Dead Heat

CHAPTER 7

There were kids everywhere. Kids slid down miniaturized slides and climbed plastic play forts in bright colors, and a few plastic play forts in dull, sun-bleached colors. Kids in sandpits dug with plastic shovels or threw sand on one another. One little boy in jeans and a pale blue T-shirt was running as fast as he could as two little girls chased him with death on their faces. Anna hoped he could run fast or he was in for it.

Adults fluttered among the chaos of children. Some of them brought order with them like the best Alphas did. Some of them elicited excitement and happiness. Some of them made the kids scatter before them like chickens in front of a fox.

She left her hand on her husband’s arm, feeling the tension in him, knowing it was her fault. She would never do anything to harm her husband in any way—not on purpose.

Yet she was unwilling to sit around and wait a hundred years for the opportunity to have children. It wasn’t impatience, no matter what Charles thought. Werewolves could live forever, but on average lived far shorter lives than their human originally could have expected to.

Charles did not live quietly. More even than the Marrok, he lived with a target painted on his chest. As the werewolves crept further out of the shadows and into the daily lives of ordinary people, the list of his enemies increased.

Anna hadn’t died the day she’d been involuntarily Changed, had in fact been made less mortal rather than more. But she had lost her old self as surely as if she had died, and it had taught her not to be complacent. She was not impatient, but she no longer trusted life to be good. She had become more conscious, not less, that people died: that she might die, that Charles might die. Death was real to her in a way that it had never been real when she had been human.

She was a long way from defeated. His arguments that any child of his would be a target were unassailable. Within the supernatural community, Charles, as the Marrok’s son and hatchet man, was very well-known. Eventually even the humans would know about him. Any child of his would be perceived as a weakness. She could not argue that point, but she did not feel as though that necessitated refusing to have a child.

His other stated objection, that there was no current possibility for them to conceive, was more open to argument. She didn’t want to argue with him, shouldn’t have to argue with him. She’d thought that he’d been willing to listen to the possibilities.

The key, she thought, was to pick through her husband’s complicated and mostly unspoken issues with children or with his own children or being a father. She didn’t know exactly where his absolute refusal was finding its power. When she found something real, she’d work at the knot of his resistance until she had it unraveled. Then she would go back to the next tangle and do the same thing.

Her brother didn’t call her Anna the Relentless for nothing.

She needed a loose end, and so far she hadn’t been able to find it. His father might know, but it seemed dishonest and possibly damaging to go to someone else for insight without knowing what kind of a tangle she was working with. Better to get it herself if she could.

Two months of effort had resulted in nothing except the tension in Charles’s arm as they walked through the safety zone of the sidewalk.

“Even if they were to choose to attack,” she murmured to him, “they are safely caged behind that vinyl chain-link fence. I think you can relax.”

“Vinyl doesn’t do anything to stop magic,” Charles murmured back. “The steel wire beneath might have some effect, but it is best to be prepared.”

Under the circumstances it was difficult for her to tell whether he was being funny or serious. Neither of them was under the illusion it was the threat from the fae that was causing his tension.

Still, he had a point about being prepared to face a hostile threat from the fae here. It was time she turn her attention away from having her own children and start trying to discover who had sent Chelsea off to murder hers.

The kids took no notice of a pair of uninteresting adults wandering up to the main doors. Surely if a fae were among them, he or she would notice that Anna and Charles were a little different from most people, but maybe not.

When Charles drew a deep breath of air through his nose, Anna followed suit. She didn’t smell any fae—though her experience with fae was fairly limited. She wasn’t sure she would detect one right under her nose. Charles didn’t say anything, so she assumed that he didn’t scent anything, either.

Hosteen had rendered his power to be of assistance moot by his absence. Charles had turned down Kage flatly—one human was as easily bespelled as another. Probably more easily, since Kage was not witchborn like his wife. Wade had been easier because Hosteen’s orders were that he was to help with Chelsea, so leaving him home hadn’t incited rebellion.

That left Anna and Charles to go check it out. Anna was pretty sure that being a werewolf wasn’t an automatic defense, either, but Charles wasn’t worried about confronting a fae. She put her trust in him.

Anna winced as someone blew a shrill whistle on the playground. Charles didn’t even twitch as he held the door open for her. She wondered how he managed it.

