Storm Cursed

7

It took Adam, Kelly, and Luke a while to dig me out of the debris. By that time, Paul’s extremities had cooled and his blood had stopped flowing over my skin. When they pulled Paul’s body off me, we were stuck together with his blood.

Maybe it was shock or the shot the EMT people gave me, but I was pretty loopy. I remember the faces of the EMT people dealing with two unhappy wolves (Kelly and Luke had both shifted to dig rubble), which varied from terror to fascination. But other than that, I don’t remember getting from the hotel to the hospital.

In the emergency room, I collected information a little haphazardly, as people came in and out of my cubby, and as I was hauled out for X-rays. Some of the people were pack, some were the nonpack who worked for Adam, but a few of them were strangers who looked like alphabet agency types. The fog increased after they decided I didn’t have a head injury and gave me something stronger.

I woke up to an unfamiliar voice.

“—twenty-five years old. Grad student in viticulture at WSU.”

“What does making wine have to do with making bombs?” That was Kelly. So I must have dozed off long enough ago that he’d had time to shift back. He sounded indignant, as if people who grew plants (like he did) should not contemplate blowing up hotels. It struck me as funny.

The bed moved a little, so I pried open my eyes.

A grim-faced man was sitting on the end of my bed. Apparently disaster makes us all friends because it was the caustic Secret Service guy from the meeting, now a little more battered and dusty.

He said, “Nothing. But growing up in a family with a demolition business does. I don’t know what the connection with Ford is, but the FBI is working on that.”

“Ford?” I asked; my voice came out a little wobbly.

Adam leaned in to look at me. He was seated on a rolling, backless chair pulled up to my bed. He and his clothing were filthy with blood and dirt, but his face and hands were clean.

It made me aware that sometime between when I was last functioning and now, I’d been stripped out of my blood-soaked clothing and put in a clean hospital gown. Parts of me were clean and parts of me were horrid. I smelled like gunpowder, muck, and Paul’s blood.

Adam touched my face with gentle fingers. “Back with us again, I see,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Floaty,” I said, instead of telling him I wanted to crawl out of my skin to get Paul’s blood off me. “Floaty” was true, too. “It’s nice. What does the bomber have to do with trucks?”

He smiled—it was a real smile, though his face was tired. “Not much, sweetheart. But Ford is the name of Rankin’s man. Right now it looks like he’s the one who arranged for the bombing.”

“Okay.” I couldn’t quite remember which of the men in the meeting was Rankin’s man. Rankin was one of the Democrats, included because he was on the House committee on fae and supernatural affairs. That committee had undergone so many name changes over the past few years that I couldn’t, right off the top of my head, come up with what it was officially called. I knew it wasn’t the Tinker Bell Committee, which is what most people called it.

The filth and the blood and the dust that everyone was wearing told me that it was probably still the day of the bombing. The position of the sun told me that it wasn’t more than a few hours later.

“What’s the situation?” I asked Adam.

I didn’t have to spell out for him what I needed.

“Paul is dead. The bomber is dead,” he said.

“Did you—” I glanced hurriedly at the Secret Service guy, who glanced blandly back at me. This was why I didn’t drink. Too many minefields.

“I didn’t kill the bomber, no,” Adam said, his voice a little harsh. “I didn’t need to because he did it for us.”

“How about everyone else?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

“We got tossed around a little. The windows went and we lost chunks of ceiling and wall. No one was seriously hurt—Abbot has a broken arm. The rest of us just got bumps and bruises.”

“Luke broke his shoulder,” Kelly added. “But it healed up. Adam sent him home with Darryl.”

Translation: Luke was too worn out by the healing to change back to human and too upset by the bombing to be trusted out in public without a wolf dominant enough to make him mind.

“Okay,” I said. I looked at the Secret Service guy. “If the bomber died at the scene, how did you figure out—” I was still not at the top of my game because I had to run down truck brands until I came up with the right one. Not Dodge or Chevy. “—Ford was responsible?”

“I missed all but the end of it,” said the Secret Service guy regretfully. “I was too busy not dying and then scrambling out from under Kelly—thank you. But as soon as he realized he was alive, Ford started screaming that it was fifteen minutes early.”

“Abbot got the whole thing on his cell phone,” said Adam.

“We contacted Representative Rankin,” said the Secret Service guy. “You’ll be surprised to know that he was shocked and appalled.”

The Secret Service guy sounded honestly regretful when he added, “Unfortunately, I think that shock was real, at least. I’d love to pin this to that slimy toad. But it’s likely that the whole thing rests on Ford.”

“What is your name?” I asked. “I can’t just keep calling you the Secret Service guy.”

“Judd Spielman,” he said.

“Cool,” I said, leaning forward earnestly. “Paul saved me.”

“And there she goes again,” murmured Kelly. “We know, Mercy. You’ve told us a time or two.”

I turned to look at him—he was somewhere behind Adam—but I ended up burying my face against Adam’s chest. It felt so good I stayed there.

