Mortal Danger Read Online Free PDF

their lives to conform to some notion of autonomy.
    “The uniform is staring at us,” she muttered.
    “Mmm.” The uniform, as she put it, was not happy about having a lupus on the scene. The man’s first impulse had been to arrest Rule on general principles. Dissuaded from that, he’d wanted to remove Rule from the crime scene.
    Reasonable enough, from a cop’s point of view, Rule supposed. But he wasn’t leaving Lily. Eventually the officer had accepted that, though it was a toss-up whether it was Lily’s newly minted federal badge, her past status as a homicide cop, or Rule’s simple refusal to leave that had prevailed.
    He rubbed his cheek against her hair, trying to breathe her in. And paused. “You smell funny.”
    “Hey.” She leaned away. “No more cracks about sweaty socks.”
    “Not that kind of funny.” Rule bent, sniffing down her shoulder and along the sling that held her left arm, where the scent was strongest.
    “Could you try to be a little less weird?”
    “Picture me wagging my tail, and this will seem more natural.” He inhaled deeply, trying to sort the odd scent from all the others. “I can’t place it,” he said, straightening. “Not in this form.”
    “Maybe you’re smelling whatever left the traces I felt on the floor.”
    Lily was a touch sensitive, perhaps the rarest of the Gifts, and an unusually strong one. She couldn’t be affected by magic, but she could feel it, even the slight traces left by the passage of supernatural beings. His eyebrows lifted. “What did you feel?”
    “It was odd. Sort of… orange.”
    “Which tells me little.”
    “Doesn’t tell me much, either.” She shook her head. “Magic feels like a texture, not a color, yet this… I can’t explain it. I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
    She looked troubled, but Rule felt relief. “It didn’t feel like that damned staff, then.”
    Before she could respond, they were interrupted.
    “Sorry, ma’am, you can’t go in there.”
    That was the officer by the door. A familiar feminine voice replied with a stream of Chinese, followed by another familiar voice—Julia Yu. “I told you they wouldn’t let you in. If they won’t let her own mother in, they won’t make an exception for her grandmother.”
    Lily sighed and pulled away. “Grandmother, don’t curse the man for doing his duty.”
    “I curse who I curse. You will come out now.”
    The old woman standing on the other side of the burly officer was less than five feet tall. Her dress was red, ankle-length, and Oriental style. Black hair striped with silver was drawn up in a knot secured with twin enameled picks, and the ring on one finger held a cabochon ruby. Despite her years, she had a spine like a sapling, supple and erect, and the hauteur of a queen.
    Rule couldn’t look at Madame Li Lei Yu without thinking of a cat. She knew she was in charge, whatever the idiots around her might think. Right now, she was a cat who wanted a door opened. Immediately.
    Lily gave Rule a wry glance and left the restroom. He followed.
    At the west end of the hall another officer was talking with one of the women who’d complained about the locked restroom door. Food smells drifted in from the nearby kitchen, and the sounds of diners in the public part of the restaurant competed with the hum from the rooms occupied by the wedding party.
    Here, under the suspicious eyes of the patrol cop, three women made a triangle, with the oldest and smallest of them at its apex. Julia Yu—the one in the middle— touched her daughter’s shoulder, looking anxious. Lily gave her a reassuring smile and turned to her grandmother. “I’m here, as instructed.”
    “Ha! You do not fool me. You come because you are ready to come.”
    Two pairs of black eyes met—one wrapped in wrin“-kles, one surrounded by smooth young skin. The two women were almost of equal height. Alike in other ways, too, some of them visible. ”You don’t want me to neglect my duty,“