LETTER FROM LILY YU
It had all started on a fairly normal day. Normal, that is, if your husband is a werewolf and the two of you are hanging out with your brother-in-law—also a werewolf and maybe the deadliest man in the world—and your best friends, who include a sorcerer, a Rhej, and a part-sidhe computer geek. We’d eaten chocolate chips cookies and talked about weaning and cussing and a device intended to absorb stray magic before being interrupted by a man who wanted to kill Rule.
Okay, that last part had been unusual. Not wildly so, but not an everyday occurrence. Things didn’t really take a turn for weird, though, until we were summoned by the black dragon, who told us that Tom Weng wasn’t dead. (I said that, didn’t I? I kept saying he might still be alive, and everyone kept rolling their eyes at me.) Worse—it turns out he’s a dragon spawn. Don’t know what that is? Neither did we, until Sam told us.
Centuries ago, dragon spawn were created when a botched hatching resulted in baby dragons who were utterly mind-dark. Impervious to mind magic, they would never have been able to communicate, living their lives in terrible isolation. To spare them this, the dragons had permanently altered their forms so they could be raised as humans by humans, including learning our type of speech.
The dragons didn’t get the outcome they were hoping for. Instead of reasonably well-adjusted imitation humans, they’d ended up with a crew of supersmart, sorcerous sociopaths with major parental issues. Fortunately for everyone else in the world, those spawn had died out a long time ago. They were supposed to be the only ones ever created, so Tom Weng’s existence had come as a shock to Sam’s crowd.
Another shock had interrupted the telling of this tale when someone fired two missiles at the black dragon’s lair. Sam’s defenses deflected one enough to minimize the damage; the other missile hit, but he somehow kept it from exploding.
The FBI Headquarters building in Washington, D.C., didn’t fare as well.
It was bombs, not missiles, that took Headquarters down, decapitating much of the federal policing structure—including Unit 12. My unit. The only federal force composed primarily of magically Gifted agents. Martin Croft, who’d been running the Unit after Ruben was forced out, was critically injured in the blast. So were a lot of others. At least seventy-nine people were dead. People I knew. Probably a lot more than that, since there were a hundred forty-nine still missing the last I heard.
It sure looked like our Enemy had gotten tired of keeping the war under wraps and was coming after us with both barrels—and by “us” I mean the dragons, the lupi, the Gifted, and the Bureau. Anyone who might prove an obstacle to her plan to take over the world and remake humanity. The Great Bitch does not have a high opinion of free will. Too damn messy, all those people making their own decisions.
That night everything got worse. Much worse. They took Toby.
They also took Ryder—Cynna and Cullen’s daughter, the nine-month-old prodigy who’d inspired our discussion of weaning. And eight-year-old First Fist, Diego, grandson of Ybirra Clan’s Rho. Four-year-old Sandy of Czøs, son of that clan’s Lu Nuncio. And a three-month-old baby named Noah, whose grandfather had been the Etorri Rho. The children had been snatched from their homes, where they should have been safe—homes that were all over the bloody continent.
They made one mistake, though. They didn’t kill my cat.
Dirty Harry had been sleeping with Toby, as usual. Sam managed to extract Harry’s memory of the snatch and share it with us. It was easy to ID one of the perps as Tom Weng. Easy, too, for some of us to ID the other perp: Ginger Harris. Ginger, Sarah’s older sister. Sarah had been my best friend in the third grade and a big part of my introduction to monsters. The man who abducted the two of us had been fully human and fully a monster. He’d raped her because he loved her pretty blond hair. He’d killed her just before the police showed up and saved me.
We had a complicated history, me and Ginger. Two years ago, she’d tried to get Rule framed for murder. Now it looked like she was serving as avatar for the Great Bitch.
Because a dragon spawn was involved, the dragons were, too. With an assist from another dragon—Reno—Sam was able to determine where the children had been taken: Dis, the demon realm. Also known as hell. The dragons arranged for the best gate-builders in all the realms—that’s what everyone kept saying about them anyway—to open passage for us. Dirty Harry was in serious-but-stable condition when eleven of us mounted up on motorcycles and went roaring off into hell.
One of our party used the gate, but not a motorcycle: Reno. Another one didn’t need the gate. Gan, my short, orange, used-to-be-a-demon friend, had come here from Edge to help, and she was one of the extremely rare beings who could cross realms without a gate.
I’m not going to go into everything that happened in Dis. Most of it was bloody; all of it was terrifying. The short version is that Rule and I ended up separated, but we almost managed to reconnect while battling demons in the belowground palace of the former ruler of that region of hell. Who was supposed to be dead, dammit. Instead Xitil was very much present and mad as hell—by which I mean crazy, Looney Tunes, nuts, ’round-the-bend bonkers. One of the last things I saw in that battle was two tons of Xitil looming over Rule, giggling merrily while the place burned around us. Rule had been standing over his brother’s motionless body, armed only with a knife.
I was trying to get to him when two enormous Claws caught up with me. One of them slapped the M4 out of my hand. The other reached out with huge, taloned hands.
That’s when Gan grabbed me.
ONE
Lóng Jia
PAIN comes in many varieties. There’s the crushed outrage of a smashed thumb and the oh shit rip of a twisted ankle. A bad tooth throbs, a headache pounds, and when a bone breaks, the bright shock of it shorts out your entire system, as intense as a climax. Then there is pain that swallows the entire world, admitting no presence beyond itself. Pain that goes on and on.
Rule woke to pain.
In the first few seconds or eons, there was no place to put the pain, nothing to assign it to, no sense it was lodged in this or that part of his body. Pain was entire, complete . . . until it wasn’t. He grew aware of a voice. Not words, for the pain-universe allowed him no space to sort sound into words, but he knew this particular sound was a voice.
He was not alone.
Some instinct rose from a place so deep inside the pain could not shut it out. An instinct that said quiet. That said listen. He was hurt, badly hurt, and he was not alone. Not-alone was dangerous. His nostrils flared. He did not smell clan or Lily. He smelled . . .
“. . . did you stop?” the voice was saying. It sounded scared. “It’s not enough to get him out of the water. We’ve got to get to cover. One of them could swoop down at any moment and . . .”