Fair Game (23 page)

After a while, Malcolm said, “It’s not Long Island or Georges. We’re either going to Gallops or someplace along the coastline.”

“It’s not the coast,” said the witch, lifting her face to the night sky. “Don’t you feel it? It’s glorious. They must be amateurs to leave such a feast behind unconsumed.” She smiled, and it was a terrible smile because it made her look so sweet and young—and the cause of the smile was the death of Jacob Mott and others before him.

“It is too bad that so many of us, so many witches, are afraid of water,” Hally said to Charles. “Otherwise we’d have known about this a long time ago. They’ve used this more than just this season.”

The Hunter had hit Boston twice, Charles remembered.

“If this were springtime, we’d have trouble accessing Gallops,” said Malcolm. “As it is, there are some docks that are still usable. I’ll take us around.”

“We know where we’re going,” said Charles to the witch. “Release the boy.”

“I thought he was just a collection of memories,” she murmured. “Just an old sweater discarded when Jacob died.”

Charles jumped to the top of the railing of the fishing platform and bent his knees, balancing with the sudden lurch the force of his jump had caused and then settling more comfortably as the rise and fall of the boat steadied to the ocean’s hand.

He caught the witch’s eyes and, bringing Brother Wolf and all of his power to the fore, said, “Let him go.”

She obeyed before she thought, his sudden appearance and the force of his order dictating her actions. She dismissed the ghost with a flick of her power. Then her jaw dropped in outrage, and magic gathered around her.

“Don’t,” said Charles before she could complete whatever mischief came to mind. “You won’t like what happens.”

He hopped down beside her and picked up the little frog pot. The sickly magic residue tried to crawl onto his fingers, but flinched back from Brother Wolf’s presence at the last moment. His instinct said that whatever ties the contents of the pot had to Jacob were gone, used up—and that was good enough for him. He tossed the frog out over the side of the boat, making sure that it spun upside down and scattered its contents as it fell.

She hissed and flung something that slid off him like water. Charles shook his head.

“Do you think I would have survived this long if some hastily constructed spell could harm me?” It wasn’t a lie. He was just asking her a question. If her answer was the wrong one, it was not his fault. Half of his reputation rested on stories people told about him. He’d been lucky. He wore some protections, and being a werewolf was another kind of protection, but no one was invulnerable. The secret of being safe from magic was to make people think it was useless to attack him by that method.

Charles swung back over the platform railing and landed lightly on the deck below. He took a seat on one of the benches that served as
bait containers near the bow, and his mate scooted over and sat on his lap.

Anna kissed his jawline and he felt the ghosts’ predatory rumblings.
Closer, bring her closer,
they said, cackling.
We shall eat her and share her among us.

Mine,
answered Brother Wolf. He tightened his arms around her when Charles would have sent her to safety. But Brother Wolf held her and stared at the moon, who sang serenely to him.

CHARLES JUMPED OUT
with one of the dock lines as soon as the boat was near. The wooden platform felt sturdy under his boots and the cleat he tied his line off to looked new. He asked Malcolm about it as the others disembarked.

“The parks department comes out and they need somewhere to tie up their boats, don’t they?” asked Malcolm rhetorically. “So they keep the dock up.”

“Stick together,” said Charles. “Malcolm, your job is to keep our FBI agents safe.”

Leslie drew in a breath, but Goldstein held up a hand. “You and I can’t see in the dark if our flashlights give out. There’s a moon out right now, but given the clouds in the sky, that could change. We are slower and more vulnerable than they are—and if this is the killing ground, then someone might be here to guard their latest victim.”

Leslie pulled out her gun, checked to make sure it was loaded, and then put it back in her shoulder holster.

“If you can manage without flashlights,” Charles told them, “it will help the rest of us keep our night vision. But don’t risk a broken ankle. I don’t know how well you can see—we wolves can see just fine in the dark; most witches have a trick or two—” He glanced at Beauclaire.

The fae nodded. “I can see fine.”

