Mortal Ties (2 page)
L
ILY
Yu hadn’t planned to visit the graveyard at sunset. It just worked out that way.
Mount Hope’s main gates closed at three thirty, but the pedestrian gates stayed open.
People liked to stop by after work, the guy at the cemetery’s office had said, especially
on the deceased’s birthday or other important dates. No parking available at this
hour, though, except for what you could grab along the street.
Lily pulled her government Ford to the curb and checked her rearview mirror. The white
Toyota that had been following her drew close, then cruised on by. She would wait.
No point in making them anxious by getting out before they could park. It was bad
enough she brought them here when the light was going.
Not that they would be spooked by the setting sun, no more than she was. The dead
weren’t scary. It was the living you had to watch out for.
While the Toyota hunted for a parking place, Lily transferred her penlight from her
purse to her pocket. The day was slipping down toward dusk, and twilight’s a tricky
bugger. In the daytime you know where you are and can see
where you’re going. At night you know you can’t see, not without help—electric help,
most likely, from the city, a flashlight, whatever. You know, so you take precautions.
Twilight blurs the edges. In the shadow time, it’s easy to mistake what you see, to
step wrong, thinking there’s light enough to keep going. Back when she worked homicide,
Lily had arrested people who went that one terrible step too far, confused by a personal
twilight of drugs or emotion. People who never set out to be killers.
But some take that step on purpose. Some damn well know where the lines are and cross
them deliberately. Like the bastard whose hearing she’d testified at today.
Goddamn copycats.
The Toyota backed itself into a spot between an SUV and a pickup halfway up the block.
Lily grabbed her purse, checked for cars, and climbed out of her Ford. Traffic was
sparse enough she could cross right away, so she did. By the time she reached the
cemetery side of the street, two men had gotten out of the Toyota.
One was slim and pale, with a round face and glasses. He looked like he ought to have
a pocket protector tucked away somewhere. The other was a head taller, eighty pounds
heavier, and looked like he ought to have a couple of tattoos and a rap sheet. Geek
Guy wore a cheap sports shirt. Tough Guy wore a black T-shirt. Both wore jeans, athletic
shoes, and sports jackets.
Lily wore a jacket, too, and for the same reason. It might be a few days short of
January, but this was San Diego. The air was crisp, not cold. But people get upset
if you walk around with your shoulder harness showing.
The men crossed the street between a dark sedan and a delivery truck. Geek Guy made
a quick gesture with one hand. Tough Guy set off through the gate at an easy lope.
Lily followed Tough Guy—also known as Mike—and was in turn followed.
They hadn’t been tailed here, but it was just barely possible their enemies knew she
planned to come and had someone waiting. Highly unlikely, but possible. A month
ago she’d picked up a map of the cemetery. Theoretically, Friar could have somehow
learned about that and kept the place staked out ever since.
Or so Scott had said when she told him she was coming here. Lily considered this one
of the safest things she’d done lately. Friar’s organization had been badly damaged
in October when he’d managed to get a lot of people killed and had seen his long-laid
plans blow up in his face. She doubted he had the resources to keep a sniper in place
24/7 for a month. She doubted even more that he had any idea she’d picked up that
map in the first place.
He did, however, have one resource they could neither predict nor evaluate in any
meaningful way, so she could be wrong. If so, well, she had backup.
Sometimes it really is all in the name.
For months she’d struggled with the need for bodyguards. No—be honest, she told herself
as she set off down a narrow road that twisted through the cemetery, heading generally
where she needed to go. She’d hated it. She’d hated dragging guards everywhere, hated
the loss of privacy…hated, most of all, that one of them had given his life for her.
The need for them was real, but her acceptance of the necessity had been a grim thing,
testy and prone to muttering.
Last week Rule had shaken his head at her mutters and said, “I don’t get it. Didn’t
you ever call for backup when you were a regular cop? That didn’t make you crazy.”
“Backup,” she’d repeated slowly. Then said it again as a weight shifted, not disappearing
but settling into a more comfortable place, like slipping on her bra or shoulder holster.
“Backup, not guards. They’re my mobile backup.”
Trailed by half of her mobile backup—Geek Guy, aka Scott White, who was a lot more
interested in guns and knives than computers—Lily left the road for the soft grass,
moving between the resting places of the dead.
Her target lay in the newest part of the cemetery. Mount Hope was old for this side
of the country, an accumulation of graveyards the city had assumed responsibility
for over
the years, with lots of established trees and old-fashioned headstones. Here, though,
it was what they called garden-style, with neatly trimmed grass and markers set flat
into the ground, each with a little holder for flowers.
The grass was damp and springy and perfumed the air. In other parts of the country,
people associated the smell of freshly cut grass with summer. It evoked winter for
Lily. That’s when the rains came, when grass grew lush and green and was in need of
cutting. This year December had been unusually wet, bestowing nearly five inches of
rain on them. Lily walked on soft grass between the graves of people she’d never known,
heading for the one she had.
She hadn’t brought flowers. It would be tacky to bring flowers to the grave of a woman
you’d killed. Especially when you didn’t regret it.
Lily counted rows, turned, and counted graves. She didn’t see Mike nearby, but she
hadn’t expected to. Lupi were good at tucking themselves away where you couldn’t spot
them.
And there it was. Lily stopped.
