Mortal Danger (24 page)

About five feet, into soft, warm sand. She hit awkwardly, catching a glimpse of the long tail passing overhead before the creature powered itself up again with a windy flap of its wings.

She made it to her hands and knees and retched. With nothing in her stomach, the process was both brief and unproductive, but she missed seeing the second dragon drop its burden, only catching a glimpse of its long tail as it vanished upward again.

Dizzy and miserable, she sat back on her heels and looked around.

She was in a giant sandbox. End to end, it stretched about half the length of a football field.
(Football
, she thought… men in uniforms chasing a funny-shaped ball, fighting to possess it…) The sides were rocks—not masonry, for although they were fitted, they hadn’t been shaped. She was twenty feet or so above the beach.

And twenty feet away, Rule was pushing to his feet.

“Rule!” She tried to stand, but pain shot through her left ankle and she plopped back down in the sand.

A moment later a furry head rubbed her arm.

She twisted and flung her arm over his back, wanting to bury her face in his fur. He yipped.

She pulled back. He was panting softly. “You’re hurt.”

He touched his nose to his side.

The talons must have gripped too tight, or maybe he’d cracked something when the dragon dropped him. “Your ribs?”

He nodded and then touched her leg gently with one forepaw. The pad was rough and scratchy.

“I twisted my ankle when I landed. No biggie.” She ran a careful hand over his side. Nothing protruded, anyway. If there was internal damage…

A squeal brought her head up. She watched as another dragon finished its kamikaze run at the ground, dropping a small, noisy orange demon in the sand about fifteen feet away.

So Gan was alive, too. Her relief surprised her.

Of course, relief might be premature. Maybe the three of them were carryout.

To her left were tall, rocky bluffs riddled with crevices. Next to their sandbox was a broad hollow in the cliff face, like a skinny kid pulling in his stomach—too shallow to be called a cave, but deep enough that half the sand was in shadow. She had the uneasy suspicion that bowl-shaped concavity wasn’t natural, that something had dug out the rock.

Below the sandbox was beach, wide here, but tapering into nonexistence about fifty feet in one direction, seventy in the other. At the end of the beach farthest from the mouth of the inlet, grass grew.

Beach grass, she thought.
Ammophila arenaria
.

A damp tongue licked her cheek. She turned, startled… and realized both her cheeks were wet, and the salty taste in her mouth wasn’t just from the sea. “I know the name of it,” she murmured, threading her fingers into the wolf’s ruff. “I know the name of the grass here.”

The ocean drew her. The water was the wrong color, but it smelled right. It was quiet here, the waves small. As she watched a wave slid up the sand in a delicate froth, lost interest, and retreated.

“The dragons have a nice sandbox.” She ran a hand through the sand, letting it dribble between her fingers. It was grainy and loose. It would be hard to walk on and all but impossible to run across. It was also warm. Nearly skin temperature, she thought, which was odd. The air was cool.

“We could climb out,” she said, studying the rocks. “The cliff is high but rough enough to supply plenty of hand-and footholds.”

The wolf poked her shoulder and pointed up with his nose. She tilted her head and saw half a dozen shapes silhouetted against the dull sheen of the sky. Guards?

If so, climbing out wasn’t an option. For the moment, though, they weren’t threatened. She drew a shaky breath and wished for clean water to wash the foul taste from her mouth.

Rule lay down beside her. He touched her ankle with his nose and looked at her with a questioning lift around his eyes.

“It doesn’t hurt much.” But it did hurt. Maybe the ymu was wearing off. She looked at Gan.

The demon sat in a small, orange huddle, rocking itself back and forth, moaning.

“Are you hurt?‘ she called.

“I’m going to die, I’m going to die,” it moaned.

She didn’t see any blood. Maybe it was short on optimism.

“What now?” she asked, mostly of herself. Absently she sifted one hand through the sand while hunting for options. There weren’t many. “I’m going to see what happens if I climb down to the beach. Just so we know.”

Rule sighed and pushed to his feet.

“I don’t need an escort. You’re hurt. If you… what’s this?” She dug her hand deeper and pulled up… something. It was hard and sort of sand-colored, larger than her two hands put together, but thin, with a slight curve. A fragment of something, she thought. The edges were sharp. Could it be used as a weapon?

She dusted off some of the sand and her breath sucked in.

Pale colors seemed to run through it in a way that changed every time she tipped it to a new angle, colors with the subtle sheen of an opal.

Gan squealed. “Put it back! Put it back! We’re all going to die!”

“What are you talking about?‘

“You idiot! This is a dragon’s nest! We’re food for the babies! They hatch
hungry]”

One of the rocks near the cliff blinked. And the earth moved.

