Lupi 08 - Death Magic

wore a battered leather aviator’s jacket over an eye-searing muumuu with enormous fuchsia flowers on a green and turquoise background.
    They gathered and talked for a few minutes, sounding variously calm, keyed up, worried, or pragmatic. The one in the dashiki didn’t speak. Now and then a fifty-ish woman with a dramatic silver streak in her black hair would take the silent woman’s hand, smiling and nodding at her, then would relate something to the others as if the silent woman had spoken.
    The one in the muumuu was the oldest and heaviest of them. She seemed to be in charge. Her eyes were as milky white as her hair. “Enough chitchat. They’ll be here when they get here,” she told the others. “We’d best be where we need to be when they arrive. Come on.”
    “You know where to head, then?” asked a tall, husky woman with milk-chocolate skin and a thick southern drawl. “I can’t see a thing.”
    The oldest of them chuckled. “Dark, light, it’s all the same to me. The feel of the place is clear enough—thick metal doors over a big hollow tube going straight down. Susan, you might take my arm. I won’t be paying attention to what’s up close, so I could trip over a twig and embarrass myself.”
    A mild-looking woman in her early thirties took the old woman’s arm, and all seven set off into the grass, the little lights bobbing along with them . . . headed directly for the underground missile silo.
    “Oh,” said the one in the muumuu. “Here’s Sam now.”

THIRTY-EIGHT
     

     
    PAUL Chittenden was Friar’s East Coast lieutenant, but he wouldn’t be taking the stage at the rally. He kept a low profile. Humans First’s official organizer for the D.C. rally was Kim Evans, a tall, nervous powerhouse of a woman who liked cameras just fine and had a problem distinguishing between fact and fiction.
    Rule had met her recently at a D.C. party, the sort of event he used to attend more often. The sort of event Lily hated, which was why he accepted far fewer invitations than he used to. But he’d heard Kim Evans would be at this one, and he’d been determined to meet her and size her up.
    It had been worth the effort. In five minutes’ conversation, Evans lied three times—twice about things she’d said that were on record, available to see and hear at various news sites. The third lie was her insistence that Rule himself had just said something he hadn’t. She’d lied passionately and sincerely, and when called on it, brushed it off with “don’t be ridiculous.”
    Evans’s fierce insistence that the truth was whatever she said it was created its own odd sort of charisma. Heaven knew the press found her fascinating. There were television cameras set up on stage—those operated by the Jumbotron people, yes, but also from various news outlets.
    Rule stood beside Cullen at the north side of the crowd, where it thinned slightly, way back from the stage. They’d been unable to get closer without forcing a path. Rule had been ready to do just that when Abel found them. Abel had decided to pay a visit to the people hosting the event. He could badge his way in, he said.
    The crowds had swallowed them up ten minutes ago. Rule was getting increasingly nervous. Abel hadn’t called. The brownies were either late or they couldn’t get through the mob, and the show was starting. A swell of music announced Kim Evans as she mounted the steps. Evans had a racehorse’s elegance—thin and quick and nervous. She was immaculately turned out in a bright pink suit and three-inch heels; she’d worn her blond hair loose, and the wind whipped it around her narrow face. The crowd went crazy cheering.
    Rule’s phone sounded. It was Lily. His heart pounded in a mix of relief and anxiety—relief because he’d hear her voice. Anxiety because she wasn’t here . “Yes?” he said, then, blocking his other ear: “Say again. There’s too many people screaming and clapping. I couldn’t hear.”
    Even with his hearing, even with his other ear stopped up, he missed a few words when she repeated her message: “... going to be kinda busy here, but you need to know. Pass the word. They . . . making lupus dopplegängers. Wolf form. A whole lot of them. Must have used Brian’s tissue. Turning them loose on . . . here and . . . buquerque and . . . iego and New York.”
     
     
    THE plan was simple enough. Let the bad guys get all their unconscious victims loaded up—then stop them, take their wheels, and show up