Dead Heat Read online

  “This is it,” said Marsden. “We have a search warrant fast-tracked because of the terrorist angle and endangered child. Leeds called the management company and they say as far as they know it has been empty since they were asked to remove the renter. The lady he talked to said she thought they were still managing it but had no record of any maintenance or interaction with the owners since last December. She did not know why they cleared out the previous renters—only that the owners requested it. Her boss is on vacation in Florida. She’s looking for the paperwork.”

  The wooden gates were half-opened. The left-hand gate drooped sadly to the ground.

  Marsden would have led, but Charles stepped in. “Let Anna and me lead. We don’t know what we’ll find, and the two of us are less likely to get hurt if it’s bad.”

  Marsden retreated with his hands up. “All right.”

  “And stay with us,” Charles added. “If this is the fae’s home, he is unlikely to run.” This was why he didn’t like working with humans: they died too easily. “Stay with us and we’ll do what we can to keep you alive if it attacks.”

  Leslie pulled her weapon and held it down against her leg. “We’ll do the same for you,” she said dryly.

  He smiled at her and then ducked through the person-sized gap between the tall gates, Anna at his side.

  This was not the first dangerous situation Anna had strolled into at her husband’s side. She was, if she felt like being honest, pretty humiliated by her performance with the fae in Ms. Jamison’s garden. Big bad werewolf reduced to shivers by a wussy little garden fae. What was it Charles had called it? A wearden.

  Humiliation was better than the shiver of horror that the thought of Justin called up. Funny, she didn’t remember being that terrified of him while he was alive. Terrified, yes, but reduced to shivering like a jellyfish, no. Maybe the wearden’s magic had done something to make her fear worse. But if so, why did her stomach still ache?

  But she had a job to do, and she shoveled Justin to the dark dungeon in her mind where she kept him and he only bothered her in her nightmares.

  Inside the walls, the yard was barren, not xeriscaped, but zero-scaped. Red soil with patches of dead vegetation provided no cover for anything to hide behind. She breathed in deeply but smelled nothing unusual: no magic, no fae, nothing but dust.

  And yet … she put her nose down and half crept, half walked. Her ears drooped slightly in unease that was not, she didn’t think, spawned from her earlier fright.

  Do you have anything? Charles asked her.

  Her lips pulled up involuntarily, a threat display of teeth for— Nothing, she told him, and yet …

  She shivered in the warmth of the high sun. It was not summer, but in Scottsdale that didn’t mean it wasn’t warm, nearly eighty degrees. She could smell the others’ sweat.

  I let that fae spook me, she told him. I’m overreacting.

  He shook his head. No birds, no insects, nothing living here at all. There are ghosts here; they burn my skin with their breath. Stay alert.

  “In the front door?” asked Leslie.

  “If he’s in there, he already knows we are here,” Charles told her. “Front door, back door, or down the chimney, we’re not going to have surprise on our side.” He added, “I don’t smell anyone. Anna?”

  She jerked her head in a negative, but a growl rumbled in her chest. Do you feel it?

  “Yes,” he said, putting his hand on her head. “The dead have a weight here. This place is haunted in the true Navajo sense. I can feel it try to cling.”

  “Don’t try to give us courage, now,” said Marsden dryly. “I feel so much better after that speech.”

  Her mate gave him a smile. He didn’t usually give people smiles until he had known them for a lot longer, at least not friendly smiles.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find anyone alive here,” Charles said. “Does that help?”

  “Not really,” said Leeds. “No.”

  “No,” agreed Leslie.

  The front door was locked. When no one answered Marsden’s vigorous knocking, Leeds took a roll of handy-dandy lockpick tools out of his pocket and went to work on the lock.

  Anna conceived an instant desire to learn how. It didn’t look too complicated. Charles probably knew how. He could teach her.

  “Get your nose back, ma’am, please,” said Leeds. “You aren’t in the way. But I have a hard time concentrating with a freaking werewolf breathing down my neck.”

  “She won’t hurt you,” murmured Charles.

