Fair Game aao-3

by Patricia Briggs

  Beauclaire nodded politely. ‘Some mortals do. Some of them make it just fine when horrible things happen to them. Some of them …’ He shook his head and took another sip of his beer and then said with quiet savagery, ‘Sometimes broken people stay broken.’ He looked at her. ‘Why am I telling you all of this?’

  Anna shrugged. ‘People talk to me.’ She didn’t know what else to say, so she followed her impulse. ‘I’ve been where Lizzie is, brutalized and terrified. Someone rescued me before my captors were able to kill me. Next to that … losing something she loves is tragic. But she doesn’t seem to be the kind who will think that she would be better off dead – not in the long run.’

  Beauclaire looked at his glass. ‘I’m sorry to hear that you had to be rescued.’

  She shrugged again. ‘That which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?’ It came out sounding flippant, so she added, ‘I knew a woman when I was in school. She was smart, a talented musician, and hardworking. She came to college and found out that those weren’t enough to make her a first violin, or even a second – and she tried to kill herself because she had to sit with the third violins. It was the first real disappointment she’d ever had in her life and she didn’t know how to deal with it. Those of us who live in the real world and survive horrible things, we emerge stronger and ready to face tomorrow. Lizzie will be okay.’

  Beauclaire frowned at her. He looked away and then said, ‘You might visit her and tell her that.’

  She didn’t want to. She wasn’t a counselor and she didn’t like talking about what had happened to her to strangers – though it hadn’t stopped her tonight, had it? Anna was okay because Charles found her and taught her to be strong. Lizzie would have to find her own strength, and Anna didn’t know how to tell her where to find it.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she promised reluctantly. She was exhausted from being on display, and from thinking about things she’d tried to put behind her. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go visit the ladies’ room.’

  She left Leslie talking to the fae and let herself out of the banquet room. Away from the noise and the room full of mostly strangers, Anna felt better. She’d use the restroom, eat the food she’d ordered, and go home.

  When she came out of the restroom, she wasn’t pleased to see that Agent Heuter was leaning against the wall next to the door. There was no one left in the restaurant proper – it must have closed at ten. So she and Heuter were alone in the hallway next to the entrance for the room where the party was still going strong.

  ‘So you are the heroine of the day,’ he said.

  Something in his voice didn’t track and she frowned at him. ‘Not really, no. If you’ll excuse me?’

  But he stepped in front of her. ‘No. I don’t think so. Not today.’

  And someone who wasn’t there grabbed her from behind and sent her to sleep.

  11

  Anna woke with a sickly sweet taste in her mouth that spread into her nose and up through her sinuses, deadening anything else her nose might tell her.

  Nausea and a rotten headache vied with the silver collar and high-silver-content, medieval-style cuffs and chains for the honors of the most miserable distractions. Anna tried to remember what had happened that had left her chained up like someone’s extreme BDSM fantasy in a human-sized cage that hung in a large empty room. It was dark, and she was alone.

  She’d been talking to Heuter, who’d been acting weird. And then … jeez. Had they really chloroformed her? Decades-long killing spree, witch’s magic, rare old scary fae bloodlines – and they used chloroform. Several times, if her vague memories of waking up in the backseat of a car were accurate.

  That just seemed so … mundane.

  She rose to her hands and knees – and that was as far as the chains would let her go. She let the burn of the silver and the desperate need to upchuck her dinner keep her from panic as she tried to think around the headache for a plan of attack.

  Lizzie had been raped within hours of when they took her. It was almost the first thing that they had done. And that was the thought that made Anna throw up.

  As delicious as the food in Isaac’s Irish pub had been, it didn’t taste very good the second time around. She managed to get most of it out of the cage, but enough lingered on her hair – for some reason having her hands cuffed and chained had impeded her ability to keep her hair out of her mouth – and had spattered on the edge of the floor that it added to her misery.

  And then she wondered if she was as alone in the room as she had thought. She hadn’t been able to see or smell the fae who’d been guarding Lizzie’s prison on the island. Panic threatened and she forced it down because it wouldn’t do her any good.

