Free Mortal Danger by Eileen Wilks Page B

ways to enjoy speed. The city’s streets might not be empty, but at midnight they weren’t congested. Rule considered that permission to ignore the speed limit.
    He expected to be rebuked by his law-abiding passenger. But when he pulled onto 1-5 and brought the Mercedes up to a comfortable ninety miles an hour, Lily remained still and silent, her weapon in her lap.
    She’d retrieved it from his trunk as soon as they reached his car. That hadn’t surprised him. She’d be feeling the need for it tonight. And she’d be right.
    But she wasn’t asking questions. Questions were Lily’s way of sorting the world into shapes she could deal with, and she’d been tossed some pretty odd curves in the past few hours.
    Women were complicated creatures, he reminded himself. Any man who thought he had one figured out simply wasn’t paying attention, and his nadia was more complex than most. The mate bond didn’t deliver understanding along with the physical tie. That was up to the two of them. He’d be foolish to fret over her silence when he had so many more concrete dangers to worry about.
    She was tired, after all. He wasn’t, but he was still too churned up for sleep to sound remotely possible. Lily was probably craving it by now, though. An injured body needed sleep.
    He thought of seeing her sprawled on the floor, unconscious, and anger burned through his blood, hot and vivid. He wanted to howl—and then tear out someone’s throat.
    “You trying to dig a new grip into that steering wheel?”
    “Hmm? Oh.” He flexed his hands on the wheel, forcing them to relax. “How’s your head?”
    “Better.” She gave it a little shake. “A lot better. More than makes sense.”
    “You may notice some improvement in your shoulder, too. Nettie left you in sleep for a while after the ritual was over.”
    Now her head swiveled sharply. “What do you mean?”
    “You know what ‘in sleep’ means.”
    “More or less. It’s a healing trance, magically induced. I know she said something about that, but I thought she was just using a term I was familiar with to describe something similar.”
    “No, she meant just what she said. You were in sleep.”
    “But I couldn’t be! That’s magic, and magic doesn’t affect me.”
    So that’s what was bothering her. “Normally she wouldn’t be able to put you in sleep, but for this she was backed by spiritual energies, not magic. Which may have given your healing an extra boost, by the way.”
    “But that doesn’t make sense! It’s… I can feel Nettie’s Gift when I touch her, so what she does is magic.”
    “What does Nettie’s Gift feel like?” he asked, curious.
    She made a vague gesture, palm up. “Sort of like crumbly dirt or fern leaves—basic, earthy, intricate. The point is, she uses magic. Even if she gets it through prayer, it’s still the same stuff.”
    “Apparently not, since she was able to put you in sleep.”
    She frowned at the glittering worm of taillights ahead. “At first I was thinking… wondering… what if my being a sensitive messed things up? She thought I was clean because no one answered, but maybe my Gift kept her ritual from working. But that doesn’t make sense, either, because she did put me in sleep. Only I don’t see how she could.”
    He made a soft, wordless exclamation and reached for her hand. “You’re still worried about it. Lily, there’s no trace of the demonic in you.”
    “I know. I know that, and yet I feel something. When I touch my shoulder, there’s still a trace of that orangey texture. The demon did something to me, and I don’t see how it could. 1 need to know that, and I need to know what it did.”
    What could he say? He knew she wasn’t tainted, but his certainty was intuitive. She wanted rational.
    He tried anyway. “Even if a demon could somehow get behind your shields, or whatever it is that makes you a sensitive—”
    “One did.”
    “Maybe. You don’t know what that orange feeling means. But even if