First Rule asked the guards to take up positions farther from the door. Clearly he didn’t want them overhearing. By the time he returned and took her hand, Lily’s curiosity would have kept her awake even without the caffeine.
Even after sending the guards out of earshot, Rule kept his voice low. “I delayed telling you at Benedict’s request. This event is intensely personal, but it is also clan business.” He paused. “The Lady has Chosen for Benedict.”
“Has … you mean now? Again?” Lily knew almost nothing about Benedict’s Chosen, save that Claire had died many years ago and Benedict had gone half mad with grief.
He nodded. “That itself is a mystery. Never has a lupus been gifted twice with a Chosen. Nor am I aware of a time when a single clan held two Chosens. But the manner of her arrival in his life is a puzzle, also.”
There was a time for questions, and a time to let your witness—or your friend and lover and bonded mate—talk. Lily didn’t interrupt. She didn’t make notes, either. Her fingers twitched a couple times, but it was the fingers on her right hand. Which she couldn’t use, dammit.
Didn’t matter right now, though. You didn’t write down anything about the mate bond. Ever.
So she lined her questions up mentally. When he finished, she hit the first one. “She was at Friar’s two nights ago, then at Clanhome last night. At Clanhome she had some kind of potions with her, but by the time Benedict spotted her, the vials were empty. She says one of them was designed to conceal her scent. She won’t say what the other one did. Cullen’s checking the vials, I guess?”
“He will. Isen wanted him to prepare a truth charm first.”
“Did she have potions with her at Friar’s?”
“I don’t know. Benedict didn’t search her that night.”
“No, but he was wolf at the time, right? What did he smell?”
“I don’t know,” Rule repeated, and spread his hands. “I didn’t ask. I don’t think Isen did, either. I begin to think we should have told you earlier.”
“Of course you should. Benedict’s having a hard time with this?”
“Had she not shown up again, I don’t know what would have happened. He was refusing to look for her. He’s not himself, not thinking clearly.”
“Hmm. Well, if he sniffs the containers the potions were in, maybe he could tell if he’d smelled anything like them the night before, at Friar’s. Might be good to know if she was delivering potions there, too. Or if she got them there.”
“I suspect he could.” Rule shook his head. “Benedict is too distracted to have thought of this, but Isen or I should have.”
Lily suspected the lupi were more focused on the Lady aspect of this business than she was. That would be of absorbing importance to them. It probably was important, too, but she had a snowball’s chance in hell of figuring out what the Lady had in mind, so she ignored that in favor of what she might be able to figure out. “You’ve been distracted yourself, and Isen is smart as hell, but he’s not a cop.” She drummed her fingers on her leg. “They’ve persuaded her to stay at Clanhome by threatening to tell the cops about her.”
“Yes. They hope to learn more about her, of course, but also Isen wants to keep her near Benedict. You know what can happen if the bond is stretched beyond its limits.”
She damned sure did, and the bond was at its most restrictive when it was new. “Benedict really isn’t thinking straight. She has to be told.”
“If anyone can move my stubborn brother off whatever high ground he thinks he’s defending, it’s our father.”
“True.” Lily considered the nature of the threat Isen had used to keep the intruder at Clanhome. Even people who weren’t bad guys could be wary of involving the police, but this woman’s aversion seemed excessive. She was up to something. Of course, sneaking onto both Friar’s and Nokolai’s property already suggested that. “She claimed that Friar is clairaudient?”
“She was quite definite about it, but wouldn’t say how she knew.”
“Hmm.” Lily had long suspected Friar had a Gift of some sort, but so far she’d been unable to touch him and find out. “That’s a rare Gift, and a hard one to train, I’m told. Go over what they know about her again.”
“According to Isen, she looks to be around thirty. She wears glasses. She has a physical impediment of some sort. Her hair is red, long, and curly. She seems to know a lot about lupi, or at least about Nokolai. Cullen’s convinced she’s part-sidhe. Her Gift allows her to hide from others’ perceptions. It doesn’t affect Benedict, of course—”
“Stop there. I don’t get that.”
“The mate bond supersedes all other magic.” Rule smiled and ran his thumb along the side of her hand. “When we first met, it worried you that you couldn’t feel my magic when we touched. You still don’t. Your Gift doesn’t work on me.”
True, though she hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms. “So Benedict’s immune, and that’s why he’s guarding her. She can’t play mind tricks on him. Overusing her Gift makes her pass out?”
He nodded. “So she said, and she did indeed pass out. Nettie examined her and told them not to try to wake her. She called it a natural recuperative trance similar to being in sleep.”
“I take it she and Benedict haven’t, ah, completed the bond yet.” With sex, she meant. The mate bond was cemented the first time the bonded pair had sex—which they’d be really, deeply, wanting to do. “Not with her passed out.”
“I don’t think so, but she’s awake now. When I spoke to Benedict about an hour ago, she was in the shower. Isen plans to resume questioning her over dinner.” Rule glanced at his watch. “Which, on that coast, will be happening soon.”
“Okay, let’s move to impressions—Cullen’s, Benedict’s, Isen’s.”
“I didn’t talk to Benedict long, and didn’t ask for his impression of her. But he thinks she knows more about us than she should. As for Cullen … mostly, he’s excited.”
About the chance to learn new magical stuff, no doubt. “He would be.”
“He’s also suspicious of her motives. That’s typical, if illogical. Obviously she’s not an enemy.”
“Obviously, we don’t know that yet.”
“She’s Lady-touched, Lily. She might be misguided or coerced, so they are being careful. But she can’t be a true enemy.”
“According to you, I’m Lady-touched, too, and I damn near arrested you for murder before I figured things out.”
He smiled. “But you didn’t. Isen called her oddly innocent. Not naïve or ignorant. Innocent. I’m not sure what he means by that.”
Lily wasn’t either. But she was curious. Intensely so. For so long she’d been it, the only one who knew what a mate bond felt like. The only Chosen.
Not literally true, she corrected herself. There was a Chosen in Africa, a member of Mondoyo clan. Lily had never met or spoken to her. Neither had most of the lupi, because the woman didn’t travel or speak English. There’d been a Cynyr Chosen, but that was in Wales, and she’d died at the age of a hundred and three before Lily met Rule.
But other than Lily, there hadn’t been a Chosen in North America since Benedict’s first Chosen died. Now he had another one.
“Okay, so they don’t know her name or where she’s from,” she said, ticking off the obvious. “But you said they’d found her car, so it shouldn’t be hard to—”
“No, we do know her name. Sorry. I thought I told you.” Rule shook his head. “Maybe I caught a touch of avoidance from Benedict. He doesn’t refer to her by name, only as ‘she’ or his charge. It’s an unusual name. Arjenie Fox.”