Storm Cursed

10

Kyle and Zack showed up about twenty minutes later, suitcases in hand.

Zack said, “I told Kyle that this didn’t sound like a call for a meeting. This sounded more like a huddle. And huddles sometimes go overnight.”

“Warren and Zack have been watching football together again,” said Kyle, kissing my cheek lightly. “It’s left Zack using sports analogies.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m not sure how a huddle is different from a meeting.”

“A meeting is boring,” said a little girl in passing.

She was about six and carrying a bottle that was probably for the baby I could hear fussing in the living room. The baby belonged to Luke and Libby, Luke’s wife. But the six-year-old, I thought, might be one of Kelly’s. Unusually, for a werewolf, Kelly had four children under the age of twelve.

“And in a huddle all the guys pat each other’s butts,” she finished smugly.

“Makaya,” Hannah, Kelly’s wife, called out in mock anger. “No ‘butts’ in public.”

The little girl giggled and hurried away.

Kyle and Zack watched her with mixed reactions of longing and amusement. Both of them. But Zack’s eyes were sadder.

“I’m not going to pat anyone’s butt,” I announced.

Makaya’s voice said, “Mercy said ‘butt,’ Mommy. Why can’t I say ‘butt’?”

“Thanks, Mercy,” Hannah said. “I always appreciate it when you help me like that.” Presumably to Makaya she said, “Mercy is old. Old and grown-up. Her mommy didn’t teach her not to say ‘butt’ in public—and now she’s too old to change. Poor Mercy.”

I get no respect.

“A meeting is boring,” said Zack. “And nine times out of ten, when Adam calls a meeting, the meeting itself is a punishment for someone being stupid. Peer pressure usually makes sure that person doesn’t do the stupid thing again. It’s amazingly effective, and I’ve never seen another Alpha werewolf do it.”

“Army training,” I said.

“A huddle,” he continued, “is what you do when you are in trouble, but you have a plan that might get you out of trouble. But you have to all come together in a safe place, so that the enemy doesn’t know what you intend to do.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, feeling the weight of the world, which had lifted after seeing Kyle on the doorstep, drop back on my shoulders with a thump, “I’m not even sure we have a problem—”

“Witches,” called Sherwood from the basement. He’d taken all the boys under fifteen (two of them) downstairs to play video games.

“—an immediate problem,” I said. Then I got a momentary mental flash of something.

“Mercy?” asked Zack.

I shook my head. “It’s nothing. Just a flashback to a dream I had last night. Which is pretty stupid considering that I don’t remember what I was dreaming about.” I might not remember it consciously, but something about it was trying to wiggle out.

“Was it a Coyote dream?” asked Zack.

I gave a surprised look. “Yes,” I said—though I had intended to say no. And it had been. “Oh damn,” I said. And I still didn’t know what I’d dreamed about.

My phone rang. I pulled it out of my pocket so fast that if it had been a match, my pants would have been on fire. But it wasn’t Adam.

I hit the green button. “Uncle Mike?” I said.

“Ruth Gillman has come to us at the pub,” Uncle Mike told me gravely. “Best you come, Mercy, and hear what she has to say.”

“Put her on the phone,” I said.

There was a pause, and I could hear Ruth’s agitated voice in the background saying, “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.”

Uncle Mike’s voice was dry. “Do you hear that? All she has told us is ‘They are all dead. I have to tell Mercy.’ In my considerably educated opinion, she has been cursed. If you come, we’ll make sure you are safe in our place—but I would bring Adam or someone who can have your back. A lot of somethings about this smells like a trap.”

I had a momentary panic attack when he said “they are all dead,” but the pack bonds were still in place and healthy. I couldn’t tell anything else from them, because the bonds are pretty hit-and-miss for me, even my mate bond.

“Okay,” I said, happy to discover that none of the flash of panic came through in my voice. “I’ll be right down.”

I hung up the phone.

“No,” said Sherwood.

“No,” said Zack.

I raised an eyebrow at them both. “You aren’t the boss of me,” I told them. “I am the boss of you.”

I turned to Kyle. “We have a clue,” I told him. He didn’t have a werewolf’s senses, so he couldn’t be an übereavesdropper.

“I heard,” he said, and at my look of surprise, he continued, “Uncle Mike’s voice carries.”

“You’re not the boss of me, either,” I said.

