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6: SETH

“Ithaca” had been a random collection of data to Seth. He knew it was a small college town, home of Cornell University, and stable enough not to need a werewolf alpha to keep the area safe. He wasn’t prepared for how remote the town was. After hours of winding his way through darkness on what seemed to be back roads claiming to be major highways, he dropped down a long, steep hill into the tree-lined center of town. The city had been built in the flat valley beside a large lake. Everything seemed clean, neat, moneyed and peaceful.

At the first red light, he closed his eyes and focused on his cousin.

He had guessed horribly wrong. Jack wasn’t in Ithaca. Jack was somewhere far away in the northeast. Weaker. Closer to death.

“Shit!” Seth leaned back in his seat, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. What the hell should he do? He couldn’t even guess how far away Jack was. It could be hundreds of miles. He’d already driven nearly five hours in the wrong direction. At this rate, it could take him a day or more to slowly triangulate where Jack was.

A car came up behind him and beeped. The light had turned green.

He drove through the empty dark streets. He needed to find Jack quickly.

At the first empty parking lot, he pulled in and parked. Bishop’s number got him an “all connections are busy” message. He ran through the phone numbers of all the Thanes with Alexander. Fifteen identical results. He checked the newsfeeds for Belgrade. The city was in chaos. The humans thought that an unused transit tunnel under the city had collapsed, taking out dozens of buildings. Hundreds were dead and fires were burning unchecked in the bohemian neighborhood of Skadarlija.

Bishop had come to Ithaca to talk to the police. Seth was going to do the same thing.

* * *

His phone directed him to a stark white stone building with the words “Hall of Justice” written over the door in giant letters. He sat in the idling Porsche staring at the entrance. The dozen squad cars confirmed that it was the police station.

“Seriously? Hall of Justice?” He snorted as the image of the Justice League’s headquarters flashed through his mind. “I am Batman.”

He could use a few super friends. And one of his uncle’s flaming Mexican coffees or something. He was so tired he was getting silly. And someplace to park. There wasn’t any street parking and all the lots within sight had signs reading: police vehicles only. It would be a stupid move to illegally park in front of a police station. He’d be stranded if they towed the Porsche instead of just ticketing it.

He rolled down the window and called out to a police officer walking toward the building. “Officer? Where’s a legal place to park?”

He was tired. The police officer was a tall, wide-shouldered woman with a pixie haircut.

She walked cautiously to the side of the Porsche, eyeing him with suspicious. “Does your father know you’ve got his baby?”

“My father is dead. This is my car.” He lied about the second part.

She blushed but didn’t apologize. “There’s a parking garage across the bridge.” She pointed down the street toward a narrow ravine. “I’m sure your fancy car would have found it if you asked it.”

“I was looking for the police department,” Seth said. “I want to talk to someone about a stolen car.”

“Well, you found it. Come back after you park your car.” She glanced at her wristwatch. It was a rugged military-grade timepiece. “I come on shift in fifteen minutes.”

The parking garage had a vending machine selling Monster energy drinks. Yawning, he debated the flavors. Mean Bean Java Monster? Anti-Gravity Monster Energy Extra Strength Nitrous Technology? What the hell was “Nitrous technology”? He fed in a fistful of coins and two rumpled dollar bills and punched the top button. Nothing happened. He checked the digital display. Yes, he’d put in enough money. He pushed the second button. Third. All the buttons.

“Give me the damn can!” He punched the machine. It rocked to the side. He caught it as it started to fall. “Don’t! Stop that!” He shook it hard. With a nervous rattle, it dropped three cans out of the slot. Two of them rolled across the floor in a desperate bid to escape.

Seth righted the machine. His father had warned him there would be days like this. His father had warned him of a lot of things. “When you’re Prince of Boston…” It was mostly useless advice now. “You will need to be firm but respectful with your uncle. He was a Thane but you will be the prince.” His uncle was dead. “Your little brothers will push your patience, but you must protect them from everything, including your own anger.” His brothers were also dead.

His father said nothing about Jack, because Jack left Boston to serve the king once he came of age. The last three years had been hard on the Thane, trying to be at once father and older brother to a boy he couldn’t hope to control.

If Seth lost Jack, he’d be utterly alone.

Despair rushed through him so strong he wanted to howl. He accidently crushed the can he’d picked up. Luckily it was a non-carbonated coffee. The cold dark liquid poured through his fingers. “Oh freaking hell.” He dumped the leaking can into a nearby trashcan and chased down the cans that rolled to freedom.

“Hold it together for the police,” Seth muttered. He cracked open the second can of iced coffee. “Going full out wolf will only make them shit their pants.”

