Tempting Danger (35 page)

He ran a hand down her back. “You’re trembling.”

“Sensory overload,” she muttered into his chest. Which could bring on strange fancies . . . that’s all it was, the odd fancy of an overwhelmed nervous system. People don’t change in any fundamental way between one blink of the eye and the next. She was still herself.

But her arm shook slightly when she propped herself up to look at him. “Hey. Something wrong?”

He shook his head slightly, his expression bemused. “You pack a punch.”

Had he felt it, too?
Stop that,
she told herself. Nothing had happened—nothing except incredible sex, that is. “So do you. And now that I’ve had my way with you, we’d better—”

The weight that landed on the bed made them both jump. Lily looked over her shoulder into a pair of glaring yellow eyes.

“Feed the cat?” Rule suggested.

“Right. And
then
we’d better get back to work.”

BUT
they accomplished very little more that evening. They were going through the papers in Croft’s briefcase and recent files on the laptop they’d brought from the agents’ room when Nettie called. Her patients were installed in her guest bedroom, still asleep and under guard. It would take time to discover what had been done to them—if she could do it at all.

They did at least find the connection Karonski had mentioned so briefly when he called Lily. The elders of Mech’s church—a fundamentalist Christian denomination—had secretly raised and donated a substantial amount to the Church of the Faithful.

“Strange bedfellows,” Rule murmured.

“You’d think. But they found a common cause.” Lily passed him a printout.

It seemed that both churches believed fervently in the need to safeguard “the purity of the human race.” Both opposed the Citizenship Bill and spoke of the destruction of decency and civilization. Though they defined decency very differently, they agreed that the lupi were creatures of the devil who should be exterminated, not enfranchised.

Lily shook her head. “How could an African American buy into this drivel after what’s been done to his people?”

“How does anyone buy into it? No one is racially exempt from bigotry.”

“What about lupi?”

“Certainly not us.” He grimaced. “Not all of the tales of lupus savagery are fabrications. There have been those of us who preyed on humans. For some, lupi or humans, honor extends only as far as the line they’ve drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ What’s done to ‘them’ doesn’t count.”

It was late when they gave up and went to bed. Rule was tired, but not so weary he wouldn’t have welcomed another loving. But Lily was distracted, her eyes shadowed, her body language saying plainly she wanted sleep, not sex.

But she did cuddle into him, and that was good, too. To fall asleep with her in his arms . . .

Not so good being woken up by her moans, with the stink of fear-sweat thick in his nostrils. “Lily?”

She was still in bed, but no longer cuddled up to him. In the darkness he found her by touch and smell. He spoke her name again, laying a hand on her shoulder. “Wake up, sweetheart.”

He heard her gasp. She went rigid, then a shudder passed through her. “Oh, God.”

He eased closer, murmuring love words, endearments. All of a sudden she rolled over and all but burrowed into him.

She was shaking. He wrapped her up tightly in his arms and held on, just held on, until the trembling stopped. “A nightmare?”

Her head moved against his shoulder in a nod. “I haven’t had it in awhile. It’s . . . from the abduction. I guess I should have expected it to pay me a visit after seeing Ginger today.”

He stroked her hair. “Do you want to get up? When I have a nightmare, I don’t go back to sleep easily.”

She pulled back to look into his face. There was just enough light for him to see her wobbly smile. “What does a werewolf have nightmares about?”

“The usual things. Fire, hatred, being lost or threatened, losing someone I love. Being locked up . . . trapped.”

The tremor that went through her answered the question he hadn’t asked.

He made hot chocolate. That had been Nettie’s all-purpose remedy when he was a boy, and he still found comfort in it at times. They sat together in her single oversize chair, sipping and speaking very little, giving her world a chance to turn normal again.

And he wondered bleakly if the nightmare had been triggered by seeing Ginger—or by him. Because Lily’s demons were all about being tricked and trapped . . . and that was how she felt about the mate bond. Tricked into caring. Trapped for life.

TWENTY-FIVE

LILY
woke disoriented. She wasn’t in her bed, she was . . . she blinked, then smiled. Curled up with Rule in her chair and a half.

She turned her head to look at him. He was bristly with morning beard, his head tilted back, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. So much less elegant than the man she’d seen in Club Hell.

So much more real.

And hers. For better or for worse . . . not that lupi believed in marriage, but what else was this mate bond but a marriage that no court could dissolve?

Of course, marriage used to be pretty permanent, too. A few generations back, women often found themselves bound for life to men they knew little or not at all. In her own family, Lily had only to go back two generations. Grandmother’s first husband had been a stranger to her on their wedding night. That didn’t make what had been done to Lily right, but, as the T-shirt said, Shit Happens.

And when it did, it was Lily’s job to clean it up, put things right. Police work was a lot like housework, she thought. An endless and mostly thankless task that people only noticed when the dust bunnies or the criminals got out of control.

It was all she’d ever wanted to do.

The phone rang. She sat up carefully, but the phone had already woken Rule. “I can’t feel my left hand,” he muttered.

“Sorry.” She’d been sleeping on that arm. She stood, looking around. Where was her phone? In her purse, which was . . . not ringing, she realized as she reached it.

“I think it’s mine.” He stood, shaking his left hand and frowning.

She grinned as he headed for the bedroom and his jacket, where he’d left his phone. There was something silly about a werewolf’s hand going to sleep. Silly and kind of endearing.

A moment later he was back, all sleepiness wiped away. “That was Max. He’s says Cullen left me a message at the club. He wants me to come see it.”

LILY
stared at the message written in sloppy cursive above the bar at Club Hell: “Rule—Don’t believe me. Don’t come. And don’t mention this.”

The letters were still smoking. Beside them was a crude map—at least, that’s what she thought it was supposed to be.

