Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega 4)

The creature’s face twisted in an expression that didn’t belong on a child. “No werewolves. That’s the only rule. Mackie’s mother is not a werewolf. Mackie is not a werewolf. Mackie’s brother is not a werewolf.”

“They belong to us,” Charles said, noting that the fae was more interested in Chelsea as Mackie’s mother than as a person herself. That indicated the attack was actually focused on Mackie. He walked toward the child, keeping her attention on him and not his mate or the human woman who was more vulnerable than either of them.

He could smell fae magic; it permeated this room, where this fae had apparently been playing at being five years old. But the smell didn’t get stronger as he approached her. Also, he detected only magic and not the fae herself. Had she disguised her scent somehow? But then why not disguise the magic, too? And what was she doing with the magic he could feel as a steady presence?

She snarled soundlessly, backing away from him before he got within touching distance. “No. She wasn’t a werewolf. Fair game. Fair game. Witch but not werewolf. I could kill her, the rules say.” She still sounded like a five-year-old.

“Amethyst?” said the teacher, sounding afraid.

“Amethyst is mine,” said the child in a sharp bark of anger. It was said with the same degree of possessiveness that Anna had just used with the four-year-olds’ teacher. “You can’t have her. She’s mine.”

Charles knew what it was. It had given the game away with its last two words.

If Amethyst wasn’t the one who was talking to them, there was only one thing a creature who looked and spoke like Amethyst could be. The reason he could not smell the fae was that there was only magic here.

“Riddle me questions,” Charles said, chanting the old words slowly. “Riddle me rhymes. Riddle me swiftly, I’ve said it three times. By threes and by custom you dare not deny. I bind you to answer and compel your reply.”

“Riddle say, riddle say,” it said, as it had to, being what it was. “Riddle say me, and I will answer thee.” Fae magic and the fae themselves were constrained by rules that allowed magic to exist in a world where magic was a rare thing. Riddles needed to be answered.

“What walks like a child and talks like a child and is left by the fae in the child’s right place?” Charles asked in a singsong voice that was part of the draw of the riddle. “What curdles cream, makes sick the cows, what makes a mother moan? What hides like poison and rots away family and home?”

“A fetch! A fetch! A fetch!” it answered, and as soon as the third response had left its lips, the child disappeared and a bundle of sticks fell to the ground. Worn ribbons tied the sticks in a semblance of a human figure, arms and legs and head. There was a scrap of hair banded top and bottom and shoved into the body of the thing.

The smell of brimstone and vinegar overwhelmed his nose and sent him into a paroxysm of coughing. Behind him he could hear Anna doing the same thing. The smell didn’t bother the human, though.

“Amethyst? Amethyst?” Miss Baird hurried over to the board and then looked back at Charles. “What happened to Amethyst?”

“When did you last talk to her parents?” Anna asked hoarsely. He turned to see that she had covered her nose with her arm.

“This morning,” Miss Baird said. “Not her parents, though. Her mother dropped her off and is supposed to pick her up. Her parents are in the middle of a nasty divorce. After the third incident, we have this list to tell us who is to pick her up on which day.” Her voice trailed off.

“Where is she?” Miss Baird asked very quietly. “What happened to her?”

Anna looked at him, and he pulled out his cell phone. “I think this has gone beyond my sphere of authority,” Charles said. He hit the button that dialed his father.

To say that the police were displeased with them when Charles and Anna refused to talk was an understatement. Miss Baird talked to them until she was hoarse while Amethyst’s parents watched in unrelieved apathy. Miss Baird, who knew about werewolf secrets, didn’t tell them anything about werewolves, just that Charles and Anna were there interviewing the teachers at the day care.

“It’s a fetch,” Miss Baird told the police officer for the fifth or sixth time. “Not a child all. He didn’t turn a child into a bundle of sticks, he just made it admit that’s what it was. No. I don’t know why it worked or what he did.”

Anna didn’t know why she and Charles weren’t talking to the police. Except perhaps the obvious reason, which was that Miss Baird was not having any effect on their disbelief. Why should their reaction to what Charles or Anna had to say be any different? If no one would believe the truth, then why say anything at all? But that didn’t seem very Charles-like. Bran hadn’t told them to maintain silence when Charles had called him.

Bran had listened to Charles’s careful recital of the exact events from the moment they walked into Miss Baird’s classroom. When Charles was finished he told them to call the police. They were to wait at the school until help arrived, with the implication that help would be a while in coming.

Then Bran had ended the call and they’d spent most of the afternoon waiting. First with Miss Baird, then the police arrived. Eventually, Ms. Edison had wandered in; finally Amethyst’s parents, the Millers, who had arrived separately, joined them.

The Millers were pretty subdued for people whose only child had turned into a pile of broken sticks. From Miss Baird’s description of warring parents, Anna had sort of expected more hostility. More energy. They sat near each other, not touching—or communicating in any other way, either. They hadn’t said much when Miss Baird tried to explain to them what had happened. Unlike the police, they hadn’t tried to argue with her, though they hadn’t seemed to believe, either.

They looked … faded. She thought they waited with the rest of them because no one told them to go home, rather than out of any curiosity. They hadn’t been angry, or disbelieving, or any of the things they should have been. Either children made you as crazy as Anna’s own father claimed, or the changeling had been doing something to them. She thought about Charles’s riddle and how poison could be spiritual rather than just physical.

The police officers were officially skeptical that a child had turned into a bundle of sticks. They were inclined to write Miss Baird off as a stupid mark willing to believe anything. Either Charles and Anna were con artists in the middle of some muddled game that involved kidnapping Amethyst, or they were stupid marks, like Miss Baird, who had the bad luck to witness some flimflam trick. That she and Charles weren’t talking to the police made them more inclined to believe the first than the last.