There was a big sign on the door immediately to their right as soon as they entered the building. It said PRINCIPAL EDISON—ALL VISITORS PLEASE CHECK IN. It amused Charles. A day care was really just an efficient way to provide babysitting and not actually a school.

Anna knocked on the closed door and Charles stepped back to let his wife interface with the public. People liked her, and, as a bonus, she didn’t scare them. People talked to him because they were intimidated. Anna could usually get more and better information from people because they honestly wanted to make her happy.

The woman who opened the door of the principal’s office looked tired and a little startled to see them, though she tried to cover it over with a big, and mostly sincere, smile.

“Hello,” she said, recovering. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I’m Farrah Edison. Welcome to Sunshine Fun. You said you have a four-year-old and a five-year-old, right?”

“We’d like to talk to the teachers of the four-year-old and the five-year-old classes,” Anna said.

Charles took the opportunity to sample the air in the principal’s office. He didn’t notice that it smelled particularly of fae-anything. But he wouldn’t, because the principal wore Opium, one of the perfumes that tended to kill his ability to scent things.

Anna looked at a ragged piece of paper she carried. “We’d like to see Miss Baird and Ms. Newman. You told us this would be a good time to speak with them both.”

Anna’s voice rose at the end, as if she weren’t sure they were here at the right time, seeming to allow Ms. Edison a graceful way to reschedule things if she needed to. It was a tactful response to the surprise Ms. Edison had displayed; she’d obviously forgotten they were coming.

“Yes. You can talk to Ms. Newman first. Her children are in music for another fifteen minutes. When they get back, Miss Baird’s students will go and you can sneak over to her room.”

Students and teachers at a day care? Charles weighed the vocabulary. He supposed children were learning a lot between the ages of two and five. He pursed his lips and regarded the sign again. Maybe this was a school.

As they followed the principal down the hallway, she told them about how they planned the meals they served, their hours, and their rates, which were very high. She assured them, without looking at Charles, that they did not discriminate on the basis of race or religion. Every teacher had an assistant teacher for every ten children.

She told them about weekly outings to nearby parks, and that once a month each age group went to a local private swimming pool, where the students would learn to swim. Two-year-olds en masse at a swimming pool sounded to Charles like a disaster waiting to happen. Maybe the remarkable thing was not how many children, teachers, and parents associated with this school had died, but that there had not been more.

Ms. Edison talked a lot, and he rather wished she’d chosen different perfume. He trailed behind Anna and the principal in order to save his nose. Generally the more expensive the perfume, the better it smelled; most chemical re-creations of scent smelled like their chemicals to him. Opium, the perfume Opium anyway, smelled fine; he just couldn’t scent much of anything else after he’d been around it very long.

Just before she opened the door, Ms. Edison gave Anna a sharp look. She’d avoided looking at him, Charles had noted, though that might have been because he followed about ten feet behind them. More probably it was the usual response people had around Anna: as long as he didn’t draw attention to himself, they grew so focused on her that they forgot about him.

“As I’m sure you know, Miss Baird is new to us this month. Who gave you her name in particular?”

“My sister-in-law,” lied Anna smoothly. “But it was a friend of a friend of hers who had children in your day care. I don’t know their names, I’m sorry. Just the names of the teachers.”

“In all honesty,” said Ms. Edison somberly, “I should tell you that we have given her notice. She is new and on probation and there have been some unacceptable disruptions in her classroom.”

“I see,” said Anna. “I’d still like to speak with her.”

“Yes, that’s fine. I just didn’t want to mislead you.”

Anna smiled. “I appreciate that.”

Ms. Edison introduced them to Ms. Newman, an Energizer Bunny of a woman wearing too much makeup and perfume that made Brother Wolf sneeze in disgust. It only smelled bad, though, and wouldn’t keep him from detecting other scents the way Ms. Edison’s did.

Ms. Edison’s phone buzzed; she glanced down at a text message, frowned, excused herself, and then abandoned them to their fate with the teacher of four-year-olds.

Ms. Newman talked at them for fifteen minutes without letting Anna get a word in edgewise. In contrast to Ms. Edison, Ms. Newman had no trouble at all paying attention to Charles. Ms. Newman told them, or rather told him because she ignored Anna, about her BS in child psychology and about her philosophy of education. While she was doing that, she managed to sneak in a lot of information about her divorce three years ago and how it was so hard to find nice men who weren’t already in a relationship.