  “I know that,” Leeds said calmly, still wiggling the delicate picks, one in each hand, his head tilted so one ear was nearer the lock than the other. “My brain does anyway. My gut says, ‘Run away, run away, you freaking moron. That’s a werewolf.’”

  Anna backed up. She tried looking through the windows, but the blinds were down and turned so she couldn’t see anything. She could positively say that no living creature had been on this porch for a long time. She got a faint whiff of perfume, presumably belonging to whoever had rented the house, but nothing else. If the fae had been to this door, it hadn’t been for a long time.

  The lock gave up and the door admitted them into an empty living room that smelled of dust and cleaners that made Anna sneeze. She trotted past Leslie and into the main house, which was as barren as the rest. She caught faint scents of humans who had once lived here: a girl in the pink room and someone who smoked cigarettes in the master bedroom. They’d had a dog, too. Helpfully, all of the doors were open, so she didn’t have to wait for someone with hands to let her into anywhere. The bedrooms and bathrooms were a bust, as far as her nose went, anyway. From the sounds in the living room, someone had found something.

  In the kitchen there was a ladder nailed into the wall, painted cream with mint-green, tole-painted leaves to turn it into a decoration. At the top of the ladder was a locked trapdoor in the ceiling with a note taped to it: RENTERS NOT ALLOWED IN ATTIC.

  She put her nose on the ladder and smelled nothing. But it wasn’t like the house was Hosteen’s mansion. There weren’t many places to hide things, and a locked door looked interesting. She climbed up to the trapdoor, digging her claws into the wood and leaving indentations behind. The narrow edge of the two-by-four ladder hurt her paws, and she thought maybe she should let one of the comfortably shod people try this. Not to mention, werewolf bodies were not exactly designed to climb ladders. It was an older house, and the ceilings were high, maybe ten feet or more.

  She smelled nothing more up at the top than she had at the bottom. She pushed her nose against the trapdoor, and it wiggled a little. As soon as the edge of the door broke contact with the frame, scent wafted out of the attic only to disappear as soon as the door settled again.

  But that was enough. She smelled the little girl whose grubby rabbit was in a plastic bag back in their room at the Sanis’ ranch.

  She dropped to the ground and ran to Charles.

  In the living room they had pulled up some stone around the fireplace and were looking into a metal-lined hole filled with not much.

  I found her, she told Charles, and then ran back to the kitchen, claws catching on the tile floor. This time she bolted up the ladder and hit the trapdoor with her shoulder as hard as she could. Wood cracked and she bounced down to the ground. When she looked up, the door was still intact. She ran up and hit it again and this time when she landed, the door landed with her, in three pieces with a fourth still attached to the ceiling.

  The reek of death, old death and new blood, billowed through the kitchen. Of the others, only Charles caught the full brunt of it.

  He pulled his forearm up to his nose. “Stay down here,” he ordered.

  Anna didn’t wait, though. There was a child up there who was bound to be hurt and scared, a child who had been held captive for months. She scrambled through the hole at the top of the ladder, ignoring Charles’s impassioned “Anna!”

  The attic space was stuffy and hot, a room of maybe tw
enty by twenty with a ten-foot-tall ceiling that sloped down sharply with the slant of the roof until on two sides it was only three feet high. The old-fashioned linoleum, marbled army green, was cooler than the air and reminded Anna of photos of her grandmother’s house.

  In the center of the room was a child’s princess bed, a four-poster painted white and trimmed in gold leaf—Louis XIV style, Anna thought, or maybe Louis XVI. Gauzy white fabric was artfully tangled around like—she remembered Ms. Jamison—a fashion shoot of some sort. Pale pink, dried rose petals littered the fabric, the bed, the floor around the bed, and the little girl who lay like Sleeping Beauty in a gown of pale pink silk. Her skin was milk white and she was not breathing.

  Charles climbed up beside Anna and then called down, “No. Stay down. This is a crime scene and there’s not enough room up here. If you come up, too, we’ll compromise the scene.”

  “What do you have up there?” asked Leslie. “I’ll call it in.”