She hadn’t brought flowers, but someone had.
Not an expensive bouquet. More like the kind you pick up at the grocery store, with
a few dyed carnations supplemented by baby’s breath. Pink and red carnations, in this
case. There was an inch of water in the glass cylinder holding the bouquet.
Was this the right grave? Maybe she’d lost count. She knelt by the headstone laid
flat into the ground, frowned at its unexpected decoration, then used her penlight
to read the inscription on the plaque.
H
ELEN
A
NNABELLE
W
HITEHEAD
When Lily killed Helen a year ago last month, she hadn’t known the woman’s last name.
She hadn’t known much about her at all, save for a few vital facts. Helen had lived
up to the common wisdom about telepaths—she’d been batwing crazy. She’d tortured and
she’d killed; she’d tried
to open a hellgate; she’d intended to feed Lily’s lover to the Old One she served.
She’d also been doing her damnedest to kill Lily just before Lily put a stop to that
and the rest of the woman’s plans.
So…no regrets, no. Lily had done what she had to do. And Helen hadn’t had a spouse,
lover, or any living family, so Lily didn’t even carry the burden of having brought
grief to those who might have loved the woman.
Yet here she was. She wasn’t sure why. In some murky, underneath way it was connected
to what she’d done yesterday, when she and Rule had stood in line for a ridiculous
amount of time at the County Clerk’s office. They’d left with a marriage license good
for the next ninety days.
The wedding was in March—two months, one week, and two days away.
Yesterday had been the immediate catalyst for this visit, but the decision to come
here had grown up organically in Lily’s mind over the last several months. She’d found
out where Helen was back in June, but hadn’t come. Last month she’d swung by Mount
Hope’s office and gotten directions and the map, but hadn’t gone to Helen’s grave.
She hadn’t been ready.
Ready for what? She wasn’t sure. She was here, and she still wasn’t sure why.
Mount Hope had been San Diego’s municipal cemetery for about a hundred and fifty years.
Raymond Chandler was buried here. So was Alta Hulett, America’s first female attorney,
and the guy who established Balboa Park, and a lot of veterans. So was Ah Quin, who
was remembered as one the city’s founding fathers…at least by its Chinese residents.
And so were those who’d been buried at the county’s expense, though budget cuts meant
the county was likely to cremate, not plant, these days.
Helen had died a virgin, a killer, and intestate, but taxpayers hadn’t had to pick
up the tab for disposing of her mortal remains. The trustee appointed by a judge had
seen to that, paying for it out of her estate.
Turned out Helen had socked away well over a quarter
million. Telepaths had an inside track on conning people, didn’t they? If they could
shut out the voices in their heads enough to function, that is—which Helen had been
able to do, thanks to the Old One she served. That’s how she’d met her protégé, Patrick
Harlowe…who’d also died badly, but not at Lily’s hands. Cullen Seabourne had done
the honors there.
But Lily had killed again since then. Helen was her first, but killing and war went
together, didn’t they? Even if most of the country didn’t know they were at war, the
lupi did. Lily did. And so did her boss, head of the FBI’s Unit Twelve…head, too,
of the far less official Shadow Unit.
In the run-up to the war, Lily had killed demons, helped a wraith reach true death,
and ushered a supposed immortal through that small, dark door. This last September
she’d tried and failed to kill a sidhe lord. And in October, just before the first
open battle of the war, she’d shot a man. Double-tapped him.
That man had just shot a fellow FBI agent—a lying, treacherous bastard of an agent,
but at that point he’d been on Lily’s side. There had been other lives on the line:
four lupi, another FBI agent, and the twenty-two people the bad guys intended to slaughter.
Lily had sited on the shooter’s head—his body had been blocked by the van he’d driven—and
squeezed off two quick shots. She’d killed him cold, not hot, killed him to stop him
from killing others.
That was training. Most cops never had to use their weapons, but when you took up
the badge you knew you might be called on to take a life. Lily had never doubted she
could. Not since she was nine, anyway. The man who’d raped and killed her friend while
she watched, tied up and waiting for him to do the same to her, had been arrested
and tried and convicted. He’d gone to prison for life, which was all the vengeance
she was supposed to want.
But for months afterward, she’d dreamed of murder.
Lily had always known she entered the police force to stop the monsters. She was beginning
to understand the other reason she’d needed that bureaucratic harness.
“Goddamn morbid sort of thing to do, isn’t it?” said a gravelly voice. “Hanging out
at the grave of someone you killed.”
Lily jolted, then twisted to scowl at the intruder. “Oh, hell. I thought you were
gone.”
“Guess you were wrong.” The man standing disrespectfully atop a nearby grave wore
a dark suit with a wrinkled white shirt and a plain tie. He was on the skinny side
of lean, with his dark, thinning hair combed straight back from a broad forehead,
and he was pale. Pale as in white. Also slightly see-through.
Al Drummond. Her very own personal haunt.
W
HAT
had she ever done to deserve this? Lily ran both hands through her hair. “Go away.”
“Ah…Lily?” Scott said.
Scott, of course, hadn’t seen or heard anything, except for her talking to empty air.
“It’s Drummond, dropping in again for a visit.” Al Drummond, former FBI Special Agent…the
lying, treacherous bastard who’d been shot by the man Lily had killed last month.
Scott knew about him.
