Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(32)
Author: Patricia Briggs

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 markings were ripped down the middle by angry slashes; others were distorted by degradation of the flesh they had been carved in.

"They lied to you," said Charles, bending over to get a closer look at one.

"Who?"

"The witches," said Beauclaire. He pulled one out of the mix, then set it back down quickly. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them again they were hot with…rage or terror; Anna’s nose wasn’t sure which.

"The symbols witches use," Beauclaire told Goldstein in polite, formal tones, "follow family lines, for the most part. I can’t, but the witches should have been able to tell you what family line these came from. There’s something wrong with the way they’re placed or the shape…In a very long life, I have seen many things. I do not perform blood magic, but I’ve seen it often enough."

Charles turned one of the photos to view it from a different angle and frowned. He took his phone out of his pocket and took a close-up of one of the photos. He hit a few more buttons and put the phone to his ear.

"Charles," said Bran.

"Ears might hear," warned Charles, telling his father that there was someone else in the room who could overhear their phone call. "I sent you a photo. Looks like witchcraft to me. What do you think?"

"I’ll call you back," Bran said and hung up.

Goldstein rubbed his face tiredly. "We’re supposed to be holding these back from the public," he said. "Can I ask that the photo won’t hit the Internet or the news services?"

"You’re safe," Anna reassured him. "We’re calling in an expert opinion."

The phone rang before anyone could say anything. Charles put it on speaker as he answered it.

"Everyone can hear you now," he said.

There was a little pause before Bran spoke. "You need to get a witch to look at that. It appears to be something from the Irish clans to me, but it doesn’t look quite right. Some of those symbols are nonsense and a few others are drawn wrong. It would be best if the witch could see the real thing, not just the photos. There’s more to a spell than only the visual can tell you."

"Thanks," Charles said, hanging up without ceremony. "So, anyone know a local witch we can talk to?"

"I know a witch," said Leslie. "But she’s in Florida."