Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

yammered about, the one that hadn’t shown up when Big Thumbs pulled the trigger.
     Or maybe…
    He hadn’t really let himself think about that “maybe.” He didn’t deserve it. But it
     was like a rope—there were two ends to it, and if the end he held was grimy and black
     with guilt, the other end was as shiny and right as any of the angels he didn’t believe
     in.
    Mostly, though, he’d expected to die for good. Drummond hadn’t believed in God for
     years, much less an afterlife…though Sarah used to tell him he wasn’t a true unbeliever,
     just too mad at the deity to give Him the time of day. She’d been at least somewhat
     right. He figured that any God who let the sort of shit happen that he’d seen over
     and over wasn’t worth much. Sure, you could blame it on free will and people being
     assholes, but if so, God had done a pisspoor job of creating when it came to man,
     hadn’t He?
    So he’d left, walking off into the gray. Pushed aheadeven when he didn’t have any sense of a body, when there was nothing left of darkness
     or light, no whisper of sensation, barely the memory of it. Slogged on until he couldn’t
     tell if he was moving anymore, until even the blasted whatever-it-was that tied him
     to Yu grew so faint he couldn’t find it.
    Maybe he’d stopped then. Maybe he’d kept going. He had no way of knowing. But still
     moving or just plain still, he’d waited. And waited.
    At some point—it had seemed like hours, but might have been weeks or minutes, given
     how little time meant in the gray—he’d known he’d been wrong about that “maybe.” Wrong
     that it might be even a little bit possible. Wrong, too, about how desperately he’d
     wanted it to happen anyway.
    If Sarah had had any way of coming to him, she would have come then.
    He’d broken down then, broken apart. Sobbed like a baby, and if he hadn’t had eyes
     and a body to sob with, that made it worse. There was no Sarah. There would never
     be a Sarah for him again.
    There was no anything…but him.
    People think they know what
alone
means. Shit, he’d thought he did, thought he was more loner than not. He hadn’t had
     the least damn clue. Broken, bereft of bones, breath, sight, hearing, touch, he’d
     known that the gray was hell, and he’d waited for hell to eat him.
    It hadn’t.
    Not that he knew what had happened. Maybe, like he told Yu, he’d slept. At some point
     he’d drifted back to himself, wisping around like a bit of fluff so insubstantial
     that gravity was a lesser force than the eddies of air he floated on. He’d come back
     soft and slow and gentle, and found himself lying on a bed in one of the guest rooms
     in Yu’s D.C. house. He’d come back knowing two things.
    While he was away or asleep or whatever, someone had talked to him. Not Sarah, and
     he didn’t think it was God, but someone. And he had to help Lily Yu.
    However little either of them liked it.
    What I want to hear,
she’d said,
is that you’ve changed your mind about magic and the people who use it.
    People like her. People like her boss, who he’d tried to kill, and her fellow agents
     in Unit Twelve, and that damn werewolf she intended to marry. People like most of
     her friends and at least one of her family, according to the reports he’d read when
     he checked her out.
    People like Dennis Parrott. Not that he’d known about Parrott’s charisma Gift back
     when he was busy pissing on everything he’d spent a lifetime fighting for. Dennis
     Parrott had found him easy prey, twisting him around until it made perfect sense to
     kill Ruben Brooks because he was in charge of the magic-users in the FBI. Perfect
     sense to conspire to kill a U.S. senator—not that he’d known exactly how Parrott planned
     to do it, but that was no excuse—and frame Brooks for the murder. Perfect sense to
     do whatever it took to rid this country of magic.
    Whatever it took…until he learned that his associates thought that meant killing twenty-two
     people to make death magic. Parrott and Chittenden had kept him in the dark about
     the death magic. They shouldn’t have been able to do that, but he hadn’t been at his
     best, had he? When he did find out, it had been almost too damn late. When he found
     out…
    Al Drummond didn’t deny one ounce of the blame that was his. He’d earned the hell
     that hadn’t eaten him. But magic made the playing field too damn uneven.
    And Lily Yu wanted to know if he still hated