Fair Game (36 page)

Charles banished his da’s words, wishing the ghosts of them didn’t linger in his ears. There was no reason to panic. She was bleeding freely, but the bullet had gone right through and was embedded in the floor, and there was no sign of arterial bleeding. But Brother Wolf wouldn’t be happy until she was well.

Once he had the bullet wound under control, he took a second good look at Anna’s head.

He bent down to touch his lips to her ears and asked her, “I can do it now, or you can wait until later. Their drugs don’t help much and they’ll have to rebreak…”

Now.
Her voice was clear as a bell in his head—and he realized that their bond was open and strong.

For a moment he was breathless. When had that happened? When he’d accepted his role as justice once more? Accepted that there were other answers than death—but that death was the proper and fitting one? Or had it been when he’d seen blood and known that Travis had
managed to hurt her even with her mate so close, when guilt and right and wrong had become only words next to the reality of his mate’s wound?

But Anna was hurt and there would be time to figure out what had happened later.

He used their bond to soak up her pain and take as much of it into himself as he could. Then he set the bone of her nose back where it needed to go before the werewolf’s ability to mend quickly made it heal crooked. She didn’t flinch, though he knew he couldn’t take all the pain from her.

Stop that,
Anna scolded him.
You don’t need to hurt because I do.

But I do,
Charles replied, more honestly than he intended.
I failed to keep you safe.

She huffed a laugh.
You taught me to keep myself safe—a much better gift for your mate, I think. If you had not found me, I would have killed them all. But you came—and that is another, second gift. That you would come, even though I could have protected myself.

She was confident and it pleased him. So he didn’t think about the three experienced, tough wolves these men had killed at their leisure. Let her feel safe. So he didn’t argue with her about it, just ran gentle fingers through the ruff of her fur.

The ghosts are gone,
she pronounced with regal certainty, and was asleep before he could answer her.

But he did anyway. “Yes.”

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.”