Human Nature

11

THE Mustang jolted over one last rut and rocked to a stop in the packed earth at the base of a craggy hill. “We’re there,” Lily said into her phone. “Putting you on speaker now.” She did so and slipped the phone in her pocket, clipping it to be sure it stayed.

Steve’s body hadn’t actually been left on the hiking trail, but slightly off it, in a small cul-de-sac walled by rock and packed earth. There were two ways to reach that spot—the trail itself, which was used often enough that it had a parking area at its foot. And the route she’d be taking.

No one came this way, according to Mannie. It was a rugged scramble with no rewarding views. He knew about it because he coursed all over the hills gleaning flowers and roots and stuff.

So did Adele, but it seemed she hadn’t come this way today. Her car wasn’t here.

“Jason hasn’t reached the parking area yet,” she said, throwing open her door. “But he’s close. We aren’t waiting.”

“Okay.” Mannie climbed out of the passenger’s side. “What about the others?”

She’d called out backup of the unofficial kind—Jason, who was close. And Rule’s brother Benedict, who was not. But he was in charge of security at Nokolai Clanhome, and he was good. Very, very good. He was bringing some of his people. “ETA forty to fifty minutes. We’ll move in and I’ll assess the situation. If it’s stable, I’ll wait until they’re in place.”

“If not?”

“Then I don’t wait. You remember the signals?”

“You’ll tap my shoulder if you’re close enough. Otherwise you’ll tap your head or face or whatever you think I’ll see. One tap means stop, freeze, hold. Two taps means keep going or come closer. Three taps—get the hell out of there any way I can.”

He answered easily enough, but he was taut. Jumpy. She was insane to bring him. “It’s okay to be nervous, you know. I’d be worried if you weren’t. Just remember your role—guide and consultant on the magic stuff, if needed. Not Rambo.”

“No Rambo shit. Right. I’m cool with that. Did you ever notice how everyone but Rambo gets killed?”

“Yeah,” she said dryly. “I have. Let’s move.”

This part she didn’t like. Every instinct said she needed to get out in front. She had the badge, the gun, the training. She couldn’t be affected by charms or whatever magical hoodoo Adele might pull.

But she didn’t know the way. Mannie did. Instinct lost this round.

He led her around a boulder the size of a Buick standing on end. There was a path of sorts—at least, there was a route up among the tumbled rocks.

For maybe fifteen minutes they went up—almost straight up at times, scrambling over rock in all shapes and sizes, slithering up scree. Slipping a time or two, but not badly. Here the stone was granite, some loose, some fixed, earth’s tawny bones poking through where the skin was thin. Many of the larger boulders bore a reddish residue from the aerial spraying used on a wildfire a few years back. Grass sprouted in the oddest places. So did pines, scrub oak, and thorny manzanita.

Lily’s breath was labored by the time the ground leveled out some, and she’d scraped one palm. No snakes, though. If they made it the rest of the way without seeing a snake, she’d count herself lucky. They set out along a narrow vee between two steep, stony shoulders shrugged up by some distant geological upset. About ten paces in, Mannie stopped, looked at her, and pointed.

Smoke wisped up in a tattered tail, barely visible against the blue of the sky.

She nodded grimly. Smoke meant a campfire, which meant Adele Blanco, not Robert Friar, waited ahead. That’s what she’d expected, but confirmation was good. Lily took out her phone. No bars.

No surprise. They’d thought they would lose coverage as they moved up among the rocky hills. She had to hope Jason spotted the smoke, too, and avoided getting a whiff of it. Lily tapped Mannie’s shoulder twice.

They were close, dammit. She wanted to shove him aside and race to Rule—but that was stupid, and stupid got people killed. Mannie knew the path. She didn’t. Lily set her jaw and kept following.

