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  He raised his voice. “Two men, both human, both armed. They wouldn’t identify themselves.”

  The first voice spoke firmly. “Special Agent, we’d prefer to keep our presence here quiet.”

  Another door opened—the one to the room next door, which was shared by several of the guards. José stood there with his Glock ready. Lily gave him a nod, and opened the door with her left hand. Her right held her weapon.

  Two men, as Carson had said, both on the shady side of forty. One was skinny, white, and balding, with black-rimmed eyeglasses. He carried a briefcase. The other was all-over bland—bland suit, bland tie, a bland blend of English and Irish in his features and skin tone.

  Bland Man glanced down at her gun with neither surprise nor offense. Skinny Guy wasn’t as sanguine. “What are you, crazy? You answer the door ready to shoot?” He spoke fast, shooting the words out like bullets. “What kind of damn cop are you? That’s not the way you were trained. Pretty damn paranoid, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t. Who are you?”

  In answer, Bland Man held out an ID folder much like Lily’s. He was blessed with a most unbland name: Aloysius A. Griggs. The card that offered the information he hadn’t wanted to state out loud was not from the FBI, but it was federally issued. Lily’s eyebrows lifted. “Homeland Security?”

  The other man rolled his eyes. “Which part of ‘we’d like to keep our presence quiet’ did you not understand?”

  “You’re mistaking understanding for giving a shit. I haven’t seen your ID yet.”

  Skinny Guy was named William Rutherford. He was also with HSI, the investigative branch of Homeland Security. Usually Homeland Security played well with others, that being a big part of their mandate, but some agents from their investigative branch liked to pretend they’d never gotten the memo about interagency cooperation. Rutherford seemed to be of that ilk.

  Or maybe he was just naturally judgmental and obnoxious. Lily held out the hand that didn’t have a weapon in it. “Agent Rutherford.”

  She got another eye roll from Rutherford, but he did shake her hand. Dry palm, no calluses, no magic. Griggs had a firm grip and a smidgeon of an Earth Gift, so small she could barely detect it. He probably had no idea it was there. She told them to come in and stood aside.

  Two paces into the room they both stopped. This was a reasonable reaction to having a wolf place himself across your path, especially when his hackles were raised. “Charles,” Lily said sharply. “Back off.”

  He didn’t.

  “Not very well trained,” Rutherford said disapprovingly. “A large dog like that can be dangerous if he isn’t properly trained.” He held his briefcase in front of him as if he was trying to shelter behind it.

  The bland Griggs snorted. “That’s not a dog, Will.”

  “You mean he’s a—” Rutherford stopped. His hands tightened on the thoroughly inadequate shield of his briefcase.

  Lily frowned at Charles and spoke under the tongue, a type of subvocalization only lupus ears would pick up. “You embarrass me by disobeying.”

  His tail drooped. He gave the two men a quick growl—a warning to behave themselves probably—and reluctantly moved a few feet away. Lily wondered if they smelled especially aggressive, or if he just didn’t like Rutherford.

  “He can’t remain,” Rutherford said. “Neither can your man there.” He scowled at José, who still stood in the door to the other room, though he’d put away his weapon.

  “Guess what? You aren’t in charge here. I am.” She reminded herself to be professional. Rutherford was making that difficult. “But José can go watch TV for—no, wait. We need another chair. José, if you wouldn’t mind?” Her room was standard hotel fare. Aside from the bed it held a dresser with the television, a nightstand, and by the window was a round table with two chairs.

  José brought a chair from his room . . . which held a couple more lupi who were keeping quiet, staying out of sight. He then went back to his room and turned on the TV, but without closing the door. The HSI agents didn’t like that. Aloysius A. Griggs went so far as to frown. Rutherford nattered on at her in a way that might drive her nuts if she had to listen to him for long.

  Lily sat down and put her hands on the table. “I’m not going to ask José to shut the door. You might as well have a seat and tell me why you’re here.”

