Dead Heat (19 page)

The woman who answered Anna’s knock looked sad underneath her warm smile. She was very young, a little younger than his wife, he thought. Like Ms. Newman, she smelled entirely human.

Her ash-blond hair was cut short to reveal the bright purple elephant earrings that were the same color as her bright purple shirt. The bright colors only served to emphasize the depression that weighed down her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing perfume at all—which meant he already liked her better than Ms. Newman.

“Hello,” she said cautiously. “Ms. Edison told me to expect you. She also said she told you that I’m leaving at the end of the week.”

Anna nodded. “Yes. We’d still like to speak with you if you don’t mind.”

Miss Baird’s look sharpened, but she backed up and opened the door to invite them in. Her room was not as big as the very-available Ms. Newman’s, but it was decorated with art obviously created by her five-year-old students.

One student was washing a whiteboard with a spray bottle and an ink-stained rag, her back to them. She seemed totally engrossed in cleaning the board. There was a stiffness to her movements that didn’t please Brother Wolf, who always looked for things that were ill or off.

The teacher saw his glance.

“Amethyst is choosing not to sing today, so the music teacher sent her back here. Choice is fine, but it is a choice between music and work, not music and play.”

He’d thought initially that she was a submissive person, and that would indeed mean trouble while she was trying to run a class of young children. But that firm voice was plenty dominant. So her defeated greeting of them probably had more to do with the temporary nature of her employment than her usual personality.

“This is the five-year-olds’ classroom,” she said to him and Anna in the same tone she’d used on Amethyst. “It’s the smallest class until later in the year. The children who are five in the fall started kindergarten, so we only have the children who were five after the beginning of September. This class will grow as the four-year-olds in Ms. Newman’s class turn five. The kindergarten kids, who go to public school for half the day, go in an entirely different classroom. We do have an after-school program for older children divided by grades—first and second graders, third and fourth graders, fifth and above.”

She looked at them both, shoved her glasses more firmly on her nose, and said in a faintly accusatory tone, “But you aren’t here for that, are you?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the girl cleaning the whiteboard and lowered her voice. “I thought you looked familiar, but I only just this moment figured out why,” she told Charles in a voice that would not carry across the room over Yo-Yo Ma’s cello. “My stepfather is”—another glance at the girl—“one of you. When I was ten, you came to talk with him about his … friends. We lived in Cody, Wyoming. I know who you are and I know you don’t live in Scottsdale. Your moving away from Montana would have been big enough news that my stepfather would have told me.”

He didn’t remember her, though he had indeed gone to Cody about a decade ago and removed an Alpha who had lost control of his wolf. He’d gone to talk individually to all of the wolves in the pack. Some of them had been married, with human families.

“You don’t live here,” she said. “You don’t have children. So why are you here?”

He took in a deep breath, to make sure, then turned at Brother Wolf’s steely determination to face the child who was still wiping down the same board, which had been clean for a while.

“We are here to speak with her,” he said.

The child froze. Then straightened and turned awkwardly around.

Beside him, Anna, too, had stilled.

“This doesn’t concern you, wolf,” the child said in the voice of a five-year-old.

“Chelsea Sani belongs to the grandson of the Alpha of the Salt River Pack,” he told her. Miss Baird already knew about werewolves, and about secrets. She would not tell other people of Chelsea’s connection to the pack. It was important to let the fae know where it had erred. The pack was a deterrent that would keep Chelsea and her children safe. “You picked the wrong victim, protected by the pack and by the Marrok.”

The creature’s face twisted in an expression that didn’t belong on a child. “No werewolves. That’s the only rule. Mackie’s mother is not a werewolf. Mackie is not a werewolf. Mackie’s brother is not a werewolf.”

“They belong to us,” Charles said, noting that the fae was more interested in Chelsea as Mackie’s mother than as a person herself. That indicated the attack was actually focused on Mackie. He walked toward the child, keeping her attention on him and not his mate or the human woman who was more vulnerable than either of them.

