Текст книги "Fair Game"

Автор книги: Patricia Briggs

Соавторы: Patricia Briggs
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Brother Wolf grew more interested in her bedroom. She was as much the prey he hunted as the one who took her was. Maybe something he could learn about her would help in their search.

On the wall were some framed art photo prints of dancers, and eight of them were black-and-white photos set in a circle. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were immortalized in a moment when Ginger was up in the air, a huge smile on her face, and Fred had a sly grin. Another black and white was of the scene fromDirty Dancing that caught the primary actors on hands and knees, staring hungrily at each other– though the tension of their pose told the observer that they were still in the midst of a dance. A number of other dancers he didn’t know, mostly couples in a wide variety of dances from ballroom to tribal to modern. In the center of the circle of photos was a poster-sized image that dominated the room.

The photographer had caught a male dancer in mid-flight, stretched across the canvas in a gracefulY. His feet at the lower left-hand corner were slightly out of focus, giving the photo a sense of aliveness and making the stillness of the rest of it more profound. The dancer’s left arm, farther from the viewer, was stretched out to the top right, and his right arm, nearer to the viewer, flung back to the top left corner. His head was bowed, the line of his body so pure and straight he might have been swinging from the rope of a pirate ship. His muscles were flexed and straining, yet somehow he managed to give the impression of being relaxed, at peace.

Unlike the others, it was in color, but just barely, as if someone had filled it with shades of brown. The loose white shirt he’d worn looked cream, his tights were taupe, and the backdrop came out a dark brown rather than black. A warm, beautiful image.

Rudolf Nureyev, supplied Charles.

‘Brother Wolf,’ called Anna from somewhere nearby. ‘Charles? Could you come here for a moment? I think I smell something.’

She was standing out in the hallway, next to the bathroom, a thoughtful look on her face.

‘What do you smell?’ she asked him, and when she did he came another step closer and caught it, too.

Terror, he answered– and tried again, closing his eyes to shut out other senses.Blood. Her blood. And

A low growl rose

And his.

She had fought her attacker, the little dancer had. It was only a small drop of blood, but it was enough.

He licked it– feeling the scent rise up as soon as his tongue touched it, breaking the magic of concealment that had tried to hide even so little of the man who had come here to do harm. A man, but not human, or not wholly human. The bitter flavor of magic in the blood made his tongue tingle. He would recognize this man when he smelled him again.

Half-blood fae, he told her.

‘We probably should have left that blood for the FBI labs,’ said Anna, her tone a little rueful.

My hunt, Brother Wolf assured her, though Charles agreed with Anna.My rules. That last was as much for Charles as for Anna. He looked at the closed bathroom door. If he’d been stalking her, he might have waited in the bathroom.Would you open the door so I can seek him there?

She wrapped her hand in the tail of her shirt and opened it. At first he thought there was nothing to find, that the woman’s attacker had awaited her somewhere else.

Then he caught a faint trace of excitement, something he felt almost more than scented– and a hint of something else that brought Charles to the fore, drawn by something he understood better than the wolf did: spirits.

Some homes had spirits and some did not, and neither he nor Charles knew why that was. Spirits weren’t ghosts; they were the consciousness of things that Charles’s da didn’t believe were alive: trees and water, stones and earth. Houses and apartments – some of them, anyway.

This one was faint and shy, better for the shaman’s son to deal with rather than the wolf.

Show me, said Charles to the spirit of the house.Show me who waited here.

The condo was new. It had not been a home for generations of children, so the spirit was weak. All it was able to give them was an impression of patience and largeness, so much larger than she whose home this was. Clean smelling– no, that was wrong; he smelled of cleaners. He carried a

something.

Something? Charles was patient with it.A weapon? Brother Wolf provided the smell of a gun, oil, powder, metal.

Swift negation and a response, an answer more sensory than in words: something soft, mostly textile, with only a hint of metal.

A bag, like a gym bag, Charles thought, picturing such a bag carefully in his head, and the spirit all but jumped for joy, providing more and more information about the bag. As if by naming it, Charles had pulled a cork out of the bottle of what the spirit knew.

He brought a bag, Brother Wolf told Anna– triumphantly, because he’d been right about the stairway.A big canvas bag, and stuffed our missing woman inside. He carried her down the stairs, which is why I could only smell her along the walls.

‘He has no scent?’ Anna asked, having caught something of what he’d found. Her voice sent the shy spirit fleeing.