He raised his hands. “I’m with you. You need to go talk to her.”

I pointed at Sherwood. “I elect you to come with me.”

Joel barked insistently.

“I would love to have you with me,” I said. “But I can’t afford to leave this place undefended. I need you and Zack to keep everyone safe. Kyle.” I turned to him. “You are in charge.”

Joel’s jaw dropped in an approving grin.

“I’m not a werewolf,” Kyle said.

“Maybe not, but you are dominant enough to keep everyone in line.”

“Mercy?” Libby stood in the kitchen doorway, cradling her baby as he drank from his bottle. “Our men,” she said. “They’re in trouble?”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know. I don’t like it that they all turned off their phones. That’s not like Adam.”

“What can I— What can the rest of us do?”

“Stay here,” I said. “Stay safe. And if you get a call from your wolves, let me know.”

Sherwood insisted on driving. I’d have backed him down, but we were taking his car—a four-year-old Toyota that was more likely to make the trip there and back than my Jetta.

I might still have insisted, because I had a policy of never letting any of the wolves get away with macho baloney around me, but he was in a state. I could smell his tension and his fear—he was in a cold sweat, never a good sign around werewolves. Scared werewolves are much more prone to violence. If driving gave him the illusion of control, I could let him have that.

And my Jetta still had only one functional seat.

It wasn’t late, so I was surprised at how few cars were at Uncle Mike’s—and that the Closed sign was lit. With Sherwood standing with his back to me, I knocked on the door.

“Who is’t?” hissed Kinsey.

“Mercy and Sherwood,” I told him.

The door opened and the hobgoblin, free of the clothing he had to wear when the pub was running, gestured us in. “Come in’t, come,” he said. “Hurry, do. Don’t want to leave the door open on a night like this.”

Sherwood brushed past me so that he entered first. I gave Kinsey an apologetic smile as I scooted past.

The pub was empty of customers and mostly empty of workers. There were a handful of fae working at cleaning the rooms and getting them ready for the next day’s business.

“Closed early,” Kinsey said, leading us with purposeful strides. “If the witches are hunting that one, the master didn’t want no one here what couldn’t protect themselves.”

“Good call,” I told him.

“Weren’t mine,” he said. “But I agree. Here you are, right through that door. Master has her in his office. On through, first door on the left. I’m to stay out here, first line of defense. Keep ’thers safe.”

I noted that the hobgoblin, whom I’d always liked but had categorized with the lesser fae, was the one Uncle Mike trusted to keep the bad things out.

Sherwood, again, went through the door first, but this time he held it open for me. It was a graceful procedure, and it looked like he’d done it a time or two. A lot of werewolves work as guards of one sort or another, but not all of them know how to be a bodyguard.

We didn’t need Kinsey’s directions to find Uncle Mike and Ruth—all we’d have had to do was follow the sound of her weeping.

“There, there now,” said Uncle Mike, looking up as we entered his office. He had Ruth seated in a big leather chair, and he knelt beside it with his arm around her shoulders in a hold that was half-protective and half-restrictive.

The office was large enough to contain a big desk and a wall of filing cabinets and still have ample room for six large mismatched but comfortable-looking chairs. Nearly twice the size of the office where we’d met Senator Campbell, but far more scabby.

“They’re all dead,” Ruth wept, her hands in front of her face as if she could not bear what she’d seen. It reminded me oddly of the weeping angels from Doctor Who. “I have to tell Mercy.”

“She was sent with a message,” murmured Uncle Mike. “She can’t deviate from it without a great deal of effort. I’m a little concerned about what else they’ve done to her.”

He took a better grip on her, then nodded at me.

“I’m here,” I told her.

The weeping stopped as she sat up suddenly. She lunged toward me, but Uncle Mike kept her still.

“She’s alive,” I said, relieved. Her lunge had put her close enough to be certain.

He nodded. “That was our first thought as well, given all the zombies we’ve had running around the town. Some of them can look very much alive for a while. That reminds me I should have told you that my people took care of a pack of dogs yesterday.”

“They are all dead,” she told me intently, as if she could not hear Uncle Mike at all.

“They have her under a compulsion,” he told me. “I think she’s been fighting for all she’s worth.”

“Who are all dead?” I asked.

