Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega #4)(56)

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.

Dr. Miller hesitated, then opened the door to welcome them inside. “Don’t hurt her,” he told them earnestly, and he wasn’t talking about Amethyst.

“Life hurts,” Charles said gently. “But we won’t lie to you or to your wife.”

Amethyst’s room was neat as a pin. Toys were organized by size, then by color on the white shelves along one wall. The bed was tidy and Anna suspected she could have bounced a quarter off the bedspread.