fate of the alpha - episode 1 (11 page)

“Different how?”

Ainsley looked back at the creek.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” Grace said insistently. “I want to know what he has to say about my lowly
cottage
magic.”

Ainsley swallowed. If she really wanted to know…

“He says you can only get so far on raw talent. Like playing an instrument, or anything, really. You can’t get to Carnegie Hall without a ton of practice, no matter how much of a knack you have for playing the piano.”

“What do
you
think, Ainsley?”

Ainsley studied her friend. There was no malice in her eyes, only curiosity.

“When he says it, it seems to make sense,” Ainsley ventured. “I mean, you have to work hard if you want to be good at something, right?”

“Did you have to work hard to be good at softball back in school?”

“Yes.”

“What about being a big shot Realtor?”

“Hell, yes!”

“Do you have to work hard at being smart, or funny or loyal?”

“Uh, no…”

“How about loving Erik?”

“Of course not!”

Grace stopped and placed her hand on Ainsley’s arm.

“That’s because those things are part of who you are,” Grace said. “They come naturally to you, but you can’t fake them. Like you can’t just go through the motions with the magic.”

Ainsley thought of the times she had used magic successfully. To avenge her parents. To protect her mate. She certainly hadn’t been faking it then.

“Is the magic part of who you are?” Grace asked. “Or is it some foreign thing to be mastered?”

“I… I don’t know,” Ainsley replied.

“Well.” Grace clapped her on the arm. “You’d better decide one way or the other.”

They continued to walk.

“Julian wants me to do it his way,” Ainsley said.

“Where would Erik be right now if it weren’t for my way?”

Ainsley’s stomach clenched at the thought of the way Erik’s wound had looked before Grace had intervened.

“True.”

“And besides, since when do you ever
not
do anything the Ainsley way?”

“That’s also true,” Ainsley admitted. “Thank you, Grace.”

“No,” Grace replied. “Thank
you
for coming out to help me today. It means a lot that you would do that with Erik…not himself.”

Ainsley gulped. It was time to change the subject.

“How’s Sadie?”

“She’s stable at least.” Grace frowned. “But she’s still comatose.”

“Aren’t wolves supposed to be speedy healers?” Ainsley asked, embarrassed at her own lack of knowledge on the subject.

“I thought so, too,” Grace said. “A better question might be, what’s going to happen to her on the full moon, Ainsley?”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck,
fuck.
How had she not even considered that?

“I don’t know,” Ainsley admitted.

“That’s not good.”

It certainly wasn’t. How would they explain a comatose wolf to the decidedly non-lupine staff of the hospital in Springton?

It would have to be a question for later. They had reached the stone monument that marked the entrance to the amphitheater.

Ainsley looked down over the rows of carved stone seating. It was hard not to envision the faculty weddings and graduations that she had witnessed here over the years. As a little girl, she had run squealing up and down the rows after the other staff kids. She had never seen it hauntingly empty and hung with mist.

“Lilliana was down on the stage,” Grace whispered.

Ainsley nodded and they headed down together. It seemed silly to whisper, but the place certainly inspired a mysterious feeling.

When they reached the bottom, Ainsley lifted her nose to the sky. The moist, heavy air played tricks with the scents. It was like trying to smell through a pond. She’d have to shift to have any chance of tracking in this.

Instinctively, Ainsley wished for Erik and his amazing tracking skills.

Then she remembered that Erik couldn’t track anymore. A lump formed in Ainsley’s throat. She swallowed it down and began to search the arena for prints without much luck.

Grace pulled a zip-lock bag out of her jacket.

“This was hers,” she said, handing it to Ainsley.

Ainsley opened it and sniffed the yellow fabric of the belt inside. There was something… but she couldn’t quite catch it.

“Hold it a sec’,” she said.

Ainsley lifted her dress over her head and draped it on her friend’s shoulder.

In a breath, she sank into the form of her shimmering red wolf.

Her human’s world of sight narrowed and faded at the edges. And her sense of smell and hearing accordioned out into another dimension like the pop-up illustrations in a children’s book.

