Okay, first question: why tonight? Why had Ruben tried to recruit her now instead of three weeks ago, or three weeks from now, or not at all?
That one almost answered itself. He had something he wanted her to do that hadn’t needed doing earlier. Something he couldn’t ask of her as an FBI agent. Maybe something he couldn’t put on the record because the wrong person might learn about it? Something to do with the traitor.
Lily knew very little about the investigation into the attack on Ruben. Abel Karonski was lead, but if he’d turned up anything solid, he’d managed to keep it a big, fat secret. That was harder than a civilian might think. However tight-lipped FBI types were with outsiders, they were as prone to chatting with their colleagues as anyone else. Prone to speculating when they lacked information, too, but Lily hadn’t heard any rumors. Everyone seemed to know that the perp was with the Bureau. No one knew anything else.
Lily’s burning desire to arrest people flamed especially hot for the rat bastard who’d betrayed them all and nearly killed Ruben. If she could have a part in catching him or her, that was almost enough to get her to join the damned ghosts.
Almost.
Next question. This one, she realized, she had to ask out loud. “Have you told Ruben about, uh . . . the thing that’s the Lady’s secret?” Mantles, that is.
Mantle
was a word whose meaning Lily could only approach obliquely. She knew it was a magical construct that unified a clan and granted unquestionable authority to the Rho who held it. She knew that lupi needed the mantles. But she couldn’t say how they worked, how they felt, why the loss of that feeling could drive a lupus insane. She knew it could, but how and why were outside her experience.
“I haven’t,” Rule said. “Because that
is
the Lady’s secret, and not up to me to disclose.”
“But that thing you can’t disclose keeps Friar from eavesdropping magically on us.” Friar’s power came from the Great Bitch. The mantles blocked
her
magic, so his clairaudience didn’t work around Rule. “He can’t listen in, and it’s close to impossible for a directional mic to pick up anything from a moving vehicle. And if someone had planted a bug on the car, Scott would have smelled it, right?”
His eyebrows lifted. “We can speak more freely here than in other places, if that’s what you mean.” But his glance cut to their driver. Scott might seem professionally oblivious to their conversation, but he heard every word.
She nodded that she’d understood. No talking about Armageddon or Shadow Units in front of Scott. Or, technically, behind him. But Scott knew this part already. “I’m wondering about the Wythe mantle.” She rested a hand on her stomach. “This has to be part of your Lady’s plans.”
“Of course.”
And the Lady was a patterner. Lily hadn’t thought of her in those terms before. It changed things . . . she couldn’t say how, exactly, but since the Lady was an Old One, she’d be an adept. Maybe that meant that Lily was doing just what she was supposed to do.
Rule wasn’t the only one in the car with a mantle. Lily had one, too. Sort of.
She wasn’t a Rho. She wasn’t lupi, could never be lupi, so she couldn’t use the mantle in her gut. Couldn’t do anything with it but get rid of it as soon as possible . . . which surely would happen on Tuesday, when they went to Wythe Clanhome in upper New York.
Last month, Lily and Rule had rescued his friend Brian from Friar, a sidhe lord, and a bunch of evil elf minions. But they’d been too late. The sidhe lord’s experiments had damaged Brian so badly he was dying, and he lacked an heir. With his death, the mantle would be lost, and with it the clan. That meant death for some, insanity for others. Probably human deaths, too, because lupi did not deal well with being clanless.
Lily’s Gift let her absorb magic the way dragons do. She’d breathed in the mantle as Brian died—and the lupi’s Lady had somehow made it so she didn’t just absorb the power. Instead the mantle resided inside her, intact and unreachable, a furry tickle that never went away.
Most of the time it felt like she needed to scratch her colon. Or burp.
She was caretaker of the mantle, not Rho. Wythe needed a Rho, but all they had right now were the clan elders. Normally they were an informal council of advisors to the Rho, men and the occasional woman who held positions of trust—as chief tender, for example, or head of security, or manager of an important business owned by the clan.
