Fair Game (14 page)

“Send them up,” said Leslie Fisher’s voice. She sounded a good deal less calm than she had when she’d called Anna. She hung up without ceremony.

Chris the Security Guard nodded at Anna. “I’ll buzz you through. How come you’re taking the stairs? Twelve stories is a lot.”

“He doesn’t like elevators,” Anna said. “And it sounds like, if she
was kidnapped, maybe her assailant would have taken her down the stairway because you’d have noticed him in the elevator.” She indicated the wolf with a tip of her head. “He’s got a good nose. We’ll check it out.”

Chris looked at Brother Wolf with less fear and more interest. “It would be good,” he said, “if he could find her fast.”

Anna nodded. “We’ll try.”

BROTHER WOLF TROTTED
up the stairs scenting the people who’d come this way. There were old scents—several people had dogs and someone had the
worst
cologne…and six or eight fresher scents. As he and Anna moved up at an even and steady pace, the other scents fell away, leaving just a few. He could smell the woman who cleaned here—she came up often—but there was another that overlaid it, fresher by days.

Brother Wolf pinned his ears and stopped, because Charles told him what he was smelling was unlikely.

“What?” asked Anna, then, more properly,
What?

She came here on her own, without touching the floor.
Brother Wolf knew his tone was grumpy, but he could not change what was just because it didn’t make Charles happy.
Sliding against the wall about three feet from the floor. Charles says, “No.”

“Fair enough,” said Anna, her voice soothing his ruffled fur. “Momentarily inexplicable evidence in an abduction that possibly involves fae or werewolves isn’t surprising when you think about it.” She put her hand on his head, between his ears. “Arguing with your senses at this point is useless—which is something Charles taught me. There will be an explanation. Let’s see what her condo tells us.”

More cheerfully—because she had taken his side over Charles’s—Brother Wolf resumed the hunt.

They came, by and by, to the twelfth floor, where Anna held the door open for him. It wasn’t difficult to locate the missing girl’s condo, because, like the building itself, there were police and other people standing around just outside the door.

The woman from the FBI was there, her arms folded and her face set. In front of her was a delicately built man, taller than the FBI woman, but he appeared shorter because of his build. His hair was chestnut and grayed at the sides. Fae—Brother Wolf’s nose could smell it. Some sort of water fae, maybe; he smelled like a freshwater lake at dawn.

He looked so very helpless, this fae, though there was no sense of timidity about him. Brother Wolf couldn’t get a fix on how powerful he was, either. Brother Wolf was no expert on fae, though he’d met his share. But it seemed to him that the ability to hide from all of Brother Wolf’s senses might mean the same thing among the fae as it did among the werewolves. Only Bran could hide what he was so well that Brother Wolf could not immediately discern his power.

“We are doing what we can,” the FBI woman said. “We don’t know if this case is related to the others—only that our serial killer has been killing fae for a number of years and abducts his prey in a manner similar to this. No one sees or hears anything—though the abduction site is well guarded or well populated.”

“My daughter is only half-fae,” said the man. “And until Officer Mooney, here, asked me, no one knew it. No one. There is no reason to suppose that your serial killer has my daughter before your forensic people go in to see what they can find. I was in there, and there is no sign of a struggle. We were meeting to celebrate her successful audition—she won a place in a top-flight ballet troupe—and she would not have stood me up. Not without calling to cancel. If there is no sign of a struggle, then she knew her kidnapper and let him get too close. She was a trained athlete and I saw to it she knew how to defend herself.
I need to find her address book and you need to start down the line and send people to visit each and every person there while we wait for the kidnappers to call and demand a ransom. We are wasting time.”

This one, thought Brother Wolf, was used to giving orders rather than following them. He might have been tempted to teach him better except for the smell of frantic worry and heartsick terror that the fae was covering with quiet orders.

“If it is our serial killer,” said the FBI woman, sounding much more patient than she smelled, “then there will be nothing our forensic units can find, and it won’t be anyone she knows. I have a—” Something caused her to look around just then. Probably the startled swearword one of the young cops said when she noticed Anna and Brother Wolf standing just outside of the stairwell.

