Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(38)

Goldstein narrowed his eyes. "The old term for a man who was cuckolded? That's not what you mean."

"Horned," said Charles. "You mean antlered."

Beauclaire nodded. "Yes."

"Herne the Hunter," suggested Charles.

"Like Herne," agreed Beauclaire. "There were never many of them, less than a handful that I'm aware of. The last one on this side of the Atlantic was killed in 1981, hit by a car in Vermont. The driver thought he killed a very large deer, but the accident was witnessed by one of us who could see the fae inside the deer's skin. When no one was looking, we stole the body away."

"You think there is another one?" Leslie asked.

The fae nodded. "That is what the evidence suggests."

"If the killer is fae, then why didn't he start hunting fae victims before the fae came out?" Anna asked.

That the UNSUB was fae would explain why he was still active after so many years, why he could take down a werewolf without anyone noticing. But it didn't explain why he began targeting fae only after they admitted their existence.

"I am not the killer to know his motivations, Ms. Smith," said Beauclaire. He bit off the "Smith" to show that he knew what their last name really was - still jockeying for top dog in the room. "Coincidences do happen."

"Call me Anna," she told him in a friendly voice. "Most people do."

He stared at her a moment. Charles growled and the fae jerked his eyes off of hers, then frowned in irritation at losing the upper hand. But Anna could feel the whole atmosphere of the living room lighten up as the fight for dominance was lost and won.

Beauclaire gave a bow of his head to Charles, then smiled at Anna, and she thought that she'd never seen such a sad expression in her life. In that look she understood what he was doing and why - he thought his daughter was lost, she saw. He hadn't, not when they were at his daughter's apartment, but something - maybe that the killer was fae - had changed his mind. He was hunting her killer now, not trying to save his daughter. Perhaps that was why he'd given in to Charles so easily.

"Coincidence," Beauclaire admitted, "is highly overrated. I have an alternative explanation about how a fae could not know what he was until he knew that there were such things as fae."

He glanced around the room, but Anna couldn't tell what he was looking for.

"In the height of the Victorian era," Beauclaire said finally, in a quiet, calm voice that belied what her nose told her, "when iron horses crossed and crisscrossed Europe, several things became obvious. There was no longer a place for the fae in the old world - and we were too few. From 1908 until just a few years ago, it was the policy of the Gray Lords, those who rule the fae, to find fae of scarce but useful types and force them to marry and interbreed with humans since humans breed so much more rapidly than we do."

Anna knew about that, but she hadn't realized how long it had gone on. From Leslie's face, Anna was pretty sure that the FBI agent hadn't known about the crossbreeding policy. That was interesting, because her face hadn't changed at all when Beauclaire had mentioned the Gray Lords, who were also a deep secret.

Goldstein might have been listening to the weather report for all the change in his face. There was no telling what he knew or didn't know about the fae.

"It was believed," continued Beauclaire, "that humans were of weaker bloodlines and the fae blood would prevail - and humans breed so very easily, even with the fae for a partner." He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. "The wisdom of these forced interbreedings is now being reexamined. Half-blood fae face many challenges. They, for the most part, are not accepted by the other fae. And too many of them exhibit...odd properties - birth defects are very high. Once fathered or mothered, a high percentage of the halflings were abandoned by their fae parent altogether, which left them to discover who and what they were on their own - to sometimes disastrous results. And a large number of the children have turned out to be entirely human."

Charles sat back. "Like your daughter?" he said in a soft voice.

"Like my daughter. The only thing she gets from me is my mother's love of dance - and she has to train hours every day to do what my mother did effortlessly." Beauclaire looked down, then back at Charles. "You are old, but not so old as your father. Maybe you can understand why I fought this dictate as hard as anything I've ever fought against. To deceive a human woman for the purpose of fathering a child upon her...it is dishonorable. Yes. And yet it gave me someone I care deeply about."

He drew in a breath and then looked Charles in the eye. It was not a challenge, more a way of showing how serious he was. "It is not wise," Beauclaire said, his voice clipped, and somewhere in the vowels Anna heard an accent not too far from Bran's when he was angered. "It is not wise to give something old and powerful something they care about. And I am very old." He looked at the FBI agents. "Even, possibly, older than your father. We haven't compared notes."

Leslie reacted to the idea that a werewolf could be older than an old fae - an immortal old fae. Goldstein just looked more tired, and maybe that was a reaction, too.

"Don't get the wrong idea," Anna told them. "The average life expectancy for someone from the time they are Changed and become a werewolf is about ten years."