Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

on.
    What…you doing?
    Yu’s mental voice was so faint he’d missed a couple of words. He looked at her. “I’m
     going to try it. Turner can see me. Maybe I can use this to get to him, let him know
     you’re being taken to a warehouse.”
    Use what?
    “Whatever this thing is between the two of you. I can hold it. Maybe I can follow
     it.” Maybe he’d gotten lost in the gray because it didn’t have landmarks. This—this
     cord thing—maybe it wouldn’t go away. Maybe he could hold on to it, pull himself along
     it, even when everything else went to gray.
    But he’d better hurry. Once the halfling got Yu in a car, he was going to come apart.
    “Don’t call me,” he told her urgently. “If you do, I’ll come back, and I need to try
     this.” He held onto the cord tightly and started running—out the door and right down
     into the floor.
    He felt both door and floor as he passed through them. Not tactilely, the way he felt
     the cord. Just a vague sense of compression as if whatever he was composed of now
     reacted to the mass he passed through. He raced through someone’s living room, through
     a wall and a hallway, and out of the building entirely. He was still nearly two stories
     above the ground.
    The cord felt strong and stable in his hand. It stretched out straight ahead of him
     as he ran. It didn’t seem to matter that his feet had nothing below them but air.
     He grinned, exhilarated. He’d never tried this. When he wanted to move fast, he’d
     always let himself go misty. But mist didn’t have hands, couldn’t hang on to a cord.
    This was fun.
    His grin faded as he looked ahead and saw the way buildings, people, everything faded.
     Only a few yards ahead of him now, the world took on a gray cast. Beyond that…nothing.
     The cord stretched out and out into the nothing.
    He kept running. The world had faded to gray, ghostly shapes, barely seen, when the
     first vibration shook him.
    He hadn’t been fast enough. Lily Yu was in a car, and it was speeding up.
    He began to tatter quickly, and as he came apart he felt the pull, as if he had a
     hook set deep in his soul that was yanking him. Pulling him back toward her. He’d
     only felt a little tug before, not this deep ripping. His hand started to lose the
     feel of the cord, lose…
    No.
He focused everything he had, everything he was, on his hand, on the hand gripping
     the cord. On the gold of the ring he wore, glowing like the cord still glowed. Even
     here where all was gray, here in the heart of the nothing, his ring glowed faintly,
     just like the cord. He couldn’t see anything but his hand, his ring, and a short length
     of the shining cord. Everything around him was gone. He was gone, except for that
     hand, but he kept moving even as that hook ripped him.
    It hurt. It felt like the hook was ripping open the gut he didn’t have anymore.
    He focused even harder on his hand, the one part of him that was still real. That
     would, by God, stay real. And he kept moving away from Lily Yu.

FORTY-ONE

    T HAT was the last name on his list. Rule had checked every damn one, and found nothing.
    He rubbed his face and looked around. Madame Yu and Mike were still bent over their
     lists, but the rest were through. Now what? What the hell did they do next? “I guess
     we pass our copies to the person next to us. Double-check each other.”
    “We eat now,” Madame Yu said without looking up from her pages.
    Eat. Yes, it was…God, it was noon. Friar had had Lily for about twelve hours. Rule
     closed his eyes and tried not to think of what that meant. She was alive. She was
     alive, and she’d managed to contact him once. “Of course,” he said, amazed at how
     level his voice sounded. “Scott, would you order something for us?”
    Scott nodded and took out his phone and tapped the man sitting next to him on the
     shoulder. “I don’t know the takeout around here. Where should I call?”
    “There’s a pizza place two blocks over that’s pretty good. I’ll get you the number.”
    Rule’s phone sounded. He grabbed it. “Yes?”
    “We found something,” Tony said. “Pretty fresh, too. It’s at the Whole Foods in Potrero
     Hill. Rick’s in the produce section now with his cop. He indicated that the strawberries
     have a lot of elf-scent.”
    “Potrero Hill,” Rule repeated, jotting it down. “The Whole Foods store.” He shoved
     his chair back.
    Bergman came in. “That Crescent Street address is a warehouse. It was