When I lifted my head, the Secret Service guy whose name was Judd Spielman was gone from the end of the bed. Instead, inexplicably Tory Abbot was there in an immaculate suit that was slightly different from the one he’d worn in the meeting. The lines in his face were a little deeper, and he had a splint on his left arm.

He was saying, “—hadn’t panicked we’d all have been dead and he’d have been alive.”

It felt like I’d just blinked and he’d appeared out of nowhere, but his presence wasn’t the only change in the room. Everything was a little grubbier than it had been—the white sheets had acquired dirty smudges.

Adam was cleaner, though. His hair was wet and he was in different clothing. Kelly was gone, and Warren sat on the windowsill, looking out at the setting sun.

“I hate drugs,” I said muzzily. “My mouth is dry.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Adam, kissing my forehead. Warren got off the window ledge and brought a glass of water with a straw. “And they won’t be giving you any more. Looks like you sustained lots of cuts and bruises but nothing major.”

“Probably,” said Warren, going back to the window.

“Probably,” agreed Adam smoothly. “Having a hotel dumped on top of someone isn’t usually something people walk away from, so they’re keeping you here for a couple more hours to be sure.”

“You’re driving them batty,” said Warren. “Because a hotel fell on you and you should be dead. They can’t figure out why you aren’t.”

“Paul saved me,” I told Adam.

He kissed me again. “I know, love.”

“Why does she keep saying that?” Warren asked. “Does she have a concussion?”

“He asked me to,” I told Warren with drug-born earnestness. “He touched my cheek and asked me to make sure that everyone knew that when push came to shove, he was a hero.”

“He died instantly,” said Abbot, not ungently. “He couldn’t have asked her to do anything.”

“I see dead people,” I told him.

“Hush,” Adam said.

“That’s why I don’t like hospitals very much,” I continued. “Paul died and the only thing he wanted me to tell people was that he saved me.” I paused. “He didn’t want me to tell Mary Jo he loved her.”

“You see dead people?” asked Abbot, his voice arrested.

“Let’s just give Abbot time to brief us, okay?” Warren said. “You’re talking nonsense, Mercy.”

I nodded—which hurt my neck, my shoulders, and my left toe, so I stopped.

“Your wife talks to ghosts?” Abbot asked.

“P-p-please!” I told him earnestly in the voice of Roger Rabbit—or as close to it as I could get. “Only when it’s funny.”

“Go to sleep,” Adam told me.

I closed my eyes and listened until we were all alone. But I must have slept a little because when I woke up, Judd Spielman the Secret Service guy was back. This time he had taken the same seat that Abbot had used.

“The FBI say that the bomb was expertly constructed. From the brass caps to the detonation wiring.” Spielman was wearing clean clothes, too. Instead of another suit, though, he’d gone for jeans and a T-shirt. It made him look tougher—the shiner didn’t hurt that impression, either. Some people (me) get a black eye and people ask, “Hey, who beat you up?” Other people (Spielman) get a black eye and people say, “Where did they bury the other guy?”

Adam doesn’t get shiners.

“Goes with him being raised by a demolition expert,” said Adam.

“Guess the kid was bright and paid attention.” Spielman’s tone was ironic. “But I wouldn’t have sounded as admiring as my contact did. The boy killed two people, including himself. I asked them, if he was such a genius, why wasn’t he working for his parents’ company? They told me that he didn’t like to take orders. So his father encouraged him to go into another line of work before he killed someone—hence the viticulture. His family didn’t quite say it, but my guy in the FBI says that he started to get radical and his family shipped him out west to get him away from all of that.”

“Well, that worked,” said Warren.

“Like dumping a drowning boy into the ocean,” agreed Spielman. “He came here and joined the local Bright Future chapter, dated a few girls from that group. Then he brought a new girl for a couple of weeks. Word from the Bright Future people is that those two said something about being tired of belonging to a useless group who didn’t do anything but talk and paint graffiti—a charge BF denies, for the record. They quit coming. My guy is checking to see if they found another, more radical group, or if they headed off on their own.”

“Any word on the connection to Ford?” I asked.

The whole room turned to look at me—apparently they hadn’t noticed that I’d started paying attention again. Adam’s hand tightened on mine.

“Apparently Ford was a friend of the kid’s family,” Spielman said. “I understand that right at the moment, past tense is the correct verb form. The kid’s father is ready to do murder.”

“Why now?” asked Adam suddenly. “This was a meeting of—you’ll forgive me—minions. Why didn’t he wait until the key players were in place?”

“Because Ford had been dating Senator Campbell’s youngest daughter before she broke it off,” Spielman said heavily. “Apparently he was worried that if Campbell was killed, Stephanie would move back to Minnesota and he would lose his chance to get her back.”

“Wow,” I said, a little awed by the . . . wrongness of that thinking. “That’s special.”

“How do you know that?” Warren asked.

