Fair Game aao-3

by Patricia Briggs

  Along the perimeter of the clearing, Malcolm trailed after the FBI agents, who were busily using their flashlights to examine the ground for clues or a trail.

  ‘We’ll have to come back in daylight with a team,’ Goldstein said, and there was a hard edge to his voice. ‘We shouldn’t be tromping around here at night; we’re going to miss or destroy clues.’

  ‘You aren’t going to get Beauclaire to leave without his daughter,’ said Leslie. Then she glanced back at the werewolf behind them and stepped a little closer to Goldstein.

  Charles took a good look at Malcolm himself. ‘Malcolm,’ he said sharply.

  The bearded werewolf looked up. ‘You told me to watch them.’

  Isaac had been in a low-voiced conversation with his witch, but when Charles spoke he looked over, too.

  ‘Malcolm?’ he asked, his voice too gentle.

  The other wolf sighed and drifted a little farther away from the FBI agents, but also shifted his body language from stalker to bodyguard. Charles wasn’t sure that the humans could consciously read body language well enough to tell the difference, but their hindbrains could. As soon as Malcolm started to behave himself, Leslie’s shoulders relaxed and she quit patting her thigh with her right hand.

  Isaac left the witch kneeling beside the chains, her fingers tracing spells that left little red glowing lines behind them.

  ‘Hally says that there were ten or twelve people killed here over a period of years,’ he told Charles. ‘She says that she’ll gather some of her apprentices and they’ll put the island to rights after the police have gathered their evidence. She’s doing what she can now. We don’t want a herd of armed people in a place that has such a strong dark magic residue – the words “accidental shootings” don’t even begin to cover the disasters that could spring up.’

  ‘Good,’ said Charles. That was one less thing for him to worry about. ‘Any sign of Lizzie?’

  ‘Not right here. No one alive but us and some rabbits within hearing range, and there aren’t any trails into or out of this place. I can’t smell anyone but us in the vicinity. Maybe if I were in wolf form, I could do better.’

  ‘We’ll all change to hunt for the girl – except Malcolm, if he can help it,’ Charles said.

  ‘I can help it.’ Malcolm sounded a little put out to be left behind.

  ‘We need you to be able to take us back to the mainland in a hurry when we find Lizzie,’ Charles explained. ‘She’s going to need medical attention as soon as possible. It’s not just guard duty.’

  ‘You believe Lizzie is here,’ Beauclaire said sharply, leaving off his spell casting. ‘Can you smell her? Do you have proof?’

  Charles waved his hand at the stone. ‘They have used this place to kill all of their local victims once they are through with them. Do you think that they found a better place than this isolated and quarantined island to keep their victims while they are still alive?’

  The fae stared at him, his face hungry. ‘How do you propose finding her? If she were here, I would be able to find her. But my magic doesn’t tell me anything. It hasn’t from the beginning.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I thought it meant that she was dead.’

  ‘I know a few ways to stymie fae magic,’ said the witch without pausing in whatever she was doing to the granite stone. ‘The Irish and German witches are well-known for their ability to disrupt your kind of power, one way or another, and Caitlin told me that this guy got his rune spell from an Irish witch. There’s a dozen ways to make charms that I know, some more effective than others.’

  Beauclaire looked at her, face taut with hope. ‘There are,’ he said. ‘There are indeed.’

  Isaac started stripping off his clothes and so did Anna. Charles moved until he stood between them in answer to a small fit of territoriality and unfounded jealousy. Brother Wolf was feeling possessive tonight.

  Not bothering to take off his jeans, he began his change. It was harder this time because he’d been changing a lot today, and the last time he’d pushed for speed. His shift was slower and it hurt more, leaving him with the dull ache in his bones that told him he would pay for the next change back to human. If he could, he’d wait until they got back to their condo before attempting it.

  He still managed the full change before the others and was shaking the tingles and cramps out of his muscles when Isaac staggered to his feet, a wolf of medium height and a gold coat that reminded Charles of Bran’s mate, Leah. Anna was still changing.

