Mind Magic (57 page)

He kept smiling. Kept rising. And made that little gesture with the gun again.

Her fingers numb and clumsy with shock, she managed to pull herself up the last bit, rose to her knees—and saw him land several feet away. Too far, dammit. Too far for her to tackle him when she wasn’t on her feet yet.

A helicopter slid into view, coming over the top of the rocky hill, then dropping lower.

Tom the sorcerer smiled with his mouth, but some mask had dropped away. His eyes were cold now. Viciously cold. He raised his voice to be heard over the chopper’s noise. “Quite the showstopper, that little trick, isn’t it? Cousin.”

Cousin? What did—

He said something, but the chopper was so loud now that she couldn’t hear his words. It hovered some twenty feet up and maybe forty feet away. As she watched, someone dumped out a rope ladder. It unrolled to almost reach the ground.

Two black-and-silver wolves leaped down, down from overhead—one from the right, one from the left. Leaping straight for the man who’d called her cousin.

Lily dropped, the gun cracked—and the sorcerer burst into flame. One wolf fell short of his goal. The other completed his leap to crash into the burning man—knocking him down, only to be seized by arms that seemed made of flame. Burning man, burning wolf, rolled together on the ground for deadly seconds—rolled close to Lily, who pushed to her feet and stumbled back.

And immediately dropped to the ground again as machine-gun fire spattered the ground and rocks nearby. The helicopter. They were firing from the helicopter. She lay flat but turned her head, desperate to see the other wolf, the one who’d been shot—

Tom the sorcerer, no longer burning but covered in ash and blood and scraps of burned cloth, kicked her in the head.

He was barefoot, his shoes having burned off, so the blow wasn’t as bad as it might have been. She didn’t black out. But she lost a few seconds to a pain-wracked daze, and when her eyes would focus again, she was alone. Tom must not have been hurt badly, in spite of the blood. He’d reached the chopper’s dangling rope ladder—and he had the tote.

A few feet away, the corpse of one of the wolves smoldered. And it was a corpse. No breath stirred ribs with fur and flesh burned away. Charles. Charles, who she’d forgotten was up here, waiting patiently and loyally while she named baby dragons—waiting and no doubt listening, maybe pacing, when the sorcerer arrived, watching for his chance to act.

Then Rule had arrived while she was on the brownies’ rope ladder. She’d tried not to notice, tried hard not to use the mate sense, but he couldn’t be so close without her knowing. He and Charles had attacked together. Fate or luck let only one of them connect with his target—and die for it.

Lily pushed to her feet, shaking. And saw the other wolf pushing to his feet, his side bloody. Reality took a quick dive into impossibility, a sudden Möbius-strip twist impossible to follow with eyes alone, and Rule stood on two legs, one hand holding his side, where blood dripped.

Lily staggered toward him, dizzy but determined. And the chopper rose with Tom partway up the rope ladder. Rose up and away.

She stopped. “Goddammit!” They were getting away, and she had nothing, no way to stop them.

Rule managed a few wavering steps and she hurried to him, tucking her shoulder under one arm to prop him up. “How bad—”

The earth shook with the dragon’s roar.

Mika. Mika had woken, either because the chopper and its occupants were too far away or because Amanda just couldn’t keep her asleep any longer. Fuzzily Lily tried to open her mindsense so she could tell Mika to stop them, that the bad guys were getting away—

Before she could, the red dragon shot out of the opening to the creche in a huge leap, narrowly missing knocking them both down—a leap that exploded into flight. She roared again.

And the helicopter burst into flame.

FORTY-EIGHT

AS
Rule had expected, there were a lot of messy bits. Those bits kept them in Washington for days, though they stayed in Nokolai’s Georgetown house instead of with Ruben and Deborah. Rule was satisfied that he and Ruben had established that they could share a house. Staying in another Rho’s territory when he was wounded and vulnerable was not necessary. Not very smart, either.

