Free Blood Magic by Eileen Wilks

‘probably.’ ” He glanced around. “The food tables. If you want to question people separately, we’ll need some distance so the others won’t overhear.”
    “Okay. Good idea. I need one of the guards to do the things I’d have a uniform do—fetch witnesses, mostly. Can you—”
    “Of course.” He gestured to the nearest guard, who happened to be Shannon, the youthful-looking redhead, and told him he was needed to help Lily with the witnesses.
    Then he pulled off his watch and tucked it in his jeans pocket. Then he Changed.
    Lily had watched the Change often enough. She still couldn’t say precisely what she saw. Every time, she thought maybe this time she’d be able to really see the process, but she never did. Not quite.
    It wasn’t like the way the movies depicted it, though—an arm sprouting fur and elongating into a leg, a face stretching into a muzzle. Nothing so clear and linear. Nor did she see the same thing a camera recorded. Rule had been caught on TV once when he Changed, and the space his body occupied had simply frizzed into visual static until he was wolf.
    It didn’t help that Rule was extremely fast about the business, but her eyes couldn’t track it when she watched other lupi Change, either.
    This time she tried watching out of the corner of her eye instead of head-on. Didn’t help. Reality folded itself up, space and flesh bending into places her brain couldn’t follow. Then it snapped back, and a wolf stood beside her. A really large wolf with black and silver fur.
    Lily glanced at Cullen—then forced herself to think, dammit, think about what she could do, not what lay outside her scope and skills. She bent to pick up the cutoffs that had fallen from Rule when he put reality on hold, then nodded at Mike and Shannon.
    “Let’s go over to the food tables. Shannon, I need my purse.” Her notebook was in it, for one thing. Also her weapon. “It’s in the kitchen at the Center, in the cupboard by the rear door. Can you get that pretty quick, then join us?”
    He nodded and took her at her word. He ran. Since he went at lupus speed while they simply walked, he was on his way back before they reached the tables.
    Potato salad. Coleslaw. An opened pack of buns. A spill of plastic forks. For some stupid reason the sight of all that made her eyes burn. She swallowed. Swallowed again. This shouldn’t have happened. Shouldn’t have happened at all, but especially not here, where Cullen was safe. Happy. He’d been so blasted happy, without his usual guards of cynicism and humor.
    He couldn’t die. She hadn’t given him his baby present yet.
    That thought nearly tipped her over, but Shannon arrived before she lost it. She got herself under control, took her bag, and dug out her notebook and a pen. She turned to face the gangly lupus.
    Jittery, she decided. She didn’t have to smell him to know he was strung tight. “Mike, you okay? You look pretty tense.”
    “Never mind making nice. Let’s get this over with.”
    His hostility puzzled her. Sure, sometimes wits took out their anger on the cop questioning them, but this felt personal. “All right. First, I’d like to shake your hand.” No point in hiding what she intended. Everyone here knew she was a touch sensitive.
    Mike’s palm was damp. No magic other than the familiar wash of lupus magic—cool, furry, with something that reminded her of the scent of pine needles, rendered tactilely.
    She dropped his hand. “Thanks. Did you see who stabbed Cullen?”
    His gaze darted to Rule, standing four-legged beside Lily. He nodded once.
    “Tell me what you saw.”
    He looked at the ground, his mouth tight. “I’ll tell my Rho.”
    Rule didn’t move. He didn’t growl or snarl, yet all at once he was more . Not more of any one thing—just twice as present as before . He stared at Mike out of yellow eyes, hackles raised.
    Mike’s head came up. He twitched as if fighting the need to abase himself, his gaze darting toward Rule, then