Fair Game

9

As they climbed, scrambling over broken cement, rocks, and bits of assorted underbrush, Anna had too much time to think about the show they’d just put on.

It had been her fault.

Charles had been trying to raise her wolf – because apparently the black magic had been affecting her. She cringed away from the self-pitying stupidity she’d allowed herself to wallow in. Talking hadn’t worked to pull her out of it, so he’d kissed her, and her wolf had risen up to shrug off the effects of the magic, just like he’d thought she would. And then her wolf had changed the game.

Anna remembered distinctly that he’d warned her that they had an audience – and she’d totally ignored him. That was bad enough. To do it when there was a distinct chance that they were going to run into the bad guys was the height of stupidity.

‘Anna,’ said Charles. ‘Stop brooding.’

‘That was really dumb,’ she said without looking at him. ‘My fault. I’m sorry. We could have been attacked by the killers.’ She threw up her hands. ‘We might as well have set up cameras and invited everyone to watch. And now we’re going to have to go meet up with our audience and explain ourselves.’

He stopped abruptly and jerked her to a halt beside him with a hand on her wrist. It startled her with its hint of violence – Charles was never out of control.

‘If you think that it was dumb, unnecessary, and your fault,’ he said in a husky voice, ‘then you weren’t paying attention.’ He kissed her again, his mouth demanding her response, his body hot against hers.

Charles smelled like home, warm and right. She knew she should pull back, knew that this was more distraction they couldn’t afford, but she was so hungry for him – not just for sex, but for the simple touches, the absolute certainty of knowing she was welcome to pet and tease and laugh. Anna sank into him and gave as good as she got.

They were both breathless when he pulled back.

‘When we get back tonight, we will talk,’ he told her. ‘I just learned something.’

‘That my wolf is shameless,’ she muttered, though she couldn’t pull away.

He laughed, damn him. More of a huff than a chuckle, but she knew amusement when she heard it.

She’d thrown him down in the middle of a hunt when there were a herd of people listening in. All the werewolves, he’d reminded her – and Beauclaire, who was here to find his daughter, not to listen to her make out in the woods. And now, to show that she hadn’t learned her lesson, all she wanted to do was take up that last kiss where it had left off.

‘No help for it,’ Anna muttered. ‘Time to face the music.’

‘Shame is … not a very productive emotion,’ Charles told her. There was a funny little pause when he tilted his head to look at her face and then away. ‘Brother Wolf liked claiming you in front of the others so that there will be no question who you belong to. While I … I regret your embarrassment but otherwise agree with Brother Wolf.’

Anna stared at him incredulously. If there was a more private man in the world than her husband, she hadn’t met him.

‘As for the other …’ Charles grinned rather fiercely at her and raised his voice. ‘Isaac, go on ahead; we’ll follow.’

‘You’re the man,’ Isaac called back.

‘We’ll trail them closely,’ Charles said. ‘If something happens, we’ll be right there – but if we wait until there are more interesting things about than we are, they won’t give you a hard time.’ He didn’t need to say that no one would give him a hard time.

‘Thanks,’ Anna said, not knowing how else to respond.

He put his hand on her shoulder as they started back up the trail. While they hiked, there was none of the reluctance to touch her that had characterized him for the past few months. He kept a hand on whatever part of her was closest to him.

Charles had tried to open their bond and call up her wolf to defeat the black magic and hadn’t been able to. Brother Wolf had panicked because Charles had somehow messed up their bond – and then Anna threatened to leave them and Charles had panicked, too. If she hadn’t allowed them to make love to her, to re-establish their claim, things might have gotten … interesting, in the same way that a grizzly attack is interesting. Because neither he nor Brother Wolf was capable of letting her go.

It had been something of a revelation.

The bottom line was that he was a selfish creature, Charles decided more cheerfully than he’d been about anything in a long time. He guided Anna around a hole in the ground with a subtle push of his hand on her hip. She probably had seen the hole, but it pleased him to take care of her in such a small way. He was willing to pay any price to keep her safe … any price except for losing her.

When they got back to the condo he would tell her about the ghosts who threatened to kill all that he loved unless he could find the key to releasing them. It was a risk – but quite clearly, he had damaged their mate bond by trying to do this alone – and that was worth any risk to fix. He’d see if, between the two of them, they could mend what he’d broken – and if not, he’d call his da.

