Dead Heat Read online

  Kage crouched down beside his wife and touched her cheek. Charles couldn’t see his expression but had no trouble reading the love and relief in the bend of his head and the softening of his shoulders.

  “Hey, little rabbit,” he said huskily. “You okay?”

  Chelsea blinked up at him, and then her whole body tightened. “The children … I … the children. Kage?”

  “They are fine,” he told her. “Freaked-out. But fine. They are asleep as of ten minutes ago. Ernestine is staying in the suite with them tonight.”

  Chelsea fought to stay focused, but Anna’s power was too much. It said something about how dominant her wolf was going to be that Anna affected her nearly as much as she affected Hosteen. Or maybe Anna was getting stronger. Chelsea’s body grew looser and her face softened into a smile. “That bastard wanted to kill me,” she said, pointing a wobbly finger at Hosteen. “I heard him.”

  “Didn’t want to,” said Hosteen; he sounded as though he were talking to himself. “Never a good thing when you have to kill the mother of your great-grandchildren. Could scar them for life.” It didn’t sound as though it bothered him much. “But it’s like knitting and purling. I don’t have to. Not until you do something evil, witch.”

  Kage’s head turned and he looked at Hosteen, hostility in every line of his body.

  “Actually,” Anna said quietly, “I think he was trying very hard to find a reason not to kill her. Very hard. He wouldn’t have been so easy to talk out of it otherwise.”

  Hosteen giggled again. “The Marrok told me to do it. After I decided not to. Spoke in my head. I hate it when he does that; creepy. I thought, ‘Geez, old man, if you want someone to do your dirty work, you get Charles to do it. I’m not going to follow orders and destroy my family for you.’” He sighed, a happy, contented sound, and slid down the wall until he was seated on the floor, his feet stretched out until they nearly touched Chelsea’s hair.

  He looked at Anna and tried to frown. “What did you do to me, little girl? I haven’t felt like this since … since … since I was six and my father gave me a glass of whiskey to drink before he set my wrist. Got tossed off a horse and we lived out in the wild country. My ma, she didn’t trust those white doctors in town, anyway. They didn’t know about the evil spirits, didn’t know how to sing them out of a body. So my dad, he set it. Used to ache something fierce some days. But not since I became a werewolf.”

  “What happened to him?” Kage asked Anna. “I’ve never seen him like this. I thought werewolves couldn’t get drunk.”

  Chelsea reached up, grabbed her husband by the back of the neck, and dragged his startled head down to hers.

  “Charles Cornick,” said Maggie in a soft voice from just behind him.

  Charles realized that he’d stepped too close to the room because Maggie caught him by surprise. If he hadn’t been affected by Anna, no one, especially not a human, would have been able to sneak up on him. He turned his head to see Maggie with an odd expression on her face.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you laugh like that,” she said.

  Anna woke up blearily, her knitting needles on her lap. It took her a moment to remember why she was sleeping in a rocking chair with Charles, in wolf form, curled up at her feet.

  Chelsea slept on. She’d been awake for less than an hour, spending most of that time eating. When she’d fallen back asleep, Kage escorted his still-giddy grandfather upstairs. Maggie had gone back to Joseph’s room as soon as she was certain there was nothing to worry about.

  Kage had come down to check his wife, and Anna had driven him gently back to his own room.

  “No sex,” she’d told him, again. “Not until Chelsea truly understands her own strength. And that means separate beds, because the Change will increase Chelsea’s libido by a lot.”

  He’d nodded, touched his wife’s face, and smiled when she moved toward him without opening her eyes. “You’ll watch over her?”

  Charles said wryly, “Since Anna’s incapacitated the only other person who could do that, yes, we’ll stay here.”

  “How did you manage that?” Kage asked.

  She shrugged. “I’m an Omega wolf. I have a tranquilizing effect on other werewolves, but I have to admit I’ve never seen anything like what happened to Hosteen.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that, either.” He hesitated at the door. “She’ll be okay?”

