He let me borrow his flute. He—” Her face crumpled.

Rule tried to put an arm around her. She pushed it away, turned, and ran.

A huge, dark wolf raced past Lily, running after the girl—on three legs.

Rule watched them for only a moment before looking back at the laptop. “Thank you, Alex. You won’t be able to reach me, so I’ll call again later.”

The men parted to let Lily come close. They looked grim. Her mouth was dry when she asked, “How many?”

Rule had his face in lockdown. No emotion in his voice, either. “Thirty have reported to Alex. Ten of them were injured. Three have been confirmed dead.” His gaze flicked briefly in the direction Danny had vanished. “Including Saul. As you see, four have reported here. That leaves eleven unaccounted for, counting Carson. We’re fairly sure at least two of them were arrested.”

She asked the hard question first. “Who’s dead?”

“Saul Cotton. Dave Wells. Roger McConnell. They were all on the squad José led to draw the helicopter away. James is the only one from the squad who has called Alex. He reported the three deaths. Of the remaining squad members, he thought one was dead but wasn’t sure, as he was hit at the same time and was briefly unconscious. When he came to, José ordered him to leave.”

“José was alive yesterday, then.”

“Alive then, yes. He’d lost a great deal of blood, mostly because of his leg, which James thought must have taken multiple rounds.”

“No word about Claude?”

He shook his head.

She absorbed that in silence for a moment. “If one of you doesn’t die right away, there’s a good chance his healing will keep him alive.”

“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—”