Capitol Kidnap: Urban Werewolf Book 1 (9 page)

Prepare the concoction by crushing the spearmint to best extract its oils, concentrate on the clarity of sight you need. Combine with a fist full of salt. Naomi followed the directions and dutifully put the mixture on her stove to simmer. If a rusting pan didn't interfere with Mac's cookies, hopefully, Naomi stainless steel pot when it react with the spell or cause any problems. She set the timer for twenty minutes and, feeling like an idiot, leaned over the pot and whispered her desire for clear sight.

Naomi glanced towards the bedroom, hopefully Mom wouldn't wake up as she whispered her intention over the simmering mixture. Mom would laugh her ass off. The guys – well they were all being whiny dick heads anyway – well, I guess Jeff was kind of useful, but that he picked locks threw him out of the running for boyfriend material. Naomi didn't like that. He was way too sketchy for her. Why couldn't she just find a nice werewolf who liked living in the city or at least shared some of her goals?

Mom had almost been on the right track bringing him around, even if the other two were complete idiots. Of course, now that Naomi had gone and declared herself alpha, these three would only be the tip of the iceberg. There weren't enough were-women as it was, let alone true alphas. Naomi's phone rang. Mike was calling. Just great. She hadn't made any progress. In fact, the situation was so much worse since last time she had talked to him. Still, she was lonely, had a magic spell cooking on her stove, and didn't have anyone else to talk to. "Hi Mike. What's going on?" Naomi asked. Maybe Mike had a better answer than she did, but he'd probably been freaking out the last couple of days with nothing to do.

"Nothing. Is there any news? I mean, they said they would kill him tomorrow… That's what you told me –"

"No, Mike. Well… There's news, but none of it good." Naomi shook her head. She couldn't believe she was pulling someone else into this mess. "I'm kind of all my own here. My mom and those three guys she had with her, they're asleep and they won't wake up. Some kind of spell knocked them out. I could really use your help."

"What do you need me to do?" Mike sounded eager to help.

"Are you good to drive?" Naomi asked. Naomi paged through the journal as she waited for the mixture to cool. There is nothing in it about the disappearances, nothing that would help her at all. It didn't even talk about meeting with his clients who bought the perfume. Ginger had bought the perfume and he was missing, could Ginger have been lying? If she'd been lying, she was perfect at it. Her eyes didn't go off to the side, her pulse didn't race, and her scent didn't change. Of course, she wasn't human, so maybe those signs of lying didn't apply to her. Naomi tested the liquid in the glass again. Now it was merely warm. She hoped the mixture would drip off her finger and neatly into her eyes. She tilted her head back and waited. It won't drop. She shook her finger and she blinked several times and didn't see anything different about her house. She repeated the process with her other eye, still no difference.

Well, that was useful. She checked on her mother and maybe she could see something slightly different. Mom might have looked slightly more wolflike than normal, but that could've been Naomi's imagination and the exhaustion. Her mind to be playing tricks on her.

"T
HANK
G
OD
YOU
'
RE
HERE
!" N
AOMI
said pulling open Mike's door. "I'm at another dead end. I keep circling back and forth in my head."

"Slow down. It's good to see you, too." Mike threw his arm around Naomi's shoulders. "Let's go inside and you can get me up to speed." She showed him her mom and the sleeping men. Mike tried shaking them and shouting in their faces, but they didn't respond to him any more than they had to Naomi. She filled him in about Mac disappearing and the mess of the flower shop. Finally, they settled onto the couch.

"This is serious," Mike said shaking his head.

"It's not just Bryan who's in the mix. All these people have been kidnapped and we don't know what they're going to do or how or anything." Naomi could feel her eyes starting to water. She bit her tongue to resist the temptation to cry.

"We have to stop them before tomorrow morning," Mike said.

"Mike, do you know anything else?" Naomi asked. "I mean did he mention that he had talked to anyone? Or was he afraid that maybe someone else knew a secret?"

"No. I told you everything I know."

