someone they “yes, sir”ed who had asked them to hold the witnesses at the day care and wait for an investigator who was coming.
Ms. Edison could have gone home after the children had cleared out, but she was “disinclined” to leave Miss Baird to fend for herself. That made Anna like her better, and she’d been inclined to like her in the first place.
The Cantrip agents came next, Marsden and Leeds. Cantrip was the federal agency that dealt with the supernatural. It surprised her, given the attitude of the police, that there was a Cantrip presence in the greater Phoenix area.
Anna didn’t recognize either of them, but her experience with Cantrip was not vast. Nor was it a happy experience, either. She couldn’t tell from his reaction if Charles knew who they were, though he had extensive files on Cantrip, since Bran viewed it as a danger. The Cantrip agents weren’t, she was pretty sure, the help that Bran had promised.
“So you are Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” said the Cantrip officer to Charles. She was pretty sure it was the one named Marsden, not Leeds. Whichever one he was, he managed a credible sneer. “And you were here when the child turned into a pile of sticks?”
Cantrip seemed to attract a variety of people, from the true-believer geek to the rabid “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” kook and most everyone else in between. Leeds, Anna thought, was of the geek variety, but Marsden seemed to be a disbeliever. That didn’t make sense. Why would someone who didn’t want to believe in magic become an agent of Cantrip?
No one had touched the sticks so far. Anna thought it hadn’t been Charles’s soft-voiced warning that it wasn’t always safe to deal with fae magic, even spent fae magic, that had kept the police from messing with it. She thought it was because no one wanted to be the one who collected the bundle as evidence, and thereby also collect harassment from everyone in the department for listening to a bunch of crazy people.
To date, the fae had been too good at appearing powerless and telling people that the stories of Tuatha Dé Danann, who could level mountains and raise lakes, were make-believe.
The truth was, humans wanted them to be stories. They didn’t want to be afraid, didn’t want to believe that their ancestors who huddled in stone crofts and wooden huts had been right to hide. So they listened to the fae weave a fictional story out of truths and the people believed.
The sole exception to that image was the day Beauclaire had beheaded the son of a US senator in front of a Boston courthouse several months ago. And that had been more a show of strength rather than a show of power, really.
She was sort of surprised that a Cantrip agent would take that attitude, though.
Charles looked at Marsden and said, as he had to the police, “We only want to tell the story once. We’re waiting for the proper authority to tell it to.”
Maybe Bran had told Charles who he’d planned on calling in to help in one of his one-sided only-in-your-head conversations, though Anna doubted it. Bran tended to include her in most of those unless there was some urgent reason not to. Charles sounded cool and certain that someone else was coming, though.
Marsden frowned. “We are the proper authorities, Mr. Smith. Cantrip is in charge of anything that looks as though magic is involved. Are you saying that there was no magic?”
“There was no magic,” said one of the cops, deadpan. To be fair, she whispered it to the cop next to her. Anna was pretty sure that anyone who wasn’t a werewolf wouldn’t have heard her.
In a land where the police didn’t believe in the supernatural, at least not in their jurisdiction, a pair of Cantrip agents must be bored stiff.
The attitude of the police department also told her that Hosteen Sani was a very good Alpha. That none of his wolves—and this was a fair-sized pack of twenty-seven plus Chelsea—had had a run-in with the law was unusually good discipline. Even Bran could not claim that, though his pack … her pack, too … tended to have a lot of the more dangerous wolves, the ones he could not trust in the care of another werewolf.
Marsden’s little speech didn’t have any effect on Charles, but Miss Baird finally hit the end of her tether.
“Idiots,” she snapped. “No wonder he’s not talking