“Our pack will watch over Chelsea,” said Wade. He smiled at Kage’s carefully neutral grunt. “Hosteen occasionally ties himself up in knots, but I’ve known him a long time. He’ll get his head out of his—” He glanced at Anna and rephrased. “He’ll come through. He always does.”
“Yeah,” said Kage without conviction.
“Do you think we’ll find her?” asked Anna as she emerged from the bathroom, ready for bed.
“Yes,” Charles said after a moment. “Because we won’t stop until we do, even if we have to take this town apart stick by stick.”
She froze, then turned to him. “You feel it, too?”
“She’s five years old,” he said. “And the very best case is that she’s been in the hands of a fae for months. The very best case.”
Anna nodded. “I feel as though we should be out looking some more. But I don’t see that it would do any good because after we didn’t find anything at the Millers’ or the day care, there’s no place else to look.”
“Come here,” he said.
She crawled onto the bed and into his arms.
“We’ll find that fae,” he promised her. “I don’t know if we’ll be in time for Amethyst. But we’ll be in time for the next one.”
She burrowed against him. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
He felt Brother Wolf’s joy in his mate’s fierceness. He would never take the gift of her presence in his life for granted. He’d been alone so long, so certain that there would be no one for him. He scared even other werewolves. And a part of him—of Charles, not Brother Wolf—hadn’t wanted to find anyone. He’d understood that caring for another person the way he cared for Anna would leave him vulnerable. His father’s hatchet man could not afford any weaknesses. And one day, there she was, his Anna: strong and funny despite the harm that had been done to her. She had tamed Brother Wolf first, but before he’d been in her presence ten minutes, he’d known that she would be his. That he needed her to be his.
“You’re growling,” she said, her voice drowsy. “What are you thinking?”
“That I love you,” he said. “That I am grateful every day that you decided to let me keep you.”
She hmmed and rolled over on top of him with hard-won confidence. “Good,” she said. “Gratitude is good. Love is better.” She paused, her mouth almost touching his. “I love you, too.”
He told her, “The day I met you was the first day I ever felt joy.”
She drew in a surprised breath. “Me, too,” she said, her truth making his eyes burn. “Me, too.” Then her lips traveled the few millimeters that lay between them.
They made love. To his amusement she grabbed his hand and put it over her mouth to muffle the noises she made. He left it there until she was too involved to remember it, and then he used that hand, too.
She didn’t want anyone to hear her cries, but in this house, with Chelsea and Wade, the only werewolves, a full floor away and on the other side of the house, there was no chance of it.
When they were finished, she lay limply on him and slipped effortlessly into sleep. He lay awake awhile, listening to the rain pouring down outside.
The rain would have a salutary effect on Hosteen’s ruminations, he was certain. That’s right, old man, you think before you blow up at my wife, who saved Chelsea. Not her fault that it affected you like alcohol did your father, awakening old demons. Put them back to bed, old wolf.
And you get ready to welcome Chelsea into your pack with a whole heart. Or else you will lose your grandson and your son in the same year, because if Chelsea has to leave, he will, too. He’s as stubborn as either you or Joseph.
Charles never had the knack for sending his words into other people’s heads, except for sometimes Anna’s. But he figured that the rain would do the job for him.
Anna stirred in his arms. “We have to find her.”
He kissed the top of her head. “Yes,” said Brother Wolf.
CHAPTER
9
Leslie called them at seven in the morning. Anna answered Charles’s cell because Charles was just emerging from the shower.
“I heard you stopped in at the Millers’, about an hour before a pair of my FBI agents stopped in,” Leslie said. “Did you find anything?”
“Yes and no,” Anna told her. “We confirmed that Amethyst has been missing for months. We have one of her stuffed animals that Charles and I can use for scent if we get close enough. No one who lives nearby is a fae. Or else they’re hiding their scent trail all the time, which Charles assures me is unlikely. Most fae don’t expect to have werewolves on their trail.”
“Okay,” Leslie said. “I’d have preferred you talk to me before you go off hunting on your own.”
“Okay,” said Anna, deliberately unspecific about what she was okay about.
Leslie laughed tiredly. “So I have people doing background checks on anyone who has worked at the day care, but that’s not a priority. I think that the day care trouble was caused by the fetch. All of the people who died were connected in some way to Amethyst.”
“That’s what we think, too,” said Anna.
“What we have been doing is compiling two lists. The first is weird things that have happened in the vicinity of the day care. For the second, Leeds suggested that maybe the fetch was not the first or the last this fae has made. So we’ve made some calls to local counselors, psychologists, and anyone else we could think of, asking about children who have had sudden personality changes. We still have some calls coming in on that. What we’d like to do is have you ride with me for the weird things and Charles ride with Leeds and Marsden looking into the kids. I know you usually work together, but neither the Cantrip agents nor I could tell if someone was fae or fetch if they spit on us.”
“Leeds can’t tell if someone is fae or not?” Anna asked.
“He says he’s hit-and-miss, and we can’t afford a miss. We have eleven calls to make; with luck we can do most of those today.”
“Fast work,” Anna said. She heard a huff of breath that might have been a laugh, hard to tell over the phone.
“We have a kid in danger, Anna. We take that seriously. Lots of folks have been up all night putting this information together for us.”