Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties Read Online Free PDF Page B

your mind about magic and the people who use it.
    People like her. People like her boss, who he’d tried to kill, and her fellow agents
     in Unit Twelve, and that damn werewolf she intended to marry. People like most of
     her friends and at least one of her family, according to the reports he’d read when
     he checked her out.
    People like Dennis Parrott. Not that he’d known about Parrott’s charisma Gift back
     when he was busy pissing on everything he’d spent a lifetime fighting for. Dennis
     Parrott had found him easy prey, twisting him around until it made perfect sense to
     kill Ruben Brooks because he was in charge of the magic-users in the FBI. Perfect
     sense to conspire to kill a U.S. senator—not that he’d known exactly how Parrott planned
     to do it, but that was no excuse—and frame Brooks for the murder. Perfect sense to
     do whatever it took to rid this country of magic.
    Whatever it took…until he learned that his associates thought that meant killing twenty-two
     people to make death magic. Parrott and Chittenden had kept him in the dark about
     the death magic. They shouldn’t have been able to do that, but he hadn’t been at his
     best, had he? When he did find out, it had been almost too damn late. When he found
     out…
    Al Drummond didn’t deny one ounce of the blame that was his. He’d earned the hell
     that hadn’t eaten him. But magic made the playing field too damn uneven.
    And Lily Yu wanted to know if he still hated magic?
    God, yes. Just like he hated the gun laws in this country that made it too fucking
     easy for bastards to blow each other away along with whoever else might be standing
     nearby. Didn’t mean he hated guns—just the ones used by goddamn idiot losers who had
     no business being handed power like that.
    That’s what he hated about magic. That it could be wielded by losers at least as easily
     as by the good guys. That it could—like all power—turn a good guy into a loser.
    He should have told Yu that. She didn’t trust him, whichproved she wasn’t an idiot. But he needed her trust. He needed her, period. Needed
     her more than he’d needed his mother’s tit as a baby.
    Just went to prove…if there was a God, He had one sick sense of humor.

FOUR

    “I’ M fine, Mother. Really.” Beth Yu dropped to the floor, lifted the bed skirt, and peered
     into the crowded darkness under her bed. Nope. Not there. Which meant it had to be
     Deirdre…again. “The apartment may be small, but you saw it. It’s in a perfectly decent
     part of San Francisco, and…he did? Well, you can tell Uncle Feng to butt out of—”
    That, of course, was a mistake. While she listened to “Respect Your Elders” speech
     number twenty-seven she pushed to her feet and headed to the door of her closet, aka
     bedroom. Through superhuman organizational ability she’d managed to make room for
     her desk, but that’s about all it held. That and a small file cabinet and the twin-size
     bed she’d swapped out her old bed for so she could wedge the desk in. When you were
     freelancing from home, you had to have a desk.
    The door to closet number two—Deirdre’s room—was three steps down the hall. She opened
     it and frowned at the debris covering every surface. Was it only two years ago that
     she’d lived like this, too? Back then, it had seemed deliciously hedonistic. Liberated.
     Now it just looked stupid. You couldn’t find anything in a space this messy. Likeshoes.
Her
shoes, which Deirdre liked so much she kept borrowing them, maybe because she couldn’t
     find any of her own.
    Beth stepped into the one spot of carpet that showed between piles of cast-off clothing
     and started digging.
    When her mother paused for breath, she said, “I’m sure my uncle meant well, but I
     hate that he got you all worried. There’s nothing wrong with this neighborhood. People
     can get shot anywhere. No one was killed, and it isn’t like it was a gang shooting
     or