Problem was, while she could get her feet and hands to do what they were supposed to, she couldn’t make her mind behave. And she couldn’t make sense of this. Why had Adele taken Rule? Had she just wacked out and decided to kill everyone who’d ever pissed her off? Had Rule caught her doing something that revealed her guilt?

Maybe she was willing to kill just as a distraction. Lily had run up against killers c old-blooded enough for that—people who’d kill a second time just to throw the cops off the scent. She might have set up some cockamamie alibi. Or did she have some crazy notion of using Rule to bargain with?

But she hadn’t tried to contact Lily. Hard to arrange a bargain if you don’t let the other side know about it. No, she meant to kill him.

But she hadn’t. Not yet.

Why not? If she had Rule paralyzed, he was helpless. There were so many ways to kill a helpless man—quicker, easier ways than tattooing a spell around his neck. But Adele hadn’t gone for quick and easy. Lily knew that much, held on to that certainty. If Rule had been killed, the mate bond would have snapped. It hadn’t.

How long did it take to ink a tattoo all the way around a man’s neck?

Lily didn’t know. She didn’t have any goddamned idea, so all she could do was keep going forward and pray. And all she could manage for prayer was oh, God, oh, God, oh, God…

Mannie stopped. He looked at her and jerked his chin, indicating they went up again. This time “up” wasn’t a scramble, but a vertical climb. Not for very far, thank God—after about ten feet they’d reach a ledge. That ledge wandered off to the right, leading to a crevice.

The crevice led to Rule. Lily’s heartbeat picked up. She gave Mannie a nod, studied the rock face briefly, and reached for the first handhold.

This was where she took over the lead.

It wasn’t a tricky climb. Hard work, but not tricky. The hand-and footholds were good. But it was impossible to make it completely silently. Every scuff of a foot, every loose pebble, sounded horribly loud. Her scraped hand stung as she hauled herself up on nearly two wide feet of blessedly level ground.

Hard to say who was more startled, her or the rattler she’d disturbed.

Lily took two hasty steps back. It didn’t seem to calm the snake any. It was curled up except for the tail, which shook—and the head, which was lifted, testing the air with its tongue.

No time. She had no time—Mannie was coming up right behind her. Where was a stick when she needed it? There was nothing in sight, and she had no time.

Lily pulled off her jacket, lunged forward, and tossed the jacket over the snake just as Mannie’s hand appeared on the ledge. Then she kicked it—jacket, snake and all.

The two separated in midair. Mannie froze with his arm on the ledge, his head swiveling to watch as the snake landed below. Then he scrambled up the rest of the way.

She barely waited for him to make it safely up before hurrying to the crevice. It was low and narrow. She got on her knees, twisted sideways, and started wiggling forward.

It was about a yard long, and taller at the other end. According to Mannie, she’d come out about seven feet up from the floor of the cul-de-sac. She stopped just before reaching the end and unholstered her weapon. Her heart pounded so hard she felt it in her ear canals, yet she was calm.

He was still alive. She’d made it in time.

Slowly she peered around the rocky lip of the crevice.

Ahead of her—rock. Below was more rock, this with some dirt atop it. And Rule. He lay on his back on a bright blue blanket, his eyes closed, his head a couple feet from a small camp stove. His hands were handcuffed in front of him. At his feet was an ordinary ice chest. And those were…rose petals? Someone had sprinkled rose petals on the blanket?

No one else in sight. The cul-de-sac was about ten feet by fifteen, with no visible hiding places.

She heard Mannie coming up behind her and reached up and tapped her head once: stop. Was this some kind of trap?

She eased farther out, craned her head. She couldn’t see anyone, and no one shot at her. Always a good sign.

She twisted around and leaned closer to Mannie, barely visible in the deep shadows of the crevice. “Stay up here,” she whispered. His head moved in what she hoped was a nod.

She straightened, sat, and swung her legs up to her chest—hard squeeze to get them fully twisted around in this tight space, but she made it, letting them dangle out the opening. She dropped, weapon out.

