Blood Lines (5 page)

Start with the easy stuff. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s, uh . . . it’s been five weeks since my last confession, and I’ve missed five Sunday Masses. The first one couldn’t be helped because there wasn’t a church there.” No duh. Hell was seriously short on houses of worship. “The others . . . I’ve been busy. Okay,” she admitted. “That’s lame. But I like to be confessed when I take communion, and I guess I’ve been putting this off.”

He waited.

“Uh . . . I lusted after a man. Two men, really, but one of them is taken, so that doesn’t count. I just have to get over it, you know? But the other one . . .”

“Have you acted on your lust?”

“No. But I want to. I’m not married or otherwise committed,” she added. “Neither is he.” Another understatement. “So we wouldn’t be breaking any vows if we did, uh, you know.”

“Sex can be a joyous expression of love within the sacrament of marriage. Outside that union, it’s an inherently selfish act, the pursuit of pleasure for selfish reasons.”

This was one of those areas where she and the Church disagreed. Cynna couldn’t see what was so wrong about sex. Back a zillion years ago, yeah, sex outside marriage had led to lots of ugly consequences, so abstaining had made sense. But now?

Of course, Father Michaels said it was hubris to put her own reasoning above the collected wisdom of God’s holy Church. He was probably right, but Cynna figured she’d have to come to her own understanding in her own way. “I’ve been guilty of pride. And anger. And . . .” Her heart jumped in her chest and started pounding hard, as if she were pushing something uphill. “This is hard to say.”

“Do you have a specific act in mind? Something you did that troubles you?”

“Yeah.”

“Was this act a venial sin or a mortal sin?”

“I don’t know.” That was the problem.

“I couldn’t help noticing your tattoos. You were once a Dizzy?”

Like most people, he referred to the street-born cult by its nickname. Not many had ever heard of the movement’s real name: the
Msaidiza
. In Swahili, it meant helpers.

“Not since I came to the Church.”

“Have you practiced other forms of forbidden magic or otherwise been drawn into superstition?”

That was a hard one. Father Michaels said the Church’s stance on magic was so tangled you practically had to call a conclave before casting a spell. He’d advised her to consider her skills in the same light she did her weapon—to use her Gift and her spellcrafting only for self-defense or in pursuit of her duties, and only when it clearly served the greater good. “I think I’m clear there,” she said after a moment. “That isn’t what’s bugging me.”

He waited.

She took a deep breath and got it said. “I’ve killed.”

Silence.

“Not humans. Shit. Sorry, Father. I’m saying this all wrong. What I mean is, I killed demons.”

The silence was longer this time. Finally he said, “You are quite sure these were demons you killed?”

At least he hadn’t told her she was nuts. She didn’t blame him for asking, though. Everyone knew demons couldn’t cross unsummoned, and accurate summoning spells were as rare as hens’ teeth these days. Had been since the Purge. Like a lot of things “everyone knew,” that was wrong, but this priest wouldn’t have any way of knowing that.

Of course, demons were common as hell in hell. “Um . . . I’m with MCD. You know, in the FBI? And . . . look, I’m sorry, but I can’t talk about the details, not even with a priest. But it involved killing demons.”

“There is no sin in that, if the act was without malice,” he said kindly. “Since Vatican II, destroying them hasn’t been considered an act of grace in and of itself, but they are soulless creatures.”

She sighed. That’s pretty much the reaction she’d expected. “Thanks, Father.”

He talked with her a little more and assigned her penance. He added that he’d be in his office a while, so the sanctuary would be available.

Cynna could take a hint. She sat in one of the pews to get started on her Our Fathers, but her attention kept drifting.

The thing about killing demons was that they stayed dead. The ones she’d shot had been planning things even nastier for her and the others, so she didn’t regret killing them. Not exactly. But the whole thing didn’t seem right to her. No souls meant they were morally blind. They didn’t know they were being evil, so they couldn’t choose good. No souls also meant no shot at an afterlife.

