World of Lupi 10 - Ritual Magic (20 page)

The Big A ran into them in the hall. “Fielding. Why don’t I have that wit report yet?”

“Uh—I thought, after making that mistake about Agent Yu’s Gift, I’d better learn more about how the Unit operates. I wanted to—”

Ackleford rolled his eyes. “Get me that wit report.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ackleford shoved open the men’s room door and went in.

Fielding said quickly, “I’ll be right out, okay? I’ve almost got the report done. I’ll be just a minute.”

“He’s eager,” Cynna commented.

“He’s new,” Lily said dryly. “He’s still trying to get on the Big A’s good side. He hasn’t figured out that the Big A doesn’t have a good side. Why do you need a circle?” She’d seen Cynna cast for a pattern plenty of times without setting a circle first.

“There’s a wee chance that if Miriam is able to banish the contagion from your officer, it will sort of rebound into the fillings.”

“Mind you,” Cullen put in, “it’s a very slim chance. The resonance would be very slight, considering how little the fillings had to do with generating the contagion and, I suspect, with containing it until it was called or decided to move out. If the—”

“Don’t explain.” Lily looked at Cynna as they turned into the hall that led to the stairs. They’d go out the back way, which was really on the side of the building, but everyone called it going out the back. “Is this going to be safe for you?”

“Ought to be. I’m not impervious to magic the way you are, but I’ve got pretty heavy-duty protections these days. And I set one hell of a circle. I won’t open the baggie until the circle’s set.”

Just how much power did Cynna have available as Rhej? She probably shouldn’t ask. Rhejes kept a lot of things secret. “How much power do you have now, anyway? On, say, a scale of one to dragon.”

Cynna grinned. “Less than Sam, certainly.”

She hadn’t said less than a dragon, but less than Sam, who was the oldest of the dragons, and presumably the most powerful. “Does that mean—”

“It means,” Cullen said, “that your question can’t be answered. In the first place, magic isn’t electricity. You can’t break it down into neat little quanta like ohms or volts or whatever. In the second place, the real question is how much power someone can safely handle. There are casters with minor Gifts who can cast quite powerful spells because they’ve mastered the use of external power. Abel Karonski, for one. Then there are people with powerful Gifts who can’t channel external power worth a damn. Like you.”

“But—”

“And then,” Cullen said as they reached the door to the stairs, “there are a few rare souls like me.” His grin flashed. He swung the door open with a flourish. “Strong as hell and masterful, too.”

“Not to mention pretty,” Cynna said, patting him on the cheek as she passed. “But not modest. Somehow he missed the modesty gene altogether.”

“I thought about adding modesty to all my other wonderful qualities, but decided it would be too much.”

“Couldn’t squeeze it in past your ego, you mean.”

Lily smiled, but she couldn’t help noting that, between the minilecture and the banter, Cullen and Cynna had done a fine job of changing the subject. Rhejes did get to have secrets, she reminded herself as she started down the stairs. But Cullen didn’t. “Why did you say I can’t channel? I can’t, of course, but doesn’t that go without saying with a Gift like mine? I can’t use magic, period.”

“You can’t use spells. You use magic all the freaking time. You soak it up, mostly unconsciously, but you’ve done it on purpose, too, though that nearly killed you precisely because you couldn’t dump it fast enough. I don’t understand why Sam hasn’t taught you how to avoid that.”

“Oh, gee, maybe it’s because I can’t do it.”

“You probably can’t learn to channel, but you can learn to get rid of excess magic. You already do, just not consciously.”

“No, I don’t.” Her Gift soaked up magic and made it hers, which was how she was able to read magic with a touch and why she couldn’t be affected by it. Throw a spell at her, and her Gift ate the power. And yes, like he said, she could use it to suck up magic on purpose, although doing so bothered her. But . . . “That’s why I can’t cast spells. You told me that yourself. To cast a spell you have to be able to use whatever magic you’ve got, you said, and mine isn’t available for that. My Gift hangs on to all the magic it absorbs.”

Cullen snorted. “Why is it that your brain works fine on other subjects, but not about your Gift? I said one of those things. The other is your unconsidered assumption. Think about it. Your capacity to absorb magic is not unlimited. Your experience with the Chimea proved that. So why didn’t you exceed your capacity years ago?”

Lily’s mouth opened . . . and closed again.

“You must be shedding excess magic somehow. I don’t know what the mechanism is, so I can’t teach you how to use it consciously. But Sam ought to be able to.”