  Charles nodded. “For tonight, all is as it should be.”

  He’d left then. She’d turned out the lights and Charles changed into Brother Wolf’s form, settling himself by her feet and keeping them warm with his dense fur. She knitted for a while; her eyes were good enough for it even in the dark. Eventually she must have fallen asleep.

  Charles stirred, standing up and stretching.

  “I hear them,” Anna assured him, because the sounds of someone getting serious in the kitchen was what had awakened her in the first place. She checked Chelsea, but the new wolf was sleeping deeply.

  “Is it safe to leave her long enough to change and freshen up?” she asked Charles.

  In answer he led the way out of the room and up to their own. While she showered, he changed and dressed in his preferred fashion statement of battered jeans and bright-colored T-shirt. This one was pumpkin orange and clung to his bone and sinew and made her want to pet him.

  Instead she braided her damp hair and dressed herself.

  “Wear something comfortable,” Charles told her. “We’ll probably go out to the barns again this morning.”

  They walked into the kitchen just as Ernestine put a tray piled high with bacon on the table. Kage, his three kids, and a stranger were already seated at the table.

  “Good,” said Ernestine. “I was about to send Max to find you and see if you wanted to come down. You can sit where the clean place settings are.”

  “Good morning,” said Kage. “This is Hosteen’s second, Wade Koch. Hosteen brought him in to help with Chelsea. Wade, this is Charles and Anna Cornick.”

  “I know Charles,” Wade said. “I’m pleased to meet you, Anna. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  He was a soft-spoken man, neither tall nor short. His eyes were intense when he looked at her.

  “Wade,” said Charles, his tone of voice telling Anna that he liked this man.

  “I’m going to call Chelsea’s work this morning,” Kage said. “Do you know how long it will take before she’s ready to go back to work?”

  Charles shook his head. “That depends on her, and how stressful her work is. Not this week, but maybe next week.” He hesitated. “I’d keep all the kids around here for a week or so. Not because of Chelsea, but because whoever bespelled her in the first place is still out there.”

  “That work okay for you and school, Max?” asked Kage.

  Max nodded, swallowed, and then said, “I was going to stay home for the first few days of the show anyway. It’s only another couple of days on top of that. Most of my teachers post their assignments on the computer. You’ll have to call it in for me, though.”

  “Okay,” said Kage. “I’ll make the calls, and then if you’d like, we can go out and try a few more horses.”

  “Where’s Hosteen?” asked Charles.

  “That man got up about two hours ago, saddled a horse, and rode off into the desert,” said Ernestine. “He told me he had some thinking to do.” She looked at Charles. “He said you were to keep his family safe until he got back.”

  “He did, did he?” said Charles softly.

  Ernestine had been walking toward the table. She stopped.

  “Do you remember exactly what Hosteen said?” asked Kage.

  “He said that the family would be safe with Charles here,” she said slowly. “He told me to ask you to keep an eye out for them.”

  Charles nodded. “That’s fine.” He went back to eating.

  Ernestine gave him a cautious look that he didn’t see. Anna smiled at her. “This is very good,” she said. “I don’t k
now when Chelsea will get up, but she’ll be hungry again. It might be a good idea to put together some food for her. Well-fed werewolves are easier to deal with than hungry ones.”

  Anna rode three more horses. Her favorite of the morning was a quick-moving gelding named Ahmose who had a long scar down the length of his shoulder.

  When Anna, Charles, and Kage, sweaty and smelling like horses, got back to the house, Chelsea was sitting at the table and eating ravenously. She looked up when they came in.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about yesterday. I felt just fine driving to the day care. But by the time I was belting the kids into the car, I had a killer headache. I don’t get headaches as a rule, and it seems to me that it was part of the whole compulsion that eventually pushed me to try to hurt the kids.”

