Mortal Sins, page 15
part #5 of World of the Lupi Series
“Cullen might twist the truth or withhold it, but he wouldn’t outright lie to me. Not about this.”
But Lily thought he might very well do just that—if he thought it was what Rule needed. And then devote the next three or four years to finding a way to save Toby before First Change.
“Lily.” Rule smiled and tickled the ends of her hair. “He’s coming here. He can’t lie to me in person.”
“Oh, right. I guess you could ask as his Lu Nuncio, couldn’t you?” One of the functions of a Lu Nuncio was to act as a prosecuting attorney within the clan—one to whom witnesses couldn’t lie. Not successfully, anyway. Lupi couldn’t always sniff out a lie, but supposedly the guilt of lying to their Lu Nuncio made it impossible for them to carry it off. “You think he’s flying here to make sure you believe him?”
“No. There’s something he won’t say over the phone.”
Paranoid of him, but Cullen combined normal lupus secrecy with a sorcerer’s suspicion that everyone really was out to get him—or at least to steal his spells. “Maybe he’ll be able to consult on my case while he’s here.”
“If you pay him, he probably will.” He wound a strand of her hair around one finger.
“He’s an approved consult.” Rule kept touching her. That was his way, but those constant, light touches were replacing comfort with other feelings.
“You want to talk about the case?”
She met his eyes … and her heart ached at what she saw in his face.
He’d lied. It was his father’s fault, she thought, in so many ways … but his own doing, too. Rule had learned early to project confidence, the kind of unworried air people—human or otherwise—crave in a leader. He could make his body lie for him, make it speak of control or power or ease, whatever was needed. And he’d needed to hide how much he still feared for his son. Maybe Cullen’s words had helped, but they hadn’t erased the fear.
But why hide it from her? No, she realized. No, he hadn’t hidden it from her. He’d imposed ease on his body for his own reasons, not to keep her out. He’d left his eyes unshuttered, hadn’t he? Let her see his need, the place that words couldn’t touch.
Other things could, maybe. She’d try.
Lily touched his cheek gently. I see you. I will be careful with the places that hurt. “I don’t think so.”
“No?” He drifted a thumb across the line of her jaw.
“No. We’re not in the driveway now, are we?”
He glanced around, eyebrows tilting in feigned surprise. “I believe you’re right. We’re on a couch, indoors …” He switched his attention to her mouth, and all he did was look at it … intently. Her lips tingled as if he’d touched them. “But hardly private. And you’ve had little sleep.”
“True.” She sighed, picked up the remote, and turned off the TV, dropping them into darkness. “And you’ve had even less. None, I think, which is a shame, because you’re going to have to pay up anyway.”
“Pay up?” Amusement warmed his voice. There was warmth, too, in the hand that clasped her waist.
“You’re charged with inciting a cop, buddy, and the penalty’s pretty steep.” She moved deliberately to straddle his lap, placing her hands on his shoulders and bringing her mouth close to his. Close enough that he would feel her breath on his lips. “How do you plead?”
The lips she wasn’t quite kissing curved up. Both of his hands now gripped her waist. “I get a chance to plead my case, do I?”
“Oh, yes.” She skimmed her mouth over his. “Though I recommend we go straight to the plea bargain. Judge’s chambers. Upstairs.”
His hands slid lower to cup her ass. Rule had a thing for her ass. “Will the court entertain an insanity plea?”
“Mmm.” She undulated gently against him—breasts, belly, groin. “You saying I make you crazy?”
“Guilty.” His hands smoothed their way up—ass, back, shoulders, head. Which he pulled down, toward his.
She resisted briefly, smiling. “I’m pretty sure there were onions in that chicken and rice.”
“I love onions.” His tongue licked at her smile, asking. She answered by parting her lips and he dived in, his mouth suddenly hungry. His hands went back to her butt. And he stood up.
She made an undignified noise that in someone else she would have called a squeak, quickly hooking her legs around him. Not that she needed to worry. He supported her easily.