If this trip had done nothing else, it had given him distance from the unrelenting grimness that his life had become since the were wolves had revealed themselves to the public. He’d been so focused on duty, on need, and on just getting the job done that he’d lost perspective.

Honor, duty, and love. He would not sacrifice Anna for his father and all the other werewolves in existence. Given a choice, he chose love.

That meant he had to find a way to deal with the ghosts – or quit being his father’s hatchet man. It wasn’t the result his father had been hoping for from this trip, but Charles couldn’t help that. He would not lose Anna even if it meant they went to war with the human population.

The decision left him feeling oddly peaceful, if more than a little selfish.

‘We found it,’ Isaac called.

Charles started jogging and Anna stayed by his side – just where she belonged.

The place where the others awaited them had once been a yard with a small house or storage shed, maybe ten feet by fifteen, in the center. The wooden part of the structure was long gone, but the granite foundation blocks were still in situ. The eyebolt that was driven into one of the blocks might have been original, but the chain and cuffs attached to it were bright and shiny new.

Beauclaire was standing in the center of the foundation, his eyes closed and his lips moving. Charles was pretty sure he was working some magic, but with the feel of the blood magic that had already been done here clogging his senses, he couldn’t sense it.

Along the perimeter of the clearing, Malcolm trailed after the FBI agents, who were busily using their flashlights to examine the ground for clues or a trail.

‘We’ll have to come back in daylight with a team,’ Goldstein said, and there was a hard edge to his voice. ‘We shouldn’t be tromping around here at night; we’re going to miss or destroy clues.’

‘You aren’t going to get Beauclaire to leave without his daughter,’ said Leslie. Then she glanced back at the werewolf behind them and stepped a little closer to Goldstein.

Charles took a good look at Malcolm himself. ‘Malcolm,’ he said sharply.

The bearded werewolf looked up. ‘You told me to watch them.’

Isaac had been in a low-voiced conversation with his witch, but when Charles spoke he looked over, too.

‘Malcolm?’ he asked, his voice too gentle.

The other wolf sighed and drifted a little farther away from the FBI agents, but also shifted his body language from stalker to bodyguard. Charles wasn’t sure that the humans could consciously read body language well enough to tell the difference, but their hindbrains could. As soon as Malcolm started to behave himself, Leslie’s shoulders relaxed and she quit patting her thigh with her right hand.

Isaac left the witch kneeling beside the chains, her fingers tracing spells that left little red glowing lines behind them.

‘Hally says that there were ten or twelve people killed here over a period of years,’ he told Charles. ‘She says that she’ll gather some of her apprentices and they’ll put the island to rights after the police have gathered their evidence. She’s doing what she can now. We don’t want a herd of armed people in a place that has such a strong dark magic residue – the words “accidental shootings” don’t even begin to cover the disasters that could spring up.’

‘Good,’ said Charles. That was one less thing for him to worry about. ‘Any sign of Lizzie?’

‘Not right here. No one alive but us and some rabbits within hearing range, and there aren’t any trails into or out of this place. I can’t smell anyone but us in the vicinity. Maybe if I were in wolf form, I could do better.’

‘We’ll all change to hunt for the girl – except Malcolm, if he can help it,’ Charles said.

‘I can help it.’ Malcolm sounded a little put out to be left behind.

‘We need you to be able to take us back to the mainland in a hurry when we find Lizzie,’ Charles explained. ‘She’s going to need medical attention as soon as possible. It’s not just guard duty.’

‘You believe Lizzie is here,’ Beauclaire said sharply, leaving off his spell casting. ‘Can you smell her? Do you have proof?’

Charles waved his hand at the stone. ‘They have used this place to kill all of their local victims once they are through with them. Do you think that they found a better place than this isolated and quarantined island to keep their victims while they are still alive?’

The fae stared at him, his face hungry. ‘How do you propose finding her? If she were here, I would be able to find her. But my magic doesn’t tell me anything. It hasn’t from the beginning.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I thought it meant that she was dead.’

‘I know a few ways to stymie fae magic,’ said the witch without pausing in whatever she was doing to the granite stone. ‘The Irish and German witches are well-known for their ability to disrupt your kind of power, one way or another, and Caitlin told me that this guy got his rune spell from an Irish witch. There’s a dozen ways to make charms that I know, some more effective than others.’

