Fair Game

Beauclaire, but the fae said, “I think I’ll wait outside with the others. He’ll be easier without me here.”
    There was a quiet click as his front door was shut and another as Isaac threw the dead bolt.
    “All right,” Isaac said, and it took a moment for Charles to realize he was talking to Bran. “It’s just Charles and me—though Beauclaire hears just fine. He might be able to hear every word we say.”
    “Acceptable,” said Charles’s da crisply. “Beauclaire is trustworthy—and he owes us a debt, if you’ve rescued his daughter.”
    Trust Da to know Beauclaire.
    “Fine,” said Isaac. “So am I reading this right and there’s something about that fu—” He caught himself, probably remembering someone warning him not to swear around Bran. Charles’s father was old, and though he could swear with the best of them (usually in Welsh) he generally preferred to avoid it. He could get pretty scary with underlings who had foul mouths. Isaac continued with slightly milder adjectives. “Screwed-up thing in Minnesota that Charles got stuck with that is somehow interfering with his bond with Anna?”
    “I don’t know,” said Bran. “Charles, is that what the problem is?”
    Charles didn’t know Isaac well, and talking in front of him was akin to dancing naked in public. But if his father could figure out a way to help—and if he couldn’t, then no one could—then he would have stripped off his clothes and run naked down Congress Street in downtown Boston at lunch hour just to get a chance to talk with him.
    “They’ve broken the link,” Charles said.
    “Who has?” asked Bran.
    “The ghosts of the people I’ve killed who should have lived.” He turned to look at his father, but all he saw was Isaac holding his cell phone open.
    He smiled grimly at Isaac, who took a step back, and spoke to him. “Another man would probably have a mental breakdown—and blame all sorts of psychoses. But my grandfather was a shaman and he gave me the gift that allows me to see the ghosts of those I’ve wronged.”
    “So they are haunting you,” Isaac said, his face quiet.
    Charles hadn’t expected the Alpha to get in his face and call him a liar—Charles was the Marrok’s hatchet man, after all. But the simple belief he saw made him remember that Isaac’s grandfather could see ghosts, too.
    “And they are haunting me,” he said, Brother Wolf standing down a little from immediate attack. Brother Wolf approved of Isaac, as long as the other wolf didn’t get too pushy.
    “Tell him why,” Bran said into the silence. His voice was odd, as it got when he was following an impulse he didn’t understand. The truth was, Charles got his ability to deal with magic from both halves of his heritage—but it sometimes bothered Bran when magic spoke to him, probably because
Bran’s
mother had made the Wicked Witch of the West look like Cinderella’s fairy godmother.
    “Because my guilt holds them here,” Charles answered Isaac,because Bran thought it might be important. “They should be off wherever dead people go, but I’m holding them here because I can’t let them go.”
    “You feel guilty about what?” Isaac asked, sounding honestly bewildered. “We all know about Minnesota—no one gossips like us Alphas. Three wolves killed some old pedophile, half ate him, and then left him for the civilians to find—and it was some ten-year-old kid who found him. Probably, taking into account what the gossip says and the police reports I saw, the ten-year-old was the kid the old guy was after. The damned fools probably made so much noise fighting over the body that the kid came to investigate. At least they had the sense to run instead of killing the kid, but I think they racked up enough stupidity to register on the Top Five Dumbass Moves list for the next ten years or so.”
    Charles hadn’t known that it had been the child who found the body. His father had told him that his job was to go find out if they had killed the man and left him for humans to find—and, if so, execute them. Brother Wolf had forced their confession—dominant wolves can do that if they are more dominant enough—and then carried out his Alpha’s orders.
    “Poor boy,” murmured Bran. “No one told me it was the boy who found him.” Someone, Charles knew, would contact the boy’s family and make sure he got counseling. His parents would think it some sort of victim’s organization or something. It was one of the jobs