Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega #4)(55)
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.”