“If you’ve dealt with possession before, why is Nettie doing this?” Lily glanced at Nettie. “No offense.”
Nettie just smiled.
Karonski shook his head. “I didn’t say I’ve performed an exorcism. I haven’t. When an animal’s involved, the procedure is different. Demons can’t hide themselves as well in animals as they do in humans, so we can confirm possession pretty easily. Then we kill the animal. That forces the demon out so we can kill or banish it.”
Oh. That was different, all right.
“Another thing,” Rule said. “They can’t possess cats. Or lupi.”
“Cats?” Lily couldn’t see behind the surfaces of his eyes. They were dark and glossy in the glare of the fluorescents, reflecting the overhead light and hiding everything else. But he looked tired. “You’ve been talking to Max.”
Nettie snorted. “I take Max’s pronouncements with a whole lick of salt, but the part about lupi is right.”
“Who’s Max?” Cynna asked.
“A friend,” Rule said.
“He owns Club Hell.” It was Nettie’s face, Lily decided. Or maybe just the eyes. They seemed to hold… more. Which was a silly thing to think. What did she mean, more? More what?
Nettie nodded at Cynna. “I need you to stand over by Abel, please.”
Karonski’s eyebrows shot up. “Lupi can’t be possessed?”
“No. The Lady made them that way.” Nettie approached Lily’s bed. “It’s time for the rest of you to be quiet.”
“This is a religious belief, then? One of your legends‘?”
Rule answered. “It’s fact, though I don’t expect you to believe that.”
“Talk later,” Nettie said, “or you’ll have to leave. Rule—”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Stand on the other side of the bed, then. Don’t touch her until we’re finished.” She took Rule’s place by Lily’s bed. “How are you doing?”
It seemed a genuine question, not mere courtesy. And her eyes, those huge, dark eyes… darker than Rule’s, they were, that deep, bottomless brown people sometimes call black. “I’m okay. I don’t know what to expect. Have you done this before?”
“I have, yes. Twice. Possession is as rare as true amnesia, so my experience is unusual. The first time was with a chicken.”
Lily grinned. “A possessed chicken. That’s… I don’t know. Like Bunnicula, who drains the juice from carrots. Just not scary.”
“The chicken had killed two dogs and attacked a child. The other time was an adult man. He—or rather, the demon in him—tried to kill me.”
That cut off any mirth.
“He couldn’t. It wasn’t allowed. I tell you this so you won’t worry. You and I will be protected.”
How? Or maybe she meant, by whom?
Nettie smiled as if she’d heard the unspoken question and found it amusing. She sat on the bed by Lily’s hip. Her eyes were so dark. Knowing. “This won’t be like a Catholic exorcism. My people don’t wrestle with a demon spiritually. We connect with our gods through the earth. Demons aren’t of our world, so we call on the powers of this realm to expel the intruder.”
Okay, that made sense. Sort of. “I don’t worship your gods.”
“You are of the earth, so you are theirs whether you acknowledge them or not. They do require your permission, however. You must willingly surrender to the ritual.”
Lily considered that. “I’m not much at surrender, but I want this to happen. Does intention count?”
“It does. I have your permission to continue?”
“Yes.”
“Very well, then. Be calm.” Nettie certainly was. Her eyes were so serene, yet vast. Vast enough to hold answers to questions Lily had always wondered about, and maybe some she’d never dreamed of asking. “We’re entirely safe. You can relax. Rest.”
“I’m not…” Not nervous, she was going to say, but it seemed rude to finish the sentence. Nettie had started chanting—low, quiet, a soothing repetition of words Lily didn’t know.
The sound made her sleepy. She fought it. She wanted to look for those answers, the ones hinted at in Nettie’s eyes… the same kind of answers the stars are always trying to give us, she thought, when we look up and up at them. So high above, speaking in gradual whispers about time, about their own flaming hearts and the endless cold that lies between…
“Wake up,” someone said softly. “Time to wake up, Lily.”
Everything had changed between one blink and the next. Nettie stood instead of sitting on the bed. Karonski was on his feet, too, shrugging into his jacket. Cynna wasn’t even in the room.
Rule was where he had been, though. Beside her.
Lily scowled at Nettie. “I was asleep. You put me to sleep!”
Nettie smiled. “I put you in sleep, yes. With you out of the picture, I could find out if anyone else was home.”
“You’re finished?”
“All done, and you’re not possessed.”
Rule laid a hand on her arm. She turned to see him grinning at her. “The ritual proved to be a major anticlimax. Nettie chanted, you dozed off, she asked some questions, and no one answered.”
Lily was disgruntled. It didn’t seem right. After all that tension and buildup, she hadn’t even been around for… well, for whatever had happened.
Or hadn’t happened, and that was what mattered. Lily caught herself before she could start rubbing her shoulder again. She reached for Rule’s hand instead. “All right, then. Everyone clear out. I want to go home.”
SIX
One and a quarter million people worked, ate, slept, loved, and fought in San Diego’s four-hundred-square-mile sprawl. It was never quiet, never fully dark in the city. Tonight, overcast had turned the sky into a dirty brown bowl that sealed in the city lights and shut out the night. Rule couldn’t see the moon.
He still felt her, of course. The moon’s deep, slow chimes sounded in his blood and bones, growing louder when she waxed toward full, as she was now. But he missed seeing her changing face. He missed the stars and the spangled depths of night. And he missed being four-footed. There’d been little opportunity to run the hills in his other form.
If he couldn’t run on all four feet, he might as well find other ways to enjoy speed. The city’s streets might not be empty, but at midnight they weren’t congested. Rule considered that permission to ignore the speed limit.
He expected to be rebuked by his law-abiding passenger. But when he pulled onto 1-5 and brought the Mercedes up to a comfortable ninety miles an hour, Lily remained still and silent, her weapon in her lap.
She’d retrieved it from his trunk as soon as they reached his car. That hadn’t surprised him. She’d be feeling the need for it tonight. And she’d be right.
But she wasn’t asking questions. Questions were Lily’s way of sorting the world into shapes she could deal with, and she’d been tossed some pretty odd curves in the past few hours.
Women were complicated creatures, he reminded himself. Any man who thought he had one figured out simply wasn’t paying attention, and his nadia was more complex than most. The mate bond didn’t deliver understanding along with the physical tie. That was up to the two of them. He’d be foolish to fret over her silence when he had so many more concrete dangers to worry about.
She was tired, after all. He wasn’t, but he was still too churned up for sleep to sound remotely possible. Lily was probably craving it by now, though. An injured body needed sleep.
He thought of seeing her sprawled on the floor, unconscious, and anger burned through his blood, hot and vivid. He wanted to howl—and then tear out someone’s throat.