Missing, Suspected Dead: Elisabeth Hicks, Witch Detective

by Rachel Graves

  “Tell me what I can do, tell me how you want…” I stopped, because my magic felt something different, no, someone different.

  “What?” All of Ted’s features shifted, his hand reaching under the pillow for his gun. Before I could reply, we heard a knock at the door.

  “Do you want to answer that?”

  He shook his head.

  “Should I?”

  “Probably not. Any idea who it is?”

  I reached out with my magic trying to get an impression. “No one I know. No one I’ve met. If I had to guess, I’d say…someone young, and scared. Teenager breaking curfew, maybe?”

  He looked at me for a second, then rolled out of bed. I followed him without a sound.

  We were two feet from the front door when a voice outside spoke.

  “It’s me. I mean, uh, I’m alone.” It came through the door female, young, and nervous.

  “Amy?” Ted asked as he opened the door. I caught a glimpse of a woman in the porch light, long brown hair falling down her back, smooth sepia skin, and then Ted was hugging her.

  When he stepped back, she smiled, and hope radiated off her. “Hey, Teddy Bear.”

  “Teddy Bear?” I asked before my brain told me to shut up.

  Amy smiled at me. “Your boyfriend used to bring me stuffed teddy bears in the hospital. Every week, I’d get a new one, and since his name was Edward…”

  She let her voice trail off so I looked at him. She’d given me half the story. I wanted the rest.

  “This is Amy,” he introduced her to me as if the name made sense.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” I said still clueless but not wanting to be rude. “Why don’t you come in?”

  “Oh that’d be great. I wouldn’t want Sue to catch me out here.”

  “Sue? Wait you’re a wolf?”

  “Only a few days out of the month,” Amy grinned, but my confusion didn’t fade until she added, “I’m the girl he rescued.”

  “The girl he… Oh.” I hadn’t recognized her, not healed, with her clothes on. She was the girl was from his nightmare.

  “And I’m the boy you rescued. I never would have called the FBI if it wasn’t for you.”

  Amy shook her head and they started what sounded like an old circular debate. She and Ted had a beer, while I played with a bottle but didn’t really drink. After Sue’s performance, her threats and abuse, I wasn’t about to relax with any werewolf. I kept my gun close, but did it subtly.

  “So you’re with the Pack?” I asked.

  “No way,” Ted answered for her, but from her spot on the couch Amy blushed. He caught it and mumbled a colorful set of curse words.

  “Just, hear me out, okay? After college, I sort of wandered around a bit, trying to decide what to do with my life. People didn’t really get it, they wanted being a werewolf to be like some religion that you only worry about on weekends. I never really fit. With the Pack I do, and,” she dropped her voice, slowing down to emphasize her words, “They changed.”

  Ted’s face filled with disbelief.

  “Okay, not completely, Sue’s still…well you know how she is, but there’s a lot of new people now. The whole place is different. I’m in charge of helping victims transition. Can you even imagine the old Pack having someone to do that?”

  “No,” Ted admitted.

  “There are families, some with little kids and Vincent’s got a real classroom now, and—”

  “And you want me to come,” Ted cut her off without a drop of emotion in his voice.

  “No. Well, yes. But no.” She threw her hands up, frustrated. “I don’t want Sue to force you to go but I do want your help. I don’t have any right to ask you but, would you at least think about it?”

  “I…”

  “You know what, I should let you think, alone, or with uh…”

  “Elisabeth,” I supplied.

  “Right, thanks.” She shot me a grateful smile. “Besides, Sue doesn’t know I’m here. In fact, if she asks, you don’t know I’m with them. At all.”

  “She makes you sneak around?” I asked.

  “It’s just easier,” Amy shrugged.

  “And you hide that from a psychic?”

  “She’s not nearly as all powerful as she thinks,” Amy confided. “She’s going to spring me on you at breakfast tomorrow. At least that’s the plan. You’re supposed to see me and realize we’re all one big happy family.”

  Ted snorted.

