Mortal Ties (26 page)

“What just happened?” Lily asked. “I know he submitted, but something about it surprised
you.”

“Laban submitted
plene et simplicite—
that means fully and completely, nothing held back. Such language is unusual. It’s
sometimes used when one clan defeats another in battle, but even then there are often
terms applied to the submission.”

“Like how long it will last?”

“Among others, yes. Tony, this is my Chosen, Lily Yu. Lily, this is Tony Romano.”

He was back on both feet now and zipping his jeans. “Miss Yu.” He gave her a nod,
but his attention returned to Rule immediately. “I submitted fully. It was the right
thing to do. Laban lost honor through my father’s actions. I needed to acknowledge
that wrong. He meant well, but he was wrong.” His brows drew down. “I told him so,
but he doesn’t listen to me.”

“He’ll have to now, won’t he?” Rule said.

“It will take time for him to learn how to do that. Isen didn’t let my father change
his heir back to my brother before passing the mantle. He must have wanted me to be
Rho. Why me instead of James?”

“He didn’t tell me. It may be that he trusts you more than he does James.”

The young man thought that over, then nodded. “James thought Father’s scheme to sell
information was clever. I thought it was wrong. Maybe Isen guessed that. Or maybe
Fred is right. Fred thinks that Isen preferred me because I would be easy to manipulate
because I’m not very smart.”

“Tony!” the short man exclaimed. “I didn’t say—”

“No.” For the first time he smiled, a singularly sweet expression turned briefly on
his counselor. “You didn’t call me stupid. You never do. But I am slow in my thinking.
I’m an odd choice for Rho. My father never meant me to be Rho. I was his way of telling
James to shape up. But now I am Rho, and so I submitted
plene et simplicit.
Now Isen won’t feel he has to manipulate me because he has all the control, and we
can be comfortable together.”

A single sharp crack of laughter burst from Rule. “And so you prove that thinking
slowly is not the same as being
stupid. You may have just gotten the best of my father, Tony, and there are very few
who can say that.”

Lily was confused. Her expression must have shown that, because Rule turned to her
with a half smile. “This makes Isen more fully involved in Laban’s welfare, you see.
Increasing his authority increases his responsibility to them.”

“Isen is sneaky,” Tony said, “and very clever, so it would do me no good to try to
outthink him. He is also very much a Rho. He will deal honorably with us.”

Fred didn’t seem as sure of that as his new Rho. He sighed faintly. Lily thought Tony
was right, though. Isen was both clever and sneaky, but he was also as dominant as
they came…the lupi version of dominant, that is, which was as much about taking care
of those in your charge as it was about taking charge.

“Who did you name Lu Nuncio for Laban?” Rule asked.

“My cousin Charlie.”

Rule’s eyebrows rose. “I’d expected you to name your father.”

Tony’s sigh was long and windy. “So did he. He’d be a safe choice, but he was Rho
too long to make a good Lu Nuncio, and he doesn’t listen to me. Charlie is very dominant
and thinks he’d make a better Rho than I will, but he listens. He’s not jumpy the
way James is. He won’t try to kill me. Not right away, anyway. He’ll give me a chance.”

“You have much to do within your clan,” Rule said. “I stand ready to help, if I can.”

“Thank you. First, though, I must do as Isen said. He wants me to help you investigate
the theft. How can I help?”

“For now, by answering some questions,” Lily said.

“Okay,” he said, but barely glanced at her before looking back at Rule with doubt
writ large on his face.

“Lily is in charge of the investigation,” Rule said. “She’s an FBI agent.”

“I think I knew that, but I’d forgotten.” For the first time he really looked at her…and
kept looking for a disconcertingly long time. Finally he nodded. “I’m not used to
women being in charge. I know they are sometimes, but not in the clans, and I don’t
see many women on my job.”

“What do you do?”

“Underwater and hyperbaric welding.”

“Ah…that’s a very specialized skill.”

