Fair Game (2 page)

The strange woman’s head lowered aggressively and her shoulders got tight. Leslie took a step behind her father. But Mrs. Cullinan’s retort had drawn the attention of the men by the limousine.

“Eve,” said one of the men mildly, his hand on the open car door. His voice was mellow and rich, as thick with Ireland as Mrs. Cullinan’s own, and it carried across the street and down the block as if there were no city sounds to muffle it. “Come to the car and keep Gordie company, would you?” Even Leslie knew it wasn’t a request.

The woman stiffened and narrowed her eyes, but she turned and walked away from them. When she had taken his place at the car, the man approached them.

“You’d be Mrs. Cullinan,” he said, as soon as he was on their side of the street and close enough for quiet conversation. He had one of those mildly good-looking faces that didn’t stand out in a crowd—except for his eyes. No matter how she tried, Leslie could never remember what color his eyes were, only that they were odd and strange and beautiful.

“You know I am,” Mrs. Cullinan said stiffly.

“We appreciate you calling us on this and I would like to leave you with a reward.” He held a business card out to her. “A favor when you need it most.”

“If the children are safe to play in their yards, that is reward enough.” She dried her hands on her hips and made no move to take the card from him.

He smiled and did not put down his hand. “I will not leave indebted to you, Mrs. Cullinan.”

“And I
know better than to accept a gift from the fairies,” she snapped.

“Onetime reward,” he said. “A little thing. I promise that no intentional harm will come to you or yours from this as long as I am alive.” Then, in a coaxing voice, he said, “Come, now. I cannot lie. This is a different age, when your kind and ours needs must learn to live together. You could have called the police with your suspicions—which were correct. Had you done so, she would not have gone without killing a great many more than the children she has already taken.” He sighed and glanced back at the car’s darkened windows. “It is difficult to change when you are so old, and she was always in the habit of eating small things, was our Nellie.”

“Which is why I called you,” Mrs. Cullinan said stoutly. “I didn’t know who it was taking the little ones until I saw Nellie over by our backyard two nights ago and this child’s puppy was missing in the morning.”

The fae looked at Leslie for the first time, but Leslie was too upset to read his face. “Eating small things,” the man had said. Puppies were small things.

“Ah,” he said after a long moment. “Child, you may take what comfort you can that your puppy’s death meant that no more would die from that one’s misdeeds. Hardly fair recompense, I know, but it is something.”

“Give it to her,” Mrs. Cullinan said suddenly. “Her puppy’s dead. Give her your reward. I’m an old woman with cancer; I won’t live out the year. Give it to her.”

The fae man looked at Mrs. Cullinan, then knelt on one knee before Leslie, who was holding very tightly to her father’s hand. She didn’t know if she was crying for her puppy, the old woman who was more her mother than her mother had ever been—or for herself.

“A gift for a loss,” he
said. “Take this and use it when you most need it.”

Leslie put her free hand behind her back. He was trying to make up for her puppy’s death with a present, just like people had tried to do after her mom had left. Presents didn’t make things better. Quite the opposite, in her experience. The giant teddy bear her mama had given her the night she left was buried in the back of the closet. Although Leslie couldn’t stand to get rid of it, she also couldn’t look at it without feeling sick.

“With this you could get a car or a house,” the man said. “Money for an education.” He smiled, quite kindly—and it made him look totally different, more real, somehow, as he said, “Or save some other puppy from monsters. All you have to do is wish hard and tear up the card.”

“Any wish?” Leslie asked warily, taking the card, more because she didn’t want to be the focus of this man’s attention any longer than because she wanted the card. “I want my puppy back.”

“I can’t bring anyone or anything back to life,” he told her sadly. “I would that I could. But outside of that, almost anything.”

She stared at the card in her hand. It had one word written across it:
GIFT
.

He stood up. Then he smiled—an expression as merry and light as anything she’d ever seen. “And, Miss Leslie,” he said, when he shouldn’t have known her name at all, “no wishing for more wishes. It doesn’t work like that.”

She’d just been wondering…

The strange man turned to Mrs. Cullinan and took her hand in his and kissed it. “You are a lady of rare beauty, quick wits, and generous spirit.”

“I’m a nosy, interfering old woman,” she responded, but Leslie could see that she was pleased.

As an adult, Leslie kept the card the fairy man had given her tucked behind her driver’s license. It looked as clean and fresh as it had the day she’d agreed to take it. To the shock of her doctors, Mrs. Cullinan’s cancer mysteriously disappeared and she’d died in her bed twenty years later at the age of ninety-four. Leslie still missed her.

Leslie learned two valuable things about the fae that day. They were powerful and charming—and they ate children and
puppies.

ASPEN CREEK, MONTANA

“Go home,” Bran Cornick growled at Anna.

No one who saw him like this would ever forget what lurked behind the Marrok’s mild-mannered facade. But only people who were stupid—or desperate—would risk raising his ire to reveal the monster behind the nice-guy mask. Anna was desperate.

“When you tell me you will quit calling on my husband to kill people,” Anna told him doggedly. She didn’t yell, she didn’t shout, but she wasn’t going to give up easily.

Clearly, she’d finally pushed him out to the very narrow edges of his last shred of civilized behavior. He closed his eyes, turned his head away from her, and said, in a very gentle voice, “Anna. Go home and cool off.” Go home until
he
cooled off was what he meant. Bran was Anna’s father-in-law, her Alpha, and also the Marrok who ruled all the werewolf packs in his part of the world by the sheer force of his will.

