by Wen Spencer
Sometime in the last week or so, chaos had blown through the house. Death lingered on the air; even the candles couldn't cover it. Bits of vines and dead leaves littered the floor along with long black zip ties. Judging by the number of cut restraints, the family had been kept hogtied in the living room when the warlock was too preoccupied to focus on them. Somewhere upstairs, the youngest wailed in long pent-up fear.
Carl Jensen lay on the kitchen floor. A bullet had cut a trail down the outside of his left leg. His wife Patsy was trying to administer first aid and failing badly while her eldest son shouted at her.
"We should call 911!" her son Johnny said.
"They will know then!" Patsy cried. "They will come and take us again."
"Not if I kill them first," Elise said.
Silence fell on the kitchen. The only sound was the wailing of the boy upstairs.
Bethy recovered first. "You can't just go around shooting people."
"Why not?" Elise asked. "I do it all the time."
"Are you some kind of sociopath?" Bethy cried.
"No, she's a law officer of the highest order." Cabot drifted in behind Elise. It surprised her how quietly he could move. Considering how his last brush with a Wicker in a kitchen ended, he was most likely spooked.
"Interpol?" Bethy said as if doubting the authority of the police agency.
"God." Elise put the first-aid kit down beside Patsy.
The woman flinched away. "Please don't hurt us. We didn't want to do those things. You got to believe us. Garland was a monster. He made us do horrible things. We were like remote-controlled toys to him and he took pleasure in breaking his toys. Please. It wasn't us. It was Garland."
"Yes, I know. That's why I shot him." Elise opened up her first-aid kit. It was a good thing that she'd restocked yesterday after dealing with Cabot. She would need to stock up again soon at this rate. "How long has..." What was the name Patsy used? "How long has Garland been holding you captive?"
"Twelve days. We were at Sangertown Square to get snow boots for the boys. He walked up and looked at us and said 'oh, you'll do nicely' and that was it. He had us. We didn't even know that we should run from him. He seemed nice at first. It only seemed a little odd that we needed to leave with him."
Nearly two weeks? The Wickers had been in the area longer than she'd thought. Horrible for the Jensens but good news for her. They'd been held long enough to know useful information.
"How many are in his coven?" Elise cut open Carl's bloody pant leg, exposing the long narrow wound. Edges of the denim were stuck in the wound, embedded by the bullet. He was bleeding too much for just gauze. "Bethy, find me some clean towels."
"I'm not sure. They're all monsters." Patsy smeared her husband's blood on her face as she wiped at the tears running down her cheeks. "There was Garland and his mother and his uncle Reed. Reed is dead. There was a girl. Daphne. She's dead too. I'm not sure how she was related to Garland. The news is saying Reed was her father but that wasn't true. Her father was someone named Linden, who was killed when she was a baby."
"What's his mother's name?" Elise wanted to know how many Wickers were still alive. Bethy had said that Daphne's mother was Dahlia, or at least, the woman pretending to be the grieving mother.
"I don't know. We never saw her; he talked to her on the phone. Garland would mostly say 'yes, mother' and 'no, mother' to her."
"There's one in Europe," Johnny added. "Garland's brother or cousin. His name is Heath. First thing Garland did when he found out that Daphne had been killed was to call Heath and tell him to come back. They had a big fight on the phone. We couldn't hear what Heath was saying, but Garland kept shouting at him. He said that Heath had to be in Boston when they put the leash on the lost heir."
Cabot growled dangerously. If Joshua was Ilya Tatterskein, then he might have inherited Boston from his father, not Seth. "Where in Europe? Belgrade?"
"Yes!" the boy cried in surprise. "How did you know?
"The Prince of Belgrade was killed by a large breach," Cabot explained to Elise. "The king left Friday morning to close it. None of this insanity would have happened if Alexander wasn't distracted."
The Wickers were on a tight timeline then. They needed to finish what they planned before the Wolf King returned to United States.
