Lupi 08 - Death Magic

fur-and-pine tickle in her gut—the reason her shattered bone had knit so quickly, the cause of her muscle’s gradual, impossible regeneration—made her feel as if she should burp.
    Fifty feet away, a drift of otherness obscured the paper target she’d been putting holes in.
    It was white. Maybe that’s why she immediately thought ghost . It drifted on a diagonal like three-dimensional rice paper—translucent, not transparent, its edges too clearly defined for smoke, shaped right for a human, but faceless. Even as it floated closer on a steady, nonexistent air current, it remained out of focus—four limbs and a trunk in human proportions, the details blurred like a smeared chalk-drawing.
    It was coming straight at her. The quick clamp of fear stiffened Lily’s spine and widened her eyes.
    As the faceless thing floated closer it stretched out one hand—and yes, that was clearly a hand. For all the vagueness of the rest of the form, that milky hand was painstakingly vivid, as if an artist had etched in every minute detail from the mound at the base of the thumb to the lines crossing the palm to the wrinkles at the joints. There was a ring on the third finger of that hand.
    A gold ring. Glowing. On the left hand, palm up. Beseeching.
    Lily’s heart raced and ached under the weight of a terrible pity.
    The filmy shape drifted to a stop. As if it were, after all, only smoke, it began to tatter in an ethereal breeze, wisping away into nothing.

TWO
     

     
    AMERICA was not a classless society.
    No place was, of course. Not if that place counted humans among its residents. Humans were every bit as hierarchical as werewolves, from what Lily could tell. Just less honest about it. The official line was that the United States was a meritocracy: the talented, the dedicated, the extraordinary would rise to the top.
    Maybe so, if you were willing to stipulate that money equals competence. Lily wasn’t. That tidy metric also didn’t account for another American preoccupation that fed into class: beauty. A woman who had both, she reflected as she zipped her jeans, might come across as cold because she felt isolated and wary of other women. Or she might be a stuck-up bitch.
    Maybe today she’d figure out which was true of her boss’s wife. Their one encounter last spring inclined Lily toward the “bitch” summary, but it had been a very brief meeting. Maybe she was wrong. After all, Ruben had picked Deborah and stayed with her, and the woman did teach seventh grade, so . . .
    “You’re sure it was a ghost?”
    “Of course not.” Lily saw red for a moment—the red of the stretchy sweater she tugged over her head. Then it was down and she saw the gray walls and pale wood of the bedroom, and the man she shared that bedroom with. “How can I be sure? I’m no medium.”
    “But it looked like a ghost.” Rule sat on the bed to pull on his shoes. With his head bent, his mink brown hair fell forward, hiding his face. Rule had been overdue for a haircut even by his standards when he got the subcommittee’s request for “clarification of your expert testimony from last March.” He’d promptly cancelled his hair appointment.
    That was stubbornness, not lack of time. The request had come from an überconservative senator pursuing sound bites for his base. He’d wanted to ask Rule annoying questions to get them on the record, and Rule refused to look as if he’d raced out to trim himself to fit conservative notions of grooming.
    “White and filmy. Floating. Yeah, it looked like a ghost.” The remembered ache of pity closed Lily’s throat. It had wanted something from her. Needed something.
    Ghosts, she told herself firmly, were not people. She’d been told that by an expert. Whatever that fragment of ectoplasm wanted, it had come to the wrong place. She didn’t have any answers.
    Lily turned to check herself in the full-length mirror. She could see Rule behind her. The aging athletic shoes—no socks—he was tying suited the worn-to-white jeans with a hole in one knee. Oddly enough, they also went great with the whisper-light black cashmere sweater that had probably cost as much as one of the car payments Lily had finally finished making on her Toyota. “I know Ruben said casual, but—”
    “You think the jeans are too casual?”
    “No, not you. You’re fine.” Rule could pair ragged jeans with cashmere and look like a film star. Lily couldn’t. First, she didn’t own cashmere. Second, a sane woman who