Fair Game

valuable to us, just because there are so few left—if it is not someone who has family or allies with power, mostly other fae look upon that death with a sigh of relief. First, it was not they who died. Second, it didn’tcause anyone else harm, and that fae is no longer free to make alliances with someone who might be an enemy.” His voice deepened just a little on the last sentence.
    “It bothers you,” said Leslie.
    Anna liked competent people. Not many humans were as good at reading others as the wolves were. Leslie was very good to be able to read Beauclaire so well.
    Beauclaire looked at the agent, started to say something, hesitated, then said, “Yes, Agent Fisher, it bothers me that a killer was allowed to continue picking off those he chose for nearly half a century. Had
I
known of it, I
would
have done something—which was probably why I was not informed. A mistake I have taken steps to correct. What should have been is, in this case, superseded by what is: a killer who tortures his victims before he kills them has my daughter.”
    “Do you know who or what we are hunting, Mr. Beauclaire?” asked Goldstein. “Is it a fae?”
    “Yes. I know what kind of fae could get into a building without leaving a scent trail that a werewolf could follow, and could hide so that people who walked past him could not discern that he was there.”
    “It is unusual,” said Anna. “Most glamour doesn’t work on scent.”
    “You can’t hide what you don’t perceive,” agreed Beauclaire. “Most of the fae who could follow a scent as well as a werewolf were beast-minded—like the giant in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’ Those fae couldn’t hide themselves from the cold-iron-carrying Christians who drove us from our homes—so they perished, most of them. But there are a few left who would be capable of perceiving and hiding their scents. Among those who have these abilities, the only one who would also be strong enough to carry my daughter out of her home in a satchel and be mistaken for someone carrying laundry is a horned lord.”
    Goldstein narrowed his eyes. “The old term for a man who was cuckolded? That’s not what you mean.”
    “Horned,” said Charles. “You mean antlered.”
    Beauclaire nodded. “Yes.”
    “Herne the Hunter,” suggested Charles.
    “Like Herne,” agreed Beauclaire. “There were never many of them, less than a handful that I’m aware of. The last one on this side of the Atlantic was killed in 1981, hit by a car in Vermont. The driver thought he killed a very large deer, but the accident was witnessed by one of us who could see the fae inside the deer’s skin. When no one was looking, we stole the body away.”
    “You think there is another one?” Leslie asked.
    The fae nodded. “That is what the evidence suggests.”
    “If the killer is fae, then why didn’t he start hunting fae victims before the fae came out?” Anna asked.
    That the UNSUB was fae would explain why he was still active after so many years, why he could take down a werewolf without anyone noticing. But it didn’t explain why he began targeting fae only after they admitted their existence.
    “I am not the killer to know his motivations, Ms.
Smith
,” said Beauclaire. He bit off the “Smith” to show that he knew what their last name really was—still jockeying for top dog in the room. “Coincidences do happen.”
    “Call me Anna,” she told him in a friendly voice. “Most people do.”
    He stared at her a moment. Charles growled and the fae jerked his eyes off of hers, then frowned in irritation at losing the upper hand. But Anna could feel the whole atmosphere of the living room lighten up as the fight for dominance was lost and won.
    Beauclaire gave a bow of his head to Charles, then smiled at Anna, and she thought that she’d never seen such a sad expression in her life. In that look she understood what he was doing and why—he thought his daughter was lost, she saw. He hadn’t, not when they were at his daughter’s apartment, but something—maybe that the killer was fae—had changed his mind. He was hunting her killer now, not trying to save his daughter. Perhaps that was why he’d given in to Charles so easily.
    “Coincidence,” Beauclaire admitted, “is highly overrated. I have an alternative explanation about how a fae could not know what he was until he knew that there were such things as fae.”
    He glanced around the room, but Anna couldn’t tell what he was looking