Soul Taken

13

Adam’s words rang in my head. “Don’t split up. Don’t get complacent.”

We had done both, Warren and I. My fault more than his. But I didn’t have time for “should haves” and “what-ifs” right now. I concentrated on here and now.

“Guns don’t work in the dark without specialized equipment,” Adam had told us on some training session or other. “If you can’t see your target clearly, you’re too likely to shoot your friends.”

The werewolves and I could see just fine at night, outside where there was always some sort of light. In this house with no windows, I was blind.

I holstered my gun and drew the sword. I didn’t bother to be quiet about it. Whoever had taken down Warren already knew where I was. It was as dark as a cave, and my enemy thought that these conditions would benefit them. It was my job to make them wrong.

I wasn’t helpless without sight. Movement would make floorboards shift, fabric rub, and my ears were very sharp. I concentrated on what my senses could tell me. I heard one person breathing and hoped it was Warren.

We were in a vampire’s house. It might be midafternoon, but I had seen Wulfe awake and moving during the daytime before. Vampires only have to breathe when they want to pretend to be more human or when they want to talk—which requires air. I had a very good nose, even among the werewolves. I opened up my other sense, too, the one that let me feel magic in the air.

I heard and smelled nothing. Moreover, when I tried to reach Adam using our mating bond, I could not get through. It was still there, but I couldn’t touch it. The same was true of the pack bonds and my bond with Stefan—which I tried in a fit of desperation. Someone was interfering. Something. I knew what it was.

“Soul Taker,” I said.

A brush of air current had me raising the katana across my body. After I held it there, something hit it. A touch, not a blow, metal on metal that rang softly rather than a proper clang.

Wulfe was mocking me.

I had to assume that my opponent knew exactly where I was. Maybe Wulfe had some of that specialized equipment Adam had talked about. Maybe vampires didn’t need any light at all in order to see. Either way, standing around waiting to be attacked when he could see me and I couldn’t see him seemed stupid.

I bolted out of the bathroom, finding the doorway by memory. My shoulder caught something that yielded like flesh, but not hard enough to do more than send me sideways for a step until I caught my balance. I didn’t let the brief misstep slow me down much.

I had assumed that the lights had gone out all over the house, but the light edging the bottom of the bedroom door said differently. My attacker had shut the door, trapping us inside, and turned off the lights just in this suite. The light under the door was not enough to penetrate the darkness, even for someone like me who could see in the night. But it gave me a goal.

The bedroom was very sparsely furnished, and everything was pushed up against the walls—there was nothing to trip me up as I sprinted to the door. But it was a huge room, maybe twenty feet by thirty feet that I was crossing on a diagonal.

Wulfe chased me. I couldn’t hear him, couldn’t smell him, but I could feel the floorboards move under my feet. And I knew that he was just behind me.

I slapped my hand on the switch, illuminating the room once more, and bounced off the wall like a swimmer on a turn. When speed is your only superpower, you learn to keep moving. This time I ran toward where I’d heard the sounds of breathing. Toward Warren.

Behind me something hit the door hard—as if to slam it shut when I’d never tried to open it. That sound told me I’d done the right thing by going for the switch instead of the door. I hadn’t considered escape with Warren apparently incapacitated, but it was nice to know that the morally reprehensible choice would not have worked anyway.

Warren was collapsed on the floor not far from the bed; his body was totally lax, a little too much like a corpse. I reminded myself fiercely that I could hear him breathing. I couldn’t stop and didn’t want to lead Wulfe to him, so I kept going.

Abruptly the whole room was filled with magic so dense that I coughed as my throat buzzed with it and I tripped. I rolled when I hit the floor and came back to my feet. Something had been shielding itself but had decided to come out of hiding, and it tasted like darkness.

“Olly olly oxen free,” I said.

I’d stopped in the middle of the circular rug that had been centered in the empty space between the bed and the door. It was as good a place to begin as any. And it put me between Warren and Wulfe. Warren and the Harvester.

