Showers were out. Washing her hair by herself was out. She could brush her teeth left-handed, but first she had to get the toothpaste on the toothbrush. She did still have a right hand, so she managed that, but she had to do it differently.
Lily had experienced some of this last year, but it had been her left shoulder, not her right, and the damage hadn’t been nearly as bad. Maybe what was getting to her was not knowing how much function she’d regain.
With one finger Lily tapped in her password and waited for the computer to offer her the file she wanted. Everything had to be done differently, and she kept forgetting to allow for that. Last night, when she decided to send Jeff to D.C. with a written report, she’d forgotten that she couldn’t type it. She ended up dictating it to Cynna… . who was acting as her chauffeur as well. Lily could drive one-handed, but she had to admit that would be stupid. Especially since she’d taken half a pain pill earlier, before Nettie arrived.
Nettie would be cleaning Lily’s wound and changing the dressing on it every morning for a week or so. Having experienced that in the hospital, Lily hadn’t tried to go without some kind of chemical buffer.
Lily glanced in the side mirror. They were being tailed by a white sedan slightly newer than Lily’s personal vehicle. She knew both the men in the car. Rule had insisted on guards. Lily considered an attack highly unlikely—Friar would have to be able to track her magically, and tracking a moving target was extremely hard if you weren’t a Finder. So, she was told, was Listening; chances were Friar couldn’t eavesdrop on them in motion. To be sure, Cullen had given her a charm that was supposed to be putting out magical static.
So she had the charm and the guards for just in case. She’d told Rule he could guard her, after all, and Cynna would be with her. Cynna was trained and armed, but she was also pregnant—and potentially a target. They didn’t know what Friar knew and what he didn’t. They didn’t know how he chose his targets, whether he was guided by her or had some other metric.
Rule couldn’t do the guarding himself. He and Benedict and Isen were working on details for tomorrow’s meeting. Cullen was busy making charms for that meeting. And Arjenie was doing what she did best: research.
“So what are you hoping to learn from Mariah Friar about her dad?” Cynna asked.
“First, if she had any inkling about his clairaudience. Second, dates.” Lily skimmed the report she’d filed last April, looking for the transcript of her interview with Friar’s estranged daughter. “We might get more, but I’m hoping for dates. Specifically, the date when Friar suddenly acquired shields. Mariah said he was gone for a while, then bam! When he turned up again he had these handy-dandy shields. Or maybe it’s a single shield. I didn’t get a date from her at the time.” Should have. Didn’t think of it.
“And Mariah knows about shields because … ?”
“I didn’t tell you about that?” Cynna had been gone when Lily met Mariah Friar in the course of an investigation. Way gone. She’d been kidnapped into another realm. “Mariah’s an empath. Completely unblocked.”
“Aw … that’s rough. Nearly as bad as having Friar for a father.”
True. “It’s important to her to keep her Gift secret.”
“Sure, I can see that. What will the date Friar got shielded tell us?”
“It suggests that’s when she recruited him. It’s probably when he became a Listener, too. If he had a clairaudience Gift before that, Mariah wasn’t aware of it. I think she would have been, considering her Gift. She was wary of him, kept track of him until she moved out.”
“You can’t turn a null into a Gifted.”
“We don’t know what an Old One can do.”
Cynna was silent a moment. “You think Friar left our realm to go see her?”
“I sure as hell hope he left our realm. I’d hate to think someone here on Earth could turn a null or a near-null into the strongest Listener on the planet.”
“Me, too. But what about Dya? How does she fit? The G.B.—”
“G.B.?”
“Great Bitch. She doesn’t hold that contract Dya is bound by. Some elf bigwig does.”
“Sidhe. We don’t know if he’s an elf, just that he’s a sidhe lord of some sort.” Lily had tried to ask Arjenie more questions about Dya’s lord this morning … and gotten nothing. Nada. Zilch . It was intensely frustrating. “So maybe Friar wasn’t contacted by the Great Bitch directly. Maybe this mysterious sidhe lord showed up here and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Sidhe lords can cross into our realm. I’m guessing one of them could take Friar traveling with him if he wanted to.”
“You think this sidhe lord is hooked up with her and brought Friar to her?”
“Maybe.” This morning Lily wasn’t sure of her earlier reasoning. Was the fact that Friar couldn’t Listen at Clanhome reason enough to implicate the Great Bitch? There could be other explanations. Just because she couldn’t come up with one didn’t mean it didn’t exist. She couldn’t explain color televisions, either. Or how her own Gift worked.
TURN RIGHT AT THE NEXT INTERSECTION, an automated voice said.
“You think it knows what it’s talking about?” Cynna said, slowing as they approached a stop sign marking an intersection with another winding mountain road.
“Yes. Ah … can I ask you something?”
“When people say that, they always mean ‘ask something personal.’ But sure. Shoot.”
“There’s a mental component to spellcasting, right?”
“Of course. You know that.”
“What I was wondering … is there an emotional component, too?”
Cynna turned onto the other road and gave Lily a look she couldn’t read. “You can’t separate mental and emotional into neat little boxes. Emotions affect what you think. What you think affects your emotions. It’s all tied together.”
“So guilt might interfere with you casting a spell?”
“Maybe you should tell me what you really want to know.”
Lily looked down and shut her laptop. “I, uh, dreamed about Helen last night.”
“The nutty telepath who tried to open the hellgate?”
“Yeah.” The investigation that led to Helen and the Azá and Lily’s first encounter with both Rule and the Great Bitch had happened before Lily met Cynna, but Cynna knew the basics. “I’ve been dreaming about her lately, generally after a session with Sam. I dreamed about her last night, after mindspeaking Arjenie, and I couldn’t mindspeak at all this morning.”
“You feel guilty for killing Helen.”
“No. I didn’t have a lot of choice about that—not unless I was willing to let her kill me, Rule, and a bunch of other people, then let a godawful lot of demons into our world.” Lily bent and put the laptop on the floor. It was awkward to do it one-handed. Everything was awkward. Especially this conversation. “Never mind.”
“Uh-uh. You don’t get to stop now. Quit thinking so much. When you dreamed about Helen, what did you feel?”
“While I was dreaming?” Lily flashed back to the dream. “Rage. I wanted her dead. She was going to kill Rule. She’d killed his brother and she was going to kill him, and I wanted her dead.”
“You didn’t feel guilty in the dream?”
“No.” She’d felt angry. Killing mad. She wasn’t sure anymore if she’d felt that way last year when she actually killed Helen. Was the dream making her face a truth she didn’t like? Or had it distorted the truth, replacing her real memory with a dream version?
“How about after you woke up? How did you feel then?”
She’d felt the way she always did after a Helen dream. Drained. Tainted. Ugly. “Not good. Not angry. More like … smeared.”