Fair Game

Equally, Charles couldn’t bear to be separated from her again.

Anna’s cell phone rang and she grumbled as she fumbled around the unfamiliar nightstand for it.

‘Hello, this is Anna,’ she said, her voice husky with sleep.

He was too distracted to pay attention to the words of the person on the other end of the conversation. He listened to Anna, let her voice remind him that he hadn’t driven her away, hadn’t hurt her irreparably. Not yet.

‘Right now?’ A pause. ‘Sure. We’re glad to be of assistance. Can you give me the address? No. Not necessary. There’s Wi-Fi here so I have the Internet. Just wait for me to find a sheet of paper.’ She pulled something else off the table next to the bed – her purse, he thought from the sound of it. Charles looked away from the mirror.

‘Okay. Have pen and paper. Shoot.’

He couldn’t go out and perform for the feds. Not like this. He would hurt someone, someone who didn’t deserve it.

Use me, said Brother Wolf. If I stay with Anna, it will be safe for everyone. I will not harm any of the people. I will keep her safe.

Which them? Charles asked.

FBI, killers, the dead. All of them and any of them. She will be safe – and so will the others. I will not hurt them unless I have to. Can you say the same?

Charles almost smiled at the thought that Brother Wolf would be less dangerous than he, but at the moment it seemed to be true enough. Without another look in the mirror, he let the change take him: he would trust the wolf to keep her safe.

‘How long will it take you to get here?’ Leslie Fisher’s voice was cool and professional in Anna’s ear, but her question had just a hint of urgency.

A young woman was missing from her condo, though she hadn’t been gone long. Luckily, the policeman who’d gone to check it out had been briefed on their serial killer and thought it was a close enough match to the way other people had been taken to call in the FBI.

There was something wrong with Charles. It had been nagging at Anna since she woke, but she’d already answered the phone. It didn’t feel urgent, just not good – so she decided to take care of the truly urgent matter first to get it out of the way. If it was their serial killer, they had a chance of getting to the girl before anything happened.

‘How far is the apartment from the hotel we were at’ – it was two in the morning – ‘yesterday morning?’ Charles hadn’t been in bed beside her, though she knew he was in the condo. She could feel him.

‘Ten-or fifteen-minute walk. Something like that. The victim’s apartment isn’t too far from the Commons.’ Then Fisher clearly remembered that Anna and Charles weren’t from Boston. ‘The Boston Common. The big park a couple of blocks from the hotel.’

After a day of sightseeing, Anna could have told Fisher how big the Common was and approximately how many people were buried in it and all about the ducks that inspired a famous children’s book.

Their condo was less than a five-minute run from the hotel, and she and Charles could always take a taxi if the place they needed to get to was too far.

‘Less than fifteen minutes, then,’ Anna told her.

‘Good,’ said Fisher. ‘We’d appreciate anything you can do. Assuming this is our UNSUB, based on previous cases, she’s still alive and will be for a few more days.’

‘We’ll do our best.’

Anna hung up the phone and began dragging on her clothes. ‘Charles? Did you hear? There’s a girl missing. Is Lizzie Beauclaire one of our werewolves? I don’t remember her name from the Olde Towne Pack roster.’

Not that I know of. It wasn’t Charles who answered.

Anna paused, one foot off the ground as she’d been shoving it into a pant leg. Brother Wolf padded out of the bathroom, all three hundred pounds of fox-red fur, fangs, and claws. There were bigger werewolves, but not many. Her own wolf was closer to the two-hundred-pound mark – so was Bran’s, for that matter.

‘Well,’ she said slowly. The wrongness in their bond was fading, leaving behind the cool, thoughtful presence that was Brother Wolf. ‘I suppose it’ll help save time if one of us is already wolf when we get there.’

Charles is worried that he will do something bad, Brother Wolf told her. We decided that it would be best if I take point tonight. Brother Wolf had gotten better about speaking to her in words rather than images. She got the distinct impression that he looked upon it as baby talk, but it amused him anyway.

She resumed dressing while she considered his words. Of all the wolves she’d known over the past few years, none but Charles could let the wolf rule without disaster. The wolf part of a werewolf was … a ravaging beast, born to hunt and kill, protect the pack at all costs, and not much else. Brother Wolf was different from other werewolves’ wolf spirits because Charles, born a werewolf, was different from other werewolves.

Different because of you, too, Brother Wolf told her.

‘I suppose if you – both of you – think it’s wise. You know better than I do. Let me know if there’s some way I can help. But it does mean we aren’t getting a taxi.’

It no longer felt odd to talk to Charles and his wolf as if they were two separate people who shared the same skin, both of them beloved. She and her wolf nature were much more entwined, though she had the impression that they were still not as integrated as most werewolves were.

Brother Wolf butted up against her, knocking her over, and licked her face thoroughly. Yes. No taxis for werewolves. Charles doesn’t like driving in cars. The werewolf stepped away and tilted his head, gold eyes gleaming with humor – whatever had Charles upset, it must not be too bad because his wolf wasn’t worried.

I will take care of him. Brother Wolf’s humor fled. As your sister wolf took care of you when you needed her to defeat the Chicago wolves.

‘All right, then.’ Anna didn’t know what to think of that because her wolf had helped her endure rape and torture. But in the optimism of the change in Charles yesterday, she decided to believe that Brother Wolf’s intervention was a positive thing. Anna dried her face on her shirt tail and got up to finish dressing.

Shoes on, face washed, she looked up the address on her laptop. ‘We’re in luck,’ she told him. ‘Only two miles from here.’

There were people out and about at two in the morning, but no one seemed to think it odd that she was running down the street with a three-hundred-pound werewolf. Might have been a touch of pack magic making people see a large dog – or not see them at all. Pack magic, she’d discovered, could be capricious, coming and going without any of the wolves calling for it specifically. Bran could direct it, as could Charles – but she had the feeling that pack magic mostly did what it chose to do.

The lack of interest they were spawning might also simply have been city survival skills on the part of their observers. Anna had grown up in Chicago. In a city, you don’t look at anyone whose attention you don’t want to draw. Who wants to have a big scary wolf decide you might be interesting?

Brother Wolf was on a leash, because Bran thought that the leash and collar made a lot of difference to the humans they ran into – and not much difference to the werewolf. The collar was store-bought from a big-box pet store and came with the cute plastic clasp designed to make sure someone’s dog didn’t get caught and choke to death. It meant that the collar wouldn’t even slow a werewolf down before the plastic broke.

The name on the collar he wore was Brother Wolf. Bran had disapproved. He liked the names to be less truthful, more friendly and cute. Unusually, Charles’s brother had told her, Charles had held out until his father gave in.

The address Leslie Fisher had provided led them to one of the skyscrapers, a tall but narrow edifice squeezed in between two even taller buildings. Anna would have picked it out even without the giant black numbers tastefully etched into the glass over the main door because it was the one with police cars parked in front of it.

No one looked at them when they entered the building, though there was a small group of officers huddled up in the foyer. A young man in a security uniform manned the desk; he looked upset.

On impulse, Anna walked over to him. ‘Excuse me. Were you on duty when the young woman went missing?’ She waited for him to ask her for her credentials, but either he was too shocky or he’d just gotten used to answering any and all questions put to him.