Fair Game aao-3 Page 11

  ‘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.

  This one was faint and shy, better for the shaman’s son to deal with rather than the wolf.

  Show me, said Charles to the spirit of the house. Show me who waited here.

  The condo was new. It had not been a home for generations of children, so the spirit was weak. All it was able to give them was an impression of patience and largeness, so much larger than she whose home this was. Clean smelling – no, that was wrong; he smelled of cleaners. He carried a … something.

  Something? Charles was patient with it. A weapon? Brother Wolf provided the smell of a gun, oil, powder, metal.

  Swift negation and a response, an answer more sensory than in words: something soft, mostly textile, with only a hint of metal.

  A bag, like a gym bag, Charles thought, picturing such a bag carefully in his head, and the spirit all but jumped for joy, providing more and more information about the bag. As if by naming it, Charles had pulled a cork out of the bottle of what the spirit knew.

  He brought a bag, Brother Wolf told Anna – triumphantly, because he’d been right about the stairway. A big canvas bag, and stuffed our missing woman inside. He carried her down the stairs, which is why I could only smell her along the walls.

  ‘He has no scent?’ Anna asked, having caught something of what he’d found. Her voice sent the shy spirit fleeing.

  He hid his scent with magic that feels something like fae magic, Charles told her.

  Brother Wolf thought of the bitter taste that still lingered on his tongue from the kidnapper’s blood. It also feels like witch magic, black and blood-soaked.

  Charles agreed. It feels less … civilized than the fae magic I’m familiar with.

  ‘Would a witch have been able to carry a full-grown woman down twelve flights of stairs?’ Anna asked.

  Maybe not directly, answered Charles after a moment of consideration, but there are ways.

  ‘Early in the hunt,’ said Anna.

  Exactly, agreed Charles.

  ‘Who do we know who knows a lot about fae and their magic?’ asked Anna. ‘Would Bran know?’

  We have a better source, suggested Brother Wolf. Her father is old and powerful.

  ‘He reached for a sword,’ Anna said. ‘Is that how you could tell he was old?’

  Brother Wolf supplied the memory of the scent of creatures that were older than a few centuries, a light fragrance that grew richer.

  Old, explained Charles.

  And then they gave her what power smelled like among the fae, beginning with something weaker and increasing until Charles told her, That is strength. But they are subtle creatures, the fae. They cannot add to their scent because they, for the most part, cannot smell it. However, when they conceal what they are, sometimes they can also obscure what we can smell about them. This one smells old, but he smells as weak as is possible for someone who still smells like fae.

  ‘So a fae will probably not smell more powerful or old than he is,’ said A
nna, ‘but he might smell weaker. Like the way Bran enjoys hiding what he is.’

  Brother Wolf huffed out an affirmative sneeze. Charles added, I think it might be a good thing to discuss this with Lizzie’s father – when there are no humans present.

  ‘Discuss how powerful he is?’ asked his mate, a corner of her mouth twitched up. She knew what Charles had meant – she had a silly sense of humor sometimes. Brother Wolf liked that about her. Charles, however, was in a more serious mood and treated her question as if she’d really meant it.

  No. Discuss with him what kind of fae would fit the parameters we have been given for this serial killer.

  Brother Wolf sneezed to let her know that he thought she was funny.

  ‘Did you find something?’ asked Leslie as Anna let Charles and herself out of the apartment.

  Anna looked at the techie-type police officers who awaited them and wondered if it was the serial-killer angle – or something about the missing girl’s father – that had brought out the big guns on a missing person’s case where the victim had been gone for only a few hours.

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said, answering the FBI agent’s question. ‘Whoever took her is fae … or has some access to fae magic. He concealed himself in her bathroom and waited for her to come to him.’

  After gesturing the waiting forensic team into the condo, Leslie took out a small spiral notebook and began scribbling things down in it. She didn’t look up when she said, ‘What else did you find?’

  ‘He came up unobserved. A pure-blood fae could have come up looking like anyone else, probably someone who actually lives here,’ Anna told her. It was speculation, but that was what she’d have done if she could conceal herself the way the fae could. They had several variants of the ‘don’t look at me’ magic that were stronger than pack magic was, but glamour, the power that all fae shared, was more than that – a very strong illusion. ‘However he arrived, he left with his prey in a gym bag and carried her down the stairs.’

  Leslie looked up at that. ‘He carried her down? Twelve flights of stairs?’

  ‘Without dragging her,’ Anna said, putting a finger on the hallway wall about the height that Brother Wolf had been tracing. If he had been carrying her with his arms hanging down … he was more than human tall. Anna didn’t say that, though, just told Leslie the facts. ‘Our perpetrator doesn’t leave a scent, so we were pretty confused at first.’

  She glanced at the missing woman’s father, who stood at parade rest, his gaze on the floor. ‘Because he didn’t leave a scent, it might have been someone who had been to the apartment before, someone she knew – but it didn’t have that feel. He took her by surprise in the hall in front of the bathroom. She fought him – fought hard. There’s a pretty good ding in the drywall next to the bathroom door. But she was no match.’

  He used a drug, Charles said. I caught a hint of it in the bathroom.

  ‘What did the wolf just tell you?’ asked Alistair Beauclaire. His voice must have been quite an asset in the courtroom, cool, even, and beautiful. If she had been human, without her senses to tell her better, she’d never have known that her words had hit him hard – he’d been hoping it was someone he could track down.

  ‘The kidnapper drugged her.’ She looked at Charles. ‘Do you know what he gave her?’

  Smelled like ketamine to me, said Charles. But it isn’t my area of specialty.