Not the pack, I was certain of that much. Ruth’s face grew eerily still, and her voice became a monotone that sent off warning signals in my hindbrain. “I was in the study with the senator. Two women, spectacularly beautiful goddesses, walked into the room, with our security team escorting them as if they were knights to their queens.”

She gave me a panicked look. The effect of the sudden flash of emotion was a little schizophrenic—as if she were fighting off the hold the witches clearly had over her, only to lose control again.

“The senator asked them who they were, and she, the Ishtar—”

I’d heard that word before. “What is an Ishtar?” I really wanted to know, but I also wanted to see if she was allowed to answer questions. Especially a question that Ruth Gillman would not be able to answer.

Had they preloaded the lines they wanted her to say? Or were they in active control?

She paused midword and breathed in and out a few times. “The dark goddess,” she said, “the goddess of death.”

“Hubris,” Uncle Mike grumbled. “Why is it that all the witches carry with them so much hubris?”

“Like a marionette,” said Sherwood quietly.

I glanced at him. He thought they were actively controlling her, too. I suppose they could have fed her that information, but it seemed more likely that they were here. Sherwood’s face was tight with something: fear or anger. Maybe both.

I wondered if Ruth knew that, too. If that had been why she’d been keeping her eyes covered.

“Ishtar was like Aphrodite,” I said. “The goddess of love and sex and spring, right?”

Ruth started to smile; I could see it try to break out, but it was gone. I couldn’t tell whose smile it was because I didn’t know Ruth well enough.

“Ishtar is the right hand of the coven,” she said.

“There are no more covens,” Sherwood growled. “Just make-believe attempts. You don’t have witches from thirteen families.”

“Ten,” she said hotly, as if his words had stung her pride. “We meant to take one of Elizaveta’s. That would have given us eleven. But none of them was strong enough.”

Were they after Elizaveta herself?

Before finding out that she’d been working black magic, I’d have said that she’d never join with them, especially after they’d killed her family. But I obviously had not known Elizaveta as well as I’d thought.

They set things up so that there are many ways for them to win, Elizaveta had told us. Was one of those possible wins getting Elizaveta to join them?

After a moment, I spoke, repeating the words Ruth had been reciting when I interrupted her, exactly how she’d been saying them. “The senator asked them who they were, and she, the Ishtar—”

“—and she, the Ishtar, brought the Death and all fell to her power,” Ruth said, speaking the first four words at the same time as I had. Those words, I thought, were rote. Something they’d pressed upon her earlier, not something they were actively feeding her. Real people don’t use the same exact words each time they say something.

“They died for her glory,” Ruth said. “All but the senator and I. They took the senator and left me to make a record. My phone.”

She reached for her purse, but Uncle Mike prevented her from touching it. Sherwood reached in and took out her phone, which was lying on top.

“It’s not locked,” he said.

He tipped it so Uncle Mike and I could see, and went through the photo gallery. Pictures of ten dead bodies, most of whom I didn’t know. Spielman was there. The skin around his eye was still bruised. I’d liked Spielman. There were a couple of others who might have been in the meeting I’d attended. None of them were my pack.

Even though the pack bonds were live, I’d half expected to see one of the pack among the dead. The witches terrified me—partially because I really had no good understanding of the limits of their power.

“I suppose they might still be alive,” Sherwood said. “If you can think of a reason they’d be acting dead.”

“I am . . . I was to drive to your house. The address was programmed into my car,” Ruth said, in a completely different voice—her own voice. Then she gasped as if she were having trouble breathing. “I came here instead. Thought the fae could help.”

I glanced at Uncle Mike.

He said, “Some of the great ones, maybe, but witchcraft is . . . more like Underhill’s magic. It doesn’t answer well to the fae.”

“Sherwood?” I asked.

Sweat gathered on Ruth’s forehead and she gripped Uncle Mike’s hands. “Don’t let me go,” she gasped in a whisper. “Was supposed to attack. There’s a knife . . . a knife.”

“We took it when you came here,” he crooned. “There’s no knife now.”

I turned to Sherwood, who stood as far from her as he could get, his eyes wild—but not wolfish. It had been the wolf who’d taken down that zombie, I thought. The man didn’t want to remember.

I wished Elizaveta were here. Sort of. Wulfe?

