Missing, Suspected Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective

by Rachel Graves

  Which lead to another problem; how did I keep the werelion baby a secret until I found its parents? Because if I was a mama werelion and my baby went missing, I wouldn’t be too picky about how I dealt with the people who had him. No, I’d claw first and ask questions later. I needed to keep the Osceola gossips occupied or in the dark until I had some serious leads.

  And that was another big problem: I had only one slim lead. With the way society was it wouldn’t be an easy case to crack. I mean sure, supernatural citizens had jobs, houses, kids, lives but really, you wouldn’t just come out and tell someone you were what you were. Not if you wanted to keep moving up the corporate ladder or if you didn’t want to wonder when the other shoe would drop. That wondering, that giant debate of how people will treat you once they knew was a personal fear of mine. I’d never come out of the broom closet to my parents. Gina knew, but only because I didn’t have a choice at the time. Jo knew, but again that wasn’t by choice. Ted, well, I had a choice there, and I took the chance. Who would the werelion’s parents have taken a chance with?

  I drained the last bit of coffee in my cup and headed for the relative privacy of my car. My cell phone’s memory could hold hundreds of numbers, I only used a handful. The one I dialed now, I knew by heart.

  “Garcia, IA.”

  “Good Morning to you, too.”

  “Hicks?”

  “Yeah. I need a favor, about a missing person’s case.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Missing baby, actually, and he’s a werelion.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah.” My mind boggled at the enormity of the situation. “So you’ve got nothing on a missing baby werelion?”

  She didn’t even take a minute to check. “Nothing.”

  “Let me know if you get anything, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  “And, Garcia, if anyone else asks, let me know, but don’t tell them about me?”

  “Will do.”

  I started scrolling through my phone, a second coffee resting in my car’s cup holder. I wanted to spend some time checking things out before I rushed off to confront the breeder. Maybe I’d find a werelion group or a forum for werelion moms. I daydreamed about a detailed website talking about the missing baby giving me everything I needed to know with pictures. I didn’t get one, and in the middle of helpful but not perfect websites, my phone sang out the “Ballad of the Green Berets”. My mom’s ring tone filled me with dread. When I answered, a baby cried through the speaker.

  “Mom?”

  “Lizzie, hang on.” I tried to understand the noises in the background, more wailing, maybe a thump, then a bit of controlled sobbing. “What do I feed this kid?”

  “Baby food?” I tried. She sounded exhausted.

  “He’s three months old! He should still be on formula.”

  “Okay, so try that.”

  “I did. He spit it up. All of it. And then he started screaming.”

  “So baby food?”

  “You only brought me a few. I started with peas. They’re all over the wall now and he’s still screaming.”

  “Okay, okay, just calm down,” I panicked. I needed more time to track down the kid’s parents. If he wasn’t going to eat, I only had few hours.

  “Isn’t there someone you can call? Someone with experience with these things? Maybe a support group?” She sounded really tired. “When you girls were little all the neighborhood moms had babies, we talked to each other.”

  “Right. Someone with experience with werelions.”

  “Not just lions maybe, were-anything? I mean werejaguar is hereditary, too.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There was a guy on TV. Maybe if you called the station, they could give you his number.”

  “I doubt a guy knows much about how to take care of a baby.”

  The wailing in the background went up a notch, then abruptly silenced.

  “What happened?”

  “Your father took him,” Mom said, with a tone that told me I’d screwed up. “Your father, the guy who knows how to take care of a baby.”

  “Right. I was being sexist.”

  “I don’t tolerate that, Lizzie.”

  “I know. I know. Can we focus on the crisis at hand though?” That was Mom for you, any moment could be a teachable moment. What we needed was someone who knew about were-creatures, someone who’d seen them grow up. It hit me. “Let me call you right back, okay Mom? I’ve thought of someone who might be able to help.”

  Her goodbye didn’t sound happy, but I didn’t have time to reassure her. Instead, I dialed the spa and got lucky when Ted picked up. “What do baby werewolves eat?”

