Fair Game (17 page)

Charles sat back. “Like your daughter?” he said in a soft voice.

“Like my daughter. The only thing she gets from me is my mother’s love of dance—and she has to train hours every day to do what my mother did effortlessly.” Beauclaire looked down, then back at Charles. “You are old, but not so old as your father. Maybe you can understand why I fought this dictate as hard as anything I’ve ever fought against. To deceive a human woman for the purpose of fathering a child upon her…it is dishonorable. Yes. And yet it gave me someone I care deeply about.”

He drew in a breath and then looked Charles in the eye. It was not a challenge, more a way of showing how serious he was. “It is not wise,” Beauclaire said, his voice clipped, and somewhere in the vowels Anna heard an accent not too far from Bran’s when he was angered. “It is not wise to give something old and powerful something they care about. And I am very old.” He looked at the FBI agents. “Even, possibly, older than your father. We haven’t compared notes.”

Leslie reacted to the idea that a werewolf could be older than an old fae—an immortal old fae. Goldstein just looked more tired, and maybe that was a reaction, too.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” Anna told them. “The average life expectancy for someone from the time they are Changed and become a werewolf is about ten years.”

“Eight,” said Charles, sounding as weary as Goldstein looked. Anna knew her data had been correct last year. She reached out and touched his thigh, but he didn’t look at her. Charles wasn’t, she thought, totally involved with the proceedings. He kept glancing over the couch to the wall of windows beyond. She frowned, noting how, with the sky still
dark outside, the window reflected the room back at them. He was seeing something in the reflection.

“Four out of ten of our halfling children survive to adulthood,” Beauclaire was saying. “They are a favorite prey of other fae if they are not protected. My daughter is twenty-three in two weeks.”

Anna glanced at Charles. He didn’t appear to be listening, and whatever he was seeing in the window-mirrors was making him more and more remote.

“What kind of dancer is your daughter?” Anna asked suddenly. “I saw ballet shoes, but also ballroom costumes.” She hadn’t, not really, but Brother Wolf had and had kept her informed.

“Ballet,” Lizzie’s father said. “Ballet and modern. One of her friends is into ballroom dancing and she partnered with him for a while a couple of years back. Ballroom is for fun and ballet for serious, she told me.” Beauclaire smiled at Anna. “When she was six, she dressed for Halloween as a fairy princess complete with wings. She was dancing around the room and I asked her why she wasn’t flying. She stopped and told me quite earnestly that her wings were make-believe. That dancing was the closest she could do to flying. And she loved to fly.”

It wasn’t enough. Charles was still preoccupied.

Anna touched Charles’s face and waited until he turned from the window. “Lizzie Beauclaire is not quite twenty-three. She loves to dance. And she’s all alone with a monster who will torture and kill her if we don’t find her soon. You are her best hope.” She didn’t add, “So suck it up and pay attention,” but she trusted that he heard it in her voice.

Charles tilted his head, though his face was quiet. At least he wasn’t looking in the windows anymore.

“Remember that,” Anna told him fiercely as she dropped her hand. “You can’t change the past, but this we can do. Beauclaire answered first; it’s our turn. What do we know that would help the hunt?”

She met Charles’s
gaze and held it until he shifted his weight forward and gave a brief nod.

“The bodies that the police have been finding are cut up.” Charles turned to the FBI agents. “I smelled black magic—blood magic—on the man who took Lizzie Beauclaire. That makes me think witches, and that those cuts on the victims might be significant. The fae have no use for blood magic.”

“It doesn’t work for us,” said Beauclaire, but his voice was absentminded. He was watching Charles. Not looking him in the eye, not quite.

Goldstein said, “I have more details on that.” He opened up his briefcase and handed Charles a thick file of photographs. “Most of the victims have shapes carved into their skin—we’ve been looking at the witchcraft or voodoo angle for the past ten years. But the witches willing to talk to us only say that it’s not anything they know. Not voodoo or hoodoo. It’s not runes. It’s not hieroglyphs, nor any other symbolic language used by witches.”