"What did he mean by leash?" Elise couldn't get the bleeding to stop. It soaked through all the gauze that she had in her kit before Bethy returned with a stack of folded bath towels. They were going to have to call 911 and get Carl to a hospital. Her window of questioning was closing quickly.
"I don't know," the boy said. "Please, I really don't. All I know was after Garland hung up, he kept shouting 'Not me! it won't be me!' And then...he...he...he made us...he made us do horrible things."
Elise didn't want to ask the nature of the acts Garland forced them to commit. Witches could dream up horrendous torture to display how complete their control was over their puppets. It made it less likely that the humans would disobey a command even when the witch didn't have full control over them. The historical records had given Elise nightmares when they covered it during her training. She didn't need new dreams.
"Daphne, Reed, Garland, Garland's mother, and Heath." Elise listed out the names they'd given her, starting with the Wickers that were safely dead. They still hadn't mentioned Dahlia. "Any others?"
"Rose," Patsy said. "She comes and goes. They're always saying that: where the hell has Rose trailed off to now? They treat her like she's some kind of bad weed. She's an older woman."
"She's at the Hillcrest Manor," the boy said. "It's a bed and breakfast. When Garland called his mother last, he told her that Rose and Cecily spent yesterday taking their dog to the vet to be tested for rabies and then getting it stuffed and mounted. Who does that to their dog?"
He misunderstood what had been done to the Thane Samuels.
"Is that all?" As if three wasn't enough to straighten Elise's hair. Four if Garland's mother wasn't Dahlia.
"I don't know," Patsy whispered. "I don't think so."
The boy shrugged even as he shook his head.
Elise changed the gauze for the stack of clean towels. "Here. Put pressure on this. Don't let up!"
She pulled Bethy into the living room. "He needs to be taken to the hospital or he's going to bleed out. Call 911. Once the ambulance gets here, don't let the kids out of your sight. Children often commit suicide after what they've been through, especially teenage boys. They feel like they should have protected their mother or siblings better. Make sure the people at the hospital understand that the family was held hostages for weeks."
"Me?"
"Yes, you." It would keep Bethy out of Elise's hair while she hunted for the remaining Wickers. "There was another family that Garland was holding. Find out what happened to them. They'll need intervention too if they were held more than a day or two."
* * *
She shouldn't have loaned Cabot her phone.
Somehow the Thanes decided that her number was his new contact information. The first call came as they were climbing into her Jeep. She frowned at the unrecognized number.
"That's Haji. Thane Tawfeek." Cabot held out his hand. He answered her phone with, "Cabot. Yes, for the time being, this is the number you can reach me at."
She was never going to be able to use her phone again. If he blithely assumed that a single use of her phone meant he could commander it, what else would he assume was his for the taking?
Garland's body after Cabot killed him flashed through her mind. He rendered the warlock into pieces in seconds. He'd obviously been trained to tear people limb from limb. Considering that anyone that he didn't kill instantly would become a feral werewolf, it should be no surprise. She'd been taught to kill humans but it was with blades and bullets. The intimacy of Cabot using his mouth unsettled her. It stressed how much faster and stronger he was than her. She shouldn't have told him that she was interested in him. At least, not until she knew she could trust him. He'd
growled at her when he found out she knew where Joshua was.
He growled again, a dangerously loud noise in the tight confines of her Jeep. This time his anger was at the Thanes. "Yes, that's Seth's number but he's not answering his phone. Did you check with the Albany pack? Well, what did they say?" Cabot listened for several minutes before saying, "If Seth told them to leave him alone with the new marquis, then they should do it! Alexander sat on Seth for almost a month while he had alpha amnesia. Isaiah told them what? Oh, for Christ's sake, he can try to take Seth back to the city. No, I'd be happier knowing Seth was safe back at the Castle, it's just that I doubt Seth will allow that. If Isaiah doesn't want a public beating, he'd better give Seth at least a full day or two with the new marquis."
