Lupi 08 - Death Magic

you say something earlier?” she demanded. “We spent hours at Fagin’s place and you didn’t say one word about this.”
    “I didn’t tell you the aliens ate my homework, either. You don’t get how outlandish this would sound to anyone who knows anything.”
    Rule chuckled. “He didn’t say anything because he hadn’t put it all together until just now.”
    “I just figured out the Vodun trigger,” Cullen said, “in spite of constant interruptions.”
    Rule grinned at his friend. “You also just realized—because Lily said it—that Rethna could have made the necessary charm or whatever it is before he was killed.”
    Cullen scowled. “An amulet. It’s probably an amulet.”
    “Whatever you say. You were thinking we had a second elf hanging out with Friar, weren’t you?”
    “Sure, it sounds obvious now, but I had to swallow two impossible ideas to get there. Number one being that dopplegängers are even possible. Number two was that Rethna was not just good enough to make a dopplegänger, but so ungodly good he could make a dopplegänger amulet that others could invoke a month after he died. One that outlasted the limit on charms. You don’t have any idea how crazy that sounds. He’d have to have been a goddamned adept.”
    Lily tilted her head. “Isn’t that exactly what he was? You’ve got that gem he wore. The bullet-stopping one. You called it an artifact. It takes an adept to make an artifact, so—”
    “So we don’t know that Rethna made it himself.” Cullen grimaced and ran a hand over his head, making his hair stand up. “But yeah, okay, maybe he did. Only it gives me retroactive creeps, thinking we went up against an adept. We shouldn’t have won. He was away from his realm, his land, so he didn’t have the power to draw on that he would have back home, but still.” He shook his head. “We shouldn’t have won.”
    “We wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for Dya. So is the dagger an artifact? It lasted more than one moon cycle, but the spell on it isn’t hidden. You said you couldn’t see the spells on artifacts.”
    Cullen grimaced. “That’s another thing that kept me from fingering Rethna at first. All the artifacts I’ve seen have the spellwork hidden, but I was extrapolating from too small a sample. Maybe Rethna didn’t know how to do the hiding trick. Maybe he just didn’t bother, since almost no one here can see magic.”
    “I imagine it’s a lot of work to—hey!” Movement glimpsed out of the corner of her eye had Lily spinning around.
    He stood in the doorway to the dining room grinning at her. He was brown all over—shaggy brown hair, skin midway between caramel and chocolate, brown cargo pants with oversize pockets, brown sweater, brown loafers. And green eyes. Grass green, leaf green eyes with crow’s feet tucked in the corners. Eyes round and large like a cat’s set low in his face, giving him the look of an oddly aged child. He had a little dab of a nose and a wide, merry smile. He was about eighteen inches tall.
    He was freaking adorable. Lily smiled back. She couldn’t help it. “Harry, I presume?”
    Rule’s eyebrows shot up. Karonksi looked baffled. Cullen rolled his eyes. “Oh, great. The runt’s here.”

THIRTY-ONE
     

     
    THE pinkie-swearing took less than five minutes and was, indeed, a solemn business. Cullen left the room right after that, saying he wanted to call Fagin’s lawyer then talk dirty to Cynna . . . “and you know how that makes Lily blush.”
    Though Harry was the only brownie Lily met, the rest of his troop was nearby—out in the backyard, having fun hiding from the guards. Whatever magic brownies used to hide in plain sight didn’t work on Lily or Cullen, who was shielded against mind-magic. It worked great on everyone else. Very good spies, indeed.
    “ Dul-dul works on scent,” Harry said when Lily asked why the lupi couldn’t find him or his troop. He was perched on a small stack of books set on one of the chairs so he could join them at the table. “Not hearing or touch, though. Just sight and scent.”
    “Why scent but not hearing?”
    He rolled his big green eyes. He had long lashes and cute little eyebrows that made perpetually surprised arches. “Because we need it to work on scent, of course. We can learn how to move silently, but we can’t learn how to not smell, can we?”
    That wasn’t exactly an answer. “How did you get in? Everything’s locked.”
    That just made him giggle.
    Before