Rule leaned his forehead against hers. “Upstairs, I think. Quickly.”
Oh, yeah. Lily agreed with her mouth, but in a way that didn’t use words. Judging by the growl low in his throat, he appreciated her communication skills.
He started up the stairs, dimly illuminated by a night-light at the landing and one in the hall at the top. She stopped what she was doing to say, somewhat breathlessly, “I can walk.”
“It’s more fun if I carry you.” His fingers did interesting things to demonstrate what he meant.
“We’re not alone. Not alone enough. Mrs. Asteglio might wake up.”
“I’d hear her before she … Lily, I won’t notice a brass band following us up the stairs if you keep doing that.”
She grinned, bringing her hand back up to his shoulder, and snuggled her nose into the curve of his throat, where she could breathe him in. “Maybe you should put me down, then. I’m not sure I can restrain myself.”
Reluctantly he did. Not, she knew, because he was the least self-conscious about sexual play in public, but from courtesy. To a lupus, it was rude to indulge in front of someone who lacked a sexual partner. And Mrs. Asteglio really could wake up.
So they held hands for the last few steps, and they paused together at the door to Toby’s room, left ajar. Lily had learned during Toby’s visits to always leave his bedroom door cracked—and never to mention it. Like his father, Toby hated small, enclosed spaces. Like his father, he insisted they didn’t bother him at all.
Rule pushed Toby’s door wide open.
Lily glanced at him, puzzled.
In three quick steps Rule was at the twin bed, where a huddled form seemed to lie beneath the covers. One fling of the covers, and even in the darkness Lily could see that the huddled form was a pair of pillows.
After a moment’s stretched silence, he moved to the window. It was open. She joined him, looking out at the slatted beams that covered the porch. It would be an easy exit for an athletic boy.
Rule sighed. “I’ll go outside to Change. Too much of his smell here for me to track him in this form.”
“I’ll get my shoulder holster. Just in case.”
FOR the fourth time in twenty-four hours—the third since the sun rose—Rule prepared to Change into wolf. He stood in the backyard with the dirt under his bare feet and the moon’s lopsided grin over his shoulder. Lily waited, holding the clothes he’d removed.
It took more time than usual, long moments spent spinning through pain. When he finished, he let his head hang, catching his breath, already dreading the Change back to human. He was tired. He’d slept roughly one of those twenty-four hours, curled around his son in the late afternoon. A son who, at the moment, he’d very much like to nip.
Sorting out Toby’s most recent trail wouldn’t be easy, not with his scent everywhere. Rule trotted to the gate first … and paused, surprised.
Toby had marked the grass beside the gate—marked it as if he were wolf already, with a few drops of urine.
Alarm spiked. Until that moment, Rule had been annoyed, not worried. Boys will sneak out. Lupus boys in particular feel a need to taste the night, and at Clanhome that wasn’t a problem. They were taught always to mark their trails in case they got in trouble. But why would Toby practice this in the midst of the human world?
Obviously he meant for Rule to follow. As to the why … Rule thought he knew, but had to be sure Toby hadn’t been coerced somehow. He checked the grass again, sniffing up along the gate for the touch of hands other than Toby’s.
Toby’s trail was fresh, no more than a couple of hours old, and Rule didn’t find any other traces as recent. He paused and, as he had in the woods something over twenty hours ago, he shifted something in his focus, bringing the mantles into the mix of sensory impressions.
Scents immediately sharpened. And no, Toby hadn’t been afraid when he passed this way. So Toby wanted his father to find him; he wasn’t afraid, yet he hadn’t told Rule. Either he’d been sure Rule would forbid whatever action he’d taken, or he’d given his word not to tell.
Rule was betting on the latter. He lifted onto his rear legs, nosed the latch, and dropped back onto four feet as the gate swung open onto an unpaved alley. He picked up Toby’s scent immediately and started west. Lily followed silently, carrying his clothes.
He’d nearly told her not to come.