If they wanted Elizaveta for their coven, they’d be salivating for Wulfe. I didn’t know what witchblood family line he carried—or if he was wizard instead. But he was twisted like a pretzel and he represented a lot of power. On the whole, it was probably good that he wasn’t here.

“Sherwood,” I said. My voice was quiet, but there was authority in it. Not Adam’s, I realized, because the bond between my mate and me felt like it was filled with cold grease—sluggish and reluctant—when I tried to draw on it.

Panicked, I reached for Adam again . . . and our bond was back to being uncommunicative, but healthy. Maybe it had just been that I was smack-dab in the middle of a fog of foul magic.

In any case, I couldn’t afford to fret about Adam right now. I put that concern aside. Right now we were dealing with a good woman hexed by witches.

“Mercy, her breathing keeps stopping,” Uncle Mike said. “I’ve already done what we can. We tried the usual salt and circles as soon as we realized she’d been cursed. Had no effect at all. Usually salt and circles work on everything.”

“They have her blood,” Sherwood said, still with his back against the door. His eyes were trying to go wolf, but he was fighting it. “Blood magic is harder to block.”

I didn’t need Sherwood Post. I needed—

“Wolf,” I said, yanking on the pack bond between him and me.

Sherwood jerked as if that pull had been physical. Then he turned his head toward me and snarled—and this time his eyes were wolf.

“Sherwood,” I said clearly. “Fix her.” I pointed at Ruth without looking away from his eyes. “Fix her and then we’ll go out and hunt some witches.”

I didn’t know why I said that last. Sherwood certainly had never shown any desire to go out and hunt witches, not even after he’d destroyed the zombie werewolf that had been made from the body of someone he’d obviously known.

He looked at me with golden eyes and growled, “Done.”

I was afraid I’d gone too far and he’d begin the change. But I’m not that dominant unless I can pull authority from Adam, and our bond was being stubbornly quiescent.

Sherwood looked at Uncle Mike and rumbled, “I need chalk or a pencil. A candle and a knife.”

Uncle Mike went to his desk and opened a drawer from which he gathered a piece of chalk, a pencil, a candle just barely small enough to have fit in a drawer, and a silver knife. He glanced at the knife and put it back.

He handed over everything else to Sherwood, who had left the door to kneel beside Ruth, prosthetic leg stretched out awkwardly. For her part, Ruth was slowly writhing, both hands against her throat, tears sliding out of her eyes.

“Why didn’t you give him the knife?” I asked.

“That was the athame the witch gave Ruth to kill you with,” Uncle Mike told me. “I don’t know how it ended up in my drawer, because that’s not where I put it. Under the circumstances, I think that it’s probably best not to use it for this.”

“I have my cutlass—” I began.

Uncle Mike shook his head. “I have something better than a cutlass, no matter how fine.” He pulled a worn pocketknife out of a pouch on his belt and gave it to Sherwood, who took it with a raised eyebrow.

“My word that for this purpose, it’s just a pocketknife. Be careful, wolf, it is sharp.”

That seemed to be enough for Sherwood. He took the chalk and began to draw symbols on Uncle Mike’s cement floor.

The leg got in his way again and with a growl he pressed something on the ankle of the prosthetic and pulled it off with so little trouble that I wondered if he’d broken something and would have trouble putting it back on. Especially since he tossed it across the room with frustrated speed. It hit one of the metal file cabinets and left a dent.

His knee seemed to be his own . . . which shouldn’t have surprised me. In werewolf form he was missing most of his leg, but a human knee corresponded to the stifle joint, which is farther up the wolf’s leg.

The leg dealt with, Sherwood continued to draw. I would have had trouble writing at the speed he moved—and he was drawing things a lot more complicated than a letter from the Latin alphabet. I’ve never seen a werewolf use their enhanced speed to draw before.

Ruth’s breathing was oddly broken. She wouldn’t breathe for a minute or two, and then she’d gasp and wheeze for a little bit until she stopped breathing again. While she gasped and wheezed she would flop around like a fish out of water. Her hand hit one of the chalk symbols Sherwood had drawn, scuffing it.

Sherwood caught her arm before she could do it again. He looked at me. “Can you tie her up? I’m drawing a circle.”

“No need for bonds, I don’t think,” said Uncle Mike. The old fae touched Ruth on the shoulder. She quit moving.

