Mortal Danger Read Free Page A

mother wants it. So does mine.”
    “My mother wants me to get married, period. You’re the right gender; you’re Chinese; you have a good business. That works for her, but she’s already married. Give it up, Freddie. You don’t want to marry me. You don’t even like me.”
    “Of course I do. I’m very fond of you. You’re my cousin.”
    He meant it, too. Or believed it, which was almost the same. She sighed. “I agree with your mother—you do need to get married. Soon. Just not to me.” She handed him her plate, patted his arm, and made her getaway while his hands were full.
    Relatives could be the very devil sometimes.
    She’d dance some more, she decided, heading for the other room. That wouldn’t eliminate the possibility of nosy questions, not when so many people here felt entitled— obliged, even—to ask about her shoulder, her new lover, or her career change. But it limited their opportunities.
    The DJ was playing “I Want You to Want Me,” and the room was crowded. Lily stood at the edge of the dance floor tapping her foot, more in irritation than to keep time.
    Freddie was not exactly the soul of insight, which made it all the more irritating that he’d put his finger on the truth. She was taken, all right. Taken over, it sometimes seemed.
    Her gaze drifted across the crowded room, past cousins and strangers, acquaintances, family friends, and those newly related by marriage. It snagged on Aunt Mequi, who was dancing with Lily’s father.
    Mequi Leung was her mother’s sister. They ran tall on that side of Lily’s family, and Mequi was thin all over— thin body, thin face, and a thin smile that looked like a bandage slapped over something painful. Lily’s own lips twitched. Aunt Mequi hated to look ridiculous, and Edward Yu’s head barely topped his sister-in-law’s shoulder.
    He wouldn’t be troubled by that, she knew. Her father possessed a marvelous capacity for ignoring things he considered unimportant. He was probably talking about option strike, vertical spread, and other esoterica of the broker’s world.
    Probably… but Lily couldn’t know for sure. They were fifteen feet away. She couldn’t hear them over the babble of other voices.
    Three weeks ago, she would have been able to.
    Relief mixed with a wisp of disappointment. For a while, the mate bond had made her hearing as acute as Rule’s, but the effect had faded. She didn’t know why it had happened in the first place, or why it had gone away. Inhumanly good hearing might have come in handy at times, but so much had changed in her life in such a short time. On the whole, she was glad one thing had reverted to normal.
    Of course, it might come back.
    Lily touched the small charm dangling from a gold chain around her throat. The toltoi was the outward emblem of all those changes, the token she’d been given when she formally accepted membership in Rule’s clan. Her foot began tapping faster, losing the beat of the music altogether.
    Rule thought the bond had responded to danger by blurring the lines between their separate abilities. Maybe he was right. At the time, he’d been able to draw on some of her own immunity to magic, and they had definitely been in danger. A nutty telepath had been trying to sacrifice them to her goddess.
    But Rule’s theory made the mate bond seem almost sentient, like some sort of psychic snake—now tightening its coils around the two of them, now loosening them. Most of all, it irritated Lily that she didn’t know . There were entirely too many mysteries about this bond.
    Maybe she’d find out soon. She had an appointment in three days to talk to the Nokolai Rhej —Rhej being a position or title. Rule said the woman was sort of a combination of priestess, historian, and bard. Now that Lily was clan, she was supposed to get filled in on some of the history.
    She hoped this Rhej person had some answers. She had a lot of questions.
    As if the shifting sea of couples hid some arcane lode-stone,