only one who would also be strong enough to carry my daughter out of her home in a satchel and be mistaken for someone carrying laundry is a horned lord.’
Goldstein narrowed his eyes. ‘The old term for a man who was cuckolded? That’s not what you mean.’
‘Horned,’ said Charles. ‘You mean antlered.’
Beauclaire nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Herne the Hunter,’ suggested Charles.
‘Like Herne,’ agreed Beauclaire. ‘There were never many of them, less than a handful that I’m aware of. The last one on this side of the Atlantic was killed in 1981, hit by a car in Vermont. The driver thought he killed a very large deer, but the accident was witnessed by one of us who could see the fae inside the deer’s skin. When no one was looking, we stole the body away.’
‘You think there is another one?’ Leslie asked.
The fae nodded. ‘That is what the evidence suggests.’
‘If the killer is fae, then why didn’t he start hunting fae victims before the fae came out?’ Anna asked.
That the UNSUB was fae would explain why he was still active after so many years, why he could take down a werewolf without anyone noticing. But it didn’t explain why he began targeting fae only after they admitted their existence.
‘I am not the killer to know his motivations, Ms
‘Call me Anna,’ she told him in a friendly voice. ‘Most people do.’
He stared at her a moment. Charles growled and the fae jerked his eyes off of hers, then frowned in irritation at losing the upper hand. But Anna could feel the whole atmosphere of the living room lighten up as the fight for dominance was lost and won.
Beauclaire gave a bow of his head to Charles, then smiled at Anna, and she thought that she’d never seen such a sad expression in her life. In that look she understood what he was doing and why – he thought his daughter was lost, she saw. He hadn’t, not when they were at his daughter’s apartment, but something – maybe that the killer was fae – had changed his mind. He was hunting her killer now, not trying to save his daughter. Perhaps that was why he’d given in to Charles so easily.
‘Coincidence,’ Beauclaire admitted, ‘is highly overrated. I have an alternative explanation about how a fae could not know what he was until he knew that there were such things as fae.’
He glanced around the room, but Anna couldn’t tell what he was looking for.
‘In the height of the Victorian era,’ Beauclaire said finally, in a quiet, calm voice that belied what her nose told her, ‘when iron horses crossed and crisscrossed Europe, several things became obvious. There was no longer a place for the fae in the old world – and we were too few. From 1908 until just a few years ago, it was the policy of the Gray Lords, those who rule the fae, to find fae of scarce but useful types and force them to marry and interbreed with humans since humans breed so much more rapidly than we do.’
Anna knew about that, but she hadn’t realized how long it had gone on. From Leslie’s face, Anna was pretty sure that the FBI agent hadn’t known about the crossbreeding policy. That was interesting, because her face hadn’t changed at all when Beauclaire had mentioned the Gray Lords, who were also a deep secret.
Goldstein might have been listening to the weather report for all the change in his face. There was no telling what he knew or didn’t know about the fae.
‘It was believed,’ continued Beauclaire, ‘that humans were of weaker bloodlines and the fae blood would prevail – and humans breed so very easily, even with the fae for a partner.’ He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. ‘The wisdom of these forced interbreedings is now being re-examined. Half-blood fae face many challenges. They, for the most part, are not accepted by the other fae. And too many of them exhibit … odd properties – birth defects are very high. Once fathered or mothered, a high percentage of the halflings were abandoned by their fae parent altogether, which left them to discover who and what they were on their own – to sometimes disastrous results. And a large number of the children have turned out to be entirely human.’
Charles sat back. ‘Like your daughter?’ he said in a soft voice.
‘Like my daughter. The only thing she gets from me is my mother’s love of dance – and she has to train hours every day to do what my mother did effortlessly.’ Beauclaire looked down, then back at Charles. ‘You are old, but not so old as your father. Maybe you can understand why I fought this dictate as hard as anything I’ve ever fought against. To deceive a human woman for the purpose of fathering a child upon her … it is dishonorable. Yes. And yet it gave me someone I care deeply about.’
