Read Death Magic Online

Authors: Eileen Wilks

Death Magic (6 page)

“Oh, you must be a gardener! Yes, I love the way masses of white flowers seem to glow in the dusk. I wish you could have seen it a month ago. Even the summersweet is past its peak now, I’m afraid.”
“Summersweet?” Lily asked. “I don’t know much about your plants here, but I had the idea it was a summer bloomer. There’s that “summer” in the name.”
A dimple winked slyly in Deborah’s left cheek. “I may have persuaded it to keep blooming longer than usual.”
“Now that’s a useful trick. Not one most Earth-Gifted can do, either.”
“An elemental showed me how once.”
Lily’s eyebrows shot up. “An elemental?”
“They show up here from time to time. They’re curious about me, I think.”
“Ah.” She didn’t have to let herself be fetched, Lily decided, and she’d rather talk to Deborah than make up to Bixton’s chief of staff. “I don’t have my own garden, but my grandmother lets me muck around in her dirt. There’s nothing like destroying a few square yards of weeds to set the mind at rest.”
“Exactly. Though Bermuda grass—!” Deborah rolled her eyes. “The people who owned the place before us had planted it. After twenty years, I still find clumps I have to dig out.”
“Nasty stuff. Roots that want to contribute to Chinese agriculture. Why anyone ever thought Bermuda grass was a good idea—”
“They’d never planted a garden, that’s for sure. Talk about invasive. You have it out in California, then?”
“Oh, it’s everywhere. I’ve heard,” Lily said darkly, “it’s been found at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. What kind of grass do you have? It’s a turf grass, I can see that much, but it isn’t like any we use out in California.”
“Kentucky bluegrass. You have to mow it high, but if you do that, an established bluegrass lawn is almost weed-free.”
Twenty minutes later, Lily and Deborah were studying a sad-looking rhododendron on the eastern edge of the lawn near the woods, talking about mulch and compost and black root rot.
“. . . not much of a problem in my part of the country,” Lily was saying, “but I know good drainage is key. But if you’ve already amended the soil and given it your own special boost, then switching to a different mulch—”
A clear tenor voice broke in wryly. “I should have known.”
Deborah looked over her shoulder at her husband, that single dimple winking again. “Lily likes to garden.”
Ruben Brooks didn’t look like a man who’d recently had a heart attack . . . one that had nearly killed him and still had him on indefinite medical leave. A heart attack caused by a potion that, for reasons of timing and proximity, restricted suspects to those at FBI Headquarters. A potion administered by a traitor.
Tonight, though, Ruben looked healthy. Still on the skinny end of lean, he had a beak of a nose, messy hair, and glasses that said “geek” more than “power broker.” But he wasn’t wasted anymore. He wasn’t in a wheelchair, either. When Lily first met him last November, he’d suffered from a mysterious condition that caused progressive weakness. The condition hadn’t gone away. It was genetic and would be with him for life, but now he knew what triggered it and could avoid his triggers . . . mostly. You couldn’t avoid iron and steel altogether.
He gave her a quizzical smile. “I didn’t realize you were a gardener. You don’t have one yourself.”
“No, but like I told Deborah, I get to play in Grandmother’s dirt.” When she had time. When she was in San Diego instead of Washington.
“I’m glad you get a chance to get grubby. Lily, please try not to react visibly to what I tell you now. I’d like to have a word with you and Rule after the other guests leave. If you could linger without it being noticed . . . perhaps Deborah can show you the ficus that’s trying to take over the sunroom. You can remain inside as the others depart.”
Deborah sighed faintly. “Time, is it?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Lily smiled and nodded as if Ruben had commented on the weather, but now that he’d brought it up, she noticed that the guests had thinned out while she was talking to Deborah. Half a dozen questions jostled in her mind. She suppressed them. If Ruben felt free to tell her what was up, he would have done so. “Okay.”
He couldn’t have read her mind and she didn’t think her face gave her away, but he answered one of the questions anyway. “It’s about the war.”
FOUR
 
