Fair Game (Alpha and Omega #3)

Fair Game (Alpha and Omega #3) Page 6

After a hard day of being a tourist, Anna slept deeply in the bed on the other side of the bathroom wall. Charles put his forehead against his side of that wall for a long moment before he worked up his..."Courage" was not the right word. Fortitude.

After a deep breath, Charles stepped in front of the bathroom mirror. It was one of those full-length things that women used to use to make sure their ankles weren't showing below their skirts and now used to make sure, he assumed, that their underwear showed only when they wanted it to.

And he was trying to distract himself by looking at the mirror rather than looking at the image it held.

Charles couldn't see them if he turned his head to look behind himself, but in the mirror the spirits who haunted him were as clear, as three-dimensional, as they were when they were still alive. They had stayed away all day while he and Anna did the tourist thing, this evening when Anna took him on the silly haunted tour that had been a surprising amount of fun, and tonight when he had held her as she fell asleep.

As soon as she slept, they returned.

We see her, they said. Does she see you? Does she know what you are? Murderer, killer, death bringer. We will show her and she'll run from you. But she can't run far enough to be safe.

Hollow-eyed and cadaverously thin, they stared at him, meeting his eyes in a way that no one except Anna, his father, or his brother had dared to do in a very long time. The oldest ones morphed into something they had not been in life - their eyes black, their faces distorted until they hardly looked human. The three newest ones looked as they had the moment before he'd ended their lives. They stood so close to him that it was strange that he could not feel the heat of them - or the chill - at his back. Even so, it wasn't only his eyes that told him they were there.

Charles could smell them. Not the odor of rotting meat precisely, but something close, the sweet, sickly smell that some flowers produce to attract flies and other carrion-feeding bugs. The smell penetrated his skin. Like the ghosts in the mirror, the scent was a reflection, not the real thing.

And he heard them.

Why? they asked. Why did you kill us? He knew they weren't interested in the answers, not really.

The first time he'd seen them, when he'd first started this job for his father, he'd tried answering them, though he'd known better. He'd been certain that if he hit upon just the right thing to say, they would go away. But explaining things to the dead never works. They don't hear the way the living do and words have little effect. The questions were for him, but not for him to answer - and talking to them just gave them more strength.

Guilt attracted them. His guilt - it kept them from moving on to where they belonged. There should have been something else that could have been done for them. That there had not been didn't make him feel any differently about it.

They had been protecting a child and lost control of their anger. Charles knew, as any werewolf did, all about losing control. There had been a pedophile stalking children in the pack's territory, and they'd been sent out to hunt him down. That was exactly what they had done. Then they botched the job beyond repair. In another time, they'd have been punished, but not killed.

And now they haunted him. That Charles could not release them was a second burden to bear, a second debt he owed to them.

His grandfather - his mother's father - had taught him it was so, and his very long life had given him no reason to doubt it.

Dave Mason, the dead man nearest Charles, the last of the Minnesota wolves Charles had killed, opened his mouth and darted forward. Dave had been a good man. Not the brightest or the kindest, but a good man, a man of his word. He'd understood that Charles was only doing what was necessary. Dave wouldn't have wanted his ghost to torment anyone.

In the mirror Dave's cold, eager eyes met Charles's as his lamprey mouth attached to Charles's neck, cold and sharp, feeding on guilt. He disappeared from sight after a few minutes, but not from Charles's senses as, one by one, the ghosts behind him did the same, until Charles stood apparently alone in front of the mirror and felt his ghosts gain strength from him while they weakened him. They didn't touch him physically, not yet. But he knew that he wasn't thinking as clearly, wasn't able to trust his judgment anymore.

On the other side of the wall, Anna moved restlessly. Not awake, but aware.

He should close down his bond with her, again. He didn't think any of his ghosts could cross it and touch her, but he wasn't certain. He couldn't bear it if he caused her harm.

Equally, Charles couldn't bear to be separated from her again.

Anna's cell phone rang and she grumbled as she fumbled around the unfamiliar nightstand for it.

"Hello, this is Anna," she said, her voice husky with sleep.

He was too distracted to pay attention to the words of the person on the other end of the conversation. He listened to Anna, let her voice remind him that he hadn't driven her away, hadn't hurt her irreparably. Not yet.

"Right now?" A pause. "Sure. We're glad to be of assistance. Can you give me the address? No. Not necessary. There's Wi-Fi here so I have the Internet. Just wait for me to find a sheet of paper." She pulled something else off the table next to the bed - her purse, he thought from the sound of it. Charles looked away from the mirror.

"Okay. Have pen and paper. Shoot."

He couldn't go out and perform for the feds. Not like this. He would hurt someone, someone who didn't deserve it.