He hid his scent with magic that feels something like fae magic, Charles told her.

Brother Wolf thought of the bitter taste that still lingered on his tongue from the kidnapper’s blood.It also feels like witch magic, black and blood-soaked.

Charles agreed.It feels less

civilized than the fae magic I’m familiar with.

‘Would a witch have been able to carry a full-grown woman down twelve flights of stairs?’ Anna asked.

Maybe not directly, answered Charles after a moment of consideration,but there are ways.

‘Early in the hunt,’ said Anna.

Exactly, agreed Charles.

‘Who do we know who knows a lot about fae and their magic?’ asked Anna. ‘Would Bran know?’

We have a better source, suggested Brother Wolf.Her father is old and powerful.

‘He reached for a sword,’ Anna said. ‘Is that how you could tell he was old?’

Brother Wolf supplied the memory of the scent of creatures that were older than a few centuries, a light fragrance that grew richer.

Old, explained Charles.

And then they gave her what power smelled like among the fae, beginning with something weaker and increasing until Charles told her,That is strength. But they are subtle creatures, the fae. They cannot add to their scent because they, for the most part, cannot smell it. However, when they conceal what they are, sometimes they can also obscure what we can smell about them. This one smells old, but he smells as weak as is possible for someone who still smells like fae.

‘So a fae will probably not smell more powerful or old than he is,’ said Anna, ‘but he might smell weaker. Like the way Bran enjoys hiding what he is.’

Brother Wolf huffed out an affirmative sneeze. Charles added,I think it might be a good thing to discuss this with Lizzie’s father – when there are no humans present.

‘Discuss how powerful he is?’ asked his mate, a corner of her mouth twitched up. She knew what Charles had meant – she had a silly sense of humor sometimes. Brother Wolf liked that about her. Charles, however, was in a more serious mood and treated her question as if she’d really meant it.

No. Discuss with him what kind of fae would fit the parameters we have been given for this serial killer.

Brother Wolf sneezed to let her know that he thought she was funny.

‘Did you find something?’ asked Leslie as Anna let Charles and herself out of the apartment.

Anna looked at the techie-type police officers who awaited them and wondered if it was the serialkiller angle– or something about the missing girl’s father – that had brought out the big guns on a missing person’s case where the victim had been gone for only a few hours.

‘Yes,’ Anna said, answering the FBI agent’s question. ‘Whoever took her is fae

or has some access to fae magic. He concealed himself in her bathroom and waited for her to come to him.’

After gesturing the waiting forensic team into the condo, Leslie took out a small spiral notebook and began scribbling things down in it. She didn’t look up when she said, ‘What else did you find?’

‘He came up unobserved. A pure-blood fae could have come up looking like anyone else, probably someone who actually lives here,’ Anna told her. It was speculation, but that was what she’d have done if she could conceal herself the way the fae could. They had several variants of the ‘don’tlook at me’ magic that were stronger than pack magic was, but glamour, the power that all fae shared, was more than that – a very strong illusion. ‘However he arrived, he left with his prey in a gym bag and carried her down the stairs.’

Leslie looked up at that.‘He carried her down? Twelve flights of stairs?’

‘Without dragging her,’ Anna said, putting a finger on the hallway wall about the height that Brother Wolf had been tracing. If he had been carrying her with his arms hanging down

he was more than human tall. Anna didn’t say that, though, just told Leslie the facts. ‘Our perpetrator doesn’t leave a scent, so we were pretty confused at first.’

She glanced at the missing woman’s father, who stood at parade rest, his gaze on the floor. ‘Because he didn’t leave a scent, it might have been someone who had been to the apartment before, someone she knew – but it didn’t have that feel. He took her by surprise in the hall in front of the bathroom. She fought him – fought hard. There’s a pretty good ding in the drywall next to the bathroom door. But she was no match.’

He used a drug, Charles said.I caught a hint of it in the bathroom.

‘What did the wolf just tell you?’ asked Alistair Beauclaire. His voice must have been quite an asset in the courtroom, cool, even, and beautiful. If she had been human, without her senses to tell her better, she’d never have known that her words had hit him hard – he’d been hoping it wassomeone he could track down.

‘The kidnapper drugged her.’ She looked at Charles. ‘Do you know what he gave her?’

Smelled like ketamine to me, said Charles.But it isn’t my area of specialty.