He’d be less than fully mobile for a while. The bullet had missed his heart, but it hadn’t done his stomach much good. The rib it broke was healing nicely, but gut wounds healed slower than most. Fortunately, Nettie had been able to fly out to put him in sleep for the surgery. Unfortunately, she’d put him on a liquid diet for the first two days, followed by disgustingly bland food “until I tell you otherwise.”

He was propped up on the couch trying to work—trying not to think about steak—when Lily returned. He heard her on the porch. “No, I’ve got it,” she told the guard who’d gone with her. “Just get the door. Thanks.”

His heart lifted in anticipation. He closed the laptop and swung his legs off the couch as Lily came in . . . pushing José in a wheelchair.

“Don’t you dare get up,” she told him, parking the chair near the couch. “You’ll set a bad example.”

He ignored her, of course, standing so he could hug his friend and get his back pounded in return. He’d known that José had survived since waking from his surgery. It was the first thing Lily had told him. But he hadn’t been able to go to him, hadn’t seen him until now.

José had nearly bled out before being found and taken prisoner. The military doctors had given him blood, which was good, but they’d also decided they had to take off his leg at the hip. They’d been quite surprised when their unconscious, anesthetized patient woke up when they started to make the incision. Bloody fools. They’d known he was lupus. They should consider themselves lucky he’d been too weak from blood loss to do more than knock out the surgeon.

They’d been half right, though. Even lupi healing could only do so much. José did lose his leg below the knee, but Nettie had been present to put him in sleep for that surgery yesterday.

Once they’d greeted each other, Rule told José to sit down before he fell over, then he did the same. They talked awhile, mostly meaningless things. Rule said that regrowing a limb was a bitch, especially when José couldn’t use crutches until the hole in his shoulder finished healing. José said yeah, but at least he could eat real food while he healed. Rule called him a couple of rude names. Then José asked about the firnam—when and where it would be held.

Not for another two weeks, Rule told him, and at Leidolf Clanhome. They should both be well enough for it by then.

Silence fell.

Rule had lost friends, people he valued. Five of the dead had been his men—Andy, killed by a scared cop; Saul, Dave, and Roger gunned down by the National Guard; and Claude, shot by a gods-cursed vigilante. The people in uniform Rule had seen had been deputies who were trying to get the damn vigilantes to go home. Five wasn’t a lot maybe, considering their enemies had included the national government. But they’d been good men. Men who shouldn’t have died fighting their own countrymen. The firnam would honor them and others who’d died in battle, but firnams were also for the living, meant to help those who’d survived. Rule hoped it would help José. He hoped it would help him, too.

He’d lost men before. It didn’t get easier with repetition.

“Will you hold the
gens amplexi
then?” Lily asked.

He flashed her a smile, appreciating her effort to turn the conversation to a happier subject. “I don’t know yet if there will be a
gens amplexi,
but Demi will be here soon, so I expect I’ll find out. And you,” he told José, “had better get up to bed. You look like hell.”

José didn’t protest much, proving that it was, indeed, time to get him horizontal. One of the guards came in to carry him upstairs. The house was not convenient for a one-legged man.

Lily came and snuggled next to him. “Did you make up with your lawyer?”

His mouth twisted wryly. He’d been having that conversation when Lily left to pick up José. “She’s mostly forgiven me. Largely, I think, because she’s relishing the suit for false arrest I plan to bring.”

Lily snorted.

No one was in jail. No one was going to jail. That was an unexpectedly good outcome, and one he’d had nothing whatsoever to do with. He’d been only half a day out of surgery when he picked up his phone and the person on the other end asked him to hold, please, for the president.

Rule didn’t know what the black dragon had said to the president, but he’d clearly been persuasive—rather, he thought, in the way that nuclear bombs can be called persuasive. She’d sounded shaken when she promised Rule that there would be no arrests, no fines, and that all expenses incurred on behalf of the dragons would be reimbursed by the government. She’d added that Sam had asked her to let Rule know that he would be in touch when Rule and Lily returned to his territory.