  Charles would be looking for her by now. But when she tried their bond, it was closed as tight as it ever had been. Didn’t he know she was missing? Isaac would tell him right away. But what if Isaac didn’t know? What if Heuter told him that Anna had decided to go back to the condo on her own? But that didn’t make sense, because Isaac would be able to tell Heuter was lying – and Heuter knew that. He’d have to stay as far out of the way as he could so he didn’t give himself away to the werewolves.

  So why hadn’t Charles opened the bond between them?

  There was noise outside the cavernous room and Anna crouched low, trying to quiet her breathing and slow down her pounding heart so she could hear through the closed doors and the walls. They were talking pretty loudly so it wasn’t too hard to get most of it.

  ‘… pretty one. I like the women and the pretty ones best.’

  ‘I thought you had decided you were a superhero, Bulldog?’ Heuter’s voice was mocking.

  ‘It pays well,’ the stranger said. ‘Better than janitorial work. Never got a blow job for cleaning a floor; got one for saving that hooker from her pimp. This one we got now is pretty. Isn’t she pretty?’

  ‘Not as pretty as the one you let get away,’ said Heuter.

  ‘Not my fault. Not my fault. That big wolf – he was going to kill me.’ There was an edge of hysteria in the man’s voice and an odd cadence to his speech pattern. ‘You never said they’d have a monster with them. Killing werewolves isn’t hard. I killed all of them Uncle Travis sent me. Why is that one so hard to kill?’

  ‘The witch did something,’ said Heuter. ‘Used some kind of magic so the wolf could see you, and it must have made him stronger. The girl we got tonight is his wife.’

  ‘He’s going to be so mad at me.’ He sounded scared.

  Heuter headed it off at the pass. ‘He has to find us first. This will be the last one for the year, and then we’ll move on.’

  ‘I get her first,’ said the man who wasn’t Heuter. Anna was pretty sure that Heuter was not the fae – surely Beauclaire would have been able to tell if he had been. She decided that the other man must be the fae. Neither of them sounded old, and Lizzie had told them that one man was older – and if Anna decided one of the speakers was the fae, no unseen person could be watching her from the shadows.

  ‘I get her first because that wolf hurt me. I get to hurt her. I’m going to take her until she understands who’s boss. I’ m—’

  He continued in that vein, working himself into a frenzy as he used fouler and fouler language to describe her fate in ugly detail. Anna deliberately tuned him out. She’d learned how to do that shortly after she’d been Changed and there had been no Charles to save her from the crazy bastards in the broken Chicago pack.

  She couldn’t feel Charles. He was going to be too late, and that would destroy him. She tugged on the chains, but they’d held werewolves before and there was no way she could break them. Blowing on her hands to ease the burn, she thought about how Isaac had said that his wolf Otten had been waiting for a chance and the killers hadn’t given him one.

  She couldn’t afford to wait – she had to make her own chance. Because Anna had been a victim once upon a time, and she was damned sure never going to be one again.

  Despite
her determination, she was scared. Her chances weren’t good – these men had managed to kill a lot of people, werewolves and fae, some of them considerably more experienced at protecting themselves than she was.

  The sick, acrid smell of her terror burned out the last of the chloroform from her nose and she grabbed her fear, the lingering pain of the headache, and the ache that was seeping into her muscles from the silver. She pitted it all against the metal cuffs that held her – neck, wrists, and ankles – and called on the change.

  These were not a pack of werewolves; they were human and fae. Raping Anna when she was a wolf was an entirely different proposition from doing the same to her when she didn’t have freakishly sharp teeth and claws that would be a credit to any cougar on the planet.

  The change always hurt. Always. And she’d long ago learned to use the pain to bully her way through the freaky feeling of her bones stretching and bunching, of muscles growing and teeth sharpening that was so much more intolerable than mere pain.

  This time the change was worse than usual.