Thoroughly uncomfortable and not sure why, Lily didn’t respond.

They’d reached the bottom of the stairs, which opened onto a short hall with locked doors on either side—one to the parking lot, the other to the rest of the building. Both doors required key cards; Lily moved to the front to use hers.

“Weird weather,” Lily said as she stepped outside. The air was heavy with moisture and smog. Humidity was always a surprise, and usually the wind off the ocean was a tidy and tireless housekeeper, sweeping the city’s air clean of man-made murk. The air was utterly still today.

A few steps out, Lily stopped and shook her head. “Cullen.”

The parking lot was deep but narrow, with a single central lane and parking slots arrayed along the federal building on one side and an insurance company on the other. The spaces were reserved for Bureau and ATF employees, and there weren’t enough of them. And smack-dab in ATF territory, occupying not one but two spaces, sat a black behemoth of a car. A glossy Lincoln Town Car, to be precise, with armored sides and bulletproof glass. Three less-than-glossy men lounged nearby.

“What?” Cullen said. “You don’t think Cynna should have bulletproof glass between her and possible snipers?”

“Using the tankmobile is a great idea. Parking it illegally, not so much. Isen would be pissed if it got towed.”

“You wouldn’t let them do that.”

“ATF is hugely unimpressed by me. If one of them sees it, they’ll have it towed before I can blink. Hi, José,” she said to one of the men near Isen’s tankmobile.

José had a quick, appealing smile. “It’s good to see you, Lily. Ah . . . Isen said I was to mention the chain-of-command issue.”

Lily looked at the
other
three men standing about ten feet away . . . Santos, Joe, and Andy. Her Leidolf guards. José and the guards with him were Nokolai. The two clans had been enemies for at least two hundred years. Rule was now Rho of one and Lu Nuncio of the other and was trying to mend that, but some habits were hard to break. At the moment no one looked hostile, perhaps because they were avoiding looking at each other at all. “Right. Santos.”

“Yes?”

“This is José”—she pointed—“and Casey and Steve. While we’re all together like this, José’s in charge.”

Santos’s dark eyes flickered with outrage. He glanced at José, who was a head shorter and about fifty pounds lighter. A decade older, too, but that didn’t show. His response was carefully courteous. “May I ask for your reasoning?”

“First, I’m not going to put you over someone who’s been subordinate to your boss, and Scott was under José in D.C. Second, I’m told you’re good. I believe it, but I know José better than I know you. I know what to expect, how he thinks, how he reacts when the shit hits the fan. That’s an edge I don’t intend to give up just to smooth your ruffled fur.”

Santos didn’t like it. That was obvious in the very blankness of his face, but he nodded.

She glanced at Joe and Andy. She didn’t expect any problems there. Santos was pricklier and more dominant than the other two. They each nodded.

Good enough. Lily turned to follow Cynna and Cullen, who’d headed about a third of the way down the parking lot, arguing cheerfully—something about a ley line. José gave low-voiced instructions for how the men should station themselves. Lily carefully did not check to make sure Santos and the others obeyed. That was José’s job.

“I still say you’re too close,” Cullen said to Cynna, “but have at it. Just because I was playing with ley lines before you were born doesn’t mean you should listen to me.”

“Glad you realize that.” Cynna set her tote down.

He looked at Lily. “José could kick Mr. Macho’s ass.”

“When they’re two-footed, yeah.” Two-footed wasn’t Santos’s best form for fighting, and Lily had seen José take down fighters who outweighed and outmuscled him every bit as much as Santos did. As a wolf, though, Santos was supposed to be one of the best. Lily had heard Benedict’s assessment: superb in wolf form and potentially excellent on two feet, though mishandled and mistrained. Currently a pain in the ass.

Santos had issues. A lot of issues. Rule hoped to reclaim him. He said that Victor, the previous Rho, had wanted to make a weapon of Santos, alternately petting and punishing, trying to obliterate the man’s sense of right and wrong so that the only “right” was Victor’s word. Victor had been a grade-A son of a bitch. “But Santos has to be able to take orders from people who can’t kick his ass. Me, for one.”

“True.”

The door into the building opened and Fielding hurried out. “Have you started?”

“Not yet. There won’t be much for you to see,” Lily warned him.

“More than I’ve seen until now,” he said as he moved to join them. He glanced around, obviously noting the guards. “What are they—”

“They’re my men,” Lily told him.

