Storm Cursed

8

“It started with this?” asked Elizaveta, holding up the air filter.

She had been stalking around the garage for five minutes, muttering about the puddles everywhere. I was actually surprised that there wasn’t more water—but she hadn’t been here during the deluge.

Tad was in the office calling (with his poor sore fingers) the clients whose cars we had doused with water. We were offering them the repairs free of charge, but not delivering the cars until tomorrow or the next day, depending on how long cleanup took us. A problem, I could hear Tad explaining, with the new fire suppression system.

I’d found a spot near the wall that separated garage from office, and Adam had taken up a station next to me, where he proceeded to ignore Elizaveta’s doings and answer texts and e-mails on his phone. Or maybe he was planning world domination—with Adam’s phone it was hard to tell.

Zee took my other side, leaving the garage at large to Elizaveta.

My cell went off again. But the caller ID was blocked and my policy was that I didn’t pick up on blocked-ID calls just after I got off the hook for a nonpaying government job I didn’t want.

“Yes,” I said. “The air filter was the first thing we found.”

She made a noise and began examining it minutely. The bright orange substance had changed to something that looked a lot more like (and maybe was) the caked-on dirt I sometimes find in cars that belong to people who do a lot of driving on dirt roads around here. A lot of our dirt is powder-fine and coats everything in its path.

“So,” I said, “do you think that the cheese-colored magic plague let loose in my shop is the Hardesty witches? I know it’s an obvious question, but I figured I should ask it anyway.”

“Could be,” drawled Adam. “Unless you’ve been out annoying other witches without telling me.”

“The Hardestys are like . . . the Borgia family. There is seldom only one way for them to win,” counseled Elizaveta absently as she continued to examine the air filter. “Their goal always is to consolidate their power. Judging by their actions, if the meetings do not take place, they win. If they take place and they blow up—literally or figuratively—they win. If you spread a mysterious and fatal magical plague wherever you go, they triumph on all fronts.”

My phone rang again and she gave me an irritated look as if it were my fault that someone was calling me. There was no caller ID so I refused that call, too.

Elizaveta turned back to Adam. “The attack on your home . . . a zombie werewolf would be a treasure for a witch family, something not easily replaced. They did not expect you to defeat it. They expected it to kill whoever triggered the trap—maybe everyone in the house when it was triggered. It would not have destroyed the pack, unless they got lucky and it killed you, Adam. But if you had lost more pack members . . . I think that the meeting between you and the government would not be so important to you.”

She frowned again at the air filter. “They do seem to want badly to stop it, don’t they? I wonder why they do not want the government and the fae to make peace.”

“If the witches are trying to stop it, maybe we should fight a little harder to see that the meeting does take place,” Adam said. “To that end, Mercy, I have a dozen or so texts that tell me that you should answer your phone.”

I frowned at him, but the blocked caller started calling my phone again. Adam’s eyes on me, I answered the phone.

“Ms. Hauptman,” said the rough-hewn voice of the man everyone thought was about to declare his candidacy for president. “This is Jake Campbell. How are you?”

“Wet and cranky,” I told him. “My fire suppression system just went off and doused both me and my place of business. What can I do for you?”

There was a brief pause. “You can step back into the shoes that my assistant tried to force you out of. I have explained matters to him, and you’ll be dealing directly with my personal assistant, Ruth Gillman, after this. Ruth, you will find, is a very good listener.”

“Look,” I told him. “Fae are what they are. The ones you will be dealing with—assuming they send anyone who can actually make a deal or has any authority—are very old. They won’t give you true names because true names have power. Even names that are old, true or not, have power. They won’t tell you what they can or cannot do. First, it is rude. Second, most of them do not have the kind of power that they used to before Christianity and iron swept over their territory, and that is a very sore spot for most of them. Asking them about their power, about their names, could inspire one of them to demonstrate on the spot just how much power they still do have. I have a business to run and a very happy marriage. I am not interested in being squashed like a bug because someone else wants me to do something stupid.”

“Tell him how you really feel,” called Tad from the front desk; he must have been in between calls.

I guess I’d gotten a little loud. I get mad when I am afraid. And I had been afraid since I walked into the killing field of Elizaveta’s house.

“Okay,” Campbell said. “And that is exactly why we need you. And I am very sorry for the loss of your pack member. I think we both agree that it would be best if we proceed without incurring any more deaths if we can. So what is the proper approach?”

