* * *
Joshua's family seemed to have nothing to hide. Their home address was listed with their phone number.
It was small house; it looked like the entire thing would fit in the Wolf King's ballroom. A large metal Quonset hut garage in the back of the property dwarfed the house. Life, for Joshua's family, was apparently all about cars.
A solid wall of trees edged the sprawling yard. According to the map, the woods extended a mile on private land to meet up with a large state forest. Seth could see why people thought that Joshua had simply wandered off and gotten lost.
Seth pulled cautiously into the driveway. Somewhere in the area were Wickers who'd already killed one Thane and badly hurt another. Seth turned off the motor and listened to the quiet ticking of the engine.
He'd grown up with stories of how his infant brother had been picked up helpless from his crib and carried out of the mountain lodge. His kidnappers tracked Anastasia's blood through the snow. His father had howled himself hoarse when he realized he'd chased after the wrong car; that he'd forever lost his first-born son. The only child his father would ever have with his childhood sweetheart, the girl he'd loved nearly half his life.
It would be a miracle if Joshua were his lost brother.
The important thing, though, was he was a newborn werewolf. He wouldn't be able to fully control his transformation into a wolf. One bite would create a feral, and then there would be an uncontrollable monster loose. It was a cascading disaster waiting to happen. It might be smarter to wait for backup now that Seth knew what was going on but if he hesitated, dozens of people could be killed.
* * *
The back door was unlocked. It surprised Seth until he remembered that the family thought Joshua might have wandered off in a fit of amnesia. They didn't want to lock Joshua out on a cold autumn day. Seth opened the door and slipped in.
Water from an upstairs bathroom had flooded down through the kitchen's ceiling the day before. The plaster still dripped. The range sat pulled out from its cove and unplugged. The receptacle looked half-melted; char marks followed the path of water down the wall to the floor.
Seth eyed the dripping ceiling. "Oh, yeah, someone is having trouble with their new wolf strength."
There was more than one reason why his family normally took newborns camping for a month. Broken faucets, toilets, doors, lamps, and electronics got to be expensive. Seth had spent an entire summer shifting chicken eggs from one basket to another to learn control.
The living room reflected a modest income. Worn furniture. No paintings or artwork. Ancient TV. The items normally displayed on the fireplace mantle had been shoved aside to make way for a multitude of photos of Joshua. Afraid that he was already dead, Joshua's family had built a shrine to him.
Seth stared at the pictures, trying to see his father in the boy. Joshua didn't belong with this family. His parents and older sister were willowy tall, blue-eyed and blond. In other words, everything Joshua was not. He didn't look like a Tatterskein either; he was far too short and mousey. However he ended up with this family, though, it was obvious he'd been raised with love. A toddler sat awe-struck on Santa's lap. An eight-year-old grinned widely to show off missing baby teeth. A pre-teen had grease up to his elbows and smeared across his face as he did male bonding under the hood of a muscle car. A teenager looked embarrassed by his mother's hug.
Seth was assuming that the boy was Ilya. If Joshua was his lost older brother, then Ilya had had a good childhood. One that was a far cry from the horrific death that Seth's family had always imagined. Furthermore, if Joshua had been found and returned as an infant, he would have died with the rest of their family.
"Good for you," Seth whispered to the pictures.
Seth started to turn away when he noticed that one of the photos had fallen to the floor. Joshua's parents stood outside their business in Utica, infant in arms, snow on the ground. In the background was the Dodge Viper with a wolf head painted on front panel.
The only reason that this picture would be on the mantle would be that Joshua was the infant in the photo. It was proof that Joshua was Seth's long lost brother, Ilya. Seth put the photo into his wallet.
Was Joshua also now a werewolf?
Seth took a deep breath through his nose. The house been closed up for the approaching winter. Trapped in and circulated by a forced air furnace, the room held a heady soup of scents. The family had had Chinese takeout the night before; General Tso's chicken and Mongolian beef masked the fainter scents.
