Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega 4)

In the kitchen there was a ladder nailed into the wall, painted cream with mint-green, tole-painted leaves to turn it into a decoration. At the top of the ladder was a locked trapdoor in the ceiling with a note taped to it: RENTERS NOT ALLOWED IN ATTIC.

She put her nose on the ladder and smelled nothing. But it wasn’t like the house was Hosteen’s mansion. There weren’t many places to hide things, and a locked door looked interesting. She climbed up to the trapdoor, digging her claws into the wood and leaving indentations behind. The narrow edge of the two-by-four ladder hurt her paws, and she thought maybe she should let one of the comfortably shod people try this. Not to mention, werewolf bodies were not exactly designed to climb ladders. It was an older house, and the ceilings were high, maybe ten feet or more.

She smelled nothing more up at the top than she had at the bottom. She pushed her nose against the trapdoor, and it wiggled a little. As soon as the edge of the door broke contact with the frame, scent wafted out of the attic only to disappear as soon as the door settled again.

But that was enough. She smelled the little girl whose grubby rabbit was in a plastic bag back in their room at the Sanis’ ranch.

She dropped to the ground and ran to Charles.

In the living room they had pulled up some stone around the fireplace and were looking into a metal-lined hole filled with not much.

I found her, she told Charles, and then ran back to the kitchen, claws catching on the tile floor. This time she bolted up the ladder and hit the trapdoor with her shoulder as hard as she could. Wood cracked and she bounced down to the ground. When she looked up, the door was still intact. She ran up and hit it again and this time when she landed, the door landed with her, in three pieces with a fourth still attached to the ceiling.

The reek of death, old death and new blood, billowed through the kitchen. Of the others, only Charles caught the full brunt of it.

He pulled his forearm up to his nose. “Stay down here,” he ordered.

Anna didn’t wait, though. There was a child up there who was bound to be hurt and scared, a child who had been held captive for months. She scrambled through the hole at the top of the ladder, ignoring Charles’s impassioned “Anna!”

The attic space was stuffy and hot, a room of maybe twenty by twenty with a ten-foot-tall ceiling that sloped down sharply with the slant of the roof until on two sides it was only three feet high. The old-fashioned linoleum, marbled army green, was cooler than the air and reminded Anna of photos of her grandmother’s house.

In the center of the room was a child’s princess bed, a four-poster painted white and trimmed in gold leaf—Louis XIV style, Anna thought, or maybe Louis XVI. Gauzy white fabric was artfully tangled around like—she remembered Ms. Jamison—a fashion shoot of some sort. Pale pink, dried rose petals littered the fabric, the bed, the floor around the bed, and the little girl who lay like Sleeping Beauty in a gown of pale pink silk. Her skin was milk white and she was not breathing.

Charles climbed up beside Anna and then called down, “No. Stay down. This is a crime scene and there’s not enough room up here. If you come up, too, we’ll compromise the scene.”

“What do you have up there?” asked Leslie. “I’ll call it in.”

“Multiple homicides,” said Charles, his voice steady, but his horror bled into and blended with Anna’s own. “I count twenty bodies, at least. All of them children. Most of them have been here awhile. At a guess, the murders took place before the fae came out and the Gray Lords put a stop to our Doll Collector’s habits.”

Bodies were stacked like cordwood against the three-foot wall between the floor and the ceiling along the edge of the room. Old bodies with skin like parchment and hair stiff and dry.

They looked more like the doll Anna’s mother had made her out of nylons, stuffed and stitched, than the remnants of people, of children. Anna’s nose told her the truth that her eyes wanted to deny. Some of the children were dressed in gowns like Amethyst’s, satin gleaming through layers of dust. Others wore dark suits. It looked as if they were all dressed for a wedding.

Anna thought that from now on, whenever the air was warm and still and smelled like leather and dead things, she would remember these children. She pressed against Charles, and his hand touched the top of her head to comfort them both.

“Is Amethyst up there?” That was Leeds.

“Yes,” said Charles. He moved then, toward the bed. Brave Charles.

Amethyst was silent, no breathing, no heartbeat. Anna whined at Charles. If he touched Amethyst, he’d be contaminating the scene. The other children were decades dead. Amethyst was the Doll Collector’s most recent victim. The one most likely to provide clues.

“Is she alive?” asked Marsden.

“She’s not breathing and her heart isn’t beating,” said Charles.

“I take that as a no,” said Marsden. “Damn it. Just once I’d like to be in time.”

“Don’t be too hasty.” Charles drew his boot knife. “It’s hot up here. She isn’t rotting. All the putrefaction I can smell is old. Death and heat equal rot. Either he killed her less than a half hour ago, or she’s not dead.”

Or she’s dead and the fae has found a way to preserve her body.

Charles nodded at Anna, but he didn’t relay her comment to anyone else. He used the blade of his knife to push the fabric aside, petals falling down like leaves in autumn, leaving Amethyst exposed. He put the back of his hand against her skin and pulled it back with a hiss, shaking it out.

“If the Doll Collector didn’t know we were here before, he does now,” said Charles.

“What’s going on?”

“I touched Amethyst and tripped some sort of magic,” Charles told them. “I’m going to try something.”

“Wait,” said Leeds. “We have an expert in fae magic who is flying in from Oakland tonight.”

“Might be too late,” Charles said. He rolled his knife in his hand.

Anna had had it custom-made for him last Christmas. It was a san mai knife, high-carbon steel sandwiched in stainless steel. The high carbon meant that it held an edge better, and should be effective against fae magic because it was closer to “cold iron” than straight stainless steel was.

He pressed the edge of the knife against Amethyst’s arm. It rested against her skin for half a breath and then cut through. As the first drop of red smeared the knife, Anna’s ears popped as if the air pressure dropped. Then Amethyst sat up and screamed in terror.