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is.”
    “So Charles is doing nothing at all except going out and killing? Nothing to distract him, nothing to dilute the impact. I know I just said he might need a break, but that’s almost the opposite. Do you really think that’s a good idea? He enjoys making money—it’s like an infinitely complicated game of chess for him. He told me once it was even better than hunting because no one dies.”
    He’d told Bran that, too. Maybe he should have listened more carefully.
    “I can’t give him the finances back,” Bran said. “He’s not…I can’t give him the finances back.” Not until Charles was functioning better, because the money the pack controlled was enough to mean power. His reluctance to trust Charles, who had engendered it, made Bran admit, at least to himself, that he’d noticed that Charles was in trouble a while ago.
    “I have an idea,” said Adam slowly. “About that task you had for me—”
    “I’m not sending him to deal with the FBI,” said Bran, appalled. “Even before…this, Charles would not be the right person to send.”
    “He’s not a people person,” agreed Adam, sounding amused. “I imagine the last year and more hasn’t helped that any. No. Send Anna. Those FBI agents won’t know what hit them—and with Anna as a cushion, Charles may actually do them some good. Send them in tohelp as well as consult. One of us can tell the cops a lot about a crime scene that forensics can’t. Give Charles something to do where he can be the good guy instead of the executioner.”
    Let him be a hero,
thought Bran, his eyes on the
Ivanhoe
in his bookshelf as he hung up the phone. Asil had been right to point out that there was nothing wrong with a little bit of romance to cushion the harsh realities of life. Adam might have given him the Band-Aid he needed to help his youngest son. He devoutly hoped so.

CHAPTER

2
    Special Agent Leslie Fisher stared out of the window that looked out over downtown Boston. From her vantage point she had a lovely, veryearly-morning view. Traffic was still light, and though it would get a lot heavier as people came to work, lack of parking kept the streets from being as crazy as Los Angeles, the last place she’d been assigned. In the FBI, she got to move every few years whether she wanted to or not, but she’d always thought of Boston as home.
    The hotel was old and expensively elegant. Tasteful, striped, satiny paper covered the walls of the meeting room in authentic Victorian style. The smallish room was dominated by the large mahogany table with padded chairs that looked more like they belonged in a dining room than a boardroom. It
was
a hotel, though, no matter how well decorated, and it lacked even the hint of personalization that managed to break through the government drab in her own office cubicle.
    She was here to meet a consultant. Though there was the occasional perfectly innocent computer geek or accountant, in her experience,consultants were quite often bad guys who had made deals so that the good guys could catch bigger bad guys: rewarding the smaller evil so that the big monsters got stopped.
    Five people dead in the last month: an old woman, two tourists, a businessman, and an eight-year-old boy. A serial killer was hunting. She’d seen the boy’s body, and to catch his killer, she’d have met with Satan himself.
    In her time in the FBI, she’d dealt with former drug dealers, an assassin already serving a life sentence in jail, and any number of politicians (some of whom
should
have been serving life sentences in jail). Once, she’d even consulted a self-proclaimed witch. In retrospect, Leslie hadn’t been nearly as afraid of the witch as she should have been.
    Today she was talking to werewolves. To her knowledge, she’d never met a werewolf before, so it should be interesting.
    She considered the table they’d all be sitting around. The FBI offices or a police station would have given her side the home advantage—her side being