She related his answer and caveat to their listeners while she thought about how to get Lizzie’s father alone to discuss matters away from human ears.

‘I am sorry we cannot be of more help,’ Anna said. ‘As you know, we have a stake in this – and no one wants another person dead. Perhaps if we knew more about the fae who took her or what exactly the killer was doing to his victims.’ She paused and said delicately, ‘Or is that “killers”?’

Agent Fisher gave her an assessing look while Mooney, the only regular police officer left on scene, cleared his throat harshly. Beauclaire looked at her with interest.

Anna met his gaze and said with no particular emphasis,‘We’ll find him, but the more we know, the faster we can be.’ She turned back to the FBI agent and told her, ‘If you need to get in touch and my phone rings through, you might try Charles’s.’ She rattled off the number, which had a Boston area code because Bran thought that advertising they were from Montana was a mistake.

Leslie Fisher’s face grew speculative before it returned to neutral. She’d caught that Anna’s slip had been on purpose, but she didn’t comment out loud.

‘You might as well go home,’ Fisher said. ‘If you think of anything else, give me or Agent Goldstein a call.’

6

Anna locked their door and took the collar off Charles, laying both it and the leash on a small table against the wall.

‘If her father is an old and powerful fae, why can’t he find her?’ Anna asked.

Perhaps his power doesn’t lie in that direction, answered Brother Wolf.Or there is something blocking him. I do not know a lot about fae magic, other than to say that no magic has answers for everything. It is a tool. A hammer is a good tool, but not useful for removing screws.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy that.’ She pulled off her shoes and finger-combed her hair. She was tired. ‘Can you tell me what’s wrong with Charles?’

Brother Wolf looked at her and said nothing.

‘I didn’t think so,’ she said. ‘Charles, how can I help if you don’t let me in?’

You cannot help, Charles replied.

She sucked in a breath.‘Did you just lie to me?’ She wasn’t sure, but it hadn’t felt like the truth, either.

Brother Wolf looked away.Charles will not let you help.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘There. I lied to you, too.’ It wasn’t fine, not even close to fine.

We should be human when the fae lord comes, Brother Wolf said, finally.

Anna didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. After a moment, Charles began changing back. It wouldn’t take him long, five or ten minutes. The blood of a Flathead shaman meant that it took him a lot less time to change than any other wolf she’d met.

It hurt to change, hurt more when you did it back and forth in only a couple of hours– and Charles hadn’t been in a good place when he’d started. Anna could feel the pain he was in – faintly, because he’d never let her feel it all if he could help it.

It was better to leave him alone for a few minutes. It was better to remove herself from the temptation of a real fight, especially when they could have visitors at any time. And they weren’t back to square one, either. Their bond lay open between them, a testimony that he was better than he had been.

It was four in the morning. She debated showering and getting dressed– or brushing her teeth and going back to sleep. She didn’t make it to the bathroom. The bed was still rumpled from when she’d left it earlier, and it was too inviting to resist.

She crawled under the blankets and buried her head in Charles’s pillow. She felt more than heard when Charles came into the room. He paused by the bed and patted her rump lightly, and something inside her relaxed. ‘Don’t get too comfortable, Sleeping Beauty,’ he rumbled teasingly, sounding like his old self. He might not be letting her help, but he was making progress just the same, despite his decision to retreat behind Brother Wolf earlier. ‘We’ll have company sooner rather than later. You made the fae an obvious offer to give him information the FBI won’t, and he won’t wait until a polite time of day to come calling. I doubt he’ll sleep much as long as his daughter’s fate is uncertain – I wouldn’t.’

She waited until the shower started before pulling her head out from under the blankets. No. Charles wouldn’t rest while a child of his was in danger. If he had children.

Female werewolves couldn’t carry babies to term. The moon called and they changed to wolves, the violence of it too much for the forming child. She’d asked Samuel, who was a doctor, about staying in wolf form for the full term instead. He’d paled and shaken his head.

‘The longer you stay a wolf, the less the human rules. If you stay wolf too long, there is no coming back.’

‘I’m an Omega,’ Anna had told him. ‘My wolf is different. We could try it.’

‘It always ends badly,’ her mate’s brother had said roughly. ‘Don’t, please, talk to Charles or Da about it. The last one was brutal. There was a woman

She managed to hide from Bran until it was too late. A werewolf isn’t a wolf, Anna, who will care and protect its young. When we finally tracked her down, Charles had to kill her because there was nothing of humanity left, only a beast. He backtracked her to the cave where she’d established her den. She’d given birth, all right. And then she’d killed the baby.’