“Will that harm your working?” he asked Sherwood. “I put a hold on her arms and legs and back muscles. Bound her a bit to the floor in case. We don’t want her moving into your work, but I want her to be able to breathe if she can.”

Sherwood looked at Ruth as if he could see something that I couldn’t.

“No,” said the wolf in Sherwood’s human body. “That will be all right. Good.”

He didn’t say thank you. He was wise enough to know better than to thank a fae, no matter how helpful Uncle Mike had been.

He fixed the symbol Ruth had marred, then went back to work. When his piece of chalk got too small, Sherwood took the pencil—grunting in approval when he saw it was a grease pencil. But he said, “This won’t last long and I don’t have time to unwrap the damned thing.”

“Pencil or chalk?” asked Uncle Mike.

“Pencil if you have a dozen so I don’t have to mess with them.”

Uncle Mike went back to the drawer and pulled out a handful of pencils—and the silver knife. He frowned at the athame, this time keeping it in his hand. When he got close enough to hand Sherwood the pencils, Ruth’s eyes opened, focused on the silver knife.

“Get that away from us,” growled Sherwood. “I’ll take care of it later.”

Every time Ruth quit breathing, I counted the seconds off in my head. I wasn’t sure why; I didn’t really know how long a person could go without air. But it seemed to me that she had been not breathing a lot longer than earlier episodes.

Sherwood must have been paying attention, too. He quit drawing long enough to put a hand on her forehead.

“Breathe,” he said.

She sucked in a breath of air and released it.

“Again,” he said.

When she had accomplished that, he went back to drawing.

“Can’t do that too often,” he muttered—to me, I supposed—but it might have been to himself. “Or I’ll disrupt what I’m trying to do here. Still, I suppose this won’t do any good if she dies in the meantime.”

Ten pencils were discarded the same way his discarded leg had been—as was the chair when it got in his way. The file cabinet acquired another dent—this one bigger than the first. Uncle Mike muttered something that sounded like “Werewolves,” but he didn’t sound too unhappy about the chair even though it was obviously broken.

Sherwood completed the circle before he had to switch pencils again. Then he lit the candle.

He did it by saying a word; I didn’t quite catch it, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t English. But at the sound of it, there was a pop of magic and the candle wick started to burn.

He held the candle sideways and let the wax drip into a place where the grease made a circle about the size of the base of the candle. When he had enough soft wax on the floor, he set the candle into it, using the wax to create a holder to keep the candle upright.

He took up Uncle Mike’s knife and opened it. He frowned at it and cast a wary look at Uncle Mike—who’d moved to the far end of the room, with the silver athame in one hand.

“It’s just a knife today,” Uncle Mike said. “It will do as you wish.” He wiggled the athame in his hand. “This one is not as cooperative. You might want to deal with it quickly, when you’re done. It seems to have a taste for one of you—probably Mercy.”

“Ruth,” said Sherwood, staring at the knife for an instant. “It’s supposed to kill Ruth.” Again, I had the impression that he could see something I could not. As if the patterns of magic were something his eyes could perceive. It seemed to be more accurate than my scent-and-hair-on-the-back-of-my-neck method.

Sherwood used Uncle Mike’s pocketknife to open up a cut on the back of his hand, keeping it open by moving the blade back and forth as he dripped his blood along the edge of the circle all the way around. It was made more difficult because he couldn’t use either of his hands to stabilize himself—and the missing leg seemed to put him off-balance.

“This would be easier,” he grunted, crawling awkwardly, “if I’d pulled off the liner and the pin with the damned leg.”

I got up and put a hand under his elbow to help stabilize him. “Does this help?”

“Yes,” he said—then turned his attention to what he was doing.

When he reached the candle again with his blood-drip circle, he dug a little deeper with the knife, pulled it away, and flicked his bleeding hand at Ruth. As the drops of his blood touched her, he said three . . . somethings. They sounded like musical notes more than words, but they were more complex than a single note, as if he could form a chord with his human throat.

For a moment, nothing happened.

That was not quite true. Nothing happened except that the moment he flicked those blood drops on Ruth, the foulness of black magic, or my sense of it, just disappeared. There was plenty of magic, for sure, but only a little of it felt like black magic.

I was eyeing the knife in Uncle Mike’s hand, and so I missed the first bit. The little movement that made Uncle Mike stiffen and Sherwood actually relax a little under my hand.

