Dead Heat (8 page)

“Fae magic,” Anna said; she’d gleaned a little from Brother Wolf.

“What does that mean?” muttered Max, kicking a rock off the sidewalk. He caught his wandering brother by the hand and tugged him out of the road. “No, Michael, you walk next to us. Stay on the sidewalk, no matter how cool some rock might be.”

“Wasn’t a rock,” said Michael with dignity. “It was a penny.”

“Sorry, buddy, you need to stay with us.” Max let out his breath. “So. Let’s assume ‘fae magic’ doesn’t mean anything to me; what does it mean to you?”

“Charles says that someone, some fae someone, put a magical compulsion on your mother.”

“When did he tell you?” Max asked sharply. “Mackie, put that down, you don’t know where it’s been. Tell me, Anna, did you know that when you came in through the window? Because it takes a werewolf fifteen minutes to half an hour to change to a wolf. And he was a wolf when we went downstairs.”

“He is my mate,” Anna told him, patient with his sharpness. His blistering anger was caused by worry and frustration that he couldn’t protect his mom. “We can communicate without talking.”

“Telepathy?” Max’s voice was scathing.

“Look,” she huffed in exasperation. “Werewolf. Me. Magic darn near strong enough to make your mother try to kill you—and you are balking at telepathy. Charles is my mate, and that means we share a spiritual bond. Far as I’ve been able to find out, that bond works a little differently for everyone. Charles and I can find each other in the middle of an Atlantic hurricane—and we can communicate some things.”

“Men,” said Mackie smugly, reacting to Anna’s tone rather than the content of their conversation. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.”

“Shut your piehole, punk kid,” Max said, thumping her on the head with the palm of his hand.

“I’m telling Mama you said ‘Shut your piehole,’” Michael said. “‘Shut your piehole’ is a bad word.”

“‘Shut your piehole’ is three words, Michael,” said Mackie.

Undaunted, Michael said, “I’m telling Mama you used three bad words.”

“You do that, kid,” Max told him, sounding subdued. “I hope you do that.” He glanced at Anna and said, “So tell me about this fae magic that made my mother try to kill us. I thought the fae were all locked up.”

Anna snorted. “They locked themselves up. I don’t know who got your mom or why; maybe she can help with that when she—”

“Don’t you mean if she—” He didn’t complete the sentence.

“It could go wrong,” she admitted. “Lots of people don’t make it. But your mother has courage and willpower. She fought to keep you safe. Apparently she could stave off the compulsion by hurting herself; that’s why she was so cut up, why she stabbed herself before telling you to take the kids away.”

“But she made it,” Max said. “Why didn’t they just call the ambulance? Why Change her?”

“She saved you,” agreed Anna. “But it took us too long to get here. By the time Charles found her, she was dying from blood loss.”

He swallowed.

“Mom is dying?” asked Mackie.

Darn it,
thought Anna.
Forgot the little ones were listening in.

“I thought she was turning into a werewolf like Ánáli Hastiin,” Mackie said. “Dying is like Mrs. Glover. Dying is gone forever.” Her voice rose and wobbled.

Her little brother picked up on it and started to cry. “Mrs. Glover was nice. I loved Mrs. Glover. She gave me candy.”

Max looked overwhelmed.

Anna gathered herself together and said, “I don’t know who Mrs. Glover is, but your mother is strong. Brother Wolf told me so, and he never lies.”

“Who is Brother Wolf?” asked Max.

She hadn’t meant to bring Brother Wolf out in the open. His presence confused people who had been werewolves for centuries.

“He’s the big wolf,” said Mackie. “The one who made Ánáli Hastiin listen.”

Anna tilted her head at the little girl who smelled like witch—witchborn and observant, too.

“That was Charles, Anna’s husband,” said Max.

“You are both right,” she said. “That was Charles and Brother Wolf.”

“You call your husband Brother Wolf when he is in his wolf shape?”

Anna decided that a technical discussion would lower the emotional distress and possibly give the kids some useful information. Charles wouldn’t mind; Brother Wolf wasn’t a secret.

“No,” she said. “I call Charles Charles. And I call Brother Wolf Brother Wolf. It has nothing to do with the shape they wear, or that they share the same body.”

“I’m lost in an episode of
Doctor Who
,” said Max without even a hint of humor. “Explain that to me.”

