“Go to hell, Jiri.”
Jiri made an impatient noise. “Tommy, I need Beecher to hold her hand out and steady for me. Surely one guard is sufficient for the sensitive.”
“No. By now she realizes we don’t want to kill her. She might try something.”
“She’s handcuffed. Make her lie down on her stomach and threaten her lover if she moves.”
Cordoba hesitated, but gave the orders. Rule was beginning to wonder . . . Jiri was bound to the man, but she was twice as smart. She seemed to be getting everything she wanted from him.
A few moments later Lily lay on her stomach in the dead grass. One of the Azá still guarded her, but the other fought to bring Cynna’s arm forward. It took him a few moments, but he managed to hold her hand out, palm up.
“Good.” Jiri rested her own hand on top of Cynna’s. “Be ready to hold her up,” she added. “She’ll probably collapse.”
“You didn’t,” Cordoba said.
“I consented.” Jiri closed her eyes. She whispered something in that other language, the words soft and singsong. Cynna’s eyes widened—then rolled back in her head. She went limp.
And the demon let go of Rule.
Pain roared from his shoulders down to his fingers in a white-hot sheet. But he didn’t move his arms, though his abused muscles trembled and twitched with the strain of holding them back. He prayed desperately he was right—
“Did it work?” Cordoba demanded. “Wake her up. Make her . . . oh, make her kill the one Melli has pinned. Not the sorcerer. The other one.”
The demon stepped out from behind Rule, but he moved clumsily, as if he’d forgotten how his muscles worked. A fierce joy seized Rule. He’d been right. He just had to hold on a moment longer, see which target—
Cordoba’s back was to them, but one of the Azá saw. “Sir,” a gravelly voice said, “The big demon—”
“What?” Cordoba snapped—but he glanced over his shoulder.
The demon lumbered into an awkward run. Straight for Cordoba.
Change.
Yes. Rule reached for the moonsong and threw himself into it. The pain in his shoulders vanished, subsumed by the familiar, rippling agony of the Change.
Cordoba’s eyes widened. “Shoot her!” he cried, then slapped the barrel of the rifle pointed at Lily. “Not her, fool! Jiri! Shoot her!”
Jiri stepped away from Cynna. She was smiling, her eyes alight with triumph as one, two, all three rifles went off.
And the Change went on. And on.
Wrong,
shouted some yet-human pocket of him. Something was wrong. It was taking too long. The pain was huge, and the mantles—the mantles were—
Jiri was on the ground. Lily was moving, rolling into the legs of the man closest to her.
Lily! He tried to wrest back control from the mantles, but the Change had never been his to order. He could only—
Surrender.
He let go and blinked out, and then he wasn’t.
And then he was. He stood and panted with his head hanging, remembered pain shuddering through him, though this body no longer hurt. But his front legs were weak, the joints throbbing. The scents of blood and demons were strong in his nostrils, but he couldn’t think. He shook his head to clear it, but something was wrong. Different.
Never mind. He had to get to Lily.
But the demon already had. It tossed aside one of the Azá, then another—still clumsy, but moving faster, as if its rider was getting the hang of the massive body. Cordoba screeched and ran toward the house.
And the winged creature stirred.
Cordoba,
Rule thought. He had to stop Cordoba, who controlled the creature.
But the wolf didn’t want Cordoba. The wolf wanted the monster that spread its wings—not for flight, but for balance as it ran toward the two women and the demon defending them.
The demon was big, compared to a man. Not compared to the winged nightmare. And the demon’s rider wasn’t familiar with the body.
Rule snarled and threw himself at the beast. He wouldn’t fail her this time.
It was fast. He was faster. It checked its charge when it saw him, stretching out one great wing, trying to sweep him away with it. He avoided it easily, so it tried to club him with the knobby bone at the hinge. He flattened, rolled, coming to his feet near the body. It tried stepping on him, but it was ungainly on the ground. He dashed around the taloned foot and darted beneath the belly to its other side.
The belly didn’t tempt him. He needed the throat. He readied himself, haunches bunching, and leaped.
The head darted at him, jaws gaping. Rule twisted in midair so that his side smashed into the teeth rather than being seized by them. The impact stunned him, though, and he fell badly when he dropped. Pain shot up his left front leg when he stood, making him stumble. Those jaws descended on him, the breath rank and hot.