“Ford is talking like someone put a nickel in him,” said Spielman. “I have no idea why. I don’t see how announcing that he did it for the good of mankind because we shouldn’t be bargaining with the fae, we should be nuking them out of existence, is going to help him in court. He is sounding more like someone campaigning for president than someone facing time behind bars for bombing a government meeting.”

Warren growled, “For murder.”

Spielman’s face lost the blandly pleasant expression that seemed to be its default setting. “I know. I helped carry your man out.”

Warren breathed deeply. “Sorry.”

“Me, too,” said Spielman.

“Paul—” I started to say, but Warren broke in.

“Saved you,” the lanky cowboy said firmly. “On purpose. I never liked him, would not have thought he had it in him. I was wrong and he died a hero.”

“You wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t protected you,” Adam said. “We won’t forget what we owe him.”

Eventually Spielman left with a couple of his people. The doctor came and told me I could go, but I shouldn’t make any life-changing decisions for a day or two.

Warren headed to his truck as I climbed into the SUV under Adam’s assessing eye.

“At least,” Adam said as he started the big diesel engine, “we know that this attempt had nothing to do with witches.”

“No,” I told him. “Abbot smelled like the witch in Benton City. Not like Frost; I don’t think they are related. But the two of them use the same laundry soap, shampoo, and toothpaste—and he carries her scent, too, a little.”

“Abbot,” said Adam slowly. “But not Ford.”

“I couldn’t tell you which one of the government minion clones in that meeting was Ford,” I admitted. “And maybe the bombing was all this Ford guy in some sort of attempt to make sure that the government and the fae don’t reach any sort of agreement.”

“But,” Adam said, “Ford is acting weirdly—and we have a witch who we think might be able to make mundane people do things.”

“But,” I agreed. “I don’t know if it is only when the witch is present—or if it’s like the vampire thing.”

“I’ll ask around,” Adam told me.

I felt awful for the next four days. Nothing specific, just headachy and sore-muscled. When I went to the garage, Tad made me man the front desk while he worked on the cars. On the second day, Zee worked on the cars, too. On the third day, Dale brought Stefan’s bus over—and I stood up to the two overprotective louts and fixed her myself.

There were things more painful than my sore muscles, like the press conference. Luckily, I didn’t have to say much. The reporter was a woman, so she was much more interested in talking to Adam than to me. The debriefing by the FBI wasn’t fun, either. But in my hierarchy of painful things, Paul’s funeral and the tasks surrounding it topped them all.

We had him cremated—and Sherwood went to watch while it was done. We weren’t going to let Paul be slipped out and donated to science while our backs were turned. Sherwood, I think, was more concerned that his body might be stolen and made into a zombie. Maybe it was just paranoia, but it gave us something to focus on.

And there were more zombies.

Our pack got called to Pasco to deal with a zombie cat—a stray this time, so at least there were no crying children. I didn’t go, but apparently there was quite a chase before Ben caught it. And then there was the cow.

They didn’t call us in for the cow until it had already killed two people and injured a handful more. I wish I had gone for that one, but I had to settle for a secondhand account of Warren roping it from the back of his truck at thirty miles an hour. He secured the rope and had the driver hit the brakes. The resulting snap of the rope ripped the rotting head right off.

Adam thought the witch—or witches, because we really weren’t sure—was playing with us.

Adam dealt with the FBI, the Secret Service, and all of the hoopla that happens when you don’t actually die when a bomb goes off. The secret meeting wasn’t so secret anymore, and Bright Future, undeterred by their association with the bomber, held a sit-in at John Dam Plaza, a little park in the middle of Richland. I heard they gave out free ice cream cones.

Ford died in custody. The public was being held in suspense but our new friend in the Secret Service told Adam that no one knew why he died. It wasn’t suicide, but it didn’t look like murder, either.

After a couple of days, the news stories all concentrated on the upcoming meeting between the fae and the government. The bombing sort of faded to the background. After all, all of the bad guys died. They only had a driver’s license photo of Paul, and a few words from Adam about how he was a good and faithful employee—not enough to make a story out of Paul.

Paul only wanted Adam and the pack to know that he was a hero. He wouldn’t have cared, much, about what they said in the news.

Senator Campbell did a series of interviews with both conservative and liberal press. I caught several of those.

The senator was a handsome man—he could have starred in one of the 1950s Westerns that my foster father had been addicted to. He looked like a man you could trust.

He looked me directly in the eye. Or at least he looked in the camera and spoke as if he were talking to me.

“In the view of the fae,” he said, “we broke faith with them when we denied justice to one of their own. But they are willing to step up to the table one more time. It doesn’t matter what you or I feel about the fae, the fact of the matter is that we are less safe from them right this minute than we were before. An agreement will make us safer, make them safer, and make the lives of our children safer.”

Still looking at me through the TV, he said, “This is not a chance that is likely to come again in our generation. And I am not going to let the actions of a homegrown terrorist get in the way of making my country a safer place to live.”

He was an effective speaker. And his opinion was made more weighty by the common knowledge that he was the poster child for the anti-fae groups.

