Dead Heat (18 page)

“You are witchborn,” said Charles. “Trust your instincts. It happened at the day care?”

“Yes.”

“There’ve been some other bad things happening at the day care lately,” Anna said. “I had a long talk with Max about it yesterday. He said that they had a teacher commit suicide. And they also had a family killed in a car wreck.”

Chelsea nodded. “People do commit suicide, and they die in traffic accidents, but I am not naturally inclined to kill my children and then myself. If one of those was a spell, maybe all of them were?”

“I think,” said Charles, “that Anna and I will go visit the day care. If there is a fae there, one of us should be able to figure out who it is.”

“Should be?” asked Kage.

“This fae is strong,” Charles answered. “A powerful fae can disguise itself from a werewolf.”

“I’ll stay here,” Wade said. “I’ve taken the next few days off work.”

There were kids everywhere. Kids slid down miniaturized slides and climbed plastic play forts in bright colors, and a few plastic play forts in dull, sun-bleached colors. Kids in sandpits dug with plastic shovels or threw sand on one another. One little boy in jeans and a pale blue T-shirt was running as fast as he could as two little girls chased him with death on their faces. Anna hoped he could run fast or he was in for it.

Adults fluttered among the chaos of children. Some of them brought order with them like the best Alphas did. Some of them elicited excitement and happiness. Some of them made the kids scatter before them like chickens in front of a fox.

She left her hand on her husband’s arm, feeling the tension in him, knowing it was her fault. She would never do anything to harm her husband in any way—not on purpose.

Yet she was unwilling to sit around and wait a hundred years for the opportunity to have children. It wasn’t impatience, no matter what Charles thought. Werewolves could live forever, but on average lived far shorter lives than their human originally could have expected to.

Charles did not live quietly. More even than the Marrok, he lived with a target painted on his chest. As the werewolves crept further out of the shadows and into the daily lives of ordinary people, the list of his enemies increased.

Anna hadn’t died the day she’d been involuntarily Changed, had in fact been made less mortal rather than more. But she had lost her old self as surely as if she
had
died, and it had taught her not to be complacent. She was not impatient, but she no longer trusted life to be good. She had become more conscious, not less, that people died: that she might die, that
Charles
might die. Death was real to her in a way that it had never been real when she had been human.

She was a long way from defeated. His arguments that any child of his would be a target were unassailable. Within the supernatural community, Charles, as the Marrok’s son and hatchet man, was very well-known. Eventually even the humans would know about him. Any child of his would be perceived as a weakness. She could not argue that point, but she did not feel as though that necessitated refusing to have a child.

His other stated objection, that there was no current possibility for them to conceive, was more open to argument. She didn’t want to argue with him, shouldn’t have to argue with him. She’d thought that he’d been willing to listen to the possibilities.

The key, she thought, was to pick through her husband’s complicated and mostly unspoken issues with children or with his own children or being a father. She didn’t know exactly where his absolute refusal was finding its power. When she found something real, she’d work at the knot of his resistance until she had it unraveled. Then she would go back to the next tangle and do the same thing.

Her brother didn’t call her Anna the Relentless for nothing.

She needed a loose end, and so far she hadn’t been able to find it. His father might know, but it seemed dishonest and possibly damaging to go to someone else for insight without knowing what kind of a tangle she was working with. Better to get it herself if she could.

Two months of effort had resulted in nothing except the tension in Charles’s arm as they walked through the safety zone of the sidewalk.

“Even if they were to choose to attack,” she murmured to him, “they are safely caged behind that vinyl chain-link fence. I think you can relax.”

“Vinyl doesn’t do anything to stop magic,” Charles murmured back. “The steel wire beneath might have some effect, but it is best to be prepared.”

Under the circumstances it was difficult for her to tell whether he was being funny or serious. Neither of them was under the illusion it was the threat from the fae that was causing his tension.

Still, he had a point about being prepared to face a hostile threat from the fae here. It was time she turn her attention away from having her own children and start trying to discover who had sent Chelsea off to murder hers.

