World of Lupi 10 - Ritual Magic (19 page)

“I don’t know. We’ve got our vic’s fillings. Could you use them to Find the dentist who made them?”

“Nope. Any of them gold?”

“Two.”

Cynna brightened. “Excellent. Forget about Finding the dentist, but gold picks up and holds its wearer’s pattern real well. Since your victim is dead and oh-so-thoroughly gone, I can’t Find him, but I might be able to Find other objects that hold his pattern.”

“Really? I didn’t know you could do that. What sort of objects?”

“His home is the most likely.”

“I was already glad to see you. Now I’m really, deeply glad.”

“If he’s just moved, I may not pick up his new place.”

“If you get anything, it’s more than we have now.” Knowing who Friar had killed would either answer some of Lily’s questions or point her at new ones. “Good chance, you think? Fair?”

Cynna shrugged. “It depends on how much of his pattern I can get from the fillings, on what the house is made of, and on how long he lived there. Brick and stucco absorb pattern well, but slowly. Wood absorbs pattern fast. Doesn’t hold on to it well, but he hasn’t been dead long enough for that to be an issue.”

Lily headed for the door, opened it, and leaned out. “Fielding!”

His office was diagonally across the hall from the conference room. She could see him at his desk, eating from a foam take-out carton. Mexican, she thought, judging by the amount of cheese smothering it. He didn’t look up. “What?”

“I need you to bring me the fillings. John Doe’s fillings.” They were at the morgue, since they were the only remains the victim’s family would be able to bury. If they ever found the victim’s family. “
Now
would be good.”

“All right, all right.” He shoveled a last forkful of cheesy whatever into his mouth, shoved back his chair, and grabbed his iPod from the speaker it had been plugged into.

Blessed silence. Lily closed the door, pleased. Two birds, one stone.

“Tell me what you know,” Cullen demanded suddenly.

He’d been quiet so long Lily had almost forgotten he was there. “In a comprehensive mood, are you?”

“About that, of course.” He waved at the murder board.

“Precious damn little. I need lunch first,” she decided. “Unless you learned something I need to know right away?”

“Not urgent, but I—”

“Then it can wait a few minutes. Anyone want something to drink?”

“No, thanks,” Cynna said. “We just ate.”

“Okay.” Lily headed for the door. Her lunch was in the refrigerator in the break room.

Right after they moved into their new house, Lily had started packing her lunch. She’d gotten a look at one of Rule’s spreadsheets. The one that tracked his expenses for their Leidolf guards. Their salaries weren’t large, but there were twenty-four of them plus Scott, who was Rule’s second and had his own line item in the budget. Add that to a fortune per week in groceries, the insurance and upkeep on the five vehicles Rule provided for the guards, and ammo and withholding and utilities and something called WCP—

“Are you hyperventilating?” Rule had asked.

“No, but—but you can’t possibly afford that!”

“I don’t pay it. Leidolf does.”

“But you said Leidolf’s finances were a disaster.”

“I never said the clan was broke.” Rule had leaned back in his chair. “Stop and think, Lily. Leidolf is the largest clan. Not all of them pay
drei
, but most do. At the moment, seven hundred and forty-five clan members are providing Leidolf with an income of nearly two hundred thousand.”

“Yes, and if I ever pulled in two hundred grand a year I’d think I was swimming in money, but that’s, uh . . . fifteen thousand a month? Sixteen? That’s barely a third of—”

“Lily,” he’d said patiently, “I’m talking about monthly income, not annual.”

Oh.

“Obviously that’s gross. After-tax is more like a hundred forty—at least it is now that we’ve paid off that damn tax bill. We do get some income from other investments, but not much. Leidolf owns only two small businesses outright, and only one of those is profitable, and then there’s the tax bill on the North Carolina land and . . . and you don’t want to hear all that, do you? Basically, Leidolf has about one-third of Nokolai’s net income and half again as many clan members to provide for. I’ve started a college fund, but it’s badly underfunded. There are other obligations that can’t be stinted on . . . still, one of those obligations is maintaining an adequate number of full-time guards. I’ve increased that number, true, but we’re at war. I’d already increased it before bringing the guards here.”

Two hundred thousand. A month. Per year that would be . . . two million, four hundred thousand. Lily was used to thinking of Leidolf as
poor.
Two point four million a year was not poor.