Nothing. No one fired, no one came running out of some previously unnoticed hidey-hole. Two quick steps took her to Rule. She knelt and put her hand on his neck—his clean-skinned neck. No tattoo.

His pulse was strong. She kept her weapon out, her eyes scanning the area. What the hell was going on?

The scuff of feet. A woman’s voice, too low for her to catch the words. The sounds came from the opening to the cul-de-sac—a wide opening, not a narrow, slither-through-it crevice. From the trail beyond—and not very far down that trail.

With her empty hand she tapped her head once: stay put.

Question was, did she do the same, or try to ambush whoever was coming? She did not like leaving Rule stretched out, helpless and unaware—but logic said he’d be safest with his kidnapper caught, and the best way to catch her was by surprise.

Lily stood and started for the side of the cul-de-sac that would screen her from whoever was approaching. And stepped on a damned pebble. It slid under her, making her jerk to regain her balance—making her make noise, dammit to hell. She froze, listening.

The voice was silent. The footsteps had stopped.

Never mind stealth, then. Lily swung out around the rocky wall, weapon held out in both hands. “FBI! Freeze! Hands up!”

Two women, not one, looked back at her. One was Mariah Friar, her eyes huge in her pallid face. The other was taller, older, heavier, with dusky skin and dark brown hair in a wild froth of curls halfway down her back. She wore jeans and a snug, short-sleeved black sweater.

With one arm, she kept Mariah’s arm pinned high behind her back. Her other hand kept her snub-nose Beretta jammed under Mariah’s chin. Her eyes were tilted and smiling, as were her full lips. “Maybe you should freeze, too, FBI.”

Now it made sense. Crazy sense, maybe, but Lily knew she should have figured it out the second she spotted those damned rose petals. Adele had watched too many episodes of Murder She Wrote. She thought she could stage a murder-suicide. Lily could read the script the woman had written: Mariah lured Rule here for sex. Rule, being lupus, accepted. Mariah—for what reason, Lily wondered?—killed him instead of fucking him, then shot herself.

No doubt Adele would have supplied some kind of motive, given time.

“You’ve got a problem, Adele. Your little plan to kill a couple more people to distract me didn’t work.” Lily shook her head. “And your staging sucks. A romantic tryst on rocks? What were you thinking?”

The woman’s eyes flashed, but her smile didn’t budge. “You don’t think it’s a pretty setting? I’m crushed—or would be, but your presence here makes your opinion less important than it was. It seems we will have an even worse tragedy than I’d originally thought.”

“How’re you going to manage that, Adele? If you shoot Mariah, I shoot you. If you move that gun so you can shoot me, I shoot you. Seems like you wind up dead no matter what—unless you put that gun down.”

“Oh, you’re tough, aren’t you? Not so tough you’ll stand there and let me shoot poor little Mariah, though.” She jammed the gun harder into that terribly vulnerable spot, her face twisting with hate. Mariah whimpered. “Shut up, Mariah. God, but I’m so sick of your whiny little feelings. All that sweet, sweet neediness of yours seducing Steve…”

Suddenly she laughed. “You want to know how to lie to an empath, FBI? All you have to do is mean it when you say it. She can only read what you’re feeling right that moment, so if you keep the hate pushed down deep, she doesn’t know.”

“I knew.” Mariah’s’ voice was thin and shaky, but clear. “I knew how jealous you were, but the friendship was real, too. You know it was.”

“Shut up.” She jerked Mariah’s arm higher, making her cry out. “And you, FBI. Put the gun down. I’ve got nothing to lose. Might as well shoot this little friend of mine, eh?”

“You’re lying,” Lily said calmly. “You want to live. You shoot her and I shoot you. We’re only ten feet apart. This close, I can go for a head shot, no problem.”

For the first time, uncertainty flashed across the woman’s face—only for a second, but that sublime, crazy confidence had faltered. “You ever killed someone, FBI? You think it’s easy? Think you’re up to it?”

