Fair Game

princess complete with wings. She was dancing around the room and I asked her why she wasn’t flying. She stopped and told me quite earnestly that her wings were make-believe. That dancing was the closest she could do to flying. And she loved to fly.”
    It wasn’t enough. Charles was still preoccupied.
    Anna touched Charles’s face and waited until he turned from the window. “Lizzie Beauclaire is not quite twenty-three. She loves to dance. And she’s all alone with a monster who will torture and kill her if we don’t find her soon. You are her best hope.” She didn’t add, “So suck it up and pay attention,” but she trusted that he heard it in her voice.
    Charles tilted his head, though his face was quiet. At least he wasn’t looking in the windows anymore.
    “Remember that,” Anna told him fiercely as she dropped her hand. “You can’t change the past, but this we can do. Beauclaire answered first; it’s our turn. What do we know that would help the hunt?”
    She met Charles’sgaze and held it until he shifted his weight forward and gave a brief nod.
    “The bodies that the police have been finding are cut up.” Charles turned to the FBI agents. “I smelled black magic—blood magic—on the man who took Lizzie Beauclaire. That makes me think witches, and that those cuts on the victims might be significant. The fae have no use for blood magic.”
    “It doesn’t work for us,” said Beauclaire, but his voice was absentminded. He was watching Charles. Not looking him in the eye, not quite.
    Goldstein said, “I have more details on that.” He opened up his briefcase and handed Charles a thick file of photographs. “Most of the victims have shapes carved into their skin—we’ve been looking at the witchcraft or voodoo angle for the past ten years. But the witches willing to talk to us only say that it’s not anything they know. Not voodoo or hoodoo. It’s not runes. It’s not hieroglyphs, nor any other symbolic language used by witches.”
    Charles opened up the folder and then spread the photos out on the coffee table. These were mostly blowups or close-ups, some in black and white, some in color. Names, dates, and numbers were written in white marking pen on the upper left corner. The photos documented symbols, ragged and dark around the edges. Some of the markings were ripped down the middle by angry slashes; others were distorted by degradation of the flesh they had been carved in.
    “They lied to you,” said Charles, bending over to get a closer look at one.
    “Who?”
    “The witches,” said Beauclaire. He pulled one out of the mix, then set it back down quickly. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them again they were hot with…rage or terror; Anna’s nose wasn’t sure which.
    “The symbols witches use,”Beauclaire told Goldstein in polite, formal tones, “follow family lines, for the most part. I can’t, but the witches should have been able to tell you what family line these came from. There’s something wrong with the way they’re placed or the shape…In a very long life, I have seen many things. I do not perform blood magic, but I’ve seen it often enough.”
    Charles turned one of the photos to view it from a different angle and frowned. He took his phone out of his pocket and took a close-up of one of the photos. He hit a few more buttons and put the phone to his ear.
    “Charles,” said Bran.
    “Ears might hear,” warned Charles, telling his father that there was someone else in the room who could overhear their phone call. “I sent you a photo. Looks like witchcraft to me. What do you think?”
    “I’ll call you back,” Bran said and hung up.
    Goldstein rubbed his face tiredly. “We’re supposed to be holding these back from the public,” he said. “Can I ask that the photo won’t hit the Internet or the news services?”
    “You’re safe,” Anna reassured him. “We’re calling in an expert opinion.”
    The phone rang before anyone could say anything. Charles put it on speaker as he answered it.
    “Everyone can hear you now,” he said.
    There was a little pause before Bran spoke. “You need to get a witch to look at that. It appears to be something from the Irish clans to me, but it doesn’t look quite right. Some of those symbols are nonsense and a few others are drawn wrong. It would be best if the witch could see the real thing, not just the photos. There’s more to a spell than only the visual can tell