Sand slipped and shifted as something beneath it rose, sending her rolling. She ended up on her back, both hands gripping futilely at sand as if she could hold it still, make it stop moving.

Up and up it rose—a head shaped like a snake’s, but the size of a Volkswagen and with a scarlet frill at the back of the skull. A head long and flat and covered with iridescent scales whose colors ran one into the other— steel, blush, twilight. A head on a neck that seemed to stretch up forever, a Loch Ness Monster of a neck, the muscles taut and visible beneath the shimmer of scales— dawn, dusk, the tarnish of old mirrors.

The dragon’s body humped up out of the sand like a football field-sized snake, sending sand slithering and flying, making her blink grit from her eyes. It was thickest in the middle between the pairs of legs, dwindling to a tail long enough to balance all that neck. It lay in a circle, the tail ending near the head, forming a living wall around them. Along its back rested the origami folds of its wings.

The dragon looked down at her out of eyes the size of platters, eyes that were all silver and black with no whites. Fear was a weight on her chest, a taste in her mouth, a clamor in her brain and the noise in her ears from a pulse gone wild. She knew only one clear thought:
That’s no baby
.

TWENTY-FIVE

Cynna frowned at Cullen. “I don’t buy it. Not as a sure thing, anyway. Too many assumptions.”

Cullen gave his eyebrows a little lift. God, the man even had gorgeous eyebrows. Life wasn’t fair. “Or else you don’t know everything I do. That seems possible.”

“Tie a knot in your ego for a minute, will you? Look at all the big, fat maybes you’ve stacked up. First we have to assume that hell actually is the closest physical analogue to Earth, but some say that’s Faerie.”

“They’re wrong.”

“I suppose you’ve checked that out personally?”

“No. I had it from ni‘ Aureni Aeith. I think you’ll agree he ought to know.”

“I might,” Lily said. “If you tell me who Nee-orenee-aith is.”

Cynna sighed. She could admit it when she was wrong. Not easily, but she could do it. “One of the lords of Faerie, if I’ve got the naming conventions right. You trust his information? 1 mean, the Fae are supposed to have a pretty playful attitude toward the truth.”

“In this case I do. There was a debt.”

“Okay. So, if Rule’s in hell, how the hell did he get there?”

“I covered that.
She’s
in hell, and—”

“Not established.”

Impatience flashed in those pretty blue eyes. “It’s an assumption, but backed by fact—things that happened before you showed up. Somehow Rule must have been dragged along when She retrieved what was left of the staff.”

She shook her head. “Too many maybes,” she repeated. “Why not go for the simpler explanation?”

Cullen was all polite disbelief. “And that would be?”

“Demon transfer.” She looked from one of them to the other. “Well, there was a demon, wasn’t there, trying its damnedest to possess Lily? Not that anyone but her saw it, but—”

“I saw it,” Cullen said. “Not with regular vision, but it was there.”

“Okay, so that’s confirmed. Now, I don’t know why the demon would grab Rule when it had been targeting Lily, but it’s still a simpler explanation, isn’t it?”

“It might be,” Lily said, “if I had any idea what demon transfer meant.”

“Oh.” She glanced at Cullen, her eyes widening—then narrowing as she grinned. “You don’t know, either, do you? Ha. How about that. I know something the hotshot sorcerer doesn’t.”

He got even more polite. “Would you care to share your vast knowledge?”

“Put simply, demon transfer is when a demon takes something with it when it moves between realms.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Demons can’t move freely between the realms any more than we can. That’s why the hellgates were closed at the Purge—to keep the demons out. Seems to have worked.”

“Yes, but—”

“I haven’t noticed any demon hordes ravaging the countryside, have you?”

Cynna scowled. “Will you listen a minute? You may know all sorts of fancy spellcraft, but that’s not demonology. Demons vary a lot more than people do.”

“Six-year-olds who watch Saturday-morning cartoons know that much.”

“Maybe they don’t know that some demons can cross unsummoned and without a hellgate. Or maybe you should watch more Saturday-morning cartoons.”

“You know this for a fact?” Cullen snapped.

“I do. They can carry stuff with them, too.”

“Stuff?” Lily said. “Does that include people?”

Cynna grimaced. “I’d have to, ah, do a little research to find out for sure, but I think so.” Research she was not eager to attempt.

“What kind of research?”

Cullen waved a hand dismissively. “Your explanation requires a few big, fat maybes as well. Maybe this particular demon can cross unsummoned. Maybe demon transfer works on people as well as objects. Maybe it decided to take Rule along instead of Lily. Maybe—”

“The demon was here, so obviously it
did
cross. If you’d get your big, fat ego out of the way—”

“This isn’t about ego. We have to look at the facts, which you’re confusing with opinions. The demon—”

Lily spoke. “Shut. Up.”

