Fair Game aao-3

by Patricia Briggs

  ‘I don’t want those bastards to get Anna,’ Leslie said. ‘If Charles can’t find her, what about my wish? You said it was dangerous to use except in specific or small ways. But I lost a puppy – and now we’re trying to find another one.’

  Charles narrowed his eyes at her. ‘What wish?’

  Beauclaire ignored him, staring at Leslie with something approaching delight. ‘Clever,’ he said. ‘Oh, that is a clever way to look at it.’

  ‘A fae man left me a gift when I was a child,’ Leslie said to Charles, and she remembered not to look him in the eyes. ‘To make up for not being there to rescue my puppy, I think. I’ve never used it – and our expert in fae magic says that I need to be careful with it. But that sounds like a fair exchange to me.’ She looked at Beauclaire.

  Gravely, he nodded. ‘I think that might be right.’

  She opened her purse and took out her wallet, and Charles could smell the magic from where he stood. Fae magic strong enough to make him sneeze, powerful enough to give him hope. She pulled out a little white card from her billfold. ‘I’m not exactly sure how to do this.’

  ‘Magic follows intention,’ said Charles, and Beauclaire gave him a sharp look. ‘Tell it what you want – and tear up the card to seal the deal.’

  ‘Since when did the Marrok’s son become an expert in fae magic?’ asked Beauclaire – and Charles saw Goldstein look very bland. It was ‘the Marrok’s son’ that had done it. Goldstein had heard that term before and now wanted to know what it meant.

  ‘Since when did the fae give up information on the werewolves?’ countered Charles silkily. Anna was missing: he didn’t care what Goldstein found out. But the fae would do very nicely to sate Brother Wolf’s desire to tear into flesh until it bled. Beauclaire, Brother Wolf decided, would be a worthy opponent, and once he killed something, maybe he could think clearly again.

  Beauclaire took a cautious step back and Isaac eased between them. ‘You don’t want to do anything rash, Charles,’ he cautioned. ‘We’re all on the same team here.’

  ‘I wish—’ said Leslie, drawing Charles’s attention away from the fae. ‘I wish …’ She looked at Charles. ‘One lost puppy for another – but Anna is yours as Toby was mine. So I wish that as I lost my puppy, my dog that I loved, that Charles should find his lost wolf.’ She tore the card in half and the magic … did something.

  Charles’s phone rang before he could figure out what the magic had done. Its sudden blaring ringtone that wasn’t the song it sang when Anna called him irritated Brother Wolf, who pulled it out of their pocket and crushed it to make it stop.

  Everyone in the condo quit breathing – and Charles realized that his ability to speak coherently had apparently given them a false sense of safety.

  ‘How long until it works?’ he asked Beauclaire in a soft, soft voice.

  The fae sighed. ‘We don’t even know it will work, werewolf. Something happened, but it wasn’t my magic in that card. Treasach tended toward subtle magic that snuck up behind you.’

  Another cell phone rang and Charles growled. Isaac pulled out his phone and started to hit the off button, but paused. ‘Four-zero-six is the Montana area code, right?’

  He answered the phone before Charles replied, and clear as day Charles’s father’s voice came out of the speaker of Isaac’s phone.

  ‘I have a feeling that my son is in a bad place,’ Bran said. ‘And I have made a habit of not ignoring my feelings – especially when neither he nor Anna are answering their phones.’

  Isaac gave Charles a nervous glance. ‘That’s right. Charles is here and Anna’s been taken by the murdering bastards we’ve been chasing. We have the FBI here, the two who’ve been working with us. And Beauclaire is present as well, the fae whose daughter we rescued yesterday.’

  It was a very good rundown of what was happening, Charles thought.

  ‘Why isn’t Charles chasing down Anna?’

  Brother Wolf growled.

  ‘That’s not helpful, Charles,’ Bran said.

  ‘He says he can’t contact her.’

  There was a very long pause and then his father said quietly, ‘Charles. Is it the same thing that was bothering you before you went to Boston?’

