Fair Game

fix on him when I woke up.”
    He focused on Charles, meeting his gaze for longer than she’d ever seen anyone outside of his father. “They cut him. Raped him and killed him while they cut into him.” His voice was raw with rage, and golden embers sparked in his dark eyes despite the tears on his cheek.
    “They,” said Charles intently. “How many?”
    Isaac looked startled at the question, and then surprise jerked his head up and he frowned. “Two? Two…is wrong; there was a third. I just got impressions. Mostly pain. Didn’t think the shadows I got were important. Let me think.” He closed his eyes and tilted his head, a wolflike motion that was familiar. They all did it, now and again. If Anna’s nose quit working, she’d still know a werewolf when she met him, just from that motion.
    Isaac frowned and shook his head.
    They cut him,
Isaac had said. The FBI had shown them only select views of the later victims, as if to hide damage that had some significance they hadn’t wanted to share. Or else they were trying not toshock a civilian consultant who might pay so much attention to the dead body, he failed to see anything else. But cutting…She knew a kind of creature who might cut up a werewolf before killing him.
    “Were the cuts random?” asked Anna. “Or were they in a deliberate pattern?”
    Isaac caught on to where she was going. “Witches? You think witches are behind this?”
    Charles shrugged. “This is the beginning of our hunt, Isaac. I try not to think anything at this point.”
    Isaac nodded and looked at Anna. “Could be the cuts were deliberate. Or it could just have been someone playing, like a cat with a mouse—they seemed to enjoy it. The bond between an Alpha and his wolves isn’t a mating bond—I just caught the worst of what he was experiencing here and there.” Something unhappy grew in his face, and his eyes widened as he kept the tears in. “He wasn’t scared, you know? Even when the pain was bad. Otten was a cool one, just waiting for his chance—but they didn’t give him one.”
    “I knew him,” said Charles, and his voice said a lot more than the words. It acknowledged and agreed with Isaac’s assessment of the man and told Anna—and Isaac—that the dead man had been someone Charles respected and liked. “Thank you for talking to us, Isaac. You’ve helped. We’ll stop them, and when we do, you’ll know that you helped.”
    “You find those bastards”—it came out in a low growl from Isaac’s belly, a command by one who was used to giving orders—”who killed Otten…” He sucked in his breath and looked abruptly away and down. Anna glanced at Charles but she couldn’t see the expression on his face that Isaac had responded to; it was already gone.
    When the Boston Alpha spoke again, the command was gone from his voice. “You find them, and I would take it as a personal favor if you called me for backup.”
    He handed Anna a card. It had only a phone number below hisname, so she put out her empty hand demandingly. He lowered his lids and stared at her as she met his gaze unflinchingly—then wiggled her fingers. “Gimme.”
    He laughed, wiped the tears from his face with both hands, and looked at Charles. “
What
is she?” But without waiting for a reply—that wasn’t forthcoming anyway—he handed Anna a pair of cards that had
The Irish Wolfhound
embossed on them. “Don’t bend ‘em all up. We reuse them.”
    Anna snorted as he popped up to his feet and jumped on top of the wagon he’d been on before in an easy leap. With a half wave of his hand, he took off, moving fast without giving the appearance of fleeing. He lightly hopped from one kiosk to the next, rocking them but not enough that anything fell off the shelves.
    Charles rose unhurriedly, but without any wasted motions, either, and gathered the debris of their meal. “Let’s go while he’s still distracting everyone.”
    THEY WALKED BY the Old State House on their way to the condo. It was sitting right in the middle of a bunch of skyscrapers, looking like a bright gold and white anachronism in the middle of all the dark glass and chrome of its near neighbors. Boston…Anna’d been expecting something like Seattle, since so many people compared the two. And there were some things that reminded her quite strongly of the Emerald City—the ocean, for instance—and the whole educated-and-liberal feel to the place. But Boston was different, at least the part of it that she had