“They know you want a meeting,” I said. “Before the hotel blew up, the subject of that discussion was where.”

“You suggested a winery on Red Mountain,” he said. “It sounds like an excellent compromise.

“I might be part of a werewolf pack,” I said dryly, “but I do not require a pat on my head.”

“Noted,” he said. And I could hear a scratching sound, as if he were actually writing that down on a sheet of paper.

It probably said, M. Hauptman is touchy but possibly useful. Treat with kid gloves until she proves otherwise. Or maybe it was just his lunch order for his personal assistant, Ruth.

Being wet and scared was making me way more grumpy than usual.

“I told you I was wet and grumpy,” I said. “Also thoroughly spooked.” I hadn’t intended to admit that last part. “It makes me snap at people who might not deserve it.”

“I haven’t been near a bomb since I was in the army,” Campbell said. “Roadside mine took out the truck just ahead of mine. Not something I’ve forgotten, and I wasn’t hurt. It will be a while before you feel safe again.”

He was sincere. But other than the wrenching sadness that was Paul’s absence, I had hardly worried about the bomb. Witches were way scarier than bombs.

“That’s not what’s spooking me,” I said slowly. Senator Campbell and the other government officials were all at risk here.

There was a little silence. Then he asked, “I thought the fae agreed not to harm anyone in your territory.”

“They won’t,” I said, “as long as no one insults them by trying to insist that they fill out a questionnaire.”

“Not my idea,” said the senator. “But I didn’t object to it. It would be good to know something—anything about the fae we’ll be dealing with.”

“I can see how you’d feel that way,” I said. “You might start by reading the Mabinogion.”

“On my mother’s knee,” said Campbell. “I was afraid of that. But if you aren’t worried about the fae, just what is spooking you?”

“Witches are spooking me,” I said.

Elizaveta hissed, “Mercy, that is my business.”

I narrowed my eyes at her.

“It ceased being your business when Paul died,” said Adam; he nodded at me.

“Witches?” The senator’s voice was cautious.

“Witches,” I said.

And that is how you get a personal meeting with a US senator. Tomorrow, with details to follow.

“Okay, then,” I said, letting out a surprised and appalled breath as I hit the disconnect. “That was weird.”

Elizaveta gave me a long stare. Then she looked at what she still held in her hands.

“This is not the spark,” she proclaimed, placing the filter back where she had found it, on the floor by the sink. She turned around, looking at the wet shop.

“Who was it who knew to flood the shop with water?” she asked. Her gaze fell on Zee. “Adam said it was the fae. Are you the fae who works for Mercy?”

Zee smiled meekly and agreed that he was. “One picks up a thing or two in a long life,” he said. “It would have been better if it had been salt water, but city water seemed to do well enough.”

Keeping track of who knew what about whom was eventually going to make me crazy. Elizaveta knew nothing of who Zee was beyond that he was a simple mechanic. To be fair, I’d known him for nearly ten years before I understood much more than that.

“You may have saved the lives of everyone here,” she told him graciously.

He gave a slight nod. “Did what I could.”

She dismissed him from her thoughts as she looked around the shop. “Let’s see what they’ve hidden in here.”

She muttered something under her breath in Russian that made Adam smile—a thing here and then gone—behind her back. And she waved her hands out as if she were shaking dust off them in a rhythm that seemed to have a specific beat. She frowned and said, “This would be easier to do without the water masking the feel of the magic.”

“I am sorry,” said Zee meekly. “It seemed the right thing to do at the time.”

She nodded. “I see. And yes, it was. But it still makes this more difficult.” She closed her eyes and made that same flick-flick gesture with her hands, but this time she started walking forward.

Adam moved closer to her. I thought it was probably to be in a better position to keep her from, say, falling into the pit under the lift or over the knee-high toolbox, a tripping hazard that had already claimed a victim today—me. And my eyes had been open at the time.

But she seemed to sense those hazards before she came too close to them. She walked in a hesitant, zigzag path that reminded me of the finding game of Hot and Cold. Whatever she was using to guide herself took her to one of the shelving units that covered the back wall. She reached into a cardboard box of oil containers and pulled out a rag doll dressed all in black.

She opened her eyes then and regarded the doll. “Well, look what we have here. A poppet.”