He growled in annoyance and closed his eyes to focus tighter on his sense of smell. Yes, there, the scent of a youngling. Fainter still was newborn werewolf; Joshua had only been in the house an hour or two before disappearing. Under the food and youngling and werewolf was something else. Seth breathed deeper.
There was something dead in the house.
A cat yowled from somewhere in the house. Another howl followed. It was a call that demanded that a stupid human come and find out what was the matter.
Seth gathered his power close to him and followed the sound upstairs.
The smell of carrion came from the bathroom. The sink's cold-water faucet had been snapped cleanly off, creating the downstairs flood. A seal-point Himalayan sat in the battered bathtub. The cat glared at him. It wanted a human, not a werewolf, to obey its summons.
"Good kitty." Seth's experience with cats was limited to those he met at the Dr. Huff's office.
The cat hissed.
"Yeah, yeah, I know." The cats at Dr. Huff's never liked the big bad wolf either.
Something fluttered under the Himalayan's front paws.
"What did you catch?" He leaned closer, making the cat hiss again.
A snitch fluttered its paper wings, trying to escape. Its twig legs scratched against the tub's porcelain as it clawed at the smooth surface.
"Shit!" Seth ducked back into the hallway. He didn't want the Wicker's knowing he was in the area. The magical construct worked as a spy, communicating back what it saw and heard. The coven needed to use a freshly harvested human eye to create the snitch. None of the dead teenagers at the barn had been missing their eyes. The town's body count just went up by one.
How to catch the snitch without the Wickers knowing that the Prince of Boston was the one who caught it?
His first impulse was to use his hands. The construct couldn't hurt him and he was trained to fight barehanded. A human, though, wouldn't want to touch it.
He scanned the bathroom from the door. What could he use as a weapon? Yesterday's flood must have triggered a massive cleanout, as the room was bare. The only object in the room was a toilet plunger.
The things his father never warned him about.
He leaned in, picked up the toilet plunger and braced himself for a fight.
As he moved closer to the tub, the cat hissed and fled. The freed snitch darted forward, careened off the tile wall and headed for the open door. He smacked it out of the air with the plunger and then stomped the red rubber end over it. It buzzed angrily under the suction cup.
"Gotcha!" He glanced around the bare bathroom again. "Now, how to kill you?"
A magic wound like a werewolf's bite would work, but there was no way he was putting it in his mouth. A silver knife? He doubted that Joshua's family had real silverware, but he should at least look.
He felt vaguely like a robber going through the kitchen drawers and kitchen cabinets. Nothing silver. Not even candlesticks.
Out the kitchen window he spotted a charcoal grill.
Fire would work.
* * *
He found a flat cookie tray and slid it under the plunger. He carried the unwieldy trap downstairs and out the back door. Joshua's parents were orderly people; all the needed utensils for a cookout were carefully organized. All that was needed was a dishcloth to drape over the snitch so it couldn't report who was burning it. He used tongs to hold it over the fire and spray it with lighter fluid. The flames leapt greedily up. Under the thin clo
th, the snitch's paper wings thrashed.
If the Wickers had snitches in place, then they didn't have Joshua.
Was Joshua lost in the woods? Had he gone feral?
Once Seth was sure that the snitch was nothing but ashes, he stalked through the yard, sniffing. He found Joshua's scent overlaid by that of multiple people. He followed it to the Quonset hut garage. Unlike the house, this was locked tight. He gave the side entrance a hard push and the dead bolt broke the frame.
Someone had run a gasoline engine in the tight confines in the last two days. Neat and orderly continued in the garage. Along the near wall was a herd of ATVs, motorcycles and dirt bikes. There was an obvious void where one of the bikes had been taken. Four pegs by the door used to hold four helmets. Only three hung there now. Seth sniffed at them. Joshua's was missing.
The newborn hadn't "wandered off," he'd fled at full speed.
"Way to go, big brother."
The snitches were in place in case Joshua contacted his family or came back home. The Wickers had lost track of his brother. Joshua would be safe from the Wickers as long as he stayed hidden.
