Blood Magic Read Free

get your pretty dress dirty.” Of course he’d heard Munoz’s comment. He started toward her. “Let’s see what I can do.”
    “Hey!” Munoz said. “You’re that lupus!”
    Lily tensed, but Rule had a smile for him. “I’m a lupus, at least.”
    “No, you’re the prince one! The one in all the magazines with . . . I mean . . .” Munoz took a breath. Lily suspected that if his complexion had been paler, she’d have seen an embarrassed flush. “Never mind.”
    He’d been about to comment on the plethora of lovely women Rule had been photographed with. Though not recently. Recently, all the articles were about him and Lily . . . way too many articles. She touched the little lump beneath her dress where her engagement ring hung on a chain, dangling next to the toltoi she’d been given to mark her status as Chosen.
    Until they made an official announcement, she was keeping her ring out of sight.
    “Uh . . . Turner, right?” Munoz smiled hopefully.
    Lily took pity on the officer’s embarrassment. He meant well, which a lot of cops didn’t. Not with lupi. “Officer Munoz, this is Rule Turner. Rule, Officer Jesse Munoz.” She looked at the young patrol officer. “Rule’s right about my dress, though. I’d rather not get it dirty, plus there’s some broken glass. Do you have anything I could put on the seat?”
    Rule touched her arm. “Give me a moment. You know I enjoy flexing things for you.”
    She shook her head but stood back to let him have at it. “Just don’t bleed. I hate it when you bleed.”
    Rule gave her a quick grin, stepped up to the door, braced himself, and pulled. Metal groaned, but nothing happened. He frowned. Then he put one foot up on the frame next to the door and heaved. With a loud shriek, the door opened. He didn’t even fall over backward.
    “Thanks. You know, most men open pickle jars.”
    “Fortunately, I can open them, too.”
    She grinned and glanced at the convenience store, where the looky-loos were getting excited. “Better watch out. I think someone in that crowd recognized you.” And not everyone felt the same sort of excitement about lupi as Officer Munoz . . . who was forgetting his professional dignity again.
    “Hey, that’s cool! You just yanked on it and opened it. I’d always heard lupi were strong, but man.” Munoz shook his head, all admiration. “That’s cool.”
    Lily left Rule to his one-man fan club and went to do her job. Which, as Munoz had said, was sometimes pretty odd.
    Until last November, Lily had been a homicide cop here in San Diego. Now she worked for Unit 12 of the Magical Crimes Division of the FBI. Usually that didn’t mean running her hands over what was left of the driver’s seat in a crumpled Honda, but the walking-around-barefoot part happened fairly often.
    Lily was a touch sensitive. She experienced magic as a texture on her skin, but couldn’t be affected by it. When local police thought magic or those of the Blood might be involved in a crime, they called MCD—who passed most of it on to the Unit.
    Lately she’d been called out a lot. In the dog days of summer, some of the citizens of San Diego were seeing monsters. Big, hairy monsters with tyrannosaurus teeth. Grinning demons chittering at a window. Leprous undead charging a house.
    Every time the nutcases called the cops, the cops called her. Every time, she had to check out the sighting. Because these days, there was always a chance the loonies were right.

THREE
    CREATURES unseen on Earth in hundreds of years—creatures never seen here at all—had been swept here at the Turning, when the power winds blew open barriers between realms.
    The power winds had been temporary, thank God, and the experts said it would be impossible for anything to wander here without them. They also said that any crossing would release a burst of nodal energy, and the D.C. coven, who kept watch over a sophisticated simulacra map, swore there’d been no significant node disturbances