TWENTY-SEVEN
COBB had listed Alex—his Lu Nuncio—as his next of kin. That’s the only reason Rule had found out, the only reason Lily knew about Cobb’s death now. No one had called her. No one called her because it wasn’t her case—but still, Croft should have let her know. Someone should have let her know.
Lily simmered on that, then twisted so she could reach her purse on the floor. She could call Sjorensen. The young agent would give her something, she was sure.
“No,” Nettie said clearly.
“What do you mean, no?”
“You’re not working now. You’re resting.”
“Like hell.” Lily found her phone, pulled it out.
“You gave me your word.”
Lily clamped down hard on a number of things she wanted to say. “Resting is not restful.”
“Then you need to learn how to do it differently.”
She wanted to throw something. It was childish, it was stupid, and only the ghostly remembered image of her mother’s disapproving face kept Lily from doing it anyway. Which was also infuriating.
Rule was talking to Alex about Cobb’s burial, which was not the same as the ceremony—the firnam—she’d been invited to take part in. Burials were generally a private affair, attended only by the deceased’s closest family. Both firnam and burial would have to wait, though—one for the body to be released. The other for Lily to be able to fly back to North Carolina.
Had Rule known this would happen? Expected it?
Maybe. Cobb had been on suicide watch. That was standard procedure with a lupus prisoner and one reason his cell had lacked so much as a cot. Lily hadn’t known how easily a lupus could kill himself when denied access to any of the tools a human would need to do the job.
Rule had known. He must have.
She thought she understood. If Rule had granted Cobb’s request but delayed acting on it, Cobb would have waited for someone to come give him the honorable death he longed for. He would have waited forever, because Rule couldn’t get anyone in to do it without using Lily. He would have gone mad waiting.
Instead, with his silence Rule had left a door open for Cobb. Rule believed Cobb had killed due to some sudden, uncontrollable defect, that he wasn’t responsible. In his eyes, Cobb wasn’t to blame and deserved the grace of an honorable death. When Cobb took his own life without his Rho’s permission, he lost that.
Lily looked at her lover. Her mate. Her friend. Weariness and worry grooved furrows along his mouth as he listened to whatever Alex was telling him. She reached for his free hand.
His eyes flashed to hers. She saw surprise there, a question. Had he expected her to be angry when she realized he could have prevented Cobb’s death? Probably. She’d been angry a lot lately. Lily squeezed his hand and closed her eyes.
She was not dealing with this well. Any of it. Being injured, being taken off a case that mattered, being unable to do … anything. Any damned thing. Someone had nearly killed Ruben. Someone had killed LeBron. Cobb had killed himself. And she couldn’t do a damned thing about any it.
With her eyes closed there was just the quiet murmur of Rule’s voice, the red tide of her own anger … and the sick feeling in her gut, a roiling wrongness.
Lily had dreamed last night, but not of Helen. Of Sarah.
She and Sarah had been best friends. They’d teamed up in kindergarten, and stayed glued together up through third grade … when they’d done one last cool thing together. They’d played hooky.
They’d been snatched by a monster.
That monster had had a human face and drove a Buick with a big trunk. That’s where he’d put them, in the trunk. She and Sarah had gone to the beach, just the two of them. It had been their big adventure, one they’d planned carefully because it wouldn’t be at all fun to get caught. They’d both been good kids. Sarah had possessed a streak of mischief Lily lacked, but neither of them had cut school before.
Lily never did it again. Sarah never did anything again.
The monster had had a name, a perfectly ordinary name: George Anderson. George Anderson had driven around for hours with them in that big trunk, waiting for dark. Once it was dark enough to hide what he did, he’d carried them into his house, one at a time. Sarah had been a blue-eyed blonde, a pretty, pink and white little girl. George Anderson had raped her first. Sarah kept crying and crying, so he choked her to make her stop. He’d been surprised when she died, flustered, like a kid sneaking cookies who accidentally broke the cookie jar. Whoops.
It was a cop who saved Lily. He’d broken down George Anderson’s front door. A jogger had seen the monster put them in his trunk and had even managed to get the Buick’s license number. She’d called the police. But this was before cell phones, the Internet, Amber Alerts. Everything had taken time. Too much time for Sarah.
They called it survivor guilt. Lily understood the urge to tag something, label it, claim control by naming it. But that particular label had never helped. This roiling, murky wrongness was so much more than guilt. It was shame and terror and fury and loss, a world and a self turned equally strange and terrible.
Between one step and the next, the world could upend itself. Lily had known that since she was eight, but she hadn’t felt like this in so long. So long.
It wasn’t hard to see why she felt it now. She wanted desperately for the feeling to go away, but it wouldn’t. Not all at once. That was the other thing she knew: it took time. Her arm wouldn’t heal right away. Her self wouldn’t, either.
But she wasn’t eight years old anymore. And LeBron hadn’t died because either of them broke the rules. He’d died because someone wanted Lily dead … and like Rule had said, LeBron had stopped the monster the only way he could.
Beneath her closed eyelids, Lily’s eyes burned with salt, with blood transmuted to tears. And that was okay.
MOST Nokolai did not live at Clanhome, but they had to be welcomed and sheltered when they did visit. There were two barracks-style dormitories on the south side of the meeting field, each with a communal kitchen, communal showers, and multiple bathrooms. Together, they could house around four hundred lupi.
One of the dorm buildings was also used year-round as a group home for a few elderly clan who didn’t want to live alone, and—when needed—for those who could no longer care for themselves. Even lupi eventually succumbed to the malfunctions and indignities of old age, but for them, the decline tended to be sudden and swift. An elderly lupus might be riding his Harley one week, bedridden the next, and dead the third.
Out-clan guests were rarer, but they also had to be accommodated. Two small cottages near the barracks were intended for out-clan guests. Often, though, they were used by clan, with the understanding that they might have to vacate the cottage if it was needed for a guest. No point in leaving them empty.
Lily had assumed that she and Rule would stay in one of the cottages. She blamed the drugs for that mistake.
Naturally, Rule’s father wanted them to stay with him. Naturally, Rule wanted to stay there, too. It’s where he’d grown up. It’s where Toby stayed when he was at Clanhome. And there was plenty of room, even with Arjenie Fox in residence. Isen’s sprawling home had lots of bedrooms … and she did not want to stay in any of them.
Why not? She didn’t know. Neither she nor Rule would have to cook or clean, so while she was there she could focus on what she needed to do, start pulling together some of the threads their enemy had left dangling … whoever that enemy might be. Plus there were guards stationed around the house day and night, so Rule wouldn’t be worried about her.
Staying with Isen made sense. But it bothered her, which meant she wasn’t making sense, and she hated that.