“May you—oh. You want to check me out. Sure.”
José went to the refrigerator and pulled out the milk. The Rhej moved behind her and rested her hands on Lily’s shoulders, humming “Amazing Grace.”
It took a while, though as usual Lily didn’t feel anything. José had time to mix the corn bread and slide two big pans into the oven before the Rhej spoke. “Your arm is completely healed, aside from a bit of scarring.”
Lily nodded. That much she knew.
“The microscopic damage in your brain is healed, too. And the circulation problems that led to it are gone.”
Grins sprang out around the table. José spun away from the stove with a huge grin. Even Deborah looked happy. Maybe they’d told her what the mantle had been up to before the Lady got it where she wanted it.
“But this is wonderful!” Isen cried. “Lily, you are no longer angry with our Lady? And not surprised at all to learn about this, I think.”
She was a great many things, too many to sort into words. But not surprised. “You’ll tell Rule.”
“Of course.”
The Rhej squeezed her shoulders before releasing her. She came around and sat next to Lily. She had a broad face, the skin a warm, friendly sort of brown, with beautifully arched brows above dark eyes with thick, stubby lashes, and the kind of smile that made you want to smile back. “You want to talk about it, honey? Because I’d surely like to hear.”
“About the Lady, you mean?”
“About her. About whatever you’d like to tell me, but I am always most interested in hearing about the Lady.”
“She spoke to me this time.” Lily paused, surprised that she’d said that. That she wanted to talk about it. “Not in words. I didn’t get words like you Rhejes do. Maybe she spoke the other time, too, but the part of me that . . . that can hear her doesn’t have words, so the rest of me didn’t know about it. But I remember her voice this time. It was a voice,” she added as if the Rhej had disputed this. “Not just a feeling or a knowing.”
“Her voice is beautiful, isn’t it? Like a purring kitten and a thunderstorm all wrapped up together.”
Small and vast, cuddly and shockingly powerful. Yes. All of that at once. A pang shot through her and she looked at Deborah. “She asked me to let her put the mantle into Ruben. She let me know what I was supposed to do for that to happen. So I knew what I was agreeing to. Not in words, I didn’t know anything in words, but I agreed. The Lady needed my permission to put the mantle into me. She needed my permission to take it out, too. So what’s happened to him is partly my fault.”
Deborah frowned. After a moment she said, “Maybe he had to agree, too. If you had to give permission, surely he would have, too.”
“If he did, there’s a good chance he doesn’t know it.” Lily shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about the Lady anymore, but there was one question she couldn’t keep back. “When I said she told me what she’d do, I don’t mean she gave details about the project. How could she turn Ruben into a lupus?”
“Ah. We’ve been discussing that,” Isen said, “at some length. I believe she first had to alter the mantle itself. Cullen said it was changing while you hosted it. I think she was—mapping human neurological paths, perhaps. Or other elements that differ from ours. Second . . . but this is your part of the story to tell.” He nodded at Deborah.
Deborah leaned forward slightly. “Arjenie Fox found something. I think I told you she’d been looking into Ruben’s genealogy for me? Well, after Ruben went through First Change, I guess everyone at Nokolai Clanhome was talking about it. At least Benedict and Arjenie were, and she got the idea to see if any of Ruben’s people could have been lupus. It seems lupi keep records. By combining her search with those records, she found . . . you have a term for it.” She looked at Isen, tossing the explanation back to him.
“A pernato. Yes. One of Ruben’s great-grandmothers on his mother’s side was the granddaughter of a Wythe Rho. One of his grandfathers on his father’s side was descended from a Wythe-Leidolf pernato, who was in turn descended from another Wythe Rho. He had the bloodline on both sides. Very thin, but it was present.”
Lily gave up trying to track the great-greats. “Pernato are the result of recessives on both sides. I get that. But why didn’t you know about him?”
“We knew about his grandfather on one side and his grandmother on the other. But beyond the fourth generation, no pernato are born, so we don’t track our descendents past that point. It’s a matter of magic as well as genealogy, you see. The recessive genes may continue to be passed down, but the power is too diluted for a lupus babe to be born. And, indeed, Ruben Brooks was not born lupus. But he possessed the bloodline.”
And the Lady, presumably, possessed the power.
Deborah chuckled suddenly. “All that fooling around on the side! Plus there’s an elf in the family tree somewhere. Ruben’s forebears were frisky folks. I’m looking forward to teasing him about that.”
The oven timer dinged. Isen pushed back from the table. “No, no, sit down,” he told José, who’d started to rise. “I’ll feed my daughter-to-be.”
Lily looked at Deborah, curious but cautious. “You seem pretty okay with all this. With Ruben turning into a lupus.”
Deborah met her eyes. “He was dying. Now he isn’t.”
“He . . . dying?” Ruben had said there was damage to his heart. That’s why he wasn’t going to head the Unit—the regular Unit—anymore. He hadn’t said dying.
Deborah smiled slightly. “He thinks I don’t know. As if he could keep something like that from me by simply not saying it out loud! But yes, he expected to die, and fairly soon, I think. Now he’s lupus. Lupi don’t get sick, don’t have heart trouble. That was the other reason I came here.” She nodded at Isen’s broad back, bent now to remove the pans of corn bread from the oven. “To find out if that was true. It is.” She rested her folded hands on the table. “ Am I okay with Ruben becoming lupus? There’s a lot about it that scares me, a lot I don’t like or don’t understand or both. But none of it matters as much as this: Ruben was dying. Now he isn’t.”
LILY was served homemade chili and corn bread by a barefoot multimillionaire with a dishtowel stuck in the waist of his jeans. Then Isen called all of the guards who were present but not on duty to join them. The kitchen got crowded. Some of them had to eat standing up, but that didn’t seem to bother them.
It was early for supper, but the food was ready, and lupi were almost always ready for food. Especially when it was steaming hot corn bread and crazy-good chili made with chunks of meaty chuck instead of ground beef.
Deborah seemed to have forgotten she was shy. Probably being immersed in an ongoing crisis helped, but mostly it was Isen. Lily was willing to bet Deborah had relaxed beneath the weight of that gentle, implacable charm within the first five minutes. He kept her talking throughout dinner.
Yesterday had been a rough day for Deborah. After watching her husband turn into a wolf and try to eat her, Drummond had taken her to Headquarters for questioning. When Deborah was finally allowed to return home, her parents had been lying in wait. They thought she should move in with them, and offered to help find a good divorce lawyer. There’d been a fight. No one was speaking to anyone else.
Lily made another mental note: call parents as soon as finished eating. “I hope you’re able to patch things up.”
“My family fights very politely,” Deborah said. “They didn’t actually say terrible things about Ruben, but everything they didn’t put into words shaped what they did say. I, on the other hand, wasn’t feeling polite. I’ll be expected to apologize. I don’t believe I will.”