He grimaced, but didn’t comment out loud. Maybe he didn’t consider lupi men, or maybe he didn’t approve of her having bodyguards. Either way, he didn’t want to make her mad. He really wanted to watch the magic happen.

Cynna was drawing her circle with her special chalk, using a piece of string.

Fielding whispered, “Is it okay if we talk?”

“Sure,” Cullen said. Not whispering.

“Why the string?”

“Same reason you used a compass to draw a circle back in geometry class. Circles don’t have to be mathematically precise, but the cruder the circle, the more power is needed to close and maintain it.”

Cynna finished drawing, crouched, and touched the chalked line to set the circle. She moved to its center and opened the plastic baggie, shaking the fillings out into the palm of her hand. She spoke a Swahili word and made a quick gesture with her other hand. After that, nothing at all happened, to Lily’s eyes.

Or to Fielding’s. “What’s she doing?” he asked.

“Copying all the patterns imprinted on the gold,” Lily said.

“What exactly are these patterns?”

Lily gestured at Cullen. “You try. I don’t understand it myself.”

“You might think of patterns as words. Both are representations of something, not the thing itself. The analogy isn’t precise, of course. A word is like a basket that lets you carry the idea of the thing around. Patterns actually partake of the nature of the thing, which is why they’re so effective for all types of sympathetic magic.”

Fielding looked at Lily. “Do you understand what he just said?”

“Not really.”

Cullen sighed. “It’s magic.”

Fielding nodded, satisfied.

Cynna made another gesture and then just sat there with her eyes closed.

“Whatever patterns are,” Lily said quietly, “she’s doing the heavy lifting now. First she copied the patterns that relate to those two fillings. Now she has to get rid of everything that isn’t part of the pattern for the victim.”

“Huh.” Fielding thought about that a moment. “How does she know what to take out?”

Cullen took over again. “Part of it is plain old hard work and experience. Part is art. She’ll recognize some of the elements she wants to keep, like ‘human’ and ‘male,’ because she knows them pretty well. She’ll spot some that she wants to remove that way, too. But the art . . . that’s what makes her such a helluva Finder. She’s got a sense for how a pattern flows, what belongs, what doesn’t. She’ll know when she’s got something she can work with.”

Fielding smiled. “She’s your wife, right? I can tell you’re proud of her.”

“Pride would suggest I played some part in what she can do. I didn’t. In other areas, maybe—I’ve beaten a little theory into her thick skull—but not this. She’s just damn good with patterns.”

Lily smiled. Yeah, he was proud of her.

Now and then Cynna gestured or spoke in Swahili. Fielding began to fidget. He dug into one pocket and pulled out a crinkly cellophane bag. It rustled as he dug into it and popped something in his mouth. “Want some?” He held it out.

It was some kind of virulently green candy shaped like . . .

Cynna’s eyes opened. She dropped the fillings back in the bag, sealed it, stood, and stretched. “Well, I’ve got something, anyway.”

Lily grabbed the bag out of Fielding’s hand and held it up. It was full of frog-shaped gummies. Or maybe they were toads. Candy toads.
The candy man can. There’s a killer on the road—

“Lily!” José called sharply. “Ten o’clock and twenty feet up! What the hell is that?”

TWENTY-THREE

“S
O
that’s going to be your secret tunnel.” Julia crouched next to the earthen trench, impressed. Big metal bars were rammed into the dirt along the walls every few feet and the floor was outlined by boards called forms because they’d form the way the concrete would go when they poured it. That was what Rocky had told her. He was the foreman or crew boss or something like that, and she ought to call him Mister Something, but Toby hadn’t told her the man’s last name. Toby called everyone by their first names no matter how old they were.

The trench ran about twenty feet from the house’s basement to what was going to be a big garage, but right now was a big mess. They’d knocked down the original garage, because it had been in sorry shape, plus it hadn’t been big enough. Two men and a woman were working to clear away the mess. The woman was operating a backhoe—a machine with a big scoop on one end that Julia really, really wanted to drive, but they wouldn’t let her. The woman used it to scrape up chunks of cement and broken-up boards from the old garage. Then the men used their shovels to toss smaller pieces of broken stuff into the scoop, and then the machine would pivot and bump along several feet to empty its load into a dump truck.

They wouldn’t let Julia drive the dump truck, either.

“Want to see the other one?” Toby asked.

“Other one what?”

“Other secret tunnel.”

Julia sat back on her heels, indignant. “You get
two
secret tunnels?” One secret tunnel was cool. Two was like having two swimming pools or two maids picking up after you or—or doubles on anything that was just too much.

