Eileen Wilks - Ritual Magic

He wasn’t going to like this. “It can’t compel me. It tried. The contagion tried to get into me, and it couldn’t. As for the corrupt or persuade part . . . either the mate bond or the toltoi gives me some protection. We don’t know how much, but some. Miriam’s no fighter. If I can take her down quickly, get the knife away from her—”

“You don’t seriously think I’m going to let you go in alone.”

“If you’re with me, what’s to stop her from compelling you to stop me from stopping her?” That came out tangled. “You know what I mean. What’s to stop her?”

Rule’s face turned dark. His eyes did, too, in the way that said he was fighting for control. He didn’t speak.

Into his grim silence, Cullen chirped, “Polyester?”

FRIARdidn’t like Lily’s plan any better than Rule had, but for different reasons. “You have fucking got to be joking.”

The address he’d given them turned out to be a florist’s shop. They’d taken elaborate precautions getting inside, all of which turned out to be unnecessary. He’d had help getting there, according to Ronnie’s nose, but he was alone now. Alone, unarmed, and a bloody mess. Lily’s first sight of Friar had startled her into an instant’s pity. He’d taken several bullets. Someone had wrapped his chest and shoulder in gauze, but they must have run out. His right arm had an old T-shirt tied around it. His left leg wasn’t bandaged at all, so it was easy to see the damage there. The kneecap was gone. Pulverized.

The first thing they’d done was remove the gauze and the bloody T-shirt along with his clothes. They didn’t find a damn thing except for the two bullets that his body had apparently expelled from his chest. But no weapon or wallet, just the phone he’d used to call them. Friar declined to explain the lack of a wallet.

They had a stash of medical supplies in the trunk, so they’d used some of their gauze to rewrap his wounds. No point in letting him bleed all over the leather seats. While Mike bandaged his arm, Friar told Rule to order his men outside so he could tell them something “not for public consumption.” Rule ignored him. Friar then told him to “send the sorcerer away, at least. He’d find information about the knife entirely too enticing.”

“The sorcerer,” Cullen had said, “already knows about the knife. Both what you told me—I listened to your conversation with Lily, you see—and a few tidbits you left out. Which part did you think I’d find unbearably enticing?”

Lily had almost heard Friar’s teeth grind. Maybe he was truly desperate. He looked royally pissed, but he’d gone ahead and told them at least some of the truth about the knife, ending by saying that obviously they had to shoot its current holder from a distance. That was when Lily told him she meant to go in alone . . . though that wasn’t entirely settled. Cullen was pushing to go with her. He was sure his shields would protect him. She didn’t mention that Gray would be staying back with a rifle.

“This is not my joking face,” she said now, “and you don’t have a veto.”

“And I thought you were the practical one. If you—hell, you don’t have to wrap it that tight.”

Mike had started rewrapping Friar’s chest. “Shut up,” he said and kept winding.

Friar looked at Rule. “Are you going to let her throw away her life? And with it yours and everyone else’s? Your clan will not survive what happens to our realm if the god is brought through.”

Rule hadn’t spoken much. He was crouched near his enemy, his eyes never leaving Friar’s face. He was, Lily thought, about halfway into his wolf, though his voice was civilized enough. “It’s surprising that a man of your intelligence—one who has had reason to learn what he could of Lily—could believe it is within my power to let her do anything.”

Friar had quite a sneer when he made the effort. “Perhaps you’ll feel differently when I tell you that the next victim is almost certainly one of your people. One or more.”

“You didn’t choose one of my people for your rite.”

“I’m not constrained the way the god of that knife is, nor do I want to destroy our realm.”

Lily wanted to smash his face in. “Shut up. Just shut up about how you don’t want to destroy the world. Do you think if you say it often enough we’ll believe it? You don’t want that dead god coming in and taking over your playground, but you had every intention of messing it up yourself. You were going to sacrifice Angela Ward. Millions of people have memories of her. Millions. That’s why you chose her, isn’t it? She’s loved and she’s famous and cutting her out of time would create millions of victims. It would damn sure destabilize the realm, and that’s exactly what you wanted.”

Friar didn’t answer right away. He was thinking, dammit. She’d given away more than she meant to, letting her temper lead instead of her brain. He was wondering how much more they knew and how they knew it. “Reality would have wobbled a bit,” he said at last. “Nothing my mistress couldn’t fix. Dyffaya áv Eni will destroy it.”

“What kind of constraints is this Dyffaya under?” Rule asked.

Friar’s gaze flicked to him. “Because of the way the knife was awakened and fed, its god is bound to act . . . if not precisely according to my plans, then in league with them. At least until he pulls himself fully into our realm.” He shifted as if uncomfortable, but he was breathing a lot better, wasn’t he? Probably because he’d expelled those two bullets. His chest was still pretty messed up, though. “If you’re not going to be reasonable, you’d better call that shaman of yours. We’re dealing with a sidhe god. The only chance short of bullets we have of stopping him is to invoke a deity native to our realm.”

Lily was staring. “You don’t know. How could you not know?”

“What are you talking about?”

Cullen’s eyebrows looked like they were trying to climb off his face. “He doesn’t. He really doesn’t know. And he talked about the god being bound by his rite, not the knife. It isn’t just Lily’s secondhand memory of Debrett that let this semidead god take over. You used the wrong bloody rite.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Cullen gave a single, harsh bark of laughter. “Oh, don’t I? Then why didn’t you know that a police officer was possessed by the corruption left behind by your rite? That the corruption compelled him to shoot Nettie Two Horses?”

Friar’s eyes widened. Only for a second, but it gave him away.

“You didn’t know,” Cullen said, leaning forward, “because you thought the knife was still in your control at that point. You thought you didn’t lose control until later, but you were so bloody wrong. You used the wrong bloody rite. That knife is a named artifact, you stupid asshole—and you didn’t know that, either, did you? A named artifact, and you didn’t bind it when you woke it. Which gave this Dyffaya áv Eni a big, fat loophole to squirm through.”

Silence.

“Now that,” Lily said, “is interesting.”

Friar’s dark eyes glittered. “Almost as interesting as the fact that you knew the knife was named. Since you’re so interested in us sharing information—”

“Uh-uh. You want us to take care of this little problem you’ve created. You’re just along for the ride, so your part is supplying information. I need to know why you didn’t use the knife to compel others. You carried Alan Debrett to the ritual site. You could have just told him to follow you.”