Adam hit a button on his phone. “I need a review of Mercy’s shop. Someone planted a doll along the east wall in the garage bay area.” He met Elizaveta’s eyes. “Sometime between close of shop yesterday and opening today.”

Elizaveta nodded. “I concur.”

Tad came into the garage and, after Adam disconnected, he nodded at what Elizaveta was examining.

“A voodoo doll?” he asked.

She made a negative noise, but then said, “Of a sort, I suppose. Though this is nothing so crude as that, nor does it rely on sympathetic magic. This is something of a higher art.”

She looked at me. “I’m surprised you weren’t killed outright.”

“I was wearing nitrile gloves when I picked up the air filter,” I said, approaching to examine the doll with morbid curiosity.

She snorted. “I don’t know why that curse didn’t touch you—but it wasn’t a silly pair of plastic gloves.”

“Nitrile,” said Zee sourly. “They were not plastic.”

She ignored him, which I think was his point. There is more than one way to be unseen. If he’d been skulking in the background saying nothing at all, she might wonder about him later. If he made annoying and not too germane comments, then she’d simply dismiss him as unimportant.

Her mistake—but not one she was alone in.

Up close, the doll was unquestionably handmade, from its fabric face to its intricate clothing. Tiny, precise seams edged the black lace dress, and a plethora of black beads littered the frilly skirts. Her silk head was crowned with black and dark brown yarn confined in two even braids. Even the shoes were detailed: tiny boots laced with silvery embroidery thread. Her face was a smooth blank canvas of silk.

Looking at the braids, I asked, “Is that supposed to be me?”

She pursed her lips. “No. It represents the witch who wanted to curse you.” She picked up the doll’s hand to show me that a strand of black hair had been stitched into the fabric there. “This is you—to symbolize the one the curse was aimed at. I don’t understand why whatever it was on the car part—”

“Air filter,” said Zee.

She ignored him and kept talking. “—didn’t do anything to you.” She frowned at me as if that were something she deemed worse than a strange witch putting a death curse on my place of business.

“Is that safe?” asked Adam, nodding to the doll Elizaveta held.

She looked at it as if she’d forgotten what she held. “No, actually.” She glanced over her shoulder and then seemed to realize that none of her usual minions were there. She looked around and her eyes found me. “Mercy, you must have something like a torch we can use to burn this, yes?”

“I do,” I agreed.

We had been doing a lot of burning lately.

We burned the little doll in the dirt section of the parking lot where I kept a few cars I stripped for parts. It was daylight, so the burning shouldn’t attract much attention. To make sure of that, we picked a spot where the junker cars blocked the line of sight to the road.

I half expected the wet doll to be difficult to ignite. But Tad doused it with gasoline, and it seemed to catch fire easily enough. Tad was ignoring his burnt hands, which looked terribly painful.

I thought about why the curse hadn’t hit me.

I was Coyote’s daughter, which made me one of the walkers, people who were descended from the avatars of the first people: Coyote, Wolf, Raven, and the like. We could all assume the aspect of our ancestor—I could turn into a coyote. My friend Hank descended from Hawk and he could take that shape and fly. Otherwise we mostly all had different talents except for the two we all shared: we could see ghosts, and magic acted oddly around us.

Vampiric magic almost never affected me. I don’t know how it affected Hank because, as he liked to tell me, “I don’t hang out with those folk. They come near me and I skedaddle away.” The other thing he liked to tell me was “I am lucky to be Hawk’s get. Luckier than you. And we are both luckier than someone who descends from Iktomi.”

I had to agree with Hank. Iktomi was Spider, who tended to be a trickster like Raven and Coyote, though with a crueler edge than either of them.

The witch’s magic had not wanted to work on Arnoldo Salas, and we’d been assuming it was because he was a witch. Maybe that was so—or maybe it was because he was like me. I didn’t know if I would recognize another walker. I hadn’t met enough of them to be sure.

But I didn’t see how the witches could know that about me . . . unless one of Elizaveta’s family had told them so. While I was still shaking things up in my head, Adam asked Elizaveta the question I’d been working on.

“Why attack Mercy?” he said.

Elizaveta said, “Not now, beloved. Let me see this thing done and we can talk.” She was walking around the burning doll clockwise, very slowly. After she finished speaking, she began to walk backward, counterclockwise. Widdershins. And she sang a little song in Russian.