"Sometimes, I just wish I could go to the cops. That there were resources to investigate. If we could go to them with the names of all the people that disappeared.…" Naomi shook her head frustrated.

"Do you know their names?" Mike asked.
 

Naomi shook her head. "I was hoping that maybe Mac's journal would have something, but it didn't."

"Nothing?" Mike asked.

"No, it was useless." Naomi started pacing. She felt so frustrated again. She just wanted to smash something. Instead, she talked to Mike. "It went on and on about his trips to the river. Like he thought he was a poet or something. He took notes people watching them things. Useless stuff. Doesn't even tell me anything about who he is or where he came from."

"Why don't we look at it again?"

"I don't want to look at it again! I read it a good half-hour while I…" Naomi's voice trailed off.
 

"What?"

"I didn't try looking at it since I tried to do that stupid spell." Naomi grabbed a small black journal and flipped towards the end. "This is… It's completely different."

Naomi opened to the first page. "Listen to this," she said starting to read from the journal. "I'm so sick of hiding. I just wish that I could walk around and be myself and not have to hide anymore."

"That's huge. If he doesn't want to hide what he is anymore, could he be our kidnapper?" Mike asked.

"You could be right." Naomi turned to the back of the journal and read, "Another one has disappeared. I don't know what to do about it. I can only keep tabs. I have no way to know who is behind this, they're too far beyond my powers of observation. I just know when someone is gone.

"Damn! He's not the one doing it. This is – he's just frustrated as we are."

"Maybe we could go to the cops," Mike said. Naomi looked at him like he was crazy. "We don't have to tell them everything. We don't have to tell them what you are, but we could tell them about Bryan being kidnapped –"

"And when they come to my house wanting to ask me questions and find my mother and three men comatose, what do we tell them?"

"Shit. There has to be a way to get them involved that doesn't risk exposing everything."

"You tell me Bryan, you tell me how that'll work."

"Well, we have Mac's journal, right? Maybe there's some sort of supernatural person on the police force that could help us."

"And how will he keep all this craziness out of his report?"

"We could go back to Mac's look for more clues." They argued for a while, each getting more and more frustrated with the other, until Naomi finally agreed for Mike's stupid supernatural cop idea.

##

"Go for Jim," the voice on the other end of the phone answered.

"Hi, is this the Jim McCoury who works for Sac Metro PD?" Naomi asked. This was the third James McCoury that they called out of the phone book. The first two had not been the leprechaun from Mac's journal.

"Maybe," he said.

"Do you know Mac?" Naomi asked feeling more than a little stupid, at least this was more towards her line of work though. She had to call like this to find out about preparation key ownership sometimes.

"Mac who?" Naomi smiled tightly. At least that wasn't a definite no.

"I don't know his last name," Naomi said, feeling dumber by the minute.

"That's not very helpful."
 

"He's gone missing," she said.

"Then you should file a report," this Jim McCoury said, but Naomi continued speaking over him, "he had your name in his journal. He's not the kind of guy that would want the whole police force involved, but maybe you might have the resources to help us find him."

"What kind of stuff is this Mac involved in? Drugs?"

"No, nothing like that. He always has cookies for his guests and he sells perfumes and cologne."

She crossed her fingers hoping that this was the Jim McCoury worked for the police department.

"I might know this Mac," he said guardedly. "He's disappeared?"

"He's just the last of quite a few people that have disappeared," Naomi said nodding to Mike. This had to be the right one.

"Quite a few?" Jim repeated after her.
 

"Yes, everyone that's disappeared is… uh, uniquely talented."

"Unique talents?" he asked.

Naomi felt herself nodding and realized that he couldn't see or hear her nod through the phone.
 

"I'll meet you somewhere safe," Jim said. "How does Starbucks at Howe-About-Arden sound?"

"We'll meet you there," Naomi said, ending the call.

"Can we trust him?" Mike asked.

"As much as we can trust anyone else, I suppose."

"G
REAT
," N
AOMI
GROWLED
AS
SHE
scanned the room for a leprechaun sized cop or any cop for that matter. "We hurried over here just so he could stand us up. Nice."

