Death Magic (13 page)

Read Death Magic Online

Authors: Eileen Wilks

“Rather the way you make your fingers flex or grasp or release.”
She drummed those fingers on the table. “A baby doesn’t arrive knowing how to use its hands. Maybe I need to—to practice or something.” But she didn’t really possess the mantle. It hung inside her, impervious to her thoughts and will. She didn’t
feel
it the way Rule felt the mantles he carried. Lily tilted her head to look up at him. “You could do it, right? If you wanted to, you could put the Leidolf mantle in someone from Leidolf.”
“If he carried the founder’s blood, yes. Apparently that’s the problem with Wythe. Their founder’s bloodline has grown thin.”
“But it has to go to one of them.” They knew that one Wythe clan member held plenty of the founder’s blood—Brian’s son. Lily had met him yesterday. He was three years old.
But there were six adult lupi descended from the previous Rho’s great-grandfather, dammit. They had the bloodline—a bit diluted, yeah, but the mantle shouldn’t be so damn picky. Aside from the sheer annoyance of the furry tickle in her gut, Wythe needed a Rho. Preserving the mantle might have kept the clan from an explosive death, but it didn’t give them a leader.
Rule squeezed her shoulder and moved away, aiming for the coffeepot. “We’ll begin looking outside Wythe.”
“Lost ones
?”
she said dubiously. The potential for Change was carried as a recessive in clan daughters and their children. If two people with that recessive got together, they sometimes made a little lupus baby without either of them knowing it was possible. The clans kept records, though. Pretty good records. They kept track of their daughters’ descendents. “That’s a long shot.”
“It would be, yes, but I was speaking of children born to a lupus of another clan whose mother is Wythe or descended from Wythe. We don’t keep records of such pairings, so it may take a while.”
“I can wait.” She didn’t have much choice. “I’m just hoping not to have to wait for little Charlie to grow up.”
“If the Lady intends the mantle to go to a Wythe clan member anytime soon, then someone exists who can accept it. If so, we’ll find him. I hope to have all such potential heirs located in time for the All-Clan.” He filled his mug. “Ready for a refill?”
She sighed and pushed her chair back and stood. “I’d better grab a shower and get going. I may not be doing anything much at Headquarters, but I have to show up on . . .”
Rule’s eyebrows snapped down. He took a quick step toward her. “What is it?”
An ice pick through my skull.
“Headache.”
“Do you want some . . .” He was in front of her now. She felt him, but didn’t see him. Her eyes were closed against the pain. “That isn’t an ibuprofen headache.”
“I’m okay.” But her voice came out wrong and her hands felt clammy. “Some ibuprofen, though, sure. That’s a good . . .” Slowly her eyes opened. “Or maybe not. It’s easing off on its own.”
Rule took her arms. “You’re pale.”
“It hurts, but it’s going away.” No, not going away. Gone, between one heartbeat and the next. Though the departure of pain left her a bit shaky . . . she mustered a reassuring smile. “I really am okay.”
His fingers tightened. “You’ll cancel your session with Mika today.”
Of course that’s what he thought of. “I will not.”
“Lily—”
“I’ll tell Mika about the headache. If there is a connection—and honestly, I don’t think there is. But if I’m wrong, he’d know, wouldn’t he?”
“Sam probably would. I’m not sure about Mika. He’s the youngest of them.”
“Then he can ask Sam. Rule, it was just one of those weird pains everyone gets from time to time.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I guess not.” She smiled wryly and went up on tiptoe to drop a kiss on his unsmiling mouth. “Everyone human, I should’ve said.”
NINE
 
