Eileen Wilks - Mortal Sins

Her hand tightened on the flashlight. “I doubt that whatever you’ve heard has any bearing on jurisdiction.”

“Maybe not.” His eyes were hard, dark walnuts, appraising her. “All right. I’ll cooperate if you’ll show me the bodies. I won’t mess up your scene.”

Temper urged her to give him the finger, but temper wasn’t a good guide, and he had called it her scene. She was going to have to work with this man. He and his deputies had gathered the initial evidence; they knew the area and the people.

Wait, wait. She wasn’t working with him because she’d be handing the case off. Assuming the Unit could get someone down here . . . well, they’d have to. She was here for Rule and Toby, not the FBI.

But for now, those bodies were her responsibility. “Deal. You’d better call your coroner, tell him to go back to bed.”

Deacon didn’t like that, but he was making an effort. He asked if she wanted his people to wait for the ERT. She thanked him, and he spoke to his deputies, then appropriated one of their flashlights. The batteries in his, he said, were dead. “How far is it?” he asked her.

“Less than a mile.”

“Hope you know how to find your way around without street signs. Under a mile doesn’t sound like much, but one tree looks a lot like another if you aren’t used to woods. Especially at night.”

Lily didn’t have to know how to track the pathless primeval, not with Rule waiting for her. She just had to find him, and that was easy. “There’s a deer trail, and I left someone on-scene who knows woods. If I have trouble finding the spot again, he’ll assist.”

He gave her a nod. She turned on her own flashlight and set off.

Near the highway the trees were new growth, young and dense and skinny. Teenage trees, she thought, but they were tall enough to spread an umbrella between her and the night sky. The moment she stepped under that canopy, the world turned godawful dark.

Crickets revved their motors like they were about to blast off. The ground was spongy, absorbing the sound of their footsteps as Deacon followed her. Lily kept her light trained on the piney carpet ahead. According to Rule, copperheads turned nocturnal in the hot months.

Trees had completely erased the highway behind them when Deacon spoke. “I guess you touched the bodies.”

“The one on top. I didn’t disturb the scene.” Which was as ugly as any she’d ever been called out on. Lily wouldn’t have known the body she’d touched was female if not for the bra tangled up with gnawed-on bones and scraps of stinking meat. “Why are you so determined to see the bodies, Sheriff?” She’d told him about the dogs. Did he think he had to prove how tough he was by seeing what they’d left?

He ignored her question. “When you touch things, you feel it if they’ve got magic in them.”

“That’s right. Magic is a texture to me.”

“Hold up a minute.”

Lily turned. With her flash pointed down, it was hard to make out his expression; his face was a dark blur in the greater darkness. But the pale skin on his outstretched palm showed up clearly.

Her eyebrows lifted. “Testing me?” Well, why not? She took his hand.

The prickle of magic was immediate. And confusing. She held his hand longer than she’d intended, frowning, trying to sort the sensation . . . slick, all slickness and surface, like a gumball. A faint pulsing, as if the magic within swayed to some distant tidal pull . . . “You’re Gifted,” she said at last, dropping his hand, “but damned if I can say what kind of Gift, though it’s tied to water. There’s some sort of worked magic overlaying it. Suppressing it, maybe.”

After a moment he muttered, “Guess you know what you’re doin’. No one’s ever been able to tell. No one.”

“You going to tell me about your Gift?”

He wasn’t at all sure he would. That was obvious in his hesitation, if not his expression—she couldn’t see clearly—but finally he said, “Empathy.”

Her eyebrows rose. He wasn’t talking about physical empathy. That was an Earth Gift, and rare. No, his Gift would be the emotional sort—more common and less welcome. With a minor empathic Gift, you could get by okay as long as you avoided crowds. A strong Gift like Deacon’s could make life unlivable.

“That’s a rough Gift for anyone,” she said, “but for a cop . . . it seemed to be coated.”

“I keep it spelled shut.”

“I hadn’t realized that was possible.”

“My granny put up the block years ago. She, ah . . . she knows stuff. Her great-granddad was a shaman. Some stuff got passed down.”

Lily nodded and turned to hunt her way through the trees. “I’ve got a friend trained in African traditions. She’d be interested in that spell, if you’re willing to talk about it.”

“Might be. Depends. I’d have to get a feel for her.”

Even with his Gift coated by that spell, he probably picked up impressions about people. Lily’s mouth twisted wryly. That didn’t say much for her, considering how hostile he’d been. “You had any trouble with your block since the Turning? It’s handling more magic now.”

“I have to freshen the spell more often. That’s about it. You were connected with that, weren’t you? With the Turning and the dragons and all.”

“With the dragons, anyway.”

He stopped, staring at her. “So that part’s true?”

THETurning. The first person to call it that had been Lily’s grandmother, and the name had somehow spread and stuck. It fit. The world had turned from one thing into another, leaving everyone scrambling to understand the new rules.

It happened just before Christmas last year. The realms had shifted and nodes all over the world had cracked open, spilling a tsunami of raw magic. Computers—and everything they controlled—had been scrambled for days. That initial, overwhelming surge hadn’t been repeated, thank God, but power continued to leak into the world. Ambient magic levels were up and expected to keep rising.

One expert expected them to rise to levels not seen in roughly three thousand years.

For the moment, computers and related tech worked fine in places that lacked a major node. Unfortunately, people seemed attracted to nodes. All the big population centers had multiple nodes, which meant multiple problems . . . except for the cities that had dragons.

People used to think dragons were myth, like Cyclops or Baba Yaga. That’s what Lily had believed until last November, when she ran into them in Dis . . . a realm better known as hell. The dragons had been ready to end their centuries-long exile; Lily had been more than ready to return to Earth. Together, they’d made that happen . . . for a price.

The price had been Lily. Part of her, anyway, a part that had been separately embodied at the time. But they’d brought Rule home; he’d had the surgery he needed, and he’d healed. And it turned out that the part of her that had been sacrificed wasn’t entirely gone. Just mute. Mostly.

As for the dragons, they’d gone into hiding at first. Two months later, the Turning hit—and the dragons reappeared.

The world learned that dragons act as oversize sponges, soaking up magic. After serious negotiation culminating in the Dragon Accords, the dragons had agreed that each would overfly a prescribed territory, keeping the ambient magic level low. Problem was, there weren’t enough dragons. Only the largest U.S. cities and a dozen overseas had a resident dragon. Rural areas like this had to make do with lesser protections—spelled collection crystals, silk coverings, and less proven barriers or receptors.

Then there were cell phones. Radios worked reliably everywhere, but cell phones were hit or miss—fine in some areas, chancy in others. This randomness offended scientists. Both radios and cell phones operated on broadcast radio waves, yet for some reason cell phones were more affected by magic. Worse, the interference seemed random.