Beauclaire looked at her, face taut with hope. ‘There are,’ he said. ‘There are indeed.’

Isaac started stripping off his clothes and so did Anna. Charles moved until he stood between them in answer to a small fit of territoriality and unfounded jealousy. Brother Wolf was feeling possessive tonight.

Not bothering to take off his jeans, he began his change. It was harder this time because he’d been changing a lot today, and the last time he’d pushed for speed. His shift was slower and it hurt more, leaving him with the dull ache in his bones that told him he would pay for the next change back to human. If he could, he’d wait until they got back to their condo before attempting it.

He still managed the full change before the others and was shaking the tingles and cramps out of his muscles when Isaac staggered to his feet, a wolf of medium height and a gold coat that reminded Charles of Bran’s mate, Leah. Anna was still changing.

Charles left the others to recover and started to explore the ground with his nose. Like the FBI agents, he concentrated his efforts along the edge of the clearing. He found nothing on his first pass or his second and was starting a third – Beauclaire pacing attentively by his side, a hand on the long knife he wore in a sheath on his belt, a knife Charles didn’t remember seeing on the boat – when Anna called him over with a couple of demanding yips.

He took his time, casting around where Anna stood, but he scented nothing, not even the ubiquitous rabbits and mice. She whined at him when he lifted his head and he tried again. The second time he lifted his head, she yipped and started trailing something he couldn’t smell.

Frustrated at his inability to perceive what she had, doubly frustrated because if he hadn’t messed up their bond somehow, she could have told him what she found, Charles stalked after her with Isaac and Beauclaire following. Probably because he was so annoyed, it took him about fifteen feet to figure it out.

Nothing. He smelled nothing.

As if something that disguised scent had trailed by here many times, he smelled absolutely nothing. His mate was very smart. He touched his nose to hers to let her know he understood. She smiled at him, her tongue lolling happily between sharp white fangs.

‘Wait,’ said the witch.

Charles stopped and looked at her.

‘Isaac said that you won’t be able to see or hear this fae you are chasing.’

Charles gave Isaac a dark look. He’d told Isaac what they were hunting when he’d called him for help tonight. That information had not been for general distribution, and the Alpha wolf had known it.

‘Peace,’ the witch said. ‘Isaac only told me because I was putting myself at risk in coming here, and he knows that I do not talk. This fae has been eating the essences of the people who died here, and that Isaac did not need to tell me. I talked to Caitlin about the nature of the magic they were using. So. I can give you some of that power and it will recognize the fae – sympathetic magic, wolf, like to like. There is enough to give it to only one of you.’

Charles flattened his ears at Isaac when that wolf would have stepped up. If there was a risk, it was for Charles to take – of them all he was the one with the best chance of taking on the enemy.

He trotted over to the witch and waited for a lot of smoke and dramatic gestures and dancing. Instead she simply bent until her face was level with his and blew on him.

He coughed and then choked and gagged at the smell. It hurt, too. Like getting stung by a thousand bees at once or leaping from a car onto asphalt that shredded the skin off of him – both of which he’d done before. But that wasn’t the worst of it. It felt like used motor oil had been poured over his body and clung there, smelly and greasy.

Brother Wolf growled and hung his head low, his ears pinned. Isaac whined and took a step forward, as if he might try to get between Charles and the witch. The ghosts inside of him began howling and laughing. Then Anna brushed up against Charles, silencing the voices inside with a radiant peace, the gift of the Omega, that let him regain control.

Only then did the witch move. She stood up and dusted her hands briskly. ‘My apologies. I didn’t know that it would affect you so adversely. It will stay on you until dawn dispels it – and likely it will only be enough for a quick warning, so pay attention.’

Calmer now, if not more comfortable, Charles nodded his thanks – it was not her fault that it hurt, or that it made him long to go jump in the ocean to clean the oily filth of it off his fur. Or that she gave him orders, because Isaac hadn’t taught her any better. The spell, if it worked as she said it would, allowed them a chance if they ran into the fae. For that, he could forgive her a great deal.

Hally the witch stood before him unafraid – and so fragile in her humanity.

She could not help being a witch any more than he could help being a werewolf. Both of them born to their otherness. Isaac was right that most white witches died while still very young, unable to defend themselves from their blood-magic-using kin. She had, within the limits of what she was, been very helpful – and he would remember it.

