Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

jollies. Not my thing.”
    Yu rolled her eyes. “Rule may see you now and then, but he can’t hear you. Come on.”
    “See me?” He tried to grab her as she reached for her shoulder harness. Didn’t work,
     of course. It made him want to growl like the wolf man, or maybe howl like one.
    The worst thing about being a ghost wasn’t when she went in the damn car. Even being
     alone, bad as it was, wasn’t the worst. It was the sheer, unrelenting uselessness
     of his existence. Hell was being unable to do one damned thing, and maybe he’d earned
     a stint in hell. Maybe he deserved it. But God, what he’d give to be able to affect
something
. If Turner could see him…“What do you mean, he sees me sometimes?”
    “Just what I said, and this isn’t the time to talk about it.”
    Turner opened the door and moved silently into the other room. Drummond followed Yu
     through the door. He could go through walls, but he liked to use doors. Made him feel
     more real. She had her rig fastened by the time she stopped beside Turner. She drew
     her weapon and held it down at her side.
    The two of them glowed. He’d told Yu that all the embodied had a glow, but these two
     lit up brighter than most…and brighter still when they stood close like that. Drummond
     thought he knew why. It was that weird, glowy cord stretched between them.
    No one else had one. None of the people he’d seen sincehe died, anyway, and with nothing to do but watch, he’d been paying attention. He
     didn’t know what the cord-thing was, but it glowed like the living did. As if it was
     alive. It freaked him out. He stepped back, not wanting to touch the eerie thing.
    Turner stood in front of the vent, studying it. Yu started to say something, but Turner
     tapped her arm and laid a finger to his lips.
    “You hear something?” she whispered so softly that Drummond wasn’t sure he heard it
     with his ears. Well, whatever passed for ears with him like this. It wasn’t like when
     she’d talked in his head at the branch office, so it probably had to do with their
     goddamn mystical connection.
    Turner nodded and tipped his head to one side. Yu glanced that way and nodded back
     as if she knew exactly what he meant.
    Maybe she did. She went to the door to the other bedroom and opened it. She didn’t
     step inside, though, but whispered real softly again. “Get up. Be quiet. Someone’s
     coming.”
    In total silence, three men went from what looked like sound sleep to standing. Then
     they stood there, naked and motionless. Waiting.
    Yu jerked her head at them—come on—and went back in the sitting room, where Turner
     looked at them and wiggled his hands around as if it meant something, pointing now
     and then. Two of the naked guys stood with him in front of the vent. One went to the
     door to the suite and opened it.
    “Did he tell them to do all that?” Drummond said.
    Yu glanced at him, opened her mouth, then closed it. And put words right into his
     damn mind again.
Yes. It’s ASL, mostly. He wants the guards at the door to know what’s happening.
    The guy who’d gone to the door came back. Drummond hadn’t heard him say anything to
     the two guys guarding the door. Maybe he’d used ASL, too. Turner made some morehand-talk at him, and he loped silently into the bedroom he’d emerged from, returning
     with a wood-gripped 9 mm in one hand—a Smith and Wesson 952, he thought. An expensive
     piece, if so. He was still buck naked.
    Turner pointed at the other two, made a circle in the air…and the two guys without
     guns turned into wolves.
    Al had been around when lupi turned into wolves once, but he hadn’t really watched.
     He’d been busy at the time, what with being freshly dead and trying to stop a bunch
     of demons shaped like wolves from killing a few hundred people. This time, he paid
     attention. It gave him the creeps to think of a man morphing into a beast, but it
     was better to know your enemy, right? So he watched, but he didn’t see much. It was
     like they flowed somewhere else, somewhere he couldn’t go, then flowed back, reformed.
    He hadn’t expected to hear anything. “Did you…” He had to stop and clear his throat.
     “Does that music happen every time they do that?”
    Yu looked at him sharply.
You heard music?
    He nodded. Clear and distant, so distant he shouldn’t have heard it…and pure. Pure
     like a baby’s laugh or the way stars look, spattering the darkness. Pure like nothing
     he’d