The kids took no notice of a pair of uninteresting adults wandering up to the main doors. Surely if a fae were among them, he or she would notice that Anna and Charles were a little different from most people, but maybe not.

When Charles drew a deep breath of air through his nose, Anna followed suit. She didn’t smell any fae—though her experience with fae was fairly limited. She wasn’t sure she would detect one right under her nose. Charles didn’t say anything, so she assumed that he didn’t scent anything, either.

Hosteen had rendered his power to be of assistance moot by his absence. Charles had turned down Kage flatly—one human was as easily bespelled as another. Probably more easily, since Kage was not witchborn like his wife. Wade had been easier because Hosteen’s orders were that he was to help with Chelsea, so leaving him home hadn’t incited rebellion.

That left Anna and Charles to go check it out. Anna was pretty sure that being a werewolf wasn’t an automatic defense, either, but Charles wasn’t worried about confronting a fae. She put her trust in him.

Anna winced as someone blew a shrill whistle on the playground. Charles didn’t even twitch as he held the door open for her. She wondered how he managed it.

There was a big sign on the door immediately to their right as soon as they entered the building. It said
PRINCIPAL EDISON—ALL VISITORS PLEASE CHECK IN
. It amused Charles. A day care was really just an efficient way to provide babysitting and not actually a school.

Anna knocked on the closed door and Charles stepped back to let his wife interface with the public. People liked her, and, as a bonus, she didn’t scare them. People talked to him because they were intimidated. Anna could usually get more and better information from people because they honestly wanted to make her happy.

The woman who opened the door of the principal’s office looked tired and a little startled to see them, though she tried to cover it over with a big, and mostly sincere, smile.

“Hello,” she said, recovering. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I’m Farrah Edison. Welcome to Sunshine Fun. You said you have a four-year-old and a five-year-old, right?”

“We’d like to talk to the teachers of the four-year-old and the five-year-old classes,” Anna said.

Charles took the opportunity to sample the air in the principal’s office. He didn’t notice that it smelled particularly of fae-anything. But he wouldn’t, because the principal wore Opium, one of the perfumes that tended to kill his ability to scent things.

Anna looked at a ragged piece of paper she carried. “We’d like to see Miss Baird and Ms. Newman. You told us this would be a good time to speak with them both.”

Anna’s voice rose at the end, as if she weren’t sure they were here at the right time, seeming to allow Ms. Edison a graceful way to reschedule things if she needed to. It was a tactful response to the surprise Ms. Edison had displayed; she’d obviously forgotten they were coming.

“Yes. You can talk to Ms. Newman first. Her children are in music for another fifteen minutes. When they get back, Miss Baird’s students will go and you can sneak over to her room.”

Students
and
teachers
at a day care? Charles weighed the vocabulary. He supposed children
were
learning a lot between the ages of two and five. He pursed his lips and regarded the sign again. Maybe this
was
a school.

As they followed the principal down the hallway, she told them about how they planned the meals they served, their hours, and their rates, which were very high. She assured them, without looking at Charles, that they did not discriminate on the basis of race or religion. Every teacher had an assistant teacher for every ten children.

She told them about weekly outings to nearby parks, and that once a month each age group went to a local private swimming pool, where the students would learn to swim. Two-year-olds en masse at a swimming pool sounded to Charles like a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe the remarkable thing was not how many children, teachers, and parents associated with this school had died, but that there had not been more.

Ms. Edison talked a lot, and he rather wished she’d chosen different perfume. He trailed behind Anna and the principal in order to save his nose. Generally the more expensive the perfume, the better it smelled; most chemical re-creations of scent smelled like their chemicals to him. Opium, the perfume Opium anyway, smelled fine; he just couldn’t scent much of anything else after he’d been around it very long.

Just before she opened the door, Ms. Edison gave Anna a sharp look. She’d avoided looking at him, Charles had noted, though that might have been because he followed about ten feet behind them. More probably it was the usual response people had around Anna: as long as he didn’t draw attention to himself, they grew so focused on her that they forgot about him.

“As I’m sure you know, Miss Baird is new to us this month. Who gave you her name in particular?”