  “Multiple homicides,” said Charles, his voice steady, but his horror bled into and blended with Anna’s own. “I count twenty bodies, at least. All of them children. Most of them have been here awhile. At a guess, the murders took place before the fae came out and the Gray Lords put a stop to our Doll Collector’s habits.”

  Bodies were stacked like cordwood against the three-foot wall between the floor and the ceiling along the edge of the room. Old bodies with skin like parchment and hair stiff and dry.

  They looked more like the doll Anna’s mother had made her out of nylons, stuffed and stitched, than the remnants of people, of children. Anna’s nose told her the truth that her eyes wanted to deny. Some of the children were dressed in gowns like Amethyst’s, satin gleaming through layers of dust. Others wore dark suits. It looked as if they were all dressed for a wedding.

  Anna thought that from now on, whenever the air was warm and still and smelled like leather and dead things, she would remember these children. She pressed against Charles, and his hand touched the top of her head to comfort them both.

  “Is Amethyst up there?” That was Leeds.

  “Yes,” said Charles. He moved then, toward the bed. Brave Charles.

  Amethyst was silent, no breathing, no heartbeat. Anna whined at Charles. If he touched Amethyst, he’d be contaminating the scene. The other children were decades dead. Amethyst was the Doll Collector’s most recent victim. The one most likely to provide clues.

  “Is she alive?” asked Marsden.

  “She’s not breathing and her heart isn’t beating,” said Charles.

  “I take that as a no,” said Marsden. “Damn it. Just once I’d like to be in time.”

  “Don’t be too hasty.” Charles drew his boot knife. “It’s hot up here. She isn’t rotting. All the putrefaction I can smell is old. Death and heat equal rot. Either he killed her less than a half hour ago, or she’s not dead.”

  Or she’s dead and the fae has found a way to preserve her body.

  Charles nodded at Anna, but he didn’t relay her comment to anyone else. He used the blade of his knife to push the fabric aside, petals falling down like leaves in autumn, leaving Amethyst exposed. He put the back of his hand against her skin and pulled it back with a hiss, shaking it out.

  “If the Doll Collector didn’t know we were here before, he does now,” said Charles.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I touched Amethyst and tripped some sort of magic,” Charles told them. “I’m going to try something.”

  “Wait,” said Leeds. “We have an expert in fae magic who is flying in from Oakland tonight.”

  “Might be too late,” Charles said. He rolled his knife in his hand.

  Anna had had it custom-made for him last Christmas. It was a san mai knife, high-carbon steel sandwiched in stainless steel. The high carbon meant that it held an edge better, and should be effective against fae magic because it was closer to “cold iron” than straight stainless steel was.

  He pressed the edge of the knife against Amethyst’s arm. It rested against her skin for half a breath and then cut through. As the first drop of red smeared the knife, Anna’s ears popped as if the air pressure dropped. Then Amethyst sat up and screamed in terror.

  It wasn’t a pretty sound, raw and pitched like nails on a chalkboard. It hurt Anna’s ears. She hadn’t been happier to hear anything in a long time.

  Charles gathered the girl into his arms and held her, face pressed against his shoulder. Anna wasn’t sure that was a good idea. A stranger, a male holding her? Who knew what the fae had done to her in the months since he took her?

  “Shhh,” said Charles as the other three came boiling up the ladder. “Shh. It’s over. It’s done. We won’t let anyone hurt you again. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  And, perhaps because it was Charles, the little girl grabbed his T-shirt with both hands and buried her face against him. Her screams became sobs that were even worse than the screams. Anna whined, remembering the garden fae, the wearden, saying that the child the people in Scotland had saved had died anyway.

  Leslie took a good look around and climbed back down out of the attic. After a few moments she said, “Hey, Hemmings, this is Fisher. Can you go pick up the Millers and bring them to this address in South Scottsdale”—she read them the address—“tell them we found her, but not until you have them in the car. I don’t want any tragic traffic accidents on the way here. There are enough dead people haunting this place already. Tell the team—FBI, Cantrip, and Scottsdale PD. Tell them to get down here ASAP: we have a crime scene to process. And tell someone to find out who owns this damned place.”