  “The wolf—”

  “Stays. He’s suffering from a condition that doesn’t allow him to Change, so he won’t be able to repeat anything he hears, if that’s your concern.”

  Griggs stepped up, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

  Rutherford frowned. “I don’t like it.”

  “TV’s on,” Griggs said in that deep, melodious voice. “They won’t hear us if we keep our voices down.”

  “The wolf will.” But after shooting Charles a deeply suspicious glance, Rutherford did finally take a seat. He set his briefcase on the floor beside him and looked at Lily the way most people would eye a bug in their beer. “They warned us you’d probably have lupi with you, but this is over the top. You really are freaking paranoid, aren’t you?”

  “Funny how even a handful of attempts on your life can do that. Why don’t you tell me why you’re here?”

  Griggs answered before Rutherford could. “The victim you found. The one you say was killed by magic. He was one of ours.”

  Lily blinked. “HSI? He sure didn’t look like it. You don’t get that kind of ground-in dirt unless you’ve lived rough awhile.”

  Rutherford sneered. “He was undercover. On the trail of a suspected domestic terrorist. We need to know everything you’ve learned.”

  “Pretty damn little, at this point. He was killed by a type of magic that either is or strongly resembles telekinesis. How do you know he was your guy?” The body hadn’t been autopsied yet.

  Rutherford didn’t answer the question. Instead he leaned down, opened his briefcase, and pulled out a thin folder. “His name was Jason Humboldt.” He tossed an eight-by-ten photo on the table.

  It was a head shot and looked like it had been blown up from a much smaller picture. An ID photo maybe. The background was plain white. Lily picked it up. The man in the picture was both clean and clean shaven, which made it hard to compare the photo to her memory of the dead man. She tilted her head, studying it. “That could be him.”

  “It is.”

  Her voice softened a bit. “You knew him?”

  Rutherford shook his head. “No, but he’s been positively identified.”

  “By who?”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  She tried another tack. “Who’s this terrorist he was investigating, and why did that require him to pass as a homeless man?”

  “We can’t give you many details, which is why we’ll be handling the investigation into his death.”

  “No, you aren’t.”

  “We aren’t asking your permission.”

  “You’d have to ask Congress’s permission. They’re the ones who gave me, as an agent of Unit Twelve, the authority to take charge of any investigation into felonies involving magic.”

  Rutherford and Griggs exchanged a look. Griggs shrugged. Rutherford scowled at her. “We’ll see about that. I can oblige you in one way.” He pulled out another photo but held on to it. “This is one of our suspects. We had reason to believe she was in Georgia—but we thought Humboldt was, too. His cover doesn’t allow him to report regularly, but he’s been following her, trying to ID other members of her cell.”

  “By pretending to be homeless? Is she homeless?”

  He ignored the question. “If we were wrong about our man’s location, chances are we were wrong about hers, too. It’s possible Humboldt identified and followed someone else from her cell here, but we consider that unlikely.” At last he handed over the photo. “She’s had Lasik surgery since that was taken, so she won’t be wearing glasses now. Do you recognize her?”

  This photo had the grainy, out-of-focus look of a low-resolution ph
oto blown up too large. Snapped by a phone camera maybe, and not one of the newer models. In it, a skinny girl with dreadlocks and thick glasses sat on a narrow bed, grimacing at the photographer. One hand was raised, her fingers spread, as if she’d tried to block the camera. She’d failed, but given the glasses, the picture quality, and her expression, she needn’t have worried. Her features weren’t clear.

  Lily raised her eyebrows. “Homeland Security is in hot pursuit of a kid?”

  “The picture’s two years old.”

  “Making her at least fifteen now.”

  “Seventeen. I know it’s hard to believe, but some terrorists don’t actually look like terrorists.”

  Lily grimaced, acknowledging that the sarcasm was warranted. She picked up the photo, frowning. Something about it . . .

  Rutherford leaned forward. “Have you seen her?”

  Lily shook her head. “Something about her strikes me as familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe I saw an alert about her.”