The wolves and the fae left the others behind to the dubious safety of the little clearing, and the guardianship of Malcolm and the witch.

Charles let the other wolves take the lead, as his nose was not at its best under the burden of the spell the witch had used. They traveled slowly because it was more difficult to follow no scent than it was to trail any given odor.

Isaac picked up on what they were doing after a few hundred feet and his nose was better than Anna’s, but Anna caught him once when he’d taken a false trail. Eventually their noses led them to a door rough-set in cement that seemed to be attached to the side of the hill. Charles ran uphill to the top of the cement where it was capped by a crude roof, about two feet by three feet. A possible entrance or exit if they needed it, he thought, but better if they went through the door.

The door, when he ran back down to study it, looked as if it had been purchased used and rehung on new hinges. It was locked with a steel bolt lock latch. Steel wasn’t as damaging to fae, he’d been told, as iron, but it would still resist any magic Beauclaire could bring to bear.

The fae had evidently had the same thought. He stood up from where he’d been scrounging in the bushes with a big hunk of stone in one hand. He muttered a few words until the stone glowed mud green and then chucked it at the door. It hit with a bang more reminiscent of a grenade than a rock and shattered into dust, leaving a good-sized dent in the door. Neither the lock nor the latch survived the encounter. The doorknob was aluminum and didn’t seem to give Beauclaire any trouble opening it.

Inside it was pitch-black, but even so Charles could tell that it was far deeper than the two-foot-by-three-foot roof would have indicated. Someone had burrowed into the side of the hill. All of this he sensed from the way the chamber echoed, not from anything he could see. Even a wolf needed some light to see by.

The air smelled fresh, so there was either another entrance or some sort of ventilation. Charles couldn’t smell anything dangerous, but, under the circumstances, he wasn’t willing to trust his nose alone to warn him of danger.

The fae lord solved the light problem by throwing a ball of glowing magic through the doorway and into the darkness within. It stopped before it hit the dirt floor, hovering about three feet off the ground six or eight feet ahead of them, lighting a space that looked as if it had begun life as the basement of a large building – maybe part of an old military building. A large number of the islands in Boston Harbor had had military installations at one time or another over the last four hundred years.

‘Who’s there?’ whispered a slurred voice as they stood just past the entryway. It was such a soft voice, coming from an empty room – all of them froze in place.

‘Help me, please.’ Her voice was so quiet a human would never have heard her. The effect on Beauclaire was electric.

‘Lizzie!’ he thundered, poised to run, head cocked trying to figure out where her voice came from. The room didn’t have any doors, was barren of everything except a scattering of debris. It obviously did not hold Lizzie Beauclaire.

‘Papa?’ Her voice didn’t get stronger; it sounded querulous and hopeless.

Isaac had been cautiously exploring the dark edges of the room, and he made a soft grunt to attract their attention. Behind a pile of rotted timbers, pipes, and broken granite blocks, what Charles had thought was just a dark shadow or more debris turned out to be a narrow cement stairway with holes and rusted metal fittings where there would once have been a handrail. One side, the side with the rusty fittings, ran along the wall of the room; the other was open.

Beauclaire, his light leading the way, scrambled down the stairs and left the rest to follow. Not the smartest idea in the world, thought Charles – but he understood. If it had been someone who belonged to him below, he’d have lost no time in getting to her, either.

The fae’s ball of light revealed a room nearly half as big as the one above with a doorway on the far wall. The door was long gone and one of the uprights of the doorframe had tipped over and lay on the floor. Beauclaire stopped momentarily at the foot of the stairs: Lizzie had quit making noise. When he started forward again, his initial rush had slowed, and he moved cautiously, aiming for the open doorway because the subbasement was obviously empty.

Only it wasn’t.

Charles paused, still six or eight steps from the bottom of the stairs. There was a scattering of fine gold sparks, like a constellation in miniature. ‘Pay attention,’ the witch had said.

He might not have, might not have noticed them if they hadn’t moved. But once he did, they did a pretty good job of telling Charles a little something about the fae they were stalking.

The horned lord, if that was what it was, was big. The ceiling of the subbasement was nine, maybe ten feet high, and the little sparks started right at the top and took up a fair chunk of the corner of the room it stood in. He didn’t get any details, but he knew it was there.

