Fair Game

scheduled tomorrow, with you and your pack. There was no need for this…” He glanced around. People were still watching them, but they were pretending not to. “Theater,” he finished.
    “This is Boston, hoss.” Isaac bent his knees and squatted, putting his head on a level with theirs. “That’s ‘thee-ah-tah.’ We’re all about theater here.” He pronounced the second “theater” just as Charles had. He wasn’t native to Boston, she remembered. She thought he was from Michigan or Pennsylvania.
    Anna gave him a gimlet eye and spoke to Charles. “He was probably walking by and spotted us. Decided he couldn’t wait until tomorrow to throw a hissy fit.”
    “And aren’t you one to burst everyone’s posturing?” Isaac’s dark eyes considered her. Then, in a more down-to-earth tone, he looked at Charles and said, “As a matter of fact, she’s right.” Then his face and his voice went very, very serious. “I meant what I said. To get to my wolves, you’ll have to go over my dead body.”
    “If you do your job, he’ll never have to do his.” Bitterness made Anna’s tone sharper than she meant it to be.
    “She make all of your words,
kemosabe
?” Isaac asked Charles.
    Charles raised his eyebrows in an exaggerated fashion and pointed his chin at Anna as if waiting for her to answer for him. He never used his fingers to point. It was, he’d told her, very bad manners among his mother’s people.
    Speaking of bad manners…”Where’s our card for a free meal?” Anna demanded. “I think you owe us one.
Cogita ante salis,
my father would tell you. You should think before you leap.”
    Charles murmured, “Before you depart. Sally forth. Close enough.”
    Anna was never sure how many of the Latin phrases she knew were right, and how much her father simply had made up on the spot. She’d quit speaking it in front of Bran because he’d get this pained look on his face. Charles seemed mostly to find it funny, a joke they shared. He claimed not to speak Latin, but apparently Spanish and French were close enough to allow him to comment.
    “Charles is not here to enforce justice, at least not on you or yours.” She nodded at Isaac. “We were coming to you to ask for information. There are dead werewolves and the FBI and police apparently don’t have anything but bodies. We were sent here to help them. We were coming to ask you the questions the FBI probably already have in the hopes you could answer differently for us. How were our people taken and killed? Where were they taken from?”
    “Information on the dead guys?” Isaac raised his chin and met her eyes. He waited for her to drop hers—and when that didn’t happen, he frowned thoughtfully. Likely he’d never met a wolf before that he couldn’t either stare down, or felt driven to bow before.
    The Omega part tended to confuse a lot of wolves who were used to immediately sizing up others when they first met them.
Is this wolf more dominant or less? Will she do as I ask, or do I have to do what she tells me? Are we close enough in rank that I have to worry about a fight to determine who rules and who is ruled, who protects and who is protected?
Anna didn’t register at all on the obey-or-be-obeyed scale—and she apparently came with something that made all the dominant wolves need to protect her.
    Finally Isaac shook his head. “My take is that it is some seriously powerful fae, vampire, or something of that ilk. I don’t know about the other two—I cangive you the addresses of their hotels and their stated businesses. But they’ve been here before, lots of times. Neither was in the habit of causing trouble, so I don’t have them shadowed anymore. But my boy, Otten, he was taken right while he was out jogging along the Charles River about five in the morning.”
    Isaac glanced over his shoulder as if he could see the river from where they sat, though it wasn’t possible. “That’s early; I know that’s early. But there are other people, and
damn
, he’s a werewolf, right?” And Anna realized he’d turned his head so they couldn’t see the expression on his face. “Still, no one saw
anything
. No sign of a struggle—and Otten, he’s pretty old, right? Old, tough, and a fine scrapper in wolf or human form. He knew how to watch his back. Not someone to be surprised. Pack bonds hit me hard about three hours later, dropped me right down and out—he was hurt that badly. But there was so much static I couldn’t get a