Hunting Ground (Alpha & Omega #2)(74)

"Or you can let the remainder fester out. There isn't a lot-I don't think it's enough to make her sick."

"That's where my vote goes." Anna's luminous skin was greenish, and there were dark circles under her eyes. "No more probes, please."

Charles slid out from behind her. "You'll change your mind when they start festering," he predicted. "But you can wait if you'd like."

"I'll do that." She huffed indignantly. "Festering. What a lovely thought."

He kissed her lightly, then took a good look at the manacles they'd used on Anna. "I can pick these," he said, "if Arthur has the right tools around."

"Go look," Anna told him. "If I'm going to fester, I'd like to do it in comfort. And these things are not comfortable. Plus they're tacky."

Charles was smiling when he left the room, shutting the door behind him. While she was hurting, and he had to get her help, he hadn't even thought about her nudity. But he didn't want Arthur walking in on her, so he shut the door.

The house was dark, and he thought Arthur must have gone back to bed-morning was still a while away. He wasn't going to sleep again, not in Arthur's house-and he wasn't going to move Anna until she'd healed up a bit.

He went to the kitchen and opened drawers to see if he could find anything useful.

"Charles?" Arthur's voice. It came from the room that he kept his treasures in.

"Yes," he answered. "I'm looking for something to get the manacles off Anna. You wouldn't happen to have a lockpick kit, would you?"

"I probably have something that would work," Arthur said.

Charles stopped sorting through the kitchen implement drawer, lifting his head. There was something... odd about the other man's voice.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe. He removed a fillet knife from the block and slid it into his jeans pocket.

"That would be cool." He was careful to keep his throat loose, so Arthur wouldn't have any reason to think Charles had noticed anything different. "She's tough, she'd handle it-but I want them off." He moved unhurriedly through the dark living room... and caught Sunny's lingering scent from the couch nearest him.

Poor thing. He hadn't known her well enough to do more than feel sorry for her. No wonder Arthur was off. Oddly, the sympathy he felt for Arthur was far more sincere than any mourning he could do for Sunny.

He tried not to think about how much worse tonight could have been. Anna, they wanted to kidnap. Not kill.

Their taking her made him angry, so angry that not even killing three of them soothed him. Or Brother Wolf, either.

If they had killed her... he would have joined her. He paused, not having worked that out before. But it didn't particularly bother him. If she died, he would follow. Just as he would have followed her wherever they had planned on taking her had they succeeded. She was his and he hers.

"Charles?"

His phone rang. "I'll be right there. Angus is calling."

He opened the phone, "Yes?"

"Your Anna was spot on. About an hour ago-fifteen minutes after the cleanup crew left Chastel's place-we had police all over the place. Someone had called in a report of screaming, dogs howling, gunshots, and hell-all-knows else. They brought in luminol-the stuff that glows in the presence of blood. We owe Moira big-time because they found squat. The last witch we had could never have cleaned up that well. The police are still tearing the place apart-but they're being nicer about it."

"Trap sprung too late," said Charles-aware that Arthur had come out to listen.

"Yes." Angus paused. "And your scent? Moira found clothes in one of the... well, in the mess of body parts. As best we can figure, someone snitched the clothes you wore to the hunt, dragged them around the room, and dumped them."

"Deliberate."

"Absolutely. And not even the fae can pin it on you now. I know you left the hunting grounds in a completely different set of clothes."

"Good."

"On another interesting news front... that van? The local vampires who were doing the cleanup on it recognized the stick you poked through one of the bad guys. She called it a spellcatcher."

Charles frowned. "Spellcatcher?"

"Vampire hocus pocus, apparently. Very secret-the vampires here really don't want trouble with your father over this to tell us this much. Only a couple of vampires can make them-and they charge a lot for them. If our team of out-of-town vamps were hired guns, they were successful and expensive to be able to purchase such a thing. Apparently this stick can absorb up to four spells, and the person it's tuned to can use it to cast them, even if that person wouldn't normally be able to do magic."

"That would explain the shadows spell and the Look-Not-At-Me the vampires used when they attacked Anna the first time. And how they kidnapped Anna while we were both in the hotel room-they must have used the spellcatcher to put us out with a witch's sleep spell."

"The thing to remember is that it can only absorb spells given to it voluntarily by the spell caster. Means a wolf gave them the shadows spell and the Look-Not-At-Me."

"Confirming Anna's theory," Charles said. He was pacing. There were many things he did not like about cell phones-but not tangling himself up in cords was a definite benefit.