  Her throat buckled under the pressure of the silver collar. Then it rehealed and buckled again, trapped inside a metal band that was too small to contain it. She thought she’d just stymied her kidnappers by killing herself when something in the more-fragile mechanism of the lock finally broke, sending a piece of metal flying. The collar fell away from her, hitting the floor and bits of chain with a harsh clank.

  Sucking in air like a bellows, she still had to hold on to her thoughts and make her arms that were becoming her front legs move at just the right time while her hands were still hands but after her arms had slightly reshaped in order to get out of the wrist manacles. Her wrists bled and she panted, trying to keep quiet, as she dragged herself free of the two-inch-wide silver bands that imprisoned her. She didn’t worry about the cuffs on her ankles because they were wider and the wolf would just step out of them.

  She waited, but there was no pause in the conversation outside. Either they were too involved to notice, they expected her to be making some noise, or their ears were too human to hear through the walls the way she could hear them.

  She lay spent for a moment – then realized that moment was dragging on into the next without any further change happening. Dangerous to stay half-shifted, though some of the most dominant wolves could do it for a while. She scrambled for a way to continue the change, but her body was exhausted, shaking with the need for food and …

  They had doped her up with something. Mostly werewolves were immune to drugs and alcohol. Their metabolism just ran through it too fast, but they had given her something, probably a whole lot of something. GHB or Rohypnol, maybe – or some sedative designed to keep her passive. It had been no match for the adrenaline surge that the thought of being helpless in the hands of rapists and murderers had brought – but it had stalled out her shift.

  Pain came in waves, because her body wasn’t meant to be caught between for this long. Fluids, clear, pink, and bright red, began to leak onto the floor of the cage. She reached out for Charles and found the moon instead.

  Tomorrow would come the night of the full moon, when her song was too strong to resist, but tonight she was waxing and full of strength that she lent to her daughter who asked. With a painful jerkiness that scraped chain and manacles loudly on the bottom of the cage as her muscles flexed and tore and reshaped themselves, Anna restarted her change.

  Charles was deep into his work. Brother Wolf loved the hunt even when it was on computers instead of in flesh and blood. Both of them could smell their prey, weak and quivering just out of their reach. So the first knock on the door elicited no more than a growl of annoyance.

  It was Brother Wolf who noticed something was wrong the second time the knock came. Even buried in the endgame of his hunt, his senses were still on alert, and they told Brother Wolf that the smart FBI lady, the smart FBI man who tried very hard to be underestimated, the fae whose daughter had been hurt, and the local Alpha were knocking on his door – and they were all supposed to be with his mate, who was not here.

  Anna. Charles reached for her, but he couldn’t touch her through their bond, not even through their pack bond. With his help, his ghosts had well and truly isolated him.

  Enraged and terrified for Anna in equal measures, he opened the door knowing his eyes were showing Brother Wolf. ‘Where’s Anna?’ he growled.

  Isaac was supposed to make sure no one hurt her while Charles worked. The temptation to blame the Olde Towne Alpha rose and was banished. Anna was Charles’s; she was his to protect and he had failed. Brother Wolf wanted to charge into the night and kill until they found her; Charles held him back with the knowledge that there were better ways to find Anna faster – and that blood would flow when he did.

  ‘We were hoping you could tell us,’ Isaac said. ‘She went to the ladies’ room and never came back. You two are mated, right? Can you tell where she is?’

  Charles tried again. Right there and then, with the others still standing in the doorway, he tried again to open up the bonds he’d closed to protect her.

  Nothing. He tried harder, tried until it hurt worse than the change. He growled and tried again – and felt the ghosts who haunted him howl in triumph. He turned and walked almost blindly until he stared into the big mirror in the bedroom. The ghosts were unrecognizable, having melted into one creature with fifty mouths and twenty hands that were busily tying the ribbon of his bond into knots.

  We can kill her no matter how you try to protect her, it told him, its voices high and vicious. Your fault, your fault we died, your fault she dies. One voice started laughing, and then the others continued until there was an unholy cacophony in his head.

