Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(23)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"Intimidating."

She nodded again. "He was playing muscle, I think. But she didn’t treat him that way." Why did she think that? "He came in late with coffee for all of us – she’d sent him out so she could explain to us how to make the matter easier for him."

"To keep everyone safe?"

Leslie shook her head. "She said so, but I got the distinct impression she was a lot more worried about him than she was any of us. It was the standard stuff – don’t meet his eyes if you can help it. No aggressive moves. The only new thing was that we weren’t supposed to try to touch her at all. I expected a wild-eyed maniac, and the man who came in was tight, controlled, and at ease. He looked like he conducted meetings with the federal government every day of his life."

"And that made you think he was running the show behind the scenes?"

"No. That’s not all of it. Body language said she respected him and deferred to his judgment. She was in front, but he was more than just backup."

"So do we invite them in?"

"She pointed out that our killer took out werewolves. Taking out werewolves, I gather and surmise, is akin to taking out a SEAL team. This UNSUB has been hunting fae and coming out – as far as we know – unscathed. Do we have a choice?"

"The FBI has some fae on payroll. We have a choice. You met them and you’re damn near the best agent I have for reading people. What do you think?"

Leslie sighed loudly. "I like her. I told you. And he is…competent – he’s got that air. The one that says, ‘I’ve seen a lot and made it out alive.’ They won’t cost us anything, so the budget will be happy. But" – she held up a finger – "he’s not going to take orders."

Nick nodded his head and did his finger-hand-talk thing for a good half minute before blowing out a breath of air. "There’s a couple of people at the BAU who are familiar with the Big Game Hunter. I’ll give them a call and see what the profilers say might happen to our killer if the media knows we have werewolves hunting him. You and Craig can pick up information on werewolves as you work with them. Let me think about implications for the rest of today, and if nothing strikes me as too stupid, I’ll give you a go tomorrow."

Chapter 5

After a hard day of being a tourist, Anna slept deeply in the bed on the other side of the bathroom wall. Charles put his forehead against his side of that wall for a long moment before he worked up his…"Courage" was not the right word. Fortitude.

After a deep breath, Charles stepped in front of the bathroom mirror. It was one of those full-length things that women used to use to make sure their ankles weren’t showing below their skirts and now used to make sure, he assumed, that their underwear showed only when they wanted it to.

And he was trying to distract himself by looking at the mirror rather than looking at the image it held.

Charles couldn’t see them if he turned his head to look behind himself, but in the mirror the spirits who haunted him were as clear, as three-dimensional, as they were when they were still alive. They had stayed away all day while he and Anna did the tourist thing, this evening when Anna took him on the silly haunted tour that had been a surprising amount of fun, and tonight when he had held her as she fell asleep.

As soon as she slept, they returned.

We see her, they said. Does she see you? Does she know what you are? Murderer, killer, death bringer. We will show her and she’ll run from you. But she can’t run far enough to be safe.

Hollow-eyed and cadaverously thin, they stared at him, meeting his eyes in a way that no one except Anna, his father, or his brother had dared to do in a very long time. The oldest ones morphed into something they had not been in life – their eyes black, their faces distorted until they hardly looked human. The three newest ones looked as they had the moment before he’d ended their lives. They stood so close to him that it was strange that he could not feel the heat of them – or the chill – at his back. Even so, it wasn’t only his eyes that told him they were there.

Charles could smell them. Not the odor of rotting meat precisely, but something close, the sweet, sickly smell that some flowers produce to attract flies and other carrion-feeding bugs. The smell penetrated his skin. Like the ghosts in the mirror, the scent was a reflection, not the real thing.

And he heard them.

Why? they asked. Why did you kill us? He knew they weren’t interested in the answers, not really.

The first time he’d seen them, when he’d first started this job for his father, he’d tried answering them, though he’d known better. He’d been certain that if he hit upon just the right thing to say, they would go away. But explaining things to the dead never works. They don’t hear the way the living do and words have little effect. The questions were for him, but not for him to answer – and talking to them just gave them more strength.

Guilt attracted them. His guilt – it kept them from moving on to where they belonged. There should have been something else that could have been done for them. That there had not been didn’t make him feel any differently about it.

They had been protecting a child and lost control of their anger. Charles knew, as any werewolf did, all about losing control. There had been a pedophile stalking children in the pack’s territory, and they’d been sent out to hunt him down. That was exactly what they had done. Then they botched the job beyond repair. In another time, they’d have been punished, but not killed.

And now they haunted him. That Charles could not release them was a second burden to bear, a second debt he owed to them.

His grandfather – his mother’s father – had taught him it was so, and his very long life had given him no reason to doubt it.

Dave Mason, the dead man nearest Charles, the last of the Minnesota wolves Charles had killed, opened his mouth and darted forward. Dave had been a good man. Not the brightest or the kindest, but a good man, a man of his word. He’d understood that Charles was only doing what was necessary. Dave wouldn’t have wanted his ghost to torment anyone.

In the mirror Dave’s cold, eager eyes met Charles’s as his lamprey mouth attached to Charles’s neck, cold and sharp, feeding on guilt. He disappeared from sight after a few minutes, but not from Charles’s senses as, one by one, the ghosts behind him did the same, until Charles stood apparently alone in front of the mirror and felt his ghosts gain strength from him while they weakened him. They didn’t touch him physically, not yet. But he knew that he wasn’t thinking as clearly, wasn’t able to trust his judgment anymore.

On the other side of the wall, Anna moved restlessly. Not awake, but aware.

He should close down his bond with her, again. He didn’t think any of his ghosts could cross it and touch her, but he wasn’t certain. He couldn’t bear it if he caused her harm.