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him.”
    “You should probably recover him, then.”
    “I’ll call him in a minute.”
    “I’m fine,” he repeated, annoyed.
    “Maybe. Rule, there was magic coating you when I arrived. Death magic.”
    He stilled. After a moment he said, “Whatever happened, I lived through it.”
    “The magic’s gone now. Everywhere I’ve touched, it’s gone. Which is good, but I don’t understand it.” But she hadn’t touched everywhere, had she?
    His shirt was loose. She ran both hands up under it, feeling his chest.
    “Ah . . . Lily?”
    “It could have localized, like the demon poison did.” Not on his chest, though. She moved closer so she could reach beneath his shirt to feel his back. The skin was warm, slightly moist . . . and just skin. No pond-scum grit.
    “Death magic either kills you or it doesn’t. It didn’t. Lily—”
    “We don’t know. We don’t know what it can or can’t do. You’re going to need to take off your shirt.”
    “Christ.” Deacon’s voice came from behind her, thick with disgust. “You raced here to feel him up.”

FOUR
    HALO was tiny compared to San Diego, but it was no fly-speck. As the county seat, it held a four-story district court building, where Rule would learn if his son was coming home with him. And the two-story sheriff’s department, where Rule was now. The Dawson County Sheriff’s Department smelled of dust, disinfectant, tobacco, printer’s ink, and mice. And people, of course. People who’d sweated and fretted, worked and eaten here for years
    The most interesting thing about the smells, Rule thought, was the one that was absent: fear. That scent had been absent from the first, unfortunate moment he met Sheriff Deacon. The man didn’t like Rule, but he didn’t fear him. That was unusual enough to make Rule curious.
    They were more or less alone. The sheriff’s office was on the second floor of the cement block building, separated by a glass panel from a large, communal space crammed with desks. Most of those desks were empty at this hour, though a square-set woman in civilian clothes had grim possession of the desk in front of the door to Deacon’s office.
    It was 6:42 a.m. Rule sat on a hard wooden chair and longed for coffee. Lily might classify the liquid in his foam cup as that beverage, but Lily had drunk the sludge perpetrated by cop-house coffeepots too long. Her senses were permanently skewed by the experience.
    “Okay.” Deacon hit a button on his computer and the printer jumped into action. “I’ll need you to sign your statement, then you’re free to go. Don’t leave town.”
    Rule considered pointing out that he’d been free to go all along—he was here voluntarily. Lily had wanted him to wait to give Deacon his statement until she was finished at the scene and could come with him. Rule had understood. He, too, knew the need to protect, though he still found it odd, even unsettling, to have that instinct trained on him.
    Protection was unnecessary in this instance. He’d dealt with any number of suspicious or prejudiced police in his time. He’d chosen to cooperate with this one. So far, cooperation had earned him no points at all. “I’ll wait here for Lily, if you’ve no objection.”
    Deacon shot him a hard glance. “Your lover may be a while, you know.”
    “Lover” was a fine word, yet in this man’s mouth it sounded like “slut.” Rule told himself he would not allow anger to make his choices for him, but it was just as well he didn’t have Cullen’s knack with fire. “It would be more respectful to refer to her as Agent Yu.”
    Deacon snorted. “Pull the other one. I know how your kind treats women, and respectful isn’t the word for it.” The printer spat out a sheet of paper and he leaned sideways to pluck it. “Here. Read and sign.”
    Rule accepted the page without looking at it. He couldn’t tell Deacon he would be faithful to Lily unto death. She was his nadia , his Chosen. But while that was understood