Lupi 08 - Death Magic

dream, but his body did. When he’d had the heart attack, its kinetic memory had awakened, telling him this was the pain he’d previewed in a dream.
    He’d expected to die. He hadn’t.
    He hadn’t stopped having the dream, either.
    Any dream he had that often, through so many changes of course, meant the events it depicted were not to be stopped by any conceivable branchings in the possibilities. His dream always ended the same way: in cessation. Not darkness or some version of the fabled tunnel, but a blankness his waking mind couldn’t conjure or reconstruct.
    Tomorrow or a month from tomorrow, his body would be crushed by pain. It would end. And Ruben would find out what lay on the other side of the small, dark door that everyone passes through alone.
    He would miss her so much.

EIGHT
     

     
    ON Sunday, Lily did not brood. Much. She called her parents because she was supposed to, and that was okay—she enjoyed talking to her dad—but it left her churned up. Ruben’s scenarios would have her family living under some weird military dictatorship a year from now.
    If they lived.
    Rule called Toby and she talked to him awhile, too. Math still sucked, but quadratic equations were kinda cool. Toby was being homeschooled by a retired teacher, but Isen’s cook/ housekeeper, Carl, was teaching him quadratic equations. Which sounded like math to Lily, but not, apparently, to Toby.
    He still couldn’t decide on an instrument, but the oboe was okay, so he’d stick with it awhile. He and Johnny were going rock climbing—of course with an adult, and anyway Granddad wasn’t really mad about the other day, but Toby did not want to be stuck with a bodyguard all the time, so he’d agreed he wouldn’t do that anymore. And Dirty Harry was doing great. He’d established his territory in spite of the dogs that ran loose at Clanhome. He’d cowed several of them, but there was a German shepherd mix that gave him trouble. Or had until yesterday. Harry had figured out that the odd-smelling people he now lived with would back him up if the German shepherd gave him any trouble.
    Being a cat, Harry had no issues about calling for backup. You used the tools available to you, right? He was pretty smug, Toby said.
    Between phone calls, Lily cleaned while Rule did their laundry, a division of labor they’d settled on after a couple months. She was picky about cleaning—he didn’t seem to even see dust bunnies—and he was picky about his clothes. That was part vanity, part necessity due to that whole “public face of his people” thing, and also because of his nose. Even unscented detergents left a scent, he said, and he wanted his clothes to smell one way and hers to smell another because of how those scents mingled with their personal scents.
    She’d asked him once if he could actually smell himself.
    His eyebrows had shot up. “You mean you can’t?”
    The rest of the day, Rule messed with his spreadsheets and financial wheelings and dealings while she studied up for the stupid damn committee hearing. They cooked supper together—salmon en papillote, which was a fancy way of saying you wrapped fish and vegetables and stuff in special paper and baked it.
    When Rule first taught her how to make it, she was highly dubious. Surely paper in the oven wasn’t a good idea. Apparently parchment paper was different. It hadn’t caught on fire yet, anyway, and they fixed salmon en papillote pretty often.
    She had a hard time getting to sleep that night, and when she finally did drift off, she didn’t sleep well. Bad dreams, though they evaporated when she woke up.
     
     
    ON a scale of one to firing squad, Monday was a five. First Lily put in a couple hours drone work at Headquarters—limited duty meant sitting on her butt a lot—then she went to PT, which was probably good for her soul even if she wasn’t sure what it did for her body. Nettie had instructed Lily to continue her physical therapy while she was in D.C. and had given her the name of a therapist to use. Lily tried not to make Dr. Nettie Two Horses mad, so she grunted and groaned her way through the session.
    Then there was the stupid damn committee hearing.
    The first couple hours went about like she’d expected. The senators wanted to know everything about the collapse of the node and what led up to it. They had the right clearance, so she gave it to them straight—well, except for leaving out a few things, like the mate bond and the tickly passenger in