The doll, for all that it had caught fire, did not seem to be burning as quickly as I’d have expected from the materials it was composed from.

Elizaveta’s magic didn’t feel like the same magic that Sherwood had used on the zombie werewolf. But the music, like his, had power if not beauty. I found it jarring, like someone was petting my fur backward.

And it reeked of black magic, foul and sticky.

I grimaced at Adam. “I’m going to go back and clean up the shop.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Zee.

Adam gave him a nod of thanks. So I and my bodyguard went back to see if I could earn a living.

Most of the pack stayed at our house that night. For one, it was our weekly ISTDPB4 night, when all our werewolves could pretend to be pirates and kill each other for gold, for women (or men—The Dread Pirate’s Booty didn’t bother with historical accuracy; Saucy Wenches were matched with Mouthwatering Manservants), and for the heck of it. I don’t know why ISTDPB4 ended with a 4 when CAGCTDPBT (Codpieces and Golden Corsets: The Dread Pirate’s Booty Three) ended with a T. It had started as ISTDPBF, but at some point someone had said “four,” and “four” it remained.

The other reason the house was full was that Adam had issued a quiet call to the pack, welcoming wives and dependents to stay. The conditions were crowded, but they were safe from the witches. He didn’t tell anyone why we were safe—that was Sherwood’s secret for now. To my . . . amazement, I guess, the pack decided that it had been something I’d managed.

When I went to bed, every bed and couch was full of people (sometimes more than one) trying to sleep while the pirates (including my mate) howled and hooted from the basement.

Cries of “Put up or shut up!” “Die, you freaking rapscallion!” “ARGHHHHH!” sounded sort of homey. I smiled when I closed my eyes.

The next morning, Adam and I drove to a house outside Pasco, situated in lonely exile on the bluffs overlooking the Columbia about ten miles away from its nearest neighbor. There was a helicopter on a pad next to the driveway we parked in, but other than that, the house could have been plopped down in any middle-class neighborhood in town and blended in.

Senator Campbell was borrowing the house, Adam had told me.

I followed Adam to the door, regretting the stubbornness that had put me in jeans and a button-down shirt instead of something more formal. Adam, of course, was wearing his working uniform, which was a well-cut suit.

We were met at the door by a smiling, middle-aged black woman who introduced herself as Ruth Gillman, Senator Campbell’s personal assistant.

“Come in,” she said. “The senator is on a conference call, but it should be finished up in the next few minutes. Can I get you something to drink?”

She led us through a sparsely furnished living room with worn patches on the carpet into a kitchen that was nearly as large as the living room and filled with cherry cabinets, marble countertops, and expensive everything else.

“I know,” she told us, “it looks like it belongs in a different house. It’s going to be Bob’s retirement house, and he and Sharon are redecorating one room at a time. This year, he told me, it will be the master bedroom.”

“Bob?” I asked.

“The senator’s younger brother,” she said. “He’s an engineer and worked for twenty years in Richland at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He was transferred to Virginia, but he fell in love with this country.”

“Huh,” I said. The Tri-Cities were my home, but I’d grown up in the mountains of Montana. It had taken me a long while to appreciate the barren hills and rolling landscape.

She laughed. “His wife thinks he’s crazy, too. But she loves him. I think they still have a lot of friends here.”

“Are you making fun of Bob again?” asked Senator Campbell.

“No, sir,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that.” She lied when she said it, and he laughed because she intended him to.

He was a big man, maybe half a foot taller than Adam and fifty pounds heavier—not much of that was fat. His hair was light brown fading to gray around the edges. There were laugh lines at the corners of his eyes.

His eyes were hard and predatory. Hawk’s eyes.

He gripped Adam’s hand firmly—and mine less so.

“Welcome to my brother’s home,” he said. “Why don’t we all go into the study—you, too, Ruth. If you and Ms. Hauptman are going to be working together, you might as well start now.”

The study had probably been a bedroom when the house was built, but like the kitchen, it had been changed into a better version of itself. The floor was some exotic hardwood, and the whole room had a masculine feel.

There was a mahogany desk, but there were four comfortable-looking leather chairs, too. He took one of them and left it to the three of us to take the others.

