Eileen Wilks - Ritual Magic

“In the old days, it took ten or twelve lupi to kill one, and even with those numbers, several were always lost. We always tried to fight them in the open. We needed room to maneuver. Your men lacked room, in that parking lot. In spite of that, your casualties were amazingly low. José was quick and beautifully competent. So were you.”

“Competent?” Her voice rose and cracked. “José, yes. Me? I couldn’t fight them. I did nothing.”

“You sent for backup before you even knew what you faced.”

Which got one person killed, another badly hurt. Though it had also alerted Ackleford, who’d gone for the RPG as soon as he looked out his window . . . “It was the candy frog. Toad. Whatever. I saw that and thought about Hardy’s warning.”

“For which I have thanked him. Once the monsters arrived, you recognized that you couldn’t personally engage with them and trusted José to do his job. You got Cynna to safety. You drew the dworg away from José so your compatriot could fire his RPG. How is it nothing, when you did all these things right?”

A huge lump rose in Lily’s throat. She had to swallow twice to get rid of it. “That doesn’t feel true, but thank you.”

“Feelings are not always a guide to truth, and guilt is an indulgence you cannot afford. It clouds the mind. Set it aside and think. What would you do differently?”

Several impossibilities rose to mind immediately, like never leaving the house without an Uzi in her hands. She let those bubbles rise to the surface and pop, then said, “From now on, we park as close as possible. I’ve got the authority. I’ve been reluctant to abuse it, or seem to be abusing it. We had AK-47s in the trunk of the car, but it was too far away to do us any good. They don’t have the stopping power of Uzis, but they would have been a damn sight better than the handguns we did have.” And maybe she’d see about getting a couple of Uzis, too. Could Ruben pull some strings, make that a legal acquisition somehow?

Which reminded her—she needed to check with Karonski, see if he’d been able to keep those Uzis off the record. She had a couple of ideas about that. Her fingers twitched. Where was her notebook?

“Excellent. Remember that José and the others were not fighting your enemy, Lily. We were, all of us, fighting our enemy. Today that enemy struck using an ancient horror. We not only won, but won handily. They failed to achieve a single one of their objectives. Thirty-two dworg were sent against us. In the old days, that many dworg would have meant at least a hundred lupi deaths, and many times that in human casualties. They were our enemy’s most feared and potent weapon. Today, thirty-two dworg managed to kill only three of us before we killed every one of them.”

“Modern weaponry beats teeth and claws. Admittedly, it took major firepower to bring them down. If we hadn’t had the Uzis, the story would’ve had a different ending.”

“And somehow the Great Enemy failed to take modern weapons into account?” Isen paused for a moment, letting that sink in. “ She spent an enormous amount of power today, power on a level she has not used against us in thousands of years. And achieved . . . nothing.”

Lily opened her mouth. Closed it again. And said, “Shit. We’re missing something.”

“I think so, yes.”

Could the dworg have been a diversion? Maybe, but you didn’t use that kind of power for a distraction unless you had something even bigger planned, and nothing else had happened.

That wasn’t the only thing that didn’t make sense. “The Azá. Last year, she needed them in order to open a gate. Them and a whole lot of death magic. How come she’s suddenly able to pop open four gates—bam, bam, bam, bam!—with no helpful ritual on this side? Three of them without nodes, too. We have to ask what’s different now. Friar, yeah, she’s got him all supercharged, but he wasn’t in four places at once, opening gates. I don’t think he could open even one. If Sam can’t do it himself, I can’t believe . . . hold on a minute. Hold on. Cynna’s here.”

Cynna’s scrubs were pink with little bunnies on them. It made for an odd look with her tats. Her face was tired and a bit grim, but she smiled the moment she saw Lily heading for her. “José’s out of surgery. He should be okay. No guarantees—I’m not Nettie, I can’t check him out myself—but his surgeon has operated on lupi enough to make a guess about his recovery, and he thinks José will make it. Oh, and I saw Rule in with Andy. I told him about José.”

This time the relief hit hard and immediately. Lily’s eyes filmed with tears. “Thank God. Are you . . . you look tired, but okay. Cullen got up here and crashed.”

“He was still so drained after his stint with Sam—he damn near burned himself out just using sleep spells. Where . . . oh, there he is.” She moved around Lily and crouched beside her soundly sleeping husband. She watched him a moment, stroked his hair, and whispered something Lily didn’t catch. Then she stood and looked at Lily. There was a lot more grim in her expression now, along with a healthy dollop of determined. “Just before the shit hit the fan, I got a decent pattern for your murder victim. I am by damn going to Find whatever I can with that pattern. I’m headed outside now to do that. You with me?”

Oh, shit, was this a good idea? Cynna was a target, and just because—

Drummond popped into being in front of Lily, his face clear, the rest of him fuzzy and indeterminate. “That’s it! That’s the first thing I wanted to tell you, but couldn’t. She needs to do that. You need to go, both of you. And hurry.”

CYNNAcould not be talked out of it. Admittedly, Lily didn’t try very hard, not with Drummond cheerleading the idea from his side, but Rule did. He was hampered by having to make his case over the phone, since he had to stay with Andy and José until they could be taken home. Cynna told him he’d have to cope, because she was damn well going to finish what she’d started before it rained down dworg on their heads.

“I don’t think the dworg were sent on my account,” Cynna told Lily as she sat down on a wide strip of grass next to the hospital’s parking lot. She untied one shoe. “ She didn’t go to all that trouble just to keep me from Finding your victim’s home or whatever. But maybe that was part of the timing. And even if it wasn’t”—she took that shoe and sock off and started on the other one—“I’m going to do this.”

Lily suspected Cynna was hell-bent on doing her Find because she could . This was what she did, what she was good at, and there’d been little she could do for their wounded. Reason enough to follow through, Lily thought, if Cynna hadn’t been Rhej. She was, though, which raised the stakes considerably. For that reason and a couple of others, Lily would stick with her. No point in dividing up their guards.

Those guards stood in a circle around them now, facing out. Once Cynna had removed her shoes and socks she stood, her stance wide, knees flexed, arms overhead. Her Gift didn’t need anything but her attention to work, but for a tricky Find she sometimes boosted her focus with a sort of barefoot drumming dance. That was what she was doing now.

Slowly she began to stamp the earth with her bare feet. The rhythm picked up as she turned in a slow circle, her hands weaving invisible patterns, her arms gradually descending as her feet punched the ground faster and faster. Her dance paused twice before she stopped, her arms straight out in front of her. She nodded once, satisfied. “Got it.”