Fair Game (Alpha and Omega #3)

Fair Game (Alpha and Omega #3) Page 14

When Charles was a boy, every fall his grandfather had taken his people and met up with other bands of Indians, most of them fellow Flatheads, Tunaha, or other Salish bands, but sometimes a few Shoshone with whom they were friendly would travel with them. They would ride their horses east to hunt buffalo and prepare for the coming winter.

He was no longer a boy, and traveling east was not a treat anymore, not when it meant that he and his mate were back in a big city instead of settled into his home in the mountains of Montana. Three months had passed since he'd killed Benedict Heuter, and they had come back for his cousin's sensational trial. Boston was beautiful this time of year - the trees showing off their fall colors. But the air still smelled of car exhaust and too many people.

He had testified; Anna had testified; the FBI had testified. Lizzie Beauclaire on crutches with her knee in a brace, and the scars that the Heuters had left her with, had testified. She might, with enough surgeries, be able to walk without crutches again, but dancing was out of the question. Her scars could be reduced, but for the rest of her life she would bear the Heuters' marks as reminders every time she looked in a mirror.

When the prosecution was done presenting its case, the defense began.

They'd spent the last week guiding the jury through the hell that had been Les Heuter's childhood. It had almost been enough to engage Charles's sympathy. Almost.

But then, Charles had been there, had seen the calculation on Les Heuter's face when he shot his uncle. He'd been planning this defense, planning on blaming his ills on the dead. His uncle had been wrong; Les Heuter was smart.

Heuter sat in front of the court, neatly groomed in slacks, shirt, and tie. Nothing too expensive. Nothing too brightly colored. They'd done something with his hair and the clothing that made him look younger than he was. He explained to the jury, the reporters, and the audience in the courtroom what it was like living with a crazy man who'd made him come help him clean up the country - apparently Travis Heuter's name for the torture and rape of his victims - when he was ten years old.

"My cousin Benedict was a little older than me," he told them. "He was a good kid, tried to keep the old man off my back. Took a few beatings for me." He blinked back tears and, when that didn't work, wiped his eyes.

Maybe the tears were genuine, but Charles thought that they were just too perfect, a strong man's single tear to create sympathy rather than real tears, which could have been seen as weakness of character. Les Heuter had hidden what he was for more than two decades; playing a role for the jury didn't seem to be much of a stretch.

"When Benedict was eleven, he had a violent episode. For about two months he was crazy. Tried to stab my uncle, beat me up, and..." A careful look down, a faint blush. "It was like a deer or elk going into rut. My uncle tried beating it out of him, tried drugs, but nothing worked. So the old man called in a famous witch. She showed us what he was, what he must have instinctively hidden. He looked like a normal boy - I guess the fae can do that, can look like everyone else - but he was a monster. He had these horns, like a deer, and cloven hooves. And he was a lot bigger than any boy his age should be, six feet then, near enough.

"My aunt had been raped by a stranger when she was sixteen. That was the first time we realized that she'd been raped by a monster."

His lawyer let the noise rise in the courtroom and start to fall down before he asked another question. "What did your uncle do?"

"He paid the witch a boatload of money and she provided him with the means to keep Benedict's ruts under control. She gave him a charm to wear. She told him if he carved these symbols on an animal or two a month or so before the rut came to Benedict, it would stop them. She'd intended for us to sacrifice animals, but" - here a grimace of distaste - "the old man discovered that people worked better. But now the witch knew about us, and we had to get rid of her. My uncle killed her and left her on the front lawn of one of her relatives."

It was a masterful performance, and Heuter managed to keep the same persona under a fierce cross-examination, managed to keep the monster that had helped to rape, torture, and kill people for nearly two decades completely out of sight.

His father was nearly as brilliant. When his wife had died, he'd abandoned his son to be raised by his older brother because he was too busy with public office, too consumed by grief. He'd thought that the boy would be better off in the hands of family than being raised by someone who was paid to do it. He had, he informed the jury, decided to resign from his position in the US Senate.

"It is too little, too late," he told them with remorse that was effective because it was obviously genuine. "But I cannot continue in the job that cost my son so dearly."

And throughout the defense's case, the Heuters' slick team of lawyers subtly reminded the jury and the people in the courtroom that they had been killing fae and werewolves. That Les Heuter thought that he was protecting people.

When Heuter told how his uncle portrayed the werewolves as terrifying beasts, his lawyer presented photographs of the pedophile slain by the Minnesota werewolves. He was careful to mention that the man had been a pedophile, careful to say that the Minnesota authorities were satisfied that those involved had been dealt with appropriately, very careful to say that these were examples of the kinds of things that Travis Heuter had shown his nephew.