His eyes had been raw and wild, so she’d changed the subject. But Anna had her own thoughts on the matter – Brother Wolf was no unthinking creature who would eat his young, and she was pretty sure her own wolf was gentler still. But there was no need for desperate measures yet.

The werewolves were out to the world now with no further need to hide. There were ways for couples who could not have biological children for one reason or another that would work for werewolves as well as humans. Right now, with the public so ambivalent about werewolves, it would be difficult to try to use a surrogate to carry their child. But they could afford to wait awhile for public opinion to change.

‘For public opinion to change about what?’ asked Charles as he opened the door of the bathroom to let the steam roll out. He had a towel wrapped around his waist and was drying his long hair with another.

She didn’t have to answer him because someone rang their doorbell. The fae was supposed to call them; she’d left her number. Apparently he’d decided to drop in uninvited instead.

Anna hadn’t undressed, so she ran her fingers through her hair and started toward the door. Charles moved in front of her and dropped the towel he held to the floor.

‘No,’ he said.

She rolled her eyes, but said,‘Fine. I’ll wait for you.’

He dressed quickly without apparently rushing while she watched him. Watching Charles dress and undress was one of her favorite things to do– better than wrapping and unwrapping Christmas presents. Werewolves were, as a whole, young, healthy, and muscled – all of which were attractive characteristics. But they all weren’t Charles. His shoulders were wide and his dark skin had a silklike sheen that invited her fingers to touch. His long, black-as-midnight hair smelled—

‘If you don’t stop that,’ he said mildly, though he paused with his shirt just over his shoulders so she could see the way the smooth muscles of his back slid down into well-fitted jeans, ‘our gentleman caller might have to wait awhile longer.’

Anna smiled and reached out to run a finger down his backbone. She pressed her face against his cotton T-shirt and inhaled.‘I missed you,’ she confessed.

‘Yes?’ he said, his voice soft. It got even softer when he said, ‘I’m not fixed yet.’

‘Broken or whole,’ she told him, her voice dropping to a growl, ‘you’re mine. Better not forget that again.’

Charles laughed– a small, happy sound. ‘All right. I surrender. Just don’t go after me with that rolling pin.’

Anna tugged the shirt down and smoothed it.‘Then don’t do anything to deserve it.’ She smacked him lightly on the shoulder. ‘That’s for disrespecting my grandmother’s rolling pin.’

He turned around to face her, wet hair in a tangled mess around his shoulders. Eyes serious, though his mouth was curved up, he said,‘I would never disrespect your grandmother’s rolling pin. Your old pack did everything in their power to turn you into a victim, and when that crazy wolf started for me, you still grabbed the rolling pin to defend me from him, even though you were terrified of him. I think it is the bravest thing I have ever seen. And possibly the only time anyone has tried to defend me since I reached adulthood.’

He touched her nose, bent down—

The doorbell rang, an extended buzz, as if someone was getting impatient.

Eyes at half-mast, Charles looked at the front door the same way he would a grizzly or a raccoon that had interfered with his hunt.

‘I love you, too,’ murmured Anna, though she found herself at least as grumpy about the interruption as Charles could possibly be. ‘Let’s go see what Lizzie’s father has to say.’

The doorbell rang again.

Charles sucked in a breath of air, ran his fingers through his wet hair to get rid of the worst of the tangles, glanced in the mirror on the wall, and froze.

‘Charles?’

His side of their bond slammed down so fast she couldn’t help a faint gasp, but not so quickly that she didn’t see that his motivation was singular and huge: he wanted to protect her. Charles didn’t look at her, and when the doorbell rang again, he stalked out of the bedroom.

She stood where he had, in front of the mirror, and tried to see what it was that had disturbed him so much. Men’s voices and a woman’s rushed past her ears. The mirror was beveled, set in a plain but well-made frame, and in it she saw herself and a reflection of the walls of the room behind her. There was an original oil painting of a mountain on the wall to the right of her, next to the door to the bathroom. Directly behind her, cream-colored lace curtains hung over the window, still dark with night’s reign.

What had he seen that he wanted to protect her from?

By the time she got out to the living room, Alistair Beauclaire was already inside the condo– and so were Special Agents Fisher and Goldstein.