  “Will do,” said a man, presumably Hemmings, on the other end. “And I have good news on the ownership. We have a name. A dozen officers are at his address as we speak. Sean McDermit. He’s mostly retired, but he works ten hours a week at Sunshine Fun Day Care.”

  Charles took one good look around, skipped the ladder altogether, and jumped down to the main floor. He absorbed the fall by bending his knees. Anna was pretty sure Amethyst never noticed their descent at all. Anna jumped down after him. It was easier for her to jump than to climb down in the wolf’s body.

  She followed Charles out of the house. Watching his body language, she suddenly was reminded of something she already knew. Alphas fancied themselves responsible for the safety and well-being of everyone around them. Charles wasn’t an Alpha—he ceded that rank to his father—but he was more dominant than any Alpha other than his father. The way he held Amethyst Miller said that he felt responsible for her.

  At that moment something clicked, and she understood his reluctance to have children of his own. She’d noticed it herself, hadn’t she? That the people he cared about he could count on the fingers of one hand: herself, Bran, Samuel, probably Mercy. This trip had allowed her to add one more person to that list: Joseph. Five people, because he could not keep any more than that safe. And Joseph was dying.

  Oh, Charles.

  Charles held Amethyst until her parents came to claim her. It was a little like holding a puppy. Hot and wet and shivering, she breathed in ha-ha-ha jerks. He sang “Froggy Went a-Courtin’” because it was long, repetitive, and something his father had sung to him when he was Amethyst’s age. He didn’t know what parents sang to their children these days, but there was a fair chance that she might find it familiar.

  He rubbed her back and walked in the shadows of the wall, hidden from the public and away from the noise and sirens. Anna paced beside him, cloaking herself in pack magic so that he was the only one who could see her. He didn’t think she was doing it on purpose. Pack magic didn’t always wait for someone to ask it to do something. He wondered, belatedly, if those photos Ms. Jamison had taken would come out, or if Anna would just be a blurry figure.

  Amethyst was asleep by the time her parents arrived, and Leslie escorted them to the isolated corner of the yard where Charles paced. Dr. Miller hesitated when he saw the limp bundle cradled against Charles’s chest, but his wife made a
low, moaning sound and pulled her daughter away from Charles.

  “Baby?” Tears spilled down her cheeks.

  “Mommy?” Amethyst blinked at her mom, who held her awkwardly because she was not a big woman and Amethyst was not a toddler. “Mommy? He said, he said you wouldn’t miss me. That you had a new daughter who looked like me only was better.”

  “No,” said her father, picking her up without really removing her from her mother’s arms, so they were all in one little huddle. “He fooled us for a little while, but we knew all along that something was missing. The one he left in your place wasn’t our baby girl. It just took us a while, too long, to find you.”

  “I want to go home,” she said. “Daddy, I want to go home, please?”

  “Dr. Miller,” said Leslie. “I recommend you call her own doctor and have him meet you at the emergency room. One of my guys, the bald guy in the FBI jacket, is waiting to take you all there. He’ll make sure you get back home safely, too.”

  They started to go, but then Dr. Miller stopped. He turned, releasing his daughter into her mother’s care. He wiped his face, then met Charles’s eyes and held them.

  “Thank you.”

  “It wasn’t just me,” said Charles, the gratitude in the other man’s expression strong enough that even Brother Wolf couldn’t see a challenge in that gaze. “It took a lot of people to find her. And we don’t have the one who took her yet. We are not done until he’s out of business.” He’d heard what Leslie’s agent had said on the phone. But it was too soon to declare Amethyst’s kidnapper captured.

  Dr. Miller looked at the house and said, “I’m a physician, sworn on my honor to do no harm. But I could kill him myself and never lose a wink of sleep over it. Not just for my daughter, but for all the daughters and sons. I heard what you found in that attic.”

  Charles nodded once at him, then let Brother Wolf out so Dr. Miller could see the predator lurking in his eyes. “I’ll take care of him if I get the chance.”