Charles wished he’d thought to ask Beauclaire what the horned lord looked like in its original shape. Even knowing whether it stood on two legs or four would have been useful. As it was, he was hoping for two – a four-legged creature that was big enough to brush the ceiling would be nearly elephant-sized.

Anna had stopped when he did, her stillness alert and watchful. Charles turned his head and nipped her shoulder lightly. When she looked at him he directed her toward Beauclaire, who was already halfway across the room.

The fae should have backup – and Anna didn’t have a whole lot of experience in combat. Fighting something that she couldn’t see wasn’t the best way for her to gain more.

She gave him a puzzled look and then trotted off after the fae, while Charles continued more slowly down the last few stairs behind her. Isaac, aware that something was going on, stopped at the bottom and waited for Anna, then Charles, to go past him.

Charles bided his time, watching the hidden fae, trying to use the sparks to infer what it was doing. When Anna and Beauclaire passed it, it moved. Charles gathered himself, but the hidden creature stopped before it got close to Anna – the top part of it moving with a dizzy swirl of sparks.

He imagined that it had finally noticed the pair of werewolves, he and Isaac, focused on where it stood, though it should be invisible and had turned its head to watch them.

After a moment, the top part of the creature bent down and shook itself at him like an irritated moose – it was definitely paying attention to Isaac and him. Rather than jump from above and find himself impaled, Charles crept cautiously down the stairs until he stood just in front of Isaac, letting the other wolf see from his body language just where the enemy stood.

Isaac sank down into a crouch and took a couple of gliding leaps away, separating so that they could attack from different directions and also would be two targets instead of one.

There was an abrupt crash from the doorway that Anna and Beauclaire had disappeared into, and then came the broken sound of a woman sobbing. The mostly invisible fae moved again, swinging its head toward the noise, Charles thought. Then Anna appeared in the opening, and the fae rushed her.

But it wasn’t as fast as Charles. He aimed low, relative to the size of the creature he was attacking, about three feet up. From the way it moved he was pretty sure it was bipedal – and that meant tendons. He hit something that felt like the front of a moose’s hock and changed his bite mid-attack, letting his momentum pull him around so that his fangs cut through the joint horizontally as his body swung around until he was behind the creature. Then he set his jaw like a bulldog and hung on, digging into bone while he tore at the horned lord with his claws, reaching upward to see if he could find an important part to damage.

The fae creature howled, a wild, piercing whistling sound that was an odd combination of elk bugle and stallion scream, and when it did, air moved through the subbasement like a sea-fed storm hitting shore. Something that felt like a club hit him in the shoulder, and then Isaac leapt into the fray, striking higher than Charles had, perhaps hoping to knock it over. Beneath Charles, the fae creature swayed, but it didn’t go down as Isaac found something to set his fangs into. His head rocked in a motion that told Charles he’d scored a chunk of muscle rather than bone. He was tearing it while he held on with front claws and raked with his hind legs like a cat.

Charles’s back legs were on the ground and he used them to shift his weight, preparing to find something more fragile than the thick bone he had, no matter that it gave him a good solid hold. It was too thick to break with his jaws and he needed to incapacitate it so it couldn’t get to Anna.

The creature screamed again and ripped Isaac free, tossing him all the way across the room and into the cement wall. Watching how it handled Isaac told Charles that the horned lord had hands of some sort – and was seriously strong, stronger than a werewolf.

Free of distraction, the creature turned its attention back to Charles. It pounded twice more at him, but awkwardly, as if it couldn’t quite get to him. Then it lifted the leg Charles had grabbed and something hit him in the shoulder again, a fair hit that loosened his grip. Before he could regain his hold or drop it, the horned lord kicked his hock against the back wall.

Charles dropped to the floor. For a moment he was helpless, the wind knocked out of him, but before the creature could do anything about it, a black dynamo dove over Charles like a whirlwind.

Anna didn’t bother trying anything fancy. She just ran, back and forth and in dizzying circles. When she hit something she sliced at it, but kept going. Distracting it.

Charles staggered to his feet and launched himself at the creature again. This time, dizzy from hitting the wall and then the floor, he had no idea what he hit – all he knew, all Brother Wolf knew, was that they had to protect their mate. But luck favored him and he got a clean hit. It was flesh and bone beneath his fangs and he sank his claws in deep.

