Lily looked for her cat, but Harry had apparently tired of watching the corner. He was nowhere in sight.
“Your call,” Rule said quietly to her.
Her hands had made fists. She didn’t notice until the stinging in her palms grew too sharp. She forced herself to open them. “Here. They found me at my sister’s wedding. They must know where your apartment is.”
“Cullen?” Rule said.
“Will do. Do you have rosemary?”
“Will the dried stuff work?”
They didn’t need her. Lily picked up her weapon. “I’m going to take a shower.”
Cullen’s eyebrows went up. “Armed?”
“Your spells may not work on demons, but I’m betting my bullets will.”
EIGHT
In the bathroom Lily turned on the tap, stripped off her bridesmaid’s dress, wadded it up, and stuffed it in the trash. In spite of what she’d said to Cullen, her gun was on the bedside table, not in here with her. Her bathroom was too tiny for armed combat.
Panties and bra went on the floor as the tiny room filled with steam. She peeled off the gauze pad covering her wound.
Most of the damage didn’t show. The doctors thought she’d been hit by a ricochet—there’d been no scorching around the entry, and the bullet had lodged instead of ripping a second hole in her back on its way out. But it had tumbled inside her flesh, tearing up muscle and chipping bone.
All she saw was a depressed, puckered circle, still an angry red. A crescent-shaped scab at one edge marked where it had torn open when she fell. They told her the scar would fade in time. She hoped so. She’d known since she was ten that she could be damaged, permanently and irreversibly—and that scars didn’t have to stop her. But she was vain enough to dislike the way this one looked.
Rule thought the in-sleep thing might have speeded up healing on her shoulder as well as her head. Gingerly, Lily touched the small, puckered circle.
Orange.
There were drugs that crosswired the brain so you tasted a color or smelled a sound. Synesthesia, that’s what it was called. LSD, peyote, mescaline… even marijuana had been known to blur the lines between the senses. But she wasn’t on drugs, and her regular senses weren’t crossing things up. Just the extra sense that let her touch magic.
Maybe this was normal. Her Gift was rare. She’d never met another touch sensitive, and there was precious little about them in folklore. She didn’t have much to go on except her own experience, and she’d never run across a demon before. Maybe she experienced the magic from other realms differently.
But why had it stuck to her?
Frowning, she adjusted the water temperature, stepped into the tub, and pulled the shower curtain closed.
God, but that felt good. For a moment the sheer animal pleasure of hot water blanked her mind. She wanted to sleep right here, standing up, with hot water pouring over her… and not have to face Rule.
That was just lame. Disgusted with herself, Lily squirted shampoo into her hand. She could use her left hand enough to do that, but she couldn’t raise that arm over her head. Washing her hair one-handed was awkward, but she’d be damned if she’d go to bed with dried blood sticking the strands together.
Rule had been washing her hair for her since she got hurt.
Guilt twinged. So he was older than she’d thought. Lots of women dated older men. What was the big deal?
She closed her eyes and let the water stream over her. He was fifty-four, she was twenty-eight, so he was twenty-six years older than her. Twenty-six years was pretty much a lifetime to her. Not to him. That was the problem.
She got out of the shower, dried off, and told the mother-voice in her head nattering on about taking care of her skin to shut up. Then reached for the lotion anyway.
Did he still argue with the mother-voice in his head? Or maybe it was a father-voice, because he was a guy… but surely at fifty-four he’d have found his own voice to listen to.
Lily pulled on a T-shirt and panties, tugged a wide-toothed comb through her hair, and gave serious thought to going to bed without drying it. The prospect of a wet pillow dissuaded her, though. She got out the blow drier and plugged it in.
Had they had blow driers when he was growing up? He would have been born about 1950. Blow driers came along a lot later than that, didn’t they?
He looked maybe thirty. It hurt to find out he wasn’t. That he had let her believe an untruth. She’d thought they stood on roughly the same cultural ground, and they didn’t. When she was a kid, she’d listened to disco. He’d listened to… what? The Beatles? Elvis? She’d grown up watching Cagney and Lacey, Cheers, Happy Days. Rule had grown up in Happy Days.
She clicked off the blow drier, wound the cord around it, and shoved it in a drawer. She started to get out a fresh gauze pad and the tape, frowned, and decided she didn’t need a bandage. Nettie’s religious version of magic seemed to have worked on her—which was disconcerting, but she’d work out the ramifications of that later.
Then she took a deep breath and opened the door.
Rule was in bed, propped up against a couple pillows on the right side—she always slept on the left—with the sheet pulled up over his legs and hips. Beneath the sheet he was naked. He thought pajamas were one of the silliest things ever invented.
He was watching her closely. His eyes made her think of water at night—full of mysteries and hints, revealing little.
She’d had it with mystery. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Before you became clan, I couldn’t. After that… fear, I suppose. Ignoble, but accurate.”
“You were afraid I’d be upset?”
“Aren’t you?”
Upset wasn’t the right word. Confused, disoriented, achingly aware of all the differences between them …
“It isn’t as if you haven’t kept secrets, too. I’ve respected that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Grandmother.”
She blinked. “But you know about her. I didn’t tell you, but you saw her in action. Benedict even saw her Change.”
His mouth turned down at one corner, a crooked not-smile. “I also know there aren’t any, ah, were-beasts. Yet that’s what she is. I haven’t pressed you for an explanation.”
“Bully for you. I don’t have one.”
“I wasn’t asking you to explain.”
She gritted her teeth. “You aren’t listening. I didn’t say I wouldn’t explain. I can’t, because I don’t know. If there’s anyone more secretive than your father, it’s my grandmother.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment and then grimaced and rubbed his chest. “That does make my silence harder to explain.”
“You’re my mother’s age. My father is only two years older than you are.” A thought struck her. “You do age, don’t you?”
His eyebrows lifted. “You’ve met my father, among others. Yes, we age. Just more slowly. Perhaps we heal the free radical damage scientists have begun touting as one cause of aging.”
Lupi healed everything from colds to STDs to bullets.
Why wouldn’t they be able to heal most of the damage that caused aging? “Copies,” she muttered.
“What?”
“I’ve read about it. By the time we’re seven or so, every cell in our bodies is a copy. By the time we’re seventy, our DNA is running copies of copies of copies, and things start to wear out. Maybe the same thing about you that messes up lab tests keeps your copies clearer than mine.”
“You do like things logical.”
“Why not? Magic is a system, right? Figure out the rules and you know where you stand.”