Free Blood Challenge by Eileen Wilks

agreed to wait a day or two.”
    Her eyebrows drew down. “Was it urgent?”
    “Perhaps not urgent, but important.”
    “And I’m not allowed to know. Do I get to ask questions?”
    “Only if you want to make me extremely uncomfortable.”
    She considered in silence for a moment, then said, “Okay, back to Cobb. Tell me what else Alex said about him.”
    “Hmm. Well, he never attended college. Leidolf lacks a fund for higher education—”
    “Something you plan to change.”
    He gave her a quick smile. “I do. Even had such a fund been available, though, Cobb might not have taken advantage of it. He seems to be a highly physical man. He competed in the last three All-Clans, and he tends to choose physical work. Carpentry and logging, in the past. Currently he’s a certified personal trainer and owns a small gym in Nashville.”
    “That’s unusual, isn’t it? Mostly you guys stay away from human athletics. You’re too good, and it’s hard to rein yourselves in enough to pass. Unless his customers are all lupi?”
    Rule thought of a certain Olympic swimmer and smiled, but said, “Generally that’s true, yes. I gather Cobb’s clientele is mostly human, but two nights a week he closes the gym to the public. Those are clan-only nights. There are a fair number of Leidolf in Nashville,” he added, “who need a physical outlet. He offers that at no charge, and in return the clan exempts him from the drei .” Rule hadn’t known of that arrangement until this morning, but that wasn’t Alex’s fault. Alex had never been privy to Leidolf’s financial matters—which were an unholy mess—and hadn’t known about the waived drei until he began asking about Cobb. “Also, Cobb had a child, a daughter, but she died about ten years ago. No sons, but he has a pernato grandson—”
    “Hold on. Drei is your head tax. I know that one. But what’s pernato? ”
    “One without a lupus father.”
    “Without … oh, you mean like the ones you call throw-backs or lost ones? Only these pernato are known to the clan.”
    “Exactly. A pernato is lupus because of recessives in both parents’ genes. In this case, Cobb’s daughter proved fertile with a young man who is essentially human, but whose maternal grandfather was lupus.”
    “A pernato grandson wouldn’t be considered full-blood.”
    “It’s a distinction without a difference. Pernato are lupi. Sometimes they’re below average in one of our abilities, but there’s variance among the full-blood, too.”
    “Why haven’t I heard about pernato ?”
    “ Pernato clan are rare in Nokolai. Leidolf is known for throwing them more often than most. It’s one reason they’re the largest clan.”
    “Plus they have a habit of absorbing smaller clans, though I don’t see how the—no, I’ll ask that later. This gym Cobb owns. Do you know its name and address?”
    “I don’t have the address. It’s called Cobb’s Gym.”
    “Not an imaginative guy,” she said, making another note. “You say his clientele is human except for those two nights a week. That suggests he’s comfortable being around a lot of humans a lot of the time, even training them.”
    “It does.”
    “It doesn’t suggest someone balanced on an unholy edge, teetering toward multiple homicide.”
    Rule considered what to say. How much to say. He snuggled her close so he could speak very softly. “You read about the fury in that history of the clans the Rhej gave you. You asked me about it.”
    “You’re talking about the berserker thing. One of the clans—I don’t remember the name—had a bad rep with the others because its members fell ‘into the fury’ too often. This was a long time ago, well before the Purge, and there wasn’t a lot of communication between the clans, so the Nokolai guy who wrote the history didn’t know the details, but—wait, stop, I’m sidetracking. Basically, you said, the fury is when a lupus goes berserker in battle.”
    “That’s the short version. You