Didn’t that make it worse to kill them?

And why had God set things up that way?

She shifted. Questioning the Almighty probably wasn’t something good Catholics did, but she’d come late to the Church, and partly for selfish reasons. Believers were protected against possession.

Of course, possession was another thing everybody knew didn’t happen anymore.

Damn. Still chasing her thoughts instead of paying attention to her act of contrition. Maybe she’d do better with her Hail Marys. She felt more comfortable with Mary than with the omnipotent Father.

“Hail Mary, full of grace . . .”

“Child.”

The voice was church bells and wind, the lap of waves at night and the hunting hoot of an owl. And yet it was utterly human. Female. It was an actual voice, too, air vibrating to produce sound, not mindtalk . . . yet it seemed to happen inside her as well.

Awe. For the first time Cynna fully understood the meaning of that word. For a long moment she neither moved nor breathed, hoping the voice would speak again. Finally she said, “M-Mary?”

“No.” The presence was amused, but so gently. “I have been many, but not that one. I am yours already, Cynna. Are you mine?”

There was no thought to her answer, but neither was there fear. “I don’t know. Who are you?”

“When you know, you will choose. For now, Find your friends. Go quickly. You are needed.”

THREE

WASHINGTON
wasn’t round-the-clock busy like New York or L.A. Even on the main arteries, traffic thinned out by midnight. But it didn’t evaporate entirely. Lily watched the scattering of headlights on the other side of the median, the way they seemed to merge in the curve of the windshield with the reflections of taillights and neon. Her fingers tapped impatiently on her thigh.

They were in the Mercedes Rule had rented, not her government-issue Ford. It wasn’t a convertible like his own car, but it had the same bells and whistles.

Lily still didn’t get why Rule hadn’t wanted to bring his car to D.C. Sure, it would have taken longer, but he hated flying. A touch of claustrophobia he liked to pretend didn’t exist made anything but first class impossible for him. Maybe that was why he’d insisted on flying. He’d prefer fighting a weakness to working around it.

That, she understood.

There’d been no question that he would come with her to Washington. Even if they’d been okay with a long separation, the mate bond wouldn’t have let them stay on opposite coasts.

The mate bond. That’s what she’d referred to earlier when she’d said she was Rule’s Chosen—not that he’d chosen her, or vice versa. According to Rule’s people, their Lady had tied the knot for them—a till-death-do-us-part bond she’d fought like crazy at first. But then, at first she’d thought of it as entirely physical. Sexual.

But mind-blowing sex was only part of it. There was a limit to how much physical distance they could tolerate; put too much space between them and they’d pass out. If that limit varied maddeningly according to no rules she could fathom, she was learning to live with it. Plus she always knew where Rule was—his direction and roughly how far away he was.

There might be a spiritual aspect to the bond, too, but Lily preferred not to think about that. Religion made her uneasy, and dying hadn’t provided as many answers as you might think.

She glanced at the man behind the wheel and smiled, thinking of the way he’d woken her that morning. Whatever the mate bond had brought to their relationship, she’d fallen in love with him on her own.

She loved him. He loved her. It was that simple, and sometimes that scary.

Rule had so many nooks and crannies, so much that remained a mystery . . . but she knew the important things, didn’t she? He was smart and often kind. He could laugh, and he could listen. Mostly he was reasonable, though there was an autocratic streak in him.

No surprise there. Rule was the heir, the Lu Nuncio, of his clan. When his father died, he’d be the big cheese, the Nokolai Rho. Lily hoped Isen Turner lived a long, long time.

Which he might. One of the more unsettling things she’d learned recently was that lupi aged roughly half as fast as humans.

Another thing she knew about Rule: at the moment, he was in a major snit. “All right,” she said. “Let’s talk. All that silent, simmering anger is interfering with my thinking.”

“Should I be flattered?”