Charles opened up the folder and then spread the photos out on the coffee table. These were mostly blowups or close-ups, some in black and white, some in color. Names, dates, and numbers were written in white marking pen on the upper left corner. The photos documented symbols, ragged and dark around the edges. Some of the markings were ripped down the middle by angry slashes; others were distorted by degradation of the flesh they had been carved in.

“They lied to you,” said Charles, bending over to get a closer look at one.

“Who?”

“The witches,” said Beauclaire. He pulled one out of the mix, then set it back down quickly. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them again they were hot with…rage or terror; Anna’s nose wasn’t sure which.

“The symbols witches use,”
Beauclaire told Goldstein in polite, formal tones, “follow family lines, for the most part. I can’t, but the witches should have been able to tell you what family line these came from. There’s something wrong with the way they’re placed or the shape…In a very long life, I have seen many things. I do not perform blood magic, but I’ve seen it often enough.”

Charles turned one of the photos to view it from a different angle and frowned. He took his phone out of his pocket and took a close-up of one of the photos. He hit a few more buttons and put the phone to his ear.

“Charles,” said Bran.

“Ears might hear,” warned Charles, telling his father that there was someone else in the room who could overhear their phone call. “I sent you a photo. Looks like witchcraft to me. What do you think?”

“I’ll call you back,” Bran said and hung up.

Goldstein rubbed his face tiredly. “We’re supposed to be holding these back from the public,” he said. “Can I ask that the photo won’t hit the Internet or the news services?”

“You’re safe,” Anna reassured him. “We’re calling in an expert opinion.”

The phone rang before anyone could say anything. Charles put it on speaker as he answered it.

“Everyone can hear you now,” he said.

There was a little pause before Bran spoke. “You need to get a witch to look at that. It appears to be something from the Irish clans to me, but it doesn’t look quite right. Some of those symbols are nonsense and a few others are drawn wrong. It would be best if the witch could see the real thing, not just the photos. There’s more to a spell than only the visual can tell you.”

“Thanks,” Charles said, hanging up without ceremony. “So, anyone know a local witch we can talk to?”

“I know a witch,” said Leslie. “But she’s in Florida.”

Charles shook his head. “If we’re
going to bring someone up, I know a reliable one or two. Do you know any in Boston?” He looked at Beauclaire, who shook his head.

“I know of none who would help.”

“If we find someone,” Anna said, “could we get her in to see one of the bodies?”

“We can arrange it,” said Leslie.

“All right, then, let’s call the local Alpha and see if he has a witch who will cooperate with us.”

Charles dialed and then gave Anna his phone. “He likes you better. You ask him.”

“He’s scared of me,” Anna said, feeling a little smug.

“This is Owens.”

“Isaac, this is Anna,” she said. “We need a witch.”

THE FBI AGENTS
left to arrange a viewing for the witch, who wouldn’t be available until ten in the morning. Beauclaire told them he was going to see if he could find anyone who might know if the horned lord who died in 1981 had left any half-blood children behind.

Anna waited until Charles had closed the door. “What do you see in the mirror?” she asked him.

He closed his eyes and did not turn to look at her.

“Charles?”

“There are things,” he said slowly, “that are made better by talking them out. There are things that are given more power when you speak of them. These are of the second variety.”

She thought about that for a moment and then went to him. The muscles of his back were tight when she touched them with her fingertips.

“It doesn’t appear,” she said slowly, “
that being silent about whatever it is has helped, either.” What kinds of things did he not like to talk about? Evil, she remembered. “Is it like a Harry Potter thing?”

He turned his head then. “A what?”

“A Harry Potter thing,” she said again. “You know, don’t say Voldemort’s name because you might attract his attention?”

He considered it. “You mean the children’s book.”

“I have got to get you to watch more movies,” she said. “You’d enjoy these. Yes, I mean the children’s book.”

He shook his head. “Not quite. Noticing some things make them more real. They are already real to me. If you notice them, they might become real to you as well, and that would not be good.”

Suddenly she knew. Charles had told her once that he didn’t speak his mother’s name for fear that it would tie her to this world and not let her go on to the next. Ghosts, he’d told her, need to be mourned and then released. If you keep them with you, they become unhappy and tainted.