While the pack was herding zombies and Adam was dealing with investigators and reporters, Mary Jo, George, and I cleaned out Paul’s apartment. It took us two evenings to pack up his things. It seemed to me that it should take more time to bundle up a person’s life.

“Is his ghost here?” asked Mary Jo as we sorted books into boxes.

I looked around and shook my head. “I haven’t seen anything while we’ve been here.”

She closed up the box she was working on and taped it shut. “I called Renny. We’re going on a date on Saturday.”

“Good,” I said.

“Is it?” she asked pensively. “Pensive” was not an emotion I’d ever seen in Mary Jo.

“He loved me, you know,” she told me. “Paul, I mean. I know you didn’t see the best side of him, but he could be a lot of fun.” She was quiet for a moment, then she said, “I wish I had loved him back.”

She cried—and didn’t push me away when I gave her a hug. George came over and crouched beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder. He said what we’d all been thinking.

“He didn’t have anyone but pack,” he said. Then he rubbed her shoulder gently. “But he did have us, darling. We had his back when things went rough—and he had ours.”

“He saved my life,” I said.

I met Mary Jo’s wet eyes—mostly to avoid looking at Paul’s shade, who had shown up, looking lost, as soon as Mary Jo had acknowledged that he had loved her.

She nodded. “He was not an easy man, Mercy. But he was a good person to have at your back.”

“I know,” I told her sincerely.

“What he wasn’t,” George said, “was sentimental. Back to work, me hearties. Time and tide wait for no one.”

“We’re not sailing anywhere,” said Mary Jo. “So we don’t care about the tide, even if we were anywhere near the ocean. Maybe you should lay off the pirate game for a while. It’s warping your brain.”

“His brain is already warped,” I said.

George grinned at me. “I know you are, but what am I?”

I stuck my tongue out at him and we all got back to work. Paul lingered, touching a book or two as we packed them or fingering the empty bookcase. Sometimes he would reach out and almost caress Mary Jo—but not quite.

This shade wasn’t really Paul, I could tell—not like when he’d talked to me just after he’d died. But his shade made me sad. Sadder. So I didn’t look at him. At it.

Elizaveta made it back in time to just miss the funeral. I think she planned it that way—I sure would have under the circumstances.

A taxi dropped her and her luggage at our door smelling of stale air and all the things that go with air travel. She looked . . . old.

“Adam,” she said, brushing by me, and launched into a spate of Russian.

Her face crumpled with grief and loss and he held her while she cried. But his face was— It was probably a good thing she couldn’t see his face. After a moment, though, he closed his eyes and grief deepened the line of his mouth.

“Elizaveta,” I said. “Come sit down. We have a situation here and I think you may be the only one who can clarify what’s going on.”

She started to come in, but took a step back before her foot landed inside the threshold. “It is lovely outside,” she said. “I have just spent most of a day inside planes and airports. Can we sit out on the porch?”

I thought of the cleansing that Sherwood had performed on the house.

“Of course,” I said. “Why don’t you two find a seat and I’ll bring out some iced tea for everyone.” Elizaveta was fond of iced tea.

Eventually we all sat in the comfortable chairs that were scattered in seating groups all over the porch. Elizaveta drank her tea. I did not doubt her grief or her fear.

It sounded like Sherwood’s cat was going to make it. But Elizaveta’s house had been full of the ghosts of people she and her family had tortured to death for power. I couldn’t look at Elizaveta without seeing the face of that half-dead cat, as if he stood for all of her victims. She grieved, and I had not the slightest bit of sympathy.

“We buried the ashes of your family in your garden,” said Adam.

And there had been a lot of bones in that garden, Warren had told us. They had reburied what they found. We were still considering what to do about that garden.

Elizaveta’s face went still. “Oh?” But when he didn’t say anything more, she said, “Thank you. They would have liked that.”

I didn’t think any of her family would like where they were now. But I didn’t generally impose my beliefs on other people—especially when they wouldn’t do anyone any good.

“About the black magic,” she said tentatively. She was watching Adam; my reaction didn’t matter to her.

Adam shook his head. “I understand. I know how witchcraft works.” “Understand” did not mean “approve.”

“They tried to take us once before,” she said, watching him narrowly. “The Hardesty witches. Some sacrifices were necessary to ensure our survival.”

“I see,” Adam said. “Why didn’t you come to us for help?”

“It was at the same time that you and your pack got taken by the government agents,” Elizaveta said. “You were a little busy. By the time matters settled down for you”—after Frost was dead—“they had backed off.” She gave Adam a grim smile. “My family was not big compared to theirs. But we had some powerful practitioners.”

I was going to have to call Stefan and see what he’d found out about Frost.

“Mercy?” Adam asked.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was woolgathering.”

“I asked if you could describe the witch you saw,” Elizaveta said.

“Tall,” I said. “Dark hair. Big smile that lights up her face. She sounds like she comes from Adam’s quadrant of the country, though maybe not Alabama.”