  Charles couldn’t answer, wasn’t human enough to answer. He turned around and stalked to the far side of the room. If he hadn’t killed them, hadn’t executed those wolves in Minnesota, he’d have been able to find Anna before she got hurt.

  ‘Before Boston …’ said Isaac and his voice trailed off. ‘Oh, I know what you did before Boston, Charles. This could get messy,’ he said to the others, suddenly decisive. ‘I think we can work something out, but it might be better if you people, who are a little too easy to hurt, are out of the way. Would you mind waiting in the hall?’

  ‘You have something to talk about that you don’t want us to hear,’ said Goldstein. ‘You don’t have to lie. We’ll go wait.’

  ‘I never lie to the cops or the FBI,’ Isaac said. He was being truthful, Charles noted somewhat absently. ‘Things might get pretty bad before they get better and I don’t want you hurt.’

  Isaac didn’t say anything to Beauclaire, but the fae said, ‘I think I’ll wait outside with the others. He’ll be easier without me here.’

  There was a quiet click as his front door was shut and another as Isaac threw the dead bolt.

  ‘All right,’ Isaac said, and it took a moment for Charles to realize he was talking to Bran. ‘It’s just Charles and me – though Beauclaire hears just fine. He might be able to hear every word we say.’

  ‘Acceptable,’ said Charles’s da crisply. ‘Beauclaire is trustworthy – and he owes us a debt, if you’ve rescued his daughter.’

  Trust Da to know Beauclaire.

  ‘Fine,’ said Isaac. ‘So am I reading this right and there’s something about that fu—’ He caught himself, probably remembering someone warning him not to swear around Bran. Charles’s father was old, and though he could swear with the best of them (usually in Welsh) he generally preferred to avoid it. He could get pretty scary with underlings who had foul mouths. Isaac continued with slightly milder adjectives. ‘Screwed-up thing in Minnesota that Charles got stuck with that is somehow interfering with his bond with Anna?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Bran. ‘Charles, is that what the problem is?’

  Charles didn’t know Isaac well, and talking in front of him was akin to dancing naked in public. But if his father could figure out a way to help – and if he couldn’t, then no one could – then he would have stripped off his clothes and run naked down Congress Street in downtown Boston at lunch hour just to get a chance to talk with him.

  ‘They’ve broken the link,’ Charles said.

  ‘Who has?’ asked Bran.

  ‘The ghosts of the people I’ve killed who should have lived.’ He turned to look at his father, but all he saw was Isaac holding his cell phone open.

  He smiled grimly at Isaac, who took a step back, and spoke to him. ‘Another man would probably have a mental breakdown – and blame all sorts of psychoses. But my grandfather was a shaman and he gave me the gift that allows me to see the ghosts of those I’ve wronged.’

  ‘So they are haunting you,’ Isaac said, his face quiet.

  Charles hadn’t expected the Alpha to get in his face and call him a liar – Charles was the Marrok’s hatchet man, after all. But the simple belief he saw made him remember that Isaac’s grandfather could see ghosts, too.

  ‘And they are haunting me,’ he said, Brother Wolf standing down a little from immediate attack. Brother Wolf approved of Isaac, as long as the other wolf didn’t get too pushy.

  ‘Tell him why,’ Bran said into the silence. His voice was odd, as it got when he was following an impulse he didn’t understand. The truth was, Charles got his ability to deal with magic from both halves of his heritage – but it sometimes bothered Bran when magic spoke to him, probably because Bran’s mother had made the Wicked Witch of the West look like Cinderella’s fairy
godmother.

  ‘Because my guilt holds them here,’ Charles answered Isaac, because Bran thought it might be important. ‘They should be off wherever dead people go, but I’m holding them here because I can’t let them go.’

  ‘You feel guilty about what?’ Isaac asked, sounding honestly bewildered. ‘We all know about Minnesota – no one gossips like us Alphas. Three wolves killed some old pedophile, half ate him, and then left him for the civilians to find – and it was some ten-year-old kid who found him. Probably, taking into account what the gossip says and the police reports I saw, the ten-year-old was the kid the old guy was after. The damned fools probably made so much noise fighting over the body that the kid came to investigate. At least they had the sense to run instead of killing the kid, but I think they racked up enough stupidity to register on the Top Five Dumbass Moves list for the next ten years or so.’