“So that our cards are on the table before we begin,” he said. “You know that I want to keep the fae and the werewolves and everything else that goes bump in the night as far away from the citizens whom I represent as I possibly can. If we could come up with something that could keep the werewolves from walking around with regular people, I would. If I could hit a button right now and kill all of your kind, all of the fae, I would.”

“Fair enough,” said Adam. “I know a few werewolves who feel the same about you.”

Campbell leaned back in his seat, his eyes steady on Adam. “So why the hell did you warn my team last fall that there was going to be an attempt on my life—that one of my security people was an assassin? I trusted him with my wife and daughters. I’d have sworn he was loyal. I told Spielman that. But he talked me into setting up a sting anyway, and damned if you weren’t right.”

“I said,” my husband said gently, “that I knew werewolves who felt the world would be a better place without you. But I didn’t say I was one of them. You are the honorable enemy, I suppose. But we, my kind, need you where you are. Giving voice to the fear, but also to reason. If you weren’t where you are, it would be that idiot from Alabama who wanted to make it legal to hunt werewolves.”

Campbell winced. “Right, her. It’s like when I played dodgeball in my high school gym class. The Republicans and the Democrats both get some good players—and to make things even, we both get some idiots. We have the Honorable Ms. Pepperidge from Alabama. The Democrats get the Honorable Mr. Rankin from California.”

He paused. “You should know that the reason that I’m here—that we are coming down from Washington”—he snorted— “Washington, D.C., I mean, is because of that. That you warned me when it would probably have made your life a lot easier if he’d managed to kill me.”

“To be fair,” Adam said, “I also did it to spite the people who tried to make me assassinate you.”

Campbell laughed. “I didn’t expect to like you.”

“Funny what happens when you talk to people,” I said.

Campbell nodded. “Fair enough.” He spread his hands out, palms up. I think they teach politicians to use their hands when they talk in politician school. “So talk, Ms. Hauptman. Tell me about the witches who spooked you.”

They also teach them to lie. Campbell had expected to like Adam and he wouldn’t push a button to eliminate all the werewolves and fae in the world—though he’d been honest enough about keeping the werewolves away from the general population.

“There are at least two witches who entered our territory a few weeks ago. We became aware of them last week. From their actions and what one of them told me directly, they intend to stop the talks between the fae and the government,” I said.

“I’ve been reading the Herald,” he said. The Tri-City Herald is our local newspaper. “Are the witches responsible for the zombies?”

“The zombie cow made Facebook sit up and beg,” said Ruth. “That cowboy is fine.”

“His boyfriend thinks so, too,” I said.

“Honey, I am married,” she told me. “And my wife was the one who pointed out what a hunk your zombie-roping man is. There is something about a man with a lasso.”

I grinned at her. “I’ll tell him you said so.”

“When you are through flirting with the enemy, Ruth, we could get back on topic.” There was irony in the senator’s tone, but no bite.

I told him about the witches, beginning with the difference between a white witch, a gray witch, and a black witch. None of that, I saw, was news to either Ruth or the senator. I began with the zombie miniature goats all the way through the poppet at my garage yesterday. I brushed over Elizaveta’s fourteen dead with “a forceful attack on our local witches.” After a moment’s thought, I included what my nose had told me about Abbot.

“Oh no, honey,” Ruth said. “Tory Abbot is a good man. He goes to church every Sunday.”

“Abbot,” said Campbell slowly. “Abbot changed a few months ago.”

“He got married,” said Ruth. “That kind of thing changes a man a little.” But there was no conviction in her voice. Something about that change had bothered her, too.

“To a nice girl from Tennessee?” I was guessing, but . . . Abbot had smelled like the zombie witch.

“How’d you know?” asked Ruth.

“The Hardesty witches come from Tennessee,” Adam told them. “From what we can find out, the family is large. They own businesses all over the country. But the core of their power is in Tennessee.”

“You told me there was something off about Tory’s new wife,” Campbell said to Ruth. “You didn’t like the way she treated him.”

“Ordered him around like a dog,” said Ruth. “You think she is a witch?” She paused, thinking about it. “I could see that. There is a core of cold in her that chills my bones.”

“So what should we do?” Campbell asked.

“Don’t be alone in a room with Abbot’s wife,” I told him. “Don’t let her into your personal spaces.”