“And she makes zombies,” said Elizaveta, as if what I’d told her had given her the final bits she needed to make an identification. “Definitely the Hardesty family.”

“Why do you think she’s making so many zombies?” I asked. “We’ve had a werewolf, twenty miniature goats, a cat, and a cow.”

“She can’t help it,” said Elizaveta. “It is the curse of that kind of necromancy, this uncontrollable need to create more. I am told that the euphoria that lingers after you bring the dead to life is more addictive than morphine. That’s why there aren’t many witches who do it. Some of the African-influenced families seem to have a better handle on that, but even they have a limit. She must be valuable if they haven’t put her down yet.”

“So could we track her using the zombies?” asked Adam. “How does zombie-making work?”

“It doesn’t matter how it works,” Elizaveta said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “By the time there are zombies running around, she could be miles away. What matters is that I can track that sort of magic in my territory.” She took a deep breath. “There were two witches at my house, and one of them was this zombie-maker.”

“Yes,” I said. “Would being a Love Talker make her valuable enough to keep around?”

“Ha,” said Elizaveta. “Is that what she is?”

“I’m not sure,” I told her honestly. Then I described the incident with Salas.

Elizaveta nodded. “Your vampire is right. This man— What was his name? This man is probably witchborn—you say that he has left town?”

“Yes.” I didn’t give his name, and Elizaveta didn’t ask for it again.

“Safer for him,” she commented. “And if she is, indeed, a Love Talker, that would explain a few things I have wondered about her over the years.”

“Can she influence people over distance—like when the vampires mark one of the people they feed from?” Adam asked.

Elizaveta pursed her lips. “Possibly. Some of them have been known to do that.” Then her face cleared. “Oh, I see. You think that she might have been behind your explosion?”

“Ford died in custody,” said Adam. “And he died very much like your family did.”

“If they want to stop an alliance between the humans and the fae—and it is my understanding that they would do that—it could be the Hardestys behind the bombing.” She shrugged and waved her hands. “It might be a single incident; there are enough humans who would be appalled by this alliance. But the Hardesty family is famous for using others to do their work when they can.” She compressed her lips and nodded slowly. “It smells like something they would come up with—and given the death of this man who was supposed to be behind it all, I think it very likely to be them behind the incident. It cost them nothing and had the potential to forward their goals.”

“You think that primarily, these witches have come to take over your territory,” said Adam.

She nodded decisively, but said, “It is too soon to tell. Sometimes they come one by one, others two by two.” She spoke that sentence in a singsong, as if it were a children’s rhyme. She shivered a little, looking old.

“Ah well,” she said. “I should find a hotel, do you think?” She had planned on staying here, I thought, until she found she could not cross our threshold.

“How worried should we be?” I asked her. “I mean, should we caution our werewolves?”

She frowned. “From the Love Talker, not much, I don’t think. I’ve never heard of one who could influence a werewolf. The Hardesty lineage has had a few who had the ability to persuade vampires. From the one who killed my family? It takes a lot more power to kill werewolves than it does humans. Adam told me that it was your assessment that all of my family died at the same time, no?”

I nodded. “All of your family, all of the animals—” I wasn’t going to tell her about Sherwood’s cat. She might try to claim it, and that would be bad all around. “—all of the insects. Everything.”

“Ah,” she said. “I hadn’t known it had gone that far. That’s not your zombie-making Love Talker who did that, Mercy. There is only one witch I know of who can relieve others of their lives in such a manner. I suppose I should be flattered that they sent Death after my people.”

My heart skipped a beat, because I heard Coyote echoing her voice in my head when she said “Death.”

She smiled tightly and looked at Adam. “If they sent Death, she is after me. But you should know that allying yourself with me will put you in her crosshairs. That thing she does, eating the lives of others . . . she did it in my home. That was a mistake.” Her expression grew hungry and satisfied at the same time. “She will regret attacking my family with her curse.”

“I couldn’t smell or feel the zombie-making witch until she wanted me to,” I said. “I couldn’t even sense the magic of the trap that Sherwood fell into until we were right on top of it.”

“Mercy is sensitive to magic,” Adam said.

“Walkers are,” said Elizaveta with a nod.

“And,” I said, “none of us knew that you had begun practicing black magic—you know that it has a scent that werewolves and I can pick up.”

She froze with her glass halfway to her lips. She knew that we understood what she’d been doing—or she should have known. Maybe she’d been lying to herself until this moment. She glanced at Adam. I couldn’t read Adam’s face, so I didn’t think she could, either.

“The trap in your basement,” she said finally, setting her glass down gently, “that is a simple thing. If a witch knows that there is someone about who might be able to sense magic, there is an extra step that can be used to insulate the spell, separate it from the air around it. It doesn’t work on active magic, but the trap you described to me is in stasis until it is triggered. It might take a few minutes or even hours for the insulating layer to dissipate after the spell is triggered. So you still wouldn’t feel the magic until you walked into the spell.”