  “I don’t know.” I heard a door shut, and imagined him in the tiny store room of the spa, the phone hanging on the wall. “The Pack didn’t change anyone until they were thirteen.”

  “Shit.” No good answer there. What was I going to do?

  “Is there a problem with a baby werewolf?” Ted asked.

  “Actually, a baby werelion.”

  “Oh, try meat.”

  “Meat?”

  “Meat,” he confirmed. “Were-anything needs a lot of protein. If you’re really stumped, we could call Sebastian, but he’s going to want to know why you’re asking. Sort of like I want to know.”

  “Let me text Mom real quick.” I sent the text and my mother’s almost immediate reply questioned my sanity. She agreed to try steak baby food, which apparently was a thing. Instead of asking about it, I sent her a thumb’s up then went back to my phone call. “Thanks, lover. Mom’s going to try it.”

  “Does this have anything to do with the lion cub in your apartment last night?” Ted’s voice sounded cold.

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Have you talked to LaRue?”

  “I haven’t gotten him yet. I’m really hoping he didn’t know. If he did, if he bought a person…”

  “Then we’d both be really pissed off, and he’d know it. No one’s going to ask a veteran of the Morality Wars to traffic anyone, not even a werelion. LaRue’s not that arrogant.”

  “I hope so.” If he was, it would probably end my friendship with Jo forever. It might end LaRue or me forever, too.

  I took highway 138 out of town, ignoring the scenery and traffic around me. My mind was on another highway, one in a miserable pocket of Eastern Europe where I’d met, and killed, my first traffickers. After my squad pumped them full of more bullets than was needed, we nervously advanced on their area—a wide spot in a road with some crappy concrete block buildings and a bunch of trucks. Big trucks, like the kind you saw on interstate highways; and though I didn’t want to remember it, the smell came back to me. The stench of unwashed bodies and too many humans pushed into too small a space. My radio played classic rock, but I heard the sound of a metal door rolling up and the muffled cries of the women and children inside, twenty of them, or maybe fifty, pushed into the truck when our squad arrived. I couldn’t be like the men who put them there. I wouldn’t be part of anything like that. The baby was going back to his mother, and anyone that tried to sell them or anyone else wouldn’t be breathing for long.

  I deliberately relaxed my hands on the steering wheel, unclenching white knuckles. Traffic was light. In less than an hour, I turned off the highway onto a dusty side road. Sand collected beside the faded asphalt lane, no other cars came my way. A turn, and then another turn, my GPS worked perfectly. I arrived in the middle of several acres with a few tall trees and more dusty California clay.

  A concrete sign roughly as long as my car announced the Predator Breeders Associated, “where education and entertainment promote conservation.” A few cracks here and there, along with chips in the paint didn’t exactly scream high class. When I walked in the front door, the woman in a tiger embossed sweatshirt offered me a smile.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so. I’m wondering if you sell lions?”

  “To some people.” Her eyes
gave me a long look up and down, judging. “What kind of a lion do you want?”

  “Actually, I’m looking to find out more about one that was recently sold.”

  Her eyes tightened, the wrinkles on the sides becoming more pronounced as we regarded each other in silence. Her hair was dyed red, badly. It didn’t match the deep brown leather look of her skin or the three silver earrings. Curvy. Medium height. Mostly I noticed that she didn’t trust me.

  “It’s not illegal to sell large animals.” She bit the words out barely opening her mouth.

  “I didn’t say that it was.” I picked the chair with the fewest rips in the fake leather and sat down in front of her desk. “My friend bought a lion, and now he’s asked me to look after it for a few days. I’m curious about the process. I want to make sure I’m taking good care of the little guy.”

  “Your friend brought a lion from us?”

  “I think so.”

  “And you’re not from PETA, here to ruin my day?”

  I shook my head and tried to look innocent. “I’m looking after a baby lion and I want to know more about him.”

  “A baby?” Her voice went up on the end, like I’d just said something impossible.

  “Sold to Jean-Laurent LaRue, he would have picked it up last night.”