And, Charles was certain, no one on the jury heard any of what the defense attorney said; they only looked at the pictures. They showed photos of Benedict Heuter's dead body. The body itself had disappeared a few hours after it had been taken to the morgue, but the photos remained. The photos showed a monster, covered in blood and gore, none of the grace that had been the fae's in life visible in his death. One photo showed the bones of Benedict Heuter's neck, crushed and pulled apart though they were as big as the apple someone had used, rather gruesomely, for a comparison.

Though the biggest monster in the room was sitting in the defendant's chair, Charles was sure that the only monsters the jury saw were Benedict Heuter - and the werewolf who had killed him.

THEY WAITED FOR the verdict in Beauclaire's office, he and Anna, Lizzie, Beauclaire, his ex-wife and her current husband. Charles wished that they could have accepted Isaac's offer of a good meal instead - but Beauclaire had been insistent in that polite-but-willing-to-draw-a-sword-to-get-his-way kind of manner that some of the oldest fae had. Charles was pretty sure that it was Anna's presence he wanted, and that he wanted her to be with Lizzie when Heuter was sentenced.

Because the lawyer surely knew, as Charles knew, that it would be a light sentence. The defense attorneys had earned their pay. They couldn't erase all of the bodies that the Heuters had left behind, but they had done their best.

Beauclaire's office smelled empty. The wall-to-wall bookshelves were clean and vacant. He was retiring. Officially outed as fae, his firm felt that it was in their best interest, and the interest of their clients, that he cease practicing. He didn't seem too upset about it.

Charles's nose told him that the rest of the firm were mostly fae - and that there were a lot of taped-up boxes in the hallway. Maybe they were planning on closing the firm altogether, reinventing themselves and going on. One of those gift/curse things about a long life. He'd "retired" and started anew a few times himself.

They played pinochle, a slightly different version than either he or Anna knew, but that was, generally speaking, true of pinochle anywhere. It kept them busy while they waited and kept the tension at a low sizzle.

There was no love lost between Lizzie's parents, though they were frighteningly polite to each other. Her stepfather ignored the tension admirably and seemed to have decided it was his job to keep Lizzie entertained.

When the call came that the jury had handed in a verdict, after only four hours of deliberation, they threw in their hands with a sigh of relief.

THE JUDGE WAS a gray-haired woman with rounded features and eyes that were more comfortable with a smile than a frown. She had avoided looking at Charles, Anna, or Isaac during the trial - and she had quietly stationed a guard between her and the witness stand when any of the werewolves or fae, including Lizzie, had been questioned. Her voice was slow and patient as she listed the names for which murder charges had been lodged against Les Heuter. It took a long time. When she finished, she said, "How do you find the defendant?"

The foreman of the jury swallowed a little nervously, glanced at Charles, cleared his throat, and said, "We find the defendant innocent of all charges."

The courtroom was silent for a long breath.

Then Alistair Beauclaire stood, his face expressionless, but rage in every other part of his body. He looked at the members of the jury, then at the judge. Without a change of expression, he turned and stalked out of the courtroom. Only when he was gone did the room explode into noise.

Les exchanged exuberant hugs with his lawyers and his father. Beside Charles, Anna let out a low growl at the sight.

"We need to get Lizzie out of here," Charles told her. "This is going to be a zoo."

He stood up as he said it and used his body to clear a pathway for Beauclaire's daughter and her mother and stepfather while Anna shepherded them out. Several reporters came up and shouted questions, but they backed off when Charles bared his teeth at them - or maybe it was his eyes, because he knew that Brother Wolf had turned them to gold.

"I expected he'd get off lightly," Lizzie's mother said, her teeth chattering as if the brisk autumn air was below freezing - rage, Charles judged. "I thought he'd be convicted on a lesser charge. I never dreamed they'd just let him go."

Her husband had an arm around Lizzie, who looked dazed.

"He's free," she said in a bewildered voice. "They knew. They knew what he did. Not just to me but to all those people - and they just let him go."

Charles kept half of his attention on Heuter, who was speaking to a crowd of reporters on the courthouse steps, maybe fifty feet away. His body language and face conveyed a man who was sincerely remorseful for the deeds his uncle had made him do. It made Brother Wolf snarl. Heuter's father, the senator from Texas, stood behind him with a hand on his shoulder. If either of them had seen Lizzie's mother's face, they'd have been hiring bodyguards. If she'd had a gun in her hand, she'd have used it.

