Lupi 06 - Blood Magic

running her hands over what was left of the driver's seat in a crumpled Honda, but the walking-around-barefoot part happened fairly often.
    Lily was a touch sensitive. She experienced magic as a texture on her skin, but couldn't be affected by it. When local police thought magic or those of the Blood might be involved in a crime, they called MCD - who passed most of it on to the Unit.
    Lately she'd been called out a lot. In the dog days of summer, some of the citizens of San Diego were seeing monsters. Big, hairy monsters with tyrannosaurus teeth. Grinning demons chittering at a window. Leprous undead charging a house.
    Every time the nutcases called the cops, the cops called her. Every time, she had to check out the sighting. Because these days, there was always a chance the loonies were right.

 
    THREE

    Creatures unseen on Earth in hundreds of years - creatures never seen here at all - had been swept here at the Turning, when the power winds blew open barriers between realms.
    The power winds had been temporary, thank God, and the experts said it would be impossible for anything to wander here without them. They also said that any crossing would release a burst of nodal energy, and the D.C. coven, who kept watch over a sophisticated simulacra map, swore there'd been no significant node disturbances recently. And while there was now a gate between Earth and one other realm - Edge - it was on the other side of the country and was warded and guarded on both ends. Nothing was slipping through there.
    But unlikely doesn't mean impossible, and Lily wasn't convinced the experts knew all that much, so when the cops called the Unit, she went to check out the scene.
    First she ran her hands over every inch of the steering wheel, from which the deflated airbag hung like the world's biggest condom. The monster du jour had been a giant snake, one as big around as a cow, which the Honda's driver swore had suddenly reared up in front of her car, fangs dripping venom. Naturally she'd swerved - right in front of a pickup.
    Luckily for that driver, it was a quiet, mostly residential street and the pickup's driver had kick-ass reflexes. The Honda's driver had been taken to the ER, but the EMTs didn't think she was hurt badly. The pickup's driver insisted he didn't have so much as a bruise.
    And guess what? He hadn't seen a snake, giant or otherwise. Nor had Lily found any traces of magic on the street where the snake was supposed to have been.
    Nothing here, either. She began checking out the dash.
    It wasn't as if she didn't have anything else to do. She was finishing up a magical fraud case she'd worked with the local FBI office, and had just returned from the tiny town of Eagle's Nest. That case hadn't taken long, thank God. She'd handed off the supposed lupus attack to the locals. The victim, it turned out, had been drunk, and the assailant was a bear that had wandered into town to check out the trash cans.
    The dash was devoid of magic, so she started on the oddments the woman had collected in her car - an empty soda can, a newspaper, a wad of crumpled receipts.
    No doubt a social scientist would have a blast analyzing the current vogue in crazy calls, and who knows? Maybe they really were the result of a collision in the collective psyche between reason and magic. The Turning had spooked people, no doubt about that. But Lily preferred more concrete answers - like a new, undetectable drug. Or a new, undetectable spell.
    If the latter, it was her job to detect it, dammit. And she wasn't.
    She scooted out and crouched so she could run her hands over the driver's seat, and underneath it. She didn't expect to find anything, having checked out the driver before the EMTs took her away. If the woman had been hexed or enspelled, Lily should have felt it on her. She hadn't.
    Nothing on the seat, either. She straightened, careful not to touch her dress with her dirty hands.
    Rule handed her the bag of wipes from her purse. She took it and gave him a smile. "I knew there was a good reason to keep you around."
    "Don't forget the pickle jars."
    That turned her insides mushy. He'd proposed over pickles. Also blini, cheese, and a really lovely Dom Perignon, but it was the pickles that got to her. She gave him a smile, but no words - couldn't say what she wanted with Munoz standing by - and finished wiping her hands. "Officer, there's nothing more I can do here. It's your case. Thanks for your cooperation."
    Her skin prickled faintly, as if