"Would you be talking about me?" a man asked from behind her.

"Are you Officer Jim McCoury?" Naomi asked. He didn't look particularly like a leprechaun, even with her clarity of sight eyedrops. She supposed she shouldn't have really expected them to work with everything.

"At your service," he said.

"So, how do you know Mac?" She asked.

"Well, I do buy certain products from him to help me blend in a little better."

"Really?" He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. "Sorry. That was rude. I should introduce myself, I'm Naomi and this is my friend Mike."

"Let' s get some coffee and chat," Officer Jim said. They ordered and settled into the most isolated table. Naomi explained how Mindy had brought her to meet Mac after visiting where Bryan had been kidnapped and how Mac disappeared.

"Mac somehow knew there were other victims. He said three fledgling vampires, a couple leprechauns, and some changelings had all disappeared in the last month." Naomi shrugged. "Sounds like he really kept tabs on the…" She hesitated looking for the right word.
 

"Community," Mike said.
 

"So what do you want me to do?" Jim asked.
 

"Can you help us find them? They called me and said they were going to kill my brother and hunt us down."

"Well, I don' t see what what you want me to do. I can' t really do much –"

"Can't you use the police resources or something to help us out?"

"I'm a bike cop. I don' t have any resources like that. I can't just look up anything, even if I could, everything' s tracked. If it weren't related to an active case they' d be all over me."

"So, you won' t help us?" Naomi asked. Her shoulders slumped and she looked down into her coffee as if it would give her some sort of inspiration about what to do next.

"I just give tickets to jay walkers. I don't have any awesome powers of observation. All I know how to do is work a little magic."

"You can do magic?" Mike asked.

"Nothing too crazy," Jim said shaking his head.

"Could you – my mother and some other friends of ours, they went to sleep and we can't wake them up. It was some kind of magic. I – I was awake before the spell took place, so I think that's why I didn't fall under it."

"Your mom and friends are under a sleeping beauty spell?" Jim nearly knocked over his coffee.

"I don't know. I don't know anything about magic."

"Don't lie to me. You know Mac, so you must know something about magic."

"No, my friend knew Mac. I just… Our kind doesn't do magic."

"Right," Jim said sarcastically.

"We don't. At least, no one I know of ever has," Naomi said.
 

"Fine, whatever. Why don' t I look at these friends of yours, see if I can do anything to break the spell?" Naomi didn't like that he didn't believe her.

"Can you do that?" Naomi asked.

"Depends who worked at and how strong it is."

Something clicked in Naomi' s brain when Jim said that. "Could you tell who did the spell just from seeing them asleep?" she asked.

Jim shook his head sadly. "I could tell how much more or less powerful the spellcaster is than me, but that' s all."

"Wouldn't that narrow it down a little bit? I mean, there can be that many fae living here in Sacramento."

"You' d be surprised at what happens just under your nose," Jim said tapping the side of his nose over his coffee.

"Not a lot happens under my nose I'm not aware of," Naomi said. " Maybe in my town, but not under my nose."

"Point taken."

"We can take you back to –"

"Hell no!" Jim almost shouted. They drew looks from several other tables. Naomi stared at him shocked by his reaction. He spread his hands on the table and took a deep breath. "No offense, I think I' ll follow in my car. You tell me all these people, including Mac – a powerful far darrig – have disappeared, and then you want me to get into your van willingly? What makes me sure that you aren't the kidnappers?"

"What's a far darrig?" Naomi asked.

"You're kidding right?" Jim asked. Naomi and Mike shook their heads blankly. "A red man?" Naomi frowned. It was like Jim was trying to communicate with her, but she didn't understand him at all. "This really is your first dealings with the fae, isn't it?" Jim sighed. "The far darrig, or the red man, is a fae who was born human and made into a fairy. Usually, this does something to their minds. They all love pranks. Mac especially loves jokes, but usually they're pretty dangerous."

"He served us choking chip cookies and thought it was hilarious," Naomi said remembering how scared she was that her mother would stop breathing.