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?”
“I don’t know,” Anna said slowly, as if she were considering the invitation. “My husband doesn’t like to be left behind. But if we take him with us, the bad things will all run away and it won’t be any fun.”
“Your husband is a werewolf, too?”
“Yes.”
“If he scares away our prey, he’ll have to stay home,” Mackie said.
Anna grinned. “Right. He’d ruin our fun. But maybe it would make him feel bad not to be included.”
“If he cries, you just have to explain it to him.” Mackie said wisely.
“Mackie,” said Max reprovingly.
“Max,” she said in the same tone.
“Both of you shut up,” Michael told them, still staring at the TV. “The shark is coming.”
Anna heard feet traveling upstairs in a rush and, just outside the door, Kage whispered his wife’s name and tried to open the door.
All of the kids came to alert (shark or not), but no one said anything. Maybe the whisper freaked them out—urgent and stressed. They’d already had one parent scare the bejeebers out of them today; apparently they weren’t trusting the other one not to do the same.
“No,” said Anna, unlocking the door, but staying ready just in case whatever had affected their mother was catching. “Not Chelsea. But all the kids are here with me and they are okay.”
When the door opened, Kage brushed past her to drag the kids into his arms, then pulled back to check each one to make sure they were okay. There was no difference in his urgency when he grabbed Max, whose coloring suggested that he was a stepson and not Kage’s own child. Hosteen watched them, his face cool, his attention focused outside the room. He knew that this was not over.
“There’s a fog of fae magic on the first floor of the house,” he told her. “Where’s Charles?”
“Downstairs,” she told him. “He sent me up here to make sure nothing happened to the kids.”
“There’s a pool of blood just outside the door,” he whispered, stepping aside so Anna could see it while the kids were preoccupied. “Chelsea’s blood. I can’t scent her through the stink of fae magic that is coating this house.”
“Charles will find her,” she said. “He—” She couldn’t complete the thought as her wolf surged forward with the urgency of the message Charles sent her through their mating bond. She knew that her usually brown eyes were pale, icy blue when she looked at Kage and said, “Choose.”
Kage looked up from his children. “What?”
She gave him the only words she had. “Choose. Choose now.”
Charles inhaled blood and magic. Blood he’d been half expecting, at least until he found the children all apparently safe. So the blood was not surprising. It was the fae magic he felt carelessly caressing his skin that changed the game.
There weren’t supposed to be fae out and about. They had, with great fanfare, locked themselves away on their reservations, declaring themselves free of the laws of the United States. For the last several months they’d made no appearances outside the reservations that he was aware of.
But he knew magic, knew the feel of fae magic. Brother Wolf rose and abruptly colors dimmed a little, and the shadows revealed their secrets to his eyes.
There was no one in the room he entered. It was a typical family room with a big-screen TV on one wall and bookshelves filled with trophies, photos, books, and games on the other. But the blood was fresh and nearby. He angled his head to see if he could pick up where the scent was coming from without making a large movement that would be more likely to attract attention if something was waiting for him.
Upstairs the TV was still blaring. If there weren’t so much noise his ears would be of more use. But the noise would make it more difficult for any enemy to hear him, too.
The floor creaked somewhere in the house. He thought it was to his left, but it was difficult to tell. He moved quickly to that side of the room, staying low, pausing next to the wall. He didn’t trust walls—he’d broken through a few too many in search of prey himself. Sheetrock and two-by-fours didn’t stop a werewolf, and a lot of fae were just as strong. But as a visual barrier, a wall worked okay.
He put his head cautiously around the corner. It was the laundry room. There was blood all over the floor here, some of it splattered, and then drag marks that slid around the appliances and out of sight. He paced cautiously forward, past the washer and dryer—and found himself staring into the eyes of a wild-eyed woman who was crouched in the bathroom hidden on the far side of the room. He froze where he was.