Mind Games (13 page)

I cried out in alarm, but only for an instant. Training took over and I stomped down, hard, on my attacker’s foot. This didn’t do much except cause him to loosen his hold on my hair, but that allowed me to slip away and reach for my gun.

I never made it to the gun. Someone pushed me, then someone else knocked my hand away from the weapon. At least four large men took notice of me, their hair ranging from brown to gray, their expressions somewhere between anger and disgust.

One of them grabbed me from behind, holding both of my arms in his. I turned my palms down and twisted away, simultaneously throwing my hips backward, but before I could escape, another man flipped open a pocket knife and held it under my chin. For the space of several heartbeats, I knew he would use it. I could see murder in his eyes, which may have been brown, though in my dreams I see them as red.

Then a familiar voice said, “You don’t really want to do that.” Matthew. There was an odd, strained note to his voice that wasn’t usually present, but he exuded confidence nonetheless.

The arm holding the knife faltered, dropping the weapon. The man who had an iron grip on my arms released them, while the other two men backed off ever so slightly.

“Run,” Matthew said.

He didn’t have to tell me twice. Spinning on my heels, I dashed into the park, Matthew only a pace behind me, until we reached the shade of the elm tree and the relative safety of his family.

“Is she all right?” Robert asked, talking to his brother as if I weren’t there. I might have gotten angry with him for that, but Matthew beat me to it.

“Never drop a spell like that,” Matthew hissed. “Someone could have been killed – might still get killed. Haven’t you ever heard of recoil?”

Robert stood his ground, balling his hands into fists. “I told you ten minutes ago it wasn’t working, and again five minutes ago. You weren’t listening. I couldn’t hold it anymore.”

“Boys,” James said, looking between them and then flicking his gaze over to me. “Not now. Too public.”

They glared at one another, but I found myself wishing they would continue arguing. I’d always thought of the Blairs as amazingly powerful – the way they’d made most of the town forget that I’d been wanted for murder back in June and the way… the way… I frowned. There was something else they’d done recently, but it eluded me.

Oh well, it probably wasn’t important anyway. The point was, they couldn’t handle this mob. Why not?

Matthew placed an arm around me, protectively. “I’ll explain later,” he promised. “Right now, do you think you can make yourself scarce for an hour or two while we calm them down?”

“Yeah.” Part of me wanted to stick around and see what they did, but I had sense enough not to argue.

Matthew placed a light, feathery kiss on my temple, the gesture somehow making me feel safe and warm. “Thank you. How about if I stop by your place later tonight?”

“Sounds great.”

* * *

It was difficult to manufacture a reason for not reporting in, but I managed. I could have just said that the crowd had become violent, which would have been true, but I had the impression that their violent behavior wasn’t entirely their own fault. It had something to do with the failed spell the Blairs had been trying to cast.

So instead, I told the sheriff that I needed to check out a lead on the McClellan case, which wasn’t entirely untrue. On impulse, I decided to go to city hall to figure out who lived near the site of the abandoned car. It may have been closest to Malloren land, but they weren’t the only ones who lived that way. The car had been found near the edge of the Malloren property, very near the border with the Eagles. The Mallorens’ other neighbors were Scott Lee and his sister, Amanda.

David McClellan didn’t live anywhere near the site, nor did his family. I had no idea whether that was interesting or not, but I decided to spend the afternoon interviewing the Mallorens and their immediate neighbors to find out if they had seen anything.

When I called Sheriff Adams to let him know, he insisted that Wesley drive along with me.

“Why?” I asked, startled. Not that I had a problem with Wesley so far, but I didn’t relish the thought of confronting three powerful households by myself, let alone with an unknown quantity like Wesley.

“Just humor me,” Sheriff Adams said. “I know who these people are, and I even know they’re more likely to talk to you if you’re alone, but I don’t trust them.”

“And Wesley is going to help how?” If my parents’ protection didn’t help me, Wesley’s certainly wouldn’t.

“Just humor me.”

Ten minutes later, Wesley met me at city hall and the two of us headed back out to the lake.

“What happened this morning?” Wesley asked after a while.

My first thought was of Cormack McClellan attacking me with mind magic, then of the spell-shocked mob, but he was probably just asking about the car and my reason for going to question the neighbors. I kept my report simple and to the point.

Wesley remained silent for almost a full minute after I finished my story. “Is there any reason you didn’t report those men attacking you outside the station today?”

My hands slipped a little on the steering wheel. “What?”

“I had an eye on them all morning,” Wesley said. “I was about to call for backup when that man walked calmly into the middle of things and somehow got you out. Not sure if that’s the magic everyone’s talking about around here or another symptom of the insanity. Maybe both.”

“Both,” I agreed. “Definitely both. Um, did you tell the sheriff?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why he wanted you to drive out here with me?”

“Yes.”

That explained a lot. I hadn’t heard it in his voice, but the sheriff had to be pretty upset with me for lying to him, or at least for holding back the truth. He could be understanding to a point, but only to a point.

We drove in silence until we reached the Mallorens’ house, where I made a show of taking the lead. Wesley didn’t protest in the least, and seemed quite happy to slide back into the shadows almost out of sight while I depressed the doorbell and waited for someone to answer.

A sour-faced young man, not much younger than me, answered the door with iPod buds still in his ears. “What?” he asked loudly.

I gestured to his ears. “I have a few questions.”

Grudgingly, he removed the ear buds and gave me a rather unflattering head to toe appraisal. “Cassie Scot?”

I returned the appraisal, trying to mimic his snide look. “Pat Malloren? Shouldn’t you be in school?”

