Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega 4)

“Do you remember exactly what Hosteen said?” asked Kage.

“He said that the family would be safe with Charles here,” she said slowly. “He told me to ask you to keep an eye out for them.”

Charles nodded. “That’s fine.” He went back to eating.

Ernestine gave him a cautious look that he didn’t see. Anna smiled at her. “This is very good,” she said. “I don’t know when Chelsea will get up, but she’ll be hungry again. It might be a good idea to put together some food for her. Well-fed werewolves are easier to deal with than hungry ones.”

Anna rode three more horses. Her favorite of the morning was a quick-moving gelding named Ahmose who had a long scar down the length of his shoulder.

When Anna, Charles, and Kage, sweaty and smelling like horses, got back to the house, Chelsea was sitting at the table and eating ravenously. She looked up when they came in.

“Hey,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about yesterday. I felt just fine driving to the day care. But by the time I was belting the kids into the car, I had a killer headache. I don’t get headaches as a rule, and it seems to me that it was part of the whole compulsion that eventually pushed me to try to hurt the kids.”

“You are witchborn,” said Charles. “Trust your instincts. It happened at the day care?”

“Yes.”

“There’ve been some other bad things happening at the day care lately,” Anna said. “I had a long talk with Max about it yesterday. He said that they had a teacher commit suicide. And they also had a family killed in a car wreck.”

Chelsea nodded. “People do commit suicide, and they die in traffic accidents, but I am not naturally inclined to kill my children and then myself. If one of those was a spell, maybe all of them were?”

“I think,” said Charles, “that Anna and I will go visit the day care. If there is a fae there, one of us should be able to figure out who it is.”

“Should be?” asked Kage.

“This fae is strong,” Charles answered. “A powerful fae can disguise itself from a werewolf.”

“I’ll stay here,” Wade said. “I’ve taken the next few days off work.”

CHAPTER

7

There were kids everywhere. Kids slid down miniaturized slides and climbed plastic play forts in bright colors, and a few plastic play forts in dull, sun-bleached colors. Kids in sandpits dug with plastic shovels or threw sand on one another. One little boy in jeans and a pale blue T-shirt was running as fast as he could as two little girls chased him with death on their faces. Anna hoped he could run fast or he was in for it.

Adults fluttered among the chaos of children. Some of them brought order with them like the best Alphas did. Some of them elicited excitement and happiness. Some of them made the kids scatter before them like chickens in front of a fox.

She left her hand on her husband’s arm, feeling the tension in him, knowing it was her fault. She would never do anything to harm her husband in any way—not on purpose.

Yet she was unwilling to sit around and wait a hundred years for the opportunity to have children. It wasn’t impatience, no matter what Charles thought. Werewolves could live forever, but on average lived far shorter lives than their human originally could have expected to.

Charles did not live quietly. More even than the Marrok, he lived with a target painted on his chest. As the werewolves crept further out of the shadows and into the daily lives of ordinary people, the list of his enemies increased.

Anna hadn’t died the day she’d been involuntarily Changed, had in fact been made less mortal rather than more. But she had lost her old self as surely as if she had died, and it had taught her not to be complacent. She was not impatient, but she no longer trusted life to be good. She had become more conscious, not less, that people died: that she might die, that Charles might die. Death was real to her in a way that it had never been real when she had been human.

She was a long way from defeated. His arguments that any child of his would be a target were unassailable. Within the supernatural community, Charles, as the Marrok’s son and hatchet man, was very well-known. Eventually even the humans would know about him. Any child of his would be perceived as a weakness. She could not argue that point, but she did not feel as though that necessitated refusing to have a child.

His other stated objection, that there was no current possibility for them to conceive, was more open to argument. She didn’t want to argue with him, shouldn’t have to argue with him. She’d thought that he’d been willing to listen to the possibilities.

The key, she thought, was to pick through her husband’s complicated and mostly unspoken issues with children or with his own children or being a father. She didn’t know exactly where his absolute refusal was finding its power. When she found something real, she’d work at the knot of his resistance until she had it unraveled. Then she would go back to the next tangle and do the same thing.

Her brother didn’t call her Anna the Relentless for nothing.

She needed a loose end, and so far she hadn’t been able to find it. His father might know, but it seemed dishonest and possibly damaging to go to someone else for insight without knowing what kind of a tangle she was working with. Better to get it herself if she could.

Two months of effort had resulted in nothing except the tension in Charles’s arm as they walked through the safety zone of the sidewalk.

“Even if they were to choose to attack,” she murmured to him, “they are safely caged behind that vinyl chain-link fence. I think you can relax.”

“Vinyl doesn’t do anything to stop magic,” Charles murmured back. “The steel wire beneath might have some effect, but it is best to be prepared.”

Under the circumstances it was difficult for her to tell whether he was being funny or serious. Neither of them was under the illusion it was the threat from the fae that was causing his tension.

Still, he had a point about being prepared to face a hostile threat from the fae here. It was time she turn her attention away from having her own children and start trying to discover who had sent Chelsea off to murder hers.

The kids took no notice of a pair of uninteresting adults wandering up to the main doors. Surely if a fae were among them, he or she would notice that Anna and Charles were a little different from most people, but maybe not.

When Charles drew a deep breath of air through his nose, Anna followed suit. She didn’t smell any fae—though her experience with fae was fairly limited. She wasn’t sure she would detect one right under her nose. Charles didn’t say anything, so she assumed that he didn’t scent anything, either.