Lupi 08 - Death Magic

construction crew from Leidolf would arrive to finish it in a couple of weeks. They had guards now, ten of them, and Rule wanted those guards housed here, not at a hotel. He’d added an alarm system to the detached garage out back, and he wanted Lily’s government-issue Ford in that garage. If she didn’t want to park there, fine, he wasn’t telling her what to do—but the garage would stay empty, because he wasn’t going to use it. He’d rented space in a parking garage a few blocks away—the one where he kept a couple of vehicles for the guards’ use. When Rule needed his car, he had one of the guards retrieve it. Since they were lupus, they’d smell it if anyone had tried to tamper with the car.
    This focus on security was as necessary as it was unwelcome. But Lily’s car was in the garage and Rule’s Mercedes wasn’t, so they left by the front door, watched over invisibly by José on the roof. Out back, she knew, Craig paced the perimeter of the small yard on four feet.
    One up, watching the street; one down, watching the rear of the house; one with Rule. The Leidolf guards were blended with those from Nokolai now. At first they’d worked separate shifts, divided by clan, but Rule had recently changed that. They needed to work as a team, he said . . . which made sense, but Lily had expected it to cause problems, at least at first.
    When she’d said something about that to Rule, his eyebrows had lifted. “A month ago, it might have. War changes things.” He’d been right. The Leidolf and Nokolai guards were working together as smoothly as if their clans hadn’t been enemies for a few hundred years.
    “What did your ghost look like?” Rule asked as she locked the door. He stood with his back to her, scanning the street.
    “Not my ghost.” She dropped her keys in her purse and started for the car double-parked in front of the row house.
    “The ghost that isn’t yours, then.”
    “Five-ten, one sixty . . . or what might be one sixty if it had an actual body instead of the ectoplasmic suggestion of one. No distinguishing features. No features at all.”
    Rule’s eyebrows lifted as he opened the car door for her. He was big on opening doors. “A faceless specter?”
    She grinned. “In fact, it was.” She slid inside and scooted over.
    He followed. Scott clicked the locks.
    This was the part Rule disliked most about the tightened security, she knew. He preferred to drive himself—but he also preferred to have his hands and attention free if they were attacked, so he used a driver now. Lily disliked pretty much every part, but she was adapting, dammit. Though the loss of privacy still grated.
    She said hello to Scott and fastened her seat belt. “Married, I think.”
    “Yes, we will be,” he said, claiming her hand. “Only five months now.”
    “And I’m not even hyperventilating.” Marrying Rule was easy. Holding the wedding was another story, but she had a list, after all. Several of them. “But I meant that the ghost was married before the death-do-you-part clause got activated. He, she, or it wore a ring on the left hand.”
    “You saw a ring? No face, but a wedding ring?”
    “When it reached for me, the hands got a lot clearer. The ring kind of glowed.” She considered. “I should say he, not it. They looked like a man’s hands. Not real young, not real old, and he wasn’t a manual laborer.” No, they’d been soft hands, she remembered. Clean and cared for. Narrow palms, long fingers, nicely trimmed nails.
    “It reached for you?” Rule did not sound happy.
    “Then wisped away.” She squeezed his hand. “Relax. It—or he—didn’t seem hostile, and even if he was pissed and was able to interact with the physical, what could he do? Lob a pencil at me?”
    “I seem to recall a wraith who managed to do quite a lot.”
    “I couldn’t see the wraith. I saw this, so it’s unlikely he was a wraith.” It was unlikely for other reasons, too, having to do with how wraiths were made.
    “Hmm.”
    Rule didn’t ask the obvious questions. He knew that whatever she’d seen, it hadn’t been a trick of the light or a delusion. He also knew it couldn’t have been an illusion. Lily was a touch sensitive. She felt magic tactically, but couldn’t work it or be affected by it. Whatever she’d seen had been real.
    Scott signaled for the turn. Lily tried to pretend he wasn’t able to hear everything they said. Rule was better at that than she was. Ignoring their front-seat