She lifted her snout and sniffed delicately at the belt in Grace’s hands.

Instantly, the scent revealed itself to her. It was sweet and flowery, the flavor of freshly baked bread and honey, as yellow as the coat.

It stretched out to Ainsley and beckoned into the woods. She trotted after it.

But the scent weakened and disappeared almost as soon as she hit her stride. It must have been the way the woman had entered the amphitheater, not the way she had left it.

Ainsley sauntered back out to the stage and lifted her muzzle to the breeze.

There was nothing.

Something familiar tugged at the edges of her thoughts, unraveling her concentration.

Ainsley slid up into her human form and took her dress back from Grace.

She pulled it back on and turned to her friend.

Grace was staring at her in shock.

“What?” Ainsley asked.

“I’ve just… never seen it up close before. It was amazing.”

“I hope you’re talking about my wolf,” Ainsley teased. “You’re not going to try to make out with me are you? Have you been using magic today?”

“You’re really not ready to let that go yet, huh?”

“Not even close.”

“So,” Grace asked. “Did you find anything?”

“No, I didn’t have any luck. But there was something strange.”

“What was it?”

Ainsley paused.

“What did you smell?” Grace asked again.

“Nothing.”

“What’s so strange about that?”

“Grace, I can smell the residue from the lamp you broke while you were having sex with Landon last night.”

“Oh…”

“I should
never
smell nothing.”

“Hm.”

“Can you use magic to hide your scent?” Ainsley asked.

“Maybe,” Grace replied. “I’ve never tried.”

“Let’s go ask Julian. He’s coming to my house to talk about Erik anyway.”

Ainsley turned toward the wooded path that led back to town.

“Actually, I have to go,” Grace said quickly.

“Sure you do.”

“I’m serious,” Grace said. “I have a possible suspect coming in for questioning.”

“I’ll tell Julian you said hi!”

CHAPTER 13

G
race arrived at the station twenty minutes before the appointed time. The interrogation room was blessedly free of parking meter change today.

She grabbed the Lysol and paper towels from her desk drawer and used them to clean the table top until it shone.

Satisfied, she ran the cleaning supplies back to her desk, helping herself to a bottle of water out of the mini-fridge on her way past.

She sipped it slowly while looking out the single window of the interrogation room at the Haber’s elm tree across from the fire station. The elm’s nearly bare branches twisted in a way that made it look like it was in constant motion, though of course the only movement it actually made was at the microscopic pace of its growth. A classic example of the fact that things weren’t always what they seemed.

“Hello?”

Garrett Sanderson’s voice brought Grace out of her reverie.

“Thank you for coming in again, Mr. Sanderson.”

“Please, dear, it’s Garrett,” he said.

When she looked up at him, he gave her a wolfish wink.

“
A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat…
” he said in a sing-song way.

Grace studied him calmly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking of the treasure that was here before.”

“Is that from a song?” Grace asked.

She knew full well it was Edgar Allen Poe’s
Gold Bug
. In high school, Grace had been a horror junkie. She moved through Poe and Lovecraft, and into King and Koontz, devouring all the books the librarian threw at her. Finding out she actually lived next to werewolves had been the coolest moment of her formative years.

“A book, actually,” Garrett replied, his tone dipping just to the border of condescension.

Perfect. Let him start off with some false confidence.

“Oh.” Grace wrinkled her nose a bit for good measure.

He sat down gracefully with a pleased look on his face. Once again, he held his cane like a scepter next to his elegantly crossed legs.

Grace smiled back, with practiced guilelessness.

“That is such an interesting cane.” She leaned forward to examine it. “What’s the carving at the head?”

“A wolf.”

“A silver wolf.” Grace nodded. “Does it have any special meaning?”

“It means I can walk without assistance, which isn’t always easy, especially when the weather is foul.”

Okay, so he wasn’t going to play nicely. Grace couldn’t help but think back to how fast the man from the amphitheater had been.

“What exactly is the nature of your injury, Mr. Sanderson?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant to your investigation,” he said brusquely.