“Most witches are going to avoid you like the plague,” Adam told him. “They are trying to survive by hiding in plain sight. They don’t want to draw notice. I don’t know what’s up with this bunch, but they are not acting like normal witches.

“In the meantime,” Adam said, “I can send over some of my pack to keep an eye out.”

“No,” said Campbell heavily. “Let me think about this. I have some experts I can consult.”

“Okay.” Adam stood up, so I followed suit.

Ruth took out a card and gave it to me. “The senator gave me your number. Why don’t we do lunch tomorrow—just you and I. And we can discuss how best we should deal with the Gray Lords. I would be grateful for anything you could tell me.”

Campbell’s hawk eyes met mine. “You aren’t the only person we are talking to about this, but we’ll take anything you can add.”

The senator had gotten to his feet when Ruth and I had, but he let Ruth lead us from the room. I got to the door and turned back to him.

“Senator, I didn’t know you were Native American?”

His eyebrows climbed to his hairline. “That’s because I’m not. What gave you that impression?”

I shook my head. “Sorry. Something about your eyes.”

He shook his head. “Wish I were,” he said. “It would help me get the Native American vote in Minnesota. Being red in a blue state, I need every vote I can get.”

Adam waited until we were in the SUV before asking me, “What was that about?”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” I murmured. “If the senator isn’t one of Hawk’s children, I’ll eat my hat.”

“You don’t have a hat,” Adam said.

“I feel like all I need is the right perspective and everything will become clear,” I told him. “I’m calling Stefan tonight. I meant to do it last night. But I’m a lot more interested in what he managed to dig up on Frost now than before.”

“You think Frost ties into all of this?” Adam asked.

I huffed. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think,” Adam said, “that I am heartily tired of witches.”

“Hear, hear,” I said. “So would you vote for him for president?”

“Yes,” Adam said without hesitation.

“Huh,” I said. “I’d vote for Ruth. She didn’t lie.”

“Politicians have to lie,” Adam said. “It’s written into their black souls. It’s only a problem when they begin to believe their own lies.”

“And these are the people we are going to introduce to the fae,” I said.

Adam smiled. “I’m kind of looking forward to it.”

“You probably would have liked bloody gladiator sports, too,” I said, leaning my head on his shoulder.

When I called his cell that night, Stefan didn’t answer his phone. When I called his home phone, I didn’t recognize the boy who answered it, but he called for Rachel, whom I did know.

“Hey, Mercy,” she said. “I don’t know where Stefan is. He left last night to go talk to Marsilia and hasn’t made it back yet.”

“Is that usual?” I asked.

“It’s not unusual,” she told me, “but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it happens all the time.” She paused. “She wants him back and he lets her think that might happen. He thinks that you are safer as long as she thinks she can bring him back into the fold.”

“Is that dangerous for him?” I asked slowly.

She laughed bitterly. “She’s a vampire, Mercy. Of course it’s dangerous.” Her voice softened. “But he’s not dumb—and he’s not an easy mark. He’s been playing games with her and worse for centuries and he’s not dead yet.”

I didn’t correct her—Stefan had been dead for a very long time. But Rachel had not had an easy life and I liked her. I tried not to pick at her unless I had to.

Adam went right to sleep. I had more trouble. I felt like we were all standing around waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Senator Campbell was a walker like me—or rather, like my friend Hank. Though he didn’t know it. Should I have told him?

That did answer the question of whether I’d know a walker when I met them—so the Salas family’s resistance to witchcraft must have been because they were witchborn. I felt a little uneasy that Elizaveta knew it now, too. When Arnoldo called, assuming he would, I would see if I could talk him into moving elsewhere.

Was it important that Campbell was a walker? Was it important to the witches? Did they know?

“Adam,” I said.

“I’m asleep, Mercy. It’s a guy thing. We like to sleep after sex.”

“Frost wanted to take over the North American vampires, and he mostly managed it,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed, rolling over so he could look at me. “For this you wake me up?”

“He intended to bring them out to the public,” I said. “So they could hunt like vampires of old.”

“That’s what he said,” Adam agreed.

“But that would be stupid,” I said. “If the vampires come out—especially if they are engaging in hunting in ways that terrorize the human population—they’ll be hunted into extinction.”

“Yes.” Adam’s voice was patient. “He’s not the first idiot to attain power.”