 
VERY
few guests remained when Rule started making his way to the Brookses’ back door. It was almost time. His main feeling was relief.
The next hour or so would be difficult. He didn’t fool himself about that, but it would be hardest on Lily. First she’d be hit by Ruben’s news, then . . . well, his
nadia
hated it when he kept secrets from her. He’d learned that he hated it, too, and was more than ready to lay that particular burden down.
He’d had no choice. She knew him well enough to understand that.
As he continued along the path, he felt the moon rise. He smiled.
Her song was always with him, but the bulk of the Earth muffled it until her orbit and the planet’s slow turning brought her above the horizon once more. Tonight the song was quiet and pure, resonating inside him like a plucked harp string. Quiet and pure and sweet. Always it was sweet. The song and the pull would mount over the next week to the wondrous, full-throated call of full moon.
The Brookses’ land would be a lovely place to spend full-moon night, he thought as he smiled and shook his head, declining an invitation to stop and chat with a couple of slow-to-leave guests. He’d love to sample the scents around him with a keener nose. Changing here would be easy. The earth itself welcomed him in a way he usually felt only at Clanhome. The Change was a matter of Earth communing with moonsong . . . and someone here worked Earth magic regularly.
Not Ruben, he thought as he went through the open French doors into a large, well-lit kitchen. Mainly because Ruben was not a practitioner, but also, Rule thought the welcome he felt suggested an Earth Gift, not spellwork. And Ruben’s Gift was aligned with fire.
Deborah, then. Odd that Ruben had never mentioned his wife’s Gift . . . or perhaps not. He seldom mentioned Deborah. Rule had wondered about that. He doubted that he’d gone half a day without speaking of Lily since he met her. But for all that he knew a good deal about human sexual customs, marriage remained a mystery to him.
It was a mystery he was growing eager to explore. Why had he thought it a good idea to wait until March for the ceremony?
He passed from the kitchen to a spacious, slightly cluttered den, then into a hall that gave access to the front of the house and to the stairs. Rule approved of Ruben’s home. His own taste leaned more toward contemporary, but he had a love for old wood. Clearly, either Ruben or Deborah did, too, judging by the antiques sprinkled throughout their house.
The banister curving along the stairwell was old, too. He rested a hand on it as he climbed to the second floor. Smooth wood, polished by countless hands over the years. Had Ruben once dreamed that his children’s hands would be among those polishing the wood? This was a large house for two people, yet he and Deborah had no children, either by birth or adoption. Rule wondered about that, too.
Of course, humans weren’t as uniformly focused on children as lupi. There was a cultural assumption that everyone wanted children, but that wasn’t always the case. Perhaps he was imagining a grief where none existed.
The stairwell opened into a hall with lovely wainscoting. Rule followed something that was not a tug, not a song, but was every bit as dear and certain to a door on the left. He knocked softly.
Lily opened it. She glanced behind him, confirming that he was alone, and sighed. “I’ve washed my hands, played with my hair, glossed up my lips . . . I’m running out of things to do in case someone comes up here and finds me hanging out in the bathroom. I take it Ruben asked you to wait around, too?”
“Your lips are beautifully glossy.” He bent and kissed them lightly. “Apples. I like it. Almost everyone is gone. I believe we can wander downstairs now.”
She started for the stairs with him. “Do you know where he wants us to wait? Deborah didn’t say.”
“In his study, I think. You and Deborah hit it off.”
She slid him a grin. “You sent her to fetch me.”
“I assure you I did not.”
“Her word, not yours, maybe. But you wanted me to come meet Senator Bixton’s chief of staff.”
“Dennis Parrott. A smooth man. Like an iceberg, most of him remains hidden, and the exposed surface is cool and glossy. I’d like to hear your impression of him. Also, most people find it harder to accept killing if they know the victim.”
She stopped moving. “You think Parrott wants me dead?”
“Not you specifically, perhaps, but he might privately use the term
collateral damage
if you were killed by one of the haters he and Bixton court. Publicly, of course, he would acknowledge no responsibility for the results of the inflammatory speeches he writes for Bixton.”
“Doesn’t the senator have a speechwriter?”
“He does, but Parrott handles speeches that deal with magical policy in all its many forms. He has ties to Humans First.”
Her expression soured. “Is he going to be at the big rally?” The Humans Firsters had planned demonstrations to take place across the country. The big one would be here in D.C. at the Mall.
“Bixton’s supposed to give a speech. Parrott will attend with him.”
“Why in the world did Ruben invite him?”
“A better question might be, why did he come?”
She started down the stairs again. “I’ll bite. Why did he?”
“I’m not sure. He despises Ruben, though he hides it well. Fears him, too, and hides that even better. If I weren’t able to smell his fear, I wouldn’t know.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t you he was afraid of?”
“We’ve met before, and he’s concluded I’m safe.”
“Is he foolish about other things, too?”
Rule smiled. “Perhaps I should say that he knows I won’t attack him physically. But he’s known Ruben longer and better than he has me, and fears him more. I find that interesting.”
“I’d guess that Ruben stands between him and something he wants. You don’t.”
That’s why he’d wanted her to meet Parrott. She had a good mind, quick to cut through gristle and fat to the meat. “You may be right. Maybe Ruben can tell us what that something is.”
“Do you have any idea why Ruben wanted to talk to us privately? The two of us.” She frowned. “He said it was about the war, and that’s just weird. He’s not lupi.”
“He’s our ally.”
“Yes, but first and foremost, he’s FBI. Government. The U.S. government isn’t at war. For the most part, it doesn’t even know the Great Bitch exists.”
War did not mean the same thing to humans as it did to lupi. Rule knew this. Most beings who knew anything about the Great War—and not many did—believed it had ended roughly three thousand years ago. Not lupi. To them, war ended only with the death or complete subjugation of the enemy, and their Lady’s enemy was an Old One, as incapable of dying as she was of submission. Three thousand years might be a very long lull in the action, but lupi had been at war with
her
for all that time.
Recently the lull had ended.
“I think I understand what you mean,” Rule said as they crossed the entry hall. The study door was almost directly opposite the staircase. It stood open. “For humans or lupi, war is a joint effort. An individual can only consider himself at war in a metaphorical sense, if his society isn’t also at war. Perhaps Ruben spoke metaphorically.”
“I don’t think so,” she said dryly. “Maybe he wanted me to know it was about
her
without saying so directly. Deborah was right there.”
“You think he hasn’t told his wife about our enemy?”
“I don’t know what he’s told her. He carries a lot of secrets in his head. Some of them he isn’t free to talk about. Some he may not want to talk about.”
Rule considered that as they went into a room that, by day, would be sun-flooded from the tall windows on the north wall. Tonight the drapes were closed and the only light came from a floor lamp. It was an inviting room—dark cherry desk and file cabinets, chocolate drapes, cinnamon upholstery on the two armchairs, walls the color of an old chamois. The warm colors were likely Deborah’s doing, since Ruben didn’t take an interest in such things. But those chamois-colored walls held objects Ruben did take an interest in: books, framed photos, a tribal mask, what looked like a broken walking stick, and a magnificent abstract painting.

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