Death Magic (33 page)

Read Death Magic Online

Authors: Eileen Wilks

“Ah! Yes, that might help. That might indeed help. They’re supposed to have a very keen sense of smell.”
“It’s strongest when they’re in wolf form, so I’ll ask Scott to Change.”
“Excellent. First I need to look over those pictures you sent me. Hold on a moment.”
Scott came out of the back of the house, carrying a plastic grocery sack. “Baggies, trash bags, Sharpie, masking tape, paper towels.” He held it out. “I couldn’t find paper bags or a ruler.”
“Thanks.” She took the sack and reported to the hearty Uddley on what kind of crime scene equipment she had. “I’ve got my spiral, so I can take notes, make some sketches. I don’t have anything to measure with, but I can estimate shorter distances pretty well. My spread hand is eight inches from thumb to little finger, so . . . just a sec.” Scott still stood there, waiting. “Yes?”
“Is it okay if I scrounge for sandwich fixings or something? For all of us, I mean, but especially Cullen. Healing burns a lot of calories.”
And lupi shouldn’t get too hungry. “Sure, go ahead. I won’t need you right away, but eat quick, just in case.”
He headed for the back of the house. Lily did, too, stopping at the doorway into the library. “We’re going to do this bass-ackwards,” Uddley boomed cheerfully in her ear. “Could all blow up in our faces, but we’ll go for it anyway.”
“I’m not following you.”
“When you work a scene, you never start with a theory and look for evidence to support it—but that’s what we’re going to do. It gives us a clear set of priorities, you see, in case you run out of time. Now, we know we’ve got an incendiary device, not a true bomb—not much blast, plenty of burn. According to your witness, there were two projectiles.”
“According to one of them, yes. The other—Dr. Fagin—I haven’t interviewed him yet. His injuries needed attention.”
“Two projectiles fits my theory. They wanted to break the window first so they could get their incendiary device well into the room before it broke and started burning everything. The witness you interviewed is a lupus, yes?”
She agreed that he was.
“Excellent. It’s his description of the smells that all but clinches it. Good man. Observant. I’m betting someone tossed an SIP.”
“Okaaay.”
A quick, booming laugh. “Jargon’s a bitch. Sorry. SIP stands for self-igniting phosphorus. The original SIPs were made during World War II by the British, but were never used in combat. Too dangerous to the user. They’re a take on the good old Molotov cocktail, though more sophisticated chemically. Easy to make. You put white or yellow phosphorus—that’s the garlic smell—mixed with benzene, water, and a bit of rubber into a glass bottle. Benzene smells sweet, see? Like your lupus reported. You throw your bottle at a hard surface. It breaks, the ingredients ignite, and you get a quick, hot fire, caustic smoke, and fumes from phosphorous pentoxide and sulfur dioxide. Sulfur dioxide—that and phosphorus make a burned match smell, and it’s also a key ingredient in smog. It all fits. So here’s what we’ll do.”
Uddley went on to give her a quick précis of what she would do in the first hour and what would come later, if she had more time. He assured her he could stay on the phone with her all day, if necessary—“No need to rush on my account! It’s all billable hours!” They’d keep the line open, but she’d need both hands to work the scene, so she put her phone on speaker and clipped it to her waistband.
Thirty-eight minutes later she’d taken dozens of pictures, completed a rough sketch, and had begun collecting trace evidence. She’d scraped burned crud from walls and floor, carefully marking each Baggie with the precise location, and sticking each location with a bit of masking tape, then taking a picture of the marked location. She’d also taken into evidence one larger item—a big chunk from a concrete block. Probably the first projectile.
Now it was time to collect glass. Unfortunately, there was glass everywhere from the window. What they wanted was glass that might have come from a bottle filled with phosphorus, benzene, and a bit of rubber.
Time for less conventional means. Lily straightened. Her right arm, the weak one, was aching. She’d been leaning on it a lot. Absently she rubbed it. “Scott? I’m ready for you to Change.”
A tinny voice came from near her waist. “I’d like to brief him myself, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure. Hold on a minute, Scott,” she said, heading for the door to the kitchen. She reached for her phone with her left hand and unclipped it.
And dropped it when her hand tingled, then turned numb and useless.
TWENTY-TWO
 
