That was good to know.

The sirens he’d been hearing were close now. Good. They’d need a lot of ambulances. So many injured . . .

“And the others?” Lily asked, her voice low and raw. “I see some of them, but . . . Karonski. Did anyone ever find him?”

“He’s alive. Got knocked out, but Mike found him and brought him out.”

“And Chris?”

Silence.

So many dead . . .

“They converged on us,” Cullen said after a moment. “About the time that giant elemental Fagin had been keeping as a pet rose up, all of the demon wolves came after Rule. The rest of us were just obstacles. There’d be more dead if they’d cared about killing us, but they didn’t. Everyone’s hurt, but not as many lupi died as might have. All they wanted was to get to Rule.”

“I thought—they seemed to be after you, Cullen. First one wolf, then the demon Lily, then another wolf.”

“Oh.” Rule could hear the shrug in his friend’s voice. “A demon will usually go after a sorcerer if it can. They never know what one of us might be capable of, so they like to take us out quick.”

Funny that Cullen was just now mentioning this.

“Something changed,” Cullen went on. “They seemed to be acting on their own at first. When they came for Rule, they weren’t. They were under someone’s control.”

“Chittenden,” Lily said. “He sent them. He must . . . I think at first he stuck to the original plan, turning the demon-ridden dopplegängers loose. The more people they killed, the better. Lupi would be blamed. It sounds like he changed his tactics when he realized he wouldn’t be getting an on-site delivery of victims to feed to the elementals. I don’t know what he’d planned to do with the elementals, or how he planned to sacrifice twenty-two people right out in public. Maybe he thought everyone who saw him slitting throats would end up dead, so it didn’t matter.”

“Yeah, that fits,” Cullen said. “By then he’d seen Rule, though, so he sent the dopplegängers after him. It must have seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. Is Chittenden dead?”

“I knocked him out. I wanted to . . . but I didn’t. He’ll live to stand trial.”

“That’s something, I guess.” Cullen was silent a moment. “You want to tell me what happened with that enormous elemental? I saw the brownies scaling it like it was a climbing wall, but I don’t know what they did.”

She told them. Rule felt a smile stretch across his face. It hurt, but so did everything else.

Someone—Mike, it sounded like—called Cullen to come help with setting a bone. Cullen told Lily to “call me if he starts bleeding again, but he won’t”—and moved away.

The wail of one of the sirens peaked, then shut off. Some kind of help was here. Rule needed to speak before they lost this brief privacy. “Lily.”

She bent closer. Close enough that he could breathe her in, the sweet, comforting scent of her ... and her tears. She’d worked so hard to keep those tears from her voice, but she’d been crying from the moment she settled down beside him. He must look bloody awful. “You did the right thing. If you’d obeyed . . .” Obedience was not something his nadia was inclined toward, no, and he was so glad and grateful for that. “If you’d heeded me when I tried to forbid you, we’d all be dead.”

“I did what I had to do, but I was just guessing. It was all such a guess.”

“A guess backed by great courage.” He made the effort and raised one hand to touch her hair. He didn’t touch her face, though he wanted to. But she didn’t want him to know about the tears, so he avoided discovering them. “I knew you had to go, to do what you could. I just couldn’t . . . you’re braver than I.”

His beautiful, brave nadia snorted. “Yeah, right. Why did you send Scott with me instead of coming yourself?”

“I couldn’t.” That moment rose up and choked him again—Lily racing off into God knew what, her very motion a lure to whatever wolfish instincts lived in the demon-ridden doubles of his people. “Scott isn’t fully healed yet. He couldn’t fight properly. Too many would have died if I left. I had to stay.”

“I know,” she said softly, and miraculously found the one spot on his face that didn’t hurt, and stroked it. “I know. Which means you did what you had to do, just like me, doesn’t it?”

TWO hundred fifty-nine people died at the four Humans First rallies—one hundred and twelve of them in D.C. alone. That had been by far the largest rally, so there had been a great many targets. Plus it was the only rally where elementals had been summoned, and estimates put the number of demon wolves there at more than twice those at the other rallies. The second highest number of fatalities occurred in Albuquerque, mostly because Manuel and his clansmen had had the farthest to travel, and had arrived late.

Of those two hundred fifty-nine people killed, thirty-seven were lupi . . . which didn’t sound too disproportionate until you looked at all the numbers. Which Arjenie did, because her mind worked that way. She sent Rule an e-mail with those numbers, which he read while being given the last of the four pints of blood he’d needed.

He immediately called several of his media contacts and arranged to speak to reporters from his wheelchair as he was being released from the hospital. One of his eyes was covered by a gauze pad. The swelling had gone down around the other one, just as he’d said it would.

At that press conference, he told reporters and their cameras that there had been an estimated thirty-five thousand humans altogether who’d attended the four rallies. Seven-tenths of one percent of those people were killed. There had been one hundred sixty-four lupi who raced to save the humans at those rallies.

One-fifth of them were killed. Nearly a third of them died in D.C.

Rule’s press appearance garnered attention for several hours, until an announcement that night by the Secretary of Defense eclipsed everything else for a while.

A nuclear warhead had been accidentally deployed that morning due to a mysterious series of glitches that no one was able to explain. The missile had apparently been on course for the West Coast when—with even greater mystery—it had vanished from sight and radar. No trace of the missile or the warhead was ever found.

WITH everything that happened that day, it wasn’t surprising that no one noticed that four of the U.S. cities with dragons were temporarily without dragons. Since they were gone a single day, people might not have noticed even without the dramatic events.

It was the next day when six women boarded planes at the Denver airport at various times, headed back to their various homes.

The seventh woman didn’t need to catch a plane. She’d left as soon as her work was done. An enormous black dragon had flown her home already, his talons wrapped carefully around the empty body, her bright muumuu flapping merrily in the wind of their passage.

Dragons cannot open gates on their own. They can manipulate them, power them, even close them, but they can’t open them. For reasons they do not explain, song magic alone isn’t enough. The Rhejes could open a gate; that knowledge was held in the memories. They couldn’t shift one in front of an ICBM boosting at thousands of miles an hour, so they needed the dragons as much as the dragons needed them.

It takes a godawful amount of power to open a gate. The dragons supplied much of that, but the Rhejes had had to channel it. An eighty-one-year-old heart, however valiant, can only take so much strain, and the two healers present couldn’t stop chanting to help. She’d held on, though—held on until the gate opened and the missle shot into a realm that had held no life for over three thousand years.

Nokolai clan had a new Rhej.