“He corrupted and then funded the Cantrip agents who kidnapped the pack and tried to force you to kill Senator Campbell.”

“Yes,” said Adam slowly—and I knew he saw it, too.

“You thought that they didn’t care if you were successful or not, thought they had a backup plan to kill him. All they wanted was to pin the attempt on werewolves.”

“Yes.” Adam sat up. Then he got out of bed and started to pace as he ran through the patterns that I was painting. He had a better understanding of politics than I did because he actually trod the halls of power occasionally.

He stopped to look out the window. He was naked and I got a little distracted.

“Sorry,” I said, “I was distracted by the scenery. What did you say?”

He grinned at me, showing a flash of dimple. “I said, what if we assume that Frost wasn’t stupid?”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Let’s say that he was a witchborn vampire,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“It’s like your miniature zombie goats,” he said. “The important thing isn’t the ‘miniature’ or the ‘goat,’ it’s the ‘zombie.’ With Frost, the important thing isn’t the ‘vampire.’ It’s the ‘witchborn.’ If we look at it like that, then he was engineering the downfall of werewolves and vampires.”

I nodded. “And then he wasn’t being stupid. So what does that have to do with what the witches are trying now?”

“Damned if I know,” he said, after a long moment.

I pulled the covers up under my chin. “Me, either. But it clears up a few things.”

“So that was what was keeping you up?” Adam asked.

I nodded.

“You can sleep now?”

“And so can you,” I promised.

Adam shook his head slowly and lowered his brows, his eyes flashing gold for a moment. “Nudge,” he said.

I fell right asleep afterward, feeling warm and comfortable and safe.

That didn’t last long.

I dreamed that I was walking along a road. It seemed familiar, somehow. I couldn’t quite place it until I realized that there was someone walking with me.

“You could have picked anywhere,” I told Coyote. “Why did you choose a dirt road in the middle of Finley?”

Coyote stopped walking and I turned to face him.

“Because,” he said soberly, “it is better to come home.”

I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“I have,” he said, “some information for you.”

“What is that?” I asked.

Coyote didn’t answer me in words.

I was locked in a cage with my brother, and I hurt. I was scared and he was scared and we huddled together in joined misery. We lived in moment-to-moment terror, waiting in dread for when we were taken out of the cages again. When the new witches came, when the old ones screamed out their lives, I was glad because I thought they’d forget about us.

I was wrong.

It took me a while to come to myself enough to realize what had happened. Coyote had put me into the mind of Sherwood’s cat sometime before the Hardesty witches killed Elizaveta’s people. I was dreaming, I remembered, so all I had to do was wake up.

But I couldn’t wake up.

Time did not speed up like it did in normal dreams. Minutes crept by like minutes. Hours were hours. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to move—but my catself cleaned my brother’s face so he’d know he wasn’t alone. It comforted us. All three of us.

The cat became aware of me at some point. He didn’t seem frightened by having a visitor inside his head, though I couldn’t communicate with him very well. I crooned to him while the witches did their work, harvesting our misery. I don’t know if he heard me or not.

“Amputation and mutilation are not effective,” the witch the others called Death told the young woman who had taken our eye with disapproval. “The shock can kill the animal, and that is a waste of potential magic to be harvested. They aren’t human, and they don’t realize that you have done permanent damage, so there is no additional boost from emotional trauma.”

The cat and I disagreed with her. But we didn’t tell her so.

The other witch, who was Elizaveta’s kin, who had spent the last few days learning from Death, prodded our new wound and then coated it with a paste that made us cry piteously.

In my human life I had found that witch dead (will have found her dead) in the workroom of Elizaveta’s house. Militza. I was not sorry that she would die.

The cat’s senses were different from my coyote’s, from my human ones. He could see the ghosts better than I could, and he saw the witches as entirely different from the humans. The witches mostly appeared oddly twisted—not visually, but to some other sense I could find no human correlation for. I knew, because the cat knew.

Death, on the other hand, was a black hole so dense that we shivered from the icy cold of it. She was scary on a level that if we could have willed ourselves to die before she ever touched us again, we would have.

The zombie witch was there, too. She had a touch of that fathomless void that watched us as we watched it. We grew to know her, as we did Elizaveta’s witches. But because I knew that they all died, the cat and I ignored Elizaveta’s family and watched the Hardesty witches. We learned who they were and what they wanted, and it terrified us.