The FBI woman—

Leslie Fisher,
admonished Anna, because she had a thing about proper word-names.

To demonstrate that he knew perfectly well who he was talking about, Brother Wolf sent her a complicated impression of muted dominance, human, and a scent that was a combination of skin, hygiene products, and a family smell indicating that the FBI woman had a long-term relationship with a male and several not-adult children and two cats. He was showing off a little, because it took a lot of experience to separate a person’s scent into so much detail.

Anna thunked him lightly on the head with her knuckles. “Behave,” she told him sternly. But he felt her laughter.

“Here they are,” said the FBI woman,
Leslie Fisher
. Her eyes slid over him twice. She blinked, then focused on the leash.

Anna smiled. “We use the collar and leash because it makes people feel safer,” she explained. “That way no one does anything stupid.”

The fae looked at Brother Wolf and reached for a sword on his hip that wasn’t there—which seemed to discomfort him quite a bit. Brother
Wolf relayed that to Anna so that she would know that the fae saw them as a possible threat.

“Anna Smith and Charles Smith, I’d like to introduce you to Alistair Beauclaire, a partner at the legal firm of Beauclaire, Hutten, and Solis. He was to meet his daughter, Lizzie Beauclaire, age twenty-two, here at eleven p.m. for a late celebration. But sometime between when he talked to her at six p.m. and when he came at ten minutes before eleven, she went missing.”

Though her tone was mild, her body language, the way her own hand moved so she could reach a weapon, and the spike in her pulse told Brother Wolf that the FBI woman had seen what he saw. She talked more than she’d had to in order to give everyone time to calm down. All of which made her altogether more of a person to him, because she was not anyone’s victim and she was smart, Leslie Fisher of the FBI.

“Sir,” said Anna, “we’re here to help. In addition to his other victims, this killer has taken out three werewolves in Boston this summer.”

The slender man let his eyes drift from Anna to Brother Wolf, and Brother Wolf resisted displaying his fangs because he’d promised Charles that he would take care of Anna. Provoking a fight with a fae might be entertaining, but it was
not
protecting Anna.

“You’re both werewolves,” said the fae.

Anna nodded. “Does she have a lot of people over?”

He shook his head. “She spends six to eight hours a day taking classes and rehearsing. Usually she’ll meet her friends at a club or restaurant if they want to go out. Most of her friends are dancers, too, which means poor. I think it embarrasses her to live this upscale. Her mother lives in Florida with her stepfather, as do Lizzie’s two younger half siblings.”

“Good. That will help a lot. So who has been in the apartment tonight?”

Leslie raised her hand. “Me.” Pointed to the fae. “He has.” She looked around. “Hey, Moon. Mooney, are you still around?”

One of the police officers farther down the corridor stepped out from behind several others and raised his hand. “Right here,” he said.

“If that’s true, that’ll really help when we go in to check who’s been in there. But Charles needs to scent you all so he can discount your presence. He won’t hurt you; just stand still.”

Anna dropped the leash. Brother Wolf approached the policeman with his ears up and his tail wagging gently, and the man still stiffened and lost color. That was fine. Enjoyable, even. Not as much fun as if he’d run away, but Brother Wolf took his pleasure where he found it. Still, a quick sniff from several feet out was enough.

When he had the policeman’s scent, he stopped by the fae—who kept a wary eye on him, but otherwise did not object. Interestingly, Leslie Fisher didn’t flinch, either; only her rising pulse gave her fear away. He liked her better all the time.

He looked at his mate.

“Anyone else that we know has been in there tonight?” Anna asked.

“No,” said Leslie. “As soon as I got here I sealed the room.”

“If you’ll let us in?” Anna nodded at the apartment’s door.

Brother Wolf waited until they were closed in the apartment together before setting to work. Cross-scenting a room was old hat, but required no less concentration than the first time he’d done it—he just did a better job now. It was a matter of dismissing old or stale scents, then sorting through the ones he’d picked up in the hallway and seeing what was left.