He didn’t know when Beauclaire joined the fight. Just suddenly he was there, his face icy and more beautiful and inhuman than Charles remembered it. He was taller, too, and thinner, and he fought with a knife in one hand and magic in the other. He was quick and tough, fighting blind, but he scored again and again with the knife – and when he used his magic, Charles couldn’t tell what Beauclaire did, but the horned lord felt it and shuddered underneath his fangs.

Charles was pretty sure that it was the magic that turned the tide. As soon as Beauclaire attacked him with it, the horned lord quit fighting to win and started fighting to get away.

The fae beast that Charles clung to screamed, this time a raw, drum-deep sound that hurt his ears, and threw itself on the floor, rolling as if it were on fire, first one way, then the other. Charles hung on for two rolls, but fell off on the third. Beauclaire, having neither fang nor claw, lay motionless on the ground after the first roll.

Free of his attackers, the creature made for the stairs – and Charles got a good look at what they’d been fighting, because whatever it was that kept it invisible had quit working. Its antlers were huge. He thought at first that they were shaped like a caribou’s, but it must have been a trick of shadows because they started … glowing faintly with an icy white light, and they were the horns of a deer – a huge ancient deer.

It had a silvery coat that whitened as it staggered upward – and Charles realized he’d been mistaken earlier because it had four legs, long and delicate looking. Black blood disappeared even as he watched, absorbed by the silvery coat of a great white stag taller by a hand or more than any moose he’d ever seen.

Brother Wolf wanted to chase it down and kill it because they wouldn’t be safe until it was dead. Charles agreed, but decided that since one of his shoulders was out of joint or broken, having one werewolf go after a creature that was healing as it retreated faster than a werewolf could was stupid. Especially when it had nearly defeated three werewolves and a tough fae already. He wondered if the horned lord, a half-blood, was really that tough, or if his borrowed magic made him that way. Either way, Charles wasn’t going after him, no matter what Brother Wolf wanted.

He wasn’t going to leave his Anna defenseless.

Brother Wolf roared his frustrated rage and took what satisfaction he could when the stag leapt up the last five or six stairs, staggering at the top when its left rear leg, still healing, didn’t support its weight.

When it was out of sight, Charles turned to survey the fallen. Isaac was still on the ground, but he’d rolled to a sphinxlike pose and blinked a little stupidly at Charles. If he wasn’t dead, he’d heal soon. Beauclaire was on one hand and his knees, trying to regain his feet with limited success – but everything seemed to be moving all right except for an obviously broken wrist. Anna … Anna was crouched next to Lizzie Beauclaire and crooning to her, or as close to a croon as a wolf could get.

The girl … He’d seen photos of her on her wall and she’d been beautiful. Now scabby wounds decorated her forehead and cheeks, all of the skin he could see. She was wearing her father’s shirt, but was obviously naked underneath it, and her formerly flawless skin was covered with sigils and bruises – just as Jacob’s body had been. On a living, breathing person it was even worse, because she was also covered with a miasma of black magic that he could see – like a fog of invisibly small fleas. Lizzie blinked at him with drugged eyes and moved backward, stopping abruptly with a little gasp because something hurt.

They’d broken her knee. Shattered it, if he was any judge – and he was. It was deliberate – and he wondered if she, a trained athlete, had been a little tougher than they expected. Her feet were bruised and bloody, as though she had broken free and gone running through the rocky terrain barefoot. She’d have had no chance of really escaping, not unless she could call upon the merfolk – and he doubted that. They tended to be standoffish or aggressive, even with their own kind.

Lizzie was clearly in no shape to walk. She’d have to be carried out, and, looking at the others, Charles knew he would have to do it. With a broken wrist, her father wasn’t going to be able to, and Anna was still too new of a werewolf to change back and forth this quickly. Isaac was dazed and confused, and pretty new as well. He’d been Changed about the same time as Anna, as Charles recalled, only a few years ago. So Charles was just going to have to manage one more shift to human right this minute.

It hurt. He’d forgotten how badly it hurt to change when something was wrong. He was old and changing would help heal any injury that wasn’t caused by silver – but the change healed the same way salt water kept wounds from getting infected: accompanied by a lot of pain.

Charles didn’t cry out. He didn’t howl and scare the poor little dancer who had wrapped herself around Anna as if the werewolf were a stuffed puppy. Sweat poured off his body even before he should have been human enough to sweat. And then he became human, kneeling in the dust-covered cement, wearing a red T-shirt soaked with sweat and his blue jeans, which – he noted with a hint of amusement – were old-style button fly.