Anna cleared her throat.

“I believe,” said Ms. Newman, still without so much as looking at Anna, “that children benefit from order. Every day they come into my class exactly at seven thirty and we all get out our crayons and set them on the tabletop for inspection. They have to tell me what color each crayon is and something that is that color.”

As she described her very regimented schedule for the children, Charles found himself feeling sorry for them. Children should run and play, not have learning shoved down their throat for their own good from the moment they hit the day care until they left. But Kage’s boy had seemed to like this woman, so maybe she knew more than he did.

“I have been on staff for ten years and have more experience than any other teacher here,” Ms. Newman told Charles in a voice someone might use to impart state secrets. “When Ms. Edison is ill or when she has to travel, like when she was called away for a death in the family before Christmas, I’m the one who keeps an eye on things.” She breathed deeply, drawing attention to an asset that wouldn’t help her in her job.

Was it acceptable to wear low-cut shirts to take care of children? he wondered. The mores of the world tended to change more often than he paid attention to them, but her clothing didn’t seem to be entirely appropriate.

Ms. Newman looked at him until he felt like a side of beef she was thinking of eating for dinner. Like Ms. Edison, she was scared of him. He hadn’t been able to smell the principal’s fear, but he’d heard her heart rate speed up. But unlike with the principal, fear seemed to excite Ms. Newman. Brother Wolf much preferred Ms. Edison’s avoidance to Ms. Newman’s flirtation.

A bell rang from somewhere in the building, and Ms. Newman’s face fell. “That’s my cue, I’m afraid. It was very nice talking with you,” she said to Charles. “I look forward to seeing you again when you bring your child in.”

“Ms. Newman,” said Anna in a low voice.

Ms. Newman dragged her attention off Charles. Anna put her hand on him and leaned toward the other woman, who stepped back; smart woman.

“You need to understand something,” she said intensely. “Charles is my husband. You can’t have him. Mine. Not yours. There are lots of nice, unattached men out there, I’m sure. Pick one of them and you might live longer.” Then her body relaxed and her voice regained its usual cheeriness. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Newman.”

As they left, Charles turned back toward the teacher and shrugged helplessly. Then he put on his meekest face and turned around to follow Anna.

“I saw that,” she muttered at him.

“Saw what?” asked Charles in mock innocence. Brother Wolf was pleased with her claiming of them. So was Charles.

She gave him a look that made him smile, then knocked on the door of the room that bore a temporary paper sign that said miss baird in big block letters. Behind the door, decorated hopefully with spring flowers and bright green leaves, the strains of cello music wafted out. Charles recognized a recording of Yo-Yo Ma that he often listened to himself. The soon-to-be-unemployed Miss Baird had good taste in music.

The woman who answered Anna’s knock looked sad underneath her warm smile. She was very young, a little younger than his wife, he thought. Like Ms. Newman, she smelled entirely human.

Her ash-blond hair was cut short to reveal the bright purple elephant earrings that were the same color as her bright purple shirt. The bright colors only served to emphasize the depression that weighed down her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing perfume at all—which meant he already liked her better than Ms. Newman.

“Hello,” she said cautiously. “Ms. Edison told me to expect you. She also said she told you that I’m leaving at the end of the week.”

Anna nodded. “Yes. We’d still like to speak with you if you don’t mind.”

Miss Baird’s look sharpened, but she backed up and opened the door to invite them in. Her room was not as big as the very-available Ms. Newman’s, but it was decorated with art obviously created by her five-year-old students.

One student was washing a whiteboard with a spray bottle and an ink-stained rag, her back to them. She seemed totally engrossed in cleaning the board. There was a stiffness to her movements that didn’t please Brother Wolf, who always looked for things that were ill or off.

The teacher saw his glance.

“Amethyst is choosing not to sing today, so the music teacher sent her back here. Choice is fine, but it is a choice between music and work, not music and play.”

He’d thought initially that she was a submissive person, and that would indeed mean trouble while she was trying to run a class of young children. But that firm voice was plenty dominant. So her defeated greeting of them probably had more to do with the temporary nature of her employment than her usual personality.

“This is the five-year-olds’ classroom,” she said to him and Anna in the same tone she’d used on Amethyst. “It’s the smallest class until later in the year. The children who are five in the fall started kindergarten, so we only have the children who were five after the beginning of September. This class will grow as the four-year-olds in Ms. Newman’s class turn five. The kindergarten kids, who go to public school for half the day, go in an entirely different classroom. We do have an after-school program for older children divided by grades—first and second graders, third and fourth graders, fifth and above.”