Cabot explained the fight with Garland and what they found out at the Jensens. "I'm heading to the bed and breakfast. The Jensens didn't know anything about what had been done with Samuel's body. The warlock that was holding them was trying to recover Joshua. The newborn. The warlock had made a huntsman that the Grigori killed and some snitches to spy on the boy's adoptive family. A pair of witches took Samuels' body from the vet's. We're hoping they're at the bed and breakfast with his skin."
Cabot listened, shaking his head. "The Wickers were in the area for at least two weeks before the Ithaca police called Bishop. They knew that wolves were incoming; they set a trap for both me and Samuels. They knew that Ithaca contacted the king; they had puppets there. The only reason they would let the information leak out was because they wanted it to. They wanted a Thane here. They wanted the newborn and for some Godawful reason, Samuels' body. I think Albany might have been simply collateral damage---although they might have realized that we wouldn't be able to find the body without Albany's help. Certainly it means they've eliminated any chance for us to find them easily in Utica, but there's no way they could have predicted that Albany would be the one to trigger the booby-trap."
Cabot was right. The Wickers could have kept the Ithaca police department from calling the Wolf King. The Wakefields had planned on Joshua becoming a werewolf. They intentionally wounded the boy so that the Thane had no choice but change him to save his life. It was an insane plan requiring impossible timing. If they killed the werewolf too fast, then Joshua would have died of his wounds. It explained the anonymous 911 call so that the rescue teams arrived just as Joshua awoke. The EMTs were there to save Joshua's life in case the plan had failed.
It would have been a much easier task if the Wickers had been working with a willing subject. If the Wakefields had raised infant Ilya, they could have been able to condition him to be a sacrificial lamb.
The question remained, what did they plan to do with Joshua now that he was a werewolf? Elise could call Clarice, get her to focus her genius on the problem. To do that, though, she needed her phone back from Cabot.
He was gazing at her with a slightly sorrowful look. Her phone was nowhere in sight.
"What did you do with my phone?"
He patted at his pockets. "I was five when the Prince of Moscow sent his daughter Anastasia to Boston to marry my Uncle Gerald. She was thirteen, as headstrong as you'd expect a princess to be, and not happy about being sent to a country that didn't speak Russian. Because she was so young and didn't speak English, she lived with my family. My grandmother had been from Saint Petersburg and my father was fluent in Russian."
Elise wasn't sure why he was telling her this. Anastasia had been Joshua's biological mother, murdered by Wickers when she was just nineteen. Elise had known about the arranged marriage but she hadn't actually considered all the logistics. What were the wolves thinking, putting children that young into marriages? Shipping them off to foreign countries to live?
Then again, was it much different from her family? Elise flew to Greece when she was thirteen to take her vows as a Virtue and receive her daggers. Elise had pledged herself to God, not a boy on the onset of puberty, but she wasn't that much different from Anastasia. At least the other girl had the future of being Princess of one of the strongest territories in the world. It should have been a life of wealth and luxury with a large extended family. Elise had gotten a loft apartment, meals alone, and a depressed vampire as her only constant companion. Not to knock Decker, but he was a sad shadow of the man she remembered as a child.
Cabot was now checking the Jeep's various drink holders and change bins for her phone. "I don't remember what my parents told me but I distinctly recall asking my Grandmother Tatterskein why this strange girl had suddenly moved into the bedroom across the hall from mine. Nana said that Anastasia was the bride for the heir. Somehow, I decided that this meant she was going to marry me. To be fair, she was in my house, not Gerald's. I took some money from my dad's wallet and marched over to Macy's---scaring my family to death when I vanished without a word---to get an engagement ring."
How very sweet, but a little sad. Cabot had always been clueless.
It was also becoming obvious why Cabot didn't have his own phone on him. He'd gone back to patting his pockets. "It took a few months for me to get things straightened out in my mind. We settled on big sister and little brother. She didn't like Gerald at first; it was later that they fell madly and completely in love. Their fights at school until then were legendary. One time she time flung this two-hundred-pound stone statue at him. Nearly killed him. It was one of the matched set of wolves that used to guard the front gate, so there's just this one wolf statue sitting there now. You remind me of her when you're angry."