And all of it went to Rule. A clan’s wealth was held by its Rho. Rule didn’t think of it as his money, but the IRS would. Add that to what he managed for Nokolai and . . .

Rule’s mouth crooked up. “You have such a funny look on your face.”

“My mind does not deal well with numbers that big when they’re preceded by a dollar sign. How could Leidolf’s finances be such a mess with that much income?”

“Victor, like many of those who don’t understand money, alternated between pure liquidity—by which I mean keeping everything in a bloody checking account—badly chosen loans, and throwing money at whatever took his fancy. He didn’t keep proper track of his assets, such as they were, and at one point he decided to save money by not reporting most of the
drei
he received for a few years. That worked about as well as you’d expect. He ended up owing nearly three million in back taxes, which the idiot was making monthly payments on instead of—are you all right?”

She’d assured him she was fine, and the color must have come back into her face, because he’d accepted that. In an effort to sound rational she’d asked, “I saw the entry for ammo, but nothing about the AK-47s you bought recently.” Those would come in handy if they ever found themselves up against a demon again. Not as much stopping power as the Uzis Isen had, but machine guns were illegal in hell. She’d settle for the AK-47s.

“Those are capital expenses, which are budgeted separately.”

“Oh.” She glanced at the spreadsheet again. “What’s WCP?”

“Workers’ Compensation Pool.”

TWENTY-TWO

L
ILY
grinned as she pulled her lunch sack out of the fridge. Workers’ comp for werewolves. Rule hadn’t understood why she found that so funny. It was state law, he’d pointed out. He’d explained—in rather more detail than she required—how he’d been able to pool that obligation with Nokolai, who already self-insured their workers’ comp. “Self-insuring is a better deal than buying it elsewhere,” he’d assured her.

Lily believed him about that. She believed him when he said Leidolf could afford the guards, too. She still started taking her lunch. She had a mortgage now. Saving a little money couldn’t hurt. Besides, as she’d told Rule, it also saved time.

The break room was just across from the conference room. Lily pushed open the door to the conference room. Cynna was telling Cullen how she intended to use the fillings. He nodded and said something about the rashies—at least, that was what it sound like. It was probably Sanskrit or something. Then he looked over at her with sudden interest. “Roast?”

“I don’t know.” She set the insulated bag on the table and popped the tab on her Diet Coke.

“Roast,” he said with certainty. No doubt his nose had informed him of this. “Have any extra?”

“Undoubtedly. Either Rule told the Kitchen Carls to double my portions or—”

Cynna hooted. “Kitchen Carls? As in Isen’s houseman, Carl?”

Lily nodded and opened the bag. Sure enough, there were two fat sandwiches, two apples, and a baggie with a half dozen cookies. Lupi just couldn’t get their minds around the idea that a single sandwich could be a meal. “That’s what I call whoever has kitchen duty. They always put in way more than I can eat.” She took out one of the sandwiches and tossed it to Cullen.

He caught it, sniffed. “This has a mother lode of pickles.”

“I like pickles. Want some cookies, Cynna?”

“No, thanks. I thought you didn’t have a kitchen yet.”

“Rule and I don’t, but the guards do.” Their new property consisted of the house, several acres of land, and a barracks that had been a cheap motel in a former life, then sat derelict for several years. It had been renovated before the house. Friar wanted them dead and he was tenacious about it, so Rule wouldn’t move into their new home until he could house his men. As a result, the barracks had a working kitchen. The guards rotated cooking chores among themselves.

“They were already sending over supper most nights,” Lily said, sitting down and unwrapping her sandwich. “And they buy in bulk to save money, so when I decided to start packing a lunch, I asked Scott to add a few things to the grocery list for my lunches and let me know how much I owed. He agreed. Early the next morning that week’s Kitchen Carl sent me a packed lunch. They’ve been doing that ever since.” She snorted. “And they’re all remarkably bad at numbers. Not a one of them can figure out how much I owe for my share of the groceries. I finally quit asking.”

Pot roast, she discovered when she took a bite. With butter pickles. Yum. She swallowed and chugged down some Diet Coke. “What did you learn from the crime scene pics?”

“The sigil on his chest looks like a sidhe rune.”

Lily didn’t quite spit out her Coke. “God, no. Not another evil elf.”

“Probably not. Not many in our realm know sidhe runes, but they aren’t completely unknown, either. I’ll need to check my source materials to be sure, but I thought I recognized a couple of the runes drawn inside the circle, too. They look more like ancient Sumerian.”

