Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(27)
Author: Patricia Briggs

One of the police officers farther down the corridor stepped out from behind several others and raised his hand. "Right here," he said.

"If that’s true, that’ll really help when we go in to check who’s been in there. But Charles needs to scent you all so he can discount your presence. He won’t hurt you; just stand still."

Anna dropped the leash. Brother Wolf approached the policeman with his ears up and his tail wagging gently, and the man still stiffened and lost color. That was fine. Enjoyable, even. Not as much fun as if he’d run away, but Brother Wolf took his pleasure where he found it. Still, a quick sniff from several feet out was enough.

When he had the policeman’s scent, he stopped by the fae – who kept a wary eye on him, but otherwise did not object. Interestingly, Leslie Fisher didn’t flinch, either; only her rising pulse gave her fear away. He liked her better all the time.

He looked at his mate.

"Anyone else that we know has been in there tonight?" Anna asked.

"No," said Leslie. "As soon as I got here I sealed the room."

"If you’ll let us in?" Anna nodded at the apartment’s door.

Brother Wolf waited until they were closed in the apartment together before setting to work. Cross-scenting a room was old hat, but required no less concentration than the first time he’d done it – he just did a better job now. It was a matter of dismissing old or stale scents, then sorting through the ones he’d picked up in the hallway and seeing what was left.

The woman’s scent he’d picked up in the hallway was the one he’d found in the stairwell. Outside of her father, once he left the main living space, there were no scents of anyone who had been there in the last six months. Only the woman’s scent was in her bedroom.

She was a dancer, her father said, Charles told Brother Wolf. Look at the closets. One for everyday clothing and for parties. The other filled with workout clothes and a few competition dresses. Ballroom competitions. I thought her father said she danced ballet.

Brother Wolf considered it. The first set of clothing is camouflage, he offered. It was good that Charles had decided to participate instead of just observe. The clothes in this one are a disguise to help her blend in and look like everyone else. They smell like perfume – she even hid her scent when she wore them. The second is who she really is. They smell like long hours working: like triumph and pain, blood and sweat.

Brother Wolf grew more interested in her bedroom. She was as much the prey he hunted as the one who took her was. Maybe something he could learn about her would help in their search.

On the wall were some framed art photo prints of dancers, and eight of them were black-and-white photos set in a circle. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were immortalized in a moment when Ginger was up in the air, a huge smile on her face, and Fred had a sly grin. Another black and white was of the scene from Dirty Dancing that caught the primary actors on hands and knees, staring hungrily at each other – though the tension of their pose told the observer that they were still in the midst of a dance. A number of other dancers he didn’t know, mostly couples in a wide variety of dances from ballroom to tribal to modern. In the center of the circle of photos was a poster-sized image that dominated the room.

The photographer had caught a male dancer in mid-flight, stretched across the canvas in a graceful Y. His feet at the lower left-hand corner were slightly out of focus, giving the photo a sense of aliveness and making the stillness of the rest of it more profound. The dancer’s left arm, farther from the viewer, was stretched out to the top right, and his right arm, nearer to the viewer, flung back to the top left corner. His head was bowed, the line of his body so pure and straight he might have been swinging from the rope of a pirate ship. His muscles were flexed and straining, yet somehow he managed to give the impression of being relaxed, at peace.

Unlike the others, it was in color, but just barely, as if someone had filled it with shades of brown. The loose white shirt he’d worn looked cream, his tights were taupe, and the backdrop came out a dark brown rather than black. A warm, beautiful image.

Rudolf Nureyev, supplied Charles.

"Brother Wolf," called Anna from somewhere nearby. "Charles? Could you come here for a moment? I think I smell something."

She was standing out in the hallway, next to the bathroom, a thoughtful look on her face.

"What do you smell?" she asked him, and when she did he came another step closer and caught it, too.

Terror, he answered – and tried again, closing his eyes to shut out other senses. Blood. Her blood. And…A low growl rose…And his.

She had fought her attacker, the little dancer had. It was only a small drop of blood, but it was enough.

He licked it – feeling the scent rise up as soon as his tongue touched it, breaking the magic of concealment 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.