Charles understood the sentiment.

"They played up the strangeness of the fae and the werewolves and used it to scare the jury into acquittal," said Lizzie's stepfather, sounding as shocked as Lizzie. Then he looked Charles in the eye, though he'd been warned by Beauclaire not to do so. "Travis and Benedict won't hurt anyone else - and people will be watching Les if I have to hire them myself. He'll make a mistake and we'll send him back to jail."

"You might consider investigating the jurors, too," suggested Anna in a cold voice that didn't hide her fury. "The good senator has more than enough money to bribe a few people if necessary."

Lizzie's stepfather turned to Lizzie and his voice softened. "Let's get you home, sweetheart. You'll probably have to give an interview to get rid of the reporters, but my attorney or your dad can set that up."

"Trust Alistair not to be here when we need him," muttered Lizzie's mother. But she said it without venom. Then she said, "Okay, I know that's not fair. He knows you're safe with us, honey. And he probably was worried he'd kill Heuter if he had to look at him, running around free as a bird. And much as I wish he could do that, it would cause more problems than it solved. He always missed the days when he could kill anyone who bothered him."

Anna put her hand on Charles's arm. "Do you hear that?" she asked so urgently that everyone turned to look at her.

Charles didn't hear anything over the crowds of people, honking cars, and carriage-horse hooves.

Anna glanced around, standing on her toes to see over people's heads. There was still a crowd on the steps and hordes of reporters because serial killer plus senator's son equaled Big Story. Charles looked around, too - and then realized that he couldn't see any carriage horses.

He never saw when they appeared, or where they came from, but suddenly they were just there. After a few minutes, other people saw them, too, and fell silent. Traffic stopped. Les Heuter and his reporter were still wrapped up in his statement full of lies for the national news, but Senator Heuter was facing the street and put his hand on his son's shoulder.

Fifty-nine black horses stood motionless on the roadway in front of the courthouse. They were tall and slender, like thoroughbred racehorses, except their manes and tails were fuller - absurdly so. Silver chains were woven through their manes, and on the chains were silver bells.

Charles knew horses. There was no way fifty-nine horses would stand still, with neither a flick of an ear nor a twitch of their tails.

Their saddles were white - old-fashioned saddles with high cantles and pommels, almost like a western saddle without a horn. The saddle blankets were silver. None of them wore bridles.

Every horse bore a rider dressed in black with silver trim, as motionless as their horses. Their pants were loose-fitting, made of some lightweight fabric; their shirts were tunics embroidered with silver thread, the pattern of the stitching different for each rider. This one had flowers, this one stars, the other ivy leaves. Charles knew that there was magic at work because he could not discern a single face, though none of them wore a mask.

Just when the spell of their arrival started to thin, when people in the crowd started to whisper, they parted. The horses backed up and around to form two lines facing each other, and through this passage a white horse cantered slowly. As with the other horses, he wore no bridle - but this horse had no saddle, either. Just black chains strung through his mane and tail, covered in silver bells that jingled sweetly in time to the horse's steady movement.

On the horse was a man dressed in silver and white. In his right hand he held a silver short sword, in his left a sprig of a plant, blue green leaves, and small yellow blooms. Rue.

The white horse stopped at the foot of the stairs and Charles noticed two things. First, the horse had bright blue eyes that caught his and studied him coolly before the horse moved on to stare at Lizzie. Second, that the horse's rider was Lizzie's father.

"I told them," he said in a clear, carrying voice, "that they should not give someone as old and powerful as I a daughter to love. That it would end badly."

His horse shifted, raising one front leg and pawing at the air before replacing it exactly where it had been.

"Now we shall all live with the consequences."

The white horse rose on his hind legs, not rearing. This was a precise, slow levade, as balanced and graceful as any ballet movement.

"What was done today was not justice. This man raped and tortured my daughter. When he was finished, he would have killed her. But you all see us as monsters - so frightened of the dark that you cannot see truly your own monsters among you. Very well. You have made it clear that we and our children are not citizens of this country, that we are separate. And that we will receive a separate justice that has little to do with the lovely lady who holds the balanced scales - and has everything to do with your fear."

The horse came down to rest on all four feet again.

"You have made your choice. And we will all live with the consequences. Most of us. Most of us will live with the consequences."

