Fair Game

Charles let Brother Wolf assimilate it while he observed the room. Agent Fisher was watching Anna with the same look that Asil got when he found a rose that he wanted for his greenhouse, sort of greedy and satisfied.
    We’re not going to have to talk our way into helping with this case,
he told Anna.
Agent Fisher wants us for her very own.
    Brother Wolf brought his attention back to the room, where the other Homeland Security agent, Jim Pierce, was speaking. “What if the killer
was
a werewolf?”
    Anna shook her head. “Then you wouldn’t be finding tagged bodies; you’d be finding body parts.”
    “Werewolves eat people?” asked Heuter, coming alert like a hound. “That killing in Minnesota—that was werewolves?”
    Anna snorted and lied like a politician. “Look. Becoming a werewolf doesn’t make you a serial killer—and it doesn’t make you a superhero, either. Whoever you were, that’s who you are. If a bad guy gets Changed, he’s still a bad guy. However, we police our own and we’re pretty good at it. Mostly we’re just ordinary people who turn into a wolf during the full moon and go out and hunt rabbits.”
    Being Changed turned everyone into killers. Werewolves weren’t timber wolves or red wolves who hunted only when they were hungry. Werewolves were killers—and the ones who couldn’t control it sometimes took a lot of people with them before they died.
    No one looking at his mate’s earnest freckled face would ever hear the lie—unless they were a werewolf, too. His da would be proud.

CHAPTER

4
    Anna followed Charles out of the hotel, trying to figure out what had happened with him and why so she could decide how to proceed.
    Charles led the way out of the hotel and turned in the direction of the condo where they were staying. Charles, the Aspen Creek Pack, and the pack’s corporation had condos all over the place. The one in Boston belonged to the corporation. It made travel more discreet, no hotel charges, no strangers coming in to clean every day.
    “Wait a minute,” she said.
    Charles turned back. The expression on his face was exactly the same as the one he’d had when they left their house yesterday, heading for the airport so he could fly them to Seattle, where they had caught the commercial flight. But he felt so different.
    When Charles had chosen to frighten all those poor people at the airport so she’d win her bet, she’d thought she’d detected mischief in his eyes. But it had been so long since he’d laughed—or teased her with his sneaky sense of humor—that she’d been afraid to hope. After all, they
had
been patting himdown pretty thoroughly, something that could have ticked him off enough to growl, and the timing
could
have been accidental.
    And even the meeting…it had been necessary, if the feds were to believe she was the one with the information, for him to feed it to her. And the best way to do that was for him to open the bond between them. Bran didn’t want the feds scared of werewolves, and Charles, especially the past few months, was really scary.
    If he were just doing it for business’s sake, he would have closed their link down when they left the hotel, but he hadn’t. And he’d touched her.
    Bran, it seemed, had indeed found a cure—or at least a bandage—for his son.
    “What?” Charles asked. Evidently she’d been staring at him too long. He reached up and tucked a flyaway piece of her hair behind her ear.
    She wanted to grab his hand and hold it to her, wanted to climb into his arms and feel them close around her. But she was afraid if she drew his attention to it, he’d close her off again. So she kept her hands to herself and bounced up and down on the balls of her feet a couple of times instead. She needed to keep him off his game, keep him thinking about other things—and she had just the thing to do it with.
    “Let’s go exploring.” She pulled the city map she’d taken from the hotel’s lobby this morning out of her pocket and opened it up.
    “I know Boston,” said Charles, with a slightly pained look around to see if anyone had noticed the map. It was bright orange and highly unlikely to evade even the most casual glance.
    “But I don’t,” she told him, enjoying the expression on his face. Being mated to a wolf two hundred years her elder meant that she seldom got to see him disconcerted. “And since
I
want to do the exploring…”He would take her to interesting places, she knew. Tomorrow that would be