“Yes, because maybe our enemies will explode the garage, or maybe that won’t be a good way to go ’cause there’s too many of them in that direction, or maybe they’ll find this one. So there’s one the other side of the house, too. It’s not finished, but it’s closer to being done than this one.” He popped to his feet. “Come on. If the cement truck shows up, we’ll hear it.”

Maybe it wasn’t too much after all, Julia thought as she followed the boy. Or else it was too much of the wrong thing. If you had to worry about your enemies blowing up your garage . . . “Will we be able to see the cement truck if it does come?”

“We’ll hear it, anyway. But Rocky didn’t think the truck was gonna make it today.”

Rocky was the foreman, who’d gone into the house with a couple of his men to eat lunch when they found out there was a problem with the cement truck. Watching them pour the cement was supposedly the reason Mr. Turner had chased them outside. She bet, though, that if they tried to go in, he’d make them leave again. He was working on his computer, which looked a lot like Toby’s computer, but he was reading stuff on it instead of playing stuff on it.

She sighed. “I guess grown-ups are all the same about some things. Like wanting kids to go away when they’re busy.”

“Dad didn’t want us to go away. He wanted us to stop playing computer games. He thinks too much gaming isn’t good for me. That’s usually okay because I usually have plenty of other stuff to do, but since we moved here . . .” He shrugged and kicked a small rock. It skittered several feet.

“You don’t like it here?”

Toby shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s just that there’s more to do at Nokolai Clanhome and lots of kids to do it with. Maybe they’d let you go to Clanhome with me tomorrow. Do you like to fish or rock climb?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done either one.”

“Not ever?”

“My father doesn’t like fishing.” He probably wouldn’t have taken her and her sisters even if he went fishing every week, but she didn’t want to say that. Not when Toby had the coolest father ever . . . even if he had chased them outside after lunch. “I don’t know if I could do rock climbing. I used to be pretty strong for a girl, but I don’t know how strong this body is.” They rounded the corner of the house. “I don’t see a tunnel,” she said, frowning.

Toby grinned. “They did a good job, huh? It’s camouflaged. That’s why I’m not supposed to play on this side of the house, in case I forget what to look for and accidentally fall in.”

“Are we going to get in trouble for being here?”

“We’re not playing, are we? And you ought to know about it so you don’t accidentally fall in.”

“And that
is what you plan to tell your father if he finds out.”

“I’ll tell him anyway. I don’t lie to him . . . well, I can’t, because he’d smell it if I tried. But I don’t hide stuff from him, either.” He paused. “Usually.”

Was he pulling her leg about Mr. Turner smelling a lie? She looked at him suspiciously, but decided it might gratify him too much if she asked. He was okay, for a boy. But he did think he was pretty special. “So where’s the tunnel?”

He showed her. It was well hidden, all right. They’d put plywood on top and put sod over the plywood, so all you really saw was a kind of bump that ran out to a small grove of trees. They ambled along in that direction.

“This tunnel is a bigger secret than the other one,” Toby said. “See, if someone’s tracking what we do here they’ll spot the other one and think they know what we’re up to. So you can’t tell anyone about it. No one at all.”

“Okay.” It was a really tricky way to do things, which she had to admire, but it made her stomach feel tight to think they might need this much trickery. “It looks like it’s been here all along. The grass and weeds look like they grew up all by themselves.”

“They used magic to help with that.”

“Did Mr. Seaborne do the magic?”

“No, he’s not that good with plants, because of him being so good with Fire. Grandmother did most of it, but she taught Cynna how so Cynna could do it, too.”

She looked at him, astonished. “Grandmother? You mean the old lady who . . .” Julia had to think for a minute to recall the relationship. “Mr. Yu’s mother?”

“I guess you don’t know about her anymore.” His brow wrinkled. “I’m not sure if I should tell you, but . . . well, she’s got what you might call a really special Gift, but it’s a big secret. She knows some spells, too, and one of them makes things grow.”

Julia frowned, studying the slight hump that indicated the tunnel-to-be. “So why do they worry about you falling in? You don’t weigh enough to break plywood.”

“Oh, it isn’t plywood everywhere. There’s places where it’s just a bit of tarp and not much dirt. See that scuffed spot by that dead-looking bush? And I think there’s one close to us, too.” He studied the ground, then squatted and brushed at the dirt. “See?”

The edge of a yellow tarp showed through beneath a thin coating of dirt. “But that’s not enough dirt to grow things!”