  She related his answer and caveat to their listeners while she thought about how to get Lizzie’s father alone to discuss matters away from human ears.

  ‘I am sorry we cannot be of more help,’ Anna said. ‘As you know, we have a stake in this – and no one wants another person dead. Perhaps if we knew more about the fae who took her or what exactly the killer was doing to his victims.’ She paused and said delicately, ‘Or is that “killers”?’

  Agent Fisher gave her an assessing look while Mooney, the only regular police officer left on scene, cleared his throat harshly. Beauclaire looked at her with interest.

  Anna met his gaze and said with no particular emphasis, ‘We’ll find him, but the more we know, the faster we can be.’ She turned back to the FBI agent and told her, ‘If you need to get in touch and my phone rings through, you might try Charles’s.’ She rattled off the number, which had a Boston area code because Bran thought that advertising they were from Montana was a mistake.

  Leslie Fisher’s face grew speculative before it returned to neutral. She’d caught that Anna’s slip had been on purpose, but she didn’t comment out loud.

  ‘You might as well go home,’ Fisher said. ‘If you think of anything else, give me or Agent Goldstein a call.’

  6

  Anna locked their door and took the collar off Charles, laying both it and the leash on a small table against the wall.

  ‘If her father is an old and powerful fae, why can’t he find her?’ Anna asked.

  Perhaps his power doesn’t lie in that direction, answered Brother Wolf. Or there is something blocking him. I do not know a lot about fae magic, other than to say that no magic has answers for everything. It is a tool. A hammer is a good tool, but not useful for removing screws.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy that.’ She pulled off her shoes and finger-combed her hair. She was tired. ‘Can you tell me what’s wrong with Charles?’

  Brother Wolf looked at her and said nothing.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ she said. ‘Charles, how can I help if you don’t let me in?’

  You cannot help, Charles replied.

  She sucked in a breath. ‘Did you just lie to me?’ She wasn’t sure, but it hadn’t felt like the truth, either.

  Brother Wolf looked away. Charles will not let you help.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘There. I lied to you, too.’ It wasn’t fine, not even close to fine.

  We should be human when the fae lord comes, Brother Wolf said, finally.

  Anna didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. After a moment, Charles began changing back. It wouldn’t take him long, five or ten minutes. The blood of a Flathead shaman meant that it took him a lot less time to change than any other wolf she’d met.

  It hurt to change, hurt more when you did it back and forth in only a couple of hours – and Charles hadn’t been in a good place when he’d started. Anna could feel the pain he was in – faintly, because he’d never let her feel it all if he could help it.

  It was better to leave him alone for a few minutes. It was better to remove herself from the temptation of a real fight, especially when they could have visitors at any time. And they weren’t back to square one, either. Their bond lay open between them, a testimony that he was better than he had been.

  It was four in the morning. She debated showering and getting dressed – or brushing her teeth and going back to sleep. She didn’t make it to the bathroom. The bed was still rumpled from when she’d left it earlier, and it was too inviting to resist.

  She crawled under the blankets and buried her head in Charles’s pillow. She felt more than heard when Charles came into the room. He paused by the bed and patted her rump lightly, and something inside her relaxed. ‘Don’t get too comfortable, Sleeping Beauty,’ he rumbled teasingly, sounding like his old self. He might not be letting her help, but he was making progress just the same, despite his decision to retreat behind Brother Wolf earlier. ‘We’ll have company sooner rather than later. You made the fae an obvious offer to give him information the FBI won’t, and he won’t wait until a polite time of day to come calling. I doubt he’ll sleep much as long as his daughter’s fate is uncertain – I wouldn’t.’

  She waited until the shower started before pulling her head out from under the blankets. No. Charles wouldn’t rest while a child of his was in danger. If he had children.

  Female werewolves couldn’t carry babies to term. The moon called and they changed to wolves, the violence of it too much for the forming child. She’d asked Samuel, who was a doctor, about staying in wolf form for the full term instea
d. He’d paled and shaken his head.

  ‘The longer you stay a wolf, the less the human rules. If you stay wolf too long, there is no coming back.’

  ‘I’m an Omega,’ Anna had told him. ‘My wolf is different. We could try it.’

  ‘It always ends badly,’ her mate’s brother had said roughly. ‘Don’t, please, talk to Charles or Da about it. The last one was brutal. There was a woman … She managed to hide from Bran until it was too late. A werewolf isn’t a wolf, Anna, who will care and protect its young. When we finally tracked her down, Charles had to kill her because there was nothing of humanity left, only a beast. He backtracked her to the cave where she’d established her den. She’d given birth, all right. And then she’d killed the baby.’

  His eyes had been raw and wild, so she’d changed the subject. But Anna had her own thoughts on the matter – Brother Wolf was no unthinking creature who would eat his young, and she was pretty sure her own wolf was gentler still. But there was no need for desperate measures yet.

  The werewolves were out to the world now with no further need to hide. There were ways for couples who could not have biological children for one reason or another that would work for werewolves as well as humans. Right now, with the public so ambivalent about werewolves, it would be difficult to try to use a surrogate to carry their child. But they could afford to wait awhile for public opinion to change.

  ‘For public opinion to change about what?’ asked Charles as he opened the door of the bathroom to let the steam roll out. He had a towel wrapped around his waist and was drying his long hair with another.

  She didn’t have to answer him because someone rang their doorbell. The fae was supposed to call them; she’d left her number. Apparently he’d decided to drop in uninvited instead.

  Anna hadn’t undressed, so she ran her fingers through her hair and started toward the door. Charles moved in front of her and dropped the towel he held to the floor.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She rolled her eyes, but said, ‘Fine. I’ll wait for you.’