“Okay,” said Adam. “And the rest? How did you keep us from knowing you had changed your mind about staying to the lighter path?” “The lighter path” is what the witches themselves sometimes call gray magic. It isn’t the path of light, but it isn’t pure evil, either.

She sighed. “I told you that I was good at talismans, or gris-gris, while we were in Italy.” She tugged on one of the necklaces she was wearing to display an amulet. It looked like something I’d seen displayed in craft fairs when potters tried their hands at making jewelry. It was pretty, made of green and copper glazed pottery, and vaguely resembled a flower, if that flower had been put together by Picasso.

She moved her hand until the amulet dangled away from her skin. As soon as it was no longer in contact, I felt like someone had dumped a bucket of filth over my head.

“I did not want you to know, Adam,” she said. And a tear trailed down her face. She wiped it away with the edge of her free hand. “I did not want you to know what I had become. So I made this.”

She tucked it back into her clothing and the awareness of black magic faded.

“It is a thing of my own devising, using secrets of my family. It is unlikely that the Hardesty witches made such a thing—their magics don’t lend themselves to this kind of working. But my people knew how—and I fear that the Hardesty witches weren’t without allies in my home.”

“There were four who hadn’t been tortured,” I said.

Elizaveta nodded. “I am afraid that ambition is a problem among my kind. They were the ones who most chafed at my restrictions.”

“And one of them was Robert’s daughter, Militza,” Adam said. “We found Robert.”

“That wouldn’t have bothered her,” Elizaveta said. “But she minded the loss of status when her father betrayed me.”

“So why did they kill the members of your family who helped them?” I asked.

“The Hardestys value family loyalty, Mercy,” said Elizaveta. “Those who betrayed their blood—they would never be welcomed to the Hardestys.” She looked at Adam. “I assume you have been looking for them.”

Adam nodded. “We think they drove an RV here and were staying in it at an RV park for a while. They left the park two days before we discovered the bodies at your house, and they haven’t been back since.”

“Frustrating,” I said.

Adam nodded at me. “How can we kill them if we can’t find them?”

Elizaveta watched him with a little smile. “They will find us, my darling,” she murmured. Then she said briskly, “Yes, well, all of this information you have now. I am an old woman and I need my rest after my long journey. I will be on my way.”

“Let us know which hotel you’re staying at,” Adam said. “We’ll keep a patrol on it.”

She straightened and looked a little less old and fragile. “Thank you, darling boy. That is very kind.”

Did Adam mean for the patrol to watch over her, or just watch her? Probably best not to ask that right this minute.

“I took a taxi here,” she said. “Might I have someone to drive me to a hotel?”

“I’ll do it,” I volunteered. “I need to pick up some more eggs anyway.”

Adam tensed, shook his head—not like he was indicating a negative, more like he was shedding something off. “Bad things happen when you go by yourself to get eggs, Mercy. I’ll take her and pick up whatever groceries you need on the way back.”

I didn’t talk to Adam about Elizaveta until he closed our bedroom door behind him that night.

“The talks are still on,” he told me as he unbuttoned his shirt. “The president was going to pull the plug, but apparently Campbell and a bipartisan group of senators cornered him in his office and convinced him.”

“He’s coming up for election next year,” I said. “He’s worried about how this will look.”

Adam nodded and stripped out of his shirt. He made an irritated sound because he’d forgotten to unbutton the cuffs. I started over to help him out of his shirt manacles—but he solved the problem by ripping off the sleeves. He hadn’t looked particularly upset until that point—but he didn’t usually destroy bespoke shirts casually, either.

“I’m sorry about Elizaveta,” I said.

He ripped off the rest of his shirt and tossed it into the garbage bin, just inside our bathroom door. He then carefully unbuttoned the cuffs and threw them away, too. With his back to me, he put a hand on either side of the bathroom door and bowed his head.

“I wanted her to have a good explanation,” he said.

“I know,” I told him.

“I wanted her to be . . . different than she is.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked at me, his face stark. “She was one of mine,” he said.

I slid into his arms and wrapped mine around his waist. “You can’t force people to make the right choice, Adam.”

He drew in a breath. “Every time I have ever asked her for help, she has come. She came to face down Bonarata because I asked her to.”

I nodded and just held him. Sometimes there is no way to make things better. There is only making it through. I couldn’t make Adam not hurt; I could only let him know he wasn’t alone.

The next day, as I put together a Jetta that someone had tried to rewire themselves, I thought about connections. Making a car run smoothly was all about connections: fuel, air, coolant, electric.

I wondered if I was becoming a conspiracy theorist because the web I was building from bits and pieces was truly Byzantine. And if all the things that seemed to be connected were, then a family of witches I’d never heard of had been responsible for an awful lot of chaos in my life for the last four years or more.

Maybe things would become more clear when Stefan got back to me with information about Frost.

I finished the Jetta and pulled a sputtering Rabbit into the garage. It died about four feet from where I needed it to be.

