Eileen Wilks: Blood Challenge

Lily so did not want to reveal stuff. But Friar would be there, so she had to go.

Robert Friar had started the rounds of the talk shows the day after she and Rule announced their upcoming marriage at a press conference. At first he’d hit the hard-right radio shows, then FOX, and now a couple mainstream news pundits had had him on. Any controversy was good controversy when you had twenty-four hours to fill with something vaguely news-related.

Friar called Lily’s relationship with Rule bestiality. He wanted the California government to rule that a lupus couldn’t marry a human. On his last appearance, he’d gone even further. He wanted to make it a crime for a human woman to conjoin with a lupus. That was his word— conjoin , as in “this unnatural conjoining of the races.”

Lily ground her teeth as she scrubbed her scalp.

Friar knew—everyone knew—that lupi were always male. If he could eliminate all that conjoining, after awhile there wouldn’t be any more lupi. That would suit him. Oh, he didn’t come out and say he wanted an end to lupi and brownies and witches, to anyone of the Blood, anyone with a Gift, anyone who carried the taint of magic. He was too slick to say that outright, talking instead about legal remedies.

So she had to go to Chicago. She had to try to get him to show his true colors.

And it was sick to be wishing for a triple murder by some whacked-out witch to keep her here. She shut off the water and grabbed a towel.

Lily worked for the FBI’s Unit Twelve, which on paper looked like part of its Magical Crimes Division. MCD usually handled the more routine cases, while the Unit got the weird ones. And Lily, because of her background as a homicide cop, often got the ones involving dead bodies.

Not always, though. At the moment she had four open cases and nary a murder in sight. One case was all but closed. A pissed-off girlfriend had cursed her cheating partner—who, as it happened, was also female—and had left plenty of non-magical tracks for Lily to follow, which was fortunate. A good curse was hard to track magically.

Not that Lily could do that, anyway. She was a touch sensitive, able to experience magic tactilely, but she could neither work magic nor be affected by it. Mostly she liked it that way.

The curse Sheila Bickner had plucked from the Internet wasn’t all that good. It had made the victim seriously ill, but that was more a matter of the practitioner’s power than the curse’s efficacy. At least that’s what Lily had been told by the experts—the Wiccan coven who would be doing their thing today, tracing the curse to its caster to tie up the last bit of evidence.

The courts accepted very little magically produced evidence, and then only from Wiccan practitioners. That was being challenged in court as a religiously biased criteria—which, of course, it was. Lily expected the criteria would change. She just hoped the congressional committee working on a new bill came up with something reasonable before the courts struck down the old law.

Two of the other cases were both felony theft involving magic. So far, she was ringing up a big zero on both of them. The warehouse theft shouldn’t even be hers, she thought as she slathered on lotion with sunscreen. Magic had been used to gain access, sure, but otherwise it was a straightforward burglary. It would be solved by regular police work, which was best carried out by regular cops.

She’d talk to Ruben about handing that one back to the locals, she decided as she gave her hair a quick blast with the blow-dryer. No time to dry it completely, but she could keep it from dripping.

The other case was relatively minor, but she wasn’t letting it go. It involved theft by magical means of a controlled substance—gadolinium.

Gadolinium was a rare earth metal with a handful of legitimate applications, but it was best known as the key ingredient in gado. Gado was the drug the government had used to control lupi—any they could identify, that is, and register—until the Supreme Court put a stop to it.

Gado stopped the Change. It also tended to drive lupi insane.

The amount of gadolinium that had been stolen from a medical lab was quite small, but Lily meant to find out who had it before he or she used it to make some lupus miserable. Or dead.

Then there was the task force. Lily shook her head and pulled on underwear, bra, black slacks, and a black tank. She wore a lot of black, too, she admitted. But only because it was easy, not because she was working on a certain look. Black slacks, black tee—add a colorful jacket to hide her weapon, and she was good to go.

It wasn’t that the task force wasn’t important. It was. There was a new drug on the streets in California, one with a magical component, and several agencies—federal, state, and local—were working together to stop its spread. Lily had personally confirmed that magic was involved by touching one of the very few samples the DEA had. The street name for the drug was Do Me, which pretty much said it all. Best date rape drug ever, from all accounts. It only affected women; it was impossible to detect within a couple hours of ingestion; and there were no known side effects. Just lust, and lots of it. The only upside was that there didn’t seem to be a plentiful supply.

So it wasn’t the task force itself that bugged her. It was her role on that task force. She was liaison for MCD. Being liaison meant she went to meetings, reported to Ruben on those meetings, and now and then passed on a request from some other agency for information.

It did not mean investigating.

Lily stepped into her flats, slipped on her watch, then her shoulder holster, and grabbed a jacket at random. It turned out to be one of her favorites, a pale turquoise with oversize buttons. She glanced at the time. Looked like she’d go makeup-free today. She took one more second to grab a scrunchy and stick it in her pocket. It had been way too long since she had her hair cut, and it was long enough now to get in the way if she didn’t do something with it.

She called out as she slipped on the jacket, “Toby, we should be able to make it. Got your books?”

No answer. Frowning, she hurried to the living area.

Rule stood near the dining table, his expression wiped clean. “Toby’s gone. I asked Jeff to take him this morning.”

Lily stopped. “Something’s wrong. Something’s happened.”

“While you were in the shower, I heard from Alex about a Leidolf clan member, Raymond Cobb. At one thirty this morning East Coast time, Cobb was at some sort of party. A human party, not clan. He killed three people and injured ten others before the party’s host retrieved his rifle and shot him.”

THEoverhead fan clicked with every revolution. Need to get that fixed , Benedict thought. Could come a time that small sound masked another small sound, one Isen needed to hear.

It was easier to think about the fan, about security issues, than about why he was here, in his father’s big, comfortable den. Benedict had been in charge of security at Clanhome for thirty-one years. He was good at it. Some might say he was obsessive, but his obsessiveness had paid off more than once.

Aside from the fan, the room was silent. The silence, the waiting, was hard. He’d given his report. His Rho needed to know what took place on Robert Friar’s property last night.

Everything that took place.

“You’re sure you don’t need Nettie to take a look at that arm?”

“It’s been eighteen hours. It’s almost healed.” Fire enough bullets and even a slow, sense-dead human could hit something, but Benedict was still annoyed that he’d been clumsy enough to pick up a wound from a ricochet.