had planted a bug on the car, Scott would have smelled it, right?”
His eyebrows lifted. “We can speak more freely here than in other places, if that’s what you mean.” But his glance cut to their driver. Scott might seem professionally oblivious to their conversation, but he heard every word.
She nodded that she’d understood. No talking about Armageddon or Shadow Units in front of Scott. Or, technically, behind him. But Scott knew this part already. “I’m wondering about the Wythe mantle.” She rested a hand on her stomach. “This has to be part of your Lady’s plans.”
“Of course.”
And the Lady was a patterner. Lily hadn’t thought of her in those terms before. It changed things . . . she couldn’t say how, exactly, but since the Lady was an Old One, she’d be an adept. Maybe that meant that Lily was doing just what she was supposed to do.
Rule wasn’t the only one in the car with a mantle. Lily had one, too. Sort of.
She wasn’t a Rho. She wasn’t lupi, could never be lupi, so she couldn’t use the mantle in her gut. Couldn’t do anything with it but get rid of it as soon as possible . . . which surely would happen on Tuesday, when they went to Wythe Clanhome in upper New York.
Last month, Lily and Rule had rescued his friend Brian from Friar, a sidhe lord, and a bunch of evil elf minions. But they’d been too late. The sidhe lord’s experiments had damaged Brian so badly he was dying, and he lacked an heir. With his death, the mantle would be lost, and with it the clan. That meant death for some, insanity for others. Probably human deaths, too, because lupi did not deal well with being clanless.
Lily’s Gift let her absorb magic the way dragons do. She’d breathed in the mantle as Brian died—and the lupi’s Lady had somehow made it so she didn’t just absorb the power. Instead the mantle resided inside her, intact and unreachable, a furry tickle that never went away.
Most of the time it felt like she needed to scratch her colon. Or burp.
She was caretaker of the mantle, not Rho. Wythe needed a Rho, but all they had right now were the clan elders. Normally they were an informal council of advisors to the Rho, men and the occasional woman who held positions of trust—as chief tender, for example, or head of security, or manager of an important business owned by the clan.
Walt McDonald was the most senior Wythe elder. He’d been an attorney for forty years before retiring to run Wythe’s dairy farm, which he’d done for twelve years now. He was one hundred and seven years old, for God’s sake, yet he consulted Lily over every little decision. As if she knew what to do with a twenty-year-old lupus who couldn’t control the Change reliably! Or water rights. Or the dozen other things he’d called her about.
Not for much longer. Lily figured that if the Lady had stuffed a mantle into her, she could get it out again and put it where it belonged. They just had to find the right Wythe lupus to take it. The whole clan would be waiting for her Tuesday, so surely one of them would . . .
Rule turned her hand palm up, cradling it still in his left hand. With his right he gently opened her fingers.
She looked at him. It was darker along this stretch of road in spite of the headlights flashing up and past, up and past, but she saw the way his mouth turned up. The way his eyes locked on to hers.
Rule had hidden something from her. Something important. She hated that, but he hadn’t hidden himself. Not on purpose. Shouldn’t she have known, though? Shouldn’t she have realized a secret lay between them? Had she been too wrapped up in everything else to see? In her wounded arm, her job, Friar’s disappearance, the All-Clan that was finally scheduled, the muscle that might or might not regrow, the furry tickle in her gut and the complications it posed, their upcoming wedding, the . . .
Okay, yes, she should have noticed. But maybe she could give herself a pass this time.
With his thumb, Rule drew a circle lightly, lightly in the palm of her hand.
She knew his body very well. She knew the shapes of his mind . . . sometimes. Other times those shapes mystified her. It was like wandering through a fog, with