She looked at them both, shoved her glasses more firmly on her nose, and said in a faintly accusatory tone, “But you aren’t here for that, are you?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the girl cleaning the whiteboard and lowered her voice. “I thought you looked familiar, but I only just this moment figured out why,” she told Charles in a voice that would not carry across the room over Yo-Yo Ma’s cello. “My stepfather is”—another glance at the girl—“one of you. When I was ten, you came to talk with him about his … friends. We lived in Cody, Wyoming. I know who you are and I know you don’t live in Scottsdale. Your moving away from Montana would have been big enough news that my stepfather would have told me.”

He didn’t remember her, though he had indeed gone to Cody about a decade ago and removed an Alpha who had lost control of his wolf. He’d gone to talk individually to all of the wolves in the pack. Some of them had been married, with human families.

“You don’t live here,” she said. “You don’t have children. So why are you here?”

He took in a deep breath, to make sure, then turned at Brother Wolf’s steely determination to face the child who was still wiping down the same board, which had been clean for a while.

“We are here to speak with her,” he said.

The child froze. Then straightened and turned awkwardly around.

Beside him, Anna, too, had stilled.

“This doesn’t concern you, wolf,” the child said in the voice of a five-year-old.

“Chelsea Sani belongs to the grandson of the Alpha of the Salt River Pack,” he told her. Miss Baird already knew about werewolves, and about secrets. She would not tell other people of Chelsea’s connection to the pack. It was important to let the fae know where it had erred. The pack was a deterrent that would keep Chelsea and her children safe. “You picked the wrong victim, protected by the pack and by the Marrok.”

The creature’s face twisted in an expression that didn’t belong on a child. “No werewolves. That’s the only rule. Mackie’s mother is not a werewolf. Mackie is not a werewolf. Mackie’s brother is not a werewolf.”

“They belong to us,” Charles said, noting that the fae was more interested in Chelsea as Mackie’s mother than as a person herself. That indicated the attack was actually focused on Mackie. He walked toward the child, keeping her attention on him and not his mate or the human woman who was more vulnerable than either of them.

He could smell fae magic; it permeated this room, where this fae had apparently been playing at being five years old. But the smell didn’t get stronger as he approached her. Also, he detected only magic and not the fae herself. Had she disguised her scent somehow? But then why not disguise the magic, too? And what was she doing with the magic he could feel as a steady presence?

She snarled soundlessly, backing away from him before he got within touching distance. “No. She wasn’t a werewolf. Fair game. Fair game. Witch but not werewolf. I could kill her, the rules say.” She still sounded like a five-year-old.

“Amethyst?” said the teacher, sounding afraid.

“Amethyst is mine,” said the child in a sharp bark of anger. It was said with the same degree of possessiveness that Anna had just used with the four-year-olds’ teacher. “You can’t have her. She’s mine.”

Charles knew what it was. It had given the game away with its last two words.

If Amethyst wasn’t the one who was talking to them, there was only one thing a creature who looked and spoke like Amethyst could be. The reason he could not smell the fae was that there was only magic here.

“Riddle me questions,” Charles said, chanting the old words slowly. “Riddle me rhymes. Riddle me swiftly, I’ve said it three times. By threes and by custom you dare not deny. I bind you to answer and compel your reply.”

“Riddle say, riddle say,” it said, as it had to, being what it was. “Riddle say me, and I will answer thee.” Fae magic and the fae themselves were constrained by rules that allowed magic to exist in a world where magic was a rare thing. Riddles needed to be answered.

“What walks like a child and talks like a child and is left by the fae in the child’s right place?” Charles asked in a singsong voice that was part of the draw of the riddle. “What curdles cream, makes sick the cows, what makes a mother moan? What hides like poison and rots away family and home?”

“A fetch! A fetch! A fetch!” it answered, and as soon as the third response had left its lips, the child disappeared and a bundle of sticks fell to the ground. Worn ribbons tied the sticks in a semblance of a human figure, arms and legs and head. There was a scrap of hair banded top and bottom and shoved into the body of the thing.