Scaring people was a lot less useful than it sounded.

* * *

The female officer’s desk placard read “Freja Kjeldsen.” From the back, her wide shoulders made her look male. From the front, she had the chin of a linebacker and a flat chest. He suspected that she didn’t give a shit that people mistook her for a man, otherwise she wouldn’t cut her dark hair so short. On the left side of her neck, she had a long-legged spider tattoo. Wasn’t there some spider monster boss in a video game with the name Freja?

She ignored him after a glance at her wristwatch. She apparently wasn’t on duty yet. He locked down on a growl of impatience. He didn’t want to stand there waiting if she couldn’t help him. “Officer Kjeldsen, I need to talk to someone about a stolen car.”

She glanced at her wristwatch and grunted. Her shift must have started as she pulled her keyboard toward her. “Name?”

“Seth Tatterskein.”

“Can you spell that?”

Seth did and then realized that she was entering it into a form. “I’m not reporting a car stolen. You recovered a stolen car? It was found in a lake?”

She frowned. “Wait. Tatterskein? Are you related to Gerald Tatterskein?”

“He was my father. Someone with the Ithaca police department called my lawyer and said…” And Seth suddenly realized why the police called Bishop. He’d assumed that the car had been stolen recently and one of the three local wolf packs were involved. There was only one reason, though, why his father’s name would be brought up.

“You found a ‘96 Dodge Viper? Black? Custom gold pinstriping with a wolf head front panel, driver’s side?” Seth had charged Jack’s phone during the drive. He took it out, entered the password and opened up the photo album. The Viper was the first picture in Jack’s album. “This one?”

She frowned at the picture. “Yes, that’s the car. Divers found it in the lake mid-September. What do you know about this car?”

He opened his mouth and then remembered his father had killed two people the day that the Viper had been stolen. What had Bishop told the police? “My lawyer was here; Edward Bishop of King’s Law. Didn’t he explain?”

“He’s your lawyer? He talked to our Lieutenant Townsend.” She cleared her computer screen. “He’s head of the investigative division. He’s not in today.”

In other words, Seth was going to have to wait until tomorrow.

“Please. My cousin is missing.” He flipped through Jack’s photo album to find one of Jack’s selfies. The first picture Seth found was of both of them in Times Square. “This is him. Jack Cabot. He left New York City after talking to Bishop about the Viper. Something has happened to him.” Because he couldn’t explain how he knew, Seth added, “No one has heard from him since Friday morning. Did he come here to follow up?”

He thought she would dismiss him as an alarmist. It had been only forty-eight hours since Jack walked out of the Castle, not a huge amount of time for a grown man, considering the driving distances involved. She studied the picture longer than necessary, linebacker jaw flexing. She knew something and was considering tactics.

“I would remember him,” Officer Kjeldsen said finally. “He didn’t come here. Have you called your lawyer?”

“He’s in Belgrade. I haven’t been able to reach him. There was some kind of disaster—part of the city is on fire—and it’s taken out all communication lines. Why? Did something happen to my cousin?”

“I really can’t answer any of your questions…”

“My entire family was killed in a house fire three years ago while I was visiting Jack in New York City.” That was the official explanation of his family’s massacre. “He’s all I have left. I need to find him, make sure he’s okay. I’m afraid he might be hurt.”

She sat for a minute, staring at him and tapping her pencil on her desk. “I’ll do an information trade. You first.”

“Trade?” Seth had so many secrets he couldn’t tell police.

“All we told your lawyer over the phone was that we found a twenty-year-old Dodge in the lake. He shows up five hours later. You’re what? Nineteen?” She missed his age by three years. “You’ve got a lawyer on retainer and are driving a Porsche. You’ve got to be stinking rich. Why did your lawyer drop everything and push the speed limit to get here from New York City in that short a time? For a freaking twenty-year-old Dodge?”

Obviously Bishop hadn’t told them anything. What should he tell her? There was no guarantee that she would tell him anything useful. She probably was just trying to milk him and had no intention of giving him information.

But Jack wasn’t in Ithaca, nor anywhere close. Seth would have to drive blindly, and Jack had grown weaker over the hours. He had to find Jack soon.

“It’s not the car that is important,” Seth cautiously started. “The people that stole it killed my father’s first wife. The car is the only lead we’ve ever had.”

“Oh! Bishop said nothing about a murder.”

Seth spread his hands, trying to look innocent. “I don’t know why. Maybe he’s trying to keep my family’s name out of the news.” Seth knew he was setting bridges on fire. He was willing to risk anything to get to Jack. “Her name was Anastasia Tatterskein.”