  “I don’t like her games, but she thinks you’re the only way to solve the problem and…I don’t want to disappear.”

  Amy didn’t get a hug goodbye at the door. Apparently, asking for Ted’s help took her visit out of the friendly column. We headed back to the bedroom, rechecking all of the locks on the way.

  “She’s a werewolf?” I asked, when we were back on the bed.

  He nodded, but didn’t speak for a minute. “When they…hurt her.” He swallowed and I remembered how bad it had been, how terrible she had looked. “That was the point of it all.”

  “And she changed.” I took his hand and drew him to sit on the bed. “But you still visited her?”

  “She wasn’t like them. Wasn’t part of that. She was a victim.”

  “What about now? Does joining up with the Pack make her one of the bad guys?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought about it for a minute. “Maybe.”

  He stared at the ceiling, and I let him think. He’d never go for Susan, the dangerous animal that was his mother. But helping Amy, the girl he’d saved, wasn’t such an easy choice.

  “Do you want me to stay tonight?” I asked after a few minutes of quiet.

  “No, I’m not fit for company. In fact, you should get out of here and let me brood over it all.”

  “Are you sure? What about nightmares? We could talk more about this.”

  “We could, but really there isn’t much more to say. I go or I don’t, I just have to make the decision.”

  “Whatever you decide, I’ll back you up on it.”

  “I know.” He kissed me. “I’ll call you about it, okay?”

  “Okay.” I kissed him, then held him tight for a second. “I love you.”

  I walked out of the bedroom, watching him. The whole time we were talking he’d kept his hand under the pillow, probably on the gun filled with silver bullets he kept there. Tonight, I guessed he’d sleep with it in his hand.

  Calvin saluted me at the top of the stairs, running off like he had someplace to be. Inside the lion cub sat only a few feet from where I’d left him, his butt completely filling the milk bowl.

  “Nice.” I opened the door and shouted out toward the street, where Calvin could probably still hear me. “Thanks for leaving me a mess.”

  The darkness didn’t reply to me, but there might have been a quiet chuckle. After a few deep breaths, I took the kid for a bath in the sink. The cuteness factor just kept getting higher, with adorable wet kitten antics like trying to lick the water coming out of the faucet. Calvin was right when he said I didn’t have a maternal bone in my body, but the kitten was too darn cute to ignore. After I toweled him off, he slid around on the linoleum for a second, all paws and no traction, before making it to the living room.

  I watched him, relaxing against the counter until claws went into the couch then I raced over and scooped him up. The ball of fluff wiggled in my arms for a few seconds before he tucked his face against my chest and went to sleep. Putting a baby in a crate still felt wrong, but he’d climb out of Gina’s old playpen or any crib on the market. Guilt-ridden and wet from old milk mixed with bath water, I hit the shower, hoping the hot water would help me feel better. Nothing could drown out my anxiety though, and the lock on the front door got checked twice before I went and my gun stayed on the bathroom sink.

  The water washed away the day, but not the thoughts from it. I didn’t know how to help Ted. It would be great to talk to someone who had been there, but how many boys were kidnapped by a werewolf pack? That had to b
e a pretty small group. And really it wasn’t about the kidnapping. When you got down to it, the important thing was that his mother turned her back on him when he was being beaten and then later when she didn’t come home with him. He had some industrial-sized abandonment issues hiding under all the other stuff. I’d never dealt with that sort of thing. I stepped out of the shower wondering if perusing some psychology websites would help.

  I grabbed a white terry cloth robe Ted had brought me from the spa. Standard issue there, but a luxury for me. Wrapped in soft fluffy whiteness, I took a towel to my hair. I got a feeling, a silly notion, that I wasn’t alone. Putting the gun into the robe pocket I took a deep breath, and looked myself in the eye in the mirror. Yes, you were kidnapped. Yes, it was terrible. But it isn’t a reason to go around jumping at shadows. You’re safe. If anyone was out there the werelion would make a noise.

  A long high-pitched meow let out from the living room.