Was this a good thing? Why was he telling her this?
"I think because she felt so isolated, she bonded closer to me than a teenage girl normally would. For the first two years, we were inseparable. I was jealous of Uncle Gerald when she finally fell in love with him. She knew I was feeling left out, so for nine months she made me part of her pregnancy. She took me to the sonogram. She let me feel it when Ilya started to kick. She even tried to let me pick his middle name, but Gerald wasn't buying Boba Fett. When Ilya was born, she made sure I was the first person to hold him after her and Uncle Gerald, even before my grandfather. Ilya was the tiniest thing I'd ever seen. She told me that I needed to protect him. That he would be my beloved baby brother just like I was hers. It was the first time I understood the term 'love at first sight.' Five days later, they were both gone."
The Wolf King hadn't sent a Thane to fetch Joshua, he'd sent the one person in the world who would move mountains to save him. Why hadn't Alexander told Cabot who he was looking for? Was it simply that the king had been distracted by the events in Belgrade or did he not want Cabot rushing blindly into danger? Certainly if Cabot had known it was Ilya at the barn with the Wicker, he wouldn't have played Rock-paper-scissors with Samuels. Cabot would have died at the barn instead of Samuels.
And she hadn't told Cabot where Ilya was. Still hadn't---not exactly.
"Joshua---Ilya---is in Boston. The Wickers sent a huntsman after him but we killed it. I have him where he should be safe from them. That's why the warlock came after me; he wanted to know where I had the boy hidden. I don't trust Bethy, though, to keep anything secret. She's a complete loose cannon with no clue what's going on."
"Who the hell is she?"
"Ilya's adoptive sister. She's doesn't know a thing about Wickers or werewolves. She's just trying to find her brother."
"Oh!" Cabot sat with a slight stunned look on his face as he thought back over the last few hours. "Okay. I couldn't understand why you were obviously lying. I thought you were trying to keep the information from me and doing a terrible job at it."
Note to self: subtlety was lost on the man.
"I'm sorry for being angry with you." He checked his door bin and found her phone. He held it out to her. "I'm sorry about your phone too. I lose mine so often that everyone is used to me improvising. They'll stop using this number once I call them with a different one."
"Apology accepted." She'd nearly pistol whipped a man yesterday for pointing a camera in her direction. Cabot had his
heart ripped out at ten years old. She'd be a hypocrite if she couldn't forgive him growling a bit.
At least he demonstrated that he understood boundaries.
* * *
She pulled off the road into a cornfield before the driveway to Hillcrest Manor. According to the Jensens, the Wickers had taken over the bed and breakfast nearly three weeks ago. "How are we going to do this?"
"I'll scout ahead." Cabot pulled off his T-shirt.
"Oh, God," Elise whispered without thinking. After half a day, she'd gotten used to seeing him with clothes on. Shirt off was a whole different category of sexiness. Did he lift weights to achieve that chiseled physique or did it just come with the package deal? She'd never seen an overweight werewolf. Her breath caught as he undid his pants button.
"What?" He paused, hands on his pants zipper.
Elise stared at him for a minute before remembering what she was going to say. You always considered your grandfather a pervert. "I won't know if you run into trouble. No phone, remember?"
"Wolves can't use phones anyhow." He tugged his borrowed blue jeans down.
She blushed and looked away. Wolves. He's a wolf; only sometimes a stunningly sexy man. "Cars make effective weapons against Wicker constructs. I'll drive up."
"Be careful." He got out of the Jeep before stripping off his underwear. He tossed them onto the seat and shut the door.
She forced herself to watch him become a wolf; own what he was. He started to kneel. His body shimmered like the illusion that it was. The gleam became darker as his form blurred and changed shape. The color shifted from celadon to jade to obsidian. A wolf snapped into focus, larger than any found in the wild, covered in black fur.
See, he's not a human being. He's a magical being that just pretends to be human.