He stood next to the door, the rough-bladed sickle in his left hand. He made no move to turn the lights off again. As if that had been a joke that had run its course and didn’t need to be revisited.

He was, as he had been on the roof of my house and in the movie, clothed in ragged dark brown robes that resembled monk’s robes and a sort of hooded cloak. But this time there was no darkness obscuring Wulfe’s face.

Even so, the Harvester didn’t look quite as much like Wulfe as he had last night on the roof of my house. His body language was hunched in a way that reminded me of the broken creature I’d seen in Stefan’s memories. Wulfe’s face was drawn, hollowed, as if he had neither fed nor rested in days, and it was missing a couple of important parts.

No wonder the darkness hadn’t bothered him.

“Bonarata have something against eyes?” I asked, holding the katana defensively in front of my body and wishing for the cutlass that I’d trained with until it was nearly a part of my body. The katana was similar, but its weight and balance were off enough that I had to think about what I wanted it to do.

I wondered what Wulfe was waiting for.

His robes moved, as if touched by a ripple of wind, but the air in the room was stagnant. When the Harvester spoke, no words passed through Wulfe’s lips.

My servant does not need eyes, the Soul Taker said in my head.

It was the same way Adam and I could talk to each other. Having this thing do it felt like a violation. A corruption.

But I set aside my revulsion to be dealt with at some later date and considered its words. I thought of Marsilia’s thick veil, of the way that she hadn’t really met anyone’s gaze. The glint of something I’d seen behind her veil could have been open wounds. I thought of Stefan. In one of the communications we’d had, he’d been missing his eyes, too, hadn’t he?

Eyes let your enemies see into you.

The second time I felt the Soul Taker speak in my head, I realized I’d gotten it a little wrong. Adam spoke to me through our mating bond. The Soul Taker spoke through a different bond, one that was stronger than I’d realized.

I wondered why it had stopped to talk. But no matter how horrible having that thing talk to me, inside of me, was, the longer I kept it engaged, the better the chance that Adam would come looking for me.

It wasn’t just words filling my head, either. I received concepts, dozens of them, one on top of the other. I understood that the sickle’s realm was one of souls. I understood the truth in the belief that eyes were the gateway to the soul. At some fundamental level I also gained an understanding of why vampires could freeze their prey with their gaze. I knew if Wulfe still had his eyes, someone like Marsilia could have saved him from serving as the sickle’s vessel.

All of that in less than the tick of a clock.

I understood that Bonarata had tortured Stefan, Marsilia, and Wulfe. He had given Wulfe to the Soul Taker—but prepared the other two vampires to be wielders should they be needed. Bonarata thought he’d taken their eyes because he’d wanted to. He did not understand the necessity.

“Does Bonarata know that you make some of his decisions for him?” I asked out loud.

The Soul Taker laughed inside my head.

I wanted to shake my head to rid myself of its laughter, but I couldn’t take my gaze off Wulfe. I’d seen him fight. I needed to see when he decided to come at me before he moved. The clothing he wore obscured my usual cues—I couldn’t tell when his shoulders tightened, and it was going to be hard to see his weight shift. And, of course, I couldn’t watch his eyes.

I still didn’t know why the Soul Taker had stopped to talk to me. But I knew it couldn’t last. This encounter would turn to blood soon enough. That was the purpose of the Soul Taker—to take souls.

I had better than a decade of martial arts training under my sensei and three years of daily sparring with Adam. I was pretty handy in a fight with someone vaguely in my weight and ability class. Wulfe was a vampire who had been fighting with a blade since sometime before the Renaissance.

I was, I thought, a little faster than he was in the same way I was a little faster than most of the werewolves—not enough to be a significant advantage. I was also smaller and not nearly as strong.

If I had to depend upon my katana to save me, I was doomed.

“Why me?” I asked, to see if I could keep it talking. If the Soul Taker was feeling chatty, maybe I could figure out a way to survive. I’d already learned that if Wulfe could see, then someone might be able to wrench him free of the Soul Taker. Not likely to be useful until he’d fed enough to regenerate his eyes—which wasn’t going to happen in the next few minutes.