  “You are witchborn,” said Charles. “Trust your instincts. It happened at the day care?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’ve been some other bad things happening at the day care lately,” Anna said. “I had a long talk with Max about it yesterday. He said that they had a teacher commit suicide. And they also had a family killed in a car wreck.”

  Chelsea nodded. “People do commit suicide, and they die in traffic accidents, but I am not naturally inclined to kill my children and then myself. If one of those was a spell, maybe all of them were?”

  “I think,” said Charles, “that Anna and I will go visit the day care. If there is a fae there, one of us should be able to figure out who it is.”

  “Should be?” asked Kage.

  “This fae is strong,” Charles answered. “A powerful fae can disguise itself from a werewolf.”

  “I’ll stay here,” Wade said. “I’ve taken the next few days off work.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  There were kids everywhere. Kids slid down miniaturized slides and climbed plastic play forts in bright colors, and a few plastic play forts in dull, sun-bleached colors. Kids in sandpits dug with plastic shovels or threw sand on one another. One little boy in jeans and a pale blue T-shirt was running as fast as he could as two little girls chased him with death on their faces. Anna hoped he could run fast or he was in for it.

  Adults fluttered among the chaos of children. Some of them brought order with them like the best Alphas did. Some of them elicited excitement and happiness. Some of them made the kids scatter before them like chickens in front of a fox.

  She left her hand on her husband’s arm, feeling the tension in him, knowing it was her fault. She would never do anything to harm her husband in any way—not on purpose.

  Yet she was unwilling to sit around and wait a hundred years for the opportunity to have children. It wasn’t impatience, no matter what Charles thought. Werewolves could live forever, but on average lived far shorter lives than their human originally could have expected to.

  Charles did not live quietly. More even than the Marrok, he lived with a target painted on his chest. As the werewolves crept further out of the shadows and into the daily lives of ordinary people, the list of his enemies increased.

  Anna hadn’t died the day she’d been involuntarily Changed, had in fact been made less mortal rather than more. But she had lost her old self as surely as if she had died, and it had taught her not to be complacent. She was not impatient, but she no longer trusted life to be good. She had become more conscious, not less, that people died: that she might die, that Charles might die. Death was real to her in a way that it had never been real when she had been human.

  She was a long way from defeated. His arguments that any child of his would be a target were unassailable. Within the supernatural community, Charles, as the Marrok’s son and hatchet man, was very well-known. Eventually even the humans would know about him. Any child of his would be perceived as a weakness. She could not argue that point, but she did not feel as though that necessitated refusing to have a child.

  His other stated objection, that there was no current possibility for them to conceive, was more open to argument. She didn’t want to argue with him, shouldn’t have to argue with him. She’d thought that he’d been willing to listen to the possibilities.

  The key, she thought, was to pick through her husband’s complicated and mostly unspoken issues with children or with his own children or being a father. She didn’t know exactly where his absolute refusal was finding its power. When she found something real, she’d work at the knot of his resistance until she had it unraveled. Then she would go back to the next tangle and do the same thing.

  Her brother didn’t call her Anna the Relentless for nothing.

  She needed a loose end, and so far she hadn’t been able to find it. His father might know, but it seemed dishonest and possibly damaging to go to someone else for insight without knowing what kind of a tangle she was working with. Better to get it herself if she could.

  Two months of effort had resulted in nothing except the tension in Charles’s arm as they walked through the safety zone of the sidewalk.

  “Even if they were to choose to attack,” she murmured to him, “they are safely caged behind that vinyl chain-link fence. I think you can relax.”

  “Vinyl doesn’t do anything to stop magic,” Charles murmured back. “The steel wire beneath might have some effect, but it is best to be prepared.”

  Under the circumstances it was difficult for her to tell whether he was being funny or serious. Neither of them was under the illusion it was the threat from the fae that was causing his tension.

