“Cullen,” the woman said in a low, soft voice, “I want you to look at that passenger of hers. Look real close and careful.”
Rule frowned. “What is it?”
The Rhej shook her head without replying. Cullen slipped out of his chair and knelt on one knee beside Lily. “Push away from the table so I can see.”
“I can’t . . .” But the Rhej let go of Lily’s hands so she could. She scooted her chair back and tried not to fidget while Cullen moved in front of her and stared intently at her abdomen. After a bit he frowned. He started muttering under his breath—it sounded like an unholy mix of Hawaiian and Norwegian—while he sketched signs in the air. He put his palms together as if he were praying, then drew them apart slowly, stopping when they framed about twenty inches of space.
He moved that space slowly up to Lily’s neck, peering at it intently for several moments, then shifted so he could move behind Lily, holding his hands steady. She couldn’t see what he did for several way-too-long moments. Her heart pounded.
Finally he moved back in front of her. His hands were only about ten inches apart now. He dragged those ten inches of empty space back down her trunk, pausing now and then, passing her stomach to study her pelvis. He snapped his fingers, releasing what Lily guessed was a magnifying spell.
Slowly he stood. “That . . . doesn’t make sense.”
“What did you see?” the Rhej asked.
“Roots. That’s what they look like, tiny tendrils finer than a hair, too small to see without magnification. I found seven of them. They go from the mantle into her spinal cord. Four of them seem to stay there. Three of them . . .” He stopped, looked at Lily, then at Rule. “Three extend through the brain stem to the cerebellum and are tangled up in her brain.”
“In my brain?” Lily’s voice came out too high. “The mantle’s doing something to me? It shouldn’t be able to. My Gift wouldn’t let it.”
Rule clasped her hand tightly. “Even without your Gift, it shouldn’t be doing that. Mantles don’t root in their holder. They don’t work that way.” He looked sharply over his shoulder at Cullen. “You’ve never seen that with another mantle.”
Cullen shook his head. He looked from Lily to Rule and back. Not at their faces, but their middles, as if he were comparing Rule’s mantles to the one Lily harbored.
“I’m sorry,” the Rhej said. “I can’t say what’s going on, but the mantle seems to be . . . changin’ things in your body. Not in a way that makes sense to me. Not in a way that’s good for you.”
“Is it trying to make me lupi?” Lily’s voice was still too high. She couldn’t make it sound normal.
The Rhej shook her head slowly, her eyebrows drawn in a hard frown. “I don’t know what it’s doin’. Oh, it’s healing that arm of yours—that’s part of it—but the rest . . . maybe it is tryin’ to turn you lupi and can’t, but I’ve seen plenty of youngsters right close to First Change. There are neurological changes that occur then. But the changes I sense in you aren’t what I sensed then. Maybe it’s tryin’ to heal you in a way your system isn’t set up for. I don’t know.”
She met Lily’s eyes. Her gaze was steady, but Lily saw trouble in those dark eyes. “But whatever the mantle’s doin’, it’s not good for you. You’ve had two mini-strokes in the last few days. The mantle’s healing that damage, but what else it’s doin’ . . . I don’t have the medical words to describe that, but you need to get it out of you and where it belongs. You need to do that real soon.”
“It’s not all one way,” Cullen said.
“What?” Lily craned her head to look up at him. “What do you mean?”
He gestured at her stomach. “The Wythe mantle is still purple, but it’s the wrong shade of purple. It may be doing something to you, but you’re doing something to it, too.”
SIXTEEN
LILY reached the conference room she and Mullins were using a little after two thirty. Craig drove her, not Cullen. That pissed her off. She didn’t know Craig well and hated the idea of having one of her headache fits in front of him. But Cullen needed to keep his afternoon free to go take a look at the dagger, and that was exactly what she wanted him to do. She had no damn reason to be angry.
Maybe her anger wasn’t about Cullen.
She shoved the door open. Mullins looked up from a scatter of papers. “About time you got back.”
The air was redolent with hamburger and onions. Lily could see the remains of Mullins’s lunch pushed to one end of the table. She headed for the coffeepot. “You ever get in to see a doctor exactly on time?”
“Guess not. I want to take the secretary first.”
“Nanette Beresford? Sure.” Lily poured a cup of coffee.
The Rhej hadn’t told her to avoid caffeine. She’d said Lily should “avoid exertion.” No running. No late nights. Not that the healer knew for certain those things would hurt Lily. She was just guessing.
Mini-strokes. Dear God.
“The doctor gave you a green light?”
“I’m supposed to avoid strenuous exercise.”
“Guess you’d better not chase me round the table, then. You were going to talk to your expert. Find out anything useful?”
“Parrott must be having his charm renewed every four weeks at the very least. Whether or not it does what he says, it would need renewal at least that often.”
He grunted. “Doesn’t tell us much. You sure you’re okay? You look like crap.”
“Headache. It won’t interfere with the job.” Except that her head didn’t hurt right now, and it would interfere. She was lying and would keep on lying. She couldn’t tell anyone about mantles, and she didn’t see any way of explaining that a healer considered her life in danger without mentioning why. If she tried, she’d be pulled from the investigation and stuck in a hospital and they’d run tests, which wouldn’t help because the doctors couldn’t fix the mantle even if they knew about it.
She poured herself some coffee. Her arm shook ever so slightly. “We need to find out who made Parrott’s charm. Who’s renewing it. Maybe he’s doing it himself, maybe he knows a really good practitioner—because it would take a real expert to make a strong, sophisticated charm like that.” She sipped. It was this morning’s brew, old and bitter. “Someone who can make a charm like that might be able to make a cursed dagger, too.”
“Huh.” He made a note on the paper in front of him. “I’ll pass that on to Al. Worth looking into. Here’s who we still need to talk to.” He read a list of names.
Lily listened and sipped at the bitter sludge in her cup and tried so damn hard to think about the case, and not about ticking time bombs and Old Ones who used you for their own purposes and didn’t care if it killed you or not. Not about Rule and the wild fear in his eyes, or how many people her dying would hurt, or how in the hell she could keep that from happening.
She went to get their first witness for the afternoon. And managed to focus on the case, on what the senator’s secretary had to say, fairly well. But as soon as the interview was over, her attention splintered as needs nudged and shoved and yelled inside her. As she asked Nan to send in the next staffer—a young man with the interesting name of Kemo Maddon—one of those needs reared up and spoke clearly.
She wanted her mother.
How could she not smile at that thought? It was funny, it really was. Lily’s mother drove her crazy, but she wanted her, wanted to be home, back in San Diego, maybe back in her narrow childhood bed, with the covers drawn up and her mother fussing at her.