  I bolted into the room, hand on the gun, adrenaline pumping, only to run into the hard, cold chest of a man I knew all too well. Instead of stepping back, he wrapped his arms around my body, folding the two of us into an embrace.

  “You smell divine,” LaRue told me, inhaling deeply. “What is that?”

  “Soap.” I counted to ten in my head as I pulled away. “Jean-Laurent I could have shot you.”

  His look told me he didn’t believe it. I lifted the gun out of my pocket to prove it.

  “That would have been unfortunate.”

  “You think?” I took two more steps back, to glare at him better.

  “I have been shot before,” he shrugged. “I recovered.”

  “Right, but I haven’t shot you. When that happens, I intend to enjoy it. Not feel like an ass because you startled me into it.”

  He threw his head back in a long laugh. I waited, wanting to shoot him the whole time, and then demanded to know why he’d arrived.

  “You called. I came. Is it not always this way?” He was next to me again, his hand cradling a damp curl of my hair. “Have you not seen how quickly I run whenever you call?”

  “What about this morning?” I backed away, taking the piece of hair with me. “I left like twenty messages with Samuel.”

  “I received none of them.” He paused thinking about it. “Was it urgent?”

  “Very. The cat you got Jo? It’s actually a werelion.”

  “Impossible!”

  “Possible. Wait around long enough and you’ll see it for yourself.”

  “I purchased a lion cub.”

  “From a reputable dealer?”

  His look told me otherwise.

  “Uh-huh. How’d you get the cub?”

  “The breeders lacked inventory so I found a private sale.” His eyes locked on the cub for a second. “We need to get this child back to his mother.”

  “Amen. Can you get me the details of the sale? Any names, places, times? Anything?”

  He nodded. “The information is in my office.”

  “Great, let’s go get it.”

  “Elisabeth, he needs as much care as any other infant.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You would leave him alone here?”

  “Of course not!” Guilt tickled at me. Hadn’t I done exactly that before I’d known he was a kid? Was that any better? I squished the feeling down. “He’ll come with us.”

  “Josephine would see him.”

  “You’re still worried about spoiling some surprise?”

  His green eyes filled with absolute disdain.

  “Fine.” I thought for a minute about all of the would-be babysitters I knew who could handle it. “Douglas?”

  LaRue nodded, and vampire magic brushed by me like silk against my skin. I took a second to enjoy the feeling, then reminded myself of some important facts. We were friends, not lovers. I’d told him we never would be, and I meant it. He respected that. Now my stupid hormones needed to shut up. But seduction and arrogance aside, his magic felt damned good. Unfortunately, he knew it.

  “Douglas will be here soon. How should we amuse ourselves, dear Elisabeth?” He stepped closer to me, deliberately moving slower. “More of the same?”

  His magic slid across my skin, working its way under the bathrobe I wore, around my thighs and up higher. Magic and sex felt almost the same, but LaRue was not the man for me. Hell, he wasn’t even a man.

  “No.” I made my voice firm. “I’m going to go get dressed. You’re going to wait out here.”

  “Of course,” he agreed. But before I was out of the room, he stopped me. “Elisabeth?”

  “Yes, Jean-Laurent?”

  “I will punish Samuel for his rudeness to you.”

  “Not for me, I don’t want to be part of that master and servant power trip,” I told him as I shut the bedroom door, but inside, where he couldn’t see me, I smiled.

  In my room, I hastily grabbed a pair of fresh jeans and a new shirt. My hair got about three minutes worth of attention, but even that turned out to be too much. By the time I made it back out to the living room, LaRue taunted the kitten with one of my towels while Douglas looked on.

  “You boys having fun?” I asked from the doorway. It was as domestic a scene as my living room was likely to get: two vampires, one young, one old with a baby lycanthrope on his lap. I grinned at the way LaRue didn’t bother to hide his joy at the simple game and the way Douglas looked pained. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  “I’m allergic to cats,” Douglas moaned.

  “You were allergic to cats. Now, you have no allergies,” LaRue chastised him.