The woman’s scent he’d picked up in the hallway was the one he’d found in the stairwell. Outside of her father, once he left the main living space, there were no scents of anyone who had been there in the last six months. Only the woman’s scent was in her bedroom.

She was a dancer, her father said,
Charles told Brother Wolf.
Look at
the closets. One for everyday clothing and for parties. The other filled with workout clothes and a few competition dresses. Ballroom competitions. I thought her father said she danced ballet.

Brother Wolf considered it.
The first set of clothing is camouflage,
he offered. It was good that Charles had decided to participate instead of just observe.
The clothes in this one are a disguise to help her blend in and look like everyone else. They smell like perfume—she even hid her scent when she wore them. The second is who she really is. They smell like long hours working: like triumph and pain, blood and sweat.

Brother Wolf grew more interested in her bedroom. She was as much the prey he hunted as the one who took her was. Maybe something he could learn about her would help in their search.

On the wall were some framed art photo prints of dancers, and eight of them were black-and-white photos set in a circle. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were immortalized in a moment when Ginger was up in the air, a huge smile on her face, and Fred had a sly grin. Another black and white was of the scene from
Dirty Dancing
that caught the primary actors on hands and knees, staring hungrily at each other—though the tension of their pose told the observer that they were still in the midst of a dance. A number of other dancers he didn’t know, mostly couples in a wide variety of dances from ballroom to tribal to modern. In the center of the circle of photos was a poster-sized image that dominated the room.

The photographer had caught a male dancer in mid-flight, stretched across the canvas in a graceful
Y
. His feet at the lower left-hand corner were slightly out of focus, giving the photo a sense of aliveness and making the stillness of the rest of it more profound. The dancer’s left arm, farther from the viewer, was stretched out to the top right, and his right arm, nearer to the viewer, flung back to the top left corner. His head was bowed, the line of his body so pure and straight he might have been swinging from the rope of a pirate ship. His muscles were
flexed and straining, yet somehow he managed to give the impression of being relaxed, at peace.

Unlike the others, it was in color, but just barely, as if someone had filled it with shades of brown. The loose white shirt he’d worn looked cream, his tights were taupe, and the backdrop came out a dark brown rather than black. A warm, beautiful image.

Rudolf Nureyev,
supplied Charles.

“Brother Wolf,” called Anna from somewhere nearby. “Charles? Could you come here for a moment? I think I smell something.”

She was standing out in the hallway, next to the bathroom, a thoughtful look on her face.

“What do you smell?” she asked him, and when she did he came another step closer and caught it, too.

Terror,
he answered—and tried again, closing his eyes to shut out other senses.
Blood. Her blood. And…
A low growl rose…
And his.

She had fought her attacker, the little dancer had. It was only a small drop of blood, but it was enough.

He licked it—feeling the scent rise up as soon as his tongue touched it, breaking the magic of concealment that had tried to hide even so little of the man who had come here to do harm. A man, but not human, or not wholly human. The bitter flavor of magic in the blood made his tongue tingle. He would recognize this man when he smelled him again.

Half-blood fae,
he told her.

“We probably should have left that blood for the FBI labs,” said Anna, her tone a little rueful.

My hunt,
Brother Wolf assured her, though Charles agreed with Anna.
My rules.
That last was as much for Charles as for Anna. He looked at the closed bathroom door. If he’d been stalking her, he might have waited in the bathroom.
Would you open the door so I can seek him there?

She wrapped her hand in the tail of her shirt and opened it. At first he thought there was nothing to find, that the woman’s attacker had awaited her somewhere else.

Then he caught a faint trace of excitement, something he felt almost more than scented—and a hint of something else that brought Charles to the fore, drawn by something he understood better than the wolf did: spirits.

Some homes had spirits and some did not, and neither he nor Charles knew why that was. Spirits weren’t ghosts; they were the consciousness of things that Charles’s da didn’t believe were alive: trees and water, stones and earth. Houses and apartments—some of them, anyway.