She nodded. “But we’re not moving him one jot more than we have to, so no turning him to check the entrance wound. Scrub first. We don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t want to take any chances.”
Lily’s eyebrows rose. Normally lupi didn’t worry about infection, but with something messing with Cullen’s healing . . . better safe than sorry, she supposed. She went to the small sink in the corner and squirted stuff on her hands. “Cullen, who was close to you when it happened?”
“Cynna. Mike. I was talking to him. Uh . . . Sandra, I think. Gods. Hurts like hell.”
Nettie’s voice was soft now. “I can put you back in sleep.”
“No.” He was quiet a moment. “Behind me . . . I heard Phil behind me. Uh . . .” His voice sank so much Lily couldn’t hear the rest, not over the sound of the tap. She looked at Rule.
“He said that your sister was near, and Jason, and Teresa. I believe he means Teresa Blankenship.”
“Okay. Didn’t have her on my witness list, so that’s something.” Lily rinsed and used her elbow to shut off the tap. Jason handed her a towel. She dried her hands and moved up beside Cynna. “What about Rule? Was he near?”
“No.”
“Did you smell anyone or anything that didn’t belong?”
“No.” His voice was blurry.
“An Asian man, maybe? One who didn’t look like my brother-in-law.”
“Don’t know your damned brother-in-law. Can’t . . .” He frowned, his eyes closing. “Can’t remember anyone like that.”
“That’s okay. Did you see anything funny with your other vision?”
“Nothing funny. Some sorcéri.”
“Okay. I’m going to touch your shoulder first, then your incision. Lightly. I’ll do my best not to hurt you.”
He grunted.
She took that as permission and laid her hand on his shoulder. The skin was warm, but she barely noticed.
Cullen’s magic didn’t feel like anyone else’s. There was what she called fur-and-fir magic—the lupus magic that felt like fur yet reminded her subtly of evergreens. But mixed with it was a dancing tickle of heat. The heat meant a Fire Gift. The dance, though, that was how she read the sorcerous part of his power. As motion.
She drew her hand toward his chest.
There. Weird. She felt a little bump or ridge. On one side of the ridge, everything felt normal—fur and tickly heat. On the other, warm skin with just the faintest overlay of magic . . . and something else. Something smooth.
She tried coming toward the incision from another angle. Another. Soon she’d mapped out the edges of . . . whatever it was. And whatever it was, it was remarkably uniform.
Lily straightened. “There’s an area five inches in diameter where your magic is thin, as if it’s only skin-deep. I can feel the . . . Call it a barrier. It feels smooth, uniform. Shaped. I can’t tell what kind of magic is involved, not with your skin between it and my hand.”
“Need to look.” Cullen spoke more strongly, but his eyes didn’t open.
“We should let him,” Cynna said. “He needs to know. It might help.”
Nettie hesitated, then said, “All right. You can hold his head up.”
Cynna slid her hand beneath his head and lifted. His eyes never opened. Lily knew he didn’t need them to, not for his other vision. He’d still “seen” that way after his eyes had been gouged out.
But it looked pretty odd, the way he studied his chest with his eyes closed. Finally he spoke. “Hell.” He took a careful breath, winced. “Nettie . . .”
“I’m here.” She took his hand. “You’re going back in sleep now.”
“Yeah. Lily.”
“Yes?”
“You’re right. Shaped. It’s shaped. Someone stuck a goddamned spell in my heart along with their knife.” He took a slow, careful breath. “I can tell you one thing about it. It’s blood magic. And the sorry bastard’s using my blood to power it.”
TWELVE
The city of Luan; Shanxi Province, China; sixteenth day of the eleventh month of the forty-fourth year of the Ching Dynasty* * *
THE winter wind was like death—importunate and intrusive, poking its cold, bony fingers through Li Lei’s layered rags to find flesh. She did not disdain the contact. She disliked being cold, but death was a powerful acquaintance.
She could have been warm. Had she been in the midst of a blizzard rather than squatting on the cold cobbles of the street, Li Lei could have been warm. That was one of the more useful tricks she’d learned from the one she called Sam in the past year and seven months—how to craft a second skin out of will and magic, one that warmed her precisely as she wished.
She didn’t dare. Not in Luan. Sam had told her to assume the sorcerer could track any use of power in his city. They did not know that he could do this, or that he did so constantly, but the caution made sense. In the eight days since her return to Luan, Li Lei had confirmed that those who had actively practiced magic had been among the first to die.
Many others had died since. Some were killed outright when they opposed the sorcerer. Some were killed more cruelly as they—or those they loved and trusted—fell through the open door of madness.
A door opened by a demon. The sorcerer’s lover. The Chimei.
Li Lei stared at the silent house in front of her. Had it been her father who went mad first and killed the rest, slicing or bludgeoning those he loved more than life? Had it been his wife, Li Lei’s pretty, ambitious, and stupid stepmother, who’d first fallen through the cracks the Chimei opened in her mind? Or had it been one of the children who caught the nightmare and somehow infected the rest?
She had heard various tales. She could not, of course, ask directly, but she’d managed to steer the talk in the marketplace now and then to the story of the deaths in Wu An’s house. The gossips had only a mishmash of tales, unhelpful save for the way they kept the wound open. No one knew. No one save, perhaps, the Chimei, who had caused it all.
The Chimei, who could not be killed.
Li Lei watched the house where everyone who mattered had died. And waited.
It was a finely crafted structure with beautiful carving on the lintels, built from the best materials, but it was not pretentious. The doors were red lacquer, centered amid the four columns upholding the roof, yet that roof possessed but a single tier. Li Lei’s father had scoffed at merchants who aped the nobility. Wu An had been a commoner, only a few generations removed from pure peasant, and proud of it. How did you honor your ancestors, he said, by pretending to be other than they had been?
Used to say, Li Lei corrected herself. He said nothing now. Nothing she could hear, at any rate.
She did hear the giggles and stumbling feet approaching. Before their owners rounded the corner she reached for a small stick she’d selected earlier. She didn’t look up. Her ears told her enough—a small group of young men, drunk enough to be foolish.
Few other than the drunk, the mad, or the desperate were out at night in Luan these days. Li Lei began drawing in the dust that covered the cobbles with her stick, pausing to grunt like a satisfied sow and move a few pebbles around, then “writing” with the stick once more.
One of the drunks called out, “Hey, you! What’s your stinking carcass doing here, eh?”
“Leave him,” another voice muttered. “Leave him ’lone, Zhi.”
“Gonna get him outa here. Don’t need stinking beggars hanging around—”
“He’s no beggar.” This voice was hard, the words less slurred than the others’ had been. “He’s one of the eaten, you fool.”
“Still stinks.” That young man was sullen now. He’d moved close enough that Li Lei saw his feet out of the corner of her eye. “Don’t need this smell on my street.”