Use me, said Brother Wolf. If I stay with Anna, it will be safe for everyone. I will not harm any of the people. I will keep her safe from them.

Which "them"? Charles asked.

FBI, killers, the dead. All of them and any of them. She will be safe - and so will the others. I will not hurt them unless I have to. Can you say the same?

Charles almost smiled at the thought that Brother Wolf would be less dangerous than he, but at the moment it seemed to be true enough. Without another look in the mirror, he let the change take him: he would trust the wolf to keep her safe.

"HOW LONG WILL it take you to get here?" Leslie Fisher's voice was cool and professional, but her question had just a hint of urgency.

A young woman was missing from her condo, though she hadn't been gone long. Luckily, the policeman who'd gone to check it out had been briefed on their serial killer and thought it was a close enough match to the way other people had been taken to call in the FBI.

There was something wrong with Charles. It had been nagging at Anna since she woke, but she'd already answered the phone. It didn't feel urgent, just not good - so she decided to take care of the truly urgent matter first to get it out of the way. If it was their serial killer, they had a chance of getting to the girl before anything happened.

"How far is the apartment from the hotel we were at" - it was two in the morning - "yesterday morning?" Charles hadn't been in bed beside her, though she knew he was in the condo. She could feel him.

"Ten-or fifteen-minute walk. Something like that. The victim's apartment isn't too far from the Commons." Then Fisher clearly remembered that Anna and Charles weren't from Boston. "The Boston Common. The big park a couple of blocks from the hotel."

After a day of sightseeing, Anna could have told Fisher how big the Common was and approximately how many people were buried in it and all about the ducks that inspired a famous children's book.

Their condo was less than a five-minute run from the hotel, and she and Charles could always take a taxi if the place they needed to get to was too far.

"Less than fifteen minutes, then," Anna told her.

"Good," said Fisher. "We'd appreciate anything you can do. Assuming this is our UNSUB, based on previous cases, she's still alive and will be for a few more days."

"We'll do our best."

Anna hung up the phone and began dragging on her clothes. "Charles? Did you hear? There's a girl missing. Is Lizzie Beauclaire one of our werewolves? I don't remember her name from the Olde Towne Pack roster."

Not that I know of. It wasn't Charles who answered.

Anna paused, one foot off the ground as she'd been shoving it into a pant leg. Brother Wolf padded out of the bathroom, all three hundred pounds of fox-red fur, fangs, and claws. There were bigger werewolves, but not many. Her own wolf was closer to the two-hundred-pound mark - so was Bran's, for that matter.

"Well," she said slowly. The wrongness in their bond was fading, leaving behind the cool, thoughtful presence that was Brother Wolf. "I suppose it'll help save time if one of us is already wolf when we get there."

Charles is worried that he will do something bad, Brother Wolf told her. We decided that it would be best if I take point tonight. Brother Wolf had gotten better about speaking to her in words rather than images. She got the distinct impression that he looked upon it as baby talk, but it amused him anyway.

She resumed dressing while she considered his words. Of all the wolves she'd known over the past few years, none but Charles could let the wolf rule without disaster. The wolf part of a werewolf was...a ravaging beast, born to hunt and kill, protect the pack at all costs, and not much else. Brother Wolf was different from other werewolves' wolf spirits because Charles, born a werewolf, was different from other werewolves.

Different because of you, too, Brother Wolf told her.

"I suppose if you - both of you - think it's wise. You know better than I do. Let me know if there's some way I can help. But it does mean we aren't getting a taxi."

It no longer felt odd to talk to Charles and his wolf as if they were two separate people who shared the same skin, both of them beloved. She and her wolf nature were much more entwined, though she had the impression that they were still not as integrated as most werewolves were.

Brother Wolf butted up against her, knocking her over, and licked her face thoroughly. Yes. No taxis for werewolves. Charles doesn't like driving in cars. The werewolf stepped away and tilted his head, gold eyes gleaming with humor - whatever had Charles upset, it must not be too bad because his wolf wasn't worried.

I will take care of him. Brother Wolf's humor fled. As your sister wolf took care of you when you needed her to defeat the Chicago wolves.

"All right, then." Anna didn't know what to think of that because her wolf had helped her endure rape and torture. But in the optimism of the change in Charles yesterday, she decided to believe that Brother Wolf's intervention was a positive thing. Anna dried her face on her shirt tail and got up to finish dressing.

Shoes on, face washed, she looked up the address on her laptop. "We're in luck," she told him. "Only two miles from here."

THERE WERE PEOPLE out and about at two in the morning, but no one seemed to think it odd that she was running down the street with a three-hundred-pound werewolf. Might have been a touch of pack magic making people see a large dog - or not see them at all. Pack magic, she'd discovered, could be capricious, coming and going without any of the wolves calling for it specifically. Bran could direct it, as could Charles - but she had the feeling that pack magic mostly did what it chose to do.