 
“YOU
should’ve told him,” Scott said.
They were in Rule’s car, headed for Bethesda. Scott was driving, of course. Lily had turned the heater on. The sun was down and the temperature kept dropping. Surely it was too early in the year for snow? She hoped so. She hadn’t brought a heavy coat with her.
Rule was in the ambulance with Cullen. Her mate-sense told her they were still in motion, so they hadn’t reached the hospital yet. But they’d get there well ahead of her and Scott, having left first. Before Lily could wade through the surging sea of reporters to the car, she’d needed to hand off evidence and get a bandage on her arm so it didn’t bleed onto her jacket.
Sherry had been right about the type of offering the elemental would require. The cut was small and tidy, on the inside of her elbow . . . her left elbow. That hand was working again. Not quite normally, but headed there. “I’m going to tell him. I want privacy for it.”
She hadn’t had that at Fagin’s place. Once the elemental agreed to release them, things had moved quickly. They’d had a brief window of time to seal the deal with blood, then scramble or be passed over the earthen wall. Then they’d been surrounded by cops of both local and federal flavors, with the press just the other side of the barricades.
“When are you going to tell him?”
“At the hospital, probably. You don’t argue like this with Rule.”
“You’re not my Rho. And I do get to argue with Rule if I think it’s important. Not during, but afterward.”
She sighed and shoved back her hair with her left hand. Those fingers still felt thick and clumsy, but she felt them. She could use them.
No pain bolt this time. Just a hand that forgot it was part of her body, or a brain that forgot how to talk to the hand. The paralysis hadn’t lasted long, but for a few minutes Lily had been scared shitless. She’d had Scott find her some coffee—old stuff that he’d heated up in the microwave. Maybe it had helped.
Lily let her hand drop to her lap. She closed the fingers in a loose fist. Opened them. Closed them. “Thank you for giving me time to tell him myself. I am going to. I’m not quite stupid enough to think I could keep this from him.” Or that she had any right to. But God, she was dreading it.
Rule was teetering on some unholy edge. She might not understand what that edge was, exactly, but she recognized it. She’d seen his eyes bleeding toward black like that before—when she was threatened, when he was locked up, when the first of the power winds blew shortly before the Turning.
She’d never seen the wildness try to take over, try to force the Change on him, when things were calm. He was angry that Cullen had been hurt, sure. But anger, even rage, didn’t threaten his control.
Maybe he’d felt trapped because of the ward? That plus the imminence of the full moon . . . yeah, that might do it.
Relief loosened the muscles across her neck. Much as he hated it, Rule did suffer from claustrophobia. Though it was usually triggered by small, enclosed spaces, and Fagin’s yard wasn’t small. Not like an elevator, which Rule hated but consistently used. Not like the cramped seating on a plane . . . which he also hated but consistently used. His eyes didn’t bleed to black when they flew across the country.
But he
had
been trapped. Until the elemental agreed to let them out, Rule had been well and truly trapped. “Did it bother you?” she asked Scott. “Being trapped inside the elemental’s wards, I mean.”
“I didn’t like it, but I knew we’d get out sooner or later. Why?”
“Some lupi have a touch of claustrophobia.”
“A touch of it, yeah, and that would be true for just about all of us. But there was plenty of room and, like I said, I knew we’d get out. I guess if we’d been stuck there a couple days I’d have started getting the willies, but we were only there a couple hours.”
Two hours and twenty minutes, to be specific. Time enough for Lily to get quite a bit of glass bagged and tagged, with Scott’s help. With the help, maybe, of the coffee she’d drunk. Lily looked at the fist she kept clenching and opening. It was getting better.
She could have gone to Rule right away, right when it happened, and told him. That’s what Scott had wanted her to do. She’d finished collecting evidence instead. Maybe that was wrong. No doubt Rule would be angry that she’d waited. But she didn’t have these spells because she’d been exerting herself. She had them because the Lady was messing with the stupid damn mantle.
And that, she feared, was why Rule hovered on that precarious edge. It was rage unbalancing him, yes, but rage born of betrayal. Not something she could discuss with Scott. With Cullen, yeah, if he hadn’t been hurt, she could’ve asked him. But Rule was Scott’s Rho. Lupi needed to know their Rho was in control.
And he was, Lily told herself. Maybe Rule was having to work for control, but he hadn’t lost it. But she hoped they got to the damn hospital soon. Absently she rubbed the crook of her elbow.
“Your arm hurting?” Scott asked.
“Stings a bit. Not bad. I suppose yours is all healed up.”
He sounded apologetic. “It wasn’t very deep.”
There had been very little ceremony involved in the blood offering. She and Cullen had only had to donate a token amount, no more than a medical vampire would extract for a blood test. Scott and Rule had donated quite a bit more. The elemental had been especially interested in the lupus blood. That was new to it.
Blood offerings themselves were not. One reason the negotiations had taken so little time, Sherry said, was that the elemental was both old and familiar with human concepts. English was new to it, but it understood the ideas behind the words with relatively little explanation. The humans it used to deal with had spoken another language, calling themselves the Acolhuas, the Tepanecs, and the Mexica. Nowadays, those people were usually named collectively: the Aztecs.
They’d been a waste-not, want-not sort of people, it seemed. They’d harvested death magic from their ritual slayings and given a portion of the blood that flowed from their altars to earth elementals. Or at least to this one.
Surely it was a mistake to trust an elemental grown old and powerful on so much human blood. Sherry assured Lily the creature would not break the restrictions the agreement placed on it, but it made Lily nervous to have such power lurking beneath a populous D.C. neighborhood. And if it made her nervous, how would everyone else react? She needed to—
Her phone chimed. She dug it out of her pocket, glancing at the display. Getting pretty low on juice. She’d better plug it in. “Agent Yu here,” she said, digging in her purse for the cable.
“It’s Anna. Anna Sjorensen.”
Her voice sounded tight. Unhappy. “What’s up?”
“You remember I told you we had a possible lead on the dagger? Well, it played out. I guess it did, anyway, but I just can’t believe it. Something’s screwed up, though I don’t see what, but I’m not a computer whiz, so maybe—”
“Anna, what’s happened?”
Lily heard the young woman take a deep breath. “We traced the dagger to a dealer. It was a credit card transaction, and it’s been confirmed, checked, and rechecked. The credit card—the address the dagger was mailed to—they both belong to Ruben Brooks. Drummond is getting a warrant for his arrest.”

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