Lupi 08 - Death Magic

Should have seen this when she was mopping up blood.
    Voices at the front of the house. No time. She crammed the pottery shards behind a spring green throw pillow on the banquette, sat in the only remaining chair, and took a bite of a cookie.
    “I told you,” Deborah was saying, her voice growing closer, “he went for a walk.”
    “Was that before or after someone smashed your window?” Drummond asked.
    “I didn’t know it had been broken until you asked me about it just now. I haven’t been at the front of the house.”
    Lily washed down the bite with a sip of cold coffee just as Drummond strode into the room with Deborah a pace behind. Three more men followed behind the two of them—two she didn’t know, plus Mullins, who was looking especially dense and dull.
    “I’m sure Ruben will be back soon,” Deborah said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
    Drummond stopped when he saw Lily—but not like he was surprised. He smiled, cold and nasty, his eyes glittering with anger. “Look who beat me here. What a coincidence. You dropped by to chat with a suspect just before I came to arrest him.”
    “You’re arresting Ruben?”
    “He doesn’t seem to be here, does he? You know anything about that?”
    Lily looked at those glittering eyes and her stomach lurched as if she were in an elevator headed down way too fast.
    That wasn’t anger she saw. That was triumph. Drummond had just gotten exactly what he wanted. “How could I? I’m not part of the investigation anymore.”
    “You got the last part right. Special Agent Lily Yu, you are under arrest.”

TWENTY-FIVE
     

     
    IN the cold darkness beneath the oaks and hawthorns and elms, the world was moist and fragrant. Two wolves walked under those trees. Leaves crunched and released their mélange of scent-messages with every footfall. Impossible even for Rule to walk silently here, much less the raw new wolf who trailed him.
    Enough leafy canopy remained above them to hide the stars . . . though not the moon, not entirely. Fat and pale and so nearly full Rule’s eyes could barely limn the missing sliver, she lit their way and flooded them with moonsong. Behind him the new one paused as he had from time to time, so intoxicated by the scent-torrent the world poured upon him in shimmering abundance that he had to stop and smell. Just smell.
    Rule paused patiently with him.
    Tomorrow was full moon. The three days and nights leading up to full moon were the normal period for First Change. And that was the only normal thing about this particular First Change.
    Rule didn’t think of the wolf who followed him as Ruben Brooks because he wasn’t. Surely he would be again. This First Change couldn’t be that different. But it would be a few days, perhaps a week, before memories and thoughts of his other form began to surface; another week before he was able to resume his original form for a time. That would happen at the new moon following First Change. Brand-new wolves often needed help with that Change, or at least strong encouragement.
    Those first two weeks were a heady time, each moment brimming with newness and delight. Or they should be. The wolf keeping pace with Rule had known all too much confusion and fear. It boded ill for how man and wolf would weave their joint life in days to come.
    Of course, until now, no lupi had ever been a forty-six-year-old man when First Change hit. They could hope that would make a difference.
    Rule and the wolf who used to be Ruben Brooks wound through the trees along the west side of Dumbarton Oaks Park, roughly forty acres of woodlands in the middle of Georgetown. It had taken them hours to get this far. Some of that was due to the careful, roundabout way two wolves must travel in a populous city, but some had to do with the new wolf’s need to play.
    Normally new wolves were born at First Change into bodies as gangly and unfinished as the boys they were before that moment—not puppies, no, but not fully adult, and with a youngster’s need to play and explore. This wolf needed that, too, though his body was fully mature. He and Rule had romped in Rock Creek Park—Mika was away from his lair, unfortunately, but Rule made sure they left their scent near it—and rolled in the creek as they followed it south. Once they reached Dumbarton, they’d snapped at scampering field mice near the Naval Observatory, then flushed a rabbit in the wooded area between the embassies of Denmark and Italy.
    The new wolf had