  She relaxed, slumping back in the chair. “I remember him, nice man.” Her mouth opened a little and she licked her lips. I suspected LaRue had worked his charm and failed to mention his wife.

  “So you sold him the lion?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Oh I intended to, I assure you of that. Mr. LaRue was too convincing to say no.” She stopped, lost in some memory.

  “But?”

  “But he insisted on a baby and we’re fresh out. Lion cubs are like that. We’ve got teenagers, yearlings, but no babies. I gave him the name of some private rescue groups.”

  “Can you give me those names?”

  She hesitated, her forehead wrinkled probably over some internal debate. “Sure, I guess, it’s public knowledge and all that.”

  I decided to just come out and ask, “Why are you so worried?”

  “We get trouble with animal rights groups about some of the people we sell to—people who do nasty things to the animals.”

  From her expression, she expected me to know what the nasty things were. I didn’t. “Like what? Hunt them?”

  “Like sleep with them.”

  My eyebrows went up as my jaw went down. There was no way to disguise my shock.

  “It’s disgusting, isn’t it? People get their kicks like that.” She shivered, then rubbed her hands up and down her arms as if the idea left her cold. “We’d prefer to sell to zoos or circuses but it doesn’t always work out. With private owners you never know. Except for Mr. LaRue, he convinced me that wasn’t what he wanted.”

  “So the list?” I prompted.

  “Sure, hold on.” She opened a desk drawer, flipped through three folders, and then pulled out a sheet. I took it from her, reading the photocopied page. “We don’t take cats back. There’s just not enough room. If someone buys one and then regrets it a week later, we give them the sheet.”

  I nodded, looking at the list of names: six places, five in the area, one down in San Diego. “Can I ask you something?”

  “I guess,” she said, her guard back up.

  “Why do you do this?”

  “It’s a job.” Her lips drew back in a resigned half-frown. “At first I thought it was a calling. I was going to help save the tigers. I fed them, I looked after them. But then I realized, people really don’t give a shit, not deep down. We’re trying to keep a species alive, and all they want is a fancy house cat or something to impress people at a party. So it turned into a job. Show up, clean the cages, serve the meals, and try not to wonder about the kind of home they’re going to. I mean at least the movie studios—”

  The turning of the knob on the front door stopped her. Silhouetted against the light, a tall, fit man dressed entirely in black leaned in with a smile. “Morning, Jeannie.”

  “Mr. Raven,” she nodded.

  They both looked at me. I sized him up: black hair, with a little white in it, silver hoop in his ear, and a thin smile that was probably supposed to give me the impression he was dangerous.

  “I was just leaving.” I discreetly folded the paper and stepped toward the door but he didn’t move.

  “You don’t have to. We might have,” he paused deliberately, “tastes in common.”

  “I doubt it.” I pushed by him, doing my best not to touch him. I didn’t want to know what went on in his head.

  At a coffee shop down the highway, I started making calls. They all got the same story: my friend adopted a baby lion and I was trying to find out more about the cub. I went through two coffees before I gave up. Every group had a long vetting process with interviews, required letters of recommendation, and home visits. One of them didn’t give cats to private citizens under any circumstances. LaRue couldn’t have gotten the cat from a rescue group without manipulating someone’s mind. Would he do that sort of thing? Sure, but I’d bet he was good enough at it that the victim would have no clue the next day.

  Outside, the sun started to slip from the top of the sky. LaRue would be awake soon, and, hopefully ready to give me some answers. Sometimes we were close confidantes, intimate friends with no real romantic inclinations. Despite all his flirting, I’d told him no once, and I knew he would respect it. But our friendship didn’t always come first for him there were times when he made me feel like the hired help. Defining what we were wasn’t easy, but if he’d bought someone, that unnamed relationship was over. I checked my gun, pulling out the clip, then slapped it back in trying to get that hint of gun oil in the air. Shooting him wouldn’t kill him, but it would hurt a hell of a lot. If he knew what he’d asked me to do, he deserved to hurt.