The smell of brimstone and vinegar overwhelmed his nose and sent him into a paroxysm of coughing. Behind him he could hear Anna doing the same thing. The smell didn’t bother the human, though.

“Amethyst? Amethyst?” Miss Baird hurried over to the board and then looked back at Charles. “What happened to Amethyst?”

“When did you last talk to her parents?” Anna asked hoarsely. He turned to see that she had covered her nose with her arm.

“This morning,” Miss Baird said. “Not her parents, though. Her mother dropped her off and is supposed to pick her up. Her parents are in the middle of a nasty divorce. After the third incident, we have this list to tell us who is to pick her up on which day.” Her voice trailed off.

“Where is she?” Miss Baird asked very quietly. “What happened to her?”

Anna looked at him, and he pulled out his cell phone. “I think this has gone beyond my sphere of authority,” Charles said. He hit the button that dialed his father.

To say that the police were displeased with them when Charles and Anna refused to talk was an understatement. Miss Baird talked to them until she was hoarse while Amethyst’s parents watched in unrelieved apathy. Miss Baird, who knew about werewolf secrets, didn’t tell them anything about werewolves, just that Charles and Anna were there interviewing the teachers at the day care.

“It’s a fetch,” Miss Baird told the police officer for the fifth or sixth time. “Not a child all. He didn’t turn a child into a bundle of sticks, he just made it admit that’s what it was. No. I don’t know why it worked or what he did.”

Anna didn’t know why she and Charles weren’t talking to the police. Except perhaps the obvious reason, which was that Miss Baird was not having any effect on their disbelief. Why should their reaction to what Charles or Anna had to say be any different? If no one would believe the truth, then why say anything at all? But that didn’t seem very Charles-like. Bran hadn’t told them to maintain silence when Charles had called him.

Bran had listened to Charles’s careful recital of the exact events from the moment they walked into Miss Baird’s classroom. When Charles was finished he told them to call the police. They were to wait at the school until help arrived, with the implication that help would be a while in coming.

Then Bran had ended the call and they’d spent most of the afternoon waiting. First with Miss Baird, then the police arrived. Eventually, Ms. Edison had wandered in; finally Amethyst’s parents, the Millers, who had arrived separately, joined them.

The Millers were pretty subdued for people whose only child had turned into a pile of broken sticks. From Miss Baird’s description of warring parents, Anna had sort of expected more hostility. More energy. They sat near each other, not touching—or communicating in any other way, either. They hadn’t said much when Miss Baird tried to explain to them what had happened. Unlike the police, they hadn’t tried to argue with her, though they hadn’t seemed to believe, either.

They looked … faded. She thought they waited with the rest of them because no one told them to go home, rather than out of any curiosity. They hadn’t been angry, or disbelieving, or any of the things they should have been. Either children made you as crazy as Anna’s own father claimed, or the changeling had been doing something to them. She thought about Charles’s riddle and how poison could be spiritual rather than just physical.

The police officers were officially skeptical that a child had turned into a bundle of sticks. They were inclined to write Miss Baird off as a stupid mark willing to believe anything. Either Charles and Anna were con artists in the middle of some muddled game that involved kidnapping Amethyst, or they were stupid marks, like Miss Baird, who had the bad luck to witness some flimflam trick. That she and Charles weren’t talking to the police made them more inclined to believe the first than the last.

The police officers in Scottsdale were evidently not used to dealing with the supernatural. They would have dismissed everyone and gone home themselves if it weren’t for a call they received from someone they “yes, sir”ed who had asked them to hold the witnesses at the day care and wait for an investigator who was coming.

Ms. Edison could have gone home after the children had cleared out, but she was “disinclined” to leave Miss Baird to fend for herself. That made Anna like her better, and she’d been inclined to like her in the first place.

The Cantrip agents came next, Marsden and Leeds. Cantrip was the federal agency that dealt with the supernatural. It surprised her, given the attitude of the police, that there was a Cantrip presence in the greater Phoenix area.

Anna didn’t recognize either of them, but her experience with Cantrip was not vast. Nor was it a happy experience, either. She couldn’t tell from his reaction if Charles knew who they were, though he had extensive files on Cantrip, since Bran viewed it as a danger. The Cantrip agents weren’t, she was pretty sure, the help that Bran had promised.

“So you are Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” said the Cantrip officer to Charles. She was pretty sure it was the one named Marsden, not Leeds. Whichever one he was, he managed a credible sneer. “And you were here when the child turned into a pile of sticks?”