He could smell fae magic; it permeated this room, where this fae had apparently been playing at being five years old. But the smell didn’t get stronger as he approached her. Also, he detected only magic and not the fae herself. Had she disguised her scent somehow? But then why not disguise the magic, too? And what was she doing with the magic he could feel as a steady presence?

She snarled soundlessly, backing away from him before he got within touching distance. “No. She wasn’t a werewolf. Fair game. Fair game. Witch but not werewolf. I could kill her, the rules say.” She still sounded like a five-year-old.

“Amethyst?” said the teacher, sounding afraid.

“Amethyst is mine,” said the child in a sharp bark of anger. It was said with the same degree of possessiveness that Anna had just used with the four-year-olds’ teacher. “You can’t have her. She’s mine.”

Charles knew what it was. It had given the game away with its last two words.

If Amethyst wasn’t the one who was talking to them, there was only one thing a creature who looked and spoke like Amethyst could be. The reason he could not smell the fae was that there was
only
magic here.

“Riddle me questions,” Charles said, chanting the old words slowly. “Riddle me rhymes. Riddle me swiftly, I’ve said it three times. By threes and by custom you dare not deny. I bind you to answer and compel your reply.”

“Riddle say, riddle say,” it said, as it had to, being what it was. “Riddle say me, and I will answer thee.” Fae magic and the fae themselves were constrained by rules that allowed magic to exist in a world where magic was a rare thing. Riddles needed to be answered.

“What walks like a child and talks like a child and is left by the fae in the child’s right place?” Charles asked in a singsong voice that was part of the draw of the riddle. “What curdles cream, makes sick the cows, what makes a mother moan? What hides like poison and rots away family and home?”

“A fetch! A fetch! A fetch!” it answered, and as soon as the third response had left its lips, the child disappeared and a bundle of sticks fell to the ground. Worn ribbons tied the sticks in a semblance of a human figure, arms and legs and head. There was a scrap of hair banded top and bottom and shoved into the body of the thing.

The smell of brimstone and vinegar overwhelmed his nose and sent him into a paroxysm of coughing. Behind him he could hear Anna doing the same thing. The smell didn’t bother the human, though.

“Amethyst? Amethyst?” Miss Baird hurried over to the board and then looked back at Charles. “What happened to Amethyst?”

“When did you last talk to her parents?” Anna asked hoarsely. He turned to see that she had covered her nose with her arm.

“This morning,” Miss Baird said. “Not her parents, though. Her mother dropped her off and is supposed to pick her up. Her parents are in the middle of a nasty divorce. After the third incident, we have this list to tell us who is to pick her up on which day.” Her voice trailed off.

“Where is she?” Miss Baird asked very quietly. “What happened to her?”

Anna looked at him, and he pulled out his cell phone. “I think this has gone beyond my sphere of authority,” Charles said. He hit the button that dialed his father.

To say that the police were displeased with them when Charles and Anna refused to talk was an understatement. Miss Baird talked to them until she was hoarse while Amethyst’s parents watched in unrelieved apathy. Miss Baird, who knew about werewolf secrets, didn’t tell them anything about werewolves, just that Charles and Anna were there interviewing the teachers at the day care.

“It’s a fetch,” Miss Baird told the police officer for the fifth or sixth time. “Not a child all. He didn’t turn a child into a bundle of sticks, he just made it admit that’s what it was. No. I don’t know why it worked or what he did.”

Anna didn’t know why she and Charles weren’t talking to the police. Except perhaps the obvious reason, which was that Miss Baird was not having any effect on their disbelief. Why should their reaction to what Charles or Anna had to say be any different? If no one would believe the truth, then why say anything at all? But that didn’t seem very Charles-like. Bran hadn’t told them to maintain silence when Charles had called him.

Bran had listened to Charles’s careful recital of the exact events from the moment they walked into Miss Baird’s classroom. When Charles was finished he told them to call the police. They were to wait at the school until help arrived, with the implication that help would be a while in coming.