“I don’t seem to be in your usual category of victim,” I said, when it did not reply.

Sacrifice, it corrected me. The echoes of its voice made me understand that my death would serve a greater purpose. That I should feel joy as the blood of my body pooled on the ground and the magic of my death and my soul linked with those who had gone before. I even gained an understanding of the depth of that phrase “those who had gone before.”

Souls caught together and stretching through time, still as connected to the Soul Taker as they had been on the day of their death. And the Soul Taker perceived them all individually in the same thorough and extensive way that I had tasted Aubrey Worth’s soul. Not quite the same way. I was sad that Aubrey had died; the Soul Taker felt nothing. No. Not nothing. Satisfaction.

“So many people,” I said involuntarily, their numbers pressing upon me like a great weight.

To release my lord into the world requires the sacrifice of many, it said.

I understood that as the years had passed, the definition of the kind of sacrifice who could be brought into the magical web this thing was creating had narrowed. The web had taken on the characteristics of the sacrifices before and become less elastic in what it could accept. Many had died uselessly before the Soul Taker had understood that it needed to refine its hunt.

Magic ability, but not too much, nor with too much training. Magic ability still malleable, able to be shaped.

I understood that as it touched me when I’d destroyed the spider-creature’s web, it had been able to see further through me than it usually could before it made a sacrifice of someone. I’d exposed my soul (yes, that had really been a stupid thing to do, I decided; next time I’d throw a chair or something), allowing the Soul Taker to perceive that I was connected to a spark of divine that might be the single power needed to make the spell work.

Coyote’s daughter, it had called me the first time I’d seen it.

But it wasn’t just Coyote. It was the wolves of our pack—and I had a moment to think that it was a very good thing that we’d broken from Bran, or it could have taken every werewolf Bran was connected to, assuming Bran wouldn’t be able to stop it. It was the seethe through my blood tie with Stefan, who was tied to all the vampires in the seethe, to his maker and her maker before her. To Bonarata and everyone he was tied to.

Bonarata was in control of all the vampires in Europe and, Marsilia had told Adam, most of the vampires in the US. He and his vampires in turn controlled thousands of humans by blood bonds.

The Soul Taker understood souls, and apparently all of the blood ties that connected wolf to wolf and vampire to vampire were soul bonds.

I really, really should have just thrown a chair.

“But you have Wulfe already,” I protested out loud.

Vampires are dead. They cannot be sacrifices.

For an instant I understood, really understood, what that meant—that they were missing the magic that defines life—but there were too many things getting shoved into my head, and I didn’t try to keep that one. The Soul Taker needed a living conduit into the vampires’ web of blood bonds, and for some reason—

Coyote, among other things, was a guide for the dead. I tried very hard not to let the Soul Taker see that thought.

—for reasons, my bond with Stefan would work, when other bonds with other living things did not.

I understood that my death, by means other than the Soul Taker’s blade, was the only way to prevent the Soul Taker from doing as it wished. Right now, there was no feasible way for me to do that in such a way that the Soul Taker could not take a final blow before I died by other means.

By sacrificing you, I finish my task, the Soul Taker said.

“I see,” I said, my mouth dry.

So why was Wulfe just standing there? Why didn’t the Soul Taker have him kill me this minute? Why was it talking to me?

How would it be, I thought, to have existed all those years—and I knew that it was old in the same way that I understood Aubrey Worth’s life. How would it be to have had a single task for all those years, and then come to an end of it? What would happen to it? Would it cease to exist?

Was it afraid?

I opened my mouth to ask, but the Harvester moved, and then I was too busy for conversation. I felt the Soul Taker withdraw its awareness from me as Wulfe occupied it fully.

Drill is the secret sauce to creating a fighter. If you have to think about what you’re doing, you’re doing it too slow. I had drilled and drilled and drilled with my cutlass. Not with the katana. The automatic reflexes still helped, but the differences between the blades threw me off.