Lily’s eyebrows went up. “Someone’s blending disciplines, you think? I could send copies of the relevant photos to Fagin, see if he can ID them.” Dr. Xavier Fagin was the preeminent authority on pre-Purge magical history.

“Good idea. He’s got an impressive library still in spite of those assholes and their firebomb. Now tell me what you know about the ritual.”

Lily filled him in between bites, ending with their failure to identify the body they no longer had.

“Huh.” Cullen frowned. “Let me know when you get the labs back on those samples.”

He meant the samples taken from the substances used to draw the circle and the runes. “Okay. Keep in mind that the lab may not get consistent results. There wasn’t much magic left on—”

“I thought you said all the magic was gone.”

“The contagion was completely gone. There was still a tiny tingle of magic in the circle itself—about what I feel if I walk in Isen’s house barefoot.” Which was not, as she used to think, entirely from the traces of magic left on the floor by so many lupus feet. There was some kind of stealth node under the deck behind his house—one that didn’t give off the usual drifts of stray power that Cullen called sorceri. Whenever she asked Isen about it, he smiled and changed the subject. Isen could be really annoying sometimes. “And no, it didn’t feel like
arguai
. And no, I can’t describe the difference, but I can feel it.”

Cullen’s frown tightened a notch. “Describe the contagion again. Your experience of it.”

“Icky. Gooey. Like something that had been dead a long time and was soft with corruption. A lot like death magic, really, only mushier, and without the ground glass. And it moved. Maybe that’s why it seemed alive to me, as if it had intention. As if it really wanted to crawl all over me.”

“Huh.” He thought about that a moment. “Maggots?”

“What?”

“What was the movement like? Like maggots crawling around inside the corruption, or like the magic itself was in motion?”

She had to stop and think. “More like it was made up of maggots—soft, putrid, dead maggots that were still moving and wanted to get on me.”

“Now there’s an image I didn’t need to have in my head,” Cynna said.

“Tell me about it.” Cullen had fallen silent, as if she’d given him something to think about. She couldn’t imagine what. “Why did you want to know, Cullen?”

“Trying to figure out if something was moving the contagion or if it moved on its own.”

“Miriam thought I was projecting. She said the contagion couldn’t have intention.”

“Miriam lacks imagination sometimes,” he said absently, bending to pull a small spiral notebook out of Cynna’s purse. “If something’s never happened before, she thinks that means it can’t happen.”

Lily tended to think that, too, but she’d had enough evidence to the contrary in the past year to understand how wrong that was. “I figured you’d ask me about the body dissolving.” That being the spookiest thing she’d ever seen.

He didn’t answer, busy thumbing through his little notebook.

“How can you figure out if the contagion was moving on its own without looking at it?”

“I’m thinking. Stop talking to me.”

“See? Grumpy as a gorilla with a cold,” Cynna announced. “It won’t bother him if we talk because he won’t notice, and
I
want to know about the body dissolving.”

“It seemed to go through all the stages of decomposition, only on fast-forward. They ran some tests on the soil and found the kind of organic traces you’d expect to find in a burial site . . . about fifty years after the burial.”

Cynna’s forehead wrinkled. “Do you think it was a way of getting rid of the evidence? They couldn’t have expected the body to be found as soon as it was, so they could have done something to make it self-destruct. Not that I know of any way to do that, but it happened, so it’s possible. If Hardy hadn’t gone looking for the body—oh, that reminds me. I’ve got a message for you from him.”

Lily’s eyebrows shot up. “You do?”

“Isen wanted me and Cullen to meet Hardy, or for Hardy to meet us, or maybe he thought Hardy would talk me into staying at Clanhome. Or maybe, being Isen, he had something else in mind altogether. I went along with it because I was curious. I’ve never met a saint.”

“Do you think you have now?”

“I don’t know. I liked him, even though he’s got this way of looking at you as if he’s been reading your diary. Not that I’ve ever kept a diary, but . . . how do you know if someone’s a saint or not?”

Lily had no idea. “He seems to know things he shouldn’t. Not without getting tipped by, uh . . . someone or something. The question is what side is tipping him off.”

“Even people without magic can have visions. If drugs or magic aren’t involved, then spirit is. Would that mean he really is a saint?”

