Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

First he’ll be patient. That won’t last long. Leo has never
     mastered patience. Then he’ll be increasingly angry. That will last longer, but eventually
     he’ll move from anger into dread. That’s when I’ll talk to him.”
    Isen had kept the other Rho waiting on hold a full thirty minutes while he talked
     to Lily about Jasper…and Jasper’s mother. When Isen deemed Leo sufficiently steeped
     indread, he’d dismissed Lily. “If you can find Rule, tell him I want him. If you can’t,
     have someone track him down. He may be running.”
    She hadn’t found Rule. She hadn’t found out what Leo’s fate was, either. When she
     came back inside, Isen had retreated to his study, and when he closed that door no
     one was supposed to disturb him for anything short of an emergency. Badly as she wanted
     to know things, she couldn’t call it an emergency. She’d gone to bed.
    Cynna broke the silence. “Lupi have a word for them, you know. For their half siblings
     on the mothers’ side.”
    Lily snorted. “Human?”
    Cynna flashed her a grin. “Yeah, but this word is just for that relationship. For
     out-clan siblings. They call them
alius
kin.”
    “I’ve seen that word somewhere. Maybe in one of those journals the Rhej—I mean Hannah—had
     me read.” Before Hannah died, Lily wasn’t supposed to use her name. Now she was, because
     “the Rhej” meant Cynna. Thank God Cynna had told her to ignore all that no-naming-the-Rhej
     business. Bad enough, she’d said, that the lupi mostly wouldn’t use her name anymore.
     She didn’t want to stop hearing it entirely. “I thought it just meant kin.”
    “I don’t know what
alius
kin would mean to someone who knows real Latin, but lupi translate it as
otherkin
.”
    Kin who are other. Not us, not clan. “Like they aren’t real siblings.”
    “It makes sense, if you look at the history. It used to be rare for lupi to be raised
     by their mothers. If the mother was married, it wasn’t to the baby’s father, and if
     she wasn’t, out-of-wedlock babies were a BFD for centuries. So it was normal for lupi
     to grow up not knowing their mothers’ families at all, and only natural they didn’t
     feel a close bond. Kin, not clan, you know? Chances were good their human half siblings
     didn’t even want to know about them, much less call them ‘brother,’ so it went both
     ways.” She shrugged. “A lot of lupi are raised by their moms now, at least part of
     the time, but the attitude has held on.”
    Lily thought that over. Rule had never wanted to know if he had any
alius
kin, had he? He’d never asked. And yet they were going to San Francisco. Jasper called,
     and she and Rule were headed for San Francisco. She didn’t think it was just about
     the prototype. “That’s part of it, maybe.”
    “But not all?”
    Lily was pretty sure some of it—maybe most of it—had to do with the mother this Jasper
     Machek shared with Rule. The one who’d handed a two-week-old baby to Isen and walked
     away, uninterested in whether her son lived or died. Learning about Jasper meant learning
     something about that woman, didn’t it? “Her name was Celeste Babineaux. Rule’s mother,
     I mean. She was twenty-nine when she had Rule.”
    “Did Rule tell you that? Or Isen?”
    “Until last night, I didn’t even know her last name.”
    “Rule did, though, didn’t he?”
    “I don’t know. He’d been told her name, but I don’t know if he remembers.” It seemed
     like he’d have to, but he always flew the “off-limits” banner on the rare occasions
     the subject of his mother came up, and she’d never pushed.
    Last night she’d pushed…but it was Isen she’d talked to, not Rule.
    Celeste Babineaux had been a French expatriate living in California, and—in Isen’s
     words—the most staggeringly beautiful woman he’d ever met, then or since. She had
     also been bipolar. At least that’s the diagnosis she’d eventually received, after
     being in and out of sanatoriums and treatment centers and such for much of her life.
    Isen had paid for those stays, some of them extended. Even after Celeste married a
     man named Michael Machek, Isen had paid for her treatment. His eyebrows had lifted
     when Lily expressed surprise at that. “She was my son’s mother. Of course I helped
     her when she needed it. Bipolar is such a recent way of understanding one type of
     mental illness,” Isen had added. “It wasn’t the doctors’ fault they