Eileen Wilks - Mortal Sins

Deacon scowled—but Rule caught the whiff of guilt-scent on him. “Why the hell would I want the press around?”

“You don’t like bossy women. You don’t like feds. And you really don’t like bossy female feds who have a personal connection to a lupus, because you’re a narrow-minded, self-righteous bigot.” Lily straightened, glanced at Rule. “We’d better go before the vultures realize you’re here.”

“Bigot!” Deacon shot to his feet. “You’re nuts, you know that? You notice that I’m black? Don’t tell me about bigotry, you sorry little—”

“Sheriff.” Rule stood. Anger slid into ice, setting its cold claws at his throat so that his voice dropped to what, in his other form, would have been a growl. “You don’t want to finish that sentence.”

Deacon stared at him, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. And didn’t say a word.

Rule turned to Lily. “I’d rather not be on television this morning.”

“My car’s out front. Yours isn’t. Back door?”

He nodded. The press would find him. He knew that. Halo was too small, and he was too well-known for his presence to remain secret. But he wanted a chance to talk to Toby first.

Lily opened the door, then paused to look over her shoulder. “By the way—the dogs weren’t rabid. That will be confirmed by the appropriate tests, but I already know what the problem was.”

“What?”

“Something they ate disagreed with them.”

RULEslid behind the wheel of his Mercedes. Lily shut the door on the passenger side with what, in a less perfectly engineered piece of equipment, would have been a slam. “Stupidity I can live with. God knows I have to, at times. But that sort of mean-spirited behavior . . . He did it on purpose, didn’t he?”

Rule started the car. “Perhaps not consciously, but he knew the veterinarian would cause trouble for you.” Not that Lily had taken that parting shot because of the trouble Deacon had caused her. To her way of thinking, she’d already dealt with that. She’d done it for Rule.

That protective instinct again. His lips curved up. Lily might never run four-footed in the moonlight with him, but in other ways she made a fine wolf.

“A couple of the reporters recognized me,” she said. “They asked about you, of course. They’ll find you pretty quickly here.”

“I know. You’ve given me time to warn Toby and Mrs. Asteglio, at least. You touched the dogs’ bodies?”

She nodded. “The magic felt different, I guess because of the way they, uh, encountered it—through ingestion. Slimy as hell. But it was there. I’ve warned the ERT to treat all the bodies as biohazards. Rule, Ruben wants me to work the case.”

Ruben Brooks was the head of Unit 12, a formerly obscure section of the FBI’s Magical Crimes Division that had risen to importance with the Turning because most of its agents were Gifted.

Rule was silent as he pulled out of the small parking lot onto an empty street. Dawn had cracked the horizon and light was bleeding back into the world, but no one seemed to be up yet, save themselves. “I suspect he didn’t phrase it as a request.”

“No. Not really.”

“Good.”

“What?” Her head swung toward him fast enough to send her hair flying. “I know you don’t want me to work this case, not with the hearing so close. Then there’s Leidolf and what you have to do there.”

“I don’t want it, no, which is why it’s just as well Brooks didn’t leave it up to you. You would have been torn by opposing obligations. I understand why Brooks wants you on it. No one else has your protection against death magic, for one thing.” Lily’s Gift gave her that. She could touch magic; she couldn’t be touched by it. “For another, you want this one. It’s already yours.”

She reached for his right hand, curling hers around it. “Think you know me pretty well, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t say that. You’re like Russia.”

“What?” This time he’d surprised a smile from her. “I’m guessing you don’t mean I’m cold—too much evidence to the contrary. And as for any communist tendencies you think I’m harboring—”

“No, I was borrowing from Churchill. Like Russia, you’re a ‘riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ But I’ve been studying the riddle, the mystery, and the enigma awhile. I know the obvious things. You’ll let go of an investigation about as easily as a bulldog unclamps its jaws.”

“So I’m an enigmatic bulldog.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know about the enigmatic part.” Her smile faded. “Speaking of dogs . . . it’s stupid, but that got to me. Having to shoot those dogs got to me.”

Rule didn’t doubt that, though he suspected she was focusing on that horror because the other—the children—was too large to come at directly. He squeezed her hand. “I won’t tell you it wasn’t your fault, because you already know that. But maybe it hasn’t occurred to you that death by bullet was cleaner than what they’d have endured otherwise.”

“They’d been pets, you know? At least two of them had. They had collars. No tags, but collars. If you could have seen their ribs . . . They were starving to death. That’s why they dug up the grave. They were starving.”

“They were sinned against twice—by those who abandoned them, and by whoever left the tainted bodies for them to find. But not by you, Lily.”

“I guess.” Her eyebrows knitted. “I don’t see why the magic transferred that way. Why they went mad. I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.”

“I don’t know much about death magic.”

“Well, neither do I, but I thought it took a big-deal ritual to work it. I’ll ask Karonski about that.”

“Ah. Will he be joining you? Or is Brooks sending you some other minions?”

“Minions. I like that.” She smiled, but in the pale light of early morning, she looked tired. “For now, just the ERT. Karonski will be calling soon, though. Ruben’s going to brief him. He’s on a case in Wisconsin he can’t leave—one involving a coven gone over to the dark side.”

Surprised, he looked at her. “A Wiccan coven?”

“I’m afraid so. Magical theft. They found a way to persuade the Bank of America’s computers they were millionaires. That’s been done before, of course, but not effectively. Their spell was a lot more sophisticated than the typical lone practitioner’s—it took months for the bank to become suspicious. The story’s going to hit the media in a big way in another day or two, when Karonski makes the arrests. Ruben says Karonski plans to come out of the closet at the press conference.”

“Out of the—oh. You mean he’ll make his own Wiccan status public.” Abel had avoided that in the past. “Damage control?”

“Yeah. If nothing else, people will see that they need the good witches to protect them from the bad ones.” She shook her head. “There’s always been some distrust of Wiccans, especially in rural areas, but it’s worse since the Turning.”

Rural areas, yes, and small towns like Halo.

“You didn’t mention the AP earlier, or CNN. Are they here?”

“They will be.”

Oh, yes. The prospect of a magical component to the murder of children would draw reporters in droves—reporters who would demand to know why Rule was in Halo. Reporters who would gleefully switch to report on a custody hearing involving the son of the Nokolai “prince,” shoving their microphones at Toby, fighting for a chance to put the boy’s face on the six o’clock news.

Rule wasn’t too happy with the sheriff himself.

The sifted light of dawn had already strengthened as summer blew on the coals of yesterday’s heat, ready to throw a new day onto the forge. Halo’s streets remained quiet, but were no longer empty. Rule passed a shiny Ford pickup headed the other way, its driver sipping Coke from a cup the size of a bucket of popcorn. A gray Suburban was backing out of the cracked driveway leading to a small frame house surrounded by mounds of hydrangeas, their bright blue blooms floating in clouds of green like flakes from a dandruff sky.