  Charles left the others to recover and started to explore the ground with his nose. Like the FBI agents, he concentrated his efforts along the edge of the clearing. He found nothing on his first pass or his second and was starting a third – Beauclaire pacing attentively by his side, a hand on the long knife he wore in a sheath on his belt, a knife Charles didn’t remember seeing on the boat – when Anna called him over with a couple of demanding yips.

  He took his time, casting around where Anna stood, but he scented nothing, not even the ubiquitous rabbits and mice. She whined at him when he lifted his head and he tried again. The second time he lifted his head, she yipped and started trailing something he couldn’t smell.

  Frustrated at his inability to perceive what she had, doubly frustrated because if he hadn’t messed up their bond somehow, she could have told him what she found, Charles stalked after her with Isaac and Beauclaire following. Probably because he was so annoyed, it took him about fifteen feet to figure it out.

  Nothing. He smelled nothing.

  As if something that disguised scent had trailed by here many times, he smelled absolutely nothing. His mate was very smart. He touched his nose to hers to let her know he understood. She smiled at him, her tongue lolling happily between sharp white fangs.

  ‘Wait,’ said the witch.

  Charles stopped and looked at her.

  ‘Isaac said that you won’t be able to see or hear this fae you are chasing.’

  Charles gave Isaac a dark look. He’d told Isaac what they were hunting when he’d called him for help tonight. That information had not been for general distribution, and the Alpha wolf had known it.

  ‘Peace,’ the witch said. ‘Isaac only told me because I was putting myself at risk in coming here, and he knows that I do not talk. This fae has been eating the essences of the people who died here, and that Isaac did not need to tell me. I talked to Caitlin about the nature of the magic they were using. So. I can give you some of that power and it will recognize the fae – sympathetic magic, wolf, like to like. There is enough to give it to only one of you.’

  Charles flattened his ears at Isaac when that wolf would have stepped up. If there was a risk, it was for Charles to take – of them all he was the one with the best chance of taking on the enemy.

  He trotted over to the witch and waited for a lot of smoke and dramatic gestures and dancing. Instead she simply bent until her face was level with his and blew on him.

  He coughed and then choked and gagged at the smell. It hurt, too. Like getting stung by a thousand bees at once or leaping from a car onto asphalt that shredded the skin off of him – both of which he’d done before. But that wasn’t the worst of it. It felt like used motor oil had been poured over his body and clung there, smelly and greasy.

  Brother Wolf growled and hung his head low, his ears pinned. Isaac whined and took a step forward, as if he might try to get between Charles and the witch. The ghosts inside of him began howling and laughing. Then Anna brushed up against Charles, silencing the voices inside with a radiant peace, the gift of the Omega, that let him regain control.

  Only then did the witch move. She stood up and dusted her hands briskly. ‘My apologies. I didn’t know that it would affect you so adversely. It will stay on you until dawn dispels it – and likely it will only be enough for a quick warning, so pay attention.’

  Calmer now, if not more comfortable, Charles nodded his thanks – it was not her fault that it hurt, or that it made him long to go jump in the ocean to clean the oily
filth of it off his fur. Or that she gave him orders, because Isaac hadn’t taught her any better. The spell, if it worked as she said it would, allowed them a chance if they ran into the fae. For that, he could forgive her a great deal.

  Hally the witch stood before him unafraid – and so fragile in her humanity.

  She could not help being a witch any more than he could help being a werewolf. Both of them born to their otherness. Isaac was right that most white witches died while still very young, unable to defend themselves from their blood-magic-using kin. She had, within the limits of what she was, been very helpful – and he would remember it.

  The wolves and the fae left the others behind to the dubious safety of the little clearing, and the guardianship of Malcolm and the witch.

  Charles let the other wolves take the lead, as his nose was not at its best under the burden of the spell the witch had used. They traveled slowly because it was more difficult to follow no scent than it was to trail any given odor.