He’d learned how to run on three legs in hell. He did that now, racing beneath the belly, and spun the second he was shielded by the beast’s body, darting between the legs to stand in front of it. And once more launched himself up—almost straight up, at its throat.
The man was screaming that this was wrong, he couldn’t hang on to that leathery skin long enough to do any damage. But the wolf
knew.
If he could sink his teeth in that throat—
He struck, mouth gaping, and clamped his jaws shut through hide and flesh, holding on with every ounce of his strength. And hung there, fifteen feet from the ground. The creature snapped at him but couldn’t reach him. It flung itself sideways, trying to throw him off. His body slapped to one side, then the other, but he hung on, his teeth meeting in sour flesh. And convulsed.
Huge, wrenching contractions seized him, spasms that pumped acid through his body—acid forced by the spasm up into his throat. He went blind with pain, blackness swarming over his vision, but he hung on as muscles he’d never felt before squeezed tight in his upper throat and jaw, pumping the acid out. Out of him and into the beast.
It howled. Then it, too, convulsed.
The contractions of those enormous muscles were too much for him. He lost his grip and fell, hitting the ground hard. He tried to scramble to his feet, but he was weak, so weak. When he accidentally put weight on the damaged leg, it buckled. Darkness flickered around the edges of his vision.
One of the taloned feet smashed into him, sending him skidding across dirt and grass. The blow knocked out his air. Consciousness wisped to a thin thread . . . He blinked. The creature was collapsing. The foot that had struck him had saved him from being buried beneath that great body as it crashed down, wings akimbo, head stretched out flat and motionless on the ground.
Eyes open and staring. Dead.
For several moments he just lay there and breathed. He was alive. He hurt everywhere, but he was alive. That seemed so starkly incredible he couldn’t take it in. And Lily . . . Lily was coming to him.
He managed to turn his head so he could see her running awkwardly toward him, her hands still bound behind her. For a second—just a second—he saw two of her. Both Lilys were running to him: the one who’d known him mostly as a man, and the one who’d known him only as a wolf.
A joy so keen it blanked out all the pains of his body filled him. His head went light with it.
Then he simply passed out.
He came to with her kneeling beside him, crying and cursing the handcuffs and ordering him to wake up. He couldn’t smile well in this form, but he tried.
“Rule! Damn these handcuffs,” she muttered. “I can’t touch you, can’t check to see what . . . but you’re alive. You’ll stay that way,” she told him. “Hang on a little longer, and we’ll be able to get help. Cynna’s back from wherever she was. I guess she was riding, but she’s parked the demon now. He’s just sitting there, not moving. Cordoba’s dead.”
How—?
She knew what he meant to ask. “The others got him. Hennings or Alex, I don’t know which. They’d hidden inside the house, waiting for a chance to help. I think Jiri knew. She steered Cordoba’s attention to the field, didn’t she? To the cliff we came up and away from the house. She . . .” Her breath hitched. “She’s dying.”
He’d thought her already dead.
Alex limped up. Blood covered one side of his body, but Rule’s nose told him it wasn’t all his. “Three of the Azá are dead,” he said. “The other’s got a cracked skull, I think, but he might live. The other two demons, the overgrown hyenas, winked out when Cordoba died. I don’t know how to tell if they’re still around, though. How . . .” His voice caught. “How in the bloody hell did you kill that thing?”
Rule was in charge. He needed a voice and words for that. Drawing on the last of his power, he called up the Change.
And, seconds later, he lay gasping for breath in the cold night air. Normally cold didn’t bother him, but he was too damned weak. He forced himself to sit. His left arm hung limp; the bone was broken just above the elbow. He hurt in places he didn’t remember injuring. “Get the keys for the handcuffs,” he told Alex. “The Azá who unlocked Cynna’s cuffs probably has them. Where’s Hennings? Robbins?”
Alex gave him a funny look. “You saw Robbins killed.”
“My memory of recent events has some gaps.”
“Hennings is hurt,” the man told him, “but not badly. He’ll probably be able to walk soon.”
“All right. Bring us the keys, then see about our wounded. Cullen and Brady.” Cullen had still been alive earlier. He was tough. Surely . . .
Alex nodded and took off at an uneven run.
“The girl,” Rule said suddenly, remembering. “Jiri’s daughter.”
