Seven other men stood in front of their Rho. They were giving Rule the kind of looks a butcher might give a mongrel that's eyeing his roasts… or that a wolf might give another wolf intruding on its territory.
A single wisp of magic, feathery light, tingled across Lily's face. A sorceri, she realized. Cullen had said there was a node in the central field. They often leaked a bit. She tried and failed to think of some way to take advantage of that.
She still had one weapon. A SIG Sauer wasn't proof against a thousand lupi, but she need only train it on one. "You must be Victor Frey," she said, stepping forward. "I'm Lily Yu with the FBI's Magical Crimes Division. You're in a lot of—"
"Stop her," Victor said.
Whatever the mate bond had done for her hearing, it hadn't granted her lupus speed. She got her gun out, but it clattered uselessly to the ground when two guards grabbed her, one on each arm.
Rule jolted but didn't move. "You're putting hands on a Chosen," he said softly, and looked at the Rhej.
"She won't be hurt," the woman said. Though her face remained impassive, trouble edged her voice. "Will she, Victor?"
"Of course not. But she can't be allowed to shoot me." He pushed to his feet and stood stick-straight, but it cost him. She saw the tremor in his hand, the way his face tightened. Yet he found that carrying voice again. "The candidates will kneel."
The seven who'd given Rule such unfriendly looks dropped to their knees. So did Brady, she saw when she twisted in her captors' grip to check.
Rule didn't.
Victor smiled. It made his face a gargoyle's mask of wrinkles. "You will," he said softly, "before we are through." He closed his eyes and said something in Latin. He spoke the words three times.
Lily waited, her heart trying to knock its way through her chest. They were gambling everything on the mate bond, the capricious, do-what-it-wants bond she'd never understood, much less controlled. "Lady," she whispered, "if you're around, if you're in charge of any of this, help him. Help him."
The Rho held out his hands, palms forward as if he were pushing something. He swayed. One of the kneeling men made a small sound, maybe of astonishment. Another toppled over in a silent heap.
And Rule… like the Rho, he swayed. His eyes were wide, unseeing, his hands limp at his sides.
And the power wind blew in.
THIRTY-TWO
NOT a wind, Lily thought in the first split second as magic gusted across her face, prickled up her nose, and burned her hands.
A gale. Stronger than the first one, horribly strong.
Reality splintered. Here—here—here—everywhere the vortex of the Change seized men and spun them into other shapes. Screams sounded. One of Lily's guards dropped his hands or lost them to the Change.
It was all she needed. Her elbow rocked into the other guard's ribs, distracting him from his battle with the Change. He howled and bent, and reality splintered even as she spun away, diving for a rifle dropped by one of Benedict's guards.
She got her hands on the rifle, rolled, and flowed to her feet.
Wolves. Wolves everywhere, with a scattering of women uncertainly upright in the sea of fur. None near her were two-legged except the Rhej, who stood motionless, her eyes closed and her lips moving; the Rho, equally unmoving where he lay on the ground, unconscious or dead, his skin blooming with dark lesions… and Rule.
Rule was on his knees as Victor had wanted, his head thrown back, his face contorted. Screaming. And bleeding. Even as she stared, more blood sprang out in drops on his skin like sweat.
She threw herself into motion only to jerk to a halt, nearly falling. Benedict's hand had closed over her arm and stopped her. She rounded on him and would have hit him—or tried to—if that hand had been free instead of full of rifle.
That flashback to sanity brought with it a full-fledged thought: his hand had stopped her. Benedict wasn't wolf anymore, but he had been. His clothes were gone. How could he have Changed back so quickly?
"No!" he shouted over the howling. "You can't touch him now. The mantle has him."
The power wind still rushed over her skin, but silently. The howling came from lupus throats—a dozen, two dozen, more. As Rule fought some terrible internal battle, Leidolf howled.
"Why doesn't he Change?" she cried.
Benedict's voice was hoarse. "He can't."
The Rhej moved. Only four steps, but each taken with such ponderous care she might have been treading quicksand or crossing a minefield. She knelt between Rule and the prostrate Rho, stretched out her arm, and seized Victor's hand. With her other hand she gripped Rule's shoulder.
Lily jolted, instinctively wanting no one to touch Rule if she couldn't, but Benedict's grip held her fast. The Rhej's eyes rolled back. She held there, motionless in the dead grass, a white-robed bridge between the two men—one unconscious at best, the other…
Rule stopped screaming. Slowly he straightened, swaying, though he remained on his knees. The blood drops began to dry on his skin. His eyes were open but it was obvious he saw nothing as tremors snaked up his spine in quick succession. The Rhej released him.
Growls rumbled up from a throat far too close. Her head swung. Most of the wolves howled or watched the tableau of Rule, the Rhej, and their Rho, but two didn't. Two gray-black wolves the size of small ponies watched them, ears flat, heads lowered, hackles raised. Then another one moved, this one with reddish fur, and smaller—Great Dane instead of Shetland. She shouldered the rifle.
"Don't shoot the little one," Benedict said, his own rifle ready. "It's Cullen."
Suddenly the air lost its rush of power and was just air, cold and still. Then the magic returned, but quieter now, brushing her skin in an ebbing rhythm until it tickled her face like dandelion fluff.
The howling died, but the growling increased as more wolves focused on her and Benedict and the red wolf standing between them and the rest. The ground was littered with clothing. Shoes, jeans, slacks, belts, shirts—all had fallen to the ground when the form they belonged to whistled into elsewhere and came back reshaped.
Rule slumped forward suddenly, catching himself with one hand so that he didn't quite land on his face in the dirt. But that arm trembled, and his chest heaved as if he'd run for miles and miles.
"Goddamn it." She couldn't go to him, not with wolves surrounding them, wolves with little that was human shining in their dark eyes. Dozens now watched her and Benedict with hackles raised, their growls a rumbling chorus.
"Leidolf!Heliedtoyou!"
A woman's voice, rich and loud: the Rhej. Lily spared her the barest flick of a glance. The woman had moved closer to Victor, rolling him onto his back. She held his hand in both of hers as she spoke. "Your Rho lied. He didn't let the mantle choose. He tried to force it on Rule Turner, and it cost him. Look at Victor. Smell him. Your Rho has the cancer, and he damn near killed himself tryin' to find a legal way to kill someone he'd granted guest rights. He'd die now, be dead in seconds, if I let go of him. And I will let go if you attack our guests. I will let go, and the Rho will die."
Some of the growling faded. Not all.
"Women," the Rhej called, "your brothers know you. Pet them, touch them, help them remember who they are." She looked at Lily, and her voice dropped. "Go to your man. Move slow, but go to him. Get him on his feet. He's got the heir's portion now. He was winnin' the fight till the node burst open and damn near the whole mantle was just sucked right up into him. I forced most of it back, but he's heir. Leidolf won't like that, but they have to feel it, smell it on him."
Lily did fine on the "go to him" part, not so well on moving slowly. But she made it without inciting a lupus riot, knelt, and got her free arm around Rule.