with the lava fire and exploded into eye-searing white. White that shot straight up in a brilliant column three or four stories tall . . . and gradually dissipated, like the slow, shiny fade-out of fireworks.
THREE miles away, a woman sat cross-legged on the beach, her head tipped back, her mouth round in a silent “oh” as the brilliant white light faded. It was time to go, and yet she lingered. The wind off the ocean was chilly. It felt good on her hot cheeks . . . hot cheeks, shivery stomach. She’d felt so odd ever since she picked up that knife. For just a moment longer she’d sit here and smell the ocean . . . brine and fish, the Mother’s moist breath. Only she wasn’t thinking of the Mother. She was wondering if anyone had died in that beautiful flash of light. If she’d killed people she didn’t even know.
“A little.” Apologetically she added, “I’ve never killed anyone before.”
It did to them. And to her, too, though he wouldn’t understand that. She hoped no one had been near when the node exploded. The others . . . no, she didn’t regret them. She’d been shocked by how loud the gun was, that was all. She’d owned the weapon for ages and dutifully took it to the firing range two or three times a year to make sure she stayed familiar with it, but she’d never fired it without the protective gear at the gun range. She’d never really thought she’d shoot it anywhere else.
Tears sprang to her eyes. Ah, look at her, indulging in melancholy when there were important things to do! Vital things. “Soon. Soon I’ll feel your arms—and all sorts of other parts of you, too.” She laughed, suddenly flooded with a wild, exuberant energy, and bounced to her feet. She had places to go, things to do.
People to kill. On purpose.
LILY was still blinking bright spots out of her vision when Cullen plopped to the ground with a satisfied sigh. “Glad that worked.”
“So am I,” Rule said dryly.
“The node’s still not entirely stable. I think . . .” Cullen tipped his head, studying something only he could see. “Yeah, it’s settling down. Should be safe enough, but I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“My turn, then.” Lily stood. “I guess you don’t see any power radiating from an ancient artifact or you’d be rooting around, looking for it.”
“No, but if this Nam Anthessa is as good at hiding as Sam said, maybe I wouldn’t. If you see a knife, don’t touch it.”
“Sam made that clear. It’s safe to cross the line?”
“Sure. Not a whiff of power left in it. I may have damaged some evidence. Couldn’t be helped, so don’t bitch at me about it. But the missing blood isn’t my fault.”
“What missing blood?”
“There’s no blood on the ground inside the hexagon. Some outside it, but none inside. I think the
That was seriously creepy. Lily flashed her light over the ground. “I don’t see any runes.” Though there was a drift of ashy residue of some sort she hadn’t noticed before. And the once-yellow line of the hexagon was burned black.
“No runes?” Cullen stirred himself to come look. “Huh. That’s weird.”
“Meaning?”
“I guess my pyrotechnics burned them up.”
Lily decided not to worry about it. The scene was already thoroughly compromised—first by the rangers, then by the EMTs, and now by Cullen’s efforts to keep something—either the runes or the node, she wasn’t sure which—from exploding. “Rule . . .” She realized he’d moved. He was a little ways down the trail, talking to Scott. And when had Scott come up past T.J. and his two cops?
Rule looked at her. “Scott, Barnaby, and Mike are going to stay with you. I’m going to take the others for some four-legged sniffing.”
“Okay. Before you Change, would you let T.J. and the rest know they can come up?” Time to put her shoes back on. Lily took out the baby wipes she kept in her purse for occasions like this. By the time she’d wiped both feet—which were scratched and tender in spots, but she didn’t find any blood—and put her shoes back on, Scott and T.J. were coming up the trail together. She didn’t see Rule, but she knew where he was—about forty feet away, and not sticking to the trail.
“I’ve got to say,” T.J. said when he reached them, “you do know how to mess up a scene, Seaborne.”
“Would’ve been a bigger mess if the node had exploded.”
Lily shivered. That answered that question. “T.J., you said you took some pictures from the scene earlier. We need to document what’s changed. Can you have your guy snap some more while I look things over?”
“Will do. We need the SOC squad. They’re going to bitch enough as it is.”
“You can send for them now.”
T.J. called the scene-of-crime people in and gave instructions to his two cops—a woman whose name Lily hadn’t caught and a grizzled sergeant named Armstrong whom she knew slightly.
While the woman set up a pair of small floodlights, Lily pulled on a pair of the disposable gloves she kept in her purse. She approached the body carefully, avoiding the ashy smears that had been runes, and crouched.
The burned smell was strong. Some of it was from the dead man’s exposed skin.
He lay facedown in the dirt. Might not be much face left of it to see when they turned him over, judging by the way the back of his head looked. High-caliber rounds made a mess. A couple feet from his outflung hand lay a weapon—a Sig Sauer P226, either new or nearly new, she thought, playing her flashlight over it. Good gun, but no weapon’s much use if you’re shot from behind. She directed her light at his head, hoping to learn his hair color, but he’d worn a ski mask. What was left of his head was covered by knitted stuff.
The rest of his body seemed unmarked, aside from postmortem burns. He’d been maybe one eighty, one ninety, and under six feet. Dark turtleneck, dark slacks, dark athletic shoes, all good quality. His right hand was underneath the body. The outflung left hand lacked a wedding ring. No visible calluses. No sign of defensive wounds.
And the wrong build for Friar, dammit.
The floodlights came on. Lily put away her flashlight. Sergeant Armstrong began snapping pictures.
“I’m going to check out the spot I picked for the shooter,” T.J. said.
Lily looked at him, then studied the way the dead man had fallen. The bullets had to have been fired from the east . . . she shifted to check. “That patch of brush about thirty feet southeast of us?”
“Not a bad spot to hide while waiting to pick off your targets.” T.J. turned and headed for it.
Shooting uphill could be tricky, but the slope wasn’t bad there. “You think the perp was already in place?”
“I don’t see how he could’ve gotten there without being heard,” he said without turning around, “if anyone had been around to hear.”
Some lupi could move that quietly, but otherwise he was right. So why had he or she waited until the rite was under way? Could the shooter have wanted to create the instability Cullen had shut down with his pyrotechnics?
A large, black-and-silver wolf slid out of the darkness to meet T.J. at the brushy spot. T.J. froze. “Uh, right. Which one are you?”
“That’s Rule,” Lily called and went back to studying the scene.
No knives of any sort visible. The altar, singed now, was next to the body. Things had spilled when it tipped over—a metal chalice and some other stuff too crispy to identify right away, but no knife. “Why didn’t they use a circle?” she asked Cullen.
“They had one. It poofed when the rite was disrupted, leaving the hexagon. Which is not a stable array for a node.”
“They didn’t drive stakes through Angela Ward’s hands and feet like they did Debrett’s. Or this guy’s, for that matter.” Though she suspected he’d been one of the ones throwing the party, which someone else had
