“No,” she whispered. “Together . . . we will . . . die. Look.” And she managed to pull her gaze to the left.
A red wolf with eyes a bright, unlikely blue crouched ten feet away, snarling. Cullen’s sorcerous vision worked in either form, and he did not like what he saw.
He leaped, crashing into her, knocking her to the ground—she glimpsed slashing teeth, his muzzle reaching for her throat—
She convulsed.
RULE ran faster than he ever had in his life—as if he could outrun death, race backward in time, find Lily safe and alive and laughing at him.
Three of the Leidolf lupi had Changed quickly enough to be on his trail. He barreled straight at them, the growl rising from his chest and breaking free in a maddened howl. They scattered.
He leaped over the next one. Then he’d reached the clearing and saw Lily’s body crumpled on the ground, and Cullen—Cullen!—crouched over her, teeth bared.
He slammed into his friend’s red-furred body, getting him off her, off Lily, twisting in midair to go for the throat, needing blood, blood, oceans of blood—
Cullen ducked his head and Rule got mostly fur in his mouth. The two of them landed hard and tangled, rolling, bones jarred by the force of Rule’s charge. Rule snapped at the paw nearest his teeth. Missed.
Around them, women’s screams. Other wolves gathering, growling. Other wolves . . . In the madness of grief, Rule hadn’t thought, wasn’t thinking much now, but—Cullen? No, Cullen wouldn’t kill Lily. Maybe he’d been standing guard over her body . . .
Her body. Rule raised his nose and howled.
Cullen Changed. Then stood there on two legs, hands on his thighs, head hanging, blood dripping from a slash on his shoulder near the neck. “Rule, she’s alive. Lily’s alive. The mate bond . . .” He gulped, as if he were holding back tears. “The mate bond is gone, but Lily’s alive.”
“I hate hospitals,” Lily muttered from her perch on the exam table.
“I know.” Rule leaned his forehead against hers.
She could feel his warmth, his skin. She couldn’t feel him. Not anymore. If she didn’t see him or touch him, she didn’t know where he was.
It was a small loss, she assured herself. The mate bond hadn’t given her access to his thoughts or feelings. Just a sense of where he was, physically. “I’m not hurt.” Except maybe in her brain, but that damage wouldn’t show up right away. And the wraith hadn’t been in her long—hadn’t been able to move her, control her. Maybe there wouldn’t be any damage.
She tried not to remember the sharp edges of the ice. She tried not to blink too much.
“I know.” Rule kissed her cheek and straightened. “But you’ll indulge me and allow the doctors to finish looking you over.”
“They’ve checked every inch of me, and their evil cohorts have drained me of blood.” Some of the results of the blood tests wouldn’t be back for a while, but that wasn’t what they were waiting on. Halo’s hospital didn’t usually run MRIs at night. They’d had to be persuaded to get their MRI tech out of bed.
Ruben had accomplished that with a phone call. Got to have a good look at her brain, after all. So they’d know if it started going wonky.
“Nettie will check you out tomorrow,” Rule said.
“Nettie? But she . . . Rule, you didn’t ask her to fly across the country.”
“Of course I did.” He was still speaking in that utterly calm voice, the one he’d used since she came to after her seizure. “I spoke to the Rhej, also.”
“Which one?”
His smile was as beautiful as ever, and as dear. It was the calm voice that made her want to hit him. “The Nokolai Rhej. What happened was impossible. I asked her how the impossible could occur.”
“And—?”
His smile died. “She said the mate bond is dissolved by death. Somehow the wraith pulled the bond inside it. And the wraith is dead.”
Lots of impossible happening lately. Like a wraith sliding in past her Gift as if it didn’t exist. It seemed she had a back door. “Now we know who is susceptible to the wraith,” she said wearily. “That’s something.”
“You said something about that earlier.” Rule slid up to sit on the exam table beside her. “Things were somewhat confused at the time, but you said you thought you knew how it . . .” His voice trailed off as if he found the reality too hard to speak.
“How it got in me,” she finished grimly for him. “Yes, I think so. Earlier today I learned that Meacham and Hodge had one thing in common. They both died for a few minutes. Cardiac arrest, no heartbeat. I need to talk to Brown about that, get him checking hospital records. We need to warn anyone who’s been clinically dead for a little while.”
He didn’t speak. She turned and saw that he was gripping the table so hard his knuckles were white. He stared straight ahead.
“Rule.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Unpack it, whatever it is.”
“My fault,” he gritted. “I . . . What you did in Dis, that was because of me. You died. Part of you died. It’s my fault that abomination got in you.”
Aw, shit. She twisted so she could grip his shoulders, making him look at her. He allowed that. The bleakness in his eyes hurt her all the way down. “All of me would have died in Dis if part of me hadn’t.” That came out jumbled, but he knew what she meant. If war was hell, war in hell was a double-dip of deadly. If the other-Lily hadn’t made that sacrifice, they wouldn’t have lasted long.
“And since none of me died for good, it wasn’t a bad deal.”
A shudder traveled up him, and suddenly he grabbed her, holding on tight. He rubbed his cheek along hers, then buried his face in her hair and sucked in air, shuddering again. “This time, I thought you were all the way dead,” he whispered.
For long moments she said nothing, just held him. She needed this, too. Funny. Even without the mate bond, she needed this. Finally she pulled back enough to brush his hair back and look at him. His eyes were damp.
She tried a smile. “You thought Cullen did it. You ass!”
“He was standing over you.”
“You know why.”
“I do now.”
Cullen had seen the ugly smear of death magic covering Lily. He’d read the desperation in her eyes, and he’d guessed what had her. He’d done the only thing he could—scared the hell out of her in order to persuade the wraith it would die if it stayed inside her.
It had worked. When the wraith left, she’d convulsed. Just like Hodge. Unlike Hodge, though, it had left no smear of death magic on her. Once the wraith was gone, her Gift rid her of that.
She’d made Cullen check. Just to be sure. “Did you ask Nettie about my theory?” Cullen couldn’t see the wraith. Her own Gift couldn’t stop it. That told her the wraith might use death magic, might eat it the way the Etorri Rhej had said, but its basic self was something other than magic.
Spirit, in other words. Her Gift didn’t protect her from spiritual stuff.
“I did. She agrees with you.”
“The wraith wanted to talk to someone there at the gens compleo. Ask him something. I think it wanted you.”
Rule stared. “You heard it?”
“Yes.” The others hadn’t, but it never got all the way inside Lily. Maybe that’s why she’d been able to hear it, because they’d shared her body rather than her being shoved completely into the backseat.
There’s two of you . . .
She shivered at the memory. “It wanted me to go to the fire. I could understand why. Ice . . . doesn’t begin to describe that kind of cold.”
This time when he put his arms around her, it was to comfort her, not himself. “Warm now?”