“I guess you’re going to San Fran, huh?”
“Rule’s going, so I am.” The mate bond limited how far apart they could be. It was not consistent about this, but San Francisco was five hundred miles away, well beyond what they could expect to be okay. “Ruben thinks I should go.”
“Yeah?”
“He’s got a hunch.” Lily had called her boss last night. Ruben Brooks had a precognitive Gift that was off-the-charts accurate. When he had a hunch, everyone—up to and including the president—paid attention.
“That’s handy, since you have to go anyway. How’s Rule dealing with his surprise sibling?”
And that answered her question. Her stuff this morning was all about Rule, and Rule wasn’t talking. “He’s not. At least that’s what it looks like. You know how I don’t talk about stuff? He’s doing that times ten. Times ten on the logarithmic scale.”
“Is that a math word? Don’t talk math. He’s all shut down?”
“Not exactly.” Rule closed down when he didn’t want to talk about something. Usually Lily understood and respected that…well, she tried, anyway. But this was different. “He didn’t ask any questions. Did Cullen tell you that? This Jasper Machek calls and says he wants us to come to San Francisco and help him out, and Rule didn’t ask one question.”
“Not everyone deals with a shock by asking questions.”
“I know, but he still isn’t asking questions. He’s avoiding them. Did you know that Isen knew about this Jasper guy? Not a lot, maybe.” Lily had run a check on Machek. It turned up plenty that Isen hadn’t mentioned. “But he knew Rule’s mother had had another child a few years after she handed Rule over. He knew Rule had a brother, and he never told him. And Rule’s cool with that. So cool he left the room when I started asking Isen questions about Jasper.”
“Just walked out?”
“Not in a rude way. Suddenly he had things to do.”
“Huh.” Cynna fell silent.
Rule had said he needed to arrange their trip, including the security. A nice, valid activity, only there was no reason for him to go outside to do it. Lily had just started on her questions when Isen’s phone rang again.
That time it was the Laban Rho. Isen had told Leo that he was busy at the moment. No, he didn’t want Leo to call back. He was to wait on hold until Isen was ready to speak with him.
“I can leave,” Lily had said.
“No, I want him to wait. First he’ll be patient. That won’t last long. Leo has never mastered patience. Then he’ll be increasingly angry. That will last longer, but eventually he’ll move from anger into dread. That’s when I’ll talk to him.”
Isen had kept the other Rho waiting on hold a full thirty minutes while he talked to Lily about Jasper…and Jasper’s mother. When Isen deemed Leo sufficiently steeped in dread, he’d dismissed Lily. “If you can find Rule, tell him I want him. If you can’t, have someone track him down. He may be running.”
She hadn’t found Rule. She hadn’t found out what Leo’s fate was, either. When she came back inside, Isen had retreated to his study, and when he closed that door no one was supposed to disturb him for anything short of an emergency. Badly as she wanted to know things, she couldn’t call it an emergency. She’d gone to bed.
Cynna broke the silence. “Lupi have a word for them, you know. For their half siblings on the mothers’ side.”
Lily snorted. “Human?”
Cynna flashed her a grin. “Yeah, but this word is just for that relationship. For out-clan siblings. They call them alius kin.”
“I’ve seen that word somewhere. Maybe in one of those journals the Rhej—I mean Hannah—had me read.” Before Hannah died, Lily wasn’t supposed to use her name. Now she was, because “the Rhej” meant Cynna. Thank God Cynna had told her to ignore all that no-naming-the-Rhej business. Bad enough, she’d said, that the lupi mostly wouldn’t use her name anymore. She didn’t want to stop hearing it entirely. “I thought it just meant kin.”
“I don’t know what alius kin would mean to someone who knows real Latin, but lupi translate it as otherkin.”
Kin who are other. Not us, not clan. “Like they aren’t real siblings.”
“It makes sense, if you look at the history. It used to be rare for lupi to be raised by their mothers. If the mother was married, it wasn’t to the baby’s father, and if she wasn’t, out-of-wedlock babies were a BFD for centuries. So it was normal for lupi to grow up not knowing their mothers’ families at all, and only natural they didn’t feel a close bond. Kin, not clan, you know? Chances were good their human half siblings didn’t even want to know about them, much less call them ‘brother,’ so it went both ways.” She shrugged. “A lot of lupi are raised by their moms now, at least part of the time, but the attitude has held on.”
Lily thought that over. Rule had never wanted to know if he had any alius kin, had he? He’d never asked. And yet they were going to San Francisco. Jasper called, and she and Rule were headed for San Francisco. She didn’t think it was just about the prototype. “That’s part of it, maybe.”
“But not all?”
Lily was pretty sure some of it—maybe most of it—had to do with the mother this Jasper Machek shared with Rule. The one who’d handed a two-week-old baby to Isen and walked away, uninterested in whether her son lived or died. Learning about Jasper meant learning something about that woman, didn’t it? “Her name was Celeste Babineaux. Rule’s mother, I mean. She was twenty-nine when she had Rule.”
“Did Rule tell you that? Or Isen?”
“Until last night, I didn’t even know her last name.”
“Rule did, though, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know. He’d been told her name, but I don’t know if he remembers.” It seemed like he’d have to, but he always flew the “off-limits” banner on the rare occasions the subject of his mother came up, and she’d never pushed.
Last night she’d pushed…but it was Isen she’d talked to, not Rule.
Celeste Babineaux had been a French expatriate living in California, and—in Isen’s words—the most staggeringly beautiful woman he’d ever met, then or since. She had also been bipolar. At least that’s the diagnosis she’d eventually received, after being in and out of sanatoriums and treatment centers and such for much of her life.
Isen had paid for those stays, some of them extended. Even after Celeste married a man named Michael Machek, Isen had paid for her treatment. His eyebrows had lifted when Lily expressed surprise at that. “She was my son’s mother. Of course I helped her when she needed it. Bipolar is such a recent way of understanding one type of mental illness,” Isen had added. “It wasn’t the doctors’ fault they couldn’t do more for her back then.”
“Don’t you think Rule needed to know that his mother had a mental illness?”
Isen had shrugged. “He didn’t want to know about her. There was no medical concern—he couldn’t inherit her condition—so I didn’t force the knowledge on him.”
“It could have made a difference in how he thought about her. It could have had a lot to do with why she abandoned him.”
“You oversimplify. Do you think Rule felt abandoned? Do you see that kind of early trauma in him today?”
Maybe not. But he hadn’t just missed out on knowing about his birth mother. He’d missed out knowing about his brother. “Does he have other half siblings you haven’t mentioned?”
“No.” Isen had smiled with sly amusement. “Although Benedict has two that he may not have mentioned to you. He sees them when he visits his mother’s tribe.”
No, he’d never mentioned them. Not that Benedict was exactly chatty, so that wasn’t surprising. But Rule had never mentioned them, either.