  “We haven’t distributed her picture. I can let you have that photo, but I need your word that you won’t show it around.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t want to spook her. Notify us immediately if you see her.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “It doesn’t matter. She won’t be using it.”

  “Seriously? You aren’t going to tell me the name of your terrorist?”

  Rutherford stood. “You need to consider her very dangerous. Either she or someone from her terrorist cell killed Humboldt. It’s believed that there are at least three more in her cell. All of them are Gifted.”

  The silent Griggs pushed his chair back and stood, too, so Lily did the same. “What are their Gifts?”

  “That’s all I’m cleared to tell you. We didn’t want you stumbling across her without being aware of the danger, but I can’t give you any more than that.”

  Apparently they were done. She got a nod from Griggs, a scowl from Rutherford, and the two men left without another word.

  She shook her head as the door closed behind them. “That was weird.”

  José came through the door to his room. “What did they want? Did they really think you were going to meekly hand over the investigation?”

  “Beats me.” José had, of course, heard everything. Humans almost always underestimated lupi hearing, which wouldn’t be bothered by a little TV noise. “Couple of things stuck me as odd. First, they were surprised by Charles, but neither of them jumped to the conclusion that he was Rule. Seems like they would unless they already knew where Rule was. Second, they refuse to tell me anything about their investigation into a terrorist cell . . . except for identifying this girl as the leader.” She tapped the photo they’d left.

  He glanced at the picture. “You think that was the real point of their visit?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Ruben will.”

  He didn’t, though he did find it interesting that he hadn’t heard from Homeland Security himself. If HSI wanted to try to kick her off the investigation, they weren’t going about it through the usual channels. He told her he would call his counterpart in the other department. Eric Ellison had recently become executive director of HSI, after a bit of a shake-up. Ruben said he didn’t yet have a feel for the man, but the way he said it made Lily think that what feel he had was not positive. Still, he’d get in touch with Ellison. They needed to know a helluva lot more than Rutherford and Griggs had been willing to say.

  Lily studied the photo again after making that call to Ruben. A nagging sense of familiarity lingered, but she couldn’t get anything to rise to the top of her brain. After wrestling unsuccessfully with her memory, she set it aside. Maybe her subconscious would work on that overnight. She wanted a shower. Usually she preferred to shower in the morning, but this time she wanted one before bed.

  It wasn’t until she was standing beneath the driving pulse of hot water, reluctant to turn it off, that she realized she was putting off going to bed. That she felt sad and scared and lonely and hated the thought of sleeping in that big hotel bed alone.

  How foolish. Surely she wasn’t so needy she couldn’t spend one night away from Rule. It was okay to miss him. It was not okay to be so damned pathetic about it. On a scale of one to horrible—and she’d experienced the truly horrible—such a brief separation barely nudged the needle. She told herself those things. It didn’t help. She took her time drying her hair and wished she could reach for Rule through the bond, but when she tried, the disorientation was worse than ever.

  She could call him. It was only a little after eleven. He wouldn’t be asleep yet.

  He’d think something was wrong. He was already anxious about them being separated. She didn’t want to make that worse.

  This sucked. She opened the door and saw that she’d been wrong about one thing. She wouldn’t be sleeping alone. Charles had resumed his spot on the king-size bed. She shook her head, but didn’t try to make him leave. Maybe his bones ached too much for the floor. She climbed into bed and turned off the light.

  It took her a long time to fall asleep. When she did, she dreamed about hell.

  Hell was cold, not hot. It was stony and barren, yet it was a place for the living, not an afterlife repository for errant souls. Only the living had to worry about dying, and a lot of dying went on there. Hell—the real place, the one Lily had experienced—was also known as Dis, the demon realm, and demons ate the living, not the dead.

  The dream mixed memory and imagination, jumbling past horrors with present confusion. In reality, Lily had arrived in hell shorn of clothes, memories, and her name. In the dream, she knew who she was, but not how she got there. She was just as naked as the first time, though. The rocks she climbed cut her feet and slithered beneath her as if they wanted to dump her back down the slope. Way down, to where the demons waited.

