Eileen Wilks - Blood Lines

It's been a little over three months since I met Rule. It seems a lot longer. I could turn all mushy and say it feels as if my life began when our eyes met that night at Club Hell, but I'd be lying. I had a life before him—bumpy and imperfect, but a life.

Just about everything in that life has changed, though. That is why it feels like a lot more than three months have passed.

I was a homicide cop back then. That's all I'd ever wanted to be—at least since the age of eight, when I learned that the monsters are real and look a lot like the rest of us. Now I'm working for the FBI, Unit 12 in MCD—that's the Magical Crimes Division—and I'm bonded for life to the prince of the Nokolai Clan.

Two months ago I was investigating the first West Coast killing in decades by a werewolf—excuse me, a lupus. Rule Turner looked to be my prime suspect. I realized pretty quickly he couldn't be, but it took longer to find out who was behind it all. A nutty telepath, a charismatic cult leader, and an ancient goddess-wannabe had teamed up to destroy all lupi in the United States, and they didn't object to killing a few humans along the way to taking over the country.

We stopped them. By "we" I mean Rule and me and a few others, like my grandmother—who's gone to China, dammit, on some sort of personal pilgrimage. She left about a week before I ended up in hell. Literally.

See, I killed the telepath. She was doing her damnedest to kill me at the time, so I didn't have much choice. But the cult's leader got away, and he took her staff with him. Or maybe I should say Her staff, because it was tied to the goddess we don't name. We had to find and destroy the staff, which meant tracking down Harlowe, the cult leader.

We found him. It didn't turn out well for any of us. Harlowe got dead, along with some others. I got split in two, with half of me blasted into the demon realm.

Rule went with me. That part of me, anyway.

Don't ask me to explain this split business. Cullen— that's Rule's friend, the sorcerer—might be able to, but you'd be making a mistake to ask. The man looks like walking sin, but he turns into the nutty professor when he starts talking spellwork and theory.

It gets pretty confusing after that. Neither part of me knew the other one existed. The one in hell—or Dis, as the natives call it—had no memory. She did have Rule, but he was stuck in wolf form. The me still on Earth knew Rule wasn't dead because of the mate bond, but finding him was another story. Eventually some of the lupus priestesses— they're called Rhejes—plus Cullen managed to open a small hellgate, which is only a little less illegal than mass murder. Me, Cullen, Cynna, and an obnoxious gnome named Max went after Rule.

Dis is split into regions, each ruled by its prince. The goddess-wannabe had infiltrated one of those regions by sending her avatar—think of an avatar as a sentient cup, with most of the person poured out to make room for some of the goddess—to make a deal with its prince. They had a falling out. The demon ate the avatar and went nuts, and both sides of me found ourselves in the middle of a war in hell.

Both of me were very surprised by the dragons.

The Other Me and Rule had been scooped up by a dragon early on. This hadn't seemed like a lucky break at the time; more like a nasty way to die. But in the end it was a dragon who knew how to get us back—get me back with my Other Me, that is, and get all of us back to Earth… including him and about twenty of his huge, beautiful, and deadly buddies.

We didn't escape unscathed. The authorities decided to pretend it wasn't possible to open a hellgate, so we weren't in trouble for that. After all, the gate vanished as soon as we returned. But Rule nearly died, and I… I know things I never thought it was possible to know. Death isn't the absolute I used to believe it to be.

And the dragons? They vanished so thoroughly that some people are talking about Hollywood publicity stunts. It did happen in California, after all.

This is the story of what happened after we all came home, sort of like Dorothy & Co. after Oz. I'm betting you thought everything was peachy for Dorothy once she got home.

We forget that Kansas is no safer than Oz. After all, that's where the tornado hit.

2:52 A.M., December 20 (Greenwich)

JUST outside Miller's Dale, Derbyshire, two budding naturalists snuck out of their cottage. Julie and Marnie weren't supposed to be out at night, of course, but they had every hope their mother would never know. She always slept very soundly after one of her "girls' night out" parties. They meant to find and photograph the pair of Mustela erminea whose tracks they'd spotted yesterday.

At least, Marnie was convinced they were stoat tracks. Julie kept annoying her sister by pointing out that they might have been made by Mustela nivalis, known to the Latin-impaired as the common weasel. Both left five-toed tracks and were largely nocturnal, though weasels often went about in the daytime, too.

But they'd also found a tuft of white fur nearby. "It could have come from a hare," Julie said for the fifth or sixth time.

"That was not hair from a hare."

"How do you know?"

"I just do." Privately Marnie had to admit she couldn't be sure, but it would be ever so lovely if they could find the weasel's beautiful white-coated cousin.

It was possible. Stoats weren't that uncommon, and Miller's Dale was blessed with not one, not two, but three nature preserves nearby: the two belonging to the Derbyshire Naturalists' Trust at Priestcliffe Lees and Station Quarry, and the National Nature Reserve at Monk's Dale. Being in the Peak District, the area was also lousy with hiking trails, not to mention tourists and other pests.

No hikers now. The moon was a lumpy golden goblin hanging low on the horizon, just over half-full. There was plenty of light for the girls to keep to the road that tracked the River Wye. Their breaths puffed pale in the still air. Marnie tucked her hands in her pockets, feeling the bulky shape of her new Nikon. She'd taken about a hundred pictures, trying to get the shutter speed, f-stop, and ISO right for night pictures. She'd preset everything. If they saw a Mustela erminea, all she had to do was point and shoot.

Some plans are never fulfilled. The girls made it less than halfway to the area where they'd spotted the tracks when they saw a soft glow coming from a small copse off to the left.

"Some stupid bugger has left a fire burning," Julie said.

"Maybe." The light wasn't flickering, like a fire would. "Looks more like a torch."

"Not moving, is it? C'mon. We'd better check."

Marnie jigged from foot to foot, wanting badly to pursue her stoats… but if that light did come from an abandoned campfire, it needed to be put out. "All right. But keep it quiet, in case it's just teenagers."

The girls were good at moving quietly so as not to alarm wildlife, but it was much darker beneath the trees. Still, they reached the small, circular clearing at the center of the copse without making too much racket. And stopped dead—then ducked behind a tree.

There were fairies in the fairy ring.

That's what Marnie thought they were, anyway, though no one had seen a fairy in… well, forever. But they were little, so little they probably wouldn't have come up to her knee if any of them had been standing… which they weren't. Plus they had great, huge, butterfly wings. And they glowed. As if they were made out of LEDs, a soft light radiated from all over their pale, perfect little bodies.