It took Charles a couple of tries to get to his feet, and even then, his hands were still shaking. But the shoulder must have only been dislocated, because that injury the change had healed completely, other than a lingering soreness.

When he and Anna got back to their apartment, he was going to have to sleep for a week. He looked around to do triage, with the idea of getting everyone up the stairs and on their way to the boat before the horned lord came back to finish them.

Charles left Lizzie Beauclaire with Anna for a few minutes more and walked over to crouch in front of Isaac.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Are you with us?’

The wolf just panted, not focusing.

‘I’m going to touch you,’ Charles told him in a tone that brooked no opposition: dominant wolf to less dominant wolf. ‘To see if there’s anything that needs mending. You won’t like it – but you will let me do it. Growls are acceptable. Biting is not.’

After a quick exam, during which Isaac growled a lot, Charles was pretty certain that, though there had probably been other damage initially, the Boston Alpha had healed most of it. What was left were a lot of sore spots and a humdinger of a concussion that would work itself out in a few hours with adequate food. Charles hoped that Malcolm had more in his bait boxes than squid, chum, and worms – though protein was protein.

Charles stood up and looked around again.

Beauclaire had managed to get to his feet and walk unsteadily to his daughter. He sat down on the ground a foot or so from her and reached out to touch her hair with a light hand. She flinched and he started to sing to her in Welsh.

Ar lan y môr mae lilis gwynion

Ar lan y môr mae ’nghariad inne

He had a good voice. Not spectacular, as Charles would have expected from a fae of rank and power (and the fae who’d fought beside Charles this night obviously had power), but good pitch and sweet-toned, though that was somewhat affected by the unshed tears in his voice. Another song might have suited Beauclaire’s range better, and this particular song wasn’t among Charles’s favorites. He preferred those that had a story, powerful imagery, or at least better poetry.

Charles took a step forward and, though Beauclaire didn’t look up or quit singing, Charles felt the fae’s attention center on him. It felt like the attention of a rattlesnake just before it strikes.

‘ “Beside the Sea,” indeed,’ Charles said softly, watching Beauclaire’s body language.

The fae lord quit singing and looked up. Charles saw that he’d read him aright. Beauclaire was ready to defend his daughter against anyone who got too close. Like Isaac, he’d taken quite a beating on the unforgiving stone, and he looked a little dazed – something Charles hadn’t noticed in his first assessment. Being wounded made the fae all the more dangerous. The long knife had reappeared in his good hand and it looked very sharp.

‘Ar lan y môr,’ sang Charles, and watched Beauclaire stand down just a little, so he sang a few more lines for him. ‘All right. Allies, remember? We need to get everyone on the boat. Maybe have Isaac’s witch do something for your daughter so the black magic doesn’t eat her – I don’t know if you can see it, but I can. We need to fix your wrist.’

Beauclaire shut his eyes and banished his knife. Magic, Charles thought, or quick hands. The fae nodded, then winced and grimaced. ‘Right.’ His speaking voice was less steady than his singing voice had been. ‘We need to get her to safety in case the horned lord comes back. I can’t carry her.’

‘I can, if you let me,’ offered Charles. If necessary, he’d pull the same sort of dominance on Beauclaire that he had on Isaac. But Beauclaire wasn’t a wolf. It might work for a second, but it might also get Charles knifed in the back when he wasn’t paying attention to Beauclaire. Better to get real cooperation.

‘Her knee,’ Beauclaire said.

‘I know. I see it. It’s going to hurt no matter how we do this. But this island isn’t that big. It shouldn’t take us long.’

Beauclaire looked up and gave him a half smile. ‘First we have to stand up and go up the stairs.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Charles.

‘It could be waiting for us up there.’

Charles started to agree, but Brother Wolf spoke up. The old wolf might not know horned lords, but he knew prey, and Charles trusted his judgment. ‘The white stag is long gone.’

Beauclaire froze. ‘You saw it? As a white stag?’

Charles nodded. ‘When we fought it, it wasn’t in that form.’ He’d had time to think about it. Charles knew what he’d touched and it had been vaguely human shaped with legs like the hind legs of a moose. ‘But it ran up the stairs and turned into a stag – just as its invisibility ran out.’