“Werewolves,” Anna told him, “have two natures. The human part and the wolf part. But the wolf isn’t like a real wolf—it’s a lot more angry than that.” How did you tell a kid his mom was going to be a monster? Maybe she should have thought this through better.

“Like the Incredible Hulk,” Mackie said thoughtfully. “Nice Mommy and Werewolf Mommy. We’re not supposed to bother Ánáli Hastiin when he’s grumpy.”

Anna looked at her for a moment. “Exactly. Most werewolves learn to control the wolf, the Hulk part, in a year or two.”

“Does Great-Grandfather have a Brother Wolf?” asked Michael.

“I don’t know,” Anna told him. “Most werewolves don’t actually think of themselves as two people, not like my husband does. But he was born a werewolf and it made him strange in a lot of ways. To him, his wolf is a separate being who lives with him inside his body.”

“I thought werewolves weren’t genetic,” said Max. “Kage isn’t a werewolf and neither is Joseph, even though Joseph’s father is.”

Anna nodded. “You are right. Except in Charles’s case. His mother was Flathead, one of the Salish tribes, a wisewoman with magic of her own. Werewolf women can’t have babies, but she did anyway.”
As I will.
“She died when Charles was born.”

“I could be a werewolf puppy,” said Michael thoughtfully. “Then no one could steal my toys.”

“That happened a long time ago,” said Mackie impatiently. “Don’t be a baby. Mrs. Glover made Joshua give you back your robot and say ‘I’m sorry.’”

Michael’s bottom lip stuck out. “I liked Mrs. Glover.” Tears gathered.

“Mrs. Glover was
my
teacher,” Mackie said. “She liked me better than she liked you.”

“Shut up, you freaks,” snapped Max. “Shut up.”

“‘Shut up’ is a bad word,” said Michael, incipient tears interrupted by the chance to point out his older brother’s fault.

“Just shut up anyway.”

Anna touched his arm. “Who is Mrs. Glover?”

“My teacher,” wailed Mackie. “She died and never came back.”

“She did too like me,” said Michael, crying in earnest.

“And now Mommy is dying,” Mackie said. “Everyone is dying.”

“Stop it,” said Max tightly. “Just stop.”

“Your teacher where?” Anna asked. Mackie might be old enough to go to elementary school—but Michael wasn’t.

“Preschool/day care,” said Max. “They both go. Different classes. Mackie is five, but she was born after the September deadline, so she’ll go into kindergarten next year.”

“So your mom leaves work, picks up the kids, and then goes home, right?” Anna said.

“That’s right,” Max said. “I get home an hour or so after they do. Hey, Mackie, was Mom okay when she picked you guys up at the day care?”

Mackie had been bickering with Michael, but Max’s question made her fall silent.

“Mackie?”

“Mackie was in the time-out chair,” said Michael. “Her teacher was mad at her, but Mommy wasn’t.”

“Yes, she was,” said Mackie in a small voice. “She didn’t sound like it when she talked to Miss Baird, but when Mommy was talking to me in the car she got mad. She didn’t talk to me at all, and then she sent us to watch TV.”

“That’s unusual?” Anna asked.

Max nodded. “Mom doesn’t do the silent treatment, not ever. My grandmother—her mom—abused it. Mom swore she’d never do that to us. She yells.”

“Once she threw dishes at Daddy,” Michael said. “But she hit the floor instead of him. Then he laughed and cleaned up the glass. I didn’t touch the glass.”

“She wasn’t trying to hit him, just make a point,” said Max. “But yeah, Mom is loud. She doesn’t do the silent treatment, and she doesn’t like the kids to watch TV by themselves.”

“Half hour a day,” said Mackie. “Michael gets a show and I get a show, unless we’re at Granddad’s. There’s the park.”

“And Mom or Kage or I watch those shows with them,” Max said. “She’d never just send them in on their own.” He glanced at Anna and gave her a half smile. “Especially not after Grandma let them watch
Supernatural
; Michael had nightmares. She says she can’t control what they watch at their granddad’s house, but she can make sure they’re not watching grown-up shows at home.”

The park was small and carefully tended without a single bit of plant life. It was beautiful anyway. There were two fountains on either side of a play area that was covered with a giant roof held over the playground equipment on painted steel poles. It was pleasantly warm right now, but Anna expected that anything left out in the sun in high summer would be hot enough to burn skin.