“It’s Cullen’s handwriting,” Rule said.

“Does he often leave you notes burned into walls?”

He wasn’t amused. “No.”

Max was perched on top of the bar, glowering at Lily. “I know she’s got great knockers, but did you have to bring her with you?”

He’d been grouching about Lily’s presence ever since they arrived. She’d had about enough. “Are all gnomes obnoxious little perverts, or is it just you?”

“What the hell are you talking about? Just because I’m on the short side doesn’t mean you can—”

“Save it, Max.” Rule pulled his attention away from the smoldering writing. “She’s a sensitive.”

His squinty little eyes opened as wide as they were able. “No shit?”

Exasperated, Lily said, “You want to just put a notice in the paper and save yourself the trouble of telling people one at a time?”

“Max will no more tattle on you than you would him. Will you, Max?”

“Haven’t I taught you better than that? If you have to ask if you can trust someone, you can’t.”

“I trust you. I also trust Lily.”

“Yeah?” He sighed heavily. “Well, you’re young. So what do you make of the vandalism to my place?”

“I don’t know. He says not to come, but he drew a map. That upside down V must be a mountain, and SD would stand for San Diego, but the rest of it . . .”

“The squiggles might be water.” Lily moved closer. “And that’s the number five, isn’t it? Five miles, maybe. I’d better make a copy.”

“Don’t bother, Knockers. I already did.” Max held out a sheet of paper.

Her eyebrows rose. It wasn’t a sketch. It was an exact replica, done in blue ink.

Rule spoke. “He’s in trouble.”

Max snorted. “More likely he was test-driving a new spell. And picked my wall to do it on, dammit! I’m gonna have a word or two with him when he finally shows up.”

Max reminded Lily of a parent with a kid in trouble—mad on top, worried underneath. “You think he’s in trouble, too.”

His long drip of a nose quivered. “Who knows, with a jerk-off like him.”

“Breakfast,” Rule said suddenly. “Max, I know you’ve got mushrooms. If you can find some eggs, too, we’ll eat. We need fuel and coffee . . . and then, I think, we need to talk.”

THEY
adjourned to Max’s private quarters above the club, a crowded hodgepodge of kitsch and art. One crowded end table, for example, held a beautiful Victorian lamp, a plastic hula dancer, three undistinguished rocks, a cheap candy dish shaped like a skull, six paperbacks, and a small stone replica of Michelangelo’s
David
that was, quite simply, perfection.

Max saw her studying the little statue and smirked. “Mike copied me, but what the hell. He did a good job. Let him take the credit.”

She shook her head and followed Rule into the kitchen.

They’d argued downstairs. Rule wanted to tell Max everything. Lily agreed that they needed help, but a lewd gnome with a bad attitude wasn’t the source she’d have picked.

“Max has been around a very long time,” Rule had said. “He’s seen things that are myth or history to us, and he can’t be corrupted by our enemies.”

“You have a lot of faith in your friends,” she’d said noncommittally.

He’d been irritated. “Don’t they teach you anything these days about those of the Blood? Gnomes can’t be corrupted by spell or by Gift. They’re too bloody stubborn. Max has no loyalty to ideals as you or I think of them, but he would literally stop breathing before he betrayed a friend.”

He’d persuaded her. So, over mushroom omelets—Rule really did know how to cook—they filled Max in.

Rule got as far as mentioning, without naming, the One the Azá worshiped when Max interrupted.

“She? Who’s she? Don’t talk in riddles.”

Instead of answering, Rule asked for a pencil and paper, then in three swift stokes drew what looked like an advertising logo—a line drawing of an egg lying on its side with a slash through it. Max started cursing. Fluently. In several languages, for longer than Lily had ever heard anyone curse before.

Eventually he stopped, wiped his forehead, and said, “Tell me the rest.”

He didn’t speak again until Lily described what had been done to the two agents. Then he asked a number of precise questions. Finally he nodded. “Okay. First, your federal cops weren’t bespelled. There’s a fucking
difference
between spell casting and mind Gifts, which no one these days—”

“Skip the diatribe on our degenerate times,” Rule said. “How do we tell the difference?”

Max scowled. “Sorcery ain’t like Wicca. If you work with power directly, you gotta shape it, which means you gotta get the pattern of the spell inside you. Mind Gifts you’re born with, they’re already part of you, like feet. You don’t have to understand how your feet are made to walk on ’em. Which is one reason sorcerers are so blasted stuck on themselves, thinking they know so much more than anyone else—hell, never mind that. The point is, the results come out different. Your two Feds had these thoughts they couldn’t get away from, set up like a loop. That means someone put those thoughts there and tied ’em in place with a good jolt of power.”

“Thoughts can’t be put in place with a spell?” Lily asked.

“Yeah, if you’re an adept.” He snorted. “Which no one in this realm
is,
or any of the nearby realms, either, never mind what his Hoity-Toitiness in Faerie thinks.”

She blinked. Was he talking about the King of Faerie? “This, uh, goddess of theirs couldn’t make someone into an adept?”

“Nope. Not that She would if She could, but She can’t work here directly. Has to work through her tools—people native to this realm. Can’t just hand someone the words and gestures to a spell and have it work, can She? No more than I could hand you a stone and chisel and you’d chip out a bust of Rule, here. But she can give them power.”

He leaned back in his chair—a barstool with arms and a footrest—and laced his hands over his belly. “Now, the way it works is, the new thoughts have to blend natural with the old ones. If you give someone who dotes on pretty little birdies a bunch of bird-hating thoughts, they’re more likely to go crazy than to do whatever it is you wanted ’em to. So your telepath gets into someone’s mind and—”

“Telepath?” Rule’s eyebrows went up. “Speaking of crazy, aren’t telepaths driven insane by their Gift?”