As I struck and whirled in the deadly dance I was engaged in, I wondered why Bonarata had given Wulfe to the Soul Taker rather than Stefan. Marsilia he had bigger plans for. She would either become his devoted slavish follower or he would kill her in some spectacular fashion that would be spoken of for centuries. Bonarata was jealous of Stefan. And between Stefan and Wulfe, I would think that the Soul Taker would have an easier time using Stefan.

“Stefan,” I said out loud, “is old and tough and strong, but he’s not a freaking witch wizard crazy person. So why did Bonarata pick you, Wulfe?”

The sickle made a wicked quick slash at me, but I moved a quarter of an inch and it missed my throat. I dropped and thrust the katana like it was a foil or a spear and forced the Harvester back, a wet stain over one of his hips.

“Why you?” I asked.

In my mind’s eye I remembered the skeletal thing crouching against Marsilia’s skirts, surrounded by the blood-drenched dungeon and the dead.

I blinked and was back in the unused master bedroom just in time to get out of the way of Wulfe’s elbow. That jump back into Stefan’s dream-sending thing had been dangerous. I couldn’t do that again.

Bonarata had tortured Wulfe for centuries. He’d turned him into that creature—and still Wulfe was his own person, broken as that was. Bonarata had tried to use Wulfe to undermine Marsilia, to spy upon her, and Wulfe followed Bonarata’s orders exactly as they were given—and somehow defied Bonarata by twisting those directives on their heads.

I thought of Stefan’s long-ago words. Bonarata was still afraid of Wulfe. Something kept him from killing Wulfe outright. I did not know what those reasons were. Maybe it was as simple as the fact that by killing Wulfe, Bonarata admitted that he was afraid. But he did not expect Wulfe to survive the Soul Taker.

I understood now, in a way I hadn’t an hour ago, exactly what the Soul Taker did to those who wielded it. I understood why Bonarata would assume that Wulfe would die a servant to the blade.

But I’d seen the damaged thing Marsilia and Stefan had released from Bonarata’s prison. And he’d survived. If I were a betting woman, I’d put my money on Wulfe. Long shots have always appealed to me.

Adam said it was the Coyote in me. Of course, I’d never know how it turned out because I would be dead.

That’s when it hit me how odd it was that I wasn’t already dead. I had calculated that my life span after we started to fight would be in seconds. It should have been over in seconds.

I hadn’t kept track of the time we’d been at this, but I’d broken a sweat and my breathing was starting to be more labored. I knew this state from practice bouts with Adam. From that I estimated that we must have been fighting for three or four minutes.

A minute is a very long time in a fight, especially a fight with sharp things. I wasn’t good enough to last this long in a fight with Wulfe.

Did the Soul Taker not want to kill me and finish the purpose of its existence?

We exchanged more moves and countermoves, and I could feel myself slowing down. He knocked me back and it took me too long to get my guard up. He should have hit me—and he didn’t.

Some king had enslaved Zee, and Zee had made cups from the king’s son’s skulls and got the king and his wife to drink from them. Some people made very bad slaves.

I bet, I thought with a surge of hope, that it would be really difficult to make Wulfe do something he didn’t want to do. I wouldn’t want to try it.

The tip of the Soul Taker slid along the top of my scapula, cutting the shirt and my bra strap away and ripping a slice in my skin. I felt my awareness of it grow, felt its magic sliding into me, even as I spun away and lashed out with a low swing that forced the Harvester back.

Wulfe was serving the Soul Taker, exactly as well as he had served Bonarata. And that was why I was still alive after roughly five minutes of fighting.

That was a bad idea, Bonarata, I thought. It’s going to bite you in the butt.

Teach him to play with the daughter of a chaos deity. Send the Soul Taker out to kill me and see what that gets you.

I turned aside the Soul Taker again—and Wulfe’s head jerked down and he bit me. Surprised, I rolled away and—

I walked beside someone in the formal gardens at the seethe with rosebushes taller than my head on either side. Some part of me was very concerned about this. It felt like a very dangerous thing to do. I shouldn’t be walking in a garden. I should be—

“Pay attention,” said Wulfe sharply.