Lily let the memories in, chilling her. Flattening her voice. “With a gun, you mean? I’ve only killed one human, but that was with my bare hands. With a gun, though, I’ve hunted demons. You’ll be a lot easier to kill than they were.”

Adele laughed again, but it was shaky. “What are you, crazy? You think I’m going to believe you’ve been demon hunting? Never mind. Never mind, damn you, keep your stupid gun. But stay there. Stay back.” She took a careful step backward, her gaze never leaving Lily. “You stay back.”

“Sure. Just one problem, Adele. There’s a wolf behind you.”

Her lip curled in contempt. “I’m supposed to turn around now, I take it. Fool. Rule isn’t going to wake from that stupor for at least an hour, and when he does, he’ll be too sick to Change.”

“I said there’s a wolf. I didn’t say it was Rule.”

Some fifteen feet down the path, Jason—tawny and huge, hackles raised and lips peeled back from really large teeth—growled.

Adele jerked. She yanked Mariah with her, half-turned—saw the wolf gathering his legs beneath him—and shoved Mariah at Lily.

Mariah cried out, stumbling. Jason leapt. A shot rang out. Another. Adele was running straight at Jason, firing. Lily was running, too, unable to get a clear shot.

The big wolf yelped and landed hard, but he thudded into Adele, knocking her down, too. She lost the gun and rolled, ending up flat on her back just as Lily skidded to a halt beside her, gun pointed right between her eyes. “Don’t move.”

Adele stared, her chest heaving—and all of a sudden flung her head back and screamed in rage, her hands digging into the dirt on either side of her.

The earth moved.

A small lift, first—but enough that Lily wobbled. A couple rocks slithered, fell. Then the ground danced—a horrid, rolling shudder as if rock had turned liquid to roll beneath them like the ocean. More rocks fell. She heard Mannie cry out. She fell to one knee, arms out, trying to balance on the shifting planet.

Adele howled with laughter, pushing up onto her hands and knees. “Go! Go! Or I’ll bring it all down! Rocks falling on your lover, your precious lover—rocks falling on all of us! Go!”

She was doing it. Adele was using her Gift to do the impossible—to call an earthquake.

Something hot and fierce swelled up in Lily so fast she didn’t question, didn’t think. She dropped her gun and threw herself on top of the laughing madwoman—wrapped her arms around her, holding tight, reaching—

Power, vast and raw, power like nothing she’d ever touched—power called from earth—power reverberating between woman and earth, call and answer, again and again, a shuddering cascade building out of control—

No! Lily squeezed her eyes shut, squeezed her arms tighter, squeezed with everything she was as if she could stretch herself around the woman and cut her off, shut it down, close it off, you cannot reach this woman, she has no call, no power. NO.

The earth stilled.

Dizziness swam through Lily, a vicious, sucking exhaustion. She pried her eyes open and shook her head, trying to clear it. What…?

Adele lay motionless beneath her. Lily pushed up on one trembling arm, suddenly afraid she’d squeezed the woman to death or something. She’d done…something. She couldn’t quite remember…

But Adele was quite alive—and staring up at her in horror. “What did you do to me?” she whispered. “What are you?”

Lily dragged in one shaky breath. Another. Several feet behind her, Jason was panting like he hurt. But panting meant he was alive.

From farther away she heard Mannie call, “Don’t be mad, but when the rocks came down, so did I. Rule’s okay, though. None of them hit him. I’m okay. Limping, but okay. Are you okay?”

She got one more good breath into her and called back, “I’m good. I don’t know about Mariah. Jason’s hit. Drag Rule out of there, if you can.” The earth had stopped moving, but there could be loose rocks. Aftershocks.

Then and only then did she look at Adele once more. “What am I?” She smiled a nasty, satisfied smile. “I’m the FBI bitch who’s arresting you. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have…”