Later that day, she’d given a press conference in which she said publicly the same things she’d told him privately, praising Rule and his people for their actions, and going on to praise the brownies lavishly.

As she damn well should have. Sixteen brownies had been injured, to varying degrees.

Dilly was the only one who’d died.

Guilt rose, a smothering miasma. His thoughts ran through the usual cycle of if-only’s . . . if only he’d turned faster, dodged better, run straight for the healer instead of just trying to get away . . . if only he’d not taken the little brownie on his back in the first place. The thoughts were as inevitable as they were useless, his brain trying to rewrite reality.

Lily stirred. “I heard the news on the way here. That damn fool in charge of the Ohio National Guard finally stepped down. The one who told his troops they were firing gaddo bullets. I hope they hang him.”

So did he. “Add him to the three at NSA who’ve resigned, the five who are under arrest, Eric Ellison and the other two who’ve resigned from Homeland Security and will probably end up indicted—”

“Don’t forget the slimy bastard,” she said, using her pet name for Jim Mathison, who’d taken over the Unit for such a short time.

“—and the slimy bastard, and I think we can say that the nation’s security apparatus is undergoing a major upheaval.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Ruben says he’s satisfied. I don’t believe him.”

Technically, Ruben Brooks was still on the FBI payroll, an agent of Unit Twelve. But he wasn’t on active duty. He wasn’t running Unit Twelve. “Ever since he became one of us, he’s said that eventually he’d have to step down. His secret couldn’t be kept forever.”

“I like Croft. I’m trying to be glad that he got the job. I haven’t managed it yet, but I’m trying.”

He gave her a gentle squeeze. “He’s a good man.”

“He is still looking for Tom Weng,” she said as if that proved it.

“Or for any sign that the man ever existed?”

“That, too.”

Weng’s body hadn’t been found. He’d been on the rope ladder when the helicopter exploded, which Lily was convinced meant he’d managed to teleport away. The first time she brought that up, he’d pointed out that being able to rise fifteen feet did not mean the man was Mary Poppins. He’d been a couple hundred feet up, not fifteen. Maybe he had teleported a short distance—enough to make his body hard to find. The helicopter had gone down in a particularly rough section of the Appalachians.

What about the way no one could find any record of him? That, she claimed, suggested he was alive. He knew how to use magic to change computer records, after all. Rule had retorted that Weng’s partners in crime at the NSA knew how to do it without magic. Obviously they had, for some reason, removed all traces of Tom Weng. For God’s sake, they’d both seen the helicopter explode. Weng was dead.

She’d given him a look and said she’d be glad when he could eat meat again.

Beside him, Lily stirred. “You need to get your feet up.”

“I’m five days out of surgery, not one. I don’t need to spend the day in bed.”

“I didn’t say go to bed. I said put your feet up. You’re hurting.” She stood, crouched, and lifted his feet for him.

He allowed that, even helped swing his legs around. She was right. His stomach hurt like blazes when he sat up for long. He was tired of it. He and Lily had managed to make love last night, but he disliked the care they had to take because of his bloody wounded stomach. He told himself to be patient. He scowled at his own advice.

The doorbell rang, followed by brusque words from the porch. “It’s me.”

Rule perked up at the sound of Mike’s voice. He’d sent Mike to pick up Demi. When he and Lily returned to D.C., they’d offered Demi a bedroom for as long as she wished, but she’d turned them down. She’d wanted to go to Whistle and see some of the people she’d gotten to know there. She needed to explain why she’d deceived them, she said.

He hoped that had gone well. He doubted it had, but perhaps his view of people was jaundiced.

Sean unlocked the front door. A moment later, Demi entered the living room. She wore old khaki shorts and a faded T-shirt with a hideous zombie shambling across it moaning,
GR-R-RAINS!