A black Mercedes was parked on the other side of the patrol car. Its door opened, and a tall man wearing jeans and a black dress shirt got out. “Need a hand?”
Her heart gave a happy little bump. Funny how just looking at him still did that for her. She shook her head. “Even you couldn’t get this door open. I’ll climb across.”
He gave her a bland smile. “You’ll get your pretty dress dirty.” Of course he’d heard Munoz’s comment. He started toward her. “Let’s see what I can do.”
“Hey!” Munoz said. “You’re that lupus!”
Lily tensed, but Rule had a smile for him. “I’m a lupus, at least.”
“No, you’re the prince one! The one in all the magazines with . . . I mean . . .” Munoz took a breath. Lily suspected that if his complexion had been paler, she’d have seen an embarrassed flush. “Never mind.”
He’d been about to comment on the plethora of lovely women Rule had been photographed with. Though not recently. Recently, all the articles were about him and Lily . . . way too many articles. She touched the little lump beneath her dress where her engagement ring hung on a chain, dangling next to the toltoi she’d been given to mark her status as Chosen.
Until they made an official announcement, she was keeping her ring out of sight.
“Uh . . . Turner, right?” Munoz smiled hopefully.
Lily took pity on the officer’s embarrassment. He meant well, which a lot of cops didn’t. Not with lupi. “Officer Munoz, this is Rule Turner. Rule, Officer Jesse Munoz.” She looked at the young patrol officer. “Rule’s right about my dress, though. I’d rather not get it dirty, plus there’s some broken glass. Do you have anything I could put on the seat?”
Rule touched her arm. “Give me a moment. You know I enjoy flexing things for you.”
She shook her head but stood back to let him have at it. “Just don’t bleed. I hate it when you bleed.”
Rule gave her a quick grin, stepped up to the door, braced himself, and pulled. Metal groaned, but nothing happened. He frowned. Then he put one foot up on the frame next to the door and heaved. With a loud shriek, the door opened. He didn’t even fall over backward.
“Thanks. You know, most men open pickle jars.”
“Fortunately, I can open them, too.”
She grinned and glanced at the convenience store, where the looky-loos were getting excited. “Better watch out. I think someone in that crowd recognized you.” And not everyone felt the same sort of excitement about lupi as Officer Munoz . . . who was forgetting his professional dignity again.
“Hey, that’s cool! You just yanked on it and opened it. I’d always heard lupi were strong, but man.” Munoz shook his head, all admiration. “That’s cool.”
Lily left Rule to his one-man fan club and went to do her job. Which, as Munoz had said, was sometimes pretty odd.
Until last November, Lily had been a homicide cop here in San Diego. Now she worked for Unit 12 of the Magical Crimes Division of the FBI. Usually that didn’t mean running her hands over what was left of the driver’s seat in a crumpled Honda, but the walking-around-barefoot part happened fairly often.
Lily was a touch sensitive. She experienced magic as a texture on her skin, but couldn’t be affected by it. When local police thought magic or those of the Blood might be involved in a crime, they called MCD—who passed most of it on to the Unit.
Lately she’d been called out a lot. In the dog days of summer, some of the citizens of San Diego were seeing monsters. Big, hairy monsters with tyrannosaurus teeth. Grinning demons chittering at a window. Leprous undead charging a house.
Every time the nutcases called the cops, the cops called her. Every time, she had to check out the sighting. Because these days, there was always a chance the loonies were right.
THREE
CREATURES unseen on Earth in hundreds of years—creatures never seen here at all—had been swept here at the Turning, when the power winds blew open barriers between realms.
The power winds had been temporary, thank God, and the experts said it would be impossible for anything to wander here without them. They also said that any crossing would release a burst of nodal energy, and the D.C. coven, who kept watch over a sophisticated simulacra map, swore there’d been no significant node disturbances recently. And while there was now a gate between Earth and one other realm—Edge—it was on the other side of the country and was warded and guarded on both ends. Nothing was slipping through there.
But unlikely doesn’t mean impossible, and Lily wasn’t convinced the experts knew all that much, so when the cops called the Unit, she went to check out the scene.
First she ran her hands over every inch of the steering wheel, from which the deflated airbag hung like the world’s biggest condom. The monster du jour had been a giant snake, one as big around as a cow, which the Honda’s driver swore had suddenly reared up in front of her car, fangs dripping venom. Naturally she’d swerved—right in front of a pickup.
Luckily for that driver, it was a quiet, mostly residential street and the pickup’s driver had kick-ass reflexes. The Honda’s driver had been taken to the ER, but the EMTs didn’t think she was hurt badly. The pickup’s driver insisted he didn’t have so much as a bruise.
And guess what? He hadn’t seen a snake, giant or otherwise. Nor had Lily found any traces of magic on the street where the snake was supposed to have been.
Nothing here, either. She began checking out the dash.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t have anything else to do. She was finishing up a magical fraud case she’d worked with the local FBI office, and had just returned from the tiny town of Eagle’s Nest. That case hadn’t taken long, thank God. She’d handed off the supposed lupus attack to the locals. The victim, it turned out, had been drunk, and the assailant was a bear that had wandered into town to check out the trash cans.
The dash was devoid of magic, so she started on the oddments the woman had collected in her car—an empty soda can, a newspaper, a wad of crumpled receipts.
No doubt a social scientist would have a blast analyzing the current vogue in crazy calls, and who knows? Maybe they really were the result of a collision in the collective psyche between reason and magic. The Turning had spooked people, no doubt about that. But Lily preferred more concrete answers—like a new, undetectable drug. Or a new, undetectable spell.
If the latter, it was her job to detect it, dammit. And she wasn’t.
She scooted out and crouched so she could run her hands over the driver’s seat, and underneath it. She didn’t expect to find anything, having checked out the driver before the EMTs took her away. If the woman had been hexed or enspelled, Lily should have felt it on her. She hadn’t.
Nothing on the seat, either. She straightened, careful not to touch her dress with her dirty hands.
Rule handed her the bag of wipes from her purse. She took it and gave him a smile. “I knew there was a good reason to keep you around.”
“Don’t forget the pickle jars.”
That turned her insides mushy. He’d proposed over pickles. Also blini, cheese, and a really lovely Dom Pérignon, but it was the pickles that got to her. She gave him a smile, but no words—couldn’t say what she wanted with Munoz standing by—and finished wiping her hands. “Officer, there’s nothing more I can do here. It’s your case. Thanks for your cooperation.”
Her skin prickled faintly, as if she’d picked up enough of a static charge to make the little hairs on her arms stand up. Automatically she looked up.