Eileen Wilks: Death Magic

Typically writers use this space to acknowledge the help others provided. I’m using it to offer an apology. There are inconsistencies between what we call the real world and some of the details in my fictional world that may disconcert some readers. A female president, for one. The building and security systems at the FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., for another. There are more, but if I describe them, I’ll give away too much about the story.

What can I say? The realm Lily and Rule live in isn’t ours. For some reason, they elected a female president a couple years ago. We didn’t. The architect of the FBI building there had a slightly different plan than ours did. And they have lupi. And dragons . . .

LILYYu was at the shooting range at FBI Headquarters when she saw the ghost.

Her ears were warm beneath the headgear. Her bare arms were chilly, with her left arm out and steady; the right one ached and trembled. She’d fired a few clips right-handed before switching, which was dumb. Should have started with the left so her bad arm wouldn’t be bitching so much. To bring her new Glock in line with her dominant eye while keeping her stance and grip neutral, she had to twist her right arm in a way that her damaged bicep objected to.

It objected to a lot of things. The humerus might be healed, the skin grown back nice and smooth over the entry wound, but the exit wound was bigger, bumpier, and dented. Lost muscle didn’t regrow.

Except that Lily’s was. Slowly, but it was returning.

A whiff of sulfur hung in the air. Sound slapped at her ears through the protective muffs as her neighbor to the right fired steadily on the other side of the divider. The fur-and-pine tickle in her gut—the reason her shattered bone had knit so quickly, the cause of her muscle’s gradual, impossible regeneration—made her feel as if she should burp.

Fifty feet away, a drift of otherness obscured the paper target she’d been putting holes in.

It was white. Maybe that’s why she immediately thought ghost . It drifted on a diagonal like three-dimensional rice paper—translucent, not transparent, its edges too clearly defined for smoke, shaped right for a human, but faceless. Even as it floated closer on a steady, nonexistent air current, it remained out of focus—four limbs and a trunk in human proportions, the details blurred like a smeared chalk-drawing.

It was coming straight at her. The quick clamp of fear stiffened Lily’s spine and widened her eyes.

As the faceless thing floated closer it stretched out one hand—and yes, that was clearly a hand. For all the vagueness of the rest of the form, that milky hand was painstakingly vivid, as if an artist had etched in every minute detail from the mound at the base of the thumb to the lines crossing the palm to the wrinkles at the joints. There was a ring on the third finger of that hand.

A gold ring. Glowing. On the left hand, palm up. Beseeching.

Lily’s heart raced and ached under the weight of a terrible pity.

The filmy shape drifted to a stop. As if it were, after all, only smoke, it began to tatter in an ethereal breeze, wisping away into nothing.

AMERICAwas not a classless society.

No place was, of course. Not if that place counted humans among its residents. Humans were every bit as hierarchical as werewolves, from what Lily could tell. Just less honest about it. The official line was that the United States was a meritocracy: the talented, the dedicated, the extraordinary would rise to the top.

Maybe so, if you were willing to stipulate that money equals competence. Lily wasn’t. That tidy metric also didn’t account for another American preoccupation that fed into class: beauty. A woman who had both, she reflected as she zipped her jeans, might come across as cold because she felt isolated and wary of other women. Or she might be a stuck-up bitch.

Maybe today she’d figure out which was true of her boss’s wife. Their one encounter last spring inclined Lily toward the “bitch” summary, but it had been a very brief meeting. Maybe she was wrong. After all, Ruben had picked Deborah and stayed with her, and the woman did teach seventh grade, so . . .

“You’re sure it was a ghost?”

“Of course not.” Lily saw red for a moment—the red of the stretchy sweater she tugged over her head. Then it was down and she saw the gray walls and pale wood of the bedroom, and the man she shared that bedroom with. “How can I be sure? I’m no medium.”

“But it looked like a ghost.” Rule sat on the bed to pull on his shoes. With his head bent, his mink brown hair fell forward, hiding his face. Rule had been overdue for a haircut even by his standards when he got the subcommittee’s request for “clarification of your expert testimony from last March.” He’d promptly cancelled his hair appointment.

That was stubbornness, not lack of time. The request had come from an überconservative senator pursuing sound bites for his base. He’d wanted to ask Rule annoying questions to get them on the record, and Rule refused to look as if he’d raced out to trim himself to fit conservative notions of grooming.

“White and filmy. Floating. Yeah, it looked like a ghost.” The remembered ache of pity closed Lily’s throat. It had wanted something from her. Needed something.

Ghosts, she told herself firmly, were not people. She’d been told that by an expert. Whatever that fragment of ectoplasm wanted, it had come to the wrong place. She didn’t have any answers.

Lily turned to check herself in the full-length mirror. She could see Rule behind her. The aging athletic shoes—no socks—he was tying suited the worn-to-white jeans with a hole in one knee. Oddly enough, they also went great with the whisper-light black cashmere sweater that had probably cost as much as one of the car payments Lily had finally finished making on her Toyota. “I know Ruben said casual, but—”

“You think the jeans are too casual?”

“No, not you. You’re fine.” Rule could pair ragged jeans with cashmere and look like a film star. Lily couldn’t. First, she didn’t own cashmere. Second, a sane woman who wanted to stay that way didn’t compare herself to Rule Turner. He could make Bubble Wrap look good.

He stood up. His grin flashed white in a way that still sliced right through her. “You are not wearing one of your work jackets to a backyard barbecue, Lily.”

“That would be stuffy.”

“Which means you can’t wear your shoulder harness.”

“I know that.”

“You’re wearing your ankle holster, aren’t you?”

“Of course.” It held a little snub-nosed Beretta that had started out as a loaner from Rule’s father. When Isen wanted to gift her with it, she hadn’t argued. Range and accuracy were no more than you’d expect from a snub-nose, but it had good stopping power. It made an excellent clutch piece.

The Glock she’d been practicing with earlier was now her main weapon. It had a comfortable grip, which was always a factor when you had small hands. It had range, too, and accuracy, and kick-ass stopping power with the right ammo. But it was not her SIG. That was back in California, buried beneath a few tons of earth and rock. She missed it.

But she would not have carried it to her boss’s barbecue anyway, she reminded herself, so that didn’t matter now. She gave her reflection a frowning study. This was the first time she’d been invited to the Brookses’ place socially, and she wanted to get it right.