Fair Game

that had tried to hide even so little of the man who had come here to do harm. A man, but not human, or not wholly human. The bitter flavor of magic in the blood made his tongue tingle. He would recognize this man when he smelled him again.

Half-blood fae, he told her.

‘We probably should have left that blood for the FBI labs,’ said Anna, her tone a little rueful.

My hunt, Brother Wolf assured her, though Charles agreed with Anna. My rules. That last was as much for Charles as for Anna. He looked at the closed bathroom door. If he’d been stalking her, he might have waited in the bathroom. Would you open the door so I can seek him there?

She wrapped her hand in the tail of her shirt and opened it. At first he thought there was nothing to find, that the woman’s attacker had awaited her somewhere else.

Then he caught a faint trace of excitement, something he felt almost more than scented – and a hint of something else that brought Charles to the fore, drawn by something he understood better than the wolf did: spirits.

Some homes had spirits and some did not, and neither he nor Charles knew why that was. Spirits weren’t ghosts; they were the consciousness of things that Charles’s da didn’t believe were alive: trees and water, stones and earth. Houses and apartments – some of them, anyway.

This one was faint and shy, better for the shaman’s son to deal with rather than the wolf.

Show me, said Charles to the spirit of the house. Show me who waited here.

The condo was new. It had not been a home for generations of children, so the spirit was weak. All it was able to give them was an impression of patience and largeness, so much larger than she whose home this was. Clean smelling – no, that was wrong; he smelled of cleaners. He carried a … something.

Something? Charles was patient with it. A weapon? Brother Wolf provided the smell of a gun, oil, powder, metal.

Swift negation and a response, an answer more sensory than in words: something soft, mostly textile, with only a hint of metal.

A bag, like a gym bag, Charles thought, picturing such a bag carefully in his head, and the spirit all but jumped for joy, providing more and more information about the bag. As if by naming it, Charles had pulled a cork out of the bottle of what the spirit knew.

He brought a bag, Brother Wolf told Anna – triumphantly, because he’d been right about the stairway. A big canvas bag, and stuffed our missing woman inside. He carried her down the stairs, which is why I could only smell her along the walls.

‘He has no scent?’ Anna asked, having caught something of what he’d found. Her voice sent the shy spirit fleeing.

He hid his scent with magic that feels something like fae magic, Charles told her.

Brother Wolf thought of the bitter taste that still lingered on his tongue from the kidnapper’s blood. It also feels like witch magic, black and blood-soaked.

Charles agreed. It feels less … civilized than the fae magic I’m familiar with.

‘Would a witch have been able to carry a full-grown woman down twelve flights of stairs?’ Anna asked.

Maybe not directly, answered Charles after a moment of consideration, but there are ways.

‘Early in the hunt,’ said Anna.

Exactly, agreed Charles.

‘Who do we know who knows a lot about fae and their magic?’ asked Anna. ‘Would Bran know?’

We have a better source, suggested Brother Wolf. Her father is old and powerful.

‘He reached for a sword,’ Anna said. ‘Is that how you could tell he was old?’

Brother Wolf supplied the memory of the scent of creatures that were older than a few centuries, a light fragrance that grew richer.

Old, explained Charles.

And then they gave her what power smelled like among the fae, beginning with something weaker and increasing until Charles told her, That is strength. But they are subtle creatures, the fae. They cannot add to their scent because they, for the most part, cannot smell it. However, when they conceal what they are, sometimes they can also obscure what we can smell about them. This one smells old, but he smells as weak as is possible for someone who still smells like fae.

‘So a fae will probably not smell more powerful or old than he is,’ said Anna, ‘but he might smell weaker. Like the way Bran enjoys hiding what he is.’

Brother Wolf huffed out an affirmative sneeze. Charles added, I think it might be a good thing to discuss this with Lizzie’s father – when there are no humans present.

‘Discuss how powerful he is?’ asked his mate, a corner of her mouth twitched up. She knew what Charles had meant – she had a silly sense of humor sometimes. Brother Wolf liked that about her. Charles, however, was in a more serious mood and treated her question as if she’d really meant it.

No. Discuss with him what kind of fae would fit the parameters we have been given for this serial killer.

Brother Wolf sneezed to let her know that he thought she was funny.

‘Did you find something?’ asked Leslie as Anna let Charles and herself out of the apartment.

Anna looked at the techie-type police officers who awaited them and wondered if it was the serial-killer angle – or something about the missing girl’s father – that had brought out the big guns on a missing person’s case where the victim had been gone for only a few hours.

‘Yes,’ Anna said, answering the FBI agent’s question. ‘Whoever took her is fae … or has some access to fae magic. He concealed himself in her bathroom and waited for her to come to him.’

After gesturing the waiting forensic team into the condo, Leslie took out a small spiral notebook and began scribbling things down in it. She didn’t look up when she said, ‘What else did you find?’

‘He came up unobserved. A pure-blood fae could have come up looking like anyone else, probably someone who actually lives here,’ Anna told her. It was speculation, but that was what she’d have done if she could conceal herself the way the fae could. They had several variants of the ‘don’t look at me’ magic that were stronger than pack magic was, but glamour, the power that all fae shared, was more than that – a very strong illusion. ‘However he arrived, he left with his prey in a gym bag and carried her down the stairs.’

Leslie looked up at that. ‘He carried her down? Twelve flights of stairs?’

‘Without dragging her,’ Anna said, putting a finger on the hallway wall about the height that Brother Wolf had been tracing. If he had been carrying her with his arms hanging down … he was more than human tall. Anna didn’t say that, though, just told Leslie the facts. ‘Our perpetrator doesn’t leave a scent, so we were pretty confused at first.’

She glanced at the missing woman’s father, who stood at parade rest, his gaze on the floor. ‘Because he didn’t leave a scent, it might have been someone who had been to the apartment before, someone she knew – but it didn’t have that feel. He took her by surprise in the hall in front of the bathroom. She fought him – fought hard. There’s a pretty good ding in the drywall next to the bathroom door. But she was no match.’

He used a drug, Charles said. I caught a hint of it in the bathroom.

‘What did the wolf just tell you?’ asked Alistair Beauclaire. His voice must have been quite an asset in the courtroom, cool, even, and beautiful. If she had been human, without her senses to tell her better, she’d never have known that her words had hit him hard – he’d been hoping it was someone he could track down.

‘The kidnapper drugged her.’ She looked at Charles. ‘Do you know what he gave her?’

Smelled like ketamine to me, said Charles. But it isn’t my area of specialty.

She related his answer and caveat to their listeners while she thought about how to get Lizzie’s father alone