“It means that he had a valid warning for me once, so if he gave you a message for me, I’d probably better hear it.”

“Oh, yeah, right. Hardy kept singing ‘I’ll be calling you,’ emphasis on the ‘you,’ until I asked if he had a message for you. He nodded a lot, then he went like this.” She hummed the refrain from “Riders on the Storm,” then switched to singing, “‘There’s a killer on the road . . . da-da-da . . . squirming like a toad.’ Just like that, with some of the words left out.”

Lily huffed out a breath. “Unless he’s trying to warn me about a killer toad, I don’t get it.”

“Me, neither. Isen told him that probably wasn’t enough information to help, so . . .” Cynna launched into another song.

Lily stared. “The candy man? He’s warning me about killer toads and the candy man?”

“He added a few bars from something called ‘I Want Candy’ by the Strangeloves.”

“That can’t be a real band.”

“I never heard of them, but Isen has. I guess they’re an older band.”

Lily shook her head. “I suppose Hardy means well—saints have to mean well, right? But I don’t see how that helps. Unless he’s not a saint and is getting his information from the dark side of the Force, in which case he doesn’t mean well. And it still doesn’t help.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Cullen said.

Surprised—and too inured to Cullen’s habits to be any more than a little annoyed—Lily looked at him. He’d put away his little notebook. “Was that a general suggestion, or were you actually listening?”

“I meant,” Cullen said with exaggerated patience, “that of course the man’s a saint. Isn’t it obvious?”

“No. And you wouldn’t be my first choice for spotting holiness.”

“He made me want to squirm. Made both of you feel like that, too, didn’t he? When he looks at you, it’s like he’s shining a light right through to the back of your skull. Shine a light in a dark place and you get roaches scurrying for cover. We’d all rather think we weren’t full of roaches.” He raised his eyebrows. “What, did you think saints were supposed to make you feel good about yourselves? That’s
Sesame Street
’s job. Saints make people uncomfortable, which is why people usually kill them.”

After a moment Cynna said, “He has a point.”

It was more insight than Lily was used to from Cullen, and it made her uncomfortable. Kind of the way Hardy had. Which was practically proof Cullen was wrong, because she was abso-damn-lutely sure that Cullen Seaborne was no saint.

“What spell is Abel planning to use to reconstruct the runes?” Cullen asked.

“Something that requires an Earth witch. Beyond that, I have no idea.”

“Probably one of the variants on Cyffnid’s Dire,” Cynna said—which set her and Cullen to arguing in technobabble about the Law of This and the Quadrant of That and synchronicity. Lily tuned them out and thought about a saint who couldn’t talk. Was Hardy’s message supposed to be a warning? The “Riders on the Storm” made her think so, that being such an ominous song, but maybe it was intended as a clue about the killer. Or the victim’s identity? Maybe their victim had written the damn song back in his younger days. Hell, maybe he’d been the lead singer in The Strangeloves.

No, not that. Hardy communicated through song lyrics, not by playing some kind of music trivia game. So . . . assume it was a warning. What did he mean by singing about the candy man? Should she be on the alert for a Willy Wonka lookalike? If she spotted one, was he supposed to help, or was he the killer toad? Toad-on-the-road . . . roadkill. Candy roadkill. A smashed chocolate bar. Smashed into the shape of a toad. Don’t take candy from strangers, little girl . . .

The door swung open and Fielding entered, carrying a small plastic bag. “Here they are. What in the world are you going to do with them?”

“Cast spells,” Lily said, standing up and grabbing her Coke.

“Huh. You Unit people are weird. Can I watch?”

Lily exchanged a look with Cynna, who shrugged. “All right, on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You leave the iPod unplugged the rest of the day.”

* * *

C
YNNA
needed to go outside to set her circle, since she couldn’t draw on carpet. First Lily notified her guards. They—Santos, Joe, and Andy today—were waiting for her in the public reception area. They’d prefer to be a lot closer, but she’d tried bringing them into the offices once. Lily could have put up with the comments and funny looks she got for having bodyguards, but the men were just too much of a distraction. Because they were lupi, yes, but also because they weren’t FBI. Civilians aren’t supposed to hang around in law enforcement offices unless they’re witnesses or under arrest.

She notified Santos of where they were going and why. That was part of the deal, that she let them know if she was going to stick her nose out the door. Cullen had already headed for the conference room door; Lily, Fielding, and Cynna followed.