I started to turn my head to look at him.

“Do not,” said Wulfe, and I froze before my eyes found him. “We don’t have much time.”

I knew that what I should be doing was fighting off the Harvester—who was Wulfe, or at least partly Wulfe. My body was defending itself on pure reflex while Wulfe pulled me into his dream.

“Do you remember Frost—” he said.

Frost? What did our situation have to do with Frost? Forgetting his injunction, I looked at Wulfe incredulously. But my perceptions were altered by my ties to the Soul Taker, which had tasted my blood and which operated in the world of souls.

I saw Wulfe.

The sickle hooked my katana and ripped it out of my hand at the same time that Wulfe . . . that the Harvester’s elbow cracked against my jaw, knocking me to the ground.

I rolled with the blow and came to my feet, meeting the backhand swing of the sickle with a blow of my own with the walking stick almost before I realized that the walking stick was in my hand. I didn’t try to hit the sickle with the walking stick; I took aim at Wulfe.

“Steel loves flesh,” Adam liked to say, though he said it as if he were quoting someone else. “Wood loves bone.”

I hit the back of Wulfe’s wrist with the wooden stick and heard the bone crack. The Harvester dropped the sickle—and there was a moment when I could have grabbed it before he did, but I would sooner have stuck my hand into a nuclear reactor than touch that blade.

I knew what Wulfe was. I had seen him, seen the power he still held, and twisted and broken as it was, his capacity to wield magic to protect his mind was infinitely larger than my own small measure of ability. The Soul Taker had control of Wulfe. If I touched that thing, I wouldn’t have a chance.

The Harvester picked up the sickle in his right hand, almost before it had touched the floor. He continued the fight as if I had not hurt him.

If the katana had thrown me off balance, the walking stick was . . . odd. Better, I decided, in some ways, even than my own cutlass, because it felt as if I’d always fought with the walking stick in my hand. But if I’d been careful to turn aside blows rather than risk a full-strength sickle-to-blade strike with the katana, I was even more careful with the walking stick.

I had the feeling that if that sickle dug its corrupted blade into the walking stick, something very, very bad was going to happen. But something bad was going to happen really soon anyway. We had been fighting for a relative age for this kind of aerobic full-on, full-contact fight. We were both bleeding.

If I didn’t change the nature of this fight pretty soon, my death was going to be the bad that was going to happen, even if Wulfe was managing to play a reluctant attacker. If I died, according to the Soul Taker’s own calculations, it would have repercussions I was not willing to be a part of.

But I had seen Wulfe.

I used the movement of my body to center myself and gathered my magic, the magic that allowed me to speak to the dead, a magic that I understood better after the Soul Taker had shown me its world of souls and ties between life and death. I tried to form it the way I had when I’d laid to rest an army of zombies. When I’d done that and accidentally included Wulfe in my workings, I’d knocked Wulfe for a loop. I was hoping it would work again.

All this time I’d wondered if I had simply knocked him out that night. Given him the vampiric equivalent of a concussion. There was no question it had affected him more than just physically. He’d behaved more like someone who’d had too much to drink. So it was possible he’d gotten the edge of what I’d thrown at the zombies and been sort of hotboxed.

But, however it had happened, I had just seen Wulfe. If I weren’t fighting for my life, I might have struggled to explain how I’d seen into him. But I’d just had the Soul Taker in my head, and I didn’t have time to lie to myself.

I’d seen his soul. I knew why he stalked me and what he wanted from me.

Having seen him in his dream time in the garden of the seethe, I understood exactly what I’d done in Elizaveta’s backyard. For a very brief time, I’d given Wulfe back himself, the person he’d been before Bonarata had tortured him all those centuries ago. Once again, he’d been the traveling scholar, Marsilia’s poetic friend, the man who had played a vielle while sitting in a tree in the moonlight.

Wulfe hoped that I could make him whole once more, permanently this time. That I could save him. I was pretty sure—having seen the scars of his past and the person he was—that I could not. Though I might give him brief respite, fixing what had been done to him was beyond any magic I could lay claim to.