  Still, he had a point about being prepared to face a hostile threat from the fae here. It was time she turn her attention away from having her own children and start trying to discover who had sent Chelsea off to murder hers.

  The kids took no notice of a pair of uninteresting adults wandering up to the main doors. Surely if a fae were among them, he or she would notice that Anna and Charles were a little different from most people, but maybe not.

  When Charles drew a deep breath of air through his nose, Anna followed suit. She didn’t smell any fae—though her experience with fae was fairly limited. She wasn’t sure she would detect one right under her nose. Charles didn’t say anything, so she assumed that he didn’t scent anything, either.

  Hosteen had rendered his power to be of assistance moot by his absence. Charles had turned down Kage flatly—one human was as easily bespelled as another. Probably more easily, since Kage was not witchborn like his wife. Wade had been easier because Hosteen’s orders were that he was to help with Chelsea, so leaving him home hadn’t incited rebellion.

  That left Anna and Charles to go check it out. Anna was pretty sure that being a werewolf wasn’t an automatic defense, either, but Charles wasn’t worried about confronting a fae. She put her trust in him.

  Anna winced as someone blew a shrill whistle on the playground. Charles didn’t even twitch as he held the door open for her. She wondered how he managed it.

  There was a big sign on the door immediately to their right as soon as they entered the building. It said PRINCIPAL EDISON—ALL VISITORS PLEASE CHECK IN. It amused Charles. A day care was really just an efficient way to provide babysitting and not actually a school.

  Anna knocked on the closed door and Charles stepped back to let his wife interface with the public. People liked her, and, as a bonus, she didn’t scare them. People talked to him because they were intimidated. Anna could usually get more and better information from people because they honestly wanted to make her happy.

  The woman who opened the door of the principal’s office looked tired and a little startled to see them, though she tried to cover it over with a big, and mostly sincere, smile.

  “Hello,” she said, recovering. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I’m Farrah Edison. Welcome to Sunshine Fun. You said you have a four-year-old and a five-year-old, right?”

  “We’d like to talk to the teachers of the four-year-old and the five-year-old classes,” Anna said.

  Charles took the opportunity to sample the air in the p
rincipal’s office. He didn’t notice that it smelled particularly of fae-anything. But he wouldn’t, because the principal wore Opium, one of the perfumes that tended to kill his ability to scent things.

  Anna looked at a ragged piece of paper she carried. “We’d like to see Miss Baird and Ms. Newman. You told us this would be a good time to speak with them both.”

  Anna’s voice rose at the end, as if she weren’t sure they were here at the right time, seeming to allow Ms. Edison a graceful way to reschedule things if she needed to. It was a tactful response to the surprise Ms. Edison had displayed; she’d obviously forgotten they were coming.

  “Yes. You can talk to Ms. Newman first. Her children are in music for another fifteen minutes. When they get back, Miss Baird’s students will go and you can sneak over to her room.”

  Students and teachers at a day care? Charles weighed the vocabulary. He supposed children were learning a lot between the ages of two and five. He pursed his lips and regarded the sign again. Maybe this was a school.

  As they followed the principal down the hallway, she told them about how they planned the meals they served, their hours, and their rates, which were very high. She assured them, without looking at Charles, that they did not discriminate on the basis of race or religion. Every teacher had an assistant teacher for every ten children.

  She told them about weekly outings to nearby parks, and that once a month each age group went to a local private swimming pool, where the students would learn to swim. Two-year-olds en masse at a swimming pool sounded to Charles like a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe the remarkable thing was not how many children, teachers, and parents associated with this school had died, but that there had not been more.

  Ms. Edison talked a lot, and he rather wished she’d chosen different perfume. He trailed behind Anna and the principal in order to save his nose. Generally the more expensive the perfume, the better it smelled; most chemical re-creations of scent smelled like their chemicals to him. Opium, the perfume Opium anyway, smelled fine; he just couldn’t scent much of anything else after he’d been around it very long.