Lupi 08 - Death Magic

kept dropping. Surely it was too early in the year for snow? She hoped so. She hadn’t brought a heavy coat with her.
    Rule was in the ambulance with Cullen. Her mate-sense told her they were still in motion, so they hadn’t reached the hospital yet. But they’d get there well ahead of her and Scott, having left first. Before Lily could wade through the surging sea of reporters to the car, she’d needed to hand off evidence and get a bandage on her arm so it didn’t bleed onto her jacket.
    Sherry had been right about the type of offering the elemental would require. The cut was small and tidy, on the inside of her elbow . . . her left elbow. That hand was working again. Not quite normally, but headed there. “I’m going to tell him. I want privacy for it.”
    She hadn’t had that at Fagin’s place. Once the elemental agreed to release them, things had moved quickly. They’d had a brief window of time to seal the deal with blood, then scramble or be passed over the earthen wall. Then they’d been surrounded by cops of both local and federal flavors, with the press just the other side of the barricades.
    “When are you going to tell him?”
    “At the hospital, probably. You don’t argue like this with Rule.”
    “You’re not my Rho. And I do get to argue with Rule if I think it’s important. Not during, but afterward.”
    She sighed and shoved back her hair with her left hand. Those fingers still felt thick and clumsy, but she felt them. She could use them.
    No pain bolt this time. Just a hand that forgot it was part of her body, or a brain that forgot how to talk to the hand. The paralysis hadn’t lasted long, but for a few minutes Lily had been scared shitless. She’d had Scott find her some coffee—old stuff that he’d heated up in the microwave. Maybe it had helped.
    Lily let her hand drop to her lap. She closed the fingers in a loose fist. Opened them. Closed them. “Thank you for giving me time to tell him myself. I am going to. I’m not quite stupid enough to think I could keep this from him.” Or that she had any right to. But God, she was dreading it.
    Rule was teetering on some unholy edge. She might not understand what that edge was, exactly, but she recognized it. She’d seen his eyes bleeding toward black like that before—when she was threatened, when he was locked up, when the first of the power winds blew shortly before the Turning.
    She’d never seen the wildness try to take over, try to force the Change on him, when things were calm. He was angry that Cullen had been hurt, sure. But anger, even rage, didn’t threaten his control.
    Maybe he’d felt trapped because of the ward? That plus the imminence of the full moon . . . yeah, that might do it.
    Relief loosened the muscles across her neck. Much as he hated it, Rule did suffer from claustrophobia. Though it was usually triggered by small, enclosed spaces, and Fagin’s yard wasn’t small. Not like an elevator, which Rule hated but consistently used. Not like the cramped seating on a plane . . . which he also hated but consistently used. His eyes didn’t bleed to black when they flew across the country.
    But he had been trapped. Until the elemental agreed to let them out, Rule had been well and truly trapped. “Did it bother you?” she asked Scott. “Being trapped inside the elemental’s wards, I mean.”
    “I didn’t like it, but I knew we’d get out sooner or later. Why?”
    “Some lupi have a touch of claustrophobia.”
    “A touch of it, yeah, and that would be true for just about all of us. But there was plenty of room and, like I said, I knew we’d get out. I guess if we’d been stuck there a couple days I’d have started getting the willies, but we were only there a couple hours.”
    Two hours and twenty minutes, to be specific. Time enough for Lily to get quite a bit of glass bagged and tagged, with Scott’s help. With the help, maybe, of the coffee she’d drunk. Lily looked at the fist she kept clenching and opening. It was getting better.
    She could have gone to Rule right away, right when it happened, and told him. That’s what Scott had wanted her to do. She’d finished collecting evidence instead. Maybe that was wrong. No doubt Rule would be angry that she’d waited. But she didn’t have these spells because she’d been exerting herself. She had them because the Lady was messing with the stupid damn mantle.
    And that, she feared, was why Rule hovered on that precarious edge. It was rage