I could not undo the damage done to him, but I thought I might, just might, be able to shake the Soul Taker’s hold on him. After all, the Soul Taker itself had told me that it did not think it could have held Wulfe had Bonarata not blinded him first.

I pulled on whatever magic lingered in the room, no matter that it was the Soul Taker’s magic. Although my mating bond and my pack bonds were intact, the Soul Taker—or possibly some magical protections that Marsilia had on her seethe—was blocking me from pulling on that power. Instead, I called upon the ghosts tied to the seethe with unbreakable bonds of trauma, and they came, despite their fear of the vampire in the room with me. And, when the walking stick fed it to me, I took power from the dance of blade and staff that the Harvester and I engaged in.

When I could hold no more magic, I dropped the walking stick, slipped my head under Wulfe’s arm, shoved my neck into his armpit, and reached up with my hand so I could touch his face, the only place his skin was exposed.

His flesh was chill under my battle-and-magic-heated fingers as I whispered, with all the Coyote-born magic within me, “Be at peace.”

He stiffened, smooth movement suddenly clumsy. But he didn’t stop.

Wulfe twisted and got a hold on my shoulder. He was a lot taller than me, stronger, and I was pouring everything I had into the magic. I had no defense. He threw me across the room. He caught me with some magic, too, but its effect and the shock of hitting the wall with the back of my head mixed together into a miserable, pain-filled instant.

Get up, get up, Aubrey whispered in my ear. I felt icy cold hands on my face.

My vision came swimming back. Aubrey, if it had really been him, was nowhere in sight. But the Harvester was.

He walked toward me, casually swinging the sickle like a tennis player warming up. There was no need for hurry on his part. I was still stunned by the impact, either of the wall or his magic. My eyes worked, so I could stare into the crusted wounds where Wulfe’s blue eyes should have been. He stood in front of me for a second. I managed to move my shoulder. If I’d had a couple of minutes, I thought I could shake it off.

The sickle came at me, cutting the air so fast that it made a noise.

The blade missed, sweeping by me and up in a strike I would never have been able to get much force behind. But Wulfe was a lot stronger than me. The pitted old blade dug into Wulfe’s own belly, spilling entrails and splashing me with blood. It was so unreal that it felt almost like I was watching a scene in a Quentin Tarantino martial arts movie.

The Soul Taker’s enraged howl rang in my aching head without making an audible sound as Wulfe laughed. My magic, it seemed, had worked after all. Though I hadn’t dreamed that this was what Wulfe would do with the moment of freedom—vampires were not built for self-sacrifice or suicide. They were vampires, in fact, because they refused to die.

Blood pooling at his feet, Wulfe tried to open his hand, fingers relaxing. But before the sickle fell to the ground, his hand moved like a striking hawk, closing around the leather-wrapped handle. He stood still, armed with the sickle, as blood continued to drip.

I tried to gather myself and managed a sort of full-body twitch. The Harvester staggered away from me, toward Warren, his footfalls heavy. Warren, who was unconscious. I was helpless to do anything to interfere as the vampire dropped to the ground and bent over the werewolf. From where I was, I couldn’t see exactly what he did, but I could hear it when he started to feed.

Feeding was how vampires were able to heal their wounds because—although I now knew, somewhat to my surprise, that vampires had souls—they were not truly alive. They did not reproduce sexually, and they could not heal using their own biological abilities. They needed to borrow healing from the living blood they fed upon.

The Soul Taker had decided to fix Wulfe’s body before sacrificing me. I looked at the blood on the floor in front of me. There was a lot of it. I wondered why it chose to feed on Warren instead of me.

“That one is dangerous,” said Coyote conversationally. If I could have turned my head, I imagined I would have seen him squatting on his heels beside me.

“Which?” I whispered.

Wulfe took no notice of my words—which meant that Coyote was keeping our conversation private.

“Both,” Coyote said. “All. But you need to destroy that weapon, Daughter. The opening it is building does not call a well-meaning god into this realm.” He considered his words. “It could be summoning a world eater.”

