Ritual Magic

the gurney. “Hi, Julia. You’ve had a really rough night, I hear.”
    “Sir, you need to step away,” one of the EMTs began.
    “Susan,” Lily said, “Cullen isn’t going to question her. He just needs a minute.”
    Susan frowned hard, but she told the EMTs to wait.
    Julia’s jaw tightened pugnaciously. “I don’t know you. I’d remember you if we’d ever met, and I don’t.”
    Cullen was memorable. On the one-to-ten scale of male beauty, he was an eleven. Lily had seen passing strangers stop in their tracks to stare. Especially women, but men did it, too, sometimes. “Well, now,” Cullen said with a smile, “if you don’t want us to be on a first-name basis, you’ll have to call me Mr. Seaborne. I’d rather be Cullen to you, but if you insist . . .”
    Julia blushed. Lily had never seen her mother blush. “I—I guess that’s okay.”
    “I’m going to make some funny gestures,” he told her, “so I can get a better look at the magic used on you. You won’t feel a thing, except maybe like giggling if I look silly.”
    Julia’s eyes got big. “Can you fix me?”
    “First I have to figure out what’s wrong. What I’m going to do now . . . think of it like going to the doctor and getting a thermometer stuck in your mouth. He usually has to do other things, too, to find out why you’re sick, like look in your ears and your throat. And sometimes that isn’t enough and they have to do more tests. Right now, though, I’m just taking your temperature.”
    “Mr. Turner,” Julia said, and tried to sit up, but they’d strapped her in. “Mr. Turner—?”
    “I’m right here,” Rule said and moved to her and took her hand.
    She blinked up at him. “Is this your friend that you said was coming?”
    “It is. Cullen is very good at magic.”
    “I’m the great pooh-bah of magic,” Cullen assured her. He drew a sign in the air, whispered something, and put his two hands together, then separated them slightly, thumbs and forefingers extended and touching to shape a crude circle. He moved that empty circle around, staring through it, ending with it framing Julia’s forehead. He frowned, muttered something that wasn’t English, and shifted his hands a couple millimeters. Then he dropped his hands and smiled. “Thanks for staying so still, Julia. I’ll see you a little later, okay?” He winked and stepped back.
    “Is he going to be able to fix me?” Julia asked Rule as the EMTs got her moving again. She was still clasping his hand.
    “Everyone is going to work together to fix you,” Rule said firmly. “It may take awhile, though, so you’ll have to be patient.”
    “I guess that’s why they call a patient a patient,” she said as they stopped at the back of the ambulance. “Because everything takes so long, and you have to be patient.”
    “You may be right.”
    Getting her loaded created a problem. Julia wanted Rule with her in the ambulance, and there wasn’t room for both him and Susan, and Susan was the doctor. In the end Julia did let go of Rule, but he had to promise he’d do his best to be there as quickly as possible.
    As soon as the ambulance doors shut, Rule came to Lily. He put his hands on her shoulders. They felt warm and large and familiar, and she wanted to burrow into him and hold on. She didn’t reach for him. She didn’t trust herself to let go.
    “I’ll stay with her,” he told her. Just that. He didn’t ask if she was okay or how she was doing, for which she was grateful. She wasn’t okay.
    But she was functioning. She’d keep doing that. “Go,” she told Rule.
    “I’ll leave the car for you.”
    “No, take it. I’ll have a uniform or one of the agents bring me when I’m through.”
    “All right.” His hands fell away. “Mark, you’ll drive. Barnaby, with me.” He went from motionless to a lope in the blink of an eye, his guards trailing after.
    This whole time, Lily’s father hadn’t said a word. He’d kept his eyes fixed on Julia, then on the ambulance as it backed up. As it pulled away, he turned and started for his car.
    “Edward,” Grandmother said, “you are not driving.”
    “I’m perfectly fit to drive,” he said without looking at her. But he stopped at the Nissan he’d bought the previous year and didn’t open the door.
    She didn’t answer, but walked up to stand in front of him. She put her hands on his arms and looked up at him—not very far up, for Edward Yu was not a tall man. For a long moment they