Eileen Wilks - Blood Lines

It stuck its snout into Paul's gut and slurped.

Rule jumped on its back. It screeched in rage and threw him off.

Cynna stopped and her voice rose: "… aerigarashiPAD!" Light snapped between her outflung hand and the demon, light thin and cold and colorless. The demon jerked.

And died.

Lily ran up to the big, ugly body, pressed her gun to the skull, and pulled the trigger. Her ears echoing from the shot, she called to Cynna. "Have you got your phone?"

Cynna stood motionless, her expression masked by the tattoos. Her hand fell, limp, to her side. "Yes."

"Call it in." She turned to Paul.

Some of his guts hung out the hole in his middle. The smell was rank. Rule sat on the other side of him and touched his nose to the red wolf's muzzle.

She knelt. Lupi healed so much faster than humans, but this… there was so much blood. Too much. It pumped out in spurts, but weakly. "Shit. He's bleeding out. There's an artery torn open somewhere…" She had to try, had to reach into the bloody cavity and try to find that torn artery.

His eyes opened. Then… it was like shaking the chips in a kaleidoscope to make them fall back in another pattern. The second she touched the ripped and slippery flesh, magic hummed along her fingertips like tactile music. And the cells of his body jiggled like agitated dust motes and fell back in place.

It was a man lying on the rough pavement of the street, not a wolf. A man naked and gutted and dying.

His eyes met hers. She saw confusion there, not pain. His mouth opened as if he would speak, but no sound came. Instead, blood did—filling his mouth, staining his lips, dribbling down his chin. His eyes cut to Rule and held there for a long moment. He exhaled… and left. Just like that, there was no one home anymore.

Rule lifted his nose to the sky and howled.

OVERHEAD, the sky was shit-brown. City lights reflected off low-hanging clouds, tossing back light without heat.

Things were mostly shit down below, too.

Police spots punctured the darkness. The street was cluttered with vehicles at both ends of the scene: squad cars, a government-issue Ford like Lily's, an ambulance, the crime-scene van, the cars that had delivered reporters from the Post and the AP. For the moment, local and federal officials were playing nice with each other, with the uniformed cops keeping the press and other nuisances away while FBI techs recorded the scene.

One ambulance had already departed, carrying the man who'd left the Triple-X Theater at the wrong time. He should be in surgery by now.

The red pulse of the lights on the remaining ambulance reminded Lily of Paul's blood pumping out, beat by beat.

Cynna knelt beside the demon's body, one hand stroking the air above it. Her form of spellcraft didn't look like much from the outside. Rule was across the street, talking on his cell phone. He'd needed to call his father.

So had Lily. Her own father, that is, and for different reasons. He was expecting to pick her up at the airport in a couple days, and she wouldn't be on that flight. She might not make it back for

Christmas. She'd left him a text message, hoping to delay the explanations.

"Cynna told you she had a premonition?" Croft asked as Lily finished a quick summary.

"Yeah." The man beside her was the only familiar face in the bustle of strangers working the scene. Martin Croft was a special agent, one of the two who'd recruited her. He was brown, too, but a lot friendlier shade than the sky—cinnamon without the sugar. There was a touch of Hah-vahd in his voice, a high gloss on his shoes, and no trace of a Gift in his makeup.

Despite that lack, he was one of the Unit's top agents. She'd been glad when he showed up. Lily knew how to handle a crime scene. She didn't know what to do with a dead demon.

Besides, if Croft was in charge, he'd have to talk to the press, not her. "She said it hit her suddenly that she needed to Find us."

"Hmm." Croft looked at Cynna, still making passes over the demon's corpse. "Yet she tests in the low teens on precognition."

"Low teens?" Lily's eyebrows went up. "Some of the unGifted score higher than that."

"Exactly. We'd better have a word with our Cynna."

Cynna stood as they approached. She was a tall woman with an Amazon's build: strong shoulders, miles of legs, and breasts any centerfold model would covet. Her hair was blond and brutally short; Lily suspected nature got a chemical assist in the coloring. Her features were the most ordinary thing about her, once you looked beneath the indigo tattoos that covered most of her face and body. She had a crooked nose, strong jaw, and eyes the color of whiskey. Her mouth was wide and prone to smiling.

Not tonight.

Cynna wore jeans, a thin black sweater, and an unzipped bomber jacket. Looking at her made Lily feel even colder. "Anything?"

Cynna shook her head. "Nothing. Like I figured, the bindings slipped off when it died. I couldn't trace its master."

"But you're sure it had a master? It didn't just show up on its own?" Lily's toes were going numb. She curled and uncurled them inside her shoes, hoping to get some circulation going.

The Evidence Response Team—that's what the FBI called their crime-scene techs—was standing by. Their boss broke in. She was an older woman with an unfortunate resemblance to Lou

Grant, only with more hair. "You finished with the woo-woo stuff?"

Cynna waved at the demon. "Have at it."

They'd already taken photos, both film and digital, so the next part was hands-on. It turned out two of the three were a mite reluctant to put their hands on a demon.

One—a short white guy with a mustache—shook his head. "I dunno, Marion. Jesus. Look at that thing. Just look at it. You ever seen anything like that? Seventeen years I've been doing this, and I've never seen anything like that."

"Now you have," his boss said. "Get your gloves on."

"Maybe this is a dumb question," said the third tech, "but are we sure it's dead?"

Lily supposed even jaded federal crime-scene officers weren't used to dealing with three hundred pounds of fanged and clawed demon. "See the brains spattered outside the skull?" she said. "They're a clue."

"Yeah, but demons—"

"Need brains to live," Cynna drawled, "same as everyone but politicians."

That brought a couple chuckles. D.C. cops loved jokes about politicians. "So what do we look for?" the one with a mustache asked, pulling on his gloves.

"Same as usual," Croft said. "Anything and everything." He collected Lily and Cynna with a glance, and the three of them moved away to let the techs do their job.

Not that Lily expected much to come of it. Cynna said there was a physical component involved in binding a demon, but they'd need an autopsy to find it. The demon would have eaten it.

Croft repeated Lily's earlier question. "Do you think the demon was sent? Bound to its task?"

"Well, yeah. You know they don't act like that normally."

"Pretend I don't know what you're talking about," Lily said. "Since I don't."

"Oh. Okay. First, it's supposed to be impossible for a demon to cross unsummoned. We now know that's not true, but the ability is damned rare. But mostly I'm going by the way it behaved. It went straight for Rule, even though you were the more immediate threat. An unbound demon wouldn't do that."

"It seemed to lose that focus on Rule after it attacked Paul."

"It got a taste of blood. Demons love blood, especially the human variety. Makes them drunk. I don't know what lupus blood does to them, but it might have gotten enough of a charge from the victim's blood to resist the binding briefly."

"They get a magical zing from blood?"

"Oh, yeah. Blood carries power. That's why it's been used in so many spells and rituals over the centuries."