  6

  The traffic that stalled my trip owed its existence to a stopped car. With a few curses for the people who slowed down to look, I switched routes and headed directly to Mom’s house. Coffee for lunch and not much of a breakfast, made the smell coming from Mom’s kitchen a little piece of heaven. Somehow, with all the distractions of a baby in the house, she’d still cooked a perfect dinner, exactly on time. I loved my mom. I really, really did.

  “How’s it going?” I called out as I walked into the kitchen. The dining room table just past the kitchen counter was set for three, so I grabbed an extra plate. There was no debate about if she made enough for me to join in, Mom liked to feed people. God help me if I ever stopped swimming and doing magic, I’d gain fifty pounds before I even realized it. Tonight’s dinner exemplified her cooking style: meatloaf, a heaping bowl of mashed potatoes, green beans with almond slivers, and a large salad with red ripe tomatoes. I smelled apple pie for dessert. I drooled a little as I started to sit down.

  “Call your sister first,” Mom admonished me.

  Undaunted, I walked to the swinging kitchen door, opened it and yelled, “Gina, dinner!”

  “That wasn’t what I meant.” Mom looked at me in disbelief.

  “I’m starving. I had to skip lunch,” I complained, and it worked. Mom pushed me toward the table.

  Dad came in from the living room, setting a book down on the counter. “Lizzie,” he acknowledged me with a smile.

  “Hey Dad.” I kissed him on the cheek and grabbed the mashed potato bowl. “Where’s the—”

  “Who’s the best baby in the world? Who is,” Gina cooed at the little blond moppet.

  “Gina, he’s supposed to be napping.” Mom rolled her eyes.

  “But he woke up and kicked his feet at the ceiling and I knew that meant he wanted to come join us.” She turned from us to the baby. “Doesn’t he?”

  “Don’t let Jeremy see you do that,” I warned her. “He probably wants ten of ‘em.”

  My comments earned me a dirty look from Gina but a smile from Mom. She took the baby from my sister and put him in the playpen.
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  “I got the picture you wanted,” I told Gina.

  “Oh great, that’s good. Hey, do you want to come?”

  “Of course, she does, Gina, she’s your sister,” Mom finished for me. “I’m sure she’s almost as excited about the bridal shower as you are.”

  That was all it took for Gina to talk wedding stuff for the rest of dinner. I appealed to Dad with my eyes, hoping he would take over the conversation, but I had no luck. Dad rarely put more than five words together, whether the topic was the war or my sister’s wedding. I asked Mom to pack my pie to go, hoping to sneak away when Dad stopped me.

  “It’s getting late.” His eyes shifted to the playpen in a pointed look.

  “So what?” Gina asked.

  “The baby probably needs a diaper change, want to help?” I asked her. She wrinkled her nose and announced she needed Mom to look at a wedding website. Mom let herself be led off, leaving Dad and me staring at the baby.

  “Cute onesie, Mom get it?” The baby wore a white onesie with tiny blue, pink, and green dots. I started taking it off, preparing for the sunset.

  Dad nodded.

  “I take it you know what’s going to happen here?”

  He nodded again.

  “And you’re okay with watching?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Right.” I cleared a space in the freshly scrubbed playpen then put the naked baby on top of a blanket. Together, Dad and I watched as skin stretched, then split, rippling away to reveal fur underneath. His pink baby gums grew long pointed teeth. In less than a minute, a lion cub sat in front of us.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that?” I shook my head.

  “A few times. Be careful with this one, Lizzie, you never want to get between a mother and her baby.”

  The lion cub and I went back to my place. He climbed all over the car, exploring everything, licking my arm and then pouncing on his own tail. If you forgot he was only hours away from being a kid again you could get caught up in all the kitten cuteness. Back in the crate LaRue had bought him, he sacked out. I didn’t like the idea of a baby being in a crate, but the apartment wasn’t kitten proofed. And wasn’t a crate just a playpen with a top? The justification felt slim even inside my own head, and guilt had me reaching for my phone, desperate to talk to the arrogant vampire who’d put all of us in this ugly situation.