“You need help with that?” asked Zee as I got out of the car.

“Nope,” I said.

“Gut,” said Zee shortly. “The boy and I are busy.”

I laughed and pushed the Rabbit until it was rolling, then hopped in to hit the brakes before it traveled too far. Pushing cars wasn’t a new thing for me. I propped up the hood and contemplated the engine compartment. It was surprisingly pristine given the age of the car and left me feeling a little nostalgic for my Rabbit.

My cell phone rang as I pulled the cover off the air filter. The filter material, which should have been whitish but more often in the Tri-Cities was brownish with dust, was an astonishingly bright orange.

Staring at the orange air filter, I answered my cell without checking ID.

“This is Tory Abbot,” said Senator Campbell’s assistant, who smelled like the zombie-making witch. Darn it, “zombie witch” was easier and it flowed off the tongue better—even if it left the impression that the witch was a zombie. So “zombie witch” it was.

“What can I do for you?”

“I have some documents for you to take to the fae. We need a complete list of which fae will be there—names, attributes, and all of that.”

I pulled the phone away from my face and gave it an incredulous look. “Paperwork for the Gray Lords to fill out,” I said slowly. “Huh. That’s an interesting proposition. But they won’t do it.”

“They will if they want a meeting,” he said. “I’ll drop them by your . . . place of business this afternoon.” He said the last as if he just noticed that my place of business was a garage and not, say, a lawyer’s office.

“You can if you want to,” I told him. “But I won’t pass them on.”

“I’m afraid this is nonnegotiable,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell them that the meeting is off. And I’ll tell them why. You can explain to the president and the secretary of state why this meeting that they were so hot to have was canceled by your grandstanding. But maybe they will agree with you. That without some pieces of paper—that your side would have filled with lies if you were the fae—this meeting should not be held. Even though it is the first step in a process that might keep our country from being at war with the fae. You can start, maybe, by informing Senator Campbell.”

A short silence fell. I think he was waiting for me to continue my rant.

“Ms. Hauptman,” Abbot began, “I know that you are overset by the bombing. Maybe you should pass on your duties to someone more experienced and less obstructionist.”

“Okay,” I said. “Give me the name of someone the fae won’t object to.”

“Adam Hauptman,” he said.

“Someone made sure that Adam had a job for this meeting,” I said. “He won’t renege on an agreement he has already made.” I decided I wasn’t really interested in helping him with his hunt for my replacement. “And if you think I am an obstructionist, you should try him. Good luck with your search.”

I hit the red button and went back to the mystery of the Rabbit’s air filter. Experimentally I brought it to my nose because it looked like someone had dusted the whole filter with cheese powder from a macaroni and cheese box. But it didn’t have a smell.

I took an air hose and used it to blow off the filter, half expecting orange powder to fill the air—but nothing happened. The substance looked powdery, but it clung to the filter as if it were glue.

I poked at it with my finger. I was still wearing gloves when I worked, though Adam’s ex-wife was back in Eugene and not around to make little pointed remarks about the grease I couldn’t get out from under my nails. I hated the way my hands sweated in them. But that was made up for by the way my skin was less dry and cracked because I wasn’t using as much caustic soap on them to get the grease off. Christy had done me a favor.

There was no orange residue on my gloves.

“Hey, Zee?” I asked, holding up the filter.

“Was,” he said, perched on the edge of an engine compartment with a limberness that belied his elderly appearance. “I am busy,” he added.

“I have a bright orange air filter,” I singsonged. “Don’t you want to give it a look?”

There was the buzz of hard rubber on cement and Tad slid out from under Zee’s car, a flashlight in his hand. “Orange?” he said.

“Bah,” said Zee. “You’ve distracted the boy, Mercy.”

“What is orange and keeps air from flowing—and why would someone dump that all over an air filter?” I asked.

Tad took the air filter and stared at it. He looked at the Rabbit.

“What was supposed to be wrong with the car?” he asked.

I looked at the repair sheet I’d filled out while I’d been in exile on the front desk. “Sputters and dies,” I said.

“I guess I know why,” Tad said. And then he dropped the filter like it was a hot potato and jumped back.

“Dad?” he said in a semipanicked voice, holding up his hands. The skin on his fingers, where he’d touched the air filter, was blistering and cracking. As I watched, the tips of his fingers blackened.

Zee grabbed Tad’s hands, muttered something foul, and hauled Tad to the sink. I got there just before them and turned the water on full force. Zee held Tad’s hands under the flow of water and then SPOKE.

Wasser, Freund mir sei,

komm und steh mir bei.

Fließe, wasche, binde, fasse,

Löse Fluch, trag ihn hinfort,

Lass ab von Hand und diesem Ort.

The power in his voice made my ears ring. And that made me realize that whatever was on the air filter wasn’t caustic—which was what I’d thought when I’d seen Tad’s skin—but magic. And as Zee’s power touched it, something that cloaked that magic washed away and the whole shop smelled of witchcraft.