My brain was still not quite tracking. I could tell because I was having a conversation with Coyote while the Soul Taker used Wulfe’s body to feed upon my friend. And because the next thing I said was sort of stupid.

“We killed the river devil,” I said. I sounded offended—which I was. We’d killed that being, the world eater, at great cost. I was pretty sure that it should stay dead.

“The river devil was a conduit for great destruction,” Coyote said. “That body was a means by which our world could be devoured. A metaphor.”

“Pretty concrete for a metaphor,” I said. “It laid me up for months and put me in a wheelchair that I couldn’t move because my hands were hurt, too.”

“There is nothing in the world that says a metaphor cannot be concrete,” Coyote chided. “But if that thing—”

“The Soul Taker,” I said, and then my heart froze in my chest because Wulfe’s body stiffened and he quit drinking.

After a moment, he began feeding again.

“Don’t name it,” said Coyote kindly. “Not unless you want its attention.”

“It wants you,” I told him. “Through me.”

Coyote nodded. I couldn’t see him do it, but I knew he was nodding. “Dangerous.” He paused. “It is more likely that it is summoning something that has long since dissipated or reintegrated with the Great Spirit. Still, a summoning of that size is likely to end in disaster. You are my hands and heart in this world, Mercedes Athena Thompson.”

“Hauptman,” I said.

“Ah,” he agreed. “That is a very important part of your name. Don’t forget it.”

Warm fingers pressed against my head in farewell or blessing. Or possibly “Good-bye. You are going to die today.” With Coyote, it could be difficult to tell.

A few seconds that felt like hours later, my head cleared and I could work my arms and legs again. I didn’t think this was anything Coyote had helped me with, but I was too frantic to worry about it one way or the other.

Vampires were not supposed to kill their meals. In return, no one would tell the mortals that vampires were real. It was a pact that had stood for a very long time. It was better for all of us. The vampires followed the agreement, more or less, and were careful to hide the bodies when they “forgot,” which was often enough to leave vampires’ homes haunted by their victims. I couldn’t trust Wulfe, in his altered state, or the Soul Taker to leave Warren alive.

I reached out and grabbed the walking stick without looking for it—the best way I’d found to make sure it showed up. As soon as my fingers closed on the carved surface, I surged to my feet.

The door exploded.

Well, not really “exploded.” But it burst open with a noise that indicated bending metal and splintering wood. It felt even louder than it actually was because as soon as the door opened, the bond I shared with Adam lit up with information.

And if I had ever, once, doubted that I was loved, if I had ever doubted that my husband was a scary monster who would kill anything that threatened me, that moment disabused me of it. Which was only fair because I felt the same way.

Adam went for the vampire feeding on Warren. But without even looking up, the Harvester vanished. I hadn’t known Wulfe could teleport—though Marsilia and Stefan could, which implied an inherited gift. No reason that it could not have come from Wulfe.

Deprived of his target, Adam hit the bed rather than tripping over Warren. The two-by-eight of mahogany that served as the long side of the bed frame cracked and broke, and the legs dug deep gouges into the hardwood floor. It hit the wall with the speed of a locomotive, and other parts of the bed and the drywall and the wainscoting took an impressive amount of damage. Adam kept on his feet but howled his rage at missing his rightful kill, as the pack, all of them still in human form, poured into the room.

“So,” I said into the silence that followed, “I’m afraid we got complacent, even after two warnings. Maybe next time you should give us three?”

Without a word, Adam stalked over and wrapped me in his arms, picking me up off the ground. It hurt all of my various bruises. Most especially it hurt the long cut across my back. There had been several moments during which I’d been pretty sure I wouldn’t get to do this again. I hugged him back.

“Warren’s breathing okay,” Darryl said. “But there’s something weird about the way he feels in the pack bonds. Feels like corruption.”

Adam let me go. “You’re sure you’re okay?” he asked.