‘It didn’t run out,’ Beauclaire said. ‘He dropped the glamour on purpose. Why didn’t you follow it?’

‘I wasn’t in any shape to take it on by myself,’ said Charles, gesturing around to the fallen. ‘Even with allies, we might not have been able to defeat it had it not decided to run. And I wasn’t going to leave you injured and vulnerable.’

Anna snorted. She knew him, knew who he wouldn’t leave vulnerable.

Beauclaire bowed his head and smiled. ‘I should have known that Bran’s son would be too hardheaded to be led by his nose by any magic – even by the white stag. Had you chased it, you would have continued, never stopping, never catching up until your legs were but bloody stumps or you died.’

Charles looked at him. ‘Thanks for the warning.’

Beauclaire laughed. ‘Bran’s son, no one can guard against the white stag – and knowing what he is and hunting him anyway is very dangerous. Even more dangerous than hunting in ignorance. If the white stag walked past me two weeks ago, I would not have been compelled to go after him. But if I had seen him tonight, after hunting him since he stole my daughter away – I would have followed him, power that I am, until one of us was dead.’

‘I thought fae were immortal,’ said Charles. ‘At least those who can refer to themselves as “power that I am.” ’

Beauclaire started to say something, but broke off as Charles held up a hand.

There was a scuffing sound above them. Someone was upstairs.

‘Isaac?’ It was Malcolm.

‘We’re down here,’ called Charles, relaxing, though Brother Wolf was upset with them. They were supposed to stay safe where he had left them.

Malcolm, the witch, and the FBI came charging to the rescue, bringing more noise and chaos with them than four people should have been able to manage. Goldstein and Leslie Fisher took over, and Charles, tired, aching in every bone of his body, let them.

Leslie stripped out of her knee-length waterproof jacket and helped Beauclaire wrap it around his daughter. The witch dug through her satchel and muttered unpleasant things. Finally she found a Baggie of salt, made them take the coat and Beauclaire’s shirt back off the girl, and dusted Lizzie from head to toe in the salt.

Brutal but effective. The black magic dissipated – but the salt burned in her open wounds. She cried, but seemed to be too deeply under the influence of whatever her kidnappers had fed her to make too much noise. Charles smelled ketamine and something else.

‘We could have thrown her in the ocean and fished her back out,’ Hally told them. ‘But the cold wouldn’t have done her any good. Better leave the salt on. A half hour should be long enough, but longer won’t hurt. It’ll also stave off infection.’

They bundled Lizzie back up and Charles picked her up, to her evident distress, even with whatever drugs they’d given her in her system. She hadn’t been in their hands long – a little more than a full day – but she’d been tortured and who knew what else. Males were not anything she wanted to deal with.

But Anna couldn’t change back, and Leslie, though in good shape, was human, and not capable of carrying Lizzie all the way back to the boat.

Charles tried singing to her, the same song her father had been singing. Beauclaire – and Malcolm – joined in, and the music seemed to help.

Goldstein had used a stick and a strip off the bottom of his cotton dress shirt to splint Beauclaire’s wrist. And when they started up the stairs, he wedged a shoulder under the fae’s arm and helped steady him, having evidently decided Beauclaire would be his personal responsibility. Beauclaire shot Charles the ghost of an amused look, and let himself be helped – possibly a little more than he really needed.

Isaac was obviously in pain, panting with stress, but he got to his feet and followed, Malcolm walking steadily beside him. Charles kept a close eye on them for a while – wolves could be a little unpredictable when a more dominant wolf was injured. It was a good time to eliminate the dominant and take his place. It didn’t usually happen when an even more dominant wolf like Charles was around to keep the peace and protect the pack, but better to be safe. Happily, Malcolm seemed honestly concerned about his Alpha.

Anna ranged, sometimes walking beside Charles, but mostly trotting in a wide circle around them, looking for danger. Leslie took rear guard, her gun out and ready to shoot. Hally walked in front of them, leading the way as she mostly ignored them all.

They staggered and stumbled, wounded but triumphant, singing the old Welsh folk song ‘Ar Lan y Môr.’ And if there was something odd about returning from battle singing about lilies, rosemary, rocks, and – for some reason he’d never fathomed – eggs, of all things, by the sea, well, then the three of them made it sound pretty good and only he and Beauclaire knew Welsh.