Eileen Wilks - Death Magic

“Three weeks. Slightly less, to be specific.”

She flung up a hand. “Okay. Fine. Be specific by all damn means. For three weeks you’ve acted like things are okay, but if you believe everything Ruben said, everything’s going to hell—or could, pretty damn fast. How could you pretend with me?”

He looked baffled. “I haven’t.”

“When you first learned all that stuff I can’t say out loud, it didn’t just about blow off the top of your head? And you hid that from me!”

He answered slowly. “The timing came as a shock. She is moving much faster than I’d expected. The rest of it . . . no. We’ve known for nearly a year that she is active in our realm once more. Now we know some specifics about her plans. That’s tremendously valuable, and learning that we—the clans—have strong allies against her is a great relief.”

She stared at him. All this time, he’d been expecting something like this. When he proposed to her, he’d known they’d face some kind of Armageddon shit. When they planned their wedding, he’d known. He hadn’t just thought there would be danger—he’d known it would be vast and powerful. World-toppling. All along, he’d known. “You’re really okay with . . . with all this. You expected it. You’re not freaked and hiding it. You’re . . . okay.”

A small frown tugged at his eyebrows. “My wolf helps. That I live more closely with him than I used to helps a lot. Fear is . . . an immediate thing for a wolf. What hasn’t yet happened isn’t real enough to trouble him.”

“What about the man? How does that part of you stay so damn calm, and plan a wedding, and spend time picking out a necklace for me, and set up Toby’s college fund, and—and look to the future as though things were going to be okay?”

“Lily.” He took her arms gently. “How else could I live? It’s helpful to know what our enemy intends, and while I take Ruben’s visions very seriously, none of it is fated.” He cocked his head as if listening to something she couldn’t hear, then leaned in so close his lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “My Lady is also a patterner, and vastly more experienced than Friar.”

“But . . .” She switched to a whisper so soft only he could hear. “But your Lady isn’t able to act in our realm.”

She felt his lips move in a smile and the breath of his next words. “Except through her agents, nadia . She acts through us.”

Through lupi. Who she’d created, and who served her still, wholly and freely. She could act through them, and that was why the Great Bitch had to remove them. And instead of finding this terrifying, Rule took comfort in it.

Lily didn’t answer with words. She took his hand. She was frowning as she did it, but knew he’d understand both the frown and the touch. “We should go home.”

He tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled. “Yes. I love you.”

Emotion burst out in a shaky laugh. “Don’t I get to brood at all?”

“Later, perhaps.”

LATERstarted as soon as they got in the car.

Ruben’s street was quiet, but once they turned onto Bethesda Avenue the traffic picked up. Wet streets bounced light back from taillights, headlights, streetlights, bistros, clubs, and storefronts. If the brief rain had washed people inside for a time, they were back out now, wandering the pretty downtown area and sitting at tiny outdoor tables with frothy drinks or beer and nachos. It was only a little after eleven, and on a Saturday night.

All these people busy having lives . . . people mad at the boss, celebrating a raise, hunting for a hookup, getting busted, falling in love. People praying, partying, laughing, yelling, making up, breaking up . . . people helping a stranger or robbing one. People who expected tomorrow to arrive in about the same shape as today.

And maybe it would for most of them. And the day after, and the one after that. But next month was looking pretty damn iffy.

An Old One wanted to amputate the future all these people were building with whatever mix of altruism and cruelty, determination and thoughtlessness. The Great Bitch wanted to graft her version of the future onto the world. According to the lupi, she saw herself as humanity’s benefactor. Sure, people would die on the way to her shiny utopia, but death was what mortals did, right? No real problem. She’d make it up to the survivors by making sure they didn’t get to make bad choices anymore.

If the strongest precog on the planet—who also happened to be a good man, good all the way down—was convinced the only way to stop her lay in a shadowy, extralegal organization, Lily could accept the necessity. It didn’t go down easily, but wasn’t bullshit often easier to swallow than truth? She wouldn’t be reporting Ruben to the federal attorney. She’d keep his secret, but she wouldn’t be part of it.

She was a cop. She didn’t know how to be anything else.

They left the downtown behind. Rule hadn’t said a word since they got in the car, but he was holding her hand. He did that a lot. She looked at him. Light and shadow slid over his face, shifting as they passed this streetlight, that bar, a pocket of darker land anchored by oaks. “Did you know what Ruben had in mind for tonight?”

“I did.”

She wanted to ask how he’d known. How did Ruben’s Shadow agents communicate? Phones weren’t safe. Neither was e-mail. Not if they wanted to be sure neither Friar nor the non-ghostly FBI caught them at it, but what other options were there? But if she wasn’t going to be part of them, she couldn’t ask. She couldn’t ask who else was in the Shadow Unit, either, or who knew about it, or how it was organized, or what Rule’s place was in it . . . other than as a coconspirator, that is.

This was deeply annoying.

As for the rest of it . . . the collapse of the nation, a military coup, “the surviving lupi” . . . her stomach churned. Contemplating Ruben’s visions didn’t help. Her mind kept trying to go there, but it didn’t help. So what would? She drummed her fingers on her thigh and stared at the back of Scott’s head.

Scott drew driving duty whenever Rule went out at night, partly because he looked so harmless. He was short and wore baggy clothes that turned his wiry frame skinny. His face was round and boyish with guileless blue eyes he framed in geek glasses—clear lenses, of course, since no lupus needed vision correction. He was adept in three martial arts, deadly with a blade, good with a gun and getting better.

From the back, she could see Scott’s short, badly cut brown hair and the way his small ears hugged his head like they’d been superglued down. A small Bluetooth headset curled around his right ear like a question mark.

Questions. Lining up her questions always helped. Her fingers twitched with the need to jot them down, but she restrained herself. None of this could go on paper.

Okay, first question: why tonight? Why had Ruben tried to recruit her now instead of three weeks ago, or three weeks from now, or not at all?

That one almost answered itself. He had something he wanted her to do that hadn’t needed doing earlier. Something he couldn’t ask of her as an FBI agent. Maybe something he couldn’t put on the record because the wrong person might learn about it? Something to do with the traitor.

Lily knew very little about the investigation into the attack on Ruben. Abel Karonski was lead, but if he’d turned up anything solid, he’d managed to keep it a big, fat secret. That was harder than a civilian might think. However tight-lipped FBI types were with outsiders, they were as prone to chatting with their colleagues as anyone else. Prone to speculating when they lacked information, too, but Lily hadn’t heard any rumors. Everyone seemed to know that the perp was with the Bureau. No one knew anything else.