Lupi 08 - Death Magic

numbers, which he read while being given the last of the four pints of blood he’d needed.
    He immediately called several of his media contacts and arranged to speak to reporters from his wheelchair as he was being released from the hospital. One of his eyes was covered by a gauze pad. The swelling had gone down around the other one, just as he’d said it would.
    At that press conference, he told reporters and their cameras that there had been an estimated thirty-five thousand humans altogether who’d attended the four rallies. Seven-tenths of one percent of those people were killed. There had been one hundred sixty-four lupi who raced to save the humans at those rallies.
    One-fifth of them were killed. Nearly a third of them died in D.C.
    Rule’s press appearance garnered attention for several hours, until an announcement that night by the Secretary of Defense eclipsed everything else for a while.
    A nuclear warhead had been accidentally deployed that morning due to a mysterious series of glitches that no one was able to explain. The missile had apparently been on course for the West Coast when—with even greater mystery—it had vanished from sight and radar. No trace of the missile or the warhead was ever found.
     
     
    WITH everything that happened that day, it wasn’t surprising that no one noticed that four of the U.S. cities with dragons were temporarily without dragons. Since they were gone a single day, people might not have noticed even without the dramatic events.
    It was the next day when six women boarded planes at the Denver airport at various times, headed back to their various homes.
    The seventh woman didn’t need to catch a plane. She’d left as soon as her work was done. An enormous black dragon had flown her home already, his talons wrapped carefully around the empty body, her bright muumuu flapping merrily in the wind of their passage.
    Dragons cannot open gates on their own. They can manipulate them, power them, even close them, but they can’t open them. For reasons they do not explain, song magic alone isn’t enough. The Rhejes could open a gate; that knowledge was held in the memories. They couldn’t shift one in front of an ICBM boosting at thousands of miles an hour, so they needed the dragons as much as the dragons needed them.
    It takes a godawful amount of power to open a gate. The dragons supplied much of that, but the Rhejes had had to channel it. An eighty-one-year-old heart, however valiant, can only take so much strain, and the two healers present couldn’t stop chanting to help. She’d held on, though—held on until the gate opened and the missle shot into a realm that had held no life for over three thousand years.
    Nokolai clan had a new Rhej.
     
     
    TWO days later, Lily was called to Croft’s office to “discuss the results of the administrative hearing.” The sound of his voice told her it was good news, so she was hopeful, really hopeful, that she was going to get to keep her job. Maybe there’d be a black mark on her record, but she could live with that.
    “They want to what ?” she said, dumbfounded.
    “It’s a great honor. The Presidential Citizens Medal is the second-highest civilian award in the country. The president will, of course, present it herself.”
    It made her furious. “I’m no hero. I showed up. That’s about it. Oh, and I did manage to give Chittenden a skull fracture, which makes me personally very happy. But if the president wants to hand out medals, I can name a dozen who deserve it more. Harry and his troop. Chris, Mike, Scott, Rule, Isen—” She had to stop, her breath hitching. Not everyone she spoke of was still around to receive a stupid medal. “That old woman with her handbag—now, there’s a hero! It’s not right to single me out this way. It’s not right.”
    “Sometimes showing up is what it takes. Showing up over and over and over in spite of how hard it gets.”
    She shook her head, out of words.
    “Besides, I disagree about you not doing much. There are twenty-two other people alive today who’d disagree, too. And if you hadn’t acted on that tip . . .” Croft paused a moment, clearly uncomfortable. He knew who had tipped Lily about Chittenden’s possession of the amulet, though it wasn’t in her official report. He always avoided mentioning it, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of ghostly tips. “If you hadn’t acted, the brownies couldn’t have done what they did.”
    “So give the brownies a