“Bran—”

His power unleashed with his temper, and the five other wolves, not
counting Anna, who were in the living room of his house dropped to the floor, even his mate, Leah. They bowed their heads and tipped them slightly to the side to expose their throats.

Though he made no outward move, the speed of their surrender testified to Bran’s anger and his dominance—and only Anna, somewhat to her surprise at her own temerity, stayed on her feet. When Anna had first come to Aspen Creek, beaten and abused as she’d been, if anyone had yelled at her, she’d have hidden in a corner and not come out for a week.

She met Bran’s eyes and bared her teeth at him as the wave of his power brushed past her like a spring breeze. Not that she wasn’t properly terrified, but not of Bran. Bran, she knew, would not really hurt her if he could help it, no matter what her hindbrain tried to tell her.

She was terrified for her mate. “You are wrong,” Anna told him. “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And you are determined not to see it until he is broken beyond repair.”

“Grow up, little girl,” Bran snarled, and now his eyes—bright gold leaching out his usual hazel—were focused on her instead of the fireplace in the wall. “Life isn’t a bed of roses and people have to do hard jobs. You knew what Charles was when you married him and when you took him as your mate.”

He was trying to make this about her, because then he wouldn’t have to listen to her. He couldn’t be that blind, just too stubborn. So his attempt to alter the argument—when there should be no argument at all—enraged her.

“Someone in here is acting like a child, and it isn’t me,” she growled right back at him.

Bran’s return snarl was wordless.

“Anna,
shut up
,” Tag whispered urgently, his big body limp on the floor where his orange dreadlocks clashed with the maroon of the Persian rug. He was her friend and she trusted the berserker’s judgment
on most things. Under other circumstances she’d have listened to him, but right now she had Bran so angry he couldn’t speak—so she could get a few words in past his stubborn, inflexible mind.

“I know my mate,” she told her father by marriage. “Better than you do. He will
break
before he disappoints you or fails to do his duty.
You
have to stop this because he can’t.”

When Bran spoke, his voice was a toneless whisper. “My son will not bend or break. He has done his job for a century before you were even born, and he’ll be doing it a century from now.”

“His job was to dispense
justice
,” she said. “Even if it meant killing people, he could do it. Now he is merely an assassin. His prey cling to his feet repentant and redeemable. They weep and beg for mercy that he can’t give. It is destroying him,” she said starkly. “And I’m the only one who sees it.”

Bran flinched. And for the first time, she realized that Charles wasn’t the only one suffering under the new, harsher rules the werewolves had to live by.

“Desperate times,” he said grimly, and Anna hoped that she’d broken through. But he shook off the momentary softness and said, “Charles is stronger than you give him credit for. You are a stupid little girl who doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does. Go home before I do something I’ll regret later. Please.”

It was that brief break that told her this was useless. He did know. He did understand, and he was hoping against hope that Charles could hold out. Her anger fled and left…despair.

She met her Alpha’s eyes for a long moment before acknowledging her failure.

ANNA KNEW EXACTLY
when Charles drove up, newly returned from Minnesota where he’d gone to take care of a problem the Minnesota
pack leader would not. If she’d been deaf to the sound of the truck or the front door, she’d have known Charles was home by the magic that tied wolf to mate. That was all the bond told her outright, though—his side of their bond was as opaque as he could manage, and that told her a whole lot more about his state of mind than he probably intended.

From the way he let nothing leak through to her, she knew it had been another bad trip, one that had left too many people dead, probably people he hadn’t wanted to kill.

Lately, they had all been bad trips.

At first she’d been able to help, but when the rules changed, when the werewolves had admitted their existence to the rest of the world, the new public scrutiny meant that second chances for the wolves who broke Bran’s laws were offered only in extraordinary circumstances. She’d kept going with him on these trips because she refused to let Charles suffer alone. But when Anna started having nightmares about the man who’d fallen to his knees in front of her in mute entreaty before his execution, Charles had quit letting her go.

She was strong-willed and she liked to think of herself as tough. She could have made him change his mind or followed him anyway. But Anna hadn’t fought his edict because she realized she was only making his job harder to bear. He saw himself as a monster and couldn’t believe she didn’t also when she witnessed the death he brought.

So Charles went out hunting alone—as he had for a hundred years or more, just as his father had said. His hunt was always successful—and, at the same time, a failure. He was dominant; he had a compulsory need to protect the weak, including, paradoxically, the wolves he was there to kill. When the wolves he executed died, so did a part of Charles.

Before Bran had brought them out to the public, the new wolves, those who had been Changed for less than ten years, would have been given several chances if their transgression came from loss of control. Conditions could have been taken into account that would lessen the
punishment of others. But the public knew about them now, and they couldn’t allow everyone to know just how dangerous werewolves really were.

It was up to the pack Alpha to take care of dispensing commonplace justice. Previously, Charles had only had to go out a few times a year to take care of bigger or more unusual problems. But many of the Alphas were unhappy with the new harshness of the laws, and somehow more and more of the enforcement fell to Bran and thus to Charles. He was going out two or three times a month and it was wearing on him.

She could feel him standing just inside the house, so she put a little more passion into her music, calling him to her with the sweet-voiced cello that had been his first Christmas gift to her.

If she went upstairs, he’d greet her gravely, tell her he had to go talk to his father, and leave. He’d come back in a day or so after running as a wolf in the mountains. But Charles never quite came back all the way anymore.

It had been a month since he’d last touched her. Six weeks and four days since he’d made love to her, not since they’d come back from the last trip she’d accompanied him on. She’d have said that to Bran if he hadn’t made that “Grow up, little girl” comment. Probably she should have told Bran anyway, but she’d given up making him see reason.