Free Death Magic by Eileen Wilks Page A

switched to a whisper so soft only he could hear. “But your Lady isn’t able to act in our realm.”
    She felt his lips move in a smile and the breath of his next words. “Except through her agents, nadia . She acts through us.”
    Through lupi. Who she’d created, and who served her still, wholly and freely. She could act through them, and that was why the Great Bitch had to remove them. And instead of finding this terrifying, Rule took comfort in it.
    Lily didn’t answer with words. She took his hand. She was frowning as she did it, but knew he’d understand both the frown and the touch. “We should go home.”
    He tucked her hair behind her ear and smiled. “Yes. I love you.”
    Emotion burst out in a shaky laugh. “Don’t I get to brood at all?”
    “Later, perhaps.”
     
     
    LATER started as soon as they got in the car.
    Ruben’s street was quiet, but once they turned onto Bethesda Avenue the traffic picked up. Wet streets bounced light back from taillights, headlights, streetlights, bistros, clubs, and storefronts. If the brief rain had washed people inside for a time, they were back out now, wandering the pretty downtown area and sitting at tiny outdoor tables with frothy drinks or beer and nachos. It was only a little after eleven, and on a Saturday night.
    All these people busy having lives . . . people mad at the boss, celebrating a raise, hunting for a hookup, getting busted, falling in love. People praying, partying, laughing, yelling, making up, breaking up . . . people helping a stranger or robbing one. People who expected tomorrow to arrive in about the same shape as today.
    And maybe it would for most of them. And the day after, and the one after that. But next month was looking pretty damn iffy.
    An Old One wanted to amputate the future all these people were building with whatever mix of altruism and cruelty, determination and thoughtlessness. The Great Bitch wanted to graft her version of the future onto the world. According to the lupi, she saw herself as humanity’s benefactor. Sure, people would die on the way to her shiny utopia, but death was what mortals did, right? No real problem. She’d make it up to the survivors by making sure they didn’t get to make bad choices anymore.
    If the strongest precog on the planet—who also happened to be a good man, good all the way down—was convinced the only way to stop her lay in a shadowy, extralegal organization, Lily could accept the necessity. It didn’t go down easily, but wasn’t bullshit often easier to swallow than truth? She wouldn’t be reporting Ruben to the federal attorney. She’d keep his secret, but she wouldn’t be part of it.
    She was a cop. She didn’t know how to be anything else.
    They left the downtown behind. Rule hadn’t said a word since they got in the car, but he was holding her hand. He did that a lot. She looked at him. Light and shadow slid over his face, shifting as they passed this streetlight, that bar, a pocket of darker land anchored by oaks. “Did you know what Ruben had in mind for tonight?”
    “I did.”
    She wanted to ask how he’d known. How did Ruben’s Shadow agents communicate? Phones weren’t safe. Neither was e-mail. Not if they wanted to be sure neither Friar nor the non-ghostly FBI caught them at it, but what other options were there? But if she wasn’t going to be part of them, she couldn’t ask. She couldn’t ask who else was in the Shadow Unit, either, or who knew about it, or how it was organized, or what Rule’s place was in it . . . other than as a coconspirator, that is.
    This was deeply annoying.
    As for the rest of it . . . the collapse of the nation, a military coup, “the surviving lupi” . . . her stomach churned. Contemplating Ruben’s visions didn’t help. Her mind kept trying to go there, but it didn’t help. So what would? She drummed her fingers on her thigh and stared at the back of Scott’s head.
    Scott drew driving duty whenever Rule went out at night,