‘I thought,’ Beauclaire was saying, ‘it would save time to have us all meet together and put all the cards on the table. My daughter’s life is more important than politics and secrets.’ It was, from a fae, a shocking move. Anna hadn’t had much to do with fae, but even she knew that theynever gave a shred of information to anyone if they could help it.

Beauclaire looked at Charles; he had to look up.

‘I know who you are,’ the fae told Charles. ‘You just might have a chance of finding her, but not if we’re all tripping over the secrets we cannot tell.’ He glanced over to pull the FBI agents into the conversation. ‘If you withhold something that would have allowed us to find Elizabethone minute sooner, you will regret it. We will talk this morning about things that outsiders do not know – trusting you to use this to stop the killer.’

Leslie’s eyes tightened at the threat, but Goldstein absorbed it without a reaction, not even an increase in heartbeat: he just looked tired and more frail than the last time Anna had seen him.

‘I assure you,’ Goldstein told Beauclaire, ‘that it is our mission to see that your daughter is found quickly. If we didn’t agree with you, we wouldn’t be here. No matter what favors you called in.’

Anna wondered how the FBI or Beauclaire had figured out where she and Charles were staying. The condo belonged to a small company that was wholly owned by a larger company, and so on ad infinitum. The whole thing was owned in turn by Aspen Creek, Inc., which was the Marrok.

Appearing unannounced was a power move, sayingYou can’t hide from us. It seemed a little too aggressive for the FBI: she and Charles weren’t suspects. Anna thought it was more likely that Beauclaire was responsible for the early-morning visit, looking to establish dominance with his unannounced invasion of their territory – claiming the point position on the hunt for his daughter. She could see what he was trying to do, but it wouldn’t work on Charles, though it might make her mate more dangerous if he decided to take offense. Charles’s public face was too good for her to read right now, which told her that he was feeling a whole lot of things he didn’t want her to know about.

He’d closed their bond to protect her.

Anna tried to get mad about it, so she wouldn’t have to be worried or hurt, but he was a dominant wolf and part of being dominant was taking care of what was his. His wife, his mate, headed that list. So Charles would protect her from whatever he thought would attack her through their connection.

But he had forgotten something along the way. He was hers.Hers. He was hurting himself to protect her and she was going to put a stop to it– but not now. Not in public. A good hunter is patient.

Charles glanced at Anna, and she narrowed her eyes to tell him that the anger he sensed from her was aimed at him. He raised an eyebrow and she raised her chin.

Redirecting his attention to the intruders, Charles soundlessly gestured everyone to the big sectional sofa in front of the TV. He pulled a hardwood chair away from the dining table for himself and set it to face them over the coffee table.

The FBI agents perched on the edge of the sofa. Goldstein appeared more tired than interested, but Leslie Fisher watched Charles intently, not looking him in the eyes, not challenging him, just cataloging. Such intent interest would have put Anna on edge except there was no heat in Leslie’s gaze. It was more of an ‘observing the subject in his native habitat’ than a ‘he’s really hot’ kind of thing.

Beauclaire, for his part, sank back in the soft material of the couch as if the thought that it would impede him should he have to move quickly had never occurred to him.I’m not afraid of anyone here, his body posture said. Charles’ s – relaxed, arms folded loosely, chin slightly tilted – said,You’re boring me; either fight and die – or back off.

Anna grabbed another of the hardwood chairs and parked it next to Charles, then sat down.‘All right,’ she said, to break the testosterone fest before it could really get going. ‘Who goes first?’

Charles looked at Beauclaire.‘Do the fae know that there’s been someone hunting them since the eighties?’

‘We are here to share information,’ Beauclaire said, spreading his hand magnanimously. ‘I am happy to begin. Yes, of course we knew. But he’s only been hunting the nobodies, the half-bloods, the solitary fae. No one with family to protect them. No one of real power.’ His voice was cool.

‘No one worth putting themselves at risk for,’ said Charles.

Beauclaire gave Charles a polite look that was as clear as any adolescent raising his middle finger.‘We are not pack. We are not all good friends. Mostly we are polite enemies. When a fae dies, if it is not one of power – who are valuable to us, just because there are so few left – if it is not someone who has family or allies with power, mostly other fae look upon that death with a sigh ofrelief. First, it was not they who died. Second, it didn’t cause anyone else harm, and that fae is no longer free to make alliances with someone who might be an enemy.’ His voice deepened just a little on the last sentence.