The wolf snorted, disgusted. If his motives had been clear, he’d have nothing to condemn himself for. Lily was tired, too, her human system probably as wrung out as his by a day that had started at four a.m. and just kept going, a day spent wading through violence and bureaucracy. But his motives were murky as hell.
Well, to the man they had been. Considered from the vantage of a wolf’s brain, his motives were as obvious as they were foolish. Rule found the next spot Toby had marked, glanced at Lily and nodded to let her know they were on Toby’s trail, and trotted on down the alley.
When Lily said she was coming, Rule had noticed the dirty wash of resentment in time to stifle it. He’d nodded, accepting that of course Lily would go with him. It was practical, of course—there were many places a wolf couldn’t go, and a naked man sometimes alarmed people more than a wolf, which they might take for a large dog. It was also typical of Lily. She’d already made room for Toby in her heart and was busily making room for him in her life.
All of which was what he’d wanted … and part of him resented her. Part of him—a thoroughly human part he’d tried to ignore into nonexistence—didn’t want her intruding on his relationship with Toby.
The wolf thought this was very silly. But he supposed it wouldn’t go away just because he had better sense in this form than in the other.
They reached a street empty of traffic and crossed quickly. A quick check confirmed Rule’s first guess—Toby had proceeded down the alley. They did, too.
Rule knew where the resentment came from. Now that he’d recognized it, that was obvious. He’d been raised without a mother, hadn’t he? Technically, at least. In practice he’d been mothered by virtually every woman living at Clanhome, dispersing the feminine ideal through a dozen loving lenses, leaving him with an idealized version of motherhood … soft-focus, unreal … too unreal, he saw now, to have come between him and his father. Or between him and his son.
Lily was extremely real. He stopped beside another gate and sighed. She would expect him to talk about this, and man and wolf both disliked that notion.
“Something wrong?” Lily whispered.
Nothing they could deal with now. He shook his head … and prepared to Change yet again.
NINETEEN
SOMETHING crawled across Toby’s ankle—he noticed because he hadn’t bothered with socks. He flicked it off with his finger. “I can’t just stay here.”
“I know, but … a little longer.” Talia huddled her long, skinny arms closer around her knees. Talia was two years older than him and Justin, and four inches taller. Toby liked her pretty well, even if she had started painting her fingernails lately and worrying about her hair.
There was just enough breeze to keep the leaves whispering tree secrets to each other. That was good. Toby didn’t like it when the tree house—which was just a platform, really, without any sides, but they all called it the tree house—got to swaying because the branches started moving.
Funny how steady trees looked from the ground, he thought. Get up in one and it was never entirely still.
“We’ve got to come up with a plan,” Justin said firmly.
“Come up with a plan,” Toby muttered. “Sure. You go first, since you don’t like my ideas.”
“We can’t tell them!” Justin forgot and let his voice get a little loud, and Talia shushed him, looking back at the house. “Toby, you know what my folks are like.”
“Yeah. They’re nice. I like them.”
“Well, duh! But they’re just stupid about this sort of thing.” Justin waved a hand in the general direction of his sister. “You know that. They’re all creeped out about you now, too, since you’ve been on the news and all, and that makes it worse.”
Shit. Toby tested the word in his mind, found he liked the weight of it, and tried it aloud. “Shit. They saw that stupid news deal about the custody hearing, huh?”
“Toby.” Talia could put more frown into a whisper than anyone else Toby knew. “Don’t you be cursing.”
Justin broke off a little twig growing out from the trunk. “Everybody’s seen it. Everybody in the whole country, I bet.”
“You’d think they’d be paying attention to people getting shot, not to the stuff about me.” Toby hadn’t seen much when it happened because of the way his dad had pushed him down. He’d glimpsed Dad Changing in midair, heard the scary-big blast of the gun. The people screaming. Lily’s voice all crisp and fierce telling him and Grammy to stay down, don’t move.
He hadn’t really seen much at all. So why did it stick with him so hard? Toby’s stomach felt tight and unhappy. He swallowed.
Justin and Talia looked at each other.
“What?” Toby scowled when they didn’t answer. “You’d better tell me.”