Walt McDonald was the most senior Wythe elder. He’d been an attorney for forty years before retiring to run Wythe’s dairy farm, which he’d done for twelve years now. He was one hundred and seven years old, for God’s sake, yet he consulted Lily over every little decision. As if she knew what to do with a twenty-year-old lupus who couldn’t control the Change reliably! Or water rights. Or the dozen other things he’d called her about.
Not for much longer. Lily figured that if the Lady had stuffed a mantle into her, she could get it out again and put it where it belonged. They just had to find the right Wythe lupus to take it. The whole clan would be waiting for her Tuesday, so surely one of them would . . .
Rule turned her hand palm up, cradling it still in his left hand. With his right he gently opened her fingers.
She looked at him. It was darker along this stretch of road in spite of the headlights flashing up and past, up and past, but she saw the way his mouth turned up. The way his eyes locked on to hers.
Rule had hidden something from her. Something important. She hated that, but he hadn’t hidden himself. Not on purpose. Shouldn’t she have known, though? Shouldn’t she have realized a secret lay between them? Had she been too wrapped up in everything else to see? In her wounded arm, her job, Friar’s disappearance, the All-Clan that was finally scheduled, the muscle that might or might not regrow, the furry tickle in her gut and the complications it posed, their upcoming wedding, the . . .
Okay, yes, she should have noticed. But maybe she could give herself a pass this time.
With his thumb, Rule drew a circle lightly, lightly in the palm of her hand.
She knew his body very well. She knew the shapes of his mind . . . sometimes. Other times those shapes mystified her. It was like wandering through a fog, with shapes now emerging, now retreating into mist. How well could she know the mind of one who was only a part-time human, after all?
His thumb circled the pad at the base of her index finger. Every nerve ending in her hand woke up. Her breath did, too.
Slowly she smiled. Some shapes were easy to recognize.
For the next three-and-a-half miles Rule drew flesh-whispers in her palm. They were both silent, both still, except for the feathery brush of his thumb, over and over.
Somewhere Lily had read that there were around twenty-five hundred nerve receptors per square centimeter in the palm. Every one of them was bleeding sensation into the rest of her body by the time the Mercedes stopped in front of the Georgetown row house.
Rule thanked Scott gravely, as he always did. He and Lily got out on the sidewalk side, not touching now. Overhead, the sky was a dark, blank shield, its vastness muddied by D.C.’s reflected light. Their street contributed to the overall light pollution, but light made shadows, didn’t it? Hard shadows, topped by the smoggy shield civilization raised between it and infinity. They were both watchful as they slipped between parked cars.
Lily unlocked the door. Even such minor details as this were scripted now. Rule’s senses and reaction time were better than hers, so he kept watch while she opened the door and stepped into softer light. He closed the door behind them, muffling the city sounds of traffic and television, the distant wail of a siren, and someone’s dog barking two streets away.
Rule moved to the foot of the stairs. He stood motionless, head up and nostrils flared. She waited until a subtle shift in his stance said he’d found no strange scents. Safety was a slippery state, but for now, they were as safe as they could be.
She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t know how to stop. It wasn’t as if she’d thought of safety as a constant—not since she was eight, anyway—but the dangers were so faceless and pervasive now that she—
“I hated it.” Rule spun and stepped to her and gripped her arms, his eyes a dark blaze in his set face. “Do you understand? I hated keeping my word, keeping a secret from you, a place I couldn’t let you in. I don’t know how cops and Ruben and whoever else piles up such barricades of secrets can stand it.”
She tilted her face up. His brows were drawn. His fingers clenched on her arm just below the wounded place, where muscle might grow back. Or not.
He needed something from her. Words? She hoped not. She didn’t want words tonight. Words would open a gate to thinking and worry and fear, to the precipice gaping before them, a stony-toothed hole big enough to swallow a world, and her mind would skitter off to find means for a bridge, some way across or around or away from. And she’d do that, she had to, but not now. Now she slid her hands onto his shoulders, where cashmere slinked between his skin and hers. She went up on tiptoe.
