Fair Game Part 8

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 cla.s.ses 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 embarra.s.ses 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 compet.i.tion dresses. Ballroom compet.i.tions. 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 a.s.sured 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 Anna, "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 un.o.bserved. 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 a.s.set 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 a.s.sessing 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."

CHAPTER 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.