“I like it. I’m good at it, too, and the pay’s good, but I won’t be able to do it
anymore. There’s a lot of travel involved.”

Rule spoke. “Tony works for an underwater fabrication and repair firm. They work on
ships, drilling platforms, and underwater installations of all kinds. He’s been all
over the world.”

Lily exchanged a glance with Rule. There was more to this slow-speaking new Rho than
met the eye. “I need to ask you some questions. Do you have a problem with a woman
having authority?” she asked Tony.

He thought that over a moment. “I don’t think so. I’ll need to study on it awhile,
I expect, since I’m not used to it. If your questions are about who paid my father
to betray Nokolai, I know some things that may help.”

“Good. Have a seat,” she said, gesturing at the round table and chairs near the window.
She glanced at Rule. “Maybe we could have a few less bodies in the room…and some coffee?”

L
ILY
, Rule noted with amusement, was sublimely unaware that she’d shocked some of their
company. Those who hadn’t been around her much weren’t used to seeing someone casually
ask a Rho to get her some coffee, and these were Leidolf. Leidolf tended to cherish
women in the abstract while devaluing them as individuals.

It was good for them to see that Lily was his partner, not his subordinate, and that
she possessed her own authority that didn’t devolve from his, even if they didn’t
really understand. Yet. Rule emphasized the point by ordering the coffee himself,
then asked her, “Do you need me?”

“Always, but not immediately. Why?”

He gave her a quick kiss to show how much her response pleased him and told her he
needed to tend to a few security matters. While she questioned Tony, Rule conferred
with Scott. They needed to rotate the guards, with some sleeping, some present but
in the other suite, and some in the second-floor gym. Confining a number of lupi in
a relatively small space for long periods of time created problems. Burning off some
of their energy would help. He also wanted to change the guard rotation on Beth. They’d
been handling it with
three guards—Murray, who was in charge, plus two Laban men—with each taking an eight-hour
shift. Rule wanted two men on her at all times, starting immediately. For now they’d
have to take twelve-hour shifts. After a brief discussion with Scott, he sent Patrick
McCausey. Patrick was a steady sort with excellent control, unlikely to offend the
notoriously prickly Laban.

He was probably locking the barn door after the fact, but they didn’t have any idea
why Sean Friar was missing. In the absence of data, Rule preferred to add a belt to
the suspenders. If the belt proved unnecessary, good.

After that he talked to Scott about a contingency he wanted covered—if they did end
up faking a trade of Cullen for Adam, he didn’t want some sniper doing away with Cullen
before they could act. Then he called Isen and brought him up-to-date, learning in
turn that Lily’s crime-scene people had come and gone and that Benedict and Arjenie
would be stuck in D.C. for a while. Some of the sidhe delegation were staying holed
up in their suite due to an unspecified indisposition, and the administration wanted
Arjenie around when they emerged.

That struck Rule as suspicious. Elves’ ability to heal varied, but it seemed unlikely
they’d caught a bug. Perhaps “indisposition” was diplomatic code for “we’re sick of
talking to you.” Still, he called Benedict and, after some discussion, they agreed
on a plan.

Then he called an old acquaintance who had lived in San Francisco a long time and
had contacts in some less-than-legal venues. He might know about this Hugo they wanted
to find.

He didn’t, but he promised to ask around. Just as Rule disconnected, Cullen arrived
with Marcus and Steve. They hadn’t found a body or signs of a fight, so Rule called
Beth to let her know, then directed Cullen to the small conference room he’d booked
on the second floor, where he could work on his Find spell. Marcus and Steve would
remain Cullen’s personal guards, so they went with him.

At last Rule was able to pour himself a cup of coffee from
one of the insulated carafes room service had delivered and sit beside Lily, who was
just getting off the phone. Good coffee, he noted, savoring the aroma. “What do I
need to know?”

She glanced at her notebook. “This part is secondhand. An individual calling himself
Ahab contacted Leo Romano on December second.”