“What’s got your tail in a twist?”

“If that’s your colorful way of asking why I’m angry—”

“That’s me. Colorful.”

“You stepped between a shooter and his target.” Rule didn’t get loud when he was angry. He turned quiet. His voice lowered now until it thrummed like an overloaded power line. “That cop was ready to pull the trigger, and you put yourself in his line of fire.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

Rule growled. It was an honest-to-God growl, not a sound human throats accommodate well.

“Look, the cop pulled an idiot act. Paul wasn’t a threat until someone tried to shoot him, and firing a normal load at a lupus is more likely to annoy him than stop him. Not a good way to live to collect your pension. But most cops don’t know enough about lupi to handle them right, and he’d had good training otherwise. It showed in his stance, the way he handled his weapon. I figured he wouldn’t shoot with someone in his line of fire. I was right.”

“If you expect me to applaud your decision to risk your life because you won your gamble—”

“I expect you to trust my judgment! What about you? You jumped an angry wolf, for God’s sake, and invited him to rip out your throat!”

“It was a brave act, and an honorable one,” the man in the backseat said. “Especially under the circumstances. You want the next exit, sir.”

Lily didn’t quite jump, but she came close. Their passenger hadn’t spoken since telling Rule how to get to his apartment. She’d nearly forgotten him.

It wasn’t easy for a lupus to Change back to human quickly after going wolf. Paul Chernowich had managed it an hour after turning down his chance to kill Rule. By then the place had emptied of audience and most of the performers, and refilled with cops.

It had taken another hour for the locals to accept that Paul hadn’t actually violated any laws and let him leave. The soprano who usually gave him a ride home was among those who’d left, so Rule had offered to drop him off.

Rule signaled and pulled into the exit lane. Lily twisted to look at Paul in the backseat. “What do you mean, ‘under the circumstances’?”

He shrugged. He was a young man—at least he looked young—with a gangly build, a hooked nose, and straw-colored hair. “Just the obvious. He’s the Nokolai Lu Nuncio.”

“And you don’t care for Nokolai.” She’d had a clue about that earlier, but it was hard to read a wolf ’s emotional reactions.

They’d left the elevated highway for the stop-and-go of regular city streets. Here the late hour was more obvious. There was little traffic. She looked at Rule as he slowed for a light. “Something you want to tell me?”

He was silent a moment. “Paul is Leidolf.”

Her jaw dropped. “Leidolf? As in, your clans are hereditary enemies? The Hatfields and McCoys of the lupus world? Leidolf would be the ones who nearly killed your father not long ago.
And you offered him your throat?
” Unlike Rule, she did get loud when she was mad.

Paul spoke stiffly. “The assassination attempt on your Rho was not sanctioned by our Rho.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right, then! And if you’d killed Rule, that would have been okay, too, I guess, as long as your Rho didn’t order it!”

“No. It would have been greatly dishonorable.” He gave the back of Rule’s head a puzzled glance. “She does not understand
ni culpa, ne defensia
?”

“The Lady brought us together only recently. Lily is learning our ways, but the past two months have been . . . busy.”

There was an understatement. “What Paul just said . . . Isn’t that what you said when you invited him to rip out your throat?”

“It is.”

“So clue in the ignorant human. What does it mean?”

“Literally, ‘if not guilty, don’t defend.’ To prove innocence, we submit without offering any defense. Guilt has a scent,” he added, slowing as he took the off-ramp.

“Your mate did me great honor,” Paul told her earnestly. “I’m not alpha, but my blood was up enough that I didn’t realize at first that he’d allowed me to pin him.”

“Allowed.” Her finger began tapping on her thigh again. She looked at Rule. “You jumped him so he could pin you?”

“It was the quickest way to control the situation. Paul wasn’t beast-lost, but he was too deeply into the wolf for reason to be effective. Instinct would have been pressing him to find his enemy, the one who’d exposed him by forcing the Change.”