Cynna turned to her, surprised.

The China doll looked like she was trying to stuff all sorts of messy emotions back down. “I don’t care who knows more than who, I don’t care who wins your little pissing contest, and I don’t want to waste time finding out.”

Shit. She was right. While Cynna made like the poor little misfit girl trying to get the cutest boy in class to notice her, Rule was trapped in hell. Maybe one of these days she’d grow up. “Sorry.”

Lily drew a deep breath and let it out. “It does make a difference how Rule ended up in hell. He’s either with what’s-her-name or he’s with the demon. But in the end, it doesn’t matter much. I might as well assume I’ll be dealing with a demon. There’s no way to plan for an encounter with Her.”

“Shit.” That came from Cullen. He looked like he was vibrating. “That’s what I was afraid of. What Isen was afraid of. That if you knew where Rule was you’d try to go after him.”

Lily looked at him as if he’d said something really stupid. She kept looking.

“All right. All right, I said!” He snapped that out as if she’d been arguing with him instead of just turning that flat, dark gaze on him. “I’ll help. I’m a double-damned idiot, but I’ll help you. For whatever good it will do,” he added gloomily. “I don’t know how to open a hellgate. I don’t know anyone who does.”

Cynna really, really didn’t want to say anything, but her mouth made a decision without consulting her brain. “I do.”

Cullen’s head swung toward her. “Who?”

In for a penny… She sighed. “Two people, actually. One who does know, and one who might be able to figure it out. That’s Abel. You know him,” she said to Cullen. “Abel Karonski. He can close leaks, and wouldn’t this be like doing the same thing in reverse? We don’t need a great big gate.”

His eyes narrowed as if he was totting things up mentally. Reluctantly he nodded. “It might work, if he’s capable of creative thought. Spells don’t reverse neatly.”

“No duh.”

Lily shook her head. “Karonski would be last-ditch. Aside from the fact that he’s in Virginia, he’s not going to agree. Opening a hellgate is illegal. Who’s the other person?”

“No one I want to talk to, if I can avoid it. She, ah, probably wouldn’t be happy about me tracking her down, and she might not help, anyway. And if she did, it would come with a price.”

For a few minutes, none of them spoke. Lily had herself back under control. Cynna couldn’t read a thing on that pretty face as she sat there, one finger tapping against her thigh. Finally she said, “I need to get out of here. I guess the things I was wearing are around somewhere.”

“I think your chums collected them as evidence,” Cullen said. “Evidence of what, I’m not sure, but they have a passion for plastic baggies.”

She grimaced. “There’s a gift shop downstairs, isn’t there? Would you see if—”

“No need,” Cynna said. “I’ve got that covered. Only where… oh, yeah.” She went to the door, where she’d dropped her tote upon being introduced to the cop with the Santa Claus face and the big gun. She snatched it, unzipped it, and pulled out a wrinkled T-shirt and the pants to her second-best gi. “They won’t fit,” she said apologetically, “but they’re better than nothing.”

For the first time, Lily smiled. It wasn’t much, but it was a smile. “You came prepared to bust me out.”

“Pretty much. Oh, here. You’ll need this to hold them up.” She pulled out her belt. Unlike the rest of the outfit, it was neatly folded.

Lily took it, a small V between her brows. “A brown belt. Judo? With those long legs, you’d be good at it.”

“Judo’s mostly defense. I’ve been told I’m offensive.” She grinned. “Tae kwon do. I don’t practice enough.”

“Brown’s nothing to apologize for.” She swung her legs to the side of the bed, managing to keep it modest in spite of the hospital gown’s shortcomings.

Cynna was hit with a nasty, rotten suspicion. “You do judo, don’t you?”

Lily nodded. She was so short her feet didn’t quite reach the floor, so she had to slide off the bed.

“What belt?” Cynna asked that even though she was sure she wouldn’t like the answer.

“Black. Second
dan
. I’ll be right back.” She headed for the tiny bathroom, the mismatched clothes over her arm. She moved slowly, as if she hurt, but Cynna was pretty sure an offer of help would get her snapped at.

Second
dan
—that was like second-degree black. Impressive as hell, dammit.

“Jealous,
shetanni rakibu
?” Cullen’s voice was lightly mocking.

Cold prickled up her spine, popping out in goose bumps on her arms. She wanted to rub them, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “It’s been a while since I heard that.”

He nodded, satisfied. “Then you were a demon rider. I thought so.”

What exactly did he think? How much did he know about
shetanni rakibu
? She asked very casually, “So where did you hear that title? It’s not exactly common knowledge.”

“I read a lot. Is it a demon you’re hoping not to consult about opening a wee little hellgate?”

“Dumb question. Most of them wouldn’t know how, either, or they’d do it. Seen any demon hordes ravaging the countryside lately?”

