“That’s better than I’d expected, considering the decay.”
“I based my estimate on the wound to the heart itself.”
Speaking of which . . . “Have you put Mr. Xing’s pieces back together yet?”
“The tech is doing that now, I imagine.”
“Maybe we could stop him or her. It would be handy if the heart wasn’t put back yet. That’s where I’d expect to find traces of magic, if any are present.” That body had been rotting in the heat a few days. But she had to try.
Dr. Davis’s frown seemed to be a permanent fixture. “I’m concerned about your touching any portion of the corpse without gloves. With such intensive microbial action, there’s a severe risk of contamination.”
Lily grimaced. “Guess I’d better scrub really well, hadn’t I?”
TWENTY-FOUR
THERE was no magic on the corpse. Not on the entry wound or on the heart. Lily hadn’t really expected to find any so long after death, but it would have made the connection between this killing and the attack on Cullen definite. As it was, she only had a “maybe.”
Still, it was a strong maybe, and the detective in charge of the case was T.J. He wouldn’t hold out on her. She didn’t intend to hold out on him, either. The treaty might have kept her from giving Ruben information, but T.J. wasn’t an agent of the federal government. He needed to know what he might be facing.
Dr. Davis personally supervised her scrubbing. He even timed her. When she was done, he allowed that she was probably safe to mingle with others and even eat.
Eating was a damn fine idea, and she knew just the spot. Rosa’s was a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint a couple blocks from the Medical Examiner’s. The crowded lunchroom had frigid air-conditioning, red-hot enchiladas verdes, and a TV that was always tuned to a local Spanish channel. Lily agreed to treat T.J. to lunch there.
T.J. had two cases with the Medical Examiner, so while he talked to Dr. Davis about a different DB, Lily headed to Rosa’s and ordered for them both. She sat where she could keep an eye on the door so she’d see him when he got there. That also gave her a view of the TV, which was showing a Mexican soap opera.
It was just like old times. T.J. had always insisted that junior detectives were obliged by code, courtesy, and common decency to pick up the check for their seniors. Now his story was that rich FBI agents could damn well afford to treat their underpaid local cousins.
While she waited for the food and for T.J., she took out her notebook. She hadn’t made any notes yet about her talk with Sam. She needed to get the details down, get her thoughts moving—and to see if she could. Would the treaty stop her from recording information?
First, though, she made a couple phone calls. She got Rule’s voice mail, which made her drum her fingers. She left him a message . . . a brief, businesslike message asking what he’d told Cynna and Cullen.
It made her stomach hurt. She didn’t understand why. It hadn’t been all that big a fight. Sure, she’d been mad, and who wouldn’t be? He’d picked a helluva time to get all huffy about the wedding. He . . .
Was right, dammit. Anger drained out like a balloon deflating. She’d overreacted all the way around. The binding the damned treaty placed on her infuriated her, and she’d kicked out at Rule. That wasn’t fair.
Rule was right about something else. She knew in her gut it was right to marry him, but . . . Well, some people might be fine going with their gut, but she needed reasons. They were bound together for life whether or not they got a license from the state, so why marry?
Instead of figuring that out, she’d pretended the question didn’t matter. In some obscure way she’d felt it was disloyal to ask questions about marrying Rule.
Lily sighed. It wasn’t like her to avoid asking.
She wasn’t the only one in the wrong, though. Rule’s anger must have been simmering awhile, but he could have brought it up earlier or left it on the back burner a little longer. Like maybe until they weren’t trying to stop an undying being from wrecking the city without precipitating a wave of illegal immigration that really might destroy the fabric of civilization.
She tapped her pen on her notebook. How many Chimei were there, anyway? How did you stop them if they weren’t entirely physical?
Time to get some things on paper. First she jotted down the gist of what Sam had told them about the Chimei. The treaty didn’t stop her. Maybe it would keep her from showing them to anyone? She made a note to find out, then added her conversation with Li Qin, then the call from Ruben. Then sat there, tapping her pen against the table.
Some three hundred years ago, Grandmother had killed the Chimei’s previous sorcerous lover. And that was weird, thinking of Grandmother being around longer than the United States . . . but the point was that killing the Chimei’s lover would stop her. But it was a temporary solution, and not one Lily could use, anyway. She was a cop. She arrested people. She didn’t assassinate them.
Of course, Lily could have legally killed the Chimei if the Chimei had been killable. The Chimei wasn’t human. The law was in a huge muddle about nonhumans, but Congress had given Unit agents wide discretionary powers right after the Turning, when any number of creatures had been blown here by the power winds.
But she wasn’t some legalized hit man, dammit. That wasn’t what she did.
She also wasn’t entirely human herself.
Her thoughts hitched—just this quick, mental hiccup that interrupted her as thoroughly as a siren.
She understood why it bothered her. It upset her sense of who and what she was. Until last year, she hadn’t even thought of herself as Gifted. People didn’t think of sensitives that way because blocking out magic seemed the antithesis of working it.
Then she’d found out that being a sensitive was a type of Gift. That had unsettled her, but not for long. Once she thought about it, it made sense. This, though, was like . . . It was like finding out she was mostly female, but not entirely.
What did it mean to “partake of dragon nature”?
You have already begun to manifest one ability common to dragons, Sam had said. He’d said something about her overlooking it, too.
Mindspeech? She hadn’t done that except with him, and her conversations with the black dragon were hard to overlook. How could it be possible for her to use mindspeech with non-dragons when her Gift prevented her from using magic? Did she even want to?
Automatically, Lily started to jot those questions down. She stopped with “how would.”
Her notebook could be produced in court. She didn’t want to be cross-examined about mindspeech or partaking of dragon nature on the witness stand.
She went back to the original question. How could she stop the Chimei?
From what Li Qin had said, the bond between the Chimei and her lover had something to do with keeping the Chimei physical, or with her ability to affect people’s minds, or both. Lily needed to know more about that.
Grandmother, she wrote. And underlined it. And added Cullen’s name beside it. Either the Chimei or her lover considered him a real threat. He might have some ideas about how to break that bond without resorting to murder.
Okay, assume she found the sorcerer. She knew a few things about him now, and she had a lead to follow, thanks to Dr. Davis. Assume she learned how to break his bond with the Chimei . . . big assumption there, but was that bond anything like the one she knew so much and so little about? The mate bond that tied her to Rule?
If so, did the Chimei have to be physically close to her lover?