  Isaac picked up on what they were doing after a few hundred feet and his nose was better than Anna’s, but Anna caught him once when he’d taken a false trail. Eventually their noses led them to a door rough-set in cement that seemed to be attached to the side of the hill. Charles ran uphill to the top of the cement where it was capped by a crude roof, about two feet by three feet. A possible entrance or exit if they needed it, he thought, but better if they went through the door.

  The door, when he ran back down to study it, looked as if it had been purchased used and rehung on new hinges. It was locked with a steel bolt lock latch. Steel wasn’t as damaging to fae, he’d been told, as iron, but it would still resist any magic Beauclaire could bring to bear.

  The fae had evidently had the same thought. He stood up from where he’d been scrounging in the bushes with a big hunk of stone in one hand. He muttered a few words until the stone glowed mud green and then chucked it at the door. It hit with a bang more reminiscent of a grenade than a rock and shattered into dust, leaving a good-sized dent in the door. Neither the lock nor the latch survived the encounter. The doorknob was aluminum and didn’t seem to give Beauclaire any trouble opening it.

  Inside it was pitch-black, but even so Charles could tell that it was far deeper than the two-foot-by-three-foot roof would have indicated. Someone had burrowed into the side of the hill. All of this he sensed from the way the chamber echoed, not from anything he could see. Even a wolf needed some light to see by.

  The air smelled fresh, so there was either another entrance or some sort of ventilation. Charles couldn’t smell anything dangerous, but, under the circumstances, he wasn’t willing to trust his nose alone to warn him of danger.

  The fae lord solved the light problem by throwing a ball of glowing magic through the doorway and into the darkness within. It stopped before it hit the dirt floor, hovering about three feet off the ground six or eight feet ahead of them, lighting a space that looked as if it had begun life as the basement of a large building – maybe part of an old military building. A large number of the islands in Boston Harbor had had military installations at one time or another over the last four hundred years.

  ‘Who’s there?’ whispered a slurred voice as they stood just past the entryway. It was such a soft voice, coming from an empty room – all of them froze in place.

  ‘Help me, please.’ Her voice was so quiet a human would never have heard her. The effect on Beauclaire was electric.

  ‘Lizzie!’ he thundered, poised to run, head cocked trying to figure out where her voice came from. The room didn’t have any doors, was barren of everything except a scattering of debris. It obviously did not hold Lizzie Beauclaire.

  ‘Papa?’ Her voice didn’t get stronger; it sounded querulous and hopeless.

  Isaac had been cautiously exploring the dark edges of the room, and he made a soft grunt to attract their attention. Behind a pile of rotted timbers, pipes, and broken granite blocks, what Charles had thought was just a dark shadow or more debris turned out to be a narrow cement stairway with holes and rusted metal fittings where there would once have been a handrail. One side, the side with the rusty fittings, ran along the wall of the room; the other was open.

  Beauclaire, his light leading the way, scrambled down the stairs and left the rest to follow. Not the smartest idea in the world, thought Charles – but he understood. If it had been someone who belonged to him below, he’d have lost no time in getting to her, either.

  The fae’s ball of light revealed a room nearly half as big as the one above with a doorway on the far wall. The door was long gone and one of the uprights of the doorframe had tipped over and lay on the floor. Beauclaire stopped momentarily at the foot of the stairs: Lizzie had quit making noise. When he started forward again, his initial rush had slowed, and he moved cautiously, aiming for the open doorway because the subbasement was obviously empty.

  Only it wasn’t.

  Charles paused, still six or eight steps from the bottom of the stairs. There was a scattering of fine gold sparks, like a constellation in miniature. ‘Pay attention,’ the witch had said.

  He might not have, might not have noticed them if they hadn’t moved. But once he did, they did a pretty good job of telling Charles a little something about the fae they were stalking.

  The horned lord, if that was what it was, was big. The ceiling of the subbasement was nine, maybe ten feet high, and the little sparks started right at the top and took up a fair chunk of the corner of the room it stood in. He didn’t get any details, but he knew it was there.