The question was: where did Joshua go?
* * *
Upstairs had once been two bedrooms. The largest had been split into two claustrophobic bedrooms for children of opposite gender. Joshua's room was just big enough to wedge a bunk bed into it. The lower bunk had been removed to make space for a desk. Seth's shower at the Castle was bigger
The room was surprisingly clean; especially for a teenage boy whose life had been turned upside down. There were no dirty clothes or books or papers on the floor. Even the small closet was neatly organized. To Seth, nothing seemed to be missing. There was even a phone sitting in a charger on the desk.
He picked up the phone. It turned on as he lifted it out of its cradle. A swipe put him at the passcode screen. Seth tried 0000 and 1234 and 4321 without any success.
"Not a simpleminded man, are you, Joshua?" Seth scanned the room for a possible clue. What would Joshua use for his passcode? Above the desk was a bookshelf. On the left side were a half-dozen textbooks. The rest of the shelf was science fiction and fantasy novels. No real clues there, at least nothing obvious.
A corkboard hung to the left of the desk. Pieces of Joshua's life were pinned into place. A straight "A" report card. An SAT score higher than Seth's. Applications to half a dozen colleges. Joshua ranked his applications with sticky notes. He wanted to go to Harvard or Boston College or Northeastern University but would settle for Syracuse or Rochester or Albany. Red-penned Amtrak schedules explained the latter three; he wanted to get to school and back via the train.
Seth unpinned the applications. All the little boxes were filled out with Joshua's personal information. His birthday was listed as February twenty-ninth instead of Ilya's date of March seventh.
Neither was his passcode.
Joshua had left his social security number blank on all the applications. Seth scanned the corkboard. A note reminded Joshua to get a copy of his birth certificate from his "mom" and apply for a social security number.
"She can't supply what she doesn't have." Seth folded up the Harvard application and tucked it into his pocket. The others he repinned to the corkboard.
Joshua's phone vibrated in Seth's hand with an incoming text.
The screen identified the contact merely as "George." "Your folks are on the news again, asking for information on you. Where are you? No one knows where you are. I called everyone."
If George had actually contacted "everyone" that Joshua knew, then the newborn werewolf wasn't hiding with friends. All things considered, that was probably a good thing.
The phone vibrated again. George asked, "Are you okay, Kickboy?"
Kickboy?
Seth noticed for the first time that there was a shelf above the closet door. It held dozens of martial arts medals, ribbons and trophies. Werewolves didn't compete in most high school sports; their speed and strength would draw unwanted attention. A youngling didn't have any advantages over a normal human. The number of trophies was impressive considering Joshua's small size.
"Wow, you rock, big brother." Seth put the phone back into the charger. The room painted a picture of a boy who was organized and compulsive over the smallest of details. Joshua had left his phone on purpose, most likely so he couldn't be tracked via its GPS. He'd probably deleted any telling information. It was a dead end.
Down the hall, the Himalayan howled, announcing it had caught a second snitch.
Seth swore. He should have guessed that there would be a second one. The Wickers would be economical; they'd use both eyes of their victim to make the snitches.
He leaned into the bathroom to grab the toilet plunger again and followed the howling.
* * *
Joshua's older adoptive sister fared better in the room division; she'd wedged a full-size bed on eighteen-inch risers into her bedroom. A dormer gave her space for a low dresser with piece of plywood hinged to the top so it could double as a desk. The room seemed partially stripped of belongings as if his sister had been the one who fled the house. Most likely she'd gone off to college. Otherwise it was much the same: clean, compact, focused on sleep and study, sprinkled with martial arts trophies.
The howling came from under her elevated bed. Seth got down on his hands and knees.
Up against the far wall, the Himalayan pinned a second snitch. The cat hissed at him and then dared to growl at him. Him! The Prince of Boston.
"Damn, you're one stupidly brave cat."
