Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega 4)

Leslie gave Leeds an assessing look. “Him I want on my team, especially. Geeks are really useful.”

“So am I,” said Marsden. “How do you know the Smiths, Special Agent Fisher? And who are they?”

“I worked with them last year—you probably heard about the case,” she said. “It culminated in Beauclaire, Prince of the Elves, beheading the son of a US senator. Charles and Anna Smith were sent to help in the investigation.”

Marsden frowned, but he wasn’t slow on the uptake. “Werewolves. There were a couple of werewolves called in to consult on that. They testified under pseudonyms by special dispensation—” He looked at Charles. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” he said. “I should have caught that.”

“Werewolves?” said Leeds, distracted at last from the now safely contained bundle of sticks.

Charles smiled at him, the smile that had teeth. “Werewolves, yes, both my wife and I. What you should know is that this fae launched a barely failed attack on a couple of children under the protection of the local Alpha. We were available, so we volunteered to see if we could find the culprit. We walked into the room with Miss Baird and found the fetch. It didn’t take long to realize what Amethyst, the thing wearing Amethyst Miller’s shape, had to be.”

He looked at Leslie and his face softened. “And yes, that the fae attacked some of ours means that we have chosen to work with the humans against the fae, in this instance. I cannot say that alliance will last, or that we won’t retreat back to being a neutral third party when this incident is resolved. My experience with the fae leads me to believe that such a retreat would be useless. I will convey my belief to … those higher up.”

“Who were the children who were attacked?” asked Marsden, prepared to write it down. “We should go talk to them, too.”

Charles just looked at him.

“No need to be rude,” Anna told Charles. To Marsden she said, “We know the details and we’ll tell you if anything would be useful, but mostly they just led us to the changeling. Some of the werewolves are out to the public, but some of them have chosen not to be. This is not our pack. I don’t know who is out and who is not, and we will not give their names out unless it becomes necessary.”

There was an awkward silence as Marsden clearly wanted to push the issue, but Charles was at his intimidating best. She could almost see the moment when Marsden remembered he was dealing with a werewolf, and that it wasn’t a smart idea to meet a werewolf’s eyes unless you were prepared for a dominance battle. Once he dropped his eyes from Charles’s, it was too late to push.

“So do you know what we’re dealing with?” asked Leslie.

“Fae,” said Charles. “But you know that much.”

“One that can build a fetch.” Marsden indicated the bundle of sticks with his chin.

“I thought that a fetch is an exact duplicate of yourself that warns you that you’re about to die,” said Leslie.

“Or kills you,” added Anna.

“Or a bundle of sticks that is magicked to look exactly like a child,” said Charles.

“Another word for ‘changeling,’” said Marsden.

Leeds shook his head. “No. Well, yes. But a fetch is specifically a changeling that isn’t a real living thing—” He pointed to the sticks. “Most changelings are fae who make themselves look like the child who’s been stolen away. That takes very little magic, just a variant of the glamour they use to appear like normal human beings. But this, this is very rare. I’ve seen six … seven changeling cases. None of them involved a fetch.”

Anna looked at Charles. She hadn’t known that the fae had been that … active before Beauclaire had killed his daughter’s attacker and then retreated with the rest of the fae behind the walls that everyone had believed to be jails. Those jails, as it turned out, were really fortresses. He gave a subtle shake of his head. He hadn’t known, either.

“Seven?” Leslie asked. “I haven’t heard of any.”

“Oh, two of them weren’t real. One was some parents who thought it would be convenient if the child they beat to death wasn’t really theirs. Another was, oddly enough in this day and age, an actual case of babies switched at birth. Resulted in a heck of a lawsuit and a lot of work running down just which babies had been switched and switching them back. But five changelings—” He gave them a wry smile. “One was me. My parents never knew. They died in a car wreck when I was twenty or so. I didn’t find out for a long time afterward, when I volunteered for a DNA sample to … let’s just say my human family has a number of people who would bring up the ratings of one of those Dr. Phil analogues. Turns out I’m half-human, half-fae. My human half has nothing in common with either of the people I always thought were my parents.” He looked down at the floor and muttered, “I found it to be kind of a relief, really. Not the being-half-fae part, but not being related to the people who raised me? That was outstanding.”

Marsden put himself between them and his partner. Anna didn’t think it was a conscious move. But he positioned himself in such a way to let them all know that anyone who wanted to take a potshot at his partner would have to go through Marsden to do it.

No one said anything. Leeds smiled gently at his partner’s back and shrugged. “My bosses give the changeling cases to me, for obvious reasons. The last one, the boy who was beaten to death, landed me in Phoenix. I was apparently more blunt than necessary.”

“Scared them into confessing,” said Marsden. “Useful, but not the approved method of coaxing the truth into the open.”

Leeds looked kind of harmless to Anna. Harmless people don’t scare people into confessing to murder.

“The changeling targeted my friend’s grandchildren,” Charles said. “Will the fae who made the fetch know what the fetch did? Does the fae use the changeling for ears and eyes?”

Leeds shook his head. “I don’t think so. Assuming the fae isn’t here, too. Everything that I’ve been able to dig up on them is that a fetch operates on its own. It is an inanimate object given intelligence and purpose.”

They all considered that a moment.

“How many of the stolen children were recovered?” asked Leslie.

Leeds sat back on his heels and gave her a half smile full of sympathy. “None of them. But then the ones I’ve seen, like me, were all adults when it was discovered. As far as I know, this is the first stolen child in two decades. Still, the fetch is really a hopeful sign, not that I’d have said so in front of the Millers. I don’t like to give false hope.”