Free Lupi 08 - Death Magic by authors_sort Page B

partly because he looked so harmless. He was short and wore baggy clothes that turned his wiry frame skinny. His face was round and boyish with guileless blue eyes he framed in geek glasses—clear lenses, of course, since no lupus needed vision correction. He was adept in three martial arts, deadly with a blade, good with a gun and getting better.
    From the back, she could see Scott’s short, badly cut brown hair and the way his small ears hugged his head like they’d been superglued down. A small Bluetooth headset curled around his right ear like a question mark.
    Questions. Lining up her questions always helped. Her fingers twitched with the need to jot them down, but she restrained herself. None of this could go on paper.
    Okay, first question: why tonight? Why had Ruben tried to recruit her now instead of three weeks ago, or three weeks from now, or not at all?
    That one almost answered itself. He had something he wanted her to do that hadn’t needed doing earlier. Something he couldn’t ask of her as an FBI agent. Maybe something he couldn’t put on the record because the wrong person might learn about it? Something to do with the traitor.
    Lily knew very little about the investigation into the attack on Ruben. Abel Karonski was lead, but if he’d turned up anything solid, he’d managed to keep it a big, fat secret. That was harder than a civilian might think. However tight-lipped FBI types were with outsiders, they were as prone to chatting with their colleagues as anyone else. Prone to speculating when they lacked information, too, but Lily hadn’t heard any rumors. Everyone seemed to know that the perp was with the Bureau. No one knew anything else.
    Lily’s burning desire to arrest people flamed especially hot for the rat bastard who’d betrayed them all and nearly killed Ruben. If she could have a part in catching him or her, that was almost enough to get her to join the damned ghosts.
    Almost.
    Next question. This one, she realized, she had to ask out loud. “Have you told Ruben about, uh . . . the thing that’s the Lady’s secret?” Mantles, that is.
    Mantle was a word whose meaning Lily could only approach obliquely. She knew it was a magical construct that unified a clan and granted unquestionable authority to the Rho who held it. She knew that lupi needed the mantles. But she couldn’t say how they worked, how they felt, why the loss of that feeling could drive a lupus insane. She knew it could, but how and why were outside her experience.
    “I haven’t,” Rule said. “Because that is the Lady’s secret, and not up to me to disclose.”
    “But that thing you can’t disclose keeps Friar from eavesdropping magically on us.” Friar’s power came from the Great Bitch. The mantles blocked her magic, so his clairaudience didn’t work around Rule. “He can’t listen in, and it’s close to impossible for a directional mic to pick up anything from a moving vehicle. And if someone had planted a bug on the car, Scott would have smelled it, right?”
    His eyebrows lifted. “We can speak more freely here than in other places, if that’s what you mean.” But his glance cut to their driver. Scott might seem professionally oblivious to their conversation, but he heard every word.
    She nodded that she’d understood. No talking about Armageddon or Shadow Units in front of Scott. Or, technically, behind him. But Scott knew this part already. “I’m wondering about the Wythe mantle.” She rested a hand on her stomach. “This has to be part of your Lady’s plans.”
    “Of course.”
    And the Lady was a patterner. Lily hadn’t thought of her in those terms before. It changed things . . . she couldn’t say how, exactly, but since the Lady was an Old One, she’d be an adept. Maybe that meant that Lily was doing just what she was supposed to do.
    Rule wasn’t the only one in the car with a mantle. Lily had one, too. Sort of.
    She wasn’t a Rho. She wasn’t lupi, could never be lupi, so she