When Anna relayed the suggestion, Leslie sighed. “Already working on that, but it was right around Thanksgiving. A lot of people left to visit relatives. We are, my flunkies are, confirming that people actually went where they say they did. So far we found one wife who was supposed to be visiting her parents who was actually sleeping with a married man. And another who was in rehab. It is understandable that he told his work that he was taking an extended vacation. I promise I’ll call when I get something, or if I can get you in to talk to Mr. McDermit.”
They drove back to the Sanis’ ranch about two hours after they left the show, only to find it deserted. Anna called Kage.
“Chelsea’s hanging out with Michael, Mackie, and the girl who was last place in Mackie’s class,” Kage explained, a smile in his voice. Charles wondered why no one had called them to let them know that everyone was staying at the show. But Hosteen had his family well guarded, even without Anna and Charles.
“Mackie was feeling pretty bad until she saw that the little girl on the chestnut was crying,” Kage said. “She gave her the same pep talk Hosteen gives everyone. Did you do your best? Well, okay then. Any class where you don’t end up on the ground is a good class.” Charles could hear the smile in Kage’s voice. “Chelsea took them both to get ice cream with Hosteen.”
“I told you not to worry,” Charles said after she hung up.
“If I were a fae trying to steal children, that horse show with all of its distractions would be just the place to do it,” she said.
“He’ll have to get past Hosteen, Wade, and the handful of werewolves working the crowd because they aren’t going to be distracted from their job. And it’s pretty public. So far this one has gone out of its way to avoid detection.”
“Handful?” Anna frowned. “I only spotted two.”
“They mostly stayed out of range of your nose,” he said. “No use them running over the same places in the crowd where we were already looking. If we didn’t pick up on any fae, neither would they. But I know most of the people in Hosteen’s pack by sight.”
Charles settled in with his laptop on the only chair in their room to work on pack finances. Just because the fae were out terrorizing Scottsdale didn’t mean the rest of his work stopped.
Anna pulled out a paperback novel with a half-naked man holding an improbably long sword. He wondered if the sword was meant to be metaphoric. Then he wondered if he should be concerned that his mate was reading a book with a naked man on the cover. Anna stretched out on her stomach to read. Her feet were toward him. Her position gave him a nice view when he needed a break from studying numbers, and he quit worrying about naked men.
A couple of hours later they heard a car drive up and the front door opened. The chatter of happy voices told Charles that the younger children were home—and so was Max. He didn’t sound as happy as the kids. Charles was already logging off and shutting down his laptop when there was a quiet knock on their door.
Anna hopped off the bed and pulled the door open.
“Um, excuse me,” Max said. “But Granddad is down in the car and he’s too tired to get out. Grandma sent me up to get you.”
Charles brushed past him and leapt down the stairs. He was worried, though he knew that was ridiculous. Joseph was dying. He might die tonight, waiting for someone to help him out of the car. He might die a week from now in his bed.
Ridiculous or not, Charles rushed out to the car, where Maggie stood with the door open.
“Don’t you die on me, old man,” she said. “We have some fighting left to do.”
“And arguing, too,” Joseph said, the humor coming through the breathlessness just fine.
“I told you we should go after Mackie’s class,” she snapped.
“But we needed to see how good that stallion Conrad’s been bragging about really is. And then Lucy was riding in the amateur class on that filly she bought from us two years ago.”
“I know why you stayed,” Maggie said. “And it had nothing to do with Lucy’s filly and everything to do with stupid pride. You couldn’t admit you were feeling poorly.”
If she was yelling at him, Joseph was all right. As Charles bent down to lift his old friend, Maggie put her hand on his arm and leaned her head against his shoulder; he could all but feel her pain himself. Maggie was always sharpest when she hurt.
“Let’s get you inside,” Charles said.
“If I die after a day of watching beautiful horses, that would be okay,” Joseph said.
The spirits that seemed to be always hovering around Joseph, even if Charles was the only one who could see them, hit Charles so hard he could barely breathe. Their impact forced him to hesitate, stop walking altogether, and spread his legs a bit to keep his balance.
“You have a task yet,” he murmured when he could. He headed for the house. “Let me see if they’ll give you a little more strength to do what is necessary.”
“Tell those spirits that if they want him so badly, they might cure his cancer,” said Maggie tartly.
“It’s worth my life to tell the spirits anything,” Charles said. “You know better than to ask.”
He was starting to get an odd notion about those spirits. The spirits who petitioned him were not human, they were spirits of the earth and air. That didn’t mean there weren’t spirits of the dead. Usually the dead had a weight to them, a feeling of wrongness. The spirits surrounding Joseph burned with purpose, a heat that made Charles’s heart pound in his chest and called to Brother Wolf. There was nothing twisted or wrong in them.
Still. This incident he and Anna were unraveling involved so many dead innocents: children killed before they had a chance to decide who they were going to be. Unfinished.
The innocent dead … he’d only met one of those and if Mercy, who could see ghosts better than anyone he’d ever met, had not been with him, he’d never have connected that spirit to the child who’d been killed on that stretch of road a dozen years before. Mercy had seen the boy quite clearly, but Charles had only felt a hot sizzle on his skin, like a sunburn, only deeper.
Maybe this heat he felt from these spirits was like that child, only multiplied by all the dead who were owed balance because of the loss of their chance at life. Not rage, but vengeance.
Still, what service could an old man dying of cancer provide for dead children?
“Charles?” Anna asked hesitantly. “Are you going to keep Joseph out here all afternoon?”
He wondered how long he’d been standing still. Without replying he carried Joseph into the house.
“Anna?” he asked. “Could you come with me?” He thought again. “Maggie, it would be best if you stayed with Mackie and Michael.”
“Where do you want me?” asked Max. “I know how to hook up all of Granddad’s machinery.”
Max was like Samuel, Charles thought, a good man to have at your back. And he brought nothing with him that might change the nature of what Charles wanted to do.
Maggie … he didn’t quite trust what Maggie wanted. Maggie was never happy where she was, always looking elsewhere for happiness, for fulfillment. As much as she loved Joseph, and she did, she was not a restful person.
“Yes,” he told Max. “Come with us.”
Maggie looked at him with stricken eyes, and he felt as though he’d struck her.
“Strength and purpose are useful qualities,” he told her. “But for what I’m going to attempt, we need quiet souls.”
He didn’t know if it was enough, but he left Maggie and the kids in the living room and headed up to Joseph’s rooms.
He and Max helped Joseph into the bathroom to take care of the necessities of living, while Anna pulled back the bedding and generally made herself scarce so as not to embarrass Joseph. Charles hadn’t had to say anything to her. His mate was one of the most perceptive people he’d ever met.
They laid the old man, who had once been one of the toughest men Charles had ever met, on the bed, and he struggled to draw breath enough to talk. It made Charles’s heart hurt to see him this way.
“Shh,” said Charles.