He drew in a breath and then looked Charles in the eye. It was not a challenge, more a way of showing how serious he was. ‘It is not wise,’ Beauclaire said, his voice clipped, and somewhere in the vowels Anna heard an accent not too far from Bran’s when he was angered. ‘It is not wise to give something old and powerful something they care about. And I am very old.’ He looked at the FBI agents. ‘Even, possibly, older than your father. We haven’t compared notes.’
Leslie reacted to the idea that a werewolf could be older than an old fae – an immortal old fae. Goldstein just looked more tired, and maybe that was a reaction, too.
‘Don’t get the wrong idea,’ Anna told them. ‘The average life expectancy for someone from the time they are Changed and become a werewolf is about ten years.’
‘Eight,’ said Charles, sounding as weary as Goldstein looked. Anna knew her data had been correct last year. She reached out and touched his thigh, but he didn’t look at her. Charles wasn’t, she thought, totally involved with the proceedings. He kept glancing over the couch to the wall of windows beyond. She frowned, noting how, with the sky still dark outside, the window reflected the room back at them. He was seeing something in the reflection.
‘Four out of ten of our halfling children survive to adulthood,’ Beauclaire was saying. ‘They are a favorite prey of other fae if they are not protected. My daughter is twenty-three in two weeks.’
Anna glanced at Charles. He didn’t appear to be listening, and whatever he was seeing in the window-mirrors was making him more and more remote.
‘What kind of dancer is your daughter?’ Anna asked suddenly. ‘I saw ballet shoes, but also ballroom costumes.’ She hadn’t, not really, but Brother Wolf had and had kept her informed.
‘Ballet,’ Lizzie’s father said. ‘Ballet and modern. One of her friends is into ballroom dancing and she partnered with him for a while a couple of years back. Ballroom is for fun and ballet for serious, she told me.’ Beauclaire smiled at Anna. ‘When she was six, she dressed for Halloween as a fairy princess complete with wings. She was dancing around the room and I asked her why she wasn’t flying. She stopped and told me quite earnestly that her wings were make-believe. That dancing was the closest she could do to flying. And she loved to fly.’
It wasn’t enough. Charles was still preoccupied.
Anna touched Charles’s face and waited until he turned from the window. ‘Lizzie Beauclaire is not quite twenty-three. She loves to dance. And she’s all alone with a monster who will torture and kill her if we don’t find her soon. You are her best hope.’ She didn’t add, ‘So suck it up and pay attention,’ but she trusted that he heard it in her voice.
Charles tilted his head, though his face was quiet. At least he wasn’t looking in the windows anymore.
‘Remember that,’ Anna told him fiercely as she dropped her hand. ‘You can’t change the past, but this we can do. Beauclaire answered first; it’s our turn. What do we know that would help the hunt?’
She met Charles’s gaze and held it until he shifted his weight forward and gave a brief nod.
‘The bodies that the police have been finding are cut up.’ Charles turned to the FBI agents. ‘I smelled black magic – blood magic – on the man who took Lizzie Beauclaire. That makes me think witches, and that those cuts on the victims might be significant. The fae have no use for blood magic.’
‘It doesn’t work for us,’ said Beauclaire, but his voice was absentminded. He was watching Charles. Not looking him in the eye, not quite.
Goldstein said, ‘I have more details on that.’ He opened up his briefcase and handed Charles a thick file of photographs. ‘Most of the victims have shapes carved into their skin – we’ve been looking at the witchcraft or voodoo angle for the past ten years. But the witches willing to talk to us only say that it’s not anything they know. Not voodoo or hoodoo. It’s not runes. It’s not hieroglyphs, nor any other symbolic language used by witches.’
Charles opened up the folder and then spread the photos out on the coffee table. These were mostly blowups or close-ups, some in black and white, some in color. Names, dates, and numbers were written in white marking pen on the upper left corner. The photos documented symbols, ragged and dark around the edges. Some of the