The lack of interest they were spawning might also simply have been city survival skills on the part of their observers. Anna had grown up in Chicago. In a city, you don't look at anyone whose attention you don't want to draw. Who wants to have a big scary wolf decide you might be interesting?

Brother Wolf was on a leash, because Bran thought that the leash and collar made a lot of difference to the humans they ran into - and not much difference to the werewolf. The collar was store-bought from a big-box pet store and came with the cute plastic clasp designed to make sure someone's dog didn't get caught and choke to death. It meant that the collar wouldn't even slow a werewolf down before the plastic broke.

The name on the collar he wore was Brother Wolf. Bran had disapproved. He liked the names to be less truthful, more friendly and cute. Unusually, Charles's brother had told her, Charles had held out until his father gave in.

The address Leslie Fisher had provided led them to one of the skyscrapers, a tall but narrow edifice squeezed in between two even taller buildings. Anna would have picked it out even without the giant black numbers tastefully etched into the glass over the main door because it was the one with police cars parked in front of it.

No one looked at them when they entered the building, though there was a small group of officers huddled up in the foyer. A young man in a security uniform manned the desk; he looked upset.

On impulse, Anna walked over to him. "Excuse me. Were you on duty when the young woman went missing?" She waited for him to ask her for her credentials, but either he was too shocky or he'd just gotten used to answering any and all questions put to him.

"Lizzie," he said, his eyes drifting over her face, down to Brother Wolf and back up, as if not looking at the giant wolf in front of his desk might make the scary thing go away. "Her name is Lizzie. She came in about eight and I never saw her leave. Neither did the security tapes." He swallowed. Glanced down at Brother Wolf again.

"Who used the elevator after she came in?"

"Tim Hodge on the fifth floor. Sally Roe and her partner, Jenny, on the eighth. That is the biggest dog I've ever seen." He sounded a little apprehensive.

"And Lizzie is on the twelfth."

"That's right."

"How many people use the stairs?"

"Businesses on the first three floors," he answered, frowning at Brother Wolf. She could hear his heartbeat pick up as something instinctual kicked in to tell him that there was a big predator on the end of her leash. Though he continued talking, he took a step back. "A couple of the people on the fourth and fifth floor take the stairway down sometimes, but mostly everyone who lives here takes the elevator."

Brother Wolf took a step forward.

"And where is the stairway?" Anna asked, then hissed, "Stop that," to her mate. If it had been Charles, she would have been certain he was only teasing - the wolf was a different matter.

Brother Wolf turned his head toward her, his eyes half-veiled, and let his ears slack a little in a wolf smile. All of which didn't mean that he hadn't been interested in hunting the young man down - just that he also had enjoyed teasing her.

"Over there." The security guard pointed just beyond the police officers. "I'll have to buzz you in. For that, I'll need some ID."

"Do you have to buzz people out?"

He shook his head. "Against the fire code, I think."

The stairs would have been a better way to exit. The door was out of the way and didn't chime, as the elevator's doors did, to announce when someone was leaving. She'd take Brother Wolf up that way - if she could talk her way around the ID thing. She hadn't brought any with her, and wouldn't have used it if she had. She wouldn't lie with a false ID, and she had no intention of giving them any more personal information than she could help, not unless Bran told her differently.

"Do you have a card from Agent Fisher or Agent Goldstein of the FBI?" Anna asked.

He looked at the small collection of cards on the desk in front of him. "Agent Fisher. Yes."

"Why don't you buzz us in and call her. She called me in and I left in a hurry and forgot my purse and ID. She's expecting me."

He frowned at her.

"Really," Anna said dryly. "Woman with werewolf. It's hard to mistake us for anyone else."

The security guard's eyes widened and he took another good look at Brother Wolf - who slowly wagged his tail and kept his mouth closed. Apparently he'd decided not to torment the young man.

"I thought they'd be bigger," the security guard said, unexpectedly. "And...you know. Grayer."

"Less civilized, more slathering?" asked Anna with a smile. "Half-human, half-wolf, all monster?"

"Uhm." He gave a quick smile and kept a wary eye on Brother Wolf. "Can I plead the fifth on that? You'll still have to wait until I call for confirmation. If I don't know you, you don't get in without ID or an invitation."

"Did the police already ask you about the people who came in today?" Anna asked.

The guard nodded. "Everybody. Police, FBI, and possibly a dozen other agencies and people as far as I could tell. Starting with Lizzie's father."

"I don't need to repeat their work, then," Anna said.

