Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

three-hundred-pound perp threw her against a wall. Or like it
     had on one miserable morning of her freshman year, when she’d decided that nothing,
     absolutely nothing, was worth getting a hangover that bad.
    But she hadn’t been drinking or playing arrest-the-perp, had she? What…wait, there
     had been a perp, and Lily had told her she was under arrest, and then she’d been…shit.
Captured.
That was the word.
    The quick spurt of panic cleared the fog from her brain. She made herself lie still
     and take stock with her eyes closed. She lay on something soft that sure felt like
     a bed. Good news: she wasn’t naked and the only injury seemed to be to her head. Her
     arms rested at her sides, unbound. She didn’t hear anything but the Brahms, nor did
     she smell anything in particular. Rule would have, but…
    The panic this time was an ocean, not a spurt. Her eyes flew open and the light made
     her headache worse, but the pain in her head was drowned by the cold fear racing through
     her. After an endless, drenched moment, sherealized the mate bond was screwy, not severed. Rule wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dead,
     but she couldn’t tell where he was. When she tried to use the mate-sense, it felt
     like he was everywhere, in every direction, and she had no idea how far away he was.
     When she tried harder she felt queasy. Motion sick, like when she’d seen that
On Motion
film at the IMAX and the crazy 3-D zooming around had forced her to shut her eyes
     so she wouldn’t puke.
    Lily lay very still and waited for her stomach and heartbeat to settle. Her mouth
     was dry. Her head hurt. If she couldn’t find Rule, she had to assume he couldn’t find
     her, either. She’d been captured by a furry woman, and Rule couldn’t find her.
    Couldn’t find her that way. He’d still be trying.
    Unless he’d been captured, too, and was in the room next to hers. She didn’t know.
     With the mate-sense wonky, he could be on the other side of the wall and she wouldn’t
     know it. Or he might have been hurt at the middle school. Badly hurt.
    Keep taking stock
, she told herself firmly.
    Okay, point number one: her head hurt, but it wasn’t the kind of crippling pain that
     suggested serious injury. It was an all-over ache, too, not localized like it would
     be with a concussion. Number two: she was dressed, she was not tied up—in fact, someone
     had tossed a blanket over her, as if they cared if she got cold while she was out
     cold. Number three: the whiteness overhead was an ordinary ceiling, not an underground
     cavern, which was encouraging. The last sidhe she’d tangled with had stashed his captives
     underground where he…
    A small ball of light bobbed into her field of view. A mage light. Common in sidhe
     realms, not so common here. She’d seen a lot of mage lights in that underground cavern.
    She frowned at the glowing ball. Rethna hadn’t been able to block the mate-sense,
     and he hadn’t just been sidhe—he’d been a sidhe lord. And when Rule had been dragged
     to the hell realm, she’d still
known
his direction. When an ancient being had locked Lily and Cynna in an underground
     bunkerwarded so tightly Cynna’s Gift couldn’t tell up from down, the mate bond had still
     worked.
    And somehow Cullen’s prototype could do what Rethna, hell, and the Chimei couldn’t?
     It didn’t make sense.
    Enough taking stock. She needed to see where the hell she was. Expecting it to make
     her head worse, she sat up.
    It did.
    “You’re awake.” The voice was male and sounded pleased. “How do you feel?”
    “Like crap.” The room didn’t spin, and her head didn’t fall off. It might have felt
     like that, but then it would have stopped hurting, wouldn’t it? Carefully she looked
     around.
    She was in a bedroom. An ordinary enough bedroom with blue drapes at the only window
     and two chairs at the other end of the room. There was a tall stack of books next
     to one of the chairs. A bowl of fruit rested atop it. Two doors, both closed. All
     very ordinary, if impersonal, except that the light didn’t come from something as
     prosaic as a lamp. It came from those mage lights bobbing up near the ceiling.
    Being a bedroom, it had beds. Twin beds. She was sitting on one. The man sitting on
     the other bed was taller than her. Hard to say how much taller with him sitting all
     yoga-like with his feet tucked up on his thighs, but maybe five-ten, and built solid.
     One seventy, maybe. He wore jeans and a