I thought of Elizaveta’s explanation of what the witches had done to disguise the trap in my basement, and figured that they had done something like that here.

“How is he?” I asked.

“He is angry at himself for being so careless. His hands smart a bit, but they will heal up just fine now that his dad has made the bad magic go poof. And he is able to evaluate himself, thank you very much,” said Tad crossly.

“He is fine,” said Zee. “Grumpy as usual.”

“That’s a little ‘pot calling kettle’ of you, don’t you think?” asked Tad.

Zee grunted, frowned, and tipped his head to the side. He sniffed loudly.

“I smell it, too,” I said. “It’s not just the air filter. If it were the air filter emitting that much magic, Tad wouldn’t have any hands left.”

“Hey,” said Tad. “Thanks for that thought.”

“Serves you right for being so careless,” said Zee. “Mercy, this new shop of yours, it is equipped with fire suppression, no? Do you know if it is foam or water?”

“Water,” I said. “Water was easier.”

“Ja,” he said. “And useless in a grease fire.”

“We dealt with building codes, not practical matters,” I said. “Building codes said sprinkler system. But the fire extinguishers will take on grease fires.” We had lots of extinguishers.

“The sprinklers are good news for us,” he said. “But maybe not for a fire. Mercy, help me get the vehicles opened up.”

So we opened hoods and air filter covers and any other kind of covers that Zee thought useful. Tad unplugged and collected various electronics and covered them with plastic—something he could do with minimal use of his poor hands.

Zee inspected the computers, cell phones, and computational equipment and gave a reluctant nod. “Those have not been affected yet. We can let them stay out of the water.”

Then Zee stalked over to the test lever for the water suppression system and pulled it down. As he did, he SPOKE again.

Wasser, Freund mir sei,

komm und steh mir bei.

Fließe, löse, binde, fasse,

Hexenwerk verfange dich,

Schwinde Fluch, zersetz den Spruch,

nimm’s hinweg, erhöre mich.

This time, since Tad wasn’t writhing in pain, I paid more attention to what Zee said. My German wasn’t good enough for a full poetic translation (and it sounded like poetry) but I got the rough gist of it. He called upon water—the element, I thought—and entreated it to wash away the witchcraft.

Nothing different happened after he spoke, until he pulled out his pocketknife and nicked the back of his hand, letting his blood wash into the water.

Black smoke filled the air, and the water hissed and steamed as it came down. Some of the foulness was from the water that had been sitting for months in the tanks that supplied the system, but most of it was magic-born.

“This is a cursing,” Zee told me, grabbing a clean rag to stanch his hand. “The last time I saw something like this was . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t remember how long ago. But it doesn’t matter. If we do not take care of it now, right now—it will spread from the shop, from us, from everything here, like a virus. Gaining power from the misery it causes.”

I put up the Closed sign and locked the door.

When the water had finished its job in the shop, Zee ran us—clothes and all—into the shower for the same treatment.

Finally, wet and shivering with nerves, I dug my phone out and called Elizaveta, just as if nothing had changed in our relationship.

I don’t know that I trusted her—and I was really, really glad that Zee had been here so I didn’t need to trust her with everything. But calling her for help beat calling in Wulfe, the witchblood (or something magic using, anyway) vampire.

Elizaveta, black magic and all, was preferable to Wulfe. Besides, it was daytime, so I had no choice.

Then I called Adam.

“I heard you gave up your position as organizer,” he said.

“Was that what I was?” I asked. “I thought I was message girl. Yes. Abbot wanted me to get the fae to supply a list of the attending fae, by name, and what their powers were.”

“Ah,” he said. “And you told Abbot it wouldn’t fly.”

“And he said then there would be no talks,” I agreed. “So it wasn’t so much that I resigned as it was that if I continued in my position, there would be no talks.”

“And you wouldn’t have a position,” Adam said dryly.

“Exactly,” I agreed. “But I think he fired me anyway.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “It will be a lot less work.”

“Might shorten the life span of everyone living in the US by a decade or so, but less work is good,” I agreed.

He laughed. “The fae would never fill out paperwork for a meeting,” he said.

“Or supply real names,” I said. “Or fill out the sheets with lies. Better all the way around to establish what is possible and what is not possible before all hell breaks loose.”

Back when the fae first went into the reservations, the government had required the fae to give names and tell them what kind of fae they were. I don’t know about the other fae, but I know that Zee gave them the name he was going by right now—and the human-made category of gremlin. That probably fit him as well as anything else, but it trivialized the kind of power he could manifest. The one thing I did know was that none of the fae who filled out those forms were Gray Lords.

“So if you weren’t calling about that,” Adam said, “what are you calling about? And does it have anything to do with the reason my people tell me that the fire suppression system in your shop has been drained?”

“Yep,” I said. “The shop was cursed.”

“I will be right there,” he said. Then he said, in a low tone, “Did you call Elizaveta?”

“It was either her or Wulfe,” I said.

“And it’s daytime,” he agreed. “I’m leaving now.”