Alpha Omega 03 - Fair Game

finger-hand-talk thing for a good half minute before blowing out a breath of air. “There’s a couple of people at the BAU who are familiar with the Big Game Hunter. I’ll give them a call and see what the profilers say might happen to our killer if the media knows we have werewolves hunting him. You and Craig can pick up information on werewolves as you work with them. Let me think about implications for the rest of today, and if nothing strikes me as too stupid, I’ll give you a go tomorrow.”

CHAPTER

5
    After a hard day of being a tourist, Anna slept deeply in the bed on the other side of the bathroom wall. Charles put his forehead against his side of that wall for a long moment before he worked up his…”Courage” was not the right word. Fortitude.
    After a deep breath, Charles stepped in front of the bathroom mirror. It was one of those full-length things that women used to use to make sure their ankles weren’t showing below their skirts and now used to make sure, he assumed, that their underwear showed only when they wanted it to.
    And he was trying to distract himself by looking at the mirror rather than looking at the image it held.
    Charles couldn’t see them if he turned his head to look behind himself, but in the mirror the spirits who haunted him were as clear, as three-dimensional, as they were when they were still alive. They had stayed away all day while he and Anna did the tourist thing, this evening when Anna took him on the silly haunted tour that had been asurprising amount of fun, and tonight when he had held her as she fell asleep.
    As soon as she slept, they returned.
    We see her,
they said.
Does she see you? Does she know what you are? Murderer, killer, death bringer. We will show her and she’ll run from you. But she can’t run far enough to be safe.
    Hollow-eyed and cadaverously thin, they stared at him, meeting his eyes in a way that no one except Anna, his father, or his brother had dared to do in a very long time. The oldest ones morphed into something they had not been in life—their eyes black, their faces distorted until they hardly looked human. The three newest ones looked as they had the moment before he’d ended their lives. They stood so close to him that it was strange that he could not feel the heat of them—or the chill—at his back. Even so, it wasn’t only his eyes that told him they were there.
    Charles could smell them. Not the odor of rotting meat precisely, but something close, the sweet, sickly smell that some flowers produce to attract flies and other carrion-feeding bugs. The smell penetrated his skin. Like the ghosts in the mirror, the scent was a reflection, not the real thing.
    And he heard them.
    Why?
they asked.
Why did you kill us?
He knew they weren’t interested in the answers, not really.
    The first time he’d seen them, when he’d first started this job for his father, he’d tried answering them, though he’d known better. He’d been certain that if he hit upon just the right thing to say, they would go away. But explaining things to the dead never works. They don’t hear the way the living do and words have little effect. The questions were for him, but not for him to answer—and talking to them just gave them more strength.
    Guilt attracted them.
His
guilt—it kept them from moving on towhere they belonged. There should have been something else that could have been done for them. That there had not been didn’t make him feel any differently about it.
    They had been protecting a child and lost control of their anger. Charles knew, as any werewolf did, all about losing control. There had been a pedophile stalking children in the pack’s territory, and they’d been sent out to hunt him down. That was exactly what they had done. Then they botched the job beyond repair. In another time, they’d have been punished, but not killed.
    And now they haunted him. That Charles could not release them was a second burden to bear, a second debt he owed to them.
    His grandfather—his mother’s father—had taught him it was so, and his very long life had given him no reason to doubt it.
    Dave Mason, the dead man nearest Charles, the last of the Minnesota wolves Charles had killed, opened his mouth and darted forward. Dave had been a good man. Not the brightest or the kindest, but a good man, a man of his word. He’d understood that Charles was only doing what was necessary. Dave wouldn’t have wanted his ghost to torment anyone.
    In the