“So it’s up
to you. If you use the flashlights, please try not to shine them in our eyes.”

“I have a question,” said Leslie. “If you can see in the dark, why did Malcolm say he needed lights to find the island?”

“Because I’m not taking a boat that has parts not working into waters that aren’t safe,” Malcolm said. “There are some pretty nasty places around here if you don’t know where you are, and her spell killed all of my instrumentation lights—GPS, depth finders, the whole kit and caboodle.”

The witch smiled at them all. “Are you still talking?”

Isaac touched her shoulder. “Lead the way, Hally.”

The fae followed Isaac and his witch, her pale skin standing out in the darkness like a candle in the night. The FBI agents followed the witch with Malcolm trailing them. That left Charles and Anna to take the rear guard.

Castle Island had been parklike with carefully planted trees and bushes. Gallops was more like a jungle. Not quite as dense as the temperate rain forest near Seattle, but the undergrowth could have used a machete or two to clear it out. Perforce they followed paths that had once been sidewalks or narrow roads before nature had started to reclaim them. Mostly they walked uphill—from what he’d seen on the water, the whole island was mostly one long, narrow hill. It wasn’t very big, less than forty acres, he thought. It wouldn’t take them long to find the place where Jacob had been killed, as long as the witch was telling the truth—that she could feel it.

Anna pointed out the cornerstone of a house and what was undoubtedly originally a planted hedge of roses that had gone wild. He pointed out some poison ivy and a pair of curious rabbits who weren’t at all scared of them. Any hunt on this island would be boring if they were hunting rabbits.

The whole thing stank of black magic. If he’d been trying to find the center on his own, he’d have had to crisscross the whole island and hope he’d stumble into it.

As much as he hated to admit it, the witch had been right. Only amateurs would leave this much power residue behind. After they were done here, he’d have to talk to his father about how to clean it up. This much tainted power was more troublesome than asbestos—people would get sick here and die from colds. They would scratch themselves on a thornbush and die from the resultant infection. They would kill themselves from a despair they would never otherwise have felt.

This much residue would also attract dark things—and in the ocean there were some very bad things who might decide to come ashore for the kind of invitation the island was sending out. And the worst part was that there were more places like this, everywhere the killers had struck over the years.

Sally Reilly, Caitlin the witch had said when she identified the marks the killers left on their victims. It made sense. He hadn’t ever met Sally, but his father had made a point of attending one of her “demonstrations” and had come back shaking his head and sent Charles out to do research. Back then it had been more foot and phone work than computer work. After talking to her father (her mother was dead), some old friends, and a couple of witches, he’d returned to Bran with a report.

Sally wasn’t a hack or an amateur, but rather a skilled witch. She’d broken with her family and decided to turn the heat up—maybe cause another witch hunt. A hunt that she intended to protect herself from by money she gained while she was busy convincing the television-watching public that witches were real.

He’d told Bran that they needed to stop her—and then she’d quit trying to publicize witches. Instead, she’d started charging rich people
large fortunes for her work. She’d disappeared altogether sometime in the early 1990s, but he’d always supposed that she had retired, until Caitlin the witch had been so utterly convinced that Sally Reilly was dead.

It would have been just like Sally to do something like agree to work up a spell that would leave a residue like this, one with incorrect symbols, maybe—while she charged them through the nose for it, thinking them fools who intended to kill chickens or goats.

Had
they
killed her? The timing was right. And if they’d paid a witch for a spell to let them feed from people they killed, they’d have felt the need to get rid of her, since she was a witness they wouldn’t have wanted. And serial killers didn’t stay free and killing for this many years without being smart enough to take care of witnesses.

Charles let his hand linger on Anna’s back. She wore a sweater and a light jacket, but he pretended he could feel the heat of her through the clothing that covered her.

Brother Wolf wanted her off this island and somewhere far away from killers who hunted werewolves and left no scent behind for them to discover. But Charles knew better. To try to encase his Anna in Bubble Wrap would be to kill the woman who protected him with her grandmother’s marble rolling pin. She was the woman he fell in love with.