“Just after the demo Cullen gave for the T-Corp people.”

She nodded. “Ahab is a male with a voice described as a ‘resonant tenor.’ Accent and
diction suggest a native Californian, educated, no perceptible ethnicity. Contact
was by phone only, with Ahab calling Leo from a series of numbers—probably throwaways,
but we’ll check. Ahab claimed to work for a large multinational corporation, though
he refused to say which one.”

Ahab certainly could be Friar. Rule looked at Tony. “You know quite a lot, considering
you never spoke to this Ahab.”

“I thought you’d want to know things like that, so I asked my father once I was Rho.”

“Good thinking.”

“I don’t think fast,” Tony said with a hint of humor, “but I do think.”

“I’ll speak with Leo to confirm, of course,” Lily said. “Ah…I’ll skip some of the
details to get to the interesting part. Payment was in cash, with the first installment
left at the Golden Gate Park on December twenty-first. Tony persuaded his father that
it would be good to know more about their mysterious Ahab, so they’d staked out the
drop hours before it occurred. Successfully.” She flashed him a grin. “A Laban guard
saw the drop made and followed the woman who did it to her car—an older model Toyota,
license number 2LBZ112. Which is registered,” she finished smugly, “to a Ms. Carrie
Ann Rucker. Special Agent Bergman is sending someone out now to pick her up for questioning.”

B
ETH
hit
send
and leaned back with a sigh of relief. It was not her best work, but it was what
the client wanted, and it
was finished. Which was something of a miracle considering she didn’t really give
a damn, not with Sean missing, but working was better than pacing. So she’d worked.

When she wasn’t Googling Humans First, that is. And the October massacres and Robert
Friar and sociopaths. She hadn’t expected to find anything about this war the lupi
thought they were fighting, and she’d been right about that. She’d turned up plenty
about the Azá and their attempt to open a hellgate a year ago last November, but very
little about the goddess they were said to worship. The one Lily called the Great
Bitch. Who they didn’t name because
she
was attracted to her name. Who was apparently behind everything—Harlowe and the staff
he’d used on Beth. The demons who’d killed so many at the Humans First rallies. The
sniper who’d shot Lily last September and the plastic explosives planted at Nokolai
Clanhome that they’d found barely in time.

There was a good chance
she
was behind Sean’s disappearance, too. Lily said Robert Friar was
her
agent and acolyte. Beth didn’t know why Robert would kidnap his own brother, but
she didn’t have to understand to think he was involved.

Kidnap
, Beth repeated silently, giving the word a mental underline. Sean had been kidnapped,
not killed. He was alive. She believed that fiercely, knowing she was being irrational
and not caring. He was alive, and they’d find him.

On the rational side, they did know now that he wasn’t lying dead or dying in his
house. That was something, she told herself as she powered down her laptop.

Not enough,
shouted the anger simmering inside her. Not nearly enough, and if Lily had only told
her more about what was going on—at least that Sean’s brother was still alive! If
Lily had told her that, she would have warned Sean, and he’d have been on his guard,
and maybe he wouldn’t be missing now.

She hadn’t wanted to know.

Grimly Beth acknowledged that truth. She’d avoided learning more about all the bad
things that had happened in
the past year. She hadn’t wanted to know how scary things really were for her sister
and for anyone connected to her. How dangerous it had become to be lupi or Gifted,
and how many people purely hated them. How much crap was out there masquerading as
fact, and how many people believed it. She really hadn’t wanted to know there was
an Old One auditioning for the role of Baddest Megalomaniac I-Will-Take-Over-The-World
Villain Ever. She hadn’t wanted to know, so she hadn’t asked Lily the questions that
were now burning up her brain. After she’d been enspelled by Harlowe, held prisoner
by a gang, and nearly killed, she’d just wanted her life back, wanted to choose her
own course, not get sent careening off on some crazy trajectory like a badly struck
cue ball.