Then Bran had ended the call and they’d spent most of the afternoon waiting. First with Miss Baird, then the police arrived. Eventually, Ms. Edison had wandered in; finally Amethyst’s parents, the Millers, who had arrived separately, joined them.

The Millers were pretty subdued for people whose only child had turned into a pile of broken sticks. From Miss Baird’s description of warring parents, Anna had sort of expected more hostility. More energy. They sat near each other, not touching—or communicating in any other way, either. They hadn’t said much when Miss Baird tried to explain to them what had happened. Unlike the police, they hadn’t tried to argue with her, though they hadn’t seemed to believe, either.

They looked … faded. She thought they waited with the rest of them because no one told them to go home, rather than out of any curiosity. They hadn’t been angry, or disbelieving, or any of the things they should have been. Either children made you as crazy as Anna’s own father claimed, or the changeling had been doing something to them. She thought about Charles’s riddle and how poison could be spiritual rather than just physical.

The police officers were officially skeptical that a child had turned into a bundle of sticks. They were inclined to write Miss Baird off as a stupid mark willing to believe anything. Either Charles and Anna were con artists in the middle of some muddled game that involved kidnapping Amethyst, or they were stupid marks, like Miss Baird, who had the bad luck to witness some flimflam trick. That she and Charles weren’t talking to the police made them more inclined to believe the first than the last.

The police officers in Scottsdale were evidently not used to dealing with the supernatural. They would have dismissed everyone and gone home themselves if it weren’t for a call they received from someone they “yes, sir”ed who had asked them to hold the witnesses at the day care and wait for an investigator who was coming.

Ms. Edison could have gone home after the children had cleared out, but she was “disinclined” to leave Miss Baird to fend for herself. That made Anna like her better, and she’d been inclined to like her in the first place.

The Cantrip agents came next, Marsden and Leeds. Cantrip was the federal agency that dealt with the supernatural. It surprised her, given the attitude of the police, that there was a Cantrip presence in the greater Phoenix area.

Anna didn’t recognize either of them, but her experience with Cantrip was not vast. Nor was it a happy experience, either. She couldn’t tell from his reaction if Charles knew who they were, though he had extensive files on Cantrip, since Bran viewed it as a danger. The Cantrip agents weren’t, she was pretty sure, the help that Bran had promised.

“So you are Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” said the Cantrip officer to Charles. She was pretty sure it was the one named Marsden, not Leeds. Whichever one he was, he managed a credible sneer. “And you were here when the child turned into a pile of sticks?”

Cantrip seemed to attract a variety of people, from the true-believer geek to the rabid “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” kook and most everyone else in between. Leeds, Anna thought, was of the geek variety, but Marsden seemed to be a disbeliever. That didn’t make sense. Why would someone who didn’t want to believe in magic become an agent of Cantrip?

No one had touched the sticks so far. Anna thought it hadn’t been Charles’s soft-voiced warning that it wasn’t always safe to deal with fae magic, even spent fae magic, that had kept the police from messing with it. She thought it was because no one wanted to be the one who collected the bundle as evidence, and thereby also collect harassment from everyone in the department for listening to a bunch of crazy people.

To date, the fae had been too good at appearing powerless and telling people that the stories of Tuatha Dé Danann, who could level mountains and raise lakes, were make-believe.

The truth was, humans wanted them to be stories. They didn’t want to be afraid, didn’t want to believe that their ancestors who huddled in stone crofts and wooden huts had been right to hide. So they listened to the fae weave a fictional story out of truths and the people believed.

The sole exception to that image was the day Beauclaire had beheaded the son of a US senator in front of a Boston courthouse several months ago. And that had been more a show of strength rather than a show of
power
, really.

She was sort of surprised that a Cantrip agent would take that attitude, though.

Charles looked at Marsden and said, as he had to the police, “We only want to tell the story once. We’re waiting for the proper authority to tell it to.”

Maybe Bran had told Charles who he’d planned on calling in to help in one of his one-sided only-in-your-head conversations, though Anna doubted it. Bran tended to include her in most of those unless there was some urgent reason not to. Charles sounded cool and certain that someone else was coming, though.