Cantrip seemed to attract a variety of people, from the true-believer geek to the rabid “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” kook and most everyone else in between. Leeds, Anna thought, was of the geek variety, but Marsden seemed to be a disbeliever. That didn’t make sense. Why would someone who didn’t want to believe in magic become an agent of Cantrip?

No one had touched the sticks so far. Anna thought it hadn’t been Charles’s soft-voiced warning that it wasn’t always safe to deal with fae magic, even spent fae magic, that had kept the police from messing with it. She thought it was because no one wanted to be the one who collected the bundle as evidence, and thereby also collect harassment from everyone in the department for listening to a bunch of crazy people.

To date, the fae had been too good at appearing powerless and telling people that the stories of Tuatha Dé Danann, who could level mountains and raise lakes, were make-believe.

The truth was, humans wanted them to be stories. They didn’t want to be afraid, didn’t want to believe that their ancestors who huddled in stone crofts and wooden huts had been right to hide. So they listened to the fae weave a fictional story out of truths and the people believed.

The sole exception to that image was the day Beauclaire had beheaded the son of a US senator in front of a Boston courthouse several months ago. And that had been more a show of strength rather than a show of power, really.

She was sort of surprised that a Cantrip agent would take that attitude, though.

Charles looked at Marsden and said, as he had to the police, “We only want to tell the story once. We’re waiting for the proper authority to tell it to.”

Maybe Bran had told Charles who he’d planned on calling in to help in one of his one-sided only-in-your-head conversations, though Anna doubted it. Bran tended to include her in most of those unless there was some urgent reason not to. Charles sounded cool and certain that someone else was coming, though.

Marsden frowned. “We are the proper authorities, Mr. Smith. Cantrip is in charge of anything that looks as though magic is involved. Are you saying that there was no magic?”

“There was no magic,” said one of the cops, deadpan. To be fair, she whispered it to the cop next to her. Anna was pretty sure that anyone who wasn’t a werewolf wouldn’t have heard her.

In a land where the police didn’t believe in the supernatural, at least not in their jurisdiction, a pair of Cantrip agents must be bored stiff.

The attitude of the police department also told her that Hosteen Sani was a very good Alpha. That none of his wolves—and this was a fair-sized pack of twenty-seven plus Chelsea—had had a run-in with the law was unusually good discipline. Even Bran could not claim that, though his pack … her pack, too … tended to have a lot of the more dangerous wolves, the ones he could not trust in the care of another werewolf.

Marsden’s little speech didn’t have any effect on Charles, but Miss Baird finally hit the end of her tether.

“Idiots,” she snapped. “No wonder he’s not talking to you. You’re supposed to be experts in the supernatural and you don’t even recognize the signs of a fairy kidnapping when it slaps you in the face. It’s a fetch. A mannequin spelled to look like a child and act enough like a child that people who do not know what to look for believe it is a child.” She scowled at the Cantrip agents. “A fetch is the word for a changeling left in the place of the real child.”

Gradually all the rest of the conversations in the room stopped as Miss Baird’s voice grew a little shrill. She was tired; they were all tired.

Leeds, Anna was almost certain he was Leeds, wasn’t paying any attention to Miss Baird or anyone else. He’d been wandering around the room for a while, letting Marsden take point. Anna had seen him check out the artwork (as done by five-year-olds) on the walls and peer into the shelves of games and toys. He’d gotten to the part of the room where the sticks and ribbons had dropped to the floor. In the middle of Miss Baird’s definition of a fetch, he dropped to the floor, too, right next to the bundle that had once looked like a little girl. He stared at the mess and then tilted his head.

No one but Anna was watching him, she thought, though one could never tell with Charles.

Miss Baird was still ranting. She swept her hand toward the silent couple who were seated incongruously on the small chairs usually occupied by children. They were huddled together and silent. “Ms. Edison, two other teachers, and half the day care children can tell you about the nasty fight these two had a week ago right in the hall. With the changeling gone, just look at them. It’s like they’re comatose or something. They haven’t even processed that the Amethyst who came to school today is gone, let alone that she wasn’t really their daughter at all. A family with a changeling in it suffers and dies, gentlemen.”

“And how do you know so much about the fae?” asked Marsden in a nasty voice.