The white horse started forward again, up the cement stairs. His silver-shod hooves clicked as he walked and Alistair Beauclaire crumbled the rue in his left hand and scattered it as they walked, leaving behind a trail of leaves that was too thick for the small sprig he had started with. The last of it fell from his hands as the horse stopped in front of Les Heuter.

Charles tried to move at last - but found he could do nothing except breathe.

"It is not meet that my daughter's attacker should live," Beauclaire said. He raised his sword and swung, scarcely slowing as metal met flesh and won. He beheaded Les Heuter in front of the television camera - and then spoke into it.

"For two hundred years I have been bound by my oath that I would not use my powers for personal gain, nor for the gain of my people. In return we would be allowed to come here and live in quiet harmony in a place unbound by iron."

He didn't say whom he'd sworn his oath to, though Charles rather thought it didn't matter. For one such as this fae, an oath sworn to a child was as valid as an oath sworn to a king or the pope.

Tipping his bloody blade toward the body on the ground, Beauclaire said, quietly, "The time of that oath is past, broken by this man and by those who freed him without regard to justice. I reclaim my magic for me and for my people. Our day begins anew."

Then he raised the dripping sword up toward the sky and announced harshly, "We, the fae, declare ourselves free of the laws of the United States of America. We do not recognize them. They have no authority over us. From this moment forward we are our own sovereign nation, claiming as our own those lands ceded to us. We will treat with you, as one hostile nation treats with another, until such time as it seems us good to do elsewise. I, Alistair Beauclaire, once and again Gwyn ap Lugh, Prince of the Gray Lords, do so determine. All will abide my wishes."

The white horse raised his front feet and spun, bounding down the stairs and back through the path the other riders had made for him. As the white horse ran, a white mist rose behind him, covering them all for a moment before dissipating, taking with it all the fae.

Senator Heuter dropped to his knees to mourn his son.

THE MARROK LET himself into his son's house. Charles had flown home the night before - all the way from Boston. He'd decided to quit taking commercial flights until security no longer required him to watch others pat down his mate. Bran couldn't argue with his logic, but they had arrived late and gone straight home. Bran had tried to let them sleep in, but the need to make sure they were safe had overridden his sense of courtesy.

He walked soundlessly down the hall to the bedroom.

Charles lay on the bed with Anna sprawled bonelessly on top of him, her hair covering her face. Bran smiled, pleased that his son was happy. No matter what else was wrong, and he was very afraid that a lot was going to be wrong in very short order thanks to the unexpected move by the usually cautious fae, the knowledge that Charles was going to be all right was satisfying. In that moment, watching his son sleep, he understood Beauclaire's actions entirely.

Charles's eyes slit open, bright gold.

"Sleep for a little while, Brother Wolf," Bran murmured very softly. "I'll keep watch until you wake."

"THE FAE HAVE retreated to their reservations," Da said as he served Anna pancakes. His da liked to make pancakes for breakfast, but the deer-shaped ones were a new thing. Charles tried not to analyze his father when he could avoid it.

"What about the humans?" Anna asked. "The reservation bureaucracy?" She didn't seem bothered by the pancakes.

He'd woken up after flying from Boston to Montana to find his da cooking breakfast for them: sausage and pancakes shaped like deer. It wasn't just any deer, either - they looked like Bambi from the Disney cartoon. Charles didn't want to know how his father had managed that.

Charles preferred his deer to taste like meat and his pancakes to look like pancakes. Brother Wolf thought he was too picky. Brother Wolf was probably right.

"The humans were driven out and the gates closed against them. Army helicopters sent to surveil the area can't seem to find the reservations to fly over them."

Charles snorted. "Typical fae stuff."

"They've approached me," Da said.

Charles put down his fork. Anna, being Anna, took the spatula out of his da's hand and tugged him down to sit with them. She didn't say anything, just piled up some pancakes on a plate, poured maple syrup over them, and handed them to his da.

"What did they say?" asked Charles.

"They apologized for the disruption their actions will have on our ability to integrate with human society." He ate a bite of pancake and closed his eyes. "They thanked me for my son's help in the matter of Les Heuter."

"The fae thanked you?" asked Charles. The fae didn't thank anyone, nor was it wise to thank the fae: it put you in their power.

His father nodded. "Then they asked me to meet with them to discuss matters of diplomacy."

"What did you say?"

His father smiled briefly, ate another bite of pancake. "I told them I'd consider it. I don't intend to let them force me into following their lead."

Anna held up her glass of orange juice in a formal toast. "To interesting times," she said.

His da leaned over and kissed her forehead.

Charles smiled and took a bite of his deer pancake. It tasted just fine.