Grace waited. She was learning that with Garrett Sanderson, the trick was to stay neutral, and let him fill in the blanks.

“Forgive me,” he said almost immediately. “It is an old injury, and I don’t really like to talk about it.”

Grace nodded sagely.

“Fair enough. Do you know Lilliana Atwater?”

Sanderson exhaled through pursed lips.

“Oh dear,” he said. “I suppose this was bound to come out. I should have told you straight away.”

Grace’s heart lurched and she fought to keep her face a mask of calm.

Was he going to confess?

Could it really be that easy?

“I have had some involvement with Miss Atwater,” he said, recrossing his legs.

Nothing was ever that easy.

“What kind of involvement?”

“Romantic,” Garrett said, tenting his fingers over the knob of his cane. “Although that part is over now.”

Again, Grace clamped down her instinct to ask a follow-up.

Garrett rewarded her by spilling, as she had hoped he would.

“I started seeing Lilliana when I first came to town,” he began. “I didn’t know anyone, and she was a bit of an outsider herself, so we connected. Maybe it was her southern hospitality. In any case, it ran its course, or so I thought. When I started spending time with Ms. Epstein-Walker, Miss Atwater wasn’t what you would call agreeable. She started calling me at all hours of the night. I had to block her number. She even started following me around, spying on me, if you will.”

Grace heard Lilliana’s voice in her head,
He didn’t know I was there, because I was in the storage closet.

“I was with her the night of Sadie’s accident,” he continued. “I agreed to meet with her, simply to tell her that it was over, and it would be better for both of us if she moved on.”

He paused and smoothed his thumb over the silver head of the wolf on his cane.

“And how did she take that?” Grace asked.

“Not well, I’m afraid. She told me that I wasn’t cooperating, and she was tired of playing nice.”

Those were exactly the words Lilliana had quoted. The problem was, she’d told Grace that
Garrett
had said them about
Sadie
.

Grace fought the temptation to use her magic. This would have to be sorted out with good, old-fashioned police work. Fortunately, Grace was very good at that very thing.

“I didn’t think she was serious, or I would have reported it,” Garrett said. “Wait. You don’t think she had something to do with Sadie’s accident, do you?”

“We are still looking into every possibility,” Grace said, keeping her demeanor calm and professional.

“Have you questioned Miss Atwater?”

Though she didn’t need to tell him, Grace was curious to see Sanderson’s reaction.

“Lilliana is missing,” Grace said. “She hasn’t been seen since last night.”

Sanderson’s eyes widened. He rested his cane against the table and placed his palms on its cool surface. For once he remained silent.

Either this was news to him, or he was one hell of a poker player. Grace began to wonder if maybe she had been barking up the wrong tree.

Maybe Lilliana had run because she was afraid to be caught in a lie. Grace was back to square one.

Damn.

“Thank you for your time, Garrett,” Grace said.

She stood abruptly, anxious to be done with the man and back to her investigation. In her haste, she bumped the table, knocking over his cane. Without thinking, she bent to retrieve it for him.

As her fingers grazed the silver wolf’s head, a tidal wave of static washed through her, nearly knocking her off-balance again and reverberating in her head until her teeth ached.

The sensation matched what she had felt in Sadie’s house perfectly.

“Are you alright?” Garrett asked.

He swept the cane out of her hand, releasing her from the hold of the feedback.

“Sure,” Grace said, summoning all her willpower to hide any indication of what she’d just experienced. “I just stood up too fast. Sorry about that. We’ll be in touch if there is any new information.”

Grace smiled tightly and opened the door for the older man.

He gave her an enigmatic smile as he headed out, the tapping of his cane reverberating in the empty hall.

CHAPTER 14

E
rik was having a hard time adjusting.

No matter what else was wrong in the world, everything was right in the hardware store. At least that was what Erik had always believed.

Today every corner of Tarker’s Hollow seemed to be painted in bright colors but was suspiciously devoid of smell. And nowhere was it more obvious than in Hollow Hardware, where the smell of saw dust was thin and two dimensional, and what Erik knew should be the heavy scent of axle grease barely met his consciousness.