He gave her a polite smile, picked up the phone, and called the number from a card resting on top of the desk. "This is Chris at the security desk downstairs. I have a woman and a werewolf down here."

"Send them up," said Leslie Fisher's voice. She sounded a good deal less calm than she had when she'd called Anna. She hung up without ceremony.

Chris the Security Guard nodded at Anna. "I'll buzz you through. How come you're taking the stairs? Twelve stories is a lot."

"He doesn't like elevators," Anna said. "And it sounds like, if she was kidnapped, maybe her assailant would have taken her down the stairway because you'd have noticed him in the elevator." She indicated the wolf with a tip of her head. "He's got a good nose. We'll check it out."

Chris looked at Brother Wolf with less fear and more interest. "It would be good," he said, "if he could find her fast."

Anna nodded. "We'll try."

BROTHER WOLF TROTTED up the stairs scenting the people who'd come this way. There were old scents - several people had dogs and someone had the worst cologne...and six or eight fresher scents. As he and Anna moved up at an even and steady pace, the other scents fell away, leaving just a few. He could smell the woman who cleaned here - she came up often - but there was another that overlaid it, fresher by days.

Brother Wolf pinned his ears and stopped, because Charles told him what he was smelling was unlikely.

"What?" asked Anna, then, more properly, What?

She came here on her own, without touching the floor. Brother Wolf knew his tone was grumpy, but he could not change what was just because it didn't make Charles happy. Sliding against the wall about three feet from the floor. Charles says, "No."

"Fair enough," said Anna, her voice soothing his ruffled fur. "Momentarily inexplicable evidence in an abduction that possibly involves fae or werewolves isn't surprising when you think about it." She put her hand on his head, between his ears. "Arguing with your senses at this point is useless - which is something Charles taught me. There will be an explanation. Let's see what her condo tells us."

More cheerfully - because she had taken his side over Charles's - Brother Wolf resumed the hunt.

They came, by and by, to the twelfth floor, where Anna held the door open for him. It wasn't difficult to locate the missing girl's condo, because, like the building itself, there were police and other people standing around just outside the door.

The woman from the FBI was there, her arms folded and her face set. In front of her was a delicately built man, taller than the FBI woman, but he appeared shorter because of his build. His hair was chestnut and grayed at the sides. Fae - Brother Wolf's nose could smell it. Some sort of water fae, maybe; he smelled like a freshwater lake at dawn.

He looked so very helpless, this fae, though there was no sense of timidity about him. Brother Wolf couldn't get a fix on how powerful he was, either. Brother Wolf was no expert on fae, though he'd met his share. But it seemed to him that the ability to hide from all of Brother Wolf's senses might mean the same thing among the fae as it did among the werewolves. Only Bran could hide what he was so well that Brother Wolf could not immediately discern his power.

"We are doing what we can," the FBI woman said. "We don't know if this case is related to the others - only that our serial killer has been killing fae for a number of years and abducts his prey in a manner similar to this. No one sees or hears anything - though the abduction site is well guarded or well populated."

"My daughter is only half-fae," said the man. "And until Officer Mooney, here, asked me, no one knew it. No one. There is no reason to suppose that your serial killer has my daughter before your forensic people go in to see what they can find. I was in there, and there is no sign of a struggle. We were meeting to celebrate her successful audition - she won a place in a top-flight ballet troupe - and she would not have stood me up. Not without calling to cancel. If there is no sign of a struggle, then she knew her kidnapper and let him get too close. She was a trained athlete and I saw to it she knew how to defend herself. I need to find her address book and you need to start down the line and send people to visit each and every person there while we wait for the kidnappers to call and demand a ransom. We are wasting time."

This one, thought Brother Wolf, was used to giving orders rather than following them. He might have been tempted to teach him better except for the smell of frantic worry and heartsick terror that the fae was covering with quiet orders.

"If it is our serial killer," said the FBI woman, sounding much more patient than she smelled, "then there will be nothing our forensic units can find, and it won't be anyone she knows. I have a - " Something caused her to look around just then. Probably the startled swearword one of the young cops said when she noticed Anna and Brother Wolf standing just outside of the stairwell.

The FBI woman -

Leslie Fisher, admonished Anna, because she had a thing about proper word-names.

To demonstrate that he knew perfectly well who he was talking about, Brother Wolf sent her a complicated impression of muted dominance, human, and a scent that was a combination of skin, hygiene products, and a family smell indicating that the FBI woman had a long-term relationship with a male and several not-adult children and two cats. He was showing off a little, because it took a lot of experience to separate a person's scent into so much detail.

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 classes 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 embarrasses 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 space, 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 competition dresses. Ballroom competitions. 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 participate 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 assured 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 unobserved. 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 asset 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 assessing 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."