The tiger stirred, alarmed.
The tiger was both ageless and very old. It was wise and unwise, vast and starkly limited. It was all conundrum and contradiction, and it knew what it knew. Some of what it knew, it shared easily with Li Lei—the muscular joy of movement, the wild elation of rending the prey’s flesh with teeth and claws. Some of what it knew she could not touch. And some knowledge it shared, but in sideways glimpses, hard to understand.
She had no precognition herself, and she had not lived long enough as dragon to develop the ability to read patterns, a skill that awoke in them after the first few centuries.
But the tiger was spirit. Spirit was not as time-bound as flesh.
“Get back!” she ordered the people standing around her. “Do not stand so close to me!”
THIRTY-FIVE
TOO many people in the crowded space beneath Grandmother’s ward, Lily thought, and not enough spawn overhead—which was a seriously strange thing to think, but where the hell were Kongqi and Dick Boy? She didn’t buy Shēngwù’s scornful answer to Alice’s question. They hadn’t run off, but where were they? Dead?
“Lead us to your crossing spot,” she told Gan, and chivvied the people around her into following the small orange being who could save the children. She wanted the lot of them to clutter up a different spot—Gan’s crossing spot. If they were really lucky, the crowd might keep the spawn from noticing it when their targets started disappearing.
The spawn were too furious to think with their usual cold precision, and they were not good at working together. Lily could only be glad of that. The three overhead had first called down contradictory orders to the Fists, and were now arguing about it. The Fists had no way to sort out which orders to follow.
Alice went with Lily. “I do not know a great deal about lupi,” she said as the spawn argued overhead. “Did the stress of capture precipitate this First Change for the boy?”
Lily just shook her head, not knowing the answer or if she’d give it to Alice if she had. Toby wasn’t supposed to enter First Change until he entered puberty. Rule was supposed to be able to smell it when Toby’s hormones shifted, signaling that period. Admittedly, puberty was a process, not a moment, but dammit, Rule should have known.
With Toby, there was an additional fear about First Change. They’d had a strong indication that he was susceptible to the wild cancer, which was cancer on steroids, with tumors and growths overtaking pretty much all of the body. Lupi were only vulnerable to the wild cancer at two points in their lives—at the very end and right after First Change. This was why Rule had resisted creating an heir for Leidolf for so long. When he made someone heir, he placed a portion of the mantle in the man. And Rule had intended that portion to go to Toby. Some quality of the mantle prevented the wild cancer from setting up shop.
But just before they’d left Earth for Dis, Rule had given in and placed the heir’s portion in a Leidolf high dominant named Mateo Ortiz. If Rule died without an heir, the mantle was lost. With it would go much of the sanity of an entire clan. So the heir’s portion of the mantle was back on Earth, where it did them no good at all.
Toby looked okay, though. He looked normal, for a value of normal that included four legs instead of two. Lily wished desperately she could smell Toby the way Rule could so that she’d know. The wild cancer was supposed to have a distinctive scent. Hell, she wished she could just touch Toby. Stroke him. But right now he didn’t know who she was, and he wouldn’t for several days. Maybe a couple weeks.
? ? ?
“WHERE’S Kongqi? And D—” At the last second she kept herself from calling him Dick Boy. “Dìqiú?”
Alice frowned. “I think the Zhu Shēngwù apparated them elsewhere. I did not know he could to do that. I had not thought it possible.”
“Is apparate the same as teleport?”
“I enjoyed the Harry Potter books.”
Which did not seem like an answer at all, but Lily let it drop.
Cynna was kneeling on the ground. Ryder had, amazingly, fallen asleep in her mother’s arms. The four-year-old—Sandy—leaned up against Cynna and Diego stood close, cradling Noah protectively and watching Cynna as if she held all the answers.
“You’re certain you can take them both?” Cynna asked Gan.
“Doing it this way, I can.” Gan nodded wisely. “They’re little and Edge is easy to cross to, even from here. But not the wolf.” Gan cast a quick glance across the warded area at where Rule stood beside his panting, agitated son. He’d gotten Toby as far from everyone else as possible. “I can’t take him. He’d eat me.”
“No, you can’t.”
Overhead, the spawn continued to argue, but not as loudly. Lily couldn’t hear them well. At her feet, the ground gave a delicate shiver. Three-point-something, she thought, and tried to ignore how frequently it was happening because she couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Cynna looked at the four-year-old clinging to her side. “Sandy, you have to go with Gan now. She’ll take you to a place called Edge. A lot of the people there will look funny to you. Have you ever met a gnome?”
Sandy shook his head solemnly.
“They’re small, like Gan. They’ll take care of you and Ryder and see that you get home.”
Sandy’s bottom lip quivered. “I want to go home. I want to go home real bad.”
“You are. It will take time to get there, but you’re on your way home now.” She encouraged Sandy with a little push on his bottom, and the boy took three small steps to join Gan. Cynna took a shuddery breath and held Ryder out. Ryder woke up and started to wail, reaching for her mother.
Gan’s eyes widened. “It’s screaming!”
The ground shuddered once. Stopped.
“Babies do that sometimes,” Cynna said. “And Ryder’s a she, not an it.”
“It’s weird how you people get a sex when you’re so new. You don’t even get to pick.”
Cynna huffed out a shaky laugh, stood, and bent and kissed her crying daughter, avoiding the reaching arms. Then she kissed Gan’s forehead.
Gan rolled her eyes. “Cynna, we can’t do sex now!”
“That was a friend’s kiss, not a sex kiss. Now go.”
“Okay,” Gan said, and grabbed Sandy with her free arm, pulling him up tight against her.
Then they were gone.
Cynna just stood there, staring at the empty spot with red eyes.
The spawn didn’t react. They must not have seen Gan take the children away. Lily breathed a huge sigh of relief and moved close to her friend, touching Cynna’s arm. “You okay?”
“I just sent my baby off with Gan. Gan doesn’t know how to change a diaper. She probably doesn’t know which end to diaper. Not that she has any diapers, so I guess that doesn’t matter.”
“They’re bound to have diapers in Edge, and people who know how to change them.”