Dark Fae (22 page)

“Tell me something.” I said, totally unimpressed “If this is just a regular case, just a kid gone missing, why is the illustrious FBI on it?” I strolled to my Jeep, the two men following a few feet behind me. “Could it be that unlike most people whose children go missing, this family has money and can buy the really good help?”

Both agents flushed at the implication. Mini-Me stepped into the ring next. “The FBI can’t be bought Ms. Adamson.”

“Really?” I smiled at him sweetly, turning to face the men, my hand on the Jeep’s handle. “That’s not what I heard. In fact, I heard that when you’ve got lots of money or fame, that’s when the FBI steps in.” I paused. “Glory hounds seeking the spoils of others sorrow.”

O’Shea stepped close and held my door closed, once more looming over me. I didn’t often feel small, but this close to him I felt like a child. The same child he’d met nearly ten years ago. “Adamson, one of these days I’m going to find out how you did it, how you made your little sister disappear. And when I do, all this vigilante shit of yours will stop because I will make sure you’re in jail for a very,
very
long time. You’re not fooling me. I know who’s to blame for your sister’s death. We may not have a body, but one day soon, you’re going to slip up.”

My jaw tightened and tears threatened. I would not let him see me cry damn it. “And when I do, you’ll be there, right? You’ll be there to slip the noose over my neck and watch me swing?” He growled an obscenity and suddenly we were nose to nose, Mini-Me was in the background muttering about people starting to stare.

“You’d think that the FBI would like a little help finding kids and returning them to their families.” I said.

“Not when they’re dead!” He hissed at me, hot minty breath flooding my nose. That had been the last kid. I’d found him, but it had been too late. The family was grateful though to have closure. The FBI and local police, not so much. It’s a little difficult to explain a werewolf attack to people who have no idea that the monsters are real.

“At least I can find them! More than you slackers ever manage!” I snarled back. I hoped my breath smelled bad.

“Slackers?” His voice got soft, and I knew I touched a raw spot. I couldn’t help poking some more at it.

“Glorified donut eating cops. The only difference is you get to dress in Gucci and the cops have hand me down uniforms.”

His eyes nearly bugged out and he grabbed me by the shoulders. I went limp in his hands. “Assault on an unarmed woman O’Shea? Now that won’t look good on the old permanent record will it?”

He didn’t drop his hands, not right away. “Since when do you go anywhere without your blades?” He took his hands off my shoulders and flipped my jacket open
, fingers brushing underneath my breasts even, the perv
. I let him. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that all my weapons were waiting for me in the Jeep. But on me, I had nothing at the moment.

Wiping his hands on his pants as if he’d touched something nasty, he said,
“I know what you are Adamson. You’re a fraud and a child killer.”

I’d had enough of his tirade, enough of the memories he stirred up. I leaned forward till we were nose to nose again, and gave him the eye contact I knew most people couldn’t handle. When you have chocolate eyes laced with gold and emeralds, it either freaks people out or turns them on. I was hoping it freaked him out.

“You know what I think agent O’Shea?” He blinked at me and I took advantage of the proximity of his lips. I planted a big fat kiss on him, slipping my tongue through his teeth and flicking it along the roof of his mouth. He didn’t fight me for a split second his lips softened on mine
, the taste of mint lingering on my tongue as I pulled away from him. O’Shea swayed, t
hen scrambled away from me, dark eyes wide and hand going to his gun.

“I think you just like to follow me around so you can watch my nice tight ass wiggle. You’ve been watching it for nearly ten years, haven’t you?” I blew a kiss at Mini-Me and hopped into my Jeep.

The kiss did what nothing else could have. It shut him up and I left from our encounter whistling a tune, a smile on my lips.

3

Before I went any further with the search, I did what had become more than a habit for me and something closer to a ritual. I had two stops to make. The first one was the local toy store, “Hannigans Shenanigans” where I purchased a large stuffed elephant. It was my required gift for my next stop.

Her house was barely that, a shanty, a shack, with just enough insulation to make it through the coldest part of our winters here in the badlands. The whole thing was on a slant, tilted crazily to the left, seemingly propped up by the pile of junk that reached the eaves on that side of the house. The floor boards groaned under my weight and the smell of rotting wood filled my nose.

“That you baby girl? I thought I told you not to come around till your momma cleaned you up some. Crazy blue socks everywhere.” Her soprano voice echoed through the thin wood and I shook my head. Obviously not one of her more lucid days.

As far as adults went, Giselle was one of the few who had my sympathies. She was born with the ability to see a person’s past, present and probable future. But just like a carpenter that only has so many hammer swings in him before his elbow blows; she only had so many viewings in her before her mind broke.

There isn’t a lot for me to say about Giselle. She’s a broken woman, still in her prime but aged prematurely by her calling in life. Since her mind had wandered and there were very few people she would see, but she had an affinity for stuffed animals. And I didn’t get all freaked out by the voices that showed up on occasion around her. Not ghosts, but some sort of leftover from her guides she’d acquired in life. Above all that, she was my mentor and the closest thing I had to a mother.

“It’s just me, Giselle. Rylee. I brought you a new stuffed toy. An elephant, I know you don’t have one of those.”

I pulled the large grey velvet covered elephant from behind my back. She came to the screen door and I got a good look at her. I hadn’t seen her for some time, so busy I’d been with tracking, at least a month had gone by and it hadn’t been kind to her. She’d lost weight and there were patches of skin that showed through her clothes, skin that no longer was a healthy pink but mottled and age spotted. Dirty blond hair was pulled into a severe bun, stretching her features even more, leaving her sunken cheeks and vacant brown eyes the only thing you noticed. My heart sank at the sight of her. I didn’t want to believe I was losing her to the madness.