“Cynna has her,” Lily said quietly. “Jiri . . . wanted to see her. She’s still sleeping.”
Toby. If Jiri died before removing her spell—Rule lurched to his feet, then swayed.
“Put your arm over my shoulders,” Lily said.
“I don’t—”
“Yes, you do need help,” she snapped. “You’ve been a big enough hero for one night. I’m not injured. Lean on me so we can get over there and talk to Jiri.”
He did. And she was right; it did help to lean on her a bit. Not just because of the physcial aid, but the peace of the mate bond eased through him.
He’d seen her. He’d seen both of her. The other Lily wasn’t lost.
“How did you do that?” she asked softly. “How did you kill it? I thought . . .” She shuddered.
“The poison. The mantles.” He shook his head, knowing he wasn’t making sense to her. Though it all made sense to him now.
It was the wolf who’d hung on to the demon poison, the wolf ’s guilt over failing Lily that made it impossible to let go. And the man’s need for control, he admitted, that made it impossible to understand. If he’d spent more time as wolf, he might have known, but the wolf felt he deserved to lose his memory, just as Lily had lost her memory of him.
Most of it, anyway. When she died. The part that lived on, her soul, remembered, but the Lily he spoke with and made love with had only brief flashes of memory from their time in hell.
It was the wolf who’d known how to expiate that guilt, but it was the two mantles that made it possible.
“Somehow the mantles affected the Change,” he said slowly. “I don’t understand it. I didn’t know it was possible. Maybe it was the combination of mantles, demon poison, and the mate bond . . . I’m pretty sure there hasn’t been another lupus with that mix acting on him before. I grew fangs. Real, hollow fangs, the kind a viper uses. I pumped the creature full of demon poison. It died, and . . . the poison’s gone.”
“You’re sure?” Startled, she stopped. “Kiss me. I can’t touch you because of these damned cuffs. Kiss me and let me check.”
He smiled. “What an excellent idea.” He bent, cupping her cheek with his good hand, and kissed her gently.
When he straightened, her eyes were wide. “It’s gone. It’s really gone.”
Relief shivered through him. He’d been sure . . . almost sure. It helped to know Lily couldn’t feel the poison anymore.
They started walking again. “It’s beyond weird, but makes a certain bizarre sense. The poison was intended to kill other demons. That creature wasn’t a demon, but it was from hell. It probably had a similar body chemistry.”
Alex found the keys just as they reached the others. He unlocked Lily’s cuffs, and she gasped in pain as her arms fell forward. Rule knew just how much it hurt, but she just shook her head at him and helped him over to Jiri.
The woman shouldn’t have been alive. She had two bloody holes high in her chest and a much bigger one in her abdomen. An exit wound, he thought. One of the guards had shot her in the back. The dirt around her was wet and sticky with her blood.
Cynna sat beside her, holding the little girl, and Jiri held the girl’s hand. Her eyes tried to find him as Lily helped him sit, but he could see death hazing them. He doubted she saw much.
“It’s Rule,” he said.
“Ah.” Her voice was faint. Her eyes drifted closed, and she smiled. “Tommy’s dead.”
“Yes,” Cynna said. Rule saw her throat work as she swallowed.
“Should’ve listened to you, Cynna, but I liked the power too much. Couldn’t do what I wanted without an apprentice, but by then the only kind I could get were worse than me.” Her voice faded, but she got her eyes open again, searching through what must be pure darkness to her. “Rule Turner.”
“Here. I’m right here.”
“Want you to take my Cece, raise her as clan. She needs protection. Damn that Tommy.” Hatred momentarily strenghtened her voice. “Her own father, and he was ready to give her up to the Great Bitch.”
“Cordoba was her father?” Cynna said, startled.
“Bastard. Thought he had me . . . damn near did. I couldn’t disobey, but who taught him those bindings? I kept a little back. Not much, but it was enough. Rule.” Her eyes shifted, sought his blindly. “You’ll take my daughter as clan. The goddess wants her. You’ll take her, or your son will never wake.”
“I’d have seen to her welfare without the threat,” he said evenly. “Even with it, I’ll see she’s adopted into the clan. I’d not let
Her
get Her hands on a child.”
Her mouth twisted. “Habit . . . sorry. Your son woke before we attacked.”
He jerked slightly in surprise.
“Told you—I don’t harm children. Knew I wouldn’t come out of this alive.”