“Nothin’.” Justin gave all his attention to stripping the leaves off his twig.
“He might as well know.” Talia eased her hunch. “Daddy thinks the shooting was about you. He says Mr. Hodge went crazy because he found out what you are and was trying to shoot you, or maybe your dad and you both, only he’s a real bad shot.”
Toby sat up straight. “That’s not right. That’s not right at all. Talia, you know better. You have to tell—”
“I can’t! If they find out—”
“I’m afraid,” said a deep, sympathetic voice from the ground below them, “you are going to have to tell.”
Talia yipped as if she were the lupus. Justin shot to his feet so fast he hit his head on the branch over him. Toby turned and peered over the edge of the platform, feeling about a hundred pounds lighter. “Hi, Dad. That’s my dad,” he added to his friends. “I guess I’m in trouble?”
“Some,” Dad said, keeping his voice low. “I think you should all climb down now. I could come up there, but I’m tired. And I don’t think Lily is in the mood for tree-climbing.”
Lily? He’d brought her along? Toby frowned, trying to see past all the leaves, not sure how he felt about Lily being here. Probably just as well, he decided. Lily was who Talia needed to talk to, anyway. “Okay.”
Justin grabbed his arm. “No.”
“What’s the matter? You scared to go down there with the big, bad werewolf?”
Justin shook his head hard but said nothing. It was Talia who answered. “Well, I’m going down. I bet none of them will come around Toby’s dad.”
“Come on,” Toby said to his best friend. “If we don’t go down, he might think he has to tell your folks.”
That persuaded Justin. A few moments later, Toby stood with Talia on one side, Justin on the other, facing his father and Lily. They did not look happy with him.
“I assume your friends asked you to give your word not to tell,” Dad said in that quiet voice that might make some people think he wasn’t mad, but Toby knew better.
“Yes, sir. Well, I gave my word about Talia’s secret a long time—” Justin poked his side. Toby gave him an exasperated look. “He heard us talking. He knows there’s something we aren’t telling, so he knows there’s a secret.” He looked back at his dad. “But even though they don’t have to keep my secret anymore, I still have to keep theirs. Because I promised.”
Dad nodded, agreeing. Toby had known he would, about that part of it. “Yet that doesn’t explain why you sneaked out of the house.”
“That,” Toby said, “was a judgment call.”
Lily made a little choked sound but didn’t say anything, and Dad just waited, so Toby rushed ahead. “See, Justin’s got a cell phone, but I don’t, so I bought one of those phones where you buy minutes? So Justin could call me sometimes. And he called tonight and it was sort of an emergency, so I made a judgment to come like he asked. Only you can’t tell if it was a good judgment or a bad one unless they say I can tell the secret, or if they tell you themselves. Which they ought to.” He bent a frown on Justin and Talia.
Lily spoke in that quiet way she had that wasn’t like Dad’s quiet voice, but still made you want to listen, like what she said was probably important. “Maybe you could start by introducing us to your friends.”
Toby flushed. Proper introductions were one thing lupi and Grammy agreed about, and he’d completely forgotten. “Oh, yeah. Dad, Lily, this is Justin and Talia Appleton. Justin and Talia, this is my dad, Rule Turner, and his mate, Lily Yu.” Wait—was he supposed to say mate?
Toby frowned unhappily. He wasn’t.
“Pleased to meet you, Talia, Justin.” Dad glanced at Lily. “Perhaps we should sit down and discuss the situation.”
Justin and his sister exchanged a disbelieving look. They weren’t used to adults wanting to have a discussion when rules were broken. Mostly the adults they knew just ganged up together, and kids were not allowed to have secrets. “Okay. C’mon, sit down. He’ll listen to you,” Toby encouraged his friends.
“Does that mean you aren’t going to tell my folks?” Talia said.
“I don’t know yet. That’s one of the things we must discuss.”
So everyone sat in a circle on the grass, which was cool and damp and smelled great. There was plenty of light from the moon, almost overhead now and three-quarters full.