“I read,” she snapped. “Which is something I recommend you learn to do.” She looked at Charles. “I hope whoever you are waiting for is not a complete moron.”

Leeds, still on the floor, laughed.

Marsden looked at his partner, who said, “He’s in Cantrip, Miss Baird; ‘moron’ comes with the territory. No offense, Jim. I think we’ve both been morons about this.”

“Have we?” Marsden asked in an altered voice. He sucked in a breath and then looked at the small contingent of police officers in the room. “Tell you kids what. Shift change is coming in half an hour. We’ve got this. Looks like they’re going to stick by their claim that it’s magic, so we’ll give your department our report. If one of your superiors is upset, you know our names and numbers. We’ll take it from here, and you folks can all go home.”

“You got it,” said the officer who apparently was in charge. “Let’s pack it up, boys and girls. Hey, Marsden, you and Leeds on for softball on Saturday?”

“Yessir,” Marsden said. “Ten a.m. sharp.”

They waited until the police filed out.

“Okay, they’re gone,” said Marsden. “This is real?”

His partner, still on the floor, said, “There hasn’t been a case of a fetch since we first found out that the fae were real. Standard changelings, where a fae disguises itself as a human child, those we’ve had a few of. But a fetch, an inanimate object spelled to mimic real life, that’s a new one.”

Marsden sucked air. “Leeds. Pay attention. Is it a real case?”

“We’ve been looking at a series of oddities in this neighborhood, right?” Leeds focused on Miss Blair. “I overheard you are new. Did you get this job because the previous teacher—I’m sorry, her name escapes me just now—hanged herself? I remember reading about a teacher here who died recently.”

She nodded.

“So,” said Marsden slowly. “It is a real case.”

“And that odd car wreck, Jim,” Leeds continued as if he were talking to himself—even though he addressed Marsden. “This is the right area of town and there were some kids in the car that were the right age for day care.” He caught Miss Baird’s eye again. “Someone in your classroom recently die in a nasty car wreck with their family?”

“No,” said Miss Baird.

“Yes,” said Ms. Edison. “About three days before Mrs. Glover’s unfortunate death. Henry Islington. His mother crossed the median and she and her three boys all died. Henry was the only one who was a student here.” She paused. “There was an incident the day before he died between him and one of the girls in the classroom. I don’t know if it was Amethyst.”

“It was,” said Amethyst’s mother in a dull tone. “Mrs. Glover gave us his written apology after he died.”

“If Henry was in this classroom, he was five years old,” Anna said. “He wrote an apology?”

“Mrs. Glover wrote it, of course,” Mrs. Miller said. “He signed it—his r was backward. Then he died and it was horrible. And now Amethyst…”

Ms. Edison walked over to her and patted her on the shoulder. “I know, Sara,” she murmured.

Amethyst’s mother wiped her eyes, but not because she was crying. Maybe they were too dry. “Amethyst and Henry were best friends from day one. She talked about him all the time. And then, out of the blue one day, he punched her.”

“Henry said she said something bad,” Ms. Edison told them. “He wouldn’t tell us what it was, and she just smiled.” She paused. “In retrospect, it was very odd behavior for Amethyst. It didn’t strike me that way at the time, but she is usually a gregarious, cheerful child.”

“Amethyst?” said Miss Baird. “Cheerful?” She shook her head. “But we weren’t dealing with Amethyst, were we?”

“It’s real, Jim,” said Leeds.

Marsden stared at him a moment, then took a good long look at the bundle of sticks on the floor. “Do you know how many fake calls come in? We’ve been stationed here for a year, and the most excitement we’ve had was when some kids swore a demon was eating their dog’s food every night. Twelve hours of stakeout turned up a half-grown coyote. Then there was the lady who saw a unicorn, which turned out to be her neighbor’s kid running around in last year’s Halloween costume. My brain’s a funny thing—it tends to atrophy if I don’t use it. Real, huh?”

Leeds nodded. “Real.”

Marsden waited a beat. “Okay, then.” He pulled out an electronic notebook and said, in a cool professional tone, “Can I get everyone’s name and what their relationship to the missing girl is?”

Anna leaned on her husband and raised her eyebrows. He narrowed his eyes at her, but she thought he was smiling a little. It was hard to tell.

Marsden started with Miss Baird.

“I’ve been teaching here for two weeks,” she told him, her feathers still ruffled. “Probationary period. I was informed this morning that they would be terminating my contract because there had been too many incidents in my room and parents were complaining.”