  At first that was all there was to the dream—climbing those cold, treacherous rocks in a fever of fear, trying to escape the waiting demons. She pulled herself up and up. Gradually, in spite of her terror, the conviction grew that this was wrong. Why was she here again? She couldn’t be. She remembered hell. She remembered escaping it. How could she be here again?

  Without Rule this time. Without anyone. She was alone in the vast, rocky desolation. She stopped and looked up.

  Not really alone, after all. High in the sullen sky, a dark shape spiraled down. A dragon. The black dragon, who’d carried her away in his talons the first time. He’d do that this time, too, and it would crack open her mind and spill out whatever sanity she’d collected in her thirty years of living, and it wasn’t right. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.

  Why? she screamed at the sullen sky and the stooping dragon.

  Get out of my head! the sky screamed back. Get out!

  Rocks and sky disappeared, fading to black . . . the black of her closed eyelids. She felt the weight of the blanket drawn up over her body and the chill of the air on her face and understood that she’d been dreaming. Now she was awake. Mostly awake . . .

  She felt something else. Who are you?

  Nothing. The voice, the sense of presence, had been a product of the dream, nothing more. She . . .

  I’m going crazy.

  Despair coated that thought. And it wasn’t hers. Not her despair. Not her thought, either.

  FIFTEEN

  “YOU did what?” Rule stopped moving, phone in one hand, sock in the other.

  “Mindspoke someone. I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure I did. I was half asleep when it happened . . . well, at first I was all the way asleep. I had a nasty dream about hell, complete with rocks and demons. You weren’t there.”

  Perversely, that made Rule smile. He shouldn’t have. His nadia had clearly had a nightmare, and he hadn’t been there to hold her. But he couldn’t help but appreciate the unsubtle message her subconscious had sent. “I wonder what your dream meant,” he murmured.

  “I have no idea. The point is, in the dre
am the black dragon was swooping down to get me. I yelled at him and someone answered, told me to get out of their head. That woke me up, but I still felt . . . I don’t know how to put it. A connection, I guess. I asked who they were and I ‘heard’ their reply. It felt like mindspeech.”

  “Are you saying ‘they’ because you don’t know which pronoun applies?” He finished pulling on his sock and slid his feet into his shoes.

  “Of course. Mindspeech isn’t sexed. Whoever it was thought they were going crazy.”

  “Understandable, especially if they’d never experienced mindspeech before.” In Rule’s experience, it was impossible to mistake mindspeech for his own thoughts. It was like the difference between imagining eating chocolate and actually biting into it. “What happened next?’

  “I got a headache,” she said wryly.

  Rule slid his wallet and a couple more things into the appropriate pockets. “Better now, I hope.”

  “God bless ibuprofen. I hope whoever’s party I crashed isn’t still freaked out this morning. Maybe they persuaded themselves they were dreaming.”

  “Very likely. You got a headache, but no hallucinations?”

  “Nope.” She sounded cheerful about that. “I’m trying not to get all crazy optimistic, but I can’t help thinking that’s a good sign. Maybe my brain is getting itself sorted out.”

  “We can hope.” Fully dressed now, Rule left the bedroom where he’d almost slept last night. Every time he’d dozed off, some part of his mind had reached for Lily. Every time, the resulting disorientation had woken him. “What’s on your schedule today?”

  “Did Ruben tell you about those HSI guys who dropped by last night?”

  “He did.”

  “Did he tell you they left a couple photos with me? One of their man, taken from his ID badge. One of a girl—seventeen now, fifteen when the picture was taken. She’s supposed to be a terrorist.”

  “Supposed to be?”

  “Something’s fishy. I have no idea what. Ruben checked out my visitors, and they’re genuine HSI agents. Everything they told me is accurate—what little of it there was,” she added with disgust. “But they’re up to something. I’m going to see if I can find out what.”