She didn’t kiss him. She bit his lower lip. Not hard, but hard enough. “Mine.” She nipped again. “Secrets and all, you’re mine. Don’t do it again.”
He lifted both hands to her face and ran his thumbs along the underside of her jaw. “Yours,” he agreed, and touched the necklace he’d put around her throat earlier. “This. I want to see you in just this.” He cocked a brow. “Upstairs?”
Yes.
Halfway up, a stair creaked beneath her foot. Otherwise the house was silent. To her, anyway. What did he hear? Three steps from the top he put his hand on the small of her back. Her heart stuttered.
“I’ll get the lights,” he said at the top of the stairs. Three were on, one in each bedroom. And the two downstairs, of course—parlor and kitchen—but they left those on all night. Security again. If anyone made it inside despite José and Craig, they’d show up great in the well-lit interior. Plus this gave them the option of suddenly shutting off the lights, blinding the intruder or intruders more thoroughly than it would Rule or the guards. If the guards had survived, that is.
And she was sick to death of thinking about security and survival. While Rule turned off lights, Lily went straight to their room at the back of the house. She left that light on.
“Catch up,” she said when he joined her, and popped the button on her jeans. The wooden floor was decorated with her shoes, sweater, and bra.
He smiled and caught up—at lupi speed. Damn competitive man. She still wore her panties but he was entirely naked when he knelt in front of her, pressed his face to her belly . . . and blew raspberries.
She looked down at him, astonished. He looked up, grinning.
Oh, he wanted to play. She lifted her eyebrows. “Don’t get full of yourself. I know your weak spots.”
His hands slid up her thighs to her butt, clamped, and lifted—and sent her sailing onto the bed.
She landed in a whomp of tangled limbs and laughter, rolled onto hands and knees, and beckoned him.
Come on, big boy, I can take you . . .
He dived onto the bed in a tackle that would have been far more effective if she’d been standing. And the tickle fight was on.
She was horribly ticklish on her sides at the waist. He knew it, damn him. He had two main points of vulnerability: his belly and his underarms. The belly was an iffy target because he could banish tickles by tightening his abs. Armpits, though—they worked every time, if she could get to them.
There was only one rule: no pinning. Otherwise the battle would be over too quickly; he could pin her about nine times oftener than she could him. She was agile, she was ruthless, but she was not lupus. So Lily was indignant when, with most of the covers on the floor and both of them breathless from involuntary laughter, he flipped her onto her back and held her down with the length of his body. “Hey!”
“I submit.” His breath came fast. He was grinning in the way that melted her, open and happy. She didn’t see it often enough. “I submit, I submit. You won.”
“You’re throwing the match.”
“Oh, yes,” he breathed, and lowered his face to her shoulder. This time he just inhaled, deep and luxurious. The inhale was to fill up on her scent, she knew. The exhale was her name, just that, warm and moist against her skin. “Lily.”
Something in that soft exhale . . . she sifted a hand through his shaggy, too-long hair. “I’m here.”
He pushed up on one elbow, raising his upper body, looking in her eyes. His were dark with need. “And here.” He touched his chest.
She knew then, knew what his need was—not sex, or not just sex. He was only a man. He could take her scent inside him, but he couldn’t take her body in, couldn’t open to her as she did him. He had no portal, no cradle made to receive. Only skin, surfaces. And breath.
So she breathed on him. “And here,” she whispered, letting her breath warm his shoulder before she licked it. “Here,” she said, and blew on his throat, licked and nibbled, then blew again on the damp skin. He shivered. “And here.” She drew her leg up along his, a slow slide of flesh, and ran her hand along his arm. He had long arms, tightly knit, smooth and firm with muscle. She kissed him in the hinge of his arm, the bent place, the tender skin in the crook of his elbow.
There is no place on you I can’t love, and love grants me entry . . .