  Charles hadn’t known that it had been the child who found the body. His father had told him that his job was to go find out if they had killed the man and left him for humans to find – and, if so, execute them. Brother Wolf had forced their confession – dominant wolves can do that if they are dominant enough – and then carried out his Alpha’s orders.

  ‘Poor boy,’ murmured Bran. ‘No one told me it was the boy who found him.’ Someone, Charles knew, would contact the boy’s family and make sure he got counseling. His parents would think it some sort of victim’s organization or something. It was one of the jobs Charles used to handle or oversee.

  ‘You feel guilty for executing them,’ Isaac said, dragging Charles’s attention back to him. ‘I get that. But I don’t get why you should. Were they crying like babies? Because that really sucks when they do that. Was it Robert, their Alpha? I heard that garbage he was passing around. Their victim was a bastard who deserved to die. Fine. If they were sure he was guilty, kill him somewhere quietly and get rid of the body. If you ask me, I’d have executed their Alpha, too, for being incompetent enough to let them get so out of control that they left him for civilians to find.’

  ‘Had this happened before we came out,’ Charles said, ‘I could have let them live.’

  ‘Could you?’ Isaac said. He shook his head. ‘If they had been in my pack, I’d have killed them. Now, ten years ago, whenever.’

  Charles read the truth of that in Isaac’s voice.

  ‘It didn’t matter to them that the guy was dirt,’ Isaac said. ‘If they were after a righteous kill, they wouldn’t have eaten him. If they hadn’t been hunting in a pack, they probably wouldn’t have killed him, either. They were dumbasses. They were out of control. And you can’t have dumbass out-of-control werewolves. Not now. Not ever. And it was their Alpha’s job to make sure they weren’t dumbasses. I know better than to send a pack out hunting when we don’t want a bloody mess to result, and I haven’t been a werewolf half as long as Robert has been Alpha of his pack. And he couldn’t accept the blame – oh no. They were the good guys; he wasn’t going to kill the good guys – because he knows it was his fault they needed to be killed in the first place. So Bran must send you out to kill them. I bet that f—’ He cast a panicked glance at the phone and bit his lip and finished more quietly, ‘I bet he said all the right things, all the polite things, and still made you feel like a murderer, right? He did it because he knows it’s his fault and he can’t admit it to himself so he’s looking for someone to blame. And they all know, we all know, that right now we werewolves cannot afford headlines like we’ve been seeing in Minnesota.’

  It was truth as Isaac felt it. And it sounded right. Maybe he’d been listening too hard to Robert and not thinking clearly.

  Charles took a deep breath. ‘Anna knows how people work,’ he said. ‘She’d have seen it, too. But I don’t bring Anna with me anymore.’

  ‘It makes sense, though, right?’ Isaac said.

  ‘If you weren’t already worn down with the killing,’ said Bran heavily, ‘you would have recognized the truth yourself. If I weren’t so busy trying to justify something that has less to do with justice than expedience, I would have seen it, too. Just because it was necessary, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t the right answer anyway.’

  ‘One of the wolves had been a wolf for less than two years,’ Charles said.

  ‘Too bad for them,’ said Isaac. ‘They chose to give in to the wolf at the wrong time. They chose to hang out with idiots. They chose to act as they did. They chose their own death and you were just the delivery system.’

  ‘I think,’ said Bran, ‘that the Minnesota pack needs a different Alpha.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Isaac.

  ‘Charles,’ said Bran. ‘Where is Anna?’

  He pointed southwest, unaware until he did so of how accurate a fix he had on her. ‘Ten miles that direction.’ He couldn’t tell anything else, couldn’t touch her mind, but he knew where she was.

  ‘Find her,’ his father told him. ‘And take these people down. Avoid killing them if you can – remind your wolf that jail is a much worse sentence than death. If we can help take them down with minimal violence, that would be good.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Charles, though his da had already hung up.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Isaac.

