Free Mortal Danger by Eileen Wilks Page A

experience is unusual. The first time was with a chicken.”
    Lily grinned. “A possessed chicken. That’s… I don’t know. Like Bunnicula, who drains the juice from carrots. Just not scary.”
    “The chicken had killed two dogs and attacked a child. The other time was an adult man. He—or rather, the demon in him—tried to kill me.”
    That cut off any mirth.
    “He couldn’t. It wasn’t allowed. I tell you this so you won’t worry. You and I will be protected.”
    How? Or maybe she meant, by whom?
    Nettie smiled as if she’d heard the unspoken question and found it amusing. She sat on the bed by Lily’s hip. Her eyes were so dark. Knowing. “This won’t be like a Catholic exorcism. My people don’t wrestle with a demon spiritually. We connect with our gods through the earth. Demons aren’t of our world, so we call on the powers of this realm to expel the intruder.”
    Okay, that made sense. Sort of. “I don’t worship your gods.”
    “You are of the earth, so you are theirs whether you acknowledge them or not. They do require your permission, however. You must willingly surrender to the ritual.”
    Lily considered that. “I’m not much at surrender, but I want this to happen. Does intention count?”
    “It does. I have your permission to continue?”
    “Yes.”
    “Very well, then. Be calm.” Nettie certainly was. Her eyes were so serene, yet vast. Vast enough to hold answers to questions Lily had always wondered about, and maybe some she’d never dreamed of asking. “We’re entirely safe. You can relax. Rest.”
    “I’m not…” Not nervous , she was going to say, but it seemed rude to finish the sentence. Nettie had started chanting—low, quiet, a soothing repetition of words Lily didn’t know.
    The sound made her sleepy. She fought it. She wanted to look for those answers, the ones hinted at in Nettie’s eyes… the same kind of answers the stars are always trying to give us , she thought, when we look up and up at them . So high above, speaking in gradual whispers about time, about their own flaming hearts and the endless cold that lies between…
    “Wake up,” someone said softly. “Time to wake up, Lily.”
    Everything had changed between one blink and the next. Nettie stood instead of sitting on the bed. Karonski was on his feet, too, shrugging into his jacket. Cynna wasn’t even in the room.
    Rule was where he had been, though. Beside her.
    Lily scowled at Nettie. “I was asleep. You put me to sleep!”
    Nettie smiled. “I put you in sleep, yes. With you out of the picture, I could find out if anyone else was home.”
    “You’re finished?”
    “All done, and you’re not possessed.”
    Rule laid a hand on her arm. She turned to see him grinning at her. “The ritual proved to be a major anticlimax. Nettie chanted, you dozed off, she asked some questions, and no one answered.”
    Lily was disgruntled. It didn’t seem right. After all that tension and buildup, she hadn’t even been around for… well, for whatever had happened.
    Or hadn’t happened, and that was what mattered. Lily caught herself before she could start rubbing her shoulder again. She reached for Rule’s hand instead. “All right, then. Everyone clear out. I want to go home.”

SIX
    One and a quarter million people worked, ate, slept, loved, and fought in San Diego’s four-hundred-square-mile sprawl. It was never quiet, never fully dark in the city. Tonight, overcast had turned the sky into a dirty brown bowl that sealed in the city lights and shut out the night. Rule couldn’t see the moon.
    He still felt her, of course. The moon’s deep, slow chimes sounded in his blood and bones, growing louder when she waxed toward full, as she was now. But he missed seeing her changing face. He missed the stars and the spangled depths of night. And he missed being four-footed. There’d been little opportunity to run the hills in his other form.
    If he couldn’t run on all four feet, he might as well find other