Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(73)
Author: Patricia Briggs

When the call came that the jury had handed in a verdict, after only four hours of deliberation, they threw in their hands with a sigh of relief.

THE JUDGE WAS a gray-haired woman with rounded features and eyes that were more comfortable with a smile than a frown. She had avoided looking at Charles, Anna, or Isaac during the trial – and she had quietly stationed a guard between her and the witness stand when any of the werewolves or fae, including Lizzie, had been questioned. Her voice was slow and patient as she listed the names for which murder charges had been lodged against Les Heuter. It took a long time. When she finished, she said, "How do you find the defendant?"

The foreman of the jury swallowed a little nervously, glanced at Charles, cleared his throat, and said, "We find the defendant innocent of all charges."

The courtroom was silent for a long breath.

Then Alistair Beauclaire stood, his face expressionless, but rage in every other part of his body. He looked at the members of the jury, then at the judge. Without a change of expression, he turned and stalked out of the courtroom. Only when he was gone did the room explode into noise.

Les exchanged exuberant hugs with his lawyers and his father. Beside Charles, Anna let out a low growl at the sight.

"We need to get Lizzie out of here," Charles told her. "This is going to be a zoo."

He stood up as he said it and used his body to clear a pathway for Beauclaire’s daughter and her mother and stepfather while Anna shepherded them out. Several reporters came up and shouted questions, but they backed off when Charles bared his teeth at them – or maybe it was his eyes, because he knew that Brother Wolf had turned them to gold.

"I expected he’d get off lightly," Lizzie’s mother said, her teeth chattering as if the brisk autumn air was below freezing – rage, Charles judged. "I thought he’d be convicted on a lesser charge. I never dreamed they’d just let him go."

Her husband had an arm around Lizzie, who looked dazed.

"He’s free," she said in a bewildered voice. "They knew. They knew what he did. Not just to me but to all those people – and they just let him go."

Charles kept half of his attention on Heuter, who was speaking to a crowd of reporters on the courthouse steps, maybe fifty feet away. His body language and face conveyed a man who was sincerely remorseful for the deeds his uncle had made him do. It made Brother Wolf snarl. Heuter’s father, the senator from Texas, stood behind him with a hand on his shoulder. If either of them had seen Lizzie’s mother’s face, they’d have been hiring bodyguards. If she’d had a gun in her hand, she’d have used it.

Charles understood the sentiment.

"They played up the strangeness of the fae and the werewolves and used it to scare the jury into acquittal," said Lizzie’s stepfather, sounding as shocked as Lizzie. Then he looked Charles in the eye, though he’d been warned by Beauclaire not to do so. "Travis and Benedict won’t hurt anyone else – and people will be watching Les if I have to hire them myself. He’ll make a mistake and we’ll send him back to jail."

"You might consider investigating the jurors, too," suggested Anna in a cold voice that didn’t hide her fury. "The good senator has more than enough money to bribe a few people if necessary."

Lizzie’s stepfather turned to Lizzie and his voice softened. "Let’s get you home, sweetheart. You’ll probably have to give an interview to get rid of the reporters, but my attorney or your dad can set that up."

"Trust Alistair not to be here when we need him," muttered Lizzie’s mother. But she said it without venom. Then she said, "Okay, I know that’s not fair. He knows you’re safe with us, honey. And he probably was worried he’d kill Heuter if he had to look at him, running around free as a bird. And much as I wish he could do that, it would cause more problems than it solved. He always missed the days when he could kill anyone who bothered him."

Anna put her hand on Charles’s arm. "Do you hear that?" she asked so urgently that everyone turned to look at her.

Charles didn’t hear anything over the crowds of people, honking cars, and carriage-horse hooves.

Anna glanced around, standing on her toes to see over people’s heads. There was still a crowd on the steps and hordes of reporters because serial killer plus senator’s son equaled Big Story. Charles looked around, too – and then realized that he couldn’t see any carriage horses.

He never saw when they appeared, or where they came from, but suddenly they were just there. After a few minutes, other people saw them, too, and fell silent. Traffic stopped. Les Heuter and his reporter were still wrapped up in his statement full of lies for the national news, but Senator Heuter was facing the street and put his hand on his son’s shoulder.

Fifty-nine black horses stood motionless on the roadway in front of the courthouse. They were tall and slender, like thoroughbred racehorses, except their manes and tails were fuller – absurdly so. Silver chains were woven through their manes, and on the chains were silver bells.

Charles knew horses. There was no way fifty-nine horses would stand still, with neither a flick of an ear nor a twitch of their tails.

Their saddles were white – old-fashioned saddles with high cantles and pommels, almost like a western saddle without a horn. The saddle blankets were silver. None of them wore bridles.

Every horse bore a rider dressed in black with silver trim, as motionless as their horses. Their pants were loose-fitting, made of some lightweight fabric; their shirts were tunics embroidered with silver thread, the pattern of the stitching different for each rider. This one had flowers, this one stars, the other ivy leaves. Charles knew that there was magic at work because he could not discern a single face, though none of them wore a mask.

Just when the spell of their arrival started to thin, when people in the crowd started to whisper, they parted. The horses backed up and around to form two lines facing each other, and through this passage a white horse cantered slowly. As with the other horses, he wore no bridle – but this horse had no saddle, either. Just black chains strung through his mane and tail, covered in silver bells that jingled sweetly in time to the horse’s steady movement.

On the horse was a man dressed in silver and white. In his right hand he held a silver short sword, in his left a sprig of a plant, blue green leaves, and small yellow blooms. Rue.

The white horse stopped at the foot of the stairs and Charles noticed two things. First, the horse had bright blue eyes that caught his and studied him coolly before the horse moved on to stare at Lizzie. Second, that the horse’s rider was Lizzie’s father.

"I told them," he said in a clear, carrying voice, "that they should not give someone as old and powerful as I a daughter to love. That it would end badly."