By the time I looked at the circle, Ruth’s mouth was already open. The first scream had almost no sound—because she had no air to make a noise. The second scream was even quieter, her whole body shaking with the effort of it. If she could have moved her body with Uncle Mike’s magic upon her, I think she would have done so, but all she could do was move her mouth and her rib cage.

My eyes teared up and I dug my fingers into Sherwood’s shoulder—because there was nothing, not a darn thing I could do to help her except break the circle (maybe I could do that) and waste all of Sherwood’s efforts.

The third scream was silent. Blood gathered in the corners of Ruth’s beautiful dark eyes and dribbled out of her mouth, staining her white teeth red.

Sherwood remained as he was, crouched near the circle—ready to intervene if matters didn’t go as he thought they should. I let go of him so he could move more quickly if he had to, but he just waited.

“And that’s why I hate witchcrafters,” said Uncle Mike, his voice a prosaic contrast to the events in the circle. “So much blood in their workings.” He sounded vaguely disapproving.

Sherwood raised his head. “And the fae are so gentle.”

“No,” Uncle Mike agreed. “Mostly we’re worse—but not as messy.”

As if the circle held the very air inside it as well as the magic, I could not smell the blood—or other things—as matters took their course. Ruth Gillman, elegant and tidy, would not be happy remembering this moment, but hopefully she would be alive.

Ruth’s mouth opened wider and blood, bright arterial blood, gushed out, flooding the circle where she lay, unable to move her body. The blood hit the edge of Sherwood’s drawings and stopped, as if the chalk and pencil were a raised ledge that it could not cross. Where it touched Sherwood’s work, it turned grayish black. Not a color I’d ever seen blood display.

As the liquid began to increase impossibly, I said, quietly, so as not to interrupt things that I might not be able to perceive, “She’s going to drown in that if she can’t get her head up. She’s also going to exsanguinate if she keeps going.”

“Patience.” Sherwood gave me a quick glance I could not read. I thought maybe he was just making sure I wasn’t going to try to rescue her. “And that blood is . . . not all her blood. Well, no, it’s her blood but it’s reproducing. Cloning, you could say. Though I wouldn’t.”

“And that makes sense,” said Uncle Mike dryly.

“How would you have put it?” asked Sherwood. Sherwood’s wolf, I thought, and he put a bit of a growl in his voice.

Uncle Mike smiled slyly. “Magic blood.”

Sherwood snorted. “Makes it sound as if it weren’t blood at all—or as if you could do something powerful with it.” He paused. “But, since it is blood, her blood even, I suppose that’s true enough.”

They might have been . . . not precisely joking . . . sparring was more like it. But they were both watching Ruth intently.

“She’s breathing,” I said.

Ruth was still vomiting blood (and everything else she had eaten or drunk recently), but she was inhaling and exhaling in between spasms.

Sherwood nodded. “This is a nasty bit of work. There’s probably a more humane way of breaking this spell, but I don’t know it. Maybe if I were in my own space with my own . . .” He shook his head and didn’t complete that thought.

He leaned forward, careful not to get too near to the circle. “Poor darling,” he said. “Sorry, sorry. It’s rough, I know. But you’re going to be all right in a moment. I promise that the worst is over.”

It was ten or fifteen minutes before the blood and horror subsided. Sherwood, still watching something I couldn’t, said, “There now, that’s done it.”

He snapped his fingers, the candle went out, and the room suddenly bloomed with the smell of everything in the circle, blood and vomit and other things—the sour smell of terror and dissipating black magic underlying everything. Fluids that had been held back by Sherwood’s marks slid out over them. But the mess looked to have been reduced to only the nonmagical substances, so it didn’t flow very far.

Uncle Mike started over and Sherwood snapped, “Knife. That knife needs to stay away from Ruth.”

Uncle Mike gave the knife an . . . intrigued look.

“Hah,” he said. “I’d forgotten I had it. What an interesting knife for them to let come into enemy hands.”

I glanced at Sherwood. “Is it safe for me to touch her?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But she’ll not thank you for it. Everything will hurt just now—like being parboiled alive, as I recall. Give her a few minutes.”

I’d been reaching for her, but at Sherwood’s words, I backed off.

“Ruth needs a shower and clean clothes,” I told Uncle Mike. “Is that available here?”

