“You understand enough now?”
“No, but that’s probably all you can help me with. Rule had the right idea. I’m going for a run.”
LILY left Rule a text plus a written note on the pillow in case the text didn’t reach him. Then she told LeBron she’d be downstairs in the hotel gym. Much as she preferred to run outside, it was after ten and she could be sensible when she had to. Muggers were so damned distracting.
Telling LeBron didn’t work out like she’d intended. He went with her. He apologized, but Rule had told him to guard her, not their room, so that’s what he had to do. The hotel gym didn’t work out, either. There was only one treadmill, and it had an OUT OF ORDER sign.
She looked at LeBron when she saw that. “I tried. You’re witness to that. I tried to do this the cautious way.”
LeBron grinned. “We’re still going to run, then.” Clearly he liked the idea.
She grimaced at the “we,” but didn’t argue. He’d go with her whether she agreed to it or not. On the upside—she could be a glass-half-full person if she tried, dammit—LeBron was six-five and bodybuilder buff. Having him along ought to cut down on the risk of an unpleasant interruption. “I’ll check with the concierge to map out a route, but yeah, I still need a run. You could probably use one, too, after being cooped up so much.” She considered a moment. “I’m going to head back upstairs first and get my weapon. I’ve got a tidy little pancake holster that lets my clutch piece ride at the small of my back. You aren’t carrying, are you?” He was wearing cutoffs with a tank. Not many options for concealed carry.
He looked sheepish. “I didn’t think of it.”
LeBron shared the usual lupi distaste for guns. He was receiving weapons training, but she suspected guns still seemed foreign to him. “You probably don’t have a permit for it here, anyway. You can follow a little behind me, okay? I need to think about some stuff.”
“I hate to argue, but a black man running after a woman? In the South?” He shook his head. “I’d just as soon not get the local boys in blue all excited.”
She should have thought of that. “I’m not used to this.”
“After a while, you’ll forget I’m there,” he assured her.
DOWNTOWN Nashville was downright pretty. Streets and sidewalks gleamed wetly in the glow of streetlights, tail-lights, and headlights. It was almost too clean for an urban center and far from deserted, with enough nightlife to bring people downtown even on weeknights.
The air was muggy with the brassy taste of pollution. By the time she and LeBron reached a spot called Victory Park, Lily’s skin was already filmed with a light sweat.
Lily did not forget that a ridiculously tall hunk was running beside her. At first she made conversation—they weren’t running fast, so she had enough breath, and naturally LeBron wasn’t winded. That was the downside of running with a lupus. You couldn’t measure yourself against them at all. He had pointed out it would be harder to forget his presence if he was talking to her.
True. But now that she had what she wanted, she didn’t want it anymore. Her thoughts made for uncomfortable company.
Victory Park wasn’t what Lily would call a real park. It was more like an oversized, paved veranda for some sort of public building to the north. Trees sprouted from their designated strips of dirt, and a large water feature sprouted a tall spray. She and LeBron ran up some steps—good for the quads—and veered right, their feet slapping wet pavers as they headed toward the Tennessee Capitol Building on the other side of Charlotte Avenue.
That was a thoroughly Greek structure with a plethora of columns and a single round tower giving the sky the finger. Lights trained on the building burnished the stone to soft gold. The grounds surrounding it were broad and dark and higher than street level, so it seemed to loom over them as they ran alongside it on Charlotte. No foot traffic here, except for them. Not many cars.
Rule must have known Cobb might ask for final mercy. All this time, he must have known it could happen. And he hadn’t told her.
Lily’s muscles had warmed up by now. She ran easily, her body loose. She tried to focus on that, on the sensations in her calves and thighs, on keeping her elbows in and her shoulders back. For a little while, she didn’t think.
The route the concierge had suggested took them past the Capitol building, past the state library, then turned onto James Robertson Parkway, which curved in a large half circle around the buildings. They’d follow it to Fifth Avenue, take a right, and run along past the Nashville Auditorium and on back to Deadrick, which would return them to the hotel.
They swung onto the sidewalk flanking the Parkway, and LeBron dropped back a couple of paces. He didn’t need to—the sidewalk broadened here. Maybe there were lots of pedestrians in the day, when the government offices were open. Not now. They had it to themselves. On the left, headlights flashed and passed, flashed and passed. On the right was a grassy embankment studded by trees that ended in a parking lot. A sparse sprinkling of cars suggested that a few government employees were working really late.
LeBron stayed behind her, but on her left, closer to the highway. If she’d thought there was a real threat, she’d have placed him on her right. With his night vision, he could pick out any lurkers in the deep shadows beneath the trees a lot better than she could.
Was his choice of highway-side instinct? Did cars and the people in them seem more of a danger to a part-time wolf than the darker, unpopulated stretch of grass and trees?
Lupi were human-like or human-plus, but they were not plain old human. Their default settings were different. They doted on babies. They never let themselves get too hungry. They were subject to the Change, the fury, and a nasty form of late-life cancer. They were promiscuous and beautiful and deeply, irrationally protective of women.
They kept secrets.
Rule’s tendency to keep things to himself had tripped them up more than once. He tried, but sometimes he simply didn’t notice he was keeping things from her, no more than she’d notice she hadn’t commented on her menses lately. Was his silence this time merely habit? Had it just not occurred to him to tell her he might be asked to kill his clansman?
How could it not? When you got down to it, Rule had used her to gain access to Cobb, knowing what Cobb was likely to ask of his Rho. Knowing—he had to know!—she could not allow him to kill the man. Maybe she’d used him, too, but he could have said, No, I’m not going to use my position as Rho to get my clansman to confess. She might not have liked it, but she would have understood. He had the right to refuse to help in that way.
He hadn’t given her a chance to refuse. And that was not like him.
Rule insisted the Leidolf mantle didn’t affect him. Lily was growing more and more sure that it did … because if she was wrong, he’d knowingly withheld information so he could use her.
Somewhere to the north and east he was running, too, seeking the surcease of the physical. She knew he’d been pulled by opposing needs—his duty and hers. In the end, he’d backed away from his duty for her sake, and maybe that should make everything okay.
It didn’t. It mattered. It meant a lot, but it wasn’t enough. Not when she felt separated from him by more than eight or nine miles of city.
He needed to see that the mantle was affecting him. She didn’t know how to make that happen, but somehow she had to.
Lily picked up the pace. LeBron kept up easily. She pushed herself, craving the burn, knowing he’d have no trouble with any pace she could set. A less confident person could get a complex, going running with—