Fair Game

closer.
    “I warned you,” she said. “You didn’t let me sleep.” She yawned widely and said regretfully, “And now I have no choice but to eat your brains.”
    “Obviously,” he said. “You need more exercise before you go to sleep.” He rolled onto his back. “I suppose I’ll just have to be a good mate and help you with that.”
    She crawled on top of him, naked and warm and soft, smelling like a miracle that had saved him from a lifetime of aloneness.
    “I wouldn’t want you to strain anything,” Anna told him. “Why don’t you just lie back and think of England.”
    His mouth caught the nearest of her body parts—the soft inside of her elbow—and gave it a light nip. “England is the furthest thing from my mind.”
    She settled down on top of him, taking him inside her, and he quit talking altogether. Her eyes were blue, her wolf’s eyes, when she came for him for the second time that night.
    Flushed and joyous, Anna bent down and nipped his ear. “No audience necessary, I see.”
    “Move,” Charles told her.
    She laughed again, her eyes still moonlit azure—but she moved.
    THEY SLEPT IN .
    Charles woke up first and watched her face in the late-morning light. It was peaceful and pleased Brother Wolf even though the moon was waxing nearly full and the urge to hunt always ran strong in his bones at that time. Contentment was still something new for Charles, something he’d never experienced in all his long life before he’d met Anna.
    “I’ve been thinking about the killers,” Anna said without opening her eyes. “Three people is a pack.”
    Charles waited for her to continue.
    She sat up with a snap. In a voice filled with hushed excitement she said, “The fae—he’s the soldier, the bottom of the pecking order. Doing as he’s told, when he’s told to do it. The old guy, he’sthe one who started this. He’s the Alpha.”
    “Mmm,” Charles said, when it appeared she needed his agreement. The hunting moon might not be stirring Brother Wolf, as long as he had Anna in his bed, but apparently Anna was feeling it pretty strongly.
    “Who is the second young one?” she asked. “Do you think he’s the obedient second? Loyal, dedicated? Or is he the Alpha in training, waiting until the old man is too old to control the pack so he can kill him and take over?”
    “Neither of us is a trained profiler,” he felt obliged to point out.
    She bounced in the bed, her brown eyes glittering with excitement. “Now that Lizzie is rescued, all we have to do is solve the rest.”
    “As they have been trying to do for longer than you’ve been alive,” he told her dryly.
    “Yes,” she said, “but they didn’t have you and me on the case.”
    They had a TV now, and satellite—mostly so Anna could watch her detective shows. She was enjoying this. Charles…He supposed he was enjoying it, too. More now that the innocents were safe, in the hospital or the morgue.
    “Motive,” she said in the same voice he imagined Archimedes might have said, “Eureka!” in his bath all those years ago.
    “Doesn’t work the same way in serial-killer cases as it does in most murders,” he said. “Serial killers are addicted to the hunt and they aren’t capable of stopping, most of them. Their lives are controlled by the kill.”
    “He’s tagging his victims,” Anna said. “What does that say?”
    “These are less than human,” said Charles, repeating what they both knew. “Animals I have killed.”
    “Right. Animals that he has killed. He’s claiming the kill with that tag.” She frowned. “Aren’t serial killers supposed to try to step into the investigation? To watchpeople struggle and fail to solve the case—or to control the case better?”
    “I’ve heard that,” Charles agreed. “For some kinds of killers.”
    She grinned at him.
    “All of which the FBI knows better than we do,” he said. “We’ve probably helped the case as much as we can until someone else is taken.”
    Anna sobered. “It’s too bad we weren’t able to hurt the horned lord worse than we did. He was mostly healed by the time he hit the top of the stairs—did you notice? The police don’t have a chance against him.”
    “We’ll stay here for a while. Leslie and Goldstein seemed to be sensible people. They’ll call us in if they need us.”
    She tilted her head and asked, “What does Brother Wolf say about all of this?”
    “That these hunters didn’t get what they want; we stole their prey.