“Fourteen in two weeks,” Ms. Edison said. “Our average is about once a month for the whole school.” She gave Miss Baird a half smile. “We need to revisit that decision, I think. All of those complaints revolved around Amethyst and for some reason none of us, myself and our board members, even thought twice about that. And I assure you that is something we normally do. If one student causes more than three incidents in a month, he is on probation and the next time he is gone. Under normal circumstances Amethyst would have been served notice and then asked to leave.”

“Your name is?” Marsden asked. His partner, evidently satisfied that he’d gotten Marsden on the right track, was back to examining the bundle of sticks.

“Farrah Edison,” Ms. Edison said. “I run this lunatic asylum. I stayed because what I know might help. Cathy, Miss Baird, has only been here for a short time.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve been sitting in this room for going on four hours, and every hour it feels like my head clears a little more. Amethyst used to be a cheerful, gregarious girl, and she came back from Christmas break totally different. I intended to call her home, but Sara, her mom, came in to talk to me before I managed it. She told me that she and her husband were thinking of divorce. Then they—I’m sorry, Sara—they started to have some loud altercations when they would come to pick up or drop off Amethyst. I decided that was an adequate cause for Amethyst’s sudden change in personality.”

Marsden nodded. “Okay. Thanks. And you are Amethyst’s parents, right? Names, please?”

Amethyst’s parents were Sara and Brent Miller. She was a bank administrator, he was a doctor. No, they hadn’t noticed anything different about their daughter. Not when she’d had the fight with Henry. Not any time.

“When did you two begin to fight?” asked Anna, her eyes on their clasped hands.

Sara looked up and just blinked at Anna, but her husband’s eyes sharpened. “It was just before Christmas,” he said slowly. “We were going to go visit my parents, it was their turn. But the day before we were supposed to go, Amethyst said she didn’t want to go. Then Sara was adamant that she didn’t want to go, either. My parents aren’t always kind to her. But over the years she’s always just dealt with them. But not this time.” He cleared his throat. “I’m babbling.”

The slowest babbling Anna had ever heard, though maybe he was talking about coherence and not speed.

“They’re not so bad,” said Sara suddenly. “Your parents. I like your dad. He’s funny when your mom isn’t in the room.”

Marsden was watching Anna but typing on his notebook as fast as he could anyway.

Charles stepped in then. He didn’t ask a question so much as make a statement. “Dr. Miller, you’ve had a run of bad luck since Christmas.”

Miller opened his mouth, then nodded abruptly. “Two car wrecks—the second totaled my car. Our six-year-old cat died. It seems like we can’t keep an appliance up and running longer than a week.” He gave a half laugh and a shrug.

“I can’t bake bread,” said his wife. “Not since Christmas. The dough just won’t rise.”

“Most of it is centered in your home?” Charles asked. “It hasn’t followed you to the office, right?”

The Millers nodded.

“That’s right,” Sara Miller said. “Just at home.”

Marsden looked Charles in the eye and said, harshly, “Okay, buddy. Just who are you?”

Anna felt Charles stiffen against her at the challenge, but he kept his voice steady when he replied. “I am Charles and this is my wife, Anna.”

“Smith,” said Marsden.

“That will do,” Anna said. “We were asked to come and talk to the teachers here on a related matter, having some experience with the fae. We expected to find a renegade fae who had escaped from the Nevada reservation. If that had been so, we’d have been in and out with none the wiser. This”—she indicated the bundle on the ground—“was unexpected.”

“A related matter?” Marsden asked.

“A friend of ours gave us reason to believe that there was a fae problem here,” she said.

Ms. Edison smiled thinly. “Was that the friend of a friend of your sister-in law? No wonder you wished to speak to Miss Baird even though I told you she was only temporary.” She looked at Marsden, effectively dismissing Anna. “So you believe a fae stole the real Amethyst and replaced her with a … simulacrum?”

“Correct,” said Marsden grimly.

“So what happened to our daughter?” asked Dr. Miller. He didn’t sound like he thought it would be good. A doctor would know all about not good, Anna thought.

“That depends on what kind of fae we’re dealing with.” A lean, muscular black woman dressed sharply in a dove gray suit stepped into the room. “Special Agent Leslie Fisher, FBI. Sorry I’m late.”