After a number of days had passed, I forgot that I was not the cat.

When Death stopped the world, I huddled with my brother and felt the life leave his body. I waited for her to take me, too. I felt her magic sweep over me, but it could not take hold. I hid against my dead brother and tried not to attract her notice.

My face was pressed against gravel, my paws . . . fingers dug into the ground as I curled tighter into myself and sobbed for my dead brother, making hoarse, ugly sounds. I cried for the creatures who died to feed Death’s appetite, and I cried for the darkness in the world.

A man’s voice crooned to me, saying words that didn’t make sense. I knew that voice, but it did not bring me any comfort.

But a warm blanket was laid over me, and the night sky gave way with bewildering swiftness to golden sun that warmed the blanket and made me feel safer. I breathed in the familiar scents of sage, sun, and fresh air.

“Come home, little coyote,” said Coyote. His voice was as gentle as I’d ever heard it, and he petted the top of my head. “You are safe. For now, anyway.”

After a while I quit crying, though I remained curled in a ball in the middle of the road. His touch was an anchor that kept me from drifting back into the witch’s lair.

“Those times are all in the past and beyond changing,” he said, and then his hand stilled. “Huh. I had wondered how that single half-grown cat escaped Death. I found it was convenient because if I’d used one of the animals who died it might have killed you, too. He didn’t appear to be special—and now I find that I saved him myself and didn’t know it. How clever of me.”

I braced myself on my arms and sat up. My whole body ached down to the bone. His hand fell away from my head, but that was okay, I didn’t need it anymore.

He smiled brightly at me, rising to a crouch but keeping his face at my level. “I guess you could claim credit, too. If you hadn’t been with him when Death called—resistant as you are to the magic of the dead—he would have died, too.”

I cleared my throat and tried to speak but my mouth was too dry. I swallowed a couple of times and tried again. “You suck.”

He beamed and rubbed his chest with false modesty. “I do try.” Then all the laughter left him.

“The Hardesty witches are abominations. They take death, a change that is sacred, and they profane it. Kill them, my child. Kill them and kill their kin.”

I looked at him, inclined, after my sojourn, to agree with him. Instead I held up one finger. “You aren’t the boss of me.” I held up a second finger. “I am not an assassin.” I held up a third finger. “Who are you to complain about making the sacred profane? Isn’t that what you do?” I held up a fourth finger. “I am, in this moment, more inclined to kill you than anyone else.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “Good. Good. Take that anger and remember, all I did was allow you to see what they are.”

“What do you care about them for?” I said. “Did one of the witches place a curse on you?”

He hung his head and looked up at me through his lashes. His eyes were mournful and sly. “Yes,” he said, then shook his head. “No.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He sat on the ground beside me and crossed his legs. “Oh, it’s story time,” he said. Then he sat without talking for a long time.

“Yes?” I said.

“You aren’t ready to hear this story,” he said. “So I’m trying to make up another one. But it isn’t working. So let me just say this.” He looked at me, and his face and body were suddenly very serious. “Death is sacred. It is a change . . . and I am the spirit of change. So death is sacred, specifically to me. The Hardesty witches are blood-tied, by bone, by breeding, and by choice, to death magics.” He paused to give greater weight to his words, then said, “Zombies are anathema.”

“I agree,” I said. “I noticed. A lot of the things those witches were doing are anathema. Especially if you consider death sacred. I ask you again, why the Hardesty witches? Why not Elizaveta?”

He snorted. “Can’t get one by you, can I? Let’s just say that they are particularly stupid about the way they have gone about things.” His face twisted and I saw, to my surprise, honest grief. “They have taken something that was pure and holy and besmirched it with their filthy magic.”

“Why don’t you kill them?” I asked.

“I can’t do that,” he said regretfully. “This isn’t like the river monster. These are once-mortal witches whose flesh originated in a different land. They are in your realm of influence, not mine.”

“I don’t understand,” I told him. Unhappy about the “once-mortal.” “Once-mortal” is a bad thing when dealing with a witch, for whom learning is one of the keys of power. Old things have an opportunity to learn a lot.

He patted me on the head. “That’s all right. You just need to kill them. I’ll do the understanding for both of us.”

“Mercy,” Adam’s voice said urgently. “Mercy, wake up.”