Eileen Wilks - Death Magic

“Yeah, that fits,” Cullen said. “By then he’d seen Rule, though, so he sent the dopplegängers after him. It must have seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. Is Chittenden dead?”

“I knocked him out. I wanted to . . . but I didn’t. He’ll live to stand trial.”

“That’s something, I guess.” Cullen was silent a moment. “You want to tell me what happened with that enormous elemental? I saw the brownies scaling it like it was a climbing wall, but I don’t know what they did.”

She told them. Rule felt a smile stretch across his face. It hurt, but so did everything else.

Someone—Mike, it sounded like—called Cullen to come help with setting a bone. Cullen told Lily to “call me if he starts bleeding again, but he won’t”—and moved away.

The wail of one of the sirens peaked, then shut off. Some kind of help was here. Rule needed to speak before they lost this brief privacy. “Lily.”

She bent closer. Close enough that he could breathe her in, the sweet, comforting scent of her ... and her tears. She’d worked so hard to keep those tears from her voice, but she’d been crying from the moment she settled down beside him. He must look bloody awful. “You did the right thing. If you’d obeyed . . .” Obedience was not something his nadia was inclined toward, no, and he was so glad and grateful for that. “If you’d heeded me when I tried to forbid you, we’d all be dead.”

“I did what I had to do, but I was just guessing. It was all such a guess.”

“A guess backed by great courage.” He made the effort and raised one hand to touch her hair. He didn’t touch her face, though he wanted to. But she didn’t want him to know about the tears, so he avoided discovering them. “I knew you had to go, to do what you could. I just couldn’t . . . you’re braver than I.”

His beautiful, brave nadia snorted. “Yeah, right. Why did you send Scott with me instead of coming yourself?”

“I couldn’t.” That moment rose up and choked him again—Lily racing off into God knew what, her very motion a lure to whatever wolfish instincts lived in the demon-ridden doubles of his people. “Scott isn’t fully healed yet. He couldn’t fight properly. Too many would have died if I left. I had to stay.”

“I know,” she said softly, and miraculously found the one spot on his face that didn’t hurt, and stroked it. “I know. Which means you did what you had to do, just like me, doesn’t it?”

TWOhundred fifty-nine people died at the four Humans First rallies—one hundred and twelve of them in D.C. alone. That had been by far the largest rally, so there had been a great many targets. Plus it was the only rally where elementals had been summoned, and estimates put the number of demon wolves there at more than twice those at the other rallies. The second highest number of fatalities occurred in Albuquerque, mostly because Manuel and his clansmen had had the farthest to travel, and had arrived late.

Of those two hundred fifty-nine people killed, thirty-seven were lupi . . . which didn’t sound too disproportionate until you looked at all the numbers. Which Arjenie did, because her mind worked that way. She sent Rule an e-mail with those numbers, which he read while being given the last of the four pints of blood he’d needed.

He immediately called several of his media contacts and arranged to speak to reporters from his wheelchair as he was being released from the hospital. One of his eyes was covered by a gauze pad. The swelling had gone down around the other one, just as he’d said it would.

At that press conference, he told reporters and their cameras that there had been an estimated thirty-five thousand humans altogether who’d attended the four rallies. Seven-tenths of one percent of those people were killed. There had been one hundred sixty-four lupi who raced to save the humans at those rallies.

One-fifth of them were killed. Nearly a third of them died in D.C.

Rule’s press appearance garnered attention for several hours, until an announcement that night by the Secretary of Defense eclipsed everything else for a while.

A nuclear warhead had been accidentally deployed that morning due to a mysterious series of glitches that no one was able to explain. The missile had apparently been on course for the West Coast when—with even greater mystery—it had vanished from sight and radar. No trace of the missile or the warhead was ever found.

WITHeverything that happened that day, it wasn’t surprising that no one noticed that four of the U.S. cities with dragons were temporarily without dragons. Since they were gone a single day, people might not have noticed even without the dramatic events.

It was the next day when six women boarded planes at the Denver airport at various times, headed back to their various homes.

The seventh woman didn’t need to catch a plane. She’d left as soon as her work was done. An enormous black dragon had flown her home already, his talons wrapped carefully around the empty body, her bright muumuu flapping merrily in the wind of their passage.

Dragons cannot open gates on their own. They can manipulate them, power them, even close them, but they can’t open them. For reasons they do not explain, song magic alone isn’t enough. The Rhejes could open a gate; that knowledge was held in the memories. They couldn’t shift one in front of an ICBM boosting at thousands of miles an hour, so they needed the dragons as much as the dragons needed them.

It takes a godawful amount of power to open a gate. The dragons supplied much of that, but the Rhejes had had to channel it. An eighty-one-year-old heart, however valiant, can only take so much strain, and the two healers present couldn’t stop chanting to help. She’d held on, though—held on until the gate opened and the missle shot into a realm that had held no life for over three thousand years.

Nokolai clan had a new Rhej.

TWOdays later, Lily was called to Croft’s office to “discuss the results of the administrative hearing.” The sound of his voice told her it was good news, so she was hopeful, really hopeful, that she was going to get to keep her job. Maybe there’d be a black mark on her record, but she could live with that.

“They want to what ?” she said, dumbfounded.

“It’s a great honor. The Presidential Citizens Medal is the second-highest civilian award in the country. The president will, of course, present it herself.”

It made her furious. “I’m no hero. I showed up. That’s about it. Oh, and I did manage to give Chittenden a skull fracture, which makes me personally very happy. But if the president wants to hand out medals, I can name a dozen who deserve it more. Harry and his troop. Chris, Mike, Scott, Rule, Isen—” She had to stop, her breath hitching. Not everyone she spoke of was still around to receive a stupid medal. “That old woman with her handbag—now, there’s a hero! It’s not right to single me out this way. It’s not right.”

“Sometimes showing up is what it takes. Showing up over and over and over in spite of how hard it gets.”

She shook her head, out of words.

“Besides, I disagree about you not doing much. There are twenty-two other people alive today who’d disagree, too. And if you hadn’t acted on that tip . . .” Croft paused a moment, clearly uncomfortable. He knew who had tipped Lily about Chittenden’s possession of the amulet, though it wasn’t in her official report. He always avoided mentioning it, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of ghostly tips. “If you hadn’t acted, the brownies couldn’t have done what they did.”

“So give the brownies a medal.”

“The president wanted to. Their spokesperson said they respectfully declined to receive any sort of award, and besides, they never leave their reservation, so what were we talking about?”