“Of course,” he said. “But perhaps Sherwood should deal with the knife first. I need to touch her so she can move again. But I can’t get near her with this knife. I don’t like the feeling that I should just set this knife down and forget about it.”

“Mercy,” Sherwood said, “could you get my leg for me, please?”

Happy to have something I could do to help, I fetched the prosthesis for him. He hiked up the leg of his jeans and I saw that he had a spike sticking out of the bottom of the stump of his leg.

He saw my look and smiled with his wolf’s eyes.

I was raised by werewolves and I’m mated to one. I’d never seen one smile quite like that. Werewolves just don’t do merry, not their wolf part. And the emotion seemed a little out of place with Ruth recovering painfully in a puddle of blood and other substances. But wolves don’t always react the way a human might to dire situations.

“The pin isn’t coming out of my leg,” he told me. “There’s a silicone sleeve around the stump that holds the pin.”

He took the leg and fitted it on, and got up using only his good leg in a smooth movement that proved he was not human. Someone who was all human would have had a lot more trouble doing that gracefully. Then he put the artificial foot on the ground and stomped with it until there was a sharp click.

“Good,” he said. “I was afraid I’d broken it.”

He strode over to Uncle Mike and took the knife from him. He looked at it a moment, weighing it in his hand. Then he jammed it point first into Uncle Mike’s scarred wooden desk. It sank two inches, more or less, and then he snapped it.

I sucked in a breath as a wave of horrid, filthy magic burst out and left me staggering. I did not fall into Ruth’s miserable huddle and the solidifying liquids surrounding her. But it was a near thing.

Judging from the past few days, witchcraft affected me more powerfully than other sorts of magic. Black magic was worse than the other kind. Or maybe I was just getting more sensitive to it.

“Was that wise?” Uncle Mike asked Sherwood with a raised eyebrow. “You might have blown us to Underhill doing it that way.”

“Only way I know of,” Sherwood said, tapping his head. “I have to work with the limits of what I’ve got.”

Speaking over his shoulder at Sherwood as he made his way briskly toward Ruth, Uncle Mike said, “If all you needed to do was break the blade, I could have done it at the beginning.”

“No,” said Sherwood. “I needed to do it. I’ve got a touch, a link with our enemy, thanks to my work with Ruth—and the witches’ work, too. Breaking it that way will have hurt the owner of the athame, almost as much as she hurt Ruth. And if it had tried to blow up in our faces, I could have contained it.” He looked at the broken blade on the handle that he still held. “I’m pretty sure, anyway.”

Ruth, scrubbed and dressed in fresh clothes, had not had a lot to add to what she’d already told us. She was frightened, for which none of us blamed her. Uncle Mike assured us—and her—that since Sherwood had broken the witch’s hold on her, he and his could keep her safe.

“You did it,” Sherwood told her.

“Did what?” The pub was warm enough, but one of Uncle Mike’s people had brought Ruth a blanket and she had it wrapped around her as if it were a shield against the dark.

“By coming here,” said Uncle Mike. “You put the fox in the henhouse for them. If you had arrived at Mercy’s house with that knife, I don’t know that anyone could have broken what they tried to do. But you came here and created a weakness in their curse. Sherwood here was able to break the rest.”

Uncle Mike looked at Sherwood. “I didn’t know you were witchborn.”

Sherwood shrugged.

“But they are all dead,” Ruth said. “And they have Jake.”

“There wasn’t anything you could do about that,” I said. “But you held out against them. You won us a chance to find the senator and get him back from them.”

I was worried that the witches had Adam and the pack, too. That the pack bonds were strong was good. That I couldn’t tell a darned thing from them, except that everyone was healthy, was worrying.

There was still the faint possibility that the president had shown up and all the werewolves had turned off their phones. But that seemed increasingly unlikely.

“Because you held out,” Sherwood said—and it was Sherwood again—“we have dealt them a blow, and we have a chance to find them.” He held up the broken knife, which he was carrying in a kelly green take-out box from Uncle Mike’s.

We left Ruth in the safety of Uncle Mike’s hands. As we stepped out into the parking lot, Sherwood held up the box again.

“The trouble being,” he said, “I don’t know how to use this to find them. May—”

He stopped abruptly and turned in a slow circle.

“It’s just me, wolf,” said the goblin king, emerging from the shadows along the side of the building.

