That great head turned, focusing on Gan. The demon’s kind are good with bodies.
Gan sniffed. “I’m not going to help him. He tried to kill me.”
You will do as 1 wish, Izhatipoibanolit—
“Right, right. But do you mean you want the wolf’s leg fixed?” Gan was incredulous.
I do.
Gan heaved a huge, put-upon sigh and stood. “I can put his bone back in place, but it won’t stay. He’s no demon. He can’t heal that quick.”
“That’s what the splint is for.” Hope stirred, fragile and hard to trust. The dragon had broken Rule’s leg, but now wanted it to heal straight. She didn’t understand. Were dragons capable of compassion? “We have to stabilize the leg.”
The dragon tilted his head up. After a moment, one of the circling shapes overhead broke from the rest, diving for the land at the top of the cliff.
We are well supplied with bones. One of my line-kin will bring you an assortment to choose from for the splint. There are coverings in your cave. Tear strips from one, or have the demon do so. It has good teeth.
“Uh—my cave?”
The place you will stay. The entrance is near the grass at the eastern end of the beach. With that, he stood.
The dragon’s legs were short and thick in proportion to his body, bowed out like a lizard’s. His haunches were house-high, his shoulders slightly lower. There is food in the cave. You won’t need it, but the lupus will. At the rear of the cave is a small freshwater spring.
“I need food, too,” Gan said. “I can’t eat dead things.”
You’ll be fed. You’ll continue to feed the human. Drop to the ground now.
The dragon moved.
A creature so large should have seemed ponderous. He wasn’t. She had to flatten herself to avoid getting clipped by his tail when he started walking, but the wide-set legs carried him over the sand as agilely as one of his tiny kin.
“Wait!” Lily pushed to her feet. “Where are you going? When will you be back?”
The dragon flowed over the side of the sandbox, stepping down the twenty feet to the beach like a cat oozing off a couch.
“What’s your name?” she called.
He just kept moving.
“How did you know we were in that other region? How did you know I’m a sensitive before you brought us here? Why did you bring us here?”
The great beast was a several dozen yards down the beach now.
“Dammit, I’m vocalizing at you!”
He stopped, his wings partially unfurled. They were doubled, those wings, like a moth’s. Slowly the neck swung around until he was looking back at her. Faint, so faint she might have imagined it, she caught a wisp of amusement just before he straightened, rising up on his hind legs, the long body lifting up and up. The haunches bunched and he sprang for the sky like a cat leaping onto a windowsill.
Even from this distance, the wind from his wings stirred the sand, getting grit in her eyes. She was blinking them clean when she caught his last words: Sam. I believe you may call me Sam.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LILY needed clothes. Cynna’s belt had to be snug to keep the pants from falling off, and snug hurt. She also had to do something about Dirty Harry.
So after checking herself out, she sat in the back seat of Cullen’s old Bronco, fists clenched, trying not to think about what might be happening to Rule while she took care of her cat and her damned grooming. One of the officers had driven her car back to her place last night, and Rule’s car had been impounded.
For a few blocks she leaned her head back and shut out the sound of Cynna and Cullen arguing. She needed to see Beth, talk to her. She didn’t want to. Not when Beth was staying with their parents. But a phone call wasn’t enough, not for this. She needed to know how badly Beth had been scarred by last night.
God, she was tired. She closed her eyes, but there was no rest inside her. Not with everything humming like an overloaded power line.
She was scared. All the way down scared. Not so much of dying, though she wasn’t in denial about that.
Death was a strong possibility, but she knew how to keep going in the face of that sort of risk. As a cop, she’d usually had backup going into a dangerous situation. Barring that, she’d had training to fall back on. You identified your goal, made your plans, and did the best you could. Fear was normal, just one more factor to account for.
What was grinding at her wasn’t as clean as the fear of death. The shaky feeling came from the fear that she wasn’t enough. She didn’t know enough, couldn’t be enough or do enough to get Rule back. Her Gift was gone. She wasn’t sure there was enough of her left to do what had to be done.
Maybe, even with her Gift, there wouldn’t have been enough. What they were planning—or, so far, failing to plan—was nuts. One lupus sorcerer, one female Finder, and one damaged former homicide cop were going up against who knew how many demons on their home ground. How do you plan for that?
One step at a time, she told herself. If she couldn’t tell if she was going in the right direction, tough. She still had to take that next step.
Up front, Cynna snorted. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no technical difference between opening a big gate and opening a little one. It’s just a matter of power.”
They should have taken Cynna’s rental. The Bronco’s engine knocked so badly she wondered if Cullen kept it running with sorcery. But Cullen had insisted on driving, and Cynna wouldn’t let him behind the wheel of her vehicle. Even one only temporarily hers.
“I don’t imagine you’ve ever heard of McCallum’s Theorem.” Cullen sounded like an adult talking to a sweet but slow child.
“He’s got a theory about hellgates?”
“No, it concerns the difference between relevance and resonance, but it suggests that—”
“There’s only one kind of relevance that matters with gates. Now, if we were talking about voodoo—”
“Pretend you’re more interested in figuring this out than one-upping me,” Cullen said. “You won’t embarrass yourself so much.”
Lily wondered if she was going to have to kill them both, or if taping their mouths shut would be enough. “Bickering is one way of dealing with tension, but it isn’t doing much for mine. Since neither one of you knows how to open a gate, can we talk about something more to the point? Make some plans?”
“Believe it or not,” Cullen said, “our discussion is very much to the point. In a roundabout way.”
“Sure. Right. Now I understand.”
“We’re trying to settle what kind of gate to open,” Cynna said. “Single-relevance or multi-relevance. Only there isn’t such a thing as a multi-relevance gate, so you’re right. We’re wasting time.”
Cullen hissed. That’s what it sounded like—a cat’s hiss. “Lady save me from small-minded hedge witches. Just because you’ve never heard of something doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”
Lily tried once more to get them back on track. “Because you don’t know how to open a gate anyway, the discussion is moot.”
Cullen was impatient. “We know the general principles behind it.”
“Right,” Cynna said. “That’s like saying we don’t know how to build a television, but we know the general idea behind how one works. Cullen thinks that once we get our TV we should tinker with it. I think that would be too dangerous. We’ve got no reason to think his idea is even possible.”
“It’s possible,” Cullen insisted. “McCallum’s Theorem—”