  Charles wished he’d thought to ask Beauclaire what the horned lord looked like in its original shape. Even knowing whether it stood on two legs or four would have been useful. As it was, he was hoping for two – a four-legged creature that was big enough to brush the ceiling would be nearly elephant-sized.

  Anna had stopped when he did, her stillness alert and watchful. Charles turned his head and nipped her shoulder lightly. When she looked at him he directed her toward Beauclaire, who was already halfway across the room.

  The fae should have backup – and Anna didn’t have a whole lot of experience in combat. Fighting something that she couldn’t see wasn’t the best way for her to gain more.

  She gave him a puzzled look and then trotted off after the fae, while Charles continued more slowly down the last few stairs behind her. Isaac, aware that something was going on, stopped at the bottom and waited for Anna, then Charles, to go past him.

  Charles bided his time, watching the hidden fae, trying to use the sparks to infer what it was doing. When Anna and Beauclaire passed it, it moved. Charles gathered himself, but the hidden creature stopped before it got close to Anna – the top part of it moving with a dizzy swirl of sparks.

  He imagined that it had finally noticed the pair of werewolves, he and Isaac, focused on where it stood, though it should be invisible and had turned its head to watch them.

  After a moment, the top part of the creature bent down and shook itself at him like an irritated moose – it was definitely paying attention to Isaac and him. Rather than jump from above and find himself impaled, Charles crept cautiously down the stairs until he stood just in front of Isaac, letting the other wolf see from his body language just where the enemy stood.

  Isaac sank down into a crouch and took a couple of gliding leaps away, separating so that they could attack from different directions and also would be two targets instead of one.

  There was an abrupt crash from the doorway that Anna and Beauclaire had disappeared into, and then came the broken sound of a woman sobbing. The mostly invisible fae moved again, swinging its head toward the noise, Charles thought. Then Anna appeared in the opening, and the fae rushed her.

  But it wasn’t as fast as Charles. He aimed low, relative to the size of the creature he was attacking, about three feet up. From the way it moved he was pretty sure it was bipedal – and that meant tendons. He hit something that felt like the front of a moose’s hock and changed his bite mid-attack
, letting his momentum pull him around so that his fangs cut through the joint horizontally as his body swung around until he was behind the creature. Then he set his jaw like a bulldog and hung on, digging into bone while he tore at the horned lord with his claws, reaching upward to see if he could find an important part to damage.

  The fae creature howled, a wild, piercing whistling sound that was an odd combination of elk bugle and stallion scream, and when it did, air moved through the subbasement like a sea-fed storm hitting shore. Something that felt like a club hit him in the shoulder, and then Isaac leapt into the fray, striking higher than Charles had, perhaps hoping to knock it over. Beneath Charles, the fae creature swayed, but it didn’t go down as Isaac found something to set his fangs into. His head rocked in a motion that told Charles he’d scored a chunk of muscle rather than bone. He was tearing it while he held on with front claws and raked with his hind legs like a cat.

  Charles’s back legs were on the ground and he used them to shift his weight, preparing to find something more fragile than the thick bone he had, no matter that it gave him a good solid hold. It was too thick to break with his jaws and he needed to incapacitate it so it couldn’t get to Anna.

  The creature screamed again and ripped Isaac free, tossing him all the way across the room and into the cement wall. Watching how it handled Isaac told Charles that the horned lord had hands of some sort – and was seriously strong, stronger than a werewolf.

  Free of distraction, the creature turned its attention back to Charles. It pounded twice more at him, but awkwardly, as if it couldn’t quite get to him. Then it lifted the leg Charles had grabbed and something hit him in the shoulder again, a fair hit that loosened his grip. Before he could regain his hold or drop it, the horned lord kicked his hock against the back wall.

  Charles dropped to the floor. For a moment he was helpless, the wind knocked out of him, but before the creature could do anything about it, a black dynamo dove over Charles like a whirlwind.