He surprised her by grinning. “Touché. If you’re not consulting a demon about the gate, it must be someone in this realm. You know a master, don’t you?”

“Everyone knows there aren’t any real demon masters.”

“Everyone knows there aren’t any real sorcerers.”

“You talk too much.”

“It’s part of my charm.” He moved closer. “Are you going to help?”

She needed to say no. Lord, but she did not want to go looking for Jiri. She wasn’t crazy about crossing into hell, either. “You didn’t want to do it.”

He snorted. “I’m a selfish sonofabitch. What’s your excuse?”

“That the whole idea is nuts?”

“Consider that a drawback, do you?” He glanced at the closed bathroom door. “She’s going. With or without my help or yours, she’ll find a way to go after him.”

“Yeah.” Cynna didn’t think Lily was fooling herself about the odds. They just weren’t a big factor in her decision.

What would it be like to have someone matter that much? To matter that much to someone?

Rule didn’t matter to her that way. She’d had some hopes about him, yeah. She’d wanted to be with him again, and not just because of the mind-boggling sex. Lord, the things a lupus could do… but that hadn’t been all of it. She’d wanted him to see who and what she’d become. To approve. It made her squirm to admit that, but it was true.

But Rule did matter. And she owed him.

Cullen moved closer. Close enough for her to see that he hadn’t shaved that morning. Close enough to see the darker rims around his irises, and the way his pulse beat in the hollow of his throat. “Even aside from opening the hellgate, you know more about Dis and demons than I do. Our chances would be better with you along.”

“That must have hurt, saying it out loud.”

“I’m tough. I can take it.” He ran his fingertips along the side of her neck. “What do you say?”

Her heart was pounding. He’d know it, too, dammit. “You offering me sex in exchange for tossing my career in the trash, maybe ending up in prison?”

He smiled into her eyes, and that was seduction more potent than the stroke of his fingers. “Think of it as a bonus. For both of us.”

She stepped back. It was harder than it should have been. “Do I have ‘idiot’ stamped on my forehead?”

The bathroom door opened. Cynna glanced that way… and had to bite her lip.

“Did your mommy give you permission to play dress-up, little girl?” Cullen asked.

“Shut up, Cullen.” Lily shuffled out.

Cynna’s lips twitched. “Sorry. I should’ve stopped and picked up something in your size.”

Lily flipped one hand, dismissing it. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s get me checked out.”

“You could just leave.” Cynna kind of liked the idea of smuggling her out.

“I need to get my prescription first. I don’t have time to deal with an infection.” She made it to the chair, lowered herself, and reached for the buzzer to call the nurse. Then she faced Cynna. “I need to make plans, and to do that, I need to know where you stand. The Bureau is not going to investigate Rule’s disappearance. They aren’t going to like it if we do.”

“No duh.” Cynna frowned. “It bugs me, though. Ruben made it sound certain-sure that Rule was dead, but he’s not stupid. He had to realize that wasn’t a sure thing. Well, when we tell him what we’ve figured out, he’ll—”

“We won’t be telling him.”

“Huh? Wait a minute. Wait. I didn’t agree to hold out on Ruben. I can see why you’re suspicious, but you’re wrong.”

“You’ve worked for him a while.”

“Long enough to be certain-sure he’s righteous. Shit, if I had half his integrity I could count on a straight shot to heaven when the time comes.”

“Ah… you believe in heaven?”

“Hey, I’m a good little Catholic girl now.” A stab of honesty made her add, “Or at least I’m Catholic. Which reminds me.” She reached for her tote again.

“Let’s say Ruben’s as straight as you think he is,” Lily said as Cynna bent and rummaged in her tote. “That doesn’t mean he can turn a blind eye to what I’m planning. Even if he were willing to do that, someone wants Rule declared dead and the case closed. Someone who can either persuade or order Ruben to go along.”

“Sure. The Big Dick. Oh, here it is.” Cynna grabbed the little paper sack and straightened.

Cullen nodded. “I see. The FBI has a master penis. That explains a lot.”

Cynna grinned. “He’d like to think so. Dick Hayes is the acting director. I don’t think he’s bent, exactly. He’s just an asshole. Here.” She came up to Lily, dug into the sack, and held out a little cross on a gold chain.

Lily flinched.

Cynna drew it back, her forehead wrinkling. “I take it you aren’t Christian.”

“It’s not that. I’m not sure what I am, but…” She blinked quickly, but Cynna had seen the sheen in her eyes. One hand went to her throat. “Rule’s necklace is missing. I… it may not turn up, but I’m not going to wear another one in its place. Not yet.”

“The
toltoi
isn’t just from Rule,” Cullen said in a low voice.