Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

recognize. Alycithin brought the candle in herself
     while the armed elf—Dinalaran—kept his SIG trained on Lily. She chanted softly with
     her hand hovering over the candle’s wick. A flame popped into being there.
    The elf and the halfling left, closing and no doubt locking the door behind them.
     Lily tried to settle. Her heart was racing. She felt halfway nauseous.
Drummond,
she said.
    Nothing happened. No white mist. No annoying yet reassuring ghostly shape.
    She swallowed. If she couldn’t even reach Drummond, how was she going to…
Try again
, she told herself. This time she spoke his name. “Drummond.”
    And this time it worked. He shaped up pretty quickly. And he was grinning. Actually
     grinning. “We’re at 1132 North Bretton. The neighbors ordered pizza and gave the address.
     1132 North Bretton.”
    Hot damn.
She sent him that along with a quick, fierce grin.
Now I have to make use of what you learned. You need to go in the other room or something
     so I can concentrate.
    He seemed to notice the candle for the first time. “What the hell are you doing?”
    Trying to mindspeak someone else. Someone who can send help to 1132 North Bretton.
    He hesitated, then jerked a quick nod and went misty. He didn’t go in the other room,
     though, but drifted up to the ceiling.
    She’d just have to pretend he wasn’t there, watching. Or whatever he did when he was
     misty.
    Look into the flame,
Sam always said.
Find me there.
    One more thing Alycithin didn’t know about Lily. Her teacher, her grandfather-in-magic,
     was the black dragon…who was currently about five hundred miles away. Who approached
     teaching in a toss-the-kid-in-the-water-and-see-if-she-drowns sort of way. And Lily was really bad at mindspeech and had little
     to no chance of reaching that far…
    Don’t think about that.
    She might suck at mindspeech, but Sam was very, very good at it. He mindspoke across
     the entire damn continent—five hundred miles was no problem for him. But it might
     not be five hundred miles. He overflew San Francisco regularly; it was part of his
     territory, one of the cities he’d agreed to patrol to sop up excess magic. He didn’t
     keep to a strict schedule, but this was the right part of the week for his overflight.
     He might be at Laban Clanhome right now, chowing down on a couple cows.
    If not, well, she’d had a breakthrough, hadn’t she? She was a little better than totally
     sucky now.
    She might be able to reach Rule again. Without the
toltoi
she wasn’t confident she could, but she might. But she couldn’t hold the connection
     long enough to be sure he “heard” the address, much less who held her, what their
     capabilities were, what part Robert Friar played, or why the elves wanted the prototype.
     With Sam, all she had to do was get the merest whisper of a message to him and he’d
     do the heavy lifting. At minimum, he could pass what she told him to Rule. At maximum…she
     didn’t know what Sam’s maximum was, and she wouldn’t find out today. He wouldn’t exert
     himself that much. But all he really had to do was tell Rule where she was. And Rule
     would take it from there.
    Lily looked into the candle flame.

FORTY

    T HE conference room at the FBI’s San Francisco office was small and crowded. The room
     smelled of clan—Scott, Mike, and Alan were among those at the table—but also of stale
     coffee, humans, and all the various scents they were so fond of. In addition to cologne,
     aftershave, and shampoo, Rule smelled six different brands of deodorant. One of them
     wasn’t working as well as it might.
    His wolf did not like it here. It didn’t help that humans were forever closing doors.
     It was a damn fetish with them. Rule told his wolf to settle, that they were hunting
     Lily and everyone here was helping and he needed to focus, dammit.
    “Stop that,” Madame Yu snapped.
    Everyone looked up at her. The man who’d just come in—Agent Smith or something similarly
     bland—stopped in midstride.
    “Stop closing the door,” Madame Yu said. “The air is stale in here.”
    “Sure,” Agent Smith said. “No problem.” He swung the door wide open. Everyone else
     went back to studying their printouts.
    Rule made a mental note to buy Madame Yu somethingfoolishly extravagant. He gave her a grateful nod and looked back at his own set of
     lists.
    The California Department of Public Safety had coughed up a list of the owners of
     cars with license plates ending