He needed to start with the half-truths. He’d been taught early never to discuss his father’s arranged marriages. “She was born in Moscow. She came to the United States as an exchange student when she was thirteen. My aunt was her host mother. Jack was five when Anastasia arrived. He was ten when she was killed. He’s never gotten over her death. He loved her like an older sister.”

After Anastasia’s murder, the king had insisted on Seth’s father take a new wife immediately. It was why Jack had been so angry at the joining of Seth’s parents that he’d gotten himself banned by the Mexican pack.

“When and where was Anastasia murdered?” Officer Kjeldsen said.

“Tyringham, Massachusetts on March fifteenth.” His father always disappeared on the date to grieve privately while his mother raged about the Ides of March. It had etched the date into Seth’s brain. “My family has an isolated mountain lodge outside of Tyringham. The land is totally backed by Beartown State Forest. Anastasia was there with my father. They’d gotten snowed in the night before. He’d gotten up early, shoveled out the driveway and gone to town for groceries. While he was gone, she was shot a dozen times.”

“And there were no suspects? Your father was cleared of the murder?”

Seth stared at his foot rather than look at her. If he did, he’d frighten her. “We know who killed her. It was a cult that practices black magic; they use human sacrifices in their rituals. They cut up their victims and combine them with silver and myrrh and pieces of wood to create—” he caught himself. Most humans didn’t believe in magic any more than they believed in monsters. “— items that they believe hold magical powers. There were three to seven people.” Three was the minimum because his father had killed two and one had gotten away in the Dodge. It was one of the many secrets Seth needed to keep. “They came in multiple vehicles. One of their cars got stuck in the snow. They couldn’t get it free, so they took the Viper. After they fled the lodge, they disappeared. My family has never been able to find any clue to their whereabouts.”

His father killed two of the coven that day. A witch at the lodge. A warlock just a mile from the Lee interchange on Mass Pike. His grandfather was still alive; the power to track people through their territory hadn’t passed to his father yet. His father had guessed blindly and gone cross-country to get ahead of the warlock.

Seth got his anger under control. He looked up to meet her eyes. “These are dangerous people. If my cousin followed some kind of lead on them, he could have fallen into a hornet’s nest full of trouble.”

“You think your lawyer discovered a lead when he was here?” Officer Kjeldsen said.

“Yes. Bishop was my family’s lawyer when my father married Anastasia. He dealt with her funeral arrangements. He could have seen a clue in something that seemed insignificant to you. Bishop met with Jack and an hour later my cousin drove out of New York City.”

Officer Kjeldsen tapped the desk with her pencil, flipping it on each tap. Tip. Eraser. Tip. Eraser. “Okay. Let’s look at what we pulled from the car. It would be useful to know what triggered all this.”

* * *

She gave him a long lecture on how she would show him what was found in the car. He couldn’t touch it in any way. Chain of evidence required that items be handled by a minimum number of people, all of them authorized. Standard stuff. Bishop had drilled police procedures into Seth. As the Prince of Boston, Seth might need to make bodies disappear. Shit happened; he would be responsible for cleaning it up.

As she talked, Officer Kjeldsen let slip that the lieutenant in charge had been off sick since Friday morning and she was bucking for a promotion.

She had Seth wait in an interrogation room while she got the case files out of storage. It was a big cardboard box marked: Cayuga Lake Jane Doe 34.

Seth realized he hadn’t asked the most important question.

“There was a body in the car—that’s why you’re so interested in what I know.”

“Yes. A woman. Coroner says she was between eighteen to thirty years old. We found ten different driver’s licenses in the car. Ten different names. All with the same woman’s photo. They appear to be stolen identities. It’s possible that none of them are her real name. We’ve been attempting to track down next of kin for all the IDs.”

Each photo license was in a separate plastic bag. The driver had been a waifish Latino woman. The only name that seemed remotely Latino was Wonder Woman Alvarado, which didn’t sound real at all. The rest ran the gamut from Orli Cohen to Kyung-sook Kim. In half the photos she sneered confidently at the camera, obviously proud of her long glossy dark hair and good looks. In the other pictures, she looked like a frightened prisoner, stripped of makeup and her hair hacked short. His gut was telling him that this was one of the Wickers’ puppets, one that they’d controlled over months instead of a few hours as they normally did.

If the car was in the lake by sheer misfortune, then the driver would have simply vanished for the Wickers as well as for his family. By contacting next of kin, the police most likely reached the coven. They had set up a collision between Jack and the Wickers. The question was where? Why not here?

“Did any of the next of kin come look at this evidence?”

