“Lia!” Sebastian grabbed me by the upper arms, tightly enough to remind me of just how much brute strength that polished linen was hiding. “Listen to me! The only report from Cyrus I received said his quarry was hiding somewhere in Tartarus. But there are four hundred miles of tunnels. We could search for weeks and never find them!”
“So what are you saying? We just sit here and hope for the best?” Because that so wasn’t happening.
“No, we must go after him.”
That stopped me. “We? As in…”
“You and I.”
“But you’re bardric. You can’t put yourself—”
The skin along his jaw stretched white over the bone. “What I cannot do is let my brother die at the hand of a monster!”
“Then send someone else!”
“And who would you suggest? Cyrus is vargulf—dead, as far as the clan is concerned! I cannot send a team in after him without admitting the deception. And if I do that, the Council will be within their rights to call for a new election, one which almost certainly would go against me.”
“And your position is worth more than Cyrus’s life?”
Those blue eyes flashed, and for the first time, he looked more like a predator than a diplomat. “My most likely replacement is Whirlwind of Rand. He hates our alliance with the humans. One of his first actions in office would almost certainly be to undo it!”
I stopped struggling for a moment. The Corps was supposed to be a police force, not an army, but lately we’d had to be both. One of the few saving graces had been the Weres, who were as vicious in combat as legend said. They’d saved our asses more than once, however much the Corps might not want to admit it. I honestly didn’t know what we’d do without them.
“Grayshadow was my Third,” Sebastian told me more quietly. “And the only one, other than White Sun, who knew the truth about Cyrus. Now that they’re both dead, I do not know who I can trust, and I cannot risk making a mistake when the repercussions could be disastrous.”
I was trying for calm, trying hard, but it wasn’t working that great. “But how are we supposed to find him without help? The only witness is dead!” And if I didn’t find Cyrus soon, he might be, too. I suddenly couldn’t seem to get enough air in the claustrophobic little room.
“You will lead me to him.”
“If I knew where he was, don’t you think I’d have told you?” There was a weird, teakettle sound. The air around us had gone into motion, sending Sedgewick’s piles of clutter flapping against the ceiling like trapped birds.
“Lia!” Sebastian’s fingers bit into my arms, bruising hard. “Sedgewick was wrong! Our abilities are not defined by the limitations of anatomy. We are magical beings, and when we make connections, they are magical also. In some cases, mated pairs among our people have been known to share images of what one is seeing, or to experience something of what the other is feeling—”
“For Weres, perhaps. I’m not one!”
That won me a hard glance. “We both know that isn’t true.”
“My mother was Were; I am human,” I repeated, angry that he couldn’t seem to understand. “Considering how often I have to say that, maybe I ought to get a tattoo!”
“Tattoos are only skin deep. What you are runs through to the bone.”
“What my mother was. Lobizon tried to turn me, but they failed. You know that!”
The leaders of my mother’s clan had pressured her for years to have me undergo the Change, but she had always hedged, telling them it was my decision. And her rank was high enough that they had been unable to force the issue as long as she lived. But barely two days after she died, they sent a group to attack me, intending to take the choice out of my hands. Sebastian had saved me by adopting me into Arnou, which as the clan of the current bardric, outranked Lobizon. As long as I remained under his protection, they couldn’t touch me.
Sebastian didn’t say anything for a long moment. “How certain are you that we are not being overheard?” he finally asked.
“Pretty sure. The Corps usually spies on other people.”
“Be certain.”
I threw a silence shield around us. “Okay.”
Sebastian slanted a sharp look at me. “I could not allow someone into my clan, not even for Cyrus’s sake, without knowing the truth. You carry Neuri. Why bother to deny it?”
It hit like a quick punch to the gut, leaving me breathless. No one ever said that word aloud, not even me. It was the elephant in the room, the thing that even my mother had tiptoed around in case uttering it somehow made it more real. I’d been fifteen before I learned the name for the problem that would define my life: Neuri Syndrome.
It occurs sometimes when the mother is Were and the father is not, which is why female Weres rarely marry outside the clan. It’s a variation on lycanthropy, but doesn’t permit its carriers to change. It also prevents them from ever getting the full-blown disease—and therein lay the problem.
Weres have a low birthrate—the disease often proves deadly to children younger than five or six, killing many in the womb—and therefore periodic “recruitment” is necessary. The clans feared that carriers of Neuri might pass their resistance on to their children, who might disseminate it to their kids and so on. Married to Weres, they would weaken the clan by infecting the bloodlines. Married to humans, they might ensure that, one day, there would be no one left to turn.
Of course, that argument had made a lot more sense in the medieval world when people tended to live in small villages and rarely traveled. The local gene pool had been limited, and contamination from Neuri had been a real threat. With the much larger, more mobile population of the modern world, the danger was miniscule. But I hadn’t noticed anyone changing the old kill-on-sight rule.
My mother had fought her clan elders not to give me a choice, as she’d claimed, but because the disease I’d been born with had already made it for me.
“I haven’t denied anything,” I told Sebastian angrily, when I got my breath back. “I just don’t see any reason to broadcast my status as metaphysical leper to every Were I come across. That’s a good way to get dead, or have you forgotten?”
“I am not the one who has forgotten something! Carriers of Neuri are Were.”
“No! We aren’t! We’re prey, that’s why there’s so goddamned few of—”
I stopped because something rippled over my skin, something that raised the hair on my arms, on the back of my neck, and sent chills down my spine. Something liquid and dark and compelling. I stared up into eyes that were no longer blue, but brilliant, inhuman chartreuse. I tried to turn away, but hard fingers bit into my arms.
“Not Were, Lia?” he murmured. “Then you don’t taste the wind in the back of your throat? Don’t see the night light up for you, with every branch, every blade of grass crystal clear and vibrating with life? Don’t hear the earth under your feet, whispering to you, revealing its secrets?”
I was running, light as the wind ruffling the tops of the trees. It was almost dark, but I could see every stone, every bit of life scurrying, slithering or darting, quick and startled, out of my path. Every tiny tremor in the earth that bore my weight, every scent on the breeze that flowed around me, carried stories of friends and enemies, of water and food, of mile after mile of fascinating, vivid ground to be explored.
The forest came to life with sleek, dark shadows. They ran close enough that I could feel the heavy, nonhuman heat of them, smell the rich, heady scent of Clan, see the slide of fur over heavily muscled bodies. Their eyes filled with the lambency of living jewels as they howled, sending an unearthly chorus floating out over the valley below us. It tightened my skin, pulled at my heart, set my breath to racing until it tore out of me in a cry of pure delight.