Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

needles. She kept
     her flashlight on the ground right in front of her, but farther down she could see
     light through the branches. It wasn’t very bright, but it gave her a target. She could
     hear something, too—Cullen cursing as he hurried up the trail toward her. The light
     brightened as he got close, resolving into a small ball of pure light floating just
     ahead of a half-naked man who could have given nine out of ten Hollywood stars a run
     for their money.
    Ten out of ten, if he hadn’t been scowling so hard. “Did it even occur to you that
     I wouldn’t be down there if it wasn’t important?” Cullen demanded as he came to a
     stop in front of her.
    “Important and urgent aren’t the same thing. Are you going to behave, or should I
     tell Cynna?”
    “Cynna would understand. If there was a firebomb, I could put it out, couldn’t I?
     But there isn’t. I did a quick Find spell.”
    She didn’t say a word.
    “I may not be a Finder, but my spell’s pretty good.”
    She kept looking at him.
    “And don’t tell me I proved anything by coming up here to stop you. If something did
     blow, I’d heal. You wouldn’t.”
    She glanced back over her shoulder, where David and the rest of the squad waited—all
     of whom were every bit as good at healing as Cullen—then looked back at him, eyebrows
     raised.
    “All right, all right. But it was important enough to take a small risk.” Cullen ran
     a hand through his hair—somethinghe’d been doing a lot of, judging by the way it was spiked up all over. “You don’t
     have to mention this to Cynna.”
    “I need to know about the prototype that’s missing.”
    “Yeah, well, I need to know how the rat bastard got through my second ward, which
     I can’t figure out from up here.”
    “We can start there. What does your second ward do?”
    “Stops kids.”
    “I’m pretty sure the perp isn’t a kid.”
    Cullen waved one hand impatiently. “It takes too much power to outright block people
     with a ward. If I could figure out how they used to do it, using ley lines to—never
     mind. The point is, I can keep out fleas and scorpions. Flies are harder. So are kids.
     You tell kids they can’t go somewhere, they’re immediately going to want to check
     it out. Can’t have that. Aside from the sheer nuisance of having them sneak into the
     workshop, it isn’t safe. So I added a second ward. If someone crosses it, a wall of
     flames springs up around the building.”
    Lily’s eyes widened. “You’d risk burning nosy kids?”
    “It won’t burn anything.”
    “I thought you couldn’t do illusions.”
    “It’s real fire. It just doesn’t burn anything.”
    “But—”
    Cullen rolled his eyes. “Look, let’s skip the explanations. You wouldn’t understand
     ’em anyway. I’ve got three wards on the workshop. The first one’s the keep-away. There’s
     layers to that one, but it’s basically a single ward. It makes anything with a nervous
     system deeply reluctant to go farther. A motivated adult—or a kid being egged on by
     his buddies—can summon the determination to keep going. Or you can hit it at a run
     and be through before you have time to stop.” He stopped, his scowl returning. “The
     rat bastard wasn’t running, so he—”
    “You know that how?”
    “Tracks. He left some clear prints, so I know he walked through the first ward. But
     like I said, if someone’sdetermined enough, he can do that. But then he should have set off my second and third
     wards. The third ward worked. That’s strictly a warning to me that there’s an intruder.
     But the second one didn’t. No pretty flames.”
    “Pretty flames that don’t burn,” Lily said. “Maybe he knew that and kept going.”
    “It’s real fire,” Cullen said again. “Even if he somehow knew it wouldn’t burn him,
     he’d have a hard time talking himself into walking into it. He wouldn’t just see it
     and hear it—he’d feel the heat. It should have at least slowed him down. But that
     doesn’t matter, because the ward wasn’t triggered.”
    “You’re sure? With the way your workshop’s tucked away in this cleft, you wouldn’t
     have seen the flames from Big Sister, and since they don’t burn anything there would
     be—”
    He snorted in disgust. “What do you think I was doing just now? I can see the power
     loss if one of my wards gets triggered. That one wasn’t, so I was looking for signs
     of tampering.”
    “Did you find