“My sister-in-law,” lied Anna smoothly. “But it was a friend of a friend of hers who had children in your day care. I don’t know their names, I’m sorry. Just the names of the teachers.”

“In all honesty,” said Ms. Edison somberly, “I should tell you that we have given her notice. She is new and on probation and there have been some unacceptable disruptions in her classroom.”

“I see,” said Anna. “I’d still like to speak with her.”

“Yes, that’s fine. I just didn’t want to mislead you.”

Anna smiled. “I appreciate that.”

Ms. Edison introduced them to Ms. Newman, an Energizer Bunny of a woman wearing too much makeup and perfume that made Brother Wolf sneeze in disgust. It only smelled bad, though, and wouldn’t keep him from detecting other scents the way Ms. Edison’s did.

Ms. Edison’s phone buzzed; she glanced down at a text message, frowned, excused herself, and then abandoned them to their fate with the teacher of four-year-olds.

Ms. Newman talked at them for fifteen minutes without letting Anna get a word in edgewise. In contrast to Ms. Edison, Ms. Newman had no trouble at all paying attention to Charles. Ms. Newman told them, or rather told
him
because she ignored Anna, about her BS in child psychology and about her philosophy of education. While she was doing that, she managed to sneak in a lot of information about her divorce three years ago and how it was so hard to find nice men who weren’t already in a relationship.

Anna cleared her throat.

“I believe,” said Ms. Newman, still without so much as looking at Anna, “that children benefit from order. Every day they come into my class exactly at seven thirty and we all get out our crayons and set them on the tabletop for inspection. They have to tell me what color each crayon is and something that is that color.”

As she described her very regimented schedule for the children, Charles found himself feeling sorry for them. Children should run and play, not have learning shoved down their throat for their own good from the moment they hit the day care until they left. But Kage’s boy had seemed to like this woman, so maybe she knew more than he did.

“I have been on staff for ten years and have more experience than any other teacher here,” Ms. Newman told Charles in a voice someone might use to impart state secrets. “When Ms. Edison is ill or when she has to travel, like when she was called away for a death in the family before Christmas, I’m the one who keeps an eye on things.” She breathed deeply, drawing attention to an asset that wouldn’t help her in her job.

Was it acceptable to wear low-cut shirts to take care of children? he wondered. The mores of the world tended to change more often than he paid attention to them, but her clothing didn’t seem to be entirely appropriate.

Ms. Newman looked at him until he felt like a side of beef she was thinking of eating for dinner. Like Ms. Edison, she was scared of him. He hadn’t been able to smell the principal’s fear, but he’d heard her heart rate speed up. But unlike with the principal, fear seemed to excite Ms. Newman. Brother Wolf much preferred Ms. Edison’s avoidance to Ms. Newman’s flirtation.

A bell rang from somewhere in the building, and Ms. Newman’s face fell. “That’s my cue, I’m afraid. It was very nice talking with you,” she said to Charles. “I look forward to seeing you again when you bring your child in.”

“Ms. Newman,” said Anna in a low voice.

Ms. Newman dragged her attention off Charles. Anna put her hand on him and leaned toward the other woman, who stepped back; smart woman.

“You need to understand something,” she said intensely. “Charles is my husband. You can’t have him. Mine. Not yours. There are lots of nice, unattached men out there, I’m sure. Pick one of them and you might live longer.” Then her body relaxed and her voice regained its usual cheeriness. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Newman.”

As they left, Charles turned back toward the teacher and shrugged helplessly. Then he put on his meekest face and turned around to follow Anna.

“I saw that,” she muttered at him.

“Saw what?” asked Charles in mock innocence. Brother Wolf was pleased with her claiming of them. So was Charles.

She gave him a look that made him smile, then knocked on the door of the room that bore a temporary paper sign that said
miss baird
in big block letters. Behind the door, decorated hopefully with spring flowers and bright green leaves, the strains of cello music wafted out. Charles recognized a recording of Yo-Yo Ma that he often listened to himself. The soon-to-be-unemployed Miss Baird had good taste in music.