“Yes.” Officer Kjeldsen studied a sheet of paper. “A woman came in three weeks ago. The lieutenant accessed the files the day she was here. She was a clotheshorse with a red Bentley. She parked in our lot, ignoring all the signs. Jenkins went out to give her a ticket and came back panty whipped. He followed her around like puppy, holding the doors and fetching her coffee.”

Definitely a witch. She could have left one of the policemen on post-hypnotic script to contact her if anyone else looked into the case. It might explain the officer who was out “sick” immediately after Bishop’s visit.

Seth clenched his hands tightly. Of all the things in the world, a witch was the most dangerous to werewolves. They knew all the wolves’ weaknesses and they had an unlimited supply of human puppets to throw at wolf packs. At one time, wolves killed any witch that crossed their path, but the treaty with the Grigori changed that. Now only witches that worked blood magic were killed, and only after being screened by the Grigori.

Larger plastic bags followed the small ones out of the box. They held a rusted gun, two large meat cleavers, the tattered remains of a purse, a plastic drinking cup from Roy Rogers, and a nylon windbreaker with a rusty zipper. Seventeen years in water had destroyed most of the evidence. Why were the police even bothering to follow the case so closely?

“There was something else in the car,” Seth guessed. This was Wickers after all. “Was it a severed limb or something?”

She eyed him. Her silence alone confirmed it. After a long silent debate with herself, she finally admitted, “A human head in the trunk. Wrapped in a black garbage bag. We’ve got it at the FBI labs for identification.”

So they were treating it as a murder case.

Officer Kjeldsen pulled out an evidence bag containing a small lump of leather and fur. Seth gasped and snatched it up.

“Hey! I said don’t touch!” Kjeldsen put out her hand for it.

Seth reluctantly gave her the plastic bag. He’d gotten a close enough look to recognize it.

She squinted at the contents. “What is this?”

“It’s a hat.” His grandmother had made it with yarn, leather and fur. Water had rotted it into a shapeless mass but the wolf ears were still recognizable. In his concern for Jack, he’d forgotten about his half-brother Ilya.

The Wickers had stolen his father’s firstborn. They’d taken Ilya out of his crib and driven off with him. His father had gambled that Ilya was in the warlock’s car. He’d been devastated when he discovered that he was wrong.

Had Ilya died in the lake?

Seth scanned the items on the table. Purse. Nylon windbreaker. Plastic cup. All the little items belonging to the puppet stayed in the car. Except for the hat, there was nothing else related to an infant. “Did the windows break when the car crashed? Could anything small float out?”

“All the glass is intact. The victim didn’t have her seatbelt on when the airbags deployed. Coroner says it looks like she’d been knocked unconscious and then drowned.”

Bishop had helped clean up the dead Wickers before the police were notified of Anastasia’s murder. He had been a frequent visitor to Boston when Seth was growing up. Bishop would have recognized the baby hat; Seth and all his baby brothers had worn one. Bishop would have realized that Ilya could have been in the Dodge Viper when it was driven away from the lodge.

It was possible that Ilya’s body simply hadn’t survived being submerged for seventeen years. Something, though, made Bishop send Jack someplace north. Someplace not within Seth’s territory but between here and Tyringham.

“She stopped someplace,” Seth said with certainty. The answer was on the table in front of him. He just had to look.

“Probably,” Kjeldsen said. “It’s like two hundred miles to Massachusetts state line. She would have needed to stop for gas someplace.” She pointed at the Roy Rogers cup. “There’s only a handful of Roy Rogers in the state and all of them are on the Thruway.”

Seth scanned the other bags. The smallest evidence bags held scraps of paper inside a gallon-sized Ziploc storage bag. He leaned close to study them. One was receipt from an auto repair place in Utica. The other was a deposit envelope from First Niagara Bank. He typed Utica into his phone GPS system. The town was just off the New York Thruway. “What was in the deposit envelope?”

“A cashier’s check made out to one of the IDs. This one. Wonder Woman. It was drawn on the account of a New Hartford law firm that closed doors fifteen years ago. Both partners are dead. We’re trying to track down any clerical staff that worked there. The check is for twenty thousand dollars.”

New Hartford was a small town bordering Utica.

“What’s the date on it?” Seth asked.

She checked. “Oh shit. March fifteenth.”

Ides of March.

A puppet flees Massachusetts with a baby, most likely without a script in place to control her actions. She went via the Thruway until the Viper broke down near Utica. Facing possible kidnapping and murder charges, she had to be in a panic. Obviously via the auto repair place, she got the Viper running. In New Hartford, lawyers gave her twenty thousand dollars. In Ithaca she died without the baby in the car. The logical explanation was that she sold the baby in Utica.

“I know where my cousin is.” It would take Seth two hours to get there.


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