‘It bothers you,’ said Leslie.

Anna liked competent people. Not many humans were as good at reading others as the wolves were. Leslie was very good to be able to read Beauclaire so well.

Beauclaire looked at the agent, started to say something, hesitated, then said,‘Yes, Agent Fisher, it bothers me that a killer was allowed to continue picking off those he chose for nearly half a century. HadI known of it, Iwould have done something– which was probably why I was not informed. A mistake I have taken steps to correct. What should have been is, in this case, superseded by what is: a killer who tortures his victims before he kills them has my daughter.’

‘Do you know who or what we are hunting, Mr Beauclaire?’ asked Goldstein. ‘Is it a fae?’

‘Yes. I know what kind of fae could get into a building without leaving a scent trail that a werewolf could follow, and could hide so that people who walked past him could not discern that he was there.’

‘It is unusual,’ said Anna. ‘Most glamour doesn’t work on scent.’

‘You can’t hide what you don’t perceive,’ agreed Beauclaire. ‘Most of the fae who could follow a scent as well as a werewolf were beast-minded – like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Those fae couldn’t hide themselves from the cold-iron-carrying Christians who drove us from our homes – so they perished, most of them. But there are a few left who would be capable of perceiving and hiding their scents. Among those who have these abilities, the only one who would also be strong enough to carry my daughter out of her home in a satchel and be mistaken for someone carryinglaundry is a horned lord.’

Goldstein narrowed his eyes.‘The old term for a man who was cuckolded? That’s not what you mean.’

‘Horned,’ said Charles. ‘You mean antlered.’

Beauclaire nodded.‘Yes.’

‘Herne the Hunter,’ suggested Charles.

‘Like Herne,’ agreed Beauclaire. ‘There were never many of them, less than a handful that I’m aware of. The last one on this side of the Atlantic was killed in 1981, hit by a car in Vermont. The driver thought he killed a very large deer, but the accident was witnessed by one of us who could see the fae inside the deer’s skin. When no one was looking, we stole the body away.’

‘You think there is another one?’ Leslie asked.

The fae nodded.‘That is what the evidence suggests.’

‘If the killer is fae, then why didn’t he start hunting fae victims before the fae came out?’ Anna asked.

That the UNSUB was fae would explain why he was still active after so many years, why he could take down a werewolf without anyone noticing. But it didn’t explain why he began targeting fae only after they admitted their existence.

‘I am not the killer to know his motivations, MsSmith,’ said Beauclaire. He bit off the ‘Smith’ to show that he knew what their last name really was – still jockeying for top dog in the room. ‘Coincidences do happen.’

‘Call me Anna,’ she told him in a friendly voice. ‘Most people do.’

He stared at her a moment. Charles growled and the fae jerked his eyes off of hers, then frowned in irritation at losing the upper hand. But Anna could feel the whole atmosphere of the living room lighten up as the fight for dominance was lost and won.

Beauclaire gave a bow of his head to Charles, then smiled at Anna, and she thought that she’d never seen such a sad expression in her life. In that look she understood what he was doing and why – he thought his daughter was lost, she saw. He hadn’t, not when they were at his daughter’s apartment, but something – maybe that the killer was fae – had changed his mind. He was hunting her killer now, not trying to save his daughter. Perhaps that was why he’d given in to Charles so easily.

‘Coincidence,’ Beauclaire admitted, ‘is highly overrated. I have an alternative explanation about how a fae could not know what he was until he knew that there were such things as fae.’

He glanced around the room, but Anna couldn’t tell what he was looking for.

‘In the height of the Victorian era,’ Beauclaire said finally, in a quiet, calm voice that belied what her nose told her, ‘when iron horses crossed and crisscrossed Europe, several things became obvious. There was no longer a place for the fae in the old world – and we were too few. From 1908 until just a few years ago, it was the policy of the Gray Lords, those who rule the fae, to find fae of scarce but useful types and force them to marry and interbreed with humans since humans breed so much more rapidly than we do.’

Anna knew about that, but she hadn’t realized how long it had gone on. From Leslie’s face, Anna was pretty sure that the FBI agent hadn’t known about the crossbreeding policy. That was interesting, because her face hadn’t changed at all when Beauclaire had mentioned the Gray Lords, who were also a deep secret.