“Rylee? Ah, I remember now. Rylee. Yes, come inside dear; show me what you’ve brought for Giselle.”

She shuffled away and I followed her in, breathing shallowly; trying not to think of all the possibilities for the smells. This was not good. Milly and I were going to have to do something about this, no matter how hard it might be. Scattered junk littered the floor, old newspaper, bags of groceries un-emptied and stacks of books to the ceiling, and those were just the things I could identify. It was worse every time I came.

The back kitchen was as full as the rest of the house, only I suspected that this was where the majority of the bad smells were coming from.

Giselle dusted off a rickety gold chair circa 1960 and I sat down. She pulled a green vinyl chair with rips in it close and grabbed my hand before I could even ask her, her eyes suddenly focusing, an intelligence that hadn’t been there a moment before filled them.

Because I’m an Immune, even psychics can’t read me, it’s like I don’t exist. But I have lines in my hand and reading those lines isn’t really magic, it’s like knowing how to read a map and understand all the symbols and variances.

“Ah, little Rylee, you have big trouble coming your way. Always the same with you though.” She turned my hand first one way, then the other, her grip intense.

“You will find someone, a man, from your past that will become a part of your future.”

“You mean like a lover?” I hated the almost hopeful tone in my voice, the way it sounded, but I needed to be as clear as possible. A little romance never hurt anyone, but if it got in the way of finding India, or any other child for that matter, it wouldn’t matter how I felt about him.

“Obsession.” She whispered the word and a cool wind wrapped around my ankles. “Death. Power. They are all tangled here,” she pointed to the middle of my hand where indeed there seemed to be several lines tangled about one another. “But you will also find your own past in this circle of three.”

The house groaned as a gust of wind pummeled the barely standing structure. I shivered, and Giselle did too.

“You must go now. I have said enough for today. Where are you blue socks child?” Her eyes began to slide into vacancy once more and I grabbed her hands, snagging her attention. I asked her what I always asked. “The child I seek, will I find her in time?”

Giselle’s eyes flickered and the intelligence returned. “This child you seek, she is strong, you have time, I do not know if it will be enough but you have time.” I stood to leave, pressing the stuffed elephant into her now empty hands. For all that she loved her stuffed animals, I never once saw one after I had left it with her, and I still had no idea what she did with them. I brought them now because it was one of the few times I got to see her smile.

“Wait.”

I froze in the hallway, Giselle’s voice drawing me back in.

“There is another child, a child of golden sunshine and blue skies that seeks for you.”

Every muscle in me tensed, my body paralyzed by the seer’s words. It couldn’t be what I thought, but I whispered her name without meaning to.

“Berget.”

The cold wind whipped through the house again, papers scattering about, a stack of books toppling over, and chaos ensued.

Giselle scrambled to her feet, and rushed past me, caterwauling like a banshee about blue socks, her hair coming loose from her bun and the strands of it whipping about her face, obscuring her features as she attempted to right the things that the wind had demolished. It only made matters worse, for every pile she straightened, another fell, taking two more with it.

I shook myself free of the paralysis and reached out for Giselle, grabbing her by her bony shoulders.

“Let me go devil spawn! Blood seeker! Killer! Whore! Let me go!” I didn’t take the names personally. Though some were accurate. You can’t get too pissy when people are telling you the truth.

I hung onto her shoulders, steered her back into the kitchen and plunked her into the green chair. She went limp and a voice came softly to my ear. “Sing for her child.” I didn’t look around; I knew it was one of her guides. They loved Giselle and so I did what they said. I sang.

“
Trip upon trenchers, and dance upon dishes, my mother sent me for some barm, some barm; she bid me go lightly, and come again quickly, for fear the young men should do me some harm. Yet didn’t you see, yet didn’t you see, what naughty tricks they played on me? They broke my pitcher, spilt the water, cursed my mother, chided her daughter and kissed my sister instead of me
.”

I trailed off, the old song from my childhood catching in my throat. They didn’t call it a melancholy tune for nothing.

“So nice dear. Perhaps you’ll sing to me again sometime?” Giselle’s coherent question surprised me, but I took it in stride.

“Of course Giselle. Will you be alright now?”

She cocked her head and squinted her eyes at me. “Child, go home, get your blue socks, you’ll need them before the week is out.”

I left her there in her kitchen, muttering about blue socks, the elephant gripped in her frail hands and a cool wind blowing through her house.

The cell phone shook a little in my hand. Milly’s number was normally embedded in my brain but I had to look it up.

Millicent, Milly to her friends, was my
closest
friend and the other girl that Giselle had raised alongside me. Raised gives the impression that we were little when she took us on. I was sixteen and Milly was a year younger. Both orphaned in our own ways, both needing a mentor for the innate abilities that were becoming apparent.

“Hello?” Her soft voice was sleepy and it was obvious I’d pulled her from sleep.

“Hey witch. Get out of bed. We’ve got a bit of a problem.” I switched ears with the phone and turned the heat up with my now free hand. I could still feel the wind from Giselle’s house in my bones.

She groaned. “Listen. I’ve barely been in bed for two hours. You know I don’t run on the same schedule as most people.”

I nodded to myself and said, “I know, I wouldn’t call if it wasn’t important. It’s Giselle.”

She gave a sharp gasp and I heard the bed creak in the background then a soft exclamation that wasn’t Milly. I smiled to myself. She was always having “sleepovers.”
That was something I didn’t have time for, or the inclination. Matters of the heart were just too messy in my opinion.

Footsteps and then a door closing told me we had a little more privacy. “What’s wrong?” She whispered.

“We have to move her. I don’t know how, but that house is falling down around her ears. And the madness has moved quickly in the last few months. I don’t think she’ll survive the winter on her own.” I paused. “Hang on a minute, I think I’m lost.”