Seth leaned back to eye the bed. It touched three walls. He wasn't even sure how they'd gotten the mattress and box-springs down the hall, through the door and into the space. It wasn't wedged tight, it simply had nowhere to go if he tried to move it. Maybe they'd built the room around the bed.
When his father warned him he'd have rough days as the prince, his father probably wasn't envisioning a fight with a magical construct and a large house cat under a co-ed's bed with a toilet plunger.
He crawled under the bed and chaos erupted.
It hadn't occurred to him that his body would block both the snitch and the cat from escaping. Or that by blocking "flee" for the cat, he'd trigger "fight" instincts. The Himalayan became a howling cyclone of claws as the snitch flitted about madly, looking for a way to escape. Seth stabbed with the plunger, trying to nail the snitch to the wall. Every time he'd thought he had it, the cat would leap in the way. He didn't want to reduce his brother's cat to a pancake.
He swung his leg out, trying to pin the cat. It wrapped itself around his leg and latched all four sets of claws and its needle-sharp teeth into his leg just below his groin. He roared, abandoned trying to trap the snitch with the plunger and merely grabbed it with his free hand.
"What the hell?" a woman shouted.
He'd been so focused on the snitch and the cat that he missed someone coming up the stairs.
He jerked up, taking the bed with him. A tall, willowy blonde stood in the doorway with a bamboo kendo practice sword in hand. "Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house? Why are you under my bed?"
He stood panting, plunger in one hand, snitch in the other, and the damn cat wrapped around his leg. Seth breathed in her scent. Yes, it was her bed that he'd just upended, the frame still lying across his shoulders like an ox-yoke.
This was going to be fun to explain.
Was he still fully human? Yes. Yay him; years of practice just paid off.
Now what did he tell her? What was a good and rational reason to break into someone's house and molest their cat under a bed?
He had nothing. He was too tired to be that creative.
So he went with the truth.
"Catching this." He held out the snitch as evidence.
She took a step back, raising the sword into strike position, before glancing down at his hand. "What is---Holy shit!" She jerked back. "It moved! What the hell is that?"
The snitch fluttered its paper wings and f
lailed with twig legs, trying to get free.
He forgot for a moment that he had the toilet plunger in his left hand. He raised it, saying, "I need to---ow! Ow!" She'd whacked him twice with the bamboo sword, both head shots. It stung but she couldn't actually hit him hard enough to hurt him. She would need a silver weapon or a Mack truck for that. "Shit! Just wait!"
He blocked a series of blows with the toilet plunger. She was fast; he only managed to block her because he was a werewolf. He managed to get her to back up by advancing. The Himalayan kept hold of him, growling fiercely and occasionally raking at his leg with its back claws.
They went down the steps and across the living room before she realized that he was just blocking and not attacking. At that point, she grew reckless and started to swing without trying to guard herself.
"Just. Let. Me. Show. You. This!" He smacked the sword hard. The plunger broke and the sword went flying out of her hand. He thrust his hand with the snitch forward, trying to make her stop and look at it.
She caught his wrist and threw him onto the ground.
He was starting to get seriously pissed off, which was a very bad thing. He struggled not to growl or radiate his power. She was just freaked out right now. If he terrified her, there would be no talking with her. Ever. (Although he was getting to the point where he didn't care.)
At least the cat had let go of his leg.
"What kind of bug or whatever is that?" she asked.
Oh thank God, now that she thought she had him pinned, she was actually looking at what he held in his hand.
"Is that calculus?" she asked.
What? Oh, the snitch's wings. The Wickers would have used items they found in Joshua's house to make it. In this case, a calculus textbook.
"I've been trying to show it to you," Seth said. "It's not a living creature. It's like origami on crack."
"Who the hell are you?"
He didn't want the snitch---and thus the Wickers---to hear. "Look, can I deal with this thing first and then talk?" To keep the conversation on a "normal" level, he added, "It's really creepy."
She let him go and backed away. Her stance reflected the martial arts trophies in her room; she braced for a second round of fighting.