“No.” For a minute I thought he was going to leave it there, then he shrugged and added, “Graduated last May.”

“I thought you were 17.”

“I’m gifted. Are you the truancy officer or do you have some other point in being here?”

Ignoring his tone, I plunged forward. “I found an abandoned car near the edge of your parents’ property.” I gestured in the general direction I meant. “Belonged to David McClellan.”

Surprise, raw and unmistakable, flickered across his face. In the next instant it was gone, but I knew I hadn’t missed it.

“Are your parents home?” I asked. Just because Pat didn’t know anything, didn’t mean his parents wouldn’t.

“No. And the kids are at school.”

I handed him a card. “Have your parents call me when they get in, all right?”

He shrugged. “Sure, but they won’t want to talk to you.”

“Why not?” I shouldn’t have asked, but the words popped out before I could help myself.

“It’s not personal. They just don’t talk to cops. Well, and they don’t like your family. Or you.”

He had an odd definition of personal, but I decided that I really didn’t need to know any more. One of the runes carved into the door frame had begun to glow, probably because of his declaration that I was neither welcomed nor liked.

“Come on, Wesley, let’s go.” I turned to leave.

“Don’t tell my parents I said so,” Pat said. “But David McClellan’s no big loss.”

The words surprised me so much that I stopped and spun on my heels to face him once more. “You don’t like him?” I had always thought of the McClellans and the Mallorens as sort of allies. The Mallorens were among those demanding justice.

“He’s a creep,” Pat said. “Saw him try to lure some little girl into his shop a year or so ago. Don’t know why and don’t want to know.”

He started to put his ear buds back in his ears but I stopped him. “What happened to the little girl?”

“Nothing. David tried to play it off when he saw me and didn’t do anything to her. She and her parents left town the next day. Tourists.” Again, he shrugged. I was beginning to think of it as a nervous tic. “The guy thought he was invincible. Sooner or later he was going to mess with the wrong person.”

“Someone who could fight back, you mean?”

“More likely someone with a protector who would fight back. He wasn’t quite that sloppy.” With that, Pat apparently decided he’d said enough and plugged his ear buds back in, shutting the door in my face.

* * *

I couldn’t look forward to talking to Scott Lee again, despite his recent assistance in the rescue of two missing girls. I even checked the lunar calendar to make sure the moon wasn’t full, knowing it wouldn’t ease my mind either way. I had seen Scott kill a man in broad daylight – quickly, viciously, and without remorse. Werewolves made me nervous. They were unpredictable, often quick to anger, and some of them were killers. I knew that many managed the condition well enough, and Evan assured me that Scott was not only one of them, but a leader of his pack. He was the one who taught newly bitten werewolves the control they needed. He also killed the ones who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – learn.

The trouble was that in wolf form, even someone as in-control as Scott Lee might hurt someone. He had confessed that truth to me when we’d first discovered David’s body in the woods Scott’s pack used each month.
Yes
, he had said,
one of us probably did that to him. He shouldn’t have been in our forest.

That had been before the medical examiner’s report came back, saying David had been dead before he’d been dumped in that forest. I had decided not to question the pack further afterward, and not just because Scott refused to name them.

I didn’t tell Wesley about any of that, partly because I wasn’t sure he would believe it, and partly because I didn’t want to out Scott Lee as a werewolf. Most of the magical community knew that he’d been bitten as a teenager, so I didn’t believe it to be a closely guarded secret. But whatever else he was, Scott had helped me out recently, and I would keep his confidence.

It wasn’t Scott who opened the door when we knocked, however; it was his eighteen-year-old sister, Amanda. She was a tiny little thing, barely topping five feet, but full of infectious energy. She was one of those people it was difficult not to like because she had a smile for everyone. Hard to imagine, really, considering that her mother had died when she was a little girl and her father had died six years ago, leaving her to her wolfish older brother to finish raising.

“Is something wrong?” she asked when she opened the door.

“No, everything’s fine. We’re just looking into the murder of David McClellan, and we found his car abandoned not far from here. Right past the edge of your properly. We wanted to know if you might have seen anything suspicious.”

She bit her lip. “No. Why do you care, though? David was a horrible person.”

“That may be, but I still have to do my job.”

“Who says?” Amanda asked.

“Amanda,” came another voice from within the house. A few seconds later, Scott appeared behind his sister. He gave her a look that sent her scurrying back into the house.

Scott wasn’t much taller than me, but he had a lot of bulk, and in his face was a hint of the wolf that lay beneath the surface. He and Evan were best friends, which meant seeing him brought uncomfortable memories to the surface.

“What’s this about?” Scott asked.

I repeated what we knew about David’s car.

“I didn’t see anything, but if his car was taken around the night he was killed, I wouldn’t have been nearby, and Amanda would have remained safely inside.”

In other words, he would have been a wolf running through a forest about ten miles away, where David’s body had been found, and his little sister would have been tucked safely in her bed, behind a threshold.

“Thank you for your time,” Wesley said, turning to walk away.

“I have one more question,” I said in a low voice when Wesley was out of earshot. “Do werewolves usually go after carrion?”

Scott glared at me, somehow giving me the impression that I had insulted him. “Only if it’s fresh.”

“How fresh?” I pushed.

“Fresh.” Clearly, he’d said as much as he intended to say.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me David’s not worth my effort?” I asked.

Scott shrugged. “You know he’s not. I assume you have your reasons.”

“I do.” I shot a glance over my shoulder at Wesley, who looked impatient to leave. “Can you give me a minute alone with Scott?”

“I’ll go stand by the car.” He told me without words that the car was as far as he would go. From the curb, he could see us, although he shouldn’t hear a quiet conversation.