“A few cuts and a cursed weapon to hunt down,” I told him briskly, ignoring the aching bones and muscles that I knew would get much worse once the adrenaline wore off. “I’ll find time to gibber in a corner with fear as soon as we’re all safe. But I’m good.”

Adam went to Warren, who hadn’t stirred. Mary Jo, a trained EMT, was going over the back of his head and neck with careful hands. There was a fireman’s axe on the ground beside her, her favorite weapon.

“I don’t know why he’s unconscious,” she said. “How long has he been this way, Mercy?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. As much as I wanted to check on Warren with my own eyes, I stayed back. Mary Jo and Adam were better with first aid. “I was busy, and that makes time feel odd. And I got hit with a magical whammy that laid me out. The Harvester took Warren by surprise. Maybe he hit Warren with a magical whammy.”

Yes, said Aubrey from right beside me. I can see it. But it’s fading.

I didn’t respond.

“The vampire’s trying to bind him,” said Darryl flatly. “I can feel it.”

His eyes were gold, the pupils small. I wondered how long he’d been dealing with his wolf trying to get out. From Auriele’s surreptitious glances, I figured it might have been a bit too long for comfort.

Adam nodded. “I can feel it, too.”

“We can keep him in the cage until we can get Marsilia to free him,” Darryl said.

“Assuming she can,” said George.

“She freed me,” Darryl growled.

“Those bastards who got you weren’t Wulfe,” Auriele said, sounding worried.

Adam moved Mary Jo aside and sat on the floor beside Warren. “I learned a little trick while we were in Italy,” he said. “Let me see what I can do.”

He pulled Warren around, then leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead.

Lips still touching skin, Adam said, “Wake up.” The words carried the push of the power of the pack Alpha, and I could feel him draw upon us. This was nothing unusual. Adam could call upon any of his wolves.

Warren’s eyes opened and Adam caught his gaze.

The gateway to the soul, I thought.

Adam forced power down the pack bonds and thrust it into Warren. The magic rose in every werewolf in the room until they all wore their wolf’s eyes. I heard a few growls.

Warren’s body jerked in reaction, but he didn’t fight to break eye contact.

“Change,” Adam told him. Outwardly that wasn’t anything special, either. Forcing a wolf’s change could help them heal. I’d also seen it used as a disciplinary move a time or two, in order to reinforce the knowledge that the Alpha was the wolf in charge without resorting to outright violence.

But what Adam did with his power as Warren began to change was different. It felt like he was burning through Warren with what I could only describe as spiritual fire as Warren’s body altered.

Warren was dominant and old. His change didn’t take as long as some of the others. But it wasn’t my instantaneous change, either. It took maybe ten minutes for him to complete it, but the vampire taint was gone after the first few moments of his shift. Adam stayed where he was and held Warren’s eyes until a wolf stood where the man had been.

Mary Jo cleaned my various cuts. There were a number that I didn’t even remember. Fights were like that. The worst of them was the long cut across my back. Honey produced a safety pin and rerouted my bra strap so it still worked without pressing across the cut.

I gave them an abbreviated version of what had happened.

“This was the last room we were checking,” I said. “I took the bathroom, Warren got the office. The Harvester knocked out Warren and cut the lights.”

“The Harvester?” interrupted Auriele. “Isn’t that Wulfe?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry that I’m being confusing. We fought.”

“And you’re still alive?” Her surprise was not flattering, but I shared it, so I didn’t take offense.

“The Soul Taker wanted to kill me,” I told her, “but Wulfe didn’t.” I decided I was too tired to run through the whole fight, and I’d only get lost babbling about the woo-woo part of it. So I said only, “Wulfe managed to break free of the Soul Taker’s hold for a moment and stabbed himself instead of me.” I waved at the blood on the floor. “Which is where you all came in. Thank you. How did your search go?”

“Marsilia is going to have to replace a lot of doors,” Auriele said with an admiring look at Darryl.

He snorted. “We didn’t find a thing. Not so much as a body. Empty room after empty room.” He looked at me. “But we did not get complacent.”

“We should get Warren home,” Adam said, rising to his feet. “We’re done here.”