“Ghosts,” she said, and he drew in a sharp breath and stepped away from her, closer to the window.

“Don’t,” he said sharply. She’d have snapped back at him if she hadn’t remembered that when he’d closed down their bond he’d been worried about her.

“All right,” she said slowly. “You feel better than before we came here, though. Right?” If he was getting better, he was dealing with it.

He had to think about that one before he answered her. “Yes. Not good, but better.”

She wrapped her arms around his waist from behind and breathed him in. “I’ll leave it alone if you promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“If it starts getting worse again, you’ll tell me—and you’ll tell Bran.”

“I can do that.”

“All right.”
She brushed off the back of his shirt, as if there were some lint or something on it and not as though her hands were hungry for the warmth of his skin. “Sleep or breakfast?” she asked briskly. “We have two hours before the FBI picks us up and takes us to the morgue.”

THE SMALL, SHEET-COVERED
body on the table smelled of rotting flesh, salt, and fish. None of which managed to quite cover up the lingering scent of terror. From the size of the corpse, Anna thought he might have been seven or eight.

Anna had been Changed by rape both physical and metaphorical. She had served three years in a pack led by a madwoman, during which time death had become something to look forward to, an end to pain. Charles had changed all of that—and Anna appreciated the irony that the Marrok’s Wolfkiller, arguably the most feared werewolf in the world, had made her safe and made her want to live.

Irony aside, Anna knew death. The morgue smelled of it, as well as a healthy dose of antiseptic, latex gloves, and body fluids. When they had entered the small viewing room, the scent of a little boy added itself to the mix, a boy who rightfully should be out playing with his friends and instead bore the unmistakable signs of autopsy.

Beside her, Brother Wolf growled, the sound low enough that she didn’t think any of the humans heard it. He’d come as wolf—again. Anna dug her fingers through the fur of his neck and swallowed hard, trying to focus on something besides the little body on the table. Even worry about her mate was better than a dead child.

Charles promised that he’d let her know if it got worse—but he hadn’t reopened the bond between them, not even wide enough that he could talk to her while he was in wolf shape.

“His family were supposed to pick him up today,” said the man who’d let them in. He was dressed in scrubs that were clean and fresh—
either he was just beginning his day, or he’d changed for them. “When I explained to them that a werewolf had offered to look for clues we couldn’t find, it was not difficult to persuade them to leave him here until tomorrow.”

“You didn’t tell his parents they were bringing me, too?” said the witch, who looked like she’d come right out of a 1970s sitcom—middle-aged, a little dumpy, a little rumpled, hair an improbable shade of red, and wearing clothes that didn’t quite fit. “The werewolf is incidental and, I might add, begged the witch to come—and you didn’t think to mention me?” The death threat in her voice did a fair job of removing any sense of comedy, though Anna couldn’t help but think of Sleeping Beauty and the evil fairy who was offended because she wasn’t invited.

Anna didn’t like witches on the whole. They smelled of other people’s pain and they liked causing problems. But even if this one hadn’t been a witch, she doubted she’d have liked her.

Dr. Fuller—Anna had missed Leslie’s introduction of their contact at the morgue while absorbing the smells of the place, but he wore a name tag—frowned. “He comes from a staunch Baptist family. Werewolves were a big stretch for them already. I didn’t think they’d have taken to the idea of a witch at all well.”

The witch smiled. “Probably not,” she agreed cheerfully, just as if she hadn’t taken offense a moment before.

Isaac had warned Anna that his witch of choice was a little unstable. He’d also told her that the witch wasn’t all that powerful, so the harm she could do was minimal. He had another witch who worked upon occasion for his pack, but that one was secretive and a lot more dangerous. The witch here now, Caitlin (last name withheld), would tell them everything she found out, just to prove how much she knew. The other would keep it to herself for later use or just for her own amusement, which wouldn’t do Lizzie any good at all.

“Tell
them we appreciate their cooperation,” said Heuter, the younger Cantrip agent, who had shown up as they were waiting for the witch in front of the building where the county morgue resided. He’d claimed that someone told him that they were going to visit the body, but from Leslie’s attitude (polite but distant) it hadn’t been her.