Baba’s grim face stared at Maya from a few feet away, making it clear that a cell was the safest place for her. Her arms were crossed over her chest as if to keep them from involuntarily reaching out and strangling the other woman.
As Liam put out a hand to take Maya, lifting her up off the floor, she said plaintively, “It wasn’t me, I swear! It was him all along. He’s been stealing children and killing them, and now he’s using me as a scapegoat to take the blame. As sheriff, he’s got the perfect cover—pretending to search for the children he’s already murdered and looking for new victims along the way. No one would ever suspect him.” She paused, took a deep breath, and added, “What’s more, he killed his own child three years ago, and I can prove it!”
*
LIAM FELT AS though someone had slapped him, the blood draining from his face like water from a breached dike. His fingers tightened involuntarily around Maya’s wrist and she let out a gasp of pain that was only partly feigned.
“That’s enough,” he said in a voice like sandpaper. “More than enough.” Out of long habit, he schooled his features into a mask that hid the anguish ripping through his heart, and marched her over to the nearest intake desk. With an efficient twist, he unlocked the manacle from one slender wrist and reattached it to the circle imbedded there for the purpose, placing her firmly in the seat facing the desk.
“Watch her,” he said through gritted teeth to the deputy who had allowed her to slip away earlier. “As if your life depended on it. I will be right back. You can start on her fingerprints while you wait for me.”
He turned back to talk to Peter Callahan, only to see the tall businessman disappearing out the door. On his way to go get a fancy lawyer, no doubt. Fine. Whatever.
Clive Matthews was busy reassuring the parents of the missing children and his fellow board members that every measure would be taken to discover the location of the other victims. His smug and self-congratulatory air made it seem as though he personally had been responsible for the apprehension of the culprit, while at the same time snidely insinuating that if Liam had been a little more on the ball, they would have caught her long before this. It all made Liam sick.
He swallowed bile as Baba came up and laid a gentle hand on his arm. Her touch seemed to send waves of comfort straight to his battered heart.
“No one believed her,” Baba said. “They could see she was just trying to shift the blame to you. She’s a desperate woman, and desperate people will say anything to try to talk their way out of trouble.” Her amber eyes gazed at him with concern.
He shrugged, as if Maya’s words—and the momentary doubt on the faces all around them—hadn’t stung like aftershave on a fresh cut. “I know. And at least we’ve got her. She won’t steal any more children, and that’s what matters. That, and getting her to tell us where she stashed the first three.” Across the room, he could see Belinda Shields and her parents, standing together by Belinda’s desk and glaring at Maya.
Baba shook her head, long dark hair swinging. “She’s never going to tell you, Liam. And you can’t use the kind of tools it would take to get the information out of her. You have to let me take her to the Otherworld. Ten minutes with the queen, and Maya will be singing like a canary.” She gave a laugh without humor. “Hell, she might be a canary.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” Baba asked, taking a step back. “We agreed; when we caught Maya, I would take her back to the Otherworld. Otherwise the queen is going to have my head!”
Even though they were already speaking in a relatively quiet tone, Liam lowered his voice even further. All he needed was for Clive Matthews to overhear him talking about some kind of fairyland. At the moment, he might have saved his job, but that would certainly lose it for him, arrest or no arrest.
“I’ll let you talk to her in private, after these people have all gone home and things are calmer,” Liam said, thinking he was being perfectly reasonable. “I’ll even let you work whatever voodoo you want to get information, as long as there are no physical signs of it when you are done. But I can’t just allow you to take her out of here. Not only would I get fired as soon as it was discovered that she’d escaped, but people would start to wonder about her accusations. I could even end up facing an official inquiry. I’m sorry, Barbara, but she has to stay here.”
Baba’s face became a frozen lake of cool disdain. “I see,” she said. “So your career is more important than the fact that the Otherworld is falling to pieces because that bitch you currently have chained to one of your desks has been overusing magical power through the door I haven’t been able to find,” she said, scorn dripping like acid. “And if I can’t find that door without removing her from this station, that’s just too bad?”