Mortal Sins Read Free

consider eating meat this rotten. And Rule was too human, even now, to feel anything but a sad sort of horror at what lay in a shallow ditch between a pair of oaks.
    Not all beasts are so picky, however. And he hadn’t been the first to find them.

TWO
    IN a small, upstairs room in a large frame house, Lily Yu was sleeping. She didn’t know this.
    She knew pain, grief, despair. A sky overhead that wasn’t proper sky, but a storm-colored dome, dimly glowing. In that surreal sky, legend battled nightmare—a dragon, dark and immense, grappled with a flying worm-thing whose gaping jaws could have swallowed a small car. The ground Lily knelt on was stone and dirt without a trace of green.
    In front of her, unconscious and bleeding, lay a huge silver and black wolf.
    So much blood. She couldn’t see how badly Rule was hurt, but it was bad. She knew it. The demon had ripped him open so thoroughly that even he couldn’t heal in time. Rule needed a doctor, a hospital, but there were no hospitals in hell.
    She knew what she had to do. It was a hard knowing, as hard as the stones of this place—and as certain as spring in that other place, the Earth she remembered. The Earth she would never see again.
    Another woman knelt across the wolf’s ripped and bloody body, a woman bound to Rule as she was bound because she, too, was Lily. Another Lily, the one who could take Rule home.
    She looked up now and met her own eyes. “Leave now. You have to go right away and take him where he can heal. To a hospital. He’ll die here.”
    The other-her swallowed. “The gate—”
    “Sam told me how to fix it.” That’s what the dragon had told them to call him. Sam. Was that a bit of desert-dry dragon humor? She’d never know.
    So much she’d never know. Never have the chance to learn.
    Other-Lily’s eyes widened, and Lily saw her own dread knowledge reflected at her—a certainty the other tried to deny. “There has to be another way.”
    “Funny.” Her lips quirked up, but her eyes burned. “That’s what I said.” She reached up and ripped the chain with its dangling charm from her neck, the emblem of her bond with Rule. “There isn’t, though. You’re the gate.”
    Slowly the other-her held out a hand.
    Lily dropped the toltoi charm into it. “Tell him . . .” Feelings smacked into her, a torrent too churned and powerful to sort. She looked down, blinking quickly, and stroked Rule’s head. She didn’t care that her voice shook. “Tell him how glad I was about him. How very glad.”
    Other-Lily’s fingers closed around the necklace. She nodded, her expression stark.
    Lily pushed to her feet. She tugged at the top of her sarong, and it came open. “Bind him with this. He’s bleeding badly.” She tossed it to her other self and took off running. Naked, barefoot, she ran full-out.
    There were others nearby, too. Rule’s friends—a sorcerer, a gnome, a woman he’d once cared for. And there were demons, the demons they fought. Not so many of them yet, but more were coming. Hundreds, maybe thousands more. And there was one demon, one small and insignificant demon, who was something like a friend. A little orange demon named Gan, who wasn’t fighting as the others were, and so saw Lily race for the cliff. And understood.
    “No!” Gan howled, and started after her. “No, Lily Yu! Lily Yu, I do like you! I do! Don’t—”
    She reached the edge of the cliff. And leaped.
    And as the air rushed past, heavy with the scent of ocean, whistling of terror and death, the dragon who called himself Sam whispered in her mind, Remember.
    The opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth cut through the whistling wind, snatching Lily away from the impact just in time. Her eyes popped open on darkness, her heart pounding in soul-sickening fear. Automatically her hand stretched out for her phone on the bedside table. And bumped into a wall.
    That simple, unexpected collision with reality jolted her back the rest of the way, though it took her