Then why are you hiding your ghosts from her?
Brother Wolf said.

Because I am afraid,
Charles answered his brother, as he would have answered no one else. He had lived a very long time, and only since he gained Anna had he learned to fear. He’d discovered that he had never been brave before—just indifferent. She had taught him that to be brave, you have to fear losing something.
I am afraid I will lose her. That they will take her from me—or that I will drive her away when she sees what I really am.

Beauclaire had addressed that. Charles couldn’t remember the fae’s
exact words, but he felt them. People as old and powerful as he should never be given someone to love.

For Anna he would destroy the world.

ANNA FELT CHARLES
more than heard him, even though he’d taken his hand off her back and let her go ahead. She could hear the others walking in front of her, but Charles was a silent, reassuring presence behind.

She could smell the wrongness in the air and it made her wolf nervous. It felt like something was watching them, as if the wrongness had an intelligence—and it didn’t help to remember that at least one of the people they were hunting could hide from their senses.

Anna fought the urge to turn around, to take Charles’s hand or slide under his arm and let his presence drive away the wrongness. Once, she would have, but now she had the uneasy feeling that he might back away as he almost had when she sat on his lap in the boat, before Brother Wolf had taken over.

Maybe he was just tired of her. She had been telling everyone that there was something wrong with him…but Bran knew his son and thought the problem was her. Bran was smart and perceptive; she ought to have considered that he was right.

Charles was old. He’d seen and experienced so much—next to him she was just a child. His wolf had chosen her without consulting Charles at all. Maybe he’d have preferred someone who knew more. Someone beautiful and clever who…

“Anna?” said Charles. “What’s wrong? Are you crying?” He moved in front of her and stopped, forcing her to stop walking, too.

She opened her mouth and his fingers touched her wet cheeks.

“Anna,” he said, his body going still. “Call on your wolf.”

“You should have someone stronger,” she told him miserably. “
Someone who could help you when you need it, instead of getting sent home because I can’t endure what you have to do. If I weren’t Omega, if I were dominant like Sage, I could have helped you.”

“There is no one stronger,” Charles told her. “It’s the taint from the black magic. Call your wolf.”

“You don’t want me anymore,” she whispered. And once the words were out she knew they were true. He would say the things that he thought she wanted to hear because he was a kind man. But they would be lies. The truth was in the way he closed down the bond between them so she wouldn’t hear things that would hurt her. Charles was a dominant wolf and dominant wolves were driven to protect those weaker than themselves. And he saw her as so much weaker.

“I love you,” he told her. “Now, call your wolf.”

She ignored his order—he knew better than to give her orders. He said he loved her; it sounded like the truth. But he was old and clever and Anna knew that, when push came to shove, he could lie and make anyone believe it. Knew it because he lied to her now—and it sounded like the truth.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’ll go away—”

And suddenly her back was against a tree and his face was a hairbreadth from hers. His long hot body was pressed against her from her knees to her chest—he’d have to bend to do that. He was a lot taller than her, though she wasn’t short.

Anna shuddered as the warmth of his body started to penetrate the cold that had swallowed hers. Charles waited like a hunter, waited for her to wiggle and see that she was truly trapped. Waited while she caught her breath. Waited until she looked into his eyes.

Then he snarled at her.
“You are not leaving me.”

It was an order, and she didn’t have to follow anyone’s orders. That was part of being Omega instead of a regular werewolf—who might have had a snowball’s chance in hell of being a proper mate.

“
You need someone stronger,” Anna told him again. “So you wouldn’t have to hide when you’re hurt. So you could trust your mate to take care of herself and help, damn it, instead of having to protect me from whatever you are hiding.” She hated crying. Tears were weaknesses that could be exploited and they never solved a damned thing. Sobs gathered in her chest like a rushing tide and she needed to get away from him before she broke.

Instead of fighting his grip, she tried to slide out of it. “I need to go,” she said to his chest. “I need—”