  Charles gave him a shallow bow of respect, one dominant wolf to another. ‘Better.’ Not fixed, not anywhere near normal, but he couldn’t find it in him to care one way or the other, because now he could find Anna. ‘I have a lock on her. What’s ten miles in that direction?’

  ‘Islington, Dedham, Westwood. Milton, maybe. I know my way around here by road, not as the crow flies. We’ll have to consult a map to be sure – and how certain are you of the ten miles?’

  ‘It’s close to that,’ Charles said. He considered just getting into a car and following his link, but it would probably be faster if he knew where he was going. ‘As the crow flies’ directions had some serious issues in a day of fences and roads. Especially when he was pretty sure that he could figure out exactly where she was before they left the condo. He hadn’t wasted his time today. ‘Why don’t you let the rest of them back in and join me at my computer?’

  He needed the moment it would take Isaac to assemble the others. Charles was shaking, and dominant enough not to want anyone to see. She was alive. It would be enough for the moment.

  He sat down at the table and found that his computer had finished the task he’d set for it. He heard them file in but he didn’t turn around. He didn’t want to risk meeting anyone’s eye unexpectedly until he had Anna safe.

  ‘Anna is a nut for police procedurals,’ he told them as he resized a window so he could see if he’d made any progress. ‘This morning she observed that serial killers often like to insinuate themselves into the investigations. I initially dismissed it – because you would have noticed something like that after this many years, right?’

  ‘We looked,’ Goldstein said. ‘There was no sign of anything.’

  His script had done its job and he was in through the firewalls – it always was good to have friends on the inside. He could talk and hack at the same time, and maybe it would keep the feds from figuring out where he was. It would probably help that none of them had worked for the IRS – and that the back door he’d gotten in through was low on graphics and high on code.

  ‘I decided that maybe the initial killer, the old one, maybe he wasn’t that kind of psycho. But the new guy might be – the mysterious third man. So I went back ten years. And I ran a list of the names of everyone involved in the case for all those years. There were two people who showed up more than three times.’

  ‘I assure you, I am not a serial killer,’ said Goldstein dryly.

  ‘I was pretty sure it wasn’t you,’ Charles agreed. ‘You want to catch him so badly I can smell it. So I took a look at the other guy first.’

  Goldstein drew in a sharp breath. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  Goldstein had been involved in a number of the investigations, and he would know who else had been there with h
im.

  ‘Someone was present for six of the last ten years,’ Charles continued. ‘Giving an interview to the newspaper or the TV news. Helping out at the call center. Assigned as liaison to someone – and once I lucked out and found his photo on the front page paper of where one of the bodies turned up. I was able to confirm that he has been in the right town at the right time for nine of the last ten years in a job that usually moves people around. The other year, when he was assigned halfway across the country, he was on a mysterious vacation at the time of the killings. So I went looking into his background. Called in a few favors. Hacked a few databases. Called a couple of police officers and a retired minister.’

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Beauclaire, an eager bite to his voice.

  Charles hit a button and a photo of Cantrip’s poster boy came up on half his screen, leaving him to file through records on the other. ‘According to a former nanny, the good senator was obsessed that his son be a manly man – Texas-style. And when the six-year-old Les Heuter was discovered playing with his mother’s makeup, he was bundled up and sent to spend some manly time with the senator’s older brother, the Vietnam War vet and avid hunter Travis Heuter, who lived and still lives in Vermont. Travis Heuter also has houses and properties in a number of the cities where the Big Game Hunter’s killing sprees have taken place, as well as a good dozen in places that haven’t had killings. In the few places our killer has been active and Travis Heuter doesn’t own property, his family owns property or one of his three companies has condos or apartments. He’s a little bit crazy, is Travis, so the Heuter family doesn’t let him appear at public functions or on TV because he might not be politically correct in his views.’

  ‘Heuter.’ Goldstein spoke with the barest shadow of Brother Wolf’s desire to destroy the killer in his voice.

  ‘A senator’s son. This is going to be a nightmare of political pressures,’ Leslie said. ‘My boss is going to love it.’

  Charles couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not – probably because she didn’t know, either.