Larry seemed more tired than he had the last time I’d seen him. He usually looked like a smile was a moment away, if it wasn’t already on his face. Not tonight.

“I’m here to give you some information,” he said. “In exchange for calling me out to your hunt the other morning.”

I had sort of thought the ball was in the other court, but I wasn’t about to argue with him.

“Don’t go to the senator’s house in Pasco until daylight,” he said. “And don’t let anyone else go, if you can help it. We goblins lost much to the witchcrafting around that place.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“I sent three of my best to follow Ruth Gillman after your lunch with her,” he said. “One of them was my daughter, who I have had in my heart to be my successor when I quit this duty. She called me to tell me that the witches had set up an immense circle around the house. They set up watching places outside the circle as I directed her.”

“That is a very large circle,” I said.

He nodded. “The work of days and much power,” he agreed. “If they had been working in town where my people patrol, we would have seen it long since. They waited until the witches left with Senator Campbell. They knew that all were dead inside except for Ruth—do not ask me how, because I will not tell you. Our survival depends upon us being aware of things that others try to hide from us. She and her compatriots could feel Ms. Gillman’s distress. They thought that the witches had missed one of their targets. She called me and explained all of this. I told her not to go in.”

He looked off into the distance. “She made her own decisions, my daughter, from the time she first learned to walk. It was why I chose her to replace me. A leader needs to make her own decisions.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

He sighed. “The other two tell me that she crossed the circle with no trouble. Took another two steps, then turned and looked at them. Said, ‘Tell Father I was wrong.’ And she died, standing on her feet.” He closed his eyes. “But I had to kill her body and we lost four more of my people before we managed to kill them all.”

“Them all?” I asked.

“All of the dead rose as reanimates—you call them zombies. With my daughter’s fate to warn us, my people crossed the circle and dealt with the dead. I brought them out. But any who cross that circle before daylight without my intervention—and I will not go back there—will suffer the same fate as my daughter.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

He made a slashing gesture with his hand. “Not your fault, Mercedes Hauptman. But Uncle Mike told me you are out hunting the witches, and I thought to tell you what we found. The witches are not where Ruth Gillman came from tonight. Doubtless there are clues to be discovered, but they will do you no good until daylight cleanses the land. Do not repeat my daughter’s mistake.”

I tried to figure out when Uncle Mike would have had time to contact Larry. When Ruth was showering, maybe.

“The senator’s residence was the first place I would have gone searching,” I told Larry. More carefully I said, “I appreciate your warning.”

“We destroyed the bodies,” Larry said. “But their wallets are piled by the front door so that their deaths can be made known to their people.”

“Good,” I said. “Ruth took pictures, so we’ll know who they are.” That part of this day wasn’t going to be my job.

He nodded, turned to leave, and then, with his back to me, said, “You’ll be tempted to go to Siebold Adelbertsmiter and his son. You probably know that there is a good chance that the old fae will go with you.”

He turned back to me, his features stark. “You could probably ask me, after this night, and I would go with you, too.”

“But,” I said.

He nodded. “But. It may be that without us you will fail, and with us you will take the day. But the Gray Lords have been quite clear. They will not—cannot allow any of us to take part in this battle. They will make sure that if any helps you in direct confrontation with the witches, that fae will die in this day and all days.”

“But,” Sherwood said in a low voice, “warning us of a trap—that is not direct confrontation.”

Larry nodded. He tipped his head toward Uncle Mike’s. “And giving shelter is part of the guesting laws, as is protecting an innocent victim.”

I looked at Larry. “That’s why he couldn’t break the spell holding her.” Because that had bothered me. Uncle Mike wasn’t a Gray Lord, but other fae walked warily around him. That he could not break a witch’s spell . . . had made the witches seem a lot more powerful than I had thought they were.

His face became bland. “I don’t know what Uncle Mike can or cannot do, Mercedes. All I can tell you is that if he had broken the spell, he would have faced the wrath of the Gray Lords. He asked me if I thought you were clever enough to have a path forward that he did not see.”

“Nope,” I said. What if we had not had Sherwood? Then I felt a touch of relief. I could have called upon Elizaveta or even, heaven help me, Wulfe. “Not that clever. But I am a coyote and apparently stupid lucky.”

Larry did smile then. “And that is exactly what I told him.”