Leslie nodded and then looked at Marsden. Leeds, Anna saw, was sliding the fetch-bundle into a large evidence bag.
“Marsden,” Leslie said. “I’ve done my homework on you, on both of you. You’re innovative and capable, even if the thing you’re best at is ticking off the higher-ups. It was your people, Cantrip analysts, who first alerted us—that would be the FBI—that the fae are sending out … a few individuals who have particularly nasty histories and letting them loose on the general population.”
Charles made one of his noises, and Leslie nodded at him. “Hah. I thought you might have noticed what the fae were doing. The FBI has been hoping that you people would contact us so that we can work together. Or at least talk about working together.”
He didn’t say anything, and Anna abided by his judgment. Marsden was staring at Charles like he was a puzzle.
Join the club. Anna hid her smile.
Leslie, apparently deciding she wasn’t going to get an answer yet, continued. “The fae want to get our attention. We took out someone … something in Florida, a kelpie we think. It was eating people who swam in its lake. There have been other incidents, too. Our analysts think it’s probably a negotiation tool, a ‘look what we’ve been saving you from all these years; you humans better start thinking about how the negotiations are going to proceed’ kind of thing. That’s the optimistic view. The pessimistic view is that this is the first wave of a war that we’re not sure we can win because the only thing that we know about the enemy comes from folktales and what they themselves have told us. They might not be able to lie, but they left a whole freaking lot out.”
She looked at Charles again and asked, “What do you know about it?”
Charles angled his face a little, considering her question. Finally he said, “About what you do.”
That was news to Anna. Though, to be fair, she wasn’t actively involved in everything he did for the packs or his father. She wasn’t honestly certain that Bran would be upset about the fae attacking regular people. She might love her father-in-law, but she was not blind to his faults. He was focused on the werewolves to the exclusion of anything else.
There was also the possibility that Charles hadn’t been aware of the attacks until Leslie told them. Some of his reputation for awesome cosmic powers came from not telling anyone how much he knew about anything. Thus leaving it to other people to assume the answer was “everything.” The rest of his reputation was wholly deserved.
Charles glanced at Leeds or maybe at the remains of the fake Amethyst Miller. “There was some question about what side we’d come down on, if any.”
“That’s what I thought,” Leslie said. She waved her arms around the room. “I’m hoping that your presence here means that you’ve decided to help?”
“All right, who are you people?” Marsden waved his hand vaguely at Charles and Anna.
“This thing is really pretty cool,” Leeds announced from the floor, as though he had entirely missed the conversation going on ten feet away. “I never thought I’d see one of these in person. Just think of the kind of power that can take a mannequin—something, anything, shaped to look vaguely human—and make it walk and talk and act human. Well, mostly human, anyway. And it fooled people for months. I suppose it could have been a doll or a clay figure, but a bundle of sticks is traditional. I think that this ribbon must have been something the original child wore. I also think, though I can’t swear to it without taking it apart, that there is some hair here as well.” He spoke with the intense enthusiasm of a miner discovering gold for the first time.
Leslie gave Leeds an assessing look. “Him I want on my team, especially. Geeks are really useful.”
“So am I,” said Marsden. “How do you know the Smiths, Special Agent Fisher? And who are they?”
“I worked with them last year—you probably heard about the case,” she said. “It culminated in Beauclaire, Prince of the Elves, beheading the son of a US senator. Charles and Anna Smith were sent to help in the investigation.”
Marsden frowned, but he wasn’t slow on the uptake. “Werewolves. There were a couple of werewolves called in to consult on that. They testified under pseudonyms by special dispensation—” He looked at Charles. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” he said. “I should have caught that.”
“Werewolves?” said Leeds, distracted at last from the now safely contained bundle of sticks.
Charles smiled at him, the smile that had teeth. “Werewolves, yes, both my wife and I. What you should know is that this fae launched a barely failed attack on a couple of children under the protection of the local Alpha. We were available, so we volunteered to see if we could find the culprit. We walked into the room with Miss Baird and found the fetch. It didn’t take long to realize what Amethyst, the thing wearing Amethyst Miller’s shape, had to be.”
He looked at Leslie and his face softened. “And yes, that the fae attacked some of ours means that we have chosen to work with the humans against the fae, in this instance. I cannot say that alliance will last, or that we won’t retreat back to being a neutral third party when this incident is resolved. My experience with the fae leads me to believe that such a retreat would be useless. I will convey my belief to … those higher up.”
“Who were the children who were attacked?” asked Marsden, prepared to write it down. “We should go talk to them, too.”
Charles just looked at him.
“No need to be rude,” Anna told Charles. To Marsden she said, “We know the details and we’ll tell you if anything would be useful, but mostly they just led us to the changeling. Some of the werewolves are out to the public, but some of them have chosen not to be. This is not our pack. I don’t know who is out and who is not, and we will not give their names out unless it becomes necessary.”
There was an awkward silence as Marsden clearly wanted to push the issue, but Charles was at his intimidating best. She could almost see the moment when Marsden remembered he was dealing with a werewolf, and that it wasn’t a smart idea to meet a werewolf’s eyes unless you were prepared for a dominance battle. Once he dropped his eyes from Charles’s, it was too late to push.
“So do you know what we’re dealing with?” asked Leslie.
“Fae,” said Charles. “But you know that much.”
“One that can build a fetch.” Marsden indicated the bundle of sticks with his chin.
“I thought that a fetch is an exact duplicate of yourself that warns you that you’re about to die,” said Leslie.
“Or kills you,” added Anna.
“Or a bundle of sticks that is magicked to look exactly like a child,” said Charles.