  There was a drip of blood leaking out of Charles’s nose and the whites of his eyes were pink from broken blood vessels – it made his yellow eyes look particularly bizarre.

  ‘Did you try to track her?’ he asked Isaac, as Charles continued to stare into the mirror, his voice so low and rough he didn’t recognize it as his own. He stuffed his rage into a small icy place and promised it release if it would let him work right now. He would be cold and controlled until he found where they had stashed his Anna – and then he’d take them down into small, bite-sized chunks.

  ‘Yes,’ the Olde Towne Alpha said. Charles turned away from the mirror to find Isaac watching him warily from the relative safety of the living room as he continued to explain. ‘I trailed her into the ladies’ room and out again. Then she walked about two feet the wrong way if she intended to go back into the party – which she did, because she’d ordered another round of fish and chips according to the waitress who delivered it – and then her scent trail just ends. Like Otten’s did.’

  Isaac must be a good tracker. It was unusual for a wolf that new to be able to trail that well, even in wolf form. No matter how good he was, Charles was better.

  The computer hadn’t confirmed his guesses yet, but he was only waiting for the final nail. He considered going after the people he had decided were behind the killings – but if he was wrong, it meant Anna would stay in her kidnappers’ hands while he chased down the wrong trail. And then there was the problem that the people he was looking at had nearly Bran’s resources and he would need—

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Leslie asked in a quiet voice that nonetheless interrupted his thoughts. ‘Why is he bleeding like that? Do you see his eyes? They weren’t like that when he opened the door.’

  ‘I don’t have a clue,’ Isaac said in a calm voice. ‘Look, you two, you don’t stand a chance if he loses it. You stay out here, back, out of the way – keep your guns out and watch. If he looks like he is headed your way, just shoot – and make sure your shot counts. If he’s the wolf I think he is, he’d rather be dead than have you become collateral damage. And if he’s far enough gone that he’s taking out civilians, he’s not going to be much help to Anna anyway.’

  ‘Civilians?’ said the male FBI officer, sounding offended. Brother Wolf might h
ave known his name, if he had cared. But his mate was missing and he cared for nothing and no one except for that.

  Isaac ignored him – maybe he’d fallen for that tired, worn-looking mien, but Brother Wolf knew better. He recognized a fellow predator in the male FBI agent, even though Goldstein – the name rose up when he called for it – Goldstein was no threat to anything Charles cared about.

  ‘Humans are civilians here,’ said Charles. To himself he sounded calm. ‘And you might listen to Isaac, though I don’t think I’m far enough gone to hurt our allies. Isaac, I should be able to find her – but I’m not going to be able to use our link tonight.’ His throat shut down as Brother Wolf fought to the surface in a panic at Charles’s admission.

  Anna was missing. Anna was in the hands of the people who’d hurt the little dancer. His Anna who’d already survived so much – he’d sworn nothing like that would ever happen to her again when she was theirs. And they had failed, Brother Wolf and Charles, two souls sharing one skin … They had failed their mate.

  Charles convinced Brother Wolf that they had a better chance of finding Anna in man-shape rather than as wolf, but it took more willpower than he knew he had to do it.

  ‘He can’t find her?’ Leslie asked.

  ‘I told you it wasn’t a sure thing,’ Isaac told her. ‘The mating bond is a very personal thing.’

  Isaac was doing a good job of keeping his Alpha nature tamped down; his voice was soft and nonthreatening. Brother Wolf liked Isaac, but just now would not be a good time to interest him in proving who was more dominant. People got killed in fights like that – and Brother Wolf was craving violence just now.

  ‘You also said if it didn’t work, we might be in serious trouble,’ said the tough little dancer’s fae father. ‘Because there isn’t a person in this city more dangerous than a wolf whose mate is in danger. Are we in serious trouble?’

  Yes, thought Charles. He needed to do something urgent – but Brother Wolf’s rage was clouding his thoughts. He needed to get to his computer and confirm—