 
ROCK
Creek Park was a welcome, woodsy sprawl sticking its unpaved finger up D.C.’s concrete butt. Portions of the park were tidied into bike trails, paths, bridges, a planetarium, a couple historic sites, and tennis courts. The wilder bits welcomed birds, raccoons, even the occasional deer or coyote.
And one dragon.
Not that Mika’s lair had originally been one of the wild bits. It had started out as an amphitheater—the closest thing, Lily supposed, to a cave Mika had spotted when he arrived last December to take up his duties as a magic sponge. That lair was supposed to have been temporary, but Mika had decided he liked it here.
No one knew why, exactly. The park was a pretty place, but Lily wasn’t sure dragons shared the aesthetic sensibilities of humans. Though she knew Mika liked trees. She walked along a cement path roofed by the interwoven branches of oaks beginning to don their fall colors . . . a path that was still intact because Mika hadn’t wanted to damage the trees that hugged it so closely. He’d removed most of the cement in his domain.
It was the parking lot, she’d heard, that had pushed park authorities over the edge.
They wanted it back. They wanted their amphitheater back. There wasn’t much they could do about it—the Accords allowed dragons to choose from any publicly owned land. But city authorities were unhappy, too. Lily could see why. People can be remarkably stupid at times. You could post all the “Danger: Dragon Lair” signs you want. A few idiots are going to climb the fence anyway.
As far as Lily knew, Mika hadn’t eaten any intruders. There had been a few incidents, however.
D.C. authorities had grown worried enough to approach Sam about it. Sam—otherwise known as Sun Mzao—was the largest, oldest, and most powerful of the dragons who’d returned to Earth after their long sojourn in the hell realm. It was he who’d sung the gate open wide enough, he who brought Lily and Rule with him . . . or they’d brought him, depending on how you looked at it.
Sam had been the one to descend from the night sky onto the White House lawn when he deemed it time to open negotiations. After the Turning, magic leaked into the world in quantities human tech couldn’t handle. Dragons absorbed free magic—and needed it, too. They also needed a new home, hell having grown too hot for them after a certain demon lord devoured the Great Bitch’s avatar and went wildly insane.
It wasn’t surprising D.C.’s mayor thought Sam was the dragons’ leader. Wrong, but not surprising. People really didn’t understand dragons.
Sam had been—for him—quite polite to the people who’d flown across the country to speak with him. He hadn’t allowed the mayoral party into his lair, but he had replied when they stood at the gate and talked to him.
Mika is young
, Sam had said.
He will tire of his odd choice eventually.
“But ‘eventually’ might mean years. Maybe decades, from what I understand. People use the park
now
. Children. It’s an invitation to disaster, having him there.”
Has Mika eaten anyone he shouldn’t? A pet? Your government was anxious about pets, I recall.
“No, but the danger remains. He is—”
Not in violation of the Accords. If he violates the Accords, you may tell any of us and we will deal with it. Otherwise, it is none of my affair. Go away.
“If you don’t wish to order him to move to the new lair, perhaps you could persuade him. Or just talk to him about it. He won’t listen to us, but it’s a very nice place, with a small lake and—”
At that point, the mayor and four of the five people with him had fallen asleep. The fifth—a husky National Park Service employee—had been told to remove the collapsed members of his party. He had. Quickly.
D.C.’s mayor was wonderfully persistent. That’s why Lily knew about the exchange between him and Sam. After he woke up, he’d gone to Grandmother to ask her to intervene.
Grandmother had served him tea—not the full tea ceremony, simply the beverage—gotten the story from him, then told him the truth. “Mika has shown admirable restraint in the face of such rudeness. You will learn to live with his presence. You will stop pestering him, and you will not pester any of the other dragons about this. No one tells a dragon where to lair. Not even another dragon.”
Lily smiled as she reached the end of the tree tunnel. Grandmother did enjoy telling that story.
Trees and path alike ended at a wall of earth and rock greened by uncut grass and an assortment of what gardeners optimistically refer to as volunteers or native plants. Weeds, to most people. Lily looked up. As hills go, this one was more abrupt than most. Lots of boulders, which was like the rocky jumble back home, but these were planted, not grown naturally from the earth’s bones.
She’d been warned about this aspect of Mika’s upgrades, so she’d dressed for it—jeans, Nikes, a tee, a light jacket that hid her weapon and had a secure inside pocket for her phone. After a moment, she spotted the faint trail off to her right and started climbing.
There were two ways into the heart of Mika’s lair. One involved the lost parking lot, now a large livestock pen. Lily had been told not to approach through the dining room, so she toiled up the Mika-made slope. It was steep but not tricky; only one short stretch required handholds.
As she reached the top, magic buzzed faintly on her skin. Mika’s ward, she assumed. She looked down. Farther down than she’d come up.
It didn’t look much like an amphitheater anymore. Where rows of seats had stepped neatly down toward the stage, stone buttressed the earthen wall she’d climbed. Not solid stone, nor were the boulders arrayed with the tidy geometrics humans favored; it was thicker here, thinner there, with the occasional jut of a boulder clearly not native to this soil. An artistic choice, perhaps. At its foot was bare earth—Mika’s landing pad and sun porch. Beyond that, the half dome where orchestras had played was partly obscured by hard-packed dirt built up to create a lip. The dome’s roof was obscured by yet more heaped dirt. For a startled moment it made Lily think of an enormous sand crab burrowing down to safety.
Dragons always lair in earth and rock. They blocked the mental cacophony. “Hello, Mika,” Lily said—and nearly jumped when a small, gray streak arrowed past her feet. A cat.
I named her Beelzebub
, Mika said. His mental voice was different from Sam’s—cool and precise, yes, but without the razorlike clarity, and with a whiff of flavor. It was like the difference between Arctic ice and a snow cone dribbled with a few drops of Bahama Mama.
She wanted more syllables at first, but I don’t think her name should be longer than she is. Beelzebub is a use-name, of course.
“Ah—do cats have real names?” Lily eyed the rocky jumble. This was going to be harder than the other side had been. Her bad arm twinged as if already protesting its role in the descent.
Your question is silly. I don’t know all cats.
“I suppose not. Look, do I have to come down there for my lesson? Maybe we could do it with me up here.”
No.
Thirty feet below and twice that far horizontally, the shiny coils disposed on the sun porch began unwinding. Mika wasn’t as large as Sam—no longer than a house, she thought, tail included, and dragons were eighty percent tail, neck, and wings. But he was ohmygod beautiful.
His scales were red. All shades of red, from ruby to magenta to crimson, shading into eye-popping orange on the wings currently folded along his back. He glistened and gleamed in the sunlight like every jewel men had ever coveted.
Sam said you had sustained damage to your limb. I perceive it has not healed. Humans heal poorly. This impedes you? Hold still. I’ll fetch you.
“No, that’s not necessary, I can—” But dragons can move fast when they want. Before Lily could finish telling him not to, Mika’s bunched haunches had launched him into the air. He jumped most of the ninety feet between them to land in a blaze of brilliance, wings outstretched for balance. Landed lightly, too, his rear talons gripping a couple of those outthrust boulders.
His front talons gripped
her
. She made a deeply undignified noise more squeak than scream.
You are very loud
, Mika told her disapprovingly. And shoved himself backward off the stone-strewn embankment.

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