“That’s why they needed magic.”

That was some pretty cool magic. Julia sighed. She’d never thought about magic much before, but now she found herself sad because she didn’t have any. “So why did they use a tarp in some places?”

“So they can get in and out to work on it, which they mostly do at night.”

“They really are working hard to . . . hey, what’s that?”

“What?”

“Up there.” Julia pointed at a patch of sky between them and the house. “See where the air is all wavy and funny?”

* * *

“Y
OU’VE
seen the greenhouse, the store, and the rec center,” Isen said. “Shall we visit the babies now?”

Hardy’s face lit up. “‘You are my sunshine,’” he sang. “‘You make me happy when skies are gray.’”

Isen chuckled and turned down the path to the clan’s day-care center. “Babies do that for me, too.”

He had learned quite a bit about his unusual guest today. Some of it was obvious. Hardy couldn’t use words normally, but he understood them just fine. He had a vast repertoire of songs and commercial ditties from before 1975. Most likely, then, he’d been hurt in 1975, or close to it.

Isen had also learned that Hardy loved dogs, chocolate ice cream, and hot water. That last item was probably not a pleasure he could indulge in often, but he certainly had this morning. He’d been in the shower a full hour. He also knew that Hardy had a bad knee, a child’s curiosity, and a clear and flexible mind. Humans might not notice that. Without language, Hardy wouldn’t think the way they did, so sometimes he would baffle them, or vice versa. But Isen was accustomed to new wolves who’d temporarily lost language . . . and old wolves who didn’t always bother to put words to their thoughts.

He might be the most nearly fearless man Isen had ever met.

Not completely without fear. He’d been anxious about the message he wanted passed on to Lily, but otherwise he lived in the moment, sunny and untroubled. Certainly lupi didn’t worry him. Once he understood the nature of his hosts, he’d been fascinated. At Hardy’s request—rather elliptically posed, but Isen had figured it out—Isen had Changed in front of his guest. Hardy had watched intently, then he’d grinned and sung out that God had “you and me, baby, in His hands”—a clear proclamation that Hardy considered Isen one of God’s children, even when he was four-footed. Interestingly, he’d assumed that Isen would still understand him.

Hardy also walked with angels.

That was how Hardy thought of it, at least, and who was Isen to say he was wrong? They’d had a good conversation about it. Hardy didn’t actually see the beings he called angels, but he felt their presence. Sometimes they spoke to him, and the way they . . .

What was that? Isen stopped, all his senses alert.

Hardy grabbed his arm and sang so quickly that the words all smeared together. “Running-just-as-fast-as-we-can!”

The mantle in Isen’s gut twisted as some part of Clanhome
ripped.
Isen looked toward that breach and felt the wrongness and knew precisely where it had occurred—the node halfway up the rocky slope of Little Sister. He pulled hard on the mantle, tipped back his head, and bellowed,
“Fighters—to me!”

* * *

S
EVEN
floors up at St. Margaret’s Hospital, Benedict pushed to his feet. He didn’t suffer from claustrophobia the way his brother did. He had a touch of discomfort in very tight, enclosed spaces, sure, but almost all lupi did. Nettie’s room was small, and at his insistence, it lacked a window. But it wasn’t small enough to trigger that response in him.

So why was he on his feet, pacing?

Arjenie looked at him over the top of her laptop. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Go run the stairs again.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re restless and anxious and sick of this room. You’re also accustomed to a lot of physical activity, and you haven’t been getting it.”

Benedict stopped to smile at his mate. “Know me pretty—”

Thud.

He froze.

“What is it?” Arjenie whispered.

He made the sign for silence and listened keenly. Then he spun. Quicker to take the bed with Nettie in it than to disentangle her first from the various tubes. He pulled his hunting knife from the sheath on his calf. “We’re evacuating. I’ll get Nettie. You get her IV.”

She didn’t hesitate. She put her laptop on the floor and hurried to the IV stand.

Thud.

She must have heard it this time, too. Her eyes widened.

“Bill, Tommy!” he snapped. “Get in here. Rearguard!” He laid the knife beside Nettie and shoved her bed, aiming for the door, which opened to admit the two guards. Arjenie kept pace with the IV stand. “Something’s on the wall outside. Something big. It—”

Thud, thud, crack!

“—wants in.”

* * *

L
I
Lei Yu woke suddenly, sat bolt upright in her borrowed bed, and did something she never did. She yelled. “Rule! The children!
Run!
”