Fair Game

that moment was dragging on into the next without any further change happening. Dangerous to stay half-shifted, though some of the most dominant wolves could do it for a while. She scrambled for a way to continue the change, but her body was exhausted, shaking with the need for food and…
    They had doped her up with something. Mostly werewolves were immune to drugs and alcohol. Their metabolism just ran through it too fast, but they had given her something, probably a whole lot of something. GHB or Rohypnol, maybe—or some sedative designed to keep her passive. It had been no match for the adrenaline surge that the thought of being helpless in the hands of rapists and murderers had brought—but it had stalled out her shift.
    Pain came in waves, because her body wasn’t meant to be caught between for this long. Fluids, clear, pink, and bright red, began to leak onto the floor of the cage. She reached out for Charles and found the moon instead.
    Tomorrow would come the night of the full moon, when her song was too strong to resist, but tonight she was waxing and full of strength that she lent to her daughter who asked. With a painful jerkiness that scraped chain and manacles loudly on the bottom of the cage as hermuscles flexed and tore and reshaped themselves, Anna restarted her change.
    CHARLES WAS DEEP into his work. Brother Wolf loved the hunt even when it was on computers instead of in flesh and blood. Both of them could smell their prey, weak and quivering just out of their reach. So the first knock on the door elicited no more than a growl of annoyance.
    It was Brother Wolf who noticed something was wrong the second time the knock came. Even buried in the endgame of his hunt, his senses were still on alert, and they told Brother Wolf that the smart FBI lady, the smart FBI man who tried very hard to be underestimated, the fae whose daughter had been hurt, and the local Alpha were knocking on his door—and they were all supposed to be with his mate, who was not here.
    Anna.
Charles reached for her, but he couldn’t touch her through their bond, not even through their pack bond. With his help, his ghosts had well and truly isolated him.
    Enraged and terrified for Anna in equal measures, he opened the door knowing his eyes were showing Brother Wolf. “Where’s Anna?” he growled.
    Isaac was supposed to make sure no one hurt her while Charles worked. The temptation to blame the Olde Towne Alpha rose and was banished. Anna was Charles’s; she was his to protect and he had failed. Brother Wolf wanted to charge into the night and kill until they found her; Charles held him back with the knowledge that there were better ways to find Anna faster—and that blood would flow when he did.
    “We were hoping you could tell us,” Isaac said. “She went to the ladies’ room and never came back. You two are mated, right? Can you tell where she is?”
    Charles tried again. Right there and then, with the others stillstanding in the doorway, he tried again to open up the bonds he’d closed to protect her.
    Nothing. He tried harder, tried until it hurt worse than the change. He growled and tried again—and felt the ghosts who haunted him howl in triumph. He turned and walked almost blindly until he stared into the big mirror in the bedroom. The ghosts were unrecognizable, having melted into one creature with fifty mouths and twenty hands that were busily tying the ribbon of his bond into knots.
    We can kill her no matter how you try to protect her,
it told him, its voices high and vicious.
Your fault, your fault we died, your fault she dies.
One voice started laughing, and then the others continued until there was an unholy cacophony in his head.
    There was a drip of blood leaking out of Charles’s nose and the whites of his eyes were pink from broken blood vessels—it made his yellow eyes look particularly bizarre.
    “Did you try to track her?” he asked Isaac, as Charles continued to stare into the mirror, his voice so low and rough he didn’t recognize it as his own. He stuffed his rage into a small icy place and promised it release if it would let him work right now. He would be cold and controlled until he found where they had stashed his Anna—and then he’d take them down into small, bite-sized chunks.
    “Yes,” the Olde Towne Alpha said. Charles turned away from the mirror to find Isaac watching him warily from the relative safety of the living room as he continued to explain. “I trailed her into