A comfortable number of children were playing on the equipment, with a few adults sitting on the ubiquitous benches set around playgrounds to encourage parents to watch over their children. One woman talked with extreme animation into her cell phone while a man of approximately the same age was deeply engrossed in a book.

Michael and Mackie bolted for the play fort as soon as their feet hit the sand of the playground at the edge of the sidewalk. Evidently that was where walking with grown-ups was no longer necessary.

“Tell me about your mother,” Anna said. “Where does she work?”

“She’s a trainer like Kage,” he said with a wry smile. “But instead of training horses, she trains people to sell things. She’s very good at it. She’s part owner in a company that sells that training to other companies. And because she really
is
very good at selling things, lots of companies hire her company.

“People like her,” he said. They’d stopped on the edge of the sidewalk, right where Mackie and Michael had taken off. But now Max walked with quick determination toward an empty bench. “She says everyone likes her because she’s good at selling herself, too.”

He swallowed and said without humor, “Except for Hosteen. Kage says that if she really
were
selling herself she’d have the sheiks at her feet with piles of money. Then she says, ‘There’s that one who came to buy a filly from you. He’d have bought me, too.’ And then Kage says…” He looked at Anna. “It’s not going to be like that anymore. You can’t bring people back from the dead—they come back different.”

Anna pursed her lips and then nodded. “Life changes people more than death does, in my experience. Ten years from now you wouldn’t see her the same way you do now, any more than you see her the same way you did when you were Michael’s age.”

Max’s face flushed. They’d reached the bench, but he didn’t sit down. “You don’t have to patronize me. I understand you’re a million years old like Kage’s grandfather and that means you know
so
much more than I do. But this is different from being a child looking at a parent. I’ve seen Hosteen when he isn’t playing human, and I don’t want to look in my mother’s eyes and know she’s thinking how good my liver would taste.”

“I’ll be twenty-six on my next birthday,” Anna said mildly. “That gives me ten years on you. Take it from me,
anyone
who lives with you is going to occasionally wonder how your liver might taste, and not because they are hungry. It comes with being a teenager—you inspire violence in the hearts of those who love you. It mostly goes away when you hit twenty.”

He laughed reluctantly.

Seriously she said, “Your mother’s basic nature won’t change. She is quick thinking and fierce. She will probably still throw dishes at Kage and hit the floor with them to make a point. She’ll have to learn to pull her throws, though, or she’ll leave marks on the floor. She loves you, and respected you enough to know that you were capable of protecting those two kids until Kage could get home to help you. None of that will be different.”

He dropped down on the bench.

“This would never have happened if she hadn’t married Kage,” he said bleakly. “Our lives were normal until she met him.”

“It’s a little too early to look for causes,” she told him, deciding to respond to the logic of his statement instead of the emotion.

She sat down beside him and looked at the fountain instead of at him. “It might have been an attack aimed at your great-grandfather and his pack. Or maybe your mother was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although I admit when someone connected with werewolves is attacked by supernatural means, my first thought is that it has something to do with the supernatural elements in the victim’s life. What do you know about Hosteen’s pack? Have they done anything recently that might attract the attention of the fae?”

“I don’t know anything about the werewolves,” Max said. “Hosteen Sani hates my mother. He did not attend the wedding. He hates her because she … because we’re white and Kage divorced his proper wife and married my mother. He doesn’t take it out on the munchkins—but he and I don’t have anything to say to each other.”

“I can’t address how Hosteen feels about the color of your skin or his son’s previous marriage. I don’t know him that well,” Anna told him. “But I can tell you that today, the thing that bothered him about her is that she’s witchborn.”

In the house, steeped in the magic of the fae, she hadn’t been able to smell it as well. But out in the open air, sitting next to him, she could smell the scent of witch faintly. She didn’t smell magic as well as Charles, but witches had a distinctive odor, a sweet, almost-floral tang that emanated from their skin.

He snorted. “She isn’t a witch. It’s just a story that my grandmother liked to tell, my mother’s mother. She ran away from home when she was a kid. She never did tell anyone where she came from. She made up a story about a wicked witch for my mother so that my mother never went looking for them.”

“Nope,” Anna said. “Sorry to blow your worldview, but you can’t afford to be ignorant on this issue. There are witches, good and bad witches. There isn’t much worse than a bad witch. If her mother was a wicked witch, your grandmother was smart and lucky. I can smell it, a little, on you. I expect that Hosteen can smell it, too.”