“Another word for ‘changeling,’” said Marsden.
Leeds shook his head. “No. Well, yes. But a fetch is specifically a changeling that isn’t a real living thing—” He pointed to the sticks. “Most changelings are fae who make themselves look like the child who’s been stolen away. That takes very little magic, just a variant of the glamour they use to appear like normal human beings. But this, this is very rare. I’ve seen six … seven changeling cases. None of them involved a fetch.”
Anna looked at Charles. She hadn’t known that the fae had been that … active before Beauclaire had killed his daughter’s attacker and then retreated with the rest of the fae behind the walls that everyone had believed to be jails. Those jails, as it turned out, were really fortresses. He gave a subtle shake of his head. He hadn’t known, either.
“Seven?” Leslie asked. “I haven’t heard of any.”
“Oh, two of them weren’t real. One was some parents who thought it would be convenient if the child they beat to death wasn’t really theirs. Another was, oddly enough in this day and age, an actual case of babies switched at birth. Resulted in a heck of a lawsuit and a lot of work running down just which babies had been switched and switching them back. But five changelings—” He gave them a wry smile. “One was me. My parents never knew. They died in a car wreck when I was twenty or so. I didn’t find out for a long time afterward, when I volunteered for a DNA sample to … let’s just say my human family has a number of people who would bring up the ratings of one of those Dr. Phil analogues. Turns out I’m half-human, half-fae. My human half has nothing in common with either of the people I always thought were my parents.” He looked down at the floor and muttered, “I found it to be kind of a relief, really. Not the being-half-fae part, but not being related to the people who raised me? That was outstanding.”
Marsden put himself between them and his partner. Anna didn’t think it was a conscious move. But he positioned himself in such a way to let them all know that anyone who wanted to take a potshot at his partner would have to go through Marsden to do it.
No one said anything. Leeds smiled gently at his partner’s back and shrugged. “My bosses give the changeling cases to me, for obvious reasons. The last one, the boy who was beaten to death, landed me in Phoenix. I was apparently more blunt than necessary.”
“Scared them into confessing,” said Marsden. “Useful, but not the approved method of coaxing the truth into the open.”
Leeds looked kind of harmless to Anna. Harmless people don’t scare people into confessing to murder.
“The changeling targeted my friend’s grandchildren,” Charles said. “Will the fae who made the fetch know what the fetch did? Does the fae use the changeling for ears and eyes?”
Leeds shook his head. “I don’t think so. Assuming the fae isn’t here, too. Everything that I’ve been able to dig up on them is that a fetch operates on its own. It is an inanimate object given intelligence and purpose.”
They all considered that a moment.
“How many of the stolen children were recovered?” asked Leslie.
Leeds sat back on his heels and gave her a half smile full of sympathy. “None of them. But then the ones I’ve seen, like me, were all adults when it was discovered. As far as I know, this is the first stolen child in two decades. Still, the fetch is really a hopeful sign, not that I’d have said so in front of the Millers. I don’t like to give false hope.”
“Why hopeful?” asked Leslie.
“Because a fetch costs a lot of magic, right?” Leeds told them. “And what is the primary purpose of a fetch?”
“To disguise the fact that a child is missing,” said Anna.
“And why disguise it, if not to keep people from looking for the missing girl.” Leeds nodded. “If she were dead, a body is easy to get rid of, easier to hide than a living child. The thing is, unlike a living changeling, a fetch has a finite life … animation period. Presumably, if Charles hadn’t forced the issue, it would have continued in her place until the real child died.”
“It could have been left to keep people from looking for the fae who stole Amethyst,” said Charles.
“And that right there is why I didn’t say anything while the Millers were here,” agreed Leeds.
He looked at Marsden. “If Special Agent Fisher is right, and the fae are really letting loose their bad guys upon us, you know what that means.”
“No,” Marsden said.
Leeds sighed. “Who are their favorite prey?”
“Children,” said Anna, a cold chill running down her spine. “It’s the children.”
“We should go to the Millers’ house,” Charles said to Anna as they walked toward their car. They’d borrowed it from the Sanis, and so they’d parked it in the parking lot of a strip mall a mile or so from the day care. It would be stupid to give the Sanis up to the fae, the FBI, or Cantrip with a license plate.
“Can you get their address?” she asked, and was rewarded by her mate’s smile.
“Will they let us in?” she asked.
“Their daughter is missing,” he said. “Now that they’re coming out of the fog of the fae’s spell, they will be looking for help from whoever offers it.”
It was dark by the time they found the right street. Every light in the house was on. Anna thought about how she’d feel knowing her child had been missing for months, hurting and afraid if not dead. And the whole while they’d believed that the fetch had been their daughter.
“It’s important they have hope,” she said, pulling into their driveway.
“We won’t take it away from them,” promised Charles.
Dr. Miller opened the door before they knocked.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My husband and I are specialists of a sort,” Anna said. “Fae, werewolf, whatever. We get called in. We thought, if you don’t mind, that we might find something here to help find your daughter.”
“She’s dead,” he said heavily. “She’s been gone for months. Twenty-four hours is the usual time frame for recovering kidnapped children alive.”
“Maybe,” Anna said. She’d been wrong, she saw. There was no chance of taking away hope that wasn’t there. Maybe it was cruel to give it back to them, but she couldn’t help herself. “If she’d been abducted by humans, almost certainly. But the fae are funny creatures when it comes to children. Sometimes they kill them, but some kinds of fae take children to keep as their own. We don’t know enough about this one to know what happened to Amethyst.”
“Let them in,” said Mrs. Miller from behind her husband’s back.