  “You sure?” LaRue had changed Douglas almost a year ago, but my friend was still feeling his way around being a vampire. It didn’t sound like he trusted his maker all that much.

  “Have you had a cold or a headache since you turned?” I asked. LaRue didn’t look up from the kitten.

  “I guess not.”

  “See, nothing to worry about from the big bad putty-tat.” I shook my head at him.

  “Very funny, Hicks.” Douglas gave me a dirty look before he turned back to LaRue. “Anything I should know?”

  “You might need silver bullets.” I turned to get them but now it was his turn to laugh. “Right, vampire, no need. You have a great night.”

  LaRue had flown to my place, and while I did wonder what it felt like to soar through the clouds, I wasn’t up to finding out tonight. Instead, I gave into the gleaming chrome and purple siren singing from beneath a canvas tarp. “I’m going to take the bike. I guess I’ll meet you there?”

  LaRue studied the machine, then ran a tentative hand down the wasp-waisted shape. The stroke bordered on sensual, his fingers barely touching the metal. “It’s not silver?”

  “Just silver colored, but I’m sure motorcycles are beneath you.” I unclipped the helmet from the seat back and swung a leg over. “And there’s only one helmet.”

  LaRue’s eyes locked on me, while his fingers drummed on the outside of his thigh. I deliberately ignored the body language to roll the bike off the stand.

  “Do you have any idea how that motion looks?” LaRue’s voice sounded gruff and that probably wasn’t from the helmet.

  “It’ll take me about an hour.” I leaned forward and goosed the engine when a light weight settled behind me.

  “Do tell me where to put my hands, dear Elisabeth. I would hate to presume.”

  I ground my teeth. Never should have given him the opportunity. “Around my hips.”

  “For an hour you say? How delightful.”

  The engine raced as if it knew how much I didn’t want LaRue to be delighted. I fishtailed out of the parking lot, taking the curves with more speed than I should, reckless and bratty. LaRue didn’t notice. My arm could cramp, my leg could lock up, we could hit a tar snake or a patch of damp and skid out. His hands would probably never leave their place on my hips. I wanted to hate every minute of it, but LaRue was good with his body. He melded into the bike, keeping his weight balanced. His
cool form moved with mine, close and confident. When the ride was over and he got off, I almost missed it.

  “Tell me, Elisabeth, do I still remind you of the snake?”

  I shook my hair out from under the helmet, then set about locking the helmet in place again. “It was a cobra.”

  The memory came back: a giant albino cobra with wonderful iridescent scales, shifting and turning, living in a glass box in Turkey. I’d wanted to stroke that skin, to know how it felt under my palms and see those scales in the sunlight. But it would kill me the minute I tried. LaRue and the cobra were equally desirable and deadly.

  “So you said. Remind me, what became of the cobra?”

  “I shot it.”

  His fingers were on the back of the bike, oblivious to the possibility of being burned. “But you touched it, didn’t you? You satisfied yourself.”

  “Sure.” I blew its head off, then took it outside while the strong muscles still twitched. It’d been after a fight. I must have been feeling feral because I wanted to skin the snake and keep it forever. Of course, I moved on instead; it was obvious the snake would look like hell in just a few hours.

  “Shot, but then handled and still remembered, one might even say loved, years later,” LaRue mused. “Not a bad end.”

  I shook my head and gave him a dirty look. It was just like him to know he reminded me of the snake but twist it into something sexy, especially after the ride we’d just had. The man didn’t just have issues he had a subscription. Actually, that might be helpful tonight.

  “Can I ask you something? Something intimate?”

  “I always hope you will,” he immediately replied, his voice smooth.

  “Not like that, it’s just personal.” I waited for him to change his mind. When he didn’t, I plowed ahead. “Your mother abandoned you in the street, right? I mean, that’s how you got your name and all. Did you ever find her? Later? How’d you work that out?”

  “I never looked for her.”

  “Really?”

  “She was my past. I concerned myself with the present, and when my situation improved, the future.”