Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega #4)(14)

She chattered at them as if everything were normal. Charles tuned her out and dropped to a crouch as he approached a pair of French doors he intended to use to gain entry. Inside the house, Kage called his wife’s name, but there was no response.

Charles eased the nearest door open and slid inside without wasting time.

Anna put her back against the wall, just to the side of the door, between the human children and whatever made this room smell of fear. They were as safe as she could make them at the moment.

“Okay,” she said. “Michael, Mackie, and Max. Tell me what happened. All we got was a few odd phone messages from your mom.” She kept an ear out. Kage was calling for his wife in a soft voice that she didn’t think the kids could hear. His wife was not answering.

“I got home from practice,” Max said. “Mom was in the kitchen and the kids were in the family room watching TV. She seemed a little off, but I figured she was tired—she works hard.” He glanced down at Michael, who had decided that the exploits of a lost little fish on the TV were more interesting than the woman who had climbed in the window.

Reassured that he wasn’t going to freak out his brother, Max continued in a calm voice designed, Anna thought, not to attract Michael’s attention. “She was chopping carrots on the cutting board and I reached out to take one.” He hesitated, looking at the youngest boy again. His sister patted his hand.

“Chindi,” she said in a very small voice.

Max nodded back at her. “Chindi.”

“What’s chindi?” Anna asked.

“Wild spirits, evil things, wrong things.” Max gave a nervous shrug. “It’s a Navajo word.”

“I’m not supposed to say it,” Mackie said in a small voice. “I said it, and then Mom got angry. It’s all my fault.”

Max huffed. “That’s just superstition. It’s not real.”

“ánáli Hastiin says not to say that word or the evil spirits will come get you,” she told him.

“ánáli Hastiin…” Max swallowed whatever he’d been going to say. “Look, pipsqueak, you didn’t cause any of this. Kage—your dad says that a lot of what ánáli Hastiin says is make-believe. You can ask your dad, but he’ll tell you the same thing. You did not cause anything bad to happen.”

“You promise?” she asked distrustfully.

“Promise.” He raised his hand, trapped his pinkie with his thumb, and left three fingers straight in the air. Anna thought it might be the Boy Scout sign, but it could be the sign of the flying spaghetti monster for all she knew. She’d never been a Boy Scout or any other kind of scout.

Mackie evidently knew what it was because she heaved a big sigh. “Okay.”

“So your mother was chopping carrots?” Anna asked Max.

“And I reached out to grab a carrot out of the bag and she—” He swallowed and looked very young. He mimed someone holding a knife and bringing it down with speed and force. “She meant to get me, but she changed the direction at the last moment. She”—he made sure Michael was still occupied, but he spelled it out anyway in the manner of older brothers with too-young-to-be-literate siblings the world over—“s-t-a-b-b-e-d her own hand and screamed at me to get the kids and lock us in a room and not open the door until Dad came home. Not to let her in under any circumstance.”

He looked at Anna with great big puppy eyes and whispered, “She was bl— b-l-e-e-d-i-n-g. Her hand was stuck to the cutting board and I just left her there. Left my stupid cell phone in my backpack with my laptop and there aren’t any landlines in the house except in the kitchen. I couldn’t call anyone for help.” He looked away and blinked hard as his nose reddened.

“How long ago?” Anna asked, to give him something else to think about.

“Fu—” He quit speaking, wiped his face on his shoulder, and looked down at his sister. “Freaking feels like hours, but this movie is about an hour and a half long and we are only about two-thirds of the way through.”

“The chindi who looks like my mother knocked on the door,” Mackie told Anna solemnly from the shelter of her brother’s arms. “She screamed at Max to open the door. And then she cried. And she tried to be nice—and Max turned up the movie so we didn’t listen.”

Chindi indeed, thought Anna. It was as good an explanation of the events Max had described as any. She was a musician, not a psychologist, but she was pretty sure that mothers didn’t go crazy and stab themselves out of the blue.

“Max is very brave,” Anna said.

Mackie nodded. “Yes. Yes, he is. When I grow up I am going marry someone like Max and make him hunt chindi with me.” Her belief that saying that word would cause problems was allayed, evidently, by Max’s honest scout sign, because she said it without hesitation.

Max gave a choked laugh. “You do that, squirt.” To Anna he said, “Someone let her watch Supernatural and now all she wants is to go out and fight evil magic.”

Mackie frowned at Anna. “You said you are a werewolf. Like ánáli Hastiin.”

Anna nodded. “If that is your great-grandfather Hosteen, then, yes, I am.”

“You can come hunt chindi with me,” she said with authority. “Max can’t because he’ll be an old man by then. Michael is too loud and clumsy. He gets scared and he will make mistakes. The bad things will eat him. And then what will I do without a little brother?”